Photograph Source: Xuthoria – CC BY-SA 4.0

“Nearly every federal agency in the US government could fall under the scrutiny of DOGE”. With these words on Fox News on February 7th, Donald Trump outlined the scope of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – his administration’s planned overhaul of federal institutions, with Elon Musk at its helm. Within days, the administration has moved to consolidate control over key security apparatus, with the Senate confirming former Democrat turned Trump loyalist Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel, author of “Government Gangsters,” as FBI director[1]. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy characterized these developments as “the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced certainly since Watergate,” warning of a “billionaire takeover of government.”[2]

Yet this radical transformation of American governance, far from being an impromptu imitative, represents the culmination of nearly a century of meticulously laid groundwork by conservative elites. Drawing from the previously unexplored McCune archives at Columbia University (NY), this investigation reveals how, since the 1930s, a powerful alliance of industrialists, conservative foundations, and far-right ideologues has progressively worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition.

Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 marks the culmination of this counter-revolutionary project, with an unprecedented offensive aimed at dismantling the traditional federal administration in favor of a streamlined structure populated by his loyalists. Recent analyses have begun to grapple with this transformation of American governance from different angles. In their February 2025 Foreign Affairs piece “The Path to American Authoritarianism” Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way notably highlight how the Heritage Foundation has invested millions to prepare “an army of up to 54’000 loyalists to fill government positions.”[3] While their analysis astutely identifies mechanisms of state capture, it perhaps underestimates how wealth concentration and corporate influence have historically enabled rather than resisted democratic erosion. Similarly, Mike Brock’s investigation “The Plot Against America” (February 2025) reveals how contemporary tech elites are working to shift power “from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.”[4] Yet these vital contemporary accounts capture only the latest chapter of a much longer historical process, one whose roots stretch back nearly a century.

Wesley McCune’s work provides an indispensable historical record of Trump’s actual counterrevolution effort, through his founding of Group Research Inc. (GRI) in 1962. Prior to establishing GRI, he had served in several government agencies and as assistant to both the Secretary of Agriculture and President Truman (1945-1952). Under his leadership, the GRI compiled the largest documentary collection ever assembled on conservative networks and their funding[5]. These archives expose, through thousands of pages of evidence, how the conservative and fundamentalist Christian right methodically worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition – prefiguring with remarkable accuracy the very transformation we are witnessing today[6].

A Strategy Decades in the Making

The roots of this counter-revolution can be traced back to the 1930s. In reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, influential industry captains from the banking, chemical, and steel sectors perceived state intervention as an existential threat. Their opposition crystallized around major figures: Alfred P. Sloan (president of General Motors) and Irénée DuPont (Arms and Powder manufacture), who became the principal architects of the “American Liberty League” in August 1934[7]. Their design was unequivocal: they promoted a model, inspired by fascisms in Europe, where the United States would be governed according to a corporatist and non-democratic logic, under the guise of “deregulating” the economy[8].

This vision quickly found concrete expression in an attempted coup that presaged the League’s formal establishment[9]. In his testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee during a secret executive session in New York City on November 20, 1934, General Smedley Butler exposed what became known as the “Business Plot” – a failed conspiracy by wealthy industrialists to overthrow President Roosevelt. The plotters, who ironically styled themselves as a “Society to maintain the Constitution”, had envisioned installing a “Secretary of General Affairs” who would effectively usurp the President’s executive powers under the guise of administrative efficiency[10]. While the coup attempt failed, these same industrialists quickly redirected their efforts toward institutional capture, manifesting their financial power in the creation of numerous foundations aimed at implementing their vision of societal restructuring[11].

The post-war period ushered in an acceleration of this program[12]. A network of entrepreneurial foundations – Mellon, Scaife, Lilly and Richardson, Olin, supported by the DuPont and Koch dynasties – orchestrated an unprecedented effort to undermine the federal state structure, operating under the cover of Cold War anti-communist polices initiated immediately after the war[13]. These foundations established and solely funded dozens of political and research institutes, enabling them to obtain intellectual legitimacy for their political-economic vision[14]. This influence remains pervasive today through these still-active institutions and their successors, as illustrated by Timothy Mellon’s $50 million support to Trump’s Super PAC, revealed by the press in 2024[15].

This design first materialized through the creation of the American Enterprise Association (AEA) in 1943, which would later become the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1962. That same year, the AEI spawned one of its key affiliates: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University (Washington)[16]. A decade later, the Heritage Foundation (1973) emerged, backed by resources from the J. Coors conglomerate, the Scaife Family Trust, the Noble Foundation, and the John M. Olin Fund.

The far-right John Birch Society (JBS), founded in 1958, served as a catalyst for the radicalization of the conservative base by cultivating populism as an essential ingredient of this long-planned revolution[17]. As historian Matthew Dallek’s work demonstrates, the JBS through its media network and forums led by Fred Schwartz and Clarence Manion (The Manion Forum), would find its contemporary echo in Alex Jones “Infowars” channel, an early Trump supporter. This progression shows how extremism became increasingly mainstream within conservative circles[18]. These networks successfully nurtured and sustained an ultranationalist momentum built on victimhood narratives that aligned with white nationalist and supremacist ideologies. This movement laid the groundwork for what would become the “Moral Majority” in 1979, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., which achieved a powerful synthesis of conservative political activism and religious fundamentalism in their shared opposition to Democratic progressive policies.

An essential component of this strategy, very early on, involved creating civic institutions capable of shaping future leaders through youth movements. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), associated with William F. Buckley and the JBS, established itself as both an ideological training ground and a vector for conservative activism. Operating within cultural institutions, colleges, universities, and public spaces, the YAF conducted numerous campaigns and demonstrations, drawing inspiration from their intellectual mentors Friedrich Hayek and his successor Milton Friedman[19].

From Nixon to Reagan: The Rise of the Conservative Power

The conservative movement’s ascendancy, which would give rise to the New Right, underwent a decisive evolution in the 1960s. While Barry Goldwater (1964) and George Wallace’s (1968) presidential bids failed, it was Richard Nixon, a former Goldwater supporter, who ultimately emerged as the movement’s hope for establishing a bulwark against the left. During this period, conservatives innovated their communication methods, particularly through direct mail techniques, pioneered by Richard Viguerie, former executive secretary of the YAF.

Direct mail became the New Right’s central organizing tool, proving to be a formidable instrument for both mobilization and fundraising. Viguerie deployed it to structure a network of conservative donors and raise funds for multiple organizations: the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Senator Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club. Prefiguring modern targeting algorithms, this system channeled resources toward emblematic conservative causes: school prayer, campaigns against gay rights and abortion, opposition to progressive cultural policies, and support for armed guerilla movements. In the 1990s and 2000s, these same networks would serve as vectors for attacks against Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, becoming efficient conduits for spreading conspiracy theories about both presidents.

Under Nixon’s presidency, and with the patronage of his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the movement’s key figures steadily infiltrated high offices. Among these key appointments were David Abshire, who would later direct CSIS (1983-1986), William Baroody Jr. who led AEI (1978-1987), and Ed Feulner who headed the Heritage Foundation (1977-2013, then 2017-2018). Mr. Feulner would later join Trump’s transition team in 2016, helping shape the “America First” foreign policy agenda[20].

Following setbacks in direct political action after the Vietnam war policy failures, conservative forces reoriented their approach by strengthening their ideological apparatus. The social context proved propitious: mounting pressure from civil rights and abortion rights movements fostered an effective synthesis between ultraconservative political factions and Christian religious groups, united in their opposition to what they perceived as a “Marxist drift” threatening America’s soul.  This period marked what some observers would later identify as the beginning of parliamentary democracy’s decline in America, though few recognized it at the time.

William J. Baroody, who alongside Milton Friedman had orchestrated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, became a leading advocate for subordinating democratic processes to capitalist imperatives during this period of social upheaval. The movement achieved its first major success by supporting Ronald Reagan’s bid for the California governorship, which served as both testing ground and steppingstone to the presidency. Joseph Coors, the Heritage Foundation’s principal donor, became Reagan’s personal advisor. Soon after, entire segments of the Californian State bureaucracy were targeted for privatization, beginning with the electricity market – a process that effectively delegated substantial state prerogative to business interests.

This vision of a large-scale culture war found its definitive expression in Baroody’s pivotal address to the Business Council in Virginia in October 1972:

“To the extent that public opinion is hostile to business, one can expect – at minimum – that the public policy climate will make their operation increasingly difficult, and in some cases, compromise their survival. One can go further and assert that, to the extent public opinion is hostile to the institutional framework of a free society, there is then genuine cause for concern about the very viability of that free society.”Adding further: “In this war of the minds of men – and it is an unrelenting war – at stake is the institutional framework of the free society itself.” Baroody concluding: “In brief, America’s free society and economy cannot survive…if you fail to recognize the imperative necessity to begin mustering, in the media and in the Nation’s educational institutions, the necessary resources to counter the propaganda supremacy now held by the adversaries of our free enterprise system – a supremacy I regret to say, all-to-often sponsored and subsidized by the very industries and companies that are under attack.”[21]

Convinced of society’s vulnerability to “internal enemies,” these actors believed businesses must intervene forcefully to shape public opinion in favor of “market freedom”. Simultaneously, New Right conservatives worked to institutionalize surveillance and repression of movements deemed subversive. They built upon the precedent of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), active between 1938 and 1975, where Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had cut their political teeth[22]. After HUAC’s decline, this approach of public tribunals and presumption of guilt continued through the Senate internal Security Subcommittee, amplified by the alarmist rhetoric of pseudo-patriotic movements, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). These organizations systematically cultivated a climate of paranoia regarding communist and Marxist subversion, which would prove instrumental in legitimizing increasingly stringent security and anti-terrorist policies in the public eye – patterns that are being deployed as of this writing in the early days of the new Trump Administration, in the systematic dismantling of so-called diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) programs across federal institutions, including the purging of high-ranking military officials under manufactured pretexts, most notably the dismissal of Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown.

Through expanded direct mail campaigns and sophisticated media strategies, these organizations evolved into vectors of political paranoia promoting conspiracy theories that would help legitimize draconian security and anti-terrorist policies across American society. This deliberately fostered climate of fear facilitated the adoption of the Huston Plan, a sweeping covert program of surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and intimidation targeting political opponents.

Tom Charles Huston, an experienced figure and leader in the YAF, developed this blueprint under Richard Nixon’s aegis. While its exposure during the Watergate scandal (1972-1974) temporarily halted its implementation, it marked an intensification of executive power, with the FBI functioning essentially as a political police force, drawing troubling parallels to the German Gestapo[23]. The unprecedented nature of this development was captured by historian Frank J. Donner who noted that “For the first time in our history a chief executive had expressly authorized a political police structure with a range of powers in conflict not only with established law but with the provision of the Fourth Amendment as well.”[24]

Despite a brief post-Watergate setback, the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations embraced and empowered these organizations, viewing them as vital to their power structure. A telling symbol of this entrenchment emerged when Richard Mellon Scaife secured a position on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (USACPD), overseeing the United States Information Agency (USIA), the body responsible for American strategic communication and propaganda abroad.

Strategic think tanks, particularly the CSIS, emerged as the primary architects of “terrorism” studies, mobilizing public opinion through research that predominantly reflected U.S. strategic interests. Their work proved instrumental in garnering public acceptance for expanded “national security” policies and shaping the judicial framework of the anti-terrorism apparatus. Under Reagan’s two terms (1981-1988), surveillance and control became further institutionalized, notably through Executive Order E.O. 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981), which authorized extensive information gathering and enforcement measures against U.S. citizens deemed antagonistic to national security interests[25].

The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) functioned both as precursor and prototype for ideological youth movements, emerging despite the haunting memory of Hitler’s Jugend experiment. Over two generations, the YAF methodically prepared the ground for this revolution, claiming to restore moral order[26]. Their campaign exerted mounting pressure on media outlets and academic institutions while challenging the right of free speech. Trump’s campaigns (2016, 2024) benefited substantially from their active support networks.

Over two decades, the conservative movement, guided by its most radical elements, gained momentum through unprecedented support from the US Chamber of Commerce, JBS and American Legion, and an extended network of paramilitary factions – the later proliferating due to continuous U.S. military engagements abroad. Under the banner of the “Moral Majority”, an alliance solidified between the Christian nationalist and libertarian politicians[27]. During a political action seminar in Dallas, Texas, in August 1980, Paul Weyrich articulated their vision: “We are talking about Christianizing America. We are simply talking about spreading the gospel in a political context,” This declaration would find its echo in Trump’s 2016 campaign promise that “Christianity would have power”[28].

Toward the end of Reagan’s presidency, hardliners within the Heritage Foundation grew disillusioned with his failure to fully implement their “institutional reform program” (known as Mandate I and II) and what they saw as his betrayal of their vision to remake America great again. In response, they adopted a more subtle approach: rather than focusing solely on capturing the presidency, they would systematically transform government from within, targeting both lower-level offices and high courts to achieve a fundamental redistribution of power through strategic redistricting.

This transformation accelerated under Newt Gingrich, founder of the “Conservative Opportunity Society” (COS) in 1983, who ascended to Speaker of the House following the Republican takeover of the lower Chamber of Congress in 1994 – their first such victory since the interwar period. In 1989, Gingrich declared before Congress: “Liberals have declared open war against our constitutional system of government.”[29] Yet this accusation masked his own agenda ; he was actively orchestrating precisely what he accused his opponents of doing – launching an all-out assault on democratic institutions, methodically preparing the ground for a leader who would embrace this monumental task, accepting the risk, that had nothing to lose : Donald Trump.

Gingrich emerged as one of Trump’s most steadfast and influential though behind-the-scenes supporters well before his first presidential bid[30]. His 2022 book titled “Defeating Big Government Socialism, Saving America’s Future” reveals the persistence of these long-standing themes: “If the United States loses its patriotic commitment to being a united nation, there is a real danger that our enemies will manipulate and finance radical Marxist factions to tear our country apart and leave us defenseless.”[31] As a historian-turned ideologue, Gingrich serves a vital bridge between the New Right and Trump’s movement, frequently articulating Trump’s positions through his platform on Fox News. Eric Trump acknowledged this role in his preface to Gingrich’s 2017 book about Donald Trump, noting: “Newt was able to perfectly articulate my father’s beliefs.”[32]

Historian Julian E. Zelizer draws a compelling parallel between Gingrich and Joseph McCarthy, observing: “His virulent political style became the echo chamber of the Republican Party.”[33] However, Zelitzer identifies a crucial distinction: while McCarthy was ultimately marginalized for his excesses, Gingrich succeeded in embedding his ideas within mainstream conservative thought. He championed some of the most extreme policies that Trump would later adopt, including the constructing of a wall between Texas and Mexico. More broadly, Gingrich’s ascendance coincided with conservative forces’ readiness to flex their institutional muscle – no longer content to merely defend the system but determined to bring it down.

The Heritage Foundation’s influence extended well beyond U.S. borders. The GRI archives reveal how, beginning in the 1970s, it channeled funds to far-right groups and organizations across Europe that shared its anti-welfare state stance and free-market absolutism. This transnational network encompassed the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies (IEDSS), the International Freedom Fund Establishment (IFFE), the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Germany, and the Club de l’Horloge in France (renamed “Le Carrefour de l’Horloge” in 2015), which aligned closely with the far-right National Front party[34].

During the first decade of the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) launched September 20, 2001, these networks mobilized their full resources. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) emerged as a particular nexus of hawkish influence, bringing together figures such as Richard Perle, who presided over the quasi-governmental Defense Policy Board; Irving Kristol, the architect of neoconservatism; Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan advisor advocating military action against Iran; and John Bolton, who personified the fusion between hardline conservatives and the neoconservative interventionist agenda[35].

Under George W. Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), the interweaving of business interests, lobbyists, industry-funded think tanks, and the Republican Party reached unprecedented level of complexity[36]. The military sphere became a particularly fertile ground for ideological propaganda. The return of ROTC programs to college campuses, all over the U.S. signaled conservative foundations growing capacity to leverage military education for advancing their worldview and their conviction that democratic institutions had failed. The military’s “Operation Paperback” which distributed books to the troops included many of them from New Right’s rank, such as Mark R. Levin, President of the Legal Foundation, whose “Plunder and Deceit, Big Government’s exploitation of young people and the future” (2015) aspired to generate  a “new civil rights movement, one that will foster liberty and prosperity and cease the exploitation of young people by statist masterminds.”[37]

The emergence and ferment of the Tea Party movement in February 2009 signaled a decisive shift in the conservative takeover of the Republican Party (GOP), exploiting the aftermath of the financial crisis to prepare the way for their chosen standard-bearer, Donald Trump. The governing circles of these foundations identified him as uniquely capable of executing their long-awaited rupture with the established order. Within the movement’s religious base, many viewed his ascendance through a messianic lens, perceiving him as divinely ordained to lead not just America but the World[38].

Trump’s explicit embrace of the “America First” movement’s heritage – characterized by historians as profoundly pro-fascist – came during his landmark speech at the Center for the National Interest (Washington D.C.) on April 27, 2016[39]. While his first term served as a trial run for this new doctrine of integral nationalism, his return to power in January 2025 initiated the fulfilment of long-held ambitions:  rejecting international law, withdrawing from multilateral treaties, and reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward aggressive economic warfare while marginalizing traditional allies.

Project 2025: The institutionalization of an Authoritarian Model

Project 2025, dubbed the “mandate for leadership”, emerged as the blueprint for Trump’s return to power, despite early attempts by some campaign advisers to distance themselves from its extreme implications[40]. This imitative marks the culmination of the conservative counter-revolution[41]. Most appointees to key positions in the new administration maintain direct or indirect ties to the Heritage Foundation and its affiliates[42].

 This “New Mandate”, heir to previous versions from 1980, 1984, and 1988 took concrete form upon Trump’s inauguration last January. His administration, with Elon Musk’s support and advice, has promptly begun purging institutional opposition through mass dismissal of civil servants, wielding existing legal mechanisms to suspend democratic institutions and procedures by simple executive order, neutralizing remaining checks and balances. While ignoring congressional budget prerogatives and judicial independence, the administration has realized McCune’s dire predictions: “The first victims of these measures,” he wrote, “are minorities, union movements, and proponents of multiculturalism.”

The first cornerstone of this transformation centers on the wholesale removal of senior civil servants, replaced by hand-picked loyalists, coupled with the dismantling of agencies and offices dedicated to social services, education, environmental protection, and international aid like USAID – a pillar of U.S. international development policy since its creation under John F. Kennedy, with roots in earlier progressive efforts such as the New Deal and the Marshall Plan (ERP programs). This foundational component manifests through a cascade of recent executive orders targeting federal-level Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) programs, especially affecting cultural and educational institutions.

Within this comprehensive unfolding offensive, higher education stands as a priority target of the radical right. Trump explicitly declared his intention to “take back” universities from “Marxist maniacs,” while his Vice-President J.D. Vance openly branded them as “enemies”. A position reflecting both his venture capital background and his longstanding alliance with Silicon Valley power brokers, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk[43]. In echoing Baroody and Gingrich’s martial previous rhetoric, Project 2025 envisions establishing an “American Academy,” marketed as a free and “strictly non-political” online university, funded through dramatic increase in taxes on existing university endowments[44]. This initiative serves a dual purpose: weakening traditional institutions while creating an alternative under strict ideological control.

The second cornerstone of this design implements expansive deportation measures targeting resident aliens labeled as “criminal illegal,” while simultaneously advancing the criminalization of opposition groups. Internal security agencies, particularly Homeland Security’s ICE, established in response of 9/11 and subsequent antiterror policies, are being transformed into auxiliary forces supporting the FBI and CIA, now operating from shared databases powered by algorithms and AI from major U.S. technology companies. In February 2025, ICE launched an unprecedented surveillance program aimed at monitoring “negative sentiment” about the agency across social media platforms, using artificial intelligence to identify and track not just threats but any form of criticism, while collecting extensive personal data on targeted individuals[45].

True to their historical role documented by the GRI, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Federalist Society continue to provide the intellectual framework and support for these measures[46]. A persistent tension between state control and deregulation remains visible in their arbitration between institutional repression and privatization of state functions. The paradox is striking: these organizations now advocate for forms of political authoritarianism that mirror exactly what they once accused their enemies of promoting.

The systematic implementation of this New Right counter-revolutionary “master plan” follows patterns reminiscent of, especially Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1939. By combining the systematic erosion of checks and balances, criminalizing political opposition, and institutional reorganization based on loyalty criteria according to loyalty criteria, the current administration materializes a model that Wesley McCune identify as an underlying tendency in American society as early as the 1950s.

The fate of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in February 2025 illustrates the apparent contradiction – but the underlying logic of this institutional transformation. Created under Reagan in 1983 and historically supported by the Republican establishment, the organization found itself abruptly cut off from Treasury funds following Elon Musk’s attacks branding it an “evil organization that needs to be dissolved,” The telling silence of traditional Republican figures, including those serving on its board like Senator Todd Young, suggests this dismantling is part of a broader strategy : the intent to transfer traditional American public diplomacy functions to private actors, particularly tech giants[47]. This reconfiguration, far from being a mere “purge” marks a potential transition from institutional soft power to a model where American influence abroad will increasingly be exercised through social media and digital platforms – giving precedence to private corporations over pseudo-government agencies.

The GRI archives holds a Congressional session report from 1953, at the height of McCarthy-era anti-communist fervor, analyzing factors behind fascism’s emergence and its potential presence in the U.S. According to experts at the time, the key factors weren’t those typically highlighted in Western textbooks, but rather the deliberate creation of a “corporatist state” through “social demagogy” capable of gradually subverting republican institutions[48]. A 1965 Group Research Inc. report issued a prescient warning: “One of the most dangerous aspects of fascism is that it advances in small steps, under the pretext of efficiency and reform.”[49]

That same year, historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, offered a crucial insight into this dynamic, noting that “a fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” He observed how this “paranoid disposition” serves to “mobilize into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” His analysis of what he termed the “pseudo-conservatives”, particularly the Goldwaterites, precisely anticipated the rhetorical and mobilization patterns that would later define Trump’s MAGA movement[50].

A Decisive Turning Point for American Democracy

The possibility of the collapse of democratic institutions results from a long process. From the first organized attempt to seize power by force in 1933, to the current mandate given to E. Musk and his Department of Government efficiency (DOGE), a consistent pattern emerges: the systematic use of private wealth and corporate efficiency models to restructure federal governance, ultimately preparing the ground for oligarchic rule.

The positioning of Russell T. Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a U.S, executive agency responsible for developing the federal budget, overseeing agency performance, and ensuring regulatory and fiscal efficiency, illustrate the uncompromising nature of their strategy. As one of the main “Project 2025” architects, Vought’s statement about federal civil servants reveals their stark worldview: “We want them to wake up in the morning not wanting to go to work because they are increasingly seen as the bad guys.”[51] exemplifying their simplistic division of the world is divided between the “good guys” and “bad apples”.

The designation of loyalists to key security positions further exemplifies this transformation of federal institutions. The Senate’s confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI director demonstrates how personal loyalty has become the primary qualification for leadership roles in critical agencies. Both nominees openly embraced Trump’s vision of a politicized civil service, with Patel’s 2023 memoir “Government Gangsters” explicitly targeting supposed “deep state” opponents and including an appendix listing potential “conspirators” within the executive branch. Their appointments signal a decisive shift toward using federal law enforcement and intelligence capabilities to target political opposition[52].

This echoed Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts’ own words shortly before Trump re-election in July 2024: “We are experiencing the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left permits.”

This revolutionary rhetoric is not new. As early as the 1960s, Murray N. Rothbard, a leading figure of libertarianism, has already laid the groundwork for this radical vision. While the official historiography of the New Right, as presented by Justin Raimondo, tends to portray Rothbard’s approach as a pragmatic evolution beyond Ayn Rand’s romantism, a closer examination reveals a more calculated strategy[53]. Rothbard, who saw himself as an “extreme-rightist,” deliberately sought to co-opt revolutionary language and tactics from the left. His creation of the review “Left and Right” in 1964 and his attempts to infiltrate the antiwar movement were part of a broader strategy to reframe libertarians as “true revolutionaries.” By the 1990s, Rothbard had identified social democracy as the main enemy, more dangerous than communism in his view because it combined socialism with the “appealing virtues of democracy and freedom of inquiry.” This strategic shift prefigured the current assault on democratic institutions under the banner of “liberty”[54].

More than just a resurgence of radical conservatism, 2025 marks the culmination of a strategy methodically constructed over nearly a century. Far from the singular genius-entrepreneur he claims to embody, Trump appears instead as tool of the same Corporate elites that have driven this conservative ascendence since its inception. This is evidenced by oil baron Harold Hamm’s role, CEO of Continental Resources, who orchestrated a billion-dollar fundraising effort from oil magnates supporting Trump’s candidacy – thus perpetuating the historical alliance between the radical libertarian right and corporate tycoons first documented by the GRI in the 1930s[55].

This convergence of traditional conservative networks with tech power brokers has been meticulously detailed in Mike Brock’s recent analysis of the New Right’s technological aspirations. Building on James Pogue’s groundbreaking investigation of the National Conservative Conference (NatCon) and Max Chafkin’s prescient work “The Contrarian” (2021) on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s pursuit of political power, Brock reveals how Bitcoin and other technological innovations have become vehicles for implementing long-held libertarian ambitions, particularly Friedrich Hayek’s vision of private entities challenging government control of currency[56]. Though extensive reporting on figures like Curtis Yarvin and Balaji Srivasan, these investigations expose how Silicon Valley’s libertarian wing has increasingly aligned with the New Right power structures, advocating what Yarvin terms a “National CEO” model of governance. This technological dimension adds a powerful new vector to the historical conservative project of dismantling democratic institutions, one that promises to accelerate and amplify their longstanding agenda through unprecedented technological capabilities.

Now that technological means, including AI, provide extraordinary opportunities to reshape American society more rapidly and profoundly, we witness an accelerating convergence between the conservative circles, tech giants, and military leaders within a new bold and undisputed military-industrial-technological complex[57].

The accumulated financial and technological resources, combined with the U.S. military might, now fuel renewed hegemonic ambitions, manifesting in territorial claims from the Panama Canal to Greenland, reminiscent of 19^thcentury imperial expansion. A week after Trump unilaterally declared the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as The Gulf of America, major search engines had already implemented this change. Yet, when the Associated Pressrefused to adopt the new designation in defense of its editorial independence, the administration’s response was swift: barring its reporters from White House events – a direct challenge to press freedom and clear violation of First Amendment’s right of free speech[58]. Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, has been ordered to investigate traditional “liberal” media such as ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and NPR. The Defense Department has thrown such mainstream media outlets as The New York Times, NBC News and NPR out of their work spaces at the Pentagon, replacing them by conservative outlets.

Preserved at Columbia University’s rare books section, the documentary collection assembled by Wesley McCune and his team, provide unique evidence of this transformation, tracking payments and contributions between key actors through a detailed paper trail – particularly valuable now that most of this history has been scrubbed from the websites for institutions like the AEI, Heritage Foundation, and YAF. The fruit of thirty years of meticulous journalistic investigation into ultraconservative networks illuminates, with disturbing accuracy, the mechanisms driving today’s dismantling of democratic institutions.

As democratic societies face this systematic and powerful offensive, some might argue we are merely witnessing the final chapter of parliamentary democracy’s long decline – a process that should have been recognized far earlier. A fundamental question emerges: what forces can still mobilize the resources and energy necessary to counter this systematic and formidable offensive on democratic freedoms, particularly when citizens struggle to see through the carefully constructed narratives that have obscured these actors’ fundamentally anti-democratic intentions, under the guise of a fight for individual liberty? The GRI archives stand as both warning and guide, reminding us that the preservation of democratic governance requires not just vigilance but active engagement with the historical record that exposes the true nature of this decades-long transformation.

Notes.

[1] German Loez and Lyna Bentahar, “Two Loyalists for Trump” in The New York Times, February 12, 2025

[2] “Daily Show”, Democracy Now, 10.02.2025

[3] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Path to American Authoritarism” in Foreign Affairs, February 11, 2025,

[4] Mike Brock, “The Plot Against America, How a dangerous Ideology born from the Libertarian Movement stands Ready to Seize America” on Substack, February 8, 2025.

[5] This archival collection consists of 512 boxes, housed at Columbia University (New York). The inventory is available on the internet Archive: https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_5010936. Below, in the footnotes are references to GRI boxes used for this article.

[6] GRI, box 12

[7] The American Liberty League is an American political organization founded in 1934, whose announced objectives was: “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.

[8] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[9] See Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, New York, Hawthorne Books, 1973.

[10] Ibid. pp. 139, 151, 155

[11] Documents from the GRI archives establish that in November 1937, representatives of Hitler’s regime and seven major American industrialists met to develop agreements for international monopolies “The Nazis have made a fifth column pact with seven influential Americans,” In Fact, no 92, Vol. V, No. 14, July 13, 1942, edited by George Seldes, GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[12] While these arrangements would ultimately be derailed by the war, historian Anthony C. Sutton’s groundbreaking research has extensively documented the persistence of business connections between American industrialists and Nazi Germany well beyond the 1930s. uncovering evidence of technological transfers, financial arrangements, and strategic partnerships, see Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, San Pedro Ca., GSG Publishers, 2002

[13] The Lilly Foundation was established from the pharmaceutical fortune of Eli Lilly, and the Richardson Foundation is based on the Vick Chemical Co, see GRI, box 12, folder AEI.

[14] At the time, the Mellon family controlled the oil company Gulf Oil and the aluminium company Alcoa, as well as the bank of the same name – Mellon Bank ; they alsoheld capital in numerous other companies listed in the Fortune 500 index.

[15] Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, “Timothy Mellon, Secretive Donor, Gives $50 Million to Pro-Trump group” in The New York Times, June 20, 2024

[16] The CSIS Center published the proceedings of its first conference, held in January 1962, in the form of a 1,021-pages book titled : National Security : Political, Military, and Economic Strategies for the Decade Ahead.

[17] Harry L. Bradley, chairman of the board of Allen-Bradley Co., was both a trustee of the AEA since 1957 and influential in the forums of the John Birch Society, such as American Opinion.

[18] Matthew Dallek, Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, New York, Basic Books, 2022.

[19] GRI, box 161, folder Heritage Foundation. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) would later be renamed Young America’s Foundation in 1969, while maitaining its original student branch.

[20] Paul Weyrich in addition to being considered one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, was also the strategist of the “New Right”. He chaired the “Coalition for America,” an umbrella for all conservative organizations.

[21] Baroody, William J., “The Corporate Role in the Decade ahead.” Remarks presented at The Business Council, Hot Springs, Virginia, October 20, 1972, dans GRI box 12, folder AEI.

[22] Dissolved in 1975, its functions were transferred to the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives.

[23] Brian Gluck, War at Home, covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it, Boston, South End Press, 1989.

[24] Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance, The Aims and Methods of America’s Polticial Intelligence System, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, P.266

[25] GRI, box 47, Business Advisory Council

[26] GRI, box 341, folder YAF

[27] In 1979, The Religious Roundtable formalized the alliance between the leaders of the New Right and those of the Religious Right.

[28] Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the power and the glory, New York, Harper Collins, 2023

[29] Newt Gingrich, Message to Fellow Citizens, on “The Deepest Crisis America Has Ever Faced in Our 200-Year-History,” May 23, 1989, U.S. Congress

[30] In 2023, he published with Joe Gaylord, March to the Majority : The Real Story of the Republican Revolution, New York, Center Street.

[31] A work in which Gingrich, tracing the alleged links between “Wokism” and “Marxism” warns of the disappearance of Christianity in the United States due to the rise of socialists, whom he associates with communists.

[32] Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump, New York, Center Street (Hachette Book Group), 2017.

[33] Julian E. Zelitzer, Burining Down the House, Newt Gingrich and the rise of the New Republican Party, New York, Penguin, 2020, p.302

[34] GRI, box 160. Folder Heritage Foundation 1988-

[35] The AEI board of directors included, among others, figures such as Lee Raymond, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, and William Stavropoulos, Chairman of Dow Chemical.

[36] John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General from February 2, 2001, to February 3, 2005, is a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), founded in 1981. The CNP has nearly 500 members, bringing together political figures, business leaders, and conservative activists to discuss political strategy. Historian Journalist Joe Conason describes it as the “Central Committee of the Religious Right,” cited in David Cole, Justice at War, New York Review of Books ed. 2008, p.8

[37] Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit, Big Governement’s exploitation of Young People and the Future, New York, Threshold Editions, 2015.

[38] Mike Hixenbaugh, “evangelical leaders celebrate Trump’s victory as a prophecy fulfilled”, NBC News, 7 novembre 2024 ; see also Tim Alberta, op. cit.

[39] Jason Stanley, Les ressorts du fascisme, Eliot Edition, 2022 (édition anglaise 2018), p.22 ; the Center for the National Interest is a think tank founded by Richard Nixon in 1994.

[40] One of the authors of this political manifest is Donald Devine, who published a book in 2004 titled In Defense of the West, which became a mandatory course textbook in several conservative U.S. Universities.

[41] GRI, box 160, Folder Heritage, see in particular the Group Research Report, “The Right Works on an Agenda for the 1990s,” Vol. 29, No. 2, March-April 1990.

[42] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, op cit.

[43] Max Chafkin, op. cit.

[44] Patel, Vimal et Sharon Otterman, “Colleges Wonder if They Will be “the Enemy” Under Trump” in The New York Times, November 12, 2024

[45] Sam Biddle, “ICE Wants to Know if You’re Posting Negative Things About it Online”, The Intercept, February 11, 2025.

[46] “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for Institutionalizing trumpism” in New York Times, 2024

[47] Kine, Phelim, “Elon Musk’s attacks on a group long backed by GOP prompt Republican Shrugs” in Politico, February 13, 2025

[48] Exerpt from the Congressional Record, Appendix, July 30, 1953 in GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[49] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[50] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York, Vintage Books, 2008 (1965), p.32, p.39.

[51] Rappeport, Alan, “The Senate confirms Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.” in The New York Times, February 8, 2025

[52] German Lopez and Lyna Bentahar, op. cit.

[53] Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right, The lost legacy of the conservative movement, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2008, pp.251-260.

[54] During this decade Charles and David Koch provided this new brand of libertarianism with their Wealth, financing new insititutes such as the Cato Institute, and many magazines, and Student organizations, such as the Student for a Libertarian Society (SDS).

[55] Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow, “This oil tycoon brings in millions for Trump, and may set his agenda” in The Washington Post, August 13, 2024

[56] James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest Bets” in Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022 ; Max Chafkin, The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of power, New York Penguin, 2021

[57] Valentine Faure, “Comment la droite tech américaine a pris le pouvoir” in Le Monde, 15.11.2024, sur : https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/11/15/comment-la-droite-tech-americaine-a-pris-le-pouvoir_6395657_3210.html

[58] Rhian Lubin, “Trump accused of violating First Amendement after AP reporter barred from event over “Gulf of America’s renaming” in The Independent, February, 12, 2025

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jérôme Gygax.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to the Guardian:

1. The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes. The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.

2. Now in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received – and who else received it – to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former Foreign Secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.

3. The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering – something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.

4. Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel – or 8 per cent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the US.

Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.

In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 per cent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.

5. There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.

The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the UK is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief”. He is thereby calling for the UK to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the UK facilitate genocide.

The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The Board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decryingLammy’s decision.

Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the UK government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But equally to the point: according to the rules Starmer imposed on the Labour party – that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to antisemitism, especially on issues concerning Israel – the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, antisemitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.

Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.

6. Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice – that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid – as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.

Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment – the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right – at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.

The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the US is not banning its own arms sales.

Journalist Humeyra Pamuk questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on why the US has not followed the UK's decision to suspend arms sales to Israel over concerns about potential violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/mujwDyblgZ

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 4, 2024

Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses – weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit. We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

We speak with filmmaker Lauren Windsor, whose recorded conversations with U.S. Supreme Court justices have sparked the latest firestorm over how the country’s top jurists are ruling on consequential cases. Windsor posed as a conservative activist to speak with Justice Samuel Alito at a June 3 event of the Supreme Court Historical Society, where he appeared to endorse running the U.S. as a Christian theocracy and said he was doubtful about living peacefully with political opponents. In a separate recording from the same event, Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, complained about rainbow flags during Pride Month and made other incendiary remarks. Alito has refused to recuse himself from cases involving Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrection even after photos emerged of two flags associated with election deniers flying in front of his homes. “It wasn’t hard to speak with either of them,” says Windsor, who collected the recordings as part of her upcoming film Gonzo for Democracy and paid a total of $650 to get into the event. “These are individuals who have to operate professionally at the highest degree of discretion,” she says of Supreme Court justices. “It should tell you something that [Alito] felt comfortable enough to make these admissions to an almost virtual stranger.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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I have been covering the bare-knuckle, far-right political battles in a rural North Texas county since shortly after the 2020 presidential election. Just about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, Hood County might be off the beaten path, but it has been at the cutting edge of hard-line conservative activism in Texas for the past few years.

A year after the 2020 presidential election, I covered the effort in the county, which voted 81% for former President Donald Trump, to force out its independent elections administrator and give her duties to an elected county clerk who had used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

That’s when a local activist named Courtney Gore first came across my radar; she seemed to be the very embodiment of an uncompromising Republican movement intent on making schools the battleground for culture war issues over race and gender. As the co-host of a local far-right web-based talk show, Gore and her colleagues had taken aim at fellow Republicans they considered insufficiently conservative and frequently attacked the school district, alleging it was providing sexually explicit books to kids and teaching socialism and left-wing ideology about race and gender.

Gore ran for a seat on the Granbury Independent School District board in the fall of 2021. After she won, I spoke to parents who feared the worst. One gay parent said she and her wife were contemplating moving their 4-year-old son out of the district.

“Seeing stuff like the school board election definitely opens my eyes,” the parent told me. “Even though this is a small town, and I know most of the people, and I grew up next door, when it comes to sexuality nobody’s safe.”

A few months after the election, the local school district became one of the first in Texas to remove about 130 library books. The district eventually returned most of the books to the shelves, but in 2022 the Department of Education launched an investigation into whether the district violated federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender after ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News published audio of the district superintendent targeting books with LGBTQ+ themes.

As we continued to cover the district and efforts to remove LGBTQ+ library books, I kept tabs on the always lively local Facebook forums, where I watched Gore make a stunning about-face.

In May 2022, she publicly broke with her former hard-line supporters and admitted to her Facebook followers that she had unwittingly contributed to an effort to weaken support for public education in Granbury. Without naming names, she warned her followers on social media to be on guard against misinformation and efforts to manipulate their emotions with “conjecture.”

Gore’s social media messages became more pointed a week later. In response to a Facebook post about some of the tactics she believed were being used by her former allies, she spoke bluntly: “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” she wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better, imvho.”

The next month, she made her break explicit and began warning residents that a deeper plan was afoot to eliminate public education in Texas.

Then, in October, she told her Facebook followers that she had witnessed firsthand a plan for “weaponizing” the school board in an effort to build support for a voucher program, in which public education dollars would be spent on private and religious schools.

I reached out to Gore to see if she would be willing to talk to me about her political evolution. She was initially hesitant to do an interview, but I kept in communication with her. Then, nearly a year after I’d first reached out, as the Granbury district continued to undergo battles about library books, bond elections and vouchers, she agreed to meet with me. Since then we have done hours of interviews over Zoom, where she has described her experience, providing insight into what was happening behind the scenes as she ran for school board and in those first crucial months after she took office. Our stories this week detail how she came to her conclusions and her thoughts on what she sees as the larger forces that have played a role in Hood County politics.

Texas politics experts told me it is rare to see someone in modern political life have the fortitude to not just admit that they were wrong and had been misled, but to then turn around and challenge the party directly. Much more common in the Trump age, political scientists told me, is for politicians to stay silent or quietly resign rather than risk facing the wrath of the conservative hard-liners.

I’ll continue to report on school district elections and vouchers in Texas throughout the year. If you have tips or inside information, you can fill out this form.

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Schwartz.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The blue and orange leaflets that arrived in Idaho Falls mailboxes ahead of the school bond election in November 2022 looked like the usual fare that voters across the country get. Sent out by the school district, the mailers encouraged people in the eastern Idaho city to register to vote and listed bullet points highlighting what the bond would pay for.

But the mailers, along with other materials the district distributed, would lead the county prosecutor’s office to fine the superintendent and the district’s spokesperson, accusing them of violating election law by using taxpayer money to advocate for the bond measure. According to the prosecutor, it was illegal for district officials to describe the schools as “overcrowded” and “aged” or to say that students “need modern, safe, and secure schools.”

Such penalties were made possible by a 2018 state law originally pushed by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a conservative lobbying group that has become a big player in Idaho Republican politics. The foundation has stoked hostility toward public education across the state, pushing book bans in school libraries and accusing districts of indoctrinating students with “woke” ideas like critical race theory.

But unlike groups in other states, the Freedom Foundation has extended its reach by targeting school bond and levy elections, which have traditionally been local issues and are the main ways districts build and repair schools.

Over the past year, the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica have reported on how many Idaho students learn in poor conditions, in part, because the state has one of the most restrictive policies in the nation: It is one of two states that require two-thirds of voters to approve a bond. Lawmakers recently passed legislation to invest $1.5 billion in new funding for school facilities and proposed a ballot initiative to lower the voting threshold during elections that typically have high turnout. But those measures wouldn’t change the 2018 election integrity law.

School bond supporters said they agree taxpayer money shouldn’t be used to campaign for ballot measures, but they said the interpretation of the law has restricted the ability of school district officials to explain to their communities why the measures are needed, making passing bonds more difficult. Since the law was passed, the Freedom Foundation and those with similar positions have publicly accused at least four school districts of improperly advocating for bonds and levies. In the other cases, prosecutors have not moved forward with fines.

Many states prohibit school districts from taking sides in bond elections to prevent public agencies from using taxpayer dollars to influence elections, and some laws include fines. A similar situation is playing out in Texas, where the attorney general sued several school districts over concerns that administrations were electioneering for candidates, measures or political parties. Generally, however, the laws allow school districts to educate voters. Idaho’s, for example, specifically permits providing information about the cost, purpose and property conditions in a “factually neutral manner.” But there is a lot of gray area between educating and advocating.

Don Lifto, a former Minnesota superintendent who consults for school districts running tax elections, said it’s rare for school administrators to be fined. “I think this was a pretty strict and conservative interpretation of the statute,” he said. Under most state laws, he said, it would be hard to argue that saying students “need modern, safe, and secure schools” is a violation.

A conservative anti-tax tilt has long defined Idaho, well before the Freedom Foundation launched in 2009. Since then, it has become the leading voice against public education in Idaho. Its lobbying arm, Idaho Freedom Action, was the top spender on Facebook ads before the last statewide primary election in 2022.

“They monitor every single vote, and then they really go after people that don’t vote in alignment with them. And I can tell you just from being around the Legislature that a lot of legislators are afraid of them,” said Rod Gramer, the president and CEO of Idaho Business for Education, a group of business leaders focused on improving public schools. “They’ve made it very clear that they want to defund education and privatize education.” (The Statesman is a member of Idaho Business for Education.)

Superintendents, school board trustees and community members in at least half a dozen school districts said in interviews that the Freedom Foundation’s arguments have spread across the state, with local advocates frequently parroting its talking points during board and bond elections.

At the Capitol, the Freedom Foundation’s legislative index has become the authority for some lawmakers when deciding how to vote on bills. Unlike typical lobbying report cards, the group’s elaborate ranking system assigns positive or negative points to each bill, serving as a regular reminder for lawmakers that any step outside the group’s platform could cost them.

“There’s some legislators who follow that religiously and just look at those notes and see how to vote,” said Sen. Rod Furniss, a Republican from Rigby in East Idaho.

Late last year, the local Republican committees in Idaho Falls cited the group’s scores when it decided to investigate six Republican lawmakers because of their votes on certain bills, including education spending bills. Some lawmakers were censured, although they defended their voting records.

Ron Nate, the president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, declined to comment and did not answer written questions. The Freedom Foundation has called the index an “objective measure” of how legislators vote on the “principles of freedom and limited government.” “Score well, and your political profile is good; score low, and you have some explaining to do,” Nate wrote in 2023. It also said that the Idaho Falls case deserved “significantly worse consequences” but that the election integrity bill had been watered down by education groups before passing.

They’ve made it very clear that they want to defund education and privatize education.

The high bond threshold and low voter turnout can allow well-funded interest groups like the Freedom Foundation to have significant influence, said John Rumel, a University of Idaho law professor. “There’s a relatively small number of people that they need to convince to change the outcome in those elections,” he said.

Even with a high turnout in a general election year, the 2022 bond measure in Idaho Falls failed despite getting 58% of the vote.

The fallout for the district didn’t end with the election. A week before, a complaint was filed with the Bonneville County Sheriff’s office, and three days later, the Freedom Foundation called for the district to be “held accountable for electioneering.”

In the end, the district said, the case cost $54,000 in legal fees.

The Freedom Foundation’s mission is to “defeat Marxism and socialism” with principles of “limited government, free markets and self-reliance,” according to its website.

As broad as that sounds, early on, the group set its sights on bond and levy elections, which intersected with two of the group’s focus areas, taxes and public schools. In 2010, its founder, Wayne Hoffman, wrote an editorial in the Statesman decrying the city of Boise for spending money to educate voters on a ballot measure and warned of what he thought could happen next.

“What happens if Idaho’s 115 school districts decide that it is their job to help ‘educate’ Idahoans on the two-thirds majority needed to pass a school bond?” Hoffman wrote. “If government agencies across Idaho start to follow Boise’s lead, taxpayers — and freedom — don’t stand a chance.”

In 2014, the Freedom Foundation argued on its website that school districts had too many chances to hold bond and levy elections and called for the Legislature to limit them to once every two years. Since then, the Legislature has eliminated two election dates school districts could use each year.

Hoffman declined to comment and referred the Statesman to Nate.

In 2017, the foundation pushed for a strict election integrity law.

That version would have banned any mass communication or mailers leading up to the election, only allowing notices to be posted online or in the newspaper stating the election date, the bond’s impact on residents’ taxes and a “neutral and concise explanation” of what it would do. A public official who violated the law could be charged with a misdemeanor, fined up to $1,000 and sentenced to up to six months in jail. And the election result could be voided.

In part, the legislation grew out of a state Supreme Court case that barred public entities from promoting bonds but provided few guidelines.

Several key education groups sent a letter to Rep. Jason Monks, R-Meridian, who sponsored the legislation, with concerns that it would create a “heckler’s veto” to invalidate elections and have “a serious, chilling effect for anyone working in the public sphere to speak out on relative policy issues.”

A compromise bill in 2018 still banned advocating but specifically allowed districts and local governments to provide information in a “factually neutral manner.” It removed criminal charges, and the penalties were lowered to a $250 fine, though they rose if someone knowingly violated the law.

While some lawmakers raised concerns that the law’s language would inhibit school officials from knowing what they could say, education stakeholders thought the bill provided more clarity, and it passed in the Legislature overwhelmingly.

In the years since, as the education culture wars have heated up, the Freedom Foundation has again positioned itself at the center. The group started publishing a map that promises to reveal “if your school district is indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense,” like having gay-straight alliance clubs or asking students their pronouns. The map also includes diversity, equity and inclusion personnel; test scores; and superintendent salaries.

We were passive about the elections. And it came back to bite us.

Last year, exhibiting the reach of the group’s influence, Branden Durst, a former Freedom Foundation analyst, was picked to be the superintendent of the West Bonner School District in North Idaho. Durst did not have the required experience in the classroom for the job, according to the State Board of Education. The trustees who hired him worried about a curriculum that included “social emotional learning.” The appointment and the board’s decision to toss the educational program led two trustees to be recalled. And after the public outcry, Durst submitted a letter that said he’d decided to step aside, and the board accepted it as his resignation. Durst declined to comment.

Organizers of the recall effort said that low voter turnout and a lack of involvement in recent years had fostered an environment that allowed the Freedom Foundation to take hold.

“We were passive about the elections,” said Candy Turner, one of the organizers. “And it came back to bite us.”

In May 2023, when Idaho Falls administrators learned the prosecutor was fining two district officials under the election law, the board felt the district had done nothing wrong. It had educated the public on the $250 million bond to build a new high school and two elementary schools, along with other repairs — and it had ultimately failed. Superintendent Karla LaOrange, who joined the district after the complaint was filed, said the district thought if it paid the fines, which came to $375 in total, it would signal to the community that it was admitting guilt. So the district, known as D91, spent the money to fight.

Lisa Keller of D91 Taxpayers, a group that opposed the bond effort, said the group was not responsible for filing the complaint, though she and its members had concerns about the materials. She said community members worried about losing their homes due to the increase in taxes from the bond, which was the largest the district had ever run. She described the district’s plan for a new school as wanting to construct a Taj Mahal.

The formal allegation, however, came from Larry Lyon, a local resident who helped fund the political action committee behind D91 Taxpayers, with the help of Brian Stutzman, another nearby resident who has been involved in tax issues statewide, according to campaign finance records and the complaint obtained through a public records request. The Freedom Foundation had alleged the district violated the law in a website post days before the election, and D91 Taxpayers shared the post on its Facebook page.

Lyon said in a message he filed the complaint because he was “sincerely concerned” the district “crossed the line from simply presenting facts to advocating for higher taxes with public funds.” He said he was confident the prosecutor’s office would “be fair to everyone involved.” Stutzman declined to comment.

Bonneville County Prosecutor Randy Neal said he had no choice but to move forward with the complaint because he thought it was a clear violation. In an interview, he went through the district’s mailers to explain the problematic language. Instead of saying “overcrowded,” the district could have said the school was built for a certain number of students and that it now served more. “What I can’t do is say, ‘We need to replace the school because it’s overcrowded.’ That’s advocating for the bond,” he said.

Neal said the district ignored its own legal advice, citing a memo from Idaho law firm Hawley Troxell that warned the “most questionable actions” happen when districts explain the “‘need’ for the new facilities” and said “crowding issues or age of facilities” may be better for others to talk about. Hawley Troxell and the school district didn’t respond to requests for comment about the memo.

Erin Bingham, one of the leading supporters of the bond effort, said she felt like Neal was associated with D91 Taxpayers and the Freedom Foundation. She called the complaint “frivolous” and a “waste of time and taxpayers’ money.”

“I feel like it creates a precedent that if they don’t fight it,” these groups will continue to file complaints against the school district during bond elections, she said.

Neal denied taking action for political reasons or being affiliated with any advocacy groups. “I have no dog in the fight,” he said. “I don’t have children. This isn’t the school district I live in. I don’t know any of these people.”

The district’s decision to fight the fines bred even more distrust with D91 Taxpayers, which said the district was wasting money on legal bills.

“What a breach of public trust, to fight the county prosecutor with my money, paying their lawyers with my money,” Keller told the Statesman and ProPublica. “This is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.”

The district eventually settled the complaint. The total fine was lowered to $250, and the case was dismissed.

What I can’t do is say, ‘We need to replace the school because it’s overcrowded.’ That’s advocating for the bond.

The prosecutor’s action, though, has had a chilling effect across the community and state, education stakeholders say.

“It’s panic I’ve heard for sure,” said Quinn Perry of the Idaho School Boards Association. ISBA, along with two other education groups, wrote an opinion piece last year noting that the Legislature has been making it increasingly difficult for school districts and local governments to run measures that raise taxes. If simply communicating a need is interpreted as advocacy, “we are not sure that school districts can sustain their operations or ever build a new school,” the groups wrote. “Perhaps that is the point.”

Idaho Falls board chair Hillary Radcliffe said district officials may feel they can’t speak as “frankly” about what’s going on because it could be construed as advocacy. “They have to be very, very limited in what they’re saying,” she said. “It makes it hard sometimes for our community to fully grasp some of the issues we have going on in our schools.”

Republican Sen. Dave Lent, who represents Idaho Falls and chairs the Senate Education Committee, said Neal took the law too far. “It’s an aggressive interpretation by our prosecuting attorney,” said Lent, a former Idaho Falls school board member. “You have to educate people as to the why. And if you’re not allowed to tell them the why, your hands are tied.”

The district has been grappling with how to fix its schools, with narrowing options and intense opposition and distrust from community members and groups like the Freedom Foundation.

The hallways of Idaho Falls schools are still overcrowded, and administrators worry about projected growth. The bathrooms regularly have to be closed at the district’s Skyline High School because the plumbing is failing, administrators said. Students with disabilities are crammed into small classrooms with doorways that barely fit wheelchairs.

Idaho Falls High School was built for 900 students but now serves about 1,250, administrators said. Between periods, hundreds of students rush out of their classrooms, walk down narrow staircases and push to get to their classes on time. Students eat lunch on the floor because the cafeteria accommodates only about 200 students, fewer than even the number of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Classrooms flood, as does the athletic field.

After heavy rains last spring, Bingham said, “the kids were skipping rocks across it.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Algernon Austin.

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Photograph Source: Phillip Pessar – CC BY 2.0

Less than a week after its release, The Barbie Movie has garnered an intense reaction from the Right, from accusations of “delivering more lectures than laughs,” and “the most anti-man film ever made,” to a 43-minute rant by Ben Shapiro, during which he burned a Barbie, Ken, and a toy car, claiming the movie “undermines basic human values.”

In their urgency to crush a perceived feminist agenda, Right Wing commentators are missing the film’s remarkably balanced attempt to mend a rift in the cultural dialogue about gender and identity. Rather than heeding the critics who cry “woke”, conservatives would do well to see the film and judge for themselves.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie explores themes that should appeal to conservatives, championing the value of motherhood — I challenge any parent to not get misty-eyed — refusing to dichotomize traditional femininity and professional achievement, criticizing the ironically anti-woman elements of internet feminism, and even acknowledging the struggle to achieve constitutional equality between groups. As a psychologist, however, what I found most interesting, and certainly most relevant to the right wing “discourse” surrounding the movie, is the film’s interaction with the psychological principle of “precarious manhood”.

Precarious manhood refers to the male tendency to measure their masculinity according to others’ estimation, rather than by personal or objective means. In other words, the respect of being a “real man” is something that is difficult to gain, easily lost, and must be constantly proved. Men who perceive their manhood as being threatened tend to respond aggressively, often posturing and blustering to appear tough and “manly.” This other-dependent masculinity is one of the central themes of the movie — and it’s the reason why many right wing critics are reacting so strongly.

Barbie’s Ken, played with Oscar-winning aplomb by Ryan Gosling, is a man-doll whose identity is entirely tied up in his desired relationship with Barbie. The narrator’s introduction perfectly summarizes Ken’s self-concept: “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.” When it becomes clear that Barbie isn’t interested, Ken’s threatened precarious manhood drives him to embrace “patriarchy,” conquer Barbieland, and brainwash the once-independent Barbies into wearing French Maid outfits and serving the Kens “brewski beers.”

Many across the ideological spectrum, including the American Psychological Association, feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, and even Ben Shapiro’s fellow Daily Wire contributor Jordan Peterson, have all highlighted the dangers of this masculine insecurity. Lack of self-identity mixed with feelings of isolation — in other words, precarious manhood — drives men to dangerous beliefs and behaviors. Although Ken is the antagonist, the film treats him compassionately, and Ken resolves his crisis by realizing that he is “Kenough,” and must anchor his identity beyond his job (which is not a lifeguard, but simply “beach”) or desired romantic relationships. Instead, he must view himself as an individual with innate value. Sure it’s not quite Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” but you’d think this positive depiction of individualism as the solution to a crisis of masculinity deserves some Right Wing approval.

The trouble is many conservative critics are afflicted by the same precarious manhood as Ken. For example, I’d suggest that setting toys on fire like Toy Story’s kid-nightmare Sid is not the behavior of someone secure in their masculinity. Modern conservative media is full of similar examples, from Donald Trump’s constant temper tantrums to supposed masculinity advocate Jordan Peterson’s refusing to apologize for sexist comments about swimsuit models. Testicle tanning Tucker Carlson takes the cake by sympathetically interviewing alleged sex trafficker and admitted sexual predator Andrew Tate as a part of his efforts to address his perception of society’s masculinity crisis.

Clearly there is a crisis of masculinity within our society, but solving it would require admitting that these problems exist, not just blame-shifting or melting down every time someone else points them out. Barbie’s critics are too consumed by their precarious manhood to do this — so much so that a movie affirming men’s need to source their identity in something stronger than female approval has provoked their ire and left them seeing an olive branch as a threat. Were these people more secure in their manhood — if they could only realize that they, too, are “Kenough” — then their response to Barbie would likely be very different. It would certainly involve less burnt plastic.

I won’t pretend that The Barbie Movie is perfect. For instance, I wish the father character had been less buffoonish. However, I didn’t perceive the film’s questions or jokes as a threat to men, but as opportunities to engage in important conversations. Greta Gerwig claims she intended the film as an “invitation for everybody” — men and women, liberal and conservative. The film simultaneously rejects toxic masculinity and extreme feminism, patriarchy and matriarchy, suggesting that answers to our culture’s ideological differences must lie somewhere in the middle. Like Barbie and Ken, the audience is left to work out our answers through our own self-examinations and discussions..

But those discussions can’t occur if we burn Barbie-mobiles instead of building bridges. Like Ken, we should abandon our precarious manhood and instead follow Barbie’s example: “do the imagining, don’t be the idea.” Go see the movie yourself (wear pink!) — you might be pleasantly surprised.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dr. Aaron Pomerantz.

Photograph Source: Phillip Pessar – CC BY 2.0

Less than a week after its release, The Barbie Movie has garnered an intense reaction from the Right, from accusations of “delivering more lectures than laughs,” and “the most anti-man film ever made,” to a 43-minute rant by Ben Shapiro, during which he burned a Barbie, Ken, and a toy car, claiming the movie “undermines basic human values.”

In their urgency to crush a perceived feminist agenda, Right Wing commentators are missing the film’s remarkably balanced attempt to mend a rift in the cultural dialogue about gender and identity. Rather than heeding the critics who cry “woke”, conservatives would do well to see the film and judge for themselves.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie explores themes that should appeal to conservatives, championing the value of motherhood — I challenge any parent to not get misty-eyed — refusing to dichotomize traditional femininity and professional achievement, criticizing the ironically anti-woman elements of internet feminism, and even acknowledging the struggle to achieve constitutional equality between groups. As a psychologist, however, what I found most interesting, and certainly most relevant to the right wing “discourse” surrounding the movie, is the film’s interaction with the psychological principle of “precarious manhood”.

Precarious manhood refers to the male tendency to measure their masculinity according to others’ estimation, rather than by personal or objective means. In other words, the respect of being a “real man” is something that is difficult to gain, easily lost, and must be constantly proved. Men who perceive their manhood as being threatened tend to respond aggressively, often posturing and blustering to appear tough and “manly.” This other-dependent masculinity is one of the central themes of the movie — and it’s the reason why many right wing critics are reacting so strongly.

Barbie’s Ken, played with Oscar-winning aplomb by Ryan Gosling, is a man-doll whose identity is entirely tied up in his desired relationship with Barbie. The narrator’s introduction perfectly summarizes Ken’s self-concept: “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.” When it becomes clear that Barbie isn’t interested, Ken’s threatened precarious manhood drives him to embrace “patriarchy,” conquer Barbieland, and brainwash the once-independent Barbies into wearing French Maid outfits and serving the Kens “brewski beers.”

Many across the ideological spectrum, including the American Psychological Association, feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, and even Ben Shapiro’s fellow Daily Wire contributor Jordan Peterson, have all highlighted the dangers of this masculine insecurity. Lack of self-identity mixed with feelings of isolation — in other words, precarious manhood — drives men to dangerous beliefs and behaviors. Although Ken is the antagonist, the film treats him compassionately, and Ken resolves his crisis by realizing that he is “Kenough,” and must anchor his identity beyond his job (which is not a lifeguard, but simply “beach”) or desired romantic relationships. Instead, he must view himself as an individual with innate value. Sure it’s not quite Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” but you’d think this positive depiction of individualism as the solution to a crisis of masculinity deserves some Right Wing approval.

The trouble is many conservative critics are afflicted by the same precarious manhood as Ken. For example, I’d suggest that setting toys on fire like Toy Story’s kid-nightmare Sid is not the behavior of someone secure in their masculinity. Modern conservative media is full of similar examples, from Donald Trump’s constant temper tantrums to supposed masculinity advocate Jordan Peterson’s refusing to apologize for sexist comments about swimsuit models. Testicle tanning Tucker Carlson takes the cake by sympathetically interviewing alleged sex trafficker and admitted sexual predator Andrew Tate as a part of his efforts to address his perception of society’s masculinity crisis.

Clearly there is a crisis of masculinity within our society, but solving it would require admitting that these problems exist, not just blame-shifting or melting down every time someone else points them out. Barbie’s critics are too consumed by their precarious manhood to do this — so much so that a movie affirming men’s need to source their identity in something stronger than female approval has provoked their ire and left them seeing an olive branch as a threat. Were these people more secure in their manhood — if they could only realize that they, too, are “Kenough” — then their response to Barbie would likely be very different. It would certainly involve less burnt plastic.

I won’t pretend that The Barbie Movie is perfect. For instance, I wish the father character had been less buffoonish. However, I didn’t perceive the film’s questions or jokes as a threat to men, but as opportunities to engage in important conversations. Greta Gerwig claims she intended the film as an “invitation for everybody” — men and women, liberal and conservative. The film simultaneously rejects toxic masculinity and extreme feminism, patriarchy and matriarchy, suggesting that answers to our culture’s ideological differences must lie somewhere in the middle. Like Barbie and Ken, the audience is left to work out our answers through our own self-examinations and discussions..

But those discussions can’t occur if we burn Barbie-mobiles instead of building bridges. Like Ken, we should abandon our precarious manhood and instead follow Barbie’s example: “do the imagining, don’t be the idea.” Go see the movie yourself (wear pink!) — you might be pleasantly surprised.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dr. Aaron Pomerantz.

The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes‘ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.

The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were eighteenth century intellectuals who “applied reason to the study of many areas of learning, including philosophy, history, science, politics, economics and social issues.” Most importantly, they believed in progress and tolerance and in many different ways sought to highlight injustice and seek ways of changing society for the better.

The anti-philosophes rose up to defend ‘throne and altar’ and over time many of the ideals of the anti-philosophes were taken over by Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and the conservative politics of the twentieth century; for example, in Western culture, “depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of social institutions such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, property rights, and monarchy.”

The origins of right-wing politics in Europe are often attributed to Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Irish philosopher, who is seen as the philosophical father of modern conservatism. His book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a criticism of the French Revolution, which itself was partly fueled by the writings of the philosophes, thus setting up the dividing lines between the supporters of radical republicanism and revolution, in opposition to the supporters of the older monarchy and church of the ancien régime.

The idea of the Counter-Enlightenment is itself controversial as some academics argue that an organised force against the Enlightenment was non-existent, or at the very least, a complex debate. For example, Jeremy L. Caradonna (There Was No Counter-Enlightenment) and Robert E. Norton (The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment) both look at contradictory aspects of the individuals called anti-philosophes. As has been noted the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment “did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of society.”

It was Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas who popularised the term in his essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’. Berlin was critical of the irrationalism of the early conservative figures from the 1700s such as Joseph de Maistre, Giambattista Vico, and J. G. Hamann. He also examined the German reaction to the French Enlightenment and Revolution as the main source of reaction to the Enlightenment in general and which eventually led to the Romanticist movement. Berlin noted that:

Such influential writers such as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet believed that the development of the arts and sciences was the most powerful human weapon in attaining these ends [e.g. satisfaction of basic physical and biological needs, peace, happiness, justice etc] and the sharpest weapon in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression and barbarism, which crippled human effort and frustrated man’s search for truth and self-direction. ¹

Writers like Darrin M. McMahon have looked at the early opponents of the Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary France, while Graeme Garrard has shown in detail the conservative counter-Enlightenment ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very different perspective on one of the heroes of the French Revolution.

In this essay I will look at the individuals and groups who took a stand against the philosophes through their movements, books, and journals in support of the church and monarchy.

Early opposition to the Enlightenment

Opposition to the philosophes of the Enlightenment did not start with the French Revolution. According to McMahon in his book Enemies of the Enlightenment:

Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge that conservative salons existed in the eighteenth century in which the philosophes‘ ideas were regarded with horror… ²

Many writers in France mocked the progressive ideas of the philosophes in “a host of satirical plays, libels, and novels published in the late 1750s, 1760s and early 1770s”. ³  McMahon comments that: “It stands to reason that the reaction to the Enlightenment should also have occurred first in the place of its birth and been spearheaded by the very institution – the Catholic Church – charged with maintaining the faith and morals of the realm”. ⁴

This can be seen, for example, in the Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire which chronicled Voltaire’s ‘traffic with Satan’, and was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.

“Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire. This brief work, chronicling Voltaire’s traffic with Satan, was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.”  ⁵

The adverse reaction to the ideas of the philosophes was evident in the hundreds of books, pamphlets, sermons, essays, and poems written against them, as well as becoming the raison d’être of journals such as the Anée littéraire, the Journal historique et littéraire, and the Journal ecclésiastique. ⁶ McMahon writes about how the enemies of ‘throne and altar’ and their ‘treasonous’ activities were perceived by the anti-philosophes:

The anti-philosophes saw the philosophes as ‘enemies of the state’, ‘evil citizens’, ‘declared adversaries of throne and altar’, and unpatriotic subjects guilty of human and divine treason. […] Thus, the anti-philosophes frequently accused their opponents of spreading “republican” and “democratic” ideas. The philosophes, they claimed, preached the sovereignty of the people, advocated “perfect equality,” and spoke endlessly of “social contracts.” They lauded the political institutions of the United Kingdom, spreading a contagious “Anglomania” that held up Parliament and the limitations placed on the powers of the English crown as models to be emulated in France. And they talked ad nauseum of “liberty and equality,” natural rights and the “rights of the people” without ever mentioning duties and obligations.” ⁷

They even appealed to the new dauphin [The distinctive title (originally Dauphin of Viennois) of the eldest son of the king of France, from 1349 until the revolution of 1830] to be wary of the new anti-religious attitude that was being spread by the philosophes: “From this anarchy of the physical and moral universe results, necessarily, the overthrow of thrones, the extinction of sovereigns, and the dissolution of all societies. Oh Kings! Oh Sovereigns! Will you be strong enough to stay on your thrones if this principle ever prevails?” ⁸

The 1757 frontispiece to the first volume of Jean Soret and Jean-Nicolas-Hubert Hayer’s anti-philosophe journal, La Religion vengée, ou Réfutation des auteurs impies. True philosophy, in possession of the keys to the church, presents a copy of the work to the dauphin, Louis Ferdinand, who looks on approvingly as religion and wisdom trample false philosophy under foot. The latter bears a sign which reads in Latin, “He said that there is no God.” ⁹

The power of the philosophes‘ ideas could be seen in their influence on the French Revolution of 1789 and in particular on the human civil rights document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789) which was adopted on the 26 of August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution.

Ultra-Royalist reaction

However, the Ultra-Royalist reaction, the nobility of high society who strongly supported Roman Catholicism as the state and only legal religion of France, as well as the Bourbon monarchy, initiated what became known as the Second White Terror, a counter-revolution against the French Revolution.

It provided an opportunity for the counter-Enlightenment conservatives to get their revenge on the revolutionaries, taking the form of militant struggle that resulted in bloody consequences. For example:

The Ultra-Royalist assembly returned after the upheaval of the Hundred Days, this conservative revolution set out to cleanse France of the men and spirits of 1789. Throughout the country, exceptional courts and special jurisdictions tried and punished revolutionary criminals. In the civil service and royal administration as many as fifty thousand to eighty thousand former officials were stripped of their positions, and in the church, the army, and the universities, similar purges were encouraged, although on a smaller scale. In the provinces, particularly in the Midi, marauding gangs took matters into their own hands, hunting down revolutionary collaborators and settling old scores in a great bloodletting known as the White Terror. ¹⁰

However, the Terror worried even the king himself as in 1816 Louis XVIII dissolved the chambre introuvable, to the great horror of the Catholic Right: “Louis feared its intransigent refusal to compromise with any vestige of the Revolution, its exaggerated religiosity, and its resolute efforts to exact retribution from the “criminals” who had sullied France.” Thus the conservative pro-monarchy forces had become even more royalist than the king himself. ¹¹

The Chambre introuvable (French for “Unobtainable Chamber”) was the first “Chamber of Deputies elected after the Second Bourbon Restoration in 1815. It was dominated by Ultra-royalists who completely refused to accept the results of the French Revolution.”

The conservative ideas of the Ultras, for example, “the weight of history, the primacy of the social whole, the centrality of the family, the necessity of religion, and the dangers of tolerance” found their way into many right-wing and conservative ideologies of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹²

Rousseau’s turn against reason and science

Similarly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conservative turn laid the groundwork for the future irrationalist Romanticist movement. Despite  Rousseau’s popularity as a philosopher of the French Revolution, Rousseau ultimately went against the rationalism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century and moved towards a philosophy based on emotion, imagination and religion.

“Flee, vile imposters, no longer sully this temple”, the frontispiece to Pierre-Victor-Jean Berthre de Bourniseaux, Le Charlatanisme dans tous les âges dévoilé (Paris, 1807). Angels of the Lord banish the philosophes from the Temple of Truth. In the foreground, Voltaire, Rousseau, La Mettrie, Plato,and other philosophes flee in despair. ¹³

According to Graham Garrard in Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment:

Rousseau’s “unequivocal preference was for the “happy ignorance” of Sparta over Athens, that “fatherland of the Sciences and the Arts” the philosophes so much admired. He regarded virtue as much more important than knowledge or cognitive ability; a good heart is worth inestimable more than the possession of knowledge or a cultivated intellect, he thought” and concludes that “relying on reason – as philosophers do – “far from delivering me from my useless doubts, would only cause those which tormented me to multiply and would resolve none of them. Therefore, I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light'”. ¹⁴

Rousseau’s inward looking attitude and distrust of reason resulted in a very different kind of politics than the philosophes had imagined, as Garrard writes:

Unlike the foundation of political society envisaged by Hobbes and Locke, [Rousseau] stresses the need for a legislator who relies principally on religion and myth rather than reason, self interest, or fear to “bind the citizens to the fatherland and to one another.” […] For Rousseau, religion substitutes for reason as the cement of society and the means of inducing respect for the laws. […] Rousseau’s legislator is a prophet and (perhaps) a poet, whose “magic” produces a nation, rather than a philosopher who appeals to reason. ¹⁵

For Rousseau the spread of knowledge was to be controlled and funnelled into localist communities and beliefs, away from modern conceptions of the nation state:

Rousseau was opposed to the popularization of knowledge, not to knowledge per se. In his final reply to critics of his first Discourse, he clarifies position by stressing this distinction between knowledge and its dissemination. “[I]t is good for there to be Philosophers,”he writes, “provided that the People doesn’t get mixed up in being Philosophers”. ¹⁶

Leo Strauss’s sentiments exactly! Knowledge as a set of myths that would keep the masses happy but not the kind of universalist knowledge that might lead them to revolt:

The key to Rousseau’s patriotic program is what he referred to as a “truly national education.” Unlike the “party of humanity,” he called for education to be put entirely in the service of particular national communities in order to prevent the corrosive spread of universal ideas and beliefs. He rejected the view put forth by the philosophes that the universal arts and sciences are an adequate basis for political community. ¹⁷

The Despair of the philosophes. Frontispiece to the 1817 edition of the prolific anti-philosophe Élie Harel’s Voltaire: Particularités curieuses de sa vie et de sa mort, new ed. (Paris, 1817). Christ reigns supreme over a fallen medusa, who vomits up the Encyclopédie, Rousseau’s Émile, Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, and other key Enlightenment texts.” ¹⁸

Moreover, Rousseau advocated the use of catharsis and ‘bread and circuses’ to maintain loyalty to the patriotic fatherland (and thereby stymieing any type of burgeoning class consciousness):

Rousseau also advised would-be legislators to establish “exclusive and national” religious ceremonies; games which “[keep] the Citizen frequently assembled;” exercises that increase their national “pride and self esteem;” and spectacles which, by reminding citizens of their glorious past, “stirred their hearts, fired them with a lively spirit of emulation, and strongly attached them to the fatherland with which they were being kept constantly occupied. ¹⁹

Rousseau opens one of his most famous books, The Social Contract, with the words ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’ yet this was a far cry from Marx’s ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains’, as Rousseau refers to rising up against a tyrant, not rising up against one’s own slavery. Especially not the ‘respectable rights’ of ‘masters over their servants’:

The Protestant, republican Rousseau bristled with indignation at the thought of his hardy, virtuous Genevans watching the cynical comedies of Moliere who, “for the sake of multiplying his jokes, shakes the whole order of society; how scandalously he overturns all the most sacred relations on which it is founded; how ridiculous he makes the respectable rights of fathers over their children, of husbands over their wives, of masters over their servants! ²⁰

Rousseau’s move away from enlightened humanism to authoritarianism can be seen in his attitude towards the state whereby any “attempt to liberate a prisoner, even if unjustly arrested, amounts to rebellion, which the state has a right to punish.” ²¹

If we compare this to Voltaire’s involvement in L’affair Calas we see a very different attitude, as Voltaire fought in defence of a Huguenot merchant who was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed.

Furthermore, Rousseau believed that “The taste for letters, philosophy, and the fine arts softens bodies and souls. Work in the study renders men delicate, weakens their temperament, and the soul retains its vigour with difficulty when the body has lost its vigour. Study uses up the machine, consumes spirits, destroys strength, enervates courage. … Study corrupts his morals, impairs his health, destroys his temperament, and often spoils his reason.” ²²

The Enlightenment philosophes thought the opposite: “The less men reason, the more wicked they are,” wrote the Baron d’Holbach. “Savages, princes, nobles and the dregs of the people, are commonly the worst of men, because they reason the least.” ²³

The Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticist ideas today

The Enlightenment seems to get blamed for everything these days. In an article titled  ‘Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism’, the author Jim Kozubek writes:

From the use of GMO seeds and aquaculture to assert control over the food chain to military strategies for gene-engineering bioweapons, power is asserted through patents and financial control over basic aspects of life. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in The Will to Knowledge (1976) referred to such advancements as ‘techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’.

Foucault does at least remark on a basic aspect of the problem: subjugation and control.

Kozubek comments that “science is exploited into dystopian realities – such fraught areas as neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care” but notes that “The biggest tug-of-war is not between science and religious institutional power, but rather between the primal connection to nature and scientific institutional power.”

Historically, the Enlightenment was a battle between the church and the new scientific approaches to knowledge in the 18th century. The philosophes wrote against the power of the church and the monarchies and developed progressive ideas about democracy and republicanism, torture and the death penalty, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

In the frontispiece to Voltaire’s book on Newton’s philosophy, Émilie du Châtelet appears as Voltaire’s muse, reflecting Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire.

However, this universalising philosophy and writing against injustice of the Enlightenment philosophes is missing from modern analyses of Romanticism, that by the 19th century those battles had developed into the Romanticist ‘primal connection to nature’ versus capitalist technocracy. Yet, what the Romanticists and the technocrats did have in common was that neither questioned slavery: whether it be the slavery of feudalism (which the Romanticists liked to hark back to), or the wage slavery of modern capitalism (which the technocrats prefer to ignore).

In fact, the Romanticists and the technocrats helped each other in a reactionary symbiotic relationship that perpetuated the status quo: the Romanticists had always used technology (to indulge their fantasies, for example, train technology brought them to gaze in awe at the ‘mystical’ Alps), while the technocrats used Romanticism to create diversion and escapism for the masses (thereby avoiding mass uprisings and revolution). This can be seen in the almost wholly Romanticist culture of fantasy, terror, horror, superheroes etc. that dominates global modern culture today in the era of global monopoly capitalism.

The Enlightenment and its opposing counter-Enlightenment, represented the main ideological battles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but as people became less and less religious over the ensuing century, Romanticism took over from the irrationalism of the church as the main counter-progressive force in society.

This can be seen also in the ‘suspicion of reason’ contained in the definitions of the post-Romanticist ideologies of Modernism and Postmodernism, and the outright return to Romanticism of Metamodernism. Once the bourgeois revolutions of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité‘  had been carried through, the universalist ideas of the philosophes were quietly dropped and the anti- (wage) slavery torch passed on to the revolutionary socialists.

It seems that the role of Romanticist movements (including Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism) is to react to any burgeoning progressive movement, to suck the life blood out of it and while not necessarily killing it, to at least leave it extremely weakened and non-threatening.

Meanwhile, any obvious lack of consistency in Romanticist movements merely points to, and demonstrates, its reactive nature. For example, Romanticist neo-Gothic is full of decoration, yet Romanticist (Modernist) Minimalism, in the form of Bauhaus, for example, is completely devoid of decoration.

McMahons description of the anti-philosophes confirms that reactive view:

If the philosophes assailed religion, then the anti-philosophes must protect it. If the philosophes attacked the king, then his authority must be upheld. If the philosophes vaunted the individual, then the social whole must be defended. If the philosophes corrupted the family, then its importance must be reaffirmed. And if the philosophes advocated change, then the anti-philosophes must prevent it. ²⁴

While the Right may not be able to get away with arguments for the re-establishment of monarchies these days, their ideology is still rooted in organized religion and the social teachings of the church, (combined with the military, and property rights).

The philosophes were progressive thinkers who struggled for radical changes against the injustices of their time. Their universalist writings on liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state are just as important in the world today as they have ever been, especially in an era of increasing globalised poverty where one  billion people worldwide live in slums (and yet this figure is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2030) and which is exacerbated by rising inflation and the impacts of war. It is time now for new thinking that is not dominated by the selfish political and war agendas of the billionaire media machine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The conservative justice insisted there was nothing untoward about the private jet flight to Alaska; his stay at a commercial fishing lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, a donor to the right-wing legal movement; or his decision not to disclose them. Alito wrote that he was "invited shortly before" the fishing trip—without mentioning by whom—and "was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant."

Notably, Alito also omitted the detail that Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and a key figure in the decades-long effort to pull the U.S. judiciary to the right, helped organize the Alaska trip. A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative appellate judge, also attended.

According to ProPublica, Leo "invited Singer to join" and asked the hedge fund tycoon "if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire's jet."

"Leo had recently played an important role in the justice's confirmation to the court," ProPublica reported. "Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo's political groups."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a longtime critic of the Supreme Court's complete lack of binding ethical standards, argued in a series of tweets late Tuesday that Alito's attempted prebuttal of ProPublica's reporting is riddled with holes.

"He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?" Whitehouse asked. "Oh, and would that 'empty seat' trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint: no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn't ask.)"

"This just keeps getting worse," the senator added.

ProPublica's reporting on Alito—who authored the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—comes weeks after the outlet revealed that another right-wing justice, Clarence Thomas, has been taking billionaire-funded trips for decades without disclosing them.

A common thread in the reporting about the two high court judges is Leo, who five years ago attended a vacation with Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow's lakeside resort in upstate New York.

In a statement to ProPublica, Leo declared that he would "never presume to tell" the conservative judges "what to do, and no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip."

ProPublica reported Tuesday that Singer "has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes."

The outlet detailed the most prominent example:

His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles...

Singer's most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression... Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer's fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespreadmediaattention.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer's fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

In 2014, years after the Alaska fishing trip, "the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter," specifically "how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund's legal maneuvers in U.S. courts," ProPublica reported.

Judicial Crisis Network, a right-wing group with connections to Leo, filed a brief in support of Singer's fund.

"The court ruled in Singer's favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority," ProPublica reported. "The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer."

In his Journal op-ed, Alito claimed he wasn't aware of Singer's connection to the case, even though his role was well publicized.

Singer also has connections to a high-profile Supreme Court fight involving the Biden administration's plan to cancel student debt for many borrowers.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that Singer chairs, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging justices to block the debt relief plan, ProPublica reported.

"If the Supreme Court kills student debt cancellation nobody can pretend the court has an ounce of legitimacy," the Debt Collective tweeted Wednesday. "Singer became a billionaire buying debts for pennies on the dollar and then weaponizing the courts to collect the full amount from the poorest people. Alito must recuse."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan added that "in any just world, and in any world in which Dems could do politics, there would be calls tonight for both Alito and Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court—and calls for impeachment if they refused to do so."

"But in our real world," Hasan lamented, "they won't even be subpoenaed by the Senate."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The conservative justice insisted there was nothing untoward about the private jet flight to Alaska; his stay at a commercial fishing lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, a donor to the right-wing legal movement; or his decision not to disclose them. Alito wrote that he was "invited shortly before" the fishing trip—without mentioning by whom—and "was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant."

Notably, Alito also omitted the detail that Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and a key figure in the decades-long effort to pull the U.S. judiciary to the right, helped organize the Alaska trip. A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative appellate judge, also attended.

According to ProPublica, Leo "invited Singer to join" and asked the hedge fund tycoon "if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire's jet."

"Leo had recently played an important role in the justice's confirmation to the court," ProPublica reported. "Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo's political groups."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a longtime critic of the Supreme Court's complete lack of binding ethical standards, argued in a series of tweets late Tuesday that Alito's attempted prebuttal of ProPublica's reporting is riddled with holes.

"He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?" Whitehouse asked. "Oh, and would that 'empty seat' trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint: no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn't ask.)"

"This just keeps getting worse," the senator added.

ProPublica's reporting on Alito—who authored the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—comes weeks after the outlet revealed that another right-wing justice, Clarence Thomas, has been taking billionaire-funded trips for decades without disclosing them.

A common thread in the reporting about the two high court judges is Leo, who five years ago attended a vacation with Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow's lakeside resort in upstate New York.

In a statement to ProPublica, Leo declared that he would "never presume to tell" the conservative judges "what to do, and no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip."

ProPublica reported Tuesday that Singer "has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes."

The outlet detailed the most prominent example:

His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles...

Singer's most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression... Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer's fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespreadmediaattention.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer's fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

In 2014, years after the Alaska fishing trip, "the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter," specifically "how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund's legal maneuvers in U.S. courts," ProPublica reported.

Judicial Crisis Network, a right-wing group with connections to Leo, filed a brief in support of Singer's fund.

"The court ruled in Singer's favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority," ProPublica reported. "The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer."

In his Journal op-ed, Alito claimed he wasn't aware of Singer's connection to the case, even though his role was well publicized.

Singer also has connections to a high-profile Supreme Court fight involving the Biden administration's plan to cancel student debt for many borrowers.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that Singer chairs, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging justices to block the debt relief plan, ProPublica reported.

"If the Supreme Court kills student debt cancellation nobody can pretend the court has an ounce of legitimacy," the Debt Collective tweeted Wednesday. "Singer became a billionaire buying debts for pennies on the dollar and then weaponizing the courts to collect the full amount from the poorest people. Alito must recuse."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan added that "in any just world, and in any world in which Dems could do politics, there would be calls tonight for both Alito and Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court—and calls for impeachment if they refused to do so."

"But in our real world," Hasan lamented, "they won't even be subpoenaed by the Senate."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The post Conservative Justices Save Voting Rights Act by Citing Systemic Racism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

We look at how a new Supreme Court ruling awards a major victory to polluters and land developers. In a 5-4 decision last week, the justices sharply limited the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect and preserve wetlands under the Clean Water Act. The ruling ends protections for about half of all the wetlands in the contiguous United States, jeopardizing access to safe drinking water for millions. “That just defies science, physics, commonsense,” says Earthjustice’s Sam Sankar, who urges Congress to take action to once again protect the country’s critical water resources.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post A Conservative Wipe-Out in the 2023 England Local Elections appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by John Nicolson.

The post Lost and Found: The Republicans Haven’t Lost Their Conservative Minds appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

• Anti-abortion Texas judge holds oral arguments on bid to ban key abortion medication
• Warnings that big tech is trying an international end run against privacy and civil rights rules
• California dries out before a 12th atmospheric river is set to strike by early next week
• Cycle Freddy kills 100s in Malawai and Mozambique
• Reparations advisory committee briefs San Francisco Supervisors on its draft report and recommendations
• Bay Area school district sues social media companies for adverse impacts on youth and schools

Image by Robin Marty:https://www.flickr.com/photos/92599314@N00/

The post Conservative Texas judge holds hearing on abortion pill; Cyclone Freddy kills hundreds in southern Africa; S.F. Supervisors hear reparations recommendations: Pacifica Evening News March 15 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in two challenges to the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan, which could give tens of millions of federal borrowers up to $20,000 of relief. During arguments, several conservative justices expressed skepticism over the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan, while liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Republican states who brought one of the lawsuits. We’re joined by Eleni Schirmer, who organizes with the Debt Collective and is a writer and postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre in Montreal. Her new piece in The New Yorker is headlined “How the Government Cancelled Betty Ann’s Debts.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The leading Conservative and Orthodox Jewish organizations in the United States on Monday issued rare condemnations of Sunday's deadly rampage by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank, joining U.S. and Israeli human rights groups in decrying the violence.

The Rabbinical Assembly, the New York-based international association of Conservative rabbis, published a statement saying that "we are in pain and join the condolences to the families of those killed, among them the Yaniv family and the Al-Aqatsch family," a reference to 19-year-old Yigal Yaakov Yaniv, one of two Israeli brothers murdered by a Palestinian gunman on Sunday, and Sameh Al-Aqatsch, a 37-year-old Palestinian man killed by rampaging settlers in Hawara hours later.

"Committed to Zionism and the state of Israel, we are deeply disturbed by the acts of terror, vandalism, and violence supposedly carried out in the name of Israel or of God," the assembly continued. "These actions both harm Jewish sovereignty and constitute a danger to the existence of the Jewish state."

"We are deeply disturbed by the acts of terror, vandalism, and violence supposedly carried out in the name of Israel or of God."

Meanwhile, the Orthodox Union—also based in New York—issued its own condemnation of what the group's vice president, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, called the settlers' "undisciplined and random fury" in Hawara, where Jewish settler colonists burned homes, businesses, and vehicles while violently attacking Palestinians as Israeli soldiers looked on.

"We need to speak consistently and clearly, pledging security and a decisive response to those who commit acts of terror and violence against Jews, but absolutely condemning and decrying indiscriminate violence committed by Jews against anyone, anywhere," the statement added.

Rabbinical Assembly and Orthodox Union joined progressive organizations including the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and U.S.-based Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in condemning the settler rampage.

However, where Hauer asked "how can such a thing happen... that young Jewish men should ransack and burn homes and cars," JVP called the settler attack "the inevitable result of Zionism."

"Zionism has always required the displacement and removal of Palestinians from their lands to make way for a Jewish state," the group noted. "Under the leadership of Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, the current far-right extremist Israeli government is escalating the ethnic cleansing begun in 1948 with the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their land."

Where Rabbinical Assembly said it expects the Israeli government and military "to act to prevent harm to people and to property, and to try any person who has chosen to harm another person," B'Tselem placed blame for the violence squarely upon the "Jewish supremacist regime."

"The Huwara Pogrom was an extreme manifestation of a long-standing Israeli policy," the group argued. "It was carried out by the state of Israel."

Ironically, anti-Jewish pogroms—organized terror campaigns—in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries were a major driver of Zionist migration to Palestine.

Refuting claims that the murderous settlers were "out of control," B'Tselem asserted that "this isn't 'loss of control.' This is exactly what Israeli control looks like."

"The settlers carry out the attack, the military secures it, the politicians back it," the group said. "It's a synergy."

Sunday's killings and rampage came days after Israeli troops killed 12 Palestinians, including a child and two elderly people, during a raid in Nablus, home of the Lion's Den, a militant Palestinian resistance group.

More than 60 Palestinians—around half of them resistance fighters—and 14 Israelis, all civilians save for one paramilitary police officer, have been killed this year alone. This follows what human rights advocates called the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since the second intifada, or general uprising, ended in 2005.

Meanwhile, two weeks after approving the "legalization" of nine apartheid settler outposts in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem that are considered illegal even under Israeli law, Israel's far-right government is pressing ahead with plans for a settlement project that would bisect Palestinian territorial contiguity in the West Bank.

Last week, the Israeli government also approved the construction of 7,287 new Jewish-only homes in West Bank settlements, the largest number ever authorized in a single proposal.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

The post Conservative Contradictions Stacking Up appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

In a remarkable development, New York Democrats look likely to defeat Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle to be the state’s next chief judge, after progressives raised concern about his conservative judicial record and anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-bail reform positions. “We have a situation here in New York where we have an opportunity to shift the highest court in a progressive direction, and the governor is completely fumbling that opportunity,” says Jabari Brisport, a Democratic Socialist state senator in Brooklyn who was one of the first to oppose LaSalle’s nomination.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Russia attacks Ukraine with explosive drones, air and sea based missile in the biggest wave of military strikes in weeks.
• Benjamin Netanyahu returns as Prime Minister for an unprecedented 6th term. He leads the most right wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history.
• The first in a series of storms is hitting the San Francisco Bay Area – a flood watch will be in effect from Friday night into Saturday.
• Southwest Airlines promises to return to normal operations tomorrow following more than a week of travel chaos.
• President Biden signs the $1.7 trillion dollar spending bill to fund the government through the end of September.
• And soccer sensation Pele dies of cancer in Brazil at the age of 82.

Image: Pele plays in a 1963 match between Brazil and Italy via Wikimedia.

The post Russia attacks Ukraine in a wave of missile strikes; Netanyahu returns as prime minister leading most far-right conservative government in Israel’s history; Biden signs $1.7tn spending bill appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The post Conservative Governance has Undermined U.S. Life Expectancy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

The majority-conservative Supreme Court appears poised to strike down race-conscious college admissions decisions, after hearing arguments Monday against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs argued the admissions process discriminates against white and Asian American applicants by giving priority consideration to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. The decision could jeopardize affirmative action initiatives implemented after the Civil Rights Movement to give more equal opportunities to people disadvantaged by centuries of racial discrimination and the legacy of slavery. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, says his organization investigated the allegations against Harvard and found no discrimination but rather that “allowing race to be considered benefited Asian Americans.” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, says rescinding affirmative action programs risks harming students of color and will dramatically decrease the racial diversity that has shown to benefit colleges.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No10 Downing Street Posted by: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and The Rt Hon – OGL 3

“The Tories believe in the markets but the markets no longer believe in the Tories!”

– Ed Miliband, former Labour leader, now Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change

“It’s hard to construct an argument now that the Conservatives can win that general election, I suspect the conversation is, you know, how much do we lose it by?”

– Veteran Tory MP Charles Walker on Times Radio

The Conservative party held its annual conference in Birmingham last week.

Prior to the Tory conference the MSM had decided party leader Keir Starmer had a “good” Labour conference, which was not difficult, given that the Tory meltdown after Liz Truss’s debacle of a “mini budget” gave Labour a double-digit lead in the opinion polls during the Labour conference. That lead has now extended to 33-points in the latest poll.

All Starmer had to do was demarcate himself from Truss, who has done a fantastic impersonation of a kamikaze politician in the short time she has been in office.

The cynical dishonesty of describing her “Dom Pérignon budget” as a “fiscal event” in order to avoid scrutiny by the government’s Office of Budgetary Responsibility was remarkable though hardly surprising. Her predecessor Boris Johnson had a breathtaking record when it came to weaving and sidestepping round the official bodies entrusted with scrutinizing his decisions and government policy. He also bypassed the “mother of parliaments” as often as he could. No surprise then that Truss should take a leaf out of BoJo’s book.

The seriously unstable Tory party appears to have nuked itself. Four prime ministers in 6 years, 5 chancellors of the exchequer/finance ministers in 6 years, and 4 health secretaries (in charge of the critically underfunded NHS) in 6 years, are markers of this instability. For the first time in NHS history the nurses union is polling members on possible strike action.

To this shuffling of the proverbial deck chairs we have to add the fact that the Tory party is now riven by cliques publicly at war with each other.

This warfare was in open view when the chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced in a U-turn that he was scrapping plans to abolish the 45p tax rate paid by those on incomes of more than £150,000/$166,000.

In addition, there was confusion over whether Kwarteng will bring forward a key Commons statement regarding his plans for funding his tax cuts (the cut to the top rate was accompanied by several other cuts). He told GB News he was sticking to his original plan of delivering a medium-term fiscal plan on November 23. However his own officials confirmed it could be brought forward to the end of October.

BoJo’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who lost to Truss in the Tory leadership contest and now has no ministerial position, had promised to tackle inflation before looking to cut taxes.

The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, challenged Truss to espouse BoJo’s promise to increase welfare benefits by the rate of inflation. BoJo’s former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries echoed this position, and accused Truss of “lurching to the right”.

The former cabinet minister Grant Shapps, sacked by Truss when she became PM on September 6, told media she had only 10 days to save her job.

With Kwarteng facing withering criticism, Truss failed to say she trusted him– she had previously appeared to blame Kwarteng for the 45% tax rate debacle.

At a conference fringe event, the home secretary/home affairs minister, Suella Braverman, announced her opposition to the 45% U-turn. Braverman went further and claimed that Truss’s opponents had “staged a coup and undermined the PM in an unprofessional way”. One of Braverman’s first pledges when she became home secretary was to resume the deportation of refugees, some clearly victims of torture, to Rwanda by December this year. Braverman is the daughter of Kenyan and Mauritian immigrants.

The levelling-up secretary, Simon Clarke, then displayed his fealty towards Truss by tweeting his support for Braverman.

Clarke is a close ally of Truss, and had said in a speech at the start of the conference that Britain had long lived in a “fool’s paradise” and needed to curb public spending to subsidize the £45 billion worth of tax cuts. Clarke blamed the “very large welfare state” for the country’s economic stagnation, and said government departments, already slashed to the bone, would have to “trim the fat”.

Clarke obviously needs to be told that several European countries with larger welfare states (measured by using welfare expenditure as a percentage of country GDP) have long been performing better economically than the UK.

The former home secretary, the loathsome Priti Patel who wanted refugees flown to Rwanda for offshore “processing”, urged her party to back Truss while speaking at a fringe event. Patel is also the child of immigrants.

Clearly Truss still has a few lackeys marching in lockstep with her.

The Tories rebelling against Truss and Kwarteng probably also recalled that the two fired the most senior civil servant in the Treasury (in case he stood in the way of their farcical budget’s implementation).

Truss and Kwarteng cut every possible corner in this reckless “push for growth”, in essence using vast government borrowing to transfer wealth upwards from those who have little to those to those who have lots.

A probable sign that a major western government has gone completely off the rails comes when the IMF rebukes it for irresponsible economic decision-making. The IMF typically only uses such rhetoric when bullying less wealthy countries into submitting to its draconian policy prescriptions (think of hapless Greece during its economic collapse a decade or so ago). This time it was the Truss government’s turn to receive an IMF tongue lashing.

Truss’s short closing keynote resembled her gung-ho stump speeches during the campaign for the Tory leadership. Lots of huffing and puffing about “aspiration” and “growing the economic pie”– the word “growth” was used 29 times during her 34-minute speech. But no detailed economic plans were mentioned.

There was also no mention of the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis, the NHS, the minimum wage, the creaking education system, the judiciary under pressure, or the parlous benefits system. Truss was unable to rule out cuts to public spending and curbs on welfare payments to pay for her policies.

Instead, in yet another attempt to stoke the “war on woke”, Truss made a fierce attack on what she called the “anti-growth coalition” alleged to be standing in the way of her “pro-growth” plans. This “coalition” includes “Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier” (the Greenpeace protesters who were removed for disrupting her speech).

When her speech was over he pound went down by nearly 1% against the dollar but gained ground afterwards.

After Kwarteng’s budget Moody’s warned that the UK’s sovereign credit rating could be downgraded, and adjusted its 2023 growth forecast for UK GDP downward from 0.9% to 0.3%.

The Bank of England intervention to halt the economy’s nosedive ends on October 14, and UK financial assets, the pound, and gilts could behave even more unpredictably when this happens.

Truss and Kwarteng are still in deep water with no lifeboat in sight.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and  to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.

She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within  a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.

The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.

Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.

Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.

In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.

Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the  suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.

Rising misery

The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.

The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years  of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for an ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases, days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security, homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,”up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.

Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.

The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardian reports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us, it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.

The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems, an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may, however, be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.

Enough is Enough

Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation, have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members’ demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.

The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken, it would be a powerful act of resistance against  years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.

In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families; i.e., it’s about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.

The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country finds itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.

In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If, after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral, people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

The post UK: Fragmentation and Decline Under Conservative Rule appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Graham Peebles.

New revelations about the secretive right-wing billionaire Barre Seid, who donated $1.6 billion to a conservative nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, known as Donald Trump’s “Supreme Court whisperer,” show he has also used his massive fortune to undermine climate science, fight Medicaid expansion and remake the higher education system in a conservative mold. We speak with The Lever’s Andrew Perez, who reported on what Seid calls “attack philanthropy,” after obtaining emails through an open records request.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

At the beginning of the year, Liz Cheney told Robert Costa of CBS that she believes there is
a “cult of personality” around Trump, representing a moral test that the Republican Party is “failing.”

While the growth of a Trump cult is evident, there is another more significant movement that Trump reignited. And one that Cheney must take into consideration. That would be the underlying feeling of grief among the majority white population. They see their prominence slipping away as new immigrants and minorities obtain more government control.

Elie Mystal of the Nation points out that Republicans rejected Cheney because “white conservative voters trash everything to keep themselves in power.” In other words, the core Republican base will not support any candidate who fails to address their fears of being replaced by others.

The Republican Party landscape sees an ebbing Trumper and a waning conservative tide.

Trump, or some Trump-like presidential candidate, makes a show of appeasing the fears of the white majority through harsh anti-immigration measures and guaranteeing a pro-Christian religion constitution. But their most explosive belief is that a government conspiracy, be it federal or local, is run by radical liberals’ intent on taking away the constitutional freedoms of average Americans.

Most traditional conservatives are comfortable with restricting immigration and emphasizing Christian values, but they do not endorse a conspiracy that undermines America’s democratic institutions. Leaders like Mitch McConnel were once the leaders of this traditional conservative Republican faction. Still, to retain their power, he and others believe they must tolerate Trump and even defend him.

By speaking without moderation, Trump successfully triggered resentment among Republicans and many non-Republicans against the disdainful “elites.” These are the people ­- all of them labeled liberals – to blame for government policies that are more concerned about gay rights, minority rights, labor rights, migrant rights, and human rights than about the rights of Americans who are white and have lived here for a long time.

Although pre-Trump Republicans were traditional conservatives, most have been swept into the Trump tide. Participants are in an existential war between good and evil, i.e., Trump followers versus liberal Democrats and RINOs.

Cheney refused to float along in the Trump tide  

Cheney abandoned the Trump movement despite voting for Trump’s legislation 93 percent of the time while in Congress. Perhaps she thought she could reach Trump’s voter base by explaining how corrupting Trump was to the party and the nation. Nevertheless, she voted to impeach Trump for encouraging a mob to invade the Capital to overturn a fair election. As the co-chair of the House Committee to investigate January 6, she has been the sharpest Republican critic of Trump and his allies.

Cheney won her previous primary with 73 percent of the vote. This year she garnered only 29 percent, running against a Trump-endorsed candidate who considered the 2020 election “rigged.” On election night, with her defeat inevitable, she told the audience that she could not “go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would’ve required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic.” Instead, she said, “I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”

So where can Liz Cheney go in her quest to stop Trump, or a Trump mini-me like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, from becoming our next President? There are only two paths to challenge Trump from becoming President. Either beat him in the Republican primary or run as an independent.

Cheney has only one realistic option 

Cheney understands that running in the Republican Primary is a guaranteed loss if Trump enters the race. Trump’s favorability dropped among Republicans in the wake of the January 6 riot, But it’s still above 80 percent in YouGov’s polling this summer.

However, even if he doesn’t run, his messaging has so resonated with Republicans that a Trump acolyte will be their presidential candidate. Republicans hinting at running in their presidential primary have moved further to the right by supporting Trump’s cultural war on the liberals and preparing to challenge the legality of any Democratic victory in 2024.

In an analysis by Washington Post, Philip Bump noticed that many Republicans who are not Trump supporters took his side in criticizing the FBI on the search of Mar-a-Lago. He saw this attack on the FBI more as possible allegiance to a belief in an evil deep state rather than to Trump personally. However, this trend among Republican candidates is more insidious than just opposing policies open to diversity.

Unlike in the McCarthy era of exposing communists in government, the deep state is now seen as liberals leaving our gates wide open for people who do not deserve to be new Americans. Instead, they are invaders, many with criminal ties or tendencies and unwilling to assimilate into our culture.

For most Republicans, as repeatedly measured by polls, the Democrats cannot win the next presidential election. But that belief is not based on verifiable fraud; it’s based on the necessity that they cannot win – period. If they do, this country will be lost.  Our liberties will be narrowed, our conservative values will be outlawed, and our right to defend ourselves will be stripped away. So, they repeatedly deny that Biden won the election. Cheney says, “No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility.”

By confronting the election deniers and not being silent, even die-hard conservative Liz Cheney could not win the Republican primary. Yet, she and a significant minority of Republicans are willing to campaign within our republic’s democratic framework. They believe even if the liberals win an election, a democratic republic will survive.

The message that elections should not be discounted or overthrown could propel Cheney into a formidable independent candidate. In effect, she would be turning the Trumper view on its head. Instead of our country being lost if the Democrats win, Cheney’s message would be that if a Trumper wins, our country will be lost. In effect, she says that Republicans should have a strong and viable conservative party to protect our electoral process; otherwise, the liberals will win against Trump reactionaries. Even worse, if the Trumpers win, our country will drift toward minority rule and violent conflicts.

She should argue that Trump has hijacked the term” conservative.” He has redefined it within a Christian Nationalist framework. Although that trend goes back to Ronald Reagan’s Presidential 1980 campaign, forty years later, Trump converted that belief into the dominant Republican zeitgeist and required adhesion to it for a Republican to win a primary.

Liz Cheney is no Abraham Lincoln, but …

There are some historical parallels between Cheney and Lincoln. The idea of there being any similarity between the two may strike liberals and conservatives as a crazy notion. But they have the same path from losing a prominent Congressional race to being a national icon for a principled position in a divisive political environment.

Cheney lost her Congressional seat to a fellow Republican because she was an outcast in her party. However, she gained national prominence for being the highest-ranking Republican member in Congress to publicly recognize the 2020 election as being fairly won by Joe Biden.

Unlike Cheney, Lincoln was not an outcast in his party. In 1858 he was a former one-term Whig Congressman who ran for the US Senate as a Republican. He was expected to lose his Senate race and did to Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas because that state was solidly Democratic. Nevertheless, that campaign attracted national attention because he spoke bluntly about his opposition to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

In effect, the Dred Scott decision said that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories or the nation. It opened the door for slavery to be introduced into all states and at the expense of the free poor white male farmer class. Lincoln appealed to this constituency through his campaign slogan, “vote yourself a farm.” The slogan’s strong implication was that the Dred Scott decision would promote Democratic state legislatures to allow slaves to replace white farmers. It is akin to the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision to enable every state to ban abortion. The specter of nationwide abortion bans is prompting voters to reject Republicans and, like Lincoln, question the validity of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Lincoln’s presidential race in 1860 was critically different from what Cheney will face as an independent in 2024. Then, he was in a four-way race, which greatly fragmented the total vote. However, Cheney is not expected to face three strong presidential candidates in 2024. Since 1860, there have been only two other elections (1912 and 1948) with four nationally visible contenders. In each case, one of the major party candidates won the election.

The newly created Republican Party in the 1850s was not even a national party. It was mainly a party of the North and the West comprised of members left from the disintegrated Whig party and the much smaller Free Soil and Liberty Parties. While the Democrat party was the only national party in 1860, it had split in two.

Cheney’s Republican Party is not disintegrating, although deep fissures exist among its middle-class and college-educated voters. As an independent candidate, she would most likely be in a three-way race, which no independent candidate has ever won. To make a good showing, she must have a solid message to attract non-Trump Republicans and conservative independents. And she needs to articulate it as clearly as she has done on the House Committee investigating January 6.

Cheney could initiate a New Conservative Party

Lincoln had a clear position on slavery: no more expansion of it. This was anathema to the Democrats and the South. His prior debates with Douglass allowed him to explain it to the nation. Just as Cheney’s comments from the Congressional hearings have given her a national platform to present why we must save our democratic institutions from authoritarian leaders. She continues to force Republican leaders to justify why they do not condemn the January 6 attack on the Capital Building to halt the electoral vote count.

Cheney’s conservative politics will not appeal to liberals or even moderate independents. Still, she could find support among non-Trump Republicans and conservative-leaning independents who believe our democratic process is under attack when election results are dismissed as fraudulent. These voters would most likely be conservative middle-class professionals and influencers who think Trump has ruined the Republican party by emphasizing ethnic divisions and aligning religious orthodoxy with the Constitution. They are a minority within the Republican party but have a significant presence in the media market.

Cheney would not win the popular vote as an independent. History suggests that she may not win any electoral votes as well. In the 100 years preceding the 2024 election, only three third-party candidates have received more than one electoral vote: Robert La Follette, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace. All of them received less than 50 votes. Popular candidates like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace, John B. Anderson, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader received none. Nevertheless, as an independent, she could attract enough votes to deny Trump or a Trump-like Republican a win in a swing state.

Running as a die-hard conservative, not a reactionary or a liberal republican, she could be the “real” conservative presidential candidate in 2024. Will Cheney exceed the highwater mark established by the presidential elections in the last hundred years for the popular vote (Ross Perot at 19%) and the electoral vote (George Wallace at 46%)? If she did, she could spark a counter-Trump movement of traditional conservatives to retake the Republican party or create a new Conservative Party.

Cheney could reach out to a national audience if she took a page from Lincoln’s playbook before he became the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. In February 1860, Lincoln bolstered his growing national recognition coming off the Lincoln – Douglas debates when he gave his Cooper Union address in New York.

Lincoln argued that he and his liberal Republicans had the true “conservative” policies and not the self-proclaimed “conservative” Democrats. For example, he said his views on slavery were the same as most American founding fathers. In contrast, the Democrats rejected the founding fathers and substituted something new. Substitute slavery for the electoral process and Trumpers for Democrats, and you have Cheney making the same argument.

Journalist Robert J. McNamara (with the Libertarian Justice Institute) wrote that Lincoln’s Cooper Union speechpresented careful research and a forceful argument, and “it was stunningly effective.” Lincoln ended his speech by saying, “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.”

Cheney might tap into Lincoln’s spirit of patriotic defiance in the face of a Trumper Republican attempting to dismantle our democratic electoral process.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair

The recent overturn by the U. S. Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade, beyond the will of Congress and of the American people, has called into question the role of the so-called third branch of government. In this instance, it has also unleashed widespread division and anger across the country, together with predictable harms to the health and well-being of girls and women comprising 51 percent of our population.

This article has five goals: (1) to bring some historical perspective to this controversy; (2) to summarize the action of the Supreme Court in this case; (3) to describe the subsequent legislation passed by conservative state legislatures; (4) to consider the adverse impacts on women’s health; and (5) to show how this kind of action of the Supreme Court, uninformed by medical science, intrudes upon the role of the medical profession as caregivers as they try to act in the best interests of their patients.

Brief Historical Perspective

Historical context is useful since the overthrow of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court on June 24, 2022 has put a spotlight on its role of judicial review. The extent of its power through judicial review has seen some controversy since the founding of this country. Although many might believe that it has the power to interpret the Constitution and to strike down any law that it chooses, judicial review does not appear in the Constitution and is not firmly rooted in the American tradition. In fact, Abraham Lincoln directly attacked its role in his inaugural address:

[The] candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.¹

Thomas Jefferson argued that judicial review of this kind makes the Constitution “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.²

The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision recognized by a 7-2 vote the right of women to terminate any unwanted pregnancy at any point up to “viability”, about 24 weeks. Conservatives have waged war against this right for many years, succeeding in 1977 with the passage of the Hyde amendment, which banned federal funding from covering abortion services. Since then, it has often been a budget rider on federal spending bills.

In 1992, in its ruling Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court affirmed the Roe v. Wade decision that the state is prohibited from banning most abortions except in instances to protect the health of the mother and the life of the fetus. A Partial Birth Abortion Ban was enacted in 2003 permitting abortion only as a last resort to save the mother’s life, or if the fetus was already dead.³

Ryan Cooper, journalist and managing Editor of The American Prospect, describes how politicized the Supreme Court has become in his seminal paper against judicial review by that body. Five of the six right-wing justices were appointed by presidents who took office after losing the popular vote. The sixth, Clarence Thomas, is married to an avowed conservative activist who agitated to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Republicans have maintained a Court majority since the Nixon administration despite winning the presidential popular vote only once since 1989. Other wealthy democratic nations do not have anything close to America’s hyper-powerful Supreme Court. ⁴

In its emphasis on so-called pro-life, the GOP has been pushing for years the concept that abortion kills a person, no matter how far along in pregnancy, even to the point that a fertilized egg is a person.

The Overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court

It immediately became front-page news across the country igniting widespread anger and protests.  A draft opinion of the Supreme Court, authored by Justice Alito and passed by a 6-3 vote, was leaked to the public that the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling would soon be overturned. Its ruling on June 24, 2022 did just that in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Further decisions about access to reproductive health and abortion were returned to the states, half of which were poised to ban many or most abortions.⁵ Of further concern is the opinion of Justice Thomas that the rationale to overturn Roe should also be applied to overrule cases that have established rights to contraception and same-sex marriage.⁶ The three dissenting Justices released this scathing rebuttal: 

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.⁷

Amidst the controversies in the aftermath of this year’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the question of settled law and precedent has come to the fore. Three of the conservative Justices agreed on earlier occasions that the 1973 ruling was settled precedent, reaffirmed it on several occasions during their confirmation hearings, although they acted differently this year in denying that precedent.⁸

Recent events are raising questions whether Supreme Court Justices are above the law. As one example, Clarence Thomas refused to recuse himself from a case regarding former President Trump’s records on January 6, and in an 8-1 ruling was the only dissenting vote who wanted to keep the White House records hidden. His conflict of interest was obvious—his wife, Ginni Thomas, has been shown to have been directly involved with efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and aware of planning the January 6 insurrection.⁹ Although a petition calling for his removal from the Supreme Court received more than 1 million signatures,¹⁰ he remains there, unelected, for life.

What State Legislatures Have Done

Many states passed anti-abortion laws before the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

More than 100 antiabortion laws were passed at the state level in 2021. Perhaps the most extreme was S.B. 8 in Texas, the so-called “heartbeat bill”, which banned abortion after just 6 weeks’ gestation, before many women know that they are pregnant. It even deputizes private citizens to bring civil lawsuits against anyone they suspect or know to have broken the law, with a reward of $10,000 for such reports. In response, some employers have been offering help with travel for women forced to leave their home state to gain access to abortion care.¹¹

Access to abortion in about one-half of the country changed quickly after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, leaving patients, providers, lawyers and state officials scrambling to interpret confusing and often conflicting anti-abortion legislation. “Trigger bans” were ready for 13 states to ban abortion, mostly without exceptions for rape or incest. Indiana became the first post-Roe state to pass a near-total abortion ban, with the exceptions being rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or when it is necessary to prevent serious health risks or death to the mother.¹²

Abortion remained legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia.¹³

Adverse Impacts on Women’s Health

It was hard to believe for many Americans to see how extreme the GOP’s “right to life” had become until the case of a 10-year-old rape victim being denied abortion in her home state of Ohio and having to travel to Indianapolis, Indiana for termination of her pregnancy. Outrage followed quickly among abortion right activists, was criticized by President Biden, and became international news. Her physician was the target of threats and harassment, considered filing a defamation suit, and the state’s Attorney General began investigating how the case was being handled.

David Blumenthal and Laurie Zephryrin, President and Vice President of The Commonwealth Fund, which has done so much to advance health equity in the U. S., said this immediately after Roe was overturned:

The loss of abortion rights will further erode and fragment our health care system, which is already failing women—the U. S. is the high-income country where women are most likely to die of preventable causes, including complications from pregnancy.

They had these further concerns about the loss of Roe:

+ Fewer options for providers and for women suffering from ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or other complications.

+ Creating anxiety, fear, and hesitancy to seek or provide care in states where abortion is criminalized.

+ Resulting in thousands of unplanned births and thus the increased likelihood of maternal morbidity and mortality.

+ Increasing the long-term risks to life and health of children, since evidence shows that children of unintended pregnancies are more likely to suffer preterm birth, low birthweight, impaired child development, and adverse childhood experiences.¹⁴

There are many complications of pregnancy that are hazardous for women, some life threatening, that require early medical evaluation and consideration of termination of pregnancy. Miscarriages occur in 15 % of all pregnancies, pre-eclampsia (pregnancy-induced high blood pressure) in 5-8 %, and ectopic pregnancy (outside the uterus, usually in the fallopian tube) in 2 %. Delay in termination of pregnancy with these conditions often puts the mother’s health and even life at risk. A recent study in Dallas County, Texas, in the face of state-mandated limits on treatment, makes these risks real. The complication rates for mothers were doubled, especially for infections and hemmorhaging.¹⁵

In the aftermath of abortion bans by state legislatures, hospitals have often been forced to bring together panels of physicians and attorneys to decide when a pregnancy can be prematurely ended. In other cases, two or more physicians may be required to sign off on such a decision. As a result, this process delays treatment and increases the risk to the mother.¹⁶

Beyond medical complications of state-mandated abortion bans, the overturn of Roe removes a fundamental right of women to make their own decisions about reproduction, and to control their own bodies and future lives. It is unconscionable that a state law can require a woman to give birth to an unwanted child and support that child until age 18, especially under circumstances that are often unfavorable for both. The hypocrisy of the “pro-life” movement is made clear by Sister Joan Chittister, O. S. B.., author of The Breath of the Soul, this way:

I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that makes you  pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed.¹⁷

Medical Science and Professionalism vs. Uninformed Political Action

The U. S. Supreme Court, without medical knowledge of the impacts of their rulings (or if so, uncaring), has far exceeded what should be expected in a democracy. It has tried to substitute its judicial review for medical science and the everyday roles of physicians trying to serve patients with their personal choices and reproductive health care.

In recent months, more than one-half of abortions are being carried out by medication—mifepristone—effective up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. It could not be obtained, however, through telemedicine because of restrictions during the Trump administration. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other groups sued the FDA over that exclusion, which since has allowed women to get the medication by mail.¹⁸ Under the Biden administration, the FDA has permanently lifted the in-person requirement to receive medication abortion, allowing patients availability of treatment if unable to travel to a provider. ¹⁹ The FDA is also considering whether medication abortion products may be made available over the counter.²⁰

Conclusion

The Supreme Court is out of touch with American values, and has acted beyond the will of the electorate and the federal government. Six in ten respondents to national polls by ABC News and the Washington Post from 1995 to the present have consistently affirmed that personal reproductive decisions should belong to women themselves. In addition, the ripple effect of the 2022 Roe v. Wade overturn may have more impact on the economy than expected. As one example, Eli Lilli, the largest employer in Indiana with more than10,000 employees there, has recently stated that “we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state.”²¹

The Roe overturn is also likely to have a major impact on the outcome of the 2022 midterms, most likely to the benefit of Democrats. It remains to be seen, however, how all this will turn out beyond the midterms, but it is already clear that the so-called third branch of government has exceeded its role as visualized by the Founders of our country.

References

1. Cooper, R. The case against judicial review. Prospects 2032. The American Prospect, August 2022, p. 6.

2. Ibid # 1, p. 7.

3. Geyman, JP. Roe v. Wade at a crossroads: Can it prevail for the common good? CounterPunch, October 8, 2021.

4. Ibid # 1.

5. Dapena, K, Calfas, J. Where abortion is legal and where it loses protections without Roe v. Wade. Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2022.

6. Kendall, B, Bravin, J. Supreme Court ends constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years and allows states to ban the procedure. Wall Street Journal, June 25-26, 2022: A:1.

7. Kusisto, L, Lucey, C, Calfas, J. Roe v. Wade overturned. Wall Street Journal, June 25-26, 2022: A:1.

8. Jayapal, P. Who’s to say they won’t come after other fundamental rights? Pramila for Congress, May 6, 2022.

9. Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show. The Washington Post, March 24, 2022.

10. Oshin, O. Petition calling for Clarence Thomas removal from Supreme Court gets more than 1 million signatures. The Hill, July 6, 2022.

11. Butler, K. U. S. firms are creating abortion benefits. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2022.

12. Cheng, A. Indiana passes a near-total abortion ban, the first state to do so post-Roe. The Washington Post, August 6, 2022.

13. Kitchener, C, Schaul, K, Kirkpatrick, N et al. Abortion is now banned in these states. See where laws have changed. The Washington Post, August 6., 2022.

14. Zephyrin, L, Blumenthal, D. The loss of abortion rights will send shockwaves through the U. S. health care system. New York. The Commonwealth Fund, June 24, 2022.

15. Goodman, D, Gorayshi, A. Women face risks as doctors struggle with medical exceptions on abortion. New York Times, July 20, 2022.

16. Ibid # 15.

17. Salzillo, L. Catholic nun explains pro-life in a way that will stun many (especially Republican lawmakers). Daily Kos, July 30, 2015.

18. Armour, S. FDA allows women to get abortion pill by mail. Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2021.

19. Belluck, P. Abortion pills now account for more than one-half of abortions. New York Times, February 24, 2022.

20. Walker, C. FDA is considering making birth control pills over the counter. Truthout, July 11, 2022.

21. Smyth, J. Eli Lilly says Indiana abortion ban will shift jobs out of its home state. Financial Times, August

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Geyman.

Our country may be divided on the issue of abortion. But when it comes down to it, most Americans believe that it's a pregnant person's right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy.

Voters are scared about the horrific, real-world human consequences we've seen with our own eyes since states started banning abortion.

That's not only a blue-state attitude—it's just as true in conservative states like Kansas.

By a margin of nearly 20 percentage points in an election with record turnout, Kansas voters just overwhelmingly rejected Republican efforts to cancel the state's constitutional right to personal bodily autonomy, even after the U.S. Supreme Court deleted that right at the federal level.

Abortion rights loom front and center as a major political issue this fall. But anti-abortion forces are trying to deflect responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade by claiming that Democrats are using "scare tactics" about abortion bans.

Scare tactics?

Yes, voters are scared—and they should be. Voters are scared about the horrific, real-world human consequences we've seen with our own eyes since states started banning abortion.

Forcing teenagers to drop out of college so they can care for a baby they don't wish to have is scary. Forcing married women to bear a second child when they don't have the resources to raise the child they already have is scary. Forcing children who are rape or incest victims to continue a pregnancy is scary.

Forcing women to continue a pregnancy they very much wanted after they learn that their fetus has a heartbeat—but a fatal brain ailment—is scary.

Endangering the lives of women by forcing doctors to delay treatment until serious pregnancy complications worsen and they're approaching death is scary. Making doctors fear that they will be prosecuted for providing appropriate medical care during a miscarriage is scary.

Thanks to tireless organizers and plain old common sense, Kansas voters staved off these scary prospects for now. But no matter where you live, voters have our work cut out for us. Many states are rushing bans through, and Republican politicians have openly floated passing a federal abortion ban for the whole country if they take control of Congress.

Voters of both parties need to think hard about the possibility that they or someone they love might need medical care that will be seriously compromised if this happens.

Voters of both parties need to think hard about the possibility that they or someone they love might want to make their own decision about how their life will unfold—whether they go to college, whether they pursue a career, whether they have the child they want on their own time table. Few voters want extremist politicians or religious leaders they don't follow to make these choices for them.

Republican leaders spent decades manipulating the selection of Supreme Court justices so extremist judges could strip Americans of a right they've had for half a century. So they can't claim it's a "scare tactic" to warn that other fundamental rights, like the right to use contraception or marry a partner of their choice, could fall. Especially not when far-right Justice Clarence Thomas has promised to attack those very rights, too.

Many of the political issues being debated in this election season may seem abstract to voters. But nothing can be less abstract than control over one's own body. This fall's election will be as personal as it gets.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Mitchell Zimmerman.

The rank hypocrisy among conservatives in the Brittney Griner case continues apace. Yesterday, the conservative Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by a man named Gregg Opelka, who expressed sympathy with Griner. He hopes that “she doesn’t receive the disproportionate 10-year sentence she faces. A milder punishment seems fitting for her unfortunate error of judgment.” He wants the Russian authorities to show her “mercy” because “Ms. Griner’s situation evokes in me a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ sense of relief.”

Really? Well, how about all the people who have received long jail sentences in the United States for drug possession or distribution? What about them? I don’t recall many conservatives calling for mercy when they were receiving those punishments during the past 40 years or more. I certainly didn’t read anything about them in Opelka’s WSJ op-ed. 

 A couple of days ago, theleafonline.com published an article entitled “Biden Pardons Nine Federal Cannabis POWs.” Let’s review a few of the people mentioned in that article.

52-year-old Dexter Eugene Jackson has been in jail since 2002 for a marijuana conviction. That’s much longer that the 10 years that Griner is facing in Russia. 

51-year-old Jo Bogans was convicted in 1998 for a cocaine violation. That too is a lot longer than Griner’s possible 10-year jail sentence.

Ramola Kaye Brown was sentenced to 12 years in jail for a marijuana violation.

Stacie Demers — 10 years for a marijuana violation.

They are just the tip of the drug-war iceberg. It is impossible to know the exact number of people whose lives have been severely damaged or destroyed by the drug war, but it has to be extremely high. 

Where were conservatives when those high jail sentences were being meted out here in the United States? I’ll tell you where they were. They were out there ardently supporting the continuation of the drug war, calling for mandatory-minimum sentences, asset forfeiture (i.e., police stealing), and no-knock raids. In other words, there was no mercy for any of those U.S. drug-war victims among conservatives. 

So, what’s different about Brittney Griner? Why have conservatives suddenly discovered that they have a conscience when it comes to her? 

I’ll tell you why. It’s because of the standard mindset that has afflicted the conservative movement since the end of World War II: “Russia bad!” It’s because Griner is being held by those bad Russians that conservatives have become motivated to act on her behalf.

Let’s assume that Griner had gotten caught by U.S. officials doing the same thing on her return to the U.S. I will guarantee you that conservatives would have been angrily exclaiming, “Lock her up! We’re waging a drug war in this country. The only way we are going to win this war is by showing people that they cannot violate our drug laws. Why give her favorable treatment?”

But since it’s those bad Russians who have arrested Griner, that completely alters the conservative mindset. Since everything those bad Russkies do is bad, their drug bust of Griner has to be considered bad too.

Some conservatives are saying those bad Russians are holding Griner as a “political hostage.” Their Cold War-era, anti-Russia animus is so extreme that they are unable to recognize something important: Griner has pled guilty to the offense! What are the Russian authorities supposed to do — just let her go immediately after she pleads guilty, without even appearing before a judge for sentencing? There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hades that that would happen here in the United States if it was a Russian citizen who pled guilty to drug possession immediately after he got caught with drugs as he entered the United States.

The fact is that Griner should be released because everyone in the world, including Griner, has the fundamental, moral, natural, God-given right to possess, ingest, or distribute any substance he or she wants. No government has the legitimate authority to punish anyone for possessing, ingesting, or distributing drugs. Conservatives just don’t get that, and you’ll search in vain for that critically important point in Gregg Opelka’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. Conservatives continue to hold that the drug war is good and wonderful — well, until those Reds, I mean, those bad Russkies, decide to enforce it against Americans visiting their country.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jacob G. Hornberger.

A U.S.-based libertarian coalition has spent years pressuring the Canadian government to limit how much Indigenous communities can push back on energy development on their own land, newly reviewed strategy documents reveal.

The Atlas Network partnered with an Ottawa-based think tank — the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — which enlisted pro-industry Indigenous representatives in its campaign to provide “a shield against opponents.”

Atlas, which has deep ties to conservative politicians and oil and gas producers, claimed success in reports in 2018 and 2020, arguing its partner was able to discourage the Canadian government from supporting a United Nations declaration that would ensure greater involvement by Indigenous communities.

The Canadian Parliament did eventually pass the legislation to begin implementing the declaration in 2021, but observers say the government has made little progress to move it forward.

Meanwhile, Indigenous groups linked to the Macdonald-Laurier Institutes’s campaign — including the Indian Resource Council — continue to appear at conferences, testify to federal committees, and get quoted in major media outlets to push the view that Indigenous prosperity is virtually impossible without oil and gas.

Hayden King, executive director of the Toronto-based Indigenous public policy think tank Yellowhead Institute, called the campaign “a contemporary expression of the type of imperialism that Indigenous peoples have been dealing with here for many, many years.”

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute directed questions about the reports to the Atlas Network, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The Atlas Network calls itself a “worldwide freedom movement” and has nearly 500 partners, including think tanks like the Manhattan Institute. Other powerful partners include the Cato Institute, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977, as well as the Heritage Foundation, which hosted a keynote speech by Donald Trump in April. Their influence on U.S. politics includes leading campaigns to make Americans doubt if human-caused climate change is real.

Atlas members have helped influence the views of Republican politicians, including George W. Bush. The Arlington, Virginia-based organization — which received more than one million dollars from the oil company ExxonMobil through 2012 and $745,000 from foundations linked to the Koch brothers through 2018, according to watchdog groups — has also exerted significant influence on conservative politics in the U.K. and Latin America.

Bob Neubauer, a researcher with a Canadian oil and gas watchdog organization known as the Corporate Mapping Project, said Atlas includes “a very significant number of the most influential right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations on the planet.”

“It should make people nervous,” he added.

Atlas and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute have for years been pushing back against attempts by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, a declaration Canada endorsed more than a decade ago. That could have codified Indigenous rights to reject pipelines or drilling, the Atlas Network feared, according to their strategy documents, which were shared with Floodlight by an investigative climate research organization called DeSmog.

That’s because the treaty contains clauses affirming Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over territories they’ve lived on for thousands of years. Implementing it would potentially make it harder for extraction companies to operate on those territories. At stake, the report explains, were Canada’s “monumental reserves of natural gas, hydroelectricity, potash, uranium, oil, and other natural resources.”

In recent years the Atlas Network has deepened its connections to Canada, setting up a Center for U.S. and Canada that “works with local civil society organizations on both sides of the border to create positive perceptions of the role of free enterprise and individual liberty,” according to its website.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is one of roughly a dozen Atlas Network partner organizations in Canada. It’s a relatively new organization, formed only in 2010, but its board members and advisors come from some of the top lobbying, legal, and financial firms in the country.

In 2018, the Atlas Network created a 13-page “think tank impact case study” report about a campaign being led by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute called the “Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy Project.” Atlas wanted to highlight this project at a training academy for its partners around the world.

The report is no longer accessible on the Atlas Network website but was recovered by DeSmog on an internet archive called the Wayback Machine.

“The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, its staff, and the authors affiliated with the Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy project were the only entities that worked on that project,” institute spokesperson Brett Byers wrote in an email.

“Questions regarding the content, nature, or interpretation of a report published by the Atlas Network are better directed toward the Atlas Network,” he added. The Atlas Network didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about its involvement.

The report claims that this project was started “at the behest of the Assembly of First Nations,” a national advocacy group for Canada’s Indigenous peoples, which “saw potential in the natural resource economy as a major driver of transformation in Indigenous opportunity.” The Assembly didn’t respond to a media request asking if this is accurate.

The Atlas report notes that a prime objective of this collaboration was removing barriers to the production of fossil fuels. It explains that as political momentum began building in 2016 for Canada to implement the U.N. declaration, this “concerned the team” at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

That was because the U.N. declaration contains a clause stating that Indigenous peoples have the right to give “Free, Prior, and Informed Consent” before governments make decisions that could have a large material impact on their traditional territories.

Some legal experts see this as a reasonable way to ensure that Indigenous communities are equal partners in decision-making. But the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Atlas Network appeared to interpret this to mean that those communities could effectively veto new oil pipelines, fracking operations, and other resource extraction projects.

“It is difficult to overstate the legal and economic disruptions that may have followed from such a step,” the report continued.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute with the support of Atlas embarked on “a sophisticated communications and outreach strategy to persuade the government, businesses, and Aboriginal communities on the dangers involved with fully adopting UNDRIP,” the report says.

Early success came that November, when then-Canadian minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, who is is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation, “offered her support to [the institute’s] view.” The report was referring to a 2016 speech where she said that fully implementing UNDRIP would be “unworkable,” creating doubt about the government’s commitment.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s “experts are always in regular communication with MPs, ministers, and government officials,” Byers wrote. Wilson-Raybould didn’t respond to a media request.

Meanwhile, an opposition party member introduced a new bill meant to enshrine UNDRIP in law. This effort slowly gained momentum and political support, but when the bill ended up before Canada’s Senate for approval in 2019, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute scholar named Dwight Newman submitted written comments that the legislation’s inclusion of “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” could “have enormous implications for Canada.”

“The bill was ultimately defeated,” Atlas explains on its website.

“There could be some truth to that,” said King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation. “The bill died in the Senate because Conservative senators delayed and basically filibustered the legislation.” And one of the senators accused of filibustering, Don Plett, quoted at length from a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report during a Senate debate about UNDRIP.

This was seen as a major victory by Atlas, which appears to have provided funding for the campaign. “Atlas Network supported this initiative with a Poverty & Freedom grant,” notes a 2020 document on the Atlas website. That document also identified First Nations allies “working directly” on the campaign, such as the Indian Resource Council and the First Nations Major Projects Coalition.

“That is inaccurate,” wrote a spokesperson for the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, referencing 2018 testimony its vice-chair gave in support of UNDRIP.

When the Trudeau government made yet another attempt to implement the U.N. declaration in 2021, Indian Resource Council president Stephen Buffalo told a standing senate committee that there should be language in the legislation preventing “special-interest groups” from being able to “weaponize” the declaration to block new pipelines.

“Whether or not you support the oil and gas industry, it is the right of the 131 nations of the Indian Resource Council of Canada to develop their resources as they see fit,” he said. The organization didn’t respond to a media request.

The Trudeau government successfully passed a bill starting the implementation of the declaration in June 2021. But it’s been a slow process since then. “There’s very little progress,” King said. “It’s bogged down in administrative morass.”

The Atlas Network appears to be moving into a new phase of advocacy. At a conference in Guatemala earlier this year, leaders “from freedom-minded organizations, many of them Atlas Network partners,” gathered to “sharpen their plans for the coming year.”

At this invitation-only event, Macdonald-Laurier Institute “workshopped a project to improve opportunities for native populations,” according to an Atlas Network write-up of the conference.

Macdonald-Laurier Institute wanted to apply what it has learned in Canada globally. “The goal of the project would be to promote Indigenous economic development across the world,” Byers wrote.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a conservative US network undermined Indigenous energy rights in Canada on Jul 30, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Geoff Dembicki.

Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is reportedly planning to announce his resignation Thursday after dozens of his government ministers stepped down earlier this week, jumping ship as the U.K. leader was engulfed by scandal, backlash over skyrocketing costs of living, and other crises.

As the Associated Press summarized, "Johnson, 58, managed to remain in power for almost three years, despite allegations that he was too close to party donors, that he protected supporters from bullying and corruption allegations, and that he misled Parliament and was dishonest to the public about government office parties that broke pandemic lockdown rules."

"But recent disclosures that Johnson knew about sexual misconduct allegations against Chris Pincher, a Conservative lawmaker, before he promoted Pincher to a senior position turned out to be the last straw," the AP added.

Johnson, who has also come under fire for badly mismanaging the U.K.'s coronavirus response and working against diplomatic efforts in Ukraine, is expected to stay on as a caretaker prime minister until October.

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, questioned whether it is "sustainable" for Johnson to remain prime minister until the fall.

"Boris Johnson was always manifestly unfit to be PM and the Tories should never have elected him leader or sustained him in office for as long as they have," Sturgeon said. "But the problems run much deeper than one individual. The Westminster system is broken."

In a statement, Labour Leader Keir Starmer declared that "it is good news for the country that Boris Johnson has resigned as prime minister."

"But it should have happened long ago," said Starmer. "He was always unfit for office. He has been responsible for lies, scandal, and fraud on an industrial scale. And all those who have been complicit should be utterly ashamed. The Tory Party have inflicted chaos upon the country during the worst cost of living crisis in decades. And they cannot now pretend they are the ones to sort it out."

"We don't need to change the Tory at the top—we need a proper change of government," he added. "We need a fresh start for Britain."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

For the first time ever, Colombia has chosen new leadership that is not conservative. Voters in the third-most populous nation in Latin America narrowly elected the former mayor of Bogotá, Gustavo Petro, in a runoff election against his conservative opponent Rodolfo Hernández, with 50.47 percent of the votes.

Petro, who ran on a platform to tackle inequality, is a former rebel soldier who, at the age of 17 joined a now-defunct guerilla group called M-19 and was briefly imprisoned and tortured. His election is viewed as part of the ongoing “pink tide” in Latin America where a wave of left-leaning, but not-hardcore-communist leaders have succeeded in taking power through democratic elections.

Perhaps even more impressive than Petro is his running mate, Francia Márquez, the nation’s first Afro-Colombian vice president and a celebrated environmental activist.

No other Afro-Colombian has risen so far up the ranks of the government as Márquez—in spite of the fact that nearly 10 percent of the nation’s population is of African descent—and neither has anyone with the kind of environmental and social justice credentials that Márquez has.

Hailing from one of the poorest provinces in Colombia, Cauca, Márquez was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018 for her courageous work against illegal mining. In 2014, she led 80 women on a massive march spanning 10 days and 350 miles and faced death threats for her environmental work.

Janvieve Williams Comrie, executive director of the U.S.-based organization AfroResistance, is a long-time friend of Márquez’s and someone she considers a “sister and comrade.” Comrie traveled to Colombia for the election and in an interview she shared her elation at seeing someone who looks like her rise to the position of vice president.

Márquez “is loved by the whole country,” says Comrie. “She has been impacted by the [civil] war, she is an internally displaced person, and to come from where she comes from and now be the vice president of a nation, it’s for the people, by the people.” She adds, that Márquez’s win, “is the whole community’s victory.”

For a nation that has embraced U.S.-style neoliberal politics and, for years, been a bulwark against leftist leaders in nations like Venezuela and Cuba, Colombia’s election results represent a shattering of the prevailing regional political order in the Americas.

Colombia has been a United States ally for 200 years. The U.S. State Department boasts of the more than $1 billion aid it has given Colombia in recent years, saying on its website that “With the support of the United States, Colombia has transformed itself over the past 20 years from a fragile state into a vibrant democracy with a growing market-oriented economy.”

Already, pro-capitalist Western media outlets are responding negatively to the election results. Barron’s published an article with a headline that read, “Colombia’s New President Moves the Country to the Left. Markets Don’t Seem Enthusiastic.” Bloomberg had a similar response with a story titled, “Colombian Markets Sink After Leftist Wins Presidential Election.” The cryptic desires of “markets” are apparently important enough to warrant strong opinions from media outlets about the nation’s new leadership.

What’s missing from the news coverage is how Colombia “has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world,” and the second-highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, as per the World Bank. Further, more than 40 percent of Colombians live below the poverty line.

To news outlets like Barron’s and Bloomberg, such statistics are unimportant. To the State Department, this is apparently what a “vibrant democracy with a growing market-oriented economy” looks like.

Given how reliably conservative and pro-U.S. Colombia’s leadership has been, how is it that Petro and Márquez won?

Comrie explains the election results saying, “people needed a change.” Petro and Márquez’s “whole platform was around cambio, which means ‘change’ in Spanish.”

Environmental justice is a critical aspect of the change that the new government has promised. Comrie contextualizes how “[Colombia] is really the environmental lung to Latin America,” given that a significant portion of the Amazon rainforest lies within its borders. Colombia’s rainforest has experienced devastating deforestation.

Petro and Márquez, according to Comrie, are, “committed to dealing with the high levels of deforestation,” and to “figuring out how can we restore what has been depleted and what has been exploited from an environmental perspective that is accountable to Mother Earth first, and then to the economy, second.”

A significant portion of the United States’ aid to Colombia has come in the form of mass aerial fumigation of glyphosate, a “probable carcinogen,” to supposedly combat Colombia’s cocaine farming efforts.

Furthermore, the United States’ “Plan Colombia” has centered on a failed drug war that analyst Brendon Lee, in an in-depth report for the Harvard International Review, described as, “largely ineffective, causing drug production to expand into other countries and creating a militarized war on drugs that has victimized countless Colombian citizens.”

Petro and Márquez have vowed to take the country in a different direction, moving away from aerial fumigation and focusing instead on eradicating poverty among farming communities.

According to Comrie, the election results are, “not only about Colombia, it’s about the whole region. And those policies [that Petro and Márquez plan to implement] will impact how other governments behave” elsewhere in Latin America.

She explains that Márquez and Petro plan to create a Ministry of Igualdad, or Equality which, “will propose new policies and new structures,” to address inequality, such as, “giving women heads of households [who] have been excluded from the economy, a base salary so that they can then sustain themselves.” Additionally, there is expected to be an “expansion of social programs,” and an exploration of programs like “education for all.”

Historically, the U.S. has opposed left-leaning governments in Latin America whose focus on eradicating poverty outweighs a desire to enrich industries. The U.S. has instead preferred right-wing authoritarian rule and backed dozens of coups on the continent.

In replacing a pro-U.S. government with one that is focused on progressive solutions to internal problems, Colombian voters face the prospect of American interventionism. Comrie advises President Joe Biden’s administration, saying that if Biden wants to address climate change, “this is really the administration to work with on that.” But, she warns, “it can’t be on Biden’s terms, it really has to be on Petro and Márquez’s terms.”

Ultimately, Comrie thinks, “it’s time to really… shift the power dynamics” between the U.S. and Colombia.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

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This article was co-published with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In August 2020, Boise State University chose a doctoral student in public policy, Melanie Fillmore, to deliver what is called a “land acknowledgment” speech at a convocation for incoming freshmen. Fillmore, who is part Indigenous, would recognize the tribes that lived in the Boise Valley before they were banished to reservations to make way for white settlers.

Fillmore considered it an honor. She was devoted to Boise State, where she had earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught undergraduate courses and served on job search committees. She also admired Marlene Tromp, a feminist literary scholar who came from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2019 to become Boise State’s first female president. Tromp had been hired with a mandate to promote diversity, and including an Indigenous speaker in the ceremony marking the start of students’ higher education would advance that agenda.

The convocation was to be virtual, because of the pandemic. Fillmore put on beaded Native American jewelry and recorded an eight-minute video on her phone. She began by naming the “rightful owners of this land,” the Boise Valley Indigenous tribes, and then described her own “complicated” background. Her father was Hunkpapa Lakota, her mother white. “I can trace eight generations of my Lakota ancestors being removed from the land of their lifeblood to the reservation, just as I can trace seven generations of Norwegian and English ancestors taking that land,” she said.

Fillmore urged viewers to “find a way to share your story here at Boise State” and to learn the history of Indigenous people. “When we acknowledge the Boise Valley ancestors and their land, we make room for that story of removal that was genocidal in purpose,” she said. “When we tell those stories honestly and fully, we heal, and our ancestors heal with us.”

She submitted her speech to the university, but the students never heard it. Boise State higher-ups thought that it was too long and too provocative to roll out in a politically precarious climate, one former official said. They consulted another administrator about whether to drop the speech. “I communicated that pulling it was a bad idea and incredibly wrong,” said this person, who has also left the university. “I don’t believe in de-platforming Indigenous voices.”

The advice was disregarded. Two days before the convocation, the vice president for student affairs told Fillmore that her appearance was canceled, explaining that her safety might be at risk or that she might be trolled or doxxed online.

Fillmore was devastated. She had encouraged the students to tell their stories, and now hers was being erased. She wondered if administrators were worried about the timing. The Idaho Legislature — which normally meets from January to March, when it decides how much money to give to public education, including Boise State — would hold a special session three days after the convocation to consider COVID-19 measures. Conservative legislators, who ever since Tromp’s arrival had been attacking Boise State’s diversity initiatives, might hear about Fillmore’s talk and seize on it to bash the university.

“I didn’t say anything that I haven’t already been sharing with my research and work,” she wrote to a faculty mentor, political scientist Stephen Utych, in an email the next day.

“I was incredibly frustrated for Melanie, but also that the university caved on something so relatively benign, because there’s so much pressure coming externally,” Utych said in an interview. He added that concerns about the Legislature’s impact on Boise State were one reason he quit his tenured professorship this year to work in market research.

When the university’s convocation committee, which organized the event, was informed of the decision, Amy Vecchione expressed misgivings. “I remember saying, ‘Typically, what we do is allow speech to take place, regardless of the content,’” said Vecchione, assistant director of the university’s center for developing online courses, who was the faculty senate liaison to the committee. “‘We process reactions if there are any. That’s part of academic freedom.’”

After the convocation, Tromp commiserated with Fillmore over Zoom. “She told me it was a sad outcome,” Fillmore said. Tromp did not respond to questions about the incident. Alicia Estey, chief of staff and vice president for university affairs, said in an email that “safety was a concern.”

Almost two years later, Fillmore still broods about how she was treated. Although she loves teaching, she’s rethinking her aspirations for an academic career. “I really lost a lot of faith in Boise State,” she said. “It was more important for the university to cope with whatever the Legislature wanted than to advocate for students. I feel more like a liability than a part of the community.”

Across the country, elected officials in red states are seeking to impose their political views on public universities. Even as they decry liberal cancel culture, they’re leveraging the threat of budget cuts to scale back diversity initiatives, sanitize the teaching of American history and interfere with university policies and appointments.

In Georgia, the governor’s appointees have made it easier to fire tenured professors. Florida passed a law requiring public universities to survey faculty and students annually about “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented,” and allowing students to record professors’ lectures as evidence of possible bias. In North Carolina, the Republican-dominated legislature, through its control over key positions, is “inappropriately seeking to expand [its] purview into the day-to-day operations” of state campuses, the American Association of University Professors reported in April. In Texas, the lieutenant governor and conservative donors worked with the state university’s flagship Austin campus to start an institute “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets,” according to The Texas Tribune.

Perhaps reflecting such tensions, the average tenure of public university presidents has declined from nine years to seven over the past two decades, and they are increasingly being fired or forced to resign, according to data prepared for this article by Sondra Barringer and Michael Harris, professors of higher education at Southern Methodist University. Between 2014 and 2020, 29% of departures by presidents of NCAA Division 1 public universities were involuntary, up from 19% between 2007 and 2013, and 10% between 2000 and 2006. Moreover, based on media reports and other sources, micromanaging or hyperpartisan boards were responsible for 24% of involuntary turnover at such universities in red states from 2014 to 2020, a rate more than four times higher than in blue states, Barringer and Harris found.

“One way to weaken these institutions is to weaken the leadership of these institutions,” Harris said. “Higher education is under attack in a way that it has never quite been before. These are direct assaults on the core tenets of the institutions. ... Boards are running leaders out of town. It’s scary stuff.”

The pressure has been intense in Idaho — and especially at its largest university, Boise State. Egged on by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to “exposing, defeating, and replacing the state’s socialist public policies,” conservative legislators have pushed to prevent an overwhelmingly white institution from considering diversity in its policies and programs.

In 2020, Idaho banned affirmative action at public universities. Last year, the state trimmed $1.5 million from Boise State’s budget, targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, along with a total of $1 million from the other two state universities. Idaho also became the first of seven states to adopt laws aimed at restricting colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory, which examines how racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure. The lieutenant governor convened a task force to “protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism and Marxism” in higher education. This year, the Legislature adopted a nonbinding resolution condemning critical race theory and The New York Times’s 1619 Project for “divisive content” that “seeks to disregard the history of the United States and the nation’s journey to becoming a pillar of freedom in the world.”

Boise State is a revealing prism through which to examine how public universities, meant to be bastions of academic freedom, are responding to red-state pressures. The school would seem to be in a strong position to resist them. It receives a relatively modest 18% of its budget from the state, with the balance from tuition, student fees, federal student financial aid, research grants and donors. Buoyed by its nationally known football team, which plays on a blue field that has come to rival the potato as Idaho’s most recognizable symbol, and located in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, Boise State has seen its academic stature and private fundraising rise. It received $41.8 million in donations in fiscal 2021, up from $34.2 million in 2020, although one prominent donor vowed to reduce his giving, complaining that the university was trending leftward.

But for all its seeming clout and independence, Boise State has yielded again and again. It has canceled events, like Fillmore’s speech, that might alienate conservatives; avoided using the terms “diversity” and “inclusion”; and suspended a course on ethics and diversity with 1,300 students over a legislator’s unfounded allegation of misconduct by a teacher.

University administrators “seem to want to placate the conservatives,” said sociology lecturer Michael Kreiter, who was an instructor in the suspended course and teaches classes on racism. “Their goal, in my view, is just to stay out of sight, hoping that all of this backlash won’t get focused on them.”

Idaho’s anti-critical race theory law “has chilled some Boise State educators and shut down their teaching and speech about race and gender in the classroom,” said Aadika Singh, legal director at the ACLU of Idaho, which investigated potentially unconstitutional enforcement of the law. “But it is also clear that some courageous educators have doubled down and reacted to the legislature’s attacks on education by teaching more controversial topics. The university administration has not been courageous; they haven’t had their faculty’s backs.” While the investigation remains open, Singh said, the ACLU of Idaho shifted its focus to educating faculty members on their academic freedom and free-speech rights in the classroom.

Boise State spokesperson Mike Sharp said that the 18% slice of its budget doesn’t convey the full scope of the state’s support for the university. Its land is titled in the name of the state Board of Education, and its buildings are all state buildings, he said. If Boise State had to cut programs to meet payroll, he added, enrollment would decline, and its credit rating might be downgraded. Without state support, “Boise State as it exists today would disappear,” Sharp said.

In an email to ProPublica, Tromp explained her strategy. “My aim is to support our faculty, students and staff and to open lines of dialogue with those in our community who are certain universities don’t see or hear them,” she wrote. “The work we are doing has the potential to be truly transformative — not just here but more broadly.” She declined to comment further, saying it is “a delicate moment, in which it continues to be easy to harm the best efforts in almost any direction.”

Some professors worry that the unanswered attacks are hurting Boise State’s credibility. When faculty members and community organizations recently sponsored a symposium on how to adjust property taxes to help homeowners affected by Boise’s soaring housing values, they held it off campus and didn’t list the university as a sponsor, in contrast to a similar symposium that the university conducted on campus 15 years ago.

“I am saddened by what’s happened in the last couple of years,” said Boise State political scientist Stephanie Witt, who helped organize the discussion. “There’s the perception that working with us is somehow connected to this taint on all higher education. We can’t be trusted.”

As it searched for a president in 2019, Boise State was increasingly gaining national recognition — and not just for athletics. Founded as a junior college by the Episcopal church in 1932, it entered the state system in 1969 and became a university in 1974. For years thereafter it was largely a commuter school for working adults. But now enrollment was steadily growing, especially from out of state; 17% of its undergraduates come from California. Its status had recently been upgraded to “high research activity” under the Carnegie system for classifying universities, and U.S. News & World Report had named it one of the country’s 50 most innovative universities.

One shortcoming stood in the way of its aspirations: a lack of diversity. Its faculty is 83% white, 5% Latino, 5% Asian and 1% Black. Even though 43% of degree-seeking undergraduates come from outside predominantly white Idaho, fewer than 2% are Black. Latinos make up 14%. The services needed to attract faculty and students of color, as well as low-income and LGBTQ students, and make them feel at home were scanty compared with many universities.

“We are a modern day Cinderella story,” a university commission concluded in 2017. “Unfortunately ... it is not clear that everyone is being invited nor supported to participate in the ball.” It called for creating “an infrastructure with executive leadership, and with the appropriate resources.”

During the presidential search, faculty, staff and students emphasized the importance of diversity. But some candidates were wary of Idaho politics. One finalist, Andrew Marcus, former dean of arts and sciences at the University of Oregon, cited “limited state funding and a climate of growing national concern about universities” as challenges in his job application. A Boise State staffer warned Marcus that Idaho was a one-party state in which Republicans were split into three factions: Mormons, who supported state funding for higher education; and libertarians and Trump acolytes, who didn’t.

Another hopeful bowed out after researching state politics. “I felt my values may not be shared by the governance structures in Idaho,” she said. “I didn’t want to have those fights.”

Tromp was the clear choice for the job. Born in 1966, she was raised a two-hour drive from the Idaho border, in Green River, Wyoming. Her father was a mechanic in a trona mine, a mineral processed into baking soda, and her mother was a telephone operator. Her high school guidance counselor applied to colleges for her, because she couldn’t afford the application fees. When an East Coast university offered her a full scholarship, her father said, “Honey, what would happen if you got all the way across the country and this turned out not to be real?” She enrolled at Creighton University in Nebraska, where she was smitten by Victorian poetry.

After earning her doctorate at the University of Florida, she spent 14 years at Denison University, a liberal arts college in Ohio. An English professor and director of women’s studies, she earned teaching awards and churned out books and articles. She advocated for nontraditional departments such as queer studies, said Toni King, a professor of Black studies and women’s and gender studies at Denison. “She cares very deeply about individual people, she pulls talent together, she innovates beyond,” King said. “She was always, ‘We can get there quicker, sooner, bigger.’”

Tromp immersed herself in campus life, speaking at “Take Back the Night” marches to raise awareness of violence against women. She was married on the steps of Denison’s library in 2007. Music department faculty played in the reception band. When she left for Arizona State, King thought, “There goes a college president.”

At Arizona State, Tromp served as dean of a college that offered interdisciplinary programs across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. At UC Santa Cruz, which she joined in 2017 as executive vice chancellor, she launched a mentoring program for faculty from underrepresented groups. She also proposed a new strategic plan too quickly, without enough familiarity with campus culture, according to Ronnie Lipschutz, an emeritus professor of politics.

“Marlene swept in and wanted to make an impact,” said Lipschutz, who is the author of an institutional history of UC Santa Cruz that examines why numerous strategic plans there have failed. “She didn’t talk to many people about how the place operated.” Tromp did not respond to questions about the strategic plan and her experience at Santa Cruz.

The battle over her plan was dragging on when Tromp left. She told the Santa Cruz academic senate that “incidents involving her personal and family’s safety” led her to accept the Boise State presidency, according to meeting minutes summarizing her talk. She also “expressed fear that there may be a lack of understanding of how easy it is to incite rage against the leaders in our community.” Santa Cruz colleagues said that she had been alarmed when people threatened and jeered her while she was jogging along a coastal road. They may have been unhoused students for whom dormitory space wasn’t available, and who had been denied permission to live in their cars and park in a campus lot, one friend said.

For a feminist university president, Idaho seemed unlikely to provide a safer, less volatile environment. “We were all surprised” at her departure, “especially since her project had not finished,” Lipschutz said. “The fact that she was going to Idaho was also a bit of a surprise. It was like, ‘Why on earth would you go to Idaho?’”

Tromp had no such doubts. “She was very enthusiastic and very much felt that she was coming home to the region that shaped her,” King said.

The Legislature wasn’t about to give her a honeymoon. In June 2019, Boise State’s interim president had highlighted the university’s diversity initiatives in a newsletter. They included graduation fetes for Black and LGBTQ students, six graduate fellowships for underrepresented minority students, recruiting a Black sorority or fraternity and implicit bias training for employees.

The next month, eight days after Tromp started, half of the 56 Republicans in Idaho’s House of Representatives wrote to her, assailing these programs as “divisive and exclusionary” and “antithetical to the purpose of a public university in Idaho.”

Through no fault of her own, Tromp was boxed in. She responded by calling for “meaningful dialogue,” thanking legislators for their “genuine engagement” and saying she looked forward to hearing their concerns.

In the midst of this firestorm, she met with three student activists. Ushered into her office, they noticed her treadmill desk and the bookshelves featuring her own works. When they told her about racism on campus, including swastikas painted on dormitory walls, Tromp started crying, according to two students, Ryann Banks and Abby Barzee.

“Didn’t you know about this before you took the job?” Banks asked her.

“I did not know,” Tromp said.

About 10 days after the legislators’ letter, cartoon postcards were mailed anonymously to state officials and lawmakers, depicting Tromp as a clown. Other attacks ensued. Although Tromp had spent only two years at UC Santa Cruz, the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s sister organization, Idaho Freedom Action, lampooned her as a “California liberal ... Turning Boise State Into a Taxpayer-Funded Marxist Indoctrination Center.” A scholar of xenophobia in Victorian England, Tromp was experiencing fear of outsiders firsthand.

After the foundation encouraged its supporters to troll her, Tromp received “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of some of the most venomous hateful emails I could possibly imagine,” she said at a private 2021 meeting, according to a recording the Idaho Freedom Foundation obtained and posted. “Threats to drag me out in the street and sexually assault me and kill me. Messages of hatred. ... It’s a manifestation of the toxicity of the political climate across our country.”

Much as former President Barack Obama once courted congressional Republicans, Tromp sought to conciliate the conservative legislators. In one-on-one meetings, she assured them that she took the free-speech rights of a student wearing a Make America Great Again hat as seriously as anyone else’s. “All means all” became her mantra. Previously either a Democrat or undeclared, she registered to vote in Idaho as a Republican.

But she faced several disadvantages, starting with her gender. “These extremists think that it’s easier to pick off a woman than a man, and so they go after” her, said former Boise State President Bob Kustra.

Tromp’s striking appearance — she’s tall and slender, with close-cropped hair, glasses (often red) and multiple ear piercings — may have disconcerted some Idahoans. “I sometimes wonder if Dr. Tromp isn’t an easier target because she looks like a modern woman,” said Witt, the political scientist. “People say, ‘She’s got more than one hole in her ears, she’s got short hair.’”

As Idaho’s only urban university, Boise State attracts disproportionate media attention and conservative skepticism. It also has few of the natural allies on whom universities often lean politically: alumni in key government posts. Tromp reports to the state Board of Education, which has only one Boise State graduate among its eight members.

While its campus is a mile from the state Capitol building, Boise State’s presence there is sparse. About 10% of legislators are Boise State alumni, which may be partly attributable to its lack of a law school. Two Mormon institutions, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, together have about twice as many alumni in the Legislature as Boise State does. The University of Idaho has almost double Boise State’s representation. Gov. Brad Little is a University of Idaho graduate.

The disparity is even greater on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which sets the higher education budget. Six members of the Republican majority on JFAC graduated from the University of Idaho, including a co-chair, and none from Boise State.

As Idaho’s only land-grant university, with the state’s only public law school, the University of Idaho possesses in-state cachet and connections that Boise State is hard-pressed to match. Its diversity initiatives are comparable to Boise State’s. It has a chief diversity officer, as well as a director of diversity and inclusion for its engineering college. Boise State has neither position. Yet the Legislature appropriated 72% more per student to the University of Idaho in fiscal 2022 than to Boise State.

The University of Idaho’s president, C. Scott Green, called out the freedom foundation this past January, denouncing “a false narrative created by conflict entrepreneurs who make their living sowing fear and doubt with legislators and voters.”

Green avoided any pushback because “he has friends in key positions,” said Rep. Brent Crane, a committee chairman and former House assistant majority leader, who graduated from Boise State in 2005.

Even though Crane is an alumnus, Boise State can’t count on his support. His father, a former state legislator and treasurer, is treasurer of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, with which Crane agrees 82% of the time, according to its rankings.

The 47-year-old Crane represents the Boise suburb of Nampa, where he was born and grew up, and where he’s vice president of his family’s security and fire alarm business. He and his brother also own a fire sprinkler company. At a nearby coffeehouse, he said that, when he was a political science major at Boise State, his teachers never revealed their opinions. “What I respected most about my professors was that I didn’t know if they were Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “Whatever the student thought, the professor took the opposite tack. In my perfect world, I’d like to see Boise State get back to where it was when I was there.”

Crane, who is white, said that he disagrees with critical race theory: “There’s no racism in my life.” In his boyhood, he said, “African Americans were revered and looked up to. They were the athletes who played on the football and basketball teams. They were the heroes.”

Under immediate pressure, Tromp began rethinking her agenda. “From day one, when she came in, and the letter from the legislators came in saying, ‘You’re under a microscope, you’d better start scrubbing your campus of these programs,’ that changed the operating environment from her perspective, and probably the perspective of everyone,” one insider said.

“There was a quiet reassessment of what can we reasonably accomplish and an ongoing conversation about how do we serve our students best without unnecessarily inflaming the rage and the accusations of these legislators?’”

Crane, the legislator and Boise State alumnus, had a role in one of the university’s early concessions. Boise State was advertising for a new position: vice provost for equity and inclusion. It would be the top diversity job at the university, implementing Tromp’s agenda. The vice provost would oversee recruiting and retaining faculty, building diversity into the curriculum and monitoring the campus climate.

The search produced two finalists. One of them, Brandy Bryson, looked into Idaho politics and withdrew her name from consideration. “There was no way the institution was going to survive the political strong-arming that was coming from the Legislature,” said Bryson, director of inclusive excellence at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. “Boise State’s desire to hire a vice provost for equity and inclusion was a clear commitment to academic excellence and the empirically proven benefits of diversity, which the Legislature didn’t seem to understand or value.”

The other finalist, John Miller Jr., then chair of social work at a liberal arts college in the South, noticed that someone from the Idaho Freedom Foundation was tracking him on social media. Nevertheless, he accepted an invitation to visit Boise State, where he met in March 2020 with Tromp and other leaders, and gave a presentation.

Some search committee members had reservations about Miller, who wasn’t a shoo-in, insiders said. Still, “the vibe I got, when I was dropped off at the airport, I fully expected an offer,” Miller said. “I was definitely under strong consideration.”

After the student newspaper reported on the opening, though, Boise State’s critics weighed in. Idaho Freedom Foundation President Wayne Hoffman wrote on the group’s website that “BSU didn’t get the message” from the “written rebuke” by the 28 legislators. Shortly after Miller returned to South Carolina, Crane denounced his alma mater for hiring a “vice president of diversity,” calling it “a direct affront” to the Legislature and “me personally.” Despite getting the job title wrong, Crane clearly meant the vice provost position.

Crane also conveyed his concerns privately to Tromp. He regarded the new position as part of “the woke agenda sweeping the country: I don’t want to see Boise State caught up in that,” he told ProPublica. The House had already killed the higher education budget twice. If Tromp had forged ahead, other Boise State priorities might not have been funded, Crane said.

“She and I disagree on the vice provost of diversity,” he told ProPublica. “That’s not a hill she wants to die on. She chose to pay deference.” A week later, Boise State notified Miller that it had halted the search. It never filled the position.

Crane continued to lambaste Boise State. During an April 2021 debate on the higher education budget, Crane read aloud what he said was an email from an unnamed Boise State music student complaining that a professor had asked a class to discuss how Black composers are superior to white composers. The student protested that skin color has nothing to do with the quality of music but was purportedly told to be quiet. (The incident could not be confirmed.)

“I’m disgusted. I’m embarrassed and I’m ashamed,” Crane told the legislature. “There has been a direct shift in the ideology that’s being taught at Boise State University. ... Our tax dollars” do not “need to be spent silencing kids’ voices on our college campuses.”

One way that Boise State sought to reduce legislative pushback was by adjusting its language. For example, Tromp asked a university planning committee to avoid the words “diversity” and “inclusion,” which legislators would be searching for, said Angel Cantu, a former student government president on the committee. Boise State’s 2022-26 strategic plan doesn’t mention “diversity” or “inclusion,” while the phrase “equity gaps” appears four times. By contrast, the University of Idaho’s plan calls for building an “inclusive, diverse community” and creating an “inclusive learning environment.”

Boise State administrators discussed the importance of terminology at several meetings, a former official recalled. The message was that “you can use different words to have the same meaning. Equity and words like that are less incendiary.”

The university tweaked job titles similarly. In August 2020, Francisco Salinas, then the university’s top diversity officer, moved from “director of student diversity and inclusion” to “assistant to the vice president for equity initiatives.”

Although his responsibilities did change, Salinas said, the new description wasn’t his choice, and he disagreed with scrubbing words like diversity. “The tactics being used” against Boise State, he said, “were bullying tactics. It’s the same thing you learn as a kid. If a bully is successful at taking your lunch money, they’re going to keep going. You have to stand up and let them know they can’t do that to you.”

Discouraged, Salinas left Boise State in April to become dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at Spokane Falls Community College in Washington. He said other diversity officials have fled. “I know what Dr. Tromp’s heart is,” he said. “I was very pleased she was hired. I thought she’d be able to make progress along this axis. But the environment did not afford that.”

The legislative barrage also affected recruitment. “I’ve been on hiring committees and I see who applies for jobs here,” said Utych, the former political science professor. “They are a lot whiter than they are at other universities. Part of that is the location, but part of that is also the Legislature attacking diversity and inclusion.”

Tromp “described being very, very disheartened that the best thing to do might be to pull back because of the resistance,” her friend King recalled. “There was concern, with all the information she had before her, how could she move forward? She had to think about the university as a whole.”

When the university did move forward with a lightning-rod event, it took precautions to avoid a backlash. Republican legislators had attacked the “Rainbow Graduation,” which honors LGBTQ students, in their letter to Tromp, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation had accused Boise State of holding “segregationist” commencements. At this spring’s Rainbow Graduation, Boise State’s dean of students pointedly reminded the 30 or so seniors that “this is not a commencement ceremony.” Since they were aware that they would actually graduate nine days later, the disclaimer appeared to be intended for critics outside the university.

Some faculty were undaunted. The sociology department has doubled the number of its courses focusing on race and racism from two to four, and it opened an Anti-Racism Collective that brings in speakers. “This is a great opportunity in some sense,” said sociology department chairman Arthur Scarritt. Added Kreiter, who doesn’t have tenure: “I feel I don’t have a lot of longevity here. I’m just going to teach this as fiery as I can.”

Several professors and administrators urged Tromp to fight back. “There were a lot of people on campus, even in senior leadership, who said, ‘You can’t get out of this by taking the high road,’” one recalled. “I would have preferred a more direct approach.”

Tromp drew the line at cultivating the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Hoffman said he has asked to meet with her on multiple occasions and has been refused. “Nothing has changed at Boise State,” he said in an email. “It’s just handled more carefully.”

There is some evidence for the contention by Crane and other critics that conservative students at Boise State tend to feel squelched in class. A state Board of Education survey completed last November found that 36% of Boise State students who self-identified as right of center felt pressured often or very frequently to accept beliefs they found offensive, as opposed to 12% of students in the center and 6% on the left. Conservative students were more apt to feel this pressure from professors; liberals, from classmates.

Still, the faculty encompasses a range of views. Anne Walker, chair of the economics department, holds a fellowship in free enterprise capitalism. One member of the lieutenant governor’s task force on communism in higher education was Scott Yenor, a Boise State political scientist and occasional Tucker Carlson guest. In December 2020, Yenor and an Idaho Freedom Foundation analyst co-authored a report urging the Legislature to “direct the university to eliminate courses that are infused with social justice ideology.” In a speech last fall, Yenor mocked feminists as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and universities as “the citadels of our gynecocracy.”

Boise State’s donors also span the political spectrum. Timber and cattle ranching magnate Larry Williams served for 20 years on the Boise State Foundation board and has donated millions of dollars for athletics and business programs. He has also given six figures to the Idaho Freedom Foundation. In this year’s Republican primary campaign, he gave about $125,000 to more than 30 conservative candidates, including $1,000 to Crane.

Throughout 2020, Williams pressed Boise State to scuttle the programs identified by the 28 Republican legislators, to no avail. Although he found Tromp to be open and engaging, he told legislators in February 2021 that he would no longer donate to Boise State, with the exception of its football program, “until this is turned around.”

“It appears BSU no longer shares our Idaho values,” Williams wrote. “Students are taught ... that our honest, hardworking rural farmers, ranchers, miners and loggers are ‘white privileged’ with ‘implicit bias’ toward minorities and Native Americans.”

The Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Hoffman acknowledged that Boise State has fewer diversity initiatives than some big universities in other states. “We recognize that it’s a small but growing dedication of resources to this enterprise,” he said. “I don’t care how big it is. I care if any taxpayer dollars are wasted on these efforts. We want to catch it now before it becomes an even bigger problem.”

Like white students from rural Idaho who are exposed for the first time to concepts like white privilege and systemic racism, some students of color, especially from other states, endure culture shock on campus. After Kennyetta Coulter, a biology major from Long Beach, California, arrived at Boise State last year, accompanied by her mother, they hardly saw another Black person for two weeks. “If you don’t like Boise, don’t be afraid to tell me,” her mother said on leaving.

In a “Difficult Conversations” class, Coulter, who describes herself as a political moderate, found that she was the only student in her discussion group who favored background checks for gun buyers or was open to letting transgender athletes participate in sports based on their gender identity. Her three roommates, all of whom had blue eyes and blond hair, were nice to her. But sometimes she felt peer pressure to suppress her views. At Boise State football games, she squirmed in the student section while “big, buff white boys with cowboy boots” chanted, “Fuck Joe Biden.”

Coulter became so depressed that she sought counseling. “Sometimes I just feel I’m all alone,” she said, “and I’m the only one who understands what I’m going through.” She didn’t have the energy to go to class and stayed in bed and watched television.

The administration’s reluctance to challenge legislators dispirited her. “Why isn’t the university saying anything?” Coulter wondered.

In some red states, public universities have fought back. The University of Nebraska has been especially effective in warding off political pressure. It’s the only public university in Nebraska, and about half of the state’s legislators earned degrees from institutions within the University of Nebraska system. So did all eight regents. And as a retired vice admiral and former superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, Nebraska president Ted Carter has the kind of military credentials that make it hard to call him a communist.

University regent Jim Pillen, a veterinarian and former Nebraska football star who is running for governor, proposed a resolution last year that critical race theory “seeks to silence opposing views and disparage important American ideals” and should not be “imposed in curriculum, training and programming.”

Aided by the ACLU of Nebraska and other advocacy groups, the university’s administration, faculty and student government mobilized against the resolution. At a hearing last August before the regents, almost 40 people testified against it, while only a handful supported it. Defenders of critical race theory noted that the Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian Savages.” A retired English professor pleaded with the board: “If you pass this, you repudiate my whole career.”

The four nonvoting student regents also voiced their opposition, including Batool Ibrahim, the first Black student government president of Nebraska’s flagship Lincoln campus. Ibrahim considers herself a native Nebraskan, although technically she isn’t. Her Sudanese parents were flying to the U.S. in 1999, hoping she would be born on American soil so she could become president someday, when her mother went into labor on the plane. The pilot hurriedly landed in Dubai, where Ibrahim was born. The family soon moved to Lincoln, where she grew up.

Critical race theory “is the history of people of color in this nation,” Ibrahim said. “It is my history. So when we talk about whether critical race theory should be taught or it should not be taught, you’re telling me that my history does not belong in the classroom.”

Pillen defended his resolution, saying that it did not violate academic freedom and that “Nebraskans deserve the confidence of knowing their hard-earned tax dollars cannot be used to force critical race theory on anyone.”

The board upheld teaching critical race theory by a 5-3 vote. But the battle was just starting. One regent in the majority warned that 400 of 550 constituents who contacted him supported the resolution — a promising sign for Pillen, who would go on to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

In November 2021, the chancellor of the University of Nebraska’s Lincoln campus, saying he had been “shaken” by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, announced a plan to “recruit, retain and support the success of students, faculty and staff who are people of color.” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, who can’t seek reelection because of term limits and has endorsed Pillen, called the plan “ideological indoctrination” that would “inject critical race theory into every corner of campus.”

Then a Nebraska legislator proposed withholding funds from colleges or public schools that engaged in “race or sex scapegoating.” In a rerun of the regents’ hearing, 40 people testified against the bill in February, while three supported it. Speaking for the university, Richard Moberly, dean of the law school, warned that the bill could be interpreted to prohibit legitimate discussion of systemic racism and unconscious bias. It died in committee.

Pillen isn’t giving up. “As governor, I’ll fight CRT and other un-American, far-left ideologies in our classrooms,” he told ProPublica.

Despite Tromp’s conciliatory approach, a controversy in October 2020 further roiled the university’s critics. It pitted a popular downtown establishment, Big City Coffee, which had just opened a branch in Boise State’s library, against student activists galvanized by Floyd’s killing five months before.

Big City Coffee’s name appears to be ironic. Agricultural signs hang from the walls and rafters: “Duroc Hog,” “Strawberries for Sale,” “Cattle Crossing.” But it was another aspect of the downtown location’s decor that prompted student complaints, even though it wasn’t replicated in the library shop: a “thin blue line” flag. The students argued that such flags can signify support for white supremacists and hostility to the Black Lives Matter movement, and that a business with those sentiments should not have a campus outlet.

The coffee shop owner, who describes herself as a political moderate, explained that she was engaged to a former police officer who had been shot and disabled in the line of duty, and that she only meant to support law enforcement. Student government President Angel Cantu agreed that the shop should not be kicked off campus simply for being sympathetic to first responders.

The protesters weren’t mollified. They were already upset with Cantu because they wanted the university to cancel its security contract with Boise police. He felt Boise State shouldn’t do so without first knowing how to replace the department’s services.

The wrangle escalated as Big City Coffee shut down the campus branch, and other student government leaders impeached Cantu. The coffee shop owner sued Boise State, Tromp and three other university officials, accusing them of forcing her off campus. Charges against the university and Tromp were dismissed, while the case is proceeding against the other defendants, who have denied wrongdoing.

The branch’s demise and Cantu’s impeachment galvanized conservative students. Jacinta Rigi, a sophomore who had opposed the impeachment, posted a video accusing the student government of ignoring her and others on campus. “Freedom of speech is being abused and stolen from many students at the university and our voices are being silenced,” she said. The video drew almost 8,300 views, and Rigi ran for student government president in 2021.

Although Rigi lost — she now works at Fox News in New York while completing her Boise State degree online — the political momentum on campus had shifted. This past March, Adam Jones, a former intern in the Republican Party’s Boise office who urged Boise State to reconcile with the Legislature, was elected student government president. “Too often it is looked at that the state is being the bad guy,” Jones told ProPublica.

Jones is a Boise native. His father, a lawyer, and his mother, a banker, both graduated from Boise State. He campaigned in a 1993 white Ford pickup truck he rebuilt himself, with “Blue Lives Matter” and “God Bless America” stickers on its rear windshield, a mounted American flag and a “USA4EVA” license plate. Asked about public safety at a candidates’ debate, he said, “Every time I see a Boise police officer go by, I feel safe.”

In March 2021, about 1,300 Boise State students were taking University Foundations 200, “Foundations of Ethics and Diversity.” The course, which predated Tromp, was split into more than 50 sections. Each tackled the topic through a different lens, from the “Star Wars” saga to how lack of access to technology affects rural Americans and other groups.

Sociology professor Dora Ramírez was teaching a section on censorship. She was about to start a unit about a bill, under consideration in the Idaho Legislature, attacking critical race theory. Then, Ramírez said, she and the other UF 200 instructors got a lesson in censorship from their own university.

Boise State had received a complaint from a legislator, who has never been publicly identified. The legislator said he had seen a video of a UF 200 class in which an instructor had demeaned a female student’s intelligence and forced her to apologize in front of the class for being white. She was supposedly taunted by other students and left the class in tears.

Without seeing the video, Tromp suspended all UF 200 sections for a week and hired a law firm to investigate. “Isn’t it ironic?” to suspend a censorship class, Ramírez recalled thinking. “What a way to undermine the authority of all those instructors. You work so hard to build a rapport with all those students. Then they’re thinking, ‘What did she do wrong?’”

Some faculty members were appalled. “A lot of us were quickly pointing out, ‘We have students of color made to feel bad every day of the week,’” said sociologist Martin Orr, a former president of the faculty senate. “One white student feels bad, all hell breaks loose.”

When the course resumed, Kreiter used the suspension as fodder for his UF 200 section on inequality in higher education. “The university is robbing you of your education because of politics,” he told students. “You’re still out the same tuition bill, but you’re getting less education.”

The law firm’s report, which came out in May, concluded that no student was mistreated and no instructor acted improperly. The complaint apparently mischaracterized a class discussion about universal health care in which a student had called an instructor’s logic “stupid” — not the other way around. “There were no reports of anyone being forced to apologize for being white.” The legislator told investigators that he didn’t have the video, which has never surfaced publicly.

Tromp told the Inlander, a community newspaper in Spokane, Washington, that since she hadn’t known in which class section the alleged incident took place, she had been forced to suspend the entire course. Other university presidents whom she consulted agreed with her decision, she said. “It’s a little bit like being told there’s a gas leak in the building, but you don’t know where it is,” Tromp said. “It always feels dramatic to clear the building to find the gas leak.”

For one UF 200 instructor, who was teaching a section on misinformation, the incident was “very much” what his class was about. Legislators were “trying to craft a completely unwarranted narrative for political reasons in order to shut something down.”

Nevertheless, Tromp redoubled catering to them. She established an “Institute for Advancing American Values” to inspire “us to talk and listen to each other respectfully.” Its first speaker was conservative pundit Jason Riley.

Boise State also scaled back an annual tradition, “Day at the Capitol.” In the past, a dozen student government members would set up a booth in the Capitol rotunda and chat with legislators. Other students were invited to watch from the gallery.

Mostly, Democratic lawmakers dropped by. Republicans sent aides to say they were busy. “We got used to being avoided by them,” Cantu said. “We still went out of our way to invite them.”

This year, there was no booth. “The university’s concern was that the students would protest or do something inappropriate,” Jones said. Two student leaders met briefly with the governor as he declared it “Boise State University Day.” Three other students delivered gifts — 105 jars of honey, courtesy of Boise State’s beekeeping team — to the offices of each of the 70 representatives and 35 senators.

While reining in students, Boise State invited Crane, the alumnus who had opposed hiring a vice provost for equity and inclusion, to introduce its leadership team on that special day to the House chambers. Crane was delighted to help.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Daniel Golden and Kirsten Berg.

Leave politics aside for a moment, if you can. What does the word “conservative” mean to you, outside of that cursed arena? To me, it connotes respecting tradition, caution when it comes to change, and hewing to the tried and true. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions; marked by moderation or caution; and marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners.”

Returning to the political realm, does any of that apply to so-called conservatives today?

When Mitch McConnell refused even to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the specious grounds that it couldn’t be considered in a presidential election year, what manner of existing views, conditions or institutions was he maintaining?

And when he upended that supposed rule to rush Amy Coney Barrett through the confirmation process just weeks before the 2020 elections (when early voting was already underway), how did that show moderation or caution?

When candidate Donald Trump mocked a disabled journalist and trashed the parents of an American soldier killed in action, what traditional norms of taste or manners was he upholding?

Once in office, when he lied again and again about almost anything, what principle of honest government was he serving?

And when he knowingly and repeatedly lied that the 2020 election was stolen, and plotted to overthrow the results, how does that in any way conform to any reasonable concept of conservatism?

Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson is often described as a “conservative commentator.” How so? In what way does he respect tradition, caution or moderation?

When he praises — “idolizes” is probably a better word — Hungarian autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán, what part of his tenure does he most appreciate: curtailing press freedom, moving to restrict or eliminate LGBTQ rights, or embracing “Christian democracy”?

As if following Carlson’s playbook, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held in Budapest this year. Speakers included Trump and Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff. Another speaker was described in The Guardian newspaper as a “notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews ‘stinking excrement,’ referred to Roma as ‘animals’ and used racial epithets to describe Black people.” This is “conservative”?

And what is conservative about the members of Congress who have tried to portray the January 6 mob as a bunch of “tourists” quietly visiting the Capitol, or those at the podium that day urging the crowd to “fight like hell,” or Senate Republicans refusing to approve an investigation into that day’s deadly violence?

Words matter. Calling McConnell or Carlson or a January 6 rioter conservative is to normalize their behavior. “Conservative” is such a comforting word; it connotes thoughtful consideration, reasoned debate, consideration of others’ viewpoints. It suggests adherence to the law, not gaming the system or trying to overturn an election based on lies. It allows the reader or hearer to relax: These are not crazy people, they’re just conservatives and patriots.

When McConnell said when he took over as Senate majority leader that his first job was to ensure that President Obama was a one-term president, that was not a conservative statement. It was an extremist saying he had no interest in governing despite the fact that he was leading a government institution. When Missouri Senator Josh Hawley raised a fist in salute to the January 6 insurrectionists, that was not a conservative act. It was a direct violation of his oath of office.

There are other words the mainstream media can use for these people. My favorite happens to be “extremist.” It’s short and businesslike. It doesn’t need any explanation; it nicely stands on its own. It could be modified, if desired, as in “right-wing extremist” or “anti-democracy extremist,” though that’s probably not necessary.

Some members of this crowd can of course be further identified as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists and other such categories. I hope the wordsmiths in the media can and will find many other terms that both clarify and elaborate on “extremist” or “extremism.”

What’s essential is to give the extremists no quarter, no place to hide behind comforting, compromising, euphemistic — and deceptive — words like “conservative.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Dover.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeb Barnes.

What role did dark money play in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade? We speak with reporter Andrew Perez about how conservative anti-abortion groups and right-wing extremists have funneled millions of dollars into promoting politicians and Supreme Court justices to ultimately curtail reproductive rights. A dark money network led by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo has spent at least $10 million promoting each of President Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court and another $10 million blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016, says Perez, senior editor and investigative reporter at The Lever.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

At around 7 p.m. on March 17, Formula TV reporter Nano Chakvetadze, camera operator Archil Nikolaishvili, and camera assistant Giga Tskhovrebashvili were attempting to conduct an interview at a bar in the capital Tbilisi, when they were assaulted by a customer after he heard the journalists worked for the outlet, according to news reports and Chakvetadze, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app.

In the early hours of March 18, a group of 8 to 10 unidentified men in the western city of Zugdidi beat Mtavari Arkhi camera operator Zviad Ablotia, broke his camera, and threatened the outlet’s correspondent Ema Gogokhia while they were filming outside the local office of the far-right political party Conservative Movement, according to news reports and Giorgi Papava, Gogokhia’s son and a journalist at Mtavari Arkhi, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Georgian authorities have charged one individual with assaulting the Formula TV camera crew and arrested four men accused of attacking the Mtavari Arkhi journalists, these sources stated.

The attacks were the most recent in several assaults on the press in the past year in Georgia, as CPJ has documented.

“Georgian authorities must demonstrate their commitment to press freedom and the safety of all journalists by ensuring that those responsible for the recent attacks on crews from Mtavari Arkhi and Formula TV are held accountable,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “The reputation of Georgian authorities is on the line if they don’t send a clear message that violence against members of the press will not be tolerated by fully prosecuting all involved.”

On March 17, Chakvetadze, Nikolaishvili, and Tskhovrebashvili were interviewing a Russian citizen who had relocated to Georgia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A customer who had been drinking and identified himself as Davit Velijanashvili disrupted the interview and demanded they leave, saying he hated Formula TV, as the channel spread disinformation.

When the journalists refused, Velijanashvili struck Chakvetadze on her shoulder and punched Nikolaishvili and Tskhovrebashvili in the face and head, according to Chakvetadze and a statement by the Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia. Nikolaishvili sustained a broken nose, concussion and remains in the hospital following emergency surgery on his nose, Chakvetadze said.

Police arrested Velijanashvili the following day and prosecutors charged him with unlawful interference with a journalist’s professional activities and persecution of persons because of their speech, opinions, or professional activities by violence or threat of violence. These crimes carry penalties of two and three years in prison respectively, according to the criminal code of Georgia.

On March 20, Velijanashvili pleaded guilty to these charges and Tbilisi City Court ordered him remanded in custody for two months, Formula TV reported.

On March 18, the Mtavari Arkhi crew was filming Zugdidi municipality workers removing pro-Ukrainian graffiti that activists had spray painted on the office of the Conservative Movement, which has been accused of being pro-Russia, according to those reports and Papava.

While they were filming, four cars pulled up and a group of 8 to 10 men, some wearing brass knuckles, got out. They tried to punch Ablotia in the face, chased him, hit and kicked him on the back and legs, and threw his camera to the ground, breaking it, Papava said, adding that the men swore at Gogokhia and accused her of being a “U.S. agent.” Mtavari Arkhi posted footage of part of the incident taken by Ablotia on its Facebook page.

Gogokhia recognized the attackers as members of the far-right Alt-Info group which founded the Conservative Movement party last year, Papava told CPJ, adding that he believed their main goal was to destroy the camera equipment to prevent the story from being reported, as it would include the group’s implied pro-Russian stance, which is unpopular in Georgia.

Police officers standing nearby allegedly watched the attack without intervening until other civilians attempted to help the journalists, Papava said, after which police arrested four of the attackers. Ablotia was taken to a nearby clinic with bruising but both journalists escaped serious injury, he added.

The Special Investigation Service, a state investigative body, has launched an investigation into the incident as unlawful interference with a journalist’s professional activities, according to a press release published on its website.

CPJ emailed the Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia for comment but did not immediately receive any reply. Via its Facebook page, the Special Investigation Service sent CPJ its press releases on the Formula and Mtavari Arkhi cases from March 18, but did not reply to requests for further information. CPJ was unable to find contact details for Alt-Info.

In statements on its Facebook page, the Media Advocacy Coalition, an alliance of local and international NGOs, said the attacks on the Formula TV and Mtavari Arkhi crews were “the result of a hostile environment created for the media” and had been “encouraged by [authorities’] inappropriate response to a number of crimes committed against journalists.”

In March 2021, unidentified men beat Formula TV anchor Vakhtang Sanaia, and in May a group of men attacked two journalists working with Mtavari Arkhi, as CPJ documented. In July, hundreds of anti-LGBT protesters attacked more than 50 journalists covering a pride march in Tbilisi, with camera operator Aleksandre Lashkarava later dying after sustaining facial fractures.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Some laws are ridiculously broad, making it impossible for teachers to develop a well-rounded curriculum. For instance, in Tennessee, lawmakers enacted a ban forbidding any classroom material which demonstrates “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.” Penalties for recorded slip-ups may include fines against individual educators or revocation of their teaching licenses. Schools may even face losing state funds or their school district’s accreditation.

In the Spring 2021 issue of City Journal magazine, author Christopher Rufo, a leader in the burgeoning anti-CRT movement, wrote an article criticizing Portland public school teachers for encouraging 100 days of Black Lives Matter protests in the city that summer. In the article, Rufo included the full names of several teachers who attended protests, which spurred vicious online hate. Then in June 2021, after several educators showed their support for the Zinn Education Project’s “pledge to teach the truth,” The Daily Wire published each one of the 5000 names signed on the petition, carefully organized by state and community. Following The Daily Wire’s article, teachers on the list faced countless complaints demanding their immediate dismissal.

Editors of Rethinking Schools maintain a teacher’s purpose is to inspire questions and curiosity, to foster growth and intellectual freedom, not hide information from young minds. Massive labor unions like National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have stood in staunch opposition to the sweeping anti-CRT bills and bans.

“Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in July 2021.

In May 2021, the Washington Post published an article which gave an overview of critical race theory and described the coordinated GOP effort to ban its teaching in public schools. However, the article did not consider the impact these severe and inflexible bans may have on teachers’ livelihoods. Similar 2021 articles by the New York Times and ABC News approached the issue from a political perspective but neglected labor rights and teachers unions entirely. To this day, no corporate coverage has centered teachers and their students in this long-winded battle for the truth.

Source: Rethinking Schools Editors, “Confronting the Right-Wing Attacks on Racial Justice Teaching,” Rethinking Schools, Fall 2021.

Student Researcher: Magret Nunes and Kenyon Kremin (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

The post Conservative Lawmakers in Several States Push Sweeping Bans on Critical Race Theory in Classrooms appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Republicans to confirm President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee before presidential election.
• Health care activists warn a conservative justice could overturn Obamacare amidst pandemic.
• +200,000 dead from coronavirus in U.S., health experts warn of a 2nd wave.
• California allows 9 more counties-3 in the Bay-to loosen restrictions as infection rates lower.
• Death penalty opponents rally against “spree” of federal executions ahead of election.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash.

The post Republicans to confirm President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee before election; Activists warn a conservative court could overturn Obamacare amidst pandemic; Death penalty opponents rally against “spree” of federal executions ahead of election appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

WASHINGTON — Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during the State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Limbaugh, 69, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, announced Monday he is battling advanced lung cancer.

Trump said the diagnosis was not good news, but added, “What is good news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet.”

A bearded Limbaugh, seated next to first lady Melania Trump, looked stunned as the president announced the award. He eventually stood and saluted Trump and offered a thumbs-up to Republicans in the House chamber.

Melania Trump presented the award to Limbaugh, placing the blue-ribboned gold medal around his neck.

Trump thanked Limbaugh for “decades of tireless devotion to our country” and said the award recognized the millions of people a day Limbaugh speaks to and inspires, as well as his charity work.

Limbaugh said Monday he intends to work as much as possible. He also said he had focused more “intensely” in the past two weeks on what he called his “deeply personal relationship” with God.

Limbaugh is widely credited as key to Republicans’ takeover of Congress in 1994 and has strongly supported Trump and other Republicans.

Limbaugh has frequently been accused of hate-filled speech, including bigotry and blatant racism through his comments and sketches such as “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song featured on his show that said former President Barack Obama “makes guilty whites feel good” and called Obama “black, but not authentically.”

His popularity has survived brickbats and thrived despite personal woes. In 2003, Limbaugh admitted an addiction to painkillers and entered rehabilitation.