Regarding the Christian nationalist theocratic wealth & power movement

Source

Context

A NYT opinion, This Case Has Flown Under the Radar. It Won’t Stay There, summarizes the gravity the threat of bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy presents to what’s left of our democracy, rule of law, civil liberties, and defenses of the public interest. In a nutshell, theocratic MAGA elites are not close to finished with their goal of making America an aggressive, arrogantly bigoted theocracy.

The opinion starts with a very short list of some of the damage that Trump and MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy have caused so far. It includes mention of (1) lost abortion rights that Roe v. Wade used to afford, (2) gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendering it incapable of preventing states from undermining the political power of minority citizens, (3) killing off the independence of executive branch agencies, leaving the president now able to fire nearly all agency heads for any or no reason, (4) neutering federal agency power by removing federal judges deference to an agency’s interpretation of its own authority, instead being told to decide for themselves the validity of agency regulations, and (5) eliminated the government’s ability to pass reasonable gun safety laws. All of those lost functions and powers were generally pro-public interest.

Although that short list covers a huge amount of damage to our democracy, rule of law, civil liberties and public interest power, there is a lot more that isn’t mentioned. For example, undermining reasonable public health measures, killing off funding for genuinely useful research, transferring vast wealth and power from the people and the public interest to wealthy people and special interests, normalizing lying, corruption and bigotry, etc. Vast amounts of power have been redirected to serve and protect wealthy people and special interests at the expense of the public interest.

Regarding Christian nationalist theocracy

Not mentioned in the damage list is religion. What do elite MAGA theocrats plan for us, whether we want it or not? They have huge plans. Aggressive plans. The opinion cites an assessment by three constitutional scholars that MAGA’s theocracy for America plan amounts to a massive shift in the law that raises theocracy to the same level as existing secular law. In those minds, there is no such thing as church-state separation. The scholars write:

The slow undoing of constitutional limits on government support for religion that began with the Rehnquist Court has intensified over the last several years into a systematic dismantling of the previous legal regime. The Court has mandated government funding of religious schools alongside secular schools, where before the government had been forbidden from doing so under the Establishment Clause.

In essence, the NYT opinion is warning is that MAGA-aligned legal politics can turn Christianity into a preferred constitutional interest, instead of being one freedom among equal freedoms. MAGA’s way of doing this has not been a simple, explicit declaration that Christianity outranks everything else. Instead, theocratic MAGA judges have weakened church-state separation in a series of court rulings. Over time, the new dictates increasingly require government to include, fund, or exempt religious entities while giving much less weight to competing “secular” rights. In essence, what the MAGA judges have done in decisions over decades is to write the Establishment Clause almost completely out of the US Constitution by narrowing with MAGA judges say they want it to mean. With the Establishment Clause gone, there’s nothing left to stop America from degenerating into a bigoted, racist, misogynist Christian nationalist theocracy.

Not all Christians support an American theocracy

If the MAGA USSC goes further by allowing religious providers to receive public funds while disregarding nondiscrimination conditions, that would put religious claims above the equal citizenship and civil rights of the people taxpayer-funded programs are supposed to serve. That obviously strengthens the Christian-nationalist theocracy agenda by forcing public power and money to be freely available to institutions that can deny equal treatment in the name of religious dogma.

Q1: Is it reasonable to see MAGA elite’s Christian nationalist theocracy agenda as aggressive and significantly intolerant, bigoted, racist, or misogynist?

Q2: Should America be a Christian theocracy or a secular democracy that protects freedom of religion but separates church from state?

Some info sources:

Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership — Comment: This is the primary document that lays out Christian theocracy for America. It details a highly intolerant authoritarian executive-branch agenda that uses explicitly Christian religious framing. That includes a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. This is the best source to answer the question, “Where does the MAGA agenda include Christian theocracy?”

Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change — Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” He’s not exaggerating.

Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Civil Rights — Comment: This is one of the clearest sources linking the Heritage Foundation-led agenda to racial, gender, LGBTQ, disability, immigrant, and religious-minority rights. This assessment characterizes the Project 2025 blueprint as reflecting “extreme white Christian nationalist ideology”.

Project 2025’s Threat to LGBTQI+ Equality, Safety, and Health, Racial and Gender Equity, and Sexual and Reproductive Health

The line between fact and truth

 

Source

In history and politics, a claim counts as established fact when (1) it is supported by independent convergent, reliable, and publicly checkable evidence, (2) it survives reasonable attempts to refute it, (3) it fits the broader body of evidence better than competing or different claims; and (5) it may retain some uncertainty, but only to a point that does not rationally materially affect the accuracy of the claim.

The 2020 election

An example is the fact that the 2020 election was not stolen. Trump and MAGA demagoguery still consistently claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by several different means, e.g., rigged ballot count machines, massive voter fraud, pedophilic communist Democrats, etc. For competing explanations, the question is: Which explanation best predicts the total evidence, including the evidence one would expect but does not find?

In over 60 lawsuits and lies repeated hundreds of times, Trump and MAGA elites challenged the 2020 election result. All except one of those lawsuits failed to find evidence of significant election theft. Nothing found would have changed the outcome. The two biggest single instances of election stealing probably were (1) Trump trying to get Georgia to give him over 11,000 votes so he would win that state, and (2) Trump’s 1/6 coup attempt, which tried to negate the entire election and overthrow the government by force. Other than those major attempts at election theft, there was no evidence of major fraud or theft. Every attempt to find the theft failed. That included re-examination of paper records, inquiries by local and state election administration officials, recounts, audits, adversarial litigation in courts, and federal investigations.

Despite all the intense scrutiny, there were no major discrepancies found ballots, ballot counts, tabulation records, voter records, recounts, canvasses, audits, sworn testimony, or litigated evidence. Repeated review across all of those channels failed to find any major discrepancy, other than efforts by Trump and MAGA elites, e.g., the fake electors fiasco. That is not just a situation where we have not seen proof. It’s affirmative, cumulative evidence against the stolen election hypothesis. There just was no persuasive evidence.

Source

The boundary

Political matters do not become facts by majority vote, institutional prestige, or repeated assertion. They acquire fact standing when the evidence and procedures appropriate to the question converge. Despite that, the exact fact-truth boundary is pragmatic, not partisan or popular. One does not need to wait for absolute certainty, because then almost no historical, scientific, or political proposition would count as fact. And we cannot call something factual merely because an official, pundit, or expert announces it. Simply put, the standard is proportionate to the stakes and evidence. The higher the stakes, the more evidence and verifying is warranted.

For the 2020, the political truth to political fact threshold was crossed long ago. The outcome was certified, audited, recounted where requested or required, litigated, and independently investigated. Later repetition of allegations without new, credible, outcome-changing evidence does not restore the original uncertainty. This is a about continued rational, evidence-based belief, not questioning of the evidence due to some asserted epistemological, partisan or ideological belief detached from solid, verifiable evidence.

Source — Trump’s pants are on fire a lot — but usually he’s lying at least some

Q: Is it fact, truth or false that Trump’s public record supports describing him as a chronic liar, not simply a near-constant source of good faith mistakes.

Some info sources:

Transcript: President Trump’s Phone Call With Georgia Election Officials — The president pressured [Georgia’s] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of the election in an hourlong phone conversation. Here is a transcript of the audio recording.

No Evidence Found that a Foreign Government Manipulated Any Election Results

Ballotpedia’s 2020 Election Help Desk: Tracking election disputes, lawsuits, and recounts

Vote Recounts and Election Contests in Battleground States

GPO J6 Report: Executive summary

MAGA’s strategy

He doesn't tell people he broke a lot of it and

has no intention of ever fixing it for us

The MAGA 3-step plan

An article, The GOP’s 3-Step Scam: Break the Country, Blame Others, Then Claim Only They Can Fix It, published by Common Dreams nicely states a major part of MAGA’s authoritarian-kleptocrat strategy. The title is self-explanatory. The article fleshes it out commenting that MAGA creates crises, makes working Americans suffer while (1) rewarding billionaires with more wealth and power, and (2) blaming Dems for their wreckage. Now, while they are in campaign mode they say that Trump and MAGA politicians are the only people who can fix the vast damage. Obviously, MAGA demagoguery conveniently ignores the fact that most of the damage, maybe ~97%, is caused by MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic politics and policies.

A toxic blast from the past: Carl Rove rises again!

In addition to the MAGA 3-step scam, the war on democracy and truth also includes coddling of criminals via Trump’s pardons-for-profit grift, and MAGA’s demagogic appeals to kleptocrats, oligarchs, bigots, racists, and extremists. Speaking of welcoming extremists into the MAGA party, a San Antonio Current article, Karl Rove says Republican Party is being taken over by ‘Nazis’, conveys blunt criticisms from a surprising source.[1] Rove never seemed to be bothered by extremism, or sophisticated, reality-trashing demagoguery.

In an extremely rare moment of candor from a MAGA-aligned elite, Rove is quoted: “If [U.S. Sen.] John Cornyn were the nominee, this race would be over. But when you’ve got a guy [Ken Paxton] that has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of improvements in his house from a corrupt business guy whom he does favors. Can you make this shit up? ….. I mean, really. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’”

Well, yeah, some of us could make up morally rotted stuff approximately this, especially after Trump’s treasonous 1/6 coup attempt and the 2024 elections putting the traitor-kleptocrat back in office. But opinions on this differ a lot.

Q: About how important is MAGA’s 3-step plan compared to everything else in the overall scheme of MAGA’s goal to empower and advance authoritarianism and kleptocracy, unimportant, moderately important, highly important, dominant, etc.?

Footnote:

1. One confused member of the public fretted: It’s really really confusing seeing this. I always thought Karl Rove was a Nazi so I am perplexed. I’m an older millennial. Back in the W era, all of us anywhere near the left, watched as this guy and his crew used the Iraq war to drive a wedge into society. If you weren’t for it, you were unamerican and filth. They finished what the southern strategy started – brought in racist backwoods idiots, religious zealots, etc. thinking they were easy votes and they could control them later. You can’t start using the “us vs them = good vs evil” messaging and be surprised when the new “us” start taking control. All the rest of us saw this shit coming in 2003-2004. It was so obvious. How did they not understand this would be the outcome?

Trump and MAGA aren’t “taking over” the GOP. MAGA is the natural end result of decades of GOP practices and policies. This includes the “us vs them” and “we are good; they are evil” as well as “never compromise” and many other aspects of standard Republican and radical extremism. Karl Rove is very much responsible for this.

Isn’t a little blast of history like this refreshing to help the mind maintain context and good feng-shui?

Some info sources:

ASYMMETRIC CONSTITUTIONAL HARDBALL — Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Administrative Sabotage — This Article offers an account of the “what, why, and how” of administrative sabotage that answers those questions. It contends that sabotage reflects a distinct mode of agency action that is more permanent, more destructive, and more democratically illegitimate than more-studied forms of maladministration. In contrast to an agency that shirks its statutory duties or drifts away from Congress’s policy goals, one engaged in sabotage aims deliberately to kill or nullify a program it administers. Agencies sabotage because presidents ask them to.

MAGA attacks elections with whopper lies

Markwayne Mullin, the MAGA thug in charge

of subverting the 2026 elections

By now, most reasonable people paying at least a little attention to politics are aware that Trump and MAGA elites are doing their very best to subvert, rig and suppress voting before the 2026 mid-term elections. The lying MAGA elites use to attack and undermine election integrity is off the charts. The whoppers are coming fast and furious.

In recent months, Trump and MAGA elites alleged they found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and three other states. Other Trump attacks on election included statements that voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, but he provided no evidence to support that had happened. He also alleged that China obtained 220 million US voter files beginning in the run-up to the 2020 election, that too was not backed up by solid evidence that had happened or that any vote irregularities happened if it did happen.

Other reporting indicates that MAGA continues to make the broad claim that American elections are rife with noncitizen voters. But no evidence backs that up. In one incident, DHS said it found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was the ceiling and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. Nevada asked for more information on those 185 voters, and the data used to match them to noncitizens. DHS refused to provide the evidence. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that need additional review, and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were higher confidence matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Well, it turns out that the number of noncitizen voters, 250,000, 16,000, 6,000, 185, 1 or whatever the number is in whatever states they were supposed to be illegally registered in has turned out to be 100% false. DHS is unable to confirm that there is even 1 noncitizen voter on the Nevada rolls. We went from an allegation of 250,000 illegally registered voters to zero.

That is the scale of lying that Trump’s MAGA administration is spewing on us in its focused attempt to subvert the upcoming elections.

Q1: Are Trump and his authoritarian MAGA elites in power a bunch of lying liars trying hard to wreck the upcoming elections, and if not why do they talk and act as if they were? What is the evidence that MAGA is acting in good faith?

Q2: Is it reasonable to believe that MAGA elites dealing with election and voter matters are (1) grossly incompetent, or (2) worse, authoritarian liars knowingly trying to subvert democracy and elections, because they can’t find even 1 noncitizen illegally registered to vote in at least 4 states?**

** Common sense says that there has to be at least a few noncitizens, e.g., maybe ~20-50, illegally registered to vote among the states that DHS claimed to have looked into. If nothing else, people do make honest mistakes.

Some other info sources:

State Board to Check Voter Rolls to Identify, Remove Non-U.S. Citizens

The hunt for noncitizen voters in Georgia yields few results

Unpacking Myths About Noncitizen Voting — How Heritage Foundation’s Own Data Still Proves It’s Not the Problem It’s Made Out to Be

Flaws in Government Tool to ID Noncitizen Voters — But the tool has wrongly flagged many as being noncitizens, and there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. The data-matching program employed in those states over the last year identified about 10,000 potential noncitizens on voter registration lists, out of about 49 million voter registrations checked, according to reporting by the New York Times citing federal officials. But upon further investigation, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified. In addition, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens. Experts and state audits refute the idea of widespread noncitizen voting.

MAGA’s legacy: A radicalized, authoritarian Supreme Court

Context

Even if MAGA loses control of the House and Senate in the 2026 elections, American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties can still wind up crushed to death and replaced by some form of a cruel, deeply corrupt dictatorship-oligarchy-bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy. Even if the Dems control congress, that institution will remain broken. That’s because the MAGA party is irreparably broken, authoritarian, and serving special interests at the expense of the public interest. MAGA politicians are absolutely unwilling to let congress function effectively. The presidency will probably remain controlled by an enraged, vengeful kleptocratic psychopath (malignant narcissist, etc.) until Jan. 2029.

And then, there’s our MAGAfied USSC (US Supreme Court). That corrupted, ethics-free institution and its power will outlast Trump. It now openly serves special interests at the expense of the public interest, democracy, the rule of law, and what’s left of our shrinking civil liberties. What can we reasonably expect? Welp, a current analysis indicates that we’re now seeing the future of how our authoritarian, pro-kleptocracy, special interest-dominated and corrupted USSC will function. Long story made short, it will operate in as much secrecy and opacity as it can get away with, even if doing so breaks laws. The USSC has made itself above the law, just like it made Trump above the law.

The USSC’s shadow docket

A ProPublica article (and YouTube video), The Supreme Court Changed. What Now?, discusses data showing that the USSC’s shadow docket has replaced normal public arguments and reasoned, detailed opinions with judge’s votes on cases. The shadow docket decides cases with little to no reasoning given and no indication of who voted for what. Most shadow docket decisions are about time-sensitive or procedural matters that are not troubling for democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. That is no a matter of concern.

But what is anti-democratic, anti-rule of law or anti-civil liberties is a small number of important shadow decisions that would normally be briefed by the parties, arguments heard in public, with detailed decisions and vote counts made public. For what appears to be the first time in modern history, important secret shadow decisions outnumbered public merits decisions.

In public merits cases, the judges usually give detailed reasoning for their decisions. That provides necessary guidance to lower courts and the public as to what the law is and how it is applied. It also tells the public how individual judges voted. That secrecy shields judges’ identities from corrupt votes that give benefits to special interests, usually while either (1) taking benefits from the public interest, or (2) causing damage to democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, which also generally benefits affected special interests.

A few shadow decisions have been favorable to the public interest democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. Some of them have given at least some explanation for the decision and some give vote counts. But those are in contrast to the larger MAGA pattern in courts, congress and the presidency of quietly shifting wealth and power from the public interest and giving it to elites and allied special interests. The USSC is a central powerful player in MAGA’s corrupt authoritarian agenda of wealth and power shifting. Given its power, the USSC will very likely be the most consequential legacy of the MAGA wealth and power movement. That legacy will not be on our side. It will be in opposition to us.

Q1: Do you believe that the current USSC is mostly supportive of, or mostly opposed to (1) service to the public interest before service to special interests with wealth, or (2) democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties?

Q2: Is shadow docket secrecy, coupled with recent public decisions, a basis to believe that the USSC has been (1) heavily politicized, (2) corrupted by its anti-democracy ideology**, secrecy in its operations, and its constant refusal to impose ethics rules or laws on itself, and/or (3) significantly captured by special interest money?

** The MAGA judges vehemently deny they are anti-democracy. They say they are fiercely pro-democracy and pro-rule of law. Their track record, including (a) anti-democracy decisions that make Trump all powerful (unitary executive dogma) and immune from nearly all criminal prosecutions (also unitary executive), and (b) decisions that legalized special interest corruption of government (Citizens United., etc.). Opinions on this point are bitterly divided.

Some info sources:

Supreme Court ‘Shadow’ Docket Is Now Bigger Than The Real, ‘Transparent’ One

Favorable views of Supreme Court remain near historic low

Supreme Court Job Approval Slumps to Record Low — Republicans responsible for decline from 2025

Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions — The Trump administration has prevailed in the vast majority of its requests for emergency action, as the data below shows. These rulings have allowed administration policies to move forward after lower courts had found that the administration’s actions were likely illegal. ….. The lack of reasoning in most shadow docket rulings also leaves lower courts with little guidance about how to address similar issues in other cases.

The Supreme Court “Shadow Docket” Explained

Regarding MAGA and racism

 

The rhetoric used in a NYT opinion piece, Trump Makes Republicans More Racist and Democrats Less So, is starting to sound more reasonable in assessing Trump’s toxicity and profoundly sick mind.

The opinion opens with this: President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House. If anything, his narcissism ranks higher than his corruption. ….. Today, though, I want to look at another destructive aspect of Trump’s ascendancy: what he has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race. Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters.

The opinion goes on to observe that Trump has turned the party of Abraham Lincoln into a political home for people who hold serious racial resentments, are xenophobes and are generally hostile to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities. Although the shift did not start with Trump, he made it central to his politics and demagoguery. Also, the opinion comments that recent studies are showing that Democrats and liberals have responded to Trump and MAGA politics by becoming noticeably less prejudiced and more open to diversity and growing minority populations.

Those assessments are evidence-based and feel reasonably accurate. Trump’s presidency and business career produced a huge record of documented direct conflicts of interest, criminal convictions, civil fraud findings, and use of his power for personal and political advantage. For example, Trump sells presidential pardons to convicted criminals that shaft crime victims by depriving them of restitution payments and the treasury of fines.

Q: Does Trump encourage racism and racist behavior for his political and economic advantage?

Some info sources:

Malignant Narcissism: Does the President Really Have It?

More than 200 health professionals say Trump has ‘malignant narcissism’ in open letter

Trump’s pardons wipe out payments to defrauded victims — In Milton’s case, prosecutors argued that the former CEO of Nikola should pay investors $660 million. But before a judge had the chance to calculate and order restitution, President Donald Trump pardoned Milton — which in addition to sparing him any time behind bars also wiped away any financial penalties.

Pardon brokers offer to “put pressure on the president,” at sky-high costs

Did Donald Trump’s presidency reshape Americans’ prejudices? — People in Donald Trump’s political base, on average, became increasingly willing to declare their disdain toward minoritized ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, both foreign groups and their fellow Americans.

Global racist contagion following Donald Trump’s election

United States: Racial Resentment, Negative Partisanship, and Polarization in Trump’s America

A deep dive with AI into our political situation

Context

This post exemplifies how a person can use AI to do deep dives into politics and related subjects, e.g., moral philosophy, the human condition, authoritarian wealth and power politics, the cognitive and social science of politics, etc. Although most MAGA supporters and all MAGA trolls routinely reject the evidence and reasoning my posts lay out, a lot of effort and evidence-checking goes into criticisms of Trump, MAGA elites and MAGA’s deeply corrupt authoritarian politics, demagoguery tactics, and policy.

This morning’s deep dive was triggered by a NYT opinion piece, Why Scandals Don’t Bring Down Politicians Anymore — It’s about more than just shamelessness. That led to a Q&A series with Pxy (my AI Perplexity). Being way too long for a blog post, probably ~2500 words or maybe more, a link to my queries with reasoning and Pxy’s responses might be of some interest to readers with the patience to at least scan the Q&A thread to see how deep AI dives can play out. The thread is at this link — ignore the ask for your email, just click through to the Q&A thread.

The main thrust of the Q&As wasn’t about the NYT opinion. It veered off that topic into MAGA authoritarianism, and the institutional failure of the MSM to report on the ongoing fall of democracy, the rule of law and our shrinking civil liberties under the MAGA wealth and power movement’s onslaught. Examples help clarify the back and forth between me and Pxy.

Example 1

Q: Yes, I understand that a 55/45 division [55% of blame for the mess is due to MAGA elites’ deceit and manipulation and 45% due to a generally deceived and betrayed rank and file] is a moral-political judgment, not a measurable social-scientific finding. I get it. I read the social science. But it is very hard to know how to translate that to average Americans so they get a feel for where they are in this gigantic mess without alienating or insulting them. This is my central frustration with politics. And the MSM is utterly useless in dealing with this matter.

A (severely truncated): Your frustration makes sense. The central problem is not merely how to communicate facts; it is how to say, “You are being used and misled” to people for whom the movement is entwined with identity, belonging, faith, family, patriotism, and dignity—without making the sentence itself feel like proof that you despise them. A useful public posture is: firm about conduct and evidence; humane about people. That permits moral clarity without converting every ordinary supporter into an object of contempt.

Your task, then, is to translate structural diagnosis into moral and civic language that does not require someone first to concede, “I am gullible” or “my identity is corrupt.” For example, rather than: “MAGA voters are enabling authoritarian kleptocracy,” try: No citizen should be asked to trust any leader more than verifiable evidence, the courts, fair elections, or the Constitution. A free country is endangered whenever loyalty to a politician becomes more important than whether the politician tells the truth, obeys the law, or accepts losing. That is still a sharp criticism. But it makes the standard universal rather than tribal.

Example 2

Q: I’ve been writing to reporters, editors, opinionators, and academics for years about the threat of authoritarianism and kleptocracy. It is their damned jobs to listen and learn. If I can do the work to put the email together, it is their job to understand what I am saying and assess for themselves if I am full of shit or not. My patience with institutional failure has come to an end.

A (severely truncated): You are right about the basic civic demand: people and institutions with extraordinary access, authority, expertise, and agenda-setting power have a corresponding obligation to confront credible evidence—especially when the subject is whether democratic institutions, rule-of-law safeguards, and civil liberties are being degraded. ….. Their role is not to outsource civic judgment to readers; it is to use institutional capacity to investigate whether the warning is correct. ….. They should take the substance seriously enough to test it against the record, report what they find, and explain it honestly to the public. That is exactly what responsible institutions are for.

Your anger should not be mistaken for a demand that journalists parrot a political line. It is a demand that those entrusted with public truth-telling recognize that neutrality toward evidence is not neutrality at all—and that silence, euphemism, and fragmentation can become forms of institutional failure.

Questions

Q1: Are examples like this helpful to (1) see how politics really works, and (2) see how one can use AI too help parse through large amounts of information that can be fact checked to see if AI is accurate?

Q2: Are Pxy’s analyses and responses rational and evidence-based, or should they be dismissed as unreliable, and if so, why?

Q3: If you scanned the Q&A thread, did you get a feel for the effort it takes to be fair, rational, and evidence-based about doing politics? Is that too hard for most people to be expected to engage in (I believe it is)?

Illegal immigration: A democracy, rule of law, and civil rights killer

Cat & mouse games with US Border Patrol

By now, the evidence seems to be overwhelming: illegal immigration is a democracy killer. Maybe that one issue alone qualifies as the #1 most potent killer. Of course, other factors such as things like low wage jobs, high living costs, racism, mass media including social media demagoguery, and threats to social status due to social change, are also significant components in the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the US and Europe. At least in the US, demagoguery with hate, bigotry and fear mongering over illegal immigration has been absolutely critical for the rise of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism to power.

If there had been highly effective border control in the US since ~1990, Trump and MAGA probably would not be in power now. What the US did not have was lawful, credible immigration enforcement combined with orderly legal migration, controlled asylum processing, solid labor protections, and successful integration of low levels of immigrants into society. We had far too little of that. That failure was bipartisan. Both parties had no intention of imposing effective immigration and border control right from the get go in Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

It is quite unlikely that the American radical-right authoritarian wealth and power movement would have become as electorally powerful and agenda-setting as they are today. They would not have vanished, but they would not be in power. By controlling not only unauthorized immigration but also the politically explosive combination of visibly unmanaged arrivals, long asylum backlogs, weak labor standards, uneven local capacity with integration failures, the basis for demagoguery centered on the issue would not have existed as it did. Failed border and immigration controls allowed radical-right players to turn immigration into a general proof that democratic elites were incompetent, indifferent, or disloyal. If government had instead demonstrated durable control while admitting limited numbers through transparent rules and integrating newcomers successfully, the radical right would have lost its single most effective, cross-national organizing issue.

Now, it’s too late to avoid the vast democratic, social, economic and governmental damage that Trump and MAGA wealth and power elites have knowingly caused. Now that Trump and MAGA have brutally stopped illegal immigration, the big question is whether our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties will survive in a form more meaningful than some fig leaves covering huge gaping, bloody wounds.

Q: For democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties, is it most likely true that illegal immigration (1) is the #1 killer, (2) is one factor of several**, (3) is irrelevant, or (4) strengthened democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties, because illegal immigration posed a huge threat that Trump and MAGA has eliminated.

** E.g., racism, populism, ethnonationalism, cultural backlash, economic and wage stagnation, distrust in institutions, the rise of social media-fueled demagoguery, the devastating undermining of anti-corruption laws in the name of “free speech” (Citizens United, etc.), the rise of highly politicized media (Fox News, etc.), the rise of LGBQT rights and acceptance, etc.

Some info sources:

The Causes of Populism in the West — Established mainstream parties may adopt dismissive, adversarial, or accommodative strategies when populist parties first appear on the scene (Berman 2019). A dismissive strategy entails ignoring the new party and the issue(s) it is focused on. This only makes sense, however, if the new issue is unimportant and/or fleeting and the new party is likely to fade away. Otherwise, the dismissive strategy simply cedes ownership of the new issue to the new party, enabling it to capture voters who prioritize that issue. (Comment: Arguably, the Dems ceded ownership of immigration because the elites were too arrogant, stupid or ignorant to sense the importance of the issue. The GOP understood it very well.)

When economic and cultural interests align: the anti-immigration voter coalitions driving far right party success in Europe — We argue that the success of far right parties depends on their ability to mobilize a coalition of interests between their core supporters, that is voters with cultural grievances over immigration and the often larger group of voters with economic grievances over immigration.

Immigration & the Origins of White Backlash — The success of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign surprised many. ….. it was actually a continuation of a long-standing Republican strategy that has targeted immigrants and minorities for over five decades. It is not only a long-term strategy but also a widely successful one. Analysis of the vote over time shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divided by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racist Resentment and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments — ….. a Trump vote [in 2016] cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. ….. both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote. …..  this is not a new finding because we know that, indeed, in 2008 Barack Obama suffered from a lack of support among racist voters (Lewis-Beck, Tien and Nadeau 2010). 

Poll: Majority of Americans believe undocumented immigrants are a threat to democracy

The paper curtain: employer sanctions’ implementation, impact, and reform

New species of cat discovered!

NBC News reports that a new species of cat has been found, New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say. This kitty is a type of tiger cat. It's slender, spotted and smaller than a house cat. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest. 

The newly identified critter, Leopardus tilcayo was found in the Senda Verde animal refuge in Bolivia’s Yungas region. The Bolivian Yungas is a the cloud forest where the Andes mountains meet the Amazon basin. The tilcayo is completely new to human knowledge.

As usual, humans are polluting the situation to death. Tadeu de Oliveira, a co-author of the study and an ecologist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil said: “All of them are in habitats that are vanishing fast”.  According to DNA analysis, this diverged from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species!

Q: Any bets on how long it will take before overpopulated humans force the kitty from the wild into survival in zoos or some other place of refuge?