Climate change update: Things may be worse than experts believed

Clearing trees in a peatland forest for a palm oil plantation in the 

Central Kalimantan province on Indonesia’s Borneo island in 2014

The Washington Post writes on new research has has identified what has been a large but overlooked source of carbon dioxide emissions due to human activities. This one is unsettling. WaPo writes:

A new study finds a large, previously unknown contribution to climate change through human conversion of peatlands for agriculture.

Long before the era of fossil fuels, humans may have triggered a massive but mysterious “carbon bomb” lurking beneath the Earth’s surface, a new scientific study suggests. If the finding is correct, it would mean that we have been neglecting a major human contribution to global warming — one whose legacy continues.

The researchers, from France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and several other institutions across the globe, suggest that beginning well before the industrial era, the mass conversion of carbon-rich peatlands for agriculture could have added over 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of more than seven years of current emissions from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

The new finding of an “ignored historical land use emission” suggests that even now, we lack a complete understanding of how the Earth’s land surfaces are driving and modulating the warming of the planet. That’s troubling, since the use of land to trap and contain greenhouse gases is set to play a critical role in the Paris climate agreement.

WaPo points out that peatlands are a type of wetland where dead plant matter only partly decay due to wet conditions. Normally peat slowly pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. But if it is disturbed decay resumes and carbon dioxide is released into the air. Draining peatland and using it for agriculture restarts the decay process. An expert estimates that CO2 from peatland amounts to ~10% of the carbon that humans have emitted from burning fossil fuels since 1850 based on the current study.

The new study is incomplete because it only considers Northern Hemisphere peatlands from the year 850 until now. And, it is possible that CO2 emissions could have been lower if humans had turned to draining peat only after once all other good land was in use. Further research and analysis is needed to better estimate how big this effect has been. 

Question: Are humans playing Russian Roulette by not taking climate change seriously, e.g., when special interests block or minimize climate change regulations, usually to protect profits.[1]

Footnote: 

1. A couple of days ago, the New York Times wrote this:

LONDON — During a contentious meeting over proposed climate regulations last fall, a Saudi diplomat to the obscure but powerful International Maritime Organization switched on his microphone to make an angry complaint: One of his colleagues was revealing the proceedings on Twitter as they happened.

It was a breach of the secrecy at the heart of the I.M.O., a clubby United Nations agency on the banks of the Thames that regulates international shipping and is charged with reducing emissions in an industry that burns an oil so thick it might otherwise be turned into asphalt. Shipping produces as much carbon dioxide as all of America’s coal plants combined.

Internal documents, recordings and dozens of interviews reveal what has gone on for years behind closed doors: The organization has repeatedly delayed and watered down climate regulations, even as emissions from commercial shipping continue to rise, a trend that threatens to undermine the goals of the 2016 Paris climate accord.

One reason for the lack of progress is that the I.M.O. is a regulatory body that is run in concert with the industry it regulates. Shipbuilders, oil companies, miners, chemical manufacturers and others with huge financial stakes in commercial shipping are among the delegates appointed by many member nations. They sometimes even speak on behalf of governments, knowing that public records are sparse, and that even when the organization allows journalists into its meetings, it typically prohibits them from quoting people by name.

Obviously, huge polluters like Saudi Arabia, Exxon-Mobile, etc., have no significant concerns about keeping the fossil fuels burning and the carbon spewing into the air. For the polluters, profit and power talks and risk of civilization collapse walks. After all, the rich believe they will always be able to take care of themselves. They could not care less about the rest of us.

Chapter Review: The Blitz

Chapter 7 of Katherine Stewart's 2019 book , The Power worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, is entitled The Blitz: Turning States into Laboratories of Theocracy. This chapter focuses on the propaganda and legislative tactics that Christian nationalist (CN) leaders have successfully employed in their relentless quest to merge secular government with a CN authoritarian vision of Christianity. Their ultimate goal is to convert federal, state and local governments from secular institutions that work on ideals of equality and tolerance for all Americans. CN vehemently opposes that secularism and any other secular ideology. 

Instead, the CN political goal is to control governments at all levels who will rule according to a particular CN biblical worldview. That worldview privileges the true believers above all others. That authoritarian-fascist theocratic ideology gives government freedom to openly discriminate against the unworthy in the name of “religious freedom.” 

Those not worthy of equal dignity and treatment include all women, the entire LGBQT community, and all non-CN Christians, i.e., everyone who does not faithfully adhere to CN dogma. CN dogma is rigidly patriarchal. Women must submit to their men and they cannot be preachers. Children, including defiant infants fresh from the womb, must be raised to fear God and they must be subject to corporal punishment when they are disobedient. Failure to beat naughty children is failure to be a good Christian.

Three phases of Project Blitz - looks like CN is mostly doing phase III now:

democracy and the rule of law are on the verge of falling

The Blitz Project is the social and political war plan that the CN movement has been following and refining for years. The propaganda is sophisticated and carefully crafted to split conservative religious from other people in society using shrewd, subtle messaging that has been quite effective.

Stewart describes the three phases of Project Blitz like this: 

The first consists of symbolic or ceremonial gestures that will receive some “some opposition but not hard to beat,” according to David Barton.[1] Some like the Minnesota bill, focus on placing mottos in schools. Others aim to place “In God We Trust” placards and stickers in statehouses, federal buildings, libraries, post offices -- even even police cars. 

But the point of phase I is just to clear the path for phase II, which consists of bills that propose to inject Christian nationalist ideas more directly into schools and other government entities. Some phase II bills are intended to promote the teaching and celebration of Christianity in public schools, including support for sectarian “Bible literacy” curricula, particularly those that serve hefty servings of Christian nationalist history and the declaration of a “Christian Heritage Week.” They are a means of spreading the message, among children especially, that conservative Christians are the real Americans and everybody else is here by invitation only. According to Barton, these laws “will also be pretty easy to pass,” but the opposition is “going to be a lot more virulent and mean in their attacks.” The point of phase II, of course, is to make room for phase III, which legalizes discrimination against those whose actions (or very being) offends the sensibilities of conservative Christians.

Subtle but powerful propaganda

CN leadership has though long and hard about how to trap the religious conservative mind in the authoritarian CN vision of America. Their thinking is deep and subtle but effective. Stewart writes:

The documentation of Project Blitz[2] makes clear that a principal purpose of the “In God We Trust” legislation is to force the opposition to take unpopular stands on seemingly symbolic issues. In fact, the authors specifically seemed to envision using the bills to catch opponent lawmakers on video saying things that can later be used against them.

The documentation of the Blitz is particularly valuable in that it shows that Christian nationalists have self-consciously embraced a strategy of advancing their goals through deception and indirection. For many years critics have warned that concessions to the Christian right on “symbolic” issues -- erecting religious monuments and emblazoning religious mottos on state property, for example -- would set the nation on a course leading to the establishment of religion. We now knw that the critics were right .... 

 Like the sponsors of Americans United for Life [anti-abortion] legislation initiatives, the leaders behind Project Blitz are playing a long and ambitious game. They have invested their deepest hopes in the third and most contentious category of model legislation. Recognizing that the initiatives will be unpopular, Project Blitz advises its troops against framing them in religious terms, recommending instead that they “begin a public discourse on these important topics grounded in the language that the opponents themselves use.” 

The public perceptions of these bills, often abetted by Christian nationalists themselves, is that they they concern only the religious feeling of homophobic cake bakers and florists. 

 

Stewart cites some examples on the power of the propaganda. In one example, in opposing the “In God We Trust” motto in public schools, one political opponent wondered if conservative Christians would be OK if “God” was replaced with “Allah.” Another politician opposed to putting the motto in public schools commented that it was offensive. Stewart writes: “The last comment in particular was like gold for the right-wing media sphere. The implication that “God” was “offensive,” or that Islam might claim equal rights before the law with Christianity, was more than worth its weight in conservative rage. This seemingly minor incident led to massive publicity on right wing outlets like Fox News. CN propagandists had a field day in making democrats and other opponents look like anti-Christian zealots, which was not the case. But that point was lost in the thunder and fury of right toxic wing propaganda.

The important thing to keep in mind about this is simple. Under secular constitutional government, equal treatment and equal respect, it does not matter one iota if the “In X We Trust” motto recites God, Allah, Satan or Reason and Empathy as X. But under bigoted CN ideology, Allah, Satan, Reason and Empathy and everything else are all unacceptable. Only the “Christian God” can be mentioned. That is unconstitutional theocracy, pure and simple.

Protect the gravy train at all costs

The CN movement is deeply concerned that its bigoted, pro-discrimination against everyone except CN loyalists will cost it the precious tax breaks it heavily relies on for financial support. Stewart writes:

Apart from consolidating the privileges of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs on others, the point of bills like HB 1523 [now the law in Mississippi] has a lot to do with money. A helpful clue can be found in a letter that the American Family Association sent out in support of the Mississippi bill before it was passed. The bill, said the AFA, is critical because it protects the AFA and groups like it  from “government threat of losing their tax exempt status.”

There is a revealing irony in that statement. Tax exemption is a kind of gift from the government: a privilege. It is an indirect way of funneling money from taxpayers to groups that engage in certain kinds of activities (like charity work or nonprofit education) and not other kinds of activities (like business and political activism). In articulating their concern for potential threats to their government subsidy, the AFA implicitly recognizes that if our society decides that it no longer wishes to to subsidize groups that preach homophobia and promote discrimination, the justification for continued subsidies and privileges from government will evaporate.

The people who drafted the bill on behalf of the Mississippi legislators get it. This is why the very first “discriminatory action” by the government that the law prohibits is “to alter in any way the tax treatment” of any person or organization that abides by the newly sanctioned religious beliefs.

Thus, states are trying to make it illegal for society, through the federal government acting on behalf of the will of the people, to revoke the tax breaks that are so valuable to CN welfare queens. Although the CN hates government and wants to drown it in Christianity, it wants to keep its vast welfare-industrial complex alive and fat with precious tax dollars.

Stewart concludes the chapter asserting that the Project Blitz agenda is not really about genuine religious freedom. Instead, it is a declaration of a war that is squarely aimed at retaining tax subsidy funding and empowering conservative Christians to discriminate against people who do not share their beliefs. To CN, “religious freedom” means privileges only for those who adhere to its vision of Christianity.

Questions: Probably most conservatives (~97% ?) would reject Stewart’s characterization of CN and Project Blitz. Is Stewart’s characterization credible, and if not why not, and if so, why? Does any politically active religious organization deserve tax credits, CN, anti-CN or otherwise, e.g., anti-abortion or pro-abortion? Are states under significant CN influence, i.e., most or all Republican-dominated states, mostly laboratories of theocracy, mostly laboratories of anti-democratic autocracy and corruption, some combination of both, and/or something else to a non-trivial degree?

Footnotes: 

1. David Barton is one of four key CN leaders. Barton founded Wallbuilders ProFamily Legislative Network and is the president of the National Legal Foundation, both of which are influential in the CN political movement. Barton is also on the steering committee of Project Blitz and one of the two CN leaders (along with lea Carawan) who lead in laying out Project Blitz strategy for Republican politicians and leaders.

2. Project Blitz documentation was uncovered by a journalist. It came as a major revelation in understanding CN as a powerful, sophisticated political movement. What appeared to be an uncoordinated and scattershot phenomenon was in fact a carefully orchestrated political assault on secular government and the legislative process. Over time the CN expanded and refined the document to increase the effectiveness of the the CN effort to establish a privileged CN version of Christianity as the official American religion. The 2018-2019 edition of the project is entitled Report and Analysis on Religious Freedom Measures Impacting Prayer and Faith in America, a copy of which is here. 

I intend to do a separate blog post on 2018-2019 document and maybe some other CN-related material. The CN war plan is too complex to be included in this chapter review, which is more than complex enough by itself.

An escape from Afghanistan

A New York Times article reports on how one of Afghanistan's best pilots escaped from both the Taliban and the Afghan military. It hints at how broken Afghanistan is and how far America has fallen in all regards. The helicopter pilot, Maj. Naiem Asadi, is a member of the Afghan air force and considered one of its most effective Taliban killers. He, his wife and 5 year old daughter have been in hiding for 7 months.

Asadi's wife and daughter at the Kabul airport

The threat from the Taliban is clear. The Taliban threatened Asadi's life stating that “The U.S. cannot protect you.” They posted his photo online with the instructions “Find him and kill him.” The Taliban also wrote and phoned his father, ordering him to surrender his son or face death. So, there's that aspect of Taliban justice for at least some Afghan people.

The other threat to Asadi comes from the Afghan military who is angry at him for being in hiding, asserting that he is deserting his post during a time of war. They want him to stay at his post where he and his family would be subject to Taliban justice. To add some spice to the story, the Afghan military discriminated against Asadi because he is a member of the Hazara ethnic minority. The military there is angry because of fear that if the country’s top attack helicopter pilot was allowed to leave his post, other threatened Afghan pilots and soldiers might also want to get out.  

The Asadis getting a COVID test before their flight to the US

The NYT writes:

Many pilots and soldiers have been threatened by the Taliban. Most can only dream of relocating their families to the United States.

Major Asadi conceded that his actions could undermine air force morale, but he said he acted to protect himself and his family. He said he ignored orders to report for duty because he feared he would be detained for desertion.

But he said he had fulfilled his 10-year commitment to the military last year — serving eight of those years as a pilot, logging 3,000 flight hours and countless combat missions. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said.  

“It’s a pity. He did this to escape from serving his homeland,” said Lt. Col. Jalaluddin Ibrahimkhel, an Afghan Air Force spokesman, adding that others were now more likely to “make excuses and escape.”  

The Defense Department “would have been in the position of abetting the desertion of a serving Afghan officer as Major Asadi had not informed his chain of command of his parole application,” pentagon spokesman Major Robert Lodewick said.

Yes, it is a pity that an officer who served his country, who cannot protect him, and fulfilled his military obligation did not want to stay to be slaughtered by the Taliban at their leisure. 

Then, there's the US government. What a steaming pile of . . . . whatever. 

In his application to come to the US for safety, assistant secretary of defense Ezra Cohen wrote for Major Asadi: “Applicant and his family are in imminent danger of being killed by the Taliban.” In support of Asdi's application for entry into the US, US Air Force Capt. Robert V. Yost stated that in July of 2020 Major Asadi flew one of two armed helicopters to protect the crash site of a downed U.S. Air Force pilot in northern Afghanistan until he was rescued. Yost wrote “This is one of countless events where Major Asadi’s actions have protected and saved lives.”

The US military rejected Asadi's application to come to the US. The excuse was that Asadi’s application “was found to have not been fully vetted” by the Department of Defense. The application was fully vetted, but there's no law against lying by the all mighty US military. The US military confiscated the Asadi's passports. So, there's that aspect of how the US operates, or depending on how one sees it, fails to operate, or betrays, or whatever.

Kimberly Motley and the Major working on immigration papers in Kabul

Then, North Carolina-based human rights attorney Kimberley Motley was asked to intervene. She secured a humanitarian parole for the Asadis’ last month. That came without endorsement or support from the Pentagon. Last Tuesday she flew with the family from Kabul to Dubai to New York. Major Asadi’s American sponsor has asked for anonymity to safeguard the location of the Asadis. He or she has offered housing in New Jersey and paid travel expenses. Former and active U.S. military advisers who worked with Major Asadi pledge to support the family. The Asadi family will be able to apply for asylum. Whether they will get it or not is an open question. The NYT writes about the family's arrival in the US:

The family walked outside onto American soil, weary but elated. “I’m really not so tired because of all the new and beautiful things we’ll be doing now,” Major Asadi said.

During the long plane ride, he released emotions that had been welling inside him for months. In neatly printed English, he wrote a two-page letter of gratitude to everyone in the United States and Afghanistan who had helped them.

He wrote: “Your ambition is like a roaring sea and running water and your kindness is as high as the sky and the vastness of the earth.”

The Major is grateful to the US. Will the US be grateful and kind in return?

Questions: The "he said, they said" disagreement here is whether Asadi is a deserter or not. He says no, they say yes. What should the US do, send Asadi back or grant asylum? Lying by the Pentagon and the rest of the US government is nothing new, so how much credibility should they get? Does it matter that he deserted, assuming he did? Does it matter that the Taliban threatened his family (father) and the Afghan military and police cannot protect people from Taliban assassinations? 

Between flights at the Dubai airport

Godwin's Laws

 Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler becomes more likely.^[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

It’s time to stop making comparisons to Hitler

The deadliest, most destructive war in human history should not become a metaphor

Godwin’s Law, an internet adage coined by American attorney Mike Godwin in 1990, states that in any online discussion, sooner or later, someone will compare a person or a trend to Adolf Hitler, fascism or Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Sadly, this trend seems to be happening faster and more frequently than in the past.

I’ve heard and seen the Nazi comparisons made about COVID-19 restrictions, public safety policies and more. World leaders, elected officials and supporters of certain political parties have too often been compared to Hitler or his supporters, even when their ideologies are far from that of Nazi Germany.

https://www.trailtimes.ca/opinion/its-time-to-stop-making-comparisons-to-hitler/

Snowy's question: Is it ever appropriate to refer to another, or a political group, or a group of people, or someone you just disagree with - as Nazis?

Granted neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Qanon and the like, maybe even some Trumpers might invite that comparison, but folks on the internet tend to use that term too freely, and is that in a way being disrespectful to those who actually did suffer under Nazism?

Just curious.

Chapter Review: Theocracy from the Bench

Chapter 10 of Katherine Stewart's 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, focuses on the long, carefully coordinated, and intense legal battle that Christian Nationalism (CN) has been waging in an increasingly successful effort to fuse the federal, state and local governments with a CN of version Christianity. Chapter 10, entitled Theocracy from the Bench or How to Establish Religion in the Name of “Religious Liberty,” lays out how successful the CN legal battle has been. From what I can tell, most of the public knows little to nothing about what has happened, how important it is, and what will happen to this country if the CN battle continues to succeed. 

In the CN legal war on secular governance in the name of Christian privilege, money is no constraint. There is more than plenty of it to wage this war. Hundreds of millions have been spent in this quiet battle that is being fought mostly below the public’s radar. Again, the free press and professional MSM generally are failing the American people and democracy. Maybe they have been subverted by Christianity.

This post is long and complex. It is set out in three sections in my to try to make this easier. Examples of what has happened are easiest to grasp intuitively, so that is first. Next easiest to grasp is about the success that CN has had in infiltrating the all-powerful federal courts. That is second. Last and most complicated is the legal strategy that CN attorneys have successfully convinced the US Supreme Court to adopt.

Sections 1 and 2 alone go a long way to explaining the whole shebang. Section 3 is for wonks or people with interest and some time on their hands.

Section 1: Examples

Three examples help clarify what has happened in the CN legal offensive against secular government. They hint at what is going to happen if CN gets its way with us. 

Giving more tax money to greedy churches and the collapse of opposition: After the court opened to door to public schools, the CN legal behemoth sensed another opening that they tested by filing a lawsuit during the flooding of Houston by hurricane Harvey on September 4, 2017. The lawsuit argued that FEMA's policy of excluding houses of worship from disaster relief money was unconstitutional. Two of the three churches provided no essential services to the community during or after the flood. The CN legal argument was that FEMA must provide money for church repairs the flood caused because (i) the Churches did not want to buy disaster insurance, and (ii) FEMA funds were necessitated as a matter religious liberty and non-discrimination. The fact that religious operations already were heavily subsidized by tax breaks apparently was of no relevance. 

At this point, political opposition to this Christian raid on the US treasury seems to have collapsed. Apparently FEMA just caved in without a court decision. Stewart writes: “.... with Trump in office and the Republican Party controlled by the far right, the announcement by FEMA that houses of worship could now claim this special government benefit, too, was met with a collective shrug. The lines of separation between church and state were so blurred, the Establishment Clause so degraded, and the list of outrages over Trump-and-allies-related  instances of graft and corruption so long and overwhelming that few people could muster the ability to notice or care.”

Church planting in public schools and even more big taxpayer gifts to Christianity: CN leaders realize that a key religious liberty gravy train is the public school system. Stewarts points out that Christianity can get a “cheap ride on public school facilities. .... churches can claim access to public facilities for their [religious] services, typically with below-market-rate facility use fees on the grounds of ‘religious liberty.’” What CN is doing is literally planting Christian churches in hundreds of public schools in America, while mostly ignorant state and local taxpayers are heavily subsidizing the onslaught. 

Stewart points out the vast propaganda and financial value of churches in schools: “.... establishing churches in public schools has the added advantage of investing their activity with a high degree of public trust, especially among children and school families. Over the past two decades, vast networks of ‘church planting’ organizations have sprung up and rolled across the nation, effectively using taxpayer largesse to establish religion in the name of ‘religious liberty.’ Church planting is now happening on an industrial scale, and it often takes place in neighborhoods that least expect it, with little or no input from residents who are, in the end, subsidizing the process.”

A cofounder of one of the large networks, Act 29, with about 700 school-churches worldwide is a preacher named Mark Driscoll. Driscoll is, at most, a colorful person. He disparages “sensitive emasculated men” and claims that Americans “live in a pussified nation.” He blamed a homosexual affair between a major gay bashing evangelical Christian preacher and a male prostitute as the preacher’s wife’s fault blaming her for “letting herself go.” This is the kind of moral example that some or most of the CN leadership has embraced.

Radical right small government policy invites Christianity into public school operations: CN infiltration and subversion of public schools is a complicated and broad attack plan. Stewart points out that anti-government conservatives have cut back on state funding for schools. Strangling schools for money has led to about 59% of American public school teachers to take on additional paid work just to survive. 

The state of Florida is an example. Between 2007 and 2015 Orange County FL cut spending by about $105 million or about $11.6 million/year on average. In response, the superintendent of schools reached out to religion with the following explicitly no-sectarian appeal: “Our missions to better dovetail when churches, synagogues and mosques and all faith-based organizations harness the power of volunteerism and servant leadership to benefit the region’s youth.” The response from Orange County “faith partners” was almost exclusively evangelical Christian. The appeal was to plant religious groups (churches, etc.) in the school on Sundays in return for some cash.

On the other hand, at least some of the Christian “faith partners” were looking for a high return on their investment. The website of Venue Church in Apopka, FL commented: “If you are looking to maximize missional money, the school campus is where you will yield the highest return on your investment.” A CN activist in Georgia commented that church volunteers in public schools was a way to open doors to the vast flow of money into public education, “Once [the door to public schools] is open, it is wide open.”

Stewart argues that the CN goal of building its network of quasi-state-funded churches is not just access to cheap or free facilities. They want to get their hands on more of the hundreds of billions the US spends annually on public education, about $668 billion on primary and secondary education in the 2014-2105 fiscal school year. Stewart comments: “Christian nationalists understand that if they can capture a portion of that figure in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end.” The flow of money here was envisioned for publicly funded religious schools and school vouchers. 

A major step to achieving the CN goal for publicly funded religious schools was achieved in the June 2017 Supreme Court decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. There, the CN Supreme Court majority held that Missouri’s policy violated the rights of Trinity Lutheran under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by denying the Church an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status. Trinity Lutheran, located in MO, was not eligible for state money for church school repairs. The Supreme Court said that the state was unconstitutionally discriminating against the religious character of the school.

Section 2: Context and stacking the courts

In many lawsuits over many years, the successful CN legal strategy has mostly eroded the separation of church and state. The CN strategy is now at a point that religious organizations are on the verge of tapping into vast flows of taxpayer money for direct support of Christian churches and business operations. Other religions are excluded. Much of the political opposition has faded and apparently given up after having been worn down. 

Federal courts, especially the US Supreme Court, have adopted the irrational reasoning that CN legal experts have dreamed up to force governments into supporting Christianity with tax dollars. The end result has been a high return of tax dollars on Christianity’s investment in itself, and the ROI is only going to increase over time. With that flow of tax dollars comes political power to grab even more money and more power that added future revenue will bring.

The CN effort understands that it cannot get what it wants, power, wealth and exclusive privileges for Christianity, by winning elections. That appears to be why the modern fascist GOP (FGOP) doesn't pay much attention to contrary public opinion except to use dark free speech (lies, deceit, partisan motivated reasoning, etc.) to convert as much of it as possible into support based on deceit, division, distrust and so forth. Stewart writes:

Not long after the election of Bill Clinton, Leonard Leo realized that the Christian Right had little hope of winning at the ballot box. A Catholic ultraconservative, Leo was sure that the public, seduced by the shallow values of a liberalizing culture, would never voluntarily submit to the moral medicine needed to save the nation. The last best chance to rescue civilization, he concluded, was to take over the courts. If activists could funnel just enough true believers onto the bench, especially onto the Supreme Court, they just might be able to reverse the moral tide. 

“He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war,” said Leo’s former media relations director, Tom Carter. “Abortion, gay rights, contraception -- conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”

From that, one can clearly see the arrogance and authoritarianism in the CN mindset. One can also see the demise of abortion rights and the reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Leo became influential in The Federalist Society and he influenced the ex-president’s selection of at least two CN Supreme Court justices, which were in addition to the three already on the bench, i.e., Roberts, Thomas and Alito.

The CN movement recruited lawyers and now has them positioned to take power in state and local courts and governments. The critical requirement isn’t legal excellence. Instead it is blind loyalty to CN moral dogma. Stewart comments:

Undistinguished academic records might be forgiven provided an unwavering commitment to the cause could be verified. .... the “carefully manicured terrarium of the conservative legal community,” as the journalist Charles P. Pierce has described it. “Federalist Society member? Check. Clerkships for Supreme Court justices? Check. . . . Wingnut culture-war bona fides? Check.” 

In addition to advising Trump on his judicial picks, Leo and his allies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars -- over $250 million between 2014 and 2017 alone -- in part to promote conservative policies, provide funding for right wing TV pundits, and coordinate and finance campaigns for their judicial picks, including Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.  

Stewart points out that CN groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom (~$50 million/year), the Liberty Council, the American Center for Law and Justice and others were spending about $100 million/year on legal advocacy alone.

Section 3: The successful but crackpot CN legal strategy - use the Free Speech clause, smoke and mirrors to obliterate the Establishment Clause

The First Amendment reads as follows: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There are three separate clauses. Note that the first clause specifies establishment and free exercise of religion. The separate second clause invokes free speech. Those two two clauses deal with two different things. Well, at least that is how it used to be. The CN legal movement with its judges on the Supreme Court have successfully obliterated the establishment clause by breaking down the legal separation of free speech from religion. In essence the free speech clause has swallowed the establishment clause, thereby protecting the intrusion of Christianity, nominally “religion,” into secular government. 

Simply put, governments cannot keep religion out of government. Religious people and organizations can now argue that their activities in government have nothing to do with establishing any religion. Instead, their activities are protected by their free speech rights. The floodgates are now open for Christianity, not other religions and not atheists, to exercise exclusive privileges and gobble as much tax money as possible as fast as possible. The CN legal strategy has rendered governments powerless to stop Christianity from exercising privileges in government activities and feeding at the tax dollar trough. 

Stewart writes: “One could spill a lot of ink explaining why it is absurd to suppose that religion is not religion at all, but just speech from a religious point of view.”

The Supreme Court has given Christianity the green light to have access to government while excluding other religious and secular groups. Once the Supreme Court opened the door to religious activities in schools, it quickly became apparent that the opening into government operations was for Christianity and not much else. Non-Christian groups could not exercise the same privilege. Stewart writes on this point: “A [nontheistic, secular] religious group called the Satanic Temple proved the point. .... A key difference was that, instead of teaching small children that without Jesus they would suffer eternal torment, as [Christian] Good News Clubs do, The Satanic Temple clubs aimed to teach reason and empathy. .... The schools could not slam their doors fast enough, throwing up a variety of procedural and legal hurdles.”

In other words, when non-Christian groups try to exercise the same privileges the Christian groups easily get, they are usually harassed enough to give up. This kind of discrimination is legal. 

Questions: Stewart argues that probably the best source of power to oppose CN and its fascist, bigoted agenda is among Christians who are aware of the CN ideology and agenda and who oppose it. Assuming that is true, and it probably is, what can one do to try to coalesce that opposition into a more powerful political force? Or, is it already too late and American will inevitably fall to some form of corrupt Christian fascism under the cynical CN banner? 

Another warning about the fall of democracy and the rule of law

For the last year or two (or three or four) I've raised multiple warnings about the possible impending fall of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law (weak as it already is) to demagogic tyranny and kleptocracy. That possibility increases with time. 

So, it is some minor relief that others see the same thing. Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent writes in a piece entitled, A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger:

Democrats can’t say they weren’t warned.

With yet another GOP effort to restrict voting underway in Texas, President Biden is now calling on Congress to act in the face of the Republican “assault on democracy.” Importantly, Biden cast that attack as aimed at “Black and Brown Americans,” meriting federal legislation in response.

That is a welcome escalation. But it remains unclear whether 50 Senate Democrats will ever prove willing to reform or end the filibuster, and more to the point, whether Biden will put real muscle behind that cause. If not, such protections will never, ever pass.

Now, in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself.

“Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write in the statement, which I obtained before its release. “History will judge what we do at this moment.”

And these scholars underscore the crucial point: Our democracy’s long-term viability might depend on whether Democrats reform or kill the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections.

“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards,” the scholars write, in a reference to the voting rights protections enshrined in the For the People Act, which passed the House and is before the Senate.

What’s striking is that the statement is signed by scholars who specialize in democratic breakdown, such as Pippa Norris, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. Other well-known names include Francis Fukuyama and Jacob Hacker.

“We wanted to create a strong statement from a wide range of scholars, including many who have studied democratic backsliding, to make it clear that democracy in America is genuinely under threat,” Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and a leading organizer of the letter, told me.

“The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections,” Drutman continued.

Among these, the scholars note, are efforts by GOP-controlled state legislatures everywhere to restrict access to voting in ways reminiscent of tactics employed before the United States became a real multiracial democracy in the mid-1960s:

Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

The scholars also sound the alarm about GOP efforts to deepen control of electoral machinery in numerous states, casting them as a live threat to overturn future elections, and a redoubling of emphasis on extreme gerrymanders and other anti-majoritarian tactics:

In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional and normative conditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome.

After noting that all these Republican efforts are threatening those fundamental principles, the scholars warn: “These actions call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy.”

Crucially, the scholars note that the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — which would restore some protections gutted by the Supreme Court — would be insufficient, and they call for federal protections such as those in the For the People Act, or S.1.

“Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South” in the 1960s, the scholars write, so must federal law step in again:

True electoral integrity demands a comprehensive set of national standards that ensure the sanctity and independence of election administration, guarantee that all voters can freely exercise their right to vote, prevent partisan gerrymandering from giving dominant parties in the states an unfair advantage in the process of drawing congressional districts, and regulate ethics and money in politics.

It is always far better for major democracy reforms to be bipartisan, to give change the broadest possible legitimacy. However, in the current hyper-polarized political context such broad bipartisan support is sadly lacking.

That is the rub. An acceptance that protecting democracy will never, ever, ever be bipartisan, and will happen only on a partisan basis, is fundamental to accepting the reality of the situation that Democrats face.

We can go back and forth about specific misgivings that some Democrats have about S.1 — see this good Andrew Prokop report for an overview — but the core question is whether Democrats will cross that Rubicon. So doing would lead inevitably to the need to reform or end the filibuster.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is the most visible obstacle here. But an unknown number of other moderate Democrats are also reluctant to cross that Rubicon, and it’s unclear how much effort Biden will put into making that happen.

And so, when these scholars warn that history is watching, those Democrats are the ones who should take heed.

Questions: Is this just more fantasy-based liberal poppycock, and democracy and the rule of law are safe, while Republican moves to change vote laws and the 2020 election are just for “election integrity” GOP as it claims they are for? Or, is America, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties in serious danger of falling? Does Biden hurt his defense of democracy and voting rights by saying this is aimed at just “Black and Brown Americans”?***

*** Maybe Biden has to invoke race because federal law provides for no other basis to intervene. And if that is true, does that reflect yet another a major failure of both major parties to protect democracy and voting rights?