The next front in Republican Party election subversion

The New York Times writes:

The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it would hear a case that could radically reshape how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures independent power, not subject to review by state courts, to set election rules in conflict with state constitutions.

The case has the potential to affect many aspects of the 2024 election, including by giving the justices power to influence the presidential race if disputes arise over how state courts interpret state election laws.

In taking up the case, the court could upend nearly every facet of the American electoral process, allowing state legislatures to set new rules, regulations and districts on federal elections with few checks against overreach, and potentially create a chaotic system with differing rules and voting eligibility for presidential elections.

“The Supreme Court’s decision will be enormously significant for presidential elections, congressional elections and congressional district districting,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge. “And therefore, for American democracy.”

Protections against partisan gerrymandering established through the state courts could essentially vanish. The ability to challenge new voting laws at the state level could be reduced. And the theory underpinning the case could open the door to state legislatures sending their own slates of electors.

We all know where this is going, straight to neo-fascism and Republican single party rule. The Democrats just might be going extinct before our very eyes. 

Expect that neo-fascist Supreme Court decision to be handed down in June of 2023 at the latest.

The Christian nationalist assault on secular public education and inconvenient historical facts

A key target for Christian nationalist (CN) social engineering is secular public education. CNs need to push secular education aside to establish the myth (lie) in public education that America was founded as a White, Christian country with a Christian constitution. 

The contempt and resentment that CNs have toward secular school teachers is intense. A local news report from Tennessee makes this clear. That report comments:

Hidden-camera video obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates reveals a recent closed-door reception with Tennessee’s governor and a key education ally who repeatedly mocks the intelligence of public school teachers and questions whether they really care about what is best for their students.

That ally, Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, also takes aim at diversity efforts in higher education, claiming people in those positions have education degrees because they are “easy” and “you don’t have to know anything.”

Throughout the nearly two-hour video, Gov. Bill Lee offers only praise for Arnn, who Lee has invited to set up charter schools across Tennessee. The Republican governor never takes issue with the Hillsdale president’s remarks, nor does he defend the state’s 80,000 public school teachers or the stat’s teacher training programs.

Among Arnn’s provocative remarks:

• “The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

• “They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”

• “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”

• “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”

• “You will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”

• “Here’s a key thing that we’re going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”

Arnn’s curriculum in Michigan is based on the 1776 Project, the radical right’s and CN response to the 1619 Project that liberals produced. Historians have criticized both 1776 and 1619 as flawed with important errors in historical facts.[1] Currently, Arnn plans to open 50 CN religious charter schools in Tennessee to teach the 1776 version of American history. According to the news report, Governor Lee wants 100 of them. The flaws in the 1776 version of history are of no concern to the CN movement, because that is the version they choose to believe is real.

Note the incoherent irrationality in the CN attacks on secular education teachers. On the one hand CN extremists say secular teachers are ignorant. On the other hand, they say that anyone can teach and no expertise is needed to teach K-12 education. 

One cannot be rational when facts, truths and sound reasoning contradict an agenda based on lies, a false version of reality and crackpot motivated reasoning.

Yes, not all public education teachers are great. Some are undoubtedly incompetent. But that is no excuse for CN elimination of secular education in favor of Dark Ages Christian Sharia and Christian Taliban. We are in the middle of a vicious, brass knuckles culture war. For the most part, it is radical right lies, fundamentalist Christianity and unrestrained capitalism fighting hard and dirty against truth, democracy and civil liberties.

Footnote: 

1. Criticism of 1619 includes this:

On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.  

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.  

Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.

Criticism of 1776 includes this:

The report, commissioned by the Donald Trump administration, urged America to return to an era of “patriotic education” amid what it called “reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one”.

But historians saw it differently.

“The 1776 report is a puerile, politically reactionary document,” stated David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. He tweeted: “It doesn’t really use evidence except to employ founding documents and too many quotations out of context.”

Blight wrote that the report’s use of the abolitionist’s historic quote from a 4 July speech on the complications of its celebration for Black people was “so mis-used [he couldn’t] stop laughing.

“Trumpians will eat it up as may Fox News,” he wrote to the Guardian. “No legitimately trained historian or teacher will even be able to read through it all without nausea.”

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Peach Freeze for bringing this news story to my attention 

The wealthy Republican attack on the “Administrative State”

Wealthy Republican capitalists hate regulations. They really do. Regulations tend to impair their profits. Yesterday's Republican Supreme Court ruling that gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide pollution was a smashing victory for pro-pollution businesses and corporate profits generally. This Republican attack is not just limited to gutting environmental protections.

The victory yesterday is something that wealthy laissez-faire capitalists have been working toward for decades. The public interest and environment are going to receive massive damage in coming years from the unleashing of unrestrained, callous capitalist greed. 

The New York Times comments:

The Supreme Court ruling in the Environmental Protection Agency case on Thursday was a substantial victory for libertarian-minded conservatives who have worked for decades to curtail or dismantle modern-style government regulation of the economy.

In striking down an E.P.A. plan to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, the court issued a decision whose implications go beyond hobbling the government’s ability to fight climate change. Many other types of regulations might now be harder to defend.

The ruling widens an opening to attack a government structure that, in the 20th century, became the way American society imposes rules on businesses: Agencies set up by Congress come up with the specific methods of ensuring that the air and water are clean, that food, drugs, vehicles and consumer products are safe, and that financial firms follow the rules.

Such regulations may benefit the public as a whole, but can also cut into the profits of corporations and affect other narrow interests. For decades, wealthy conservatives have been funding a long-game effort to hobble that system, often referred to as the administrative state.

“This is an intentional fight on the administrative state that is the same fight that goes back to the New Deal, and even before it to the progressive era — we’re just seeing its replaying and its resurfacing,” said Gillian Metzger, a Columbia University professor who wrote a Harvard Law Review article called “1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege.”  

When the United States was younger and the economy was simple, it generally took an act of Congress to impose a new, legally binding rule addressing a problem involving industry. But as complexity arose — the Industrial Revolution, banking crises, telecommunications and broadcast technology, and much more — this system began to fail.

Congress came to recognize that it lacked the knowledge, time and nimbleness to set myriad, intricate technical standards across a broad and expanding range of issues. So it created specialized regulatory agencies to study and address various types of problems.

While there were earlier examples, many of the agencies Congress established were part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Wealthy business owners loathed the limits. But with mass unemployment causing suffering, the political power of elite business interests was at an ebb.

The NYT refers to the wealthy people and powerful businesses that are attacking government regulations as “libertarian-minded conservatives,” but that is the wrong label. It is another example of mainstream media not getting it. These people and companies are greedy, radical laissez-faire capitalists with no social conscience. They are not libertarian-minded conservatives. Real libertarians actually do have some social conscience. In applying that misleading label, the NYT commits malpractice and plays into the hands of powerful pro-greed special interests at our expense.

One is forced to ask, do regulations tend to benefit society and customers more than they impair profits? That is the central question. The business community firmly rejects the idea that government regulations confer more benefits than harm. According to wealthy elites, the businesspeople always know what is best for us, while government always screws things up. That propaganda is a blatant lie. But it works for lots of people with conservative mindsets who have been exposed to decades of capitalist anti-government and anti-regulation propaganda. 

Once again, the destructive power of dark free speech is on display for all who can see it. Many cannot see it.

This radical right capitalist Republican attack on government and society will be at least as damaging to average Americans as the Christian nationalist social agenda will be with its attacks on civil liberties. Loss of civil liberties has already started with loss of abortion rights.  

Things are probably going to get much worse for average people in America. It will likely stay that way for a long time. At this point, all that average people can do is try to save themselves from the coming onslaught to the limited extent it can be averted. Patriotic Americans need to vote against all Republicans and constantly voice opposition to the literally and figuratively toxic Republican capitalist and radical Christian social agendas. 

Qs: Is it unreasonable or inaccurate to argue that the Republican Party, its wealthy capitalist donors and its elite radical Christian nationalists are enemies of the American people? What about the GOP rank and file who support the party?

Laissez-faire Republican Supreme court guts federal ability to deal with climate change

Recently, I have been criticizing and pounding on the bigoted, corrupt, theocratic agenda of the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party. But that is only one of the two corrupt, dogmatic ideologies that control the GOP. The other power source that runs the Republican Party is radical right, regulation and government-hating laissez-faire capitalism (LFC). Those people have no social conscience. They have only one moral imperative, namely profit. Dead humans, poisoned humans and extinct species are of no concern. That is merely a small kerfuffle for their public relations (propagandists) people to spin into little or nothing of public importance or concern.

The biggest among the pro-pollution behemoths include the oil and carbon energy sector and the chemical sector. Both make mega-profits from polluting. Exxon-Mobil is front and center in the decades-long sophisticated, money-backed LFC agenda to pollute freely and offload the damage onto society and the environment. They are no succeeding on a gigantic scale.

The Washington Post writes:

The Supreme Court on Thursday sharply cut back the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce the carbon output of existing power plants, a blow to the nation’s chances of averting catastrophic climate change.

The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the court’s conservatives.

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ ” Roberts wrote, referring to a court precedent. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the dissenters, countered: “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

The decision risks putting the United States even further off track from President Biden’s goal of running the U.S. power grid on clean energy by 2035 — and making the entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050.  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised the ruling.

“The Court has undone illegal regulations issued by the EPA without any clear congressional authorization and confirmed that only the people’s representatives in Congress – not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats – may write our nation’s laws,” McConnell said in a statement.[1]

There we have it. Another long-cherished Republican Party goal has been achieved. America can no longer control carbon dioxide pollution. Now attention will turn to other ways of gutting the power of the EPA to regulate pollution. This LFC assault on the EPA is not over yet. This is just the beginning.

If one listens carefully, one can begin to hear the sounds of (1) money going from trickling up to gushing up into the bank accounts of the elites who profit from polluting, and (2) damage and harm flowing to the masses and the environment. 

Qs: Is it hyperbole or a lie to assert that the Republican Party elites and pro-pollution LFCs 

(i) have no social conscience when it comes to pollution, and/or 

(ii) are overwhelmingly concerned with more profits from pollution for the elites, while offloading as much damage and harm onto the public and the environment? 

Footnote: 

1. McConnell, is a bare-faced liar. Recall what Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) correctly said in 2017 about the gross incompetence of congress in writing laws? Here it is again for those who forgot: 

“. . . . . the people don’t have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

A call for defending church and state separation against the Christian Taliban

For this blog post,

substitute Santorum with Lauren Boebert 

I have been referring to a key goal of the Republican Party’s Christian nationalist (CN) political-theocratic movement as establishing Christian Sharia. It stands for an America controlled by God’s law, which stands above the US Constitution. What God demands is dictated by self-interested CN elites.

Apparently, some others are seeing the threat in this radical Christian fundamentalist legal attack on the secularism and provisions in the US Constitution that defend it. Secularism, pluralism and church-state separation are now all directly and openly attacked by the CN movement, Republican elites and the neo-fascist propaganda Leviathan that works for them, e.g., Faux News. One other critic of CN theocracy calls it the threat Christian Taliban. The Hill writes:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Wednesday criticized comments that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) made on Sunday in which she called for ending the separation of church and state in the United States.

Boebert said in a speech at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., that she is “tired” of the principle and falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers did not intend to keep religion separate from government.

Kinzinger condemned Boebert’s comments and compared them to the views of the Taliban, the militant Islamic fundamentalist group that rules Afghanistan.

“There is no difference between this and the Taliban. We must oppose the Christian Taliban. I say this as a Christian,” he tweeted.

Boebert argued that the separation of church and state “junk” is not in the Constitution and was only in a letter that “means nothing like they say it does.”

She appeared to be referencing a letter that then-President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Church Association in Connecticut. In the letter, Jefferson wrote that the American people had built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

The constitutional interpretation of separation of church and state comes from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Supreme Court applied this provision also to the states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which prohibits states from passing laws that restrict people’s “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The same legal arguments from the CN political-theocratic movement openly come up over and over and over now. One cannot deny the fact (not opinion) that the movement wants to gut core constitutional defenses of civil liberties. The radical Taliban Christian tyrants that run the CN movement hate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Once those defenses fall to the CNs, the door is wide open to legally and brutally discriminate against hated out groups, especially racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBQT community, Democrats and political opposition generally, atheists, all non-Christians and all women, but especially minority and non-heterosexual women. In CN dogma, women are inferior and subordinate to men.

Core CN dogma is that God chose and still chooses elite and/or wealthy, White, heterosexual men to lead all people everywhere on Earth because they are morally superior to the rest of us. Proof of that is their elite status and/or wealth. They would not be elite or wealthy if God had not chosen them. 

A core CN creation myth is exactly what Taliban Boebert argues, i.e., the separation of church and state is “junk” that is not in the Constitution and was only in a letter that “means nothing like they say it does.” She lies. The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment separates state from church. There is no religious test for holding office in government, but the CN movement wants to make Christianity a litmus test for holding power in government. In sacred CN dogma, non-Christians cannot hold positions of significant power in government or society generally.

In the 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that Taliban Boebert misrepresents (lies about), Thomas Jefferson stated that when the American people adopted the establishment clause they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.” That is the point of the Establishment Clause in the 1st Amendment:

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.

That is why the CN movement hates the 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause, along with the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses in the 14th Amendment. Those are the key provisions of the US Constitution that block what I call Christian Sharia and Kinzinger calls Christian Taliban.

This points to the reasons why, by the 1980s or earlier (arguably the 1950s in the wake of the horrific Brown v. Board of Education decision that ordered public school desegregation and abolished the separate but equal religious-political myth) the CN fundamentalist movement came to understand that they needed a whole now legal strategy to deal with a secular Constitution. A secular built on church-state separation stood squarely in the way of establishing Christian Sharia or Taliban in the US. Out of those intense White Christian fundamentalist frustrations grew aggressive but crackpot legal theories like Originalism, Strict Constructionism and Textualism that allowed American Christian fundamentalist elites to reinterpret the Constitution in their own personal, corrupt, intolerant Christian theocratic way. 

Those crackpot theories are what Republican CN Supreme Court justices are relying on right now to attack and gut the vitality of the Establishment, Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. In his concurrence in overturning Roe v. Wade Clarence Thomas directly attacked the scope of the due process clause: 

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. .... We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents. .... After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”

Once those three clauses fall to the CN theocratic movement, America will in fact be a kleptocratic Christian Sharia or Christian Taliban state. Church-state separation will have been demolished and all the rage, hate, vengeance, bigotry and corruption will gush out to smite all those who God demands to be smitten good and hard, even if it kills some or many of them. There is no reasonable doubt that cruel Sharia-Taliban laws will directly or indirectly kill at least some innocent Americans. 

Qs: Is it unreasonably inaccurate, or even a lie, to argue that the Republican Party’s CN wing 

(i) is attacking the secularism the US Constitution defends, and/or 

(ii) intends to establish God’s religious laws (Christian Sharia or Christian Taliban) above human secular laws the US Constitution is built on? 

Adventures in brains: Liberal ones may not be like conservative ones

Brains 25¢!

AI can predict your political ideology using just a brain scan:

A deep learning AI running on a supercomputer was able to link patterns of brain connectivity to political ideology.

• The AI was about 70% accurate, which is roughly equivalent to predicting a person's political beliefs based on their parents' ideology.

• While the study certainly is stimulating, it's essentially pattern-hunting with big data. Revealing the neurological roots of ideology will be much harder.

Scientists have used brain scanning techniques to delve into the neuroscientific underpinnings of political beliefs before. For example, researchers have found previously that conservatives tend to have more gray matter volume in their amygdala (a region associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression), while liberals tend to have more in their anterior cingulate cortex (tied to, among other things, ethics and morality). Another experiment showed that the brains of liberals and conservatives react differently to “charged” words in political videos.

In the current study, the researchers observed and recorded functional connectivity in the brains of 174 healthy young adult subjects as they performed various simple tasks, such as pressing a pop-up button as quickly as possible for a monetary reward, pairing names with faces, or answering true/false questions about a story they had just read. Subjects also had their brains scanned in a resting state — awake and relaxed, with their eyes closed.

Measuring functional connectivity (FC) is somewhat rare in political neuroscience. FC refers to how different parts of the brain can concurrently show similar activity, as if they are communicating with each other. The researchers utilized a state-of-the-art AI deep learning technique called BrainNetCNN, running on supercomputers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, to analyze the functional connectivity data from all of the tasks and to correlate them with the subjects’ self-reported political ideology, which was scored on a one to six scale from very liberal to very conservative.

While the study certainly is stimulating, it is essentially pattern-hunting with big data. That’s fine, but a model is only robust and widely applicable if it is based on a large, diverse study group. In this case, the subjects were all young adults, seven out of ten of whom were liberal. So the model may not work if tested on other Americans (or people, in general). Moreover, the AI cannot tell us anything about the neurological roots of ideology; it wasn’t designed to do so. Answering that will be a much taller task.

This is another suggestion, not proof, that there are fundamental differences in liberal compared to conservative brains. If this data could be confirmed and the underlying neurology better understood in bigger studies and different studies, that might point to ways to increase the relative power of messaging based on fact, truth and sound reasoning (honest speech) compared to lies, falsehoods and crackpot motivated reasoning (dark speech, free and unfree). 

Personal thoughts

A personal estimate is that if one says for the sake of argument that the power to persuade, evoke true beliefs and evoke corresponding overt behavior is X, it feels reasonably accurate to think that dark speech has about 3X power to persuade, evoke false beliefs and evoke corresponding overt behavior. That estimate or intuition is based on hints in the data that conservatives might be responsive to triggers to fear, anxiety, and aggression, while liberals may be more responsive to  triggers to ethics and morality. 

The reason I'm interested in possible ways to better understand messaging and how to boost the power of honest speech to elicit beliefs and behaviors, e.g., voting vs. not voting. A basic assumption I base that on is that, in my firm opinion, it is usually better for politics, political outcomes and civilized social progress for most people to believe and act based on honest speech than on dark speech. That accords with my limited knowledge of history and my lifetime of experiences with politics. 

If I am right, then finding ways to elevate the power of honest speech relative to dark speech just might be a factor in reducing the odds of destruction of modern civilization, or on a really bad day, self-annihilation and extinction of the human species. Of course, all of that is also just personal opinion.

I doubt that more than maybe ~10% of adults would disagree with that personal belief. Those who would agree, probably ascribe, consciously or not, to a moral value that the means justify the ends, including using dark speech to deceive and manipulate. Where the currently intractable liberal vs. conservative disagreement lies is in what is fact, truth and sound reasoning and what isn't. The rank and file on both sides firmly believe they usually or almost always rely on honest speech, while the opposition does not. 

Hence my belief in the importance of understanding the neurology of political ideology and the nature and frailty of honest speech (as PD discussed here a couple of days ago) compared to dark speech. If the advantage of the demagogue wielding dark speech relative to a speaker with weaker honest speech could be mostly neutralized, the odds of better outcomes arguably increase somewhat.

Most conservatives will quite probably reject that characterization of the conservative brain and possible neurology as nonsense. Maybe in time those criticisms will be vindicated and those inconvenient possibilities eliminated by reliable data. So in the meantime, we're still stuck with fascinating possibilities but not yet able to draw firm, data-based conclusions. We still don't know about the neurology of political ideology. We also still don't know if it is even possible to empower honest speech so it is at least fairly close to par with dark speech, assuming honest is less powerful than dark. 

One thing we do know. America will remain awash for years or decades in radical right dark speech from trusted but immoral, corrupt Republican elites. That is just not going to change. Maybe that alone is a barrier that any tactic or form of honest speech can never overcome. If so, I'm barking up the wrong tree.

That's where I left that darned thing

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Larry Motuz for point out this article -- it gave me a chance to talk about what this blog is about