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I spent the Fourth of July with some of the few sane people left in the United States: Drag queens. Chris Hedges ScheerPost FIRE ISLAND, New York – I am on a boat with 100 drag queens who are traveling from the gay enclave of Cherry Grove on Fire Island to the neighboring community of […]

Bita Iuliano and Olivia DiNucci As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250  “Celebrations”, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with […]

“Religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years,” President Donald Trump announced to the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26. “Religion’s really …”—he made a rocket-ship sound effect and thrust his finger skyward—“going up. If that were a stock, we’d be very, very rich, all of us.” Great nations have God and religion, and, he added, “if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?” It sounded almost like a threat.That same day, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission delivered a full draft of its 224-page report, the centerpiece of which is “12 Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans.” Those recommendations include the creation of a Justice Department “religious liberty task force,” production of “Know Your Rights” posters, repealing the Johnson Amendment, and creating “religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals.”The commission, housed in the DOJ, was established via executive order last year to advise the White House Faith Office and Domestic Policy Council by offering suggestions for how to “preserve and enhance religious liberty” in U.S. law and public life. Chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and vice-chaired by Ben Carson, it is primarily composed of right-wing activists. A few have legal experience; others are prominent religious leaders, politicians, authors—and Dr. Phil. The report itself is, as legal scholar Micah Schwartzman has put it, “an embarrassing document” (although “shameless” might be more fitting). Still, as we have learned and relearned over the past decade, government officials do not have to be thoughtful, competent, or serious to do real damage. Slapdash and unserious as the report might be, it does its job: laying out how to use the cause of religious liberty to advance right-wing goals.For over two decades, the Christian conservative legal movement, led by well-funded groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and with help from the Roberts court, has transformed the idea of religious freedom. The era of “high separation” between church and state is over, and free exercise is a tool reserved primarily for conservative Christians. If the commission’s recommendations are implemented with the DOJ’s backing, they will be the next steps in this broader project. Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.The commission’s report offers many legal and policy suggestions, but it also seeks a broader cultural shift. “Safeguarding religious liberty,” it claims, “requires more than defending legal rights after they have been violated. It requires cultivating a culture that understands why those rights exist in the first place.” This mission demands that Americans respect religious liberty and the rights it affords, but first they must celebrate and value religion itself. The premise of the commission’s work is “a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.” In recent decades, high-profile cases have dramatized the conflict between individual religious freedom and the public good. The religious belief and speech of cake bakers, website designers, and licensed counselors—to refer to three Supreme Court cases in which ADF successfully sought exemption from or contested Colorado’s civil rights laws—come into conflict with the civil rights of others, particularly LGBTQ people. But, the commission argues, the “Founding Fathers recognized that religious liberty is not merely a private benefit for believers, but a public good for the nation.” Here, they sidestep the fact that private benefits do in fact conflict with public goods—when business owners discriminate against their potential clients, when tax dollars are funneled to discriminatory private institutions and away from public schools, or when religious groups flout public health mandates during a pandemic—and instead assert that, because religion is ultimately good, religious liberty benefits everyone. If religion is “an essential aspect of what it means to be human,” as the report claims, then it follows that it would be privileged at least as much as, if not more than, other aspects of one’s humanity. Thus, those institutions that foster religion are not at odds with, or even really separate from, state institutions: Church and state should not be completely separate but, “in reality,” should “strengthen and support one another.” There is no wall between the two, the commission concludes, but a “bridge.”The report is divided into 14 chapters, most of which are devoted to a particular issue or arena of public life. Chapter titles include “Students Don’t Check their Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate,” “The Rights and Roles of Parents and Teachers,” and “Anti-Semitism.” The content of each is drawn largely from the commission’s seven hearings held over the past year. These hearings primarily served as platforms for supposedly persecuted believers—each one a potential “religious freedom celebrity”—to offer testimonials, with occasional subject-area experts adding their analysis. Some were claimants in well-publicized disputes, including cases brought by conservative Christian legal organizations, such as ADF and First Liberty Institute, whose Kelly Shackelford and Allyson Ho are on the commission. These anecdotes make up much of the report, the final recommendation of which is: “Honor the courage of religious liberty heroes through creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards to recognize Americans who stand up for religious freedom and play an indispensable role in protecting citizens’ Constitutional rights.” Chapters conclude with pictures from the hearings of these heroes. It reads like a book of martyrs with policy recommendations. The testimonies reveal their uses. Twelve-year-old Shea Encinas testified that in fifth grade, his “school forced [him] to teach [his] kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow Is Pink.” Shea did not refuse. However, his family “spoke up” afterward, and, according to Shea, “the school treated us badly and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith and the school did nothing to stop it.” The school did not offer an opt-out of certain readings. Later, the school hosted a “Pink Out the Hate” day, on which students would wear pink to show solidarity with LGBTQ students. According to Shea, he “felt like the entire school …[was] standing against me and ridiculing my beliefs.” When he arrived, he was dismayed to see that “over half the school wore pink. I felt completely alone.” Shea and his brother were ostracized, and the family “felt they had no choice” but to enroll in a private school. Without discounting (or taking too seriously) Shea’s feelings, there is something poignant in stating so starkly that when he was not in the majority he “felt completely alone.” In the nation the commission hopes to create, Shea’s rights would not simply be protected; so too would his feelings. The commission wants Americans to be proud of religion, and of religious liberty. Perhaps even more than wanting to feel pride, they want some people not to feel shame. They want anti-sociality without consequent social stigma. As religious studies scholar Donovan Schaefer has written, for some conservatives, “it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.” Following this line of argument, religious studies scholar Finbarr Curtis explains, “Trumpism is the response to the fear that someone somewhere is threatening to take something that is rightfully yours. As a vigorous response to threats, Trump’s illiberalism makes his supporters feel safe.” The message of the commission’s report is that these threats abound, from vaccine mandates and “transgenderism” and “bad actors in the government and within institutions,” but the Department of Justice will protect you. There will be posters reminding everyone to “Know Your Rights.” Your teachers will undergo religious liberty training. If anyone does violate your rights or make you feel unsafe, there will be an online portal where you can report the threat. They will be investigated.Even in this boom time for religious liberty, with religion’s stock going up, some claimants still lose their cases. In fact, the named claimant in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the most recent religious freedom case at the Supreme Court, lost. And a landmark law—2000’s Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA—was significantly restricted. Naturally, it was a case that spelled out exactly who could expect to enjoy religious freedom and who should not.Damon Landor, by all accounts a devout Rastafarian, did not cut his hair in keeping with his faith. When incarcerated, he explained and documented this practice. For a while, his religious rights were honored. When he was transferred to a new facility, he handed them his paperwork stating his religious exemption. Prison guards threw it in the trash and then held Landor down and shaved his head. He sued the prison officials in their individual capacity, which the court found was beyond the scope of RLUIPA. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that prison employees could not be sued here because they had not “voluntarily and knowingly consent[ed] to answer lawsuits” under RLUIPA. As lawyer and legal scholar Elizabeth Reiner Platt noted, this is a standard that “employees are unlikely to agree to.” Why would they?The Religious Liberty Commission’s report—in a draft issued three days after the Landor decision—says DOJ “should issue updated guidance on how [RLUIPA] provides incarcerated individual with the right to receive reasonable religious accommodations while incarcerated.” To what end? With what effect? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her Landor dissent that “state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law.” It is hard to imagine that DOJ will effectively cultivate a culture of respect for religion and religious liberty in a case like this. Will prisons hang “Know Your Rights” posters in common spaces? Will wardens undergo religious liberty trainings that would prevent such an incident? Will incarcerated persons call the hotline? The recommendations seem to be for Shea Encinas and his parents more than Damon Landor.Some critics, such as Sarah Posner, a journalist and expert on the Christian right, have called the commission’s report “an homage to Christian nationalism.” As Posner notes, a multi-religious coalition legally challenged the commission, based on its nearly entirely Christian composition and clearly biased framing. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that the commission is “not about religious liberty, it is about pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate people across our nation.” The Public Religion Research Institute has found that 11 percent of Americans are “adherents” to Christian nationalist ideas and 21 percent are “sympathizers.” Christian nationalism is correlated with support for religion in general and “Judeo-Christian values.” In a 2021 poll on religious liberty, PRRI found that 10 percent of Americans completely agree and 21 percent somewhat agree with the statement, “In the U.S., when there is a conflict, the rights and religious freedom of Christians have priority over the rights and religious freedom of non-Christians and non-religious Americans.” Perhaps this is the “culture of Christian Nationalism” of which Perryman warns. About a third of Americans, then, support some kinds of favorable treatment for Christians. It is reasonable to think that the hotlines are for them—or, at least, that they’ll be frequent users.While Christian nationalist ideology might be a factor, the Religious Liberty Commission is better understood as a right-wing project. If its goal is to install Christian supremacy, it is only as a route to empower private actors to subvert the public good. It seeks to exempt certain people—Christians, yes, but more importantly conservatives—from public accountability, and from feeling bad about abridging the civil rights of disfavored groups. It advocates siphoning funds from public schools and rerouting them toward private institutions, or “creating a robust system of universal school choice” and “securing parental rights.” It encourages citizens to surveil and report, rather than tolerate, their neighbors. It recommends that DOJ “develop a dedicated Religious Liberty Task Force,” whose tasks would include issuing cease-and-desist letters to public school districts with trans-inclusive policies. It seeks to create a culture of fear and suspicion and, in so doing, alleviate the fears of anti-pluralists, their feelings of loneliness, exclusion, and shame. Throughout, the message is clear: Get religion. If you don’t, the commission suggests, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?

Not every World War II story was good triumphing against evil. The post The Dark Side of the Good War appeared first on The American Prospect.

Hoo boy. Many of us slogged through a July 4 more vigil - "act of purposeful wakefulness" - than celebration as hostages of a dark timeline wherein history's smallest, weakest political "leader" and his racist cabal screech about "godless communists," one-party rule and forced sterilization of brown people who will "suicide your civilization" while masked Nazis march in the streets. Welcome to "exceptionalism," stripped of its pieties. The "danger of this age," notes one sage, "isn't merely organized hate (but) indifference to it."In the summer of 1776, a few dozen brave men with much to lose who had "watched power gather dangerously into one man’s hands" came together in Philadelphia to pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to stop it. Concluding a long list of grievances against King George in their Declaration of Independence, they issued their ultimate moral and legal justification for the American colonies to sever ties with Great Britain: "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Today, in his new show, Larry David echoes them. On this Fourth of July, wrote John Pavlovitz, "Most of us were pulled between the despair of what this nation has become (or always has been) and the hope of what we might still be," leaving us "not knowing quite where to stand." We are "told today by the men who would humiliate us," he adds, "that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others" - this, in a country founded in genocide that blithely went on to institutionalize slavery and racism, then took to rampaging imperialism.Despite the right's longtime myths about American "exceptionalism," for decades the arc of our political history has bent toward liberalism and the egalitarian ideals of its founding. No more. The last ten years, and especially the last two, have seen us hurtling backwards, obviously in large part due to the toxic rise of Trump, who "didn't invent America’s oldest prejudices (but) exploited them, legitimized them, rewarded them (and) transformed grievance into political identity." Writes Congressional candidate Fred Wellman, "The level of racism and bigotry this pathetic small man spits out daily could fill an algae-filled pool."Last week saw some of what it's wrought. Death by firing squad - really - is on the rise: Idaho just became the first state to adopt it as its primary method of state murder, which can inflict "prolonged and agonising death," and it's the seventh state to include it in grisly execution rosters. SCOTUS hacks just stripped legal protections from over half a million Haitians and almost as many Syrians, prompting hateful vampire Megyn Kelly to spew, "Get out. Go home. Go back to fucking Haiti. We know our country’s better than yours (because) we filled it with our work ethic and culture and values. You being here only dilutes it for us."MAGA ghouls emitted more vicious racist bilge after SCOTUS barely struck down Trump's "BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL" move to strip birthright citizenship from U.S-born kids of non-citizens despite a 14th Amendment clearly stating anyone born here, even with dark skin, is a citizen. It was widely deemed a win for the rule of law, but it was also "one step away" from a scary "birthright precipice" that saw four judges construct 100 pages of legal arguments "to write immigrants’ children out of the Constitution and still call it jurisprudence." The ruling was "very nice," wrote Jonathan Last, like "it's nice when a person walking past you doesn't pull out a gun and shoot you...(The) majority followed the Constitution. Yay."Still, the right freaked out, raving it was "a betrayal of the republic (that) cheapens the sacred value of American citizenship." Sample rants: "We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage," "Any woman illegal alien who is capable of having a child needs to be rounded up and ejected," the "obvious lesson" of traitor Amy Barrett upholding "birth tourism of China's communist party" is to stop nominating female justices, "Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it," and, "If you see a pregnant foreigner, contact ICE immediately - the future of our country depends on it.” They want to ban foreign-born pregnant women, ban all female foreigners, do pregnancy screenings for those women, "require sterilization of all foreign visitors before entry," dissolve the Union. Todd Blanche will fight (imaginary) "birth tourism." J.D. Vance says his faith is why "we don't like low-wage foreigners stealing" jobs: "We want normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life, and I think that's a very Christian concept." Texas Rep.Troy Nehls wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration - "We gotta put a big bedsheet over the Statue of Liberty," maybe with cut-out eye holes and pointy hat? - "because we’re not letting anybody in."As usual, a not-at-all-unhinged Stephen Miller won the Mein Kampf Award by arguing the ruling “requires you to suicide your civilization.” After proposing the case serve as a litmus test for all future judges, he warned - under a Fox chyron blaring “Birth Tourism Is A Ticking Bomb” - that it offers "a direct line into American cash (for) the rest of that child’s life (as mothers) send welfare checks back home to support a whole family." "They can just come into the country, have a baby in a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?" he howled. "And that baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18, and sit in judgment of...me?“That baby won't be the only one. In The Empire Loses the Ball, a terrific piece about the World Cup, Troy Nahumko describes colonial powers who've "spent centuries confusing dominance with superiority," Africa's "arrival" this year as a force to be reckoned with, and soccer's contempt for and inexorable repudiation of racial hierarchy. "There comes a time when the people who used to draw the maps no longer get to decide what the world looks like," he writes. "The World Cup has become that moment." And Stephen Miller, "a man who has made the question of human belonging his life’s organizing principle," has been or will be made to confront it.As part of his racist rant, Miller denigrated people "from third world nations (that) on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, medicine, air travel." Hold my beer, says Nahumko: The wheel emerged in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, writing in Sumer and Egypt, algebra in ninth-century Uzbekistan, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, the "numerical system Miller uses to count the families he splits up and deports" in India. "That is the birthright Miller calls worthless," he writes. "On the pitches where he would have their descendants excluded, (they) are eliminating European football powers in front of the watching world."The beautiful game "rolled downhill" from "a damp little island" through oil towns in Algeria, fishing villages in Senegal, barrios, favelas, refugee camps "where the goalposts are flip-flops." "We come from the red earth," said Paraguay’s coach after they beat Germany. "We learned to play football barefoot." Europe long bragged about a diversity that "won trophies for France," but proved "less popular in Dakar than in Paris." This year, nine of ten "shithole countries" - Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cape Verde, Egypt, DRC, Algeria - advanced. The final will be in New Jersey, "across the river from where millions of immigrants arrived and received the protection of an amendment Stephen Miller would now like to declare worthless."Cockroach-like, Miller has also declared "divine providence“ the reign of a moronic narcissist con man who, says a report from House Democrats, hijacked and twisted a landmark 250th anniversary into ”a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,“ packed with pay-to-play schemes through a DOGE-run, wire-fraud-committing shadow corporation, all ”in service of the President’s ego, political ideology and pet projects.“ The resulting grift and incompetence is now everywhere, from the trashed “Reflecting Lakes” with “criminally-made algae” to the post-rapture-like State Fair where Fox bobbleheads yammered about non-existent “crowds,” there were no chairs, shade or AC in the steamy heat, but if desperate you could find relief in the baptism pool.Meanwhile, the "festivities" lurched on. Speaking at Mt. Rushmore, amidst millions going hungry, losing health care or voting for Democrat Socialists in primaries, Trump back-tracked to the 1950s and blamed it all on "godless communists" who are "finally making their move," also "illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work,“ who he'll "send into exile." Saturday, in a still-broiling D.C, officials cancelled the parade due to "heat," aka rumors nobody would show, but Patriot Front Nazis turned up to march, wave Confederate flags and chant "Reclaim America," evidently for racist morons with socks on their patriotic faces in 100-degree temps.That night, back at the Great American Shitshow on the Mall, looming thunderstorms prompted chaos and a mass evacuation; it was close to midnight by the time limp crowds snaked again through security lines and Trump ranted, “You can be a communist or a patriot - you cannot be both.” He bragged he’s taking America’s “Golden Age” to “new levels” and he’d insisted the show go on “so it was even more spectacular (than) it would have been as normalized.” Then they set off 850,000 fireworks - experts had urged viewers wear N95 masks - which made so much smoke it was all people could see. Some said it looked like war footage or the,end of the world; Trump dozed off.Sunday morning, D.C. officials issued a Code Red Air Quality Alert for the most polluted air of any major city on the planet; some observers wondered if Trump had hired his pool guy for the fireworks. The pool itself, thick with algae and guarded by soldiers, fencing, signs and security cameras, was now also littered with menacing black husks of spent fireworks. "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" asked Frederick Douglass, who bared the hypocrisies of this nation's founding. "To him, your celebration is a sham; your national greatness, swelling vanity...your prayers and hymns, mere bombast, (a) thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.""Stand out - someone has to," historian Timothy Snyder urges today. "Whenever you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken." For the Fourth of July, who better than New York City's Zohran Mamdani to take on that task, to sit at George Washington's desk among new Americans, "take measure of who we are as a nation," see "an opportunity to begin anew," and join with the city's immigrants, peasants, serfs, those "treated as less than, for whom power was something that someone else had " - to come together in "the work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals." The core of our exceptionalism: Nothing is fixed in its place." Our "special power": "To determine what America means." For the Black woman in this image, for all of us: Not this, please. A lone tense Black woman rides the D.C. subway surrounded by masked Nazis in an "image that indicts an era."Photo by Cheney Orr/REUTERS/TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The soccer body rejected Belgium’s challenge of FIFA’s decision to overturn US star striker Folarin Balogun’s one-match World Cup suspension.