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Dr. Adam Hamawy wins in New Jersey, despite a smear campaign from Democrats. Plus, Trump finds a new person to politicize U.S. intelligence for him, and his illegal war in Iran continues to heat up.

Alfred McCoy Tom Dispatch While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that U.S. military might is no […]

Elias Irizarry, who entered the Capitol through a broken window clutching a metal pole, is now a counterterrorism specialist at the Pentagon.

Edward Curtin Years ago when I was twenty-seven years-old and my father fifty-eight, we wandered around an off-beat section of a small New England town. There was a section where old wooden structures had been abandoned years before and lay forlorn. But they drew us to them. Old names on walls, here and there a […]

I have been reliably informed that the United States is currently governed by Christian nationalists. The term “Christian nationalism” is often used in academic and liberal circles to refer to the modern American right’s fusion of American conservatism with evangelical Christianity. In practical terms, it does little more than provide spurious biblical justifications to an authoritarian and illiberal worldview.Manifestations abound. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth quoted Scripture earlier this year to justify the war on Iran, which the United States is now losing. Trump and his allies hosted an under-attended event on the National Mall last month where participants took turns reading Bible verses. Government officials now use their official platforms for overtly sectarian messaging, aimed at either the public or the federal civil service.The problem is that Trumpism these days is neither all that Christian nor all that nationalistic. The MAGA movement’s leaders, including Trump and his top lieutenants, do not appear to be guided by any recognizable Christian values. They are merely looters and wreckers.A person’s innermost thoughts and beliefs are unknowable. That said, there is no real evidence that Trump himself is a devout Christian. It’s true that the president has said that he believes in God and that he identifies as Presbyterian. Like a growing number of Americans, he does not regularly attend church. At a 2015 event, Trump claimed he had never asked God for forgiveness of his sins, thereby missing the central point of Christianity. The following year, he famously referred to one of the books of the New Testament as “Two Corinthians,” which is sort of like hearing a Yankees fan refer to Babe Ruth as “George.”If anything, Trump himself appears to be the living negation of Christian moral teachings. He lies, cheats, and steals with casual ease. He had extramarital affairs in multiple marriages, including one with an adult-film star whom he later paid hush money to keep quiet during the 2016 election. Almost two dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct in various forms, ranging from harassment to rape. A federal jury concluded in 2023 that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, the New York writer, during an encounter in the mid-1990s.Trump’s own statements on Christianity and Christian denominations have also verged toward the blasphemous. Last year, Trump mocked Catholics by suggesting that he should be elected as the next pope after Pope Francis’s death. (More recently, he attacked Pope Leo XIV by describing him as, among other things, “weak on crime.”) In April, he outraged even some of his ardent evangelical supporters by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. Trump later deleted the post amid the backlash and claimed that he thought the image, which depicted him in linen robes and with glowing hands, showed him as a doctor.One can be a Christian and still sin, of course. But the sheer breadth of Trump’s sins, as well as their habitual nature, calls into question any commitment he might have to any personal Christian beliefs. For those close to him, however, it matters little. Evangelical pastor Mark Burns, who describes himself as one of Trump’s “spiritual advisers,” told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that Trump has been forgiven by God for his sins and that his misconduct “doesn’t matter in the eyes of the Lord, and apparently, it doesn’t really matter to the eyes of the American voters because they voted for him and made him president twice.”There is also scant evidence of ethics or moral principles in the Trump administration these days, let alone Christian ones. This is an administration that has sought to ethnically cleanse the U.S. through mass deportations. Those who are arrested and do not agree to immediately leave the country are housed in a vast network of federal warehouses in inhuman and dangerous conditions to coerce their compliance.A lawsuit filed last month against federal officials alleged that detainees at a warehouse in Fort Bliss, Texas, are facing “severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; no meaningful programming or recreation; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors, or nail clippers; outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight.” The state of New Jersey is suing the private operators of a detention facility outside Newark for denying access to state health inspectors.Those outside U.S. borders are also suffering. When DOGE commissar Elon Musk destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development last year, he severed billions of dollars in funding for Christian charities and other faith-based groups that provide lifesaving aid to developing countries. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of people likely died because of the agency’s sudden demise. The loss of USAID funding for these groups, as well as secular ones, has been met with aggressive indifference by the Trump administration. The New York Times’ David French, a conservative and Christian lawyer, tied the cuts to a growing shift among right-wing Christians to reject empathy as a concept.French pointed to books by evangelical Christians that denounced “toxic empathy” and the “sin of empathy,” which appear self-contradictory. “These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject,” French explained. “For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.” Vice President JD Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism, expressed similar views on the supposed limits of Christian spiritual love—drawing a pointed rebuke from Pope Francis.Other Trump policies are shaped by undisguised cruelty. Last month, Trump told an audience that in the past six months, his administration had “lifted nearly five million Americans off food stamps.” With a normal president, one might infer that nearly five million Americans had obtained better-paying jobs that made federal assistance unnecessary. What Trump actually meant was that his administration had excluded more than four million people from SNAP since last year thanks to new requirements that make it harder to obtain. In other words, the president was celebrating the fact that millions more Americans are going hungry.Describing Trumpism as “Christian nationalism” also obscures the role that Christians and their churches have played in opposing Trump. Many of those who voted against Trump in the last three elections are Christians; Catholic bishops and mainline Protestant leaders have been among Trump’s most frequent critics. One of the nation’s top civil rights leaders today is the Reverend William Barber, who has led “Moral Monday” civil rights protests in North Carolina for the last two decades. In a New Republic interview in 2024, Barber denounced Christian nationalists for misappropriating Jesus’s teachings.“They hijack symbols and attempt to hijack the faith,” he explained. “We have a name for it in Christianity. It’s called heresy.” Barber noted that the Bible speaks at far greater length about “the least of these, the left out, the oppressed, the poor” than the issues upon which Christian nationalists most often dwell.Another flashpoint in this theological debate came last month when James Talarico, a Texas state lawmaker, won the state’s Democratic primary for November’s U.S. Senate race. Almost immediately after news outlets called the race for Talarico, Republicans at the state and national level launched a deluge of attacks against him. Most of these attacks centered around his support of transgender rights; right-wing pundits and officials described Talarico as effeminate, vegan, or even transgender himself. (He is a heterosexual man.)In 2021, Talarico denounced a state bill that forbade transgender K-12 students from playing in certain sports based on their gender identity. Part of his argument was made in biblical terms. “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between,” he argued. “God is nonbinary. In Genesis 1:26, God speaks of God’s Self in the plural, saying, Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. That’s the infinite multitude of God: the masculine, the feminine, and everything in between.“Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image,” Talarico continued. “There’s nothing wrong with them, nothing at all. They are perfect, they are beautiful, and they are sacred. Bullying children is immoral. It’s a sin, a special kind of sin.” Much of the postelection blowback centered on the “God is nonbinary” part, with some social media critics describing it as heretical or blasphemous.Even Talarico’s more nuanced critics had to concede that he was essentially right on the theological aspects. “Some of this, stripped out of context, is Christian orthodoxy,” National Review’s Ramesh Ponnoru begrudgingly acknowledged. “As the Catholic catechism puts it, ‘God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.’” Since God is omnipotent, in other words, he cannot be bound by the gender binary.Tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are also not really Christian nationalists in any meaningful sense. Thiel describes himself as an “orthodox Christian,” though not in the sense that he’s a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He has been giving a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist that are intellectually and theologically incoherent at best. According to excerpts from The Guardian, Thiel identifies Greta Thunberg as a potential candidate for the Antichrist, denounces the International Criminal Court as a vehicle for it, and describes Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a potential “new Rome.” Sure, whatever, man.Musk, by comparison, described himself a few years ago as a “cultural Christian.” The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said that he was “not a particularly religious person” but that he believed that the “teachings of Jesus are good and wise.” In the same breath, he rejected some of Jesus’s basic teachings about turning the other cheek and encouraged people to hit back against their “bullies.” His “cultural Christianity” is a video-game Christianity, one that draws more upon Age of Empires II or Crusader Kings III than the New Testament. It gives him a permission structure for hating and fearing others in the name of defending the West without any of the actual moral or ethical constraints that Christianity prescribes.The base motivation behind all of these policies is better understood as white supremacy. Christian groups often helped administer the nation’s refugee-resettlement programs in the pre-Trump era; it was the Trump administration that shuttered them for all but white Afrikaners from South Africa. Christian hospitals and health care providers helped administer vaccines in the U.S. and around the world; it is the Trump administration that has embraced eugenic thinking to spread anti-vaccine propaganda in a grave blow to centuries of American public health policy.I point all this out not to deny that there were numerous Christian leaders, churches, and organizations who aided in Trump’s rise to power and continue to support him, nor to deny the millions of self-identified Christians who do the same. The chasm between their professed faith and the acts of this administration is for them to reconcile, not for me to justify or explain. If I saw a woman eating a hamburger, I would not presume that she was Hindu. If I saw a man drinking a beer, I would not presume he was Muslim. If I saw a government that brutalized and abused people in warehouses, cut off food to the hungry, took health care from the sick, and venerated the most corrupt and amoral president in U.S. history, I would not presume that its supporters had Christ in their hearts.Beyond its unchristian nature, the second Trump administration is not particularly nationalistic, either. Trump and his associates do a half-hearted job of feigning it, of course. They drape themselves in flags, salute the troops, and claim that they are doing everything they can to benefit Americans. In Trump’s second term, however, there is an almost perfunctory nature to it, like they are just going through the motions.Nationalists typically claim that they are seeking to strengthen and revitalize a nation, which they see as the principal level for organizing society. But Trumpism is arguably not a nationalist movement at all these days. It is an increasingly personalistic one, where Trump himself is the central figure of reverence instead of any recognizable American ideal. There is also no real evidence that Trump and his associates are actually trying to strengthen the nation or materially improve Americans’ lives. If anything, they appear to be stripping it for parts or smashing its crown jewels for ideological reasons.Since returning to power last year, Trump and his underlings have slapped his face on every government product that they can. Massive banners that feature his leering visage hang from federal buildings in D.C., including the Department of Justice. The Treasury plans to put his face on a new coin and on a $250 bill, defying a statutory ban on placing living people on U.S. currency. Trump’s portrait adorns National Park passes and some passports; he says the planned 250-foot triumphal arch that he wants to build outside Arlington National Cemetery is for himself. He has often suggested on social media that his face should be added to Mount Rushmore. (Not to worry: Everyone with any expertise on the matter says it can’t be done.)Among his most high-profile renovation efforts, the administration has renamed the United States Institute of Peace building and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after Trump. A federal judge ordered that his name be removed from the latter last week; Trump petulantly replied with a rambling social media post that suggested he would “transfer control” of the center to Congress, which does not really make sense.This summer marks the 250th anniversary of American independence. While this would normally be a year of national celebrations, similar to the bicentennial in 1976, Trump has spent most of his second term reorienting the ceremonies toward self-glorification. After a number of musicians dropped out from a July music festival meant to celebrate the semiquincentennial, Trump announced that it would be replaced with a speech given by him—his first open-air remarks in the capital since January 6, 2021.Military prowess is often the last bastion of the avowed nationalist, but here too Trump has fallen short. The Iran war is shaping up to be the worst defeat in U.S. military history—not because Iran defeated the U.S. through strength of arms but because the Trump administration exposed the limits of U.S. military power to impose its will. Now Trump is poised to surrender freedom of the seas and control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran in the vainglorious effort to achieve a vastly inferior deal with Iran compared to the one struck by Barack Obama a decade earlier—if a deal can even be reached, that is. More than 160 American soldiers died in the war, as well as unknown numbers of Iranian civilians. Perhaps Trump thinks of them as “losers” and “suckers,” as well, for embarrassing him.Even as the Trump administration dives further into supporting Trump’s self-delusions, it also tries to diminish and destroy what actually made the United States the world’s most powerful country. The U.S. once had the world’s preeminent public health system, which helped eradicate diseases like smallpox and subdue perennial foes like measles. In revenge for the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump happily turned that system over to a failed Kennedy scion who is wrecking the nation’s health infrastructure so his influencer allies can sell quackish “wellness” products to desperate people.American universities have been powerful engines of economic growth and social well-being for the last 250 years, and the hub of international science and research since the end of World War II. Knowledge, in American hands, has driven the engine of prosperity; Trump is ceding that wealth to other nations. Instead of cashing in, the Trump administration has sought to choke would-be innovators out of federal funding and assume direct ideological control over them, often for white nationalist reasons. Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, put forward new rules for federal science grants last month that would irreversibly politicize the nation’s scientific infrastructure. Trump officials are wrecking climate science research programs and institutions to satisfy their fossil fuel patrons, many of whom will reward them with nonprofit jobs and funding later.The Trump administration also simply hates many Americans on a personal level. Trump’s executive order purporting to nullify birthright citizenship was an anti-constitutional effort to refine who counts as an American, making it easier to ethnically cleanse the country by depriving many lifelong Americans of the legal protections to which they are entitled by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court appeared unlikely to embrace this effort during oral arguments earlier this year, but no one can breathe freely until a ruling is handed down by the end of June.Even those who are American by the Trump administration’s terms will be hammered by its policies. Trump’s tariffs have raised prices for Americans across the economic spectrum, particularly when it comes to groceries. His illegal war against Iran clipped the jugular vein of the global economy, with even greater economic pain likely ahead. Even if Americans manage to weather these headwinds, they face new threats from Trump officials’ slash-and-burn deregulation. The Trump administration has made it easier for industries to poison your water, pollute your skies, and sell you tainted meat and infected milk.Along the way, Trump has essentially adopted a pro–white collar crime agenda. Vought largely shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as quickly as he could last year, depriving Americans of a helpful hand against crooked actors in the financial sector. The Trump Justice Department has redirected almost all of its energies toward anti-immigrant policies. Trump appointees are doing almost nothing to stop the growth of corrupt prediction markets (and may even be profiting from their insider knowledge on them) and crypto scams. Trump-led financial regulators are refusing to stop Musk from siphoning off Americans’ retirement funds to become a trillionaire when he takes SpaceX public later this year. Trump himself has pardoned white-collar fraudsters and insider traders at a record clip. The goal appears to be to create a nation of marks who can be hustled and rug-pulled at whim.The end result will be a nation that is less prosperous, less influential, less dynamic, less educated, less healthy, and less trusting than the one Trump first took over in 2016. There is no nationalism (and no Christianity, for that matter) in Trumpism, just personalism, corruption, and white supremacy with a vaguely patriotic and religious gloss. Trump and his allies cynically hope that Americans will be too fixated on the flag and the cross to notice that they’ve pulled the copper wiring out of the nation’s walls.

For years, corporations and insurers have complained that America’s personal injury system is overrun with frivolous claims, shady doctors, and greedy lawyers. Now Uber is trying to turn those complaints into federal racketeering cases.Over the past two years, the ride-hailing company has filed at least four civil RICO lawsuits around the country accusing plaintiffs’ legal firms and medical providers of coordinating to defraud the company by bringing bogus lawsuits with car accident victims. Last month, a judge in Pennsylvania declined to dismiss one of Uber’s complaints at the pleading stage, and the company immediately began citing the ruling in its other pending cases.Uber’s allegations are serious. If lawyers and doctors knowingly fabricated injuries, falsified medical records, or concealed unlawful kickback arrangements, that conduct should be punished. But Uber’s complaints simply allege coordination, and it is unclear if the company has any actual evidence. Instead, it repeatedly treats ordinary features of the U.S. personal injury system as inherently suspicious, and in doing so it reveals a greater truth about who is afforded the benefit of the doubt in the civil legal system and who is not.The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was originally enacted to help combat organized crime, and allows for enhanced criminal charges in cases of racketeering, along with treble damages in civil cases brought by people harmed by racketeering. But over time, civil RICO has evolved into an aggressive weapon for corporations to retaliate against plaintiffs’ lawyers who file claims against them. One of the clearest examples came in CSX Transportation v. Gilkison, where a railroad company brought a civil RICO suit against a plaintiffs’ firm and medical experts, claiming that they had filed fraudulent asbestos exposure claims against the company. Although CSX identified only 11 supposedly baseless claims out of more than 5,300 handled by the firm, it secured a verdict that was automatically tripled under RICO and exposed the plaintiffs’ firm to potentially millions more in attorneys’ fees and costs before the case ultimately settled. Uber undoubtedly is hoping for a similar result. Its complaints are filled with allegations that plaintiffs’ lawyers referred clients to doctors “with whom the firm maintained a close relationship,” that clients were treated on liens instead of using insurance, that attorneys coordinated appointments and care, and that law firms focused on cases involving substantial insurance coverage. Uber presents these examples as telltale signs of corruption. But this is how injury litigation frequently works in a country with a fragmented, privatized health care system built around the financial interests of insurers.The modern American personal injury system does not exist in a vacuum. It developed alongside a health care system in which private insurance companies responsible for their bottom lines act as gatekeepers for medical care. Every denial of coverage, delayed authorization, narrow provider network, burdensome deductible, or refusal to pay for treatment creates pressure elsewhere in the system. One place that pressure lands is personal injury litigation.Many injured people cannot easily obtain timely specialty treatment through their ordinary insurance, particularly after an accident where liability is contested and payment remains uncertain. Providers sometimes refuse to take patients whose care may become entangled in litigation. Deductibles and co-pays can be crushing, and some injured people lack meaningful coverage altogether. And of course, insurers themselves are incentivized to deny coverage for all but the most clearly needed treatment. Litigation liens emerged in part as a workaround to this reality, where doctors agree to defer payment until a case resolves when patients otherwise could not afford treatment at all.That dynamic is even more fraught in cases involving chronic pain and spinal injuries, which appear repeatedly throughout Uber’s complaints. Chronic pain patients already face enormous barriers to receiving consistent treatment and being believed about the severity of their symptoms. Back and neck injuries are notoriously difficult to reduce to objective measurements, particularly when pain persists long after visible trauma heals. Defense lawyers and insurers have spent decades building litigation strategies around casting doubt on pain that cannot be cleanly quantified by scans or lab results.Uber’s complaints repeatedly portray the decision not to use insurance as evidence of bad faith, but that choice reflects the incentives created by the insurance industry itself. Private insurers have spent decades opposing universal health care and public insurance expansion precisely because such systems would reduce the profitability of private insurance intermediaries. Corporate America helped build a health care system in which access to treatment is unstable, expensive, and deeply adversarial, and now it points to the downstream consequences of that system as evidence of fraud.The same dynamic shapes the economics of personal injury law itself. Corporations have spent years cultivating the caricature of the greedy ambulance chaser going after easy payouts from sympathetic juries. But contingency-fee plaintiff work only exists because ordinary people generally cannot afford to pay lawyers by the hour while fighting corporations and insurers with effectively unlimited legal resources. Insurance companies and large corporations can spread litigation costs across enormous balance sheets and have access to armies of attorneys, but injured people do not have that luxury. Someone with little income and chronic pain cannot afford to spend huge amounts of money up front to litigate against insurers determined to contest liability, causation, and damages at every stage.That is why plaintiffs’ lawyers work on contingency. They absorb enormous financial risk up front in exchange for a percentage of any eventual recovery. And because the economics are so precarious, those lawyers frequently have to make hard decisions about which cases are financially viable enough to justify years of litigation against heavily resourced defendants. Uber’s complaints portray that reality—that lawyers prefer cases with meaningful insurance coverage—as though it were evidence of corruption. Really it is just a reflection of the brutal economics of litigating against corporate defendants in the United States.Corporations’ moral framing of the issue is perverse. They routinely cast plaintiffs’ lawyers—who often accept uncertain income and substantial financial risk in order to represent injured people against institutions with vastly greater resources—as uniquely greedy or unethical. Yet defense-side lawyers at major firms routinely earn salaries and bonuses dwarfing the incomes of plaintiffs’ attorneys, and insurance companies spend enormous sums building litigation strategies explicitly designed to reduce payouts and defeat claims. Meanwhile, corporations maintain vast ecosystems of preferred experts, “independent” medical evaluators, damages consultants, biomechanical engineers, and defense-oriented physicians whose opinions predictably minimize injuries, challenge causation, and reduce payouts. A recent ProPublica investigation documented how major insurers repeatedly relied on doctors whose reports had been criticized by federal judges for cherry-picking records, disregarding physicians, and issuing unsupported opinions used to deny disability claims. No one suggested that those insurers were operating criminal enterprises, and no corporation is currently facing RICO claims for relying on their trusted experts to contest injuries and reduce liability exposure. But when injured plaintiffs coordinate with lawyers and providers to obtain treatment and pursue claims, corporations increasingly portray the same kinds of relationships as organized fraud.Even if Uber ultimately loses many of its cases, the lawsuits impose substantial costs on plaintiffs’ firms and send an unmistakable message to attorneys considering aggressive litigation against powerful corporate defendants. As American Tort Reform Association president Tiger Joyce put it, “Companies with sufficient wherewithal may increasingly resort to table-turning RICO lawsuits of their own to punish and deter [alleged] fraud.”Corporations understand that they do not need to eliminate personal injury litigation outright to reshape the legal landscape in their favor. They simply need to increase the costs of such litigation, thereby reducing the number of lawsuits that plaintiffs’ firms consider to be a reasonable financial risk. The point is to make these lawyers, as well as doctors and even injured clients, think twice before pursuing claims against companies with virtually unlimited litigation resources.That strategy fits within a broader corporate effort to constrain civil liability. In recent years, corporations have worked to narrow access to the courts and shift power away from ordinary plaintiffs through mandatory arbitration, limits on contingency fees, procedural barriers, and aggressive public campaigns against plaintiffs’ attorneys to make it harder for injured workers, consumers, and other plaintiffs to bring claims at all. Uber’s RICO lawsuits are merely a more dramatic evolution of the same project of redefining structural inequities in the civil justice and health care systems as evidence of corruption by the people trying to survive them. The lawsuits expose how deeply corporate power shapes whose doctors are treated as legitimate, whose pain is believed, and who is entitled to medical care for harms caused by those same corporations.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We have a really great guest who’s going to join us—it’s Stacey Abrams. I’m sure people who are tuned in or listening know she was a state representative in Georgia. She had two great campaigns for governor. She played a big role in Georgia turning blue, and she’s really worked on voting rights and a lot of other important issues, both in the South and around the country. So Stacey, welcome.Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.Bacon: So I want to talk about the work you’re doing now. You’re helping run a group called American Pride Rises, and part of what it’s doing is defending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And you’ve written a lot about how DEI is essential to democracy—which I think a lot of people don’t think of as connected ideas. So explain to people why defending DEI is important as we try to fight for and defend democracy right now.Abrams: Thank you so much, Perry. For me, it’s all of a piece. I’ve been working on voting rights for decades. I started with a table at Spelman College as a freshman—was the loneliest 17-year-old in college because nobody stopped at my table.And I’ve always understood that democracy is organized around who needs what and who has a voice in making it possible. And in the United States, the communities that have been the most isolated from power, the most isolated from opportunity, have been vulnerable communities—people of color, women, religious minorities, basically anyone who is considered on the margins. And in a nation that was predominantly white and mostly male with power, everything we’ve done since the founding of this country has been about how we share more and more of that power. That’s what democracy is—it’s about shared power.And in the United States, because we like acronyms and because we like to be efficient, we have lumped all of the communities that have had to fight for their share of that power under the umbrella of DEI. The way I tell people to think about it is: diversity means all people, equity means fair access to opportunity, and inclusion means respect for belonging.Whether we’re talking about a Revolutionary War fought so that, in part, white men who did not own land had the same rights as the landed gentry, or we’re talking about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to guarantee African Americans access to citizenship and the perquisites thereof, the 19th Amendment which allowed women the right to vote—actually white women, until we got the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black women equal power—whether we’re talking about Native Americans getting citizenship in 1924, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title I which expanded public education to actually include rural children and children of color and poor kids, or the Respect for Marriage Act less than a decade ago—these are all DEI.DEI isn’t just about Black kids going to Harvard. It is about any law or rule or regulation or policy change in the United States that created corrective action to allow more people to share power. And if democracy is about how we have shared power, then DEI is how we guarantee that shared power includes all who are eligible in the United States. That’s why DEI is in the DNA of democracy.Bacon: You said DEI doesn’t just mean Black kids go to Harvard. And it also doesn’t mean—it’s become this thing where DEI means you had a training at your workplace and you didn’t like it. And you and I are probably for certain kinds of training, but it’s much deeper than that. How do we get people to think about DEI the way you said it, as opposed to the way the right—and we’ll come back to the center-left—has defined it?Abrams: I would actually say that the right has properly defined DEI, and we know that because if you read Project 2025, it is one of the most oft-cited issues that they attack, and they mean for it to cover the waterfront. For example, they understand that DEI includes the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that’s why, under this regime, when they eliminated federal compliance with DEI, one of the first actions taken was that the Department of Energy ceased to enforce Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. What that means is that buildings built in the United States that have to get a seal of approval from the Department of Energy no longer have to comply with sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act.The right has long understood that DEI is the body of law and the body of regulation that allows everyone to participate. But they also recognize that the left has largely been embarrassed by the necessity, and therefore they lean into the tendency to demonize our language. And what happens on the side of those who know what we need—we become so chagrined that we spend our time apologizing for it or trying to change the language to accommodate their distaste, as opposed to recognizing they’re going after it for a reason.And so the work that we do at American Pride Rises is to expand people’s understanding of what everyday DEI looks like. DEI meant that when veterans in the United States, after this administration took power—again, another example of what they did when they slashed DEI—a lot of vets lost their small business loans, because many veterans in the United States were covered under DEI protections. They got access to funding. They got access to education. It was necessary because that was a population that was being underserved. They got special access, corrective access, expanded access—and all of those things can be separate but interchangeable. And in the process, they became part of DEI. So when the right, in this regime, canceled DEI protections, they canceled them for people who put their lives on the line, who are disabled because they were in U.S. service. And that was DEI.So a lot of our work is expanding how people understand it, to comport with what the right has done to demonize it and deconstruct it.Bacon: So in some ways you’re saying that the right understands DEI and the left, or the Democrats, either don’t understand it or are not invested in defending it? You’re saying, to some extent, they understand what DEI does more than we do?Abrams: They have a more expansive recognition of it, because what tends to happen—this has worked very well on the right for eons. They have this, I call it a triad. They demonize our language. They recognize that there is a corrective action, an expansion of power that is happening in this country, and they immediately attack the language.So let’s think back to abortion. The right actually supported abortion for years and then changed their minds. Gerald Ford supported abortion rights. They realized they could weaponize it and suddenly started demonizing the language. When you demonize something, you make the recipient think that they are wrong—because when you can control someone’s language, you often control how they think about a thing.They demonize, and while we’re so busy trying to make them like us again—like the language we use—they then move to litigation. They sue to dismantle whatever corrective action has been taken, whatever expansion of power has happened. And then they legislate to ensure you never get it back.And so we watched that happen with abortion rights. We watched it happen with voting rights. We’ve watched it happen with education. And the reason I use those three is that in America, if you want to access the American dream—which is the intention of our democracy, that we all get to have this fulsome life—there are three parts to it: education, what we know; the economy, what we do; and elections, who’s in charge.But when you can convince a community, a people, an organization, a party that what they’re asking for is somehow unjust—if you can embarrass them into thinking that if they were just better at it, they wouldn’t need it—then we ignore the systems that are being put in place to either constrain our access or take it back. And that’s why we have watched the left capitulate to the insult, while the right uses that capitulation and our instinctive chagrin to further expand their dominion.They’ve been clear. They do not want multiple communities to participate. Mike Lee has said that too many people are in democracy—I’m paraphrasing him poorly.Bacon: He actually said that, yes.Abrams: And he’s a U.S. senator who said this. We have watched J.D. Vance lift up white supremacy and Christian nationalism. We have watched the president of the United States suggest that women are unfit for leadership, and certainly unfit for power. Why would we then be surprised that they would oppose any of the rules and laws that allow that participation to be not only manifest but effective?Bacon: Talking about our side—I guess what I read a lot is there’s this thing called “wokeness” that I don’t really know what it is, and Democrats lose when they are too woke but win when they talk about the economy. You might agree with the last part. But that’s generally implied in five New York Times op-eds a week. So when you hear that, how do you respond to it?Abrams: OK, let’s start with what “woke” means. “Woke” is actually a term of art created by Black women, and it referred to the need to be awake to the threats that you face. If you know how to hunt, wokeness should make sense to you. You don’t want to be asleep when danger is facing you. So wokeness simply says: we should be not only aware of but intentional about our response to those dangers, those threats, and aware of possibilities and pushing for those possibilities.So think about who has been angry about the idea of wokeness: anyone who’s been forced into actual competition. If you were in a protected class of people who were guaranteed access to education because of legacy, guaranteed access to the economy because of barriers to women, people of color, the disabled—all these populations that are now competing with you for these jobs—if you now have to participate in a competitive system, what are you going to say? That the system isn’t fair. And how are you going to say it? You’re going to blame the people who are now making you have to work a little harder.What the left has done—and I wouldn’t put the New York Times on the left—is they have taken the critique and internalized it as though it’s valid. And you see this happen with anyone who’s the victim of abuse. There is a tendency to internalize what you’ve been told is wrong with you. So the notion that communities fighting for fair access to housing, to healthcare—that somehow should be demonized—is the weapon of those who oppose those communities having access.Then you layer that on top of elections. We did not lose an election because of wokeness. The populations who vote for Democrats are populations that have benefited from us being awake to the systemic barriers that make it impossible or very difficult to fully participate in America—including those who want to participate in the economy. Which is why affordable housing and healthcare are not woke issues in a way that should be demonized, but woke issues in the sense that we now see the systems that make it harder for us to get what we need. Who is telling us it’s a bad idea? The people who don’t want you to have access.And so it is like listening to the arsonist tell you about the dangers of fire. We cannot do that. And what’s happening unfortunately with mainstream media—especially with the editorial direction we see in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, because they’re all of a piece in this—is a tendency to say that any community that does not have everything they need is simply not working hard enough. It is gaslighting at the highest level with the best language.The work that I do—not only with American Pride Rises, but with the 10 Steps campaign—is about how we remember how power is built, how it is shared, and how it is reclaimed. And that cannot happen if we allow people to tell us we’re not entitled to that power to begin with. That is the through line of all of those op-eds and all of those screeds and all of those arguments—that we don’t need to think about the systems, we just need to think about the outcome.Bacon: I want to shift a little bit to the last few weeks, which have been rough to watch—basically, Republican states are redrawing districts to eliminate Black congressmen from them, and I think they’re going to do that with state legislators coming up soon. So just generally, what is your reaction to what Louisiana—every day we have a new person redistricted out of their seat. What is your general reaction to that, and what do we do about it?Abrams: Again, I draw a through line from the work I did when I was a student at Spelman to today. In the 20th century, when you and I were younger, we were fighting for expansion of voting rights—getting more people to participate. We wanted more engagement, and that’s because we had the Voting Rights Act.You and I were born after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. My parents were not. My parents were in college when the Voting Rights Act became effective. And so they grew up without having access to not just democracy but the ability to participate in how decisions are made.Then you and I—we are from a generation that benefited from having a law that said, no matter which state you lived in, you now all have to comply with the notion of one person, one vote. And you have to comply, no matter what state you’re in, with the idea that using someone’s race, color, and creed against them is no longer permissible.And since the day the Voting Rights Act passed, there has been an assiduous attempt to dismantle it. And they did it in 2013 with Shelby v. Holder. They did it in 2021 with the Brnovich decision. They did it in [2019] with Rucho v. Common Cause, which said partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable. That was a precursor to being able to say that if you call everything that affects people of a certain race “partisanship,” you can do it and it’s fine. And then you capstone it with the Callais decision.And so what we have watched unfold since April 29 is the arms race to take away political power from communities that are politically inconvenient. They are starting with Black communities, because every time they’ve tried to dismantle and harm democracy in America, they start with Black people—but they never stop there.And so what I want those listening to us to recognize is: it may be centered in the South now, but it’s heading west, it’s heading north. It’s heading for any community where power being held by someone else is inconvenient. You cannot protect democracy by only protecting those in the majority. You have to protect those who need those protections the most, if those protections are to mean anything.And therefore, what we’ve watched happen in Tennessee—where I went to testify—in Mississippi, where they luckily had to pull back; in Alabama, where they intentionally dismantled Black power; in Louisiana, where they canceled an election; in South Carolina, where luckily those state senators said not now—but what’s happened in Florida, what’s happening in Texas, what’s going to happen in Georgia in two weeks—it’s all about wresting power away. They may use race as the proxy, but this is a fight for power. This is a fight for authoritarians to have more, and for people who believe in democracy and who need democracy to have less.Bacon: What do we do with this argument from Roberts and Alito and so on—which is basically that any consideration of race, any time race is thought of in any way, we can’t talk about race? The way to—what does Roberts say? Basically trying to erase any conversation, as if the country’s been equal the whole time—as opposed to acknowledging the inequality as part of what we have to do. How do we deal with those kinds of arguments—that the key is to not talk about race, ever, basically?Abrams: Perry, you know this as a student of history. Jim Crow laws regarding voting rights came after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 15th Amendment said you can’t use race to deny someone the right to vote. The Jim Crow laws that passed in the wake of the 15th Amendment were race-neutral. They never mentioned race.Bacon: Did not say “Black people cannot vote” directly. Yes.Abrams: Never said it. Never said it once. What they said was: you have to pay a poll tax. Who didn’t have money? People who were recently enslaved. They said you have to pass a literacy test. Who was likely illiterate? People who were legally prohibited from learning to read.But when that got harder and harder, they also had another rule. And this is the perfect example of why race neutrality is a fallacy. Those same communities who had lesser literacy because they weren’t slaves but were sharecroppers, the same white folks who weren’t able to pay the poll taxes because they had sub-minimum-wage jobs—they were told: as long as your grandfather could vote before the Civil War, you’re fine.That meant it was race-neutral, but it used conditions that only applied to certain races to provide protection.But when that got harder and harder to maintain—because more and more Black people went to HBCUs, got better jobs, started creating means of production and paying themselves and their comrades more—what happened then was that they started redrawing districts, and they started concentrating power. And you had at-large districts, because if the population was too small to have power without districts drawn to represent their community of interest, you could shut them out. That’s how you end up with runoffs. That’s how you end up with massive districts. That’s how you get gerrymandering.Gerrymandering had existed before, but it got perfected by those who opposed the racialization of America—meaning Black people could vote. And so anytime you hear “race-neutral,” what you should hear is that we do not want races that we do not like to have power that we do not want to cede, for purposes that may not benefit us in the future. There is no race neutrality in America. That’s like saying gender neutrality exists. It doesn’t. We are human, and immutable characteristics exist. But they’re also not just visible—they’ve been baked into the construct and the context of how we live our lives.But what is neutral is the decision not to do anything about it. This is a moment where race neutrality is cowardice. Now is the time for us to recognize that when race is used as a proxy to diminish democratic participation, to undermine the fealty we have to one another, then race neutrality is an act of cowardice. We have to acknowledge that race exists, that race is used and weaponized against us, and that while they may start with a race you’re not necessarily that worried about, they’re coming for a race near you pretty soon.Bacon: So what is the redress? There have been some lawsuits filed against these gerrymanders, and I think some have been delayed. But is there any redress here? Are we going to wake up next week and there are no Black congressmen and very few Black state legislators? Or what can we do, both people in the South and people outside of the South?Abrams: We’ll start with the last part. Everyone in the country needs to be concerned. Sixty percent of the Black population in America lives in the South, but roughly half of the Latino population lives in the Sun Belt. While the Callais decision focused on Louisiana and the South, we have to remember that in 1975, because of John Roberts’s mentor, William Rehnquist—who used poll taxes and literacy tests to deny Latinos and Native Americans the right to vote in Arizona before he became a Supreme Court justice—this is not just about what happens to Black people. But Black people are always the first line of ignominy in the attacks on democracy.And so what we have to recognize, first and foremost, is that this is a national issue. That is why I am so proud of states across this country who are not racing to weaponize—they’re racing to neutralize. This is the one time where neutralization is actually good. This is about saying, You’re not going to gain advantage by creating harm. That is a genuine good.Bacon: California and Virginia—Abrams: Exactly.Bacon: OK.Abrams: They are not trying to expand the number of seats just to have them. They said, If Texas, if you’re going to take this number of seats, we’re going to neutralize the number of seats you get. I think that is good. It’s jury nullification with voting. I’m fine with that.Bacon: OK. Sure.Abrams: But the next thing we have to do is recognize that we had more than 90 million Americans who did not participate in the 2024 elections. That is more than enough to win races across the country—and that’s not presuming that everyone shares our political values. But the more activated people are in the participation in elections, the more likely we are to get the benefits that all of us need.And this goes back to your very first question about wokeness and the economy versus questions of identity. Identity matters when the economy matters. You can’t get to affordability if the reason you are denied access is that the system is organized against you, either intentionally or benignly. And so the more people who participate in a democracy, the fairer that democracy tends to be. It is not a given, but it is more likely.And so we’ve got to increase registration, we’ve got to increase turnout. We also have to recognize that this is a national project. This is not about ignoring the South, once again—this is about understanding that we’re in this together.And so over the course of the summer and heading into the fall, there are going to be organizations across the country that are participating—a number of organizations that I helped to start through Fair Fight, Fair Count. But also, if you look at the 10 Steps campaign, which I started—10stepscampaign.org—we’re helping to aggregate organizations and groups that are doing this work. All Roads Lead South—allroadsleadtothesouth.org—has a list of opportunities for participation. We’ve got to fight to defend Southern access, because it’s the way we protect everyone’s access.Bacon: Last question. I want to talk about what’s happening in Georgia, the state you’ve been involved in politics in. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the primary. Jon Ossoff has raised a lot of money, been polling really well. They’re now joined together—they had a joint rally. How do you feel about their chances in November?Abrams: Georgia is a swing state, and they can win. We can win up and down the ballot. We have the opportunity actually to flip the State House in Georgia.And so I’m working hard to encourage voting up and down the ballot. We’ve got to vote not only for our senator and our governor, but we have to have a lieutenant governor who can help in the State Senate. We’ve got to flip the State House so we have a Democratic speaker. We have to have a secretary of state who actually fights for all Georgians and not just for the Georgians he likes—he got a lot of credit for not committing treason, but he also was the architect of a lot of voter suppression. And so I’m looking for a new secretary of state who actually defends the right to vote for all Georgians.We have to have an attorney general who sues on behalf of Georgians and doesn’t sue to protect those companies and those who would attack Georgians. So we’ve got to vote up and down the ballot, and I think we have a ticket that can make that happen. We’ve got to get through these runoffs, but I think on the other side, Georgia remains the state to watch and the state to win.Bacon: On that note, Stacey Abrams, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.Abrams: Thank you for having me.Bacon: Bye-bye.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.Former Georgia state representative and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams says that conservatives are right to target diversity, inclusion, and equity because implementing those concepts forces white people, men, and other traditionally dominant groups in the U.S. to share power. She argues the Nineteenth Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and other landmark policies are part of DEI. “DEI is the body of law that allows everyone to participate,” Abrams says in the latest edition of Right Now. Abrams helps lead America Pride Rises, an organization trying to define DEI initiatives across the country. Abrams also emphasized that people around the country need to start focusing on the rollback of Black political power happening in the South. Tactics used against Black people in the South, Abrams warns, are likely to be used to target other groups around the country. That’s what’s happened in the past, she says. Abrams also discusses the strong chance that Democrats have to sweep the statewide races in Georgia this fall.