December 31, 1915 The U.S. branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was founded. FOR’s Mission StatementThe Fellowship of Reconciliation seeks to replace violence, war, racism and economic injustice with nonviolence, peace and justice. We are an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a transforming way of life and as a means of radical change. We educate, train, build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and compassionate actions locally, nationally, and globally. FOR’s website
December 31, 1970 The U.S. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which in 1964 authorized an increase in U.S. military involvement in Vietnam as a response to a reported attack on U.S. naval forces patrolling close to the North Vietnamese border. The reports of the attacks were later revealed to be fictitious. The resolution was used as the basis for the entire war which lasted until 1974 and took the lives of millions of Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans. What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin
(Their email program seems to be off for the holidays! I keep a link; here is today’s.)
December 30, 1901 The worst year in the 20th century for lynching in the U.S. ended with a total of 130 victims (105 blacks, 25 whites). Ida Wells-Barnett had been a teacher and newspaper editor in Memphis, Tennessee, where she wrote against the evils of lynching in her columns in The Free Speech and Headlight. Forced from the South by threat of violence, she continued her efforts in Chicago. From a letter to President William McKinley from Barnett, published in the Cleveland Gazette April 9, 1898: Mr. President, the colored citizens of this country in general, and Chicago in particular, desire to respectfully urge that some action be taken by you as chief magistrate of this great nation, first for the apprehension and punishment of the lynchers of Postmaster Baker, of Lake City, S.C.; second, we ask indemnity for the widow and children, both for the murder of the husband and father, and for injuries sustained by themselves; third, we most earnestly desire that national legislation be enacted for the suppression of the national crime of lynching. For nearly twenty years lynching crimes, which stand side by side with Armenian and Cuban outrages, have been committed and permitted by this Christian nation. Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless. Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years. To our appeals for justice the stereotyped reply has been that the government could not interfere in a state matter. Postmaster Baker’s case was a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post of duty in defense of his country’s honor, as truly as did ever a soldier on the field of battle. We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home. Italy and China have been indemnified by this government for the lynching of their citizens. We ask that the government do as much for its own.
December 30, 1936 above: Workers sit down at GM Supporters pass in food to sitdown strikers Members of the United Automobile Workers sat down at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. GM, the world’s largest corporation at the time, had refused to recognize or negotiate with the union, despite passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935 which promised unions the right to organize. The local’s membership adopted a tactic developed by French workers. Instead of picketing outside a factory only to be ignored or forcibly cleared away, the sit-down strike enabled workers to halt production and seize the plant “from the inside.” The strike began just days after the end of a successful sit-down at Ford supplier Kelsey-Hayes.
December 30, 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst, and his colleague Anthony Russo were indicted by a federal grand jury for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the news media. The papers were part of a 7000-page, top-secret government history of the United States’ political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, and described air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the American public had been told that such actions had occurred. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers The Post – new movie (2017) watch trailer Why were they being prosecuted?
December 30, 1972 President Richard Nixon ordered an end to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. The most recent air strikes had been retaliation for North Vietnam’s walking out of the peace negotiations in Paris and pressure to force it to submit to U.S. terms. Bombing of strategic targets and Hanoi (the North’s capital) and Haiphong lasted for eight days with a 36-hour break for Christmas. The 20,000 tons (18.1 million kg) of bombs killed just over 1600 North Vietnamese, and a dozen B-52s were lost. North Vietnam agreed to return to the bargaining table.
December 30, 1993 The state of Israel and the Vatican under Pope John Paul II agreed to extend diplomatic recognition to one another.
By JOHN HANNAUpdated 10:44 AM CST, December 29, 2024Share
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there’s one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas.
That’s because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory.
The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.
Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.”
Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas.
“The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.”
A small problem, but wide support for a fix
Kansas’ experience appeared to receive little if any attention outside the state as Republicans elsewhere pursued proof-of-citizenship requirements this year.
Arizona enacted a requirement this year, applying it to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or president. The Republican-led U.S. House passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP won control of the Senate in November.
In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state revised the form that poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require those not born in the U.S. to show naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge declined to block the practice days before the election.
Also, sizable majorities of voters in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and the presidential swing states of North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to amend their state constitutions’ provisions on voting even though the changes were only symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all U.S. citizens could vote now say that only U.S. citizens can vote — a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible.
To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught.
“There is nothing unconstitutional about ensuring that only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, of Texas, the leading sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email statement to The Associated Press.
Why the courts rejected the Kansas citizenship rule
After Kansas residents challenged their state’s law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That’s an issue Congress could resolve.
The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn’t justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year.
In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.”
Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved.
“The technological challenge of how quickly can you verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.”
Would the Kansas law stand today?
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kansas case in 2020. But in August, it split 5-4 in allowing Arizona to continue enforcing its law for voting in state and local elections while a legal challenge goes forward.
Seeing the possibility of a different Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should pursue proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was the Kansas attorney general when his state’s law was challenged.
“If the same matter arose now and was litigated, the facts would be different,” he said in an interview.
But voting rights advocates dismiss the idea that a legal challenge would turn out differently. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court fight.
“We know the people we can call,” Johnson said. “We know that we’ve got the expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted “a flurry — a landslide — of litigation against this.”
Born in Illinois but unable to register in Kansas
Initially, the Kansas requirement’s impacts seemed to fall most heavily on politically unaffiliated and young voters. As of fall 2013, 57% of the voters blocked from registering were unaffiliated and 40% were under 30.
But Fish was in his mid-30s, and six of the nine residents who sued over the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three even produced citizenship documents and still didn’t get registered, according to court documents.
“There wasn’t a single one of us that was actually an illegal or had misinterpreted or misrepresented any information or had done anything wrong,” Fish said.
He was supposed to produce his birth certificate when he sought to register in 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver’s license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. A clerk wouldn’t accept the copy Fish had of his birth certificate. He still doesn’t know where to find the original, having been born on an Air Force base in Illinois that closed in the 1990s.
Several of the people joining Fish in the lawsuit were veterans, all born in the U.S., and Fish said he was stunned that they could be prevented from registering.
Liz Azore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans haven’t traveled outside the U.S. and don’t have passports that might act as proof of citizenship, or don’t have ready access to their birth certificates.
She and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make a proof-of-citizenship law run more smoothly today than it did in Kansas a decade ago.
“It’s going to cover a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It’s going to be disenfranchising large swaths of the country.”
___
Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
—
Note:
Every year on this date, I post the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
My book about that event was so hard to write I had to take a long break in the middle of it. When you write a book, you get to know your characters as if they were family. Sometimes you love them and sometimes you don’t, but they become part of you. As the massacre drew inexorably closer, I wrote about the scenery, plant life, and animals of the Plains as a distraction from what I knew was coming.
But it came anyway. Even after all these years, I still have a hard time on the date of the massacre.
In an interview this year, someone asked me why I write as if I am running out of time, and it hit me that I write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre.
December 29, 1890 The U.S. Army killed approximately 300 Miniconju Sioux (another of the Teton Sioux tribes). They had fled after the murder of Sitting Bull and sought refuge on the Oglala reservation of Pine Ridge at Wounded Knee, in the new state of South Dakota. The 7th Cavalry (Custer’s old command) fired their artillery amidst mostly unarmed women, children, and fleeing men. The Wounded Knee Massacre was the final major military battle in the genocide against Native Americans. 18 soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their “bravery.” Encroaching white settlement after gold was found in 1874 on Sioux lands led to conflicts. The Great Sioux Agreement of 1889 established reservations for the native inhabitants and encouraged further white settlement on Indian land.
December 29, 1996 War-weary guerrilla and government leaders in Guatemala signed an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict. What was the conflict all about?
Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.
On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.
During the campaign, these two wings made common cause because they both want to destroy the current U.S. government, especially as President Joe Biden had been using it to strengthen American democracy. Traditional MAGA wants to get rid of the government that protects equality and replace it with one that enforces white male supremacy and Christianity. New MAGA—which some have started to call DOGE, after the Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—wants to get rid of the government that regulates business, especially technology, and protects American interests against competition from countries like China.
Their shared commitment to the destruction of the current government is about the only overlap between these two factions.
With the campaign over, traditional MAGA and DOGE are ripping apart. Trump sparked the fight when he announced on Sunday, December 22, that he would appoint Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India, as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence.
On Monday, MAGA activist Laura Loomer criticized Trump’s choice of Krishnan. Loomer was in Trump’s inner circle until three months ago, when her anti-immigrant tirades made Trump campaign staff worry she would cost Trump votes and forced her out of his public schedule. Loomer noted that Krishnan wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from certain countries.
Krishnan has also called for making it easier for skilled foreign workers to come to the U.S. on H-1B temporary visas. These programs are important to the technology sector, but critics say they enable companies to hire foreign workers at lower pay than U.S. workers, that H-1B workers are trapped in their jobs, and that wage theft is rampant in the H-1B program.
Loomer said those jobs “should be given to American STEM students.” Then she got to the heart of the matter, complaining that MAGA is getting left out of the new administration. She noted that “none of the tech executives who are meeting with Trump and getting appointed in his cabinet supported him in 2020 or during the 2024 primary.” She continued: “I feel like many of them are trying to get into Trump’s admin[istration] to enrich themselves and get contracts at [the] D[epartment] O[f] D[efense]. This is not America First Policy.”
When another tech entrepreneur and Trump appointee David Sacks defended Krishnan, Loomer made a series of racist posts, claiming among other things that: “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India.” She said, “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas. Not an extension.”
On Wednesday, December 25—Christmas, a major holiday for MAGA supporters—Musk took a stand against Loomer and the MAGAs. He posted on X that the U.S. needs twice the number of engineers it has, and welcomed foreign engineers. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he tweeted. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
Loomer responded: “Is DOGE real? Or is it a vanity project?” Others complained about the “Tech Bros” “hubris [and] arrogance with their flippant, condescending, and elitist responses to legitimate criticisms of the H1B1 program.” Still others pointed out that there were big layoffs in tech this year and asked why they weren’t getting rehired if there was such a desperate need for workers.
Musk posted: “Investing in Americans is actually hard. Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite a good a job [sic], but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”
Loomer responded: “The elephant in the room is that [Musk], who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total f*cking drag on the Trump transition. He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big Tech to slither in to Mar a Lago.” [sic]
Musk called Loomer a troll, and she responded that “Telling the truth isn’t trolling… You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago…. We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing.”
Thursday everything broke open. Ramaswamy, who was born in Ohio to parents who immigrated to America from India, posted on X an indictment of American culture that seemed a direct assault on MAGA Republicans, who have been vocal about their disdain for education.
Ramaswamy posted that tech companies hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers rather than native-born Americans because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” He called for “[m]ore math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”
“If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve,” he warned. “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our a**es handed to us by China.” He called for America to embrace “a new golden era,” but warned it was possible “only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence.”
With that, the fat was in the fire. MAGA dragged Ramaswamy, with even former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley retorting: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.” Haley ran for president against Trump but ultimately endorsed him. She is herself the child of Indian immigrants.
Loomer also hit back against Musk, posting: “Is DOGE a way to ‘cut spending’ or REDIRECT the spending toward the pet projects of tech bro billionaires? It’s looking like the latter, T[o] B[e] H[onest].” She continued: “‘Hey, let’s convince the peasants that we are saving them money as we enrich ourselves!’” Another right-wing poster wondered: “How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight?”
When Musk appeared to limit Loomer’s ability to use X, she posted: “I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.” Other right-wing accounts accused Musk of censoring them, too, and racist anti-immigrant sentiments flowed freely.
On Friday, when cartoonist and right-wing commenter Scott Adams posted that MAGA was “taking a page from Democrats on how to lose elections while feeling good about themselves,” Musk agreed and added: “And those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.”
Loomer commented that Musk “is now referring to MAGA as ‘contemptible fools.’… The Trump base is being replaced by Big Tech executives. So sad to see this.” She tagged Trump and added “I feel so sad for MAGA.” Meanwhile, other MAGA supporters on X piled on Musk, complaining that he had not paid them, as promised, for their participation in his “free speech” petition during the campaign.
By today, key Trump ally Steve Bannon, a central figure in MAGA, had taken to another right-wing social media platform to warn his supporters that Musk is showing his “true colors” and to demand that the H-1B visa program be “zeroed-out.” Another right-wing influencer, Jack Posobiec, tweeted: “Today was the day we found out who is getting rich by screwing over the American worker.”
Trump did not weigh in on the fight but, in what appeared to be intended to be a private communication to Musk, wrote on his social media site: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.” (According to Aaron Pellish and Alayna Treene of CNN, “x” here likely refers to Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii.)
Why does this all matter? Because while Trump’s people keep insisting he won in a landslide and has a mandate that he will put in place on day one, his fragile coalition is splintering even before he takes office.
Trump won less than 50% of the vote. Despite their slim victory, the Republican Party was already in a civil war between MAGA and establishment Republicans who are fed up with the MAGAs who threaten to burn down the government and almost a century of international diplomacy: just a week ago, Senate Republicans were publicly complaining about the dysfunctional “sh*t show” and “fiasco” in the House.
Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base—which, indeed, have opposing interests—are at war.
This video is a great resource as he details his own sources that show the in 1776 only 17% of the population was religious. It also shows how the religious people keep pushing for something that never was due to being taught that lie as a child. Hell they say my pastor / preacher told me it was a Christian nation, my parents did, my friends knew it was … so it must be. But no it is a created fiction on the scale of Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Lord of the Ring trilogy. Great short video to watch. Hugs
Were Americans more religious in 1776? Here’s what we know about religious affiliation in 1776 America.
Is America a Christian nation? Was America founded on Judeo-Christian values? The United States had a religious affiliation rate of about 17% in 1776, according to The Churching of America 1776-2005 by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark.
This is an incredibly informative post on how to understand and deal with Christian apologetics anti-trans disinformation and lies. I started following this young person when he first left his church and faith doing videos on how the anti-science he was taught all his life in his church schools was incorrect and wrong. Now he exposes how Frank Turek got his breasts reduced in the Navy because it did not look male enough to him … yet he doesn’t feel that had anything to do with gender. The hypocrisy hits you hard in the face, but Frank can not see it, because he is paid not to. The video also talks about the Littman study and the Cass report in a small section. The video also talks a small amount on how the right / religious people frame their talking points to get sympathy for their views by pretending to save the innocent victims. If there is any doubt I support trans people 100% let that end. Trans rights are human rights. Trans women are simply women, trans men are men. I look forward to the day we don’t need to use the word trans, just as I do the day when we can call same sex marriage just marriage. As I think it was Spock in Star Trek who said a difference that makes no difference is no difference. Hugs
and there was quite a comments thread either here or on Jill Dennison’s place, (I think it was a little in both places, and the link to Jill’s is not that thread) about resistance and community teaching. Here’s an example, right there in Florida. All the links within are pertinent and worth clicking to read.
Scottie's Playtime 