Professor of immigration and citizenship law at the University of Virginia, Amanda Frost joins the show to discuss her book You Are Not American: Citizen Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Live-streamed on September 22, 2025.
The man in the MAGA cap and the “Size Matters” T-shirt allowed me to take his picture. The “size” in question had to do with bullets, represented on the shirt in a line from pistol- to bazooka-grade. Not far from us stood a man in a T-shirt that read “MAKE MEN MEN AGAIN.” Women walked past in red-white-and-blue outfits. Many had Bible verse numbers or slogans on their T-shirts, though quite a few sported images of guns, some of which were aimed at “RINOs.” At a booth nearby, a group of women was raising money for the “patriots” of January 6 incarcerated in “the DC gulag.”
It was a hot summer day in 2023, and there was little new for me at this gathering of right-wing activists in Las Vegas. Yet as I took in the January 6 memorabilia, I couldn’t help thinking back on another, very different event four years earlier. In 2019, I found myself in a seventeenth-century palazzo in Verona, Italy, for a gathering of the World Congress of Families, where I sat in on speeches and discussions with American, Russian, and European political activists on “the LGBT totalitarians” and the evils of “global liberalism.” The message was in some sense the same as the one in Las Vegas, but it’s safe to say that among the well-heeled, stylishly-dressed, highly-educated, and well-traveled participants there, members of the Nevada T-shirt crowd would have stuck out like a platter of corn dogs at a fine Italian trattoria.
The last of the speakers in Verona was a diminutive white-haired academic in a nondescript jacket and tie, the dean of a small law school in California, whose brief tirade about “gender confusion” among the “radical Left” didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I did, however, take note of his name: John Eastman. The same Eastman would later show up at the podium on the White House lawn on the morning of January 6 and he would subsequently turn up as “Co-Conspirator 2” in the federal indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. He himself would be indicted in Georgia for the same conspiracy and disbarred in his home state of California. (He’s pled “not guilty” to conspiracy fraud and forgery charges.)
It’s a long way from the palazzo populists of Verona to the RINO hunters of Las Vegas, but they’re clearly part of the same story—the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Though diverse and complicated, the movement is united in its rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the republic was founded and represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
They don’t want a seat at the table—they want to burn down the house
The American idea, as Abraham Lincoln saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. While the American republic has often fallen short of this idea, many people rightly insist that we should, at the very least, try to live up to it. And in its better moments, the United States and its revolutionary creed have inspired freedom movements around the world.
But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey.
No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and now controls the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It claims to be “patriotic,” and yet its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.
How did such an anti-American movement take root in America?
The antidemocratic movement isn’t the province of any single demographic, or even ideology. The real story of the authoritarian Right features a rowdy mix of personalities, often working at odds with one another: “apostles” of Jesus; atheistic billionaires; reactionary Catholic theologians; pseudo-Platonic intellectuals; woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy”; high-powered evangelical networkers; Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand; pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (White) babies; COVID truthers; and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.
To repeat the obvious: this movement represents a serious threat to the survival of American democracy. Today’s political conflicts aren’t simply the result of incivility, tribalism, “affective partisanship,” or some other unfortunate trend in manners. All will be well, the thinking goes, if the red people and the blue people would just sit down for some talk therapy and give a little to the other side. In earlier times this may have been sage advice. Today it’s a delusion.
American democracy is failing because it’s under direct attack, and the attack isn’t coming equally from both sides. The authoritarian movement isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house. It isn’t the product of misunderstandings; it advances its antidemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation. In my book, Money, Lies and God, I bring the receipts to support these uncomfortable facts.
The fall has been swift, but it was decades in the making
When did the crisis begin? It can sometimes seem that the antidemocratic reaction snuck up on us and suddenly exploded in our living rooms when Donald Trump descended on the escalator and announced his candidacy. Looking back over the decade and a half I’ve spent reporting on the subject, the escalation of the threat is breathtaking. In 2009, I was reporting on an antidemocratic ideology focused on hostility to public education that appeared to be gaining influence on the Right. By 2021, I was writing about an antidemocratic movement whose members had stormed the Capitol—and about a Republican Party whose leadership disgracefully acquiesced in the attempted overthrow of American democracy. Yet the swiftness of the fall should not distract from the long duration of the underlying causes.
The present crisis is deeply rooted in material changes in American life over the past half century. The antidemocratic movement came together long before the 2016 election, and the forces hurling against American democracy will long outlive the current political moment. Their various elements have emerged along the fissures in American society, and they continue to thrive on our growing educational, cultural, regional, racial, religious, and informational divides.
This antidemocratic reaction draws much of its energy from the massive increase in economic inequality and resulting economic dislocations over the past five decades. In the middle of the twentieth century, capitalist America was home to the most powerful and prosperous middle class the world had hitherto seen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, capitalism had yielded in many respects to a form of oligarchy, and the nation had been divided into very different strata. At the very top of the wealth distribution arose a sector whose aggregate net worth makes the rich men of earlier decades look like amateurs. Between 1970 and 2020, the top 0.1 percent doubled its share of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, lost a corresponding share.
For the large majority of Americans, the new era brought wage stagnation and even, within certain groups in recent years, declining life expectancy. In the happy handful of percentiles located just beneath the 0.1 percent, on the other hand, a hyper-competitive group has managed to hold on to its share of the pie even as it remains fearful of falling behind.
While the political conflicts of the present cannot be reduced to economic conflicts, the great disparity in wealth distribution is a significant contributor. It has fractured our faith in the common good, unleashed an epidemic of status anxiety, and made a significant subset of the population susceptible to conspiracism and disinformation.
Different groups, of course, have responded differently. The antidemocratic movement isn’t the work of any one social group but of several working together. It relies in part on the narcissism and paranoia of a subset of the super-rich who invest their fortunes in the destruction of democracy. They appear to operate on the cynical belief that manipulation of the masses through disinformation will enhance their own prosperity. The movement also draws in a sector of the professional class that has largely abdicated its social responsibility. Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below, from the anger and resentment of those who perceive that they’re falling behind.
As these groups jockey for status in a fast-changing world, they give rise to a politics of rage and grievance. The reaction may be understandable. But it’s not, on that account, reasonable or constructive. Although the antidemocratic movement emerged, in part, out of massive structural conflicts in the American political economy, it does not represent a genuine attempt to address the problems from which it arose. This new politics aims for results that few people want and that ultimately harm everybody.
The rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism
What are the main features of this new American fascism grounded in resentment? In America, just as in unstable political economies of the past, the grievances to which the daily injustices of an unequal system give rise inevitably vent on some putatively alien “other” supposedly responsible for all our ills. America’s demagogues, however, have a special advantage. They can draw on the nation’s barbarous history of racism and the fear that the “American way of life” is slipping away, abetted by an out-of-touch elite.
The story of this movement cannot be told apart from the racial and ethnic divisions that it continuously exploits and exacerbates. The psychic payoff that the new, antidemocratic religious and right-wing nationalism offers its adherents is the promise of membership in a privileged “in-group” previously associated with being a White Christian conservative—a supposed “real American”—with the twist that those privileges may now be claimed even by those who aren’t White, provided they worship and vote the “right” way. At the same time, the movement is the result of the concerted cultivation of a range of anxieties that draw from deep and wide roots.
Anxiety about traditional gender roles and hierarchies is the rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism. Among the bearded young men of the New Right, it shows up in social media feeds bursting with rank misogyny. In the theocratic wing of the movement, it puts on the tattered robes of patriarchy, with calls for “male headship” and female subordination, and relentlessly demonizes LGBT people. On the political stage, it has centered around the long-running effort to strip women of their reproductive health rights and, in essence, make their bodies the property of the state. That effort has had significant consequences at the ballot box—which is why a sector of movement leadership is starting to speak openly about stripping women of the right to vote. The tragedy of American politics is that the same forces that have damaged so many personal lives have been weaponized and enlisted in the service of a political movement that’s sure to make the situation worse.
Expressions of pain, not plans for the future
The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy, rather than what it proposes to create. Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story. Its members resemble the revolutionaries of the past in their drive to overthrow “the regime”—but many are revolutionaries without a cause.
To be sure, movement leaders do float visions of what they take to be a better future, which typically aims for a fictitious version of the past: a nation united under “biblical law”; a people liberated from the tyranny of the “administrative state”; or just a place somehow made “great again.” But in conversations with movement participants, I have found, these visions quickly dissipate into insubstantial generalizations or unrealizable fantasy. There is no world in which America will become the “Christian nation” that it never actually was; there’s only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.
These visions turn out to be thin cover for an unfocused rage against the diverse and unequal America that actually exists. They’re the means whereby one type of underclass can be falsely convinced that its disempowerment is the work of another kind of underclass. They’re expressions of pain, not plans for the future. This phenomenon is what I call “reactionary nihilism.” It’s reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; and it’s nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.
Yet there is method in this phenomenon. The direction and success of the antidemocratic movement depends on its access to immense resources, a powerful web of organizations, and a highly self-interested group of movers and backers. It has bank accounts that are always thirsty for more money, networks that hunger for ever more connections, religious demagogues intent on exploiting the faithful, communicators eager to spread propaganda and disinformation, and powerful leaders who want more power.It takes time, organizational energy, and above all, money to weaponize grievances and hurl them against an established democracy—and this movement has it all.
To be clear, there’s no single headquarters for the antidemocratic reaction. There are, however, powerful networks of leaders, strategists, and donors, as well as interlocking organizations, fellow travelers, and affirmative action programs for the ideologically pure. That matrix is far more densely connected, well-financed, and influential at all levels of government and society than most Americans appreciate.
History shows, however, that better organization does not always flatten the contradictions. On the contrary, it can sometimes amplify the conflicts. This is perhaps the most difficult to appreciate aspect of the antidemocratic movement—and the source of both its weakness and its strength. This movement is at war with itself even as it wages war on the rest of us. It consists of a variety of groups and organizations, each pursuing its own agendas, each in thrall to a distinct set of assumptions.
Viewed as a whole, it seems to want things that cannot go together—like “small government” and a government big enough to control the most private acts in which people engage; like the total deregulation of corporate monopolies and a better deal for the workforce; like “the rule of law” and the lawlessness of a dictator and his cronies who may pilfer the public treasury; like a “Christian nation” that excludes many American Christians from the ranks of the supposedly righteous. It pursues this bundle of contradictions not merely out of hypocrisy and cynicism but because the task of tearing down the status quo brings together groups that want very different things and are even at odds with one another.
Hope despite—and because of—the chaos
While a survey of the antidemocratic reaction in the United States is bound to provoke alarm and perhaps even a feeling of hopelessness, the self-contradictory nature of this reaction should be a source of hope for those who want to defend American democracy. MAGA is in many regards a weak movement, not a strong one. It draws on multiple factions, including oligarchic funders, the Christian Right, the New Right, libertarians, Q-Anoners, White nativists, “parent activists” radicalized by disinformation, health skeptics, a small segment of the Left, and others, all of whom worked together to bring slim majorities of voters to their side. These groups don’t really belong together, and they probably won’t stay together indefinitely.
In spite of their differences, for now these groups are rowing in the same boat. They told us ahead of the 2024 election that they were going to smash the federal bureaucracy, which they view for ideological reasons as interfering with their agenda. Trump said in no uncertain terms that he would turn the Department of Justice into his personal vendetta machine, and that’s what he’s attempting to do. He promised trade wars and let everybody know he would trash vital international alliances, and that’s what he’s doing.
So this is no time to retreat under the covers. Now is the time for moral courage. There are more Americans who would prefer to live in a democracy than a kleptocratic, Christian nationalist autocracy.We need to come together in broad coalitions and stay focused on organizing—from developing pro-democracy strategies and infrastructure to taking local action to improving voter turnout operations—now and in the long term.
When they lost in 2020, the MAGA movement didn’t roll over. They simply resolved to organize better and fight harder. Above all, they found new populations to evangelize with untruths. We wouldn’t wish to emulate their most craven tactics, of course, but we can learn something from their strategic resolve.
What is it with these religious bigots who think their god gives them the right to force everyone to believe / live as they claim to do. They are the first to demand their rights to worship / live as they wish. What gives them the idea the rest of us don’t want the same right. They were the first to attack the Taliban for forcing everyone in the country to worship / live by their version of Islam. Yet now they demand to be the US Christian Taliban. I do not understand their hate. They pick one or a few passages in the OT to clobber others while ignoring all the rest. They don’t stone their rebellious children, they don’t follow the other things in Leviticus and they do not follow anything Jesus said about caring for others. Hate, dominance, and vengeance is all they care about. The Old Testament god gives them that. And pleae notice the bill is titled Increasing Penalties for Child Pornography … it goes against all porn. Just like innocent drag queen story hours were attacked to protect the children from seeing people in costumes reading stories. Hugs
Alongside SB593, Deevers, who is also a pastor at Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Elgin, Oklahoma, introduced legislation to abolish abortion, prohibit drag performances in front of minors, ban divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, and provide tax credits to couples who opt into “covenant marriages” or have multiple children within the bounds of marriage — just to name some highlights.
An Oklahoma state senator has introduced legislation that would ban all pornography, with criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for the “production, distribution or possession” of any pornography, according to a press release from the Oklahoma Senate. SB 593, proposed by Senator Dusty Deevers on January 21, is part of a slate of eight bills by the legislator to “restore moral sanity” to the state of Oklahoma.
The bill, entitled “Increasing Penalties for Child Pornography and Prohibiting Pornography in Oklahoma,” goes far beyond the scope suggested in its title. While it does advocate for raising the penalty for the possession, distribution, or production of child pornography from 0-20 years up to 10-30 years, the bill has gone so far as to prohibit pornography entirely.
“Pornography is both degenerate material and a highly addictive drug,” Deevers said in the press release. “It ruins marriages, ruins lives, destroys innocence, warps young people’s perception of the opposite sex, turns women into objects, turns men into objects, degrades human dignity, and corrodes the moral fabric of society. Any decent society will stand against this plague with the full weight of the law.”
Deevers’ description of pornography as a “highly addictive drug” directly echoes the words of the authors of Project 2025,who, in the foreword to the over 900-page blueprint for a very different America, linked pornography to both child abuse and trans identity.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” the foreword to the document reads. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.”
Alongside SB593, Deevers, who is also a pastor at Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Elgin, Oklahoma, introduced legislation to abolish abortion, prohibit drag performances in front of minors, ban divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, and provide tax credits to couples who opt into “covenant marriages” or have multiple children within the bounds of marriage — just to name some highlights.
Mike Stabile, the director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, said the proposed bill was really an attempt to encroach on free speech in a statement to USA Today.
“Porn is the canary in the coal mine of free speech, and the trial balloon used by governments to pass laws that can censor speech more broadly,” he told the outlet. “No matter how people feel about adult content, we should all be concerned about the proposed government crackdown on speech.”
Deevers’ attack on pornography comes less than a month after age verification laws effectively made porn inaccessible in 16 U.S. states, mostly in the regional South.
At the time that many of these bans went into effect, Aylo, the parent company to PornHub, told Mashable that it has “publicly supported age verification of users for years” but that the kind required by these bills is “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” as well as a threat to users’ security.
A contributor to Project 2025 was recorded last year stating that age-verification laws are a “back door” to broader porn bans.
Legislators in several states have introduced similarly bizarre bills criminalizing sexual freedom in the short time since Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency for the second time. Last week, Mississippi state senator Bradford Blackmon introduced the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act,” which would make it illegal for a person to “discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.” The bill suggested a fine of $1,000 for a first offense, $5,000 for a second offense, and $10,000 thereafter. In a statement to local affiliate WLBT, Blackmon said the bill was meant to act as a counterpart to contraception and abortion bills.
“All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation,” he told WLBT. “This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”
Mathew Rodriguez is the former senior news editor at Them. In the past, he has been a senior culture editor at The Atlantic, as well as a staff writer at Out Magazine, INTO, and Mic. His writing has been featured in Slate, Teen Vogue, The Village Voice, MEL Magazine, and more. He … Read more
Republicans love third party candidates and ghost candidates when it helps them. They get Jill Stein to run in every swing state every presidential election. And only during the presidential election. But like all republicans they end up whining when things don’t go their way. Democrats stood up and admitted their loss and conceded with grace. I know people will suffer, but I hope the republicans so over play their hand that even their base turn against them … but it could be like the 1930s Germany all over again. I have a doctor’s appointment today so will not be on the computer until later in the morning. Hugs
Republicans would never use a fraudulent candidate for the purpose of siphoning votes.
Is this the country the maga cult wants? Yes? but what about all the rest who wouldn’t vote for a black woman? Those who claimed that they wouldn’t vote for Harris because she did not say the right words on Gaza? Well Israel now has no restraints, good choice you made for them, right? The brownshirts, the people who want to act like kids in gangs, want to have rule by thugs, that believe might makes right are going to find out it take far more than pretend bravado to keep a country this size running. The movie Idiocracy was not a how to do it show, but a warning. Right now we have moved a lot closer to the movie. Hugs
They always claim to be joking but their intention is to “move the Overton Window” so that when executions do happen, the public is well used to the prospect.
Wallnau cures Rush Limbaugh’s terminal cancer in the name of Jesus. Wallnau claims there are “high levels of angelic activity” at Trump’s DC hotel. Wallnau claims the MAGAbomber was possessed by Satan to make Trump look bad. Wallnau claims the Charlottesville Nazis were “paid actors” because right wing white supremacists do not exist. Wallnau declares that God killed Antonin Scalia to “wake up America” on how much they needed Trump. Wallnau “takes authority” over Hurricane Maria in the name of Jesus, orders it not to hit Puerto Rico. Wallnau claims Hurricane Irma bypassed Mar-A-Lago because Trump is under God’s protection. Wallnau releases the “Jezebel spirit” on Robert Mueller. Wallnau prays to protect Trump from “witches, jinxes, and demons that jump into dogs.” Wallnau prays for God to “unleash his holy sword” and smite Trump’s enemies. Wallnau claims angels literally dusted his face with gold flakes as a reward for loving Trump. Wallnau prays away obstruction of justice charges against Trump in the name of Jesus. Wallnau claims a gay bar owner was “cured of homosexuality” after eating a slice of anointed cake.
DeSantis is the first Florida governor to threaten TV broadcasters with criminal charges unless they stopped running ads he didn’t like. He’s the first governor to send his election police to knock on the doors of Amendment 4 supporters and the first to employ a last-ditch “investigation” of signatures gathered to get that amendment on the ballot. And credit, too, DeSantis for hiring just the right kind of election police.
Read the full editorial. As the paper points out, both measures passed with majority support and DeSantis “only had to shave off a few points” from the required 60% margin.
The conservative blueprint envisions ‘a biblically based’ definition of marriage and wants to protect adoption agencies that only work with Christians
Rebecca McCrayWed 24 Jul 2024 07.00 EDTShare
In 2021, Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram decided to take the next step toward growing their family and applied to foster a child. After identifying a three-year-old in Florida who they hoped to ultimately adopt, the Rutan-Rams turned back to their home state of Tennessee to start training to become foster parents.
But their plans quickly fell apart when the Christian state-funded foster care placement agency informed them by email that they “only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. The Rutan-Rams, who are Jewish, were out of luck.
“There’s already emotions playing into wanting to be a parent, and then to have us attacked personally just made it that much harder,” Liz Rutan-Ram told the Guardian.
The Rutan-Rams sued the Tennessee department of children’s services, arguing that a state law permitting private agencies to refuse to work with prospective parents on religious grounds violates the Tennessee constitution’s equal protection and religious freedom guarantees. The case will soon go to trial.
The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
A billboard in Milwaukee, part of a campaign by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to raise awareness of Project 2025, that ran during the Republican convention. Photograph: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
“The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out,” Washington-Leapheart told the Guardian. “This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
The Holston Home for Children in Tennessee, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.
The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.
“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.
It’s a thing one of the women still active in the Dem party told me back when I was active, and USA PATRIOT got passed. No one really knew where the lines were, and what could make a person be determined to be “against us,” as opposed to “with us,” and what would happen if that determination was made. She told me she learned during McCarthy that while one should be very careful in phrasing, we should never obey in advance. Now doesn’t that make great sense? There is always at least a little time, so far. Here is a snippet of Mary L. Trump’s Substack, where she reiterates this, along with more, because she knows things.
We Can’t Unify around Fascism
Vance and Cannon remind us Donald is not the only danger
Like most Americans, I too want the national temperature to be lowered. I want to see the violent rhetoric to stop. And I want to see our nation unified.
But the other side seems to be saying that, in order for that to happen, we’re not allowed to talk about Donal’d’s record of lawlessness, cruelty, and incompetence and we must make concessions to the would-be dictator.
On Monday, while Republicans tried to shame their critics into silence by making false and increasingly incendiary claims that it was Democrats who are responsible for creating the context in which Saturday’s shooting took place, we were reminded just how dangerous things will get if Donald wins this election.
Today, Aileen Cannon, Donald’s personal pocket judge, took the shocking (but not surprising) and illogical step of dismissing the charges against my uncle. Her behavior since acquiring this case has been abysmal and partisan; she has frequently skated across the line of malpractice. Her repeatedly putting her thumb on the scale in favor of the defense (who am I kidding?—she acted like she was lead counsel for the defense) felt even worse, because we know Donald is guilty. We know he stole our national security documents; we know held them in non-secure locations; and we know he refused to return them. We know these things because we witnessed Donald commit the crimes—and he confessed to them over and over again.
here is no way to interpret Cannon’s decision other than as a political favor from a corrupt judge who, along with the illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court (especially Clarence Thomas) is determined to put Donald above the law.
Try to imagine an entire federal judiciary made up of Aileen Cannons. Because that’s what’s coming if Donald Trump’s Project 2025 is implemented. One of the chief tenets of the Heritage Foundation’s controversial and comprehensive fascist playbook, that was specifically designed to shape a second Donald administration, is firing dedicated and non-partisan civil servants in order to replace them with people willing to take a loyalty oath not to the Constitution but to Donald. The corruption currently overtaking the federal judiciary will infiltrate absolutely every
aspect of our government.
It’s terrifying, and that’s why I refuse to be quiet—we all should.
Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repress will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
What happened at Donald’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday was deeply wrong and un-American. The same can be said of his plans for this country if he’s put in the Oval Office again. We can’t be quiet. We can’t let the side that continues to traffic in violent political rhetoric blame us shame us or scare us into silence. We must continue to sound the warnings—there will be no pivoting to unity and peace. There will only be Donald and his sycophants and enablers being exactly what we have known them to be.
This morning, while pundits and columnists were, once again, falling for the promise to pivot to unity, Donald simply couldn’t help himself. In response to Cannon’s horrifying ruling, he called for the “dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—the January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia ‘Perfect’ Phone Call charges.”
(Given the state of play, we can’t rule out his getting his way, but let’s take note that in the process of reveling in his seemingly limitless immunity, he once again defamed E. Jean Carroll.) (snip-More)
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