Month: June 2023

From law professor Xiao Wang in the LA Times:

Looking for a federal law to be declared unconstitutional? Religion may well be your best bet — and that’s true regardless of how “real” your religious beliefs are.

That’s part of the thinking behind one case the Supreme Court heard this session and will resolve soon. In 303 Creative vs. Elenis, the court is considering the constitutionality of a Colorado statute prohibiting most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers. Lori Smith, a Christian webpage designer, had wanted to expand into the wedding website business — but only for opposite-sex couples, a plan that would have violated the Colorado law at issue. Her lawyers made the case on free speech grounds, but given Smith’s religious beliefs, “religious freedom” represents an undeniable backdrop to the suit.

The 303 Creative case is no outlier. Religion-based claims have proliferated in recent years, and plaintiffs have often won because courts have almost invariably found their religious beliefs to be sincerely held. Meanwhile, the burden of proof for the government — that it is not unduly interfering in religious practice — has become much harder to prove.

A string of recent Supreme Court cases demonstrates how religion offers litigants a ready path to disobey laws without consequence. In the 2021-22 term alone, the Supreme Court decided several high-profile cases that affirmed religion’s supremacy.

In Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, the justices determined that a high school football coach could not be placed on leave for violating a rule against public prayer. In Carson vs. Makin, it held that Maine was constitutionally required to subsidize religious schools. And in Ramirez vs. Collier, it postponed the execution of an inmate after he asked, at the 11th hour, that his pastor lay hands on him — despite having previously explicitly disclaimed the same form of relief.

Then, in a narrow 5-4 decision last September, the court left in place a New York state court decision requiring Yeshiva University to recognize an LGBTQ+ student group over the school’s purported religious objections. Ruling on technical grounds, the majority directed the university to first seek relief in state court. But four dissenting justices would have granted review to vindicate the university’s 1st Amendment rights — and those justices say that the university would “surely” win if the case comes back up, after state proceedings conclude.

How did these results come to be?

In the conventional understanding, religious exercise was cast off as an almost disfavored right. Courts were, historically, generally willing to let the government prevail whenever public policy and religion came into conflict. Now though, when the court says that government action affecting religious exercise must satisfy “strict scrutiny” — a notoriously difficult burden — it actually means it.

But that’s not the full story. Courts aren’t just making it harder for the government in these cases; they’re also making things easier for plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs must in theory show that their religious beliefs are sincerely held before strict scrutiny can kick in. This requirement dates to a 1944 decision, United States vs. Ballard, which for many years served as an effective gatekeeper against cries of “religion” casually trumping the law.

But in practice, this requirement has been hollowed out since at least the early 1990s.

Today, many claims for “free exercise of religion” arise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. I conducted a systematic review of roughly 350 such cases decided by the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts over the last 30 years. Since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, the Supreme Court has always found plaintiffs sincere. Lower federal appellate courts found plaintiffs sincere in 270 out of 291 (93%) cases from 1994 to June 2022.

This marks a striking difference from other areas of law, in which plaintiffs are frequently unable to meet their burden. For instance, employment discrimination plaintiffs meet their burden just 27% of the time and antitrust plaintiffs only 16% of the time. In other words, the onus on the plaintiff poses a meaningful barrier to obtaining relief — except in religious free exercise cases.

Litigants have taken note. The rate of claims under those two religion-related laws has tripled since the 1990s. It has become easy for a plaintiff to win by leveraging beliefs, even if their “religious belief” is just a ruse to get into federal court.

The relaxing of the sincerity requirement has real-world consequences across many fields.

For instance, courts allowed plaintiffs to skirt COVID-19 vaccine mandates based on religious objections to the use of embryonic tissue in research development and testing. Never mind that those same methods were used to develop everyday medications such as Benadryl, Claritin and Tylenol. And the Supreme Court set aside COVID restrictions on gathering sizes to accommodate religious events.

Education hasn’t escaped the religious beatdown, either. States now must provide funding to both secular and religious private schools, or only to public schools. And many teachers at church-run schools are not protected by federal employment discrimination laws.

Further, these teachers — and any other nongovernmental employees — may not be able to receive contraceptive care through their employer-provided health insurance after religious objectors attacked the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. And, emboldened by recent judicial decisions, Catholic hospital systems and certain insurers have begun denying LGBTQ+ people fertility treatments.

Since anyone in America can start a religion,you can imagine where this leads — total abnegation of civil rights laws. I do have a sneaking suspicion that the courts will once again discover the “sincerity requirement” when an offbeat religion decides to test it by say, refusing to rent an apartment to white people.

This really is revolutionary. However much it may have been culturally dominant, religion has never been legally supreme in America. Until now. And unsurprisingly, it’s happening as fewer and fewer people are participating in organized religion.

Once again we have a group that is shrinking in number attempting to rig the law and the constitution in their favor. You have to wonder what would happen if they tried adapting and evolving instead of forcing the nation to turn back the clock, alienating their countrymen in the process? They might have better luck.

America’s second independence day

I thought this was a nice thought for this holiday:

There are little joys to be found in overheard conversations, like this recent gem on an Acela train. A couple of young professional dude-bros sat behind me and were discussing why they couldn’t reschedule something for the 19th of June. “Because it’s Juneteenth — we get it off this year,” one said. And after a beat or two too long, the other replied, “Oh yeah. What’s it for anyways? Like, I know for Black people but …”

The first gave a pitying chuckle and returned with, “It’s when America freed the slaves” — followed by an incredulous, “C’mon man.”

I mean, well, yes. Juneteenth commemorates the day when — more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant and more than two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation — a Union army finally reached South Texas with news of emancipation. But I was far less interested in historical accuracy than I was in the fact that these two guys were having a casual Juneteenth civics conversation. Five years ago, that exchange would’ve been unimaginable. Most Americans had little clue what Juneteenth was until it became a federal holiday in 2021.

The newness of the holiday for much of the country means that there’s no shared set of traditions associated with it yet. Without ritual and mythology, things do not stick to the culture. We need to decide what the holiday will mean for us and for posterity.

This doesn’t happen without thought and effort. Labor Day, for example, has become an end-of-summer milestone rather than an homage to the American worker. So I cringed to see social media last year fill with pictures of Juneteenth-themed party supplies and T-shirts in red, black, green and gold. These were clearly the product of a marketing shortcut: Nothing says Black people like kente cloth or the Pan-African red, black and green.

But in America, to mark something as explicitly Black is to understand that some will interpret that as exclusively Black. So robing Juneteenth in those colors and patterns will naturally cause many to think that the holiday is “for Black people,” rather than an observation of a vital story for all Americans. Given this marketing, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear from my fellow train passengers that “Juneteenth is kind of like a summer Kwanzaa.” A mishmash of cultural understanding, perhaps, but serviceable.

Don’t get me wrong. An occasion to mark the mythical Black American Cookout (with its specific instructions of who can bring what and its notoriously stingy invitation list) is always welcome.

But Juneteenth must be a national and inclusive holiday with a narrative to match. It symbolizes how the emancipation of Black people initiated a new beginning for a nation that had fallen short of its founding ideals. It recalls the important truth that emancipation was not a gift; it was hard won by perhaps the greatest multiracial coalition the nation has ever assembled — with Black Americans actively engaged in the taking. The promise of America is clearest in the resulting Reconstruction amendments.

Juneteenth represents the ushering in of this new nation, and a glimpse of its potential. For Independence Day to have any meaning that connects to the founding ideals, Juneteenth must exist. Without a shared celebration of June 19, there is no reason for fireworks on July 4. It’s for this reason that the initiating legislation was titled the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. At its core, the holiday observes the nation’s rebirth, its second founding.

The colors on the Juneteenth flag are red, white and blue; they must be. It is an American holiday, not a Pan-African one. When Lincoln and various organizations proposed exporting enslaved Black Americans to freedom on distant shores, Black folks almost universally refused. Their goal was not just freedom — but freedom here, in the country they helped shape and build. Imagine the national pride required to fight so hard and for so long to improve a place and become fully part of it.

Our national story urges every American to remember both a past in which our forebears were excluded and their battle for inclusion. This is the common thread in the story of every American, no matter their race, ethnicity or nation of origin. Juneteenth has the potential to represent that shared narrative better than any other civic observance. It comes just a few weeks after Memorial Day and a couple weeks before Independence Day. After a solemn remembrance of those who have given their lives in service to the country, but before celebrating another year of existence, Juneteenth represents the pride and resolve necessary to keep the nation moving forward. It admonishes us not to squander the sacrifices of previous generations. In this moment of divisive indictments and a looming presidential election, it is a hopeful project to shape the holiday’s meaning and traditions.

For now, I’m content to know that more of us are learning of an official holiday to mark the end of slavery in the United States. This is a big deal and something we should all be proud of. Before the summer Kwanzaa commercialization takes permanent control, however, there is still a chance to replace it with an annual reaffirmation of a commitment to build an inclusive democracy. We can still dream.

Indeed we can. And we must.

Last week I wrote about the misinformation being distributed by Republicans in comparing the Trump documents case to Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails” scandal in 2016. It’s taken as a given on the right that she broke the law and was granted special dispensation despite the fact that there were five different investigations that found otherwise. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only fake scandal they’re flogging these days to try to cover for Trump’s corruption and criminality. They’re back on the Burisma beat.

I wrote about this pseudo-scandal back in 2020 when it was making one of its periodic rounds in the right wing media, mostly so they could have a excuse to circulate embarrassing photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop (which is a whole other story for another day.) I distilled the story into this succinct description:

The “scandal” itself is actually nothing more than an example of the very common (and admittedly skeevy) business practice of hiring the family members of important people for the purpose of obtaining favors, gaining access or simply being viewed in a favorable light. Hunter Biden clearly made a mistake in joining the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president. The apparent conflict of interest was obvious to literally everyone. But Republican charges that Joe Biden granted a favor to Burisma by having the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor that was investigating the company are flat-out provably false. It’s true that Biden (along with virtually the entire Western alliance) pressured the Kyiv government to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor in question. But one of the reasons was because Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma. There was no favor done on Hunter Biden’s behalf. If anything, it was the opposite.

The claims of Biden helping out Burisma just don’t make sense, the timeline is off and it’s easily disproved by the fact that the prosecutor Biden (and everyone else) wanted fired wasn’t targeting Burisma at all.

Not that it mattered. The right is operating, as usual, under a set of “alternative facts.”

Recall also that Trump’s first impeachment was partially based upon this bogus narrative along with some other bizarre assertions regarding the cyber security company Crowdstrike and the DNC server supposedly being kept in Ukraine. Wired explained the thinking behind that:

Trump believes—and by all indications this is true belief, not posturing—that after the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016, the DNC gave a physical server to Ukrainian cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and refused to let the FBI see the evidence. Trump further argues that the server in question now physically resides in Ukraine. Inside that server, Trump suggests, one would find evidence, gleaming like a Pulp Fiction briefcase, that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC in 2016.

Part of this false narrative now includes the charge that Biden received 5 million dollars in bribes from Burisma to fire Shokin based upon a confidential source that Rudy Giuliani dug up in his forays over to Ukraine to set up the smear against Biden. Again, Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma at the time but pesky facts like that don’t matter when a hysterical right wing scandal is in motion.

(It all seems to be a sloppy conflation with a 5 million dollar bribe that was revealed in September 2020 when they arrested 3 Burisma executives for offering 5 million dollars to Ukrainian anti-corruption officials and which the Ukrainian government went to pained lengths to say neither Hunter Biden or Joe Biden had anything to do with.)

Two investigations were launched into these allegations, one by Bill Barr and another by the Nebraska Sen Chuck Grassley and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson of the GOP led Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees. The DOJ case was handled by the US Attorney for western Pennsylvania to handle all the alleged “evidence” Rudy Giuliani was producing and which the FBI and Intelligence community believed was likely being fed to him by Russian agents. He talked to Giuliani and closed the investigation without saying a word.

The other investigation also found nothing except the old news that Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name to get a lucrative sinecure with Burisma and nobody testified that Biden changed any policies to help him out. Grassley apparently forgot all about that when he joined up with House Oversight Committee Chairman to demand that the FBI turn over a document in which a confidential informant alleged that he’d heard a Burisma executive (whom we later learned was Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky) claim that he had paid 5 million dollars to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. That document was one of Giuliani’s and was known to Barr and the DOJ since June of 2020. It was not considered credible for obvious reasons.

As Politico reported back in 2020, Giuliani’s former accomplice Lev Parnas said he and Giuliani met with Zlochevsky the year before and when asked what contacts Zlochevsky had had with Joe Biden he said, “no one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement.” Parnas told Politico that “at that point, after seeing the answers, Rudy started pounding the table and saying, ‘We just need to get this information!” He told Parnas to keep looking and it appears someone “found” some.

As I’m sure you’ve heard there was a big back and forth between the Justice Department which did not want to release the document and the House which demanded it or they would hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of congress. The FBI finally agreed to show a redacted version to members of congress and they very excitedly reported that the document revealed that Zlochevsky told the informant that there tapes of Joe and Hunter Biden accepting a bribe to fire the prosecutor in order to stop an investigation that didn’t exist. (No one knows if these tapes exist either which even Comer, Grassley and Ron Johnson have been forced to admit.)

Now Comer and the committee can’t find their whistleblowers and Giuliani is claiming his informant was killed and everyone knows it must be that the Biden Crime Family is doing something terrible to their enemies. None of it makes any sense but that’s really the point. The confusion and the contradictions and the possibility of tapes is all that’s needed to create a lot of smoke that their voters can claim proves that Biden is the real criminal for which the Trump investigations have been created to provide cover.

The right has done this sort of thing for years. Just look back at some of the ridiculous “investigations” they launched during the 1990s. It works for them. Normal people can see that it’s all a joke but it feeds into the overall impression that everyone in Washington is corrupt anyway. And today the person who benefits most from that belief is the presidential candidate who is under numerous investigations and indictments with more to come. If they all do it, what he did must not be all that bad, right?

Salon

Slavers hid news of slavery’s end

A Juneteenth tale from CNN:

Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

Damn.

That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

My messaging friends remind us not to passive-voice the actions and decisions of others. “Mistakes were made” is obfuscatory bullshit. People made those decisions. Employees laid off did not “lose their jobs.” Their bosses/companies fired them. People were not “slaves.” Someone enslaved them.

“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

John Blake offers several myths. This anecdote was new to me:

In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

“They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

Apparently, British missionaries created the radically edited Bible to reassure Caribbean farmers that they had not come to preach liberation to the enslaved. Nor to teach them to read?

If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it

The people who ran against Democrats over “defund the police” (never a Democratic Party policy) now want to dismantle the F.B.I., make the Department of Justice a political enforcement tool of a future Republican presidency, dismantle the civil service and more.

Consider it an extension of the profit motive to our entire experiment in popular sovereignty, from regulatory capture to full repurposing the government to serve personal aggrandizement. If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it.

Now under federal indictment under a Joe Biden administration D.O.J., Donald Trump promised in a speech last week that if elected he would appoint a “real” special prosecutor to investigate the current president and his entire family. Being held to the rule of law is for Republicans an abomination. Holding your enemies to it is delicious.

Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman write in the New York Times:

But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.

[…]

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

The Heritage Foundation is all in. “[The FBI] needs to be started over from scratch and rebuilt,” says Heritage president Kevin Roberts.

"[The FBI] needs to be started over from scratch and rebuilt. This is not a law enforcement agency. It's a political weapon." @KevinRobertsTX pic.twitter.com/sDxXE10r0m

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) May 22, 2023

The F.B.I. is the most respected law enforcement agency in the world, handling some of the most critical and complex investigations there are, McCaskill told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner.

“What do these guys think are going to happen if they just fire everybody?” Are they going to recruit Trump fans from rural sheriff’s departments and train them to do this work, McCaskill asked, calling the notion ludicrous on its face. What happens to federal law enforcement in the meantime?

(How many times did Republicans in Congress promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? How many times did they attempt the repeal with nothing to replace it?)

Republican 2024 presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, agrees with his rival Trump. As part of his “Day One” strategy, DeSantis plans to “end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system” (Real Clear Politics):

[DeSantis] has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

[…]

DeSantis, who takes a broader view of executive authority than is typical of constitutional conservatives and who has told advisors he “doesn’t buy” the idea that presidents can’t fire anyone on the federal payroll. 

Scott McKay, a contributing editor at the fringe-right The America Spectator agrees wholeheartedly. The Trump indictment “stinks of a banana republic.” Whichever candidate Republicans nominate, he doesn’t care:

What I care about is that (1) we’ve got to have a Republican nominee who is capable and willing to do the things necessary to win in November 2024 — whether that means harvesting ballots, hiring every lawyer in America to engage in lawfare against local Democrat vote-fraud machines, kissing all the babies, lying to the rubes, whatever — and (2) that nominee, once he wins, had better be willing to take action.

“Action” meaning overhauling and/or dismantling the D.O.J., the Department of Energy, the E.P.A., etc. “The Departments of Education and Homeland Security, the IRS, and practically all the rest of them need major, strategic, and structural reorganizations.” To better comport with their arrogation of personal power, to be sure.

“Weaponization of government” is fine so long as Republican fingers are on the trigger. Or, as President George W. Bush said in perhaps his most famous Kinsley gaffe, ‘If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… just so long as I’m the dictator. Hehehe.”

The Trump Republican Party represents the triumph of the profit motive (monetary and personal power) over government stewardship. Americans owe a debt of thanks to those who enter government service driven by the mission. Trump, DeSantis, et al. simply ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Founding Fathers, indeed.

Imagine reading this 10 years ago in the Washington Post:

“A conviction and a decisive defeat at the ballot box might force Trump from the political scene and cause the Republican Party to move in a different direction, although in an era of close elections, the prospect of 2024 producing a blowout in either direction remains doubtful — and even that would not necessarily cleanse the system.”

“A conviction and a decisive defeat at the ballot box might” force Trump out of politics? And maybe it would cause the Republican party to sober up?

If that doesn’t do it, what would? Violence, I guess. Great.

Trump did it so it’s ok now

Reuters reports that even if Trump was allowed to declassify documents in his mind, which is, of course, ridiculous, he couldn’t have declassifed the nuclear document they found among his hoard:

Even when he was president, Donald Trump lacked the legal authority to declassify a U.S. nuclear weapons-related document that he is charged with illegally possessing, security experts said, contrary to the former U.S. president’s claim.

The secret document, listed as No. 19 in the indictment charging Trump with endangering national security, can under the Atomic Energy Act only be declassified through a process that by the statute involves the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

For that reason, the experts said, the nuclear document is unique among the 31 in the indictment because the declassification of the others is governed by executive order. “The claim that he (Trump) could have declassified it is not relevant in the case of the nuclear weapons information because it was not classified by executive order but by law,” said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists.

The special status of nuclear-related information further erodes what many legal experts say is a weak defense centered around declassification. Without providing evidence, Trump has claimed he declassified the documents before removing them from the White House.

[…]

Document No. 19 is marked “FRD,” or Formerly Restricted Data, a classification given to secret information involving the military use of nuclear weapons. The indictment described it as undated and “concerning nuclear weaponry of the United States.”

[…]

The most sensitive nuclear weapons information is classified as “RD,” for Restricted Data, and covers warhead designs and uranium and plutonium production, according to a DOE guide entitled “Understanding Classification.”

The Department of Energy downgrades from RD to FRD nuclear weapons data it needs to share with the Pentagon, but the materials remain classified, experts said.

Materials classified as FRD include data on the U.S. arsenal size, the storage and safety of warheads, their locations and their yields or power, according to the guide.

FRD information only can be declassified through a process governed by the AEA in which the secretaries of energy and defense determine that the designation “may be removed,” according to a Justice Department FAQ sheet.

And yet, some right wing freak disagrees:

David Jonas, who served for 10 years as general counsel for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy division that oversees the nuclear arsenal, said Trump had the constitutional authority to declassify all classified documents under the “unitary executive theory,” which holds that Congress cannot limit the president’s control over the executive branch.

“The president is the executive branch and so he can declassify anything that is nuclear information,” he said.

The “Unitary Executive theory” is one which the experience of Donald Trump should have relegated to the dustbin of history. It’s always been bullshit and now we can see why we actually a re supposed to have a separation of powers. Some narcissistic nutbag might just fall into the presidency some day, stage a coup, steal nuclear documents and store them in his toilet.

Actually constitutional experts as opposed to looney tunes wingnuts agree:

Elizabeth Goitein, a national security law expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to limit presidential power related to most national security issues and “there is no question it can legislate in this area.”

While the president can request declassification of FRD materials, “it’s got to go through both DOE (Department of Energy) and DOD (Department of Defense). And it takes forever,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

Someone should ask Bill Barr whether he still believes in the Unitary Executive Theory. He was a big proponent for years. Now he says that the president he served is a “troubled man.” Is it really a great idea for such a person to have “unitary” power over national security and Justice Department? Could it be that the writers of the Constitution saw such a possibility, what with the whole Mad King thing, and tried to set up a system to mitigate that threat?

Hmmmm.

“A Tulsi Gabbard drag king act”

For those of you who wisely don’t follow twitter, the ere was a brouhaha over the weekend over RFK Jr’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast in which he blathered about his anti-vax nonsense with Rogan the idiot dupe believing every word. Elon Musk joined in on twitter affirming RFK and somehow Rogan called out Dr Peter Hotez (a world renowned virologist and expert on vaccines) for refusing to “debate” him on his show on the subject.

Let’s just say,m the stupid was very, very strong.

Here’s one thread that explains RFK’s idiocy from someone who actually understands the science. You may not want to go that deep into the weeds but if you do, it’s interesting.

1/ I watched Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan yesterday and it gave me an opportunity to look into some of the "old-school" antivax claims.

First Joe Rogan let's us know that he used to think RFK Jr. was "kinda loony", but now he's a true believer in RFK's antivax claims. pic.twitter.com/F456vLXA6h

— bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 (@thebadstats) June 17, 2023

Mehdi Hasan says it best:

Noted conspiracy theorist who has zero background in medicine and public health and said Covid would be gone by April 2020 (!) thinks he knows more about vaccines than the world-renowned, award-winning scientist who helped create patent-free Covid vaccines for the poor. 🤷🏽‍♂️ https://t.co/ajnHl4i5gm

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 18, 2023

It would be easy to ignore all this but the anti-vax faction in America got a lot of people killed and they want to keep doing it.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr is being promoted all over the right for equally nefarious reasons. As Tim Miller says here, it’s basically become a ratfucking operation:

He did post a few other things about how the Justice Department needs to apologize and Fox news getting bad ratings. But that’s it.

I’m so old I remember when that book caused the religious right to have a hysterical meltdown. Good times.

Salon’s Kathryn Joyce takes a look at this emerging coalition of conservative American Muslims and far right Christians protesting gay rights. She notes that one of the hotspots of this activism is oddly in Southern California where there has been a number of large protests.

“In covering the far-right in LA and Southern California,” tweeted local photographer and journalist Joey Scott, “[i]t is always the same people who have been fixtures since even before 2020.” Others noted that many of the concerned “conservative parents” cited in media reports didn’t seem to “even know which school district they are protesting.” 

“From Los Angeles to Glendale, it is clear that organized white-supremacist, fascist forces such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front and potentially others are specifically targeting LGBTQ+ students, families and educators,” wrote the labor union United Teachers Los Angeles in a statement. “They have put our schools on the front line of their hate; preying on existing fears and prejudices in our communities. We expect the tactics at Saticoy and Glendale to be replicated.” 

Indeed, the day after the Glendale brawl, a right-wing social media account from Temecula shared a tweet about the protest clashes, writing, “Get ready Temecula.” 

On the right, however, these protests became instant fodder for jubilant claims that liberal extremism on social issues was driving some of the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters to make common cause with Christian conservatives. Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo, who has frequently made false or misleading claims about left-wing activists, celebrated the fact that the Glendale and Saticoy protesters included members of  the area’s large Armenian-American community, as well as Latinos. In a tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian-American men “want to fight #Antifa outside the school board meeting” because “immigrant families oppose pride celebrations in schools.” 

In another tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian Americans, who are mostly Orthodox Christians, were specifically outraged by an Instagram picture of a Pride collage on one Saticoy classroom door, which Ngo described as combining “Armenian colors/symbols mixed with LGBTQI+, pup play pride in the shape of a Christian cross.” Ngo’s specious claim that the elementary school was promoting “pup play”— a niche form of BDSM role-playing — was apparently based on the fact that the classroom door bore a stenciled image of a paw print. Locals on Twitter quickly pointed out that the school’s mascot is a bear, and the paw print logo is featured elsewhere in the school. That didn’t prevent the false claim that an elementary school had decorated its classrooms with “fetish” imagery from spreading widely on right-wing websites and social media. 

Christina Pushaw, the flame-throwing spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now an announced presidential candidate, breathlessly shared the “pup play” charge as well, among nearly a dozen tweets about the Glendale and Saticoy protests. “I know this community well,” she wrote in one, noting that she grew up in the area. “[T]he leftists made a big mistake trying to indoctrinate these kids behind their parents’ backs.” In another tweet, she continued, “Armenians in Glendale will never tolerate the alphabet indoctrination of their kids.” 

This emerging narrative was soon reinforced by additional protests elsewhere. Also on June 6, in Rockville, Maryland, a group of roughly 50 people — many of them Muslims, but also familiar right-wing factions like Moms for Liberty — demonstrated against a recent decision by the Montgomery County school district to stop sending parental notifications for every school reading that makes reference to LGBTQ issues. Maryland law requires districts to allow parents who don’t want their children to attend sex-ed classes to opt out, but in March the district declared it would no longer offer that opt-out choice for other classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues. In response, the right-wing legal advocacy network Becket Law has filed a lawsuit on behalf of an interfaith group of parents. Two activist groups,  Family Rights for Religious Freedom and Coalition of Virtue, began holding rallies outside the school district offices. 

At one such demonstration on June 6, author and activist Asra Nomani (who wrote for Salon in the early 2000s) was on hand to record the protests for Twitter and present them as evidence of a coming tectonic political shift: “The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it.” Touting the thesis of her recent book, Nomani went on to argue that a longstanding “Red-Green Alliance” between “Marxist” liberals and “establishment” Muslims was coming apart. 

“Muslim parents are waking up to the fact that that unholy alliance now means that their children are in the crosshairs of the WOKE ARMY,” she wrote. “And they aren’t having any of it, just like parents in other communities, from Armenian immigrants to Asian Americans.” 

After the protest in Montgomery County, Maryland, Richard Hanania, a right-wing academic provocateur who recently suggested that the U.S. needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people,” tweeted that this offered a golden opportunity for Republicans. “Selling immigrants on hating liberals would be the easiest thing in the world if conservatives had a real interest in winning,” he wrote, sharing a video of a Muslim girl in Maryland talking about religious liberty in ways that, he said, “could’ve been written by Moms for Liberty.” 

Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro likewise declared, “Essentially what you have is a cadre of upper-class white liberals who have a particular set of morals that do not match the morals of particular ethnic minorities in the United States, and the backlash is going to be very, very strong.” 

In videos from the Ottawa protest, Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting “Leave our kids alone” and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of mini-Pride flags.

On June 9, these claims got another boost by the first Ottawa protest, which  had been planned weeks in advance by Canadian anti-trans activist Chris Elston, better known as “Billboard Chris” for his campaign of wearing sandwich-board signs with anti-trans slogans around the U.S. and Canada. It gained additional steam after the school district recommended that staff use gender-neutral pronouns for students until they clarified which pronouns they prefer, and a recent controversy elsewhere in Canada after a teacher admonished Muslim students who’d skipped school to avoid Pride celebrations. 

In videos from the protest (including one video viewed nearly 31 million times), a number of Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting “Leave our kids alone” and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of mini Pride flags. Conservative Canadian columnist Rupa Subramanya tweeted that “Chants of Allahu Akbar and Christ is King” had come from the same side of the demonstration. The protest also devolved into scattered violence, including contested claims about whether a provincial legislator had been punched. 

In another photo shared widely online, a white woman in a pink polo shirt and a Muslim woman wearing a multi-colored hijab held up opposite ends of a peculiar flag: black with a white slash running across it. It was the flag of the “Diagolon” movement, which emerged during the 2022 “trucker convoy” protests in Canada as a mock-serious call for a new right-wing country, stretching diagonally across North America from Alaska to Florida, comprising states and provinces that rejected mask mandates, Marxism, globalism and “moral degeneracy.” 

The subtext to that image, however, reveals why the notion of a “Diagolon Muslim Ottawa chapter #LMAO,” as Subramanya tweeted — or of an alliance between Muslim immigrants and the far right more broadly — is problematic. The white woman in pink on one side of the flag, it turned out, was Stephanie McEvoy, a Canadian far-right activist with a long track record of supporting vehemently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups and positions (including an unintentionally hilarious online complaint about encountering a Muslim cashier at a Victoria’s Secret). 

As for the Diagolon movement, frequently described by conservatives as nothing more than an amusing meme, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) has called it a far-right separatist movement “with militant accelerationist overtones” that endorses “the formation of an illiberal republic, a halt to ‘mass immigration,’ and the maintenance of Euro-centric societies.” According to CAHN, movement “founder” Jeremy McKenzie and his followers have shared content from far-right influencers, including white nationalist “groyper” leader Nick Fuentes, and has promoted the white supremacist book “The Day of the Rope,” which depicts “a guerrilla war against a ruling class or pedophilic elite.” 

In an editorial about the two protests, CAHN’s Evan Balgord noted that Canada’s 2022 “trucker convoy” movement, which drew together many threads of the far right and has since shifted its focus from COVID-19 to LGBTQ rights, originated with “anti-Muslim organizing that took the the streets to protest M-103, a motion broadly condemning Islamophobia, in early 2017.”

Nonetheless, after the Ottawa protest, McKenzie responded to a pro-LGBTQ Muslim woman counter-protester by declaring on a podcast, “I am more Muslim than you,” claiming that his right-wing values were more aligned with Islam than were hers. (Adopting an ambiguously “foreign” accent, McKenzie continued, “Women no talk-y in Islam; women shutty-uppy.”) 

What a lovely person.

Joyce finds that according to most activists in the Armenian and Muslim communities this is a small hyper-conservative faction and points out that polling shows Muslim acceptance of LGBTQ people has grown quickly over the past few years to over 50%, with most young Muslims supporting it in even higher numbers. In other words they’re just like everyone else.

I suppose one might call this progress since it was just a few years ago that their Dear Leader was instituting Muslim bans and these folks were shrieking about “sharia law.” But it does figure that the most authoritarian, patriarchal sects of both the Christian and Muslim religious would eventually find common cause. They are on the same cultural page.

I suspect that at some point these Christians will remember they hate the Muslims and vice versa. But for now they are brothers and sisters in hate. Isn’t that something?

Read the whole thing if you’re interested in this subject. Joyce goes deep into the subject and it’s fascinating if creepy.