You won’t want to miss the June issue of AU’s Church & State magazine! Our cover story details a burgeoning threat to American democracy, church-state separation and the many rights and freedoms that depend on them: Project 2025.
I also encourage you to check out AU President and CEO Rachel Laser’s column with advice for recent graduates: to be your authentic selves – and help others do the same.
Other stories this month include how the alarming strategies of a 1970s anti-LGBTQ+ pop star are still being used in the Christian Nationalist playbook today; a sneak peek into a new book co-authored by AU Board of Trustees member Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood about how mainline Protestants inadvertently helped build Christian Nationalism; and why Americans United is opposed to erecting a statue of the late evangelist Rev. Billy Graham in the U.S. Capitol.
While #Biden has so far avoided naming #Trump during his time abroad, he has increasingly warned of the dangers posed by the kind of #authoritarian & #isolationist impulses the fmr president has embraced in his push to return to the #WhiteHouse. #POTUS, who has said in the past that America’s very #democracy is at stake in the coming #election, …[has juxtaposed] #DDay’s 80th anniversary to sound the alarm about the advance of #antidemocratic forces across the globe.
#Politics#Elections#UE#Democracy: "An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
Communities are set against each other: see how the Tories appeal to their elderly base by treating young people as a problem to be solved, currently through national service. The parties reduce our complex choices to a brutal binary; sometimes, as in the 2019 election, to a three-word slogan (Get Brexit Done). Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy, the possibility of food system failure or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up, in our supposedly representative system, with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.
Just as capitalism is arguably the opposite of markets, general elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule."
Lying about our #democracy can cost you. A jury awarded R Freeman & S Moss $148M from Giuliani. Fox News settled with Dominion for $787M after facing the prospect of a lengthy & damaging trial. #Media orgs like OANN/Project Veritas/Salem Media have issued retractions & apologies for their false election claims. We don’t know exactly how this rebalancing towards truth will impact the 2024 election. Those actors-certain to pause-. https://www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/lying-about-the-2024-election-will
Judge rules #SteveBannon must go to #prison by July 1 while appealing #contempt case
The former #Trump adviser is challenging a 4-month prison term for contempt of Congress after failing to appear before a House panel investigating the #Jan6, 2021, riot.
U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols agreed after a nearly hour-long hearing. “I don’t believe that the original basis for my stay of Mr. #Bannon’s sentence exists any longer. I no longer consider that his appeal raises substantial questions of #law of a kind likely to reverse his #conviction,” Nichols said, citing that panel’s ruling.
Modi’s authoritarian Hindu nationalist party did not fare well in India’s recent elections. This unexpected result shows that polls and prognostications are certainly not infallible. What matters is the vote.
Taliban in the Northern Sari Pul Province has publically beaten 60 women!!
It is is violation of human rights and dignity!!
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Wednesday condemned the public flogging of more than 60 people, including more than a dozen women, by the Taliban in northern Sari Pul province.
Sen Rubio -top R on Intel CMTE: Pres Biden was “a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged ppl” -it was now time to “fight fire with fire” *flame emojis to rep. the fire. Seeking retribution thru the justice system is hardly a new concept for #TFG.
A 2nd #Trump admin could #weaponize existing government agencies to dismantle democracy itself.
This article is part of “Project 2025: The Plot Against #America,” a Nation special issue devoted to unpacking the right’s vast & chilling program for a 2nd Trump term.
In Mandate’s chapter on the #DHS, Ken Cuccinelli writes, “Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis / #disinformation efforts. … #Project2025 document declares that “the entirety of the #CISA#Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.”
…This is just one way that Project 2025’s cabal of “experts” is scheming to thwart honest discourse about #elections & #democracy.
Instead of focusing on #VoterSuppression, the manipulation of #election processes by domestic & foreign agents, & other genuine threats to #democracy, Mandate for Leadership’s authors would have these agencies do the bidding of #Trump & his #MAGA movement. That’s a formula for giving Trump the #authoritarian#power he seeks—not through an explicit crushing of electoral democracy, but by “reforming” it in precisely the way that the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy warns is most dangerous.