Archives for category: Citizenship

Reverend Benjamin R. Hegseth recoiled when he heard that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth planned to create a new religious agency within the military.

Here is why:

Hello my friends,

Given recent events, I wanted to send out this newsletter to you today and reflect on them.

On September 30th during his “State of the Force” address, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of the Pentagon’s new Office of Religious Affairs. As of the writing of this post, no individual has been publicly named or announced to head this office.

According to Hegseth, the office will give military chaplains a “direct line” to him without “staff filters” and “bureaucratic dilution” that he characterized as an impediment to meeting service members’ religious needs.

“The experts, our chaplains, will finally have an advocate at the highest levels,” he said. “Policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.” “Accordingly, our department, therefore, has a sacred duty, first class religious support wherever we send our warriors,” he said.

He ended this announcement by saying, “as Psalm 33:12 extols us, “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told USA TODAY on Oct. 1 his organization “condemns in the strongest terms” what he called Hegseth’s “immoral, unethical and unconstitutional actions” that, in his view, violate the First Amendment ban on the government “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

He said his organization would continue working to combat what he alleged was “Christian nationalist bigotry, hatred and prejudice” in the military until “fundamentalist Christian religious extremism is forever eradicated.”

I think it’s easy to shrug off Pete Hegseth for many, or even see this as a good move for “religious freedom,” but I just want to put this move in the context of Christian history, which causes me to agree with Mikey Weinstein.

When nationalist political leaders in the past have created a position that oversees the religious aspects of the military that answers directly to that leader, the goals are often deeply disturbing.

Let me give you just a few examples.

Under the Romanov autocracy, the Russian Tsar ruled by “divine right”. In 1721, Peter the Great abolished the independent patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and replaced it with The Most Holy Synod, a government department headed by a secular government official who was appointed directly by the Tsar.

This effectively turned the clergy into a branch of the state bureaucracy. The Tsar appointed a Protopresbyter of the Army and Navy to oversee all military chaplains. These chaplains were tasked with preaching absolute loyalty to the Tsar, ensuring soldiers took their holy oaths of allegiance, and reporting any political subversion within the ranks directly back to the autocracy.

While the Soviet Union was officially an atheist state, it provides one of the most explicit example of an authoritarian regime appointing officials to manage the “spiritual” and ideological affairs of the military. After the 1917 revolution, Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik leadership established political commissars. These commissars were unified under the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy.

Historians often note that commissars acted as a direct substitute for military chaplains. Instead of theology, they enforced Marxist-Leninist ideological purity.

However, during World War II, facing an existential threat from Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin temporarily reversed his harsh anti-religious policies. He personally met with church leaders and sanctioned a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church to boost wartime morale. He permitted the church to collect funds for tank columns and bless troops, intentionally co-opting religious fervor to serve state military goals.

When Adolf Hitler consolidated power, his regime sought to co-opt and control Germany’s fragmented religious landscape. In 1935, Hitler appointed Hanns Kerrl as the Minister for Church Affairs, tasked with forcibly aligning the Protestant and Catholic churches with Nazi ideology, a process known as Gleichschaltung (coordination). Within the military, the regime kept a tight grip on religious personnel.

Hitler also appointed Franz Justus Rarkowski as the Catholic Field Bishop of the Wehrmacht. Rarkowski was a fanatical supporter of the regime who used his office to issue pastoral letters telling German soldiers that fighting for the Führer was a holy duty blessed by God, ensuring that religious service members did not develop a crisis of conscience while carrying out aggressive warfare.

Following his victory in the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco established a highly centralized, right-wing authoritarian regime deeply intertwined with the Catholic Church, a system often termed “clerical fascism”.

Franco secured a concordat with the Vatican that granted him the right to nominate Spanish bishops, ensuring only politically loyal clergymen were appointed. He revived the Military Vicarate, appointing a Military Archbishop to run the spiritual affairs of the armed forces. Under Franco’s oversight, military chaplains held officer ranks and were integrated into the command structure to ensure the military remained a staunchly conservative, nationalist, and religious pillar of the state.

A foundational pillar of American democracy is a civilian led apolitical military. Service members swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, rather than a specific leader, political party, or religious text.

Just as historical regimes used religion or political commissars to bind the military’s loyalty directly to the ruler’s ideological vision, our concern should be that the explicit Christian nationalist and fundamentalist views Hegseth adheres to could be used to redefine military loyalty. If defending the nation is conflated with defending a specific cultural or religious identity, the military, full of people with different beliefs, could be a place of infringement of religious liberty, causing deep division, impeding military readiness. Military promotions could be based on ideological loyalty rather than qualifications, which is ironic given Hegseth’s consistent comments about “merit based” institutions. And most disturbingly, the military could be weaponized for domestic political, ideological, and religious purposes, undermining its historical role as a neutral defender of the entire populace. Time will tell what course this move will take us.

Given this administration’s continued push for consolidating power in every sector of government and society, this move within the department of defense should be deeply troubling for every American and Christian in America.

As a Christian in America myself, I unequivocally believe that Christianity doesn’t need political privilege or military power.

It needs less arrogance.

It needs less entitlement.

It needs less animosity towards those who are different.

It needs more humility.

It needs more generosity.

It needs more compassion and understanding.

It needs more Jesus.

It needs to be vocal about the separation of church and state rather than any selfish insistence that our country must favor our religious group above all else.

The reason I don’t want a “Christian nation” isn’t because I’m against Christianity. It’s because I’ve studied church history and learned about the horrors caused by the church crawling into bed with the empire. Separation of church and state doesn’t just help protect religious freedom, it helps keep Christianity Christian rather than becoming an empire.

Nationalism keeps telling us Christians to take up our swords and make our nation “Christian” by any means necessary.

Jesus keeps calling us Christians to take up our crosses and be like him, serving the world through grace, humility, compassion, and self sacrificial love.

May it be so with us.

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Religion, Separation of church and state

Why States Should Avoid the Federal Voucher Program

By dianeravitch

October 5, 2026 //

In the Public Interest is an organization devoted to protecting the public interest. We live in an era when the public sector is at risk of being privatized, so that private sector organizations can extract profits. This project is reflected in the privatization of hospitals, vegetarian practices, nursing homes, retirement communities, private homes, and any other opportunity to turn a profit. All too often, the private owners drain their prize of profit, bankrupt them and move on.

This is happening in public schools, where entrepreneurs have persuaded many cereal and state officials that they can run schools better and for lest cost than educators.

The public has NEVER approved a voucher program yet they are being passed by state legislatures, adopted despite parents’ opposition. Now comes a federal voucher program, which mainly subsidizes the tuition of students in private and religious schools. Some public schools kids take a voucher, but whatever comparable data exist, the children lose ground compared to those who attend the public school they abandoned.

For every student who leaves public schools, the school must make cuts. Will it be sports, recess, the arts, or larger class size?

It’s basically a lose-lose situation: the public schools lose students and funding. The voucher achools hire uncertified teachers and are unable to match the certified teachers in the public school.

Here is a commentary on the federal voucher program by Jeff Hagan of In the Public Interest:

New proposed regulations released for public comment regarding the federal tax credit school voucher program have done nothing to alleviate concerns that the federal program—a tax program administered through the Treasury department—will further undermine public education in the United States.

“Not only is the program not in the best interest of the nation’s school children, it’s not in the best interest of the nation itself,” says Shar Habibi, executive director and research director of In the Public Interest, a national research and advocacy organization that explores the role of privatization of public things, including education.

“To our school children we owe the best possible education, and this lets them down,” she says. “Nothing about this program suggests that supporting and improving academic and educational outcomes for children–especially our most vulnerable children–were considered in its development. The fact that it is—as even supporters state—“a tax law…not an educational program” tells you what this legislation was always about: a subsidy for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools.”

In the Public Interest has long been opposed to school vouchers at every level.

“School vouchers have never been in the public interest,” says Leigh Dingerson, senior fellow at In the Public Interest. “They offer taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools, draining resources for our public schools. Where public schools are and have always been ‘the great equalizer,’ vouchers only divide us.”

Habibi points out that the problems with vouchers go beyond the schoolhouse.

“Vouchers put the nation as a whole at risk. A strong, nationwide system of public schooling is essential to a thriving democracy and a robust economy.”

While President Trump promised to “return education to the states,” this program in fact denies states the ability to choose how to ensure — as every state constitution requires — that all children have access to a quality education, free of charge.

Under this program, multi-million-dollar organizations can collect donations and hand out school vouchers in virtually any state in the country that agrees to participate, with little oversight from state policymakers or voters and with no regard to the state’s history or vision for providing public education to its children.

This federal school voucher program will, over time, lead to the decimation of our nation’s system of public schools. ITPI’s already-stated position that all states decline to participate in the program has not changed with the release of these new regulations.

Categories Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

A Young Man Wanted to Be an American. He Was Killed by the Racism of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Their MAGA Followers.

By dianeravitch

September 9, 2026 //

“The photograph of his leg, posted on Instagram, documents his sense of shame at having to wear the device, at being branded somehow a criminal. His short life had followed the same arc as hundreds of millions of Americans, immigrants or descendants of immigrants, who came here seeking hope, opportunity and a chance for dignity. He wanted to grow and prosper and be free of tyranny — in this case, the tyranny of crime and instability.”

Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post wrote about the death of Pierre Damas Bel.

Kennicott says we all share responsibility for his death. I disagree. Pierre’s death belongs to Stephen Miller, who wants to expel as many dark-skinned immigrants as possible. His death belongs to Donald Trump, who knew that racism and hatred was a good political issue for him, who told Republicans in the Senate not to pass a bipartisan immigration bill in 2024 because he wanted to run in the issue. His death belongs to the Republican elected officials who bowed to Trump’s wishes and have failed to rein in the heartlessness of ICE. His death belongs to all those who turn a blind eye to the reign of brutality and violence imposed on anyone who is swept up in the un-American crusade against immigrants, especially those who are black and brown.

Kennicott wrote:

The most haunting photo of the past week shows not a whole human, just part of one. Sometime in the past few weeks, a 20-year-old college kid named Pierre Damas Bel took a photograph of the lower part of one of his legs. He’s wearing black pants and gleaming, thick-soled, black-and-white brogues, the toe so polished it reflects the light. Around his ankle is a heavy plastic GPS tracking device, with a red, LED status light glaring like a demonic eye

Bel was one of about 350,000 Haitian immigrants who lost temporary protected status after a Supreme Court ruling in June. He fled Haiti, a country racked by gang violence and crime, in 2024, and he apparently despaired at the thought of having to return. On Monday morning, he stepped in front of a tractor-trailer on Interstate 70 in Springfield, Ohio, and now he is dead. His family believes he died by suicide, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word. He was desperate and depressed, but that misery was forced on him. No matter how he died, his life was taken from him.

Bel, who is seen in an earlier image in a blue tuxedo jacket beaming as he receives his high school diploma, entered the country legally to rejoin his family and request asylum. He graduated from high school, matriculated at university, joined the ROTC program, and he had a pending asylum hearing. But just after 8 a.m. Monday, he called his father and said, “I’m not feeling okay.” Less than an hour later he was dead.

The photograph of his leg, posted on Instagram, documents his sense of shame at having to wear the device, at being branded somehow a criminal. His short life had followed the same arc as hundreds of millions of Americans, immigrants or descendants of immigrants, who came here seeking hope, opportunity and a chance for dignity. He wanted to grow and prosper and be free of tyranny — in this case, the tyranny of crime and instability.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote on Instagram in late July. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Likely, the GPS device made his leg feel foreign to him, just as this young asylum seeker, perhaps an aspiring American, had suddenly been branded foreign to the country he hoped to serve. The weight of the device made it impossible for him to play soccer, a sport he loved; according to his father, it also made him an object of ridicule to his classmates, who mimicked on an interpersonal level what has become the basic tool of this country’s domestic politics and foreign policy: bullying.

No administration in my lifetime has used imagery and narrative more effectively than the Trump administration. A White House webpage called “Aliens” uses “X-Files” music and text to suggest that we have been secretly invaded, and that President Donald Trump alone can repel the enemy living among us.

“Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society,” reads the scrolling text, with a spooky electronic, sci-fi soundtrack suggesting the invaders are extraterrestrials. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences,” the site also says. “With one exception — they do not belong here.”

From emphasizing the supposed criminality of immigrants, the administration moves on to stressing their normality. The very things that are, for so many Americans, definitive markers of being American — living peacefully, shopping, learning — become markers of suspicion. And so we are invited to look at ourselves as Bel looked at his leg, the normal as abnormal. Even people who abhor this cruelty face what is essentially an existential question: If I am American, and America does this, what am I? To remain within this ugliness is insufferable; to flee would only make it worse.

“I do not know how long it will still physically be possible to breathe this European air,” wrote critic Walter Benjamin in 1938, as the Nazi’s made life unlivable for Jews. He killed himself in 1940, in a small border town in Spain, where he was denied entry after fleeing France. That, too, was an act of desperation.

The loss of temporary protected status for Haitians means that the U.S. will have to find tens of thousands of new health care workers to staff an already overburdened system. A recent study by the Yale Budget Lab found that even if immigration returned to normal after the Trump administration, by the 2030s there will be thousands fewer new businesses than would be expected, and the economy will be smaller than it could be, with effects lasting as far as 2075.

And thus, another metaphor travels through the body, upward and outward, from the death of a young man on a highway in Ohio to include all of us. Bel was desperate, and his death is a kind of murder, but what the U.S. is doing to itself is simply suicide.

Categories Bigotry, Citizenship, Extremism, Immigration, Trump

J. Michael Luttig: How to Save Our Nation and the Rule of Law

By dianeravitch

July 4, 2026 //

On June 22, retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, a greatly revered Appeals Court Judge, delivered these remarks to the Election Integrity Summit of the Cleveland Municipal Bar Association and the Task Force for American Democracy in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite his conservative credentials, he has been one of the most critical voices raised against Trump since January 6, 2021. His resistance to tyranny makes you wonder why most other conservatives have not spoken out on behalf of the rule of law.

He said:

Thus it is that in less than two weeks, on July 4, 2026, we will celebrate the birth of the greatest nation on earth, the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world.

In 1787, after the Revolutionary War to secure our independence from the tyrannical King George III, “We the People of the United States . . . ordain[ed] and establish[ed] the Constitution of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union.” The Constitution was ratified and adopted by the States and became the Great Charter for our self-government and the guarantor of our cherished rights and liberties on June 21, 1788.

On July 4, 1776, the American Colonists declared their independence from King George III and the British Crown, two hundred and fifty years ago almost to the day “bringing forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

For the 250 years since its Founding, America has been the envy of the world and the beacon of freedom and liberty because of the shining light of its Democracy, Constitution, and Rule by Law, not by men.

But as we all know, today America is not the same beacon of freedom or the same envy of the world that it has been for a quarter of a millennium.

Today, two hundred and fifty years later, we are again engaged in a great battle “testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Prophetically, these times in which we live on the 250th Anniversary of this nation’s Founding are — once again – the times that try men’s souls.

As we celebrate our Founding today, the question for “We the People” of America is whether we are willing to do the sacred work necessary to return our country to its deserved place as the beacon of freedom and envy of the world, whether we are willing to do the hard, but sacred, work necessary to ensure that America will long endure.

As we struggle to decide what we ourselves want for America and what we want our America to be – and not to be – the entire world is anxiously awaiting our answer, more anxiously awaiting our answer today than it awaited our answer a quarter of a millennium ago.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in human history, the time of America’s testing has finally come.

The Founders of this great nation feared these times in America.

In this 250th Anniversary year, America’s institutions of government and governance and its institutions of democracy and of law are under vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack – from within.

At this point, five and a half years since January 6, 2021, the 47th President of the United States has all but wrought the complete inversion of our nation’s positive law — the Constitution and laws of the United States – our moral law that has been passed down to us through the ages, and even our biblical law as found in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, including The Ten Commandments.

But where, say some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain . . . Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king.

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the Crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).

Speaking in a time of similar moral and legal upheaval in America nearly two centuries ago, a 29-year-old state legislator, who would later become the 16th President of the United States, urged a revival to the Constitution and the Rule of Law, a renewed reverence for that Great Charter for our governance and guarantor of our liberty and our freedoms.

“Let reverence for the laws,” the young Abraham Lincoln implored, “be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; — let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. . . .”

“[I]n short,” Lincoln sermonized with the reverence he urged, let the Constitution and the Rule of Law “become the political religion of the nation.”

Today, America is in desperate need of such a revival to our Constitution and Rule of Law as our 16th President urged upon the nation in 1838 – a reawakening and quickening to the reverential imperatives of the Constitution from which we have strayed so very far.

Winston Churchill said that “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because . . . courage is the quality which guarantees all others.”

We Americans must summon the courage that has eluded us in our all-consuming fear over the past decade of years. We must summon from deep within the courage that was once our Founders’ courage when, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, they mutually pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor” to secure their — and our — liberty and freedom.

With the united support of a hopeful world, we Americans must overcome our fear. We must find our voices again.

We must finally – finally – rise to our feet, raise our voices, and speak out against what we are witnessing in America today.

After all, ours is a nation founded upon dissent and protest.

America’s protest against the British Empire 250 years ago is the single greatest protest in all of history – a revolutionary protest and dissent from the tyranny and oppression of King George III.

Until now, we Americans have never hesitated to support, defend, and protect our cherished liberties, our freedoms, and our fundamental constitutional rights from governmental tyranny, whether it be from abroad or from at home.

Why are we hesitating now? Why are we silent now, at the very time of America’s testing, on this 250th Anniversary of America’s birth? Why have we Americans chosen to remain silent or why have we allowed ourselves to be silenced and betray, in this fateful year of years?

Why have we suddenly lost our voices, two and a half centuries since we were gloriously given our voices by the Constitution of the United States?
I will tell you. We have lost our voices because of fear. Fear of ridicule, fear of political reprisal. Fear of political persecution. Fear of personal persecution. Even fear of prosecution. In far too many cases, fear for our lives and livelihoods.

Fear of the known and fear of the unknown, the unknown as to when this all ends and how.
We can be forgiven for our fear, but we will never be forgiven for our cowardice in the face of our fear.

The Founders of this great country did not cower in their fear, and unlike us, they had reason to fear. When the men who founded the greatest nation on earth first came face to face with fear, “they mutually pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor.” They stared down their fear and defeated fear itself.

There is no excuse or defense for the cowardice that is inflicting America today, especially the cowardice that has consumed our political leaders. Nor is there forgiveness awaiting those who have cowered or been cowered, least of all those we have elected to represent us and our country.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., hauntingly warned that “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
We should pray that we will not be remembered for our cowardice and our cowered silence in these times when America needed us most.

If we are to be victorious over the evil that is warring for the heart and soul of America today, it is going to take the courage of the armies of God and the moral clarity of the collective voices of “We the People.” It is we who “ordained and established” this Constitution” “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Ours is the righteous war, not theirs.

America is calling and we must answer.

If we answer and but find the courage to speak our powerful truth to our government’s powerless untruth now — today, not tomorrow — as did the Founders and our ancestors when their time of testing came, the United States of America will soon again be the envy of the world and it will endure forever as the beacon of freedom and liberty to the world.

Once we have finished the righteous and noble task at hand, we must then finish the great task that yet lies ahead of us 250 years since our Founding.

But “[t]he dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” as Abraham Lincoln exhorted the nation in 1862.

So then, this must it be in this 250th Anniversary year. We Americans must think anew and act anew. We must re-found America again. We must reacquaint ourselves with the truths that we once believed were self-evident – and still are. We must reawaken ourselves to the ideals, the beliefs, the principles, the values, and the truths upon which America was founded and has flourished for two and a half centuries – and reexamine these foundational truths, beliefs, and principles, if need be.

We must build anew the hopes and the dreams upon which this country was founded, the hopes and dreams that have inspired us and bound us together into the more perfect union that “We the People” ordained and established, the hopes and dreams that have made America the greatest nation on earth.

We must “turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it,” as Abraham Lincoln once urged.

We must shore up and reinforce the bulwark of our faltering democracy and Rule of Law and refortify the institutions of our law and democracy. “Preserving virtuous institutions is its own noble purpose,” David French put it so well.

And as we refortify and restrengthen our sacred institutions of law and democracy, we need to inspire among our citizenry a reverential revival to the Constitution and to the Rule of Law. Above all else, America is “[a] government of laws, and not of men.” We are desperately in need of a revival, a revival that will renew and revitalize the flagging faith of the American People in our Constitution and Rule of Law, the organic law of our ordered liberty.

We have no other choice than to pass the test laid down for us by our ancestors, to ensure that this “nation so conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal will long endure.”

And when this storm has passed, we must promise ourselves and the generations that follow that we will never again take our Democracy and our Constitution for granted. We must learn from these tumultuous times – never to forget – that our Democracy and Rule of Law are fragile and can be wrested from us in an instant, even by those among us, if we are not ever-vigilant.

Almost two centuries ago, that same young man of mere twenty-nine years who would one day become President of the United States foretold of the “danger” “from within” that is preying on America today. Listen to Abraham Lincoln’s prescient and ominous warning.

We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them–they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ‘tis ours only, to transmit these . . . to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! . . .

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.[6]

What, then, must we Americans do today, if we are to bequeath this “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” to our descendants, this legacy that was bequeathed to us by “our once hardy, brave, and patriotic, race of ancestors”?

I will tell you. We must “dedicate ourselves to the great task that yet remains before us” 250 years later. “[‘T]is ours only, to transmit this ‘goodly land’ and this ‘political edifice of liberty’ . . . to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.”

We in the profession of law belong to one of the most honorable and honored, the most noble and nobilified, and the most venerable and venerated of professions.

Of our Founding Fathers, 35 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were lawyers or had legal training. Of the Framers of our Constitution, 32 of the 55 were lawyers. Of the “Committee of Five” tasked by the Continental Congress with writing the Declaration of Independence, 4 were lawyers.

We in the legal profession are the guardians and stewards of the Constitution and the Rule of Law, the foundations of our democratic nation and the guarantors of our liberty.

We lawyers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
We are uniquely qualified, positioned, and obligated to defend our Constitution, our Rule of Law, and our democracy – and we must do so today, tomorrow, and the next day, until the present existential threat is no longer.

Thereafter, at long last finally understanding their fragility, we must forever protect and preserve the Constitution and America’s Democracy, as we are obligated by oath to do.
If this sounds as if the lawyer holds a special place in the constitutional order that is our democracy and that we are weighted by an almost-sacred responsibility, it is because we do, and we are.

We have a high appointment, and we have a high charge.

There comes a time in every single one of our lives – whether that life be private or public – when we are summoned to attest to our beliefs and convictions, when we are summoned to stand, bear witness, and affirm what we believe and what we do not believe.

This moment of truth and decision is our moment of calling. And the decision that we must make in that moment always comes at personal cost.

When our call comes, if we answer with the courage of our convictions, we are heroes, whether we be heroes just to ourselves, to our families, our friends, our loved ones, our communities – or heroes to our country.
We call those in public life and in public service heroes who, when summoned, stand, affirm, and act to preserve and protect all that we cherish and hold dear in America.

We honor these men and women as heroes because when their time comes and they are summoned, they rise, they speak, and they act – without having to decide whether to do so. For them, there is no decision to be made, for they made their decision long before.

When their time comes, these heroes stare down fear, often profound fear – already knowing what they must do and what their sacrifice might be.
We bear witness to, and we affirm, the heroism of these heroes in order that heroism will be forever encouraged in a world in which there are vanishingly few with the strength, the will, and the courage to speak and act when they are called upon — that is, in a world where there are fewer and fewer heroes.

Members of the noble profession of law, our moment of calling has come.

We here today are being summoned, as are all Americans – to stand, bear witness, and affirm that we believe in America, that we believe in our Constitution and our Rule of Law, and that we believe in our Democracy.

You, and we, as members of the venerated profession of law are being summoned to stand, bear witness, and affirm again that we will honor the oath we took to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

We must challenge and entreat each other today to commit and re-commit ourselves to the Constitution and to the Rule of Law, to pledge ourselves to these and to their protection and preservation.

We must vow today that it will be the Rule of Law that triumphs over politics and not politics that triumphs over the Rule of Law.

If we succeed in this, our sacred obligation to our country, we will have risen to what is our high calling to ensure that America long endures as a nation of laws, not of men. We will be heroes for the Constitution and the Rule of Law in America…

Friends, our task is righteous and our task is noble. Our struggle is not only for today, but also for our vast future, Abraham Lincoln reminded us. And the hour is late.

Godspeed America.

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History

Florida Threatens to Withhold Diplomas from Students in Anti-ICE Silent Protest

By dianeravitch

July 4, 2026 //

Scott Maxwell, opinion columnist for The Orlando Sentinel, wrote about the state’s effort to silence speech, even a silent protest. It is heartening to know that there are students in Florida willing to dissent. It is disheartening to learn that state officials never heard of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Back in March, a handful of students at Florida International University stood up at an event where the school president was speaking and showed off their T-shirts.

They didn’t say anything to interrupt the program or speakers.

Instead, they simply revealed shirts that said they wanted the state school to stop coordinating with ICE on immigrant crackdowns on campus via the slogan: “ICE OFF FIU.”

Now, months later, the school is trying to discipline the students — even threatening to withhold their diplomas — if they don’t apologize for expressing their opinions.

In one of the creepiest twists, the school told the students that the only way they can escape punishment and “receive a diploma” would be to make a two-minute “video reflection” swearing they now understand what they did wrong.

It sounds like a hostage video. Except in this case, the hostages are being forced to apologize for free thought and expression.

Such is life in the “Free State of Florida.”

Once upon a time, college students were encouraged to be free-thinkers. That is, in fact, what Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s other GOP leaders claim to believe … when they’re renaming roads after Charlie Kirk anyway.

But what they really mean is that Florida students should think the way they do or else shut the hell up.

And this is just the latest attack on speech by DeSantis and his fellow Republican lawmakers.
There was also the state’s infamous “Stop WOKE” bill where the governor and lawmakers tried to make it illegal for private companies to hold diversity training sessions that offended these bro-flakes’ fragile sensibilities. (That part of the law was, of course, ruled unconstitutional.)

There have been multiple cases where the state tried to fire employees who said things the politicians disliked about Charlie Kirk. (The firings have been repeatedly challenged, with the state already agreeing to pay one fired biologist $485,000 for her wrongful termination.)

And a few years ago, DeSantis signed a law that would’ve allowed the state to actually imprison Floridians who donated more than $3,000 to citizen-led efforts to get amendments on the state ballot. Yes, imprison. (A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump struck down that law as well, declaring the politicians’ attempt to arrest citizens who donated to causes the governor disliked as “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”)

It’s tempting to go numb to this constant and casual assault on your rights. And to the steady stream of public money spent on these losing legal battles with attorney bills at $675 and $725 an hour.

But this Independence Day weekend seems like a good time to remember that truly patriotic Americans don’t support government trying to suppress speech.

You don’t have to agree with the FIU students’ anti-ICE sentiments. Many Floridians certainly don’t.

But if you claim to call yourself a patriot, you’d damn well better support their right to express it.
As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said, the First Amendment wasn’t created to protect viewpoints everyone likes, but specifically for “freedom for the thought that we hate.”

In the FIU case, Community Justice Project attorney Adam Saper, who’s representing the students pro bono, said: “This prosecution is the most clear violation of the constitution’s constitutional rights. They’re trying to silence these particular students who were speaking up against a policy of this school.”

That sentiment was echoed by the national free speech group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which honed in on the fact that the targeted “speech” involved words on a T-shirt — which the university obviously doesn’t crack down on with any regularity.

“Since this case involves clothing, would a student be prohibited from wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt in a university building under the same policy?” asked FIRE attorney Garrett Gravley.

“What about a Palestinian keffiyeh or an Israeli flag lapel pin? If a student wore purple for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, would that be actionable?”

Of course not. Even if the students had the audacity to … um … stand.

According to emails from university officials obtained by Axios and other news outlets, even school officials conceded that the students’ actions “did not disrupt the event.”

Basically, as far as protests go, this one seemed about as tame as it gets. Just a thoughtful, brief and silent statement of opinion. But apparently that was too much for Florida.

The school has said little about the case. But in correspondence with the students, FIU cited its policies on “student conduct” and “expression.”
Those rules are a lengthy, self-contradicting mess. They attempt to place a bevy of restrictions on students expressing their viewpoints while also stressing that none of the school’s rules “should be interpreted” as abridging anyone’s Constitutional rights, including “the freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment.”

It’s like a prosecutor telling you that you’re not entitled to a speedy trial or access to an attorney … while acknowledging that the United States Constitution says you’re guaranteed to precisely that.

Interestingly, the students staged their silent protest in March without much hubbub. It wasn’t until weeks later that the school told the kids they were in trouble.

It almost looks like someone told school president Jeanette Nuñez — DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor, one of many DeSantis allies rewarded with cushy, high-paying university jobs — that she’d better get these critically thinking kids in line.

I sent Nuñez and some of her staffers an email this past week, asking if anyone in Tallahassee had told her she needed to crack down on the students. She did not respond.

She also didn’t answer another question I posed: Whether she’d ever attended her own school’s class on the First Amendment — one that says it explains why “the rights of conscience” are protected in this nation.

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, DeSantis, Florida, Freedom of Speech

William Kristol: For the People Born on Third Base

By dianeravitch

July 2, 2026 //

William Kristol had a storied career as a conservative and neoconservative. His father Irving Kristol (a friend of mine) was considered “the father of neoconservativism,” that is, disillusioned liberals. Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. He founded The Weekly Standard, a magazine of cutting-edge neoconservative commentary.

But he couldn’t tolerate Trump. When Trump was elected in 2020, Bill changed his party registration from Republican to Independent. In 2026, he registered as a Democrat. He is now an editor and writer at The Bulwark. What a transformation! As you will read in this article, his change of mind is more than skin-deep.

He wrote, in the same post that carried Jim Swift’s piece, the following about the indifference and arrogance of the elites:

America today has lots of hard-working immigrants, and plenty of native-born citizens who accept and respect them. But there are also plenty of Americans these days who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

I hasten to say there’s no fault in being born on third base. Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base. A healthy American patriotism begins with acknowledgment of our good fortune, and with gratitude for what our forebears—most of whom were not born on third base—did to make our privileged lives today possible.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with also taking pride in what we and our contemporaries have accomplished. And if we sometimes overestimate our own achievements and underrate those of our predecessors—and therefore underrate our simple good fortune in being born here—well, that’s human nature, and it’s probably not worth getting all worked up about.

But what is worth getting worked up about is those who have no sympathy for others who didn’t happen to enjoy good fortune. What’s worth getting worked up about is those who have contempt for and who revel in cruelty toward the less fortunate.

There are lots of those people in America today. They include our president. They include many in his administration. They include many in the world of MAGA.

And they include Megyn Kelly, who was so proud of what she said on her show yesterday after the Supreme Court’s TPS decision that she then posted the clip on X:

Megyn sends a message to the Haitians who lost their TPS today:

“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us . . . GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”

Kelly thinks that “we” made America great with “our work ethic, culture, and values.” But most Americans of Kelly’s generation—and, to be clear, of mine—have had to do little in the way of heavy lifting to make America great. And is it clear that today’s culture and values are so exceptionally wonderful?

It was our forebears who made America great. Many of them were immigrants and refugees, whom earlier generations of nativists treated with hostility, bigotry, and cruelty.

The rhetoric of yesterday’s Court ruling is not itself bigoted or cruel. But the policies it permits are bigoted and cruel. They are the policies of people who found themselves, mostly by good fortune, standing on third base. Many of them aren’t particularly good hitters or fast runners. But they’ve decided to protect their status by making sure no one else—especially no one else of a different skin color or background—will have a chance to get up to bat.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Immigration, Inequality

U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Effort to Cancel “Birthright Citizenship”

By dianeravitch

June 30, 2026 //

The Supreme Court rendered two decisions that made Donald Trump happy:

One: states may ban transgender athletes from participating in sports.

Two: It struck down limits on political contributions.

But in its last decision, it overruled Trump’s hope to eliminate “birthright citizenship.” That is, the commitment that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, even if their parents are not.

The vote was 6-3. Three conservative justices joined the liberal bloc of three.

CNN reported:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday knocked down Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship as it has been understood for more than a century, invalidating an executive order that was a key part of the president’s agenda even though it was legally dubious from the start.

The decision was nevertheless a significant loss for a president who ran for office in part on ending “birth tourism” and whose second term has been largely defined by its push to crack down on both illegal and legal immigration.

The court’s decision leaves in place the understanding that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, even if that child’s parents are not.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for a majority that included both conservatives and liberals. Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — dissented from the decision.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote for the court. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Birthright citizenship is explicit in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Originalists on the Court chose to ignore the Constitution. They are Originalists when it suits their purpose, and they make it up out of thin air when it doesn’t.

Categories Citizenship, Trump

When a U.S. Citizen Was Wrongly Arrested by ICE…

By dianeravitch

March 5, 2026 //

This story could be told again and again. George Reyes was on his way to work. He is a citizen and a veteran. ICE agents stopped his vehicle, smashed his windshield, dragged him away, and jailed him for three days.

This should not happen in our nation.

Retes wrote:

The author being detained by federal agents on July 10 / Credit: Blake Fagan via AFP

“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” – Thomas Paine

By George Retes

Last Wednesday, February 18, I officially launched my lawsuit against the federal government. For me, this was something that felt like it was never going to happen. Not because I didn’t want to or because I was afraid, but because I thought that was just the way the law works when you’re trying to hold federal officials—and the government that employs them—accountable for violating someone’s rights.

On July 10, 2025, I was driving to my job as a security guard at a licensed farm in Camarillo, CA. Federal immigration agents were lined across the road that led to the farm I worked at. I clearly stated my citizenship and fully complied with officers, even though they were all yelling contradictory orders and no one was clearly in charge. Yet, despite doing everything right, I was detained and treated as if I had no rights. Agents engulfed my car with tear gas, smashed my window, sprayed pepper spray in my face, and dragged me out. I was choking on gas, unable to breathe, and even though I wasn’t resisting, I had one agent kneeling on my back and another kneeling on my neck while my hands were already behind my back.

I was first taken to a Navy base, where the agents took my fingerprints, picture, and swabbed my DNA. I was then taken off the base to a detention center and held for three days without charges. No phone call. No lawyer. No medical care, even though my skin burned from the chemicals. I never even got to shower. Friday morning, I was put on suicide watch, which means they put me in a yellow concrete room with a concrete bed and tiny mattress on top. They left the light on 24/7. I was in a hospital gown, and a guard watched me. I was in those conditions from Friday morning to the point I was released. I was released with zero charges and no explanation for anything that happened.

After my release, the harm did not stop. Instead of correcting the record, officials from DHS, specifically DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, used social media to spread false and misleading statements about me, in an attempt to justify my detention and undermine my credibility.

I was wrongfully detained and then publicly misrepresented by the very agency that violated my rights. That is not transparency. That is damage control at the expense of the truth. And since they only respond through social media, I would like to ask them to answer these questions, not only to me, but to the world: Why didn’t I ever get a phone call? Or a shower? Or a lawyer? If your accusations are true, why was I released without charges?

Under a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a person filing a lawsuit against the government must wait six months before they are even allowed to file suit. And even after all that, the chances of actually prevailing in your lawsuit are very low because of the so-called “discretionary function immunity” that the federal government gets. It is even harder to sue federal officials individually. Not because the court system is defending this, but because there is no clear law that allows people to sue individual federal officials for violating their rights.

There is another law that’s sadly relevant here: 42 USC 1983. As my attorneys wrote in Bloomberg Law, Section 1983 “allows constitutional claims to be brought against those acting under color of state law.” But, if, instead, an official is acting under color of federal law (which generally means an official working for the federal government), the result is “near-complete immunity from conventional lawsuits.”

All of that could be easily fixed by Congress. All Congress would have to do is amend the law to allow us to hold federal officials accountable for violating someone’s rights. The law already does this for state officials, so this change would be an easy fix that would hold all law enforcement to the same standards, implying that no one, no matter the badge, is above the law.

This week, I attended the State of the Union as a guest of Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.). I was honored and extremely grateful for the opportunity. Never did I think I would be in this situation, surrounded by these people, and yet here I was. By attending, I was a living reminder of government overreach and how it has impacted so many people, contrary to this administration’s claims that they are only going after “the worst of the worst.” I listened as the president painted DHS’s actions as appropriate simply because we need to fix the border issue. But this characterization is not true. This is not immigration enforcement; it’s madness.

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

I’m fully aware that my lawsuit might fail; that the world might look at my story and choose to just move on; that the federal officials who did this to me might get off scot-free. But there’s another future possible here: one where we succeed in court, where people choose not to look away, where federal agents can’t unjustifiably detain a US citizen with impunity. That’s the future I choose to believe in, and the one I’m fighting to make real—not only for myself, but for every single person in this country.

What happened to me is not about politics. It is not about immigration policy. And it is not about one bad decision made in a chaotic moment. It is about power without accountability. If a US citizen, an Army veteran, someone who complied with officers’ directions, identified himself, and broke no law, can be treated this way—detained without charges, denied basic rights, physically restrained, and then publicly smeared to justify it—then no one in this country is as safe as they believe they are.

The Constitution does not only apply when it is convenient. Civil rights do not disappear because an agency makes a mistake. And truth does not stop mattering because it is uncomfortable. I am asking for accountability and my day in court, not just for myself, but for everyone who does not have a platform, a lawyer, or the ability to stand in front of you and tell their story. Because if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

The measure of this country is not whether we admit when we are wrong, but whether we are willing to correct it.

George Retes is a US citizen and Army veteran who served in Iraq and was jailed by ICE and held for three days without an explanation.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Trump Aides Insert Citizenship Question into 2030 Census

By dianeravitch

March 4, 2026 //

In his first term, Trump wanted the U.S. Census to ask about citizenship. Critics worried that inserting the question would lower the response rate, leading to an undercount. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that Trump had not provided a sufficient rationale to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census as part of his broader campaign to stop illegal immigration.”

But that was then, this is now.

Science reports that the Trump administration scrapped plans to overhaul the census and inserted the citizenship question. The result, say knowledgeable insiders, will be an inaccurate census.

The U.S. Census Bureau spent 6 years preparing for a test this spring of ways to make the 2030 decennial census both more accurate and less expensive. In 1 day this month, the administration of President Donald Trump discarded many of those changes and replaced them with an approach researchers warn will likely do the opposite. That’s in part because the test will now include a citizenship question—something Trump has wanted to add since the previous census.

The agency originally planned to ask more than 650,000 residents in six test sites to respond to the same nine questions as on the 2020 census. But on 3 February, the Census Bureau posted a notice that “turned the plan on its head,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, former staff director of a congressional panel that oversees the agency. In addition to paring down the sites to two, both midsize cities in the South, the agency said it would use some version of the much longer American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey that monitors demographic changes and asks where residents were born and whether they are a U.S. citizen.

Taken together, the changes blow up the agency’s carefully crafted plans to better reach groups who are traditionally undercounted and to hold down costs, which reached $13 billion in 2020, says former Census Bureau Director and statistician Robert Santos. “It’s no longer a test of how to conduct the decennial census,” explains Santos, an appointee of former President Joe Biden who stepped down 1 month after Trump took office. “The changes make no sense and are not something the Census Bureau would have done on its own.”

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Data, Immigration, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Stephen Miller and Echoes of the Confederacy

By dianeravitch

February 2, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson pays attention to the rhetoric of President Trump’s close advisor Stephen Miller. She hears echoes of the Confederacy. Miller thinks that immigrants should never be allowed to be on a path to citizenship. If that had been the policy when his great-grandparents arrived from Belarus in the early 20th century, little Stephen would be a serf, a slave, or a laborer, not a well-educated white nationalist advising the President to expel millions of immigrants and close the door to others.

Richardson writes:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

History is doing that rhyming thing again.

In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.

Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond was very clear about what he believed the world should look like. Black Americans should always be subordinate to white men, of course, but white women, too, were subordinate. They were made “to breed,” as “toy[s] for recreation,” or to bring men “wealth and position,” he had explained to his son in 1852. Hammond’s promising early political career had been nearly derailed when he admitted that for two years he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces, the daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton II (although he insisted he was being wronged because he should get credit for showing any restraint at all when faced with four such “lovely creatures”).

If women and Black people were at the bottom of society, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia…a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” By definition, whatever such leaders did was what was good for society, and any man who had not achieved that status was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.

The southern system, Hammond told the Senate, was “the best in the world…such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth,” and spreading it would benefit everyone.

The next year, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee that he rejected Hammond’s mudsill theory. Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes, arguing that men with money drove the economy and workers were stuck permanently at the bottom.

For his part, Lincoln embraced a different theory: It was workers, not wealthy men, who drove the economy. While men of wealth had little incentive to experiment and throw themselves into their work, men on the make were innovative and hardworking. Such men could—and should—rise. This “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained.

In the election of 1860, southern Democrats tried to get voters to back their worldview by promising they were reflecting God’s will and by using virulent racism, warning that Black Americans must be kept in their place or they would destroy American society.

But, in a nation of immigrants and men who had worked their way up from day laborers to become prominent men, Lincoln stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. He warned that if people started to make exceptions to the idea that all men are created equal, they would not stop. They would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.” “If that declaration is not the truth,” Lincoln said, “let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No! No!” he responded: “[L]et us stand firmly by it then.”

Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.

The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.

The horrors of the Epstein files show a group of powerful and wealthy men and women who sexually assaulted children and showed no concern either for their crimes or that they might have to answer to the law. The public still does not know the extent of the horrors or the human-trafficking business in which Epstein and others were engaged. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters yesterday that the Department of Justice was not releasing any item from the Epstein files that showed “death, physical abuse, or injury.”

“You [know] the biggest problem with being friends with you?” Dr. Peter Attia wrote in an email to Epstein in response to an email with the subject line “Got a fresh shipment.” Attia answered his own question: “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

Trump echoed Hammond in a different way tonight on Air Force One as he traveled to Florida. Asked by a reporter how he would handle being on both sides of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, he suggested that taking the money of the American people into his own hands would enable him to use it for the public good. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said. “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.”

Another story tonight indicated the degree to which the president sees himself as part of a wealthy caste that is above the law. Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhous, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report showing that four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, men working for an Abu Dhabi royal signed a secret deal with the Trump family to buy 49% of their brand-new cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. The investors would pay half immediately, sending $187 million to entities held by the Trump family and at least $31 million to entities held by Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial whom Trump had named U.S. envoy to the Middle East weeks earlier.

The deal was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and oversees more than $1.3 trillion that includes the country’s largest wealth fund. Tahnoon has wanted access to U.S. AI technology, but the Biden administration blocked access out of concern it could end up in Chinese hands. The Trump administration, in striking contrast, has committed to allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy about half a million of the most advanced AI chips a year.

Federal agents acting for the Trump administration are trying to enforce the authority of those like Miller, tear-gassing, arresting, and killing American citizens. Thousands marched peacefully in Portland, Oregon, today but, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle recorded, “federal officers outside the ICE facility in Portland…indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs” at marchers, including children. Portland, Oregon, city councillor Mitch Green reported: “I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions.”

Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote: “Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps.”

And yet, in another echo of the 1850s, MAGA Republicans are reversing victim and offender, blaming the people under assault for the violence. Trump officials insist that community watch groups and protesters are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Greg Jaffe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times flagged that Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday that those people protecting their neighbors from the violence of federal agents want “revolution.” “They want to fundamentally remake and tear down the institutions and the culture of this country.”

In an order requiring the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from detention, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery noted that in their crusade against undocumented immigrants, U.S. officials are ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “[F]or some among us,” the judge wrote, “the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”

Judge Biery signed the order after saying he was putting “ a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” Under his signature, he posted the now-famous image of the little boy detained in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, along with the notations for two biblical passages: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”

Tonight, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Mag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.

And yet, as G. Elliott Morrisof Strength in Numbers noted, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. After removing the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.

—

Notes:

James Henry Hammond, Speech on the Admission of Kansas, March 4, 1858, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Thrown & Co., 1866), pp. 301–322.

Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 37–104, 312–314.

https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm

Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858, in: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:526?rgn=div1&view=fulltext

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-trump-crypto-tahnoon-ea4d97e8

Click to access gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492.9.0.pdf