I am listening to the White House Conference on American History and it is batshit crazy. This is absolutely nuts.
A taste from Peter Wood on the protests: “Riots appear to be planned, staffed, scheduled for nights on end. These are not spontaneous, … but well staged … they run according to a well-rehearsed script. Who rights that script? The answer is obvious.” Then he blamed professors.
Quotes are not exact, sorry. Double check them all.
I thought this was going to be about statues or promoting the revisionist, Christian nationalist version of America. But I think this is really just a swipe at the #1619Project.
It's an entirely white panel. Plus Ben Carson, a medical dr., to intro.
Authoritarianism kills irony.
Carson, referring to the Constitution, just said, “I believe that’s a divinely inspired document." It wasn't.
And now he's attacking the media and essentially threatening to remove the First Amendment protections from the press. On #ConstitutionDay2020
I'm very curious about why a few of the people on this panel, especially after looking up their co-panelists but more especially knowing they're getting in to bed with Trump, signed on to this.
A big focus has been Bill McClay's textbook which he
now admits didn’t go through any normal textbook editing. Didn’t run it through "any committees, ... stakeholders" “it was just me up in my attic...I didn’t have research assistants….I just felt passionately about it….”
That's totally cool with me for a book. Many books are like that. But one has to wonder if textbooks are different for a reason.....
Here was the panel. Woman on left was a student, neither woman asked a question during the discussion. Carson was just there to introduce event. It's in the National Archives Rotunda. In front of the Declaration and Constitution.
Trump is now picking up on the theme of this panel in one of the worst, most soporific history lectures of all time.
Fun historical fact. The presidential tradition of ending speeches with that phrase dates to Nixon's first address about Watergate, one of the worst pre-Trump scandals. I detail this in The Founding Myth: a.co/d/a59fCqy
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When I write that Project 2025 is already happening in Okla., I mean that the Heritage Foundation is in bed with Ryan Walters.
Walters is also using state funds to hire Heritage folks "to project a cartoonish image of a macho Christian culture warrior." The details are alarming.
Walters had the state contract with Vought Strategies for his public relations campaign. The president of Vought Strategies is Mary Vought, who’s also VP of Strategic Communications at the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 handbook.
Mary is/was married to Russ Vought. You know him. He's the guy recently caught on tape admitting that Trump was still very much working toward a Project 2025 future. (We locked this article last week, before that video broke).
Some facts about the Ten Commandments that Louisiana really should have looked up before forcing public schools to display them in classrooms. A thread.🧵
The text of the Louisiana law actually specifies a state-sanctioned version of God's holy writ. It begins “I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shall have no other gods before me.”
The point of this bill is to give the false impression that America is a Christian nation. That's Christian Nationalism.
Historical flags are often adopted by modern political movements. Sometimes this is obvious, like neo-Nazis adopting the Confederate flag. Or less so, like when the Tea Party adopted the Gadsden (Don't Tread on Me) flag.
The Appeal to Heaven flag is even more under the radar.
This flag—which was widely flown during the insurrection—has become like a secret handshake for Christian Nationalist public officials to signal their fealty to the cause, while maintaining plausible deniability about their allegiance. That's literally the point behind the flag.
I explained this to @BradleyOnishi on the latest episode of @StraightWhiteJC.
So this is a huge deal. The Appeal to Heaven flag was all over the insurrection and comes out of explicitly Christian Nationalist spaces. Sam Alito is professing his Christian Nationalism.
🚨We need to talk about this alarming pressure campaign that's happening right now. An attempt to muzzle discussion, criticism, and reporting on the authoritarian Christian Nationalism that is working against American democracy and a free press.
In Dec., journalist @HeidiReports wrote a piece exposing how the dark money network that financed the conservative takeover of the courts is also backing the Christian Nationalist push to dismantle public education, with Oklahoma as a test case. politico.com/news/2023/12/2…
Just days ago, Przybyla wrote a piece about Christian Nationalism in a second Trump administration which broke the internet. The reporting is accurate and terrifying. It shows that American democracy is unlikely to survive a second Trump term.
Despite Wheerler's unearned arrogance, @HeidiReports is absolutely correct. Rights given by a god can be taken away by men claiming to speak for that god. That's exactly the fight we're in now. That's what the Alabama Supreme Court just did with IVF. That's Christian Nationalism.
Again, I tackle this all in The Founding Myth, including the inevitable rejoinder of misquoting the Declaration of Independence, usually as "endowed by Our Creator," including a look the natural law philosophy the Declaration relies on.
Here's a bit.
📖 bit.ly/TFMpaperback