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The Hijacking of America's 250th Anniversary

Having followed Christofascists and "conservative Christians" for decades their agenda has always been to inflict their beliefs - often driven by hatred and fear - on all of society.  Project 2025 put this agenda in written form and the Felon's extremist regime is working diligently to implement the theocratic and racist goals of these people who hold contempt for an interracial democracy. White supremacy, the restriction of the civil rights of others and rewriting history (much as Florida is doing as noted in a prior post) to give a sanitized, pro-white view of America's past are all part of this agenda.  As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this effort is on overdrive with the aid of the Felon's regime.  Ironically, so-called "Nones" make up a larger percentage of the American population than right wing evangelicals, yet the Felon's regime is all in making the rights, hatreds and bigotries of Christofascists supreme over the rights of the vast majority of American citizens..  One example of this effort is the  Felon's "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving," which gives center stage to a who's who of far right Christofascist who seek to further the lie that America was founded as a "Christian nation." A piece at Salon looks at this insidious effort and the efforts to erase the rights of many Americans, including women.  Here are highlights:

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why.

Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement.  . . . Trump’s efforts to inflict his grotesque architectural tastes on the nation’s capital cannot be separated from the administration’s schemes “to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.”

Trump’s plans of erasure fit in well with the Christian right’s efforts, stretching back decades, to replace real history with a false, sanitized tale of an America founded not to be a secular democracy but something closer to a right-wing Christian theocracy. This includes making phony claims that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington didn’t really mean what they clearly did with their talk of “freedom of religion” and “separation of church and state.” The decision to kick off months devoted to celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial sends a blatant message of support for this alternate reality in which the nation’s founders were all right-wing Christians who wanted a nation ruled not by reason and the rule of law, but by a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.

The scary thing is that, on its surface, Sunday’s event will likely read as innocuous when compared to the myriad of other travesties committed daily by the Trump administration against our nation’s laws and traditions.

The speaker list, though, reveals what’s really going on. Rededicate 250 is not just about imposing a Christian identity on the United States; it promotes something more specific — an evangelical, far-right flavor of the faith. According to Pew Research, only 23% of Americans are evangelical Christians, but the event’s program implies that the only truly legitimate Americans are the ones who spend their weekends waving their hands to ear-splitting worship music inside a stadium-sized megachurch. Worse, most of the religious leaders speaking at this event are committed to pushing a political agenda opposed to the basic rights and freedoms of everyone outside their right-wing tribe.

Franklin Graham, who has built his entire career piggybacking on the fame of his famous father, the late evangelist Billy Graham, was rewarded with a plum spot on Sunday’s roster. . . . Why Graham is willing to gaslight his followers like this isn’t a mystery. At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, he argued that Trump is singularly equipped to fight the “godless anti-American agenda,” which he described as legal abortion, “woke culture, critical race theory [and] transgender ideology.”

Also on the program is Dr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, which boasts “a new 178,000-square-foot Worship Center and a three-story structure with a 3,000-seat sanctuary with a full production and broadcast studio.” From his pulpit there, Jeffress teaches that women should submit to their husbands because the Bible says a woman is “man’s helper,” provided by God to support a man in his life’s purpose. He is also famous for his 2008 “Gay Is Not Okay” sermon, in which he condemned “their filthy behavior that explains why they are so much more prone to disease.” Three years later, Jeffress declared that Catholicism was a “counterfeit religion” inspired by “the genius of Satan.”

Then there’s Paula White, a charismatic preacher who has long been close to Trump. The thrice-married evangelist opposes same-sex marriage and has equated the Black Lives Matter movement with the Ku Klux Klan.

There are many more: the minister who rose to fame by telling his congregation to refuse Covid-19 vaccinations, another who suggested Christians may be banned from speaking if Joe Biden won in 2020, one who vowed to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Hating LGBTQ people is a common theme among the invited speakers. And of course, so many of them eagerly preach that it’s a wife’s duty to submit to her husband.

That’s why the Rededicate 250 event is so insidious — even if the speakers behave themselves and don’t say anything too controversial on stage. By giving far-right radicals the main stage at an event that’s supposed to be celebrating America’s birthday, the event’s organizers — with the cooperation of the Trump administration — are normalizing and mainstreaming their anti-democracy views. It sends a message that the government that’s supposed to be of, by and for the people actually agrees with the speakers that huge swaths of Americans — including women, immigrants, LGBTQ people and advocates for racial equality — do not count as full citizens.

This is why the founders were wise to insist on creating the United States as a secular nation. When the government gets into promoting religion, it cannot help but separate people into groups who are seen as more or less worthy of the status of citizen. Even if Rededicate 250 somehow manages to avoid presenting outright hate on stage, promoting voices like these sends a message loud and clear: The rest of you don’t matter.

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Florida Whitewashes American History

Before the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025 - a road map for turning back time, erasing the progress of racial minorities and LGBT Americans, and empowering Christofascists - Florida under Ron DeSantis and the extremist state legislature had already begun the process of sanitizing American history to erase or distort the true facts of American history, including the ugliness of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.  The goal? To pander to whites worried about perceived lost white privilege and upset with restrictions on their ability to mistreat others, especially Blacks and gays.  The other larger goal is to dumb down the populace and make it more receptive to Republican/Christofascist lies and propaganda. Personally, I do not understand the fear of these whites.  Perhaps its because I lived in New York State through high school and had blacks and Onondaga Indians as classmates and members of the student body.  Perhaps its because of my upbringing by my family where respect for others was drilled into us children. Whatever the reason, I have never grasped why others with different skin color bettering their lives poses some kind of existential threat as perceived by far too many whites, especially in the South. A piece at Salon looks at Florida's effort to sanitize and white wash history to ignore and omit an accurate telling of the the nation's true past. Here are highlights:

Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.

Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world.

The scope of Florida’s latest right-wing project is ambitious, and part of a three-year campaign, according to a recent report by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times. The course, she revealed, “focuses on the Protestant faith of the Founders, argues that the U.S. Constitution is an antislavery document and recommends a textbook written explicitly to build patriotism.”

This is a polite way of saying that the curriculum is nothing more than right-wing propaganda.

The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country’s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of “patriotism” and “nationalism,” rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history, which can encourage them to be responsible citizens who are intellectually and psychologically equipped to challenge the powerful. 

This is not an accident. Would-be authoritarians like Donald Trump want and need a passive, compliant public that lacks the agency and tools for democratic governance, so they work very hard to create one.

The impact of Florida’s changes will be felt far beyond its borders. As Goldstein reported, the state has often set the pace for Republican education policy in the Trump era. Other red states will likely administer the new course, along with others in the program of accelerated courses the state has dubbed FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests), which will be, she wrote, “a sort of red-state competitor to the College Board,” which oversees the AP curricula.

Most of the new history course reflects a boilerplate conservative view of American history and society, where cheerleading too frequently substitutes for rigor and accuracy. But it also claims that the Constitution is an antislavery document — and that the nation’s founders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both owned enslaved people, were opposed to the institution. Such pronouncements are not merely wrong. They are insidious.

Mainstream contemporary historians view the Constitution as a compromise between free and slaveholding states. But there is significant and respected scholarship that goes much further and holds that the Constitution is a pro-slavery, and pro-Southern, document which protected that vile institution.

The scholarly consensus is clear: The Constitution is not an antislavery document, and America’s founders produced a document that protected the interests of the slaveholding class. But these facts are being buried to construct a narrative that valorizes the founders.

Florida previewed this whitewashing of history in 2022 when it passed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which banned the teaching of so-called divisive subjects that might make white children uncomfortable because of their race. The discomfort of Black and brown children — who watch their communities’ histories, experiences and reality being systematically erased and distorted — was apparently of little concern.

In 2021, both the National Coalition of History and the Organization of American Historians denounced these laws and the damage they do to democratic life and freedom of thought. “Our nation’s history is complex,” members of the organization’s wrote in a joint statement. “The study of it requires not just a celebration of our triumphs, but frank discussion of our shortcomings, indeed our divisions.” Ignoring those, they said, “stifles that debate and our ability to move forward as a nation,” and impedes healing.

Thirteen of the 39 signers of the Constitution were from the South, and it’s estimated that 25 delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. The document counted enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation — which meant that slaveholding states were systematically overrepresented in both Congress and the Electoral College. The Constitution barred any federal prohibition on the importation of slaves until 1808, and it included a fugitive slave clause requiring that Black people who escaped slavery, even to free states, be returned to their owners. The federal government was given the responsibility for putting down rebellions, which in practice meant crushing slave uprisings and resistance.

Black people were not citizens under this framework. They were anti-citizens, existing outside of the polity. America was a racialized democracy from its inception. It was only after the Civil War, through ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, that Black Americans were written into the Constitution as equal citizens — on paper, but rarely in daily American life.

Florida’s whitewashing of the Constitution and the founders’ relationship to slavery is made more perfidious still by its timing. The Trump administration and its allies are working diligently to end multiracial democracy by gutting the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the Long Black Freedom struggle to build a contemporary version of Jim and Jane Crow. And the president is leading this project while hurling racist attacks at Barack and Michelle Obama and other Black leaders on social media.

Florida’s history education program is not an outlier. It is a smaller version of the Trump administration’s white racial authoritarian project masquerading as patriotism and American exceptionalism.

As I watch the rapid collapse of American democracy in real time, I keep returning to “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the 1976 Pulitzer-winning photograph that depicts Ted Landsmark, a Black attorney and civil rights activist, being beaten by a white teenager wielding a flag pole. The image was captured during a violent protest against school desegregation in Boston, and as the assailant wields the pole against Landsmark, Old Glory streams from it mournfully.

How would Florida’s new history course explain this photograph? Would it even be taught? And if the Trump administration’s Orwellian whitewashing of American history and public memory succeeds — what then?

I know the answers. They fill me with dread. A people without history, without context, who lack the means to understand their predicament or the tools to resist it, are easy prey for authoritarians. This is why Florida’s new conservative history course exists.

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Is The Felon Lying About Iran's Continued Military Strength

Anyone conscious and who hasn't had a lobotomy should at this point in time know, based on the Felon's past conduct and statements, that the safest approach to take is to assume that anything and everything the Felon says is a lie until documented otherwise. Based on new reporting by the New York Times, this pattern of endless lies extends to the Felon's war of choice in Iran where the Felon and his bootlicking Secretary of Defense have claimed that Iran's missile capabilities have been "decimated . . . and rendered  combat-ineffective for years to come.”  New intelligence reports show a different story with Iran still possessing large missile supplies and many missile sites restored to operational status and Iran still posing a threat to neighboring Gulf countries should open hostilities resume. Add to this some indications that Russia and China may be aiding Iran and the situation becomes even worse. Hence the recent post entitled "Checkmate in Iran."  Meanwhile, the Felon openly stated that he was not worried about the economic pain of average Americans even as he spouts more lies about dropping consumer and gasoline prices.  None of this should give Americans any sense that someone rational and responsible is in charge.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.

Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.

People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.

Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.

Military intelligence agencies have also reported, based on information from multiple collection streams including satellite imagery and other surveillance technologies, that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” the people with knowledge of the assessments said.

The findings undercut months of public assurances from [the Felon] President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have told Americans that the Iranian military was “decimated” and “no longer” a threat.

On March 9, 10 days into the war, Mr. Trump told CBS News that Iran’s “missiles are down to a scatter” and the country had “nothing left in a military sense.” Mr. Hegseth declared at a Pentagon news conference on April 8 that Operation Epic Fury — the joint U.S.-Israel campaign launched on Feb. 28 — had “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.”

The intelligence describing Iran’s remaining military capacity is dated less than a month after that news conference. . . . Asked about the intelligence assessments, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, repeated Mr. Trump’s previous assertions that Iran’s military had been “crushed.” . . . . Ms. Wales pointed to a social media post from Mr. Trump on Tuesday declaring that it was “virtual treason” to suggest that Iran’s military was doing well.

Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, responded to questions about the intelligence by criticizing news coverage of the war. “It is so disgraceful that The New York Times and others are acting as public relations agents for the Iranian regime in order to paint Operation Epic Fury as anything other than a historic accomplishment,” he said in a statement.

The new intelligence assessments suggest that Mr. Trump and his military advisers overestimated the damage that the U.S. military could inflict on Iranian missile sites, and underestimated Iran’s resilience and ability to bounce back.

The findings underscore the dilemma Mr. Trump would face if the fragile month-old cease-fire in the conflict collapses and full-scale fighting resumes. The U.S. military has already depleted its stocks of many critical munitions, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot interceptor missiles, and Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, and yet the intelligence suggests that Iran retains considerable military capability, including around the vital Strait of Hormuz.

If Mr. Trump ordered commanders to launch more strikes to take out or diminish those Iranian capabilities, then the U.S. military would have to dig even deeper into stocks of critical munitions. Doing so would further undercut U.S. stockpiles at a time when the Pentagon and the major arms makers are already struggling to find the industrial capacity to replenish American reserves.

Mr. Trump and his advisers have repeatedly denied that U.S. munitions stocks have been drained to dangerously low levels. . . . . In testimony on Tuesday to a House appropriations subcommittee, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We have sufficient munitions for what we’re tasked to do right now.”

Iran’s apparent ability to retain substantial military capacity has exacerbated concerns among U.S. allies about the wisdom of the war and generated criticism among Mr. Trump’s anti-interventionist supporters who opposed getting into the conflict in the first place.

The intelligence assessments on Iran’s capabilities point to the consequences of a tactical choice made by U.S. military commanders.

When American forces struck Iran’s hardened missile facilities, the Pentagon, faced with limited stocks of bunker-busting munitions, opted to try to seal off many of the entrances rather than trying to destroy the entire sites with all of the missiles inside, officials said, with mixed results.

Some bunker busters were dropped on Iran’s underground facilities, but officials said military planners faced a difficult choice and needed to be cautious in using them because they needed to preserve a certain number for U.S. operational plans for potential wars in Asia with North Korea and China.

Replenishing those stockpiles will take years, not months. Lockheed Martin currently produces around 650 Patriot interceptors a year. The company has announced plans to ramp up production of the crucial air defense weapon to 2,000 a year. But doing so will not be easy. And the industry’s ability to produce rocket motors cannot be scaled up as quickly as Mr. Trump has demanded, officials said.

Quite the fine mess - all of the Felon's creation.  Russia and China must be laughing.

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