David M. Perry, “The Trump administration is ready to abandon kids like my son”
Attacks on disabled people are emerging on all fronts. The new “Make America Healthy Again” campaign reads as a targeted attack against support for conditions such as autism or mental illness, not to mention chronic diseases of all sorts. As they did during the last Trump regime, Republicans are seeking to gut Medicaid. Looming closures of Social Security Administration offices around the country will make it much harder for recipients of disability insurance and benefits under the program to apply, get approved and contest denials.
Then there is the Education Department. … The White House is still attempting to abolish the department by executive order. For decades, federal funding has been absolutely crucial for special education programs. The Office of Civil Rights in the department provides the means for disabled students and their families to demand accountability and compliance with the law. Terminating the department could also accelerate the devolution of public education into state voucher programs for private schools, which are not legally required to accept disabled students.
Robert O. Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Liz Dye, “One Firm Fights, One Firm Forfeits”
Willie James Jennings, “Whiteness rooted in place”
This is what we came to call European: the power to transform the land and the perception of the people. A racial vision started to emerge. It floated around in many places with many differences in body type, skin color, and so forth. It didn’t come out of nowhere. But now, inside this matrix, it starts to harden. It starts to become a way of perception, not simply of a conjecture. This is where Whiteness begins.
So unless you know that this is a Christian operation, you cannot grasp the absolute power of race to define existence right now, even when people move beyond that Christian matrix and say they don’t confess it or agree with it. They are still inside it. That’s my definition of Whiteness: it is a way of perceiving the world and organizing and ordering the world by the perception of one’s distorted place within it. But it is also more than a perception: Whiteness includes the power to place that perception on other people and to sustain it.
Ansley Quiros, “Christianity, White Supremacy & the Rise of American Nazism”
It’s horrifyingly germane now. And it was then, part of the broader story of American racism and the American Right, which I should have known. After all, I had just read J. Kameron Carter’s masterful book Race: A Theological Account, which sets out to understand how “the discourse of theology aided and abetted the processes by which ‘man’ came to be viewed as a modern, racial being.” Though it’s a deep and complex book, the origins of this racializing, Carter concludes, are in a heretical anti-Semitism. “The genesis,” he writes, was in “the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” which required first casting Jews “as a race group in contrast to Western Christians”– a non-Occidental, later non- white, group– and then deeming themselves superior. It’s a stunning, deeply intellectual and theological history, but what’s clear from Carter’s telling is that all racism is first anti-Semitic, an anti-Jesus Christ heresy. It’s been there all along. And it’s still here right now a fundamental part of the American far Right.
Inae Oh, “In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA”
The new look among MAGA women is consistent with the conservative movement’s decades-old willingness to embrace women’s rights—up to a point. As Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor at San Diego State University, notes: “The caveat is, ‘Of course, women should have the ability to make choices, but we don’t want to go as far as the feminists.’”
At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.
Heather Cox Richardson, “March 22, 2025”
Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. On June 1, 1950, with McCarthy sitting two rows behind her, Smith stood up in the Senate to speak. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she said. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves, she said. She condemned those trying to stifle dissent.
“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” she said. “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”
Senator Smith ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Holly Brewer, “The Supreme Court Turns the President Into a King”
The Founders were hardly all wise or all knowing, but they did understand a history that we have now forgotten. There’s a reason that they so carefully included accountability for governors, and presidents, and wanted it for kings. They not only experienced abuses of power at the hands of royal governors, and at the whims of kings, abuses they recounted in the Declaration of Independence. They knew as basic history that this question was at the center of disputes over the actions of unrestrained monarchs during England’s two revolutions in the seventeenth century.
The 1686 case of Godden v. Hales affirmed the power of James II, king of England, to ignore all laws and not be bound by them. Like the decision in Trump v. U.S., the judges could cite no substantial precedent. Before the decision, James II personally interrogated the justices, all of whom held their positions at his pleasure. When it appeared that some of the 12 justices on England’s highest court might not rule as he wished, James II fired them and replaced them with other more amenable justices. After the decision, which cited “the King’s will,” James II’s actions became increasingly egregious, so much so that there was a revolution against him, called the “Glorious Revolution” because his soldiers refused to fight for him. The Convention Parliament that met afterward, in the spring of 1689, requested all of the records from the case be brought to them. They then fired all of the high court justices, levied fines on them, ruled that they could never again hold any office. They also decreed that no high court decisions from the reign of James II could ever be cited as precedent.
Today’s Supreme Court has just recreated one of the most despicable cases in English history, a case that signified the apex of absolutism in British history and was repudiated by a revolution for the damage it caused. Their language about presidents facing no responsibility for criminal actions if they are remotely related to their official responsibilities is substantially the same ruling for Trump that Godden v. Hales was for the king of England in 1686.
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