i see a friend the oak i helped bottle removed from the hollow missing branch.
i feel hello in my heart my heart hellos back.
i walk on sidewalk flat white. tree grows up down out arms in air brainy fingers underground brown cooling moving water feeding squirrels housing birds insects collecting transforming sunlight storing energy observing being. giant work silent unseen.
dream: i see an intensive care ward for plants. it's small, only five or six plants, each in its own isolation chamber. metal-framed boxes, glass walls, artificial light, climate control to suit each plant's preference.
put the weather in a box, put the box onto the bike, ride the bike around the world, until you get heard.
same night another dream: man puts a bomb in his own house. who knows why. it's a movie a thriller. the movie ends not the way expected. everything turns out fine.
wait that's a false ending. now the man hurries his son out of the house and the house explodes dramatically behind them.
Things that matter that we can all do to thwart the weird ones.
Register to Vote
First time voters and voters needing to re-register for any reason can do so at Vote.gov. The deadline to register to vote varies by state and may be as much as one month ahead of the Nov. 5. Don't delay.
Check Your Voter Registration (Even if you think you don't need to.)
Before you do anything else, take a minute and be sure your voter registration is still current. Many states have new laws that make it easier to remove eligible voters from the rolls. It's worth taking a minute to be sure that you're not one of those voters.
Volunteer to Canvass and Get Out the Vote for Harris Walz 2024
Sign up to door knock, phone bank, and more. There are multiple opportunities to get involved every day of the week, with online and local events as well as action teams to join.
Support Democratic Candidates in State Legislatures
Swing Left helps you quickly identify and learn about the most critical races where you can make the biggest impact. You'll find a donate button on each candidate page so you can take action without having to search or click away.
Know Your Judges!
We've all learned how important it is to elect judges who have integrity and believe in democracy. Now is the time to research the judges on your ballot. Try this excellent resource from Ballotpedia. Everything's in one place, with multiple ways to navigate to find the information you're looking for.
Support Democratic Candidates in Red States (No, really!)
It might seem like a waste to give money or time to candidates running in solidly red states or districts. But is it? Check out “We've been obeying in advance” with Michele Hornish for a different perspective and consider joining up with Every State Blue to fund and support red-state candidates.
Want to Go Deep? Work on the Harris Walz 2024 Campaign
“We had a revolution to get rid of [the] kingly prerogative and the supreme court just reinstituted it. This emboldens any president to indulge his baser instincts. Secure in their ability to avoid criminal responsibility and confident in the supine nature of Congressional impeachment oversight, they will be willing to push to the edge of permissible conduct and beyond.”
“The Supreme Court’s biggest power grab for a generation isn’t just about bestowing new and huge powers upon itself, it’s also about shifting power from agencies established in the public interest to corporations, industry, and billionaires.”
Project 2025 is the anti-democratic blueprint for a second-term Trump presidency authored by the The Heritage Foundation with the support of more than 100 right-wing organizations – including ALEC, Tea Party Patriots, and Turning Point USA. At least five of the authors are known racists or white supremacists. Getting the word out about Project 2025 is critical in the months leading up to the 2024 election to be sure that voters understand the extent of what is at stake. Trump has claimed to be unfamiliar with Project 2025, but like so many things he says, that's simply untrue. His running mate, JD Vance, wrote the Project 2025 introduction.
This is an excellent overview of Project 2025 from an established, respected source, with a high-level summary, plenty of supporting links, all the detail you need, and easy-to-use navigation.
“In the foreword of Project 2025, on page six, the Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts warns, 'The Dobbs decision is just the beginning.' Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document and it includes plenty of ideas to further restrict reproductive rights that are so extreme that it will continue to endanger more women’s lives. 'Project 2025 is about dismantling democracy,' says Georgetown Constitutional Law & Global Health Policy professor Michele Goodwin, noting that abortion is just the first part of it. 'This is all about dismantling the autonomy of women.'”
If you don't know Heather Cox Richardson, she's a respected historian with a large and devoted following. It is worth 53 minutes of your time to listen to what she has to say about Project 2025. There are links and opportunities to connect with the host organization in the video description. (I have no affiliation.)
2) Take him seriously.
Trump's not “joking” about serving more than one term
Look what he posted to Truth Social after the event:
So don't discount him. Don't give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't believe the lies. Don't dismiss the buffoonery. This is all deadly serious. It's not hyperbole to say that this year's election could be our last.
How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology | Aja Romano for Vox | 2017 (This one is dated, but still highly relevant. “Alt right” is terminology coined by Richard Spencer to obscure the extremist, nothing-new-under-the-sun nature of his movement. Just say “far right” or “right wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” etc.)
“Trolling distorts reality in order to trick you into dismissing its message”
Listen to U.S. Attorney and law professor Joyce Vance on this:
3) Trump will try to regain the presidency by any means necessary.
He has already threatened to challenge the results of the election if he doesn't win. And that was before he was convicted on 34 felony counts. He'll do what it takes, from blunt lies and political pressure to court appeals and incitement to violence. We've seen all of this before and there's every reason to believe we'll see it again.
“In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results. At least 22 of these county election officials have refused or delayed certification in recent years.”
“At a rally in Ohio with J.D Vance, a GOP state senator said Trump victory in 2024 is the last chance to avoid bloody conflict”
Note: As of August 10, 2024, Trump appears to be losing support among white supremacists, major players in the January 6 insurrection. Will the threat of violence flag or simply move under a new masthead?
4) Keeping Trump out of the White House starts with engaging American voters and getting the word about the very real threats of a second Trump term.
Whether we're talking to family members or strangers on the internet, it's smart to know when to cut our losses, how to recognize trolls who engage only waste our time and demoralize us, how to effectively exit those conversations, and how things can go very wrong on social media. The following resources are excellent – even if you just dip in a toe for a bit.
This series is designed to help viewers identify far-right rhetorical strategies and avoid getting sucked in and played. It runs over 6 hours in all, but it's broken down into (mostly) relatively short topical videos that are highly engaging and include many real-life examples, at least some of which will be familiar to many viewers. Watch as much or as little as you want, but I would recommend watching at least through video 9, Endnote 2: White Fascism, if you can. If you have concerns about terminology, jump right to Endnote 1: What I Mean When I Say “The Right.”
It's YouTube. There are ads. But I haven't found another complete repository If you prefer to read, every video has a link to a transcript in the description section.
*NOTE: As noted previously, “alt-right” is a term coined by far-right, white nationalist Richard Spencer. Use a different term. Some outlets call him a neo-Nazi (or just shorthand it to “Nazi”), others simply go with “white nationalist” or “right-wing extremist.”
“Bridget Todd explains how bad actors use the internet to target and silence marginalized people, especially Black women. Excluding them from discourse and desensitizing us to sexist, racist attacks makes us all less safe. Bridget talks with people who have been the targets of coordinated attacks, activists who are fighting back, and experts to help break down the deliberate agenda behind it.”
The whole series is worth listening to, but several episodes are especially pertinent to the moment:
Things feel a wee bit hopeful right now, don't they? With Kamala Harris on board and punching back hard – engendering historic democratic unity and enthusiasm – it's tempting to think that Trump's chances for 2024 are flagging. But if you're old enough to remember 2016, then you know there's no sure thing. Millions of Americans gathered around their TV sets that year to watch Hillary Clinton defeat a vile, clownish candidate to become the first woman president of the United States – and went to bed devastated. Then, on January 6, 2021, we saw Trump and his gang try to negate the will of he voters and violently seize control of the country.
So in 2024 we fight with everything we have until it's over. And truth be told, there's really no such thing as over. A lot of Americans thought that this country had “progressed” away from the worst of its past. I used to be one of them. It's impossible now to ignore the fact that, like Friday the 13th's Freddy Krueger, the worst lurks behind the scenes, ready to return under favorable circumstances with violence and vengeance. If Trump doesn't get his authoritarian way in 2024, there are other far-right politicians waiting to take up the mantle from him. And a groundwork has been laid that just might enable them to succeed.
6) Get involved.
More to come here, but a good starting point would be to sign up as a volunteer with the Harris 2024 campaign.
At the center of this scheme is an effort to replace the existing federal bureaucracy with “an army of people who have a biblical worldview” and a willingness to “lead with reckless abandon.” Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are toothlessly threatening the jobs of federal employees on Twitter. Vought, however, will have real power at the OMB to “put them in trauma,” as he threatened in a recent speech at the Center for Renewing America. The goal, he said, was to make their work lives so miserable that they are “traumatically affected” and forced to quit. Unlike Musk and Ramaswamy, however, Vought doesn't pretend this is about saving money. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists. In sum, the conspiracy theory of the “deep state” was concocted so the right could justify creating a real “deep state,” one that is geared towards remaking America in its Christian fundamentalist worldview.
Increasingly, members of the media, academics, Americans United and others are using the term “Christian nationalism” and often “white Christian nationalism” to describe a political movement that seeks to topple church-state separation and declare America a “Christian nation” – with “Christian” in this case being far to the right and supremely fundamentalist.
While they’re sometimes openly aligned with racist movements, their ultimate goal is seen as a branch of white supremacy because it would result in a society governed by conservative white Christian men who would make decisions for everyone else.
[Butler:] A lot of readers will find this troubling because they would prefer not to think about it. But if you look at evangelicalism as a political movement, in addition to a religious group, you have to grapple with the various ways that whiteness can be reinscribed. It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system.
The report provides a brief history of white Christian nationalism in the United States, which is followed by a thorough unmasking of the networks of power and money that prop up the ideology.
Roberts predicted that his “second revolution” would be complete by 2050, and that would it would coincide with a new “great awakening” that would bring America to God — underscoring the extent to which Heritage and its Project 2025 is entwined with Christian nationalism.
Walters’ announcement came two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a contract between the Statewide Virtual School Charter Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious-based charter school, violated both the state and U.S. Constitutions and state law. Walters was not a party in that case, although he strongly criticized the court’s decision.
A new Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms is drawing new scrutiny to Christian nationalism, a once-fringe movement steadily gaining political power in the U.S.
in legislative hearings, they assured lawmakers that chaplains were not interested in proselytizing. Last week, however, The Texas Tribune reported that the head of the National School Chaplain Association — a key supporter of the chaplains bill — has led another group for decades that touted its ability to use school chaplains for evangelizing to kids.
Members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus (CFC), a collection of 20 lawmakers in Congress who seek to “protect the secular character of our government by adhering to the strict Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state,” released a white paper report on Wednesday showcasing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s (R-Louisiana) disturbing Christian nationalist views.
That a Supreme Court justice would have two partisan flags representing anti-democratic movements displayed outside his homes, especially while he’s deliberating cases involving people active in those movements, is alarming. But that one of those flags signals that Alito has Christian Nationalist sympathies that run contrary to the constitutional promise of church-state separation shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has paid attention to his judicial opinions and public remarks.
The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol resulted from a brew of political polarization and economic dislocation fueled by conspiracy theories and nationalist rhetoric. But the events of that day also marked a high tide of white Christian nationalism, a longstanding phenomenon in American religious and political history.
In Season 2 of Extremely American: Onward Christian Soldiers host Heath Druzin and James Dawson take an inside look at Christian nationalism. The movement aims to end American democracy as we know it and install theocracy, taking rights away from the vast majority of Americans in the process. The season follows the movement through the story of an influential far-right church, its attempt to take over a small town and a dark underbelly of abuse.
An in-depth examination of the culture and politics of Christian Nationalism and the Religious Right by two ex-evangelical ministers-turned-religion professors.
This is a popular podcast and covers topics and events often overlooked by other media outlets. For example, it was SWAJ that broadcast the Congressional Freethought Caucus hearing on Speaker Mike Johnson's Christian Nationalism. Recommended with reservations because on at least one occasion the podcast shamelessly used antisemitic tropes.
Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021. And bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; “Jesus Saves” and “Don’t Tread on Me”; Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus’s name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Gorski and Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism. In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; and where it’s headed and why it threatens democracy. They explain what makes white Christian nationalism “white.” They show how it took shape over three centuries ago. And how it has influenced American politics over the last three decades. Throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand “sacrifice” from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their “rights” in the names of “liberty” and “property.” The future of American democracy, they argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.
This book provides a good overview of how we got to where we are today in the US. A notable omission is the vociferous othering of trans people. The increasingly tenuous status of women is also not given the attention it deserves.
Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country—communities of which Onishi was once a part—to ignite a cold civil war?
Reviewers seemed to like this book and it's highly rated online. I found it to be a bit tedious, but informative. Be alert around Onishi's takes on Jews. He's on record using some very old-school antisemitic tropes.
Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.
An excellent short read. Butler has personal experience in the Evangelical community.
In a powerful historical narrative spanning nearly two millennia, Magda Teter describes how Christian theology of late antiquity cast Jews as “children born to slavery,” and how the supposed theological inferiority of Jews became inscribed into law, creating tangible structures that reinforced a sense of Christian domination and superiority. With the dawn of European colonialism, a distinct brand of European Christian supremacy found expression in the legally sanctioned enslavement and exploitation of people of color, later taking the form of white Christian supremacy in the New World.
Drawing on a wealth of primary evidence ranging from the theological and legal to the philosophical and artistic, Christian Supremacy is a profound reckoning with history that traces the roots of the modern rejection of Jewish and Black equality to an enduring Christian heritage of exclusion, intolerance, and persecution.
Not specifically about Christian Nationalism, but a foundational read, Teter's book provides a deeply researched explication of the common Christian roots of antisemitism and anti-Blackness.
turn away from the light
rest a while power down
tune out calls
perform in brightness grow
in darkness
honor the full cycle praise
the quiet corner the staging
area the secluded room with
the burned-out bulb the
blackout that stops you in
your tracks and forces you to
listen
Today’s sermon is the turnaround at the end of the road, how nothing goes on forever, even the worst things. How everything comes undone and crashes down, eventually.
Today’s sermon is how impossible it seems after the fact, that thing that felt insurmountable.
Because now you’re in the new story, and it’s time to get on. You may be looking backward still at what was, not yet seeing what is, unable to speak the new language of this narrative twist.
Today’s sermon is that we have arrived here, in this new place, together. That we’re all trying to figure it out. That there are many stories, in fact, all at once, endings and beginnings overlapping, some opaque, others transparent. It’s a wonder we’re able to make sense of even one moment.
Today’s sermon is about loving what is. Those tiny hands that will grow large and strong, that lover’s kiss, your wrinkles that will only grow deeper, your scars, all the death that you know is coming.
Today’s sermon is to love all of it, to hold it lightly and love it until it tugs away, slips through your fingers, or transforms itself right there in the fleshy crook of your palm like a moth emerging from its cocoon.
Here’s what I want you to know: the future wants to overthrow the present. The future is revolution.
Today’s sermon is the necessity of discomfort, the necessity of letting go, the necessity of starting again, the necessity of truth, the necessity of love, and the unlikeliness of it all that feels like cruelty.
Evolved from a Wild Write with Laurie Wagner, inspired by the poem Today’s Sermon by Cheryl Dumesnil.
you can call me ma'am
and you can call me a mammal
but don't you call me an environmentalist
as if i am one thing
and “the environment” is another
call me a mother
a daughter
a sister
a colleague
a neighbor
a friend
call me a californian
an american
a global citizen
an earthling
call me a soil tender
a seed sower
a tree hugger
but don't call me an environmentalist
as if monarchs are one thing
and milkweed is another
as if koalas are one thing
and eucalyptus is another
as if polar bears are one thing
and sea ice is another
don't call me an environmentalist
as if air is one thing
and lungs are another
as if rain is one thing
and roots are another
as if i am one thing
and you are another
