When it comes to climate change, the point of no return has already passed.
That is the message of anew report published in the esteemed scientific journal Environmental Research Letters. It paints a picture of a future Earth in which, regardless of actions taken today, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes by rising sea levels. The carbon dioxide emissions already released into our atmosphere will linger for hundreds of years, warming the oceans and thus causing sea levels to rise. The only question now is whether the damage can be limited.
The answer, according to the report, is yes — but humans will need to take specific, drastic actions as soon as possible.
“Meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement will likely reduce exposure by roughly half and may avoid globally unprecedented defense requirements for any coastal megacity exceeding a contemporary population of 10 million,” the authors write. (The report was co-written by Benjamin H. Strauss and Scott A. Kulp of Climate Central, DJ Rasmussen of Princeton University and German scientist Ander Levermann.) The long-term goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit the mean increase in global temperatures to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Even if that happens, however, oceans will continue to swell, meaning there will be millions upon millions of drenched city dwellers.
“Roughly 5 percent of the world’s population today live on land below where the high tide level is expected to rise based on carbon dioxide that human activity has already added to the atmosphere,”Strauss told AFP. With roughly 7.8 billion human beings alive today, this means approximately 390 million currently live on land that will be under the high tide level as a result of climate change.
That said, reducing the temperature rise is crucial, experts say. If Earth’s average temperature increases by even half a degree Celsius, an extra 200 million people will be vulnerable to the effects of sea level rise and increased storm surges. Each successive degree only increases the damage, as sea levels progressively rise and thereby displace more people.
In the report, the scientists offer detailed projections for the 20 most-affected large countries (those with at least 25 million people) in terms of the percentages of their populations that currently occupy land below high tide lines based on different warming scenarios. If the planet merely warms by 1.5°C, 2.8 percent of the population of the United States could be directly impacted. Increase that by half a degree, and suddenly 5.9 percent of Americans could deal with rising sea levels. If it goes up by 3°C or 4°C, 7.9 percent or 9.9 percent of the American population could see rising sea levels where they live.
Things will be particularly bad in New York City, whereofficials are already considering sea walls and other measuresto fortify its population against rising sea levels. Even under the most ambitious Paris Agreement target, land will fall under the high tide line that is currently home to 6.7 percent of the population. At 2°C, that rises to 13 percent; at 3°C, it reaches 19 percent; and at 4°C, it hits 28 percent.
The most vulnerable region, however, is Asia. Nine of the ten megacities at the highest risk are on that continent, and many of the countries with the starkest projections are also located there. The jump from 1.5°C to 2°C makes the difference, in Vietnam and Bangladesh, between more or less than half of their total populations living below the high tide line. If the planet’s temperature rises to 4°C above pre-industrial levels, more than 60 percent of those nations’ populations could fall below the high tide line. More than 30 percent of the populations of Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan and Myanmar would also suffer that fate in a scenario where the temperature rises by more than 4°C.
Climate Central has also releasedvisual illustrationsof how prominent American landmarks will look after sea level rises. Almost all of the land around the Statue of Liberty National Monument will be submerged, as will the area surrounding Space Center Houston. Yet these and other major landmarks would almost certainly have to be abandoned long before sea levels rose that high, as there will be an increase in heavy rainfalls and storm surges.
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Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria, who early this year was elevated within the House Armed Services Committee, wants Congress to pre-authorize President Biden to take military action to defend Taiwan against China.
“The president has no legal authority to react in the time necessary to repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and deter an all-out war,” Luria, a 20-year Navy veteran, wrote in anop-edpublished by the Washington Post this week. “If the president’s hands remain legally tied in preventing Chinese military action against Taiwan, then an even larger conflict with China is most certainly assured.”
As Luria notes in her article, Republican lawmakers agree with her that Congress, which has the power to authorize war by the U.S. Constitution, should cede its war powers on this matter to the president. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) have introduced a bill called the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act that would authorize the president “to use the Armed Forces of the United States and take such other measures as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to secure and protect Taiwan” against China. The measure had 18 House Republican co-sponsors in the previous Congress.
At the Quincy Institute’s website Responsible Statecraft, attorneyElizabeth Beaverswrote that Luria’s proposal “rests on a fantasy of American exceptionalism in which the United States can and must lead Taiwan to a military victory against Chinese invasion.
“It also defies logic to suggest that such an authorization would deter or prevent large-scale conflict, as it would surely be seen as a provocation by China. By establishing an overly-available military option, Congress would be setting in motion a chain of events that could hamper diplomatic possibilities and make war between two nuclear powers all the more likely.”
Luria has been in Congress since 2019 and she is rapidly gaining foreign policy influence in the Democratic caucus. She was seated this session on the Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee and the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over acquisition and procurement of items like military ships and submarine-launched weapons. She was also elected in February as the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, a committee leadership position that suggests she has the confidence of the chairman, hawkish Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.).
Defense contractors’ PACs donated $42,750 to Luria’s campaigns from January 2019 to June 30, 2021. When she was first a candidate for Congress during the 2018 cycle, Luria promised voters in her district that she would not take donations from corporate PACs, taking a pledge organized by End Citizens United, but she quietly backed out of the pledge in late 2020, when she took funds from the PACs of defense contractors including BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Rolls-Royce North America, which she kept for herself as payback for money she had loaned her campaign.
Luria’s office defended the decision to withdraw from the “No Corporate PAC Money” pledge by saying to theVirginian-Pilotof the corporate PACs she is now taking money from that “all these PAC funds come from individual small dollar contributions from employees.” But a review ofcampaign finance data from Code for Democracyreveals that since 2019, the PACs of the top five defense companies, all of which have donated to Luria besides Northrop Grumman’s, have received donations of at least $1,000 from 332 senior executives and that the average amount that these executive-donors have given to them is $2,113. Forty defense executives, who told the FEC their titles included president, CEO, chairman, or director, have given their employers’ PACs more than $10,000 since 2019.
More than 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, some states are once again facing shortages of medical resources needed to care for sick patients — leaving some to enter crisis mode or consider rationing vital resources, such as intensive care unit beds.
In Idaho a shortage of ICU beds is postponing non-emergency surgeries, while hospitals contend with fewer staffers to care for patients. As of Oct. 1, Idaho has the lowest percentage of people who’ve received one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine of any state.
In September, Idaho implemented statewide crisis standards of care, a plan for allocating resources amid shortages, in an attempt to save as many lives as possible and giving a lower priority for ICU beds to those less likely to survive.
Late last month, the legal advocacy group Justice in Aging asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the state’s rationing plan, saying it discriminates based on age. Idaho’s crisis policy includes a scoring system for “tiebreakers” that prioritizes patients that have “lived through fewer lifecycles.”
Prioritizing certain groups of people over others was the subject of an April 2020 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity showing that in the early months of the pandemic, at least 25 states had crisis standards of care that could put people with disabilities at the back of the line for ventilators and other critical care.
Citing Public Integrity’s reporting, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, announced proposed legislation that would deny states health-care resources from the federal government if their policies discriminated against people with disabilities. And a group of Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, asked the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure patients received fair access to medical care.
Sasse’s proposal, the EQUAL Care Act, died at the end of the last Congress. He reintroduced it in June, but even as the delta variant and low vaccination rates have created shortages in some states, there has been no movement on the bill.
Sasse’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
After The Arc, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, filed nine federal complaints last year to try to get HHS to step in, multiple states changed their policies, specifying that health care workers should not discriminate.
“Rather than making assumptions about a patient’s ability to respond to treatment based solely on stereotypes, doctors have to perform an individual assessment of each patient based on the best objective medical evidence,” said Shira Wakschlag, legal director of The Arc.
Multiple civil rights laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, already prohibit the denial of care on the basis of disability to an individual who would benefit from it. In March 2020, the AARP, which represents older Americans, released a statement opposing the use of age or disability to deny people access to treatments.
New Variant Prompts New Shortages
Earlier on in the pandemic, health care professionals worried they might run out of ventilators for all the patients who needed them. ProPublica reported last year that some doctors even considered putting two patients on one ventilator.
Now, hospitals continue to face shortages of ICU beds and staff, an issue leading to continued debate over delaying non-emergency surgeries for non-COVID-19 patients.
Govind Persad, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, said rationing policies center around how much life doctors can save. However, they should not make stereotypical judgments about how long patients could live, Persad said.
Alaska recently implemented crisis standards of care for 20 healthcare facilities.
Hawaii’s crisis standards of care framework, released in September, came under criticism from AARP Hawai’i and other groups for including age as a “tie-breaker” criteria for deciding who gets care.
Bernard Lo, professor of medicine emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, said the higher contagiousness and deadliness of the delta variant caused surges in hospitalizations, leading to strained resources.
Lo co-authored an article, published in February by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, that details recommendations for equitably allocating ICU beds when shortages occur during a crisis. Those recommendations include considering whether patients live in poorer neighborhoods, prioritizing people whose jobs put them at high risk of infection, and not using long-term life expectancy as a criterion for resource access.
“If you look at people who have multiple social vulnerabilities — they live in neighborhoods where there’s low income, people tend to have low educational status, a lot of unemployment — all these social factors that we know are associated with poor health outcomes,” Lo said. “Those people have had a disproportionate number of COVID deaths. Many of them are people of color as well.”
Role of Doctors
Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said individual doctors should not have to decide who might receive certain resources when they may not be as focused on how many resources are available more broadly.
“You want the doctor at the bedside to be able to serve as the advocate for their patient,” Wynia said. “You don’t want them being the judge deciding between their patients.”
A December 2020 NPRinvestigation found reports of Oregon “doctors and hospitals denying equipment like ventilators; insisting that an elderly or disabled person sign a DNR — maybe when they couldn’t understand it and in the middle of a crisis.”
Steven Joffe, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said another debate that’s gone on in the medical field is whether to prioritize vaccinated or unvaccinated patients when allocating monoclonal antibody treatments.
“We ought to actually be prioritizing the unvaccinated and immunocompromised, so that they don’t go on to get severe disease, and so that they don’t fill up the hospitals and we don’t need to use our crisis standards of care,” Joffe said.
Meanwhile, The Arc will keep watch on how rationing policies are implemented on the ground, Wakschlag said. “We’re going to be continuing to monitor that situation and advocate wherever we see discrimination happening.”
This July, a constitutional convention convened in Chile following the mass uprising that swept Santiago in October 2019. The convention is the most representative body in Chile’s history, including many citizens who never previously held political office. Members include teachers, social workers, community activists and a homemaker. Half of the 155 representatives are women, and at least six are from the LGBTI community.
Rather than a purely national affair, the convention holds deep significance for the international left. In many ways, the constitutional process is a radical experiment in inclusion and participatory democracy.
Yet it is also a reckoning with past dreams and entrenched inequality. In the 1970s, Chile assumed the vanguard of neoliberalism. The convention marks a point of rupture in Chilean history, signifying the failure of the neoliberal constitution that coalesced during the military dictatorship. And it marks the culmination of a history of class struggle that extends back to the Chilean Revolution.
The Chilean Road to Socialism
The immediate catalyst for that revolution was Salvador Allende, the first socialist to win a presidential election in Latin America. Under the banner of Popular Unity, the bespectacled doctor championed an ambitious agenda, including the expansion of social services, land reform and full nationalization of the copper industry — “the salary of Chile” that garnered the majority of its export revenue.
After his election on September 4, 1970, a broad cross-section of the working class came tantalizingly close to political power for the first time. The historian Peter Winn evokes the popular ferment in Weavers of Revolution. “It was something we had never expected,” former textile worker Alma Gallegos told Winn. “It was a joy that couldn’t fit inside one, to see all the compañeros embracing each other — whether they were poor or hungry or well dressed.” Galvanized by Popular Unity’s soaring rhetoric, a militant and newly empowered working class mobilized to transform Chilean society. The promise and threat of revolution divided the country for three years, as political conflict spiraled into open class warfare.
In large part, Allende’s platform captivated voters because of the persistence of extreme poverty. During the early 1970s, the North American Congress on Latin America reported that 40 percent of Chileans suffered from malnutrition. Leading historian Franck Gaudichaud concludes that about half the working population earned less than the minimum wage. At night, bleary-eyed children slept beneath the bridges spanning the Mapocho River.
While vilifying the revolution from above, the Nixon administration and Chilean opposition really feared the revolution from below.
But the election promised profound change. In his first speech as president-elect, Allende simply asked to be “el compañero Presidente” — a fellow comrade and worker. The sociologist Tomás Moulian suggests that the Popular Unity was “the most democratic moment in the political history of Chile.” Working-class Chileans finally felt they were “historical subjects” with the ability to construct a more just society.
Seizing the moment, the parties composing Popular Unity suspended ideological differences to pursue socialism through political means — what observers called the “vía chilena” (“Chilean road”). Allende’s adviser, Joan Garcés, aspired to transform the class composition of the state, harnessing legal channels to check elite power and democratize the economy. By stanching the outward flow of profits and nationalizing strategic sectors, Chile would accumulate the surplus necessary to develop domestic industries, expand the internal market and fortify a welfare state.
Yet Allende and Garcés’s vision of a dirigiste state bestowing socialism on obedient workers failed to anticipate the grassroots surge that followed. Their “revolution from above” inspired a “revolution from below” that radicalized the vía chilena, while accelerating a confrontation with the oligarchy and the Nixon administration in the U.S. Previously disenfranchised groups — those the elite cruelly called “los rotos ” (the broken) — occupied farms and seized factories; formed worker assemblies, industrial cordons and neighborhood councils; and became formidable political subjects with a sharp sense of their own agency. Above all, they built “people power,” making the revolution their own.
Political ferment boiled over in factory seizures, often to the chagrin of cautious bureaucrats. The machinist Carlos Mujica recalled that he and his colleagues seized factories to demonstrate that “workers were also capable of managing a business.” Labor organizer Jorge Varas watched workers at the Yarur textile mill spontaneously demand nationalization. “I have never in my life seen anything like this,” he exclaimed. “It was incredible. It was revolution!” Two thousand workers shouted, “We want socialization!”
Yet Popular Unity faced aggressive backlash. Adversaries engineered a legislative impasse and charged Allende with totalitarian designs. Meanwhile, the Nixon administration financed opposition parties, organized an embargo and goaded the military to strike.
Before the revolution, Nixon largely neglected Latin America. But the revolution jolted his administration into action. Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier confided that Allende’s election “noticeably upset” the president. “That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch,” Nixon barked while pummeling his palm with a fist. “We’re going to smash him.”
Even today, private interests such as the Marubeni Corporation largely control the country’s water supply, pension program and education system.
His administration worried that the vía chilena offered an appealing alternative to capitalism. “I feel strongly,” Nixon confided, “that this line is important … on the people of the world. If he can prove he can set up a Marxist anti-American policy, others will do the same.” In response, U.S. policymakers engineered an economic siege, blocking financial credits and copper markets, while supporting the Chilean opposition.
The vía chilena finally succumbed to tragedy on September 11, 1973, when conservative officers intervened with U.S. backing, searing the presidential palace’s neoclassical facade with ordnance. Although they justified the coup by accusing Allende of dictatorial intent, it was the popular ferment that preoccupied them. While vilifying the revolution from above, the Nixon administration and Chilean opposition really feared the revolution from below.
From Neoliberal Hegemony to Crisis
Under Augusto Pinochet, the military dictatorship divested from social services, smashed unions and opened the country to foreign capital. Inequality increased dramatically, as Chile became a laboratory for neoliberalism with an extreme tendency toward privatization. Even today, private interests such as the Marubeni Corporation largely control the country’s water supply, pension program and education system.
After Pinochet lost a referendum in 1988, the country slowly transitioned to civilian rule. But change was bittersweet. By accepting the 1980 constitution elaborated under his shadow, the political coalition that brought President Patricio Aylwin to power did something the military never could: it legitimated neoliberalism. A conservative Christian Democrat, Aylwin himself had backed the coup. Since then, every administration has accommodated itself to the country’s neoliberal constitution.
Popular discontent has periodically surged, most visibly climaxing in massive strikes in the education sector. In 2006 and 2011, students shut down schools across the country in order to protest glaring inequities. Tuition rates remain among the highest in the world, and access to resources varies widely across districts. Many of Chile’s youngest and most radical politicians, including Deputy Camila Vallejo and presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, cut their teeth in the student movement.
Chile reached a point of rupture in 2019 when the neoliberal regime consolidated during the transition entered an organic crisis. At the time, the national teachers’ union warned that the education system was “falling to pieces.” Educators reported stagnant wages, schools that lacked heat, and rats scurrying across classroom floors.
The uprising signified the rejection of a liberal regime that politicians had grafted onto the edifice of a dictatorship.
Union leader Mario Aguilar petitioned the government for months. “Unfortunately, there was no response,” he lamented. President Sebastián Piñera largely ignored the union’s grievances. Aguilar recalled that the government flirted with reforms, but “did not even offer them in a written proposal.” In response, teachers launched a seven-week national strike on June 3. After teachers walked out, Minister of Education Marcela Cubillos, the daughter of a Pinochet-era minister, suggested they were lazy.
The Ministry of Education became a contested space along the Alameda, Santiago’s main artery. While working at nearby archives that summer, I repeatedly found myself in the middle of a demonstration. When traffic lights turned green, demonstrators piled into the street, weaving between cars and waving union flags. A gigantic banner supporting strikers hung on the building across the street, while another adorned the nearby University of Chile.
During the strike’s fifth week, the Ministry of Education struck in solidarity with the teachers. That day the building was conspicuously vacant. A bored crowd of police in body armor fidgeted before a handwritten sign on the gate: “Ministry of Education workers support Chilean teachers!” After a solar eclipse, Minister Cubillos appeared on tabloids in solar shades. Critics portrayed her as an aloof Martian — willfully ignorant of earthly matters.
The teachers’ strike reached its inconclusive denouement on July 23 of that year. Educators returned to the classroom, but the Piñera administration remained inflexible. In retrospect, the popular strike was a prelude, illuminating dividing lines, channeling widespread discontent and foreshadowing the massive uprising that followed.
On October 18, 2019, protests gripped Santiago after authorities raised the cost of public transportation, freezing the subterranean network that knits the capital together. Chile has one of the most expensive public transit systems in Latin America. Yet the price hike was merely the proverbial drop that spilled a deluge, as thousands took to the streets to denounce long-standing grievances. A working class that once waged revolution had recovered its voice.
Protesters expressed smoldering disgust with the existing political regime, while emphasizing its roots in the dictatorship, brandishing signs such as “New constitution / without blood / without Pinochet.” An especially popular slogan stressed that the problem was structural: “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years.” Ultimately, the uprising signified the rejection of a liberal regime that politicians had grafted onto the edifice of a dictatorship — a negotiated transition that internalized, rather than confronted, the inequities and trauma of the past.
Yet the October 2019 uprising also dramatized the continuing importance of the Chilean Revolution to the political imaginary and lexicon. After curfew, protesters defiantly saturated the air with songs by Quilapayún, Víctor Jara, and other revolutionary artists whose songs have become emblems of resistance. At the height of the uprising, 1.2 million demonstrators packed the Plaza Italia, an event that inevitably stirred memories of the vast gatherings that defined the Popular Unity period.
Fifty years after Allende’s election, ordinary Chileans are pursuing revolutionary change following a strategy reminiscent of the vía chilena. And as in the Chilean Revolution, change has come from the bottom.
Initially, the Piñera administration responded with repression. Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds, eventually injuring thousands of civilians and notoriously blinding Fabiola Campillai. A mother of three, Campillai was in a peaceful neighborhood and heading to work when police inexplicably fired a tear gas canister into her face. The Chilean Human Rights Commission has denounced Piñera before the International Criminal Court for overseeing “a systematic and widespread attack against the civilian population.”
In many ways, the bare-fisted response was suggestive. A neoliberal laboratory, Chile’s welfare state has suffered debilitating blows. When citizens interact with the state, it is often with the repressive apparatus: the very institutions that originally imposed neoliberalism. Above all, the violence revealed the desperation and weakness of a political regime that had lost legitimacy — and a working class that had lost its fear.
Democratizing the Constitution
Twenty-eight days after the initial uprising, the government presented plans for a plebiscite that would allow citizens to vote for a constitutional convention. The news was a bombshell. Many protesters indeed regarded the 1980 constitution as the underlying issue. Yet the historical significance lay even deeper; as the historian Gabriel Salazar emphasizes, Chileans had never democratically drafted a constitution before.
Pressure from below again forced the hand of those at the top. The official plan cited “the country’s grave political and social crisis,” claiming its object was “to seek peace and social justice through a procedure that is indisputably democratic.” President Jaime Quintana of the Senate portrayed the plebiscite as a “peaceful and democratic” solution to the crisis. “This is a historic night for Chile,” Quintana announced, admitting that, “we [politicians] are indeed responsible for many of the injustices that Chileans have pointed out to us.”
In October 2020, 77 percent of voters approved the formation of a constitutional convention, and, in May, Chileans elected their representatives for the convention. The high voter turnout and results signified an unambiguous rejection of the status quo. A remarkable number of representatives were independents who had never held political office. Many were young (their average age is 45 years old), brandished progressive credentials and participated in the very social movements that had converged on the Plaza Italia.
Feminists even convinced organizers to accept gender parity. “We know not only feminists will enter because of parity, but also women opposed to women’s rights,” noted activist Karina Nohales. Yet even they “will enter thanks to the parity that feminism achieved.”
The revolution’s legacy is palpable throughout this process. A founder of the convention’s leftist coalition, Gabriel Boric, pointedly referenced Allende after winning its nomination for the November presidential election. Boric claimed that the revolutionary “reverberates in our memory,” paraphrasing his famous prophecy that “much sooner than later, great avenues will again open, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society.”
New avenues opened when the convention convened on July 4, 2021, marking a symbolic rupture with the past. Instead of graying party bosses in stiff suits, enthusiastic representatives strolled alongside ordinary citizens from the Plaza Italia to the former National Congress Building singing a revolutionary hymn. The president of the convention, Elisa Loncón, is a Mapuche academic with a history of Indigenous rights activism. In her first official address, she denounced colonialism and racism, while promoting a constitution that acknowledges Chile’s plurinacional character.
Loncón describes the convention as an “exercise in participatory democracy, in inclusion.” Her colleague and vice president of the convention, Jaime Bassa, emphasizes that the convention is “without a doubt” the most representative institution in the country’s history, reflecting its political, cultural and geographic diversity.
Rather than placate dissent, the convention has stimulated and rechanneled political activism. A community organizer living near Plaza Italia observes that the constitutional process has inspired “many conscientious people.” The excitement among neighborhood organizations, feminists, environmentalists, and others is irrepressible. “You see the enthusiasm of people wanting to participate, wanting to contribute with their own knowledge.”
Social movements, communities and individual Chileans have inundated the convention with petitions, proposing everything from the right to sports and water to environmental and consumer protections.
Currently, the convention faces daunting challenges. Conservatives have launched a smear campaign, accusing its leaders of partisanship, incompetence and reckless spending. A leading progressive representative, Rodrigo Rojas Vade, triggered a national scandal after wrongly claiming to have cancer. And the fate of the eventual document remains an outstanding question.
Yet 50 years after Allende’s election, ordinary Chileans are pursuing revolutionary change through legal means, democratizing the state by literally overhauling its constitution. In other words, they are following a strategy reminiscent of the vía chilena. And as in the Chilean Revolution, change has come from the bottom.
The author would like to thank Sarah Priscilla Lee of the Learning Sciences Program at Northwestern University for reviewing this article, which combines academic scholarship and Chilean news media.
A recent Washington demonstration supporting those charged with crimes for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol fizzled, with no more than 200 demonstrators showing up. The organizers had promised 700 people would turn out — or more.
But the threat from far-right insurrectionists is not over.
For months, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults — nearly 1 in 5 — agree with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, 21 million also agree that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.”
Our survey found that many of these 21 million people with insurrectionist sentiments have the capacity for violent mobilization. At least 7 million of them already own a gun, and at least 3 million have served in the U.S. military and so have lethal skills. Of those 21 million, 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, and 1 million said they are themselves or personally know a member of such a group, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
Only a small percentage of people who hold extremist views ever actually commit acts of violence, but our findings reveal how many Americans hold views that could turn them toward insurrection.
A Solid Survey
In June 2021, our group commissioned a survey done by the independent, non-partisan researchers at NORC at the University of Chicago, seeking to discover how widespread insurrectionist sentiments are among U.S. adults.
First, NORC pulls together a panel of 40,000 people, called AmeriSpeak, who are representative of the entire U.S. population on dozens of characteristics, such as age, race, income, location of residence and religion. From that representative sample, NORC drew a random sample — in our case, 1,070 people.
Extreme Beliefs
This polling found that 9% of American adults say they agree with the statement that “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.” And 25% of adults either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that “The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.”
Overall, 8% of the survey participants share both of those views.
The margin of error of this survey was plus or minus 4 percentage points. So when calculating the number of the 258 million adult Americans who hold these views, we looked at the range of between 4% and 12% — which gave us between 10 million and 31 million. The best single figure is the middle of that range, 21 million.
People who said force is justified to restore Trump were consistent in their insurrectionist sentiments: Of them, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America’s traditional way of life.
The Fringe Moving Into the Mainstream
Combined with their military experience, gun ownership and connections to extremist groups and militias, this signals the existence of significant mainstream support in America for a violent insurrection.
This group of 21 million who agree both that force is justified to restore Trump and that Biden is an illegitimate president has two additional views that are also on the fringes of mainstream society:
Some people with insurrectionist sentiments hold one of these political views but not the other, suggesting there are multiple ways of thinking that lead a person toward the insurrectionist movement.
There is no way to say for sure when — or even whether — these insurrectionists will take action. On Jan. 6, it took clear direction from Donald Trump and other political leaders to turn these dangerous sentiments into a violent reality. But the movement itself is larger and more complex than many people might like to think.
Question: When is a Democratic majority not a Democratic majority? Answer: When it’s a Democratic majority.
The roof started to cave in visibly on Monday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned her caucus to expect “adjustments” to the $3.5 trillion climate/social spending budget bill that lies at the center of President Biden’s policy agenda. This is Democrat for “Prepare for imminent retreat, again.”
A day later, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that they would keep to a totally artificial and arbitrary September 27 deadline for voting on the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a huge victory for the likes of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and the House Pharma Dems, who have been chopping away at the legislation like hyper-caffeinated woodpeckers (or like feckless politicians swimming in lobbyist cash).
Members of the Progressive Caucus have made it clear that they plan to vote to kill the infrastructure bill if it is brought up separately from the budget bill, because they know conservative Democrats will vote for the former and against the latter if they don’t come on the same sled.
It is clear at this juncture that the budget bill will not be ready for a vote by September 27. Hoyer’s announcement effectively decoupled the two bills, and if the Progressive Caucus is to maintain any credibility at all, they will have to vote down the infrastructure bill in order to rescue both it and the climate bill; if the infrastructure bill fails, it can be offered again coupled to the budget bill once the budget bill is ready for daylight.
The plot thickened substantially late Tuesday after Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, emerged from a two-hour meeting with Speaker Pelosi. Upon its conclusion, Jayapal made it known that she had enough votes in hand — half the 95-person caucus, in her words — to kill the infrastructure bill. Deftly swatting the ball into the Speaker’s court, Jayapal said, “I don’t think that the Speaker is going to bring a bill up that is going to fail.”
Note well, gentle reader, that there is almost no Republican involvement in this slow-rolling fiasco. Mitch McConnell has informed the world that there will be no Republican votes for anything — the budget bill, the government shutdown bill, or the debt ceiling bill — which effectively makes him and his caucus one of the lakes on the Stratego game board: It’s there, it ain’t moving, so you have to go around it.
House Republicans are even more invisible, though there is mounting pressure on Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to whip his caucus into voting “no” on the infrastructure bill. If 30+ Democrats also vote “no,” however, those GOP votes will be a sullen afterthought and nothing more.
President Biden, whose entire domestic agenda is about to go up in a ball of flaming tatters, is planning to hold a Wednesday sit-down with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Pelosi in order to find a way forward. A number of Democrats have been pleading with Biden to get more involved in the process, but the guest list raises the question: Why just those two, and not Jayapal and a contingent from the Progressive Caucus? Why not Bernie Sanders, who has cultivated this process with care and patience from the beginning? Why not the real adults in the room who have the power to make or break this thing?
It is past time to stop mollifying “moderate” (conservative!) Democrats, who have been the real wreckers over the course of this process. A full 80 percent of Sinema’s Arizona voters support the Medicare/drug pricing reforms she has pledged to vote against, and the only coherent reason she opposes those reforms is because a dark money group funded by the pharmaceutical industry launched a massive ad campaign praising her just before she announced her opposition.
The whole thing smells like smoke right now, like gears grinding, like a massive and tragic waste of everyone’s time.
When you make concessions to that sort of brazen broad-daylight corruption, concessions that will cause real-world pain for millions of real-world people, you will come away with nothing and get everything you deserve. The progressives have been steadfast throughout this benighted process — they have stood for everything a “Democrat” is supposed to support, they have already made significant compromises with the “moderates” in the name of progress, and it looks an awful lot like they are about to get the back of Pelosi’s hand, again.
If so, there’s a galling irony here. The Democrats were thrilled to recapture the House majority in 2018, having done so by riding anti-Trump sentiment to victory in a number of conservative districts. Those gains were rolled back in 2020 when Republicans took back a number of those seats. In the time between, Speaker Pelosi has gone above and beyond defending the safety of her “moderate” Reps, even when they voted with Republicans time and again.
Those same “moderates” are now the ones trashing this entire process. When is a majority not a majority? When those people are allowed to drive the bus.
The whole thing smells like smoke right now, like gears grinding, like a massive and tragic waste of everyone’s time.
In a way, I suppose, it might come to be a fitting epitaph: To have all this sound and fury come to nothing because the people who round out the House majority are also doing the most damage to the priorities of that majority. These conservative Democrats don’t want to make prescription drugs more affordable, any more than they want to tax their wealthy benefactors. That fact has already been included as one of the concessions made in the way these bills will pay for themselves, and it stands as a glaring flaw at the heart of the whole process. For all the genuine good contained in the budget bill, it pays for itself while making sure the vast wealth of the wealthiest remains virtually untouched. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains:
Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee released its proposed tax increases to fund President Biden’s $3.5 trillion social policy plan. Here’s the big thing that hit me: Democrats didn’t go after the huge accumulations of wealth at the top – representing the largest share of the economy in more than a century.
You might have thought they’d be eager to tax America’s 660 billionaires whose fortunes have increased $1.8 trillion since the start of the pandemic — an amount that could fund half of Biden’s plan and still leave the billionaires as rich as they were before the pandemic began. But House Democrats on Ways and Means decided to raise revenue the traditional way, taxing annual income rather than immense wealth. They aim to raise the highest income tax rate and apply a 3 percent surtax to incomes over $5 million.
Yet the dirty little secret — which House Democrats certainly know — is the ultra-rich don’t live off their paychecks. Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon was $81,840 last year, yet he rakes in some $149,353 every minute from the soaring value of his Amazon stocks – which is how he affords five mansions, including one in Washington D.C. with 25 bathrooms.
In other words, a lot of things will improve if this bill somehow struggles safely to shore, but nothing significant will actually change. Capital must be protected, and wealth must be extracted: That should be carved into the sign on the Statue of Liberty, right below the word WARNING.
I live in a country where the current president has his job because Mike Pence got desperate consultation from Dan Quayle on the limits of his constitutional powers regarding the certification of Electors while a furious mob was battering down the Capitol doors trying to stop the whole thing in its tracks, and now a pair of bills that almost everyone likes is probably doomed because capitalism doesn’t want them.
It’s not over yet, and Democratic leadership could pull off the legislative version of a nine-run rally in the late innings… except these are the late innings, and there is a government shutdown/debt ceiling crisis to be dealt with almost simultaneously. “The worst are filled with passionate intensity,” said W.B. Yeats. Pretty much sums it up.
Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic, the state of Idaho is facing a health emergency so dire that doctors and nurses are attempting to transport patients to other states.
The Idaho Department of Health and Wellness declared on Thursday that the state is experiencing a hospital resource crisis. That declaration allows medical facilities to ration resources and the care of triage patients in order to adequately deal with the crush of hospitalizations due to COVID.
According to reporting from NBC News, doctors and nurses in Idaho have been contacting hospitals in other states across the West to see if they can transfer individual patients — with some calling 30 or more hospitals, across multiple states, in order to find space for even a single patient.
The situation is so urgent that doctors and nurses have reached out to medical facilities in states like Texas and Georgia. The crisis endangers both coronavirus patients and those who are hospitalized with unrelated ailments.
“We don’t have enough resources to adequately treat the patients in our hospitals, whether you are there for COVID-19, or a heart attack, or because of a car accident,” said Dave Jeppesen, the director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.
Hospitals are also being forced to improvise when it comes to patient care. A hospital in the city of Coeur d’Alene has tried to attract nurses to come and work at its location by offering a pay rate of $250 per hour. The hospital has also converted a conference room into a COVID overflow unit.
The state is currently identifying 69 new cases of coronavirus per day for every 100,000 of its residents — a rate that makes it the ninth highest in the nation, in terms of new cases being identified. Idaho has a COVID mortality rate that is 81 percent higher than the national average and the state ranks sixth highest for coronavirus per capita deaths per day.
Cole’s fear mongering lies about the danger of vaccines may have also resulted in the state’s residents adopting an anti-vaccination stance. Despite the emergency resource crisis Idaho’s hospitals face, as of Thursday, only 40 percent of Idahoans are fully vaccinated.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Thursday that humanity’s “future is at stake” with governments’ climate commitments, as he marked the launch of a U.N.-backed report he called “an alarming appraisal of just how far off course we are.”
“This year has seen fossil fuel emissions bounce back, greenhouse gas concentrations continuing to rise, and severe human-enhanced weather events that have affected health, lives, and livelihoods on every continent,” wrote Guterres in a foreword to the report, United in Science 2021.
“Unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” he continued, “limiting warming to 1.5°C will be impossible, with catastrophic consequences for people and the planet on which we depend.”
The third edition of the multi-agency United in Science report was compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and brings together assessments from partner organizations including the Global Carbon Project (GCP), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Guterres also gave a video message alongside the launch in which he said that “we continue to destroy the things on which we depend for life on Earth.”
The U.N. chief noted in his remarks that developed nations aren’t immune from climate-related disasters, pointing to recent events like Hurricane Ida, which “cut power to over a million people in New Orleans” and left New York City “paralyzed by record-breaking rain that killed at least 50 people in the region.”
Key points noted in the report are that concentrations of key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) — continued to increase in 2020 and the first half of 2021.
CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels dropped in 2020 as a result of the pandemic-related economic slowdown. And while there remains “uncertainty about the global post-pandemic recovery,” the report warns that decline appears to be temporary, pointing to “initial estimates for 2021 [that] show a strong recovery in emissions with a possible return to pre-Covid levels within a year or two.”
The report also highlights the warming planet’s impact on Arctic sea ice.
“In every year from 2017 to 2021,” the report stated, “the Arctic average summer minimum and average winter maximum sea-ice extent were below the 1981–2010 long term average. In September 2020, the Arctic sea-ice extent reached its second lowest minimum on record.”
The publication further notes the climate crisis’ impacts on human health.
“The increased occurrence of wildfires leads to peaks in air pollution concentrations,” the publication states, and “long-term exposure to air pollution is linked to chronic diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, heart diseases, effects on the nervous system and diabetes.” The study also cites increasing evidence related to how “the compound effects of air pollution and Covid-19 may lead to increased Covid-19 mortality.”
It’s also likely that the annual global mean temperature will be between 0.9°C and 1.8°C above pre-industrial conditions for the period of 2021–2025, with a 40% chance of a single year within that five-year span being 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
According to WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, the report shows that global demands for governments to “build back better” from the pandemic have fallen on deaf ears. “We are not going in the right direction,” he wrote in a foreword to the report.
Joeri Rogelj, one of the authors of the report and the director of research and lecturer in climate change and the environment at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the publication is another call to action.
“The messages in this report provide a grim and alarming picture,” he said in a statement. “We are experiencing unprecedented climate change. We have caused it. And our actions to date are largely insufficient to avoid it from getting worse.”
“The combined evidence in this report should empower anyone to make sure the report’s messages are heard in places of power by those making decisions about our future,” said Rogelj, pointing to COP 26, the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, as “a key date where the world will have to come together to take the decisions necessary to halt climate change within our lifetimes.”
Not all opponents of mask mandates and anti-vaccine activists are alike. They constitute a diverse and heterogeneous group. But a certain segment of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers comprise extremists who represent a violent and nefarious influence in our country as we work to defeat this seemingly endless pandemic.
There is a small but loud and forceful group of people who object to wearing masks.Studies indicate that those people generally believe they are ineffective and are violating their civil liberties. Some of those people are increasingly behaving in violent and dangerous ways.
As early as July 2020, the Retail Industry Leaders Associationexpressed alarm over the number of instances of hostility and violence experienced by front-line employees. That same month, asurveyof McDonald’s employees showed that 44% had experienced verbal or physical abuse from customers not wearing masks.
These repeated incidents necessitated the CDC to offer newguidancefor retailers and restaurants on how to prevent workplace violence from customers. These suggestions included installing panic buttons and cameras, and recognizing the signs that angry customers might be on the verge of violence.
Things since then have only worsened.
In June 2021, acustomer shot and killed a cashier and wounded a sheriff’s deputy at a supermarket after an argument about face masks.
In August 2021, Christopher Key, who calls himself the “vaccine police,”live streamed himself and his “Missouri Crew” entering a Walmart Supercenter. The group was targeting the pharmacists who they believe should be “executed” for administering the COVID-19 vaccine. They berated the workers, informing them they have been put “on notice” and that “if they give one more vaccine … they can be hung up … and executed.”
The group brought with them “sworn affidavits” that supposedly proved that 45,000 people had died within days of being vaccinated against COVID-19. That belief is based on a lawsuit filed by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD), recently described in a Time magazine expose as “the 21st-century, digital version ofsnake-oil salesmen.” AFLD was founded by Dr. Simone Gold, who wasarrested for her participation in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
A COVID-19 drive-through testing and vaccination site in Georgia was recently forced toshut down after being threatened by a group of anti-vax protesters. Reports indicated that the health care workers were harassed via email and on social media.
Health care workers have repeatedly faced threats for promoting vaccines, especially prominent public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Peter Hotez. Both have faced seriousdeath threats. A man was arrested for allegedlysending threatening messages to Dr. Fauci, saying that he and his family would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death and set on fire.” Dr. Hotez notes that the threats faced by health care workers have created “an unprecedented culture ofantiscience intimidation.”
Three men recently ambushed the principal of a school in Arizona. They brought plastic handcuffs, ready to perform a “citizen’s arrest.” They were upset about the “injustice” of the principal asking a child to quarantine because of possible exposure to COVID-19. One of the men,Kelly Walker, a well-known anti-masker, live-streamed the event on his business Instagram page.
That same victimized principal described some of the death threatsshe has been receiving, including this ominous warning: “Next time it will be a barrel pointed at your Nazi face.”
There is also evidence that extremist groups such as the Proud Boysare behind some of the anti-mask organizing. As some experts have noted, “violence is at the heart” of their ideology.
At a recent school board meeting in Florida, awoman stated that anyone who believes in vaccines or mask mandates in schools is a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” She thenwarnedthat “all of us Christians are sticking together to take them all out” adding that “all the police officers that kick us out … will also be going down with them.”
Not all anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers will become violent. But these cases illustrate the propensity of some to threaten and erupt into violence as they attempt to overwhelm others with their positions.
It may be easy to laugh off or dismiss these incidents, but minimizing or denying the potential violence associated with these groups and individuals is a grave mistake. Pretending it does not exist is irresponsible and gives implicit permission for further violence and destruction.
If conservative religious leaders have their way, the words “In God We Trust” and the Ten Commandments will soon be affixed to the walls of all U.S. classrooms and courthouses. Every gathering — PTA, library or school board meeting, city council hearing and sporting event — will begin with a prayer, and we’ll all be expected to lift a glass in celebration of an annual Religious Freedom Day and Christian Heritage Week. What’s more, doctors, therapists and other health professionals will be able to refuse care to those whose sexuality, gender identity or expression they dislike. So will clergy, business people and social service providers.
And there’s more. Much more.
A 51-page document, “Model Religious Freedom Measures Protecting Prayer and Faith in America,” lays out a wish-list, complete with ready-made model legislation and talking points for conservative, Christian activists to use in statehouses throughout the country.
The “model measures” are the brainchild of what was once called Project Blitz — a campaign coordinated by the Congressional Prayer Caucus (CPC) Foundation, a 33-state coalition of Christian nationalist lawmakers “advocating for the right of individuals to engage in public prayer and the expression of faith” — and the National Strategic Center, the CPC’s training arm. Another sponsoring group, the National Legal Foundation, works to “glorify the Lord Jesus Christ” via legal action, and its litigation has included representation of Philadelphia Catholic Social Services’ refusal to place foster children with same-sex couples and opposition to Pittsburgh’s 15-foot abortion clinic buffer zone to keep anti-abortion protesters from accosting patients. The fourth sponsor is WallBuilders’ ProFamily Legislative Network, whose mission is the promotion of “Biblical values.” According to its website, this includes seeking redress for what they see as “a serious shortfall in many educational systems,” most significantly, the lack of religion in the public square.
The effort is more than the pie-in-the-sky pipe dream of the far right. In fact, so far in 2021, 74 bills supported by these groups have been introduced; 14 have passed, including Ten Commandment Display acts in Texas and North Dakota and four proclamations recognizing Religious Freedom Day on January 16.
Fighting for Church-State Separation
But resistance to the religious right’s agenda is building. Since Project Blitz first launched in 2017, progressives, civil libertarians and people concerned with the erosion of church-state separation have gotten organized, not only monitoring state legislation, but pushing back against discriminatory bills and efforts to bring faith into public schools, courtrooms and secular gatherings. Called Blitz Watch, the coalition includes 13 groups, among them: American Atheists, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Interfaith Alliance, and Jews for a Secular Democracy.
Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at the Massachusetts-based Political Research Associates, an organization that focuses on researching the far right, told Truthout that the Blitz-driven measures are “part of a coherent plan to bring the U.S. to religious dominion.” This, he explains, is the belief that God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking charge of each and every political and cultural institution.
“All of the legislation they’ve proposed makes interrelated sense to them,” Clarkson says, whether it’s posting “In God We Trust” on walls; taking over public library boards to control what books children can access; declaring that the U.S. is built on a foundation of Christian precepts; offering elective classes in Bible literacy in public high schools; or opposing comprehensive, LGBTQIA+-inclusive sex education classes.
So far in 2021, 74 bills supported by these groups have been introduced; 14 have passed.
“They are a formidable adversary,” he says, “Proponents of these bills are the same people who deny climate change and oppose changes in our understanding of race and gender, and they are now hijacking the idea of religious freedom.”
Clarkson has studied the religious and secular right wing for decades and says that people who crafted Project Blitz have a clear strategy: start with seemingly noncontroversial measures and build from there. “‘In God We Trust’ has been the national motto since 1956,” he explains, and since it is already on all paper currency, the expectation was that it could be painted on walls and added as an option on car license plates with minimal opposition. They may be right: already, 20 states give drivers the option of purchasing an In God We Trust license plate.
Since these wins, Clarkson continues, the religious right has moved beyond slogans to craft carefully strategized political campaigns that zero in on local policymaking.
“They started with low-hanging fruit, but the idea of taking over school and library boards, for example, is not new,” Clarkson says. “Back in the 1960s, the John Birch Society — an explicitly racist group founded by candymaker Robert Welch in 1958 to oppose communism and the growing welfare state — realized that they could take advantage of low-turnout elections to get onto school boards and oppose sex education classes.”
The strategy has gained traction.
Legal Challenges to the Right-Wing Religious Push
According to Alison Gill, vice president for legal and policy at American Atheists, Project Blitz activists understand that bills surrounding the posting of the national motto are difficult to contest. “Courts have determined that in order to have legal standing in federal court, you need to be able to show that you’ve been harmed, and it’s hard to prove that seeing the words ‘In God We Trust’ has hurt you,” she told Truthout.
In addition, Gill continues, courts have repeatedly found the phrase to be “symbolic” or “historic,” rather than religious.
License plates, however, may provide an opening for challenges. “Mississippi puts the motto on all tags, unlike other states which make it one of many options that people can voluntarily purchase, and residents have to pay an additional $32 to buy a plate without the phrase,” she says. “Several groups, including American Atheists and Mississippi Humanists, have sued the state about this, charging that it is discriminatory, and the case is currently in discovery.”
Still, Gill concedes that support for the motto is extensive. “The movement to put ‘In God We Trust’ everywhere began to move forward after school shootings became more common,” she explains. “Many people believe that bringing God back to schools will be a shield and protect students and staff. It seems like a desperate measure, though, since young people today are the least religious generation we’ve ever seen.”
Gill is right: Researchers have found that 21 percent of Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2015 identify as atheists and a third say they have no religion.
Sanctioning Discrimination
Despite trends toward less religiosity among younger people, Gill notes that many Christian nationalists are pushing for religion to have a more invasive place in public life, holding that religion and government should not be separate. Nowhere is this clearer than in promulgation of state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, or RFRAs. “These bills give hospitals, medical providers, foster care and adoption agencies, and others the right to deny care to LGBTQIA+ people,” Gill says. “We defeated a raft of RFRA and ‘In God We Trust’ bills so far this year, but I expect we will continue to see more being introduced next year and beyond.”
The threat is extremely serious.
The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that over the past 28 years, 21 states have passed RFRAs — giving religious conservatives the right to refuse to take part in abortions, gender affirmation surgery and anything else they consider “morally objectionable.”
This was not the original intent of RFRA — initially a federal bill — when it first passed Congress in 1993. At that time, the law stipulated only that “government should not substantially burden religious exercise without a compelling justification.” This changed in 2014 when the Supreme Court expanded RFRA to allow an employer (in this case, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialists) to rescind employee health coverage for contraceptives. The court found that the religious beliefs of the employer superseded the rights of workers to comprehensive health care. Since then, Blitz Watch and other right-wing monitors have seen the “religious exemption” invoked to justify discrimination against religious minorities, nonreligious people, women and the LGBTQIA+ community.
More recently, Gill adds, RFRA has been used to keep churches open during COVID — allowing them to eschew mandatory masking, vaccination requirements and maintenance of social distancing — by deeming these health protections a “substantial burden.” Since the start of the pandemic, Arkansas, Montana and South Dakota have used mandates to shutter churches as a pretext to pass local RFRAs.
Gill calls the COVID rationale “ridiculous,” and notes that it is imperative that lawmakers and the public be educated about the devastating impact these measures can have on impacted individuals and communities.
“The best place to challenge RFRAs and other ‘model legislation’ is at the legislative level,” Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, told Truthout. “Educating lawmakers about the aim and consequences of these bills is better than suing later.” But, she adds, bringing progressive faith leaders into the fight is paramount. “They can help counter false claims that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and speak directly and compellingly about the harms these bills cause for religious minorities, women and LGBTQIA+ people.”
Public pressure, she adds, is key. “People of faith are especially effective in making clear that these bills are not supported by all Christians and can offer cogent arguments as a counterbalance to the Christian nationalists.”
Another important argument, members of Blitz Watch say, is emphasizing that the founders of the U.S. considered religious freedom sacrosanct. “The concept of religious freedom is that everyone gets to decide for themselves what religion, if any, to follow. This is why the idea of religious freedom has thrived,” Nikolas Nartowicz, state policy counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told Truthout. “Efforts to bring religion into schools and government are not new, and the effort to rewrite our history and think of ourselves as a Christian nation has always been both wrong and incredibly dangerous. What’s new is that the right-wing effort is now very well coordinated.”
Clarkson agrees. “We should know in our bones that we can’t take anything for granted,” he says. “When we get complacent, it leads to misplaced optimism in the inevitability of progress, but progress needs to be constantly defended…. As progressives, we can’t let [the Christian right] run away with the meaning of religious freedom. But to be effective, we need sufficient knowledge of the other side to know how to respond.”
