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      Donald Trump has become master of the US Senate | Sidney Blumenthal

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      First, before Elon Musk came for everyone, Donald Trump came for the US Senate. When he returned to office, the House of Representatives was already under his heel. Many of the House Republican leaders had been his sidekicks during January 6, and one, Mike Johnson, had since become the speaker. The Senate, however, still retained, for the most part, its club-like atmosphere where the members considered themselves powers unto themselves. Senators with a toga complex have always looked down on House members as rabble. Trump viewed the independent character of the upper body as a thorn in his side. The subservience of the House of Representatives was the model that Trump envisioned for the Senate. It could no longer pretend to be the greatest deliberative body of legislators in the world, but a vassal fiefdom subject to his whims.Trump’s opportunity to crush the Senate appeared at once. As soon as he made his nominations for his cabinet, the Senate would hold confirmation hearings. His misfit nominees gave him his chance. In any previous time, just a tincture of the alcoholism, serial sexual abuse, playing footsie with a Russian-backed despot, hawking of snake oil, doodling enemies lists and bilking non-profit organizations, quite apart from plain incompetence, would have been enough to knock them out before they ever approached a seat in a hearing room.The senator John Tower, of Texas, very much a member of the club of his day, but a drunken sexual harasser of the old school, groping in elevators, was exposed when George HW Bush nominated him as secretary of defense, and dropped out. But shame in the Trump orbit is as antiquated a notion as virtue.The patent unfitness of Trump’s nominees put the senators on the spot. It was the senators, not the obviously disqualified nominees, who had to pass the test. They were not the ones sitting in judgment; they were in Trump’s dock. If Trump could break the lords of the Senate over his cabinet of curiosities, he could reduce them to being his serfs. By transforming their duty to advise and consent into shut up and obey, Trump would trample more than unstated norms. He would be obliterating a constitutional responsibility of the Senate and removing a further check and balance on his power.Subverting the institution was not an abstract exercise. If individual senators looked like they might stand in the way, it was not enough that they be defeated on a roll-call vote. They had to be personally violated. The part of themselves that they held to be at their core both as public officials and private persons had to be soiled. They had to be made examples before the others. Their humiliation had to be performed as a public demonstration. By voting in favor of nominees they knew in their bones should never be approved, whose disqualifications crossed the senators’ deepest principles, their intimidation made them Trump’s subjects. Once the method of defilement was established, it would be applied again and again. It would loom as an ever-present threat over any others’ wavering. Trump’s degradation would be sufficient to cow the rest. But he would not stop. After the first victim, then there was the next, and the next, one after another, until Trump was the master of the Senate. Trump began with one senator whose vulnerability he could twist to make her writhe.That senator was Joni Ernst, of Iowa.View image in fullscreenAfter attending Iowa State University, where she joined ROTC, Ernst enlisted in the army, served during the Iraq war in Kuwait in charge of a transport unit, and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. Running for the US Senate in 2014, she said she had been sexually harassed in the military and pledged that, if elected, she would make independent investigation and prosecution of sexual crimes her signature issue.Once she entered the Senate, Ernst was for the most part a down-the-line conservative Republican, yet was also among the few Republicans who consistently sponsored and voted for bills to protect victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, especially focusing on women in the military.When Ernst divorced in 2019, her painful story of emotional and physical abuse became public – her husband’s dalliance with a babysitter, his long-term affair with a mistress and, after she confronted him, how he suddenly “grabbed me by the throat with his hands and threw me on the landing floor. And then he pounded my head.” Her husband responded by accusing her of having an affair herself, which she said was a “lie”. She also revealed at that time that she had been raped as a college student, reported it to the counseling service, but chose not to go to the police, and had kept it a secret. “I couldn’t stomach the idea that my rape would become public knowledge,” she wrote in a memoir published in 2020. “I was sure my boyfriend would find a way to blame me.”Ernst’s divorce complaint disclosed for the first time that she had turned down candidate Donald Trump’s offer to be his vice-presidential running mate in the 2016 campaign. She attributed her refusal as vaguely not being “the right thing for me or my family”. It is uncertain whether Trump ever made the actual offer. He took Mike Pence, who was pressed on him by his campaign manager Paul Manafort to represent the evangelical right.When Trump nominated Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense, stories instantly surfaced that the Fox News weekend host had been accused of rape, paid hush money, had a history of sexual abuse in two of his marriages, impregnated a girlfriend and was a raging alcoholic who drank on the job. He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military, as Ernst had.“I am a survivor of sexual assault,” Ernst said in her initial response to Hegseth’s nomination. She insisted that she wanted “to make sure that any allegations have been cleared, and that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process”.But the “vetting process” was warped. Witnesses were hesitant to come forward, afraid they would be subject to the reign of terror that Christine Blasey Ford endured when she publicly testified in Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing to be on the supreme court he had sexually assaulted her. But the woman who claimed that Hegseth had raped her was willing to speak privately with Ernst. So were two other witnesses, both female soldiers who would also talk to her in private about his drunkenness and sexual harassment.Ernst was then subjected to waves of “Maga” attacks. Facing re-election in 2026, she was threatened with a primary challenge from a local rightwing talkshow host, Steve Dease, who posted: “Joni Ernst sucked as a Senator long before this … I am willing to primary her for the good of the cause.” Elon Musk forked over a half-million dollars to blast ads that wallpapered Iowa TV, hailing Hegseth as a “patriot” and “warrior”, and warning that the “deep state” (ie Ernst) opposed him. Donald Trump Jr unleashed a storm on social media against Ernst, saying that if any senator criticized Hegseth, “maybe you’re in the wrong political party!” An online squadron of winged monkeys swarmed her. The phrase “She’s a Democrat” trended.Ernst succumbed to the smear campaign. She refused to meet with the alleged rape victim, according to a report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. She also would not see the other women with first-hand accounts. Ernst hid. The witnesses, however, told their stories to Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois and a combat veteran who lost both of her legs. From her isolation, Ernst finally released an announcement that she would support Hegseth. Duckworth said that Ernst and other Republican senators had refused to put “the national security of America over their own political survival”.Then came the turn of Thom Tillis, the senator of North Carolina. He, too, was wary of Hegseth. He heard first-hand from a witness about his drunken behavior. Tillis told Hegseth’s former sister-in-law that if she provided an affidavit about Hegseth’s abuse, he would vote against him. So, she came forward despite the slings and arrows of the Trump mob. The evening before the vote, Tillis quietly told the Republican leader John Thune he would oppose Hegseth. Tillis spoke with both JD Vance and Trump. Unlike Ernst, none of his drama was conducted in public. When the time came to vote, Tillis, who faces a tough re-election in 2026, voted “yes”. Tillis turned on a dime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThen they came for Bill Cassidy, the senator of Louisiana. Cassidy is a physician who has devoted much of his career to public health and educating people about the importance of vaccinations. He was the decisive vote on the Senate finance committee on the nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr to become secretary of health and human services, the leading vaccine skeptic who has made millions off his crank conspiracy theories and whose cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him “a predator”.Cassidy attempted to coax Kennedy into committing to the scientific truth that vaccines work.“I’m a doc, trying to understand,” Cassidy said. “Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn the old information so that there’s never a conclusion.” No matter how many times he tried, Kennedy would not give him a straight answer.Cassidy was already vulnerable. He had voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. A far-right primary opponent, the representative Clay Higgins, was preparing to run against him. After Cassidy’s questioning of Kennedy, the winged monkeys descended on him. And Higgins posted on X: “So, vote your conscience Senator, or don’t. Either way, We’re watching.” Cassidy replied with a biblical quotation: “Joshua said to them: ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the LORD will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.” But when the vote came, Cassidy crumpled.They came for Todd Young, the senator of Indiana. He is something of Hoosier Republican royalty, married to the niece of former vice-president Dan Quayle. Young was poised as the decisive vote on the Senate intelligence committee on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. In addition to “parroting false Russian propaganda”, as the former senator Mitt Romney put it, and visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, whom she declared was not a “torturer” and “murderer”, she had urged a pardon for “brave” Edward Snowden, who stole massive amounts of data from the National Security Agency and absconded to Russia. When Young asked her whether Snowden had “betrayed the American people”, she acknowledged he had broken the law, but would not go beyond that formulation. Young appeared edgy about her nomination.“Todd Young is a deep state puppet,” posted Elon Musk. His ears had pricked up when he had learned that Young was on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, created by Ronald Reagan and funded through USAid to promote the rule of law and democracy around the world. Musk tweeted that the NED was “an evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved”. The Trump X mob swarmed. Besieged, Young spoke with JD Vance. The US vice-president arranged a call with Musk. Young announced he would back Gabbard. The noise disappeared.The novel Advise and Consent, by a Washington reporter, Allen Drury, published in 1959 and produced as a movie in 1962, described a cold war melodrama in the Senate over the confirmation of a nominee to become secretary of state who had a left-wing background in his youth. One senator, with a secret gay past, caught up in the fight, fearing exposure, commits suicide. (The scene depicting a gay bar was a movie first.) But the suicide was not over any great principle. The victim was collateral damage. And the president in Advise and Consent was not attempting to use the process to coerce the Senate into vassalage.Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard are now all confirmed. The advise and consent responsibility of the Senate was twisted. The senators came to kneel before Trump – and Musk. Musk praised Young, the former “puppet”, as “a great ally”. Cassidy posted: “After collaborative conversations with RFK and the White House, I voted yes to confirm him.” Tillis gave a floor speech extolling Musk and Doge: “Innovation requires pushing the envelope and taking calculated risks.” Ernst wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled USAid Is a Rogue Agency.Meanwhile, the $2bn in USAid purchases of agricultural products for humanitarian aid were suspended. The Iowa Soybean Association, dependent on a $95m grant supporting more than 1,000 farms that was now not being paid, protested. Ernst, a member of the Senate agriculture committee, was silent.“I was embarrassed,” Ernst told the Des Moines Register about speaking about being raped. “I didn’t know how to explain it. I was so humiliated. And I’m a private person, when it comes to those things.” After that incident, she found herself in an abusive relationship and the victim of domestic violence. As a senator, she used her position to break with her past of victimhood and established herself as a champion of those who had been victimized as she had been. But then she found herself in another abusive relationship, with Donald Trump. She was threatened with being completely stripped of everything she had striven for and her status as a senator destroyed. She had a choice to stand up against her transgressor or to subject herself to him. She decided to submit to the humiliation. And afterward she became the enabler of the abuser.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Democrats in Congress see potential shutdown as leverage to counter Trump

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      With the US federal government expected to shut down in one month unless Congress approves a funding bill, Democratic lawmakers are wrestling with just how far they are willing to go to push back against Donald Trump’s radical rightwing agenda that has thrown American politics into turmoil.Specifically, Democrats appear divided on the question of whether they would be willing to endure a shutdown to demonstrate their outrage over the president’s attempted overhaul of the federal government.The stakes are high; unless Congress passes a bill to extend funding beyond 14 March, hundreds of thousands of federal employees may be forced to go without pay at a time when they already feel under attack by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”. And given Trump’s eagerness to flex his presidential authority, the fallout could be particularly severe, depending on how the office of management and budget (OMB) handled a shutdown.To be sure, Republicans are taking the lead on reaching a funding deal, as they control the White House and both chambers of Congress, but party leaders will absolutely need Democrats’ assistance to pass a bill. While Republicans hold a 53-to-47 advantage in the Senate, any funding bill will need the support of at least 60 senators to overcome the filibuster.In the House, Republicans hold a razor-thin majority of 218 to 215, and hard-right lawmakers’ demands for steeper spending cuts will likely force the speaker, Republican Mike Johnson, to also rely on Democratic support to pass a funding bill.“There’s no reasonable funding bill that could make its way through the Senate that wouldn’t cause uproar in the Republican party on the House side,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible. “That is the fault of the Republicans in the House, not anybody else. But because of that, it is something that is giving Democrats in the House leverage.”In recent weeks, a bipartisan group of congressional appropriators from both chambers have met to hash out the details of a potential funding agreement, but Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, suggested on Thursday that Johnson had instructed his conference members to “walk away” from the talks.“At this moment, there is no discussion because the speaker of the House has apparently ordered House Republican appropriators to walk away from the negotiating table,” Jeffries told reporters. “They are marching America toward a reckless Republican shutdown.”Johnson shot back that Democrats appeared “not interested in keeping the government funded”, adding: “So we will get the job done. We’re not going to shut the government down. We’ll figure out a path through this.”The dynamics of the funding fight have empowered some Democrats to suggest that the negotiations could become a powerful piece of political leverage as they scramble to disrupt Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding, unilaterally shutter the foreign-aid agency USAid and carry out mass firings across the government.“I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing when it comes to this administration’s actions,” Andy Kim, a Democratic senator of New Jersey, said on NBC’s Meet the Press last weekend. “And for us to be able to support government funding in that way, only for them to turn it around, to dismantle the government – that is not something that should be allowed.”Progressive organizers have called on Democratic lawmakers to hold the line in the negotiations to ensure Congress passes a clean funding bill that Trump will be required to faithfully implement.On Monday, prominent congressional Democrats rallied with progressive groups outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, and 15 of them pledged to withhold their support from a funding deal until Trump’s “constitutional crisis” comes to an end.“We’re not just looking for statements. We’re not looking for protest votes. We’re also asking them to identify where they have power, where they have leverage and use that power,” Levin said. “And because of the nature of this funding fight, this is a clear opportunity.”Other Democrats have appeared much more cautious when it comes to the possibility of a shutdown, even as they insist that Republicans should shoulder the blame for any funding lapse.The senator Cory Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey, argued that Democrats must now embrace their role as “a party of protecting residents, protecting veterans, protecting first responders, protecting American safety from [Trump’s] illegal actions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The Republican party has shown year after year that they’re the party of shutdowns. They’re the party of government chaos,” Booker said on CNN’s State of the Union last weekend. “So we’re not looking to shut down the government. We’re looking actually to protect people.”The political fallout of past shutdowns may give Democrats pause as well.The last shutdown occurred during Trump’s first term and began in December 2018, eventually stretching on for 35 days and becoming the longest shutdown in US history. It started after Trump demanded that Congress approve billions of dollars in funding to construct a wall along the US-Mexico border, and it ended with Trump signing a bipartisan bill that included no money for the wall. At the time, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed 50% of Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown, while 37% said congressional Democrats were responsible.“Historically, I think it has been the case that shutdowns are costly, and they’re disruptive. When they conclude, you look back and wonder, what did we get for all of that? The answer is usually nothing,” said Gordon Gray, executive director of Pinpoint Policy Institute and a former Republican staffer for the Senate budget committee. “For people who have to interact with the government during a shutdown [and] for the workforce, there’s real downsides. Politically, there just seems to be more downside than upside.”This shutdown, if it occurs, could be unlike any other.Trump has shown an extraordinary willingness to test the bounds of executive power, and while past presidents have taken steps to alleviate the pain caused by shutdowns, he may choose not to do so. Considering his apparent fixation on eliminating government “waste”, some fear Trump and the new OMB director, Russell Vought, might use the shutdown as an opportunity to sideline federal agencies and departments that the president deems unimportant.“There’s a tremendous degree of discretion that OMB can exert in its interpretation of this,” Gray said. “Clearly this administration is willing to contemplate its discretion more expansively than we’ve seen. It would not surprise me if we saw novel developments under Trump.”Levin agreed that it is entirely possible Trump and some of his congressional allies may want to “shut down the government so that they can more easily steamroll” federal agencies. He expects some House Republicans to propose funding provisions that will be absolute non-starters with Democrats, such as eliminating the health insurance program Medicaid, to potentially derail negotiations.“I absolutely think it’s possible that the Republicans’ plan is to drive us into shutdown. I think that it is giving them the benefit of the doubt to say that they are interested in making any kind of deal,” Levin said. “Democrats have some amount of leverage here, but if we head into shutdown, there should be no illusion of who benefits and whose grand plan this is.” More

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      The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?

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      Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More

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      Musk-linked group offered $5m for proof of voter fraud – and came up with nothing

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      In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics.Close ties to world’s richest manThe Fair Election Fund is a fictitious name for another 501(c)(4) non-profit, Documented can reveal, and operates within a network run by Musk’s top political advisers. The group received funding from the same dark-money vehicle Musk has used to channel his political spending, and also routed funds to another Musk-backed non-profit.The group is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund. Formed on 3 January 2023, the non-profit raised $8,226,000 from a single donation in 2023.The group is led by Victoria “Tori” Sachs, a Republican operative who was also executive director of And to the Republic, a group also formed in January 2023 that supported Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, including by funding DeSantis’s private jets and hosting quasi-campaign events.The naming of the two Sachs-led groups – And to the Republic and the For Which It Stands Fund – and the timing of their creation in January 2023 suggests that the group that now houses the Fair Election Fund was originally intended to support DeSantis’s run, which Musk initially supported.Sachs’s involvement continued through 2024, with her name appearing on records that accompanied the Fair Election Fund’s broadcast purchases.Since 2022, Musk has been secretly channeling his political spending through a dark-money non-profit called Building America’s Future. That group is run by Generra Peck and Phil Cox, two Republican operatives who were involved in DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and now advise Musk. Building America’s Future reportedly backed the Fair Election Fund in 2024. It also provided half of And to the Republic’s overall fundraising in 2023.View image in fullscreenThe Fair Election Fund has other ties to the Musk advisers who lead Building America’s Future. Cox’s digital marketing firm IMGE LLC, which provides services to several groups in the Musk-backed, Building America Future-tied universe, manages the Fair Election Fund’s Facebook page, and an IMGE employee appears to be responsible for articles on the Fair Election Fund’s website.The Fair Election Fund/Interstate Priorities also acted as a conduit to support other Musk-backed groups. The group’s 2023 tax return shows that it made a $1,550,000 grant to Citizens for Sanity, which Musk funded in 2022 through Building America’s Future, and which aired racist and transphobic ads that election cycle. That grant made up almost the entirety of Citizens for Sanity’s funding in 2023.In the 2024 election cycle, Musk publicly disclosed at least $277m in political contributions to Super Pacs that worked to elect President Trump and other Republicans. It is not known how much he may have given to other politically active groups that disguise their donors.A detour into third-party ballot accessThe Fair Election Fund’s goal of exposing election fraud seemingly turned up nothing of significance.Out of its $5m fund, the group announced $75,000 in “bounty” payments, releasing $50,000 in July 2024 and $25,000 in September 2024. The Fair Election Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible.Instead, the group took a detour in July 2024: it launched a $175,000 ad “blitz” targeting North Carolina state board of election (NCSBE) members who delayed placing third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr on the ballot. At the time, Republicans and their allies believed that West and Kennedy would act as spoilers to help Trump, by siphoning left-leaning votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.Ironically, the NCSBE had delayed a decision on West’s and Kennedy’s ballot eligibility based on evidence that petitions were obtained through fraudulent means – concerns that would seem to align with the Fair Election Fund’s stated mission of exposing election fraud.The Fair Election Fund ads declared that the Democratic members of the NCSBE were “blocking your voting rights”, and offered a reward for evidence of the members’ “shady backroom deal”. The group also projected images on the side of the NCSBE’s building, and drove mobile billboards around the agency’s headquarters.The Fair Election Fund also ran digital ads in North Carolina featuring Black voters, some of which asserted that “African American voices are not being heard”, while others declared “Support Equality, Support Inclusion, Support [Cornel West’s] Justice for All Party”. The group pushed similar efforts in states such as Michigan.Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who sought to keep West off of ballots in North Carolina and elsewhere, was a frequent target of the group. In October 2024, the group announced that it would be running a six-figure ad buy to “troll” Elias. The ads included mobile billboards around the Elias Law Group office as well as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, which declared: “We beat Marc Elias and his racist voter suppression lawsuits … He tried to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West, but the Fair Election Fund stopped him.”The Fair Election Fund then veered into a series of efforts to chase other trending rightwing conspiracy theories.For example, over the summer, the Fair Election Fund seized on to a far-fetched conspiracy theory about the online fundraising platform ActBlue, claiming to have found “60,000 potential discrepancies” in ActBlue-facilitated contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign, based on an investigation conducted “from late July to early August”. The group claimed to have “spent $250,000 on these initial findings” – a jaw-dropping sum to spend on a brief review of campaign finance records.The group then announced a $50,000 ad buy in several swing states soliciting evidence from people who claim to have been “defrauded by ActBlue”. No evidence from this “investigation” has been made public.In fall 2024, as conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting gained momentum, the Fair Election Fund announced that it would be launching a “six-figure investigation into noncitizen voting in seven key swing states”. The results of this “six-figure investigation” were never made public.

      This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director and Emma Steiner is a researcher with Documented More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr sworn in as health secretary after Senate confirmation

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has taken control of America’s vast healthcare apparatus, after the Senate voted on Thursday to confirm the controversial anti-vaccine campaigner’s nomination as health secretary.The Senate voted 52 to 48, with all Republicans other than the veteran Kentucky senator and former majority leader, Mitch McConnell, backing the former environmental lawyer.Kennedy was sworn in later on Thursday by US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch.Kennedy abandoned his independent presidential bid last year after a weak campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.The vote installs one of America’s most prominent vaccine skeptics to run its federal health infrastructure, granting oversight of the very agencies – including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration – that he has spent years battling through lawsuits and public campaigns. Kennedy will wield sweeping authority over the nation’s $2tn health system, including drug approvals for Medicare, the government health insurance scheme for older Americans.His path to the top crystallized after securing backing from the Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who extracted what he called “unprecedented” commitments for collaboration from both Kennedy and the Trump campaign. The key moderate Senate Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski also fell in line this week, having previously expressed doubts over Trump’s nomination.McConnell, the lone Republican defection, cited his own experience battling childhood polio as a primary reason for his vote against Kennedy.“I’m a survivor of childhood polio,” McConnell said. “In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures.”At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy equivocated and said he just wanted to ensure vaccine safety and would not stop vaccines from being available. But he has long peddled conspiracy theories and debunked claims, including that vaccinating babies against measles, mumps and rubella is linked to autism, and had previously said that “no vaccine is safe and effective”.He also tried to persuade the US government to rescind authorization for the newly developed coronavirus vaccine in 2021, despite the world having desperately waited for the shots to be developed while millions died during the pandemic. At the hearing he said “I don’t think anybody can say that” the Covid-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.McConnell said: “Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness. But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr Kennedy to lead these important efforts.”This was the second time in as many days that McConnell has opposed one of Trump’s nominees. On Wednesday, he voted against confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, again the sole Republican to do so.Democrats – the party historically aligned with the Kennedy family legacy – have, on the other hand, totally disavowed RFK Jr as a nominee, chiefly based on his lack of subject area expertise.“Robert F Kennedy Jr is not remotely qualified to become the next secretary of health and human services,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on the floor on Wednesday. “In fact, I might go further. Robert F Kennedy Jr might be one of the least qualified people the president could have chosen for the job.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMost of the wider Kennedy political clan disowned RFK Jr, the son of the former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of US president John F Kennedy, during his presidential campaign last year.JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, the former US ambassador to Australia, wrote to lawmakers ahead of the confirmation process and called her cousin a predator, saying he had enriched himself through his anti-vaccine “crusade”, while making victims of sick children and their families. She also noted that he had vaccinated his own children, something Kennedy says he now regrets having done.Kennedy has been at the center of numerous other controversies, including being accused of sexual misconduct, staging pranks with roadkill, including a dead bear cub, and claiming a previous illness was caused by having a worm in his brain, which prompted some opponents to call him a laughing stock. Kennedy has talked about his own recovery from heroin addiction. Through it all, Trump stuck with his nomination and on Thursday the Republican-controlled Senate acquiesced.Kennedy has in the past, however, been admired by Democratic leaders for his environmental advocacy. He has pledged to take on the big food manufacturers to try to loosen their grip on America’s over-processed diet and has become the face of the Trump administration’s offshoot motto “Maha”, or Make American Healthy Again.During the Senate finance committee hearing, Elizabeth Warren had raised alarm over Kennedy’s financial ties to anti-vaccine litigation, including a fee-sharing arrangement with the law firm Wisner Baum that earned him $2.5m over three years – an arrangement he initially planned to maintain while serving as secretary before amending his ethics agreement under pressure.Post-confirmation, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who had her own run for president in 2020, reiterated her dismay, calling the vote in favor of the incoming secretary of health and human services “a huge mistake”.“When dangerous diseases resurface and people can’t access lifesaving vaccines, all Americans will suffer,” Warren said in a statement. “And thanks to his serious, unresolved conflicts of interest, RFK Jr’s family could continue getting richer from his anti-vaccine crusade while he’s in office.”The Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, defended his vote for Kennedy. “Every president deserves their team,” Graham said, adding: “I look forward to working with RFK Jr to improve our quality of life and health in America.” More

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      The #Resistance is no more. But a quieter fightback to Trump 2.0 is growing | Jon Allsop

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      In January 2017, the day after Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US president, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington for a “Women’s March” that was actually a broader-based vessel for popular rage. Not that the atmosphere was uniformly angry: I covered the march for a US radio network and found pockets of joy among the crowd. “It’s really exciting,” a teenager from New York told me. “It’s democracy in action.”The march, and parallel events around the country, was emblematic of what came to be known as the #Resistance, a loud liberal movement in opposition to Trump that took the form not only of mass protests, but court fights, adversarial media coverage (and increased consumption thereof) and grassroots organising. The movement made cult figures (not to mention merchandise) of figures seen as standing up for institutions, from the Trump-probing special counsel Robert Mueller to the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Now though, as Trump’s second term is under way, a consensus has formed that the #Resistance is dead. Almost as soon as Trump won in November, media leaders swore off the term, and liberal news consumers appeared to tune out. Titans of tech and culture who criticised Trump last time around either openly backed him or grovelled at his feet; even staunch Democrats suggested that they would find areas of common ground with his new administration. Protests around the inauguration were much smaller. Ross Barkan argued recently in the New York Times Magazine that the era of “hyperpolitics” – or politics as an all-consuming social battleground – is now over.Why? The principal answer might simply be fatigue. Trump is an exhausting figure, and American politics has now revolved around him for nearly a decade. And hopes that the burst of first-term energy against him would exile him from public life proved forlorn.The opposition to Trump also appears rudderless. The institutional Democratic party might technically have a new leader – Ken Martin, a little-known apparatchik – but for now, it lacks towering political talents. Many supporters doubtless feel disillusioned after watching Joe Biden cast the last election in existential terms, then fail to do everything in his power to ensure that the Democrats won it, before welcoming Trump back with warm words and a cuppa.And, if the Democrats are palpably diminished, there is a sense that Trump stands astride the political landscape as a colossus. In 2016, he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, making room for the conclusion that his win was a fluke or somehow illegitimate. This time, the country knew the threat he posed, and he won decisively anyway. Trump and his allies have seized on that fact to claim a huge mandate.As the influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Trump’s victory has percolated down into US culture. Big tech firms and other industries may have submitted to Trump’s will this time out of fear that he would otherwise use the power of the state against them. But it seems equally likely that they are using the clarity of his victory as a permission slip to distance themselves from pesky liberal imperatives (diversity! Workers’ rights!) that they never liked, while seizing on areas of interest alignment and ideological affinity. For all his populist rhetoric, Trump has always been a slasher of tax and red tape at heart.The vibes, as the saying goes, have shifted since 2017. Trump has proved to be a lasting reflection of deep currents in American public opinion, not an accident. Peppy Obama-era liberalism is discredited. The #Resistance really does appear to be dead.Get rid of the hashtag and capital letter, however, and a small “r” resistance to Trump is still visible, as the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr and New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister have argued. In-person protests are kicking back into gear – albeit still on a smaller scale – as are Democratic blocking moves in Congress. There’s evidence that liberals are tuning back into the news.None of this matches the mass energy and ubiquitous liberal iconography of 2017. But the less flashy work that undergirded the #Resistance – civil society groups suing to block Trump’s policies; local-level organising – is very much in evidence again this time. The Women’s March was a headline-grabbing show of force, but the courts were the most important brake on Trump in the early days of his first term. That’s already been the case again.And Trump is more vulnerable than he might appear to be, for two main reasons. First, if it was an overreaction to think that his 2017 win was an aberration, it’s also an overreaction to see him as an electoral Goliath now; he won the popular vote last year only narrowly and with a plurality, not a majority. Second, he might be enjoying a honeymoon, but his radical and chaotic early moves in office are already likely eating up his political and cultural capital.In part, this is by design. Trump and his allies want to overwhelm their opponents, as has been well documented. But I think they also want to provoke them. Trumpism as a political project is about conquest, yes, but it’s also about conflict – it needs resistance in order to thrive. It is a politics that will keep on pushing until opponents can’t not fight back.The past few weeks might have heralded the death of a specific brand or aesthetic of oppositional politics. But the underpinning idea is alive. It might not feel exciting any more, but democracy is still in action.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today More

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      The Orbánisation of America: inside the 14 February Guardian Weekly

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      We’re just over three weeks into the second Donald Trump administration, and the pace of events both inside and outside the US has been dizzying and unprecedented.Many of us have been alarmed by Trump’s shocking pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war, trade tariffs and territorial claims on Greenland and Panama. But inside America, an equally startling transformation has been taking place.Aided by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has moved swiftly to fire critics, reward allies, punish media, gut the federal government and exploit presidential immunity. Yet much of the blueprint comes not from Trump’s own policy team, but from a power-consolidation playbook established over the past decade by the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.For the Guardian Weekly’s big story this week, our Washington bureau chief David Smith sets out the parallels between Orbán’s self-styled “petri dish for illiberalism” and Trump’s vision for America. Then columnist Moira Donegan argues that it is not the president but Musk who is actually running the US now.Get the Guardian Weekly delivered to your home addressFive essential reads in this week’s editionView image in fullscreenSpotlight | The families vowing to stay in GazaMalak A Tantesh and Emma Graham-Harrison speak to defiant Palestinians who reject Donald Trump’s resettlement plan after enduring 15 months of conflictScience | Why silence is goldenOur increasingly noisy world has been linked to numerous health complaints. But that’s not the only reason we need more peace and quiet in our lives, explains Sam PyrahFeature | An amazing/terrifying brain implantAn accident left Noland Arbaugh paralysed, but Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip allows him to control computers with his thoughts. Is it a life-changing innovation – or the start of a dystopia where a billionaire can access our thoughts? Jenny Kleeman reportsOpinion | The right are wrong on climate – why is the UK following their lead?Promoting green growth does not make you an ‘eco-nutter’. It’s the only way forward, argues Will HuttonCulture | The rise and fall of Emilia PérezLess than three weeks ago, the movie was flying high, with 13 Academy Award nods. Then came a social media scandal and a serious backlash. Steve Rose finds out whyWhat else we’ve been reading I enjoyed this picture essay about 1990s British nightlife in the hours after the clubs had shut. I particularly liked the photographer’s dedication to going to bed at 10pm to be up at 4.30am the next morning to shoot. I imagine he must have some excellent stories from tagging along with some of the groups captured in the images. Eimhin Behan, marketing executive I’m always looking for film recommendations so I was drawn to Rebecca Liu’s piece about the review site Rotten Tomatoes. While the “fresh” or “rotten” critics’ verdicts do lend themselves to a polarisation of opinion, Liu decided to explore the 40 worst-rated films to find if their hype (or tripe) was justified. Neil Willis, production editorOther highlights from the Guardian websiteView image in fullscreen Audio | Going bald in an increasingly hairy world – podcast Video | Artificial news: How to create an AI anchor Gallery | ‘A place with its own rules’: images of London’s Square MileGet in touchWe’d love to hear your thoughts on the magazine: for submissions to our letters page, please email weekly.letters@theguardian.com. For anything else, it’s editorial.feedback@theguardian.comFollow us Facebook InstagramGet the Guardian Weekly magazine delivered to your home address More

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      Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools

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      When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.View image in fullscreenTwenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.View image in fullscreenTalarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.The battle for schoolsTrump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”View image in fullscreenThe first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.View image in fullscreenIn the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.Escaping the bubbleI was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.View image in fullscreenThe collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

      This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. More