Muslim Assimilation in Europe

They came in boats, rafts… anything that floats. To Europe. Lebanon. Anywhere they could. Over land, past hostile immigration barriers, barbed wire and angry locals. Some were assisted. Some were sent back. Some died from the journey. And still they poured in. Civil wars in North Africa, Syria and Iraq. Drought. Some stopped in nearby Arab nations, many in Lebanon. Poor. Penniless. Culturally so different from those in the European lands they had entered. Darker skin met angry local eyes. Islam faced mostly Christian believers. Language barriers made the transition difficult. Hordes. Few landed in Eastern Europe where language barriers and the most virulent hostility made entry difficult, notwithstanding European Union mandates to accept these wannabe immigrants.

Most landed in the UK, France and Germany. The UK, already expanded by generations of colonial Muslims settling in, was better prepared… but still hostile to the new arrivals. Germany and France reluctantly accepted what they felt was a supportable mass. France made sure these new residents knew they were not welcome. Germany, still somewhat hostile (particularly the growing nationalist right-wing) at first, found ways to teach the language, train for new required job skills and provide housing. To the surprise of most Germans, these recent immigrées managed to hold on to much of their culture while assimilating into Germany almost seamlessly. The expected surge in Islamist terrorism never materialized. They found jobs, went to university and added value to the German workforce. 

And then there was France. Making sure that those of Arab heritage knew that most of the French resented these foreigners and their faith, the ghettoization of these settlers, their difficulties finding jobs and assistance in assimilating, generated swaths of terrorist incidents, many fomented by these recent arrivals or those children of earlier waves of Islamic migration into France. Why? How did Germany pull it off, while France continues to reel and rail against Muslim migrations? After all, France was a colonial power with deep roots into Arab lands.

Perhaps the answer lies in the respective views on assimilation. Nazi treatment of those with differing religious and cultural views – the prime mover of the Holocaust – was such an embarrassment to modern Germany that tolerance became a cherished value at the top of their cultural choices. It became possible to adhere to Islam and Arab cultural practices while becoming a productive and accepted member German society. France required migrants to relinquish their former culture and move strictly into traditional views of “being French.” The hijab, Muslim religious symbols, and holding a parallel cultural life were simply outlawed… often by law. Muslims were not welcome into many neighborhoods, forced into pockets of isolated communities.

“For France, the issue has its roots in the country’s domestic and international politics. The concept of radical assimilation has been a part of France’s governance tradition since its colonial reign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, in Francophone Africa, the natives were considered ‘French’ and ‘civilized’ as long as they rejected their own cultures in favor of that of the colonial power.

“The same mentality applies to the immigrants who have moved to France from former African colonies, particularly Algeria, Tunisia, and those countries across West Africa. This strict interpretation of the assimilation policy is further reinforced at home by the rigorous redefinition of French secularism, or laïcité, whereby the visibility of religion, particularly Islam, is suppressed in the public sphere, and the responsibility of immigrants, and Muslims in particular, is to demonstrate their attachment to French values and culture.

“The suppression of religion in the public sphere has created enormous friction between the secular state and Muslims, whose faith requires observance around the clock. For example, the arrest of Muslims who have had to pray in the streets due to lack of mosques has become commonplace. In a striking display of French secularism, a Muslim woman was forced on a beach in Cannes in 2016 by police to remove her Islamic burkini and given a citation for ‘wearing an outfit that disrespects good morals and secularism.’ France’s aggressive attempt to create nationwide equality has naturally led to repression of diversity, forcing Muslims to retreat to ghettoized suburbs. This in turn created discrimination and a fear of social rejection among France’s rapidly growing Muslim population.” The Fair Observer, November 5, 2020. This attitude has led to an “us versus them” approach.

Of the eleven significant terrorist incidents in Europe in 2019 and 2020, most occurred in France, and only one (a relatively minor knife attack in Dresden) occurred in Germany. The view of most Germans of their nascent Arab immigrants has been one of pleasant surprise. Meanwhile, in France, retired Generals – supported by many in the military – raged in public: “A new open letter has been published in France warning of the threat of civil war and claiming to have more than 130,000 signatures from the public… The message, published in a right-wing magazine, accuses the French government of granting ‘concessions’ to Islamism… ‘It is about the survival of our country,’ said the text, said to be issued anonymously by soldiers and appealing for public support.” BBC.com, May 10th.

As Germany supports immigrants to respect and continue their culture openly (see above picture), France continues to view practicing such cultural manifestations as a threat. Arabs and Muslims are kept separated, denied opportunities and constantly reminded that their religious and cultural practices cannot be tolerated in the French view of assimilation. What is fascinating is what works, what grows the internal benefit of immigration, and what does not work. See any parallels to the vision of immigrants here in the United States?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if the notion of poor but hardworking immigrations – from Scandinavian, Irish and Italian waves of immigrants – has indeed grown the political and economic power of the United States, what does the nascent open hostility to the same kind of immigration from people with slightly darker skin augur for our future growth?

If It’s This Bad on Land, What’s it Like in the Oceans

The above government-prepared chart presents the steadily deteriorating impact of global warming just in the United States. Clearly, this process is mirrored across the globe. The threat to mankind is profound. From habitability to the increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters as ugly punctuation to an existential challenge to life as we know it. Rising generations are expressing varying levels of panic knowing that they will feel the brunt of these horrific changes. And clearly, humanity is doing way too little, way too late. But if this is what we can see with little or no amplification, what is it like for life we cannot see easily? Life under the seas? As land temperatures rise, so too, of necessity do the temperatures in our oceans.

James Shelton, writing for the May 13th Yale News, paints the picture more clearly based on a recent cross-university study, focusing simply on mollusks as the oceans’ canary in the coal mine: “Writing in the journal Current Biology [the study is entitled Metabolic Tradeoffs Control Biodiversity Through Geological Time by Thomas Boag, William Gearty and Richard Stockey published in the May 6th issue of Current Biology], researchers at Yale, Stanford, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln say mollusks such as clams, sea snails, and cephalopods will be particularly vulnerable in tropical regions if global climate projections hold true. 

“The researchers analyzed 145 million years’ worth of data, in increments of approximately 10 million years. They looked at geochemical data that reveal past ocean temperatures, fossil data of mollusks, and models for habitability and biodiversity.

“Their analysis suggests that by the year 2300, upper ocean temperatures (up to about 200 meters deep) in tropical latitudes will mirror those of ‘hothouse’ eras millions of years ago, when upper ocean temperatures rose well past 68 degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes past 85 degrees. These periods saw significant biodiversity loss at low latitudes, the researchers said.

“‘That’s when you start to see a dramatic decrease in species diversity,’ said lead author Thomas Boag, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth and planetary sciences at Yale who conducted the research as a graduate student at Stanford. ‘We’re already seeing a loss of diversity of species at the equator.’…Currently, sea surface temperatures near the equator top out at 82 or 83 degrees Fahrenheit.” 

“But the cause of species loss isn’t just a matter of temperature, Boag said. Rather, it is an intricate balance of ocean temperature, oxygenation of the water, and the physiological composition of species themselves that determines whether life thrives or begins to wither.

“That’s why global changes in species diversity in the ancient oceans don’t resemble a swinging pendulum between ‘hothouse’ and ‘icehouse’ periods, with the equator in the center. Indeed, the fossil record shows instances when species diversity peaked far away from the equator.”

While these many variables all contribute to the decline and demise of marine species of every kind, most of the damage can be traced directly to temperature rise. The study summary states this conclusion: “We therefore suggest that the effects of ocean temperature on the aerobic scope of marine ectotherms is a primary driver of migrating biodiversity peaks through geologic time and will likely play a role in the restructuring of biodiversity under projected future climate scenarios…

The earth has experienced wild shifts in global temperatures since life began. Fossil remains present a picture of what the earth faces in this current and growing cycle of global warming. What this study portends is not pretty. “Looking to the future, the new analysis places rising ocean temperatures and their interactions with dissolved oxygen in the ocean as the primary driver for stifling biodiversity. The researchers said their projections for 2100 and 2300 show the planet’s low latitudes — near the equator — are at particular risk… ‘Based on our model and past temperature extremes, 50% loss of modern, low-latitude diversity does seem possible in a worst-case climate scenario,’ Boag said.” Yale News. We do not have to wait until 2300 to see the massive impairment of life in the oceans. The trends are well-underway right now. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and as much as we know about the probable impact of continued global warming on the planet, think of how much we really do not know… yet!

Proactive Government Willing to Invest in the Future

We really haven’t had such a government since we became enmeshed in a recent series of wars and conflicts, most of which we either lost or simply stalemated, beginning with Vietnam. Long mired in the annals of history are the New Deal reconstruction of American infrastructure that actually created excess electrical power generation capacity that won WWII. The United States was thus able to manufacture munitions and the ships, planes and vehicles of war that eventually crushed the Axis powers. The allies were otherwise incapable of building what was necessary to win, not even the Soviets.

Gone is that ambitious National Highway Defense Act of 1957 that resulted in our magnificent Interstate highway system. Long past is our reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in that same year: upgrade our public school with STEM subjects and invest in a technological fountain of job creation and scientific innovation we called the Space Race. We picked up some very, very bad habits along the way. Ronald Reagan’s belief, still stubbornly clung to as fiscal conservatives’ most basic axiom even though it has consistently been proven false, is the supply side/trickle down theory that if you cut taxes for the rich, they will immediately begin creating new high paying jobs and hiring lots of people. It never happens. Even Reagan raised taxes back up.

Or Bill Clinton’s belief that Wall Street traders could be trusted to own commercial banks, which led to trading firms borrowing from themselves to invest, many in the derivatives (like subprime mortgages), until the Big Recession hit years later in 2007. Perhaps it was George W Bush’s decision to cut taxes for the rich even as he began the most expensive and longest lasting wars in U.S. history that turned a budget surplus into the massive, interest accruing deficit we have do not seem to be able to stop. Apparently, he missed the “guns vs butter” lecture at Yale. Or maybe it was the 2017 Trump corporate tax cut, dropping the corporate rate from 35% to 21% that has generated several trillion dollars of additional deficit without really creating any new jobs (that infamous and disproven “trickle down” economics again).

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (April 1st): “At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations, and it appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020.

“The tax-avoiding companies represent various industries and collectively enjoyed almost $40.5 billion in U.S. pretax income in 2020, according to their annual financial reports. The statutory federal tax rate for corporate profits is 21 percent. The 55 corporations would have paid a collective total of $8.5 billion for the year had they paid that rate on their 2020 income. Instead, they received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.” Seriously? Yup!

We’ve managed to drop our educational system from first to thirty-eighth (according to international testing standards applied to high school scores around the world), and China is making hay by pointing to our obvious decline as our own civil engineers give our infrastructure a D minus, trillions of dollars of deferred maintenance later. We still spend 41% of the entire planet’s military expenditures and continue to watch our state and federal legislatures continue to cut taxes or support existing tax cuts for the rich. We are the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare, where embedded incumbents have created a medical system that costs double per capita than the rest of those developed nations. As upward mobility has been rendered to the history books, what exactly is that military protecting? The worst income inequality in the developed world?

When the government once invested in infrastructure, scientific research, education and human resource protection, productivity soared and new unexpected technology spun off new jobs at, you’ll pardon the expression, warp speed. And when our immigration doors were open, not only did we generate greater diversity, accessing minds from other cultures to add new ways of creating value, but we created so many more jobs than we are creating now. 

Turns out immigrants create double the number of new businesses than do native born Americans. In a study based on U.S. Census data, Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Business) addressed the commonly held belief that immigrants steal jobs from U.S. citizens and proved exactly the reverse. “‘The idea is that immigrants come to your community and they take jobs,’ says Ben Jones, a professor of strategy at Kellogg. ‘That could mean that people already in the community could have more trouble finding a job or, by having to compete with immigrants for jobs, could get paid a lower wage.’

“The logic is straightforward. Yet curiously, the economic data have not generally borne this out. Previous studies have not found lower local wages after influxes of immigration. In fact, regions of the U.S. that have historically seen more immigration have actually experienced higher gains in per-capita income. ‘They seem to be the outperformers,’ says Jones… [adding] ‘the rate of founding businesses is 80 percent higher among the non-U.S.-born than among the U.S.-born.’

“The same general trend was also borne out among fortune 500 firms… Critically, the researchers also found that immigrants founded firms of all sizes at a higher rate than those born in the U.S.: small firms, large ones, and everything in between. This is important because it suggests that that the net influence of immigrants on the economy is to increase the demand for labor, ultimately pushing up overall wages.” KelloggInsight, October 5, 2020.

We pretty much had to parallel a wartime economy during the pandemic. Deficits were incurred to fend off a severe recession, if not another great depression. So now we come to the threshold of rebuilding, facing not only the ravages of the pandemic-caused recession, but the double whammy of escalating climate change devastation and the rise of artificial intelligence replacing so many higher paying jobs. We need to upgrade infrastructure, scientific research, education and human resource protection to resume our competitive edge. The proposals to address this desperate and highly “deferred maintenance” need is set forth in the President’s infrastructure proposal, which itself falls short of the recommendations of America’s civil engineers, but which is fiercely opposed by a filibuster threat from Senate Republicans who still stupidly cling to the tax cut mentality of trickle-down economics, willing to spend only a modest fraction of that proposal. Deterioration is now a national policy.

Even in blue state California, even with a budget surplus, the tendency to avoid spending money without a current dire emergency simply mirrors a national trend toward spending money in reaction to disasters rather than proactively to mitigate future inevitable disasters by prudent spending and planning. Writing for the Los Angeles Times daily coronavirus supplement (May 20th), Kiera Feldman writes: “It’s hard to imagine a situation that would highlight the value of public health agencies more than a global pandemic. At all levels of government, public health workers have been instrumental in mapping out the extent of the coronavirus crisis and formulating a strategy for overcoming it.

“So how does California Gov. Gavin Newsom express his appreciation for this hard work? By denying a request from local public health leaders to include $200 million for them in his new proposed state budget… That’s the charge from healthcare advocates who say Newsom’s budget would return the state to a dangerous, years-long pattern of underfunding local public health agencies despite the glaring inadequacies exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic…” We reap what we sow, but we most certainly aren’t sowing very much anymore. Exactly how long do you think we can sustain a competitive edge in a global economy. And why is China smiling… no, laughing… at our political distractions and unwillingness to invest in ourselves?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if America does not begin to live in the real world, we can expect to slide into history’s waste bin of former great powers.

Carbon-Based Emissions Suck

Bill Gates tells us that even with the most widespread deployment of alternative energy and the elimination of the nastiest fossil fuel emissions, the earth will still fall roughly 30% short of meeting its expected energy needs. His answer: a ground-up redesign for safer nuclear power generation. Combining government with his own funding, Gates has supported research that has led to the development of cost-efficient construction, much safer nuclear fuel usage and the elimination of a concentrated steam-powered electrical generation. 

Bill Gates tells us that even with the most widespread deployment of alternative energy and the elimination of the nastiest fossil fuel emissions, the earth will still fall roughly 30% short of meeting its expected energy needs. His answer: a ground-up redesign for safer nuclear power generation. Combining government with his own funding, Gates has supported research that has led to the development of cost-efficient construction, much safer nuclear fuel usage and the elimination of a concentrated steam-powered electrical generation.

He told CNBC (February 25th): “‘There’s a new generation [of nuclear power] that solves the economics, which has been the big, big problem,’ he said, referring to the fact that the power plants are very expensive to build. ‘At the same time, it revolutionizes the safety.’

“Innovations include using liquid sodium instead of water to cool the reactor at a lower pressure, which can help avoid meltdowns and also allows nuclear power plants to be smaller and therefore simpler to build… ‘As we solve these engineering problems and cost problems, I hope people will be open-minded to see how incredibly safe the next generation will be,’ Gates told [interviewer Adam] Sorkin. Gates is an investor in and founder of TerraPower, one of the leading new nuclear power companies.”

Still, with lingering memories of Chernobyl and Fukushima destruction, despite those being very old-world nuclear power stations, the return to nuclear power – even under the most modern and safest configurations – is going to be a more difficult sell. Even if that alternative just might be inevitable. The first steps in countering our climate change emergency have to be a very quick end to the use of coal-fired anything. Despite verbiage to the contrary, there is no existing commercially viable method to produce “clean coal.” After some scrubbing, we just shove the effluents underground for future generations to address. Can we shove more carbon-based effluents underground or recapture and neutralize them?

Indeed, there is a growing notion that we not only need to stop adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere but that active steps must be taken to suck these carbon-based gasses out of the air. There are technology sectors focusing on exactly that alternative, still struggling with whether or not that feat is feasible on a scale that is reasonably possible. Environmental leader California is now facing some of those existential choices.

Evan Halper, writing for the April 22nd Los Angeles Times, sets the stage: “It is no small undertaking. Installing sci-fi-type machinery to pull carbon from the air — or divert it from refineries, power plants and industrial operations — and bottle it up deep underground is a monumentally expensive and logistically daunting challenge. It is one climate leaders now have no choice but to try to meet as they race to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the central commitment of the Paris agreement on climate change, which aims to avert cataclysmic effects.

“‘To have any chance of holding warming below that level, you can’t do it simply by limiting emissions,’ said Ken Alex, a senior policy advisor to then-California Gov. Jerry Brown who now directs Project Climate at the UC Berkeley School of Law. ‘You have to sequester significant amounts of carbon.’

“The recognition has pushed state regulators to start drafting blueprints for what could be one of the larger infrastructure undertakings in California history. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide would need to be captured and compressed into liquid form, at which point it would be either buried throughout the state or converted into materials for industrial uses such as manufacturing plastic and cement… The state is essentially starting from zero. There are no large-scale carbon-removal projects operating in California.”

The technology is still at a nascent and fairly primitive stage. Most of the efforts are focused on removing the nasty gasses from the air and sequestering them. Neutralizing these emissions seems farther down the road. “Among the most ambitious are the backers of a process known as direct air capture, through which giant fans suck carbon from the atmosphere.

“The technology has been deployed in modest demonstration projects — including one in Menlo Park — for years but never at a scale large enough to make a meaningful dent in emissions. With the cost of running the machines on the decline and the willingness to consider increasingly outside-the-box solutions on the rise, as well as a new administration in Washington promising an infusion of federal subsidies, the vacuum approach is suddenly getting a lot of attention.

“‘The question had always been, could we fund a multi-hundred-million-dollar plant, find a site and get it built?’ said Steve Oldham, chief executive of Carbon Engineering, a direct-air-capture company based in British Columbia, Canada. ‘The answer now is, fantastically, yes.’

“California regulators are closely watching the progress of the hulking direct-air-capture facility the company is building with Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin in Texas [pictured above]. The 100-acre operation aims to capture up to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year… Even if the Texas plant meets its goals, the carbon dioxide it removes would account for less than 1% of the emissions California needs to pull from the atmosphere to hit its climate targets, according to estimates by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“‘The models are telling us these approaches are essential, but we don’t yet know if they will be successful,’ said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington. ‘There is lots of promise, lots of potential, but not yet lots of proof.’…

“California officials say direct-air-capture developers are eyeing where in the state they can build. Some are looking toward remote areas in Northern California where they could tap into geothermal energy… Others are more focused on the deep underground basins of the Central Valley, suitable for storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide.

“The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.” LA Times. Experts say the storage potential in the Central Valley and other sites in California is on the order of magnitude of 70 billion tons. We need to embrace the fastest path to carbon-based gas reduction, and while this is clearly only an interim solution, we just might not have time for perfection. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and our existing slow and steady climate change reversal is now clearly vastly too little and vastly too late.

Well-Fed on an Unrelenting Stream of Conspiracy Theories vs God on the Run

From gpb.org

There is a deeper push-pull in the political polarization of America. My recent Rising Voters, Sinking Republicans focused on a growing generational schism between voters from younger generations versus current Republican values, one that threatens to decimate the GOP once the delaying tactics of voter suppression and gerrymandering no longer protect an old-world white incumbency. Today, I would like to approach another facet of that schism: fading religiosity against a population of faith particularly vulnerable to anti-science conspiracy theories.

Let’s start with a global trend, but one that is particularly visible here in the United States. Writing for the April 3rd, Los Angeles Times, Phil Zuckerman explains the shift: “Democratic societies that have experienced the greatest degrees of secularization are among the healthiest, wealthiest and safest in the world, enjoying relatively low rates of violent crime and high degrees of well-being and happiness. Clearly, a rapid loss of religion does not result in societal ruin.

“For the first time since Gallup began tracking the numbers in 1937, Americans who are members of a church, synagogue or mosque are not in the majority, according to a Gallup report released this week [first week in April]. Compare today’s 47% to 1945, when more than 75% of Americans belonged to a religious congregation.

“This decline in religious affiliation aligns closely with many similar secularizing trends. For example, in the early 1970s, only 1 in 20 Americans claimed ‘none’ as their religion, but today it is closer to 1 in 3. Over this same time period, weekly church attendance has decreased, and the percentage of Americans who never attend religious services has increased from 9% to 30%.

“In 1976, nearly 40% of Americans said they believed that the Bible was the actual word of God, to be taken literally. Today only about a quarter of Americans believe that, with slightly more decreeing the Bible is simply a collection of fables, history and morality tales written by men. And the percentage of Americans who confidently believe in God’s existence, without a doubt, has declined from 63% in 1990 to 53% today.

“Fears that this rise of irreligion might result in the deterioration of our nation’s moral fiber — and threaten our liberties and freedoms — are understandable. Such concerns are not without historical merit: The former Soviet Union was a communist country deeply rooted in atheism and was one of the most corrupt, bloody regimes of the 20th century. Other atheistic authoritarian regimes, such as the former Albania and Cambodia, were equally crooked and vicious. But here’s the thing — they were all godless dictatorships that tried to forcibly destroy religion by persecuting the faithful, actively oppressing religious institutions, and making a demagogic cult out of their thuggish rulers. Such coercive secularization is, indeed, something to dread.

“However, there is another, alternative kind of secularization, one that emerges organically, amid free and open societies where human rights, including religious freedom, are upheld and respected. Many societies qualify for this label — including those in Japan, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Australia, Canada and Uruguay, among many others. In these places, religion is not actively repressed, nor do governments promote secularization. And yet, it occurs simply because the people living in these societies lose interest in the whole religious enterprise.” In reality, the New Testament did not reach sufficient codification until approximately 600 years after the birth of Christ. Still, today’s political schism has religious ties.

The GOP is laced with reliance of outdated and disproven economic theories (“supply side economics” where favoring the rich is supposed to create jobs but never does) and outlandish conspiracy theories (like QAnon), which justify repression and even armed insurrection. Holding its evangelical base has become Republican Party gospel. The fundamental notion of fiscal conservatism has been lost in this unsustainable and mythical catering to essential GOP constituencies. Reality has simply left the Republican building. They are against much more than they stand for, an unhealthy erosion of an important political party.

UC Davis Professor and author, Kathryn Olmsted, is an expert on the combustible blend of politics, conspiracy and paranoia. After the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, she felt that perhaps the litany of conspiracy theories – the CIA was drugging Americans, the Watergate break-in, FBI investigations everywhere, UFO links to Area 51, etc. – would now fade. Not to worry, Dr. Olmstead, as LA Times writer (on April 3rd) Mark Z. Barabak, explains: “The decade that followed was bracketed by two Big Lies: the canard that Obama was born in Africa and thus didn’t belong in the White House, and the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen and thus Donald Trump never should have vacated it. Countless other mistruths and wackadoodle theories gained purchase in the years between.

“Indeed, thanks in good part to Trump’s mendacity, these are glory days for an academic with Olmsted’s expertise, which has placed her in great demand as an explainer and debunker… She’s not particularly glad about that, though Olmsted does laugh a lot for someone who spends so much time plumbing the nether reaches of the body politic. Just the day before, she said with a dry chuckle, a journalist mentioned this loopy tale making the rounds: Former First Lady Michelle Obama is transgender, a fact known to the late actress Joan Rivers, who was murdered by Bill and Hillary Clinton to keep it secret…

“But [according to Olmstead], recent years have seen a perilous development, which she called ‘conspiracy theory without the theory.’ Or, more simply, utter fabrication with no grounding in reality whatsoever… ‘It used to be there were a lot of facts that were actual facts and then people would make this leap. But like the birther conspiracy theory’ — regarding Obama’s supposed African origin — ‘there’s no kernel of truth there. There’s nothing you can point to and say, ‘Well his mother did make that trip to Kenya when she was pregnant,’ ‘ Olmsted said. ‘It’s just totally made-up and there’s no attempt to justify it.’”

But polls tell us that the “big lies” and conspiracy theories conspicuously resonate much more frequently among people of faith, particularly evangelicals. “The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, reported in February that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a cabal of powerful politicians run a global child sex trafficking ring, is ‘mostly’ or ‘completely’ accurate. The rate was the highest of any religious group. The same survey indicated that 3 in 5 white evangelicals believe Biden’s win was ‘not legitimate.’… A poll released this year from Nashville-based Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, indicated that 49% of Protestant pastors often hear congregants repeating conspiracies about national events.” LA Times, March 3rd.

Indeed, we seem to be in a race between a fading power constituency, unable to sustain its body politic among rising generations, and Millennials and younger who are facing the horribles that the GOP denies, marginalizes or refuses to spend money to solve. When you realize that the only way for this aging GOP constituency to maintain its political power is to repeal democracy, the stakes have not reached this level of combative polarization since the Civil War.

I’m Peter Dekom, and neither time nor scientific reality are on the side of the current configuration of the Republican Party, and they desperately know that.

Stop the Steal in 2024 – The Constitutional Ambiguity

 

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 4 (the “Elections Clause”)

*Updated 6/2/2021

As of this writing, there are well over 300 voter suppression bills pending in 47 states, with statutory limits already passed in Georgia and Arizona. In Texas, Democrats in the legislature walked out to protest that state’s Republican sponsored voter suppression bill, taking away the necessary quorum. On May 31st, GOP Governor Abbott threatened to veto the budget bill which contained approvals for legislative pay. Republicans fear that they cannot win elections without exclusionary voter suppression legislation. And so they have promulgated a false narrative of “voter fraud” to make their case. And it is clearly and solely a Republican effort.

All the bills that have passed or are likely to pass are in states with Republican controlled legislatures and governors; none are in Democratic states. The goal is to eliminate as many categories of voters as possible likely to vote against GOP candidates and issues. Although even in Republican states where fraud investigations have been initiated, no evidence of any significant voter fraud has been identified (and where it has most of those miscast ballots favor Donald Trump), the justification for such voter suppression is to increase voter confidence because of voter fraud. Can states do that? Let’s start by looking at the U.S. Constitutional provision cited above:

“The Elections Clause is the primary source of constitutional authority to regulate elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The Clause directs and empowers states to determine the ‘Times, Places, and Manner’ of congressional elections, subject to Congress’s authority to ‘make or alter’ state regulations. It grants each level of government the authority to enact a complete code for such elections, including rules concerning public notices, voter registration, voter protection, fraud prevention, vote counting, and determination of election results. Whenever a state enacts a law relating to a congressional election, it is exercising power under the Elections Clause; states do not have any inherent authority to enact such measures. 

“Although the Elections Clause makes states primarily responsible for regulating congressional elections, it vests ultimate power in Congress. Congress may pass federal laws regulating congressional elections that automatically displace (“preempt”) any contrary state statutes, or enact its own regulations concerning those aspects of elections that states may not have addressed. The Framers of the Constitution were concerned that states might establish unfair election procedures or attempt to undermine the national government by refusing to hold elections for Congress. They empowered Congress to step in and regulate such elections as a self-defense mechanism.” Michael Morely, Assistant Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law and Franita Tolson Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, for ConstitutionCenter.org

Those attacking the Capitol on January 6th, now being hailed as heroes by too many Republican members of Congress who are stopping a full Congressional investigation of the underlying powers that fomented that abortive rebellion, certainly believed, as many registered Republican voters continue to believe, that they were protecting the constitutional election process. In fact, they were attempting to destroy that constitutional right. Instead of merely suppressing contrary votes, they were and are actually trying to nullify actual certified election results. 

Can courts undo these efforts? Yes, if they are born of unconstitutional actions and biases that are sufficiently proven. We’ve seen voting restrictions, many set out in the Jim Crow era, tossed out by federal courts, supported by the highest court in the land. But that was before recent justices were nominated and confirmed because of their political biases, not because they were excellent jurists. The Trump legacy, particularly in the U.S. Supreme Court, suggests that Republicans will be accorded wide latitude in voter suppression legislation and other right-wing issues, including the containment and possible reversal of Roe v Wade. 

Given the cloture/filibustering reality in the U.S. Senate, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Congress will elect to preempt state laws that rather obviously repress Democratic votes. “Stop the Steal” appears to be one of the few major GOP platforms, as the removal of Liz Cheney from the third most powerful House seat within the Republican congressional delegation clearly indicates. Even if Donald Trump does not run in 2024, but may continue to define GOP positioning and candidacy for years to come, can we expect Republicans to accept a 2024 result that does not result in their retaking the White House?

LA Times OpEd contributor, Doyle McManus writes for the May 19th edition: “Pro-Trump forces in dozens of states are working to change election laws to make it harder for Democrats to win — and easier for Republicans to challenge the results if their candidate loses. If they’re successful, the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election may only have been a rehearsal for a second round in 2024… ‘What was really scary about 2020 was how close we came to a meltdown,’ Edward B. Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, told me. ‘It’s not too early to worry about Jan. 6, 2025.’

“One part of the GOP election-law campaign has gotten plenty of publicity: new laws in Georgia and elsewhere to make voting more difficult, including a statute that makes it a criminal offense to give people water while they wait to vote… But other, less visible actions may be even more important. In at least 36 states, Republican legislators have proposed laws to weaken the autonomy of local election officials and put more power over vote-counting in the hands of legislators.

“That’s a recipe for political meddling in election results. ‘It’s the opposite of what good election administration should be,’ Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said recently… In Georgia, for example, the same law that criminalized giving water to thirsty voters also gave the Legislature the right to appoint the chair of the state election board — and gave the board the right to take over counties’ election management… ‘The most destabilizing thing is the effort to change who’s in charge of the vote-counting process,’ Foley said. ‘That’s really dangerous.’

“And the most important battle over the ground rules for the 2024 presidential election will happen in plain sight with the 2022 elections of governors, secretaries of state and state legislators, plus members of the U.S. House of Representatives… In most election years, that process is uncontroversial. But when a losing candidate contests the election, it can turn into a thicket of ill-defined powers.

“Last year, for example, Trump asked several GOP governors to refuse to certify their states’ results — under the legal theory that if electoral votes for Biden weren’t certified, they couldn’t be counted… When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp refused, Trump called him ‘worse than a Democrat’ and threatened him with a primary challenge.

“Next step: If no candidate has a majority of certified electoral votes, the House of Representatives decides the winner — under a peculiar system in which each state’s delegation gets one vote… If Trump had succeeded in throwing the 2020 election to the House, he could have won a second term, because 27 of the 50 House delegations have Republican majorities.

“‘To control the outcome [in a given state], one party has to be in control of both the legislature and the governorship,’ Foley told me. ‘That makes the gubernatorial elections in 2022 critical in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.’.. The otherwise obscure races for secretary of state will matter as well. In Georgia, where Raffensperger refused Trump’s request to ‘find’ extra votes, the former president has already endorsed a challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, who is casting himself as a Trump loyalist…  ‘They are trying to lay the groundwork [for 2024] to make sure local officials will jump if Trump tells them to jump,’ Foley said. ‘They didn’t jump last time, but they might the next time.’

“Do Republicans really want to win a presidential election this way? Probably not; any political party would rather have a clear and convincing majority, without any need to resort to chicanery… But Trump clearly has no such scruples — and his supporters like House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who hopes to be speaker of the House by 2024, have fallen in line. McCarthy signed on to a pro-Trump lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s electoral votes in four states, and was one of 126 GOP House members who voted against accepting the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, which Biden won.” In a strange way, then, the mid-terms just might make GOP states that much more committed to making sure Democratic voters are marginalized. More steadfast GOP legislators and governors… unwilling to let democracy work? Will the Democratic backlash likely to result wash away those attempts to control the results? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at no time since the Civil War has the American democracy been so much under siege such that the nation’s very foundation of government just might not survive.