Stephan: Trump could not make his views any clearer than this. My read on this is that he has become frightened and is beginning to recognize that he really could be indicted, and preparing his troops for violence. I don't think there is a chance that Trump is going to go to prison without creating a second civil war.
In his one-term presidency, Donald Trump pushed out a number of notorious conspiracy theories tied to voter fraud, climate change and vaccines, but it wasn’t until recently that Trump expressed his explicit support for QAnon – which promotes the idea that Trump is the savior of the American people.
Despite the dangers of endorsing a movement the FBI has labeled a domestic terror threat, Trump posted a picture of himself wearing a Q lapel pin, with the QAnon catchphrases “The Storm is Coming” and “WWG1WGA,” on his Truth Social account earlier this week. He shared the post after an account called “Patriots in Control” originally published the photo on the platform.
His latest embrace of QAnon comes as no surprise since Trump spent much of his presidency praising followers who were a part of the movement and even endorsed a Republican candidate for congress who is a prominent QAnon supporter. He has previously defended the movement saying it consists of people who “basically believe in good government.”
But what makes his recent endorsement especially disturbing is that it came hours after a man […]
Stephan: How can you have a viable democracy when nearly a majority of Americans cannot even name the branches of government? Or have no idea what the Constitution actually says. The Republican Party assisted by the Jones Day Law firm, and the Federalist Society, have been working for years to completely corrupt the American judiciary, and turn it into a christofascist network of judges. The House and Senate, particularly the House, have become filled with ignorant corrupt MAGAt ideologues. And the Executive branch of government under Trump became basically a mafia organization. And because of their ignorance, most American voters so dimly understand how the government operates that they haven't even been able to comprehend what was happening. From a MAGAt Republican perspective, this is all very desirable, which is why they don't like fact-based civics classes in public schools.
About a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch.
U.S. Capitol Credit: iStock
The survey also found a decline in the number of respondents who could name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.
Around 26 percent of respondents could not name any First Amendment freedoms.
Americans’ understanding of basic facts about the U.S. government declined for the first time in six years, as fewer than half in a new survey could name all three branches of government.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual Constitution Day Civics Survey found a significant drop in the percentage of Americans who could name all three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — falling by 9 percentage points from a year earlier.
About a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch.
The survey also found a decline in the number of respondents who could name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.
Freedom of religion was named by 24 percent of those surveyed, falling from 56 percent from […]
Stephan: The MAGAt Republicans do not like a public education system that teaches children real facts, and trains them to be successful adults. Why? Because study after study has shown (see SR archives) that the more educated a person is the more likely they are to vote Democratic. Instead, what the MAGAts want is a system that lies to children and rather than educating them, merely indoctrinates them in the MAGAt world's religiously conservative fascist fantasies.
Children going to school Credit: Shutterstock
Over the weekend, New York Times reporters Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal published a carefully reported exposé about the private school system run by the Hasidic Jewish community in New York. For decades, this insular community — which largely separates itself from the wider world, including a large majority of Jewish people — has operated its own piecemeal system of religious schools or yeshivas whose goal is “to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world.” Students at these gender-segregated schools spend most of their classroom time on religious instruction, leaving them with very little basic education in science, math, history or other skills necessary in the modern world. The inevitable outcome, Shapiro and Rosenthal report, is that many are trapped “in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.” At one school mentioned in the article, more than 1,000 students took New York State’s standardized reading and math test, and not a single one passed.
At Giddings State School, a Texas juvenile prison, youths reported regularly soiling their cells this summer because there weren’t enough officers to take them to the bathroom. Credit: Jolie McCullough / The Texas Tribune
Throughout this summer, children in Texas’ youth prison system have repeatedly been trapped in their cells, forced to urinate in water bottles and defecate on the floor.
For months, children in at least two of five state lockups reported regularly lacking access to toilets as the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s workforce shrunk below dangerous levels. Calls for immediate action by juvenile justice advocates and dozens of lawmakers to address the crisis have largely gone unanswered by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Last month, the governor’s office said the safety of staff and youth at TJJD was a top priority for him, touted the agency’s recent pay raise — funded largely by agency officials siphoning cash from the plethora of vacant officer positions — and promised to support further salary boosts during next year’s legislative session. His office did not immediately respond to questions for this story.
Stephan: Conservative religiosity, whatever its denomination, is almost always patriarchial, sexually dysfunctional, and views women as subordinate not quite fully equal human beings. Frankly, I am tired of this crap, and I am always surprised how many women buy into this worldview. We are not going to be able to successfully move into a wholesome future until we get that humans should be defined by their character, not their race, gender, or religious affiliation, or lack thereof.
A Catholic Deacon holds an anti-choice sign and the rosary in the run-up to Kansas’ August abortion vote. Credit: Kyle Rivas / Getty
There was no winner in last month’s vote on abortion rights in Kansas. Technically, nothing changed after voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure intended to strip abortion protections out of the state’s constitution. When the race was called on the evening of August 2, every Kansan retained the same set of rights they’d woken up with that morning. But there was a loser: the ballot initiative’s largest financial backer by a long shot, the Catholic Church, whose dioceses squandered millions of dollars on the failed effort.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City contributed $3.18 million, the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, $652,355; $175,000 came from the Diocese of Salina; tens of thousands more from smaller churches scattered around the state. The Kansas Catholic Conference threw in $275,000. Together, the donations amounted to well over half of the Value Them Both Association’s total haul — an “absolutely stunning” amount of […]
