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Note: Everything in this post is my personal opinion. If you don’t agree, set up your own Substack. Or, leave me a comment.
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!
As has been observed many times in many places that every accusation our current administration makes is actually a confession.
When I hear our president, or one of his spokespeople, say that people they don’t agree with, “Hate America and want to destroy it,” I know that they are the ones who hate America and are doing everything they can to destroy it.
My evidence is that this administration is doing everything it can to make the Constitution irrelevant by ignoring it entirely.1
For instance, one of the first things our new-ish president did was declare that birthright citizenship no longer applied to children of undocumented immigrants.
This is blatantly unconstitutional.
The very first sentence of the 14th Amendment says:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
It doesn’t say, “All persons born to citizens.” This is blackletter law. The only way to change it is a constitutional amendment.
Good luck with that.
Most, if not all of the amendments in the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution refer to the rights of “The People” or “Persons” in the United States.
I.e. if you’re on our soil you have these rights whether or not you’re a documented citizen of the US.
IMHO Trump’s attempt to invalidate birthright citizenship alone violated the Presidential Oath2 to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It disturbed me so much I immediately called my US House Representative, Young Kim, and demanded that she immediately submit articles of impeachment.3
She didn’t.
I don’t really understand the hold our president has over the current iteration of the Republican Party, but it seems rock solid.
But why do the Republicans in charge at the moment keep doing these hateful things? Supremacy.
In his most recent column A. R. Moxon4 defined supremacy this way:
…supremacy is a principle. It's a principle that states that only some people in society matter, and all others can and should suffer and die… [emphasis in the original]
He was talking about a law recently passed by the Michigan State House to deny access to restrooms and changing facilities to transgender people.
The state Senate and Executive are both currently controlled by the Democratic Party, so the law is almosst certainly doomed.
Moxon speculates:
Why would the Republicans needlessly expend political capital?
Well maybe they're idiots. This seems possible. They certainly sound like idiots a lot of the time…
He goes on to note that Supremacists (mostly Republicans at the moment) see this as a way to gain political capital among Supremacist voters.
The thing is, this country was founded on Supremicist principles.
These principles were evident in, for instance, the 3/5ths compromise, the Dred Scott decision, the acceptance of slavery in the south, right on through Jim Crow and the current, largely successful efforts to invalidate the Voting Rights Act and keep the “wrong people” from voting in upcoming elections.
Systemic racism is a form of Supremacy that is so embedded in our society most of us can’t even see it. Water to a fish.
I was born in 1949, and I continually have to watch my thinking to avoid Supremicist ideology.
For instance it’s very easy for me to fall into a line of thought that assumes people who voted for Donald Trump are just not all that bright, and maybe they should be made to suffer for their sins.
Christian Nationalism is another form of Supremacism.
As an agnostic I don’t care which “Holy Book” you build your life around.
I tend to think that you’d probably be better off without a book full of, IMHO, campfire tales told by nomadic herders starting in the neolithic and ending in the bronze age when someone finally wrote them down.
Then agan, I know a lot of people who seem to get a lot out of their religion, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology or yu-name-it. Whatever floats your boat as long as you leave me and other non-believers out of it.
But I digress.
In his latest essay Moxon goes on to say:
First, there is the lie of individualism, which insists that society doesn't exist; that we have no relationship to one another, and bear no responsibility for one another.
This first lie bolsters the second and greatest lie, which is that there are some people who matter and others who don't.
The other supremacist lies involve the rights of the people to do whatever they want to the people deemed to not matter—to own or punish or kill them, for whatever reason they personally deem valid—and the right of people who are deemed to matter to consider the people who don't matter to be implied danger, implied violence, implied theft, which validates as redemptive any violence that might be done to people who don't matter.
This rings true of the policies of our current Federal administration. ALL immigrants are criminals, thieves, rapists, carjackers, kidnappers!
They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!
They are LESS THAN we are! They need to be rounded up and shipped to foreign torture prisons or Alligator Auschwitz!
At the end of the essay Moxon suggests some principles that could be applied in a just, fair and empathetic society.
1) Every human being is a unique and irreplaceable work of art.
2) Therefore, life is a right of all humans; it is not earned.
3) Anything that fails these foundational principles is an injustice that is the cause of all violence.
4) Therefore, addressing injustice is more important than enforcing order.
5) Injustice is brokenness, and brokenness demands repair.
6) Therefore we will pay the cost of repair.
7) We know that brokenness can be fixed, and should be fixed.
8) We expect improvement, and we will demand it.
9) If our demands are not met, we will issue consequences for the failure.
10) We won't give up.
At first I found these suggested principles to be a little fraught, so I attempted to edit them to make them a little less, um, fraught.
But what I came up with was almost identical,
So I’m presenting Moxon’s suggested principles for review, discussion and possible adoption by organizations who are already resisting the Supremicist policies of this administration and any new resistance organizations that may arise.
I have a real fear that if we keep allowing this administration to take away our rights, trample the Constitution and nullify the checks and balances our government has been based on for over 200 years, there will be a new and bloody Civll War.
I am hoping that there are enough people of good faith in this country to keep that from happening, no matter which political party they’re a member of.
I am not a Democrat or a Republican, but I know a lot of folks from both parties, and none of the “hate America and want to destroy it.”
Let’s figure out how to do that without any bloodshed, shall we?
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!
Trump lie of the week:
Lies our President has told recently. Not necessarily this week. I’m only posting statements rated “Pants On Fire!” by Politifact. I’m too disorganized/lazy to keep track of these so I there may be duplicates once in a while.
Musical Coda:
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Except the Second Amendment. They LOVE to misinterpret that one!
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Yup! I started demanding impeachment on January 21, 2025. Call your Congressperson!
Yes, yes, I know. I’m writing about Moxon again. He’s long winded and a little over-the-top but I like a lot of what he has to say. And his audience is WAY bigger than mine, so he must be doing something right.