AcidiclyBasicGlitch

The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.

Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.

Yet now the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.

Few things illustrate that reality more clearly than the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally — and often unlawfully — defund Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad.

In the first three weeks of his administration, Trump issued a series of stop-work orders and funding freezes that effectively yanked funding from religious groups that have been providing lifesaving care to many of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Caritas International, a confederation of international Catholic relief agencies, has warned that the cuts are “catastrophic” and said that the “ruthless and chaotic” way that the administration has made its cuts “threatens the lives and dignity of millions.”

The Trump administration’s cuts are immaterial to the deficit. U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign assistance constituted less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for example. All direct foreign aid (including the surge in aid to Ukraine) adds up to a mere 1.17 percent of total government spending in the 2023 fiscal year.

Yet cuts to foreign aid endanger people’s lives, including those of Afghan refugees who risked everything helping Americans during our longest war.

The cuts are also symbolic. They demonstrate the extent to which Trump is influencing the evangelical church more than the church is influencing him.

So what happened? The answer is complex, but two factors stand out. The Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.

Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, is an “ideological lodestar” among conservatives who are impatient with originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning can be determined by its text and the founders’ intent, according to a story by the New York Times.

Vermeule, dubbed “the godfather of post-originalism” by the New York Times, argued in a March 2020 essay in the Atlantic that originalism has “outlived its utility.”

Vermeule instead embraced an approach that he called “common-good constitutionalism” that goes beyond originalism in incorporating conservative values. Common-good constitutionalism is based on the idea that government helps direct society generally “toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote.

The main aim of common-good constitutionalism “is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power,” Vermeule wrote. Instead the aim is “to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well,” Vermeule wrote.

October 2024

Police in Belize have temporarily paused their deal with U.S. facial recognition company Biometrica following concerns over moving data overseas.

The project was created to improve the tracking and identification of suspects in the popular Central American tourist destination. The collaboration, however, would have required sharing the county’s criminal database, including biometric fingerprint data, with Biometrica.

Belize Police Commissioner Chester Williams said that the agreement is on hold while they are looking for ways to keep data from Belizeans from being taken abroad. If this is not possible, Belize will look for a different software provider, the commissioner added.

“Perhaps if it is that they can develop a software and then we just get that software without the exchanging of data where we can keep our data in-house then we may be able to go with that,” says Williams. “But even the company itself had also called to say that they could not go through with the agreement because of some issue with the software they had developed.”

Williams also noted that Biometrica’s software is facing issues in other Caribbean countries, as reported by the local news outlet Channel 5 Belize. Biometric Update has reached out to the company for more information.

Biometrica has been working with law enforcement agencies in the U.S. The company’s eMotive criminal background checking software was integrated by the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) to track potential child abductors and traffickers with facial biometrics.

Belize has been working on a national biometric strategy that was approved by the Cabinet in June.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto's office has agreed to pay six figures to a Georgia man who was jailed for nearly a week over a bad identification using facial recognition technology.

The $200,000 payout to Randal Quran Reid was sealed last month in federal court in New Orleans, a transcript shows. It resolves a civil rights lawsuit that Reid, now 31, filed against Lopinto's office over his arrest in DeKalb County, Georgia on a warrant signed by Jefferson Parish Judge Paul Schneider.

The affidavits supporting all of those warrants make no mention of facial recognition. They cited only "a credible source" for the suspects' identities. Schneider signed the warrants for all three. The case highlights the pitfalls of a technology that more police agencies are adopting in Louisiana and across the country — including in New Orleans, where some officials are pressing to expand its use.

The case highlights the pitfalls of a technology that more police agencies are adopting in Louisiana and across the country — including in New Orleans, where some officials are pressing to expand its use.

This is the same sheriff that recently made news after he left his personal gun in his unlocked car.

Sheriff’s gun stolen from car, “Do as I say, not as I do”

when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.

It is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:

The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and issues,” our real task is a moral one . . .

For Weyrich, who was a devout traditionalist Catholic, conservative policymaking needed to adopt a new moralism that went far beyond the tenets of fiscal responsibility and small-government conservatism. It also had to embrace a conservative Christian worldview and seek to impose a narrow definition of the common good on society.

The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore, the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations. At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one.

Inspired by Ronald Reagan and funded by the right’s richest donors, a web of free-market think tanks has fueled the nationwide attack on workers’ rights.

Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 “freedom centers,” or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states.

SPN’s board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a few thousand dollars to $260,000, according to 2009 records.

Nelson seeks to document the connections between "the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives." Many of these connections, she writes, were made possible through the CNP, whose members have included such familiar names as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, the Christian Coallition's first executive director Ralph Reed and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.

Nelson traces the group from its founding in 1981 "by a small group of archconservatives who realized that the tides of history had turned against them" — specifically, activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie. (Other founding members included Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye.) The CNP's structure, Nelson writes, was similar to a group called the Council on Foreign Relations (of which Nelson herself is a member) — like that group, the CNP organized as a tax-exempt educational institution, although it was "designed to serve as the engine for a radical political agenda."

The CNP soon realized it could reach prospective voters through the media that many of its members owned. That included the radio broadcasting company Salem Media Group, co-founded by CNP members Stuart W. Epperson and Edward G. Atsinger; and would later include online publications like the Daily Caller. The programming of these various outlets, Nelson writes, "is not uniform, but it harmonizes."

Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.

But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors." It was time, Weyrich concluded, to contemplate the once unconscionable: another revolution, this time against "our people."

Funny how in 1987 Weyrich blamed the democratic process for someone as inexperienced as Oliver North being allowed to fumble the ball during the Iran Contra scandal, but just 10 short years later, he was ready to ask for North's help to stage a revolution against the American people...