The Myth of "Them" Borrowing (or Stealing) From Social Security

You hear it all the time, even if the villains change depending on who's telling the story. The myth that the Social Security Trust Fund will soon be insolvent because "they" borrowed (or stole) from it without ever paying it back. 

I've addressed this before by trying to explain how Social Security Benefits are financed, but this time I'll start with how the government itself is financed. 

In virtually any year the United States Government functions by way of deficit spending. This means that the amount that the government plans to spend in any given year exceeds what is being taken in by way of taxes. The difference is made up by borrowing. This doesn't mean that the Treasury goes to the bank and applies for a loan - on the contrary the United States Treasury issues bonds and other securities which are purchased by individuals, financial institutions and even foreign nationals and governments. These instruments have a term at the end of which the holder redeems it for the purchase price plus interest. Once a budget is approved by Congress and signed by the president, the additional debt is approved. Politicians often argue about how this or that program is going to be paid for, and negotiate over cuts in other areas to counter increases, but for all the arguing they still end up having to borrow in order to pay the bills. If Congress or the president wants to start another war, or forgive student loans, or any other expensive proposition they don't really have to borrow or steal from anywhere, especially not the Social Security Trust Fund, they simply authorize a larger deficit for that year, triggering more debt. 

Conservatives blame Democrats for this mythical theft from Social Security, Democrats typically blame George W. Bush for doing it to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not only did they not need to take any money from the Social Security Trust Fund, but it's not as if the Trust Fund is a vault full of cash or even a bank account. The money that individuals are taxed to fund Social Security are not sequestered away for each worker's future use. It's not "our" money any more. That money that comes out of our paychecks goes to pay for current retirees. When we retire our benefits will be paid for by money taken out of future workers' paychecks. In addition, any surpluses are required by law to be invested in nonmarketable government securities - so there's not even any cash in the Trust Fund for anyone to steal. 

To be fair, in some sense, Congress and/or various presidents have borrowed money from the Trust Fund, but only because that's how it's legally structured. Going back to the concept of deficit spending - if the government has to borrow, i.e. issue Treasury bonds, to cover the deficit each year, wouldn't it make sense for the amount that has to be borrowed from outside sources be reduced by the amount of Social Security surplus that is required to be invested? And the Social Security Trust Fund receives interest from the general fund when those bonds are redeemed by the Trust Fund. The 2.9 trillion dollar Trust Fund balance is the result of decades of surpluses and consists entirely of Treasury bonds. 

Several years ago the amount of benefits being paid out each year exceeded the amount taken in by payroll taxes, so the Trust Fund stopped running surpluses. The Trust Fund balance will be reduced each year by that deficit. The potential insolvency next decade isn't due to the piggy bank getting raided, but because there aren't any more surpluses. Even then, revenue from payroll taxes will be able to cover around 70% of projected benefits each year unless Congress makes other arrangements. 

There aren't any missing funds pilfered by previous presidents or congresses, it's simply a result of the ratio of retirees to workers increasing over the years. 

Trump Chaos

Trump supporters live in a fantasy world. A world where Trump was an effective, competent president. A world where 2017-2020 were idyllic years. Maybe I spend too much time reading Trumpist posts and tweets, and the pro-Trump cult isn't as numerous as it seems, but in the Republican primaries so far, he has garnered the support of at least half of voters in the primaries and caucuses, and the ones who voted for Haley or DeSantis will likely vote for Trump in November. 

Trumpists are adept at rewriting history. Trump's term in office ended with him undermining trust in the electoral system for half the year, capped off with over two months of efforts to overturn the results. Just weeks before the inauguration a crowd of his supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral votes affirming Biden as president. Despite no credible evidence to support these claims, Trumpists, led by Trump himself, are still insisting that the election was "stolen". And they've been gearing up for this year's election by insisting that the Democrats will attempt to "steal" this election as well. 

Trumpists often assert that he was the only president in 20 years (or 30, or 40, depending on the day) to not preside over our country being involved in war. While it's true that he didn't start any new ones (neither did Obama, Clinton, Carter or Reagan) we were still enmeshed in Afghanistan throughout his whole term. We supported the Iraqi Army and the Kurds in the fight to eliminate ISIS. (If we weren't at war, how could he brag that he defeated ISIS?) His sycophants also claim that the world was a safer place and there weren't wars breaking out all over, like in Ukraine, when he was president. Russia had attacking eastern Ukraine in an attempt to annex two majority Russian-speaking provinces; there had always been unrest and violence in Israel regarding Gaza (although not to the current scale). He had a high-ranking Iranian general assassinated. Special Forces operators were killed in Niger. 

Trump, despite his inauguration speech featuring "American carnage" inherited a mostly peaceful, prosperous nation. Employment was rising, the stock market was climbing, inflation was low and there were no threats from without for three years. Metrics that had been climbing steadily as we recovered from the recession that Obama inherited continued to climb. For three years there was no significant crisis for Trump to deal with; he could concentrate on devising insulting nicknames and rage tweeting. When a significant crisis finally arrived on the scene in early 2020 he downplayed it, blamed his predecessor (who had left him a detailed plan for dealing with a pandemic) and, as was his habit, made it all about him. Instead of confidently leading he refused to take any role in attacking the problem, leaving implementation of any Covid strategy to the states, and then criticizing states' actions. He undermined his own team of experts and constantly made rosy predictions (15 cases and it will be gone; when the weather warms up - it will be gone by Easter) and his ignorant suggestion that injecting disinfectant was a possible cure. (Critics often mistakenly misquote him as saying "inject bleach, his supporters jump on this as proof that critics don't know what they're talking about. As if disinfectant injections are somehow better than bleach). To his credit he worked with the pharmaceutical companies to fast track the creation of a vaccine, but set the nation up for ant-vax hysteria by not forcefully promoting vaccinations. He was more focused on the fact that the post-election release of the vaccine meant that he couldn't benefit from it in the November voting. Always about him.   

To be fair, the pandemic was a situation where it would have been virtually impossible to steer a course that would have simultaneously protected public health, children's education and business. No one knew what was going to happen next, and add to the chaos the eruption of protests (and some riots) in the wake of George Floyd's killing. Do we keep businesses open and risk more transmission, or close them and risk people losing their livelihood? There was no right answer, and in retrospect, some of the answers turned out to be harmful. But when you have a narcissist in charge, the public relations optics of solving a problem become more important than actually solving the problem. 

Trump, despite his insistence that he always hired the best people, has a long track record of characterizing people who left his administration as "losers". One thing I noticed about his selection process was that it resembled more a regular job interview, or even a contest, than selecting public servants who will be best for a very important job. In previous administrations you didn't "apply" to be a Cabinet Secretary. You might signal some interest, or your chief of staff might put together some promising possibilities for you. Trump process looked more like a cross between "The Apprentice" and a job fair at the local high school, with him talking about finalists and one again..."losers". The most obvious disability in Trump's process was that he selected for loyalty to him above all else. Of course you want your team to have a sense of loyalty. You can't have your top people trying to undermine you. But the loyalty should be primarily to the country, and to the office of the president. He wasn't the first president to overvalue personal loyalty, but he was so utterly transparent about it, and the loyalty only went one way. 

Trumpists like to mock Democrats by claiming that our main objection to Trump is "mean tweets". It's true that Trump's prolific tweeting was a focus of the opposition. Not because they were simply "mean", but that his tweets, along with his rally rants, were a clear indicator of his mindset. It was in his tweets where he targeted his enemies, literally calling groups like the media "enemies of the people". It was in his tweets where he turned on his former appointees in a storm of insults. It was in his tweets where his thin skin and his inability to admit that even his most far fetched assertions could be wrong. (The storm path Sharpie wasn't on Twitter - but the principle is the same) The tweets told us who he was. He somehow claims that he was a uniter, while his tweets and other public statements indicate clearly that to him, being a unifier means categorizing those who disagree with him as not "true" Americans, so that what he considers the real Americans are united behind him. 

One of the areas where Trump can claim better results than Biden is immigration through the southern border. It is inarguable that the number of illegal crossings and asylum claims is significantly higher now than it was under Trump. It is a fact that our system is wholly unprepared for the number of people who want to move here and we simply don't know how to process them. This, however, is not simply a Biden problem, it is a government problem, which currently includes both Democrats and Republicans. Trump and the Republicans seems more interested in the problem continuing in order for it to remain a campaign issue. 

Let's not forget the 91 indictments against Trump and the civil cases he has already lost. Trump voters want you to believe that the various cases against him are a political hit job. That he is being targeted in order to take him off the ballot. This ignores (1) the fact that, even if convicted and in jail he could still be elected president and (2) should we ignore criminal activity just because he's running for president? His defenses in some of these cases give you tremendous insight into his thinking. He thinks he can declassify documents  just by thinking about them, that he has immunity for any otherwise illegal acts, that overturning an election is part of his official duties. The things he has been indicted for are actions that he committed in broad daylight, there's no question that he did what he did, meanwhile the Republicans are searching frantically, with no success, for anything that Biden did that would warrant impeachment. 

The battle cry of the Trump camp, lifted from Ronald Reagan, is to ask "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" I am. For one I'm not concerned that I'm going to catch some deadly disease and die. I'm aware of inflation, but I'm spending around the same amount for groceries every month than I did 4 years ago. Rent has gone up, but so has my pay rate. Personally, things are about the same. I'm not confident that Biden makes the right decisions all the time. But I'm more confident that he thinks about what is best for the country, while Trump only thought about what was best for Trump.

Immigration

The Congressional Tinfoil Hat Caucus has found a martyr in Laken Riley, a young woman who was killed recently, allegedly by a man who, the Trump brigade likes to point out, had entered the country illegally.  While it is true that Ms. Riley in particular would still be alive if it were not for the policies that allowed her killer to remain in the country, it is disingenuous to act as if murders do not occur every day by people who were born here and come from a variety of backgrounds. Or to pretend that anything more than a tiny portion of immigrants, no matter how they entered the country, commit any crimes, let alone murder.  The Trumpublicans are using the tragedy to make their own candidate look like a better alternative. 

Is our immigration system "broken"? There's not much argument from any quarter that something needs to change. However, it's often politically advantageous for the out-of-power party for there to be a broken system, which is why bipartisan agreements rarely happen. In our current political climate it's not so much the process that is under attack, but the fact of immigration itself. In other words, Right Wing opposition comes in the form of a fear of "the other" supplanting our culture. In 2016 Candidate Trump characterized immigration from Mexico and Central America as "They're not sending you their best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists". This is the point of view of many in the U.S. - that immigrants, no matter how they get here, are the problem. Anti-immigration rhetoric often focusses on how recent immigrants cling to their homeland's culture and language instead of assimilating. But they don't understand that by the second or third generation they do assimilate. A few years ago the company I worked for held a seminar called Spanish for Retailers. The presenter was the son of Mexican immigrants. He told of how his parents spoke very little English, that he was bilingual, but his daughter did not speak Spanish. This mirrored my own experience growing up in a New York neighborhood with a lot of Italian-Americans. The matriarch of the family spoke mainly Italian. Her son, of my parents' generation, spoke both English and Italian, while the grandson spoke no Italian at all. Immigrant families eventually become American. 

Another trope that is common among the anti-immigrant crowd is "my grandparents came here the right way". The problem with that thinking is that, unless you were coming from a country from which immigration was barred, there weren't a lot of hoops that you had to go through to be allowed in. Saying that the qualifications for admittance were being white and free of tuberculosis is not that far off. I've got at least one ancestor who would not have passed a background check if such a thing had been done a century ago. 

President Biden was criticized for referring to non-citizens as "illegals" in his State of the Union speech. He was then criticized by the other side for "apologizing" to Laken Riley's alleged killer for calling him an illegal. (Biden didn't "apologize" - in an interview he corrected himself and said that his use of that term was inaccurate). There is a tendency among anti-immigrants to call anyone who has not completed the long process of applying for a Green Card, or is here on a student or other temporary visa, an "illegal", or an "illegal alien". But are they really here illegally? The first thing to remember is that under current U.S. law, one may claim asylum simply by presenting oneself to a Border Patrol officer or other immigration official, regardless of how they entered. If someone crosses the Rio Grande, or hops a fence, once they have requested asylum their status is no different from an asylum seeker who came in through an official Port of Entry. They are here legally according to U.S. law. But here's where the problem gets worse. If you're claiming asylum, you have to convince a judge that you have a credible claim. Wait times for an asylum hearing can take 3-10 years, depending on whether the claim is made thorough the Justice Department's immigration court or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. There is currently a backlog of 2 million applicants with only around 650 immigration judges and 800 asylum officers to handle all those cases. 

This backlog results in the asylum seekers putting down roots in American towns and becoming a part of their communities. They have children who were either born here or were toddlers when their parents arrived. If they are denied asylum, they are understandably unwilling to uproots their American lives and return to their home countries - it's then when they truly are here illegally. But who can blame them? Who wouldn't do everything in their power to make a better, safer, life for their family? 

What would motivate someone to uproot their family from the land where their ancestors have lived for generations to go to a country where they would have to learn not only a new language, but a whole new way of doing things? No one does this so they can marginally improve their lot in life. No, the violence and poverty that many of these immigrants have endured make the dangerous trek to the United States the logical option. Isolationists in the this country want us to draw back into our borders and ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. But the truth is that what happens in the rest of the world affects us. Violence and poverty and political upheaval spur migrations. What can we do to alleviate these conditions in other countries? If your neighbors house is on fire, doesn't that constitute a danger to you? Foreign aid is money that ultimately benefits us here in this country.

So what do we do? I'm not opposed to building border barriers. My main objection to Trump's "Wall" was not that I thought our borders should be porous, but that it wasn't a plan, it was a campaign applause line,  and was ultimately based on his characterization of most immigrants as "not their best people". We've also seen that walls, no matter how high, can be breached and that people can be very imaginative and persistent about getting around, over or under them. We can change the asylum laws and refuse to allow more than a trickle of asylum claims - but I imagine all that will do is encourage people to not turn them selves in to Border Patrol, but to keep their heads down and hope they don't get caught. Or do what Texas is doing and refusing to entertain any asylum claims and turn everyone back. Does Governor Abbott really believe that little park on the river is the only crossing point? We definitely need to expand our capacity for processing asylum seekers. How many judges and asylum officers would it take to reduce the wait time to days or weeks, other than months? What about expanding the reasons that we allow immigration? If someone has held down a job and stayed out of trouble for a year, expedite their application and let them continue to be productive members of the community. On the flip side, any criminal activity should result in immediate deportation, or at least detention until the facts are determined. 

Until sane and practical long-term solutions are enacted there will always be a "crisis at the border". For those who pine for the days of Trump's "closed border" - wasn't it he who declared a National Emergency at the southern border so that he could divert funds to pay for a few miles of his "Big, Beautiful, Mexico-Paid-For Wall"? Or was constantly crying about "caravans"? I concede the numbers are larger now, but the problem isn't one that appeared ex nihilo, and isn't exclusively a Democratic problem. And it will continue to be a problem as long as it's used as a political football.

Presidential Immunity

Followers and sycophants of former president Trump, as well as Trump himself, allege that there is absolute immunity from prosecution for anything that the president does while in office. While there is no specific mention of immunity in the Constitution, various Supreme Court rulings established that a president was immune from prosecution for actions taken as part of his or her official duties, but not actions taken outside of those duties. The claims from the Trump camp are often contradictory and confusing: are they claiming that everything a president does is covered by presidential immunity? Or are they claiming that his action to overturn the election were part of his official duties? 

In general I believe that federal officials must be immune from prosecution for exercising their official duties. Virtually anything a president or Congress does will be vigorously opposed by someone. Sometimes official acts result in damage to individuals or institutions. There are so many moving parts to anything that the government does that the chances that there will be no problems or negative consequences approaches zero. Two examples of presidential decisions that went wrong are Trump's handling of Covid and Biden handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Both resulted in chaos and death, and it could be argued that there were ways to address both that would have yielded better outcomes. But hindsight is usually 20/20 and it could also be argued that both of these decisions were made in good faith and that neither should suffer criminal penalties for not being fortune tellers. We elect people because we believe that they are best suited to represent us and to competently manage a crisis. Sometimes there's no 100% right answer where everybody wins. 

The alternate excuse, that attempting to overturn the election, including not just Trump's speech on January 6th, but all shenaniganesque machinations that led up to it, were part of official duties is nothing short of absurd. I've commented multiple times about the many acts that Trump took to undermine faith in the system as well as illegal end runs around that system, so I won't recap them here. But his actions certainly don't fall within faithfully executing the office of the president or preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution. 

Trump and his people like to say that he's being targeted to prevent him from being re-elected this year. In my opinion it's more a case of the chickens coming home to roost. He has spent his whole life avoiding accountability for his actions because he had enough resources to stall the legal system and wait out his opponents. He did whatever it took to secure his own paycheck. Getting elected in 2016 just made it worse. He laughed at campaign laws and welcomed assistance from Russian agents. He monetized the presidency. His final acts were an attempt to retain power. He and his cult allege that all of the indictments are the result of a hatred that Democrats have for him - frankly I don't care what the motivation is for these investigations, in each case a grand jury of ordinary citizens thought that there was sufficient evidence to indict. 

Hope there's plenty of roosts for those chickens.

Insurrectionist on the Ballot

The Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in the case to have Trump removed from the Colorado Republican Primary ballot. The courts in Colorado ruled that Trump, having engaged in insurrection, was ineligible to be president and would be removed from the ballot. Trump appealed (of course). 

As much as it may appear obvious that Trump engaged in a months-long strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and incited his followers who stormed the Capitol in attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral votes, the law isn't always as clear cut as we think it should be. I've thought all along that these attempts to get him off the ballot were based on flimsy reasoning, and that there's some question whether the Fourteenth Amendment even applies. 

The first weak point is whether or not what happened on January 6th was an insurrection. Well, there's no doubt the crowd, in some inchoate and disorganized way, wanted to stop the certification of the Electoral votes and prevent President Biden from taking office on January 20th. There's also no doubt that Trump, in his signature Henry II manner Trump incited them, notwithstanding his "patriotic and peaceful" line. There's no doubt that January 6th was the culmination of months of purposeful attacks by Trump on the reliability of the election apparatus in the country and two months of frivolous lawsuits and yes, incitement, based on nothing more than a refusal to accept his loss. So what's the problem? The United States criminal code does have a law that criminalizes insurrection:

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)

Seems pretty clear, but no one has been charged with insurrection. No one. Sure, plenty of people have served or are serving prison sentences, but the most serious charges were for seditious conspiracy:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)

Similar, but not the same. I would guess that Jack Smith thought it more likely that he could get convictions under the seditious conspiracy law than for insurrection. At first glance it seems like seditious conspiracy is broader and less likely to suffer from alternate interpretations. Who knows? At any rate, no one, including Trump, is facing a charge of insurrection. 

Other weak points is the question of whether the president is "an officer" under the meaning of the amendment. Common sense would suggest that he is, but there's enough ambiguity about that to enable the Supreme Court to gain cover for giving Trump a pass. There's also the question of whether a President takes an oath to "support" the Constitution. Most would think that's a stupid question. Of course he does. Most of us would be wrong, he takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" it. Same thing? Probably not to a legal nitpicker looking for an excuse to rule in favor of their patron. The fact that there is absolutely no precedent to remove a former president from the ballot, allows the Court to set the precedent (not that this court majority care a whit about stare decisis). 

Trump sycophants have plenty of illogical and irrational reasons why Trump should be on the ballot:

• It couldn't have been an insurrection, he was president; was he trying to overthrow himself?
• Nancy Pelosi (or was it Nikki Haley?) was the insurrectionist on January 6th
• He was simply exercising free speech
• The election was stolen, he was saving democracy (or the Republic, or freedom...or something)
• It was Antifa,,,it was BLM...it was the FBI...they were tourists
• BLM burned down cities, what's the big deal?

And if the case wasn't weak, or didn't allow enough wiggle room for the Trump Court to give Trump a win, you have at least two justices engaging in obvious partisanship in the their questioning. 

Trump is going to be on the ballot, he'll all but certainly be the eventual nominee, and scarily enough he might win. There's enough people who ignore or excuse his incitement of insurrection and his multitude of other facets that make him unfit, that he could pull a Grover Cleveland.

But he's still an insurrectionist.

Christian Nationalism

Instead of shunning the label "Christian Nationalist", right wingers are embracing the term, mainly due to a misunderstanding of it - whether purposely or out of ignorance.

Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Their definitions are very close and they denote the same thing: support for one's country and its interests, but the connotation is very different. Patriotism implies a love for one's country, serving it in the military or through volunteerism, running for office or supporting candidates that will make the country better. Nationalism has some overlap, but being a nationalist rather than a patriot connotes a desire to advance a nation's interests no matter the cost and at the expense of other nations, even extending to offensive military action. A patriot believes their country is a great place to live, and is proud of being a citizen; a nationalist believes in the inherent superiority of their country and will justify any action that it takes. 

Even if one were to equate patriotism and nationalism as synonymous, adding the qualifier "Christian" or "White" does not simply mean that a Christian Nationalist is no more than a nationalist who is also a Christian or White, it has a specific meaning which is different than simply combining the definitions of the two words. A Christian Nationalist is one who believes that the nation should exclude from public life, or at least from a role in governing, those who are not Christian and remake the nation under an exclusively Christian regime. White Nationalists can be viewed as a subset of Christian Nationalists who want to narrow the franchise, not only to Christians, but only to White Christians.  

The problem that Christian Nationalists don't seem to grasp is that if Christianity and The Bible are to be viewed as the governing documents of the United States, what form of Christianity? What interpretation of The Bible? Despite the alliance of convenience forged to oppose abortion,  evangelicals barely consider Catholics as Christians. Many Christians think nothing of accusing their fellow Christians of not being true Christians, or even worshipping Satan if they disagree on what they consider key doctrinal points. So who would be part of the governing overclass in the kind of nation the Christian nationalists envision? You can wager your next paycheck that it would end up being a small, but vocal and committed minority. 

Our nation was founded with many counter-majoritarian feature built in. For a while it seemed like we were moving in a more democratic direction, but gerrymandering and ideological judges are cementing into place supermajorities of a party, the Republicans, that does not represent a majority of the people. Even when the majority of voters overwhelmingly vote in Republicans, like in my home state of Nebraska, elected office-holders attempt to institute laws that reflect what only a minority of their voters support, let alone what a majority of the whole state is in favor of. A Christian nationalist government wouldn't be that different. In fact it would have a built-in advantage over simply partisan politics, since a clear majority of the electorate still identify as Christian, even if they are not active in a church. 

When a politician brays about governing according to "Christian values" he doesn't need to get very specific in order to get even the "ashes and palms" Catholics or the occasional church goer to nod their heads in agreement. What Christian, even a nominal one, could possibly object to things being run in a Christian manner? (Which they equate with good, moral, ethical) And that's how they get people to vote for them. That's how laws get passed that little by little erode the rights of non-Christians, or even Christians who don't toe the line of the Christians in power. And there's no doubt that the ones in power won't be your friendly neighborhood pastor who preaches the Sermon on the Mount and runs a soup kitchen. It won't be the inclusive congregation who live the command to love one another and welcome LGBTQ people and immigrants. No, the ones in power will be the minority who subscribe to the fire and brimstone preachers. The ones who have no problem executing gay people, or, if they're a good mood, merely declaring them non-citizens and making them wear pink triangles; the ones who, even now, are working hard to ban books; any past trampling of rights which you thought was ancient history is now up for grabs.

For the hardcore Christian Nationalists Christianity is not a religion of peace and love, but an identity that must be fought for. It is inseparably linked with militant nationalism and tribalism. Isolationism and abandonment when our allies need us, interventionism and preemptive wars of disproportionate response when we see something we want or some Podunk country insults us. If "love thy neighbor" is observed at all, it is within the circle of other White Christians and those non-whites who "know their place" and don't get uppity. 

They're not going away any time soon.

Critical Thinking & A Free Press

Somewhere in my top ten list of idiotic rejoinders is when someone discounts facts simply because said fact appeared in the mainstream press. I have seen information dismissed out of hand only because it appeared in The New York Times or Washington Post. While it would be foolish to uncritically accept everything printed or broadcast in any news source it would be equally, if not more, foolish to do the opposite and decide that everything a given source puts out is false. 

No news source is infallible. Newspapers and broadcast networks make mistakes, they have their own agendas. But since Donald Trump came on the scene it has become unremarkable to brand news that one disagrees with as "fake", and elevate the reporting from outlets that support one's confirmation bias. With the internet facilitating anyone and everyone with wi-fi thinking that they're reporters, it's easy to get lost in the sandstorm of information - but how does anyone decide what sources are trustworthy? 

A key to understanding the trustworthiness of the media is that there is no "The Media", or even "The Mainstream Media". Meaning that media isn't a monolithic entity that marches in lockstep. The various broadcast outlets and newspapers with national reach are competitors, not subsidiaries of the same uber-media. Another important aspect of what we call the mainstream media is that the various outlets are staffed by professionals. Reporters are people who have been trained to look for and disseminate facts. Editors will insist that a reporter has their facts straight and can substantiate them before going to press. This sometimes means that, while rumors are swirling around, and accusations are being bandied about, a national news outlet may be silent about "what everybody knows", while the keyboard warriors and partisan blogs and podcasts are shouting from the rooftops what later turns out to be false. All the while screaming that "the media won't report on this". If I had a choice between a newspaper with a decades-long reputation and track record for accuracy and a neophyte with an axe to grind, I'll take the track record. 

Another thing that confuses many people is the difference between the news and opinion sides of any news organization. "News" is what happened. "Opinion" (or editorial) is why it happened (according to the columnist) with some crystal ball gazing thrown in for good measure. Yes, sometimes they get the facts wrong or jump the gun before all the facts are in, but you would be hard-pressed to find an actual lies, or even major errors in the reporting of the big dogs of mainstream media. Editorial or opinion pieces are another story since they are presenting...opinion.  "Senator 'A' is a disgrace" is opinion. It's subjective and you could argue that Senator 'A'  isn't a disgrace. "Senator 'A' voted for XYZ legislation" would be an example of a fact. Various conclusions can be drawn from that fact, and those conclusions are...opinion. An argument can be made that a news outlet shows bias by spending time identifying problems with one politician while ignoring issues with another. It very well might be bias. Or it might just be that one of them has a lot more problems than the other. Showing bias doesn't mean that the information being presented is wrong, just that the choice of what to publish is a function of what the outlet believes is important. 

The confusion between news and opinion could be attributed to the popularity of the opinion side of Fox News. As much as I dislike Fox News, my dislike stems from the way their opinion shows have served to mild the thinking of much of the right wing in the last decade. Their news reporting is, in my opinion, as accurate and unbiased as anyone else's, but it's hosts like Hannity and Tucker Carlson who get the most attention, while the actual news team is virtually ignored. 

Speaking of bias - no one is free from bias. While a reporter or editor should recognize their own biases and work to minimize them, we as consumers of news should be aware of any bias present in a news organization's reporting and allow for that. I think you'll find that in a reputable news outlet bias manifests itself mainly in (1) The opinion columns and (2) The choice of what stories to cover. We already discussed the opinion pages. One might question why some things are covered and other things ignored, but that doesn't mean that what is covered is false. 

The proliferation of blogs and podcasts has become real competition for where people get their information. But is it information? Or is it just opinion? Are we to believe that Steve Bannon, who worked for Losin' Don and is a full-throated supporter of him, is an unbiased news source? Or any of the other podcasters whose mission seems to be to elevate Trump and get us to believe that President Biden wants to intentionally destroy the country? Should you listen to alternative sources of information? I think you should - and apply the same level of critical thinking you would apply to mainstream media sources. 

The advantage of having a vibrant and independent free press is that they have resources that most ordinary citizens do not. They often have access to political figures and have the time and ability to really "do the research" to determine if our government is telling us the truth. They have access to experts that they can interview in order to compare what the politicians are saying to what the data are saying. A disturbing trend over the last few years has not only been the denigration of the press and its characterization as "enemies of the people", but the habit of barring the press from events and meetings so that there is no independent set of eyes verifying what the government is telling us. 

We have organizations that are staffed with men and women whose mission in life is to shine a light on the shadows in the corners, it's foolishness to reflexively and without thought reject the wealth of information they bring us.