03 January 23
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The alternative is Kevin McCarthy beholden to the Freedom Caucus
Welcome to the challenges of 2023. Today I want to talk about one of the first.
When the 118th Congress is sworn in tomorrow, Republicans will hold very narrow control of the House — 222 seats to the Democrat’s 213.
The first thing they’ll do is vote for the next Speaker (who’ll determine the agenda for the House, what bills make it to the floor, the fate of critical legislation such as spending bills, and the House’s negotiating positions with Senate leaders and the White House).
The most likely is the current Republican House Leader, Kevin McCarthy. He could squeak by with 218 votes, a bare majority of House members. But if just 5 Republicans vote against him, he won’t make it. (Technically, he could be elected with fewer than 218 votes if he persuades Republican lawmakers who don’t want to vote for him to instead vote “present” or to miss the vote entirely.)
To get the votes he needs, McCarthy will have to cozy up to the MAGA “Freedom Caucus,” which includes bizarro extremists like South Carolina's Ralph Norman (who as late as January 17, 2021 urged Trump to invoke martial law), Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ohio's Jim Jordan, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, and some 30 others, none of whom you’d want to invite to dinner.
For their support, the Freedom Caucus is demanding that any member be able to call a vote at any time to oust McCarthy (a “motion to vacate the chair”) if he strays from their hard MAGA line. (Under current rules, only party leaders can bring such a motion.)
Which would put McCarthy on a very short leash controlled by the Freedom Caucus (with Trump indirectly controlling them).
In effect, Trump and the Freedom Caucus would call many of the shots — on committee assignments, investigations (Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the FBI), and key issues like raising the debt ceiling (they’ll demand that McCarthy refuse — imperiling the credit of the United States and catapulting the nation into an economic crisis).
Does this mean the rest of us have to sit back and allow a tiny minority of extreme rightwing MAGA House Republicans controlled by Donald Trump to hijack congressional Republicans, who in turn will hijack the entire House, and thereby much of Congress?
No. There’s an alternative, and I urge House Democrats and the few remaining “moderate” Republicans to take it: Make Ohio’s Republican Rep. David Joyce the Speaker of the House.
House Dems and moderate Republicans could come up with the 218 votes to put Joyce over the top.
Why Joyce? He’s the new chairman of the Republican Conference Group, a group you probably never heard of (years ago it was called the “Tuesday Group”) because it flies under the radar. It’s a collection of the remaining 40 or so Republican moderates. I say “moderate” only in comparison to the rest of the Republican House. The Conference Group at least wants the government to function.
Joyce would be acceptable to most current Republican representatives, even though the Freedom Caucus won’t want anything to do with him. During Trump’s presidency, he voted in line with Trump's stated position 91.8% of the time. And he voted against impeaching Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. In other words,
But Joyce is not a MAGA Republican. He refused to sign the Texas amicus brief that tried to overturn the results of the presidential election. He was also one of the few Republican House members who did not object to the counting of electoral college votes on January 6, 2021.
Since Biden became president, Joyce has voted in line with Biden’s positions over 30 percent of the time. He was one of 35 Republicans who joined all Democrats in approving legislation to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the storming of the US Capitol. He and 46 other Republicans voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying the right to same-sex marriage in federal law.
Overall, Joyce’s politics are similar to Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s. “Everybody’s a Joe Manchin,” Joyce said a few weeks ago.
Joyce wants to keep swing-district Republicans out of the harm’s way coming from the Freedom Caucus and other MAGA conservatives. He saw what happened to Ohio Republican candidates viewed as too close to Trump’s MAGA wing: The state’s House delegation shrank from an eight-member edge for Republicans to just five because voters rejected several MAGA GOP candidates. “There’s some exotics that like chaos, they thrive in chaos because that’s how they get the media,” Joyce told the Washington Post.
Given that the likeliest alternative will be a Speaker McCarthy beholden to the Freedom Caucus, Joyce should be Speaker — and he could be if House Democrats support him.
I urge them to do so.
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Although George Santos had once admitted to using a stolen checkbook in Brazil, he now asserts that he is not a criminal 'here or in Brazil.' (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
A 2008 court case had been suspended because Brazilian law enforcement officials could not find Mr. Santos.
But an older criminal case may be more pressing: Brazilian law enforcement authorities intend to revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos, and will seek his formal response, prosecutors said on Monday.
The matter, which stemmed from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook, had been suspended for the better part of a decade because the police were unable to locate him.
A spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office said that with Mr. Santos’s whereabouts identified, a formal request will be made to the U.S. Justice Department to notify him of the charges, a necessary step after which the case will proceed with or without him.
The criminal case in Brazil was first disclosed in a New York Times investigation that uncovered broad discrepancies in his résumé and questions about his financial dealings.
Just a month before his 20th birthday, Mr. Santos entered a small clothing store in the Brazilian city of Niterói outside Rio de Janeiro. He spent nearly $700 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Mr. Santos admitted the fraud to the shop owner in August 2009, writing on Orkut, a popular social media website in Brazil, “I know I screwed up, but I want to pay.” In 2010, he and his mother told the police that he had stolen the checkbook of a man his mother used to work for, and used it to make fraudulent purchases.
A judge approved the charge in September 2011 and ordered Mr. Santos to respond to the case. But by October, he was already in the United States and working at Dish Network in College Point, Queens, company records show.
Despite his earlier confessions, Mr. Santos has recently denied any criminal involvement, telling The New York Post, “I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.”
Joe Murray, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, said on Monday, “I am in the process of engaging local counsel to address this alleged complaint against my client.”
Mr. Santos’s swearing-in on Tuesday as the representative of New York’s Third Congressional District was already set to take place amid a cloud of scrutiny.
Last week, irregularities in Mr. Santos’s campaign spending emerged, including $40,000 on flights and payments for rent that are linked to an address where Mr. Santos is reported to be staying, a possible violation of the ban on using campaign funds for personal expenses.
Mr. Santos also lied about graduating from college and had misled voters about having worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He also acknowledged owing thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, and withdrew his claim that he owned multiple properties.
The next step for Brazilian prosecutors is to file a petition when the courts reopen at the end of the week requesting that Mr. Santos respond to the charges against him. A judge would then share the request, called a rogatory letter, with the federal Justice Ministry in Brazil, which would share it with the U.S. Department of Justice. Neither the Justice Department nor Brazilian authorities can compel Mr. Santos to respond at this point. But Mr. Santos must be officially notified in order for the case to proceed.
A criminal conviction, even for a felony, is not on its own an act that would disqualify a congressional member from holding office. The last time a member of Congress was removed from office for breaking the law was in 2002, when James A. Traficant Jr. was removed from the House after his conviction on felony racketeering and corruption charges.
If Mr. Santos does not present a defense in the Brazilian case, he will be tried in absentia. If found guilty, Mr. Santos could receive up to five years in prison, plus a fine.
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Rachel Sweet, who led campaigns to defeat anti-abortion ballot initiatives in Kansas and Kentucky. (photo: Mike Hardin)
Rachel Sweet on the ‘uphill battle’ to protect reproductive rights in red states Kansas and Kentucky
The latter, in Kentucky, seemed an even harder bet: Kentucky is one of the 16 US states that, before the November vote, seemed to have more support for banning abortion than protecting it, according to analysis by the New York Times from May. It also already had an outright ban in place. But the ballot initiative, also brought by anti-abortion campaigners, failed to pass, with 52% of voters rejecting an amendment to say there was no explicit protection for abortion rights in the state constitution.
One woman was at the center of these two campaigns: Rachel Sweet. The straight-talking 31-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, previously managed Planned Parenthood’s public policy for the Great Plains area, before leading the campaign to defeat the Kansas initiative, and then the Kentucky one.
The way she sums up both wins is simple: if you want to protect abortion in red states, you have to target Republicans.
“Democrats are not most of the voters [in Kentucky],” she says. “So you always go with a message that is the most broadly persuasive, so that you can get to your 50% plus one vote.”
She explains that the key to winning is to understand that no two electorates are the same, and to research, poll test and work on the messages that resonate with voters in each state.
In Kansas, Republicans and independents were most swayed by messages focusing on how abortion bans are an attack on personal liberty and represent government overreach.
But in Kentucky, which already has a total ban on abortion that has been in place since Roe fell, there was more room to focus on the reality as well as on ideology – and that turned out to be effective.
“There were voters who were far more likely to understand the long-term ramifications of these extreme anti-choice policies, because they were already seeing how banning abortion impacts not only access to abortion care, but [also] treatment for miscarriages and other areas of health care in a way that is particularly concerning,” says Sweet.
She gives the example of a Kentuckian named Meredith, who signed up to tell her personal story for a campaign ad for Protect Kentucky Access, the group leading the No campaign, which the group ended up not airing.
“She was suffering a miscarriage. And her pharmacist tried to deny her prescription for the medication she needed to manage her miscarriage because it’s part of the medication abortion regimen. He literally said: ‘I need you to prove that you’re actively miscarrying.’
“The cruelty of that situation is just really powerful,” says Sweet, adding: “There is no need to sell people on some dystopian future. That future is already here.”
Kentucky proved a harder race to win than Kansas, with less institutional buy-in: While campaign donations for Kansas’s No campaign totalled $11.48m, in Kentucky, they reached just $6.59m.
“We were always ahead of our opposition. But it did feel it was an uphill battle at a lot of times,” says Sweet, over the phone from her apartment in Kansas City.
The Kentucky abortion ban is still in place. But the ballot win could impact deliberations by Kentucky’s supreme court, which is considering whether to uphold the ban.
Sweet has learned to focus on meeting Republicans where they are, explaining why abortion bans don’t chime with their core values – rather than trying to change hearts and minds on abortion itself.
“Abortion is a very complex issue that people have very complex and entrenched feelings about. People form their opinions on abortion over time, for a lot of reasons, and it is not something that any campaign, no matter how message-disciplined or well-funded, can change in the span of three months,” she says.
After the two campaigns, which saw Sweet working long days for months on end, she is taking some time to rest before she works out her next move. But it’s clear she will have plenty of options should she want to build on her wins through another ballot initiative.
Seventeen states currently allow citizen-led referenda. Abortion is under threat in at least ten of them. Advocates in states like Ohio, Idaho and potentially Missouri have already discussed bringing such ballots in the coming years.
Sweet acknowledges the battles to come will be hard, and different in each case. In Ohio, Republicans are trying to change the threshold for citizen-led ballots to pass, from a simple majority to a 60% threshold, and Republicans in Missouri have suggested doing the same.
“When red-state voters adopt or reject policies contrary to conservative politicians’ points of view, this is always the immediate response: ‘How do we restrict access to the ballot box?’” says Sweet, adding: “They want to take away people’s right to direct democracy.”
Of the more conservatives states that took abortion restrictions directly to voters in 2022 – Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan – none secured 60% of the vote in favor of abortion rights.
She points to the Michigan win, where advocates succeeded in enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution with 55% of the vote.
“That’s huge. You don’t usually see candidates in Michigan win with 55% of the vote. So 60% would be a very daunting obstacle to have to work around.”
But she points out that the successes for the pro-choice campaign in recent months are indicative of broad, sweeping support for abortion rights across the US, regardless of geography.
“We saw all across the country, in really progressive states, purple states and red states, that people wanted to protect abortion. We saw that in really tiny states like Vermont and in huge states like California,” she says. “It’s very clear that abortion rights is an issue that can win everywhere. And I’m sure that scares the anti-choice politicians that are in office in places like Ohio.”
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At a Constitutional Defense course hosted by Patriot Academy in New Braunfels, Texas, in early December 2022, participants practiced a drill training them to shoot from the hip in close combat stance, imagining they're within a few feet of their possible target. (photo: Mark Peterson/The New Republic)
An on-the-ground report on the movement trying to rewrite the Constitution—and arm supporters along the way
We are standing at the firing line. The world is dust and sun and the kind of oversaturated deep blue sky possible only at high altitudes where the air is thin. Each of us stares down our own personal Bob, as the instructors have named him: a beige, featureless paper silhouette already pockmarked with holes.
LaBarbera, our handgun instructor, continues his story. “You can’t tell, but he’s got something in his hand. He’s getting a little close, you’re a little worried, you can’t tell what it is. Challenge!”
Our hands fly up, palms out in the universal signal for the thing we shout: “Stop right there!” The New Mexico prairie swallows the words without an echo.
“He keeps coming, but you don’t know what he has in his hand. Present!”
All down the line, we hear the click of handguns freed from holsters. They point at the ground, ready to come up at a moment’s notice. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
“It’s a knife!” LaBarbera shouts. “He’s still coming! THREAT!!”
No words this time, just the thunder of gunfire up and down the line. I take my time aiming to ensure I hit Bob where I’m supposed to: inside what the instructors call the thoracic cavity, where all the vital organs live.
I am approximately halfway through Patriot Academy’s Constitutional Defense course, a five-day program run by a right-wing organization that promises to give participants both “the physical training you need to be able to defend your family” and “intellectual ammunition to defend the Constitution.” It’s late September, and my classmates and I—a group of about 60 in total—have sent approximately 200 rounds through various forms of Bob over the past day and a half. There are 600 more rounds in the trunk of my rented Chevy Malibu, currently dwarfed by rows of pickup trucks in the parking lot behind our line of fire.
Patriot Academy is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to rewrite America’s Constitution—and teaching its supporters how to defend themselves with a handgun, just in case.
The idea of combining political instruction and 35 hours of intense, combat-focused pistol training in 2023 America seems insurrectionary on its face. And it is, but not in the immediately obvious way. The guns are a red herring. The insurrection, if Patriot Academy has its way, will be bloodless: a heart transplant for the body politic. Patriot Academy, along with many fellow-traveler evangelical organizations across the country, is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to rewrite America’s Constitution—and teaching its supporters how to defend themselves with a handgun, just in case.
Rick Green, founder of Patriot Academy, has always been ahead of his time.
In the spring of 2001, back when he was a fresh-faced twentysomething in the Texas state legislature, one of Green’s proudest accomplishments was a bill that required all of Texas’s public school students to spend a week each year studying the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “My colleagues made fun of me,” Green recalled during Constitutional Defense orientation. “Said I was just a flag-waver. Well, five months later, 9/11 happened. None of them were laughing at me anymore.”
Green’s foray into politics may have been short-lived—his initially promising career tanked following allegations of fiscal impropriety that led to a narrow defeat in 2002 after just two terms—but his passion for educating the youth about America’s founding endured. This is how Patriot Academy began: not as a handgun training course or any of the other things the outfit would eventually become, but as a summer camp for politically minded students between the ages of 16 and 25. Once a year, approximately 30 ambitious youngsters spent a week in the Texas Capitol building, where they participated in mock legislative sessions, received leadership and activist training from notable local Republicans, and learned about how America’s roots trace back to a deeply Christian founding and to religious men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
That dubious tale of America’s origins appears to come courtesy of David Barton, the man who put up the cash for Patriot Academy’s founding. Barton, whose academic qualifications consist of a large collection of revolutionary documents and a bachelor’s degree in religious education, has written over a dozen books on America’s biblical roots, including one pulled from shelves for factual inaccuracy after outcry from fellow Christian historians. In Barton’s defense, it is very difficult to prove that Thomas Jefferson, infamous Deist and slave owner, was both deeply Christian and a civil rights pioneer.
Rick Green would not approve of my sarcasm. “You [said] David Barton teaches that America was founded on Christian principles,” he told me when I pulled him aside for an interview four days into the Constitutional Defense course. “I argue there’s no question. America was founded on Christian principles. You read the Founding Fathers, 95 percent of them were Christians. Even the ones that weren’t Christians were still believers in God.”
One thing no one can dispute is Barton’s decades-long influence on evangelical conservative thought. He served as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006 and has advised a variety of prominent conservatives over the years, including Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz.
Few conservatives, however, can boast a closer relationship with David Barton than Rick Green. In the two decades following Patriot Academy’s founding, the men have formed a close working relationship. In 2004, Green became a featured speaker for WallBuilders, Barton’s flagship organization “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes.” In 2009, the duo launched WallBuilders Live!, a syndicated radio show that consistently ranks in the top 100 news commentary podcasts on Apple. Green and Barton teach online courses together, promote each other’s work, and appear together at conferences.
As with Green’s 2001 American enthusiasm, Patriot Academy arrived ahead of its time. It took the world years to catch up to Barton and Green’s vision. The neoconservative climate of the early to mid-aughts proved inhospitable to a camp dedicated to dusty old documents the USA PATRIOT Act authors were all too eager to forget.
And then the Tea Party arrived.
Demand for all things constitutional skyrocketed; the organization’s donations quintupled in 2009 and continued to rise. As evangelical Christianity now surges back into mainstream political discourse, Patriot Academy finances are enjoying a second Great Awakening. Between 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue nearly tripled. In 2008, Patriot Academy’s revenue was less than $29,000. In 2020, the group collected $1.2 million.
These funds have not sat idle. Patriot Academy’s Leadership Congress camp for young people continues not just in Texas but in state Capitol buildings across the country. A separate series of leadership congresses for veterans kicked off in 2017. Slickly produced video courses, with names like Constitution Alive! and Biblical Citizenship, allow students of any age to learn Barton’s worldview in living rooms and churches throughout America. Through it all, an undercurrent of concern carries students toward a worrying conclusion: America currently teeters on the brink of godless authoritarian communism, and only something as radical as the well-funded and rapidly growing conservative effort to rewrite the Constitution can save it.
The NRA Whittington Center is a sprawling assortment of ranges and cabins just south of Raton, New Mexico: a coal mining town where coal mining does not exist anymore. When you turn off the highway, you find yourself flanked by a procession of state flags. A bronzed Charlton Heston in chaps and a cowboy hat awaits you at the welcome center. His cold dead hands, eternally empty, are moments away from either forming two fists or drawing the revolver on his hip.
I signed up to attend the class shortly after the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to reacquire the classified documents the former president took with him when he left the White House. His supporters were furious; insurrectionary rhetoric flared. America felt on the cusp of something monstrous; a moment when we reach for guns instead of procedure to settle our differences. A quick-draw course on constitutional defense sounded like the embodiment of this precarity and, perhaps, preparation for what comes after.
“What can just regular citizens do to fight?” Real America’s Voice anchor Anna Perez asked Rick Green after the Mar-a-Lago raid. “Because there may come a time when Americans may have to take up arms.”
“That’s why education is so important,” the Patriot Academy founder replied. “We have so many tools right now to peaceably defend and assert our rights, but we’re not using them. And that’s how you end up in a civil war, that’s how it ends up going physical.”
Patriot Academy’s description of the Constitutional Defense course makes it clear that the handgun training and constitutional education are complementary, but separate. I was skeptical. In an era where right-wing talk of civil war is never more than a mouse-click away, who would we be preparing to shoot?
Attendees drove past Charlton Heston, through the gate, then past two shotgun ranges and an RV campground to park in front of the squat corrugated steel building that houses the Ajax Classroom. Though the welcome orientation was not scheduled to begin until 3 p.m., the nearly full classroom proved irresistible to Green, who bounded to the front 15 minutes early for an impromptu Q&A.
The first question—“When are you going to run for governor of Texas?”—received a “never,” followed by a digression on the many shortcomings of current Governor Greg Abbott compared to Ron DeSantis, on Covid restrictions, and on the role of the church in American politics. Longtime Patriot Academy supporter Sally Kern, a tight-lipped former Oklahoma state representative, wanted to know how to resist efforts to codify gay marriage. Again, Green took off: this Supreme Court as the great American hope, bathroom litter boxes for trans furries, the need to dismantle the FBI.
Despite the frenetic detours, Green is an arresting speaker, and time flew by. When he stopped fielding questions, we had gone from 15 minutes ahead of schedule to 30 behind. No stranger to self-inflicted time constraints, Green launched into the constitutional instruction portion of the course at “90 words a minute with gusts up to 350.”
After a whirlwind exploration of America’s foundational document, we arrived at the Second Amendment, which Green, like many conservatives, views as the lynchpin of the entire Constitution. “It’s not about hunting,” Green told us emphatically. “It is literally about defending your life and about keeping a tyrannical government at bay.”
I closed my eyes and braced for a week of insurrectionary training, but this line of rhetoric stopped there, never to be revisited on the range. The focus of the course was a concept that well predates widespread talk of political violence: the bad guy with a gun.
Our instructors referred to the bad guys as “scumbags,” sometimes “scums” for short. Scums tend to lurk in bushes around ATM machines or approach unsuspecting victims in parking lots. Occasionally, they might break into your house. They love to hold up convenience stores. None of them seem to have much in the way of ideology. But there are occasional hints regarding their identity. The most detailed description comes from Aaron Marshall, the Range A instructor and director of training, in the form of a warning: Your adversary may not conform to your expectations of the enemy. “We imagine a scuzzy-looking guy,” he says. “Dreadlocks, hasn’t showered in a month, probably just got out of prison. He’s all tatted up. You think: Oh yeah, I could shoot someone like that.
“What if your bad guy doesn’t fit that profile? What if your bad guy is sharp, clean-cut, well-dressed? What if your bad guy isn’t a guy at all, but a woman?”
The course, designed for people of varying skill levels, starts with the fundamentals and works its way up. We do not fire a shot until halfway through the first day: It is all about safety, stance, loading, and unloading. Only after the instructors are satisfied that we are not going to do anything stupid do we begin to put holes through Bobs.
Hollywood has lied to you. Accurate shooting requires finesse and skill and an almost pathological attention to detail. It is easy to get lost in the mechanics of it: Weaver stance, bladed feet, bend your knees, sight picture, trigger pull, move, assess, reset, reload. Add in shooting from the holster and a focus on speed, and the act becomes so ritualized that you can easily forget that, ultimately, you are learning the most efficient way to kill another human.
Constitutional Defense never lets its students forget the point of handguns for long. Except in two accuracy drills, our targets are exclusively human-shaped. This makes me uncomfortable. I think it is supposed to.
Twice, instructors replace Bob with photo-realistic targets of men pointing guns back at us. The first group stares menacingly at us from across the firing line when we arrive on the fourth day: a sequence of four scumbags repeating down the line. All of them are white. I choose the man in a cream-colored turtleneck and a bad haircut, wanted for crimes of fashion.
The next day—our final day of training, when our aim is best and our confidence high—a second group of bad guys with guns assembles to oppose us. All of them appear to be people of color.
I am spectacularly uncomfortable as I step up to the line. With one possible exception, every single student here is white. My opponent is an Asian man in a white T-shirt. Next to me, a classmate takes aim at a Black man in overalls. He names the targets while we wait to begin the drill. Hong. José. Jamal. The drill starts. I take aim at Hong and pull the trigger.
When I tell liberal and progressive friends about this constant focus on what it might mean to shoot another human being, they say it sounds like desensitization training. Green sees it differently. “One of the things that I had never approached until going through a class like this was really thinking through the moral questions,” he tells me. “I think if you’re going to carry a gun, you should ask those questions.… And if you can’t make that assessment, and feel OK with it, you shouldn’t carry a gun.”
The course never flinched away from those questions, nor did it provide easy answers. Any given Avengers movie seems more desensitizing than instructors with military and law enforcement experience exhorting a class of approximately 60 people with some passing interest in violence to avoid it whenever possible.
“I know some of you live in those states where you [have] that ‘no need to retreat’ stuff, castle doctrines, whatever,” said LaBarbera, who worked as a police officer in Oakland and Fremont for 13 years. “I’m just gonna tell you this: If you can avoid getting into any kind of a deadly altercation, why wouldn’t you?”
“There absolutely are things that are worth using deadly force to protect,” Marshall told us later that day. “And here is a simple yet profound criterion that you could use to determine what those things are. If it’s not worth dying for, it’s not worth shooting for.” A Rolex is not worth dying for. Your child? Absolutely.
I still could not figure out why the course involved a two-hour lecture on the entire Constitution rather than 10 minutes on the background of the Second Amendment. So I asked Rick Green about it.
His answer was simple. “I want [Constitution training] for everybody.”
Constitutional Defense is shockingly affordable for what it offers: $500 for four days of handgun training and a day of lectures. Comparable classes elsewhere cost up to $500 per day. Nor is the training shoddy. As a veteran and a longtime gun owner, I have been through my share of firearms courses. Constitutional Defense is far and away the best training I have ever received.
Only after the class is over do I put it together. The handgun course is a loss leader. The ideology is the product.
This moral marketing began before the class did. Upon registration, Patriot Academy automatically enrolled us in Biblical Citizenship, an eight-week online course hosted by Rick Green and a man named Mark Meckler. Halfway through Constitutional Defense, a cheerful Patriot Academy employee delivered a half-hour–long seminar on the virtues of becoming a Constitution Coach, complete with a prize for the person who signed up first.
Constitution coaching, Patriot Academy’s flagship program, is a fascinating spin on a now-common concept: online conservative education. Unlike many other courses, Patriot Academy does not intend for participants to take these classes in the privacy of their home. Instead, the organization encourages interested parties to recruit a class of people to watch the material and go through the workbook together. These Constitution Coaches then encourage their students to form groups of their own and bring the material to new people. Classic MLM recruiting technique, but with ideological downlines instead of monetary ones. The organization claims over 500,000 students trained in “Constitutional Foundations of Freedom” so far.
The approach works. At a fundraiser dinner at the conclusion of the Constitutional Defense course, three people said they first heard about Patriot Academy through a Constitution Coach. During the dinner, we were asked when—not if—we would host a Constitution class of our own.
But Patriot Academy is more than an ideological MLM; it is part of a powerful affiliate program. Throughout the week, one organization came up again and again—from Green, from participants, and certainly at the fundraiser dinner. It is an organization that pops up in all sorts of places lately, from the CPAC stage to Steve Bannon’s War Room, an organization co-founded by Green’s co-host for that Biblical Citizenship course we were all signed up for.
“Rick is another guy that I would call in a firefight,” Mark Meckler said as he introduced Green at the Convention of States Action’s Reclaiming Liberty Leadership Summit in October 2022. “The Patriot Academy family has blended beautifully with the Convention of States family. Everywhere I go, people say, ‘I never knew about Convention of States; I’m a Patriot Academy person, I’m a Biblical Citizenship person, and that’s where I first got introduced to you.’… Or vice versa, right? They say, ‘I love Convention of States, I always wanted more.… Now I’m involved with Patriot Academy.’”
Clockwise from top left: At the Constitutional Defense course in New Braunfels, Texas, a trainee received a cutout of his target as a souvenir; a participant wore a belt holster with a gun on his right hip and a magazine with spare ammo on his left; 9 mm bullets and a magazine loader; a couple helped each other reload their magazines.
“The thing that [Convention of States] would most like to see happen is to gut the Constitution by engineering a constitutional convention,” Russ Feingold, former Wisconsin senator and current president of the American Constitution Society, tells me. The effort worries him enough that he and Peter Prindiville wrote an entire book about it: The Constitution in Jeopardy. “[They want] to really destroy the power of the federal government.”
Forget the guns. This is the real insurrection.
For a long time, even Constitution nerds tended to overlook Article V.
The article specifies two processes for amending the Constitution. The first method, which concerns individual amendments first approved by Congress and then ratified by states, is what you learned about in Schoolhouse Rock! But Article V also says that if two-thirds of states petition Congress, the federal government must declare a convention that can consider an unlimited number of amendments at once. As with the individual amendment process, three-fourths of the states would then be required to approve any changes before they could become official.
In the 234 years since the ratification of the United States Constitution, the country has passed amendments 27 times and not once called a convention. Mark Meckler and his friends would like to change that.
Like Green, Meckler hitched his wagon to the Tea Party star and saw his fortunes rise. The organization he co-founded in 2009, Tea Party Patriots, quickly became one of the movement’s major players. In 2010, their efforts paid big dividends: six seats gained in the Senate, and 63 in the House. It was the biggest congressional power shift since 1938.
“I knew for sure that everything was gonna change,” Meckler told CPAC Texas in August 2022. “And then nothing changed.”
It became clear to Meckler that something more fundamental than Congress would need to shift for Tea Party dreams to become reality. Four years later, he found a possible Archimedes’ lever in Article V. With the help of co-founder Michael Farris and a $500,000 grant from the Mercer family, he incorporated Convention of States Action, or COSA, and got to work. The objective: get 34 states to petition Congress for an amendment convention.
“They have been carefully training for this for years,” Feingold told me, concerned that the time might soon arrive where their plan could actually come to fruition. “Anybody that can ignore this kind of training and work by the right is not learning the lessons of recent history.”
Meckler’s organization bristles with conservative power players and dark money. COSA’s chairman of the board, Eric O’Keefe, is a Beltway veteran with 37 years of experience and deep ties to the Koch brothers. Former Senator Jim DeMint, who serves as a senior adviser to COSA, founded the Conservative Partnership Institute in 2017, a group that has since become arguably the most influential dark money organization in MAGA country. COSA also enjoys the endorsement and promotion of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative powerhouse that connects corporate donors with state lawmakers eager to turn their political wish lists into law.
Meckler denies that COSA has ever accepted Koch money, but he is certainly getting money from somewhere. The three nonprofits associated with the Convention of States movement, all headed by Meckler, had a combined revenue of $11.9 million in 2020. Investigative reporting by the Center for Media and Democracy found that one of them, once called Citizens for Self-Governance, now rebranded as the Convention of States Foundation, received $2.5 million from the Koch-connected Donors Capital Fund between 2010 and 2018.
COSA also does well in the attention economy. Meckler earned a coveted main stage spot at CPAC Texas last summer. Steve Bannon—a man who knows a weapon when he sees one—promoted the movement on his War Room show as “another line of attack” in his quest to tame the federal bureaucracy, which he would like to gut and then refill with obedient partisans.
Meckler urged his CPAC audience to judge the movement by its friends, and I am inclined to agree. Only power attracts this many power players. What do they hope their Convention of States will accomplish?
In 2016, COSA gathered 137 delegates from every state in the nation—Rick Green among them—for a simulated Convention of States in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. They proposed and debated amendments, then cast votes: one vote per state.
There is nothing in the Constitution that says the convention ought to operate precisely this way; in fact, the phrase “Convention of States” does not appear in the Constitution at all. If the states maintained control of the convention, not only would urban populations be devastatingly underrepresented, but heavily gerrymandered and disproportionately Republican state legislatures would get to decide which delegates to send. Many of the delegates at this simulated convention, Feingold and Prindiville assert, would likely be appointed delegates at the real thing.
After three days, the delegates emerged with six proposed amendments that abolished the federal income tax, imposed congressional term limits, and made it more difficult for the federal government to take on debt. They closed the commerce clause loophole and passed something Feingold described as the “John C. Calhoun amendment”: nullification of any federal law or regulation if 30 state legislatures vote to overturn it.
None of this is secret. It is COSA working as advertised, delivering the libertarian goods.
“How about we get rid of the Department of Education?” Meckler asked his cheering CPAC audience last summer. “How about we get rid of the EPA?” A Convention of States could render both illegal. The proposed changes would allow conservatives to fulfill the longtime Republican dream of shrinking the federal government until it can be drowned in the bathtub, then going one step further and throwing it out with the bathwater.
Green, Meckler, and many others believe COSA is America’s last chance to avoid destruction. Meckler asserts that America currently has two options: secession or the restored federalism a convention for amendments could offer. BlazeTV talk-show host Steve Deace put it more bluntly when speaking at the COSA Reclaiming Liberty conference last October. “The people assembled in this room and people like you might be all that is standing between the America we know now and a civil war.”
At first glance, COSA appears solidly libertarian. The group talks a lot less about its fundamentally evangelical character, but the deep-seated Christianity of nearly everyone involved, once noticed, is inescapable.
The Convention of States project was originally the brainchild of Michael Farris, a battle-tested warrior from the religious homeschooling movement of the 1980s and founder of Patrick Henry College, a Christian conservative institution that serves as a pipeline to high-powered GOP jobs and internships. Farris co-founded COSA with Meckler, but left four years later to head Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a legal organization Farris described as being “dedicated to the preservation of religious freedom, human life, and a godly definition of marriage.” ADF helped draft Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, the law upheld in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that effectively ended Roe v. Wade. He now hopes to reverse Obergefell, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. “It’s the states that get to make the policy,” Farris asserted a few months ago, “and the states should follow God’s law and God’s principles.” This is a shift from 2004, when Farris helped draft a constitutional amendment that would not only have banned same-sex marriage, but civil unions as well. Farris stepped down from his position as ADF chief executive in August 2022, though he remains heavily involved. In October, he announced a return to COSA as a senior adviser.
In Green’s Biblical Citizenship series, which Meckler has both hosted and promoted, Barton explicitly argues against the separation of church and state. Instead, he believes freedom of religion protects the expression of religion in the public sphere. “If we think we should pay adoration to God by hanging the Ten Commandments in public, what business is that of the state?” he asks.
Barton, who recently spoke at COSA’s Reclaiming Liberty conference, subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate, which is associated with Dominionism and teaches that Christianity should be part of every aspect of public life: education, religion, family, business, government, entertainment, and media. “If you can have those seven areas, you can shape and control whatever takes place in nations, continents, and even the world,” Barton said in a 2011 radio interview. “Jesus said you ‘occupy till I come.’… What we’re supposed to do is take the culture in the meantime, and you got to get involved in these seven areas.”
Barton’s reference to the Second Coming is not accidental. The name “Seven Mountain” comes from Revelation and alludes to conditions necessary to kick off the End Times. The mandate frames the Christian struggle to assert control over society as a battle against demonic forces: a view Barton seems to endorse.
The pervasive perception of COSA as part of a spiritual struggle of good versus evil may explain why some more secular arguments for the convention seek to seize power, not share it. America forgets, sometimes, that not all civil wars are fought over secession. Sometimes they are knockdown, drag-out fights over who gets to control a country. A state-controlled convention of amendments would involve less bloodshed than a civil war, but the end goal seems the same: the expulsion of the enemy from public life by force.
Would COSA’s conviction that America is and ought to be a Christian nation affect the outcome of an Article V convention? Rick Green says no. Yet prominent COSA allies have a history of attempting to use federal power for evangelical ends. Farris endorsed an amendment that would outlaw both gay marriage and civil unions. DeMint voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would ban flag burning and for two amendments that would have banned gay marriage. Barton, in addition to asserting that the First Amendment protects only monotheistic religions, has implied that homosexuality should be illegal.
Some COSA affiliates were also neck-deep in schemes to subvert the electoral process in 2020. Farris quietly helped draft Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against Pennsylvania and other swing states for Covid-related voting accommodations, which they believe to be unconstitutional. John Eastman, who infamously endeavored to prevent Biden’s certification through the appointment of alternate electors, was a delegate at the 2016 simulated Article V convention in Williamsburg. Senior COSA adviser Jim DeMint’s Conservative Partnership Institute has its sticky little fingers all over the attempt to thwart Biden’s certification: Its Washington office hosts several groups tied to the coup attempt, and CPI’s group of affiliates employs at least 20 people purportedly involved in Trump’s effort to remain in power.
“[COSA] is, in some ways, their crown jewel,” Feingold says in reference to these concerted efforts to bend American democracy to their own will.
It makes sense. If you believed you were engaged in a cataclysmic struggle against demonic forces for the future of the country you love, wouldn’t you do everything you could to win?
What if you believed, as many COSA advocates do, that American freedom depends on American Christianity?
“Benjamin Rush said if you don’t teach the Bible in every generation to the children, a constitutional republic will not survive,” Rick Green told my Constitutional Defense course in his opening lecture. “Because, without religion, you don’t have morality. And without morality, you don’t have liberty.”
“Biblical principles are what produce freedom of society,” Barton proclaims in Patriot Academy’s Biblical Citizenship class. “But you won’t have biblical principles in society in which you don’t have citizens with a biblical worldview.”
This may sound like a theocracy to the untrained ear. Green wants you to know that it is not. “I don’t know a single person in our movement that wants a theocracy or wants a nation where everybody’s got to be a Christian,” he tells me. “Whether you’re atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish … everybody benefits from the freedom principles that came from a Christian society.”
I am beginning to get the picture. You will not be forced to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior in Biblical America. You will not be forced to attend church. But there will be prayer in school, and our history will be highly sanitized. Trans people will not have access to gender-affirming care, and marriage will be between a man and a woman. No one will force you to be a Christian in Rick Green’s America. But you will largely need to live like one.
When we are not shooting, my classmates and I shelter from the blazing sun beneath two white awnings and reload our magazines. We talk about our progress and encourage one another to keep trying. Some people at this class are expert marksmen. Some have never held a gun before. Most of us are somewhere in between. “New students are great because they have no bad habits,” Aaron Marshall tells us on the first day.
I am not a new student, and as we start to shoot, it becomes apparent just how many bad habits I have. My stance is all wrong. I focus on the target and not the front sight. And my old nemesis continues to haunt me: a trigger pull that anticipates the gun going off and jerks the barrel to the right every time. But over the course of four days, I improve dramatically.
It feels good to get better. The weather is beautiful. We practice shooting from the holster—Charlton Heston out front would be pleased.
As the days go by, we begin to talk about our lives as well as marksmanship. My classmates talk about Zumba and beekeeping and searching for jasper in Arkansas. Struggling to make truck payments and contemplating online business opportunities. Missionary work. Friends who won’t speak to them anymore. When they learn that I have legal troubles, they all offer to pray for me. Two of them urge me to make a GoFundMe and send them a link.
Many of my classmates are veterans. Many others work in helping professions like retirement care or education. They have a strong sense of civic duty. Like Green, they believe they are making the world a better place by teaching people about the Constitution, volunteering with Convention of States, and becoming good guys with guns.
The threat we are training to stop is real—bad guys with guns do exist—but life is rarely so simple. During these five days of training, Hurricane Ian will smash into Florida and kill at least 114 people. Russia will escalate threats of nuclear retaliation against Ukraine. Italy will elect its most far-right regime since Mussolini. A 34-year-old man will walk into a school in Izhevsk, Russia, and kill at least 15 people in an apparent homage to the Columbine killers.
And yet, I can do nothing about any of those things. I cannot single-handedly stop climate change or influence Russia’s foreign policy. What I can do—at least in theory—is be a good guy with a gun.
In the final lecture of the class, Marshall talks about the importance of trusting your gut. Sometimes your subconscious perceives danger that your conscious mind misses. A woman who hesitates a moment when the light turns green and narrowly avoids being T-boned by a semi, for example, might have heard some faint sound or seen a flash of reflection without registering it consciously.
We register other things subconsciously as well.
The instructor provides an example of a man threatening you with a knife in his pocket. When you pull your gun and tell him, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he laughs and says he’s going to take the gun away from you, too. So you shoot him. And then, after he falls, you see that he was holding a Popsicle stick.
This is a justifiable use of force, we are told, and it is hard to disagree. The would-be assailant told you it was a knife and gave you plenty of reason to believe he intended to use it. Open-and-shut. Case closed.
I am thinking, however, about Skittles in the hands of a boy who will remain 17 forever: gunned down by George Zimmerman as a potential threat. Did Zimmerman get an unsettled feeling when he saw Trayvon Martin walk past? Did something seem “off” about the Black teenager walking back from the convenience store?
An Article V convention, like a gun on your hip, offers a simple solution to a complicated problem. During our interview, Rick Green refers to eighteenth-century federalism as “utopia.” If we can just get back to a time when things made sense, the logic goes, the world would be a lot less awful.
Green hopes to bring his utopian vision to life soon with his most ambitious project yet: a sprawling Patriot Academy campus near Fredericksburg, Texas. He wants to create a combination of education facility and vacation destination that, for lack of a better phrase, he describes as “Disneyland for Patriots.” The campus will feature a full-scale replica of Independence Hall, where visitors can take constitutional classes (“without having to go to Philadelphia and get shot,” Green tells the class during his introductory lecture), and a mock-up of the Rotunda, where visitors can look at replica art (“without going to D.C. and getting arrested and having to spend a year and a half at the gulag”). The campus will also have on-site housing for 300 students as part of the academy’s newest course offering: an entire year of training and apprenticeship for young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. “Do that before you decide whether or not you want to go to college,” Green recommends.
Constitutional Defense courses will take place on state-of-the-art ranges that will allow for not just basic handgun training but more advanced classes for handgun, rifle, or shotgun. There will be houses with simulated targets for active shooter drills. This sounds like a lot of fun. It also goes far beyond home defense.
“[People] know the country’s falling apart,” Green says at the fundraising dinner at the end of the course. “They know we’ve got real challenges in our nation right now, and they don’t know what to do.… You feel it in your gut. You know you need to do something, you don’t know what to do. We know what to do.”
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Damar Hamlin, #3 of the Buffalo Bills, reacts after making a play during the first quarter against the Minnesota Vikings at Highmark Stadium on November 13, 2022, in Orchard Park, New York. (photo: Timothy T Ludwig/Getty)
It took mere minutes for anti-vaxxers to flood social media with claims the NFL player’s collapse was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.
Hamlin collapsed after an innocuous-looking tackle on Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins in the sixth minute of the first quarter. Higgins’ helmet hit Hamlin in the head and chest area, but Hamlin initially stood up after the tackle, then collapsed.
In a statement posted on Twitter in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Bills said that Hamlin “suffered a cardiac arrest following a hit in our game versus the Bengals. His heartbeat was restored on the field and he was transferred to the UC Medical Center for further testing and treatment. He is currently sedated and listed in critical condition.”
But even before the game was officially called off on Monday night, conspiracies about Hamlin’s injury were spreading like wildfire on social media, where conspiracy theorists and right-wing trolls claimed that Hamlin had “died suddenly” because he had received the COVID-19 vaccination.
On Twitter, multiple accounts made completely unproven connections between Hamlin’s collapse and the COVID vaccine.
There’s a lot of anti-vaccine misinformation being spread about Damar Hamlin right now. People are attributing his collapse to the COVID vaccine, despite no evidence of a connection. They will use any opportunity, even tragedy, to advance their agenda. pic.twitter.com/2hBAqK7L4l
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) January 3, 2023
“I know what everyone with any common sense is thinking,” former Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield tweeted. “This isn’t the first time a pro athlete had this happen,” he added, alongside two needle emojis.
Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, tweeted to his 1.9 million followers: “This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.”
Stew Peters, the far-right podcaster behind the viral Died Suddenly conspiracy film, tweeted: “It appears Hamlin may have #diedsuddently aged 24.”
The account for Peters’ film, which has over 200,000 followers, also tweeted about Hamlin’s collapse.
Like the other accounts mentioned above, the Died Suddenly account has a verified blue checkmark as a result of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s new subscription service, which allows anyone to buy a verified badge for $8.
Musk on Sunday indicated that Twitter could even further boost COVID conspiracy theories when he announced that something called “Fauci Files” would be released this week—suggesting an attack on former chief White House adviser and face of the national COVID response, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
On more fringe platforms like Telegram, users in conspiracy channels rushed to comment on the baseless connection between Hamlin’s collapse and the vaccine.
Some linked to fake Twitter accounts claiming to belong to the doctor who gave Hamlin his booster in December, while many linked to comments from cardiologist Peter McCullough, who has touted ivermectin as a cure for COVID-19 despite multiple studies showing no evidence that it works. After the Bills announced that Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field, McCullough claimed in an interview Silicon Valley entrepreneur and COVID misinformation superspreader Steve Kirsch that the vaccine could have caused his collapse.
“I watched the play live both as a fan and a cardiologist and I saw blunt neck and chest trauma, a brief recovery after the tackle and then a classic cardiac arrest,” McCullough said. “I have communicated to one of the most experienced trainers in the world and we agree that it was a cardiac arrest in the setting of a big surge of adrenalin. If Damar Hamlin indeed took one of the COVID-19 vaccines, then subclinical vaccine-induced myocarditis must be considered in the differential diagnosis.”
One commentator on a QAnon Telegram channel suggested that the doctors speaking about Hamlin’s injury on TV were covering something up by failing to ask if he was vaxxed—and claimed this was part of a wider conspiracy against men.
“The TV doctors have not asked if Hamlin was c19 vaxxed,” the user wrote. “Instead, they are talking about the safety/health issues about football as a contact sport. The [New World Order] agenda is about feminization of men.”
Ever since the COVID vaccine rolled out, anti-vaxxers have been jumping on any sudden death or injury suffered by a high-profile individual as proof that the vaccine is “poison.”
Celebrities including Coolio, who died in September of a suspected cardiac arrest, and sportspeople like cricketer Shane Warne, who died last March of a suspected heart attack, have been subject to similar, baseless speculation in the last year.
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Lula after receiving the presidential sash, accompanied by his wife, Rosangela, Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire, and other community leaders. (photo: Sérgio Lima/AFP)
Leftwinger promises environmental protections and social progress as he’s sworn in as president
Fighting back tears as he addressed tens of thousands of supporters who had packed the plaza outside the presidential palace in Brasília, Lula declared the end of “one of the worst periods in Brazilian history” under the former far-right president.
“[It was] an era of darkness, uncertainty and great suffering … but this nightmare is over,” Lula said, vowing to reunite the bitterly divided South American country and govern not just for those who elected him in October’s historic election, but all 215 million Brazilians.
“It is in nobody’s interest for our country to be in a constant state of ferment,” Lula said, urging citizens to rebuild friendships destroyed by years of hate speech and lies. “There aren’t two Brazils. We are one single people.”
The veteran leftwinger, a former factory worker who was president from 2003 to 2010, broke down as he outlined plans to wage war on hunger, which he called “the gravest crime committed against the Brazilian people”.
“Women are rummaging through the rubbish to feed their children,” said Lula, 77. “Entire families are sleeping out in the open, exposed to the cold, rain and fear.”
Brazil’s new president did not mention his right-wing predecessor by name. But he excoriated the damage done by Bolsonaro’s four-year administration during which nearly 700,000 Brazilians died of a mishandled Covid outbreak, millions were plunged into poverty, and Amazon deforestation soared.
“No amnesty! No amnesty!” the crowd bellowed of Bolsonaro, who many want brought to justice for sabotaging Covid containment efforts and vaccination against an illness he called “a little flu”.
“Bolsonaro killed my son. He was 20 when he died,” said one man in the crowd, Waldecir da Costa, his hands shaking with anger as he held up a photograph of his late child on his phone. “I want him to pay for everything he did.”
Addressing congress shortly after being sworn in on Sunday afternoon, Lula said the “criminal behaviour of a denialist and obscurantist government that treated people’s lives with callousness” during the pandemic should not go unpunished.
Bolsonaro took refuge in the US on Friday, refusing to hand the presidential sash to his leftist rival as is democratic tradition.
Instead, during a profoundly symbolic and emotionally charged ceremony outside the presidential palace, that task was performed by Aline Sousa, a black rubbish collector from Brazil’s capital.
Lula strode up the ramp into the palace flanked by eight representatives of Brazil’s diverse society including one of its most revered Indigenous leaders, Raoni Metuktire, a rap DJ and metalworker and a 10-year-old child.
Vivi Reis, a leftist politician from the Amazon, shed tears as she watched Lula’s entrance. “After so much tragedy and a government that plunged Brazil into destitution and hunger, we now see that we have overcome this. We are here, we resisted – and we have won.”
Huge crowds of ecstatic Lula supporters flooded the streets of Brazil’s capital to celebrate the sensational political revival of a man who just over three years ago was languishing in prison on corruption charges that were later annulled.
“We feel dizzyingly unfathomable relief,” said the journalist Arimatea Lafayette, 59, as red-clad revellers marched towards the congress building on Sunday morning to toast Lula’s return and the downfall of Bolsonaro, who has taken up residence in the Florida mansion of an MMA fighter. It is unclear when he plans to return.
“We’ve been through four years of terror and now we feel free,” added Lafayette, who had flown in from the north-eastern state of Alagoas wearing a T-shirt stamped with Lula’s face.
Franceli Anjos, a 60-year-old feminist, had travelled 55 hours by road from the Amazon city of Santarém to witness the long-awaited end of Bolsonaro’s chaotic reign. “I’m convinced a new spring has arrived,” she said.
Lucas Rodrigues’s hands trembled with emotion as he described his delight at Lula’s sensational comeback, exactly 20 years after the former union leader became Brazil’s first working-class president in January 2003.
“The whole of Brazil is here – that’s what Lula’s capable of,” the 25-year-old said after stepping off a bus from the southern state of Santa Catarina, where he is part of the landless workers’ movement.
Lula’s American biographer John D French said he believed that after declaring war on hunger – a hallmark of Lula’s first government – the new president’s top priority would be reuniting a bitterly divided nation after a poisonous election campaign marred by violence.
“I think what he’d like would be a generalised reconciliation … and a standing down of the levels of conflict,” French said, although he warned that would be difficult given the toxic chasm between Lulistas and Bolsonaristas.
“The notion that everything is going to be roses and peaches and cream [is misguided]. I think this is going to be a very conflictual period.”
Bolsonaro’s narrow defeat in October’s election – which he lost by 2m votes – sent a wave of relief over progressive Brazilians desperate to see the back of a man they accused of wrecking Brazil’s environment and place in the world.
French said that relief was reminiscent of Democrats’ reaction to Donald Trump’s 2020 demise. “[People were] like: ‘Phew, OK – now things can go back to normal.’
“But they didn’t go back to normal in the US. Nothing is normal politically. And it’s not going to return to some sort of placid normality [in Brazil, either].”
Still, the mere prospect of a fresh start under a progressive and inclusive Lula government – which has vowed to fight environmental crime and named an Indigenous woman to lead Brazil’s first-ever ministry for Indigenous people – has thrilled supporters who have flocked to the capital.
“I know it won’t be easy for Lula to rebuild everything that Bolsonarismo has destroyed. But I feel hopeful. If there’s anyone who enjoys the popular support and international respect from leaders around the planet needed to rebuild Brazil’s relationships with the world, it’s Lula,” said Diogo Virgílio Teixeira, a 41-year-old anthropologist from São Paulo.
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Skyglow is the combined illumination of all the light sources that creates an artificially bright arch in an urban area at night. (photo: Pexels)
- There are four main types of light pollution: skyglow, glare, light trespass and clutter.
- Human development, thoughtless behaviors, and poor light fixture design contribute to light pollution.
- The vast majority of the populated planet cannot see the natural night sky because of light pollution; fewer still are the number of Americans or Europeans who can.
- Human health impacts have been tied to light pollution exposure.
- As many wild creatures rely on natural sunlight and moonlight conditions to complete critical life functions, like reproducing or migrating, light pollution weighs heavily on their ability to do so.
- Experts say light pollution is a sign of energy inefficiency.
What is Light Pollution?
Whether you’re walking along a cul-de-sac sidewalk or headed to a neighborhood restaurant for dinner, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a residential or commercial neighborhood that doesn’t have an abundance of lights to guide the way. And unless you’ve ever lived in a truly rural area, chances are that you’ve always lived with more lights around you than visible stars in the sky above.
But that abundance isn’t simply a harmless excess. A form of environmental harm that many of us in more densely populated areas have become acclimated to, light pollution is associated with a range of issues, including wildlife conservation and climate change, according to several experts.
While other forms of pollution are widely accepted as environmentally negative, “we haven’t had that discussion with artificial light,” says Ashley Wilson, director of conservation with the International Dark-Sky Association.
“Even the regulatory bodies, like the Illuminating Engineering Society, provide their recommendations, but the recommendations include minimum values and not maximum values,” she explains. “Communities will often opt to have lights brighter than these minimum values because they feel like it would make them more safe [but] it’s not really based on any research. or are testing.”
What are the Different Types of Light Pollution?
There are four main types of light pollution, according to the International Dark-Sky Association, the main organization focused on light pollution and its repercussions.
Skyglow is the combined illumination of all the light sources that creates an artificially bright arch in an urban area at night.
Glare is gratuitous, bright light causing discomfort or pain — like when you’re driving at night and another driver has left their high beams on.
Light trespass is when a light beams where it shouldn’t, unintentionally “trespassing.” That can look like a street light beaming straight into your bedroom at night.
Clutter is when too many sources of light are bunched together and cause confusion. A row of street lights without shields to direct the light downward can be a source of light clutter.
What Causes Light Pollution?
Light pollution comes from artificial sources of light, of course. However, the concept of light itself doesn’t necessarily equal pollution in any and all forms. A source of light becomes a source of light pollution typically because of the density, design or improper use of the fixture.
Increased development means more high-rise condominium buildings and skyscrapers to sprawling suburbs and downtown streets — and more people installing and turning on outdoor lights throughout the night, even if the benefits of doing so aren’t always clear or identifiable.
“The mindset has always been that ‘dark is bad and light is good,’ so more light is better and we also have thoughts that if you light up a place, crime goes away,” says Paul Bogard, an associated professor of English and environmental studies at Hamline University in Minnesota who wrote The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. “There’s not a lot of evidence for that, but we still have that mindset.”
The light design is another problem, as fixtures are often inefficient and indiscriminate as to where their beams of light hit. Wilson noted that since brighter, whiter lights are popular, “manufacturers are happy to make products that people are ordering.”
“We just have this [LED] technology that allows us to pump out more lights … more efficiently from a cost standpoint, but we haven’t changed our thinking about light,” says Bogard. “One example is that a lot of the light fixtures that you see, the designs of those fixtures were created for gas lamps.” Those lamps, Bogard explains, were dimmer and less efficient than the bulbs we use today, so casting a wider illuminance made sense at the time, but that’s no longer the case.
What Places Have the Most Light Pollution?
Light pollution is a problem almost all humans encounter on a daily basis. According to a 2016 study published in Science Advances, over 80% of the planet lives under light-polluted skies. That number shoots up to over 99% when looking at only Americans and Europeans.
Maps that accompany that study show the ratio of artificial light to natural light across the planet. The most light-polluted hot spots appear concentrated around the planet’s largest cities, with significant streaks throughout even many areas where the population isn’t dense. No countries seemed to be without at least some amount of light pollution
How Are Humans Impacted by Light Pollution?
Artificial light messes with our circadian rhythm, the instinctual beat humans follow to know when to wake up, go to sleep and carry out other natural processes.
Wilson notes that “many studies have proven that exposure to artificial light leads to increased rates of cancer — like breast cancer and prostate cancer — as well as increased rates of diabetes.” Her organization, the International Dark-Sky Association, also says that exposure to artificial light at night can increase “risks for obesity, depression [and] sleep disorders.”
What Animals Are Impacted By Light Pollution?
Given that humans are impacted by light pollution, it makes sense that the rest of the animal kingdom is, too. The life cycles of many creatures — from foraging to migration and more — are dictated by the amount of moonlight there is during the lunar phase, according to Wilson.
Here are some of the many wild species that are affected by artificial light pollution.
Birds
Migratory birds face dire threats from light pollution. According to the Convention on Migratory Species Secretariat, “millions of birds” are killed every year as a direct result of the pollutant.
“It alters the natural patterns of light and dark in ecosystems. It can change birds’ migration patterns, foraging behaviors and vocal communication,” the organization explains. “Attracted by artificial light at night, particularly when there is low cloud, fog, rain or when flying at lower altitudes, migrating birds become disorientated and may end up circling in illuminated areas.” That, the group noted, causes the birds to become exhausted or collide with buildings.
Turtles
Light pollution harms both adult and hatchling sea turtles. Adult female sea turtles seek out dark beaches to lay their eggs, but they won’t come ashore to do so if there are too many lights.
“Evidence of sea turtle disorientation along Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts can be heart-rending and grisly,” writes the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in a blog post. “Hatchlings often leave confused, zig-zagging tracks in the sand before heading inland to be crushed on a nearby roadway. Gigantic adult females sometimes wind up in a resort’s swimming pool, or under the wheels of a vehicle.”
Moths
An article published in 2020 in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity found that artificial light at night can disrupt reproduction, as well as larval and pupal development. However, while researchers identified “strong evidence for effects of artificial light on moth behavior and physiology,” they found “little rigorous, direct evidence” that light pollution impacts on individual moths would impact an entire population.
Bats
Experiments conducted by Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit dedicated to the mammal’s protection, showed that lesser horseshoe bats (which are nocturnal creatures) would alter their activities in a “dramatic” manner amid artificial nighttime illumination.
Are Plants Impacted by Light Pollution?
Plants do indeed see impacts from light pollution, according to Wilson. Plants photosynthesize, meaning they use sunlight to create energy and oxygen. But artificial light can alter their cycle, shortening the recovery periods they undergo following a period of growth or even creating flowers when they traditionally wouldn’t, she says — an issue that is particularly problematic in the early wintertime.
“They’re starting to bud and make flowers earlier in the year, so there’s this temporal mismatch,” Wilson says. And “all the other animals that usually come out around the same time, they’re now behind schedule because these plants are already doing this … so now you’re having this risk that these two species that depend on each other are no longer interacting.”
How Are Astronomical Studies Impacted by Light Pollution?
Looking up at the sky at night in a deeply dark area, you’re able to see many more stars and perhaps even other celestial bodies than you could in a densely populated area without technological assistance. That means that there are only a few places on Earth where excellent conditions exist for astronomical observation.
How Are Light Pollution and Energy Efficiency Connected?
Whenever you’re using too much of something or aren’t being careful with how you use it, inevitably there is waste. And leaving lights on all night or not directing them to the intended point results in quite a bit of inefficient energy use.
“You’re not wasting energy, so if you want to talk about financial savings, if you’re not producing that light, the [avoidable costs] merely go back into the community’s pocket,” says Wilson, citing the efforts of the city of Tucson, Arizona, which dimmed its street lights to 60% intensity after midnight. The Arizona Daily Star reported at the time that “the city estimated the conversion would cost about $16.5 million and would be paid back in savings over about 10 years.”
Across the U.S., the International Dark-Sky Association “estimates that at least 30% of all outdoor lighting” is wasted because of unshielded fixtures.
What Can I do to Reduce Light Pollution?
“If you turn a light off that’s not serving a task, it has an immediate and tangible impact — you are no longer providing that pollutant in the environment, it is gone,” says Wilson. “It’s not like water quality [or] agricultural runoff, that’s going to take decades to clean it all out and let the environment restore.”
You can educate yourself on the types of lights that avoid excessive cast or brightness and opt to purchase those. Or let manufacturers know that light fixtures designed with light pollution in mind is a product quality you care about.
But in terms of long-term repair, Wilson said it’s hard to say how quickly — if at all — certain impacts on humans could be reversed, even if we all picked up better lighting habits.
“You still have accumulation from what you were exposed to previously … it’s not a single factor” says Wilson, noting the exposure to blue light from electronic devices. “ If we’re talking about [wildlife] communities and ecology, yeah, it’s gonna take them a while to come back and use that habitat if there was a lot of bright light that surpassed their tolerance.”
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