Why Christian Nationalism makes American Christians less Christlike

What if the greatest danger to the witness of Christianity in the United States wasn't an outside threat? What if the danger was closer to home and looked so familiar that it was able to evade detection?

In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, a man holds a Bible as Trump supporters gather outside the Capitol in Washington. The Christian imagery and rhetoric on view during the Capitol insurrection sparked renewed debate about the societal effects of melding Christian faith with an exclusionary breed of nationalism. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

August 18, 2023

By 

Andrew Whitehead

(RNS) — Growing up in a primarily white, conservative Christian community, I repeatedly heard warnings concerning what was going to destroy our Christian faith and the United States with it — feminism, divorce, homosexuality, Secularism or non-Christian faiths.

In presidential election years, these threats became even more acute.

Leaders instructed us to “vote our values” and ensure God’s blessing on the United States by placing the right people in positions of power to turn our nation back to God. Many well-meaning and earnest Christians, like myself, fell in line and did what we felt we had to do in order to return the United States to its Christian roots.

It was in this context I was taught to love Jesus, love my neighbor and seek to do God’s will. Being a good American meant being a good Christian. And being a good Christian meant accepting the correct beliefs, caring for those around you, standing up for what is right and advocating for our Christian convictions in the public square.

By doing these things, we could keep the dangers threatening America at bay.

But what if we were wrong? Not about the importance of living our faith out every day, at home and in the public square, but about the nature of the threats facing the country.

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RELATED Christian nationalism’s opponents are getting organized

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What if the greatest danger to the witness of Christianity in the United States wasn’t any of these outside threats? What if the danger was closer to home and looked so familiar that it was able to evade detection?

After years of examining Christian nationalism as a social scientist, I’m convinced the greatest threat to Christianity in the United States is not outside forces.

Instead, it is white Christian nationalism. Over and over, I find evidence that the practical fruit of Christian nationalism is not love; it is power, control, domination, fear and violence.

Christian nationalism makes American Christians less Christlike.

Here’s what I mean.

White Christian nationalism is a cultural framework asserting that civic life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity. In addition to the standard Christian religious and theological beliefs, Christian nationalism brings with it a host of cultural assumptions about who really matters and who should be in charge of life in the United States — primarily white Christian citizens.

Christian nationalism is not interested in a government for the people by the people, but rather for a particular people, by a particular people. Christian nationalism weakens the church by demanding it seek earthly, self-interested power, rather than seeking to support and serve the marginalized.

Central to Christian nationalism are three idols that make promises of protection and provision to American Christians and require allegiance: Power, Fear and Violence. These three idols co-opt our theological imaginations and distort our knowledge of God and neighbor. They lead us to betray our loyalty to Jesus and the gospel.

Power is the ability to get others to do what you want, despite their resistance.

Wielding power to serve one’s own group is tempting, especially when facing the political realities of living in a pluralistic, democratic society where collaboration and compromise are vital.

But when it comes down to democracy or power, white Christian nationalism chooses power every time.

Fear and a sense of threat, the second idol of Christian nationalism, focuses on a perceived loss of privileged access to power. It seeks to protect the people like us against “them.” It urges Christians to fear their neighbors — those with different skin colors, nationalities or religious beliefs — rather than love them.

Violence is a third idol of Christian nationalism. It is intimately intertwined with worshipping power and demonizing others through fear. When the fires of fear and threat are constantly stoked because “they” are out to steal “our” rightful power, violence is a natural result.

But the use of violence against our neighbors signals a distrust of the work of God in the world and seeing the image of God in all people. This weakens the church by building up dividing walls of hostility, rather than breaking them down.

Two clear examples of these three idols are our country’s continued struggle with racism and xenophobia. Christian nationalism weakens the church and threatens democracy by blinding us to the cries of those speaking out against social inequality. It obscures the structural and systemic causes of racial inequality. And because it claims that the United States has a special relationship with the Christian God, any criticism of America is seen as an attack on God and the Christian faith.

Ironically, the Bible itself is filled with criticism of God’s people when they fail to live up to God’s commands, and especially when they mistreat their neighbors.

I am convinced that we can all — whether Christian or not — recognize that Christian nationalism only leads to harm for our neighbors and betrays more loving expressions of the Christian gospel.

As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. showed us, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Injustice experienced by one community is injustice experienced by all.

When Jesus came he preached the Kingdom of God and a gospel that was good news to the poor, oppressed and imprisoned (Luke 4:16-21).

He was not only talking about our personal salvation but about abundant life for everyone.  

Once we see the gospel as good news for the present, good news for the marginalized, good news for the prisoner, good news for the poor, good news for the blind and good news for the oppressed, we can begin to take the evidence that social science hands us about Christian nationalism and recognize that this ideology limits — and in many cases outright opposes — the work Jesus claimed he came to do and commanded us to do likewise (Matt. 22:37–40) — love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself.

I have long wrestled with the implications of Christian nationalism for Christianity, both professionally and in my own faith journey. I hope the American church can move toward expressions of Christianity that allow it to regain its prophetic voice and no longer make it the servant of one particular vision for this nation.

By confronting Christian nationalism in our midst we can journey toward a future where everyone is allowed to flourish.

(Andrew Whitehead is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where he codirects the Association of Religion Data Archives at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. He is the author of “American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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RELATED:   A religious calling to protect democracy

Unearthing racism's Christian roots: How far-right Christianity quietly fueled Jacksonville shooter

A shooting in Jacksonville is the latest example of overt, growing, and gruesome anti-Black violence

By SERENE JONES - REV. DR. LAKEESHA WALROND
PUBLISHED AUGUST 31, 2023

A United States and Christian flag are sandwiched together (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

This weekend, a racist shooter – Ryan Palmeter – murdered three Black people – Angela Carr, Anolt Laguerre, Jr., and Jerrald De'Shaun Gallion. This is the latest example of overt, growing, and gruesome anti-Black violence in our nation.

We've heard from our leaders time and time again that we need to end racism. But we can't just keep giving the issue lip service. To create true change, we need to peel back the layers, understand how we got here, and defeat the forces that have allowed violence against Black bodies to proliferate.

For us, as people of faith, that means acknowledging the perverse role of a distorted Christianity in fueling rampant racism.

This distorted Christianity is at the core of our nation's deep history of racism. Starting from the very beginning of European settlement, colonists used the Bible to claim Christian explorers had a divine right to seize lands that were not inhabited by Christians. They also argued that they had a godly duty to bring the Bible to native lands. These "Biblical" missions left fields of blood and fire behind them.

Then, as colonists took over the South, Christianity became a lynchpin of slavery. Faith leaders and policymakers professed that the Bible contained passages that clearly supported enslavement. For example, they claimed that Noah's curse on Ham in Genesis 9:20-27 justified the subjugation of Black people. In some areas, slaveholders also distributed tainted Bibles that removed mentions of freedom and equality.

It is these types of distorted uses of the Bible that allowed many Christians to leave church on Sunday morning, and then attend a lynching on Sunday afternoon.

Keep moving through our history, and you'll see endless examples of purported Christians using the Bible for racist ends: Enforcing segregation, blocking civil rights movements, forbidding interracial marriage, creating a racist incarceration system, committing yet more acts of violence, and more.

Fast-forward to today, and far-right Christians continue their hateful crusade. They have supercharged their white supremacist rhetoric and pushed for policies that uplift white communities and denigrate Black and Brown ones. For instance, many far-right Christians have fought tooth and nail to redact our nation's history of brutally enslaving human beings. They have also demonized Black Lives Matter, denied systemic racism at every turn, and conjured fear that white people are in danger. And all of this is imbued with the language of a white supremacist Christian piety.

And the violence continues. In 2015, a white supremacist influenced by Christian nationalism entered a predominantly Black church in Charleston and killed nine people during a Bible study. Last year, a shooter with ties to white Christian nationalism stormed into a grocery store in Buffalo and killed 10 Black people. These are but two of too many instances to date in our country.


Crucially, while the Jackson shooter hasn't yet been overtly connected to Christianity, the racist propaganda that fueled his hatred is grounded in far-right Christian forces. Virtually every white supremacist post, video, meme, and social media group can be traced to our nation's religious history.

It's particularly alarming how far-right Christianity can quietly infiltrate people's lives. A small cohort of white Supremacists has become particularly adept at using online platforms to gently draw in new followers and espouse hateful ideas. Those carefully chosen words quickly translate into discrimination and violence.

We simply can't dismantle racism unless we understand and unearth its far-right Christian roots. It's up to all of us to speak truth to power in a way that ensures every life matters. From individuals who can say something if they see something, to faith leaders who can speak and preach messages of love, to lawmakers who can ensure justice rolls down, we all have a responsibility to engage.

Every moment we delay puts more Black and Brown lives in danger. It's time to own up to our nation's history and use the Bible for good.

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CHURCH DOCTRINE

Robert Jones’ new book roots white supremacy in 500-year-old papal decree

The Doctrine of Discovery shaped the way America’s white, European Christian settlers saw themselves and their mission and gave rise to uncontrollable outbursts of violence.

"The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy And the Path to a Shared American Future" and author Robert P. Jones. 

August 22, 2023
By  Yonat Shimron

(RNS) — Many Americans have long accepted that slavery was America’s original sin.

But what if it wasn’t? What if that original sin stretches back 500 years to the forced removal and, in many cases, extermination of Native Americans by America’s white European settlers?

And what if there’s a religious decree, dating back to the late 15th century, that gave divine sanction to the robbery, enslavement and violent oppression of nonwhites?

That’s the argument pollster Robert P. Jones makes in his new book, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.”

The book, which releases Sept. 5, locates the origin of America’s race problem in the Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery. In that 1493 edict, Pope Alexander VI provided a blueprint for seizing “undiscovered lands” that were “not previously possessed by any Christian owner” and subduing the people on that land.

Jones makes the case that the doctrine’s underlying worldview of divine entitlement shaped the way America’s white, European Christian settlers saw themselves and their mission and justified outbursts of violence, dispossession of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Blacks.

In his book, Jones focuses on three sites where the scars of white supremacy are, as he says, “carved across the land” and where earlier violence begot more violence: the Mississippi Delta, where Choctaw Indians were forcibly removed from the land and where, in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered; Minnesota, site of the mass deportation of the Dakota people and the execution of 38 Dakota men, followed in 1920 by the lynching of three Black circus workers; and finally, Oklahoma, where the Osage people suffered theft and forced assimilation and where the Tulsa race massacre took place in 1921. 

“If we do the hard work of pushing upriver, we find that the same waters that produced the Negro problem also spawned the Indian problem,” Jones writes. “If we dare to go further, at the headwaters is the white Christian problem.”

Religion News Service spoke to Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, about his book and how a 500-year-old church doctrine — recently repudiated by the Vatican — persists in the rise of today’s anti-democratic defense of white Christian nationalism. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

When did you first come across the Doctrine of Discovery?

It wasn’t until I was really digging in and reading Native American scholars who were writing about the origins of the country. People like Vine Deloria Jr., for example, had a piece called “An Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America,” that he wrote in the early 1970s, where he talked about the Doctrine of Discovery and the centrality of that doctrine to the way white Christian people treated Indigenous people in this country from its inception. Over the last 50 years it’s been a common theme, particularly among Indigenous authors and authors of color. But, you know, I went to a Southern Baptist seminary, and even in my Ph.D. program at Emory, it just never figured prominently in the history to which I was exposed.

Tell me why you chose the three sites that you did.

For different reasons. I’m from Mississippi. So that was a story close to home. On the ground in Tallahatchie County — where events happened — there were no markers telling the story of Emmett Till prior to 20 years ago. So if you had driven through the Delta in the year 2000, you would have seen literally nothing there. Tulsa, Oklahoma, had been on the national radar because we had just passed the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. I thought there was more of a story to tell there, particularly how it connects with Native American history in Oklahoma. And then, I didn’t want to be accused of cherry-picking stories from red states or the South. I wanted to write also about something in the far north. I had come across the story of this lynching in Duluth, and in my last book, “White Too Long,” I wrote just a couple of pages about it, and I realized it was a much bigger story to tell there. And so I went back to that story again.

You mention The New York Times’ 1619 Project and your own realization of its limitations — that it doesn’t tell Native American history. Was that what led you to this book?

I think the root of it is bigger than that. The 1619 Project has been vitally important for resetting the way we think about American history. But I think we need to push back even further. We have more than a century of European contact with Indigenous people. That history is really important. The 1619 Project expanded the aperture beyond what we see on postage stamps and patriotic paintings of a bunch of white men gathered in Philadelphia around the table with their quill pens. Getting us beyond that picture of the beginnings of America was a herculean effort and vitally important. It’s just that I think we need to kind of keep moving to tell the story on a little bit of a bigger canvas.

So, is the Doctrine of Discovery America’s new origin story?

I want to be careful here not to commit my own sin of overreach — to say this is the date that we should declare as our nation’s beginning point because there are certainly things that led up to that point. But there are these kinds of watershed moments and, among them, 1493 is certainly an important one. Many of us learned that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, as the poem says. But it’s really the year he goes back to Spain and gets this permission and stamp of approval from the sitting pope at the time, Alexander VI, that puts the kind of full imprint of the church on conquering any lands that are possessed by non-Christians. If you were not Christian, then you didn’t have any inherent human rights.

How do you hope to change the conversation with this book?

We’re at a moment where we are arguing over history. We’ve seen Arkansas not counting AP African American history and fights in Florida over the status of AP American history. These are all about our origin stories. We’re caught in this moment because of the changing demographics of the country. What I’m hoping the book does is tell a bigger story.

What we often get — and I say as someone who was educated in Mississippi public schools — are words like “pioneers,” “settlers,” these kind of innocent words that I think don’t do any sort of justice to the violence that was wielded. Facing that history squarely is important if we’re going to be honest with ourselves about how we arrive to the place we’re at.

Frankly, everywhere you go in the country, the place names testify to this history. In the Mississippi Delta, there’s Tallahatchie County, a Native American name. There is DeSoto County right next door, which is named for Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who comes and claims all of that Mississippi watershed for Spain using the logic of the Doctrine of Discovery. If we’re going to get to a shared American future, we have to have a shared American story. And I think that is vitally important and white Christians have to be more honest about what that history is.

You strike a note of hopefulness about these three places for grappling with the tragedies that took place there. Are you more hopeful about America’s future?

Part of what I did for the book is I interviewed people who have been involved in these very local efforts and not in easy places. The Mississippi Delta is a tough place to do this kind of work. There’s not a lot of resources, it’s rural and fairly poor. And yet here, this intrepid group of citizens got together — white descendants of plantation owners, organizing alongside descendants of enslaved people and sharecroppers. I think that’s a real mending of the fabric at the very local level. Just a few weeks ago, we had President Joe Biden declare a new national monument to Emmett Till to be permanently funded, maintained and part of the National Park system.

You’re a public pollster. What’s the relationship between what you do at PRRI and your books about American history?

These books are written in my name. They’re not PRRI books. But there’s a question that we’ve asked for a couple of years now that really is at the heart of the matter: Are we a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians, or are we a pluralistic democracy where we are multireligious, multiracial and everybody stands on equal footing as citizens?

We have been struggling between these two questions our entire history and they’ve been fairly unresolved. About 30% of the country will say, for example, the United States was intended by God to be a promised land where European Christians could set an example for the rest of the world. But that means that by a margin of 2-to-1, Americans reject that vision of the country. You would think that might mean, OK, well, debate over. Let’s move on. On the other hand, it’s captured a majority of one of our two political parties. So it means we’re fighting over the way we are.

We are at this hinge point where this question is getting asked in a very forthright way. We’ve been there at other times: Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement. But now the demographics have changed so there’s no longer the supermajority of white Christian people in the country. So now the answer to that question matters in a way it didn’t for past generations. The books add social, historical and cultural context to the kind of things we’re capturing in public opinion polls today. When you understand the longer sweep of history, those things become less mysterious.

(This story was was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.)

New from Robert P. Jones:

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future

Taking the story of white supremacy in America back to 1493, and examining contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma for models of racial repair, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy helps chart a new course toward a genuinely pluralistic democracy.

“Through its linking of narratives typically considered separately, the book provides a revelatory view of U.S. history and its guiding assumptions. . . . . A searing, stirring outline of the historical and contemporary significance of white Christian nationalism.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Arresting and deeply researched, this unique account brings to the fore the deep-rooted sense of ‘divine entitlement, of European chosenness’ that has shaped so much of American history. It’s a rigorous and forceful feat of scholarship.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Blistering, bracing and brave . . . This book couldn’t be more timely in the courageous effort to close the gap between what we as a nation say we are and what we truly have been.”
—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“In this elegantly crafted book, Robert P. Jones unearths harrowing and long forgotten stories of the racial violence inscribed on our nation’s past. Yet it is not a book without hope, for only by confronting our collective history can we begin to heal our nation’s wounds.”
—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Professor of History and Gender Studies, Calvin University; author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“Robert P. Jones is an extraordinary moral force in this country. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy is his latest effort to help the nation imagine itself apart from the distorting effects of racism and the violent genocide of Indigenous people at its root. This book is the latest in his own personal journey as a white southerner from Mississippi, and I am thankful that he has shared it with all of us.”
—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University; author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lesson for Our Own

“An essential journey into the origins of America’s current identity crisis, told through the voices of people working across lines of race to create a truer vision of our shared history, and our future.”
—Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Finally, a book that addresses white supremacy as more than a Black/white binary. Jones artfully moves from the colonial devastation, murder and displacement of American Indian to the degradation, and murder of African Americans in America after emancipation. White supremacy is rooted both legally and socially in the fifteenth-century canon law of Catholic papal bulls. And he demonstrates that this sentiment continues in the subliminal thinking and acting of Americans yet today.”
—Tink Tinker (wazhazhe/Osage Nation), Professor Emeritus of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions, Iliff School of Theology

“Robert P. Jones has deepened our understanding of how Americans think about religion, justice and oppression. . . . This eloquent volume, by turns personal and analytical, calls us to face up to the past in order to build a more just and democratic future.”
—E. J. Dionne Jr., senior fellow, the Brookings Institution; author of Our Divided Political Heart and co-author of 100% Democracy

“With brilliant research, rediscovery, and writing, Robert P. Jones once again demonstrates that it is time for ‘white’ Americans to uncover the history we have for so long purposefully and shamefully hidden. As Jesus said, and Jones shows, only truth telling can set us free. The work to which Jones calls us—a struggle for the very soul of the nation—will test our commitments to democracy and our faith.”
—Jim Wallis, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice, Georgetown University; author of America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege and the Bridge to America

U$ Tax prep companies that spent over $90 million lobbying against free tax-filing system face new scrutiny

Anna Massoglia,

 OpenSecrets
September 3, 2023, 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA, center) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA, right) have pressed tax prep special interests for additional information about their lobbying activities and revenue. Scott Olson/Getty Images

This article originally appeared in OpenSecrets. 

Leading tax prep companies have poured $90 million into lobbying on the Free File Program and other issues since the program’s inception in 2003, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.

Now the lobbying juggernauts are facing mounting scrutiny from members of Congress over their deployment of “revolving door” lobbyists in alleged attempts to undermine the federal government’s adoption of a government-run system that would allow taxpayers to file for free.

After years of lobbying and negotiations, a coalition of tax prep companies called the Free File Alliance reached a deal with the IRS to offer free tax prep services to a larger portion of taxpayers starting in 2003. The agreement, spearheaded by Intuit lobbyists, required companies to provide some tax filing services at no cost to certain individuals, those same companies could still charge for ancillary services and other tax-filing products.

ALSO READ: Busted: Vivek Ramaswamy campaign took money from a notorious Islamophobe

As a part of the public-private partnership, the IRS promised not to develop its own tax prep software or e-filing services. However, a December 2019 addendum to the alliance’s original memorandum of understanding lifted that restriction, despite tax prep companies spending heavily on lobbying to bar the government from creating its own e-filing software.

The December 2019 addendum also barred tax prep companies in the alliance from blocking Free File Internet search results. The change came shortly after ProPublica reported that tax prep companies in the alliance lured tax filers away from free tax filing options by hiding their Free File options from Google results and instead directing users to paid products – including products marketed as “free” that allegedly tricked clients into paying.

Since then, multiple companies have pulled out of the agreement with the IRS, including H&R Block in 2020 and Intuit in 2021.

While both leading tax prep companies have continued to spend heavily on lobbying, federal government efforts to roll out a government-run free tax filing system are moving forward – albeit not without some pushback.

ALSO READ: 'Why do we do this?': Unused government fund gets $3M cash influx from taxpayers

After President Joe Biden’s December 2021 Executive Order instructed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to consider “expanded electronic filing options,” Yellen testified before the Senate Finance Committee that building a free direct filing service is “definitely a priority.” The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allotted $15 million for the IRS to explore the creation of a free federal tax filing service.

In May, the IRS released a report announcing plans to launch the pilot program for the 2024 tax filing season and indicating that most U.S. taxpayers are interested in filing their taxes directly to the IRS for free.

But in June, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee proposed a budget rider that would bar the IRS from using federal government funds to create a government-run tax preparation software, unless approved by the House and Senate’s appropriations committees.

The IRS report and pilot program have also faced fierce opposition from tax prep companies.

“An IRS Direct File system is redundant and will not be free — not free to build, not free to operate, and not free for taxpayers,” Intuit spokesperson Derrick Plummer told ABC News.

The Intuit spokesperson further told AP that the report “cherry-picks data to support its flawed conclusion,” noting the study found that only 12% of taxpayers said they would use a government-run system if state tax returns are not included in the program.

On Aug. 23, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) sent letters to Intuit, H&R Block, the Free File Alliance and the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights, a tax prep, software and financial services trade association whose members include Intuit, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, TaxSlayer and Liberty Tax Services.

Warren and Porter gave the organizations until Sept. 6 to provide additional information about the tax prep industry’s lobbying activities and revenue.

The American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights spent $150,000 on federal lobbying during the first half of this year, a smaller sum than the leading tax prep companies but outpacing any of its prior years and putting it on track for another record-setting year. The coalition spent $80,000 of that on federal lobbying in the second quarter of 2023 with $50,000 of that going to Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which started lobbying for the coalition May 1.

In 2022, the coalition spent $260,000 on federal lobbying — the most it has spent any year other than the $265,000 it spent the year it launched.

There is no record of federal lobbying by the Free File Alliance and its executive director, Tim Hugo, told AP that his organization “does not lobby, does not hire lobbyists, has not hired lobbyists in the past, and has never had a PAC.”

This is not the first time congressional Democrats have scrutinized the tax prep industry’s lobbying activities.

In 2022, several members of Congress called for probes into the company’s deployment of revolving-door lobbyists who previously held government positions, citing investigative reporting by OpenSecrets and ProPublica.

After OpenSecrets’ March 2022 reporting on Intuit’s lobbying in Washington, Warren sent another letterto Intuit’s CEO accusing the company of “extensive lobbying and adroit influence peddling.”

In a June letter, Warren, Porter and Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) further called on federal inspector general offices to investigate Intuit’s “use of the revolving door to influence policy decisions” and the “extent to which Intuit — and other Free File Alliance members — have used the revolving door to exert undue influence on department and agency policies, particularly Free File.”

Intuit has also taken heat from the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a complaint in 2022 accusing Intuit of deceptively advertising their paid tax preparation services as free filing.

On Wednesday, an administrative judge inside the agency ruled against Intuit but the ruling will remained sealed until Sept. 6, pending redactions, Politico reported.

“We expect to appeal this decision to the FTC Commissioners and, if necessary, then to a federal court of appeals. We intend to continue to defend our position on the merits of this case,” Intuit wrote in its annual SEC filing filed Friday.

Even amid the scrutiny, tax companies continue to reap the profits of the current system.

On Aug. 23, Intuit announced its total revenue was $12.7 billion for the 12-month fiscal year ending June 31, up 32% from the prior year. H&R Block reported $3.5 billion in revenue during its own 12-month fiscal year ending June 30, a more modest increase of about $9 million — or 0.3% — from the prior year.

Over the two decades since Free File launched, Intuit has poured over $43.3 million into federal lobbying while H&R Block spent nearly $42 million.

Intuit, the company that owns TurboTax, has spent more than $1.8 million on federal lobbying in the first half of 2023, outpacing any prior year. H&R Block spent more than $1.5 million on federal lobbying during the same period.

Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect information Intuit’s annual SEC filing, which was posted after publication.

OpenSecrets is a nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research and news organization tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.

A Biden-Voting Pro-Choice Republican Could Pull Off A Shock Special Election Win In Utah

Winning would put Becky Edwards on a glide path to becoming the only Republican in the House who says she didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

By Liz Skalka

DESERET  NEWS
|Updated Sep 1, 2023

Becky Edwards, a Republican, could pull of a victory in Utah's special election Tuesday.
(AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER, FILE)


A Utah Republican who says she voted for President Joe Biden and doesn’t toe the party line on abortion is competing to represent Utah’s 2nd Congressional District in a little-noticed special election happening Tuesday — opening up the possibility of a wildcard member of the House GOP caucus.

The race could put former U.S. Senate candidate Becky Edwards on a glide path to becoming the only House Republican who says they didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Edwards would be an extreme outlier in the GOP-controlled House, where Republicans are strongly aligned with the former president.

Edwards topped an early August poll of the three-person GOP primary field conducted by the Mormon Church-affiliated Deseret News and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and released Monday, creating some national buzz around her campaign. It’s the only public survey of the race so far and showed nearly half of the respondents were undecided on whether to support Edwards, RNC committeeman Bruce Hough or attorney Celeste Maloy. The winner advances to a general election against Democratic state Sen. Kathleen Riebe.

Edwards is running to replace Republican Chris Stewart, who is leaving office this month in the middle of his sixth term due to his wife’s health issues. His resignation announcement in May set into motion a special election for a House seat extending from the southwestern corner of Utah north to Salt Lake City.

Since GOP gerrymandering eliminated Utah’s only competitive House seat in 2022, the contest to replace Stewart’s safe Republican seat had gone largely under the radar.

But Utah’s second district could end up electing one of the lower chamber’s most interesting new members: A Republican who expressed concerns about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and who openly urged Republicans to vote for someone besides Trump — although neither are issues Edwards is putting front and center to voters in a district that includes a broad swath of ultra-conservative rural Utah.

During her 2022 primary against hardline conservative Sen. Mike Lee, Edwards said she saw “no compelling reason why we need to revisit Roe v. Wade.” Edwards was also secretly recorded expressing concerns about a trigger law banning nearly all abortions. Edwards told the Salt Lake City Tribune’s editorial board she believes in the “sanctity of life.”

The paper also reported that Edwards encouraged Republicans to ditch Trump in 2020 and said that, unlike her opponent, Lee, she believed Trump deserved to be impeached for his role in spurring the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. She later told Bloomberg that Utah voters just “want to move forward” from Trump.

Her opponents and political observers cautioned against reading too much into the single poll that showed Edwards up 20 points on the rest of the field, chalking it up to her name recognition and the survey’s poor timing. A representative for Hough, the RNC member, called it a “garbage poll” with stale results, while Maloy, a former attorney in Stewart’s congressional office who won the support of Utah Republican Party delegates, said her own support is “real and growing.”

A whopping 47% of respondents were undecided, a sign that many hadn’t started paying attention to the race. The survey ended Aug. 14, the day before voters received their ballots. Utah is one of the only states that mail every active voter a ballot.

Hough, whose own campaign says it has him leading in an internal poll, has attacked each of his opponent’s voting records, writing on social media that he’s the “only candidate in this race who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.” Maloy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about her voting record and the race in general.

“I think there may be a bit of a misunderstanding of the type of Republican that Becky [Edwards] is.”

- Chelsea Robarge Fife, Edwards' campaign communications director

Edwards’ campaign brushed off the implication that she’s not solidly conservative because she doesn’t back Trump, citing her decade in the Utah House, where she led the economic development committee and helped balance the state budget during the last recession.

“I think there may be a bit of a misunderstanding of the type of Republican that Becky is,” Chelsea Robarge Fife, the campaign’s communications director, told HuffPost. “Because she has 10 years of service in the Utah House, she has a record that shows where she is and how she votes, and that’s very conservative.”

Her campaign lists a host of priorities — none of which are MAGA-coded. They include approaching immigration “as a challenging issue that deserves sensitivity and nuance” and realizing that climate change “poses both opportunities and challenges for our state.”

Robarge Fife said voters they hear from are most concerned about the economy and inflation. “People are really worried about the cost of everything. That’s something we’re hearing everywhere,” she said.

Matthew Burbank, a political science professor at the University of Utah, said Edwards likely beat her opponents in the poll due to her legislative career and name recognition from her Senate campaign, in which she garnered 30% of the vote against Lee. Maloy likely had more traction with Utah GOP delegates because of her connection to Stewart, who endorsed her as his successor.

“Becky Edwards is clearly a better-known politician, even though she wasn’t that well-loved by the delegates because they didn’t see her as conservative enough,” he said.

Even so, Utah is not necessarily a MAGA state, Burbank said. He called Utah Republicans — who elected both Lee, a Trump antagonist-turned-ally and Romney, the only Republican in the Senate who didn’t vote for Trump — “conservative, in the older sense of what that meant.” He also noted the influence of former CIA agent Evan McMullin, a protest candidate who mounted an independent presidential campaign in 2016 and another for the U.S. Senate in 2022 to siphon votes from Trump and Lee, respectively.

“Trump did not do well in the 2016 primary … and he didn’t do particularly well in the general election,” Burbank said. “Trump did better in 2020, but he also didn’t carry the state with the kind of numbers that we would expect from an incumbent Republican.”

Sahara space rock 4.5 billion years old upends assumptions about the early Solar System

The Conversation
September 2, 2023

Sahara space rock (Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA)

In May 2020, some unusual rocks containing distinctive greenish crystals were found in the Erg Chech sand sea, a dune-filled region of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria.

On close inspection, the rocks turned out to be from outer space: lumps of rubble billions of years old, left over from the dawn of the Solar System.

They were all pieces of a meteorite known as Erg Chech 002, which is the oldest volcanic rock ever found, having melted long ago in the fires of some now-vanished ancient protoplanet.

In new research published in Nature Communications, we analysed lead and uranium isotopes in Erg Chech 002 and calculated it is some 4.56556 billion years old, give or take 120,000 years. This is one of the most precise ages ever calculated for an object from space – and our results also cast doubt on some common assumptions about the early Solar System.

The secret life of aluminium

Around 4.567 billion years ago, our Solar System formed from a vast cloud of gas and dust. Among the many elements in this cloud was aluminum, which came in two forms.

First is the stable form, aluminium-27. Second is aluminum-26, a radioactive isotope mainly produced by exploding stars, which decays over time into magnesium-26.

Aluminium-26 is very useful stuff for scientists who want to understand how the Solar System formed and developed. Because it decays over time, we can use it to date events – particularly within the first four or five million years of the Solar System’s life.

The decay of aluminum-26 is also important for another reason: we think it was the main source of heat in the early Solar System. This decay influenced the melting of the small, primitive rocks that later clumped together to form the planets.

Uranium, lead and age

However, to use aluminum-26 to understand the past, we need to know whether it was spread around evenly or clumped together more densely in some places than in others.

To figure that out, we will need to calculate the absolute ages of some ancient space rocks more precisely.

Looking at aluminum-26 alone won’t let us do that, because it decays relatively quickly (after around 705,000 years, half of a sample of aluminum-26 will have decayed into magnesium-26). It’s useful for determining the relative ages of different objects, but not their absolute age in years.

But if we combine aluminum-26 data with data about uranium and lead, we can make some headway.

There are two important isotopes of uranium (uranium-235 and uranium-238), which decay into different isotopes of lead (lead-207 and lead-206, respectively).

The uranium isotopes have much longer half-lives (710 million years and 4.47 billion years, respectively), which means we can use them to directly figure out how long ago an event happened.

Meteorite groups

Erg Chech 002 is what is known as an “ungrouped achondrite”.

Achondrites are rocks formed from melted planetesimals, which is what we call solid lumps in the cloud of gas and debris that formed the Solar System. The sources of many achondrites found on Earth have been identified.


A chondrite meteorites like Erg Chech 002 offer clues about the early years of the Solar System. Yuri Amelin, 

Most belong to the so-called Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite clan, which are believed to have originated from Vesta 4, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. Another group of achondrites is called angrites, which all share an unidentified parent body.

Still other achondrites, including Erg Chech 002, are “ungrouped”: their parent bodies and family relationships are unknown.

A clumpy spread of aluminium

In our study of Erg Chech 002, we found it contains a high abundance of lead-206 and lead-207, as well as relatively large amounts of undecayed uranium-238 and uranium-235.

Measuring the ratios of all the lead and uranium isotopes was what helped us to estimate the age of the rock with such unprecedented accuracy.

We also compared our calculated age with previously published aluminum-26 data for Erg Chech 002, as well as data for various other achondrites.

The comparison with a group of achondrites called volcanic angrites was particularly interesting. We found that the parent body of Erg Chech 002 must have formed from material containing three or four times as much aluminum-26 as the source of the angrites’ parent body.

This shows aluminum-26 was indeed distributed quite unevenly throughout the cloud of dust and gas which formed the solar system.

Our results contribute to a better understanding of the Solar System’s earliest developmental stages, and the geological history of burgeoning planets. Further studies of diverse achondrite groups will undoubtedly continue to refine our understanding and enhance our ability to reconstruct the early history of our Solar System.

Evgenii Krestianinov, PhD candidate, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Guatemala's president-elect Bernardo Arevalo denounced an"ongoing coup" to block him from taking power

Guatemala's president-elect Bernardo Arevalo has vowed to crack down on corruption in the country 

Johan ORDONEZ/AFP

Guatemala's president-elect Bernardo Arevalo on Friday denounced an "ongoing coup" by the country's institutions to block him from taking power, after his political party was suspended

Arevalo, a 64-year-old sociologist, swept from obscurity to win an August 20 election with his vow to crack down on graft, which observers say has alarmed a corrupt elite.

After a campaign marked by concerns of meddling, Arevalo was on Monday declared the winner of the poll with 58 percent of votes, but the electoral tribunal suspended his Semilla (Seed) Movement.

"There is a group of corrupt politicians and officials who refuse to accept this result and have launched a plan to break the constitutional order and violate democracy," Arevalo told a press conference.

"These actions constitute a coup d'état that is promoted by the institutions that should guarantee justice in our country."

Arevalo pulled off a massive upset by advancing to the runoff after a first round marked by apathy among voters tired of the poverty, violence, and corruption that pushes thousands abroad every year in search of a better life, many to the United States.

After the first round of voting on June 25, Guatemalan judge Fredy Orellana, at the request of prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, ordered the electoral tribunal to suspend Semilla pending an investigation into alleged anomalies in its registration as a party.

Orellana and Curruchiche are both on a US list of "corrupt actors" and foreign allies slammed meddling in the election process.

At the time, the court said a party could not be suspended in the middle of an election campaign.

But with voting over, the suspension was confirmed.

"We are seeing an ongoing coup, in which the justice apparatus is used to violate justice itself, mocking the popular will freely expressed at the polls," said Arevalo.

- Death threats -

Analysts told AFP the suspension would not prevent Arevalo taking up the presidential reins in January, but would impede his Semilla party's work in Congress.

The party also cannot issue statements or collect money.

"They are weakening and denying the resources, authority and legitimacy that the people of Guatemala have legally conferred upon us," Arevalo said.

The head of the electoral mission to Guatemala for the Organization of American States (OAS), Eladio Loizaga, also warned about a possible "break in the constitutional order in Guatemala."

Speaking at an extraordinary meeting in Washington on Guatemala, Loaiza said the mission "considers that the abuse of legal instruments ... continues to cause a high degree of uncertainty in the process and puts the country's democratic stability at risk."

Last week, the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) said Arevalo and his deputy Karin Herrera "are being subjected to stigmatization, harassment, hounding, public disclosure of personal details on social media, and threats including two specific plans to hurt them and even kill them."

The government said in a statement that "necessary measures" had been taken in coordination with police to boost their protection.

Here's how Trump's comments show he is planning a 'dictatorship': Historian

Matthew Chapman
September 1, 2023

On Friday, presidential historian Michael Beschloss analyzed Trump's recent speeches in which he valorized his own criminal indictments, and warned MSNBC's Ali Velshi that he is planning a "dictatorship" if he manages to get into power again.

"In 2016, I declared, I am your voice," said Trump in one clip. "Today, I add that I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and been betrayed, I am your retribution. In the end, they're not coming after me, they're coming after you, and I am just standing in their way. Here I am, standing in their way." In a second clip he said, "Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists, fascists indict me, I consider it a great, great, great badge of honor ... because I am being indicted for you."

"Using the example you and i just talked about, if you and I ever get indicted for anything, I am not sure I can get away with that," said Velshi with a bitter laugh. "I am getting indicted for you. Who are these people that are cheering for him? I didn't do anything, I did not commit a foul crime."

"A duet to the music of totally devoted to, you know, proudly indicted. I'm still not sure that will earn us very much money," said Beschloss. "But this is as serious as it can possibly get because, look what's at stake November of next year. Donald Trump has told us if he becomes president again, he wants a presidential dictatorship without much regard to Congress, without much regard to the courts, without people in the executive branch who are ever going to say no, and also, locking a lot of people up."

This sort of agenda, Beschloss warned, is "much more the language of Mussolini and other fascists and dictators throughout history, than anything else we have seen in the American story."

"All I am saying is, anyone who does not understand what this means — a year from November, we could have lockups, we could have fascists, we could have a dictator," added Beschloss. "That is what all this really means, and what happens between now and then, largely as a result of how people react today trials, is going to determine the fate."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

 

Trump considered sending political foes to Gitmo -- here's why he didn't: Ex-Trump official

David McAfee
September 2, 2023

Donald Trump actually once considered sending his political enemies to Guantanamo Bay, but didn't in part because it would be too expensive, according to a former Trump administration official.

Ex-DHS official Miles Taylor, known for secretly voicing his Trump criticisms while employed within the administration, appeared on MSNBC's Alex Witt Reports on Saturday and was discussing Trump's purported tendency to weaponize the justice system against his "adversaries."

"A number of folks who worked in the Trump Administration with me and have since spoken out against the ex president, we joke darkly about the fact that in the second term, a number of us will be in orange jumpsuits in Guantanamo Bay," Taylor said, adding that the joke isn't entirely outside of the realm of reality.

"I say that the comment is half facetious, because Donald Trump actually did have a vision, while I was in the administration, to go use the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay to house political prisoners," he said. "In that case what he wanted to do is use it to move people from the southern border to send a message and put them in the same place where people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, sits behind bars, and send a message."

He noted that "the only reason Donald Trump didn't start sending people to Gitmo" is because "he was convinced it would be too expensive, and the facility couldn't house the number of people he wanted to send there. That was the mindset of the man when he was president of the United States.

Watch below or click the link here.