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

DEATH THREATS

Conspiracy Theory Kingpin Calls for Hunter Biden’s Execution

At a wild pitstop of the ReAwaken America tour, headlined by Donald Trump Jr., Stew Peters demanded “permanent accountability” for another presidential failed son

NOBODY SAID THIS ABOUT JARED


BY TIM DICKINSON
ROLLING STONE
SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

Stew Peters speaks at the ReAwaken America tour's latest pitstop in North Las Vegas STEW PETERS NETWORK/RUMBLE


CONSPIRACY THEORIST STEW Peters made a startling demand for public executions at the latest stop on the ReAwaken America tour — calling for the death of Joe Biden’s son Hunter as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Peters insisted should “hang from a length of thick rope until he is dead.”

Peters speaks in the argot of the tin-foil-hat set. To hear him tell it, Fauci deserves the gallows because the federal physician-scientist supposedly backed a Wuhan “bioweapons lab” — and that this “illegal research” cost “millions of lives.” The younger Biden should get the “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” treatment, Peters insisted, for the “treason” of “selling this country off to rich oligarchs.” Peters also demanded that Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, be executed as “a treasonous traitor” because he has permitted legions of “rapists and murderers and killers and goons” to breach the border.

“In the world that we are going to build,” Peters declared, “traitors will hang.”

As Peters ramped up this violent diatribe, including with a call to drown doctors who care for transgender patients, no one cut his microphone. The North Las Vegas crowd didn’t recoil; rather, they filled the giant air-conditioned tent hall with hoots and hollers of approval. After Peters thundered his demand for “permanent accountability with extreme prejudice,” emcee Clay Clark treated Peters as if he were a WWE star. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Let’s hear it for Stuuuuuuuuuuuuuu Peters!!”

ReAwaken America is a traveling, far-right roadshow, headlined by pardoned criminal Gen. Michael Flynn, and Clark, the Tulsa-based entrepreneur radio personality. It has drawn raucous crowds across the country, with an atmosphere that’s part political convention, part religious revival, and part QAnon circus. Just minutes after Peters’ call for Hunter Biden’s execution, a different presidential failson, Donald Trump Jr., picked up the same red-white-and-blue mic, and began preaching to the MAGA minions about the dangers and “derangement” of the Left.

Peters couldn’t be a more natural fit in this setting. He is a media maven for a country hooked on conspiracy theories,catering to a religious, red-pilled audience that chooses to live in a dark irreality, full of horrific plots, satanic forces, and illicit knowledge. No longer just a sideshow on the right’s lunatic fringe, Peters, through his dark films and on his nightly streaming broadcast, is reaching an audience of millions. Increasingly, he’s playing host to elected officials, including sitting members of congress, at least one of whom praises him as a “friend.”

Peters is a prolific conspiracy content creator. In the last two years, he has churned out a pair of feature-length films — “Watch the Water” and “Died Suddenly” — each falsely purporting to reveal demonic plots behind the novel coronavirus and the “bioweapon” vaccines allegedly foisted on an unsuspecting public by a nefarious cabal.

His first film absurdly purported that Covid is connected to snake venom in the water, and that mRNA jabs transform humans into satanic “hybrids.” The second movie spreads the widely debunked conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines are causing an epidemic of heart failure — which Peters paints as part of a genocidal plot by “globalist” elites to “depopulate” the world. The noxious films have been streamed by tens of millions of viewers.

In addition to the viral success of his smooth-brained cinema, Peters has also built a large audience for his weeknight broadcasts of the “Stew Peters Show,” which has more than half a million subscribers on Rumble alone. Peters did not respond to an interview request to discuss his worldview or his calls for public hangings. But such calls to violence — in particular toward Fauci — are a staple of Peters’ schtick. As is lofting new, ever-more-absurd conspiracy theories, like that the Titan submersible was destroyed to prevent the public from learning that the Titanic was not, in fact, sunk by an iceberg but in a nefarious plot linked to the Rothschilds.

RELATED
‘Alex Jones Did Nothing Wrong’: Meet the Christian Nationalist Behind ‘Pastors For Trump’

In a sane world, Peters would be politically radioactive. But the conspiratorial audience that Peters is building is, to be frank, a key component of the modern GOP base. And these days, Peters’ broadcast is not just filled with fellow-citizen crackpots. It’s becoming a venue for right-wing GOP politicians who treat Peters as just another media persona. Peters has interviewed many members of the United States Congress, including Paul Gosar, Bob Good, Pete Sessions, and Andy Biggs, who signed off with the encouraging words to Peters: “Keep preaching, my friend.” He’s also interviewed the anti-vax extremist Robert Kennedy, Jr., now a Democratic candidate for president.

Peters has long hungered for this kind of limelight. He grew up in Minnesota and first attempted to launch a career as a rapper, performing under the name Fokiss, pronounced “focus,” while sporting a frosted-tip mini mohawk.

His boastful bars included predictions of triumph: “The future looks real bright for Fokiss/ we’re planning shows in the tropics / I’m talking Grammys and Oscars.” But when his rap dreams fizzled, Peters turned to a different life on the edge — as a bounty hunter.

In this business, Peters was infamous for controversial outfits, including a dark uniform and a badge, that critics contended could be confused with law enforcement. The Minnesota legislature took this issue seriously enough to make changes to state law in 2015 that, as AP reported it, were “aimed mostly at curtailing Peters.” (At the time, Peters insisted he had no intention of being confused for a policeman. “We’re proudly bounty hunters,” Peters said. “I don’t go out to play cops and robbers.”) But Peters’ career catching bail hoppers petered out, around the time he ran afoul of the law himself in 2021 — reportedly getting sentenced to probation after a domestic dispute.

But by then, Peters’ conspiracy-laced, shock-jock enterprise was already taking off. His online show launched in 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic struck. Is Peters a true believer in the garbage he peddles? Or a cynical man who found lucrative way to build an audience? In the end, any level of ironic detachment from the material matters less than surface-level ugliness that Peters is preaching to rapt crowds.

At ReAwaken America, Peters flashed the full, rancid, often bigoted, display of his conspiratorial repertoire. (Peters’ dark comments were first highlighted by Right Wing Watch.) The theme of his address was how “Trust the Plan” — a popular slogan among believers in the QAnon conspiracy — may be too passive, and why listeners must decide to make their own plan.

“The group of people who can sit around and ‘trust the plan’ are liberal Democrats,” he argued. “Our enemies have a plan. Our enemies’ leader has a plan. We all have one common enemy, his name is Satan,” Peters said, giving the speech a dark, biblical twist. “And right now his minions are trying to run this country.”

Even as he invoked the Good Book, Peters wove in the latest, utterly abominable conspiracy about the Obamas, suggesting Michelle Obama is secretly a man (known to believers of this hokum as “Big Mike”) and insisting, therefore, Barack Obama was the “first gay president” — with Peters sneering hatefully that liberals want “our first tranny president.”

Lacking a theory to peddle as much as just naked, bigoted disrespect, Peters then railed against “big, fat, black Fani Willis,” the Fulton County DA who indicted Trump for election crimes, before pivoting to a medley of Covid misinformation, and then adding a soupçon of QAnon: “Our opponents have a plan to make America communist, to overthrow our constitution,” he said, and “to turn our children into their painted sex slaves.”

TRENDING

Videos Show Angry Neo-Nazis Cursing and Screaming Slurs During March in Florida

In his ReAwaken calls for public executions, it should be noted, Peters did call for nominal trials before imposing the death penalty. But introducing a video of his speech on the Christian nationalist social network Gab, Peters seemed to suggest he’d be also alright with wild-west style justice.

“The plan is called EXTREME accountability,” he wrote. “So get your ropes ready…”

Scientist Peter Kalmus: The Hurricanes, Floods & Fires of 2023 Are Just the Beginning of Climate Emergency

DEMOCRACY NOW!
STORY  AUGUST 31, 2023

GUESTS  Peter Kalmus
climate activist and scientist.

LINKS Peter Kalmus website
"Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution"


As Hurricane Idalia left a wake of destruction Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.” Climate activist and scientist Peter Kalmus calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency in order to unleash the government’s ability to transition away from fossil fuels. “The public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in,” says Kalmus. “This is the merest beginning of what we’re going to see in coming years.” Kalmus blasts the fossil fuel industry for manipulating politics through campaign contributions, and GOP presidential candidates for misleading the public about climate science. “As a parent, as a citizen and as a scientist, I find it appalling and disgusting,” declares Kalmus. “I can’t mince words anymore.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hurricane Idalia has left a trail of flooding and destruction from Florida to the Carolinas, inundating coastal towns and leaving over 300,000 customers across the region without power. Idalia made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane and was later downgraded to a tropical storm. It was the strongest hurricane to hit the Big Bend section of Florida in over 125 years. The storm produced record storm surge across much of the region. As Idalia continues northward, North Carolina residents are bracing themselves for heavy downpours and possible tornadoes. Officials warned residents dangerous storm surges are still possible. Two people died in Florida in car crashes linked to the storm.

On Wednesday, President Biden spoke at the White House.


PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. Just look around. Historic floods — I mean historic floods — more intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Raleigh, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Peter Kalmus, climate activist, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, joining us today speaking on his own behalf, not as a spokesperson for NASA. Last year, he was arrested for locking himself onto an entrance to the JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles.

And you can explain why, Peter Kalmus, you locked yourself to the JPMorgan Chase building, how that relates to your climate science work, and what the south and the east of the country is experiencing right now, even Raleigh getting the tail end as the storm moves north.

PETER KALMUS: Yeah. Thank you.

So, the public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in. This is the merest beginning of what we’re going to see in coming years. And to me, it’s absolutely horrifying. I don’t think people really fully appreciate how irreversible these impacts are. We can’t just reverse this. It’s not like cleaning up trash in a park. How hot we allow this planet to get is how hot it will stay for a very long time. And I feel like climate scientists, including myself, have been being ignored for decades by world leaders. They just don’t seem to get this, either.

I’m glad to hear President Biden finally using his bully pulpit a little bit to try to wake people up that this is real, but he continues to expand fossil fuels at breakneck pace. He continues to permit more drilling on public lands at a pace even faster than Trump, to approve the Willow project in Alaska. He went out of his way to make sure that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline in Virginia and West Virginia, was approved. He could have stopped that, but, instead, he’s pushing to expand fossil fuels.

And that’s the cause of all of this damage that we’re seeing — the deadly fires in Greece, in Maui a few weeks ago, the flooding that we’ve seen in Vermont this year, in Pakistan last summer that basically inundated most of the country. The record heat that we’re seeing is going to get worse and worse. I feel like we are on the verge — these are very nonlinear changes. So, it feels like they’re increasing very quickly, because they interact with society in very complex ways. And we’re a lot more vulnerable than I think that most people think, or thought quite recently. And so, we could start seeing things like regional heat waves that end up killing a million people over the course of a few days in coming years. And it won’t stop there. That’s the thing. It just gets worse, the more fossil fuels we burn.

And so, yeah, the science, just doing the science, publishing the papers hasn’t seemed to got the message across either to the public or to world leaders. I’ve got two sons, and it breaks my heart to see the Biden administration continue to expand fossil fuels and take us deeper into this catastrophe, instead of trying to bring us back from this. He’s deeply on the wrong side of history.

Choosing JPMorgan Chase Bank in Los Angeles last year, that was a strategic choice, because a lot of these new fossil fuel projects — and just let me say again how insane it is that we’re still building new — we’re still allowing new fossil fuel projects to be built, because they have lifetimes of three to four decades. Anyway, the financing of those new projects is crucial. And no one, no institution on the planet does more damage to the Earth system, irreversible damage, by financing fossil fuel projects than JPMorgan.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Peter Kalmus, could you talk about that? Elaborate on the role of the fossil fuel industry, not just in, of course, contributing over 80% — being responsible for over 80% of global heating, but what role, if any, it plays in the Biden administration’s — despite what he said, that there’s no question now of denying the impact of the climate crisis, he’s falling short. Even though he says — he said earlier this year that he’s “practically” declared a climate emergency, he has not done so. So, what would declaring a climate emergency enable? And what role is the fossil fuel industry playing, if any, in preventing him from doing so?

PETER KALMUS: Yeah, so a lot of questions there. Let me start out by saying that the public needs to know that the fossil fuel industry and its leaders, the fossil fuel executives, have — and their lobbyists, have been lying for decades, for about 50 years. This is very well documented. There’s a paper trail — people like science historians like Naomi Oreskes, Ben Franta, journalists like Amy Westervelt. There’s a very clear and sizable body of evidence that the fossil fuel industry, and through organizations like the American Petroleum Institute, have been literally lying to the public, trying to spread confusion about the science, countering climate scientists’ attempt to sound the alarm, kind of creating this sense of uncertainty through their lies, you know, spending billions of dollars on these misinformation campaigns, and then bribing politicians.

So, I think it was a year ago a story in The New York Times said that, you know, we all know that Joe Manchin gets a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry, but even Senator Chuck Schumer received almost $300,000 in one election cycle from the corporation that benefits from the Mountain Valley Pipeline, to ensure that the Mountain Valley Pipeline was built. So, the tendrils of the fossil fuel industry — and it’s surprising how cheap it is for them to buy off these politicians. It reminds me of the David Bowie song “The Man Who Sold the World.” I know that President Biden, when he was — during the primaries, a lot of the people in his campaign team had worked previously in the fossil fuel industry, so there’s a lot of connection there, as well. So I think that, you know, part of the problem is simply we have one of the most powerful industries on the planet, if not the most powerful industry, which has extremely deep pockets. They have profits of over, I think, a trillion dollars per year. And they can spend a tiny bit of that money to basically influence politicians. It’s essentially legalized bribery.

So, you know, I think there’s also — their disinformation campaign is a big part of why the public doesn’t understand how serious of an emergency we’re in right now. And that, in turn, kind of doesn’t push journalists to kind of connect these dots. So I see a lot of stories being reported, in The New York Times and elsewhere, about these individual climate catastrophes, but they miss very key points in the story, right? First of all, they often use the passive voice. They say, like, “The Earth is heating up.” No, it’s being heated up by the fossil fuel industry, by their dishonesty, by their legalized bribery. So they don’t make that connection.

They also don’t make the connection of where we’re going in the near future. Right? So, if they’re talking about a deadly heat wave that happens in 2023, they don’t say how much worse things are going to get by, say, 2028 or 2032. This is what really frightens me about climate change caused by global heating. It’s a trend. You might have some years that are slightly cooler than others due to natural variability, so it’s a little bit of a noisy trend, but it’s rising year on year. The physics is absolutely — you can’t negotiate with it. We understand the physics quite well. We don’t understand how it’s all going to play out with these complex human systems like the agriculture system, water systems, geopolitics. That’s a whole other question. But we know it’s going to get hotter and hotter, and that’s going to drive all of these types of catastrophes that we’re seeing to get more intense, more frequent.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kalmus, I wanted to go back to last week’s Republican presidential debate. Some are calling it a vice-presidential debate, those who are competing to be the vice-presidential running mate of President Trump. But Fox News played a question from Alexander Diaz, a student at Catholic University of America.


ALEXANDER DIAZ: Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you, as both president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party, calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?


MARTHA MacCALLUM: So, we want to start on this with a show of hands. Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.


GOV. RON DESANTIS: Look, we’re not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate. I mean, I’m happy to take it to start, Alexander.


MARTHA MacCALLUM: OK. You know what?


BRET BAIER: So, do you want to raise your hand or not?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He and the other seven candidates refused to say climate change is caused by humans. Vivek Ramaswamy went on to call climate change a “hoax,” Peter Kalmus.

PETER KALMUS: It’s absolutely disgusting to me. I mean, he made a reference to schoolchildren. Schoolchildren understand this science much better than these adult men who are running for high office. And as a parent, as a citizen and as a scientist, I find it appalling and disgusting. I mean, I can’t mince words anymore. You know, I think too many scientists are holding back in how they talk about this. But the science is — there’s a mountain of evidence; the science could not be any more clear. There is no debate. It’s just ridiculous. And I don’t know what else to say. It’s like: How would I be able to argue with somebody who insisted that two plus two equals five?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Peter, before we end — we just have a minute — what alternatives to fossil fuel are being explored now?

PETER KALMUS: Well, so, let’s be really clear, right? So, as you said earlier, about roughly 80% of global heating is caused by burning fossil fuels. Most of the rest of it is caused by industrial animal agriculture. So, but we know nothing we do will stop this, besides — if solution packages don’t include ramping down fossil fuels very quickly, they’re complete, basically, garbage. Right? So, look at the COP28 process, too — I want to make this point — which COP28 has — the last few COPs, the fossil fuel industry has sent the largest group of delegates to. This is the United Nations global negotiations on —

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.

PETER KALMUS: Yeah, and now it’s being led by the UAE national fossil fuel executives. So, the fox is controlling the henhouse. We have to ramp down fossil fuels. There’s no other choice. And renewable energies are already cheaper. So it’s just this money in politics which is blocking everything, and the ignorance of some of these politicians.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kalmus, climate activist, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, not speaking on behalf of NASA but speaking on his own behalf, and, some might say, on behalf of the planet.

Coming up, we’ll look at another crisis: the rapidly shrinking supply of groundwater in the nation’s aquifers. 

U.S. Aquifers Are Running Dry, Posing Major Threat to Drinking Water Supply

STORY AUGUST 31, 2023
GUESTS Warigia Bowman
director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

LINKS"America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There's No Tomorrow"


A major New York Times investigation reveals how the United States’ aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities. The Times reports that Kansas corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix, Arizona, and rivers across the country are drying up as aquifers are being drained far faster than they are refilling. “It can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted in 50 years,” says Warigia Bowman, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. “All coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow.” That’s the headline to a major New York Times investigation that examines how the nation’s aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities.

The depletion of the nation’s aquifers is already having a devastating impact. The Times reports that in Kansas, corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water. In Arizona, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix. And rivers across the country are drying up.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going now to Oklahoma, where we’re joined by Warigia Bowman, who has been closely tracking this issue, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

Thank you so much for being with us. Can you start off by just explaining what an aquifer is, why these groundwater resources are under such threat, why they’re so critical not only to the United States but all over the world?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: Well, thank you so much, Amy. It’s really an honor to be on your show. I’ve been listening for years, so I am grateful for the opportunity.

For your listeners, an aquifer refers to, essentially, a container of soil and rock that holds water under the ground. This is not an underground river. Rather, it’s water flowing through porous rock and soil. So, if you have an aquifer very close to the surface, we usually call that artesian, and that’s when you see a spring. So, if you see a spring bubbling out of the ground, that means that the aquifer is very close to the surface. Some aquifers are very deep below the surface, and they were formed by glacial rainwater billions and millions of years ago. So, an aquifer is just a fancy way of saying, you know, the place that holds our groundwater.

Now, aquifers are critical for both the United and the world, because we get so much of our drinking water from groundwater. It’s really a significant percentage. In California, it could go as high as 60% in a drought year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Warigia, if you could talk about how the federal government and state governments manage public water supplies?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: OK. Well, the federal government does not deal with groundwater. They have the power to. The Supreme Court has said, in Nebraska v. Sporhase, that the federal government has that opportunity. But all water law is done at the state level for the moment. And what that means is that each different state has a different approach to managing its water. So, actually, who manages water at the local level, that’s a municipal issue. That’s a little bit more of an infrastructure issue. But in terms of who owns the water and the legal regime to utilize it, that’s a state law issue.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about how aquifer depletion isn’t solely a problem in the west of the country, how the tap water crisis is emerging in other parts of the country, as well?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: OK, well, I’m not an expert on the tap water crisis, but I will say that all coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems. Some of the hardest hit are going to be Louisiana and Florida. Obviously, New York will eventually be hit.

Let’s take Florida. I’m sure you guys have already heard about how residents in Miami are trying to move their properties or find property on hillier areas, but in places like the Everglade, you have a very delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater. But when we overdraw our aquifers, then you get something called saltwater intrusion, which upsets that balance. And that’s also a serious problem in Louisiana.

And surprisingly, under the Mississippi River between Mississippi and Arkansas, there’s enormous aquifer depletion. It’s hard to believe because the Mississippi is such a big river. But the farmers in that region are withdrawing so much water so fast that actually the aquifers underneath the Mississippi River are one of the most endangered aquifers in the United States.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Warigia, if you could talk about, very quickly, in the last minute we have, how the climate crisis worsens this aquifer depletion and accelerates it?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: Well, there are a few different ways. The first way is precipitation is declining. Snowmelt is declining — I mean, snow is declining. But one thing to understand it that aquifers and groundwater, they recharge incredibly slowly. So, it can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted, you know, in 50 years. But as surface water supplies, like rivers and streams and lakes, are depleted, farmers and industry are going to draw more from groundwater, and so that accelerates the depletion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Warigia Bowman, we want to thank you so much for being with us, associate professor and director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday to Hany Massoud! Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Sonyi Lopez. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick, Matt Ealy and Emily Anderson.

If you want to sign up for our daily digest, news in your email box, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.

This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.DONATE

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

 

Oklahoma bank and the Justice Department propose settlement of redlining allegations around Tulsa


The U.S. Department of Justice and a northeastern Oklahoma bank have announced a proposed agreement to settle claims that the bank discriminated in lending to Blacks and Hispanics in the Tulsa area.

Collinsville-based American Bank of Oklahoma used the illegal practice known as redlining in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Tulsa area, including the area of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, according to the Justice Department.

Redlining is an illegal practice in which lenders avoid providing credit to people because of their race, color or national origin.

The practice was used by the bank from 2017 through at least 2021, the Justice Department alleged.

The proposed consent agreement filed in federal court in Tulsa on Monday is pending court approval and calls for ABOK to provide $1.15 million in credit opportunities in neighborhoods of color in the Tulsa area.

“This agreement will help expand investment in Black communities and communities of color in Tulsa and increase opportunities for homeownership and financial stability," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

“Remedial provisions in the agreement will open up opportunities for building generational wealth while focusing on neighborhoods that bear the scars of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Clarke said.

Lawsuit Filed Over "Improve Our Tulsa"

ABOK denied the allegations but said in a statement that it agreed to the proposal to avoid the cost and distraction of lengthy litigation.

Bank chief executive Joe Landon said in a statement that ABOK, with branches in Collinsville, Ramona, Muskogee, Disney and Skiatook, is a small community bank with $383 million in assets and lamented that the Justice Department referenced the 1921 Race Massacre.

“As Oklahomans, we carry a profound sense of sorrow for the tragic events of the Tulsa Race Massacre over a century ago,” Landon said.

The 1921 massacre left hundreds of Black residents dead when an angry white mob descended on a 35-block area known as Greenwood, looting, killing and burning it to the ground. Beyond those killed, thousands more were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp.

The three known living survivors of the massacre are appealing a ruling that dismissed their lawsuit seeking reparations from the city and other defendants for the destruction of the once-thriving Black district.

Landon said the bank will expand its deposit and lending products and add mortgage and refinancing options in Tulsa and open a new loan production office in a historically Black area of the city.

The Justice Department said the bank will also provide at least two mortgage loan officers for majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and host at least six consumer financial education seminars annually with translation and interpretation services in Spanish.

ABOK is also to hire a full-time director of community lending to oversee lending in neighborhoods of color in the Tulsa area.

Ken Miller, The Associated Press

Gen Z’s Declining College Interest Persists — Even Among Middle Schoolers

Joshua Bay

THE 74
Thu, August 24, 2023 




Consumed with pandemic-era grief, Gen Z’s apathy towards attending college has grown — even influencing students as young as middle schoolers.

A new YPulse report found two in five Gen Z students agreed with the statement: “The pandemic has made me less interested in pursuing higher education.”

Middle school students, generally 11 to 13 years old, not only contribute to the trend but also lead the view that work experience is more valuable.

That attitude has translated into an 8% decline in college enrollment from 2019 to 2022, showing how attending college is no longer a given for Gen Z.

“Seeing the way many Millennials are saddled with insurmountable debt from the higher ed system, and knowing from their online lives that other paths are possible, these high school and even middle school students are reconsidering if they even need college to be successful,” YPulse wrote in the report.

Gen Z advocates Brian Femminella, co-founder and chief executive officer of SoundMind, Bella Santos, community leadership board president of The Conversationalist, and Ian Gates, policy and program quality fellow of The Opportunity Project Tulsa talked about key takeaways from the report:

From left to right, Brian Femminella, 23, Bella Santos, 20, and Ian Gates, 22.
1. The vast majority of Gen Z middle school students say they don’t see a future pursuing college.

YPulse found 80% of Gen Z middle school students and 85% of high school students plan to go to college compared to 100% pre-pandemic.

YPulse

Gates, 22, said pandemic-era online learning showed younger Gen Z students how monotonous taking classes can be — whether they’re in middle school, high school, community college or a four-year institution.

“[Gen Z] is thinking about different options now,” Gates told The 74. “A lot of us are thinking about non-college careers…like being a Youtuber, influencer and other alternate paths like that.”

Femminella, 23, said his own college education didn’t necessarily help him start his mental health company.

“When I see how a lot of younger kids would rather do something else, I applaud that,” Femminella told The 74. “We need more folks that want to do different things and shouldn’t fall into the stigma of college being a must.”

Related: Gen Z Entrepreneurs Tackle Youth Mental Health Crisis With Music Therapy
2. Gen Z students are more likely to find Google and YouTube more helpful than a teacher.

YPulse found Gen Z students were more likely to choose Google and YouTube over a teacher when asked: “If you wanted to learn something new, what resources would you use?”

Santos, 20, wasn’t shocked.

“There is often not a ton of oversight when it comes to how choosy schools are with who gets to teach — especially in public schools,” Santos told The 74. “Teachers and the system in which they teach aren’t always suited for success to begin with.”

Gates said disparaging parent attitudes towards teachers and school curriculum also had an effect on how Gen Z grows up to question the value of a college education.

“With the parental rights movement, certainly when you’re telling your kid ‘hey your teachers are trying to indoctrinate you and make you communist and make you gay’ it obviously gets to them,” Gates said.

Gates added how states such as Florida, which have banned AP Psychology and AP African American Studies, contribute to Gen Z’s disinterest in pursuing higher education by not exposing them to diverse courses.
3. Gen Z college students struggle to stay interested in their classes and believe they don’t teach practical skills.

YPulse found 55% of current Gen Z undergraduate students and 38% of Gen Z graduate students found their classes not relevant to their lives — in part because college doesn’t teach practical skills such as mental health skills, cooking and personal finance.

“Learning should be an enriching experience no matter what your interests are,” Santos said. “Yet school systems are often set up to just drill information into people’s brains.”

Femminella said mental health concerns should be the foundation on which professors shape their curriculum.

“There are some moments when students in college need to have a mental health day because they’re overworked,” Femminella said. “There’s not a lot of outlets and resources until it’s too late…and you’re really in the midst of a mental health crisis when there’s ways to avoid that.”

Femminella also said colleges should require personal finance and cooking courses.

“A lot of colleges forget that when Gen Z students close their computer, they’re a human and have to go do other human things like pay bills, cook and clean,” Femminella said. “I think it’s something that should just be incorporated into the entire university structure.”
4. Gen Z students wish they learned about alternative career paths growing up.

YPulse found that 74% of Gen Z students wish they learned more about alternative career paths compared to a traditional college education.


YPulse

Santos said the social stigma of not attending college is declining among Gen Z students.

“I don’t think it’s for everyone, I don’t think it’s necessary, so it makes sense that other people in my generation see that,” Santos said.

Gates added how this is especially true for students who come from immigrant families and used to feel “the pressure that college is just what’s next.”

“Gen Z knows people are graduating college with all these loans,” Gates said. “They’re taking that into account, especially those from lower income families, and asking themselves if college is really worth it.”

Related: What Gen Z Teens Are Asking About Education, Work and Their Future
5. Gen Z students believe work experience is more important than a college education.

YPulse found that 57% of Gen Z middle school students and 49% of Gen Z high school students believe work experience is more important than a college education.


YPulse

Femminella said work experience has been the most helpful tool to his success.

“When you’re in your field and you get to practice, you also get to fail,” Femminella said. “And by failing you learn the most, and that’s been invaluable to starting my company.”

Nearly half of Gen Zers think they won’t ‘get a dime’ in Social Security: survey

Aris Folley
Tue, August 22, 2023 

Almost half of Generation Z adults said they don’t expect to get any of the Social Security benefits they’ve earned, according to a survey.

In a survey released Tuesday by the Nationwide Retirement Institute, 45 percent of Gen Z adults between the ages of 18 to 26 said they expect to not “get a dime” of the benefits they have earned.

Additionally, 39 percent of millennials said the same, compared to 25 percent of Gen X adults and 10 percent of baby boomers who agreed.

More older Americans also expressed concern that Social Security could run out of funding in their lifetimes, with 75 percent of respondents aged 50 and older sharing that concern in the survey, up 9 percent from roughly a decade ago.

The fate of Social Security drew significant attention around Capitol Hill earlier this year as Republicans and Democrats warred over how to tackle the nation’s climbing debt, which stands at more than $32 trillion.

As one of the country’s largest mandatory spending programs, dollars for Social Security comprise a significant portion of the nation’s annual spending.

The program is expected to approach insolvency in roughly a decade, so lawmakers on both sides have floated potential changes to extend the lifetime of the program.

In the new survey, less than a fourth of respondents backed increasing funding through payroll taxes. Instead, 49 percent of respondents pushed for tax increases on higher earners to pay for the program.

Forty-one percent also said they supported increasing funding through taxes paid by employers, compared to 40 percent who also pushed for less taxation and 24 percent who wanted to see the age of eligibility lowered.

The survey found less support among respondents when it came to some changes tightening eligibility, with only 19 percent saying they support raising the full retirement age, while just 9 percent backed a gradual reduction of benefits that would most affect younger generations.

Only 6 percent of respondents support reducing benefits across the board.

Gen Z, millennial, and Gen X respondents were more likely than boomers and older respondents in the survey to say they have or “will have retirement accounts and savings as additional sources of retirement income beyond Social Security benefits.”

They were also more likely to say they plan to delay or have delayed retirement in case a quarter of their monthly benefit is cut during retirement.

The 2023 Social Security survey was conducted online between May 18 and June 13 among 1,806 adults age 18 and older who receive or expect to receive Social Security. That includes 300 Gen Z respondents, 500 millennials and 502 boomers or those age 59 and older.

The sample data is accurate to “within plus 3.0 percentage points using a 95 percent confidence level,” the survey notes.