U.S. Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) introduced today the Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act to prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to promote politically divisive concepts, such as Critical Race Theory, through the U.S. Department of Education’s American History and Civics Education program.
The PEACE Act codifies the Trump administration’s definition of “divisive concepts” as outlined in the 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, ensuring our education standards reflect America’s founding principles and reject extreme ideology.
Thus begins a press release issued today by the once legitimately conservative Risch/Crapo Idaho duo, now just two more radical right sheep bleating the lines of MAGA with the conviction of the convict-in-chief himself.
“For too long, the radical left has tried to rewrite American history and indoctrinate future generations with their woke agenda,” said Risch. “My PEACE Act ensures taxpayer dollars are not used to promote Critical Race Theory or subject students to a divisive and misguided political agenda.”
“Teaching children they are inherently ‘bad’ or ‘good’ based on conditions they cannot control is destructive and unproductive,” said Crapo. “Schools should get back to quality education that will allow the next generation of leaders to thrive.”
Forget the facts, toss out the truth, let’s get back to teaching the kiddies that the kind and generous great white father cared for the noble but savage red man and wanted to see his red children grow up believing in the white man God upon which they themselves could not agree and how the slaveholder loved those he bought and beat and raped and kept in chains and toil for their own good, delivering the insolent dusky devils unto the one true God who will lift them up on account of my beating them down, praise Jesus!
Pray tell, America, what are we thinking? Isn’t the preeminent Biblical principal “love thy neighbor?” Nowhere in the book do I see the caveat, “unless they’re different.”
Those swooning in ecstasy over Trump’s inaugural need to read a bit closer. It reads more like a third grader running for class president or an edict by Kim Jong Un or his daddy — it’s all about me.
For comparison, look up John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural or, better yet, Lincoln’s second inaugural in 1865, wherein you’ll read how an individual of true strength deals with enmity, not by retribution or revenge, especially of the type Trump is after — Jack Smith, Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, prosecutors Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg — all of whom did their jobs in spite of or in response to Trump. They did the people’s work. Trump expected them to do his.
“Our liberties and our nation’s glorious destiny will no longer be denied and we will immediately restore the integrity, competency and loyalty of America’s government,” Trump proclaimed Monday. Sounds reasonable. “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. The journey to reclaim our Republic has not been an easy one, that I can tell you. Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life. Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have a president, we have a demigod. A savior with clay feet, cauliflower brains, and a miraculously pierced ear, followed by a cult that wants two things, both inimical to all America stands for, inimical to all the promise inherent in the constitution bequeathed by far wiser, far stronger, far more serious men than apparently exist today. They both have one thing in common — the false notion of supremacy.
There are the evangelical white Christian nationalists who want their God, not the one who ran out the money lenders but the one answering the heartfelt prayers of the Joel Olsteens, the Kenneth Copelands, the Jim and Tammy Fayes, who teach us to plant the seed of dollar bills in their garden, by our faith we too will not have to await our place in heaven to redeem our blessing, but have the prosperity rewards of His love and blessing here and now … can you say Amen?
I wonder why none of them share the pictures of the millions of elderly in drab rooms, lit and heated by a few candles, walls and shelves festooned with tawdry “Christian” treasure cheaper than anything you’d win at a 10-cent carnival, tables laden with stamped envelopes stuffed with $2-dollars in checks, cash or coin … addressed to parasitic televangelists, cat food in a bowl on the floor but the plate on their table empty?
Trump gave these sanctimonious self-righteous ones the right to subjugate women by coercing his supreme court to end Roe v. Wade, putting man in his supreme and rightful place, Biblically on top of women, and in so doing instilled in their hearts the hope that this weak and sinful reed, now made an instrument of the one true God, might just be the one who can elevate their all-seeing, all-knowing omnipotent God and savior to His rightful place at the helm of our government, that they, who just happen to have God’s ear, might beat us into subjug … er, bestow upon us the blessings of the one true God and hold power over us.
Many, but not all, who hold themselves to be religiously supreme also fall into the second main branch of MAGA, those who hold themselves racially superior. There are the overt; klansmen in their white sheets, Proud Boys, the Aryan Nations, the White Resistance, Neo-Nazis and more, but the true span of the affliction is far, far deeper, instilled in our unique culture over centuries and affecting not only whites, but those of color who endured the effects of such misguided fallacy. They assume Trump will restore “the good old days,” when their superiority was respected if not appreciated, when their inferiors knew their place and kept it lest it be swiftly kept for them.
And so we again have a president who embraces both factions, pays lip services and on occasion tosses them a boon — even if he could care less about the cause. Trump’s only cause, after all, is himself.
But don’ fret. As did Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, more federal GOP legislators are doing the right thing and standing up to Trump most egregious proposals, such as making Fox host Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense or ending birthright citizenship.
Hopefully others, maybe even Idaho’s delegation, will begin waking up to the realization that their oath of office was to ideals laid down in our nation’s constitution, and not to a man who yearns to be king.