Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

Oklahoma’s state superintendent ordered public schools to incorporate the Bible as “an instructional support into the curriculum.” But social media posts have shared the inaccurate claim that “Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Louisiana and Texas haven’t issued such an order.

Full Story

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, issued a directive on June 27 that all the state’s public schools “incorporate the Bible … as an instructional support into the curriculum,” the New York Times reported.

Walters said the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” the Times reported. “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Walters said.

Walters’ directive and other recent efforts by conservative-led states to introduce religion into public schools — which are facing legal challenges — have generated attention on social media. But some posts mischaracterize what changes have been made to public school curricula and where these changes have taken place.

A July 11 Threads post misleadingly claimed, “States of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Similar posts have been shared on Facebook, including a post that shows a group of students praying in a classroom.

Conservative leaders in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas have all sought to expand the role of religion in public education, but only Oklahoma’s education department has ordered that the Bible be taught in classrooms.

Ten Commandments in Louisiana

Two weeks before Walters’ order in Oklahoma, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a requirement that classrooms in every public school and state-funded university display the text of the Ten Commandments by Jan. 1, 2025.

The law requires that the posters be at least 11 inches by 14 inches and that “the text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster.” The posters will also include a lengthy statement intended to provide context for the display, stating, “The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” The posters will be purchased with donations, and public schools are not required to spend money on the displays.

A suit challenging the law has been filed by some Louisiana parents represented by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of church and state.

They argue that the law violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent. A Kentucky statute similar to the one passed in Louisiana was the subject of the 1980 Supreme Court case, Stone v. Graham. The superintendent of Kentucky schools, James Graham, was sued by parents for an order that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The high court decided against Graham, ruling that the poster violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution — which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — and that displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms were “plainly religious in nature.”

In an interview with NewsNation at the Republican National Convention on July 18, Landry said, “I think this is one of the cases where the court has it wrong. And so here is the question: If the Supreme Court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected?”

Landry also said, “I would submit that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on [would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’] wall in the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot” at former President Donald Trump.

While Landry wants to display the Ten Commandments in Louisiana’s classrooms, the state of Louisiana has not “ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools,” as the social media posts claim.

Proposed Curriculum in Texas

In May, the Texas Education Agency introduced elementary school materials that include biblical and other religious references for public review and comment. The proposed materials include lessons on biblical stories and discussions about how early American political figures were shaped by their religious beliefs. The materials contain references to several religions, though Judeo-Christian religious material appears most frequently. The Texas Tribune reported that “districts will have the option of whether to use the materials, but will be incentivized to do so with up to $60 per student in additional funding.”

The 2024 platform of the Texas Republican Party, adopted days before the new educational materials were unveiled, includes a call for the state board of education to mandate teaching of the Bible. But no such guidelines have been put in place in Texas, contrary to the claim in the social media posts.

The state education board will vote on the proposed elementary school materials in November. If approved, the changes would be implemented in August 2025.

Last year, the Texas State Senate approved legislation that would place copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms — similar to the order in Louisiana — but the measure didn’t receive a final vote before the end of the legislative session.

Challenges to the Oklahoma Directive

Before the Oklahoma superintendent’s recent directive ordering that public schools incorporate the Bible into curricula, Walters was a proponent of state funding for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which supporters hoped would be the first religious charter school in the U.S.

However, the state Supreme Court ruled that the state’s charter school contract with the online Catholic school violated “Oklahoma statutes, the Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause.” Justice James Winchester wrote that public schools must be nonsectarian, but “St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State,” which violates the Establishment Clause.

The Establishment Clause has been at the center of many of the most significant Supreme Court decisions regulating the role of religion in schools. The 1962 case Engel v. Vitale banned school prayer for violating the Establishment Clause, even if the prayer was optional and nondenominational. In 1963, the court upheld Engel in Abington School District v. Schempp, when it decided that mandatory Bible readings in public schools are unconstitutional. 

Michael Klarman, a professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School, told us in an email, “It’s pretty clear to me that these states are presenting the current [Supreme Court], dominated by conservative Catholics, with an opportunity to reconsider” the Engel and Schempp decisions.

Walters’ recent order for schools to incorporate the Bible calls for “immediate and strict compliance.” But a spokesperson for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office said that the superintendent does not have the power to issue a memo mandating that content must be included in the curriculum, NBC News reported.

Under current law, “public schools can include the Bible in discussions of secular subjects like history or literature,” but the Bible cannot be used “as a form of religious instruction” in the classroom, Rachel F. Moran, a law professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, told us in an email.

According to Oklahoma law, individual school districts can determine what instructional material is used in the classroom. “School districts shall exclusively determine the instruction, curriculum, reading lists and instructional materials and textbooks, subject to any applicable provisions or requirements as set forth in law, to be used in meeting the subject matter standards,” the law states.

Andrew Spiropoulos, a professor of constitutional law at Oklahoma City University School of Law, told us in an email, “Some public school districts will likely allege that the state department of education does not possess sufficient statutory authority over school curricula to issue these particular directives.”

As of July 19, none of Oklahoma’s schools had agreed to follow the state superintendent’s directive, saying instead that they would follow “the current regulations for academic standards which include not having a Bible in every class,” Oklahoma City news station KFOR reported.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

ACLU. “Clergy, Public-School Parents Sue to Block Louisiana Law Requiring Public Schools to Display the Ten Commandments.” Press release. 24 Jun 2024.

Bolden, Bonnie and Shannon Heckt. “Louisiana governor: 10 Commandments in schools could have stopped Trump rally shooting.” BRProud. 18 Jul 2024.

Brown, Dylan. “No school districts have announced following Bible mandate, OSDE responds.” KFOR. 19 Jul 2024.

CBS News. “Lawsuit challenges Louisiana law requiring classrooms to display Ten Commandments.” 24 Jun 2024.

Constitution Annotated. First Amendment. Congress.gov.

Downen, Robert. “Bill requiring Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms fails in House after missing crucial deadline.” Texas Tribune. 24 May 2023.

Epstein, Lee and Eric Posner. “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait.” Supreme Court Review. 2022.

Evans, Murray. “3 Large OKC-area school districts among those that won’t follow Ryan Walters’ order to teach Bible.” The Oklahoman. 19 Jul 2024.

Jacobson, Linda. “Exclusive: Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program.” The 74 Million. 29 May 2024.

Kingkade, Tyler and Marissa Parra. “Oklahoma schools head Ryan Walters: Teachers who won’t teach Bible could lose license.” NBC News. 28 Jun 2024.

Klarman, Michael. Professor of American legal history, Harvard Law School. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah. “Oklahoma Supreme Court Says No to State Funding for a Religious Charter School.” New York Times. 25 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Elizabeth Dias. “Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible.” New York Times. 27 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Ruth Graham. “The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Limits of Long Tradition.” New York Times. 28 Jun 2024.

Moran, Rachel. Professor of law, Texas A&M University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Oklahoma State Department of Public Education. State Superintendent Ryan Walters.

Perez Jr., Juan. “Oklahoma high court rejects religious charter school contract.” Politico. 25 Jun 2024.

Republican Party of Texas. “Report of the 2024 Permanent Platform and Resolutions Committee of the Republican Party of Texas.” 23 May 2024.

Salhotra, Pooja and Robert Downen. “Texas education leaders unveil Bible-infused elementary school curriculum.” Texas Tribune. 30 May 2024.

Spiropoulos, Andrew. Professor of constitutional law, Oklahoma City University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Sy, Stephanie, et al. “Oklahoma education head discusses why he’s mandating public schools teach the Bible.” PBS. 1 Jul 2024.

Yoshonis, Scott. “Jeff Landry says benefit of defending La. Ten Commandments law ‘outweighs’ any cost.” KLFY. 18 Jul 2024.

The post Posts Misrepresent States’ Efforts to Teach the Bible in Public Schools appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Vice President Kamala Harris rallied members of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. on Wednesday, urging some of her staunchest supporters to “make history” in one of her first events as the Democrats’ all-but-assured nominee — and underscoring her connection with a critical voting bloc.

Her rousing speech amounted to a hometown reception. Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority since her days at Howard University, which is also part of the “Divine Nine.” The group represents historically Black sororities and fraternities, a ready-made coalition of supporters who the vice president called on “to energize, to organize and to mobilize” against former President Donald Trump.

The organizations collectively represent a significant well of support for Harris, both personally and politically.

“When we organize, mountains move,” Harris said. “When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”

After Harris’ ascension to the party’s apparent standard-bearer, the “Divine Nine” presidents collectively put out a statement promising to “meet this critical moment in history with an unprecedented voter registration, education and mobilization coordinated campaign.”

Harris, President Joe Biden’s endorsed successor, turned from running mate to all-but-certain ticket leader just four days ago. And she drew some of the biggest cheers of her speech by alluding to the historic nature of her own candidacy.

“When I am president of the United States,” Harris said, pausing for a wave of cheers, “and when Congress passes a law to restore those freedoms, I will sign it into law.”

“We are not playing around,” she added to laughter from the crowd.

Harris’ appearance at the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc.’s Grand Boulé, the group’s annual national gathering, underscores her connection to Black voters — and her effort to push them to the polls in November. During her 2020 presidential campaigns, both in the primary and as Biden’s running-mate, she leaned on her sisters from AKA and the broader community.

“Family is my beloved Alpha Kappa Alpha — our Divine 9 — and my HBCU brothers and sisters,” she said during her convention speech in 2020.

Given her apparent new role at the top of the ticket, the Harris campaign is now arguing that she can shore up the party’s coalition, particularly among young voters of color, which had frayed under Biden. In a memo released Wednesday morning, Harris’ campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said the “shift in the race” — swapping out Biden for Harris — “opens up additional persuadable voters who our campaign can work to win the support of.”

“This race is more fluid now,” the memo said. “The Vice President is well-known but less well-known than both Trump and President Biden, particularly among Dem-leaning constituencies.”

During her speech, she briefly previewed Biden’s Oval Office address, scheduled for Wednesday evening, when he will talk about his “decision to step down as a candidate” and “about his work in the next six months,” as he finishes his term.

Harris also road-tested more of her attacks against Trump, who she said was “trying to take us backwards,” and the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” which envisions a massive overhaul of the federal government — and which Trump has sought to distance himself from.

“Now, can you believe they put that in writing? 900 pages of it,” Harris said. “This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back.”

Vice President Harris and the return of the 'San Francisco Democrats.'

My, how things have changed in the past few weeks. By the time the Republican National Convention convened, the Democrats had hoped to be running President Biden on a platform touting the alleged succ

The key to effective civics is for teachers to engage students in 'conversations based on primary sources.' Immersion in such conversations, the authors contend, 'makes us ...

A Harris candidacy may not change the dynamic of the presidential race as much as we think

On Wednesday, Netanyahu will stand before Congress to make the case for Israel's battle for survival against those who seek its destruction.

Costco can't keep bars in stock. They sell it by the gram in vending machines in Korea. 'There's something about gold that hacks us.'

On the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Today on TAP: And how she can talk to working-class voters

The future of American democracy now rests on the vice president's shoulders. That's why it's more important than ever to understand who she is.

Former President Donald Trump has solidified Republican support in the wake of an assassination attempt and unity-building national convention, while Vice President Kamala Harris has seamlessly stepped into the Democratic nomination after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is nowhere to be seen.

Instead of campaigning, the independent challenger has canceled multiple campaign events and discussed dropping out of the race and backing Trump. Instead of raising serious donations, he’s continuing to rely on his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and set up a joint fundraising committee with the Libertarian Party. Instead of moving up in the polls, where he’s been stagnant for months, Kennedy has called for himself to be picked as the Democratic nominee to replace Biden.

Kennedy, who was once seen as a historic outside disruptor to the presidential race, remains a threat — if he can be a spoiler in a few key states in a close presidential race.

“One would think that any well-heeled, well-known independent or third party challenger should have been able to gain some momentum, and it almost seems that the Kennedy campaign went backwards during the post-debate coverage,” said Christopher Thrasher, a ballot access attorney and political consultant who has advised multiple independent and third party campaigns.

But far from trying to capitalize on the moment of upheaval, Kennedy had to issue a statement on social media during the Republican National Convention last week to deny he was leaving the race — after he took a private meeting in Milwaukee with Trump to discuss dropping out. Officially, his campaign continues to insist he’s “surging,” including in an email to supporters on Tuesday morning.

The campaign did not respond to a request for comment and list of questions for this story.

But new details about the meeting, which was facilitated by Tucker Carlson, suggest that Kennedy was considering suspending his campaign in exchange for a potential job in a second Trump administration. The two discussed the possibility of a job with a health-related portfolio in exchange for the political family scion’s support, according to a person familiar with the conversation granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The Washington Post first reported the readout of the meeting.

The position floated for Kennedy was undetermined, but the idea fell apart, the person familiar with the conversation said.

“There was a widespread expectation in the Kennedy camp that Trump was going to make the deal, which was why he stayed in Milwaukee for several days,” said Ben Braddock, a health commentator close to the campaign. “As of last Thursday morning the buzz was that there would be an appearance on the final night. Maybe the Trump campaign decided it was better for Kennedy to stay in to bleed votes from Biden.”

Trump and Kennedy also had a phone conversation on Sunday before the in-person meeting in Milwaukee, according to a second person familiar with how the call came together. In a leaked video revealing part of that phone conversation, Trump expressed concerns about the side effects of infant vaccines — an area of Kennedy’s advocacy before he ran for president last year.

This isn’t the first time Trump and Kennedy met about a possible job opportunity. They had a similar discussion during the transition period at Trump Tower in 2017. After the meeting, Kennedy told Science magazine that he was under consideration to oversee a vaccine safety review commission. A Trump spokesperson at the time declined that any decisions had been made.

While Kennedy did not ultimately secure a job offer, it did result in Trump’s team brokering a meeting between then-NIH head Anthony Fauci and Kennedy.

The most recent conversations with Trump came as the campaign struggles financially and is carrying $3 million worth of debt, according to its most recent financial disclosures. Kennedy has spent more money than he has raised in the last four consecutive months in the race, when excluding the self-funding contributions from Shanahan.

In a new attempt to raise cash, Kennedy set up a joint-fundraising committee with the Libertarian Party, according to a campaign press release. That would allow both Kennedy and the Libertarians to raise more money from individual donors, potentially helping the campaign’s money woes. But the plan was immediately met with pushback from within its ranks and is being appealed on the basis that it violates its bylaws.

Kennedy has also canceled a series of campaign events in the last two weeks, including a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, a live-audience interview at the CNN-POLITICO Grill at the RNC and a farm visit in Wisconsin.

His last campaign rally was on May 19 in Denver, Colorado, though he has secured speaking slots at conventions and with other hosts in the interim. The next event on his public schedule is a private reception and an address at a Bitcoin conference later this week.

To promote his viability, Kennedy’s team released new internal polling numbers that showed him performing well in a head-to-head matchup against Trump on Sunday.

“Kennedy is in no way dropping out. That's not going to happen,” Larry Sharpe, a third party political consultant who works with the super PAC backing Kennedy, said on Monday. “There is a higher chance of the Democrats putting him on their ticket than him dropping out. And Democrats are not going to put him on a ticket.”

Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.

On July 29, 2021, JD Vance appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show back when he was still a Fox News host. Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.

For years, Vance has played a key role in the elite echelons of the New Right, which can be described, loosely, as the intellectual wing of the Trumpified GOP (including many of the people in charge of Project 2025). This mixed-up group of intellectuals, activists, politicians and influencers is made up of a wide array of characters, who hold to a variety of belief systems and sometimes have divergent policy goals.

But the one instinct that Vance and the rest of the New Right share is a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality — or what the New Right calls “gender ideology.” Overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains is one of the most obvious unifying threads of this varied movement, and Trump’s choice of Vance anoints and entrenches it into the culture-war side of the MAGA movement.

Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.

Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggestedthat it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign saidsuch an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.

In all of this, Vance fits squarely within (and identifies with) the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as “postliberalism.”

Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, captured the basic outlook on gender and feminism among this cohort in his 2018 hit Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s argument is that liberal modernity is based on an irreparably individualistic view of human nature, which leads to a culture that values autonomy over community and family life. “Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation,” he wrote, “but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage,” because work outside the home is submission to the forces of market capitalism. Somewhat bizarrely, in the postliberal mind, even gay marriage — people coming together and uniting legally into family units — becomes a form of social dissolution, because it is based on individual choice rather than traditional moral forms.

Vance is an admirer of Deneen’s work and was a featured speaker at the launch of his most recent book, Regime Change, at Catholic University in May 2023. Vance spoke highly of Deneen’s book, identified personally with postliberalism and the New Right, and declared himself to be “anti-elitist” and “anti-regime.” He has picked up on the populist language used by the postliberals, who speak in all-or-nothing terms like the “ruling class,” “replacing the elites,” “using Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends,” or “searing the liberal faith with hot irons.”

The most important figure in American postliberalism is Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, whose 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism describes a mode of constitutional thinking that would make it much easier for conservatives in the United States to legislate morality. Under Vermeule’s conception, judges could rule against a given law — say a law allowing marriage equality, or abortion in another state — by appealing to his “Common Good” standard.

Vance is also friendly with the Claremont Institute, an election-denying “nerve center” for the broader New Right movement. He gave a speech at their newly opened “Center for the American Way of Life” in 2021 where, revealingly, he declared that the conservative movement should be about something simple: “I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

The Claremont cohort is home to, or friendly with, some of the most extreme anti-feminists and misogynists in the movement, such as Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State and a fellow with Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life. He courted controversy in 2021 for calling career-oriented women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Or Jack Murphy, a stalwart of the Manosphere, who once declared that “feminists need rape,” and was a fellow with Claremont in 2021. Many of the leaders at the Institute, including Yenor and the president, Ryan Williams, are also part of a newly formed and pro-patriarchy fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal.

As for Vance’s comments about miserable cat ladies, they sound like the tamer musings of far-right extremists like Costin Alamariu, whose 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset popularized the concept of “the Longhouse,” a disparaging description of a political culture dominated by women, or Stephen Wolfe, who similarly rails against a “gynocracy” society where women have outsize control in his 2023 book The Case for Christian Nationalism</i>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://canonpress.com/products/the-case-for-christian-nationalism","_id":"00000190-e552-d6a3-a1d5-e7d70d5c0002","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000190-e552-d6a3-a1d5-e7d70d5c0003","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">The Case for Christian Nationalism and believes that in the ideal state women would not have the right to vote. 

Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel, who is also well-connected in the New Right world, has expressed similar views about women’s suffrage, writing in a 2009 essay, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”

National Conservatism is the big tent, umbrella organization where the New Right comes together. Vance has been a speaker at all three of the four National Conservatism conferences that have taken place in the United States since 2019 — including the meeting in D.C. earlier this month, where he gave the final keynote address at a VIP dinner on the closing day. Whereas the first big NatCon conference seemed like an upstart, fringe affair, this year, Chris DeMuth, a former American Enterprise Institute president who is one of the conference’s key leaders, opened the conference by declaring: “A revival of faith, family, and fertility are not far right, they are the new mainstream!” Vance, for his part, gave a speech titled “America is a Nation,” which touched only lightly on questions of gender, merely echoing DeMuth’s call for a renewal of the American family. Patrick Deneen was pleased. 

Back in 2022, writer James Pogue went to NatCon 2 and profiled the rising New Right for Vanity Fair. Pogue detailed an interview that Vance did in September 2021 with Jack Murphy, where Vance said he was convinced the liberal order was about to collapse, and was hoping for something dramatic from Trump. When Pogue asked Vance directly why what he had in mind for the country was not in fact a fascist takeover, Vance explained that if what he had in mind worked, “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity — his support of his family and his community, his love of his community — is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.” Fair enough, but I worry about what this means for our daughters, especially in MAGA’s masculinist, zero-sum world.

Trump lost women by 15 points in 2020; if he has any hope of moving back into the White House he’ll need to make up at least a bit of that ground. But if he hoped the vice presidential pick would help with that he may be sadly mistaken. While Trump’s sexism has manifested as a crude machismo, Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming.

Kamala Harris’ path to victory counts on base Democratic Party voters to come home, including young people, African Americans and Latinos — an implicit acknowledgment that a new candidate may be able to hold together the coalition that had been fraying with President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.

In a memo penned by campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and released Wednesday, she argued how Harris, Biden’s endorsed successor, can win the race against former President Donald Trump by expanding support from 2020 and "drawing the support of voters who have moved towards Democrats since the 2020 election.” It also places Harris’ abortion rights platform front and center in her campaign.

“In many cases, these voters did not vote for the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020, but came out in support of Democrats in 2022 as Donald Trump’s Republican Party grew more and more extreme,” the memo said. “These voters supported Democrats in battleground states in 2022, and they will be critical to hold onto in 2024.”

In the memo, O’Malley Dillon said that the “shift in the race” — swapping out Biden for Harris — “opens up additional persuadable voters who our campaign can work to win the support of,” adding that the race is “more fluid now.” She drilled into the undecided segment, arguing that they are “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30,” so they “are more likely to have supported the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and are two times more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.”

That kind of coalition would enable Harris to put Sun Belt states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina — where the electorates are more diverse — firmly in play, along with the traditional “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Earlier this month, O’Malley Dillon wrote a different memo, when Biden still led the ticket, which said the president’s best path lay primarily through winning the Midwest, though she said the Sun Belt was “not out of reach.”

Harris, who announced her candidacy on Sunday, effectively cleared the field of would-be challengers by Monday afternoon. A cascade of endorsements, from members of Congress to all Democratic governors to Democratic convention delegates, solidified her support, making her the presumptive nominee by Tuesday.

The Biden-turned-Harris presidential campaign raised $100 million since Biden withdrew from the presidential race, her campaign said Tuesday, as well as $150 million in major donor commitments to the flagship Democratic super PAC, Future Forward.

O’Malley Dillon previewed the vice president’s messaging, leaning hard into abortion rights. It also centered Harris’ background as a prosecutor who is “uniquely positioned to hold [Trump] accountable.” Harris also cast the 2024 race in those themes at her first campaign rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday.

Trump’s campaign released a polling memo of its own this week, acknowledging a potential “Harris honeymoon” in forthcoming public surveys, which Trump has largely led over the last year against Biden.

The usual suspects are out in force to undermine J. D. Vance as antithetical to Reagan's realism merely because he repudiates George W. Bush's disasters.