The Trumpian Assault on Voting, Race, and Freedom of Religion

We discuss the resurgence of racism, particularly in this era of Trump’s rule. We start the journey talking about church-state separation in public schools, demonstrating the systematic violation of children’s rights when religious teachings are integrated in their education through policy created by Christian nationalists. This reversal of argumentation has prompted troubling precedent in some recent legal battles, including the notorious example of a football coach praying on the field that illustrates a dangerous narrative toward endorsement of religious activity in schools and how that leads to the latest conservative pushback on race and gender scholarships that is compounding systemic inequities not resolving them. The US Supreme Court is also poised to gut the Voting Rights Act to help dilute Black voting power since there are Black people in Congress and the conservatives believe that means voting rights protections aren't needed.

Transitioning to legislative developments, we examine a current bill in Ohio that was passed which would regulate the administration of overdose reversal drugs in schools, and was later amended to include provisions favorable to LifeWise Academy. The unthinkingly adopted passage of this amendment along partisan lines raises serious questions of transparency in governance and the continuance of favoring religious instruction during school hours at the expense of the fair funding of real rational education.

We then examine the connotations of President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum, in which those who oppose Trump and his policies are viewed as potential foes. The new measure aims to repress and silence all forms of political dissent. Building off that historical overreach, with some links to the past, we encourage listeners to be on their toes, aware and watchful — that engaging and informing each other on our rights is critical in standing up when the tide of intolerance and authoritarian government approaches. 

Full Show Notes & Links Used

Chapters

• 1:00 The Roaring Return of Racism
• 21:49 AOC Would be a better president than Trump
• 26:13 The Trumpian Assault on Voting, Race, and Freedom of Religion

Transcript

[0:04] In this episode, we look at racism roaring back into fashion in the Trump era, why AOC would make a far better president than Trump, and the dangerous and scary attacks on progressive people and groups coming from conservative snowflakes who no one really likes.

[0:26] This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[0:59] Since the 1940s, one of the most restricted areas for church and state separation, where we see a lot of legal precedents that had been set in the U.S. Supreme Court, are public schools. And one of the reasons being is because mixing religion in public school with students who are not free to leave due to mandatory attendance laws violates their civil rights. It violates their right to freedom of religion for themselves, because the school or the teacher acting as part of the state or part of the government is dictating what religion to expose to these children. And that was one of the main arguments where we saw the school prayer cases, where we saw the Zorach v. Clausen.

[2:13] You know, there's dozens of smaller cases as well. And basically, it's the idea, the legal idea, that since children aren't in school voluntarily and they're not allowed to leave, if you expose them in a general metaphorical way to religious teachings, then you are subsuming their right to their own religious education. You're violating that child's parents' right to dictate how their child is taught in religion.

[2:59] And that's been, like I said, that's been part of the legal landscape for decades. It's kind of going back the other way now. It's this idea that the conservatives came up, including Christian nationalists and fiscal, not fiscal, but cheap labor conservatives. They came back and they said, well, if you invoke, if the court comes in and invokes this law and says you can't do this because you have to protect the children, then you are violating the rights of the teacher or the organization or the other entity of their right to freedom of religion. Or in this case, in the teachers, their right to free speech, right? Because they've turned this upside down, and they're saying that if you're trying to protect Timmy and Jane from their teacher's religious extremism, then the teacher is the victim.

[4:03] That's what they've been doing in a lot of these legal cases. Like when we had that case about the coach praying on the football field, where they faked him being in trouble to get in front of the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ruled in his favor and said that the school violated his right to free speech, freedom of religion. And so you see the conservatives doing this now. The other thing recently that is coming up is that there's this group, this conservative group, that is going around to different universities and filing complaints, Title IX complaints.

[4:45] Title IX are discrimination complaints about, and I don't mean to laugh because this is a serious issue, but it's just an absurd argument, is they argue that scholarships and grants that are for specific racial groups are discriminatory towards white people. And so, according to Title IX, you can't discriminate based on religion. You can't discriminate based on race. OK, but they're forgetting that a lot of these gender and they're going after gender specific scholarships as well. Gender specific scholarships and racial specific scholarships are because of previous systemic racism before.

[5:49] Because when you had scholarships where everybody was open to, it was open to everybody, a lot of times most people, most of the non-minorities got these scholarships. And so people decided to create these other scholarships for these marginalized groups so that it would level the playing field, as it were. But they're turning, again, the conservatives are turning that on its ear as well. They're saying, well, if you have a scholarship for black women, you're discriminated against.

[6:25] Non-black, non-women. And they are saying that that is wrong. That should be wrong.

[6:33] And in some cases, these conservative groups are actually suing. Yeah, this happened in 2024. The Fearless Fund, it was a venture capital firm with an associated non-profit foundation, discontinued its Stryver's Grant contest for black women business owners as part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit challenging the program's racial exclusivity. A conservative group, American Alliance for Equal Rights, and I think that's the group that's going after some of the scholarships as well, it's argued that the grant program exclusively for businesses, majority owned by black women, violated section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a federal law prohibiting racial discrimination in contracting. We know why the Fearless Fund had this grant. It's to help black women business owners who don't normally, it's not that they don't normally get help, but it's harder for them to get the same kind of help that businesses run by non-black, non-women get. It kind of reminds me of church seating with religious people. What they do is they go in and they start a church, and they want a building. So they want to buy a building.

[7:57] Brand new church. They have so many congregants. Maybe they've been meeting in a library branch, or they've rented a public school gymnasium or something and held their church services. So, you know, they've been together for a year or two, a couple years, and they pledge some money for a down payment and they go to a bank to get a loan to purchase a building. Well, my humanist group, if we did that, we would be less successful in getting a loan than a church, a religious church. Why? Because there's an inherent bias to favor churches. And it doesn't matter. All you have to do is you have to prove that you're going church and that you have congregants and you're getting donations.

[8:50] And banks are more inclined to loan money to you if you're going to use it to purchase a building or build a building for a church or build a church. Now, is that fair to my group? No, that's not fair to my group. What I would do is I would probably try to establish or work with an established foundation or private entity that would loan me the money specifically because I have a humanist group in order to level the playing field so that we have just as much chance of establishing ourselves as a church. And that would not be discriminating against churches because they still have the avenue to get those special deals from the banks. We're not taking that away by establishing a separate fund or a separate mechanism for non-religious groups to get loans. And the thing is, these programs for these black businesses and Asian students and people from Lithuania and things like that, it's to correct previous wrongdoing against marginalized groups that we have historically done to people in this country. It's to fix racism.

[10:16] And the thing is, these grants and scholarships and other funds that go to these marginalized groups, they don't take anything away from white people.

[10:33] Somebody once, I saw it on the Internet, or somebody told me that equal rights is not a pie. If you give equal rights to everybody, you're not losing anything. And it's the same with these scholarships. There's tons. Oh, my goodness. When I was going to go to college, oh, there was page after page after page after page of grants and scholarships to apply for.

[11:02] That were not selected for a particular group that was open to everybody. And basically what it is, is these conservative groups attack these programs, these grants, these scholarships, to get them taken away or opened up to everybody, which means that the marginalized groups then have less access to them. And that trickles down and prevents marginalized people from going to college because if they can't pay for it, their only recourse is to get a student loan, which many of them won't be able to, or they have to work, which means it takes them longer to get through college. It really degrades their experience. So the conservatives do that. And then the third thing came up today. The U.S. Supreme Court had or this week had a hearing on a case out of Louisiana where some white people are suing the state of Louisiana for a congressional redistricting map.

[12:18] Louisiana was the heart of the Confederacy during the Civil War. They were the shakers and the movers in the Jim Crow era. And so the Civil Rights Act, when it was passed in the 1960s, attempted to address systemic racism that black people had experienced in southern states. And applied that law around the country. And one of them was called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Basically, what it would do, it would protect marginalized groups of voters to make sure that they were represented according to their population. So if they made up 30% of the population, then they should be able to choose 30% of their representatives.

[13:17] And a lot of times they draw these districts to dilute minority groups, particularly black people, because these white supremacists in these southern states and other states, this has even happened in Ohio, but it's all based on racism, is that these white supremacists naturally assume that all black people vote Democrat. So because they can't intentionally...

[13:50] Make a map to exclude blacks, what they do is they find another reason to exclude blacks, and they do it politically. And the Supreme Court ruled a couple years ago, a year or two ago, that gerrymandering congressional districts based on politics was probably okay. So they had this thing, and the way that the conservative justices were questioning, asking questions and talking about this Louisiana case, it looks like that they might finally get rid of the entire Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And so Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo had this article up today, and I just want to read probably three paragraphs, and then I'll throw a link up. She starts out, it says, a central grievance motivating today's conservative legal movement and the Republican Party more broadly holds that any major measure rectifying the country's habitual discrimination against minorities actually discriminates against the in-group. This is why Black Lives Matter, a call to recognize the disproportionate violence and death Black people suffer at the hands of the.

[15:12] Why DEI has become the battle cry for rolling back the perpetration and memorializing of civil rights advancements. It explains why Republicans' fixation on protecting freedom of speech evaporates as soon as they bump up against speech they don't like, say a rally to protest the Trump administration's authoritarian behavior. Civil liberties are a zero-sum game, as thinking goes, So any protection of minority groups must implicitly harm the majority group. That same grievance animated the right-wing justices Wednesday as they heard a case that could decimate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which voting rights groups typically use to prove that states are deluding minority voters in a given district to decrease their electoral power. Section 2 is the last weapon in a landmark civil rights legislation that the Roberts Court hasn't yet destroyed and has been a bulwark against largely red state legislators, often in the states that made up the Confederacy using crafty line drawing to ensure that white voters always have disproportionate power over black ones to elect the representatives of their choice.

[16:28] And basically what it is, is it's a technique called crack and pack. And so what you do is you take a large minority population and you divide it into little bitty pieces and connect it with a district that has a large white population that votes Republican. And so basically what you've done is you've diluted the voting power of that large black population. It's kind of like if you take oil and put it in water. You know, you're going to dilute the oil at some point. And that's the whole point.

[17:09] Here in Ohio, they have a black majority. I think there's two districts in Ohio that are black majority. One is in Columbus and the other one is in the Cleveland area. So if this court case goes through and the Republicans in Ohio are allowed to redraw the maps to how they want it to protect the Republicans, they could make sure that Democrats don't get another seat. And so you have to ask yourself, you know, what's the issue here? Well, John Roberts, Chief Justice John Roberts, worked with in the Reagan administration in the Justice Department, and he had written a paper about.

[17:57] Decimating the Voting Rights Act. And basically what conservatives like him, they are like, well, there's black congressmen, there are black senators, so we don't need to protect the black vote anymore. We can go back to everybody having the chance and not have any special rules to protect black voters or other minorities. That's their argument. That's their point. And the thing is, systemic racism still exists, okay? Just the fact the way they're gerrymandering the maps now and the Kraken Pack and the voter suppression laws that they keep passing, like doing away with early voting centers in black neighborhoods so that they have to go clear across town to vote early. Like here in Ohio, the county is only allowed to have one early voting center. For example, here in Toledo, in Lucas County, there's at least 100,000 people in the county. And if you want to vote early, you have to travel to Toledo to the early voting center on West Silvania Avenue. And not everybody has transportation that can do that.

[19:13] So they do things like that to dilute the vote for people who are more likely to need transportation. Representatives that can work with them and help them, help them survive and get food assistance or help them try to get a job or economic development, things like that, that would be listening to them instead of some rich guy, some rich billionaire that gets phone calls returned. And has the guy, has the representative over for dinner and talks and says, hey, let's do this law. And the representative's like, hey, that sounds like a good idea, Bob.

[20:03] Meanwhile, Joe and John over in the poor neighborhood, you know, they just want to have safe streets and a road that isn't full of potholes. And so they would like a representative, elected official, that's going to respond to those issues. Gerrymandering maps to hurt marginalized groups is not the answer, but that's where we're at. So, you know, we've got the dumpster fire with Trump, the ICE and the Border Patrol. I think I read 170 people, U.S. citizens, have been detained since the start of the attacks. And now they're weaponizing the IRS to go after so-called leftist terrorist groups, nonprofits. And now we're going to have, you know, black people are not going to have a vote. They're not going to have a voice.

[21:10] You know, so we would rewind the clock to the 1950s. I think it's just ridiculous, and we need to do something about it.

[21:30] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[21:49] I think I've mentioned before how I listen to short video clips on Facebook. Yes, I am still on Facebook and other places like TikTok and Blue Sky and places like that. And I really like the idea. And then I do that for the podcast is I do short clips and trying to promote the episodes. And so I really enjoy them. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to share one that I listened to the other day that was posted by Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or better known as AOC.

[22:32] What it is, is we are in the middle of a government shutdown. It's been going on now, I think, for two weeks now. And basically the Republicans are refusing Democratic demands that they protect tax breaks that have been going to people that get the Affordable Care Act or, as people sometimes know it as Obamacare. And those tax breaks and subsidies that paid for the premiums are going away. And the Democrats want the Republicans to make sure that they continue. And the Republicans have turned it around and said, well, they want health care for illegal immigrants, forgetting the.

[23:27] By law, undocumented people are not allowed to receive the Affordable Care Act benefits or any federal benefits at all. They're not eligible for it.

[23:41] And so, of course, then the Republicans then complain about emergency care. Well, that's just being human. If an undocumented person gets, let's say, hit by a car, they can be assured that they're going to be treated. And yes, taxpayers are going to pay for it because that's what many hospitals do in this country that receive federal funding like Medicare or Medicaid is they are required to treat everyone that shows up.

[24:12] That's just being human. That's human dignity. That doesn't have anything to do with politics or supporting open borders or any of that other bullshit that conservatives like to spout. So AOC posted this little clip. She was at a forum talking about Trump. And now we know President Trump is a transactional president. He's treating his time in the White House like it's one of his companies, which means, what does that mean? That means that he's running it into the ground and personally benefiting from everything that he does. And so she, AOC, decided to talk about that, about the difference between herself as a representative, a progressive representative, and President Trump. So let's take a listen. Trump believes that if you don't vote for him, he doesn't have to be your leader.

[25:12] That if you didn't vote for him, that you don't deserve good things to happen to you.

[25:19] I don't care if someone voted for me or not. I don't care if someone is a Republican or an Independent or a Democrat. I don't care if someone likes me or not. That will never change the fact that I'm going to fight for them to have health care. I want MAGA to have health care. I want MAGA to be paid a living wage. But he doesn't want people who are Democrats

[25:49] or he doesn't want people based on their political affiliation to benefit. And that is the difference between a strongman and an authoritarian and a leader of a democracy.

[26:13] We are currently in the month of October. Most of the legislators, well, except for the Congress, are back in session after summer recess.

[26:24] And so what I wanted to do is there's already been some actions taken by various legislatures around here in the country and particularly in Ohio that I wanted to go over briefly and explain them to you. And I have like one state thing to talk about and one national thing to talk about on the state side.

[26:50] So the Ohio legislature came back from their summer recess and there was a bill that was in the Senate Education Committee, the Ohio Senate Education Committee. It was called House Bill 57 and had previously been passed by the Ohio House before the break. And so now it got sent to the Senate committee to be considered. And if it passes out of the Senate committee, then it moves to the Senate. Well, the title of the bill, or at least how the log line was showing in the Ohio legislature website was House Bill 57, says regards school policies on administering overdose reversal drugs. And this bill was introduced bipartisanly by a Democrat, Representative Gerals, and our buddy, Representative Josh Williams. They introduced this together. And what it would do, what the original purpose of this bill was, was to...

[27:59] Regulate how schools would administer overdose reversal drugs. Because you have to remember in public schools, at least in Ohio, I don't know how it is in other states, at least in Ohio, administrators and teachers and everybody, they're not even allowed to give out Tylenol. Even before the wacky doodle said that it caused autism. Pain relief, medication, medication, any kind of medication, EpiPens, things like that, you had to take them to the administration and they would hold them for you. And if you needed them, then you'd have to find them and administer it yourself.

[28:42] So what they wanted to do was with these overdose reversal drugs, we're talking like Narcan and some other ones, they wanted to have a policy or a state law to govern the use of those reversal drugs for public schools so that they had some guidelines. So it was a positive bill. We loved it. I supported it. At least I didn't hate it. So it goes through the House Education Committee, goes to the House, gets passed by the House, gets sent over to the Ohio Senate Committee, Education Committee. And the Republicans decided to, because it had something to do with public schools, that they decided to amend it for more crap about LifeWise. LifeWise Academy is the Christian nationalist group that is forcing its way into public schools during the middle of the school day.

[29:36] And so their buddies in the Ohio Senate, and I know there's a couple of them on that Ohio Senate Education Committee that are big supporters of LifeWise. They decided to add or make an amendment to clarify the amount of time that a student could be released for LifeWise or any release time religious education. They didn't need to put that in there. They just didn't. as I've argued incessantly since they started this forcing LifeWise into public schools, is that it should be up to the schools how things like LifeWise are regulated. But instead, the state decides to stick its nose into the process.

[30:31] So one of the amendments to this House Bill 57 that they made was, they added, it says, under Section E, it says, unless otherwise specified in a school district's policy adopted under Division B of this section, a student shall not be excused from school to attend a release time course in religious instruction for longer than either of the following. That's what they added was excuse from longer than before. Previously, it had just said exceeded, exceed. The first thing was for students in elementary or middle school, two periods in total per week. So that was added in the budget bill that was passed, a specific amount of time that kids would get to go to Bible class. And then the second thing was, for students in high school, the amount of time that is equivalent to attending two units of high school credit per week.

[31:33] So now most people are going to say that that is not a big deal. It's just clarifying. Instead of using the word exceed, it just says that they shouldn't be longer than that, which means that schools can't have life-wise academy stuff that lasts longer. You know, you can't go three or four times a week. So I'm not sure why they added it. But anyway, so the Senate Education Committee added that as an amendment without any. Now, this is the part. This is why I'm bringing it up. Is they did this without any public input. They didn't hold any hearings or anything because it had already passed in the House. And so in one day, they added this, pretty much one day, they added this amendment, then they reported it out of committee. They sent it to the Senate floor the same day the Senate voted on it and it passed.

[32:35] And so then they had to send it back to the House because they had made changes to it. And the very same day that the Senate passed it, the House concurred all in one day. So there was no public input allowed. There was no hearings held. Nothing. Nobody knew that this was happening until it happened. I didn't know it until I got an alert about it from one of the progressive groups that I follow because they found out about it.

[33:08] And when the original bill that didn't include the RTRI stuff passed the House, it passed unanimously. The vote total on the original bill in May when it passed was 96 to nothing. And then when the Senate committee added that, it passed the committee 5 to 2. And the people that voted against it was Catherine Ingram. She is a former, I believe, teacher. She was a schoolteacher, and Democrat Kent Smith voted against it. All the Republicans voted for it. Then when it went to the Senate, also on October the 1st, it passed 28 to 4. And there were some Democrats that voted for it. Four people voted against it. It was Democrats. It was Bill DeMora. Catherine Ingram, again, voted against it. Paula Hicks-Hudson, who is the senator for the Toledo area, she voted against it. And Kent Smith also voted against it.

[34:09] So then when it went back to the House for the concurrence, now remember when it passed in May, it passed 96 to nothing. When it went back with the changes, with the addition of the RTRI stuff, it only passed 76 to 18. Erica White, she's from the Toledo area. She represents the Toledo area. Michelle Grimm also, she's from the Toledo area. She voted against it. Beryl Piccolon-McCutaneo, She is a former school board member. She voted against it. And that's the thing. Usually with these RTRI bills and things, the people that actually have experience in education, public education, either they were teachers or former or they were on school boards, they oppose release time religious instruction, especially how LifeWise has it. And so that got passed. And like I said, all in one day, that's what a supermajority can do for you, is it can pass a bill if they want to in one day without any further hearings.

[35:21] And not to mention the fact that they ruined a perfectly good bill by tacking on a different subject. See, they're not supposed to put more than one subject in a bill. The RTRI stuff was a different subject besides opioid reversal drugs. You know, those are two separate issues. But they do that stuff all the time.

[35:49] So that was in the state. That was not a good thing in the state.

[35:53] And the national thing is a little bit worse. We had the report come out, initial report for Trump's Trumped Up Anti-Christian Bias Task Force. And it pretty much said whatever we knew it was going to say. They were complaining that too many people are anti-Christian. But what happened, though, during the run-up to the shutdown and in the wake of the murder of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, was that Trump, President Trump, issued a formal presidential memorandum. And it's a national security presidential memorandum number 7 NSPM 7, And what it does is it calls on the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, which works under the FBI, to go after particular threats to our nation. Which threats? Oh, you know, just all critics of conservatism.

[37:04] Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist has a good write-up. Rebecca Watson did an excellent video on this issue as well. And I'll have links for the show notes on our website, glasscityhumanist.show. But reading from Hemet's article, and he quotes the memo, says, There are common recurrent motivations in indicticide uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism. These movements portray foundational American principles, support for law enforcement, border control as fascist, to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This anti-fascist lie has become the organizing rally cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Now, again, I'm reading from the memo. This is the memo that President Trump signed. He didn't read it. He just signed it. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government.

[38:25] Extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American values on family, religion, and morality.

[38:35] So that is what the text of the memo is. Now, the reason why this is an issue is because it's a national security presidential memo. Those memos typically are secret or kept secret or under wraps for many, many years because they deal with national security issues that they don't want to put out there. There was a national security memo that George W. Bush had issued that was leaked and people really got upset about it. I don't remember what it was, but for those that like freedom and everything, I think it was pretty, pretty bad.

[39:17] But anyway, so this National Security Presidential Memorandum is giving or directing their Joint Terrorism Task Force to stop these groups that they claim are using anti-fascism to justify violent takeover of the government. It's not true, but that's the justification they use. And then they lump in people who criticize Trump and his administration. As Hemet writes in his article, it says, So the government must be on the lookout for anyone who criticizes America, calls out wealth inequality, condemns the worst aspects of Christianity, accepts transgender identities, and has any hostility toward bigots who insist the only good families are single-income households with stay-at-home trad wives who homeschool their two-and-a-half children. Pretty much my entire social media feed, and probably pretty much my own. The other part of this memo that is very disturbing is.

[40:29] Normally what happens when government law enforcement is looking at a particular group, they want to see you try to take an action. Either you've taken an action or you're just about to take an action. And usually it's a violent action. Like when they stopped Muslim terrorists, they usually get them when they're buying guns or whatever, and then they'll arrest them. Well, they're going to do the same thing to those of us who are anti-Christian.

[41:02] And this is quoting the memo again. It says, The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so the law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts. Through this comprehensive strategy, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society. And as Hemet writes again, he says that the way that's worded, conservatives could argue that atheist organizations that routinely push for church-state separation, criticize religion, and refute the false beliefs of Christian nationalists are disrupting the functioning of a democratic society and need to be shut down. This memo gives law enforcement permission to disband those groups long before they've done anything to warrant any kind of scrutiny. This isn't about seeking justice after a group has done something wrong. It's about going after them on the assertion that they will do something wrong.

[42:16] And this brings up a point that I want to talk about. It was an effort that was done by the federal government in the 1960s, 1950s, 60s, into the 70s. They called it COINTELPRO. And basically it was a program where they would have government agents infiltrate certain groups that they were wary of and attempt to disrupt those groups and break them up and stop anything, any anti-American things that they may try to do. They did surveillance. They infiltrated with, you know, they would send people to join and take over the group and then get rid of them. They would jail leaders, et cetera. Now, what the problem was is that they did this without any legal authority to do it. There's a thing called the Constitution. We have a right to get together in groups. We have a free speech right to express our grievances to the government.

[43:31] You know, as long as we're not bombing things or shooting people or being violent in that way or destroying property, they don't have a legal basis for arresting you or putting you in jail or surveilling you or anything. That's what they did through the whole 50s, 60s and 70s. They justified it as trying to keep out communism.

[43:54] But it hurt a lot of people along the way over many decades. If you get a chance, do a Google search on the church committee. That was where it all came out. And they even passed laws after that that are supposed to prohibit that.

[44:11] Or they raised the bar for you to be able to do that. You have to have probable cause and things like that. And that's what they would do. And I saw, and I can't think of what it was some historian was talking about, why those on the left seem not to be organized. That the people on the right, they're well-funded, they have a solid infrastructure, and they've basically gotten everything that they've wanted in the last 30 years. And the reason is, is because the federal government has been disrupting people on the left for decades. And not allowing them to get a start or to get any headwind to try to make change in this country. And they've been doing it either secretly or out in the open. The one example that we have is, you know, Trump is sending National Guardsmen into Portland, Oregon. There's nothing going on in Portland, Oregon. People are protesting outside an ICE detention facility.

[45:14] But if you remember right, if you go back and look at some of the protests during the George Floyd thing, there was a lot of a lot of not violent violence, but there was a lot of severe expression of dissatisfaction, firebombing police stations in Portland, you know, being disrupted by by police moving through the crowds. It happened in Columbus, Ohio. I was part of one that got disrupted in here in Toledo. And so, you know, that's that's happened in the past. Right now, there is nothing like that going on.

[45:55] But unfortunately, President Trump believes that there is because he's got some mental issues of some kind. And so he issued this. Now, most of the executive orders that we know about that he's issued or not issued, but he signed since he started in office in January, a lot of it is a lot of bluster. This National Security Presidential Memorandum, because this is going to actually, something will happen, this Joint Terrorism Task Force will do something, because now they've been given permission. And that is why we have this this national security apparatus that surveils people. And, you know, they've been trying to get voter registration information from the states. They've been trying to buy data that you've used on social media to track you.

[47:00] Things like that. And so this is a real concern. This is real. This memo, this National Security Presidential Memo 7, is the real thing. It's the real stuff. And we need to be wary of it and be aware that it's out there. And so one of the things that I'm doing with my group is I'm vetting people. If people automatically show up and want to join my group, I'm vetting them. I'm checking them out. I recommend other people do that as well. And if somebody is getting extra close to you or want to get extra close to you or your groups, and they just give a bad vibe because I don't think that they're very talented, some of these federal agents, it could be. So you just need to be careful. You need to be careful. You need to watch everything because one day you could be out walking your dog and they pull up in their SUVs and take you away. It's a real possibility.

[48:09] You know, I'm not trying to scare people, but it's a real possibility. So make sure you check out the ACLU. They have materials available so you know your rights, even though that's kind of up in the air. But know that, you know, as being a leader of a non-religious group who could be considered anti-Christian because I don't agree with the Christian religion,

[48:37] my group could go away. Who knows? But I just want to make people aware of that national issue. And as I said, I put the links up to Hemet Mehta's article and Rebecca Watson's video. And I really encourage you to check them out when you get the time.

[49:04] Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.shop. See you next time.