DOGE Is So Ohio

[0:02] How can the world’s richest man with access to any tech he needs be so dumb when it comes to slashing and burning the government down?

[0:12] Lack of context is not a feature, it’s a bug. Then we look at the next installment of Christian nationalists cramming religion into public schools using the power of the state here in Ohio. I’m Doug Berger, and this is Secular Left.

[0:36] Music.

[0:44] We haven’t even seen the first month of the new Trump administration, and all we can see right now is a huge dumpster fire. And one of those, of course, was the ridiculous, ridiculous public meeting that Trump had with President Zelensky of Ukraine. I just was astonished that one of the so-called MAGA influencers, who is pretending to be a reporter who was in that meeting chastises Alinsky for not having a suit on. And just so you know that that particular so-called reporter is the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, who also has no clue what’s going on.

[1:44] But the point that I want to talk about today is about the so-called doggy committee. I’m sorry, Doge, I guess, is how they pronounce it. You know, because it’s related to the Doge coin that Elon Musk put out, the crypto coin. So he likes to reuse labels. Like he used to, he called his first internet startup on his own. He called it X and then he bought it back from PayPal and applied it to Twitter because that’s how he is. He’s a bit narcissistic about that. So the Trump administration, because it is a Russian asset and it’s been compromised by Russia, has given Musk and his college boys a run of sensitive, mostly a lot of sensitive material in the federal government, like your social security information, your Medicare information.

[2:45] They’ve attempted to get to access the IRS tax information. And I just read an article this week where they were given access to the federal child support payment tracker and basically allowed it to slash and burn through the bureaucracy. I know some people are saying, well, yeah, the government’s too big. It’s unwieldy. It’s inefficient. But see, the thing is that the government that we have, this government structure that we have, has been voted on and agreed to by Congress. Congress sets the policy agenda. They pay for everything. So if you have 80,000 workers at the IRS, it’s because the Congress said, yes, let’s have 80,000 workers at the IRS. It’s not some deep state conspiracy.

[3:43] To employ all these people to make it bad for you, you know, that just doesn’t make any sense. So if you want to reform government and cut out waste and fraud or whatever, supposedly that exists, then you have to do it through Congress. You have to pass spending laws. You have to change the budget. You just don’t basically bring somebody off the street and send them to all these different agencies and unilaterally cut stuff. And it’s just, and this is something, you know, look, I’m interested in tech. I’ve been interested in tech since, and here I’m dating myself, since our junior high school got a TRS-80 Model 1 computer back in the early 80s. So I’ve always been interested in computers and tech. You know, I’ve built my own computers. I know all this stuff. I know about databases and doing searches, but I also know how to do that stuff correctly. And it looks like these, uh, these dog boys don’t know how to do that. And that’s, that’s unfortunate.

[4:58] You would think that they would be smarter. They’re not smarter. For example, there’s been a wide number of examples that they cut a, in the VA, they cut a position because the job description explained how this person, this worker, would help veterans transition from their service to civilian life. That’s a common thing that the Veterans Administration helps with. It helps former soldiers who are going back into civilian life, help them transition into that life, back into civilian life. Well, it seems like the Dog Boys did a word search on the database for anything that was related to transgender terms and DEI. So they put in transition and it popped this position. So they cut it.

[5:57] Didn’t take a look at it, didn’t want to consider the context, nothing. They just cut the position. Another one that they did was fired a bunch of people at a nuclear lab on the West Coast without realizing that they were security experts, nuclear security experts. Their job was to protect our nuclear assets. And they just cut them because they just didn’t think farther away from their screen. They saw, hey, here’s some stuff that we don’t think that… First of all, they didn’t understand what they did. So they assumed that it was worthless. And then they fired them all. So they had to try to go back and rehire them. And then, of course, then we had the recent one that went viral where they cut a grant for the National Institute of Health that was doing research on transgenic mice because it said trans and they assumed it was transgender. Gender, and it had nothing to do with gender. Transgenic is where you change the genes of a particular entity in order to change its behavior or to change its health or whatever.

[7:21] You know, this is some of the stuff that they’re doing. They’re saying, well, Doug, this is just, you know, anecdotal. It’s not overall. They’ve been cutting a lot of money. No, they have not. They have not been cutting a lot of money. In fact, a lot of the stuff that they’re cutting, is they’ve had to walk back because it wasn’t, it was either, it was either stuff that was cut before Trump took office and was just now being, you know, removed or it was, uh, stuff that shouldn’t have been cut and they had to put back. And that’s the thing. It’s like Musk and his buddies just go in and they just slash and burn everything.

[8:04] And and I’m sure that there’s quite a few conservatives are like, yeah, go, go, Musk, go. You know, get rid of this and get rid of that. But usually what they’re talking about is that they want them to get rid of stuff that they don’t want or that they don’t agree with. And that’s what Trump’s doing. He’s getting rid of stuff that he doesn’t agree with, that he doesn’t want. And there’s unattended consequences. They just fired thousands of probationary employees at the Veterans Administration. And a majority of those people are veterans. And some of them are even disabled veterans, because in the federal government, veterans and disabled veterans have high preferences for getting hired. You know, and that’s something else that the federal government wants to cut. That’s DEI. A veteran getting extra points on their application to get hired to the federal government, that’s diversity, equality, and inclusion.

[9:13] So that’s going to be cut of course there’s the old crotchety uh veterans that don’t like trans people that did not realize that at the time when they voted for trump of course then you have all the people you know the stories of the people that are having buyer’s remorse right now i just read the other day, an article, a Hispanic gentleman who was born in the United States, and I think he’s in his 30s or 40s, got pulled over and detained by ICE because he was Hispanic. And he said, I’m a citizen, and they didn’t want to believe him. And he just can’t understand why they did that. It’s because you were Hispanic. These guys, they don’t do context. They don’t do nuances. And that’s what you need when you run a government.

[10:11] And so then you have some people on my side of the aisle, on the left side, who don’t want us to call out these people with the buyer’s remorse and make fun of them because we need them to help defeat the evil that is Trump the next time, the next opportunity we have. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s bullshit. You know, if you were bigoted enough to vote for Trump in the first place, and now the blowback is hitting you, oh well, SOL, that’s how I feel. You know, we knew this was coming. We told you. We warned you. You didn’t believe us. You didn’t think it was going to affect you. And now it does. The simple fact is that the conservatives, the extremist conservatives, have been planning for this for decades. They’ve been wanting to do this for decades. They’ve tried to do this recently when Bush was president.

[11:26] And yeah, when Bush was president and they’ve tried on various different occasions when Democrats had been the president and the Republicans have controlled Congress, they’ve tried to do this. They’ve tried to slash and burn the budget to get that. Because what they want to do is they want tax cuts. They want to cut taxes even more for the wealthy. They barely pay taxes as it is compared to the working people, the regular working people. The rich people in this country barely pay more in taxes than the regular people. I think corporate taxes, they’re down to like 28%. And the last time I looked, When I did my numbers, I was paying, including state and federal taxes, was 22% taxes. And I barely make any money at all. And here’s some multinational corporation that’s making hand over fist, barely pays anything. Amazon hasn’t paid taxes in a couple of years.

[12:42] You know, is that really fair? We would have the money to pay for housing and medical care for everybody and lunches for all kids if the rich people actually paid the taxes proportional to their wealth or their income. If they paid their fair share. See, they’re not paying their fair share and they’re gaming the system. in the process. So they want, so Trump and his cronies, his billionaire buddies want tax cuts. And usually with Republicans, tax cuts mean we’re going to cut social security. We’re going to cut Medicaid. We’re going to cut food stamps and anything else that helps regular people. Because they claim you have to offset tax cuts by cutting social programs.

[13:44] And that’s not the case because we could cut stuff from the military, but they don’t want to do that. We could cut stuff from other things that are not social or non-defense discretionary spending, but they don’t want to do that. And so for decades, literally decades since the Ronald Reagan era, they’ve tried to cut the social services. And now with a storm that has gelled together, a perfect storm, they’re getting their wish.

[14:25] Because you had Trump get reelected, who’s compromised by the Russians. They forced him to bring in Elon Musk, who is not elected, who takes his dog boys and goes and just cuts stuff. And Trump says, well, I’m the president. I can do this, even though it’s not legal. And people are saying, why is Congress letting him do this? Well, first of all, the House, they love it. The leadership love it. Even though a lot of the Congress people, when they went home and did town halls, found out that a lot of their constituents don’t love it. So they just stopped having town halls.

[15:14] I wouldn’t know what that’s like because the congressman that was in my district for many years, he refuses to do town halls anyway. He’s always done it because he’s not a very good off-the-cuff speaker. He’s a very shy person in public. And so he’s never had town halls. Photo ops, yes. Town halls, no. So the Republicans aren’t doing town halls, but they love it. The Senate is also controlled by Republicans, but it’s not as easy. So Congress isn’t really going to do anything about Musk right now. So we have to depend on the courts. Well, like I said, this thing, this wet dream of zealot conservatives about burning down the government, they’ve been working on this, like I said, this plan for decades. They’ve spent billions and billions of dollars to do it. They’ve bought and paid for many, many conservative judges that agree with it. So if you think that the court is going to bail us out, They may or they may not. Who knows? It’s a crapshoot because many of these judges that are hearing these lawsuits were appointed by Trump. Some of them even have the same idea. Just to tell you.

[16:41] Trump has been issuing these highly suspect about legality executive orders. Hundreds of them. And I remember when Joe Biden wrote a few, including college loan forgiveness, protecting trans people for Title IX, and what was the other one? The FDA regulations on abortion pills. And our attorney general, David Yost, who is a sycophant for Trump, him and his red state buddies rushed to federal court to sue the Biden administration over these executive orders saying that he had exceeded his authority as president. And then they found a judge in the Fifth Circuit, Kazmarek, who ruled in their favor pretty much all the time. They didn’t win every case. They won. They won the Title IX case. They won the student loan forgiveness one, but they lost the one about abortion pills. So that’s what Yost would do. He’d run to the courts and do what they call amicus briefs, where you write a letter saying, yes, I agree with this case. Please rule on this.

[18:06] Since Trump has been issuing these executive orders, not a peep coming from David Yost. Now, some Democrat state attorney generals are suing Trump. But it’s just telling that the red state guys that hate executive orders and think that they exceed presidential authority on many issues. Not a peep out of them. Not a peep out of them at all. And that should tell you something. Like I said, they’ve been working on this for decades and it’s a perfect storm. And so, you know, it’s going to be kind of interesting to see how this turns out. They’ve lost some of those court cases. It doesn’t look like Congress is going to try to enforce their authority on things. So it’s going to be up to the people. And they do answer to the people, believe it or not. You know, the Constitution starts, we the people. You know, we’re the ones that allow them to govern. And because we’re the ones that allow them to govern, if we think that they’re messing up, then we need to change that. Either now or at the next election And that’s the only way that for sure this is going to change.

[19:35] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode Check out our show notes at secularleft.com.

[19:42] Music.

[19:48] One of the bills that was introduced so far in this term in the Ohio legislature was Senate Bill 34. And it was introduced by Senator Terry Johnson, whose district is directly east of Cincinnati along the Ohio River, Scioto County. He lives in Scioto County. The title, the short title of the bill that he introduced was Enact the Historical Educational Displays Act. And what this would do is it would require public schools to display certain historical documents. And what this bill does is it has a list of approved historical documents that a school may display. Let me read it. Let me read the list of the documents, and I’m sure the one that sticks out like a sore thumb will catch your eye like it did mine. The documents that are allowed include the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the United States Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the mottos of the United States and Ohio.

[21:18] So which one of those do you think sticks out like a sore thumb?

[21:24] Well, if you said the Ten Commandments, ding, ding, ding, ding, you win a prize. Basically, what this bill does is is a disguise in order to allow public schools or actually requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments without actually saying that they are to display the Ten Commandments. In previous court cases, including a Supreme Court case out of Kentucky back in the 1980s, posting the Ten Commandments by itself is generally unconstitutional because usually what happens is that the intent of posting it is a religious intent, and that is not allowed in a public school. Now, knowing how the Supreme Court and some of the federal courts are acting these days when it comes to church and state separation, I think that they could make a good case to try to get that part overturned, that precedent. I mean, they overturned Roe v. Wade. So who knows? But anyway, so basically it would require schools to post one of these documents. They wouldn’t be able to use tax money, and they would have to put it in a prominent place.

[22:50] It says, reasonably visible and accompanied by a description of its historical importance that serves an educational purpose.

[23:00] It says, this section does not require a board of education to spend its own funds to purchase displays or erect a monument or other marker. The board shall determine the amount of funds or donations required to comply with this. Oh, and it sounds pretty good because they also mentioned markers and monuments. There was a previously, previously there was an issue about Ten Commandment monuments in that very area, that very vicinity in Adams County, which is next door to Scioto County, which happens to still be in the district that Terry Johnson, who introduced this bill, is representing. So, you know, you would think that they would know the history. But let me, in case you don’t, back in 1997, a group of Christian ministers donated Ten Commandment monuments, like granite monuments, to the high schools in Manchester, Pebbles.

[24:06] Seaman, and West Union. And the ACLU of Ohio filed a lawsuit, and it wound its way through the courts, including two appeals to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the school district lost. And that was in 2002.

[24:31] U.S. Magistrate Timothy Hogan said that the Ten Commandments violated the United States Constitution. For 10 months after the ruling, the monuments remained at the four high schools until a U.S. District court order issued on May 7th of that year threatened to hold the school board in contempt if they did not remove them by June the 9th. And so when the crew, the work crew, the monument crew came in to remove them, people protested, tried to prevent them from being removed, like physically tried to prevent them from being removed. And at the time, and this is dated June 9th, 2003 is when they’re finally being removed, 21 people were arrested for interfering in the removal.

[25:25] And the monuments were removed. The people that were arrested were later released without charges, as usually happens. And so you would think that somebody would tell the senator that introduced this bill that this is what happened last time. Now, for my secular friends and people listening to this, the environment for separation of church and state is completely different than it was in the early aughts, in the 2000s, 90s, 2000s. The lemon test that was used to find these monuments unconstitutional is essentially meaningless now. The recent U.S. Supreme Court cases pretty much chucked it to the curb.

[26:15] And now people have to prove that they’ve been injured by these monuments or being forced to pray to a religion that they don’t hold or things like that, rather than the optics of it being there, which still exists. Yes, the optics still exist, but that is the history that we don’t remember that we are doomed to repeat. But what I wanted to point out by bringing this up is that when sponsors introduce these bills, they go before the committee. In this case, it is the Senate Education Committee.

[27:00] And they have to speak to the committee and explain why they are introducing this bill. So Senator Terry Johnson, he’s in the 14th Senate District, is the sponsor. And he has this to say. This is his entire thing. It was two pages. He explained why he had to introduce this bill.

[27:27] Chairman Brenner, blah, blah, blah, the committee, blah, blah, blah. I thank you for the opportunity to provide sponsored testimony on Senate Bill 34. The legislation will require public schools to display one of a variety of historical documents in each classroom. The reason for this bill is to expose our students to the documents which have, in America, served as the backbone of our legal and moral traditions as a people. In my mind, it has been inexcusable that more focus has not been shown towards these historic texts within the academic arena in our state, denying the vital legal and moral essence that our children need to thrive as good American citizens. As it is written in the bill, the Board of Education of each school district shall select to display in each classroom at least one of the listed historical educational documents. This list includes the Mayfire Compact, Declaration of Independence, Northwest Ordinance, Mottos of the United States and State of Ohio Ten Commandments Magna Carta Bill of Rights U.S. Constitution and Articles of Confederation The Boards of Education shall ensure that each display is accompanied by a description explaining the historical importance of the document Simply put, this legislation intends to reintroduce disciplined historic principles, Those same principles upon which our founding fathers drew inspiration and put to writing back to the classroom.

[28:57] Importantly, this legislation ensures that no public funds will be required to be expended for the cost of these displays, although public funds may be used. The bill allows each local board of education to accept donated funds for the purchase of these displays or to accept donated displays themselves. It is essential that the displays are funded and promoted by the communities themselves, having a say in what gets displayed in their schools. Cost is a crucial factor in this legislation, and we do not want to put any undue burden on our public school districts. Realistically, many of these displays need not be any bigger than a simple 8.5 by 11 printout. More sizable documents such as the U.S. Constitution, Articles of Confederation, Northwest Ordinance, and Magna Carta may require more formatting as long as it remains reasonably visible. The Department of Education and Workforce shall post on its website materials to assist school districts with the formatting and educational information requirements. How lavish or detailed these displays become will be left up to the individual teacher’s discretion and creativity. Thank you again for your time and attention. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have. Yeah.

[30:22] Just have to love these Christian nationalists. And basically that’s basically what it is. It’s just an end around to try to get the Ten Commandments posted. You know, they’re assuming that the school is going to pick the Ten Commandments or they’re going to encourage them to do it. I do particularly take issue one with the displays need not be any bigger than a simple eight and a half by 11 printout. So do that. Print out something on your printer, if you have a printer at home, and post it on a wall and see if you can see it.

[31:04] Oh, and in his idea that says, in my mind, it has been inexcusable that more focus has not been shown towards these historic texts within the academic arena in our state, denying the vital legal and moral essence that our children need to thrive as good American citizens. He doesn’t know that. He can’t know that. He never asked. When this came out and I read what he said, I asked some people who have children in school. I also talked to a couple of school people that are on school boards.

[31:39] And many of those historical texts mentioned are discussed in school. In fact, they even have posters up of the Declaration of Independence. And they talk about the context and the historical significance. The Ten Commandments does not have a historical context in the founding of the United States. It just still happened that some of the founding fathers were Christians who subscribed to the Ten Commandments. But the Ten Commandments was not written into our laws at all. And even if they had been, only two of them, such as do not steal and do not kill or do not murder, those are the only two that we see in our law today. The rest of them, the rest of the Ten Commandments either would be unconstitutional or just not practical. You know, there is no law currently. It’s not in the Constitution that we have to honor our father and mother.

[32:49] There’s no law about that. And this is just, again, just a cheap way to disguise putting up the Ten Commandments. And I can tell you, too, that just because you post the Ten Commandments in a public school will not guarantee that your children will thrive as good American citizens. We’ve had religion available to people for over 2,000 years. Christianity is an old religion. Islam is an old religion. You can go back and you can check all these major religions. Catholicism’s been around for a long time. And you still have bad people. You still have evil. Just because you force kids to pray does not make them good citizens. It will not protect them. They will not be good people just because of that. You know, you have to teach your kids how to be good people. Maybe religion plays a part in it. Maybe it doesn’t. That is up to the parents.

[33:54] And I just do not agree that the state and the government should be dictating this stuff. You know, they should give opportunities for teachers and schools to teach this stuff. And the other thing, too, where he was talking about the description explaining the historical importance of the document and that the state would come up with that. You know it’s not going to be accurate.

[34:26] It just won’t be. And it says here where Senator Johnson says, it is essential that the displays are funded and promoted by the communities themselves having a say in what gets displayed in their schools. People already have a say at what gets displayed in their schools. That’s why they elect a school board. That’s why parents go to parent teacher conferences. Like I said, when we were talking about the LifeWise bill this past year, where people are saying that the parents want to have rights to tell what their kids learn. And I said, you already do. All you have to do is call the superintendent, call the principal, and have a meeting with them. And they will be more than happy to go over exactly what you learned. The curriculum you can get from the state because a lot of these schools follow the state curriculum. You know what they teach. You know what books they use.

[35:27] You know, the school boards purchase these textbooks. So you know, if you go to school board meetings, what they’re doing. And those people are elected from the community. So this idea that somehow if we just post this poster of the Ten Commandments that our schools are going to be great again is horse crap.

[35:56] And this is what they waste their time on. They waste this time on this. There’s a bill that was introduced that would pay for lunch and breakfast for every student in public school in the state of Ohio. That gets short shrift when they waste time on crap like this about getting their religion back into school. How about if you be Christian and making sure that the kids have something to eat? Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments at SecularLeft.us, Our theme music is Dank and Nasty composed using Amplify Studio.

[37:11] Music.