Socialist Wins, GOP Spin, and the Fight Over Who Gets to Be Free

[0:00] Ohio Republicans are all in with Trump, including outright lying about stuff that’s easily fact-checked.

[0:07] Who knew that Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission wouldn’t be the inclusive, neutral task force federal law requires? And finally, we talk about the huge Democratic Socialist wins in the New York primary that the media would have you believe is bad for Democrats. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[1:00] So the last episode I talked about or mentioned about how the Ramaswamy campaign is in trouble in Ohio because you have a purple state that leans, Republican by a couple of percentage points, heavily gerrymandered so that Republicans have a supermajority in the state legislature that they’ve had since 2011. And Ramaswamy and Dr. Amy Acton, who is running on the Democrat side, are statistically tied at this point in the campaign. So the Republicans are panicking. And as I detailed in my last episode, they came out with this photo ID amendment to the Ohio Constitution to try to gin up, enthusiasm for their candidate and to bring people out, bring people out to vote for Ramaswamy in November, Vivek Ramaswamy.

[2:08] Well, it is the start of being end of June, start of July. It’s the start of the county fair season in Ohio. And so at the county fairs, you have a lot of political candidates that hang out at the county fairs to grab hand and talk to voters. It’s usually one of the best ways you can meet candidates that, uh, because the.

[2:38] County parties usually have a booth in the merchant building, whichever, wherever their merchant building is, where you, you know, have the roofers and the plumbers and people like that. And then you have the Democrats have a booth and the Republicans have a booth. And usually it’s staffed by candidates running for office so that they can meet them. So the Republicans decided to play up this lie that they tell about Dr. Acton, that they’ve been telling since the beginning, that she shut down Ohio during COVID because she was the director of the state health department. And she wrote the orders that did the stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and required masks. And county fairs were canceled or initially canceled, an order that prohibited large gatherings of people completely. And that included parades, festivals, and county fairs. Then Dr. Acton left in early June of 2020 and the interim health director signed an amended order.

[3:56] In July that allowed county fairs to start back up. As long as they followed certain protocols, such as having masks and social distancing and that sort of thing. But once the county fairs had started back up again, there was a spike in COVID infections. And so they amended that order once again to prohibiting anything but junior fair activities. That means that the 4-H’ers could show their animals and things like that, but there would be no rides, no concessions, no senior fair activities. And so several counties canceled their fairs outright. And most of the ones, most of the county fairs in Ohio, then did the modified junior fair version.

[4:59] And the Ohio State Fair was canceled in May of 2020 for 2020 itself. So that just shows how much of a lie the Ram Swami Macaulay argument about Dr. Acton is, because, She signed the initial order and shut down county fairs, but they hadn’t even started in March of 2020. And by the time they did start in the summer of 2020, the governor had already modified the order so that county fairs could open up again.

[5:42] So, you know, it gets me that they can lie incessantly like that and get away with it. And so they’re using that as part of their county fair booths. And they had one in Putman County, which is one of the first ones, where they have a cardboard cutout of Dr. Acton wearing a mask from that time period. And something about being a liberal. You know, we don’t need this liberal or whatever. So you can take pictures with her. I don’t know. I don’t get conservative sometimes. I don’t understand that part of it. That’d be like having a cutout of Trump at the Democrat booth and taking pictures with a cutout of Trump. No Democrat would do that. But anyway, not even for goof, not even for irony. Anyway, so that’s the lie that they’re telling is that she shut down the county fairs, but allowed the Black Lives Matter protests to happen. The Black Lives Matter protests happened that summer of 2020 due to the murder of George Floyd and some other incidences. And there was a lot of protesting. And so a lot of these conservative white conservatives that are.

[7:09] Subtly racist, if not outwardly racist, are upset that these Black Lives Matter protests happen, but they couldn’t have their little county fairs to show off their sheep and their cows. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would not want to vote for somebody who doesn’t know the difference between exercising one’s First Amendment right to protest, and a county fair, attending a county fair, which is not your right under the First Amendment.

[7:46] And because it’s controlled by the state, because it’s a gathering, a public gathering, they could shut that down. The protests, they could not shut down because that happened out on the street, outside. They did, and I remember this, as people said, you know, hey, wear masks. And I attended a Black Lives Matter protest in that summer, and there was a lot of people wearing masks at that time. It was outdoors and, you know, people still did that six feet social distancing that we were asked to do. And, you know, so even though we were all gathered together protesting, people still took, tried to take as much precautions as they could. So they could never have banned protest, the protest. They never could have. They probably would try, but it would get thrown out of court because it’s a First Amendment violation.

[8:49] Attending a county fair is not a civil right, put it that way. The other thing that I want to point out, too, is Black Lives Matter weren’t the only people protesting that summer of 2020. There was also a major protest at the statehouse against mask mandates. And in fact, there was a picture that was on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch of a bunch of white people with no mask pressing their faces up against the doors of the statehouse, that was closed protesting. Protesting. And so I’ve used that on a couple of stories.

[9:35] After that. But that protest also happened. And I have a link to it. Even Fox News, local Fox affiliates covered it. And so, like I said, the Republicans are worried about Ram Swamy’s campaign. He just does not have the juice. And probably one of the reasons why he does not have the juice is because his last name is Ram Swamy and he does not look like he’s white. You know, personally, I don’t care. You know, personally, I don’t care. But there are some people that are in his party that seem to care because they just aren’t enthusiastic about him. The other story, too, that came out this week about related to that lie that they’re telling about Dr. Acton is that Vivek Ramaswamy supported lockdowns. He supported mandatory vaccinations, which the state never did. And he also supported requiring biomarkers.

[10:53] Be put in people if they got the vaccine to show that they got a vaccine so that they could be segregated afterwards. Afterwards so that the people that had these biomarkers that they had been vaccinated then could leave their home and go out in public. He supported all of that back when he was, because that was during his time when he was a biotech edgelord. And so that was good for business. That biomarker stuff was good for business. Mandatory vaccinations was good for business, and he supported the lockdown. But you don’t hear about that from his campaign today. And we know why we don’t hear about it is because that is not.

[11:46] The way that his campaign is operating today.

[11:50] But they can do that to Dr. Acton. And the reason why what they’re talking about Dr. Acton is a lie is because, and the governor has confirmed this, Governor DeWine confirmed this, that it was ultimately up to him to institute the lockdowns and the other mitigation, activities that the state did at the time. She advised him. She wrote the orders, but it was all his direction. He said, you know, she said, well, we need to have lockdowns. And he said, write the order. So she wrote the order. That’s one of the reasons why she ended up quitting, because in June of 2020, DeWine caved to the pressure from Rob McCauley, who was running with Ramaswamy, and decided to ignore her advice and ignore the science and open things back up because they didn’t know who was sick. They didn’t know people that were sick. And they said, why are we at home if we’re not sick? You know, this is just the flu. You know, they were totally ignoring the science. So that’s another reason why I couldn’t vote for somebody like Ramswami or any Republican who doesn’t know science and doesn’t accept science and cherry pick science based on, what they agree with or what they don’t agree with.

[13:17] And so it’s just very interesting. You’ll see that this summer, they’ll be playing that lie up about Dr. Acton a lot. And you’ll see these cutouts. So if you have a chance to talk to a Republican, any Republican really, any state Republican running for state office would be good too, is ask them how they feel about Vivek Ramaswamy supporting the lockdowns in 2020. And how do they feel about him supporting mandatory vaccinations back during the pandemic and see what they say about that? I’m sure they’ll try to blow you off and won’t answer you or maybe they’ll stick security on you. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[14:31] Last year, one of the things that the Trump administration did in order to attempt to privilege more Christian nationalism was they formed a task force through the Department of Justice, called the Religious Liberty Commission or something like that. That was the name. And unfortunately, it wasn’t anything about religious liberty for everybody. It was about religious liberty for Christian nationalists, and it was.

[15:10] What young people call a bitch session. Basically they would have, They had this commission that they Appointed people to And they had these meetings where they would Talk to people have like a Couple people come in and be Witnesses and they would talk about Oh, how much Trouble it was to be a Christian in America today And all the persecution that they Suffer and, Stuff like that which isn’t true but That’s what the that’s the whole point Of it, And the Religious Liberty Commission was headed up by Dan Patrick. I think that’s his name. He’s the lieutenant governor of Texas.

[15:54] And it also had Dr. Phil for some reason. Nobody’s sure why Dr. Phil was part of it. And probably the biggest takeaway that commission members came up with was that, the separation of church and state is the problem. With religious liberty, believe it or not.

[16:17] Hemet Mehta, over at Friendly Atheist, wrote some good articles about the commission. And so I would advise you to check that out. I’ll have one of the articles in the show notes. But he writes, nobody is scared. Pastors routinely endorse candidates from the pulpit and often brag about it because they know damn well the Trump administration doesn’t care about justice or the law. But Shackelford’s point here is that the commission should use its power to force the president’s weirdly discolored hand. The reason all this matters is because this group only has two jobs, producing a report on the state of religious liberty in America and advising the White House and connected agencies on policies it should adopt. We can now be assured that the report and advice will be built on the faulty assumption that church and state separation is unnecessary, and that churches, by which they mean white evangelical ones, should be allowed to endorse Republicans from the pulpit, further contributing to the idea that this is a Christian nation.

[17:21] In some ways, this was already a foregone conclusion. This committee and its meetings have always been just for show. If Republicans want to pass pro-Christian executive orders or resolutions, they already have the numbers to do it, whether or not their desires are legal. It’s not like GOP officials are sitting around reading white papers and thinking, wait a minute, maybe we should protect religious freedom for Muslims. Hell, Dan Patrick didn’t even realize that Trump extended the life of this commission through 2027. Patrick is treating this body as if it’s about to be disbanded while Trump wants to keep it going past the midterms for no apparent reason.

[18:01] So that’s the commission, the Religious Liberty Commission. A couple of progressive groups, including Americans United for separation of church and state.

[18:13] Earlier this year sued the Trump administration about that commission because they claim, and they make a very good point in claiming, that it violates federal law. The commission violates federal law where you have to be inclusive and have more than just one voice on a commission when you’re trying to advise government agencies on policy. Trump’s commission only had evangelical Christians and a token Jewish member. And that’s it. That’s all they had on there. They filed this lawsuit back in February, and it’s working its way through the federal courts. And so when the Trump administration found out about it, originally the commission was going to last until 2027 after the midterms, but it just recently closed up shop. Suddenly, unexpectedly, probably because of the lawsuit and they’re going to issue their, they want to issue their report. So Americans United and the groups that they’re working on, collaborating with on this lawsuit, went back to court to prevent that report from being released. Because if that report gets released, then the lawsuit that they filed against the commission would be moot because the commission would no longer exist. See how that works?

[19:41] But I mean, we know what the report’s going to say As Hemet pretty much makes the points about what it’s going to say It’s just a continuation of Project 2025 Or going to be one, And that Church and State is the problem Which we know is not the case And so that’s going to be interesting to find out how that turns out, Now, on a related issue, we have, the Department of Defense and Pete Hegseth recently put out a policy statement where they reduced the number of recognized religions that the military recognizes, from over 100, I think it was from over 100, down to like 31. And, of course, they excluded atheists and agnostics and Unitarians.

[20:41] And some other ones. One that they excluded that they got some flack for was Mormons, Church of Latter-day Saints, which is hilarious. Because the Mormons are an.

[20:59] Evangelical-adjacent ally. They’ve been pairing up with the evangelicals for the church-state stuff, the anti-abortion stuff, and just until recently, they helped run the Boy Scouts and things like that, and they’re anti-LGBTQ. But here, the Christians, the white Christian nationalists like Hegseth, excluded Mormons. And we know why, because many evangelicals don’t believe that Mormons are Christians. And so that’s why they got excluded from this list, from this list of recognized religions that the military recognizes. And so they had a list of Christian religions and Mormons was not listed on there. Mormonism wasn’t even listed on there at all, but especially not in Christian. So Senator Mike Lee, who’s a senator from Utah and a Mormon, complained. He even called President Trump personally, he claims, and complained. And so the Department of Defense backtracked a little bit.

[22:17] And what they did was they returned Mormonism to the list of officially recognized religions. But in a kind of ironic twist that is a whole sixth level of pettiness.

[22:37] Is that they then excluded the Christian label from the list. So they have a list of religions that in the previous list was Christian and Mormons were not on it. Then they put Mormons back on the list and remove the label Christian.

[22:58] So now you just have a list of religions that are acknowledged by the military. Of course, the whole thing is just dumb in itself, that they would take the time, the military, the Department of Defense would take the time to go back to do that. But of course, they’ve done other stuff, too. They’ve stopped promotions for black soldiers and Navy personnel. They’ve forced out women out of leadership positions. Uh, Hegseth actually fired the commandant of the Coast Guard because, uh, the commandant was a woman. They, he talks about being manly men and being lethal and all that stuff, like, uh, like a frat boy version of the military. And it, and it shows, but this whole, uh, list that they recognize religions and humanism used to be on it. And so humanism isn’t on it either, but neither is atheism or anything like that. And…

[24:16] Personally, I didn’t care if the military recognized religions. I know there are some people that religion is very important to them and that they should have the resources that they need. Like if they’re Catholic, they should have access to a priest or at least somebody who’s familiar with Catholic theology, if that’s what they want to do. I don’t think they should be doing that. I think there’s too much religiousness, in the military nowadays. There’s just way too much.

[24:56] They had a big problem with the U.S. Air Force Academy and forcing airmen, cadet airmen, to go to church services and things like that. That I don’t agree with. I think they should have it available for service people that want to do that, but people should not be forced to do it. I mean, that is part of, you know, the military is a branch of the government. And I don’t believe that the government should force military people to go to church or to believe in a religion or to punish them or promote them based on their religious beliefs. I think that’s just wrong. And so many people that I talked to that are in the free thought movement were just outraged by the playing around with this recognized religious list. Me, I just, it wasn’t a big deal for me, but I understand why people were concerned about it. But that’s how we go. That’s how we go right now. Now, that’s what we’re all about, it seems, here under the Trump administration, that there isn’t anything that they can’t do to privilege white Christian nationalism. And everything that they’ll do, they will try. They will try to do, whether it’s legal or not.

[26:22] It just came out just this week. There was a Supreme Court decision, a 6-3 Supreme Court decision, where a Rastafarian could not sue the federal prison that shaved his head. Um, he had a, he even had a judge’s order that they weren’t allowed to shave his head, but they shaved his head anyway. And the U S Supreme court said that he couldn’t sue for the violation of his religious beliefs. And the funny thing is, the reasoning that they did, the pretzel twist that they said was because the prison guards didn’t agree to the protection of his religious rights.

[27:08] And I’ll throw a link up for that court case. So that’s what we’re dealing with currently in this country. And I’m telling you, the midterm elections can’t come soon enough, that hopefully we can get some checks on some of this more severe, and outlandish violations of the First Amendment and privileging of the white Christian nationalism. I just hope we’re able to, you know, mitigate that and check that a little bit better going forward, hopefully, after the elections this November. We can only hope. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either compliment a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets at secularleft.substack.com and it is totally free.

[28:21] I wanted to make some comments about the recent elections in New York City that happened because the MAGA people, and even some establishment Democrats have lost their minds over the fact that Zoran Madami’s.

[28:44] Endorsed candidates won during the primary. It was a primary election. And they are just flummoxed that people would support communism, socialism, all those big words that they throw out. And again, these are also some establishment Democrats that are doing that, too, like the Chuck Schumers and people like that. Well, first of all, and you see that in the news narrative, the legacy media narrative, they’re using those talking points, too. They actually referred to them as the Democratic Socialists that won Tuesday as Democrats Tea Party. Now, if you remember your history correct, the Tea Party was a right-wing group that came out of, a backlash against President Obama and his health initiatives that turned out to be the Affordable Care Act and things like that. And so it was not a grassroots, it was an organized rejection of President Obama’s policies.

[30:12] And so they are, the media is labeling these democratic socialists at one as the Democrats Tea Party. We could use some more democratic socialists in the Democratic Party.

[30:26] For transparency, I do need to tell you that I am not a Democrat. I am not a member of the party. I refuse to be a member of any party because I don’t like party politics. Although I have not voted for a Republican in probably 10 years, and I probably will never vote for a Republican, especially as long as Trump is still involved in some aspect. I do have some opinions about the Democratic Party, and one of those things is that they are losing their minds because some progressive, upstart young people, younger people, won a primary election in a city that happens to be predominantly Democratic. See, that’s the other thing, you know, they’re extrapolating this win as something that’s going to happen across the country and you’re in danger. That’s how Fox News is labeling it.

[31:33] You know, look out. These people are coming for your for your children or however they characterize it. And that’s not the case. In fact, they had the woman that’s in charge of the Center for American Progress was making that claim on CNN that.

[31:52] You know, we can’t have this and this won’t happen in Iowa. They’re a little bit more straight laced in Iowa is basically what she was saying. I’m paraphrasing.

[32:03] And that’s not the case because just because these people in New York that won were Democratic socialists doesn’t mean that what they were fighting for or what the people voted for them were worried about, is any different than what is outside the city. And in Iowa, affordability and inflation and putting food on the table and health insurance and housing, you know, all those basic, basic humanity things. And so the message is the same just because they have a different label to it. And people are like, well, democratic socialists want to get rid of capitalism completely. And that means communism. No, it doesn’t mean communism. Communism is another economic system. That, uh, that Karl Marx, uh, uh, uh, trumpeted the democratic socialists. Yes. The, their policy statements are that they want to end capitalism, but they want to do it through democratic means. They don’t want a dictatorship. That’s what we get with the communist system, or we have gotten with the communist system in the past where we’ve seen it. It’s been a dictatorship And that’s not what democratic socialists are all about. They’re about.

[33:31] Lessening the effects of capitalism. And in fact, in the United States, democratic socialists, most democratic socialists would be considered social democrats in that they don’t want to do away with capitalism completely. They just want to heavily regulate it and heavily tax it and use that money to support people who are struggling, the social safety net. And that’s what I can get behind. I really agree with a lot of democratic socialist policies. You know, I… I have my problems with capitalism. I wish it didn’t exist. It’s not the best economic system, no matter what the Republicans say, because you always have the have and the have-nots.

[34:28] And, in fact, I saw this one video clip. I wish I remembered to save it. But they were talking about that what you should do is you should go back, because back in the 60s when there was a lot of prosperity, post-war prosperity, income tax was about 90% for rich people. And and after reagan got in office and knocked that down the corporate tax rate down into the into the 20s that’s where we see a lot of our problems where they shifted shifted a lot of the burden from the corporations and the top one percent they shifted a lot of the burden to regular people that, can’t really afford higher taxes and and and fees and things like that But somebody, I saw this video clip and somebody was saying that they should have a progressive tax system for corporations, that if you pay corporations.

[35:35] Your employees like shit, you should get jacked up taxes that the state or the government should tax that you hire because you pay your employees crappy. If you pay a decent wage to your employees, then you get a tax credit. And I fully agree with that. I think that’s great, Um, you know, especially because the, the tax incentives that they do now don’t work. You know, they, they claim that they’re going to create 50 or 60 new jobs and then they get a, you know, 20, 30 year tax abatement, and then come to find out in most cases, in a lot of the studies that they didn’t fulfill their end of the bargain and they had no way of, getting that tax incentive back. And so I would much prefer that you base the taxes on how well you treat your employees.

[36:38] Because I think there would be a lot of corporations that would then improve how they treat their employees just so that they could get the tax benefit from it. So it’s like either pay your employees the money or you’re going to pay it to, the state because the state then has to take care of your employees to fill in the gaps that you don’t help out with. So it’s like you’re still going to be responsible for that in one way or the other. Would you rather do it up front or on the back end?

[37:14] And that’s one of the things that when I do have conversations with a conservative friend of mine and they complain about regulations, I tell them, I said, well, the thing is, we’re going to have to pay for this eventually. Either whatever energy costs or water or climate change or whatever. We’re going to have to pay for it eventually. I would rather pay for it up front, where it’s cheaper than waiting and not doing anything. And then it costs a lot more on the back end to try to correct something that went wrong.

[37:54] And so what I wanted to say, you know, to get back on track, because I kind of went off on a tangent there, is that these Democrats that are.

[38:06] Losing their minds over these three primary wins for Mondami is, like I said, it’s New York City. It’s predominantly Democrat. You’re going to have Democrats winning. Um, the people that lost that those primaries were, uh, incumbents that had been in office for quite a while. I think one guy had been there 30 years or something like that. And people are tired of the old politics. They’re tired of what’s been going on and, and the fact that they want to see more fight from the Democrats against the fascist Trump administration. And a lot of these older incumbents that have been losing, at least in the New York City area, they have been part of that system that has done nothing. And so here you got these younger people that come in and say, hey, we’re going to do this, this and this. And the people are like, we’re going to vote for them. So it’s the voters that chose these candidates. There isn’t some nefarious conspiracy theory to impose communism on the country. It’s just that.

[39:26] People are looking for a different kind of political outcome. They are looking for a better life and they want a government that is responsible, responsive to their needs and what they want to get out of those outcomes. And so they’re going to vote for those people. And in many cases in these New York primaries, the Democrats that won their primary are going to be pretty much elected to Congress in the general election because, again, the city is predominantly Democratic. And we saw the same thing with California. Trump and the MAGAs were like talking about that the Democrats were cheating, but California is dominated by Democrats. It’s just, it’s demographics. It’s, it’s math. So you’re going to have, uh, Democrats winning a majority of the elections in California. It’s just gonna, that’s just how it’s going to happen. And so I think that a lot of the establishment Democrats just need to get on the bandwagon and try to help their party.

[40:43] Move on and win these midterms so that they can start fighting back against Trump and have some teeth with it. But instead, there’s some of them that are going to get lost in the weeds because they have interlopers in their party. No, they don’t. It’s like that’s what the Republicans do. The Republicans don’t fight like that with the interlopers in their party, and that’s how Trump was able to take over the party. So the Democrats just need to get on the bandwagon for the midterms.

[41:29] Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using the Amplify Studio. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you wanna support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.shop. See you next time.