Republicans expose their dark plan to demolish free society

Big money, fringe interests, and a legal coup

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a busy 72 hours for the absolute worst people in the country. From Donald Trump raising millions of dollars off of his Blue Steel mugshot to other GOP presidential candidates scrambling to say the most demented things possible, their sadism and shamelessness continue to be rewarded in a system built on perverse incentives.

On the bright side, it’s Saturday and the new Steven Toast series is now streaming.

Today we’re going beyond the headlines to examine the GOP’s ultimate game plan to end free, secular, and fair society as we know it, and what can be done about it.

Later this weekend, we’ll have some important election coverage, as well as a review of big stories on abortion, democracy, organized labor, and other issues.

Please consider upgrading your membership and/or donating to keep this work sustainable and viable. The extremist conservative movement is financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in a constellation of right-wing outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their ideas. We have readers like you, who can band together and help keep the scrappy upstarts afloat.

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When I promised that I’d lay out my thoughts about the GOP debate in the next newsletter, it was based on the assumption that by the time that Fox News called it a night on its GOP C-lister circus, I’d have some actual thoughts to share. Turns out I was being overly generous to those involved, as I barely felt or thought a thing after the debate wrapped. At least at first.

This isn’t a recap of the debate, but instead a look at the GOP’s far-right’s quiet, coordinated attacks on government, public services, and secular society. The debate offered a little window into their strategy, while other current events provide further indication of what they’re plotting.

The post-debate numbness that many of us felt was a product of the stupidity and disposability of the event, yes, but the event was only stupid and disposable because we’ve normalized utter madness — a key component of the GOP’s plan.

The Republican Party’s takeover by death cult-level extremists has turned fringe-lunatic ideas into party orthodoxy, and because the GOP is one of two major parties, utter madness has been mainstreamed and turned into actual policy. Candidates correctly assessed that there would be no pushback to even the most craven things they said, so when the moderators asked the candidates to indicate whether they believed that human behavior is causing climate change, not a single hand was raised. This, at the tail end of the hottest and deadliest summer in history.

Ron DeSantis followed up the inquiry by raging against the corporate media and lying about President Biden’s response to the deadly wildfires in Maui. It was a non-sequitur and disturbing response, especially coming from the governor of a state that’s regularly ravaged by extreme weather events. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about his property tax issues.

In between their squabbling and screaming at Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical fraudster and wrestling heel, the candidates managed to squeeze in a litany of other fringe and fascistic policy proposals, like invading Mexico to stop migrants and drugs. What happened to simply building the wall?

The most telling moments came when the candidates discussed which federal agencies and cabinet departments they’d eliminate in the exceedingly unlikely case that any of them became president.

The plot to end secular democracy

Conservative antipathy toward federal workers and so-called government bureaucracy is nothing new, even if it’s disingenuous given how much they spend on enriching their donors and future employees while they’re in power. The difference today is that Republicans are no longer simply hoping to cut regulations and redirect money from federal agencies to corporations, contractors, and the richest elites; now, they’re plotting to gut and neuter some parts of the government entirely, while using the courts to rework long-standing, universally acknowledged principles.

Their talk of abolishing or rewiring federal law enforcement agencies is in large part a product of having to play along with their base’s belief that Trump and his cast of clowns have been unfairly targeted by the FBI and DOJ. For all they cry about the “weaponization” of those agencies, the tears are only because a few of them are being forced to face some consequences for trying to overthrow the government. Instead, they simply want to appoint their own leaders and replace lifetime employees with dogmatic conservatives and Q-pilled mid-level cops.

The only real weaponization of government that’s happening right now is the Republicans’ utilization of the courts. The approach has become crystal clear over the past six years, since Trump made the federal judiciary a subsidiary of the Federalist Society. There are two main approaches:

1. A conservative organization backed by billionaire dark money and a conservative state with leaders willing to claim a nominal interest file lawsuits against the executive branch in an effort to limit long-acknowledged authority;

2. A conservative state passes a brazenly unconstitutional policy with the explicit intention of drawing a lawsuit that will allow the Supreme Court to throw out long-standing precedents and mandate wildly unpopular policies that would never pass muster with voters.

Examples of the first approach include the lawsuits that led the Supreme Court to gut the EPA and overturn the Biden administration’s modest student loan cancelation rule. The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that seeks to obliterate the Consumer Finance Protection Board, which has become an important part of Biden’s regulatory regime. More recently, drug companies have launched a series of legal challenges to the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that gives Medicare the ability to negotiate over what it will pay for a handful of expensive prescription medications starting in 2026.

Additionally, an appeals court just ruled against a high profile challenge seeking to strip OSHA of a vast majority of its ability to protect workers on the job site, but the decision could be appealed to the Supreme Court, and there will undoubtedly be more such challenges to come.

Four Republicans vowed to end the Department of Education if they somehow found themselves in the White House, but disbanding the department is more shorthand messaging than what they’d actually do. Conservatives are more than fine with the federal government laying out trillions of dollars in school funding every year, they just want to direct it toward charter schools, which are privately owned and operated with state funds, and private religious schools.

As we’ve continued to report, a growing number of conservative states are enacting or expanding school voucher programs, which suck away money and students from what are often already underfunded public schools. The next step in the right’s war on public education is striking down the separation of church and state in public schools altogether, a pursuit with multiple points of attack. In most instances, states are adding Christian conservative values to curriculum and student life in public schools, while right-wing legal groups are financing another gambit to open the floodgates even further.

Religious grifters radicalizing education

In June, Oklahoma became the first state to approve a state-funded religious charter school, a controversial decision that has drawn exactly the kind of blowback that some state officials and conservative activists intended.

I say some state officials both because granting the approval required a blatant disregard for both the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s rules and the vehement protests of the state’s Republican attorney general. Gentner Drummond, a Republican, withdrew guidance issued by his predecessor that gave legal blessing for the state to approve a charter for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, noting that public funding was unequivocally unconstitutional.

“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” Drummond said in response to the board’s decision to approve St. Isidore. “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the State to potential legal action that could be costly.”

Drummond is a Republican, but nonetheless understands the basic tenets of his state’s laws, the US constitution, and the many cases that have affirmed the Establishment clause. None of this is vague or oblique: courts have found over and over that public schools — and charters, though often owned and operated by private corporations, are nonetheless public schools — may not favor a religion or coerce students into participating in specific religious traditions, much less fully affiliate with a religious institution.

Drummond withdrew his office from defending the state and school from lawsuits over the approval of public funding — lawsuits that both Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt and the religious conservatives backing the school very intentionally courted. The school has since enlisted the services of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right Christofascist legal group that helped to overturn Roe v. Wade last year and has made dismantling secular education one of its most pressing priorities.

The ADF seems to be involved in most high profile legal battles waged by pushy Christian conservative zealots, especially those in which they are seeking the right to discriminate or access public money. The ADF cynically describes these cases as defenses of “religious freedom,” twisting it from something that protects minorities by preventing the state from declaring and imposing an official religion to a blanket permission slip for Christian conservatives to impose their will on others.

Reversing the judicial coup

It’s taken the conservative “movement” decades to get this far, with billions and billions spent on assembling the infrastructure, winning the elections, planting the judges, and mainstreaming the fringe legal theories necessary for their fundamental tear down of government and secular society.

Undoing the totality of the damage they have already caused will require Democrats building out a similar infrastructure and filling elected offices and courts with generations of ideologically committed figures. That’s doable, at least in many parts of the country, but will require the sort of mission-driven discipline that generally eludes Democrats, who have done their fair share of damage with corporate judicial nominees and elected officials. A big tent party lets in a lot of ghouls.

More immediately, Democrats and progressive allies need to take an aggressive, hardliner approach to the corruption and clear conflicts of interest in the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. Far-right advocacy groups, bankrolled by billionaires and religious zealots, are behind most of the cases aimed at kneecapping the federal government and authorizing religious takeover, which they have pursued with new urgency since having the justices they groomed and financed installed throughout the judiciary.

The ongoing revelations about Clarence Thomas’s being treated like a living deity by billionaire donors aren’t simply about disclosure. One of his principle patrons, the dictator-obsessed billionaire Harlan Crow, has given extensively to right-wing dark money groups that have worked to advance court cases, win elections, and buy off judges. Thomas’s wife Ginny is deeply enmeshed in these movements, and has been paid extensive sums by Leonard Leo, the right-wing judicial overlord whose group helps to fund the Alliance Defending Freedom. She also worked closely with Mark Meadows on the plot to overturn

Amy Coney Barrett also has ties to the ADF, having been paid generous sums to speak at some of the organization’s events. The link was briefly brought up during her Senate confirmation hearings, but it’s been otherwise ignored, even when the court heard Creative v. Elenis, the farcical case in which a majority ruled that an aggrieved Christian bakery owner could discriminate against an imaginary gay couple.

Money to push Coney Barrett’s controversial nomination over the line in 2020 flowed in from billionaires such as Jeffrey Yass, the richest man in Philadelphia and an ardent supporter and financial backer of the school privatization movement. She also has close connections to Betsy DeVos, the ultimate architect of the school voucher and religious school movement.

It’s not just the Supreme Court, and is actually worse in some ways at lower levels. For example, James Ho, the appeals court judge who just placed stringent regulations on abortion medication, financially benefits from his wife’s handsome arrangement with the organization.

Thus far, it’s been largely left to outside groups and progressive media outlets on shoestring budgets to uplift these stories, because Democratic leaders have very studiously avoided questioning the integrity of judges who lack any hint of it. Nobody believes that these judges are good, impartial people driven only by their love for law and loyal to their oath to dispassionately apply it, so by refusing to take any sort of action, Democrats are simply blessing the gross corruption and impunity of the judges as well as communicating to the public that their rights are conditional and not worth fighting for.

As the bedrock principles, protections, and public services of American society continue to fall, it’s incumbent on Democrats in power to put the spotlight on the dark corruption that has been festering inside the courts and eating away at the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. Inert Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin must begin investigations into the financial ties and conflicts of interests that compromise each justice, using subpoenas and all other methods available to him. Democrats must in the mean time demand recusals by judges with tight links to these right-wing groups that bring the cases, finance the lawyers, and work publicly to advance the causes.

It may well be that they refuse to recuse, but that will only justify further investigations (inevitably revealing more damning information) and draw more attention from a public that has shown immense motivation to vote in elections where judicial issues are directly at stake. Continued failure is surrender, both legally and electorally. Society as we know it can be saved, but not without leaders willing to do their jobs and shake up the system that has grown sclerotic from their indifference and inaction.

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