Day 30 – "Don’t Dream It’s Over" (Or, the Resistance to Their Resistance)

Why, Despite the Institutional Power the Supremacist Faction Currently Wields, the Only Way They Win Is if We Allow Them To.

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

I break chains all by myself; won't let my freedom rot in hell. I’m a keep running, ‘cause a winner don’t quit on themselves. – Beyoncé – Freedom

There’s a battle ahead. Many battles are lost, but you’ll never see the end of the road while you’re traveling with me. – Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s over

I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table

Last summer, I started trying to read pretty much everything publicly available on the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project, aka Project 2025. I wrote about it frequently in the months leading up to the election and plenty about it since. The reason is because I knew, from first-hand experience, they were deadly serious. This wasn’t just political hyperbole or bombastic rhetoric meant to fire up their base. It really was their proposed transition plan. But, not from one presidency to another. It was a how-to guide for turning the United States into an anti-democracy.

Back then, even well-meaning friends wondered if I was perhaps being alarmist. That’s not what those friends are saying to me anymore. But the crazy thing is, as far as I can tell, every truly smart (I’m clearly not talking about the imbecilic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico – that was all Trump), truly evil thing this administration has done in its first 30 days was laid out in that same presidential transition plan.

That’s the thing we must remember; while this all feels like it came out of nowhere, it didn’t. What they’re putting forth is this faction’s greatest hits; a range of tactics they’ve been shaping and honing for 60 years. It started with the mass segregationist defection from the Democrats – the party of slaveholders to the Republican Party – the party that came into existence to fight slavery.

Those defections began in 1964, when Strom Thurmond, head of the southern contingent and lifelong Democrat, jumped ship. This was the second time Strom had left. The first time, as we saw in Election Reflections #8: 1964 – 2024: Meeting History, was in 1948 to cofound the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic Party, otherwise known as the Dixiecrats.

Their platform stated, among other things: “We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program” (their first foray into combatting DEI) then, they selected Strom as their presidential candidate.

After their abysmal showing during the 1948 election, they found themselves slinking back to the Democratic Party. But they kept the name, along with what they saw as “ideological purity” and a commitment to “conservative values”. Strom, disgusted by his party’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, left the Democratic Party for good.

A few months later, Alabama state trooper James Fowler effectively executed Jimmie Lee Jackson, who’d draped his body over his mother to prevent her from being beaten. Their crime? Staging a tiny voter registration drive in Alabama, a state where it was commonly understood that democracy wasn’t for them.

And suddenly, all hell broke loose in Selma – everything from the murders of James Reeb, Jonathan Daniels and Viola Liuzzo, to the images of a concussed and bleeding John Lewis and Amelia Boynton, beaten unconscious, lying in the middle of a tear-gassed Edmund Pettus Bridge. Still, Americans of every ancestry and faith, men and women, young and old, straight and gay, kept coming, descending on Selma.

By the time they entered Montgomery, they were 10,000 strong – the same size as the so-called Jericho Marchers who assaulted the Capitol on Insurrection Day. There’s also no doubt that the Selma activists and all who stood by them won. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, exactly 60 years ago, because of them, as well as a slew of other advances, including Mildred and Richard Loving’s victory over the state of Virginia, which sought to invalidate their marriage due to their mixed ancestry.

Mildred and Richard Loving, in their hometown of Central Point, Virginia, 1967.

But, the defenders of a “for some” America weren’t done. Nixon’s 1968 win, after Bobby’s and Martin’s deaths and LBJ’s decision to not run again, breathed new life into their bones. They saw how it was possible to change tactics while keeping their goal intact. Their strategy was simple; take their vices, repackage them, and sell them back to the American public as virtues.

They sanitized their language. They quit shouting about niggers and physically barring university doors to prevent integration, and rebranded themselves “social conservatives” and “army of the faithful”. The $22 million Project 2025, this ideology’s ninth iteration, is what this “culture war” strategy looks like today. But, already, there’s mounting evidence that it’s a war they can’t win. This is a story with four parts.

“We Can Help You”

Over these past months, I’ve also sought to use my experience – both as African American Southerner who grew up at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement and as a former Southern Baptist minister who saw, first-hand, the denomination’s backslide on everything from racial justice to women’s equality – to help us make sense of the place we’re in. One where religion has been politicized, politics has been religionized, and democracy has been undermined.

Understanding this is particularly important, given that churchgoers, the group doing this ideology’s heavy lifting, crossed the threshold into minority status eight years ago, with their rate of decline steadily increasing. Supremacists would call this effort, this counter-offensive, many things, most of which were meant to present it as its opposite. To word-weight it. But, in the end, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. What matters is what it does. What it is.

At its core are three men we’re already familiar with, and who are, in many ways, its Founding Fathers: Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority (and who insisted that Tinky Winky, the children’s puppet, was a gay groomer); Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate and founder of the Christian Coalition, and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of both of the above organizations and the Heritage Foundation.

The ideas Weyrich conceived of and that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell popularized, allowed segregationism to reinvent itself; shifting from overt racism to covert versions to social conservatism, culture warriors, Tea Party-ism (remember those guys?) and most recently, self-described “patriots”/MAGA-ism. (It’s not just roses that smell the same no matter what you call them – if you’re looking for a refresher, all three – Falwell, Robertson and Weyrich – were covered, in detail, in Election Reflections #9: The Gospel According to Gaga.)

The impetus for the creation of the Moral Majority, which would emerge as militant Christianity’s flagship organization, was actually a power struggle over control of Christian Voice, an advocacy group Weyrich co-founded, funded, and equipped with its most enduring strategy – so-called Moral Report Cards. The pamphlets allowed the organization to claim to be non-political while signaling to an estimated 50,000 pastors – and through them, their congregations – who God wanted them to vote for.

After Robert Grant, Christian Voice’s president, claimed that the organization was being overtaken by “Three Catholics and a Jew”, referencing Weyrich (Catholic-turned-born-again Christian), Terry Dolan (closeted strategist who fought against gay rights during the day and cruised gay bars at night), and Howard Phillips (Jew-turned-born-again Christian who pioneered “defund the left” campaigns). All of them promptly left Christian Voice and joined with Falwell to found the Moral Majority.

As the chief architect of the New Right, Weyrich’s most enduring influence lies in his novel combination of regressive economics with Christian dominionism; creating a feedback loop where one energizes the other. The original goals of his Heritage Foundation were strictly economic; focused on issues of taxation and regulation, which he and his cofounders considered to be anti-business. But, it never gained traction. Not until he began strategically targeting his efforts toward Southern Christian groups, in essence, marrying his economic and political ideas to racialized religion.

Churchgoing businessmen, fueled by the heady combination of economic opportunism and supremacy ideology, joined in droves. The result was the Heritage Foundation’s patented “come back” strategy: a) keep the “wrong” people from voting, and b) keep those same people from holding office. Turns out, a strong execution of “a” renders “b” effectively moot.

The Heritage Foundation, despite its name, was never about America’s heritage or being a charitable foundation. It was envisioned as a culture-war think-tank, a conservative counterpart to the Brookings Institution. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it was legally bound to be nonpartisan, which was a farce, given how quickly the organization mastered the art of stopping just short of explicitly naming the presidents their plans had been crafted for – starting with Ronald Reagan – for whom the first Mandate for Leadership was written. Many of its contributing authors went on to roles in the Reagan administration.

In 2004, this supposedly Christian organization worked out how to capitalize on the surge of American nationalism following 9/11, and how to use those sentiments to secure George W Bush a second term, along with Republican control in Congress. They enlisted counter-protestors to oppose those opposing the invasion of Iraq. And, they steadfastly defended the unlawful detaining and inhumane treatment of people held at Guantanamo Bay. Then, they spent eight years deriding not just Obama’s policies but him as a person.

That said, they, like most Republicans, opposed Trump. Until they didn’t. When Trump announced his candidacy, the leader of the organization’s advocacy arm stated, on Fox News, no less, "Donald Trump's a clown. He needs to be out of the race." Heritage Foundation economic writer Stephen Moore described Trump as “full of all of these contradictions” and “kind of a tabula rasa on policy."

And, Executive Vice President Kim Holmes declared that Trump was "not a conservative," and that his supporters "are behaving more like an alienated class of Marxist imagination than as social agents of stability and tradition.” But all that changed when Trump secured the nomination, and even more once he’d been declared victor. “We can help you,” they essentially said, “Just like we’ve been helping conservative presidents since Reagan.”

An out-of-his-depth Trump invited them in, and they’ve been both driving policy and influencing placement ever since. The database of roughly 3,000 sufficiently vetted religious conservatives the organization had been building since 2014 led to at least 66 Trump administration hires his first term.

The reason they were able to exercise such outsized influence? Because they were one of the few groups, even among conservatives, who’d been moderate in their criticisms. First, they’d never come out as “never Trump”, and second, they pivoted early, seizing on the opportunity a Trump presidency, a “tabula rasa on policy”, afforded.

Which, gets us to Project 2025; devised with the understanding that even if they eked out a win in 2024, demographically, it would be their last one. Unless democracy was essentially dismantled. Though centered around a 30-chapter, 920-page book that details their strategy, the Project is far more than that.

It includes a personnel database of ideologically aligned potential appointees, an extensive “online education” curriculum aimed at the public, and a distilled "playbook" designed for "forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President's utterance of 'so help me God.'"

They’re the ones writing Trump’s most dehumanizing and destructive executive orders and coming up with tactics like using national emergency powers to override those states’ rights segregationists once held so sacred, this time, to press deportations.

That’s the most alarming thing about what they’ve put together. While certain bits will need the support of Congress and/or favorable rulings from SCOTUS, the rest of it is designed to completely circumvent the checks and balances built into the system, utilizing executive power in ways we’ve never seen.

Never has a single, outside organization – let alone a religious nonprofit – had this kind of unilateral reach and unfettered influence within a presidential administration. On July 2, 2024, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts stated, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

Mr. Sam

My grandparents’ home, the house where I grew up, was located about a mile due west of downtown Birmingham in Smithfield, a historically African American section of town, which is why 16^th Street Baptist Church and so many other congregations were located nearby. But, I don’t remember any of the businesses being owned by people who lived in our neighborhood.

For instance, down at the corner of our street was a little red general store. It was owned and operated by a heavy-set, white-identifying man who everybody called Mr. Sam. His wife, Mrs. Deana, a chain-smoking big-haired woman in her forties, worked behind the deli counter. Word was, Mr. Sam had shot and killed over twenty men – all colored – and all with no consequence.

I remember my teenage uncle Don telling me, at seven years old, not to notice Mrs. Deana’s ample breasts if I didn’t want to end up on the business end of the sawed-off shotgun Mr. Sam kept behind the counter, or worse yet, end up like poor Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire and sank in Alabama’s Tallahatchie River. Nearly 20 years later, what those grown men had done to 14-year-old Emmett was still being used to terrify little boys like me.

I remember one afternoon, being in the store on the far side from the register, trying to recall whether I was supposed to get Hunt’s or Heinz. Another man, dressed in a police officer’s uniform, walked in and started chatting it up with Mr. Sam, discussing the upcoming poker game, etc. The talk wound around to race relations in Birmingham, and I remember the man saying something like, “A nigger is like a good hunting dog, useful, as long as they know their place.” “But when they bite their master,” he continued, “It’s time to put ‘em down.”

Mr. Sam looked over and saw me standing there, church mouse quiet, waiting to pay for the catsup. I remember him looking at me with something that felt almost like regret that I’d been privy to that conversation. The police officer looked down at me with no sense of remorse, or even awareness. “Hey there, sonny,” was all he said with that gentle smile adults reserve for kids.

If I’d been lost and distressed, I have no doubt that this man would have picked me up and delivered me safely home. That’s because, in his eyes, I was a kid. There was zero recognition that, before long, when he looked at me, he’d no longer see a kid but a nigger, the equivalent of a good hunting dog.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that the way this man was behaving wasn’t personal. Nor was it revenge-seeking for anything his fellow Alabamians had done to him. It was practical — what needed doing — if they wanted to dissuade “those people” from coming for their share of the American pie. From seeking jobs, homes and businesses, legal protections, political power and cultural spaces that belonged exclusively to those he deemed “his people”.

This is what supremacy does; it asserts that some lives matter and others don’t; that some people are worth more, others, less. Like Gattaca’s “Valids” and “Invalids”. So, if you’re poor, it’s okay to attach a work stipulation to your SNAP benefits. But, not if you’re wealthy, also unemployed, but living off a trust fund.

Let’s say you and I were Mr. Sam and his police officer buddy, and that it was 1975. By then, our group would have enjoyed 30 years of outsized societal benefits; since 1945 – the end of WW2. But also by then, wherever we looked, sociological, cultural and legal changes would have been chipping away at our privileged position. Evidence of our shifting demography would have been everywhere, making it apparent that soon, we’d no longer be at the top of the pyramid.

That, by extension, also means that, in a vote-based system, if we’re not the majority, someone else is. And, it would stand to reason that they’ll do to us, the new minority, the same thing we did when we were on top; seek to grow their prosperity, power and social worth at the minority’s expense. That new ruling faction (“Meet the new boss,” The Who sang, “same as the old boss”) might call what they’re doing, “democracy”, but it’s no truer for them than it was for us. We see that clearly when they’re in charge, but we were blind to it when we were.

Sure, we believe in democracy, or, at least we thought we did. But that was before — when our group was the majority. But now, after always being the hammer, it appears we’re soon to be the nail, the cattle when we used to be the butcher. The hunting dog when we used to be the hunter. And it’s an especially bitter pill because it’s exactly the system we set up. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to go along with it.

If we remove the societal system that awards rulership to the majority and replace it with one that awards it to the wealthy, people with “royal blood”, nobles, or adherents to a particular brand of faith, etc., if we limit citizenship and the vote to immigrants from our homelands, if we demand that wives submit to their husbands and vote the way their husbands vote, we can extend our reign. And, if we can buy ourselves enough time, with the right people in the right roles, if everything goes just right, maybe we can ensure that our supremacy will never be challenged again. Or, at least that’s the hope.

The One-Two Punch

Right now, the US is in the midst of what I’d argue is the most consequential four-year period since we became a nation, second only to the Civil War itself, also four years. (“Freedom, freedom, I can’t move, freedom, cut me loose!” Beyoncé sang, “Freedom, freedom, where are you?” ‘Cause I need freedom, too!”)

That’s because the unprecedented sociological shifts we’re undergoing have made one thing clear; our days of vacillating between supremacy and democracy, supremacy and democracy, something we’ve been doing since our founding, are over. On Martin’s 100^th birthday, when the dust finally settles, only one ideology will be left standing.

The thing is, the supremacy faction knows this. Ironically, it’s Trump’s 2024 votes, the same thing they’re touting as proof of how dominant they are that actually reveals otherwise. Because, despite significant population growth over the intervening four years, votes for Trump were essentially the same in both 2020 and 2024. That means that, with respect to the size of the voting public, his voter share actually went down.

That’s because, like the polar ice cap, their numbers are shrinking. This faction will have even fewer votes to put forth in 2028 than they did in 2024. Then, even fewer in 2032, and so forth. Again, they know this. They’ve known this was where things were headed for 60 years. Which, is why tactics to undermine the vote became so prominent. We’ve explored this in detail in various letters, but perhaps most extensively in Election Reflections #2: The Way It Is?

It all started in 1968, with the creation of the Southern strategy and the supremacist takeover of the GOP, followed by the SBC and NRA, the enactment of poverty protocols, and the FBI’s war on the member groups of the first Rainbow Coalition, combined with massive increases in felony disenfranchisement. That led to deal-making with Reagan (who the SBC endorsed instead of supporting fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter) and other Republican presidents, which made a takeover of the US Supreme Court possible.

Then, came the one-two punch from the US Supreme Court itself – Citizens United (punch one), which gave moneyed interests the ability to do today what the three-fifths compromise allowed wealthy slaveholders to do – buy enough slaves to run roughshod over democracy – and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (punch two), which allowed states most likely to oppress votership to do so legally.

This is on top of the many ways money has already restricted everything from who can run for public office to who can afford to serve – if they win. As a result, in Congress, there’s an astounding 96.6% incumbency rate, which means that once someone wins, there’s virtually no chance of them not being reelected. For life. As long as that's the case, the needs of the people will never be part of their calculus.

But wait, there’s more! Just this past Thursday, the BBC reported on the 299 undocumented migrants - from India, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka (notice, despite this administration’s efforts to portray immigrants as Mexicans, they’re missing from this list).

All of them were deported from the United States, then, put under armed guard in a Panama hotel. The Panamanian government, in exchange for payment from the US, agreed to be a “bridge” country for deportees – one that allows us to drop people off in a foreign country and effectively wash our hands of them.

Trapped in crowded rooms, children held up signs that said, "Please help us," "We are not safe in our country," and "Please save the Afghan girls." Their choice? Return to those countries they’re terrified of, or be shipped off to a Panamanian internment camp. Perhaps, even forever.

Then, there’s the Stonewall LGBTQ National Monument, where a Trump executive order renamed it the LGB National Monument – erasing trans and queer people, despite the fact that the majority of original protestors were both trans and of color, from Marsha P. Johnson (African American trans woman) to Sylvia Rivera (Latinx trans woman) to Stormé DeLarverie (biracial non-binary).

Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, NYC, 1970s.

"The transgender community threw the first bricks that launched the contemporary LGBTQ human rights movement," said New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, one of our nation’s few out, LGBTQ+ elected officials. And he’s right. We owe it to them to stand with them.

And this is all before getting to the increasing devastation caused by escalating poverty, the cutting of critical supports for people suffering from everything from homelessness to food insecurity, and the ways we’re reversing not just DEI gains in the workplace but reverting to adversarial, targeted policing – the same brand of justice practiced by Mr. Sam’s police officer buddy, and that led to George Floyd’s death.

The Nation We’ll Grow Up to Be

But, even with all the power this faction is currently wielding, and all the injustices they’re perpetrating, supremacy is a doomed cause. The good news is nothing they’re doing can stand against the tsunami of voters who now believe in an America for all of us, rather than just some of us. This emergent majority’s numbers are so massive, and growing so rapidly, that nothing short of them splintering themselves into factions or simply giving up the ghost can keep them from winning.

Still, it won’t be easy. Doing so will require from us the same thing it required from those before us; an unwavering commitment to stand, including with those who need us to stand with them. To be what the WW2 resistance was to Nazism, what the Underground Railroad was to slavery and what sit-in protestors and Freedom Riders were to segregation.

This is the moment in which we find ourselves. One where each of us, by what we resist and what we allow, by whether we stand up or slink back, has a small but definitive say in the kind of nation we’ll finally grow up to be.

Right now, there are so many anniversaries we should be celebrating, but that we aren’t. This year is the 160^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, the end of slavery and the ratification of the 13^th Amendment. It’s the 70^th anniversary of Rosa Park’s arrest for breaking the law by not relinquishing her seat, followed by the year-long Montgomery bus boycott – considered the dawn of the modern Civil Rights movement.

It’s been 70 years since Operation Wetback – the biggest mass deportation of undocumented workers in US history. As many as 1.3 million people were swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with the racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society; most of whom we’d implored to come here to pick our crops.

This year is the 60^th anniversary of both Selma and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it’s the five-year mark for the 2020 protests. But none of that’s being acknowledged. It’s like we’re a nation that’s aware we’re not worthy of remembering these things.

Instead, we’ve got companies that are scared to celebrate African American History Month, and who are backsliding on their former commitments to DEI as fast as they can. And that might be the most tragic aspect of where we are – so much of what we Americans have to be proud of is being eaten away, like termites in the basement, and with it, so many of the advances we’ve made – ones that would have equipped us to thrive.

Which gets us back to Trump. Nothing he’s doing should be surprising to us. He hasn’t changed. He’s still the same person he was back when he took out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty for the five boys falsely accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. He’s the man who sent federal troops to Portland, who visited the murderer of protestors in Kenosha, but not the victims’ families.

He’s the president who blamed Heather Heyer’s death on her because she was out protesting a Proud Boys rally, who threatened NFL players for kneeling, and who claimed, for years, that Obama wasn’t a United States citizen. He’s still the same guy who, in 2005, was recorded saying, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab 'em by the pussy," who’s obsessed with convincing us he’s “really smart”, and who’s fixated on petty vendettas.

So, no, I don’t think he’s all of a sudden become a sage, beloved statesman or anything of the sort. But all that’s also beside the point. Because, Trump, despite the damage he’s already done in his first 30 days, is still not the real danger here. He never has been. It’s the people behind him and around him, the very smart people creating strategy for him and writing executive orders for him.

It’s the cabinet he’s assembled, most of whom were Heritage Foundation recommendations. And it’s the Heritage Foundation itself, which came to this presidency fully aware that this was their Normandy, their “now or never”, their Edmund Pettus Bridge.

But, the only way they win is by successfully convincing us they’ve already won. So, while they’re working up unconstitutional executive orders for Trump to sign, while they’re bullying Congress, firing federal workers and threatening the private sector, we’re embracing our power. We’re forcing Congress and the private sector to choose whose power they respect more – this administration’s or ours.

We’re putting people on notice that every vote they cast, every DEI policy they scuttle, every time they allow this faction to bully them into submission, they’re showing us who they are and where they stand. And, that we won’t forget. At the same time, we’re backing the growing list of companies, from Delta Air Lines, e.l.f beauty, Meijer and Proctor & Gamble to Apple, Sephora and, of course, Costco, who are doing right by us, and who are refusing to backslide on their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The plan for ending this protracted assault is simple: 1. Stand with everyone who needs us to stand with them. 2. Leverage our power to ensure that everyone who doesn’t have enough, has enough. And, 3. Transform ourselves into a government of, by and for the people, a society where we all have a vote, a voice and a stake, a land made for you and me. A democracy.

Though this toxic ideology won’t die easily, from every indication, it’s in its final arc, which is why its proponents are fighting so hard. But, they don’t know us. They don’t get that we’ve been here so many times before; that the reserves of our resilience run deep. Every time, from slavery on, they’ve put the nation in a chokehold, we’ve risen up to break it. Every time. Even when they thought their victory was assured, and their power, absolute.

Then, there’s how the world itself has changed, and how we, the people, are different in every way, from demographics to how we see each other to the kind of America we believe in. That’s what they don’t get, and why we’ll end this once and for all. How we’ll use democracy to break supremacy’s back. “Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over. When the world comes in,” Neil Finn of Crowded House sang. “They come, they come to build a wall between us. We know they won’t win.” He was right. They won’t.

Today marks Day 30 of the fight to make us into a society that works for all of us. There are 1,355 days between today and the 2028 presidential election, and 1,430 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.

I have two closing songs for you today. The first is Beyoncé’s powerful anthem, Freedom, with its beautiful, but haunting antebellum imagery, and that features Kendrick Lamar’s incredible cultural countdown that hits like a machine gun on the bridge. (If you’re not already familiar, you’ll want to read along with the lyrics on the screen.) And second is Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over, from which we get this letter’s title. Together, they remind us that the only way they win is if we let them.