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A new poll shows Americans care more about money and less about religion and patriotism than they did a quarter century ago, and a New York Times columnist calls the decline in the extent to which Americans care about traditional values “startling.”
According to the findings of the newly released Wall Street Journal poll, 43 percent of respondents cited money as very important, a 12 percentage point jump from 1998.
Patriotism has tumbled from being a top priority among 70 percent of respondent to 38 percent today, and religion has fallen almost as much as a top priority, from 62 percent in 1998 to 39 percent today.
The poll was conducted by NORC, a research organization at the University of Chicago.
Prioritization of money is bipartisan, according to the poll, with 45 percent of both Democrats and Republicans cited it as very important.
In 1998, 70 percent of Americans said patriotism was very important to them. This year only 38 percent said so. In 1998, 62 percent said religion was very important to them. This year only 39 percent said so.
The poll also saw big declines in the extent to which people value having children and community involvement.
The WSJ poll tracks with similar polling conducted by Gallup and and the Pew Research Center.
“The declines in traditional values are startling,” NYT columnist Peter Coy wrote.
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New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has been criticized for being too close to Donald Trump and holding back information that congressional investigations or impeachment panels could have used to score more news for her book. In her latest report with Michael Schmidt, she takes a hit at her golden goose.
The Wednesday report nails the former president for hypocrisy after he complained that the government was being weaponized against him. "He would know," the title says.
“He was always telling me that we need to use the F.B.I. and I.R.S. to go after people — it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now,” the report quoted Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly. It isn't the first time he's said it.
In 2022, Kelly told Schmidt that Trump wanted to target Andrew McCabe and James Comey.
READ: Lauren Boebert shot down by witness as she obsesses over 'public urination' in Washington, D.C.
Trump fired Andrew McCabe mere days before his retirement, barring his federal pension, simply because he criticized Trump's role in the Russia scandal. Trump was furious that McCabe's wife supported Hillary Clinton. In fact, he said Trump was obsessed with her. McCabe ultimately got an extremely rare and invasive audit by the IRS that turned up nothing.
Comey's clash with Trump became infamous, as he was fired after refusing to give Trump absolute loyalty.
“I would tell him why it was wrong, and while I was there I did everything I could to steer him away from it and tell him why it was a bad idea,” Kelly recalled. “I thought we were successful, but he would often ask a lot of people to do a lot of things that he didn’t want to do himself in the hopes that someone would do it and he could claim he did nothing wrong.”
The 2022 report cited Trump regularly demanding something be done to his enemies that would make them look bad.
"The president would carry on about having them investigated to the point that Mr. Kelly thought he needed to tell the president that what he wanted was highly problematic, explaining, in sometimes heated conversations, that what Mr. Trump wanted was not just potentially illegal and immoral but also could blow back on him," said the Times.
Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen published his book Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics before Republicans even won the election and started their so-called "weaponization of government" subcommittee. Trump had desperately tried to kill Cohen's previous book.
Cohen's stories recall being let out of prison on house arrest due to the pandemic. When he was meeting with those ready to process his release, he was faced with the demand to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying he wouldn't write a book about Donald Trump and he wouldn't speak to the media about Donald Trump. Cohen and members of Congress have demanded how something like this became a formal request. While Cohen ultimately won a court case against this unprecedented demand, there has been no information about the request and how it reached Cohen.
The Haberman/Schmidt report also cited a "petty" decision to block then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi from using a military plane in 2019 to visit troops in Afghanistan.
READ: Trump busted by CNN fact checker for telling a 'story that cannot possibly be true'
Then there was his war against former secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator John Kerry. Trump was desperate to prosecute him. He claimed that Kerry broke the law by speaking to Iranian officials he negotiated a nuclear deal with. Trump was working to kill the deal, despite Kerry continuing to speak to his contact.
"As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed senior officials behind closed doors about using the Justice Department to target Mr. Kerry," the Times said, citing two people familiar with the matter. "Ultimately, federal prosecutors in New York were pushed by senior Justice Department officials in Washington to investigate Mr. Kerry, according to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan at the time."
Trump's campaign still calls Kerry a "threat to national security" despite never being able to prosecute him for it.
John Bolton, who served Trump as the national security adviser, eagerly denounced Trump's playing the victim card.
READ: Conservative judge issues stark new warning about GOP's 'war against democracy and rule of law'
“The idea that he’s a paragon of virtue who didn’t do this to other people and is now a victim of this unfairness really is laughable," he told the Times.
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How right-wing activists are using school shootings to reignite the 'homeschooling' movement
March 29, 2023
Elected Republicans around the country have no plans of any kind to pass laws to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands after the devastating mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee this week.
Instead, many of them have another idea, wrote Molly Olmstead for Slate: get kids out of public shools altogether.
"After the mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school this week, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett was asked how Congress should respond to the violence. And Burchett was remarkably forthright. 'It’s a horrible, horrible situation,' he said. 'And we’re not gonna fix it,'" wrote Olmstead. "But there was another part of the interview that revealed the specific place this belief was coming from. When asked what should be done to protect children like his own daughter, Burchett replied, 'Well, we home-school her.'"
Similar rhetoric was pushed after the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas last year, which actually led to the first major federal gun legislation passed in 30 years. “It is clear now from the long list of school shootings in recent years that families can’t trust government schools, in particular, to bring their children or teachers home safely at the end of the day,” wrote Jordan Boyd for the far-right site The Federalist. “The same institutions that punish students for ‘misgendering’ people and hide curriculum from parents are simply not equipped to safeguard your children from harm.”
On the face of it, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since the vast majority of shooting deaths of children occur in the home, not in school shootings. But this is part of a pattern, wrote Olmstead, of the right-wing religious homeschooling movement latching onto unrelated issues to push their influence.
"The modern 'parental rights' movement was built off the work of conservative Christians who bemoaned changes in public schooling that occurred in the 1960s — namely that the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings in the classroom were unconstitutional," wrote Olmstead. "Those Christians pushed white evangelicals to pull their children out of schools to give them a more 'Christian' education. The Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian organization, campaigned during the 1980s to popularize and legalize home-schooling — and it quickly won political victories: home-schooling went from being largely illegal to legal everywhere by the early 1990s."
Burchett, Olmstead noted, makes no effort to hide this as his own motivation. “I think you’ve got to change people’s hearts,” he told reporters in the viral interview. “You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church — and I’ve said this many times — I think we really need a revival in this country.”
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