Put your shoulder to the wheel

This is the most important election of our lifetimes. Again. What are you doing about it?

Americans defeated white nationalism and Christian supremacism in 2020, but like every horror-movie villain, it’s come back for one more try. The good news is, we have every chance to beat them for good. We can deal these fascists an overwhelming defeat in 2024, consigning them once and for all to the trash heap of history. But that will only happen if good people stand up and fight. I want to do my part to make that happen, and you should too.

Reasons for, not just against

Unlike Republicans, we have more to run on than just fear and hatred of the other side. Progressives can point to a long and impressive list of wins we’ve gotten in the last four years from the Biden-Harris administration.

Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act, far and away the most transformative climate law in American history, as well as a massive infrastructure bill. He’s the most pro-union president we’ve ever had.

He ended forced arbitration in sexual-harassment cases. He’s taken steps to legalize cannabis, made Juneteenth a federal holiday, bolstered the IRS to catch tax cheats, ended the occupation of Afghanistan, won Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, capped insulin costs, and brokered an interstate agreement to conserve the Colorado River, among many other underpublicized progressive wins.

And he’d have done more if he could. Most notably, we could have had full student-loan forgiveness and prosecution of Donald Trump for his many crimes, if both of those hadn’t been stymied by wacko far-right judges. But that isn’t Democrats’ fault. If anything, it shows the vital necessity of winning more elections so we can appoint the next few Supreme Court justices.

I’m not satisfied yet. I want to defend all these wins, and I want more of them. I have every confidence that Kamala Harris will extend the winning streak of the Biden administration, on top of the historic nature of her own candidacy. I’ll proudly cast my vote for her to be our next president this November.

Oh yeah, but what about Israel?

Progressives are often hampered by our own sense of morality and nuance. We argue, we agonize, we second-guess our decisions. Too many of us withhold our votes as protest, waiting for a perfect candidate who will never materialize.

Meanwhile, religious conservatives have no such reservations. They worship their golden calf with cultish devotion, they ignore every one of his lies and outrages, and they don’t care what harm he might inflict on themselves, the country or the world. Too often, this means that thoughtful people of conscience lose, while the worst side wins.

I’m not saying we need to take lessons from the right in how to be more mindlessly obedient. But I am saying this is a perverse dynamic that leftists should be able to step back and appreciate. Too often, we let the perfect become the enemy of the good. We end up actively hurting our interests for the sake of ideological purity, rather than taking our wins where we can get them.

It’s okay to support Democrats even if you still have disagreements with them. Voting isn’t a religious pledge of eternal loyalty, it’s a utilitarian exercise in harm reduction. It’s simply an answer to this question: given the choices available to me, which is the best one? Which one most pushes the world in the direction I want it to go?

I wish I could cast a vote in this election to end the latest round of Middle East wars, but I can’t. But I can cast a vote to protect future generations from even worse climate change; to protect immigrants from white supremacy and mass deportation; to protect women’s reproductive rights from anti-choice attacks and abortion bans; to preserve Obamacare, Social Security and other safety net programs from plutocracy; to protect and advance unions; to do something about gun violence in America; to defend science against aggressive anti-intellectualism; and to help the people of Ukraine resist the invasion of a tyrannical aggressor. My vote can’t stop every evil in the world, but I’m not going to let that dissuade me from doing the good I can do.

So, with that in mind, here’s what I’m doing in 2024 in addition to voting:

• I’m writing postcards to voters in swing-state races all around the country. I’ve signed up with Postcards to Voters and Activate America. You choose a campaign and how many postcards you want to send, and they e-mail you a list of addresses and an approved message to write.

I’ve been writing ten postcards per week, and I plan to do more as the election draws near. This is my favorite method of outreach because it’s easy and flexible. You can write whenever you have a spare moment, and send out as many or as few as you’re capable of doing.

I also think it’s less intrusive and less annoying than other methods of contacting voters, which makes it more likely to be effective. A friendly, handwritten postcard is a good reminder to vote that people can keep and stick on their fridge.

• I’m donating money, as my budget allows. I dream of a post-capitalist world where money is no longer a factor in elections, but that world doesn’t exist yet. Where possible, I try to donate to local and overlooked races, rather than big national campaigns that get the lion’s share of funding.

• I volunteered to canvass for two competitive races in my backyard, one for the New York state senate and one for the House. I wanted to travel further afield, maybe to Pennsylvania, but unfortunately my son’s school schedule and my wife’s work schedule just made it unworkable. If you can travel to volunteer, you should consider doing so.

• As Election Day draws nearer, I also want to sign up for text banking. I’ve done phone banking before, and I’m not a huge fan – I find I have to make calls for an hour or more to reach just one real person, which doesn’t seem like a great return on investment for my time. But text banking seems like an acceptable compromise.

• Last but not least, I have this hat:

The author in a Harris-Walz camo hat

I don’t know what’s going to happen in November. There are reasons to be anxious, but there are also many reasons for hope and optimism. Unlike the frequently-wrong-but-never-in-doubt Christian prophets, I don’t claim to be able to see the future.

But, win or lose, I want to be able to say I did my part. It takes millions of people working together to shift the course of democracy, and I want to be one of the people who helped push it in a better direction. I imagine that one day, when he’s an adult, my son will ask me about this election. I want to honestly tell him that I did everything I could, for his sake and for the sake of the world he’s going to grow up into.

Richard Dawkins keeps getting smaller

[Previous: Why I lost faith in New Atheism]

I haven’t thought about Richard Dawkins in a while, but he’s still around. At the age of 83, he’s going on a lecture tour that’s being advertised as his farewell bow. Ross Andersen, writing for the Atlantic, attended one of these talks.

It really is a tragedy what Dawkins has become. Those of us who once looked up to him, including me, admired him for his earnest desire to bring the spirit of scientific wonder to the masses. It was his first passion in life, and that was always obvious when he was speaking about it. I had the impression that his atheist advocacy wasn’t separate from that, but came from the same wellspring of wanting everyone to know the true nature of reality. Next to the power of real understanding, the tall tales of religion are shoddy counterfeits.

The attendees at the talk (though lacking a certain diversity) still reflect some of that spirit:

The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

However, the evening immediately took an ugly turn. The introduction, from a member of Atheists for Liberty – a hard-right organization – gave a hint of what was to unfold:

Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty, told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition. Klein’s opening remarks, to that point, could have described Dawkins of 20-odd years ago, when he was first going on the attack against religion’s “profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.” But then things took a turn. Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed.” He sounded a lot like J. D. Vance.

Regrettably, this wasn’t a case of an overstepping host seizing the pulpit to preach his own weird ideas. Dawkins himself has embraced this worldview, to his detriment:

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

But… sex is a continuum. That’s not political correctness or woke culture gone mad. That’s science!

Sexual reproduction evolved from precursor species that were asexual, and nature doesn’t do binary, saltationary jumps from one state to another. Evolution works through gradual transitions and slow accumulations of complexity.

If you think sex is a straightforward binary, then how do you explain the many species that are hermaphroditic, producing both male and female gametes? What about the species that change sex in response to life cycles or environmental cues?

Even if you confine the discussion to human beings, there are people whose bodies defy simplistic notions of a gender binary. There are people with chimeric sex chromosomes, ambiguous genitalia, and bodies that don’t match what a genetic scan “should” lead one to expect. Dawkins, who’s a biologist, has no excuse for not knowing any of this.

Richard Dawkins, of all people, has done the same thing creationists are so often guilty of. He started with an ideological premise – in his case, that transgender and non-binary people shouldn’t exist – and allowed that belief to dictate his factual conclusions. Certainly, you can make philosophical arguments about what makes a person male or female, or debate how we should allocate rights based on sex or gender. But there should be no room for denying the facts of nature to support a political preference.

The saddest part of this is that, even while echoing the language and the preoccupations of right-wing culture warriors, Dawkins doesn’t seem to understand why they cheer him:

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics.

This is the only thing Andersen has to say about this video call – no further detail, no direct quotes – and his article suffered from the omission. I wish we could’ve heard more details from that call. Why does Dawkins think he’s getting support from right-wingers?

Does he have any idea? Even a wild guess? Or is he just writing it off as a mystery he has no desire to speculate about?

When it comes to culture-war issues like this, Dawkins isn’t just on the same side as the right; he’s on the same side as the religious right. You’d think that he, of all people, would have noticed the stark incongruity of this.

Obviously, I don’t choose my opinions based on the company it puts me in. But if I found that my allies on one issue were people I vehemently disagreed with about almost everything else… at the very least, I’d want to do some serious reflection to figure out why that was. Dawkins seems remarkably incurious about it.

Andersen suggests that Dawkins built his reputation on defending evolution against creationist attacks. Now that that’s no longer a burning culture-war issue, he doesn’t know what to do with himself and he’s casting about for another target worthy of his attention:

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational.

I think this misses the mark. At best, it’s only a partial explanation.

Rather, Dawkins possesses an all-too-human flaw: he can dish it out but can’t take it. He delights in skewering other people’s sacred cows, but when it’s his own cherished assumptions under attack, he lashes out with the same knee-jerk defensiveness he so often encounters from religious believers. (Remember when I wrote an article in the Guardian offering some criticisms of Dawkins, and he flew into a rage and accused me of wanting to stamp out all dissent with my verbal jackboots?)

Like I said, Dawkins built his persona on scientific skepticism, on willingness to question what everyone “knows” to be true. In The God Delusion, he wrote: “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.”

Now he’s abandoned that principle entirely. It’s almost a cliche: the scientist who made great achievements in his youth, but ossified into stubborn crankery in his old age, resisting any new ideas he wasn’t personally responsible for.

When confronted with sex and gender issues or social-justice controversies that he had no personal experience with, his own principles should have led him to be gracious, considerate and open-minded. Instead, he entrenched himself, exactly like the fundamentalists he deplores. He concluded that he was right and everyone else was wrong and that he had nothing left to learn. It’s small-minded, mean behavior, unworthy of a true scientist. It’s a grand shame that, at the twilight of his career, he’s made this his last act and the way he wants to be remembered.

New on OnlySky: Be an average citizen of the future, now

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It poses a thought experiment: If you were flung hundreds of years into the past, how would your modern morality clash with the sentiments that were commonly held then?

The past wasn’t a nice place, and most of the moral ideas we take for granted today only won out after long struggle. In ages of monarchy, of empire, of colonialism, of patriarchy, of religious supremacism, our modern beliefs in democracy, equality, human rights and tolerance would be shocking, outrageous notions that would put you in league with the most radical thinkers of those days.

Now slide the lesson forward: What beliefs do we hold that the future will abhor? And what does that tell us about what we should be thinking and doing right now, knowing that our era will one day stand in the judgment of history?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

So, what would you do as a modern person trapped in the past?

Hopefully, you’d be a shining light to those dark ages. You’d join the visionaries and reformers who stood against popular prejudice. You might become a crusader for free thought, sheltering religious dissenters from the wrath of the Inquisition, writing books that defended people’s right to make up their own minds. You might take up arms in the revolution and fight for democracy.

You might oppose imperialism and speak up for indigenous rights against colonizers who wanted to exterminate them. You might make your dwelling a station on the Underground Railroad, a secret shelter for people escaping from slavery into freedom. You might hide Jewish families from pogroms. You might march in the nascent movements for women’s suffrage or civil rights.

You’d do these things, not just because you’d have the benefit of knowing you were on the right side of history, but because you’d know it was the right thing to do. Your conscience would demand no less.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The great nonreligious gender realignment

A subway platform sign reading "Mind the Gap"

The atheist community has always had more men than women. Why?

One commonly heard answer goes something like this: more men are atheists because logic and science disprove religion, and those are inherently male pursuits. They’re rigorous and objective and based on hard facts. Women care about feelings and other squishy stuff, which makes them more susceptible to appeals based on wishful thinking and emotion.

A different answer points to the intersecting circles of privilege and exclusion. In a majority-religious society, nonbelievers still face ignorance, prejudice, and oppression. Women, too, have to deal with sexist treatment and harmful stereotyping. In particular, they’re judged more harshly than men for breaking with social norms. In essence, women might decide they have enough to deal with without voluntarily adding one more source of discrimination to their lives.

We can debate which of these answers are closer to the mark, but the underlying fact of the gender imbalance remained. Skepticism remained stubbornly male, and over the years, this gave rise to huge blowups and divisive arguments. Nonreligious women repeatedly spoke up about sexist language, sexual harassment and even assault at atheist gatherings. No surprise, some of them concluded that the secular community was no home for them.

This is ironic because, as skeptics of all genders pointed out, women have suffered a disproportionate share of religious oppression through the ages. Historically, religion has held women to far stricter rules. It’s barred them from positions of power and authority, demonized them as temptresses and sources of sin, harassed and shamed them for their appearance, sought to deny them autonomy over their own bodies, dismissed their ambitions of being something more than mothers and housewives, taught them to be silent and to obey the commands of men.

When religion is the source of so much hateful sexism, the nonreligious community should be a safe and welcoming place for women. We should have so much more to offer: more freedom, more equality, more respect for self-determination. But, again, the numbers refused to reflect that.

Until now.

Over the last two decades, which witnessed an explosion of religious disaffiliation, it was men more than women who were abandoning their faith commitments. In fact, for as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.

Older Americans who left their childhood religion included a greater share of men than women. In the Baby Boom generation, 57 percent of people who disaffiliated were men, while only 43 percent were women. Gen Z adults have seen this pattern flip. Fifty-four percent of Gen Z adults who left their formative religion are women; 46 percent are men.

In demographic terms, this is a magnitude 8 earthquake. As Phil Zuckerman points out, women have scored higher than men in every measure of religiosity in every survey since at least 1945. This finding, if it holds up, shatters a pattern that’s held up throughout the world for the last eight decades.

What changed?

It certainly appears that, though it took time, the secular argument is making headway. This is tied to the overall progress of feminism in society: more women than ever are completing higher education, having careers of their own, getting married and having families on their terms or not at all. There’s an expectation of equal treatment and autonomy that didn’t exist in previous generations.

And as women become more accustomed to fairness, the churches are increasingly an outlier. Most major denominations still preach male superiority and female submission. They haven’t changed, while the world has. That makes their archaic, harmful attitudes easier to notice:

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z women identify as feminist, far greater than women from previous generations. Younger women are more concerned about the unequal treatment of women in American society and are more suspicious of institutions that uphold traditional social arrangements. In a poll we conducted, nearly two-thirds of (65 percent) young women said they do not believe that churches treat men and women equally.

When we zero in on specific causes, two big sociopolitical changes – the movement for LGBTQ equality, and more recently, the fall of Roe and the spread of abortion bans – have had an impact. Both of these have made women, especially young women, more liberal and more politically conscious. It’s impossible not to notice when your rights are under attack, and women can see for themselves that conservative churches are the major cultural force behind it:

It’s not only about gender roles. There is a cultural misalignment between more traditional churches and places of worship and young women who have grown increasingly liberal. Since 2015, the number of young women who identify as liberal has rapidly increased. I speculated in a previous post about whether the abortion issue might be driving young women away from church. They are unequivocally pro-choice—54 percent of young women believe abortion should be available without any restriction in the 2022 General Social Survey.

This has also coincided with the rise in LGBTQ identity among young women—nearly three in ten women under the age of 30 now identify as something other than straight. It may explain why more Americans cite this as a reason for leaving. A new PRRI poll found that 60 percent of young people who left their childhood religion said that “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” was an important reason.

To be sure, we’re not on a trajectory towards a world where men are all religious and women are all secular. More young people of all genders are religiously unaffiliated than ever before; that hasn’t changed. But among churches that still have young members, some are starting to see a pronounced gender slant toward men:

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

What’s comical is the pretense of bewilderment that pastors put on, pretending they have no idea why this is happening:

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

In reality, this should be no surprise. When you preach patriarchy, you get wannabe patriarchs.

We’re living through a time of shifting gender roles and crumbling stereotypes. These mass social changes always create confusion and anger, as the old messaging about masculinity that men have absorbed clashes with new realities. Millions of young men are adrift, struggling to figure out their place in the world. They’re receptive to anyone who tells them where they belong.

Conservative churches have an appealing message for these men. It tells them that they’re entitled to special privileges by virtue of birth: that God put them in charge, that they should have power and authority, and that they deserve obedient housewives who wait on them hand and foot and devoted children they don’t have to give birth to or raise. For obvious reasons, they flock to that message like flies to spoiled meat.

What these pastors would be asking, if they had any sense, isn’t why men are showing up but why women aren’t. What does their religion offer to women, other than a life of subservience and a predefined role they may not want to conform to? Why should they want to attend a church that promises them second-class status? Women have broken out of that box, and they’re not going back into it.

But this is no moment for atheists to rest on our laurels. We have a huge opportunity to bring women over to our side, but we shouldn’t take it for granted that they’ll want to. The problems that drove so many women away from the secular movement haven’t necessarily been fixed. We need to make a deliberate effort to appeal to them and speak to what they care about, in a way that religion hasn’t. This is our moment to seize – but if we fail, we’ll have no one to blame for it but ourselves.

More washing machines in schools, please

A grayscale photo of washing machines in a row

The existence of poverty is a choice, not a fact of nature. We could end it any time we choose. In the darkest hour of the pandemic, we proved it:

In 2020, when schools across the country closed to slow the spread of Covid-19, federal lawmakers did something unprecedented: They decided to pay for free lunch for every public school student in America, every day, no questions asked.

The effect of the free meals was dramatic. Parents, many of them facing layoffs, illness, and grief, no longer had to worry about the cost of lunch for their kids… Instead, they could pick up a free, nutritious meal at their children’s school, or in some cases even have it delivered by school bus. As a result, food insecurity in at-risk households with children declined by about 7 percentage points between the beginning of the pandemic and summer 2021.

It’s a disgrace that it took a crisis of this magnitude to push Congress into acting. Even so, it was a valuable proof of concept. But COVID-19 is receding from people’s minds, and the clouds have rolled back in. The pandemic supports are gone, and America is returning to school lunch debt as a policy:

In a November 2022 survey by the School Nutrition Association, 96.3 percent of districts reported that the end of federal waivers have led to an increase in unpaid debt. At East Hampton Public Schools in central Connecticut, for example, debt is going up by $500 every week. At one district, the Washington Post reported, debt for the school year has already reached $1.7 million.

It’s obscene that there’s such a thing as school lunch debt. Only a mind so warped by capitalism that it’s lost all its morals could conceive of something so sick and cruel. The occasional feel-good stories about donors paying off lunch debt don’t disguise the fact that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Thankfully, the more sensible parts of America recognize this. Not every place has given up the pandemic-era gains. A host of blue states and cities, including my hometown of New York City, offer universal free meals to all students in public schools, and more are working toward this goal.

The best part of NYC’s free school meals is that they’re available to everyone, no exceptions. There are no hoops to jump through, no cumbersome bureaucracy, no intimidating eligibility checks. If kids are hungry, they can eat. That’s the way it should be. I have a son in public school, and while my family isn’t in distress, it’s reassuring to know they have this service if we ever need it.

Free school meals come from the logical recognition that, for schools to succeed in their mission, it’s not enough to have chalkboards and textbooks. They have to have all the things that make it possible to learn, not just a narrow-minded focus on academics. When students face poverty or homelessness or hunger, school can and should be a haven of stability for them. That’s both wise and compassionate.

For the same reason, it’s a great idea to have schools with washers and dryers. There should be more of this:

More than a decade ago, Principal Joseph Mattina noticed students at P.S. 23 Carter G. Woodson were consistently arriving at the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, elementary school without their uniforms.

Initially, Mattina grew frustrated with the students, asking why they couldn’t wear the clothes that had been supplied by the school.

“One day, one of the kids turned around and said to me, ‘Well, it’s dirty, and my mom can’t wash it,'” he said. “That really resonated with me, because it was something that I had never thought of before. It was an obstacle that I didn’t realize existed.”

This is a pain of poverty that privileged people never have to think about. Families who are homeless, living out of a car or in a shelter, don’t have access to laundry facilities. Even if there’s a laundromat nearby, they may not be able to afford to wash their clothes regularly. When kids’ clothes are dirty or smell bad, they get bullied or shunned by their peers and skip school out of shame.

Not only is this a problem, it’s a bigger problem than you might guess. Chronic absenteeism is shockingly common – as high as 36% of all public school students in NYC, and even higher in some other places. Schools that install laundry machines have found that rates of absenteeism go down dramatically:

At Gibson Elementary in St. Louis, after learning that many children were missing school due to a lack of clean clothing, the principal reached out to Whirlpool to ask if they would donate a washer/dryer. In turn, Whirlpool performed a study of 600 public school teachers around the country to see if they were facing similar issues. The study revealed that one in five students did not have access to clean clothing. As a result, Whirlpool decided to donate a washer/dryer not only to this school, but also to 11 other schools that were in need. After one year, 93% of students who utilized the washer/dryers reported an improvement in attendance. Similarly, in 2017, a Kansas City public school reported that only 46% of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90% of the time. After installing a washing machine, this figure shot up to 84%.

It’s the same theory as hospitals helping people find housing. People with chronic conditions like diabetes or HIV can’t possibly manage them if they’re sleeping on the streets, with no refrigerator or safe place to store medicine. And it’s not just better for those people – it’s actually cheaper for hospitals to help people find housing, rather than repeatedly patching them up every time they land in the ER with a crisis.

However, making sure that kids have clean clothes is about more than just improving attendance numbers or balance sheets. The deeper purpose is restoring a sense of dignity to students and their families. It helps them feel that they deserve to be there, that they’re not lesser human beings. At that P.S. 23 school in Brooklyn, they’ve seen the effect firsthand:

Now, families can come during the school day to wash their students’ clothes, or drop off laundry for the school to clean. Mattina said he frequently throws loads of laundry into the washer in the morning. The school’s speech therapist also shares an office with the machines and often moves clothes over to the dryer, he added.

… “Often when we tell parents that we have this service for them, they break down and cry,” he said. “Because of the unspeakable things that they’ve gone through and the trauma that they’ve experienced. This is just one less thing that they have to worry about.”

This is the hallmark of a decent society. It’s one way to show we’re serious about breaking the cycle of poverty, treating people as equals in fact and not just in rhetoric.

But more has to be done. Even among the schools that have laundry machines, too many rely on donations to keep them running. This should be a permanent program, not dependent on volunteer goodwill. Like free school meals, it’s an investment in the future, and it will more than pay for itself in the long run.

New on OnlySky: The era of cleanup

I have a new column up today on OnlySky. It’s about a huge, important task that lies ahead for us: the era of cleanup.

Humans have prospered, but we’ve trashed the planet to do it. Fossil fuels have choked the atmosphere; capitalism has polluted the oceans with plastic junk; suburban sprawl has bulldozed ecosystems. At long last, we’re coming around to recognizing the price of our folly. In the future, green energy and other innovations will allow us to power our civilization with less incidental harm. But what about the harm we’ve already done? How can we make amends?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

For the past eight decades or so, the world has enjoyed relative peace and relative prosperity. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been the unchallenged superpower presiding over a global order of its choosing. It’s been a neoliberal’s dream. Nations signed free-trade pacts, and goods and jobs flowed freely across borders. Industry flourished, damming rivers, building cities in deserts, turning prairies into megafarms and rainforests into cattle ranches. Skyscrapers rose, markets boomed, and air travel and the internet knit distant places together and flattened the world.

…For a while, we prospered with no thought to when the bill would come due. But that time is drawing to an end, as humanity belatedly realizes the magnitude of its folly.

A monumental task lies ahead of us. It’s like waking up in a trashed house the morning after a blowout party. We’ve had our fun. It’s time to clean up.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The natalist plan hits a snag

Abortion bans are always about control. Always.

The religious right lawmakers who push them don’t care about women, children or families. If they did, they’d support paid family leave, or universal health care, or laws to stop gun slaughter. They want to ban abortion for one reason only: to force women into fulfilling what they believe is God’s purpose for them, to be wives and mothers. As long as women are getting pregnant and giving birth like they’re “supposed” to, these theocrats don’t care what happens after that.

The problem, from the anti-choicers’ perspective, is that women know this too. American women can see that they’re in danger of being forced to carry pregnancies they don’t want, threatening their lives, their health and their futures. To reassert control over their bodies, they’re making the logical choice.

According to a new report in JAMA, after the Dobbs decision, the number of reproductive-age women getting their tubes tied spiked across the country. In blue states that protected abortion access, those numbers quickly tapered off. But in states hostile to abortion rights, they kept rising:

In states that enacted total or near-total abortion bans following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, the rate of sterilizations among reproductive-age women that July spiked 19 percent. A similar initial spike was seen across the nation, with states that either limited or protected access to abortions seeing a 17 percent increase.

But, after that, states with bans saw a divergent trend. The states that limited or protected abortion access saw sterilization procedures largely level off after July 2022. In contrast, states with bans continued to see increases. From July 2022 to December 2022, use of sterilization procedures increased by 3 percent each month.

The religious right got their win on abortion, and now they want more. They’ve made their goals clear: They want to ban contraception. They want to ban divorce. They want to imprison women in anti-choice states, preventing them from traveling elsewhere to get an abortion. They don’t care whether a pregnancy comes about through rape, or whether it endangers the woman’s life, or whether the fetus has severe abnormalities that will result in a short life full of suffering.

In fact, they don’t care if women can get medical care at all. Red states have passed anti-abortion laws that are both draconian and intentionally vague, making doctors and hospitals guess at what they can and can’t do. It seems that the religious right wants to intimidate health care providers so that they’re afraid to help pregnant women in distress. If doctors flee and those states become maternity care deserts, they count that as a victory.

But, apparently, the religious right didn’t count on women being able to read these same headlines for themselves. They assumed that they could pass whatever laws they wanted and everyone else would just keep doing whatever they were doing before. Without abortion, they believed, women would have no choice but to bear more children.

In reality, they’ve created a powerful disincentive to get pregnant, and people are responding accordingly. In this sense, the natalist agenda is self-defeating. People are accustomed to freedom, and they’re not willing to give it up, whatever religious zealots with their heads in the Middle Ages might think.

An added tragedy is that anti-choicers are preventing the birth of wanted children. Of course, many people who get sterilized are childfree. But it’s also likely that among this group, there are some women who aren’t dead-set against having kids – or who already have kids and, in a better world, would consider having more.

However, they’ve made a rational calculation of the risks and the benefits. They’d prefer to get sterilized to ensure that they’ll be alive. That’s better than the prospect of an unwanted pregnancy they can’t do anything about – or even a wanted pregnancy where they’re barred from medical help if something goes badly wrong. Given the extreme hostility that red states have shown toward women needing medical care, it’s impossible to blame them.

It pays well to be a useful idiot

A microphone similar to the kind used for recording podcasts

I’ll admit it: If a wealthy benefactor offered to pay me millions of dollars a year to write this blog, I’d be tempted.

As you may know, it’s almost impossible to earn a living in media anymore. Even successful writers and artists have to hustle, and almost none get rich unless they were rich to begin with. Prestigious media outlets have gone bankrupt, and others are resorting to AI-generated filler.

So yes, the temptation is understandable. A rich person who’s willing to fund your journalism and punditry startup is priceless in these turbulent times.

However, the very unfriendliness of the climate ought to spark at least a little skepticism. Specifically, if you find an investor who wants to fund you handsomely, when most outlets are struggling for survival, you should wonder why they’re being so generous and what they hope to get in return. And that’s especially, especially true when this backer doesn’t want their identity known.

That’s a lesson some American right-wingers learned too late.

According to a newly unsealed indictment by the Justice Department, Russia’s state-owned media outlet, Russia Today or RT, was kicked out of the U.S. after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In response, RT hatched a covert plan to influence American public opinion, laundering money through shell companies to evade sanctions, and funding a Western media outlet to push Kremlin-friendly content.

(Full disclosure: In 2013, I was on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, a progressive TV show which at the time aired on RT.)

The indictment doesn’t name this outlet, but it’s widely reported to be Tenet Media, a conservative agitprop site founded in 2022 by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan. Tenet employed right-wing influencers like Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. It’s hosted “high-profile conservative guests, including Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake.”

To be the supposed wealthy backer, the RT employees named in the indictment invented a persona named “Eduard Grigoriann”, supposedly a Belgian banker with a generic resume and no Web presence. However, notwithstanding the clumsy attempts at deception, Tenet Media’s founders seem to have been well aware who they were really working for. According to the indictment, they referred to their funders as “the Russians”, and Googled “time in Moscow” while trying to decide when to send a message in order to get a quick response.

Russia paid $9.7 million to Tenet Media, which, according to the indictment, is almost 90% of all the money it took in. In exchange, they got a stable of American right-wingers to parrot Kremlin propaganda on command.

Commentators like Tim Pool denounced Ukraine as the enemy and raged against American military aid. When Tucker Carlson went on a pro-Putin propaganda tour of Russia, RT urged Tenet Media to promote it. One of the producers resisted – “it just feels like overt shilling” – but gave in after pressure from Tenet’s founders. After the deadly Crocus City terrorist attack in March 2024, RT urged Tenet to ignore ISIS’ claim of responsibility and blame the bloodshed on Ukraine and the U.S.

When the indictment was unsealed, Tenet Media immediately shut down. YouTube also deleted their channels. Pool and other affiliates of Tenet claimed that they were innocent dupes and that they’re the real victims. (None of them, so far, have announced any plans to give away the Russian blood money in their bank accounts.)

The notable thing about this indictment is that none of these right-wingers seemed especially hard to buy. None of them questioned why they were being asked to push pro-Putin content. None of them proved too principled to go along with the scheme. It raises the question: When it comes to the American right’s friendliness to Russia, how much is organic – born of Donald Trump’s love for right-wing dictators because he yearns to be one of them – and how much is astroturf – purchased by Russian rubles and amplified by conservative pundits who’ll say anything they’re told to say for money?

If anyone on the right has a conscience, the exposure of this plot should be an occasion for remorse and soul-searching. Whether knowingly or not, they were doing the bidding of a brutal foreign dictator. They were spreading propaganda to blind and confuse Americans, to turn us against each other and weaken our collective will to fight tyranny. They’re modern-day Moscow Roses. Just call them Putin’s rose garden.

However, I doubt they’ll be unduly bothered. Trump’s M.O. is to always deny, never admit fault, and double down whenever you’re caught, and that attitude has been adopted by his fans and followers. They’ve learned that the only sin in modern-day conservatism is to apologize. As long as you deny everything and keep yelling that the accusations against you are concocted by the deep state and the liberal media, there are legions of Trumpist true believers who’ll lap it up. This means that Putin’s cronies are sure to try again, and they’re likely to find many more receptive targets.

What kind of person moves to Russia?

Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square

[Previous: Uncle Vladimir wants you]

Vladimir Putin is encouraging Western conservatives to move to Russia to escape oppressive liberal values. He’s gone so far as to exempt them from immigration quotas and waive language tests that were previously required. The real question is how many people will take him up on that offer.

Notwithstanding enthusiasm from people like Alex Jones, I suspect the answer will be “not many”. Conservatives moving to Russia is like progressives moving to Canada. It’s something that a lot of them fantasize about, especially when an election doesn’t go their way, but few follow through on.

Here’s one who actually did it.

His name is Joseph Gleason. By his account, he was born in America, raised as a Protestant and became a pastor, then converted to the Eastern Orthodox church. In 2017, he moved to Russia with his wife and eight (!) children.

In an interview he republished on his Substack site, he explains why he took this drastic step:

In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America upheld the “right” of all states to recognize same-sex “marriages”. Of course, the acceptance of homosexual behavior is the primary reason why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God. I believe that the foundation of any society and any nation is based on what people think about God, what they believe in, and how they feel about the institution of family. If these fundamental values — faith in God and family — are destroyed, then the whole country will come to destruction. I think that either America will repent of this monstrous sin, this idea of same-sex marriage, which destroys the family, or this country will be destroyed.

He sounds pretty confident about that. So here’s my question: what’s taking so long?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in the U.S. for almost ten years, and LGBT people have benefited from societal acceptance for longer than that. Massachusetts has had marriage equality since 2004, over twenty years now. Vermont has had same-sex civil unions since 2000, almost a quarter-century.

Where’s the brimstone? Why hasn’t God destroyed all these places yet, if he hates gays so much? Is he procrastinating? Is he asleep at the switch?

Here’s his list of reasons to move to Russia. There’s some normal-sounding stuff about how taxes are low, land is abundant and cheap, Russian culture is great… and then, in the middle of it, you come across this:

The GloboHomo LGBT Rainbow Mafia is not allowed to force their views down your throat here. Homosexual “marriages” are not permitted in Russia, nor are there any civil unions. LGBT propaganda for minors is illegal. And they are now working on putting a new law on the books, which will make LGBT propaganda illegal nationwide, regardless of age.

In a perverse way, you have to respect the bluntness of his bigotry. There’s no tiptoeing around the subject, no “hate the sin, love the sinner” evasions. He just says it flat out: LGBTQ people shouldn’t exist, they should have no rights, and it should be illegal for them to speak out, punishable by gulag or deportation. The law should favor his views and crush any opposing views.

Just in case you thought this profound homophobia was the only personality flaw in someone who’s otherwise a lovely person, here’s another of Gleason’s reasons to move to Russia:

You won’t get called a “racist” every five seconds. No riots. No “Black Lives Matter” marches. Lots of white people live here, and we aren’t aware of any particular reason we should be ashamed of it.

Obviously, Russia doesn’t have the same history of plantation slavery and Jim Crow segregation that America does. That doesn’t mean it’s free of racism.

On the contrary, racist attitudes are widely reported to be omnipresent. There’s widespread racism by ethnic Russians against migrants from Central Asian countries, as well as against foreign students from African countries. Immigrants in Russia report discrimination like “Slavs only” signs on apartment buildings. Russia has committed mass deportation so brutal, it’s been called a form of ethnic cleansing.

It’s safe to assume that Gleason hasn’t experienced this kind of treatment himself. Therefore, in his eyes, it doesn’t exist. Judging by his attitude toward Black Lives Matter – where his disdain is clearly for the marchers, and not for the racism they’re protesting – he doesn’t care what racism exists in his society, just as long as he doesn’t have to hear about it.

Here’s yet another of Gleason’s reasons to move:

There are gazillions of Orthodox churches and vibrant Orthodox Christian communities here. For example, in Rostov Veliky there are five monasteries, numerous churches, and zero mosques.

He doesn’t state the reason for this. Do mosques just happen to not exist near where he lives, or are they not allowed there? Is he concerned for religious freedom at all?

Last but not least, there’s this reason that should provoke bitter laughter at his shameless hypocrisy:

The American military industrial complex has no power here. No need to worry about the United States arriving on the doorstep to overthrow another national government.

Gleason felt no compunction about republishing this interview while Russia was waging an unprovoked war against its historically Orthodox Christian neighbor, Ukraine. The Russian invasion has included torture and mass slaughter of civilians, kidnapping of children, leveling cities with artillery barrages, and indiscriminate bombing of churches and cathedrals along with other civilian targets. It’s a level of brutality and callous destruction that American colonialism never reached, even at its harshest.

Most notable about his list is what’s not there. He admits that Russian bureaucracy can be slow and unpleasant to deal with, and that the Russian language is difficult to learn – but that’s it. He says nothing whatsoever about Russia’s lack of freedom, its oligarchical government, its corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement, or Putin’s habit of imprisoning protesters and murdering dissidents. It’s not listed, even euphemistically, in reasons not to move.

In summary, what kind of person moves to Russia? The answer is: a violently homophobic, white supremacist, Christian dominionist who decries American imperialism but cheerfully turns a blind eye to even more brutal and violent Russian imperialism. He doesn’t want to live in a free country where people have rights. He wants to live in a dictatorship, just one where he’s on the same side as the dictator. In Russia, that’s what he’s found.

New on OnlySky: When we abolished borders

I have a new piece of short fiction today on OnlySky. It looks forward to a future where declining birthrates and global warming have become serious problems for the industrialized world, and explores the obvious solution – abolishing borders so that people can move from climate-change-ravaged areas to cooler lands where labor is needed. It imagines what a post-border world might be like for those who live in it, both the positives and the negatives.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full story:

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our numbers as a species were declining every year. Capitalist economies premised on the assumption of infinite growth couldn’t cope. Stock markets stagnated, inflation surged out of control. Governments had belatedly tried to address the problem, but every means of encouraging people to have kids—longer parental leave, tax breaks, cash payments, religious scolding—had failed.

Rural villages were emptying out, becoming ghost towns. Grass and weeds pushed up through cracked pavement in silent streets. Abandoned cars decayed on the roadside. Vacant houses were overgrown with vines, dry leaves and birds’ nests. Trees sprouted like the vanguard of an invading army as forests spread and reclaimed the urban areas humanity had ceded.

Continue reading on OnlySky…