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Once upon a time, in the distant past of 2016 and for a few years after, there was a surge of right-wing populism. Country after country swung sharply to the right and inflicted grievous wounds on itself. The UK voted for Brexit. The Philippines elected a lunatic mass killer. Austria and France almost elected Nazis. The United States elected Donald Trump.

Russia, which covertly funded much of this far-right insurgency, was having a great time. The rest of us? Not so much.

And then the crowning jewel: The United States elected Donald Trump again. This time, unleashing an open fascist attack on the rule of law in an attempt to topple the world’s oldest democracy.

You would think this would embolden far-right “populism” across the globe the way it did in 2016. Back then, fascists all around the world took Trump’s win as a cue to rise up and swing for the fences while the legacy press breathlessly reported that the tide of far-right populism seemed unstoppable.

A funny thing appears to be happening this time, though. Instead of a far-right insurgency, a strong backlash to authoritarians appears to be playing out.

In December, the right-wing president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried to stage an autocoup. He was tired, you see, of all these pesky laws and barriers keeping him from ruling as he saw fit. How fucking DARE the opposition party have power and, worse, USE it?! Yeol declared martial law on the flimsiest of pretenses and ordered the opposition party to be disbanded.

But the people of South Korea lost their collective shit and stormed the National Assembly (their version of Capitol Hill). The Assembly (their Congress) broke into the building, voted to lift martial law, and the military, after wavering for a bit, gave in to the rule of law.

There would be no coup. President Yeol was impeached and removed from office. Whether he ends up in jail remains to be seen, but do not be surprised. The criminal trial is currently ongoing.

Canada, on the other hand, did not have a coup. They seemed set and ready to elect a right-wing government, though. Our northern neighbor would have been run by a ass-kissing Trump toady. Wouldn’t that have been fun? No. No, it would not.

But then Trump wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how much he hated Canada. They’re gonna be the 51st state, he said. We’re going to crush them economically, he said. Something something fentanyl over the border which everyone knew was absolute bullshit.

And we KNEW it was bullshit when Kevin Hassett, a little turd from the White house, vomited this out:

After Hassett raised concerns about fentanyl reaching American soil through the northern border, [ABC’s Jonathan] Karl reminded his guest, “I don’t think that’s happening. I mean, 1% of fentanyl is being smuggled across the border, 1%. I mean, Canada is not a major source at all of fentanyl in the United States, are they?” Hassett replied:

“Well, yes they are a major source. And I can tell you that in the Situation Room, I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.”

As always, whenever someone from the Trump regime is speaking, assume they are lying. I believe the amount of Fentanyl seized at the northern border last year was twenty-something pounds? Truly, a tsunami of drugs flows from the Great White North.

Trump’s tariffs were the final straw. Canada’s Conservative Party went from a VERY comfortable 27-point lead in December, much to the delight of the far-right:

…to getting stomped into the ground so badly, the leader of the party lost his seat:

Womp-womp.

Every political observer understands very clearly that Canadians were furious at Trump and took it out on anyone who seemed aligned with him. That meant the right-wing Poilievre and his Conservative Party, who ran a populist campaign complaining of Canada’s lost glory days and immigration and blablabla “We want to be just like MAGA.”

If Trump has kept his fucking mouth shut, he would have had a bootlicking worm to feed his ego and boost his credibility. But he couldn’t do that because he’s Trump. So now he has a hostile nation on his border who will wage economic war if Trump continues to fuck with them. Lovely. Just what we needed.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre likes Canada, eh?

Then there’s Australia. Trump didn’t go out of his way to attack Australia but the results were the same. The country took a sharp and unexpected swing to the left.

Now, the right-wing party in Australia, curiously called the Liberal Party, was not expected to win the election. But they WERE expected to pick up a lot of seats and significantly increase their power in the government. The left-wing party, the Labor Party, had been struggling in the polls but was still ahead, if not by a lot.

Instead of picking up seats, though, the Liberal Party (remember, right wing) was crushed and, just like in the UK, the party leader, Peter Dutton, lost his seat.

Dutton also ran a nasty Trumpian campaign filled with racism and “populism,” and he paid the price for it.

The UK didn’t follow this trend as the “populist” Reform Party had a great election night last week. But the UK is a slow-motion car crash after Brexit, with its economy shriveling like a slug in a tub of salt. It’s so bad that the center-left party, Labour, has tacked to the right, attacking immigrants and cutting public spending in an attempt to woo back voters.

It didn’t work. Perhaps that should be a lesson to certain Democrats who have recently taken to kicking the trans community in a bid to appeal to voters? Adopting fascist framing on social issues will not win you votes.

With no actual left to vote for as their economy continues its decade-long implosion, the people of the UK went with the loudest, angriest voice. There’s a reason fascists love economic downturns. It’s why the Trump regime is engineering one as we speak. Desperate people listen to loud, angry voices.

But aside from the UK, the trend is unmistakable. Complacent people across the globe saw the United States put a literal fascist in power. They’re watching the most powerful country in the world, once the gold standard of democracy and freedom try very VERY hard to remodel itself into an authoritarian Nazi shithole complete with concentration camps and a gestapo.

A lot of this shock has to do with the fact that foreign media are reporting on what’s happening here accurately. They’re not whitewashing it and downplaying the ongoing coup the way the legacy press is. The horror of watching America fight against encroaching fascism scared enough people to ask the question: “If it can happen there, it can happen here, too, right?” And they are acting accordingly.

Likewise, our own elections have veered sharply to the left, not that you would know it from the dearth of coverage by the legacy press. Sure, they made a big deal out of that one election in Wisconsin but they just kind of gloss over all the OTHER elections where the electorate has shifted sharply to the left.

Did you know the GOP had a very bad night in Texas on Saturday? Probably not. The legacy press hasn’t bothered to talk about it. But the Lone Star Left newsletter did:

Last night, voters across Texas sent a message loud enough to rattle the far-right out of their echo chambers: we’re done with your culture wars, your book bans, and your crusade against public schools. Voters chose community over chaos, educators over agitators, and progress over extremism.

The local elections weren’t just a series of wins but a sweep. MAGA-backed candidates got absolutely trounced across the state. This was the result of deep organizing, years of work by local Democrats, and voters who are fed up with the far-right hijacking of school boards and city councils to push their agenda.

Texas isn’t turning blue overnight, but make no mistake: the MAGA movement had a very bad night, and the momentum is shifting.

Thank god for independent journalism. Otherwise, I would have never known about this and neither would you.

But this has been the case all over the country. Special elections have been disastrous for Republicans. Even when they win, their margin of victory is far smaller than it was just six months ago and we haven’t even gotten to the REAL effects of Trump’s recession. And wait until the regime ramps up with its terrorism tactics against dissent. That’s REALLY going to max out their popularity! For sure!

So, yeah, Trumpism is killing right-wing populism. Nothing sours the public on fascism like seeing it in practice, and after years of populists across the globe patterning themselves after Trump and his brand of racism and misogyny and hate? It’s going to be really hard to distance themselves and convince people they won’t be anything like the man they’ve based their entire political identity on.

Everything Donald Trump touches dies. Let’s hope that holds true for the movement he inspired.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 181 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution is optional, useful only when it supports what he wants to do.

In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Trump said that moving speedily to carry out mass deportations may take precedence over giving immigrants the right to due process under the Constitution, as required by courts.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump replied to a question about statements by Secretary of State Mario Rubio who had said, “Yes, of course,” to whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process. “We’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” Trump said. “We have thousands of people that are — some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth. I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”

The interview covered a lot of topics, and drew Trump ire for asking questions he thought were bent on showing tariffs having a depressing effect on growth and the economy, as reflected in any set of economic measures not authored by Trump. Most news outlets nevertheless found the doubt about the protection of the Constitution the most noteworthy event, except on Fox, Breitbart and Newsmax, which ignored the comment altogether.

While Trump said he would follow court rulings, it was clear that a promise to implement the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history may require deportations without allowing a hearing even to show that they are convicted of crimes, members of targeted gangs, or in violation of some other standard adopted by the Trump administration. Already, those deportations have involved U.S. children of undocumented migrants, graduate students outspoken against the war in the Middle East, people with tattoos or hats associated with gang membership. Already, we’re way beyond undocumented people with criminal records.

As lawsuits challenging such deportations are working their way towards the Supreme Court — which has ruled 9-0 that due process indeed is a basic Constitutional value — Trump wants to decide what the law is, and well as who is breaking it. Any chance his comments will become part of every court challenge about deportations going forward?

Why did we bother with an inauguration in which Donald Trump swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and to promote the laws of the land? What meaning did putting his hand on a Bible have — though keen observers of the Jan. 20 proceedings have showed that he never did put his hand on the Bible? What America is he protecting exactly when he thinks the Constitution is optional?

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump posted a photo of himself as the pope to his personal social media accounts and to the White House’s. On Monday, he told reporters, “I had nothing to do with it.” He continued,“Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

He may have no idea where the image came from. But he certainly had something to do with posting it.

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As for Catholics who were offended by the image, “They can’t take a joke,” Trump said, then quickly clarified: “You don’t mean the Catholics; you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it.”

Some far-right MAGA Catholics no doubt loved it. But many Catholics did not, and many prominent Catholic groups and leaders said so publicly. That, though, is beside the point. Trump seems to be in full mad king mode, surrounded by people who only tell him what he wants to hear, and convinced that the false reality he’s built around himself might just be real. And in this false reality, whatever Trump says must be accepted — no matter how contradictory to his previous statements, or how contradictory to observable reality. Late last month, for example, Trump refused to concede that a photo he shared on social media of an alleged MS-13 tattoo on the hand of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man the administration mistakenly and illegally deported to an El Salvador prison for terrorists, was digitally altered. The digital alteration doesn’t even appear to be a serious attempt at photoshop; it looks more like the kind of label law enforcement might put on evidence. This is the photo:

If you think that looks like an actual tattoo that says “MS 13,” I know a Nigerian prince who has some money he would love to deposit into your bank account, if you can just send him your details.

“Donald Trump lies” is hardly news. But his lies have gotten more brazen. What’s stunning about these lies is that they aren’t denials of some past misdeed or even false or misleading claims about a fact-checkable statistic or data point. They are things the public can see with their own eyes, that Trump is telling them isn’t true. The image of Trump as pope — it’s right there on his Truth Social account. The clearly photoshopped MS-13 tattoo — it’s obviously not a tattoo. And yet Trump seems to genuinely believe that anyone he’s speaking with, including the broader American public, will simply go along with what he’s saying. That’s scary, coming as it does from the most powerful man on earth.

It also seems to be correct. For Trump’s second term, he is surrounded entirely by sycophants, many of whom seem to think it’s their job to root out the disloyal — the end result is a White House full of people falling all over themselves to be the most obsequious. No one saying, “uh, that’s a bad idea” or “that doesn’t make sense” or “that’s demonstrably false.” No one seems to be saying, “Sir, the public is just not believing that claim.”

And there isn’t much in the way of reality-based living happening in MAGA world more broadly. The conservative public turns to conservative influencers, who see their influence drop if they contradict the president. MAGA conservatives largely reject mainstream publications that have safeguards including fact-checking and standards teams. Many social media companies have removed their fact-checking functions, leaving users to correct each other. This is consistent with the general American retreat from expertise or excellence: What do professional journalists know that the average anon on Twitter doesn’t?

To be honest, I found some of the earlier fact-checking obsession to be tedious and, on occasion, genuinely skewed. Reality does, as the saying goes, has a well-known liberal bias. But on some fact-checking sites there was a kind of pedantry that could be eye-rolling; sometimes, social media statements were flagged for what really did feel more like political reasons than factual ones. There was certainly room for correction.

Instead, we’ve gotten a wholesale chucking-out of any claim that the truth matters.

Politicians have always lied. But getting caught in lies — especially really obvious ones — used to be a political problem. There were social penalties for lying: Newspapers and TV channels would run negative stories; clarifications or sheepish apologies would be issued; voters might lose trust and punish you at the polls. Being a liar was stigmatized, in the political realm and the personal. This was a good thing. I don’t know how a society survives if we don’t agree that when someone knowingly and obviously lies to your face, that person should lose your trust and esteem.

This is not just a Trump problem. This is a society-functioning problem. If we don’t figure out a way to fix it — a way to impose social costs on people who lie obviously and on purpose — we aren’t going to have a functional society left.

xx Jill

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The Trump Administration is pushing a dangerous and sweeping attempt to control our bodies, our families, and our lives and a Supreme Court case this term will shape the future of transgender people’s freedom – and bodily autonomy for all. The state of Tennessee wants the Supreme Court to expand its ruling overturning Roe v. Wade to allow the state to target transgender people’s autonomy over their own bodies. Continuing down this road will hurt everyone's freedom to control their bodies and lives.

The ACLU told the court that everyone deserves the freedom to control their bodies and seek the health care they need. The government has no right to deny a transgender person the health care they need, just as they have no right telling someone if, when, or how they start a family.

Join the ACLU in calling on the Supreme Court to uphold constitutional guarantees for everyone – including trans people. ADD YOUR NAME.

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Well, that didn’t take long. An enterprising hacker has already penetrated whatever security that supposedly protected the third-party communications app used by Mike Waltz to send text messages on Signal to the Secretary of State, the Vice President and the Director of National Intelligence during the White House cabinet meeting last week. The hack was reported earlier today by 404 Media, the new journalism website covering cybersecurity, the intelligence and surveillance business, and other topics involving the rapidly changing terrain of the tech industry.

The hacker apparently read the coverage of the loose use of the Signal app and its cousin TeleMessage, which sells its app to government agencies and corporations which require the archiving of messages sent via communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram. The TeleMessage app is supposed to piggy-back on the other communications apps to provide secure storage of the messages on the other communications platforms, several of which can be set to delete messages after a set period of time.

The hacker, whose identity is not known to 404 Media, sent the tech website screen captures and data that “includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers. One screenshot of the hacker’s access to a TeleMessage panel lists the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of CBP officials.” “CBP” refers to Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies in charge of protecting, among other borders, our border with Mexico, which according to the Trump administration, has been regularly breached by human traffickers and drug cartels shipping the dangerous drug Fentanyl into this country where it is sold on the street and has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of addicts.

Apparently, the hacker set out to penetrate the TeleMessage security just to see if it could be done. “I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes,” the hacker told 404 Media. “It wasn’t much effort at all.”

So, what we have here, folks, is a random computer hacker, whose identity and location is not known, meaning he or she could be living in a foreign country and working for its intelligence agency or tech firm in Russia or China, casually surfing into the communications channel Signal that the Trump administration itself admits is permitted to be installed on government-issued computers and cell phones used by high level administration officials even at cabinet meetings inside the White House.

What does this mean? It means that security throughout the U.S. government, including in the Departments of State and Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the intelligence agencies overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, has been so wide open that an apparent independent civilian hacker was able to download names, phone numbers, and email addresses of government officials as well as some of the contents of text messages, including links to tweets containing video and sound clips.

The data accessed by the hacker also included information relating to crypto firms such as Coinbase and Galaxy, meaning that communications within those firms and perhaps between the firms and their clients, who have invested real dollars in the firms’ stores and trading systems of cryptocurrencies, has been breached.

Based on the reporting of information provided by the hacker to 404 Media, communications within and between U.S. government agencies, as well as members of Congress and offices and officers within the White House, should be assumed to be compromised. Trump came into office promising to use Elon Musk and his cybernauts to save taxpayer dollars as well as modernize and increase the security of U.S. government data systems. Based on this reporting, it’s going to cost at least as much as Musk claims to have saved from so-called “waste and abuse” to take back and wipe clean every government computer, data storage facility, and cell phone that has been in use since January 20.

We have known since Trump’s first administration that he refused to use an official secure government cell phone and instead through his first term in office and this term so far has used his private cell phone to communicate with everyone from golfing buddies to foreign leaders. He has been compromised for years.

Now we know that everyone who works for him has been compromised due to their use of highly insecure communications apps. The 404 Media story even identifies the Northern Virginia location of the servers and storage facilities, owned by Amazon, through which and into which TeleMessage has sent data accumulated through its piggy-backing on communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. In the intelligence business, this sort of information is known as “gold.” The hacker “was able to login to the TeleMessage backend panel using the usernames and passwords” found during the penetration of the communications systems.

When you start to see words like “usernames” and “passwords” and “login” in a story about the official communications of the United States government, you know we’re in trouble.

And the trouble we’re in is rooted in the two north-stars of everything Donald Trump has ever done in his life: a complete absence of consequences and the overwhelming presence of arrogance. That combination is the yellow brick road foreign adversaries look for when they are trying to penetrate U.S. information stores, intentions, and methods of tactical and intelligence operations.

One independent hacker, in what he or she admitted was “15 to 20 minutes,” has stripped the façade from the Trump administration’s pretense of governing and put all our military services, including 1.4 million men and women and trillions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and facilities at risk. It’s going to cost lives.

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Perhaps it’s what we could call the Mar a Lago effect – The first time he was president, Trump authorized the wholesale removal to his Palm Beach lair of top-secret material he had hoarded in the White House, seemingly giving permission to lesser Trumpazoids to engage in the same behavior in his second term in office. It didn’t help that a conspiracy between a half-wit judge in Florida and the half-wit Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rubber-stamped Trump’s violations of the espionage act, first by dismissing the charges against him at the District Court level, and then by gifting him carte blanche immunity for anything he decided to do both as president and after leaving office, so long as his dastardly deeds could be termed “official acts.”

Stealing secrets that belong to the United States government wasn’t the worst thing Trump did as president – there was the matter of his attempt to steal an election as well – but it was seen by legal and national security experts alike as his most egregious violation not only of the law of the land but also of what had heretofore been seen as one of the most gravely important norms of presidential behavior, that of insuring the nation’s security by keeping its secrets.

The frenzied first 100 days of Trump’s new adventures in office have consigned his violations of the nation’s secrecy laws to the Great Trumpian Memory Hole, where all things outrageous about the man seem to have come to rest. This is a grave mistake. We still don’t know the full extent of what secrets Trump spirited out of the White House in 2021. We know that he removed boxes that were used to store the top-secret materials in Mar a Lago when he left Florida for his New Jersey golf resort in May of 2022. We also know that the FBI never sought or executed a search warrant on Trump’s Bedminster golf club and residence, though we have learned that he was seen there waving around a plan to attack Iran in front of a writer working on a memoir being prepared by one of Trump’s chiefs of staff, Mark Meadows.

With all the concentration on national security information and secrets kept on paper, of the sort seized by the FBI from Mar a Lago, we do not know what secrets Trump may have squirreled away that had been stored in digital form on discs or thumb drives that were of course much more easily concealed than boxes of papers. And we’ll never know what secrets Trump may have passed verbally to his pal Vladimir Putin during his private meeting in Helsinki – from which even Trump’s official translator was excluded – and during phone calls between the two men after Trump left office and since he returned to the White House in January of this year.

This is Trump’s legacy in keeping the nation’s secrets: he didn’t. He stole them, and by the evidence we have seen from his public behavior and what is known about what he has done privately, he spread with abandon the nation’s secrets he was charged with keeping.

Since taking office this year, everything we know about the behavior of his minions indicates that they are going about their jobs by following Trump’s example. That’s what the whole Signalgate thing was ultimately about. The Pentagon and White House and the office of the Director of National Intelligence are outfitted with secure forms of electronic communication by text and voice both, as well as a system of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF), rooms which are protected from intrusion by every form of spying known to man. And yet none of the official channels of top-secret communication were used by the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Security, and all the other Trump officials who were included in not just one but three Signal chats about the secret attacks by the U.S. military on Houthi targets in Yemen.

This week we learned that despite being roundly criticized for his use of the Signal app to share highly sensitive information about Yemen, while he was still National Security Adviser earlier in the week, Mike Waltz was seen at the cabinet meeting in the White House apparently using the Signal app on his phone to send and receive messages from Vice President Vance, Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Today, the tech website 404 Media reported that Waltz wasn’t actually using the Signal app. He was instead texting with his fellow national security figures using a third-party app that piggy-backs on Signal to enable the user to archive chats as the law requires all federal officials to do. 404 Media reports that while Signal’s encryption protocols are considered by experts to be extremely secure, once a text leaves the Signal app to be repeated through a third-party app, its encryption is insecure. Additionally, when you send a text via Signal from your phone to the phone of another individual using Signal, that specific text is encrypted, but hostile actors could hack your phone or the phone of your text recipient and access your texts as you recorded them in unencrypted form on your phone, and as they were decrypted on the recipient’s phone.

Suffice to say none of the texts sent using Signal by Waltz or Rubio or Hegseth or Gabbard or any of the other Trump officials and private citizens like Hegseth’s wife were truly secure as they would have been had they been sent through official secure Pentagon and White House channels.

If you are a clerk down in a company in an Army unit and part of your job is to type up the “Morning Report,” the document which records who is present for duty and who is absent on any given day, you must have a secret security clearance, because Morning Reports reflect on a unit-by-unit basis the military’s so-called “readiness,” its capability on any given day to be called into action to respond to threats to the nation.

Hegseth yaps continually about concentrating on our military’s “war-fighting” capability. A Morning Report is a daily compilation of “war-fighting” readiness in its record of who is ready for duty and who isn’t. A Morning Report is thus a national security secret. If a clerk were to lose a Morning Report or give it to someone not authorized to see it, he or she would be court martialed. That is how serious the military considers a thing as simple as recording who is present for duty and who isn’t.

The question is, what in the unholy hell is going on with Trump’s people at the top of the secrecy food chain – Hegseth and Waltz and the rest of them? Is their disregard of and disrespect for information security simply reflective of their boss, or is it something else? Have they not been schooled in what security is and why it's important? Do they just not give a shit about the security of our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines? Do they even know what a secret is?

Hegseth sure as hell does. His record of adulterous behavior, not to mention the allegation of sexual assault he has faced, indicate his familiarity with the necessity of keeping secret at least some things in life.

Secrets, especially national security secrets, are not a game. This country has adversaries: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran come immediately to mind. Each of those countries has tens of thousands of people working full time to penetrate the security that protects our nation’s secrets.

As long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office and his clown show of a cabinet is sitting around texting each other on their personal cell phones using who-knows-what apps they downloaded from who-knows-where, U.S. national security secrets are no longer safe, and we are our own worst enemy.

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Attorney Michael Farris, speaking on behalf of a Virginia church, said the IRS had investigated it for alleged violations of the Johnson Amendment, which requires churches to refrain from participating in political campaigns if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. Representatives from Liberty University and Grand Canyon University also claimed their institutions were unfairly fined because of their Christian worldview.

Additional allegations included the denial of religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for military personnel, biased treatment of Christian Foreign Service Officers, and efforts to suppress Christian expression in federal schools and agencies. Critics further accused the Biden administration of marginalizing Christian holidays while giving prominence to non-Christian observances, and of sidelining faith-based foster care providers.

Speakers also alleged that Christian federal employees were retaliated against for opposing DEI and LGBT-related policies that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

Recent Federal and State policies have undermined this right by targeting conscience protections, preventing parents from sending their children to religious schools, threatening funding and non-profit status for faith-based entities, and excluding religious groups from government programs.

"Conscience protections" is another favored construction, as in "my conscience tells me that I shouldn't treat Those People like people and how dare you infringe on my right to do that."

The modern rejoinder to someone claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about state's rights is to ask, "The state's right to do what?" The answer, of course, is "The state's right to perpetuate a system of enslavement." 

When someone on the far right starts talking about religious liberty, the question is "The liberty to do what?" The answer is, "The liberty to enjoy a position of high privilege from which we can decide which people we think are worthy of civil rights." Or more simply, "The liberty to discriminate against others without consequence." 

It all makes me sad because it is the worst testimony ever for the Christian faith. It's the kind of thing that makes my non-believing friends and relatives point and say, "See? Religious people are just as awful as anyone." There are actual Christians in the world, and they deserve better than this. There are people who daily wrestle with how to live out their faith in the world in challenging situations, and they deserve better than this. If your assertion is that you can't really, truly follow Christ unless you are freely enabled to treat certain people like shit, then you are talking about some Jesus that I don't remotely recognize. You are not talking about religious liberty; you're talking about toxic politics with some sort of faux Jesus fig leaf.