Background Briefing: December 25, 2023

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America’s Foundation as a Christian Nation and How the Right Captured Freedom

We begin on this Christmas Day as Christians celebrate the birth of the prophet Jesus with the country’s foundation as a Christian nation and the legacy of settler freedom that has the language of freedom in American culture claimed by the political right and how it can be reclaimed. Joining us is Aziz Rana, a professor of law at Boston College Law School where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development, as well as how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom and the forthcoming book The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them. He recently hosted a forum, Reclaiming Freedom, available in paperback and in print in the latest issue of The Boston Review.

 

The “Christian” Moral Authoritarianism of Supreme Court Justices in the Pockets of Plutocrats

Then we examine the theocratic capture of our Supreme Court and the moral authoritarianism that has brought about a reversal of women’s reproductive rights by activist justices in the pockets of plutocrats. Joining us is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research.  She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts.