The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies, by James Temple, MIT Technology Review, June 2, 2025

Friends,

James Temple’s reporting in MIT Technology Review is deeply alarming. The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 NSF-funded climate studies, cutting off tens of millions of dollars in research on climate change, clean energy, methane emissions, sea-level rise, heat waves, environmental justice, and community adaptation. This is not simply a budget decision. It is an attack on the knowledge infrastructure we need to survive on a warming, increasingly unstable planet.

What makes this especially troubling is that these cuts come at the very moment when we should be expanding, not shrinking, our public capacity to understand a hot Earth. We are already seeing the consequences of extreme heat, water stress, storms, flooding, pollution, and energy insecurity.

Communities most affected by these crises are often the very ones whose realities are dismissed when environmental justice research is labeled “DEI” and made politically suspect.

This is how anti-democratic politics works: not only by censoring speech, but by defunding the research that helps people see clearly. If we cannot study climate harms, public health impacts, methane emissions, community vulnerability, or clean-energy transitions, then we are left less prepared, less protected, and less free.

We should be very concerned. A government that disables climate science while the Earth heats up is not protecting the public interest. It is abandoning it.

—Angela Valenzuela

The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies

Tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants have been slashed, and scientists fear the US is about to lose a generation of climate researchers.

By James Temple | June 2, 2025 | MIT Technology Review

Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Getty, Adobe Stock, Envato

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s "America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here.

The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising risks of a warming world.

The move will cut off what’s likely to amount to tens of millions of dollars for studies that were previously approved and, in most cases, already in the works.

Affected projects include efforts to develop cleaner fuels, measure methane emissions, improve understanding of how heat waves and sea-level rise disproportionately harm marginalized groups, and help communities transition to sustainable energy, according to an MIT Technology Review review of a GrantWatch database—a volunteer-led effort to track federal cuts to research—and a list of terminated grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) itself.

The NSF is one of the largest sources of US funding for university research, so the cancellations will deliver a big blow to climate science and clean-energy development.

They come on top of the White House’s broader efforts to cut research funding and revenue for universities and significantly raise their taxes. The administration has also strived to slash staff and budgets at federal research agencies, halt efforts to assess the physical and financial risks of climate change, and shut down labs that have monitored and analyzed the levels of greenhouse gases in the air for decades.

“I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to understand where this is going,” says Daniel Schrag, co-director of the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard University, which has seen greater funding cuts than any other university amid an escalating legal conflict with the administration. “I believe the Trump administration intends to zero out funding for climate science altogether.”

The NSF says it’s terminating grants that aren’t aligned with the agency’s program goals, “including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation.”

Trump administration officials have argued that DEI considerations have contaminated US science, favoring certain groups over others and undermining the public’s trust in researchers.

“Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth,” Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said to a group of NSF administrations and others last month, according to reporting in Science.

Science v. politics

But research projects that got caught in the administration’s anti-DEI filter aren’t the only casualties of the cuts. The NSF has also canceled funding for work that has little obvious connections to DEI ambitions, such as research on catalysts.

Many believe the administration’s broader motivation is to undermine the power of the university system and prevent research findings that cut against its politics.

Trump and his officials have repeatedly argued, in public statements and executive orders, that climate fears are overblown and that burdensome environmental regulations have undermined the nation’s energy security and economic growth.

“It certainly seems like a deliberate attempt to undo any science that contradicts the administration,” says Alexa Fredston, an assistant professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

On May 28, a group of states including California, New York, and Illinois sued the NSF, arguing that the cuts illegally violated diversity goals and funding priorities clearly established by Congress, which controls federal spending.

A group of universities also filed a lawsuit against the NSF over its earlier decision to reduce the indirect cost rate for research, which reimburses universities for overhead expenses associated with work carried out on campuses. The plaintiffs included the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has also lost a number of research grants.

(MIT Technology Review is owned by, but editorially independent from, MIT.)

The NSF declined to comment.

‘Theft from the American people’

GrantWatch is an effort among researchers at rOpenSci, Harvard, and other organizations to track terminations of grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NSF. It draws on voluntary submissions from scientists involved as well as public government information.

A search of its database for the terms “climate change,” “clean energy,” “climate adaptation,” “environmental justice,” and “climate justice” showed that the NSF has canceled funds for 118 projects, which were supposed to receive more than $100 million in total. Searching for the word “climate” produces more than 300 research projects that were set to receive more than $230 million. (That word often indicates climate-change-related research, but in some abstracts it refers to the cultural climate.)

Some share of those funds has already been issued to research groups. The NSF section of the database doesn’t include that “outlaid” figure, but it’s generally about half the amount of the original grants, according to Noam Ross, a computational researcher and executive director of rOpenSci, a nonprofit initiative that promotes open and reproducible science.

A search for “climate change” among the NIH projects produces another 22 studies that were terminated and were still owed nearly $50 million in grants. Many of those projects explored the mental or physical health effects of climate change and extreme weather events.

The NSF more recently released its own list of terminated projects, which mostly mirrored GrantWatch’s findings and confirms the specific terminations mentioned in this story.

“These grant terminations are theft from the American people,” Ross said in an email response. “By illegally ending this research the Trump administration is wasting taxpayer dollars, gutting US leadership in science, and telling the world that the US government breaks its promises.”

Harvard, the country’s oldest university, has been particularly hard hit.

In April, the university sued the Trump administration over cuts to its research funding and efforts to exert control over its admissions and governance policies. The White House, in turn, has moved to eliminate all federal funds for the university, including hundreds of NSF and NIH grants.

Daniel Nocera, a professor at Harvard who has done pioneering work on so-called artificial photosynthesis, a pathway for producing clean fuels from sunlight, said in an email that all of his grants were terminated.

“I have no research funds,” he added.

Another terminated grant involved a collaboration between Harvard and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), designed to update the atmospheric chemistry component of the Community Earth System Model, an open-source climate model widely used by scientists around the world.

The research was expected to “contribute to a better understanding of atmospheric chemistry in the climate system and to improve air quality predictions within the context of climate change,” according to the NSF abstract.

“We completed most of the work and were able to bring it to a stopping point,” Daniel Jacob, a professor at Harvard listed as the principal investigator on the project, said in an email. “But it will affect the ability to study chemistry-climate interactions. And it is clearly not right to pull funding from an existing project.”


Plenty of the affected research projects do, in one way or another, grapple with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But that’s because there is ample evidence that disadvantaged communities experience higher rates of illness from energy-sector pollution, will be harder hit by the escalating effects of extreme weather and are underrepresented in scientific fields.

One of the largest terminations cut off about $4 million dollars of remaining funds for the CLIMATE Justice Initiative, a fellowship program at the University of California, Irvine designed to recruit, train and mentor a more diverse array of researchers in Earth sciences.

The NSF decision occurred halfway into the 5-year program, halting funds for a number of fellows who were in the midst of environmental justice research efforts with community partners in Southern California. Kathleen Johnson, a professor at UC Irvine and director of the initiative, says the university is striving to find ways to fund as many participants as possible for the remainder of their fellowships.

“We need people from all parts of society who are trained in geoscience and climate science to address all these global challenges that we are facing,” she says. “The people who will be best positioned to do this work … are the people who understand the community's needs and are able to therefore work to implement equitable solutions.”

Gender-Baiting Is Dehumanizing—And It Hurts Families Across the Political Spectrum, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Gender-Baiting Is Dehumanizing—And It Hurts Families Across the Political Spectrum

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 13, 2026

Elaine Godfrey’s Atlantic piece on the Paxton-Talarico Senate race is a sobering reminder that we are likely to see an ugly campaign season in Texas. Already, the attacks on James Talarico have moved beyond policy disagreement into gender-baiting, mockery, and false claims about his identity. These tactics are not only dishonest; they are dehumanizing.

Whatever one thinks of Talarico’s politics, no candidate should be reduced to insults about masculinity, gender identity, or sexuality. This kind of rhetoric does not merely target one public figure. It sends a message to every LGBTQIA perso—and to every young person who is questioning, searching, or simply different—that their dignity is conditional and that their humanity can be turned into a punchline.

That cruelty is especially painful because Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA) people are not abstractions. They are our children, siblings, cousins, parents, students, neighbors, colleagues, and friends. They live in Democratic families, Republican families, religious families, secular families, rural families, urban families, and every kind of Texas family. 

Geez, human variation does not sort itself neatly by party, denomination, ZIP code, or ideology. 

That is not “higher education gobbledygook.” It is lived reality.

So when political leaders mock gender identity or use anti-LGBTQIA insinuations to score points, they are almost certainly wounding people in their own communities—and quite possibly in their own families. 

They may imagine they are attacking an opponent, but the damage radiates outward. It reaches the child listening from the back seat, the teenager in the pew, the college student afraid to come home, the parent who loves their child but now feels politically cornered into silence.

Most positively, this moment also reminds us that LGBTQIA people have never been merely the objects of ridicule or fear. They are agents of courage, culture, family, faith, scholarship, public service, and democratic possibility. Every year on June 28, communities around the world observe International LGBT Pride Day, honoring the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City—a watershed moment that helped catalyze the modern gay liberation movement. 

Pride is not only a celebration. It is a public affirmation that people who have been shamed, criminalized, silenced, and excluded are fully human and fully worthy of dignity, safety, joy, and belonging.

Happy Pride Month, by the way!

This is why gender-baiting is so morally bankrupt. It asks us to move backward, toward shame and stigma, precisely when history calls us forward—toward recognition, repair, and love.

This is not strength. It is not faith. It is not leadership. It is the politics of humiliation.

Texas deserves better than campaigns built on ridicule. We can debate taxes, schools, health care, immigration, war, democracy, and the future of the state without stripping people of their dignity. In fact, we must. A democracy worthy of the name depends not only on votes and institutions, but on the moral discipline to recognize one another as fully human.

The truth is simple: LGBTQIA Texans belong to all of us. They are part of every community, including those that pretend otherwise. To attack them for political gain is to attack the sacred fabric of family, faith, and human dignity itself.

Reference

Stonewall riots. (2026, June 12). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

‘We Have Not Seen Ugly Yet’

Paxton versus Talarico is already awful.  

By Elaine Godfrey | May 27, 2026

Mark Felix / Bloomberg / Getty
May 27, 2026

TWO THINGS are as certain as bluebonnets in spring now that Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas: Democrats have a better-than-usual chance of winning statewide. And the next 23 weeks are going to be hideous.

Paxton’s big win comes days after President Trump stuck his finger into the wind, determined that the incumbent, John Cornyn, was toast, and gave the attorney general his last-minute support. Even though the nearly 28-point margin was surprising, it was probably always going to be Paxton. A runoff tends to attract the hardest of the hard-core—the kind of determined voter who is willing not only to show up to vote in March, but to show up and vote in March, sit through 12 weeks of brutal attack ads, then head back out to the polls in May. The kind of Republican who might argue, as one woman did in Dallas when I spoke with her last week, that Paxton and Trump are bringing masculinity back to the party like Bambi’s father “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Now that these dutiful Republicans have secured the animated stag of their dreams, they will turn their attention to his general-election opponent: James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic state lawmaker and aspiring Presbyterian minister. In some ways, the two men have become avatars for their respective parties, which will spend the next five months ruthlessly attacking each other.

Paxton, a MAGA folk hero, seems even more committed to the movement than Trump himself is. As attorney general, he filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits against Presidents Obama and Biden, and sued to overturn the 2020 election results. Paxton and Trump happen to share a strikingly similar ethical and legal rap sheet: Both men have been indicted (Paxton’s charges involved securities fraud and were dismissed after he agreed to do community service and take an ethics class); both have been impeached (Paxton was suspended by the Texas House but later acquitted by the Senate); and both have been accused of—and deny—infidelity. (Angela Paxton is now divorcing Ken on “biblical grounds.”)

Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this

Although Talarico doesn’t yet have Paxton’s name recognition, he does have strong youth-pastor energy and, at least for now, the moral high ground. As a faith-forward economic populist, Talarico has a core campaign message of love triumphing over hate, and little guys taking on the billionaires. Republicans know that they’ve got a tough race ahead of them, which is why they’ve already settled on a strategy: make Talarico seem like a weird dude.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Talarico has been more than a little helpful in this effort. In 2021, the state lawmaker said that “God is nonbinary,” a statement that is off-putting to some Christians, not because they believe that God is literally a man but because they can’t fathom why someone would drag God into the earthly debate over gender identity. Talarico has also said that there are six biological sexes and that he supports access to abortion, in part, because God asked for consent when he blessed Mary with the baby Jesus. As a candidate in 2022, he pledged to run a “non-meat campaign,” which was never going to play well in cattle country.

Lately, Talarico has been doing some backtracking. “I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he told CBS this week, adding that there are “some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret.” Whenever Talarico is accused of being insufficiently pro-meat, his campaign circulates a photo of the candidate gnawing on a turkey leg at the state fair.

Still, both sides have heaps of material to work with. Which is why the next few months promise a total inundation of negative advertising online, and on the airwaves in Texas. Democrats will hammer into voters Paxton’s scandals—and the failures of Republican leadership. “Will Republicans get away with running a superficial attack campaign when Texans are really hurting?” Matt Angle, a state Democratic strategist, told me. “They’ve been in control for 30 years. If something’s broke, they broke it.” Meanwhile, Republicans are already parroting Paxton’s proposed “Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico” nicknames. This morning, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X that Democrats have nominated their “first transgender senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told me. They’re going to make Talarico “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.”

The task ahead will be tough for Talarico, who will have to decide when to counter these attacks directly—Define thyself lest ye be defined, as the political maxim goes—and when to remain firmly astride his moral high horse. He will also have to fend off the unprecedented amounts of money that Republicans are pumping into the race in order to protect their fragile Senate majority. Already, Paxton has secured the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which initially endorsed Cornyn and which, last night, dutifully scrubbed its website of all anti-Paxton press releases and ads.

Yet for Talarico, hope remains. No Texan needs reminding that inflation is high, or that the war in Iran has the whole world on edge and gas prices rising. Trump’s polling is bad, and among Texans, Talarico has higher favorability numbers than both Paxton and the president. In what might end up being a particularly good year for Democrats, victory is not only possible but achievable.

Still, if Democrats have done one thing well in Texas over the past 30 years, it’s dash hopes. The last time a Democrat came close to winning statewide in Texas was in 2018. Back then, Senator Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by roughly 215,000 votes. This time, the figure that Republicans have their eye on is 778,139, or the number of Texans who voted in the March GOP primary but who were not excited enough about either Republican candidate to vote in the runoff. A drop in turnout was expected. But a 36 percent decline “mirrors a lack of Republican enthusiasm we’ve seen in other states,” Minchillo said. For Texas Republicans, that number is “distressing.”

Last night on Truth Social, Trump congratulated Paxton and promised to hold a few rallies to help gin up some excitement. “Texas, this will be FUN!” the president teased. We’ll see.

A Wall That’s Worth Defending, by David R. Brockman, Texas Observer | March 17, 2026

I have had the good fortune of encountering the work of religious scholar and Texas Christian University professor Dr. David R. Brockman, whose Christian thought resonates deeply with my own. I grew up in the Mexican Baptist Church, where we understood faith as inseparable from justice. Ours was a social justice gospel—not because we agreed on everything, but because the church offered a space for moral reflection, honest questioning, and collective care. For many of us, it was also a refuge from the gaze, exclusion, and unsafety often experienced in predominantly white university institutions.

This is why Christian nationalism feels so profoundly alien to the Christian theology many of us inherited. Glenn Bracey and Dr. Brockman's Baker Institute colleague Michael Emerson contend that Christian nationalists are defending a “religion of whiteness” against religious and racial diversity. Alternatively, in their book on Christian nationalism, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue argue that Christian nationalism is less about religion itself than about the pursuit of power. However one frames it, Christian nationalism is not about Christ or Jesus. It is hateful and hurtful, profoundly antithetical to a faith tradition rooted in love, humility, justice, and care for the vulnerable.

—Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A Wall That’s Worth Defending

Some evangelical Christians are hammering away at the very church-state separation that allowed them, and other believers, to first flourish in America.


by David R. Brockman | Texas Observer | March 17, 2026

When our nation’s Founders took the revolutionary step of creating a republic with no state religion, they likely never envisioned how religiously diverse the nation would become. Drive around my hometown of Fort Worth, or any populous Texas city, and you’ll see Muslim mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and Jewish synagogues, as well as Christian churches of all sizes and varieties.

Once-predominant Christians now account for less than two-thirds of Americans, and their faith has fragmented into hundreds of denominations that differ over theology, morality, and politics. One out of 15 Americans now belongs to a religion other than Christianity. Almost a third of Americans don’t identify with any particular religion, yet belief still flourishes. Over half of Americans consider religion very important in daily life; that share struggles to reach 20 percent in other economically advanced nations.

As America grows more religiously diverse, the Founders’ decision to separate church and state looks increasingly wise. Though it’s easy to spot flaws in the Founders themselves and the Constitution they crafted (the Electoral College, for instance, or the three-fifths clause), what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation” was one thing they definitely got right.

Two centuries on, it’s easy to overlook just how novel that wall was in its day. Whereas both America’s adversary (Britain) and main ally (France) in the Revolutionary War officially endorsed one religion (the Church of England and the Catholic Church, respectively), the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibited the “establishment” of such an official religion, instead guaranteeing individuals’ right to freely practice their own beliefs. The Founders also went against the grain in prohibiting any religious tests for holding public office, a requirement both in Britain and in many of the states at the time (North Carolina and Georgia, for instance, restricted public office to Protestant Christians).

As historian Steven K. Green notes, leading clergy of the day attacked the Constitution’s “irreligious” character—particularly the fact that, unlike most public documents of the time, including the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, it neither invokes nor mentions a deity.

Scholars and jurists have long debated how church-state separation should be interpreted and applied, but it remains a cornerstone of our democracy. And it’s one worth keeping, according to most Americans. Fifty-four percent want the federal government to enforce church-state separation; 69 percent believe the United States should never declare an official religion—and with good reason: Just imagine the mess if the government tried to foist one religious group’s beliefs on so varied a people.

Yet that’s effectively what Christian nationalists are attempting to do today. This largely white evangelical movement, which holds sway in GOP politics, especially here in Texas, seeks conservative Christian domination over law and public policy.

Despite contrary evidence offered by mainstream historians, many leading Texas lawmakers and politicos apparently agree with Aledo-based David Barton that church-state separation is a “myth” liberals and secularists concocted to conceal the Founders’ alleged intent to create an explicitly Christian nation. The Texas GOP has pledged to work “toward dispelling” this purported myth. Both Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and state Senator Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican, have declared there is “no such thing” as church-state separation.

At the Capitol, Texas lawmakers have sought to weaken Jefferson’s wall, especially in public education. In 2021, they required “In God We Trust” be posted in public schools. In 2023, lawmakers authorized school districts to hire chaplains as counselors, with no prohibition on proselytizing. In 2024, the State Board of Education gave its blessing to a “Bible-infused” K-5 curriculum featuring instructional materials more appropriate for Sunday school than public schools. And last year, lawmakers mandated that all public schools display one religious tradition’s sacred text—the Ten Commandments—and provide a daily period for prayer and Scripture reading.

These measures arguably promote one religion over others, and religion over non-religion, threatening to turn students, families, and teachers who don’t subscribe to Christian-nationalist religiosity into outsiders in their own public schools and communities.

As a recent book, Randall Balmer’s America’s Best Idea: Separation of Church and State, makes clear, what the author calls our “best idea” was no deus ex machina; it emerged from a particular history and particular coalitional forces. America’s “grand experiment of constructing a government without … an established religion,” Balmer writes, grew from an alliance of “two unlikely camps,” secular rationalists and—ironically—evangelicals.

The latter group had their own history of persecution under state religion. In colonial Virginia, where the Church of England was the established religion, “a sheriff brutally horsewhipped a Baptist minister,” Balmer recounts as an example. Quaker William Penn, persecuted in Britain by the Church of England, and Baptist Roger Williams, who suffered at the hands of Puritan colonial officials, worked to free people from the yoke of official religion; they established colonies (Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, respectively) that offered religious freedom, setting a precedent for the later First Amendment.

Secular, Enlightenment-minded Founders like James Madison had their own reasons for rejecting state religion. They needed to accommodate the religious diversity already present in the new nation, where religious groups “rang[ed] from Catholics and Moravians to Jews, Quakers, and Dutch Reformed—and perhaps hundreds more.” Moreover, Madison linked religious establishment with political tyranny and violence; he wrote that “torrents of blood” had been spilled in official religion’s “vain attempt” to proscribe religious differences.

In rejecting official religion, the Founders created what Balmer calls a “free marketplace of religion”: Since no religious group holds a state-sanctioned monopoly over religious life, “religious groups … compete for adherents on an equal footing.”

Pushback to the Founders’ free-market approach, though, does have a long history. In the 19th century, for instance, the elaborately named National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution pushed for explicit acknowledgment of Christ’s will as the law of the land. Though this group’s efforts failed, it foreshadowed today’s Christian nationalism.

Then and now, Christian nationalists threaten a system that has actually benefited both government and religion. Though Americans haven’t always lived up to the promise of religious tolerance, we have been spared widespread sectarian bloodshed. Meanwhile, “religion has flourished in America,” Balmer writes, “precisely because the government (for the most part, at least) has stayed out of the religion business.”

Separation has perhaps benefited no group more than evangelicals themselves. They have proved far more adept than other groups at adjusting to social and technological changes (think of their adroit use of digital media or their move to megachurches featuring multisensory worship experiences). And, of course, there’s the unprecedented political power evangelicals wield, especially here in Texas.

So why the eagerness of many evangelicals to kill the golden goose of separation? Balmer blames evangelical leaders’ (and President Donald Trump’s) “rhetoric of victimization.” However, he leaves unanswered the question of why they find such rhetoric so compelling. Other scholars offer possible answers. For instance, Glenn Bracey and my Baker Institute colleague Michael Emerson contend that Christian nationalists are defending a “religion of whiteness” against religious and racial diversity. Alternatively, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue that Christian nationalism is less about religion than the pursuit of power.

Like other bedrock principles of our democracy—say, the separation of powers or freedom of the press, both also under threat today—church-state separation was born of mixed motives, has not always lived up to its own promise, and remains subject to shifting interpretations. At times, it has functioned more as a hedge than an impermeable wall (as when a Cold War Congress made “In God We Trust” the national motto). Yet, it’s no myth. It has prevented any one religion from gaining a state-sanctioned monopoly in the religious marketplace, and that has served us well, fostering a pluralism that makes us stronger and freer. As Jefferson’s wall faces perhaps its most severe tests to date, it is up to all of us, religious and nonreligious alike, to speak out in its defense.


David R. Brockman, Ph.D., is an author, Christian theologian, and nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He teaches at Texas Christian University.

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule: Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

Russell Vought

Russell Vought’s hostility toward higher education research is not anti-intellectualism in the simple sense. It reflects an authoritarian theory of knowledge embedded in the governing vision he helped construct as a principal architect of Project 2025.

As Elizabeth Ginexi warns in her May 28, 2026 Substack analysis, OMB’s proposed overhaul of federal grant rules would translate that vision into a government-wide apparatus of political control "layered over every stage of the federal science lifecycle" such that senior appointees could override expert peer review. They could require grants to advance presidential priorities. They could subject research to an undefined standard of “Gold Standard Science,” as well as terminate ongoing awards without any finding of fraud or misconduct.

 
The proposal would also make federal support for conferences, scholarly memberships, journal access, publication, public communication, and international collaboration contingent upon administrative approval—giving political officials influence not only over what research is funded, but also over whether scholars can develop, test, share, and defend their findings.

Research would remain tolerable only when it serves the executive’s ideological agenda. Peer review becomes suspect because it is independent; academic freedom because it is pluralistic; and DEI, climate science, gender studies, public health, and civil-rights research because they can produce evidence that challenges hierarchy and concentrated power. 

What Vought calls “taming the bureaucracy” is therefore not merely an administrative project. It is an effort to subordinate universities, scientific inquiry, and public knowledge to presidential authority—to tame knowledge itself.

Yes, all of this is pretty dire and outrageous. One thing all can do is submit a public comment. Everyone should do this. The deadline is July 13, 2026 for doing so. Ultimately, we must vote this administration out of power.

-Angela Valenzuela

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

Elizabeth Ginexi | Substack | May 28, 2026

Federal Register, May 29, 2026 | Docket OMB-2026-0034 | Comment Deadline: ~July 13, 2026

https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance

1. Political Appointees Take Control of Grant Awards (§200.205)

This is arguably the most consequential change in the rule. Senior political appointees, rather than career scientists or program officers, would now be required to conduct a “pre-issuance review” of every discretionary grant before it is awarded. These appointees are explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers or routinely ratifying their recommendations.

The criteria they must apply include blocking awards that touch on denial of “the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration, or anything deemed to “promote anti-American values.” The rule also requires that discretionary awards must:

“...demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

In practice, this gives political appointees a veto over any science that conflicts with the current administration’s ideology.

2. Peer Review Is No Longer Binding (§200.205(d))

The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations “remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding.” This directly dismantles the post-WWII system used by NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA, and nearly every science agency, in which independent expert peer review was the primary measure of scientific merit. Under this rule, a political appointee can simply override the scientific community’s judgment with no finding of cause.

3. “Gold Standard Science” as an Undefined Political Test (§200.205)

The rule repeatedly invokes a concept called “Gold Standard Science,” tied to Executive Order 14303 of May 23, 2025, without defining it in any concrete or measurable way. Under the proposed requirements:

• All grants must include benchmarks for compliance with “Gold Standard Science”

• Agencies must prioritize institutions that have “demonstrated success in implementing Gold Standard Science”

• Institutional prestige and historical reputation are explicitly deprioritized in favor of compliance with this undefined standard

Because the standard is never defined, the administration retains broad, unguided discretion to favor or disfavor institutions based on their political alignment.

4. Active Grants Can Be Terminated at Any Time, for Any Reason (§200.340)

The rule codifies and expands the authority to terminate active grants mid-award simply because they are “inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities.” Agencies need only provide a brief written rationale; no finding of noncompliance or fraud is required. This retroactively threatens ongoing multi-year research that researchers and institutions have built programs around.

OMB frames this as analogous to the “termination for convenience” clause used in federal contracts, but grants are fundamentally different instruments. Researchers take on staff, make commitments to participants, and design years-long projects around the presumption that a funded grant will run its course.

5. DEI, Gender Research, and Related Topics Banned as Grant Conditions (§200.300)

All federal award funds are prohibited from being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” any of the following:

• DEI or DEIA policies or practices

• “Gender ideology,” defined as any theory that “denies the biological reality of sex or the sex binary”

• Any assistance with gender transition for individuals under 19

These restrictions are embedded as mandatory grant conditions across all agencies and all programs. A university or research institution that conducts such research, even with entirely separate, non-federal funds, could face grant termination if the activity is found to conflict with award conditions.

6. Broad Prohibition on International Scientific Collaboration (§200.220)

A new government-wide rule prohibits the use of any federal funds, including indirect costs, for bilateral or multilateral collaboration with “covered foreign countries” or entities affiliated with them. The rule extends beyond China to all countries designated under broad sanctions lists, and covers travel, research activities, technical assistance, and indirect costs allocable to any such collaboration.

While legitimate national security concerns exist with certain foreign entities, this provision is sweeping enough to severely disrupt international partnerships that have been foundational to U.S. leadership in fields from climate science and astrophysics to genomics and epidemiology.

7. “Domestic-First” Framework for Research Awards (§200.202(e))

A new domestic-first framework requires that any international element in a federally funded R&D grant be affirmatively justified on a case-by-case basis by agency officials. Foreign entities cannot receive R&D awards at all except with written approval from a senior political appointee. International collaboration, currently standard practice across many scientific disciplines, would become presumptively disfavored.

8. Applicants Can Be Denied Based on Organizational “Affiliations” (§200.206)

The risk factors agencies may use to deny a grant application are expanded to include an applicant’s membership in or affiliation with organizations that “advocate for the overthrow of the United States Government” or “undermine public safety or national security.” Given the preamble’s expansive framing of what constitutes anti-American activity, this language could be used to disqualify researchers affiliated with civil rights, environmental, or public health advocacy organizations.

9. E-Verify Mandated for All Grant Recipients (§200.303)

All recipients and subrecipients of federal awards must enroll in and use the DHS E-Verify system for every employee and contractor working on a federal award. Any Final Nonconfirmation must be reported to the federal agency. This adds significant administrative burden to universities and research institutions and could jeopardize grants at institutions employing researchers from abroad.

10. OMB Claims Direct Binding Authority Over All Agencies

The rule restructures 2 CFR to make OMB’s guidance a directly binding regulation on all agencies, effective government-wide on a single date. This removes the previous system under which individual agencies had meaningful flexibility in adopting OMB guidance. It also eliminates the ability of individual science agencies to shield their communities from any of these changes through their own implementing rules.

Conference Attendance and Related Costs

11. Conference Attendance Now Requires Express Agency Pre-Approval (§200.432)

Under current rules, conference attendance related to the scientific work of a grant is a standard, routine allowable cost. The proposed rule eliminates that presumption entirely. The new text states:

“The costs for attending conferences are allowable only if participation in the conference is expressly approved by the Federal agency and included in the terms and conditions of the Federal award.”

This means every conference a researcher wishes to attend using grant funds must be pre-approved by the agency and written into the award at the time it is made. Conferences not anticipated when the award was issued cannot easily be added later, and the agency has full discretion to deny approval or simply decline to include any conferences in the terms at all.

Conferences are where scientists present results, receive peer critique, discover new approaches, and build the collaborations that advance their fields. Giving political appointees gatekeeper authority over conference attendance is a direct tool for isolating researchers from their professional communities.

12. Professional Memberships Require Prior Approval and Must Be “Necessary” (§200.454)

The proposed rule makes three significant changes to allowable membership and subscription costs:

• Professional society memberships are only allowable if they are necessary to fulfill the award requirements and receive prior written agency approval

• Subscriptions to professional, academic, and technical journals are made categorically unallowable

• Memberships in organizations whose primary purpose is lobbying or issue advocacy are unallowable

The journal subscription ban deserves particular attention. Researchers routinely use grant funds to access the scientific literature that is foundational to their work. At institutions with constrained library budgets, this could make it genuinely difficult to conduct research.

13. Publication Costs and Open Access Fees Presumptively Unallowable (§200.461)

The rule proposes that all journal publication costs, including article processing charges, open access fees, and similar fees, are unallowable by default. Exceptions would require either a specific statutory mandate or case-by-case agency pre-approval. The proposed regulatory text reads:

“Publication costs (including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications) are unallowable under Federal awards.”

This directly conflicts with longstanding federal open access mandates, including the 2022 OSTP memorandum requiring that federally funded research be made publicly available. Peer-reviewed publication is the mechanism by which science is validated and shared. Making it financially prohibitive for federally funded researchers to publish their findings would effectively suppress the scientific record.

14. Public Communications and Outreach Severely Restricted (§200.421)

All public relations costs are proposed as unallowable except those explicitly required by statute. This would restrict researchers from communicating findings to the public or press. Combined with the issue advocacy prohibition below, it adds another layer of control over how federally funded science reaches the public.

15. New “Issue Advocacy” Prohibition (§200.450)

Federal grant funds could not be used for:

• Any messaging that promotes or opposes a “particular social, political, or public policy position unrelated to the statutory objectives” of the award

• Voter registration activities

• Attempting to influence any state executive branch agency on matters outside the precise scope of the award

Given that the rule’s preamble characterizes climate science, public health research, and equity research as “divisive ideologies,” this prohibition could be deployed to bar researchers from speaking publicly about their own federally funded findings on politically sensitive subjects.
Notices of Funding Opportunities: New Restrictions and Controls

16. Program Goals Must “Align with Administration Policies and Priorities” (§200.202)

Every new federal grant program, including science programs, must now be designed with goals that explicitly align with administration policies and priorities. This requirement is embedded directly in the regulatory text governing program design, meaning science agencies must structure their grant solicitations around the current administration’s political agenda rather than solely around scientific need, statutory mandate, or the advice of the scientific community.

17. Agency Heads Can Exempt Grant Competitions from Public Notice (§200.204)

A new exception allows a federal agency head, or their designee, to approve an exemption from the requirement to publicly post a funding opportunity on Grants.gov when “publicly announcing an opportunity would pose a risk to national security or is in the national interest of the United States.” While narrow national security carve-outs for classified defense research are legitimate, this language is considerably broader. “National interest” is a phrase this administration has used expansively, and it could justify conducting entire grant competitions outside public view.

18. Agencies Can Restrict Eligibility to Specific Nonprofit Categories (§200.202(d))

Agencies can now explicitly restrict grant eligibility to specific IRS nonprofit categories, for example limiting eligibility to 501(c)(3) organizations while excluding 501(c)(4) organizations. This could be used to exclude advocacy-affiliated scientific organizations or civil society groups that conduct or fund research.

19. OMB Gains Direct Oversight of Which Institutions Receive Grants

A new provision allows OMB to require agencies to submit reports identifying the specific recipients of federal awards over any given period. Combined with OMB’s new authority to require political alignment in program design, this gives the White House direct oversight and leverage over which institutions receive federal research funding. That function has historically been insulated from political interference, and with good reason.

Bottom Line

Since World War II, the United States built the world’s preeminent scientific enterprise on a straightforward principle: federal dollars should fund the best science, as determined by independent experts rather than politicians. Peer review, open competition, and institutional autonomy were the pillars of that system. This proposed rule dismantles all three, simultaneously, government-wide, and binding on every federal agency by October 1, 2026.

What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.

• Before a competition opens, every program must be designed to align with the President’s policy priorities, not scientific need, statutory mandate, or expert consensus.

• When opportunities are announced, agencies can restrict who is eligible, and the agency head can exempt solicitations from public posting under a broad national interest exception.

• When applications are reviewed, political appointees must personally evaluate every discretionary grant. Peer review is explicitly reduced to advisory status. Appointees are forbidden from deferring to scientific experts.

• When awards are made, grants can be conditioned on compliance with an undefined “Gold Standard Science” standard, and institutions can be disqualified based on their affiliations or the political character of their prior work.

• During the research itself, scientists cannot attend conferences, join professional societies, subscribe to journals, or publish in peer-reviewed journals without express agency pre-approval. Each of those approvals can simply be withheld.

• At any moment, an active grant, including a multi-year award already mid-project, can be terminated because a political appointee decides it no longer aligns with agency priorities. No finding of misconduct is required.

• When results are ready to share, publication costs are presumptively unallowable, and any public communication that could be labeled issue advocacy on a sensitive topic puts the entire award at risk.

The rule is also notable for what it cites as justification. The preamble relies heavily on Heritage Foundation reports, partisan Senate committee documents, and White House fact sheets, rather than independent scientific or administrative assessments. It characterizes decades of peer-reviewed research on climate, public health, equity, and international collaboration as “woke,” “neo-Marxist,” “anti-American,” or “divisive ideology.” It treats the scientific community’s professional infrastructure, including conferences, journals, international partnerships, and open access publishing, as wasteful overhead to be controlled or eliminated.

Congress has repeatedly appropriated funds for science agencies with the expectation that those funds would be administered through merit-based, expert-driven processes insulated from political interference. This rule attempts to override that expectation administratively, without new legislation, by repurposing OMB’s grants management authority as a vehicle for political control of science.

The public comment period closes approximately July 13, 2026 (45 days from May 29 publication). Comments must be submitted to regulations.gov, Docket OMB-2026-0034.

Scientists, universities, scientific societies, patient advocacy organizations, state governments, and members of the public all have standing to comment. Given the scope of what is proposed, the breadth and volume of opposition in the formal record will matter both legally and politically.

Why Policy Matters: Ally Flores’ Call for Accountability to the UT System Board of Regents, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 9, 2026

Why Policy Matters: Ally Flores’ Call for Accountability to the UT System Board of Regents, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., June 10, 2026

I want to elevate the powerful letter to the editor by Ally Flores published onMay 29, 2026 in The Austin Chronicle, “Demand Accountability," also published below.

A recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, Flores names something deeply important: policy is never neutral. The rules that govern who gets to speak, when meetings are held, how testimony is controlled, and who has the authority to eliminate departments or terminate faculty all shape the democratic life of a public university.

Ally Flores

Her letter raises serious concerns about the UT System Board of Regents’ recent actions, especially the newly introduced rule granting university presidents sweeping authority to eliminate departments and terminate faculty while removing existing appeal processes and the requirement to provide a rationale. This is not merely an administrative change. It is a governance shift with profound implications for academic freedom, shared governance, faculty rights, and the future of ethnic and gender studies at UT Austin.

Policy matters because it is the machinery through which values become institutional reality. It can protect democratic participation, transparency, and academic freedom—or it can be used to silence, consolidate, and control. Ally Flores’ letter reminds us that accountability begins with paying attention to the rules, because the rules determine what is possible.

Her voice not only deserves to be heard, but heeded—especially by those entrusted with the stewardship of our public universities.

Demand Accountability
Ally Flores, Austin Chronicle | May 29, 2026

Dear Editor,

Last week, the UT System Regents met after the academic year ended, when many students and faculty were already out of town. Between no same-day sign-ups for testimony, timed remarks limited to the “chairmen’s discretion,” requiring pre-approval of speaking topics, and a phone line for speaker registration and questions that was disconnected the day before the meeting, public input felt, at best, discouraged. More concerning, buried in the 228-page agenda was a newly introduced rule granting university presidents unchecked authority to eliminate departments and terminate faculty, removing the existing appeal process and requirement to provide a rationale for these decisions.

It is difficult to accept these changes as anything but censorship when a fully Abbott-appointed board, including a former Republican state senator and members with explicit partisan ties, reliably advance any conservative measure placed before them. With UT-Austin moving to consolidate its ethnic and gender studies departments this fall, faculty remain in limbo about its impending implementation and whether newly grouped departments will be forced to compete for already-limited resources.

However, this selective austerity seems convenient. Tech moguls Michael and Susan Dell recently crossed $1 billion in lifetime giving to the university, and as AI has become a consistent subject of praise from President Jim Davis, this year’s decision to automate the simple task of reading graduate names at commencement signals not only a disregard for the human foundations of academia but a growing institutional malleability. I implore those reading to demand accountability before a leading public university surrenders what remains of its integrity to the outside pressures it has shown no willingness to resist.

Ally Flores

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement: What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement:
What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See          

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 10, 2026

Today's anti-DEI movement does not merely invoke the language of neutrality; it weaponizes it. Its appeals to “colorblind equality,” “individual responsibility,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “freedom from coercion” provide moral cover for a coordinated effort to dismantle the institutional commitments that make multiracial and multiethnic democracy possible.

A Manhattan Institute (2023) policy brief by Christopher Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, and Matt Beienburg makes this clear. The document calls for state legislatures to abolish DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training, prohibit diversity statements, and eliminate identity-conscious policies in public universities. It even supplies model legislative language for states to adopt. In other words, it does not merely criticize DEI. It operationalizes a political project.

What would Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer help us see in this document and in the broader movement from which it emerges? At the risk of oversimplifying the work of these formidable researchers and thinkers—or failing to fully acknowledge the many conceptual overlaps among them—I offer the following reading. Each illuminates a different dimension of the same political project: Stewart helps us understand the religious-nationalist drive for power; MacLean reveals the anti-democratic political economy beneath it; and Mayer follows the money and institutional networks that make such ideas actionable.

Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, would
likely urge us not to mistake this for a simple “culture war.” Christian nationalism, in her analysis, is not merely about religious belief. Nor is it reducible to debates over prayer, abortion, sexuality, or school curricula. It is a political movement seeking power over the institutions of democracy. Its aim is not pluralism, but control. From this perspective, attacks on DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and public education are not side issues. They are part of a larger attempt to define whose knowledge counts, whose histories matter, and whose presence in public institutions is legitimate.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, would likely locate this effort within a longer history of anti-democratic political economy. Her work shows how radical-right, neoliberal thinkers and donors have sought to constrain majority rule, weaken public institutions, privatize public goods, and insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability. Seen through MacLean’s lens, anti-DEI legislation is not only a cultural backlash. It is also a governance strategy. It

narrows what public universities can do, what faculty can say, what students can learn, and what communities can demand of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, would likely follow the money. She would ask: Who funds the think tanks, advocacy organizations, litigation networks, media campaigns, and policy shops that produce these “model bills”? Who benefits when public institutions are weakened? Who gains when democracy is recast as “coercion,” equity as “orthodoxy,” and civil rights as “preference”? 

Mayer’s work helps us see that ideas rarely move on their own. They are carried, amplified, and institutionalized through networks of wealth, influence, litigation, media, and policy advocacy. In higher education, this influence can become especially consequential when donor support comes with expectations—whether explicit or implicit—that shape curricula, research priorities, faculty appointments, or public-facing programs. When private wealth gains this kind of leverage over academic life, it does more than fund ideas; it helps determine which ideas become legitimate, visible, and powerful. The result is a serious threat to academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of universities as public-serving institutions.

Together, these three writers help us understand that the attack on DEI is not simply about administrative offices or training sessions. It is about the future of democracy itself.

John Oliver’s recent and timely Last Week Tonight segment on New College of Florida gives us a concrete glimpse of what this project looks like when theory becomes governance. New College was not merely criticized as “woke”; it was politically captured and remade through state power. 

Board appointments, administrative upheaval, the elimination of gender studies, numerous faculty departures, escalating costs, and an aggressive campaign to rebrand the institution all became part of a larger effort to transform a distinctive honors public liberal arts college into a showcase for ideological control. Put plainly, New College was not simply reformed; it was targeted. Its transformation should be understood as an intentional and orchestrated attack—one that other states, especially those already moving in this direction, should heed as a warning.

Oliver’s satire makes the story accessible, but the implications are grave: New College reveals how appeals to freedom, neutrality, and anti-indoctrination can become instruments for narrowing intellectual life and subordinating public education to political spectacle.

Link to John Oliver's show on New College

What happened at New College of Florida should therefore be read not as an isolated Florida story, but as a warning about a broader national strategy—one that has already taken legislative form in Texas through SB 17 and related efforts to discipline public higher education.

This is especially clear in higher education. Public universities are among the few institutions where young people can still encounter histories, literatures, theories, and communities that challenge inherited hierarchies. They are places where students learn that inequality is not natural, that democracy is unfinished, and that knowledge can serve justice. This is precisely why they have become targets.

The anti-DEI movement tells us that it seeks neutrality. But there is nothing neutral or apolitical about banning the vocabulary of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, power, privilege, or structural inequality from public life. 

There is nothing neutral or apolitical about using state power to restrict how universities support historically excluded students. There is nothing neutral about turning “colorblindness” into a weapon against the very communities whose labor, taxes, cultures, and struggles built the state.

Nor is there anything Christian, in the deepest moral sense, about denying the dignity of the vulnerable, erasing histories of suffering and resistance, or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful. The Christianity rooted in justice that many of us recognize speaks to humility, justice, love, mercy, and care for the stranger. Christian nationalism, by contrast, cloaks hierarchy in sacred authority. It baptizes domination. It transforms—and disfigures—a faith tradition into an instrument of political control.

This is why Stewart’s analysis matters. She helps us see how religious language can be marshaled to justify anti-democratic power. This is why MacLean’s analysis matters. She helps us see how democracy is weakened not always by dramatic coups, but by slow institutional redesign. And this is why Mayer’s analysis matters. She helps us see how concentrated wealth builds the infrastructure that makes these transformations possible.

The struggle over DEI, then, is not a narrow dispute over campus bureaucracy. It is a struggle over whether public institutions will continue to serve a multiracial democracy or whether they will be remade to protect hierarchy under the banner of freedom.

For those of us in Texas, this is not abstract. Under SB 17, we have seen how anti-DEI laws chill speech, restructure universities, eliminate offices, threaten programs, and place entire fields of study under suspicion. We have seen how Mexican American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other knowledge traditions become vulnerable when political leaders decide that democracy itself has become too diverse, too demanding, and too honest.

The answer is not despair. It is clarity.

We should name the movement accurately. We should refuse the false innocence of its language. We should defend academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, civil rights, and public education as essential democratic goods. 

And we should insist that pluralism is not a threat to democracy. Pluralism is democracy.

The future being offered by Christian nationalism and its allied political networks is a narrowed one: fewer rights, fewer histories, fewer voices, fewer protections, fewer public goods. The future we must defend is broader, deeper, and more humane: a democracy capacious enough to tell the truth, educate all children, honor all communities, and build institutions worthy of the public trust.

That is the real choice before us.

Reference

Last Week Tonight. (2026, June 8). New College of Florida: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities [Press release]. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.