Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Gen Z is less religious, less Republican than others
Generation Z adults are less likely than older generations to join an established religion, far more likely to identify as LGBTQ and generally are less likely to be Republican, a new survey shows.
Why it matters: Gen Z — which includes those born between 1997 and 2012 — is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in U.S. history, and an estimated 40.8 million Gen Zers will be eligible to vote in 2024.
The big picture: The survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute confirms the left-leaning beliefs of Gen Z shown by other studies.
It also gives more details about their identities and religious habits that reflect broader shifts in American culture.
By the numbers: Gen Z adults — who now make up about 1 in 6 of the Americans eligible to vote — are more politically left than older Americans, with 43% of them identifying as liberal, the survey found.
Gen Z might be the MAGA movement’s undoing
the Public Religion Research Institute’s massive poll of 6,616 participants suggests that what works with his base might pose an insurmountable problem with Gen Z teens and Gen Z adults (who are younger than 25).
Ideologically, “Gen Z adults are the most likely of any generation to identify as liberal, at 43%, compared with one in four members of the Silent Generation (24%), baby boomers (25%), and Gen Xers (25%), and 39% of millennials.” However, Gen Z women are much more liberal than Gen Z men: “There is also a pronounced gender gap among Gen Z adults, with 47% of Gen Z women and 38% of Gen Z men identifying as liberal.” A racial divide exists, but it’s not as great as one might imagine: “White Gen Z adults are more likely than their non-white counterparts to identify as conservative (32% vs. 23%), but there is no significant difference in the proportion who identify as liberal.”
In Biden’s pledge to ‘shut down’ border, a stunning political shift
The deeper policy context of the comments, delivered at a campaign event in South Carolina Saturday and in a statement from the White House on Friday, is that Biden wants to resuscitate a bipartisan deal to pair new border powers with additional military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
But the Trump-like rhetoric from the Democratic president – and the fact that Democrats are not even talking about a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently in the country – is also an important political admission as immigration-focused Donald Trump zeroes in on the Republican presidential nomination and the border crisis reverberates through the country and into Washington, DC.
Biden is willing to offer concessions so he can make deals, and Trump wants to keep this as a campaign issue.
Man sentenced to 18 years for bombing church that was hosting drag event
Committed to stopping one near his home in northeastern Ohio, he got in his vehicle and, starting just after 11 p.m., drove about an hour to the Community Church of Chesterland, where organizers were planning to host a two-part “Drag Brunch and Story Hour” on April 1. Once there, investigators said, he hurled two molotov cocktails, hoping to burn “the entire church to the ground.”
On Monday, Penny, 20, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to two felonies: committing a church arson hate crime and using fire and explosives to commit a felony. Penny’s attempted firebombing of the Community Church of Chesterland came as some right-wing media outlets intensified their rhetoric against drag shows and conservative lawmakers made banning them or limiting children’s exposure to them an increasingly high priority. Meanwhile, the number of attacks against drag events rose.
‘The politics have changed’: South warms to expanded health benefits
House speakers in three Republican-controlled states — Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi — have said in recent weeks that they need to consider covering more people through their state-run health insurance programs.
Their comments represent a stark departure from more than a decade of lawmakers in conservative statehouses arguing vehemently against expanding Medicaid or similar benefits — many of them because of a reflexive revulsion to Obamacare.
MAGA World Is About to Meet Taylor Swift’s Fandom. It Won’t Go Well.
Far-right internet personalities and even a former Republican presidential candidate are spreading the notion that something is not quite right with Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star player Travis Kelce — and that somehow the Super Bowl is rigged and it’s all leading up to a Swift presidential endorsement of Joe Biden.
To explore how Swift’s influence has grown and how the attacks could backfire on the GOP, POLITICO Magazine reached out to Brian Donovan, a University of Kansas professor who teaches a popular college course called “The Sociology of Taylor Swift.”
“The Swiftie fan is arguably the most immersive and intense fandom in the U.S. right now,” Donovan said. “And to anger them is just political folly. They are a political force that I don’t think anyone really should mess with.”
America’s white male meltdown starts with Taylor Swift and ends with Justin Mohn
Oh, wait, I’m sorry — that wasn’t the Bucks County beheader. That was the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who was speaking this week on Fox News and spouting the kind of rhetoric that might inspire a “Mohn militia” — blaming all of America’s problems on some Other, whether it’s refugees or Black Lives Matter or the federal bureaucrats overseeing your student loans. The hateful blather is an effort to politically hijack the real moral panic among young white American men: that the safety net of white privilege and patriarchy that long served as an insurance policy against personal failure is collapsing on top of them.
Liz Cheney weighs in on the controversy of the day: Taylor Swift
“Taylor Swift is a national treasure,” Cheney said on X, seeming to rebutt the heat Swift has taken from the right.
Though Swift has yet to offer Biden her endorsement in the 2024 election, Donald Trump recently complained that he is “more popular” than Swift, and an ally to the former president pledged a “holy war” against the singer, Rolling Stone reported.
Absurd Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce conspiracy theories more right-wing brain rot
OPINION:Did liberals put Taylor Swift and pro-vaccine Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl? Yes, we did.
OAN might be a bit player in the media landscape, but this lunacy isn’t limited to the wing-nut fringe. Fox News has been pushing similar garbage for weeks. Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday he thinks the fix is in and, as a result, the Kansas City Chiefs will win their — checks notes — second consecutive Super Bowl and third in five seasons.
Supreme Court mifepristone case will affect millions. Don't base ruling off junk science.
In Idaho v. United States, the question is whether states can disregard longstanding federal protections and bar doctors from providing abortions to patients experiencing medical emergencies.
Another case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. Food and Drug Administration, targets access to mifepristone, a safe and effective medication used in most abortions in this country and for miscarriage management. Since its FDA approval a quarter century ago, mifepristone has been safely used by more than 5 million people.
As the dozens of legal briefs filed this week in support of the FDA make clear, if the Supreme Court allows the court of appeals’ order to take effect, it would roll back the clock on science and cause turmoil nationwide.
Here’s the real reason why right-wing media figures are targeting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce
“There’s something striking about watching the far-right tying itself in knots and attacking Swift and [her boyfriend Travis] Kelce that demonstrates how badly the far-right media has alienated itself from most of society,” Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers the intersection of politics, technology, and culture, told me Tuesday. “They’ve built out this alternate universe and reality of grievance and it feels like instead of using it to wage an effective culture war, they’re fully lost in it and can’t see that they’ve chosen as their primary enemy the person with the literal highest approval rating in American life right now.”
States Fights
What Texas is (and is not) doing to defy a Supreme Court setback
Questioning the court’s action, the Republican governor criticized its lack of clarity when it sided with the Biden administration, which wants to remove the razor wire while a legal challenge to Abbott’s actions plays out.
“There were no sentences, or paragraphs or pages of an opinion written by the Supreme Court, so no one knows at all what they were thinking – all we know is that they wanted to send it back to the 5th Circuit,” Abbott said on Fox News, arguing, “There was no opinion about anything – about razor wire, what Texas is doing or anything like that.”
The razor wire issue is playing out as part of a larger standoff in which Abbott argues by not acting more forcefully at the border, the federal government has violated its responsibility to protect the state from “invasion.”
Anguish lingers as transgender kids’ families seek medical care outside Texas — and fight a state ban
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office considers gender-affirming surgical procedures and puberty-blocking drugs “child abuse,” he declared in a 2022 legal opinion. “‘Transing’ kids through surgery/drugs is abuse & I’ll do all I can to stop it,” Paxton posted that year on social media. The offices of Republicans Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to several CNN requests for comment for this story.
Texas’ Supreme Court on Tuesday is set to hear oral arguments in a constitutional challenge to SB 14 by parents, doctors and advocates. Already, though, the law’s fallout for many families of transgender kids – and their doctors – has been life-altering.
A proposed Satanic school helped derail a vote to repeal Idaho's Blaine Amendment
An attempt by Idaho Republicans to repeal the state’s Blaine Amendment—a move that would allow taxpayer money to flow to churches and faith-based ministries across the state—has thankfully been placed on hold.
But not before a Satanist told lawmakers how they planned to take advantage of the potential new law to create a pro-Satan school.