When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.

Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?

I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.

Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.

These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.

The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.

In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.

In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.

In Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.

“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.

And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.

In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.

“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.

Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.

That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.

Talarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.

“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”

Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.

The battle for schools

Trump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.

Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.

And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.

In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

The first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.

Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.

In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.

In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.

In the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.

The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.

Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.

Escaping the bubble

I was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.

The collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.

When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.

I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.

I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.

Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.

At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”

In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.

The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.

I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)

Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.

In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.

It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.

Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.

Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

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Thousands took to the streets on Wednesday and Saturday last week following a series of dramatic raids by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) throughout Denver as protesters expressed solidarity with the undocumented and rage at Donald Trump’s war on immigrants.

“We’re here to fight for our neighbors, to stand together and say no to the threats from the Trump administration,” Amanda Starks, a local artist at a rally on Saturday who has been handing out literature to immigrants on their legal rights.

She added: “I think this is worse than in 2016, when we thought the GOP would stand up to Trump. Now they’re all Christian nationalist yes-men, and we’re up against something greater this time around. But it’s bringing this community together.”

The US president has taken a special interest in the historically immigrant-friendly state of Colorado, calling his deportation plan for alleged gang members Operation Aurora, named for the Denver suburb claimed by him and echoed by conservative media to have been “taken over” by the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA).

One of the executive orders signed on Trump’s first day in office was to cut funding and send a stop-work order to the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (Rmian), a Colorado non-profit offering free legal services to the undocumented. Due to the large volume of those in need, Colorado has one of the lowest rates of legal representation for undocumented immigrants.

Then last week heavily armed Swat teams began storming apartment complexes around Denver and Aurora in the early hours of the morning – sometimes with a Fox News crew embedded with the teams – though with 30 arrests in all, only one gang member has been confirmed to be in custody.

With about 155,000 undocumented immigrants in Colorado fearing for their safety, many local residents have rallied to show their support however they can.

Despite their setbacks, last week the Rmian was able to offer a crash course in immigration law to 100 Colorado attorneys who, despite not working in that field, have volunteered their legal services.

Whenever Ice raids are spotted, volunteers from groups like the Immigrant Legal Resource Center often are on hand to offer literature on the legal rights of those under siege. At Saturday’s rally outside the state capitol building in Denver, activists with megaphones led a call-and-response chant of legal advice, prompting the crowd with “When Ice shows up?” followed by a collective roar: “Don’t open the door!”

The protester and artist Starks, along with many others, has been attending weekly gatherings at a local Methodist church on how to best serve the legal needs of immigrants. One organizer placed the turnout at a meeting last Monday at more than 1,500 people.

Many of the activists speaking at Saturday’s rally expressed contempt for the New York-based property management company CBZ Management, which oversee several properties in Aurora and Denver that have been fined or shut down for squalid and neglectful living conditions. Last August, Zev Baumgarten of CBZ Management, accused of being “an out of state slumlord” by the Aurora mayor, claimed one of their Aurora apartment buildings had been overtaken by TdA gang members, which was why they were unable to provide needed repairs and services.

This unfolded just in time for Trump to parrot the claims during his presidential debate against Kamala Harris weeks later, eventually making Aurora an unlikely campaign stop for the Republican candidate, since Colorado has been a reliably blue state since 2008.

For decades Colorado has cultivated a reputation for welcoming immigrants who have come across the US-Mexico border, especially when they are under siege from many across the rest of the nation.

In the 1990s, when Democrats were being pulled to the right on issues like immigration, Denver’s mayor, Wellington Webb, pushed against that tide, criticizing federal persecution of immigrants in a 1998 executive order and declaring the state capital would “welcome all to share in Denver’s warm hospitality”.

He insisted: “We must respect this diversity and ensure the rights of all our residents are protected,” and Denver “would not tolerate discrimination in any form”.

However, a movement of hard-right, anti-immigrant activists in the Republican party found representation at this time in Colorado, such as in the form of Congressman Tom Tancredo, who built his political career attacking Denver libraries for stocking Spanish language books, calling for the deportation of a Denver high school student, stripping “sanctuary cities” of their federal funding, and calling on America to reject the “cult of multiculturalism”.

Tancredo’s decade as a congressman from 1999-2009, along with his failed bids for the presidency and governorship, helped build the narrative architecture of what would become the Make America Great Again conservative movement’s anti-immigrant rage.

Despite the protests last Wednesday and Saturday in Denver, portions of the state still hold enough conservative voters to keep Trump loyalists like Representative Lauren Boebert in office.

Boebert recently joined forces with two other Colorado representatives to pressure the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to repeal a series of laws protecting immigrants rights in Colorado. Often referred to as a “Democratic libertarian”, Polis has endorsed the core of Trump’s deportation plan.

“Hey Polis, where are you? We have courage, how about you?” the crowd at Saturday’s rally chanted, as it moved away from the capitol building and through downtown Denver.

The march eventually made its way peacefully back to the capitol, where more literature was handed out and future gatherings were announced.

“We take these threats [from Trump] very seriously,” said Katie Leonard, one of the days’ speakers and an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has been documenting Ice raids and posting their locations on social media, leading to the arrival of more volunteers, often shouting advice to residents about their rights through megaphones or blasting the neighborhoods with informative leaflets.

“But the decisive factor in what happens here, when these Ice raids come and indiscriminately round up people, is whether the community is prepared, whether the people know their rights,” she said.

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When crossing the state line from Wyoming into Colorado, drivers have recently been confronted with a giant billboard that reads: “Venezuela ahead, BE PREPARED!”

The xenophobic political ad – funded by Donald Trump’s largest individual campaign donor – is, in part, a reaction to the more than 40,000 immigrants who have arrived in the Denver metro area over the last two years, many of them Venezuelan families fleeing poverty and violence.

Farther down the highway is a Denver-area city that Trump alleged – in front of 67 million people during his debate with Kamala Harris – was being “taken over” by violent immigrants. Today he is holding a rally there.

But the story he has told about Aurora, Colorado, is very different from that offered by city police and others. And just as Trump stoked fears of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, so Aurora is also at the center of a swirl of misinformation.

The Aurora mayor, for instance, has said the claims are “an incredible exaggeration”.

The controversy is rooted in a community housing problem that emerged in local news over the summer – and did not, at first glance, have anything to do with immigration.

In August, an Aurora apartment building, the Aspen Grove, was shut down by the city for neglect and mismanagement dating back a number of years. It cited leaks, mold, structural problems, an infestation of rats, uncollected trash and other issues.

The city told 85 families they had to vacate the building. The residents found themselves not only on the streets, but at the center of a political firestorm with implications for the presidential election.

Zev Baumgarten, head of of CBZ Management, the New York-based property management company, claimed the disrepair occurred because the building had been hijacked by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA). Property managers couldn’t enter the buildings without the threat of violence, he alleged. He owns other apartment buildings that he said faced similar problems.

The Aurora mayor responded by labeling Baumgarten an “out-of-state slumlord” who had neglected the properties, sentiments echoed by other officials.

Because Baumgarten does not live in Colorado, “he doesn’t have to see the consequences of being an absentee landlord, and not investing in his properties or even keeping them in livable condition,” said Crystal Murillo, an Aurora city councilmember and lifelong resident. “There are years of documented violations and mismanagement.”

CBZ did not respond to requests for comment.

The dispute gained traction on conservative media, and evidently also reached Trump himself, thanks to the purported links to migrant gangs, a favorite topic for the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.

“We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said during his debate with Harris in September. “You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently … And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality.”

Yet the truth of possible gang activity is far more nuanced, and according to local police, far less striking than the narrative elaborated by Trump.

In July, a shooting at Baumgarten’s Aspen Grove apartment building resulted in multiple injuries. Two of the four men arrested in connection to the shooting were, indeed, identified by the Aurora police as members of TdA.

“Our support for the vulnerable population of undocumented individuals in the city of Aurora goes without question,” Todd Chamberlain, Aurora chief of police, said at a press conference. “We are not going to overpolice a population based on their race or ethnicity.”

In August, door camera footage emerged in the news of six armed men, later identified as Venezuelan immigrants, knocking on the door of a unit in another of Baumgarten’s apartment buildings. Minutes later, a shootout at a nearby location resulted in the death of 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo.

The footage was portrayed in conservative media as evidence of a TdA takeover of Aurora. However, to date none of the men in the video have been identified as members of the TdA gang, or any other. One is in custody, and there are warrants for the arrest of the other five.

Altogether there have been ten individuals with ties to TdA identified by Aurora police in the Denver metro area, eight of whom have been arrested. And yet, on the whole, crime in Aurora has been trending down over the last two years, and is expected to fall further in 2024.

Undocumented immigrants are not linked to a surge in crime, research by the Marshall Project indicates.

And Venezuelan immigrants are now dealing with the consequences of the conservative rhetoric.

“I’m scared to go out. They’re accusing all of us at the complex of being in gangs, and this is completely false,” Oscar Rojas, a local resident, told Denver7.

Another resident told the station of hostile or unnerving encounters, like when “an American drove their car by with a flag, insulting people here”.

Murillo, the Aurora councilmember, says that she walks her dog in the areas near Baumgarten’s apartments, and believes the hype around gang violence is overblown. “Ten gang members out of 400,000 people is hardly a ‘takeover’ of the city,” she says.

Mike Coffman, Aurora’s mayor, initially bolstered the narrative about his city, saying during an 29 August appearance on Fox News: “There are several buildings, actually under the same ownership, out-of-state ownership that have fallen to these Venezuelan gangs.”

But a few weeks later, Coffman reversed his stance, saying in a Facebook post that he agreed with Aurora police’s assessment that “a Venezuelan gang is not in control of either of these two apartment complexes”.

Coffman was unavailable to comment further, his office said.

The issue has not gone away. Last week, Danielle Jurinsky, an Aurora city councilmember, appeared on an episode of Dr Phil titled: Armed & Dangerous: Colorado Town Overrun by a Criminal Gang?

‘These people just want to feed their kids’

Murillo and others feel disappointed that the city of Aurora has returned to the national spotlight for tragic events. A young Black man, Elijah McClain, was killed during a 2019 encounter with Aurora police and paramedics, when he was injected with a lethal dose of ketamine.

Before that, a gunman murdered 12 people in a movie theater, and injured 58, during the opening night showing of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.

Coffman welcomes Trump’s visit to Aurora. “I want the former president to come, because I want to show him this city,” he said. “I want to show him that the narrative is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination.”

Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor, had a different response.

“Obviously, we welcome anybody to the city of Aurora, to Colorado,” he said. “But obviously, we worry about some of the criminal elements that he brings with him. He’s a convicted felon himself, and a lot of people who associate with him might engage in acts of terror against the residents of Aurora.”

Amid the national attention, the families who were forced to leave their apartments continue to seek new homes.

“It’s been really challenging, because there are a lot of rumors and false stories suggesting that these families are criminals or dangerous or violent,” said Zach Neumann, co-founder of Colorado’s Community Economic Defense Project. He works with 20 of the families that were displaced from Baumgarten’s apartment building.

“These are folks who have kids, some of those kids have special needs. Being forced out of your home makes it difficult to cook and prepare food, to send your kids to school, find and keep a job. All of those critical, normal activities have been complicated by displacing those families, now unable to find a clean and decent place to live. These people just want to feed their kids and be indoors at night.”

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Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

But when accounting for all of the waste, energy consumption and transportation of goods required of a luxury hotel with two restaurants – not to mention the fact that buildings alone account for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions – will your $300 to $500 purchase of a room at Populus really help fight climate change?

“There are a lot of layers to this,” says Joel Hartter, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor who specializes in corporate sustainability. “On paper, it looks great. But it would take a lot of research to verify those claims.”

“There are a lot of layers to this,” says Joel Hartter, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor who specializes in corporate sustainability. “On paper, it looks great. But it would take a lot of research to verify those claims.”

As a term, however, “carbon positive” can be linguistically confusing (“carbon negative” would be literally more accurate), and with no clear definition of what “carbon positive” means, there are no metrics by which to determine its validity.

Jon Buerge is the president of Urban Villages, the sustainable development company behind Populus. He defines carbon positive as “sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere than would ever be emitted over the lifetime of the project”.

But just how much CO₂ emissions can you attribute to any one project? Hartter admits it’s a challenge.

“You have to account for several factors: direct emissions from the hotel itself, such as HVAC systems and company vans; emissions from purchased electricity that powers the building, including lighting, heating and cooling; and indirect emissions, like the transportation of goods, the carbon footprint of construction materials, waste disposal and guest travel. In this case, you must also consider site preparation, building materials, supply chains and everything brought into the hotel – from beds and furniture to TVs. You also have to think about the timescale over which offsetting occurs,” he explains. “It’s complex, and this is what many of the world’s largest companies are currently grappling with.”

Buerge is eager to unpack all the ways that Populus has reduced its carbon footprint both through the construction of the building – using recycled materials, low-carbon concrete and only 100% renewable energy in its operations.

“These goals led to some pretty unique approaches to hospitality,” says Buerge. “We decided not to have any onsite parking. One hundred per cent of our food products are sourced locally, and all food waste will be turned into compost and returned to those same farms.” He says the hotel also utilized eco-friendly materials such as beetle-kill wood, fly ash concrete (which emits far less carbon than traditional concrete, yet has never been used in a commercial building before) and leather made from reishi mushrooms.

“We’ve talked a lot about biophilic design, resembling nature,” says Buerge of the hotel’s interior. “It’s made to resemble a walk through the woods.”

However, it’s their promise to plant one spruce tree in Colorado for every guest that stays at Populus that their carbon positive balance sheet hinges upon. A decades-long beetle epidemic has destroyed millions of acres of trees throughout the US west, contributing to outbreaks of wildfires and devastating whole ecosystems. In pursuit of removing carbon from the atmosphere via new trees, Buerge collaborated with the US Forest Service, who directed them toward beetle-resistant spruce trees.

Buerge says they have already planted 70,000 spruce trees throughout Colorado’s National Wilderness Preservation System to offset emissions accrued in the building process of the hotel, with another 20,000 to be planted this year.

“We’re not just buying carbon credits, we’re not even just planting trees,” he says. “We’re reforesting Colorado forests.”

Jay Arehart, an architectural engineering professor at University of Colorado Boulder, has been following the Populus project for a long time and is impressed with its creators’ approach to a low-carbon development and the legitimacy of their ambitious offset goals, which he says are very rare in commercial real estate, since the construction of buildings comes with such a high carbon price tag.

“It’s a great pilot program that could definitely set a precedent,” he says. “When thinking about net-zero goals that companies might have – or are forced to have – this is a project we could point to as evidence that it can be done.”

While Hartter is cynical about companies over-relying on carbon offsets – it’s “like eating KFC every day, then paying someone in Florida to eat vegetables”, he says – he is optimistic about Urban Village’s new hotel. “They’re doing the right things: table-to-farm foods, solutions for waste, lining the sidewalks with trees, which will reduce heat.”

But, he warns, failure to live up to their claims could come back to bite them. “Millennials and gen Z often align their values to their pocketbooks, and their brand loyalty is based on a company’s sustainable values,” he says. “I really hope Populus’s aims stand up beyond just marketing.”

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Growing up closeted while attending an evangelical church in small town North Carolina, Matthew Blake found refuge in music – particularly the songs of the Christian musician turned pop star Amy Grant. When, years later, they began performing in drag, they took on the name Flamy Grant in honor of their hero.

“Writing songs in Flamy’s voice opened up a new world to me,” Blake recalls. “I could say things I didn’t know how to say before.”

Now, Flamy has earned a No 1 hit on the iTunes Christian music chart – thanks in part to a prominent evangelical provocateur.

Sean Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, called Flamy’s collaboration with a Christian rock star a harbinger of “the last days”. He probably didn’t mean for his remarks to make the drag queen a superstar – but that’s exactly what they did.

Shortly after telling Flamy Grant “hardly anyone listens or cares what you do”, Feucht accidentally inspired the growing movement of “exvangelicals” – those who have left the Christian right – whose love for Grant’s music (and disdain for Maga persecution of drag performers) drove their album and song to the No 1 spot.

The rising phenomenon of Flamy Grant and other exvangelical musicians is not only driven by the backlash to the Christian right, but exists within a tradition of queer Christian songwriters wrestling against their industry’s institutionalized homophobia. “I’ve been called groomer and pedophile a lot,” says Flamy Grant of the harassment they’ve faced following their chart success – the album, Bible Belt Baby, hit No 1 on 27 July and remained there for nine days.

Grant’s star was already on the rise when Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, tweeted about the drag queen. A marketing whiz of the Christian right, Feucht hosted large gatherings of Christian worshipers during the Covid lockdown, successfully galvanizing audiences around perceived threats to their religious freedom, from critical race theory to Covid restrictions.

This tactic boomeranged last week when Feucht’s attacks on Flamy Grant had a similar effect on the drag queen’s fans, who flooded iTunes and purchased the album and the song Good Day, a combination queer anthem and Christian worship song.

For generations, contemporary Christian music (CCM) was an isolated corner of the music industry that expected its performers to remain on the right side of the culture wars (with mixed results). But thanks to shifts in how music charts are calculated, along with a movement of confessional songs from those scarred by evangelical childhoods and questioning such teachings (whose work is still categorized as “Christian music” on iTunes), the entire genre is being turned on its head.

“There are a lot of people in Christian music who want this,” says Grant’s collaborator, Derek Webb, former songwriter for the popular Christian rock band Caedmon’s Call, speaking of LGBTQ+ acceptance in Christian music. “But no one wants to be the first to take that step. What would be suicide for one person could be a revolution for those who follow.”

Webb was part of a wave of 90s Christian rock stars – including Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and DC Talk’s Kevin Max – who became disillusioned with the rightwing culture of CCM and began writing songs questioning that institution, going through a process commonly referred to in the exvangelical world as “deconstruction”, wherein a Christian unpacks the political, cultural and theological rhetoric they’ve been fed throughout their lives and discards what doesn’t ring true any more (which, for some, is all of it).

Webb appreciates the term for fueling this movement but fears that it’s been weaponized by the right to the point of being meaningless. When Feucht attacked Flamy Grant’s collaboration with Derek Webb – with Webb dressing in drag in his music video – he tweeted:

None of this was new to Matthew Blake.

A maternal figure like Grant – a kind of Cher or Dolly Parton to young queer Christians like Blake throughout the 80s and 90s – became essential when Blake, like so many questioning Christians of their time, enrolled in Exodus International, an ex-gay, “conversion therapy” program that has since shut down and been disavowed by its founders. Blake was working as a worship band leader at a megachurch in Reno at the time, and was trying to shed the queer impulses that had been with them since grade school.

“I definitely considered ending my life,” Blake recalls. (Data shows that conversion therapy leads to higher rates of depression and suicide). “Thank God for music, because if I didn’t have those creative outlets I don’t know where I’d be.”

After five years with Exodus failed to turn Blake straight, they eventually embraced their sexuality, began attending a progressive church in San Diego, and launched a podcast that laid bare their deconstruction experience. During the pandemic, Blake played music on an exvangelical livestream called Heathen Happy Hour, and one night decided to show up in drag under the moniker Flamy Grant.

Drag turned out to be the perfect medium to portray the deconstruction experience, where Flamy could organically blend dark humor, social outrage and wild theatrics fit for a megachurch. On their album Bible Belt Baby, they sing with the delicate yet powerful range of a worship band leader, while telling the story of a boy who wants to cross-dress as the Virgin Mary, followed by a feminist anthem set in the Old Testament, and a cover of Amy Grant’s Takes A Little Time.

Exvangelical audiences flocked to Flamy Grant almost instantly, leading to collaborations with the former 90s Christian rocker Jennifer Knapp, the queer exvangelical songwriter Semler (who also topped the iTunes Christian music charts the year before with Preacher’s Kid), and Derek Webb, with Grant appearing in his music video for Boys Will Be Girls.

Chrissy Stroop, trans author and one of the pioneers of the exvangelical movement, says all these artists “display an authentic expression that is lacking in what we typically think of as CCM, allowing themselves to ask real questions and not come away with the pat answers evangelical subculture demands. They also directly reject certain evangelical doctrines and explicitly include and affirm queer people.” Still, she notes, “while they may top the iTunes charts, they’re not going to be played on Christian radio stations, because evangelicals control those”.

Ever since the CCM industry was born in the early 70s – when a small group of ex-hippies began proselytizing through rock music – there have been queer Christian musicians hiding in plain sight.

Credited with writing the first CCM song, Marsha Stevens-Pino saw her career destroyed when she came out in 1979, inspiring her to form Born Again Lesbian Music (Balm) Ministries, one of the first of a growing network of queer Christians in need of a home.

Ray Boltz was an evangelical household name with his megachurch anthem Thank You, but he lost much of his conservative audience when he revealed he was gay. Yet Boltz continued writing Christian songs, albeit with new, provocative themes, like 2010’s Who Would Jesus Love?

Unlike outright mockery of faith by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ “new atheism” movements, exvangelical songs (as well as memoirs, podcasts and stand up comedy) often bleed with raw vulnerability, sitting with the unanswered questions about the Bible and the evangelical experience, wrestling with doubt and longing, loneliness and persecution, not necessarily rejecting God but often inviting him to the table for a difficult conversation.

“I don’t think uncertainty is the enemy of faith,” says Webb, adding that a lot of the ministry of Jesus was a kind of deconstruction of Jewish laws of the time, not unlike what exvangelicals are up to today.

Questioning gender roles, sexuality, capitalism, sin and salvation doesn’t sit well with the Christian right, where biblical literalism and Christian nationalism answer most questions.

Embodying conservative principles (or at least not violating them) has been a prerequisite for any musician working in the CCM genre. But exvangelical songwriters can now simply click “Christian music” when categorizing their music on iTunes, and suddenly they’re in the game.

This has led to a fundamental revolution in the genre, dragging it into a new cultural and political sphere, and discovering a large audience has been waiting for it all along.

“The term ‘Christian’, when applied to anything but a person, is a marketing term,” says Webb. “Anyone can claim the category. My record, Flamy Grant’s, Semlers, they’re for Christians, and that’s why we categorize it that way. It’s like new life from the Phoenix ashes.”

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The post Meet the drag queen who hit No 1 on the Christian music charts – with help from a Trump ally appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

In the hours following the shooting that killed three people and injured nine at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs on Friday, many politicians and commentators were criticized for supposedly politicizing the tragedy. Some fell into the trap. Others jumped in head-first.

On Friday afternoon, shortly after news of the shooting broke, Vicki Cowart, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains, sent out a statement that referred to “domestic terrorism”. The statement was subsequently revised, to refer to “acts of violence”.

“Words matter,” Cowart told the Guardian on Saturday. “And what is the definition of domestic terrorism?”

The FBI says it is “violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law”, as well as any acts of violence with a distinct ideological message or purpose.

Nonetheless, in Colorado Springs, that question was debated in a highly charged atmosphere.

Critics said such labels should be avoided until a clear motive was established. By Saturday night, though police had not said what motivated the gunman, the mayor of Colorado Springs had said a motive could be “inferred” by the location of the shooting: a clinic run by a body which provides abortions.

On Saturday morning, however, with now characteristic anger, Barack Obama entered the debate. From the White House, the president issued a statement that connected the incident to the lack of gun control in the US.

“I actually don’t begrudge Obama his politicization of this event,” said Daniel Cole, executive president of the Republican party of El Paso county, in which lies Colorado Springs.

“Political problems demand political solutions, and clearly he thinks this is a political problem. But when victims have not even been buried yet, to suggest that ‘If everyone had simply followed my advice yesterday, none of these bad things would have occurred,’ that sounds a little silly.

“He is making the statement before all the facts come out, and the facts might not support his position. We don’t know if [the shooter] was carrying a gun that he obtained legally or illegally, and we don’t know if he had any type of mental illness.

“So it’s very unclear exactly what strictures Obama would like to create in order to prevent this type of thing from happening. Unless he just wants to take guns from everybody and get it over with.”

At an emotional vigil at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist church in Colorado Springs on Saturday, the Rev Nori Rost was not so inclined. In her opening remarks, she referred to the gunman as a “domestic terrorist”.

“It doesn’t matter what the cause was, whether it was against Planned Parenthood or not,” Rost said after the vigil. “A man with an assault rifle fired on and killed people. He was using a weapon of war.”

Cowart was the featured speaker. She stressed the necessity of access to female reproductive care, the far-reaching services that Planned Parenthood provides across the nation and the courage of her organization’s employees.

“We don’t yet know why this happened,” Cowart told a crowd of 150 to 200 people, crammed into the small church. “But we do know why people come to our health centers every day.

“They come because something has happened in their body and they don’t understand it and they’re afraid, or they’re young and exploring their bodies, and they need someone they can come to.”

Most speakers touched on gun control and reproductive rights. Following Cowart’s speech, a tearful woman stood and shattered the reverence of the moment.

“I support Planned Parenthood 100%,” she said. “But I came here today because I feel lucky that my entire family is alive, and I thought that we would grieve for the people who died, and not make political statements. So, have a nice day.”

To a smattering of applause, the woman walked out of the church.

Asked if the event had strayed too far into politics, Rost said “the announcement for the vigil said it was to come together to grieve our losses and to stand with Planned Parenthood.

“This was a devastating loss for them, and we wanted to show our support. The announcement was very clear.”

Nationally, on social media, the hashtag #IStandWithPlannedParenthood was used by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all 14 Republican candidates stayed silent. On Saturday evening Senator Ted Cruz eventually broke the silence, calling the shooting “unacceptable, horrific and wrong”.

He was joined by Ohio governor John Kasich, who tweeted that he was praying for the victims’ families.

After the release by an anti-abortion group of videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue – a charge the federal body has denied – the GOP debates have been loaded with anti-Planned Parenthood invective. Republicans in Congress have pushed to defund the organization.

Cowart stopped short of laying responsibility for the shooting at the feet of such Republicans. But she said their campaigning created “an environment where it makes it feel OK to take it one step further in bashing Planned Parenthood”.

“Actions are linked to words,” she said, “and the speeches we hear set up an environment where unstable people are pushed into inappropriate behavior.”

On Saturday night, it was reported that in statements given to law enforcement officials – who spoke off the record – the suspected gunman at one point said “no more baby parts”.

State representative Gordon Klingenschmitt, a Colorado Springs resident, took exception at any association between anti-Planned Parenthood activists and the gunman who struck on Friday.

“The pro-life community, especially in Colorado Springs, is horrified that this is happening, and we universally condemn the shooter and his violent act,” the Republican said. “Colorado Springs is a kind of evangelical mecca, but this shooter is from North Carolina.”

Police said Robert Dear, the 57-year-old suspect now in custody, was listed as residing in Hartsel, Colorado, though he did have links to the southern state.

Klingenschmitt continued: “Nobody that I have talked to in the pro-life community – and I know just about everybody in the Colorado Springs pro-life community – nobody has ever met this guy. Nobody knows who he is.

“You cannot call him a pro-life activist, or a Colorado Springs conservative, because he is not one of us. That is not how we act.”

Asked about the notion of “domestic terrorism” as opposed to foreign, and if there was any analogy between conservative Christians not wanting to be associated with violent extremists who shared their views and moderate Muslims who abhor all acts of terror, Klingenschmitt said the question was “not entirely fair”.

“We as Christians are almost universally willing to renounce violence,” he said.

As he spoke, the faith (or lack thereof) of the Planned Parenthood suspect was not known. But whether or not religion played a part, the Colorado Springs shooting had undoubtedly forced Americans to consider a new meaning for the word “terrorist”.

At the church vigil, Cowart said she was looking forward to continuing her work in the service of women’s needs.

“We don’t think healthcare should be political,” she said. “We advocate to make sure people continue to receive it, and some folks take it politically.”

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In the summer of 2019, 23-year-old Elijah McClain was stopped by the Aurora, Colorado, police while walking home, after someone called 911 saying he looked suspicious.

The incident quickly turned violent, with three police officers piling on the 140lbMcClain, twice putting him in a chokehold that has since been banned. After vomiting, coming in and out of consciousness and pleading for breath, paramedics arrived and injected McClain with an excessive dose of ketamine, a powerful sedative.

He immediately went limp and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital, dying a few days later.

The three police officers and two paramedics have since been charged with criminally negligent homicide, and the family of McClain – who was Black – was recently awarded $15m in a civil lawsuit against the city of Aurora, the second largest of its kind, just behind the one awarded to George Floyd’s family.

McClain’s death magnified the American reckoning with racism and police brutality but it has also sparked a national debate about the use of ketamine – a medical anesthetic, popular club drug, and psychotherapy tool – in law enforcement situations, leading to its ban in the state of Colorado, and possibly across the nation.

“What we’re talking about is the weaponization of medicine,” says Mari Newman, the lawyer representing McClain’s family. “It might as well be a taser or a gun.”

Newman says that McClain was exhibiting none of the signs of “excited delirium syndrome” – a controversial diagnosis that legally warrants a ketamine injection – and that police officers erroneously employed “code words like ‘he had superhuman strength’” that she says were an attempt to influence paramedics to give the injection (and justify their own use of excessive force).

Police are not legally allowed to administer ketamine. Paramedics can, but only if a patient is exhibiting symptoms of “excited delirium”. The controversy surrounding this diagnosis – characterized by aggressive behavior, superhuman strength and hyperthermia – comes in part from its emergence during the war on drugs in the 1980s, and is applied disproportionately in the post-mortem of Black men killed by police. The condition is not recognized by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, or the American Medical Association.

A report by public radio station KUNC revealed that in the past 2.5 years, Colorado medics injected 902 people for excited delirium, leading to serious complications in 17% of cases. The American Society of Anesthesiologists recently stated it “firmly opposes the use of ketamine or any other sedative/hypnotic agent to chemically incapacitate someone for a law enforcement purpose and not for a legitimate medical reason”.

A Minnesota medic filed a whistleblower lawsuit last year claiming police had pressured him to inject someone with ketamine during an arrest, adding that such acts are not uncommon (in Minneapolis, ketamine use grew from an average of four law enforcement incidents a year, to 62, from 2015 to 2017).

After the death of McClain – and a similar incident involving Aurora police – the state of Colorado passed legislation last June banning the use of ketamine for excited delirium, and clarifying that police should never influence medics to use it. “EMS is responsible for patient care, not law enforcement,” Governor Jared Polis said in a signing statement. “Ketamine should not be used for law enforcement purposes.”

A similar federal bill was introduced shortly after, and is being considered by Congress.

Emergency Medical Services Association of Colorado president, Scott Sholes, says that, when used according to protocol, ketamine is the safest alternative to violence or other sedatives available to paramedics, and removing it from their toolbox puts them at a serious loss.

“I can tell you horror stories about physically restraining people for hours, back in the day,” says Sholes. “For the first ten years of my career it was strapping people to back-boards, sometimes flipping the board over and sitting on it in order to control people, and eventually we got some medications we could use.”

Starting in the early 1990s, Shole says, medics could use antipsychotics like Haldol, and later benzodiazepines like Valium or opioids like fentanyl, to subdue those who pose a threat to themselves or others. But these drugs could often take 30 minutes to take effect, and sometimes delivered the opposite effect intended.

“In comparison, ketamine takes three to four minutes, is easy to dose, has the safest profile, and has remarkable success with sedation,” Sholes says. “With everything we’ve seen in the media on ketamine, no one is looking at the data.”

Sholes points to a study released last summer revealing that, of the 11,291 instances of patients being injected with ketamine by paramedics, “patient mortality was rare. Ketamine could not be ruled out as a contributing factor in 8 deaths, representing 0.07% of those who received ketamine.”

Sholes stresses a kind of church-and-state separation between medics and law enforcement, and that paramedics should never be collaborating with police in the execution of their duties. However, he admits, there have been instances where this line has been blurred, violating EMS protocol.

And in the case of Elijah McClain, he says that Aurora paramedics failed to follow basic practices in the administration of ketamine.

“I’ve been a paramedic for 40 years, and that video [of McClain’s death], if you think it’s bad from a layman perspective, it’s astonishing to me,” says Sholes. “That’s not how ketamine is commonly used … In that video, I see paramedics who did not assess the patient. By the time they injected him, he wasn’t moving, certainly wasn’t fighting. He was given way more [ketamine] than protocol called for. ”

First approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic in 1970, ketamine has been a popular medical tool for pain relief and sedation in humans and animals for decades.

In the 80s and 90s, illicit use of ketamine (or “special K”) was popularized by the rave scene of New York City’s club kids, who took it for its euphoric, hallucinogenic properties. In recent years, it has shown remarkably promising results in the treatment of mental health disorders, spawning an industry of “ketamine clinics” around the US.

“Ketamine’s effects operate on a spectrum,” says Desmond Wallington, a psychologist and Colorado mental health director for Klarisana, a ketamine clinic. “On the low-dose end it’s a psycholitic; so time, space and reality briefly dissolve around you. And then there’s a psychedelic experience, where those effects will last for an hour or so, and on the far end there’s an anesthetic [unconscious] experience. We operate in the first two realms.”

Wallington says he “cringes” at the idea of ketamine being used in a law enforcement context, particularly because of its growing association with police brutality against young Black men.

“You don’t want to give ketamine to someone with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder – you could send them into a delusional headspace and leave them worse than you found them,” he says. “If they’re already on a stimulant, you’re putting them at risk for a stroke.”

McClain’s family attorney, Mari Newman, says that she believes ketamine injections are being used by law enforcement simply to silence an unruly suspect.

“If someone’s disagreeing with an officer, what better way to shut them up than to knock them right out?” she says.

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The gray wolf, once numbering in the tens of thousands throughout North America, have faced public vilification and extermination programs that drove it to near extinction in the US. Now Colorado will vote on whether to reintroduce them into the wild after an 80-year absence, thanks to an effort that has cattle ranchers outraged but which conservationists say could restore an ecosystem that has long suffered without the apex predator.

The species was systematically exterminated by controversial, US government-backed programs in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was primarily due to wolves’ attacks on the cattle, a booming industry that has been integral to the expanding west economy. By 1940, wolves were almost completely gone.

Their inclusion on the 1973 Endangered Species Act, along with a 1995 effort to build a home for them in Yellowstone national park, has helped bring their numbers back up to 5,500 in the lower 48 states.

This year, a ballot measure in Colorado will let voters decide whether a home should be built for the gray wolf in the state. Polling indicates the measure is likely to pass, though segments of both the ranching and hunting communities are strongly opposed.

Conservationists argue that eradication of wolves threw the ecology of the Rocky Mountains into disarray, with elk and deer excessively grazing in open lands where they otherwise would have been targets for wolves, created a domino effect that has harmed a variety of species.

‘Ecological engines’

Colorado’s vote comes at a time when safeguards for gray wolves are threatened: the Trump administration announced last year intentions to remove the animals from the endangered species list.

“Gray wolves are the ecological engines of the northern hemisphere,” says Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, who spearheaded the ballot measure and has been working to reintroduce wolves into Colorado for over 25 years. He points to the successes of the Yellowstone reintroduction as evidence that similar efforts would be good for Colorado’s environment.

“The Aspen groves, which hadn’t regenerated in 50 years, were totally coming back” as a result of wolves returning, he says. “And with that regeneration came more beavers, which led to more beaver dams, which was good for the rivers, which led to more trout, and on and on with a cascading effect.”

He adds that wolves also benefit the landscape by forcing elk to move around. When the elk aren’t hunted, they “can hang out in river bottoms, which causes mass erosion, and the water gets shallower and hotter”, he explains.

Rancher opposition

Edward points out that the measure safeguards ranchers against losses by offering compensation for any wolves that kill their livestock, but Terry Fankhauser, executive vice-president of the 153-year-old Colorado Cattlemen’s Association – which represents the 11,600 cattle farms and $2.8bn industry in the state – believes the matter is more complex than just wolves killing cattle.

“Beyond the kills, there are indirect impacts of wolves being reintroduced to cattle,” Fankhauser says. “Cattle are fight-or-flight animals and they’re continually on the lookout for predators. And when there’s reintroduction of wolves, there’s a decrease in gestation, pregnancy, and weight gain, much like elk, deer and moose.”

Potential disruption of wild animals is also a concern for opponents of the ballot measure, who advocate on behalf of hunters who don’t want to see their game disappear. Preserving targets for hunters was also the motive behind the controversial, government-sponsored practice of shooting wolves in Alaska from helicopters. Sarah Palin’s endorsement of the practice was fuel for attack ads when the then governor ran for vice-president in 2008.

The proposed measure would call for the Colorado parks and wildlife commission to construct a plan – building on scientific data and concerns from public hearings – to reintroduce wolves into public lands by the end of 2023. The Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund would like to see enough wolves introduced to return balance to the ecology, with the additional aim of creating a habitat that links the wolves of northern states (along with Canada) and southern states (along with Mexico) stretching the length of the Rocky Mountains.

Fankhauser is concerned that the ballot measure will tie the hands of those tasked with reintroducing the wolves to Colorado, forcing them into blunt action where a nuanced approach is needed.

“We should not be making biological decisions at the ballot box,” he says. “And to arbitrarily decide, through a population vote, that we need x amount of wolves in Colorado without considering that ecosystem, it’s not only irresponsible to the ranching community, but to the wolves themselves.”

Rehabilitating the wolf’s image

The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition, another opposition group that describes itself as a group of “concerned sportsmen, farmers, ranchers and businesses”, has been playing up fears that wolves could be a danger to humans. Its homepage cites a story from last summer about a family of campers in Canada being attacked by a wolf, which has the potential to make the millions who enjoy camping in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains a little anxious.

Edward finds the suggestion wolves pose a threat to humans wildly misleading. (The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“That is a one-off rarity,” he says. “Millions of people have camped in Yellowstone since wolves were reintroduced, and there has never been an attack. Wolves do not see humans as prey. They’re curious about us, like their descendants, the dogs.”

A poll commissioned on behalf of Edward’s campaign showed that two-thirds of likely voters said they were in favor of the wolf reintroduction, with only 15% opposed. The poll showed no divide between rural and urban voters, which is noteworthy considering how large the cattle industry looms in the Colorado economy and culture.

Meanwhile, supporters of the gray wolf have been working to overhaul its fearsome image. A Denver-based musical collective, Lost Walks, wrote and performed a rock opera about a wolf who saves a pregnant woman in danger in the Colorado wilderness.

“It felt important to us to use our voices for a creature who is voiceless,” says Jen GaNun, the band’s creative director. “When we found out about how wolves were and are hunted and treated today, we felt like we had to use our internal momentum in this project we started to be a part of a social and environmental movement.”

Profits from the album have gone toward the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, and live events have doubled as signature collection opportunities for the ballot measure.

“We have gotten some messages of opposition,” she says, “but mostly find that people are in support and on the side of science and kindness towards animals and the greater ecosystem.”

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On the back, the sign said: “Nothing Says Gentrification Like Being Able To Order A Cortado.”

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If President Donald Trump is going to have any chance of improving his tanking poll numbers, he’s going to have to undertake some uncharacteristic gestures. With Lent right around the corner, one option he ought to consider is embracing the tradition of role reversal. Typically associated with the Carnival festivals of late winter, a theatrical switcheroo between rich and poor has long been a gesture of humility from those in power that ingratiates them with the common man.

Like Christmas, Carnival is one of those Christian holidays that has been interpreted a thousand different ways throughout time and geography and is inextricably linked to numerous pagan traditions. It has no singular definition but is typically a hedonistic party featuring a lot of meat—the name is believed to descend from the latin words “carne” and “vale,” which means “a farewell to meat.” It usually happens at the time of year when you’re balls deep into winter and are about to enter a period of fasting—either because your meat is about to spoil, or you’re a Catholic sinner who doesn’t deserve anymore flesh until Easter.

“It was a way to let off emotional steam after months of winter,” says Dr. Carl Raschke, professor of religious studies at the University of Denver. “It’s common in many cultures to have this ritual of excess to restore balance to the universe. Like today’s bachelor party, it’s the idea of getting it out of your system before you have to go into a disciplined mode of life.”

In order to quell the social unrest that could build up after months of winter, men in positions of authority would give those subservient to them the chance to answer that age-old question posed by Joan Osborne: “What if God was one of us?” Sometimes this could be children disciplining their parents or an enslaved man impersonating his prissy, upper-class oppressor.

“It was like how only the court jester could make fun of the king,” says Raschke. “It was an undermining of authority that doesn’t really upset the order. It was a harmless diversion for unhappy people, so you give them a socially approved instrument to express their rebellion or resentment of authority.”

“All were considered equal during carnival,” wrote Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who coined the phrase “carnivalesque.” “Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people, who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age… People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.”

In the Christian tradition, this role reversal was often an extension of Jesus’s revolutionary edict that one day “the last will be first and the first will be last.”

“The incarnation of God becoming human overturns the conventional hierarchy,” says Max Harris, author of Carnival and Other Christian Festivals. “The Catholic tradition is very hierarchical, from the pope all the way down. Carnival says, ‘There’s something wrong there, because the Christian narrative is about the guy at the top, God, becoming the guy at the bottom, Jesus.'”

When it came to slavery of blacks in the US and the Caribbean in the 18th century, this Freaky Friday tradition didn’t always play out as a progressive utopia where rich and poor realize we’re all humans who breathe the same air and should live harmoniously. In some cases, it fueled harmful stereotypes of blacks as carnal beasts with none of the civilized restraint of white folks.

“In Trinidad, the white slave owners would put on blackface and strut around and aspire to licentious activities that they believed blacks indulged in,” says Harris.

While it’s true that in many cases enslaved blacks would be served booze and invited into the homes of their overlords for a fine meal, former slave and iconic abolitionist Frederick Douglas saw this hospitality as a kind of Chinese finger trap that robbed them of their dignity (and, thereby, their ability to rebel).

“From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection,” wrote Douglas. “Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.

“Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation,” he continues. “So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back into the arms of slavery.”

This dynamic of making a peasant king for a day would likely be the side of Carnival that President Trump would be down with. When attending the Iowa State Fair last year, Trump didn’t put on cowboy boots and munch on deep-fried butter with the rest of the common folk. Instead, he offered free rides in his helicopter to giddy children, literally raising them out of a land of poverty, watched in awe by the open-mouthed mortals below.

While it’s true that the golden-haired billionaire once dressed up in overalls and sang the theme from Green Acres and has appeared on a Saturday Night Live skit that jabbed at the idea of his presidency (remember when it was all seemed too wacky to even consider?), these were always profoundly safe, pre-approved exhibitions of humility. The whole humbling-yourself-before-poor-people routine doesn’t seem to really be in Trump’s wheelhouse.

Although Carnival masquerades were used by European colonialists to present harmful stereotypes of enslaved Africans, after emancipation in colonies like Trinidad, the newly freed African men and women hosted on their own Carnival masquerades. They used the celebrations to do much more than just pretend they were their former masters—they mocked and made fun of their former masters. This tradition of speaking truth to power has carried on to this day in celebrations like J’ouvert, where Carnival revelers across the African-diaspora lampoon those in power with satirical costumes and critical placards. This subversive aspect of Carnival is probably something that would never fly with Trump. Even when he was honored with his own Comedy Central Roast, he made every comedian on the bill promise to never joke about him not being as rich as he claims he is.

It’s also a poorly kept secret that the humiliation he received at the hands of Obama during the Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011 helped motivate him to officially run for president. Now that he is in the White House, he has opted to skip the Correspondents’ Dinner entirely, making him the first president in 30 years to refuse to subject himself the gentle chiding of a comedian. That is bad news for America.

The divisive poison of the 2016 election, the catty drama of the inauguration, and a month of terrifying executive orders all amount to one long proverbial winter. And like ancient Europeans in need of a good Carnival before the meat runs out, the American people are in desperate need of Carnival’s role-reversal pageantry, even if just for a moment, before our hope runs out.

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