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President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" initiative has been exposed as a plot to grant its member states "sweeping immunity," per a report from The Guardian, protecting them from "any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts," among other things, as a result of its most contentious goal.

The Board of Peace initially began as part of Trump's plan to carry out a peace deal in Gaza and to facilitate the rebuilding of the region. By the time it was formally established, it had expanded into a more generalized international peacekeeping organization, with critics expressing concern that Trump, who would remain chairman even after leaving the White House, was using the group to try and replace the United Nations. Among the nations that accepted the invitation to join the board, many are considered to be authoritarian states or dictatorships, with prominent democratic U.S. allies declining to join.

On Saturday, The Guardian obtained a "sensitive but unclassified" four-page resolution, in which the Board of Peace plotted a "sweeping grant of legal immunity for itself," specifically for its actions in Gaza. The resolution would also permit the board to obtain property in the region "free of charge."

As the report noted, it remains unclear how broad the scale of this proposed immunity is planned to be.

"The four-page resolution, labeled 'sensitive but unclassified', extends broad protections to every member of the Board of Peace and its administrative affiliate, the office of the high representative (OHR), as well as to the Palestinian technocrats, international military forces and nonresident contractors lined up to perform work in Gaza," The Guardian explained. "It defines legal processes from which they would have immunity as 'any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts or other entities in Gaza.'"

The report added later: "It is unclear if the document is attempting to relieve the Board of Peace and its affiliates from prosecution in international courts, in addition to potential claims in Gaza."

As the chairman, Trump would retain the ability to override this immunity, "pending majority support from his peace board." A representative for the board dismissed concerns about the intentions of the resolution.

"There is no operative resolution or immunity framework of the kind described in your questions," the representative told The Guardian. "Any suggestion that this process is designed to create lawlessness or impunity is wrong, misleading and gets the issue entirely backwards."

"Six lawyers specializing in US contracting law and international armed conflict reviewed the draft resolution for the Guardian," the report added. "If the resolution goes into force, they said, it is unclear how Board of Peace officials, soldiers, and contractors would be held accountable if there are shootings or accidents that affect Gaza residents, or even how the group might resolve routine disputes over business or land use there."

Daily Beast reports a Trump endorsement could be a problem for more and more voters in the general election, according to information taken from Reuters.

“President Donald Trump’s deal with Iran has done little to boost his standing among his own voters,” said Daily Beast reporter Wiktoria Gucia. “Interviews conducted by Reuters with Americans who voted for the 80-year-old president suggest many remain skeptical of the agreement he struck this month to end the war that sent gas prices soaring above $5 a gallon.”

Trump voters went so far as to say they would reconsider backing candidates endorsed by the president in the upcoming midterm elections.

"A lot of people say: 'Why should I vote when the president's not doing what he promised?'" said Juan Rivera, 26, while canvassing Latino neighborhoods.

Hispanic voters were central to Trump’s 2024 victory, with the president winning 48 percent of the Latino vote — a 12-point improvement from four years earlier, according to the Pew Research Center. However, he is now bleeding support among this key voter bloc.

Steve Egan, 65, from Tampa, Florida, voted for Trump but became disillusioned as the president’s 2025 tariffs hit his business. Egan told Reuters that when deciding who to vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, any candidate endorsed by Trump would be “the kiss of death.”

A number of Trump voters speaking with Reuters said they were disappointed with the president’s handling of the war with Iran, arguing that he failed to deliver on what he set out to achieve. Others said that entering the conflict ran counter to his earlier promise to avoid foreign entanglements.

“We need to truly weaken the Iranian regime instead of this, ‘beat them up a little bit and then step back and let them rebuild,’” Terry Alberta, 65, told Reuters.

Rivera, similarly, told the outlet that the Trump “criticized his predecessors about negotiating with terrorists, and he’s basically done the same exact thing.”

One Trump voter speaking with Reuters complained that the Iran attack appeared to benefit oil companies at the expensive of increased pump prices. Another argued Trump’s war had “triggered greater international hostility toward the United States.”

And while Trump’s memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 originally appeared to have broad support among Republican voters, the Beast reports prominent Republicans have grown to question the fine print and whether it delivers on the president’s claimed objectives of disarming Iran and freeing the Iranian people from their onerous government.

“I hate to say this in this deal. The biggest loser is the United States and India,” proclaimed “Bolling” host Eric Bolling.

“I will say that the early returns do not look wildly promising at this point,” lamented MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro. “… Let's be very clear. This is the vice president's deal. It does not have support.”

Former Republican Steve Schmidt says House Speaker Mike Johnson is not so clueless that he can’t see the future, and that future involves a Democratic majority in the House, and lots of scrutiny.

“Mike Johnson seems like he needs to be reminded about an important reality,” said Schmidt on his “Warning” substack. “Most people drown because they panic, not because they can’t swim. Mike Johnson is panicking.”

Johnson’s overly frank claims about a future without a Republican majority in the House were quite the admission.

“If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats… impeachment’s not even the big concern,” Johnson said before a live audience. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends … half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.”

It was “an astonishing statement,” said Schmidt, comparing it to dialogue written for Burgess Meredith playing the Penguin in the old ‘Batman’ TV series: “I run the protection program.”

“Mike Johnson isn’t panicked because he believes innocent people will be persecuted,” said Schmidt. “He’s panicked because he understands that accountability may finally be coming to Washington. He knows there will be subpoenas. He knows there will be hearings. He knows there will be oversight. He knows investigators will begin asking questions that should have been asked years ago — and he knows the answers may be devastating.”

Johnson isn’t afraid of unfair investigations, Schmid added. He’s afraid of fair ones.

“He’s afraid of evidence. He’s afraid of witnesses. He’s afraid of documents. He’s afraid that Americans will finally see the greatest spasm of political corruption in our nation’s history in all of its staggering breadth,” Schmidt said.

President Donald Trump did not commit corruption in a vacuum, he explained. He did it with the help of a MAGA Congress — the worst Congress in American history. House Republicans abandoned their constitutional responsibilities while Trump likely engaged in cryptocurrency schemes and sold presidential pardons. They also stood by while Trump politicized the DOJ and other state agencies for the benefit of party over country.

“They protected power instead of checking it. They chose personal loyalty over constitutional duty. They became accomplices through silence, indifference, and submission,” said Schmidt, adding that the American people deserve scrutiny of every corrupt act, investigation of every abuse of public office, and accountability for every official who violated the public trust.

“Every investigation should follow the evidence. Every criminal referral should be based on facts. Every prosecution should meet the highest standards of fairness and constitutional due process. That’s what separates the rule of law from authoritarianism,” said Schmidt. “Mike Johnson understands this perfectly. That’s why he sounds panicked.”

A former MAGA darling lashed out against the Trump administration this week, accusing it of manipulating the stock market as it tried to strategically hide signs that its Iran ceasefire is failing.

On Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had carried out new military strikes against Iran, claiming that they were in retaliation for an attack the Middle Eastern nation carried out on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump called a "foolish violation" of the recent "memorandum of understanding" it recently signed. Iran claimed that the ship was targeted because it was using an unauthorized pathway through the Strait.

In a post to X on Saturday, the Kobeissi Letter, which tracks news about "global capital markets," highlighted something notable about the timing of the announcement.

"BREAKING" The US Pentagon delayed publicly announcing US strikes on Iran until after the US stock market had closed at 4 PM ET on Friday, per NBC News," the account posted. "The timing of the announcement was reportedly intended to 'reduce the immediate impact on financial markets.'"

This sort of effort has become commonplace during the second Trump term. Given that the president is famously known to be the most concerned about television ratings and stock market performance, his administration has frequently tried to manage the release of information that might cause markets to tumble, making sure that the news breaks after they close for the day, and preferably heading into the weekend as well.

This became especially evident during the Iran peace talks, when Trump would often hype up an impending deal as the weekend approached, only to then begin issuing threats again during the weekend, when markets would not be able to react to renewed hostilities.

Responding to the Kobeissi Letter's post, ex-congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a stalwart Trump supporter and darling of the MAGA movement, made the accusations clear.

"Two things here: 1. The ceasefire is not holding," Greene wrote in a post to X. "2. They are manipulating the markets for insider trading."

Salon reports right wing media is freaking out over a slew of Democratic victories this year and preemptively pleading to the Supreme Court to save them from the results of democracy.

This tactic involves demonizing the electorate that votes Democrat and excluding them from the electoral process as much as constitutionally possible.

“This is what happens when you import the third world,” Fox News talking head Jesse Watters recently growled about New York’s primary results, wile describing it as “a third world takeover.” Laura Ingraham, said Salon, also labored to connect progressive politics with foreignness rather than domestic political preferences.

“The entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions,” Ingraham said. “They’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because to them, red, white and blue ... is like sunshine to a vampire.”

Steve Bannon was no better on his “War Room” podcast, said Salon writer Sophia Tesfaye, calling New York a “foreign city.”

“Go look at Mamdani’s base,” Bannon told his audience. “It’s foreign. These sanctuary cities — this is all by design.” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh was even less subtle, saying “Third world communists are the enemy,” on X. “They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions.”

“The danger of this commentary lies in its explicit de-legitimization of the democratic process itself,” said Tesfaye. “When a citizen votes for a candidate who happens to hold democratic socialist views, conservative media treat the voter as an illegal interloper whose very participation in the franchise is a form of national contamination. And they’ve turned to the nation’s highest court as a counter-majoritarian shield, framing an ordinary shift in municipal politics as an existential emergency that justifies the legal dismantling of a century of constitutional consensus.”

Tesfaye referred to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who claimed in a series of his own posts following Tuesday’s New York results that Democrats had “imported a new electorate.”

“Appearing later on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Miller told viewers that ‘a vote for any Democrat anywhere for any office is empowering a party that wants to strip this country to the bone,’" said Tesfaye. “This is the kind of overheated language that has become so normalized on right-wing television that it barely registers as remarkable.”

“Within the same news cycle as these election results, conservatives turned their attention to a series of favorable Supreme Court rulings for the Trump administration on immigration policy,” Tesfaye added. “A 6–3 decision allowing the continuation of certain border restrictions was celebrated not simply as a legal victory, but also as a cultural one. The right’s reaction to these rulings exposed the raw ethno-nationalist impulses driving the judicial pivot.”

On a recent podcast, Megyn Kelly revealed her personal delight at the court decision.

“Look, this has been going on for over a dozen years,” Kelly said of the migrant populations. “Go home, get out! We know our country is better than yours! That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values! You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it!”

“The Trump administration’s effort to reinterpret that guarantee — excluding children of undocumented immigrants — has long been considered a legal long shot. But in the current climate, it has taken on outsized symbolic importance. For many on the right, it represents a way to redraw the boundaries of national belonging through judicial power rather than electoral competition,” said Tesfaye. “This is why the reaction to the New York primaries so quickly converged on the courts. If cities are ‘lost,’ if the electorate is ‘changed,’ then the judiciary becomes the arena where outcomes can still be controlled.”

The right-wing media ecosystem, said Tesfaye, is making a real-time argument that the solution to democratic elections producing outcomes conservatives hate is to ensure that fewer of the people who voted in them are legally recognized as citizens.

A biographer of President Donald Trump is sounding the alarm about plans for a 2028 "auto-coup" being in progress, citing the widely criticized recent moves of his defense secretary, which have even caused his past colleagues at Fox News to turn against him.

On Friday, foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen took to X to react to a story from the U.S. military publication, Stars & Stripes, about the concern emerging in the Pentagon over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership in light of the shocking early retirement of the well-regarded Gen. Christopher Donahue. Rozen noted that even Fox host Brian Kilmeade had spoken out in shock about the move. Hegseth famously worked as a co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend before his appointment by Trump.

"Huge loss for our country," Kilmeade wrote in a post cited by Rozen. "Like losing Tom Brady in prime of career."

"In January, Kilmeade visited USAREUR-AF (U.S. Army Europe and Africa) headquarters in Wiesbaden, where he did a segment on Donahue’s command and its efforts to develop new combat tactics that better use drones and artificial intelligence," Rozen wrote further in her post. "USAREUR-AF has been at the forefront of those efforts, with Donahue’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Line concept for NATO serving as a blueprint for how to manage networks, data and drones to get an edge. At one point during the visit, Kilmeade called President Donald Trump and introduced Donahue as his soldiers gathered around. ‘You’re doing a fantastic job. Your reputation is great,’ Trump said."

Difficulty responding to modern drone technologies and tactics has been cited as one of the U.S. military's major failings in the war with Iran, making Donahue's departure in this light all the more concerning.

In his own post to X, Seth Abramson, an attorney and outspoken critic of Trump, who has written several books about his life and career in politics, warned that something much darker was underway with Hegseth's recent trend of blocking promotions for certain military officers.

"Pete Hegseth is removing or blocking the promotions of all military officers who he has determined would not participate in an illegal pro-Trump self-coup (auto-coup) in 2028," Abramson argued. "You can believe me now or believe me in 2028. Either way, stop seeing what Hegseth is doing as random."

An "auto-coup" refers to a coup that is orchestrated by an existing official in order to stay in power against the will of outside forces, such as a president remaining in office despite losing reelection or being term-limited.

Unaffordable home prices are not the kind of thing billionaire President Donald Trump has had to worry about his whole life, but his voters are having a hard time with it in his economy. Locally elected Republicans are feeling more heat over the economic situation than Trump in his gold-plated Oval Office, however, and this is pressing Columbia, SC. Mayor Daniel Rickenmann to plead Trump for mercy.

“I think it's terrible for the Republican Party, to be quite honest,” said Rickenmann, speaking to an MS NOW “Weekend” panel Saturday morning about the possibility of Trump vetoing a popular housing bill to force Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE Act. “… When you have Senator (Rick) Scott and Senator (Elizabeth) Warren working together, this is what this country is based on, so we're really excited. You know, look, in 10 days this bill will be law. And I don't think the President would be wise to even think about vetoing something like this. This is monumental. This is the beginning. First housing bill in 30-plus years.”

Trump is facing a likely disastrous midterm election threatening to remove his protective Republican buffer in the House and Senate — which is the only thing protecting him from numerous investigations into claims of fraud and various tampering. Knowing this, Trump is determined to pass the SAVE Act, an election bill that critics say will make it harder to vote.

But passing the SAVE Act means also means nuking the Senate filibuster and removing the Senate parliamentarian, which Senate GOP leaders are loathe to do. For this reason, Trump is holding all bills hostage until the Republican majority commits to passing the SAVE Act to the White House for a signature.

But Trump may have other reasons behind his indifference to the Housing Bill, said MS NOW Eugene Daniels, who played footage of Trump dismissing the need for lower housing prices.

“I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody. Maybe anywhere. It is all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rate. You can have all the housing you want. But you have to understand: I don't want to … hurt people that own houses too. These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses, they become rich. I don't want to hurt them either.”

“What's interesting is several weeks ago, a month ago, he talked about how this is important,” responded Rickenmann. “This is the number one issue across America in every city. … If you're a Democratic city, Republican city, whatever, there's three and a half million units needed across this country. … We had over 1,800 [building permits issued] in our city. We're pushing everything we can. But to say that it's just interest rates is not true. And to say this isn’t monumental as also very disappointing, in my point of view.”

“It is very important for us to protect the integrity of elections,” Rickenmann insisted. “But at the same time, we can't hold one bill for other. We've got to work on thousands of things together, and I don't like the impression that one bill is being held up for another. That's just not the way things need to work.”

Friday night’s final season edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher delivered a patronizing interview with Vice President JD Vance, but not before Maher first hammered President Donald Trump over his plummeting approval ratings and his Reflecting Pool debacle.

“Fourth of July coming up, and you know what? Today it opened, Supergirl, perfect for the Fourth of the July. Yeah, big superhero, another superhero movie opened this week, but what’s going on in Washington? Deadpool,” said Maher, according to reporting by Mediaite.

“Oh, we’ve killed the reflecting pool. I’m tired of hearing about the god—— reflecting pool,” Maher added. “I’ve got to say. I don’t really give a s—— about the reflecting pool. And I love America, but I’ve gotta admit, we’re the only place you could make a pool improve by p—— in it.

“But you know, the problem is now, there are dead ducks in the pool, or possibly murdered by Antifa. I don’t know,” Maher then continued. “But you know the pool is dragging down the president’s approval ratings. It’s like a little in the low 30s now in the country and among independents, 25 percent—and 0 percent with ducks.”

Trump is clearly growing sensitive over the state of the pool, which he forced taxpayer to pay $14 million in a no-bod contract to one of his connected flunkies.

A Colorado-based storm chaser even got a visit by the FBI after cracking a joke about introducing algae spores into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

"I am the leftist who put algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This plan was months in the making. I introduced spores into the paint used by the contractors who repainted the pool. It was me the whole time," said Patrick Pineda, in a since-deleted BlueSky post.

Pineda said his joke was so scientifically absurd, he assumed his audience would be intelligent enough to know it was a joke. But this is Trump’s FBI.

Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is still woefully cratered, and tearing down his party’s chances in November as well.

“Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll since we began fielding in May 2025,” said pollster G. Elliot Morris. “Across 13 monthly polls (we skipped December 2025), Democrats have never trailed, with margins ranging from +5 to +10 points among registered voters.”

Just 25 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling prices, while 71 percent disapprove and 54 percent disapprove strongly, Morris added, creating a tough spot for Trump and the party.

“He is underwater on 11 of the 12 issues we tested,” Morris added.

A New York Times panel of columnists say America is heading toward its 250th anniversary, but many of its citizens and residents are not feeling celebratory, especially with billionaire President Donald Trump working to make it a celebration for only one certain class of people.

Columnists Michelle Cottle, David French and Jamelle Bouie took turns decimating the failure.

“The weird special event for our birthday boy, Mr. President, two weeks ago, with the U.F.C. fight and all of that — … that [was] not meant for the broad public. Like, you had to have a Paramount+ subscription to even watch it, first of all. It was meant for just a subset of even his own supporters,” said Bouie. “It wasn’t any kind of attempt to bring the country together under common civic rituals. And to me, that’s an intentional thing. They’re thinking of the 250th as an attempt to kind of glorify — and I use that in a religious way — Donald Trump, and not as an opportunity to, despite our many divisions and fractious nature and all that, think about our common origins and our common purpose.”

The White House doesn’t “conceive of all Americans as being American in the same way,” said Bouie, with the dividing line being whether or not you support Trump’s political project.

“It’s this constant stratification,” said French, referring to the celebrations very limited appeal of UFC wrestling and one or two acts of hard rock country singers. “It’s this constant sense of a pecking order, and then this constant sense there is always, always in the back of their mind something that goes like this: ‘How can we do this in a way that will make other people mad, that will make our enemies mad? How can we make our enemies mad today?’ As opposed to, ‘How can we bring the country together today?’ It really does seem to be an absolute communications priority of this administration to just go ahead and decide to tick people off on purpose, as long as it’s the right people.”

“That strikes me as at the root of the president’s movement all along,” said Cottle. “Whatever you think of his politics, it’s all about ticking off the elites, which is hilarious because he is an elite of sorts. He’s just an elite who’s always had a chip on his shoulder and has never really fit in.”

“Right, and elites here are defined in a purely cultural, nonmaterial way,” said Bouie. “For these people — if you are, like, a barista with an English degree, making $15 an hour, you’re an elite because Netflix producers like to make shows for you sometimes. Whereas if you are a billionaire buying pardons for your buddies, you’re not an elite, because the cultural tastemakers supposedly look down on you.”

“What Jamelle said was exactly right about elites,” said French. “You can be an underemployed Brown English or art major grad, and that’s an elite. And if you own five car dealerships in, say, Hattiesburg, Miss., you’re just a working man. … Somebody who might be on the elder board of a church, the head of the local Kiwanis Club, or, you know, has their name on a building in a local college, right? And they will view themselves as the scrappy underdog because, you know, the gender studies department in Oberlin looks down on them.

“Oh, my God, boo-hoo-hoo,” erupted Cottle. “That’s all I’ve got to say to the president, just boo-hoo-hoo. Get over it, OK? Get over yourself.”

Dispatch writer David M. Drucker dropped some truth on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” show on Saturday, explaining exactly why Republican leaders in the Senate are finally defying President Donald Trump by refusing to pass the SAVE Act.

Passing the act, which critics say will severely constrict voter access, will require unprecedented moves in the Senate, including the dismantling of the Senate filibuster and the removal of the Senate parliamentarian. Neither of that’s going to happen, however, because Republicans in the Senate can see the future whereas Trump — who is pushing 80 — sees very little future at all.

“What I find silly about this, but it kind of shows you where the President's head is at — which is the same place it's always at —,” he said suggestively, “is that what Republicans do unto you today, Democrats can do unto you tomorrow.”

“So go ahead and fire the parliamentarian, go ahead and scrap the filibuster. Democrats are going to be in power again sometime soon. Look at the past 25 years. This goes back and forth. And they will trash this bill. They'll [install] universal mail-in balloting. They'll do all these things that will force Texas and Florida and Idaho and all these red states to govern elections the way they want. We just played ping-pong doing this. So, the whole thing is just ridiculous,” Drucker said.

Drucker added that Trump’s time would be much better spent helping his party focus on economic issues to smooth Republicans' slide into the midterms — only that’s not going to happen, he said.

Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kent.), who Trump had removed in the Republican primaries for daring to release the Epstein files, said on Thursday that Republicans can expect “an absolute shellacking” in November because “we’re wasting the opportunity that voters gave us.”

Drucker agreed on Tuesday, writing that Republicans hoping for Trump to pivot to the economy would be better off spending their time hunting “proof” of the “tooth fairy.” The very next day, Trump stomped a Congressional effort to pass a housing bill that would make home ownership for affordable.

“I am prescient, man,” Drucker told the MS NOW panel. “[Trump] is … a complicated political figure, but not a complicated man. He is singularly focused on his things that interest him and his grievances.”

“[H]e is approaching this presidency doing everything that he ever dreamed he might want to do from the very beginning,” Drucker added. “He never had any use for Congress from the very beginning. He never took well to criticism from voters, and so this is how he has been, and this is how he will be to finish out his last two and a half years.”

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As education officials in Texas ban hundreds of books that run afoul of their interpretation of Christian morality, the State Board of Education on Friday approved a required reading list that forces the state’s more than 5 million public school students to read from the Bible.

The Republican-controlled SBOE voted 9-5 with one abstention to approve the list, which includes passages from the Book of Exodus as well as the Shepherd’s Psalm and the myths of Adam and Eve and David and Goliath.

“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” Republican board member Brandon Hall—who is also a youth pastor at Cavalry Baptist Church in Springtown—said during a Thursday press conference in Austin.

That “truth” omits or marginalizes climate change, US imperialism, women’s history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and racism.

Evelyn Brooks, the only Republican SBOE member to vote against the required reading list, told CNN on Friday that she believes the board’s move is “unconstitutional.”

“Teachers need to have their autonomy,” she said. “They’ve been selecting books for decades.”

In 2023, Texas’ Republican-controlled Legislature passed HB 1605, which mandated the creation of a K-12 required reading list and directed the Texas Education Agency to develop state-owned textbooks. Those texts, called Bluebonnet Learning, contain lessons on Christianity starting in kindergarten. The SBOE approved Bluebonnet Learning as an optional curriculum in late 2024 and is currently working to correct thousands of errors in the curriculum at a cost of over $8 million to Texas taxpayers.

The SBOE action comes amid a legal battle over SB 10, a law signed last year by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. US District Judge Fred Biery, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, subsequently issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. Texas families also sued to block the legislation. However, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is running for US Senate—demanded that schools comply with the law.

Public schools “exist to educate students with diverse faith backgrounds, as well as those who adhere to no faith doctrine,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) said Friday. “Public schools are not Sunday schools, and elected officials have no business using state power to elevate one religion above all others. A required reading list that overwhelmingly favors Christian texts while excluding the writings and literary traditions of other faiths, not to mention the perspectives of millions of nonreligious Americans, sends an unmistakable message about who belongs and who does not.”

FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor asserted that “a mandatory public school reading list should never function as a Bible lesson.”

“Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she added. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Rabbi Joshua Fixler at Congregation Emanu El in Houston told CNN Friday that “this list is full of Christian texts that are inappropriate for public school classrooms.”

“As a rabbi and a parent of Jewish kids, I think it is vital that this board make a distinction between teaching about religion and teaching religion,” he added. “This list will force teachers to cross that line.”

Fort Worth high school teacher Chanea Bond told The Associated Press on Friday that the SBOE’s required reading list is “very old and very white.”

“It is very narrow and does not represent what classrooms in Texas look like,” she said. “Going through most of high school without ever having much value put into voices that sound like yours kind of sends a message that your voices aren’t valuable.”