Out of Many, One: The Motto We Should NEVER Have Replaced

Sixty-nine years ago today...

Small things over time become big things. Small changes can lead to large consequences, and a four-word phrase added to our money in 1957 has grown into a tool for telling Americans who belongs. 

What was slipped in quietly should be able to come out the same way. 

But today, Trump and sadly, his, HIS Republican Party would ridiculously sell its removal as a war on Christianity, proof that the left wants God erased from American life. 

That reaction is itself the argument: a motto that cannot be questioned without being called an attack on faith has stopped being a motto and become a loyalty test.

On October 1, 1957, the first American paper money carrying the words "In God We Trust" that didn't seem then as divisional and divisive as we now know they have been, went into circulation: the Series 1957 one-dollar silver certificate. 

Sixty-nine years later, the phrase is on every bill in your wallet. Hanging in our courts and government offices. This was not the America we created originally, or wanted, and for good reason.

It has also become something more than a slogan. 

Christian nationalism has moved from the fringe into statehouses, school boards, and the White House. 

Donald Trump learned that religion is a loyalty test he can sell, and he has used it to regain power and hold it. 

A national motto that ties American identity to one idea of God is the perfect tool for that project.

So on this anniversary, a modest proposal: 

retire "In God We Trust" and restore the motto that held this country together for its first 180 years. 

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Our best and original national motto. 

How God got on the money

The phrase is not a founding principle. It is a product of two wars, one hot and one cold.

1. 1864. During the Civil War, after a minister petitioned Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to recognize God on the coinage, "In God We Trust" first appeared on the two-cent piece.
2. 1907. Theodore Roosevelt, a devout Christian, approved new gold coins without the phrase. He argued that putting God's name on money came close to sacrilege, cheapening something sacred by stamping it on what people spend. Congress overruled him in 1908 and put it back.
3. 1955. At the height of the Red Scare, Congress required the phrase on all U.S. currency, paper included. One year earlier it had added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
4. July 30, 1956. President Eisenhower signed the law making "In God We Trust" the official national motto, a deliberate contrast with "godless" Soviet communism.
5. October 1, 1957. The first bills bearing the motto reached the public.

The Soviet Union has been gone for 35 years. The Cold War branding outlived the Cold War, and a new movement found it waiting.

The motto we already had

E Pluribus Unum turns 250 this year, alongside the country itself. 

In August 1776, weeks after the Declaration, Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design a seal for the new nation. Their committee proposed the phrase, and it went onto the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, where it remains.

It was never written into law as the national motto. It didn't need to be. It should have been. Our Founders also didn't imagine they would need many laws to protect us from someone like Donald Trump, or that we'd ever elect such a vapid, malignant narcissist career criminal as POTUS.

It just couldn't enter than patriotic mind back then, or even in 2016.

For 180 years it served as our nation's motto in practice, on the seal, on coins, and in the civic imagination. It described what the founders were actually attempting: thirteen quarrelling colonies, many faiths, many origins, one republic.

Notice what it does not say. 

It does not say what you must believe. 

It says what we are building together.

Why it matters so very much now

A motto is not harmless just because it is old. Courts have upheld "In God We Trust" by calling it "ceremonial deism," a phrase so worn by repetition that it supposedly means nothing. 

Christian nationalists treat it as the opposite: proof that this is a Christian nation and a legal foothold for the next step.

It aids the putrid Christian accelerationism too many of them support and desire.

You can watch that step being taken. 

Several states now require "In God We Trust" posters in public school classrooms. Louisiana and Texas have passed laws ordering the Ten Commandments posted there too. In Washington, the administration has opened a White House Faith Office, launched a task force on "anti-Christian bias," and created a Religious Liberty Commission, while the president who hawked $60 Bibles casts himself as Christianity's defender.

The pattern is old and well documented. Strongmen wrap themselves in faith because faith converts political opposition into heresy. 

If the nation officially trusts in God, and the leader claims God's favor, then dissent becomes a sin. 

The motto on the money is a small piece of that machinery, but it is the piece every American carries in their pocket.

Look at the illiberal, autocratic, corruptive direction this Donald Trump administration, his Republican (Maga) Party are taking us. These tools in their war chest seem harmless, certainly to their supporters. But are far less harmless than they seem, then they proclaim, than seems obvious to many, but painfully obvious once you see it and can no longer not see it.

The case for Out of Many, One

It includes everyone. Tens of millions of Americans are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, pagan, agnostic, atheist, or simply unaffiliated. "In God We Trust" speaks for some citizens about all of them. E Pluribus Unum speaks for all of them about each other.

It matches the Constitution. 

The First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion. A government that declares, in its official motto, whom the nation trusts has taken a side. E Pluribus Unum takes no side on belief. It takes the side of the Union.

It ends the insider test. "In God We Trust" has become a quiet way of sorting real Americans from suspect ones. A motto about unity leaves no room for that sorting. You cannot be outside of "one."

It is civic, not sectarian. Believers lose nothing. Their faith does not depend on the Treasury's endorsement, and many would argue it is better off without it, as Roosevelt did. What the country gains is a shared identity built on citizenship rather than creed.

It is the original. Restoring E Pluribus Unum is not a radical change. It is a return to the founders' choice, made in the year of independence, after a 70-year Cold War detour.

Before God, there was "Mind Your Business"

The first coin authorized by the United States government carried no reference to God at all. The 1787 Fugio cent, approved by the Confederation Congress, used a design traced to Benjamin Franklin's 1776 Continental Currency.

One side shows a blazing sun over a sundial, the Latin word FUGIO ("I fly," as in time flies), and the motto MIND YOUR BUSINESS. In Franklin's day that meant attend to your work and use your hours well, not "stay out of my affairs." The other side shows thirteen linked rings, one for each state, around the words WE ARE ONE.

Franklin was a Freemason (I am one myself) and a Grand Master of Pennsylvania's Masons, and the coin speaks a language any Mason will recognize: the sun as light and reason, the dial as time and discipline, the linked rings as a chain of union. 

No record says the coin was designed as a Masonic piece, and it should not be sold as one. But its values are plainly Enlightenment values, the same ones that run through the Craft.

Read the whole coin as a sentence and you get the best civic creed this country ever minted: Time flies. Mind your business. We are one.

Sixty-nine years is long enough

The national motto lives in a single line of federal law, 36 U.S.C. § 302, and the currency requirement in two more. Congress put them there. Congress can take them out.

That will not happen this year or next. But mottos change when people stop treating them as untouchable, and that starts with saying plainly what this one has become: 

a Cold War slogan now serving a movement that wants citizenship to depend on belief.

On this anniversary, tell your representatives you want the founders' motto back. 

Share the Fugio cent with someone who has never seen it. 

And the next time someone tells you this is a Christian nation, hand them a dollar and ask them to read the seal on the back. 

It is still there, in the eagle's beak, where Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams put it 250 years ago.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. 

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things here at Murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

If Corporations Are People, Then Lies Are Crimes Against the Body Politic

Citizens United gave speech to power. It never gave truth to anyone.

Why isn't our Body Politic just as important? 

Isn't it MORE important?

There is a law in the United Kingdom that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly make a false statement about a political candidate's personal character or conduct during an election. It lives inside the Representation of the People Act 1983, Section 106, and it is not theoretical. Candidates have been prosecuted under it. 

Courts have taken it seriously. The British legal tradition holds, without apology, that democracy requires a baseline of factual honesty about the people competing for power. Lie about your opponent's record on policy, fine. That is politics. Lie about who he is, what he did, what she said, what they are, and you have committed an offense against the process itself.

The United States has no such law. It cannot have one, according to the current Supreme Court's reading of the First Amendment. Political speech is the most protected category of expression under American constitutional doctrine, and the Court has repeatedly signaled that the government has almost no power to regulate it based on its truth or falsity. We are, by law, a country where you may lie about your political opponents without limit, so long as the lie does not meet the high bar of defamation, which requires proof of actual malice and damages that are notoriously difficult to establish for public figures.

This was always a flaw in the American system. But it was a manageable flaw, held in check by practical barriers: journalism, peer accountability, the sheer logistics of mass communication. Then came Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided in 2010 by a five-to-four Supreme Court majority, and the flaw became a wound. A wound that has not stopped bleeding since.

The Logic That Ate Itself

Citizens United rests on a foundational claim: that corporations are persons under the First Amendment, and that political spending is a form of speech, and therefore that limiting how much a corporation can spend on political messaging is an unconstitutional restriction on free expression. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. He argued that the government had no business deciding which speakers were worthy of constitutional protection and which were not. To restrict corporate speech, he said, was to create a two-tiered system in which some voices could be silenced by the state.

This reasoning has a seductive internal logic. If you accept the premise that corporations are persons with speech rights, the rest follows. The problem is the premise itself, and the downstream contradiction it creates that nobody in the majority seemed to notice, or chose to acknowledge.

If corporations are people, and corporations compose the body politic through their spending and messaging and political participation, then the body politic is people. Not metaphorically. Legally. Structurally. The architecture of democratic participation that Citizens United helped to build is one in which artificial legal entities, backed by concentrations of wealth that no actual human being commands, flood the political commons with messaging that is subject to no truth standard whatsoever.

The body politic, understood as the aggregate of citizens who form a political community and participate in its governance, has now been reconstituted to include entities that cannot vote, cannot serve, cannot be imprisoned, cannot die, and have no direct stake in the outcome of the society their money shapes. And those entities speak into that political commons with the full protection of the First Amendment, spreading whatever messages serve their financial interests, true or false, fair or fabricated.

The UK looked at this problem and said: lies about candidates are an affront to the democratic process. We criminalize them because the body politic, which is made of actual people with actual lives, deserves to make decisions based on something approaching reality.

The United States, post-Citizens United, has said the opposite, functionally if not explicitly: the body politic is open to all comers, including artificial persons with unlimited resources, and we will not discriminate based on the truthfulness of their messages. The marketplace of ideas will sort it out.

The marketplace of ideas has not sorted it out. It has instead been cornered by the best-funded vendors, who have discovered that lies are cheaper to produce than truths, faster to spread than corrections, and significantly more effective at generating the emotional states that drive political behavior.

The Affront Against the Body Politic

The British legal tradition's language is worth sitting with. Section 106 frames false statements about candidates as an affront against the body politic. Not merely as a harm to the individual candidate, which defamation law would address. As an affront against the collective process of democratic governance. Against the body politic as such.

This is a meaningful distinction. When you lie about a candidate's personal character during an election, you are not merely injuring that person. You are corrupting the information environment in which citizens make decisions. You are polluting the commons. You are committing what amounts to a fraud against the electorate, who are entitled to make their choices based on something resembling reality.

American law does not recognize this category of harm. We have libel and slander, which protect individuals. We have fraud statutes, which protect commercial relationships. We have perjury laws, which protect judicial proceedings. But we have no legal mechanism that says: lying to voters about their candidates is an offense against democracy itself.

Citizens United made this absence catastrophic by removing the practical constraints that had kept it from fully metastasizing. Before 2010, the money that could be spent on political messaging was limited. Political organizations had to identify themselves. Coordination rules created at least some friction between wealthy donors and campaign messaging. None of this was a truth requirement. But it slowed the machine.

After Citizens United, dark money flowed into super PACs. The infrastructure of political lying scaled. A single donor or a single industry could now fund a campaign of disinformation at a level that no opposing voice, however well-funded by normal human standards, could match. The asymmetry between a lie and its correction, which was always present, became overwhelming. A lie can be produced for the cost of a press release. A correction requires research, verification, dissemination, and an audience already disposed to receive it. At scale, with unlimited money behind the lie and none guaranteed for the correction, the lie wins most of the time.

Prescience and Its Discontents

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent in Citizens United that has aged with uncomfortable precision. He argued that the Court's ruling would damage the integrity of elected institutions. He argued that corporations are not members of the political community in any meaningful sense. He argued that the identity of the speaker is relevant to the government's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption.

He was not listened to. He was in the minority.

Justice Stevens was talking about corruption in the financial-influence sense, the familiar concern that money in politics buys favorable policy outcomes. This is real and it is serious. But there is a second form of corruption that the Citizens United framework enabled and that the majority did not adequately weigh: the corruption of the information environment itself.

When unlimited money can be spent on political messaging with no truth requirement attached, the information environment becomes systematically corrupted. Not by any single act of lying, but by the structural incentive that unlimited money creates for producing and amplifying lies that serve the funder's interests. The marketplace of ideas fails not because people are stupid but because the market has been cornered. A monopoly on information is not less dangerous to democracy than a monopoly on voting.

We have built, through a combination of constitutional doctrine and corporate law and the economics of digital media, a system in which the most powerful speakers in the political commons are entities with no democratic accountability, no obligation to truth, and no limit on spending. We call this freedom of speech. The British, with their quaint little criminal statute about lying to voters, might call it something else.

The Flaw That Was Always There

It would be too easy to lay all of this at the feet of Citizens United. The decision accelerated and amplified a problem that was baked into the American approach to political speech from the beginning. The First Amendment's resistance to government regulation of political content has always meant that the United States would not build the kind of legal infrastructure around political truth that other democracies have. The trade-off was made. The idea was that free speech would be self-correcting, that the truth would win in open competition, that democracy would be resilient enough to absorb even vigorous disinformation.

That was not an insane bet to make in 1791, or even in 1950. The information environment was slow enough, local enough, and expensive enough to produce and distribute that the self-correcting mechanisms had time to operate. There were fewer actors, with lower reach, who could spread political lies. The town square had a manageable size. The body politic could, more or less, sort things out.

The digital information environment, post-Citizens United, is not a town square. It is a planetary-scale amplification system with no editorial standards, governed by engagement algorithms that systematically reward the emotionally inflammatory over the factually accurate, accessible to anyone with money and a message, including artificial legal persons with unlimited resources and no stake in the society they are shaping.

The flaw was always there. We chose not to close it because we valued something else: the principle that government should not be in the business of deciding what is true in political discourse. That principle is not without merit. Governments lie too. Governments abuse truth ministries. The instinct to keep the state out of the business of political epistemology has a real history behind it.

But the instinct has produced a structure that, under current conditions, advantages exactly the actors who are most willing to lie and most able to fund the amplification of those lies. The self-correcting market we hoped for has not materialized. What has materialized is a machine for the industrial production of political unreality, protected by the same constitutional guarantees that were meant to keep citizens free.

What Accountability Looks Like, and What It Would Require

The UK model is not a perfect solution. Section 106 applies to false statements about candidates' personal character, not to false statements about policy, or about history, or about the imagined consequences of the opponent's governance. It is limited in scope and has its own ambiguities. Prosecutions under it are relatively rare. It is not a truth machine. It is a specific, bounded legal acknowledgment that certain kinds of political lying are offenses against the democratic process.

What would it require to build something comparable in the United States? At minimum, it would require a different constitutional jurisprudence, one willing to recognize that political communities have a legitimate interest in the factual integrity of electoral discourse. It would require the Court to acknowledge that the body politic, which Citizens United has now constitutionally reconstituted to include artificial persons, is composed at its core of actual human beings who are materially harmed when the information environment in which they make decisions is systematically corrupted.

It would also require a political will that is currently absent, because the actors who benefit most from the current system are the ones most likely to block any attempt to change it. Unlimited money in politics buys, among other things, the political influence to keep unlimited money in politics.

But the contradiction sits there, regardless of whether anyone has the will to resolve it. If corporations are people under the First Amendment, and if those corporate persons now constitute a significant part of the body politic's voice, then the body politic is, legally speaking, people. And the body politic deserves what actual democratic theory has always said it deserves: a political commons in which factual accountability is not optional.

Citizens United gave speech to power. It gave amplification to money. It never gave truth to anyone. And a democracy that cannot distinguish, legally or structurally, between its citizens and its corporations, between speech and disinformation, between political argument and political fraud, is a democracy in the process of hollowing itself out from the inside.

The British have a word for what happens when you lie about a candidate to voters. They call it an offense. We have a word for it too. We call it protected speech. The difference between those two answers is the difference between a democracy that believes it has something worth protecting and one that has decided the protection itself is too dangerous to attempt.

We chose the latter. We are living with the results.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Trump vs. the Free Press: How His War on Journalism Goes Beyond Past Presidents

What actions has Trump taken to undermine or restrict media opposition, and how have these efforts affected journalism and the balance of power in the U.S. government? A free and independent press is one of the great strengths of America—something many other countries wish they had.

Trump has taken numerous actions over the years to undermine, intimidate, and restrict media opposition, often framing journalists as enemies of the people. Here are some key ways he has done this:

1. Attacking and Discrediting the Press

• Labeling the Press as "Fake News" & "Enemy of the People" – Trump repeatedly attacked major news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, calling them "fake news" and "the enemy of the people," language historically associated with authoritarian regimes.

• Encouraging Violence Against Journalists – He frequently used inflammatory rhetoric against reporters, leading to harassment, threats, and physical violence against members of the press.

• Refusing to Answer Questions – He walked out of press conferences and refused to answer questions from critical reporters, limiting accountability.

2. Legal & Institutional Threats to Journalism

• Revoking Press Credentials – The White House revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass in 2018, only reinstating it after a legal battle.

• Threatening to Change Libel Laws – Trump repeatedly suggested making it easier to sue journalists and news organizations for defamation.

• Attempting to Block Book Releases – He tried to prevent the publication of books critical of his presidency, including ones by John Bolton and Mary Trump.

• Weaponizing the DOJ Against Reporters – His Justice Department secretly seized phone records from journalists in attempts to track down leakers.

3. Favoring Propaganda Over Independent Journalism

• Pushing State Media Narratives – Trump openly praised far-right media outlets like One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, favoring them over mainstream, fact-based journalism.

• Threatening Media Ownership – He pressured companies like AT&T to sell CNN and opposed mergers (e.g., Time Warner and AT&T) to punish critical networks.

4. Undermining Government Transparency & Media Access

• Ending Regular Press Briefings – Under Trump, the number of White House press briefings dramatically declined.

• Blocking Critical Journalists – His administration attempted to block certain reporters from government events.

• Encouraging Foreign Dictators’ Crackdowns on Press – By calling American journalists "enemies," he indirectly legitimized crackdowns on the press in authoritarian countries like Russia, China, and Turkey.

5. Stoking Disinformation & Conspiracy Theories

• Promoting Election Lies – He aggressively spread false claims about voter fraud, attacking the press for debunking his lies.

• Encouraging COVID-19 Misinformation – He undermined public health journalism by spreading false information about COVID-19.

Trump's ongoing attacks on the press reflect a broader pattern of undermining democratic institutions and eroding the balance of power. By delegitimizing media opposition, he weakens public trust in independent journalism, making it easier to consolidate power and escape accountability.

While past Democratic presidents have had conflicts with the media, Trump’s approach has been notably different in both scale and intent. Here’s how his actions compare to those of Democratic presidents:

Similarities with Past Presidents:

1. Criticizing the Press:

   • Many presidents, including Obama, Clinton, and even FDR, have expressed frustration with the media.

   • Obama, for example, complained about Fox News shaping conservative narratives.

   • JFK and LBJ also had contentious relationships with journalists.

2. Targeting Leakers & Journalists:

   • Obama’s administration aggressively pursued leaks, prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.

   • The Obama DOJ secretly obtained phone records from Associated Press journalists and spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen.

3. Favoring Friendly Media Outlets:

   • All presidents tend to favor outlets that align with their messaging. Obama gave exclusive interviews to liberal-leaning media, just as Trump preferred OANN and Newsmax.

How Trump Was Different:

1. Declaring the Press an "Enemy of the People":

   • Unlike past presidents, Trump actively delegitimized the free press, calling it "the enemy of the people."

   • No modern Democratic president has used such authoritarian rhetoric.

2. Encouraging Violence & Harassment Against Journalists:

   • Trump routinely called for violence against the press, cheered physical attacks on reporters, and refused to condemn attacks on journalists.

   • Obama and other Democrats never encouraged violence against the media.

3. Revoking Press Credentials & Banning Journalists:

   • Trump revoked press passes from critical reporters like Jim Acosta (CNN) and Kaitlan Collins (CNN).

   • Past presidents have criticized reporters but did not go as far as banning them from the White House.

4. Attempting to Change Libel Laws:

   • Trump openly pushed to weaken First Amendment protections, making it easier to sue journalists for unfavorable coverage.

   • No Democratic president has seriously attempted this.

5. Threatening to Use Government Power to Control the Press:

   • Trump pressured media owners (e.g., trying to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner to hurt CNN).

   • He also suggested revoking broadcast licenses of networks critical of him.

   • Obama, Clinton, and other Democratic presidents never threatened corporate ownership to control media content.

While Democratic presidents have clashed with the press, Trump’s actions were far more aggressive and authoritarian. He didn’t just criticize the media—he sought to delegitimize it, undermine its constitutional protections, and weaponize government power against it.

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT