Month: July 2021

Total incoherence and shamelessness super-charges it:

If there was an epitome of Donald Trump’s hostile and often puzzling takeover of the Republican Party, it might have been his alliance with evangelical Christians. The thrice-married playboy who until relatively recently supported abortion rights became their champion. He did so despite demonstrating remarkably little familiarity with the Bible. The uneasy alliance culminated in Trump flashing the Good Book as a political prop in Lafayette Square last summer.

But new data suggests that whatever pull evangelicals have in American politics, it’s declining pretty significantly.

The Public Religion Research Institute released a detailed study Thursday on Americans’ religious affiliations. Perhaps the most striking finding is on White evangelical Christians.

While this group made up 23 percent of the population in 2006 — shortly after “values voters” were analyzed to have delivered George W. Bush his reelection — that number is now down to 14.5 percent, according to the data.

The partisan breakdown is interesting:

PRRI’s data suggest that, even within the GOP, White evangelicals are on the decline: White evangelicals have gone from 37 percent of the GOP in 2006 to 29 percent in 2020.

Just as important is the age disparity. While 22 percent of Americans 65 and over are White evangelicals, the number is just 7 percent for those between 18 and 29 years of age.

Again, some of that is the overall decline in religiosity in this country and that younger people are much more likely to be unaffiliated. And just because young people aren’t evangelicals doesn’t mean they might not become evangelicals later in life.

But the White evangelical population is even more disproportionately older than White nonevangelical Protestants and White Catholics. And previous data suggest the evangelical population has indeed trended significantly older over time.

I have always thought that quite a few conservative evangelicals were really “evangelicals” — people who used the term as a cultural rather than a religious signifier. But I suspect that many of those people are the ones who still identify that way which would mean the erosion is probably even worse than it seems.

The Christian Right is no longer even trying to be religious by any common definition. It’s a cultural and political movement dedicated to dominance.

Following up on the post below, I came across this from 15 years ago:

I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time. I wrote back in June [2006]:

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time they become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now, we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t necessarily even like the song, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

Rove was talking to the Republican lawyers association, many members of which specialize in “voter fraud,” and may very well be preparing to challenge every close race and file spurious complaints to Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department.

And even if they didn’t, be prepared to hear all of our complaints about election stealing yelled back at us if they lose. They are not afraid to take somebody else’s talking point and use it to their advantage. It’s one of the things they do best and because a lot of people don’t pay close attention it will sound perfectly reasonable to them that the Democrats stole the election.

Just something to think about as we look to the morning after election day.

One other thing Rove said during that talk before the GOP lawyers:

Well, I learned all I needed to know about election integrity from the college Republicans.

I don’t doubt it for a moment.

That was 2006. I don’t think we can blame Trump for this one.

This piece from the Daily Beast is spot on. Trump and his MAGA army are very consciously turning January 6th into a revolutionary rallying cry:

We’ve all heard the old adage that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

With Ashli Babbitt, Donald Trump and the GOP have found a perfect martyr to rationalize their perpetual victimhood and inspire future “freedom fighters” to assist in their full-scale assault on democracy.

Babbitt was one of thousands of Trump supporters who decided to join the violent insurrection on Jan. 6 and overrun the U.S. Capitol in hopes of canceling a free and fair election. She was shot by a Capitol police officer while climbing through a broken window on a door that led to the Speaker’s Lobby. She died while wearing a Trump flag as a cape.

The pointless death of the 35-year-old Air Force veteran came in the service of Trump’s Big Lie, but his party has shown no contrition. Rather, Republicans are cynically exploiting her death to fuel their dangerous quest for power at all costs.

This week, Trump declared that the police officer had “no reason” to shoot Babbitt, because she was not a threat as she tried to breach the door amid a mob storming the Capitol, including people who brought weapons and openly announced their intent to lynch Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. He went on, asking, “And why isn’t that [officer’s case] being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied? They’ve already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it would not be pretty.”

In April, the police officer who fatally shot Babbitt was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. His identity has not been released due to death threats that inevitably increased after Trump released a one-line statement last week asking “Who Shot Ashli Babbit?” That echoed Rep. Paul Gosar, an ally of avowed white supremacists, who accused the police officer of supposedly “lying in wait” to “execute” Babbitt.

Gosar and 20 other Republicans voted against honoring law enforcement officers with the congressional medal of honor for protecting their lives on Jan. 6. Trump, who now says the police had “no reason” to shoot a violent insurrectionist, declared “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” during the overwhelmingly peaceful protests following the murder of George Floyd. Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton called on Trump to send in the military and respond with an “overwhelming show of force” to men, women and children objecting to the police killing unarmed Black people.

The “Blue Lives Matter” crowd that claims to care so much about the safety and security of our law enforcement desperately wants to “move on” from even investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection that killed Officer Brian Sicknick, with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowing to strip Republicans of their committee assignments if they agree to join that investigation.

The goal is to keep enraging and confusing their base, convince them of a far-reaching “Deep State” conspiracy committed to depriving them of power and glory and “replacing” them, and deflect from the Jan. 6 investigations that will further document the extremist elements embedded within the GOP and conservative movement.

I think there’s also ample evidence that they are also using the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter to turn it back on the left. Ashli Babbit is being turned into their George Floyd and January 6th is being slowly but inexorably morphed into a “protest” with the same moral authority as the worldwide Black Lives matter protests in the summer of 2020. They do this all the time. (“My body, my choice” is being deployed by the anti-vax Trumpers now….)

We have ample vaccines, they are extremely safe, effective, free and accessible. And yet people are still getting very sick and dying because they refuse to get them. I just don’t know what to say about this anymore:

Some hospitals in Missouri saw a spike in Covid-19 cases by nearly 27% last weekend, which caused some to experience a ventilator shortage.

Dr. Robin Blount with Boone Hospital said the biggest hot spot is southwest Missouri in the Springfield and Joplin area. “I know this morning they were reporting that in Springfield between Mercy and CoxHealth they had over 300 inpatients,” said Blount.

The ventilator issue was happening at Mercy Springfield after the weekend forcing them to bring ventilators from surrounding Mercy hospitals in St. Louis, Northwest Arkansas, and Oklahoma City.

On Monday, Erik Fredrikson with Mercy Springfield tweeted that they are running almost 50 ventilators and searching for more. He said they are expanding a second Covid ICU and have travel nurses coming this week.

Kaitlyn McConnell spokesperson for CoxHealth said they have 96 inpatients with Covid in the system on Tuesday. McConnell said the issue at CoxHealth is not supplies or space, but staffing has been their biggest issue.

As the hospital continues to search for traveling staff and new hires, they have had to transfer 12 patients to other facilities over the weekend in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia.

The Atlantic’s Ed Yeong took a look at the Delta variant and reports that the vaccines are still very effective for people who are fully vaccinated. That’s a relief to many of us, for sure.

But he also writes this:

Another crucial question that “we really need to understand is the nature of transmission from breakthrough cases,” Hanage said. Worryingly, a recent study documented several cases during India’s spring surge in which health-care workers who were fully vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine were infected by Delta and passed it on.

If other vaccines have similar vulnerabilities, vaccinated people might have to keep wearing masks indoors to avoid slingshotting the virus into unvaccinated communities, especially during periods of high community transmission. “That is unfortunately the direction this is headed,” says Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. Israel has reimposed a mask mandate, while Los Angeles County and the World Health Organization have advised that vaccinated people should wear masks indoors.

This is because of the unvaccinated who are being ravaged by this variant. Sigh.

And then there’s this:

Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they don’t have access to vaccines; and they’re besieged by Delta. At the start of this year, Vietnam had recorded just 1,500 COVID-19 cases—fewer than many individual American prisons. But it is now facing a huge Delta-induced surge when just 0.19 percent of its people have been fully vaccinated. If even Vietnam, which so steadfastly held the line against COVID-19, is now buckling under the weight of Delta, “it’s a sign that the world may not have that much time,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me.

It is a terrible indictment of America’s national character that we are so spoiled and so rich that some 30% of our people are refusing vaccines and taxing the health care system out of ignorance and spite while people around the world are desperate for them. That COVID is now killing the countries that actually did the right thing at the beginning of the pandemic (unlike the US) are now being pummeled at a time when vaccines are available is beyond tragic.

Jonathan Chait takes a look back at the insane 2013 “IRS scandal” of the Obama administration and how it’s being deployed again to justify not funding the IRS today. It is an object lesson in how not to deal with the right wing noise machine and its lunatic followers.

Conservatives are rallying to oppose the one provision in the infrastructure bill that would help finance it: increased funding for the IRS, which has shrunk to a withered state that has enabled mass-scale tax evasion. Among the reasons they cite to defund the tax police is the fabled Obama IRS targeting scandal.

“Remember Lois Lerner? During her tenure as director of exempt organizations, the IRS unfairly singled out conservative nonprofits for special scrutiny and harassment,” recalls The Wall Street Journal editorial page. “It was a sobering lesson in how one of Washington’s most powerful agencies can be weaponized against political opponents.” Steves Forbes and Moore, a pair of high priests of supply-side economics, cite the still-looming “shadows of the Lois Lerner affair during the Obama years, when the agency targeted the tax returns of conservative organizations and donors who happened to oppose Obama’s policies.”

For one thing, we should note that there is no logical connection between the so-called Obama IRS targeting scandal of 2013 and the conservative effort to starve the IRS enforcement budget. If you believe the IRS had inappropriately singled out conservative groups for abusing tax-deductible fundraising, you should address that by requiring fair enforcement of tax-deductible fundraising. Preventing the IRS from enforcing any of its laws hardly addresses the problem, if the problem were in fact real.

In any case, the Obama IRS targeting scandal was never real. It was undeniably proven false. And the fact that essentially the entire conservative movement endorsed the myth, and never bothered to learn that it was false, is strong evidence that the movement’s misinformation ecosystem existed well before Donald Trump came along to exploit it.

The story is actually extremely simple. In 2013, right-wing political groups began complaining publicly that the IRS was harassing them for using tax-deductible donations for political campaigns, which is illegal. Their defense was not so much that the fundraising was actually legal. (Indeed, the practice of raising donations for “non-political use,” and then funneling them into political campaigning, is a very real crime, albeit one that is rampant and somewhat hard to pin down.) Instead of insisting they had acted legally, the groups charged that the agency was “targeting” conservative groups. Indeed, Republicans immediately insisted that Barack Obama himself had directed the agency to target the Tea Party.

In an effort to show he had nothing to hide, Obama condemned the disproportionate scrutiny of conservative groups and promised to fix it. This apology merely confirmed the impression of guilt, and led the media to treat the allegation as a scandal.

That was the mistake. Republicans are shameless and if you try to appease them they will use it to bludgeon you with your own words. Huge error.

This is what happened:

But not only did subsequent investigations find Obama didn’t order the targeting, they found the targeting did not occur at all.

The misimpression was confirmed because Republicans in Congress ordered the Treasury Department to audit the IRS’s scrutiny of conservative groups. The key thing about this report is that it was designed only to look for any IRS probing of right-wing groups. Sure enough, it found a lot of times the IRS scrutinized conservative groups for abusing tax-deductible donations.

Here is a chart from the report. Notice anything odd about this figure? Yes, it’s the giant blue field labeled “other”:

That “other” is all the remaining political groups the IRS scrutinized, the ones whose names are not in the report, because the report only looked for conservative groups. It’s exactly as if your oldest child claims she gets punished more harshly than your youngest child, and lists every time she is punished as “proof,” without comparing it to the number of times her sister is punished.

It took until October 2017, four years after the original “scandal” broke, for the Treasury Department to conduct a complete audit of its political nonprofit investigations. And, sure enough, it found that scores of left-leaning groups faced the exact same treatment as the right-wing groups.

Of course, by then, Donald Trump was committing actual Nixonian abuses on a daily basis, and re-litigating an alleged scandal from four years before hardly made a sound amid the cacophony.

But the belief that the scandal was real endured on the right. Even the party’s least insane voices continued to cite the “targeting scandal” years later, and its most insane voices used Obama’s alleged ordering of the imagined targeting to justify all manner of Trumpian crimes.

And now, of course, the fake scandal is being hauled out once again to justify denying the IRS funds, and enabling wealthy people to avoid paying taxes. It’s almost as if… effective, neutral enforcement of the tax laws was never the conservative goal in the first place.

This is one they’ll go to the mat for. They may be ambivalent about Trump in their hearts even though they are happy to go along with the fascist revolution he’s spawned. But when it comes to taxes, they are true believers.

Obama should have known better by 2013. He had been in office for four years, was just re-elected and there was no doubt by that time that nothing the Republicans did was in good faith. I realize that they probably thought that you just have to pick your battles, but the fact is that the right wing picks these battles and if you capitulate because you just want to “get it off the table” you’re being played. It’s never off the table as we can see with this latest bullshit.

And, as I said, this one isn’t QAnon or OAN. This is Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

I will never really understand why these people want to kill their own audience and Republican voters, but they do. It’s the damnedest thing:

The White House has been stepping up its community outreach efforts for the coronavirus vaccines, with President Joe Biden announcing an effort to get ahead of emerging variants in a speech on July 6. But at the same time as many public health experts say there should be even more stringent requirements for people to get vaccinated, right-wing media outlets are instead waging their own scare campaign against even the community outreach, continuing their shameful record of undermining the vaccination campaigns.

Polling data has shown that Republican voters are far less likely than Democrats to even want to get the vaccines, seriously contributing to the country having missed Biden’s goal for 70% of adults to have been vaccinated by July 4. (Most of the states that fell short were won by former President Donald Trump in 2020, while the states that have surpassed the goal were all won by Biden.)

But conservative media figures have quickly seized on one particular line from Biden’s speech on Tuesday, in which he appealed to people to get vaccinated as “a patriotic thing to do.”

“Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said. “Look, equity, equality — it remains at the heart of our responsibility of ensuring that communities that are the hardest hit by the virus have the information and the access to get vaccinated.”

Now, right-wing media is engaged in a dishonest and irresponsible spin operation, warning people that the government is coming to get them with the vaccine.

Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, who has led a propaganda campaign in concert with anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and with Fox’s full corporate support, fearmongered about Biden’s speech during his program on Tuesday night. 

Following a segment in which he claimed the pandemic had been “overhyped” because most deaths occurred in the elderly — though this argument also disregarded other adverse effects associated with “long COVID” — Carlson warned anyone who might come knocking to promote the vaccine to “stay the hell out of my house, for real.” Carlson then claimed that a door-to-door vaccine promotion campaign was a “much bigger” scandal than even the Iraq War.

That’s just the beginning. Click over to the full story to see that Fox, Newsmax and OAN are pimping vaccine rejection all day long. They are obsessed with it.

I wonder how many of them have been vaccinated?

William F. Buckley Jr. famously defined The National Review‘s mission as standing athwart history, yelling Stop. Conservative extremists now advocate doing in 21st century something more radical than what segregationist Gov. George Wallace did when he stood athwart the doors to the University of Alabama to keep out Black students in 1963.

Education that is not conservative indoctrination has long been a bone to gnaw for the right. It is why schools like Bob Jones University exist — as safe spaces for parents to send their kids where that Old Time Religion will not face questioning. The hissy fit over “critical race theory” would scare conservative parents into thinking public schools will turn their kids liberal or gay or something. Rather than standing in the schoolhouse door again, conservative extremists now advocate buring down the schoolhouse itself.

Someone on Twitter yesterday assembled a set of tweets with the phrase “abolish public schools.” On the heels of their hissy fit over “critical race theory,” abolishing public schools is now a cause célèbre for the American right and/or for trolls in St. Petersburg. A principle troll on this side of the Atlantic appears to be Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire.

Democrat Adam Christensen lost his bid for Congress last fall in Florida’s 3rd Congressional District. He paused his Twitter break to respond.

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https://twitter.com/AC4Congress2020/status/1412938659788173315?s=20

To start out and head off all of the right wing talking points.

1. I have been homeschooled
2. I have attended private Christian school
3. I have attended Christian college

Most of those making this argument fall back on “I have kids that were homeschooled and they’re fine” 

The example I would like to focus on is Prince Edward County, specifically FarmVille Va.

The Closing of Prince Edward County’s Schools | Virginia Museum of History & Culture After Virginia’s school-closing law was ruled unconstitutional in January 1959, the General Assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and gave the state’s counties and cities the option o… https://virginiahistory.org/learn/historical-book/chapter/closing-prince-edward-countys-schools

When Virginia was forced to integrate schools PEC decided not to. In fact what they did instead was to close down all of the public schools and open a private institution for the white students. They were able to do this because of state funded grants to cover the tuition. 

So in 1957 they closed down their public school system. The richer white kids were able to get an education, while the poor white and black kids were not. Those schools stayed shut for another 5 years. An entire generation grew up missing 5/10 years of education. 

Those kids are now in their 70s. Because they were uneducated they remained poor, they were unable to build generational wealth, and their kids and grandkids suffered because of it. Most never moved away. 

One of the main reasons that state and federal money is no longer able to be used to fund private school tuition is because of Prince Edward County. “Let us use tax dollars for private school or homeschool” is one argument that people like Walsh make. 

The issue is that the times when this policy was allowed it was used in a way that was racist and classist. Rich white kids “escaped” and everyone else was left behind and future generations suffered. Walsh knows this. 

Obviously CRT isn’t taught in K-12th grade. It’s a law school level course. But @MattWalshBlog doesn’t care about facts like that. He is using the classic white racists argument for abolishing public education that segregationists used. 

The dude is a political grifter, we all know this. But now he is falling back to old tropes, historically disastrous policy, and pushing it to people as a “reasonable” solution so that religious schools and homeschools can try to get federal and state dollars. 

This is a TERRIBLE and dangerous idea. Rooted deeply in system racism as the mechanism that segregationists used to shut down public education for black children and poor white children. In saying we should get rid of CRT, he is in fact proving why CRT matters! 

If he had his way, discussing the history behind the closing of public education as well as tax and tuition credits for private schools would be illegal. That he now also wants to put cameras in all public schools to monitor all state employees is just the tip of the iceberg. 

I started off this thread by saying that I have experience in 1. Homeschool 2. Private schools 3. Christian colleges.

Do not take anyone’s argument of “I have 5 kids who were homeschooled and they are top of their class” seriously. 

If you are financially gifted enough to homeschool (or have parents that work at the private schools) to go there, great! But lots of kids and families don’t benefit from those circumstances. And advocating to remove their only opportunity to get educated is evil. 

That someone who claims to be a pastor or a theologist is pushing these crazy/racist ideas is scary, disturbing, and undermines people of faith as well as private school teachers and educators. 

Alright that’s all I have to say for now. I’m going back on break. My mental health has been way better the last couple days not being on here (and seeing crazy shit like this). But some things can’t just go unchallenged. And this was one of them. 

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I’ve addressed before what a grift school vouchers and “tax credit scholarships” are. They are either ways many religious conservatives get taxpayers to pay for sending their kids to church schools or else schemes for rendering private school tutition tax deductible by laundering it through private tax-credit scholarship funds.

But now extremists are taking their culture war against modernity to the next level and calling for entirely abolishing public schools they once merely wanted to cannibalize. (And, of course, they want to abolish teachers unions.)

Abolish teachers unions. https://t.co/MxovL7lb54

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 7, 2021

Short of starting a second civil war (still not out of the question), conservative extremists demanding public schools be abolished is about as un-American as un-American gets. Colonists and the founders supported public schools in this country since before the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Last I looked, public education is stipluated in the constitutions of 48 states and guaranteed free in 35.

But never mind. Extremists fear they are losing the culture war they are waging. Everything they claimed to value as American is disposable now. All they’ve got left is the American flag, and they’ve reduced that to Trump merch.

Political sabotours aren’t in the building back anything business. Thus, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) explained to supporters how the Republican congressional caucus expects to spend its time and the taxpayers’ dollars over the next year and a half:

“For the next 18 months, our job is to do everything we can to slow all of that down to get to December of 2022, and then get in here and lead,” Rep. Chip Roy said in a video taped by Democratic activist Lauren Windsor. “Nobody knows what anybody’s gonna do right now. That’s the thing, this is the problem. I actually say, ‘Thank the Lord, 18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done.’ That’s what we want.”

Until then, Republicans in Congress will neither lead, follow, nor get out of the way. And by get in there and lead, Roy means tear things down, not deliver things Americans want.

In a video secretly recorded by Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent, Roy criticized fellow Republicans in the Senate for working with the Biden administration on an infrastructure plan:

Roy also chided the $579 billion infrastructure agreement, saying the moderate Republicans who negotiated it weren’t “conservative warriors.” Months of talks eventually produced an agreement on a framework last month. Biden initially tied its passage to the success of a Democrat-only bill, but he backed down on his veto threat after sparking criticism from Senate Republicans.

NEW–> GOP Congressman on bipartisanship: We want "18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done" pic.twitter.com/yvsGTNkDGB

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) July 6, 2021

Republicans are de-Americanizing political opponents the way nations dehumanize enemy soldiers in war to justify killing them. Only in this case, Republicans are de-Americanizing opponents to justify disenfranchising them. So far. MAGA rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on Jan. 6 perhaps had more than disenfranchisement in mind.

Windsor’s camera caught House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) speaking to a crowd of supporters assembled by Rick Santorum’s Patriot Voices.

NEW–> House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Biggs: "[Democrats] are enemies of the state," 5-10 of them probably lied when they vowed to honor the Constitution pic.twitter.com/B2xhJ4bRoz

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) July 7, 2021

“We hear an awful lot about the Democratic Party moving to the left, practicing socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Communism, whatever,” one attendee asked Biggs. How does he see them from up close?

“My own opinion is that they are enemies of the state,” Biggs replied.

“There are a handful of moderates left,” Biggs added, but by and large Democrats are “very, very hard left.” As examples, Biggs cited Democratic committee chairs Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), Maxine Waters (Calif.), and Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.).

Whoa! Move over “The Squad,” laughed MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Here comes The Triad.

So, while Biggs was praising Democratic moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W. Va.), Roy was deriding his party’s moderates for not being “conservative warriors.”

Republicans “have become completely reactionary,” The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes told Reid Wednesday evening.

By its actions and rhetoric, the Party of Trump is at war with the 51% of America (81 million voters) who chose last November to replace Donald Trump in the White House with Joe Biden. On Jan. 6, thousands of Trump supporters attacked the seat of government and police defending it from them and their attempt to overturn the election.

You, Dear Readers, are enemies of the state. Trump and his Republican acolytes are priming their base to act on that. Their base already has. With deadly results.

It’s always projection.

Not that this is exactly news, but Donald Trump is undoubtedly the dumbest man to ever hold the White House. It’s not even a close call:

On a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.”

The remark from the former US president on the 2018 trip, which reportedly “stunned” Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, is reported in a new book by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election has been widely trailed ahead of publication next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Bender reports that Trump made the remark during an impromptu history lesson in which Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities”.

Bender is one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he was ejected from power.

In a statement a Trump spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said: “This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired.”

But Bender says unnamed sources reported that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred”, emphasizing German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s.

“Kelly pushed back again,” Bender writes, “and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”

Trump ran into considerable trouble on the centennial trip to Europe, even beyond his usual conflicts with other world leaders.

A decision to cancel a visit to an American cemetery proved controversial. Trump was later reported to have called US soldiers who died in the war “losers” and “suckers”.

Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, left the White House in early 2019. He has spoken critically of Trump since, reportedly telling friends the president he served was “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life”.

Bender writes that Kelly did his best to overcome Trump’s “stunning disregard for history”.

“Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Black experience in general post-civil war as vague to non-existent,” he writes. “But Trump’s indifference to Black history was similar to his disregard for the history of any race, religion or creed.”

Hannity is still talking about Trump's cognitive test pic.twitter.com/5n0t2QtBk4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 7, 2021

Update —

Remember this? Trump is certainly dumb as a rock but he had some ideas about Germans. (Watch all the way to the end.)

The moron also said that his father was born in Germany, multiple times. He was not. He was born in the US.

Until six months ago, this fool was America’s top diplomat:

“I’m worried about some of the things that are being taught in our schools,” Pompeo told Sunday’s “The Cat Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM-N.Y. “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country. I certainly worry about that.

Right. The founding of the country was perfect. Everyone knows that.

I went to school a long time ago and at least in K-12 American history was pretty whitewashed (so to speak.) The genocide of Native Americans and slavery were taught as unfortunate mistakes rather than the foundational actions they obviously were. But even then, I don’t think anyone said that the founding was flawless. At least I don’t remember it that way. If Pompeo wants to teach that America was perfect he’s going to have to create a curriculum that’s even more propagandist than it was 50 years ago.

This is so disrespectful to the American people. It should not be a problem for any civilized society to look honestly at its history and take in the bad along with the good. This idea that everyone has to be brainwashed into thinking we are perfect in order to care about the country is ridiculous. A country is made up of humans — of course it’s flawed! It cannot, by definition, be perfect.

The problem here is that while we have spent a lot of time patting ourselves on the back for our ideals, as expressed in the founding documents, we haven’t fully grappled with the obvious institutional flaws that continue to hold us back. We are at the moment in our history in which we are called upon to do that.

Apparently these right wingers think that Americans are such snowflakes that they can’t handle the truth. (Mostly, they are just afraid of losing their privileges as the white majority which means they have to compete fairly — also very snowflakey.) In any case, it’s just a quixotic attempt to hold back the tide. Young Americans aren’t going to put up with fake, patriotic bullshit anymore. They want a reckoning and they are going to get it eventually whether these throwbacks want it or not.