Christian nationalist poison continues to flow into American society

One of the tenets of Christian nationalist (CN) fundamentalism is hate and intolerance of non-heterosexuality. CNs tends to be intensely focused on the sex lives of other people and making sure sex is done properly according to their version of God. 

 

A LGBTQ Nation article, GOP bill would ban teachers from talking about LGBTQ people because it “offends Christian values”, reports on a pending law in Tennessee that reflects the hatred that intolerant CN ideology has toward non-heterosexuals and their sexual behaviors: 

Critics say the bill would lead to more bullying. Proponents say that their religious values are more important.

Republicans in Tennessee have introduced a new bill that would prohibit any mentioning of LGBTQ history or teaching of any LGBTQ issues in school during the 1st legislative session.

Introduced by Tennessee Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), Tennessee H.B. 800 is the latest bill targeting the LGBTQ community brought forth by Republicans in early 2022.

This bill sponsored by Griffey would ban textbooks and other instructional materials in public schools that “promote, normalize, support or address LGBT issues or lifestyle.”

The reason behind this? It is because it would offend those with “Christian values.”

This is what Griffey wrote in the bill, spelling out the raison d’être behind his bill in plain English:

WHEREAS, the promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values;

Griffey’s bill would forcibly restrict the discussion of LGBTQ issues by subjecting them to the same restrictions and limitations placed on the teaching of religion in public schools.

This idea was not lost on critics, who see this bill as an attempt at bullying LGBTQ people. 

In 2021, Tennessee passed a bill that would require a school district to notify parents before “providing a sexual orientation curriculum or gender identity curriculum” in any kind of instruction, including but not limited to education on sexuality. Tennessee’s legislature also voted to ban trans children from playing sports on teams that match their gender identity (Lambda Legal & the ACLU among others have brought a lawsuit against this bill).

Tennessee in 2021 also passed a bill that would force any businesses in Tennessee to place a gender neutral sign in order to allow trans individuals to use the bathroom (though an injunction has been granted against this bill), and subsequently the Volunteer State banned doctors from providing life-saving gender affirming care to trans youth.

That says a lot about intolerant, cruel, hypocritical, anti-secular, anti-democratic and authoritarian theocratic CN ideology. Most CN fundamentalist elites want biblical Christian Sharia law to be the supreme law of the land, above even the US Constitution.[1] These radical anti-democratic theocrats deploy sophisticated propaganda that intentionally conflates teaching of religion with teaching of secular topics. Human sex is not a religion. Self-centered CN radical elites care only about what offends them and what they demand from everyone else. What other people might think or want are irrelevant at most, evil at worst. 

Footnote: 

1. It's not clear what most of the rank and file think or even know about CN and its inherently anti-secular, pro-theocracy ideology. The elites funding and running the CN political movement, like the modern GOP, is disciplined, expert at propaganda and prefers to operate with as much secrecy and plausible deniability as it can. That effectively hides the real intentions and goals from most average people who are not paying that much attention and/or are trapped in propaganda echo chambers that have mislead them into a raft of false beliefs and acceptance of crackpottery. It is possible that most rank and file supporters do not know what CN ideology is or that they are supporting it with their donations and/or votes for CN politicians. Public knowledge and understanding of the CN political theocratic movement is abysmal. 

Mitch McConnell and his subtle but effective anti-democratic propaganda

He's not nearly as stupid as he looks

Multiple sources breathlessly reported that Mitch McConnell has "broken with" the GOP Party line about the 1/6 coup attempt being legitimate political discourse. What a load of rot. The MSM gets a well-deserved grade of F on reporting, or actually failing to report. 

Once source quoted McConnell as saying: 

"It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election. .... This issue is whether or not the RNC (Republican National Committee) should be sort of singling out members of our party who may have different views from the majority. That’s not the job of the RNC."

McConnell's anti-democratic propaganda is in two things he did not say

He could not bring himself to say that the election was free and fair. All he could say without blowing up his fantasyland Trump party was that it was a violent insurrection to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election. 

Yeah, the election was legitimately certified. Everyone with even a tiny shred of grounding in reality knows that. Aliens in parallel universes know it. Hamsters and crocodiles the world over know it. Well OK, maybe not the crocodiles.

What McConnell did not say is glaring: 

The election itself was free and fair, not stolen.

Why not say it? Obviously, he did not say that to safely keep the deceived and betrayed Republican base falsely believing that the 2020 election was stolen and Biden is illegitimate (and horrible, and a cannibalistic pedophile, and a socialist tyrant, and a lizard person, and etc.). McConnell left untouched the unpleasant, threatening thought that the election and Biden were both legitimate. Only the transfer of power was legitimate, not the election itself. The cognitive dissonance for the "election was stolen" base would have been just too much. Maybe even so much that McConnell would lose some votes in his next election. Nah, that's not possible. Never mind that last point.

The other glaringly obvious thought that McConnell left unspoken was about what what the RNC and nearly all other Republican elites believe. He said it was not the RNC's job to "sort of" single out party members "who may have different views from the majority." Those the RNC singled out were Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger who are cooperating with the House investigation of the 1/6 coup attempt.

Here, McConnell is saying the majority of the GOP have views different from what Kinzinger and Cheney hold. What he is clearly implying is this:

The majority of the GOP does not believe that the 1/6 coup attempt merits investigation because it was not important enough to investigate and/or because any investigation is merely a partisan witch hunt and thus illegitimate. 

So what did the MSM focus on? It focused on the diversion that McConnell purposely put in his statement, namely he called 1/6 a violent insurrection, thereby "breaking with" the RNC's crackpot narrative that 1/6 was an act of legitimate political discourse. McConnell broke with the RNC and GOP as little as he possibly could. His break amounts to nothing of any significance.

That is how screwed up, anti-democratic and immoral the Republican Party is in 2022. But, to its credit, it has some very sophisticated propagandists on its team who are working ruthlessly against a largely clueless and/or subverted MSM. A pox on the GOP's morally rotten, anti-democratic house.

But waddabout the MSM here? Excellent question. Here, the MSM took McConnell's deflection bait, hook, line, sinker, fishing rod, fisherperson, boat, boat trailer and Ford F150 pickup the trailer is hitched to. They swallowed it all. Dumbfucks.[1]

Questions: Or, do I overstate or misunderstand the situation, get it wrong or am I otherwise out to lunch on this? Do I owe the MSM an apology, because what McConnell said is just what the MSM reports it to be?

Footnote: 

1. Early on, when Facebook was still young and growing rapidly, but had become well-known, a reporter asked Mark Zuckerberg what he thought of people willingly giving him and everyone he sells it to all their personal information? His four-word response: "Dumbfucks, they trust me."*** I'm starting to think of the MSM as being as much of a Facebook sort of thing than something helpful to democracy. 

*** To be fair, Zuckerberg has since backpedaled and said his opinion has "evolved." He just didn't say evolved into what. I suspect his evolved opinion is something like this "Double dumbfucks, they still trust me -- my God are they stupid."

Republican voter intimidation tactics: A serious attack on democracy or not?

Old-fashioned voter intimidation

A few weeks ago, several sources reported that at least one red state was planning to use voter police to investigate election fraud. That didn’t seem like a problem. No one condones voter fraud, so investigating it seemed innocent. And since there is very little voter fraud to investigate not much would happen, maybe other than some featherbedding and power napping on the job. 

Then, a long time interlocutor strenuously argued that this was much worse. I was given a link and ordered to read an article written by Thom Hartmann for Salon. There is an interesting snippet of history about William Rehnquist, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Here it is:

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about "voter fraud."

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: They’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for 60 years now.

This election year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: He’s planning to put together a force of "election police" under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for "voter fraud."

DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to 'build an army' of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who 'will have the confidence and courage' to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

These efforts to intimidate voters are part of a much larger Republican campaign of widespread and systemic election fraud that the party has been running since the days of Barry Goldwater. Democrats need to start calling it that.

Voter fraud, in other words, isn’t real. But election fraud is very much real and alive, and that’s exactly what DeSantis and the Texas GOP are proposing, right out in the open.

This has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was running for president on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that President Lyndon Johnson was then pushing through Congress.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were fraudulent elections.

After all, isn't it a fraud to say that a “free and fair” election was held when, in fact, large numbers of people who were legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice?

How can that not be a fraudulent election?

And back in 1964, Goldwater and the Republicans wanted to keep it that way.

But as the issue of voting rights was showing up on the nightly news and people were marching across the country for their right to vote, Republicans on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for the status quo. 

So they came up with a story that they started selling in the 1964 election through op-eds, in speeches and on the news. This story was simple:

There was massive “voter fraud” going on, where mostly Black people are voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump recently said, “by the busload” after Sunday church services. In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were voting in the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to promote to this day.

A campaign of actual “election fraud” based on the lie of “voter fraud.”

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Goldwater, ran against Johnson for president.

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of every Hispanic and Black voter and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting hours in line to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to stop the Florida State Supreme Court-mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then-little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the court as chief justice when Rehnquist died. Roberts was also the tie-breaking vote to allow Ohio to continue its voter purges in 2017, and wrote the 5–4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.)

Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As The New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry “fraud.”

The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.

The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as “a program of voter intimidation.” He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

"There is no doubt in my mind," Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, "that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd."

Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular. Who’d vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking deregulation, gutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high and preventing workers from forming unions?

The GOP’s sweet spot, however, is scaring white people about “crime” by minorities, particularly African Americans and Hispanics. Which is why Donald Trump told Congress that “3 to 5 million fraudulent” votes were cast in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. 

And when they can’t clamp down enough on ID laws or close enough polling places in Black neighborhoods, they fall back on “election police,” the 2022 version of Operation Eagle Eye.

As the conservative Town Hall site notes about the election just held in Virginia that saw that state’s governor’s office flip to a Republican:

Not only did the RNC indeed have “a robust poll watching operation,” involving 50 election integrity trainings with over 3,200 attendees, but such an operation produced results. In the 37 [many minority] target Virginia counties, poll watchers covered 100 percent of polling locations, the November memo confirmed.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican voter suppression election fraud, using the phony excuse of trying to stop “voter fraud.”

They’ve already started, in numerous states, seizing control of election systems in minority neighborhoods, aggressively purging voter lists, outlawing mail-in voting or making it far more difficult, and closing polling places by the hundreds.

This year, and particularly in 2024, they’re reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed militia volunteers and "election police" confront people in their own neighborhoods on Election Day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

Now that neither the Supreme Court nor Congress is willing to stop them, we must, like Paul Revere, awaken the American people to this long-term strategy that’s worked so well for the GOP since 1964, usually producing widespread disenfranchisement and hours-long lines to vote in minority neighborhoods.

The struggle for democracy in our republic is far from over, and the next battlefield will be the election this November. Republicans are doubling down on every tool they’ve ever used to suppress the vote.

I don’t know how many voters were intimidated into not voting by GOP intimidation tactics in 2020 or in 1964. I am pretty sure (~97% confident) that Republican Party elites intended to suppress non-Republican voters[1], but how effective was it? In close races, just a few intimidated voters and suppressed votes can flip an election. 

Videos here and here indicate that since the 1950s, Republicans have tried to intimidate non-Republican voters. For context, 2020 was the first presidential election in 40 years where the Republican National Committee (RNC) was allowed to do “poll watching” without court supervision. The Democratic Party sued the RNC and courts ordered court monitoring of RNC poll watching activity for 40 years because the Republicans were trying to intimidate voters.  

Footnote: 

1. For example, Republicans target polls where non-Republican voters dominate. Their only concern is non-Republican voters, who allegedly commit massive voter fraud. According to Republican elites, Republican voters don’t commit voter fraud, and thus they do not need to be monitored.

Armed Trump supporter arrested at polling place in 2020 

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE:

 WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU...........

WE all know the most common one, right?

Though, to be honest, that is kinda lame, better would be:

OR:

SO, complete the sentence:

When life hands you.................

Make it whatever you want and have some fun with this one.

(When life hands you partisan politics, post a goofy thread to take everyone's mind of off politics)