News blast: Christian theocracy under Christian
Sharia law starts an effort to crack open a state treasury
A central, cherished goal of the radical right Christian nationalist wealth, power and theocracy movement has been to sink its greedy claws into taxpayer dollars at the state and federal levels. One way in has been to argue in courts that religious schools are entitled to tax dollars. State laws that separate tax revenues from religion have stood in the way. However, a Supreme Court decisions held that such separation was an unconstitutional burden on free speech by religion, thereby knocking down a major barrier that protected tax dollars from Christian pillage. That decision went a long way to neutering the Constitution’s establishment clause, which had been the basis for keeping the hooks of religion out of tax revenues.
Oklahoma’s departing attorney general just took a big step toward achieving a conservative education milestone.
A state law that blocks religious institutions and private sectarian schools from public charter school programs is likely unconstitutional and should not be enforced, Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West wrote in a non-binding legal opinion this month.
Their 15-page memo leans on a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that favored religious schools and won rapt attention from conservative school choice advocates and faith groups.
Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said the advisory opinion “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.” Newly-elected state Superintendent Ryan Walters called it “the right decision for Oklahomans.”
Now it’s time to see if faith-based Oklahoma institutions successfully apply for taxpayer support to create charter schools that teach religion as a doctrinal truth just like private schools do today, and if legislators will push to change state law. Legal authorities in other Republican-led states could also pen similar opinions.
“The policy implications are huge because this is the first state that is going to allow religious charter schools,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett, a University of Notre Dame law professor and influential religious charter school supporter who wants other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead. “The legal implications are huge because this is the first state that says that they have to,” she said in an interview.
.... [this] formal opinion of a conservative attorney general marks one of three ways religious charters can find legal footing.
In a widely-read 2020 report for the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, Garnett argued states could also amend or write laws that allow such schools to exist. Or perhaps a lawyer could sue on behalf of a school operator that wants to incorporate religion into its curriculum.
His opinion, though, relies on three groundbreaking high court cases involving religious institutions: Carson v. Makin earlier this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer in 2017.
“It is a whole other ballgame for the state to instruct children on religious doctrine and teach it as truth,” said Derek Black, education and civil rights professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, in an interview. “That’s what we’re talking about here: State dollars in public schools, delivering instruction to children preaching religion as a way of life that must be adhered to. That’s staggering.”
This is more evidence of what pro-theocracy Christian nationalism empowered by Supreme Court-endorsed Christian Sharia law intends to do. Once the Christian nationalist Supreme Court finishes obliterating the concept of church-state separation as a viable legal barrier, powerful Christian nationalist elites, i.e., most Republican politicians in Congress and state legislatures, will be unleashed. Fundamentalist Christianity will be freed to have unfettered access to our tax dollars.
Because the threat is grave and imminent, I will keep raising these warnings about the threat of intolerant American theocracy under a vengeful Christian Taliban that is dead set on killing tolerant democracy and civil liberties.
Inside the 1/6 coup attempt
Talking Points Memo has obtained evidence that the House 1/6 investigation committee has about the role of Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows is a well-know Christian nationalist elite who supported the coup attempt. Meadows is on of the key Christian Taliban leaders. TPM has 2,319 text messages that Meadows sent to various elite Republicans, including 34 congressional Republicans. This is more evidence that Christian nationalism was a major influence in support of the 1/6 coup attempt.
TPM writes:
The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.
The texts Meadows provided to the select committee encompass the period from election night in 2020 through President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It is not clear which, if any, texts Meadows withheld from the committee, but the text message log offers multiple hints it is only a partial record of his conversations. There are discussions that clearly lack prior context and messages where participants indicate there is further communication taking place on encrypted channels.
TPM is kicking off this series with an exclusive story showing that the log includes more than 450 messages with 34 Republican members of Congress. Those texts show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from largely benign expressions of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jody Hice (R-GA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat.
Meadows’ text log shows what the scheme to subvert the 2020 election looked like behind the scenes. It reveals the roots of the violence and its key enablers in Washington. The messages show the plot began well before Jan. 6 and continued afterward. They are essential documentation of a dark day in American history.
It is no wonder that radical right, fascist House Republicans have already publicly stated that on Jan. 3, 2023, the day they take control of the House, they will shut the 1/6 Committee down. They need to end any further House investigation of the role of Trump and his Republican enablers in trying to overthrow the US government on 1/6. They have a hell of a lot to try to hide and spin from treason into something the Republican Party officially calls “legitimate political discourse.”
We can only hope that the Democrats release all of the evidence they have before their power to honestly inform the American people is taken away. Once the Democrats are shut up, the fascist Republicans will start their massive propaganda campaign to turn a true horror for democracy into a faux triumph for democracy.
Book banning by radical right zealots:
The role of Christian business and its money
A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups
Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans
Some groups are new, some are longstanding. Some are local, others national. Over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized.
The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity.
The change was pushed by three new school board members, elected in May with support from Patriot Mobile, a self-described Christian cellphone carrier. Through its political action committee, Patriot Mobile poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas school board races to promote candidates with conservative views on race, gender and sexuality — including on which books children can access at school.
“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” said Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education, “and letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.”
It is easy to see the power of this Christian Taliban tactic. Overtly Christian businesses generate profits. Then they leverage that profit with tax breaks to PACs that support putting more Christian Taliban into positions that can influence public schools, elections, law enforcement and everything else they can corrupt.
Also, notice the sophisticated propaganda this is packaged with. Book banning is spun into a narrative not about banning books, but about empowering parents. The Christian Taliban wants parents to indoctrinate children into their bigoted theocratic world view by keeping them ignorant and fostering intolerance of aspects of the real world the Taliban hates and wants to oppress.
1933 book burning ceremony in Berlin, Germany
2022 book burning ceremony in Tennessee
(Harry Potter and Twilight got torched)
Thoughts about anti-Semitism and
bad faith rhetoric
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
As I’ve argued here before, talented demagogues, tyrants, religious and political ideological zealots, kleptocrats and the like (“bad people”) have known for millennia that bad faith in the form of blatant lies, slanders, flawed crackpot reasoning, scapegoating bigotry and the like are hard to defend against. The burden on the defenders of truth to explain usually complicated truth in the face of assertions of simple false reality and/or reasoning.
Just as bad people understand the power of bad faith rhetoric, some observers have long understood the great advantage that the bad people have over the defenders. Along with Plato and Aristotle, John-Paul Sartre was one of those who understood the asymmetry in rhetoric and the imbalance in persuasion power that is inherent in the asymmetry.
However, maybe one thing has changed from the time Sartre wrote his comments. These days, at least for radical right American fascists, even when they are pressed quite closely, they do not fall silent. Instead, they double down and renew their attacks, lies, slanders and crackpottery. For modern bad people, the time for argument is never past.
