Cult vs. Belief System… your analysis

cult

-a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

-a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

Definitions from Oxford Languages

 

belief system

-a set of principles or tenets which together form the basis of a religion, philosophy, or moral code.

Definitions from Oxford Languages

 

Lots of difficult questions today:

Question 1. 

Based on the above definitions, what would you say is the difference between a “cult mindset” and a “belief system mindset”?  

For example, does the difference involve notions like: indoctrination, religious affiliation, central figurehead(s), size of membership, greater societal acceptance, group agendas, other, etc.?

Question 2. 

If indoctrination is a necessary part of cult activity, but not of belief systems, what about the fact that virtually all parents (caretakers) indoctrinate their innocent children with the parent’s own religious, as well as secular, belief systems? Are not both (religious and non-religious) a form of indoctrination?  Which begs a follow-up question:

Question 3. 

What’s the difference between indoctrinating and teaching?

Question4.

Is the following statement true or false?

“A cult has a belief system but having a belief system does not necessarily make an organization a cult.”  Explain your answer. 

Question 5.

a) Are the Christian Nationalists a cult or a belief system?

b) Are The Branch Davidians a cult or a belief system?

c) Are the politically oriented Oath Keepers a cult or a belief system?

d) Are the Democratic and Republican Parties a cult or a belief system?

Question 6.

Do you still stand by your original “difference” definitions?  Do you wish to revise them in any way?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

 

SECULARISM IN THE US IS LARGER, MORE DIVERSE AND MORE DYNAMIC THAN EVER, BUT YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT FROM THE MEDIA

 Earlier today I promised Germaine that I would post a "unique" perspective about our religious dialogue, from an article I found very interesting.

A bit hyperbolic and uses some questionable "catchphrases" BUT aren't we all guilty of that anyways, when discussing the effects and influence of religion on our politics and civil discourse?

So read the following with an open mind, and see if you find some of the perspectives refreshing, or just another slanted view.

Warning, the following is a long read and a bit verbose, just sayin'

“I’m done waiting for mainstream media to cover nonreligious people and secular issues fairly and accurately,” says Sarah Levin, a woman who wears a number of hats in the institutional secular world. “I’m done waiting for them to stop reinforcing the Christian Right’s framing on issues and failing to challenge religious privilege. And I am absolutely done waiting for them to start seeing nonreligious people as their whole selves, beyond our orientation around religion,” Levin goes on, speaking with RD in her role as director of advocacy for OnlySky Media, a new outlet focused on “exploring the post-religious perspective.” In addition to publishing content aimed at secular readers broadly, OnlySky will be conducting its own research on secular Americans, so it will no longer be necessary to “rely solely on research produced by institutions that do not, either by way of their mission or their funding sources, have an explicit interest in serving the nonreligious,” Levin explains. 

On the issue of media representation of secularism and secular Americans, Levin, the founder and head of Secular Strategies and co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Interfaith Council, has a point. Nonreligious Americans are generally a pro-social bunch, and overwhelmingly in favor of the very rights the anti-social, anti-democratic Christian Right is actively working to take away, like voting rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights. Yet, according to the legacy media’s punditocracy, America’s rapid secularization is something we should all be terrified of. 

Starting from the demonstrably false assumption that religion is essentially the only source of social cohesion, philanthropy, and pro-social behavior, prominent pundits and religion journalists (who should know much better) continually insinuate that secularization is somehow destroying the fabric of American civil society, and that the nonreligious are somehow to blame for American polarization. How, exactly, is unclear, and it could hardly be otherwise, given that both of these premises are entirely without factual basis.

Think pieces—and often even supposedly “straight” reporting—tend to ignore the empirically demonstrated fact that the social and political polarization that pervades these not-so-United States is asymmetric and significantly worse on the political Right. Not coincidentally, that side of the proverbial aisle consists largely of the conservative, mostly white Christians from whom the newly nonreligious are fleeing. These same conservative Christians, directly encouraged by their defeated president and a host of powerful Republican leaders, attempted to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by means that included a violent Christian nationalist insurrection in which people were injured and killed, very nearly destroying what was left of American democracy, such as it is. But, you know, there are problems with liberals and progressives too, so…

If elite pundits and journalists won’t even grapple with the basic fact of asymmetric polarization, instead falling back on a lazy “bothsidesism” that must be comforting to people of immense privilege, I suppose it’s far too much to ask for most of them to pay attention to the numerous peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that it’s precisely the Christian Right’s authoritarian culture-warring—the very dynamic that led to Donald Trump’s 2016 election with enthusiastic Christian Right backing—that has driven many to empty the pews. But even when journalists acknowledge this fact, there’s often a subtext of paternalism and victim blaming, the not-so-subtle message that these whippersnappers ought to stay in their churches and work to make them better, instead of leaving the churches to become ever more radical in their absence.

Spoiler alert: exvangelicals like myself have often spent years, even decades, trying to push evangelical Protestantism in a more humane direction from the inside, only to conclude that evangelical institutions and norms are unreformable. Journalists would know this if they considered us sources worth consulting. On a related note, Levin is far from alone in her concerns about misrepresentation of secular Americans by the press, though you would hardly know this from watching cable news or reading the legacy media, because journalists and pundits have a habit of talking over and about the religiously unaffiliated, exvangelicals, atheists, and secular advocates, rather than talking to us. 

If they were to start talking to us, treating us as valuable sources and stakeholders in the national discussion around religion and politics, civil society, and pluralism, they would of course have to grapple with a very different viewpoint on American secularization than the “Chicken Little” story they insist on purveying, as if they all nodded along with Dostoevsky’s understanding that if there is no God, everything is permitted when they were undergraduates and never revisited that proposition with a more mature, critical eye, and an awareness of the great Russian novelist’s reactionary politics, Russian nationalism, and antisemitism.

Levin’s frustration with the press is thus entirely valid. The legacy media’s approach to American secularization and secularism, frankly, constitutes journalistic malpractice.

To take a recent (admittedly far from the worst) example, many secular Americans were dismayed by Michelle Boorstein’s January 14 Washington Post report on secularization and the secular movement in America. The report failed to quote a single religiously unaffiliated young American or secular advocate. Instead, it gave pride of place to observers like Georgetown University sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau—who claims that American secularism is lacking in innovation, leadership, and movement coherence—and political scientist and Baptist pastor Ryan Burge, who contends that the secular movement is “out of step” with the country and the religiously-ambivalent nones.

Kevin Bolling, executive director of the Secular Student alliance, an organization with chapters on college campuses throughout the US, told RD that reading Boorstein’s report was “disheartening,” particularly given her record as “an accomplished religion reporter with a vast catalog of well-written articles.” He continued, “Boorstein has written about numerous topics of prime interest to secular people; follows multiple leaders in the secular movement on Twitter; is an alumnus of UW Madison [which has] a large and active Secular Student Alliance chapter; and could have easily directly reached any of the twenty national nonprofits in the secular movement for comment.”

Boorstein’s article is also typical in going to great lengths to distinguish the religiously unaffiliated, aka “nones,” from atheists, agnostics, humanists, and similar self-defined nonbelievers, painting the typical “none” as someone who is basically religious but alienated from “organized religion” as they’ve known it—someone with plenty of spiritual beliefs who could, it’s implied, perhaps adopt religious affiliation again under the right conditions (something that the American elite public sphere represents as a good thing, full stop). In the case of Boorstein’s article, the implication lingers, intentionally or not, in the way she ends the piece with Burge’s assessment of the nones as “ambivalent” toward religion as a result of “polarization.” Should American society return to a less polarized state, this framing implies, perhaps religious affiliation would start to recover as well. Such thinking inevitably casts the nones in an unserious light, as if our often painful and protracted decisions to disaffiliate from religion were not thoroughly thought through.

In fact, data now show that religiously unaffiliated youth are generally no longer returning to religion as adults, as was common in the past. While it would be equally unfair and inaccurate to portray the nones as mostly atheists and agnostics when they clearly are not (although the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising as well), the subtext that the nones haven’t fully thought through their choice to disaffiliate from religion is offensive—and it’s a prime example of how journalists talk over nones instead of to us.

Bolling, by contrast, works directly with students, which gives him valuable insight into their mindset and decision making. “Some of our students have experienced significant religion-based harm, been financially cut off, rejected by family, ostracized in their communities, kicked out of fraternities, and verbally and physically harassed,” he explains. Seeing the harm many religious believers perpetrate by acting on their religious beliefs has a powerful impact on young people, according to Bolling. 

While it’s true that “there are differences and distinctions in the spectrum of spiritual, but not religious to atheist that comprises the nones,” Bolling observes, “they are rejecting religion, to some degree. Politicians, community leaders, celebrities, and corporations need to understand this younger generation doesn’t want religion pushed in their faces, won’t stand for religious nationalism, and doesn’t want one person’s freedoms to diminish their own.”

Secular community leaders also take issue with Berlinerblau’s assertion that “There has been no innovation in secular thought in 50 years,” as well as his description of the current “third wave” of secularism as lacking in leadership. Bolling pointed to the “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.”

To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leadership and in terms of fully rejecting the misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-LGBTQ—especially anti-transgender—animus that characterize New Atheism. But by the same token, organized movement secularism has made significant strides in addressing both lack of diversity in leadership and bigotry in the movement, and that should be acknowledged.

Asked what she makes of the suggestion raised in Boorstein’s article that we’re in a “third wave” of secular organizing, Mandisa Thomas, the founder and president of Black Nonbelievers, told RD, “If this is a comparison to ‘third wave feminism,’ in some ways, that could be true. There is now more of a focus on the voices of women, cis and trans alike; our concerns are being taken more seriously; and we are asserting ourselves through our content and events.” 

Thomas also called Berlinerblau’s assertion of a lack of leadership in movement secularism “poorly researched,” noting that it “ignores the work of organizations like American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and Black Nonbelievers. What does Berlinerblau, and even Boorstein, consider to be leadership, and how narrow-minded is their view?” I, too, would like to know the answer to this question.

Thomas began her organizing work in 2011 because, while data indicated that more and more young African Americans were questioning and disaffiliating from religion, there was a lack of resources available to bring them together and address their needs. Black Nonbelievers, which now has affiliates in seven cities across the United States, became a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2014. Like the other secular leaders who spoke to RD, Thomas is frustrated with poor media representation of secular Americans and the secular movement. Her frustration extends to the paucity of coverage of BIPOC secular organizing relative to the (still sparse and often poor) coverage that majority white secular organizations and the (dead or aging and problematic) New Atheist leaders get. Despite improvement, Thomas agrees that the secular movement itself still has a diversity and inclusion problem, and maintains that the best way to address it would be for “‘allies’ to highlight the work of organizations like BN and encourage more support for us.”

Since the removal of David Silverman as its president amid allegations of financial conflicts of interest and sexual misconduct in 2018, American Atheists has also been at the forefront of diversifying the secular movement in practicing and promoting a broader, more intersectional approach to secular advocacy. The organization’s staff includes queer people, women, and African Americans in prominent roles. And, as it’s shifted away from Silverman’s “firebrand” approach to anti-religious messaging, American Atheists has begun to robustly and frequently make the case that anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ concerns are key church-state separation issues and should be an integral part of secular advocacy.

American Atheists’ current president, Nick Fish, told RD, “I view American Atheists’ role as providing opportunities for members of our community to more fully participate in American society, whether that be in politics, cultural institutions, or any number of other areas of life. That means doing more than simply being right about this one thing: the nonexistence of gods. It means finding partners who share our values and interests and working together to make this world a better place to live.” Clarifying that latter point, Fish noted, “Our advocacy is going to continue working to find areas of common ground with partners, regardless of their religious beliefs, while holding true to our own values around equality for all.”

Asked for his take on Berlinerblau’s comment about secularism’s lack of leadership, Fish asserted that it’s “unfair” to say “there’s no coherence or collaboration within the secular movement, which is advocating on behalf of the nonreligious.” He admitted, however, that the lack of centralization and hierarchy means that secular organizers face “challenges that simply aren’t present for religious groups.” He knowingly adds, “There are certain things that we wouldn’t want to replicate from the Religious Right even if it were structurally possible to do so because they run counter to our values as atheists and humanists.” Perhaps critics of the secular movement’s less centralized approach to leadership lack the imagination to conceive of models of leadership that differ from those employed by many religious institutions.

Regarding media representation, Fish lamented the tendency of the media to focus on New Atheist leaders and their angry, often bigoted style of atheist advocacy, when journalists should be looking to “actual policy advocates, community leaders, and grassroots activists.” Says Fish, “It’s certainly easier to always go back to the same people, but this does a tremendous disservice to promoting understanding of this community as it exists today.” As Fish sees it, journalists “don’t quite know how to talk about this elephant in the room: the fact that almost a third of Americans are no longer part of an organized religious tradition,” and no legacy media outlet does a particularly good job.

To speak of this significant percentage of the population as merely having lost something, or lacking something is at once offensive and ignorant. And so long as the legacy media continue to portray the nones in this way without actually talking to us, their reporting will inevitably imply that the nonreligious do not deserve to be taken seriously.

This brings us back to the new secular media project, OnlySky. Founded by Silicon Valley tech veteran Shawn Hardin, who now acts as its CEO, OnlySky already boasts an impressive group of contributors who are well known in secular circles. These include Pitzer College Professor Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist whose books on lived secularism are highly valued in the atheist and humanist communities. 

Speaking to RD as a columnist, feature writer, and editor for OnlySky, Zuckerman explained that the outlet, which was in development from early 2020, quickly became a haven for popular atheist bloggers, including Hemant Mehta and Captain Cassidy, who were pushed out of the blogging site Patheos by onerous new guidelines requiring bloggers “to avoid politics and criticism of other worldviews, two things increasingly important to our writers since the merging of evangelicalism and conservative politics in 2016.” 

But while “Patheos Nonreligious was focused tightly on the self-declared atheist and humanist demographic, OnlySky aims to serve a much broader audience—the 1 in 3 Americans who identify as having no religion,” says Zuckerman.“The hope is that OnlySky will be the main go-to media hub for secular, post-religious Americans—or for people simply interested in a secular slant on the world and on current events.”

Zuckerman and Levin, OnlySky’s director of advocacy, both share the general frustration with media misrepresentation of secularism that RD found among secular advocates. But is a secular media outlet the best way to address that issue, given that American atheist and humanist thought already exists largely in a silo, exerting little influence on anyone not already in the club? 

Asked this very pointed question, Levin was ready with a powerful answer. “If we reach even a quarter of the 29% of unaffiliated [in the American population], our reach will certainly match if not exceed that of many mainstream publications.”

Marketing, too, will play an important role in getting the public to understand that the nonreligious constitute a relatively cohesive demographic worthy of attention from both advertisers and politicians. “We are often dismissed as this nebulous, loosely connected group of people that can’t possibly be reached in a targeted way that would meaningfully impact, for example, a candidate’s election prospects or a business’s bottom line,” says Levin.

OnlySky is taking on the ambitious task of changing this perception, and I can only wish them godspeed, so to speak. “The nones are not the only large and complex demographic out there,” Levin observes. “Complexity hasn’t stopped politicians or advertisers from targeting the Latino community, for example. But unlike Latinos, the nones are not generally treated as a group worth researching and targeting.” Levin’s a smart strategist, and her enthusiasm for the project is contagious. “In success,” she maintains, “OnlySky will prove that nonreligious Americans are a cultural, political and economic force to be fully reckoned with.” Given the disproportionate political power of the Christian Right and the progressive and pluralistic tendencies of the nones, let’s hope she’s right.

Chrissy Stroop

A prominent ex-evangelical writer, speaker, and advocate. 

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)