News bits: Cancelling abortion on the internet; White supremacists reject bad data; Bits about Stormfront

  Wired writes:

Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortion

If passed, the proposed law would also require internet service providers to block websites that discuss access to abortion

State lawmakers in Texas are considering a bill introduced last month that would make it illegal to provide information on how to access abortion. The bill would also require internet service providers to block websites offering content like that in Robin Marty’s book*, allow prosecution of abortion pill “distribution networks,” and permit anyone to sue a person who shared anything about how to access a medical abortion. The proposal borrows from a Texas law passed in 2021 that offers a cash bounty to citizens who sue a person who helped facilitate access to abortion care.

* The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support

It sure seems like red state legislatures are in full-blown crazy-go-nuts fascist mode these days.

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When the data is bad, bad people reject it: Stat News wrote in 2017:

White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. 

Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Some of America's radical right is so irrational and incoherent its surprising those people can get dressed in the morning. In stead of kicking the racists out of the Nazi Stormfront neo-fascist social club, they reject the genetic testing as false and keep the impure blood in the racist's tea and cookies party. 

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Understanding extremism: Racism

The bit about Stormfront rejecting the validity of genetic testing raised the question, what is Stormfront. 

Wikipedia comments about Stormfront: Stormfront is a neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site. The site is focused on propagating white nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism (especially anti-semitic conspiracy theories) and islamophobia, as well as anti-feminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.

Stormfront was founded online in 1995 by former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black. The Stormfront website claims to have millions of posts. Some of it's rhetoric is more sophisticated than I imagined. Some is what I imagined. The top of the homepage says this:

The truth is "hate" to those who hate the truth!

We are a community of racial realists and idealists. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish Nationalists openly support their racial interests, with American taxpayers even required to support the Jewish ethnostate of Israel. We are White Nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples, including ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!

At the Stormfront science forum, how some of the racists deal with White racial superiority came as a surprise. There was some understanding of biology mixed in with racism:

Re: Bad Arguments Used By White Nationalists

Responder 1:

"Whites are superior in every sense"
That's completely spurious and counter-productive: While Whites have undoubtedly produced a great body of knowledge and achieved tremendous prowess in many fields, we are not 'superior' in every sense. Remember that each race developed under unique circumstances, thus the races developed different relative strenghths and weaknesses.

"Other races are sub-human"
Nonsense. This is a corollary to my previous statement: You wouldn't call a brown bear a "sub-bear" and polar bears the "master bears", despite their obvious phenotypic differences. Each is suited to its particular environment --problems only arise when they are no longer in their ideal environment.

We must remember what we are fighting for --cultural preservation and sovereignty. We must not confound this with irrational hatred of those who differ from us.

Responder 2 responding to Responder 1:

Well, that would be relevant had one bear made an accomplishment over the other. However, with humans this rationale is not applicable, or acceptable. The belief of White superiority should not be up for discussion because it is fact. The White race has made an unparalleled amount of development from ancient times to modern times. We have invented present and early systems of thought, technology, science, society, government, and so on. Without the White race the world, meaning Asia in particular, would have stayed completely stagnant in all of these fields.

Although Asians would have presented minor advancements, you and I both know that without White generosity, their current state of development would be about two thousand years behind and without any significant progression. Why is this? Well, this is due to the fact that Asians do not possess a broad scope of cognitive/mental ability in comparison to that of Whites. As a result, before White intervention, they did not advance through technology, science, etc because of that inability. Haven’t you ever wondered why Japan is the most technologically advanced nation in Asia? Well, it’s because of America. All of the other Asian nations are far behind, and in correlation to this, those nations have not been exposed to Western culture as vividly.

As for the Africans, well, I didn’t include them in my previous statement because it’s fairly obvious that Africans are inferior to Whites in every sense of the meaning. They have invented nothing in their history and consequently have failed to progress past the Age of Stone – about six thousand or more years behind that of us White men. Therefore, the only contender to Whites for racial superiority is Asians, but it has been made clear that they are not as broadly evolved in all fields of survival and intelligence. As a result, Whites are superior.

Responder 2

(note the cheerful avatar)

Responder 3:

Arguments referring to the brains of negroes vs brains of Whites shouldn't be used. Although I personally don't doubt them, they're virtually impossible to prove, and will only make you look silly.

Responder 4 responding to Responder 2:

One cannot use current levels of technology as a valid basis for comprehensive racial capabilities. Using this kind logic, we can argue that in the year 1400 AD, white Europeans were clearly inferior to East Asians since most of the new technologies being invented around that time came from the orient and those asian societies were the most advanced on earth. And in the year 200 AD, both the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire were equally advanced with almost no technology exchanges, so the two races were equal 1800 years ago? You must face the fact that biologically, entire races do not evolve new features overnight. Thus a great deal of the differences between societies are justifiably based on chance occurances and culture in general. And please don't quote Murray's work on human acheivements on me, because I've read it. His statistical models were based on the frequency of names of great visionaries, explorers, and inventors who lived from the ancient times up to 1950. But the frequency tables were developed from available text written after 1950 to present. He was basically counting the number of occurrences of each famous person in all published text written in the last 50 years, ranking the list of people by this metric and then grouping it by race. Now you tell me....given the fact that we live in age where Western Civilization is holding a dominant (though arguably declining) position versus the rest of the world, who will publish more books? Western nations, the semi-industrialized Asians, or the non-industrialized Africans? .... The point of contention that I'm alluding to is that it is extremely dangerous to correlate whiteness with innate superiority. Being white is not an assurance that one is strong or capable or even average. It is up to individuals and cultures alike to strive for and to maintain a dominant civilization. 

THIS JUST IN as of LAST NIGHT!

 

Trump Claims ‘Hundreds’ of Thieves Have Been ‘Carrying Refrigerators’ Away from Department Stores Across America

Yesterday 6:25 PM

Former President Donald Trump addressed the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Indianapolis on Friday. The president spent a good deal of the speech describing America as crime-infested and a place where “gangs of hundreds of young” people regularly “attack” department stores and walk out with “big stuff” like refrigerators and air conditioners.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-hundreds-of-thieves-have-been-carrying-refrigerators-away-from-department-stores-across-america/ar-AA19SuxL?li=BBnbfcL

Before you all go ridiculing Trump, we have evidence that it is true:

News bits: Regarding the Great White Replacement theory; Normalizing corruption; Thoughts on Democratic Party fascism

From the MAGA!! Files: Whites being replaced and oppressed by non-White people is one of the core dogmas that drives the American Christofascist wealth and power movement. The New Republic writes about White fears of being replaced and oppressed by barbaric non-White hoards:

Nebraska Republican Says Six-Week Abortion Ban Is Necessary 

Because White People Are Being Replaced

A Nebraska Republican state senator argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state, invoking a racist conspiracy theory.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion is allowed in Nebraska up to 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. But on Wednesday, the Senate began debating a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Senator Steve Erdman decided that the best argument in favor of the ban was the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”

NE State Sen. Steve Erdman (R) uses Great Replacement talking points arguing for a six-week abortion ban.

"[We have] not grown except those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here … because we've killed 200,000 people. These are people we killed." pic.twitter.com/ehAqEYO6oC

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 12, 2023

Erdman also said that all of the aborted fetuses “could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.”

Erdman’s argument delivers a nice one-two punch of racism and misogyny. First, he thinks that abortions should be banned to force more white people to have babies. But it’s actually people of color who are hardest hit by abortion restrictions. Not all states report the racial and ethnic data of people who get abortions, but those that do found a disproportionately high number of people of color seek the procedure.

America, it just gets nuttier and nuttier.

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Normalizing corruption by ignoring blatant conflicts of interest: Washington ethics watchdog CREW writes:

Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries as president

Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while he was serving as president of the United States, according to an analysis of his tax returns by CREW.

Throughout his time in office, President Trump, his family and his Republican allies repeatedly assured the public that his refusal to divest from his businesses wouldn’t lead to any conflicts of interest. Americans were promised that Trump would donate his salary, which he did, until maybe he didn’t—all while siphoning millions from taxpayers that more than offset his presidential pay. When it came to foreign conflicts of interest, Trump and his company pledged to pause foreign business. They did not.

Trump’s presidency was marred by unprecedented conflicts of interest arising from his decision not to divest from the Trump Organization, with his most egregious conflicts involving businesses in foreign countries with interests in US foreign policy.

The full extent to which Trump’s foreign business ties influenced his decision making as president may never be known, but there is plenty of evidence that Trump’s actions in the White House were influenced–if not guided–by his financial interests, subverting the national interests for his own parochial concerns.

Since Trump still claims he had no conflicts of interest, he has to have redefined conflicts of interest as not corruption. That made the problem go away. 

And this is what the Republican Party is going to nominate for president in 2024. 

America, it just gets more and more corrupt.

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An opinion The Guardian published considers the Republican belief that the Democratic Party is fascist:

US Conservatives love to warn of creeping fascism. Do they understand what it is?

Trump, a shrewd opportunist, has understood tendencies in American culture that most of us would prefer to ignore or deny

A few years ago a former student of mine, one for whom I had particular respect, stopped me on the street and handed me a copy of The Road to Serfdom by the British-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

This fine youth was starting out on what most would consider an enviable life, free as precious few of his fellow mortals are or have ever been. Yet he was excited by a new insight, that there was a plot afoot to plunge us into serfdom, fascism, Nazism. This alarm has surged, and now we have men in combat gear standing around at public events, absolutely defying anyone to take away their freedom. 
These “enemies” against whom they are armed are Americans who disagree with them.

I am trying to describe a Trumpism that anticipated and continues to enable Trump, that makes a kind of sense of his wild rhetoric and the reaction to it among his loyalists. A historically privileged group – whom it is, sadly, fair to call Republicans – indulge in a fear amounting almost to panic, which has become endemic, stimulated continuously by the presence of those Americans who differ from them, for example about whether the ready availability of guns is related to the criminal use of them.

Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically. It comes with the insistent association by Republicans of Democrats – the plurality or majority of the American people, a huge, unorganized swath of the population – with perversion involving children. 

History proves that solid-seeming populations do succumb to fascism. The word “serfdom” in Hayek’s title suggests that people would be passively subjugated, succumbing to a dirigiste economic order. But his real subject is fascism, whose worst cruelties always depend on the active participation of a significant part of these populations, even though they sacrifice what they might have thought they valued in order to be bound up in the unity the word “fascism” promises. Fascism is not a politics, it is a pathology compounded of nostalgia and resentment.

European fascism has had clear markers, three being white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and, of course, charismatic leadership. In using the word “pathology” I put aside the idea of politics as usual. Other patterns are easily discernible within our American strain of this virus.

It is classically fascist to influence opinion by the threat of violence. We have actual violence that lacks rational motive, but which is strikingly consistent over all in that it targets – not a metaphor – the tenderest places in our society, elementary schools, churches, outdoor festivals. It targets custom, community, contentment and hope to very great effect, dispossessing us of much of the pleasure of our national life. Weighing one thing against another, presumably, we are to accept this. At the same time the example we offer to the world of constitutional democracy is disgraced.

Fascism is an autoimmune disease. Under the banner of patriotism it hates its nation and people and oversteps all civilized limits in its zeal to bring about fundamental change, whatever the damage. Something of the kind is discernible in the talk of secession, national divorce, civil war.

So, here is a criticism that American radical right authoritarians, fascists in my opinion, level at liberals, Democrats and targeted out-groups, e.g., non-Christians, non-Whites and non-heterosexuals. 

Qs: Which is more fascist, America's radical right, or liberals, Democrats and targeted out-groups? Or, is there no such thing as America's radical right because the right generally is merely old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatives?

News bits: Regarding hyperpartisanship in the courts; Rocky exoplanet's magnetic field; Etc.

 Federal courts are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, but that pretense is fading fast. A current example is anti-abortion Christofascist judges adopting the propaganda framing and biased language of rabid anti-abortion activists to justify their illegal, authoritarian moral imperatives based on flat out lies and crackpot partisan reasoning. The NYT writes:

Judge’s Ruling Against Abortion Pill Is Filled With Activists’ Language

The preliminary ruling from Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk adopts the terminology of anti-abortion groups, such as “chemical abortion,” “abortionist” and “unborn human”

Here’s a look at the ruling.

The ruling calls medication abortion “chemical abortion,” refers to abortion providers as “abortionists” and describes a fetus or embryo as an “unborn human” or “unborn child.”

This is crackpot nonsense based on a lie

(the drug is safe and does not stress doctors)

By law, only people who can show they have suffered an actual or imminent injury from something — not one that is merely speculative — have “standing” to sue. In this case, the plaintiffs challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone more than two decades ago are doctors who oppose abortion and do not prescribe the drug. They contended that they have standing because other doctors might prescribe the drug to women who might then experience complications ....

Note the partisan propaganda: 

A fetus is aborted, not a child

Medication abortion is used in early pregnancies, typically before gestation at 12 weeks, and the tissue that passes out of a patient’s body is often in the form of blood clots. Patients cite varying reasons for having abortions, but several studies and surveys have suggested that patients often feel relief and experience fewer mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts after terminating pregnancies they felt unprepared or unable to handle.

The article continues like this by citing five more examples of the hyperpartisanship that exemplifies how some Republican judges do their job. This news bit is here to mainly to (i) exemplify the fact that the radical right rhetoric and tactics are based mostly on ill will and bad faith (lies, divisive propaganda, etc.), and (ii) the open contempt for secular law and sound reasoning that authoritarian theocrats hold.

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Earth-like magnetic field detected on a rocky planet like Earth: Without its magnetic field to shield Earth from solar wind that would blow our atmosphere away, humans would not exist. When Mars lost its magnetic field after its iron core cooled and solidified, the Sun blew its atmosphere away. Scientists routinely search for rocky planets with their own magnetic fields. Live Science writes:

Strange radio signals detected from Earth-like planet 

could be a magnetic field necessary for life

Earth's magnetic field protects life on our blue planet — and astronomers just found evidence of a magnetic field on a rocky exoplanet 12 light-years away

Recent observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes in New Mexico revealed evidence of a magnetic field on the rocky exoplanet YZ Ceti b, which orbits a star about 12 light-years away from Earth. This is the first possible detection of a magnetic field on a planet beyond our solar system, according to a study published April 3 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

YZ Ceti b, however, isn’t a habitable planet. To detect the radio waves from a small, far-away exoplanet’s magnetic field, astronomers had to look towards a particularly extreme example. YZ Ceti b is quite close to its star — far too close to be a pleasant temperature for life — and it’s also orbiting at such a pace that one of its years is only two Earth days long.

This is so close in that the planet “plows” through material sloughing off of the star, according to the researchers. The planet’s magnetic field pushes electrically charged plasma back toward the star, which then interacts with the star’s own magnetic field, emitting bright flashes of energy.

Essentially, the radio waves the team observed were an aurora on the star, likely created by the interactions with the planet, the team said.

Visualization of solar wind interacting with 

Earth’s magnetic field during a solar storm

(solar wind is a real thing, not to be ignored)

New Mexico's Very Large Array hunts 

for signs of extraterrestrial life

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Why repeating narratives and stories is useful - The abortion example: The Independent writes: 

A Republican congressman from Texas dodged questions about a federal court decision to revoke a more than 20-year-old approval for a commonly used abortion drug, instead suggesting that “women have a whole lot of other issues than just abortion” and the US should “talk about the other things that are happening in this world.”

These remarks from US Rep Tony Gonzalez on CNN’s State of the Union on 9 April followed a ruling from a federal judge in his home state to revoke the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a widely used drug for medication abortions and miscarriage treatment.

Mr Gonzalez said he supports “states’ rights,” but he stumbled when asked how that accounts for a federal court ruling that will have a dramatic impact to abortion access across the country if it goes into effect.

“Isn’t a federal judge saying on a national level that a pill cannot be administered the opposite of states’ rights?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked him.

He replied that “states started this” but “now the federal government is coming in and dictating theirs”. In the federal court case, the opposite is true: ....  

Mr Gonzalez, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, suggested that members of Congress could “defund FDA programs that don’t make sense” if President Joe Biden’s administration challenges the ruling.

Yes, we can all see why Christofascists like Gonzalez wants to change the subject to “the other things that are happening in this world.” By other things, the radical right means all the horrible, evil things that liberal and socialist tyrants, Joe Biden, his son and other opponents of Christofascism are doing to us. That's why Faux News sounds about the same day after day after day. The radical right does not want to talk about the horrors of what it is doing to us, e.g., defunding whatever bit of government God and/or capitalist plutocrats hate.

Once again, the mendacity, bad faith and ill will that dominates the radical right is clear and undeniable. 

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From the PPF (Psychological Projection Files): Projecting onto opponents what one does oneself is a topic that had exploded in popularity among elite fascist politicians and propagandists since the rise of T**** in 2016. Projection of bad acts and/or intent onto opposition is now a standard tactic to cover what fascist elites want to do themselves, or already are doing. 

Using the tactic against the opposition usually involves cherry-pickling good fact and true truth, while ignoring or denying inconvenient fact and true truth. For example, Faux News accuses Dominion Voting Systems of cherry-picking in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Faux. 

I should have been giving this topic more exposure. The WaPo writes:

Unpacking the flawed science cited in the Texas abortion pill ruling

A Texas judge’s decision to invalidate federal approval of a key abortion drug cites research based on anonymous blog posts, cherry picks statistics that exaggerate the negative physical and psychological effects of mifepristone, and ignores hundreds of scientific studies attesting to the medication’s safety.

Kacsmaryk wrote in his decision that “the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or life-threatening adverse reactions” and accused the Food and Drug Administration of acquiescing to “the pressure to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety.”

The ruling is the first time a court has suspended a medication’s approval after rejecting the assessment of a human drug by the FDA, considered among the world’s most stringent regulators. The agency says that between 2000, when the drug was approved, and last June, it received reports linking mifepristone to 28 deaths out of the 5.6 million who have used the drug. And in those 28 deaths, the agency said information gaps made it impossible to directly attribute the cause to mifepristone; in some cases, the deaths involved overdoses and coexisting medical conditions.

“The political game has nothing to do with the scientific process,” [one expert medical doctor] said.

Because individual studies often produce conflicting results, the medical community has long relied on a systematic approach known as evidence-based medicine, drawing on accumulated evidence from clinical research to inform their care of patients.

One study by James Studnicki, director of data analytics at the Lozier Institute, found that more than a quarter of women on Medicaid who had used abortion pills between 1999 and 2015 visited an emergency room within 30 days. Critics say the study is flawed because it did not specify the services people received at the ER. Medicaid patients are more likely to visit emergency rooms for routine medical care because they often lack primary care providers. 

One [study] concluded that 77 percent of women who had a “chemical abortion” reported a “negative change.” “Thirty-eight percent of women reported issues with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion,” Kacsmaryk wrote. 

Both statistics, according to the footnotes in his ruling, came from a study based on several dozen anonymous blog posts from abortionchangesyou.com. The website is run by the Institute of Reproductive Grief Care.

Once again, the bad faith and ill will that dominates Christofascist elites like the cherry-picking, inconvenient fact and truth-ignoring judge Kacsmaryk had to rely on to get at the decision God wanted. This is how Christian Sharia law works.

The state of the states

The NYT writes about hyperpartisan state legislatures and a weakening of respect for democracy by the Republican Party:

“We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. “In a normal two-party system, if one party goes too far, usually the other party stops them. They put the brakes on.”

In Tennessee, he said, “there’s nobody to put on the brakes.”

And not just in Tennessee.

And across the country, one-party control of state legislatures, compounded by hyperpartisan politics, widespread gerrymandering, an urban-rural divide and uncompetitive races, has made the dysfunction in Tennessee more the rule than the exception.

The lack of competition means incumbent lawmakers face few consequences for their conduct.

Those forces, intensified by the Supreme Court’s open door for gerrymandering and the geographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into rural ones, are buffeting legislatures run by both parties: Republicans have total control of legislatures in 28 states (including Nebraska, which is nominally nonpartisan) and Democrats in 18.

Both parties, to differing degrees, have abused their ability to gerrymander.

But it is Republican-run states, many experts say, that are taking extreme positions on limiting voting and bending or breaking other democratic norms, as Tennessee did in expelling two lawmakers last week.

Steven R. Levitsky, a Harvard University government professor and the author with Daniel Ziblatt of the book “How Democracies Die,” said one-party rule in Democratic states like Illinois has typically led to corruption and abuses of power.

But states controlled by Democrats, he said, have not tried to limit voting, restrict civil liberties or push back on democratic norms the way Republican-controlled states have in recent years.

“Only one party, I think, is flirting with authoritarianism right now,” Professor Levitsky said.

Flirting with authoritarianism seriously understates the Republican Party elite mindset. They are much more than flirting. They are fully engaged in and focused on establishing some form of American autocracy (fascism)-plutocracy-theocracy-kleptocracy. Why experts and professionals with relevant experience can't see this is puzzling. Maybe their definition of flirting differs from mine.

News bits: A major Christian theocrat attack on secular education; The Twitter hellscape; Etc.

I will keep keep warning that the crippling, corrupting Christian nationalist attack on secularism is well underway. The NYT reports:

Nation’s First Religious Charter School Could Be Coming to Oklahoma

If approved, the online Catholic school would be funded by taxpayer dollars, teeing up a high-profile constitutional battle

An Oklahoma state education board is weighing whether to approve the nation’s first religious charter school this spring, potentially setting up a high-profile constitutional battle over whether taxpayer money can be used to directly fund religious schools.

A small number of charter schools may be affiliated with religious organizations, but the proposed school, which would be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, would be the first to operate as an explicitly religious school, with religious instruction. Charter schools are a type of public school, paid for with taxpayer dollars but independently run and managed.

A decision to approve the charter, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, would almost certainly tee up a legal battle, something the school’s organizers anticipate and welcome.

With conservative justices now dominating the Supreme Court, St. Isidore’s organizers hope their project will help propel a broader national movement to lower the barriers between church and state and to allow government money to be spent on religious schools. 

Characterizing opponents as “radical leftists” with a hatred for the Catholic Church, Mr. Walters urged board members to make Oklahoma a leader in religious freedom and in expanded options for school children. He added: “I’ll stand by you, any kind of intimidation that comes your way.” 

In a series of recent rulings, the Supreme Court, which now has a 6-to-3 conservative majority, has signaled its support for the directing of taxpayer money to religious schools, amid a broader embrace of the role of religion in public life.

Once the theocrat Republican Supreme Court allows this, and presumably it will (~85% chance?), the floodgates will be opened nationwide for plunder of tax revenues by force by corrupt, rapacious Christian theocrat radicals. We will be royally screwed.

A corrupt Oklahoma Archbishop blessing the 

rape and slaughter of secularism

As usual, the stunningly clueless mainstream media still does not get it, is incompetent, and/or has been mostly subverted and neutered by the profit motive. The MSM will continues to call fascist radical right elites “conservative.” They are not conservative. They are fascist authoritarians. Conservatism is pro-democracy, not anti-democracy and pro-tyranny. Those justices now dominating the Supreme Court are deeply corrupt, anti-democracy, pro-Christian theocracy and pro-brass knuckles capitalist autocracy-plutocracy. In my opinion, the NYT and the rest of the MSM has been significantly corrupted, stupified or otherwise neutered. 

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The Twitter hellscape v. 2: National Public Radio (NPR) is quitting Twitter:

The outlet announced on Wednesday morning it would let its accounts go dormant and no longer publish its work on the social media platform, citing a recent decision by CEO Elon Musk to label it as state-affiliated media. 

Last week, Twitter under Musk had labeled a number of media outlets that receive some public funding with a “state-affiliated media” label — a descriptor typically reserved for propaganda outlets like RT and China’s Xinhua. NPR responded by ceasing tweets from its primary account, which carries more than 8 million followers.

Once again, the obvious ill-will and bad faith that dominates radical right sentiment and tactics is on public display. NPR is not close to RT or Xinhua. That is a fact, not an opinion. This is standard lies and slanders tactic the radical right routinely employs to win hearts and minds.

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How American fascists do lawsuits: NBC News reports:

Fox News sanctioned for withholding evidence in Dominion defamation case

The judge is giving Dominion Voting Systems a chance to conduct another deposition, at Fox's expense

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis on Wednesday sanctioned Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., for withholding evidence in the Dominion defamation suit and said he's considering further investigation and censure.

According to a person present in the courtroom, lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems played recordings Fox News producer Abby Grossberg made during 2020, which were not handed over to Dominion's lawyers during discovery.

This is an example of, or comes as close as one can get, to the powerful urge for radical right authoritarians to fabricate evidence. I thought this tactic would start blatantly a couple of years ago, but as far as I can tell, that has not happened yet. The faux 2020 election audit the Cyber Ninja goofballs did in Arizona seemed like the likely place for data fabrication to start in earnest. Apparently, Faux is going to lead the charge into the death of facts, truths and reasonable reasoning.

Germaine’s uplifting thought of the day: For plutocratic authoritarians, fascists, theocrats and etc., fact, true truth and sound reasoning is what the leaders say, not what they really are.

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From the Radical Tight Corruption & Sleaze Beat: The Lever writes:

Thomas Pushed To Kill Disclosure Laws While Getting Secret Billionaire Gifts

“This court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” wrote Clarence Thomas, who did not disclose years of gifts from a billionaire

While refusing to disclose lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws in America, insisting that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.

While he asserted that the Citizens United decision “does not go far enough” in rolling back federal campaign finance laws, the watchdog group Protect Our Elections argued that Thomas should have recused himself from the case altogether, because his own nomination to the court in 1991 had been boosted by six-figure spending from the Citizens United Foundation — the group that brought the case.

It was later revealed that Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia had attended conferences hosted by Koch Industries, which pours massive amounts of money into U.S. politics.

Thomas is a true, full blown old-fashioned political bribe-endorsing fascist. So was Scalia. For them these advanced math equations apply: money = power; pluralistic secular democracy = evil and bad; bigoted, intolerant fascism = God's chosen way and good.

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Wisdom from the National Park Service: The WaPo writes about these warnings the NPS has to put out to remind people of some important things:

Most squirrel bites originate at the front, or “bitey end,” of the squirrel.

— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) March 20, 2023

Don't pet the fluffy cows. 🦬

— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) March 30, 2023

Did you know if you hold an ermine up to your ear, you can hear what it’s like to be attacked by an ermine? pic.twitter.com/CS20M9XDjh

— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) February 1, 2023