The rise of an anti-democracy Christian nationalist deep state

Salon writes:

Trump ushers in a Christian "deep state": 

MAGA moves to gut the Constitution

Trump gave control of the budget to a Project 2025 henchman who calls this a "post-constitutional moment"

But that doesn't bother the Christian nationalist leaders who back Trump, because the plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president. During the campaign, much attention was paid to the disparate policy ideas in Project 2025. Less discussed was the overarching theme of the plan, which was to turn the presidency into something very much like a dictatorship. Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, is a Christian nationalist who believes the federal government's job is to impose a "biblical worldview" by fiat, which means sidestepping the House, whose members face biennial accountability with voters.

Trump has now appointed Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Don't be fooled by the boring name. The office holds unbelievable power because it's about controlling the purse strings for the whole government. As Thomas Zimmer explained at Democracy Americana, Vought argues that the law or separation of powers should not constrain him and the president, because this is a "post-constitutional moment." Vought has an elaborate and nonsensical rationale[1] blaming the left for this development, but what matters most is his conclusion: the right is now entitled to blow past legal constraints and enact their will however possible.

 
At the center of this scheme is an effort to replace the existing federal bureaucracy with "an army of people who have a biblical worldview" and a willingness to "lead with reckless abandon." Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are toothlessly threatening the jobs of federal employees on Twitter. Vought, however, will have real power at the OMB to "put them in trauma," as he threatened in a recent speech at the Center for Renewing America. The goal, he said, was to make their work lives so miserable that they are "traumatically affected" and forced to quit. Unlike Musk and Ramaswamy, however, Vought doesn't pretend this is about saving money. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists. In sum, the conspiracy theory of the "deep state" was concocted so the right could justify creating a real "deep state," one that is geared towards remaking America in its Christian fundamentalist worldview.

[DJT's] current attorney general nominee, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, isn't raising as many hackles, despite her threats to arrest prosecutors for enforcing the law against those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election. But new reports show Bondi isn't just an election denier, though that's bad enough. People for the American Way discovered she's extensively tied to Christian nationalist leaders.

Two of the people Bondi has worked with — Wallnau and Trump's favorite minister, Paula White — are part of the New Apostolic Reformation. Matthew Taylor, a religious studies scholar who follows this movement closely, told Salon in September that these folks believe they're "this vanguard that God had placed on Earth to bring about the Kingdom of God. They want a global revival and to take over whole societies and turn them into Christian nations." When she was Florida's attorney general, Bondi backed a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to fund religious groups with taxpayer money, but Florida voters shot it down.

Recently, far-right preacher Eric Metaxas gloated that Donald Trump will "go scorched Earth on the satanic bureaucracy that is the Deep State." This moralizing language conceals, however poorly, a deeply immoral agenda: to replace respectable civil servants with bug-eyed fascist ideologues who oppose the most basic values of our country, such as religious freedom, equal justice, and democracy.

Theocracy wrapped in faux secularism: Catholic bishops submitted a brief in this lawsuit. A Catholic writer for the National Catholic Reporter, described deceptive dark free speech that Christian nationalism (CN) routinely relies on to con people. The goal is to lead people to falsely believe Christian intrusion into modern law is grounded in "principles of reason." By "reason" the bishops apply theocratic reasoning, not secular. But even in this case, the theocrat bishops could not quite bring themselves to flat out lie about the role of "divine revelation" being there too:

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case United States v. Skrmetti in which the court is asked to answer the question: "Does a Tennessee law restricting certain medical treatments for transgender minors violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment?"

The Catholic Church has some compelling interests in this case, which will impact the legal parameters within which the culture wars are fought. The amicus curiae brief filed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, however, articulates a legal stance that undervalues the fact that ours is a pluralistic culture. In such a culture, the church's witness is best served when it overreaches in charity, not in legal grasping.

The brief does a reasonably good job explaining what the Catholic Church teaches about gender identity and why it opposes medical interventions of the kind the Tennessee law would prohibit. It repeatedly notes that the church's teachings do not rest exclusively on divine revelation but "on the basis of principles grounded in reason and revelation, long-held and universally applied by the Catholic Church."  

.... Boston College law and theology professor Cathleen Kaveny wrote, "In a pluralistic society, the religious freedom of one party needs to be balanced against the rights and the legitimate expectations of others." This is what the U.S. bishops' lawyers never grasp or admit. [Oh, they obviously grasp it alright, but will never admit it] (emphases added)

There we have it, right out in the open: 

Principles grounded in reason and revelation

That makes sense only if one injects CN God theocracy into the concept of "reason." My atheist, secular reasoning, sheds no light at all on what any God, Christian or not, would want the law about transgender medical treatments must be. Using "theological reasoning", anyone can argue that since God made transgendered people, he intended them to be treated respectfully just like everyone else and their wishes about their gender tolerated and accommodated.

But hell no! Absolutely not. Tolerance and accommodation is not in the CN God. The CN God[2] is full of hate, bigotry, intolerance and revenge lust. That is what the Catholic bishops are telling us our laws must reflect.

Footnotes:

1. I will do a separate post on Russell Vought's "reasoning" for why America is in an unconstitutional moment that necessitates authoritarian Christian theocracy. 

2. No, I am NOT saying all Christians are CN adherents. Most Christians are NOT CN adherents or complicit by silence. I am NOT criticizing or disrespecting regular Christians who are content to keep their God and divine revelations out of the law and government. 

I AM sharply criticizing the CN wealth and power (W&P) movement, its ghastly intolerance and its heavy reliance on theocratic irrationality and profoundly immoral lies, slanders and deceit. The CN W&P movement relies heavily on those tactics to try to push some American secular law related to civil liberties into bigoted Christian theocracy. And if CN elites get enough power, their arrogance and hubris could very well prompt them to move past merely crushing civil liberties. They could, probably would, choose to extend God's "righteous" iron fist into other areas of law, e.g., social spending laws, US military spending, tax laws, etc.

Breathtaking lying to the public about giving vast power to shockingly awful people

Yesterday, I heard a truly bizarre news segment that NPR aired. It was like being on a different planet populated by things that are not human. NPR reported that Pete Hegseth's mom (her son Pete is DJT's horrific pick for Secretary of Defense) was interviewed by Faux News and she was wonderful. She was reported to be strong and persistent in her defense of her son who is a truly goooood boy. NPR went on to speculate at how articulately she defended her good boy, musing that maybe she would be a good pick for a cabinet post.

My understanding is that Pete is a LGBQT-hater, a sex predator, and drunken alcoholic slob who likes to grab 'em by whatever naughty bits he can reach. In his world there are "party girls" and "not-party girls." Pete is the degenerate whack job and cruel woman-hater that DJT wants to run the US military.

I thought to myself, wait a minnit, didn't Pete's mom criticize Pete for being a cruel woman-hater? Yup, she sure did:

Text of the Email That Pete Hegseth’s Mother Sent Him

Penelope Hegseth sent the email to her son in 2018 as he was in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Samantha.

The following is the text of the email that Penelope Hegseth sent to her son, Pete Hegseth, on April 30, 2018. One sentence was redacted by The New York Times for privacy reasons.

Son,

I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.

I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out.

Sam is a good mother and a good person (under the circumstances that you created) and I know deep down you know that. For you to try to label her as “unstable” for your own advantage is despicable and abusive. Is there any sense of decency left in you? She did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand. Neither did Meredith.

I know you think this is one big competition and that we have taken her side… bunk… we are on the side of good and that is not you. (Go ahead and call me self-righteous, I dont’ care)

Don’t you dare run to her and cry foul that we shared with us… that’s what babies do. It’s time for someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women

We still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character. I don’t want to write emails like this and never thought I would. If it damages our relationship further, then so be it, but at least I have said my piece. [Redacted]

And yes, we are praying for you (and you don’t deserve to know how we are praying, so skip the snarky reply)

I don’t want an answer to this… I don’t want to debate with you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But… On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…

Mom

But now everyone is reporting that mom feels bad about her email and she has apologized to her good boy son for her bad, bad 2018 email. 

And now she lashes out at the NYT, saying the NYT threatened her:

To The New York Times, it was a standard journalistic practice done in the name of fairness — asking someone involved in a story for comment. To the mother of the nominee for secretary of defense, it constituted a threat.

On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth’s mother accused the Times of making “threats” by calling about its story on an email she had sent to her son six years earlier that criticized his treatment of women.

Penelope Hegseth sought and received an interview on Fox News Channel to support her son, whose confirmation chances are threatened by a series of damaging stories about his personal conduct. At one point, she said she wanted to directly tell President-elect Trump that her son “is not that man he was seven years ago.”

CBS News reported:

Penelope Hegseth, appearing on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday morning, said her son and his wife at the time were going through a "very difficult divorce" when she wrote the email in 2018, noting that she wrote it "in haste" and with "deep emotions."

"I wrote that out of love," she said. "And about two hours later, I retracted it with an apology email, but nobody's seen that." [Well then madam, why didn't you give it to Faux, who would have been overjoyed to splash it all over the screen?]

Hegseth's mother said she was appearing Wednesday on Fox to "tell the truth" to the American people, and to Republican senators on the hill — "especially our female senators."

Hegseth's mother encouraged the senators to "listen to Pete," noting that part of the reason she appeared on Fox was to "discredit the media." She added that she called Fox on Tuesday saying she wanted to speak out on the issue, noting that "I would do anything for my son."

  USA Today:

Penelope Hegseth said during the Fox News interview that Pete Hegseth, 44, is not the same man he was seven years ago.

“Pete is a new person. He's redeemed, forgiven, changed. I think we all are after seven years. I believe he's the man for the job,” she said.

For DJT, this horror show has just got to be a lot of fun to sit back, watch and savor. 

DJT watching the Pete H. show

Q: Who is at least partly discredited here, Pete, his mom, the MSM, NYT, NPR, Faux News, DJT, Republican senators, most of the American people, none, some or all of them?

Goofs indeed!

The authoritarian assault on expertise: The matter of political sludge

Yesterday I spent several hours trying to debunk false beliefs about two different things that two different commenters raised, belief in alternative medicine and rejection of vaccine safety and efficacy data. Both are heavily grounded in false beliefs. I found and laid out the evidence needed to support my beliefs, and that's about the best one can do. To me it is very discouraging that so many people hold science and expertise in such deep distrust. 

Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle

In my opinion, irrational distrust like that is part of an healthy authoritarian mindset. I'm not alone in that belief. Apparently, Joseph Stalin was also aware of the very useful anti-democratic power of irrational distrust of expertise and science generally. In a NYT opinion (not paywalled), former Russian journalist Masha Gessen raises this issue as it relates to oral arguments in a transgender-related lawsuit the US supreme court is considering: 

The only moments of obvious moral searching came when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was dismayed by the similarities between the case before the court and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Constitution. Back then, the plaintiffs argued that, if a white woman could marry a white man and a Black woman could not, then this constituted discrimination on the basis of race. Jackson noted that in that case, too, proponents of the discriminatory law cited what they considered scientific evidence of the harm of interracial marriage.

Tennessee also claims that science is on its side, and that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case. Dozens of mainstream medical societies, including the leading associations of pediatricians, filed amici briefs arguing against S.B.1. Apparently trying to find their footing, conservative justices asked about new regulations in the United Kingdom and Sweden. But those regulations were written by medical — not legislative — authorities, and they come nowhere near a total ban.

Every time they posed questions about specific treatments, the justices seemed to get lost in the medical weeds. Which is forgivable: They are justices, not doctors. And they probably shouldn’t be trying to make a ruling based on medical evidence.

The ease with which legislators overrule doctors, and the relatively small amount of attention this overreach received during the Supreme Court hearing, are symptoms of our times. Just in the last few years, more than half the states have passed legislation that limits access to gender-affirming care. Many of the laws are at least as restrictive as S.B.1 — despite the medical profession’s opposition to total bans.

Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as “pseudoscience,” while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. [Perplexity says that is basically true -- does it sound familiar?]

Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 and in similar laws. Another is the government’s intrusion into private lives — in this case, the shameless assumption that legislators can make decisions that rightfully belong with families and their physicians. The Federal District Court cited this issue as one of its reasons for overturning S.B.1. Parents have a “fundamental right to direct the medical care of their children,” the court wrote. That, however, is the part of the case the Supreme Court decided not even to consider. [In it's blatant, unprincipled radical right partisanship the Republican supreme court punted on the hard "due process" part, making it easier to rationalize upholding the state ban]

A third force is the growing intolerance of minorities and, in particular, people who dare to challenge tradition. It’s a cliché to point out that the totalitarian governments of the 20th century jailed and killed freethinkers and outliers of every kind. But it’s a cliché that seems to need repeating, since contemporary autocrats do the same thing — and many of them start by targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people.

Poor experts and scientists. Lot of people think most of them are self-serving liars or crackpots. Unfortunately some of them really are self-serving liars or crackpots. The person whose anti-COVID vaccine crackpottery I debunked yesterday is a medical doctor who spouts shockingly horrendous lies about COVID vaccines killing tens of thousands in the UK. When I finally tracked down the real data, the number of deaths associated with millions of vaccinations in the UK wasn't tens of thousands or even tens of hundreds. It was 5, single digit territory. 

Political sludge: Sigh. Our society is poisoned by an endless deluge of dark free speech oozing out of toxic social media like X, mainstream media like Faux News, podcasts by non-professional blowhards pretending but not knowing what they are talking about and dozens or hundreds of online politics sites pretending but usually knowing exactly what they are doing by claiming false information is truth. 

In the wastewater treatment industry, they call partially treated wastewater sludge. It need to be further treated to clean it up, which is the norm.  

Sludge like that is where I got my samples for

studying bacterial sex in the sewer for my MS degree

I suppose in politics, one can refer to dark free speech as political sludge. At least for wastewater treatment there are ways to deal with it. 

But in politics, there is no way to deal with political sludge. It is legal and untouchable by the government. Political sludge is like a forever chemical. It accumulates in the environment and doesn't go away very fast. For better or worse, federal courts defend political sludge at least as much as honest speech, always calling it free speech. Courts never once mention that some political dishonest speech can be harmful and can even kill some people, e.g., when they follow the advice of anti-vaccine crackpots. 

News bits

 It's all pretty bad now. Not much positive to note in most news. Science and tech still report out some promising stuff, but the rest is mostly hellscape.

Moral rot and corruption in the USSC gets institutionalized:

A few Supreme Court justices went out of their way to fight back against enforcing the court’s new ethics rules, The New York Times reported Tuesday—and it’s not that surprising.

In a series of secret offline memos and meetings, the justices toiled away over how they would formulate their code of ethics, and—crucially—whether it could actually be enforced.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson all supported enforcement rules for the court’s code of ethics. Kagan even pitched a panel of “safe harbor” judges that justices could go to about ethics concerns. Her proposal failed to gain wider support.

Meanwhile, Justice Neil Gorsuch railed against enforcement of the ethics code, essentially arguing that not abusing his seat of power should be voluntary. One of his memos raising concerns over enforcement stretched to more than 10 pages, according to the Times.

Gorsuch warned that ethics enforcement would threaten the court’s independence, and Justice Samuel Alito echoed his concerns, the Times reported. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has failed to report that he accepted exorbitant gifts and trips from conservative megadonors such as Harlan Crow, argued that the court’s critics could not be appeased.

Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito compromised and agreed to some enforcement mechanisms—but only ones that couldn’t reasonably be enforced. Ultimately, the court decided to place no real restrictions on accepting gifts, travel, or real estate.

There we have it ethics and rule of law fans, moral rot and corruption of the USSC is legal. The argument that ethics burdens or even threatens the court is self-serving nonsense. Their arrogance and contempt for ethics and the rule of law is beyond stunning. At present, there are 11 people about 99.8% above the law, the nine USSC judges, president Bident and president-elect DJT. 

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Tariffs update: President-elect DJT announced 100% tariffs on countries that move to replace the US dollar on Saturday. In a Truth Social post, Trump took aim at “BRICS Countries” — meaning Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates — over longstanding efforts to do away with the US dollar currency. Trump demanded a “commitment” from these countries that they will “neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar.”

Ah, the distinct smell of nuanced, light touch diplomacy.

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Nervousness about democracy -- an opinion: As the drama played out in South Korea, my phone lit up with a question from friends and media colleagues — including from some of the most sober-minded people I know. Can this happen here? Can an American president — or any other American leader — create a similar political emergency? The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes — if a president (or a governor) exploits ambiguities in American law. .... there is a statutory basis for military intervention in domestic affairs, and the statute — called the Insurrection Act — is so poorly drafted that I have come to call it America’s most dangerous law. The Insurrection Act is almost as old as the United States itself. The law dates to 1792, and it permits the president to deploy American troops on American streets to impose order and maintain government control.

Remember, DJT wanted to call out the troops and shoot protesters. There is no evidence I am aware of that he feels differently today. But I am aware of some reporting that says DJT is chomping at the bit to us the US military to obliterate protesters in the US. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and combat veteran is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold. Throughout this latest presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly warned Americans about “the enemy within,” an amorphous collection of left-wing ideologues whom he said pose a greater danger to the country than Russia or China. Sometimes he spoke broadly of “radical left lunatics” and “very smart, very vicious people.”

“America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth asserts in the book, which was published in June. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals.” While his generation was fighting wars abroad, Hegseth writes, “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.”

What? Me worry?? Nah, it's all good. But I do agree that we are in a cold civil war. Unfortunately we're losing.

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Tax policy for the wealthy: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes -- 

The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated. 

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is the 10th-richest person in the United States, worth $127 billion. In theory, when he dies, his estate should pay 40 percent of his net worth to the government in taxes.

But Mr. Huang, 61, is not only an engineering genius and Silicon Valley icon whose company, the world’s second-most valuable, makes the chips that power much artificial intelligence. He is also the beneficiary of a series of tax dodges that will enable him to pass on much of his fortune tax free, according to securities and tax filings reviewed by The New York Times.  

Revenue from the tax has barely changed since 2000, even as the wealth of the richest Americans has roughly quadrupled. If the estate tax had simply kept pace, it would have raised around $120 billion last year. Instead it brought in about a quarter of that.

Tax avoidance is using legal ways to reduce taxes. Tax evasion is illegal withholding of taxes that are owed. Officially, current tax evasion amounts to about $495 billion/year. My estimate is that it amounts to at least about $1 trillion/year. 

However, with new ways to use new tax avoidance laws, wealthy people don't need to resort to tax evasion and the embarrassment and inconvenience of felony convictions. That is what our failed two-party, pay-to-play tax system has done for the rich and powerful. Well, since they bought and paid to legalize tax evasion, why not use tax avoidance to steer clear of the law? Inconvenient felony convictions for tax evasion will soon be a bad memory of the past, just like that brief spasm of effort to get our morally rotted, failed USSC to operate honestly and ethically.

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I deleted my Bluesky account. The interest there was zero. But, it was an informative experiment in social media. I learned that social media like that is not suitable for serious politics. 

Trump is gonna spank Canada.........

 Want to know how to accomplish stuff? Bully your neighbors. Works perfectly for Trump:

Canada will deploy helicopters, drones to border after Trump tariff threat

Canada will deploy helicopters, drones and additional personnel to its border with the U.S. to enhance immigration security, a Canadian official announced Monday, Dec. 2. The move comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with President-elect Donald Trump, who threatened to impose high tariffs unless Canada took stronger action to secure the border.

https://san.com/cc/canada-will-deploy-helicopters-drones-to-border-after-trump-tariff-threat/

Mind you, rather than tariffs, it might just be easier to annex Canada.........

Canada as the 51st state? Apparently, that’s what U.S. president-elect Donald Trump suggested at his impromptu dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago last Friday.

When Trudeau said Canada couldn’t stomach 25 per cent tariffs, Trump mused about annexation and suggested that while prime minister is a better title, Trudeau could be governor of this 51st state. Sources told Fox News that another guest then suggested that Canada would be a very liberal state, whereupon Trump offered that Canada could be split into a conservative and a liberal state.

According to those present, this exchange produced a lot of laughter, though that of the Canadians was described as nervous. No wonder: while the scenario may seem implausible, with Trump back in the White House, anything is possible.   😳

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/trumps-51st-state-threat-has-trudeau-premiers-running-in-different-directions

Gotta admit, quite a contrast from Sleep Joe, when Trump says jump, Canadians ask "how high?"

News bits

The website Fight Health Insurance allows people who have had insurance claims rejected to use their AI to help them write an appeal against the denial. AI scans the paperwork and helps draft an appeal. To discourage people from even trying to appeal, insurance companies make the process unnecessarily complicated and hard.

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An article posted by FAIR, DC Station Rewrites Gas Exposé After a Word From Its Sponsor, describes how a gas utility company squelched reporting by WUSA in Wash. DC. The reporting was about the effects of gas burning stoves on air polluted with nitrogen dioxide from gas burning in homes. 

For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.

WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.

WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken.

When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.

Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.

“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”

It is shocking that anyone nowadays is shocked that advertisers influence news reporting. 

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Trade restrictions are having an impact. China has banned exports to US of gallium, germanium, antimony in response to chip sanctions:

China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports.

The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced the move after the Washington expanded its list of Chinese companies subject to export controls on computer chip-making equipment, software and high-bandwidth memory chips. Such chips are needed for advanced applications.

The ratcheting up of trade restrictions comes as President-elect Donald Trump has been threatening to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China and other countries, potentially intensifying simmering tensions over trade and technology.

China’s Foreign Ministry also issued a vehement reproof.

“China has lodged stern protests with the U.S. for its update of the semiconductor export control measures, sanctions against Chinese companies, and malicious suppression of China’s technological progress,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said in a routine briefing Tuesday.

That doesn't sound good. Those minerals are necessary for electronics. 

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U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack -- FBI and CISA officials said it was impossible to predict when the telecommunications companies would be fully safe from interlopers. Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. .... The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was “impossible” for the agencies “to predict a time frame on when we’ll have full eviction.”

That "salty hurricane" mega-hack sounds like a real whopper. Fortunately, my e-communications aren't worth hacking. I'm a very low value target, worth about the value of a medium sized turnip.  Ew, “full eviction” sounds nasty.

Walmart Buys Vizio to Use Its TVs as a New Way to Blast You With Ads -- Walmart paid $2.3 billion for Vizio with its SmartCast OS along with the 19 million accounts it can advertise to.

Getting blasted with ads sounds like lots 'o fun!

State board approves Bible-infused curriculum -- A majority of the Texas State Board of Education gave final approval Nov. 22 to a state-authored curriculum under intense scrutiny in recent months for its heavy inclusion of biblical teachings. Eight of the 15 board members voted to approve Bluebonnet Learning, the elementary school curriculum proposed by the Texas Education Agency earlier this year. The curriculum will become available in the spring, with schools that choose to adopt the materials expected to begin using them at the start of the 2025-26 school year. .... Members also said politics in no way influenced their vote and that they supported the materials because they believed it would best serve Texas children.

In the past, stunts like this would get shot down by the USSC. But with an aggressive Christian nationalist goal of de-secularizing public schools and a radical Christian nationalist supreme court, all bets are off. We can expect a USSC decision on this possibly in May or June of 2026 unless lower courts drag it out until the USSC's term starting in Oct. 2027.