warXian bak

2 26

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right deplores identity politics and its accompanying embracing of victimhood, but of course then DOES it // white grievance

see war on xmas thxgiving

see fox crm 4

SEE POLARIZATION, DEMONIZATION XIAN NAT’L WHITE GRIEVANCE

long a staple of fox (xmas tree vandalize]; trump pseudo-populism[ // low flow shower?] fear of blk brn ppl immigrants (esp to heartland rust belt?

aha = myth? see cult war see founding fr xian

real am = wht xian

it's really white men who are under siege, war on christmas, white genocide, jews will not replace us, black pill

the pilgrims came here to DO religious persecution, not escape it?

this is mostly the freedom to discriminate? gay wedding cake, hobby lobby see greivance

see homophobe Drag, victims they are coming for US heterosexuals

~ DEI only two genders XO

see deep state fbi catholic paleo 4 23 gubmint?

rubber reverse on weaponization

no bak

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bill of rights says state will not est'b a church, so freedom FROM relig?

===

an 2 26

A recent meeting of President Donald Trump's Religious Liberty Commission rapidly devolved into a shouting match between commission members over the issue of antisemitism.

That's according to a Tuesday article by MS NOW's Ja'han Jones, who wrote that several conservative Christian members of the commission got into a "fit of infighting" when discussing antisemitism on college campuses. Commission members Carrie Prejean Boller (who was Miss California U.S.A. in 2009) and Seth Dillon — who is the CEO of conservative satire site The Babylon Bee — battled over far-right commentator Tucker Carlson and whether MAGA influencer Candace Owens is antisemitic.

"I have not heard one thing out of her mouth that I would say is antisemitic," Boller said of Owens, despite Owens being named "Antisemite of the Year" in 2024 by advocacy group StopAntisemitism.

Boller also argued loudly with several Jewish commission members over the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the latter of which is typically defined by support for the modern state of Israel (though it is also seen as a coded attack on Jewish people). Boller, who is Catholic, proclaimed "Catholics do not embrace Zionism," and garnered boos from the crowd when condemning Islamophobia.

Now, Boller is facing calls from within the MAGA world to either resign for the commission, or for her to be removed if she refused to step down. This includes far-right commentator Laura Loomer (known as Trump's informal "loyalty enforcer") who called Boller's comments "disgraceful."

"The Trump administration should not reward individuals who openly spread anti-Jewish propaganda," Loomer tweeted.

Trump convened the Religious Liberty Commission last year, whose members include Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and Dr. Phil McGraw, as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Rev. Franklin Graham, Pastor Paula White and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, among others. Their commission itself is set to disband on July 4 of this year, unless Trump chooses to extend it. Jones wrote that given the outburst at its latest meeting, the commission may likely sunset this summer.

"That MAGA world is engaged in this kind of circular firing squad over antisemitism is no surprise and, one might argue, the natural outcome for a political movement fueled by bigotry of varying sorts," Jones wrote.

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AN 1 26

Roughly two and one-half weeks after the fatal January 7 shooting of motorist Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) agent, yet another Minneapolis resident was fatally shot during a protest in the city: 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, who worked in an internal care unit in a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House adviser Stephen Miller are claiming that Pretti was shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents in self-defense, noting that he was carrying a concealed weapon. But critics of President Donald Trump's ICE raids in Minneapolis are countering Pretti never pointed the gun at Border Patrol agents and that he was shot after being forced onto the ground and disarmed.

In an article published on Monday, January 26 — two days after Pretti's death — Salon's Amanda Marcotte offers a blistering critique of the response that far-right white evangelicals have had to the unrest in Minneapolis.

"The Christian Right will never turn down an opportunity to make false accusations of religious persecution," Marcotte argues. "These days, they're especially eager to play the victim. Doing so allows them to distract from the ugly reality that they, in voting for Donald Trump, have helped to unleash in Minnesota: A woman killed in front of her wife, children ripped from their parents, a baby nearly killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents firing tear gas at a family driving home from a basketball game. On Saturday, there was another unjustifiable shooting. Video appears to show 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, helping a woman to her feet when Border Patrol agents swarm and pepper-spray him — and then shoot him in the head."

Marcotte adds, "All this, though, apparently pales in comparison to a more serious form of oppression: right-wing Christians being told it's immoral to support a brutal, racist assault on their neighbors."

The Salon journalist is referring to a Sunday, January 18 protest in which activists disrupted a service at the evangelical Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota because one of the pastors, David Easterwood, is an ICE field director in the area. MAGA Republicans, from Noem to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, described that disruption as an attack on religious freedom — an argument Marcotte considers disingenuous.

Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist, told Salon, "Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves. This church should be disrupted. As far as I'm concerned, Jesus would've been right with those protesters…. (Cities Church) is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens."

Marcotte notes that one of the protesters arrested during the January 18 protest at Cities Church is herself an ordained Christian minister.

"Unfortunately, the right's histrionic language about 'religious freedom' has cowed many centrists and even liberals into thinking the protesters who interrupted a single church service are in the wrong," Marcotte writes. "Instead, they should be applauded as following the tradition of Jesus himself confronting the moneychangers in the temple."

Religious freedom means the right to worship as you see fit. By the same token, it also allows everyone else the right to question what churches are teaching — especially when they impact people and communities outside the church doors."

Marcotte adds, "In an era when Christian churches are condoning outright evil actions such as ICE’s deadly rampage through Minnesota, it’s more important than ever to not allow this dishonest definition of 'religious freedom' browbeat the rest of us into silence over spiritual oppression."

:{Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.}

an 9 25

President Donald Trump announced Monday that the Department of Education will soon release updated guidelines to safeguard “the right to prayer” in public schools.

Speaking before the White House Religious Liberty Commission, Trump reaffirmed his strong religious convictions and criticized how he sees the separation of church and state as being used to marginalize devout students.

He declared, “To have a great nation, you have to have religion,” adding, “I believe that so strongly.”

During the ceremony, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner delivered a prayer.

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"Father, we thank you for our president, Donald J. Trump, whom you have anointed and appointed for this time, for such a time as this. Lord, thank you that the president prioritizes prayer," he said.

Turner's prayer led to strong reactions on social media from the president's critics.

Author Jennifer Valent wrote on the social platform X: "This brash taking of the Lord's name in vain by claiming His favorable anointing over a man with an unrepentantly blackened soul will never cease to make me feel physically ill. Nor should it."

The X account @AntiToxicPeoplewrote: "What an insane cult. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sick. The last line is the best."

Journalist Michael McGough said: "What was that line about God not being mocked?"

Writer Paul Hughes-Cromwicksaid:"Interesting that the Father would anoint someone who abuses woman, lies with nearly every word, and is fond of bullying people of color. Must have been a slow day for anointing. Oh, and the Antichrist prioritizes prayer? Well, that's news!"

The account @RepublicansAgainstTrump reacted to the video and wrote: "It's a cult."

Watch the video below or at this link.

===

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an 7 25

You’d be forgiven if among all the scary national and international headlines of the past few weeks you missed the first meeting of the newly formed Religious Liberty Commission.

You may not have even heard of this Trump-appointed commission of almost entirely Christian Nationalists tasked with “safeguard(ing) and promot(ing) America’s founding principle of religious freedom.” If religious freedom is something you value, you need to add this to your list of things to follow, because the first meeting made it clear that we are headed towards the end of religious freedom for all in our country. As an atheist, that really scares me.

President Donald Trump announced the commission during the National Day of Prayer event May 1. It is responsible for creating a report with recommendations for the president, due on July 4, 2026 (the 250th anniversary of our independence, just in case their intent to push the falsehood that the USA was founded as a Christian nation isn’t clear enough). The commission is just one of Trump’s many actions to appease his evangelical base, including his establishment of a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” in February.

Religious extremists have been messaging around “Christian discrimination” for decades. They have fabricated a narrative where they are victimized by anyone who believes, lives, loves, or looks different than they do. This effectively scares the public into putting its trust into officials who say they will protect them against “the other.” Evidence of these anti-Christian offenses that the commission is meant to investigate is twisted to privilege extremist religious beliefs over the safety and wellbeing of others.

As an example of so-called anti-Christian offenses, Attorney General Pam Bondi cited the arrest of 23 anti-abortion activists who were charged in 2020 with conspiring to storm an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. Kansans are intimately familiar with the violence directed toward abortion clinics and providers after the assassination of physician George Tiller in 2009, and we don’t need to look beyond last month’s assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband to see how religious extremists target Planned Parenthood and their supporters. Instead of understanding this, Trump pardonedall 23 activists this January.

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The commission is made upof almost entirely of known right-wing Christians — including Texas Lt. Gov. and Chair Dan Patrick; former HUD secretary and vice chair Ben Carson; son of Billy Graham, disgraced evangelist Franklin Graham; former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller; lawyers from Project 2025-affiliated organizations such as First Liberty Institute and Ethics & Public Policy Center; and right-wing TV and radio hosts such as Dr. Phil. A bishop, cardinal, and rabbi round out the members in what they tout as a “diverse” representation of faiths in America.

The commission will hold several more hearings over the next year to investigate the tired list of Christian Nationalist priorities, including so-called parent rights and “school choice,” prayer in schools, vaccine mandates, government displays of religious iconography, and “anti-Christian offenses.” As expected, the other key priority voiced throughout the day was to attack the LGBTQ+ community — especially trans kids.

During this first hearing, the real objectives of the commission became abundantly clear:

Rewrite history to make America a Christian nation. A key tenet of the Christian Nationalist political ideology is that America was founded as a Christian nation, and must return to this status to secure our future success. The commission repeatedly embraced this very narrow interpretation of key historical documents, including writings by the founders and the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment. Both commissioners and witnesses denied the principle of church-state separation and a secular government.

Remake the courts with “courageous” Christian Nationalists. The courts, specifically the U.S. Supreme Court, will be the subject of many recommendations in the final commission report. The commission discussed which cases should be overturned, how Trump’s administration can assist with that, and how to make sure pesky state and local courts don’t get in the way. The Supreme Court has been chipping away at church-state separation for the past decade with crucial victories this term, but for this commission, this isn’t happening fast enough.

Promote religion in all parts of American culture, politics, and public life (but only if it’s their version of “Christianity”). Expert witnesses referred to a divine truth — the existence of a Judeo-Christian God — as the foundation for a moral, happy, and politically good society. Many devout Americans hold similar beliefs about their faith, but also recognize that our government should not prioritize one religion in a pluralistic society. Not only does this push minority faiths and nonbelievers such as myself outside of the bounds of this “virtuous citizenry,” but it asserts that one religion (Christianity) must be imposed on every person to create and maintain this good society.

In a world where we are facing very real threats to our physical, mental, and financial health, why did I spend five excruciating hours listening to a commission whose only job is to make recommendations? The obvious answer is because these individuals were hand-selected for holding a world view that advances the Christian Nationalist agenda and threatens any religious beliefs that fall outside of this ideology. The uncomfortable truth is that this rhetoric justifies hate crimes and the dissolution of rights for women and minorities has a new platform with the divine weight of presidential approval. As a lifelong atheist, I’m scared that we’re looking at the end of church-state separation and the rise of a theocracy weaponizing religion against people who don’t fall in line.

American Atheists just announced that it will no longer be hosting the 2026 World Humanist Congress in Washington, D.C., because the “Trump Administration’s actions … have created an environment that is not only incompatible with our values but also inhospitable to members of our global secular community.” They feared for the safety of their attendees because we are no longer a country welcoming of visitors, and especially not visitors who fall outside of a specific Christian identity.

But it’s not just the secular community who should be worried right now. Every person who has found within their faith the mission to love their neighbor, feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, and embrace the stranger should be fighting for the sanctity of their beliefs. The members of the Religious Liberty Commission will not be including these priorities in their final report, and you will not find a place for your faith in their new America.

*Laurel Burchfield is the advocacy director of Mainstream Coalition, where she advocates under the dome and in local communities to protect church-state separation. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

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an 6 25

Religious organizations are slamming a Republican House probe, calling it a violation of their liberty, reports Religion News Service.

“It’s an invasion of religious liberty,” said Bishop Dwayne Royster, a United Church of Christ pastor who heads Faith in Action. Royster argues his group reserves the right to practice a form of faith “which says that there’s no strangers amongst us, that we’re all siblings.”

But Royster said Reps. Mark E. Green (R-Tenn.) and Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) were anything but friends when they announced plans to probe more than 200 nongovernmental organizations earlier this month. The congressmen are accusing their targets of being “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.”

Royster told Religion News the probe was “designed to have a chilling effect” on organizations like Faith in Action. He added: “I will be damned if they’re going to stop us from doing what we feel mandated and called to do by God: To care for other human beings to the best of our ability.”

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The chairmen are requesting each non-governmental organization complete a survey of questions about government grants, contracts, and disbursements they received, lawsuits they are petitioning and amicus briefs they have filed in any lawsuit brought against the federal government. The survey also demands organizations reveal any legal service, translation service, transportation, housing, sheltering, or any other form of assistance they’ve provided to non-citizen residents or unaccompanied non-citizen children since January 2021.

Green and Breechen, who chair the House Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability, expressly targeted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Global Refuge for the probe. But a list provided to Religion News Service indicates more than 30 religious groups have received the lawmakers' letter.

Royster said the questionnaire wasn’t relevant to Faith in Action’s work, and said he had no intention of responding to it.

Unitarian Universalist Association general counsel Adrienne K. Walker denied her denomination receiving any grants, contracts or disbursements from the Biden administration, and she criticized the probe as appearing “to target the UUA and its members’ fundamental rights to exercise their religious practices protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said USCCB plans to respond to the survey but argues that the USCCB has a 45-year agreement with the federal government to serve groups of people authorized by that same government to receive assistance.

Read the full Religion News Service report at this link.

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6 25

### Trump’s religious liberty commission is filled with right-wing Christian media figures with histories of extremist rhetoric

06/12/25 MMA

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an 6 25

Busted: Republicans quietly slip 'religious freedom' clause into funding bill

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rww

05/21/2025

Peter Montgomery

President Donald Trump has rewarded his loyal religious-right base with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.” Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state. In announcing the commission, Trump dismissed church-state separation and made the simultaneously ludicrous and messianic claim that he is “bringing religion back to our country.”

The religious right’s weaponization of religious liberty is a years-long campaign that has too often succeeded in turning religious liberty from a shield protecting Americans’ religious freedom into a sword used to attack abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, public education, and church-state separation. While Trump postures as a defender of Christianity, many Christian leaders and millions of American Christians oppose his actions and agenda.

The members of the religious liberty commission announced on May 1 are overwhelmingly conservative Christians, including its chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and vice chair Ben Carson. Patrick, who has been honored by Texas publications as "assclown of the year" and "bum steer of the year," gushed to Trump at the announcement ceremony that there's "never been a president who invoked the name of Jesus more than you.”

Other commission members include:

Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevatethe influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”

Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.

Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backedTrump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promotedTrump's stolen-election claims and blamedthe Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on "antifa."

Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceeda December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatenedbloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.

Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

Late last week, the White House announced a spate of advisory board members divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.

Notable among the new advisory board members:

Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make "generational" wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justiceby the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.

Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.

Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint's trainings is to help right-wing Christians "take over the world." FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.

Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying, ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”

Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

According to the White House, the religious liberty commission will also address the protection of religious liberty around the world. While religious persecution is a real problem in many countries, the Trump administration and its religious-right allies have used religious liberty claims to promote “traditional” views on family, sexuality, and gender roles, and to limit the legal rights of women and LGBTQ people globally.

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rww Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Bondi launches dubious ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ in U.S. government

Trump administration officials could be focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government, but they’re instead focused only on “anti-Christian bias.”

ref

no lnx

Bondi launches dubious ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ in U.S. government

Trump administration officials could be focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government, but they’re instead focused only on “anti-Christian bias.”

:{April 23, 2025,

By Steve Benen

The first hint of things to come came two weeks ago, when State Department encouraged employees to report — even anonymously — allegations of anti-Christian bias within the agency. The Department of Veterans Affairs took a nearly identical step soon after.

Evidently, these weren’t just random memos. The Washington Post reported:

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday convened the first meeting of a task force President Donald Trump has charged with searching for and eradicating what he’s described as “anti-Christian bias” within federal agencies and regulatory practices. Joined by other Cabinet officials, Bondi kicked off the session by attacking the administration of former president Joe Biden, who she said had “abused and targeted Christians.”

So, a few things.

First, the idea that Biden — a devout and lifelong church-going Roman Catholic — “abused and targeted Christians” is absurd and beneath the office of the attorney general. Indeed, congressional Republicans spent much of the former president’s term raising similar allegations, but an inspector general’s report found no evidence to support the claims.

If Bondi has new evidence to support her partisan attacks, she’s kept it to herself.

Second, it’s hard not to notice the faith-specific drive of this new administrative task force. The attorney general and her colleagues aren’t focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government; they’re focused only on “anti-Christian bias” within the government.

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The Post’s report noted, “[E]ven before the group’s inaugural meeting, critics have assailed its mission as a bald attempt by government to elevate one faith over others and to rewrite recent history under the guise of protecting religious freedoms.” Given the circumstances, it’s not hard to conclude that these critics have a point.

But I was also struck by just how many Cabinet secretaries and prominent federal officials have joined this endeavor. While the increasingly hyper-partisan attorney general is serving as the task force’s chair, she’s serving alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez DeRemer, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Also on hand for the inaugural meeting of this group was Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler, Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkende, White House Domestic Policy Council Vince Haley, and a variety of leading officials from the Justice Department, FEMA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Office of Management and Budget.

Given the inconvenient fact that the task force is focused on a problem that doesn’t appear to exist, that was quite a turnout.

Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."

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an 4 25

As part of its initiative to enforce a broad new executive order aimed at supporting federal employees who are Christians, the Trump administration has reportedly instructed State Department staff to report any cases of colleagues showing “anti-Christian bias."

Politico reported Friday that an administration-wide task force at the department will help gather information “involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration." Under this new policy, examples of "anti-Christian bias" will be collected through anonymous employee report forms.

According to the document obtained by Politico, the task force, which was established by an executive order President Donald Trump issued in February, will meet around April 22 to address its findings.

The document calls on State Department employees to report on one another through a "tip form" that can be filled out anonymously.

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“Reports should be as detailed as possible, including names, dates, locations (e.g. post or domestic office) where the incident occurred,” the cable says, per Politico.

“It’s very ‘Handmaid’s Tale'-esque,” a State Department official, who was not identified, told Politico.

"Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that, even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear as the administration pushes employees to report on one another," the report says.

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an 3 25

When Donald Trump declared, "I am your retribution" during his 2024 campaign, his far-right white evangelicals supporters were quite receptive to that message. Many white Christian nationalists view themselves as a persecuted minority, and Trump is promising to defend them.

Trump's predecessor in the White House, former President Joe Biden, is known for being a devout Catholic — and Biden isn't shy about discussing his faith. But Trump and his Christian nationalist allies often claimed that Biden's presidency was hostile to Christianity.

The New York Times' Ruth Graham, in an article published on March 7, explains how a term by evangelical activist Aaron Renn is giving a voice to the sense of persecution that many right-wing evangelicals have.

Renn's term is "negative world," which, in his view, means a country that is hostile to Christianity. And that messaging, Graham emphasizes, has really caught on among fundamentalist Protestant evangelicals.

"On the Christian Right…. a thesis is emerging: If conservative Christians are no longer a 'moral majority,' but a moral minority, they must shift tactics," Graham explains. "They ought to be less concerned with persuading the rest of the country they are relevant and can fit perfectly well in secular spaces. They don't."

Graham continues, "Instead, they must consider abandoning mainstream institutions like public schools and build their own alternatives. They must pursue ownership of businesses and real estate. And they must stop triangulating away from difficult teachings on matters like sexuality and gender differences. Resilience over relevance."

Renn's "negative world" theory, according to Graham, "is now the dominant framework for many people trying to understand their place in contemporary America."

"The idea has inspired conferences, sermons, and countless response essays and blog posts," Graham observes. "A reviewer in Christianity Today called it 'among the most thought-provoking ideas pertaining to American evangelicalism this century.'"

Graham adds, "'Negative world' has turned Mr. Renn into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of conservative Christianity, a skilled taxonomist known for distilling and naming a phenomenon that many were feeling but none had articulated."

===

Right-wing media cheer Trump's anti-Christian bias task force after years of laying the groundwork

Right-wing commentators have spent years claiming that the Biden administration was “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity” and that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square”

Written by Payton Armstrong

Published 02/27/25 mma

A task force created by President Donald Trump to eradicate alleged “anti-Christian bias” is drawing praise from right-wing media figures — some of whom have spent years baselessly claiming that Christians are a persecuted group in the United States, even though experts say there’s no such widespread bias.

Right-wing commentators celebrated Trump’s task force as “a cultural resurgency” and declared that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.”

In one instance, Christian nationalist media figure Lance Wallnau joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to praise the task force as the first step in the “recapturing of institutions,” naming education, media, business, and government among the institutions he wants to infuse with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” This appears to be a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate popularized by Wallnau, which instructs Christians to impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in American life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.

Experts have argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society" and that Trump’s anti-Christian bias task force is actually “enshrining Christian privilege in our society.”

Trump issued an executive order on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” but experts say “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society”

Trump first announced the task force during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, saying it will “protect Christians” and bring “our country back together as one nation under God,” and he later issued an executive order listing examples of supposed bias under the Biden administration.The executive order — titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” — claimed that “the previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” The executive order claimed, “The Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square by bringing Federal criminal charges and obtaining in numerous cases multi-year prison sentences against nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life Christians for praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities.” The Hill, [2/6/25; White House, 2/6/25]

The Associated Press reported that “critics said Trump is claiming to see persecution in distorted case descriptions, a calendar coincidence and other situations that, while raising concerns, don’t add up to a pattern.”As noted by the Associated Press, “Christianity is by far the largest faith in America, and Christian conservatives have a strong grip on the levers of government.” The Associated Press, [2/13/25]|}:

- On CNN, religious extremism expert Matthew Taylor argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society,” noting that claims of anti-Christian persecution can “become a pretext for them persecuting actual minority groups.”Taylor urged that “we need to recognize that there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society,” and said, “It's striking that given the widespread realities of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and as you said, mosques and synagogues tend to have more attacks than churches per capita, there's no task force on rooting out anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Instead, this is enshrining Christian privilege in our society.” CNN, *CNN Newsroom*, [2/9/25]

- Multiple Republican-led states have moved to require Bible instruction or a display of the Ten Commandments in all public schools.Last year, Louisiana became the first state to require all public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Soon after, Oklahoma’s state superintendent directed all public schools to teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, and conservative media figures promoted the policy as a way to “impose Christian values” and encouraged other states to follow suit. At the start of the 2025 legislative session, Alabama Republican lawmakers proposed mandates to display the Ten Commandments in public schools and give students the “opportunity to participate in daily prayer” or risk losing some state funding. PBS, [6/19/24; New York Times, 6/27/24; Media Matters, 7/8/24; AL.com, 2/15/25]

- Right-wing media and extreme anti-LGBTQ groups have a long history of conflating criticism of anti-LGBTQ positions with anti-Christian hostility.They’ve said that Democratic senators have anti-Christian bias for questioning federal judicial nominees’ anti-LGBTQ statements or ties to bigoted groups, and they’ve described basic legal protections for LGBTQ people as anti-Christian. Media Matters, [11/8/19, 5/20/14]

### During the Biden administration, right-wing media personalities baselessly claimed Christians were targeted by the government and “the left”

* When Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter in 2024, right-wing media figures — especially on Fox News and Newsmax — claimed that the Biden administration was attacking Christians.Right-wing media used the day to warn Christians that they were under attack after Biden’s statements recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility, with Fox’s Jesse Watters arguing that Biden is “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity.” Between Fox and Newsmax, the networks combined aired more than 4 hours of coverage and nearly 80 segments, slamming Biden for his “demonic” remarks which they said amounted to an “attack on Christian faith.” Media Matters, [4/2/24, 4/2/24]

- On his network, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson hosted anti-abortion protester Paul Vaughn — who was arrested for blocking access to a clinic — and falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing prison time for merely singing hymns and praying.Carlson said that Vaughn “had dared to pray and sing hymns in the hallway of an abortion clinic. In other words he did what the Biden administration really fears, he prayed. And for doing that, he faces 11 years in prison.” USA Today fact checked Carlson’s claim, noting that: “Vaughn was arrested for physically obstructing access to an abortion clinic, not for praying,” highlighting that “the law in question explicitly protects First Amendment speech and also includes language ensuring free access to houses of worship.” [Tucker Carlson Network, *Tucker Carlson [vid] Uncensored,; USA Today, 4/1/24]

Carlson again falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing felony charges “from the Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns,” adding that “from the perspective of the people who run the country there’s really just one enemy, and that’s faithful Christians.”During a Tucker Carlson Uncensored clip posted on X, Carlson said: “If you’re interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. So Christian churches across the country have been burning and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at how Christian churches were treated during Covid … we talked the other day to a guy who is facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the Biden administration, for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns. So if you are a faithful Christian — not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian, of the kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor actually — you are seen as an enemy by the people who run it.” Twitter/X, [4/18/24]|}:

Fox host Laura Ingraham repeatedly lamented the supposed anti-Christian bias of the Biden administration, including in an interview with Vaughn where she suggested that “singing hymns and peacefully expressing your traditional Christian beliefs can get you thrown behind bars.” During the interview, Ingraham’s show displayed a chyron that read: “Liberals fighting to wipe out Christian values.” FoxNews.com, [1/31/24]|}:

- Ingraham also complained that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland was not addressing a “growing anti-Christian bias in the United States and criminal activity geared towards Christians.” The chyron read “to the left, Christians are the emerging enemy” and Ingraham claimed that “pro-life centers across the country” and “churches have been attacked,” adding that to the left, “if you’re a Christian, a bible-believing Christian, you’re a terrorist.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [3/29/23]

Following a deadly shooting at a Christian private school in Nashville, Tennessee, Ingraham claimed the Biden White House and “the left” had been “ginning up anti-Christian sentiment” by allegedly teaching kids “to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.”Ingraham told her audience: “Isn’t it also the case that the left in America — and even this White House — is ginning up, without saying the words necessarily, but ginning up anti-Christian sentiment by referring to trans activists as heroes and their bravery for standing up against the intolerant class, the haters. So these kids are learning to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [4/11/23; Media Matters, 4/12/23]|}:

Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist, argued that by charging anti-abortion protesters under the FACE ACT, “the Biden regime clearly desires to make being a pro-life Christian a crime.” As documented by Media Matters, anti-abortion figures baselessly accused the Biden Department of Justice of weaponizing the FACE Act against protestors convicted of harassment at abortion clinics. Twitter/X, [6/21/24; Media Matters, 6/11/24]|}:

### Right-wing media spent years launching hyperbolic accusations of Christian persecution, especially amid growing LGBTQ inclusion

When the European parliament displayed an LGBTQ Jesus, Steve Bannon lamented that “the Judeo-Christian West” is “anti-Christian by its leadership,” suggesting there will be “Diocletian” level persecution.He warned: “If you're prepared to accept it, it's going to get first-century Rome anti— it's going to get Diocletian. You're going to get to Diocletian anti-Christian and you're going to get there pretty quickly.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [5/5/23; FoxNews.com, 5/7/23]

While hosting Jack Phillips — a Colorado baker who had been sued for refusing to make a trans-themed cake — Fox’s Laura Ingraham declared that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square.”Ingraham added: “You don't even have a right to have a small business if you're a Christian today. You certainly don't have any conscience right, you have no religious rights, you have no First Amendment rights, if you clash with what they believe to be, you know, the supremely protected among us.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [1/30/23; Associated Press, 10/8/24]|}:

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk has relentlessly claimed that Christian values in the U.S. are under attack, claiming that they could be thrown in prison.At a 2023 TPUSA pastor’s summit, Kirk warned pastors that “if we continue theological disputes and don't focus on liberty, then we're going to be having those theological disputes from prison.” Ahead of the 2024 election, Kirk claimed that pro-choice Democrats would “create a secret police that will audit, intimidate, raid every single” pregnancy center in the U.S., saying that when that happens, “we'll be like, wow, I really wish that we Christians would have bought ourselves a little more time so that our nonprofits, our leaders, wouldn't go to federal prison.” NPR, [10/24/24; Media Matters, 4/27/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/16/24]|}:

Tucker Carlson suggested that the “trans movement is targeting Christians,” citing the Covenant school shooting.Carlson claimed that “the trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy,” declaring that “Christianity and transgender orthodoxy” are on a “collision course” and claiming that “one side is likely to draw blood before the other side.” Rolling Stone, [3/28/23]|}:

On Fox News, Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters lamented that a Harris/Walz administration would “trans the kids“ and “push all faith out of the public square,” as now-White House faith director Paula White-Cain bragged that Trump was “promising in his second term to do even more for Christians as he shares the same values.”White-Cain called for national “revival” and “turning our hearts back to God” and Walters declared that a Harris/Walz administration would be the “most anti-Christian administration in American history.” FoxNews.com, [8/10/24; Religion News Service, 2/21/25]|}:

On Sebastian Gorka’s Salem Media podcast, Breitbart’s Thomas Williams said that the U.S. is a “post-Christian society, but in many ways an anti-Christian society.”Gorka — who is now the counterterrorism chief in Trump’s administration — replied, “right,” and Williams added, “We are a Judeo-Christian nation by its foundation, and in the value system that understands what the family is, what society is.” Salem Media, *America First with Sebastian Gorka*, [6/14/23; CBS News, 1/7/25]|}:

* Fox host Emily Compagno labeled the U.S. an “anti-Christian, anti-Judeo-Christian society.”Compagno cited backlash to a graduation speech from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker that reportedly attacked the LGBTQ community and told “women to forget about a career and serve their man instead.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [6/11/24; OutSports, 5/13/24]

Former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark told Bannon that a second Trump administration needed a “beefed up” religious liberty task force to fight anti-Christian sentiment in the U.S., citing a story he heard about a “school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia.” Responding to a campaign speech where Trump pledged to create an anti-Christian bias task force if elected, Clark said: “That's wonderful to announce, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian world. I mean, I'd seen a story about a school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia to entertain the students a little bit. I mean things have gone into bonkers land. And look, in the first Trump term, we did have a religious liberty task force. And I think we need an even more beefed up one.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [12/20/23; Fox News, 12/19/23]|}:

### Right-wing media heaped praise on Trump’s task force, celebrating Trump “proudly defending our heritage as inheriting the values of the Bible”

Charlie Kirk applauded the task force’s creation, declaring that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.” He said, “We are proudly defending our heritage as inheriting the values of the Bible,” adding, “This is a cultural resurgency. No longer should you be afraid to share your faith. No longer should you be afraid to share your political values. This is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020, and it is ascendant.” Real America’s Voice, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [2/6/25]

- On her show, Ingraham celebrated that “we have a president who believes our nation has a divine destiny” and displayed a chyron declaring: “Trump restores faith in America.”Ingraham then hosted a teacher, Marisol Arroyo-Castro, who claimed she had been suspended for having a crucifix in her classroom. Ingraham told Arroyo-Castro that “they see you and your presence as a threat,” and said, “I don’t think it’s constitutional.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [2/6/25; CT Insider, 1/30/25]

- Praising the task force announcement, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles said, “I love that he [Trump] is saying anti-Christian hostility, anti-Christian bias in the government” rather than “squish Republicans” who say “we want to just generally and universally speaking protect all religions.”Knowles elaborated, saying, “There aren't really threats against all general religions kind of broadly, man. That's not the problem. America wasn't founded on the principles of just kind of all the religions generally, universally, man. The specific problem that we saw explode during the Biden administration was bias against Christians. … That's the problem that has to be addressed, and that's the specific problem Trump is addressing, and I love it.” Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [2/7/25]

Steve Bannon celebrated the announcement and hosted media figure Lance Wallnau — a “prophet” and self-described Christian nationalist — with the two discussing right-wing Christians’ “recapturing of institutions” including “education, of media, of business, of government.”Bannon and Wallnau discussed how the task force can be used “to seize the institutions of the federal government” with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” Wallnau said that “there are three arteries that make this happen: legislation, litigation, and the shaping of public opinion,” adding, “because people like you, as long as we can shape the public opinion, the secret sauce is you've got to work with the awakening that's happening and move with it in such a way that you litigate and you legislate, but never get too far ahead of public persuasion.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/7/25; Media Matters; 9/27/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]|}:

Video

Citation

From the February 7, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

After Trump’s speech announcing his intent to create a task force, Bannon suggested that the president needs to “make sure they're going throughout the government because the administrative state is absolutely anti-Christian,” claiming that “the deep state is demonic.” Real America's Voice's chief White House correspondent Brian Glenn added, “Certainly we have seen how demonic this previous administration has been in terms of allowing religious freedom.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/6/25]

Fox host Jeanine Pirro praised the task force’s creation and attacked the FBI and the Biden administration for supposedly targeting Catholics, a claim that was found to be baseless after an internal investigation.Pirro noted that Trump “went to two prayer breakfasts this morning and he talked about eradicating anti-Christian bias,” and complained about “when the FBI director Christopher Wray came out and really told us no one at the FBI was targeting Christians and Senator Hawley came out and they found that leaked memo that the FBI was investigating Catholics and priests were gone to so they could then inform on parishioners who were considered domestic terrorists.” The New York Times reported that “Republicans claimed the bureau’s memo was evidence of an anti-conservative strain among F.B.I. ranks, but an internal investigation failed to uncover any ‘malicious intent.’” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/6/25; New York Times, 4/18/24]|}:

### Trump and his MAGA allies increasingly embrace extreme prophetic media

05/30/24

### Trump scheduled to address right-wing media “prophets” and pastors who claim he’s “anointed to be King”

10/18/24

### Oklahoma state superintendent says pastor and right-wing commentator suggested his new Bible mandate in public schools

07/08/24

antidote for Bp Budde?

an 2 25

in a “meandering” speech filled with off-script jokes, recycled campaign lines, and religious-themed policy announcements, President Donald Trump addressed religious and political leaders at the controversial National Prayer Breakfast at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. He pledged to “protect Christians” and announced plans to direct the U.S. Department of Justice to create a task force to “eradicate” what he called “anti-Christian bias.”

“Well, we wanna bring religion back stronger, bigger, better than ever before. It’s very important,” the President declared. “We have to have religion and it suffered greatly over the last few years, but it’s coming back.”

“We have to bring religion back. We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time. We have to bring it back.”

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He promised to “protect Christians” in schools, the military, in government, workplaces, hospitals, public squares, and said, “I will always protect religious liberty,” as he continued unveiling religious policy promises.

“And that is why today,” he declared, “I’m announcing that I will be creating a brand new presidential commission on religious liberty. It’s gonna be a very big deal, which will work tirelessly to uphold this most fundamental right. Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve seen this sacred liberty threatened like never before in American history. There’s nothing happened like the last four years what’s happened with so many things have gone bad, but religion, what they’ve done, and the persecution that they’ve executed, have been just horrible.”

“The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible. The IRS, the FBI, terrible, and other agencies,” Trump alleged. “In addition, the task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers, nationwide. We’ve never had that before, but this is a very powerful document I’m signing, you’ve got it, you get it now.”

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Trump praised himself for “showing up to the Prayer Breakfast,” falsely implying that his predecessors had not. He also hinted at the possibility of running for a third term—an idea some Republicans are backing with congressional legislation—and firmly asserted that the President of the United States should be a person of faith.

“We have a mandate and lets say the most consequential election in 129 years, and that’s good because I’m a believer, like you’re a believer, and we want to have a believer in this position,” Trump said.

“I really believe you can’t be happy without religion, without that belief,” he added. “Let’s bring religion back. Let’s bring God back into our lives.”

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The President mentioned the tragic loss of 67 lives in a recent mid-air crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, saying their time on earth was over but they are now with God. He swiftly transitioned to talk about the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, declaring, “It was God that saved me,” and claiming his son Don’s embrace of religion had increased as a result.

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Before falsely claiming, as he has countless times before, that his election allowed Americans to once again say, “Merry Christmas,” Trump said that “from the very beginning of our republic, America has always been a nation founded by people of faith and strengthened by the power of prayer and united by four simple, but very beautiful words: ‘in God we trust.’ And you all know there was a movement to get that out.”

“In God We Trust,” was officially adopted as the motto of the United States in 1956.

He also told attendees, “we get rid of woke over the last two weeks.”

The American Humanist Foundation on Thursday declared that the “National Prayer Breakfast and its ties to the Fellowship Foundation, an extreme Christian Nationalist organization, are a sham. Holding a government-run, taxpayer-funded Christian ceremony in the U.S. Capitol disrespects the secular ideals that founded this country.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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god grifters really hate it when an actual xian calls out the fake one

1 25

01/22/2025

Peter Montgomery

Donald Trump and his Christian nationalist supporters are demonstrating once again that much of the harshest anti-Christian rhetoric in our political life doesn’t come from secular leftists, it comes from right-wing Christian leaders and activists who bitterly trash the faith of Christians who don’t share their religious and political worldviews.

Their most recent target is Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who spoke at the National Prayer Service held at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday. Budde talked for about 15 minutes on the topic of unity, using her last few minutes to directly and respectfully address Trump and ask for mercy on behalf of gay, lesbian, and transgender people, immigrants, and refugees.

The same religious-right leaders and activists who have embraced or explained away Trump’s relentless lying, cruelty, corruption, and criminality, were outraged by Budde’s willingness to challenge him over the harmful impact his actions as president will have on many people.

Sean Feucht, a dominionist musician, political activist, and ardent Trump supporter, was contemptuous, referring to Bishop Budde as “the priestess” and saying, “They should let Christians preach next time.”

In a video posted from within the Cathedral, Feucht literally sneered at the interfaith service’s inclusion of “all these random religions and faiths,” concluding, “this was not a church service.” He continued:

We’re gonna go have a real church service with a bunch of folks that were in here. We’re gonna go lift up the name of Jesus because we are one nation under God, not all these other random religions. We don’t all worship the same God. And we definitely don’t worship the God of the LGTBQ mafia.

Feucht’s comments are a reminder that religious-right activists leaders are be quick to claim anti-Christian persecution when they are criticized for their harmful agendas or dishonest rhetoric, but they are themselves quick to attack other Christians. (Marjorie Taylor Greene recently provided another example, attacking the Catholic faith of Martin O’Malley because of his pro-choice position on abortion.)

“The Washington National Cathedral has become the Sanctuary of Satan,” ranted pundit Todd Starnes. He went on to denounce the Episcopal Church as “barely a religion.” He charged that “the blasphemous bishop at National Cathedral preached hate from her pagan pulpit.”

MAGA “prophet” Shave Vaughn declared Budde “a Bishop of Babylon.” Anti-LGBTQ activist John Amanchukwu denounced Budde as “a wolf in Bishop garments,” calling her “heretical” and “diabolical.” Dominionist Jim Garlow complained that it was “torture” to listen to Budde.

The kind of religious-right figures who constantly complain that conservative pastors aren’t preaching enough about politics complained that Bishop Budde would “lecture us about contemporary political positions,” in the words of Choral Ridge Ministries’ Rob Pacienza.

Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins denounced Budde’s comments as “rather pathetic,” tweeting that “The cause of America’s decline was not what was sitting in the pew but what was standing behind the pulpit.” Wallbuilders’ Tim Barton had the gall to complain about Budde “making a political speech from the pulpit” and griped about the service including people of other faiths.

Pastor and Trump apologist Robert Jeffress complained that Budde had “insulted rather than encouraged our great president.” Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia declared on X, “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” Alex Jones denounced Budde as a “wokist cult leader.”

Trump himself demeaned Budde on his Truth social feed, calling her a “so-called Bishop.”

Meanwhile, Feucht also posted a celebratory video sharing his excitement that Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has invited him to hold one of his Christians-only religious revivals in the Pentagon.

It’s worth noting that other Christians have praised and welcomed Budde’s remarks as an example of the kind of moral courage and leadership that is required in an era when Trump’s MAGA movement has been fully embraced by dominionists and white Christian nationalists. rww

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mma 12 24 war on xmas BS

RSS

lnxno

Alternet

'Cowardly fled the scene of his crime': Sen. Hawley blasted over scathing letter to DOJ and FBI

Maya BoddieDecember 04, 2024

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) published a scathing letter addressed to to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday, warning them that "real justice" is on the way.

"I’m putting DOJ & FBI on notice: Don’t shred a single document," Hawley wrote via X. "Don’t delete a single file. Accountability is coming. The Judiciary Committee WILL investigate - and find out who authorized spying on Christians, attacks on prolifers, the vendettas against Trump - all of it."

The Missouri The letter begins: "Dear Attorney General Garland and Director Wray: I have received reports that, under your leadership, DOJ and FBI employees are destroying records and other documents in an effort to conceal the widespread misconduct that took place under the Biden Administration. You must immediately stop this attempt to evade accountability, and should terminate any employees involved."

READ MORE: Trump lining up billionaire defense investor and megadonor to be number two at Pentagon

Hawley concluded, "The bottom line is this: you must immediately take all necessary steps to preserve all documents, records, and other materials generated by your agencies during your respective tenures in office. You must cease any bad-faith document destruction. And you should prepare for the real justice to come."

American Enterprise Institute Norman Ornstein commented: "Instigator of violent insurrection who cowardly fled the scene of his crime speaks"

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan replied: As much as I loathe Hawley and his ideology, at least he understands politics and what his role is and how to exercise power. When was the last time you saw Dick Durbin write a letter like this to Republican officials? He rolled over for Justices Roberts, Thomas and Alito.

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Anti-abortion hecklers interrupted a Kamala Harris rally. Fox News and MAGA media turned them into culture war heroes — and Trump ran with it.

How Fox News manufactured outrage over anti-abortion Harris rally hecklers to smear Democrats as anti-Christian

Written by Helena Hind

Published 10/23/24 MMA

After Vice President Kamala Harris shut down anti-abortion hecklers at a campaign rally, Fox News pundits saw an opportunity to add a new misleading talking point to former President Donald Trump’s arsenal. Within days, the former president used Fox’s talking points as fodder to smear Democrats as anti-Christian on the campaign trail.

### Kamala Harris told anti-abortion hecklers they were “at the wrong rally” after they interrupted her

The exchange happened during an October 17 campaign rally, while Harris was speaking about reproductive rights. As she criticized Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade, the vice president was interrupted by hecklers in the crowd.

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“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” she retorted. “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”

As the moment went viral on social media, another version of the clip gained traction among high-profile MAGA accounts alleging that Harris was specifically responding to a heckler saying “Jesus is Lord.”

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“Christians are not welcome in Kamala’s Democrat Party,” claimed TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk. “Vote accordingly.”

The talking point inevitably made its way from Fox News’ airwaves to Trump

The hecklers first appeared on the network during the October 20 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend. “This is our first time taking an interview with anybody,” one of them confirmed to co-host Will Cain, before alleging that he was kicked out of the rally for voicing his Christian beliefs.

Co-host Rachel-Campos Duffy solidified Fox’s version of the story with her question: “Luke said something about Jesus, right? ‘Jesus is King, Jesus is Lord,’ and she said, ‘You’re not welcome here.’ I want to know what you felt in that moment.”

The next day, October 21, Fox & Friends co-hosts Lawrence Jones, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade continued to criticize Harris for supposedly disparaging Christianity. “I was shocked that any politician would put down the number one religion in our country,” Earhardt complained, before re-airing clips of the hecklers’ October 20 interview.

Later that day, host Laura Ingraham said Harris “sent a clear message to Christians: ‘You’re not welcome here.’”

Video

CitationFrom the October 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

The hecklers themselves also made an appearance in Ingraham’s show, repeating the right-wing media version of the story. A chyron reading “The Left’s anti-Christian rhetoric” briefly aired.

Sean Hannity hosted the hecklers on his radio show on October 22, one of whom alleged Harris was “publicly denouncing the name of the Lord.” The Fox host was happy to agree: “‘Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally because you believe in Jesus?’ I thought Democrats prided themselves in being open-minded.”

By October 22, the story had made its way to the Trump campaign. A video posted to his X account spliced an edited version of the Harris clip with a soundbite from a Trump speech: “While Kamala says that people who believe in Jesus don’t belong to her rallies, in our movement, we love Christians, we welcome believers, and we embrace followers of Jesus.”

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This is just another example of the stubborn Fox-Trump feedback loop, which has persisted well into 2024. As Election Day nears, the pundits will likely continue to manufacture outrage, and misleading stories, and jokes for the former president to repeat on the campaign trail.

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September 10, 2024 rww

Michele Bachmann warns that under a Harris/Walz administration, religious freedom will be destroyed: “Mark my words, they will take away your freedom of speech … and [that] will take away our freedom of religion.”

Lucas Gage claims that the Holocaust is “the most asinine story” made up by Jews “to gain sympathy.”

Ali Alexander blames former President Barack Obama for ruining race relations in this nation: “Queer Black Witches and Jewish Politicos literally killed race relations.”

What does the Cult of Trump look like? It looks like right-wing activists comparing him to Jesus and fighting to hold back tears just talking about him.

There is something wild about listening to Nick Fuentes rant about “mixed-race” and “non-White” people taking over the U.S., given that Fuentes admits that his own father is “half-White [and] half-Mexican.”

Finally, MAGA pastor/self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman prays that God will “bind up the mouth of the liar” during tonight’s presidential debate. So, if Trump finds himself unable to speak, we’ll know that it must have worked.

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In Kandiss Taylor’s Christian Nation, ‘I Don’t Have to Give You Your Freedom of Religion’

By Kyle Mantyla | August 21, 2024 rww

During the most recent episode of her “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” program, which airs on the network owned by virulently antisemitic conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, Christian nationalist GOP activist Kandiss Taylor claimed that the Christian church is supposed to be running the government and therefore non-Christians are not entitled to freedom of religion.

Taylor is flat-earth conspiracy theorist who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Georgia in 2022 and despite her paltry showing in the Republican primary, she steadfastly refused to accept that she had lost. In 2023, Taylor became a Georgia GOP district chair and started voicing increasingly radical views, even going so far as to call for the public execution of those who oppose her Christian nationalist worldview.

Those radical views were on display during her recent program as she insisted that the Constitution was founded on common law and that common law is rooted in the Bible, meaning that the United States “was founded on Jesus Christ.”

“The idea behind the whole document was that the church runs the state,” Taylor asserted. “The church is we the people. We are the church … and so we run the state. But the state, the government, has no control over the church.”

“And everybody is like, ‘Then you gotta let Satanists come in and you gotta let witches come in, and you’ve gotta let Muslims and Hindus,'” she continued. “No. No, we don’t. No, we don’t because America is founded on God almighty, Creator God, Yahweh, Elohim. That is what we’re founded on and I don’t have to honor your religion. I don’t have to give you freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is there for us to worship Jesus. It’s not for you to come force anything else upon me.”

“So we have that all wrong,” Taylor declared. “We’ve had tolerance. We’ve been politically correct. And at what point are we going to say, ‘No, we’re not going to be’? You can do whatever you want to the comfort of your home. You can do whatever you want to, but don’t come into my government and bring any of that trash in there.”

“We shouldn’t be electing anyone in government—local, state or federal—that is not a Christian,” Taylor concluded.

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rww 824

Liberty Counsel warns that “the LGBTQ lobby” seeks “to ram the LGBTQ agenda down every throat, from Olympic viewers to quiet Christian women seeking to live out their faith. The LGBTQ agenda seeks nothing less than to eliminate all religious freedom rights that might make them feel bad about their choices. And they have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as their new mouthpieces.”

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RNC 7 24 projection olympics req Earth2

note they are irrrational thus compromise impossible, their fault // self-defense

strong manly will never surrender compromise principles, submit to X

we are normally the good compassionate forgiving xians

note trump is the calm man even when being shot at

agw religion // alarmist hysterical fem

TUCKER REDEMPTION PENSION?

7 24 rww

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson closed out the all-day Heritage Foundation policy fest on the first day of the Republican National Convention. He warned the crowd that they are in a “spiritual battle” against “anti-human” forces that want to “eliminate” Christians.

In a strange choice for talking to political activists, Carlson began by describing politics as a “repulsive” process and politicians in general as ruthless and power-hungry and miserable people. But he said he is “thrilled” by Trump picking Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, because “every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance.” Carlson said that was because “they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people…that he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”

Carlson veered into spiritual warfare rhetoric, saying that since he spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s 50^th anniversary celebration 15 months ago, he has experienced “a total change in the way that I see the world,” explaining, “this is not ultimately political. This is much deeper…There is a spiritual battle underway.”

From Carlson’s remarks:

And I think what happened on Saturday, the assassination attempt against President Trump, reminded a lot of people this, or awakened a lot of people to this. There is a spiritual battle underway. There is no logical way to understand what we’re seeing now in temporal terms. You just can’t.

These are not political divides. There are forces, and they’re very obvious now. They’ve decided, for whatever reason, to take off the mask, whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction. And there are the rest of us who, once again, are not always certain we’re right, but we know that that’s bad and we’re against that, sort of standing, watching, thinking, ‘Is someone going to explain to me why this is politics?’

This is not politics at all. This is much deeper and older and more recognizable than that. This has been going on since the beginning of time. And I do think, by the way, that the more literal among us, and I would count myself in that category, fail to see this because we’re so desperate to ascribe some kind of recognizable human motive to what we’re seeing.

So we call it leftism or neoliberalism or communism or anarchism. We come up with some phrase to describe it, but those phrases are inadequate. They do not describe what’s actually happening. So what you’re seeing now is really not at all different in substance from what you saw in 1789 in France, from what you saw in 1936 in Spain, from what you saw in 1917 in Russia, from what you saw in 1975 in Phnom Penh. It’s all the same. These are forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human, which are against people.

Carlson railed against a number of movements he described as “anti-people,” including what he called “the climate cult.” He told the activists to pay close attention to what makes “them” angriest.

What group do they dislike most? What group are they absolutely terrified of and hoping to eliminate? Well, it’s Christians. That’s who it is. It’s Christians. … The group that makes them angriest, triggers them most, I guess we would say now, is Christians. Christian nationalism. People pray outside abortion clinics. People celebrate Easter, not trans visibility day. These are their real enemies.

Carlson talked about religious persecution during the Cultural Revolution in China and the French Revolution. He said at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the “anti-Christian” side opened fire on a statue of Jesus. “If you find yourself firing bullets at a statue, what you’re really doing is revealing your deepest priority, and that’s to kill Christians,” he said.

“I don’t know if any Christians here or people who are interested in continuing to live in the country you grew up in, but these are the terms and these are the stakes,” Carlson said. “They are not the ones that we’ve been told they are–left versus right, Republican versus Democrat.”

Carlson also talked about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying that Trump’s show of strength—fist raised in defiance—had won him the election, because people want and need strong leaders.

After delivering his remarks, Carlson engaged in some Q&A with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In response to a question about what kind of conversations people could have to bring their friends and neighbors into the MAGA movement, Carlson said they should pray for people who are willing to accept the status quo. He then veered into a diatribe against “weak men,” saying that fathers should be willing to beat up school counselors who “indoctrinate kids and try and turn them into freaks, circus freaks.” Roberts agreed, saying that “what we’re all yearning for is just a return to normal. And it is normal for a strong man, for a man period, to respond the way you describe to the school counselor.”

Asked about what kind of message the Trump team should be delivering, Carlson said the campaign was trying out a “unity message,” to which he responded:

And a lot of people hear “unity” and they think, well, unity implies some sort of compromise conversation. You can’t have a conversation with people who are unwilling to compromise. The left, which is a religious movement, is unwilling to compromise on any level at all. They won’t even admit men can’t become women. So you how can you have unity with people like that? And of course, you can’t.

Carlson recommended that Trump’s team ignore his critics and simply show through his actions that he is calm and in command. He urged activists to take Trump’s bravery as a model for their own political engagement.

Tags: Kevin Roberts Tucker Carlson Christian Persecution Election 2024 Republican National Convention Spiritual Warfare Heritage Foundation Republican Party

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June 13, 2024 rww

Sean Feucht has filed a lawsuit against the city of Spokane for criticizing the former mayor for speaking at an event with him and radical right-wing pastor Matt Shea, declaring, “I won’t sit quietly and let these anti-Christian bigots get away with persecuting Christians for exercising our Constitutional Rights. So I filed a lawsuit. I’m taking them to court. Their anti-Christian bigotry has gone too far.”

Parents and local activists are outraged over Kandiss Taylor’s “‘racist and sad’ online behavior.”
Self-proclaimed “prophetess” Kat Kerr, who repeatedly guaranteed that Trump would win the 2020 election, still refuses to accept the results, claiming that hundreds of thousands of Trump ballots are still being found: “They even shot down a Black Hawk helicopter [carrying military ballots] so that they could never be counted.”
Rep. Matt Rosendale declares that First Lady Jill Biden “should be absolutely ashamed of herself”: “I think that she is guilty of elder abuse.”
After spreading the right-wing myth that schools are putting litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats, self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman says that if former President Donald Trump is reelected, he must put “deliverance rooms in every single school” to cast the “liberal demons” out of teachers.
Finally, Lauren Chen asserts that if Trump is reelected, he must go “full-on scorched earth”: “I want him to be exactly the type person that the left fearmongers he could possibly be.”

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May 20, 2024 RWW

Emerald Robinson proclaims that “America is a Christian nation” and “if this offends you, then you should find another nation.”

Robert Knight declares that “by redefining marriage to dispense with the universally recognized male-female union, the [progressive] movement has engineered a legal juggernaut that criminalizes common sense and Judeo-Christian morality.”

* Elijah Schaffer attempts to explain “why racism is actually good.”

Dave Daubenmire is boldly “supporting heterosexuality while it’s still legal.”

Does Ben Zeisloft actually believe that this is a logical argument? “Men can be pastors. Men cannot be mothers. Women can be mothers. Women cannot be pastors.”

Finally, during a religious-right forum last week, candidates running for chair of the Republican Party of Texas were asked to list their top three priorities. Mike Garcia said his main priority is putting God and prayer into public schools.

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// SARAH HUCKABEE REPLY TO SOTU BUT NOT SO CODED/ JARGONY // DAD STUMP RALLY RAMBLE?

an 1 24

eric Trump broadcast a barrage of fabrications and falsehoods about America, Democrats, and President Joe Biden, while promoting blatant propaganda supporting his father, Donald Trump, as voters went to the polls Tuesday to cast their ballots in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

“You know there’s an all out war on family in this country,” Eric Trump declared while speaking to Newsmax. “There’s an all out war on God and religious freedom in this country. There’s certainly an all out war on freedom of speech and [the] First Amendment, you know, in this nation you guys have seen that, you’ve covered it probably every single day for the last three years.”

“People are sick and tired of nonsense,” Trump continued, offering up no examples to support his claims. “People want our economy back. They want low gas prices again, they don’t want World War Three to break out all over the world. They want to be able to, you know, worship God and speak freely and not be censored and not be de-platformed, and not have war waged against them and their their quality of life every single day. People are sick and tired of the games, and you know, they want to be able to live the American dream and that’s what my father did.”

IFrame Content

Speaking to Ben Bergquam on the far right wing website Real America’s Voice, Eric Trump claimed, “they have weaponized the system so viciously, so nasty, that they thought he would actually drop out,” referring to Donald Trump’s presidential race.

Donald Trump is facing 91 criminal charges across four cases in three jurisdictions. He is also facing civil cases involving business fraud and defamation, and is now an adjudicated rapist, according to a judge.

“That was always their intent, you know, make it so painful for him that he didn’t want to stay in the race that he wanted to drop out that, you know, he realizes that his life and Mar-a-Lago would be exponentially nicer and more comfortable and everything else and give it back to the political elites in DC and, frankly, he did the exact opposite.”

He also claimed, “they weaponized every AG [attorney general] and DA [district attorney] in the country to go after him similarly, civilly and criminally.”

“It’ one sham after another,” Trump said, referring to efforts in multiple states to implement the 14th Amendment’s automatic, self-executing requirement that insurrectionists cannot hold office.

“And frankly, I think he’s made a lot of Americans really question their government, which is necessary, certainly in the world that we live in now, it’s so apparent what they’re doing. It’s also very sad because you would expect that America would be a lot better than that.”

“Democrats spent 20 years weaponizing every single system of government that we had, they weaponized the military, they weaponized DOJ, they weaponized the FBI, they’ve, they’ve weaponized all of it,” Eric Trump claimed.

IFrame Content

Eric Trump also spoke with right-wing British politician turned broadcaster, Nigel Farage, in a Great Britain News interview, saying, “being president is the last thing that Donald Trump needs,” and claiming his father “can be living a much better life than getting indicted for nonsense because they want to weaponize the entire system.”

“Every single one of us. We get subpoenaed every day. We get this,” Trump declared. “Donald Trump’s better life is not in politics, and he does it every single day because he loves it. He loves his country, he loves the Western world.”

Also on Real America’s Voice, Eric Trump declared, “Joe Biden is the worst president that we’ve ever seen.”

Speaking to NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Eric Trump claimed the enthusiasm in New Hampshire is the best he’s ever seen. Some journalists have said the enthusiasm is not there.

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Fox News host Laura Ingraham calls Jill Biden's Christmas video "a big middle finger to Christians" | Media Matters for America

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an 8 23

united States District Court Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas on Monday ordered three Southwest Airlines attorneys to attend "religious-liberty training" through the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Starr was nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2019 and confirmed to the federal bench in a 51-39 party-line vote by the then-Republican-controlled Senate.

StarR wrote that "the airline twisted his words and disregarded his order in the case of a flight attendant who claimed that she was fired for expressing her opposition to abortion," reports David Koenig of the Associated Press. "Starr found Southwest in contempt for the way it explained the case to flight attendants last year after losing a jury verdict. In a blistering 29-page order, the judge said the airline acted as if its own policy limiting what employees can say is more important than a federal law protecting religious speech."

Koenig notes that "for Southwest, the sanctions add insult to injury. They stem from a roughly $800,000 judgment against the airline and the flight attendant's union. Although that was less than the jury's $5.1 million award, Charlene Carter also got her job back."

Carter had "sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent confrontational anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs," writes The New Republic's Tori Otten.

In his latest decision, Otten continues, "Starr specifically mandated the lawyers take the training as part of court-ordered sanctions for religious discrimination. He described ADF as one of several 'esteemed non-profit organizations that are dedicated to preserving free speech and religious freedom.'"

Starr "also ordered Southwest to issue a statement telling its employees that the airline 'may not' engage in religious discrimination against them. Instead, Southwest said that it 'does not' do so, prompting Carter to demand additional sanctions against the company," Otten explains.

Otten also adds that "Carter had made no request for Southwest to undergo religious liberty training. ADF is not representing Carter, nor is it otherwise related to the case at all, so it's unclear why Starr felt the need to involve the group.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jeanine-pirro/foxs-jeanine-pirro-appears-christian-nationalist-program-flashpoint-warn-takedown

On May 30, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro joined the Christian nationalist show FlashPoint for an interview where she pushed Christian nationalist rhetoric about a supposed “takedown of religion,” framed American Christians as increasingly under attack from “transgender nonsense,” and announced that she will be at the show's in-person “tent revival” event in June.

FlashPoint, a show that Rolling Stone recently described as “a rising media platform for Christian nationalists,” airs twice weekly on The Victory Channel’s TV and streaming channels, including on Rumble. The show is helmed by a panel of regular contributors who are longtime Christian nationalist figures and self-proclaimed “prophets,” including pro-Trump “prophets” Lance Wallnauand Hank Kunneman. Wallnau and Kunneman often push hard-right politics and make apocalyptic predictions about political opponents. In the last few months, Wallnau has called Biden the “antichrist,” referred to opponents of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill as the “trans taliban,” andwarned that God may soon start killing those who are “persecuting” Trump, while Kunneman said last year that Biden should be in prison for “treason” and a “demonic agenda.”

Christian nationalism, which contends that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and should be governed by right-wing Christian beliefs, has been on the rise in Republican politics and among right-wing media figures. FlashPoint has seemingly leveraged this wave of Christian nationalism to attract more mainstream conservative media figures as guests, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, former President Donald Trump, and now, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro.

Pirro, who currently co-hosts Fox’s top-rated program The Five, appeared on the May 30 edition of FlashPoint, where the host, megapastor Gene Bailey, noted that his audience is “mainly conservative Christians” and that the show is not “fair and balanced,” adding, “We're the — way to the right of center. We’re unabashedly bold about who we are.” (Unlike Fox’s former motto “fair and balanced.”) The host asked Pirro: “When you see the left and what they’re doing, what is it you think … our audience needs to know that you feel like most of America doesn't understand about this current situation?”

Pirro warned the audience of a “takedown of religion” and erosion of “Judeo-Christian ethics” in America, claiming, “America is moving so far from that foundation that we are in a dangerous point that every person who is a person of religion or a person of God understands the inherent dangers of what is happening in America today.” Pirro elaborated that due to moving away from religion, “we are flirting with the kind of destiny that only destroyed nations and fallen empires find themselves in.” During the interview, Pirro also framed Christians as persecuted and warned that “people of faith need to worry about not just what's being taught in schools in terms of transgender nonsense, but what is happening in our society today against religion." [vid]

gENE BAILEY (HOST): When you see the left and what they're doing, what is it that you think — now our audience,Judge, is mainly conservative Christians — we don't say we're fair and balanced. We say we're the — way to the right of center. We're unabashedly bold about who we are. What is it that our audience needs to know that you feel like most of America doesn't understand about this current situation?

JEANINE PIRRO (GUEST): Well, you know, I think that — look, this country was found on the Judeo-Christian ethics.We, you know, when I was the judge in my courtroom above my bench, it said “In God we trust.” I think that America is moving so far from that foundation that we are in a dangerous point that every person who is a person of religion or a person of God understands the inherent dangers of what is happening in America today.

We are flirting with the kind of destiny that only destroyed nations and fallen empires find themselves in. And so that's why I wrote the book Crimes Against America. What the left is doing to our children in schools and to Americans across the board, and especially to those believers, people who believed in God and are faith-driven, is it is destroying them.

And, you know, we saw it with the Dobbs decision. When our own Department of Justice would not follow its own rules of making an arrest of anyone who is parading or protesting in front of a Supreme Court justice’s home in the hope of getting them to change their opinion. Not one of those people was arrested, but you could rest assured that everyone, everyone who was involved in any way — and some of them who were clearly innocent and found to be not guilty by juries later — who got involved in any kind of pro-choice objection ended up being arrested and ended up being prosecuted.

But any of the pro-life centers or the pregnancy centers, any of the attacks on them were not even — they were not even investigated. And so, when you look at what is happening, the takedown of religion in America, it forebodes a very difficult future.

…

And I think that people of faith need to worry about not just what's being taught in schools in terms of transgender nonsense, but what is happening in our society today against religion.

Pirro was also recently announced as a guest for an in-person FlashPoint Live “tent revival” event next week. Past FlashPoint Live events have made headlines for their overt Christian nationalism and for appearances by high-profile Republican politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). One of FlashPoint’s regular guests, right-wing apostle Dutch Sheets, prayed over Greene at one such event and insisted she was “covered in the blood of Jesus.”

In addition to the Christian nationalist figures such as Wallnau and Kunneman appearing at FlashPoint Live’s June 8-9 event in Ohio along with Pirro, the lineup includes actor Jim Caviezel, who recently openly embraced the QAnon conspiracy.

[vid]

pirro’s interview on FlashPoint and upcoming “tent revival” appearance are just two examples of Fox’s apparent connections to the Christian nationalist movement. Fox has regularly hosted Russ Vought, the Christian nationalist figure who is reportedly advising Republicans on how to gut the federal aid programs, and the network has also propped up a harassment campaign against libraries that pushed the movement’s talking points. Additionally, since November, Fox Business has been profiting from weekly sermons from a Christian nationalist pastor airing on the network as paid programming.

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mma 4 23

Right-wing media are fearmongering that the FBI is waging “an assault on religion and Christianity” after an internal memo was leaked from the FBI about investigating potential radicalization at select traditionalist Catholic churches in Virginia. However, the memo was withdrawn and the FBI has reiterated that it does not open investigations “based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved.”

In February, internal documents leaked to a right-wing former FBI agent revealed that the FBI had attempted to develop insider sources in select traditionalist Catholic churches in Richmond, Virginia, to investigate possible radicalization. On April 10, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) issued a subpoena for FBI Director Christopher Wray to release the records on these probes, accusing the bureau of seeking to “enlist Catholic houses of worship as potential sources to monitor and report on their parishioners.”

The internal memo makes reference to the FBI’s interest in identifying “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” who are described as having an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” Christopher Dunham, the FBI’s acting assistant director of congressional affairs, has said that the report “did not meet the FBI's exacting standards and was withdrawn,” and “upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters removed it from our internal system. The FBI also initiated a review — which is now ongoing.” Dunham also stressed to Jordan that the bureau “does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved."

But in reaction to the news, right-wing media freaked out about the memo, calling it “an assault on religion and Christianity” and an example of the government’s “targeting of faithful Catholics,” while others pressured the FBI to instead target “Antifa and the trans radicals”:

During the April 11 episode of Hannity, Fox News host Sean Hannity described the memo as “an assault on religion and Christianity.” Hannity also asked guest Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) if Attorney General Merrick Garland was lying during his Senate testimony about “sending agents into Catholic churches.”
On the April 11 episode of Fox News’ Outnumbered, radio host Ben Ferguson said the FBI’s memo is an example of what “communists used to do, which is target people you want to take out,” and criticized the organization for “go[ing] after an entire religion.”
During the April 11 episode of Fox & Friends, Fox News media contributor Leo Terrell called the FBI’s probe into Catholic churches “a war by the extreme left against religion” and claimed that “the far left haveweaponized the FBI.”
Radio host Benny Johnson tweeted on April 11: “Why is the FBI targeting Catholic churches? If they want to root out domestic terrorism, they should probably start with Antifa and thetrans radicals. Not Christians.”
The Federalist’s April 11 article, titled “House Weaponization Committee Subpoenas FBI Director Over Agency Targeting Catholics,” described the memo as a “targeting of faithful Catholics by the premier U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agency” and attacked the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops for not speaking out against the FBI.
“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander sent out a Telegram message on April 10, calling the FBI “apostates” and warning his followers to “be careful of Feds infiltrating the Church and our political movements. They’re here to break us up.”
Alexander also called theFBI “sickos” for “spying on Catholics while they fake worship.”
In reference to the FBI memo, Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren tweeted, “The assault on Christianity continues! The FBI sought to develop sources in Catholic churches to combat domestic terrorism?! You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk attacked the FBI for investigating domestic extremism in Catholic churches, asking if it would investigate “radical trans groups like the one that assaulted Riley Gaines? Or militant pro-abortion groups like Jane's Revenge? Or Treehouse Antifa that attacked Cop City?”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-contributor-says-there-war-christians-america

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aha: so rights of women are being stripped in the name of religious freedom [OF CORPORATIONS?]

8 22 ah an

On July 21, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gave a keynote address at the Notre Dame Law School/Religious Liberty Summit’s gala dinner in Rome, Italy, where he mocked and ridiculed European critics of the Court’s decision to overturn *Roe v. Wade*. Alito made it abundantly clear that he couldn’t care less what European officials think of that ruling, which ended abortion as a national right in the United States and allows individual states to ban abortion if they choose.

Journalist Linda Greenhouse is highly critical of Alito’s Religious Liberty Summit speech in a guest essay/op-ed published by the New York Times on August 11. Greenhouse has no problem with the fact that Alito is religious; the problem, she emphasizes, is the disdain Alito shows for those who aren’t.

Greenhouse describes Alito’s “snarky” speech as a “victory lap” following Roe’s demise and “a call to arms on behalf of religion.” Alito told the crowd in Rome, “The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection.”

“Justice Alito’s Notre Dame speech still merits close examination for what it reveals about the assumptions built into his worldview,” Greenhouse argues. “What does it mean, for example, to assert that it is ‘people who are not religious’ who need to be persuaded that religion is worthy of special treatment? Do all religiously observant people naturally believe that religion merits more protections than other values? There’s scant evidence for that; in any event, that has not been our law, at least not until recently.”

Alito, Greenhouse writes, is openly contemptuous of law professors who don’t share his views on religion and government.

“Justices and legal scholars alike have struggled for decades to identify the right balance for religion within a pluralistic society, an effort Justice Alito reduced to a cartoonish either/or,” Greenhouse notes. “Even were I willing to cut him some slack for loose talk among friends — I don’t know whether he was aware that Notre Dame would post the video online — I would still find the narrowness of his vision deeply disturbing. He offered no acknowledgment, none, of the harm that can occur when religion is elevated above all other claims to recognition and respect.”

Greenhouse continues, “For example, in the aftermath of his opinion in the2014 Hobby Lobby case, tens of thousands of women have never received the contraception coverage to which the Affordable Care Act entitled them because they work for employers with objections to particular forms of birth control. His opinion in 2020 extending the so-called ministerial exception to cover non-ministerial employees of religious organizations stripped those employees of the protection of federal laws that prohibit job discrimination. And, of course, the very opinion he bragged about to his audience in Rome, an opinion that as I have recently explained was grounded in religious doctrine rather than constitutional law, took no account of its devastating impact on women.”

Alito, according to Greenhouse, is a defender of “militant Christianity” — and the civil liberties of other Americans are suffering as a result of it.

“His religion does not reside in the quiet recesses of his home or chambers,” Greenhouse warns. “His is religion on the march. And that’s the problem the rest of us face now.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/oklahoma-gop-proposed-bill/

violate relig beliefs?

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an 12 21

Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. Thebad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as one Fox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.

Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/genocide-denial-racist-myths-and-fight-against-canceling-columbus-look-0

no lnx ,ammy

Genocide denial, racist myths, and the fight against canceling Columbus: A look at One America News’ anti-Indigenous coverage

Over the past nine months, OAN has disseminated racist, revisionist content about Indigenous people in Canada and the United States. AT&T is responsible.

WRITTEN BY BEATRICE MOUNT

PUBLISHED 11/24/21

Note: The subjects discussed in this article may be triggering for some readers. If you need immediate care or long-term support, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has compiled a culturally sensitive resource kit.

Since February, right-wing cable outlet One America News Network has revived some of its favorite white nationalist conspiracy theories, bigoted lies, and racial epithets in a series of incendiary segments targeting Indigenous people of North America. Hosts, reporters, and guests have thrown fit after fit about small recognitions made in 2020 and 2021 to acknowledge the whitewashed history of colonization, power imbalances, and racist depictions of Indigenous people in North America.

In June, the network turned to full-fledged genocide denialism after ground-penetrating radar uncovered over 1,300 unmarked graves of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children killed under Canada’s residential school policy. Canada's 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the residential school system a "cultural genocide" of Indigenous people, and the federal government formally apologized for it in 2008.OAN downplayed this history and dismissed the discovery of the graves as an “excuse” for “an anti-Christian crusade.”

In October, OAN used Indigenous Peoples Day topraise Christopher Columbus and Europeans for “civilizing” the “savages.” And throughout the nine-month period, OAN figures regurgitated right-wing talking points about “social justice warriors” forcing sports teams to change their names from racist slurs and “erasing” Columbus from our calendars.

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation revealed that telecom giant AT&T had played a key role in creating and funding the far-right network, with 90% of OAN's revenue reportedly coming from its AT&T contract.

Less than a month later, in November, AT&T Vice President Tom Brooks (a member of the Kanien'kehà:ka nation) renewed his company's commitment to “support Indigenous peoples” for Native American Heritage Month. That marked AT&T’s latest commitment to support Indigenous people via nonprofit fundraising, policy research and advocacy, and its Inter-Tribal Council of AT&T employees.

But the company can't have it both ways: AT&T cannot support Indigenous rights in one breath while funding OAN in the next.

As we recognize National Native American Heritage Month, here’s a look at how OAN has attacked Indigenous people so far this year -- all enabled by AT&T’s continued support for the network

Key narratives

OAN denied the history of genocidal policies used to assimilate Indigenous children

In the 1800s, governments in the U.S. and Canada partnered with churches to force Indigenous children into boarding schools under a genocidal assimilation policy with the explicit goal to “kill the Indian, save the man.” An estimated minimum of 6,000 Indigenous children died from injuries, illness, abuse, and neglect sustained in Canada’s system alone. Countless more children disappeared alongside their languages, cultures, and traditional teachings. By the time Canada shuttered the last of these schools in 1996, the residential school system left behind an ongoing, traumatic legacy extending far beyond the immediate survivors of the cultural genocide.

This traumatic legacy made headlines earlier this year after the discovery of over 1,300 bodies on the sites of former residential schools in Canada. In the U.S., the story prompted Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (a member of the Pueblo of Laguna) to order the first comprehensive federal review of American residential schools with an explicit “emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.” While imperfect, this order is a significant first step in America’s own slow reckoning with its genocidal assimilation policies -- one that OAN seems intent to undermine by spreading disinformation to its viewers.

Led by Tipping Point host Kara McKinney, OAN treated the discovery of more than a thousand Indigenous children’s graves as a lie meant to target churches, drawing a tenuous connection between the discoveries and a string of church vandalism and arson across Canada.

On July 12, McKinney called the reporting on mass graves of Indigenous people at former residential schools an “odious lie” used to “excuse” the “desecration of holy grounds.”

On July 23, McKinney asserted that the media had “exaggerated” its coverage of residential schools, stating, “Just like the history of slavery in America gets overexaggerated in some cases in order to be weaponized to reorder society to this day -- they make everything about race -- the same thing is happening with these schools in Canada.”

Days later, OAN irresponsibly blamed Canadian church fires on “activists seeking revenge for Indigenous students,” comparing them to “American churches [that] were burned down or vandalized” by “George Floyd protesters” in 2020. (Though some suspects have since been arrested and charged for the Canadian fires, authorities there have yet to discuss their possible motivations.)

In a Tipping Point segment promoting her deceptive YouTube video “The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax,” alt-right troll Lauren Southern downplayed the discoveries at former residential schools, saying, “If you scratch past the surface, none of it is true.” She later claimed that “it is a far stretch to say a pit of murdered children with thousands of bodies across Canada and a gravesite that the markers have been lost -- a massive stretch, and one that ... led to mass hatred and hate crimes and terrorism, quite frankly, across Canada.”

OAN mocked Indigenous Peoples Day

OAN was outraged after President Joe Biden issued a proclamation officially recognizing October 8 as Indigenous Peoples Day. The move neither removed nor replaced Columbus Day, which is still a federally recognized holiday. Instead, it simply shifted focus onto the Indigenous community by creating what the Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative calls a “more powerful, more accurate, and more inspiring narrative about the contemporary Native experience” than the whitewashed history of colonization long perpetuated by Columbus Day.

That didn’t stop OAN from calling the move a leftist attempt to divide America. OAN hosts and guests accused Biden of “trying to erase Italian Americans,” whitewashed and defended genocide, and used derogatory terms to refer to Native Americans.

Host Stephanie Hamill discussed the “divisive” decision with Andre DiMino, executive board member of the Italian American One Voice Coalition, who portrayed the recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day as Democrats “trying to revise history and attack western culture by starting at the foundation, which was the uniting of the continents by Columbus.” DiMino whined that Indigenous people were taking Italian Americans’ holiday even though they already have “August 9, the day after Thanksgiving, and the whole month of November.”

Host Natalie Harp cited Indigenous Peoples Day as proof that “the people running our country, they do hate America at this point.” Her guest, conservative columnist Lee Smith, claimed the new holiday was part of “a campaign of demoralization” by Democrats to tell other Americans “that we will replace you with whoever we can drop into the country at any particular time” -- a direct reference to the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

After accusing Indigenous groups of cannibalism during her October 11 program, McKinney contradicted Columbus’ own accounts of enslaving and brutalizing Indigenous people, asserting that he “actually treated native peoples with great respect for his time" and “actively punished his own crew members when they abused and hurt the native peoples.”

After repeatedly referring to Native Americans as “savages,” host Dan Ball asked, “What if Christopher Columbus had not found and tried to colonize this land? What if European settlers ... did not come to America and civilize the Native Americans? … If this land was left to tribes that were warring for the last 500 years, what would this land look like?” These types of rhetorical questions are predicated on racist myths about Indigenous people that continue to perpetuate systemic health, economic, political, and social inequalities.

OAN attacked Indigenous activism and spread racist misconceptions about Native Americans

OAN regularly derided historic figures and activism and ensuing media coverage, paying particular attention to the Washington Football Team’s decision in July 2020 to stop using its previous racist moniker after decades of Indigenous activism against harmful and racist naming practices in sports. Hosts and guests referred to the team by the defunct name well into 2021.

OAN segments consistently criticized and undermined the historic nomination of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, claiming the media focused too much on “the fact she’s the first Native American named to a Cabinet position” instead of her supposedly “radical environmentalist agenda” to fight "so-called climate change.”

In an August 5 segment that repeatedly referred to the Washington Football Team by its racist former name, two OAN news hosts mocked Indigenous concerns and suggested that the Pittsburgh Pirates would be the next sports team to cede to “the left” and change its moniker “because a group of pirates are very upset about that.”

On the July 23 edition of The Real Story, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told Indigenous people to “stop taking everything so personally” as “it’s a total honor to name your team after the Indians, or [the Washington Football Team’s former name], or the Cherokees, or the Chiefs or whatever” because they were “very tough adversaries” who “we had to fight … in America for 400 years.”

Over a graphic stating “No Whites Allowed,” Ball suggested applying to a reparations fund meant for Black and Indigenous Californians “because I have Native American on my dad’s side, with probably more than Pocahontas,” referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “but if I describe myself as an Indigenous person then I could apply to this.” His guest, former Trump adviser Harmeet Dhillon, said that this reparations policy is an example of “the ultimate racial privilege, really.” (Under current Federal enrollment guidelines, tribes do not consider a vague Indigenous ancestor or DNA test as valid proof of Native ancestry. Furthermore, using tenuous claims of Indigenous identity to avoid accountability for racist policies and beliefs is racist.)

On September 29, Tipping Point guest Christopher Check, president of Catholic Answers, downplayed Franciscan monk Junipero Serra’s brutal treatment toward Native American people, calling the colonizer a “saintly man that wanted nothing more than the best thing for natives of California, that eternal salvation." As Bad Indians author Deborah Miranda (Ohlone Costanoan Esselen nation) told KQED, “Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture.”

Sumantra Maitra, a senior contributor to The Federalist, used the October 11 edition of McKinney’s show to call the landback movement “a prelude to violence” and said that “the logical endpoint to that rhetoric is taking that land back, and taking that land back would've mean a reconquest,” explicitly comparing it to the Balkan genocides of the 1990s. Maitra’s comments grossly mischaracterize the landback movement, which is the latest social media-focused iteration of a broad political movement calling for settler governments to return land stewardship to Indigenous peoples.

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an 621

Hawley demands Canada be added to religious freedom watch list

Alex Henderson

June 27, 2021

In Alberta, Canada, some pastors were arrested after openly defying COVID-19 restriction, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is claiming that the pastors, James Coates and Tim Stephens, were victims of religiou...

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staple of culture war/myth of liberal media/

INSTEAD OF PROTECTING KIDS FROM NEURAL TOXINS, DO THIS

gay teletubbies, our kids and values under attack

but culture war eruption hysteria eg gay teletubbies WEDGE ISSUE

aha this kinda harkens back to cold war red scare blacklist commies tiring to brainwash, kids most vulnerable ; urban legend grounded in fear (of some new thing?)

hype fear anger emotion note pedophile was red pill entry drug for women into Qanon

dr suess, mr potatohead, smurfs commie; sesame str?

an 521

newsmax host loses it over Lucky Charms 'gay leprechaun' and Kellogg’s 'forcing kids to be confused about their gender'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

May 26, 2021

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield had a homophobic Tuesday night freak out over kids' breakfast cereals.

After being strongly criticized two weeks ago for disgusting antisemitic remarks, Stinchfield is back to....

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virulent late phase --> civil war, existential threat by BLM? we are victims and must defend ourselves/babies/womenfolk and western civ

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/

paul r salon

As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante killing of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and widespread conservative defenses of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous charges against protesters, including "terrorism," to the Trump administration's crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for protesters to be charged with sedition.

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about why such views were myopic: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."

Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment:With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.

Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push for Political Research Associates, "Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.

Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence. Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?

I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.

Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea that post-World War II federal support for civil rights was federal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.

According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.

What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.

You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?

Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing. As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaderswho broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.

David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.

In 2008,Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war."The Center for American Progress went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."

That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative at The Social Contract, a white nationalist journal which published Raspail's novel. Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his racial civil war scenario within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety of Christian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, including Tony Perkins, Larry Klayman and Rick Joyner.

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "symbiotic dance" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the sharing of conspiracy narratives between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.

The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.

John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "Going Full Nazi,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.

You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?

The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.

The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether the political elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies which weaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter") or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").

You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?

The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.

White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.

On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consider any action by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as an existential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.

You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?

In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.

But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.

Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?

Bannon's principal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.

How has this spread through the Trump administration?

The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's immigration policy has been cruel, and as Adam Serwer noted, "cruelty is the point."

You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?

The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official linked to the Tanton anti-immigration network and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.

In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "demographic winter," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.

What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them.

Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.

The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys"during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?

The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and local elected Republican officials, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right. Bruce Wilson and David Neiwert have been tracking that.

The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.

The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.

The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.

BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.

What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?

I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/california-gop-leader-defied-order-to-hold-massive-prayer-rally-and-didnt-even-wear-a-mask/

:{:{}:

california GOP leader defied quarantine order to hold massive prayer rally — and didn’t even wear a mask

Alex Henderson September 9, 2020

Shannon Grove, minority leader of the California State Senate, has been under quarantine — or at least she was supposed to be — after coming in close contact with a…

no lnx pix

Written by Alex Henderson September 9, 2020

Shannon Grove, minority leader of the California State Senate, has been under quarantine — or at least she was supposed to be — after coming in close contact with a fellow Republican who tested positive for COVID-19: California State Sen. Brian Jones, who was diagnosed on August 26. But that didn’t prevent Grove from attending a crowded Christian music event and rally in Sacramento on Sunday, September 6 — and according to Washington Post reporter Tim Elfrink, she wasn’t wearing a protective face mask.

The event, billed as Let Us Worship, was supposed to allow up to 1000 attendees and enforce social distancing measures, but according to the California Highway Patrol, around 3000 people showed up. Videos of the event, Elfrink noted, “showed virtually no social distancing or masks in the crowd”— and California Gov. Gavin Newsom is warning that the concert could turn out to be a superspreader event.

“It does not help to have thousands and thousands of people not practicing physical distancing or social distancing not wearing masks,” Newsom warned.

Sean Feucht, the musician and Christian fundamentalist who organized the Let Us Worship event, has been highly critical of social distancing measures — and when he appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” he claimed that city officials were discriminating against Christianity.What he didn’t tell Fox News is that he might have been responsible for a superspreader event.

Grove, according to Elfrink, “took the stage on Sunday and spoke at length to the crowd — while failing to wear a mask.” Elfrink also notes that California health officials are “urging anyone who attended the prayer event to self-quarantine and monitor for symptoms.”

According to Sacramento County Health Director Peter Beilenson, the Let Us Worship event violated the safety guidelines that California has had in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Beilenson, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, said of the event, “Everyone was piled up. That’s a problem. It’s not a matter of if there will be an outbreak from this, it’s how big.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings

no lnx vid many

russian propaganda and far-right media wildly exaggerated a story about Bible-burnings in Portland — and Fox News ran with it

There was no “stack of Bibles” being burned

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 08/12/20 10:39 AM EDT

screen grab]

Fox News and other right-wing media were aghast last week about a story from the ongoing protests and civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, in which a crowd supposedly burned a stack of Bibles as a widely seen political statement — which now turns out to have been a vastly exaggerated event, further enlarged and distributed by Russian propaganda.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that what actually occurred was that just a few individuals out of thousands present seemed to have used a single Bible, or possibly two Bibles, among other pieces of kindling to start a fire: “None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.”

The story about a supposed mass fire of Bibles originated, however, from the Kremlin-financed news channel RT, and was spread by its online video service Ruptly with adeceptively edited video.

Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book that was burned.)

The Ruptly video was further tweeted by Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Twitter personality based in Malaysia, who wrote: “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.” As the Times notes, Cheong was “wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed.” There was no actual stack of Bibles being burned, let along a crowd of people bringing them to a bonfire for a public burning.

Nevertheless, his tweet was in turn picked up by American conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump Jr.

“The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful,” the Times wrote. “Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread it.”

For example, The Federalist ran an article on August 1, headlined “As They Turn To Burning Bibles, Portland Rioters Show Their True Colors.” The New York Post ran a piece headlined “Protesters burn Bible, American flag as tensions rise in Portland.”

And the story got plenty of pickup on Fox News.

On the August 2 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth discussed the Bible-burning story with a Republican congressional candidate in Oregon, and even tried to grill House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) after he compared police brutality against demonstrators to what was done to the civil rights marchers he remembered from the 1960s.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/

no lnx twt

how Trump is once again colluding with Russia

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.

tp kirk --> djt jr?]

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ted cruzretweet: This is who they are.

Ian Miles Cheong

@stillgray

Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1

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don jr

Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.

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tpkirk

BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland

The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it

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Our faith is under attack.

If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings

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Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.

The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:

The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.

Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.

Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?

Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.

Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here.

Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.

Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”

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Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.

Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.

So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.

It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.

church services are SUPER-SPREADERS, a number of revs have died of covid

Trump demanded churches re-open after polls found ‘staggering decline’ in support from Christian conservatives

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

no lnx

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement May 24, 2020

President Donald Trump’s declaration that the federal government now deems churches “essential” and they must be allowed to re-open immediately was unexpected, and a stunning display of yet another presidential power grab.

Asked to respond to the President’s remarks moments after being announced, Rhode Island’s Democratic Governor Gina Raimondo replied, “It’s been a while since I’ve been in law school but I don’t know of any executive fiat that he would have to overrule a particular governor, so I’ll have to look into that.”

She was correct: Trump has zero authority to order governors to allow churches to re-open, and zero authority to personally allow them to re-open.

But his impromptu appearance at Friday’s White House press briefing, during which he made his declaration that appeared to be plucked out of thin air, served an important goal: getting his religious right base back.

Politico reports that internal and external “polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations.”

She was correct: Trump has zero authority to order governors to allow churches to re-open, and zero authority to personally allow them to re-open.

Declaring there is “alarm inside his campaign,” Politico cited a “person close to the campaign” who “described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as ‘pretty concerning.’”

Double digit drops from the most dedicated members of Trump’s base must be alarming for the Trump re-election campaign and the President, and that led to his Friday demand to allow churches and other houses of worship to re-open.

It hasn’t gotten better.

Politico notes that the “Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.”

All these developments mean non-Trump supporters may be about to go through an even greater period of difficulty.

“Part of the strategy Trump allies have adopted to protect his relationship with conservative Christians is to frame the novel coronavirus — and church closures in response to social distancing restrictions — as a threat to religious freedom,” Politico notes. “The president’s religious supporters routinely cite religious liberty as one of their top priorities and an area in which they believe the Trump administration has been exceptionally receptive.”

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aha: abortion turned xian anti-gubmint; in 80's RR televangelists had TV programs/stations; Rove courted (organized) for Bush 43; now drollinger cabinet and GOTV network (AI/digital tracking?); scary overlap with militias?! patriot prayer

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-religious-freedom-stokes-coronavirus-protests-in-the-u-s/

Pamela E. Klassen, University of Toronto

Religiousfreedom,cherished as an American ideal, has been frequently invoked in the United States during protests against COVID-19 public health measures.

In Canada, forms of protests — including by churches — are more likely to focus on the systemic underfunding of long-term care and homeless shelters or the lack of sufficient medical and water infrastructure in Indigenous communities.

Why the difference?

Across the U.S., conservative Christians flouted state and municipal social distancing orders as late as March 31, sometimes by overtly breaking the law, claiming thatGod, not the state, will protect the people.

During the Christian Holy Week, evangelical and Pentecostal church leaders, often backed by Republican politicians, brought lawsuits against state and municipal governments, arguing that curtailing religious gatherings for the sake of limiting the spread of COVID-19 was a breach of religious freedom.

With lightning speed, federal and state lawyers weighed in on the balance between public health measures and religious liberty.

By contrast, the story in Canada is largely one of religious organizations of all varieties co-operating with public health measures. To date, there is no equivalent in Canada of these high-profile COVID-19 legal battles in which churches reject both public health directives and state legislation.

Suspicion of science, government

Religiously based suspicion of scientific and government authority is not unique to conservative Christians; Hasidic Jewish communities share these suspicions and constitute a significant number of those infected with COVID-19 in New York state.

Even in the case of Hasidic Jews, however, the border might make a difference: Hasidic communities in Québec have been praised for their diligence in adhering to social distancing, in contrast to those in New York, where some rabbis have mocked public health recommendations.

The contrasting responses to COVID-19 in Canada and the United States are rooted in very different national attitudes about individual and collective responsibility for public health.

In the United States, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden may come to embrace Bernie Sander’s plan for “Medicare for All,” but even the devastating reality of being the country hardest hit so far by COVID-19 has not seemed to turn the tide of public opinion on the need for universal medicare.

In Canada, by contrast, leaders across the political spectrum are throwing their support behind public health care, with even some conservative politicians calling for more funding, especially for long-term care. While Donald Trump tweeted a call to anti-public health protesters to “liberate” their states, in Ontario, Conservative Premier Doug Ford dismissed a scattering of such protesters in Toronto as selfish “yahoos.”

Invoking religious freedom in an attempt to opt out of health-care legislation is much more common in the U.S. than Canada. Both countries protect religious freedom, dating back to 1791 in the United States with the First Amendment of the constitution guaranteeing the “free exercise” of religion, while in Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has protected the “freedom of conscience and religion” since 1982.

Religious freedom as a rallying cry

These parallel guarantees, however, stem from very different histories of using religious freedom as a rallying cry, including to resist public health care. I’ve discussed this in my research, especially in relation to women’s reproductive health.

In the wake of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, for example, Catholics and evangelical groups used a religious freedom argument to contest the new mandate that their health insurance plans provide access to contraception for women employees.

In Canada, the less frequent citing of religious freedom rights in the courts to curtail health-care access may be related to a wider acceptance of health care as a public good and a basic human right.

In both Canada and the U.S., the struggle for publicly funded health care in the mid-20th century depended on coalitions of politicians, medical professionals and religious leaders. In Canada, a Baptist minister-turned-politician, Tommy Douglas, galvanized the country with a vision that public health care for all was a human right and, for some, also a religious obligation.

Similarly, in the U.S., when Dr. Montague Cobb, leader of the National Medical Association, successfully argued for Medicare before Congress in 1965, he concluded his testimony with a Christian hymn.

The Canadian version of public health care, however, now serves a much wider range of the population than Medicare does in the U.S., and has become a cornerstone of Canada’s national identity, with minimal overt connections to religion.

But in the United States, public health care remains a source of profound national and religious division.The current Republican administration regularly uses religious freedom legislation, including conscientious objection rules for health-care providers, to chip away at Medicare, limiting access to health care for women, LGBTQ, poor and rural people.

A time of reckoning is coming when public health measures and public and private health-care delivery will be assessed for their effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The role of religious communities and the ideals of religious freedom in supporting or impeding public health must be included in this reckoning, especially in the United States.

Pamela E. Klassen, Professor of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-religious-freedom-stokes-coronavirus-protests-in-the-u-s/

theconv

religious freedom, cherished as an American ideal, has been frequently invoked in the United States during protests against COVID-19 public health measures.

In Canada, forms of protests — including by churches — are more likely to focus on the systemic underfunding of long-term care and homeless shelters or the lack of sufficient medical and water infrastructure in Indigenous communities.

Why the difference?

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With lightning speed, federal and state lawyers weighed in on the balance between public health measures and religious liberty.

Suspicion of science, government

The contrasting responses to COVID-19 in Canada and the United States are rooted in very different national attitudes about individual and collective responsibility for public health.

In Canada, by contrast, leaders across the political spectrum are throwing their support behind public health care, with even some conservative politicians calling for more funding, especially for long-term care. While Donald Trump tweeted a call to anti-public health protesters to “liberate” their states, in Ontario, Conservative Premier Doug Ford dismissed a scattering of such protesters in Toronto as selfish “yahoos.”

Religious freedom as a rallying cry

Similarly, in the U.S., when Dr. Montague Cobb, leader of the National Medical Association, successfully argued for Medicare before Congress in 1965, he concluded his testimony with a Christian hymn.

But in the United States, public health care remains a source of profound national and religious division. The current Republican administration regularly uses religious freedom legislation, including conscientious objection rules for health-care providers, to chip away at Medicare, limiting access to health care for women, LGBTQ, poor and rural people.

Pamela E. Klassen, Professor of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/an-amped-up-war-on-christmas-why-trumps-evangelical-fans-think-god-wants-them-to-defy-lockdowns/

rAW STORY

Many of President Donald Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters believe that it is their God-given duty to defy lockdown orders during the coronavirus pandemic, as they believe obeying restrictions will result in the establishment of an anti-Christian dictatorship.

Daily Beast columnist Eleanor Clift**writes that pandemic restrictions have become yet another heated culture war for evangelicals who distrust scientists and who believe it’s part of abroader conspiracy to take away their religious freedom.

“This is an amped-up version of the War on Christmas theme that conservatives trot out every year,” Clift explains. “Trump gave voice to it recently when he said without any evidence that Muslims celebrating Ramadan, which which begins on Thursday, would not be facing the same restrictions that Christians did on Easter.”

In fact, notes Clift,Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Matt Staver this week compared Christians living under stay-at-home orders to Jews living in Nazi Germany.

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“This happened before in history,” he said. “We’ve seen people being targeted with a particular symbol that you have to wear. And then you get targeted with your business, you get terminated from your job, and eventually you get ghettoized.”

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, tells Clift that Trump-loving evangelicals see Trump’s potential loss this fall as an existential threat to their livelihoods, and they want to do everything in their power to deflect attention from his bungling of the crisis.

“They’re concerned about this crisis and his mismanagement of it and they’re going to do everything they can to support his efforts to deflect attention from his failings, to smear his critics and shift blame to governors and elsewhere — and re-elect the guy God put in charge for this moment,” he said.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/william-barr-is-on-a-theocratic-mission-to-use-the-power-of-the-doj-to-deliver-america-from-eternal-damnation-columnists/

no lnx

William Barr is on a theocratic mission to use the power of the DOJ to deliver America from eternal damnation: columnists

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story December 30, 2019

Attorney General William Barr is worse than a simple right-wing partisan, wrote religious nationalism biographer Katherine Stewart and former American Constitutional Society president Caroline Fredrickson for The New York Times.

Rather, they argued, he is best understood as a fanatical theocrat who believes America is damned to burn in hell — and seeks to use the powers of his office to course correct the nation’s sinful ways.

“Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?” they wrote. “A deeper understanding of William Barr is emerging, and it reveals something profound and disturbing about the evolution of conservatism in 21st-century America.”

“At least since Mr. Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in which he blamed ‘secularists’ for ‘moral chaos’ and ‘immense suffering, wreckage and misery,’it has become clear that no understanding of William Barr can be complete without taking into account his views on the role of religion in society,” they wrote. “For that, it is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion.”

“In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong,” they noted. “In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines. At his Department of Justice, Mr. Barr told law students at Notre Dame, ‘We keep an eye out for cases or events around the country where states are misapplying the establishment clause in a way that discriminates against people of faith.’”

“When religious nationalists invoke ‘religious freedom,’ it is typically code for religious privilege,” they wrote. “The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power … Mr. Barr has a long history of supporting just this type of ‘religious liberty.’ At Notre Dame, he compared alleged violations of religious liberty with Roman emperors forcing Christian subjects to partake in pagan sacrifices. ‘The law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy,’ he said.”

As they pointed out, Barr has been espousing this worldview long before Trump. “In a 1995 article he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, which, as Emily Bazelon recently pointed out, appears to be something of a blueprint for his speech at Notre Dame, he complained that ‘we live in an increasingly militant, secular age’ and expressed his grave concern that the law might force landlords to rent to unmarried couples. He implied that the idea that universities might treat ‘homosexual activist groups like any other student group’ was intolerable.”

And while Barr is one of the most visible and powerful elements of the administration seeking to impose Christian supremacy under law, he is not alone.

“Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence,” they concluded. “He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus. Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.”

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mma 1219

For fifteen years now, Fox News has warned of a War on Christmas. This victimization narrative has only metastasized in the time since.

Parker Molloy examined how the War on Christmas started, why Fox News loves it, and how it has evolved in the years since, from claiming that Democrats like John Kerry wanted to abolish Christmas, to deciding that Santa Claus must be a white man, to declaring that Donald Trump has personally saved Christmas. As Molloy writes: "The War on Christmas is the backdrop for a world in which 'political correctness' will be forever running amok, the left’s goal will always be to 'destroy everything that is wholesome in our country and in our Judeo-Christian civilization,' and Democrats will be stuck in a perpetual state of trying to ban your favorite hobbies and foods. Of course, none of this is true. The slightest resistance to right-wing culture creep will always be framed as a direct assault on their way of life, even if that resistance is just a defense of the status quo."

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trump declares war on non-existent ‘War on Thanksgiving’

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/a-movement-for-religious-rights-is-transforming-the-place-of-religion-in-american-public-life/

Christian pastors praise Trump for speech on ‘religious persecution’ — and ditching UN Summit on ‘imaginary’ climate crisis

Two well-known Christian pastors appeared on “Fox & Friends” Monday morning to praise President Donald Trump’s decision to deliver a speech Monday at the United Nations on “religious persecution” – while snubbing a climate change summit to do so.

Hate ground head Tony Perkins was joined by Dr. Robert Jeffress, a Fox News contributor who had plenty of praise for the President. Both men are among America’s top anti-LGBTQ activists and both are closely tied to Trump and his administration.

Dr. Jeffress called climate change an “imaginary problem” while heralding Trump’s “guts” for ignoring today’s UN summit on the crisis.

“This is the first time any leader of a nation has addressed the UN on religious persecution,” Jeffress said excitedly. “A third of the world is living under religious persecution. 80 percent of it is against Christians,” Jeffress claimed. “It is a remarkable thing that this president would skip a UN climate change summit on an imaginary problem to address the very real problem of global persecution of believers.”

“I mean, think about it: what president in history would have the guts to do what President Trump is doing?” Jeffress asked, laughing because, he said, “it’s absolutely infuriating” Trump’s “enemies” while “energizing his base.”

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More than the 150 members of the secretive right-wing network known as the Council for National Policy have signed a letter calling on President Trump to sign an executive order “protecting the practical exercise of religious freedom,” something Religious Right leaders have been clamoring for since Trump took office. On Wednesday, Fox News pundit and serial promoter of bogus religious persecution stories Todd Starnes outed himself as a member of the CNP in writing about the letter.

The Council for National Policy is a network of leaders from the religious and political right, whose membership includes both big names and lesser-known fringe figures. A 2014 membership list obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that the CNP even has room for extremists like neo-confederate Christian Reconstructionist Michael Peroutka. According to Starnes, who says Trump’s election was the result of divine intervention, other signers include “CNP President Tony Perkins, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, Morton Blackwell, Bob McEwen, Kelly Shackelford, Becky Norton Dunlop, Chad Connelly, Dr. James Dobson and Penny Nance.”

A month ago, Sarah Posner reported in The Nation on a leaked draft of the executive order, which legal experts said was of “sweeping” and “staggering” scope. If signed it would create wholesale exemptions from a range of nondiscrimination laws and regulations “for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.” The order could empower government employees to refuse to provide basic government services to gay people or couples or unmarried parents.

Posner’s article quotes a Lambda Legal attorney who says the draft order is similar to a law signed by the Mississippi governor last year, “which a federal district court ruled violated both the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.” That case is on appeal.

The desire to get federal courts to embrace the right’s vision of religious liberty was one of the major reasons Religious Right leaders rallied around Trump after he promised them the Supreme Court of their dreams. In that regard, it is noteworthy that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch ruled as an appeals court judge in the Hobby Lobby case, which for the first time gave for-profit corporations the right to claim exemption from laws protecting their employees based on the religious beliefs of the company and its owners. That’s a major reason that the Religious Right is thrilled about the Gorsuch nomination.

Tags: Becky Norton Dunlop Bob McEwen Chad Connelly Ed Meese James Dobson Kelly Shackelford Morton Blackwell Neil Gorsuch Penny Nancy Todd Starnes Tony Perkins Church-State Religious Liberty Supreme Court Council for National Policy Fox News Channel

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