The Disunited Theocracy is coming to a theater near you, if you want it
Note to readers: the bolded links are the ones I created. Unbolded links came from passages I cited. I always recommend you review the bolded ones.
Sounds like Pennsylvania RepubliQAnons have found a hater to back for US Senator. She’s poised to upset the establishment favorites, including Trump’s guy, Dr. Oz:
In 2010, for example, she wrote an online opinion piece for Canada Free Press denouncing “the homosexual AGENDA” on religious grounds.
“It is not equality that they so rabidly pursue,” she wrote. “It is domination! It is to the exclusion of the dominate [sic] voice in this country that inherently judges their lifestyle as immoral and perverse.”
On Tuesday a reporter at Inside Elections chronicled Barnette’s history of anti-Islam statements, including falsely calling former President Barack Obama a Muslim, tying the religion to pedophilia, and in 2017 tweeting that Islam “should be banned in the USA.”
Barnette and a campaign spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment about those past statements.
Barnette pursued false voter fraud claims after losing a 2020 House race to U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean by 19 percentage points, organized buses to attend the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the Capitol attack, and has continued to cast doubts on the results of Pennsylvania’s 2020 presidential election, becoming a leading election denier in the state — along with Mastriano.
And Barnette has embraced endorsements from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and has trafficked in conspiracies.
She played down her ties to Mastriano on Monday.
Rabid homosexuals and Muslims forcing sex on children really don’t seem to be anywhere right now but it’s a great sales pitch for cowards and easily bamboozled people. I continue to shake my head at how far some people have fallen from the unity and inclusion values that used to be ours as Americans.
It is, unfortunately, the new norm for the RepubliQanon Party. Political parties were formed with a singular purpose: to help candidates get elected. That role has changed over the years- especially in the past 40 years. Key to that has been the influence of three groups: the Council for National Policy, the Federalist Society and the Fake Christian Ministers.
The CNP has a 3 part mission statement:
- WE BELIEVE in limiting the size and scope of government to allow Americans greater freedom to reach their fullest potential.
- WE BELIEVE the Founding Fathers created this nation based upon Judeo-Christian values and that our culture flourishes when we uphold them.
- WE BELIEVE that this great experiment called America, a nation founded on the premise that "all men are created equal," is worth defending.
In practice, however, most of its emphasis has been on the second part, pushing their version of Judeo-Christian values, rather than mainstream ones. For legal purposes, they state:
The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a nonpartisan, educational foundation organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. We do not lobby Congress, support candidates, or issue public policy statements on controversial issues. Our members are united in their belief in limited government, a strong national defense, and support for traditional western values. They meet to share the best information available on national and world problems, know one another on a personal basis, and collaborate on achieving their shared goals.
Though it’s been dug out a few times by investigative journalists, they keep their membership list ultra-secret.
In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote:
The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party enthusiasts — but for the many real extremists who are included.
Paul S. Teller, the hardline chief of staff to Ted Cruz who was once described by The Hill as Cruz’s “agitator in chief,” is a member, or at least he was in 2014. Tony Perkins, the head of the LGBT-bashing Family Research Council, was its vice president that year, one of three executive officers. And Frank Gaffney, whose group provided Trump with bogus statistics about American Muslims’ support for violent jihad and who was a senior adviser to Cruz until May, was a member, too.
AND:
But it has long been known that the group included some key individuals whose goals are less benevolent. One of its five founders, Tim LaHaye, is the co-author of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels and a man who has described gay people as “vile,” said the Illuminati are conspiring to establish a “new world order,” attacked Catholicism, and once worked for the wildly conspiracist John Birch Society. An important member whose name was revealed early on was John Rousas Rushdoony, who is listed in the 2014 directory’s “In Memoriam” section and advocated for a society ruled by Old Testament law requiring, among other things, the stoning of adulteresses, idolaters and “incorrigible” children.
Among the other extremists in the group they identify are:
On the CNP’s board of governors, for instance, is Michael Peroutka. Peroutka was for many years on the board of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group that advocates for a newly seceded South ruled by white people.
And…
Jerome Corsi is the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry, has written an error-filled book alleging that President Obama was not born in the United States, once described Martin Luther King Jr. as a “shakedown artist,” and is a subscriber to numerous baseless conspiracy theories. In his latest, 2014 book, he claims that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun fled to Argentina after the end of World War II and lived there happily until their deaths.
And…
Another on that board is Joseph Farah, who runs the conspiracist online “news” outlet, "WorldNetDaily" and employs Corsi. When Farah’s site isn’t busy bashing anything vaguely liberal or suggesting that Obama is helping the United Nations create a one-world government, it spends its time doing such vital work as running a six-part series alleging that eating soybeans causes homosexuality.
Also on the board is Mat Staver, leader of the anti-LGBT Liberty Counsel, who has worked for the re-criminalization of gay sex, described the Boy Scouts as a “playground for pedophiles,” and likened LGBT activists to terrorists. And then there’s Alan Sears, founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the co-author of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, which falsely links pedophilia to homosexuality.
Do review the other mentions in that SPLC link; it’s short.
I first became aware of the CNP after watching a video of author Anne Nelson on a tour promoting her book in 2019: Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. The book is a must read and should be read in Poli Sci classes now. It’s available online as an audiobook. You can get the gist of it in the 21 minute intro.
To be clear, I shun most conspiracy theories, and we’re delving into one here. But the point isn’t to prove all the quid pro quos and condemn every member of active participation in some grand fully-plotted-out scheme. That’s not how the CNP works.
There are some definite whack-a-doodles in this CNP bunch, espousing white supremacy with its hatred of black, brown and Asian people, fear of international Jewish money, hatred of LGBT people, and that old fear of feminism because it threatens the patriarchal practices of sex-obsessed male narcissists who believe the pool of women they find attractive should be theirs to screw upon command. But it’s not like all the Big Money financiers are actively engaged in nefarious schemes with the haters. More simply, they have their own monetary agendas and find the whackjobs to be useful tools to exploit in pursuit of their avarice addictions.
Big Money is all about furthering wealth inequality because only their own hoarding matters. They desire a government that will tax them minimally and not regulate them at all, even though the regulations came into existence because the harm done by the avarice of wealth-obsessed barons was so profound that it damaged entire societies.
So controlling the message is important. After the tragic debacle that was Vietnam, before the worldwide web existed, media consolidation was key and remains key with the internet. I’m sure you heard some little known billionaire just bought Twitter, right?
We can be certain he did it solely in the public’s best interest. (Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a little).
From Wikipedia, the originators and early leaders of the CNP:
CNP was founded in 1981 by Southern Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye, author of The Battle for the Mind (1980) and the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants have included W. Cleon Skousen, a theologian within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and founder of the Freemen Institute; Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with the Constitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[40][41][42]
The council's first executive director was Woody Jenkins; later, Morton Blackwell and Bob Reccord served in this role. Organization presidents have included Nelson Bunker Hunt of Dallas, Amway co-founder Richard DeVos of Michigan, Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, retired Judge Paul Pressler of Houston, former Reagan Cabinet secretaries Edwin Meese and Donald Hodel, former Reagan advisor and President of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Kenneth Cribb, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, and current President (as of 2014) Stuart Epperson, founder of the Salem Media Group.
The Federalist Society had a similar aim of controlling the message. Again Wikipedia:
Founded in 1982 by students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School; the Federalist Society began as a student organization which challenged what its founding members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology common to American law schools. The group's first activity was a three-day symposium titled "A Symposium on Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications" held at Yale in April 1982. The symposium, which was attended by 200 people, was organized by Steven G. Calabresi, Lee Liberman Otis, and David M. McIntosh. Speakers included Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, and Theodore Olson.
You’re likely familiar with Scalia and Bork. But among Olson’s notable achievements was his successful defense of GW Bush in Bush v Gore, which ended the recount and installed Bush as president in the one certain stolen presidential election in 2000. He also defended President Reagan in the Iran-Contra hearings. Conversely, though, he’s actively supported gay rights, unlike many of his conservative peers.
Returning to the Wikipedia entry:
The society's initial 1982 conference was funded, at a cost of $25,000, by the Institute for Educational Affairs.[11] Later funding of $5.5 million came from the John M. Olin Foundation. Other early donors included the Scaife Foundation and the Koch family foundations. Donors to the Federalist Society have included Google, Chevron, Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.
Despite the claims of the group that its efforts are nonpartisan, the outcomes of its efforts (surely coincidental) always demonstrate fealty to conservative and Libertarian positions. Their gospel, in my words, would be:
1) The founders who signed off on the US Constitution are our Lords and Gods; don’t you dare question their primacy.
2) All the injustices that have occurred to non-white and female persons over hundreds of years of visible history can’t be remedied by any federal law that considers race or gender. Only state legislatures can fix those old wrongs. (so, yeah, States’ Rights, a notably anti-federal position that also, notably, has a shitty record of remedying any things harmful to humans.)
3) Never ever ever try to regulate guns.
4) Socialism for businesses is cool. For humans, not so much. Especially humans who can’t afford lawyers, so fuck them.
5) The founders didn’t include Black, Brown, Asian, Native American or Women people so their vision of how government should be works fine for us white male property owners. Everyone else can fuck right off any idea that the US government should address their needs.
In 40 years, the Federalist Society transformed our judicial system with decisions that favored the wealthiest Americans while diminishing the voices of the majority of Americans. Among its worst outcomes are the Citizens United v. FEC and its subsidiary SpeechNow.org v. FEC. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent argued that the framers of the Constitution wanted to guarantee the right of free speech to “individual Americans, not corporations,” and he expressed a fear that the ruling would “undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.”
He was right. So was Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address following the Citizens United ruling when he said it would “open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”
Federalist Society member Justice Alito, in the audience, was seen shaking his head and mouthing the words “Not true.” And the ruling begat the dawn of Super PACs and wholly unrelated (cough, cough) nonpartisan groups that shoveled money at the Supers that came from unknown donors.
So rich people and corporations have freer speech than the majority of Americans do and that’s who our Congress and legislators will cater to. And in addition to the high disapproval ratings of the Congress and Presidency, the faith in our election system and in our courts has been undermined just as Stevens predicted.
Which is fine, if you’re a rich sitting judge with a lifetime paycheck.
The third group in this triumvirate is the Fake Christian Ministers, and they pose the greatest threat of all.
They can be summed up pretty easily. They advocate a return to the Old Testament which is not what Christ advocated at all. They claim to represent a guy but instead of selling his message, they sell hate, intolerance and appeals for you to send them all your money. The most financially successful greedy ones live high on the hog and have a serious yen for adultery. For them, not you.
They’d also like you to believe there’s a war on Christmas because Happy Holidays is wrong to say since it takes into account the holidays of Jews and other non-Christians. They’ve turned politeness and consideration into acts of war.
The Old Testament wasn’t written by America’s founders. It was word of mouth stuff passed on for thousands of years that eventually some scribes started writing down and it ranks with the screenplays of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Debbie Does Dallas for all the betrayals, incest, rape, pedophilia and control of knowledge that goes on within its pages. Adam and Eve ate some knowledge fruit which undermined the fruit sales of the priests and ministers, and priests and ministers got the fruit straight from God. If you don’t fall for that then you’re pretty much gonna spend eternity roasting on a spit watching endless reruns of Friends.
And today, there’s a special on the admonitions from the heavens about sex sex sex, and skip all the other commandments and Lordly warnings, because sex is not about the biology of living beings like bugs and flowers. It’s only meant for married adults, 18 and over, except in Old Testament times when pre-puberty sex was acceptable. But it’s never supposed to be enjoyable because joy is pretty sinful so priests and nuns are advised to skip it completely so they can be brides and boys of Christ who never had sex and was forced to turn water into wine to console himself. I’ve known others with marriages like that.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s moral and kind and happy Christians who I commend for being very nice and neighborly folk. But the angry ranters sticking their insults into people’s motives, trying to guilt trip them so they can pick their pockets are the fake ones that Christ would turn wine into water for, hoping to sober them up.
And our Holy Founders really didn’t like the fake ones at all and created a wall of separation between church stuff and state stuff to protect us all from the fake nonsense. In countries without such a wall we can see the results with the Taliban and Saudi sharia laws. Even in Christian history, there’s been inquisitions and witch burnings and other nasty stuff so our originalists said let’s keep these two far apart to avoid all the crazy and violence that always seems to follow.
Fake Christians will say this wall is why God will afflict us with plagues and locusts and the Village People and other December holidays and then they’ll try to snatch the reins of government from the majority of people in a democracy. It’s really distasteful that they try to pin their lust for greed and power on a God but hey, whatever works.
So these three groups, working in alignment, want to control the message and convince you that greed is goodness, that biology isn’t real, that history shouldn’t be taught if it gets too close to reality, that schoolteachers are suspect if they ask kids about their feelings, that gay people are rabid animals trying to train kids to do perverted things with their tingly parts, that an ex KGB agent who assassinates his critics should be trusted while he sends troops to kill civilians in a country that never threatened Russia, hide the names of a couple of hundred Big Money funders trying to buy 51% of Congress and the courts, that every Democratic candidate or officeholder is busy in their spare time forcing white children into sex slavery and no actual evidence is needed.
And trying to take care of sick people and the elderly and hungry people and people who got addicted while trying to deal with pain are specifically things governments should avoid because that’s what churches should do and governments exist solely to make the 1% of greediest Americans richer. That’s the message all three groups keep selling.
You can see the linkages occurring. For example, the deVos family whose fortunes were built on a pyramid scheme called Amway. A son runs a business making more money selling mercenary work to the highest bidders who need more soldiers for their wars. A daughter became Secretary of Education and tried to defund public schools and redirect the monies to private religious schools.
Or the Mercer family, whose daddy made a fortune in Artificial Intelligence work and hedge fund management. He’s donated about $35,000,000 to Republican candidates in the past 15 years, much of it after the 2010 Citizen’s United ruling (possibly more since donors can remain secret). He was the majority owner of SCL Group which described itself as a "global elections management agency" with the capacity to foment coups.
He’s funded efforts to return the country to the gold standard, to reinstate the death penalty, to block a Muslim mosque from being built, has been a major funder of the fake news Breitbart operation, the Brexit from the EU, and the harvesting of info from Facebook profiles to be used in the data analytics microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica that helped Trump win the electoral college vote in 2016. As investigators closed in on that operation, his group quickly dissolved it using bankruptcy laws.
And, while not widely reported, last year he and his Renaissance Technologies associates reached the largest settlement in US history with the IRS for somewhere near $7 billion in unpaid taxes. Now his daughter Rebekah directs the family foundation, which - among other things, funds the extremist social media site, Parler. Control the message, using money and mathematical analysis, is what the Mercers do. I remain highly suspicious that they also may be anonymously funding whackadoodle groups like QAnon and feeding its members incredibly weird conspiracy theories like the one that had them gathering in Dallas waiting for JFK Jr to be resurrected and install Trump back in office. When you’re a billionaire, they’ll let you grab them by the ludicrous conspiracy.
Daddy believes the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s were a serious mistake and the only racists left in the US are Black ones. And Rebekah and pals are now tied to Emerdata which will likely be involved in future political scandals.
There’s a bottom line to this multi-pronged media propaganda, conspiracy spouting, originalist pushing triumvirate containing scholars, conservative lawyers, kooks, gun nuts, conspiracy paranoics, FatCat hoarders and political operatives.
The middle classes who are overtaxed to fund it all and the poor too busy eking out a living to grasp the interlocking scams will be directed to grab each other’s throats since the operatives and fatcats have been at this divide and conquer stuff forever. What’s changed is the rigging.
The dominant players - the wealthy, the greediest of lawyers, the most unscrupulous propagandists, the most criminal tax cheats, the bankers and real estate moguls laundering money globally while shrinking access to the American Dream - are so busy building their ‘foolproof’ loot-the-poor theocracy that everyone else is headed towards the narrowest of choices. They/we can give up on voting altogether aware that the courts will refuse to remedy any of it, view all media outlets as too biased to give them the critical facts and resort to the sabotage that always occurs when the populace is overwhelmed with corruption and opportunities are too few.
Societies growing more unjust from such rigging follow a predictable path. They grow ever more repressive - and they won’t settle for stealing rights for women alone. Crime increases. Prison-industrial complexes expand. More groups lose their human rights.
The working class will still have some opportunities, as bodyguards, security guards, police officers and military, basically the jobs protecting the assets of the wealthy. And when they get stiffed, as is common with much of the military, then there’ll be fresh domestic extremists, prone to acts of violence. Breeding terrorists is not what healthy societies do but the most organized actively conspiring ones have already been seen, in Oklahoma City some years ago and in January 2021.
The US has been at its greatest when its citizens have worked in unity. Disunity gave us a Civil War and a million dead way too early in this pandemic. And what did we gain in wisdom from the experiences? So far, too damn little.
The forces of disunity followed a housing bubble crash with no personal punishments for those who created that mess, not even the Wells Fargo staff that illegally used depositor monies to enrich themselves. For the worst off in society, the Republiqanons followed that by blocking a minimum wage increase for the longest period in US history.
And even the Federalist Society with its thin veneer of legitimacy helped block a Supreme Court nomination to stack the court. Their claim to legitimacy is what I call Shallow Originalist Theory because it remains completely unproven whether its theories can work to maintain or better a just and civil society.
They’re coming for your rights next. And your democracy and your American dream.
Even highly educated respectable people like historian Heather Cox Richardson are sounding the alarms. (Also a must read)
For decades, [Republican] party leaders managed to deliver economic liberties to business leaders by tossing increasingly extreme rhetoric and occasional victories to the religious right. Now, though, that radicalized minority is driving the party. It has thrown overboard the idea of smaller government to drive economic growth and embraced the idea that a strong government must enforce the religious and social beliefs of their base on the rest of the country.
This religiously based government wants to control not just individuals, but also businesses. We are seeing not only the apparent overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, but also the criminalization of contraception, attacks on gay and trans rights, laws giving the state the power to design school curricula, fury at immigrants, book banning, and a reordering of the nation around evangelical Christianity.
Today, when the Senate voted on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill protecting the constitutional right to abortion as originally recognized in Roe v. Wade, all of the Republicans voted against it, along with Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin said the bill was too broad, although he did not say in what way.
I’m a little more critical than Richardson is as I refuse to call Manchin a Democrat at all. He’s a rootin tootin pollutin global warming supporter, as Republican as they come and his lapel label is meaningless. But I digress.
The US has not been this disunited in 50 years and all but a handful of Republican officeholders are eager to make the situation worse.
And call me a hopeless optimist but I fully believe we can stop this craven selfish effort to turn the country into a kakistocracy. Details soon.