#Christian Trump Supporters: We Need To Talk

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

An Update from anonymous in Israel and a personal note from me:

*Hamas threatens execution of the hostages.

*1000 Israelis murdered on Israeli soil. The numbers keep rising. There are a few hundreds struggle for their lives in hospitals.

*At the strongholds of Hamas in Gaza whole neighborhoods were wiped out.

*Deputy commander of a Brigade killed in a confrontation with terrorists from Lebanon. Must be Hezbollah. Israeli doctrine is the commanders physically lead which can have a high price.

*The White House was lightened with blue and white Israeli colors. Solidarity. Will take it even if don’t like the occupants right now. We miss Trump.

*The Head of the Joint Staff of the US had a talk with the IDF Chief of Staff about making American Military support in the region stronger. My Interpretation: American fleet is on the way to deter Iran and Hezbollah from joining the war. We in Israel don’t like it. Israel should not rely on anyone else. Specially not Biden. Again , we miss Trump. On second thought it does feel good to know we are not alone even if the move is symbolic.

*Netanyahu -“What we will do to Hamas will eco for generations.” “We will treat them like ISIS” (like treating ISIS.)

*Biden – “11 Americans were killed in the attack”.

*My ____told me that the largest hospital in the North (Rambam Hospital) is converting the parking structure to a hospital space. It’s the north. Could mean preparation for a war in the north with Hezbollah.

*IDF- “Tens of terrorists were eliminated in the past day.”

*IDF – “So far we attacked 1707 targets.” Air Force.

*The leaders of the US, Germany, Italy, UK, France in a joint statement condemning the attack, warning others from joining the war and saying they support Israel. The Globalists are supporting Israel. I wonder why and for how long?

*The popular Telegram channel in Gaza is pleading not to publish names of terrorists because “the IDF is bombing their homes”. Some terrorists will be homeless and familyless. There is a black list of all the involved. Israel is known to have a long memory. All the involved directly or indirectly are going to die. I am sure.

*American Israeli in Miami – a wealthy guy- is organizing an operation room with volunteers. Arranged and arranging flight tickets for Israelis who are reservists abroad who want to come to fight. The numbers are confidential but I am sure that there are thousands who are coming back to fight. But the airport is closed. But airlines are getting prepared to help with this effort as soon as they can.

*Speaker of the National Security of the US (or whatever it is called) John Kirby is choking on live TV when asked about the images of the kidnapped. He is saying they have no direct intelligence of Iran’s involvement in this attack. (Israel will know the whole chain to the top shortly. From prisoners and other means).

Love, Shalom & God Bless you all my friends.

From me, GRITS on Tumblr:

I'm sharing the updates to encourage prayer. God loves EVERY human being, no matter your family of origin. Even those who deny his existence or seek to destroy Him are loved by Him. Why? Because He is Elohim who created everyone. He made a covenant with Abraham and God will NOT break His promises. If the entire world turns against Israel (and according to prophecy Ezekiel 38 & 39), that day will come), God alone will fight for them. This does not mean their government is good or righteous. Their government is corrupt just like the American government. It does mean that God keeps His promises in spite of politics and in spite of governments.

If you would like to pray for our world, I recommend reading aloud & meditating on the Psalms. We all have our favorites but in light of current events, start at Psalms 120 and just keep going. There are many translations. The ESV The NCV The CEV are more modern but less flowery/romantic.

If you are a Christian, you are commanded to "Pray for peace in Jerusalem" (psalm 122:6)

We don't need to understand the politics. Our job is to pray for peace.

For my friends here who are not Believers, I offer you the psalms. There is something very special about these words. We believe they were inspired by God Himself and preserved for thousands of years by a small group of Hebrew people. It was out of these tribes that God gave us our Lord Jesus who we believe is the prophesied Messiah, the Christ.

The Jewish leaders were expecting a political messiah to rescue them from a corrupt government---a political KING. God sent them a lowly, adopted son of a carpenter who waited until age 30 to begin a 3 year ministry. Jesus came not to be served but to serve. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. Unfortunately they didn't realize their greatest need was not political, but soul salvation.

Jesus, God's only son came to be the bridge between us and the Father.

Allegedly (Steve) founder of Apple Computers said, "God sent His son on a suicide mission but we forgive Him because He gave us trees."

I can see how people feel that way, but it was more than a suicide mission---It was a redemption mission: Him for us. One day we will all stand before our Creator and none of my "good works" will be enough to overcome my sinful heart. I was born a sinner but Jesus stands in the gap for me. I deserve death as the penalty for my sinful heart but Jesus defeated death. Now I will live forever with Him. You can too.

Maranatha!

#israel #pray for the peace of jerusalem

[kp777]

By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams

March 31, 2023

The Republican Party's most dangerous grift today has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It's leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift.

Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers.

But the GOP’s ability to exploit any opportunity that comes along — regardless of its impact on America or American citizens — goes way beyond just fundraising hustles.

When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company.

Just this week, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up this week to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town.

The grift is at the core of the GOP’s existence, and has been since Nixon blew up LBJ’s peace talks with the Vietnamese in 1968 and then took cash bribes from the Milk Lobby and Jimmy Hoffa in the White House while having his mafia-connected “plumbers” wiretap the DNC’s offices at the Watergate.

— Republicans successfully fought the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices for decades; in turn, Big Pharma pours millions into their campaign coffers and personal pockets (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— Republicans beat back Democratic efforts to stop insurance giants from ripping off seniors and our government with George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage privatization scam; in turn, the insurance companies rain cash on them like an Indian monsoon.

— Republicans oppose any effort to replace fossil fuels with green energy sources that don’t destroy our environment; in turn, the fossil fuel industry jacked up the price of gasoline into the stratosphere just in time for the 2022 election (and you can expect them to try it again in 2024).

— Republicans stopped enforcement of a century’s worth of anti-trust laws in 1983, wiping out America’s small businesses and turning rural city centers into ghost towns while pushing profits and prices through the ceiling; in turn massive corporate PACs fund ads supporting Republican candidates every election cycle.

— Republicans authored legislation letting billionaires own thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets; in turn the vast majority of those papers (now half of all local papers are owned by a handful of rightwing New York hedge funds) and stations all run daily news and editorials attacking Democrats and supporting the GOP.

— Republicans Trump and Pai killed net neutrality so giant tech companies can legally spy on you and me, recording every website we visit and selling that information for billions; in turn, major social media sites amplify rightwing voices while giant search engines stopped spidering progressive news sites.

Newspeak — George Orwell’s term for the grift where politicians use fancy phrases that mean the opposite of what people think they mean — has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for a half-century.

Richard Nixon, for example, promised to crack down on drugs, but instead used that as an excuse to crack down on anti-war liberals and Black people. Instead of an economic grift, it was a political grift.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era.

Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation.

He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us.

Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease.

All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition.

George W. Bush called his program to make it easier to clear-cut America’s forests and rip roads through wilderness areas the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

His program to legalize more pollution from coal-fired power plants and immunize them from community lawsuits (leading to tens of thousands of additional lung- and heart-disease deaths in the years since) was named the “Clean Air Act.”

Bush’s scam to “strengthen” Medicare — “Medicare Advantage” — was a thinly disguised plan to privatize that program that is today draining Medicare’s coffers while making insurance executives richer than Midas.

Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift.

Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world.

Other Trump grifts — most leading to grateful industries or billionaires helping him and the GOP out — included:

— Making workplaces less safe — Boosting religious schools at the expense of public schools — Cutting relief for students defrauded by student loan sharks — Shrinking the safety net by cutting $60 billion out of food stamps — Forcing workers to put in overtime without getting paid extra for it — Pouring more pollution from fossil fuels into our fragile atmosphere — Gutting the EPA’s science operation — Rescinding rules that protected workers at federal contract sites — Dialing back car air pollution emissions standards — Reducing legal immigration of skilled workers into the US from “shithole countries” — Blocking regulation of toxic chemicals — Rolling back rules on banks, setting up the crisis of 2023 — Defenestrating rules against racially segregated housing

While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in.

Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes.

Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash.

Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base.

The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism.

Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Bannon’s grift in East Palestine is the smallest of the small, after his being busted for a multi-million-dollar fraud in the “Build the Wall” scheme and others, but is still emblematic of the Republican strategy at governance.

When all you have to offer the people is a hustle, then at the very least, Republicans figure, you should be able to make a buck or gain/keep political power while doing it.

#republicans #gop #grift #common dreams

[agriftatsea]

Another day, another slew of posts from people calling for a boycott of the United States Election as a method of campaigning for change. (Refusing to participate in your shitty democracy will not actually improve the democracy btw) So! Here's a reminder that half of the country seems hellbent on re-instating a guy who is truly, comically worse than 'Genocide Joe' and it sounds like we need a reminder on how bad he was the first time.

List of horrible things Trump did in office, in no particular order:

Pulled out of the Paris Accord, claiming that climate change was not a big enough concern

Slashed regulations in safety and environmental impact in nearly every industry, some of which Biden has re-instated

Put Betsy DeVos in charge of education where she funneled money from public schools to private Christian schools and who got slammed in a class action lawsuit for her unwillingness to forgive fraudulent student loans

Put two judges on the Supreme Court which then went to repeal Roe vs Wade

Constantly downplayed COVID-19, incorrectly claimed 85% of people who wore masks got COVID anyway to justify why he didn't wear one when it messed up his spray tan, and overall horribly handled the pandemic in a way that still affects people every day

Scaled back SNAP (food stamps) to ‘save taxpayers money’ affecting 700,000 people

Pulled troops out of the Syria-Turkey border without consulting Congress or the Pentagon, leaving hundreds of thousands of people to die or be bombed

This is not even close to everything he did, because we’re still investigating what he did with all those classified documents (though even Fox News is worried that the deaths of dozens of international agents were a result of Trump leaking their identities to his foreign friends) and he keeps talking about how he wants to make himself President for Life. Even if we did somehow manage to elect a third party President, they wouldn't be able to do anything without getting all of the Dems and all of the GOPs on their side, and if you think that a centrist like Biden hasn't gotten much done you are not prepared for the nothing that Jill Stein will do if we get her elected.

“But all of our options are shit!”

I know! But one of our options is a con artist and a rapist who keeps insisting his ex-President status makes him immune to any prosecution, and the other is a union-supporting old man heading a government that is currently unified in allowing genocide. If you’re going to insist on throwing your vote away, keep in mind the thousands of people still attending Trump's rallies who have already proven they will show up in some of the worst winter weather conditions ever to prove their loyalty and think about what it would be like if we had to deal with them forever.

"Why can't we just burn it all down and start over?"

A civil war (because that's what it would be) would cause even more damage to vulnerable populations, and if you are wanting to mitigate harm you have to do the boring shit like vote and volunteer and talk to your neighbors. Life isn't a Marvel movie. The good guys aren't the ones with with the giant robots, and we can't save the world in 210 minutes with some vindicating violence and perfectly timed explosions. Changing the world is slow, and messy, and involves more 'being civil with e people you don't initially agree with' than anyone wants to make a movie about.

But if Trump gets the presidency back, he is never going away. As one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, this is not a risk we can take. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world to not blow this election in a fit of (justified) outrage.

Remember Reagan? How a celebrity got to be president and ruined so many people's lives decades after his death, including horribly mishandling a pandemic because treating it like an illness and not a punishment/inconvenience wasn't on his agenda? Do we really wanna go through that again?

Vote blue. Even slow progress is progress.

Don't give up.

#us politics #election 2024 #joe Biden #Donald trump #facts and sources #misinformation #voting

[trickstarbrave]

biden is still a better case scenario than trump even if he sucks, actually. voting is still important actually!

i do think ppl should still vote but like. voting is very basic stuff. and materially we have seen very little in the way of change. biden has done SOME stuff, but has also let or actively worked for rly shit stuff like deportations, work camps, war crimes, genocide.

all voting in a democrat has done has let less people to talking about the shit. biden has done a lot of the terrible shit people were on trump for, only this time a large majority of democrats have just been silent on it. and maybe a few changes too but not nearly enough for what we need, but a bunch of democrats keep telling people to shut the fuck up and stop being so pessimistic

what we need to actually have proper democracy is an overhaul of the voting system. allow prisoners to vote. abolish laws that allow blatant gerrymandering. allow multiple votes in order of preference. and knock it off with this two party only system where republicans are trying to put in a blatant fascist faux christian theocracy and democrats barely resist against it.

people would be less likely to be fucking through with the voting system here if there was more material change than "gets worse slightly less fast but everyone tries to tell you to shut up about it getting worse". like you're holding a gun to people's heads as the world melts around them and tell them "vote for a genocide supporter selling weapons for oil rights, or vote for a slightly less bad genocide supporter selling weapons for oil rights who might not make your life infinitely worse" and it is really no surprise people are fucking sick of that shit.

so like. yeah if you can vote go out and do it. i'll be doing it. but voting is like brushing your teeth. and in this case its like brushing your teeth when you have severe tooth decay and need like 5 root canals. like sure, if you just stop brushing your teeth it'll get worse faster but at this point people are throwing their toothbrushes to the wall going "can SOMEONE please just take me to the fucking dentist already?!" and i can't help but find some sympathy in it. because at the end of the day you can keep brushing your teeth and delaying it all you want, but eventually they will rot out of your skull and you need to go to the ER to get them all ripped out before you get a brain infection.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who for years has promoted and appeared with white nationalists, voted Thursday to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, citing... what he called “her sustained racism and anti-semitism.”

On that front, Gosar’s own record is unparalleled: In February 2021, he spoke at a political conference hosted by the white nationalist Nick Fuentes ― known today as the political adviser of the antisemitic rapper Ye. At the event, Gosar praised the crowd, telling them that “a nation without a people is not a nation.”

Fuentes, following Gosar, told his audience: “White people are done being bullied!”

The following day, Fuentes posted a picture to his Twitter account of him and Gosar getting coffee together. A few days later, Gosar tweeted a meme that included the motto of Fuentes’ white nationalist group.

Even after a public outcry, Gosar appeared at the same conference a year later, this time in a pre-recorded video. (He subsequently said the appearance was due to a miscommunication.) At that conference, Fuentes remarked: “Now, [the media is] going and saying, ‘Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing.”

Following the event, Gosar claimed he was done “dealing with Nick.” But he wasn’t: In September, he tweeted a link to a documentary about Fuentes, with a comment about “the persecution against Christians and Conservatives by the Biden Regime.” He eventually deleted the tweet.

In an email to constituents Thursday explaining his vote to boot Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, Gosar falsely said the congresswoman “has expressed a deep hatred for Jewish people and Israel.”

“Representative Omar has pursued a reckless and fundamentally anti-American agenda while in the United States House of Representatives,” Gosar wrote. “She regularly engages with racists, supports and condones racism, and champions anti-American sentiments.”

Gosar’s email, and the Republican resolution he voted on to expel Omar from the committee, cited a handful of tweets and comments from the congresswoman, such as a tweet in which she said U.S. politicians’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby.” (Omar later apologized for the remark.) Gosar also cited a public appearance in which Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” comparing pro-Israel lobbying efforts to those of the National Rifle Association and the fossil fuel industry.

Gosar’s ties to white nationalists go back years. In 2019, he was following explicit white nationalists on his personal Twitter page ― accounts with names like @TradNatWife88 (“88” is a common white nationalist code for “Heil Hitler”). One account that Gosar followed published tweets like “We need a leader who can rile the masses of Whites with their eye’s [sic] closed,” and “Wherever there’s n[******] they’ll be n[******].”

More recently, Gosar has tweeted (and then deleted) support for former President Donald Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He has also tweeted a video of an animated version of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Despite that behavior, Republicans, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have restored Gosar to committee assignments after Democrats in the previous House majority voted to kick him off various committees.

Gosar’s office didn’t respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

#us politics #news #huffington post #2023 #118th congress #antisemitism #racists #racism #rep. ilhan omar #rep. paul gosar #white supremacists #white nationalists #nick fuentes #house foreign affairs committee #america first caucus #us house of representatives

[rapeculturerealities]

JD Vance Suggests People in ‘Violent’ Marriages Shouldn’t Get Divorced

Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate JD Vance speaks to supporters of former President Donald Trump on May 6, 2022 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

JD Vance said people need to be more willing to stay in unhappy marriages for the sake of their kids—and seemed to suggest that in some cases, “even violent” marriages should continue.

The Ohio Republican Senate nominee, talking to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California last September, gave an extended answer that claimed that people now “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had done long-term damage to a generation of children.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.

“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy

#Vance #Divorce #intimate partner violence #Domestic violence

[mariacallous]

Amid all the horror, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had one cleansing effect. The self-satisfied notion that the West is Christendom and that our democratic and liberal values are rooted in Christianity is taking one hell of a beating.

As it turns out, the greatest threat to the ‘Christian’ West comes from Russia, whose imperialist expansion into historically Christian Ukraine and the attendant crimes against humanity are supported with ghoulish enthusiasm by the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia’s contempt for the supposedly religiously inspired values of democracy and freedom depends for its ultimate triumph on evangelical Christian voters returning Donald Trump to power in the 2024 US presidential election. Once in the White House, Trump has made it very clear that he will cut off support for Ukraine and leave ‘Christian’ Europe to fend for itself.

In other words, a victory for evangelical Christians’ preferred candidate will ensure the defeat of the values of the supposedly Christian West. Surely (and finally) we can now dispense with a version of Christian identity politics that has always been flattering and foolish in equal measure.

The argument that ancient cultural identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world came from Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis. Western civilisation, he maintained in 1992, was built by Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant variants. It covered the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, Australia, and Oceania, but not, strangely, Catholic South America. The West and its values were incompatible with the world’s other civilisations, most notably Islam.  

‘The most important distinctions among peoples are [no longer] ideological, political, or economic,’ Huntington declared. ‘They are cultural.’

Cultural determinism had a huge appeal after the failure of the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Otherwise respectably liberal people held that democracy and human rights were not for Muslims. Islamic culture could not handle them. Look at the Muslim Middle East, we were told. Only Tunisia was a democracy, and a visibly failing democracy at that.

Equally, Huntington held that the Orthodox Christian world was also condemned to be in an inevitable conflict with the Protestant and Catholic West. Huntington’s ideas did not directly inspire the revival of Russian illiberalism and imperialism—a foreign intellectual could never hold such power. But his emphasis on the role of religion and his notion of a separate Orthodox civilisation led by Russia appealed to Putinists for all the obvious reasons.

And yet today Russia, an Orthodox-dominated empire, is invading Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world is fighting a civil war.

The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.

Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so.  Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

 She spoke of a personal crisis and of finding ‘life without any spiritual solace unendurable’. But she made clear that her conversion was rooted in political rather than religious belief.

Hirsi Ali saw Christianity as a political identity. ‘Liberalism is rooted in Christianity,’ she declared at one point. It was a bulwark against China, Russia, and Iran, and an antidote to her ideological pet hates. ‘We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy,’ she wrote. ‘And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.’  

Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominion that Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.

But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution.  It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.

The worst of it is not the determinism but the complacency – the idea that, while we in the West have our human rights and democracies, the rest of humanity, alas, is doomed by culture and history to never enjoy our advantages. Sad, but once you are on the wrong side of civilisation’s clashes you can never escape your cultural destiny. It is the conservative’s version of the woke left’s cultural essentialism.

Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.

A Trump victory would lead to a Russian victory in Ukraine and the unravelling of European security. If this happens, the very Christians that Huntington, Hirsi Ali and Holland believe to be the providers of Western values will have destroyed Western culture.

In the 2020 presidential election, 81 per cent of white evangelical Protestant voters backed Trump, and they did so fervently. When Trump first appeared in 2016, you could have argued that the relationship between Christian conservatives and a politician who was not remotely religious, and who had committed all the sins known to scripture, was merely transactional.

Christian voters held their noses in return for Trump appointing judges who would impose their religious prejudices, most notably concerning abortion, on the rest of the United States.

But any sense that this was a marriage of convenience has long gone. Evangelical Christianity has embraced Trump and gone along with his every assault on the US Constitution. And two religious factors that Christian apologists rarely mention or even think about explain this righteous love for a pagan candidate: apocalyptic millenarianism and theocracy.

Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,explains both well. Alberta, an evangelical Christian himself, talks of the end-of-days mood in American evangelicalism. As he explained in an Atlantic interview, many evangelicals believe that ‘the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, it is not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself.’

Alberta is telling us what we already know. American Christianity, at least in its white evangelical Christian form, is not the shield of the West. If anything, religious conservatives admire Putin and celebrate his homophobia. In the words of Steve Bannon, the Machiavelli of the far right, the US should support Putin because ‘he’s anti-woke’. The real enemy of the Christian right is not Russia or China or Iran but the American left. This is why, to use Alberta’s phrase, we see today a ‘fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe.’ Trump will destroy the left, or so he says, and that is all that matters.

And if the left’s destruction means taking down American democracy, denying the verdicts of lawful elections and storming Congress, so be it.  Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.

This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.

[pruning-the-minds-garden]

Harry Potter and JK Rowling

Before we get started -

What this post is: a relatively brief run-down with examples of what I have personally dealt with, thought about, and where my ethical/moral compass is regarding this in March 2023.

What this post isn't: a comprehensive discussion of why JK Rowling is considered what she very clearly is.

I'm also going to put a Read More, because a lot of trans people are just fucking tired of talking and reading about this and it's okay if you aren't in the right brain space to deal with this at all.

Introduction

If you still like Harry Potter, if you still get good childhood feels from the world or the fandom, if you like to read fanfiction or post GIFs or quote from the series off the cuff... that's fine. At least, that's fine to me. Your feelings are not inherently an attack on anyone, nor do you need to change them. However, if you materially support the IP - and JK Rowling herself by extension - then you have gone from "I like the way Chick-fil-A tastes" to "I eat at Chick-fil-A" and you need to deal with the ethics of that. If you choose not to care ("no ethical consumption under capitalism, therefore I'll consume what I like without concern for the consequences"), that also is your choice, but I think it's a choice many can and will - and IMO are right to - judge you for. You could make other choices, but you've chosen to make that one, and I think it exists in the realm of things for which a person can be judged.

There are four instructive examples I can think of for this, each illustrating a different part of the basic argument I made above. I'll follow that up with a broader discussion to bring it home.

Example 1: HP Lovecraft / The Cthulhu Mythos

This is an objectively cool mythos and world. Yeah there are parts that are lifted from others, but it is damn neat for those who like subtle, creepy, otherworldly horror and want to inject some hentai-adjacent elements into their fiction.

That said, HP Lovecraft - the author and creator of the whole thing - was a huuuuuuuuuuuuge racist. He wasn't subtle about it, nor ambivalent, nor conflicted - he was just a racist. If you read the source material at all, some of that comes through (the frequency of discussion of "Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid" 'types' just as an easy example, along with the portrayal of native people and non-Christian spiritual practice), but you can create and consume derivative works ("Lovecraft Country," for example) that do not contain or highlight, or that even subvert, those elements. However, some do. You need to be aware of that and watch what you consume, so that you aren't - advertently or inadvertently - supporting white supremacists.

Also HP Lovecraft is, himself, dead. Whenever you consume work in his IP you are not necessarily handing him a few cents of royalties of every dollar legitimately spent.

So, by this point, as long as you aren't consuming the racist parts of the Cthulhu Mythos because they are racist, or doing so blind to their racism, but are choosing instead those derivative works that are better... then I think that's fine.

Example 2: Orson Scott Card / Ender's Game

I think it's safe to say that Orson Scott Card has some, at the very least, controversial views. He voted for Trump in 2016. He thinks Barack Obama is morally equivalent to Adolf Hitler. His writings have been seen as homophobic, and his views as similar to that. He's against same-sex marriage, even now. He grew up in the LDS (Mormon) church and still actively associates with them, meaning that he donates a percentage of his income to the church and a portion of that goes to lobbying efforts for conservative causes and political candidates, as well as supporting a massive and untaxed corporation masking itself as a church. And, as of this writing, he's still alive.

If you buy or consume anything official in that IP, which he still has rights to, you are supporting him and those causes. Utah - largely run by the Mormon church - just outlawed gender-affirming health care for trans youth. Although he did not earn backend profits from ticket sales of "Ender's Game" the success of that movie was still going to determine the marketability of the rest of the IP to movie studios. However, he still makes money from book sales. So, if you buy "Ender's Game" or another of his books new off of Amazon, you are giving him money.

Should you? I don't think you should. Go buy second-hand instead, or something else that won't profit him.

Example 3: Chick-Fil-A

Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A contribute, and continue to contribute, to social causes that are conservative, anti-LGBT, and dedicated to a theocratic vision of America dominated by Evangelical spiritual practices made manifest as government policy. If you go there to buy a chicken sandwich, you are giving their foundation, and those causes, money.

And, there are other chicken places. Whether you think they are "better" is a matter of taste (I prefer Popeye's), but the undeniable fact is that they exist. However, there are some situations where that is not available. For example -

Back in 2002, when I was in college, the only edible on-campus restaurant at a price I could was Chick-fil-A. At the time I didn't know what I was contributing to, but if I did I still might have eaten there some days because it was the only acceptable option. There are many others who live in analogous situations, whether on a campus or in a food dessert. However, now that I know, I choose other restaurants whenever I am able. Chick-fil-A is a food of last resort.

When others have bought Chick-fil-A for me, I've opted to not eat it. Now that I know their legacy, I cannot contribute to that and the only way to get through to people who'd buy it for you anyway despite knowing the aforementioned is to waste their money by not eating it. If they see that, they'll stop spending it, and although they'll keep eating there you will cease to be a part of the moral math.

Example 4: Proctor & Gamble Corporation

P&G own some of the most recognizable brands in the world - Charmin, Crest (toothpaste), Dawn, Oral-B, Downy, Gain, Pampers, Febreeze, Mr. Clean, etc - and they undoubtedly do some stuff at least some of you will find reprehensible. They are one of the last holdouts manufacturing products in Russia, despite the sanctions. They have used and profited from child and slave labor. They do lots of lobbying for and contributing to both sides of the American political aisle.

But, they are also almost impossible to avoid. The list of brands they own means they have an effective monopoly on many parts (dish soap, laundry detergent, etc) of your grocery basket, no matter what brand you buy. So, what is the moral math on buying those products?

The moral math is necessities are necessary. You can and should contribute to causes you care about, but inasmuch as you can't avoid buying these things, you cannot avoid contributing to that degree to those causes. That's just a part of life, and your unavoidable moral footprint that you leave behind on the world. This is the kind of thing meant by "no ethical consumption under capitalism."

So, go ahead and buy the Pampers if that's what you need. Be aware of what you are contributing to as best you can be, and contribute directly to causes you care about where you can, but below a certain threshold it just isn't worth it to worry about that.

Is this Hogwarts: Legacy? No. First, a video game is not a necessity. Second, even if a video game is a necessity in some circumstance (parents managing their children in specific situations, etc), it needn't be that video game.

Conclusion

JK Rowling is not Proctor & Gamble. She's not even Orson Scott Card, and since she's still alive she definitely isn't Lovecraft. She is directly tied into the backend profits of Hogwarts: Legacy (unlike the game's developers, who have already been paid all they are ever going to - buying this game doesn't support them), in addition to the other licensed Wizarding World merch. She has made it clear that she considers the profitability of that IP to be an endorsement of her views, and a license to keep loudly advocating for them. And, she puts her money where her mouth is.

If you buy that game, you are in essence writing a small check to an anti-trans, anti-Jewish hate group in exchange for your wand-slinging. That is the choice you are making. Now, understanding that ruins the magic of the IP for many, and they choose to avoid Harry Potter entirely. That's a reasonable choice to make. It is also reasonable to say "no, you move" and choose to continue to see favorably the things that framed your childhood, while taking an unambiguous moral stance - through not purchasing the game - against supporting transphobia and antisemitism now. But, if you twist yourself into knots in order to justify purchasing the game, know that no amount of mental gymnastics escapes the basic conclusion that you are supporting those things.

If you didn't know before, you know now. I understand that many say "how can you not know?!?" because JKR has hardly been subtle these past few years... but I'm not one of them. You are allowed to not understand things until you do. But, once you do, you are obligated to act on that newfound understanding. The veil of ignorance is gone, so if you choose that now you know what you're buying, and caveat emptor, because (many of) the trans people in your life care about that.

Why does it matter? I agree that Hogwarts: Legacy is hardly the forefront of the fight for trans rights, but it's a small, easy choice you can make, and that many who claim to care about this issue are nevertheless choosing not to make. I have myself already lost friends and had to leave groups over this. I did that because if you can't make that small choice to protect me or my rights, how the fuck do you expect me to believe you'll stand up for me when it matters more? A minor inconvenience is enough to tip your moral scales, so trans rights might not be nothing to you, but they certainly weigh less than a feather on your conscience. Imagine if David Duke or Fred Phelps became a famous author and people were buying games based on their writings. How would you feel as a Black and/or LGBT person? Yeah.

Anyway, here's a map as of five days ago, of where legislation stands in the United States seeking to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

But go ahead and enjoy your wizard game.

I don't expect people to stop loving the world, but ceasing support for the author ought to be an easy choice for people to make. Experience suggests otherwise, however.

#harry potter #hogwarts legacy #transphobia #antisemitism #death of the author #but the author is still alive tho? #ethics

[andthebeanstalk]

My sister-in-law frustrates me to no end even though we barely ever interact because she keeps inviting my partner to parties with her Christian Republican friends, even though my partner told her not to send an invite to us if those friends will be there. And even though my sister-in-law is bisexual!!

And then she turns around and complains about not knowing how to deal with her friends saying, like, horrible sexist stuff as though that is just some natural unavoidable quirk of having friends!

Like, these Christian Republicans she has befriended don't seem to be kind - they're not even nice a lot of the time! They don't make for good friends, and she doesn't seem happy or supported in relation to them. In fact, she basically only ever talks about how her friends and/or current boyfriend are making her unhappy!

Because here's the thing: The effect of prioritizing 'including your Trump-supporter friends at your parties' over 'being invested in creating a safe space for marginalized people in your home', is that people who DO care about creating those safe spaces... won't wanna hang out with you! Because if you invite both cats and mice to your table equally, only the cats will show!

She's so afraid of losing the shitty friends she has now that she allows them to act as barriers to accessing friends who are invested in her wellbeing in a capitalistic hellscape!

It makes me sad because she's basically trapped herself, and there's nothing I can do to offer help without either compromising my morals or making my partner's life way harder by starting shit with her family.

Like, I consider myself a good friend, yeah? I try really really hard to be one, and it matters to me immensely. I am ride-or-die for the folks I love, and I am invested in being open and vulnerable and radically safe to be around when it comes to building strong friendships that are mutually fulfilling. I have a unique talent for validating people that I have honed for years because I genuinely want to make sure people feel safe and loved and seen.

And if my sister-in-law and I were friends, I could give all of that to her. I would strive to be an example of what it looks like when someone decides to care about you and treat you right on purpose, without expecting anything in return but your mutual respect. She would be family. She would be [Queer] Family. I would see to it that she knew she could call on me when she needed a friend.

But like.

This asshole has invited me to hang out with Trump supporters on multiple occasions.

We ain't gonna be friends.

#original #diary #family shit #I'll just continue to act friendly at family events #my friends help make me a better person. i don't think she could say the same for hers. makes me mad and sad #reminds me of the time i had to end a friendship bc a woman i had been inviting to group events revealed to me that she was #literally friends with Kelly Ann Conway. yes the aid to the president. that Kelly Ann. and when i tell you this friend of mine did NOT #understand why her defending Kelly Ann Conway made me feel unsafe. it was WILD #that's how my sister-in-law reacted when my wife was like 'hey stop inviting my non-cis ass to parties with transphobes' #both made arguments similar to 'i already don't have many friends why do you want me to lose more??' #like girlies you can't invite me and a bunch of homophobic Christians to the same party what is fucking wrong with you?? #you can goddamn bet if you came to one of my parties there wouldn't be anyone there who'd try to defend the Trump administration #loneliness is frightening and painful and no joke but cowardice is no joke either #and this attitude meant that my wife and i could not safely rely on her when we went through several crisis situations #and this is something i find difficult to forgive bc shit was touch and go over here for a couple years #my wife isn't even as salty as i am about it but she never is when the primary person harmed is herself #maybe if sister-in-law recognized the flawed behavior and changed but she probably won't tbh and i have shit to do #have fun with your fascist friends girlie i wonder if sometimes it feels more lonely than if you were alone #have fun practicing the white silence our parents got so good at; you're really carrying on the family business your dad must be so proud < #i haven't had to deal with friends saying sexist shit for literal years sorry you've made yourself unsafe to trans people i guess #making friends is hard i know that all too well. but i also know that the more friends i make who make me feel sad and small #then the less time i have for friends that make me feel loved and motivate me to be a better person. time=limited. people=over 6 billion. #school was harder because the amount of folks was more limited. same with small towns. but we are all ADULTS LIVING IN CHICAGO #capitalism makes finding friends harder too but like it has GOT to matter to you that Trans people and POC feel safe #we each have control over whether oppressed people feel safe around us. don't fucking waste that.

[locallesbianheathen]

hey bitches <3

I haven't been on here in a while, because i've been trying to take a bit of a social media break for my mental health (spoiler: it didn't really work lmao) but after everything thats happened since 2020, I feel like I really need to talk about the train wreck that has been this decade.

In 2020, as we all know, the infamous event involving George Floyd and the subsequent protests around police brutality and extreme racial prejudice against people of colour, particular Black people, from the police sparked international debate around firmly ingrained racism in government and law enforcement. In Australia, where I live, there were several protests, not just around the George Floyd event, but also calling for justice for Indigenous Australians who are up to 10 times more likely to be incarcerated, with increasing numbers of unexplained deaths in custody due to mistreatment.

In 2021, the United States capital was marched on by Trump supporters following the inauguration of President Biden and religious protests took the US by storm, with heavy hate-fueled attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community and non-Christians.

In 2022, Russia began an invasion of Ukraine without provocation, sidestepping declarations of war and avoiding the wrath of NATO and countries allied against Russia as a result of peacekeeping efforts. The Don't Say Gay bill was passed, which prohibits educational discussion surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation. And Roe v. Wade was overturned, revoking women's rights to bodily autonomy.

Not even a quarter of the way through 2023, the Willow Project, which essentially sells Alaska for oil and gas which will lead to around 240 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to be released, severely accelerating the effects of global warming, was approved, and there are proposals from Australian politicians to ban abortions.

Every single fucking day we are losing control of our lives and our future. We have stood silent for too long and now we will be heard. And we will be louder than ever. Old, rich, privileged white men should not be allowed to dictate every aspect of our lives and we will not stand for it any longer. Scream it. Write it. Emblazon it on rooftops. Our generation and this movement will not stop. We will win.

[amethystblack]

I've been backreading your asks and responses WAY more than is healthy. 😅 But one story I'm curious about is: What was your coming out + transitioning like? (You don't have to answer if you don't want to.)

I put this off for a while for no real reason, but I don't mind.

The first person I came out to was an-ex girlfriend. It led to us breaking up so I un-came out for a while. Then we were friends again and she moved in with me and started going out again but she was supportive now. She lent me some old clothes, helped me get new ones, and was there supporting me when I had the talk with my mom.

My mom has been very supportive by and large. She always told me she wouldn't mind if I were gay-- and, well, I am. Just not in the way she expected. Still, the initial conversation was not graceful on her part. She fought it from the angle of being very convinced that because of being trans, I would be targeted and beaten to death. She grieved, but then she educated herself and did her best.

I left my existing job after coming out to my boss. The workplace had "this is a safe space" type signs plastered all over it in the first place so I wasn't really concerned about her reaction-- but she basically said "yeah no surprise there". Still, we agreed I should leave the job because it would be difficult to keep the respect of our clients (at risk inner city youth-- lots of rowdy teenagers who had never met a trans person, etc. the decision was ultimately mine)

I started going to school full time in my last year of university. I couldn't legally change my name, but all of my professors were supportive. I was already in the gender studies course so that was probably part of why, but also I was lucky to be born in a liberal city.

When I presented male, I isolated myself from my peers. I didn't really have anything in common with boys, but I was afraid to reach out to other girls in case I made them uncomfortable. Then, after I realized I was trans (but before I came out), I felt like there was no point in trying to make friends under an identity that was going to go away. So for the first three years of uni, I basically just didn't talk to anyone. It made it easier when I did eventually present female. I didn't make any lasting friends still, but I at least had conversations and it felt much better.

Next was therapy to get clearance for HRT. I was able to find one who specialized in gender issues, but I was very prepared for a drawn out slugfest where I was waiting forever to 'prove' that I needed help. Because I was already full time, it didn't take that long. The main thing my therapist wanted me to be sure to do was come out to my other family members. Of those, I was mainly worried about my dad and my grandma.

I met my dad in town for my birthday and told him over lunch. He ended the conversation asking if I wanted anything for a present. I told him the only present I wanted was for him to accept me. That afternoon he went and bought me a 3DS instead. ...But after some time he eventually came around too.

My grandma was republican, conservative christian, would go on to vote for trump-- etc. I was quite sure she wouldn't be accepting, and I was ready to cut off my extended family entirely and never speak to them again. She was offended that I thought she would place her ideals above her concern for me as her grandchild. She didn't entirely get it-- but she ultimately was supportive of LGBT folks, and she was supportive of me. She had a hard time adjusting to using the right pronouns and name, so she and I ended up having a running joke where if she messed up my name, she would be like "Oh, just call me Harold." It was awkward to have to remind Harold (tm) in public sometimes, but not for lack of her trying.

Honestly I don't remember when I came out online, but people had thought I was a girl for years beforehand and I'd used the name Amethyst since I was 14 or so, so it was probably pretty unremarkable.

Changing legal documents was tedious but happened. Jobs were scary but I had passing privilege even before HRT. HRT was slow but being on it, feeling like I was getting better rather than worse, was all I really needed. Time and estrogen heal all wounds.

I've been a little choppy with this so it isn't too long-winded, and yet it's still half an essay. But I hope something in my experience can help you, anon <3

#ask ame

[whostolemygoldfish]

I accidentally ended up talking to a 'MURICAN alt right guy by accident this is about how it went:

Guy: I'm disappointed in the way that this country is headed. (probably talking about the speck of diversity/representation and the fact that people are realizing that It's Not Okay To Shoot People™️)

Me: Same. (Talking about the pseudo dictatorship in Florida, the genocide of trans people, police brutality, Roe v. Wade overturning, Trump, school shootings, ect.)

Guy: I think we need more support for veterans.

Me: yeah actually many of them live in poverty and do not have enough support, and there's no proper care for the trauma that most of them will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The government does not give a shit abo-

Guy: I also think that it's my god given right to burn POC, gay/trans people, poor people, disabled people, and non-christian people at the stake.

Me: ...Okay that's not right

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Christians condemn insurrectionists in the US and Brazil – call for participants and organizers to be held accountable.

Excerpt from the pastors at the Word and the Way...

https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/christian-nationalism-invades-brazil

[...] Much like Trump and Bolsonaro received advice from shared political figures (like Steve Bannon), they’ve also been helped by their shared religious supporters. Like Lou Engle. The Pentecostal preacher peddled claims of “voter fraud” after the 2020 presidential election, casting the results showing Trump lost as proof of demonic forces at work. But Engle doesn’t just evangelize in the United States. He’s held large “The Send” prayer rallies across the country, but also in Brazil.

With more than 140,000 people attending the 12-hour “The Send” event in Brazil in 2020, then-President Bolsonaro came on stage to talk about his faith in Jesus. That led journalist Jon Ward to wonder about the impact of such religious movements on this week’s political scene in Brazil.

“Is there any self-reflection going on among Christian leaders who have supported Trump and Bolsonaro?” Ward wrote in his Substack newsletter Border-Stalkers yesterday. “Twice now, political leaders who were elected in no small part because of evangelicals have refused to acknowledge their losses, and their supporters have waged violent assaults on their country’s own government, law enforcement, and journalists. Is there any self-assessment inside evangelicalism among the many Christian leaders whose support enabled both these men to get elected and to nearly topple their respective democracies?”

The Catholic Church in Brazil quickly condemned Sunday’s violence. A statement from the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil argued, “These attacks must be immediately stopped, and their organizers and participants must be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Citizens and democracy need to be protected.”

It’s a good first step. Christian leaders must condemn the violence. But then Christians must also consider how pastors and churches helped inspire the attack on the government. And Christians in the U.S. need to evaluate our role in the violence of Jan. 6 and Jan. 8. We must stop going therefore to make disciples of all nations as we baptize them into the gospel of insurrection.

______________________________

Lou Engle (born October 9, 1952) is an American Charismatic Christian leader, best known for his leadership of TheCall, which holds prayer rallies. ... Engle strongly supports criminalization of abortion, and encouraged his audiences to ... vote for anti-abortion political candidates. Engle maintains that issues such as abortion and homosexuality should remain at the center of the evangelical movement.

Engle was described by Joe Conason as a "radical theocrat". The Southern Poverty Law Center says he can occasionally "venture into bloodlust."

______________________________

On multiple occasions, Jair Bolsonaro has publicly endorsed physical violence as a legitimate and necessary form of political action. In 1999, when he was 44 years old and a representative in the Brazilian Congress, Bolsonaro said during a TV interview that the only way of "changing" Brazil was by "killing thirty thousand people, beginning with Fernando Henrique Cardoso" (then President of Brazil).

#insurrection #Donald Trump #Jair Bolsonaro #Lou Engle #violence #steve bannon #Brazil

[sohinitheexplorer]

My introduction to the world of Digital Activism.

Today I learnt a little bit about a phenomenon called digital activism. In vague terms it is the process of standing up for a cause or advertising any kind of ideology that may help serve some kind of issue for the betterment of some kind of community......all done electronically. It is a revolutionary way of mass communication that helps people become aware of situations that they haven’t come across personally and can further influence them to take a certain course of action towards a particular cause or causes.

This whole discussion about led me to think deeply about what really is ACTIVISM?

Well this question has multifaceted answers and verbs to look forward to:

1) When we want to talk on behalf of someone in a way that brings light to their struggle so that people become aware of it, it is called ADVOCACY. For example, actor Ethan Hawke standing up for LGBTQ+ community rights.

2) When we want an audience to focus on what we want to say and stand for a cause, it is called DRAWING ATTENTION to the cause. For example, The Principles of Communism (1847) by Friedrich Engles is a small booklet that highlights worker rights and future of capitalistic worldview/economy and it’s dangers. He predicted the colonisation of India and China via rapid industrialisation.

3)When we constantly supply information to some kind of platform to shed light on a particular situation that needs to be fixed, it is called RAISING AWARENESS. For example, Rollie Williams a climate change activist made a YouTube channel to publish videos and content about climate change and pollution. Now he has a huge platform of approximately 3,89,000 subscribers who engage with his work constantly and are constatly motivated to be more eco friendly in their life and life choices.

4) When we want to approach a person or a party who is causing the genesis of the cause everyone is standing for with all the appropriate evidence, it is called HOLDING someone ACCOUNTABLE. For example, Christian Smalls is an American labor organizer known for his role in leading Amazon's worker organization on Staten Island, a borough in New York City.

5) When someone exercises the act of retrospection of their own actions and situation, in a way they become aware of a certain kind of systemic advantage. This is called PRIVILAGE CHECKING. For example, Hello, Privilege. It's Me, Chelsea is a 2019 documentary directed by Alex Stapleton and starring Chelsea Handler. The premise revolves around examining the concept of white privilege.

6) When we try to engage in a conversation that encourages changes in behavior of the person or part at fault, that is called NEGOTIATION. For example, Throughout 1928 in Colonial India, cries of “Simon, Go Back” rang out in every city which the British Commission visited. And eventually, Indians got their independence on 15th of August 1947.

7) When we want to communicate our activism through visuals or art, that is called SYMBOLISING. For example, Pink Venus and Fist were created by the feminist community of the contemporary era to symbolise feminism and female power.

And as I said, all this activism done electronically is called digital activism. I think the coolest part about digital activism is it allows the causes to gain momentum in a short period of time....without taking too much space....or barely any space since it is virtual however the impact is very real. I am an environmentalist, so I really appreciate the part that this all is very eco friendly...no by products no wastage of resources, I mean not as much as making posters on paper to yell about saving trees, or travelling in cars rallying about how we hate Trump while burning fossil fuels or, the most wasteful activity of making an effigy of OPEC founders to let them know about their catastrophic impact on earth's ecology and economy. That is what I care about.

References :

1) Ethan Hawke supporting LGBTQ+ cause; 2011 publish Human Rights Campaign Youtube Chanel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO4KeFiXBik&ab_channel=HumanRightsCampaign

2) The Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engles (1847)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

3) Rollie Williams Climate Town

https://www.youtube.com/c/ClimateTown

4) Christian smalls

Amazon fired Chris Smalls. Now the new union leader is one of its biggest problems. What’s next for the face of America’s new labor movement by Shirin Ghaffary  Jun 7, 2022. Photographs by José A. Alvarado Jr. for Vox

https://www.vox.com/recode/23145265/amazon-fired-chris-smalls-union-leader-alu-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders-aoc-labor-movement-biden

5) Simon Go Back History

Opinion | 90 years later, India must send Simon back Columns By Arghya Sengupta Updated on Jul 19, 2019

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/opinion-90-years-later-india-must-send-simon-back/story-2V64TbLO9T7EdyutjcHTPL.html

#climate activism

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was once a darling of the far-right. Apparently not anymore.

Republican Rep. Greene disavowed white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, who’s now getting cozy with disgraced rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye), “and his racist, anti-semitic ideology” in a tweet last month. Ever since, Fuentes’ followers—known as “groypers”—have viciously turned on her.

Greene’s tweet was prompted by backlash to a dinner hosted last month by former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-lago featuring Ye, who is in the midst of a very public antisemitic meltdown, and Fuentes.

The dinner catapulted Fuentes into national headlines and exposed him—and his friends in high places—to an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

But Greene’s condemnation of Fuentes came about 10 months too late. She was widely criticized for speaking at his America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, earlier this year but brushed off the criticism, claiming simply that she didn’t know who he was. (Trump used the same excuse following the controversial dinner).

While Fuentes and his army of groypers might have been OK with Greene claiming not to know him, they were not at all happy about her recent disavowal of him—and say it’s the latest evidence that she’s sold out her far-right fans and betrayed their white nationalist “America First” movement. Only weeks earlier, she rebuffed her far-right colleagues in Congress by calling on them to back Rep. Kevin McCarthy in his bid for re-election as House Speaker.

McCarthy is viewed as an establishment “RINO”—Republican in name only—by many in the far-right, but Greene knows she needs him on-side if she wants to regain her committee assignments, which were stripped from her in 2021 after her statements on social media encouraging violence against her Democrat colleagues. So palling around with white nationalists, as she’s done in the past, may not be the best idea if she wants to claw back political cachet—especially given the rebuke of far-right candidates during the midterms.

“She’s just weak. She goes and says something edgy to get attention, and then when the pressure comes, she buckles,” said Fuentes on a podcast after Greene’s disavowal of him. “You know, she’s gonna be a MAGA-mom and QAnon and all that, and then the second Kevin McCarthy reprimands her and she loses her committee, she goes and apologizes.”

Fuentes also mocked Greene’s dreams of becoming the face of “Christian nationalism” in the U.S. “How are you going to be the face of Christian nationalism when you’re a divorced woman, girlboss,” said Fuentes. “I’m so glad I don’t have to pretend to support that anymore.”

He’s also taken to calling Greene “Large Marge” and is encouraging his followers to heckle her at events.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer also announced that she was done with Greene. “MTG is no longer an ally to America First,” Loomer declared on Telegram. “She may have claimed to be so that she could climb the political ladder, but she has shown she is all talk and zero action, unless of course the action is selling t-shirts and wine glasses.”

“You are their slave Marjorie, a slave to the Democrats and the Media that you constantly talk about,” wrote Holocaust denier Vince James. “By that statement [disavowing Fuentes] it just got to show you're living according to the rules of their game, that they've completely rigged against us."

“Here’s my take: grifters are gonna grift, and it’s just sad that we have to go through that kind of betrayal,” said far-right groyper Dalton Clodfelter about Greene on his podcast.

Greene has only doubled-down on her condemnation of Fuentes and his ilk since her initial tweet. Last week, Fuentes and Ye appeared on Alex Jones’ show for an hours-long broadcast featuring unbridled anti-semitism. Greene said that she’d watched some of that and described Fuentes as “immature young man” and “racist.” “What has he ever done in his life?” asked Greene. “He knows nothing more than anyone else.” ​​

“I was concerned about some of the statements being made, Nick Fuentes being there as well,” she said. “The antisemitism, that has got to stop. It’s out of control, and we have no place for that anywhere in our politics or anywhere in our country.”

Greene then undermined her own statement with some “whataboutism” and tried to deflect blame by accusing Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Omar of antisemitism. (Similar accusations have followed because of her criticism of the Israeli government. She has apologized and has spoken out against rising antisemitism in the U.S.).

#us politics #news #vice news #2022 #rep. marjorie taylor greene #Georgia #nick fuentes #groypers #alt right #america first #america first caucus #ye #yedolf blitler #kanye west #don't vote for kanye #alex jones #infowars #antisemitism #donald trump #America first political action conference #rep. kevin mccarthy #Laura Loomer #christian nationalists #Vince James #Dalton Clodfelter #patriot takes #rep. ilhan omar

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Roe v Wade (Overturned): My Thoughts

I normally don’t like to join in “hot topics” but I have seen enough other people saying pointless things just to say them to stay quiet. Yes we still (currently) have the freedom of speech, but when certain things happen...like overturning roe v wade...then we need to use it SMARTLY. 

This is a highly charged emotional issue. But I like to take a logical step back and start with...what are we even talking about? As I have been “properly informed” by others, Roe v Wade was a landmark case in the supreme court that allowed privacy for abortion. Now remember, this was done in the 70′s. There were a lot of other cases made based on that, but it was never codified (or turned into a law). 

Government is by the people for the people. We elect the president by “majority”. One of the powers of the president is to elect people to Supreme court. The senate, also full of people we vote for, vote for the candidate and if they have the majority, they become a supreme court judge and serve for life. Obama tried to elect a new judge, but when Trump was coming in as next president, congress was not letting Obama’s pick in. Obama’s pick was pretty neutral. Trump comes in and puts 3 supreme court justices on there. Biden has put 1 so far. 

What does that have to do with anything? There are 9 justices on the supreme court. Trump changed 1/3 of them to what I am going to presume are conservative judges. He ran as a republican. Now fast forward, the supreme court reviews cases, like Roe v Wade, you need a majority vote to overturn it. If there are 9 judges, you need 5 for it and 4 against it. Abortion is generally not supported by “christians” (or religous people in general) as “life is precious” and “god would not want you to destroy life”. But take a step back even further, we SEPARATED CHURCH AND STATE when making America. 

What does overturning Roe v Wade do? It takes the “final say” on abortion out of the Federal Governments’ hands and puts it back into each states’ individual hands. So California decides to allow it or not, Texas decides to allow it or not, etc. But why would anyone want an abortion in the first place? You could be raped and not want to carry the child product of rape. You could be pregnant and have an unsafe pregnancy and need to abort it to save yourself. You could be young and you can’t take care of the child you would have. 

Now, you can say “the young girl should know better” or “there is free birth control” or “close your legs” or “stop asking for it”. All awful things to say. Sometimes someone doesn’t tell a young girl how babies are made, or doesn’t know to go to planned parenthood. And really, who is ever asking for “negative sexual attention”? I realize my own bias as I am a female writing this but switch the narrative, if I told a man: you are asking to be attacked sexually because you took your top off....wouldn’t you think I sounded a little full of myself? A little not caring that your consent is as important as mine? 

Also, I have heard the argument that “it doesn’t affect me” whether that applies because one is an older woman with kids already, or a woman that wants kids, or a man that doesn’t have a uterus in which to even receive an abortion. Really it affects us all and I will tell you why. If you are a woman whos young, you should have the right to one if you need it. If you are an older woman, you have a kid or niece that won’t have the right. If you are a man, unless you go gay, you might know a female that needs one and can’t get one. This really is also a slippery slope to the question...do they take away male reproductive rights in the future? 

But I am in California, where it has been declared a “safe haven” for abortions. Great, but people not from cali might come here to get abortions. Which if they need it, I hope they do. But this feels a lot like where the US does not even take care of its own problems but says let’s intervene in other parts of the world. And what if we get too conservative as a state and eventually say you can’t in cali? What if I move? But it shouldn’t be the governor making this a safe haven. Why did we not codify this in what...40 years? 

How do I personally feel about abortion? I am trying to have kids, so if I could safely have one, I would like to. I would not opt for one myself if I did not need it. I was almost ectopic my last attempt so I could of needed it. I believe each woman should make that decision for herself. I have seen an embryo get to the point where it starts to form and have a heartbeat, but that is why you can’t get one past a certain point. Life does start pretty early but if an abortion makes sense, in the land of the “free”, one should be able to make that choice for themselves. Should one be able to abort at any time? I think the first trimester makes sense, but that’s just me. I would not abort in the 2nd or 3rd. But that’s my personal opinion and choice. 

My social media has been full of people saying their opinion. At some point I did not want to hear a bunch of people complaining. Yeah that will come off a little rude but hear me out. Complaining means you have a problem with something, and you are using your freedom of speech and social media, to let the world know. But really, we thought it was going to be overturned and everyone lost their shit. Then it was and they lost their shit again. Complaining did not change anything. You know what I want to hear? The gameplan. What are we going to do to right this wrong? 

Also, is it just me seeing the bigger picture of...what else does this lead to? The supreme court already announced wanting to not allow gay marriage. We should be speaking up about that and making them think twice about overturning that. I also think I heard somewhere they separated church and state based on “discrimination against christians”...like what? They should get in trouble when they clearly go against the majority with their actions. I have always “joked” that my vote doesn’t count but really, am I wrong here? What else goes? How do we fix the wrong? Work smarter, not harder, people and let’s come together. Majority rules...right? Majority unite! Where are the petitions at? 

#rant #pixabay #hot topic #trending #roe v wade #overturned roe v wade #freedom of speech #california #safe haven #social media #democrat #republican #majority rules #democracy #supreme court #senate