The Las Vegas casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, died on January 11, 2021.
Donald Trump with Sheldon Adelson. Adelson reportedly contributed $75 million to Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign.
Adelson (and his Israeli born wife) was a fanatical political Zionist who, sadly, was the living embodiment of the old antisemitic slander that Jews all secretly loved Israel more than their country of residence.
Occasionally, caricatures — even slanderous caricatures — can be true.
Israeli apartheid is not limited to the Occupied Territories.
Apartheid reigns within Israel’s recognized borders as well.
Israel is NOT “the only democracy in the Middle East” because Israel is not a democracy.
As I show in my forthcoming book exposing the many errors of Christian Zionism, Israel is actually an extremely rigid ethnocracy. That is, a hierarchical state where one ethnic group (Jews) exercises the legal privilege of systematically discriminating against everyone else in the state (primarily Palestinians).
This is much more than a story about Adelson’s control over the Republican party. It is an expose in how big money donors, CEOs, and corporations are able to control American politics, including our foreign policy.
Below is an excerpt from Kane’s article, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
WITH THEdeath of 87-year-old billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party has lost its biggest benefactor.
A Palestinian girl sits inside a room of her family’s building which was damaged by Israel’s bombing attack in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Adelson’s legacy, however, will live on for generations, not only in his Israeli-born wife Miriam, who is expected to continue giving millions of dollars to the Republican Party, but in the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Adelson’s top concern. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” Adelson said in 2017.
More than anyone else, Adelson can claim credit for transforming the GOP into a party devoted to bolstering Israel’s military occupation and its expansion of West Bank settlements. And the Israeli
Israeli settlers regularly harass and attack Palestinians. They are typically protected by Israeli soldiers.
right, also bankrolled by Adelson, saw many of its political aspirations realized under Donald Trump’s presidency, a political turn that has fractured the long-standing bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state.
Adelson’s most important political conviction was that the Israeli right must be supported. The 19th-richest American used his $35 billion fortune to ensure that the GOP’s policy goals united with the Israeli right’s. In a 2010 speech, Adelson, a U.S. Army veteran, lamented that “the uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.” He added: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . .
. . . FROM 2008 TO 2016, Adelson opposed President Barack Obama at every turn, backing John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed attempts at defeating him and bankrolling the groups that fiercely wanted to defeat Obama’s Iran policies. In 2013, Adelson suggested that Obama launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Obama instead pursued his landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which he sealed in 2015.
But Adelson’s crowning achievements were yet to come. During the 2016
Israel’s Apartheid/ Annexation wall. As you see, the wall did not stop suicide bombers from entering Israel.
presidential primary, after all the GOP candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to meet with the casino magnate as part of what’s known as the “Adelson primary,” Adelson appeared to back Sen. Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk thought to be a top contender for winning the nomination. The casino magnate was said to be wary of Trump, who had demurred on whether he backed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital in a speech to the Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition. For his part, Trump, in October 2015, mocked Rubio for being Adelson’s “perfect little puppet.”
. . . Adelson wanted Trump to torpedo diplomacy with Iran; Trump backed out of the Iran deal in May 2018. Adelson believed the U.S. Embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; Trump did so, also in May 2018. (In September 2020, Adelson bought the U.S ambassador’s beach-view residence in the affluent Israeli city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv for $67 million, ensuring that the next U.S. ambassador won’t have a place to live near the old location of the U.S. Embassy.) Adelson wanted the U.S. to legitimize Israel’s policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; Trump did so in January 2019, reversing long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy that saw settlements as illegitimate obstacles to peace because they make a geographically viable Palestinian state impossible.
Officer Daniel Hodges is the young man who was trapped and crushed between the violent mob and a door post inside the Capitol building on January 6.
You have probably seen the video of his cries for help that has now been widely circulated.
His mouth is bloody. In multiple interviews he has described being beaten with his own baton. He was also tazed in the neck multiple times.
Fewer news sources have published Officer Hodges remarks on one of the most significant details about the pro-Trump mob who came to overturn the results of November’s election:
The insurrectionists were heavily armed.
You can read the entire article here. Below is an excerpt of an interview published by “The Police Tribune” where Hodges describes how the police had been confiscating weapons for hours prior to the capitol assault:
“The zealotry of these people is absolutely unreal,” Officer Hodges told reporters. “There were points where I thought it was possible I could either die or become seriously disfigured.”
He said he didn’t want to draw his service weapon because he said he knew that some of the rioters had guns, too, The Washington Post reported.
“I didn’t want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns— we had been seizing guns all day,” Officer Hodges said. “And the only reason I could think of that they weren’t shooting us was they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.”
Now-former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned in disgrace the day after the Capitol riot, said that he had requested additional help at the Capitol multiple times ahead of the planned Jan. 6 protest in DC.
History professor Loretta Ross published a provocative article at Counter Punch magazine yesterday addressing the increasingly anti-democratic
Professor Loretta Ross of Smith College
tendencies of the Republican party.
Four years ago I would have labelled her thesis a serious exaggeration.
But over the past four years, since the Republican party’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, I have found myself saying more and more often that Republican politicians do not really believe in democracy.
The entire “stop the steal” movement was nothing but an hysterical eruption of antidemocratic values among white devotees of Donald Trump, the Republican president.
Truth be told, I am not convinced that today’s Democratic party really believes in democracy, either.
We need look no further than the party’s coordinated efforts to rob Bernie Sanders (twice!) of the Democratic presidential nomination to find prima facie evidence of this fact.
Bernie Sanders would certainly have become the Democratic presidential nominee had he not been the target of manifold dirty tricks from the Democratic National Committee.
So much for the absurd accusations of conservative pundits who describe the Democratic party as a bastion of Marxist, socialist, radical Leftist revolutionaries. I don’t know what planet those people live on, but it’s not earth.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a “far left” party/movement in this country.
However, nowadays I must confess that given the Republican party’s behavior over the past 4 years, including its scandalous actions (or inactions) during and after the January 6th attack on Congress, I have come to believe that professor Ross’s words are very, very pertinent to our current situation.
Below is an excerpt of her article entitled “The Nazification of the Republican Party.” Or you can read the entire article here:
. . . Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United
Neo-Nazi insignia at the capitol on January 6
States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.
The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a
Neo-Nazi flag at the capitol riot
deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth (my emphasis). To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized.
The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated
Confederate flag inside Congress
with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests.
If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing.
Hitler led an insurrection against the German government in 1923 and was sentenced to five years in jail, served one, and used that leniency to commit the
Trump supporter wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt on capitol steps
Holocaust. Never forget that premature forgiveness before accountability is dangerous. Fascists are violent because of who THEY are, not what WE DO–like the ordinary Germans who underestimated the Nazis and thought they were just another political party on the right. Germans who weren’t Nazis passively went about their normal affairs by denying the realities of their Jewish neighbors, all for the sake of “unity.”
Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement
White nationalist insignia worn among pro-Trump rioters
of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party.
I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years.
The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future.
I’m calling them American Nazis, who adapted the playbook of the Third Reich. Trump may be gone but Trumpism is not. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, they prioritized their “whiteness over democracy.” This is highlighted by their
More neo-Nazi flags among rioters
implacable attack on voting rights. Republicans who encouraged this dangerous resurrection of fascism are already trying to erase what happened or describe it as simply a “First Amendment Protest.” These apologists trying to launder their shredded reputations should be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities to spread their contempt for democracy. As philosopher Karl Popper observed in 1945, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people.
America’s tattered global reputation is at stake in this unending Civil War. Instead of denouncing the traitors in 1865, we allowed them to be rehabilitated and enshrined in monuments across the country. Will our descendants look back and see that we flinched yet again when it was time to hold insurrectionists accountable? If not, we’ll have the shortest Reconstruction in history.
Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them.
CBN News reported on one of president Trump’s final edicts in declaring
Pro-life demonstrators participate in the 47th annual “March for Life” in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2020. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Friday, January 29 National Sanctity of Human Life Day.
“The pro-life organization Operation Rescue named the president its pro-life person of the year for 2020, saying:
“The Malachi Award is given by Operation Rescue every year to recognize individuals who sacrificially work to advance the cause of protecting the pre-born. …during President Trump’s administration, he has done more to protect unborn lives than any other president in U.S history.”
NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY, 2021
– A PROCLAMATION BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA –
– DONALD J. TRUMP –
“Every human life is a gift to the world. Whether born or unborn, young or old,
(Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
healthy or sick, every person is made in the holy image of God. The Almighty Creator gives unique talents, beautiful dreams, and a great purpose to every person. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we celebrate the wonder of human existence and renew our resolve to build a culture of life where every person of every age is protected, valued, and cherished. . .
“. . . Since my first day in office, I have taken historic action to protect innocent lives at home and abroad. . .
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: People gather for the 47th March For Life rally on the National Mall where U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the crowd. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
“. . . As a Nation, restoring a culture of respect for the sacredness of life is fundamental to solving our country’s most pressing problems. When each person is treated as a beloved child of God, individuals can reach their full potential, communities will flourish, and America will be a place of even greater hope and freedom.”
The hypocrisy of this statement is glaring, even though the same accusation could be laid at the feet of every presidential administration. After all, hypocrisy is at the heart of American politics.
However, as an American evangelical, I am always troubled by the anti-abortion movement’s hypocrisy in calling itself pro-life. For, as I and many others have said before, groups like Operation Rescue are anti-abortionactivistsNOT pro-life activists.
It is no small difference. Words matter.
Standing up for the sanctity of all human life everywhere is nowhere to be found on the agenda of evangelical activists. Neither was it a concern of Donald Trump’s.
In fact, Donald Trump’s total disregard for human life — other than his own — has been obvious over the past 4 years. The list of his anti-life actions is too long to cover here, so I will give only a few examples.
Lisa Montgomery, the first federal prisoner executed in 67 years. She also suffered acute mental illness.
the final weeks of his presidency. Trump’s last minute execution spree has killed more federal prisoners (including one mentally ill woman) than any previous president. (Yes, I believe every Christian, every American, must object to the death penalty.)
I could talk about Trump’s anti-life border policies — separating refugee families; losing track of children taken from their parents; keeping children in holding pens; arresting legitimate asylum seekers, labeling them as illegals, and then sending them back to their countries where they will face certain death.
These are not the actions of a pro-life president.
But I want to focus my attention on only one specific humanitarian scandal that has been enormously worsened by Trump’s policies: the war in Yemen.
For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.
Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.
Her bruised eyes still swollen shut, Buthaina Muhammad Mansour, believed to be four or five, doesn’t yet know that her parents, five siblings and uncle were killed when an air strike flattened their home in Yemen’s capital. The air strike, which killed at least 12 civilians. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah SEARCH “STRIKE MANSOUR” FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH “WIDER IMAGE” FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY. Matching text: YEMEN-SECURITY/AIRSTRIKE – RC1BFFB8F240
All of this blood is on American hands.
And if American church-goers were genuinely pro-life, we would be emphatically anti-war. We would be marching in the streets, pressuring the president to stop the bloodshed anywhere and everywhere that American power is killing, maiming, and suppressing the Image of God in this world.
But, then, that behavior would require us first to truly believe in the “sanctity of all human life” — which we obviously do not.
Sadly, few American evangelicals care about places like Yemen because we are a painfully provincial and ignorant people, too distracted by the obnoxious glitterati of commercialized, Christian success stories to look beyond our own self-centered existence.
The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).
In this case, the real enemy happens to be Iran, even though it’s the Yemeni people who now have the privilege of suffering from American terrorism in their own country.
Our sub-contractor in this horrific proxy war is Saudi Arabia, a long-time enemy of Iran — which makes outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s audacious accusations about Iran now providing safe harbor for Al Qaeda terrorists a laughable, buffoonish statement that should not only have set his pants on fire but left his body an ash heap on the podium.
(Perhaps I should stop being so surprised when infamously dishonest people like Mike Pompeo attend DC Bible studies and offer smiling testimony to their devout, evangelical, Christian faith.)
Even worse, the State Department has recently declared the Houthi/Yemeni group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.
The fact of the matter is that WE, the good old US of A, are the real terrorists who are destroying, not just Yemen, but a host of suffering nations around the globe.
As a radical, Salafist, jihadist, Sunni organization, Al Qaeda originated in Saudi Arabia. They are sworn enemies of the Shia nation, Iran.
So, Al Qaeda now happily works with us (as we happily work with them) in assisting their countrymen, the Saudis, to destroy the people of Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has been slaughtering people in Yemen, largely civilians, since 2015. Its #1 financier and weapons supplier is none other than the USA.
In March 2019 both houses of Congress passed a bill requiring the US to end its financial support and military involvement the Yemen war.
But President Donald J. Trump vetoed that bill as an “unnecessary” and “dangerous” attempt to weaken his powers to make war.
How very pro-life of him…
Thus, the slaughter in Yemen continues with the help of US intelligence services, covert ops, training, money, fighter jets, missiles, bombers, and other US military equipment.
The war-torn country of Yemen is in the midst of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world thanks in large part to a Saudi-led war fueled by American weapons. Now, as the war nears its six-year anniversary in March, any hopes for a diplomatic resolution have faded faster than the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outgoing administration recently announced plans to designate the Houthi rebels, the principal force battling both the Saudi-led Coalition and al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, as a foreign terrorist organization. The move effectively eliminates any ray of hope for the more than 24 million people struggling for survival amid war, siege, famine, and countless diseases and epidemics, according to the United Nations.
The largest humanitarian crisis in the world, made possible and sustained by United States of America. (Also see Juan Cole’s article at Informed Comment.)
Yemeni mother and child.
These tragic events illustrate the obscenity which lies at the heart of American politics, our foreign policy, and the evangelical, Christian nationalism that perpetuates the anti-life lies of American exceptionalism.
While purportedly Christian news organizations such as CBN prostitute themselves by offering establishment propaganda about a pro-life president and American evangelicals, here are a few hard, cold, truths to be faced:
Evangelicals, by-in-large, are not pro-life people. We may be anti-abortion people. But we then use that pro-life label like an infant’s pacifier to sooth ourselves into a comfortable, conscienceless coma allowing us to ignore the slaughter of foreign innocents.
American is not a great, humanitarian nation. Rather, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The United States is the greatest purveyor of death, violence, and destruction in the world today.” (My favorite line from his anti-Vietnam war speech; a speech that is rarely included in the bastardized memorials touted on MLK Day).
No, electing Christians to political office does not improve anything. In fact, it only confirms the doctrine of total depravity. Mike Pompeo is only one of millions of Donald Trump’s loyal, evangelical enablers.
Christian support for Trump was the equivalent of an anti-spiritual hysteria spread like a virus within the church. I pray that the fever will break soon.
For years, the Religious Right insisted that voting Christians into high office was the solution to America’s problems. But Mike Pompeo (and his numerous minions now scattered throughout DC bureaucracy) is only the latest poster-child for how very, very wrong-headed that idea has always been.
We may debate when exactly life begins. But we can all agree that a fully human life has entered this world with the delivery of a new baby.
Sadly, however, evangelical pro-lifers behave as if life ends at birth. Why else would anyone care more about the unborn than those who have been born?
Genuine members of the Kingdom of God will honor the sanctity of all human life everywhere; will work to defend those lives globally; and will seek to stop the deliberate destruction of human life anywhere and everywhere.
No. Neither president Trump nor the evangelical church in America have ever been noteworthy defenders of the sanctity of human life.
In fact, American foreign policy relishes trampling upon the Image of God without a second thought.
The editors at Christianity Today have hopped aboard the mea culpa train with many other conservative, Republican, evangelical news outlets.
However, I don’t know whether to say, “Better late than never,” or “Too little too late.”
On second thought, I think I’ll go with option two. Because it’s all way too little and much too late.
It’s too late because the inevitability of violence, fueled by Right-Wing lies about the election of Joe Biden, was as clear as the nose on your face for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Trump eagerly and persistently fomented it over and over again, every time he opened his foul mouth.
Right-Wing radio and television, a category which includes ostensibly “Christian” broadcasting networks as well, only intensified the already high levels of anger and resentment among Trump’s base over the president’s mythical conspiracy stories.
Yet, I never saw nor heard a single, Christian conservative fact-checker offer even minimal push-back against the bogus election fraud charges cooked up by the Trump-Guliani-Sekulow-Powell-Mitchell cabal of greedy, power-hungry, “legal” opportunists.
Not one.
Yet, now the editorial staff and talking heads at such bastions of Trump- mania as Fox, Newsmax, the Trinity Broadcasting and the Christian Broadcasting Networks (check here, here, and here) have all joined hands to sing kumbaya and condemn the violent assault on our nation’s capitol.
An assault that their reporting had helped to stir up and create.
Christianity Today has now joined this circle of lame repentance at the evangelical campfire.
Yet, it is far too little. In fact, it is grossly inadequate.
Remember, as far back as October 2016, candidate Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton was going to rig the election. He insisted that she could only win if she “stole the election” from him.
Where was this newly discovered evangelical moral fiber then? Trump’s long-term plans were obvious then and there. Why wasn’t he called on it?
Early on in this more recent presidential campaign, Trump was replaying the same old tune warning that “the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged.”
The remarks below were made in August.
Trump was clearly previewing his strategy for contesting the outcome of the election should he lose.
Figuring this out was not rocket science.
So, where was the Christian wisdom and warning about these obvious presidential shenanigans last fall, when it might have made a difference?
Where were the serious Christian warnings about the dangers of conspiracy theories, and the irrational behavior they can cause, when Trump first initiated his ultimate conspiracy theory that is now tearing the country apart?
I don’t have time to run through the litany of impeachable offenses committed by this president over the past four years, but they began in the first week he sat down in the Oval Office when he refused to divest himself of his business interests.
Where were the evangelical voices then, ready to condemn his refusal to abide by the Constitution?
Trump’s habitual violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses were only the beginning of his presidential criminality. And, believe it or not, we see that it his theft has never stopped as his staff now steals — yes, steals — historical artifacts from the White House (see below)!
Where was this evangelical moral concern in January of 2017?
Or. how about the Muller Report’s thoroughly documents claims that Trump had committed obstruction of justice at least 10-12 times in the aftermath of his phone call with the Ukrainian president?
Where was the evangelical worry about telling the truth then? Who was calling out William Barr’s lies for Trump then?
No, “humoring” this president is THE LAST thing his conservative, Republican, evangelical base has been doing.
Rather, they have been enablers, sycophants, co-conspirators, and mindless cheerleaders for the most incompetent, criminal, and psychologically dangerous president in American history.
So, finally I get to it. Below is Christianity Today’s wholly inadequate editorial. It’s facile references to the Bible offer only a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise shallow attempt at self-criticism:
The administration officials and members of Congress who enabled President Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election did not truly believe he won. They chose to coddle the president’s deception (and, I suspect, self-deception) because they thought it would endear them to his most loyal voters, and they assumed no one would get hurt.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an unnamed senior Republican official told The Washington Post in November. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
I think Trump will indeed leave, as he finally said he would in a brief video Thursday. But that doesn’t mean there was no downside. It doesn’t mean no one got hurt. In Washington on Wednesday, we witnessed a “failed insurrection,” to use the phrase of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in which pro-Trump demonstrators, some armed with guns, stormed the Capitol and rioted inside. The chaos claimed multiple lives as it made credible all but the direst warnings about what Trump’s elevation to the highest office in our country could bring.
Humoring him was not harmless.
For Christians, this should be no surprise. Scripture warns us that small patterns and habits grow to shape our lives in large ways. This is true of both faithfulness and sin, virtue and vice. “Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?” Paul asked the Corinthian church, incredulous at their acceptance of open, incestuous adultery in their congregation (1 Cor. 5:6). . .
. . . What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.
It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”
Well, some of them did do something. This is what the dough looks like leavened. This is where dishonesty in the little things leads.
In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s events, I’ve seen defensiveness over assignment of responsibility to white evangelicals because of our unusually high support for Trump at the ballot box. Is it fair, some have asked, to blame all evangelicals for actions (storming the Capitol) many would never condone, or for the election of a president many backed for policy reasons if at all?
“If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences”
Exactly.
The despicable figure of anchor and journalists (so-called) at Fox and CBN (especially!) now condemning the violence in DC last Wednesday pushes the limits of professional hypocrisy.
These “reporters” have faithfully pushed the Trump narrative of a stolen election from day-one. Hyping the hysteria to increase their ratings.
To now condemn the actions of those true believers (sadly misguided as they are) who were willing to put their money where their mouths are; believers the incorrigible right wing echo chamber helped to create by promoting Trump’s lies and misinformation about the November election, is really beyond the pale.
One thing such people will never do is take responsibility.
Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite investigative journalists.
Journalist, Matt Taibbi
His books Griftopia,The Divide, and I Can’t Breathe (among others) are well worth your time.
Today he offers a good analysis, largely drawn from his excellent book, Hate, Inc., explaining the role of America’s broken system of “news” coverage in fostering the turbulence we see in today’s political climate.
I have posted an excerpt below, or you can read the entire piece (by subscribing here).
The cover of Taibbi’s latest book, Hate Inc.
The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.
Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.
What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.
News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections. . .
. . . The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.
Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump’s voters for four years. . .
. . . The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.
Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted. . .
. . . Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.
What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.
Many people are pointing out the gross disparities between the way DC police handled the “Stop the Steal” mob that attacked Congress and looted Congressional chambers this week, and the way police responded to Black Lives Matter demonstrations this past summer.
Of course, the Right-Wing media bubble will never talk about this disparity. They are too busy inventing stories about mythical “bus loads” of antifa infiltrators invading DC in order to give violent Trump supporters a bad name.
NowThisNews has compiled video clips illustrating the very different responses mustered by the DC authorities last summer and this week.
The Daily Poster has another good article by investigative journalist, David Sirota.
His piece, “The Insurrection Was Predictable,” makes the case for what any informed citizen should have known: the Right-Wing violence that occurred in the nation’s capitol this week was entirely predictable. In fact, it was a foregone conclusion.
And we can expect to see more of this violent behavior from The Right in the future.
I have excerpted Sirota’s article below. Or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the link above.
Two months ago, The Daily Poster published a series of reports on the growing threat of a coup attempt, wondering why it wasn’t being taken more seriously by Democrats and the media. We were scoffed at and eye-rolled, as if such things could never happen in America.
Nobody is scoffing or eye-rolling anymore after today’s events at the U.S. Capitol. There, insurrectionists stormed the building and halted the certification of the national election, as security forces allowed them to breach the Senate chamber and shut down the proceedings. There was a notable difference in the way federal security forces met last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with a show of force, and the way they allowed the Capitol to be overrun by right-wing authoritarians that they knew were coming.
About a decade ago, I wrote a book called “The Uprising,” which described how we were entering an era of chaos where right-wing groups would try to seize power under the guise of populism. Clearly, that has been happening — we saw it speed up during the Tea Party backlash and it was further accelerated by Donald Trump, who is a unique president in his willingness to use the White House megaphone to foment and destabilize.
Today’s events were the result of all that incitement. It was a culmination that happened inside a culture of total impunity — and it is worth considering five points of context to understand what we’re really dealing with here, because it will likely continue after Trump leaves the White House.
1. We have long known that the far-right — and specifically many Trump supporters — are hostile to democracy. 2019 polling data from Monmouth University found about a third of the strongest supporters of Trump scored in the highest ratings for authoritarian tendencies. In all, Democracy Fund data show that roughly a third of Americans “say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.” That’s what was on display today.
2. While Trump has tried to blame violence on the left, his administration has been trying to downplay the threat of right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy. In a whistleblower complaint, a former top Homeland Security official alleged that Trump officials ordered him to modify an agency report’s section “on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” Politico reported earlier this year that Homeland Security officials have “waged a yearslong internal struggle to get the White House to pay attention to the threat of violent domestic extremists” — but they gave up because Trump wasn’t interested. Instead, federal security forces were focusing on deporting immigrants and investigating environmental activists.
3. The Capitol Police have a $460 million budget and 2,300 personnel to guard the U.S. Capitol complex. For comparison, that is twice the size of the budget of my own city’s police department, which is used to secure an entire metropolis. Somehow, this army of Capitol security forces was unable — or unwilling — to stop insurrectionists from breaching the building and taking over the floor of the U.S. Senate. And it’s not like they were caught by surprise — they had advance warning of the potential for unrest. So it’s almost as if they weren’t trying to stop the mayhem.
4. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request to send National Guard reinforcements to the Capitol was initially rejected by the Defense Department — the same department whose leadership was recently purged and then replaced with Trump loyalists. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence, considering Trump initially refused to call for the insurrectionists to disperse.
5. The insurrection clearly fed off months of misinformation by Republican Party officials who continued to push the lie that the national election was plagued by fraud. Those lies spread: A survey last month found that three quarters of Republican voters believe the election was fraudulent. Even though nobody has produced evidence of systemic fraud, Republican lawmakers in Washington continued to fuel the conspiracy theories, ultimately pressing Congress to overturn the national election. One photo caught Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raising a fist to the oncoming insurrectionists as he headed to the Capitol to try to halt the certification of the election.
As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican Party officials who fueled and abetted this insurrection did so because they assume they will feel no political, social or legal consequences for their behavior. On the contrary, they will likely be rewarded with higher approval ratings and support from many Republican voters. And if the Look Forward Not Backward™ crowd gets its way and makes sure there are no legal consequences for any of Trump’s many crimes, then these Republicans will know they have a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for their own extremist behavior.
After all of this, if nothing changes, then I tend to agree with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s aide Dan Riffle, who today said that “it always — even in moments like this — can get worse. If recent history is any guide, it almost certainly will.”
But things can still change — and they must.
In “The Uprising,” I argued that the best way to counter the rise of right-wing populism and to prevent it from proliferating is for an opposition movement and party to not just issue vague paeans to democracy and the soul of the nation. The opposition must also deliver tangible, material gains for working people — rather than continuing to be an elite and effete caretaker of a let-them-eat-cake establishment that right-wing provocateurs can forever burn in effigy.
The New Deal delivering such gains to the working class helped tamp down the outbreak of right-wing fascism in America. Nearly a century later, the Georgia elections this week proved the same point. There, two right-wing Republican authoritarians were defeated by the Black reverend who runs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church and by a Jewish guy — and the Democratic duo won by relentlessly campaigning on a simple promise to deliver $2,000 checks to millions of people in their state facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy.
Of course, no matter what Democrats might deliver — survival checks, a higher minimum wage, guaranteed medical care, massive investments in job creation, a crackdown on abusive corporations, etc. — there will always be a right-wing authoritarian movement in America willing to weaponize racism and illiberalism for its cause.
So it’s not simple: there is not a straightforward 1-to-1 relationship between enacting policies that improve people’s lives and instantly snuffing out the kind of fascism that reared its head at the Capitol today. But delivering for millions of people who’ve been economically pulverized for generations is the best and probably only way to try to halt fascism’s wider spread to more of the general population over the long haul.
Natasha Leonard has written an article at The Intercept analyzing Trump’s weaponization of the Right and its long-term effects. Below is an excerpt or your can read the entire article here:
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s craven loyalists in Congress plan to disrupt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Whether cynical or delusional, their plan to reject swing-state electors will fail to overturn the election results. Meanwhile, Trump has called upon his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., that day to demand that Congress hand him a second term. The protest, he tweeted, “will be wild.”
Trump supporters gather for the “Stop the Steal” rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/AP
Under the auspices of Trump’s “last stand,” violence from his furious supporters seems all but inevitable. For Black communities and other communities of color in Washington, thousands of white supremacists amassing in their city is in itself a threat of violence. For far-right groups, the president’s call represents a follow-up to his earlier, perturbing suggestion that the Proud Boys “stand by.” Now, they are being activated.
Posts about Wednesday’s protests shared on Telegram and Parler, the social media platform preferred by the far right, include promises of “boots on the ground” and anonymous tips for smuggling guns into Washington, where gun laws are strict. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted that his group would turn up “in record numbers.” The last major “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in December ended in four stabbings as Proud Boys attacked passersby and anti-fascist counterprotesters after dark.
Yet the “last stand” narrative surrounding Wednesday’s planned protests is no more than the rhetoric of escalation. There should be little doubt that Trump, desperate and wretched in defeat, will continue to call upon his base of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, and other fascists to rally after the election is certified — perhaps long after Biden is inaugurated.
Even without Trump’s direct incitements, though, the far-right violence emboldened under his presidency is not going away. While the stated aim of die-hard Trump supporters may for the moment be to reverse a “stolen” election, these groups will continue to exist and spread violence as a central part of their ethos when they gather en masse. That ethos, of course, is white supremacy. It is no accident that in addition to the stabbings, December’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington saw members of the fascistic group vandalize two Black churches and tear down and burn Black Lives Matter flags — an act of destruction for which Tarrio was arrested in Washington on Monday.
An exclusive focus on far-right attacks in response to Trump’s loss risks overlooking the ways already extant white supremacist violence will remain the core extremist threat under Biden. Attacks might come from far-right vigilantes, but we should also be wary of violence perpetrated by government agencies, such as immigration authorities and police.
Armed militia members watch members of antifa during a “Stop the Steal” protest at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
It’s clear that white supremacy undergirds the commitment to restoring Trump as president. While the fight to overturn the election could well dissipate, the racist, fascistic ideology driving the effort will remain intact.
a democracy.
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . . 
the violent mob and a door post inside the Capitol building on January 6.
some of the rioters had guns, too, The Washington Post reported.
enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already 
The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).
group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.
