Trump, at a rally in Waukesha, #Wisconsin, called for tougher action against campus protests & again suggested some of the protesters were paid actors. He called on college presidents to “remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the locals & take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”
"[#Biden] said he ran because of #Charlottesville.… Well, if the people that know Charlottesville, when you extend that statement, it’s a big hoax. Charlottesville is peanuts compared to what you’re looking at now."
"Trump’s support is uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups and the white people who align with those groups. An extensive study found that those who had those opinions in 2011, Tea Partiers, almost invariably became part of MAGA.
Very obviously, MAGA is mostly about putting people in their place – trans people, pregnant people, immigrants (you know which kind), Obama people."
Andrew Whitehead on how the worldview he was taught growing up in white evangelical Indiana was about "saving" the country by forcing the country to be like "us":
"Much of what I had been taught of how to be Christian in America was predicated on the intertwining of a particular expression of Christianity with American identity, and the accompanying desire to see this fusion elevated throughout our society to 'save' our country."
"This is the essence of Christian nationalism—a cultural framework asserting that civic life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity. In addition to the standard Christian religious and theological beliefs, Christian nationalism brings with it a host of cultural assumptions about who really matters and who should be in charge of life in the United States—primarily white, natural born Christian citizens."
"After years of examining Christian nationalism as a social scientist, and continuing my journey as a Christian, I’ve found that the practical fruit of Christian nationalism is not love. Rather, the practical fruit of Christian nationalism is power, control, domination, fear, and violence."
"Christian nationalism is not interested in a government for the people by the people, but rather for a particular people, by a particular people. Christian nationalism weakens democracy and Christianity by demanding we seek earthly, self-interested power, rather than seeking to support and serve the marginalized."
"Trump’s version of this familiar lie [about "partial birth" abortion] is not only over the top, but it reveals his deep affinity with the Christian right. It’s an affinity rooted not in a shared faith with right-wing Christians, but rather in a deeply shared fear of women’s empowerment, with the policy goal of taking it away."
"Many have questioned why right-wing Christian extremists have been so willing to overlook not only Trump’s irreligiousness, but his outright contempt for so many putative principles of Christianity. But the question ignores the deep opposition to, and indeed palpable fear of, women’s autonomy and civil rights that Trump and right-wing Christian fundamentalists share."
Now that Marjorie Taylor Greene has kindly informed us that her god, who's on call 24-7 for Marjorie and talks to Marjorie ALL the time, is out to hurt people (because Marjorie wants to hurt people and has made a god in her own image to justify this), I'm wondering how we're supposed to appease this angry god when the eclipse devastates us.
I seem to recall that a goat is de rigeur, but, unfortunately, I just don't happen to have any on hand at the moment. Ditto for a chicken.
Is there some other sacrifice I can substitute to appease Marjorie's angry god and turn his wrath away from me so he'll hurt someone else? Just wondering….
Below: Marjorie and her boyfriend Brian Glenn when Marjorie's not praying and prophesying or harassing the teenaged survivor of a mass shooting or disgracing American women by behaving with an utter lack of dignity in Congress as she hoots and hollers and screams insults at good people.
"The Christian nationalist movement has long used abortion as an issue to unify different strands of their movement. They know that if you can get people to vote on a single issue, you can control their vote. ...
If you dig deeper, it is really about the money and power, and not just sex."
~ Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
"The hostility to women's reproductive rights is also accompanied everywhere with an embrace of far-right economic theory and a rejection of rights and protections for the workforce.
So the attack on IVF is just one piece of the much larger pie of controlling people’s rights. It should obliterate any illusions that they will stop with abortion."
Marjorie Taylor Greene has told us – US, not herself, if you can imagine – that we all need to repent and her god, who's aching to hurt someone Marjorie dislikes, is unleashing earthquakes and eclipses to warn us of the wrath that's coming for us (not for Marjorie) if we (not Marjorie) don't repent.
"Think about this: A congresswoman got her start in politics harassing a teenager, and not just any teenager, but the traumatized survivor of a school shooting. She accused him of being funded by George Soros. She called him 'a coward.' She even warned him that she had her own gun in her purse.
(See link below to the video Burleigh is referencing.)
Thomas Zimmer on what's at stake in the 2024 election"
"This isn't actually about Biden versus Trump. It's basically a referendum on whether or not an effort at achieving a democratic pluralistic multiracial society should be continued or abolished altogether. It's basically thumbs up or down on, on democratic self government and the civil rights order."
How do we know that this is what the 2024 election is about? Because the Republican party has put its agenda right out there on the internet in Project 2025 for all of us to see it:
"The overriding concern is to impose this sort of reactionary white Christian patriarchal order on society. And again, they do that by dismantling some parts of government, but also mobilizing and weaponizing others."
And this is not a MAGA agenda: it's an establishment Republican agenda:
"Project 2025 is not coming from Trump. It's not coming from the Trump campaign. This is as conservative establishment as it's as it gets, right? So this is not the MAGA fringe. This is not the Trump weirdos. And so we're looking as a kind of a fusion between those forces in a very dangerous, very threatening way."
Republicans showed us something important about their coordinated, orchestrated attack this Easter weekend on Biden and Democrats in general. As Biden went to church on Easter Sunday and Trump did not – as he never does – but spewed bile on social media, Republicans mounted a coordinated, orchestrated attack on Biden and Democrats because Easter coincided with trans visibility day this year.
This was planned. It was strategic. It tells us they intend to go whole-hog this election cycle with the claim that ONLY Republicans own Christianity, and Democrats by definition cannot be Christian – even as Biden went to Easter Mass while Trump sat home raving.
The very fact that Biden demonstrates that another kind of Christianity is possible other than the politically captive, debased white Christian nationalism they want to anoint as "real" American Christianity forces them to mount this attack.
They have to demonstrate that they own Christianity in an exclusive way, and that this ownership gives them the right to own and control the rest of us as a minority of the populace.
This is all about ownership and control. This is why the ongoing Republican battle to impose a twisted version of Christianity held by only a minority of voters on all of us as "real" Christianity always fixes on a vulnerable segment of the population – trans people, LGBTQ people, migrants and immigrants – to prove its point. If it can own and control that segment of the population, it has shown that it can own and control all of us.
The twisted kind of Christianity that Republicans want to promote as "real" Christianity depends radically on othering some human beings for the benefit of other human beings. When Donald Trump persistently calls migrants "animals," he is dehumanizing and othering them to open a pathway to treating them as brutally as possible – while his white Christian base applauds this treatment as holy and in line with Christian teachings.
Ask those of us who are LGBTQ and who have been around a while about our experiences with the churches in the US, and you'll hear an earful about ugly dehumanization that allows many church people to other us and lay groundwork for abusing us by defining our humanity as less than theirs, as less than that of "normal" people. These attitudes may be shifting, but they've long been deeply entrenched in Christianity in the US.