A bill in Louisiana, HB 777, would make it a crime for librarians to use public funds to join the American Librarian Association or attend an ALA conference, punishable with prison time and hard labor for up to two years.
I am an exvangelical, ex-fundamentalist, ex-Christian Nationalist raving batshit Duggar wannabe. I fled that culture 22 years ago after having six babies (within nine years) for Jesus in order to “take back our Christian nation” from all y’all unrepentant evil pagans in the USA. You are second-class citizens to these people. If you aren’t afraid that the Speaker of the House is a Christian nationalist, you should be. #ChristianNationalism#MikeJohnson#theocracy#VoteBlue
#Trump & Co. intend to force a #theocracy despite our Constitution expressly forbidding any establishment of religion.
Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, and actual Christians should be horrified by words below from a retired general who has shown his disloyalty to America..👇🏼
Trump’s former (& future?) nat sec adviser Mike Flynn: “If we are going to have one nation under God which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God”
This week's comic: The things Mike Johnson has said are so over the top that I thought I might place him in the role of my flaming conservative character (hence the flames, in case anyone was wondering about that). It’s almost impossible to exaggerate this man’s theocratic worldview, so I tried to use actual quotes where I could.
Steven Beschloss asks readers what they hear when Mike Johnson tells us he has been "ordained" by God to be House Speaker — and what this portends for the future. Johnson announced in his first statements after being made Speaker that God had "ordained" him for this office.
I hear theocracy. And hubris. And self-righteous arrogance. And total lack of respect for democracy and the vibrant pluralism of American democracy.
"As a historian, I can assure you that Mike Johnson isn’t doing what the Founders want. And as a Christian, I’d personally argue he’s not actually doing what the Bible promotes.
Mike Johnson is doing what Mike Johnson wants. And no matter how hard he tries to wrap it in the flag and the cross, his agenda is quite extreme."
"[Mike Johnson is] a Christian Nationalist, which means that he believes that Christians matter and other people don’t matter. Christian Nationalists will put it another way, but that’s what it comes to in the end: they have immeasurable worth, everyone else who doesn’t agree to become them is fodder. …
And I think the appropriate sort of response to all of this is anger."
In his newsletter today, Robert P. Jones provides an eye-popping rundown of the race to theocracy that we're seeing now with the Republican party — if our eyes are open.
As he notes, on February 16, the Alabama supreme theocrats delivered their IVF ruling. He notes that chief justice Parker cited the King James bible, bible commentaries, and theologians as he stated that Alabamians live by a "theologically based" understanding of this issue.
Robert P. Jones finishes his summary of what has happened in the US from Feb. 16-22 by stating,
"I’ll wrap with the opening line from Charles Blow’s insightful recent New York Times column: 'If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.'”
"Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Tom Parker was downright gleeful.
He quoted Genesis in his sermon — I’m sorry, his concurring opinion — in the Alabama ruling that turned in vitro fertilization on its head by defining frozen embryos as children.
He quoted 17th century Dutch theologian Petrus Van Mastricht."
"The Christian Nationalists’ God is petty, insecure, cruel, authoritarian. Their God, like their favored presidential candidate, demands above all else obedience and loyalty. Their God sees only a few as 'elect': Mike Johnson and his ilk, straight men, blastocysts and frozen embryos. All the others He casts out. Their God is not inclusive; their Paradise, a fascist state."
"For most of my life, American Christians were cheerleaders for democracy. That’s when we were in charge of the democracy.
Today, oddly, many conservative Christians no longer believe in or support democracy. They seem to favor a kind of theocracy or autocracy — so long as they have control. Anything they can’t control is called communism or Marxism, whether it really is or not."
Greg Olear does an in-depth analysis of the plans Heritage Foundation in store for all of us, if Trump is elected — plans that are out in the open and public, so that if we vote for Trump, we're voting for these plans to be imposed on ourselves and the whole nation.
He notes that Mike Roberts, who heads Heritage Foundation, is an ultra-right Catholic who makes plain that he wants to dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy.
Annika Brockschmidt presents a chilling, thorough, and well-documented overview of the white Christian nationalist views that Mike Johnson and those allied with him hope to impose on the entire nation. As she concludes,
"Apparently, even the most spirited Googling hasn’t clued some media into the revolutionary movements that influenced the man who stands second in line to the presidency."
A helicopter carrying President #EbrahimRaisi of #Iran & his foreign minister crashed on Sunday in the country’s mountainous northwest, acc/to state media, deepening the turmoil that has gripped the nation on both the international & domestic fronts in recent months.
#Raisi, 63, was traveling from Iran’s border w/ Azerbaijan to inaugurate a joint dam project.
#Raisi is a hard-line religious cleric who came of age during the #Islamic revolution. Under #Iran’s #theocracy, Raisi, as president, is the 2nd most powerful individual in Iran’s #political structure after… #Khamenei.
After becoming president in 2021, Raisi consolidated power & marginalized reformists who wanted to defuse tensions w/the #West. He repeatedly said he pursued a policy of “strong diplomacy,” forging closer #economic & #security ties w/ #Russia & #China.
"The best approach to understanding the Right has always been to take seriously and actually grapple with their vision for American society. In that sense, 'Project 2025' is tremendously helpful. Rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country."
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."
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."
You may not think about #Tim#Dunn.
Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him.
But Dunn thinks a lot about you.
For two decades he has been quietly, methodically, and patiently building a political machine that has pushed Texas forcefully to the right, sending more and more members of the centrist wing of the Republican Party into exile.
A 68-year-old #oil#billionaire, Dunn seeks to transform Texas into something resembling a #theocracy.
👉If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his #checkbook.
If you question why Texas’s elected officials no longer represent the majority of Texans’ views, the reason can be traced to the tactics employed by Dunn and the many organizations and politicians he funds and influences.
He has built his own caucus within the Legislature that is financially beholden to him.
And despite his Sunday school pleas for comity, Dunn has deepened Texas’s political divisions:
there are the Democrats and what remains of the mainstream conservative Republican Party.
And then there are Dunn and his allies.
For Dunn, politics, work, and religion all run together.
“I have very deliberately unsegmented my life,” he said in 2022 on a podcast hosted by Ken Harrison, the chair of #Promise#Keepers, a national evangelical group for men.
“I don’t have one approach in business and another approach in ministry and another approach in church . . . I work for God, and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.”
Dunn directs that work from the center of a hive of his own creation, surrounded by politicians and pastors, fellow oil billionaires, and political consultants, all of whom are carrying out his vision.
"Alito and his robed gang are modern American fascism's real bulwark—the final reason that this cult of creepy religious bigots really could get their way in the end. There's no law these justices can't abrogate, no protection of citizens they can't demolish with a wave of a manicured hand, for whatever reason they want to make up," (continued in /2)
Matthew Sheffield, who was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family and was once a right-wing Republican activist, explains why it's futile to try to reason with Trump's white Christian nationalist base, whose aim is to dominate and force us to dance to its theocratic tune, not to reason or to accept pluralistic democracy:
"Once the internet became completely pervasive within society, low-information religious fundamentalists finally became aware that their side had totally and completely lost all scientific and historical arguments."
"Having failed to convince people of their beliefs, they have decided to mandate them. In so doing, they are embracing their core epistemology, that knowledge comes from authority rather than from the scientific method. The Bible says it’s true, so therefore it is. I feel a warm fuzzy feeling when I watch my favorite pastor, so therefore what he says is true."