noting a relationship between actions or events such that one or more are the result of the other or others
I read this essay in the New York Times, How to Make a Decision When There’s No ‘Right’ One. The premise uses the Scientist Charles Darwin and his internal debate on marriage. The author refers to this place as a “wild problem”; a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the day-to-day pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us and where those day-to-day pleasures and pains don’t fully capture what’s at stake.
We have them all the time when it comes to making life’s big decisions. This week the opinion section of the same paper had a theme: I was wrong about. There numerous regular columnists reneged on early suppositions and beliefs that they had made in earlier pieces and stated their reasoning why they had since changed their beliefs. We all also do the same, the do-over, the evolution, the passage of time that enables us to regret a decision or two. I have only one, the night I stayed for a drink with an old flame and he was late, I was angry and yet I made that near fatal error that in some ways changed my life and in turn I made lemonade out of lemons. I was not just lucky I was also financially stable and in turn smart as fuck so I could do so. This is not always the case for most. But in reality we do often look back and use our own past history, our own biases and experiences to guide us in determining what will work and what we need to do to make a decision, and with that the “best laid plans” and all that often end up in all those plans being tossed in the bin.
This really comes to focus now during the Insurrection Hearings as the witnesses have come forward, the ones that were Team Normal, the white well educated and professionally stable men who not just enabled Trump, did nothing to stop him from doing nothing. They all knew weeks before Jan 6th and yet they just let the game go on and on and on until they went, “Oh fuck, I’m out!” Some stayed during the remaining weeks as a way of guarding the gate from further damage and some just left and have embarked on their apology tour as if it was a shock to see how fucked up Trump was. All of course while simultaneously admitting they would vote again for him should he be the nominee. And many during testimony praised the President for his fine policies, which are lacking in specifics and seem to center on a lot of smoke, mirrors and tax cuts. Comforting thought that right now across the country varying acolytes who verge on plain stupidity, Herschel Walker anyone? Or just plain duplicity, Dr Oz is one such example who are running for public office and they share one other common trait – unfit to serve – the same way Trump was never fit to serve. Again if you think that it is a given he will run but not win, think back and think again.
We are entering a new form of American Theocracy and this editorial I believe carefully explains how in discussing the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. I have been watching the Right Wing Religious Crackpot right since I lived in Nashville and with that I have never been more certain of this new movement largely fueled on martyrdom and resentment. Never underestimate a religious crackpot scorned. Funny that there are so few left of the once powerful Moral Majority as they are aging out and the reduction in numbers in Church affiliations speak to that, but the reality is that the South is largely a bastion of minority rule and with that comes a sense of power and perspective that few in the North understand. I was of course immediately contradicted when I mentioned this new Theocratic nation as some jackass said there was one in 1867. How the fuck relevant was that? Again let’s live in the now shall we. And for the record this was a book that predicted and documented the Republican switch to a religious based policy format which Kevin Phillips wrote about in 2006. Prescient much? But we don’t read, we don’t think, we live in a bubble of stupidity and alliances with those who think just like us. Social media and the internet has made finding those just like you much easier. Even the reality that protests and marches once a highly successful means of influence and persuasion is just that, a thing of the past, its effectiveness has waned and its influence short lived. I steer you to this editorial to understand why and how marches are not the tools they once were but they make you feel better so hey have at it. Again it is why I have not participated in one, not one. I cannot waste time faking it till someone else makes it. This is not how change is going to come.
So read this editorial and remind yourself that we are moving to a Theocratic nation in the 21st Century, not the late 18th as that I am sure had a moment in the sun too but this is the now. Be afraid, be angry but be active. How? Fuck if I know. But as Nike says, Just do it! Slogans are grand aren’t they?
Religious Doctrine, Not the Constitution, Drove the Dobbs Decision
By Linda Greenhouse. Ms. Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.
Sign up for the Tish Harrison Warren newsletter, for Times subscribers only. An Anglican priest reflects on matters of faith in private life and public discourse. Get it in your inbox.
My own way of keeping track of a Supreme Court term is to log each of the term’s decisions on a chart labeled by category: criminal law, administrative law, speech, federalism and so on. For this past term, one of my charts was, of course, labeled “abortion,” and naturally that’s where I recorded Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
But the other day, going over my charts before filing them away to prepare for the next term, a realization struck me. I had put Dobbs in the wrong place. Along with the decision about the praying football coach and the one requiring Maine to subsidize parochial school tuition, Dobbs belongs under “religion.”
That assertion invites pushback, I’m well aware. But step back from today’s artificial arguments about originalism and history, and consider the powerful social movement that led consecutive Republican presidents to appoint anti-abortion justices and that then drove the abortion issue through the Supreme Court’s open door.
Does anyone really think it was motivated by disapproval of the court’s reliance in Roe v. Wade on substantive due process, an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that accords meaning to the word “liberty” in the due process clause? Is there anyone who believes that if only the Constitution had included the word “abortion,” the anti-abortion movement would have failed to gain political traction? (Although the Dobbs majority treated the absence of the A-word in the Constitution as nearly fatal to Roe all by itself, it is worth observing that the Constitution’s 7,600 words, including its 27 amendments, contain neither the word “fetus” nor “unborn.”)
No one really buys the argument that what was “egregiously wrong” with Roe v. Wade, to quote the Dobbs majority, was the court’s failure to check the right analytic boxes. It was not constitutional analysis but religious doctrine that drove the opposition to Roe. And it was the court’s unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that less than a month ago was theirs by right.
To be sure, the Supreme Court has not outlawed abortion. Justice Samuel Alito left that dirty work to the states: Who will rid me of this bothersome right to abortion? But during the nearly two months between the leak of his Dobbs draft on May 2 and the release of the official opinion on June 24, it became painfully obvious to all that if Roe fell, abortion would soon be illegal or all but inaccessible in about half the states. That was the point, after all.
Not only did that prospect make no difference to the Dobbs majority — the official opinion was essentially unchanged from the leaked draft except for added sections that responded to, and distorted, the dissenting opinion — but Justice Alito actually had the gall to write that “we do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision.” Polls conducted before the opinion’s release showing that upward of two-thirds of Americans wanted to retain a right to abortion offered a hint and were perhaps what led to Justice Alito’s self-righteous declaration: “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”
Justice Alito took pains to present the majority’s conclusion as the product of pure legal reasoning engaged in by judges standing majestically above the fray of Americans’ “sharply conflicting views” on the “profound moral issue” of abortion, as he put it in the opinion’s first paragraph. And yet that very framing, the assumption that the moral gravity of abortion is singular and self-evident, gives away more than members of the majority, all five of whom were raised in the Catholic Church, may have intended.
A recent essay in my local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, by a Congregational minister, John Nelson, was a powerful reminder that in speaking from one particular religious tradition, the court ignored other vital streams of religious thought. “Samuel Alito is as free as any person to hold forth on morals and politics,” Pastor Nelson wrote, “but his opening salvo is backed up with no reflection on the sources, claims or nuances of morality, leaving the impression that the decision was developed through moral bias rather than moral reasoning.” Describing his own response to the decision as one of “fury,” the pastor said that the justices, in their “concern for the lives of fetuses,” overlooked the “lived experience” of women. “To show no regard for a lived experience is immoral,” he wrote.
Indeed, the fetus is the indisputable star of the Dobbs opinion. That is not necessarily obvious at first reading: The opinion’s 79 pages are larded with lengthy and, according to knowledgeable historians, highly partial and substantially irrelevant accounts of the history of abortion’s criminalization. In all those pages, there is surprisingly little actual law. And women, as I have observed before, are all but missing. It is in paragraphs scattered throughout the opinion that the fetus shines.
“None of the other decisions cited by Roe” and Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey, the 1992 ruling that reaffirmed the right to abortion, “involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Justice Alito wrote. “They are therefore inapposite.” Further on, he wrote: “The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.”
This was a strange criticism of the dissenting opinion, signed jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They argued vigorously for retaining the 1992 Casey decision, which in fact, in a departure from Roe, declared that the state’s interest in fetal life was present from the moment of conception. Casey authorized the states to impose waiting periods and “informed consent” requirements that the court in the years following Roe v. Wade had deemed unconstitutional.
Justice Alito knows the Casey decision very well. As a federal appeals court judge, he had been a member of the panel that upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act in the case that became Casey. Then-Judge Alito, alone on the panel, wanted to uphold a provision of the state law that required a married woman to inform her husband of her plan to get an abortion. In affirming the appeals court’s decision, the Supreme Court in Casey emphasized in one of the opinion’s most vivid passages the unconstitutional burden that the spousal notice requirement placed on women: “We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.” Perhaps that aspect of the Casey decision still rankled. In any event, Justice Alito’s attack on his dissenting colleagues for ignoring the state’s interest in fetal life was seriously misguided.
Of course, from his point of view, Casey didn’t go far enough because the weight the court gave to fetal life was well below 100 percent. The Casey decision was five days shy of 30 years old when the court overturned it, along with Roe v. Wade, on June 24. Given that this was their goal from the start, the justices in the Dobbs majority really had only one job: to explain why. They didn’t, and given the remaining norms of a secular society, they couldn’t.
There is another norm, too, one that has for too long restrained the rest of us from calling out the pervasive role that religion is playing on today’s Supreme Court. In recognition that it is now well past time to challenge that norm, I’ll take my own modest step and relabel Dobbs for the religion case that it is, since nothing else explains it.
As I have always done, once I move into a new city I begin to travel outside of it, the varying other cities and states that align the region. So now I am moving northward, having been to Maine, New Hampshire and traveling within New York and New Jersey and to say that once again eyes wide open and ears on fire would be the mantra of the travels.
When in the South I have written extensively on the role of poverty and that fear, co-dependence and acceptance of what is intolerable dominates the system of belief which is framed by the role of religion and the church. I have said that until you have actually stood between the frame of the picture you only see a portion of that perspective that artist created and that is the South. To denigrate them as stereotypes and the archetypes of the “Bubba” is a mistake and one taken at risk as we can see the allure of the South as more relocate there – by choice – and by need as more jobs and industries relocate there thanks to generous tax incentives and a disinclination for regulation. Those issues are problematic in and of itself but I have written about those as well throughout the blog and likely will again; However, as we now have massive divides over issues regarding guns, abortion, LBGQT rights and other civil/voting rights and businesses claiming a position on each, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the year ahead as we approach 2024.
I read the below article and it struck me as interesting as there are missing facts or let me say details about the individuals portrayed in the story. They fit the stereotypes and one viewing of the Insurrection Hearings can confirm that yes Proud Boys have tatts, bad hair and a wardrobe assembled out of TJ Maxx, but they are willing to seek forgiveness and do the right thing. Funny I cannot say that of their better dressed and educated counterparts. Almost ALL of the Trump minions are Ivy League Educated, often with multiple Ivy’s but the one thread that holds them together is that they are all Religious. Like my friends in the South who belong to a more fractionalized form of faith under the Southern Baptist umbrella, I can point to many who are all active members of their Church, and in the case of most that is the Catholic one. Bill Barr, Kellyanne Conway, Amy Coney Barrett are examples. And with that the Catholic faith was a much more predominant one present in the Trump Administration than Evangelicals as this NPR article discusses.
It does seem odd that so many well educated (I presume as I did not go to an Ivy but I have heard it repeatedly) individuals would believe in the myths of religion. For the record Biden and Harris are not Ivy educated and with that Biden is a practicing Catholic and dedicated to his faith and yet repeatedly the Church has attempted to reject him for his ability to separate his belief’s and his work. Ah yes Church and State it is coming trust me on this.
So when you hear/see the varying depositions of the Trump cadre who are now somehow trying to explain their role and frustrations with the actions of Trump on January 6th, I cannot stress again how they continued to enable and work for him despite the many bizarre actions and behaviors he had from early on. Can you recall Charlottesville and the “both sides” comment. Or the first Impeachment where he tried to extort info from the Ukraine and one wonders what this war would have been like had he remained in office as clearly there is a Putin connection somewhere there. And with that the same educated highly professional individuals who could easily have found work elsewhere remained. One Cabinet Secretary admitted he did not quit as he feared what Trump would have brought in as a replacement. And that was some of the reasoning behind the remaining staff, aka Team Normal, clearly as why else would you but then again even if you are well reasoned do you think Sydney Powell was anyone who should be in a position of influence? So with that I get the “whining” as Kushner so reminded us.
And this week as I was in Saratoga I spoke to two couples both white and well off or reasonably enough so to go there, stay at a hotel and dine out at an expensive hotel, the Adelphi. Couple number one were not staying there but they were dining there as was I, but I was doing the hipster thing and was thrilled with my room which for the record was just over $300 night. Again I travel by train so I offset that cost and put it in my accommodation as I learned during Covid travels you need to as you may not have housekeeping or room service so you need access to at least extra towels and arrange some cleaning on a schedule. I cannot imagine staying in a smaller hotel how that works but hey you do you. But they were there and I gathered had come there before and they both lived in Manhattan at one point and now lived on Long Island near Jones Beach so they were not struggling. That said I know they both went to College and she was I believe a Traveling Nurse as I gleaned that during my convo about traveling in the States. She had be to New Orleans but they seemed to exist solely in the past as he recalled his college traveling days to Kentucky and bored me with that story twice. He said he worked for Bedminster Golf Course as a student and met Trump and said he was a good tipper. At one point I thought he was the most boring and demanding idiot I met, complaining about the beer not cold enough and fussily ordering from the menu. The comment aside about women and their Lifetime movies was enough but he tipped his MAGA hat when he spoke of living in Manhattan and the Bill DiBlasio policy about the homeless, misstating or confusing the Covid policy of using hotels closed by Covid as housing and somehow believing that developers that built new apts/condos had to build an equal number of homeless units. Which right there was utter bullshit as then there would be no housing crisis in NYC, so what.ever. Then he stated about his coming into Grand Central and having to steer himself from the homeless and beggars that were there cluttering the area. And this is is again something that you notice or you don’t. I have been there many times and I of course notice none or being the narcissist I am don’t choose to or care about it and even when I do I get that this is Manhattan. I was more distressed about the homeless man passed out over 24 hours in Saratoga outside my hotel than the ones I pass in the City. And with that I said I cannot comment on that as when I use GC I am busy figuring out where I am to go, grabbing a coffee, and taking care of business than what the goings on are around me. The same with the Subway, that if there is something so outrageous I get off immediately, get another train or get out of the station, walk or grab a cab. The most crazy I have seen were the anti mask crazies and the anti vaxxers who seemed more obsessed with my personal freedom than I with theirs. So we all live in the same city and see and experience the city through our own lens and I left it at that. They were everything I believe are classic MAGA hat wearers, white, middle class, educated and poorly informed. That is the one thing they share with their white trash counterparts the lack of information and a willful ignorance to sustain and uphold their views. These are the Trump army that get the less press and the less salivating portrayals in the media. They are afraid and sure that the Immigrants arriving will take what they have worked for all their lives. They are sure they will get a Drivers License and right to Vote in local elections, a housing credit, and access to medical care all Government supplied. And the most distressing is the concept of free education as the debate over student loans and free community colleges has been a part of the Democratic policy debates of late. The reality is that child care credits, free education, medical care and housing subsidies are all part of larger wealthier socialist nations and yet in America we love to visit but we sure don’t want to live there. And that my friends is where the reality is, they have NEVER visited Stockholm, Germany or France. If they have it is on a Cruise Ship or some Convention, but in reality Americans rarely go beyond their state lines. I read the travel sites on Facebook and there are some veteran travelers but they are not really posting as they are actually doing, most are going for their first time somewhere, scared to death and are seeking info. Much of what Americans do is be sheep, they follow the leader and try to top it or at least be like it. So if their buddy went to Ireland they will go, with a group and they will experience it all in that lens. Group think. That my friends is America, Group thinkers who are SCARED TO DEATH. What I thought was a Southern thing I realize now is an American thing and with that we are fucked. Trump is coming and his army is ready.
On the campaign trail, many Republicans see a civil war
In both swing states and safe seats, GOP candidates say that liberals hate them personally and may turn rioters or a police state on people who disobey them
By David Weigel The Washington Post July 23, 2022
Days before Maryland’s July 19 primary, Michael Peroutka stood up at an Italian restaurant in Rockville and imagined how a foreign enemy might attack America.
“We would expect them to make our borders porous,” Peroutka told the crowd, which had come to hear the Republicans running for state attorney general. “We would expect them to make our cities unsafe places to live. We would expect them to try to ruin our economy.” The country was “at war,” he explained, “and the enemy has co-opted members and agencies and agents of our government.”
On Tuesday, Peroutka easily dispatched a more moderate Republican to win the nomination. State Del. Dan Cox, who won Donald Trump’s endorsement after supporting the former president’s effort to subvert the 2020 election, also dispatched a Republican endorsed by the state’s popular governor, Larry Hogan.
Both candidates described a country that was not merely in trouble, but being destroyed by leaders who despise most Americans— effectively part of a civil war. In both swing states and safe seats, many Republicans say that liberals hate them personally and may turn rioters or a police state on people who disobey them.
Referring to the coronavirus and 2020 protests over police brutality, Cox told supporters at a rally last month, “We were told 14 days to bend the curve, and yet antifa was allowed to burn our police cars in the streets.” He continued: “Do you really think, with what we’re seeing — with the riots that have happened — that we should not have something to defend our families with? This is why we have the Second Amendment.”
The rhetoric is bracing, if not entirely new. Liberal commentators made liberal use of the word “fascism” to describe Trump’s presidency. The baseless theory that President Barack Obama was undermining American power as a foreign agent was popular with some Republicans, including Trump, who succeeded Obama in the White House.
Many Democrats saw the backlash to Obama as specific to his race, and saw Biden as unlikely to inspire mass opposition to Trump in the presidential election. But many Republicans also portray Biden as a malevolent figure — a vessel for a hateful leftist campaign to weaken America.
“It’s purposeful,” said former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who is running in next month’s special election for the state’s sole House seat, in an interview with former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. “It’s all about the fundamental transformation of America. You only fundamentally transform something for which you have disdain.”
That argument has been dramatized in ads that, for instance, show one armed candidate appearing to charge into the home of a political enemy, and another warning of “the mob” that threatens ordinary Americans. In many cases the candidates are brandishing firearms while threatening harm to liberals or other enemies.
In central Florida, U.S. Army veteran Cory Mills has run ads about his company selling tear gas that was used to quell riots in 2020. “You may have seen some of our work,” he says, introducing a montage of what are labeled “antifa,” “radical left” and “Black Lives Matter” protesters running from the gas.
In northwest Ohio, a campaign video for Republican congressional nominee J.R. Majewski shows him walking through a dilapidated factory, holding a semiautomatic weapon, warning that Democrats will “destroy our economy” with purposefully bad policies.
“Their agenda is bringing America to its knees, and I am willing to do whatever it takes,” says Majewski, who’s seeking a House seat in a district around Toledo that has been redrawn to make Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) beatable. “If I have to kick down doors, that’s just what patriots do.”
In Missouri, Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens has issued two ads this summer in which he holds or fires weapons, vowing to go “RINO hunting” — for “Republicans in name only” — in one ad and targeting the “political establishment” in the second.
Dreading deep losses in November, some Democrats have spent money to help Republican candidates who talk this wayunder the theory that they will be easier to beat in November. The Democratic Governors Association spent more than $1.1 millionon positive ads for Cox, as he was telling voters that they might one day have to battle antifa with their own weapons.
Candidates like Majewski, however, have won with no assistance from Democrats, aided instead by high turnout and grass-roots energy. The idea that the Biden administration’s policies are designed to fail — to raise gas prices, or increase the cost of food — is a popular campaign theme.
Pollsters have found that Americans are worried about the country sticking together; a YouGov poll released last month had a majority of both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that America would one day “cease to be a democracy.”
Republican wins since 2020, including a sweep in Virginia’s state elections and victory in a special election in June between two Hispanic candidates in South Texas, haven’t lightened the GOP mood. Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who works with Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, said that last year’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large companies was a turning point in views of the Biden administration, even after it was blocked by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
“It’s the number one thing that caused people to go from ‘maybe this is incompetence’ to ‘there’s something else going on here,’ ” Surabian said. “Like, do these people actually want a Chinese-style social credit system?”
Rick Shaftan, a conservative strategist working with Republican challengers this cycle, said that the party’s voters were nervously watching crime rates in the cities, asking whether public safety was being degraded on purpose. He also pointed to government responses to the pandemic as a reason that those voters, and their candidates, were nervous.
“People paid a lot of attention to the truckers,” said Shaftan, referring to Canadian protests against vaccine mandates that occupied Ottawa this year and briefly shut down an international bridge. “Canada’s supposed to be a democracy. … People worry: Can that happen here?”
The arrests of hundreds of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has frequently been cited by Republican candidates as proof of a government war on its people.
In early July, at a town hall meeting in southwest Washington state, Republican congressional hopeful Joe Kent told his audience that the “phony riot” on Jan. 6 was being “weaponized against anybody who dissents against what the government is telling us,” from parents angry about public school education to people who had questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.
“These are the types of tactics that I would see in Third World countries when I was serving overseas,” Kent told the crowd gathered in a gazebo in Rochester, a town currently represented by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.). “You’d see the Praetorian Guard or the intelligence services grab the opposition and throw them in the dungeons. I never thought I’d see that in America.”
Trump himself has frequently accused President Biden of trying to ruin the country and create conflict to maintain power.
“Joe Biden helped lead his party’s vile campaign against our police officers, and then he carried the rioters’ agenda straight into the White House,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Las Vegas last month, joined by Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, the GOP nominee for governor. “The streets are flowing with the blood of innocent crime victims.”
After a draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning federal abortion rights was leaked in early May, a group calling itself Jane’s Revenge took credit for vandalism against crisis pregnancy centers, where women are discouraged from terminating their pregnancies. Those incidents quickly made it into political ads that asked why Democrats were not more strongly condemning violence.
Some Republicans also point to a California man’s alleged assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was among the majority in Dobbs.
“Radical liberals are behaving like terrorists, calling for a summer of rage,” says a narrator in a new ad from Catholic Vote, a conservative group spending $3 million this month to target vulnerable Democratic members of the House. “An assassination attempt on a Supreme Court justice. Domestic terrorists calling it ‘open season.’ ”
Several have echoed Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, who has argued that the rise in fentanyl deaths looks like an “intentional” result of the Biden administration’s border policies — a way for an unpopular president to “punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”
The argument is not just that Democrats disagree with conservatives, but that they despise them and hurt them on purpose. This past week, after a man attacked Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) at a rally for his gubernatorial campaign, Biden and Vice President Harris condemned the violence, as did Gov. Kathy Hochul (D).
But local Republicans suggested that Democrats had effectively encouraged the attack, pointing to a Democratic news release about the rally “encouraging people to stalk” the candidate, according to one GOP county executive. Although the district attorney who let the attacker out of jail was a Zeldin supporter, the candidate and his party argued that Democratic bail overhauls, passed in 2019, had let the attacker off scot-free.
“If you love America, they hate you,” says Jim Pillen, the Republican nominee for governor of Nebraska, in one TV spot. “If you support the police, they call you racist.”
Much has been made of the nomad van life and the idea of never having a permanent address and concern of day to day worries. Apparently those who do never saw that movie Nomadland or met Gabby Pettito. Anyway, meet the new member to Van Life, a lunatic Trump Supporter who was at the January 6th Insurrection and sadly has been misunderstood by the cult fanatics as being a “false flag” plant! Oh too bad, so sad, not really. I really laughed out loud reading this and can I say, “couldn’t happen to a better man.”
A Trump Backer’s Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory
Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.
Ray Epps and his wife, Robyn Epps. Mr. Epps became the face of a conspiracy theory that rocked their lives as it spread into the mainstream.Credit…Alan Feuer/The New York Times
IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS — Up a winding country road, in a trailer park a half-mile from a cattle ranch, lives a man whose life has been ruined by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.
Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year.
Strangers have assailed him as a coward and a traitor and have menacingly cautioned him to sleep with one eye open. He was forced to sell his business and his home in Arizona. Fearing for his safety and uncertain of his future, he and his wife moved into a mobile home in the foothills of the Rockies, with all of their belongings crammed into shipping containers in a high-desert meadow, a mile or two away.
“And for what — lies?” Mr. Epps asked the other day with a look of pained exhaustion. “All of this, it’s just been hell.”
Almost from the moment that a violent mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, allies of former President Donald J. Trump have sought to shift the blame for the attack away from the people who were in the pro-Trump crowd that day to any number of scapegoats.
First they pointed at antifa, the leftist activists who have a history of clashing with Mr. Trump’s backers but who did not show up when the Capitol was breached. Then they tried to fault the F.B.I., which, according to those who spread the baseless tale, planned the attack to provoke a crackdown on conservatives.
Mr. Epps, 61, was not just a bystander on Jan. 6. He traveled to Washington to back Mr. Trump, was taped urging people to go to the Capitol and was there himself on the day of the assault. But through a series of events that twisted his role, he became the face of this conspiracy theory about the F.B.I. as it spread from the fringes to the mainstream.
Obscure right-wing media outlets, like Revolver News, used selectively edited videos and unfounded leaps of logic to paint him as a secret federal asset in charge of a “breach team” responsible for setting off the riot at the Capitol.
The stories about Mr. Epps were quickly seized on by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who gave them a wider audience. They were also echoed by Republican members of Congress like Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Eventually, Mr. Trump joined the fray, mentioning Mr. Epps at one of his political rallies and lending fuel to a viral Twitter hashtag, #WhoIsRayEpps.
After months of watching from the shadows as public figures he once respected — Mr. Trump among them — tarred his name and destroyed his reputation, Mr. Epps decided that he wanted to answer that question for himself.
In a daylong interview, sitting in his air-conditioned recreational vehicle with his wife, Robyn, and their two Shih Tzus beside him, Mr. Epps described himself as a father, a former Marine and a staunch but disillusioned conservative whose leaders had betrayed him. He granted the interview on the condition that the location of his new home not be disclosed.
“I am at the center of this thing, and it’s the biggest farce that’s ever been,” he said. “It’s just not right. The American people are being led down a path. I think it should be criminal.”
To that end, Mr. Epps and his wife have been searching for a lawyer to help them file a defamation lawsuit against several of the people who have spread the false accounts. Should they end up doing so, they would join a list of other individuals and companies — most notably, the voting machine producer Dominion Voting Systems — in using the courts to push back on the rampant disinformation that emerged again and again during Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
“The truth needs to come out,” Mr. Epps explained, petting his dogs.
While Mr. Epps was a participant in some of the events that unfolded on Jan. 6, the claim that he inspired the Capitol riot in a “false flag” plot is solely based on the fact that he has never been arrested and therefore must be under the protection of the government.
But scores, if not hundreds, of people who appear to have committed minor crimes that day were investigated by the F.B.I. but have not been charged or taken into custody.
Mr. Epps said that he had acted stupidly at times when he and one of his sons took a last-minute trip to Washington for Mr. Trump’s speech about election fraud. But he said that he had managed to avoid arrest because he reached out to the F.B.I. within minutes of discovering that agents wanted to speak with him.
On Jan. 8, 2021, just two days after the Capitol was attacked, Mr. Epps learned from a family member that the F.B.I. had issued a be-on-the-lookout alert in his name. He said he immediately called the bureau’s National Threat Operations Center, and his phone records show that he spoke to agents there for nearly an hour.
The F.B.I. has repeatedly declined to comment on Mr. Epps, but his account of calling the operations center — and of sitting down for a formal discussion with federal agents in March 2021 — is backed by transcripts of those interviews reviewed by The New York Times.
The interview transcripts show that Mr. Epps told agents that he had spent much of his time at the Capitol seeking to calm down other rioters, an assertion supported by multiple video clips.
Mr. Epps, who questioned the results of the election, was also interviewed twice by the House select committee on Jan. 6. After his dealings with the panel were completed, officials released a statement saying he had told them that he never worked as an asset for, or an employee of, any federal law enforcement agency.
One of the moments Mr. Epps said he regrets most from his stay in Washington took place the night before the Capitol attack, when he joined his son and a friend for a pro-Trump rally at Black Lives Matter Plaza. During the event, he was videotaped by a right-wing provocateur encouraging people to go inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 in what he described, even at the time, as a form of peaceful protest.
The clip has been used to depict Mr. Epps as a man who not only urged people to riot at the Capitol but also then evaded prosecution. The Justice Department has not publicly addressed its decision not to charge him, but the legal definition of incitement requires a person’s words to cause an immediate threat of danger, not one that could possibly occur the following day.
On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Epps, believing he could stop the violence at the Capitol, inserted himself into a conflict between the police and members of the pro-Trump mob that is widely considered to be the tipping point of the attack.
He can be seen in videos from around 1 p.m. that day accosting a rioter named Ryan Samsel, who had already started to confront officers behind a metal barricade on the west side of the Capitol. Mr. Epps said he intervened in the conflict to keep Mr. Samsel from attacking the police and tried to tell Mr. Samsel that the officers were merely doing their jobs. Mr. Samsel gave an identical account to the F.B.I. when he was arrested weeks later.
Mr. Epps also said he regretted sending a text to his nephew, well after the violence had erupted, in which he discussed how he helped to orchestrate the movements of people who were leaving Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House by pointing them in the direction of the Capitol.
Mr. Epps further acknowledged that while he moved past barricades into a restricted area of the Capitol grounds, he did not go into the building itself. The vast majority of those who did not enter the building or commit additional crimes have not been charged.
By the time the violence started spreading, Mr. Epps had already left the Capitol, having helped to get a sick protester to safety.
The problems began for Mr. Epps almost as soon as Revolver News published its first article about him in October. Suddenly, there were emailed death threats; trespassers on his property demanding “answers” about Jan. 6; and acquaintances, fellow members of his church, even family members who disowned him, he said.
Things became significantly worse after Mr. Carlson and prominent politicians began to amplify the lies.
In late December, Ms. Epps discovered shell casings on the ground near the bunkhouse of the farm-style wedding venue they owned in Arizona, suggesting that someone had been shooting at the building. Then, in January, Mr. Epps received a letter from someone claiming to have been brought into the country by a Mexican drug cartel.
The writer said he had overheard some cartel members talking about killing Mr. Epps.
“I right on paper to tell you need to be look out,” the letter said in broken English. “These drug gang people very bad people.”
Whether it was real or just a demented joke, Ms. Epps went into hiding, leaving Mr. Epps to arm himself and run the family business for a while through his security team. Ultimately, the couple sold the business and their ranch-style house, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and wrecking the arrangements they had made for their retirement.
“It has a been a nightmare,” Ms. Epps said.
After leaving Arizona for the mountains months ago, the Eppses have not done much. They manage to spend time with their children — and some of their 37 grandchildren — but mostly keep to themselves. Mr. Epps has taken to wearing a wide-brimmed hat that hides his face. If people at the gas station or grocery store say he looks familiar, he will usually smile and then be on his way.
While he wants to clear his name, he is under no illusion that he will ever manage to divorce it fully from the lies.
“They’ll always be associated,” Mr. Epps said. “You can’t convince some people. There are extremists out there that you’ll never convince them that they’re wrong.”
As we enter a new era in America I want to say it is not new it is of another era firmly planted in past, a time when there were clear gender lines and regulations were a word that applied to the Military and little else. I think the concept of the show Mad Men that gave a sort of glamour to the era but also was clear about the shadows truly conveyed what a shitty time it was but to those who lived it, they see it as idyllic. They saw financial growth, world power, some bastions of what they defined equality and their place in the world was clear. Here we are now 50 years later and this new world, with its pronouns, Women running their own lives, People of Color actually being elected President; It was fine to have a sole Black Man on the Supreme Court and with that today we now have not one “colored” but three, makes two too many. So the effort to turn back time to the days of their lives began in earnest a mere 40 years ago. In my lifetime I saw the security of Civil Rights, some movement towards equality of Women’s Rights (but nowhere near what it should be) and of course Gay Rights. But that was enough but not enough as the strides that took prides began to integrate too much into the safe spaces that the right have crafted for themselves. The demands for clean air and water and away from the business of gas and oil and of war was all too much. They are angry and still are and with that they are like that Liberal parent who has scolded little (fill in the gender neutral name) one time to many with the adage, “This is why you cannot have nice things!” And with that were sent to bed, to the corner and the feelings of rage, of disappointment and of rejection were burned into them. And with that they studied, the bullied, they mastered the game to ensure they would have access to all that they had been denied and what better way to do so than through the bastion and gates of power – the Ivy League. Once thought of as a haven for intellects (is is a pun that Yale is located a town called New Haven?) and the belief that intellects are in fact liberal by nature as thought does that, they graduated with not one but often two degrees from these hallowed institutions. When I think of the word institutions little good comes to mind, but allow me to digress. When you review the CV’s (yes let us use the Latin word for Resume) those credentials and memberships to the hallowed clubs are owned largely by Men, usually white, often from middle America and Middle Class homes, some who are of privilege and every now and then a White Woman or a Black man. No wonder Affirmative Action is on the next Court’s docket. Ah Justice Jackson, what a hornet’s nest you have entered and yet you possess the same credentials but I am sure they are seen of as less as AA has to your fellow Justice Uncle Tom seen as a demeaning measure of deserved entrance. I must have thought that AA meant you can be a walking fucking moron and get accepted apparently, oh wait you can be? Shit I should have applied. But again I digress, as women do.
The Supremes are a conservative based lot filled with notions of revenge, rectitude and of course moral superiority as the majority are Religious with a CAPITAL R and one even has a spouse who was involved in the insurrection and willing to end Democracy of which her husband sits firmly in command of. As again on the next years docket is just that, an election case that puts the stolen in voting firmly on the forefront, as it will enable States to oversee and command all election results. Don’t like the tally for the candidate, not a problem, toss it with those others in the back of van, a suitcase or in the garbage. If you think North Carolina was gerrymandering the hilt out of the votes, I suggest you examine Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida version of a voting map. I say, when it doubt draw it yourself. Did not Trump do that with the path of a hurricane once? Guess that is where he got the idea, a Trumpite off the old blockhead. And yet they are on the outs. This profile in The New Yorker is enough to make you be very afraid of DeSantis as he is a grad of both Harvard and Yale and pretty much hates the world in the same vein as Trump. Welcome the 2024 nominee! A Reagan on the spectrum as I see him. And this should be a comfort to families who worry about how Autism is perceived. Uh they are socially inept but academically inclined so what’s to worry!! We had a mentally ill idiot as a President so this cannot be worse. Or can it be? It seems that DeSantis is in as much denial as the Orange Baboon, as he has never faced that fact that he could be Autistic, and instead of embracing it as a tool to succeed he chose it as weapon. And that is where we are in America trying to fight a war with some hand tools and we need the big guns. I think that might be why the Supremes let the Gun law slide in NYC as they know we are going to go all 2nd Amendment nuts here soon.
The Court has decided it will be the de facto law making entity as the Congressional one is dysfunctional and has been now for decades. And with it they are the most conservative Court since the 1930s. Wow that is comforting. And with that we are seeing the slide of the stock market and the parallels to history never end. As for the other two parts of our Government, I am sure that the last time Congress worked was to enact tax cuts and ram through the Covid relief bills of the Trump Administration through. And since then, it has largely been a shit/freak show where little is done but posturing a plenty. Impeachment 2.0 and now a historical and terrifying Investigation that I am afraid will end like the other two – zip on indictments and guilt. As for the other half, certainly not the better one, the Senate, I am not sure what they do but it is where bills go to di but the band plays on as if they are on the Titanic and the iceberg was an 3-D image.
With that, I am not acknowledging, celebrating or caring about the 4th of July and the irony that this is something in which to be proud is hilarious. No folks, no. It is something of which to be ashamed. We are pulling shit out of our asses now to make laws, retract laws and with it taking to social media FOR HOURS to rant, rave and repeat over and over again the same shit. I see that you are really out there mobilizing and organizing or not. Shit I gots fireworks and BBQ’s to go to. Good luck with it all. I am going to the Me to see the Winslow Homer exhibition and then maybe treat myself to lunch and go home. I can’t stand this bullshit and why pretend otherwise. But hey Happy Birthday America. The Native Americans are surely thrilled especially as another Supremes ruling this week found them removing even more their independence and sovereignty. America is exceptional alright.
I have long felt that the Evangelical right have wanted America to become a Theocracy or a quasi Monarchy where the head of state is also the Spiritual Leader, think Queen of England and the Church of England meets the Pope and the Vatican State. And with the Football Coach Prayer case now in the Supreme Court, the deck is stacked in the favor of prayer and the line between Church and State gets murkier. The Supremes are a band of religious crackpots with Amy Coney Barrett a cult member of a sect of her Catholic faith and Clarence “My Wife is an Insurrectionist” Thomas another member of the religious extreme right it is likely that we are moving forward with this becoming closer than one thinks. And that is why the GOP are moving to destroy Democracy and are making it to be akin to a Communist nation crossed with Anarchy and that the old rule is a theory that failed and that battle for independence from the Crown was a good idea on paper but we need to move to a more concrete form of Imperialism so let’s try Federalism** or Theocracy, whatever works.
** Federalism is a type of government in which the power is divided between the national government and other governmental units. It contrasts with a unitary government, in which a central authority holds the power, and a confederation, in which states, for example, are clearly dominant.**
And to that look to the move to oppress voting, banning curriculum/books, Gay rights, Women’s reproductive rights and other social cultural issues that the States are working overtime to pass legislation that would require the Justice Department to take to court where it would inevitably roll up to the top of the block and be confirmed as due process and righteous as the Constitution establishes aka the Originalism theory.**
**Originalism is a theory of the interpretation of legal texts, including the text of the Constitution. Originalists believe that the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law. The original meaning of constitutional texts can be discerned from dictionaries, grammar books, and from other legal documents from which the text might be borrowed. It can also be inferred from the background legal events and public debate that gave rise to a constitutional provision. The original meaning of a constitutional text is an objective legal construct like the reasonable man standard in tort law, which judges a person’s actions based on whether an ordinary person would consider them reasonable, given the situation. It exists independently of the subjective “intentions” of those who wrote the text or of the “original expected applications” that the Framers of a constitutional text thought that it would have. **
Think that in this situation it is akin to the Bible which when “written” there was no common language, method for printing nor even a clear concept of writing, so the varying interpretations over time are clearly some how known; do so over what appears to be hundreds of years. Yet as the way the stories of the Bible were communicated were done so in a way that enabled those to understand in later times the true valid meaning of the stories passed on through generations and through peoples without a shared form of communication be it spoken or written. Or this more formal definition called In the history of biblical interpretation, four major types of Hermeneutics have emerged: the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical. Literal interpretation asserts that a biblical text is to be interpreted according to the “plain meaning” conveyed by its grammatical construction and historical context.
So we have the magic time machine that enables a select group, usually men, who can go back in time and through studying grammar, expressions, the manner of speech and of course cultural references that enable a flexibility of transcending class or education (gender or race not an issue in this case) so the time traveler actually knows what they were thinking and what that specific phrase or word means in context. In other words the idea that we have many meanings, homonyms, or those taken as slang that can be interpreted differently dependent upon the use and the individual using it, we are sure we know what they were saying at the time and exactly how and what purpose they were using it in that context. Okay, sure then.
And with that the Thumpers (a slang phrase meaning those who flog the Bible as real, wait “flog?” See how that works) are working overtime to continue the endless non debate over the 2020 election. They are small in number but powerful in their conviction. Just to point out that it was four women who managed to overturn the CDC’s mask regulations that were overturned in Court last week. And again the Supremes are right there in the background of this one.**
**Since the ruling, some critics have focused on the fact that the American Bar Association deemed Judge Mizelle not qualified for a life-tenured judicial seat, citing her courtroom inexperience; she was just 33 when Mr. Trump appointed her after he lost the 2020 election.
But Judge Mizelle had sterling credentials within the conservative legal movement. After graduating from the University of Florida law school, she went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.**
And with that I give you another story about the Evangelical right and their prayer for justice. God hear their prayer as they say in the church. Oh wait, he’s busy and you are on hold right now. Thanks for waiting.
A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders
Some evangelical pastors are hosting events dedicated to Trump’s election falsehoods and promoting the cause to their congregations.
By Charles Homans The New York Times April 24, 2022
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The 11 a.m. service at Church for All Nations, a large nondenominational evangelical church in Colorado’s second-largest city, began as such services usually do. The congregation of young families and older couples swayed and sang along to live music. Mark Cowart, the church’s senior pastor, delivered an update on a church mission project.
Then Mr. Cowart turned the pulpit over to a guest speaker, William J. Federer.
An evangelical commentator and one-time Republican congressional candidate, Mr. Federer led the congregation through an hourlong PowerPoint presentation based on his 2020 book, “Socialism — The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control.” Many congregants scribbled in the notebooks they had brought from home.
“I believe God is pushing the world to a decision-making moment,” Mr. Federer said, building toward his conclusion. “We used to have national politicians that held back the floodgates of hell. The umbrella’s been ripped after Jan. 6, and now it’s raining down upon every one of us. We had politicians that were supposed to certify that — and instead they just accepted it. And, lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”
Evangelical churches have long been powerful vehicles for grass-roots activism and influence on the American right, mobilized around issues like abortion and gay marriage. Now, some of those churches have embraced a new cause: promoting Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. They have opened their church doors to speakers promoting discredited theories about overturning President Biden’s victory and lent a veneer of spiritual authority to activists who often wrap themselves in the language of Christian righteousness.
For these church leaders, Mr. Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.
“What’s going on in our country right now with this recent election and the fraudulent nature of that?” Mr. Cowart, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, asked in a sermon last year. “What is going on?”
It’s difficult to measure the extent of churches’ engagement in the issue. Research suggests that a small minority of evangelical pastors bring politics to the pulpit. “I think the vast majority of pastors realize there is not a lot of utility to being very political,” said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor.
Still, surveys show that the belief in a fraudulent election retains a firm hold on white evangelical churchgoers overall, Mr. Trump’s most loyal constituency in 2020. A poll released in November by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 60 percent of white evangelical respondents continued to believe that the election was stolen — a far higher share than other Christian groups of any race. That figure was roughly 40 percent for white Catholics, 19 percent for Hispanic Catholics and 18 percent for Black Protestants.
Among evangelicals, “a high percentage seem to walk in lock step with Trump, the election conspiracies and the vigilante ‘taking back of America,’” said Rob Brendle, the lead pastor at Denver United Church, who recalled that when he criticized some Christians’ embrace of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in a sermon the Sunday after the riot, he lost about a hundred members of his congregation, which numbered around 1,500 before the pandemic.
He thinks many fellow clergy may share that view. “I think the jury’s still out, but it’s not a fringe,” he said.
Some of the national evangelical figures who supported Mr. Trump during his presidency and his 2020 campaign, like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, separated themselves from his insistence that the election was stolen. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham and the president of Samaritan’s Purse, equivocated. Writing on Facebook the month after the election, Mr. Graham acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory but said that when Mr. Trump claimed the election was rigged against him, “I tend to believe him.”
Others embraced Mr. Trump’s claims or argued for the preservation of his rule in spite of his loss. Shortly after the election was called for Mr. Biden, Paula White, a Florida televangelist who served as the White House faith adviser during Mr. Trump’s presidency, led a prayer service in which she and others called upon God to overturn the election.
Greg Locke, a preacher who leads the Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tenn., spoke alongside Alex Jones of Infowars at a “Rally for Revival” demonstration in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Locke offered a prayer for the Proud Boys, the violent far-right group, and for Enrique Tarrio, the organization’s leader who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy for his role in the Capitol insurrection.
Mr. Locke — whose congregation is relatively small, but who claims a social media audience in the millions — is one of more than a dozen pastors who have appeared onstage at the ReAwaken America Tour: a traveling roadshow that has featured far-right Republican politicians, anti-vaccine activists, election conspiracists and Trumpworld personalities, including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a central figure in the effort to overturn the election in late 2020.
The event has drawn crowds of thousands of Trump supporters in nine states in the past year. All but one of the tour’s stops have been hosted by megachurches, and the tour is sponsored by a charismatic Christian media company.
The performances wrap the narrative of election fraud in a megachurch atmosphere, complete with worship music and prayer, and have drawn criticism from some Christian clergy. When the tour came to a church in San Marcos, Calif., this month, a local Methodist minister denounced it as an “irreligious abomination” in an opinion essay.
Smaller churches, meanwhile, have proven an important support network for the individual activists who now travel the country promoting the narrative of a stolen election.
“Churches and bars, baby. That’s where it was happening in 1776,” wrote Douglas Frank, a high school math and science teacher in Ohio whose widely debunked analyses of the 2020 results have been influential with election conspiracists, in a Telegram post last month. So far this year, more than a third of the speeches he has promoted on his social media accounts have been hosted by churches or religious groups.
Seth Keshel, a former Army captain and military intelligence analyst who worked alongside Mr. Flynn in the weeks immediately after the election, is a popular draw with the same crowds. He attributed the prevalence of churches on the circuit to the instincts of local organizers.
“Most conservatives are evangelicals and naturally think ‘church’ as a venue,” he wrote in an email. “There are some pastors more fired up about elections and liberty but not all.”
Churches are commonly used as spaces for events they do not directly endorse. Often, though, pastors at the churches hosting these speakers have used their appearances as an occasion to opine about the election to their congregation.
“This will be your opportunity to find out real information about what really happened at the polls,” D.J. Rabe, a pastor of The House Ministry Center, a nondenominational church in Snohomish, Wash., told his congregation at the Sunday worship service before a speaking appearance by Mr. Keshel in August. “Here’s what we’re going to find out: What everyone thinks happened didn’t really happen. The information is coming out.”
The connection between churches and election activists has been particularly visible in Colorado Springs, a longstanding hub of conservative evangelical political power that has lately become a hotbed of the “election integrity” crusade.
The city is home to two particularly active groups dedicated to the cause: the U.S. Election Integrity Plan and F.E.C. United, a right-wing organization that protested Covid lockdowns in early 2020 and later became a prominent promoter of election conspiracies.
Both groups have support from local churches. Church for All Nations has twice hosted talks by U.S. Election Integrity Plan leaders in its sanctuary as part of the church’s current events forum. At the first event, after a woman in the audience said, “I want to see butts in jail!” Ken Davis, a group leader at the church, replied: “I think there’s a certain punishment for treason in this country, and it’s not jail.”
The second event, in March, was held shortly after the regional N.A.A.C.P. chapter and other groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Election Integrity Plan. The organization’s volunteers — some of whom were carrying firearms, the lawsuit claims — visited addresses they believed to be potentially associated with fraudulent ballots, asking residents how they voted in the 2020 election. The lawsuit argues that their actions violated both the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Holly Kasun, U.S. Election Integrity Plan’s co-founder, called the lawsuit a “baseless claim” in an email.
In February, The Rock, a nondenominational evangelical church in nearby Castle Rock, Colo., hosted F.E.C. United for a talk featuring Shawn Smith, a founder of U.S. Election Integrity Plan, and Tina Peters, the clerk and recorder of Mesa County, who has since been indicted on charges that she devised a scheme to copy voting-machine hard drives and share the data with prominent 2020 election conspiracists. (In a statement, Ms. Peters, who is running for secretary of state in Colorado, maintained her innocence.)
Mr. Smith made headlines when he accused Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, of election fraud and told the crowd: “If you’re involved in election fraud, you deserve to hang.” Mike Polhemus, The Rock’s pastor, later distanced the church from the event and told a local TV station that Mr. Smith’s remarks were “inappropriate.”
“Smith believes in due process and has said so on the record numerous times,” Ms. Kasun said.
Other pastors have continued to associate with F.E.C. United. The week after its event at The Rock, the group held a meeting at Fervent Church in Colorado Springs. The event was emceed by the church’s pastor, Garrett Graupner.
Mr. Graupner also serves as F.E.C. United’s chaplain, a role he describes as simply ministering to the group’s members. “I’m the spiritual care guy,” he said. “If you asked me to be the chaplain of The New York Times, I’d say yes.”
Mr. Graupner has been an outspoken opponent of Covid restrictions throughout the pandemic, and he said his issues of greatest concern were not necessarily the election but rather abortion, gender identity and teaching about systemic racism in schools. “C.R.T.” — critical race theory — “is a hill for me to die on,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, “I have seen some evidence to believe that the elections were tampered with at some point.”
Since the national nightmare of the slap heard and seen round the world (unless you lived in the US and the vitriolic rants of Will Smith were bleeped out) has not ended until President Biden weighs in with his thoughts, we must continue to talk about this forever or until a new absurd scandal about rich entitled privileged people hits the news; the only difference was that was about two Black men. Again not news in most communities where a great deal of violence is Black on Black crime largely committed by men. So news it is not.
But as we have worn out discussing the pandemic, Covid, Vaccines and the other social issues of being Gay, reading books or voting let’s go back to my personal favorite – Religion. I have said repeatedly that all of the above subjects and the controversy surrounding them are due to one thing only – Religion.
I read this about a Pastor in where else, Nashville, who is doing his part to continue the spread of misinformation and rile up the base. These are people poorly educated, employed in very blue collar service related work and have no concept of a world outside the parameter of the church. These are the same people who believe the Big Lie and still believe in the bullshit Trump and his acolytes push as fact. Again, I need to remind you that when you believe the Bible as a book of facts and truths you are already proving to me that you are a flaming moron. I have no problem with those who take scripture and text out of context in which to find words of restoration and hope but that of late seems few and far between. Most use the book to fuel their rage and defend their negative beliefs that enable them to remain ignorant. See Marsha Blackburn and her question to Judge Jackson, “Define Woman.”
So read and realize that this Pastor, Greg Locke, is just another cog in the wheel of the Southern Baptist cohort of churches; Nashville is the home of that organization and where they have their annual meet and hate. Just in the former shadow of where once the Lifeway Christian Publishing House was also a dominant figure in the skyline. Thanks to declining sales they have relocated and we can only hope that continues in the future to be so small a strip mall office will suffice. But there are still many trailer parks that can house these ramshackle Churches and they will continue to peddle their snake oil for the power of the God on the Dollar is in what they believe and stand for, your salvation not so much.
A Jan. 6 pastor divides his Tennessee community with increasingly extremist views
Annie Gowan The Washington Post March 31, 2022
MOUNT JULIET, Tenn. — The pastor promised his followers that this church service would be like no other, and the event on a cold Sunday in March did not disappoint.
“Devil, your foot soldiers are coming out tonight, they’re coming all the way out. We will expel them,” Pastor Greg Locke howled from the stage in a crowded white tent. “You gotta leave, Devil,” he shouted, “you gotta get out!”
Wielding a microphone as he paced the stage, his wife, Tai, at his side, Locke called out “spirits” of anger, rage, bitterness, lust and envy.
“Spirit of molestation, spirit of abuse, get out right now!” Locke commanded.
“Every spirit of homosexuality, lesbianism, come out, come out,” his wife ordered. “Transgenderism, gender dysphoria, come out.”
“We rebuke it, we rebuke it!” Locke yelled.
The tent slowly took on a spirit of its own. Worshipers began writhing as if in pain. Others waved their hands in the air in benediction. “Amens” began to mix with the guttural sound of growling, moaning and praying in tongues.
“If you’ve had the covid-19 shot, I’m telling you you’ve got poison in your veins,” Locke thundered. “We call out the covid-19 vaccine out right now. Keep that demonic spirit out of you right now in the name of Jesus!”
Some fell to the ground, pawing at cedar chips, or retched into silver vomit buckets that had been set at the end of each row of white folding chairs.
To those unfamiliar with charismatic worship style, the scene might be easily dismissed or mocked. Yet Locke, 45, head of the Global Vision Bible Church, boasts millions of followers, many of them online, gaining national attention during the coronavirus crisis when he kept his church open and defied the mask mandates of the “fake pandemic.”
But to his critics, he is spreading a dangerous message of hate that is taking root in someconservative churches. His rising prominence also comes as many mainstream faith leaders and experts on extremism grow increasingly concerned about the spread of White Christian nationalism, the belief that patriotism and love of America are explicitly intertwined with White evangelical Christianity.
Locke is an “ambassador” of a movement where he and other pastors around the country appear at rallies and tent revivals preaching Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen as a new holy war, according to Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an organization dedicated to religious freedom.
“If someone is convinced that God has preordained an election result for a messiah-like candidate and is told over and over that the election was stolen, that erodes trust in elections and democracy,” Tyler said.
Locke, in an interview, was defiant that he is not a Christian nationalist, but he makes no apologies for bringing politics into the pulpit. He was on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and has continued to preach the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Locke and his ministry have divided this quiet town on the outskirts of Nashville with many residents distressed at the thousands who flock here to hear him and the attention he attracts, most recently with a book burning where he and followers threw copies of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series and Disney villain merchandise into a giant bonfire. He has declared he now wants to “deliver” people from demonic influences and witchcraft.
Nashville resident Leyna Davis, along with other members of a loosely organized group of citizens who have been closely watching Locke and trying to combat misinformation he spreads, began seriously following him after her uncle, a member of his church, refused to get the coronavirus vaccine and died of covid-19 last year.
While Locke was casting out demons, the mother of four was at home using the gaming console of her kids to play recordings of his Sunday sermon, rewinding to watch it and texting others as she went through it.
During the sermon, Locke made no apologies for speaking about demons and witchcraft. “I love you enough to make sure I’m hated for telling the truth,” he told his congregation. Davis sighed and pressed pause.
“We kind of understand why people got into him. He goes so far off the deep end,” Davis said. “But how do they still listen to this? This is a whole new level of crazy.”
Locke is well known throughout Mount Juliet, a mostly White and affluent community of39,000, with an exurban mix of churches, farmettes and subdivisions long home to stars from the Nashville country music scene, including the late Charlie Daniels.
Neighbors have complained to authorities about noise, growing crowds, unauthorized construction and public safety threats that accompany events run by Locke, including two for which members of the neo-fascist Proud Boys provided “security.” Locke blessed the members from the pulpit and later posed for pictures with them as the Proud Boys flashed white-supremacist symbols.
The Wilson County sheriff’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Locke and his activities. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack listed Locke on a request for documents to the National Archives.
A spokesman for the House committee declined to comment. Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee and the FBI said they do not confirm or deny the existence of investigations as a matter of policy.
When Brian Larson took over as the administrator of one of the town’s unofficial Facebook pages in February, he went through and deleted all posts either by or about the pastor. He set new terms and conditions that forbade any mention of the church or Locke: “Any promotion of Global Vision Bible Church will result in suspension or ban,” citing “hate speech toward mental disabilities, culture/beliefs and sexual orientation.”
Larson said he is concerned that Locke could encourage his followers to attack those he has deemed evil. “He rode on the Trump train and attracted followers with Donald Trump’s strategy of shock and awe,” Larson said. “If you look back at the Salem witch trials you know what I mean. You’ve got a guy telling people there are witches and demons out there and to go and get them. If he claims somebody is dangerous and needs to be taken care of, something bad could happen.”
Locke called Larson’s concerns “utter nonsense” and said the town’s Facebook group, with posts on healthy brunch options and trivia nights, is run by “a bunch of witches.”
“I could care less what they think about me to be honest with you,” Locke said in an interview in his remodeled office, which includes artwork of the prophet Elijah before flames and a tattered American flag. “Jesus said, ‘Beware when all men speak well of you.’ I’m not trying to make friends in this town. I’m trying to preach the truth,” he said.
“We’re definitely the most polarizing church in town,” Locke added. “Either you love us or you hate us. There’s no middle ground.”
Locke has a social media following of 4 million across multiple platforms, and attendance at Sunday services has grown from 200 before the pandemic to more than 1,000, spilling out of the church building and into an enormous climate-controlled tent, which Locke calls a “canvas cathedral.”
To accommodate the growth, the church went on a buying spree last fall, spending nearly $2 million on four adjoining and nearby properties, land records show. One of those parcels has already been resold, the church said.
Locke said the church raised more than $4 million last year and gave much of it away, handing out $100 grocery cards to the needy and hosting a “reverse offering” at Christmas where they gave away $66,000 in five minutes.
Those who attend the church say they were drawn to his style of preaching, “verse by verse” straight from the Bible, as well as his outspokenness.
“You’ll never find a better man who speaks the word of God than Greg Locke,” said Thomas Nightingale, who drives 80 miles from his home in Scottsville, Ky., to attend services. Of Locke’s controversial statements, he said, “We’ve seen it all. That’s every church in the world but we seem to top ‘em sometimes. Never a dull moment.”
Davis and the group of watchers, both local and around the country, monitor Locke closely, reporting misinformation he posts on social media, calling out churches that host him and alerting authorities to potentially dangerous activities. Davis said she believes their repeated reporting of Locke to Twitter contributed to the company banning him in September for his tweets spreading misinformation about covid-19.
Locke’s church had already divided the Davis family into camps of those who attended services and those, like Leyna and her father, Chip, who oppose it, before her uncle, Coburn Kennedy, died at age 79 last year.
Kennedy was a former gospel and country music singer who had given up his career to raise a family but always encouraged his nephews to follow their musical dreams. Chip Davis credits his uncle’s encouragement as the reason he and his brother Billy are still in the music business, Chip as a vocalist for the country group Alabama, Billy as a music producer.
The Davises watched in dismay as their relative repeated Locke’s vaccine misinformation and refused to get the shot. There is “stuff in this vaccine” such as “aborted fetuses,” Coburn Kennedy wrote in a family group chat that Chip saved, saying he’d put his trust in God rather than get the shot.
Two months later, their beloved “Unc” was dead from covid-19. “It says volumes about the state of our country” that Locke “has a big-ass circus tent and it’s filling up with 3,000 people a week coming from all over the United States,” Chip Davis said. “When I look at it, I’m afraid for our country.”
Samuel Perry, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma and an author of the forthcoming book “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy,” said he was not surprised to see Locke veer into portraying what’s happening in America in apocalyptic terms as a grand battle between the forces of good and evil.
“Greg Locke has tapped into what is currently selling within that group at the moment, angry White evangelicals responding to talk of persecution, talk of political chaos and the need to rise up, get organized and be militant,” Perry said. “That’s what’s working, so he’s going to give that message.”
Locke rejects the label of Christian nationalist saying, “I don’t want a theocracy. I love America, but I also love Jesus. I don’t think that makes me a Christian nationalist.” But, he said, he does believe politics has a place in church.
“I think we’re in the mess we are in because cowardly pastors won’t talk” about politics, which has “100 percent got a place in the church. Jesus was very political, John the Baptist, every preacher in the Bible was extraordinarily political,” he said.
Locke grew up in the area. He was a troubled teen who was arrested five times for theft, reckless endangerment, and breaking and entering, before finding Jesus while in a local home for troubled boys. He completed his bachelor’s degree from Ambassador Baptist College in North Carolina and claims a master’s degree from a theological school that has a Facebook page but no website. He founded what is now Global Vision Bible Church in 2006. The church moved to its location on Old Lebanon Dirt Road in 2008.
Locke first garnered some national attention back in 2016, when a video rant about unisex bathrooms at Target went viral. But his fame rose during the pandemic as he held church services in defiance of shutdown orders, falsely claimed the coronavirus vaccine was made from the tissue of aborted fetuses and posted a sign outside the church that read, “This is a mask free church campus. We celebrate faith over fear.”
He said he still “1000 percent” believes the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and he spoke at a rally in Washington the day before the insurrection where, according to a published report, he told the crowd, “I declare unto you that President Donald Trump is gonna stay for four more years in the White House,” adding, “We’re a mighty army. They’ve gotta listen. They can’t ignore us. Our churches have been backed into a corner.”
Locke gave “one of the clearest and most violent prayers of the day,” noted the report, a joint project released last month by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation that detailed Christian nationalism in the insurrection.
Since then, he has found allies in Trump supporters like former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, and flies around the country giving speeches at political rallies and church events where speakers mix Christian ideology with anti-big-government rhetoric and unproved claims about election fraud. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone has twice spoken at the church.
Alarm about Locke within the group coordinated by Davis rose significantly last month, when Locke posted on Facebook that he would be having a “massive burning” after the Feb. 2 evening service, noting: “We’re not playing games. Witchcraft and accursed things must go.” Locke said his inspiration came from the Bible, in Acts Chapter 19, where disciples of Jesus burned books on the “curious arts.”
More than 200 people attended, under the watch of local law enforcement, gathering around a bonfire and tossing books, movies and games into the flames, blowing horns and chanting “burn it, burn it.”
In another episode, Locke expelled a couple from his church, accusing them of witchcraft. Gina Guy Warren and Brian Warren had been serving as his personal trainer and volunteer security detail. Gina, a speaker and author, and Brian, a mixed martial arts fighter, run a ministry they call “The Word and the Workout,” that brings “church and gym together as one.”
After Locke accused them publicly in a sermon last month of “full blown witchcraft,” the couple claimed they received threats and said in a statement to The Washington Post they do not feel safe. Locke said the expulsion stemmed from a dispute over whether to charge for counseling sessions related to exorcisms, which he opposed.
Clint Mahoney and his partner Chris Hardin were on their way to visit relatives in the area from their home in Indiana when they heard about the bonfire. They decided to stop by and wage a counterprotest. Mahoney threw a Bible into the flames, waved a copy of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,″ the dystopian tale of a society where books are outlawed, and mockingly yelled “Hail Satan.” He and his partner then kissed at their car to howls of disgust from church security trying to evict them.
“We’re going to send a statement. This is not going to stand without some opposition,” Hardin said. “You can’t operate with impunity. We are watching you.” Mahoney, who said he was expelled from a church and from his family when he came out as gay, agreed. “There are so many people in churches like Locke’s flying under the radar and fomenting radicalism all over this country,” he said.
Back underneath the big tent, the exorcising of evil spirits continued with a Kentucky teen who had been brought to the service by his grandfather, Nightingale, a church attendee. The boy, Bronson, had been writhing on the ground, beset, when he suddenly got up and sprinted for the door.
Volunteers from the church, in black hoodies, tackled the teen in the back of the room. They held him down, rubbed his back with Bibles, prayed in tongues and exclaimed, “Out, out, out!” One blew a shofar, the ram’s horn normally used in Jewish religious ceremonies that some Christians also use.
The two had watched Locke together online, but it was Bronson’s first time at a service, Nightingale said. The boy, who had never sworn before, according to his grandmother, was now cussing at the volunteers and growling.
“This is what happens at a deliverance service,” Locke said from the pulpit. “Cry it out, shout it out, weep it out, snot it out. We’re going to set people free tonight.”
Suddenly Bronson’s tight body went limp. The volunteers huddled over him. When they helped him to his feet, he was smiling and calm, ready to be baptized. “Amen, I never had to chase nobody before,” one of the volunteers told the teen.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Bronson said. They went up to the front of the room, where a livestock watering tank painted sky blue inside awaited and the Praise band began softly playing the worship song “No Longer Slaves.”
“I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God,” they sang. Locke came down from the stage all smiles. Bronson stepped gingerly into the tank.
“Upon your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, the power and glory of the Gospel and this beautiful deliverance we have seen tonight, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” Locke said, dunking Bronson into the water as the music swelled.
Bronson came up, water sluicing from his jeans and shirt, smiling radiantly. His grandfather wrapped his arms around his neck from behind and crooned into his ear along with the music, “You are a child of God.”
Once again a quick perusal of social media was drawn to the newspaper many liberal elites loathe, The New York Times. Yes that is right the liberal elite loathe it. They haven’t paid for it for years, listen to maybe The Daily as that was for a time the podcast du jour and then it wasn’t thanks to another scandal regarding reporting. Something that used to be a rarity, today is way more common thanks to the ability to fact check and due dillegence on numerous sources that once were near to impossible to track. Shame we could not track Covid in the same way but the powers of the internet providers had others issues of import that drew their attention and made more money than coming up with ways to track and trace a virus that killed over a half-million Americans. But hey they are dead so let’s focus on the living they have the clikc and bait capability we need to build profits.
When I read the rant of the Twitter poster, since deleted, he was quite intent on calling out the lack of the tech community to focus on product and on growth via development of product. It appears that like Big Pharma who for years eschewed vaccine development and using raising costs and preventing generics from being used as a more affordable opportunity for those who cannot afford the name brands. Drug Watch has an extensive list of those companies, along with medical device companies, the use their influence and peddle it to the Congress folks who once the check clears does their bidding to prevent any type of management and control over said prices.
And aside from that, the FDA and CDC actually rely upon them for the research and trials that dictate how drugs are permitted and distributed throughout the county. See Dopesick on how well that worked out. And if you think that Covid is any different, think again. Sorry folks I am vaccinated and boosted and will not put another drug into my body again until we have the full info on how long and how well the vaccine lasts, the interactions and in turn effectiveness of the vaxx with other drugs (this affects a wide cohort folks, not just elderly) and in turn how effective will it be as the variants evolve. I am pro a vaccine annually but again how many do we actually need or is this going to take a massive switch in both behaviors and attitudes. And with that we have two camps but anyone who thinks liberals are all on the same side, think again. And as that divide grows in fissure, we ask why? Why? Because we have THREE kinds of media – Liberal, Conservative, and Social. And when you limit your seeking of knowledge to a very myopic and bubble view you get just what you failed to pay for, a broad base of perspective or knowledge into which you seek facts and truth.
Peruse Twitter where they were in arms over the article below. Sorry folks I need to know who and where these people are, as unlike the ability to track Covid we do have a way to find them and make sure they are not elected into public positions, even school boards. Nope they are terrorists.
For Many Who Marched, Jan. 6 Was Only the Beginning
To many of those who attended the Trump rally but who never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.
By Elizabeth Dias and Jack Healy The New York Times Jan. 23, 2022
PHOENIX — There were moments when Paul Davis questioned his decision to join the crowd that marched on the United States Capitol last January. When he was publicly identified and fired from his job as a lawyer. When his fiancée walked out.
But then something shifted. Instead of lingering as an indelible stain, Jan. 6 became a galvanizing new beginning for Mr. Davis. He started his own law practice as a “lawyer for patriots” representing anti-vaccine workers. He began attending local conservative meetings around his hometown, Frisco, Texas. As the national horror over the Capitol attack calcified into another fault line of bitter division, Mr. Davis said his status as a Jan. 6 attendee had become “a badge of honor” with fellow conservatives.
“It definitely activated me more,” said Mr. Davis, who posted a video of himself in front of a line of police officers outside the Capitol but said he did not enter the building and was expressing his constitutional rights to protest. He has not been charged with any crime from that day. “It gave me street cred.”
The post-mortems and prosecutions that followed that infamous day have focused largely on the violent core of the mob. But a larger group has received far less attention: the thousands who traveled to Washington at the behest of Mr. Trump to protest the results of a democratic election, the vast majority of whom did not set foot in the Capitol and have not been charged with any crime — who simply went home.
For these Donald Trump supporters, the next chapter of Jan. 6 is not the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessor’s lies about a stolen election.
In the year since the attack, many have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day. They have organized efforts to raise money for the people charged in the Capitol attack, casting them as political prisoners. Some are speaking at conservative rallies. Others are running for office.
Interviews with a dozen people who were in the large mass of marchers show that the worst attack on American democracy in generations has mutated into an emblem of resistance. Those interviewed are just a fraction of the thousands who attended the rally, but their reflections present a troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election.
Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.
Some bridled at Trump’s recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.
“A lot of people in the MAGA Patriot community are like, ‘What is up with Trump?’” Mr. Davis, the Texas lawyer, said. “With most of us, the vaccines are anathema.”
In interviews, some who attended the Capitol protests gave credence to a new set of falsehoods promoted by Mr. Trump and conservative media figures and politicians that minimize the attack, or blame the violence falsely on left-wing infiltrators. And a few believe the insurrection did not go far enough.
“Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself,” said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.”
Mr. Orr added that he was not planning to do anything, only pray. Last year, he said he brought a baton and Taser to Washington but did not get them out.
More than a year later, the day may not define their lives, but the sentiment that drove them there has given them new purpose. Despite multiple reviews showing the 2020 elections were run fairly, they are adamant that the voting process is rigged. They feel the news media and Democrats are trying to divide the country.
The ralliers were largely white, conservative men and women who have formed the bedrock of the Trump movement since 2016. Some describe themselves as self-styled patriots, some openly carrying rifles and handguns. Many invoke the name of Jesus and say they believe they are fighting a holy war to preserve a Christian nation.
The people who went to Washington for Jan. 6 are in some ways an isolated cohort. But they are also part of a larger segment of the public that may distance itself from the day’s violence but share some of its beliefs. A question now is the extent to which they represent a greater movement.
A national survey led by Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, concluded that about 47 million American adults, or one in every five, agreed with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, about 21 million, or 9 percent of American adults, shared the belief that animated many of those who went beyond marching and invaded the Capitol, Mr. Pape said: that the use of force was justified to restore Mr. Trump to the presidency.
“They are combustible material, like an amount of dry brushwood that could be set off during wildfire season by a lightning strike or by a spark,” he said.
Some downplay Jan. 6 as a largely peaceful expression of their right to protest, comparing the Capitol attack with the 2020 racial-justice protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder. They complain about a double standard, saying that the news media glossed over arson and looting after those protests but fixated on the violence on Jan. 6.
They have rallied around the 700 people facing criminal charges in connection to the attack, calling them political prisoners.
Earlier this month in Phoenix, a few dozen conservatives met to commemorate the anniversary Jan. 6 as counterprogramming to the solemn ceremonies taking place in Washington. They prayed and sang “Amazing Grace” and broadcast a phone call from the mother of Jacob Chansley, an Arizona man whose painted face and Viking helmet transformed him into an emblem of the riots. Mr. Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison after pleading guilty to federal charges.
Then it was Jeff Zink’s turn at the microphone. Mr. Zink is one of several people who attended the Capitol protests and who are running for public office. Some won state legislature seats or local council positions in last November’s elections. Now, others have their eyes on the midterms.
Mr. Zink is making an uphill run for Congress as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic swath of Phoenix and said he will fight for Jan. 6 defendants — a group that includes his 32-year-old son, Ryan.
Father and son marched up the Capitol steps together and were steps away as police subdued a man who smashed a window. Mr. Zink said he and Ryan were peacefully documenting the event, and never actually entered the building. A federal criminal complaint accuses Ryan Zink of unlawfully entering a restricted area of the Capitol and obstructing an official proceeding.
The complaint against Ryan Zink quotes a Facebook message from Jan. 6: “Broke down the doors pushed Congress out of session I took two flash bangs I’m OK I’ll be posting pictures in a little bit when we get back I’m hurt but we accomplished the job.”
Mr. Zink, a onetime church deacon, referenced the biblical Book of Proverbs as he outlined why he believed Covid-19 was a bioweapon meant to convert the United States to socialism, and lamented that the United States “was no longer a Christian nation.” And despite the fallout from their decision to join the Jan. 6 rally, Mr. Zink said he would “absolutely” do it again.
“Godly men and godly women need to stand up,” he said.
Julie McKechnie Fisher, who went to Washington to hear Mr. Trump speak on Jan. 6 last year, helped organize more than 30 candlelight vigils nationwide like the one where Mr. Zink spoke, to honor the defendants. She is working with a right-wing group called Look Ahead America, which aims to register new voters in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and train them to lobby for what the group’s website calls “America First initiatives,” like changing election laws and “helping to clean up voter rolls.”
“We just can’t become complacent,” she said. “I can’t see anything good that this administration has done for us, and it doesn’t feel like he loves our country.”
Several people who marched on the Capitol described the day as a kind of Trumpian Fort Sumter — part of a life-or-death fight against socialism, anti-Christian secularism and the tyranny of President Biden’s masking and vaccine mandate.
Their views began to take shape in the hours just after Jan. 6, and have been buttressed by a flood of misinformation on social media, talk radio and from revisionist documentaries. Some said they had watched a program by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that floated conspiracy theories suggesting Jan. 6 was a “false flag” operation.
Several people charged in the breach of the Capitol have expressed remorse as they pleaded guilty and made requests for sentencing leniency, telling federal judges they now feel duped or wish they could do it over. A Colorado man wrote that he was “guilty of being an idiot.” A Kansas City man said he was “ashamed.”
Still, those who have been charged have supporters whose movement is wrapped not only in feelings of anger, but also of belonging. It is a reason the spirit of that day carries on.
That sense of community resonates for people like Greg Stuchell, a city councilman from Hillsdale, Mich., who took an overnight bus to Washington last year with his teenage daughter to protest the election results. He said he did not enter the Capitol. For him, Jan. 6 is like the annual March for Life in Washington, he said, where people simply show up to protest laws and values they believe should fall. For every one person who attends, there are another hundred who wish they could have too, he said.
Since the election Mr. Stuchell, a Catholic convert who opposes abortion, has channeled his anger by marching with other men around the Hillsdale courthouse on the first Sunday of every month. He found solidarity, he said, in similar men’s groups growing in Hungary and Poland. “Men got to step up, we don’t have that many men any more,” he said. At the machine shop he manages, some male co-workers have been tossing around ideas to protest what they see as a rigged government and election system going forward, like not filling out W2s, or not paying taxes, he said.
“If they don’t fix it, I don’t know what happens,” he said. “People need to stand up and say, ‘Enough.’”
I have amazing recall of January 6, 2021 and what occurred on a day that for all intensive purposes was procedural to mark the end of an election and declare the winner The President of the United States. It has been going on for over a Century and yet here on that day to say that all hell broke loose is an understatement.
I recall watching the initial first moments and the beginning of the protests by the established players who intended in Congress to do nothing more than delay the inevitable, that Trump lost and Biden was to become our next President. I took that opportunity to walk down to the Post Office and the Fed Ex store to drop of packages and in that hour or so when I returned the chaos that began earlier with the first group attempting to move towards the Capitol had now grown into a full form riot. And for the next four hours I was not sure what I was seeing or reading as I followed commentary on Twitter in a way of trying to see if others were seeing this and understanding it as I was. I loathe Cable News and shortly after that I canceled the news part of my Verizon plan and went fully onto entertainment, only three days ago I restored the services of cable news as I missed CNBC and Shepard Smith’s broadcast as he seemed to provide the sense and logic I needed to fully understand and comprehend what had transpired on that day. And for the record I have not. I seem to take this personally as if the one thing that was a solid in life, one that regardless of my politics and my own beliefs was one that stood the test of time and with that I could respect the institution as imperfect as it was, as one of significance when it came to the concept of Democracy. And then it all came crashing down with the election of perhaps the most hideous individual to ever be elected or placed in that office in history – Donald J. Trump. And that is the last time I will mention his name as he thrives on that, just hearing his name be it in protest or adulation, the man is the most definitive Narcissist that defines the disorder. And yes it is a mental health disorder.
Today I look back on the days that followed, the endless scanning for faces, the blasts of names, the outings, the anger and the rage and then the denial and of course the obfuscation of facts. That is why I ditched Cable News as most of it is talking heads spouting endless their opinions disguised as truths and news. No, it is not regardless of the network, be it Fox, be it CNN be it MSNBC. Even NPR and BBC have become mirrors of that prototype, endlessly chatting on as if filling up air space somehow makes things true, relevant or important. All of that began with Fox News and the Murdoch empire that has little vested interest in anything but securing their own wealth and power, the rest is just a service provided to blur the lines of what defines news and information. The Murdoch history and attitudes are so hideous and their role is not just American politics, it is in Great Britain and Australia as well. For Rupert has an agenda and that is keep those in power that will enable him to keep his power and wealth in tact. What he believes is as murky as the swamp that many dwell in as they continue to lie, to misrepresent and obfuscate the truth.
I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and subscribe to numerous journals. This last issue of The Atlantic is a must read for those trying to reconcile the past with the present and what this means for the future. I refuse to speculate or lend my theories as I have none. I have only hope that a voice will lead and the change we need to secure our Democracy will be heard and step forward in which to make it so.
One of the things that has to be understood that the endless cries for Civil War and refusing to hear or listen to anyone who does not follow the script, regardless of the side of politics you align yourself with may be that voice. But for now it is take a side and rational thought and clear thinking is gone. Read the comment page in the Post, or forums on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. But in reality we don’t, we prefer our echo chamber as it enables to feel less alone, to feel a sense of belonging and more importantly a sense of righteousness. Ah the very thing that led to Jan 6, 2021. This is one long road we are on and there will be many stops along the way, some intentional, some incidental and some accidental. But in reality we need to support the process and allow the Jan 6th commission to do this job and do it well. We not only need it, we must demand it. Scars do not heal easily and this is a deep scar.
As I write this #Covidiots is trending on Twitter, not the first nor the last. What is wrong with this is that many of them are not Trumptards, in fact many are people of color, people who never voted for Trump, never voted for Biden and are not religious zealots. Some are new age advocates who “don’t believe” in modern medicine and that crosses color lines, both of skin and politics. Some are very political and with it disengenous as they are likely vaccinated and are using it to further their position with those who are politically aligned. Some are religious and regardless and many have deep seated emotional problems that they are associating this situation with that incident that has NOTHING to do with Covid, vaccines, Trump or politics. The are well, how do I say this, stupid. These are the people that react to everything emotionally and again can be well educated, voted for Biden but when it comes to making rational decisions about their health and public well being they cannot as their cat died the same week their beloved Grandmother died and this reminds them of that or some other nonsensical reason behind this decision. My former Barista who is Black and suffered child abuse and is all new age-y claims that if he contracts Covid it is “his time.” He is fascinated by Bitcoin, has no education other than acting school and can barely read. He has many many emotional problems and his brother is also mentally ill, diagnosed Schizophrenic, who is functioning for years before finally getting the medication he needs. But he and the rest of the family are never going to ever get the kind of mental health they need. Period, that they need. And this could be a White, Asian or any other family in America where poverty has segregated them into a dynamic where access and availability to proper health care, both physical and mental, is non existent. And hence that too is why many are anti-vaxx.
But mental health is perhaps the most significant factor in why many embraced Q’Anon and in turn accepted and vested into the Big Lie. The social isolation of Covid was nothing to these people who were already in marginal jobs, had little to few friends and opportunities to vest in a larger sense of belonging to a community; be that through actual engagement or through vested knowledge shared experiences. I don’t know how many people I meet daily that seem to think Manhattan is an island akin to Hawaii and rarely, if ever, go across the river to attend a show, a museum or just walk in the many boroughs or neighborhoods. I meet many who simply have to organize, plan and schedule any and all events as if to exert some type of control in a life that seems to be lacking said control. And that too is vaccinated related. I see that in the wine store clerk every time I run into him. He said he is vaxxed but continues to wear masks, bump fists the last time I saw him and seems utterly disconnected from anywhere in the city he grew up in let alone the one he works in. I get early in the pandemic looking for work and driving distance but at this point I have to wonder why he still does. Again that is control and safety in the familiar even when it is challenging, and the kid at the coffee shop also continued to work there for months while simultaneously complaining, whining and bitching about the job long after other businesses were open and looking for help. Fear is a factor and a large emotional responder to many. I feel that way with regards to conflict as I bail so fast your head will spin but I do have some sense of rational thought that enables me to work through some of it but that took decades of work and I still feel that it is exhausting dealing with the emotional issues of others so I do little to connect in anything but brief moments that are meaningful in the moment, nothing more. So in other words, we meet, exchange numbers and texts and I send the last text and then when no response, ghosted if you must, I delete the thread and move on. But I always end on a positive, something vague and open ended, leaving it to them to be the “bad guy.” I shudder to think if I actually did get a response, then what?
So we all carry our bags and we sort through them and in that process we find an item that recalls another time in another life and we want to replicate it, or try to seek out those who have similar recollections and experiences and that is Trump. And when I read this article last night after I came home from the Theater (a monologue about blow jobs and it was like giving one or having one that just goes on too long) I thought about the evening and the fun drinks I shared with a charming 25 year old gay boy who was very drunk and very sweet and bought my drinks, shared his food and we parted as “friends” who will never see each other again. It was better than the play, with the endless Covid protocol where we had to bring our vaxx card, our ID, wear masks and the minute the house lights went off so did the masks to sit and listen to a woman wax on about waxing a dick. And then I went home and it began to rain, which I have always loved it as it was a symbol, cleaning off the evening of drinks spilled and sweat and just exhaustion. I did not need to do it again, as once was enough, but like many times in the past I thought it wasn’t and I went out trying to replicate that same moment, a moment, an encounter, an experience, that can never happen again. The diagnosis of insanity is doing the same thing over again believing that the same outcome will result. Well folks it sorta kinda can if you do it with the same people and come up with a strategy, plan of action and continue to do it over and over again, Groundhog day folks and all under your control. Control matters to those where they seem to have so little it.
So in other words spending energy on trying to rationalize, empathize or even understand the motivations of those of the traveling Trumptards is wasting time, they are not worth that effort. When you read the article note that the one woman is quite clear on why she went to DC on January 6th, “It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Yes, you were there JUST to overthrow the government. Really? Okay then. And here reason for loving Trump was less about Trump but the collective mind set, the sense of belonging and this was akin to her experience in the 80; for Saundra Kiczenski, a 56-year-old from Michigan, compared the energy at a Trump rally to the feelings she had as a teenager in 1980 watching the “Miracle on Ice” — when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly beat the Soviet Union.
And that was that, the shared thrill of the moment. Group think is a powerful tool that on some level explains the behaviors: Group think is a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people makes irrational or non-optimal decisions spurred by the urge to conform and dissent is impossible. The problematic or premature consensus that is characteristic of group think may be fueled by a particular agenda—or it may be due to group members valuing harmony and coherence above critical thought.
With that a collective consciousness is shared. Collective consciousness refers to the set of shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that are common to a social group or society. The collective consciousness informs our sense of belonging and identity, and our behavior.
So the same hysteria over # and likes is the same across groups on social media regardless of their Race, Gender, Political tribe and any other moniker, label or acronym you use to identify yourself in which to become a member. The dogpiles on social media are no less aggressive or intimidating or in fact damaging. Just ask Chrissey Tiegen on that one. Self identity is one thing, projection, distraction and of course finger pointing is easy behind a keyboard less so in real life. So have at it. I like to do the work on myself and myself alone in every sense of the word.
To Trump’s hard-core supporters, his rallies weren’t politics. They were life.
What 2020 looked like from the front row on the campaign trail
Michael C. Bender is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” from which this article is adapted. July 16, 2021|
Donald Trump soaked in the adoration as he commanded a rally stage inside a massive central Florida arena. I stewed in my seat and stopped taking notes.
It was the third summer of Trump’s presidency, and the event had been billed as the official kickoff of his reelection campaign. What unfolded, however, was effectively the exact same rally I’d already covered at least 50 times since 2016 as a White House and political reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, a campaign launch marks an inflection point for a candidate to frame the race, offering a new message or a second-term agenda. But the only differences that day in June 2019 were cosmetic: The sound system was louder, the physical stage grander. Timeworn chants of “Lock her up” and “Build the wall” rippled through the arena, with Trump supporters echoing their favorite lines like childhood friends at a sleepover watching their favorite movie for the umpteenth time.
Then it struck me. The deafening roars and vigorous choruses from the capacity crowd at the 20,000-seat Amway Arena showed that Trump’s supporters were excited to watch a rerun. They’d stood in line for hours or camped overnight — enduring stifling humidity interrupted only by brief bursts of hard, heavy rain — to ensure a spot inside. Now I was rattled. I had let the rallies, which formed the core of one of the most steadfast political movements in modern American history and reordered the Republican Party, turn stale and rote. Why was Trump’s performance still so fresh and resonant for an entire arena of fellow Americans? I spent the next year and a half embedded with a group of Trump’s most hardcore rallygoers — known as the “Front Row Joes” — to try to understand what I’d overlooked.
The answer wasn’t so much what I’d missed as what they had found. They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. The president himself almost always spent the night in his own bed and kept few close friends. But his rallies gave the Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.
In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists. Saundra Kiczenski, a 56-year-old from Michigan, compared the energy at a Trump rally to the feelings she had as a teenager in 1980 watching the “Miracle on Ice” — when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly beat the Soviet Union.
“The whole place is erupting, everyone is screaming, and your heart is beating like, just, oh my God,” Kiczenski told me. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”
Their devotion wasn’t reciprocated. Trump was careless with his supporters’ innocence, as he turned coronavirus tests into political scorecards and painted civil rights protests as a breeding ground for antifa. His last campaign-style event as president, the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, helped fuel a deadly riot at the Capitol that has resulted in the arrests of more than 500 Americans. But the former president still drew thousands to a rural fairground about an hour outside Cleveland last month and to another in central Florida. And the question from June 2019 about what keeps bringing his fans back remains a pressing one for the country — and an urgent one for the Republican Party.
Many of the people facing criminal charges related to the riot have pointed to Trump and his lies about the election as the reason they stormed the symbolic heart of the world’s longest-standing democracy. But those arguments have taken place inside courtrooms. Outside Trump rallies, there are alternative facts.
“It’s ridiculous those people are in prison for no reason,” Kiczenski told me at the Ohio rally last month. “And it’s a shame because if Donald Trump were still the president, they’d all be free.”
The Front Row Joes include several Trump aficionados who had spent decades keeping tabs on his political flirtations, tabloid melodrama and star turns on reality television. But I talked to a surprising number who’d also voted for Barack Obama at least once, attracted to the Democrat’s charisma and fed up with Republicans over foreign adventurism and the growing national debt.https://a71f6c6c32f2d06fb08c8a2d996b745e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Kiczenski met people like Ben Hirschmann, a Michigan legislative intern who posted on Facebook anytime he had an open seat in his car on the way to a rally. She bonded with Brendan Gutenschwager and flew with him to Hong Kong, where they spent 24 hours waving their red, white and blue Trump flags during protests over China’s extradition laws. She occasionally overnighted about an hour outside Detroit with Judy Chiodo, a fellow Trump rally-trotter, rather than drive all the way home to Sault Ste. Marie.
But 2020 proved grueling for the Joes. In March, Hirschmann was among the first Americans to die of covid-19. His death, at 24, shook his Trump friends. “I talked to him more than my own daughter,” Cindy Hoffman, a 60-year-old Iowa woman who ran a tool-sharpening business, said on a Zoom call that the Joes held to grieve.
Yet within a few months, as Trump’s response to the pandemic became increasingly politicized, the Front Row Joes had pinned Hirschmann’s death on a push for doctors to see patients remotely by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Her changes largely mirrored steps the Trump administration had taken, but she was a Democrat who had emerged as a foil for the president. They also turned on one another, shaming friends who wanted to wear masks or were nervous about attending rallies during the pandemic.
When Randal Thom, a 60-year-old ex-Marine with a long gray mustache, fell severely ill with a high fever and debilitating congestion, he refused to go to the hospital. He was a heavy smoker who was significantly overweight and knew he faced an increased risk of severe effects from covid-19. Still, he refused to take a coronavirus test and potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch: “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told me. Thom survived the scare, but died months later in a car accident while returning home to Minnesota from a Trump boat parade in Florida.
While most Americans only occasionally left their homes, the pandemic proved a blessing for Kiczenski’s Trump travel plans. She bought cheap airfare, repeatedly basked in the extravagance of an airplane aisle all to herself and logged more flights in 2020 than at any other point in her life. She attended 25 Trump rallies, boosting her total to 56. She spent 79 nights of the year away from her bed. Kiczenski traveled so often during the pandemic that a Delta flight attendant thanked her for being a Silver Medallion member and upgraded her to first class; she initially assumed it was a mistake.
Kiczenski was in Washington with friends for the Jan. 6 rally. She was convinced beyond a doubt that Trump had been reelected on Nov. 3, only to have his victory stolen in what she described as “a takeover by the communist devils.” She said she believed that, in part, because she had crossed paths with Corey Lewandowski, a well-known and ubiquitous Trump adviser, in the Trump International Hotel the previous summer. Lewandowski told her, she said, that the only way Trump could lose was if there was massive election fraud.
“If someone put a gun to my head and said: ‘Did Donald Trump win, yes or no? And if you’re wrong, we’re going to shoot your head off!’ I would say yes,” Kiczenski told me. “I’m that confident that this stuff is not made up.”
On Jan. 6, she and her friends made their way to the west side of the Capitol, where a mob pushed through police barricades and turned steel bike racks on their sides, leaning them against stone walls like ladders. Some men helped her climb up the rungs. People were everywhere, and it was difficult to move. Kiczenski and her friends scaled one more wall and were within about 100 yards of the Capitol. But it had become so crowded — they didn’t want to lose one another — that they decided to stop on the west terrace, take pictures and soak up the atmosphere.
They paused in the place where Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had been inaugurated in 2017 amid a crowd of former presidents and against a Capitol decorated in red, white and blue bunting. Now, four years later, Trump’s supporters swarmed the ornate building. Outside that evening, countless Trump flags flapped in the wind. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air against the purple twilight sky, and the orange light glowing from inside the Capitol’s windows gave the scene a surreal, apocalyptic feel.
Kiczenski was inspired by a vista of Trumpian strength and patriotism: the Washington Monument in the distance, the majestic Capitol in the foreground, and freedom-loving patriots fighting like hell to stop a stolen and fraudulent election, liberate their country and save their president. She snapped pictures and recorded videos.
“It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
But when Trump posted a video to social media asking supporters to go home (and saying he loved them) after the riot raged for hours, Kiczenski felt confused and depressed. “We were supposed to be fighting until the end,” she said.
She reminded herself that the president hadn’t technically conceded, and as soon as she arrived home in Michigan, she packed for the next Trump trip. Kiczenski trusted that something was coming and wanted a go-bag ready if she needed to leave for a rally at a moment’s notice.
“We’re all on the edge of our seats waiting to hear about the next event,” she said. “Now we’re like an army, and it’s like boots on the ground. Tell us where we need to go!
“The time is now,” she continued, sounding at once urgent and wistful. “It’s time to go.”
And when Trump returned to the rally circuit in June, so did Kiczenski. “We have a lot of down time now that we’re trying to fill,” she told me in Ohio. “It’s basically like we don’t have a president right now
I think of the Church as that built on the foundation much akin to the Champlain Towers in Surfside Florida. Often they begin thanks to the well organized funding and messaging ambitions of the Corporation and continue on throughout regardless of who is the CEO and the doors are opened to anyone willing to pay the price of entry. And then it takes just one mistake of a member or leader that leads the Church as a whole to re-examine their history, their practices and their long term growth and stability. The Catholic Church is one such example.
Then we have the franchised religion. These are the ramshackle churches that align country towns, exist in neighborhoods, set up a temporary pop up shop on Sundays in a bar or community center to spread the word and that defines much of the Southern Baptist Organization.
All of them have factions and side groups that embrace a more hardcore view of the world, a script that follows the Book of Myths as if it is law with a traceable cohesive view that demands adherence and complete idolatry. Yes, beware of false idols.
I am writing a great deal about religion as I had not really understood its toxicity until I moved to Nashville. I was a live and let live believer in that you need what you need to be you and then I met the Christians of Nashville. And from that I learned of the Nashville Way which is to contradict themselves repeatedly and largely in jibberish. Here is a true real world current example over the issue of the Nathan Forrest, the founder of the KKK, whose bust sits in the Capital building. With the issue of removing Confederate Soldiers statues and markings throughout the country as they represent the most negative periods in America’s history. The Plumber Governor is going forth to finally remove it and have it sent to the State Museum. Meanwhile the State Legislator is going forward to prevent this. And this is what he said:
In 2020, Lee announced “represents pain and suffering and brutal crimes committed against African Americans,” Lee declared last summer, though on the campaign trail two years earlier, the future governor said he was against removing Confederate monuments.
However, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, a staunch opponent of relocating the Forrest bust from the Capitol, and House Speaker Cameron Sexton have argued for months that the governor and his cabinet members on the Capitol Commission did not follow state law by failing to get a vote of concurrence from the State Building Commission before proceeding to the Historical Commission.
And here is where once again it goes all in circle of jerks who seem to be determined to be heard regardless that the outcome will be said it will just go around the infamous roundabouts that align the roads in the South to further confuse and frustrate drivers trying to go in a straight line.
Adam Kleinheider, a spokesman for McNally, on Thursday said the lieutenant governor expects the State Building Commission to vote on the matter at its next scheduled meeting July 22. The makeup of that commission is similar to the Capitol Commission and probably would result in the same outcome, barring the unexpected. McNally “continues to stand by his assertion” that the Building Commission needs to concur with the Capitol Commission vote — despite the fact the Historical Commission already has approved removal.
And with that the Attorney General Herbert Slatery stated both sides’ argument for the proper protocol are valid. Slatery opined that the speakers, who argued the Capitol Commission should have taken the issue to the Building Commission before the Historical Commission, and the Lee administration, which went straight to the Historical Commission, each had legitimate interpretations.
Got that? Good. Welcome to Nashville, that is the way and truth and the light. In other words cover your ass talk out of both sides of your mouth and inevitably deny responsibility, put it on others and good to go. I met many like that and all of them had asses in pews on Sunday which is where all of this is learned and reinforced.
And with that I have been sure that the Churches role in the insurrection of January 6th and the election of Donald Trump; the rise of the new right and all the varying hate bills regarding LGBQT rights, as well as removing the right to choose regarding a woman’s body is moving across state lines in a fast clip. They are a determined, focused and well funded group with regards to turning America into a Theocracy.
This is an article from the Post regarding another mega church that is determined to do just that. They are insidious throughout the Country. And they too have had their problems in the past decades the most recent was in Seattle, with the Mars Church leadership controversy. But this is like whack-a-mole, as there is another ready to step into their former mall space the next day. And just like a mall shop they have Yelp reviews in which to enable the followers to find the one that fits, like purple soled Nikes. Ah yes Heaven’s Gate is awaiting you, just get on the space ship and ride to God. So Aliens are Christians?
And below that article I have placed an opinion piece from the New York Times regarding the decline of the Evangelical Movement. Hmm which is it? I leave that to you to decide.
An American Kingdom
A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP
FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.
Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.
It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”
Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.
“Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ”
The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president DonaldTrump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.
This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.
Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.
None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.
What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.
That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting.
It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a “spiritual father” of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was “spiritual authority,” he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas.
Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born.
“Mercy” for undeserved grace.
“Culture” for the world they wanted to create.
That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services.
In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs.
In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs.
On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through — two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: “When we start, I want you to wait to build it — then I want you to do those drum rolls as we’re building it.” He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer.
The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit — not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it — a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it — golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.
That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black “MC,” in through an entrance where the words “Fear Go” were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee.
“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the “sexual confusion” of being gay, queer or transgender. They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon “Mercy” sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary.
Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs.Advertisement
What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing.
A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new.
“The Holy Spirit is in this room,” he said.
Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. Another video began playing — this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation:
America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the “seductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control God’s people.” Beware of “freedom that is actually just rebellion against God.” Beware of confusion. Beware of “rogue leaders.” Beware of a world that “preaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,” and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation.
“Just say, ‘Holy Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,’ ” he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday.
People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the church’s website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet.
When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags.
By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin.
One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was “raising up an army of influential leaders” across Fort Worth.
Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine “operations” around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worth’s sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was “the demonic battle of our lifetime” and told those gathered that “you are the warriors in that battle.”
Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers.
A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries.
A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, “Please, just bless my life.”
A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: “Jesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,” she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord.
“God wants to tell you that you’re so beautiful,” she said into one window.
“I feel God is saying that you’ve done a good job for your family,” she said into another.
“I feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,” she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. “When God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,” she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. “I feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?” she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. “And I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my shame.’ Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my regret,’ ” the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. “ ‘You know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,’ ” the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, “Welcome to the family.”
Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Women’s Night.
“I feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,” a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun.
“Every time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,” her friend said.
“Yeah, that happens to me all the time, too,” said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to “prophesy over the land” in anticipation of a revival.
“I don’t understand it; I just know it’s God,” Autumn said.
“So many miracles,” said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding.
They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastor’s wife, during which she referred to the women as “vessels” and described “the Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.”
Another day — Election Day in Fort Worth — hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding.
“Supernatural,” said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers who’d knocked on thousands of doors around the city.
A candidate for the 2022 governor’s race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that “this is the beginning of a righteous movement.”
“We are not just going after the mayorship — we’re going after every seat,” he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray.
“Jesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,” his campaign adviser said. “We stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. God, this is only the beginning.”
Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, “God, I’ll go anywhere; God, I’ll do anything,” hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love.
“Everyone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, ‘By this we know love,’ ” he said. “Jesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.”
He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, “Jesus, Jesus,” trancelike, until the blond man said, “It’s about that time.”
He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth.
One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before.
Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed.
Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door.
It wasn’t the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable.
“Maybe someone is struggling with their identity,” Ryan said.
He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void.
“I never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,” he said. “We all take care of each other, right, Tom?”
“Oh, yeah,” said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called “misfits” into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken.
“It’s all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,” Tom said. “That’s what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that it’s all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. That’s my testimony.”
That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces.
“The sheep will know the shepherd’s voice,” he repeated to himself to calm his nerves.
“Hey, Jesus loves y’all,” he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by.
“He does, he does,” the woman said, and he pressed on.
“Is anything bothering you?” he said to a man holding a shopping bag.
“No, I’m good,” the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk.
It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by.
He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest.
“Do you talk to God?” Nick asked him.
“Every day — I died twice,” the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident.
“What happened when you died?” Nick asked.
“Didn’t see any white lights,” the man said. “Nothing.”
“Well, Jesus loves you,” Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red.
“Hi, I’m Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?”
“Kind of you to ask,” the man said. “My uncle killed himself yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Nick, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesn’t feel like it all the time.”
He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time.
“The singer said if you’re struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, ‘Okay, God, I guess I give it to you,’ and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, ‘I have you.’ I heard God say, ‘I love you. I made you for a purpose.’ When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.”
The man with red eyes listened.
“Thanks for saying that,” he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test.
“If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,” said Nick. “John the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? I’m ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off — it doesn’t matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.”
Ready for what, though, is the lingering question.
Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus.
To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, “There’s a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. It’s just loving the city. Being engaged. Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who don’t align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.”
Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: “Can you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.”
That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come.
The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in.
“Submission,” he said.
“We’ve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,” he continued.
“God makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,” he continued.
“When you submit, God fights for you,” he concluded.
He cued the band. The drums began to pound again, and he told people to “breathe in the presence of God,” and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them.
“I declare beautiful, supernatural submission,” they said.
The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It
The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”
Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.
Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.
But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.
One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.
In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.
White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.
From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.
QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.
“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”
The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.
Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.
As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”
Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”
I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.
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