When Ben Swann delivers a news report, he looks and sounds like any other TV anchor: conventionally attractive, slick hair, clad in an unremarkable but well-tailored suit.
Continue reading “Inside The Russian Propaganda Mill Beaming Out Of A Florida Strip Mall”Meanwhile
Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for Ron DeSantis’s official super PAC and top cheese of the DeSantis campaign, has resigned. As usual, there’s lots of talk about cronies getting lavish sums of money. But really it’s never a good situation when your billionaire backers have given you massive amounts of money and your campaign is flat-lining.
Sic Transit
Lindsey Graham isn’t representative of much of anything good these days. But precisely because he’s now representative of fairly conventional GOP foreign policy thinking I found these remarks notable. I saw them in a round-up in Haaretz but they’re from Meet the Press …
Continue reading “Sic Transit”Russia Ramps Ups Attacks On LGBT Groups For An International, Far-Right Audience
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
With LGBTQ+ rights continuing to expand across much of the world, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has doubled down on restricting them — and a new ruling has made the future even more uncertain for Russian LGBTQ+ groups and individuals.
The LGBTQ+ “movement” is “extremist,” and its activities will be banned beginning in 2024, according to a ruling a justice of the Russian Supreme Court handed down at the close of November 2023.
Continue reading “Russia Ramps Ups Attacks On LGBT Groups For An International, Far-Right Audience”What Mike Johnson’s Stint Representing A Creationist Museum In Court Reveals About His Politics
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.
Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.
In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”
As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”
While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.
The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”
As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.
As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. And this connection is old.
Answers in Genesis and the Christian Right
In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.
More than this, Weinberg argues that, for Young Earth creationists, evolution has been understood as the “backbone” of a communist philosophy, a “socialist, Marxist philosophy” that promotes a “spirit of rebellion” in America today.
As rhetorical scholar Susan L. Trollinger and I document in our 2016 book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” AiG continues this Christian Right tradition through its extensive online presence, its museum and now Ark Encounter.
According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption. Ham claims that a once-Christian America — with Bible-believing founders who had no intention of separating church and state — has, since the 1960s, been dragged downward. In his 2012 book, “The Lie,” Ham asserts that this will eventually “result in the outlawing of Christianity.”
In the past few years, AiG has doubled down on its culture war commitments. For example, in March 2021 the AiG Statement of Faith — signed by all employees and volunteers — was expanded from 29 provisions to 46 provisions. This includes article 29, which requires signers to affirm that “‘social justice’ … as defined in modern terminology” is “anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Then there is article 32, which says that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated.”
Rejecting the dangers of global warming and the notion that governments should intervene to reverse this trend, AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.” According to him, climate activists are misled because they begin with human reason and not the Bible, and because they hold to evolution and an ancient Earth.
In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”
Mike Johnson and AiG beliefs
Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”
He also shares with the folks at AiG the conviction that belief in evolution results in immoral behavior. For example, Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”
In this, Johnson is echoing AiG authors and speakers. For example, in response to the 2007 shooting in a high school in Jokela, Finland, which left nine dead, including the shooter, Bodie Hodge, an AiG researcher and author, asserted: “So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.”
In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically, particularly given that a significant subset of American evangelicals adheres to Young Earth Creationism.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
WOW
A DC federal jury just awarded $148 million in total damages against Rudy Giuliani for defaming Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
$148 million.
Jury Holds Rudy Liable For $148 Million For Defaming Election Workers Freeman and Moss
A D.C. federal jury on Friday slapped Rudy Giuliani with $148 million in damages for defaming two Georgia election workers.
Continue reading “Jury Holds Rudy Liable For $148 Million For Defaming Election Workers Freeman and Moss”Listen To This: Where Goes Ukraine Goes Democracy
Kate and TPM’s Josh Kovensky talk with Serhiiy Plokhy, director of Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, about the Russia-Ukraine war at an inflection point as support for Ukraine fades within the Republican Party’s right flank and future aid is imperiled.
Belaboring The Point is now on YouTube! Check out the latest video episode of the podcast here.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Where Goes Ukraine Goes Democracy”Leveraged Buyout? Is Christian Ziegler Looking for Cash to Put the FL GOP Out of Its Misery?
News comes this morning that Christian Ziegler, embattled chair of the Florida GOP, accused rapist and one half (or perhaps one third) of the threesoming Zieglers, wants a buyout. Yes, a buyout. Usually we think of a buyout as a cash offer in exchange for some property interest in something, or a job in which someone has something akin to a property interest. It’s not usually something you get when you agree to relinquish an elected political office. But as we noted earlier, the bylaws of the Florida GOP don’t appear to contain any process for firing a party chair. The party can ask him to leave. They can investigate him. But they can’t fire him. So far Ziegler has been adamant in his refusal to resign.
Continue reading “Leveraged Buyout? Is Christian Ziegler Looking for Cash to Put the FL GOP Out of Its Misery?”How Sam Alito Masterminded Overturning Roe
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Behind The Scenes Of The Dobbs Decision
The NYT has a expansive new inside look at how the Supreme Court came to overturn Roe v. Wade with last year’s Dobbs decision. Drawing on interviews with court insiders and unusual access to internal court documents, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak pull back the velvet curtain on the justices’ deliberations:
To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.
The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion was not the only behind-the-scenes machinations going on in the months that the case was pending. The NYT describes a public-relations-style effort by the conservative justices to “create the appearance of distance” between the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and taking up Dobbs in order not to look as unseemly as they in fact were. (For a shorter version of the story, here are five takeaways.)
As for the leak itself, the story leaves the strong impression that it was more beneficial than harmful to the court majority that opposed abortion, effectively putting an end to a joint effort by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer to win over one of the conservatives to a more restrained approach on abortion law.
Through it all, Alito emerges as the implacable foe of Roe.
Seems Like A Big Problem
CNN:
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. …
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.
The binder wasn’t found at Mar-a-Lago and doesn’t figure in the charges against Trump in the case.
Jury Gets Rudy Giuliani Defamation Case
In the end, Rudy Giuliani balked at testifying in the trial of the defamation claims brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The end result was that Giuliani put on no witnesses in his defense and the case quickly moved to closing arguments.
The jury got the case sooner yesterday than expected and was able to get in three hours or so of deliberations before calling it day. Keep a close eye on the jury today. It’s a Friday. Juries like to finish their work before the weekend and not drag the case into another week. Plus, all this jury must decide is the size of the damage award since Giuliani has already been deemed liable. I’m expecting them to come up with a BIG number. Stay tuned.
See The Parallels?
In his closing argument, the attorney for plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss told the jury of Rudy Giuliani: “He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob.”
I initially saw the quote out of context and assumed it was from the fight over the gag order against Trump in his civil fraud trial in New York, where he has repeatedly attacked the judge’s law clerk. It’s the same modus operandi. Take a low-level public employee, demonize them, sic MAGA extremists on them, then disavow any responsibility for what transpires.
Incidentally, an appeals court yesterday rejected Trump’s challenge of the gag order in the New York case.
About Those Apology Letters …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained the apology letters written by Trump co-defendants Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Scott Hall as part of their plea deals in the Georgia RICO case.
Chesebro’s and Powell’s apologies were notably short: one sentence apiece.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, to be honest, but Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis by her own account got exactly what she was looking for:
“If you do something wrong that impacts the community … then there needs to be real contrition. The contrition doesn’t have to be some poetic melody. It doesn’t have to be pages and pages. Sometimes you just need ‘I’m sorry.’ And if you get ‘I’m sorry,’ then we can move on and move past (it) if it’s a sincere apology. … It doesn’t need to be very long. In fact, all I would rather is a sentence. But I think it’s important.”
Mark Meadows Case Back In Court
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments today on whether Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows can remove the Georgia RICO case to federal court. Meadows lost at the district court.
Jack Smith Is Still Interested In John Eastman
Special Counsel Jack Smith has obtained certified copies of the transcripts of former Trump attorney John Eastman’s testimony in his California disbarment proceedings, according to new reporting from Politico. Eastman was charged in the Georgia RICO case and is Co-conspirator No. 2 in the Jan. 6 indictment of Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether Smith plans to charge Eastman, eventually use him as a witness, or what exactly is going on.
No. 3 At DOJ Is Set To Leave Her Post
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, a former civil rights lawyer, is planning to leave the Justice Department early next year.
Former Senior FBI Official Gets Jail Time
Charles McGonigal, the former FBI counterintelligence official who pleaded guilty to helping sanctioned Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska manipulate the sanctions regime, was sentenced to 50 months in prison. The judge said she showed some leniency because of McGonigal’s “long, distinguished career as a law enforcement professional.” Ummm …
Senate Delays Its Holiday Recess
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is planning to keep the Senate in session next week while negotiations continue on a border proposal that can be packaged with Ukraine aid – even though its unclear if any deal eventually reached in the Senate would pass the House.
For Your Radar …
A federal judge in Baltimore declined for now to block the Naval Academy from using race in admissions in a case brought by the same group that persuaded the Supreme Court to knock down race-conscious admissions in higher education. The Supreme Court ruling did not apply to the service academies, which is the next front in the battle over affirmative action.
Assessing COP
- Elizabeth Kolbert: “Three decades after agreeing to avoid ‘dangerous’ warming, the nations of the world today acknowledged that this would involve ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels.’ … Depending on how you look at things, the statement represents either a genuine breakthrough that will allow the globe to avert catastrophe or a point so obvious that what it really reveals is how far offtrack things have veered.”
- Emily Atkin: “The final deal at COP28 is technically historic, in that it is the first deal that specifically calls on all nations to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. The problem with these quotes and headlines is that they convey almost zero meaning. Because when you leave a massive problem like climate change unaddressed for decades, almost anything you do represents ‘historic’ progress.
Have A Good Weekend!
See you back here on Monday.
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