Category Archives: Random Blogging

Preparing To Resist

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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I have previously posted about the rally being held just two days from now, on January 20th–Inauguration Day–in  Indianapolis.

Reasonable readers might wonder what such a gathering is intended to do. After all, the threats posed by the incoming  administration will manifest in concrete, harmful actions. Should we not be saving our energies to oppose and try to derail those actions, and to help neighbors likely to bear the brunt of the coming assaults?

That question is reasonable, but it misses an important point. Those of us who are dreading what is likely to come, who fear for the country we thought we lived in, need to find and support each other. We also need to mutually reinforce our commitment to that country’s democratic and constitutional traditions, and to its first motto: e pluribus unum.

Think of the rally–and the other demonstrations being planned–as a coming together, a communal “kickoff” to the coming resistance.

As Hoosiers4Democracy recently put it, on the 20th, we will not only be commemorating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we will be affirming that we

stand in resistance to the inauguration of a President who promises to unravel the constitution and ignores the rule of law. The rally is an act of love for our constitution and the foundational American values of liberty, equality and justice for all. We know these values are not applied equally, that many in our country are denied basic human and civil rights that others are afforded. We know that these values are under further assault by our incoming state and federal administrations. We stand in resistance to that assault.

In a paragraph explaining why the rally matters, H4D explained:

It is thought that Carrie Chapman Catt, a suffragist and founder of the League of Women Voters, said that ‘democracy is not a spectator sport’. Now is not the time to be a spectator to the spectacle that is happening in our state and our country. Despite our disillusionment, disappointment, despair and heartbreak, we must not allow ourselves to sit on the sidelines of politics. We need to stand up for our Constitution and our commitment to E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. So join us as we:

Reclaim the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Rebuild a stronger more inclusive society and the democratic institutions that are being threatened
Resist the policies and actions that undermine our freedoms and civil rights.

The missive ended by asking readers to commit “to being an engaged and informed citizen, especially in this perilous moment.”

Put on your coats, boots, mittens, warm hats and join us in song, inspired readings, and a diverse lineup of speakers as we ‘let our hearts speak’ for what we love most about this country. Reclaim, Rebuild, and Resist Rally, January 20, 2025, 10:00am-Noon, University Park, 325 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis.

The rally has several organizational co-sponsors: ACLU Indiana, ReCenter Indiana, Common Cause Indiana, Women4Change Indiana, the Indiana chapter of the American Association of University Women, and the League of Women Voters of Indiana. It will feature musical interludes and brief talks by clergy and civic leaders (and one local blogger, namely me).

I hope that those of you who live in central Indiana can join us as we reinforce our solidarity and prepare for what comes next.

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Religious War

A few days ago, I participated in a panel discussion following a showing of “Bad Faith,” a documentary film about Christian Nationalism. Coming so soon after reading “The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory,” it was even more traumatizing.

The film began with videos of the violent January 6th insurrection, and focused in on the multiple signs of “religious” motivation–placards linking Jesus to Donald Trump, crosses, rioters waving bibles and numerous other bits of Christian iconography. The rest of the documentary alternated between films of mega-church pastors preaching fire and brimstone to huge adoring audiences and anguished commentaries from scholars and clerics, including many religious figures who–like Tim Alberta–are devout Evangelicals appalled by the White Christian Nationalism that has replaced authentic Christianity for millions of believers.

The film underscored the dimensions of the religious war these “believers” are waging.

  • The sheer number of “soldiers” who have substituted White Christian Nationalism for Christianity is stunning. The videos showed “sermons” of well-known pastors (many of who have benefitted monetarily from the movement) and panned over huge audiences. According to the scholars interviewed, the movement numbers hundreds of pastors whose names are less familiar than those of the usual subjects, but whose messages are equally strident, intemperate and theocratic.
  • The movement is thoroughly racist and misogynist. Adherents are men and women who are threatened by social change and who express strong disapproval of the emerging “non-biblical” social equality of women and Black people. (Especially Black people.) The audiences for the diatribes about America’s “decline” were virtually all white, and the rhetoric employed left little room for alternative explanations.
  • This phenomenon is not just a fundamentalist tantrum against diversity and feminism; it’s leadership is strategic, well-planned and and coordinated. The role of Paul Weyrich in forming and growing the movement was amply documented, but what really struck me was the longevity of the effort. Weyrich and the others–Falwell, Robertson, Ralph Reed, etc.–began many years ago putting together a political movement intent upon replacing the government with a Christian theocracy. They made common cause with the very rich by promising to protect them from “confiscatory taxation.” They created a number of not-for-profits and think tanks that have worked in tandem for many years. Weyrich’s original manifesto has basically been reproduced in Project 2025.
  • Movement leadership accomplished their planned takeover of the GOP, expelling traditional Republicans and conservatives, and turning the party into a White Christian Nationalist cult.
  • The widespread belief that Evangelical political activity was sparked by Roe v. Wade is a myth. As I’ve previously noted and multiple religious historians have confirmed, initial Evangelical responses to that ruling were positive or neutral. It wasn’t until five years later that movement honchos decided to use “baby killing” as a tool to motivate activism from previously non-political Evangelicals–although their real trigger was withdrawal of tax-exempt status from the segregation academies they had established in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.
  • The pastors have sold Trump to their Christian Warriors by insisting, variously, that he is a flawed “tool” of the Almighty and/or that he found God and was “born again” during his first term.
  • The movement substitutes country for God and far-Right politics for religion, using bogus history to claim that the United States was established as a “Christian country.” Evangelical clergy who focus on the essence of Jesus’ message–for example, the Sermon on the Mount–lose church members who tell them that such sentiments are “woke” and then decamp for more belligerent congregations.

There was much more, and if you get a chance to see the film, it is definitely worth your time. It will increase your understanding of the threat we face, and will underscore the imperative of reaching the millions of Americans who don’t bother to vote.

What is sobering is the realization that this effort to replace America’s Constitutional democracy with a psuedo-Christian theocracy has been active for over fifty years. Those of us in the larger, “woke” American culture have, for the most part, been blissfully unaware of its well-financed and strategically-sophisticated leadership, or the significant danger it poses to tolerance, individual liberty and the rule of law.

Like Micah Beckwith, these biblical literalists think they–and only they– own God. They are certain that they, and only they, are “on God’s side.” They are convinced that there’s a bright line between (their definition of) Godliness and sin (which is pretty much everything in modern culture), and that God wants them to impose His rules (as they understand them) on the rest of us.

They are the core of Trump’s base. They vote. And he knows he owes them.

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Christian MAGA

A Northwest Indiana newspaper recently reported that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s incoming Lieutenant Governor, is telling people to refuse to comply with hospital requirements to wear masks when visiting to avoid spreading respiratory illnesses. Beckwith, you will (not) be pleased to know, speaks to God, who evidently doesn’t want us to mask up…

Those of us who find people like Beckwith difficult–okay, impossible–to understand or take seriously, need to read Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.” It’s eye-opening. And sleep-disturbing.

Alberta himself is a devout Evangelical Christian. His father was a Southern Baptist preacher, and it is very clear from the book that Alberta has not only remained wedded to that tradition, but is in possession of deep biblical knowledge. He is also, however, sane, and inhabits an America with which most of us are familiar.

He appears to be one of the declining number of deeply religious Christians who refuse to cherry-pick biblical passages in order to bolster very unChristian bigotries.

In the wake of his father’s death and the 2016 election, Alberta tried to get his head around a question that has stumped many of us: how could so many ostentatiously devout Christians be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump? (In 2020, Trump’s share of the White Evangelical vote was a whopping 84 percent.) Alberta took a year and a half to visit numerous Evangelical congregations to try to understand what motivated them.

His book was the product of those visits. I found it terrifying.

As one review noted,

This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs.

The book demonstrates that the “veneer” has pretty much peeled off. Alberta interviews some of the “usual suspects”– con-artist preachers of the Religious Right–and those interviews amply confirm what we “libs” have already concluded. Far more revealing were his interactions with members of the “flocks,” the congregants, a great many of whom had left churches where the pastors had declined to substitute MAGA politics for biblical sermonizing, and most of whom occupy an alternate, imaginary  and unrecognizable America.

Two things about those reports especially dumbfounded me: the sheer number of people who embrace what Alberta calls “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism;” and the widespread rejection of logic, fact, science and basic humanity among those thousands of “biblical literalists”. As the linked review noted,

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”

A majority of these congregants have turned religion into politics, and substituted (their version of) the “real” America for God. In one sanctuary, Alberta sees “a lot of American flags” but not a single cross.” He found belligerent culture warriors who never spoke about helping immigrants or the poor, and noted that “bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek.”

A booth at the Faith and Freedom Coalition was selling T-shirts with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands  for an expletive directed at Joe Biden. In case the expletive was unclear, the T-shirts included a hashtag #FJB. When Alberta questioned the propriety of such merchandise at a Christian event, the proprietor responded that he was protesting the “fact” that “we’ve taken God out of America.”

Shutdowns during the pandemic particularly incensed many of these culture warriors, and Alberta recounts multiple conversations with people who sound a lot like Indiana’s Micah Beckwith. COVID, they insist, was a liberal assault on Christianity and the church. (One woman insisted that Dr. Fauci had “invented” it.) Masks and vaccines are a liberal plot.

These are the people who elected Donald Trump.

The book is chilling. Read it.

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Meta Goes Vichy

The term “Vichy” refers to the shameful, collaborationist government in World War II France, during that country’s Nazi occupation. In the run-up to the Trump/MAGA occupation of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg just announced Vichy Meta.

Meta won’t be even a small part of the resistance.

Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will end its longstanding fact-checking program. Third-party fact-checking was originally instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Meta’s other social media apps.

The change was the latest sign of how companies owned by multi-zillionaires are “repositioning” (aka groveling) in preparation for the Trump presidency.

The Bulwark headlined the move “Mark Zuckerberg is a Surrender Monkey,” pointing out that he’d recently named Joel Kaplan as the company’s head of public policy. Kaplan isn’t just a Republican in good standing, he’s a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh, and–according to the article– “somewhere between friendly-toward and horny-for Trumpism.” He also appointed Dana White, manager of something called Ultimate Fighting Championship to Meta’s board of directors. That background is arguably  irrelevant to Meta’s business, but his usefulness rather clearly isn’t in any expertise he possesses; instead, his “value” clearly lies in being one of Donald Trump’s closest friends and top endorsers. 

Add to that Zuckerberg’s one million dollar donation to Trump’s Inaugural fund.

Kaplan went on Fox & Friends (of course) to explain that Facebook is killing its fact-checking program in order to make its content moderation strategy more like Elon Musk’s Twitter/X regime.  

As all sentient Americans are aware, when Musk purchased Twitter (which he awkwardly re-named X), he promised unfettered free speech. He then proceeded to invite back users who had previously been banned for bad behavior. He then fired content moderation teams, and replaced them with crowdsourced “community notes” below disputed content. That is the model Meta is adopting.

So–how are things going at X?

Numerous studies have documented the enormous amounts of false and hateful content now on X. Antisemitic, racist and misogynistic posts rose sharply immediately after Musk’s takeover, and have continued to proliferate. It hasn’t only been the bigotry. Disinformation about issues like climate change and migration has exploded, and users are spending greater amounts of time liking and reposting items from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Hamas. 

There’s a reason so many advertisers have fled and former users of the platform have decamped for Bluesky.

The Bulwark reproduced Zuckerberg’s tweets announcing the change, including one jaw-dropping post explaining that the company would move its “trust and safety and content moderation teams” out of California and send them to Texas, to allay concerns about content-moderation bias. (If just being located in a Blue state creates bias, what sort of bias can we expect from people located in and influenced by Greg Abbott’s Red, retrograde Texas?)

All this to pander to an incoming autocrat whose continuing mental decline becomes more obvious every day. In his most recent press conference, Trump once again threatened to invade Greenland–owned by our ally Denmark– and to recapture the Panama Canal (which he inexplicably explained was necessary to counter China.) He also announced his intention to make Canada part of the U.S., and to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, I’m sure those measures will bring down the price of eggs….

This is the buffoon who will soon occupy the Oval Office. The fact that a (slim) majority of Americans voted for this mentally-ill ignoramus is depressing enough, but recognizing that we have large numbers of citizens who vote their White Christian Nationalism is one thing; the fact that people who clearly know better are willing to surrender their integrity in advance in order to stay in the good graces of the lunatic-in-charge is appalling. 

Facebook has already morphed from a useful platform allowing us to interact with family and friends into a site where advertisements vastly outnumber real posts. Its content moderators were already bending over backwards to accommodate Rightwing worldviews. How many users have the time or energy–or interest–to rebut blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories? For that matter, in a platform increasingly occupied by “bubbles”–where we interact mostly with people who already agree with us–will we even see the sorts of misinformation and disinformation that will be posted and enthusiastically shared by people who desperately want to believe that vaccines are a liberal plot and Jews have space lasers?

As Timothy Snyder wrote in “On Tyranny,” this is how democracies die: by surrendering in advance.

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Defunding The Police

I’m on record describing the slogan “Defund the Police” as one of the all-time stupidest political phrases ever. Not the actual intent of the proponents, which was more than defensible; as I understand it, it was an effort to limit police activity to a focus on actual crime by creating specialized “helpers” to respond to non-criminal episodes like mental health crises. But the slogan not only failed to convey that intent, it screamed support for lawlessness and a mindless anti-police–even “pro crime”– bias.

After all, sneered Republicans, who–other than those who want to evade the rules– would be interested in hobbling law enforcement?

An excellent question, with a not-surprising answer: the obscenely rich plutocrats who–despite MAGA illusions–are really in charge of the contemporary GOP. Following the fiasco triggered by co-President Musk when he torpedoed a bipartisan bill to keep the government open, The New Republic reported on a true “defunding” of authority that has received far too little publicity:

During last week’s negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Congress quietly slashed $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service.

Republicans have long targeted the tax agency, and their cuts will hurt its efforts to go after rich tax evaders and improve the IRS’s functionality. It’s their second successful cut from President Biden’s $80 billion funding boost to the agency in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, as the GOP took away an earlier $20 billion in a 2023 budget deal.

The latest cuts to the IRS will come automatically thanks to the 2023 deal, as the language was repeated in last week’s bill. The Biden administration said the cuts would end up adding $140 billion to the national debt, as they hurt the tax agency’s ability to audit big corporations and the wealthy.

This bit of legislative game-playing shines a corrective light on two of the most egregious lies told by Republicans: that the GOP is a fiscally responsible political party opposed to increasing government debt; and that it is the party of “law and order.”

When Republicans pontificate about excessive government spending, what they are really opposing is anything approaching fair and adequate taxation of the very rich. Deficits, after all, occur when income is insufficient to fund all expenditures. Constant giveaways in the form of tax cuts awarded to the wealthy Americans who disproportionately belong to the GOP increase deficits; the GOP’s “solution” isn’t to raise taxes on the rich; it’s to cut “government waste”–defined as programs that help low and middle-class Americans.

Even under the current tax laws that favor the obscenely rich, however, tax “avoidance” strategies (i.e. cheating) employed by those wealthy Americans allows them to evade paying significant portions of what they owe. Their success in evading payment has been largely due to the (intentional) under-resourcing of the Internal Revenue Service.

The Biden administration addressed the obvious problem by budgeting adequate funds for the agency–which led to action by the GOP that can only be described as “defunding the police.” Depriving the agency of funds to audit tax dodgers can only be attributed to one purpose: allowing rich scofflaws to cheat successfully. There is no other conceivable reason.

The cuts mean that the IRS will conduct 400 fewer major business audits each year, and 1,200 fewer audits of rich individuals. Customer services for taxpayers will also be hurt. According to an agency spokesperson, by 2026, the IRS will only have the resources to answer two of every 10 phone calls to its helplines, and wait times will increase to an average of 28 minutes.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s boost to the tax agency helped relieve a long backlog of tax filings, and created a well-liked free tax filing pilot program. All of that is on the chopping block now, fitting in with Donald Trump and Republicans’ plans to weaken the IRS. The president-elect plans to appoint anti-tax extremist Billy Long to take over the agency next year, who repeatedly tried to abolish the IRS as a member of Congress.

These cuts combined with Long’s planned appointment mean that tax season next year will almost certainly result in headaches for the average taxpayer and windfalls for the wealthy and powerful. A ballooning national debt is also on the horizon. The question is whether Trump and the GOP will be able to get away with all of it.

The reason the “Defund the Police” slogan was so idiotic was that it sounded like a plea to protect transgressors, even though that wasn’t what was meant. Defunding the IRS not only sounds like protecting criminals, it has absolutely no other purpose.

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