keep_left
keep_left's JournalThis is "co-belligerence", where radtrad Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants...
...make common cause even when they otherwise hate each other. (For example, Catholics have been extremely underrepresented in the leadership of most religious right groups, so they eventually created their own, especially when it came to the abortion issue). The "abnormal lifestyle choice" nonsense is extremely close to radtrad Catholic language. Their favorite thought-terminating cliché is "intrinsically disordered lifestyle". It is a constant mantra on EWTN, (Ir)-Relevant Radio, etc. Now it's finding its way into the GOP platform.
The far-right radtrads at Church Militant go after Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson.
It's pretty funny to see the zealots at Church Militant battling the "Rev" Peterson. It's a real cringefest, and strangely enjoyable at the same time. (Extra credit cringe for that "BOND villain" line). As the kids say, "let them fight!".
Amazing Disgrace: The Secret Life of Conservative Icon Jesse Lee Peterson
https://old.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/vehres/jordan_lee_peterson_gay_scandal_exposed_by_church/
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/amazing-disgrace
There's a minority, backed by reactionary billionaires, that make a lot of noise...
...on their various paid-for platforms nobody watches or listens to like EWTN and (Ir)-Relevant Radio. That doesn't keep them from "trying to tell the world how it should spin", as the song goes. They may be approaching the point of delusional overconfidence. The rank-and-file laity doesn't give a shit and they are sick of hearing this garbage all the time.
Hmm. "...He fought for policies to help Black children while on the Buffalo School Board". Let me...
...guess: school vouchers? Yeah, let's help the little brown kids by putting them in schools that teach that the world is 6000 years old.
This Paladino idiot is a real piece of work...and a real piece of shit. 
What's funny (and prescient) about your suggestion (draft 'em) is a remark made by...
...the Chapo Trap House (podcast) guys a couple of years ago. They mentioned that the morons who join the Proud Boys and other fash groups are the Western world's version of the frustrated young men from Islamic cultures who sign up to be cannon fodder for terrorist organizations like ISIS and Boko Haram.
There are basically two possibilities for the country's future, based on attitudes like those...
...of DeSantis. They are predicated on whether we get out of this alive. In the previous sentence, the word "this" refers to the entire shitstorm we currently face. "This" includes Covid as a major factor, but it encompasses many other crises with which we are all familiar.
(1) If we get out of this, many PhD theses and popular books alike will be written about the death drive of Americans in the early 21st century and why it existed. Conversely...
(2) If we don't make it out alive, the aliens visiting the ruins of our civilization 50,000 years from now will dig through the radioactive rubble, find a newspaper quoting one of DeSantis' moronically insane antivax speeches, point to a photo of him, and say "you helped this happen!".
Possible reality #2 also applies to politicians who banned Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices, among countless other acts of stupendous, unforgivable corruption.
It's not just passive (moderates getting fed up and leaving), it's active...
...(billionaire radtrad funders). They have created an entire hermetically-sealed religious and ideological ecosystem parallel to what you see in the Protestant fundamentalist world. This includes "think" tanks like the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is an Opus Dei front. Reactionary Catholics have essentially plagiarized the "think" tank and institutional culture that Paul Krugman calls "wingnut welfare". It doesn't yet have the resources of the secular wingnut welfare system (funded by "defense" contractors et al.). But Catholic wingnut welfare is already quite effective at providing a jobs program for the otherwise unemployable failsons and daughters of the radtrads that fund this system. At radtrad broadcasters like EWTN, coverage of the Catholic wingnut welfare system takes a disproportionate share of their programming each day.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216786607#post21
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016323885#post12
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216734161
The two biggest problems are (1) the billionaire Catholic radtrad funders...
...like Tom Monaghan and (2) the numerous retrograde bishops and other Church officials who were installed during the long reign of John Paul II. A third problem which flows from the first two is the rise of the broadcasting and publishing empires made possible by this. The billionaires fund the radtrad causes, especially broadcasters like EWTN and (Ir)-Relevant Radio, and then reactionary priests and bishops go on the air and become big "stars". This amplifies their power, so it continues even though it repeatedly leads to scandals (especially at EWTN).
Another problem is the rise of various institutions of "higher education" expressly created by radtrads to silo off their kids from the modern world. This is a lesser problem right now than the radtrad mass media, but these institutions are growing in number.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216786607#post21
Yep. They WERE "on the inside", to quote Hegseth, just not the way he says.
Umbrella Man was almost certainly a professional provocateur. The early actions by provocateurs, particularly Umbrella Man, helped the protests to spiral out of control in Minneapolis.
Hegseth and the others (especially Campos-Duffy) on the Sunday Fox and Friends are too dumb to understand that they're just benchwarmers. They might as well be robots, and at some point in the near future, they probably will be.
Yeah, she was one of the original "right-wing Fembots", as Randi Rhodes called them...
...they were always showing up on Bill Maher's show (this was back when it was on Comedy Central or whatever): Crowley, Barbara Olson, the numerous Fembots from the Koch-funded Independent Womens Forum, etc.
I always thought that the "think" tanks hired them because they looked a whole lot better than old out-of-shape stuffed shirts (e.g. the actual people who run the "think" tanks). It was pretty obvious what was going on with the Fembots.
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