About This Series
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP held hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the fourth of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
Who doesn’t love a little juxtapositional smackdown? It’s kind of a rhetorical gimmick, and can be a tool of oversimplification, hyperbole and just plain sophistry. But sometimes it’s just so magnificently, you know, chef’s kiss. Such as this here:
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.): “I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist. The left has shown us exactly who they are. They hate America, they hate God, and they hate us.”
Timothy 2:23-24: Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.
Proverbs 13:16: All who are prudent act with knowledge, but fools expose their folly.
Hosea 4:6: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
I think what the Scripture is saying here is: “Jesus H. Christ, Marjorie, would you just shut the fuck up, you caterwauling imbecile?”
Paraphrasing, of course. The point is, that woman spouts nonsense like that all the time, no matter how bigoted, no matter how false, no matter how obviously antithetical to the Christianity she so shrilly and unconstitutionally proclaims. If you have interest in the Bible, you might look into “Pharisees.” (I’d especially recommend that reading to Aidan Johnston, director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, who says the 2nd Amendment is “a God-given right.”)
Whatever. These are not the most literate Americans, so maybe they just missed the framers’ fine print when they wrote what’s called the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
As the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School summarizes so succinctly:
This clause not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another. It also prohibits the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion.
The extremely fine legal point was also lost on Taylor Greene’s intellectual twin Lauren Boebert (Cretin-Colo.), who declared, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.”
Please don’t blame these distinguished legislator philosophers. Huffing Rust-Oleum behind the middle school gym can take a toll. Anyway, in the Republican Party, they are not alone.
“We need people all over the country to be willing to put on that full armor of God, to stand firm against the left’s schemes,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is campaigning for the GOP nomination for Ayatollah by conjuring armies of the marauding Woke. “You will be met with flaming arrows,” he warns conservatives, “but the shield of faith will stop them.”
He has also, like many other Christian Nationalists, claimed political persecution on the basis of his (vast majority) faith, alleging “religious liberty under assault at an unprecedented level.” A lot of this rhetoric came from the height of Covid, when churches — like all gathering places — were widely shut down to prevent super-spreader events amid a deadly global pandemic. That bogus victimhood also fits right snug with extremist Great Replacement Theory, often propounded by ex-Fox demagogue Tucker Carlson (D-Bag), which alleges that a conspiracy is afoot to push out good, God-fearing Christians and replace them with godless immigrants — or, even worse, Muslims.
Or even worse than that. You may recall the charming chant of the Proud Boys, Klansmen and other deplorables at the infamous and deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA: “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” They were probably right about that. Christians of various denominations represent 70.6% of the U.S. population. Jews are at 1.9%. That’s quite a bit of replacing to do. Yet such Republican politicians as former U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), State Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-Ariz.) and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 ranking Republican leader in the House, have all replacement-baited their constituents. Stefanik ran a Facebook campaign ad accusing Democrats of a “permanent election insurrection” by “giving amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants who will overthrow our current electorate.” Rogers said that the Great Replacement is well underway, as “Communists & our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations & other strategies to accomplish this.” Then she added, with all the nuance beloved by white supremacists everywhere, “MAKE WESTERN CIVILIZATION GREAT AGAIN.” As for Gaetz, he knows where his bread is buttered.
Of course, they are only the voices of paranoia. There are, too, the listeners, the true believers and, according to a Tulchin Research poll commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the 7 out of 10 Republicans who have swallowed the lie whole. Moreover, as USA Today reported, 45% of young Republican men said they approve of violence to achieve political change.
Just read that sentence again, because it is not mere doomsaying.
– Robert Bowers, the accused perpetrator of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting that killed 11 worshippers, claimed he was acting to stop the refugee-aid organization HIAS from contaminating our society with the refuse of the world.
– Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old Buffalo, NY, shooter convicted in the 2022 Tops Market massacre, first posted a 180-page “manifesto” repeatedly citing the Great Replacement delusion.
– In 2019, in El Paso, Texas, Patrick Wood Crusius allegedly shot and killed 23 in a Walmart. His 2,800-word manifesto said he was trying to stop the “hispanic invasion of Texas.”
– This epidemic is global, too. In that same year, a 28-year-old Australian gunman Brenton Harrison Tarrant murdered 51 people and injured 40 more in Christchurch, New Zealand. His own 74-page manifesto was titled The Great Replacement.
– They all have manifestos. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian right-winger who blew up 8 people with a fertilizer bomb outside a government office and then drove to a summer camp where he shot 69 others to death, most of them teenagers, had a 1,500-page manifesto almost entirely devoted to the replacement of pale, Christian Norwegians with swarthy immigrants indifferent to Norway’s traditional values.
Look, that guy is utterly unhinged. A lot of these mass killers are lunatics. What’s scarier is the Christian mainstream. In an October 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 81% of white evangelical Protestants reported believing that the country’s founders intended the American Experiment to be a Christian one. (Perhaps the Establishment Clause was a typo.) And 67% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States should be a Christian nation.
That’s a statistical oddity. In a 1965 Gallup poll, 70% of Americans reported that religion was “very important” in their lives. As of 2020, the number was 49%. So wither the zeal?
The answer is what Hillary Clinton called the “Great Right Wing Conspiracy.” It was not just a talking point or a wild accusation; it’s all too real, dating back to the 1960s with the formation of the so-called Religious Right, subsequently to find common cause and financial backing from Big Energy (e.g., the Koch family) and other business interests to turn religious zealotry, racism, xenophobia and the steady advance of social welfare and human rights into a constituency of the fearful and aggrieved. Many great books have documented the intense cultivation of this voting bloc, among them Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Shadow Network, Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, by Anne Nelson (listen to her here); and even a compact history in my own American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves (Chapter 3).
You’d like the receipts? The receipts are all there.
In the same vein, an excellent 2021 Time Magazine explainer by Andrew Whitehead casts much blame on Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich, who back in 1980 infamously said the quiet part out loud:
Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome ― good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
So it’s not just ignorance, hatred, culture wars, anti-democratic legislation and corruption of politicians with campaign finance lucre. It is the deliberate strategy of doing so, no matter how many mass murders are inspired along the way. And if Pew and Tulchin Research are right in their polling, the vast majority of Republican voters have eagerly signed on to the American Taliban. It is the destruction of our democracy, playing out before our very eyes.