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    County turning on the nut jobs
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    In 2022, 5,000 voters, angry about Covid-era health restrictions, ousted a moderate Republican official in Shasta county, California. The vote helped put the rural region, in the state’s north, on the map for extremist far-right politics.

    In the two years since, the ultra-conservative majority that controls the county’s governing board has attempted to upend the voting system and spread conspiracy theories that elections were being rigged. They moved to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law and offered the county’s top job to the leader of a California secessionist group.

    Now, residents frustrated by the county’s recent governance hope another recall will force a change. They’re aiming to oust Kevin Crye, a far-right county supervisor who has been in office for just a year.

    The election could be a turning point for the county, said Jeff Gorder, a spokesperson for the recall group and retired county public defender.

    “We’re seeing an extreme agenda coming here that we don’t think people want,” he said. “The [far-right supervisors] see themselves as having the ability to disregard laws that have been enacted by the state. They’re taking it upon themselves to disregard the normal workings of the rule of law.”

    Shasta has long been one of California’s most conservative counties, but it became a hotbed for far-right politics during the pandemic as residents raged at moderate Republicans they felt weren’t doing enough to resist state health rules.

    The anger grew into a thriving anti-establishment movement that – with unprecedented outside funding from a Connecticut millionaire and support from local militia – targeted the board of supervisors.

    In February 2022, voters recalled Leonard Moty, a retired police chief and Republican, from his role as a county supervisor, a move that gave the far right effective control over the board of supervisors. The body of five elected officials oversees the county as well as its roughly 2,000 workers and nearly $600m budget.

    Crye was voted into office in November of that year, beating a moderate candidate by less than 100 votes. He pledged to unite the county and tackle government corruption…….

    “There was a tidal wave of bad decisions,” said Gorder, the spokesperson for the recall group.

    In the spring, Gorder and a group of about 50 residents gathered to decide how to push back against the county board. They decided on a tried and true route in Shasta county: a recall.

    “He’s doing things he said he wouldn’t do. He violated his campaign promises. He wasn’t listening to his constituents,” Gorder said. “We took it very seriously. He was freely and fairly elected. But a recall, in our view, is appropriate when someone misrepresents who they are.”…….





     
    guess this can go here
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    A white Republican state representative made the shocking claim that her father — a white man born in the 1930's — was a slave.

    Kentucky State Representative Jennifer Decker made the comment while trying to dismiss the intention behind diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    Ms Decker, 68, spoke at a 1 February NAACP meeting discussing a state education bill she is sponsoring that would ban DEI initiatives, according to The Courier Journal.

    The bill would defund any training or scholarships associated with DEI initiatives.

    While speaking at the NAACP event, Ms Decker claimed DEI initiatives were unnecessary because her father was a slave, but worked his way to success.

    “My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white,” she said.

    Her comment was a response to an individual asking her a question about her family's role in the slave trade, according to The Daily Beast.

    Despite being born nearly 70 years after slavery was abolished in the US, Ms Decker insisted that her father was born on a dirt farm and that his mother was the illegitimate child of “of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves.”

    Ms Decker later told the Courier Journal that her father was essentially the same as a slave because he was born poor and worked on someone else's land.

    “[My father] was a child and his family all worked there," she said.

    She later admitted that calling her father a slave was "probably" too much, noting that her father did not experience the same abuses that enslaved Black people endured. Ms Decker also admitted that her family hadn't been kidnapped from their homes and shipped across the ocean to do their work.................

     
    guess this can go here
    ===============

    A white Republican state representative made the shocking claim that her father — a white man born in the 1930's — was a slave.

    Kentucky State Representative Jennifer Decker made the comment while trying to dismiss the intention behind diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    Ms Decker, 68, spoke at a 1 February NAACP meeting discussing a state education bill she is sponsoring that would ban DEI initiatives, according to The Courier Journal.

    The bill would defund any training or scholarships associated with DEI initiatives.

    While speaking at the NAACP event, Ms Decker claimed DEI initiatives were unnecessary because her father was a slave, but worked his way to success.

    “My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white,” she said.

    Her comment was a response to an individual asking her a question about her family's role in the slave trade, according to The Daily Beast.

    Despite being born nearly 70 years after slavery was abolished in the US, Ms Decker insisted that her father was born on a dirt farm and that his mother was the illegitimate child of “of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves.”

    Ms Decker later told the Courier Journal that her father was essentially the same as a slave because he was born poor and worked on someone else's land.

    “[My father] was a child and his family all worked there," she said.

    She later admitted that calling her father a slave was "probably" too much, noting that her father did not experience the same abuses that enslaved Black people endured. Ms Decker also admitted that her family hadn't been kidnapped from their homes and shipped across the ocean to do their work.................

    Well, that was mighty wh….nice of her to admit she went to far. She isn’t just tone deaf, she is tone stupid.
     
    C'mon now. I'm a white man and I'm a slave...a slave to love. Just a little Valentine's day humor, very little I admit.
     


    God & Country,” a new documentary produced by Rob Reiner, opens with idyllic scenes of American churches and a speaker borrowing part of a well-known quote of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “When I look at all the injustices of the world, and I drive past churches, I ask myself: What kind of people worship there?”

    The goal of the documentary is to wake up churchgoing American Christians — who number in the many tens of millions — to the threat of anti-democratic religious extremism in the United States.

    The film, which will open in theaters on Feb. 16 and was shown at a private premiere on Thursday at the Capitol, is perhaps the first Hollywood-adjacent effort to make the term “Christian nationalism” mainstream and to get Americans (specifically Christians) to engage in conversations about recent well-organized and well-funded efforts to officially merge church and state.

    The 90-minute documentary, directed by Dan Partland, is inspired by the 2020 book “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” by Katherine Stewart. It includes a who’s who of prominent Christians — almost all Protestant or nondenominational — who have in recent years rung bells about growing anti-pluralistic, anti-democratic strains of religion in the United States, and about their symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump.

    “Evangelicalism got married with a kind of political activism, and now evangelicalism has morphed into a cultural and political movement you could say is better described as ‘Christian nationalism,’” Skye Jethani, co-host of the “Holy Post” podcast, says in the film.

    “God & Country” illustrates this by weaving clips of prominent Christians floating antidemocratic ideas. John MacArthur, whom Christianity Today has called one of the most influential pastors in modern times, says: “No Christian with half a brain would say, ‘We support religious freedom!’ We support truth!”

    The film tallies the billions of dollars that advocacy groups have spent in an effort to put their favored version of conservative Christianity in government, and quotes longtime political consultant and founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition Ralph Reed telling a gathering of the North Carolina branch of his group how it blanketed conservative Christians with texts, calls and home visits to get them to vote. “I don’t want to scare you, but we had 147 different data points we tracked.”.

    Phil Vischer, an animator who co-created the formerly Christian-themed children’s video series “VeggieTales,” says in the film that Christian Nationalism has exploded because many Christians have come to believe that the United States has a special God-ordained role.

    “Here’s the thing: If I have decided that America is irreplaceable in God’s story … and democracy gets in the way, well democracy has to go,” Vischer said, describing this way of thinking............





    In a way, Rob Reiner has come full circle.

    Decades ago, before The Princess Bride, before A Few Good Men, Reiner first made his mark as Michael "Meathead" Stivic, the liberal son-in-law to the racist, conservative Archie Bunker on one of the biggest TV shows of the 1970s, All in the Family. Week after week, Stivic stood up for liberal values in the face of Bunker's jingoistic, racist nationalism. While conservatives loathed him, for progressives, he was like one of the only voices of conscience on national television.

    extended argument with Archie's descendants: the Christian Nationalists who played a central role in the January 6 insurrection, form the core of Donald Trump's most committed base – and make Bunker's racist patriotism seem almost quaint.

    "Archie Bunker was a a conservative and a patriot, but also a racist," Reiner tells Rolling Stone. "And what we're seeing now is the weaponization of that racism… These people [Christian Nationalists] are fine with the idea that America should be a white, Christian nation. They're frightened of what's happening in this country with diversity. But we are a pluralistic society. E Pluribus Unum."

    According to God and Country, directed by Dan Partland and based on the book The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart, Christian Nationalism has always been part of the American landscape, but took its current form in the 1950s, in the wake of Brown and the desegregation of public schools. It was then that right-wing, white Christians began realizing that their country was changing, and in response to Brown, they set up a network of so-called "segregation academies" – religious schools that, for a while at least, could still turn away non-white students.

    But wait a minute – how is maintaining segregation a Christian issue? When did Jesus say that races should be kept separate?

    As the numerous clergy and religious scholars in God and Country make clear, Christian Nationalism is more of a political movement in religious garb than anything based in the Bible or Christian theology.

    "Leaders of the movement often tell us this is about theology and religion," Stewart said, "But this is not just about the culture wars or a dispute over theology. It's a political war."

    As God and Country tells it, that war really got going in the 1970s, as "segregation academies" came under fire. Initially, movement leaders focused on an array of issue: fighting feminism, preserving ‘religious liberty' (i.e. the liberty to discriminate against Black people), and others. But one caught fire: abortion...........




     
    Chris Rufo, a rightwing culture-war celebrity and close Ron DeSantis ally, has maintained a close relationship with IM-1776, a “dissident right” magazine that regularly showers praise on dictators and authoritarians, puffs racist ideologues, and attacks liberal democracy.

    The outlet’s editors and writers – many of them so-called “anons” working under pseudonyms – have variously advocated for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act; celebrated figures such as the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the proto-fascistItalian nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio; and advanced conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic, and what they term the “regime”, a leftist power structure that they imagine unites the state, large corporations, universities and the media.

    Rufo and IM-1776​

    The Guardian has previously reported on Rufo’s links with an outlet that experts described as pushing scientific racism; with a Danish data scientist who had previously co-authored scientific-racist papers; and on co-hosting an audio stream on X in which one participant advocated cooperating with a hypothetical white nationalist leader.


    Rufo, who played a leading role in the downfall of Harvard president Claudine Gay, has said such reporting is “guilt by association”, but his relationship with IM-1776 is explicitly collaborative and supportive, and the association is apparently mutually beneficial.……

    More recently, he has expressed a personal interest in expanding the range of acceptable political discourse.

    On the Pirate Wires podcast earlier this month, he told host Mike Solana of his own activism: “I try to play that game, I try to lay traps, I try to provoke certain reactions, I try to launder certain words and phrases into the discourse.”……

    Granza said of Rufo that “he doesn’t care about convincing the other side, or battling in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. He’s going to tell you what he’s going to do, and then do it, whether you agree with him or not.”

    Granza added: “That’s what I believe conservatives should do: use whatever power they have or can get and impose their views on to society.”…….

     

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