What happens to the Republican Party now? (2 Viewers)

[MT15]

This election nonsense by Trump may end up splitting up the Republican Party. I just don’t see how the one third (?) who are principled conservatives can stay in the same party with Trump sycophants who are willing to sign onto the TX Supreme Court case.

We also saw the alt right types chanting “destroy the GOP” in Washington today because they didn’t keep Trump in power. I think the Q types will also hold the same ill will toward the traditional Republican Party. In fact its quite possible that all the voters who are really in a Trump personality cult will also blame the GOP for his loss. It’s only a matter of time IMO before Trump himself gets around to blaming the GOP.

There is some discussion of this on Twitter. What do you all think?

 

[Optimus Prime]

White evangelical Christians dominate the MAGA movement. Fear of civilizational decline, dire warnings of an existential crisis and howls that religion is under “attack” form the basis of much of the MAGA ideology. And the apocalyptic language deployed by the right wing bears a striking resemblance to Christian end-times imagery.

But while conservative Christians love to blame the left, a new Pew Research Center poll shows that their problem is not secular elites.

Prominent right-wingers, including former attorney general William P. Barr and current Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cite growing secularism as a threat to our entire way of life.

Barr (while still in office!) raged during a speech at the University of Notre Dame: “This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”

Alito’s recent rant in Rome was not his first fiery tirade against an imagined assault on religion. Back in 2020, he thundered: “It pains me to say this but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” This summer he was at it again, denouncing “hostility to religion.”

These voices posit that White Christians are victims. But in fact, the church quite simply has failed to attract and retain believers. As Ron Brownstein explained last year in the Atlantic: “The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people — especially white Christians — a steadily shrinking share of the population.”

Brownstein observed that this “vision of America will only diverge further from reality in a country where kids of color will soon represent a majority of the under-18 population, where a growing number of young people do not identify with any religious tradition, and where white Christians likely slip below 40 percent of the society.”

That process is well underway. The Pew poll tracks the rapid decline of self-identified Christians: “The projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, ‘nones’ [those affiliated with no religion] would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.”

Christianity is losing adherents — in droves. “A steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years,” Pew found. “At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become ‘stickier’: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life.”

In other words: “With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.”.........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/15/religious-decline-evangelicals-white-christians-poll/

 

[Optimus Prime]

White supremacists and extremists don’t always wear white robes and burn crosses. They don’t necessarily meet in dingy headquarters away from civilized society They are marching on Capitol Hill. They are flying Nazi flags over interstate overpasses in Florida.

They’ve distributed anti-Semitic fliers in Miami Beach, home to a large Jewish population.

They have demonstrated outside Disney World, a lighting rod for cultural wars after the company opposed a state parental rights law critics dubbed “Don’t say gay.”

Groups with names like the “White Lives Matter” network, the “Goyim Defense League” and the “New Jersey European Heritage Association” once were relegated to the dark corners of the web. More and more, they feel entitled to publicize their darkest thoughts and beliefs.

Those who have sounded the alarm about the rise of extremism in the Sunshine State have often been dismissed as hysterical liberals. Even as we learned about the Proud Boys’ close ties to Miami Republican politics, in addition to their prominent role in the Jan. 6 attacks, many state leaders remained mum.

The Anti-Defamation League describes the Proud Boys as a “right-wing extremist group with a violent agenda” and “some members espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies,” which is why it was so rattling to see them show up in force at a recent Miami-Dade School Board meeting.

A new Anti-Defamation League report shows that Florida has seen a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents — a 50% increase in 2021 compared to the previous year — and hate crimes. Nationwide, anti-Semitic acts also rose but at a slower pace of 34% increase.

The organization also found that between 2020 and 2022, there were 400 instances of white supremacy propaganda distribution — 95% of those anti-Semitic — in the state.

Many will easily jump to the conclusion that we’re placing the blame on Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who have focused on the same red-meat issues that also rally extremists, like immigration, racial resentment (through dog whistles like “critical race theory”) and an anti-LGBTQ agenda.

But neither Trump or DeSantis invented anti-Semitism and extreme ideology.

Many books and dissertations will be written on whether Trump reignited the country’s history of racial animosity, or if he’s just a symptom of it.

That anti-Semitism is on the rise in much of the Western world, as a study by Tel Aviv University found this year, hints at something deeper than MAGA.

Trump and DeSantis have been strong supporters of Israel. DeSantis signed laws requiring schools to certify to the state they teach about the Holocaust and to protect students from anti-Semitism.

At the same time, we cannot ignore that the GOP has an extremism problem — and an even bigger problem disavowing it within its ranks.

Florida has the largest number of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, according to the ADL.

There was a “significant increase in violent rhetoric in right-wing online spaces” after the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the report found...........

https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article265806851.html

 

[Booker]

Trump feared Iran would try to assassinate him to avenge Soleimani killing, new book says

That is just one of numerous revelations from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” a forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser about his tumultuous presidency.

www.yahoo.com

During his reelection campaign, there was speculation that Trump might replace Pence with Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on the Republican ticket.

But according to the book, Trump told people he would not pick Haley as a running mate because she had a “complexion problem.”

Too dark for his liking?

 

[Taurus]

White evangelical Christians dominate the MAGA movement. Fear of civilizational decline, dire warnings of an existential crisis and howls that religion is under “attack” form the basis of much of the MAGA ideology. And the apocalyptic language deployed by the right wing bears a striking resemblance to Christian end-times imagery.

But while conservative Christians love to blame the left, a new Pew Research Center poll shows that their problem is not secular elites.

Prominent right-wingers, including former attorney general William P. Barr and current Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cite growing secularism as a threat to our entire way of life.

Barr (while still in office!) raged during a speech at the University of Notre Dame: “This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”

Alito’s recent rant in Rome was not his first fiery tirade against an imagined assault on religion. Back in 2020, he thundered: “It pains me to say this but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” This summer he was at it again, denouncing “hostility to religion.”

These voices posit that White Christians are victims. But in fact, the church quite simply has failed to attract and retain believers. As Ron Brownstein explained last year in the Atlantic: “The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people — especially white Christians — a steadily shrinking share of the population.”

Brownstein observed that this “vision of America will only diverge further from reality in a country where kids of color will soon represent a majority of the under-18 population, where a growing number of young people do not identify with any religious tradition, and where white Christians likely slip below 40 percent of the society.”

That process is well underway. The Pew poll tracks the rapid decline of self-identified Christians: “The projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, ‘nones’ [those affiliated with no religion] would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.”

Christianity is losing adherents — in droves. “A steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years,” Pew found. “At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become ‘stickier’: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life.”

In other words: “With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.”.........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/15/religious-decline-evangelicals-white-christians-poll/

And if you don't get 'em young, while they still believe in the Tooth Fairy, the bullshirt won't stick.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Of course he's changing his tune...

New Hampshire GOP Senate nominee abruptly backs off false 2020 election claims

New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc won the Republican nomination on Tuesday after months campaigning on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. A little more than a day later, he attempted an about-face.

www.cnn.com

 

[CoolBrees]

Oh that is political suicide. You switch on an issue and break promises AFTER you are elected dummy!

He just lost the election. The Trumpers are going to stay home. They got him the nominee they can’t take this well. He didn’t even go with the let’s focus on the 2022 or crap like that. Just went straight “Nope, I believe in the moon landing now”

You dance with the one you brought. Even if she’s a microwaved orangutan about to be indicted for Espionage

 

[MT15]

 

[Optimus Prime]

In the battle for the soul of GOP foreign policy between establishment Republicans and Trump-style national conservatives, the former still hold the levers of official power but the latter are gaining ground.

The Heritage Foundation’s turn toward the “new right” is the clearest symbol yet that the MAGA movement’s foreign policy is becoming institutionalized but moving further away from the Republican leadership.


The Heritage Foundation has been an influential brain trust for GOP administrations since the Reagan years — and still claims to stand for Ronald Reagan’s doctrine of “peace through strength.”

But beginning in the Trump era, and even more so now under its new president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage is moving away from that tradition, according to several foreign policy staffers who recently left the foundation.


Half a dozen foreign policy analysts have left the foundation this year, while several other former employees are publicly accusing Roberts and Heritage of abandoning the national security principles and policies that it (and the Republican Party) once stood for.

“This pivot on foreign policy is ignorant, reckless, and it is clearly elevating partisan opportunism over literally decades of principle,” former Heritage foreign policy analyst Klon Kitchen, who left last year, told me.

“It’s sad to see, and that’s why Heritage is hemorrhaging foreign policy expertise.”


After Heritage Action, the organization’s political wing, opposed the $40 billion Ukraine aid bill in May, two of the foundation’s top Russia analysts resigned.

Since then, three senior members of Heritage’s Asia team, a top defense budget analyst and a top trade analyst have all departed.

Their replacements include several senior Trump administration National Security Council and State Department officials……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/15/heritage-foundation-republican-foreign-policy/

 

[MT15]

I cannot figure out why he would say this. What context could there be?

 

[Optimus Prime]

It feels surreal, as though it were a dream. And yet, it is the sleeper issue of our time.


The guy at the fulcrum of the attempt to smother American democracy is a pillow salesman.
You’ve no doubt heard of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who has gone from hawking bolsters to bolstering the “big lie.”

Only in this land of opportunists could the greatest sham of all be perpetrated by a guy who literally sells shams (“as low as $48.99 w/promo code”).

But finally, the Justice Department is going to the mattresses with the pillow magnate. FBI agents pinned his vehicle while he awaited his order in a Hardee’s drive-through this week and proceeded “to arrest my phone,” as Lindell put it. (He didn’t say whether the confiscated device was read its rights.)


The fast-food chain used the MyPillow drama on its premises to tweet: “You should really try our pillowy biscuits.”


The feds seized the phone in a probe into Trump allies’ breach of voting machines in Colorado, which state authorities are also investigating.

In case you’ve been hitting the snooze button for the past two years, Donald Trump super-fan Lindell is also facing lawsuits by voting-technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. His phone records were subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee. And his own defamation suits against Dominion and Smartmatic were dismissed as “frivolous.”


He has also spent a self-reported $35 million promoting Trump’s election lie in movies, social media and conferences, and he’s a popular warm-up act at Trump rallies.

There is something exquisite about a former professional gambler, recovering crack cocaine addict, showy evangelical (Lindell often wears a cross outside his collar, like an amulet) and pillow kingpin organizing the undoing of democracy.

Then consider the assortment of strange bedfellows involved with him in the Colorado scheme: a former professional surfer who claims to be a data expert, a county clerk who used to sell nutritional supplements, an owner of a hair and makeup business, and a high school math teacher who claims to have a secret algorithm.


Once more, we are left to marvel at how all these misfits and grifters find each other — and how they are inevitably drawn, by powerful oddball magnetism, to the charlatan in chief, who has bamboozled tens of millions. This full-employment plan for kooks and hucksters gives new meaning to featherbedding.

Since embracing Trump in 2016, Lindell has made conspiracy craziness his business model. His election lies have lost him tens of millions of dollars in business with respectable retailers such as Walmart, Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond.

So he’s recasting himself as niche pillow purveyor to the MAGA right, marketing on Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio and Trump-friendly social media outlets.


But Lindell is going to have to persuade election deniers to buy a whole lot of bedding to offset his lost sales to normal people……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/16/mike-lindell-phone-seized-mypillow/

 

[Optimus Prime]

NSFW

 

[UriUT]

I cannot figure out why he would say this. What context could there be?

Long thread and story. But this guy fired someone investigating the Brett Favre's fraud case b/c it was too political. Remind me about someone claiming there are rampant crime in blue states or city or something like that?

 

[Saintamaniac]

Trump feared Iran would try to assassinate him to avenge Soleimani killing, new book says

That is just one of numerous revelations from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” a forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser about his tumultuous presidency.

www.yahoo.com

If it happens, well....let's just say we could treat it the same way his administration treated the Khashoggi murder. Iran wouldn't do it though because they realize they would be saving the US from themselves.

 

[Bolo]

Why do democrat state legislators in Florida that voted to pass the bill that allowed DeSantis to bus illegals out of Florida get a pass? Almost all of them voted for the bill.
Page 25 of 28 at the bottom. This is what they voted for and passed it. None of them should get a pass if you're upset they passed a bill in Florida that allowed them to do this.

 

[bird]

Why do democrat state legislators in Florida that voted to pass the bill that allowed DeSantis to bus illegals out of Florida get a pass? Almost all of them voted for the bill.
Page 25 of 28 at the bottom. This is what they voted for and passed it. None of them should get a pass if you're upset they passed a bill in Florida that allowed them to do this.

Because they were not unauthorized. They were seeking asylum as opposed to simply arriving to seek economic betterment. They were from Venezuela. Rethuglicans should love that since they despise the Venezuelan government.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Books for children and young adults containing themes of race, gender and sexual identity received an “unprecedented” number of challenges last year, the American Library Association (ALA) has said, reflecting a growing national trend of attempted censorship.

The challenges came from conservative parent groups and others. In some cases, the group says, librarians and elected officials were threatened with violence by members of the Proud Boys and armed activists at school board and library board meetings……

US libraries face ‘unprecedented’ efforts to ban books on race and gender themes

Challenges from conservative parent groups and others targeted 1,651 different titles, the American Library Association said

www.theguardian.com

 

[bird]

Long thread and story. But this guy fired someone investigating the Brett Favre's fraud case b/c it was too political. Remind me about someone claiming there are rampant crime in blue states or city or something like that?

Um, Gov. Idiot? The political side? Political economy is defined as who gets what, where, when, how and why. Included in that is laws covering things like, oh, I don’t know, fraud.

Grifters gotta grift.

 

[bird]

Books for children and young adults containing themes of race, gender and sexual identity received an “unprecedented” number of challenges last year, the American Library Association (ALA) has said, reflecting a growing national trend of attempted censorship.

The challenges came from conservative parent groups and others. In some cases, the group says, librarians and elected officials were threatened with violence by members of the Proud Boys and armed activists at school board and library board meetings……

US libraries face ‘unprecedented’ efforts to ban books on race and gender themes

Challenges from conservative parent groups and others targeted 1,651 different titles, the American Library Association said

www.theguardian.com

Welp, sounds like the gene pool needs chlorination…again. These people are psychotic.