Thursday, July 31, 2014 6:28:31 AM
Ted Cruz Continues His Push To Repeal 'Every Bloody Word' Of Obamacare
07/29/2014
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is encouraging fellow Obamacare opponents [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/29/cruz-lets-repeal-every-bloody-word-of-obamacare/ ] to take their sentiments to the campaign trail.
Cruz said Tuesday the upcoming midterm elections and the 2016 elections are important opportunities for Republican candidates to push key issues, according to CNN. He was speaking at a conference hosted by the Young American's Foundation [video next below; these comments at the end].
“I think those elections should be about many, many things,” Cruz said, citing job creation and economic growth. “But they should be about repealing every bloody word of Obamacare.”
Cruz over the last year has relentlessly pursued repealing Obamacare, even prompting a congressional showdown that led to a 16-day government shutdown in October. He told the group that the showdown may not have been a clean shot, but it set in motion efforts to bring down the Affordable Care Act.
“Some battles you can win with one clean rifle shot; other battles take time, take building that foundation,” he said. “I’m convinced that fight has laid the foundation.”
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/29/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_5631988.html [with comments]
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Sen. Ted Cruz at the National Conservative Student Conference
Published on Jul 29, 2014 by SenTedCruz [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOTZ-6H1rri1lSsj6IzhUyw / http://www.youtube.com/user/SenTedCruz , http://www.youtube.com/user/SenTedCruz/videos ]
July 29, 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3jiBKC_0vs [with comments]
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The “Ted Cruz is smart” trap: Why this garbage is false — and dangerous
Ted Cruz
(Credit: Reuters/Joe Mitchell)
The Texas senator convinces all of his enemies to praise his intellect. Here's why they're wrong -- and should stop
Nathan Robinson
Monday, Jul 28, 2014 12:44 PM CDT
Even Ted Cruz’s critics seem to concur on one point: whatever else you might say about him, the man is very smart. Mother Jones magazine has called [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/ted-cruz-texas-gop-senate ] him the “thinking man’s tea partier.” Josh Marshall, in a mostly withering [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/me-ted ] assessment, made the same obligatory concession to his being an “incredibly bright guy.” Jeffrey Toobin’s recent, ostensibly critical New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all ] of Cruz is full of quotes about his being “the smartest guy in the room,” his “sophisticated” constitutional views, and the “extraordinary” erudition of his senior thesis.
Cruz likely finds all of this very pleasing indeed. In his interview with Toobin, Cruz quotes Sun Tzu, saying that “every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.” In getting those who despise him to genuflect to his intelligence, Ted Cruz has already won one battle. Jeffrey Toobin may lace his piece with dismissive sneers, yet somehow he still contributes to the ever-growing heap of liberal respect for Cruz’s mental acuity.
But there’s no reason to keep this up. For one thing, it doesn’t seem especially true. It can’t really be that we think Cruz has a sophisticated mind, given that the only thoughts he produces are angry pants-on-fire [ http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/03/half-of-ted-cruzs-political-claims-are-false-politifact-reports/ ] platitudinous drivel. Even those who lavish praise on his oratory seem to agree that his heat-to-light ratio nears the infinite, and that “thoughtfulness” and Ted Cruz cannot exist in the same room. His only memorable quotes appear to be cheap jokes [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/celebrate-the-year-of-ted-cruz-with-74-of-his-best-quotes-of-2013/article/2541075 ], and the most notable speech of his entire career is not his own, but Dr. Seuss’. Nobody who has witnessed a few minutes of Cruz’s piece of senatorial performance art would have thought to label him a thinker, were it not for the preexisting consensus that he is one.
Cruz has become notorious for using distortive, misleading rhetoric that no sober-minded individual could apply. Cruz says Obamacare’s “intent [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/28/eib_interview_senator_ted_cruz ] is to destroy the private insurance business,” despite the fact that the whole progressive complaint about Obamacare is that it is a massive windfall [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/07/14/269187/health-insurers-gain-from-exchanges/ ] to insurers. He says a campaign finance amendment attempting to rein in spending literally [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/03/law-professor-ted-cruz-is-knowingly-lying-about-bill-to-repeal-the-first-amendment/ ] “repeals the First Amendment.” But even more alarming are the straightforward factual errors. He has mistakenly claimed [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/17/ted-cruz/sen-ted-cruz-says-premiums-have-gone-virtually-eve/ ] that most premiums have risen under the Affordable Care Act and that states [ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2013/feb/01/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-jurisdictions-strictest-gun-laws-hav/ ] with gun control have the highest murder rates, among other elementary blunders that earned him a rating [ http://www.politifact.com/personalities/ted-cruz/ ] on PolitiFact of 10 falsehoods for every one truth.
One may respond that Cruz is shrewd and knows better, that these are calculated political lies by a devious plotter. But for a savant merely playing an imbecile on television, Cruz is strangely inept when it comes to policymaking. He has alienated [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/cruz-making-enemies-and-alienating-people ] all of his colleagues, and wants to [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ted-cruz-anti-gay-legislation ] revive the gay marriage fight at a time when it couldn’t be more unwise [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/support-for-same-sex-marriage-hits-new-high-half-say-constitution-guarantees-right/2014/03/04/f737e87e-a3e5-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html ]. His major act of strategic maneuvering over the government shutdown proved a colossal high-profile failure [ http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/headlines/20131016-ted-cruz-left-with-few-friends-after-leading-failed-obamacare-fight.ece ], the result of which was that as his name recognition improves, his favorability ratings actually drop [ http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/327833-gallup-cruzs-favorability-rating-plunges ]. Even the Wall Street Journal has labeled [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579379374287357650 ] him part of a “kamikaze caucus” that is dooming conservatives’ prospects. If Ted Cruz’s misstatements are deft politicking rather than idiocy, then where, one might ask, are the successes?
Ultimately, though, the most damning evidence against Cruz’s intelligence may actually come from his law school roommate and college debating partner, David Panton. “Ted’s views today politically are almost identical to when I met him,” Panton said [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all ]. “There’s nothing he says today that I didn’t hear in college.” That assessment, spoken about anybody, should be convincing enough evidence for shallowness of mind. Can there be such thing as a learned person who has discovered nothing new since freshman year?
In fact, the stories [ http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/11/10/ted-cruz-was-polarizing-figure-harvard-law-foreshadowing-his-partisan-profile-senate/gEUPs0iVgOyoidafkNe94H/story.html ] about Cruz’s younger days show the marks of someone profoundly insecure about his intelligence. Quizzing others as to their SAT scores, wanting to limit his law-school study group to graduates of the “H-Y-P” schools (a charge Cruz has denied), an unrelenting and discomforting argumentative aggression: He’s missing only a Mensa application to complete the full package of desperate IQ-dork self-affirmations.
Of course, a chorus of people from Cruz’s student years has vouched for his brilliance. No less a heavyweight than Alan Dershowitz [N.B.: a(nother) flaming jackass fucking idiot] has commented [ http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/09/dershowitz-tex-cruz-one-of-harvard-laws-smartest-students/ ] on Cruz’s precocity at Harvard. Now, one could somewhat unkindly argue that Dershowitz, too, has in his career relied on people’s confusion of credentials and bluster for depth of intellect. More to the point, though, is that the evidence put forth doesn’t support the claim. Nobody doubts that Cruz has the gift of gab, and can be formidable in an argument. But sophistry is not philosophy, and being the loudest, most driven, and most shameless guy in the room does not necessarily make one the brightest.
Any definition of intelligence is destined to be highly contestable. Yet it is hard to imagine a plausible one that does not include large measures of critical thinking and self-scrutiny. As Bertrand Russell put it, it’s always a central problem that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Intelligence necessitates doubt, for doubt is the origin of wisdom. One whose mind is clamped shut cannot be intelligent, and yet Ted Cruz does not in his life ever seem to have taken on board a single challenge to his worldview.
In fact, the consistent overgenerous assessment of Cruz’s brains may stem from a deeper problem with the values of the elite legal community. If Newt Gingrich is “a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person looks like,” Ted Cruz is a lawyer’s idea [N.B.: not ever this Harvard Law graduate/retired lawyer's idea; Cruz is a flaming jackass fucking idiot] of what a smart person looks like. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post puzzled [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/08/26/how-smart-is-ted-cruz/ ] that someone she had been assured has a “sharp legal mind” could be so blisteringly lacking in common sense. But success in the legal world does not depend on common sense. Ambition and confidence can more than make up for it. Law schools pose as Socratic institutions, where preconceptions are left in tatters on the lecture-room floor, but in practice they reward sparring ability far more than reflection and careful scholarliness (the haphazard, un-peer-reviewed world of law journals can attest to the legal academy’s prioritization of argumentative formalism over a sober-minded quest for enlightenment). A person with one or two core principles, and a ruthless willingness to bend any truth that gets in the way, can do very well for himself at law school. Certainly, this requires skill. But it would be a sad day for the progress of human knowledge if we called it intelligence.
Cruz’s outsize ambition means that this narrative makes a difference. So long as those who oppose him nevertheless dutifully incant praises to his intellect, Cruz has them right where he wants them. Josh Marshall summed up the opinion surrounding Cruz as “Arrogant Asshole, Super Smart.” But who cares about being called an “arrogant asshole,” so long as they admit you’re super smart? Assholes finish first, don’t they? That kind of consensus makes the haters seem petty and lets Cruz keep playing the scholar. The key is to admit what is obvious from a few minutes of listening to him. The man is arrogant, but he doesn’t actually seem very smart.
If the loveliest trick of the devil is to convince you he doesn’t exist, the most incontestably brilliant trick of Ted Cruz is to convince you of his incontestable brilliance. There’s no need to keep falling for it.
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/the_ted_cruz_is_smart_trap_why_this_garbage_is_false_and_dangerous/ [with comments]
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Think Tank ‘Analyst’ Says ‘Being Hung, Drawn, And Quartered Is Probably Too Good’ For Obama
Center for Immigration Studies Senior Policy Analyst Stephen Steinlight
CREDIT: Screenshot
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/23/stephen-steinlight-obama_n_5613541.html (the second from front-page article blurb)]
by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:16 am Updated: July 24, 2014 at 1:22 pm
A senior policy analyst from an immigration-restrictionist think tank wants to see President Barack Obama not just impeached, but publicly executed, he told a sympathetic audience last week. During a talk at a Tea Party organization in Sebring, Florida, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analyst Stephen Steinlight said that Obama’s supposed executive overreach couldn’t be reined in by a lawsuit and that “being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him,” Imagine 2050 [ http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2014/07/21/video-stephen-steinlight-of-cis-calls-for-public-execution-of-barack-obama/ ] first reported. He then joked that Obama’s head should be on a skewer.
Talking with members of the Highlands Tea Party, Steinlight said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoBGhC7X748#t=2234 (video "uploaded to YouTube by Highlands Tea Party Chairman John Nelson on July 20" { http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2014/07/21/video-stephen-steinlight-of-cis-calls-for-public-execution-of-barack-obama/ } and since "removed by the user"; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moUDVzPhJw (via http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/top-anti-immigrant-expert-says-being-hung-drawn-and-quartered-too-good-obama ), next below, captures a significant portion of the comments)]
“There’s no court that will stop Obama from doing anything,” Steinlight said to members of the Highlands Tea Party. “And we all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. Alright? And I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him. But you know, this man who wants to rule by the use of a pen, a telephone, let us not forget his teleprompter … the fact is that it would backfire very badly and we’ve got to be grownups and accept that we can’t have everything we want, you know, [like] his head on a skewer.”
Highland Tea Party members could be heard applauding and laughing in the background. Steinlight also alluded to the child migrant situation, saying that many of them are gang bangers and that “there are a lot more like them.”
According to his biography on the CIS website, Steinlight previously provided expert testimony [ http://cis.org/Steinlight ] on immigration for the Judiciary Committee of the United States. The work of his organization, CIS, is heavily cited by conservatives like Sen Jeff Sessions [ http://cis.org/PanelTranscripts/gang-of-eight-bill-doubles-temporary-worker-flow ] (R-AL) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte [ http://goodlatte.house.gov/press_releases/534 ] (R-VA).
This is not the first time that Steinlight has made inflammatory comments — he once advocated banning Muslim immigration [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4GV1jCJSI (next below)]
Update
In an interview with The Huffington Post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/23/stephen-steinlight-obama_n_5613541.html ], CIS director Steven Camarota called Steinlight’s comments, “ill-advised” and said, “I would also say that the Center for Immigration Studies does not in fact support drawing and quartering the president.” Executive Director Mark Krikorian added, “I reprimanded him and put a reprimand in his personnel file.”
© 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/07/22/3462497/center-immigration-studies-analyst-obama/ [with comments]
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Hispanics Will 'Unmake' America In Immigration Hardliner's Doomsday Vision
01/08/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/08/stephen-steinlight-latino_n_4561897.html [with comments]
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Stephen Steinlight
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/stephen-steinlight
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Center for Immigration Studies
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/center-for-immigration-studies
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Minuteman Militia Planning “Operation Normandy” to Deploy 3,500 Men to Stop Border “Invasion”
Bob Cesca on July 23, 2014
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of the far-right’s bellicosity in the face of refugee children entering the United States. Not a day goes by without Sean Hannity [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/real-enemies-arent-undocumented-immigrants-rick-perry-sean-hannity/ ], Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) [id.], Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/congressman-gohmert-wants-texas-mobilize-war-immigrant-children/ ], Bill O’Reilly [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/wont-believe-bill-oreilly-wants-secure-u-s-mexico-border/ ] or various screeching mobs [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/anti-immigration-protesters-mistakenly-block-school-bus-filled-ymca-campers/ ] composed of townspeople from The Simpsons brandishing torches, pitchforks and AR-15s [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/protesters-carrying-firearms-march-immigrant-children-michigan/ ] in reaction to the over-hyped immigration issue. Speaking of Gohmert, this week he suggested that President Obama is allowing women to be raped by “illegal aliens [ http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/07/16/louie-gohmert-claims-president-obama-is-allowing-refugee-immigrants-to-rape-thousands-of-american-women-video/ ].”
And they’ve committed at least 7,695 sexual assaults. You want to talk about a war on women? This administration will not defend the women of America from criminal aliens! By the thousands, and hundreds of thousands! Well, we know thousands, and we know people are coming in by the hundreds of thousands illegally. And this administration wants to talk about other people having a war on women when they will not defend the women that are being sexually assaulted by illegal aliens in this country!
Maybe Gohmert got his facts mixed up (shocker!) because the latest reports from the Southern border indicate that migrant women and children are the ones who are being sexually assaulted inside the U.S. An alleged 116 cases of sexual assault [ http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/undocumented-children-immigrants-abuse-complaint/ ] against children, some as young as five-years-old, by U.S. border patrol agents have been reported in recent weeks. One study indicated that nearly half [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/female-farmworkers-abuse-report_n_1519972.html ] of all female migrant workers are sexually assaulted or abused while working at farms across the Midwest.
Despite the reality of what’s really happening along the border, the saber-rattling continues in the face of the infant horde. Yesterday, the infamous Minuteman militia announced [ http://minutemanproject.com/operation-normandy ] that it’s raising an army that will include 3,500 volunteers to “stop an invasion” and to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. The militia’s co-founder, Jim Gilchrist, appears to be taking his tone-deaf cues from Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer who suggested the construction of another Berlin Wall. It turns out the Minuteman Project’s wartime cosplay event is called “Operation Normandy.” From the official Operation Normandy website [ http://minutemanproject.com/operation-normandy ]:
If you are familiar with the Normandy invasion of France in 1944, then you have an idea how large and logistically complicated this event will be. However, there is one difference. We are not going to the border to invade anyone. We are going there to stop an invasion.
Yes, Normandy. The operation was deliberately named after Normandy Beach, circa June 6, 1944, when Allied Forces invaded Nazi-controlled Europe. What’s wrong with this picture? It was the U.S., U.K. and the Allies who invaded at Normandy on D-Day, and the Nazis were the defenders against the invasion. That means the Minuteman gang has inadvertently (I hope) cast themselves in the role of the Nazis, with refugee children as the Allies. The Minuteman Project is even calling the date of the deployment “D-Day” — in this case, May 1, 2015.
The only way they could make it worse for themselves is if Gilchrist insisted upon being nicknamed Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt.
Beyond the horrendous metaphor they’ve concocted, the mission plan is “to cover the porous areas of the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas.” It’s unclear how they intend to accomplish this miraculous feat with only 3,500 men — or fewer, given how all of these ridiculous events end up with considerably lower attendance than anticipated. Let’s say they’re lucky enough to get a full 3,500 white guys playing military dress-’em-up. And let’s say a full half of the border is “porous.” They’d only be able to post around 3.5 men per mile. That susses out to be one hooplehead per section of border roughly the length of nearly six football fields. Talk about porous. But trust me, they won’t get anywhere near 3,500 participants.
How long will this last, by the way? The website doesn’t say. If it’s only a day or a week, what happens after that? The website doesn’t say anything about that either. It also doesn’t mention anything about reinforcements to maintain a fresh supply of militia members to fight off the, you know, little girls.
And finally, I suppose we can rest assured knowing that this reenactment of Normandy will be lawfully conducted. The website notes in all-caps: “WHATEVER YOU DO, STAY WITHIN THE RULE OF LAW.” Well, fine, in that case, all good. Seriously, what part of the law permits heavily armed civilians to militarily deploy along a 2,000 mile front with high-powered rifles (and lord knows what else) aimed at families and children? No one ever gave the Minuteman Project permission to augment the border patrol. Speaking of permission, do they intend to trespass on the private property owned by U.S. citizens who live on the border? Unknown.
If I had to wager on “Operation Normandy” (barf), I’d put my money on it never happening. Immigration is surely an important issue, but it’s only receiving this kind of belligerent attention right now because Fox News shifted away from Benghazi into this overblown “invasion” news cycle. It’s impossible to know what they’ll be flailing about in May of next year. This sort of event will require plenty of coverage from the noise machine in order to supercharge the bigotry cortexes of the militia loyalists enough to motivate 3,500 of them to take time off work, pack up their guns, coolers and red Solo cups, and travel all the way to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California for I-don’t-know-how-long. Something of this scale doesn’t happen without media hype, and there’s a fair chance “Operation Normandy” won’t get it.
Anyway, Jesus, they cast themselves as the Nazis. That’s all we need to know about the seriousness of the thing.
Copyright 2014 The Daily Banter (emphasis in original)
http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/minuteman-militia-planning-operation-normandy-deploy-3500-men-stop-border-invasion/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/minuteman-militia-plannin_b_5631566.html (with comments)]
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Ted Cruz Speech at the 2014 Texas GOP Convention
Published on Jun 7, 2014 by Craig Bushon [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK0BdjeE4h77enRdSQblkrA / http://www.youtube.com/user/craigscorp , http://www.youtube.com/user/craigscorp/videos ]
Ted Cruz gets a standing ovation for his pro America speech [on June 6, 2014] at the 2014 Texas GOP Convention
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1GqHykPezg [with comments]
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In Fever Dreams Begin Irresponsibilities, Texas Edition
A delegate wears a decorated hat during the Texas Republican Convention at the Fort Worth Convention Center; Friday, June 6, 2014.
Photograph by Rodger Mallison/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT/Getty.
By Hendrik Hertzberg
June 30, 2014
“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1899, over in Vienna, Austria.
The Republicans of Texas don’t have a lot of time for foreigners like Freud and foreign notions like psychoanalysis, although they do believe in therapy, as long as it’s “reparative.” Elsewhere on the psychiatric front, they are adamant that “minor mental-health diagnoses” are no reason to “infringe” anyone’s “God-given right” to own and to carry guns. More about the particulars in due course.
The thing is, the Republican Party of Texas has a dream. Lots of dreams: its platform, unveiled last week, has sixteen thousand words’ worth. The road it maps is anything but royal; these good people, after all, are republicans, albeit with a capital “R.” But the document does lead to the G.O.P.’s unconscious, or part of it: its fearsome, rampaging id.
The platform clears its throat with a preamble. “We STILL hold these truths to be self-evident,” it begins, with defensive all-caps truculence. Then comes an eleven-point statement of principles. Here’s principle No. 1:
Strict adherence to the original intent of the Declaration of Independence and United States and Texas Constitutions.
And here’s No. 11:
And we believe in “The laws of nature and nature’s God” as our Founding Fathers believed.
There’s juicier stuff ahead, but let’s linger on these for a moment.
On No. 1: When it comes to the Constitution, “original intent” is standard right-wing shorthand for “whatever Scalia says goes.” But how are we supposed to adhere to the original intent of the Declaration of Independence, whose insurrectionary provenance we’ll be reminded of regularly this week? By remaining ever vigilant against the iniquities of the British Crown and its allies, whom the Declaration refers to as “the merciless Indian savages”?
On No. 11: The attribution to the Founding Fathers papers over a small problem. “God” is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, a failure on the part of those Founders that, for certain ostentatiously pious Christian conservatives, among whom may be counted the authors of the Texas Republican platform, is a persistent embarrassment. The Texas Constitution, which begins by “humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God,” cannot fully compensate for this omission.
“The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is indeed a phrase found in the Declaration. Now, I may be thinking too much like an editor here, but could it be that the platform’s authors planted the Declaration in their opening principle—even though it makes no sense there—so that they could return to it, and its gratifying mention of God, in their closing one? Either way, they appear to be unaware that the Founding Fathers’ ”nature’s God” is a reference, probably a pointed one, to their Deist [ http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/equality-deism-and-jeffersons-declaration-of-independence/ ] conception of a strictly creator God, a detached deity that does not trouble itself with the outcomes of football games, illnesses, elections, or wars, including culture wars.
But enough theology. Let’s proceed to policy. In the next of its forty pages, the platform demands, among other things,
• That the Texas Legislature should nullify—indeed, “ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify”—federal laws it doesn’t like. (Unmentioned is the fact that, beginning in 1809, the Supreme Court has steadfastedly rejected state nullification of federal laws.)
• That when it comes to “unelected bureaucrats”—i.e., pretty much the entire federal work force above the janitorial level—Congress should “defund and abolish these positions.”
• That the Seventeenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1913, be repealed, so that “the appointment of United States Senators” can again be made by state legislators, not by voters. (Admittedly, the Texas Legislature could hardly do worse.)
• That all federal “enforcement activities” within the borders of Texas—including, presumably, the activities of F.B.I. agents, Justice Department prosecutors, air marshals, immigration officers, agricultural inspectors, and tax auditors—“must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county.”
This section of the platform, “Preserving American Freedom,” also features a syllogism:
Socialism breeds mediocrity. America is exceptional. Therefore, the Republican Party of Texas opposes socialism in all of its forms.
“Mediocrity” is not the first quality that springs to mind when one thinks of places like Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany, to name three contemporary exemplars of what Texas Republicans abhor as “socialism.” But let that pass. Accepting the major and minor premises as true, wouldn’t the conclusion have to be, “Therefore, since America is exceptional, socialism in America would not breed mediocrity”?
Here is another syllogism of sorts, with the usual three-part structure, assembled by me. From page 6:
We oppose the Census Bureau obtaining data beyond the number of people residing in a dwelling, and we oppose statistical sampling adjustments.
From page 11:
We oppose any identification of citizens by race, origin, or creed and oppose use of any such identification for purposes of creating voting districts.
Also from page 11:
We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.
I’m not sure which is the major premise and which the minor, but the real conclusion, though implicit, is obvious: as far as humanly possible, people of color should be prevented from achieving representation, or even from voting at all.
More highlights:
The pro-choice plank:
We strongly support a woman’s right to choose to devote her life to her family and children.
The on-the-one-hand plank:
We revere the sanctity of human life and therefore oppose genocide, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.
The on-the-other-hand plank:
Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered.
Another on-the-one-hand plank:
We strongly oppose any constitutional convention to rewrite the United States Constitution.
Another on-the-other-hand plank:
We urge the Texas State Legislators to take the lead in calling for an Article V Amending Convention of States, for the specific purpose of reigning in the power of the federal government.
The Carole King-Aretha Franklin plank:
We support the definition of marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.
And, for good measure:
We oppose the recognition of and granting of benefits to people who represent themselves as domestic partners without being legally married.
The Republicans of Texas are preoccupied with sex and its consequences, intended and unintended alike. Naturally, they devote hundreds of words to ideas for restricting access to abortion—pending the achievement of “our final goal of total constitutional rights for the unborn child”—and contraception. And their views regarding their gay fellow-citizens? Don’t ask:
Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nation’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin.
Furthermore:
We recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.
Gays are here to stay, even in Texas, but there are plenty of things that Texas Republicans plan to do away with entirely—or, to use their preferred word, things they would subject to “abolishment.” (For Calhoun conservatives, I suppose, “abolition” has regrettable overtones.) A partial list:
• Personal-income taxes
• Property taxes
• Estate taxes
• Capital-gains taxes
• Franchise and business-income taxes
• The gift tax
• Minimum-wage laws
• Social Security (“We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions”)
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• The Department of Education and all its functions
• “Unelected bureaucrats”
• “Any and all federal agencies not based on an enumerated power granted by the United States Federal Constitution”
• Congressional pensions
• Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights
• The Federal Reserve
• “Foreign aid, except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with Congressional approval”
• Obamacare (but you knew that already)
Things that the Texas Republicans support:
• Withdrawal from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank
• “Traditional methods of discipline, including corporal punishment”
• “Reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions.”
• Returning to “the time-tested precious metal standard for the United States dollar.”
The Texas Republican take on Israel:
Our policy is inspired by God’s biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations and organizations to enjoy the benefits of that promise.
On climate change:
While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, “climate change” is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or “climate justice” initiatives.
On immunizations:
All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines.
And so we come to guns.
In the opinion of the Republican Party of Texas, as set forth in its platform, the Second Amendment flatly decrees that “no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms.” No level, no regulation: the somewhat mentally ill, therefore, are not the only dubious characters whose right to assemble private arsenals the Amendment guarantees. Psychotics, sociopaths, the terroristically inclined, and violent criminals out on bail or parole are similarly privileged. (However, “disenfranchisement of convicted felons” is O.K.)
Perhaps the Texas Republicans don’t really mean what they say. Perhaps there’s just something about guns that overstimulates them. Consider this outburst:
All federal acts, laws, executive orders, and court orders which restrict or infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall be invalid in Texas, not be recognized by Texas, shall be specifically rejected by Texas, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in Texas.
There’s more—much more—where all this comes from [ http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.texastribune.org/media/documents/2014_Republican_Party_of_Texas_Platform.pdf ]. No doubt you will have your own favorites. I’ve only scratched the surface.
I am aware that American party platforms are not like the manifestoes of European parliamentary parties. They do not commit anyone to anything. It is considered impolite to hold actual candidates for office accountable for them. They are generally read only by specialists, masochists, and political opponents in search of cheap thrills and easy gotchas, such as, some might say, your correspondent.
I’m also aware that the unconscious of the Texas Republican Party isn’t all id. Like everybody else, it has an ego, too, and there’s probably a superego in there somewhere. Besides, most everything Texan tends to be exaggerated. But if you want a glimpse of what a nontrivial and apparently growing segment of one of America’s two great political parties believes in its heart of hearts, and what it says when it is essentially talking to itself—well, you’ve just been given one.
© 2014 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-fever-dreams-begin-irresponsibilities-texas-edition
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Deep in the Tell-Tale Heart of the Texas GOP
ASSOCIATED PRESS
by Michael Winship
Posted: 07/24/2014 8:07 am EDT Updated: 07/24/2014 8:59 am EDT
Imagine the official presentation of a worldview concocted by conspiracy theorists and an assortment of cranks and grumpy people. Conjure a document written by scribes possessed of poison pens soaked in the inkpots of Ayn Rand and the Brothers Grimm, caught in the grip of a dark dystopian fantasy of dragons and specters, in which everyone's wrong but thee and me and we're not sure of thee.
No, this is not some Game of Thrones spinoff. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the official 2014 platform of the Republican Party of Texas, 40 pages of unrestrained, right-wing bluster against you name it -- women, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, gays, Obamacare, the Internal Revenue Service, red light cameras, the EPA, the World Bank, vaccinations -- well, you get the picture. In the spirit of the Alamo, this is a work straight out of the 19th century with no option for surrender.
Pick a page, any page, and you'll find yourself pitched through the rabbit hole into an alternate reality. Homosexuality? "... Chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible... Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples."
But it can be cured! The Texas Republicans "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."
That's about as close to George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as the good ole boys (and 12 or so women) of the platform committee get. Corporal punishment? By all means: spare the rod and spoil the child. Guns, yes, please, more! "No level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms." Foreign aid - no way, "except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with congressional approval."
As for public schools, who needs them? "Since data is clear that additional money does not translate into educational achievement, and higher education costs are out of control, we support reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions." And Social Security -- let 'em eat pork rinds: "We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax."
Roe v. Wade must be overturned: "We revere the sanctity of human life." And yet, "Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered." Climate change is "a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or 'climate justice' initiatives." This despite the assessment of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that "Large sections of the state are experiencing exceptional or extreme drought."
Global diplomacy: "We support the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations and the removal of United Nations headquarters from United States soil." Oh, and by the way, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.
All of this is disturbing enough, but what may be the most troubling are the platform planks urging the elimination of virtually any federal authority, the repeal of certain parts of the Constitution or insisting on archaic interpretations that most of us thought were put to bed more than a century ago. Executive decisions by any agency would have to be approved by Congress and as for all "unelected bureaucrats" -- you mean civil servants, too? -- "...we urge Congress to use their constitutional authority to defund and abolish these positions and return authority to duly elected officials." Further, the FBI, DEA, ATF, immigration officers - ANY federal enforcement activities within Texas "must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county."
The Texas GOP supports repealing the 17th Amendment, which in 1913 established the direct election of US senators by the voters, taking that power away from state legislatures, which famously could be bought for pretzels and cheese. In the Gilded Age, in part because of the ease of wholesale bribery at the state level, corporations like Standard Oil and Union Pacific had the US Senate in their pocket (not that it's much better these days).
In their frenzied dreamland, what's left of the Voting Rights Act would be repealed and more stringent restrictions on who's allowed to vote would be put in place, further disenfranchising minorities. What's more, Congress is to "withhold Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom and the Bill of Rights" (!) and the Texas state legislature is to "ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify any federal mandated legislation which infringes upon the states' 10th Amendment Right." State nullification of federal law has been consistently forbidden by the Supreme Court since 1809 and, with slavery, was at the core of the losing Confederate cause 150 years ago. Then it was again used unsuccessfully by those opposed to the civil rights movement of the sixties. Still, it refuses to go away, like an antibiotic-resistant strain of strep.
No wonder the current slogan of Texas' official tourism campaign is, "It's like a whole other country." They ain't just whistling "Dixie."
But for all the platform's Texas-style bravado, there is no mention of Governor Rick Perry's much touted "Texas miracle," his and other state Republicans' boast that since 2009, "about 48 percent of all the jobs created in America were in Texas" due to low taxes and little regulation. There is in the document a general opposition to taxes, a call for the elimination of the minimum wage and this: "We believe that a favorable business climate and strong economy emerges when government is limited by low taxation, sensible regulation, and tort reform. The American private sector powers our economy and is the true creator of jobs."
Maybe the bragging was backburnered because, as Phillip Longman points out in Washington Monthly magazine [ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_may_2014/features/oops_the_texas_miracle_that_is049289.php?page=all ], the state may have no income tax, "But Texas has sales and property taxes that make its overall burden of taxation on low-wage families much heavier than the national average, while the state also taxes the middle class at rates as high or higher than in California...
And unlike in California, middle-class families in Texas don't get the advantage of having rich people share equally in the cost of providing government services. The top 1 percent in Texas have an effective tax rate of just 3.2 percent. That's roughly two-fifths the rate that's borne by the middle class, and just a quarter the rate paid by all those low-wage 'takers' at the bottom 20 percent of the family income distribution. This Robin-Hood-in-reverse system gives Texas the fifth-most-regressive tax structure in the nation.
Middle- and lower-income Texans in effect make up for the taxes the rich don't pay in Texas by making do with fewer government services, such as by accepting a K-12 public school system that ranks behind forty-one other states, including Alabama, in spending per student.
In the words of "Texas on the Brink," the annual report [ http://texaslsg.org/texas-on-the-brink/ ] written by the progressive Legislative Study Group, a research caucus in the Texas House, "In Texas today, the American dream is distant. Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured adults in the nation. Texas is dead last in percentage of high school graduates. Our state generates more hazardous waste and carbon dioxide emissions than any other state in our nation. If we do not change course, for the first time in our history, the Texas generation of tomorrow will be less prosperous than the generation of today."
Instead of real solutions trying to come to grips with real problems, the Texas GOP went for the chimerical bucket list of the extreme right. Granted, there are plenty of excellent reasons to be angry with the federal government, and like any party platform this document is more for show than anything else. But it is a frightening reminder of what's happening within the Republican Party in Texas and elsewhere in the country. As Mark Binelli recently wrote [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/lone-star-crazy-how-right-wing-extremists-took-over-texas-20140701 ] in Rolling Stone,
After nearly six years of pumping out cynical horror stories involving our nefarious president and a Washington bureaucracy run amok, the right-wing fear machine has managed to reduce its target audience to a quivering state of waking nightmare, jumping at shadows.
If, to paraphrase Baudelaire by way of The Usual Suspects, the devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist, the modern GOP's greatest trick might have been convincing its electorate that he does, and that the federal government exists as some kind of infernal machine. While impressive, this trick has also proved to be a very dangerous one, as states of panic have a tendency to produce rather extreme results.
Binelli quotes Texas Democratic strategist Harold Cook:
When I moved to Austin in 1989, Texas politicians were conservative in the classic sense of the term: They wanted to make sure government was small and unintrusive. There were pretty strong libertarian and populist streaks, and that still exists among the electorate, but what's new, I think, is a litmus test driven by the Tea Party wing, where if you're not mad enough, if you don't demonstrate a certain level of hatred, then your motives are suspect. Your final votes on legislation don't matter. These two politicians might be voting exactly alike -- but the one the Tea Party loves is running around the district all the time screaming about how much he hates Obama.
More than 150 years ago, the state's governor, Sam Houston, hero of the Texas War of Independence, recognized this same spirit of suicidal extremism, tinctured with bigotry and fantasy, infecting his fellow Texans as they prepared to leave the United States and join forces with the Confederacy. Houston, while no fan of abolition, warned against secession; that the South would be overwhelmed. In a speech on September 22, 1860 [ http://declaringamerica.com/houston-address-on-secession-1860/ ], at a mass meeting in Austin, he declared, "You are asked to plunge into a revolution; but are you told how to get out of it? Not so; but it is to be a leap in the dark -- a leap into an abyss, whose horrors would even fright the mad spirits of disunion who tempt you on...
"Are we to sell reality for a phantom?"
The Texas GOP -- and far too many others -- say yes.
Copyright ©2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-winship/deep-in-the-tell-tale-hea_b_5613703.html [with comments]
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Secrets of the right-wing brain: New study proves it — conservatives see a different, hostile world
Rand Paul
(Credit: AP/Jim Cole)
Phony WMD, Benghazi, birthers, truthers -- turns out there's a scientific explanation for deniers and Tea Partyers
Paul Rosenberg
Tuesday, Jul 29, 2014 02:31 PM CDT
“John Stuart Mill called it ‘commonplace’ for political systems to have ‘a party or order or stability and a party of progress or reform.’” So begins a recent paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. But is this “commonplace” observation rooted in our brains? Is it even true?
The paper, “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology [ http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=/BBS/BBS37_03/S0140525X13001192a.pdf ],” by lead author John R. Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, answers yes to both questions. It advances three successive waves of evidence, which combine to show that conservatives differ from liberals by having stronger, more intense reactions to negative aspects of the environment — such as physical threats, or potential sources of disease — which are ultimately physiological. At the same time, with multiple forms of mass hysteria going on at once, American conservatives seem dead set on proving the scientists right, and underscoring the importance of the work they’re doing.
But here’s the twist: The scientists themselves insist that “citing differences in the psychological and physiological traits of liberals and conservatives is not equivalent to declaring one ideology superior to the other.” While this may be true in an abstract sense, and a mix of psychological tendencies makes a society more robust in the long run — balancing needs for caution and self-preservation with needs for exploration, innovation and renewal — in 21st century America, things look strikingly different.
Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen — Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc. — make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic ],” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature — just as liberalism is — we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.
Consider the recent wave of hysteria over Central American children turning themselves in at the border. There were the hordes of angry demonstrators protesting busloads of children [ http://crooksandliars.com/2014/07/racist-murrieta-residents-terrorize-bus ], like it was Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. There was the congressman/doctor Phil Gingrey’s warning letter to the CDC, claiming that the children might be carrying the Ebola virus [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/phil-gingrey-migrant-ebola-vaccines ] — a disease unknown outside Sub-Saharan Africa. There was the ludicrous myth of the “$50 million illegal alien resort spa [ http://www.salon.com/2014/07/17/border_demagogues_outdo_themselves_inside_the_50_million_illegal_alien_resort_spa_myth/ ].” But above all there was the most basic, fundamental fact that the children were turning themselves in at the border — it was anything but a failure of border protection, although that’s what the right-wing hysteria portrayed it as.
Put simply, none of what conservatives have been doing in the recent “border crisis” moral panic makes any sense in terms of pragmatic problem-solving. But it all makes perfect sense in terms of expressively defending a threatened group identity — and that is very much in line with what researchers have found to be the defining characteristics of conservatism.
“I think immigration is a perfect example of some of the things we’re talking about,” Hibbing told Salon. “I guess I wouldn’t frame it, I probably wouldn’t use the phrase ‘moral panic,’” he qualified — sometimes psychologists and sociologists don’t see eye-to-eye — “and I wouldn’t frame it necessarily as just threat,” he added, quickly going on to explain, “A lot of the adverse to immigration could be traced to a disgust reaction as well, which is another negative stimulus being used a lot. A lot of the language that one hears, even now with the kids on the border, is fear of disease and impurities, things like that. So it’s not just threat — or it’s threat, in a way, but not like ‘a bad guy with a gun.’ It’s fear of pathogens as well,” he explained.
“So anyway, I think that is a perfect example of how these kinds of basic orientations to negative and positive stimuli can then translate themselves into political positions on issues of the day; in this case, a really important one like immigration.”
Could all the differences between liberals and conservatives really come down to something as simple as differences in responses to perceived threat? In a word, no. Just as the title of his paper says, the research Hibbing and others have done shows that differences in threat bias underlie variations in political ideology; they do not explain all the variation, just a good chunk of it. Yet, that in itself is a tremendous advancement.
To understand what Hibbing and his colleagues have achieved, it’s useful to compare their work to a 2003 paper, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition [ http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf ],” by John Jost and colleagues, which made a more modest, but related claim that conservatism could be understood as an ensemble of tendencies within a unified framework. That paper focused on psychological survey data — information gleaned from conscious questioning in 88 separate studies across decades of research in 12 countries. It did not claim that motivated reasoning was limited to conservatives, or that motivated reasoning was necessarily false, although many of its initial critics in Congress and elsewhere jumped to those conclusions (and some even threatened to defund the entire field of research into political psychology). But the paper’s abstract did say that “Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification).”
While alarmed conservatives thought they saw a sinister plot afoot, those familiar with some of the studies cited probably saw something else: an intriguing array of diverse yet interrelated factors, crying out for some sort of simplifying insight that could explain how and why they all fit together in some relatively simple, straightforward manner. Like the chemical elements before Mendeleev, or the subatomic particles in the pre-quark era, scientists in the field faced a too-complicated picture for their sense of order and simplicity to abide. They had their own sort of motivated cognition, you see.
But that earlier paper was relatively tame compared to the new one by by Hibbing’s team, which also wrote the book ”Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences [ http://www.amazon.com/Predisposed-Liberals-Conservatives-Political-Differences/dp/0415535875 ].” Where “Political Conservatism” talked about psychology, Hibbing’s work also talks about brain structure and function. It burrows much more deeply into who we are, and by surfacing the far-reaching power of a single unifying factor — differences in threat bias — it achieves a dramatic simplification of the overall picture of the field.
Hibbing is a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which has a political physiology lab [ http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/ ] “dedicated to exploring the relevance of individual-level biological variations to political orientations and behaviors,” which may well be the only one of its kind — so far. But the evolution from political psychology to political physiology in recent years has many collaborators, and the paper appeared with comments from 26 researchers or research teams, with similar expertise, the vast majority of whom (“22 or 23” by Hibbing’s count) basically accepted the general idea of the findings, though with varying degrees and kinds of qualification.
The authors note that approaches based on trying to explain political attitudes based on genetics or on parents’ political views have not produced clear, substantial results, which is why they propose to focus on an intermediate level, between pure biology and explicit political influence — that of physiological responses to experience, the realm in which threat bias emerges.
The findings of a 2008 paper [ http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/Oxley%20et%20al%202008.pdf ] from Hibbing’s team provide a concrete illustration of what they have focused on in their own work, which in turn informs their evaluation of the work of others. Forty-six individuals with strong political attitudes were exposed to three threatening images mixed among 30 neutral ones, and their physiological responses (changes in skin conductance level) were compared to their political attitudes on 18 issues related to “protecting the interests of the participants’ group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats.” The more conservative “group protective” participants showed “an increase in skin conductance when threatening stimuli were presented,” while those who were more liberal, less “group protective” were “mostly unaffected by those same stimuli” — a difference that was statistically significant.
The threatening images included “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it.” The policy issues were “support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer, and Biblical truth; and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights, and pornography.” The researchers themselves did not label them as “liberal” or “conservative,” “because we measure only one aspect of ideologies and exclude other aspects such as positions on economic issues.” However, the relationship between conservatism and group protection is self-evident, even if not all-encompassing.
In the current paper, the authors’ argument proceeds in four stages. First, an examination of “liberal-conservative psychological differences as reflected in (survey) self-reports,” which was established in Jost’s 2003 meta-analysis, and has been expanded on since. They note that two of the five core personality traits — known as the Big Five [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ] — correlate consistently with political orientation “across a broad range of studies” — conservatives score higher on conscientiousness while liberals score higher on openness to new experiences. (The other three traits are agreeableness, extraversion and emotional stability). Second, they review “psychological differences that are not fully accessible to the participants themselves,” such as differences in responding to negative imagery. Third, they describe evidence of “physiological differences between liberals and conservatives,” including differences in brain structure and function. Fourth, they present a synthesis of the research “arguing that many of the correlations described are tied together by the common thread of differences in response patterns to negative stimuli.” They point out that “Good evolutionary reasons exist for negativity bias given that negative events can be much more costly in fitness terms than positive events are beneficial; to state the obvious, infection, injury, and death curtail reproductive opportunities.”
However, what matters for political psychology is not the existence of negativity bias, “but that it varies so much from individual to individual,” the authors write. “That some people are more attuned to potential threats, more sensitive to sources of contagion, and more desirous of in-group protections is known intuitively and amply demonstrated by a large research literature,” and this variation in heightened negativity bias is significantly correlated with conservatism. Indeed, the authors state, that there is no known published study indicating the opposite.
The connection between heightened negativity bias and conservatism is not hard to make, the authors note, “It is not surprising that those attuned to the negative in life might take steps to avoid it, perhaps by refraining from taking chances with the unknown, by following instructions, and by sticking to the tried and true.” (Indeed, erring on the side of caution is one of the non-political meanings of the word “conservative,” as in a “conservative investment” or a “conservative estimate.”) Elaborating further, they note:
[N]ot only do political positions favoring defense spending, roadblocks to immigration, and harsh treatment of criminals seem naturally to mesh with heightened response to threatening stimuli but those fostering conforming unity (school children reciting the pledge of allegiance), traditional lifestyles (opposition to gay marriage), enforced personal responsibility (opposition to welfare programs and government provided healthcare), longstanding sources of authority (Biblical inerrancy; literal, unchanging interpretations of the Constitution), and clarity and closure (abstinence-only sex education; signed pledges to never raise taxes; aversion to compromise) do, as well. Heightened response to the general category of negative stimuli fits comfortably with a great many of the typical tenets of political conservatism.
Summing up, they conclude:
Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that individuals who are physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative stimuli will tend to endorse public policies that minimize tangible threats by giving prominence to past, traditional solutions, by limiting human discretion (or endorsing institutions, such as the free market, that do not require generosity, discretion, and altruism), by being protective, by promoting ingroups relative to out-groups, and by embracing strong, unifying policies and authority figures.
This is not to say the authors think there are no outstanding problems or challenges that remain to be fully explained or resolved. In particular, they focus on three major concerns. First, the problem of causal order, “Do physiological and broad psychological traits shape political dispositions, or might political dispositions actually shape physiological and broad psychological traits?” Second, the problem of messiness: that political orientations do not necessarily organize themselves neatly onto a single left/right continuum. Third, the problem of ultimate causes: “{I}f negativity bias leads to the adoption of certain personality traits, basic values, moral foundations, and bedrock political principles, what causes variation in negativity bias in the first place?”
Regarding the problem of causal order, they note that resolving the issue “requires either longitudinal or experimental data,” and that although such studies are few, they all point to politics as resulting from physiological and psychological traits, rather than causing them, although questions were subsequently raised by commentators. It certainly seems plausible that causation could flow both ways, and more studies are clearly called for to illuminate this.
The messiness question is a good deal messier. On the individual level, people often have views on one or more subjects that are at odds with the overall positions of others who share their ideology. As groups, there are various intra-ideological cleavages as well — as shown in Pew’s political typologies [ http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/the-political-typology-beyond-red-vs-blue/ ], for example. There are also questions raised by political moderates, and those who shy away from politics altogether. More generally, there is the question of dimensionality: Is there really only one dimension to political beliefs, or are there two—social and economic — or more? This was a subject of considerable debate among commentators as well, but in the response section, the authors noted:
If a concept such as negativity bias could account for a significant portion of the variance merely in socio-cultural political preferences, it would be an important accomplishment. If it were able to account for economic or equality issues, as well, we would view this as icing on the cake.
In short, regardless of how the dimensionality question is answered, the threat bias explanation for ideological differences is still a significant advance in our understanding.
However, cognitive linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio, author of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy [ http://www.asocommunications.com/html/dont-buy-it/ ],” told Salon there’s a very direct connection between social and economic conservatism, based on their moral outlook. Two things stand out about how conservatives talk about economy, Osorio said, based on several years of intensive observation and analysis. First is the “the tendency to compare it to something natural — a body or the weather or moving liquid,” she said. “But the other idea undergirding their worldview, and thus shaping perceptions of poverty, riches, inequality and desirable economic policy, is the idea that the economy exists for a specific purpose: to reward the good and punish the bad. It’s a moral arbiter; simply having great riches indicates you deserve them because the economy loves you the best. Thus, it follows that poor people deserve to be poor and we can know this because they’re poor.”
The question of ultimate causes is intriguing on several fronts. First, because of possible evolutionary origins:
One possibility is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene. Compared with the modern era, existence then was much more likely to be terminated prematurely at the hands of other human beings or by accidents involving wild animals or natural disasters.
Second, because of how conditions have changed:
In modern life, on the other hand, threats are less immediate and the selection pressures for elevated negativity biases have likely been reduced, opening the door for substantial genetic variation at relevant loci.
Third, because of the effects of this change, which can help explain conservatism as more tightly defined than liberalism:
If strong negativity biases were once selected for but now are not, it could explain why results often indicate that conservatism is in some senses better defined than liberalism. Conservatives have a negativity bias, whereas liberals do not have a positivity bias and may or may not have a negativity bias. Conservatives sometimes take umbrage at this situation, arguing that it is the result of liberal academics viewing conservatism as an aberration that needs to be explained. In truth, its status as a tighter, more discussed phenotype may be a result of the fact that, in contrast to proto-liberalism, proto-conservatism was once selected for.
Finally, the authors note that there’s a group-selection argument for the benefit of ideological diversity, although it may be more problematic for us today — a point I’ll return to later on.
As indicated above, there was broad acceptance of the general thesis of the negativity bias, but there was also a vigorous and multifaceted debate about how it fits together with the rest of what’s already known. There were far too many different issues raised to summarize them here. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one set of issues, raised from slightly different angles by different commentators, which Hibbing also commented on for Salon.
The first was raised by psychologists Matt Motyl and Ravi Iyer, who argued that negativity bias explains a lot about conservatives, but leaves some notable gaps. “Conservatives live in safer communities, perhaps to escape negative emotions, yet display numerous other community preferences unrelated to negativity,” they wrote, such as preferring to live in communities with greater involvement in competitive sports — which would naturally increase their potential exposure to competitive loss. They proposed an alternate explanation, that of a “tendency toward cognitive consistency,” which seems to make excellent sense, particularly as a follow-on influence: Once negativity bias starts shaping the broad contours of ideological orientations, consistency comes into the picture, fleshing out areas where negativity bias may not be as dramatically involved — voluntarily playing games, for example, as opposed to involuntarily being thrust into a struggle for survival.
“I’ve got no problem, I think that’s perfectly complementary,” Hibbing told Salon, in response to that notion. He saw it as well within the framework of the vast majority of comments they had received. “In fact, all the commentary — well, not all, but most of them — we were quite pleased with, because they did seem to, for the most part, accept our basic notion of greater threat sensitivity, and then kind of introduce their own angles, and twists and additions to it. And I think that’s a perfect example of that.”
The idea that negativity bias generates conservative ideology, but that cognitive coherence helps shapes how it is structured, is not a new one. Indeed, this is precisely what cognitive linguist George Lakoff argued in his 1996 book, ”Moral Politics [ http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637798.html ].” The coherence he proposed came from two contrasting child-rearing models, which he called the “strict father” and the “nurturant parent” models. But the initial logic of the “strict father” model was that it was intended to prepare children for life in a “dangerous world.” In contrast, the “nurturant parent” model was less focused on guarding against threats, more on nurturing capabilities. It was not heedless of danger — just not obsessively focused on it.
Significantly, another commentator, Ross Buck, raised a related issue in which he also drew on Lakoff’s work, in the past. Buck argued that “differences between liberal and conservative orientations … are emotional in nature and caused by differences in attachment security: Conservatives are more vigilant to negative features of the environment because of a general sense of insecurity, whereas liberals are relatively more secure.” In political theory terms, Buck related this back to the distinction between how the conservative Hobbes and the liberal Locke conceived of the state of nature, and the social contract:
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that all are motivated by instincts for self-preservation to dominate others while maintaining their own freedom. The resulting universal war of all against all made life in the state of nature “nasty, brutish, and short,” and the social contract was established as a universal peace treaty to end this conflict.
Hobbes used this argument, not incidentally, as a justification for monarchy, providing new life for the traditional rationale of the divine right of kings. However:
In contrast, John Locke suggested that people in the state of nature lived together peacefully without leaders according to reason and natural law.
As for consequences, Buck wrote:
Among other things, the relatively greater security of liberals prompts them to regard the less fortunate with pity, whereas more anxiously attached conservatives tend to regard them with scorn.
Buck also related his account to the analysis of Jonathan Haidt “who described ‘other condemning’ social/moral emotions – anger, disgust, and contempt – and a conservative ‘disgust-based moral order,’ which condemns people for what they are more than what they do, and tends to ostracize and excludes members of out-groups (based upon ethnicity, religion, social class, sexual orientation, etc.),” and to Lakoff:
The attachment-security argument also suggests a developmental origin of the liberal-conservative difference, consistent with Lakoff’s (2002) suggestion that liberal thought centers around the Nurturing Parent model of the family as opposed to Strict Father model of morality underlying conservative thought.
As with Motyl and Iyer’s argument, I thought it more plausible that attachment security reflects, amplifies and generalizes the influence of negativity bias, but it could have a circular feedback impact as well.
Again, Hibbing said that it sounded very plausible. “I think that’s a nice way of viewing how it could come about,” he said. Genetics are only part of the story, and considering how individuals are raised as well “makes perfect sense,” he said. “If there’s a father or mother who has heightened threat sensitivity, it stands to reason that they could raise their child in a slightly different way, and this could explain the generational transmission.”
One thing that distinguishes Lakoff’s work from that of most psychologists has been his willingness to be evaluative. While most of “Moral Politics” was purely descriptive and analytical, he ultimately did take up the question of which model was more effective at producing the results it promised. Drawing on the parenting and child development literature, particularly the work of Diana Baumrind [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Baumrind ], Lakoff pointed out that authoritarian, Strict Father parenting does not produce the sort of healthy autonomous adults it promises. What does work is what Baumrind described as authoritative parenting, which sets high standards but is far more focused on engagement and nurturance than on judgment and punishment. This is the essence of Lakoff’s Nurturant Parent model — and it works. Locke was right, after all, about the fundamental goodness of humanity, which runs far deeper than our obvious flaws.
There are good reasons why Hibbing and others in political psychology abstain from evaluation, as he told Salon:
One of the things we try to do, and you may have picked this up in the exchange, is do our best to be fair to conservatives on this, and not make it sound like they’re just deeply flawed. So we tend to use language like ‘they’re paying more attention to these negative things’ and it’s not like they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. But this is something that gets to them, in a physical way, and a psychological way as well, so they think it’s something that needs due diligence. So they’re really paying attention, and they’re thinking of ways that they might mitigate these threats.
And yet, though this may account for where conservatives start from, it doesn’t match as well with where they end up at. Mobs of angry adults screaming at busloads of frightened children does not exactly equate with terms like “due diligence” and “mitigating threats.” Perhaps (at this point, anyway) political psychologists have their hands full just trying to get a fix on how to understand the origins of ideology, and we must look to others (sociologists, historians, linguists, etc.) for a broader view of where things lead to, and end. Hibbing continued in a similar vein:
This is based on the way that the world appears to them. And in that sense, it’s very real.
Here’s one example, liberals are always pointing out to conservatives, and especially gun advocates, that there’s a lot more harm done by gun accidents than people using guns. And I think to a conservative, that just doesn’t mean all that much, because the notion of the volitional evil human being coming after them, them not being able to defend themselves hits them in the gut in a way that liberals, I think don’t think understand.
So, if we can get back to those basic kinds of first premises, really, before we even have logic kick in, what is it that strikes you, what is it that you fear, what is it that motivates you, then I think we start to understand some of these deep differences between liberals and conservatives.
Earlier, I promised to return to an argument that Hibbing and his co-authors made, a group-selection argument for the benefit of ideological diversity, which runs in parallel with the reluctance to evaluate ideologies. I believe it’s a virtually self-evident argument — so far as our past is concerned. But it may prove to be more problematic for us today, and for our future. Here’s what they wrote in the paper:
A somewhat different theory that relies on group selection has been floated on occasion. It holds that societies benefit from having a mixture of those with high negativity biases and those with more modest negativity biases, of those open to out-groups and of those who are more guarded…. [T]he advantages of phenotypic mixtures would have to occur among the small-scale hunter-gatherer type societies that typified human existence for so long. Just as groups of spiders benefit from having a mix of social and asocial members and virtually all species benefit from having individuals with different immune systems, the argument is that human groups benefit from having members who are differentially responsive and attentive to negative stimuli. If this were true, the polarization that afflicts many modern democracies may be a vestige of the mixes of the behaviorally relevant, biological predispositions that worked well in small-scale societies.
This last point strikes me as extremely important — arguably more important than most of the scientists involved seem to realize. It is surely quite sensible to see ideological diversity as a good, but a particular mix that is good in one social circumstance may not be so good in another. It makes quite good sense that negativity bias was very helpful in our evolutionary history, when we lacked a deep cultural reservoir for coping with various ills. But in our modern — or postmodern — world, the particular mix needs to change; our need for novelty-seeking looks to be far more important for our survival and flourishing. The challenge of dealing with global warming is but one obvious — if overwhelming — example. More generally, Einstein once said that we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, and so, for us, novelty-seeking may be even more essential to our survival than negativity bias was in the past.
In short, whether or not one ideology is better than another may itself be an empirical question, the answer to which varies over time. And at present, conservatism’s negatives clearly seem to be growing beyond all control. It may well be that psychology and physiology cannot and/or should not judge the efficacy of ideologies, but other scientists with a broader purview may well be required to. Our survival as a species could depend on it.
The fireworks today may be at the border — or in Gaza, or Ukraine — but meanwhile our goose is slowly being cooked by global warming, and conservatives have convinced themselves it’s all a liberal hoax. If that kind of thinking isn’t wrong, then what is?
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/secrets_of_the_right_wing_brain_new_study_proves_it_conservatives_see_a_different_hostile_world/ [with comments]
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Fox News’ “War on Christianity”: How right-wing hacks created a sect of victims
Clockwise from top left: Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes, Sean Hannity
(Credit: Fox News)
There is a serious agenda behind the paranoia -- and a vision of reality that is truly scary
Edwin Lyngar
Tuesday, Jul 29, 2014 01:45 PM CDT
If you only consumed the Fox News Network or books penned by Fox “journalists,” you could be forgiven for believing that the streets of America run red with the blood of Christian martyrs or that Bibles are being burned in the streets of San Francisco by marauding atheists. The claims of religious persecution are laughable even on cursory examination, but this slice of American self-delusion can no longer be ignored. The manufactured war on Christians provides cover for fundamentalist to perpetrate actual discrimination, against gay people, religious minorities and women. With the latest decision from the Supreme Court creating religious rights for billon-dollar corporations like Hobby Lobby, this wholesale nonsense has gone beyond anyone’s capacity to ignore.
To understand the rise of the Christian victim myth, one must trace it to the source: Fox News and especially its affiliated radio and book empire. Even among the intellectually atrophied, there are a few who stand out for being worse than the rest. At Fox News, I would argue it’s the trifecta of Mike Huckabee, Sean Hannity and my personal favorite (and the main subject of this post), Todd Starnes. To understand the creation of the religious victimization myth, I thoroughly examined Starnes’ latest polemic: “God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values [ http://www.amazon.com/God-Less-America-Stories-Traditional/dp/1621365913 ].” Forwarded by Huckabee and promoted by Hannity, this Fox News corporate product captures everything that is wrong, untrue and stupid about this ongoing narrative.
I have spent more hours than I want to admit trying to understand Todd Starnes as a fellow human being. Like me, Starnes is an obese, white man, and we probably share pants sizes and a love of fried foods. Where we differ is that Starnes has spent his entire life dedicated to Southern Baptists, a group that has only recently recovered from its hatred of dancing and interracial marriage. He is a marginal member of the Fox News brand, but is a constant source of misinformation and social discord, regularly featured on Fox radio and the Fox News website.
Starnes might dismiss my criticism with his favorite insult of “elitist,” but that can’t stick to me. I’m a former military enlisted man, was a libertarian for years and have been clawing my own way out of the pit of angry, white America for decades. My own upbringing should make me love Starnes: undereducated, white, rural, gun-toting and fat. Todd and I could be brothers, except that every word that he writes or utters makes me almost ill. In that way, I’ll label his book a “Nauseatus Magnum Opus.” My fascination about Starnes comes from how close I came to accepting his vision of reality.
Starnes shows a decided lack of shame in the central thesis of the book that “liberals and atheists are out to destroy America.” His over-the-top hyperbole only succeeds in exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the “religious persecution” cry. He also exposes his near genocidal hate for anyone unlike himself, gleefully waxing about many of us burning in hell, for instance. He offers a kind warning to “invest in some fire-retardant underwear” (page 131). The days I spent examining his book would have been more comfortable pummeling my own genitals with a blunt instrument.
The Starnes-led sideshow is designed to cajole mostly blue-collar, lower-middle-class whites to vote against their own self-interest, and it’s a runaway, nefarious success.
Although the word “nefarious” describes the work, you won’t find that word or any other complicated language between the covers of the book. Starnes offers many preposterous suppositions (two other words you won’t find in the book) and unsupported conclusions, but he uses only elementary school prose. Of course, he could claim to be writing for accessibility, but I’d argue he’s manufacturing a fairy tale about good versus evil using childlike language.
To contrast the lack of complexity, there are 13 separate references to “sweet tea” and eight to “sweet potatoes.” One could summarize his book with this much more accurate subtitle: White Southern Person With a Bad Diet = Good. Everyone Else = Satan.
His book purports to find examples of American Christians being victimized by the growing atheist menace. This is not my own hyperbole, but an actual claim (“Angry Atheists Armed With Attorneys,” page 175). Of course, the Pew study on religious affiliation says that 78 percent of Americans identify as some form of Christian, while those who self-identify as “atheist” or “agnostic” hover around 5 percent. Truly secular people are outnumbered 14-to-1, so the entire premise of the book is nonsense.
I consider myself an essayist rather than researcher, but the flaws in the book are so large they can be seen from space. Starnes works hard to give the appearance of scholarship but it would only be credible to the most gullible and unsophisticated reader. Starnes uses the veneer of endnotes as support, but when examined, they show only shoddy research, unsupported conclusions and narcissism.
For instance, he cites his own questionable work published in his own FoxNews.com columns, instances that have often been debunked elsewhere (thank you, Media Matters [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/05/13/todd-starnes-5-fake-culture-wars/194005 ]). When he cites a third party, it’s often a source that cannot be taken seriously, such as his references to World Net Daily, a right-wing website that reports outlandish conspiracy theories such as “soy products make people gay [ http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39253/ ]” (among other bunk). When he manages to cite journalistic sources, such as the Associated Press, the articles don’t support the point he is attempting to make. Starnes seems to think just putting numbers after a reference point in a book is sufficient scholarship no matter how irrelevant the endnotes.
Even when he gets the basic facts right, the examples often crumble under their own illogic. My absolute favorite is that of a man “Jailed for Holding a Bible Study” (page 17). That sounds bad, right? Yet a page or two later, the details emerge: “police officers raided the home and a two-thousand-square-foot building (emphasis mine) in their backyard. The family had moved their Bible study into the building after the group outgrew the home’s living room” (page 20). The man built a massive, unlicensed building in his backyard, preached to a congregation of 80 people and collected tithes. Who the hell would tolerate an unlicensed, non-permitted church or business in his or her neighborhood?
Starnes also makes some startling accusations against Barack Obama, claiming at one point that Obama’s “end goal is to eradicate the Christian faith” (page 7). Here again the examples marvelously fail. For example, Starnes includes the accusation that “[Obama] omitted the traditional phrase ‘in the year of our Lord’ on a presidential proclamation.” Wow, that sounds like driving nails right into the hands of Jesus … except that Starnes fails to mention that this proclamation honored “Jewish Heritage Month.” I find the phrase “in the year of our Lord” unnecessary, in any case, but for Jews it makes even less sense, because they don’t consider Jesus “their lord” in the year of reference. The “evidence” in Starnes’ endnote is an article gushing with praise from the Jewish community for Obama’s act of sensitivity to this non-Christian community.
For me, Starnes’ greatest sin (if I may borrow from his constant religious posturing) is that he attacks so many groups and people that are so much weaker than he is. He refers to many of these groups as “bullies” or “bigots,” even when it is he who hurls cruelty and insults. America is overwhelmingly Christian and heterosexual, but to read Starnes, one could believe that he was the last Christian in America and could be murdered any moment by Muslims or atheists. He cites examples where public schoolteachers weren’t able to preach Christianity to schoolchildren. Again, he expends not one drop of ink to ponder the feelings of Jewish, atheist or Buddhist parents. Starnes cannot accept that Americans do not all worships as he does, and his book bubbles with underlying hostility and hate for marginalized groups.
Because I am not Starnes, I can concede when my opposition has found a handful of reasonable examples. There are cases of overreach in political correctness in America, for example, when a valedictorian is forbidden from thanking Jesus in a speech. But there is a difference between a student speaker and a principal who might use his government position to preach to captive students. But even if every single example from the book were true, it still would not prove a war on Christianity. America is a big place, sadly filled with injustice. Innocent people are locked up, discrimination is a reality for many and children go hungry in the “richest” nation on earth. Real, decent Christians would do much more for their faith by ignoring the war on Christianity nonsense and instead working to address injustices in their own neighborhoods. This is the kind of activism Jesus could get behind.
This book proves that the war on Christianity narrative is devoid of merit, yet the Fox News Misinformation Complex continues to peddle it.
Rather than offer a final thought on the book, I instead will take a moment to urge every single thinking person to read this book (and follow the endnotes). Fundamentalist preachers often urge followers to avoid certain books, movies and even people. “Don’t talk to your atheist uncle anymore, because you might struggle in your faith,” one might say. Although this book is a painful read, sensible people must listen to and then combat this deluded thinking, lest American be overrun with 13th century sensibilities. If you get nothing out of it, you will at least learn how not to craft an argument.
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/fox_news_war_on_christianity_how_right_wing_hacks_created_a_sect_of_victims/ [with comments]
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Right-Wing Crackpot 'Historian' Barton Exposed by Peter Montgomery and Lawrence O'Donnell
By AlterNet Staff
Posted at April 19, 2011, 2:52am
Peter Montgomery, author of the original AlterNet investigation, "Tea Party Jesus: Koch's Americans For Prosperity Sidles Up to Religious Right for 2012 Campaign [ http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch's_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign ( http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch%27s_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign?paging=off )]," appeared last night on "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell [ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/42653890#42653890 (the YouTube of the segment, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgDZiDNo_AU , below as the original is embedded)]" to discuss his new report on David Barton, the favorite revisionist historian of the religious right and the Tea Party movement. (VIDEO BELOW) Montgomery penned the report, "Barton’s Bunk: Religious Right ‘Historian’ Hits the Big Time in Tea Party America [ http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/barton-s-bunk-religious-right-historian-hits-the-big-time-tea-party-america ]", for People for the American Way, where he is a senior fellow.
As Montgomery documented in his AlterNet piece, Barton's false history about the role of religion in America's founding, and the theological contortions he makes to assert a biblical mandate for the destruction of government, are finding their way into the rhetoric of the Republican Party's best-known potential presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
Copyright 2011 AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/564372/right-wing_crackpot_'historian'_barton_exposed_by_peter_montgomery_and_lawrence_o'donnell [with comments]
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Another Lesson In False History From David Barton
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/another-lesson-false-history-david-barton , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWNsnXos6c [embedded]
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Dr. Ben Carson at First Baptist of Orlando
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqngWTjAqCc [with comments]
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Ben Carson Says That Legal Abortion Is Human Sacrifice
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Tuesday, 7/1/2014 11:24 am
While appearing on DoveTV recently [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZBuOR5eI40 (next below, from 13:00 through 29:15)],
Carson, who has no problem [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/22/ben-carson-monica-wehby_n_5374265.html ] endorsing candidates who support abortion rights in order to win votes, was responding to a comment by host Perry Atkinson who said that if America could just end abortion then "all of the other things that God would be interested in helping us with would fall into alignment."
"It's interesting," Carson said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDXYYOi_Rs (below, as embedded)], "that we sit around and call other ancient civilizations 'heathen' because of human sacrifice, but aren't we actually guilty of the same thing?"
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ben-carson-says-legal-abortion-human-sacrifice
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Truth In Action Ministries Cites Bogus Jefferson Quote To Refute Separation Of Church And State
Submitted by Ian Silverstone on Wednesday, 7/23/2014 11:14 am
Truth in Action Ministries [ http://www.truthinaction.org/ , http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/truth-action-ministries ], a purveyor of incendiary “documentaries” that explore our country’s apparent slide [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/coral-ridge-exposes-americas-descent-socialism ] into anti-Christian [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-activists-warn-parents-against-sending-students-communist-atheist-gay-public ] moral [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-action-ministries-film-warns-gays-puts-boys-serious-risk ] turpitude [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-titanic-radical-homosexual-agenda ], is back to warn us that Christians are now an increasingly persecuted minority in America.
Watch highlights of the film here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7NpSp3-Ki8 (below, as embedded)]:
Hosted by conservative activists Jerry Newcombe [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/jerry-newcombe ] and John Rabe [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/john-rabe ], the group’s most recent film, “We the People: Under Attack [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-film-activist-judges-are-attacking-america-gay-rights-taxpayer-funded-pornog ],” is a field guide to how “activist judges” are restricting religious liberties and the freedom of speech, and includes appearances from right-wing figures such as Herb Titus [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/herb-titus ], Phyllis Schlafly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/phyllis-schlafly ], Carrie Severino [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/carrie-severino ] and Alan Sears [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/alan-sears ].
The subject of scorn in “We the People” is the federal judiciary, seen as a rogue branch of government with a revisionist interpretation of the Constitution. Newcombe warns that “our country is under attack by activist judges, including some on our nation’s Supreme Court.”
The separation of church and state is framed as both a slap in the face to Christians and a subversion of the will of our Founding Fathers, and Titus laments that the U.S. government doesn’t strictly adhere to the Ten Commandments and the Bible in its public policy. Rabe breathlessly reports that “in recent decades, the federal judiciary has instituted abortion on demand, overturned limits on partial-birth abortion, silenced voluntary prayer in schools and discovered a so-called ‘right to sodomy’ in the constitution.”
Newcombe argues that recent decisions by the Supreme Court defy the Constitution’s purportedly religious themes, and relays this quote by Thomas Jefferson to prove that even he believed in mixing religion with government:
No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I as chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.
One slight caveat, however: this quote appears absolutely nowhere [ http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/no-nation-has-ever-yet-existed-or-been-governed-without-religionquotat ] in any of Jefferson’s writings or records of his speeches, and first materialized in 1857, decades after Jefferson died. Looks like Newcombe will have to find more fake quotes from the nation’s founders to prove his point.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-action-ministries-cites-bogus-jefferson-quote-refute-separation-church-and-state
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Christian Reconstructionism And The GOP: 'Biblical Justice' vs Social Justice
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Tuesday, 7/22/2014 2:53 pm
There’s a reason so many Republican politicians seem to bring a religious fervor to their efforts to gut public institutions and social welfare spending. The modern day Religious Right draws much of its ideology from Christian Reconstructionists [ http://religiondispatches.org/tag/christian-reconstructionism/ ] who teach that God gave specific duties to the government, the church, and the family.
According to this theological worldview, education and taking care of the poor are the responsibility of families and churches, and it is unbiblical for the government to take on these roles. That meshes well with the view of “constitutional conservatives” who believe, for example, the Constitution does not authorize any federal government role in education.
A stark example of the increasingly indistinct line between conservative Republicans and hard-core Christian Reconstructionists [ http://religiondispatches.org/iwashington-posti-story-gets-christian-reconstructionism-wrong/ ] and dominionists [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/dominionism-and-religious-right-merger-complete ] (who believe the right kind of Christians are meant to have dominion over every aspect of society) can be found in the recent Republican primary victory of Michael Petrouka [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/michael-peroutka ] in a race for a county council seat in an Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Peroutka believes that any law that runs counter to God’s law is invalid, and that the Maryland General Assembly is itself no longer a valid legislative body. Here’s a concise summation of his approach to government:
Since civil government is ordained by God in order to protect God-given rights, then the function of civil government is to obey God and to enforce God’s law – PERIOD.
It is not the role of civil government to house, feed, clothe, educate or give heath care to…ANYBODY!
This religion-inflected ideological view of government is not relegated to inhabitants of the far-right fringe like Peroutka. David Barton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/david-barton ], an influential Republican activist and “historian” who helped write the GOP’s national platform in 2012 [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/6-right-wing-zealots-and-crazy-ideas-behind-most-outrageous-republican-platform-ever ], claims that the Constitution was drawn directly from the Bible and the sermons of colonial preachers, and that its focus on individual freedom reflects the founders’ theology [ http://religiondispatches.org/glenn-becks-salvation-army/ ] of individual salvation. In this view, the Tea Party’s belief in a radically limited federal government is not only a question of constitutional interpretation, it is a mandate of Holy Scripture.
Just this month, Barton promoted these views on “Praise the Lord [ http://itbn.org/index/detail/lib/Networks/sublib/TBN/ec/RrcG51bjoRcfQnwzbKDLsESPOp09mvGC ],” the flagship program of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as the world’s largest religious network and America’s most-watched faith channel. “In the Bible, Jesus has a teaching about minimum wage,” Barton said. “In the Bible, Jesus has two teachings on capital gains tax.” The Bible, according to Barton, opposes those taxes as well as estate taxes and progressive income taxes. A flat tax is “what the Bible supports.”
On the same show Barton denounced government spending on welfare. “It’s not the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor and needy,” he said, “it’s the church’s responsibility.”
According to Barton, there are 205 verses in the Bible that instruct the family or church to take care of the poor, but not the government. “The government is told to do only one thing with taking care of the poor and that one thing is to make sure that when the poor come into court they get justice. That’s the only thing government is told….What we’re doing right now is for the first time in America we have ignored what the Bible says, the Bible says you don’t work, you don’t eat.” He went on to say that people “not having to work and getting free money…violates everything the Bible tells us” about dealing with the poor.
These themes are repeated in Social Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel [ http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF13E133.pdf ], a booklet published last year by the Family Research Council [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/family-research-council ], Concerned Women for America [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/concerned-women-america ], and the anti-environmentalist Cornwall Alliance [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/cornwall-alliance ]. The booklet, written by Cornwall’s Calvin Beisner [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/calvin-beisner ] (according to him, at the request of the Family Research Council [ http://www.cornwallalliance.org/newsletter/issue/newsletter-december-4-2013/ ]), was distributed at last month’s “Road to Majority [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/topics/road-majority-conference ]” conference, which was organized by Ralph Reed [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/ralph-reed ]’s Faith and Freedom Coalition [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/faith-and-freedom-coalition ].
The premise of the booklet is that “social justice” is contrary to “Biblical justice.” If that sounds familiar, you may be recalling Glenn Beck [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/glenn-beck-0 ]’s diatribes against “social justice” a few years ago, when he urged people to leave their church if its website included the phrases “social justice” or “economic justice [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/03/12/beck-attacks-social-justice/161591 ].”
It is wrong, Beisner writes, to try to mitigate inequality “through force of government.” Why? “Because God ordained the state to dispense justice, and the church to dispense grace.” According to Beisner, giving someone “unearned” benefits is grace, not justice. People should graciously serve the poor, he writes. “But if care for the needy is made a matter of justice to the needy rather than to God, then grace becomes law. Then, the needy—and those who merely profess to be needy—may claim the benefits of grace as their due by justice.”
In other words, government has no right to tax someone in order to help feed someone else.
That is a widely shared belief on the Religious Right. Speakers at Religious Right conferences like Reed’s June event, and Republican Members of Congress [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-wrong-republican-talk-about-food ], can be heard justifying cuts in food stamps with an appeal to the Bible passage that David Barton quoted on TBN. That verse, depending on your translation, says something like “he who will not work shall not eat.”
Rep. Kevin Cramer [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-on-food-stamp-cuts-if-anyone-is-not-willing-to-work-let-him-not-eat ] and Rep. Stephen Fincher [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/23/2053081/congressmans-misuse-of-bible-verse-belies-bad-theology-and-ideology-on-food-stamps/ ] of Tennessee cited that verse last year. Fincher said, “The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” In equating taxation for social services with theft, Fincher echoes Barton, Beisner, and others. (In context, by the way, the work-to-eat verse referred to early Christians [ http://religiondispatches.org/gop-lawmaker-botches-bible-to-punish-poor/ ] who were so confident of the imminent return of Christ that they quit doing anything.)
Poor people turning to the government, Beisner writes in his anti-social-justice booklet, results in “the stultifying effects of wealth redistribution by the coercive power of the state.” Even worse, he says, “it blinds [poor people] to their deepest need: the grace of God offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
This is another theme of the Republican Party’s right wing. Sharron Angle [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/sharron-angle-0 ], the GOP’s 2010 Senate nominee in Nevada, said during her campaign that entitlement programs are “idolatry [ http://religiondispatches.org/candidate-sharron-angle-accuses-opponent-of-idolatry/ ]” because they “make government our God.” Farris Wilks [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/farris-wilks ], the Texas fracking billionaire who gives huge amounts to the Heritage Foundaiton and other right-wing groups [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fracking-sugar-daddy-religious-right ], declares that “the Torah is set up on the free enterprise system” and that “Yahweh never intended for us as a people to be afraid and reliant on government.” Former Sen. Jim DeMint [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/jim-demint ], who now heads the Heritage Foundation, says “the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/15/150676/demint-big-govt/ ].”
Heritage is just one of the institutions working to make right-wing economics an article of faith just like opposition to gay rights and abortion. The Freedom Federation, one of the many right-wing entities created in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 election, brings both "mainstream" and fringe Religious Right groups together with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity [ http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch's_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign ]. The Freedom Federation’s “Declaration of American Values” includes not only the expected rhetoric about traditional values, but also opposition to progressive taxation.
John Lofton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/john-lofton ], a right-wing pundit, is the spokesperson for Republican county council candidate Peroutka, and for Peroutka’s Christian Reconstructionist Institute on the Constitution [ http://religiondispatches.org/gods-law-is-the-only-law-the-genesis-of-michele-bachmann/ ], which has trained Tea Party activists on the biblical basis of the Constitution [ http://www.thenation.com/article/154944/tea-party-values ]. Lofton has spoken on “God and Government” at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pJvPheSF9U (next below)].
Tea Party? Religious Right? GOP? Or all of the above?
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/christian-reconstructionism-and-gop-biblical-justice-vs-social-justice
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New Anti-Choice Group Launches With Michael Peroutka Lecture On How Roe v. Wade Isn't Actually The Law
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Friday, 7/25/2014 1:20 pm
Last weekend, Iowa conservative talk show host Steve Deace held an event to launch Personhood Iowa [ http://www.radioiowa.com/2014/07/17/personhood-iowa-to-launch-this-saturday/ ], a new group he helped organize that is affiliated with [ http://www.personhood.net/index.php/personhood-advocates/personhood-advocates/personhood-advocates#Groups ] the National Personhood Alliance [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/spurned-georgia-group-launching-even-more-extreme-rival-national-right-life-committee ], a new coalition of groups that seek to outlaw abortion in all cases along with banning common forms of birth control.
In keeping with the group’s apparent mission to be so extreme that it will never attract any mainstream support, Deace invited Michael Peroutka, a regular guest on his radio show, to give an opening speech to Personhood Iowa activists [ http://personhoodiowa.com/personhood-boot-camp-part-2/ ].
Peroutka, in addition to running the far-right Institute on the Constitution [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/institute-constitution ] and a successful debt-collection business that allowed him to buy a dinosaur for the Creation Museum [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ], is now the GOP nominee [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-christian-nationalist-and-southern-secessionist-wins-gop-county-council-nom ] for a seat on the Anne Arundel, Maryland, county council. Peroutka’s close ties with the neo-Confederate League of the South [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/09/michael-peroutka-asks-for-help-from-league-of-the-south-in-bid-for-md-council-seat/ ] is causing hand-wringing in the state Republican party, with its gubernatorial nominee today disavowing [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites ] Peroutka’s candidacy.
Peroutka — who recently declared that the Maryland General Assembly is no longer a valid legislative body [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-explains-how-marriage-equality-invalidated-all-maryland-laws ] because its passage of marriage equality violated “God’s law” — told the Iowa activists that everything from seat-belt mandates to the progressive income tax to Obamacare to Roe v. Wade are not valid laws because government only has the authority to uphold what he deems to be “organic law.” In fact, he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHT0yggqFPg (below, as embedded)], all of these things are “pretended legislation,” a term used in the Declaration of Independence [ http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html ] to refer to acts of Parliament governing the American colonies.
Peroutka also presented the audience with a contrast between what he sees as the “biblical worldview,” which he says is based on the idea of literal biblical creationism, and the “pagan worldview,” which he says is based on the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution, he claimed, was responsible for the Columbine school shooting and the Holocaust, yet is still being taught through “the tragedy of public education [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiGiC6iSHA (below, as embedded)].”
Peroutka has previously argued that it is impossible to be a patriotic American and also believe in evolution [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-promotion-evolution-act-disloyalty-america ].
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/new-anti-choice-group-launches-michael-peroutka-lecture-how-roe-v-wade-isnt-actually-law
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Maryland GOPer Michael Peroutka Leads Dixie 'National Anthem' At Southern Secessionist Conference
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Monday, 7/28/2014 1:17 pm
Warren Throckmorton has dug up video of the Institute on the Constitution’s Michael Peroutka — the GOP candidate for a seat on a Maryland county council — speaking [ http://production.aws.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/26/michael-peroutka-calls-i-wish-i-was-in-dixie-the-national-anthem/ ] at the 2012 conference of the secessionist League of the South [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/league-of-the-south ], and it’s a doozy.
Peroutka’s ties with the League of the South are hardly a secret — he used to sit on the group’s board [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites (next below)] and has asked for its members help in his campaign [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/09/michael-peroutka-asks-for-help-from-league-of-the-south-in-bid-for-md-council-seat/ ] — but in his 2012 speech, he made it clear that he agrees with the group’s stand that the South may need to secede and cause the “destruction” of the current “regime.”
“I don’t disagree with Dr. Hill at all that this regime is beyond reform,” he told the crowd, referring to League of the South president Michael Hill. But he told group members he was concerned that what he calls the "biblical view" of government should “survive the secession.”
“I don’t want people from League of the South to think for one minute that I’m about reforming the current regime, or studying the Constitution is about reforming the current regime,” he said. “I, like many of you, and like Patrick Henry, probably have come to the conclusion that we smelled a rat from the beginning.”
He then asked the crowd to “stand for the national anthem”…and led the crowd in a spirited rendition of “Dixie.”
Peroutka’s influence on the Religious Right extends beyond his foray into local politics. He was the 2004 Constitution Party nominee for president, he is a great ally and funder of Religious Right hero and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ], he makes a weekly appearance with influential Iowa conservative talk show host Steve Deace (and recently helped Deace launch a new fetal “personhood” group [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/new-anti-choice-group-launches-michael-peroutka-lecture-how-roe-v-wade-isnt-actually-law (just above)]), and he recently donated a $1 million dinosaur skeleton to the Creation Museum [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ].
Late last week, the Republican candidate for county executive in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where Peroutka is running for office, asked Peroutka to resign from the League of the South because his membership “could be considered racist.”
The candidate, Steve Schuh, however, reported from his conversation with Peroutka [ http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/election/schuh-calls-on-peroutka-to-resign-from-league-of-the/article_06a79a5a-5e4a-5ae9-bde0-e561b9fa4617.html ]: “He has assured me that he is not a racist and that he believes in the equality of all members of the human family. He has further assured me that he does not believe in secession of any portion of our country.”
We’ve clipped a couple pieces of Peroutka’s League of the South speech here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSbHEAOHsI (above, as embedded)], but you can find the whole thing, which was recorded by an attendee, in Throckmorton’s post [ http://production.aws.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/26/michael-peroutka-calls-i-wish-i-was-in-dixie-the-national-anthem/ ].
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/maryland-goper-michael-peroutka-leads-dixie-national-anthem-southern-secessionist-conference
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Michael Peroutka Supporter Discusses Guerilla War Against Political, Cultural Elites
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Friday, 7/25/2014 12:26 pm
We’ve been covering the candidacy of Michael Peroutka [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/michael-peroutka ], the southern secessionist and Christian Reconstructionist [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/christian-reconstructionist-and-southern-secessionist-michael-peroutka-leading-gop-primary ] who won a primary to become the Republican nominee for a county council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
This morning the Republican nominee for governor Larry Hogan renounced Peroutka [ http://www.capitalgazette.com/maryland_gazette/hot/republicans-seek-clarification-from-peroutka-on-league-of-the-south/article_2ad3db69-b3a2-54fd-a5e3-8afab7c88166.html ], while Joe Cluster, executive director of the state Republican Party, is scheduled to meet with him today. African American leaders in the state have called on the GOP to disavow Peroutka.
Meanwhile, Huffington Post blogger Jonathan Hutson reports more information on Michael Hill [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hutson/gop-leader-questions-cand_b_5619567.html ], who heads the white nationalist League of the South, on whose board Peroutka once sat [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vze4fPPkgxY (next below)]
Hutson reports on an essay [ http://leagueofthesouth.com/?p=272 ] published by Hill on the League of the South’s website on July 15 called “A Bazooka in Every Pot,” in which Hill argues that the Second Amendment allows private citizens to own any weapon system the government has, including bazookas, rocket launchers, tanks, and, if they could afford it, warships — a position that happens to be shared by GOP congressional nominee Jody Hice [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hice-second-amendment-gives-private-citizens-right-own-cannons-and-bazookas-and-missiles ] and right-wing Republican activist David Barton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-second-amendment-guarantees-individual-right-own-tank-or-fighter-jet ].
Hill went even further in his July 15 post, however, describing a scenario in which armed citizens wage “Fourth Generation Warfare” – guerilla warfare – against political and cultural elites who support “tyranny.” Hutson summarizes Hill this way:
…on July 15, Hill wrote an essay [ http://leagueofthesouth.com/?p=272 ] for the League's website titled "A Bazooka in Every Pot," in which he outlines a program of "guerrilla war," marked by "three-to-five-man" death squads which would target government leaders, journalists, and other public figures for assassination, in order to advance the League's goals.
"To oversimplify," writes Hill, "the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don't run."
Talk on the far right about a possible armed revolution against the U.S. government is increasingly common. As Miranda reported this morning, Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt has reasserted his belief that members of Congress should live “in constant trepidation” that they could be shot [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-doubles-down-telling-congresswoman-she-should-fear-being-shot (last item below)] by “sovereign” citizens if they “attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago.”
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites
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Ted Cruz, Like a BOSS! Inspirational Tea Party Speech - Austin, Texas (Full Speech)
Published on Mar 19, 2013 by Republic of Texas TV [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJHfuA0ckvduCelhrPdutbg / http://www.youtube.com/user/RevolutionATX , http://www.youtube.com/user/RevolutionATX/videos ]
Shot at the Tea Party Express rally in Austin, Texas. May 06, 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvfaS3O7CKE [with comments]
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When Extremism Goes Mainstream
Representative Steve King of Iowa
(Larry Downing/Reuters)
Just how far out is the Republican fringe?
Norm Ornstein
Jul 23 2014, 10:38 PM ET
The most interesting, and important, dynamic in American politics today is the existential struggle going on in the Republican Party between the establishment and the insurgents—or to be more accurate, between the hard-line bedrock conservatives (there are only trace elements of the old-line center-right bloc, much less moderates) and the radicals.
Of course, tugs-of-war between establishment forces and ideological wings are nothing new with our political parties. They have been a continuing factor for many decades. The Republican Party had deep-seated struggles between its Progressive wing, led by Teddy Roosevelt and Robert La Follette [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/the-original-tea-partiers-how-gop-insurgents-invented-progressivism/374557/ ], and its conservative establishment, led by William Howard Taft and House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon, going back to the turn of the 20th century.
The Progressives succeeded in stripping Speaker Cannon of his dictatorial powers in 1910, and TR's willingness to bolt the GOP and run in 1912 as a Progressive on the Bull Moose Party line killed Taft's chances of winning and elected Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The struggles continued with moderates Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey battling Taft's progeny Robert through the 1940s. And, of course, the insurgents' struggles continued through Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Reagan first moved into national politics in 1968, with an abortive challenge to centrist Richard Nixon, who won and governed in the middle on domestic policy, promoting liberal social policies on welfare and health reform. Reagan reemerged in 1976, and his foray against centrist President Ford cost Ford the election—but Reagan's own election as president in 1980 led to an era of relatively pragmatic center-right policy-making. At the same time, however, the ongoing regional changes in the country were eliminating the bases of moderate and liberal Republicans and moving the GOP center of gravity to a lily-white and hard-line base in the South and rural West.
Democrats have had their own battles. The radical populist William Jennings Bryan won control (and lost the White House three times) around the turn of the century. But the victory of the establishment with Woodrow Wilson ushered in an era of relative calm. However, a Democratic Party built on two disparate wings—Southern rural conservatives determined to maintain segregation, Northern urban liberals determined to deploy and maintain the New Deal—had an uneasy alliance that enabled the party to keep a hammerlock on Congress for decades but began to unravel in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
A more turbulent schism developed in the 1970s, when the antiwar and antiestablishment liberal wing led by Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern fought the establishment of Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Daley, with a bloody confrontation in Chicago in 1968, McGovern's short-lived triumph in 1972, and a resurgent liberal movement in the Watergate elections of 1974. The liberal wing resisted many of the policies of Jimmy Carter; the liberal challenge of Edward Kennedy to Carter in 1980 helped to doom his reelection chances. But more consecutive presidential losses in 1980, 1984, and 1988 by liberals Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis moved the party in a more pragmatic direction with the Clinton era—Bill Clinton having been a moderate governor of Arkansas and the leader of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.
Clinton's election in 1992 moved the Democrats firmly to the center on previously divisive issues like welfare and crime. But it also provided the impetus for the forces that have led to the current Republican problem. These forces were built in part around insurgent Newt Gingrich's plans to overturn the Democratic 38-year hegemony in Congress, and in part around a ruthlessly pragmatic decision by GOP leaders and political strategists to hamper the popular Clinton by delegitimizing him and using the post-Watergate flowering of independent counsels to push for multiple crippling investigations of wrongdoing (to be sure, he gave them a little help along the way). No one was more adroit at using ethics investigations to demonize opponents than Newt. In 1994, Gingrich recruited a passel of more radical candidates for Congress, who ran on a path to overturn most of the welfare state and who themselves demonized Congress and Washington. At a time of rising populist anger—and some disillusionment on the left with Clinton—the approach worked like a charm, giving the GOP its first majority in the House in 40 years, and changing the face of Congress for decades to come.
Newt's strategy and tactics were abetted and amplified by the new force of political talk radio, which had been activated by the disastrous federal pay raise in 1989-90, and of tribal cable television news. As Sean Theriault details in his book The Gingrich Senators, many of Newt's progeny moved on to the Senate and began to change it from an old club into a new forum for tribal warfare. Move on through right-wing frustration with George W. Bush's combination of compassionate conservatism and unfunded social policy (and wars) and then the election of Barack Obama, and the ingredients for a rise of radicalism and a more explosive intra-party struggle were set. They were expanded again with the eager efforts in 2010 of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Young Guns (Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan) to exploit the deep populist right-wing anger at the financial collapse and the bailouts of 2008 and 2009 by inciting the Tea Party movement. But their expectation that they could then co-opt these insurgents backfired badly.
A lot of history to get to the point. What began as a ruthlessly pragmatic, take-no-prisoners parliamentary style opposition to Obama was linked to constant efforts to delegitimize his presidency, first by saying he was not born in the U.S., then by calling him a tyrant trying to turn the country into a Socialist or Communist paradise. These efforts were not condemned vigorously by party leaders in and out of office, but were instead deflected or encouraged, helping to create a monster: a large, vigorous radical movement that now has large numbers of adherents and true believers in office and in state party leadership. This movement has contempt for establishment Republican leaders and the money to go along with its beliefs. Local and national talk radio, blogs, and other social media take their messages and reinforce them for more and more Americans who get their information from these sources. One result is that even today, a Rasmussen survey shows that 23 percent of Americans still believe Obama is not an American, while an additional 17 percent are not sure. Forty percent of Americans! This is no longer a fringe view.
As for the radicals in elected office or in control of party organs, consider a small sampling of comments:
"Sex that doesn't produce people is deviate." —Montana state Representative Dave Hagstrom.
"It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education." —Oklahoma state Representative Mike Reynolds.
"I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don't represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We're going to take this country back for the Lord. We're going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we're not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!" —Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert, at a Tea Party rally.
President Obama has "become a dictator" and needs to face the consequences of his executive actions, "whether that's removal from office, whether that's impeachment." —Iowa state Senator and U.S. Senate candidate Jodi Ernst, one of a slew of elected officials calling for impeachment or at least putting it front and center.
"I don't want to get into the debate about climate change. But I'll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There's no factories on Mars that I'm aware of." —Kentucky state Senator Brandon Smith (fact-check: the average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees).
"Although Islam had a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protections." —Georgia congressional candidate Jody Hice.
"Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done, but when you think about the immorality of wild, lavish spending on our generation and forcing future generations to do without essentials just so we can live lavishly now, it's pretty immoral." —Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas.
"God's word is true. I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big-bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior." —Representative (and M.D.) Paul Broun of Georgia.
"Now I don't assert where he [Obama] was born, I will just tell you that we are all certain that he was not raised with an American experience. So these things that beat in our hearts when we hear the National Anthem and when we say the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't beat the same for him." —Representative Steve King of Iowa.
As for the party leaders, consider some of the things that are now part of the official Texas Republican Party platform, as highlighted [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-fever-dreams-begin-irresponsibilities-texas-edition (in full above)] by The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg:
• That the Texas Legislature should "ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify" federal laws it doesn't like.
• That when it comes to "unelected bureaucrats" (meaning, Hertzberg notes, almost the entire federal workforce), Congress should "defund and abolish these positions."
• That all federal "enforcement activities" in Texas "must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county." (That would leave the FBI, air marshals, immigration officials, DEA personnel, and so on subordinate to the Texas versions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.)
• That "the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized."
• That the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank.
• That governments at all levels should "ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or 'climate justice' initiatives."
• That "all adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine.
• That "no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms." (Period, no exceptions.)
Texas, of course, may be an outlier. But the Maine Republican Party adopted a platform that called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, called global warming a myth, and demanded an investigation of "collusion between government and industry" in perpetrating that myth. It also called for resistance to "efforts to create a one world government." And the Benton County, Arkansas, Republican Party said in its newsletter [ http://www.nogy.net/bcgop/Apr_2013/index.html , via http://www.politicususa.com/2013/04/20/arkansas-gop-newsletter-calls-shooting-republicans.html ], "The 2nd Amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives."
One might argue that these quotes are highly selective—but they are only a tiny sampling (not a single one from Michele Bachmann, only one from Gohmert!). Importantly, almost none were countered by party officials or legislative leaders, nor were the individuals quoted reprimanded in any way. What used to be widely seen as loony is now broadly accepted or tolerated.
I am not suggesting that the lunatics or extremists have won. Most Republicans in the Senate are not, to use John McCain's term, "wacko birds," and most Republicans in office would at least privately cringe at some of the wild ideas and extreme views. At the same time, the "establishment" is fighting back, pouring resources into primaries to protect their preferred candidates, and we are seeing the rise of a new and encouraging movement among conservative intellectuals—dubbed "Reformicons" by E.J. Dionne [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/are-reform-conservatives-serious/371839/ ]—to come up with a new set of ideas and policy prescriptions to redefine the ideology and the party in a positive way.
But there is a darker reality. Many of the "preferred" candidates—including Ernst as well as James Lankford in Oklahoma and Jack Kingston in Georgia—are anything but pragmatic.
A few years ago, they would have been labeled hard-liners. (Kingston, a favorite of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was beaten in the Senate primary Tuesday by businessman David Perdue, who has said he would not vote for Mitch McConnell as party leader in the Senate.) It is a measure of the nature of this intra-party struggle that the mainstream is now on the hard right, and that it is close to apostasy to say that Obama is legitimate, that climate change is real, that background checks on guns are desirable, or even that the Common Core is a good idea. When we see presumably sane figures like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal shamelessly pander to the extremists, it tells us where the center of gravity in the GOP primary base, at least, is set. Of course, there are still courageous mainstream figures like Jeb Bush who are willing to deviate from the new orthodoxy, and it is possible that he can run and get the Republican presidential nomination, win the White House, and begin the process of recalibration.
But when one looks at the state of Republican public opinion (especially among the likely caucus and primary voters), at the consistent and persistent messages coming from the information sources they follow, and at the supine nature of congressional leaders and business leaders in countering extremism, it is not at all likely that what passes for mainstream, problem-solving conservatism will dominate the Republican Party anytime soon.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/when-extremism-goes-mainstream/374955/ [with comments]
--
William Gheen and Alex Jones: Obama Using Obamaphones To Recruit Central American Kids To Become Child Soldiers
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Tuesday, 7/29/2014 1:33 pm
Americans for Legal Immigration [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/americans-for-legal-immigration ] PAC president William Gheen [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/william-gheen ] joined conspiracy theorist Alex Jones [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/alex-jones ] on his “Infowars” program yesterday [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a4Jmfht708 (next below; Gheen segments begin at 1:38:45 and continue through 2:02:00)]
In just a few minutes, the two conspiracy-theory-minded activists combined their mental powers to develop a grand theory that President Obama is luring Central American kids with “Obamaphones [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/09/27/924011/the-truth-about-the-obama-phone/ ]” to recruit them to be child soldiers in a private [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-obama-raising-private-dhs-force-equally-powerful-military ] army [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/12/gohmert-isnt-sure-if-obamacares-secret-security-force-will-use-weapons-or-syringes/ ] that will confiscate guns and crack down “in a totalitarian fashion against American citizens [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E2-O85MtQo (next below, as embedded)].”
“They’re doing that by bringing in people who have no shared national or cultural experience with us, that are willing to literally say or do anything that their new masters call on them to do to protect their positions,” Gheen said. “Once Obama brings these ‘kids’ in, gives them their Obamaphone, enrolls them in Obamacare, puts them in a public school, pays for their housing, pays for their foods…These people will do anything that their leaders call them to do, and I mean literally anything.”
“The problem about trying to take up full gun confiscation and cracking down in a totalitarian fashion against American citizens is, who amongst the country hates their fellow countrymen and women so much that you can turn them to do that? They only have a small section of people that are willing to do that, and it’s probably going to be the people who remain loyal to Obama to the very end,” he continued.
“These people that come in, if they come to them and say, ‘You must do this for your glorious leader or you’re going back to the jungle and you gotta give the phone back and the food back and the free lodging back,’ they’ll probably, most of them will make the decision to do about anything.”
“That’s like the African child slave soldiers,” Jones responded. “That’s how all those African countries are run is off of poor kids, they grab at 12 and give a machine gun to. Obama talks about his national security force, just as big, just as strong as our military. It’s so bold, but when you look at it, they really are doing that.”
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/william-gheen-and-alex-jones-obama-using-obamaphones-recruit-central-american-kids-become-ch
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Anti-Immigrant Leader Warns Response To Obama Executive Action Won't Be 'Peaceful And Political'
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Wednesday, 7/30/2014 11:33 am
William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, one of the key organizers of this month’s sparsely attended but prominently endorsed anti-immigrant protests [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-immigrant-protests-bust-five-things-weekends-rallies-told-us-about-nativist-right ], warned WorldNetDaily today that if President Obama were to issue an executive order preventing the deportation of some undocumented immigrants, that would amount to instituting “martial law” and Americans would face a choice between “subjugation” and actions that are “outside the purview of my peaceful and political efforts [ http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/new-wave-of-illegal-immigration-protests-to-sweep-u-s/ ].”
Gheen frequently hints [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-violence-may-be-needed-stop-obamas-war-white-america ] that [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-warns-violent-revolution-if-tea-party-cant-stop-immigrant-invasion ] “ illegal and violent [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-violence-may-be-needed-stop-obamas-war-white-america ]” means might be needed to push back against Obama immigration policies, although he denies supporting such means [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/william-gheen-denies-calling-violence-against-president-obama-even-though-he-has-nullified-c ].
William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said any acts by the Obama administration to declare amnesty should be shot down immediately.
“That should not be possible because Obama doesn’t have the constitutional authority to declare any such amnesty for any group of people, and any declaration is a declaration of dictatorship and a form of martial law,” he told WND.
ALIPAC is organizing a second wave of national protests against amnesty starting Saturday, Aug. 2, and continuing through Oct. 24-25.
“I’m calling it martial law because it will be a form of law that is not the rule of law, not rule by Congress or the Constitution,” he said. “If Congress does not move to immediately correct the abuse of power, which Boehner has said he will not, then that leaves the American public with some very dire choices.”
Gheen said he didn’t want to discuss what those choices might be.
“One of those choices is subjugation; the other is outside the purview of my peaceful and political efforts, but I hope that people will channel their anger into the 2014 election cycle to politically destroy and remove from office as many Obama allies as possible, every Democrat and every Republican like Lamar Alexander and John Boehner. John Boehner is protecting the president. He is protecting Barack Obama.”
Gheen is now organizing a “second wave” of anti-immigrant protests in the states and districts of Republicans who he sees as too open to immigration reform or friendly to the president.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-immigrant-leader-warns-response-obama-executive-action-wont-be-peaceful-and-political
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Larry Pratt Predicts Immigration Reform Will Lead To 'Communism': 'Kiss Our Republic Goodbye'
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wednesday, 7/30/2014 11:10 am
Gun Owners of America [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/gun-owners-america ] head Larry Pratt [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/larry-pratt ] has been insistent that Republicans must [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-immigration-reform-and-ted-cruz-s-loyalty ] oppose [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-reform-will-grant-citizenship-gazillion-immigrants-wholl-be-sitting-around-drawing-wel ] immigration reform [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gun-owners-america-warns-you-could-lose-all-your-guns-2035-if-immigration-reform-passes ] in order to save gun rights, which he claims are threatened by immigrants.
In an interview with extremist talk show host Stan Solomon [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/stan-solomon ] that was posted [ https://vimeo.com/101320971 ] online last week, Pratt alleged [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5pqSVdNWFs (below, as embedded)] that immigration reform would destroy the GOP and therefore the country: “That means kiss our Second Amendment goodbye, it means, really, kiss our republic goodbye, because if you give the Democrats a lock on all of the levels of government, the country goes communist.”
“It’s just the end because they know no limit to the big government that they support,” he said. “It will be extremely dangerous, and gun owners will be early on in the sights of those Democrats that might be voted for by the newly minted voters. So the idea of amnesty is a really bad idea.”
Pratt and Solomon also agreed that Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the GOP leadership have effectively “switched sides” and joined the Democratic Party.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-predicts-immigration-reform-will-lead-communism-kiss-our-republic-goodbye
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Gun Owners Of America Chief Embraces Fringe 'Obama's Real Father' Birther Theory
7/14/2014
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/larry-pratt-promotes-obamas-real-father-birther-theory ) embedded]
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gun-owners-america-chief-embraces-fringe-obamas-real-father-birther-theory
*
Larry Pratt Doubles Down On Telling Congresswoman She Should Fear Being Shot
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Friday, 7/25/2014 10:18 am
Prominent gun lobbyist Larry Pratt is doubling down on his insistence that members of Congress should have a “healthy fear” of being shot, lecturing a congresswoman who felt threatened by one of his group’s members that she just doesn’t understand the Constitution.
Right Wing Watch first reported [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-glad-members-congress-have-healthy-fear-being-shot ] Pratt’s comments in a March interview with radio host Bill Cunningham. Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, told Cunningham that a member of his group had spoken to a congresswoman who told him, “you want to shoot me, don’t you.”
“Well, that’s probably a healthy fear for them to have,” Pratt said. “You know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds. Hopefully they’ll behave.”
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/larry-pratt-hopes-members-of ) embedded]
The quote made it into a recent profile of Pratt in Rolling Stone [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-zealot-larry-pratt-is-the-gun-lobbys-secret-weapon-20140714 , http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-and-radical-right ], where it caught the eye [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gabrielle-giffords-husband-no-candidate-office-should-accept-support-larry-pratts-organizati ] of Mark Kelly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/mark-kelly ], whose wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was critically injured in an assassination attempt, and of Rep. Carolyn Maloney [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/carolyn-maloney ], who it turns out was the threatened congresswoman Pratt had been talking about.
When Kelly called for elected officials to reject all future support from Pratt and Maloney called for an investigation into his comments, Pratt responded by calling Maloney “foolish [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gabrielle-giffords-husband-no-candidate-office-should-accept-support-larry-pratts-organizati ].”
Then, this week, Pratt doubled down, issuing an open letter to Maloney [ http://gunowners.org/media7232014.htm ], a New York Democrat, claiming that she does not understand the Constitution and telling her once again that she “should do her job in constant trepidation” that she will be shot: “Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.”
You reported that the Capitol Police and House sergeant-at-Arms concluded that there was “nothing to be done,”[3] but since you apparently do not “get it,” allow me to explain the obvious. I have never encouraged, or even suggested, that anyone harm anyone. Rather, my speech was designed to educate citizens, and politicians, that it is the fact that Americans are armed that allows them to resist efforts to be dominated, intimidated, or controlled by politicians.
…
You should do your job in constant trepidation that:
* Should your constituents disapprove of your job performance, you will be publicly criticized from the soap box;
* Should you enact unconstitutional legislation in violation of your oath of office, you will be voted out via the ballot box;
* Should criminal charges be brought against Americans for crimes which are not authorized by the U.S. Constitution, these prosecutions will be nullified in the jury box; and
* Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.
…
Private ownership and skilled use of firearms is what enabled our country to gain its independence, and it is what continues to preserve our liberty. Someday, I hope that you study this aspect of the history of our great nation, that currently allows you to serve in the People’s House, and come to understand the great principles on which it was founded and continues to operate.
© 2014 People For the American Way (emphasis in original)
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-doubles-down-telling-congresswoman-she-should-fear-being-shot
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07/29/2014
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is encouraging fellow Obamacare opponents [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/29/cruz-lets-repeal-every-bloody-word-of-obamacare/ ] to take their sentiments to the campaign trail.
Cruz said Tuesday the upcoming midterm elections and the 2016 elections are important opportunities for Republican candidates to push key issues, according to CNN. He was speaking at a conference hosted by the Young American's Foundation [video next below; these comments at the end].
“I think those elections should be about many, many things,” Cruz said, citing job creation and economic growth. “But they should be about repealing every bloody word of Obamacare.”
Cruz over the last year has relentlessly pursued repealing Obamacare, even prompting a congressional showdown that led to a 16-day government shutdown in October. He told the group that the showdown may not have been a clean shot, but it set in motion efforts to bring down the Affordable Care Act.
“Some battles you can win with one clean rifle shot; other battles take time, take building that foundation,” he said. “I’m convinced that fight has laid the foundation.”
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/29/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_5631988.html [with comments]
*
Sen. Ted Cruz at the National Conservative Student Conference
Published on Jul 29, 2014 by SenTedCruz [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOTZ-6H1rri1lSsj6IzhUyw / http://www.youtube.com/user/SenTedCruz , http://www.youtube.com/user/SenTedCruz/videos ]
July 29, 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3jiBKC_0vs [with comments]
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The “Ted Cruz is smart” trap: Why this garbage is false — and dangerous
Ted Cruz
(Credit: Reuters/Joe Mitchell)
The Texas senator convinces all of his enemies to praise his intellect. Here's why they're wrong -- and should stop
Nathan Robinson
Monday, Jul 28, 2014 12:44 PM CDT
Even Ted Cruz’s critics seem to concur on one point: whatever else you might say about him, the man is very smart. Mother Jones magazine has called [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/ted-cruz-texas-gop-senate ] him the “thinking man’s tea partier.” Josh Marshall, in a mostly withering [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/me-ted ] assessment, made the same obligatory concession to his being an “incredibly bright guy.” Jeffrey Toobin’s recent, ostensibly critical New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all ] of Cruz is full of quotes about his being “the smartest guy in the room,” his “sophisticated” constitutional views, and the “extraordinary” erudition of his senior thesis.
Cruz likely finds all of this very pleasing indeed. In his interview with Toobin, Cruz quotes Sun Tzu, saying that “every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.” In getting those who despise him to genuflect to his intelligence, Ted Cruz has already won one battle. Jeffrey Toobin may lace his piece with dismissive sneers, yet somehow he still contributes to the ever-growing heap of liberal respect for Cruz’s mental acuity.
But there’s no reason to keep this up. For one thing, it doesn’t seem especially true. It can’t really be that we think Cruz has a sophisticated mind, given that the only thoughts he produces are angry pants-on-fire [ http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/03/half-of-ted-cruzs-political-claims-are-false-politifact-reports/ ] platitudinous drivel. Even those who lavish praise on his oratory seem to agree that his heat-to-light ratio nears the infinite, and that “thoughtfulness” and Ted Cruz cannot exist in the same room. His only memorable quotes appear to be cheap jokes [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/celebrate-the-year-of-ted-cruz-with-74-of-his-best-quotes-of-2013/article/2541075 ], and the most notable speech of his entire career is not his own, but Dr. Seuss’. Nobody who has witnessed a few minutes of Cruz’s piece of senatorial performance art would have thought to label him a thinker, were it not for the preexisting consensus that he is one.
Cruz has become notorious for using distortive, misleading rhetoric that no sober-minded individual could apply. Cruz says Obamacare’s “intent [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/28/eib_interview_senator_ted_cruz ] is to destroy the private insurance business,” despite the fact that the whole progressive complaint about Obamacare is that it is a massive windfall [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/07/14/269187/health-insurers-gain-from-exchanges/ ] to insurers. He says a campaign finance amendment attempting to rein in spending literally [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/03/law-professor-ted-cruz-is-knowingly-lying-about-bill-to-repeal-the-first-amendment/ ] “repeals the First Amendment.” But even more alarming are the straightforward factual errors. He has mistakenly claimed [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/17/ted-cruz/sen-ted-cruz-says-premiums-have-gone-virtually-eve/ ] that most premiums have risen under the Affordable Care Act and that states [ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2013/feb/01/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-jurisdictions-strictest-gun-laws-hav/ ] with gun control have the highest murder rates, among other elementary blunders that earned him a rating [ http://www.politifact.com/personalities/ted-cruz/ ] on PolitiFact of 10 falsehoods for every one truth.
One may respond that Cruz is shrewd and knows better, that these are calculated political lies by a devious plotter. But for a savant merely playing an imbecile on television, Cruz is strangely inept when it comes to policymaking. He has alienated [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/cruz-making-enemies-and-alienating-people ] all of his colleagues, and wants to [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ted-cruz-anti-gay-legislation ] revive the gay marriage fight at a time when it couldn’t be more unwise [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/support-for-same-sex-marriage-hits-new-high-half-say-constitution-guarantees-right/2014/03/04/f737e87e-a3e5-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html ]. His major act of strategic maneuvering over the government shutdown proved a colossal high-profile failure [ http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/headlines/20131016-ted-cruz-left-with-few-friends-after-leading-failed-obamacare-fight.ece ], the result of which was that as his name recognition improves, his favorability ratings actually drop [ http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/327833-gallup-cruzs-favorability-rating-plunges ]. Even the Wall Street Journal has labeled [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579379374287357650 ] him part of a “kamikaze caucus” that is dooming conservatives’ prospects. If Ted Cruz’s misstatements are deft politicking rather than idiocy, then where, one might ask, are the successes?
Ultimately, though, the most damning evidence against Cruz’s intelligence may actually come from his law school roommate and college debating partner, David Panton. “Ted’s views today politically are almost identical to when I met him,” Panton said [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all ]. “There’s nothing he says today that I didn’t hear in college.” That assessment, spoken about anybody, should be convincing enough evidence for shallowness of mind. Can there be such thing as a learned person who has discovered nothing new since freshman year?
In fact, the stories [ http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/11/10/ted-cruz-was-polarizing-figure-harvard-law-foreshadowing-his-partisan-profile-senate/gEUPs0iVgOyoidafkNe94H/story.html ] about Cruz’s younger days show the marks of someone profoundly insecure about his intelligence. Quizzing others as to their SAT scores, wanting to limit his law-school study group to graduates of the “H-Y-P” schools (a charge Cruz has denied), an unrelenting and discomforting argumentative aggression: He’s missing only a Mensa application to complete the full package of desperate IQ-dork self-affirmations.
Of course, a chorus of people from Cruz’s student years has vouched for his brilliance. No less a heavyweight than Alan Dershowitz [N.B.: a(nother) flaming jackass fucking idiot] has commented [ http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/09/dershowitz-tex-cruz-one-of-harvard-laws-smartest-students/ ] on Cruz’s precocity at Harvard. Now, one could somewhat unkindly argue that Dershowitz, too, has in his career relied on people’s confusion of credentials and bluster for depth of intellect. More to the point, though, is that the evidence put forth doesn’t support the claim. Nobody doubts that Cruz has the gift of gab, and can be formidable in an argument. But sophistry is not philosophy, and being the loudest, most driven, and most shameless guy in the room does not necessarily make one the brightest.
Any definition of intelligence is destined to be highly contestable. Yet it is hard to imagine a plausible one that does not include large measures of critical thinking and self-scrutiny. As Bertrand Russell put it, it’s always a central problem that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Intelligence necessitates doubt, for doubt is the origin of wisdom. One whose mind is clamped shut cannot be intelligent, and yet Ted Cruz does not in his life ever seem to have taken on board a single challenge to his worldview.
In fact, the consistent overgenerous assessment of Cruz’s brains may stem from a deeper problem with the values of the elite legal community. If Newt Gingrich is “a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person looks like,” Ted Cruz is a lawyer’s idea [N.B.: not ever this Harvard Law graduate/retired lawyer's idea; Cruz is a flaming jackass fucking idiot] of what a smart person looks like. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post puzzled [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/08/26/how-smart-is-ted-cruz/ ] that someone she had been assured has a “sharp legal mind” could be so blisteringly lacking in common sense. But success in the legal world does not depend on common sense. Ambition and confidence can more than make up for it. Law schools pose as Socratic institutions, where preconceptions are left in tatters on the lecture-room floor, but in practice they reward sparring ability far more than reflection and careful scholarliness (the haphazard, un-peer-reviewed world of law journals can attest to the legal academy’s prioritization of argumentative formalism over a sober-minded quest for enlightenment). A person with one or two core principles, and a ruthless willingness to bend any truth that gets in the way, can do very well for himself at law school. Certainly, this requires skill. But it would be a sad day for the progress of human knowledge if we called it intelligence.
Cruz’s outsize ambition means that this narrative makes a difference. So long as those who oppose him nevertheless dutifully incant praises to his intellect, Cruz has them right where he wants them. Josh Marshall summed up the opinion surrounding Cruz as “Arrogant Asshole, Super Smart.” But who cares about being called an “arrogant asshole,” so long as they admit you’re super smart? Assholes finish first, don’t they? That kind of consensus makes the haters seem petty and lets Cruz keep playing the scholar. The key is to admit what is obvious from a few minutes of listening to him. The man is arrogant, but he doesn’t actually seem very smart.
If the loveliest trick of the devil is to convince you he doesn’t exist, the most incontestably brilliant trick of Ted Cruz is to convince you of his incontestable brilliance. There’s no need to keep falling for it.
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/the_ted_cruz_is_smart_trap_why_this_garbage_is_false_and_dangerous/ [with comments]
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Think Tank ‘Analyst’ Says ‘Being Hung, Drawn, And Quartered Is Probably Too Good’ For Obama
Center for Immigration Studies Senior Policy Analyst Stephen Steinlight
CREDIT: Screenshot
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/23/stephen-steinlight-obama_n_5613541.html (the second from front-page article blurb)]
by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:16 am Updated: July 24, 2014 at 1:22 pm
A senior policy analyst from an immigration-restrictionist think tank wants to see President Barack Obama not just impeached, but publicly executed, he told a sympathetic audience last week. During a talk at a Tea Party organization in Sebring, Florida, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analyst Stephen Steinlight said that Obama’s supposed executive overreach couldn’t be reined in by a lawsuit and that “being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him,” Imagine 2050 [ http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2014/07/21/video-stephen-steinlight-of-cis-calls-for-public-execution-of-barack-obama/ ] first reported. He then joked that Obama’s head should be on a skewer.
Talking with members of the Highlands Tea Party, Steinlight said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoBGhC7X748#t=2234 (video "uploaded to YouTube by Highlands Tea Party Chairman John Nelson on July 20" { http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2014/07/21/video-stephen-steinlight-of-cis-calls-for-public-execution-of-barack-obama/ } and since "removed by the user"; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moUDVzPhJw (via http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/top-anti-immigrant-expert-says-being-hung-drawn-and-quartered-too-good-obama ), next below, captures a significant portion of the comments)]
that Boehner’s lawsuit against Obama to faithfully execute the law would not prevent the President from taking executive action on immigration.
“There’s no court that will stop Obama from doing anything,” Steinlight said to members of the Highlands Tea Party. “And we all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. Alright? And I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him. But you know, this man who wants to rule by the use of a pen, a telephone, let us not forget his teleprompter … the fact is that it would backfire very badly and we’ve got to be grownups and accept that we can’t have everything we want, you know, [like] his head on a skewer.”
Highland Tea Party members could be heard applauding and laughing in the background. Steinlight also alluded to the child migrant situation, saying that many of them are gang bangers and that “there are a lot more like them.”
According to his biography on the CIS website, Steinlight previously provided expert testimony [ http://cis.org/Steinlight ] on immigration for the Judiciary Committee of the United States. The work of his organization, CIS, is heavily cited by conservatives like Sen Jeff Sessions [ http://cis.org/PanelTranscripts/gang-of-eight-bill-doubles-temporary-worker-flow ] (R-AL) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte [ http://goodlatte.house.gov/press_releases/534 ] (R-VA).
This is not the first time that Steinlight has made inflammatory comments — he once advocated banning Muslim immigration [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4GV1jCJSI (next below)]
and said that immigration reform is a psychotic plot against America [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJraPZLx4o (next below)].
Update
In an interview with The Huffington Post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/23/stephen-steinlight-obama_n_5613541.html ], CIS director Steven Camarota called Steinlight’s comments, “ill-advised” and said, “I would also say that the Center for Immigration Studies does not in fact support drawing and quartering the president.” Executive Director Mark Krikorian added, “I reprimanded him and put a reprimand in his personnel file.”
© 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/07/22/3462497/center-immigration-studies-analyst-obama/ [with comments]
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Hispanics Will 'Unmake' America In Immigration Hardliner's Doomsday Vision
01/08/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/08/stephen-steinlight-latino_n_4561897.html [with comments]
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Stephen Steinlight
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/stephen-steinlight
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Center for Immigration Studies
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/center-for-immigration-studies
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Minuteman Militia Planning “Operation Normandy” to Deploy 3,500 Men to Stop Border “Invasion”
Bob Cesca on July 23, 2014
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of the far-right’s bellicosity in the face of refugee children entering the United States. Not a day goes by without Sean Hannity [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/real-enemies-arent-undocumented-immigrants-rick-perry-sean-hannity/ ], Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) [id.], Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/congressman-gohmert-wants-texas-mobilize-war-immigrant-children/ ], Bill O’Reilly [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/wont-believe-bill-oreilly-wants-secure-u-s-mexico-border/ ] or various screeching mobs [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/anti-immigration-protesters-mistakenly-block-school-bus-filled-ymca-campers/ ] composed of townspeople from The Simpsons brandishing torches, pitchforks and AR-15s [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/protesters-carrying-firearms-march-immigrant-children-michigan/ ] in reaction to the over-hyped immigration issue. Speaking of Gohmert, this week he suggested that President Obama is allowing women to be raped by “illegal aliens [ http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/07/16/louie-gohmert-claims-president-obama-is-allowing-refugee-immigrants-to-rape-thousands-of-american-women-video/ ].”
And they’ve committed at least 7,695 sexual assaults. You want to talk about a war on women? This administration will not defend the women of America from criminal aliens! By the thousands, and hundreds of thousands! Well, we know thousands, and we know people are coming in by the hundreds of thousands illegally. And this administration wants to talk about other people having a war on women when they will not defend the women that are being sexually assaulted by illegal aliens in this country!
Maybe Gohmert got his facts mixed up (shocker!) because the latest reports from the Southern border indicate that migrant women and children are the ones who are being sexually assaulted inside the U.S. An alleged 116 cases of sexual assault [ http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/undocumented-children-immigrants-abuse-complaint/ ] against children, some as young as five-years-old, by U.S. border patrol agents have been reported in recent weeks. One study indicated that nearly half [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/female-farmworkers-abuse-report_n_1519972.html ] of all female migrant workers are sexually assaulted or abused while working at farms across the Midwest.
Despite the reality of what’s really happening along the border, the saber-rattling continues in the face of the infant horde. Yesterday, the infamous Minuteman militia announced [ http://minutemanproject.com/operation-normandy ] that it’s raising an army that will include 3,500 volunteers to “stop an invasion” and to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. The militia’s co-founder, Jim Gilchrist, appears to be taking his tone-deaf cues from Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer who suggested the construction of another Berlin Wall. It turns out the Minuteman Project’s wartime cosplay event is called “Operation Normandy.” From the official Operation Normandy website [ http://minutemanproject.com/operation-normandy ]:
If you are familiar with the Normandy invasion of France in 1944, then you have an idea how large and logistically complicated this event will be. However, there is one difference. We are not going to the border to invade anyone. We are going there to stop an invasion.
Yes, Normandy. The operation was deliberately named after Normandy Beach, circa June 6, 1944, when Allied Forces invaded Nazi-controlled Europe. What’s wrong with this picture? It was the U.S., U.K. and the Allies who invaded at Normandy on D-Day, and the Nazis were the defenders against the invasion. That means the Minuteman gang has inadvertently (I hope) cast themselves in the role of the Nazis, with refugee children as the Allies. The Minuteman Project is even calling the date of the deployment “D-Day” — in this case, May 1, 2015.
The only way they could make it worse for themselves is if Gilchrist insisted upon being nicknamed Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt.
Beyond the horrendous metaphor they’ve concocted, the mission plan is “to cover the porous areas of the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas.” It’s unclear how they intend to accomplish this miraculous feat with only 3,500 men — or fewer, given how all of these ridiculous events end up with considerably lower attendance than anticipated. Let’s say they’re lucky enough to get a full 3,500 white guys playing military dress-’em-up. And let’s say a full half of the border is “porous.” They’d only be able to post around 3.5 men per mile. That susses out to be one hooplehead per section of border roughly the length of nearly six football fields. Talk about porous. But trust me, they won’t get anywhere near 3,500 participants.
How long will this last, by the way? The website doesn’t say. If it’s only a day or a week, what happens after that? The website doesn’t say anything about that either. It also doesn’t mention anything about reinforcements to maintain a fresh supply of militia members to fight off the, you know, little girls.
And finally, I suppose we can rest assured knowing that this reenactment of Normandy will be lawfully conducted. The website notes in all-caps: “WHATEVER YOU DO, STAY WITHIN THE RULE OF LAW.” Well, fine, in that case, all good. Seriously, what part of the law permits heavily armed civilians to militarily deploy along a 2,000 mile front with high-powered rifles (and lord knows what else) aimed at families and children? No one ever gave the Minuteman Project permission to augment the border patrol. Speaking of permission, do they intend to trespass on the private property owned by U.S. citizens who live on the border? Unknown.
If I had to wager on “Operation Normandy” (barf), I’d put my money on it never happening. Immigration is surely an important issue, but it’s only receiving this kind of belligerent attention right now because Fox News shifted away from Benghazi into this overblown “invasion” news cycle. It’s impossible to know what they’ll be flailing about in May of next year. This sort of event will require plenty of coverage from the noise machine in order to supercharge the bigotry cortexes of the militia loyalists enough to motivate 3,500 of them to take time off work, pack up their guns, coolers and red Solo cups, and travel all the way to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California for I-don’t-know-how-long. Something of this scale doesn’t happen without media hype, and there’s a fair chance “Operation Normandy” won’t get it.
Anyway, Jesus, they cast themselves as the Nazis. That’s all we need to know about the seriousness of the thing.
Copyright 2014 The Daily Banter (emphasis in original)
http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/minuteman-militia-planning-operation-normandy-deploy-3500-men-stop-border-invasion/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/minuteman-militia-plannin_b_5631566.html (with comments)]
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Ted Cruz Speech at the 2014 Texas GOP Convention
Published on Jun 7, 2014 by Craig Bushon [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK0BdjeE4h77enRdSQblkrA / http://www.youtube.com/user/craigscorp , http://www.youtube.com/user/craigscorp/videos ]
Ted Cruz gets a standing ovation for his pro America speech [on June 6, 2014] at the 2014 Texas GOP Convention
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1GqHykPezg [with comments]
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In Fever Dreams Begin Irresponsibilities, Texas Edition
A delegate wears a decorated hat during the Texas Republican Convention at the Fort Worth Convention Center; Friday, June 6, 2014.
Photograph by Rodger Mallison/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT/Getty.
By Hendrik Hertzberg
June 30, 2014
“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1899, over in Vienna, Austria.
The Republicans of Texas don’t have a lot of time for foreigners like Freud and foreign notions like psychoanalysis, although they do believe in therapy, as long as it’s “reparative.” Elsewhere on the psychiatric front, they are adamant that “minor mental-health diagnoses” are no reason to “infringe” anyone’s “God-given right” to own and to carry guns. More about the particulars in due course.
The thing is, the Republican Party of Texas has a dream. Lots of dreams: its platform, unveiled last week, has sixteen thousand words’ worth. The road it maps is anything but royal; these good people, after all, are republicans, albeit with a capital “R.” But the document does lead to the G.O.P.’s unconscious, or part of it: its fearsome, rampaging id.
The platform clears its throat with a preamble. “We STILL hold these truths to be self-evident,” it begins, with defensive all-caps truculence. Then comes an eleven-point statement of principles. Here’s principle No. 1:
Strict adherence to the original intent of the Declaration of Independence and United States and Texas Constitutions.
And here’s No. 11:
And we believe in “The laws of nature and nature’s God” as our Founding Fathers believed.
There’s juicier stuff ahead, but let’s linger on these for a moment.
On No. 1: When it comes to the Constitution, “original intent” is standard right-wing shorthand for “whatever Scalia says goes.” But how are we supposed to adhere to the original intent of the Declaration of Independence, whose insurrectionary provenance we’ll be reminded of regularly this week? By remaining ever vigilant against the iniquities of the British Crown and its allies, whom the Declaration refers to as “the merciless Indian savages”?
On No. 11: The attribution to the Founding Fathers papers over a small problem. “God” is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, a failure on the part of those Founders that, for certain ostentatiously pious Christian conservatives, among whom may be counted the authors of the Texas Republican platform, is a persistent embarrassment. The Texas Constitution, which begins by “humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God,” cannot fully compensate for this omission.
“The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is indeed a phrase found in the Declaration. Now, I may be thinking too much like an editor here, but could it be that the platform’s authors planted the Declaration in their opening principle—even though it makes no sense there—so that they could return to it, and its gratifying mention of God, in their closing one? Either way, they appear to be unaware that the Founding Fathers’ ”nature’s God” is a reference, probably a pointed one, to their Deist [ http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/equality-deism-and-jeffersons-declaration-of-independence/ ] conception of a strictly creator God, a detached deity that does not trouble itself with the outcomes of football games, illnesses, elections, or wars, including culture wars.
But enough theology. Let’s proceed to policy. In the next of its forty pages, the platform demands, among other things,
• That the Texas Legislature should nullify—indeed, “ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify”—federal laws it doesn’t like. (Unmentioned is the fact that, beginning in 1809, the Supreme Court has steadfastedly rejected state nullification of federal laws.)
• That when it comes to “unelected bureaucrats”—i.e., pretty much the entire federal work force above the janitorial level—Congress should “defund and abolish these positions.”
• That the Seventeenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1913, be repealed, so that “the appointment of United States Senators” can again be made by state legislators, not by voters. (Admittedly, the Texas Legislature could hardly do worse.)
• That all federal “enforcement activities” within the borders of Texas—including, presumably, the activities of F.B.I. agents, Justice Department prosecutors, air marshals, immigration officers, agricultural inspectors, and tax auditors—“must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county.”
This section of the platform, “Preserving American Freedom,” also features a syllogism:
Socialism breeds mediocrity. America is exceptional. Therefore, the Republican Party of Texas opposes socialism in all of its forms.
“Mediocrity” is not the first quality that springs to mind when one thinks of places like Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany, to name three contemporary exemplars of what Texas Republicans abhor as “socialism.” But let that pass. Accepting the major and minor premises as true, wouldn’t the conclusion have to be, “Therefore, since America is exceptional, socialism in America would not breed mediocrity”?
Here is another syllogism of sorts, with the usual three-part structure, assembled by me. From page 6:
We oppose the Census Bureau obtaining data beyond the number of people residing in a dwelling, and we oppose statistical sampling adjustments.
From page 11:
We oppose any identification of citizens by race, origin, or creed and oppose use of any such identification for purposes of creating voting districts.
Also from page 11:
We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.
I’m not sure which is the major premise and which the minor, but the real conclusion, though implicit, is obvious: as far as humanly possible, people of color should be prevented from achieving representation, or even from voting at all.
More highlights:
The pro-choice plank:
We strongly support a woman’s right to choose to devote her life to her family and children.
The on-the-one-hand plank:
We revere the sanctity of human life and therefore oppose genocide, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.
The on-the-other-hand plank:
Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered.
Another on-the-one-hand plank:
We strongly oppose any constitutional convention to rewrite the United States Constitution.
Another on-the-other-hand plank:
We urge the Texas State Legislators to take the lead in calling for an Article V Amending Convention of States, for the specific purpose of reigning in the power of the federal government.
The Carole King-Aretha Franklin plank:
We support the definition of marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.
And, for good measure:
We oppose the recognition of and granting of benefits to people who represent themselves as domestic partners without being legally married.
The Republicans of Texas are preoccupied with sex and its consequences, intended and unintended alike. Naturally, they devote hundreds of words to ideas for restricting access to abortion—pending the achievement of “our final goal of total constitutional rights for the unborn child”—and contraception. And their views regarding their gay fellow-citizens? Don’t ask:
Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nation’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin.
Furthermore:
We recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.
Gays are here to stay, even in Texas, but there are plenty of things that Texas Republicans plan to do away with entirely—or, to use their preferred word, things they would subject to “abolishment.” (For Calhoun conservatives, I suppose, “abolition” has regrettable overtones.) A partial list:
• Personal-income taxes
• Property taxes
• Estate taxes
• Capital-gains taxes
• Franchise and business-income taxes
• The gift tax
• Minimum-wage laws
• Social Security (“We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions”)
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• The Department of Education and all its functions
• “Unelected bureaucrats”
• “Any and all federal agencies not based on an enumerated power granted by the United States Federal Constitution”
• Congressional pensions
• Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights
• The Federal Reserve
• “Foreign aid, except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with Congressional approval”
• Obamacare (but you knew that already)
Things that the Texas Republicans support:
• Withdrawal from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank
• “Traditional methods of discipline, including corporal punishment”
• “Reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions.”
• Returning to “the time-tested precious metal standard for the United States dollar.”
The Texas Republican take on Israel:
Our policy is inspired by God’s biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations and organizations to enjoy the benefits of that promise.
On climate change:
While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, “climate change” is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or “climate justice” initiatives.
On immunizations:
All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines.
And so we come to guns.
In the opinion of the Republican Party of Texas, as set forth in its platform, the Second Amendment flatly decrees that “no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms.” No level, no regulation: the somewhat mentally ill, therefore, are not the only dubious characters whose right to assemble private arsenals the Amendment guarantees. Psychotics, sociopaths, the terroristically inclined, and violent criminals out on bail or parole are similarly privileged. (However, “disenfranchisement of convicted felons” is O.K.)
Perhaps the Texas Republicans don’t really mean what they say. Perhaps there’s just something about guns that overstimulates them. Consider this outburst:
All federal acts, laws, executive orders, and court orders which restrict or infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall be invalid in Texas, not be recognized by Texas, shall be specifically rejected by Texas, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in Texas.
There’s more—much more—where all this comes from [ http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.texastribune.org/media/documents/2014_Republican_Party_of_Texas_Platform.pdf ]. No doubt you will have your own favorites. I’ve only scratched the surface.
I am aware that American party platforms are not like the manifestoes of European parliamentary parties. They do not commit anyone to anything. It is considered impolite to hold actual candidates for office accountable for them. They are generally read only by specialists, masochists, and political opponents in search of cheap thrills and easy gotchas, such as, some might say, your correspondent.
I’m also aware that the unconscious of the Texas Republican Party isn’t all id. Like everybody else, it has an ego, too, and there’s probably a superego in there somewhere. Besides, most everything Texan tends to be exaggerated. But if you want a glimpse of what a nontrivial and apparently growing segment of one of America’s two great political parties believes in its heart of hearts, and what it says when it is essentially talking to itself—well, you’ve just been given one.
© 2014 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-fever-dreams-begin-irresponsibilities-texas-edition
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Deep in the Tell-Tale Heart of the Texas GOP
ASSOCIATED PRESS
by Michael Winship
Posted: 07/24/2014 8:07 am EDT Updated: 07/24/2014 8:59 am EDT
Imagine the official presentation of a worldview concocted by conspiracy theorists and an assortment of cranks and grumpy people. Conjure a document written by scribes possessed of poison pens soaked in the inkpots of Ayn Rand and the Brothers Grimm, caught in the grip of a dark dystopian fantasy of dragons and specters, in which everyone's wrong but thee and me and we're not sure of thee.
No, this is not some Game of Thrones spinoff. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the official 2014 platform of the Republican Party of Texas, 40 pages of unrestrained, right-wing bluster against you name it -- women, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, gays, Obamacare, the Internal Revenue Service, red light cameras, the EPA, the World Bank, vaccinations -- well, you get the picture. In the spirit of the Alamo, this is a work straight out of the 19th century with no option for surrender.
Pick a page, any page, and you'll find yourself pitched through the rabbit hole into an alternate reality. Homosexuality? "... Chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible... Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples."
But it can be cured! The Texas Republicans "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."
That's about as close to George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as the good ole boys (and 12 or so women) of the platform committee get. Corporal punishment? By all means: spare the rod and spoil the child. Guns, yes, please, more! "No level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms." Foreign aid - no way, "except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with congressional approval."
As for public schools, who needs them? "Since data is clear that additional money does not translate into educational achievement, and higher education costs are out of control, we support reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions." And Social Security -- let 'em eat pork rinds: "We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax."
Roe v. Wade must be overturned: "We revere the sanctity of human life." And yet, "Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered." Climate change is "a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or 'climate justice' initiatives." This despite the assessment of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that "Large sections of the state are experiencing exceptional or extreme drought."
Global diplomacy: "We support the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations and the removal of United Nations headquarters from United States soil." Oh, and by the way, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.
All of this is disturbing enough, but what may be the most troubling are the platform planks urging the elimination of virtually any federal authority, the repeal of certain parts of the Constitution or insisting on archaic interpretations that most of us thought were put to bed more than a century ago. Executive decisions by any agency would have to be approved by Congress and as for all "unelected bureaucrats" -- you mean civil servants, too? -- "...we urge Congress to use their constitutional authority to defund and abolish these positions and return authority to duly elected officials." Further, the FBI, DEA, ATF, immigration officers - ANY federal enforcement activities within Texas "must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county."
The Texas GOP supports repealing the 17th Amendment, which in 1913 established the direct election of US senators by the voters, taking that power away from state legislatures, which famously could be bought for pretzels and cheese. In the Gilded Age, in part because of the ease of wholesale bribery at the state level, corporations like Standard Oil and Union Pacific had the US Senate in their pocket (not that it's much better these days).
In their frenzied dreamland, what's left of the Voting Rights Act would be repealed and more stringent restrictions on who's allowed to vote would be put in place, further disenfranchising minorities. What's more, Congress is to "withhold Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom and the Bill of Rights" (!) and the Texas state legislature is to "ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify any federal mandated legislation which infringes upon the states' 10th Amendment Right." State nullification of federal law has been consistently forbidden by the Supreme Court since 1809 and, with slavery, was at the core of the losing Confederate cause 150 years ago. Then it was again used unsuccessfully by those opposed to the civil rights movement of the sixties. Still, it refuses to go away, like an antibiotic-resistant strain of strep.
No wonder the current slogan of Texas' official tourism campaign is, "It's like a whole other country." They ain't just whistling "Dixie."
But for all the platform's Texas-style bravado, there is no mention of Governor Rick Perry's much touted "Texas miracle," his and other state Republicans' boast that since 2009, "about 48 percent of all the jobs created in America were in Texas" due to low taxes and little regulation. There is in the document a general opposition to taxes, a call for the elimination of the minimum wage and this: "We believe that a favorable business climate and strong economy emerges when government is limited by low taxation, sensible regulation, and tort reform. The American private sector powers our economy and is the true creator of jobs."
Maybe the bragging was backburnered because, as Phillip Longman points out in Washington Monthly magazine [ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_may_2014/features/oops_the_texas_miracle_that_is049289.php?page=all ], the state may have no income tax, "But Texas has sales and property taxes that make its overall burden of taxation on low-wage families much heavier than the national average, while the state also taxes the middle class at rates as high or higher than in California...
And unlike in California, middle-class families in Texas don't get the advantage of having rich people share equally in the cost of providing government services. The top 1 percent in Texas have an effective tax rate of just 3.2 percent. That's roughly two-fifths the rate that's borne by the middle class, and just a quarter the rate paid by all those low-wage 'takers' at the bottom 20 percent of the family income distribution. This Robin-Hood-in-reverse system gives Texas the fifth-most-regressive tax structure in the nation.
Middle- and lower-income Texans in effect make up for the taxes the rich don't pay in Texas by making do with fewer government services, such as by accepting a K-12 public school system that ranks behind forty-one other states, including Alabama, in spending per student.
In the words of "Texas on the Brink," the annual report [ http://texaslsg.org/texas-on-the-brink/ ] written by the progressive Legislative Study Group, a research caucus in the Texas House, "In Texas today, the American dream is distant. Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured adults in the nation. Texas is dead last in percentage of high school graduates. Our state generates more hazardous waste and carbon dioxide emissions than any other state in our nation. If we do not change course, for the first time in our history, the Texas generation of tomorrow will be less prosperous than the generation of today."
Instead of real solutions trying to come to grips with real problems, the Texas GOP went for the chimerical bucket list of the extreme right. Granted, there are plenty of excellent reasons to be angry with the federal government, and like any party platform this document is more for show than anything else. But it is a frightening reminder of what's happening within the Republican Party in Texas and elsewhere in the country. As Mark Binelli recently wrote [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/lone-star-crazy-how-right-wing-extremists-took-over-texas-20140701 ] in Rolling Stone,
After nearly six years of pumping out cynical horror stories involving our nefarious president and a Washington bureaucracy run amok, the right-wing fear machine has managed to reduce its target audience to a quivering state of waking nightmare, jumping at shadows.
If, to paraphrase Baudelaire by way of The Usual Suspects, the devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist, the modern GOP's greatest trick might have been convincing its electorate that he does, and that the federal government exists as some kind of infernal machine. While impressive, this trick has also proved to be a very dangerous one, as states of panic have a tendency to produce rather extreme results.
Binelli quotes Texas Democratic strategist Harold Cook:
When I moved to Austin in 1989, Texas politicians were conservative in the classic sense of the term: They wanted to make sure government was small and unintrusive. There were pretty strong libertarian and populist streaks, and that still exists among the electorate, but what's new, I think, is a litmus test driven by the Tea Party wing, where if you're not mad enough, if you don't demonstrate a certain level of hatred, then your motives are suspect. Your final votes on legislation don't matter. These two politicians might be voting exactly alike -- but the one the Tea Party loves is running around the district all the time screaming about how much he hates Obama.
More than 150 years ago, the state's governor, Sam Houston, hero of the Texas War of Independence, recognized this same spirit of suicidal extremism, tinctured with bigotry and fantasy, infecting his fellow Texans as they prepared to leave the United States and join forces with the Confederacy. Houston, while no fan of abolition, warned against secession; that the South would be overwhelmed. In a speech on September 22, 1860 [ http://declaringamerica.com/houston-address-on-secession-1860/ ], at a mass meeting in Austin, he declared, "You are asked to plunge into a revolution; but are you told how to get out of it? Not so; but it is to be a leap in the dark -- a leap into an abyss, whose horrors would even fright the mad spirits of disunion who tempt you on...
"Are we to sell reality for a phantom?"
The Texas GOP -- and far too many others -- say yes.
Copyright ©2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-winship/deep-in-the-tell-tale-hea_b_5613703.html [with comments]
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Secrets of the right-wing brain: New study proves it — conservatives see a different, hostile world
Rand Paul
(Credit: AP/Jim Cole)
Phony WMD, Benghazi, birthers, truthers -- turns out there's a scientific explanation for deniers and Tea Partyers
Paul Rosenberg
Tuesday, Jul 29, 2014 02:31 PM CDT
“John Stuart Mill called it ‘commonplace’ for political systems to have ‘a party or order or stability and a party of progress or reform.’” So begins a recent paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. But is this “commonplace” observation rooted in our brains? Is it even true?
The paper, “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology [ http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=/BBS/BBS37_03/S0140525X13001192a.pdf ],” by lead author John R. Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, answers yes to both questions. It advances three successive waves of evidence, which combine to show that conservatives differ from liberals by having stronger, more intense reactions to negative aspects of the environment — such as physical threats, or potential sources of disease — which are ultimately physiological. At the same time, with multiple forms of mass hysteria going on at once, American conservatives seem dead set on proving the scientists right, and underscoring the importance of the work they’re doing.
But here’s the twist: The scientists themselves insist that “citing differences in the psychological and physiological traits of liberals and conservatives is not equivalent to declaring one ideology superior to the other.” While this may be true in an abstract sense, and a mix of psychological tendencies makes a society more robust in the long run — balancing needs for caution and self-preservation with needs for exploration, innovation and renewal — in 21st century America, things look strikingly different.
Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen — Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc. — make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic ],” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature — just as liberalism is — we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.
Consider the recent wave of hysteria over Central American children turning themselves in at the border. There were the hordes of angry demonstrators protesting busloads of children [ http://crooksandliars.com/2014/07/racist-murrieta-residents-terrorize-bus ], like it was Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. There was the congressman/doctor Phil Gingrey’s warning letter to the CDC, claiming that the children might be carrying the Ebola virus [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/phil-gingrey-migrant-ebola-vaccines ] — a disease unknown outside Sub-Saharan Africa. There was the ludicrous myth of the “$50 million illegal alien resort spa [ http://www.salon.com/2014/07/17/border_demagogues_outdo_themselves_inside_the_50_million_illegal_alien_resort_spa_myth/ ].” But above all there was the most basic, fundamental fact that the children were turning themselves in at the border — it was anything but a failure of border protection, although that’s what the right-wing hysteria portrayed it as.
Put simply, none of what conservatives have been doing in the recent “border crisis” moral panic makes any sense in terms of pragmatic problem-solving. But it all makes perfect sense in terms of expressively defending a threatened group identity — and that is very much in line with what researchers have found to be the defining characteristics of conservatism.
“I think immigration is a perfect example of some of the things we’re talking about,” Hibbing told Salon. “I guess I wouldn’t frame it, I probably wouldn’t use the phrase ‘moral panic,’” he qualified — sometimes psychologists and sociologists don’t see eye-to-eye — “and I wouldn’t frame it necessarily as just threat,” he added, quickly going on to explain, “A lot of the adverse to immigration could be traced to a disgust reaction as well, which is another negative stimulus being used a lot. A lot of the language that one hears, even now with the kids on the border, is fear of disease and impurities, things like that. So it’s not just threat — or it’s threat, in a way, but not like ‘a bad guy with a gun.’ It’s fear of pathogens as well,” he explained.
“So anyway, I think that is a perfect example of how these kinds of basic orientations to negative and positive stimuli can then translate themselves into political positions on issues of the day; in this case, a really important one like immigration.”
Could all the differences between liberals and conservatives really come down to something as simple as differences in responses to perceived threat? In a word, no. Just as the title of his paper says, the research Hibbing and others have done shows that differences in threat bias underlie variations in political ideology; they do not explain all the variation, just a good chunk of it. Yet, that in itself is a tremendous advancement.
To understand what Hibbing and his colleagues have achieved, it’s useful to compare their work to a 2003 paper, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition [ http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf ],” by John Jost and colleagues, which made a more modest, but related claim that conservatism could be understood as an ensemble of tendencies within a unified framework. That paper focused on psychological survey data — information gleaned from conscious questioning in 88 separate studies across decades of research in 12 countries. It did not claim that motivated reasoning was limited to conservatives, or that motivated reasoning was necessarily false, although many of its initial critics in Congress and elsewhere jumped to those conclusions (and some even threatened to defund the entire field of research into political psychology). But the paper’s abstract did say that “Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification).”
While alarmed conservatives thought they saw a sinister plot afoot, those familiar with some of the studies cited probably saw something else: an intriguing array of diverse yet interrelated factors, crying out for some sort of simplifying insight that could explain how and why they all fit together in some relatively simple, straightforward manner. Like the chemical elements before Mendeleev, or the subatomic particles in the pre-quark era, scientists in the field faced a too-complicated picture for their sense of order and simplicity to abide. They had their own sort of motivated cognition, you see.
But that earlier paper was relatively tame compared to the new one by by Hibbing’s team, which also wrote the book ”Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences [ http://www.amazon.com/Predisposed-Liberals-Conservatives-Political-Differences/dp/0415535875 ].” Where “Political Conservatism” talked about psychology, Hibbing’s work also talks about brain structure and function. It burrows much more deeply into who we are, and by surfacing the far-reaching power of a single unifying factor — differences in threat bias — it achieves a dramatic simplification of the overall picture of the field.
Hibbing is a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which has a political physiology lab [ http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/ ] “dedicated to exploring the relevance of individual-level biological variations to political orientations and behaviors,” which may well be the only one of its kind — so far. But the evolution from political psychology to political physiology in recent years has many collaborators, and the paper appeared with comments from 26 researchers or research teams, with similar expertise, the vast majority of whom (“22 or 23” by Hibbing’s count) basically accepted the general idea of the findings, though with varying degrees and kinds of qualification.
The authors note that approaches based on trying to explain political attitudes based on genetics or on parents’ political views have not produced clear, substantial results, which is why they propose to focus on an intermediate level, between pure biology and explicit political influence — that of physiological responses to experience, the realm in which threat bias emerges.
The findings of a 2008 paper [ http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/Oxley%20et%20al%202008.pdf ] from Hibbing’s team provide a concrete illustration of what they have focused on in their own work, which in turn informs their evaluation of the work of others. Forty-six individuals with strong political attitudes were exposed to three threatening images mixed among 30 neutral ones, and their physiological responses (changes in skin conductance level) were compared to their political attitudes on 18 issues related to “protecting the interests of the participants’ group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats.” The more conservative “group protective” participants showed “an increase in skin conductance when threatening stimuli were presented,” while those who were more liberal, less “group protective” were “mostly unaffected by those same stimuli” — a difference that was statistically significant.
The threatening images included “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it.” The policy issues were “support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer, and Biblical truth; and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights, and pornography.” The researchers themselves did not label them as “liberal” or “conservative,” “because we measure only one aspect of ideologies and exclude other aspects such as positions on economic issues.” However, the relationship between conservatism and group protection is self-evident, even if not all-encompassing.
In the current paper, the authors’ argument proceeds in four stages. First, an examination of “liberal-conservative psychological differences as reflected in (survey) self-reports,” which was established in Jost’s 2003 meta-analysis, and has been expanded on since. They note that two of the five core personality traits — known as the Big Five [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ] — correlate consistently with political orientation “across a broad range of studies” — conservatives score higher on conscientiousness while liberals score higher on openness to new experiences. (The other three traits are agreeableness, extraversion and emotional stability). Second, they review “psychological differences that are not fully accessible to the participants themselves,” such as differences in responding to negative imagery. Third, they describe evidence of “physiological differences between liberals and conservatives,” including differences in brain structure and function. Fourth, they present a synthesis of the research “arguing that many of the correlations described are tied together by the common thread of differences in response patterns to negative stimuli.” They point out that “Good evolutionary reasons exist for negativity bias given that negative events can be much more costly in fitness terms than positive events are beneficial; to state the obvious, infection, injury, and death curtail reproductive opportunities.”
However, what matters for political psychology is not the existence of negativity bias, “but that it varies so much from individual to individual,” the authors write. “That some people are more attuned to potential threats, more sensitive to sources of contagion, and more desirous of in-group protections is known intuitively and amply demonstrated by a large research literature,” and this variation in heightened negativity bias is significantly correlated with conservatism. Indeed, the authors state, that there is no known published study indicating the opposite.
The connection between heightened negativity bias and conservatism is not hard to make, the authors note, “It is not surprising that those attuned to the negative in life might take steps to avoid it, perhaps by refraining from taking chances with the unknown, by following instructions, and by sticking to the tried and true.” (Indeed, erring on the side of caution is one of the non-political meanings of the word “conservative,” as in a “conservative investment” or a “conservative estimate.”) Elaborating further, they note:
[N]ot only do political positions favoring defense spending, roadblocks to immigration, and harsh treatment of criminals seem naturally to mesh with heightened response to threatening stimuli but those fostering conforming unity (school children reciting the pledge of allegiance), traditional lifestyles (opposition to gay marriage), enforced personal responsibility (opposition to welfare programs and government provided healthcare), longstanding sources of authority (Biblical inerrancy; literal, unchanging interpretations of the Constitution), and clarity and closure (abstinence-only sex education; signed pledges to never raise taxes; aversion to compromise) do, as well. Heightened response to the general category of negative stimuli fits comfortably with a great many of the typical tenets of political conservatism.
Summing up, they conclude:
Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that individuals who are physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative stimuli will tend to endorse public policies that minimize tangible threats by giving prominence to past, traditional solutions, by limiting human discretion (or endorsing institutions, such as the free market, that do not require generosity, discretion, and altruism), by being protective, by promoting ingroups relative to out-groups, and by embracing strong, unifying policies and authority figures.
This is not to say the authors think there are no outstanding problems or challenges that remain to be fully explained or resolved. In particular, they focus on three major concerns. First, the problem of causal order, “Do physiological and broad psychological traits shape political dispositions, or might political dispositions actually shape physiological and broad psychological traits?” Second, the problem of messiness: that political orientations do not necessarily organize themselves neatly onto a single left/right continuum. Third, the problem of ultimate causes: “{I}f negativity bias leads to the adoption of certain personality traits, basic values, moral foundations, and bedrock political principles, what causes variation in negativity bias in the first place?”
Regarding the problem of causal order, they note that resolving the issue “requires either longitudinal or experimental data,” and that although such studies are few, they all point to politics as resulting from physiological and psychological traits, rather than causing them, although questions were subsequently raised by commentators. It certainly seems plausible that causation could flow both ways, and more studies are clearly called for to illuminate this.
The messiness question is a good deal messier. On the individual level, people often have views on one or more subjects that are at odds with the overall positions of others who share their ideology. As groups, there are various intra-ideological cleavages as well — as shown in Pew’s political typologies [ http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/the-political-typology-beyond-red-vs-blue/ ], for example. There are also questions raised by political moderates, and those who shy away from politics altogether. More generally, there is the question of dimensionality: Is there really only one dimension to political beliefs, or are there two—social and economic — or more? This was a subject of considerable debate among commentators as well, but in the response section, the authors noted:
If a concept such as negativity bias could account for a significant portion of the variance merely in socio-cultural political preferences, it would be an important accomplishment. If it were able to account for economic or equality issues, as well, we would view this as icing on the cake.
In short, regardless of how the dimensionality question is answered, the threat bias explanation for ideological differences is still a significant advance in our understanding.
However, cognitive linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio, author of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy [ http://www.asocommunications.com/html/dont-buy-it/ ],” told Salon there’s a very direct connection between social and economic conservatism, based on their moral outlook. Two things stand out about how conservatives talk about economy, Osorio said, based on several years of intensive observation and analysis. First is the “the tendency to compare it to something natural — a body or the weather or moving liquid,” she said. “But the other idea undergirding their worldview, and thus shaping perceptions of poverty, riches, inequality and desirable economic policy, is the idea that the economy exists for a specific purpose: to reward the good and punish the bad. It’s a moral arbiter; simply having great riches indicates you deserve them because the economy loves you the best. Thus, it follows that poor people deserve to be poor and we can know this because they’re poor.”
The question of ultimate causes is intriguing on several fronts. First, because of possible evolutionary origins:
One possibility is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene. Compared with the modern era, existence then was much more likely to be terminated prematurely at the hands of other human beings or by accidents involving wild animals or natural disasters.
Second, because of how conditions have changed:
In modern life, on the other hand, threats are less immediate and the selection pressures for elevated negativity biases have likely been reduced, opening the door for substantial genetic variation at relevant loci.
Third, because of the effects of this change, which can help explain conservatism as more tightly defined than liberalism:
If strong negativity biases were once selected for but now are not, it could explain why results often indicate that conservatism is in some senses better defined than liberalism. Conservatives have a negativity bias, whereas liberals do not have a positivity bias and may or may not have a negativity bias. Conservatives sometimes take umbrage at this situation, arguing that it is the result of liberal academics viewing conservatism as an aberration that needs to be explained. In truth, its status as a tighter, more discussed phenotype may be a result of the fact that, in contrast to proto-liberalism, proto-conservatism was once selected for.
Finally, the authors note that there’s a group-selection argument for the benefit of ideological diversity, although it may be more problematic for us today — a point I’ll return to later on.
As indicated above, there was broad acceptance of the general thesis of the negativity bias, but there was also a vigorous and multifaceted debate about how it fits together with the rest of what’s already known. There were far too many different issues raised to summarize them here. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one set of issues, raised from slightly different angles by different commentators, which Hibbing also commented on for Salon.
The first was raised by psychologists Matt Motyl and Ravi Iyer, who argued that negativity bias explains a lot about conservatives, but leaves some notable gaps. “Conservatives live in safer communities, perhaps to escape negative emotions, yet display numerous other community preferences unrelated to negativity,” they wrote, such as preferring to live in communities with greater involvement in competitive sports — which would naturally increase their potential exposure to competitive loss. They proposed an alternate explanation, that of a “tendency toward cognitive consistency,” which seems to make excellent sense, particularly as a follow-on influence: Once negativity bias starts shaping the broad contours of ideological orientations, consistency comes into the picture, fleshing out areas where negativity bias may not be as dramatically involved — voluntarily playing games, for example, as opposed to involuntarily being thrust into a struggle for survival.
“I’ve got no problem, I think that’s perfectly complementary,” Hibbing told Salon, in response to that notion. He saw it as well within the framework of the vast majority of comments they had received. “In fact, all the commentary — well, not all, but most of them — we were quite pleased with, because they did seem to, for the most part, accept our basic notion of greater threat sensitivity, and then kind of introduce their own angles, and twists and additions to it. And I think that’s a perfect example of that.”
The idea that negativity bias generates conservative ideology, but that cognitive coherence helps shapes how it is structured, is not a new one. Indeed, this is precisely what cognitive linguist George Lakoff argued in his 1996 book, ”Moral Politics [ http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637798.html ].” The coherence he proposed came from two contrasting child-rearing models, which he called the “strict father” and the “nurturant parent” models. But the initial logic of the “strict father” model was that it was intended to prepare children for life in a “dangerous world.” In contrast, the “nurturant parent” model was less focused on guarding against threats, more on nurturing capabilities. It was not heedless of danger — just not obsessively focused on it.
Significantly, another commentator, Ross Buck, raised a related issue in which he also drew on Lakoff’s work, in the past. Buck argued that “differences between liberal and conservative orientations … are emotional in nature and caused by differences in attachment security: Conservatives are more vigilant to negative features of the environment because of a general sense of insecurity, whereas liberals are relatively more secure.” In political theory terms, Buck related this back to the distinction between how the conservative Hobbes and the liberal Locke conceived of the state of nature, and the social contract:
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that all are motivated by instincts for self-preservation to dominate others while maintaining their own freedom. The resulting universal war of all against all made life in the state of nature “nasty, brutish, and short,” and the social contract was established as a universal peace treaty to end this conflict.
Hobbes used this argument, not incidentally, as a justification for monarchy, providing new life for the traditional rationale of the divine right of kings. However:
In contrast, John Locke suggested that people in the state of nature lived together peacefully without leaders according to reason and natural law.
As for consequences, Buck wrote:
Among other things, the relatively greater security of liberals prompts them to regard the less fortunate with pity, whereas more anxiously attached conservatives tend to regard them with scorn.
Buck also related his account to the analysis of Jonathan Haidt “who described ‘other condemning’ social/moral emotions – anger, disgust, and contempt – and a conservative ‘disgust-based moral order,’ which condemns people for what they are more than what they do, and tends to ostracize and excludes members of out-groups (based upon ethnicity, religion, social class, sexual orientation, etc.),” and to Lakoff:
The attachment-security argument also suggests a developmental origin of the liberal-conservative difference, consistent with Lakoff’s (2002) suggestion that liberal thought centers around the Nurturing Parent model of the family as opposed to Strict Father model of morality underlying conservative thought.
As with Motyl and Iyer’s argument, I thought it more plausible that attachment security reflects, amplifies and generalizes the influence of negativity bias, but it could have a circular feedback impact as well.
Again, Hibbing said that it sounded very plausible. “I think that’s a nice way of viewing how it could come about,” he said. Genetics are only part of the story, and considering how individuals are raised as well “makes perfect sense,” he said. “If there’s a father or mother who has heightened threat sensitivity, it stands to reason that they could raise their child in a slightly different way, and this could explain the generational transmission.”
One thing that distinguishes Lakoff’s work from that of most psychologists has been his willingness to be evaluative. While most of “Moral Politics” was purely descriptive and analytical, he ultimately did take up the question of which model was more effective at producing the results it promised. Drawing on the parenting and child development literature, particularly the work of Diana Baumrind [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Baumrind ], Lakoff pointed out that authoritarian, Strict Father parenting does not produce the sort of healthy autonomous adults it promises. What does work is what Baumrind described as authoritative parenting, which sets high standards but is far more focused on engagement and nurturance than on judgment and punishment. This is the essence of Lakoff’s Nurturant Parent model — and it works. Locke was right, after all, about the fundamental goodness of humanity, which runs far deeper than our obvious flaws.
There are good reasons why Hibbing and others in political psychology abstain from evaluation, as he told Salon:
One of the things we try to do, and you may have picked this up in the exchange, is do our best to be fair to conservatives on this, and not make it sound like they’re just deeply flawed. So we tend to use language like ‘they’re paying more attention to these negative things’ and it’s not like they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. But this is something that gets to them, in a physical way, and a psychological way as well, so they think it’s something that needs due diligence. So they’re really paying attention, and they’re thinking of ways that they might mitigate these threats.
And yet, though this may account for where conservatives start from, it doesn’t match as well with where they end up at. Mobs of angry adults screaming at busloads of frightened children does not exactly equate with terms like “due diligence” and “mitigating threats.” Perhaps (at this point, anyway) political psychologists have their hands full just trying to get a fix on how to understand the origins of ideology, and we must look to others (sociologists, historians, linguists, etc.) for a broader view of where things lead to, and end. Hibbing continued in a similar vein:
This is based on the way that the world appears to them. And in that sense, it’s very real.
Here’s one example, liberals are always pointing out to conservatives, and especially gun advocates, that there’s a lot more harm done by gun accidents than people using guns. And I think to a conservative, that just doesn’t mean all that much, because the notion of the volitional evil human being coming after them, them not being able to defend themselves hits them in the gut in a way that liberals, I think don’t think understand.
So, if we can get back to those basic kinds of first premises, really, before we even have logic kick in, what is it that strikes you, what is it that you fear, what is it that motivates you, then I think we start to understand some of these deep differences between liberals and conservatives.
Earlier, I promised to return to an argument that Hibbing and his co-authors made, a group-selection argument for the benefit of ideological diversity, which runs in parallel with the reluctance to evaluate ideologies. I believe it’s a virtually self-evident argument — so far as our past is concerned. But it may prove to be more problematic for us today, and for our future. Here’s what they wrote in the paper:
A somewhat different theory that relies on group selection has been floated on occasion. It holds that societies benefit from having a mixture of those with high negativity biases and those with more modest negativity biases, of those open to out-groups and of those who are more guarded…. [T]he advantages of phenotypic mixtures would have to occur among the small-scale hunter-gatherer type societies that typified human existence for so long. Just as groups of spiders benefit from having a mix of social and asocial members and virtually all species benefit from having individuals with different immune systems, the argument is that human groups benefit from having members who are differentially responsive and attentive to negative stimuli. If this were true, the polarization that afflicts many modern democracies may be a vestige of the mixes of the behaviorally relevant, biological predispositions that worked well in small-scale societies.
This last point strikes me as extremely important — arguably more important than most of the scientists involved seem to realize. It is surely quite sensible to see ideological diversity as a good, but a particular mix that is good in one social circumstance may not be so good in another. It makes quite good sense that negativity bias was very helpful in our evolutionary history, when we lacked a deep cultural reservoir for coping with various ills. But in our modern — or postmodern — world, the particular mix needs to change; our need for novelty-seeking looks to be far more important for our survival and flourishing. The challenge of dealing with global warming is but one obvious — if overwhelming — example. More generally, Einstein once said that we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, and so, for us, novelty-seeking may be even more essential to our survival than negativity bias was in the past.
In short, whether or not one ideology is better than another may itself be an empirical question, the answer to which varies over time. And at present, conservatism’s negatives clearly seem to be growing beyond all control. It may well be that psychology and physiology cannot and/or should not judge the efficacy of ideologies, but other scientists with a broader purview may well be required to. Our survival as a species could depend on it.
The fireworks today may be at the border — or in Gaza, or Ukraine — but meanwhile our goose is slowly being cooked by global warming, and conservatives have convinced themselves it’s all a liberal hoax. If that kind of thinking isn’t wrong, then what is?
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/secrets_of_the_right_wing_brain_new_study_proves_it_conservatives_see_a_different_hostile_world/ [with comments]
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Fox News’ “War on Christianity”: How right-wing hacks created a sect of victims
Clockwise from top left: Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes, Sean Hannity
(Credit: Fox News)
There is a serious agenda behind the paranoia -- and a vision of reality that is truly scary
Edwin Lyngar
Tuesday, Jul 29, 2014 01:45 PM CDT
If you only consumed the Fox News Network or books penned by Fox “journalists,” you could be forgiven for believing that the streets of America run red with the blood of Christian martyrs or that Bibles are being burned in the streets of San Francisco by marauding atheists. The claims of religious persecution are laughable even on cursory examination, but this slice of American self-delusion can no longer be ignored. The manufactured war on Christians provides cover for fundamentalist to perpetrate actual discrimination, against gay people, religious minorities and women. With the latest decision from the Supreme Court creating religious rights for billon-dollar corporations like Hobby Lobby, this wholesale nonsense has gone beyond anyone’s capacity to ignore.
To understand the rise of the Christian victim myth, one must trace it to the source: Fox News and especially its affiliated radio and book empire. Even among the intellectually atrophied, there are a few who stand out for being worse than the rest. At Fox News, I would argue it’s the trifecta of Mike Huckabee, Sean Hannity and my personal favorite (and the main subject of this post), Todd Starnes. To understand the creation of the religious victimization myth, I thoroughly examined Starnes’ latest polemic: “God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values [ http://www.amazon.com/God-Less-America-Stories-Traditional/dp/1621365913 ].” Forwarded by Huckabee and promoted by Hannity, this Fox News corporate product captures everything that is wrong, untrue and stupid about this ongoing narrative.
I have spent more hours than I want to admit trying to understand Todd Starnes as a fellow human being. Like me, Starnes is an obese, white man, and we probably share pants sizes and a love of fried foods. Where we differ is that Starnes has spent his entire life dedicated to Southern Baptists, a group that has only recently recovered from its hatred of dancing and interracial marriage. He is a marginal member of the Fox News brand, but is a constant source of misinformation and social discord, regularly featured on Fox radio and the Fox News website.
Starnes might dismiss my criticism with his favorite insult of “elitist,” but that can’t stick to me. I’m a former military enlisted man, was a libertarian for years and have been clawing my own way out of the pit of angry, white America for decades. My own upbringing should make me love Starnes: undereducated, white, rural, gun-toting and fat. Todd and I could be brothers, except that every word that he writes or utters makes me almost ill. In that way, I’ll label his book a “Nauseatus Magnum Opus.” My fascination about Starnes comes from how close I came to accepting his vision of reality.
Starnes shows a decided lack of shame in the central thesis of the book that “liberals and atheists are out to destroy America.” His over-the-top hyperbole only succeeds in exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the “religious persecution” cry. He also exposes his near genocidal hate for anyone unlike himself, gleefully waxing about many of us burning in hell, for instance. He offers a kind warning to “invest in some fire-retardant underwear” (page 131). The days I spent examining his book would have been more comfortable pummeling my own genitals with a blunt instrument.
The Starnes-led sideshow is designed to cajole mostly blue-collar, lower-middle-class whites to vote against their own self-interest, and it’s a runaway, nefarious success.
Although the word “nefarious” describes the work, you won’t find that word or any other complicated language between the covers of the book. Starnes offers many preposterous suppositions (two other words you won’t find in the book) and unsupported conclusions, but he uses only elementary school prose. Of course, he could claim to be writing for accessibility, but I’d argue he’s manufacturing a fairy tale about good versus evil using childlike language.
To contrast the lack of complexity, there are 13 separate references to “sweet tea” and eight to “sweet potatoes.” One could summarize his book with this much more accurate subtitle: White Southern Person With a Bad Diet = Good. Everyone Else = Satan.
His book purports to find examples of American Christians being victimized by the growing atheist menace. This is not my own hyperbole, but an actual claim (“Angry Atheists Armed With Attorneys,” page 175). Of course, the Pew study on religious affiliation says that 78 percent of Americans identify as some form of Christian, while those who self-identify as “atheist” or “agnostic” hover around 5 percent. Truly secular people are outnumbered 14-to-1, so the entire premise of the book is nonsense.
I consider myself an essayist rather than researcher, but the flaws in the book are so large they can be seen from space. Starnes works hard to give the appearance of scholarship but it would only be credible to the most gullible and unsophisticated reader. Starnes uses the veneer of endnotes as support, but when examined, they show only shoddy research, unsupported conclusions and narcissism.
For instance, he cites his own questionable work published in his own FoxNews.com columns, instances that have often been debunked elsewhere (thank you, Media Matters [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/05/13/todd-starnes-5-fake-culture-wars/194005 ]). When he cites a third party, it’s often a source that cannot be taken seriously, such as his references to World Net Daily, a right-wing website that reports outlandish conspiracy theories such as “soy products make people gay [ http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39253/ ]” (among other bunk). When he manages to cite journalistic sources, such as the Associated Press, the articles don’t support the point he is attempting to make. Starnes seems to think just putting numbers after a reference point in a book is sufficient scholarship no matter how irrelevant the endnotes.
Even when he gets the basic facts right, the examples often crumble under their own illogic. My absolute favorite is that of a man “Jailed for Holding a Bible Study” (page 17). That sounds bad, right? Yet a page or two later, the details emerge: “police officers raided the home and a two-thousand-square-foot building (emphasis mine) in their backyard. The family had moved their Bible study into the building after the group outgrew the home’s living room” (page 20). The man built a massive, unlicensed building in his backyard, preached to a congregation of 80 people and collected tithes. Who the hell would tolerate an unlicensed, non-permitted church or business in his or her neighborhood?
Starnes also makes some startling accusations against Barack Obama, claiming at one point that Obama’s “end goal is to eradicate the Christian faith” (page 7). Here again the examples marvelously fail. For example, Starnes includes the accusation that “[Obama] omitted the traditional phrase ‘in the year of our Lord’ on a presidential proclamation.” Wow, that sounds like driving nails right into the hands of Jesus … except that Starnes fails to mention that this proclamation honored “Jewish Heritage Month.” I find the phrase “in the year of our Lord” unnecessary, in any case, but for Jews it makes even less sense, because they don’t consider Jesus “their lord” in the year of reference. The “evidence” in Starnes’ endnote is an article gushing with praise from the Jewish community for Obama’s act of sensitivity to this non-Christian community.
For me, Starnes’ greatest sin (if I may borrow from his constant religious posturing) is that he attacks so many groups and people that are so much weaker than he is. He refers to many of these groups as “bullies” or “bigots,” even when it is he who hurls cruelty and insults. America is overwhelmingly Christian and heterosexual, but to read Starnes, one could believe that he was the last Christian in America and could be murdered any moment by Muslims or atheists. He cites examples where public schoolteachers weren’t able to preach Christianity to schoolchildren. Again, he expends not one drop of ink to ponder the feelings of Jewish, atheist or Buddhist parents. Starnes cannot accept that Americans do not all worships as he does, and his book bubbles with underlying hostility and hate for marginalized groups.
Because I am not Starnes, I can concede when my opposition has found a handful of reasonable examples. There are cases of overreach in political correctness in America, for example, when a valedictorian is forbidden from thanking Jesus in a speech. But there is a difference between a student speaker and a principal who might use his government position to preach to captive students. But even if every single example from the book were true, it still would not prove a war on Christianity. America is a big place, sadly filled with injustice. Innocent people are locked up, discrimination is a reality for many and children go hungry in the “richest” nation on earth. Real, decent Christians would do much more for their faith by ignoring the war on Christianity nonsense and instead working to address injustices in their own neighborhoods. This is the kind of activism Jesus could get behind.
This book proves that the war on Christianity narrative is devoid of merit, yet the Fox News Misinformation Complex continues to peddle it.
Rather than offer a final thought on the book, I instead will take a moment to urge every single thinking person to read this book (and follow the endnotes). Fundamentalist preachers often urge followers to avoid certain books, movies and even people. “Don’t talk to your atheist uncle anymore, because you might struggle in your faith,” one might say. Although this book is a painful read, sensible people must listen to and then combat this deluded thinking, lest American be overrun with 13th century sensibilities. If you get nothing out of it, you will at least learn how not to craft an argument.
Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/fox_news_war_on_christianity_how_right_wing_hacks_created_a_sect_of_victims/ [with comments]
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Right-Wing Crackpot 'Historian' Barton Exposed by Peter Montgomery and Lawrence O'Donnell
By AlterNet Staff
Posted at April 19, 2011, 2:52am
Peter Montgomery, author of the original AlterNet investigation, "Tea Party Jesus: Koch's Americans For Prosperity Sidles Up to Religious Right for 2012 Campaign [ http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch's_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign ( http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch%27s_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign?paging=off )]," appeared last night on "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell [ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/42653890#42653890 (the YouTube of the segment, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgDZiDNo_AU , below as the original is embedded)]" to discuss his new report on David Barton, the favorite revisionist historian of the religious right and the Tea Party movement. (VIDEO BELOW) Montgomery penned the report, "Barton’s Bunk: Religious Right ‘Historian’ Hits the Big Time in Tea Party America [ http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/barton-s-bunk-religious-right-historian-hits-the-big-time-tea-party-america ]", for People for the American Way, where he is a senior fellow.
As Montgomery documented in his AlterNet piece, Barton's false history about the role of religion in America's founding, and the theological contortions he makes to assert a biblical mandate for the destruction of government, are finding their way into the rhetoric of the Republican Party's best-known potential presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
Copyright 2011 AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/564372/right-wing_crackpot_'historian'_barton_exposed_by_peter_montgomery_and_lawrence_o'donnell [with comments]
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Another Lesson In False History From David Barton
4/8/2014
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/another-lesson-false-history-david-barton , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWNsnXos6c [embedded]
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Dr. Ben Carson at First Baptist of Orlando
Published on Jun 1, 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqngWTjAqCc [with comments]
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Ben Carson Says That Legal Abortion Is Human Sacrifice
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Tuesday, 7/1/2014 11:24 am
While appearing on DoveTV recently [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZBuOR5eI40 (next below, from 13:00 through 29:15)],
Ben Carson [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/ben-carson ] said that America has no right to assert that ancient civilizations were "heathen" for practicing human sacrifice since this nation is doing the same thing by allowing abortion to remain legal.
Carson, who has no problem [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/22/ben-carson-monica-wehby_n_5374265.html ] endorsing candidates who support abortion rights in order to win votes, was responding to a comment by host Perry Atkinson who said that if America could just end abortion then "all of the other things that God would be interested in helping us with would fall into alignment."
"It's interesting," Carson said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDXYYOi_Rs (below, as embedded)], "that we sit around and call other ancient civilizations 'heathen' because of human sacrifice, but aren't we actually guilty of the same thing?"
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ben-carson-says-legal-abortion-human-sacrifice
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Truth In Action Ministries Cites Bogus Jefferson Quote To Refute Separation Of Church And State
Submitted by Ian Silverstone on Wednesday, 7/23/2014 11:14 am
Truth in Action Ministries [ http://www.truthinaction.org/ , http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/truth-action-ministries ], a purveyor of incendiary “documentaries” that explore our country’s apparent slide [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/coral-ridge-exposes-americas-descent-socialism ] into anti-Christian [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-activists-warn-parents-against-sending-students-communist-atheist-gay-public ] moral [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-action-ministries-film-warns-gays-puts-boys-serious-risk ] turpitude [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-titanic-radical-homosexual-agenda ], is back to warn us that Christians are now an increasingly persecuted minority in America.
Watch highlights of the film here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7NpSp3-Ki8 (below, as embedded)]:
Hosted by conservative activists Jerry Newcombe [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/jerry-newcombe ] and John Rabe [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/john-rabe ], the group’s most recent film, “We the People: Under Attack [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-film-activist-judges-are-attacking-america-gay-rights-taxpayer-funded-pornog ],” is a field guide to how “activist judges” are restricting religious liberties and the freedom of speech, and includes appearances from right-wing figures such as Herb Titus [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/herb-titus ], Phyllis Schlafly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/phyllis-schlafly ], Carrie Severino [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/carrie-severino ] and Alan Sears [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/alan-sears ].
The subject of scorn in “We the People” is the federal judiciary, seen as a rogue branch of government with a revisionist interpretation of the Constitution. Newcombe warns that “our country is under attack by activist judges, including some on our nation’s Supreme Court.”
The separation of church and state is framed as both a slap in the face to Christians and a subversion of the will of our Founding Fathers, and Titus laments that the U.S. government doesn’t strictly adhere to the Ten Commandments and the Bible in its public policy. Rabe breathlessly reports that “in recent decades, the federal judiciary has instituted abortion on demand, overturned limits on partial-birth abortion, silenced voluntary prayer in schools and discovered a so-called ‘right to sodomy’ in the constitution.”
Newcombe argues that recent decisions by the Supreme Court defy the Constitution’s purportedly religious themes, and relays this quote by Thomas Jefferson to prove that even he believed in mixing religion with government:
No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I as chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.
One slight caveat, however: this quote appears absolutely nowhere [ http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/no-nation-has-ever-yet-existed-or-been-governed-without-religionquotat ] in any of Jefferson’s writings or records of his speeches, and first materialized in 1857, decades after Jefferson died. Looks like Newcombe will have to find more fake quotes from the nation’s founders to prove his point.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-action-ministries-cites-bogus-jefferson-quote-refute-separation-church-and-state
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Christian Reconstructionism And The GOP: 'Biblical Justice' vs Social Justice
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Tuesday, 7/22/2014 2:53 pm
There’s a reason so many Republican politicians seem to bring a religious fervor to their efforts to gut public institutions and social welfare spending. The modern day Religious Right draws much of its ideology from Christian Reconstructionists [ http://religiondispatches.org/tag/christian-reconstructionism/ ] who teach that God gave specific duties to the government, the church, and the family.
According to this theological worldview, education and taking care of the poor are the responsibility of families and churches, and it is unbiblical for the government to take on these roles. That meshes well with the view of “constitutional conservatives” who believe, for example, the Constitution does not authorize any federal government role in education.
A stark example of the increasingly indistinct line between conservative Republicans and hard-core Christian Reconstructionists [ http://religiondispatches.org/iwashington-posti-story-gets-christian-reconstructionism-wrong/ ] and dominionists [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/dominionism-and-religious-right-merger-complete ] (who believe the right kind of Christians are meant to have dominion over every aspect of society) can be found in the recent Republican primary victory of Michael Petrouka [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/michael-peroutka ] in a race for a county council seat in an Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Peroutka believes that any law that runs counter to God’s law is invalid, and that the Maryland General Assembly is itself no longer a valid legislative body. Here’s a concise summation of his approach to government:
Since civil government is ordained by God in order to protect God-given rights, then the function of civil government is to obey God and to enforce God’s law – PERIOD.
It is not the role of civil government to house, feed, clothe, educate or give heath care to…ANYBODY!
This religion-inflected ideological view of government is not relegated to inhabitants of the far-right fringe like Peroutka. David Barton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/david-barton ], an influential Republican activist and “historian” who helped write the GOP’s national platform in 2012 [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/6-right-wing-zealots-and-crazy-ideas-behind-most-outrageous-republican-platform-ever ], claims that the Constitution was drawn directly from the Bible and the sermons of colonial preachers, and that its focus on individual freedom reflects the founders’ theology [ http://religiondispatches.org/glenn-becks-salvation-army/ ] of individual salvation. In this view, the Tea Party’s belief in a radically limited federal government is not only a question of constitutional interpretation, it is a mandate of Holy Scripture.
Just this month, Barton promoted these views on “Praise the Lord [ http://itbn.org/index/detail/lib/Networks/sublib/TBN/ec/RrcG51bjoRcfQnwzbKDLsESPOp09mvGC ],” the flagship program of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as the world’s largest religious network and America’s most-watched faith channel. “In the Bible, Jesus has a teaching about minimum wage,” Barton said. “In the Bible, Jesus has two teachings on capital gains tax.” The Bible, according to Barton, opposes those taxes as well as estate taxes and progressive income taxes. A flat tax is “what the Bible supports.”
On the same show Barton denounced government spending on welfare. “It’s not the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor and needy,” he said, “it’s the church’s responsibility.”
According to Barton, there are 205 verses in the Bible that instruct the family or church to take care of the poor, but not the government. “The government is told to do only one thing with taking care of the poor and that one thing is to make sure that when the poor come into court they get justice. That’s the only thing government is told….What we’re doing right now is for the first time in America we have ignored what the Bible says, the Bible says you don’t work, you don’t eat.” He went on to say that people “not having to work and getting free money…violates everything the Bible tells us” about dealing with the poor.
These themes are repeated in Social Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel [ http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF13E133.pdf ], a booklet published last year by the Family Research Council [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/family-research-council ], Concerned Women for America [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/concerned-women-america ], and the anti-environmentalist Cornwall Alliance [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/cornwall-alliance ]. The booklet, written by Cornwall’s Calvin Beisner [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/calvin-beisner ] (according to him, at the request of the Family Research Council [ http://www.cornwallalliance.org/newsletter/issue/newsletter-december-4-2013/ ]), was distributed at last month’s “Road to Majority [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/topics/road-majority-conference ]” conference, which was organized by Ralph Reed [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/ralph-reed ]’s Faith and Freedom Coalition [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/faith-and-freedom-coalition ].
The premise of the booklet is that “social justice” is contrary to “Biblical justice.” If that sounds familiar, you may be recalling Glenn Beck [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/glenn-beck-0 ]’s diatribes against “social justice” a few years ago, when he urged people to leave their church if its website included the phrases “social justice” or “economic justice [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/03/12/beck-attacks-social-justice/161591 ].”
It is wrong, Beisner writes, to try to mitigate inequality “through force of government.” Why? “Because God ordained the state to dispense justice, and the church to dispense grace.” According to Beisner, giving someone “unearned” benefits is grace, not justice. People should graciously serve the poor, he writes. “But if care for the needy is made a matter of justice to the needy rather than to God, then grace becomes law. Then, the needy—and those who merely profess to be needy—may claim the benefits of grace as their due by justice.”
In other words, government has no right to tax someone in order to help feed someone else.
That is a widely shared belief on the Religious Right. Speakers at Religious Right conferences like Reed’s June event, and Republican Members of Congress [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-wrong-republican-talk-about-food ], can be heard justifying cuts in food stamps with an appeal to the Bible passage that David Barton quoted on TBN. That verse, depending on your translation, says something like “he who will not work shall not eat.”
Rep. Kevin Cramer [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-on-food-stamp-cuts-if-anyone-is-not-willing-to-work-let-him-not-eat ] and Rep. Stephen Fincher [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/23/2053081/congressmans-misuse-of-bible-verse-belies-bad-theology-and-ideology-on-food-stamps/ ] of Tennessee cited that verse last year. Fincher said, “The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” In equating taxation for social services with theft, Fincher echoes Barton, Beisner, and others. (In context, by the way, the work-to-eat verse referred to early Christians [ http://religiondispatches.org/gop-lawmaker-botches-bible-to-punish-poor/ ] who were so confident of the imminent return of Christ that they quit doing anything.)
Poor people turning to the government, Beisner writes in his anti-social-justice booklet, results in “the stultifying effects of wealth redistribution by the coercive power of the state.” Even worse, he says, “it blinds [poor people] to their deepest need: the grace of God offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
This is another theme of the Republican Party’s right wing. Sharron Angle [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/sharron-angle-0 ], the GOP’s 2010 Senate nominee in Nevada, said during her campaign that entitlement programs are “idolatry [ http://religiondispatches.org/candidate-sharron-angle-accuses-opponent-of-idolatry/ ]” because they “make government our God.” Farris Wilks [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/farris-wilks ], the Texas fracking billionaire who gives huge amounts to the Heritage Foundaiton and other right-wing groups [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fracking-sugar-daddy-religious-right ], declares that “the Torah is set up on the free enterprise system” and that “Yahweh never intended for us as a people to be afraid and reliant on government.” Former Sen. Jim DeMint [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/jim-demint ], who now heads the Heritage Foundation, says “the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/15/150676/demint-big-govt/ ].”
Heritage is just one of the institutions working to make right-wing economics an article of faith just like opposition to gay rights and abortion. The Freedom Federation, one of the many right-wing entities created in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 election, brings both "mainstream" and fringe Religious Right groups together with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity [ http://www.alternet.org/story/150622/tea_party_jesus%3A_koch's_americans_for_prosperity_sidles_up_to_religious_right_for_2012_campaign ]. The Freedom Federation’s “Declaration of American Values” includes not only the expected rhetoric about traditional values, but also opposition to progressive taxation.
John Lofton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/john-lofton ], a right-wing pundit, is the spokesperson for Republican county council candidate Peroutka, and for Peroutka’s Christian Reconstructionist Institute on the Constitution [ http://religiondispatches.org/gods-law-is-the-only-law-the-genesis-of-michele-bachmann/ ], which has trained Tea Party activists on the biblical basis of the Constitution [ http://www.thenation.com/article/154944/tea-party-values ]. Lofton has spoken on “God and Government” at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pJvPheSF9U (next below)].
In 2012, in reference to an article about evangelicals disagreeing on budget priorities, Lofton wrote [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-campaign-spox-john-lofton-public-officials-job-administer-god-s-law ] that “there should be no disagreement among those who believe the Bible is true. Because it is crystal clear that in God’s Word He gives NO AUTHORITY to civil government (Caesar) to give health, education or welfare to ANYBODY. If people need help, it is the role of the Church – God’s people – to provide this help and NOT government.”
Tea Party? Religious Right? GOP? Or all of the above?
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/christian-reconstructionism-and-gop-biblical-justice-vs-social-justice
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New Anti-Choice Group Launches With Michael Peroutka Lecture On How Roe v. Wade Isn't Actually The Law
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Friday, 7/25/2014 1:20 pm
Last weekend, Iowa conservative talk show host Steve Deace held an event to launch Personhood Iowa [ http://www.radioiowa.com/2014/07/17/personhood-iowa-to-launch-this-saturday/ ], a new group he helped organize that is affiliated with [ http://www.personhood.net/index.php/personhood-advocates/personhood-advocates/personhood-advocates#Groups ] the National Personhood Alliance [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/spurned-georgia-group-launching-even-more-extreme-rival-national-right-life-committee ], a new coalition of groups that seek to outlaw abortion in all cases along with banning common forms of birth control.
In keeping with the group’s apparent mission to be so extreme that it will never attract any mainstream support, Deace invited Michael Peroutka, a regular guest on his radio show, to give an opening speech to Personhood Iowa activists [ http://personhoodiowa.com/personhood-boot-camp-part-2/ ].
Peroutka, in addition to running the far-right Institute on the Constitution [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/institute-constitution ] and a successful debt-collection business that allowed him to buy a dinosaur for the Creation Museum [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ], is now the GOP nominee [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-christian-nationalist-and-southern-secessionist-wins-gop-county-council-nom ] for a seat on the Anne Arundel, Maryland, county council. Peroutka’s close ties with the neo-Confederate League of the South [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/09/michael-peroutka-asks-for-help-from-league-of-the-south-in-bid-for-md-council-seat/ ] is causing hand-wringing in the state Republican party, with its gubernatorial nominee today disavowing [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites ] Peroutka’s candidacy.
Peroutka — who recently declared that the Maryland General Assembly is no longer a valid legislative body [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-explains-how-marriage-equality-invalidated-all-maryland-laws ] because its passage of marriage equality violated “God’s law” — told the Iowa activists that everything from seat-belt mandates to the progressive income tax to Obamacare to Roe v. Wade are not valid laws because government only has the authority to uphold what he deems to be “organic law.” In fact, he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHT0yggqFPg (below, as embedded)], all of these things are “pretended legislation,” a term used in the Declaration of Independence [ http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html ] to refer to acts of Parliament governing the American colonies.
Peroutka also presented the audience with a contrast between what he sees as the “biblical worldview,” which he says is based on the idea of literal biblical creationism, and the “pagan worldview,” which he says is based on the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution, he claimed, was responsible for the Columbine school shooting and the Holocaust, yet is still being taught through “the tragedy of public education [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiGiC6iSHA (below, as embedded)].”
Peroutka has previously argued that it is impossible to be a patriotic American and also believe in evolution [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-promotion-evolution-act-disloyalty-america ].
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/new-anti-choice-group-launches-michael-peroutka-lecture-how-roe-v-wade-isnt-actually-law
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Maryland GOPer Michael Peroutka Leads Dixie 'National Anthem' At Southern Secessionist Conference
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Monday, 7/28/2014 1:17 pm
Warren Throckmorton has dug up video of the Institute on the Constitution’s Michael Peroutka — the GOP candidate for a seat on a Maryland county council — speaking [ http://production.aws.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/26/michael-peroutka-calls-i-wish-i-was-in-dixie-the-national-anthem/ ] at the 2012 conference of the secessionist League of the South [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/league-of-the-south ], and it’s a doozy.
Peroutka’s ties with the League of the South are hardly a secret — he used to sit on the group’s board [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites (next below)] and has asked for its members help in his campaign [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/09/michael-peroutka-asks-for-help-from-league-of-the-south-in-bid-for-md-council-seat/ ] — but in his 2012 speech, he made it clear that he agrees with the group’s stand that the South may need to secede and cause the “destruction” of the current “regime.”
“I don’t disagree with Dr. Hill at all that this regime is beyond reform,” he told the crowd, referring to League of the South president Michael Hill. But he told group members he was concerned that what he calls the "biblical view" of government should “survive the secession.”
“I don’t want people from League of the South to think for one minute that I’m about reforming the current regime, or studying the Constitution is about reforming the current regime,” he said. “I, like many of you, and like Patrick Henry, probably have come to the conclusion that we smelled a rat from the beginning.”
He then asked the crowd to “stand for the national anthem”…and led the crowd in a spirited rendition of “Dixie.”
Peroutka’s influence on the Religious Right extends beyond his foray into local politics. He was the 2004 Constitution Party nominee for president, he is a great ally and funder of Religious Right hero and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ], he makes a weekly appearance with influential Iowa conservative talk show host Steve Deace (and recently helped Deace launch a new fetal “personhood” group [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/new-anti-choice-group-launches-michael-peroutka-lecture-how-roe-v-wade-isnt-actually-law (just above)]), and he recently donated a $1 million dinosaur skeleton to the Creation Museum [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ten-commandments-and-4300-year-old-dinosaur-michael-peroutka-s-web-christian-nation-influenc ].
Late last week, the Republican candidate for county executive in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where Peroutka is running for office, asked Peroutka to resign from the League of the South because his membership “could be considered racist.”
The candidate, Steve Schuh, however, reported from his conversation with Peroutka [ http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/election/schuh-calls-on-peroutka-to-resign-from-league-of-the/article_06a79a5a-5e4a-5ae9-bde0-e561b9fa4617.html ]: “He has assured me that he is not a racist and that he believes in the equality of all members of the human family. He has further assured me that he does not believe in secession of any portion of our country.”
We’ve clipped a couple pieces of Peroutka’s League of the South speech here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSbHEAOHsI (above, as embedded)], but you can find the whole thing, which was recorded by an attendee, in Throckmorton’s post [ http://production.aws.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/26/michael-peroutka-calls-i-wish-i-was-in-dixie-the-national-anthem/ ].
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/maryland-goper-michael-peroutka-leads-dixie-national-anthem-southern-secessionist-conference
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Michael Peroutka Supporter Discusses Guerilla War Against Political, Cultural Elites
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Friday, 7/25/2014 12:26 pm
We’ve been covering the candidacy of Michael Peroutka [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/michael-peroutka ], the southern secessionist and Christian Reconstructionist [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/christian-reconstructionist-and-southern-secessionist-michael-peroutka-leading-gop-primary ] who won a primary to become the Republican nominee for a county council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
This morning the Republican nominee for governor Larry Hogan renounced Peroutka [ http://www.capitalgazette.com/maryland_gazette/hot/republicans-seek-clarification-from-peroutka-on-league-of-the-south/article_2ad3db69-b3a2-54fd-a5e3-8afab7c88166.html ], while Joe Cluster, executive director of the state Republican Party, is scheduled to meet with him today. African American leaders in the state have called on the GOP to disavow Peroutka.
Meanwhile, Huffington Post blogger Jonathan Hutson reports more information on Michael Hill [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hutson/gop-leader-questions-cand_b_5619567.html ], who heads the white nationalist League of the South, on whose board Peroutka once sat [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vze4fPPkgxY (next below)]
and whose support Peroutka has sought for his candidacy.
Hutson reports on an essay [ http://leagueofthesouth.com/?p=272 ] published by Hill on the League of the South’s website on July 15 called “A Bazooka in Every Pot,” in which Hill argues that the Second Amendment allows private citizens to own any weapon system the government has, including bazookas, rocket launchers, tanks, and, if they could afford it, warships — a position that happens to be shared by GOP congressional nominee Jody Hice [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hice-second-amendment-gives-private-citizens-right-own-cannons-and-bazookas-and-missiles ] and right-wing Republican activist David Barton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-second-amendment-guarantees-individual-right-own-tank-or-fighter-jet ].
Hill went even further in his July 15 post, however, describing a scenario in which armed citizens wage “Fourth Generation Warfare” – guerilla warfare – against political and cultural elites who support “tyranny.” Hutson summarizes Hill this way:
…on July 15, Hill wrote an essay [ http://leagueofthesouth.com/?p=272 ] for the League's website titled "A Bazooka in Every Pot," in which he outlines a program of "guerrilla war," marked by "three-to-five-man" death squads which would target government leaders, journalists, and other public figures for assassination, in order to advance the League's goals.
"To oversimplify," writes Hill, "the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don't run."
Talk on the far right about a possible armed revolution against the U.S. government is increasingly common. As Miranda reported this morning, Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt has reasserted his belief that members of Congress should live “in constant trepidation” that they could be shot [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-doubles-down-telling-congresswoman-she-should-fear-being-shot (last item below)] by “sovereign” citizens if they “attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago.”
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michael-peroutka-supporter-discusses-guerilla-war-against-political-cultural-elites
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Ted Cruz, Like a BOSS! Inspirational Tea Party Speech - Austin, Texas (Full Speech)
Published on Mar 19, 2013 by Republic of Texas TV [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJHfuA0ckvduCelhrPdutbg / http://www.youtube.com/user/RevolutionATX , http://www.youtube.com/user/RevolutionATX/videos ]
Shot at the Tea Party Express rally in Austin, Texas. May 06, 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvfaS3O7CKE [with comments]
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When Extremism Goes Mainstream
Representative Steve King of Iowa
(Larry Downing/Reuters)
Just how far out is the Republican fringe?
Norm Ornstein
Jul 23 2014, 10:38 PM ET
The most interesting, and important, dynamic in American politics today is the existential struggle going on in the Republican Party between the establishment and the insurgents—or to be more accurate, between the hard-line bedrock conservatives (there are only trace elements of the old-line center-right bloc, much less moderates) and the radicals.
Of course, tugs-of-war between establishment forces and ideological wings are nothing new with our political parties. They have been a continuing factor for many decades. The Republican Party had deep-seated struggles between its Progressive wing, led by Teddy Roosevelt and Robert La Follette [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/the-original-tea-partiers-how-gop-insurgents-invented-progressivism/374557/ ], and its conservative establishment, led by William Howard Taft and House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon, going back to the turn of the 20th century.
The Progressives succeeded in stripping Speaker Cannon of his dictatorial powers in 1910, and TR's willingness to bolt the GOP and run in 1912 as a Progressive on the Bull Moose Party line killed Taft's chances of winning and elected Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The struggles continued with moderates Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey battling Taft's progeny Robert through the 1940s. And, of course, the insurgents' struggles continued through Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Reagan first moved into national politics in 1968, with an abortive challenge to centrist Richard Nixon, who won and governed in the middle on domestic policy, promoting liberal social policies on welfare and health reform. Reagan reemerged in 1976, and his foray against centrist President Ford cost Ford the election—but Reagan's own election as president in 1980 led to an era of relatively pragmatic center-right policy-making. At the same time, however, the ongoing regional changes in the country were eliminating the bases of moderate and liberal Republicans and moving the GOP center of gravity to a lily-white and hard-line base in the South and rural West.
Democrats have had their own battles. The radical populist William Jennings Bryan won control (and lost the White House three times) around the turn of the century. But the victory of the establishment with Woodrow Wilson ushered in an era of relative calm. However, a Democratic Party built on two disparate wings—Southern rural conservatives determined to maintain segregation, Northern urban liberals determined to deploy and maintain the New Deal—had an uneasy alliance that enabled the party to keep a hammerlock on Congress for decades but began to unravel in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
A more turbulent schism developed in the 1970s, when the antiwar and antiestablishment liberal wing led by Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern fought the establishment of Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Daley, with a bloody confrontation in Chicago in 1968, McGovern's short-lived triumph in 1972, and a resurgent liberal movement in the Watergate elections of 1974. The liberal wing resisted many of the policies of Jimmy Carter; the liberal challenge of Edward Kennedy to Carter in 1980 helped to doom his reelection chances. But more consecutive presidential losses in 1980, 1984, and 1988 by liberals Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis moved the party in a more pragmatic direction with the Clinton era—Bill Clinton having been a moderate governor of Arkansas and the leader of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.
Clinton's election in 1992 moved the Democrats firmly to the center on previously divisive issues like welfare and crime. But it also provided the impetus for the forces that have led to the current Republican problem. These forces were built in part around insurgent Newt Gingrich's plans to overturn the Democratic 38-year hegemony in Congress, and in part around a ruthlessly pragmatic decision by GOP leaders and political strategists to hamper the popular Clinton by delegitimizing him and using the post-Watergate flowering of independent counsels to push for multiple crippling investigations of wrongdoing (to be sure, he gave them a little help along the way). No one was more adroit at using ethics investigations to demonize opponents than Newt. In 1994, Gingrich recruited a passel of more radical candidates for Congress, who ran on a path to overturn most of the welfare state and who themselves demonized Congress and Washington. At a time of rising populist anger—and some disillusionment on the left with Clinton—the approach worked like a charm, giving the GOP its first majority in the House in 40 years, and changing the face of Congress for decades to come.
Newt's strategy and tactics were abetted and amplified by the new force of political talk radio, which had been activated by the disastrous federal pay raise in 1989-90, and of tribal cable television news. As Sean Theriault details in his book The Gingrich Senators, many of Newt's progeny moved on to the Senate and began to change it from an old club into a new forum for tribal warfare. Move on through right-wing frustration with George W. Bush's combination of compassionate conservatism and unfunded social policy (and wars) and then the election of Barack Obama, and the ingredients for a rise of radicalism and a more explosive intra-party struggle were set. They were expanded again with the eager efforts in 2010 of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Young Guns (Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan) to exploit the deep populist right-wing anger at the financial collapse and the bailouts of 2008 and 2009 by inciting the Tea Party movement. But their expectation that they could then co-opt these insurgents backfired badly.
A lot of history to get to the point. What began as a ruthlessly pragmatic, take-no-prisoners parliamentary style opposition to Obama was linked to constant efforts to delegitimize his presidency, first by saying he was not born in the U.S., then by calling him a tyrant trying to turn the country into a Socialist or Communist paradise. These efforts were not condemned vigorously by party leaders in and out of office, but were instead deflected or encouraged, helping to create a monster: a large, vigorous radical movement that now has large numbers of adherents and true believers in office and in state party leadership. This movement has contempt for establishment Republican leaders and the money to go along with its beliefs. Local and national talk radio, blogs, and other social media take their messages and reinforce them for more and more Americans who get their information from these sources. One result is that even today, a Rasmussen survey shows that 23 percent of Americans still believe Obama is not an American, while an additional 17 percent are not sure. Forty percent of Americans! This is no longer a fringe view.
As for the radicals in elected office or in control of party organs, consider a small sampling of comments:
"Sex that doesn't produce people is deviate." —Montana state Representative Dave Hagstrom.
"It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education." —Oklahoma state Representative Mike Reynolds.
"I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don't represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We're going to take this country back for the Lord. We're going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we're not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!" —Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert, at a Tea Party rally.
President Obama has "become a dictator" and needs to face the consequences of his executive actions, "whether that's removal from office, whether that's impeachment." —Iowa state Senator and U.S. Senate candidate Jodi Ernst, one of a slew of elected officials calling for impeachment or at least putting it front and center.
"I don't want to get into the debate about climate change. But I'll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There's no factories on Mars that I'm aware of." —Kentucky state Senator Brandon Smith (fact-check: the average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees).
"Although Islam had a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protections." —Georgia congressional candidate Jody Hice.
"Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done, but when you think about the immorality of wild, lavish spending on our generation and forcing future generations to do without essentials just so we can live lavishly now, it's pretty immoral." —Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas.
"God's word is true. I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big-bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior." —Representative (and M.D.) Paul Broun of Georgia.
"Now I don't assert where he [Obama] was born, I will just tell you that we are all certain that he was not raised with an American experience. So these things that beat in our hearts when we hear the National Anthem and when we say the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't beat the same for him." —Representative Steve King of Iowa.
As for the party leaders, consider some of the things that are now part of the official Texas Republican Party platform, as highlighted [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-fever-dreams-begin-irresponsibilities-texas-edition (in full above)] by The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg:
• That the Texas Legislature should "ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify" federal laws it doesn't like.
• That when it comes to "unelected bureaucrats" (meaning, Hertzberg notes, almost the entire federal workforce), Congress should "defund and abolish these positions."
• That all federal "enforcement activities" in Texas "must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county." (That would leave the FBI, air marshals, immigration officials, DEA personnel, and so on subordinate to the Texas versions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.)
• That "the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized."
• That the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank.
• That governments at all levels should "ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or 'climate justice' initiatives."
• That "all adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine.
• That "no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms." (Period, no exceptions.)
Texas, of course, may be an outlier. But the Maine Republican Party adopted a platform that called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, called global warming a myth, and demanded an investigation of "collusion between government and industry" in perpetrating that myth. It also called for resistance to "efforts to create a one world government." And the Benton County, Arkansas, Republican Party said in its newsletter [ http://www.nogy.net/bcgop/Apr_2013/index.html , via http://www.politicususa.com/2013/04/20/arkansas-gop-newsletter-calls-shooting-republicans.html ], "The 2nd Amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives."
One might argue that these quotes are highly selective—but they are only a tiny sampling (not a single one from Michele Bachmann, only one from Gohmert!). Importantly, almost none were countered by party officials or legislative leaders, nor were the individuals quoted reprimanded in any way. What used to be widely seen as loony is now broadly accepted or tolerated.
I am not suggesting that the lunatics or extremists have won. Most Republicans in the Senate are not, to use John McCain's term, "wacko birds," and most Republicans in office would at least privately cringe at some of the wild ideas and extreme views. At the same time, the "establishment" is fighting back, pouring resources into primaries to protect their preferred candidates, and we are seeing the rise of a new and encouraging movement among conservative intellectuals—dubbed "Reformicons" by E.J. Dionne [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/are-reform-conservatives-serious/371839/ ]—to come up with a new set of ideas and policy prescriptions to redefine the ideology and the party in a positive way.
But there is a darker reality. Many of the "preferred" candidates—including Ernst as well as James Lankford in Oklahoma and Jack Kingston in Georgia—are anything but pragmatic.
A few years ago, they would have been labeled hard-liners. (Kingston, a favorite of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was beaten in the Senate primary Tuesday by businessman David Perdue, who has said he would not vote for Mitch McConnell as party leader in the Senate.) It is a measure of the nature of this intra-party struggle that the mainstream is now on the hard right, and that it is close to apostasy to say that Obama is legitimate, that climate change is real, that background checks on guns are desirable, or even that the Common Core is a good idea. When we see presumably sane figures like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal shamelessly pander to the extremists, it tells us where the center of gravity in the GOP primary base, at least, is set. Of course, there are still courageous mainstream figures like Jeb Bush who are willing to deviate from the new orthodoxy, and it is possible that he can run and get the Republican presidential nomination, win the White House, and begin the process of recalibration.
But when one looks at the state of Republican public opinion (especially among the likely caucus and primary voters), at the consistent and persistent messages coming from the information sources they follow, and at the supine nature of congressional leaders and business leaders in countering extremism, it is not at all likely that what passes for mainstream, problem-solving conservatism will dominate the Republican Party anytime soon.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/when-extremism-goes-mainstream/374955/ [with comments]
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William Gheen and Alex Jones: Obama Using Obamaphones To Recruit Central American Kids To Become Child Soldiers
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Tuesday, 7/29/2014 1:33 pm
Americans for Legal Immigration [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/americans-for-legal-immigration ] PAC president William Gheen [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/william-gheen ] joined conspiracy theorist Alex Jones [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/alex-jones ] on his “Infowars” program yesterday [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a4Jmfht708 (next below; Gheen segments begin at 1:38:45 and continue through 2:02:00)]
to discuss Gheen’s pathetic nationwide rallies against Central American children fleeing to the southern border [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-immigrant-protests-bust-five-things-weekends-rallies-told-us-about-nativist-right ].
In just a few minutes, the two conspiracy-theory-minded activists combined their mental powers to develop a grand theory that President Obama is luring Central American kids with “Obamaphones [ http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/09/27/924011/the-truth-about-the-obama-phone/ ]” to recruit them to be child soldiers in a private [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-obama-raising-private-dhs-force-equally-powerful-military ] army [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/12/gohmert-isnt-sure-if-obamacares-secret-security-force-will-use-weapons-or-syringes/ ] that will confiscate guns and crack down “in a totalitarian fashion against American citizens [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E2-O85MtQo (next below, as embedded)].”
“They’re doing that by bringing in people who have no shared national or cultural experience with us, that are willing to literally say or do anything that their new masters call on them to do to protect their positions,” Gheen said. “Once Obama brings these ‘kids’ in, gives them their Obamaphone, enrolls them in Obamacare, puts them in a public school, pays for their housing, pays for their foods…These people will do anything that their leaders call them to do, and I mean literally anything.”
“The problem about trying to take up full gun confiscation and cracking down in a totalitarian fashion against American citizens is, who amongst the country hates their fellow countrymen and women so much that you can turn them to do that? They only have a small section of people that are willing to do that, and it’s probably going to be the people who remain loyal to Obama to the very end,” he continued.
“These people that come in, if they come to them and say, ‘You must do this for your glorious leader or you’re going back to the jungle and you gotta give the phone back and the food back and the free lodging back,’ they’ll probably, most of them will make the decision to do about anything.”
“That’s like the African child slave soldiers,” Jones responded. “That’s how all those African countries are run is off of poor kids, they grab at 12 and give a machine gun to. Obama talks about his national security force, just as big, just as strong as our military. It’s so bold, but when you look at it, they really are doing that.”
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/william-gheen-and-alex-jones-obama-using-obamaphones-recruit-central-american-kids-become-ch
*
Anti-Immigrant Leader Warns Response To Obama Executive Action Won't Be 'Peaceful And Political'
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Wednesday, 7/30/2014 11:33 am
William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, one of the key organizers of this month’s sparsely attended but prominently endorsed anti-immigrant protests [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-immigrant-protests-bust-five-things-weekends-rallies-told-us-about-nativist-right ], warned WorldNetDaily today that if President Obama were to issue an executive order preventing the deportation of some undocumented immigrants, that would amount to instituting “martial law” and Americans would face a choice between “subjugation” and actions that are “outside the purview of my peaceful and political efforts [ http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/new-wave-of-illegal-immigration-protests-to-sweep-u-s/ ].”
Gheen frequently hints [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-violence-may-be-needed-stop-obamas-war-white-america ] that [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-warns-violent-revolution-if-tea-party-cant-stop-immigrant-invasion ] “ illegal and violent [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gheen-violence-may-be-needed-stop-obamas-war-white-america ]” means might be needed to push back against Obama immigration policies, although he denies supporting such means [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/william-gheen-denies-calling-violence-against-president-obama-even-though-he-has-nullified-c ].
William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said any acts by the Obama administration to declare amnesty should be shot down immediately.
“That should not be possible because Obama doesn’t have the constitutional authority to declare any such amnesty for any group of people, and any declaration is a declaration of dictatorship and a form of martial law,” he told WND.
ALIPAC is organizing a second wave of national protests against amnesty starting Saturday, Aug. 2, and continuing through Oct. 24-25.
“I’m calling it martial law because it will be a form of law that is not the rule of law, not rule by Congress or the Constitution,” he said. “If Congress does not move to immediately correct the abuse of power, which Boehner has said he will not, then that leaves the American public with some very dire choices.”
Gheen said he didn’t want to discuss what those choices might be.
“One of those choices is subjugation; the other is outside the purview of my peaceful and political efforts, but I hope that people will channel their anger into the 2014 election cycle to politically destroy and remove from office as many Obama allies as possible, every Democrat and every Republican like Lamar Alexander and John Boehner. John Boehner is protecting the president. He is protecting Barack Obama.”
Gheen is now organizing a “second wave” of anti-immigrant protests in the states and districts of Republicans who he sees as too open to immigration reform or friendly to the president.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-immigrant-leader-warns-response-obama-executive-action-wont-be-peaceful-and-political
--
Larry Pratt Predicts Immigration Reform Will Lead To 'Communism': 'Kiss Our Republic Goodbye'
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wednesday, 7/30/2014 11:10 am
Gun Owners of America [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/gun-owners-america ] head Larry Pratt [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/larry-pratt ] has been insistent that Republicans must [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-immigration-reform-and-ted-cruz-s-loyalty ] oppose [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-reform-will-grant-citizenship-gazillion-immigrants-wholl-be-sitting-around-drawing-wel ] immigration reform [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gun-owners-america-warns-you-could-lose-all-your-guns-2035-if-immigration-reform-passes ] in order to save gun rights, which he claims are threatened by immigrants.
In an interview with extremist talk show host Stan Solomon [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/stan-solomon ] that was posted [ https://vimeo.com/101320971 ] online last week, Pratt alleged [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5pqSVdNWFs (below, as embedded)] that immigration reform would destroy the GOP and therefore the country: “That means kiss our Second Amendment goodbye, it means, really, kiss our republic goodbye, because if you give the Democrats a lock on all of the levels of government, the country goes communist.”
“It’s just the end because they know no limit to the big government that they support,” he said. “It will be extremely dangerous, and gun owners will be early on in the sights of those Democrats that might be voted for by the newly minted voters. So the idea of amnesty is a really bad idea.”
Pratt and Solomon also agreed that Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the GOP leadership have effectively “switched sides” and joined the Democratic Party.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-predicts-immigration-reform-will-lead-communism-kiss-our-republic-goodbye
*
Gun Owners Of America Chief Embraces Fringe 'Obama's Real Father' Birther Theory
7/14/2014
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/larry-pratt-promotes-obamas-real-father-birther-theory ) embedded]
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gun-owners-america-chief-embraces-fringe-obamas-real-father-birther-theory
*
Larry Pratt Doubles Down On Telling Congresswoman She Should Fear Being Shot
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Friday, 7/25/2014 10:18 am
Prominent gun lobbyist Larry Pratt is doubling down on his insistence that members of Congress should have a “healthy fear” of being shot, lecturing a congresswoman who felt threatened by one of his group’s members that she just doesn’t understand the Constitution.
Right Wing Watch first reported [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-glad-members-congress-have-healthy-fear-being-shot ] Pratt’s comments in a March interview with radio host Bill Cunningham. Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, told Cunningham that a member of his group had spoken to a congresswoman who told him, “you want to shoot me, don’t you.”
“Well, that’s probably a healthy fear for them to have,” Pratt said. “You know, I’m kind of glad that’s in the back of their minds. Hopefully they’ll behave.”
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/larry-pratt-hopes-members-of ) embedded]
The quote made it into a recent profile of Pratt in Rolling Stone [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-zealot-larry-pratt-is-the-gun-lobbys-secret-weapon-20140714 , http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-and-radical-right ], where it caught the eye [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gabrielle-giffords-husband-no-candidate-office-should-accept-support-larry-pratts-organizati ] of Mark Kelly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/mark-kelly ], whose wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was critically injured in an assassination attempt, and of Rep. Carolyn Maloney [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/carolyn-maloney ], who it turns out was the threatened congresswoman Pratt had been talking about.
When Kelly called for elected officials to reject all future support from Pratt and Maloney called for an investigation into his comments, Pratt responded by calling Maloney “foolish [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gabrielle-giffords-husband-no-candidate-office-should-accept-support-larry-pratts-organizati ].”
Then, this week, Pratt doubled down, issuing an open letter to Maloney [ http://gunowners.org/media7232014.htm ], a New York Democrat, claiming that she does not understand the Constitution and telling her once again that she “should do her job in constant trepidation” that she will be shot: “Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.”
You reported that the Capitol Police and House sergeant-at-Arms concluded that there was “nothing to be done,”[3] but since you apparently do not “get it,” allow me to explain the obvious. I have never encouraged, or even suggested, that anyone harm anyone. Rather, my speech was designed to educate citizens, and politicians, that it is the fact that Americans are armed that allows them to resist efforts to be dominated, intimidated, or controlled by politicians.
…
You should do your job in constant trepidation that:
* Should your constituents disapprove of your job performance, you will be publicly criticized from the soap box;
* Should you enact unconstitutional legislation in violation of your oath of office, you will be voted out via the ballot box;
* Should criminal charges be brought against Americans for crimes which are not authorized by the U.S. Constitution, these prosecutions will be nullified in the jury box; and
* Should you attempt to disarm Americans the way the British crown tried 240 years ago, the same sovereign people who constituted this government using the cartridge box someday may need to reconstitute it, as clearly anticipated by the Declaration of Independence.
…
Private ownership and skilled use of firearms is what enabled our country to gain its independence, and it is what continues to preserve our liberty. Someday, I hope that you study this aspect of the history of our great nation, that currently allows you to serve in the People’s House, and come to understand the great principles on which it was founded and continues to operate.
© 2014 People For the American Way (emphasis in original)
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-doubles-down-telling-congresswoman-she-should-fear-being-shot
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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