Replies to post #456170 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Mike Johnson’s Office Walks Back Reason For Blurring Insurrectionists’ Faces

FLIP-FLOP

After saying faces were blurred in security footage to shield alleged Jan. 6 rioters from prosecution, a spokesperson confirmed the DOJ already has access to the unedited clips.

Josh Fiallo Breaking News Reporter
Published Dec. 05, 2023 5:20PM EST


Mike Johnson looks down during a press conference in November.
Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz

Just hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared Tuesday that rioters in the Jan. 6 insurrection would have their faces blurred in security footage so they’d avoid prosecution by the DOJ, a spokesperson walked back the Republican leader’s statement.

Speaking at a press conference, Johnson said, “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.”

He added that he didn’t want the House’s release of thousands of hours worth of security footage from Jan. 6—slated to be released in batches over the coming months—to cause insurrectionists any more “concerns and problems” than they’ve already faced.

Johnson: We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ pic.twitter.com/pQ6fSlAp9W

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 5, 2023

Raj Shah, a spokesperson for Johnson, wrote in a statement that his boss was mistaken on the reasoning for the blurred faces, insisting that the decision to conceal identities was to protect rioters from harassment by the public—not from prosecution by the DOJ, who already has the raw footage.

BullSHIT, the 'boss', Rep Biblical Republic, said what he meant.

“Faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” he said.

Shah’s clarification put an end to confusion about whether federal prosecutors already had access to all of the U.S. Capitol’s security footage, which has been instrumental to the prosecution of 1,200 rioters, or not.

Johnson, like other Republicans, has pushed for the full release of footage from the riot to seemingly show that the insurrection was mostly non-violent, despite there being 117 people who’ve been accused or convicted on charges that include using a deadly or dangerous weapon, or causing serious bodily injury to a police officer.

On Tuesday, Johnson said the tapes’ release will allow America to “draw their own conclusions” about what happened.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-johnsons-office-walks-back-reason-for-blurring-insurrectionists-faces?ref=home?ref=home

[fuagf]

After watching that Fox video this time had to reply, so -- The GOP’s Foolish Campaign Against Vaccinating Undocumented Immigrants

"He snuck up on most. You have it spot on now. See excerpts -- Hate Groups Rejoice Over Newly Elected Speaker Mike Johnson"

It’s not just immoral. It’s self-destructive.

By William Saletan
March 09, 20219:39 PM


Rep. Steve Scalise speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images

Many links

On Tuesday morning, House Republicans held a news conference to declare another crisis at the border. But this time, the warning came with a lethal twist. Rep. Liz Cheney, the GOP’s third-ranking House leader, said Democrats had “decided to open the border and to let in thousands of people, potentially, who have got COVID.” Rep. Steve Scalise, the party’s second-ranking leader, warned, “There are superspreader caravans coming across our southern border.” Cheney and Scalise echoed Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, who accused President Joe Biden last week of “releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who have COVID into Texas communities.” Abbott also claimed that public officials “refused to test” the immigrants and that the Biden administration was “putting these people on buses and sending them” throughout the country.

All of these allegations are false or misleading. But Republicans aren’t just lying. They’re making the situation worse. While vilifying undocumented immigrants as potential COVID carriers, they’re refusing to vaccinate them.

On Feb. 1, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement encouraging undocumented immigrants to sign up for COVID vaccinations. The statement promised that immigration officers would “not conduct enforcement operations at or near vaccine distribution sites.” Scalise attacked the statement, calling it “President Biden’s plan to vaccinate illegal immigrants ahead of Americans.” A week later, at a Feb. 11 House hearing, Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, proposed an amendment to force these immigrants to the back of the vaccine line. Rep. Debbie Lesko, an Arizona Republican, framed the issue as a political weapon, warning that she would tell her constituents “my Democratic colleagues are putting illegal immigrants over them.” Fox News picked up this line of attack and has been running with it ever since.

Technically, Republicans aren’t proposing to ban vaccinations for undocumented immigrants. But in practice, their position comes to the same thing. No “illegal immigrants” should get shots until “all” documented people are vaccinated, says Lesko. Scalise’s office says it’s a matter of basic math: “For every vaccine an illegal immigrant gets, that’s one an American citizen waiting in line is not getting.” Duncan, as he presented his amendment, declared, “The American government should not use American tax dollars on vaccines for non-American citizens.” That principle would rule out immunization of noncitizen legal residents as well as people who don’t have documents.

Duncan describes vaccination as a free health “benefit” that’s being stolen by foreigners. But vaccination doesn’t just benefit the person who gets the shot. It protects everyone else, too, by eliminating or radically reducing that person’s ability to transmit the virus. In fact, by this logic, undocumented immigrants should be a target group for inoculation. They’re in the thick of the economy, and most of them aren’t sitting at desks on Zoom calls. They make up half of our farmworkers, about 10 percent of the meatpacking industry (some estimates range up to 30 percent or higher), and more than 8 percent of the total workforce in Texas. Many are doing high-contact medical jobs, including long-term care.

Scalise and Duncan portray these people as hustlers who jumped the line to get into the United States and now want to “jump ahead” of everyone else to get vaccines. But according to clinics around the country, undocumented immigrants are hanging back from vaccination, in part because they’re afraid they’ll be seized and deported. That fear is dangerous not just for them but for everyone around them, because in many cases, their living conditions—shared residences, low savings, no access to unemployment benefits—make it more likely that they’ll get infected and that they’ll have to keep working anyway.

The GOP’s scare campaign about caravans is particularly bizarre. At the Feb. 11 House hearing, Scalise described one of the “superspreader” caravans he claimed was coming up from Latin America. He said (falsely) that Biden had told migrants they could get the vaccine for free, and that this offer had “encouraged more people to come here illegally.” Scalise told his colleagues that vaccinations for undocumented immigrants would “add an incentive to have even more people come here illegally and take the vaccine away from Americans who can’t get it today.”

It’s hard to know where to begin with this silly argument. If caravans are known superspreaders—as Scalise, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, and other Republicans continue to allege—then why would anyone, ostensibly desperate to get vaccinated and avoid COVID, join such a throng? According to Scalise, the migrants in these caravans haven’t been vaccinated (that’s why they want the vaccine), they don’t have immunity derived from exposure to the virus (that’s why they’re potential spreaders), and “they’re not wearing masks.” It’s ludicrous to think anyone would trudge across a continent with such a group, based on the possibility of vaccination at the end of the journey.

Bashing undocumented immigrants is a routine tactic from the Republican playbook. You take anything that working-class Americans don’t have enough of—health care, housing, money for college—and accuse Democrats of giving it to “illegals” instead. There’s a principled argument for drawing this distinction: People who don’t follow the law shouldn’t get the same benefits as people who do. But in a respiratory pandemic, that distinction becomes irrelevant. The virus doesn’t care whether you have papers. It only cares whether you breathe.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/republicans-covid-vaccines-undocumented-immigrants-lies.html

[fuagf]

The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith

"He snuck up on most. You have it spot on now. See excerpts
-- Hate Groups Rejoice Over Newly Elected Speaker Mike Johnson"

Like a two year old child, this is as relevant as ever.

Ruth Braunstein

Some sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals. But that’s just part of the story

Tue 25 Jan 2022 22.13 AEDT
Last modified on Thu 27 Jan 2022 08.45 AEDT


Rev Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham, records an invocation for the Republican National Convention in August 2020.
Photograph: Drew Angerer/EPA

What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? As a sociologist who has studied American religion and politics for many years, I have often struggled to make sense of these dramatic but seemingly disconnected changes. I now believe .. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srab050 .. they all can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash to the religious right.

Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion in public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.

People do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate
to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups

In a 2002 article .. http://www.jstor.com/stable/3088891 , sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize ..https://www.amazon.com/American-Secularism-Cultural-Nonreligious-Transformation/dp/1479867411 .. the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”

While pathbreaking, this research has been relatively narrow in its focus. This is because it has typically started with the puzzle of the rising “nones” and worked backward in search of a cause, landing on backlash against the religious right. I wondered what would happen if we flipped t his question around, and started with the rise of the religious right and public concerns about its radicalism. We could then consider the varied ways that backlash against it has manifested, including but not limited to the rise of the “nones”.

Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is what I call a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements .. https://www.jstor.org/stable/800260 , where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.

But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.

‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?
Read more .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/15/southern-baptist-convention-president-right

Similarly, those who associate with the religious left .. https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Progressive-Activism-Politics-Transformation/dp/1479852902 .. do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/opinion/sunday/progressive-christians-politics.html .. in the New York Times “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”

Finally, new research .. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jssr.12641 .. inds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.

Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out .. http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/ajps.12308 . Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.

Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/evangelical-republican.html .. suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump . Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.

Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.

Ruth Braunstein is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/25/the-backlash-against-rightwing-evangelicals-is-reshaping-american-politics-and-faith