Stephan: If you were watching the disgusting hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, like me you heard Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, while under oath, fail to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the legitimately elected President. This tells all of us how deeply anti-democratic and fascist the Republican Party has become.
Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall, who would not say under oath that Joe Biden was a legitimately elected president. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
On Thursday, March 24 — the fourth and final day in the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee — one of the Republican witnesses was Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. And when Marshall was questioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, he refused to admit that Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election.
The Washington Post reports, “Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) repeatedly questioned Marshall — who was the chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s Rule of Law Defense Fund in the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — over what involvement he may have had in the robocalls the Rule of Law Defense Fund sent out urging recipients to march to the Capitol that day. Marshall, who said he was not in Washington on January 6, 2021, protested Whitehouse’s efforts to ask about the group’s ties to the […]
Stephan: For whatever reason corporate media, particularly television news channels just don't seem interested in the endless criminal corrupt reports about the Republican fascists. This one is about Nebraska Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. You've probably never heard of him, but like most Republicans, he was for rent and a Nigerian billionaire rented him. Today he was found guilty by a jury on three felony counts of lying to the FBI. It only took the jury three hours to reach their decision.
Criminally corrupt Republican Representative Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska Credit: Facebook
Testimony resumed on Monday for the federal corruption trial of Nebraska Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. One main witness in the trial was a Los Angeles doctor who gave personal accounts of his role in funneling money to the official.
The Omaha World-Herald quoted Dr. Eli Ayoub, who confessed that he funneled money from Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in a brown paper bag to the Fortenberry campaign.
“A go-between handed the money to Ayoub. Ayoub set the bag of cash in the back seat of his car. After arriving for lunch following a funeral, Ayoub handed his keys to a valet and went inside the restaurant,” said the report.
The bag of cash was still sitting on the seat when he got the car back, however.
Prosecutor Mack Jenkins asked to confirm if he really left $30,000 in cash on the back seat of his car.
“Yes, I remembered I forgot it in the car during lunch, and I was very nervous about it,” Ayoub told the court.
Stephan: Republican Senator and fascist White supremacist Mike Braun said out loud what many in the Republican Party, both in-office and as voters believe but don't say except amongst themselves: interracial marriage should not be legal. How a single Black, Hispanic, or Asian person can vote for a Republican amazes me. If you are anything but a White person to the White supremacist fascists that make up the Republican cult you are second class. To some in the cult you're not really a human.
Republican and White supremacist Senator Mike Braun of Indiana making it clear that he does not believe interracial marriage should be legal.
The U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, a Republican, argued on Tuesday.
Suggesting the historic Loving v. Virginiaruling by the Supreme Court decades ago was a case of improper judicial activism, Braun said the court should have left that decision to the individual states, including those which had already outlawed interracial marriage.
“When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do,” Braun told reporters. “It’s the beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves.”
The Republican’s larger point was to publicly dissuade President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, away from what he described as “activist” behavior from the bench.
“She seems well-qualified. But whenever I vote for a […]
Stephan: Regular SR readers will recognize this line of research, the psychophysiology of politics, because I have been writing about it for the last six years. (See SR archives). The paper upon which this report is based is freely available to read, although not downloadable or open to copy, and I urge my readers to click through and read it since fear coupled with a sense of entitlement, low IQ, and willful ignorance are the sources of fascism in America.
Citation: "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," Social Science Quarterly Volume 102, Issue 1 January 2021 Pages 179-197. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ssqu.12906
Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence, Arizona. The rally marks Trump’s first of the midterm election year with races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty
The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America’s democracy from the rising neofascist tide.
American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party’s most “moderate” members are far more extreme than the most “conservative” Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in […]
Stephan: Putin is a christofascist authoritarian, an important part of his psychology that is not, in my opinion, getting the attention that it should. Here is a report on this.
Putin and Patriarch Kirill llustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
Beneath the gold onion domes of the Danilov Monastery a few miles south of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s chief shaman explains why Russia is hell-bent on destroying Ukraine.
“If we see [Ukraine] as a threat, we have the right to use force to ensure the threat is eradicated,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently preached to his church’s 90 million faithful followers. “We have entered into a conflict which has not only physical but also metaphysical significance. We are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.”
The wartime coalition between Putin and his patriarch is called symphonia, an ironclad alliance between church and state that assures reciprocal reverence, with neither institution presuming to dominate the other. Theologians have spent centuries bickering over the fine points, which have now impaled 44 million Ukrainians as the victims of a bloodthirsty land-grab that Putin and the Patriarch have packaged as a holy campaign to cleanse souls.
“A new world order is born before our very eyes,” is how Putin described the relationship in […]
