Stephan: What kind of party would put a person like Scott Esk forward as a candidate? And what kind of person, candidate or not, would openly advocate, as Esk has, stoning LGBTQ people to death? And what kind of person would vote for such an individual? This advocacy of violence has become an accepted part of the MAGAt world and is one of the things driving the Great Schism Trend.
MAGAt candidate Scott Esk Credit: Esk Campaign Facebook Page
A GOP candidate in Oklahoma is getting attention for comments he made several years ago when he justified the death penalty by stoning for gay people. When asked recently about it, he didn’t disavow his previous comments.
Scott Esk, 56, is running in the Republican primary runoff election tomorrow for a seat in the state house, and local media is bringing up some extreme comments he made in the past. He’s not handling them well.
In 2013, Esk was commenting in a Facebook conversation about the Pope saying that he couldn’t judge gay people. Esk posted some Bible quotations, including the part of Romans 1 where the Bible says that a long list of people who sinned is “worthy of death.”
Another person asked him: “So, just to be clear, you think we should execute homosexuals (presumably by stoning)?”
Esk responded: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it… Ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
Stephan: I have been doing research for weeks now trying to work out why the MAGAt minority functionally lives in a different reality from the rational majority of Americans and makes choices that literally boggle my mind, and probably yours as well. How do people, for instance, like Matt Gaetz, who apparently has just won his primary, get the votes that give them those wins? How do people choose to support a person like Gaetz with his sexual and grifter scandals? Here, I think, is one answer to my search. Not the complete answer, but a significant part of the answer.
Credit: Getty
It’s easy to think you’re a font of knowledge. And while you may have plenty of skills and expertise, it’s quite likely you know less than you think.
If you consider yourself reasonably intelligent and educated, you might assume that you have a fair grasp on the core ways the world works – knowledge about the familiar inventions and natural phenomena that surround us.
Now, think about the following questions: How are rainbows formed? Why can sunny days be colder than cloudy days? How does a helicopter fly? How does a toilet flush?
Next, ask yourself: could you give a detailed response to any or all these questions? Or do you have only the vaguest gist of what’s happening in each case?
If you are like many of the participants in psychological studies, you may have initially expected to perform very well. However, when they are asked to offer a nuanced answer to each question, most people are completely stumped – just as you may be, too.
This bias is known as an “illusion of knowledge”. You may think that […]
Stephan: It seems there is a story like this one almost every week, from one Red state or another. These indictments of MAGAt officials at the state level are so common that I wonder, do you have to be dishonest scum in order to run on the Republican ticket?
Credit: FBI agent / AFP
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that disgraced former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren have been indicted on 20 federal charges stemming from a “bribery and kickback conspiracy.”
The charges include “theft from programs receiving federal funds; bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds; honest services wire fraud; and conspiracy to commit money laundering,” according to the DOJ statement, which says that “Both were arrested at their homes this morning by FBI agents and will make initial appearances before a U.S. Magistrate Judge later today.”
“According to the indictment, beginning in and around October 2019, Casada … and another conspirator, also a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to enrich themselves by exploiting Casada and the other conspirator’s official positions as legislators to obtain State approval of Phoenix Solutions as a Mailer Program vendor to provide constituent mail services to members of the Tennessee General Assembly,” said the DOJ. “Casada, Cothren, and the other conspirator further […]
Stephan: The Supreme Court Citizens United Decision, which was engineered by MAGAt world, legalized bribery and gave the uber-rich the ability to create MAGAt world, and buy the kind of christofascist anti-democratic government we are becoming. Now we have one uber-rich christofascist who has given $1.6 billion to be controlled by christofascist Leonard Leo, the man who through the Federalist society engineered the Supreme Court appointees of Donald Trump. Because bribery is legal, and there are essentially no limits to how much dark money can be spent on misinformation and media, we are going to see a massive attempt on the part of the MAGAts to dismantle American democracy. What stops this? Only you and your family and friends, and only if you vote only for Democrats.
Leonard Leo Credit: PBS
A new group led by a prominent conservative lawyer has received $1.6 billion from one donor — the largest single contribution to a politically focused nonprofit that’s ever been made public, and a fortune that could be used to fuel right-wing interests.
The nonprofit, Marble Freedom Trust, received the contribution in the form of stock and then funneled more than $200 million to other conservative organizations last year, a tax form CNN obtained from the IRS shows.
Marble Freedom is led by Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, who advised former President Donald Trump on his Supreme Court picks and runs a sprawling network of other right-wing nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors, which are often referred to as dark money groups.
A CNN review of financial documents connected the donation to Barre Seid, a low-profile, 90-year-old Chicago electronics company executive and philanthropist who has previously been tied to smaller anonymous contributions to other right-wing groups. The New York Times, which first reported the contribution on Monday, also identified Seid as the […]
Stephan: This, from the mouth of a prominent christofacist you've probably never heard of, is what the MAGAts plan for America. Does this sound like a country you would enjoy living in?
Christofascist Dalton Clodfelter
Earlier this year, far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters gave white nationalist,Christian fascistDalton Clodfelter a nightly program on his Stew Peters Network called “The Right Dissident.”
Last Thursday, Clodfelter used his show to call for the establishment of a “far-right authoritarian government” in this nation that will imprison its political enemies, establish Christianity as the national religion, and outlaw all secular education.
“Once we take our country back, we will have federal agents kicking down the doors of every treasonous Democrat, every treasonous globalist, every homosexual couple that has molested a child, and they will be arrested, and they will be sentenced […]
