If you read me regularly you know that I have been calling the merging of White evangelical christianity and what used to be the Republican Party, christofascism. I don’t capitalize the C because this cult may use the language of the Bible but they have nothing to do with Jesus’ teaching or the values of Christianity. This is a cohort defined by their anger, White racism, resentment, sense of self-righteousness, victimization, and their worship of criminal Trump. Not the brightest group as proven by the fact that they believe what Trump vomits out every day, and think he actually gives a damn about them.
Long known for his improvised and volatile stage performances, former President Donald J. Trump now tends to finish his rallies on a solemn note.
Soft, reflective music fills the venue as a hush falls over the crowd. Mr. Trump’s tone turns reverent and somber, prompting some supporters to bow their heads or close their eyes. Others raise open palms in the air or murmur as if in prayer.
In this moment, Mr. Trump’s audience is his congregation, and the former president their pastor as he delivers a roughly 15-minute finale that evokes an evangelical altar call, the emotional tradition that concludes some Christian services in which attendees come forward to commit to their savior.
“The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,” he recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”
Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is a nightmare of stupidity, willful ignorance, and conspiracy delusions. I hope no SR reader is going to make the mistake of voting for this man or his VP mate Nicole Shanahan. We have a two-party system, voting for a third-party candidate in this case is really a vote for Trump. But apart from that Kennedy’s and Shanahan’s anti-vaxxerism in conjunction with criminal Trump’s madness is responsible for the death of a million people, and Shanahan’s anti-IVF nonsense is just more Earth II madness. These are dangerous people.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate has been a harsh critic of in vitro fertilization, while funding alternative research on extending women’s reproductive years.
Nicole Shanahan has for years denounced IVF — calling it “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”
At the same time, she has also been a vocal proponent of and financial backer for unconventional research into the possibility of helping women having children into their 50s and exploring no-cost interventions to help women conceive, such as exposure to sunlight.
“I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health. I would love to fund something like that,” Shanahan said to a 2023 panel with the National Academy of Medicine, a group to which she said she had previously donated $100 million. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Bia-Echo’s donation amounted to $150,000.
The statement was met with chuckles, “Yeah, let’s do it,” she added. “I just have an intuition that could be interesting and maybe work.”
As a candidate, her criticisms of IVF have taken on heightened importance following an Alabama Supreme Court’s […]
I have been warning SR readers for over a decade of what is coming about climate change and the migrations it is going to cause so you can prepare and make prudent decisions about your own future. (See SR archive, and search on “migration”) Now others, like this article, are taking up this same warning. I urge you to do some research on what the projections are for your region, and when something is likely to happen.
Credit: Adobe
Just months after the Carr and Mendocino Complex fires ripped through nearly 700,000 acres of northern California in 2018, the wind-driven Camp Fire erupted near Chico. The fire scorched through the abnormally dry vegetation, blazing and spreading rapidly, and at one time burned some 10,000 acres in just 90 minutes. It caught the residents of the cozy town of Paradise, nestled in the western Sierra Nevada forests, completely by surprise. The conflagration quickly consumed the entire town, destroying everything and killing 85 people.
Most of the rest of the 26,000 residents fled, and survivors relocated, mostly to California’s Central Valley. Around a quarter have returned to rebuild their homes and communities, despite the fire risks, but many of Paradise’s diaspora cannot or do not want to attempt doing so. Now that they’ve been uprooted, they’re moving on with their lives elsewhere.
Such a scenario is a sign of what’s to come for a growing swath of Americans in the climate-change era, Abrahm Lustgarten argues in “On the Move: The […]
Yet another story of the United States failing to educate its young. Fifty-four percent of us can’t read past 6th grade level as it stands now. Forty-three percent can’t read past 5th grade level. Our public schools are being deliberately sabotaged by what was once the Republican Party, and this is the latest report on what is going on with college applications. What all of this is telling anyone who will listen is that in the near future Americans will be the most poorly educated of the developed democracies, if we are still even a democracy. By every social data outcome measure I can find the United States is a country in a major decline. Few in politics will talk about it, corporate media rarely covers it, but that is what is happening.
Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Harold M. Lambert / Getty.
For years, Senator Lamar Alexander was known for theatrically unfurling a paper document so long that he could hold it above his head and still see it drag along the chamber floor. It was the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a form that every college student and their family must complete to be eligible for federal grants and student loans. Detractors argued that its length (more than 100 questions) and complexity (experts joked that you needed a Ph.D. to complete it) deterred students from getting aid and attending college. In December 2020, on the eve of Alexander’s retirement, Congress finally passed legislation to simplify the form, with implementation ultimately scheduled for the high-school class of 2024. It was a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance: less paperwork, more kids going to college.
That was the idea, anyway. In practice, seemingly every phase of the implementation has gone wrong; an ostensible process of simplification has […]
Members of Congress are leaving, now staff are talking about leaving. How much clearer does it have to get that the U.S. Congress is not functioning properly and our democracy is deteriorating? What do you think will happen if criminal Trump is elected?
House Speaker Mike Johnson on February 1, 2024 Credit: Creative Commons
The wave of retirement announcements and sudden resignations by members of the 118th Congress may soon be spreading to lawmakers’ staff as well.
Senior-level aides on both sides of the aisle are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ossified, hyper-partisan climate in Washington, DC, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Post’s Paul Kane attributed staffers’ disgust with working on Congress to not just “pandemic fallout, ranging from partisan battles over mask mandates to the long closure of the buildings to the public,” but also “the ongoing toxicity since the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.”
“Congress is broken,” the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) stated in its 2024 “State of the Congress” report. The report noted that nearly half of senior aides in both chambers of Congress are considering leaving their jobs because of “heated rhetoric from the other party.”
“Only 12% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans agreed that ‘Congress is currently functioning […]
