Maya Angelou: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” (source and source)
- How Trump and his acolytes are openly planning to set up an authoritarian government, should he rewin the Presidency;
- Similarly, Republicans in Ohio and Alabama are defying the will of the voters, and the decisions of the Supreme Court, when those results don’t go their own way;
- How the fringe conservatives are Nazis and racist conspiracy theorists;
- How “Creation Care” is the evangelical substitute for rational response to climate change, and how homeschooling mothers still dissemble to their children.
Today’s examples are how they’re telling who they are, yet again.
Front page of today’s New York Times: Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025, subtitled “The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.”
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
And what do we call it when one group wants to take more and more control of the government?
What fascinates me in the piece is this comment from one of Trump’s masterminds behind this plan.
“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
I can’t quite understand how the structure of the government would influence liberal or conservative policies. Well, unless because democracy is a liberal policy? And conservative policies would be authoritarian and fascist? Don’t these people realize they are defying the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who set up this tripartite government precisely for such reasons?
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
Some pushback:
“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
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Local examples:
Adam Lee, OnlySky, 17 Jul 2023: When you can’t win, change the rules: Abortion and Ohio’s Issue 1
Overview:
American voters support abortion rights, even in traditionally conservative states. Ohio is the next state where polls show the pro-choice position could cruise to victory—and to prevent that, Republicans want to make it harder for citizens to make their voices heard.
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And:
Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 17 Jul 2023: Alabama Republicans Are Daring the Supreme Court to Uphold Its Own Voting Rights Ruling
Alabama Republicans took a major step toward openly defying the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, advancing a new congressional map that fails to comply with the court’s landmark Voting Rights Act decision in June. In Allen v. Milligan, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered the state to draw an additional congressional district that gives Black voters a meaningful opportunity to elect the representative of their choice; instead, Republican legislators have drawn a white-majority district that Donald Trump would have handily carried in 2020. Lawmakers passed this map out of committee on a party-line vote, and the GOP-controlled Legislature appears likely to adopt it by Friday.
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Meanwhile, the conservative fringe are outing themselves as full-out Nazis.
MediaIte, 17 Jul 2023: Trump’s Neo-Nazi Dinner Guest Delivers Horrifically Anti-Semitic Speech Endorsing Trump and Declaring ‘Holy War’
Nick Fuentes endorses Trump, of course, as as the headline says, has been Trump’s dinner guest. The article cites passages from the Talmud — taken out of context, it’s claimed, but why do we matter anymore what ancient desert tribes thought??
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RFK Jr. is barely any better.
CNN, 15 Jul 2023: Jewish groups denounce RFK Jr.’s false remarks that Covid-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews and Chinese people
Oddly, RFK Jr. is gaining Republican supporters.
BBC News, 17 Jul 2023: RFK Jr’s conspiracy theories and Republican supporters
Opening with:
Robert F Kennedy Jr is running for US president as a Democrat, but the unusual backing he is receiving from right-wingers and his history of amplifying conspiracy theories has raised suspicions about his motivations.
Over the weekend, Mr Kennedy doubled down on remarks suggesting Covid-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” to “attack” Caucasians and black people but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Arguing he had “never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered”, the candidate alleged he was being smeared and cited a study published by the National Institutes of Health looking at how human genetic factors contribute to Covid transmission.
But an author of the study told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that its findings had “never supported” Mr Kennedy’s claims.
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OnlySky, Captain Cassidy, 13 Jul 2023: Meet ‘creation care,’ the evangelical substitute for environmental activism, subtitled “Evangelicals can’t care about anything unless they can feel like they literally own it.”
This is curious as an example of how people (not only conservatives) can accept certain evidence about the world only if they can fit it into their pre-existing worldview.
Overview:
As a substitute for accepting reality about climate change, evangelicals have decided that Jesus has given them ownership of the entire planet. Thus, they really ought to take care of it so he doesn’t get mad at them for breaking his gift. That sounds good—until you read the Christianese terms and conditions.
What struck me was this passage about an evangelical mother homeschooling her son. Every time I read or hear about a family homeschooling their children, I am suspicious: what are these parents trying to shield their children from? Most of the time, I gather, it’s about prioritizing the Bible. In this, the reality a climate change, with a nonsensical comparison.
A long time ago, I saw a short clip of an evangelical mother homeschooling her young son. The lad looked about nine years old and was decidedly not enthused about being filmed while engaging with substandard pseudoscience at his home’s kitchen table.
Somehow, he feigned interest in his mom’s placement of two cups of water in front of him. She’d carefully made sure that the water in the cups was exactly one degree (Fahrenheit, I assume) different.
Now, she asked him to test the temperature of the two glasses with his finger. He did so. She asked him if he could tell her which cup contained the warmer water. He could not.
“See?” she asked triumphantly. “One degree isn’t a big deal.” Then, she swooped in for the kill: Global warming is obviously fake, just some liberal ploy to, I don’t know, put oil companies out of business.
All those people saying that the Earth couldn’t get one degree warmer or bad things would happen? They were wrong. One degree is no biggie.
Tentatively, the lad agreed.
She was wrong. The writer goes on to explain…
Because yes, a planet that is one degree warmer is a huge freaking ginormous big deal, Homeschooling Evangelical Moms of the World.
This long article goes on with many examples of the dangers of “Christianese.”
If the world survives Climate Change, it will be despite these people.
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Enough for today. Well, this.
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There on the shore is a city… a sky filled with music…
