- Long before Project 2025, Christian conservatives have had an agenda to impose their values on everyone;
- How some conservatives will call any evidence about the good economy fake news;
- How MAGA disinformation can be deadly, but Trump’s followers would rather “spit on reality than admit liberals are right about something”
Long before Project 2025, it seems, an organization called the Alliance Defending Freedom has been working toward the same goals. (Of course, its use of the term “freedom” is a little like the use of “science” in “Christian Science.”)
Slate, Susan Rinkunas, 10 Oct 2024: Ban Abortion. End Gay Marriage. Outlaw Birth Control., subtitled “A powerful Christian conservative legal group is quietly reshaping America through the courts. Here’s what it’s after.”
If you heard about a well-funded right-wing group with a detailed plan to achieve conservative policy goals, you’d likely think of Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation–backed coalition has crafted an agenda for a second Donald Trump term that encompasses some truly unsettling policy ideas, and the amount of negative attention it’s gotten from Democrats, celebrities, and even Trump himself has led its leaders to retreat from the spotlight.
The thing is, there’s a lesser-known organization that’s already been working for decades to reshape America into a Christian nation—and will keep doing so, regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. It keeps racking up wins at the Supreme Court: It’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it may be the country’s most sinister advocacy group that people have never heard of. The law firm, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, says its work “advances the God-given right to live and speak the Truth” and publicly describes itself as “the nation’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” ADF reported more than $100 million in revenue in both 2021 and 2022.
The article goes on to review 10 principle items on the ADF’s agenda, which I will just list. Clearly, to them “freedom” means their own freedom to impose restrictions on others.
- Ban abortion nationwide
- Reclassify birth control as abortion — and ban that too
- Overturn marriage equality
- Require gender conformity for kids
- Erase trans adults from public life
- Redefine how the law views sex
- Control family building
- Hand judges even more power
- Demolish separation of church and state
- End DEI efforts and gut the civil rights act
And obviously these are the priorities of tribalists, who are most concerned that the species behave only in ways that promote population growth, and maintain domination by the current cultural majority of those tribalists, which currently is of Christian families. Never mind individual freedom or choice for others.
\\\
When data show the economy is doing quite well, politicians like Marco Rubio simply deny the evidence, calling it fake. It works for Trump!
Washington Post, Heather Long, 10 Oct 2024: Opinion | This is a great economy. Why can’t we celebrate it?, subtitled “2024 is shaping up to be one of the best economic years of many Americans’ lifetimes.”
By just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape. Growth is strong. Unemployment is low. Inflation is back down. More important, many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels. We are living through one of the best economic years of many people’s lifetimes. Yet it’s barely mentioned in popular culture or on the campaign trail.
Polarization in the United States makes it difficult to talk about any truth, even about the economy. Last Friday’s jobs report surpassed all expectations. As soon as it came out, Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tried calling it fake. In reality, even if the report is later revised down, it will still show an economy that is humming along. And consider the bigger picture: The United States has nearly 7 million more jobs than it did before the pandemic, and the largest share of 25-to-54-year-olds working since 2001. Many experts didn’t think it even possible for the labor market to become this robust again. Some theories considered Americans too addicted to video games or drugs, or simply too lazy to work. The jobs rebound has proved the experts wrong.
And so on.
\\\
MSNBC, 10 Oct 2024: Man blames Trump and MAGA ‘cult’ for father-in-law refusing FEMA help, subtitled “A North Carolina man lost almost everything in Hurricane Helene. Thanks to the GOP’s lies, he’s refusing any help from FEMA, according to his son-in-law.”
And
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 10 Oct 2024: Trump’s hurricane of Milton lies: MAGA has a deadly addiction to disinformation, subtitled “Trump followers will risk their lives rather than admit their leader is wrong — it will get worse if he wins”
Should we have any sympathy for those who believe Trump’s lies and suffer misfortune, even death, as a result?
Of all the lies Donald Trump tells, perhaps the most preposterous is that he cares about his own voters. That was evident in 2020, when Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of COVID-19, even calling the pandemic a “hoax.” His followers got the message, risking their own lives first by refusing to socially distance and then, going further even than Trump himself, refusing to vaccinate. The result was that excess deaths were 43% higher for Republicans than Democrats in the months after the vaccines were released. Trump’s lie killed his own voters by the thousands.
… The big lie Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, are telling is that President Joe Biden has cut off federal help to hurricane-affected areas so that he can write fat checks to undocumented immigrants instead. Every word of this is a lie, of course. As state and local officials have repeatedly told the public, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been working tirelessly to help people get to safety and to help them rebuild in the aftermath. There is also no evidence that “illegal” immigrants are being cut government checks, much less being put up in the lavish lifestyle the MAGA liars are claiming. And then there’s the underlying implication that Republicans want to help. It’s a lie. Many of the Republicans spreading misinformation amid natural disasters voted against FEMA funding mere weeks ago. Project 2025 outlines Trump’s plan to decimate FEMA if he returns to the White House.
How to understand all this? Marcotte quotes a NYT columnist to conclude.
Trump’s followers back the lies out of a misguided sense of loyalty and tribalism. They would rather spit on reality than admit liberals are right about something, even if rejecting the truth means risking their own health and safety.
There’s also an addictive quality to the lies for MAGA diehards. Trump has trained his supporters to feel empowered by lying. It is reframed as a dominance move, as if they can conquer reality by sheer will. In reality, of course, MAGA followers are being bamboozled by a con artist. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times, “To lie without shame about everything” is to “demand obedience to a narrative” and “cultivate the habits of autocracy.” Trump’s followers feel powerful when they lie, but they are selling off their freedom to a wannabe dictator. Or worse, when it comes to lies about viruses or hurricanes, they sacrifice their own lives for Trump’s lies.
Once again: it’s all about tribalism. Us vs. Them.
