Where Are We Runnin’? - American Politics Thread, May 2022

The nostalgia, the crippling nostalgia …

Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine.

He tried referencing what he described as the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” — but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE

— Michael Williams (@michaeldamianw) May 19, 2022

now that is a fucking gaffe

He's still got it!

Everyone in that room who laughed should be summarily executed.

that's your answer for everything.

not that there's anything wrong with that.

satire never had a chance

Meanwhile, here in Oregon we are in the process of trying to rid ourselves of Kurt Schrader, one of the worst Democrat blue dogs in the US House, but only 54% of the ballots in the race have been tabulated so far, because the elections office of the third most populous county in the state is run by a numbskull named Sherry Hall.

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/18/clackamas-county-votes-delay-ballot-counting-primary-election-2022/

Madison Cawthorn is taking his defeat as well as one might expect.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTJLiseUUAAgAF_.jpg

"The time for gentile politics as usual has come to an end."

I think you meant to write "genital politics"

fuckin yikes dude

“dark maga”

'it is time for Dark MAGA to rise' may sound like a supervillain in a comic book, but sadly there are millions out there for whom that kind of fantasy vision of the world is more real than the humdrum facts of daily life and there's a ton of "content" out there they can gorge on every day to feed that fantasy life.

As far as I can tell "Dark MAGA" just means pics of Trump with laser eyes

C'mon people, he didn't actually write that

shadow maga was right there!

https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/dark-maga-the-latest-cycle-in-the-far-right-aesthetics-laundromat/

The aesthetics Dark MAGA combines are:

Vaporwave: characterised by synthetic beats, neon-tinted visual artwork and semi-ironic nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s.

Fashwave: inspired by vaporwave, a music genre and visual style that incorporates neo-Nazi and fascist iconography and narratives into the vaporwave aesthetic.

and blah blah Nazi stuff

Oh this list is pretty precious:

Latest Instagram post from Madison Cawthorn who remains a member of congress for another 229 days.

What is the “dark MAGA” he references in his caption. Is there a “light MAGA”? pic.twitter.com/oARGdZwdT0

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 19, 2022

Dark Maga needs to go in the gritty reboot thread.

These guys love dark stuff:

The Intellectual Dark Web
The Dark Enlightenment

#onlydarkmagathings

Speaking of Carlson...

Okay, definitely lost my sympathy for Cawthorn and my lunch reading that IG post.

Yeah, I mean, if and when he ends up trying to murder a bunch of people, I don’t think anyone at all would be surprised, whatsoever. Kind of telling.

i don't think we need to cooperate with the the paramilitary fascist right's attempt at a rebrand.

He does know he lost, right?

Sure, it's part of his super villain origin story.

It'll be interesting to see if his fellow Legionnaires of DOOMAGA actually respond to his calls or texts

My guess is that he'll soon be hawking gadgets on QVC, but what do I know

Depends how big his email list is I imagine

whoa

I read in the news that this "Up-and-Comer" lost his "primary." Alas, perhaps he was just too repressed to advance in today's hot political climate.
My best, Kelly@TheOnion pic.twitter.com/uDwV6xBadX

— Stan Kelly (@KartoonistKelly) May 18, 2022

Here we go again...

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is barred from receiving Holy Communion over her support for abortion rights.

Cordileone said in a letter to the California Democrat that she won't be admitted to Holy Communion at Mass. The archbishop said Pelosi ignored his warning in April to either repudiate her advocacy for abortion rights or refrain from using her religion to justify her stance.

I thought this had been settled by the Vatican

Meanwhile, banning contraception continues its march to becoming a mainstream Republican idea.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/birth-control-ban-abortion_n_6287a89ae4b01a50ab579e39?ier

this is a short thing on msnbc about christian nationalism. watch one minute in, though. paula white. it's from jan 6. many of you have already seen it, no doubt. but please watch one minute in. this, to me, is really what a TON (it is never all, it will never be all) of white evangelicals are really like. paula white is a very upstanding citizen and her clothes are probably new and she will attend some dinner party tonight and behave more or less "properly", and all that - but when it comes down to it, she wants everyone that is not a evangelical christian to die and go to hell, she wants everyone that is not cishet to burn eternally, and she wants it to happen as soon as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx8tsompfiM

xp shit, sorry tipsy mothra. to try to connect this to what you just posted, i'll add, "oh yeah, and they want aaaaaaaall the white evangelical babies that can possibly be born to live, even if it means turning their country into handmaiden's tale.

i don't watch msnbc (or any other channel) and don't know Mehdi Hasan, i don't know if he's good or not -- he seems good to me, i'm glad he did this segment. i really wish there were more big ol' white cishet americans leading the charge on this. i understand why they're not, because if you're white in this country and you grew up in and around church, you are in an elite club with special protections, and that's true whether you were evangelical or not

watch at 5:55 - this is where it's leading. they will spill blood on the ground, and then they will say that it was will of jesus, all the way to their very last breath, you better believe it.

Yeah, to me the most alarming things I've read have been from people who are either evangelicals themselves or have spent many years closely observing/writing about the movement — people like David French, who I disagree with on lots of things, but who wrote this a month or two ago: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-seeds-of-political-violence-are?s=r

Like, people who actually know this territory well are sending up flares saying, Christian nationalism is headed for bloodshed. At this point I can't really see how it's not. They're primed for it.

Moreover, if Christians know anything about the far right, they know it’s vicious. Silence is the safe course. For all the (legitimate) talk of cancel culture from the left, many Christians self-censor out of fear of the right. They know Michael Flynn is dangerous, but saying so out loud carries a cost. So they remain silent. They stay in their anti-left lane.

The proper response to fear and fanaticism is reason and faith. It’s demonstrating by word and deed that the response even to the worst forms of extremism on the left is not to stampede to extremism on the other side. But we have to know what we face, and what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

seriously, watch that clip at 5:55. there are thousands of people in that room cheering him on, and many, many more watching at home.

as the host notes, if an imam said anything 1/1000000000000000000000th as inflammatory, you know what would happen

and it is definitely NOT just that one guy. that guy is just a successful version of all the other people that are trying to be that guy. it's fucked up

has anyone here ever been part of a Christian service where they openly talk about the other denominations, politics, and how their name (and Jesus') is being defined and represented by some of the most extreme, dangerous people in the country?

(I'm not sure there's a more dangerous LARGE group of people in the U.S. then white evangelical christians. there are always people out of their mind on an individual level and in relatively small groups. I'm talking millions, tens of millions of people here)

i see discussions of it online sometimes, christianity today articles where they carefully, politely, minimally, and sporadically, mention this giant group of extremist goons that now represent Christianity. is this ever brought up during a sermon? I can only speak to my evangelical experience, which was a long time ago now, was already horrific, and has (as I always expected) only gotten worse and more extreme as time passes. Is there any Christian movement to make clear where they stand on things like White Christian Nationalism? Or rather, since there are always small movements and groups of people who do the right thing -- is there any movement that has been remotely successful to speak out against the largest and loudest voice of Christians, white evangelicals?

CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — "Thou shalt not kill" was not the message at a Castle Rock Church on Thursday night when it hosted a right-wing extremist group's election fraud meeting.

linked in that piece above, at least a normal-ass news station frames things like this this way. small comfort tbh

MAGA Christian nationalism is concentrated in the churches most removed from elite American culture, including from elite Evangelicalism.

The world-famous Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church was in cahoots with the original fascists and Nazis, too. The just can't seem to get their fill of 'em.

Wtf is "elite american culture"?

Non-flyover country

Too bad I had to unfollow the account on Twitter that was posting all that stuff about the Alioto-Opus Die connection because they felt compelled to post some fairly overt copaganda re the Young Thug case.

576 officers lost their lives in the line of duty in 2021. 

We passed a Senate resolution designating this week as National Police Week to honor the officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities. One small way to recognize their courage.

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) May 21, 2022

I don’t know if “on a respirator in the COVID ward” counts as in the line of duty?

Which is higher, the number of cops who died of covid or the number of people who died of covid because the cops refused to wear masks

Looking like the worst cycle for Blue Dogs since 2010: Schrader, Cuellar, Bourdeaux at risk in primaries. Crist, Murphy, Cooper retiring. Golden, Gonzalez, O'Halleran, Spanberger at risk in general. That's almost half of the 19 Blue Dogs. https://t.co/DdbAFi3HhC

— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) May 24, 2022

And when they lose they’ll blame “Defund the Police”

JUST IN: A federal appeals court has ruled that the 14th Amendment's bar on insurrectionists holding office may be applied to current/future political candidates. https://t.co/RPuI4duUSu

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 24, 2022