Tag: Evangelicals

Blame White Evangelicals For Trump Victory

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our long national nightmare begins...
our long national nightmare begins…

Source: Pathos.com

Author: Michael Stone

Emphasis Mine

White conservative Christians propel Donald Trump to the White House.

Five Thirty Eight reports national exit polls show white evangelical voters voted in record high numbers for Donald Trump, 81-16 percent. It is the widest margin for a Republican presidential candidate ever among evangelicals since they have been tracking the numbers.

The Wall Street Journal confirms that more than 80% of white evangelical and born-again Christians voted for Trump. According to national exit polling, a larger percentage of evangelicals backed Trump then backed Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush, the GOP candidates in the past three elections.

As for women, more than 75% of white evangelical women voted for Trump, according to the exit polls.

That’s right, more than 75% of white evangelical women voted for Donald Trump. Think about that.

The irony of course is that for all intents and purposes Trump is, at best, a Christian of convenience. Indeed, he is a man that appears to have no convictions, religious or otherwise, and represents everything that Christian morality rejects, at least in theory.

The irony is only compounded by the fact that Hillary Clinton was and is a model Christian. As a lifelong Methodist, Clinton was secure in her faith, and actually tried to practice the best of Christian values, exhibited by the Methodist motto that formed a cornerstone of her campaign and personal philosophy:

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

It is stunning but not surprising to note that the majority of evangelical Christians were happy to support a candidate with a long and well documented history of racism, misogyny, and corruption, a man that brags about being able to sexually assault women with impunity.

Bottom line: Evangelical Christians are shameless hypocrites who reject morality and decency in favor of an immoral, authoritarian, bully.

And now our long national nightmare begins.

See:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2016/11/blame-white-evangelicals-for-trump-victory/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=progressivesecularhumanist_111016UTC011139_daily&utm_content=&spMailingID=52735928&spUserID=MTIxNzQwMzMwMDkyS0&spJobID=1044382176&spReportId=MTA0NDM4MjE3NgS2

Stop Comparing Trump and Sanders: The Two Candidates Aren’t Equal and Opposite Radicals

Both candidates’ supporters are fed up with their country, but the sources of their rage are radically different.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Matthew Rozsa/The Good Men Project

Emphasis Mine

This piece originally appeared on The Good Men Project.

As the 2016 presidential election gathers steam, it’s tempting to compare the Bernie Sanders surge among Democrats with the Donald Trump phenomenon among Republicans. After all, both candidates are marshalling support from the ideological grassroots in their respective parties (the left in Sanders’ case, the right for Trump), and both have successfully tapped into a deeper anger that animates their campaigns.

When you reflect on the nature of that anger, however, a crucial distinction between the two candidates emerges: Sanders is drawing on a compassionate anger, while Trump is fanning the flames of a selfish anger. This may seem like a small difference, but it’s one that will literally determine the fate of millions. First, a quick moment of clarification. When I discuss “compassionate” and “selfish” forms of anger, I’m referring to the underlying philosophy embedded in a given set of frustrations. Although both forms of anger tap into a visceral sense of outrage within their listeners, the former insists that they exhibit empathy for others, while the latter encourages them to focus on advancing their own interests at the expense of others. Thus – to use the analogy of a schoolyard setting – the practitioner of empathetic anger will demand that the rules be fair and the toys be shared, while the practitioner of selfish anger will raise a fuss whenever he’s losing the game or doesn’t have as many toys as he’d like… regardless of whether real cheating or unjust inequality is actually involved.

This brings us to the current election cycle. As the most recent Democratic debate demonstrated, Sanders is practically monomaniacal in his focus on the problem of income inequality in America. Whether he’s discussing the importance of raising the minimum wage, proposing a substitute for Obamacare that would guarantee free health coverage for everyone, or advocating policies that would lower college tuition and student loan rates, all of his positions are bound by a common thread. Sanders sees an America that, despite proclaiming itself the “land of opportunity,” is clearly rigged to offer better opportunities for the affluent than the poor.

Similarly, despite its nickname as the “land of the free,” Sanders vocalizes a widespread outrage at the notion that anyone can have a freedom worth having while languishing in insurmountable poverty. Listening to his rhetoric, one hears undeniable echoes of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Economic Bill of Rights:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Whereas Sanders’ campaign has been fueled by a consistent ideology of economic progressivism (or, as he likes to call it, democratic socialism), the Trump boom has gathered momentum by pitting various groups of Americans against each other. It’s easy to forget that when Trump skyrocketed to his current frontrunner status over the summer, it was by vilifying undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Since that time, his campaign has wallowed in the depth of misogyny, racism, and Islamophobia, with Trump garnering headlines and gaining support by openly promoting the prejudices that have marginalized non-white males in the past. While it’s tempting to identify this pattern of bigotry as the common thread tying his campaign themes together, this wouldn’t be precisely accurate. The actual thread is Trump’s cynical awareness of the fact that, by shattering the so-called “politically correct” taboos against attacking traditionally oppressed groups of people, he can simultaneously speak on behalf of the privileged while making both them and himself seem like the underdogs.

Indeed, the evidence of this can be found not on the many occasions when Trump’s hate mongering has succeeded, but on the numerous times it has failed. Take his anti-Semitic comments during a speech in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition; when he declared to his appalled audience that “you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he clearly intended to position himself as a brave challenger of a Jew-controlled status quo. This approach didn’t gain traction, so naturally he abandoned it, but structurally it was identical to the rhetoric he has successfully used against Mexicans or Muslims – insinuate that racist assumptions about those groups are correct, feed off of the media outrage regarding his remarks, and profit from the support that rallies behind him for “speaking the truth.” The same thing can be said of his efforts to mobilize a bigoted reaction against the Cuban heritage of his chief rival, Ted Cruz; when he urged an Iowa audience to remember that “not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba,” the goal was once again to politically weaponized what he hoped would be the racist inclinations of his own supporters. The fact that this tactic didn’t work against Cubans (and thus Cruz) simply proves that Trump’s strategy, though often successful, is still a hit-and-miss affair. Of course, because the hits yield such great rewards and the misses have yet to hurt him politically, Trump has no particular incentive to stop.

Even though Trump will probably never redeem the quality of his anger, though, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from his actions. If Americans truly want to elevate the quality of their political discourse, it is imperative to start by distinguishing between the type of anger that speaks to legitimate needs among the vulnerable and the type of anger that only sows seeds of dissent and hatred. This is an issue that transcends the Sanders and Trump campaigns, or indeed the 2016 presidential election entirely. At its core, this is about what it means to be a responsible citizen within a democratic society – something that Sanders clearly understands, and Trump just as clearly does not.

Matthew Rozsa is a Ph.D. student in history at Lehigh University as well as a political columnist. His editorials have been published in “The Morning Call,” “The Express-Times,” “The Newark Star-Ledger,” “The Baltimore Sun,” and various college newspapers and blogs. He actively encourages people to reach out to him at matt.rozsa@gmail.co

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/stop-comparing-trump-and-sanders-two-candidates-arent-equal-and-opposite-radicals?akid=13935.123424.2TWQRD&rd=1&src=newsletter1049911&t=8

Donald Trump Is Wrecking the Conservative Movement: How the Billionaire Is Exposing Its Most Toxic Secret

Conservative activists have spent a generation building up their movement — and the Donald is ruining it all.

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Source: Alternet

Author:Heather Digby Parton/Salon

Emphasis Mine

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has done for the leaders of the conservative movement, the Christian Right and the Republican party it’s that he’s teaching them a necessary lesson in reality: It turns out that a large number of their supporters don’t really care about ideology, morality or even their supposedly mutual loathing of the hippie Democrats on the other side. Their concerns run to something much more primitive.

Sure they all called themselves Republicans and/or conservatives. For decades they played on the same team. But all that stuff about “family values” and “drowning the government in the bathtub” and “constitutional conservativism” were just slogans they chanted for their team. They meant no more to them than “rah, rah, sis boom bah.”

National Review slowly came around to the knowledge that something terrible had happened to their movement and last week put out their ineffectual “Against Trump” issue. They realized too late that all the movement propaganda meant nothing to a whole lot of right wing voters. In fact it looks as though the constitution itself means nothing. And the conservative movement of activists, writers and grassroots organizations has suddenly awakened to the fact that a good many of those they considered true believers are completely oblivious to conservative ideology.

Poor social conservative and movement warrior Ted Cruz is finally recognizing that his fealty to the cause was a sucker move. It bought him the enduring enmity of the party electeds and too many of the movement conservatives just don’t care about any of that. That’s not to say he isn’t trying to rally the faithful. The Christian Broadcast Network’s John Brody aired some footage of Cruz desperately begging Iowa pastors to do everything they can to stop Trump:

“[I]f Donald wins Iowa, he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire, if he went on to win New Hampshire as well, there is a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee. And the next seven days in Iowa will determine whether or not that happens. So even if you’re thinking about another candidate, the simple reality is there’s only one campaign that can beat Trump in this state, and if conservatives simply stand up and unite, that’s everything.”

You can’t help but wonder if he regrets all those months of “bear-hugging” Trump now. In fact, it makes you wonder if the whole field regrets not unleashing hell on him from the very beginning. They couldn’t possibly be any worse off than they are now.

But as sad as Cruz may have been when he started the day yesterday, realizing that he’d devoted himself to a conservative movement that turns out to be an empty shell, imagine how he felt when Jerry Falwell Jr endorsed the libertine billionaire later in the morning. Falwell might as well have looked into Cruz’s face and laughed at his gullibility. All these years Cruz believed that following the Evangelical Christian code of conduct was a requirement and the man who inherited the legacy of the Moral Majority supplicated himself to a degenerate billionaire who says it’s never been necessary to ask God for forgiveness.

Sarah Posner wrote about this strange course of events for Rolling Stone yesterday:

For Falwell, Trump is a strongman who can save America where the Christian right has failed to do so. Falwell’s endorsement is a tacit admission that his father’s mission to rescue America from the supposed scourges of feminism, the “homosexual agenda” and secularism is now a defunct fundamentalist dream…

Trump has other qualities that many evangelicals admit they admire: wealth and success and — don’t let this surprise you — ruthlessness. Trump first addressed a Liberty University audience in September 2012, after his failed presidential bid. In his remarks, he suggested to students that they need to “get even” with adversaries in order to succeed, prompting

an outcry over whether this advice was compatible with Christian values.

At the time, Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen — without pushback from Liberty — told ABC News that he conferred with a Liberty official, who confirmed, in Cohen’s words, that “the Bible is filled with stories of God getting even with his enemies, Jesus got even with the Pharisees and Christians believe that Jesus even got even with Satan by rising from the dead. God is portrayed as giving grace, but he is also portrayed as one tough character — just as Trump stated.”

Falwell later told a Christian radio program that he took Trump’s advice to mean that often succeeding in life requires “being tough.”

See? No need for all that weak tea about the meek and the poor. And surely when it comes to their driving obsession with sexual morality and abortion, it just takes a real man to put his foot down. And it’s clear who is the Real Man in this campaign. Donald Trump is an Old Testament leader for a New Testament world.

According to this poll, evangelicals are flocking to Trump.

Perhaps the most puzzled by what they’re seeing is the conservative movement old guard who spent decades creating the organizations that in recent years have risen up to challenge the Republican elites for supremacy of the party. They have made great strides, primarying apostates, defeating RINOs and even taking out good conservatives just to show they could. They showed the entire country that they are willing to destroy the government itself if that’s what it takes to demonstrate their commitment to their principles. They take no prisoners, give no quarter. And finally, after decades of hard work and strategizing, they are on the verge of total dominance.

Or they were until Trump came along and proved that many of the people they had been counting on to be the foot soldiers in this conservative revolution weren’t paying attention. In fact, they don’t even care that their new strongman leader openly says things like this:

“I’m going to be able to get along with Pelosi — I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi,” Trump said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” referring to the House minority leader. “Reid’s going to be gone. I’ve always had a decent relationship with Reid,” Trump said, referring to Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate minority leader. “I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid.”

Trump said he thought he’d get along with “just about everybody,” including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), likely to be the next Senate Democratic leader, who Trump said he was “close to … in many in ways.”

“I’ve been in politics all my life, I’ve been dealing with politicians all my life,” Trump said of whether he would have any friends in Congress.

The man who has made a fetish of being politically incorrect reassured his ardent fans at a rally this week that it was all an act:

“When I’m president I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person you have ever seen,” Trump said at a rally in Pella, Iowa, on Saturday.

In what began as a typical Trump speech, the presidential candidate — who made headlines in December for saying he would ban Muslims from entering the US — said the reason for his tough rhetoric is twofold.

First, political correctness takes too long and “we don’t have time,” and second, with such a full slate of Republican candidates, Trump says he needs to be aggressive. “Right now they come at you from 15 different angles. You have to be sharp, you have to be quick, and you have to be somewhat vicious,” Trump said.

“When you are running the country it is a different dialogue that goes, and we can do that easily.”

(He seems to believe that he has experience at doing this, perhaps in a dream.)

The Republican establishment is under a tremendous amount of stress right now. Donald Trump has the party functionaries running around like his personal factotums and the elected officials are all figuring out the angles to ensure they come out on the Donald’s good side. It’s possible it may not survive in the form we’ve come to know it.

But the conservative movement is equally under pressure.  They thought their years of carefully growing and indoctrinating the right wing of the Republican Party had resulted in a common belief in a certain conservative ideology, strategic vision and commitment to a specific agenda.  It turns out that a good number of the people they thought had signed on to their program just wanted someone to stick it to ethnic and racial minorities and make sure America is the biggest bad ass on the planet — authoritarian, white nationalism. If you’ve got a man who will deliver that you don’t need ideology. And he doesn’t need democracy.

The mystery is why all these smart conservatives didn’t see this coming. They unleashed this beast a long time ago with the hate radio and the media propaganda and the ruthless politics. It was only a matter of time before it turned on them.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

See:http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-wrecking-conservative-movement-how-billionaire-exposing-its-most?akid=13923.123424.Md0AhW&rd=1&src=newsletter1049730&t=4

The GOP’s Vicious Religious Warfare: The Arms Race for Extremists’ Hearts and Minds

Trump, Cruz, Huckabee & Carson are engaging in a heated campaign to get the support of the religious right.

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Source: Salon, via AlterNet

Author: Heather Digby Parton

Emphasis Mine

Trump, Cruz, Huckabee & Carson are engaging in a heated campaign to get the support of the religious right.

There is a lot of talk in the political media about the “invisible primary,” which is the lining up of big donors and establishment endorsements. On the Democratic side, the winner of this invisible primary so far is Hillary Clinton, who has gathered many endorsements and has collected a healthy amount of major Democratic donor money. On the Republican side the invisible primary is almost as fractious as the campaign itself, with Bush, Walker, Kasich, Rubio and the rest of the allegedly establishment candidates wooing and being wooed by Republican billionaires of all stripes — conservative, ultra-conservative and extreme. Trump is already a big winner of his own invisible primary; at yesterday’s Iran rally he promised even more declaring,  “I’ll win so much, you’ll get bored with winning”.

But there’s another invisible primary going on as well and it’s an important one: the Evangelical primary. I’ve written here before about how important this constituency is to the GOP base. Indeed, one might even say that white Evangelical voters and the churches to which they belong are as important to the Republicans as the unions are to the Democrats. They are the footsoldiers. And as much as the elites may want to keep them under control and out of sight when the national zeitgeist shifts against conservative morality (it goes back and forth), since at least 1980 they know they cannot alienate them. And any conservative politician who is building himself or herself a long career needs to cultivate them carefully.

So, in this hugely populated race for the GOP presidential nomination, this invisible Evangelical primary could be more salient than usual. While the field is full of religious-right candidates — like Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, just to name three also-rans — it is Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson who are the clear favorites. (Walker polls in the middle of the field but he’s been having problems with Christian conservatives for some time, despite his impressive evangelical bona fides.)

Trump is currently polling well among Evangelicals, but it’s unlikely that a serial divorcer with a shaky record on abortion can hold this whole group no matter how many times he declares that the Bible is his favorite book. But as I wrote here, it won’t be for lack of trying. Trump has been doing outreach with the Christian right since 2012 and spent a lot of money and time cultivating their support.

Nonetheless, Ben Carson leads the invisible evangelical primary in Iowa at the moment. Polls show him gaining significantly on Trump there and with such a large contingent of religious right voters, the very pious Carson is a natural favorite. He is a political  extremist, but then so are they. The big question has been if Carson could do as well in evangelical circles in southern states. If the new PPP poll is correct, he’s certainly doing better than any of the others in South Carolina, so that’s a good sign. Trump has almost double his support though, which is perhaps why Carson challenged the sincerity of Trump’s faith yesterday.

But what of the other two big Christian right contenders, Huckabee and Cruz? Well, they seem to be going head to head, fighting for pre-eminence among the more militant of religious conservatives. This week we saw quite a spectacle with Cruz nearly coming to blows with a Huckabee staffer at the Kim Davis rally when Cruz tried to join the group onstage. Huckabee’s campaign had reportedly done all the leg work for the rally and perhaps they thought that Cruz was crashing their event like some Code Pink protester. In any case, the little contretemps showed just how important it is for candidates of the Christian right to be seen as warriors for family values and religious liberty. Kim Davis and her stand against gay marriage was an excellent way to show fealty to the cause.

Unfortunately, there was only room for one Christian soldier on that stage, and Huckabee used all of it, strutting around unctuously begging the authorities to let Kim Davis go and take him instead — even though Davis was a free woman standing right there on the the side of the stage. Judging by the response at right-wing Twitter aggregation site Twitchy, conservatives were divided on who won that round, with some calling Huckabee disgraceful and others saying “if Ted Cruz can’t stand up to Mike Huckabee …”

Cruz pouted for a bit and then headed back to Washington to join the rally against the Iran peace agreement and once again call the president “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” He seemed a bit overshadowed at that event as well, as Trump and Sarah Palin took the spotlight and competed for who could serve the best word-salad for lunch.

However, Cruz did have some very good news yesterday, which may just put him over the top of the invisible Evangelical primary when all is said and done:

David Barton, an influential Christian author and activist, is taking charge of the leading super-PAC supporting Ted Cruz.

The super-PAC, Keep the Promise PAC, is the umbrella for a group of related pro-Cruz political committees that raised $38 million in the first half of the year, more than the super-PACs supporting any other candidate with the exception of Jeb Bush.

Barton’s appointment highlights the role that Evangelical Christians are playing in the Cruz campaign. The Texas senator is the son of a preacher and announced his presidential bid at Liberty University, a Christian institution founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.

Barton is a self-taught historian, former school administrator and the founder of Wallbuilders, a group dedicated to the idea that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation and should embrace those roots. Time Magazine named him one of the country’s top 25 most influential Evangelicals in 2005.

There is no one more responsible than David Barton for the vast amounts of misinformation and downright lies the evangelical right believes about the fundamental nature of the U.S. constitution and the founders’ intentions. He has quite literally written a parallel history, using phony documents and misconstrued facts to prove that the American Revolution was a religious crusade for the express purpose of creating a Christian nation. He was most recently exposed as a fraud when constitutional scholars of all political persuasions proved that  his book “The Jefferson Lies” was riddled with errors and his publisher withdrew it from the shelves. Not that it mattered. As usual in these cases, Barton insisted he was a persecuted martyr and his stock among the Christian conservatives went way up.

If Mike Huckabee thought he won a battle by keeping Cruz off the stage down there in Tennessee, Cruz knew he won the war. Barton is not only a Christian right superstar; he also has a huge boatload of money to spend on him. His “Keep the Promise” PAC is is funded by some extremely wealthy conservative energy billionaires from Texas and one hugely wealthy hedge fund billionaire from New York, who mainly wants to abolish the IRS. Their investment makes the statement announcing Barton’s appointment downright hilarious:

“From the outset, the Keep the Promise PACs made their mission to provide a voice for the millions of courageous conservatives who are looking to change the direction of the country. Barton’s involvement is an important step signaling that the effort will not be run by a D.C. consultant but by a grassroots activist.”

Nothing says “grassroots” like fracking billionaires and hedge-fund tycoons. But in a way it’s a perfect amalgam of the invisible donor primary and the invisible Evangelical primary. Big money and big Christian Right cred. It’s probably too early to declare that Cruz has scored a win — after all, “the Evangelicals love Trump” too and Carson remains a threat. But he’s definitely a player. And whatever happens in the presidential race, that makes Cruz an even more powerful figure on the right.

See:http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/gops-vicious-religious-warfare-arms-race-extremists-hearts-and-minds?akid=13464.123424.r84Lzz&rd=1&src=newsletter1042225&t=6