“One Quadruple Bogey at a time.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I saw some of Oprah’s Zoom interview with Vice President Harris Last night. Watching the back tier with 1000 individual screens showing the faces of celebrities and folks around the country was fascinating. Tonight, the Vice President will give a speech on the preventable deaths of two young women from complications in Atlanta. I’m sure that the Republicans and the Christian Right will go after mifepristone and misoprostol since incomplete medical abortions were involved. This is even though the procedure would be used for a miscarriage as well. This is from the New York Times. “Harris Will Give Abortion Speech in Georgia After Deaths of Two Women. The vice president has said the stories of pregnant women who have been denied or have been unable to gain access to medical care show the consequences of former President Donald J. Trump’s actions.” This is reported by Lisa Lerer.
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Throughout her campaign, Ms. Harris has sought to tie former President Donald J. Trump, who has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who provided the key votes to overturn the federal right to abortion, to dire medical situations faced by women seeking the procedure in states where it is banned or heavily restricted.
Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.
The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.
Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.
The Georgia Election Board continues to make a mess of voting in Georgia. The idea appears to make it impossible to certify the vote count by the Constitutionally required Date. That way, the Trump campaign may start a lawsuit that lands in his Supreme Court. “Pro-Trump Georgia election board votes to require hand counts of ballots. Critics plan to sue, saying the new requirement would almost certainly lead to errors and could disrupt the process of certifying the vote in a crucial battleground state.” This headline is in today’s Washington Post. Amy Gardner reports the story.
The Georgia State Election Board approved a rule Friday requiring counties in the critical presidential battleground to hand-count all ballots this year, potentially upending the November election by delaying reporting of results by weeks if not months.
The change was spearheaded by a pro-Trump majority that has enacted a series of changes to the state’s election rules in recent weeks and approved the hand-count requirement despite a string of public commenters who begged them not to. Critics included democracy advocates who accused the board of intentionally injecting chaos and uncertainty into the presidential contest as well as election supervisors and poll workers who said hand counts would take too long, cost money and almost certainly produce counting errors.
The board voted 3-2 to approve the measure, which would require the hand count in addition to the customary machine count in each precinct. The rule requires the hand count to take place the night of the November election or the next day. But dozens of election officials said that would be physically impossible in all but the smallest counties. Many also said in public comments Friday that it is far too late in the year to adopt new procedures for which their staffs have not been trained and for which they have no funds.
“Military ballots have already been issued,” said Ethan Compton, elections supervisor in south Georgia’s Irwin County. “The election has begun. This is not the time to change the rules. That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”
The hand-count requirement was one of 11 rules expected to be voted on Friday, the latest batch the State Election Board has considered in recent weeks in an effort, proponents say, to make state elections more secure and transparent. The flurry is the work of a new right-wing majority that took control of the board in May with an avowed mission of preventing fraud and other irregularities from tainting the presidential result this year.
All three are supporters of former president Donald Trump, and the rules they are pushing have been promoted by the state’s leading proponents of the false claim that Joe Biden stole the Georgia election in 2020.
At a press conference on Ohio’s efforts to respond to the chaos created in Springfield by a slew of bomb threats, Governor Mike DeWine revealed that a number of the bomb threats came from “one particular country” overseas.
We have people, unfortunately, overseas, who are taking these actions. Some of them are coming from one particular country. We think that this is one more opportunity to mess with the United States. And they’re continuing to do that.
After that, in a truly deranged Xitter manifesto basically arguing that if the media doesn’t platform the false claims of Nazis attacking migrants, they’ll shoot someone, JD Vance falsely claimed that that’s proof a double standard from the media, then continued to lie that Kamala Harris was responsible for the assassination attempts against Trump.
[R]eports today suggest they came from a foreign country, not–as the media suggested–a deranged Trump fan.
The double standard is breathtaking. Donald Trump and I are, by their account, directly responsible for bomb threats from foreign countries. Why? Because we had the audacity to repeat what residents told us about the problems in their town. Meanwhile, Harris allies call for Trump to be eliminated as the media publishes arguments that he deserved to be shot.
Vance integrated this attack into his stump speech in Sparta Michigan, claiming that, “the American media has been laundering foreign disinformation” and deliberately lying — before DeWine revealed this — when they noted the bomb threats followed Trump and JD’s false attacks on Haitians.
Haitian migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio, shared with ABC News their harrowing experiences of living in constant fear, expressing deep concerns about their safety that prevent them from venturing outside their homes.
In a town of more than 58,000 residents, threats of bombings and shootings led to the closure of city buildings and schools for several days. Wittenberg University canceled all activities on Sunday and classes on Monday as a precautionary measure.
James Fleurijean, a Haitian Community Help & Support Center member, stated that the continual spread of false and divisive statements from prominent politicians was fostering an environment of fear.
The entire small city will need therapy and Federal disaster help when this happens. And still, the despicable dotard and his sidekick Vance Viscious are still spinning lies to the deplorables. Even Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, wrote this in the New York Times. ” I’m the Governor of Ohio. I Don’t Recognize the Springfield That Trump and Vance Describe.”
After Donald Trump’s disastrous debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September he decided to center his campaign on a single incendiary issue: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
When Trump was corrected during the debate by the ABC moderator David Muir, who pointed out that his statement about the Haitian community in the Ohio town was erroneous, he insisted it was factual. “Well,” he said, “I’ve seen people on television, people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” But there were no such “people on television”. There were no dogs taken for food. Trump called Muir a “foolish fool”, and said, “He’s a guy with good hair, but not as good as it was five years ago.”
…
After the debate left him staggering into the spin room to proclaim, “It’s the best debate I ever had,” before confusedly retreating, Trump’s imperative has been to hold on to his base. He can afford no erosion. Losing even a point might be a falling rock that starts a landslide.
Trump desperately needed to distract the national discussion away from abortion. His pre-debate charade of gyrating positions failed to beguile women voters. His charm offensive was offensive without the charm. The gender gap widened to an even greater chasm.
The day before the debate, he held a commanding lead on the economy, 10 points over Harris, 55% to 45%, in a Pew poll. But afterwards, the FT-Michigan Ross polls showed Harris with an advantage on trust in her handling of the economy by 44% to 42%, and 48% to 42% among those who watched the debate.
Trump knows in his bones that his supporters will believe anything he says. If he ever feels they will abandon him, he cannot shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. He does not require any evidence, not even spectral, to trigger their need to demonstrate unswerving faith. Once he speaks, declaring miracles, he is certain his supporters will fall to their knees. And, mirabile dictu, a majority, 52%, say it’s true that “Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats,” according to a post-debate YouGov poll. Only 5% are willing to confess the heresy that it is “definitely false”, while 25% are agnostically “unsure”.
Trump’s lie about “eating pet dogs and cats” is his best-polling lie. It polled nine points better among his supporters than his lie that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth”. It polled 24 points better than his lie that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations” and 44 points better than his lie that “noise from wind turbines has been shown to cause cancer.” The raw numbers dictated the emphasis of his fiction.
The illogic of his demagogy gives Trump no pause. He has railed that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs”. He says the Haitians of Springfield are illegal. But they are in fact legal and of course black. They are the black people usurping the “Black jobs”.
Trump knew before he uttered his lie in the debate about “eating pets” that it was untrue. The morning of the debate, according to the Wall Street Journal, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, had a staffer call the office of the Springfield city manager. “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” that official, Bryan Heck, told the Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
Rather than debunk the rumor he had been informed was untrue, Vance spread the falsehood immediately. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he tweeted, pinning the blame for the presence of the Haitian community, which had settled in the town a decade earlier, on Harris, who was incidentally not the “border czar”. Within a half-hour of Vance’s post, the Springfield News-Sun reported that police stated that there were no incidents of pets being stolen or eaten and that the story was “not something that’s on our radar right now”.
Trump repeated the lie in the debate and kept repeating it. His incitement was followed by 33 bomb threats that shut down schools, hospitals and municipal buildings in Springfield. The town’s CultureFest was cancelled. Classes at Clark State College and Wittenberg University were suspended because of bomb threats. (Wittenberg was founded in 1845 at Springfield by devout German-American abolitionists. The last time classes were suspended there was for the send-off of a volunteer military company of students to fight for the Union in the civil war. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the school held a day of prayer and fasting in celebration.)
“Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield?” a reporter asked Trump on 14 September.
“I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump lied. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.” He pledged: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio. Large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out.” He said they would be the first to be rounded up. He would use “local law enforcement” and the national guard, despite the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits such deployments against civilians. “Well, these aren’t civilians,” he claimed. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.” “And you know,” he had previously told a cheering crowd, “it’s going to be a bloody story.”
Trump’s sidekicks are just as despicable as he is. This story came across live while I was watching Nicole yesterday afternoon. I’ve gotten to the point that I think this guy represents the modern Republican party to a t. This is from The Bulwark,and the headline says it all. “Uh, Gross.” I’m with Andrew Egger on that one.
When the rumor mill started churning yesterday that some major, potentially campaign-shaking news was coming on North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor this year, people’s minds began going to truly dark places. After all, Robinson was already one of the most insanely controversial figures in today’s politics: a Holocaust denier; a modest enthusiast of political violence; a walking, talking Breitbart comments section who’d been posting unhinged stuff online for years. A story that he used to be a frequent patron of video porn stores was barely a blip in the race. What could possibly be worse?
Well, uh, we found out. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski had tracked down a bunch of old online profiles of Robinson—most notably, an account he’d frequently used to comment on a porn site, Nude Africa, in the early 2010s. Those posts included some of the most insane ranting you’ll ever see:
“I’m a black NAZI!”
“I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!”
“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”
Of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall. . . . I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”
Of a story about a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by her taxi driver: “The moral of this story . . . . . Don’t fuck a white bitch!”
There was more beyond that. What’s really incredible is that all this was the sanitized version. CNN tiptoed politely around a heap of other Robinson comments that were simply some of the most obscene, degraded sexual stuff you could imagine.
I’d say North Carolina is really in play now. How could you vote for anyone that’s on the ballot with this deplorable? I suppose it’s all fine and reasonable by the MAGA crowd, but I can’t see a suburban mom or dad going for any of this. Independents will likely head to the Democratic Party’s offerings. Then there’s this information on the deplorable Matt Gaetz from NOTUS. Why are Republican men so obsessed with women’s bodies? “New Court Filings Place Matt Gaetz at a Party at the Center of the Sex Trafficking Scandal. This is the first public filing that cites sworn testimony alleging that Gaetz attended one of the long-rumored parties with a teenage girl.” This is just one of many Florida stories that put Florida into play.
Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.
The minor, who was a junior in high school at the time, arrived in her mother’s car for a July 15, 2017, party at the Florida home of Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist and friend of Gaetz’s, according to a court filing written by defense attorneys who interviewed witnesses as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit Dorworth brought in 2023.
The lobbyist claimed he had been unfairly dragged into the alleged sex trafficking scandal that has dogged Gaetz and his allies for years. Dorworth ultimately dropped the case, but lawyers filed these documents in an attempt to recoup attorneys fees for a lawsuit they say should never have been brought.
One eyewitness cited in the court filings, a young woman referred to as K.M., provided a sworn affidavit that claimed the teenage girl was naked, partygoers were there to “engage in sexual activities,” and “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy … and marijuana” were present. The teenage girl was identified in the filings only as A.B.
“The discovery taken in this case to date reflects that on Saturday, July 15, 2017 … Dorworth, hosted a party at his residence … with the following guests present: (1) A.B.; (2) K.M.; (3) B.G.; (4) Matt Gaetz,” lawyers wrote in the filing, also listing several others. The defense lawyers filed testimonies from those three women — who the attorneys say placed Gaetz at Dorworth’s house that night — under seal pending a judge’s approval to make the records public.
Additionally, Gaetz’s own ex-girlfriend — who was present at the party — provided testimony that lawyers say rebuts Dorworth’s claims that he was not there.NOTUS independently verified that Gaetz and one of the women who testified were previously involved in a relationship; she is only identified in the court filing by her initials, B.G.
The congressman’s ex-girlfriend’s eleventh hour testimony on Sept. 3 came just two days before Dorworth dropped his lawsuit, defense attorneys said in the filing. The defense lawyers also relied on Dorworth’s geolocated cell phone records, which showed that he communicated constantly with the congressman that day.The defense’s court filings show a hired digital forensic examiner identified Gaetz’s number, which has a Florida panhandle 850 area code and texted back and forth 30 times that day and then called Dorworth twice in the hours before the evening revelry. “B.G., another attendee at that party, confirmed A.B.’s testimony under penalty of perjury,” defense lawyers wrote.
This marks the first time that sworn testimony has been referenced in public court filings alleging that the congressman attended one of the long-rumored parties tied to an alleged underage sex scandal.Previous reports have revealed details of ex-politician and Gaetz friend Joel Greenberg’s confession letter that was never made public, which described how Gaetz would allegedly pay him to arrange several sexual encounters with young women — including a 17-year-old girl. Greenberg is serving an 11-year prison sentence for a list of charges, including fraud and sex trafficking with a child.
On Tuesday, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, Maya Berry, appeared as a witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on an issue that should garner concern across the political spectrum: hate crimes. In both her prepared statement and her testimony, Berry apprised lawmakers of the need for stronger enforcement of the law to tackle the country’s growing “hate crime crisis.”
She acknowledged both Jewish and Arab American victims of hate crimes, and shared statistics on those crimes’ effects on all kinds of demographic groups, including Black Americans, Asian Americans and members of the LBGTQ community.
Instead, Kennedy used the hearing as an opportunity to launch a series of racist attacks on Berry, centered around accusations that she supports terrorism. His repugnant broadsides were a stunning illustration both of why the panel was being held in the first place and how politicians use ad hominem attacks to try to silence criticism of Israel.
Shortly after beginning to question Berry, Kennedy abruptly asked her: “You support Hamas, do you not?”
“Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question, because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today in a very effective way,” Berry replied.
Kennedy interjected: “Let’s start first with a yes or no.”
“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support,” Berry responded, “but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”
“You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?” Kennedy then asked — implying that he didn’t believe her answer on Hamas.
Berry replied, “I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing.”
“Is that a no?” Kennedy demanded.
“I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah or Hamas or any other entity that invokes it, so no, sir,” she said.
“You just can’t bring yourself to say no, can you? Kennedy said, even though Berry’s answer could not have been clearer. He continued his absurd line of questioning, asking her if she supports or opposes Iran “and their hatred of Jews?”
You may watch this reprehensible behavior below. I would also like to reference Kennedy’s use of the word “Jews” can be a hate word itself. The Deplorable in Chief demonstrates this. This is from the Jewish Journal Forward. “Trump says Jews would deserve much of the blame if he loses. The speech was supposed to be about antisemitism but instead trafficked in it, Trump’s critics said.” This is written by Jacob Kornbluh.
In a speech Thursday billed as former President Donald Trump’s answer to rising antisemitism, he said Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the presidential election.
And in a second speech later in the evening, to the Israeli American Council, Trump elaborated on his past assertions in recent weeks that Israel would not survive if he doesn’t win in November, by painting a doomsday scenario in which Iran launches nuclear weapons and invoking the Holocaust.
“The Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” Trump said during the first speech of the evening, an hourlong address at an event called “Fighting Antisemitism in America,” organized with GOP megadonor Miriam Adelson, at the Hyatt Regency hotel on Capitol Hill.
“You can’t let this happen,” he told his largely Jewish audience.
Trump in recent weeks has offended many Jews by questioning their mental health for voting for Democrats — as most Jews do — and predicting Israel’s demise should Harris win. But Thursday night’s comments seem to represent an escalation in Trump’s rhetoric, in that he singled out Jewish Americans — who represent only about 2% of the electorate — as a significant reason he might lose the election, one whose results he has never pledged to accept.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said after the speech that Trump’s remarks endanger Jews.
“Treating Jews and Israel as political footballs makes Jews, Israel, and all of us less safe,” she said in a statement.
“Dividing Jews into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ camps and engaging in dual loyalty tropes further normalizes antisemitism.”
“Anyone who cares about Jewish safety should call it out,” she added. “This is not partisan politics — it’s about the fundamental safety of the Jewish community.”
This is running at nearly 5000 words now, and there are more of these examples of stupidity, hatred, fear-mongering, lying, and trying to divide the country in the news today. I’m unsure if fear of a significant loss, panic, or finally dropping the sheep’s clothing to expose the wolves is for these examples of keeping the audio relentlessly at 11. So, I will end with something the Vice President said last night in her interview with Oprah. These quotes come from Australia’s The Nightly.
Speaking with Winfrey in an exclusive sit-down interview, aired on Thursday, local time, Ms Harris described the sense of responsibility she felt when President Joe Biden announced she would not seek re-election.
She described the race to the White House as being about America — not herself.
“I felt a sense of responsibility,” Ms Harris said. “With that comes a sense of purpose.
“We are here because there really is so much at stake.”
“There’s so much about this campaign I love because it’s about the people. This movement is about reminding each other that there is so much more we have in common.
“I don’t ask people if they are a Democrat or a Republican, I ask if they are okay.
“I do know that I am in a position to do something about it. I felt a great sense of responsibility.”
I want the grown-ups, the ordinary people, the ones who want to unite us to serve us. I want the weirdos and the red meanies to leave the buildings permanently. I want people that will fight for us! Do everything within your power for the Harris/Walz campaign and the local Democratic candidates in your jurisdiction.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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On Tuesday, I asked if we will ever be free of Trump and his demands for narcissistic supply–even after we pry him out of the White House. At The Atlantic, two writers argue that Trump is already losing his battle to remain the center of attention.
To a remarkable degree, people have already stopped paying attention to the 45th president.
The past few weeks have offered a preview of what Donald Trump’s post-presidency might look like: The president fulminates at length, playing pundit, but is a practical nonfactor in policy discussions. He can still command the affection of millions—and raise millions of dollars from them—but the balance of the country has already moved on and tuned out. Trump’s ability to command the news cycle has been eclipsed by the virus he couldn’t be bothered to stop and the rival candidate he couldn’t beat.
Graham notes that we still must be alert to Trump’s efforts to damage our democratic institutions and policies.
His election-related efforts are sputtering: Trump has watched while state after state certifies election wins for Biden. He has watched as dozens of judges have punted long-shot lawsuits out of court. He watched as dye ran down Rudy Giuliani’s face in a news conference that was somehow both jaw-droppingly insane and jaw-clenchingly dull. Having exhausted nearly every option, the Trump legal effort has now resorted to recycling old, failed gambits. With the Electoral College meeting on December 14, the end is in sight.
The relevant description of Trump’s role is “watching.” The president has long been an obsessive TV viewer, but without a campaign to run and with no events on his schedule, there is less to distract him from the tube—and his gripes about Fox News and praise for the network’s smaller rivals, Newsmax and One America News….
Paris in the Rain, by Dan McCole
He is now back to feeding his followers a steady diet of false and misleading claims about the election results, though it is difficult to tell whether he really believes his claims, is just processing his grief, is simply taking advantage of a lucrative fundraising opportunity, or some combination thereof.
This punditry will likely be the central element of Trump’s post-presidency. Armed with his Twitter following and perhaps a cable-news show or even channel, Trump will be able to spout off to his heart’s content….
Trump’s diminishing relevance over the past 10 days is a good preview of what to expect come late January. Trump won’t go away entirely, and he certainly won’t get quiet, but fewer Americans will listen to or care about what he has to say. They’ve voted with their ballots, and now they’ll vote with their attention.
Yascha Mounk: Why Trump Might Just Fade Away. Americans will soon grow tired of the president, despite his efforts to stay in the limelight.
Trump’s veneer of invincibility is fading. He lost his bid for reelection, and staged the most incompetent coup attempt since Woody Allen’s Bananas. He can rant and rave about what happened in November, but he can’t keep his followers from seeing Joe Biden inaugurated in January. Fear of what he might attempt next is giving way to laughter. He looks weaker and more scared by the day.
When Oprah Winfrey left her show to start her own network, she was the biggest star on television. Many analysts predicted that her new venture would be a huge success. At the time, some press reports even suggested that bosses at the main broadcast networks were seriously worried about the competition.
Contrary to these expectations, the Oprah Winfrey Network struggled to find an audience. In the first years of its existence, it bled tens of millions of dollars. Today, OWN has established a stable niche for itself, and even makes a little profit. But with an average viewership of fewer than 500,000 people in 2018, it plays in a completely different league from the four major networks and the most commercially successful cable channels.
This should serve as a warning to anybody who is now fielding pitches to invest in the Trump News Network. If Trump follows the lead of other authoritarian populists like Hugo Chávez and hosts a regular television program, he can undoubtedly induce his most devoted fans to tune in. But to be commercially viable, his channel would have to expand that core audience, recruit other hosts who are capable of sustaining the public’s attention, hire journalists who can actually cover what is going on in the world, and attract advertising from run-of-the-mill corporations.
Mounk argues that Republicans are unlikely to supports Trump’s plans for another presidential run in 2024, even if he is capable of carrying if off four years from now and it’s likely that most Americans will be sick of his antics by then, if they aren’t already.
Times Square Station, by Louis Ebarb
Another Atlantic writer, Timothy Noah suggests that we may learn much more about Trump’s time as “president” after he leaves office: The Trump You’ve Yet to Meet. Just because we know bad things about the 45th president, don’t assume that there’s nothing bad left to find out.
How well do we know Donald Trump? Pretty well, it would seem. Nobody has ever accused the outgoing president of possessing a complex personality. His behavior in office confirmed the common view, barely disputed even by his allies, that he is a shallow narcissist, blind or indifferent to common decencies, with poor impulse control and a vindictive streak. His futile attempt to litigate away electoral defeat may appall you, but it probably doesn’t surprise you.
Still, just because we know bad things about the 45th president, don’t assume that there’s nothing bad left to find out. Journalists like to pretend that we know everything about a president in real time, but our information is never close to complete. There’s always more to learn, and it’s seldom reassuring.
Americans had no idea until after he left office how completely Woodrow Wilson depended on his wife, Edith, after he suffered a stroke in September 1919; she waited two decades to admit in her memoirs that, on instructions from Wilson’s doctors, she’d winnowed his written communications with Cabinet members and senators, digesting and reframing “in tabloid form those things that … had to go to the president.”
Nor did Americans learn until a decade after his death that John F. Kennedy, a much less devoted family man than Life magazine let on, shared a mistress (sequentially if not concurrently) with the Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, whom the CIA recruited in one of several harebrained plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Then there’s Richard Nixon. Americans knew many shameful things about Nixon thanks to the Watergate investigation that prompted his resignation. But only after he left office did we learn, for instance, that Nixon ordered an aide to compile a list of Jews who worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics so he could demote some of them.
Noah lists many possibilities for how we will learn more about Trump and his time in the White House. I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Some possible sources of information and questions to be answered:
Trump, for all his talk about loyalty, has never commanded much from the people who work for him. No visible bonds of affection or respect bind Trump to his employees, leaving fear the sole motivation for keeping the troops in line. (See Cohen, Michael.) Most of that fear will evaporate by January 20, by which time trade publishers may be turning away proposals for tell-all books lest they create a market glut. Unlike the previous two administrations, which were somewhat difficult for reporters to penetrate, the Trump White House leaked like a sieve. Après lui, le déluge….
Digital art by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
How close did we come to war with North Korea when Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury” on Kim Jong Un? After Trump decided instead to become the first president to meet with Kim, how close did Trump come to agreeing to remove U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula?
Exactly how much revenue did Trump properties collect from the federal government during his presidency? How much from people seeking to influence Trump’s presidency?
Who has received promises from Trump that they’ll be pardoned? Did Trump promise in advance to commute Roger Stone’s sentence?
What were the domestic arrangements in the Trump White House? Can Melania and Barron really be said to have lived there, or did they spend more time in their New York apartment, or at her parents’ house in Maryland, where Barron went to school?
Did White House aides observe signs of mental decline in Trump related to aging?
Some stories from today’s news that suggest Trump’s power to control the narrative and intimidate fellow Republicans is fading:
But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name….
Newspaper Kiosk in Bologna, Italy, photo by Fillippo Carlot
Several high-level sources say that the graphics change, along with Pence’s disappearance from the headers of President Donald Trump’s increasingly frantic and conspiratorial pleas, are not actually coincidental. According to four people with knowledge of the matter, they reflect an effort by the vice president and his team to distance Pence from some of the president’s more outlandish claims about a conspiracy to undermine the election and illegally deny him a second term in office.
“It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that Vice President Pence absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,” said a senior administration official. “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship…and believes much of the legal work has been unhelpful.”
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told President Trump on Wednesday he’ll likely fail to get two big wishes in pending defense spending legislation, bellowing into his cellphone: “This is the only chance to get our bill passed,” a source who overheard part of their conversation tells Axios.
Why it matters: Republicans are ready to test whether Trump’s threats of vetoing the bill, which has passed every year for more than half a century, are empty.
The backstory: Inhofe leveled with Trump — over speakerphone while walking through the Senate’s Russell Building — that the bill won’t meet his demand to repeal liability protections for tech companies, or block efforts to re-title military bases named for Confederate figures.
Joseph diGenova, the Trump campaign lawyer who had been a fixture in Washington legal circles for decades, resigned under pressure Tuesday from the elite Gridiron Club after an uproar over his comments suggesting a former government official should be executed.
DiGenova later said he was joking when he made the comments about Christopher Krebs, the federal cybersecurity official who was fired by President Trump after asserting that the 2020 election was secure and free of widespread voter fraud. “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs . . . .” diGenova said on the conservative “Howie Carr Show” on Monday. “He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
Still, the White House denounced the statement, Krebs said he would consider legal action — and the 135-year-old Gridiron Club asked diGenova to step down.
Ivanka Trump, the President’s daughter and adviser, sat for a deposition Tuesday with investigators from the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office as part of its lawsuit alleging the misuse of inaugural funds, according to a court filing.
In January, the DC attorney general’s office sued the Trump Organization and Presidential Inaugural Committee alleging they abused more than $1 million raised by the nonprofit by “grossly overpaying” for use of event space at the Trump hotel in Washington for the 2017 inauguration….
The attorney general’s office has also subpoenaed records from Barrack, Ivanka Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and Rick Gates, the former inaugural committee deputy chairman, the filing said.
Intensifying attacks on the integrity of the vote by President Trump and his allies are fueling deep alarm among state and local officials, who have watched with dread in recent weeks as election workers have been targeted by fast-spreading conspiracy theories.
They echoed calls by Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official in Georgia who on Tuesday urged Trump and other GOP politicians to tamp down their baseless claims of widespread fraud. In an impassioned statement, Sterling blamed the president for “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”
He noted that a 20-year-old contractor for Dominion Voting Systems has been besieged with online attacks after QAnon supporters falsely claimed a video showed him manipulating voting data, when he was in fact simply using a computer and thumb drive.
Similar threats have cropped up across the country since Election Day.
Barr spent roughly two and a half hours on White House grounds on Tuesday for what White House and Department of Justice officials previously said was a pre-planned meeting with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
However, sources told ABC News that once Barr was in the building for meetings, Trump wanted to see him.
One source briefed on the meeting described Barr’s interaction with the president as “intense,” but would not elaborate on any additional details about the content of their discussion.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany in a press briefing Wednesday afternoon declined to answer whether the two had spoken since Barr’s interview, and also declined to say directly whether Trump still had confidence in Barr.
So, that’s my summary of the notion that Trump may fade away after he leaves the White House. I don’t know if I buy it or not, but there is some evidence that Republicans are breaking free of the cult. I’d love to get your input on this.
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I seem hard wired to avoid the caves and to wander the plains and mountains. For this, I believe I have my mother to thank. I imagine lurking some where in my family are Irish ‘traveller’ genes but who knows. I do not understand people who find one location and surround themselves with sameness. The lily white Midwestern suburbans filled with snotty WASPS were a prison to me. My mother’s insistence we travel frequently was the only thing that saved me, we used to stay at Marriott hotels all the time. It showed me there was more to people and life than a backyard prison.
Later, as a young mother, I unfortunately discovered way too late–because of promises of other things–that I basically married a potted plant who wanted nothing more than to drag to and from work day in and day out. The sofa was the center of life. I got some pleasure in taking my summers off and taking baby Doctor Daughter on the road. That worked until my parents moved back to the prison and I was surrounded by boring sameness day in and day out. It felt like being entombed in a cavern surrounded by slugs, potted plants, and narrowness in a world ruled without color or the discovery of abstract art and erotica. This came home as an astounding lesson with my inoperable cancer diagnosis at 34 and a six month old baby. I was not going to let my children suffer the same fate. They needed more back yard to play about and I would give them that for as long as I could live.
The word that best describes the circumstances of my youth is people attached to “homophilly”. It literally means the “love of the same.” It is the tendency of people with similar characteristics to congregate. That pretty much describes the WASP enclave that ensconced me. Same boring stuff day in and day out. My mother drove us to Pow Wows. She stuck us in station wagons and campers to search the far corners of the American West. We eventually landed in Europe. These were all places where I would dream I would have the courage to run away into so I would never EVER have to go back. My cousin who moved to NYC to do Broadway was my siren. She led me to believe that one day I would escape. History taught the progress of human kind was to leave caves and tribes to build cities. American History taught the American spirit is to get out there to discover and explore and build something new. None of this included the iconography of firmly planted sofas.
But, firmly planted sofas in limited areas show us that our tribal roots are still lurking. These lead to dark times, genocides, war, and oppression. I was looking at the various news items I’ve collected for today trying to find some theme. You’re probably wondering at this point too. I think therefore, I babble. Unfortunately, it all seems to be an expression of our primal fear of other and the desire of so many to huddle into a tribe based on iron age mythologies, the social constructs of race, sexuality and gender roles, and the dark side of homophilly. If we only love the same, do we also have to adapt the hate of the different?
For the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it will ask black people to designate their race. Under the check box for “Black or African American,” the bureau is adding a new space on the census questionnaire for participants to write in their non-Hispanic origins, according to a recent memo from the head of the 2020 census. “African American,” “Jamaican” and “Nigerian” are listed as examples of origins on a questionnaire the bureau is testing for 2020.
The change means many black people in the U.S. may have to take a closer look at their family trees to answer what can be a thorny question: Where are you really from? While many black immigrants can cite ties to a specific country, that question is difficult, if not impossible, for many U.S.-born African-Americans to answer.
But researchers at the bureau have said they have been trying to respond to requests for “more detailed, disaggregated data for our diverse American experiences as German, Mexican, Korean, Jamaican, and myriad other identities.” (The bureau was considering an overhaul to all racial categories that would have added check boxes for the largest ethnic groups and a write-in area for smaller groups. But it would require the Trump administration’s approval of an Obama-era proposal to change the federal standards on race and ethnicity data, which census experts say the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is not likely to move forward.)
My WASPY family has our family tree detailed out to when the first of whatever line came from where ever but only because my mother got obsessed with researching it decades ago as a hobby. And, this details one important distinction. Every one of my ancestors arrived here of their own volition. None of them were kidnapped and enslaved. None of them were here already where they were frequently murdered and driven from their lands. How does this information do anything positive?
Sebastian Junger wrote a book called “Tribe” that was published in 2016. He argued that on some level having wars and enemies is something humans enjoy because it gives us a sense of belonging. I can’t imagine needing that enough to be violent and oppressive to others. But, I see it in Trump’s White Nationalist cult and realize it has a draw.
During John Ford’s celebrated western film The Searchers, John Wayne’s character spends years hunting for his niece Debbie, kidnapped as a child by Comanche Indians.
When he finally finds her, she initially wants to stay with her Comanche husband rather than return home.
Although shocking in the film, it’s historically accurate. White people captured by American Indians (author Sebastian Junger’s preferred name for Native Americans) commonly chose to stay with their captors – and the book cites a case of a captive woman who hid from her would-be rescuers.
Even more astonishingly, from the earliest days of Europeans in America, settlers of both sexes ran away to join Indian tribes. This wasn’t just a few people, it was hundreds and hundreds. The practice was so rife that in the early 1600s settler leaders made it an offence with harsh punishments, but over the following centuries people still ran off in huge numbers.
And it hardly ever happened the other way. Indians didn’t want to join white society.
The attraction, argues Junger, was the sense of community, the importance of the tribe, evident in other primates and in primitive human societies. The superficial attractions of American Indian life were obvious: sexual mores were more relaxed, clothing was more comfortable, religion less harsh.
But mostly it was the structure of Indian society that appealed. It was less hierarchical, essentially classless and egalitarian. As the people were nomadic, personal property hardly mattered, since it was limited to what you or your horses could carry.
What changed this natural way of living for humans was first agriculture, then industry. Accumulation of personal property led to people doing what they thought best for themselves, rather than for the common good. But, suggests Junger, we’re not happy like this. We’re wired to the lifestyle of the tribe.
So tribal connectedness really doesn’t need the social construct of race, and yet it frequently and murderously oppressively does. From CBS: “Why 60 Minutes aired photos of lynchings in report by Oprah. The reason behind the broadcast’s decision to show graphic photographs of lynchings in this week’s report by contributor Oprah Winfrey”.
This week on 60 Minutes, Oprah Winfrey gets an early look at the memorial, which will open to the public on April 26. The memorial contains 805 steel markers, one for each county where lynchings occurred for more than 70 years following the Civil War. The markers are suspended in air to evoke the horror of being hanged.
To tell that story on 60 Minutes, Winfrey and a team of producers felt it was important to show historical photos of lynchings, images that are likely to disturb many viewers. In an interview with 60 Minutes Overtime, Denise Schrier Cetta, the producer of the story, and Jeff Fager, the executive producer of the broadcast, explain their decision to air such upsetting photographs.
“I don’t think the story exists without those photos,” Fager says. News executives have a tendency to self-censor too much, he says, out of concern that viewers will be turned off. For him, the decision to show the photos was about reporting important facts about a little-known but important chapter of history.
“That’s reality; that’s what happened,” he tells 60 Minutes Overtime’s Ann Silvio in the video above. “Our story is about a part of history, really almost 80 years of American history, that isn’t in the history books. We don’t see these pictures. We don’t talk about it.”
One photograph that surprises Fager the most is an image of a crowd that showed up in Waco, Texas to watch the lynching of a man named Jesse Washington. The hanging tree stands in the center of the photograph, Washington’s tortured body lies beneath it, and hundreds of well-dressed white people look on.
“I really thought most lynchings were in the cover of night and Klan outfits, and not that it was a part of life to that degree—that the town would turn out to watch it happen in broad daylight,” says Fager, who feels that many viewers will learn a lot from the story.
The Guardian previews a book written on the idea of how tribe of masculine warps young boys. The author of The Shepard’s Hut is an Australian Surfer. “About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny. In an excerpt from a speech about his new book The Shepherd’s Hut, the author says it is men who need to step up and liberate boys from the race, the game, the fight.”
There are a lot more girls in the water these days, and hallellujah for that; I can’t tell you how heartening this is. But I want to focus on the boys for a moment. For what a mystery a boy is. Even to a grown man. Perhaps especially to a grown man. And how easy it is to forget what beautiful creatures they are. There’s so much about them and in them that’s lovely. Graceful. Dreamy. Vulnerable. Qualities we either don’t notice, or simply blind ourselves to. You see, there’s great native tenderness in children. In boys, as much as in girls. But so often I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them.
Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean. As if there’s only one way of being a bloke, one valid interpretation of the part, the role, if you like. There’s a constant pressure to enlist, to pull on the uniform of misogyny and join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism. And it grieves me to say it’s not just men pressing those kids into service.
These boys in the surf. The things they say to me! The stuff I hear them saying to their mates! Some of it makes you want to hug them. Some of it makes you want to cry. Some of it makes you ashamed to be a male. Especially the stuff they feel entitled or obliged to say about girls and women.
What I’ve come to notice is that all these kids are rehearsing and projecting. Trying it on. Rehearsing their masculinity. Projecting their experimental versions of it. And wordlessly looking for cues the whole time. Not just from each other, but from older people around them, especially the men. Which can be heartbreaking to witness, to tell you the truth. Because the feedback they get is so damn unhelpful. If it’s well-meant it’s often feeble and half-hearted. Because good men don’t always stick their necks out and make an effort.
The Israeli military on Saturday accused Iran of controlling an airbase outside the Syrian city of Palmyra, from which the army said the Iranian drone that was shot down over northern Israel earlier in the day was launched.
“Iran and the [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ special unit] Quds Force for some time have been operating the T-4 Air Base in Syria next to Palmyra, with support from the Syrian military and with permission from the Syrian regime,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Saturday night.
So, it likely was an attack based on a response to that. It’s just hard to know these days.
This comes on the back of two items posted to Facebook feeds from two separate Jewish Friends. It’s quite odd, but within in my WASPY cocoon it was quite acceptable for me to have many Jewish friends as long as I didn’t try to have a Jewish boyfriends. My mother actually got a call from an angry grandmother matriarch telling her that I needed to leave them to Jewish girls once in high school. In my neck of WASPishness dating Catholics was much more suspect. Especially, if they came from Eastern European or Southern European roots. I wasn’t even allowed to pierce my ears because I’d look like some immigrant baby. See, the rules of tribalism can be very fickle as well as stupid.
Yaser Murtaja had often filmed from the sky, but he never lived to fulfill his dream of flying on an airplane through the clouds.
The young journalist shot drone images and video for Ain Media, a small Gaza-based news agency he started five years ago. Just two weeks ago, he posted an aerial photo of Gaza City’s port on Facebook. “I wish that the day would come to take this shot when I’m in the air and not on the ground,” he wrote. “My name is Yaser Murtaja. I’m 30 years old. I live in Gaza City. I’ve never traveled!”
It was one of his last posts.
Murtaja, who was married and had a 2-year-old son, died Saturday after being shot the day before while covering protests at the edge of the Gaza Strip.
His work had appeared on networks such as Al Jazeera, and in 2016 he worked as a cameraman for Ai Weiwei’s documentary, “Human Flow,” which covered the global refugee crisis, including Palestinians in Gaza. The Chinese visual artist posted photos of Murtaja on his Instagram account on Saturday.
As violence continues to rage along the Israel-Gaza border, an Israeli reporter shared a photo that could only be described as inhumane.
“Best show in town. Residents of Nahal Oz in the stands,” read the caption for the image that showed a group of young Israeli spectators sitting on an observation tower near the Israel-Gaza border line, watching and waving as unarmed Palestinians got brutally murdered and wounded at the hands of Israeli troops.
Testimonies of correspondents on the Israeli side about the rate of firing and Palestinian reports of 800 people wounded attest to quite permissive orders given to the snipers. Even when the area is divided into sectors, commanded by senior officers, an area commander has no close control over the sharpshooters’ every shot. This situation leaves a lot to the discretion of relatively young soldiers, even though they were reinforced by more veteran police and Border Police snipers. The number of casualties was in accordance with these circumstances.
The number of fatalities yet again underscores Israel’s long-standing failure – commented on by the State Comptroller in 2003 and 2017 – to develop nonlethal measures which would be effective in dispersing demonstrations and marches from a relatively large distance.
There seems to be a huge human cost to feeling that sense of belonging you get from a Tribe. And don’t even get my started about the many other gangs and such I’ve written about in the past.
I decided last night that I was going to write about the Duggar family today, but I’m really resisting getting started. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday reading about Josh Duggar, the Duggar family, and Bill Gothard, who heads the home schooling/religious cult they follow.
I’m beginning to realize that I should be watching more television. I pretty much broke the TV habit back in 2008 when I wanted to avoid all the Hillary hate, and I’ve never really gotten back to watching regularly. I’ve never watched a reality TV show, and now I think I should have been checking them out selectively so I would know what’s going on in popular culture.
I come from the days of situation comedies like I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke, and Bob Newhart. When did TV become so sick and strange? Does it trace back to those awful talk shows that used to be on–the ones that brought on weird people to be mocked by the audience?
Everyone knows by now that one of the Duggar children, Josh Duggar has been revealed to have molested four of his sisters and another girl 12 years ago. Josh is now married with his own children, who are certainly in danger.
Here are the essentials of the scandal, based on a police report obtained by In Touch magazine, which broke the news a couple of days ago.
Josh Duggar was investigated for multiple sex offenses — including forcible fondling — against five minors. Some of the alleged offenses investigated were felonies. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar were interview by the Springdale Police department on Dec. 12, 2006. The report says that James told police he was alerted in March, 2002 by a female minor that Josh — who turned 14-years-old that month — had been touching her breasts and genitals while she slept. This allegedly happened on multiple occasions. In 2006, Jim Bob told police that in July, 2002 Josh admitted to fondling a minor’s breasts while she slept. “James said that they disciplined (redacted, Josh) after this incident.” The family did not alert authorities.
Jim Bob told police that about nine months later in March, 2003 “there was another incident.” Josh was again accused by a female minor of touching her breasts and genitals. Josh was accused by several minors of touching their genitals, often when they slept, but at times when they were awake.
Children of The Family cult from Australia
Jim Bob then “met with the elders of his church and told them what was going on.” No one alerted the police or any other law enforcement agency. Instead they decided to send Josh to a “program [that] consisted of hard physical work and counseling. James said that [redacted, Josh] was in the program from March 17, 2003 until July 17, 2003.”
He said the program was a “Christian program.” Michelle Duggar later admitted to police that Josh did not receive counseling and instead had been sent during that time to a family friend who was in the home remodeling business.
Asked about the training center that Jim Bob said Josh was sent to, Michelle told police, according to the report, “it was not really a training center. Det. [Darrell] Hignite asked if the guy [redacted, Josh] talked to was a certified counselor. She said no. She said it was a guy they know in Little Rock that is remodeling a building. Det. Hignite asked if the guy was more of a mentor. She said “kind of.”
So basically, the kid was sent to do some construction work, presumably on assumption that he didn’t have enough to do with his hands? And what about the girls? What help did they receive for their traumatic experiences?
The Duggars told police that Josh “apologized” to the female minors and that they had “forgiven” him.
An alleged victim told police in 2006 that Josh had told “mother and dad what had happened… (and) asked for forgiveness.” The report notes the alleged victim says Josh “sought after God and had turned back to God.
Josh Duggar and growing family
Oh. And then there’s this:
Jim Bob told police in 2006 that when Josh returned home in 2003, Jim Bob, accompanied by some of his church elders, took Josh to Arkansas State Trooper, Jim Hutchens. Jim Bob knew Hutchens personally. Hutchens did not take any official action and instead gave Josh a “very stern talk.” As In Touch magazine reports exclusively in this week’s issue, Hutchens is now serving 56-years in prison for child pornography. He took no action on the Duggar case.
Again, why were these sick people ever on TV? I don’t understand, and I’m realizing I need to become more aware of what’s happening. It’s just unbelievable to me that religious cults are being promoted on what are supposedly publicly-owned airwaves!
It’s enraging how mainstream media outlets like Today and People treat the Duggars as though they’re just an ordinary family with an extraordinary amount of children — and aren’t they so cute! — when in fact, they are not.
Yes, they’re bigots and anti-choice and weird and they subscribe to the kind of traditional gender roles that most educated people would consider “sexist.” But all of those things, however detestable, are essentially personal opinions. The real problem with the Duggars is that they are a cult.
Think about it. If there are 19 (and counting!) Duggar children, then statistically speaking, two of them are gay. What are the chances that they will be able to live happy, mentally and emotionally healthy lives as out-and-proud homosexuals in a loving relationship with the acceptance of their family members?
Nine of the Duggar children are female. What are the chances that they will get to go away to college and live on a campus and have their own house or car financing it at https://www.britanniacarfinance.co.uk/. There’s no impossible nowadays. If some of them can put up their own business or start investing, they can afford things and can help them for their future.
Yes, they are a family, but they meet all the criteria of a mind-control group. The following are the eight factors used to identify a destructive cult, outlined by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton identifies in his seminal book on mind control, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.
Read about the criteria at the link.
It’s also noteworthy that Josh’s history of sexual assault has been known by plenty of people since at least 2006 when Oprah Winfrey learned about it and reported him to the Arkansas Department of Human Services? Are we to believe that The Learning Channel didn’t find out about this before now? Come on!
The other important fact about the Duggars is that they are active participants in a “christian” cult, which was headed by Bill Gothard until he was forced to resign over accusations of sexual abuse of young girls. From the Washington Post: Conservative leader Bill Gothard resigns following abuse allegations.
Bill Gothard, an Illinois-based advocate for home schooling and conservative dress who warned against rock music and debt, has resigned from the ministry he founded after allegations of sexually harassing women who worked at his ministry and failing to report child abuse cases.
Gothard’s resignation from the Institute in Basic Life Principles, according to a letter sent to families affiliated with the ministry he founded, comes a week after he was put on administrative leave. According to an organizer involved in the whistle-blowing website Recovering Grace, 34 women told the website they had been sexually harassed; four women alleged molestation….
Gothard’s ministry had been a popular gathering spot for thousands of Christian families, including the Duggar family from TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences were also popular among families within the Quiverfull movement, who eschew birth control and promote big families.
Gothard has also rubbed shoulders with Republican leaders. He and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee were photographed at a campaign lunch together; former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue spoke at one of Gothard’s conferences; and Sarah Palin, when she was a small town mayor in Alaska, attended his International Association of Character Cities conferences declaring Wasilla among Gothard’s “Cities of Character.”
We talked about how it was a cult, joking at first. Outsiders could point and accuse and question, but we knew that it wasn’t what it looked like.
Yes, we were often mistaken for Mormon missionaries. Yes, the red neckscarves were reminiscent of Nazi youth. Yes, we knew that sometimes we were simply trotted out as props for political stunts. We knew, and we joked about it. Don’t worry, it’s not what it looks like.
I remember saying, more seriously than joking, “If this is brainwashing, it feels good to be brain clean.”
But as I spiraled closer and closer to to the center, the realization began to sink in. The jokes became real.
“Cult-like”, sure. I’d call it that. Authoritarian, legalistic, overbearing. But not a real cult.
The worst thing about brainwashing is that you can’t see it for what it is. You never think you’re in a cult when you’re in a cult.
Until the day you can’t deny the reality of what you’ve seen, what you lived. Until the day you speak out loud what your mind has known for a while,
“I grew up in a cult.”
And now, perhaps, “I grew up in a cult run by a sexual predator.”
Read more of Murray’s story at his website (link above).
If there is anything that the Duggars love more than tater tot casserole and Aussie Instant Freeze Hairspray, it is the Institute of Basic Life Principles (which is the umbrella organization that runs, among other things, the Advanced Training Institute, providing homeschoolers with a Bible Based curriculum, including the promotion of ideas around Young Earth Creation), the organization founded by fallen leader, Bill “Grabby Hands” Gothard. And why does he deserve this delightful moniker? Bill has harassed and assaulted many women in his organization. In response, the Duggars’ increasingly glamorous fundamentalist sheen is perhaps being used to distract us from his multitude of sins.
So let’s start with who Bill Gothard is. Bill Gothard is the famously unmarried, 79 year old head of an organization which emphasizes women’s Godly obedience to men within the confines of marriage and separateness from potentially harmful secular influences, like public school, television or the democratic party. Micah J. Murray, who grew up in “Bill Gothard’s homeschool cult,” wrote that Bill Gothard cultivated an atmosphere that was “system of absolute authoritarianism” that built on “the idiosyncratic whims of an old man with way too much money and power.”
Earlier this year, 34 women brought forth allegations that Gothard sexually harassed them and 4 women reported being sexually assaulted. In response, Gothard was forced to step down from his leadership when he was placed on indefinite leave.
Again, go to the link to read about how this relates to the Duggar family and their behavior.
There are hundreds–if not thousands of these christian cults around the world. I don’t understand it, but there’s obviously something about human psychology that makes us susceptible to being drawn in by authoritarian movements like these. What better way to brainwash people than to begin in early childhood?
These people are dangerous, and they have burrowed into our politics, our system of education, and popular culture. It’s frightening.
I’m running out of space and time, but here’s Amanda Marcotte on the phenomenon of right wing christian cults and sexual abuse:
The family’s fame guarantees this story will stay in the public memory for awhile, but it’s far from the first sex abuse scandal in the tight-knit world of far-right fundamentalism. As I wrote last year for Slate, Doug Phillips of the far-right group Vision Forum was forced to step down after admitting to “a lengthy, inappropriate relationship with a woman.” The woman in question, Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, claims it was more than “inappropriate,” noting that they met when she was 15 and that he “methodically groomed” by moving her into the house as a nanny and becoming “the pastor of her church, her boss, her landlord, and the controller of all aspects of her life” before pushing for sex. The Duggars were tight with Phillips and Vision Forum, which promoted a lot of Duggar-related material.
Marcotte also discusses Gothard, with lots of good links to more information. Check it out.
As always, this is an open thread. Please post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread, and have a great Memorial Day weekend!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Georgia is very much in play. This is why so much attention has been paid to it with positive and negative actions. This kind of shenanigans is likely why Trump is only playing to his base and not heading to the middle to appeal to swing voters and voters in the suburbs. Although, when I watch the snippets of his speeches I think he may be incapable of actually doing that. He seems to repeat some of the golden oldies, then goes off on some unintelligible tangent. The Guardian reported this yesterday. 
JD Vance is not experiencing the issues of advanced age like DonOLD. He’s just admitted to making up stories to make his point. His reprehensible talking points and speeches are just that, reprehensible. 
The entire small city will need therapy and Federal disaster help when this happens. And still, the despicable dotard and his sidekick Vance Viscious are still spinning lies to the deplorables. 
Trump’s sidekicks are just as despicable as he is. This story came across live while I was watching Nicole yesterday afternoon. I’ve gotten to the point that I think this guy represents the modern Republican party to a t. This is from 
I’d say North Carolina is really in play now. How could you vote for anyone that’s on the ballot with this deplorable? I suppose it’s all fine and reasonable by the MAGA crowd, but I can’t see a suburban mom or dad going for any of this. Independents will likely head to the Democratic Party’s offerings. 
Deplorable Louisiana Senator John Neely Kennedy set a new level of low. This is from MSNBC. 
You may watch this reprehensible behavior below. I would also like to reference Kennedy’s use of the word “Jews” 
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
The word that best describes the circumstances of my youth is people attached to “homophilly”. 
I have two items of interest on the construct of separating humanity by race. First, is this new classification system for Black people living in the USA. How do you elect to be “just black”? 
My WASPY family has our family tree detailed out to when the first of whatever line came from where ever but only because my mother got obsessed with researching it decades ago as a hobby. And, this details one important distinction. Every one of my ancestors arrived here of their own volition. None of them were kidnapped and enslaved. None of them were here already where they were frequently murdered and driven from their lands. How does this information do anything positive?
So tribal connectedness really doesn’t need the social construct of race, and yet it frequently and murderously oppressively does.
The Guardian previews a book written on the idea of how tribe of masculine warps young boys.
So what really got me thinking about all of this and finding thread was this late news and the news of IDF snipers targeting children (male) and journalists in an attack on Gaza during protests near the wall. This is from The BBC about some of the oldest tribes defined by religion still left: 
o, it likely was an attack based on a response to that. It’s just hard to know these days.
And there as this: “Israeli Citizens Watch As Their Military Attacks Unarmed Palestinians”.
From Haaretz: “The Cold Calculation Behind the Israeli Army’s Sniper Fire on the Gaza Border. The politicians instructed the military to prevent a breach of the fence, but it’s doubtful that they held detailed discussions about the means to achieve this.”
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