Democracy's Enemies Still at It

Recent reporting demonstrates how determined are the opponents of democracy to continue the fight. Most of these items involve things from the past that are just now coming out into the open--but they're consistent with what's going on right now.

Making the link between past and present is Steve Bannon. On his podcast yesterday Bannon basically confirmed reporting by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa to the effect that he participated in planning the January 6 insurrection as a means of cancelling the election. The reporters' book Peril relates that prior to January 6 Bannon advised: 

People are going to go, "What the fuck is going on here?" We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him. We’re going to kill it in the crib, kill the Biden presidency in the crib.

You might remember that on January 5 Bannon told his listeners that all hell would break loose the following day. Yesterday Bannon responded to the Peril reporting:

Yeah, because his legitimacy. Forty-two percent of the American people — 4-2 — think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately. It killed itself. … Just let this go with what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. We told you from the very beginning. Just expose it. Just expose it. Never back down. Never give up. This thing will implode.

All this is consistent with Peril's reporting of a memo developed by John Eastman, "a conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump's legal team." (Bannon interviewed Eastman for his podcast on January 6, right after the assault on Congress.) Eastman laid out a complicated set of steps Mike Pence could take to nullify election results in several states and hand the election to Trump. Basically, Pence would declare certain states contested, then announce Trump as the winner. Congress might object, but that would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Trump would be elected anyway.

But they're still at it. Just yesterday the New York Times reported that Trump's campaign issued an internal memo that refuted allegations against Dominion voting that were being advanced by lawyers supporting Trump. Knowing the allegations were false, Trump refused to put a leash on his lawyers--and to this day he and his acolytes perpetuate the Big Lie that the election was stolen. 

Meanwhile, Trumpists continue to align with authoritarians around the world. Bannon and others are supporting Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro. Up for reelection but trailing badly in the polls, Bolsonaro is doing exactly what Trump did in 2016 and 2020: announcing in advance that the election is being rigged. And today, following other Trump acolytes who have made pilgrimages to Hungary, Mike Pence is speaking to a "pro-family" event, the "Fourth Budapest Domestic Summit."

And Arizona Republicans are still conducting their bogus 2020 election audit after multiple delays, even deadlines for the submission of its report. Trump keeps pounding the drum, sending another letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to demand that he decertify last year's election. Trump is already under criminal investigation in Georgia for leaning on this guy.

The present continues the past. Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was yapping yesterday about a plan to put coronavirus vaccine in salad dressing. Salad dressing! Flynn, we recall, was convicted of lying to the FBI about his financial relationship with Turkey and resigned his position after lying about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the US. He's still around. And this week Rand Paul campaign aide Jesse Benton, who was convicted of campaign finance violations in the 2016 election, only to be pardoned by Trump (!!!), received federal charges for funneling Russian money to the Trump campaign.

It never quit being about Russia.

Fox News Will Kill You; The GOP Just Hates You

Ever since the pandemic settled in, I've wondered if the Republican Party is a death cult. I can't explain why would it lead people to deny the science, reject masks, and gather for mass rallies. 

Even today, though, Fox News is out front telling people not to trust the vaccines. Media Matters documents how their evening talk shows promote conspiracy theories and outright lies, even while they push the threat that the government is going to force people to be vaccinated. But why?

If it's all to make Joe Biden look bad, it's a horrible strategy. It works only on a few people who already hate Democrats. I just don't know.

Then there's Senator Marsh Blackburn. While we were first processing the news that a young White man had murdered 8 people, six of them Asian American women working in massage parlors, Blackburn takes advantage of the opportunity to tweet this:

Given the context, Blackburn essentially waved the, "I'm a racist" flag, indicating her disdain for Asian Americans and for all who hate racism.

Finally, Brian Taylor Cohen updates us on the House resolution to award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Capitol Police for protecting the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. 

Remarkably, Blackburn was not among the Dirty Dozen. 

Southern Baptists Are Mean (the Denomination, That Is)

I'm sorry, but it needs to be said: meanness runs deep in the Southern Baptist Convention's DNA. I have some theories about why, but that's not super-important. What I want to say is, don't be surprised when you see otherwise inexplicable meanness from the SBC.

I met Jesus in a Southern Baptist church, where I received a great deal of love. I served a Southern Baptist church part-time in college, founded the Baptist Student Union there, served as a Southern Baptist Home Missionary, and graduated from THE Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I was even president of the Whitsitt Society for Baptist Freedom, the student resistance movement against the inevitable fundamentalist takeover. I met countless wonderful people and received an incredible amount of love. No one in the SBC ever came after me.

When my Mom was very sick and death was inevitable, the choir from her Southern Baptist church got on a bus and came to the house to sing hymns. I sobbed and sobbed. God bless them.

But the Southern Baptist Convention is mean. Always has been. Let me explain.

As everyone knows, the denomination was founded to defend the interests of slaveholders. It took a long time for other denominations that split over slavery to reconcile, however imperfectly, but Baptists never did. Founding moments tend to imprint themselves in your DNA. The only reason the SBC exists at all is hate.

C. H. Toy, lifted from Wikipedia

Southern Baptists embroiled themselves in one controversy after another. Southern Baptists almost universally embraced segregation until well into the modern Civil Rights Movement. In a college research project I learned that the denomination's national setting and its agencies began calling for civil rights long before congregations were on board. 

Southern Baptists did not escape the fundamentalist controversies. In 1879 they fired a professor for maintaining that Isaiah did not predict Jesus. Poor slob wound up taking a job at Harvard. Southern Seminary and the SBC publishing house faced dire threats in the 1960s when a professor published a study of Genesis that did not promote creationism. The professor, Ralph Elliott, was fired--and I double-dog guarantee you that the people who fired him mostly agreed with him. But it's a mean organization.

Lots of people are familiar with the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, which started in the 1970s and became complete in the 1990s. We'll get there, but not yet. I may offend some friends in saying this, but the fundamentalists had some legitimate grievances. Lots of Baptists resented the elitism of the SBC establishment, and it was real. Many are the times I saw SBC elites mock the people whose money fed their children for being naive, ignorant, and unsophisticated. There was indeed a spirit of hiding one's superior knowledge from the masses, lest one get fired. And there was a powerful good ole boy network that got people jobs, and better jobs, and sweet opportunities. 

I know. I was in the pipeline. Not in the middle of it, but close to people who were. I was set if I wanted to go that route. Even in my 50s, and decades removed from my SBC life, I've gotten a couple of calls.

No wonder the fundamentalists were mean. For that matter, the elites were mean in part because they were constantly under threat from the fundamentalists and had experienced hurt. But there was a meanness there too, even among some of the nicest people I've ever met.

Now, don't get me wrong. The fundamentalists, generally speaking, were assholes. That's being too nice. They were sadists. I could describe the trustee who mocked a woman professor for hyphenating her name. Or the megachurch pastor and SBC president who accused a seminary professor of heresy--but privately admitted he hadn't read the book in question. Or the trustee who expressed surprise when I told him that early Baptists had female deacons, offered me his address for me to send the evidence, and (of course) never replied when I did send a package. Or the megachurch pastor who insisted that divorced men were disqualified from pastoring... until his wife filed for divorce. He's still in the same pulpit.

We all know how mean those people are now. The two most influential figures in the takeover movement now live in shame. One has a documented track record of sexually assaulting younger men, and the other has a documented track record of sweeping sexual assault allegations under the rug and minimizing them, even advising wives to endure physical abuse if it's just occasional.

But you know how mean they were? They hired one of my friends to teach at an SBC seminary, replacing people they'd run off. I was disappointed that my friend would enable what they were doing, but I think he'd really convinced himself they were hiring him in good faith. He was "conservative enough" to work there. Within a few years, they'd fired that entire new first wave of new faculty members for not being "conservative enough." Mean.

If you're following religion on social media, it's amazing how quickly the SBC trolls come out. Some of them have figured out that the bigger an asshole you are, the faster you can gather a little following and maybe make some money. Today a colleague at an evangelical college voiced his support of LGBTQ+ students, and the backlash was immediate. Even some big names.

Two issues rival LGBTQ+ persons in their capacity to stir the trolls. So much as suggest that women might have distinctive and valuable gifts that the church should celebrate--I'm not even talking about ordination!--and men will just climb all over themselves to shout that down. And race? The Southern Baptist reaction against critical race theory has driven prominent Black churches out of the denomination--and you can absolutely tell that the condemnations of critical race theory come from people who have no idea what they're talking about. But that's another conversation. The point is, they're just mean.

So when you see Beth Moore leaving the SBC, remember: she experienced a lot of the same love I did back in the day. But she's also tolerated decades of meanness, and lately it's just crossed the line, overflowed the cup, injured the camel, you name it. Because meanness is in the SBC DNA.