Having learned nothing by paying $800,000,000 for lying, Fox News and its puppets, Hannity, Ingraham et al continue to defend the lies of a traitor.
One wonders, when these people go home at night, what they tell their spouses and children about what they do. Is it, “I’m paid to be an actor. It’s just my way of making money. I don’t have to believe this stuff. No one does.”
Here are words and pictures from Donald J. Trump:
The protection of classified information Soldiers risked their lives to protect this
If you care about facts and evidence, and have not already been brainwashed by professional liars, thiswill interest you.
If you’re worried about a rogue GOP Supreme Court Justice, who has taken hundreds of thousands in bribes — perhaps millions — and is married to an ardent, white-supremacist election-denier, but unbelievably claims he never discusses it with her, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
If you are concerned about GOP election deniers trying to foist a lying, criminal traitor on America to be the President of the United States, again, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
If you were shocked to see the President of the United States encourage a mob to overturn America’s election by brute force while he did nothing to stop it, and then you read that an entire political party denies it all ever happened — you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Here is the latest Republican Party’s plan to destroy American democracy. And I’m not exaggerating.
In Moore v. Harper, the Court will finally resolve whether there is a doctrine of constitutional interpretation known as the “independent state legislature.”
If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it will confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states.
It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.
The independent-state-legislature theory gained traction as the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In the Supreme Court, allies of the former president argued that the theory, as applied to the elector’s clause, enabled the state legislatures to appoint electors who would cast their votes for the former president, even though the lawfully certified electors were bound by state law to cast their votes for Joe Biden because he won the popular vote in those states.
Anti-abortion happens when a right-wing dominated, Catholic-dominated Supreme Court doesn’t care whether your religion accepts abortion. It’s only their religion that counts.
A dictatorship happens when a white-supremacist SCOTUS doesn’t care that extreme gerrymandering destroys the voting rights of people of color. If their vote can be destroyed, so can yours.
That as many as six right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with theindependent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling.
There literally is no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.
It’s not baffling at all. Remember, these are “impartial” right-wing justices who lean over backward to give right-wing theories serious consideration, no matter how wild-eyed they may be.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that the Constitution contemplates and provides for such judicial review.
Remember that in many of its other rulings, notably about guns, the right-wing court looks to history, especially distant history, for its decision that everyone should be allowed to own, carry, and shoot a gun if the state legislature so deems it.
No history supports the independent state legislature theory.
Their textual argument is that the total disempowerment of state courts necessarily follows from the fact that the elections clause empowers the state legislatures to prescribe the “manner” of holding congressional elections.
But there is neither more nor less significance to the fact that the Constitution assigns this quintessential legislative power to the state legislatures than that the Constitution assigns federal lawmaking to Congress rather than to the executive or the judiciary.
And yet, the Constitution provides for judicial review of the actions of both.
Considering the makeup of this Court, it would not be unbelievable for states dominated by Republicans to ignore national elections and simply send Trump-oriented electors to put him, or some other Republicans, in office.
When taken to its logical conclusion, the independent-state legislature nullifies the Constitution, a step that is not beyond the rabid right-wingers wearing black robes.
But then, if the Court, with a straight face, can claim the words, “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,” have absolutely no meaning at all, it can claim anything.
Proponents of the independent-state-legislature theory argue that because the elections clause does not assign this legislative role to the state governors and courts, the burden is on those who argue against the theory to come forward with compelling evidence that the Framers intended state courts to review state-legislative election laws.
But that’s to reverse the burden of proof.
Because there is no evident support at all for the theory, the burden instead is on those who argue for the theory to come forward with compelling evidence from the text, structure, or design of the Constitution or from the history at the time of the framing or founding, that confirms that the Constitution conferred on the state legislatures judicially unreviewable authority to redraw congressional districts.
The proponents of the theory have not carried this heavy burden to date, and they cannot possibly carry this burden in Moore v. Harper.
The fact that a Republican SCOTUS is taking this far-out idea seriously enough even to consider it worries me.
The right-wing segment of the Court, having already decided it is perfectly fine for a right-wing Justice to be bribed and have a biased family interest in a decision but not to recuse himself — those guys now itch to rewrite the Constitution.
If this decision goes the wrong way, we will experience a form of fascism that will rival Germany’s. And no, I am not exaggerating.
You may be a conservative. I once was myself until the GOP went nuts. But are you really willing to turn over the results of national elections away from voters and to a bunch of MAGAs?
We just finished the latest in over 100 episodes of “Debt Limit BS or How Government Lies Convince You to Accept Fewer Benefits While the Rich Get More.”
Being bribed by the rich, Congress does all it can get away with to widen the income/wealth/power gap between you and the rich.
One method is to tell you that federal government spending is “unsustainable,” or “out of control,” or is not “prudent,” or that the so-called federal debt is a “ticking time bomb.“
Never mind that they have been telling you the same lie for more than 80 years. While Federal Spending has increased the debt that isn’t a debt from $50 billion to $30 trillion, the nation still stands.
They lie because they are bribed and because they assume you know no better, so they can get away with it.
We all should contact our Congress people and the media and challenge them to answer a very simple question. Perhaps that will be a step toward narrowing the gap between you and the rich and give you the benefits you deserve and the government easily can afford.
If you’re tired of the BS, give this a try.
Oh, by the way, do you remember the Gephart Rule?
In 1979, noting the potential problems of hitting a default, Dick Gephardt imposed the “Gephardt Rule,” a parliamentary rule that deemed the debt ceiling raised when a budget was passed.
This resolved the contradiction in voting for appropriations but not voting to fund them. The rule stood until it was repealed by Congress in 1995.
Get it? When Congress voted for an appropriation, it also voted to fund them.
So, if Congress said, “We authorize spending a billion dollars on a dam,” that meant a billion dollars immediately became available to build a dam.
Makes sense to any normal person. Apparently, though, it was too logical for Congress.
In 1995, Congress said, “When we authorize spending a billion dollars to build a dam, we really don’t authorize paying a billion dollars to build the dam.”
And if that makes sense to you, you should run for Congress. Since that convulsion of childish illogic, Congress has plagued the nation with repeated debt limit crises.
Contact your Congress people and the media. If you don’t, then don’t complain about cuts to Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, and other benefits.
As long as you don’t complain, they will keep cutting.
Over the years, America has seen many cults. Their leaders come and go. Some notable cults are:
Charles Manson, the Manson Family
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Oregon cult
Jim Jones, the Peoples’s Temple
Marshall Applewhite, Heaven’s Gate cult
David Koresh, the Branch Davidians
Cults have several commonalities, the more important of which are:
“I am a stable genius.”
1. A psychopathic leader who claims unique abilities, including Godlike perfection in his decisions and exceptional knowledge of inside information.
The twenty characteristics of a psychopath are described here, according to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised.
Cult followers often believe their leader is omniscient and omnipotent.
Yet the simulatiously believe this all-powerful man is simultaneously besieged by outsiders who either are jealous of his powers or don’t understand his truth.
“It looked like a million people.”
2. Conformity: Dissenting opinions are actively, often angrily, discouraged.
Facts that disagree with the leader’s teachings are said to be lies and are thought to be further proof that his lies are truth.
Individuality is rejected in favor of group thought; violent group action is encouraged and often demanded.
“I’ve heard these are people (QAnon) who love our country.”
3. Exclusive knowledge gives cult members information available only to them and not to mainstream society.
That this knowledge may be fantastical and impossible only welds it further into the belief systems of followers.
Logic and reason are rejected in favor of the leader.
4. Exploitation: Membership in the cult demands that members support the leader actively, financially, emotionally, and often sexually.
Send Trump your money for non-physical collector cards
Sending one’s money or possessions to the leader is given as proof the member is worthy of membership.
5. Control: Cult leaders employ various psychological techniques to gain control over their followers.
This may include manipulating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors through coercion, isolation from the outside world, mind-altering practices, or indoctrination methods.
6. Isolation: Cult members’ extreme views and the frustration non-members feel with those views tend to break ties with family and friends.
This isolation is self-substantiating, as the only information received by members supports the cult’s beliefs.
Members become dependent on the cult for their worldview and their sense of belonging.
7. Resistance to criticism: Cults begin as a rejection of social norms. That is their raison d’etre.
They are built to resist criticism and data, while they accept counterfactual information.
Cults are highly acceptant of conspiracy theories, the more outrageously laughable, the better.
This acceptance of blatant disinformation — sharing the same “secret” strengthens the group’s internal bonds and controls.
From Scientific American Magazine:The dangerous consequences of the conspiratorial perspective—the idea that people or groups collude in hidden ways to produce a particular outcome—have become painfully clear.
The belief that the coronavirus pandemic is an elaborate hoax designed to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump has incited some Americans to forgo important public health recommendations, costing lives.
The gunman who shot and killed 11 people and injured six others in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 justified his attack by claiming that Jewish people were stealthily supporting illegal immigrants.
In 2016 a conspiracy theory positing that high-ranking Democratic Party officials were part of a child sex ring involving several Washington, D.C.–area restaurants incited one believer to fire an assault weapon inside a pizzeria.
Donald Trump’s MAGA fits every description of a cult, in this case, a dangerous cult. After at least 50 juries and judges (from both parties) ruled there was no evidence of election fraud, Trump continued to claim he “really won.”
The MAGAs dutifully believed. They attacked Congress because Trump told them to.
Counterfacts only reinforced MAGA’s beliefs.
How then, is a cult like MAGA different from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and dozens of other group beliefs that usually fall under the term, “religion”?
Religions have more followers and broader acceptance. Cults are smaller and less accepted by mainstream society. (Though both Judaism and Christianity were considered cults by mainstream society in their early days.)
Religions have a long history. (MAGAs aren’t there yet.)
Religions often have leaders, such as priests, rabbis, imams, or other clergy members. The charismatic leader is the authority. (In MAGA, the priests come from the Republican Party. They are the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Jim Jordans, and the FOX personalities.)
Religions have sacred texts and traditions. Cults create new beliefs directly from the mouth and mind of the leader. (After Trump claimed that pleading the 5th Amendment was for guilty people, he argued the 5th Amendment.)
Religions might cast out non-supporters of the religion’s fundamental beliefs. Cults cast out non-supporters of the cult’s leader. (The GOP MAGAs cast out Rep. Liz Cheney, a solid right-wing conservative, for not supporting Donald Trump.)
Within religions, a wide range of opinions about faith generally exists. Debate often is encouraged. In a cult, debate is discouraged, and there is no fundamental faith. (Those who disagree with Trump are termed “RINOs,” Republicans in name only.)
In religions, loyalty to the long-standing tenets of the religion is expected. In cults, loyalty to the leader’s latest whims is expected. (MAGAs believe the Presidential election was “rigged,” but the downstream elections that the Republicans won were legitimate, even in the same state or county.)
To say religions are popular because they are religions is a tautology, explaining nothing.
But that is what it is. MAGA is a “startup religion,” without yet the sacred texts, traditions and morals, though it already has the millions of followers necessary to be considered a religion.
Judaism is characterized by its monotheistic belief in one God and the importance of following a moral and ethical code based on the Torah.
Christianity began with the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who preached a message of love, compassion, and forgiveness.
Islam began with the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad who preached his message to the people of Mecca, calling for the worship of one God and emphasizing moral and social justice.
Hinduism developed gradually through a blend of cultural, religious, and philosophical elements, with no single religious authority or a centralized structure. Instead, it allows for individual interpretation and a multitude of paths (margas) to spiritual realization, including devotion (bhakti), knowledge (jnana), and disciplined action (karma).
Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, who later became known as the Buddha who utlined the Four Noble Truths: Suffering (dukkha) is an inherent part of existence; suffering arises from craving and attachment; it can be overcome by extinguishing craving; and there is a path to liberation from suffering, known as the Noble Eightfold Path. The Path includes ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom.
Taoism began with the sage Laozi, who encouraged individuals to emphasize humility, compassion, and going with the flow.
The various religions have one thing in common that MAGA lacks: A moral underpinning of goodness toward others, essentially forms of the Golden Rule.
This religious commonality is missing from most cults, as their focus is on the leader, for whom morality often is viewed as weakness.
Donald Trump is old for a cult leader, and it is unlikely he will have the time, temperament, or desire to instill moral virtues in his flock. His self-absorbtion makes such a transformation unlikely.
Thus, MAGA likely will die with Trump unless the GOP, which currently lacks a moral base, can find a charismatic, amoral or immoral leader to replace him.
Visualize posing this question to a current MAGA member:
“If Jesus and Trump disagreed on some point, whom would you believe and follow?”
This would pose a conundrum for Trump’s religious Christian followers because Trump is, in every way, the “un-Jesus.”
Trump expresses scorn for immigrants, blacks, gays, and the poor. He wants to wall them out of America. He calls them names. He does everything he can to make their lives a hardship.
Jesus emphasized love, forgiveness, and compassion, especially for the less fortunate among us.
“For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels.”“The Lord watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless.”
Trump promotes his own glory, greatness, superiority, perfection, and service to him. Trump’s Golden Rule is: “Do unto me as I wish.”
Jesus emphasized selflessness, humility, service to others, and the importance of treating others with love and respect. He encouraged the real Golden Rule.
Trump focuses on his own personal success. He has been proven corrupt in his business dealings and a deceitful hypocrite, even criminal, in his personal dealings.
Jesus taught that leaders should be humble, compassionate, and loving and should focus on serving the needs of others. He spoke out against hypocrisy and corruption.
While none of us can achieve the perfection of Jesus, few of us are so diametrically opposed to everything Jesus stood for as is Trump. And none of us is so slavishly worshipped by those who claim to be followers of Jesus.
Christians and others of the right wing may have answered the question, “If Jesus and Trump disagreed on some point, whom would you believe and follow?”
Despite their professed love for Jesus, many do not seem to follow Him or his teachings.
They follow Trump with his hatred, cruelty, and bigotry.
Returning to the title question, “Willthe MAGA cult become a religion?” It’s not possible to be sure. One hopes no mainstream religion ever will be based on Trump’s selfish, hedonistic, hate-mongering fascism.
But hopes are not reality. America’s current right-wing attitude toward the “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of a teeming shore, the homeless, and tempest-tossed” is not encouraging.
CouldMAGA become a religion? Not long ago, I would have said that the entire “law and order” Republican party never, never, never would countenance a violent invasion of Congress trying to overturn an election.
Times change. Morals change. And America’s religious have allowed the least moral man imaginable to put his stamp on this century and on their religion. The “religious” right is led by such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Fox News, and QAnon.
So yes, MAGA could make that transition back to the Dark Ages. God help us.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.
members supports the cult’s beliefs.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 