Republican Family Values

Republicans like to claim they are the party that stands up for family values. I have an idea of what they think they mean by that – they oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage, sex education and teenage pregnancy, abortion, and crime. But how do their beliefs translate into real life?

Thom Hartmann in his June 28, 2023 Substack post compared statistics between “Red” and “Blue“ states. He showed (with links to supporting documents) that compared with Democratic controlled states, Republican controlled states had higher rates of:

·         Spousal abuse and spousal murder

·         Divorce

·         Rape

·         Teen pregnancy

·         Sexually transmitted diseases

·         Opiate addictions and deaths

·         Robbery and aggravated assault

·         Homicide

·         Gun deaths

·         Suicide

It appears from the statistics that the majority of people involved with the items on this list are Republican supporters. Do these statistics reflect their real family values?

Related to the above items are poverty related statistics. Again the following have higher rates in Republican controlled states:

·         High school dropouts

·         Unemployment

·         Unskilled workers

·         Bankruptcy and poverty

·         Child poverty

·         People on welfare

·         People on disability support

·         Homelessness

·         Income and wealth inequality

·         Smoking

·         Obesity

·         Unvaccinated people 

·         Death from Covid and other preventable diseases

·         Maternal and infant mortality

·         Contaminated air and water

Poverty and poor health go hand in hand. One could argue that smoking, obesity and being unvaccinated are also choices people make, so could go in the family values list. But they are also symptoms of poverty and low education.

This raises the chicken and egg question: Do these people support the Republican Party because they are poor or are they poor because they have a Republican government? I argue it’s both, in what’s known as a vicious circle.

Being poor and powerless makes them angry at the system, including all levels of government. And being poorly educated makes them easy victims of the Republican propaganda (Fox News, etc.) which tricks them into voting against their own interest.

Republican policies then contribute to their poverty while enriching the wealthy. A classic example are the ten Red states which, for ideological reasons, didn’t expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act leaving 1.6 million adults without health insurance. The last item in the list, air and water pollution, contributes significantly to poor health and is the result of government policies that allow the pollution, as well as the poverty which forces some people to live in it.

So next time you hear a Republican talking about their party's family values, ask if they mean values like rape, teen pregnancy, abortion, murder and suicide?

Source:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/do-republicans-worship-poverty-death

https://stateline.org/2024/07/19/in-the-10-states-that-didnt-expand-medicaid-1-6m-cant-afford-health-insurance/

How to Make America Great Again

Donald Trump’s campaign motto from the beginning in 2016 has been “Make America Great Again”. The red MAGA ball cap symbolizes his movement and identifies his followers.

But the questions remain unanswered and rarely asked. When was America great? In what ways was it great? And for whom was it great?

I want to suggest answers to these questions and another one: how can we really make America great again?

I propose that America was “great” during the 1950s, 60s and 70s when it had the largest and most prosperous middle class anywhere in the world and at any time in human history. It was “great” for the middle class working people, most without a college degree. It was “great” in that an adult without a college degree, by working hard and spending wisely, could buy a house, marry, raise children, go on family holidays, and send the kids to college, all with a single income. As anyone can tell you now that is no longer possible. What was different then and what would we need to do to bring it back?

·   Tax the wealthy. The highest personal tax bracket in 1960 was 91%. High taxes allowed America to pay down the national debt from WWII (which was similar in ratio to GDP to todays) while building infrastructure like schools, libraries, highways and bridges. A 90+% tax rate puts a ceiling on top management salaries forcing companies to invest their profits back into the business by paying workers more and doing more research.

·   Tax businesses. This includes closing all loopholes.

·   Consider adding or increasing capital gains, estate and wealth taxes

·   Make college free or at least affordable for all. The GI Bill that gave veterans a free college education was a huge factor in creating the prosperous middle class of those decades. College was funded about 90% by government, 10% by tuition. Those ratios have flipped.

·   Enforce antitrust laws to prevent or break up monopolies to make an even playing field for small and middle sized businesses to thrive

·   Make share buy-back illegal like it used to be. This business practice enriches the remaining shareholders while doing nothing to improve the business or its workers.

·   Unions need to be strong and supported by the government

·   Minimum wage needs to be sufficient for a single person to live on

·   Labor laws need must be strong and enforced.

·   Women, people of color, and other minorities need equal opportunites in the workforce

The MAGA Republicans are of course doing the exact opposite of what actually would make America great again (though arguable Trump is making America great again for billionaires, at least temporarily).

In order to achieve this, Americans will have to wrest power back from the oligarchs, and it won’t be easy. That’s a topic for another day, but here are a few of the things that would have to be done:

·   Make bribery of politicians illegal again so their allegiance is to the voters back home, not the billionaires who funded their campaign

·   Make elections free and fair (see yesterday’s post for problems to fix)

·   Clean up the corruption in the Supreme Court

·   Tighten the laws limiting executive authority

One factor making the goal I listed for a middle-class family (to buy a house, go on vacations etc.) more difficult is that expectations have risen and along with them the cost. Compare the size of houses built in the 1950s with new ones today. And houses are now filled with expensive appliances. Vacations were more modest at that time compared with today – camping in a tent or small trailer at a lake a few hours’ drive away, not a resort in Acapulco.

I just wrote all this off the top of my head so am likely missing some points. Please add your thoughts in the comments. I’ll add more links to relevant articles as I come across them.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/sunday-review/middle-class-prosperity.html

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-share-buyback-rape-of-american

Election Fraud

To hear the American Right talk about rigged elections and voter fraud you would think that the Democrats are evil cheaters who can only win by cheating and the Republicans are honest angels who would never do anything wrong.

As usual the truth is exactly the opposite of what you hear on Fox and related sources.

Thom Hartmann in one of his posts a year or two ago made the remarkable statement that the last Republican president to win an election honestly was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was president in the 1950s before I started school. One of these days I will share that with you. Today I want to explain who is cheating and how.

Greg Palast, writing for the Hartmann Report, makes the case that Trump lost the 2024 election – it was voter suppression that won.

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Gerrymandering                                     

Elections, including federal elections, are run by the state so whoever runs the state government has a lot of control on election outcomes. Each district in a state elects its representative in the House. Careful drawing of the district boundaries, called gerrymandering, can change the number of Democrats or Republicans elected by concentrating or diluting the voters. This used to be illegal but the Supreme Court legalized it in a 2013 ruling which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Most Republican controlled states practice gerrymandering (because they can); most Democratic states do not (because it’s not fair). Hartmann estimated that without gerrymandering in the 2024 election, 10 seats in the states of N. Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio and Utah would have flipped to Democrat. Consider the damage the Republicans are doing now with a 5 seat majority.

Voter Suppression

Since that Supreme Court decision Republican states have passed hundreds of laws making it harder to vote, especially for poor, Black, disabled and elderly voters (who happen to vote largely Democratic). On the other hand Democratic states have passed laws making it easier to vote. Of course the Republicans justify their actions as preventing voter fraud. Some of the methods:

·    Ban or restrict mail in voting

·    Disqualifying mailed in ballots for technical reasons, like the address didn't exactly match the one on record

·    Strict signature matching

·    Requiring ID documents like a driver’s license, passport or birth certificate

·    Reduce the number of voting stations and the hours they are open in poor working class areas

·    One law in Georgia even made it illegal to give food or water to those in line

·    Prison penalties for trying to vote if not eligible

·    White supremacist militia gangs hired as “poll watchers” to intimidate Black and poor voters

Voter Purging

But the favorite and most effective method of voter fraud is purging the voter lists. Millions of eligible voters are removed every election year on flimsy excuses. In the two years leading to the 2016 elections more than 14 million people were purged; before the 2018 election 17 million voters were purged; between 2020 and 2022 19.2 million voters were purged. Most of these take place in “blue” cities within “red” states. Most of these were in fact dead or moved but millions were not and no attempt was made to determine which. A study in Georgia found the error rate of the purges was 63%.

In 2000 George W. Bush won the presidency over Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, just a few months after his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged over 90,000 Black voters. Jeb’s pretext was that their names were similar to those of convicted felons in Texas. Post-election investigation found not even one was an illegal voter.

A favorite trick is the postcard scam. Postcards, disguised to look like junk mail, are mailed to voters in selected areas where poorly-educated people live. If the cards aren’t returned, as instructed in fine print, the people are assumed to have died or moved away and are removed from the voter list.

The Republicans are hard at work rigging the next election. Remember Trump's words to his "beautiful Christians" asking for their votes in 2024 - "Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote any more". You can be sure there are more purges planned before the next election.

Save Us from SAVE

A new bill in the works called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) will require all new voters to prove citizenship by providing a birth certificate, passport or citizenship. Anyone updating their registration will be required to register in person with their documents. Millions of Americans do not have ready access to these documents nor can afford the time to wait in what will undoubtedly be very long lines. This act will also affect women who changed their surnames when they married but did not change their name on their documents. This will prevent millions of Americans, especially young first-time voters, and married women.

Where are all the Illegal Voters?

The rationale for all these voting restrictions is the news of millions of aliens the Dems have smuggled into the country who are voting. Where did these stories come from? Turns out they originated from the Heritage Foundation, the same people that brought us the Project 2025 blueprint for taking over the country.

Kris Kobach, one of the Heritage Fellows and Kansas Secretary of State, was one who claimed there were millions of illegal alients voting. He had the right to arrest illegal alien voters and tried hard but couldn't find even one (but did succeed in blocking 36,000 legal voters from voting). They did find some in Texas - three in 12 years.

Back in 2012 Florida removed 172,000 allegedly alien voters. They only found one person to charge, a Republican supporter from Austria, but managed to prevent thousands of mostly Hispanic voters from voting because their names matched those of deported aliens.

In his February 25 post, Thom Hartmann encourages the Democratic states to follow the "new rules" and use the same election rigging techniques that the Republicans have used so successfully for decades. This will temporarily level the playing field, and in the long run might catch the notice of the Republicans and cause them to agree to some sorely needed bipartisan election reform.

We can only hope.

For the complete story I recommend Thom Hartmann’s book The Hidden History of the War on Voting.

Living in Canada, where I have been voting for over 50 years, I have taken free and fair elections for granted. Federal elections here are run by Elections Canada, an independent non-partisan organization. There is a little bit of gerrymandering but they don't get away with much. Election boundary changes are reviewed and must be approved well ahead of the election. Every eligible voter is mailed a card prior to the election showing where to vote. I just shake my head at the uncivilized election procedures south of the border.

Sources:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/scotus-republicans-legalized-election-be4

https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f

https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-trump-and-the-gop-fixed-the-2026-c8a

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-would-hurt-americans-who-actively-participate-elections

https://www.amazon.ca/Hidden-History-War-Voting-Stole/dp/1523087781

Trump and Putin

Yesterday I suggested that Donald Trump was doing Putin’s bidding because of Putin flattering him. There must be more to it than that.

In Trump’s first presidency I wondered if Putin had perhaps bought some of Trump’s business debts, of which he had many, and was holding that over him. I thought it would have to be at least half a billion. But that seems unlikely – there has been no evidence turn up and I doubt that mere money would make Trump do what he is doing now.

Then there is the sex angle. Does Putin have compromising photos of Trump with prostitutes from his visits to Moscow? After Donald’s convictions regarding the Stormy Daniels affair and E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault, I doubt that anything could embarrass him or sway his voting base. Certainly not enough to make Donald betray his country against his will. A week after Trump’s election, November 12, 2024, Russian state-owned TV showed several nude photos of his wife Melania (these were published photos from her modelling days, not new or hacked photos). Speculation at the time suggested the nudies on TV was Putin’s way of reminding Trump that they owned him. But it doesn’t explain how they came to own him.

Thom Hartmann in his February 19, 2025 post “Does Putin Own Trump?” lists many connections between Donald Trump and Russia.

·    Real estate money laundering in New York in the 1990s

·    Hundreds of contacts and at least 38 meetings between Russian operatives and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign

·    Paul Manafort (who worked for Russia in 2010 to help elect a Russian puppet as Ukraine’s president) admitted feeding information about Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russian intelligence

·    Trump had a habit of taking national security-compromising top secret documents to hostile nations and leaving them in unsecured hotel rooms

·    Trump tried on 10 occasions to obstruct the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (and of course he has now fired every agent that worked on the case)

·    Russian intelligence and Putin’s “inner circle” celebrated Donald’s win as a great victory for Russia

·    The hours long secret phone calls with Putin (more than 20 in his first presidency)

·    Trump sent Senator Rand Paul to hand deliver a secret document to Putin in July 2018. Ten days later the CIA’s sources inside Moscow suddenly “went silent”.

·    The stolen documents stored (unsecured) at Mar-a-Lago* - were these taken to sell or trade? or just to show off??

·    Months after Trump took the boxes of documents to Mar-a-Lago, CIA warned their people “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed”. Coincidence?

If Trump is compromised and secretly (not so secretly lately) working for Russia, how long has this been going on?

Michael Sellers in his post on February 23, 2025, takes a closer look at claims by former KGB officer Alnur Mussayev that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987. Sellers should know what he’s writing about – he was a Russia specialist with the CIA.

Trump was undoubtedly on the KGB radar as a possible asset ever since his marriage in 1977 to Ivanka Zelnickova, a Czech model. Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact at that time and Czech intelligence was cooperating closely with the KGB.

After returning from the 1987 trip to Russia, Trump spent $100,000 on full page ads criticizing US foreign policy, arguing that America was being taken advantage of by other countries not paying their share (sound familiar?). The ads didn’t name NATO but the description fits.

Sellers explains that “kompromat”, threatening to reveal compromising information or photos, is not the most common or best tool of espionage recruitment. More effective are situations of mutual benefit, which fits in perfectly with Trump’s mindset. And Trump is an expert in adapting his beliefs to whatever is most expedient. The most valuable recruited assets come to completely support your position. Trump’s actions in the last week regarding Ukraine strongly suggest this is the case here.

Sellers concludes by describing the claim of Trump being recruited by the KGB in 1987 as “a possibility not to be excluded”.

 

* Man, I wish Joe Biden had pardoned the two other defendants in the Florida documents case (he knew Trump would anyway) and released the report himself (using the Supreme Court’s get out of jail free card).

 

Sources:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-melania-trumps-nude-190000869.html

https://hartmannreport.com/p/does-putin-own-trump-48b

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html

https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/a-deeper-look-at-claims-by-kgb-officer

What Motivates Trump?

How to explain Trump’s seemingly erratic moves, especially on foreign policy? Is there a common theme? Here I represent three different views on the mind and motives of Donald J. Trump.

The Trump Doctrine

Nesrine Malik argues in an opinion piece in today’s (February 24, 2025) Guardian that “a Trump doctrine is emerging [with] clear features, contours and a sort of unified theory of conflict.” Later she writes “Trump is functioning in a different value system…”

First Trump’s dealings are all transactional. There is no history prior to Trump and there is no right or wrong. Everything is “the art of the deal”. Trump is always thinking “what is in this for Trump (and only incidentally for the United States)?”

The second feature of Trump doctrine is what Malik calls “financialisation”. For Trump it’s all about money. He sees trade imbalances as other countries taking advantage of the US. He wants something back for anything America spends on other countries, hence his cutting of funds to USAID, negotiating with Ukraine for a share of their rare earth minerals, or turning Gaza into a resort.

The third feature is power and results.  For Trump, winning is the only thing that counts. He sees Ukraine resistance as a hopeless cause so wants to pull out of the effort. Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has as much as said that he will ignore the Geneva Conventions rules for warfare, including allowing torture, to ensure America wins.

Distractions

Gwynne Dyer in this week’s column presents a different view of Trump’s actions. Most, Dyer argues, are distractions from the real goal of consolidating power in order to lower taxes for the wealthy and eliminate regulations on business. His threats to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico, to take over Panama and Greenland, to turn Gaza into a Mediterranean resort, or to annex Canada, are all just distractions.

The real work is the replacement of agency heads with loyalists and the gutting of agencies that oversee business. The big one coming up will be the budget with the tax cuts. To try to justify the tax cuts, the unofficial agency of DOGE is slashing funding to everything (except of course to Musk’s own contracts).

To achieve their ultimate goals, the Trump regime needs total control of the federal government. They need to sideline Congress and put themselves above the authority of the courts. They are accomplishing this by the use of executive orders for actions that legally require approval of Congress, like spending or not spending money or gutting agencies created by Congress.  They will attempt to gain control of the courts by first ignoring then defying their orders. Trump’s atrocious picks for cabinet was at least partly to establish and tighten control over the Senate. Another technique used to control politicians, lawyers and judges is intimidation (see my February 21 post).

Trump will also need tight control of the military. Trump went a long way towards that end on Friday (February 21) with the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of Naval Operations, and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. No reasons were given but their race, gender and stand on diversity are giveaway clues. He also fired The Judge Advocate Generals of the three armed forces whose jobs were to determine the legality of military orders. Hegseth admitted Sunday on Fox News that the TJAGs were fired so they wouldn't be "roadblocks to anything that happens". Makes you wonder what is being planned to happen.

Finally to keep the people from learning what he’s up to, Trump needs to control the media. He has all the right-wing propaganda (Fox etc.) already on his side. To bring corporate media into line he is using, quite successfully, threats of lawsuits and other forms of intimidation.

To appease his racist and misogynistic base (and no doubt his own twisted desires) the Trump regime is going after DEI with a religious zeal. The Feb 6 executive order to investigate anti-Christian bias is his sop to his Christian Nationalist supporters. All of these are secondary to the goal of making his billionaire buddies richer.

Trump’s Ego

I will add a third layer to Trump’s motives – his ego. The purpose of much of what Trump does and says is to make himself feel more important, bigger, smarter, and more powerful. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t to honor America or insult Mexico as much as to make himself appear more powerful. Last week he even tweeted, referring to himself, “Long live the KING”.

Trump’s ego can of course be used against him. A large part of Putin’s hold over Trump is from flattery. Trump wants to get a good deal for Russia in the Ukraine “peace talks” so Putin will tell him “Who’s a good boy!” Similarly North Korean leader Kin Jong Un used flattery to get on Trump’s good side. His billionaire buddies have learned how to manipulate Trump’s ego to get him to do what they want – tax cuts and deregulation.

This essay presents a complicated set of motives which together try to make sense of the senseless.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/24/donald-trump-doctrine-usa-reshape-the-world

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/lets-fire-all-the-lawyers

Christian Persecution in America

It’s a standard belief in evangelical circles that there is an anti-Christian bias in America (and Canada) and even persecution of Christians. What do they mean and what are some examples?

To my mind, much of what is considered anti-Christian bias is rather a reduction in pro-Christian bias. This is happening as the country becomes more secular with fewer people identifying as Christian. Immigration brings people of other faiths, and each successive generation of people with a Christian background seem to have fewer church-goers.

A 2001 Gallop poll found 90% of Americans believed in God. In 2023 the number was 74%. For those aged 18-34 it was 59%. The split along political lines is significant: 66% for Democratic voters and 87% for Republicans.

A frivolous example claimed to be anti-Christian bias is people saying “Happy holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!” Most people that use the shorter greeting, I suspect, are just lazy. Or they are doing it out of respect for other religious faiths. Does saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Happy Hanukkah!” represent anti-Semitism?

Similarly using the shorter form of Xmas for Christmas was met with the lament “they are taking Christ out of Christmas”. Until someone pointed out that in the Early Church the Greek letter for X was used as a code for Christ.

An example that Trump himself used is the arrest and conviction of anti-abortion protestors outside of abortion clinics. But, if you deliberately disobey a law because of your religious beliefs you should be prepared to accept the consequences. If Muslim protestors were harassing people at a public beach for exposing too much skin, which is against their religious beliefs, they would get arrested too. Would the penalty be more severe for the anti-abortionist? Possibly, but it could be argued that a pregnant woman, forced to make a very difficult decision, is more vulnerable to harassment than a holiday swimmer.

Sunday store opening and Sunday sports events was a big issue a few decades ago. Christians saw this as discrimination making the attendance of Sunday morning church service more difficult. But laws prohibiting commerce, entertainment and sports on Sunday are examples of pro-Christian bias, and discriminate against Jews and Seventh Day Adventists who celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday. In Canada the Lord’s Day Act, passed in 1906, was ruled unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1985. And many Christians in my acquaintance pick up groceries Sunday afternoon.

Then there is the issue of same-sex marriage. Many Christian denominations consider homosexuality to be a sin and do not recognize same-sex marriage. Does allowing same-sex marriage constitute persecution of Christians? I don’t think so - Christians are still allowed to marry whomever they want. Here again laws prohibiting same-sex marriage (or hiring homosexuals) is an example of a pro-Christian bias which actually persecutes another minority group.

In America the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and religion, and prohibits the establishment of a national religion, has been under-enforced until recently. As the pro-Christian bias and privileges get whittled away Christians naturally see this as an attack on them. One of these privilege losses was the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools.

But then the American governments overreacted and during the 1960s and 70s restricted religious organizations from access to public facilities and funding. During the last two decades the Supreme Court has restored the balance so that, as David French writes,

“…people of faith enjoy equal access to school facilities, equal access to public funds (including tuition assistance) and extraordinary independence from nondiscrimination laws with the hiring and firing of ministerial employees”

This balance doesn’t make everyone happy so the culture wars continue. Some liberals want to go further in restricting religious rights. And many conservative Christians want to go back to the good old days when they had more things their way.

This is the trend behind the 2024 Louisiana law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school room, and the movement pushing the voucher system for public funding of religious schools in various states.

And this is the mood that the Republican Party and Donald Trump tapped into. And with good success. About 82% of the white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2024. David French states “no modern Republican has won the presidency without overwhelming support from white evangelicals.”

On February 6 Trump signed an executive order “to protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.” He put Attorney General Pam Bondi as head of a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” and directed that a report be prepared within 1 year. It will be interesting to see what the report comes up with. I predict the task force recommendations will result in less religious freedom for Americans, not more.

Trump’s executive order talks about religious freedom but considers protection only for Christians, no other religion. Yet a 2023 FBI report found only 10% (290 out of 2,833) of hate crimes motivated by religious bias were anti-Christian. About 71% were anti-Jewish and another 19% against other religions. Why were these ignored?

It can also be argued that Trump himself is persecuting Christians. He encourages his Department of Homeland officers to invade houses of worship in their search for undocumented immigrants, breaking a decades-long policy of holding them sacrosanct. And Trump’s sudden cancellation of USAID contracts affected many Christian organizations serving needy people in America and around the world. Organizations like World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Relief Services. Trump is even deporting people who have converted from Islam to Christianity who back in Iran would face death for blasphemy.

David French has a unique perspective on this issue. He was raised in an evangelical church and worked as an attorney for conservative Christian organizations. After his views on some issues changed he was forced to leave. Here is how he put it:

When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses. …personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. 

Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.

French concluded his article                                                

Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.

Sources:

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/what-anti-christian-bias-does-for

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/eradicating-anti-christian-bias/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/opinion/christianity-evangelicals-persecution-faith.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-usaid-evangelicals.html

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/trump-accused-biden-of-assorted-wrongs

Firehose #3

8 Million not 8 Billion

DOGE on Monday Feb 17 published a list of contracts that it cancelled claiming to have saved $16 billion. Half of that was a single contract worth $8 billion for technical support services for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Turns out that that figure was an error in an old government database and that the revised (January 2025) figure was $8 million, of which 2.5 million had been spent. So the amount saved was closer to $5.5 million. DOGE did correct its listing to show $8 million saved but did not subtract the amount already spent and left the total saved at $16 billion. Clearly the DOGE people are not accountants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.html

 

Dead people on Social Security

Here’s another whopper. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been trumpeting on social media that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving social security payments.

What was found was a large number of people in the Social Security Administration (SSA) database with a social security number but without a date of death, many of them born more than 100 years ago. How is that? One reason is the Cobol programming language used in the database which, if a birthdate is missing or incomplete, defaults to 150 years ago. Another is that deaths of nearly 19 million people prior to 1920 have not been entered so the database does not show them as deceased.

 But that does not mean that these people are still getting benefits. Previous reports from the Social Security’s inspector general found $71.8 billion (less than 1%) in improper payments over the 8 year period 2015-2022. Most of this was overpayments to living, not dead, people. In January of this year the US Treasury clawed back more than $31 million from overpayments from a number of federal agencies, not just SSA.

With adequate funding the SSA could update its database and find and recover more improper payments. But that won’t happen with this regime in power. The Republicans want to cancel Social Security completely.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-social-security-payments-dead-people

 

Poor Journalism or Pure Propaganda?

Stories like these illustrate, at best, poor journalism.  The purveyors of disinformation are too eager to get their story out and don’t take the time to verify the facts. At worst, it is pure propaganda. They don’t care if it’s true or not and even if they knew it was not true they would spread it anyway. Lies work as well as or better than the truth if the recipients don’t know the difference and are unlikely to find out.