Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,729]

1 hour ago, robsblubot said:

😅 
Now the part that hurts dems is the "illegal" part, and I have a hard time defending that.

There are a lot of people in South America who could improve their lives by moving to the US. Should the USA take 100m people in just because? Of course the who's responsible for this mess part gets a bit more nuanced, but the situation does benefit the Republican Party more (politically).

GOP senators seethe as Trump blows up delicate immigration compromise

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-angry-trump-immigration-deal/index.html

Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable.

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged in a private meeting on Wednesday that Trump’s animosity toward the yet-to-be-released border deal puts Republicans in a serious bind as they try to move forward on the already complex issue. For weeks, Republicans have been warning that Trump’s opposition could blow up the bipartisan proposal, but the admission from McConnell was particularly striking, given he has been a chief advocate for a border-Ukraine package.

Now, Republicans on Capitol Hill are grappling with the reality that most in the GOP are loathe to do anything that is seen as potentially undermining the former president. And the prospects of a deal being scuttled before it has even been finalized has sparked tensions and confusion in the Senate GOP as they try to figure out if, and how, to proceed – even as McConnell made clear during party lunches Thursday that he remains firmly behind the effort to strike a deal, according to attendees.

“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump.

He added, “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana called any efforts to disrupt the ongoing negotiations “tragic” and said: “I hope no one is trying to take this away for campaign purposes.”

“I would encourage (chief Senate GOP negotiator) James Lankford and other conservatives to produce a work product with which they will shortly allow conservatives like myself to review it and take heart that there are a number of us who won’t be looking to third parties and assessing the propriety of passing this bipartisan proposal,” Young said.

It’s an all-too-familiar dynamic for the Republicans who served while Trump was in office, where he could easily derail legislative action on Capitol Hill with the blast of a single tweet or stir up a new controversy that Republicans were forced to respond to. And with Trump now marching toward the presidential nomination, Republicans are once again bracing for life with him as the nominee.

Underscoring just how damaging Trump’s comments and campaign to kill the border deal have been in the Senate, one GOP senator on condition of background told CNN that without Trump, this deal would have had overwhelming support within the conference.

“This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren’t for Donald Trump,” the Republican senator said.

GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina – who has also been involved in the talks – said he didn’t know if anyone could convince Trump to not kill the deal. But he acknowledged that it would take some “courage” for members to be able to press ahead at this point in defiance of Trump – though Tillis argued it would ultimately be beneficial for Trump for them to pass a border security deal and help address the flow of migrants trying to enter the country.

“I think this is when members of the Senate have to show some courage and do something that at the end of the day will be very helpful for President Trump,” Tillis said.

Asked whether it was a mistake for Trump to be assailing this deal, Tillis said: “I’ll leave it to him to figure out how he needs to get into office. I hope you’ll leave it to some of us who would support that effort to give him the tools he needs to really manage the border and the abuse and the dangerous situation we have today.”

For his part, McConnell – who has had zero relationship with Trump since the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack – downplayed Trump’s opposition saying, “It’s not anything new,” and insisting they were not abandoning the talks.

“We’re still working,” McConnell said. “Trying to get an outcome.”

Sen. John Thune, the no. 2 Senate Republican, said the discussions have reached a critical moment but acknowledged they may need to turn to a “plan B.”

“If we can’t get there, then we’ll go to plan B,” Thune said. “But I think for now at least, there are still attempts being made to try and reach a conclusion that would satisfy a lot of Republicans.”

Status of border talks remains unclear

In the latest sign that the emerging border deal faces an uphill climb, a senior leadership aide to House GOP Leader Steve Scalise told a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff on Thursday that it was dead on arrival in the House, according to a source familiar.

Senate Republicans on the fence about the proposal may be less inclined to back it, knowing it’s going nowhere in the House and knowing Trump wants a border deal killed.

Frustration reigned inside the Senate GOP on Thursday amid lingering confusion over the status of a deal.

While McConnell has said the talks are still proceeding, Young warned Republican leadership against pulling the plug before they’ve taken a thorough temperature check inside the conference, where a contingent of Republicans are still fighting for a deal.

“I think leadership needs to count noses before they make any impulsive decisions,” he said.

Pressed on whether it was realistic to pass a border deal with Trump opposing it, Young said: “It may be possible. Listen, I’m very much attuned to the political realities, but I think before you make these consequential decisions on behalf of this conference, you’ve got to consult with the conference.”

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has been openly critical of McConnell, said he was “puzzled” by the leader’s comments during the closed-door meeting on Wednesday, which was supposed to be focused on Ukraine.

“I mean, we were talking about funding for Ukraine and all of the sudden he brings up the border and then, again, lays out what I consider a pretty lame excuse, trying to shift blame to President Trump for, I would say, his failed negotiation, not James Lankford,” Johnson said. “James Lankford has worked his tail off. It’s McConnell that took away the leverage by not tying Ukraine funding to actually securing the border.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who has made no secret of her frustration with Trump over the years, said members need to remember how big this moment is for the border and for Ukraine and put their own politics aside.

“I’m not giving up. This is not about Trump and this is not about me. This is about our country. This is about democracy around the world. This is about security for our own country and so let’s keep pushing to get this border deal,” she said. “Let’s stand by the commitments that we have made for our friends and our allies so that our word actually means something.”

This is the second time in six years Trump killed or was actively trying to kill a bipartisan immigration deal as it emerged. Back in 2018, Murkowski was part of bipartisan talks over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The bill got 54 votes in the Senate, but not enough to get it over the finish line.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the Democrats involved in the border talks, expressed frustration about Trump seeking to inject chaos into the situation.

“I think over the next 24 to 48 hours, they are going to make a decision as to whether they want to do this, or whether the forces surrounding Donald Trump – who want to keep chaos at the border – win,” Murphy said. “So they have a decision to make. I hope they make that decision very quickly. We have an agreement that is 95% written and is ready to get to the floor if Republicans decide that they actually want to solve the problem.”

[Fulham Broadway 16,808]

Looking forward to the 'debate' tonight.

I think the danger for Dems leading up to the Election is that Harris is a relatively unknown blank canvas in terms of stuff chucked at her. Think about Trump and hes still there, felon, rapist, thoughtless on any substance unless its Donald J Trump, misogynist, the list goes on yet hes Teflon Don. 

If Harris upsets the Capitol Hill billionaire lobbyists, or the Israeli lobby, or corporate media there will be all kinds of shit chucked at her. That said Trump with his mental state is perfectly capable of fucking up his own electoral objective - especially if he goes into tonights debate angry.

[robsblubot 3,496]

13 minutes ago, Vesper said:

GOP senators seethe as Trump blows up delicate immigration compromise

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-angry-trump-immigration-deal/index.html

Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable.

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged in a private meeting on Wednesday that Trump’s animosity toward the yet-to-be-released border deal puts Republicans in a serious bind as they try to move forward on the already complex issue. For weeks, Republicans have been warning that Trump’s opposition could blow up the bipartisan proposal, but the admission from McConnell was particularly striking, given he has been a chief advocate for a border-Ukraine package.

Now, Republicans on Capitol Hill are grappling with the reality that most in the GOP are loathe to do anything that is seen as potentially undermining the former president. And the prospects of a deal being scuttled before it has even been finalized has sparked tensions and confusion in the Senate GOP as they try to figure out if, and how, to proceed – even as McConnell made clear during party lunches Thursday that he remains firmly behind the effort to strike a deal, according to attendees.

“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump.

He added, “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana called any efforts to disrupt the ongoing negotiations “tragic” and said: “I hope no one is trying to take this away for campaign purposes.”

“I would encourage (chief Senate GOP negotiator) James Lankford and other conservatives to produce a work product with which they will shortly allow conservatives like myself to review it and take heart that there are a number of us who won’t be looking to third parties and assessing the propriety of passing this bipartisan proposal,” Young said.

It’s an all-too-familiar dynamic for the Republicans who served while Trump was in office, where he could easily derail legislative action on Capitol Hill with the blast of a single tweet or stir up a new controversy that Republicans were forced to respond to. And with Trump now marching toward the presidential nomination, Republicans are once again bracing for life with him as the nominee.

Underscoring just how damaging Trump’s comments and campaign to kill the border deal have been in the Senate, one GOP senator on condition of background told CNN that without Trump, this deal would have had overwhelming support within the conference.

“This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren’t for Donald Trump,” the Republican senator said.

GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina – who has also been involved in the talks – said he didn’t know if anyone could convince Trump to not kill the deal. But he acknowledged that it would take some “courage” for members to be able to press ahead at this point in defiance of Trump – though Tillis argued it would ultimately be beneficial for Trump for them to pass a border security deal and help address the flow of migrants trying to enter the country.

“I think this is when members of the Senate have to show some courage and do something that at the end of the day will be very helpful for President Trump,” Tillis said.

Asked whether it was a mistake for Trump to be assailing this deal, Tillis said: “I’ll leave it to him to figure out how he needs to get into office. I hope you’ll leave it to some of us who would support that effort to give him the tools he needs to really manage the border and the abuse and the dangerous situation we have today.”

For his part, McConnell – who has had zero relationship with Trump since the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack – downplayed Trump’s opposition saying, “It’s not anything new,” and insisting they were not abandoning the talks.

“We’re still working,” McConnell said. “Trying to get an outcome.”

Sen. John Thune, the no. 2 Senate Republican, said the discussions have reached a critical moment but acknowledged they may need to turn to a “plan B.”

“If we can’t get there, then we’ll go to plan B,” Thune said. “But I think for now at least, there are still attempts being made to try and reach a conclusion that would satisfy a lot of Republicans.”

Status of border talks remains unclear

In the latest sign that the emerging border deal faces an uphill climb, a senior leadership aide to House GOP Leader Steve Scalise told a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff on Thursday that it was dead on arrival in the House, according to a source familiar.

Senate Republicans on the fence about the proposal may be less inclined to back it, knowing it’s going nowhere in the House and knowing Trump wants a border deal killed.

Frustration reigned inside the Senate GOP on Thursday amid lingering confusion over the status of a deal.

While McConnell has said the talks are still proceeding, Young warned Republican leadership against pulling the plug before they’ve taken a thorough temperature check inside the conference, where a contingent of Republicans are still fighting for a deal.

“I think leadership needs to count noses before they make any impulsive decisions,” he said.

Pressed on whether it was realistic to pass a border deal with Trump opposing it, Young said: “It may be possible. Listen, I’m very much attuned to the political realities, but I think before you make these consequential decisions on behalf of this conference, you’ve got to consult with the conference.”

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has been openly critical of McConnell, said he was “puzzled” by the leader’s comments during the closed-door meeting on Wednesday, which was supposed to be focused on Ukraine.

“I mean, we were talking about funding for Ukraine and all of the sudden he brings up the border and then, again, lays out what I consider a pretty lame excuse, trying to shift blame to President Trump for, I would say, his failed negotiation, not James Lankford,” Johnson said. “James Lankford has worked his tail off. It’s McConnell that took away the leverage by not tying Ukraine funding to actually securing the border.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who has made no secret of her frustration with Trump over the years, said members need to remember how big this moment is for the border and for Ukraine and put their own politics aside.

“I’m not giving up. This is not about Trump and this is not about me. This is about our country. This is about democracy around the world. This is about security for our own country and so let’s keep pushing to get this border deal,” she said. “Let’s stand by the commitments that we have made for our friends and our allies so that our word actually means something.”

This is the second time in six years Trump killed or was actively trying to kill a bipartisan immigration deal as it emerged. Back in 2018, Murkowski was part of bipartisan talks over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The bill got 54 votes in the Senate, but not enough to get it over the finish line.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the Democrats involved in the border talks, expressed frustration about Trump seeking to inject chaos into the situation.

“I think over the next 24 to 48 hours, they are going to make a decision as to whether they want to do this, or whether the forces surrounding Donald Trump – who want to keep chaos at the border – win,” Murphy said. “So they have a decision to make. I hope they make that decision very quickly. We have an agreement that is 95% written and is ready to get to the floor if Republicans decide that they actually want to solve the problem.”

Yeah I am familiar with the bill and you’ve shared it before — not suggesting it shouldn’t be shared again.

It’s really easy to simply ask the same questions the police used to understand situations, “who benefits from this?”

on the other hand, this bill so close to the election was doomed from the get-go; the timing also looks a bit suspicious from the dems—like get something out to help elections.

Edited September 10 by robsblubot

[Vesper 28,729]

Donald Trump’s Unreality Show

The former president is focused on made-up problems—and terrifying solutions.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-unreality-show

 

Donald Trump is very good at highlighting problems that don’t exist, like public schools providing gender-affirming surgery without consent. Look, any time Trump starts talking about “the transgender thing,” you can expect it’ll be bad. But a riff at a recent Moms for Liberty event was particularly ugly—as well as divorced from reality. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

The supposition here is that kids are routinely getting gender-affirming surgeries at schools, in which—I guess?—doctors are lurking around to perform them. Or maybe it’s that school buses are being rerouted to hospitals? Either scenario is unhinged, and as CNN noted, “Trump’s own presidential campaign could not provide a single example of this ever happening.” Nevertheless, Trump repeated the lie this past weekend, saying, “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation.”

There is no world in which kids are going under the knife at school, except, apparently, in Trump’s post-truth world. It’s a dark and scary place filled with problems that don’t exist, albeit with potentially terrifying solutions. And what’s really scary is that if Trump can convince enough Americans that they actually inhabit this place we’ll call Earth Two, he could return to the White House.

Since entering the political scene in 2015, Trump has uttered a dizzying stream of lies. In the four years of his presidency alone, he made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to The Washington Post, and hasn’t stopped lying about his 2020 loss as we approach the 2024 election. “Trump’s lying is most exceptional in its relentlessness, a never-ending avalanche of wrongness that can bury even the most devoted fact-checkers,” one of them, CNN’s Daniel Dale, wrote last week. Somehow the guy who mused about purchasing Greenland sounds even more disconnected from reality as he runs for president again, frequently bringing up fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter and seeming to mix up asylum-seekers and people who have been in mental institutions, or asylums.

Of course, Trump has been demonizing migrants since launching his 2016 campaign, when he suggested that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

His dangerous rhetoric has continued, with Trump telling Time in April that there will be “as many as 20 million” undocumented immigrants in the United States by the time Joe Biden is out of office, with “many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions.” (Pew estimated, as of 2022, that there are around 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. Though estimates vary, there are not believed to be 20 million—never mind 25 or 30 million, as Trump ally Marco Rubio has suggested, according to PolitFact.)

Beyond Trump inflating the numbers, the scale of such a deportation plan even affecting 11 million people, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, is “incomprehensible.” Meanwhile, Trump torpedoed a bipartisan bill earlier this year to actually address immigration reform.

On Earth One, where we all live, border crossings are way down. Citing US Customs and Border Protection statistics, USA Today reported last month that the number of migrant apprehensions along the southern border “plunged in July from a year ago, to the lowest level of the Biden era.” Similarly, as the US produces and exports “the most crude oil out of any country, at any time,” Trump portrays the Biden administration as opposed to drilling—to the point that he will be required to be a “dictator” on day one to get the job done. As Trump said in December, “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Trump, however, dismisses the very real problem of climate change.

Facts are, of course, irrelevant on Earth Two, where Trump is taking fear-mongering over immigration to a new level. He recently claimed at a Fox News town hall that “Venezuelans are taking over the whole town” of Aurora, Colorado. But the AP reports that police in the Denver suburb “say a Venezuela street gang with a small presence in the city has not taken over a rundown apartment complex—yet the allegation continues to gain steam among conservatives.” (Snopes has more on how a viral video has fueled rumors on the right.)

As Trump took over the GOP, Republicans moved with him to Earth Two, focusing on non-existent problems that they could then “solve.” Earlier this year, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson touted legislation aimed at stopping something that is already illegal in America: noncitizens voting in federal elections. Despite voter fraud being extremely rare, Republicans have become laser-focused on it under the guise of  “election integrity,” presumably to pass legislation to make it harder to vote. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since Republicans demonstrated on January 6, 2021 that they wouldn’t hesitate to disenfranchise voters based on election lies.

The trick of Trump’s unreality is that if enough people believe it, it ceases to matter if it’s true or not. According to a 2023 CBS survey, Trump voters trust him more than their own friends and family, conservative media, or even religious leaders. So Trump seems to believe (probably rightly) that he can create his own truth—that if enough of Trump’s people occupy Earth Two it doesn’t much matter what actually is happening on Earth One.

The problem for the rest of us on Earth One is that Trump appears willing to shred the Constitution to address non-existent issues like widespread voter fraud. On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again … Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

As Axios’s Alex Thompson explained, “Trump is now proposing two of the largest-ever federal arrests of people living in America, including U.S. citizens, if he’s re-elected.” So there’s the proposed mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which Trump warned this past week “will be a bloody story” if he’s elected, along with jailing people over baseless election fraud claims. This is the stuff of autocrats, and it’s up to the American people to decide if they want to give Trump the power to actually become one.

[cosmicway 1,314]

Why is Trump talking such rubbish English ?
Most politicians talk in a stylized manner and some even like to use old language expressions, like Winston Churchill did.
Trump should be no exception or at least he could hire some tutors to improve his skills.
But he likes to talk like a truck driver who is caught by the police and held overnight for being pissed.
He does that because most of his followers are illiterate and when we say illiterate we mean illiterate.
Those maga folks could be alienated listening to someone who speaks proper English.

Edited September 10 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,729]

Just now, robsblubot said:

Yeah I am familiar with the bill and you’ve shared it before — not suggesting it shouldn’t be shared again.

It’s really easy to simply ask the same questions police does to understand situations: the main one being, “who benefits from this?”

on the other hand, this bill so close to the election was doomed from the get-go; the timing also looks a bit suspicious from the dems—like get something out to help elections.

It was the most right wing immigration bill in decades, and was partly crafted by some of the most conservative Republicans. Many of the progressive Dems hated it, but enough Dems overall supported it in large enough numbers to get it passed.

BUT Trump, of course, was never serious about doing something concrete, he only wanted the talking point, thus scuppered it with help from the MAGAt crew in Congress.

[robsblubot 3,496]

19 minutes ago, Vesper said:

It was the most right wing immigration bill in decades, and was partly crafted by some of the most conservative Republicans. Many of the progressive Dems hated it, but enough Dems overall supported it in large enough numbers to get it passed.

BUT Trump, of course, was never serious about doing something concrete, he only wanted the talking point, thus scuppered it with help from the MAGAt crew in Congress.

Yeah I know. Watched interviews with some of the republicans involved with it. The timing was unfortunate tho… there was no way Trump's campaign would be ok with it.

Edited September 10 by robsblubot

[Vesper 28,729]

6 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Why is Trump talking such rubbish English ?

Because he is a troglodyte, with an extraordinary lack of higher level intelligence and intellectual curiosity. He is an authoritarian, rambling carnival barker, an Olympian-level conman who trades in lowest common denominator fear, greed, hate, perpetual, never-ending lies, and powerlust.

[Fulham Broadway 16,808]

The debate will last 90 minutes with two ad breaks and no studio audience.

The rules of engagement are:

• Only the moderators can ask questions
• Each candidate’s microphone will only be turned on when it is their turn to speak
• No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate
• Trump won coin toss and selected to give last closing statement
• Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate
• Props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage
• No topics or questions have been shared with campaigns or candidates in advance
• Candidates will only be given a pen, pad of paper and a bottle of water
• Candidates have two-minutes to answers questions, two-minute rebuttals and one minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses
• Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks
• Moderators will enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilised discussion
• Trump has the last word with 2 minutes of talking

[robsblubot 3,496]

58 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Because he is a troglodyte, with an extraordinary lack of higher level intelligence and intellectual curiosity. He is an authoritarian, rambling carnival barker, an Olympian-level conman who trades in lowest common denominator fear, greed, hate, perpetual, never-ending lies, and powerlust.

Plus he's old now and slurring a lot. Which may actually be helpful to him... benefit of the doubt for all that crap coming out of his mouth. 

51 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

The debate will last 90 minutes with two ad breaks and no studio audience.

The rules of engagement are:

• Only the moderators can ask questions
• Each candidate’s microphone will only be turned on when it is their turn to speak
• No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate
• Trump won coin toss and selected to give last closing statement
• Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate
• Props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage
• No topics or questions have been shared with campaigns or candidates in advance
• Candidates will only be given a pen, pad of paper and a bottle of water
• Candidates have two-minutes to answers questions, two-minute rebuttals and one minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses
• Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks
• Moderators will enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilised discussion
• Trump has the last word with 2 minutes of talking

Watching a presidential debate is like watching two generals playing "a very serious game of darts" to determine who is the most capable at leading the military in a war. 😅

Edited September 10 by robsblubot

[Vesper 28,729]

14 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

The debate will last 90 minutes with two ad breaks and no studio audience.

The rules of engagement are:

• Only the moderators can ask questions
• Each candidate’s microphone will only be turned on when it is their turn to speak
• No opening statements; closing statements will be two minutes per candidate
• Trump won coin toss and selected to give last closing statement
• Candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate
• Props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage
• No topics or questions have been shared with campaigns or candidates in advance
• Candidates will only be given a pen, pad of paper and a bottle of water
• Candidates have two-minutes to answers questions, two-minute rebuttals and one minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses
• Campaign staff may not interact with candidates during commercial breaks
• Moderators will enforce timing agreements and ensure a civilised discussion
• Trump has the last word with 2 minutes of talking

[Fulham Broadway 16,808]

Trump, the Reality TV man,  is the champ at being a bitch, name calling, but bottom of the class when it comes to policy knowledge,or any gravitas whatsoever

Harris should concentrate on policies.

 

[Vesper 28,729]

Kemi Badenoch regains momentum in Tory leadership race as Mel Stride eliminated

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick tops the vote to replace Rishi Sunak with ex-home secretary James Cleverly in third

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-tory-leader-cleverly-stride-b2610333.html

Kemi Badenoch has regained momentum in the race to become the next Tory leader, while Mel Stride has been eliminated.

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick won the second round of voting in the contest to replace Rishi Sunak, but Ms Badenoch picked up the most votes, narrowing the gap slightly.

She also saw off a challenge from ex-home secretary James Cleverly, keeping him in third.

Seen as the early favourite, Ms Badenoch appeared to stumble last week when she came second in the first round of voting.

But she gained some ground on Mr Jenrick in the latest round, picking up six votes, the most of any contestant, to his five.

The results of the second ballot saw Mr Jenrick receive the backing of 33 MPs, Ms Badenoch 28, Mr Cleverly 21, Tom Tugendhat 21 and Mr Stride 16.

As the MP with the lowest number of votes, Mr Stride automatically leaves the race.

The remaining four contenders will now proceed to the upcoming Conservative Party conference, which will be dominated by the contest.

All four will give a speech during the week-long event in Birmingham.

After that MPs will choose who to put forward to the final two, with rank-and-file party members making the final choice of leader, who will be unveiled on 2 November.

After the vote, Ms Badenoch said she was “grateful” to be in the top two and pledged to use the conference to show she was a leader who has “conviction, strength of purpose and the knowledge to rewire our broken political system”.

Mr Jenrick said the Tory party had to be “painfully honest” about the mistakes it made in power and “bring forward the serious answers” to the challenges facing the country.

Mr Cleverly said he was “proud” to have made it through to the next stage, while Mr Tugendhat praised Mr Stride saying he had run a “great campaign”.

A source in the Tugendhat campaign said they were “confident” the majority of Mr Stride’s votes would go to him. They said: “Tom has all the momentum now going to Birmingham.”

Last month Mr Jenrick sparked outrage after he said that people shouting “Allahu Akbar” on London streets “should be arrested immediately”.

As a minister, he also came under fire after it emerged that he ordered a Mickey Mouse mural at an asylum reception centre to be painted over.

He resigned from Mr Sunak’s government last year, accusing the then PM of not going far enough with his controversial Rwanda policy, to deport asylum seekers on a one-way ticket to the African country.

Last week he made clear he still took a hardline on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The former home office minister, who has emerged as the leading candidate for the Tory right wing, hit out at claims from his rivals that he was looking for “easy answers” by saying he would call to leave the convention.

He has claimed that reforming the ECHR would take decades and that if voters give the Tories a second look they “will not give us another chance” if they fail to fix the issue of immigration.

Ms Badenoch launched her leadership campaign with a pledge to “not shut up” as she reignited a row with Doctor Who actor David Tennant about trans issues.

The shadow housing secretary railed against the “cultural establishment trying to keep Conservatives down” and promised to “take the fight to Doctor Who or whoever and not let them try to keep us down”.

In a video teeing up her leadership launch, she used a clip of the actor saying he wished she would “shut up” and that he hoped for a world in which the MP “doesn’t exist anymore”.

A Labour spokesperson said: “The Tories whittled down a list of five people who played key roles in 14 years of chaos and decline, to four people who played key roles in 14 years of chaos and decline.”

Dame Priti Patel was eliminated in the first round of voting.

 

[Vesper 28,729]

Bad Faith

Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex

From Russell Brand to JD Vance to Candace Owens, what happens when the Catholic Church chases influencers—and their legions of followers—down the rabbit hole of the right?

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/catholic-right-celebrity-conversion-industrial-complex

 

 

On Thursday, May 30, 593 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, Candace Owens came to Scottsdale to take up her sword. It was the feast day of St. Joan, and there was an evening Mass at Phoenix’s Joan of Arc Church, then a trek to the suburban Hilton, where an upstart group named Catholics for Catholics was throwing a party to welcome Owens “home.” The group, founded in 2022 to declare non-Catholic Republicans “more Catholic” than their Democratic opponents, was presenting Owens its Joan of Arc Award for “giving Christ the King his proper due.”

It was a month out from Owens’s April announcement that she’d joined the Catholic Church and two months since she’d been fired by the right-wing Daily Wire. The events weren’t unrelated.

As a pundit and livestream host with an audience of millions, Owens has built a career premised on outrage. Before 2016 she’d been one among many writers peddling women’s-interest hot takes. But when she leapt right that year—after liberals criticized her plan to create a registry of online trolls—she found new support on the alt-right. She made videos declaring she didn’t care about Charlottesville and urged fellow Black voters to wage a “Blexit” from the Democratic “plantation.” She wore matching “White Lives Matter” T-shirts with Kanye West just before he began praising Hitler, then stayed largely silent when he did.

It only followed that Owens’s conversion would come wrapped in controversy too, namely her very public split with the Daily Wire. The controversy centered on her repeated use of the phrase “Christ is king,” a mantra with a contested legacy among Catholics but which in recent years has become associated with the young men who shout it the loudest—the far-right “groyper” movement that follows white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. Owens denounced the comparison as guilt by association, but her other recent comments—about WWII Germans being the victims of a “Christian Holocaust,” “gangs” of Hollywood Jews, and her taunt that the Daily Wire’s Jewish cofounder Ben Shapiro couldn’t “serve both God and money”—didn’t help her insistence that she was just making a statement of faith. In late March, the company announced it had parted ways with Owens, with one former colleague, Andrew Klavan, a Jewish convert to Christianity, suggesting she’d been fired for antisemitism, including her “Christ is King” tweets. (The Daily Wire did not respond to a request for comment.)

 A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself?

But, Owens told her fans in Scottsdale (and more than 200,000 others who would watch online), she wasn’t prepared for how forcefully conservative Catholics rallied to her side. “The full weight of the church came upon [Klavan],” she said, noting that the phrase she’d made infamous “trended for four days.”

A month later, when she posted pictures of her baptism at a Latin Mass church in London, the outpouring was comparable. Within a day, she was announced as a headliner for this fall’s right-wing Catholic Identity Conference. Within weeks, she and her husband, George Farmer—former CEO of the failed far-right social media platform Parler and a convert himself—were photographed with a Catholic right podcaster at a gala fundraiser in Nashville, then later on the 60-mile Chartres Pilgrimage in France, alongside 18,000 Latin Mass devotees (including, this year, French nationalist politician Marion Maréchal).

Catholic Twitter hummed with excitement. Owens wasn’t the only recent prominent convert, or even Catholics for Catholics’ first. When CFC hosted a prayer dinner for former president Donald Trump in March, founder and CEO John Yep announced that one speaker, embattled Mormon activist Tim Ballard, whose questionable claims of fighting child sex trafficking inspired the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, was considering converting too. Then there was actor Shia LaBeouf, comedian Rob Schneider, Dutch pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and of course Ohio senator JD Vance, who converted in 2019, five years before he’d be named the Republicans’ 2024 vice presidential nominee. Not to mention the maybes: British actor Russell Brand, who’d begun hawking a Christian prayer app (partly funded by Vance and his Silicon Valley mentor Peter Thiel) and making videos about the rosary, and psychologist turned guru Jordan Peterson, whose wife converted on Easter and who’d been on an international speaking tour called “We Who Wrestle With God.”

A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself? By early spring, antiabortion outlet LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why ‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.” “Can you feel the energy shifting?” the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote tweeted repeatedly. “Continue praying for conversions.”

The excitement also sparked hopes that influencers might help reform a Church gone astray, since their subjects were clearly not just joining Catholicism but a highly specific version of it: one that’s spent the last decade in rebellion against a pope they disdain; one so consumed by culture war that their electoral and ecclesiastical politics can’t be teased apart; but also one that, increasingly, suspects it will win.

It’s an odd time for the US Catholic Church. Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis—the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years—has faced bitter opposition. His early calls for Catholics to lessen their “obsessive” focus on sexual issues marked him as a liberal to conservative critics; his emphasis on poverty and the environment proved him a “Marxist globalist” for the same crowd. Cardinals issued formal dubia (demands for clarification); clergy called for his resignation; some declared him an “antipope”; some prayed for his death.

As the divisions reached a fever pitch in 2020, they mapped neatly onto American politics, pitting “bad Catholics” Joe Biden and Pope Francis against Trump (the non-Catholic) and the faithful remnant. Trump’s campaign recognized as much, bypassing Church bishops to court Catholics through non-establishment leaders, including many on the “radical traditionalist” fringe. Podcaster Taylor Marshall, whose 2019 book charged the pope was part of a 100-year Masonic plot to “infiltrate” the Church, was named a campaign adviser. Trump retweeted missives from the florid Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who in 2018 had staged an unsuccessful papal coup—the closest the church came to schism in 500 years, says Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli—and who now wrote long open letters about the machinations of the “deep church.”

When Trump lost, the Catholic right was a core part of efforts to overturn the election. Former campaign strategist and right-wing Catholic Steve Bannon transformed his War Room podcast into a “stop the steal” machine. Catholic groups normally focused on abortion or religious liberty joined lawsuits to block Biden’s certification. Fuentes led his groypers in that November’s “Million MAGA March,” shouting “Christ is king.” Texas bishop Joseph Strickland addressed the carnivalesque December 2020 “Jericho March” rally—widely seen as a test run for January 6—while January 6 organizer Ali Alexander announced he too was converting (to “fight the evils in Christ’s own Church”). On the day itself, a Nebraska priest exorcised the Capitol.

 Across both Catholic and mainstream media, consensus grew that “the liberalizing energy” Francis had brought was   dissipating, and boomers’ progressive Catholicism was facing its “last gasps.”

But then their momentum seemed to falter. In mid-2021, when conservative members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) tried to pass a measure denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians—effectively excommunicating Biden—the Vatican blocked their plans. Pope Francis began speaking more openly, and derisively, about his American critics, calling them rigid, reactionary, backward, suicidal. He issued new restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass, the dominant form of liturgy before the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) introduced various modernizing reforms. And the Church hierarchy neutralized some of the loudest voices of clerical dissent. The Wisconsin priest behind a viral video claiming Catholic Democrats would go to hell was removed from his church. Another priest, who’d once delivered a pro-Trump speech with an aborted fetus on his altar, was defrocked. Leading Pope Francis opponent Cardinal Raymond Burke was stripped of his monthly stipend and lavish Vatican City apartment. Strickland, who’d begun claiming that the pope supported an “attack on the sacred,” lost his diocese. In July, the Vatican excommunicated Viganò for fomenting schism by refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and Vatican II.

None of this endeared the pope to his critics or ended the division. In February an anonymous cardinal issued a memo, styled as a job description for the next pope, accusing Francis of fracturing the Church. In May a group of lay Catholics and one priest released another document, “The Crimes and Heresies of Pope Francis,” demanding he resign or be fired. A now suspended Texas ministry announced it had received a divine prophecy: A “usurper” sat on the papal throne.

Yet the sense of impending apocalyptic schism seemed to have receded as conservatives looked ahead to an eventual post-Francis era. Across both Catholic and mainstream media, consensus grew that “the liberalizing energy” Francis had brought was dissipating, and boomers’ progressive Catholicism was facing its “last gasps.”

In a widely read article in May, Associated Press reporter Tim Sullivan diagnosed a Church-wide shift: Catholics were returning to “the old ways,” with Latin Mass, lace mantillas, and medieval music replacing signifiers of modernism in parishes across the country and a uniformly conservative crop of new priests supplanting older clergy once inspired by Vatican II.

Two weeks later one of the traditionalist communities Sullivan profiled—Kansas’s small Benedictine College—seemed to prove his thesis, when Catholic NFL player Harrison Butker delivered the most controversial commencement address of the year. In his speech Butker advised female graduates to care more about homemaking and motherhood than careers and promotions, called Pride Month a “deadly sin,” and exhorted Catholics to abandon the “Church of Nice”—a popular epithet on the Catholic right—for the Latin Mass.

Soon after, LifeSiteNews announced an October conference on the theme of “putting ‘Boomer Catholicism’ out to pasture.”

By 2024, the neat overlay of US Church and electoral politics was becoming harder to maintain, even with the same candidates initially on the ballot. There were multiple reasons why: partly the subtle but clear differences between Biden and Pope Francis on issues from immigration to Israel; partly the pope’s refusal to increase women’s leadership in the Church; partly Trump’s strategic equivocation on abortion; and partly, said Faggioli, because some bishops were becoming anxious about the Church’s association with Trumpism’s cultish third wave.

There were certainly still Catholics making a strident case for Trump. On March 19, Catholics for Catholics hosted a $1,000-a-plate rosary prayer dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, invoking the liturgical feast day of St. Joseph—patron saint against “atheistic communism”—to “make the overdue bold proclamation that [Trump] is the only Catholic option for 2024.” Roger Stone spoke, calling himself “a Joseph R. McCarthy Catholic,” as did former lieutenant general turned QAnon hero Michael Flynn. Passion of the Christ star (and fellow QAnon booster) Jim Caviezel said, between impressions of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, “If Trump is our Moses,” Catholics must “be the tip of his spear.”

There was also Trump’s drumbeat message that the Biden administration was persecuting Catholics—a claim centered on a 2023 regional FBI office memo discussing ties between “rad trad” Catholics and white nationalist extremists. The memo was written after a young, self-described “radical traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist” in Virginia was caught amassing an arsenal of homemade bombs while writing detailed threats to kill Jews. But when it was leaked, it became the subject of endless Republican charges that Biden had labeled his fellow Catholics terrorists and sent feds to infiltrate their churches. Trump whooped it up, releasing “Make America Pray Again” merch and vowing to create a task force to “fight anti-Christian bias.” Bannon’s podcast set became cluttered with Catholic iconography as he promised a coming retribution.

Trump’s messianic mythos was only reinforced when he survived an assassination attempt at one of his rallies this July. Some Catholic supporters dipped into numerology, noting that the time Trump was shot corresponded to a scripture verse about putting on “the full armor of God.” Memes about divine intervention flooded Catholic Twitter—a blue-eyed Virgin Mary flicking the shooter’s bullet off its course. Catholics for Catholics declared that a campaign they’d launched in June—to have 2,024 Masses said for Trump before Election Day—could be the reason the shooter failed, and commissioned a billboard near the site of the Pennsylvania rally, bearing images of both a bloodied Trump and St. Michael the Archangel, beseeching the angel to “defend us in battle!”

A week later, after Biden announced he was suspending his campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris became Democrats’ nominee instead, the Catholic right doubled down on its claims of persecution. CatholicVote launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in swing states to “expose Kamala’s vile hatred of Catholics”—she once challenged a Trump judicial appointee over his membership in the antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ+ Knights of Columbus—and Trump called her “the most Anti-Catholic person to ever run for high office.”

But there was scant perspective on the election from the actual Church. Where bishops once weighed in on elections, said Faggioli, now it was “only the most extreme, ideological, beyond-the-fringes voices.” CFC echoed the charge: They’d stepped in because bishops were failing to steer Catholics to Trump. The USCCB no longer even released new voter guides, as it had done every four years since 1976, observed theologian Steve Millies, because they could no longer agree on enough to do so. (In June, CFC issued its own guide instead.)

For Millies, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, all of this amounted to the Church’s “retreat from [the] public square”—a surprising claim at a time when Catholicism’s influence on US politics seems more apparent than ever. The Supreme Court that overturned Roe is dominated by conservative Catholics. The radical Project 2025 “readiness plan” for a second Trump administration was created under the Heritage Foundation’s “cowboy Catholic” president, Kevin Roberts. As the National Catholic Reporter’s Heidi Schlumpf reported last winter, right-wing strategist Leonard Leo—the devout Catholic credited with orchestrating the takeover of the federal judiciary—has declared his intent to use the same Federalist Society model to reshape American culture.

Then there’s JD Vance, the onetime Never Trumper and “angry atheist” who, in the years since Trump’s first campaign, had undergone political and religious conversions—becoming both a vitriolic MAGA advocate and, in 2019, a Catholic (a decision Vance described as “join[ing] the resistance”). Vance’s nomination was greeted as the ascendancy of several overlapping reactionary movements: Silicon Valley’s tech right; the postliberal integralists who seek to re-found America as a Catholic confessional state; the New Right’s anti-administrative-state wonks; and the far right’s seamy online fringe, where bodybuilding “masculinists” meet groypers and eugenicists. This year Vance wrote a foreword for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book, which calls for a “Second American Revolution,” and a blurb for far-right Catholic pundit Jack Posobiec, whose new book declares liberals and leftists “unhumans” and praises dictators like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.

The Catholic right was elated by the news. Bannon had already described Vance as a St. Paul figure: in Politico’s paraphrase, “the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself.” CFC summoned the Batman franchise to drive home the point: “Trump merely adopted MAGA. Vance was born into it.” The only thing that “could make it better,” CFC wrote, was if Trump converted too.

But both in politics and the ways Catholics self-identify, subtler changes were taking place. For one, the storied “Catholic vote”—long viewed as a stand-in for the swinging center and thus a bellwether of national elections—was losing its predictive power. After an April poll found Trump leading Biden among Catholics by 12 percent, a shocking jump from his 1 percent margin in 2020, Millies saw proof that Catholicism was following evangelicalism into nearly automatic identification with the GOP—not because liberal Catholics were warming to Trump, but because they were withdrawing from a church associated with Trumpism. (“It’s a circular thing,” said Schlumpf. “As the church becomes more conservative, it becomes less attractive to young progressives. And as more young progressives disaffiliate, what’s left is more conservative Catholics.”)

To many on the Catholic right, that’s just prophecy fulfilled. For decades, conservative Catholics have predicted a winnowing of the church down to a “smaller, purer” core, as liberal clergy and laity die off or drop out. The corollary to that vision—the reason Catholic-right groups are talking about “energy shifting”—is the promise the Church won’t remain small but, once purged of internal conflict, will spark a virtuous revolution and exponential growth.

But it wouldn’t be the bishops leading that revolution, since, as Millies argues, they’re no longer the ones determining “the narrative of the Church in the United States.” Instead, it’s increasingly a mix of lay movements, lay money, and the lay leaders those powers choose. When Butker’s commencement address went viral, for example, conservative Catholic media heralded him as embodying a “DIY traditionalism” with “little direct connection to Church authorities.”

 “It’s important to ask: What are they really converting to? Is it belief in what the Church teaches and the fundamental   principles of Christianity? Or are they converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”

To the extent bishops still mattered at all, agreed Faggioli, it wasn’t because Catholics obey them, but because they’d become a sort of weather vane, reflecting changes in the culture or the influence of “Big Catholic Laymen.” Now when Church authorities weigh in on public debates—as many did to defend Butker’s speech—it’s they who are “playing catch-up.”

These lay institutions, most of which are conservative, have “inverted the authority structure of the Church,” Millies said, noting that Catholic parishes and schools are closing nationwide for lack of funds while influential Catholic outlets, like Eternal World Television Network (EWTN) or Bishop Robert Barron’s hugely popular media ministry Word on Fire, draw more donations every year. “We have become a celebrity-driven church, where the lines between entertainment and celebrity, and pastoral ministry and formation, have become as meaningless as the line between entertainment and governing in our politics.”

The result was a chasm between Catholicism the Church and “Catholicism the brand,” he continued. “And what brands need are celebrity endorsers.”

It’s bad form in the Church to question the sincerity of someone’s conversion. After all, said David Lafferty, an independent scholar who has written for the website Where Peter Is, which covers the Catholic right, pivotal Church leaders like St. Paul and St. Augustine started off as “great sinners.”

And yet, said Lafferty, “when it comes to all the influencers circling around the Church”—many of whom “make their living having opinions online” and seem more attracted to “external displays of piety” than grappling with core tenets of the faith—“it’s important to ask: What are they really converting to? Is it belief in what the Church teaches and the fundamental principles of Christianity? Or are they converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”

As 2024’s springtime of conversions became more obvious, Church officials weighed in, advising Catholics not to greet the trend with suspicion.

But it’s hard not to note some similarities.

Take Brand—once so synonymous with flaky religious syncretism that one of his own movies made it a punch line—who emerged as a spokesperson for the Catholic prayer app Hallow in the months after he was accused of sexual assault, abuse, or harassment by more than 10 women. Or LaBeouf, who received the sacrament of confirmation from Barron in January and who admits his road to conversion began with a lawsuit alleging he’d abused two ex-girlfriends and shot stray dogs as a Method acting exercise. Or Ballard, whose reinvention as a proto-Catholic celebrity followed detailed refutations of his claimed heroics, expulsion from the organization he founded, at least six sexual assault lawsuits, and what one lawsuit claimed was his reported excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Both Brand and Ballard have denied the allegations against them. One lawsuit against Ballard was dismissed this July.)

Converting, in these cases, offers some benefits, whether proof of redemption or a new army of defenders. After Brand began displaying Catholic icons in his Instagram videos and saying, on Good Friday, that he could “relate” to Jesus’s “persecution and humiliation,” traditionalist Catholics began referring to the allegations against him as “historic” and non-credible. It can also represent another form of rebranding for influencers courting new fans.

As the once-liberal Brand grew an audience among the “conspiratorial right,” his “New Age beliefs only took him so far,” said Mike Lewis, founder of Where Peter Is. “To ingratiate himself into that crowd, he needs to move away from New Age and embrace some form of Christianity. That’s where the growth is for him.” Likewise, Lewis continued, after Jordan Peterson’s academic career foundered, he became a conservative self-help guru, and now “the Catholic market seems to be eating this stuff up.”

Skeptics acknowledge it’s impossible to divine others’ true motivations, and even cynical conversions could prove transformative. God works in mysterious ways. But what’s driving the Catholic groups eagerly welcoming celebrity converts seems less opaque. “It’s like the vice presidential nominee,” said Lewis. “They’re from this swing state or represent this demographic the candidate doesn’t already have. It speaks to a much larger goal.”

And in service of that goal, sincerity, or even actual belief, doesn’t matter much. Peterson has made lectures on Christianity a cornerstone of his career—a book with the same title as his speaking series is due out this fall, and he’s acquired a wardrobe of Bible-themed blazers—even as he’s been notoriously evasive when it comes to affirming the most basic tenets of the faith: Was Jesus resurrected? Does God exist? Peterson’s answers to these questions have ranged from outraged (“It’s none of your damn business”) to poetic (“God is the call to adventure”), legalistic (“It would take me 40 hours to answer the question”) to Clinton-esque (“I’ve never made the claim that what I’m talking about is like what other people are talking about”).

As Brand’s and Peterson’s potential conversions became a potent will-they-or-won’t-they-drama—with EWTN cameras documenting Tammy Peterson’s confirmation and abundant coverage of Brand’s unorthodox April baptism in the River Thames—some conservatives’ patience wore thin. The Federalist published a long takedown of Peterson’s approach as fundamentally a branding exercise, offering a vision of Christianity “so cut-rate” that it made “cheap grace” look expensive.

But in an era of strange culture-war bedfellows, the dabblers were doing their part. Soon after gaining a Catholic audience, Peterson launched into criticism of Pope Francis, suggesting Church membership had declined because modern Catholicism was too much about “guitars,” “hippies,” and “worshiping Gaia”—or Baal. In this context, even celebrities’ failure to convert becomes a form of ammunition, as multiple Catholic-right outlets concluded that the true obstacle to Peterson’s conversion was “Pope Francis himself.”

Even without conversion, the phenomenon of Peterson-like appeals to faith—what The Federalist called “post-atheist” but not quite Christian—offered something for conservatives to appreciate. Last fall, UK Christian journalist Justin Brierley released a book and ongoing podcast series, both entitled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, arguing that the mid-2000s “New Atheist” movement was being replaced by both a renaissance of actual belief and a secular religiosity, wherein former atheists find common cause with conservative believers over their shared opposition to “cancel culture” and “where the West is heading in the absence of the Christian story.”

It was something akin to the 2021 Pew finding that nonreligious Trump supporters had begun calling themselves evangelicals as a political, rather than religious, identification. A prime example came in April, when Richard Dawkins, one of the “four horsemen” of New Atheism, declared himself a “cultural Christian” because he’d rather see churches around London than mosques. By July, Elon Musk had concurred, telling Peterson that, although not a believer, he, too, “is probably a cultural Christian.” (For his part, Bishop Barron wrote a May op-ed for CNN, declaring that Bill Maher—whom he’d once considered a nemesis for his mockery of religion—was now an ally in the shared fight against “wokeism.”)

Influencers themselves made the case for a cultural, if not personal, conversion. Over several weeks last spring, Joe Rogan delighted Christians by saying, “As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things”; Brand said “the return to God” was an obvious response to crumbling institutions; and Peterson recited to Barron a list of prominent former atheists who had come to see that the “humanist enterprise” was unsustainable without being “embedded” in a “metaphysical space.”

Or, as Catholic-right podcaster Timothy Gordon put it in an interview with Candace Owens’s husband in May, people online were deciding that “secularism is fake and gay.”

Of particular note to Brierley was the fact that many of these new seekers, or strategic allies, have “large platforms” with “huge influence on a younger generation.”

He’s not the only one to notice. Peterson’s evolving, if ever-squishy, approach to religion has inspired a cottage industry of clergy tracking his appeal. Five years after Barron first praised the “Jordan Peterson phenomenon,” Word on Fire now has a dedicated page for all its Peterson content. Calvinist pastor and podcaster Paul VanderKlay has made some 750 videos about Peterson after realizing his Bible talks were selling out auditoriums while the churches he knew were empty. Another pastor, Paul Anleitner, noted that while clergy sat through endless “church growth” consultations, Peterson had become a far more effective “gateway drug,” “reversing the flow of traffic” out of the church. That Peterson tended to reduce the gospel to Jungian archetypes was regrettable, they agreed, but certainly not a deal-breaker.

In “the strategy of winning back culture,” said Faggioli, “it’s not that important how genuine these voices are.” The point isn’t “having Jordan Peterson be ordained as a priest,” but all the young people—especially young men—he brings along.

“If the Catholic Church is going to stop the bleeding, it needs to win over not just men, but real men,” declared Zach Costello, another Christian influencer, last spring in his own rumination on the Peterson phenomenon. As it was, Costello continued, Catholicism was too “embarrassing for men to associate themselves with.” Women dominated Bible studies, he said, and the priesthood was “infested with either homosexual men or men who can’t get women.” But the good news was that, as at other points in history, a “generation of men” was being “called to reform the Church when it has drifted off course. That time is now, and Jordan Peterson will play a very important role.”

Peterson agreed. In a 2022 video entitled “A Message to the Christian Churches,” he demanded that Church leaders make great efforts, rent billboards, to welcome young men demoralized by the culture’s “assault” on the “masculine spirit.” “Do it now,” Peterson warned, “before it’s too late.”

Concerns about a “feminized” Church aren’t new, said Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, a religious studies professor at Kalamazoo College who’s written extensively on Catholic masculinity. Such panics have arisen cyclically for centuries, in tandem with social change; in the mid-1800s, they came amid waves of mass migration, urbanization, and a supposed epidemic of male neurasthenia, as men who’d left farms for cities were said to be afflicted with depression, fatigue, and terminal indecisiveness.

“There was this idea that unless we get American men back in touch with their bodies, the land, and a different vision of the Church, the nation would be in decline,” said Maldonado-Estrada. “Nothing consolidates masculinity like anxiety that something is being lost.”

Today’s fretting over feminized churches overlaps with a culture, particularly for young people, where most identity building happens online, Maldonado-Estrada continued. And as signs accrue that young men are moving rightward—Gen Z support for LGBTQ+ rights dropped by double digits in the last two years, thanks primarily to Zoomer men, a majority of whom now support Trump—some Catholic leaders are following along in weird and dangerous ways.

When Barron interviewed LaBeouf about his pending conversion two years ago, they discussed how Christianity wasn’t just about a soft, near-Buddhist Jesus, but an “Old Testament Christ on a horse, cape dipped in blood, [with a] sword.” Butker’s infamous advice to women was paired with a call for men to fight “cultural emasculation.” In June, a Missouri Catholic church ran an ad in its bulletin calling on young men to join a newly formed militia that would combine “combat training” with church service; its recruits would wear white military-style uniforms with gold epaulets and crosses on the shoulders. Also last spring, Matt Fradd, host of one of the most popular Catholic podcasts online, conducted a two-and-a-half-hour interview with 20-something Catholic livestreamer John Doyle about his ardent following among young men, who could be led from Peterson-esque advice—“Stop watching porn, go to the gym, pick up the Bible”—into “intelligent Christian commentary” and eventual conversion.

There were a number of things about the interview that might have given Fradd pause: Doyle’s self-description as “an internet bigot”; his fury at women who showed up at his events wearing “little trad wife dresses” and distracting from what should be “a male environment” of young men “changing history”; his hope that Republicans will govern “like it’s The Handmaid’s Tale”; his claim that interracial pornography is a plot to convince white Christian boys they’re “being bred out of existence.”

Another thing that might have given Fradd pause is the findable fact that Doyle has complicated but deep connections to Nick Fuentes’s groyper movement. For several years, Doyle—who’s led protests with Fuentes and spoken at his annual conference—has profited from his status as a Fuentes-lite figure, passing in more mainstream right-wing spaces where Fuentes’s racial slurs, Holocaust denial, and calls to burn women alive are a step too far. When the now defunct Catholic-right outlet Church Militant began overtly recruiting followers from the broader groyper community, as Ben Lorber, a Political Research Associates analyst who tracks the white nationalist right, and I reported in 2022, Doyle was among the voices they platformed.

At the time, a Catholic media outlet courting Fuentes’s audience was a scandal. Now it just looks ahead of its time.

When right-wing youth organization TurningPoint USA held its annual student conference in June—drawing 8,000 attendees to hear Trump and other Republicans speak—Jack Posobiec tossed hats reading “White Boy Summer,” another co-opted groyper slogan, into an eager crowd. Fuentes was blocked from entering the conference and had to lead his followers in chants of “Christ is king” (and “Fuck off Jew”) from the street outside. But inside, the same message reigned. When Candace Owens spoke, the audience gave her a standing ovation, chanting “Christ is king.”

In March, Owens denied knowing Fuentes or what his movement meant by that phrase. By June, when she relaunched her podcast—which immediately hit the top 10—Owens was tweeting at him publicly, asking to get in touch. By July, she was speculating on air that various Nazi atrocities were “propaganda” and dedicating multiple episodes to convoluted theories linking “crypto-Jews” to “occult history,” “ritualistic murder,” and the satanic infiltration of all the world’s major religions—interrupting herself to read an ad from Hallow, “the number one prayer app in the world.”

Call it a form of audience capture. Or a feedback loop, says Lorber. One wherein “influencers shape the attitudes” of their young male audiences and then are influenced in turn. A race for followers becomes a race to the bottom, as the merely right wing move further right, and the far right goes further still. All the while, a Church stares into the void of the internet, unaware or unconcerned that the internet stares right back.

[Vesper 28,729]

LIVE: ABC News Presidential Debate: Harris and Trump meet in Philadelphia (Coverage starts 1 AM London time)

 

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https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-09-laying-out-their-economics-harris-trump/

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump each devoted a day last week to rolling out new economic policies. I was thinking about ending the previous sentence with the words “for better or worse,” but on balance, I think the worse outweighed the better.

“Worse,” of course, is the default setting for Trump’s ideas, economic policy very much included. His headline-grabber was an announcement that Elon Musk would be the guiding spirit of a government efficiency commission should Trump retake the White House. “Much worse” describes Trump’s further comments that this commission could not only recommend cuts to programs but also to government regulations. Programmatic cuts, presumably, would at least have to be authorized by Congress, but presidents and their appointees have freer rein when it comes to regulations. Musk, of course, owns a host of regulated companies and volubly pines for the day when such governmental constraints on his businesses (actually, when any constraints on his businesses and his conduct from anyone) are lifted.

More from Harold Meyerson

Besides, Musk’s record as a cutter is demonstrably atrocious. Once he purchased Twitter, he quickly fired roughly three-fourths of its employees, which has led to the halving of the company’s revenues. Worse still, he eliminated virtually every employee engaged in actual content oversight and moderation, so that his own increasingly bigoted musings and those of his fellow fabulists would go unchecked. That’s precisely the kind of cutting that Donald Trump wants: eliminating the empiricists while keeping the conspiracists (more likely, hiring the conspiracists). Such criteria do not augur well for scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency or physicians at the National Institutes of Health.

But Musk-ification was only one element of the economic pronouncements that Trump unveiled in a characteristically meandering talk to New York businessmen last Thursday. He also called for reducing the corporate income tax to 15 percent, though only for corporations that confine production to the United States. While all of Trump’s proposals for the corporate tax rate are egregiously too low (as president, he got the Republican-controlled Congress to reduce it from 35 percent to its current 21 percent), I actually think that rewarding corporations for discretionary policies that benefit American workers is a good idea. The problem with the 15 percent rate is that whatever good it does by keeping or restoring production in the United States, it’s so low that it forces ordinary taxpayers to take up the slack and requires major cuts to the kinds of programs on which ordinary Americans rely.

Of course, if Trump wants to open the door to variable corporate tax rates based on corporate conduct, I’ll raise the bet by proposing for the umpteenth time to raise the corporate tax rate progressively on corporations whose ratio between CEO and median worker pay exceeds 100-to-1.

Harris has chiefly been targeting the middle class in both her taxing and spending policies.

Trump also estimated that across-the-board tariffs of up to 20 percent on all imports would end deficits and leave “trillions” left over for benefits like child care. This requires exceedingly creative accounting even before you get to the fact that it translates to higher prices and perhaps shortages, since Trump has effectively proposed nothing that would actually increase domestic production (unlike, say, the tax breaks in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which have led to a boom in new factory construction). Moreover, domestic manufacturers dependent on imported parts also subjected to tariffs would have to raise their prices, too.

The most wondrous proposal that Trump trotted out last Thursday was to create a sovereign wealth fund, wherein the government invests a chunk of its money in strategically important ventures. It’s something that governments with a lot of cash on hand—Norway, some of the Gulf nations and emirates, and the state of Alaska (all from oil money)—regularly do. I only say “wondrous” because I can imagine how Trump would invest the public’s funds. Country clubs? Trump steaks? The mind reels.

By comparison, Kamala Harris’s new proposals, laid out in a speech she delivered in New Hampshire last week, are rather staid, which, under the circumstances, is not a criticism. Strategically, she’s chiefly been targeting the middle class in both her taxing and spending policies. As to spending, her proposals for increasing the Child Tax Credit (a spending policy in the form of a taxing policy) and making child care affordable speak to the material needs of every American family with kids for which these costs are a burden—that is, all but the rich. So, too, her policy to provide $25,000 for first-time homebuyers and her series of policies to increase home construction. Last week, she also proposed a series of tax breaks to small-business startups.

At the same time, however, she also proposed raising the tax on capital gains for the wealthy from its current 20 percent to 28 percent, which is substantially lower than President Biden’s proposal to raise it to 39.6 percent, the same as the top marginal income tax rate. (Both Biden and Harris would tack onto that a 5 percent surcharge for Medicare.) She made clear she still adheres to Biden’s policies of raising no taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, and of applying the capital gains tax to funds that are inherited. But by bringing down the extent of the increase to taxes on investment, she reinforces the impression that she’d be friendlier to at least some of the Silicon Valley gazillionaires who’ve been backing her since her initial San Francisco electoral campaigns.

I have a theory of the crime, here, if crime it be. And I emphasize that it’s just a theory, not buttressed by any leaks from anyone who’s really in the know. The theory is that some of Harris’s longtime big-money backers—most prominently LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman—have very publicly (and very privately) asked her to free them of some meddlesome regulators who’ve had the nerve to clamp down on their monopolistic practices. In particular, they want to be rid of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

Precisely because Hoffman and media mogul Barry Diller publicly called for Harris to present them with Khan’s head, she cannot possibly do that without showing herself to be Silicon Valley’s stooge, at once infuriating the Democratic base and undercutting her image as a conscientious public servant. But in a war with Trump over Silicon Valley’s (and more generally, big money’s) campaign contributions, she likely felt she had to deliver something. Hence, goes my utterly unconfirmed theory, the smaller-than-expected increase to the capital gains tax—which nonetheless pales alongside the tax increases to the rich and big business that she still supports.

Does that make Kamala a sellout? In the real world of American politics, no. The bulk of her economic proposals would still fund much-needed public programs with tax revenues drawn heavily from those who can afford to pay them: the rich and corporations. Still, I think there are some gaps in her economic proposals that she needs to close.

As of now, her proposals to make child-rearing more affordable and to give a boost to new small businesses have a particularly positive impact on some large but distinct subsets of the electorate: young women and aspiring small-business proprietors (a group in which Latinos and Asian Americans are very well represented). She needs a more direct economic appeal to the male working class, which at this point is the section of the electorate that’s the most challenging for Democrats to win over.

To which end, I’ll restate something I wrote last month: Alongside her promotion of the care economy, she needs to promote what I call the build economy. It’s not enough for her to have proposed a group of policies that would lead to the construction of three million new homes over the next decade. She needs to propose creating a new federal agency, somewhat like those that funded employment during the New Deal, that will devote federal funds to boost private-sector home construction that meets certain criteria (like affordability), that will increase hiring in the sector, and that will promote the construction apprenticeship programs run by the building trades unions. This program would be equally open to women as it would be to men, of course, but for now, politically, this could be the kind of “guy program” her campaign needs, not to mention the kind of housing construction program that the nation needs as well.

She might even raise this during tomorrow night’s debate. Couldn’t hurt.

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https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-10-harris-gains-stall-can-tonights-debate-change-that/

Just when we were feeling that Kamala Harris was very gradually inching ahead of Trump in the polls and that tonight’s debate would add to the momentum, here comes the latest New York Times/Siena poll showing the race in a virtual tie again. Whatever bounce Harris got from the energy and unity of the Democratic National Convention seems to have dissipated, at least for now.

Weirdly, a plurality of voters support Trump on many issues, even though his policies range from implausible to incoherent. He holds a 13-point advantage on the economy.

What’s even more disconcerting is that this Trump rebound, however slight, is occurring despite the fact that Trump’s speeches and rhetoric are becoming more and more floridly lunatic. You really have to watch a speech in its entirety and then read the transcript to appreciate just how unhinged he is. Either the ideas and formulations are insane, or he can’t keep his mind from free-associating and floating sideways, or both. And his fantasies also get crazier and crazier, including the idea that children are being snatched from parents to have gender-altering surgery.

More from Robert Kuttner

In his recent September 7 Wisconsin speech, Trump said this: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

It’s the right question. What the hell is wrong with our country … for not laughing Trump off the stage?

To some extent, the media, most notably The New York Times, is to blame for trying to treat Trump as a normal candidate and finding symmetrical things to criticize in both candidates. Here’s a doozy: A recent Times piece was titled “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”

Is the Times for real? Harris has proposed extensive new housing construction and a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers. One can debate how efficient these are and whether they would make major gains in the housing shortage. But they are serious, mainstream proposals. Trump’s major housing plan is increasing deportations of immigrants, which he says would have a side effect of freeing up housing supply.

To treat these ideas as in any way symmetrical, or worth taking with equal seriousness, is to normalize Trump. And the Times does this over and over again. The Post and The Wall Street Journal aren’t much better, and Politico is worse. In the case of the Times, one can blame the editor, Joe Kahn, who has a misplaced obsession with covering the election evenhandedly.

This Trump rebound, however slight, is occurring despite the fact that Trump’s speeches and rhetoric are becoming more and more floridly lunatic.

But in the case of the others, the conventions of “objective” journalism don’t know how to cover a candidate who is objectively nuts. The real story is Trump’s lunacy. The last thing the press should be doing is normalizing it.

It’s also the case that the shortest presidential campaign in modern times, far from being a net benefit to Harris by creating rare party unity, may have backfired by not giving Harris enough time to make an impression on the electorate. In the Times/Siena poll, 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Trump.

Harris put a comprehensive issues page up on her website in advance of the debate, perhaps for just this reason. She and Tim Walz have begun to do local media in swing states and have planned a swing-state tour after the debate. The only way to counter the short-campaign effect is to get out there as much as possible, which is the plan after the debate. The nearly half-billion-dollar war chest means that fundraisers don’t necessarily have to be on the menu anymore.

Going into tonight’s debate, the hope is that Harris will demonstrate that she is both normal and trustworthy, and that she has a set of programmatic ideas, values, and aspirations that speak to regular people. The hope is also that she will provoke Trump into displaying his unhinged side, or that Trump, obsessed by the fact that he has to run against Harris and not Biden, will be plenty unhinged with no provocation.

However, it’s easy to forget how uncharacteristically disciplined Trump was in the June 27 debate with Joe Biden slightly more than two months ago (an eternity), which marked the beginning of the end of Biden’s quest for a second term. It wasn’t just that a feeble Biden lost, but that a disciplined Trump won. Trump, having listened to his handlers for once, did not come across as a madman. Grasping the stakes, Trump may do that again tonight.

The other problem is that for Trump’s MAGA base, it doesn’t matter how crazy he sounds—the crazier the better. He channels their rage. I still believe that Harris is likely to be the better debater, but that may not change the poll numbers much.

The most hopeful thing about the Times/Siena poll, paradoxically, is that it polled likely voters. The biggest potential upside for Harris, as I’ve been writing, is among unlikely voters: those who often do not turn out, but who tend to vote for Democrats when they bother to vote at all.

Trump holds the support of a solid 46 or 47 percent of the likely vote. Harris can’t change the numerator much, but she can change the denominator, thus reducing Trump’s percentage. But any election analyst who thinks this will be other than a close election should find another profession.

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Pre-Debate Jitters

Today on TAP: On the eve of the Harris-Trump face-off, some further signs that Democratic economics delivered

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-10-pre-debate-jitters/

As I write, I’m aware that all of you who read this are fretting about tonight’s Harris-Trump debate (which I’ll be covering for the Prospect), coming as it does in the wake of polls showing the race effectively tied, with perhaps a slight edge for Trump. I’m aware that every pundit and at least half of the non-pundits have already written about what, from their point of view, needs to happen tonight. I really have nothing new to add to that chorus, so I’ll merely repeat that at a time when the gender gap among young voters is at record highs, Harris needs to talk about the jobs her administration will create in construction as well as those it will create in what she terms “the care economy.”

More from Harold Meyerson

That said (again), let me call your attention to a report on the economy that the Census Bureau released today that makes a very strong case for Bidenomics and Kamalanomics—not, alas, that it’s going to change many voters’ minds. The report shows that inflation-adjusted median household income rose by 4 percent in 2023, to $80,610—putting it in a tie with the pre-pandemic 2019 as the highest level ever. Remarkably (as was not the case in 2019), incomes increased more among the poorest Americans (those at the 10th percentile, by 6.7 percent) than the richest (those at the 90th percentile, by 4.6 percent). As the Economic Policy Institute points out, these gains are the result of the fiscal and recovery policies that the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress enacted in 2021-2022, which created a historically worker-friendly tight labor market.

One of the two presidential candidates not only supports those policies but argues for enhancing them by increasing the Child Tax Credit, making child care more affordable, and authorizing the government to bargain down the price of prescription drugs. I suspect we’ll hear about that later tonight.