Bigotry Dominates the GOP and Fox News

Early in her career, Kay Cole James - now head of the Heritage Foundation - was involved in Virginia politics and we met back in my days of Republican activism.  For the most part she always came across as calm and level headed and nowhere near as strident as some in what was then considered the conservative wing of the GOP. Thus, it was interesting to see her statements after the death of George Floyd given that she has remained involved in a political party that is increasingly open in its racism, especially with an open white supremacist in the White House.  Of equal interest was the way in which her views and statements were basically trashed by Tucker Carlson - a vile individual in my view -  and many of the other talking heads on the network's propaganda channel not to mention across much of the GOP.  Michael Gerson (a former Republican) calls out Tucker and the GOP in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts: 

On the theory that decency and sanity are rare enough these days that they should be recognized, let us praise Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

James — the first African American and the first woman to head the conservative think tank — reacted to the “horrific and needless death” of George Floyd in Minneapolis by recalling the reality of racism in her own story, in a Facebook post that appeared directly after the killing.

“When your family has had crosses burned on their front lawns,” she said, “when your own children have been stopped and harassed by police because they were driving through a white neighborhood . . . when you sit up at night with all the normal fears any parent would have when their kids are out, but have to add to that worry that they may not make it home just because they are Black males.”

James asked, “How many more black people must die, and how many more times will statements of sympathy have to be issued? . . . How many more committees will have to be formed until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country? . . . It’s time America takes responsibility and expands human flourishing to all of its citizens — not just the majority of them.”

Carlson attacked James’s article as a “long scream denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation” and urged his listeners to stop sending funds to Heritage. This is what happens when the main media platform of American conservatism is dominated by bigotry.

James felt compelled to make her points because she is woman of faith and character. For a glimpse of what the total absence of faith and character looks like, see the Republican Party of Texas. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, a dozen elected leaders of the GOP wrote or retweeted racist memes and conspiracy theories. Comal County Republican Party Chair Sue Gafford Piner propagated the idea that philanthropist George Soros is funding a race war. Bexar County GOP Chair Cynthia Brehm suggested that Floyd’s death was staged to hurt President Trump’s reelection chances. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller wrote that the civil rights protesters are “domestic terrorists who were organized and paid for by George Soros.”

This is not the rejection of “political correctness”; it is the success of white supremacy in the Texas Republican Party. The GOP, in many places, has become an institution where leaders are elevated and groomed for cruelty and bigotry. This is what happens when the president of the United States normalizes racism and mainstreams ideological madness.

These habits of prejudice took root easily in the GOP, indicating a broad, preexisting disposition. If Republicans are ever to recover their moral balance, they will need to dispose of three pervasive assumptions.

[E]very abuser of rights is dismissed as one of a few bad apples — even when it is clear that some institutions (say, police forces or the Trump GOP) are engaged in the mass production of rotting fruit.

The second is the assumption of personal innocence — the belief that because an individual is not personally at fault for segregation, redlining and police abuses, he or she is not obligated to address their legacy. This amounts to a selfish rejection of the common good, as well as a denial of the Golden Rule.

The third is the assumption of historical irrelevance — the belief that if subjugation did not take place this morning, it is morally extraneous. This is a particularly absurd view for conservatives, given their traditional belief that the past has a powerful hold on the present. . . . this does not even start to cover the legacy of stolen labor, educational inequality and disenfranchisement.

There are many horrors in American racial history but also some powerful inspiration. It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential. And this should lead to an enduring lesson: America often sees itself more clearly through the eyes of the harassed and oppressed.

When one is black, Hispanic, gay or non-Christian, one must more more fully analyze and focus on what America should be given the reality that you cannot sit back and enjoy the level of societal privilege that goes with being white and heterosexual.  Your rights and safety are always at risk.

El Paso Killer Echoed the Words of Conservative "Media Stars"

At work in the kitchen I will walk in and find on occasion that someone has set the TV to Fox News.  I typically turn it off or change thee channel rather that hear the lies and distortions spewing from the like of Laura Ingraham or other "stars" of the conservative media universe. Some of the things said are so outlandish that one has to wonder who believes the crap being said - certainly not the anchors who cannot possibly believe some of the things that are so far from even remotely true. The shooter in El Paso apparently not only listened to the lies but believed them and acted on them.  That's the conclusion in a piece in the New York Times that looks at the shooters "manifesto" and other writings.  Words have consequences, yet the shrills of Fox News and other conservative "news" sites care nothing about the potential for violence they are happily creating.  Just yesterday, the Orlando Sentinel reported as follows:

Richard D. Clayton, 26, of Winter Park, [a white supremacist] was arrested Friday after he posted threats to kill or do bodily harm on Facebook.  According to officials, the investigation began Tuesday after Clayton made a threat on Facebook saying: "3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back. Don't go to Walmart next week." 

People are listening and some will frighteningly act in violent ways. Here are highlights from the Times piece: 

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity.

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

[H]is post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

“Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people,” Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” said on her show on July 10. Days after the shooting, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed a connection between words used by the gunman and by President Trump, saying: “If you use the term ‘invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.

Sometimes the hosts are repeating [Trump's] the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes [Trump] the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.

Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.

“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”

He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”

The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.

The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.

Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language. 

The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”

The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.

“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.

Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.”

Be very afraid of the seeds these irresponsible shrills and self-promoters are sowing.  

Tucker Carlson's Ugly Racist, Anti-LGBT Track Record Has Advertisers Fleeing

I first remember seeing Tucker Carlson years ago before he went fully over to the dark side, if you will, and joined Fox News.  I do not remember the name of the news show, but I do remember how Carlson wilted and exhibited out right fear when Rachel Maddow - who was in her pre-big time, prime time show of her own - would be on the show and literally destroy Carlson who lacked even a basis command of facts and statistics on a par with Maddow.   Since moving to Fox News - Faux News on this blog - Carlson has increasingly embraced the white supremacist message of Der Trumpenführer and his hideous base.  With Carlson now facing the loss of 17 advertisers (and counting) in the wake of his racist anti-immigrant commentary, it is worth remembering that Carlson is a homophobe as well as a racist.  A piece in The Advocate looks at Carlson anti-gay history.  Here are excerpts:

Tucker Carlson Tonight is the latest Fox News program facing the wrath of advertisers after spreading lies, hate, and fear — 17 advertisers have now pulled spots from TCT after the show's host defamed immigrants.

As Trump's presidency goes up in flames, Carlson has been working to distract and rile his viewers by denouncing the migrant caravan, where refugees are seeking asylum at the U.S./Mexico border. Instead of advocating compassion for these desperate individuals, Carlson slanders them. The talking head said mass immigration “makes our country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” Following initial criticism to that comment, Carlson said in another episode that “huge swaths of the (border) region are covered with garbage and waste … that degrade the soil and kill wildlife.

Corporations have wisened up to Carlson's dangerous dehumanizing of migrants. Ancestry.com, Bowflex, CareerBuilder, Chase United MileagePlus Explorer Card, IHOP, Indeed, Just for Men, Land Rover, Minted, Nerd Wallet, Pacific Life, ScotteVest, Smile Direct, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, TD Ameritrade, Voya Financial, and Zenni have all pulled their ads from TCT.

"There's no mistaking it: Tucker Carlson's words were ugly, inaccurate, and un-American, and advertisers did the right thing by ending support of him and his show," Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD's president and CEO, said in a press release. "Current and future advertisers must also remember Carlson's pattern of peddling misinformation about and frequent attacks on other marginalized communities, including LGBTQ Americans.

GLAAD reiterated Carlson's long history of attacking not only immigrants, but the LGBTQ community. Carlson has called transgender people "crazy," denied their gender identity, described gay people as "unhappy," requested Saturday Night Live "[make] fun of transgender bathrooms," claimed pro-LGBTQ school curricula is "weird" and indoctrinates children, said a gay man worshipped Hillary Clinton "like Judy Garland," called it "fascism" for a Christian baker to make a gay couple a cake, bragged about beating up a gay man, declared "transgender privilege" is real, dismissed the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" as a "sideshow issue," and declared Moonlight only won the Best Picture Oscar because of "political correctness."

Yes, I do not like Carlson.  He embodies what's wrong with white, conservative America and advertisers are fools if they support talking heads like Carlson and turn their backs on the growing majority of Americans. 

Trump Tweets False White Supremacist "Talking Point" and Causes Rift with South Africa

Donald Trump may be the least knowledgeable individual to ever occupy the White House.  Rather than educate himself from multiple sources and reading lengthy reports, he watches Fox News which now basically broadcasts what Trump and his supporters want to hear and insists on single page briefing papers.  Add to this Trump's long history of racism - one significant detail arose right here in Hampton Roads when Trump's company was sued for anti-black discrimination - and its little surprise that Der Trumpenführer launched a totally erroneous and racially charged tweet the other evening.  Whether it was meant to be a distraction form the coverage of the conviction and guilty plea of his right hand men or pure ignorance and racial malice may never be known.  What is certain is that the story line derives from a white supremacist talking point used to spread the myth of "white genocide."  The New York Times looks at this latest falsehood peddled by the White House:

Trust President Trump, following his familiar tactic of deflecting attention from yet another scandal by issuing some outrageous tweet, to come down hard on the wrong side of an issue he knows nothing about, based on no more than a slanted Fox News program. In a late-Wednesday tweet, Mr. Trump said he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into land seizures and the “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa. It was the first time he has mentioned Africa by name in a tweet as president.

His source was a grossly one-sided report by the Fox host Tucker Carlson [who has been pandering to white supremacists] asserting that the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was seizing land from his citizens because they are the wrong “skin color.” There have been no large-scale killings of white farmers, and Mr. Ramaphosa’s proposal to change the Constitution to allow expropriation of land [in certain limited situations such as abandoned property and derelict urban buildings] without compensation has not yet passed.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 essentially reserved most of the land to the white minority, and the restrictions became more onerous in the apartheid era. When that system was finally dismantled almost 25 years ago, a new Constitution did provide for land reform, but the process has moved slowly. Statistics vary, but what is clear is that whites, who are less than 10 percent of the population, continue to own more than two-thirds of the land, while black South Africans, the overwhelming majority, own a much smaller share.

That “highly skewed” distribution of land and productive assets, according to the World Bank, contributes heavily to making South Africa “the world’s most unequal country.”

Mr. Ramaphosa argued in an op-ed article in The Financial Times that his proposal was “no land grab,” and that the A.N.C.’s land reform program would not undermine investment in the economy or damage agricultural production. The constitutional amendment he is seeking, he said, would strengthen the existing rules by making explicit the conditions under which land could be expropriated without compensation.
 Yet Mr. Trump’s tweet, and the Fox show on which it was based, were bereft of any context, sympathy or understanding. They pounced, instead, on the false narratives of right-wing white South African groups claiming widespread seizures of white-owned land and a continuing “white genocide.”
 In fact, the number of killings of farmers and farm workers is at a 20-year low, with 47 in the 2017-18 fiscal year, according to AgriSA, a farmers’ organization in South Africa.
 Not surprisingly, South Africa reacted angrily to Mr. Trump’s tweet, saying it reflected a “narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.” Sadly, it probably reflects even less than that — a clueless grasp at a racially tinged political diversion. As Patrick Gaspard, a former American ambassador to South Africa and now president of the Open Society Foundations, tweeted, “This man has never visited the continent and has no discernible Africa policy.”

Personally, I doubt Trump cares about the truth of the situation in South Africa.  His tweet was likely aimed merely pleasing his racist base that is hysterical over its loss of perceived white privilege and terrified of those with different skin color.

Fox News and the Growing Ugliness of Evangelical Christianity

Two pieces look at the growing ugliness of Evangelical Christianity. One is a column at NBC News by a Christian author and the other is in the New York Times.  Both in their own way point a finger at one of the causes of the seemingly mushrooming hate and hypocrisy that define evangelical Christianity in America.  Both also note evangelical support of Roy Moore a symptom of the malignancy evangelicals have become in the political area where the gospel's social directives have been thrown on the trash heap despite the feigned piety and religiosity of far too many evangelicals.  The NBC News column states in part as follows:

This is not Christianity. Rather, it is an extreme Republican religionism that stands by party and regressive policy no matter what. It's not the gospel of Christ, but a gospel of greed. It is the religion of racism and lies, not the religion of redemption and love.

[E]ven before these allegations [of Moore's sexual assaults] made national headlines, it was clear that Moore’s policy agenda endangered the children of Alabama and this nation. This man, who wants to be Alabama’s next Senator, wants to repeal Obamacare, making it health care inaccessible for millions, in Alabama and elsewhere. He has said Islam is a "false religion" homosexual conduct "should be illegal." and curtail equal protection under the law for gay and transgender people. Moore supports a tax plan that would hurt the poor and working poor.

In short, Moore’s political agenda presents a credible threat to millions of vulnerable people in America. Yet Moore claims to be the moral and Christian candidate, using religion as U.S. slave masters did before him to justify actions which fly in the face of Christ's teachings. Like segregationists, Moore imagines the struggle for equality in America as a story of loss. At a revival meeting earlier this week, Moore complained that he was being persecuted. He also lamented the fact that the courts took prayer out of schools in 1962 and made a cryptic and confusing reference to “new rights” created in 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was signed. Some members of the congregation responded, “Amen!”

As well as he knows his Bible, Roy Moore never quotes from the more than 2,000 verses that exhort us to care for the poor, the sick, and the stranger in our midst. He has apparently overlooked the prophet Isaiah, who said to men like Moore in his own day: “Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims — laws that make misery for the poor, that rob the destitute of their dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children” (Is.10:1-4).

So who is preaching this Republican religionism that the author condemns?  Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other right wing "news" outlets. To watch Fox News is to witness an alternate reality that has no regard for those who do not worship at the Republican/Christofascist altar. The column in the New York Times does so far as to describe Fox News viewing as the new form of worship for many evangelicals.  Here are excerpts:

Kaitlyn Schiess has a sterling evangelical pedigree. She grew up in evangelical churches in Colorado and Virginia and graduated from Liberty University before entering Dallas Theological Seminary last year to prepare for a career in the church. But lately she has been frustrated by evangelicals’ failure to challenge the prejudice and predation in their midst.

To Ms. Schiess, this [evangelicals' defense of Roy Moore] is one more sign that a new ritual has superseded Sunday worship and weeknight Bible studies: a profane devotional practice, with immense power to shape evangelicals’ beliefs. This “liturgy” is the nightly consumption of conservative cable news. Liberals love to complain about conservatives’ steady diet of misinformation through partisan media, but Ms. Schiess’s complaint is more profound: Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson aren’t just purveyors of distorted news, but high priests of a false religion.

“The reason Fox News is so formative is that it’s this repetitive, almost ritualistic thing that people do every night,” Ms. Schiess told me. “It forms in them particular fears and desires, an idea of America. This is convincing on a less than logical level, and the church is not communicating to them in that same way.”

Social scientists have documented our tendency to reject reliable evidence if it challenges our beliefs. Hours of tearful victims’ testimony will not deter evangelicals who see Roy Moore as the latest Christian martyr persecuted by the liberal establishment. “Their loyalties are much more strongly formed by conservative media than their churches,” Ms. Schiess said.
 [T]he church is not doing its job. Humans thrive on ritual and collective acts of devotion. And the way we worship has political consequences. It shapes our response to evil and our reaction to people different from ourselves.
 Some evangelicals have grown so frustrated with their tradition’s captivity to a particular brand of politics — and the idolatries of white supremacy and the free market — that they have proposed a radical withdrawal from both Moral Majority-style activism and modern consumer culture. Worship, after all, is not just something that happens in church.
 When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, he was acknowledging the special power that ritual and community have to stoke or weaken both love and hatred. There is no substitute for sharing the bread and wine — the climax of the Christian liturgy — with people unlike yourself, Ms. Schiess said. She called for fighting false idols with right worship: “Fox News forms a fear, a caricature of other people; if communion were done in churches with diverse populations, it would counteract that fear.”
 [W]orship should be an act of humility, not hubris. It should be a discomfiting experience, not a doubling down on what’s easy and familiar. The battle for the soul of evangelicalism, the struggle to disentangle it from white supremacy, from misogyny — and from the instinct to defend politicians like Roy Moore — demands sound arguments grounded in evidence.

I for one think that Christianity is moribund in America and that evangelicals and fundamentalists will be the factions of Christianity that kill it in the eyes of decent, moral people who perhaps unwittingly follow the gospel message more consistently than most Christians, especially evangelicals. 

Freepers Continually Questioning Tucker Carlson's Sexual Orientation

Pam Spauling's blog, Pam's House Blend, had a post (http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=5F9E55CE67844D5199A1F2330FDCD39E?diaryId=2309) taking Tucker Carlson to task for comments that he made recently about Obama's masculinity. Even more entertaining was a link to Free Republic where the various posted comments basically accuse Tucker of being gay (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1688811/posts). I find all this questioning of Tucker's true sexual orientation most amusing, since Tucker certainly has taken his share of snide shots at the LGBT community, even when it comes to housing for gay seniors as reported two years ago in the Southern Voice: http://www.sovo.com/2005/7-22/view/actionalert/carlson.cfm.

I hope Tucker is enjoying all the attention and commentary. His apologists, of course, say that he's married with two kids. DUH!!!! HELLO!!! I was married and have three kids and I didn't wear bow ties!! By that standard I MUST be straighter than Tucker.