Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Targeted By the Far Right

The sickness of the far right in America is truly frightening.  In a time when the nation faces an extreme health threat and people are literally dying, many on the far right are attacking medical experts who, in their sick and warped view, criticize or challenge their "glorious leader," Donald Trump.  The embrace of ignorance and partisanship is stunning yet is in keeping with the Republican Party's descent into a body where ignorance is celebrated, unqualified individuals are appointed to positions because of their extreme ideology, and loyalty to a man who is loyal to no one. The latest preferred target is Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.  Speaking the truth and medically correct information is unacceptable to the Far right and Trump cult members. A piece in the New York Times looks at the right wing lie machine.  Here are excerpts:

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.

The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

The torrent of falsehoods aimed at discrediting Dr. Fauci is another example of the hyperpartisan information flow that has driven a wedge into the way Americans think. For the past few years, far-right supporters of President Trump have regularly vilified those whom they see as opposing him. Even so, the campaign against Dr. Fauci stands out because he is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts . . .

It is the latest twist in the ebb and flow of right-wing punditry that for weeks echoed Mr. Trump in minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus and arguably undercut efforts to alert the public of its dangers. . . . [right wing “news” outlets] now accuse Democrats and journalists of trying to use the pandemic to damage Mr. Trump politically.

“There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation.

The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise, such as when dealing with climate change. But misinformation campaigns during a pandemic carry a unique danger because they may sow distrust in public health officials when accurate information and advice are crucial, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics.

“What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.

Ms. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the campaign was part of a long-term conspiracy theory propagated by Mr. Trump’s followers.

“Fauci has just been particularly prominent,” she said. “But any public health official who gets cast in a conspiratorial narrative is going to be subject to those same kinds of suspicions, the same kinds of doubt.”

On Thursday, he joined a 30-minute Instagram Live discussion about the coronavirus hosted by the National Basketball Association star Stephen Curry.

In the session, Dr. Fauci, with a miniature basketball hoop behind him, conveyed the same message that he had said for weeks about the outbreak. “This is serious business,” he said. “We are not overreacting.”

Trump’s New CDC Director: AIDS Is ‘God’s Judgment’ Against Gays

Trump’s New CDC Director: AIDS Is ‘God’s Judgment’ Against Gays (Image via YouTube)

As noted frequently, the only demographic that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, seems to want to please is right wing evangelical Christian extremists.  From moving the American embassy to Jerusalem - to satiate evangelicals delusion that the move is key to sparking Armageddon - to filling his cabinet with Christofascists who want to destroy the public schools  (which, horror of horrors, teach science, evolution and fact based sex education) when not lining his own pockets, Trump is doing all that he can to keep evangelicals behind him.  Meanwhile, evangelicals have shown their moral bankruptcy by supporting a man who is anathema to true followers of Christ.  Now, Trump has thrown evangelicals another bone by appointing an anti-science, anti-LGBT zealot to the directorship of the Centers for Disease Control.  The new CDC director, Robert Redfield is on record as stating that AIDS is god's punishment to gays for not complying with Christofascist dogma.  Never mind that legitimate science and every legitimate medical and mental health association in America stands for the reality that gays' sexual orientation is "normal" and not a choice.  A piece in Patheos looks at this totally unfit Trump appointee.  Here are highlights:

Trump’s new CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, is a dangerous Christian extremist with a history of demonizing gays and single parents.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the new Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has long standing ties with conservative Christian groups that are hostile to gays, single parents, and anyone else that offends their “family values.”

In the past, the new CDC director has worked closely with the Christian organization Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy. The group claims that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against gays, and was punishment from God for an America weakened by single-parent households and a loss of “family values.”

CNN reports on Redfield’s deplorable record:

As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families. . . . . In other words, Redfield used his prominent position in the U.S. military to design a policy that would ultimately humiliate and punish gay soldiers suffering from the AIDS virus.

Foreign Policy reports on the disastrous effect of Redfield’s odious policy decisions:

The military seemed intent on administratively punishing infected soldiers for their HIV status. Soldiers described being summoned to meet with a chaplain, who would inform them that they had tested positive for HIV, and counsel them while military police rifled through their barracks searching for evidence of homosexuality and the names of possible sex partners. . . . . Anecdotally, many of these young men committed suicide, and most were drummed out of the military without medical coverage, dying impoverished from their AIDS disease…

More on the new CDC director’s deplorable record via CNN:

In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.

Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, “Christians in the Age of AIDS,” co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of “false prophets.”

In the early 1990’s, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them.

[F]or Redfield, the new CDC director, the best way to prevent HIV is not a science-based program promoting clean needles and condoms; instead, the so-called scientist recommended a faith-based program built around abstinence and Jesus.

Bottom line: Trump’s new CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, is yet another dangerous Christian extremist holding a prominent position in the Trump administration.  Can you feel the creeping Christian theocracy?

Sadly, Redfield embodies the mind set of today's evangelicals and unfit and unqualified Christian extremists that Trump has elevated to cabinet positions and other high ranking positions.  Be very afraid.

Trump’s Know-Nothing Science Budget

The GOP and evangelical Christians have a common requirement to further their toxic agendas: ignorant, objective truth denying followers. A heavy dose of racially and homophobic bigotry and a belief in conspiracy theories, of course are similarly helpful ingredients.  Hence why knowledge and scientific knowledge of almost any sort is the enemy of fundamentalists and evangelicals and the political party that they now largely control.  Evolution is denied, climate change is denied, objective facts and figures are replaced with untrue "alternate facts," etc.   Indeed, anything that challenges the political and religious orthodoxy of these people is denied and attacked.  Donald Trump, the leading purveyor of alternate facts - read lies - is aiding in the effort by proposing dangerous and potentially deadly cuts i, science funding.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Donald Trump's dangerous budget cuts to science and medical research.  Here are excerpts: 

Donald Trump’s disregard for science has never been much of a secret. Well before he became President, he tweeted that light bulbs can cause cancer, that wind farms are unhealthy, that fracking “poses ZERO health risks,” and that Ebola “is much easier to transmit” than the government lets on. As a candidate, he regularly called global warming a hoax, repeated the false notion that vaccines can cause autism, and stated confidently that spraying hair spray in one’s apartment does not harm the ozone layer. . . . He avoids exercise, proudly fears germs, and, in Mike Pence, has chosen a Vice-President who, when pointedly asked, won’t say whether he believes in evolution.

It’s been downhill ever since. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and the phrases “climate change” and “evidence-based” have been scrubbed from federal Web sites—in the very same year that three once-in-a-century hurricanes and two major drought-fuelled wildfires ravaged parts of the nation. . . . . the Environmental Protection Agency has banned E.P.A.-funded scientists, but not industry representatives, from serving on its advisory boards; and the Centers for Disease Control, facing steep budget cuts, will soon all but shut down a vital program that helps more than three dozen developing countries detect and control the spread of infectious diseases.

Trump’s newly proposed federal budget for 2019 continues the assault on knowledge and reason. Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the E.P.A. would each be cut by eighteen per cent or more, compared with the final 2017 budget, which was drafted by the Obama Administration and amended by Trump.

The National Institute of Mental Health would see its budget slashed by thirty per cent, despite Trump’s recent avowals that better mental-health treatment is the solution to gun violence. NASA’s budget would stay roughly the same, but a number of important Earth-science missions would be eliminated, and Trump would attempt to defund and privatize the International Space Station by 2025.

 

The few increases, to the budgets of the Energy and Interior Departments, are designed to fund fossil-fuel research, offshore drilling, and surface mining. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management and the Oil Spill Research Program would be cut by at least fifteen per cent; Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses earnings from offshore oil and gas drilling to protect and restore federal public lands, would be cut by two-thirds; and research on clean energy would be cut by more than seventy per cent.

 

Other cuts would simply obfuscate. The 2019 proposal, like the 2018 budget, eliminates five satellite missions that study aspects of Earth’s surface and atmosphere—carbon-dioxide levels, the reflectivity of clouds and snow—specifically in order to monitor the dynamics of climate. According to Trump’s moral calculus, it is better to know nothing than to learn something that may conflict with what you think you know. Even the education departments of NASA and NOAA would be cut; should those agencies actually learn something, they’ll have a harder time sharing the information.

 

Thirteen months into his first term, key posts at numerous federal agencies remain unfilled, including the administrator positions for NASA and NOAA. The Department of the Interior lacks eleven of its seventeen senior officials, and Trump has yet to propose nominees for six of them, including the directors of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Needless to say, it’s easier to ransack a store when no one is officially minding it.

 

And many of the candidates whom Trump has nominated for science-oriented roles are woefully underqualified.

 

It feels almost quaint to talk of “truth” and “facts” anymore, but, as an endeavor, science at least strives to honestly approach them. Which is why it’s all the more dispiriting that, for a full year now, Trump has operated without a Presidential science adviser—the longest the Oval Office has gone without one since the position was created, decades ago.onald 

 

[Trump] trusts no one; he can’t abide to read even his intelligence reports. Science thrives on curiosity, investigation, vigorous discourse, and flexibility of thought. Donald Trump is a party of one, interested solely in hearing the sound of his own voice, regardless of the veracity of what it has to say. For now, the interim science adviser is Michael Kratsios, the deputy assistant in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios, who is thirty-one, worked previously as chief of staff to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter, and has a bachelor’s degree in political science—the only kind of science, perhaps, that Trump can understand.

Quote of the Day - Calling Out Christofascist Misogyny

My blogger friend Bob Felton - a straight man living in North Carolina who is an engineer by training - and I have never met.  We have read each other's blogs for years now and occasionally exchange e-mails or Facebook communications.  Like me, Bob holds a very dim view of religion, especially fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity.   He credits me with changing his thinking on gays and gay rights.  He often comes up with very apt summations of the evils of religion and the foulness of the "godly folk."  He hit a bulls-eye with this quote responding to one of my posts:

WE DO KNOW now that there is a lot more to sexuality than plumbing, that sexual orientation is a biological switch that is set before birth; virtually every biologist and medical researcher on earth will tell you that. The refusal to accept that, and instead constrict the lives of others in deference to the things written by some Bronze Age anonymity, goes to character.

Let me elaborate so that there is no confusion about what I’m saying: When Pastor Bubba or your Auntie Grizelda howls and bellows that it doesn’t matter what scientists say because Leviticus says everything anybody needs to know about the subject, he or she is exhibiting bad character and decent, educated adults should avoid them.

In addition to taxing churches, one of the main ways the evils of fundamentalist Christianity is to make its adherents social and political outcasts.  Truly decent people should avoid them and give them no deference whatsoever.  

Scientific American: Trump's Alarming Dismissal of Science

The journal, Scientific American, does not ordinarily write political endorsements or condemn political candidates.  Its principal concern is science and the fostering of scientific advances and discoveries that have the potential to better the human condition and foster progress.  However, this year, given Donald trump's embrace of ignorance and denial of scientific truths - something not surprising given Trump's Christofascist, natvist, white supremacist base of support - the journal has felt compelled to make the case why Trump is unfit for the presidency.  Here are highlights:

Four years ago in these pages, writer Shawn Otto warned our readers of the danger of a growing antiscience current in American politics. “By turning public opinion away from the anti-authoritarian principles of the nation's founders,” Otto wrote, “the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has faced before.”
 Otto wrote those words in the heat of a presidential election race that now seems quaint by comparison to the one the nation now finds itself in. As if to prove his point, one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.
 A respect for evidence is not just a part of the national character. It goes to the heart of the country's particular brand of democratic government. When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—they were asserting the fledgling nation's grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.

Scientific American is not in the business of endorsing political candidates. But we do take a stand for science—the most reliable path to objective knowledge the world has seen—and the Enlightenment values that gave rise to it. For more than 170 years we have documented, for better and for worse, the rise of science and technology and their impact on the nation and the world.
 [O]ver the past few decades facts have become an undervalued commodity. Many politicians are hostile to science, on both sides of the political aisle. The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a routine practice of meddling in petty science-funding matters to score political points. Science has not played nearly as prominent a role as it should in informing debates over the labeling of genetically modified foods, end of life care and energy policy, among many issues.
 The current presidential race, however, is something special. It takes antiscience to previously unexplored terrain. When the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.
 In October, as we did four years previously, we will assemble answers from the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican nominees on the public policy questions that touch on science, technology and public health and then publish them online. We will support ScienceDebate.org's efforts to persuade moderators to ask important science-related questions during the presidential debates. We encourage the nation's political leaders to demonstrate a respect for scientific truths in word and deed. And we urge the people who vote to hold them to that standard.

The GOP Convention's Ugly First Night

In some ways watching the GOP National Convention is akin to self-inflicted torture, but it should be required viewing because it puts a spotlight on just how insane and out of the mainstream the GOP has become.  If one isn't a right wing Christian fanatic, white supremacist, conspiracy theory devote, a not tethered to objective reality Hillary hater, or simply insane, there really is not much place for you in today's Republican Party.  All of this was on open display last night and reinforces my view that I did the right thing when I decided to escape the insane asylum the GOP has become years ago. A column in the Washington Post looks at some of the insanity and the freaks who Donald Trump is making mainstream within the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Welcome to the Donald Trump Republican National Convention.

Roger Stone, longtime confidant and informal adviser to Donald Trump, . . .  chose this moment, when the party presents itself to the nation, to team up with Alex Jones — the conspiracy theorist and radio host on whose show Trump has often appeared — as “co-hosts” of the rally for a couple thousand Trump supporters. Like the Trump campaign itself, the convention has elevated those who bring the crazy.

Many Republican officials are avoiding Cleveland this week entirely. Others are tacitly supporting the Trump ticket, swallowing their reservations; a last-ditch rebellion on the floor Monday afternoon by anti-Trump delegates was easily put down.

This vacuum gives voice to Trump’s proudest and loudest supporters, those who, before Trump, resided on the fringes. It has legitimized people like Jones.

Jones is famous for asserting, among other things, that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. Trump, who appeared frequently on Jones’s show to promote his theory that President Obama wasn’t born in America, told its host in December that “your reputation is amazing.” . . . He [Jones] said that “Hillary is a foreign agent of the communist Chinese, the Saudi Arabians and others.” Noticing a disruption in the crowd, he denounced these “anti-freedom scum who need to get their ass to North Korea.”

Police on the perimeter and in a boat could witness a few participants openly carrying handguns, the droning of the kudu horns, the guy carrying an eight-foot wooden cross, the woman who botched the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the primary challenger to John McCain who said, “We don’t need frail, fearful, old people representing us.”

Dozens of attendees wore “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts. One sign that said “Latinos for Trump” featured a bumper sticker declaring “9/11 was an inside job.” The flip side had the message “Hillary for Prison” (the first “i” was dotted with a Jewish star and Muslim crescent) and a bumper sticker declaring fluoride “poison in the tap water.”

Trump has “cojones,” Stone said. And Clinton? “A short-tempered, foul-mouthed, greedy, bipolar, mentally unbalanced criminal.”  “She’s a reptile!” somebody added.  “A liar!”

This is the face of Trump’s GOP. “Republicans who do not choose to join our cause: You will be replaced,” Stone said. “Good riddance. This is not about unity.”

Texas State Board of Education Candidate Embodies the GOP's Embrace of Ignorance

Coming from a family with a long history of Republican ties and having myself been a city committee member and precinct chair for nearly eight (8) years, I continue to be shocked by how low a political party that once thought of itself as educated, moderately cultured and respectful of science and knowledge has become the home base for fringe lunatics and those who frankly need mental health interventions.  On the national scene these low intelligence, low education masses in the GOP base are rallying to Donald Trump's racist and fascist themed campaign.  Shockingly, at the local and state level, things are even scarier.  Texas is seemingly ground zero for such lunacy and a candidate for the state board of education reflects just how sick and ignorance worshiping the Republican Party has become.  The candidate, Mary Lou Bruner, has claimed on social media, among other things, that President Obama had worked as a gay prostitute in his youth, that the United States should ban Islam, that the Democratic Party had John F. Kennedy killed and that the United Nations had hatched a plot to depopulate the world.  Frighteningly, many in today's GOP see nothing wrong with Bruner's insanity.  Moreover, here in Virginia, the Virginia GOP is controlled by many who hold Bruner's beliefs.  Here are highlights from the New York Times:

On Super Tuesday, Dale Clark voted for a local Republican who claimed on social media that President Obama had worked as a gay prostitute in his youth, that the United States should ban Islam, that the Democratic Party had John F. Kennedy killed and that the United Nations had hatched a plot to depopulate the world.

Mr. Clark, 75, was unaware that the candidate he had supported — Mary Lou Bruner, 68, a former kindergarten teacher running for a seat on the State Board of Education — held such views. But as he sat with his wife eating lunch in this East Texas city, Mr. Clark was ready to give Ms. Bruner the benefit of the doubt.

“I would not discount her on the basis of having those beliefs,” said Mr. Clark, a retired pilot. “It convinces me, though, that she’s quite conservative, and if I were going to err either way, I would want to err toward the side of the conservative.”

Ms. Bruner’s anti-Obama, anti-Islam, anti-evolution and anti-gay Facebook posts have generated national headlines and turned an obscure school board election into a glimpse of the outer limits of Texas politics. In a part of the state dominated by conservative Christians and Tea Party activists, Ms. Bruner’s candidacy has posed a question no one can answer with any certainty — how far to the fringe is too far for Texas Republicans?

Because of the board’s clout in selecting textbooks for all of the state’s schools, it can influence the content of textbooks produced nationwide.

Here in Ms. Bruner’s hometown, Mineola, and elsewhere in intensely conservative East Texas, her views fit a widely accepted anti-Obama and conspiracy friendly antigovernment mind-set. Inside Kitchens Hardware and Deli, the combination hardware store and diner where Mr. Clark was eating, a sign on a shelf read, “Hillary for Prison 2016.” A woman in a nearby store who declined to give her name said she would not hold Ms. Bruner’s Facebook posts against her, and spoke at length about her belief that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was a government-staged hoax.

Tammy Blair, the chairwoman of the Republican Party in nearby Cherokee County, said there were differing definitions of extreme, adding that she was sympathetic to the movement to have Texas secede from the United States.  “At the end of the day, is Mary Lou a wacko extremist? No,” Ms. Blair said. 

On her Facebook page, Ms. Bruner called Mr. Obama “Ahab the Arab,” and wrote that he “hates all white people and all wealthy people because to him wealthy means white.” Although she condemned the Ku Klux Klan in one posting, she wrote positively of its roots, writing that it started “as citizens trying to fight back against a corrupt government when there were corrupt officials or no officials at all to keep law and order in the rural areas.” Of Mr. Obama’s youth, she wrote: “I heard from a reliable source that Obama was also a male prostitute for a while when he lived in New York with his male ‘partner.’ How do you think he paid for his drugs?”

Other Republicans have expressed shock and disgust at Ms. Bruner’s comments and primary victory, and have vowed to vote for Mr. Ellis in the May runoff. Her critics include the superintendents of several East Texas school districts.

“Some of the statements that she has made make you question her ability to hold an office,” said Mary Ann Whiteker, the longtime superintendent of the Hudson Independent School District in Lufkin. “It’s very, very frightening to think that she could be giving input on what we ought to be teaching our students.”

Why They Hate So Much: the History Behind the Right's Intolerance

One of the stark commonalities between the Christofascists and far right Republicans (to the extent they aren't one and the same) is their hatred towards others.  And "others" includes a lengthy list of people: gays, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, non-Christians, Muslims, etc., etc.  Behind this hate is a desire to maintain power and control - privilege, if you will - and to combat anything and everything that challenges their world view, much of which is based on a selective reading of a book of fiction: the Bible.  As a piece in Salon notes, through out America's history there have been those who have used hate and related paranoia to further their own interest, often to the detriment of most of society.  This hasn't changed and the GOP has perfected the use of hate towards the "other" to dupe the ignorant and bigoted into voting against their own interests,  Here are column highlights:

Is Ann Coulter an anti-Semite? What’s interesting to me about Coulter’s notorious tweet (“How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”) isn’t what it does or doesn’t reveal about her, but the light that it sheds on the deep archetypes of American conservatism.

Watching the two Republican debates, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d come, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, “unstuck in time.” Ted Cruz looks to me like a silent movie villain from the 1920s, and he talks like a wax cylinder recording of a Texas governor from the 1920s. Jeb Bush is, well, another Bush. Mike Huckabee is a beefier, more homespun Pat Robertson. And for all that he is a product of New York real estate and reality TV, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the rural Populism that arose in the late 19th century.

Populism Populism is all about fear and hatred, and starting around the 1890s, when the myth of Jewish money power and the tide of Eastern European Jewish immigration were both at their peak, the fear and hatred of Jews in particular.

The so-called Jewish plot to undermine the economic and moral foundations of Christendom and rule it from Jerusalem was laid out in detail in the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a libelous forgery that was first published in Russian in 1903 and widely translated and circulated in the 1920s, when, not coincidentally, the Nativist Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a huge revival in this country and one of America’s richest and most powerful businessmen, Henry Ford, was weighing a run for the presidency. Ford also published a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, that was almost entirely dedicated to the “Jewish problem.”

Elizabeth Dilling, an anti-Communist crusader of the 1930s whose book “The Roosevelt Red Record and its Background” has often been compared to Ann Coulter’s “Treason,” also wrote a book-length indictment of “Talmudism,” “The Plot Against Christianity.”

Racism runs deep in the Republican Party, as we have all learned, seven years into the presidency of Barack Obama. But the kinds of hatreds that animated Elizabeth Dilling, if not Ann Coulter, run much deeper than nasty tweets or even racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. 

Historically, the American Paranoid’s reigning obsessions were:

1) Papism. Back in the 1600s, American colonists worried about Jesuit subversion. From the 1830s to the Civil War, the Know Nothing movement attacked Roman Catholic Irish and German immigration. A second great wave of anti-Catholic feeling arose during the Populist era, between the 1890s and into the 1920s (the KKK was as anti-Papist as it was anti-black and anti-Jew).

2) Atheistic intellectualism. There were McCarthy-esque witch hunts against Masonry and Illuminism in the 1790s and again in the late 1820s and ‘30s. To its historical enemies, Masonry occupied much the same space that secular humanism does today; its chief sin was that it elevated reason and science above revealed religion.

3) Calibanic Demonicism. This is my own coinage; I use it as a shorthand for what our forebears saw as the unbridled sexuality and unregenerate sinfulness of natural man, as embodied in blacks and indigenous Americans—attributes that would also be ascribed to Suffragists and to birth control advocates, both then and now (Google “Sandra Fluke” and “Rush Limbaugh” to see) and to LGBT people today. A simpler shorthand might be “sex.”
4) The Anti-Christ. This last includes Jewish bankers, Jewish arms dealers, and Jewish pornographers, which is to say Hollywood producers and popular culture purveyors, as well as the “left wing media.” . . . . In the classic American Paranoid understanding, Communism was fundamentally Anti-Christian and shared the same goals as the Rothschilds and their heirs.

The corporate interests and other deep pockets that have historically exerted the most power in this country, and that are the most deeply invested in the Republican Party today, have never been monolithic in their aims or beliefs; . . . . But they haven’t necessarily disbelieved them either, and they’ve never stopped using them to manipulate debt-burdened dirt farmers, struggling artisans, and exploited (or nowadays discarded) factory workers to vote against their economic interests. 

The deep substructure of Hate remains pretty much as it was, but its superstructure has changed beyond recognition. Hitler made anti-Semitism disreputable, as, after much struggle, the civil rights movement did the most overt forms of racism . . .  Nativism is resurgent, as Donald Trump’s continuing success daily proves. With Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and overt white supremacism off the table, Islam and Sharia have taken their place, alongside sex and anti-scientism (which never went away).

The party of Lincoln has become the home of many neo-secessionists, who left the Democrats en masse after LBJ’s great betrayal in the 1960s, and to numerous Libertarians, who believe that all government is tyranny.

All of these people–many of whom wouldn’t have 10 words to say to each other if they had to sit next to each other on a long airplane flight–have crowded into the Republican big tent, along with the usual suspects who think that their taxes are too high and their businesses over regulated.

Seen in this light, it makes perfect sense that Carly Fiorina would have singled out Iran and Planned Parenthood as America’s two greatest existential threats, or that the legendary brain surgeon Ben Carson would attest to his disbelief in evolution (and that all of the candidates would dismiss the science behind climate change).

As for Trump, one thinker who wouldn’t be surprised by his success is the economist F.A. Hayek, one of the GOP’s patron saints. When a minority is looking to hijack a democracy, he wrote in “The Road to Serfdom,” it needs to attract a hard core of true believers. They will look to bring in comparatively less-educated people, he wrote, because “the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.” The program they will be offered, he adds, must be negative: “the hatred of an enemy…the envy of those better off….the contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they,’ the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action.”

GOP Senate Environment Committee Rants that Climate Change a Hoax

We had plenty of warning that batshit craziness would ensue once Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) became the chairman of the Senate Environment Committee and Inhofe has wasted no time in demonstrating that he's lost touch with objective reality.   Inhofe took to the Senate floor for a long speech about how he believes human-caused climate change is fake. Never mind that the consensus of scientists (other than those funded by the oil industry) is nearly unanimous.  Think Progress looks at Inhofe's lunacy.  Here are highlights:

Wednesday was a big day for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). In the morning, he officially took the gavel as chairman of the Senate’s Environment Committee. In the afternoon, he took the Senate floor for a long speech about how human-caused climate change is fake.

[T]he speech has everything. References to the oft-debunked “ClimateGate” stolen e-mail “scandal”, a poster of a Time Magazine cover from 1974 claiming an ice age is coming, and multiple references to former Vice President Al Gore. It has a mention of a survey of weather-casters who think global warming is caused by natural variation, but does not mention that weather-casters are not climate scientists. It even includes the claim that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “started” the whole idea that climate change is happening . . .

Inhofe says he has compiled a list of 4,000 “renowned scientists” scientists who disagree (“this is all in my website,” he said). Inhofe’s list actually has 650 people, some of whom are television meteorologists, geologists, anthropologists, and even a man with no college degree. 

Conversely, one of the most recent peer-reviewed studies on the state of climate science showed that out of 4000 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published in the past 21 years that stated a position on the cause of global warming — 97 percent of these endorsed the point that it was human-caused. In the video, Inhofe says this is “just not true.”

Don’t expect this speech to be the end of climate denial in the Senate. Indeed, Inhofe ended his speech by promising more of it, citing his new position as head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

 The Republican Party that I grew up in is truly dead and gone.  Insanity, racism, bigotry and the embrace of ignorance are now the GOP norm.  As for Inhofe, he belongs in a mental institution.

Additional GOP climate change deniers

BBC to Stop Giving Equal Airtime to Climate Deniers

In a move that ought to be followed by American media outlets - and extended to hate group leaders such as Tony Perkins of Family Research Council - the BBC has indicated that it will no longer air "debates" featuring members of the anti-science fringe.  The media has a responsibility to educate the public and not give platforms to charlatans and bigots who ignore objective facts in order to further their twisted political of religious agenda.  Yes, these people are free to embrace ignorance if they choose, but the media should not provide them with outlets.  A piece in Salon looks at this move by the BBC which ought to be applauded by rational, sane individuals.  Here are excerpts:

Good news for viewers of BBC News: You’ll no longer be subjected to the unhinged ravings of climate deniers and other members of the anti-science fringe. In a report published Thursday by the BBC Trust, the network’s journalists were criticized for devoting too much airtime (as in, any airtime) to unqualified people with “marginal views” about non-contentious issues in a misguided attempt to provide editorial balance.

“The Trust wishes to emphasize the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences,” the report reads. “Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given.” So far, according to the Telegraph, about 200 staff members have attended seminars and workshops aimed at improving their coverage.

To illustrate the ridiculousness of having one fringe “expert” come in to undermine a scientific consensus, the report points to the network’s coverage of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in September released a report concluding, with 95 percent certainty, that man-made climate change is happening. As was their due diligence, BBC reporters called a dozen prominent U.K. scientists, trying to drum up an opposing viewpoint. When that didn’t happen — probably because 97 percent of scientists agree that man-made climate change is happening — they turned instead to retired Australian geologist Bob Carter, who has ties to the industry-affiliated Heartland Institute.

To be clear, having one guy dismiss the consensus of hundreds of the world’s top climate scientists as “hocus-pocus science” wasn’t the “balanced” thing to do, and the only reason why people like Carter continue to be taken seriously is because news networks continue to suggest they should be.

Were every network to start doing what the BBC is, their unfounded opinions would cease to be heard . . .

As I said, a similar policy needs to be adopted in respect to Christofascists and other hate mongers and bigots who have only fantasy world religious beliefs to support their batshitery.  Stop providing them with an audience and giving them even a shred of legitimacy.