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The Boys on the Right Who Cried "Woke!"

When not shrieking about critical race theory and the danger drag queens supposedly pose to child - there have been no drag queens arrested for child molestation unlike thousands of pastors - politicians on the political right and their media propagandists have a third favorite bogeyman: "wokeness."  Their real problem with wokeness is that the term suggests liberalism, a sense of empathy for others and factual knowledge all of which is the opposite of the self-centeredness, conspracy theory obsessed and greed on the right.   Now, with the failure of a few regional banks, these Republcans are whing the "woke" policies are to blame rather than greed, bad investment policies and weakened  banking oversight - something loved by Republicans.   As a piece in the New York Times lays out, nowadays when confronted with real issues that might cut against Republicans' greed and vulture capitalist dogma the favored approach is to launch culture war calims to deflect from the real lackings of the GOP.   Look no further than the House of Representatives where nothingh of substance is being done and the Republican approach is insane investigations and culture war bills that will never see passage by the Senate.  Given the ever stronger effort to throw "red meat" to the GOP base, making any real progress on issues will be difficult and we can expect more culture war claims to distract uninformed voters such as Fox News viewers.  Here are column highlights: 

As soon as it was clear that Silicon Valley Bank would not survive the weekend, conservative influencers and Republican politicians had a culprit in sights.

Wokeness. “They were one of the most woke banks,” Representative James Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said during a segment on Fox News.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, also spoke to Fox about the collapse of the bank, and he also blamed the bank’s diversity programs.

A Saturday headline in The New York Post declared, “While Silicon Valley Bank Collapsed, Top Executive Pushed ‘Woke’ Programs.” And over at The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler wondered if “the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.”

On Twitter, a number of prominent conservatives took this message and ran with it. Donald Trump Jr. said that “SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices.” Stephen Miller, a key White House aide to President Donald Trump, accused the bank of wasting its funding on “trendy woke BS.” And Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, complained that “these SVB guys spend all their time funding woke garbage (‘climate change solutions’) rather than actual banking and now want a handout from taxpayers to save them.”

It is unclear whether these conservatives are working from the same memo or just share the same narrow obsession. Regardless, there is no evidence that D.E.I. or any other diversity initiative is responsible for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It is nonsense. . . . this deflection is worth noting for what it represents: the relentless effort to mystify real questions of political economy in favor of endless culture war conflict.

The real story behind the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has much more to do with the political and economic environment of the previous decade than it does with “wokeness,” a word that signifies nothing other than conservative disdain for anything that seems liberal.

As its name suggests, Silicon Valley Bank was tied tightly into the financial infrastructure of the tech industry. Founded in 1983, it claimed to bank for “nearly half of all US venture-backed start-ups” and it worked closely with many venture capital firms. It is risky for a bank to take most of its deposits from a single, tightly-knit industry. But for much of the last decade, low interest rates, easy money and cheap loans meant that this industry was on the upswing. As tech boomed, so did S.V.B.

“Flush with cash from high-flying start-ups,” my newsroom colleague Vivian Giang explains, Silicon Valley Bank “did what most of its rivals do: It kept a small chunk of its deposits in cash and it used the rest to buy long-term debt like Treasury bonds.” As long as interest rates stayed low, those bonds promised safe returns.

Interest rates did not stay low. To fight inflation and reduce the price of consumer goods, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates seven times in 2022. With each increase, Silicon Valley Bank lost money on its bonds. Worse, the interest rate surge affected venture capital firms and the entire world of tech start-ups, harming the bank’s portfolio as those companies shed value and reduced deposits.

Worried clients began to withdraw more money, which spooked investors, a development that pushed more clients to withdraw even more money. (Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund reportedly called for its start-ups to pull their cash while they still could.) On Friday, as the bank run gained steam, California’s financial regulatory agency announced that it had taken possession of the bank and placed it under the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

That is the immediate situation. But there is a larger context. Silicon Valley Bank had a significant number of large and uninsured depositors — clients with accounts totaling more than the up to $250,000 guaranteed by the F.D.I.C.

Ten years ago, the bank might have been subject to a stress test by the Federal Reserve, which would have forced the bank to diversify its investments.

But in 2018, Trump signed a bipartisan bill that shielded regional banks like Silicon Valley from regulatory scrutiny under the Dodd-Frank Act. Greg Becker, the bank’s chief executive, actually lobbied for this change, urging the government to raise the threshold it used for judging systematic risk, from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion in assets.

It’s not as if no one thought this collapse could happen. “The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed,” Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement on Sunday. Senator Elizabeth Warren made a similar point in an essay published in The Times on Monday, in which she also mentioned the failure of New York-based Signature Bank in the immediate aftermath of S.V.B.’s collapse . . . . .

All of this is to say that if you want to understand the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, you have to understand the political environment that led Congress to loosen regulations on regional banking institutions. You have to understand the interests involved, the ideologies involved and the personalities involved, like DeSantis, who voted for the deregulation bill as a congressman.

The people who blame “wokeness” for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention away from the real questions and turn it toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.

This, again, is just one example of how bad actors and interested parties try to obscure serious questions about the structure of our society with claims that serve only to muddy the waters. You don’t have to look hard to find others.

Put simply, you show me a scene from the so-called culture wars, and I’ll show you what’s behind it: a real issue with real stakes for real people.

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Can the GOP Escape Its Frankenstein Monster?

Outside of the MAGA cult, Donald Trump is less popular than ever and hopefully, if nominated could never win the 2024 presidential election.  More and more Republicans seem to recognize that a Trump nomination would likely insure a Democrat victory.  Yet, working in tandem Fox News and the countless Republicans who prostituted themselves to Trump since the 2016 election have a Frankenstein monster - actually two monsters - in the form of Trump himself and the MAGA cult base.  Now numerous Republicans are confronted with the issue of how to make sure Trump is not the nominee while jockeying for their own positions.   Principles have little to do with the spectacle which first and foremost is defeating Trump while attracting at least some of the MAGA base. A long piece in Politico looks at the effort to stop Trump and find who is the individual best able to do so.  Here are article highlights:

When former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took his turn on stage at a Republican donor conference here late last month, he brought the crowd alive with a rousing and extended denunciation of Donald Trump.

Demanding his party “stop whispering” about their unease with Trump, Christie excoriated Trump for falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen, propelling a series of lackluster candidates last year and generally presiding over the decline of the GOP over the last half decade.

“If we continue down this road it’s a road that will lead us to another four years of Joe Biden,” Christie warned, repurposing Trump’s memorable vow that Republicans would become tired of winning on his watch to lament their “losing and losing and losing and losing.”

Yet what was even more revealing about Christie’s half-hour remarks, a recording of which I obtained, was the less direct but unmistakable and certainly not whispered criticism he leveled at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Christie called DeSantis’s warnings about sliding into a proxy war with China “one of the most naïve things I’ve ever heard in my life” — arguing America is already locked in such a conflict; he told the donors “don’t be fooled by false choices” being pushed by “a fellow governor,” a reference to DeSantis’s argument that Biden was too focused on Ukraine’s border at the expense of America’s border; and, most pointedly, Christie wondered how exactly “they teach foreign policy in Tallahassee.”

Immediately after saying “he is the problem” of the former president, Christie concluded his pitch by warning that the safer course was not to “just nominate Trump Lite.”

The Stop Trump campaign among Republican elites is off to a quick start. Most every weekend since the start of this year there’s been some sort of gathering of donors, strategists and lawmakers in a warm weather state. And while the hotel ballrooms, lobby bars and presidential libraries may change, the overarching goal is consistent: how not to be saddled with perhaps the one candidate who may lose to Biden.

As DeSantis heads to Iowa Friday for what’s effectively the start of his presidential bid, his initial strength with Republican contributors and voters alike is prompting the other would-be candidates to divide or at least pair their attacks. With Trump appearing to have an unshakable core of support, and the nature of the primary shaping up to be who can emerge as the strongest alternative to him, the rest of the potential field plainly feels pressure to dislodge DeSantis from his early perch as that candidate.

Clearly alarmed about being portrayed by Trump as overly tied to the so-called establishment, DeSantis has cultivated right-wing leaders and influencers, inviting them to his inauguration in January and his own donor retreat last month in Florida. As significant, he’s deepened his friendship with some of the best-known hard-liners in Congress and is poised to soon deploy them as surrogates.

While DeSantis is building the message and team of messengers to guard his right MAGA flank from Trump, though, much of the rest of the field is taking aim with hopes of raising doubts about him among non-MAGA voters.

DeSantis said last month in a Fox News interview that it wasn’t wise to tempt a wider war, downplayed the prospect Russia may invade other European countries and denounced what he called Biden’s “blank-check” aid to Ukraine. What he didn’t do was take a forceful stance aligning himself with the populist or internationalist wing of his party on the larger question of America’s role in the conflict.

Speaking on the first anniversary of the Ukraine war, Pence rejected, with a characteristic reference to scripture, DeSantis’s uncertain trumpet. “We’ve got to speak plainly to the American people about the threats that we face,” said the former vice president, calling for “strong American leadership on the world stage.”

Firmly aligning himself with the pre-Trump party from which he came, Pence said he had “no illusions about Putin,” invoked Ronald Reagan and said when “Russia is on the move, when authoritarian regimes like China are threatening their neighbors, we need to meet that moment with American strength.”

“If we surrender to the siren song of those in this country who argue that America has no interest in freedom’s cause, history teaches we may soon send our own into harm’s way to defend our freedom and the freedom of nations in our alliance,” Pence said, standing in front of side-by-side American and Ukrainian flags and declaring there’s only “room for champions of freedom” in the GOP.

Which may come as a surprise to the Republican frontrunner and much of Fox News’s primetime lineup.

But those would-be candidates hoping to compete for the 60-plus percent of primary voters unlikely to back Trump, a demographic which overlaps with the more hawkish wing of the party, see their opening.

“I’m absolutely shocked when I hear Republicans talk about not defending Ukraine and not ensuring America is strong across the planet,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu told me after his address to the donors in Austin, which was officially sponsored by the Texas Voter Engagement Project but largely convened by Karl Rove

The growing concern about DeSantis from the rest of the modest-sized field is understandable when you consider his early strengths, the long history of Republican presidential primaries and the unique nature of this race.

No other Republican is remotely as close to Trump in the polls as the Florida governor, nor do any other candidates have the nearly $100 million he’s sitting on from his state races. And they’re not drawing the sort of crowds to party dinners, or protesters, DeSantis is commanding.

What makes this contest similar to the others is that it begins with an obvious frontrunner, a hallmark of GOP nomination battles that often rewarded vice presidents, previous candidates or those who were seen as having waited for their turn. Usually, it was those early leaders who were targeted by the rest of the candidates, often from the right.

Yet what’s different about 2024, and what’s driving the growing urgency to stymie DeSantis, is that Trump’s loyalists are so committed and his skeptics so determined to find an alternative that the market of competition is shifting to the race-within-a-race: the battle to be the last Republican standing against the former president.

“We learned this back in 2016,” Mick Mulvaney, the former Freedom Caucus lawmaker turned Trump chief of staff told me, his exasperation radiating through the phone.

Mulvaney, who said he doesn’t think Trump can win a general election, attended DeSantis’s donor retreat and recalled how the governor regaled the crowd with how he performed better with women and Hispanic voters last year than in his first gubernatorial bid — “and not with identity politics.”

While he said he’s not likely to endorse DeSantis, Mulvaney urged the other Republicans to keep their fire on the former president. “In order to beat Trump you have to beat Trump,” he said.

It’s easy to see why somebody like Mulvaney is so emphatic when you consider some of the early polling, including a private survey I obtained from Differentiators Data, a GOP consulting firm.

When they tested a variety of potential candidates among Virginia Republican primary voters, DeSantis was only leading Trump by three points. Yet when the firm narrowed the choice to only the two top candidates it wasn’t even close: DeSantis was leading Trump by 17.

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Countering the Growing Threat of Christian Nationalist Violence

Over the course of history religion including Christianity has a long trail of violence against non-believers and those deemed to be a challege to the dominance of a preferred dogma.  Convert or perish to the sword, the massacure of the Cathars, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide against Natihve Americans are but a few examples of the horrors and violence unleashed against non-conforming, non-compliant populations. The irony is that the religious oppressors utilizing violence never were in a position of losing their dominance.  Rather, they irrationally felt threatened and lashed out at and all too often murdered those holding different or minority position beliefs.   In today's polarized America, somethings seemingly have not changed as far right white Christians are seven times more likely to support political violence to impose their beliefs and dogma on others according to a new survey. We are seeing this desire to erase minority groups  in the ongoing book bannings, "don't say gay" laws and efforts to block accurate history by Republican politicians prostituting themselves to evangelicals/Christofascists and white supremacist (the two groups largely overlap).  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the threat and the pressing need for other Christian traditions to speak out and discredit the lies and distortions being disseminated by right wing "Christians" who want a Christian theocracy (here in Virginia, The Family Foundation is one such Christian nationalist group) Here are article highlights: 

Troubling new details regarding the violent propensity of Christian nationalism have been revealed by a new survey on American Christian nationalism released last month. According to the PRRI/Brookings Institution data, adherents of Christian nationalism are almost seven times as likely as those who reject it to support political violence. A stunning 40 percent of Christian nationalism supporters believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The revelations of the survey do not bode well for the future of Christian nationalist violence in America. Over the past decade, I’ve analyzed hundreds of religious militant groups around the world. My studies have consistently found that the tipping point toward violence occurs primarily when religious identity and national identity become intertwined. As these identities fuse, historically and culturally dominant faith communities come to see themselves as the victims of encroachment by minority faith traditions. This perceived victimization results in a “persecution complex,” with little regard for the degree of historical or cultural dominance the community enjoys. What matters is that majoritarian religious communities feel like they’re victims. 

Perceived victimization often stems from changing religious landscapes, like the unprecedented rise of “the nones” in the US. This new pluralism is seen as threatening to the privileged station of the majority religious tradition, often prompting the self-segregation of majority communities from the rest of society. The resulting echo chamber further reinforces the paranoia surrounding the victim narrative. 

Increasingly, members of religious majorities see violence as an acceptable way to beat back the threat posed by religious heterogeneity. . . . We see evidence supportive of this thesis in countries as diverse as Brazil, Central African Republic, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar, where vigilantes from dominant religious communities routinely attack the homes, businesses, and houses of worship of religious minorities with impunity.

As I show in my recent book The Global Politics of Jesus: A Christian Case for Church-State Separation, similar dynamics appear to be unfolding in the United States today, where a combination of forces—new cultural mores surrounding gender and sexuality, increasing religious diversity, and declining numbers of Christians—are disrupting the religious landscape and leading to a sense of angst among American Christians that their country is turning its back on what they believe to be its Christian heritage.

Consider the words of Kandiss Taylor, a former candidate for governor of Georgia: “The good thing about the First Amendment is that if you’re a Jew or you’re a Muslim or you’re a Buddhist, you still get to worship your god because you’re in America. But you don’t get to silence us,” she declared last year to an approving audience. . . . . Taylor failed to mention that the United States is a Christian-majority country where Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists collectively comprise only about four percent of the total population. Similar sentiments have been expressed by a number of other prominent politicians with Christian nationalist inclinations, including Florida governor Ron Desantis, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, and Texas senator Ted Cruz.

This fusion of religion and nation has created a fertile breeding ground for a culture of violence to take root. Of course, Christian nationalist violence in the United States is nothing new. . . But Christian nationalist violence has also experienced a resurgence in recent years. Christian nationalist ideology figured prominently in the violence of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; mass shootings at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, at three different spas in the Atlanta-area in 2021, and at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York in 2022; as well as dozens of other instances of vigilante violence against religious minorities. And, of course, it was on full display during the 2021 Capitol insurrection two years ago. 

Given the dynamics present in the United States today (just look at last week’s CPAC), we can expect Christian nationalist violence to increase in the future. Paradoxically, the thumping Christian nationalist political candidates took during the 2022 midterm elections—including the failed gubernatorial candidacies of Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, Maryland’s Dan Cox, and Arizona’s Kari Lake—will likely deepen the sense of embattlement among Christian nationalists, prompting a backlash. 

Fortunately, not all is lost. My research also shows that religious violence dissipates when these narratives are discredited from within the religious traditions from which they arise. . . . . Christian communities where Christian nationalism is most likely to thrive—must offer a counternarrative that can demonstrate that there are other, equally valid expressions of Christianity that respect this nation’s diversity and secular foundation. The amplification of these voices is paramount to countering the scourge of Christian nationalism and the violence it has helped produce.

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