This goes along with my last post, Christian take over of the US pushed by Churches, leaders with money, and wealthy older people who see it as a way to enforce their bigotry to remain a white cis straight 1950s society. I really want to emphasize the hard right bigotry and hate these billionaires have and the changes they are making to society. They fund the very rabid right wing media that is trying hard to change all of our society and political leanings, increasing hate for LGBTQIA and hate against blacks / brown people. They push a pro Christian white cis straight male in charge of society. Dunn & Wilks also control influential legal, policy, & advocacy organizations. One of those orgs argued in court that pharmacies shouldn’t sell birth control. The lawyer who argued that case later became a federal judge. He banned the abortion pill. And they’ve even created their own right-wing media bubble. Dunn & Wilks fund Texas Scorecard, the top far-right publication. Wilks owns the Daily Wire and bankrolls PragerU, a right-wing “education” platform they’re trying to force into our schools. Prager U is now being used in red state public schools as instruction materials. Florida pushes their message hard. There is a serious push by really wealthy old Christian bigots to turn the US into a Christian Iran, a Christian Saudi Arabia, a Christian Afghanistan. Do we the poor majority want to allow this? Hugs. Scottie
For more than three months, Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi has vigorously attacked critics of Defend Texas Liberty, and rebuffed calls to distance the state party from the powerful group over its ties to white supremacists. As he did so, Rinaldi was also working as an attorney for one of the group’s two billionaire funders, Farris Wilks, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Since 2021, Wilks has given nearly $5 million to Defend Texas Liberty, which last year was the state party’s largest financial supporter. With Rinaldi’s help, the group has sought to purge the Texas GOP of more moderate voices by bankrolling far-right causes and primary candidates. Publicly, Rinaldi has also been silent about Defend Texas Liberty as the Tribune extensively reported on ties between the group and other white supremacists and Nick Fuentes acolytes.
Read the full article. There’s much more. Give the tweets below a minute to fully load because they illuminate how deep this goes. The final tweet links to a grimly fascinating deep dive into Defend Texas Liberty’s leader.
Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi backed a group with white supremacist ties — while working for its billionaire funder https://t.co/2h63antXz5
These two billionaire-pastors are spending their fortune enacting an extreme Christian nationalist worldview in the second-largest state in the country.
In his teens and his 20s, Jonathan Stickland was a prolific internet troll.
He later made a career of it — ascending to the role of a conservative Texas powerbroker, before taking heat for hosting a meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes. https://t.co/vvMwzjDh22
Y’know that old saw that goes, “If you enter a room and there are 12 Nazis having dinner at the table and you sit down to join them, there are now 13 Nazis at the table”?
Rinaldi, Dunn, Wilks, Strickland and the rest of these guys are the ones who catered the meal.
Two billionaires funding right wing hate groups and Nazis. And both are pastors.
Who said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then it is for a Richmond to enter the kingdom of heaven?
Who said the greatest commandment after loving God was loving your neighbor?
Who said not to store up treasures on earth?
no one of any importance whatsoever to modern fundamentalist Christianity. One could almost wish that they succeed turning Texas into a theocracy and the right wing state. Maybe they can leave the union.
I think it reveals that they don’t even believe their religious nuttery. They just want to use superstition and money to control EVERYTHING, and they also think they’re so smart that no one will pick up on the hypocrisy
Actually, they are heretic “Christians”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… Wilks’ parents founded their own church (cult?), which denies Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and gives primacy to the Hebrew Scriptures. While they seem to recognize Jesus as a prophet of some sort, they don’t seem to be bound to follow his teachings.
And look! Wilks is the pastor of his own church cult. Currently the Assembly of Yahweh (7th day) is a conservative Jews for Jesus-type congregation. It teaches that “the true religion is Jewish (not a Gentile religion)” and its members celebrate the Old Testament holidays rather than those related to the New Testament. The congregation considers the Old Testament historically and scientifically accurate.
President Joe Biden told Pennsylvanians on Friday that he works for the government in the Senate, a comment likely to fuel concerns about the gaffe-prone president’s mental fitness. “My name’s Joe Biden. I work for the government in the Senate,” said the 81-year-old president as he met employees at a coffee shop in the Keystone State. Biden, the oldest president in American history, represented Delaware in Congress’s upper chamber from 1973 until 2009, when he left to serve as President Barack Obama’s vice president.
Read the full article. As you can see below, the quote is an utter fabrication by the Republican National Committee, which has since deleted their stupid lie but not before it was picked up by multiple cultist sites like the one above.
They deleted it. We are not going to let this shit go unchallenged like 2020. We aren’t waiting in frustration for the campaign or the party to fight disinformation. We are doing it ourselves immediately. Nobody is coming to save us – we need to make this happen and win. pic.twitter.com/j0ZlCSifrr
Honestly, is this stupid lie going to change anyone’s mind? The deplorables, who suck this shit down, already aren’t going to vote for Biden and Biden supporters know it’s almost certainly lie. Or just another Joe-gaffe, no big deal.
This is only the start, with AI the trolls at GQP headquarters in Moscow are working overtime to try to match with fiction the complete insanity that actually flows from the mouth of the mango malignancy.
Russia’s living on borrowed time. When Putin dies or gets thrown out of power, watch for China to grab Eastern Siberia. They’re already building a railroad to the Bering Strait
Everything — morals, dignity, truth, respect, lawfulness, tradition, convention, patriotism, humanity, everything — is secondary to winning with these assholes.
And yet they’re still treated as acting in good faith by most media outlets, even ones that are occasionally critical of them. This has to change if America is ever to emerge from this nightmare.
Biden is senile but our very sane, cogent candidate cannot pronounce “Yosemite” or “hamburgers” and wants to nuke hurricanes—three of a million glaring oopsies Fuck à l’Orange has made.
Couldn’t the DNC just run ads featuring unaltered, widely-witnessed & published videotapes of Tchump slopping his usual word-salad blather out of that shithole he calls a “mouth”? Maybe add a CC-translation, to emphasize what unhinged nonsense oozes forth from Tchump’s syphilitic-rotting brain?
How Republicans won Michigan, how they lost it, and what it all tells us.
The “blue wall” once referred to a group of Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast states that, conventional wisdom said, “always vote for Democrats.” Unfortunately for Democrats, that was wrong, and in 2016 Donald Trump shockingly won three “blue wall” states — including, narrowly, the state of Michigan.
It maybe shouldn’t have been such a shock, though. All three of the “blue” states Trump won actually had a history of electing Republicans at the state level. Michigan in particular had been fully taken over since 2010 by Republicans, who then spent years gutting unions, restricting abortion, loosening environmental protections, and generally just turning a Republican policy wish list into law. So Trump winning Michigan was, in a way, just the culmination of a years-long drift to the right there.
But by 2022, something had changed dramatically. In a midterm election where Republicans were favored, Democrats won every branch of elected government in Michigan — governor, state House, and state Senate. The state Senate in particular had not been under Democratic control since 1984. And Democrats got busy using their new power immediately: repealing much of the right-wing legislation of the previous years, passing strong LGBTQ protections, quadrupling a tax credit for the poor, and allocating a billion dollars for the auto industry to transition to electric cars. Suddenly Michigan was cranking out more progressive legislation than almost any other state in the US.
So to recap: Michigan was once a blue state, except it wasn’t actually, and in fact over time it got pretty red, but then it became an actual blue state. (Again?) Or something like that. Obviously, the truth is that Michigan is a swing state. But the story of each of those swings is actually key to understanding how US politics work in the 2010s and 2020s. And it can tell us a lot about our next election, too.
Aside from the normal hate and bigotry towards the LGBTQIA that religious republicans normally show, this guy adds a new wrinkle. And it goes back to the point I made that some people can not accept change. While not really old at 59 he shows he can not adjust to modern times. He says, “From time immemorial, we have known that your sex was dictated by your biology,” Black said. “All I am doing is putting into Florida Statute, what we have always known, and only recently, a few people have become confused about.” He seems to reject any advancements since time immemorial. You do know that at one time humans thought thunder and lightning were caused by gods, we also thought the world was flat, we were sure that sickness and disease were caused by spirits and demons, religious leaders at one point were so certain that the earth was the center of everything with the sun orbiting the earth that they burned anyone to death who said otherwise … so much more we always knew, took as concrete never changing fact, and we were totally wrong about. Just as he is about gender, sex, trans issues, and anything his religious teaching say about the LGBTQIA people. He rejects modern science and medical best practices but instead demands that proven harmful conversion therapy be mandated by law. “”It would also require coverage of so-called conversion therapy by requiring health insurance policies to cover mental health services “to treat a person’s perception that his or her sex is inconsistent with the person’s sex at birth” by affirming their birth sex”. Hugs. Scottie
A Northeast Florida lawmaker wants to legally define the words “man” and “woman” based on biological sex at birth. Jacksonville Rep. Dean Black filed the proposed What Is A Woman Act this week, which would also impose new requirements related to transgender individuals on state agencies and insurance companies.
House Bill 1233 requires state agencies to revoke any identification cards, like driver’s licenses, that don’t match up with a person’s sex on their birth certificate.
“From time immemorial, we have known that your sex was dictated by your biology,” Black said. “All I am doing is putting into Florida Statute, what we have always known, and only recently, a few people have become confused about.”
Black’s bill would also require any health insurance policy in the state that covers transition-related “prescriptions or procedures’’ to also cover “treatment to detransition” from such procedures.
It would also require coverage of so-called conversion therapy by requiring health insurance policies to cover mental health services “to treat a person’s perception that his or her sex is inconsistent with the person’s sex at birth” by affirming their birth sex.
The bill would also require any school district or state agency “that collects vital statistics for the purpose of complying with anti-discrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic, or other data” to identify the birth sex of people in the data set, potentially restricting data collection on trans people.
Dean Black last appeared here for a bill that would allow DeSantis to remove any elected official who votes to remove Confederate monuments.
In October 2023, Black called for banning elected officials from participating in Pride events after Jacksonville’s newly-elected mayor led her city’s parade.
"It is an ugly, mean-spirited bill that helps NO ONE,” @CarlosGSmith said, “it should be voted down and rejected by lawmakers for what it is." https://t.co/7XVsoLhttp
My favorite is all the dudes who scream about trans women using women’s bathrooms. Uh………dudes? We don’t see each others’ genitals in the bathroom anyway. Because we use stalls. With locks. I have no way of knowing if the woman in the stall next to me is trans. Why would I care?
Notice how their obsession is overwhelmingly with trans women. Trans men, not so much. This is evident in his proposed legislation being titled the “What is a Woman” act.
Once again, misogyny is the root of all hatred of sexual minorities.
They also seem to think that it’s a big party in there, when all we’re doing is peeing, pooping, and menstruating. Most of us don’t even talk to anyone in there.
Take out all urinals. Put in stalls. Make every bathroom unisex. That way, men will have to wait in line just like women do now. (I went to a football game where they had port-a-potties while they were building the bathrooms. Port-a-potties, of course, are unisex. But there was one that was for women only, and of course I waited in that line for it. The other ones were disgusting.
They don’t realize that they’re saying men can’t control themselves around women and are constantly suppressing the urge to rape someone. Hell, Mike Huckabee said something like this a few years ago.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someday that red states require a mandatory genital’s check to make certain that you are male or female per their standards on gender and ID. Sigh.
Not only is he an asshole, but he’s simply fucking wrong. Factually incorrect, whether he knows or accepts it. Humans can be born with XX, XY, XO, XXY, (Klinefelter’s Syndrome) or XYY chromosomes. Take your “there are only two genders” bullshit and fuck off for all eternity.
Look at the lengths they have to go to justify their bigotry. Isis is not going to come here and demand a county in Connecticut fly their flag. There are ways to rule that extreme stuff out while not banning pride flags. But you have to want to allow the pride flag during pride month. As one of the commenters said, “I think the real reason is you don’t want that Pride flag up on this town hall” Again a group of republicans don’t want the modern age, this is 2024 and they reject the social progress we have made. They are desperate to remain in the oppressive past. Hugs. Scottie
Town buildings and flag poles can only display the American flag, Connecticut state flag and military flags
Published 01/10/24 09:21 PM ET|Updated 01/10/24 09:46 PM ET
A resolution to ban pride flags in a Connecticut town has led to outrage among the community, according to local reports.
Enfield, Connecticut, is home to around 42,000 people and its newly-elected Republican majority town council made a choice that is not sitting right with many of those residents.
On Monday, the town council approved a resolution banning town buildings and flag poles from flying any flags except for the American flag, Connecticut state flag and military flags, NBC Connecticut reported.
The 6-5 vote effectively banned the Town Hall from displaying Pride flags during Pride Month in June, reversing a 2022 policy that allowed the flags to be displayed.
A passionate exchange between town councilors followed the narrow vote.
“I don’t support it. I think it’s ridiculous. We have an opinion, and I think the real reason is you don’t want that Pride flag up on this town hall, which is absolutely disgusting,” Councilor At-Large Gina Cekala said, per the news station.
Rainbow flag against sky during gay pride parade.Portra/Getty Images
Those who voted in favor defended the resolution by saying it prevented “other” organizations from trying to have their flags displayed.
“ISIS could come in and want to display one, the IRA…basically anybody. You’d have to be content neutral and let everybody,” Tom Tyler, interim town attorney, said.
A local pastor and president of Enfield Pride, Greg Gray, encouraged residents and businesses to display Pride flags in the wake of the town’s decision.
“I am disturbed that the new Republican majority felt this was a decision they needed to make basically on day one of them coming into office,” Gray said.
Brandon Jewell, local advocate and activist for LGBTQ+ people and their families, spoke against the vote.
“The meaning of buildings, that you can’t be inside any town-owned property…so that’s the schools where many of the teachers have safe space stickers on their doors, they have Pride flags hanging,” he said. “I think there should have been more thought into this before it was actually put on the agenda.”
It’s been in their party platform in clear print for decades. No matter how “nice” they may speak to you, just don’t expect any change. They really want you to suffer long and painfully, and then to die so as to vindicate their deranged theology.
there are growing pockets of red here in CT. It’s very disturbing. We saw that 2 years ago in my little town and what the Rs wanted to do (book bans, etc.). This Nov, was a blue wave as a response. It’s a battle.
we live in a very red part of CT. My husband worked the polls the past 2 cycles and got more abuse from these country bumpkins (although he did mention how hot they were)
Where did the town of Enfield come up with so many brain-dead people? “Isis” is not going to want the town fathers (and mothers?) to fly their flag. These idiots just don’t like gay people. They think that’s not obvious?
It never ceases to amaze me how dumb the average Republican is. Did that clown really think that if they put up a Pride flag that ISIS is going to come into their town and say, “We want our flag flown too!” But you’re right, this is just a dumbass excuse to hide the fact that they hate acknowledging gay people exist.
I grew up a couple of towns away from there, and while driving through Enfield in the last few years, I’ve seen plenty of tRump and F**k Biden flags. Those are still OK, apparently.
Notice the chyron on Joe’s lede screen-cap; this was the very first piece of business of the new town council, banning pride flags, as well as the flags of other states and nations, from the town’s public schools.
Andrew Weissman, former top prosecutor at the Department of Justice, Lisa Rubin, MSNBC Legal Analyst and NBC News Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly who was inside the courthouse join Ali Velshi in for Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House reacting to today’s hearing in a Washington D.C. courtroom where Trump’s legal team made some of their most absurd claims about hypothetical crimes a President could commit while they are President which could be covered by Presidential immunity.
Scottie's Playtime 