100% Christian hate. No one loves more than bigot Christians can hate. This would be a non-story except Kegseth is the head of the military with the authority to remove any group from the military he doesn’t like. Think about the idea that woman shouldn’t vote according to his preacher yet females in the military at every level have authority over men … so if they can’t be trusted to vote …? But Kegseth thinks the US military needs to be an all white male thuggish killing machines like the Russian military who are getting their asses kicked by the inclusive Ukrainian military. The Christian bigotry prevents people like him from seeing the truth. The idea of heavily muscled men facing each other on a field of battle is far in the past. Military tech is way more far advanced. It needs twink kids in the basement playing on gaming machines, it needs females who can out think every man around. Kegseth’s idea of manliness and the military makes me suspect him of having a man fetish, an Arnold Schwarzenegger fetish. It idealizes something that is not true and doesn’t exist. This man grew up on far too many he man cartoons and movies. Hugs.
“We have to overturn Obergefell. Many people will say, ‘That ship’s sailed, man. Gay people are married. We can’t go back.’ Gay marriage does not exist in the world. It can’t, any more than a square triangle can exist. God created marriage. I had premarital counseling today, I opened up the bible to Genesis I and showed them where God created marriage. He made them male and female. He set it.
“You want us to persist in having lies at the fundamental level of our nation? What’s that going to do to our country, other than have it crumble and have judgment be upon it? You have to remember that there’s a God in heaven who has thoughts on these matters.
“Of course, it has to go because it’s non-reality. We have to become sane again as a nation. And because we’ve gotten ourself so deep into this sin, there’s no clean way to do it.” – Pete Hegseth’s pastor Brooks Potteiger, who last appeared here when he called for God to burn down a “demonic” network’s headquarters for featuring a gay couple on a reality show.
Pottigier’s church is part of Pastor Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalist network, which advocates for a full-Gilead theocracy in which women cannot vote and homosexuality is criminalized. Last week Hegseth retweeted a video in which Wilson called for all of those things.
Brooks Potteiger, who is Pete Hegseth's pastor, says that Obergefell must be overturned because "gay marriage does not exist in the world. It can't, any more than a square triangle can exist." pic.twitter.com/KA38SwN5sq
That is pretty much religion all over the world. And they mostly all believe they are the only true religion. Buddhism seems the most benign of all of them.
If Obergefell is overturned, same sex marriage will not go away but we will go back to the bad old days where there will be a patchwork of states where SSM will be valid.
I do wonder for example if someone was married in Oklahoma will their marriage be voided and would need to remarry in SSM state or will they be grandfathered in.
On Thursday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a far-right federal judge in the Northern District of Texas with a record of aligning with the GOP’s most extreme legal positions — issued a ruling declaring that Title VII no longer protects LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination. The decision directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 ruling inBostock v. Clayton County, which held that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is, by definition, sex discrimination. Kacsmaryk’s ruling marks one of the most alarming judicial rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights in recent memory — and sets up a direct legal challenge to one of the foundational civil rights protections for queer and trans people in the United States.
The case was brought against the EEOC by the state of Texas alongside the Heritage Foundation, a central force behindProject 2025 — an aggressive right-wing policy blueprint that explicitly calls for rolling back LGBTQ+ protections in federal law. In siding with the plaintiffs, Judge Kacsmaryk pointed to the Texas Department of Agriculture’s current employee policy, which requires “employees to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender,” specifying that “men may wear pants” and “women may wear dresses, skirts, or pants.” The ruling also upheld the department’s policy banning transgender employees from using restrooms that align with their gender identity.
The judge reached a verdict that Title VII only protects “firing someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” but that it does not protect transgender or gay people from “harassment”:
Judge Kacsmaryk ruling that gay and trans people can be harassed without repercussion under Title VII.
“In sum, Title VII does not bar workplace employment policies that protect the inherent differences between men and women,” Kacsmaryk writes in his ruling.
Judge Kacsmaryk further argued that disparate treatment of transgender employees does not constitute unequal treatment, reasoning that “a male employee must use male facilities like other males” — a statement that erases transgender identity altogether. He extended that logic to dress codes and pronouns, claiming that requiring employees to adhere to clothing standards and pronoun use based on their assigned sex at birth is not discriminatory because it applies “equally” to everyone. The argument mirrors the discredited legal reasoning once used to uphold bans on same-sex marriage — that such laws didn’t discriminate against gay people because they, like straight people, were allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex. It’s a circular logic designed to mask exclusion as neutrality. It also flies in the face of the fact that Texas allows people assigned female at birth to wear gender “pants, skirts, and dresses” but denies that same right to people assigned male at birth.
Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for an anti-LGBTQ hate group, was exposed in 2023 for failing to disclose millions in stock holdings.
Kacsmaryk was previously exposed for failing to disclose viciously anti-LGBTQ interviews and acting to hide his authorship of an anti-abortion article ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
Republican and Christian groups regularly filed their lawsuits in his district because they know they’ll get a friendly ear.
The billionaire helped fund an effort to gin up fraud claims against the Democratic donation platform.
Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoingeffort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, in which one person donates on behalf of another. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions, any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it is a great deal of tedious, high-risk work for a scammer.
On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for money—even, theoretically, foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy-to-obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent WinRed) fairly silly.
And notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.
Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July Federal Election Commission report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.
As Mother Jonesreported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.
More at the link above
Israel carrying out ‘live-streamed genocide’ in Gaza, Amnesty says
Amnesty accuses US President Donald Trump of committing a ‘multiplicity of assaults’ on human rights.
Israel is perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, committing illegal acts with the “specific intent” of wiping out Palestinians, Amnesty International has said.
Israeli forces in Gaza have violated the United Nations Genocide Convention with acts that include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to civilians” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”, the human rights organisation said in its annual report released on Monday.
Israeli air strikes have also frequently hit civilians who were following evacuation orders, while its forces continued to “arbitrarily detain and, in some cases, forcibly disappear Palestinians”, the rights group said.
DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.
Elon Musk and his shadowy “tech support” team have ripped through Washington, reshaping the government and culling the federal workforce with astonishing speed and scope.
Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.
DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.
DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.
In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.
Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.
The two quotes from the article I added just below what I am writing give away the Fundamentalist Christian republican’s goal, which is to make those people they disagree with, that they hate, disappear from society. Their goal by taking LGBTQ+ media out of schools is to make it appear that all kids are straight and cis. No one can be different from them or their beliefs. Everyone must walk lockstep with them, their way is the only way people can live. Holy dictators. Their goal is to erase anyone different from them from the public view, from society. We must not let them do that. Hugs
A controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”-Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.
Trump’s Department of Education called the suggestion that rightwingers are trying to ban book a “hoax.”
The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.
The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.
Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.
The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.
And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.
Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
Authorizing the “truth”
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.
These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.
This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”
The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.
In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”
The fight for all the colors
To build off of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famed poem:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out — Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out — Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out — Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
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Hello All. I know I posted a lot of videos today. I wear headphones when doing things out of my Pink Palace office and because I like what I am hearing I post them. I do that while in my office also. I am having crackers and sharp cheese as I write this because of my recent steroid shot I get hungry quickly. I was down to 168. Every time I have steroids my weight goes up a bit because I get so hungry. But to this video and why I am posting it. I hate abuse of children as you can imagine, that includes beatings which I got frequently. Please tell me how a 6 year old 40 pound child can stand up to a 200 pound barroom brawler who can put three chimney blocks over one arm and go up a ladder. I soon learned that to complain would get me told that parents have the right to discipline their children, it was in the bible. I am not sure that included the black eyes, broken bones, or seeming all over me bruises. I would gladly take the hits rather than the belts that left welts that would take weeks to stop hurting, and if on my butt made sitting still in class to learn impossible. So to hear a man of the cloth stand up and say that hitting a child is not that passage meant is very important to me. Thank you all for reading and watching. Hugs
I like what he says about the idea that you have to earn god’s love, you have to earn salvation. This is in relation to the maga in congress not wanting to give aid to California for the fire assistance. He points out that if you have to earn your salvation then you did it not Jesus. And if you can do it on your own why need god? He points out that the Jesus never required people to prove they were worth before he helped them. Hugs
I keep saying these people won’t stop ever until they get their way. They believe they are on a mission from their god to turn the entire country Christian. But not just Christian, the kind of Christian they themselves are. They want to force everyone to live according to their church doctrines. Why? I don’t understand it, but they think taking away the public’s freewill will make their god so happy he will return to give them their reward of a paradise on earth. But I thought god’s kingdom was in heaven, not on earth? But this idea that they and they alone know what god wants, that they and they alone have the right to tell others how to live, how to think, how to have sex, who to have sex with, what they can watch or listen to, even what god they can believe in, and how they are to pray to that god. As they demand. I do not get or understand what makes these people think they can rule other people, rule others lives, do all to others I have written above. Why can they not give others the same rights they demand for themselves, the right to live their lives and worship as they please? But please notice the wealthy person bankrolling so much of the effort to turn Texas in to a theocracy. Think about his actions when others try to stop him to protect democracy? He smears them to try to destroy them. This is the type of Christian warrior he is and they are. Do as I say not as I do, or the big one, it is OK to do bad things in the name of Jesus. Hugs.
AFPI has provided money, an institutional home, and political platforms to many of the people Trump has nominated to run the country; quite a few high-level Trump nominees have AFPI connections, including:
Pam Bondi, Attorney General (Chair, AFPI Center for Litigation; co-chair Center for Law and Justice)
Kash Patel, FBI (Senior Fellow, AFPI Center for American Security)
Linda McMahon, Education (Board chair; chair, Center for the American Worker)
Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection Agency (Chair, China Policy Initiative & Pathway to 2025)
John Ratcliffe, Central Intelligence Agency (C-chair Center for National Security)
Doug Collins, Veterans Affairs (head of Georgia AFPI Chapter)
Brooke Rollins, Agriculture (Co-founder, President and CEO)
Kevin Hassett, National Economic Council (Chair, Board of Academic Advisors)
Matthew Whitaker, NATO (Co-chair, Center for Law & Justice)
Casey Mulligan, Small Business Administration, chief counsel (Board of Academic Advisors)
Trump’s first public speech after winning the 2024 election was at an AFPI gala at Mar-a-Lago, where he was joined by other MAGA luminaries, including HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and “Department of Government Efficiency” leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
AFPI founder Rollins has bragged about the group’s “revolutionary” plans to seize control of the “administrative state.” The group’s agenda for the incoming administration—its “transition project”—is in some ways even more radical than the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. AFPI believes Trump should be allowed to fire and replace any federal employee at will – potentially converting the entire federal workforce into a massive and corrupt political patronage system. AFPI has reportedly prepared 300 executive orders for Trump.
As an officer at the America First Policy Institute, Bondi tried to undermine special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump by arguing that his appointment was unconstitutional. She oversaw what the Brennan Center has called “a number of troubling voting rights and election lawsuits,” leading the pro-democracy organization to conclude, “Her record on voting and elections raises questions about her ability to be the attorney general the American public deserves.”
In a case in which AFPI sought to empower local election officials to delay or block certification of elections, AFPI’s arguments were “meritless and radical,” according to the Brennan Center. In another case filed shortly before, even notorious pro-Trump Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rejected AFPI’s “emergency” request to block a Biden executive order on voter registration that had been in place for several years. Kacsmaryk wrote that AFPI’s request provided “no direct evidence” to support its claims. The Brennan Center noted that the lawsuit “served to amplify baseless conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.”
AFPI is funded in part by Tim Dunn, who the Texas Monthly has called “the billionaire bully who wants to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy.” Dunn is notorious for funding smear campaigns against Texas Republicans who don’t fall in line with his demands. Dunn poured millions of dollars into the effort to elect Trump to a second term, and supports other right-wing causes, like the Convention of States’ efforts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In a 2019 speech to Convention of States, Dunn argued that the Bible is “mainly about politics” and said that COS is triggering a Great Awakening.
Not so surprisingly, AFPI promotes Christian nationalist rhetoric; AFPI leaders have described their efforts as part of a “spiritual war.” AFPI’s political arm, which is chaired by Dunn, partnered with dominionist Lance Wallnau—who believes right-wing Christians are meant to control the government and every other sphere of influence in society–to help Trump return to power. Dunn himself reportedly told former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, that only Christians should be in leadership positions in the legislature.
Also in leadership at AFPI is Trump spiritual and political adviser Paula White, who has repeatedly called Trump’s opponents demonic and kicked off his pre-insurrection rally with a prayer for “holy boldness.” White chairs AFPI’s Center for American Values.
AFPI’s faith director RichardRogers, who took part in Wallnau’s “Courage Tour,” appeared on The Jim Bakker show this week, where he said there will be a “faith director” in every government agency in the new administration. He predicted that the “prayer warriors” who “rose up” on Trump’s behalf in 2024 will “have more power than Elon Musk.” He described AFPI as a “data-driven machine” that worked “hand-in-hand” with the RNC to boost turnout among low-propensity voters.
AFPI claims “biblical foundations” for each of the ten “pillars” of its right-wing policy agenda, which it calls “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God.” It asserts, “The Ten Commandments and Christian teachings have been the foundation that created the American legal system.” AFPI’s website declares, “This fight is not just about the culture of America; it’s about the kingdom of God and the Church’s divine mission to be the salt and light of our day in an era of increasing darkness.”
Richard Rogers of the AFPI says that under Trump, there will be a "faith director in every single agency" tasked with ensuring that anti-Christian policies are not enacted. https://t.co/RPLmEAlAJEpic.twitter.com/GaZv2yE9iP
These people are driven and a serious threat to democracy. They demand a theocracy of their god and a government enforcing their church doctrines. No non-Christians may be tolerated. Look at what they say, we don’t want government in our churches but we should be in government, and there is no separation of church and state. Plus how would these people react if a Muslim group did this, a Hindu church, or even a Jewish temple? They would lose their minds. Somewhere in the past the atheist stopped fighting these people and let them use their endless supply of church members contributions to push their goals ever closer to taking over. We must again fight back, get the people to understand the risk and what is true in history. These people will rewrite every thing to prove their lies. Hugs.
“There is no separation between church and state,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said at a small rally with clergy and GOP lawmakers. “We don’t want the government in our churches, but we should be in the government.”
Polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.
One of his movement’s ultimate goals, he said Tuesday, is to draw a lawsuit that they can eventually take to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they believe will ultimately overturn the prohibition and unleash a new wave of conservative, Christian activism.
One Christian nationalism expert said Tuesday’s events showed how normalized the ideology has become among broad swaths of the Republican Party. “I’ve argued for years that, in the Trump era, charismatic evangelicals have displaced the old guard of the (Religious Right) and brought in a new, more aggressive evangelical politics,” Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, wrote on social media. “That was on vivid display in (Texas) today.”
Taylor has spent much of his career focused on the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of “charismatic” Christians who often weave prophecy, “spiritual warfare” and demonology into their calls for Christians to take control over all spheres of society.
Abraham George’s comments are the latest sign of the state GOP’s embrace of fundamentalist ideologies that seek to center public life around their faith.
Landon Schott, pastor of Mercy Culture, leads a worship service in the state Capitol extension auditorium on the first day of the 2025 state legislative session in Austin on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
Two hours after Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock was elected Texas House speaker on Tuesday, Christian worshippers gathered in a Capitol meeting room to prepare for “spiritual war” and protect lawmakers from demonic forces.
“Pray for the fear of the Lord to come into this place,” Landon Schott intoned from the stage as a small band played acoustic hymns and 100 or so faithful laid their hands on walls, hoping to bless the room and ward off evil spirits. “Let the fear of the Lord return to Austin. In Jesus’ name.”
Schott is the pastor of Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, and was among the Christian leaders who spent Tuesday rallying fellow believers ahead of a legislative session that they hope will further codify their conservative religious views into law. He was joined in those efforts by a throng of pastors and Republican leaders, who throughout the day claimed that church-state separation isn’t real, called progressive Christians heretics, or vowed to weed out “cowardly” clergy who refuse to politick from the pulpit.
“There is no separation between church and state,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said at a small rally with clergy and GOP lawmakers. “We don’t want the government in our churches, but we should be in the government.”
George’s comments — delivered some-50 yards from another rally that focused on interfaith unity — are the latest sign of the Texas GOP’s embrace of fundamentalist ideologies that seek to center public life around their faith by claiming church-state separation is a myth or that America’s founding was God-ordained, and its laws should thus favor conservative Christianity.
Polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.
Worshippers link hands in prayer while attending a worship service led by a variety of religious groups from across Texas, including My God Votes, in the Capitol extension auditorium. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
The party’s embrace of those separate-but-overlapping ideologies has come as it has increasingly aligned with far-right megadonors Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, two West Texas oil billionaires who have sought to cleanse the Texas GOP of moderate voices and push their hardline religious views. At the same time, some Republican lawmakers have adopted an increasingly existential view of politics that paints opponents — unwitting or not — as part of a concerted effort to destroy Christianity, including by normalizing LGBTQ+ acceptance or undermining “traditional” family structures.
Such claims have been used as the pretext for a litany of bills and reforms that would further infuse Christianity into public life. During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers passed a law allowing unlicensed chaplains to supplant counselors in public schools; sought to weaken Texas’ constitutional ban on providing taxpayer money to religious institutions, a core plank of the school voucher movement; and almost passed a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.
Lawmakers are expected to continue that trend during this year’s legislative session (the Ten Commandments bill already has been refiled). And pastors, emboldened by President Donald Trump’s reelection and the ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court, said Tuesday that they believe they have their best shot yet to topple the church-state wall and the Johnson Amendment, a federal rule that prohibits churches from engaging in overt political activity.
Rick Scarborough has spent decades working to do exactly that. A former Southern Baptist pastor in Pearland, he has become a leader in a movement that seeks to mobilize pastors and undermine the Johnson Amendment, which he says is toothless but has been used by “cowardly” pastors who don’t want to engage in politics. The result, he said, has been an ineffectual Texas Legislature that has often cowered to the LGBTQ+ community and their heretical, progressive Christian allies. (Texas lawmakers have passed dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in recent years, overriding opposition from a large majority of Democrats).
One of his movement’s ultimate goals, he said Tuesday, is to draw a lawsuit that they can eventually take to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they believe will ultimately overturn the prohibition and unleash a new wave of conservative, Christian activism.
“The Johnson Amendment is nothing but a fig leaf to cover the fear that pastors already have,” he said in an interview after praying over GOP lawmakers on the Capitol lawn. “Most pastors are so fearful of their reputation that they won’t stand, and they don’t know how much God will defend them if they get out there and stand up and speak fearlessly.”
Few congregations have taken up Scarborough’s mantle like Mercy Culture Church, the Fort Worth congregation that Schott pastors. In recent years, Mercy Culture has become an epicenter of Texas’ fundamentalist Christian movement, helping push the state and local GOP further right, demonizing their detractors — Schott has called critics of the church “warlocks” and “witches,” and claimed Christians can’t vote for Democrats — and rallying voters behind church leaders as they campaign for public office. Among the church’s pastors is Rep. Nate Schatzline, who was elected to the Texas House in 2022 and has since continued to frame his political life as part of broader, spiritual struggle.
“This isn’t a physical battle,” Schatzline said in a Tuesday interview. “It’s not a political battle we’re in. We really believe this is a spiritual battle.”
Hours later, Schatzline kicked off the worship session at the Capitol with a bold promise.
“We’re going to give this space back to the Holy Spirit,” he said. “We give You this room. … The 89th Legislative session is Yours, Lord. The members of this body are Yours, Lord. This building belongs to You, Jesus.”
One Christian nationalism expert said Tuesday’s events showed how normalized the ideology has become among broad swaths of the Republican Party. “I’ve argued for years that, in the Trump era, charismatic evangelicals have displaced the old guard of the (Religious Right) and brought in a new, more aggressive evangelical politics,” Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, wrote on social media. “That was on vivid display in (Texas) today.”
Taylor has spent much of his career focused on the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of “charismatic” Christians who often weave prophecy, “spiritual warfare” and demonology into their calls for Christians to take control over all spheres of society.
Members of that movement played central roles in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, and were well-represented at the Texas Capitol on Tuesday: Schatzline and Mercy Culture have deep ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, as does Brandon Burden, a Frisco pastor who led a caravan of buses and activists to pressure lawmakers ahead of the House speaker vote. In January 2021, he told his congregants to keep weapons loaded for what he prophesied would be a national blackout orchestrated to keep Trump out of office.
Burden repeatedly appeared alongside Republican officials on Tuesday. Minutes after George, the Texas GOP chair, claimed that church-state separation doesn’t exist, Burden led a group of pastors and activists as they prayed over a small group of GOP lawmakers. “We take charge and authority of the 89th legislative session,” he prayed. “We, the people of God, called by the name of Jesus and covered in the blood of the lamb, have been given spiritual jurisdiction over the affairs of men.”
At the Texas Capitol, Christian worshippers are blessing the walls of a hearing room to protect lawmakers from spiritual forces and the “Jezebel” spirit.
“Pray for the fear of the Lord to come into this place,” says MercyCulture pastor Landon Schott. pic.twitter.com/1NAIOYkRtC
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