Rep. Devin Nunes announced last night that he is leaving Congress by the end of this month/year to take a job as CEO of Trump’s new media empire. Note that Nunes, who once sued the Twitter account of Devin Nunes’ cow, is the senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee and would have become Chair if the Trump Party takes over the House next year. This is considered one of the most powerful positions in Washington. But Nunes, if not the cow, is moooving on to greener pastures.

Having been in closed door hearings with him leading up to the first impeachment, I can tell you definitively: Devin Nunes is straight up dumb. Can’t wait to see him “lead” Trump’s media company into the ground.

— Katie Hill (@KatieHill4CA) December 7, 2021

Okay, maybe not. The media empire appears to be just another Trump scam. Judd Legum writes that Trump’s new media company is a $1.6 billion mirage that appears to be designed to let Trump get his hands on investors’ money without ever delivering a product.

One, at the moment Trump’s signature “social media” site exists as a static page that collects email addresses. A Beta version had been promised in November, but this is all there is so far:

What is known: The Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) had promised the social media site would be built on “proprietary” technology but later admitted a test site used open source technology already employed by other right-wing sites. Further, Legum writes, the only people known to be involved in building this technology are Trump and Scott St. John, a game show producer who “will supposedly be involved in TMTG’s streaming service, TMTG+, which is supposed to launch sometime in 2023.” Scott St. John is the mastermind behind “Deal or No Deal” and a bunch of other short-lived games shows I managed not to have heard of.

The investor report eventually posted a “technology team” that consisted only of first names and initials — Josh A., Billy B., Vlad N., and so on. I thought I found a woman’s name — Mortada A., a designer — but it turns out this is a man’s first name in Egypt. Anyway, there is no way to check if these guys are real people or not.

Devin Nunes is real enough, but his only known technology/media management experience is suing the fake Twitter cow.

Even better — Matt Levine writes at Bloomberg that The Trump SPAC Did a PIPE. Yeah, I didn’t know what any of that meant, either. Investopedia says that a SPAC — Special Purpose Acquisition Company — “is a company that has no commercial operations and is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company.” And “Private investment in public equity (PIPE) is the buying of shares of publicly traded stock at a price below the current market value (CMV) per share,” Investopedia says. This is done to raise capital for the public company, although it dilutes the value of shares. Further, PIPEs aren’t subject to as many regulations as other investment transactions. Keep that in mind.

In this case, the SPAC is Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), which first came into existence this September. DWAC “raised $287.5 million by selling stock to investors at $10 per share,” Levine says, even though DWAC didn’t have anything to sell yet. Then in October, DWAC announced it had merged with TMTG. So DWAC is Trump’s SPAC. Levine continues,

“Trump Media & Technology Group (‘TMTG’) will soon be launching a social network, named ‘TRUTH Social,’” said the merger announcement, promising a beta launch in November. It missed that deadline. A test version of the site seemed to be just a clone of open-source social network Mastodon. TMTG’s website has a “company overview” slide deck that contains no business information and does not mention anyone involved in building its supposed technology. “This appears to be a shell company buying a shell company,” wrote Dan Primack.

Ooo, are we watching a shell game? Hey, grifters gonna grift.

Levine explains that as of yesterday, TMTG was valued $44.97 per share. And TMTG is selling stock — to DWAC — at $10 per share. In so many words, Levine says this is weird. Levine also suggests this investment — apparatus? structure? — is being set up so that Trump can keep investors’ money even if the social media empire never launches.

The grifters in The Producers had to put a real musical on the stage in hopes it would fail. This is even better; Trump doesn’t have to bother to put a real social media site on the web.

A couple of days ago, Trump announced that TMTG and DWAC the SPAC have $1 billion in capital pledged by institutional investors through subscription agreements. I don’t know if there’s any proof of that, other than Trump’s say-so. These investors have not been identified, which Forbes says is unusual. (One investor who has been named publicly is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is reported to have given DWAC as much as $50,000.)

Elizabeth Warren, bless her, asked the SEC to look into the relationship between TMTG and DWAC over potential violations of securities laws. And the SEC is doing so, although it’s hard to see if anything will come of it.

Even so, somehow I don’t think Twitter is too worried about the potential competition.

Why I like Chris Hayes: How much pro-life leaders actually care about life https://t.co/khr57Gs0Zc via @msnbc

— Barbara O’Brien (@mahabarbara) December 3, 2021

It’s so hard to keep up with the insanity. The Texas Tribune reported yesterday that Texas has banned medical abortions after seven weeks of pregnancy. I thought all abortions had already been banned at that point, but I guess the whiz kids in the legislature realized they had left a loophole.

Medical abortions are done by taking a couple of specific drugs a few hours apart to induce a miscarriage. I’ve read the drugs can be obtained through the mail, with a prescription. The new law stipulates that no one may provide abortion medication “by courier, delivery or mail service.” In Texas, now you can’t even go to a pharmacy with a prescription. A physician has to hand you the drugs in person.

“Texas is looking at the ways that people are navigating around restrictions and trying to essentially make that as unsafe and as frightening for people as possible in order to deter them,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior legal counsel for If/When/How, a reproductive justice legal group.

Diaz-Tello and other advocates worry that the new criminal penalties may make pregnant Texans fearful of seeking medical care after a self-managed abortion.

It’s my understanding that the medications can be obtained without a prescription in Mexico, so one suspects there is already a robust black market getting underway in Texas. Black markets are not regulated by the FDA, unfortunately. .

The abortion ban that went into effect September 1 allows for abortion in case of “medical emergency,” but it’s written so narrowly that it’s hard to know what kind of “emergency” is allowable. It’s documented that since September 1 at least one Texas woman had to go out of state to terminate an ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life. Her personal physician and the nearest hospital both turned her away because they feared violating the law.

See ‘Her Heart Was Beating Too’: The Women Who Died After Abortion Bans by Sarah Waldman at the New York Times.

If the SCOTUS ends Roe as expected, Texas rules will extend to most states eventually. I suspect only the very bluest states will be able to keep abortion legal. Red states are prepared to ban abortions the minute Roe is overturned, and purple states will be at war until the criminalizers prevail.

At New York magazine, Ed Kilgore writes that For the Anti-Abortion Movement, It’s Been a Long Road Back From the Great Betrayal of 1992. I didn’t know what the “great betrayal” was. Turns out it was the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe but allowed states to impose some restrictions, such as waiting periods, as long as they didn’t create an “undue burden” on the woman seeking an abortion.

The pro-criminalization people had expected the Casey decision to overturn Roe, and they were bitterly disappointed in what they got. Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate,

Casey provoked a sense of betrayal, if not outright trauma, within the conservative legal movement. It prompted GOP attorneys to develop a more sophisticated vetting process for judicial nominees under the slogan “no more Souters.” Potential Supreme Court justices are now carefully screened for their anti-abortion bona fides with thinly veiled questions about “unenumerated rights” and “substantive due process.”

Ed Kilgore ads,

This won’t-get-fooled-again sentiment culminated in the implicit deal struck between the anti-abortion movement (including its conservative Evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic religious sponsors) and one Donald J. Trump in 2016. As he sought to consolidate his control of the Republican Party following his hostile takeover of the GOP in the presidential primaries, he violated all the rules of decorum by flatly promising to appoint only Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe. Of equal importance, he published (and regularly revised) a list of potential justices from which he would choose, giving anti-abortion activists plenty of time to vet them. And most important, once he was elected, he turned over his judicial-vetting operation to the conservative legal warriors of the Federalist Society (and, to some extent, the Heritage Foundation).

In brief, the Court is now packed with several people whose entire raison d’être as Supreme Court justices is overturning Roe. They would never have been placed on the Court were they not considered “safe” on ending abortion rights. And they know it, even as they’ve carefully denied it.

Dahlia Lithwick:

Perhaps it would be refreshing if the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court no longer felt the need to lie to us. The lying, after all, is becoming nearly untenable—especially for an institution that relies on public confidence. After confirmation hearings in which they promised that stare decisis was a deeply felt value and that Roe v. Wade was a clear “precedent of the court” and “the law of the land.” there’s something sort of soothing about knowing the lying to our faces will soon be over. They were all six of them installed on the Supreme Court to put an end to Roe v. Wade after all, and that is exactly what they intend to do. There will be no more fake solicitude for women making difficult choices, no more pretense that pregnant people really just need better medical advice, and no more phony concerns about “abortion mills” that threaten maternal health. There is truly something to be said for putting an end to decades of false consciousness around the real endgame here, which was to take away a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy—rape, incest, abuse, maternal health no longer being material factors. At least now we might soon be able to call it what it is.

Linda Greenhouse at the New York Times writes The Supreme Court Gaslights Its Way to the End of Roe. The subscription firewall has been neutralized, I believe; do read it. She documents the five-alarm disingenuousness in the questions asked by the “conservative” justices. And at the end, she said, the gaslighting prize goes to Brett Kavanaugh, who asked why court’s should even “take sides.” Let states decide!

The same argument could be used to support racial segregation and an end to same-sex marriage, of course. Over many decades one of the Court’s most solemn purposes has been to protect rights of U.S. citizens from violation by state law, per the 14th Amendment. Letting states “decide” which civil rights are protected and which are not would set us back about 150 years. The “conservative” justices may be about to end a lot more protected rights than just a right to abortion.

Greenhouse added,

Can Justice Kavanaugh really believe what he said? We’ll see soon enough. Last month, the court heard arguments in a case that challenges New York’s strict requirement for a license to carry a concealed weapon. Most states have looser restrictions. New York, through its legislative process, is in a minority.

Will Justice Kavanaugh and those of his colleagues who glorify a recently manufactured version of the Second Amendment allow New York City to keep going its own way on gun safety in the name of “letting the people decide”? That’s about as likely as the chance that those very same justices will decide to keep the right to abortion on the books. In both cases, we know what they’re going to do. The only mystery is how they will explain it.

I’m sure it will be … creative.

I am relieved about the Arbery murder verdict, but I’m also sad that one right doesn’t erase a long pattern of wrongs.

The three men convicted today almost weren’t brought to justice at all. Local prosecutors, for various reasons, refused to bring charges against them. “It took a series of extraordinary events to force the system to regard their deaths as crimes worth investigating.”

Kevin Strickland was freed yesterday. But the Kansas City Star reports that he will receive no compensation from the state for more than 40 years of wrongful imprisonment.

That’s because Missouri’s compensation law only allows for payments to prisoners who prove their innocence through a specific DNA testing statute. That was not the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across America. Unlike guilty prisoners, a parole officer will not help Strickland find counseling, housing or work. And unlike exonerees in some other states, he will not be eligible through a compensation package for social services, such as participating in the state’s healthcare program.

Surely, he can sue for damages. I hope so. Meanwhile, his gofundme page appears to be getting some attention.

And the white supremacists who organized the 2017 Charlottesville hate fest must pay $26 million in damages. I’m sorry the jury couldn’t agree to convict on federal conspiracy charges, but the liability has got to hurt.

So, some positive things have happened over the past few hours. But not enough.

Three guilty men.

The Ahmaud Arbery jury has begun deliberations. Yesterday the defense gave closing arguments for the Jim Crow ages. I half expected the ghost of Lester Maddox to show up and hand out ax handles. Newsweek:

In the closing arguments of the trial of the three men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, Greg McMichael’s defense attorney suggested that the 25-year-old Black jogger’s actions were also to blame for his death.

On Monday, Laura Hogue took direct aim at Arbery, saying that he wasn’t “an innocent victim,” but rather a “recurring nighttime intruder.”

“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails,” Hogue said.

At this point, Arbery’s distraught mother got up and left the room.

Seriously, you have to listen to the attorney’s tone of voice to get the full picture.

“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”- Laura Hogue, attorney for Gregory McMichael #AhmaudArbery https://t.co/x9B2uY47b4 pic.twitter.com/IdeDdPWd6n

— Kailey Tracy (@KaileyTracy) November 22, 2021

Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim — he was murdered. That kind of makes him a victim.

The defense attorneys also had wanted black pastors banned from the courthouse.

But Mr. Gough — who earlier this week said, “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here” — took his provocative language to new heights on Friday.

Mr. Gough noted the large crowd of Black pastors and other civil rights demonstrators who gathered on Thursday outside the county courthouse in Brunswick, Ga. “This is what a public lynching looks like in the 21st century, with all due respect,” he said.

… Mr. Gough appeared to be speaking figuratively, since there have been no reports of violence or threats from the people who have gathered outside the courthouse.

The defense had a difficult role to play. They had to downplay the idea that racism had anything to do with the defendants’ stopping a black man jogging in their neighborhood and threatening him with firearms, while at the same time they’ve been dog-whistling up a storm to the mostly white jury. I’m wondering if they haven’t overplayed the dog whistles, even for Georgia.

In other news — true to form, righties wasted no time claiming that Darrell Brooks, the guy who drove through a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, was a leftie with ties to Black Lives Matter. The lefties killed those people! BLM! Antifa! This seems to always happen after some random act of violence. See, for example, Insanity Nation (2011, Gabby Giffords shooter) and Labeling Stephen Paddock (2017, the Las Vegas shooter) from the Mahablog archives. See also Steve M, who documents that some people are fibbing.

David French is a conservative writer and a “theologically conservative traditional Christian,” Wikipedia says. But he’s also been known to think about things, which must be disorienting for him sometimes.

In The Moral Collapse of America’s Largest Christian University, French appears genuinely to be surprised at the moral rot at Liberty University. He begins by citing a report at Pro Publica documenting that women students were discouraged from reporting rape. Rape victims, in fact, were threatened with punishment for violating the university’s moral code if they reported being raped.

One young woman went to the school’s designated office for investigating sexual harassment and violence with all kinds of evidence — a hospital report, photographs of her injuries, emails from friends discussing what they saw. Liberty took all this material and lost most of it (the photos were “too explicit” to be kept in a file, as were some of the witness statements). At the hearing, all Liberty cared about was grilling the young woman on how much she’d had to drink before the incident. The investigation couldn’t continue until she had signed a form acknowledging she had violated the school’s code of conduct. And then the school exonerated the rapist. Some of the students who testified on behalf of the woman said that their testimony was misquoted in the final report. See also ‘Weaponization of the Liberty Way:’ LU punishes women reporting sex assaults, lawsuit says.

David French may have been surprised at this. I am not. This is what happens — what has always happened — in rigidly patriarchal institutions, religious and nonreligious.

As far as religion is concerned, one of the most common traits found in very conservative religious institutions, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything else, is the subjugation of women. In particular, women are seen as “unclean” and impure by nature, so if they are violated it is their own fault. Liberty University may not condone stoning rape victims as “fornicators,” but the difference between Liberty and extremist Muslims is one of degree, not kind.

In the political realm, you might have noticed that right-wingers are opposed to rape, in theory. But when confronted by an actual flesh-and-blood rape victim bringing accusations against an actual flesh-and-blood man — well, a white man — somehow the woman is never convincing. She’s probably filing a false complaint. What was she doing in a bar, anyway? What was she wearing? Is this worth destroying a man’s life? You know the drill. And while the Liberty student might have been better off if she’d gone straight to police rather than report through university channels, there’s no guarantee the local LEOs wouldn’t have been just as sexist as the university.

David French points out that while Liberty’s women students were being blamed for being raped, “their own school president was an open and notorious drunk. His wife was accused of affairs with younger men, and one of those men claimed that Falwell liked to watch.” Yes, Jerry Falwell, Jr., never met a corruption he didn’t like. He was so thoroughly debauched the university had to cut him lose to save itself.

David French, bless his heart, wants you to know that Jesus doesn’t approve of Falwell’s, and Liberty’s, behavior. He also has a pretty candid analysis of Christian influence in U.S. history.

Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.

Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled.

And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands.

He doesn’t mention Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. But it’s safe to say the influrence of Christianity has been a very mixed bag.

Religious institutions often prioritize protecting the institution over practicing the religion. We’ve seen that recently in the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, both found to have covered up sexual predation and to protect the clergy-predators rather than deal with the problem. In patriarchal cultures, it’s second nature for the menfolk in any organization to close ranks and protect other men who are predators, especially if the predator is the boss. A high-ranking church official who also has political connections and influence is practically untouchable.

I don’t see this as a religion problem as much as a problem of human cultures and institutions.

“Success often becomes its own suit of armor,” French writes, “degrading character requirements in leaders until the sin and abuse become too overwhelming to ignore. Then everyone wonders (once again), ‘How did this go on so long?'”

None of this is new. I have a hard time understanding people being shocked by it.

In other dirtbag news: The New York State Assembly has issued a report saying that Andrew Cuomo’s conduct while in office was “extremely disturbing.” And I doubt there isn’t anything in that report that most of the assembly members haven’t known for a long time.

I wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse a couple of days ago. See also:

• David Atkins, Washington Monthly, The Rittenhouse Verdict Shows the Ridiculousness of American Gun Laws and Self-Defense
• Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted
• Jeremy Stahl, Slate, Kyle Rittenhouse Redefined What “Active Shooter” Means

Put together, all of these commentaries tell a story of how a perfect storm of political and cultural factors have come together to make it perfectly legal for some people to shoot and kill other people. Here are the major points:

One, many states now allow open carry of firearms by just about anybody.

Two, there has long been a pattern of “reforming” self-defense laws to favor “defenders” over the slain. Stand-your-ground laws are just one example. See also:

Additionally, some states (including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) have replaced the common law “reasonable person” standard, which placed the burden on the defendant to show that their defensive action were reasonable, with a “presumption of reasonableness,” or “presumption of fear,” which shifts the burden of proof to the prosecutor to prove a negative.

Of course, it appears white men somehow get away with a lot more “presumptions” than other people.

A lot of this favoring of self-defenders stems from the long-standing fantasy that law-abiding citizens routinely defend themselves from criminals with guns. Self-defense shootings happen all the time, it’s believed, but in fact genuine self-defense shootings are very rare. “Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes,” the Harvard School of Public Health says, and there is absolutely no honest data showing that widespread gun-carrying either reduces crime or makes people safer from criminals. But proclaiming otherwise sells a lot of guns.

But if you’ve been listening closely, you might notice that the gun cultists don’t talk about crime as much as they used to. Ten and more years ago, people arguing for laxer gun laws talked about crime, crime, crime, and then maybe about “freedom” and telling jokes about shooting lefties. Now they’ve escalated to talking about “freedom” and “tyranny” and shooting the lefties more than about crime, and they aren’t joking. See Proud Boys call for ‘stacking up’ bodies ‘like cord wood’ after Rittenhouse verdict at RawStory.

As Adam Serwer wrote, “Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products. You can never be too skinny, and you can never have too many guns to stop the impending communist takeover.”

So far: Lax gun laws, permissive self-defense laws, lots of hysterical political demagoguery, and white supremacy increasingly backed into a corner. What could go wrong?

I was thinking of the old trope from a few years ago that Democrats don’t know how to talk about religion. See, for example, Do the Democrats Have a ’God Problem’? (Pew Research, 2006) and In Politics, the ‘God Gap’ Overshadows Other Differences (New York Times, 2006). See also The God Gap, Revisited (Mahablog, 2008). The theory was that if Democrats could speak as naturally and effusively about God as Republicans do, they would pick up a lot of voters. Democrats just needed to be more pious.

And then the Right got behind an areligious con man with no observable moral compass who bragged that he never asked God for forgiveness and can’t even site Bible verses correctly.

Let’s see who’s talking about God now. Last weekend Michael Flynn made news when he declared the United States must unite under one religion. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God,” he said.

Much commentary of this remark assumes Flynn meant Christianity would be the “one religion.” I haven’t seen a transcript of Flynn’s entire remarks, and I don’t know if he referenced Christianity specifically. Also, nothing in Flynn’s online biographies suggests he is all that religious.

He was speaking at a QAnon rally; QAnoners in the past have accused Flynn of worshiping Satan. Perhaps Flynn was just trying to assure people he does not. And I don’t know why the QAnoners would have picked on Trump-supporting Flynn to be in league with Satan. QAnoners are not famous for logic, whether internal or external.

Flynn’s utterly unconstitutional suggestion also smacks of authoritarianism. Throughouth most of human history governments have assumed power by claiming a connection to divine authority of some sort — i.e., the Chinese tianming, or mandate of heaven; the European “divine right of kings.” In the West, democracy didn’t become possible until philosophers began to challenge the assumption of a divine mandate for monarchs. Genuine democracy, government of the people, can’t very well happen if the government speaks for God.

In the 20th century, totalitarian governments lurched away from theocracy and, instead, claimed control over religious institutions or banned religious instutitons outright (see: Mao Zedong, Cultural Revolution). Today, churches or temples in China that wish to remain open must be subservient to government authority. The Chinese Communist Party can censor sermons, decide which rituals can be performed, regulate the publication and distribution of Bibles, appoint Catholic bishops, and identify reborn lamas. The Third Reich came to power in Germany in part by reassuring Christians the Reich was pro-Christian, but in truth ministers who did not support the Führer (i.e., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller) tended to come to a bad end. And no, Hitler was not a Christian. The long-term plan of the Reich, never carried out, was to destroy German Christianity.

Religious authority has power; a totalitarian state must either absorb and control that power or destroy it.

This takes us to the Christian Nationalist movement. The basic ideas behind Christian Nationalism — that Christianity must be recognized as the state religion and inform all government policies — have been with us from the beginning of the nation. What fuels its most fanatical elements is not piety, however, but a desire to maintain cultural and racial hegemony. And that’s not new, either.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTO

I’ve read the Gospels; Jesus didn’t say a word about white supremacy. Or abortion. Or capitalism. Or homosexual wedding cakes.

See The Growing Anti-Democratic Threat of Christian Nationalism in the U.S. by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry in Time:

As a political theology that co-opts Christian narratives and symbolism, Christian nationalism has its own version of the “elect,” those chosen by God. They are “people like us,” meaning conservative Christian, but also white, natural-born citizens. Moreover, in a prosperous nation, only “the elect” should control the political process while others must be closely scrutinized, discouraged, or even denied access. This ideology is fundamentally a threat to a pluralistic, democratic society. …

… The threat of Christian nationalism is buried within the seemingly harmless language of “heritage,” “culture,” and “values.” But within this language is an implicit understanding of civic belonging and relative worth. Study after study shows Christian nationalism is strongly associated with attitudes concerning proper social hierarchies by religion, race, and nativity. These views naturally extend to whom Americans think should have the right to participate in the political process and whether everyone should have equal access to voting.

What I hope people understand is that those attitudes concerning proper social hierarchies by religion, race, and nativity are deeply ingrained social and cultural biases that are not supported by Jesus’ teaching. The problem with any religion is that  churches and temples are planted in cultures with deep and long-abiding biases, and the people who are ordained into religious institutions bring those biases with them. After a few centuries it gets hard to separate wheat from chaff, so to speak. (Maybe Jesus never explicitly said white people were superior, they think, but it’s just common sense that they are. So Jesus must have thought so, too.) And eliminating religion doesn’t get rid of the biases.

And it came to pass that many of the January 6 insurrectionists displayed Christian symbols and slogans along with political ones while they were trying to overturn democracy.

Yeah, nothing demonstrates love of Jesus and country better than breaking into the Capitol and terrorizing the lawmakers.

We now have a Democratic president who is Catholic to the hilt and speaks reverently of God as easily and naturally as he can breathe. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is now being led by the Golden Calf. See also Donald Trump and Uses and Misuses of the Bible (Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, June 2020).

What this tells me is that this God Gap thing was never about religion. It was just an extension of the Culture War, with righties presuming that Jesus was on their side. Hell, they aren’t just presuming. They are clinging frantically, with all their being, to the certainty that Jesus shares their biases.

The great theologians of Christian history would be appalled.

Update: Rittenhouse acquitted. Damn. This country won’t be safe for anybody to live in.

Every now and then, somebody cuts through all the crap and gets to the heart of the problem. Today it’s Robin Givhan at the Washington Post, Identifying Danger in the Rittenhouse Case. (You can read this entire article without a firewall.)

“This would seem obvious. But all too often, White men with guns do not see themselves as a danger. They cannot fathom that their actions are suspect. They cannot envision themselves as anything but patriotic and godly. Their moral certitude has been so deeply embedded into the collective mind-set that what they choose to protect, whether a nondescript auto center or a vulnerable human being, is quickly presumed to be valuable and worthy of protection. What White men choose to disregard comes to bear the taint of effluvium. As a culture, we are only now disentangling ourselves from this web. The process has been painful and exhausting.”

The issue of “privilege” is hard to grasp for a lot of us, but much has happened lately that makes it visble.

“The defendant seemed incapable of stepping outside of himself and considering how he might have appeared to others. On a chaotic and unnerving night, he wore no uniform to announce his affiliation or to make plain to whom he was accountable. He falsely identified himself as an emergency medical technician, according to Binger. He called himself an EMT, but one whose medical bag was a mere speck compared with the size of his gun. He was not a Kenosha business owner. He was a random guy with a gun. He was a loose cannon, a wild card. A danger in the eyes of others.”

I choose to assume Rittenhouse did not go to Kenosha with the intention of shooting someone. He appears to think that it was not his fault he shot three people. They made him do it. They were scary. He can’t fathom that he was scary; he was the one brandishing an assault weapon.

“If people remember any moment from the trial, it may well be when Rittenhouse cried during his testimony. His face contorted with emotion; he gasped for air as he spoke, until the judge called for a brief recess so Rittenhouse could compose himself. But it’s also important to remember that Rittenhouse wept as he described the risk he perceived to his own life. He was crying over the danger that he saw in others. He wasn’t shedding tears over the danger that he posed.”

Firearms are intimidating. When you are walking around carrying an assult weapon in your arms, you are intimidating. Nobody’s going to notice you also have a first aid kit at your side. If you wave the firearm around and point it at people, you are threatening. You are dangerous. People should have a right to protect themselves from you.

“White male Midwestern teenagers have inherited the luxury of not having to step outside of themselves. They don’t have to consciously consider whether their comportment might be viewed as threatening, their carriage suspicious or their demeanor cause for alerting the police. They have the psychic freedom to roam widely, to claim any space as their own. Until, all of a sudden, they don’t.”

It’s not just Midwestern teenagers. Look at the three men on trial for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. There are many similarities to the Rittenhouse case.

In both cases, the defendants claim they were entitled to start shooting because the victims were trying to take their guns.

“In other words, their own decision to carry a gun became a justification to use it, lest it be wrested away from them,” said Eric Ruben, an expert on the Second Amendment at the S.M.U. Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

Ahmaud Arbery was out jogging. He was pursued and trapped by white men in pickup trucks who assumed he must be a burglar trying to get away, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t carrying anything resembling stolen loot. Arbery was “trapped like a rat,” one of the men told police. Arbery was not armed; the men who trapped him were.

“He was trapped like a rat,” Greg McMichael said, according to a transcript of their recorded interview Nohilly read in court. “I think he was wanting to flee and he realized that something, you know, he was not going to get away.”

Defense attorneys say the McMichaels and Bryan were legally justified in chasing and trying to detain Arbery because they reasonably thought he was a burglar. Greg McMichael told police Travis McMichael, 35, fired in self-defense as Arbery attacked with his fists and tried to grab his son’s shotgun.

Arbery had a reasonable expectation that these yahoos were about to kill him. This was Georgia, after all. Instead of placing himself at the mercy of his assailants, Arbery attempted to defend himself and was killed. This much is plainly obvious.

That was February 23, 2020. The local criminal justice system felt no apparent urgency to treat this killing as a crime. The case was passed around to three different prosecutors. One of the prosecutors wrote a memo saying that the shooting was “perfectly legal,” and that there were no grounds for making arrests. But then on May 5, a video of the shooting went viral on the Internet. The three white suspects were arrested on May 7. Funny how that works sometimes.

Obviously, gun-carrying is privileged. Gun-carriers may point guns and threaten unarmed people. But if those people attempt self-defense with their hands or bodies, it’s okay to shoot and kill them, because gun-carriers are entitled to self-defense. Maybe in theory unarmed people who are shot by gun-carriers have a right to self-defense, too, but since they are dead they can’t speak up for themselves.

And let us not forget Trayvon Martin. Exactly the same thing. George Zimmerman assumed the privilege to judge that a black boy didn’t belong in his neighborhood. And he stalked and threatened Martin until Martin contronted him. And that gave Zimmerman the authority to kill Martin. It was self-defense, see. And the bleeping criminal justice system agreed.

When those assuming the authority and privilege to set agendas, to brandish guns, and to occupy moral high grounds find themselves surrounded by carnage and criminal liability of their own making, that must be really disorienting for them. That’s not how the story in their heads was supposed to end. They were supposed to be heroes. They were supposed to be the ones who set the world right.

Josh Marshall wrote recently,

“Self-defense laws exist because we as a society believe you are entitled to defend yourself with what would ordinarily be criminal violence if you face imminent, grave bodily harm or death. If someone breaks into your home and is threatening to kill you you have the right to kill them first. But if you created the dangerous or deadly situation the calculus changes. Or at least it should. Rittenhouse likely broke some laws being there with the gun in the first place. He was under 18 for instance. But the basic argument here is that Rittenhouse wasn’t doing anything wrong by just carrying around an AR-15. Wisconsin’s an open carry state. The inherent aggression and menace of carrying around high caliber weapons, which we’re told is only a problem for squeamish libs, becomes a path for the person carrying the fire arm to themselves feel threatened and decide they need to use the gun.

“The aggression carries the seeds of justification within it. You show up looking for trouble on yet another of these right wing murder safaris like Rittenhouse, with his mother chaperoning, was taking part in. You’re looking for trouble and when you find it that’s your justification for taking the next step. That’s not how self-defense is supposed to work. But we can see in this case how the interplay of open carry and permissive self-defense statutes do just that.”

This just in:

Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorneys asked the judge on Wednesday to declare a mistrial, saying they received an inferior copy of a key video from prosecutors and would have approached things differently if they had received the higher quality video earlier.

Judge Bruce Schroeder did not immediately rule on the request, which came after jurors deliberating for a second day at Rittenhouse’s murder trial asked to review video evidence.

That was the video showing sweet little Kyle pointing his assault weapon at protesters before being chased by Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man he killed. The jurors, in deliberation, asked to review the video, which must have made the defense nervous.

The nation needs a conviction. The message needs to be sent that being white and well-armed is no longer privileged. Is there a chance the jury will convict? I have little hope of that. It may be the best we can hope for is a hung jury and another trial with a new judge. But we’ll see.

Also, too: A note on the recent fundraiser. The goal has been met, and I won’t nag you again. Thank you so much.