We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident

And a silent God can be made to say or support anything.

Another way to say this might be, “Absence of action is functionally the same as nonexistence.”

And yet this ghoul will probably not only not get suspended or fired, he will probably face no consequences whatsoever. A couple of days later he was forced to apologize for his actions, but probably only after being pressured to. This monster said what he really thought, and only apologized to try to avoid accountability, with no real change in his “views”. And I hasten to call them opinions, because killing people for the “crime” of being poor doesn’t seem to be an opinion, it seems like the attitude of a person and a “movement” that can only be described as a death cult. And these people claim to be Christians and hide behind the Bible! And even though the main charge in the Bible for Christian actions is to care for the poor. And in the same article, they mention that two children were killed and 17 other people, 14 of them children, in yet another mass shooting at a school.

The only conclusion is that their God is truly evil or that they only use God to justify their actions. I used to think that even though their practitioners cause irreparable harm, that there may be still some good in their intentions. But that seems to be just wishful thinking on my part — and that their “God” is simply a manifestation of their own desires. And dark desires they are.

It seems like a only a weak God would need to his followers to also become salespeople, i.e. evangelize. If your God had any influence in the world, they could just zap people into belief. If the religion was real, people would just realize which one was the right God. No need to put Bibles in hotels. No need to go door to door selling it. No reason to stand on the streetcorners with signs. No need to encourage people to go to church on their Facebook pages. Frankly, it feels insulting to them. It’s as if their God was saying, “I have no power in your world.” And I’ve said for a long time, a God that doesn’t interfere is no different than an absent God.

There has been quite an uproar over the non-release and coverup of the Epstein files by the current administration. But we are confused. Everyone has known that he is a serial sexual predator since 2015. And then there is Katie Johnson & Virginia Giuffre who directly accused him of rape in court during the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, in which she was convicted of child sex trafficking. What makes us normal people so upset is the number of people who voted for him knowing these facts. We don’t understand how you could know that and still vote for him. Why are they complaining now? You knew he was a predator, a child rapist, and pedophile. Why now? They KNEW this and ignored it. How can they now claim to be anti-child rape? Anti-pedophile? It doesn’t make sense to us, and probably never will.

I get it, Christian morality has a dilemma: you can’t seem to change your stances on moral issues because if you do, then you’re accused of relative morality. And if you don’t, then you’re accused of being irrelevant to any moral conversation because an all-knowing, omniscient God knows the future and should know that, for example, slavery would eventually be considered immoral in most circumstances.

But, I’m old enough to remember when American Christians:

• Led the calls for gun control after Columbine
• Believed fathering multiple children out of wedlock with multiple women, as well as being a known adulterer, was disqualifying for high office
• Were the main opposition to gambling,
• Believed one of their main activities as an organization was helping the poor

So it’s absolutely ludicrous to claim that their morals aren’t flexible and don’t change. Admittedly, they’ve always hated anything LGBT, but if they can change in their stance on gun control, and whatever else, then there’s no reason they can’t change their morals as it comes to basically anything.

But religion is about control and power. And there are no limits when your only goal is power, not morality. As an atheist, my morals do change based on information, like with slavery. We realize in the modern world that slavery is wrong, but the Bible was written before society came to that conclusion, and so must contort itself by saying things like “Christianity is what allowed people to find slavery unacceptable”, an incredibly weak argument that glosses over the hundreds of verses which detail how to be a good slaveowner.

Things have changed. And only one of us is willing to admit it. So can you really trust them?

Watching conservatives is like watching drug addicts. As more and more conservative “influencers” and “news stations” come out as being paid by Russia, you start to realize what is really happening–the conservatives are addicted to “conservative news”, a thing which does not exist. But now that Fox News is so dominant in red areas in the US, and they’ve been shoveling this down their throats for years, the people don’t want the truth anymore.

Anytime a conservative tries to tell their constituents something that is true but that they don’t like, they boo. Example one: There’s no invasion at the southern border. “What do you mean the border crisis is invented? No it’s not!” Then they fall into cognitive dissonance. Example two: Women who aren’t “sluts” still need comprehensive reproductive care, and you are killing women if you support this. “If they don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex!!”

And it’s completely obvious they’re brainwashed, because between Biden announcing his withdrawal and Kamala being chosen as the nominee, the man on the street interviews have gone terribly. Because the right hasn’t coalesced around an attack angle, the only thing they see when asked why they don’t support Kamala is that they don’t like her laugh, the exact thing that is filling the vacuum on the airwaves of Fox.

And they’re confused now, because racist and sexist attacks won’t work, and every criticism that Biden received now applies to Trump and only Trump. And his latest appearances show that he is completely unfit and unprepared to be the leader of the free world, as his word salad continues to get more tossed. And he is showing something that Republicans have been showing for years…the fact that they won’t answer a question.

The reason they don’t answer questions any more is because the answers refer policies that are widely unpopular. And rather than embracing that underdog status they just waffle and obfuscate and try to avoid accountability. When asked what the government can do to lower the number of mass shootings, especially in schools, JD Vance called for better security but then metaphorically threw his hands in the air and said that mass shootings are “a fact of life“. Uh no they are not. Just ask the other countries that have gun ownership but no school shootings, or very few.

But this is their policy: more guns and easier access to guns instead of reasonable gun control. Therefore, according to them, we can’t save those kids. The evil is too strong I guess. And when shootings are so often caused by easy access to high-powered war weapons (the Georgia shooting involved a 14-year-old whose father had given him an AR-style weapon for Christmas and who also had previously praised the Parkland shooting), this position is of course, widely unpopular. And why they don’t want to talk about their positions on almost anything, because they are awful.

But they don’t dare tell their voters that.

An indictment was handed down today against two Russians, backed by the Russian government and state media, who were funding a rightwing propaganda machine (and who knows how many others) in the US. They were paying Tim Pool and other lowlifes $100k per video episode to upload Russian propaganda to their YouTube and other social media platforms. The indictment apparently claims it was “unwitting” but I don’t know how dumb you have to be to not know, especially as noted in the indictment that they said the money came from “the Russians.” But this is no surprise, my question is how much of rightwing media and politicians are actually not compromised? Many elected officials have been saying the exact same things that these traitors have been, especially the further into the MAGA underworld you go.

But as despicable as these shills are, the whole movement is a danger because of the things I talked about earlier this year, and it’s proving to be true. When politics becomes your religion, and your fellow citizens become the enemy, people become more and more desperate to have those beliefs reinforced, especially in the face of evidence to the contrary. So they become easier and easier to manipulate simply by repeating their talking points. And whether it’s greed or genuine belief, the outcome is the same…selling out Americans to further Russia’s interests, all while claiming to be patriots.

In Georgia, school has barely started and already there is a school shooting with “AR-style weapon” that killed four and injured many more. I put this right at the feet of MAGA and the right wing, because before the “tea party” and later “MAGA”, school shootings or any major gun violence spurred changes in laws. But after the Sandy Hook shooting, the right sold their soul to politics, essentially saying that mass shooters have a right to the most deadly weapons available and that the 2nd amendment curtails our ability to limit them or who owns them.

To me, this decision was a clear change–saying essentially that no matter what happens, conservatives and right-wingers cannot be influenced or changed or made to feel guilt or shame. And when asked what they would do to help solve the problem, it’s either completely unserious or dystopian.

On the unserious side they say that mass shootings are caused by “mental health”, of course with no explanation. But is mental health then funded or even addressed? No, because it’s just as unserious as “thoughts and prayers.”

On the dystopian side, you have “active shooter drills”, arming the teachers, and bulletproof backpacks. Really. Not make it more difficult for shooters, but more expensive for regular students.

I’ll be happy when this election is over so that either a) MAGA loses the election and then starts on a slow decline taking what’s left of Republicans with them or b) they take over the country, never to let free and fair elections decide our leaders again.

I’m just hoping that I get my friends and family back who I’ve lost to MAGA. Although it will be hard to ever take them seriously in the future.

I’m committed to truth, no matter where it is or comes from. That means I can’t simply ignore outlets like Fox because of their bias; I need to occasionally check in to see what’s going on over there.

But watching Sean Hannity is totally bizarre. It’s like you tuned into a TV show and there is no plot rewind and you just have to figure out what everyone is referring to to figure out why the next thing they say is supposed to make sense. They just throw off terms like “communist” and “radical leftist” and lead with something like that, even though them being true requires that you watched earlier when they asserted that without evidence. Once something is asserted and repeated, it is truth.

Like the “after-birth abortions” thing. Everyone just says it like it’s true but I’ve never seen one person, let alone a Democrat, who has ever said they were fighting for what is otherwise called “child murder”.

And when you later see these things repeated verbatim on social media, your immediate reaction is to refute their points, but that is a useless exercise. Now the first thing I think is, “What planet are they on?”

Whenever they complain about “homeless in San Francisco” or how San Francisco is a hellhole, they never say what they would do other than at best some authoritarian “crackdown” that just moves the problem to a different place. The rightwing solution to what they deem to be the biggest problem in America, immigration from the south, is currently mass deportment and internment camps. Not cutting off the incentives, which might actually solve the problems, like actually enforcing labor laws that prevent immigrants from “takin er jerbs.”

I just find it exhausting that they have no desire to find out the truth, but want to be lied to. When someone tells them a truth they don’t like at one of their rallies, they boo.

You can’t lead the world if you’re not living in the world that everyone else is in. You can’t lead the world if you need to be lied to. And you certainly can’t solve any problems if you can’t even figure out what the problem is.

Which are why there are only insane “solutions” coming from the right.

The governor of Texas has pardoned a man who was tried and convicted of murder. That in itself is not that unusual, as things happen and the pardoning process can sometimes rectify these situations. But no, that’s not what happened. It appears that Gov. Abbot has pardoned him because he killed the right people. He was convicted of killing a BLM protestor in Austin, Texas. The measure he is sending is clear: “If you kill the right people, we will not hold you responsible for those killings.” This is something that if you told Americans even ten years ago, they wouldn’t believe, but now is a reality. And soon they will start suggesting capital punishment to women and their care providers who will not act as brood mares for the state.

The future looks dystopic if you venture into the South.