White fundamentalism breeds violence

The all-American terror of Donald Trump: Inside the nightmare ideology that’s made him a hero to white fundamentalists

Trump abandoned the GOP's traditional dog whistle for a megaphone—a successful strategy, and even more destructive

By Brittney CooperUsing the extreme acts of a few to condemn the peaceful lives of the many is a hallmark of the American script of racism. White Americans do this to Black people when they suggest that Black intraracial violence justifies the overpolicing of all Black people. Americans do this to Muslims when we demand that key Islamic religious leaders step forward to quickly condemn the violence, so that we will not mistake lack of censure for allegiance.

Yet, we did not require or expect conservative white male politicians and religious leaders to issue statements after the Planned Parenthood shooting affirming that Christian social values are anti-violent and condemning the actions of the shooter as an egregious mischaracterization of Christian values and principles. We did not ask all white men to feel shame over the actions of the shooter. The myth of white individualism absolves white people of a collective reckoning with the ways that white fundamentalism breeds violence against people of all colors and social backgrounds.

This is why we must begin to understand whiteness as a kind of violent fundamentalism, one at the heart of the American project. Fundamentalism is always a struggle over values and an attempt by those who feel marginalized to order the universe through a set of moral absolutes that not-so-coincidentally also concede power to their particular worldview. Donald Trump is not particularly religious, despite his meeting with Black pastors. But he deploys whiteness as ideology with the fundamentalist zeal of the worst kinds of religious zealots and proselytizers. His rhetoric about protecting the U.S.-Mexico border—rhetoric that has been unfortunately taken up by two misguided Black female Trump enthusiasts—is just one more example of the kind of power laden demands for purity that adhere to fundamentalist ideologies. Whiteness as a fundamentalist ideology frames all others as enemies of the project of white supremacy. It authorizes violence against all who divest from the project of whiteness. It uses a narrative of marginalization and the need to regain power (to take America back) to justify aggressive and violent acts towards non-white groups. And it values and seeks to perpetuate whiteness as a way of life.

Until we dismantle white fundamentalism, no people of color will be safe. All fundamentalist belief systems view other belief systems in zero-sum terms. Evangelical Christianity believes that the truer it is, the less true every other belief system is. White/American fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism also engage each other in zero-sum geopolitical terms. They will be locked into an endlessly violent battle of wills. To make it more plain, on the homefront, white Americans respond so strongly to acts of Islamic terror and with such fear, because they recognize this same capacity for fundamentalist rage in themselves. In a zero-sum battle of fundamentalism, either we are invading their shores or they are invading ours. Game recognize game.Comment:  For more on conservative Christians, see Planned Parenthood Shooter = Radical Christian and Conservative Christians Aren't Good Samaritans.

Conservatives let mass shootings happen

After the San Bernardino shootings, people are talking about how conservatives have nothing to offer but empty words and gestures. The Daily News conveyed this idea with its provocative cover:


A good cartoon made a similar point:



"Who cares? Let 'em die," said every Republican to himself. "That's fourteen fewer votes for Democrat candidates, and $14,000 more in NRA donations for us."

"Prayer shaming"

Conservatives started crying about "prayer shaming," their latest attempt to silence people pointing out their lies and hypocrisies. The following posting puts that argument to rest:

It’s Not “Prayer Shaming.” It’s Hypocrite Shaming

By Rebecca WatsonI don’t think that the New York Daily News is “prayer-shaming.” To think that is to miss the point entirely: these politicians aren’t just praying for the victims, if they’re even actually praying at all. No, they’re Tweeting about praying for the victims of a circumstance that they themselves could prevent but choose not to. That’s not being a good Christian—that’s just being a huge hypocrite. That’s like praying for your aunt to recover from skin cancer while stuffing her in a tanning bed. “Stop struggling, Agnes, this is going to give you a healthy glow!”

And to really make the analogy work, in this case the tanning salon would be paying you to bring your aunt in. Because that’s the big problem, here: the National Rifle Association’s ridiculously wealthy and powerful lobby that has the GOP on the payroll. Gun control is the fastest way to fix this problem—it’s what Australia did in 1996 just days after a gunman murdered dozens of people. They cut gun homicides by nearly 60% and gun suicides by 65%, with no increase in other kinds of homicides and no increase in robberies and home invasions.

Of course, if we want to know more about the science of what works and what doesn’t work with regards to gun violence, we’ll have to lift the current ban on the CDC studying it. Oh that’s right, 20 years ago Republicans passed restrictions on gun violence research to make sure that no money accidentally went toward gun control advocacy.

So please remember all that the next time you hear a politician whine about prayer-shaming after citizens beg them to do something about the unbelievable rash of mass shootings happening in the US. It’s not prayer-shaming—it’s hypocrite-shaming.For more on gun control, see Republicans Allow Guns for Terrorists and The Magical Power of Guns.

Planned Parenthood shooter = radical Christian

There's been a lot of talk about "radical Islam" recently. Meanwhile, radical Christians are shooting up America like it's the Wild West.

Here's a portrait of a typical radical Christian:

Accused Planned Parenthood shooter charged with rape in North Charleston in 1992

By Glenn Smith and Melissa BoughtonyDear has a history of arrests in South Carolina out of Colleton and Beaufort counties, records show. A background search completed by The Post and Courier found that Dear was arrested in 2003 on a cruelty to animals charge but was found not guilty in 2004. He was charged under the state’s Peeping Tom law in 2002 but that charge, too, was later dismissed, according to a background search.

In 1997, Dear’s then-wife reported that her husband assaulted her, according to incident reports released Saturday by the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office. She declined at the time to file charges against Dear.

Beaufort County sheriff’s deputies charged Dear with operating an uninsured motor vehicle in 2004 and he was later convicted and ordered to pay a fine, State Law Enforcement Division records show.

Dear, described as a loner by neighbors in Colorado and North Carolina, has been married at least three times and has four children.

His second wife, Mescher, described Dear in divorce papers filed in 1993 as a controlling, abusive, womanizing man who liked to gamble but was tight with his cash when it came to supporting his family. She stated that he threw her around the room by her hair during one argument and beat her head on the floor. She also said in a sworn affidavit that Dear “erupts into fury in a matter of seconds,” and she “lived in fear and dread of his emotional and physical abuse.”

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Mescher stated in the affidavit. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”Comment:  Multiple wives, arrests, assaults, rage, abuse, cruelty to animals...and he's a Christian. He terrorizes women, children, and animals and kills them if he gets angry enough. If he was a millionaire, he could run as a Republican for president and get 25% or 50% of the vote.

For more on Christian terrorism, see Conservative Christians Aren't Good Samaritans and Let's Deport White Men.

Conservative Christians aren't Good Samaritans

More on the conservative hypocrisy re refugees:Retweeted Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte):

The way that so many Christians fall over themselves denying refuge to Syrians shows that their concept of Christian compassion is lacking.

Retweeted Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte):

To every self-identified Christian who denies Syrian refuge, I simply would ask them to read this:

Luke 10:25-37 New International Version (NIV)
The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Retweeted Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte):

And don’t tell me you’re afraid for your safety. Your own God told you to be afraid for your *soul* if you do not offer compassion.Be a Good Samaritan unless it's inconvenient or risky? Don't think that's what Jesus said.



Above: All the Christian hypocrites who aren't Good Samaritans.

The Republican Crisis Recycling Center: Syrian Refugee Edition

What's the difference between the Ebola virus and a Syrian refugee? Nothing, according to conservatives.

The Republican governors who are rejecting refugees are the same ones who allow our military veterans to be homeless and sleep on the streets and are willing to let poor people starve. They don't care about refugees because they don't care about humanity. They're cowards. Pitiful and despicable cowards.

Yep.



GOP Warns Refugees Likely To Be Driven To Terrorism By Way America Would Treat Them

For more on terrorism, see Let's Deport White Men and Republicans Allow Guns for Terrorists.

Let's deport white men

Let’s deport the white males: Will we coddle terrorists or rid ourselves of danger?An Open Letter to President Obama, and all candidates for President of the United States.

The violence of recent months has brought America to a moment of reckoning. We must decide who we are as a people: whether we will coddle terrorists in the name of so-called civil liberties, or stand firm to protect our women and children. The recent attacks have been characterized by a barbarous sadism that can’t be attributed to any ideology. Rather its a streak of pure evil, what we might call suicidal — even tribal — bloodlust.

Let me be clear: I am not a racist. I have friends of all races and religions. And yet political correctness can not erase the grim fact that the authors of these atrocities all belong to the same race, creed and gender.

Columbine Massacre was committed by White Male Protestants

Aurora Theatre massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

Sandy Hook Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

Tucson Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

Roseburg Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

Charleston Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

Oak Creek Sikh Temple Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

San Ysidro McDonalds Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

UT Austin Tower Massacre was committed by a White Male Protestant

The Policy of Containment has Failed

From its earliest days, America has pursued policy to confine this dangerous race to institutions — such as Ivy League universities, state legislatures, and the United States Congress — where they would do the least possible harm to women, children, and people of color. However, WMPs eventually infiltrated nearly every aspect of our society, successfully executing such heinous terrorist plots as: enslaving Africans for 400 years, stealing a continent and murdering millions of Indians, enforcing Jim Crow segregation with mob lynchings.

Beginning in the 1950s, when it was evident that our great metropolises had been overrun with cells of WMPs, America began the most ambitious (and expensive) resettlement program of the modern era, shipping millions of white protestant boys, along with their sisters and parents, out of city limits to a ring of white-only colonies. Here, young WMPs were left to harmless diversions such as Little League, video games, and paintball contests, based on the theory that removing them from the threats constituted by the advances of women and brown people would mollify the murderous rage that had fueled their terrorism over the centuries.

Alas, the experiment failed.Or as someone said to sum it up:How can we possibly evaluate every white male Christian to make sure he has no plans to murder women and children?For more on terrorism, see Republicans Allow Guns for Terrorists and Syrian Refugees = Jewish Refugees.

The White Privilege of Cows

Brown Student Newspaper Is Sorry For Op-Ed Offensive To Native Americans

Native Americans' ancestors were slaughtered, but they should be thankful anyway, the op-ed suggested.

By Amy AnthonyThe Brown University campus newspaper apologized Wednesday after publishing what it says were two "deeply hurtful" and racist columns.

The Brown Daily Herald's editorial board published an editor's note saying it regretted the hurt caused by the two opinion columns, both written by student M. Dzhali Maier.

One titled "The white privilege of cows," which was published Monday, "invoked the notion of biological differences between races," while "Columbian Exchange Day," published Tuesday, argued that Native Americans should be thankful for colonialism, according to the editor's note.

"The white privilege of cows" column was left on The Herald's website "in an effort to be transparent," according to an editor's note later added to it. The "Columbian Exchange Day" column was removed and replaced by an editor's note. That column was "unintentionally published due to an internal error," according to the note. It was online for about an hour before it was taken down.Maier's first controversial op-ed:

Ivy League Student Paper: Native Americans Should be Thankful for Columbus

The Daily Herald has published racist content three times in as many weeks.

By Amanda GirardThe White Privilege of Cows made the argument that European societies that developed agriculture were more capable than hunter-gatherer societies, and that a steady supply of crops and livestock allowed colonial empires to build up a military, develop technological advancements, and use those developments to sail the world in search of new lands to conquer.

Even though the concept of racial superiority has been repeatedly debunked, the author of the column went a step further. Maier suggested that native populations who were enslaved and systematically eradicated by these colonists ultimately benefited by assimilating into the agriculture-based lifestyle forced on them through colonial oppression, and that society was ultimately better off due to the technological developments that took place after colonization.

“Where is this all going? It is the strong who trample the weak, the rich who trample the poor,” Maier wrote. “Colonialism simply allows those who come from a history of being well-fed enough to let experimentation happen, conquering those who have not had that luck.”

The Brown University student also suggested that pre-colonial native populations were inferior due to not having domesticated animal populations. Maier’s op-ed also proposed the idea that colonists in Africa and the Americas did everyone a favor by taming and domesticating animals (after the enslavement and genocide of native populations, which was left out).

“It does stand as fact that English colonists in Africa were able to tame zebras to be ridden or driven,” Maier wrote. “It is also fact that wild animals in Africa and the New World were left untapped, while some wild Eurasian animals were domesticated.”

Analysis

Maier spends almost half this column talking about racial differences. She then switches to cultural differences, a completely different topic.

As noted in the first paragraph above, she talks about the amazing things accomplished by Near Eastern civilizations. One, the civilizations of the Americas produced many of the same things: agriculture, writing and math, art, religion, philosophy, architecture, astronomy, medicine, etc. Two, these accomplishments had nothing to do with racial characteristics. Maier talks about biology, but the only biology in play here is access to better crops and livestock.

Near the end, Maier asks whether the link between race and culture is correlation or causation. In her final paragraphs, she implies it's causation. For instance, British colonists domesticated zebras, she claims, whereas African natives couldn't.

But as Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, this is mostly wrong:

The Story of... Zebra and the Puzzle of African AnimalsPerhaps the most puzzling question Jared Diamond encounters as he investigates animal domestication is: Why were no large mammals ever domesticated in tropical Africa?

Africa, south of the Sahara, is home to the richest diversity of animal life on the planet, including some of the largest mammals on earth. So why did the Africans never domesticate the rhino? Why did they never farm the hippo? The elephant? Or the giant wildebeest? Perhaps most strangely of all, given the importance of the horse to European history, why did tropical Africans never domesticate their own species of wild horse, the zebra?

Zebra are closely related to the domesticated horse, sharing a genus (Equus) and a common ancestor. They stand nearly five feet at the shoulder, live in small family groups or herds, are sociable herbivores who breed well in public and live in harmony with their mammalian neighbors, like antelopes and wildebeest. They are even strong enough to carry an adult human on their backs.

Zebras are also notoriously difficult to catch. They have evolved superb early-warning mechanisms, such as peripheral vision far superior to other horses. Often bad tempered, they grow increasingly antisocial with age and once they bite, they tend not to let go. A kick from a zebra can kill—and these creatures are responsible for more injuries to American zookeepers each year than any other animal.

Pity the poor human, therefore, who might try to domesticate a zebra in the wild. During the colonial era, some adventurous Europeans tried to harness this African horse. Lord Rothschild famously drove a zebra-drawn carriage through the streets of Victorian London. Yet these creatures were never truly domesticated—they were never bred and sustained explicitly under human control.Western Civ is best?

Maier is basically gushing about Western Civilization while pooh-poohing non-Western civilizations. There's no attempt at balance here--no mentions of European horrors such as the slave trade, the extermination of native populations, and the Holocaust. Her goal is to tout the superiority of white civilizations.

She tries to fudge this by referring to "Eurasians," but there are no specifics about the great cultures of China or India. With the notable exception of the Mongols, these civilizations did not try to colonize the world. Why not? Because being "well-fed" and "strong" like these Asian cultures doesn't necessarily lead to conquest.

What leads to conquest is a religious or philosophical belief that you're a chosen people who deserve to rule. That it's your God-given duty to bring the "light" of "civilization" to the dark (-skinned) corners of the globe. It's that kind of attitude that drove all the soul-crushing civilizations of Europe, including Rome, Britain, America, Germany, and the USSR.

For more on Western Civilization, see King Touts "Values Columbus Brought" and Alternatives to "Got Land?" Shirt.

Conservative Christians want American sharia

Kim Davis is the new face of the religious right: Angry, marginalized and increasingly desperate

As their numbers dwindle and their cultural influence wanes, Evangelicals are seizing power any way they can

By Amanda MarcotteWhat Davis is asking for is not an accommodation at all, but for the right to declare, by fiat, that Rowan County, Kentucky, is a mini-theocracy not beholden to the laws of the land, but by the whims of Kim Davis. Her legal team wants you to see her as a sweet but faithful woman, but in fact she’s trying to pull a coup here, claiming that “God’s authority”—read Kim Davis’s authority—trumps our entire democratic system.

It’s not just her, either. Rena Lindevaldsen, who works for the Liberty Counsel, which is handling Davis’s case, has taken to boldly arguing that Christians have the right to overthrow the democratically elected government and simply impose their will by fiat. “Whether it’s zoning or taxes or marriage or abortion, in those issues, government doesn’t have authority to say that these things are appropriate because they’re contrary to Scripture,” Lindevaldsen recently argued in front of Liberty University. Which is to say that even though the government has declared abortion legal, if you decide you don’t want your neighbors getting abortions, you should be able to declare yourself a God-appointed authority and simply shut it down. If you don’t want to pay taxes, declare yourself a “sovereign citizen.”

Mike Huckabee has been at the frontlines of pushing the claim that Christian conservatives simply have the right to ignore or overturn democracy to impose their will, and not just because he’s been running around Kentucky, trying to get himself on camera as much as possible in support of Davis’s attempt to ban gay marriage by fiat. He’s also been using the campaign trail to argue that the president should be able to simply end rule of law and start ruling like a dictator.

He doesn’t just the word dictator, of course, but make no mistake, Huckabee has repeatedly and shamelessly promised that if he is elected president, he will start declaring his beliefs to be the law of the land without the cooperation of Congress. In a Google hangout, he laid out the scheme: Declare as president that there are “constitutional rights of the unborn” and simply ban abortion by fiat. He claimed a similar authority during the Republican debate, a moment that got startlingly little play even though it was literally a candidate for president arguing that he would make himself a dictator.Comment:  For more on the subject, see What the Crusades Controversy Is About and Teabaggers Seek White Christian Rule.

The conservative war on reason

A good posting that touches upon why liberals love Spock and Obama. Namely, because they're calm and rational--unlike such cowboy characters as John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.

It’s worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of conservatives’ decades-long war on truth

The right knows that facts and reason have a liberal bent. That's why their decades-long strategy is to lie

By Heather Cox RichardsonEnlightenment ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen. They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and protected workers. The boom years of the 1920s had been good ones for them, and they believed that the continued success of their enterprises depended on their complete control over their businesses and the workers they employed. They believed that government meddling in their affairs would disrupt natural economic laws. And with their downfall would come the downfall of the entire American economy, and with it, the nation.

But the problem was that the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. After an economic free-for-all of the 1920s that had pitched the nation into the Great Depression, Americans embraced the government regulation that reined in shady business dealings and protected workers. How could businessmen make inroads against such a popular program?

In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr. articulated a strategy for opposing the consensus that supported New Deal policies. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” was a sophomoric diatribe by the Catholic son of a wealthy oil magnate, published by the small right-wing Henry Regnery Press. In it, Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.Comment:  Christianity as an absolute truth...that's why we killed Indians and enslaved Africans. That's why we continue to oppress women and minorities. It's all about maintaining white male Christian supremacy. That's been the case since the fall of Rome and the beginning of the "Dark Ages," if not before.

For more on the subject, see Conservatives Want to Brainwash Kids and What the Crusades Controversy Is About.

Below:  Liberal heroes:





Conservative heroes:

Americans worse than ISIS

More on the subject of Obama Compares ISIS to Crusaders and What the Crusades Controversy Is About:

GOP Lawmaker Says Obama Defended ISIS At Prayer Breakfast

Obama defends ISIS by comparing them to every Christian who killed, tortured, or enslaved someone. In other words, Obama thinks ISIS is as bad as America!

ISIS responds, "How dare you compare us to centuries of Euro-American thugs and killers?!"

Here are 8 Christian Terrorist Organizations That Equal ISIS

History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names

Keep trying, ISIS losers! So far we're like a thousand times more barbaric than you are!

And some "wisdom" from a few months ago:

Christian activist calls for holy war: ‘Islam has no place in civilized society’

We need a holy war to stop the Muslims' holy war because holy wars have no place in civilized society!

The holy war to end all holy wars! Just like World War I, except holy!

For more on Christian terrorism, see Report Documents Right-Wing Terrorism and The Logical Conclusion of Extremism.

Below:  There were Americans in the Crusades? Okay, if you say so.

What the Crusades controversy is about

More on the subject of Obama Compares ISIS to Crusaders:

Christian Violence: Obama Touches a Sore Spot in American Politics

By Peter d'ErricoWhat are these people upset about? One wonders whether Gilmore and Donohue really don't know the history of Christianity, or if they believe this history should be hidden. Given the sad state of education in the United States, the possibility of their ignorance exists. Equally sadly, the possibility exists that they know this history and want to hide it.5 Right-Wing Freak-Outs Over the President's Completely Accurate Comments on Christianity

The pundits forget that Christians are capable of “terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

By Amanda MarcotteThese statements are 100% true. But the right has reacted as if Obama burned the American flag in the Oval Office. Perhaps it’s because the National Prayer Breakfast was designed to strong-arm national politicians into paying fealty to the religious right on pain of being accused of being anti-Christian. Or perhaps it was just because they’re bored. Here are five more ridiculously over-the-top conservative reactions to the President saying something that is objectively, demonstrably true about Western history.Let's be clear: The Obama Crusades controversy is over whether it's okay to hate Muslims

By Max FisherTo be crystal clear: this is not a fight over the fine-grain imperfections of Obama's historical analogy or over the implications for US foreign policy. It is a fight over whether it's okay to hate Muslims, to apply sweeping and negative stereotypes to the one-fifth of humanity that follows a particular religion. A number of Americans, it seems, are clinging desperately to their anti-Muslim bigotry and are furious at Obama for trying to take that away from them.Comment:  The controversy is about making it okay to hate Muslims and not okay to criticize Christians. Today's conservatives want to turn America into a Christian theocracy. They can't do that if people understand how Christians have persecuted and killed everyone who was different from the white male norm.

For more on Christian terrorism, see Report Documents Right-Wing Terrorism and The Logical Conclusion of Extremism.

Obama compares ISIS to Crusaders

The latest manufactured "controversy" by Fox News:

Fox Hosts Explode At Obama For Talking About The Crusades At Prayer Breakfast

By Brendan JamesThe hosts of "Fox & Friends" were not amused on Friday by President Obama's reminder to Christians that the Muslim world has not been the only corner of the globe to deal with deadly religious extremism.

"How shocked were you," Brian Kilmeade asked viewers, "about the President's remarks yesterday at that prayer breakfast, equating the Crusades in the year 1095 to what we're experiencing today and witnessing with ISIS and their brutality?"

The three co-hosts then angrily talked over each other while introducing the clip of Obama speaking on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The footage showed Obama discussing the Islamic State terror group and religious violence more broadly by mentioning the Crusades, initiated by Pope Urban II. The President said Christians should not get on a "high horse" about religious barbarism."So he's saying the Catholic Church was the ISIS of its time," said Doocy. "So try telling that to the pope who is going to visit Washington, D.C."

Give me an audience with the pope and I'll be glad to tell him. We can discuss the papal bulls about converting the "savage" Indians.

Right-Wing Christians Angered By Obama’s Comparison Of ISIS To The Crusades

The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

A history of Christian terrorism

Sorry, Fox: Obama Was Right About Christianity's 'Terrible Deeds'

By Christia MercerConservatives across the country are freaking out about President Obama’s claim that “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ” at the National Prayer Breakfast. Everyone from Rush Limbaugh and Jim Gilmore to Megyn Kelly and the hosts of Fox & Friends is venting about it. Unfortunately, the president is exactly right.

Every century in the history of Christianity is full of examples. But one of the most vivid cases of Christian-motivated bloodshed is what was happening exactly four hundred years ago, in the winter of 1615. Long-standing religious hatred and political tensions were escalating across Europe. When spiritual leaders incited violence, their followers were keen to comply. The means of killing were gruesome and imaginative. Arms were ripped from living torsos, writhing bodies stretched on racks, and men’s severed genitalia burned before their dying eyes. Kings, princes and politicians employed draconian measures to squelch criticism and halt change.

A century before that, Martin Luther’s attempt to purify Christianity of its papal poisons led to decades of struggles across Europe. More than 100,000 poorly armed farmers were slaughtered in 1524-25 when they took Luther’s teachings to imply greater social justice. Over the course of the 16th century, villages were razed, schools closed and disease left unchecked. By 1615, the continent was teaming with terrorist plots, counter-plots, and spies. But when Catholic councilors were sent to Prague and summarily tossed by the Protestant assembly out palace windows, a line was crossed. The so-called Defenestration of Prague of 1618 marks the official start of the Thirty Years’ War.

In 2015, longstanding religious hatred and political wrangling are again sweeping Europe with their own shadowy sources in the last century. Kings, princes and politicians again employ draconian measures to control criticism and stop change. In this global struggle, villages have been destroyed, schools bombed, and disease left unchecked. Nor have our contemporaries lacked imagination in their violence. Schoolgirls have been kidnapped, journalists beheaded, and interrogation methods enhanced. Our cycle of violence is much the same as that of our predecessors. Unchecked power and ignorance promote loathing, leading to increased viciousness, intolerance, and more hatred. Chérif Kouachi, one of the men responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, was first moved to radicalism by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at Abu Ghraib prison. Brutality and stupidity beget more of the same.Yes, ISIS Burned a Man Alive: White Americans Did the Same Thing to Thousands of Black People

The United States practiced a unique cultural ritual that was as least as gruesome as the "medieval" punishments meted out by ISIS against its foes.

By Chauncey DeVegaISIS burned Muadh al Kasasbeh, a captured Jordanian fighter pilot, to death. They doused him with an accelerant. His captors set him on fire. Muadh al Kasasbeh desperately tried to put out the flames. ISIS recorded Muadh al Kasasbeh's immolation, produced a video designed to intimidate their enemies, and then circulated it online.

ISIS's burning alive of Muadh al Kasasbeh has been denounced as an act of savagery, barbarism, and wanton cruelty--one from the "dark ages" and not of the modern world.

American Exceptionalism blinds those who share its gaze to uncomfortable facts and truths about their own country.

For almost a century, the United States practiced a unique cultural ritual that was as least as gruesome as the "medieval" punishments meted out by ISIS against its foes.When America behaved like ISIS: Jesse Washington and the Bible Belt’s dark history of public lynchings

How dare ISIS emulate racist Americans from the last century?!

What would happen if Obama stated, "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves," or "US soldiers massacred Indians at Wounded Knee"? Censure, hearings, perhaps impeachment?

A president could get in trouble for reading a history textbook aloud. Seriously.

And a relevant tweet:Retweeted Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain):

Its too bad Obama couldn't have made this point but its clear the last Crusade was in 2003, not ~800 years ago: http://t.co/KsWc7Ngzsa

Donald Rumsfeld's holy war: How President Bush's Iraq briefings came with quotes from the BibleChristians aren't to blame?

In the following, Russell Moore, President of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said, "The evil actions that he mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians." Wow, that's roughly 100% wrong.

Why Obama Is Right About Christian Violence

By Jack JenkinsJackson and Limbaugh’s dubious claims to Christianity notwithstanding, the two main assertions underlying most of these arguments are both absurd and, arguably, unChristian. The first—that violence committed in the name of Christ is somehow exempt from criticism because it happened in the past—ignores history and reality. Like it or not, horrendous torture happened during the Inquisition and the era of slavery, both of which were justified using biblical scripture. And the argument that the Crusades—which resulted in the deaths of untold thousands—were only in response to Muslim provocation is highly contested among historians.

More importantly, while these events are long past, these critics are apparently tone deaf to the numerous modern examples of violence perpetrated by people claiming to represent Christ. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a self-professed Christian, launched a horrific assault in Oslo, Norway to defend “Christian Europe,” using an arsenal of weapons to kill 77 people—most of whom were teenagers. In November of last year, suspected Christian terrorist Larry McQuilliams mounted a full-scale attack on Austin, Texas, firing off more than 100 shots in the city before embarking on a botched attempt to burn down the Mexican Consulate. And in central Africa, the Lord’s Resistance Army (which, similar to ISIS, seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments) forcibly recruits child soldiers, terrorizes local villages, and is thought to be responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people in Uganda and the displacement of 1.7 million in the greater region, according to the United Nations.

One wonders if Jackson and others would be so willing to “defend” Christianity’s apparently sinless history to the faces of those 60,000 to 100,000 child soldiers, youngsters who were ripped from their homes, tortured brutally, and forced by the LRA to run needlessly into battle—all ostensibly in the name of Christ.

In addition, the second argument directed at Obama’s statements—that violence in the name of Christ was always met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians—is only true when examined through the lens of several centuries of history. Few senior members of the Catholic church would defend the Crusades today, but they were waged with broad support in their time, and the institution of slavery took centuries to dismantle.More Christian atrocities

The Right-Wing Doesn’t Want to Talk About Christian Atrocities, So Let’s Talk About Christian Atrocities

Tens of thousands of Muslims flee Christian militias in Central African Republic

Comment:  For more on Christian terrorism, see Report Documents Right-Wing Terrorism and The Logical Conclusion of Extremism.

Hypocrisy of free-speech fundamentalists

Mourning the Parisian Journalists Yet Noticing the Hypocrisy

By Rabbi Michael LernerI had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn't take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is.

When right-wing "pro-Israel" fanatics frequently sent me death threats, physically attacked my house and painted on the gates statements about me being "a Nazi" or "a self-hating Jew," and called in bomb threats to Tikkun, the magazine I edit, there was no attention given to this by the media, no cries of "our civilization depends on freedom of the press" or demands to hunt down those involved (the FBI and police received our complaints, but never reported back to us about what they were doing to protect us or find the assailants).And:There is a deeper level in which the discourse seems so misguided. As Tikkun editor-at-large Peter Gabel has pointed out, there is no recognition in the media of the dehumanizing way that so much of the media deals with whoever is the perceived threatening "other" of the day. That media was outraged at the attempt by some North Korean allied group to scare people away from watching a movie ridiculing and then planning to assassinate the current (immoral) ruler of Korea, never wondering how we'd respond if a similar movie had been made ridiculing and planning the assassination of an American president. Similarly, the media has refused to even consider what it would mean to a French Muslim, living among Muslims who are economically marginalized and portrayed as nothing but terrorists, their religious garb banned in public, their religion demeaned, to encounter a humor magazine that ridiculed the one thing that gives them some sense of community and higher purpose, namely Mohammed and the religion he founded.In Solidarity with a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons

By Glenn GreenwaldNor is it the case that threatening violence in response to offensive ideas is the exclusive province of extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam. Terrence McNally’s 1998 play “Corpus Christi,” depicting Jesus as gay, was repeatedly cancelled by theaters due to bomb threats. Larry Flynt was paralyzed by an evangelical white supremacist who objected to Hustler‘s pornographic depiction of inter-racial couples. The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats and needed massive security after they publicly criticized George Bush for the Iraq War, which finally forced them to apologize out of fear. Violence spurred by Jewish and Christian fanaticism is legion, from abortion doctors being murdered to gay bars being bombed to a 45-year-old brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza due in part to the religious belief (common in both the U.S. and Israel) that God decreed they shall own all the land. And that’s all independent of the systematic state violence in the west sustained, at least in part, by religious sectarianism.

The New York Times’ David Brooks today claims that anti-Christian bias is so widespread in America–which has never elected a non-Christian president–that “the University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality.” He forgot to mention that the very same university just terminated its tenure contract with Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza that the university judged to be excessively vituperative of Jewish leaders, and that the journalist Chris Hedges was just disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for the Thought Crime of drawing similarities between Israel and ISIS.

That is a real taboo–a repressed idea–as powerful and absolute as any in the United States, so much so that Brooks won’t even acknowledge its existence. It’s certainly more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing Muslims and Islam, criticism which is so frequently heard in mainstream circles–including the U.S. Congress–that one barely notices it any more.

This underscores the key point: there are all sorts of ways ideas and viewpoints are suppressed in the west. When those demanding publication of these anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the affirmative publication of those ideas as well, I’ll believe the sincerity of their very selective application of free speech principles. One can defend free speech without having to publish, let alone embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted. But if that’s not the case, let’s have equal application of this new principle.As a Muslim, I’m fed up with the hypocrisy of the free speech fundamentalists

The response to the inexcusable murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff has proved that many liberals are guilty of double standards when it comes to giving offence.

By Mehdi HasanIn the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime–not an act of war–perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’”–the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.So many Christian hypocrites

More on the hypocrisy of those who would stand with Charlie:

Vox got no threats for posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, dozens for covering Islamophobia

By Max Fisher and Amanda TaubThough we do enjoy a readership among Muslims inside and outside of the United States, some of whom have not hesitated to express displeasure or worse at our coverage of stories such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, none has seen the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as worth sending an angry email or even an annoyed tweet, much less a threat of violence.

Our coverage of Islamophobia has brought a very different response. Articles decrying anti-Muslim bigotry and attacks on mosques have been met with dozens of threats on email and social media.

The most common states a desire that jihadist militants will murder the offending writer: a recent email hoped that Muslims will "behead you one day" so that "we will never have to read your trash again." Some directly threaten violence themselves, or imply it with statements such as "May you rot in hell."

Others express a desire to murder all Muslims—one simply read "I agree with maher Kill them all"—also often implying the emailed journalist is themselves Muslim. One pledge to attack Vox writers begins, "Fuck you and any cunt who believes in allah."Conservatives' Charlie Hebdo Hypocrisy: 5 Freak-Outs Over 'Blasphemous' Depictions of Christianity

Conservatives are crowing about free speech rights of Charlie Hebdo. What about when Christianity is the butt of the joke?

By Amanda MarcotteRoss Douthat of the New York Times wrote, “If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more.”

Of course, Douthat, realizing his great affection for blasphemy will last only as long as needed to score this political point but wanting to reserve the right to denounce it when Christians are the ones being teased, tried to come up with an elaborate rationalization for why blasphemy is admirable when aimed at Islam but deplorable when the hurt feelings belong to Christians. It all goes to show how thoroughly phony this conservative enthusiasm for robust speech protections and a rowdy public discourse really is, because it will all be abandoned the second their own gods are mocked. Lest there be any doubt about that, here are some of the greatest hits of conservatives demanding censorship of what they believe are blasphemous messages.And:The double standard—brave if you blaspheme Islam, nasty if you mock Christianity—is breathtaking.

While the whole thing taught me that I’m better off as a writer than a campaigner, the larger lesson was that Christian conservatives are humorless and censorious when faced with mockery of their own faith. It’s surreal now to see the American right pose as if they have always supported those willing to tip sacred cows. In reality, they are swift to try to silence those who would ridicule their religious beliefs, or even, as some of these examples show, simply hold their beliefs up for examination. Luckily, Christian conservatives mostly turn to nonviolent means to silence their critics.

But don’t mistake the current enthusiasm for blasphemy for anything but a politically convenient pose. Next time someone mocks the Christian faith, expect all this support for blasphemers to disappear in a puff of smoke.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Charlie Hebdo's Racist Cartoons.

Religion on the way out

Religion may not survive the Internet

There's a reason churches are struggling to maintain membership, and it has nothing to do with Neil deGrasse Tyson

By Valerie TaricoIn all of the frenzy, few seem to give any recognition to the player that I see as the primary hero, or, if you prefer, culprit—and I’m not talking about science populizer and atheist superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson. Then again, maybe I am talking about Tyson in a sense, because in his various viral guises—as a talk show host and tweeter and as the face on scores of smartass Facebook memes—Tyson is an incarnation of the biggest threat that organized religion has ever faced: the internet.

A traditional religion, one built on “right belief,” requires a closed information system. That is why the Catholic Church put an official seal of approval on some ancient texts and banned or burned others. It is why some Bible-believing Christians are forbidden to marry nonbelievers. It is why Quiverfull moms home school their kids from carefully screened text books. It is why, when you get sucked into conversations with your fundamentalist uncle George from Florida, you sometimes wonder if he has some superpower that allows him to magically close down all avenues into his mind. (He does!)

Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas. These behaviors range from memorizing sacred texts to wearing distinctive undergarments to killing infidels. Such defenses worked beautifully during humanity’s infancy. But they weren’t really designed for the current information age.

Tech-savvy mega-churches may have twitter missionaries, and Calvinist cuties may make viral videos about how Jesus worship isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, but that doesn’t change the facts: the free flow of information is really, really bad for the product they are selling. Here are five kinds of web content that are like, well, like electrolysis on religion’s hairy toes.Another article says religion has outlived its usefulness and the Internet is only one force hastening its decline:

The Internet isn’t killing religion—religion is

Instead of asking why people aren’t religiously affiliated anymore, we might ask why they ever were

By Elizabeth DrescherWhat is missed, however, in the churning of this internet-killed-religion yarn is, first of all, that changes in complex phenomena—like being human or practicing religion in institutionalized membership-based groups—cannot be reduced to one factor or even a set of factors, no matter how diverse. Because I was a humanities major (I just had that one statistics class. Twice.), I turn to the novelist Margaret Drabble to explain what I’m getting at here:You can’t learn everything from the laboratory, that’s what he used to say. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, he told us. The whole behaves differently from the parts, and has different properties. That’s what he taught us, and he was right. It’s out of fashion to say these days, when we spend our time scrutinizing the interactions of eukaryotic microbes, but it’s true, nevertheless. It’s still true. (The Sea Lady)More significantly, the trouble with efforts that seek some root cause for what we have come to think of as an increasing decline in religious affiliation but which, when considered across a wider historical time span, turns out to be something of a normalization in affiliation patterns, is that it gets the question backwards.

That is, instead of asking why people aren’t religiously affiliated anymore, we might ask why they ever were. This question, which brings with it questions about what constitutes “religion” and “religious affiliation,” opens enquiry into the social and political construction of religious groups and the pressures borne upon ordinary people, often violently, to attend worship rather than, say, sitting in the park with family and friends enjoying the warmth of the sun, the smell of the grass, and perhaps the otherwise unlanguagable sigh of the human heart in certain moments of connection, contentedness, and wonder as a sweet piper’s tune sings into the air. It allows us, following Talal Asad’s critique of William Cantwell Smith’s conception of “faith,” to consider what elements of human experience are deliberately and incidentally left out of whatever it is we might understand as “religion” in its institutionalized forms, and why. Who is served by the various exclusions and inclusions of institutional religion? To what ends? And who is harmed?

What we might consider, then, with much more nuance and complexity than mere data manipulation can possibly tell us, is whether the idea of religion along with the institutional and ideological structures this idea has sponsored, has begun to run its course in Western culture. At the least, we might look at they ways in which other social platforms—coffee shops, cycling groups, drop-in yoga classes, and, yes, online social networking sites—have begun to reconfigure and redistribute benefits traditionally correlated with (but not necessarily caused by) religion and to mitigate its associated harms (even if also accruing harms of its own).Yet another article addresses the claims in the first two articles:

Christianity’s faith-based freakout: Why atheism makes believers so uncomfortable

Rather than respecting the right of atheists to disbelieve, Christians are constantly forcing them to fake it

By Greta ChristinaReligion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. It’s a bad idea, and can’t stand up on its own. But it can, and does, perpetuate itself through social consent. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion—or pretending to believe in religion—a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told.

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine.

There’s a reason that rates of atheism have been going up as use of the Internet goes up. (According to the MIT Technology Review, the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use—and while correlation certainly doesn’t prove causation, this analysis factors out pretty much every other possible causation.) The Internet has created a massive worldwide forum for atheists to argue about religion, to give evidence against religion, to ask for evidence and arguments supporting religion and point out how ridiculously weak they are. But the Internet has also created a massive, worldwide forum for atheists to simply, you know, exist.

In my research for “Coming Out Atheist,” I read numerous stories of atheists who had stayed religious for years—simply because everyone around them was religious, and they never considered the possibility that someone could be non-religious. But this is becoming less and less common. It’s getting harder and harder to keep atheism a secret. If you’re a teenager in a tiny town in the Bible Belt, you can now find out about atheists. You can talk with atheists. You can argue with atheists. You can learn what atheists think and why they think it. And you can simply learn that atheists exist, and are basically good people who love life and find great meaning in it. And that, just by itself, just by denying consent to your religion, stands a good chance of putting a serious dent in it.Comment:  These analyses apply to other irrational beliefs such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. These beliefs are also on their way out for similar reasons. The world is slowly becoming more liberal and multicultural, and there's nothing conservatives can do to stop it.

For more on the subject, see Conservative Christians in Panic Mode and Conservative Christian Persecution Fantasies.

Cliven Bundy vs. Dann sisters

Several commentators made the obvious connection between Cliven Bundy's white-privileged claim to own his land and America's treatment of the similarly-situated Dann sisters.

How Did I Miss That? Militia: God Gave Land to Settlers, Not Shoshone

By Steve RussellBig news that went on all week was the confrontation between the federal government and the “militia movement” over the removal of cattle belonging to Mormon “pioneer” Cliven Bundy from federal land. Bundy has not paid his grazing fees for 20 years. Why? His ancestors settled those lands in the 19th century. “Time immemorial,” my Cousin Ray Sixkiller pointed out, “means different things to different people.”

The 68-year-old Bundy recognizes no federal authority in the matter. If he owed grazing fees, he claimed they would be owed to the state of Nevada, which entered the United States on Halloween, 1864. Because the Civil War was going on, the Nevada Constitution contained a “paramount allegiance clause,” which is seriously inconvenient for anybody claiming, as Bundy does, a right to ignore the feds.

The year before Nevada was admitted, the US signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley, which recognized the Western Shoshone as owners of the dirt Cliven Bundy is claiming the right to use because of his “pioneer” pedigree. In 1979, the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Shoshone $26 million in compensation for land lost to “settler encroachment” while the federal government looked the other way. Those encroaching settlers would be who Cliven Bundy cites today as originators of his right to graze his cattle.

The Shoshone refused the money. They had not agreed to sell the land. They did not agree that the land should be used for nuclear testing. Carrie and Mary Dann were Shoshone elders who stood up to the abuse. Mary walked on at age 82, in 2005. The 81-year-old Carrie was last arrested in 2007, protesting against the use of Shoshone land for nuclear weapons research.

The Dann Sisters grazed their cattle on land the Bureau of Land Management claimed since 1973, refusing to pay grazing fees based on the Treaty of Ruby Valley, Article VI of the US Constitution, and a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States that found the US to be cheating the Shoshone.

In 1992 and again in 2002, armed BLM posses rounded up the Dann Sisters’ cattle and sold them for grazing fees. The New York Times reported in 2002 that the Dann Sisters had been fined $3 million for “trespass.”

When a BLM posse came to round up Cliven Bundy’s cattle, armed “patriots” rode to the rescue. The BLM got about 400 head of Bundy’s cattle and Bundy got about as many supporters, many of them armed, from as far away as Montana. The Washington Post reported on April 10 that a sign at the entrance to the protest camp read “MILITA SIGHN IN.” Cousin Ray said he hoped their shooting was no better than their spelling.

Protestor Richard Mack, a former Arizona Sheriff, told a Fox News camera that the plan was “to put all the women up at the front. If they are going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers.”

On April 12, the BLM postponed the circus, giving Bundy’s cattle back and leaving Cousin Ray to wonder where all these lovers of law and liberty were when the women up front were Carrie and Mary Dann?

Millionaire Mormon Ranchers Always Get Their Way, Indians Get Off Of Your Land!In the news in the last week has been the story of a downtrodden millionaire rancher who has refused to pay the Bureau of Land Management grazing fees for 20 years. Cliven Bundy refused to pay grazing fees on federal land and invited 1000 of his militia Nazi buddies who were heavily armed to release his confiscated cattle. The Federal government backed down yesterday to a bunch of Neo nazi shit kickers. Add to this menagerie of assholes is that Bundy is claiming his right to continue bilking us out of our money the fact that “my Mormon faith teaches me I have a right to this land.” What a load of shit!

Now contrast this with the treatment of Western Shoshone Tribal members Carrie and Mary Dann in 1998 after grazing cattle on land that was rightfully theirs since 1973 the US government ordered them off of their own land. In 2003 Federal agents with back up from local cowboys swept onto the Dann sisters traditional grazing lands in helicopters, on ATVs, and on horseback they confiscated 504 horses that belonged to the Dann sisters. at one point elder Clifford Dann doused himself with gasoline to stop federal agents to no avail. In the end the Federal government hung a 3 million dollar bill around the Dann sisters necks and kept their horses. Mary Dann passed on in 2005 at the age of 82.
Carrie is still with us. The Western Shoshone land claim was upheld by the United Nations. The United States refuses to acknowledge the treaty.

So here we are in 2014 and white ranchers are still using their faith to steal our land and Indigenous people who have a real and spiritual claim to the land are still being herded, harassed, and intimidated into giving it up. Had Cliven Bundy been an Indian we would be talking about a dead Indian. White millionaires just have an amazing ability to get whatever they want.Never Mind Cliven Bundy: Here’s the Real David vs. Goliath Story Between Ranchers and Feds

Shoshone sisters have battled against the U.S. over land and cattle.

By Evelyn NievesThe kicker to this story is that while the Bureau of Land Management’s fight against the Danns claimed the sisters' herds were overgrazing—and thus harming—the land, much of the land the Danns have fought for has been leased to gold mining companies that have conducted resource-intensive extraction methods.

The land surrounding the Danns' ranch sits atop one of the most significant deposits of gold ever found in the United States. Only a few months after the Danns' horses were first rounded up, Nevada's headlines blared about gold finds in Crescent Valley, at the exact locations where the horses were removed. Most of the world's largest gold mining companies have some interest in the land, which involves using cyanide to extract minuscule amounts of gold from rock. Because the gold dust sits under the water table, it also involves pumping 20,000 to 70,000 gallons of water per minute every day and moving tons of soil and rock, leaving open pits. The extraction methods are so energy-intensive that the production of a single gold ring generates 20 tons of waste land.

Carrie Dann is no Tea Party hero. But she vows to fight until her last breath.

"Right is right," she said in an interview. "And wrong is wrong."Video: Dann Sisters' Battle to Save Their Cattle Is Stark Contrast to That of Cliven Bundy



Nor is this prejudice limited to Indians:

Cliven Bundy and the Tyranny All Around Us

How would the Nevada standoff be different if the rancher were black? American history has already answered that question.

By Ta-Nehisi CoatesI've been laughing my way through the Cliven Bundy fiasco because, as Jamelle Bouie suggests, there may be no better example of racist privilege than the right to flout the government's authority and then back its agents down at gunpoint. Bouie asks, hypothetically, how we'd respond if Bundy were black.

Inasmuch as this is even a question, American history has already answered it (emphasis added):In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder.

In some cases, government officials approved the land takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today. Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi, a major-league baseball spring training facility in Florida ...Coates's position is self-evidently true. Roughly 0% of the gun-totin' far-right "patriots" would rush to defend a black, Latino, or Native rancher from the feds. And if it were a Muslim rancher, forget it!

Then there's this idiocy. Some right-wingers are seriously comparing Bundy the welfare cowboy to Indians:

The Cliven Bundy Standoff: Wounded Knee Revisited?

By Mary W.Cattle became the successor to buffalo in the late 1860s and early 1870s. That was the era when the ancestors of Cliven Bundy settled in what was to become the State of Nevada, and began to graze cattle in what would later be called the Bunkerville Grazing Allotment. The Bundy family made peaceful and productive use of that allotment for more than 120 years, mixing their labor with the land to create original wealth.

Unfortunately, the Bundy family—like the American Indians—had been living on a reservation: They were never allowed to exercise ownership of their grazing “allotment,” in much the same way that Indians were not permitted to have clear title to their lands. The land on which the Bundy family raised cattle was “owned” by the government, and the Bundys were required to pay rent—in the form of grazing fees—for the “privilege” of making productive use of it. The public-land grazing system has been described as “the nation’s most conspicuous and extensive flirtation with socialism”—except, perhaps, for the Indian Reservation System.I responded to this with a tweet:

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
"Bundy Standoff: Wounded Knee Revisited?" More like Trail of Tears revisited. Locals steal land and feds do nothing. http://theresistanceunited.com/2014/04/12/the-cliven-bundy-standoff-wounded-knee-revisited/

Never mind that Bundy's parents bought the ranch in 1948. Whenever they bought it, they never owned more than grazing rights to the Bunkerville allotment. In contrast, the Indians owned the land itself.



Conservatives = hypocrites

More tweets by myself and others show the hypocrisy of Cliven Bundy and his far-right supporters:

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
Bundy says feds can't take the land his ancestors took from the Indians. Because Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and white power.

deneeshka ‏@deneeshka
I am a Native American and I look forward to reclaiming my ancestral lands at #BundyRanch. pic.twitter.com/TR20tduzVq

indigenista ‏@Indigeneesta
BundyRanchers not once acknowledged the #Paiute nation, the real "owners" of the land. #IndigenousNationhood

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
Indians agree with Bundy: Ownership claims of the first inhabitants supersede those of the federal government. Give the land back to them.

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
Bundy gets different treatment from Dann sisters. Feds ordered them off their own land and sent in copters and ATVs.

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
Conservatives hate that the federal gov't owns land. So let's put it in private hands and give it back to the Indians. Win-win for everyone!

BlueCornComics ‏@bluecorncomics
A solution for everyone: Feds give land back to Indians, no more gov't handouts, and ranchers and miners pay full market rates to tribes!

For more on the subject, see Cliven Bundy the Welfare Cowboy.

Cliven Bundy the welfare cowboy

Cliven Bundy's standoff with the Bureau of Land Management says a lot about conservative Christianity, white privilege, and racism in America.

Rancher in land dispute is a bully, not a hero

By Alan O’NeillI have been following the news on the proposed roundup of Cliven Bundy’s cattle that are grazing illegally on federal lands in Gold Butte managed on behalf of the public by the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service.

I am familiar with the situation, as I served as superintendent of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area for the National Park Service from 1987 to 2000. In 1993, we reduced the number of cows that could be grazed on the Bunkerville allotment to 150 because of the emergency listing of the desert tortoise as an endangered species.

Because Bundy refused to remove his cattle to meet the 150 level and ignored repeated requests to do so, his permit was canceled in 1994 and the allotment was closed to grazing.

As the news coverage has reported, Bundy continues to graze his cattle and has refused to pay the BLM a grazing fee. The figure he owes the government exceeds $300,000. The estimate of cattle being grazed illegally since 1994 on the old Bunkerville allotment have ranged from 550 to more than 900.

It is unfathomable to me that 20 years after the Bunkerville allotment was canceled in 1994, we are still wrestling with getting his cattle off the range. And there were issues of overgrazing that allotment before 1994. It is my opinion that the BLM and the Park Service have done everything possible administratively to try to resolve the issue amicably. In addition, there are two federal court rulings upholding the agencies’ position, and the most recent ruling demanded Bundy not physically interfere with any seizure or impoundment operation.

Bundy is a bully who has used his threat of a range war and to do “whatever it takes” to stop the government from impounding his cattle to scare public officials.Fox News’ demented poster boy: Why angry rancher Cliven Bundy is no patriot

The right's new fixation: An angry old white man who thinks freedom means not having to follow the law

By Edwin LyngarBundy has not paid grazing fees in close to 20 years, while the federal government has, with painful, stupid moves, tried to somehow deal with him. Bundy also faced restrictions because he continued to graze cattle on a slice of public land reserved for the endangered desert tortoise. He was invited to talk to Sean Hannity (of course) about the “standoff.”

“We want freedom,” Bundy said. I don’t know what freedom Bundy’s talking about. He does not own the land nor does he even pay the modest fees required to use it. Thousands of ranchers across the West pay fees for their businesses, but Bundy thinks he should get to use public resources to make a personal profit. Cliven Bundy, far from being a patriot, is also clearly a straight-up communist.

Bundy is using the language of freedom, patriotism and outright paranoia to further his business interests. He succeeded wildly in drawing other “patriots” to his slice of contested desert. I don’t know these exact people, but the words and phrases they used were the nursery rhymes of my childhood. I’ve been listening to ignorant people bitch about the federal “gub’met,” since I could crawl, and I’m weary of it. I can’t bear to hear poor people rally to the defense of moneyed interests like mining and ranching, like well-trained, bleating sheep. As tired and silly as I find his language, clearly it worked. He so inflamed the lunatic militia movement, that many rallied to him, often from out of state, with guns and naked threats. They created a real possibility that someone might get killed, so the feds backed down.

It is asinine in our age that an armed group of idiots can thwart reasonable government action. Bundy is not a hero, a victim or innocent in any way. Just think of real injustice of America, like people spending life in jail for marijuana charges. It’s hard to imagine the “militia,” a mostly fat, white and ignorant group, showing up to defend a kid in the inner city who was arrested for no reason. Also think what would happen to you, if you opted not to register your car for 20 years. Bundy exploits the most sickening version of white privilege to justify what amounts to theft.

Cliven Bundy syndrome: Why Christian conservatives think they’re above the law

From Hobby Lobby to the Nevada rancher, members of the far right share a dangerous, anarchic pathology

By Amanda Marcotte[F]or some reason, Bundy’s outrageous theft of services from the taxpayers is not being taken seriously by the right-wing press. As Roy Edroso of Village Voice and Eric Boehlert of Media Matters have chronicled, the conservative response to the whole incident has ranged from minimizing the seriousness of the crime to outright cheering Bundy on in his efforts to use the threat of violence to continue stealing from the taxpayers.

It’s tempting to write this reaction off as a matter of idiocy married to identity politics. Bundy is a white guy in a cowboy hat wielding guns, which reads as “one of us” to many on the right, so they refuse to accept that he’s a bad guy no matter how much he threatens violence against federal officers simply for enforcing a law that applies to everyone. And no doubt that is part of what’s going on here. But really, what’s going on runs deeper than a knee-jerk desire on the part of the right to believe every white guy in a cowboy hat is a good guy. This is the logical extension of a push that’s grown in recent years from conservatives to argue that they, and only they, have special rights to simply disregard any law they don’t want to follow. And unfortunately that’s an argument that may be making headway this year in the Supreme Court.

The past couple of years have seen a surge in conservatives demanding special rights to disobey universally applicable federal laws on the grounds that they don’t believe in them. This argument has largely been treated favorably by right-wing media that would definitely not extend that courtesy to anyone else. The Hobby Lobby case is simply the most prominent. To recap, Hobby Lobby is arguing before the Supreme Court that because they don’t believe certain forms of contraception are allowed by their god, they shouldn’t be required to meet federal minimum standards requiring that contraception for healthcare plans offered to employees as part of their compensation package, even if the employees don’t believe in a birth control-hating god.

It’s alarming to think that Hobby Lobby is arguing that anyone should be able to ignore any law they want just by stating they don’t “believe” in it, but reading between the lines of their lawyer Paul Clemente’s arguments before the Supreme Court, it’s clear they think this right to exempt yourself from federal regulations should be exclusive to Christian conservatives.

Bundy the liar

It goes without saying that Bundy the welfare cowboy has no case. Indeed, he seems to be lying through his teeth:

BREAKING: Proof Cliven Bundy is Lying About ‘Ancestral Claim’ to Grazing Rights (Video)

By John PragerNevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his army of domestic terrorists that call themselves “militias” may claim that his family has been working taxpayer-owned land he has been using for personal gain since 1877, but property records tell a completely different story.

Bundy has claimed pre-emptive rights because of his family’s history on the land. “I’ve lived my lifetime here. My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877. All these rights that I claim, have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water and the access and range improvements,” Bundy said.

However, Clark County property records reveal that Bundy’s parents moved from Bundyville, Arizona and purchased the ranch in 1948 from Raoul and Ruth Leavitt. Water rights were, as Bundy claims, transferred, but only to the ranch–not to the federal land surrounding it. In another blow to the welfare cowboy’s credibility, cattle did not graze on the land until 1954.

The Bureau of Land Management, Bundy’s nemesis, was created in 1946–the same year that Bundy was born, and two years before the family’s purchase of the ranch. However, Bundy won’t let little things like facts stop him! “My rights are before the BLM even existed, but my rights are created by beneficial use. Beneficial use means we created the forage and the water from the time the very first pioneers come here,” Bundy claims.

But hey–who needs “facts” and “reality” when you can focus on the delusion that, as Oathkeeper and Bundy supporter Justin Giles put it, “They are literally treating western United States citizens, ranchers, rural folks like this--are the modern day Indians. We’re being driven off of our lands. We’re being forced into reservations known as cities.”

The “Indians” of which he speaks would be the Paiute, who were forced onto reservations in 1875. They were promised the land that Bundy now inhabits.

Josh Marshall quotes TPM Reader JG:

Smarter Than It Seemed?I grew up in southern Utah, not far from the Bundy ranch standoff--and the stuff going on there turns my stomach. I share Josh's concern about letting the camo crowd scare off the BLM, though it's probably wise in the short term. Here's why:

I've got FB friends who are ranchers, and most of them are pretty right-wing, but even they are rolling their eyes at this guy. They've had conflicts with the feds/BLM over land use issues, and they're way more conservative than me on those issues, but they're really worried that Bundy is going to make things much harder for them in the long run. They're also angry, too, because they pay the grazing fees that Bundy has skipped out on. Bundy will have a crowd of aimless teaparty gun-toters, bored during a midterm election year, that will wave their guns (so to speak) around for a while, but Bundy's situation won't keep that crowd inspired very long. Everyone will be embarrassed about the whole thing eventually. I think it was wise for the BLM to let the Bundy wackos go full wacko for the cameras so the feds could be seen taking the high road for the time being. Bundy won't garner much sympathy for very long. He's a no-nothing Joe the Plumber in a cowboy hat.Comment:  For more on conservative Christians, see Conservative Christians in Panic Mode and Conservative Christian Persecution Fantasies

WBC to picket Alaska Natives

God Hates Alaska Native Culture Says WBC

By Jeanne DevonFred Phelps, the founder of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas is dead and gone, but the institution of intolerance and hatred is still on the march, and headed to Alaska. WBC has a long history of organizing anti-gay protests, and picketing military and other funerals with crude and offensive signs.

Now, Westboro Baptist Church has announced plans to picket the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage on the morning of June 1. Why, you ask?

A news release posted on GodHatesFags.com, replete with Bible quotations, states two reasons for protesting the Alaska Heritage Center.“…you make a religion out of the pagan idolatrous practices of past generations. There is nothing appealing or holy about the “heritage” of the eleven “distinct cultures” or “diverse population” of Alaska. They walked in darkness and served idols of every kind, contrary to the direct commandment to have no gods before God.

“… you fail to give God the glory, instead of the traditions and gods of the past… Stop worshiping dead cultures, man-made idols, and the sinful traditions of past generations. Put the resources into teaching and learning the Bible instead, and warning your neighbor to stop sinning before it’s too late, and he’s sinned away the last day of grace.”Westboro Baptist Church protesters unlikely in Alaska, watchdog says

By Tegan HanlonAs a local group made plans Tuesday to counter-protest a Westboro Baptist Church picket in Anchorage, an expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center said it's unlikely that Westboro protesters will actually show up. Their announcements are often publicity stunts, he said.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the Topeka, Kan. church, known for controversial protests at funerals and other public events, has a long history of scheduling pickets, but actually attends less than half of the events.

"Typically, they will call the local press, get a scary story about these awful people coming to town and not show up," Potok said. "And what sometimes happens is you'll be expecting 50 people and a man and two small children show up."

Westboro Baptist Church has announced two protests in Anchorage over the past three days, one at ChangePoint, a non-denominational church, and the other at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, a nonprofit in Muldoon with a mission to share and preserve Alaska Native culture. Both pickets are planned for Sunday, June 1.'God Hates Native Culture': Westboro Baptist to Picket Alaska Natives

By Vincent SchillingShortly after the announcement of the protest by the WBC, a No Westboro Baptist Protest at our AK Native Heritage Center! Facebook page was created to offset the protest. Though the Facebook page had over 600 members on Monday evening, it had doubled in size by Tuesday afternoon to well over 1,200.

According to the ‘No Westboro’ Facebook pages’ mission statement posted by Donna Willoya:

‘We are uniting as Alaskans to honor and embrace our cultural diversity, to preserve our heritage and to teach future generations the importance of acceptance & respect for all people.’

Willoya also posted in the group that though people may get angry at the WBC members for wanting to protest, she wishes the Native community not to respond with violence and sink to their level.Photos of the Native Culture Center 'God Hates'

Comment:  Last I heard, the WBC called the protest off. Good thing for them, since Natives would've shown them up badly.

But I wonder how this came about. Did the idiots read about Alaska Natives in a hunting magazine or something? Did they decide these must be the last Natives left?

Did anyone tell them hundreds of tribes have been practicing their religions for centuries? It's kind of late to stop their "idolatry." What's next...supporting the Spanish Inquisition against the Jews?

For more on the Westboro Baptist Church, see Pix of Comic-Con 2010.