APRIL 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. The Texas State Legislature. The Texas secretary of state’s recent effort to target non-citizens for voting illegally was a giant mess—of 95,000 names flagged as non-citizens who had registered to vote, it turned out that thousands had become citizens before registering, and were doing absolutely nothing wrong. The state faces lawsuits over the effort to demonize immigrants, but that’s not stopping Texas Republicans from doubling down. Two bills in the Texas state Senate would force local voter registrars to strip their voting rolls of everyone who had at any point said they weren’t a citizen.

Under the Republican bills, people who had recently become citizens and registered to vote—as is their right—would have that right taken away without being notified so that they could set things straight. And voter registrars who failed to kick a group of mostly legal voters off the rolls would face penalties and possible removal from office.

Not that we needed any further evidence of how much Republicans want to suppress voting, but wow. Immediately after a list of supposed illegal voters was shown to be overwhelmingly a list of legal voters, Republicans are moving to use the same standard to disenfranchise voters without warning or recourse. They’re evil, they’re desperate … and they might prevent a lot of people from voting.

2. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  Damn the children, full speed ahead! Since DeVos became the education secretary under Donald Trump, she has done what most conservative billionaires do: She’s asked for budget cuts to education while trying to siphon money off and into charter schools and other private-education operations. Unlike many previous conservative education secretaries, however, DeVos is an ignorant billionaire with only the faintest grasp of reality and possibly only an eighth-grade reading comprehension level.

DeVos has asked for budget cuts that would reduce federal investment in education by 10 percent—an enormous amount of money not going toward educating our children. Check out one of the bananas highlights of DeVos’ 12-page-defense to Congress of the budget cuts. She claims:

There is no evidence that the Federal taxpayer investments in existing professional development programs or class-size reduction have meaningfully improved student outcomes. In fact, students may be better served by being in larger classes, if by hiring fewer teachers, a district or state can better compensate those who have demonstrated high ability and outstanding results. [Bold text is mine.]

Googling the terms “reduced class size education” or even “class size education” brings up all kinds of evidence that reduced class sizes are beneficial for students’ education. The pathetic rhetorical trick here is putting the “no evidence” claim next to the phrase “federal taxpayer investments in existing professional development programs,” which probably means her department hasn’t actually studied it. If you don’t know, no one can say you lied, I guess?

DeVos is actually arguing for more income inequality. Create fewer positions and strata and just pay a select few more money. But most importantly, don’t touch any of our billionaire money—let us trickle down a few schillings when we feel benevolent. It’s the fundamental problem with this kind of anti-intellectual Ayn Rand-driven thinking. The belief is that there are only a few people who are exceptional; all others are simply numbers to be used for industry.

The entire budget piece reads like a seventh-grade report where the assignment was to cut things out to reduce your bottom-line number, and you just had to make shit up to fulfill that requirement. In the end, everything being cut is then magically going to be handled by “local, State, and private resources.”

In DeVos’ new suggested budget, cuts to education mean trimming federal expenditures on things like the Special Olympics. Even if you are a piece of worthless detritus like Betsy DeVos, can you not even foresee the problematic optics of being so petty? No, ignorant, heartless billionaires like DeVos and Donald Trump have no shame.

3. Fox host Lou Dobbs. You might presume that the Fox Business network is, ostensibly, about "business." In practice the network exists as another avenue for praising Dear Leader and raising alarm about his conspiring enemies, and so on and so forth. This month Trump-favorite network host Dobbs launched into an absolute froth about how unchecked immigration on the southern border is going to lead "tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths."

Obviously, this is the sort of incoherent rage-fueled spittle that makes up much of white supremacist and neo-Nazi propaganda efforts against immigration. It tosses aside subtlety in favor of apocalyptic panic. The immigrants (southern only, mind you) are coming to kill us all—we are always only months away from a predicted collapse of civilization caused by too many non-white people in your town or on your block. It is transparently racist propaganda.

It should be noted that these white supremacist conspiracy theories aren’t new and aren’t out of character for Lou Dobbs. When bombs were sent through the mail to a laundry list of Trump’s perceived enemies, Dobbs not only scoffed at the threat, but suggested it was a story planted to distract from “left-wing driven” immigrant caravans. This guy is a fascist piece of work.

4. Former House Member (R-Minn.) and Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann. One of the most unique -- and hard to grasp -- phenomena of the Trump era is the solid and unwavering support he has enjoyed from evangelical Christians. Bachmann, the self-styled evangelical, said in an interview this month with a Christian conservative radio show called “Understanding These Times:”

"[Trump] is highly biblical, and I would say to your listeners, we will in all likelihood never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetime. So we need to be not only praying for him, we need to support him, in my opinion, in every possible way that we can."

Bachmann, who was one of Trump’s evangelical advisers during his 2016 campaign, is far from the first prominent evangelical leader to speak of Trump in such terms. Soon after Trump's election in 2016, pastor Franklin Graham, the son of the late Billy Graham, explained it this way, "Now people say, 'Well, Frank, but how can you defend him, when he's lived such a sordid life? I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.”

It's not just the leaders of the evangelical movement who back Trump. In 2016, according to exit polling, the twice-divorced man of God won 80% of the vote among those who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians.

Let's start with this: It's very hard to quantify what Bachmann meant in describing Trump as "highly biblical." Does that mean she believes him to be governing with the Bible as a sort of north star? That Trump is the platonic ideal of what the Bible wants in a leader? Or simply that Trump is a deeply religious person? Bachmann's comments about Trump's faith immediately followed a portion of the interview where she praised his military ban on transgender personnel, explaining that "he has stood up where most Republicans wouldn't dare to stand up.

Actually, when evangelicals call Trump “biblical,” they are often talking about his policies on issues like Israel and abortion, rather than personal morality. Plenty of Bible figures had big moral failings but were considered godly overall.

Trump told moderator Frank Luntz during a Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July 2015 that he was a Presbyterian, adding: "And I go to church and I love God and I love my church."

Well he’s not a regular church-goer. He usually spends Sundays when in Washington at his golf club in Virginia, He and first lady Melania did attend church in mid-March, but the last time the President went to church before that was on Christmas Eve, according to the Washington Examiner., "although he often prays with faith leaders at the White House and with spiritual adviser Paula White, an evangelical minister from Florida."

And although Trump has repeatedly said that the Bible is his favorite book (his own "The Art of the Deal" is No. 2), he was unable (or unwilling?) to name his favorite verse during an interview with Bloomberg in 2015. "I wouldn't want to get into it," he said, "Because to me, that's very personal. The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics."

The way Trump speaks about core tenets of Christianity is also, um, not exactly a convincing testament to his faith.  In that July 2015 forum, Luntz asked Trump whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness. "I am not sure I have," Trump responded. "I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don't think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."

But every visible sign -- from the language he uses to his personal life, to his well-documented adultery, to his seeming lack of familiarity with the Bible -- suggest that Bachmann and her fellow evangelicals are faking it until Trump makes it on religion. He has shown little interest in the basic elements of his faith -- whether in politics or in his private life. And even if Trump does have a private faith that he never talks about, the idea of him as "highly biblical' is ludicrous.

5. House Republicans. House Republicans are strongly hinting to state officials that they should stonewall the Oversight Committee’s investigation into voter suppression. A letter signed by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and other Republicans claims that the investigation raises “serious federalism concerns” and is “partisan.” Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee chair, responded forcefully, saying that “With a Democratic President, there was no allegation too small to investigate, but now that Donald Trump is in the White House, there is apparently no scandal too big to ignore.”

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, the chair of the civil rights subcommittee carrying out the investigations into voter suppression in Kansas, Texas, and Georgia, likewise pushed back, citing a “solemn duty” to investigate “state-based assaults on popular democracy like the reported purges of hundreds of thousands of voters and the relocation of municipal polling places outside of municipal boundaries.” And that solemn duty is absolutely within the committee’s rights, Raskin said: “It is obviously within our power under the Supremacy Clause and the Bill of Rights to conduct constitutional oversight in order to protect voters’ rights in the states, resistance by partisan state officials notwithstanding.”

Stonewalling congressional investigations on anything that might harm President Trump or the Republican Party has become the GOP’s stock-in-trade. Quite a turnabout from their investigation lust when Republicans controlled both houses of the Congress. The hypocrisy is sickening.

6. Fox New Pundit Tucker Carlson. One of the important ways that the white nationalist movement—its ideas, its agenda, its talking points—has spread in recent years has been through mainstream right-wing pundits regurgitating its propaganda and its twisted, ahistorical, and non-factual perspectives. So it’s not in the least surprising that even as the movement’s toxic effects begin to spread and manifest themselves, especially in the horrific violence it inevitably engenders, many of those same voices that enabled the spread of white nationalism are now busily proclaiming it a nonissue, an inconsequential matter involving just a tiny handful of individuals.

Particularly Tucker Carlson.

Mind you, Carlson already has a remarkable record of dabbling increasingly in white supremacist rhetoric dating back to 2006, including recently unearthed recordings of his ramblings on radio. His greatest hits include a regurgitation of neo-Nazi propaganda about “white genocide” in Africa and his strong endorsement of the white nationalist website, VDare (which is one of his loudest supporters).

After this month’s congressional hearings on hate crimes and white nationalism, Carlson went more than on the offensive—he went completely over the top. White nationalism, he claimed, isn’t really on the rise. It’s in your imaginations. It’s really just a boogeyman whipped up by Democrats to scare people. The very act of calling out white nationalism, according to Carlson, is a racist attack on white people.

He extended his rant:

“What happens when you could no longer denounce your political opponents as Russian spies? This is a major problem in the Democratic Party right now but they have a solution: You just call them white nationalists instead,” Carlson said on his show. “It's every bit as stupid and slanderous, and it's even more effective in shutting them up.”

He ranted on: “Nobody likes racists, nobody wants to be called a racist, the Left knows that, so they use the word as a cudgel to beat their political opponents into submission and have their way…. They have done this so often and for so many years that over time with the word "racist" has lost a lot of power. It is dulled from overuse. The Left needs a new attack line, a new way to make you shut up and obey. Now, they found one. Watch former Georgia politician Stacey Abrams deploy it against White House adviser Stephen Miller....You could live your entire life here without running into a white nationalist. No matter what they tell you, this is a remarkably kind and decent country. . .Attacking people for their race is exactly how you destroy a country. That's what Democrats are doing. They know that they are doing it, it's obvious they just don't care.”

Trump, like Carlson and many Republican faithful, has minimized the presence of white nationalists. After the Christchurch attacks, he opined to the press that he didn’t see white nationalism as a “rising threat” globally: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”

It’s difficult to get a handle on just how large the numbers of identifiable white nationalists have grown to be both in the United States and globally, but Charlottesville demonstrated that they have real numerical strength and the ability to inflict real harm. Experts who have grappled with the problem estimate, from internet traffic numbers alone, that participants number in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, if not millions.

As CNN noted, differing opinions on how to handle white nationalism falls heavily along partisan lines. A resent Morning Consult poll found that, among white voters, only 16 percent of Republicans consider it to be a significant threat or problem, while 60 percent of Democrats do consider it a looming threat. However, only 37 percent of the general population consider white nationalism a serious problem.
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And the winner is:

Wow! What a month. With so many worthy IGGY candidates, it’s hard to choose a winner. This said, I have to go with Michelle Bachmann. We will in all likelihood never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetime? God help us.