Doom doom dooooom

Classes start next week. This week it’s various organizational meetings. Summer is over.

I have to get my syllabi together right away. I’m also the chair of a university committee, so I had to be the bad guy writing to everyone and summoning them to our first administrative meeting of the semester. I apologized. It was not enough.

Now we just wait for the first blizzard.

Creepy weird apocalyptic conspiracy theories about sex

Project 2025 is pure electoral poison, as everyone except the goons at the Heritage Foundation are becoming aware. Kevin Roberts, the guy behind it all, has authored a book to promote it titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, but its release has been delayed to 12 November 2024 — gosh, that’s after the election! I wonder why. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Kevin Roberts is fucking weird, would it?

Media Matters got their grubby progressive hands on a copy.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks.

Dog parks? What’s wrong with dog parks?

On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.

Roberts is a Catholic who is obsessed with reproduction. Ultimately, his opinions seem to be driven by a pathological need to compel everyone else to get pregnant.

He says that having children should not be considered an optional individual choice but a social expectation or a transcendent gift, and describes contraceptive technologies as revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family. He labels reproductive choice methods as a snake strangling the American family.

You’d think that with that insistence on baby-making he’d approve of IVF, but no. You see, IVF gives women the option to not be pregnant at inconvenient times — they’ll waste their god-given fertility by going to college or working outside the home, instead.

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.

So it’s really about controlling women. Abortion and birth control are bad because once upon a time not being able to end an unwanted pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy in the first place protected women, and also kept the men in line.

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

I think you can see why the Republicans want to keep their nefarious agenda in the dark while they’re trying to get elected to office. After they have convinced the citizenry to give them power, then they can reveal the iron boot.

The New Republic has also lucked into getting a copy. They find some nuance in what they’ll do after they’ve got everyone pumping out babies: prayer.

This repopulation will take time, of course. In the meantime, what weapons do we have at our disposal to fight China? I don’t think we will succeed without the return of a practice absolutely antithetical to everything CCP and its Uniparty sympathizers stand for: widespread prominent public prayer.

Yes, that’s right: Prayer is going to be an essential factor in fighting globalization. For Roberts, the path back to economic independence involves putting public prayer

in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.

This appears to be the best strategic policy advice Roberts has to offer, a literal Hail Mary against China.

Again, it’s all about sex, procreation, babies. Everything boils down to banning birth control and abortion, and making everyone get pregnant if they want to have sex. It’s an attitude I associate with a certain kind of creepy, regressive Catholic, the kind of weirdo that Kevin Roberts, and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword to the book) are. They think the only reason someone might oppose their primitive beliefs is if there is some conspiracy theory driving misinformation about their plans. If that’s the case, why hide the book away? Please do announce it everywhere.

Childless societies, Roberts claims, are decadent and nostalgic, but of course it is Roberts who is decadent, with his $675,000 D.C. think-tank salary, and nostalgic, with his beliefs that globalization can be undone if enough people read Xenophon and take Sunday off. He seems to be arguing that it’s possible to undo the twentieth century and recapture the time of Benjamin Franklin and the Boston Tea Party (without all that violence against Catholics, presumably)—a time when the U.S. had a frontier and it was violent and lawless, a time when having many children was a necessity because several would likely die young from poverty or inadequate health care.

But Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones. Surprising literally no one, George Soros is repeatedly invoked, usually as the puppet master behind soft on crime California district attorneys like George Gascón and Chesa Boudin.

I think the Democrats are on the right track. These people are out of touch, bizarrely ideological, and just plain weird. Not amusingly idiosyncratically weird, but nasty creepy weird.

Sighted in Morris

Assholes like to advertise.

You’re missing out on the ambience, though. This gomer had left his truck running in the parking lot, and he had done something to his muffler so the engine was roaring and grumbling while idling.

In case you can’t read his window sticker:

Oh, simple farmers. The people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know…

The first crack in Tim Walz’s perfection appears

Uh-oh. You knew that somewhere in the next few months the frantic digging for dirt on Harris/Walz would strike gold, and boy, have they discovered some horrific facts about Walz.

First of all, he’s a Christian. Crap. When will we get an atheist/satanist vice president?*

Secondly, he’s a Minnesota Lutheran. I know that sect well, it’s the one I was brought up in, although fortunately, it didn’t take. It probably won’t hurt his campaign with the general public, though.

And then, the real horror show: Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy and Blasphemy. The news article exposes an unbelievably foul doctrine in which Walz has been soaking for his entire lifetime. This website has been documenting the appalling beliefs of his church.

Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul, MN, is a trainwreck of a congregation. Led by impastor Jen Rome, they are an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregation that exemplifies all the most heretical parts of the denomination. Notably, a recent article by RNS identified this as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s (who is Kamala Harris’ radical Vice President pick) denomination and parish.

Some of the ELCA’s greatest hits include:
ELCA Praises and Platforms Lutheran Pastrix Who Attended Pride Parade in the Nude
ELCA Publishes Book For Teens Saying Porn Can Be ‘silly fun’ and ‘safe way to explore your sexuality’
ELCA Releases Hilariously Woke DEI Recommendations For their Denomination
ELCA Publishes Book Encouraging ‘Queer Children’ to Ignore and ‘Limit Contact’ with Non-Affirming Parents
ELCA Church Hosts ‘Queer Nativity Play’, Featuring Mary and Joseph As Two Catfighting Lesbians
ELCA Considers Expelling all Conservative, Anti-LGBTQ Pastors from their Midst
Leader of ELCA Goes Off On Jesus in Sermon, Calling Him ‘Mean’, Troubling, and Even a Little Racist
ELCA Church Recites Blasphemous ‘Sparkle Creed’ + ‘I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural’

OMG. A liberal church. When was the last time you heard of one of those?

They then list the priorities of this church, each one like a brutal slap to the face of ‘normal’ Americans everywhere.

The church, which checks off all the usual pro-choice/ pro-LGBTQ boxes, uses the “Inclusive Bible” for all scripture readings and say they are committed to:

  • Antiracism work, de-centering whiteness, and making reparations for race violence
  • LGBTQIA+ affirmation and making a safe space for people of all genders and orientations
  • Gender equity and ensuring that the voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals are amplified
  • Accessible spaces that all bodies can navigate with ease
  • A planet we can thrive in for many generations to come, including supporting efforts to uplift and protect indigenous care of the land

Stop it, stop it, stop it. We staunch atheists can’t stand the thought of a Christian congregation supporting the same stuff we atheists and humanists do. What will we complain about if churches are all like that?

Well, I guess we’ll still have the hatemongers at that Protestia website to oppose.

*I am aware that we had an atheist/satanist president already, in 2016.

Oddments

These are just a few little things I spotted and thought I’d bring to your attention.


I don’t usually mention Laura Ingraham around here, but when I do, it’s because she said something remarkably stupid.

If you know Minnesota, and I know it well, especially Milwaukee, it’s changed. It’s never recovered from 2020. It’s not the same place. And Tim Walz was empathizing with all the DEI initiatives that were swirling about the controversies.

Somebody who knows Minnesota well ought to know that Milwaukee is in Wisconsin.

I appreciate the sentiment and the spectacular sideburns, but no, I can’t listen to Nick Offerman sing this song a second time.

The two kinds of weird, illustrated.

Also weird: this is what has the Republicans upset:

Weird.

This is not weird, this is straight up normal Minnesota.

Rep. Tim Walz won the Minnesota congressional delegation’s annual hotdish contest for the second year in a row. The Democrat’s blend of bacon, ground turkey and other ingredients was declared the winner. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., started the contest four years ago.

Walz’s winning “Turkey Trot Tater-Tot Hotdish” recipe:

You’ll have to follow the link to get the actual recipe. It looks good, but it’s definitely not vegetarian. I guess turkey is not meat, but bacon is.

How bad could Republican control be?

Donald Trump denies knowing anything about Project 2025, or the author, Kevin Roberts. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he says.


Here he is sharing a private flight with him in 2022. They were on their way to a Heritage Foundation conference on their policies, where Trump delivered (no doubt in a rambling incoherent way) the keynote speech. What do you think? Are Trump’s memory and general cognitive facilities gone, or is he lying, or both?

If you think Project 2025 is bad, it’s only the first step in a rising fundamentalist movement. NPR had a journalist follow a Christian nationalist organization for a year, and it’s as horrifying as you can imagine. Even worse, their journalist was Jewish — he had to listen to joyful, polite hatred for all that time.

The reporter opens the story with a conversation with Gabe Rench, Idaho fundamentalist.

“You said it would probably take a long time, but that you would like to see only Christians be able to run for office. So if you’re Jewish, you’re Muslim, you’re atheist, certainly if I had you right, you said that yes, you would support eventually them not being allowed to run for office.”
That’s right, I did say that. I think that the Christian faith is the ideal moral doctrine for a thriving society, and the farther you get from that the more in chaos we descend. The only way to maintain that, one of the ways to maintain that, is you have to have people running for office who believe that, or you’re going to get back in that chaotic decline.
“I tell you straight up, as a Jewish American, I hear that, that I can’t run for office, other non-Christians can’t, I have to admit that’s a little terrifying to me, because to me that means a fundamental freedom of mind, in this theoretical world, is gone.”
I mean, you’re saying that in a country where you’re experiencing all these immense freedoms that was built on the Christian faith, so…
“But where I can’t run for office!”
Um, yeah, because your worldview is not good for society. You’re unique in the sense that your problem is just that you refuse to believe that Jesus is Messiah. Whereas you get a lot right, but you get the key thing wrong.

The interview was at the Fight Laugh Feast conference, held at the Ark Encounter, of course. If you’ve noticed that Ken Ham has become increasingly politically strident, this is where his heinous worldview is being fed, among a community of the most regressive, most hateful (but joyful about it) people in the country. They want to repeal the 19th amendment. It’s not just atheists and Jews and Muslims who will lose rights, they want to deny women any rights, while teaching that the world was created in six days.

Creation in six days. A gigantic floating zoo, with giraffes sticking their heads out the windows, burning bushes, talking donkeys, dragons, unicorns, resurrection from the dead, yeah, we believe all of it. We are not embarrassed by any of it, says Toby Sumpter.

They want total theocratic control, in the name of a gemisch of stupid religious myths. Another speaker, Stephen Wolfe, says Atheists would be less free, because you wouldn’t want an atheist to be in charge of an institution, they would be suppressed. Government institution or public school or even like you may not want your CEO of a business to be an atheist. We do this all the time with social dogma. If someone has a view that’s against social dogma, we tend to think that should be suppressed, often with social harms to that person. I think atheism should be one of those things.

Stephen Wolfe is the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism (it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. I guess I’m going to have to read it — know your enemy and all that.)

Yeah, the odious Doug Wilson was also at this conference.

If we have another Trump presidency, these are the people who would be running the government, you know. If you already have a nebulous dread of the consequences of Republican control, know this: it would be far, far worse than you dream.