The growing divide within the American evangelical movement

CBSN looks at the growing split within the evangelical movement between those who take extreme ideological stances and those who try to provide a more unifying message.

Vice News looked at the rise of evangelical churches that echo the conspiracy theories of Q. This has alarmed some evangelical leaders who see this as a dangerous trend. One of them said that it used to be that evangelicals looked for churches that reflected their theology and beliefs about God. But he says that now some are looking for churches that reflect their political ideology. They want to hear their political views affirmed from the pulpit and this has given an opening to some preachers who are willing to go all in on extremist views and thus garner followers.

One thing that immediately strikes you when the camera pans over the congregations of these extreme churches is that they are almost exclusively white.

Another thing is that at one of the churches that is heavily featured in both clips, there is not a mask to be seen in the crowded tent where about a thousand people crowd together to hear the pastor say that he will throw out anyone who wears one. They are practically begging to be an Omicron superspreader source.

Such reckless behavior truly boggles the mind.

The reactionaries are in decline, not ascendant

It is easy to feel a sense of despair at the news these days. The coronavirus seems to once again have defied predictions and infections are on the rise with the new omicron variant. We have ignorant but influential people still discouraging people from taking vaccines that could save their lives. We have a Republican senate, aided by Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema block legislation that would improve the lives of so many people. And we have a US Supreme Court seemingly poised to roll back the right to an abortion and otherwise advance a reactionary right wing agenda.

Rebecca Solnit is one of the most thoughtful writers and analysts and she has come out with an opinion piece that suggests that what we are witnessing is not the rise of a major reactionary movement but the dying gasps of a desperate minority waging a bitter rearguard battle against historical forces that they realize are going to overwhelm them and take away the power they have held for so long.
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The desperate defenses of the January 6th rioters

As I wrote before, so many of the January 6th rioters gleefully posted vivid accounts of what they did on that day on social media that they pretty much eliminated any reasonable legal defense that could be mounted in court. The only option left was to throw themselves at the mercy of the courts, using permutations of “I am really sorry”, “I was stupid”, and “I was misled by Trump and others”. That defense is getting mixed results.
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Journalists should seek to be pariahs

One of the corrupting influences in US journalism lies with people shifting back and forth between the roles of reporter, a talking head pundit, political advisor, and press spokesperson for a public figure or organization. Being a reporter is the hardest job involving having to do real work and research and yet it is likely the least remunerative and has the least visibility. So it should not be surprising that reporters can be lured into those other roles. While they may think that they can remain untainted, it is not easy to maintain the intellectual separation.

In some case, they do not even try that hard to maintain a separation between what they do when working for a media outlet and advising the people they are supposedly covering. A good example of this can be seen in the report released a few days ago that Fox News personalities were privately sending messages to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the January 6th riot expressing alarm at what was going on and calling on him to persuade Donald Trump to call off the mob.
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Live by social media, die by social media

We live in an era when people have the opportunity to broadcast the minutiae of their lives far and wide via social media. It is surprising to me that so many people do not seem to realize that along with the attention they receive, there are also serious pitfalls. In the rush to be in the spotlight and impress their circle of friends and relatives, they seem to lose all sense of judgment. Nowhere was this more evidence on a large scale than in how so many of the people who invaded the Capitol building on January were eager to tell everyone of their exploits.

First of all, they gave the authorities information about their identities that allowed them to be arrested. Secondly, their online posts were effectively confessions of guilt. The best they could hope for was leniency on the grounds that they were too stupid to know that they were breaking the law. But judges are taking their posts into account in determining how harshly to sentence them and they are not amused.
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The Texas abortion law model to be used against guns

The state legislature in Texas developed a too-clever-by-half law to effectively circumvent the constitutional right to abortion as determined in the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade. It said that the state would not enforce the law but allowed ordinary citizens to sue abortion provides and offered them with a $10,000 bounty for doing so. Last week, the US Supreme Court refused to issue a stay of the Texas law while the review process was underway but did allow abortion providers to sue certain Texas officials.
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Cuba’s vaccination production effort pays off

One of the appalling things about the current pandemic is the great inequality in vaccine availability around the globe, highlighting once more how the wealthy nations are able to corner the market on valuable resources. In this case, since many of the companies that are the biggest producers of vaccines are private ones and they seek to make as much money as they can, they have entered into contracts to mostly supply wealthy nations like the US that are able to pay more, while the WHO consortium that sought to provide vaccines to poorer countries through its COVAX program has found it hard to get adequate supplies.
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Escalating cult behavior

I have written before that many of the followers of Donald Trump seem to resemble members of cults. While these cult members seem to be easily persuaded to believe the most bizarre things and even to commit reckless and pointless acts of defiance such as invading and vandalizing the Capitol building on January 6th, they do not seem (at least so far) to exhibit the more extreme forms of cult behavior, such as being willing to take actions on the command of their leader that could lead to their own deaths. One the most extreme examples of such cult behavior was the Jonestown massacre in Guyana where in 1978 over 900 people died, many of them because they took cyanide poison on the command of their leader Jim Jones, that he ordered after his guards killed a visiting US congressman and four of his entourage.
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Cable news is the tail that wags the political news dog

I do not watch TV. That statement requires some explication these days when there are so many ways in which one is surrounded by mass media. What I mean is that I live in too remote an area to receive any over-the-air broadcast network TV channels and I do not subscribe to any cable TV system that gives me access to those channels or to cable channels. I do have a TV that I use to watch streaming videos from various sources, some of which include TV shows that have been broadcast previously on network TV.

So what I mean by saying I do not watch TV is that I do not watch any of the nightly news programs on network TV or the 24/7 cable news channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. And yet, in my surfing of the web, I find myself bombarded by stories that have their origins in cable news. These channels seem to be less about unearthing and reporting actual news and more about generating news about themselves. My impression is not misguided. Jack Shafer says that these cable news networks have a very small audience and yet have an outlandishly disproportionate effect on public discourse and that it is time to cut the cord.
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The flawed US parole system

There is so much that is wrong with the US (in)justice system that one does not know where to start with trying to reform it. From overly-aggressive police departments, over-zealous prosecutors more interested in gaining convictions than justice, and a legal system where one needs good lawyers to get even a shot at justice but many people simply do not have access to them and the public defenders offices, while often endeavoring mightily on behalf of their indigent clients, simply are overwhelmed. And all that is soaked in a deep-rooted racist mentality. Changing all those things requires money and political will to go against the punitive mindset that seems to prevail

But if one were to start with something significant but feasible, it might be with the parole system that in theory enables prisoners to obtain release before completing their sentence provided they have given evidence of good behavior and the promise of not returning to crime. There is one aspect of it, however, that is a problem and that is the requirement that one must admit guilt for the crime before one is eligible for parole at all. This puts those who have been wrongfully convicted because of all the problems listed in the first paragraph, in a bind. If they admit to a crime that they did not do, they may get an early release. But they are forever barred from trying to establish their innocence and also they and their families have to live with the stigma of having committed a crime.
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