The American Right is Scared Shitless

America: Not the Home of the Brave, but of the Scared Shitless

by Thom Hartmann | June 2, 2015 - 10:34am

This week, for the first time in years, everyday Americans can theoretically make a phone call without the government spying on them.

That's because just after midnight Sunday night, Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired.

Section 215, of course, is the part of Patriot Act that the NSA uses to collect the phone records of millions of people.

Lawmakers had known for months that it was going to expire, but thanks to opposition from Rand Paul and a handful of other senators, the Senate was unable to come to deal to extend it and several other key parts of the Patriot Act before a midnight deadline.

This, of course, is a big PR victory for Paul, who's banked his entire presidential campaign on his history of standing up to the surveillance state.

It's still too soon to see, though, whether or not this will have any real, lasting victory for privacy rights.

That's because while Rand Paul got the campaign highlight he wanted when the government began shutting down its bulk metadata collection program, Congress could, in just a matter of days, reauthorize that program with only a few cosmetic changes.

You see, at the same time as Rand Paul was hamming it up for the cameras last night, the Senate voted to take up the so-called USA Freedom Act.

Passed by the House earlier in May, this bill would extend the three parts of the Patriot Act that expired at midnight and make a few minor changes to the NSA's mass surveillance program.

But despite its nice-sounding name, the USA Freedom Act is really just more of the same.

Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee explained why when he came on this program a few weeks ago.

Now, Mitch McConnell will allow Senators to make amendments to the USA Freedom Act, but the only thing that's really going to put the legacy of the Bush years behind us is to let the Patriot Act expire entirely - as parts of it have already done.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen.

Come Tuesday or Wednesday, the Senate will probably pass the USA Freedom Act and the NSA's mass surveillance programs will go on as before, with a few minor changes.

That's because in the 14 years since President Bush signed the Patriot Act into law, US society has fundamentally changed - for the worse.

We're no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; we're the land of the kind-of-free and the home of the scared silly.

The Patriot Act and the post-9/11 terrorism freak-out didn't just radically enhance the power of our intelligence agencies - it also had a huge impact on our culture.

We're now a "see something, say something society," a society that is always on the edge of all-out paranoia.

We're scared to death of terrorism, even though you're statistically more likely to die in a car accident, drown in a bathtub or get struck by lightning than you are to be killed in a terrorist attack.

If someone says the word "terrorism," we'll throw away our freedoms in a second, even if there's no proof that doing so will make us any safer.

Politicians know this, which is why many are making it sound like the apocalypse is going to rain down on us unless we reauthorize the NSA's mass surveillance program.

President Obama is part of the problem.

He supports the USA Freedom Act, and warned in his weekly address Saturday that allowing the Patriot Act to expire would leave America open to attack.

On the other hand, it's been 20 hours since Section 215 expired, and as far as I can tell, the country's still standing.

Which makes sense, because the NSA's mass surveillance program has never been definitively proven to have stopped any terrorist attack whatsoever.

Ever since the scared little men of the Bush administration came to Washington, we've let ourselves be scared by everyone and everything.

It's time for that to stop, and it's time for us to regain the freedoms - and courage - we lost 14 years ago when the Patriot Act first passed.

We're supposed to be the home of the free and the land of the brave.

Let's start acting like it, and let the Patriot Act expire.
_______

ABOUT AUTHOR

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius.www.thomhartmann.com His most recent book, just released, is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It." Other books include: "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

Noam Chomsky: The GOP is ‘No Longer a Normal Political Party’, It’s a ‘Radical Insurgency’

“It’s important to recognize that they are no longer a normal political party."

By Arturo Garcia / Raw Story

December 5, 2015

Prin

MIT professor Noam Chomsky told Truthout that, even if someone like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is elected president, the Republican Party will retain the ability to stifle any attempts to move the US in a more progressive direction for years to come.

“It’s important to recognize that they are no longer a normal political party,” Chomsky said in an interview published on Thursday, adding that “the former [Republican] Party is now a ‘radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics, for interesting reasons that we can’t go into here.”

Chomsky expanded on those reasons in a separate interview with Frontline earlier this year, citing findings from the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

Since Ronald Reagan, the leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilising sectors of the population that have not previously been an organised political force, among them extremist evangelical Christians, now probably the majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding States; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society — though not the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.

Sanders would also face opposition from many Democrats, Chomsky argued, since their policy shifts would not make them more like moderate Republicans. The senator’s best chance of effecting change if elected, the philosopher argued on Thursday, would come from the rise of popular movements which could push him further in his own policies.

“That brings us, I think, to the most important part of the Sanders candidacy,” Chomsky said. “It has mobilized a huge number of people. If those forces can be sustained beyond the election, instead of fading away once the extravaganza is over, they could become the kind of popular force that the country badly needs if it is to deal in a constructive way with the enormous challenges that lie ahead.”

Arturo R. García is the managing editor at Racialicious.com. His work has appeared on GlobalComment.com, the Root and Comment Is Free. Follow him on Twitter at @ABoyNamedArt.

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science -- and Reality

New research shows that conservatives who consider themselves well-informed and educated are also deeper in denial about issues like global warming.

By Chris Mooney / AlterNet

February 22, 2012

Photo Credit: C-SPAN

This essay is adapted from Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, due out in April from Wiley.

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Such is what is known to science--what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might say). But the Pew data showed that humans aren’t as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had cleaved over the facts stated above, like a divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn’t—and if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening matters.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

And most of all, for many liberals.

Let’s face it: We liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it’s an “education problem.”

But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

Indeed, the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.

Tea Party members appear to be the worst of all. In a recent survey by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves—they considered themselves “very well-informed” about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they “do not need any more information” to make up their minds on the issue.

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well-informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study,more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready toargue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and moreresponsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

So now the big question: Are liberals also “smart idiots”?

There’s no doubt that more knowledge—or more political engagement—can produce more bias on either side of the aisle. That’s because it forges a stronger bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a particular body of facts on the other.

But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed “Old Enlightenment reason.” They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did notact like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases—kind of the flipside of the global warming issue--for the following reason. It’s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals “smart idiots” on nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal values--knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but let’s face it: This is not the “smart idiot” effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.

What does all of this mean?

First, these findings are just one small slice an emerging body of science on liberal and conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book. An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people towards liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us.

Nevertheless, this knowledge ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and, frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who has been talking a lot about climate science lately—if only in order to bash it.

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has “facts” to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable—but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum’s argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He’d just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We’d be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

A more scientific understanding of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It’s actually an opportunity to do better—to be more effective and politically successful.

Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade--especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high time to listen to reason.

Sociopathic Fundamentalism: A Clear and Present Danger

Dinesh D'Souza's Sociopathic Fundamentalism.

By The Truth Forum Reporter  

Sunday Sep 19, 2010 4:58 PM EDT

At its core, fundamentalism is an uncontrollable quest for political power. Fundamentalists are individuals who are highly offended when the rights they themselves enjoy are extended to others. To be able to deny others their fundamental human rights, the fundamentalist needs power, lots and lots of it. Most fundamentalists really prefer a dictatorship because it presents them with greater opportunity to practice oppression. In a democracy, because the practice of universal adult suffrage where the rich and poor have only one vote makes it almost impossible to be blatantly oppressive, oppression is carried out in a more nuanced manner and the effort to manipulate and marginalize others requires a lot of creativity. The fundamentalists’ most creative approach is to engage in a lot of religious moralizing to give the appearance of seeking the common good.

This façade of morality confuses the unwary and makes them believe the fundamentalist is fighting their cause, when in reality the fundamentalist is their worst enemy. This is the deceptive manner by which fundamentalists gain the political power they need to carry out their acts of oppression. Dinesh D’Souza, who just wrote a hate piece in Forbes Magazine titled "How Obama Thinks," which is about President Obama’s supposed "anti-colonial roots," is one such fundamentalist, but with a different and darker side.

Dinesh D’Souza is a fundamentalist of a different and more vicious persuasion, and he makes no effort to be nuanced in his promotion of oppression. He is one who is not ashamed to be an oppressor and he makes no effort to hide his love of oppression of those he considers as "lesser" or "other." He loves oppression of others and is proud to admit it. How else does one explain his defense of colonialism which not only victimized Third World countries, but even the great America has been a victim of colonialism, or has Dinesh D’souza forgotten the Revolutionary War? Has he forgotten America’s Declaration of Independence? Does he not understand that the Declaration of Independence means independence from British oppression and colonialism? So in Dinesh D’Souza’s universe, anything anti-colonial is bad, and anything that is African anti-colonialism is even worse. He certainly doesn’t think that Africans deserve any freedom. So in one fell swoop he smears everyone who has ever fought for their freedom from colonialism and oppression, and the list includes America, and manages to denigrate Africa and Africans at the same time.

He accuses Obama of not having the American dream; that his vision does not square with that of the founding fathers. But it is he Dinesh Dsouza who does not subscribe to the American dream of freedom to become all that you can be. It is he who holds to the sick ideal that the colonialism is the greatest good. Has he never heard of Patrick Henry who said, concerning the fight for independence from colonial England, "Give me liberty, or give me death!?" He was a founding father. For an American who is originally a native of India, a nation which experienced some of the worst evils under British colonialism, where Indians were routinely subjected to murders and massacres bordering on genocide, it is extremely difficult to understand his romance with colonialism. As an oppressor, he appears to be of the mindset that his native country’s independence and by implication America’s independence from Britain is a bad thing. It’s a sad day indeed when the oppressed turns oppressor, but oppressors and fundamentalists exist everywhere. They are in all cultures and in every country. Dinesh D’souza ia a third world, third rate oppressor who is eager to demonstrate his love of oppression to his current masters by sanitizing and revising their history of oppression. He obviously has found one such master in Newt Gingrich, who surprise, surprise, happens to wholeheartedly agree with the inane vituperations of Dinesh D’Souza.

In his Forbes article, which took sleaze to a new low, Dinesh D’Souza digs deep into the gutter to "expose" phony connections between President’s Obama’s views on colonialism and those of his (Obama’s) father, whom he hardly knew. He then runs with his phony connections and weaves a mind-bending plot thick with innuendo, untruths and downright lies. Talking about the article on her show, Diane Rehm of NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show said in her Friday News Roundup of September 17, 2010 that, "Nothing has turned my stomach so much in recent years as reading that article." Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post described the article as "scurrilous." The dictionary defines scurrilous as "grossly or obscenely abusive or defamatory," and "using such language as only the license of a buffoon can warrant." Dinesh D’souza is a big buffoon and he has demonstrated his buffoonery by his scurrilous article.

Like his fellow travelers in the fundamentalist circuit, freedom is anathema, especially when sought by those they consider lesser creatures. That is why after the Haiti earthquake, Pat Robertson declared that it was tantamount to making a pact with the Devil for the Haitians to rid themselves of enslavement by the French. It is the very reason why a hate group like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is filing a lawsuit to deny peace-loving Muslims the right to build an interfaith center near ground zero. Only a fundamentalist organization like the ACLJ would subject the judicial process to the peculiar abuse of using the law to deny fellow Americans their fundamental human rights of freedom of association and worship, which includes the freedom to have a center that has already been approved by all relevant and appropriate authorities. What do the fundamentalists really want? If they had the power to do it right now they would intern all peace-loving American Muslims the same way they interned peace-loving Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the reason they are so angry is because they are unable to carry out their acts of oppression. Their actions prove this fact, and this is the very reason that fundamentalists crave power at all costs.

When these conservatives perpetrate their acts of foolishness, it would be nice if the administration could call them out directly once in a while, because when they don’t and instead embark on a campaign to assign blame to the peripheral actors in the dram, it presents an appearance of weakness and fear which emboldens the evildoers. As it was in the case of Shirley Sherrod, when this administration curiously blamed the media for the deeds of Andrew Breitbart, so it is in this case where the administration, once again, is blaming the media, this time Forbes Magazine for the evils of Dinesh D’Souza’s article. Why is Dinesh D’Souza not taken to task for his own article? Why was Andrew Breitbart not take to task for the malicious editing that produced the distorted Shirley Sherrod video? And why have Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich not been called out directly for the evils they have done and continue to do.

It is not the responsibility of the media to fight the administration’s battles. The media cannot be the opponents of any political party. They simply serve as an echo chamber to promote the views that are in the market place. The reason we have two political parties it so that each can promote its own ideas of governance and show the electorate why its own ideas are superior. When one side is assiduously unwilling to do its part, we get the exasperating scenario that currently exists where all we hear is one lone, unopposed viewpoint. That’s the reason the Republicans are running away with victory while remaining the most unattractive political group in the minds of voters. When a president cannot call a spade a spade, something’s wrong. When a president’s instinctive response to the antics of an oppressor is to immediately go into appeasement mode, then something is desperately wrong.

Originally published in the TruthForumReport Blog by The Truth Forum Reporter.

SALON

WEDNESDAY, NOV 4, 2015 02:55 PM EST

The GOP is a neo-Confederate party now: The South and the religious right have devoured the Republicans whole

To understand the insane 2016 campaign, you must understand the Southern, religious, anti-immigrant GOP base

LOU DUBOSE, WASHINGTON SPECTATOR

TOPICS: RACE, REPUBLICANS, THE SOUTH, RELIGIOUS RIGHT, TED CRUZ, DONALD TRUMP, EDITOR'S PICKS,ELECTIONS 2016, NEWS

(Credit: AP/Reuters/Chris Keane/Kevin Lamarque/Patrick Semansky)

When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.”

Maddox was a Democrat and an ardent defender of the Apartheid South, not exactly an American statesman. Yet his defense of Georgia’s prison system turns out to be a perfect metaphor for today’s Republican Party, created when political consultant Kevin Phillips realized that Nixon’s 43.9 percent, added to George Wallace’s 13.5 percent of the popular vote in the 1968 election, was the beginning of a coalition that would ensure a permanent Republican majority in the South. (Phillips has spent the second half of his life atoning for and writing about his Southern Strategy.)

To understand the posturing of the Republican candidates this year, you have to take into account the quality of the inmates––the Southern, conservative, anti-immigrant base that dominates the party Lincoln helped create to confront the nativism and anti-immigration politics of the Democrats and Know Nothings in the 1850s.

The candidates––not their backers and constituency-group leaders––got most of the media attention at last month’s Values Voters Summit in Washington because they are the candidates––and because their pronouncements, which range from deeply disturbing to utterly risible, are newsworthy.

When Ted Cruz implies that if elected, he will kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, that’s news. When Mike Huckabee promises to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to ban abortion with the stroke of a pen, because the unborn are fully fledged citizens of the United States (“None of your daughters and daughters-in-law called you up and said ‘Guess What? I’m going to have a blob of tissue.’”), that’s also news. As is Rick Santorum’s promise to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage “as between a man and a woman.”

As is, I suppose, Donald Trump’s truculent defense of Christmas. “I love Christmas. You go to stores now and you don’t see the word ‘Christmas.’ It says ‘Happy Holidays’ all over. I say ‘where’s Christmas?’ I tell my wife ‘don’t go to those stores!’ I want to see Christmas!”

The inmates

Where’s the market for political discourse of this caliber? It plays particularly with the constituency groups that make up today’s Republican Party.

The Values Voters Summit is an annual production of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins’s non-profit (and tax-exempt) foundation that for decades has been at the center of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT campaigns. During the presidential election cycle, its national and regional events are a magnet for candidates in pursuit of the Republican evangelical base. This year, roughly 2,500 attended the D.C. event.

“You’ve been amazing! And to have such a fantastic room!” Donald Trump said as he wrapped up his 30-minute “speech.” The Don Rickles, Vegas-style sign-off was pitch-perfect for Trump, even if waving his Bible in the air as he closed seemed contrived, and even if he had no idea of the second bananas who opened and closed for him.

Consider the Benham brothers.

Identical twins Jason and David Benham became Christian-right martyrs when the HGTV cable network cancelled their “Flip it Forward” reality show before it went into production.

The network had been careless in vetting its two stars. The twins’ father, the Rev. Flip Benham, is a virulent and confrontational anti-abortion crusader and anti-LGBT activist. The sons have followed in the father’s footsteps.

HGTV, an apolitical home-and-garden network, had been sold on a program that followed the brothers as they bought, remodeled, and flipped houses. Then network executives discovered some of David’s anti-gay advocacy, which might have made selling ads a challenge.

One example was a passage in an article the rowdier of the two twins wrote for a Christian publication:

In the Leviticus passage above it says that death is the consequence for homosexual sin. This is how detestable this type of sin is to God.

Benham did go on to observe that because “homosexual sin is covered by the blood of Jesus,” it will never again be considered a capital offense. But network execs decided that his anti-gay writing and advocacy was a reasonable justification to abort the reality program.

The “firing” catapulted the twins into a new career, their hugely popular two-man show booked by hundreds of Christian event planners. The brothers are handsome, virile, and charismatic. Their act plays off a gently mocking sibling rivalry, quibbling about who was the better player on their high school basketball team in North Carolina, or who is the harder-bodied Cross-X trainer.

On the Values Voter stage, they added to their routine a group of heroes in “the war on religion”––the Oregon couple who owned Sweet Cakes Bakery and refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple; Iowans Rich and Betty Odgaard, who refused to rent their wedding chapel to a same-sex couple; Baronelle Stutzman, the septuagenarian Washington State florist who refused to provide floral arrangements for the same-sex wedding of one of her longtime clients; Kelvin Cochran, a former Atlanta fire chief relieved of his duties after he had published a book in which he described “homosexuality, lesbianism, pederasty, bestiality,” as related forms of “biblically unclean sexual perversion,” et al.

Secular liberals are targeting only Christians, David said.

“I haven’t seen a Muslim baker gettin’ sued yet,”he said. “And I haven’t seen the imams and the clerics getting pressure to marrying gay couples.”

Indeed.

Redemption and the unredeemable

Martyrdom is one powerful Christian theme, redemption another.

Star Parker is a tall, imposing African-American woman given to stylish long braids. She, too, is in demand at Christian and other conservative political events. She has run for Congress, written books, and is a columnist whose work appears in right- wing news outlets.

Parker often prefaces her speeches (actually strident, high-decibel rants), with a short take on her CV: “I’ve been in and out of criminal activity, drug activity, sexual activity, welfare activity, until Christ reached out into my heart to reconcile me.”

Her focus is usually abortion and her performance is as Grand Guignol as political theatre gets. She tells a large Saturday morning crowd gathered in Northwest Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel ballroom that the nation is in a civil war. Committed Christians are the Union Army engaged in a campaign to free the unborn from secular forces that would have them aborted.

She describes in grisly detail excerpts of testimony from the trial of Kermit Gosnell, convicted of first-degree murder for killing viable babies at his West Philadelphia abortion clinic, by cutting their spinal cords with scissors.

“One baby was big enough to walk to the bus stop, and he slashed that little boy’s neck and tossed him in a shoe box,” she says.

There is a description of parts of “47 babies in a freezer that had to be thawed out like a TV dinner.” Then Star moves seamlessly to Planned Parenthood (never in any way associated with Gosnell’s private, for-profit Philadelphia clinic).

“Did Congress pay attention to Gosnell? See if there are any more Gosnells out there? . . . Planned Parenthood is still in business, the taxpayer-subsidized abortion business. And selling baby body parts.”

Owning an enrapt audience, she goes on.

“Homosexuals, now that they are married . . . are going to get their children right out of our foster care system.”

And on.

“Any Christian parent who has their child in one of those cesspools we call public schools is going to receive back a liberal.”

And on.

“A government that wants to retire our seniors through a taxation scheme called Social Security.”

Until I can’t go on and head out to Calvert Avenue to hail a cab.

But this road goes on forever and this party never ends––at this event, at CPAC, at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom gatherings, at hundreds of venues and before tens of thousands of activists across the country, where the religious right, the Tea Party right, and the American Conservative Union, et al. convene.

The Benham Twins, Star Parker, Oliver North on patriotism, Gary Bauer’s account of every execution that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took the oath of office; Congressman Louie Gohmert on the prospects of impeaching Barack Obama.

Until it ends, the neo-Confederate, mostly white, Christian party that Kevin Phillips envisioned in 1968 continues as half of our republic’s two-party system.

This story was originally published by the Washington Spectator

Lou Dubose is editor of the Washington Spectator, and author of "Boy Genius," a political biography of Karl Rove.