All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.
This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.
The Regressives (aka the Pedo Party) need to go away. They are holding back humanity.
If Talarico doesn’t win due to the scum-sucking pieces of shit cheating, at least he can do some damage.
As a Texan, I’ll believe it when I see it. We have a “puppies for everyone vs diarrhea forever” situation going and it’s a fucking TOSSUP!
What I really hate in our politics is when you have loads of situations like this in virtually every election cycle, and lots of basic, low-info assholes will proclaim bOtHsIdeStHeSaMe in close elections like this.
For extra irritant points, they think they are soooper dooper insightful and Above It All ™ if they say it’s a choice between a Giant Douche or a Turd Sandwich. These are the kind of apes that will smugly not vote, and then proudly point out that nothing changes for the better when the normal human being is not put into office. As if letting Republicans win proves this thesis they think they came up with themselves…
I have a feeling some of these assholes are either too stupid or cowardly to actually pick a side, and don’t want to look dumb, so take a stupid copout. I’m sure at least a few are Republicans that are savvy enough to know that Republicans are not exactly liked in mixed company, and so pull the bothsiderest card when politics come up, then still vote Republican.
I’d love to see lasting damage done to conservatives and their party - damage that lasts for generations.
Prior to the Great Depression three Republicans repeatedly cut tax cuts for the wealthy, reduced government regulation, and made corporations a driving force in the government. (Sound familiar?) It took 20 years for another Republican to be elected and almost 50 years if you exclude Eisenhower. IMO Trump is going to cause another depression and for many Americans that depression has already begun. Maybe people remember this, but who am I kidding?
I’m Gen X, and I remember hearing older generations from the working class - and the very poor part of it, no less - bitching about FDR, comparing him to a dictator, saying he was a Communist, etc…and these motherfuckers almost surely had their lives improved by FDR.
My parents were boomers and would overhear this kind of thing (usually with lots of colorful language not really meant for kids) and when I was asking what they were talking about, they would just shake their heads and I could tell they were quite pissed about all of the stupidity they had to wade through daily. We lived in the rust belt and in a very red area.
And that’s all pre-hate radio, pre-Faux News. And wayyyyy before shit platforms like Xitter and Facebook and Nextdoor…somehow, I doubt these types will learn much of anything.
Nextdoor drives me nuts. I see people posting ChatGPT-generated menu poster things with not-food images in them and some folks just slurping it up despite things like when there’s 5 sides listed, and because 2 of them are potato it ends up scrambling them into one gross object (raw/boiled fry-shaped potato sprinkled with paprika, mashing up ‘potato salad’ and ‘french fries’).
Or ‘chicken’ that is Ribbed For Your Pleasure, or chicken where every hair pore is toasted so that it looks simultaneously burnt and raw.
I guess I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing that.
When I bother to look into Nextdoor - it seems my feed is filled with Karens upset about kids and their e-bikes, lots of reactionary bullshit that seems to revolve around water restrictions - “why can’t I have a lush green yard full of a non-native grass when they are building apartment high-rises in Denver?! That’s obviously where all the water is going!”
Lots of people that refuse to accept the idea that what they assumed is some kind of eternal “way of life” is itself something that was socially engineered - everything from lush green grass of a species that is non-native to the high desert, to eating loads of meat for three meals a day, as well as unwalkable neighborhoods miles and miles from a city center with no viable public transit…I think because Nextdoor is kind of rooted in the idea of the physical space people occupy that’s why this seems to come to the fore.
The very idea of imagining changes for the better seems to be antithetical; it’s more about preserving all the systems that are currently in place, as if they have been in place for centuries instead of decades, no matter how stupid and myopic they are.
I guess I haven’t seen the AI slop. So far, it’s all human-generated.
The GOP needs to have lasting damage done to it and democrats need to get their shit together.
You can’t follow teachings of Jesus and be a Republican.
Christ said to pay your taxes, that hoarding wealth is a sin, and he flipped shit (and tables) over the commercialization of faith in the temple.
He threatens Hell one time (Matthew 25), and it’s for the mistreatment of the poor, hungry, sick, imprisoned, and foreigners.
What did Jesus say about the (ubiquitous at the time) institution of slavery?
Spoiler: not a single thing.
He threatens Hell one time (Matthew 25), and it’s for the mistreatment of the poor, hungry, sick, imprisoned, and foreigners.
Mistreat your slaves all you want (within the specific rules outlined in the Old Testament, of course e.g. Exodus 21, Leviticus 25). That includes literally raping your slaves and enslaving the offspring.
“MLK never held a speech defending trans rights, therefore he was a bigot who hated trans people.”
Its absolutely insane to me that anyone could use the bible as a moral guidepost. Shits depraved in there. Remember that time that god was like ‘its totally okay if I murder your family if i replace them with more fuckable people later’?
My parents are very strong, theologically conservative Christians and vote Republican. I say “vote Republican” because they’re not invested in the machinery and drama around Republican politics. They don’t attend conventions or rallys. They don’t watch Fox new or follow the 24 hour news cycle. They’re not at all wealthy but are comfortable (through frugal living) and they take advantage of public programs. They are essentially single-issue voters - abortion. I’m 95% sure that if the parties magically switched positions and Democrats were pro-life and Republican pro-choice, my parents would start voting Democrat.
The Republicans cause more abortions because they don’t do anything to fix the problem sooner. No sex Ed. No contraception. Nothing to allow labor to have stable home lives with financial security. Voting Republican to minimize abortion is counter productive.
The Republicans’ entire existence is due to 2 single-issue voting groups. Pro-Life and Pro-gun.
As someone who, unfortunately, needs to interact with a lot of American “Christians”, it cannot be understated how little of Christ’s own words are spoken in most Protestant churches.
Years of going to church with my wife’s family and I’ve heard Romans or Timothy 2 dozens of times but I can’t remember the last time I heard anything from the gospels that were actually Jesus’ words vice an apostle.
Sunday school is worse. Kids learn Old testament -> brief synopsis of Jesus, mostly John (should be obvious by now why) -> and then wrote memorize Paul.
Christians in America generally avoid Christ as much as possible.
I remember Robert Anton Wilson, who grew up Catholic, musing about how they should probably be called Paulians. Man, did that hit home with my experience.
I grew up xtian (from a liberal tradition of xtianity) and when I started hearing how other kids that were also xtian talking about certain issues, as early as maybe third or fourth grade I started to understand that there are vastly different interpretations of what that means.
I read the NT at a rather early age, slogged through the OT later, 2x for both of them (although I admit to skimming Numbers) and that did a lot to generally give me a great distance from all of it.
When hard core wingers talk about “the bible”, I often get the sense they have never read anything but hand-selected passages spoon-fed to them. It is especially wild to notice that when I talk about “red letter xtians” around them they often get a look of confusion. Before the term was concocted, though, even as an adolescent, when I’d ask people if what they were espousing was something that was written in red, they’d be confused. Which is strange, since quite a few bibles I’ve seen have Jesus’ words in red…
When this same batch of illiterates advocate for “teaching the bible”, part of me wants to say - yes, let’s do that, but read the entire thing and have class discussions after each assigned reading.
No special guidance, though, from certain beliefs. No apologetics applied to “explain” all the contradictions with logic, math, science and ethics. Start to finish, baby, even if it takes a few years to do it.
See how long that lasts, LOL.
Cover-to-covering the bible was a wild ride which I did later in life. My wife’s family are all “Christian” and it was a treat to discover none of them had ever actually… Read it.
I see this mainly in Protestantism. Anecdotally, it seems there is a bigger emphasis on textual knowledge in the “high churches”.
I doubt it but I hope so. And I think it’s also crucial that these Christians don’t push the party to embrace forcing everyone to follow their rules.
But the headline of an episode of evangelical podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey’s show was perhaps the most inflammatory: “James Talarico is More Demonic Than You Think.” Stuckey, who has attacked empathy as “toxic,” warned viewers and listeners that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Satan looks good. He sounds good.” Talarico, she said, is “evil disguised as goodness.”
Or, your mythical satan might use a cunt named Allie Beth as a mouthpiece.
As long as there are humans there will be the equivalent of the GOP. There are always backwards, selfish, hateful people.
Lasting damage is what we want. Too bad this is just another opinion piece and not news. Kinda like polls telling you what you want to hear until they’ve been proven false. Ignore the bullshit on both sides and vote like you’ve never voted before.
Don’t threaten me with a good time. If he can win those idiots over, I could see him becoming president at some point, which would be great if he is dismantling the toxic Christian nationalism that has plagued the USA forever.
Just look at how the older cons go on about Jimmy Carter for your answer.
Jimmy Carter wore his xtianity on his sleeve, and as far as walking the walk he was probably the closest thing as far as Presidents go and yet…all the evangelicals could not flee fast enough to the Republicans later on. And it was mostly about white flight xtian schools.
I hope I’m wrong when it comes to how it might play out for Talarico. But an early warning might be how these right-wing freaks are butthurt and very keen on insisting that their god must have a penis.
https://www.salon.com/2025/01/09/how-jimmy-carters-so-called-betrayal-of-evangelicals-led-to-maga/
Hard as it may be to believe, Carter won the majority of evangelical voters in 1976. Being a white evangelical Christian from the South, he read to many as one of theirs. Things shifted in 1978, however, over an issue that seems obscure now, but was a big deal to white evangelicals at the time: school desegregation.
The thing is, if Hell exists, it will be filled to the brim with Evangelical “Christians”. It’s like their pastors never told them that asking for forgiveness doesn’t matter if you continue the behavior.
GOP is doing lasting damage to the GOP
This is exactly what I’ve been saying since Talarico came on the scene. The voters are there if he can pierce the bubble and reach them, but that’s the hardest part. That’s exactly why his interview with Kimmel is on YouTube instead of regular cable.
Many of the kinds of people he’s appealing to don’t follow politics at all. They vote R because they perceive the people around them to be doing it too. He doesn’t need to convince all Christians in Texas to vote for him. He just needs to get some of them having the conversation. That is enough to shake things up in this election.
If he manages to make his case in a compelling enough way to reach voters in other states then the GOP is absolutely fucked. Low information Christian voters are the foundation of the party. There aren’t enough Nazis in America to replace them if the GOP loses a double digit percentage of them.
This is wishful thinking. Evangelicals have been aware of liberal Christian churches forever, and they hate them more than anything.
Evangelicals aren’t a large enough fraction, they’re just loud
Loud and highly motivated to vote
Those absurd attempts to suppress Talarico’s interview with Jimmy Kimmel tell a different story. It shows they are scared of him. Even if they didn’t need to be scared of him, showing that you’re scared isn’t a good look.
I don’t mean that Talarico can’t win. He’s a slight favorite, according to the polls. Republicans are scared of him, as they should be. They’re worried that most independents in Texas, even conservative leaning ones, will go for Talarico over the odious Paxton this year.
That’s different than saying Talarico has the potential to permanently pull Evangelicals over to Democrats in meaningful numbers. Those are Trump’s base. They’ve long been aware that it is possible to be a Christian and a decent person at the same time, and have roundly rejected the notion.
The “christian right” is a broad category going far beyond Evangelicals, and I don’t think anyone’s addressed their hypocrisy in such an appealing and convincing way before. Many will dig their heels in and stick to the tribal identity, but their claims of being real Christians are going to sound more hollow to a lot of people.
Yeah but they are “Christians” first, assholes second. They would not vote for him because he hasn’t promised to torture Latinos or further weaponize law enforcement against minorities. Those are key elements in their voting decisions.
Are you sure they are not assholes first?
They claim that’s not the case but I have my doubts
