#right wing watch

[saywhat-politics]

04/03/2025

by 

Kyle Mantyla

As the stock market crashes and the global economy reels from President Donald Trump's illogical and reckless tariffs, Trump's supporters are doing their best to put a positive spin on the crisis he has created.

For example, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian Tim Barton claims that support for Trump's tariff policy can be found in the Bible.

To make his case, Barton cited the story in Matthew 17 where Jesus and Peter were discussing paying the “temple tax.” In this passage, Jesus argued that just as the “kings of the earth” do not levy taxes on their own children, neither should he, as the son of God, be required to pay the tax in order to enter the temple. 

[troythecatfish]

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[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

The Trump campaign’s desperate and dishonest attempts to distance itself from the MAGA movement’s wildly unpopular Project 2025 policy agenda are failing miserably. The Heritage Foundation, a central hub of the right-wing political infrastructure which moved aggressively into the MAGA camp under the leadership of its current president Kevin Roberts, launched Project 2025 in 2022. Right Wing Watch took notice, reporting on the project’s confident assertion that it was preparing the MAGA movement to “take the reins of government” after the 2024 election. As RWW noted, by that point the right-wing movement had achieved its long-sought goal of taking dominant control of the Supreme Court. Project 2025 is a game plan to do the same for the executive branch.

Heritage gathered dozens of former Trump administration officials and other MAGA movement leaders to produce a more than 900-page policy agenda detailing their plans. They created a blueprint to give the next conservative president virtually dictatorial powers to bend federal agencies to his will, turning them into weapons against his personal enemies and political opponents and an enforcement arm for the Christian nationalist worldview, while at the same time sabotaging agencies’ ability to carry out their mission to protect American workers, communities and the environment. Project 2025 began recruiting and training tens of thousands of ideological warriors to prepare them to fill the jobs of the federal government employees they plan to purge.

But the Heritage Foundation’s arrogance may have gotten the better of them. It turns out that most Americans do not want to gut environmental protections, public education, and civil rights enforcement. Most Americans don’t want federal power being used to intrude into families’ most intimate decisions—or to enforce the idea that there’s only one legitimate form of family. Public opposition to Project 2025 grew as more media outlets and policy experts dug into the policy agenda this year, and explained who would be hurt if these policies were implemented. Public awareness soared after John Oliver dedicated the June 16 episode of Last Week Tonight to exposing Project 2025, and again when actress Taraji P. Henson used her platform as host of the June 30 BET Awards to sound the alarm, telling people, “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up.”

[...] Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 were ultimately doomed by his choice of MAGA hardliner J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has praised Project 2025’s authoritarian, anti-equality, anti-freedom policy agenda. Right Wing Watch reported during the RNC that Vance wrote the introduction to Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.” As Right Wing Watch noted at the time, “Roberts’ book title is reminiscent of a joke told among Federalist Society operatives describing their long game to repeal the New Deal and reverse a century of precedent and progress: ‘Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day.’”

Since then, the Trump camp has been flailing. At the end of July, Project 2025 director Paul Dans, championed as hero by MAGA leaders like Steve Bannon, was apparently forced to step down under pressure from the Trump campaign, which wanted some beneficial headlines suggesting that Project 2025 was shutting down. In reality, the policy agenda is in place, along with the secret 180-day game plan for pushing it forward, and Heritage continues to recruit potential foot soldiers. Roberts and his publisher toned down his book’s subtitle, removing the unlit match from the cover and changing “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington.” Then they announced that the book’s release—which was scheduled for September—would be delayed until after the election. Unfortunately for Trump and Vance, some journalists got review copies of the book and have reported on Roberts’ ideology and Vance’s violent rhetoric.

Roberts’ book and Vance’s enthusiastic endorsement of it are good examples of a phenomenon I identified in an article on Project 2025 for Political Research Associate’s Public Eye magazine earlier this year. I noted that Project 2025 reflects “a movement-level, ideological shift away from a libertarian mistrust of government power and toward an authoritarian view of government power being used ruthlessly—whether as a righteous force wielded to advance a ‘biblical worldview’ or turned against an ‘administrative state’ supposedly captured by a radical Marxist left.”

Peter Montgomery wrote in Right Wing Watch on Donald Trump’s dishonest bid to “divorce” himself from Project 2025 got blown up.

[dirtychai-birdie]

RWW is once again stanning Nick.

[arthropooda]

[tomorrowusa]

Norman Lear died at the age of 101 this week. Jimmy Kimmel's tribute to him captured brilliantly what Lear was all about – and was appropriately funny as well.

Lear may be best remembered for making sitcoms which resembled real life a bit more while innovatively integrating social commentary into them.

But Lear was also a lifelong progressive who founded People For the American Way (PFAW).

Home - People For the American Way

A notable offshoot of PFAW is Right Wing Watch.

Homepage | Right Wing Watch

Right Wing Watch is a must for keeping an eye on extremists like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

House Speaker Mike Johnson Will Be Honored Tonight at Christian Nationalist Gathering

So a big Thank You to Norman Lear for the laughs and for his efforts in trying to nudge America in a progressive direction! ❤️🗽

[bigswirv]

Amazing how Right Wing Media isn’t capable of even the slightest bit of integrity. It’s all about winning. They don’t even care that they’re showing the world what Creepy Weirdos Conservatives have become, that they’re So Willing to sell out every Principle and “Value” they claim to hold dear for the sake of obtaining political power.

Mad this. It literally says he got jailed for ignoring a court order telling him to stay away from the school - yet the headline says it's for not calling a kid they. He broke the court order cos he was being a self righteous stalkery Christian weirdo. I know the sort, they did the same to us at school cos we were scruffy poor unfortunates / desperate people that apparently needed god to save us. Loads of Christians are like this, proper weirdos.

[saywhat-politics]

Rep. Tim Burchett Says NPR And PBS Must Be Defunded Because "They Hate Our Lord"

Rep. Tim Burchett says NPR and PBS must be defunded because "they literally hate this country": "They hate everything it's about. They hate our patriotism. They hate our Lord."

[lenbryant]

We’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.

[dekaydk]

ALL OF THIS. Also, some fundamentals that underlie these symptoms and behaviors:

The right is driven by fear, hatred and desire for power. These feelings create needs that cannot ever be met; they are bottomless, because they spring from deep wells of inadequacy. No one on the right is an actual loving human being. Everything for them is transactional and driven by their need to make themselves feel better by having others beneath them in society.

Individuals on the right band together in their need for dominance, and invent narratives and conspiracies to justify their hatreds. From these spring their plans for long-term supremacy.

In the US, the Federalist Society (which boasts all of the conservative justices, and every Trump-nominated judge as members) is one of these long-term organizations, dedicated to one purpose: bending the justice system away from the rule of law, to a rule by a white, straight, misogynist, racist oligarchy, while disguising this as a return to an invented concept of judicial restraint. Their rulings bear this out, undoing decades of progress treating individual privacy as sacrosanct, justifying their predetermined changes with linguistically and legally empty language often derived from Biblical texts.

So many other things are tied in with this desire for a white male-centered oligarchy. Housing precarity, healthcare as an expensive, slow and rationed privilege, wage suppression, moving jobs offshore, the persistent expansion of the military-industrial complex, the undermining and corruption of the news media, people working into their late 70s because there's no alternative, the perpetuation of a moneyed class through generational wealth, the militarization and expanding impunity of the police, the extrajudicial brutality of the immigration system, and the expanding attacks on queer people and their spaces.

When your rights are treated as subject to curtailment at the directives of a religious group, your rights aren't actually rights, they're privileges, revocable at any time.

Every move they make doesn't stop with the group they're attacking now. THEY WILL COME FOR YOU because the fear and loathing is never-ending and cannot be satisfied.

All the moves from the right are in service of the long term goal of a society stratified into haves and have-nots, where a small white oligarchy can act with utter impunity and the remainder of society are reduced to wage slavery if not outright servitude.

SO: when you who consider yourself on the left start attacking others on the left for being insufficiently correct, you need to ask yourself if you're any better than those who wield power and abuse as their method of engagement.

Overstated, you say? Are you attacking people because they've done something truly wrong, or because you don't think they're in proper alignment with your positions and language? Brigading people for small mistakes is a HALLMARK of the right. Using power to control others instead of persuading them is a HALLMARK of the right. What's worse is that instead of making allies against the right, you're creating divisions and thereby DOING THE WORK OF THE RIGHT FOR THEM.

Legitimate disagreement is fine. Simply asserting someone's wrong and coming down on them instead of engaging respectfully is not. Preferring to engage respectfully does not apply to fascists, white nationalists, etc.: their form of discourse is inherently and solely violent and eliminationist, and as others have said, far better, they deserve no respect.

Last point: if you're being attacked by someone who says they're more correctly left than you instead of them attempting to persuade and educate you, consider whether to bother engaging with them. It's not your obligation to deal with someone who's attacking instead of conversing. (Also, for all you know, they're part of a troll farm in St. Petersburg.)

Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.

Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.

Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.

Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.

[olawaleshuencry]

“‘There’s a whole new day here,’ he proclaimed.
“He then proceeded to do the legislative equivalent of slipping on a banana peel, pulling down the drapes, knocking over a fully laden buffet and face-planting into the wedding cake.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/09/imaginary-war-gas-stoves-house-gop/

[navree]

we need to start making teen dramas again, the reason why children are the way they are now is because they don't have eight seasons of 22 episodes each where high schoolers go through every conceivable issue under the sun and make out with all their friends with five different pop songs playing in a single episode

[a-very-tired-jew]

Oh cool. Texas A&M had Charlie Kirk and Lara Trump on campus for their "The American Comeback Tour" the other day and were giving their whole spiel that Trump should have a third term. During their time at A&M they said, and I quote, "There are no good Jews". We've stated since the beginning that the Trump Admin's whole "fighting antisemitism" screed is absolute bullshit and is being used to scapegoat Jews.

A MAGA college tour with a Trump family member and a Right Wing propagandist are just confirming what we've said the entire time. It's such a fun time to be a Jew in the USA /s

[vendettasfanfictioning]

no. you don't understand how funny this scene was to me.

these four basically represented how dean winchester was perceived by others. there's the people who love him; charlie (platonic), sam (familial), and cas (romantic). then there's rowena who, at the time, was the stand-in for their "enemies" (hatred).

and they all need to work together to cure dean. i'm unwell 😭😭

[xxplastic-cubexx]

I cannot tell you enough how much I love the way you draw Charles, every time you post new doodles of him an angel gets their wings <3

thank you so much !!!!! at the rate im going at ill have an army of angels in no time

[saywhat-politics]

04/22/2025

by 

Peter Montgomery

Religious-right figure Rick Joyner warned in a Facebook post Tuesday that judges who “interfere” with President Donald Trump’s executive orders may be pushing the U.S. toward “another civil war.” It’s just the latest of many examples of right-wing Christian leaders and media amplifying Trump’s complaints about courts that are stepping in to slow and stop Trump administration actions that violate the Constitution or federal law. 

In his Facebook post, Joyner gave lip service to the importance of an independent judiciary but then suggested that judges’ actions to pause Trump’s orders are “an encroachment on the Legislative Branch” and “an end run around the democratic will of the people.” 

“SCOTUS can begin to reduce this and avoid a major Constitutional Crisis, or even another civil war, by how they decide some of the cases before them,” Joyner wrote. “They can begin to bring a desperately needed restraint on the Judicial Branch that has gotten very far outside of its lane.” 

Joyner has a habit of talking about civil war. During Trump’s first months in office in 2017, Joyner warned that if the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s efforts to ban immigrants and refugees from several predominantly Muslim nations, it could lead to civil war and martial law. In 2019, he said Christians should be establishing militias to prepare for civil war. A month before the 2020 election, he told viewers that they shouldn’t worry too much about the coming civil war because the violence and bloodshed would be mostly confined to the “inner cities.”