The Never Trumper Border Security Project

As a conscientious and well-informed citizen you are no doubt familiar with the long, incesutous and deeply fucked up relationship between the White Conservative Evangelical Church and the Republican Party.  

For example, you know that the Moral Majority was founded by Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich in 1979 as an explicitly as far-right Conservative political machine:

And you know what a profound influence it had over the Republican party during its heyday.   From Wikipedia:

The Moral Majority was a relatively early supporter of Reagan, endorsing him before the Republican convention.[37] According to Jimmy Carter, "that autumn [1980] a group headed by Jerry Falwell purchased $10 million in commercials on southern radio and TV to brand me as a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian."[38] Naturally, the Moral Majority continued working on behalf of Reagan after he gained the Republican nomination. Following the organization's lead, more than one-fifth of Moral Majority supporters that had supported Carter in 1976 voted for Reagan in 1980.[39] 

After Reagan's victory, Falwell attributed Reagan's success directly to the Moral Majority and others registering and encouraging church-goers to vote who had never before been politically active.[40] Empirical evidence suggests that Falwell's claim about the role of Christian Right organizations in Reagan's victory has some truth, though difficult to determine definitively.[41]

You are familiar with the long line of fanatical god-bothering Republican power brokers like Phyllis Schlafly, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson.

You have probably seen or read Frank Schaffer, Jr.  talking about the history and tactics of the Religious Right.

And, if you're old enough, you probably remember John McCain's hard pivot away from calling Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" who exercised an "evil influence" over the Republican party (2000) to bending the knee to Falwell far enough to kiss his ass in 2006 when McCain was running for president and someone reminded him that no Republican makes it to the White House without courting the good opinion of filth like Falwell.  

In fact, for anyone with the tiniest spark of interest, there are literally hundreds of books, articles, white papers, podcasts and blog posts documenting in exhaustive detail how the the White Evangelical Right came to completely dominate Republican politics. 

With all that in mind, we join Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark introducing a year-end "Best Of" podcast "Tim Alberta: The Political Poisoning of the Evangelical Church".

This is transcribed directly from the podcast, and I would ask you to pay particular attention to the last couple of sentences.  

Sykes: As we head into the Christmas holiday, we are sharing another one of our favorite episodes from this year.  This one, featuring The Atlantic's Tim Alberta discussing how politics has poisoned the Evangelical church.  The son of a pastor, he wrote about he war for the soul of the church back in May, and Tim shares here how the morphing of the Evangelical movement into something with a political identity is heartbreaking for him.  And it's a powerful episode.  Tim's also the author of "American Carnage".  We're just going to jump right in to the interview.

Sykes:  Well, y'know, this is a tough piece to wrestle with, I'll be honest with you.  Because, y'know, it's... it's one of the things that I will admit that I have had the hardest time understanding over the last, now it's, y'know, going on five, six years.  The transformation of the white Evangelical churches.  And...what your piece suggests is that whatever has happened to them, seems to be accelerating.  And that's difficult to get your head around.

So how is this possible?

How is it possible that someone who was as prominent a Conservative media voice and power broker as Sykes -- 

Charlie’s Bully Pulpit

Charlie Sykes the critic politicians fear, the moralizer liberals love to hate. Smart, articulate, connected, he can swing elections and reshape public policy. But beneath his media image is a complicated, isolated man, a walking contradiction.

-- continues to believe that the "morphing of the Evangelical movement into something with a political identity" is some new and shocking development.  Something which has only been "going on five, six years"?

And the truth is, of course he fucking well knows better.  They all know better.  They were all happy as pigs in shit with the easy money, fame and power that went along with riding the Republican toboggan down , mowing down straw men and owning the Libs, until one day they hit a bump that was too big for them to manage, and off the sled they were bucked, dazed that the wild, glorious ride was over for them.

So there they were, stranded 9/10ths of the way down Mount Fascism, hip-deep in drifts of their own bullshit, with no practical professional skills except the ability to look into a camera and glibly lie.

So that's what they did.

They pissed a line in the snow at the place where their wild ride had dumped them, and declared that the peak of Mount Fascism was right there, on that spot.  And those steep slopes of bigotry, demagoguery and lies down which they had slalomed for decades?  That towered behind them, clearly visible to anyone who cared to look?

Why, they didn't really exist at all.  

And brick by brick, lie by lie, over the last six years , they've used whatever media platforms they have to erect a mighty wall between 2016 (or whenever they got run out of the GOP) and All That Went Before.   And that wall is constantly policed and reinforced by them on virtually every podcast they're on, every article they write and every teevee camera the appear in front of.  

Like any border wall, their barrier between 2016 and All That Went Before is a little porous.  Sometimes, a man like Stuart Stevens pops up with a scathing retrospective on the long, ugly, racist history of the Republican party.  But that quickly fades into background noise under the relentless repetition of the mantra of "over these past few years" and "since 2016" and "ever since Trump"  by everyone else..  

We ended up nearly losing our democracy because Republicans were allowed to erase the travesties of the Reagan/Bush years the minute Bill Clinton was sworn in...and allowed to erase the lies and monstrous abuses of power they committed during the Clinton administration the minute the Republican Supreme Court handed the White House to George W. Bush...and allowed to expunge the lies and catastrophes the Bush administration left in its wake the minute Barack Obama was sworn in (See "Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches")...and allowed to memory hole all lies and monstrous abuses of power they committed during the Obama administration the minute they put Donald Trump into the White House.

And we do ourselves and our posterity no favors by pretending that our recently-former Republican allies of convenience -- who still nurse a seething contempt for us and everything we value -- do not have their own, long-term agenda.  And item number one on that agenda is placing a sturdy wall between 2016 and All That Went Before, and cutting anyone out of the conversation who tries to sneak over, under or around it.

Burn The Lifeboats