This has always been the fear I hold... Politics has always been full of ugly loud-mouths like Trump, MTG, and Boebert. They're dangerous but manageable because they're generally kinda stupid and can't keep their mouth shut- you can hear them coming from ten miles away and most reasonable people just work around them.
No, the most dangerous ones are always going to be the quiet ones, the ones that can sit and smile without saying a word, completely uncontroversial, while their hands are at work unravelling the knots of civil liberties under the table where you can't see them until it's too late. That's one of the reasons I never did want to see Trump leave office during his 4 years- not because I liked him (far from it), but because I feared seeing Mike Pence, the quiet, uncontroversial Christian, take a seat in the oval office much more than Trump's bumbling egotism.
And Johnson, being a completely uncontroversial nobody that was unknown to the media until now, is the exact kind of "sit-and-smile" quiet that is very, very dangerous.
Pence was far from uncontroversial in Indiana before running for VP. The whole gerrymandered red state hated him as governor. If anyone saw him as uncontroversial they weren't paying attention. Which is kind of the point of the article, I guess.
I suppose he was controversial, but to the rest of us outside Indiana we never got any of that from the news supercycle. More focusing on his time as actual VP when he became more relevant to national politics, it was very easy for him to stay in the shadows of the Tornado de la Trump.
Some of us did! I’ve been screaming about the dangers of the religion I grew up in and the aims of many-most of its followers for a decade or more.
Anyone ever hear about See You At The Poll? It was a movement that took place in middle and high schools in the early 00’s that was little more than about young Christian’s rising up with the goal of “reclaiming” the United States for Christ. The Poll in the name isn’t about voting, it’s about gathering around the US flag poll at the schools we attended and praying “that God would deliver this nation into his hands” which also served as a show of force to US government officials that there were scores of young people that wanted a Christian government.
That’s just scratching the surface of how politically motivated the religious right has been for the past 30-35ish years
And some of us were pretty upset that the Dems helped out dickheads like Gaetz in ousting a turd like Mccarthy thinking that they wouldn’t manage to choose someone worse than him.
First, the Dems are under no obligation to keep the GOP from looking like the fascist shitheads they are. Republicans moved to remove McCarthy, and Republicans voted to remove him. It's not the Democrats' fault if the GOP use their majority to put someone worse as Speaker.
Second, it doesn't matter whether Johnson is more or less evil than McCarthy as long as he isn't more effective. He has the same problem McCarthy had- a slim-margin majority that is split between vice-signalling performative fascists, and vice-signalling performative fascists in districts that Biden won. They're already coming off the least productive Congressional year in history, and that plus this being an election year combined with still simmering anger over the removal of Roe will just drive that wedge deeper.
Johnson can be as whiny a Christofascist as he wants. He ain't getting shit done before the next election.
This, and also after they ousted him, instead of trying to win over some of the more "moderate" Republicans by agreeing to vote for one of the least of the evils and hopefully get some actual work done in the House, they just grinned smugly at every photo op and toed the party line until they got Johnson and then all made shocked Pikachu faces. They've made little effort to improve the situation. It's insane that they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to slowly tear apart the flawed system instead of trying to fix it.
I've said this before: in the country I was born and raised (90% Catholic, I must say), evangelicals were seen as nutjobs and the majority didn't pay attention to what they said. Given that it's a Spanish speaking country, they are called "evangélicos."
It recently dawned on me that American evangelicals are evangélicos. How the fuck would anyone listen to those fucks?!
Evangélicos are not Christian in my view. Evangélicos have always been religious fanatics not to be listened to. They're below the deranged homeless person spouting bullshit in the corner - except that I feel empathy for that homeless person.
I’m in Germany and the word “evangelisch” means “Protestant,” not “evangelical,” which fucked me up for a while because I kept assuming my Christian friend would be insane at some point, but she’s just very reasonable. I finally realized that she’s just a very chill Lutheran and I was mistranslating
An American on Reddit once told me that America isn't any more religious than the UK.
I thought that was ridiculous. Something like 90% of septics believe in God. But in the UK it's considered a faux pas to even mention religion with a majority being atheist at the last census. Tony Blair famously refused to admit his Christianity while in office but in the US it's considered a requirement to state you're Christian.
I was genuinely fucking disturbed hearing my English step mother bang on about Jesus one Easter. That's a common reaction in the UK to anyone talking about religion.
Both sides? What's the "other side" in this one, people who don't want their kids forced to pray to Jesus in school? People who don't want to live under the Christian version of Iranian theocratic rule? Genuinely curious what you think the other side of the spectrum looks like.