According to reporting from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, Donald Trump has no immediate plans to condemn white nationalist Nick Fuentes as part of an effort to douse the firestorm he created after having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the infamous anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

While some Trump allies have fanned out to try explain away the dinner meeting by saying the former president didn’t know who he was sitting down with — which is itself a questionable claim — Trump himself is reportedly refusing to go on the record and admit that he was wrong despite pleas from allies and aides.

According to Lowell, the more the former president is pressed by supporters to make a definitive statement about Fuentes’ views, the more entrenched he has become to say nothing.

“Donald Trump repeatedly refused to disavow the outspoken anti-Semite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes after they spoke over dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort, rejecting the advice from advisers over fears he might alienate a section of his base, two people familiar with the situation said,” Lowell is reporting.

The report goes on to add that “despite efforts from advisers who reached Trump over the Thanksgiving holiday,” he is balking at helping out his own cause.

“Trump ultimately made clear that he fundamentally did not want to criticize Fuentes — a product of his dislike of confrontation and his anxiety that it might antagonize a devoted part of his base — and became more entrenched in his obstinance the more he was urged to do so,” the Guardian report states before adding that Trump is sticking to his story that he was unaware of Fuentes’ controversial background.

“The statements signal Trump will give extraordinary deference to the most fringe elements of his base – even if it means potentially losing support from more moderate Republicans who have not typically cared for his indulgence of extremism,” Lowell reported before adding, “The halting response to Fuentes most closely mirrored his inability to condemn white supremacist groups after Charlottesville, the people said, when Trump faced intense criticism for not naming the rightwing groups in the bloodshed that ended with the death of a young woman.”

Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken anti-Semite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, at Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Mr. Trump conceded on Friday.

Also at the dinner was the performer Kanye West, who has also been condemned for making anti-Semitic statements. Mr. West traveled to meet with Mr. Trump at the club, Mar-a-Lago, and brought Mr. Fuentes along, the advisers said.

The fourth attendee at the four-person dinner, Karen Giorno — a veteran political operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida — also confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there. Attempts to reach Mr. Fuentes through an intermediary on Friday were unsuccessful.

In recent years, Mr. Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference. A Holocaust denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country. 

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Former President Donald Trump hosted white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach on Tuesday night, according to multiple people familiar with the event.

Fuentes, who frequently posts racist content in addition to Holocaust revisionism, was brought as a guest of rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye.

In a post to his social media site, Trump confirmed the gathering.

“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” he wrote. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”

However eventful, the dinner reflects a remarkable moment in an extremely early 2024 campaign cycle: the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination breaking bread with a man who frequently posts racist content and Holocaust revisionism, brought there by a rapper who is launching his own presidential campaign under the shadow of his own anti-Semitic remarks.

“If it was any other party, breaking bread with Nick Fuentes would be instantly disqualifying for Trump,” said Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa. “The most extreme views have found a home in today’s MAGA Republican party.”

Remember the hilariously inept “anti-woke” bank funded by Peter Thiel and various other MAGA cranks? You know, the “anti-woke bank” that was going to be an alternative for MAGAts who were tired of dealing with “woke, liberal” banks?  The story has reached its fitting conclusion:

The Texas startup that sought to build a conservative banking alternative is shutting down.

GloriFi has laid off most of its employees and told them that it is closing up shop, according to people familiar with the matter and emails to employees reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The company’s fate became clear on Friday, when funding that it hoped would carry it through the first quarter fell through, Cathy Landtroop, the company’s chief marketing and communications officer, said in an email to employees.

The “financial challenges related to startup mistakes, the failing economy, reputational attacks, and multiple negative stories took their toll,” Ms. Landtroop wrote in the email.

GloriFi’s app made its debut in September. The company said customers could open checking and savings accounts and apply for credit cards. The app was aimed at people who saw Wall Street as too liberal and wanted a bank that shared their values.

An October article in the Journal detailed GloriFi’s turbulent start. The company missed launch dates, blaming faulty technology and failures by vendors, and laid off dozens of employees. Some employees said that founder Toby Neugebauer had a volatile temper and drank on the job, and that the company’s unusual workspace—Mr. Neugebauer’s home—added distractions.

Sure, it was the vendors.

A Republican Agenda of Hate and Revenge: Will Their Evangelical Supporters Have the Integrity to Call it Out?

It hasn’t taken very long for the Republican House leadership to put their agenda of revenge and hatred on the table.  We’ll see if some of those who won elections with razor thin margins in districts where their win hinged on their claims of actually doing something about inflation or crime or the border (Arizona 6 comes to mind) will go along with the phonies like Marjorie Taylor Green or Jim “Gym” Jordan or if they will keep them from getting a majority on the potential investigation and impeachment votes they are looking to hold.  I have my doubts, but when it comes to Republicans, I am never surprised by their extremism and their lack of concern for their constituents.  

Aside from the circus that all of that will be, it will also be a losing political proposition.  They actually thought that a “red tsunami” was coming, based on their extremism, but election denying and insurrection supporting lost big.  A majority of the electorate, a significant one if the exit polling following the mid-terms is correct, believes Trump’s impeachments were justified, support the investigation into his theft of classified documents, and don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way elections are operated and ballots are counted.  Even extremist gubernatorial loser Kari Lake, in Arizona, has not been able to find a single voter who was denied the opportunity to vote, or whose ballot did not count in spite of the glitches affecting a few hundred voters in a few scattered precincts.

A Bigger Moral and Ethical Issue 

But I’m aiming this narrative at conservative Evangelicals who read this, are looking at this and thinking that they can somehow separate this tsunami of hatred and vengeance from their claims of belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in doctrine and theology they claim is based on the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible.  How is there any connection at all between what the extremists in the Republican party want to do, and what conservative Evangelicals claim to believe are the core principles of Christian faith?

It is difficult to center positions taken by conservative Evangelicals on Christian doctrine and theology.  Most of the churches, even those affiliated with denominations and fellowships, are independent and autonomous and if they have a pastor or church leader who wanders off the beaten path and tries to build personal loyalty from a congregation around unique interpretations of obscure Old Testament passages of scripture, there is no way to hold them accountable because they intimidate their own church members into submission and there is no other means of accountability.  People like Trump’s “spiritual advisor” Paula White, or the Tennessee pastor who likes to make headlines, Greg Locke, are actually heretics by the more widely accepted standards of Evangelicals.  

But political power has trumped Biblical truth, bringing Mormons to the pulpit of Liberty University among Baptists and other ultra-conservative Fundamentalists who characterize Mormonism as a demonic cult.  The lust after worldly power is a temptation that is hard to resist.  So it’s not surprising that they’re willing to compromise sacred beliefs for political gain.  Trump, who is not a Christian by his own admission, demands, and gets, their loyalty.  Don Jr., at the Trump political organization’s “Turning Point” rallies, tells the young Evangelical-leaning audiences who show up to abandon Jesus’ teachings, that “turning the other cheek” and “loving your enemies” may be nice things to do, but “they won’t get you anywhere in this world.”

Most of the members of Congress who wear their Christian faith on their sleeve and use it as a political wedge lost my interest, respect and lost their credibility with me, and with millions of other disgusted Christians, a long time ago.  The most salient point of Christian theology in the Bible is that those who are Christians are most clearly and easily identified by the way they treat other people.

“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love their brothers and sisters, whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this:  those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  ( I John 4:20-21, NRSV  )

“Brothers,” or “brothers and sisters” in this particular translation, is not an exclusive term.  The Apostle who wrote those words did not allow for defining the terms as “only those who agree with you politically or religiously.”  He meant everyone.

So it would not be judgmental, in a Christian sense, to expect politicians who use their Christian faith as a part of their political identity to look out for the interests of all of their constituents.  It would not be unreasonable to expect that if their focus in winning election or re-election to office was to do something about inflation, the economy or the crime rate to actually come up with a plan to do exactly that.  And it would not be unreasonable to expect them to set aside the rancor, the hostile rhetoric, the name calling and the vindictiveness in favor of the people they are supposed to represent.

It would also not be judgmental or unreasonable, in a Christian sense, not to take their claims of faith seriously based on their behavior, and their words.  “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “for they shall be called the children of God.”

I’m linking a post here by Julie Roys, who is an investigator of scandals and issues among Evangelical churches and related institutions.  It’s not directly related to the Evangelical support for the vitriol and hatred that they support in Congress, but it is relevant to the point I’m making here. The post is about yet another failed investigation into issues of sexual abuse taking place on a Christian college campus, about which those in charge went about business as usual and worked hard to defend their own power and position.  She makes a poignant point in this story that is worth quoting here.

“Because the lying and corruption is rampant in evangelicalism…”  

So will any Republican, conservative, Evangelical stand up to the extremists in the GOP?  I think that question has been answered by the conduct of those who continue to fail to allow their faith to affect their politics.  Evangelicalism is now too much of a business, and too little of a church, and it has lost its connection to the spiritual power of God, laying a foundation of dependence on worldly power, popularity and prosperity, and abandoning its principles and values when those things are threatened.  There are those who do take a stand, and who do call out the sin and corruption.

I hope they prevail.

Julie Roys: Issues at Cedarville University Could Be Evangelicalism’s Chernobyl

. . . two queers did what 75 cops in Uvalde, Texas, would not do.

UVALDE, TX:  Shooter enters a school, murders 21 kids while 75 heavily-armed cops stand around for 45 minutes with their heads up their asses, afraid to take out the shooter.

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO:  Man armed with AR-15 and handgun goes into a gay club, starts shooting.  Two queers jump him, disarm him, stomp the shit out of him, hold him for the cops.

Maybe we need more queer cops.  Especially in Texas.

Here’s a news report.

A patron tackled the gunman inside Club Q and prevented him from killing more people, one of the club’s co-owners said Sunday.

Nic Grzecka said he and his co-owner had reviewed surveillance video that showed the gunman entering the building and immediately begin firing, leaving five dead and two dozen wounded, including customers and staffers.

Grzecka said the shooting lasted no more than two minutes before a patron subdued the gunman and another helped hold him down. Police arrived about three minutes later, he said.

“I don’t even know the names of these people,” Grzecka said of the two patrons. “But what they did is incredible.”

Club Q had an “active-shooter protocol,” which Grzecka’s co-owner, Matthew Haynes, said was “followed to the letter.” The two owners arrived at the scene minutes after the shooting, Grzecka said.

They turned recordings from surveillance cameras inside the club over to investigators. Grzecka said they checked their records, which showed the suspect had never been to the club before.

Here’s Hunter Biden at Andrews Air Force Base after traveling via his father’s Executive privilege to use his father’s Presidential influence to secure multiple Chinese trademarks.

OH, WAIT!!!  THAT’S IVANKA TRUMP!!

Hunter Biden, while working in his father’s administration had 41 trademarks fast tracked by China. A conflict of interest at the very least as his father was in trade negotiations with China at the time!!

DAMN!!! MY MISTAKE!!  THAT’S IVANKA TRUMP AND HER HUSBAND JARED KUSHNER!!

WAIT!!! I’M WRONG AGAIN!!  IT’S JARED AND IVANKA!!!

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Less than 24 hours after it became official that the Republican Party would now control the House in 2023, they held their first press conference to warn America that they were about to roll up their sleeves and solve America’s problems! You might be wondering how they plan to do this. Are they going to propose a policy to tackle inflation? No. Are they going to make sure these elections—those they keep denying are real—are more secure? Nope! Are they going to launch a federal investigation into President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, because of his experience with addiction? Yes.

That’s what they are going to do. They also made it clear that this would be the GOP’s jumping-off point to investigate just about everything unrelated to policymaking they can find.

According to the Republicans on the dais, there is a very compelling case against Hunter Biden and governmental corruption. So why don’t we look at the case against the Bidens.

Republicans who barely won in a blue district can read the writing on the wall — if they want to stay in Congress, in order to win, they are going to have to switch parties. If just one or two do that, it could make all the difference in the Democrats being back in charge. Furthermore, their majority is slim enough that they could be vulnerable if any vacancies or special elections occur.

By winning the House, the Republicans may have won the battle, but they’ve lost the war.

They know this.

You can see it in their reactions over the past few days.

Their party is imploding. It’s time for the few sane and moderate Republicans to jump ship and either become Democrats or declare as an independent and caucus with the Democrats.  Or, just head out the door saying you’re going out for a pack of smokes… and never come back.

From New York magazine, the Intelligencer:

Quote

What We Know About the New Special Counsel for the DoJ’s Trump Probes

By Nia Prater and Chas Danner

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that he has appointed a special counsel, veteran prosecutor Jack Smith, to oversee the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigations into Donald Trump now that the former president has announced he is running in 2024.

Garland’s Announcement

During an afternoon press conference on Friday, Garland cited Trump’s launch of his 2024 campaign and Joe Biden’s intent to run for reelection as the impetus behind the move.

“Such an appointment underscores the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” he said.

Prosecutor Jack Smith at the Hague in 2021. Photo: Robin Van Lonkhuijsen/AFP via Getty Images

Who is Jack Smith?

Garland has selected Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor, to serve as special prosecutor. Smith has had a long career in the legal world, starting as an assistant district attorney with the New York County DA’s office in 1994 and later serving nine years as assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. He supervised war-crime investigations for two years at the International Criminal Court and previously served as the chief of the Justice Department’s public-integrity section, where he led a team investigating election crimes and corruption cases.

Smith will be starting the new role immediately, traveling back to the United States from the Netherlands where he’s been serving as chief prosecutor of the special court at the Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo. Garland said that Smith will be leading the Justice Department’s investigations concerning potential interference in the transfer of power and the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and the classified documents found at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. In that role, Smith has the authority to file federal charges in connection to those inquiries.

Politico notes that Smith has handled investigations into similar crimes in the past:

During his stint at the Public Integrity Section, Smith oversaw the prosecutions of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted in 2015 of disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice — two potential crimes at the center of the Trump documents probe. Smith also oversaw the convictions of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and former Rep. Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, both for bribery and extortion charges. McDonnell’s conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

“Throughout his career, Jack Smith has built a reputation as an impartial and determined prosecutor who leads teams with energy and focus to follow the facts wherever they lead,” Garland said.  “As special counsel, he will exercise independent prosecutorial judgment to decide whether charges should be brought.”

Trump’s response

“I am not going to partake in it,” the former president said Friday when Fox News Digital asked him about the special counsel investigation. Trump also, as he has in the past, proclaimed that he had done nothing wrong and decried the DoJ investigations as politically motivated.

End Quote