Remember the perfect family at “19 Kids and Counting”? It was all bullshit.

In a new book one of the 19 children who were the center of the popular Christian reality show which eventually was rebranded as “19 and Counting,” recounts growing up in the highly restrictive home of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and how she has made a major move to separate herself from what she called an “unhealthy version” of Christianity.

In an interview with the New York Times to discuss her book “Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear,” Jinger Vuolo describes what the Times calls the “darker side” of growing up Duggar.

According to the now 29-year-old whose family’s world was rocked when brother Josh was accused of molesting his sisters and then later sent to jail for possession of child pornography, she lived in fear of doing anything outside the lines of what the family permitted in their tightly orchestrated world that was shared with their fans.

As the Times Ruth Graham wrote, “Even after the image began to crumble, the family has maintained a largely united front. No other siblings have spoken as critically about the family’s theology and values as Mrs. Vuolo. With an online following that includes 1.4 million followers on Instagram, her declaration of independence is being closely watched as a high-profile example of re-examining one’s own religious upbringing.”

Speaking with Graham, Jinger Vuolo explained, “I was just so crippled with fear, and I didn’t know why,” with the Times report adding, “She described herself as a ‘serious rule-follower,’ who took to heart her family’s admonitions to dress in long skirts, avoid rock music and date only under parental supervision. In Mrs. Vuolo’s world, it was never a question that she would bypass college, marry a man approved by her parents and devote her life to parenting and home-schooling.” (Bypass college, have kids, home-school them — and produce more kids who bypass college and home-school their kids and after 2 or 3 generations, you have truly ignorant kids producing more truly ignorant kids.)

In the interview, she discussed the influence of Bill Gothard, who was later accused of sexual harassment, on her family’s lifestyle, telling the Times, “That was all I ever knew. His words, in my mind, were almost the words of God.”

With that in mind, in her book, she writes that she is in the process of “disentangling,” as she separates “the truth of Christianity from the unhealthy version I heard growing up.”

The report goes on to note that she claimed that “she hoped the book, and her ordinary life itself, would show her friends and family who still follow the teachings of her childhood that there’s another way.”

“Even though you’re told your life is going to fall apart if you leave, it’s not. You don’t have to even lose your faith in God,” she explained.

You can read more here and watch her describe her upbringing below or at the link:

 

No doubt about it: Republicans are white trash

The owner of this blog was born in rural Mississippi and spent about 1/3 of his life in East Tennessee and Southern West Virginia.  He has a PhD in Whitetrashology and knows white trash when he sees it . . . much of his extended family is white trash.

And now we have proof the Republican Parity is white trash.

FIRST.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders — governor of Arkansas and a proud graduate of Ouachita Baptist College — just signed a bill legalizing child labor for kids as young as 14.

Image

Here’s a pic of Sanders displaying her stupid shit-eating grin after signing the pro-child labor bill into law — notice the parents are the only ones smiling, licking their lips over the money the kids can bring in by putting them to work instead of wasting their time in school.


SECOND.  As reported earlier here, Rep. Lauran Boebert announced that she will soon be a grandmother — because her 17-yr-old son knocked up his 16-yr-old girlfriend (when she was 15) — the age of consent in Colorado is 17.  Boebert herself has a string of DUI and her husband was arrested for exposing himself to teenaged girls in a local bowling alley more than once.  The 17-yr-old son was arrested a few times for terrorizing the neighborhood by racing his 4-wheeler through lawns.

And that, friends, is today’s Republican Party:  Young boys at labor and young girls in labor.


Why do people support Trump?

Trump’s supporters do not measure his success by what he does FOR them.

No — instead, they measure his success by what he does AGAINST people they don’t like.

This is why they see him as successful.  This is why they will never abandon him.  His tormenting and attacking others is what makes Trump’s supporters happy.

Trump supporters are sick, unhappy, negative people who take delight in “sticking it to” someone else.  Does not matter how wretched their sad, meaningless lives are, as long as “owns the libs” or “sticks it to” the people they hate, they love him.

How sad.

Republicans are in full retreat . . . all their loony dreams have failed but they are too stupid to see it

They had all these grandiose ideas about how they were going to show their people “the other side” of the story about the January 6th insurrection. They created a Weaponization Committee to prove it was all politics and nothing criminal ever happened.

They called the Twitter executives before them to prove they were biased against the Republicans and supportive of the Democrats. That backfired rather dramatically. The exact opposite was proven.

The Chairman, Jim Jordan, doesn’t have the courage to tell his people that there are no bullets in his weapon. He is shooting blanks.

Likewise, the move by Speaker McCarthy to give Tucker Carlson of FOXNews access to all the video files, was nothing but an act of desperation. They know there is no evidence to prove their case. They are only trying to kill time and keep the hounds from the door.

Republicans in the Senate have mostly decided to follow Mitch McConnell and admit that January 6th was an attack upon our Capitol and our democracy. Several of them finally spoke out in the last couple of days.

Republicans are backing themselves into a corner from which there is no exit.

 

Trump lawyer’s source of “election fraud” gets her information “from messages in the wind”

You will not believe this . . . but it is for real.

One of the most stunning revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News has been the fact that Trump attorney Sidney Powell got her ideas about fraud in the 2020 election from a woman who believes that the wind sends her messages.

The identity of this mystery woman has remained a mystery — until now.

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer tracked down Powell’s mystery source and found that she is a Minnesota-based “cactus artist” named Marlene Bourne, who thinks that she could be a ghost after seemingly surviving an “internal decapitation.”

During the interview, Sommer asked her to elaborate on her claim that “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost,” to which Bourne responded by asking Sommer if he believes in telepathy.

Bourne says that she believes she can receive hidden messages embedded in movies, song lyrics, and even conversations from strangers in the supermarket, and that she decided to email Powell one day because she was “on a roll” in using her powers to uncover the purported truth of election fraud in 2020.

“It’s just really interesting where I’ll have the TV on, and I’ll hear a word or a person’s name, and for whatever reason I can’t explain it, it’s going to compel me to look it up online, I’ll do a little digging,” she tells Sommer. “Instead of saying I rely on my intuition, I say ‘the wind’ is talking to me. It’s just a fun way of living my life, don’t you think?”

In addition to her conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, Bourne also thinks that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered as part of a human hunting expedition carried out by globalist elites at Bohemian Grove.

“What’s one way to get rid of a Supreme Court justice in order to get the kind of people that you want on it?” she asks Sommer rhetorically. “Hunting.”

The “christian” party once again shows what it’s made of

Lauren Boebert — who frequently claims to be “christian” — quietly announced that she’s going to be a grandma at age 36.

Her 17 year old son knocked up his 16 year old girlfriend.

UPDATE

Lauren Boebert’s son appears to be a statutory rapist. The age of consent in Colorado is 17. The girl was 15.

Boebert is against sex education in school. She has a rap sheet and is married a man who exposed himself to minors in a bowling alley.

She’s a member of Congress.  And she’s a biblethumping Republican.

2024 is our last chance to stop Republicans and save America

In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
”What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends.”

For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends.

With few exceptions, they are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Right now they’re moving gradually:

— Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military

— Taking over school boards and local boards of elections

— Firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning books that contain such “dangerous” ideas

— Demonizing queer people and outlawing drag shows

— Working with Tucker Carlson and Fox “News” to completely rewrite the history of January 6th

— Gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power

— Changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city-dwellers to vote and to ignore and then change the outcomes of elections they don’t like

— Building media structures that will support the authoritarian takeover when it happens

— Organizing armed paramilitary militias, with back-channel connections to local police

— Creating legal organizations to sanitize and rationalize ending messy democracy

— Radicalizing average Americans through social media and an ever-growing network of hard-right radio shows and podcasts

— Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Democrats and Jews using the dog whistle of “George Soros”

— Firebombing Texas Democratic Party’s Austin headquarters and threatening them that if they don’t stop trying to get Democrats elected worse will come

We’ve seen this movie before.

It was “the other 9/11.” Everything seemed normal until General Pinochet declared he was taking over the government of Chile on September 11, 1973.

The Chilean government had been run democratically since 1923, the longest in South America, but Pinochet (with help from the Nixon administration) had already infiltrated and gotten the loyalty of both the police, the army, and the civilian paramilitaries he’d spent the previous few years nurturing.

So when he rolled up to the presidential palace and declared he was taking over, nobody came to the defense of the elected president, Salvador Allende. The police were already loyal to Pinochet, including the police who defended that nation’s capitol.

Allende, along with around 30 supporters, held the palace for a few hours, gave a short national radio address, and then put a gun to his head and ended his presidency.

Gradually, then suddenly.

When Chileans poured into the streets, Pinochet swept them up and held them in the national stadium, where tens of thousands were tortured, murdered, or simply disappeared. One of the favorite tactics of his military was to throw “liberals” out of helicopters over the ocean to kill them, a practice celebrated by rightwing militia around the US today.

Pinochet’s democratic political opposition lost all its power and went underground; it would be seventeen years before anything resembling democracy would return to Chile, a process that is still pulling itself together.

If Mike Pence had gone along with Trump’s plan to imitate the election of 1876 and install the guy who lost both the popular and the electoral vote as president, America would be a very, very different country today.

Gradually, then suddenly.

Trump had previously proclaimed his desire to change the nation’s libel and slander laws so he could sue or imprison his political opponents and those in the media who opposed him; if he had succeeded on January 6th, that would have happened by now, and people like me (and maybe you) would be in jail.

Echoing one of Pinochet’s first 1973 laws, a Republican state legislator in Florida just proposed legislation requiring bloggers and writers to register with the state if they intend to criticize any elected official; had Trump succeeded we’d all be living under similar laws today.

Trump had previously promised his violent partisans that he’d pardon them and pick up their legal fees; if he’d held onto the White House, by now hundreds of Kyle Rittenhouse’s would have “defended themselves” against Black people, “Antifa,” and “commie liberals”without consequence.

If Republicans held a large enough majority in Congress, a constitutional convention like rightwing billionaires have been promoting and annually rehearsing in Washington, DC would be underway to rewrite our founding document. The right of all Americans to vote, separation of church and state, civil rights, protections of free speech and assembly, the right to due process and equal protection under the law, even the obscure Emoluments Clause would all be on the chopping block.

Trump-friendly corporations would be running political purges reminiscent of the Republican “Red Scare” and “Blacklist”1950s all across the country as social media accounts were examined for evidence of “leftist” leanings; Johnny McEntee began that process when he was “Deputy President” to Trump and was firing people in the executive branch for “liking” postings by “leftwing” entertainers like Taylor Swift.

The process Trump started in Portland and Seattle in the summer of 2020 of unmarked vans and stormtrooper-like federal police with no identifying patches kidnapping people off the streets would have expanded nationwide; tens of thousands would be in custody without charges.

Private prisons would expand to take in the hundreds of thousands of people arrested protesting in the streets or for speaking out on social media. For most Americans who voted Republican or were completely apolitical, though, life would go on as normal (just like in the early years of the takeovers of Chile, Russia, and Hungary — or Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1930s).

A handful of high-profile progressive politicians would have been assassinated or survived assassination attempts; the police and the FBI, however, would have been as clueless about their killers (or complicit) as they were about 10,000 people planning to storm the Capitol and assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House on January 6th.

The Democratic Party would have been labeled the aggressors and as subversives by rightwing media; its ranks by now would have melted away as quickly as the union-aligned parties did in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or the Allende Socialists in Chile in 1973.

First abortion would be criminalized nationwide, then birth control, then women in business and politics would find themselves under constant attack in the media and the workplace. White male dominance would by now be close to reattaining the status it had in 1972 when women couldn’t legally get an abortion, sign some contracts, or even get a credit card without the signature of a father or husband.

Newsrooms across the country would be purged by now of liberals and running editorials in support of the “new patriotism” proclaimed by the GOP; the hedge funds headed up by rightwing billionaires — who today own over half of all the nation’s newspapers — would be snapping up the rest of the nation’s media like Viktor Orbán’s oligarch buddies did in Hungary.

Every time these sorts of coups happen, the nation’s people are shocked and surprised. They had no idea how far things had gone. It even happened that way with the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Gradually, then suddenly.

Trump’s supporters are today openly calling for the end of democracy, for book banning, and for public executions of Democratic politicians. The leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to even reprimand Representative Paul Gosar for openly celebrating his fantasy murder of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A multimillionaire former head of The Carlyle Group with no political experience, running on a platform of auditing the 2020 election and not much else, won the governorship of Virginia by spreading the naked, racist lie that Democrats in that state were indoctrinating white children to feel ashamed of the color of their skin; not a single elected Republican and only a rare few in the media called him out.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt faced the fascist “America First” movement within the GOP, he went to political war with them and the Supreme Court that backed them.

“They hate me,” he thundered to cheers, “and I welcome their hatred!”

President Biden appears to think he can negotiate with these people who want to remake America in Pinochet’s image (with the same type of Chicago School neoliberal advisors who helped Pinochet turn Chile into an autocratic nightmare).

He’s wrong.

They are building their power and their organizations right now; armed paramilitary groups are expanding across the country as the GOP has become so radicalized that they even proclaim Liz Cheney as their enemy.

Billionaire-owned media properties like Fox “News” and hate-talk radio push naked lies to their viewers and listeners — all to make a buck and consolidate their political power — with no loss of audience.

And they’re packing our courts with young, hardcore rightwing ideologues.

Republicans are openly preparing for a second Civil War, calling for a “national divorce.”

Reuters did a major and shocking report on how police forces, presumably sympathetic to local neofascist elements, refuse to even investigate death threats against elections officials and Democratic politicians.

In Michigan, a militia group nearly kidnapped and killed that state’s governor; they were stopped by an insider who turned states’ evidence. Last week another group was found planning to murder that state’s openly lesbian Attorney General.

Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.”

January 6th was a rehearsal; they’re now planning 2024. Coups build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli.

Unless we stop them in-process, this may be our last chance.

Gradually, then suddenly.