As I've been laid up in bed I haven't been exposed to a lot of the paid-public relations campaign to garner that kind of disgusting himpathy that they can create for the little creeps from Covington Prep, not dissimilar to the himpathy campaign worked up for the serial sexual assaulter who was put on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. I know that the habits of giving privileged white boys every benefit of the doubt can be evoked to cover up white boys being really bad. Especially those who are jocks in a popular team sport. I read they broke into the football jock's idea of a Polynesian war dance featured in the incident. That display, appropriated and bastardized from a group of dark-skinned people, by a group of white prep-school boys wearing Trumpler Junger regalia - our version of a Nazi arm band - in an incident involving Black people on the one hand and Native Americans on the other saturates the incident with racism just as the video footage of some of the Covington boys harassing young women BEFORE THE WIDELY VIEWED INCIDENT shows that misogyny was also part of it. That those boys were in DC as part of an anti-choice demonstration is certainly included in the package of privileged vileness that comes through every time I see footage of the incident.
But, this being TV-Hollywood-hate-talk radio saturated America in the Trump era, there is a very good chance that those privileged boys will not only get away without consequences, they will be presented as martyrs, victims of the very people and groups they harassed and who in the fullness of time, like Kavanaugh, they will be empowered to screw using the power of the government to do it.
There should be a rule that any group of affluent white boys whose parents need to hire a public relations firm to get off without consequences for their bad behavior have that professional PR campaign held against them.
The Catholic school they come from may or may not hold them responsible but I'm betting that there will be a successful campaign by Covington parents to prevent the brats from being punished. That is part of the corruption of religion that comes with the maintenance of elite schools servicing the affluent - I would suggest that those in charge of such prep schools meditate on the Epistle of James for a year and they close those training grounds for teaching those who go into them with too much privilege an even greater sense of entitlement, a pipeline to the Ivy-Ivy Equivalent system which is part of the creation of oligarchy.
There is, at least, questioning of that kind being raised, this time. A Kentucky bishop is expressing serious reservations about how close the anti-choice movement, supposedly "pro-life" is to American's first overtly pagan-Mammonist ruler.
In a strongly worded newspaper column, a Kentucky bishop urged Catholics to consider the church’s full teaching on life and to resist temptations to align themselves with the “Make America Great Again” movement started by President Trump.
Bishop John Stowe wrote on Wednesday that it “astonishes” him that some students gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to protest abortion at the March for Life—including students caught on video in an exchange with a Native American tribal leader—wore so-called MAGA caps, which he said support a president whose policies are putting lives at risk.
“Without engaging the discussion about the context of the viral video or placing the blame entirely on these adolescents,” the Lexington, Ky., bishop wrote in the Lexington Herald-Leader, “it astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies.”
Well, it's a start let's hope it more than just a start. Though anyone who has failed to notice the anti-choice movement was thick as thieves with Republicans even as they devolved into fascists couldn't have been paying attention. They were allied with them even as the Reagan-Bush I administration were running a terror war that murdered people who are being canonized now. The assassin of St. Oscar Romero was trained at the School of the Americas. There has been a satanic two-step between right-wing Catholics and those sponsors of murderers for the entire modern era. It would take a whole new blog to go over just the outlines of that scandal. The elite Catholic school system was not unrelated to that, it is certainly producing some of the most depraved of of them as can be seen in the staffing of the Trump regime and the Republican establishment.
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There is something up at Raw Story, co-posted at Salon that could have been valuable but which is rather ruined by including the de rigueur slam against Christianity. I started looking a bit at the comments attached to the article at Raw Story - didn't bother to look at Salon, where it's copied from - and the opportunity to take up the Christian-bashing cat calls was taken.* At least one of them points out that Trump is not in any sense of the word Christian. You could not intuit the morality of Jesus, the theology of Paul and James and the others who provide the absolute foundation of Christianity from the Trump regime or the Trump family.
There are many things you can say about the Trump regime's similarities to the Nazis and other antisemetic governments but one thing you can't claim is that it is "Christian". While it contains many pseudo-Christians, some of the actually quite fanatical, it also contains quite a few Jews in the highest positions, Jared Kushner, for Pete's sake, Ivanak, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, and many whose names don't get in the news as often (Jason Greenblatt, David Miller, etc.).
Of course the issue of religion is largely beside the point with these guys, they are, heart, soul, mind and strength, the servants of Mammon, that swamps any other matters of identity just as thoroughly as Trump's tiny handful of Black supporters, supporters of what would be normally be considered higher aspects of their persons are entirely obliterated by their devotion to money and power for the purpose of getting more money.
Trump is certainly a racist, his hatred of Black People and Latinos, something that was part of his business practice, is real and controlling (his wall obsession). His maintenance of some ugly as well as other just stupid beliefs surrounding identity is real and often comes through. His conception of religion is best seen by the incident during his campaign when he visited the Presbyterian Church that he was confirmed in as a teenage and he was so abysmally ignorant of the religion he was confirmed in that he had to ask the, now Black, pastor if Presbyterians were Christians. "Christianity" in the minds and mouths of such people has nothing to do with Jesus or Paul or even, in many cases, God, it is a tool of working things for advantage. For Trump I'm sure being Jewish means no more than that his daughter who people say is probably the only person he really cares about converted when she married into another rich real-estate family and his grandchildren from her are Jewish. I am just as sure that anything else about Jewish identity is as meaningless to him as the slogans of American nationalism he mouths as he sold us out to Putin and the Saudi establishment, China and the Kim regime. So is the identity, "Christian". Christianity is meaningless without the morality of Jesus. It is incompatible with Republican-fascism.
* I noticed that Ron Reagan jr's Freedom From Religion ad was on Rachel's show again last night. I was watching on a pirated feed on Youtube and as soon as it was on the chats in the sidebar were immediately swayed from attacking Republicans by the typical atheist-vs "Xian" stuff. The left doesn't have the time to be swayed by those jerks for another decade. The FFRF is worse than a waste of time, it is a distraction for something that is not only not useful, it is counterproductive. They are most useful for Republican-fascists, not the productive left.
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