Kirk began his career on a lie, claiming to know that he had been rejected by West Point based on affirmative action. He started TPUSA by telling rich, elderly Republicans that he would stop the millennials from becoming socialists. (That didn't exactly work, did it?)
But Kirk did have one important difference in his message from past GOP youth outreach. He correctly understood that Americans, especially young ones, want secular arguments for ideas, not religious ones.
This idea + Kirk's open embrace of trolling, propelled him on campus.
Despite Kirk's claims to be in touch w/ young adults, his political conversion efforts haven't worked. 60% of voters between 18 & 35 voted for Joe Biden. Only 36% voted for Trump.
But in the course of his activism, Kirk came into contact w/a GOP subculture he had not seen yet.
This subculture, commonly referred to as Dominion Theology by scholars, holds that God has given Christians the right and duty to rule over everyone else. But that they must work to establish this supremacism, especially through elections.
One of the key figures in the Dominionist movement is Rob McCoy, a far-right pastor based in Thousand Oaks, California, who has turned his local congregation into a political machine. He used it to get elected to city council and to become the mayor.
McCoy has become the inspiration of a national political network called the American Renewal Project which holds free conferences for far-right pastors and encourages them to make their own political machines, too. It's funded by the owners of the Daily Wire, the Wilks brothers.
Dan and Farris Wilks have quietly used their fracking billions to steer Republican politics toward open Christian supremacism.
They've been helped by Dennis Prager & Ben Shapiro, both of whom hate atheists and LGBT ppl so much that they'd betray their Jewish heritages.
Under the influence of Rob McCoy, Kirk has turned from his previously semi-tolerant evangelical faith toward using all of his political resources to take over America in the name of Republican Jesus.
This conversation he had w/McCoy is highly disturbing:
In it, Kirk rails against America's teachers and professors. He tells his elderly audience that they shouldn't allow their children to attend college because doing so will turn them into "anti-American, godless, atheist, unhappy radicals."
Kirk also talks about how he believes liberals oppose his extremist ideas because they hate God.
It's a complete erasure of progressive Judaism and Christianity. But it also shows just how much he absolutely hates atheists. He is far from alone among GOP elites in this regard.
Kirk has gone whole-hog into outright Christian supremacism. He's launched a radio program distributed by the fundamentalist Salem Media Group, the most powerful GOP media operation other than Fox News.
And he's starting a massively funded offshoot called Turning Point Faith.
Turning Point Faith is designed to take Kirk's collegiate and high school brainwashing program directly into evangelical churches, to tell Christian fundamentalists that they are persecuted, and to focus their hatred into voting Republican.
While Kirk's goofy and awkward personality make it easy not to take him seriously, he is deathly serious about taking over America for Republican Jesus.
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1/x I haven't published anything yet about growing up in a Mormon fundamentalism but editing @C_Stroop's latest article about evangelicals' obsession w/sex got me thinking.
Although their doctrines often have vast differences, authoritarian religions often function the same.
That's definitely true in regards to the unhealthy views of sex that are so common in high-demand faiths. Members do not have autonomy over their own bodies, their very selves.
Chrissy's essay speaks to this very well in the evangelical Protestant subculture but I've heard people from extremist Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic families say the same.
Those aren't my stories, but I can tell of my Mormon experience and how it parallels to Chrissy's account.
Beyond the obvious Disney carve-out, the law is a great example of how the flim-flam peddled as conservative technology policy is nonsensical and would harm them also.
Legally, all of these laws can be used against right-wing social sites. And they will be.
Suppose that by dint of a miracle that Trump does actually get to the 100 million uniques threshold in the FL law. That means that leftist trolls can sue Trump if he bans them.
People would be lining up to file such suits. And they would be hilarious.
Texas has so many additional taxes that its burden is actually higher than California's for middle-class people.
California's taxes on rich people are significantly higher than Texas. That's actually why GOP commentators whine about CA taxes bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
1/x: Polls keep showing that Republicans believe objectively false ideas, but have conservatives really lost their grasp on reality or have they decided to just lie about it to pollsters?
American conservatism is based on a modern Christian fundamentalism which believes the Bible is literally and completely true.
This is something everyone, including them, knows to be nonsense. But this realization has psychically damaged conservatives flux.community/matthew-sheffi…
As a result, the far-right is in "epistemic collapse," they know that their arguments are unprovable but they still want to believe.
Michael Flynn's Covid election conspiracy below is a great illustration. He refers to "my truth," not the truth
Unfortunately, this keeps happening. Why? Because media executives and editors for NY and DC outlets hold very antiquated views of politics, wrongly supposing that ideas flow from elected officials down to the grassroots. But this is untrue and has been for some time.
I can't tell you how many times people have remarked to me in recent months that they're astonished how quickly the Christian supremacist political insurgency that's unavoidably obvious now was able to assemble.
My response is that this story has been out there for years.
Just as an FYI, the "Conservative Review" site mentioned in the original tweet is a vehemently anti-government publication that hates almost all Republicans for not being crazy enough.
But the site has a very curious history. It was started by a Democratic donor.
The man in question, Cary Katz, operated a massive student loan business that made him a billionaire. He worked to make student loans so that they couldn't be discharged in bankruptcy.
But his business evaporated thanks to an obscure provision in the Affordable Care Act.