@cscnme including claiming that legalized abortion is a casus belli for the formation of paramilitaries for the explicit purpose of overthrowing the US government and establishing a Christian Nationalist theocratic state.
Trewhella actually housed a terrorist in his basement,
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@cscnme who actually drew up a full plan for Army of God-esque terrorism, including clinic bombings and targeted assassinations of clinic workers and staff.
The MTTP terrorist/paramilitary manual used to actually be sold at USTP Wisconsin state conventions
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@cscnme Trewhella is also a signatory to Paul Hill's (of the Army of God, the better-known Christian Nationalist terrorist group in the US) "Defensive Action Statement", stating that the targeted assassination of clinic staff at women's clinics was "justifiable homicide"
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@cscnme And it should be noted that there is in fact evidence that Army of God organizers and convicted Army of God terrorists were participants in the Great Sedition on January 6th 2021
@cscnme Trewhella has also promoted ideas that apparently the intent of equal rights movements (and really, women working or existing outside the home and not having "quiverfulls" of children) is in part meant to neuter kids, and even Sarah Palin wasn't acceptable...
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@cscnme NOT because Palin wasn't a Christian Nationalist, but...because she was a woman.
In fact, Trewhella has actually called for women to be stripped of civil rights entirely, including the right to vote or hold property in their own name
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@cscnme Trewhella has also explicitly called for the forced roundup of LGBTQIA people in concentration camps, and has explicitly refused to buy health insurance (using an extremely anti-Semitic catchphrase)
@cscnme Oh, and Trewhella is also (unsurprisingly) a covid denialist (and has used crypto-anti-Semitic arguments to go against public health measures), but the actual covid denial is on the LIGHT end of just how extreme he gets
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@cscnme So that "Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates" that Trewhella is pushing (and which Oltmann invokes) is basically a very old Calvinist argument to the effect of "When a king or other official acts in an un-Christian manner, lesser authorities are free to Ignore or even
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@cscnme depose that authority". It's been heavily adopted by Christian Nationalists and sovereign-citizen types as an excuse to outright disobey laws and even as an argument for violent insurrection
@cscnme (the "resistance" in question being against desegregation) and honestly most of what you're seeing in public now has been said in *private* since at least Carter's, if not Nixon's or Kennedy's administrations
@cscnme Christian Nationalists and sovcit types have especially glommed to this, both because of its history within Protestantism (and also particularly because of history re the English Civil War) *and* it was used as *some* of the justification for the American Revolution
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@cscnme In practice by Christian Nationalist terrorist groups (like the Army of God, or MTTP)--including Trewhella's group--it's actually been used as not only justification for things like jury nullification and states claiming "nullification" but murder of perceived enemies
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@cscnme Specifically, Trewhella explicitly promotes states and municipalities blatantly disregarding "unjust" national laws, and even calling for violent resistance including secession and overthrowing of the legitimate US government in his book on the subject
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@cscnme So yes, tl;dr they're explicitly calling for creation of a Christian Nationalist neo-Confederacy, and (when the US government attempts to enforce federal law) actively attempting to overthrow the US government a la January 6th to establish a dictatorship
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@cscnme (And people still, to this day, do not know *how* close we actually came to that happening on J6. I'm sure we will find out much more in the J6 hearings just how close we came, but pretty much any #exvangelical or political researcher who's studied Christian Nationalism
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@cscnme can tell you that we came *EXTREMELY* close on J6 to America's own version of the Romanian Iron Guard (aka a group of fascists that even the Nazis were horrified by due to their sheer violence) and to a national hell to the right of the fictional Republic of Gilead
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@cscnme and yeah, it's not pretty, it's not nice, but I would actually encourage people to look because that is LITERALLY what unvarnished Christian Nationalism looks like when they're "keeping it in the family".
THIS is what #exvangelical survivors warn about
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@cscnme This is what we've tried to warn about for 50+ years (collectively, as an #exvangelical community of survivors, even when exit counselors couldn't wrap their heads around the concept Bible-based groups could go EXTREMELY toxic). And got gaslit over, consistently,
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@cscnme and we were among those who were sounding the alarm bells as early as *June 2020*, and in some cases almost from the moment Trump was *nominated* (not elected as president, *nominated* by the GOP) based on what we and researchers were HEARING in Christian Nationalist fora
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@cscnme We're not making this shit up.
We were *NEVER* making this shit up or exaggerating.
And this is why I keep saying *listen to #exvangelicals when we talk about this* because we've seen it unvarnished, we've heard from the time we were babies what they want to do
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@cscnme The fact another person who's actively shilled the book is Matt Shea (a Christian Nationalist in Washington state who has actively called for a Christian Nationalist insurgency where all male non-convertees will be killed and women forcibly married) also should tell much
@cscnme (No, I am not kidding on this. For context: This is literally a state legislator who was declared a threat to his fellow members of the state legislature and had plans for a coup of the WA state govt ) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Shea
@cscnme The fact that Intercessors for America, a New Apostolic Reformation group that has linkages to J6 (including attempting to pressure Pence to not certify the election), shills the book should tell you much
@cscnme The fact the American Family Association of Pennsylvania endorses it is telling, considering that the AFA is so extremely anti-LGBTQIA as to be considered a hate group (and other state affiliates have promoted the Army of God terror manual and Scott Lively's anti-LGBTQIA tripe)
@cscnme In fact, almost every reference I've seen to the book is from Christian Nationalist or sovereign-citizen groups promoting it.
One of the few exemptions I found...was the SPLC, noting Roy Moore was an adherent to Trewhella's theory (p. 12) splcenter.org/sites/default/…
@cscnme (Note: the latter is a law brief where the SPLC sued to have Roy Moore removed from the Alabama Supreme Court, and also noting that Roy Moore has extensive linkages with Randall Terry and Operation Save America, which itself has close links w/ the Army of God terror network)
@cscnme There's actually a lovely expose re OSA and Trewhella (and their calls for a Christian Nationalist coup-de-etat)
Polls don't vote. People do. Today and tomorrow is where we seal the deal and bring it home and that only happens when we vote in NUMBERS.
It looks good so far, but it's always better to get MOAR and make it OVERWHELMING--important in light of GOP lawfare threats
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So the things important for y'all voting on Election Day:
a) Many states require businesses to give you off time to vote
b) Need a way to get to polls? Most public transit agencies give free transportation, and Uber/Lyft give discounted rides, also Urban League can help
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@Politics_Polls @MorningConsult And here, I'm going to remind folks of my First Law of Political Polling:
Never, ever, *ever* trust any political polling group that refuses to publish its crosstabs freely and not locked up behind a paywall (including a paid subscription wall).
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@Politics_Polls @MorningConsult Yes, there's a VERY SPECIFIC reason I say Never Trust Anyone Who Won't Share Their Crosstabs Publicly And For Free.
Almost without *exception*, any group refusing to publish a breakout of basic things like "size of pool", "composition of pool", and so on is Hiding Something
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@Politics_Polls People talk a lot now about "herding" in polls. Probably THE most common way "herding" occurs is through issues of weighting members of a poll, and I'm going to lay out the many ways that just *weighting* the people in a pool can seriously fuck with a result
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So digging through the state-level Marist polls, and we are seeing more evidence (already indicated by both the CES national poll with 78k respondents AND previous Marist polls) of a "Dobbs Effect" that is reaching strongly even into white evangelical Christian pops
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So Marist is one of two polls that tend to be less hot garbage than most, and tend to go into some deeper details like sub-surveying of self-identified white evangelical Christians. And this is a MAJOR barometer for a Dobbs Effect, as I'll explain below
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Something like 15% of Americans self-identify as "white evangelicals" in larger religious surveys by PIRR and Pew Forum, and these populations (in deeper studies of Christian Nationalism and New Apostolic Reformation/Seven Mountains theology) are extremely R-trending
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Even IF Biden had outright called MAGAts "garbage" he'd not have been wrong and he would have arguably been CHARITABLE to *merely* call them "garbage" after that "Daily Scheisser Live" three-sheets-short-of-a-cross-burning Hate Rally at MSG
Like, literally, let's JUST go over what was pushed THIS WEEKEND AT AFOREMENTIONED HATE RALLY, and I will remind EVERYONE here that *all of this was explicitly approved to the point it showed up on teleprompters and in rehearsals* so they damn well KNEW what was up
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a) Has a shock "comedian"--who was so infamously racist he got banned from Joe Rogan's club, and who was originally going to include a routine referring to the VPOTUS as a <C-BOMB>--does the infamous "PR is a floating island of garbage" routine
And this is where I talk about a particular effect of WHY polling has gone to hell (and about all that you can get that's useful is things from crosstabs)
I have dubbed this the Straw Market Problem, and it's an issue even beyond political polls
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@garymauney @matthewjdowd More properly, I should refer to this as the Nassau Straw Market Problem, because it relates to a particularly infamous straw market (which does not exist anymore in its older form) and is an example of how aggressive capitalism and marketing can shit up *everything*
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@garymauney @matthewjdowd Up until 2 yrs ago, the Port of Nassau had its cruise ship terminal (1000s of ppl/day) empty its exit/entry into an outdoor vendor hall/outdoor mall you HAD to pass through to exit the port to get into downtown Nassau (the Straw Market in question)
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And just so people know I don't just look at GOP-friendly polls with a hairy eye, I look at ALL polls with a hairy eye: Big Village CARAVAN, which *is* looking good for Harris but STILL has methodology issues that can skew it rightward
So looking at their polling they appear to gather from "opt-in online panels", which is a real fancy term for "Used paid-survey portals".
Which that introduces a risk of pool-poisoning, as we've seen from sites that use YouGov in particular
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They also use some rather odd weighting for their grouping--in addition to ACS (which weights for population), it weights based on *vote in 2020*, which actually RISKS missing a lot of voters--much of GenZ and Gen Alpha only became registered voters in 2022 or this year
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