Month: May 2022

The jury is deliberating on the competing defamation lawsuits between movie stars Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. I read this article by Travis Andrews in the Washington Post because it promised to explain to me why I should care about the outcome of this case, but I still can’t fathom any relevance to my life.

Admittedly, the world of Hollywood doesn’t much interest me. Prior to accusations that Depp has been abusive, I probably liked him more than the average big box office actor, so I guess I was a bit saddened to learn that he is perhaps a giant asshole. As for Amber Heard, I had to look her up on IMDB to see if she’d been in anything I’ve watched. I had no preexisting opinion of her whatsoever, and I was completely unaware that she and Depp had ever been in any kind of relationship.

So, I have basically no emotional investment in the trial. Still, I followed it just enough to understand the basic outlines of the dispute. Depp says that Heard broke an agreement not to talk publicly about their troubled marriage and badly damaged his reputation. Heard says that Depp’s lawyer wrongly called her a liar and damaged her reputation. Despite the rather narrow scope of the dispute, everyone seems to agree that it’s basically an argument about whether Depp was abusive or not.

That question isn’t technically what the jury is supposed to decide, and the trial wasn’t designed to settle it. It’s a civil case about defamation. I don’t feel like I know Depp did or did not do. But, more importantly, I don’t know how the jury’s decision is important in a larger cultural sense. Depp could win the case on the merits and still be guilty of abuse, and the opposite is also true. Heard could be a genuine victim or a spiteful fabricator, but the outcome of the case won’t decide which is true.

Now, if you’ve decided what the truth is, then I suppose you can have an opinion on whether justice was or was not done. But to really have some wide-ranging significance, the outcome must demonstrate something or change something or lead somewhere new. And all I see is the possibility that Depp might gain enough vindication to land some new roles. A few more major Johnny Depp movies might please some audiences, but it hardly adds up to something I feel I should care about.

On the other side, maybe Heard will be vindicated and then that might provide some comfort or encouragement to women who find themselves in abusive relationships. But for that to be justified, Heard would have to actually be telling the truth, which isn’t something the trial really demonstrated one way or the other.

There’s also the idea that the whole trial is just an act of spite on Depp’s part, and that he wins either way. In this telling, which Andrews seems to buy, Depp brought the case not to win necessarily but to abuse Heard all over again by humiliating her on a very large stage. If accurate, then a favorable decision for Depp would show, once again, how powerful men can get away with anything and that the cards are stacked against victims of abuse. But, of course, that narrative is only valuable if it happens to be true. I am not convinced it’s not true, but it isn’t proven.

From what I see, there are a lot of people who are invested in this case for their own reasons, and who will either be happy or upset about the verdict. But I don’t see it as meriting that kind of personal investment. If the jury thinks Depp was abusive, they’ll probably rule against him, but that’s not what they’re supposed to decide. It’s quite possible that the jury will rule in Depp’s favor simply because they like him more or find him more credible,  even if Heard has the better argument that she was defamed. Of course, the opposite is also true.

In the abstract, there is a sense in which justice will or won’t be done, but since the truth is unknown all we’ll have is opinions about how things turned out. I hope justice is done, but I can tell you that I won’t know if it has been done. And I don’t see how that can form the basis for an important cultural event.

Historically, two years after they take office or win reelection, United States presidents suffer the indignity of watching their party lose lots of seats in Congress. In the last quarter century, however, there have been two exceptions to this rule. The first came in 1998 when Newt Gingrich’s House Republicans made the highly unpopular decision to impeach President Bill Clinton. The second came in 2002, when the country was still in post-9/11 mode and inclined to rally around President George W. Bush’s bellicose foreign policy.

There’s no recent record of a president avoiding midterm humiliation through good governance or passing popular legislation. Instead, in one instance, we saw a backlash against minority party extremism and, in the other, a rally-around-the-flag reaction to a major threat to our national sense of security.

In other words, it seems like happenstance has more to do with the outcome of midterm elections than the president’s performance in office. In fact, ironically, President Clinton seemed to benefit from his decision to lie about having sexual relations with a White House intern, and President Bush from his decision to ignore intelligence warning of a major domestic terrorist attack.

As of now, President Biden has not made similar mistakes and it doesn’t look like the country is rallying around him as the 2022 midterm elections approach. But there’s still a chance that something awful will happen that causes the country to unite around its existing leadership or that the Republicans will go too far and invite a concerted backlash.

The imminent outlawing of abortion in much of the country could be an example of the latter phenomenon, while an escalation of the conflict with Russia could form the foundation for the former.

One thing to consider however is that President Clinton weathered the Monica Lewinsky scandal largely because he was otherwise popular. That was probably more a feature of an excellent economy than his legislative achievements, but the sense that he actually got things done did not hurt. It still seems important that Biden signs some significant bills between now and November, especially because the state of the economy is not going to come to his party’s rescue.

The Wall Street Journal reports that negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) are heating up and there’s some renewed hope in the White House that Congress might pass some of his legislative agenda. Rather than predict that this will actually happen, I simply want to say that it would helpful to the Democrats’ election chances if it does.

It won’t be some kind of miracle solution, and it matters less politically what is included in the legislation than that something, anything, can be signed by the president and held up as proof that he’s an effective leader.

I know this is a thoroughly cynical analysis of the political situation, almost as if bad behavior is more likely to be rewarded than good, and that showy demonstrations of competence are just as good as actual competence. But, sadly, history strongly suggests that the Democrats’ best bet in the midterms is that things outside of their control wind up giving them a benefit. A backlash against Republican radicalism seems like the most likely reason why the midterms could go better than expected.

The one thing the Democrats can control is their messaging. And that messaging should quite obviously highlight they many ways in which the GOP is operating outside the mainstream of popular opinion. The January 6 hearings will be critical in this respect, but so will their positions on abortion and gun violence.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from the Navajo reservation, between Cameron and Page, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on 6×6 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Next week some substantial paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I have a laundry list of complaints about the culture and performance of local law enforcement in this country, but one thing that doesn’t particularly concern me is their collective level of courage. For one thing, whether it’s on a wartime battlefield or an elementary school corridor, I’m pretty forgiving about people who fail the test of valor in the face of automatic weapon fire. If being a hero were not exceptional we would have no reason to highly value heroism. If the cops down in Uvalde, Texas were too cautious in confronting the gunman, I can understand that. They failed the test. They weren’t equipped mentally–perhaps they also lacked leadership and proper training, too.

This is a moment in time when an overwhelming percentage of the American public is feeling supportive of efforts to restrict access to military grade weaponry. It’s not a moment in time in which people feel like passing bills to address the bravery level of first responders. For a host of reasons, I don’t think it’s a good idea to treat this as an opportunity to trash the police.

I’m not talking about giving the Uvalde police a pass on their performance, nor on the lies and inaccuracies they’ve presented to the public. There will be time for accountability after a thorough investigation, and it will largely up to the local Uvalde community and the state of Texas to fix any deficiencies they find. That will be important work, but still largely immaterial to the goal of preventing future atrocities in public spaces throughout our nation.

I think it’s quite obvious that the root of the problem at the Ross Elementary School is that a troubled 18 year old was in possession of two incredibly deadly weapons and hundreds of bullets. We can ask police officers to charge at fusillades of bullets, but we can’t think for a moment that that expectation will be consistently fulfilled, nor that it’s an answer to the mass shootings.  The public sees this right now. They’re demanding change. But the consensus and urgency will wane, as it always does.

Opponents of change always want to change the subject and waits things out. Making this about police conduct is doing that job for them. Keep your eye on the ball, people. When the public overwhelmingly agrees with you on the important things, do not focus on less important things with which the public does not necessarily agree.

This story should not be about the failures of the police. It should be about preventing police from being in that position in the first place.

It’s unfortunate that it took an apocalyptic sexual abuse scandal to inspire me to look deeply into the political power structure of the Southern Baptist Church. I quickly learned some really important history that had somehow escaped my notice. For example, I did not know about the importance of New Orleans’ Café Du Monde in the “creation story” of the conservative takeover of the church’s hierarchy.

Those outside the SBC world cannot imagine the power of the mythology of the Café Du Monde—the spot in the French Quarter of New Orleans where [in 1967], over beignets and coffee, two men, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, mapped out on a napkin how the convention could restore a commitment to the truth of the Bible and to faithfulness to its confessional documents.

For Southern Baptists of a certain age, this story is the equivalent of the Wittenberg door for Lutherans or Aldersgate Street for Methodists. The convention was saved from liberalism by the courage of these two men who wouldn’t back down, we believed.

In 2005, Albert Mohler, who was then serving as the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a review of an essay written by Paige Patterson called Anatomy of a Reformation: The Southern Baptist Convention 1978-2004. In detailing Patterson’s motivation in 1967 for initiating a conservative reformation within the church, Mohler explained the centrality of biblical literalism.

An early signal of coming controversy was issued by Houston pastor K. Owen White, who as president-elect of the Southern Baptist Convention directed his attention at a recent book written by a professor at one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s six seminaries. Ralph Elliott, a professor of Old Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, had written The Message of Genesis, a book that had been published by the denomination’s official press. As Patterson explains, the book “had employed historical-critical assumptions, conclusions, and methodologies, which led the professor to question the historicity of some of the narrative portions of Genesis.”

As an observant college student, Patterson was surprised that his Baptist religion professors supported Elliott and dismissed White’s concerns.

The actual conservative takeover of the church is usually dated to 1978, so it took a little over a decade for the plan hatched at the Café Du Monde to come to fruition. The driving force for the coup was a desire to stamp out any doubt about the inerrancy of the Bible. Another way of putting it is that Patterson and Pressler understood that they could seize control of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee and use it as a kind of protestant Inquisition to enforce orthodoxy within the denomination.

But the Southern Baptist church is completely unlike the Catholic Church. Orders from on high do not carry the same weight with Southern Baptists and what control exists has to be exercised in a careful dance related to the “Cooperative Program.”

Southern Baptist churches are all technically independent and don’t answer to anyone. But to be formally recognized they need to donate money to the Cooperative Program which is then used to fund missionary work. This is all directed by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, and it’s in their interest to collect as much revenue as possible. That presents a disincentive to discipline pastors or disown congregations.

But a disincentive is not the same as an impossibility. In recent years, the Executive Committee has taken some strong stands.

Critics have said that the Southern Baptist Convention is comfortable drawing hard lines from the top down when it chooses. After one of the denomination’s largest congregations, Saddleback Church in Southern California, announced it had ordained three women pastors in supporting roles last year, high-profile pastors and leaders criticized the church sharply, and a committee was assigned to examine whether the denomination should break with the church.

Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee expelled two churches over their decisions to accept gay couples as members and church policies that the denomination deemed accepting of homosexuality.

As you can see, if the Executive Committee is willing to forego revenue, it can expel congregations from the Church. But, for decades, they used the decentralized and voluntary structure of the denomination as an excuse for why the could do nothing about sexual predators in positions of leadership. An independent report ordered by church laity on the breadth of the sexual abuse problem dropped this week, and the strong reaction indicates that many people aren’t buying the decentralized excuse.

To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment, it’s true that it would have been tricky for the Executive Committee to do what people are saying they should have done. They aren’t responsible for hiring pastors or placing them in congregations. Unlike the Catholic Church, they didn’t move accused priests to new unsuspecting  parishes where they could continue their predations. In order to protect the flock from sexual abusers, the Executive Committee would have had to monitor complaints from many hundreds of churches and then develop some kind of coercive standard to assure that offenders were removed from power and could not find employment elsewhere.

The impracticality of this was used as an excuse for doing nothing at all. But, it turns out that they actually did take one important step in the right direction. They built a database to collect reports of sexual abuse. The problem is that they kept it a secret and used it solely to protect themselves from potential legal liability. The one constant is that financial concerns trumped any concern about victims.

According to former policy head of the Executive Committee Russell Moore, both Patterson and Pressley are in disrepute now.

Those two mythical leaders are now disgraced. One was fired after alleged mishandling a rape victim’s report in an institution he led after he was documented making public comments about the physical appearance of teenage girls and his counsel to women physically abused by their husbands. The other is now in civil proceedings about allegations of the rape of young men.

We were told they wanted to conserve the old time religion. What they wanted was to conquer their enemies and to make stained-glass windows [link] honoring themselves—no matter who was hurt along the way.

Because the Cooperative Program is both the missionary arm of the Southern Baptist Convention and it’s mechanism of control and theological enforcement, it was possible to argue that goal of spreading the Gospel would be undermined if participants were expelled or alienated through investigations of sexual misconduct. On the one hand, this was a convenient excuse, but on the other it was true that the arrangement was ill-suited for the job. One problem was that there was simply so much sexual misconduct. This is clear by looking only at those who have been found guilty of sex crimes. When we consider those who haven’t yet faced justice, the numbers are staggering.

In some quarters, pastors and church members are openly frustrated at what they see as years of inaction on a crisis that has publicly persisted since 2019, when an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News revealed that nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders, from youth pastors to top ministers, had pleaded guilty or been convicted of sex crimes against more than 700 victims since 1998.

To get their hands around a problem that big, the Executive Committee would have had to create a full-time bureaucracy staffed by dozens of employees. The problem here is that we have a mismatch between the power the Executive Committee wants to exert in some fields and the way it is able to exert that power to obtain compliance.

The whole point of the conservative reformation was to stamp out heterodoxy using the voluntary Cooperative Program as the mechanism of control. This made the church hierarchy dependent on the Cooperative Program and also mindful that it needed to choose its battles carefully. If they made decisions that caused a decrease in participation, they’d lose both revenue and control. Part of the dance was to coerce while giving the congregations the sense of their own independence.

On some things, like making an example of congregations that embraced gay rights, they felt they could take a hard stand on not get punished. But as for creating a nationwide sexual predator monitoring system, they felt this would open a can of worms that would unravel the whole system. They’d rather quickly find that taking responsibility for the hiring practices of hundreds of congregations and using the Cooperative Program as their mechanism of enforcement, would invite backlash and reduce participation.

So, they strongly resisted taking that approach and the result was catastrophic.

Many of them even convinced themselves that the controversy was the work of the Devil–a devious way to undermine their efforts to evangelize the Gospel to the world. But, in a real way, the problem was built into the structure. Southern Baptists really have to choose between two things. They can maintain the fierce independence of their congregations or they can grant power to some distant church hierarchy.

What they can’t do is have it both ways. They can’t stamp out all heterodoxy within the Church and still have fully independent congregations. They tried this, and they got the worst of both worlds.

A real reformation within the Church would see congregations find a new way to fund their missionary work. As for dealing with sexual predators, rather than relying on some giant centralized bureaucracy, they might join with other faiths and denominations in creating some kind of crowdsourced database so offenders can’t easily relocate and find new congregations to victimize.

Finally, I’ll just note that any religious movement based on the inerrancy of the ancient scriptures is bound to run into severe problems. That becomes clear the second you ponder who has the power to exert the thought control and the mechanisms they’ll need to do the job.

Hi!

Let’s start off with something that Billy Martin (of Medeski, Martin, & Wood fame) released a couple years ago):

It’s almost ambient music. Definitely experimental.

Cheers.

I didn’t attend Princeton University but I did attend its keg parties. As a senior in high school, I spent much of my free time hanging out on the campus with a small group of upperclassmen who treated me and my friend Mike as something between mascots and proteges. One acquaintance of mine, a graduate student in the Classics department, got me interested in philosophy and Ancient Greek, which I then studied when I went off to a different college.

So, I suppose I have more than the average passing interest in the case of tenured Classics professor Joshua Katz, who was just cashiered by the Princeton Board of Trustees. Ostensibly, Katz’s sin was having an inappropriate sexual relationship with an undergraduate student in 2006 and 2007. Princeton only learned of the relationship a decade later, and the New York Times reports he was “he was quietly suspended without pay for a year.”

Perhaps people should be focused on the “quiet” part of his 2017 suspension because that seems like a nice courtesy that did little to protect future students from inappropriate advances. But it turned out that Katz’s adulterous affair with an undergrad would not remain a secret.

That’s because Katz decided to become an outspoken critic of Black activists on campus during the height of the national controversy over the police slaying of George Floyd in 2020.

The saga began with an open letter to Princeton’s leadership on Independence Day in 2020, when protests over the police killing of George Floyd and demands for racial justice were rippling across the country. The first sentence declared: “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.”

The letter called on the university to take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive on its campus,” and offered 48 proposals for reform. It was signed by more than 300 faculty, students and staff members.

Prominent signers of the letter included Dr. Glaude; Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Dominican-born Roman historian, who has written that the field of classics is inextricably entangled with white supremacy; and Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, who has since left Princeton.

One of the demands was that Princeton “acknowledge, credit and incentivize anti-racist student activism,” beginning with a “formal public university apology” to members of the Black Justice League, who were met with institutional resistance when they agitated, several years before it happened, to remove President Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs.

Four days later, Dr. Katz, who has repeatedly described himself as nonpolitical, published his riposte, “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.”

He said that while some of the letter’s signers might have believed in their declaration, he thought that peer pressure played a bigger role, and that others had not actually read it. He was, he wrote, embarrassed for them.

And while he agreed with some demands, like giving summer move-in allowances to new assistant professors, he wrote that he disagreed with others, like giving an additional semester of sabbatical to junior faculty members of color.

He also described the Black Justice League as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many Black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” He described the group’s supporters as “baying for blood” during a “struggle session” recorded on Instagram Live that he said was “one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed.”

Now, Princeton is adamant that these remarks did not serve as the motivation or rationale for firing Prof. Katz. But there’s no debate that the remarks directly led to his firing. That’s because it angered and motivated people to look into his past, and that’s when his previous affair and suspension were discovered.

This, then, brought the women, now fifteen years older, out of the woodwork, and she filed a complaint against Katz.

The woman in the sexual relationship did not cooperate with the original Princeton investigation. But after the Princetonian report, she filed a formal complaint that led the administration to open a new investigation, which it said was looking at new issues rather than revisiting old violations, according to the university report.

The new investigation spurred by this complaint is what caused Katz’s termination. But if you listen to Katz’s anti-woke defenders on the right, particularly at the National Review, you won’t hear much about the victim’s complaint. In Nate Hochman’s piece on the controversy, he says “for anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s pretty obvious that the real reason for Katz’s termination was political,” and motivated “by the professor’s criticism of Princeton’s ‘anti-racism’ initiatives.” Hochman makes no mention at all of a new complaint and a second investigation.

It’s essential to the right’s argument that they leave this key detail out. After all, this is largely a debate about cause and effect. Was Katz fired because of his sexual behavior or because he was politically incorrect? There can be a legitimate debate on the relative weight to assign to each factor, but refusing to even address the sexual behavior is not a debate.

And that tactic allows the professor’s defenders to avoid confronting the results of the second investigation.

The university’s statement said a 2021 investigation had “established multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward” during its 2018 investigation into the relationship with the undergraduate.

One such instance, the statement said, was “a successful effort to discourage the alumna from participating and cooperating after she expressed the intent to do so.” The investigation also found that “Dr. Katz exposed the alumna to harm while she was an undergraduate by discouraging her from seeking mental health care although he knew her to be in distress, all in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by university rules,” according to the statement.

These actions, the statement said, were “not only egregious violations of university policy, but also entirely inconsistent with his obligations as a member of the faculty.”

For Hochman, these details go unmentioned because they’re irrelevant: “As a result of the activist-led backlash to [Katz’s] comments, the Princeton administration has been gunning for Katz’s head for some time.” In other words, the assertion is that the president of the university and the Board of Trustees were simply looking for an excuse to fire Katz, and his dishonesty and obstruction of the original investigation, along with new revelations unearthed in the student’s complaint and the ensuing investigation, are mere pretenses used to justify a predetermined event.

Here is what is true. If Katz hadn’t opened his mouth in the summer of 2020 to complain about anti-racist activism on campus, he would almost certainly still have a job. He should have counted himself lucky in that, however, both because his initial punishment was lenient and because he was successful in hiding some of the more damning details of the relationship with the student.

For those on the right who at least acknowledge these facts, they argue that anyone can be destroyed if a Woke mob attacks them and turns over every rock looking for damaging information. And maybe there’s a lot of truth in that, and maybe we should be a bit concerned about how this whole saga implicates free speech on college campuses. But that doesn’t address what a university administration is supposed to do when presented with damaging information.

In this case, it became clear that Katz’s one-year suspension was based on incomplete information and that he likely would have received a harsher punishment, including possible termination, if he had been honest and cooperative at the time. I don’t want to say the cover-up was worse than the initial transgression, but it definitely added to it and provided a reasonable cause for Katz’s firing.

Katz’s defenders might not like it, but the old adage that people in glass houses should not throw stones is apt here. He poked a bear, and the bear poked back, but the response wouldn’t have been deadly had he not had such a giant vulnerability.

Ultimately, Katz was brought down by himself. He lost his job because Princeton could not justify keeping him employed. A Woke mob exposed the truth about his character, but it was his character that did him in. For this reason, he’s a poor martyr for the cause of free speech.

The Guardian reports on the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that was just conducted in Hungary. Sometimes people complain that it’s inappropriate to compare anyone or any political movement to Adolf Hitler’s Nazis unless there’s a death toll in the millions. But exterminating human beings is the end game of Naziism, not the beginning point. By the time there is a rail schedule to the death camps, you’ve waited too long to confront the threat. What you need to do is learn to identify Nazi-like behavior while there is still time to prevent the demise of your representative form of government, and before they’ve seized power for themselves. If a political movement walks like the Nazis and talks like the Nazis, then it is probably going to end up causing world historical damage and trauma like the Nazis. And, in any case, no one wants to live under a Nazi regime even if it doesn’t count its victims in the millions.

A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.

Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.

This isn’t some simple oversight where someone forgot to thoroughly vet the conference speakers. The reason CPAC held a conference in Hungary at all is because this breed of American conservative deeply admires the fascist tendencies of the Hungarian government led by Viktor Orbán.

There is a very real chance that these lunatics will be part of a Congressional majority in the United States beginning next January. They’re already exercising their power in many states. There’s nothing more important than how these folks are treated between now and the November elections. Fascist insurrectionists are on pace to win at the ballot box just because people are annoyed about inflation and the Democrats’ inability to deliver on their promises. Before that happens, there has to be bold action to expose these people for what they are and the threat they represent. The Department of Justice has to get its butt moving, and the January 6 committee hearings need to breakthrough into the public’s consciousness.

There is a lot of important news coming at us pretty fast these days. But David Roberts nailed it!

It is so wild to me that they're holding CPAC in Hungary, openly celebrating Orban's defeat of democracy, openly planning to do the same in the US … it's just all out in the open now. And still the media can't seem to convey it clearly to the public.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) May 20, 2022

The CPAC conference in Hungary comes on the heels of the two biggest stories of the last month: (1) the leak of Alito’s draft demonstrating that the Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade, and (2) the shooting in Buffalo, NY by an adherent of the great replacement theory. Speaking from Hungary, Matt Schlapp (head of CPAC) tied the two stories together.

The GOP has come up with a solution for the “great replacement” it fears is threatening to replace traditional white Republican voters with immigrants: an abortion ban…

“Roe v. Wade is being adjudicated at the Supreme Court right now, for people that believe that we somehow need to replace populations or bring in new workers, I think it is an appropriate first step to give the…enshrinement in law the right to life for our own unborn children,” [Schlapp] said…

“If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said.

Hungary is the European country where “the great replacement theory reigns supreme.” Viktor Orban’s response has been to promote “procreation not immigration.” So he’s been tying the two together for years now. That is the basic idea behind “The Handmaid’s Tale” taking root in the 21st Century.

A lot of the stories I’ve seen lately tie this fascination with Orban’s policies in Hungary to the fact that Tucker Carlson took his talk show on the road there last fall. Sometimes those stories acknowledge that it was one of the thought leaders of the new right – Rod Dreher – who talked Carlson into the idea. But this melding of the radical right with Orban’s great replacement policies started long before that.

In March 2019, the Hungarian Embassy hosted a “Make Families Great Again” conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Attendees at this invitation-only even included White House special assistant Katy Talento, White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp (Matt Schlapp’s wife) and several members of Congress.

The Trump Administration sent representatives to the International Conference on Family Policy that was held in Budapest in September 2019. There, Trump officials lauded Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” policies.

But the Trump administration didn’t just participate in conferences. HHS provided $5.1 million Title X family-planning funds to an organization called Obria, which aims to be a pro-life alternative to Planned Parenthood.

In 2015, Obria’s founder and current chief executive explained, “When [Europe’s] nations accepted contraception and abortion, they stopped replacing their population. Christianity began to die out. And, with Europeans having no children, immigrant Muslims came in to replace them, and now the culture of Europe is changing.” She warned that America is “on the same track as Europe” and that “[i]n only two of the past 40 years have we replaced our population.”

After leaving office, former Vice President Pence got in on the action by attending the Budapest Demographic Summit last September.

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that he is hopeful the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court created during his and President Donald Trump’s administration will soon overturn abortion rights in the United States.

Pence spoke at a forum devoted to demographics and family values in Budapest, Hungary, where conservative leaders from central Europe expressed their anxieties about falling birthrates in the Western world and discussed ways to reverse the trend.

“We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself. The erosion of the nuclear family marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates,” Pence said.

As I’ve written before, this is the tie that binds the radical right’s Christian nationalism, racism, and misogyny. They are making it very clear by saying it out loud and demonstrating that they’re willing to destroy democracy (and, at minimum, justify violence) in their quest to implement their goals. Anyone who fails to see the threat simply isn’t paying attention.

Have you ever written out a check several days before you actually mailed it? Or backdated a check to make it look like you sent it on time? Maybe you were simply wrong about what day it was, and the date on the check was wrong for that reason.

The truth is, the date on a check is not reliable information. Obviously, the same is true for an absentee ballot. For this reason, election officials can’t rely on your say-so about when you filled out and (certainly not) when you actually mailed your ballot.

Fortunately, election officials have two much more important pieces of information to guide them. In many cases, they have the post office stamp that shows when the ballot was processed by the USPS, and they have their own timestamp which is placed on the ballot on the same day they receive it.

In Pennsylvania, where the U.S. Senate Republican primary race between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick is headed for a recount, there is a state law that says all mail-in ballots must be signed and dated by the voter. The signature is a reasonable requirement but the date is not. Thousands of voters forget to add the date and they can have their vote invalidated as a result.

This was just litigated in the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in as case involving a county judgeship election from November 2021. A three-judge panel ruled that the voter-supplied date on the mail-in ballot is immaterial to whether the ballot was received on time, and the absence of a date should not spoil the ballot.

This means that similar ballots in the U.S. Senate recount will not be tossed.

That’s possibly bad news for Trump-endorsed Oz, because his voters were less inclined to vote by mail than McCormick’s. When the recount begins, lawyers for Oz will be looking to invalidate as many mail-in ballots as they can, and there are a lot of undated ballots.

Nick Custodio, a deputy Philadelphia city commissioner, said there were 2,100 mail and absentee ballots that had been received without dates in Philadelphia as of Friday afternoon. Of those, about 100 were Republican ballots.

He said that number would go up slightly, however, because officials had not yet completed processing mail ballots.

If McCormick has something like 70-30 advantage with mail-in voters, an additional 100 ballots from Philadelphia County would net him 40 votes. Repeat that all over the state, and it could quickly add up to hundreds of votes. As of today, Oz has an advantage of slightly over 1,000 votes, but the ruling will reduce that number. It could possibly erase it.

This is going to make Trump and his supporters go absolutely mental. It will reinforce their narrative about the 2020 election when Biden was initially behind when the same-day votes were tallied but steadily erased his deficit and moved into the lead when absentee ballots were counted. It will give them a reason to argue that the rules were changed and state law ignored in an effort to steal the election away from Oz.

But, on the merits, there’s simply no reason to demand that voters date their ballots because they can put any date they want on the ballot and there’s no way to tell if they lied or made a mistake. If an election office received the ballot on time, that’s proof that it was submitted before Election Day.

The court’s ruling is fair and sensible, but it will be amusing to watch how it is treated by the conspiracy-minded lunatics on the right.