Croquemitaine

judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Alliance Defending Freedom, Erik Baptist #fundie #crackpot theguardian.com

[Columnist piece, Title: The right is stealthily working to remove Americans’ access to abortion medication]

[...]
This week a Republican-appointed federal judge weighed whether to grant an injunction that could remove mifepristone, the drug used in most American abortions, from the market nationwide. And the hearing almost happened in secret.

US district court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had initially planned to keep Wednesday’s hearing in the case – in which a group of rightwing anti-abortion groups are suing the FDA to reverse its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone – quiet. In a conference call with lawyers for the anti-choice groups and the Department of Justice, Kacsmaryk asked attorneys not to disclose the existence of the hearing (“This is not a gag order,” he said repeatedly), and said that the event would only be made public late on Tuesday to minimize popular awareness.
[...]
[...] the federal judicial district has become a popular venue for rightwing litigation in part because Kacsmaryk, an exceptionally conservative jurist willing to publish poorly reasoned, policy-driven opinions, is the only federal judge there.
[...]
Lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the rightwing legal outfit that is representing the plaintiffs and which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, pursued this idea on Wednesday in court. “How many more women have to die?” attorney Erik Baptist asked.
[...]

Vladimir Putin #conspiracy #fundie #homophobia #transphobia washingtonpost.com

[Opinion piece title: "Putin pitches the American right with an ungodly invocation of God"]

[...]Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. [...] the Russian dictator fired a series of heat-seeking verbal missiles into our culture wars.

“Look at what they’ve done to their own people,” he said of us Westerners. “They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.” Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.
[...]
“And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages,” he said. “That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.”

Well, not quite, but he pressed on: “However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.”

Among his enemies, Putin charged, “even the sacred texts are subjected to doubt.” Also, watch out, Britain: The “Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God,” Putin mourned. “What can you say here? Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction.”
[...]

Opus Dei, Pared Foundation, affiliated schools #fundie #homophobia #kinkshaming #dunning-kruger abc.net.au

[Title: Students at private Sydney school linked to Opus Dei told that masturbation is a disorder, porn puts holes in your brain.
How pressure recruitment is done is also in the article.]

[...]
a piece of sticky tape being passed from girl to girl around the classroom. "By the time it got to the last person, it was handed back to the teacher, and by that point the sticky tape was a bit grotty and not sticky anymore," she says. [...] 'That's what happens to you when you have sex before marriage, when you have multiple partners. You're not useful anymore, you're not valuable anymore, [...] you're dirty and unusable'."
[...]
Students say they were told that watching pornography caused holes in the brain, girls were discouraged from getting a life-saving cancer vaccine, pages on the curriculum were ripped out or redacted from text books, homophobia was rife and there were persistent attempts to recruit school students to Opus Dei.
[...]
HPV cervical cancer vaccine [...] it would promote promiscuity and they were expected to marry as virgins
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masturbation is mentally disordered behaviour, as is homosexuality
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"told that truth and fact is secondary to your ethos."
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told that abortion and the contraceptive pill cause cancer
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shown graphic cartoon videos of abortions without parental consent that showed foetuses with their limbs ripped off, which were inaccurate depictions
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'Men are like cars, it's bad to rev the engine, but then not drive the car or leave it stuck in neutral' [...] focused around teaching us to behave in a certain way that we wouldn't lead men into temptation. [...] that men couldn't control themselves [...] Sex is too powerful an urge to be 'negotiated'. The very notion of rational consent to powerful passions, [...] is absurd [...]"
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constantly told that homosexuality was a grave mortal sin that would damn them to hell
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was encouraged to engage in "self-mortification" — whipping herself
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NewsPunch #conspiracy #sexist apnews.com

[AP News article. Title: "Fabricated WEF story published by site known for false news". I wasn't sure if #sexist was the right tag but the intent is also to trivialize human rights by presenting activists as crackpots.]

[...]
The claims came from a website called News Punch, which has published numerous stories based on conspiracy theories and has promoted fabricated information and quotes in the past.

The article was published Tuesday with the headline: “World Economic Forum Declares Pedophiles ‘Will Save Humanity.’” One Twitter user who shared the story on Wednesday received more than 10,000 retweets and 15,000 likes on the post, which was also viewed more than 450,000 times.
[...]
The article claimed — without citing any evidence or sources — that WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab called pedophilia “nature’s gift” to humanity. It also falsely stated that a research paper presented at the forum in Davos, Switzerland, described pedophilia as “nature’s attempt to cleanse the earth and ‘save humanity’ from itself.”

Yann Zopf, head of media for the WEF, said the assertions are entirely fabricated.
[...]

Butler and George Neal-Bey #conspiracy #dunning-kruger washingtonpost.com

[Title: ‘Treason!’ Moorish Americans facing gun charges create disarray in Md. courtroom
Note: Black "Moorish Americans" are a splinter group from the Moorish Science Temple of America with ideology borrowed from the usually white supremacist anti-government Sovereign Citizen movement]

Two Moorish Americans — who claim to be sovereign citizens of a fictitious North African empire — were scheduled to make their first appearance in front of Judge Monise Brown for several gun-related charges.
Lamont Butler and George Neal-Bey were arrested after a confrontation with Charles County sheriff’s deputies during a traffic stop last month. Both men were armed at the time. Butler was also charged with resisting arrest.
[...]
In 2013, he tried to occupy a 12-bedroom Bethesda mansion worth $6 million and was charged with breaking and entering, fraud and attempted theft.
But Butler — who claims to be the consul general of the “Morocco Consular Court at the Maryland State Republic” — argued that the mansion fell under an 1836 treaty between Morocco and the United States and actually belonged to him. It didn’t work.
[...]
On Friday morning, the judge had barely spoken when Butler made his first objection. He went by a different name — Lamont Maurice El — and did not consent to standing in for this other person, even though that “other person” was legally him.
[...]
“I’m not making an appearance, first of all,” Butler replied. “As long as the grass grows green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, we will never come together. We are separate people.” [...] “I am invoking my treaty right,” he immediately said, referencing Morocco, a country 4,000 miles away.

Ashley Guillard #conspiracy #crackpot #homophobia washingtonpost.com

[Title: TikTok psychic sued for accusing professor of killing 4 Idaho students
Note: an unrelated suspect was arrested since. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/30/idaho-students-homicide-arrest/]

Ashley Guillard claims she knows who killed four University of Idaho students [...]. Her source of information? Tarot card readings. In scores of videos posted to her TikTok account, the self-styled psychic unwinds a bizarre and baseless theory that the chair of the university’s history department orchestrated the killings after a romantic entanglement with one of the students.
[...]
Now the historian at the center of Guillard’s allegations, Rebecca Scofield, has filed a defamation lawsuit against her.
[...]
The cards then led her to the word “history.” She pulled up the University of Idaho’s history department website and saw Scofield at the top of the page. Another reading told her the history chair was involved, Guillard said. That was that—she was convinced. She told a Post reporter not to dismiss card reading as speculation. “Having my gift or my ability, I know what I know,” she said.
She started posting her claims Nov. 24, using Scofield’s university photo and saying repeatedly — and without any evidence — that she had ordered the students’ killings because she did not want people to find out that she was in a same-sex relationship with one of the victims.
[...]
She told The Post that she isn’t worried about being sued, that “time will tell and I’m willing to take the risk.” She has not hired an attorney. “I’m going to keep posting. I’m not taking anything down,” she said. “If in the alternate universe, if I was wrong, this is an open and shut case. I did say she ordered the execution of the four University of Idaho students. I’m still posting. I’ve said a lot of things about her. I’m not going to stop. If I’m such a liar, I’m so wrong about it, then in court she will win.”

DePape, Greene, various Republicans #wingnut washingtonpost.com

[Article title: Attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband follows years of GOP demonizing her. ... yelled "Where is Nancy?" before assaulting Paul Pelosi with a hammer ...]

[...]
“Fire Pelosi” project [...] #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames
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Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.
[...]
blog written under DePape’s name and filled with deeply racist and antisemitic writings — as well as pro-Trump and anti-Democratic posts — belonged to the suspect. In a single day earlier this month, the blog had seven new posts. The titles included: “Balcks Nda jEwS,” “Were the Germans so Stupid?” “Who FINANCED Hitler’s rise to Power” and “Gas chamber doors.”
[...]
“Sadly this attack was inevitable. Political violence is on the rise,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), said. “And instead of GOP leaders condemning it, they condone it with silence or, even worse, glorification.”
[...]
Among far-right extremist groups, the anti-Pelosi memes are often cruder and more violent, but the demonization of the Democratic House leader is no fringe phenomenon. Her face — sometimes adorned with devil’s horns or a swastika — was plastered on signs at all the national rallies that led up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. [...] insurrectionists did when roaming the halls of the Capitol searching for her while yelling: “Where are you, Nancy?”
[...]
Greene liked a Facebook comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” as a way of removing Pelosi as speaker
[...]
Mark Kelly released a Western-themed ad that featured himself dressed as a sheriff shooting at actors playing President Biden, Kelly and Pelosi.
[...]
Paul A. Gosar [...] tweeting an anime video depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez, a move Pelosi instigated to demonstrate that advocating political violence would not be tolerated.
[...]
“... you have political leaders who have personalized this and their rhetoric is hot and inflammatory — it’s not contextualized — so when Donald Trump back during the 2016 campaign talks about beating the hell out of someone, he meant that literally and people took it literally,” Steele said.

ParentsVoice B.C. #conspiracy #fundie #quack #racist #sexist #homophobia #transphobia cbc.ca

[Title: "New B.C. party pushing school board candidates with anti-vax and conspiratorial views". Mentioned names in the movement: Mark Vella, Teresa Docksteader, Carmen Halpenny, Fritz Radandt, Daniel and Terah Albertson.]

A new political organization with roots in conservative Christianity is endorsing a number of school board candidates across B.C. who have anti-vaccine, anti-government and conspiratorial views.

ParentsVoice B.C. is registered with Elections B.C. as an elector organization, or civic political party, and is backing 29 school board candidates in eight school districts.
Running under the slogan "Take Back Our Schools," the party says it's aiming to reverse what it sees as the politicization of classrooms.

Many candidates running under the party's banner support political positions inflamed by the pandemic, with rhetoric similar to right-wing groups in the United States — including criticism of public heath policies and school programs about racism, gender and sexuality.

But an in-depth review by CBC of candidates' online material found that instead of promoting their political beliefs, many candidates have tried to obscure them — in some cases by deleting old social media posts.

[Rest of article follows, subtitles: "Pandemic conspiracy theories", "School systems are dictating to parents", "Online profiles scrubbed", "A lot of parents live in kind of a bubble".]

Mastriano, Garlow, Greene and others #fundie #conspiracy rollingstone.com

[New Apostolic Reformation, dominionist public prayer in preparation for the 2020 coup attempt, conspiracy by conspiracy theorists, call for holy takeover]

A week before Jan. 6, on a Zoom call organized by far-right Christian Nationalists seeking to reinstall Donald Trump in the White House, a man with a booming baritone voice bowed his bald head and began to pray. “We remember the promises of old,” he said, before invoking the book of Revelations and its account of the End Times: “We know we overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony and not loving our lives unto death.”
[...]
“God I ask you that you help us roll in these dark times, that we fear not the darkness, that we will seize our Esther and Gideon moments,” the man said, invoking a pair of Old Testament heroes who made themselves instruments of God’s vengeance. “We’re surrounded by wickedness and fear, and dithering, and inaction,” he added, “But that’s not our problem. Our problem is following Your lead.” Looking ahead to Jan 6, the man said: “I pray that… we’ll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution, and as well by You, providentially. I pray for the leaders also in the federal government, God, on the Sixth of January that they will rise up with boldness.”
[...]
The prayer meeting — one of a series of nearly two dozen “Global Prayer for Election Integrity” calls organized between election day and Jan. 6 — was organized by Jim Garlow, a prominent figure in the far-right New Apostolic Restoration movement. Garlow believes that U.S. government should operate according to biblical principles, because, “He knows best how government is to function.”
[... includes video link(s) ...]
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene identifies as a “proud Christian Nationalist” and Rep. Lauren Boehbert spoke succinctly of its aims in a June appearance at the Cornerstone Christian Center: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she said. “The church is supposed to direct the government; the government is not supposed to direct the church.”
[...]
NAR adherents view current events through a lens of “spiritual warfare” — seeing a constant battle between Christ believers and their enemies, whom they hold are literally afflicted by demons.
[...]

Ron DeSantis, some parents and activists #fundie #homophobia #racist #sexist #conspiracy washingtonpost.com

[Title: Measures across the country aim to restrict what children can read. - Context: moral panic in the US, banning books in schools, non-expert prejudice-based supervision, enabled with new controversial laws]

In one Virginia school district this fall, parents will receive an email notification every time their child checks out a book. In a Florida school system, teachers are purging their classrooms of texts that mention racism, sexism, gender identity or oppression. And a Pennsylvania school district is convening a panel of adults to sign off on every title that school librarians propose buying. The start of the 2022-2023 school year will usher in a new era of education in some parts of America -- one in which school librarians have less freedom to choose books and schoolchildren less ability to read books they find intriguing, experts say.
[...]
"This is a state-sponsored purging of ideas and identities that has no precedent in the United States of America," said John Chrastka, EveryLibrary's executive director. "We're witnessing the silencing of stories and the suppressing of information [that will make] the next generation less able to function in society."
[...]
Meanwhile, a flurry of parent-staffed websites reviewing books for inappropriate content have appeared -- including "Between the Book Covers," whose website says "professional review sites cannot be entrusted," and BookLook.info, a place for taking a closer look at the books in our children's hands." (Virginia's Bedford County district now suggests the latter as a resource for parents.) There are also Facebook groups like Utah's "LaVerna in the Library," which "collects naughty children's books."
[...]
BookLooks ratings range from 0, "For Everyone," to 5: "Aberrant Content" for "Adult only." A BookLooks review of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison's novel "The Bluest Eye," often taught at the high school level, labeled it a "4" -- meaning it should not be read by anyone under 18.
[...]
In other places, book purges are proceeding quietly -- sometimes by unwilling hands.
[...]