True or False, Are Always Revealing

Every now and then, when the stars align, the internet gives us the chance to gain some actual insight amidst all the cacophony we subject ourselves to.  Over the last week-and-a-half, there've been three articles published that give us a rather unguarded look into the current conservative mindset, so it's worth taking a look into them.

The first is an article from the Tucker Carlson owned Daily Caller, where one its editors, Virginia Kruta, went to Missouri rally for gubernatorial candidate Cori Bush with special guest star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  By now, you may have the seen Kruta's hilarious money quote where she says,

"But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided."

We'll get to the full unpacking of this in a second, but I think it's also important to note how Kruta closes the piece: "I left the rally with a photo — in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."  Kruta's been the butt of many a joke over her gut reaction to hearing that the government could indeed see to it that she could live a life free of the suffering caused by not being paid enough for her work so she wouldn't struggle to pay her bills, or that she would have to stress out over whether she'll go bankrupt if she has a medical emergency, or if her children want to go on to higher education they wouldn't have to take on a crippling amount of debt to do so is sheer abject terror, but, while she deserves all of that, it's important to note why she feels that way.

See, the amount of of suffering people experience in today's economy isn't an accident, it's the whole point of it.  If a student comes out of college with an advanced degree but mountains of debt that means they can't leverage their education to get better pay because they need whatever they can get to start paying back those loans.  The threat of medical bankruptcy is used as a way to keep workers stuck at whatever job they have because if they leave that job, they lose their insurance.  The whole point is to create a meager existence that keeps people obedient and cowed out of fear of losing what little they have if they stand up for themselves.

So why do people who are products of that system want to keep it going?  Why wouldn't they want to change things for the better?  Because in this style of system, the brutality of it is legitimized when one generation passes the suffering they went through down to the next.  This is sold as a way to reclaim a sense of  agency- they survived this world and became tougher for it so they now get to pass it on to their children and their children after them.   If younger people seek to end or change they system that causes all that suffering, then its treated like older generations- like Kruta's - are being cheated because if it's proven that all that suffering is entirely meaningless and unnecessary then, well, maybe all those times she sacrificed or went without so she could scrape by one week to the next, were unnecessary and meaningless as well.

In this system, suffering is the point.  The whole point of that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense is that you know you've "made it" when you stop being the recipient of beatings and degradation and start administering those things to other people.  If, all of sudden, people have the means to live without the indignity of working full-time living paycheck-to-paycheck or the stress of staying at a shitty job because they'll lose their benefits or they'll get the same shit pay everywhere else, then all of a sudden people like Kruta and her ideological brethren lose a lot of their power.  They don't know what to do in the face of someone legitimately offering a better way forward, all they have is that fear and a feeling of "Thank god I don't believe people should live with dignity like those whackos."  It does really go to show that they don't think that a fair days work should come with a fair days pay, or whatever other platitude about the value of hard work that drizzles out their mouth is true, at the end of the day, they just want to make sure as many people as possible are absolutely miserable so they can condescend to them when they dare think they deserve better.

Next up is this hilariously incompetent polemic against single-payer from The Hill.  Written by Dr. Deane Waldman from a Texas think-tank, Waldman's piece is a greatest hits of anti-single-payer arguments conservatives have trotted out for years now.  Classics like "it costs too much!" make their early and obligatory appearance: "Most people thought the cost of Obamacare, $1.34 trillion, was excessive, but that’s peanuts compared to the $18 trillion price tag for Bernie Sanders’ — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s — Medicare-for-All."  True, recent analysis has put the price tag of Bernie's plan at $32 trillion over ten years.  Considering that we spend about $3.2 trillion right now on healthcare, keeping our current level of spending with even more coverage is actually a pretty successful plan.  If we keep the law as is, then by 2026 we'll be spending $5.7 trillion a year so... tell me again how single-payer is too expensive?

Next up, Waldman trots out the oldie-but-goodie "people die waiting for care" scare chord,

"There is death-by-queueing in single payer systems, where sick persons die from treatable conditions because they could not get care in time and succumb “waiting in line” for care. You don’t even have to go outside the U.S. to see these avoidable deaths. In our own single payer or Medicare-for-All system, the VA, “307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical care.”

Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that, especially in recent years, more people are dying because the NHS cannot handle the sheer amount of people they need to treat. Likewise with the VA, that 307k number was the cumulative total of veterans who died while they were waiting for their applications to be processed.  That number came from a 2015 report detailing problems with the VA's patient intake process and some of the deaths go as far back as 1988.  Obviously this presents a lot of problems for how VA documented and kept track of the veterans seeking to get care which do need to be solved, but just dropping the number without any context over how many years it took to reach it is misleading to say the least.  That Waldman also tries to make the problem of patients dying because they can't get access to care an exclusively single-payer problem by omitting the 50,000 people who die a year here because they don't have insurance is a signal that he's not using these numbers in good faith.  Lastly, a significant reason why the NHS and VA have these problems keeping pace with their patients needs is that they have been subject to massive budget cuts and under-funding for years on end.  Apparently when you don't give doctors or hospitals the resources they need to keep track of or properly care for their patients, those patients end up dying.  Odd, that.

But we haven't gotten to the best part of Waldman's little screed.  Here's Waldman's utopia healthcare scenario:

"In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare for 323 million Americans, or $10,526 for every man, woman and child. Imagine if every family of four put $42,105 in an HSA every year! and simply shopped for and paid for their health care. No government stealing our money to pay its bureaucracy. No insurance company delaying or denying care. Just the old but right doctor-patient relationship with no one and nothing in between.

The answer isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rebranded socialism. The answer is for us to turn away from government dependence and rely on ourselves."

This is fantasy.  It'd be like if Waldman said that if men wanted to save money on their colonoscopy's, they should look into alien abduction because they don't bill for their time.  Even if we indulged the absurd notion that the average family of four just has $40k laying around doing absolutely nothing, let's see how far that actually gets people.  The average stay in a hospital here runs people $5,220.  So, if you stay in a hospital for eight of the 365 days out of the year, hope you don't need any other care.  Keep in mind, that's just the cost for laying in bed.  You want even more bundles of joy for your family?  Be prepared to pay $10 grand if you go the natural route or $16k if you need a C-Section.  Need a heart bypass?  Kiss $28,000 of those savings goodbye.

Reading this idiocy, I was reminded of this article by The American Conservative from last year which said that within five years conservatives will either directly offer or quietly assent to a universal healthcare policy.  The reason, they said, was because it was the only way to effectively cover everyone at the lowest possible price.  Which, yes, that's true as any Google search comparing our healthcare costs with the rest of the world will tell you.  As far as they where concerned, "[t]he objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality."  Which, again, is 100% true.  My objection to this article is that it assumes that the conservative movement as a whole actually gives a shit about reality or is capable of recognizing it.  Because right here, in the face of ever-growing popularity for Medicare-For-All single-payer system, we have a man contorting himself to put forward a solution which depends on not only turning away from government health programs but the entire concept of insurance itself.  He's committed to something so abjectly ridiculous because that is what he is paid to do so.  Waldman, and all the other hacks along with him, will only double-down on their farcical positions opposing single-payer healthcare the more popular and inevitable it  becomes, expecting them to examine their beliefs and adjust them in response to evidence is a fools errand.

Which brings me to the last article I wanted to talk about, because when it comes to ignoring reality in all its forms, no one has anything on religious fundamentalists.  This story from the Washington Post covers one evangelical congregation in Alabama and how they handle the supposed moral crisis that would come from being a Christian and a Trump supporter.  Their pastor, a guy named Clay Crum, is even doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments and just got to the one about adultery.  I guess there's supposed to be some sort of tension in whether or not Crum will say something in his sermon condemning Trump as an adulterer, but if you're able to remember a year back when the good Christian white folk of Alabama did their damnedest to elect a child rapist, it won't come as a surprise when Crum says nothing or how easily the congregation is able to wave away something as petty as philandary.

The article does try really, really hard to act like there is a serious conundrum that Christians are trying to solve, which, I guess they get points for trying?  The Post sets things up like this:

"In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.

At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins."

All I can really say here is that "awkward" is one hell of a word choice here.  Maybe if we have a sit down with Sheilia Butler, a member of Crum's church, we can better understand this issue, (apologies for the wall of text)

"we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians...

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."

 She continues:

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.
“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”
Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”
Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”
“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”
            To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”
“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.
“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”
“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila.
It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives.
“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”
She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility."

So let's just do a quick run down, shall we?  Here we have conspiracies popular with white supremacists (the idea that Obama was a Muslim), language that swaths of America would find racist/spreading falsehoods (the slavery wasn't that bad trope, citing the time of  Montgomery Bus Protests as a bad thing), and casual cruelty (the complete dismissal of even the idea that she should show compassion to immigrants).  Huh, it's almost as if she supports Trump because she's exactly like him.  Weird.

What makes this unintentionally hilarious is that the congregation is under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists, whose leadership is a little sensitive to the faith's staunch support of Trump since they have a history of- as the article so euphemistically puts it- "whiffing" on major social issues of the time.  During the Civil Rights era, for example,  the Southern Baptists either supported or said nothing against segregation, so when it comes to supporting a man who's putting people in concentration camps, you could see how they might be aware of history repeating itself.  Not that they're going to so anything, mind you, but they're aware this time that supporting Trump makes them look bad, which I guess counts as growth, if you want to really abuse the term.

What really gets me about all this though is how just painfully obtuse all of these people are.  They honestly believe that because they live in a world where black men get to be president, gays can get married, and they're called out for being the hypocritical pieces of shit that they are, that all of that somehow makes them oppressed.  Crum says of the election that "[i]t encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country," which, my only response to this is: Are you fucking kidding me? Conservative Christians have been the bedrock and sole dictator of Republican's social policy for almost forty years.  You can't be a Republican politician at any level without mentioning how much you love Jesus, every presidential candidate has to make the obligatory promise to nominate judges who will strike down Roe vs Wade; these people have one of the two major political parties in this country by the balls and they still think they're disenfranchised? Honestly, what world are these people living in? (That's not a hard one- they live in the world where Muslims are coming to kill them in the night by sneaking in with Mexicans while simultaneously stirring up black unrest to keep the police busy and since Democrats took all their guns away, they'll be helpless to defend themselves in the religious war waging all around us)

What's ironic about all of this is that Crum left the church for a time when he realized how morally bankrupt it was.  As he put it,

"He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend. That it’s all a show.”

Unfortunately, Crum is now just another cast member.  He's taken to wearing this lapel pin of tiny baby feet with the tagline that the pin is the size of a fetus' feet at ten weeks. It's all part of his (and the churches) commitment to being Pro-Life.  But that's just as hypocritical, pretend, and performative as everything else that lead Crum to leave the church in the first place.  It's easy to care about a fetus- it's not a real person yet so it hasn't had a chance to do anything disagreeable like being black and angry, or being born on the wrong side of a border, or gay, or pro-gun control, or for whatever other reason these people come up with to say that they don't have to follow through on their god's commandment to love their enemy as they love themselves.  That hypocrisy isn't unique to this one congregation- it's the cornerstone of the Pro-Life movement, after all- but it serves one of my larger points that you can't expect people to turn away from Trump when he gives them everything they want.

Christianity for these people ultimately isn't a philosophy for them to live their own lives by or seek comfort in during troubled times; at the end of the day, their faith is a weapon to bludgeon everyone else into submission.  It's why they don't mind that Trump denigrates every other aspect of society while telling them that they're the rightful heirs of America, it's why they don't care when he throws non-white people into cages or tears children from their parents arms.  This is the world they want to live in, where they're told over and over again how special they are and all the threats to their power-real or imagined- are mercilessly crushed by the state.  All Trump has done is remove the illusion that they were ever anything else.  I can understand why they would want to perpetuate that illusion, but we're not under any obligation to go along with it.