The first crack in Tim Walz’s perfection appears

Uh-oh. You knew that somewhere in the next few months the frantic digging for dirt on Harris/Walz would strike gold, and boy, have they discovered some horrific facts about Walz.

First of all, he’s a Christian. Crap. When will we get an atheist/satanist vice president?*

Secondly, he’s a Minnesota Lutheran. I know that sect well, it’s the one I was brought up in, although fortunately, it didn’t take. It probably won’t hurt his campaign with the general public, though.

And then, the real horror show: Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy and Blasphemy. The news article exposes an unbelievably foul doctrine in which Walz has been soaking for his entire lifetime. This website has been documenting the appalling beliefs of his church.

Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul, MN, is a trainwreck of a congregation. Led by impastor Jen Rome, they are an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregation that exemplifies all the most heretical parts of the denomination. Notably, a recent article by RNS identified this as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s (who is Kamala Harris’ radical Vice President pick) denomination and parish.

Some of the ELCA’s greatest hits include:
ELCA Praises and Platforms Lutheran Pastrix Who Attended Pride Parade in the Nude
ELCA Publishes Book For Teens Saying Porn Can Be ‘silly fun’ and ‘safe way to explore your sexuality’
ELCA Releases Hilariously Woke DEI Recommendations For their Denomination
ELCA Publishes Book Encouraging ‘Queer Children’ to Ignore and ‘Limit Contact’ with Non-Affirming Parents
ELCA Church Hosts ‘Queer Nativity Play’, Featuring Mary and Joseph As Two Catfighting Lesbians
ELCA Considers Expelling all Conservative, Anti-LGBTQ Pastors from their Midst
Leader of ELCA Goes Off On Jesus in Sermon, Calling Him ‘Mean’, Troubling, and Even a Little Racist
ELCA Church Recites Blasphemous ‘Sparkle Creed’ + ‘I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural’

OMG. A liberal church. When was the last time you heard of one of those?

They then list the priorities of this church, each one like a brutal slap to the face of ‘normal’ Americans everywhere.

The church, which checks off all the usual pro-choice/ pro-LGBTQ boxes, uses the “Inclusive Bible” for all scripture readings and say they are committed to:

  • Antiracism work, de-centering whiteness, and making reparations for race violence
  • LGBTQIA+ affirmation and making a safe space for people of all genders and orientations
  • Gender equity and ensuring that the voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals are amplified
  • Accessible spaces that all bodies can navigate with ease
  • A planet we can thrive in for many generations to come, including supporting efforts to uplift and protect indigenous care of the land

Stop it, stop it, stop it. We staunch atheists can’t stand the thought of a Christian congregation supporting the same stuff we atheists and humanists do. What will we complain about if churches are all like that?

Well, I guess we’ll still have the hatemongers at that Protestia website to oppose.

*I am aware that we had an atheist/satanist president already, in 2016.

Oddments

These are just a few little things I spotted and thought I’d bring to your attention.


I don’t usually mention Laura Ingraham around here, but when I do, it’s because she said something remarkably stupid.

If you know Minnesota, and I know it well, especially Milwaukee, it’s changed. It’s never recovered from 2020. It’s not the same place. And Tim Walz was empathizing with all the DEI initiatives that were swirling about the controversies.

Somebody who knows Minnesota well ought to know that Milwaukee is in Wisconsin.

I appreciate the sentiment and the spectacular sideburns, but no, I can’t listen to Nick Offerman sing this song a second time.

The two kinds of weird, illustrated.

Also weird: this is what has the Republicans upset:

Weird.

This is not weird, this is straight up normal Minnesota.

Rep. Tim Walz won the Minnesota congressional delegation’s annual hotdish contest for the second year in a row. The Democrat’s blend of bacon, ground turkey and other ingredients was declared the winner. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., started the contest four years ago.

Walz’s winning “Turkey Trot Tater-Tot Hotdish” recipe:

You’ll have to follow the link to get the actual recipe. It looks good, but it’s definitely not vegetarian. I guess turkey is not meat, but bacon is.

How bad could Republican control be?

Donald Trump denies knowing anything about Project 2025, or the author, Kevin Roberts. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he says.


Here he is sharing a private flight with him in 2022. They were on their way to a Heritage Foundation conference on their policies, where Trump delivered (no doubt in a rambling incoherent way) the keynote speech. What do you think? Are Trump’s memory and general cognitive facilities gone, or is he lying, or both?

If you think Project 2025 is bad, it’s only the first step in a rising fundamentalist movement. NPR had a journalist follow a Christian nationalist organization for a year, and it’s as horrifying as you can imagine. Even worse, their journalist was Jewish — he had to listen to joyful, polite hatred for all that time.

The reporter opens the story with a conversation with Gabe Rench, Idaho fundamentalist.

“You said it would probably take a long time, but that you would like to see only Christians be able to run for office. So if you’re Jewish, you’re Muslim, you’re atheist, certainly if I had you right, you said that yes, you would support eventually them not being allowed to run for office.”
That’s right, I did say that. I think that the Christian faith is the ideal moral doctrine for a thriving society, and the farther you get from that the more in chaos we descend. The only way to maintain that, one of the ways to maintain that, is you have to have people running for office who believe that, or you’re going to get back in that chaotic decline.
“I tell you straight up, as a Jewish American, I hear that, that I can’t run for office, other non-Christians can’t, I have to admit that’s a little terrifying to me, because to me that means a fundamental freedom of mind, in this theoretical world, is gone.”
I mean, you’re saying that in a country where you’re experiencing all these immense freedoms that was built on the Christian faith, so…
“But where I can’t run for office!”
Um, yeah, because your worldview is not good for society. You’re unique in the sense that your problem is just that you refuse to believe that Jesus is Messiah. Whereas you get a lot right, but you get the key thing wrong.

The interview was at the Fight Laugh Feast conference, held at the Ark Encounter, of course. If you’ve noticed that Ken Ham has become increasingly politically strident, this is where his heinous worldview is being fed, among a community of the most regressive, most hateful (but joyful about it) people in the country. They want to repeal the 19th amendment. It’s not just atheists and Jews and Muslims who will lose rights, they want to deny women any rights, while teaching that the world was created in six days.

Creation in six days. A gigantic floating zoo, with giraffes sticking their heads out the windows, burning bushes, talking donkeys, dragons, unicorns, resurrection from the dead, yeah, we believe all of it. We are not embarrassed by any of it, says Toby Sumpter.

They want total theocratic control, in the name of a gemisch of stupid religious myths. Another speaker, Stephen Wolfe, says Atheists would be less free, because you wouldn’t want an atheist to be in charge of an institution, they would be suppressed. Government institution or public school or even like you may not want your CEO of a business to be an atheist. We do this all the time with social dogma. If someone has a view that’s against social dogma, we tend to think that should be suppressed, often with social harms to that person. I think atheism should be one of those things.

Stephen Wolfe is the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism (it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. I guess I’m going to have to read it — know your enemy and all that.)

Yeah, the odious Doug Wilson was also at this conference.

If we have another Trump presidency, these are the people who would be running the government, you know. If you already have a nebulous dread of the consequences of Republican control, know this: it would be far, far worse than you dream.

You do not have the right to not listen to Nazis

Oh no! I’ve suffered enough with stupid lawsuits, but here I go again, annoying a litigious jerk. He hasn’t sued me (yet!), but I too have refused to advertise on Twitter and have gone so far as to not even look at ads on Twitter. Abandoning your account will do that for you. But now, Musk is suing people for violating his free speech by not advertising on his service.

Elon Musk’s X has accused a group of major advertisers of antitrust violations in a new lawsuit claiming the group conspired to “boycott” advertising on the platform.

The lawsuit claims an influential ad industry group organized “to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising from Twitter” because the group was concerned that the platform had deviated from brand safety standards after Musk’s acquisition in late 2022.

The group is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, also known as GARM, a voluntary ad-industry initiative run by the World Federation of Advertisers that aims to help brands avoid having their advertisements appear alongside illegal or harmful content.

I would have thought it perfectly legitimate to want to avoid stinky bad sites that might alienate a business’s customers. I guess I don’t understand the finer points of free speech absolutism.

Look who’s smiling

Here’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing an Arkansas bill to make more kids eligible for child labor.

Look at those kids!

Here’s Tim Walz signing a Minnesota bill to provide free school lunches to kids.

Look at those kids.

Which one is the party of family again?

To underscore the point, here’s some news from Tex-ass.

Lawyers for the State of Texas on Monday tried to convince a U.S. appeals court that it should not be fined for failures in investigations of abuse and neglect of intellectually disabled children.

I’d show you photos of the children’s response, but it’s hard to smile with a broken jaw.

One investigation into a child called “Child C” was delayed a year. The same child was once dropped off at a hospital by staff of C3 Academy, where she lived, with a broken jaw. That was just one of several incidents that the child endured, according to court documents.

No racists down here in Texas, no sir

It’s all a lie by the Democrat party. The “True Texas Project” is a wholesome organization that just loves white Christians.

An influential grassroots group with close ties to Texas Republican lawmakers is hosting a conference next month that encourages its attendees to embrace Christian nationalism and resist a Democratic campaign “to rid the earth of the white race.”
Billed as the 15th anniversary celebration for True Texas Project, a far-right activist group that got its start as a North Texas tea party organization, the agenda claims there is a “war on white America,” and elevates theories that white Americans are being intentionally replaced through immigration — a common belief among far-right extremists, including many mass shooters.

I, for one, had no idea that one of the planks of the Democratic agenda was “to rid the earth of the white race.” The “True Texas” agenda is crystal clear, at least: they hate and fear the great replacement theory, cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and love Zionism, the American Church, etc., etc., etc.

They have high-quality speakers, like Kyle Rittenhouse.

I know, I could stop right there. You already know how worthwhile this event will be.

They’re also bringing in Louie Gohmert…this isn’t helping, is it?

OK, they also include Paul Gottfried, who has the virtue of being someone most people have never heard of.

Few people have been more instrumental in that push than Gottfried, a former humanities professor who has written dozens of books on political history. Gottfried is credited with coining the term “Alt-Right,” which describes a movement of far-right reactionaries, white nationalists and race scientists that sought to intellectualize their fringe views. Led by Spencer, the neo-Nazi who was mentored by Gottfried, the Alt-Right was crucial in mainstreaming extreme views in right-wing circles, but flamed out after its members played key roles in 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where tiki-torch wielding neo-Nazis and fascists marched before killing one counterprotester and maiming countless others.

Gottfried is also the founder of the H.L. Mencken Club, which holds an annual conference that has included some of the world’s most prominent extremists, including Jared Taylor, a eugenicist who claims it is unnatural for white people to live alongside non-whites; and Peter Brimelow, whose group VDARE has been crucial to spreading white nationalist writings and propaganda.

Their claim that they aren’t racist is not very persuasive when they’ve got ties to Taylor and Brimelow and Spencer.

These people aren’t fooling anyone.

Proscribe Professional Political Pundits

If nothing else, the selection of Tim Walz for VP should teach us that the political pundit class sucks. They know nothing — they want to claim that they’re objective, neutral observers, but they’ve all got an agenda that they lie about. For instance, Jonathan Chait has the worst take. He wants the Democrats to move to the right.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now
Story by Jonathan Chait

When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee, I expressed cautious optimism that she had learned from her disastrous 2020 campaign, which revolved around placating left-wing activists by adopting highly unpopular issue positions. The data point that seemed most compelling was her rumored slate of vice-presidential selections, which consisted of Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — the three most moderate governors in the party. “What this leak indicates,” I wrote, “is that Harris understands the assignment.”

But … does she? Her decision to pick Tim Walz, while not completely irrational, makes me much more cautious and less optimistic that Harris does understand the assignment.

The assignment, to be clear, is to win over voters who don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.

Gosh. The Democrats need to be more Republican. Democrats embracing their principles is bad.

This is possibly the most idiotic take yet. Ask a Minnesotan: Walz is not the radical socialist some of us would like to see. He was elected to congress in a rural, southern Minnesota congressional district, where he had to be a conservative public servant, and he was selected to run for governor because he could appeal to both the urban Minneapolis/St Paul electorate and to the rural shitkicker vote. As governor, he’s been both pro-business and pro-civil liberties, a combination that might once have been natural for Republicans before Reagan, when they chose instead to follow the path of hating the poor.

He could be more liberal. The alternatives Chait favors are all consistently more conservatives. Screw that. It’s long past time Democrats moved to favor unions and schools and the social safety net, and that’s what Walz does, to the chagrin of the Chaits of the country.

And then there’s the awful Nate Silver, who favors the same candidates that Chait does, but for confusingly different reasons (that’s Silver all over the place, making counter-intuitive arguments for confusingly wrong-headed reasons). He thinks Walz is the risky product of triangulation.

Tim Walz is a Minnesota Nice choice
It’s fine. But Shapiro was the higher-upside option that was probably worth the risk.

If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far.

You’re just making it overly complex and twisting everything around. Walz is an advocate for politically popular choices, like childcare and free school lunches and abortion, and he’s an avuncular, friendly voice. That sounds like a good choice — true, making a smart decision is way off brand for the Democrats. Silver would rather see a radical, alienating weirdo in the position, a Democratic complement to JD Vance.

Nate Silver will always favor seeing the party don a handicap to keep the horserace close, because that’s where he makes his money and notoriety.

You know, these are the kinds of political pundits who get favored by the conservative media. Don’t trust them.