The state of Oklahoma ranks 49th in education, according to one review (there are many such reviews that come up with different values, but none of them place the state higher than near the bottom of the barrel.) The superintendent of the Oklahoma school system, Ryan Walters, is surely aware of their abysmal reputation, and surely wants to make the schools in his state better, right? That’s his job! Walters has taken bold, radical action to fix Oklahoma schools.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a directive to all public schools ordering them to incorporate the Bible as an instructional support in the classroom.

Doing so is a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country, Walters said.
…
In remarks to the board, Walters went further than his own memo, saying that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.

If I were teacher in Oklahoma, this is the point where I’d be sending my CV to schools in other states, and be preparing a lesson plan that, if I had to stay in the state for a while, would reveal what a pile of archaic shit the Bible was. That counts as teaching from the Bible, right?

The sad thing is that there are a lot of conservative Republicans who heard Ryan Walters’ plan and clutched their precious Bible and shouted “Hallelujah!” because they’re religious dumbasses, and they would run any teacher who criticized their holy book out of town.

Even sadder: thanks to the Republicans, the rest of the country wants to become Oklahoma.

Russia has suffered somewhere north of a quarter million — possibly approaching a half million — casualties in their war with Ukraine, but there’s nothing to worry about, since their dead troops are getting resurrected! Trust the words of Artemiy Vladimirov, Archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Vladimirov played along and replied, “In war, there are no unbelievers! When you are facing physical death, every fiber of your soul comes alive. Right now, there are many wonderful testimonies of Christ’s victory over death. My wife sends me many military testimonies and video clips. Before Lent, I watched a video about one Chinese man who participated in the special military operation. A bullet hit him in the stomach, destroying all of his insides. He died from this and then was resurrected.”

Vladimirov continued to spin the tale, claiming, “Saint Luke of Crimea appeared to him and completely healed him, his insides were fully restored. He was baptized along with his relatives, all of them are photographed together, dressed in white clothes, baptized into our Orthodox Church.”

Ukraine should be worried when the zombie hordes mob their country, and when the enemy they shoot simply rises back up and continues the charge. They need to be informed to aim for the head, not the stomach.

Also of concern:

Vladimirov is no stranger to spreading idiosyncratic fibs. In 2019, he claimed to have communicated with Charles Darwin from beyond the grave and alleged that the scientist repented for his theory of evolution and renounced his own hypothesis about the origin of species.

Y’all worried now? So believable.

Say you’re a poorly educated little man with no redeeming qualities, but you want to be rich and famous. You aren’t very talented or skilled, but you are able to talk fast and with confidence about very little at all. So you open a church. That’s the limit of your abilities.

But most churches are local two-bit affairs, and church pastors who are nice and try to help their communities are going to go nowhere. Yeah, you might have the respect of your neighbors, and you might be able to have some self-respect, but kindness never pays, and if you want to skyrocket to national attention and get donations from really rich people (you know, the people who matter), you’ve got to have some pizzazz. So you add this to your statement of faith.

We believe that the human race was created as genetic male (man) and genetic female (woman) by a direct act of God; that marriage has been established by God; therefore, marriage is a sacred covenantal union between one man and one woman, for life. We also believe that legitimate Biblical sexual relations are exercised solely within marriage. Hence, sexual activities such as, but not limited to, adultery, fornication, incest, polygamy, homosexuality, transgender, bisexuality, cross-dressing, pedophilia and bestiality are inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible and the Church. Further, lascivious behavior, the creation, viewing and/or distribution of pornography and efforts to alter ones gender are incompatible with a true Biblical witness.

Now you’re talking. Now you’ve got a juicy topic for many sermons, and you’ve succeeded in drawing the most venomous, petty people to attend, and they’ll take action against all the people outside your church, getting you more and more attention. It’s such a simple formula, and it works. So many big-time preachers have launched careers that buy them private jets and mansions and yachts off this basic approach! You’d think people would catch on, but no, there are always more little angry people who want to get a trivial sense of power by tormenting The Other.

The latest parasite to leap unto this bandwagon is Pastor Tim Thompson. He’s going to go far, because he has hitched his star to the MAGA message, which is going to draw in the dumbest and most gullible people in America.

Earlier this year, a Southern California pastor named Tim Thompson welcomed former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba to a stage. “I gotta say this is really refreshing from New York City,” Habba chirped at the fancy wedding venue and equestrian center in Temecula. “I’m in God’s country now.”

“Knowing the president the way you do,” asked Thompson, who runs the nonprofit ministry Our Watch, “can you give us three things tonight that we as a group can be praying for him?”

Habba told Thompson’s flock they should pray for America, non-believers, and Trump’s family, adding that, “He’s gonna go down as the best president this country has ever had.”

I’ll save them some trouble and tell them they don’t need to pray for us non-believers.

His first target has been school boards, of course. Every promoter of a crank ideology knows that local school board elections are cheap, low-profile springboards to get influence and promote stupid beliefs — people just don’t pay much attention to them, but they do have an over-sized effect on the community. Thompson has already packed the local school board with right-wingers, and a common feature of his sermons and Twitter ranting is to name queer teachers and mobilize protests against their existence.

Indeed, Thompson speaks frequently about battling “evil” on Our Watch—usually in public schools, but he’s also sounded off about tarot cards at Coachella and videos of people “sticking laser beams into their anus.”

In late March, he created a video urging California viewers to run for their local school boards. “We’ve seen Satan creep in, strip away the rights of parents and try to indoctrinate children into filth,” he warned.

Thompson already tipped the scales of the Temecula Valley Unified School District in 2022, helping to give three new right-leaning board members a majority. That year, IE Family PAC raised more than $206,000, filings show. His candidates included Dr. Joseph Komrosky, who is facing a special recall election on June 4.

After the trio assumed office, they immediately banned critical race theory (CRT) and shelled out at least $15,000 in district funds for a consultant to teach staff why CRT is harmful. The panel also passed a policy that forces teachers to “out” transgender kids to their parents and rejected a social studies book because its accompanying teacher materials included gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

We don’t know much about Thompson’s background. There isn’t much information on his education (which makes sense — he hates education) or history, and he seems to have simply grown up in Temecula and never gone anywhere else. Temecula has a bit of a reputation.

The Temecula Valley of Thompson’s youth was awash with racism and neo-Nazi activity. In the 1980s, Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger founded a white supremacist group in nearby Fallbrook. In the ’90s, a pair of 14-year-olds tied to local white supremacists were charged in two drive-by shootings targeting Latinos, while members of Hammerskin Nation, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a neo-Nazi skinhead organization, were convicted of assault in the gang beating of a 21-year-old Black man as dozens of others watched. The district attorney called it “one of the most egregious incidents of racial violence that has occurred in Riverside County.”

There’s little public record of Thompson’s early years, other than he attended Temecula Valley High School at least in his freshman year and worked as a chaplain for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, a relationship that served him well. A campaign committee for Sheriff Chad Bianco later gave $5,000 to the pastor’s political action committee. Bianco was a member of the Oath Keepers during the time Thompson was a chaplain but said he left the extremist group because “it did not offer me anything.” Thompson, as well as his adult son, Timothy Jacob, have been photographed or filmed sporting patches affiliated with the Three Percenters, a far-right anti-government militia.

In 2012, Thompson began cultivating his church. At that time it was called Venia, and met in rented spaces across the Temecula Valley, for a while in a bar. The congregation eventually found a building in 2016, and changed its name to 412 Murrieta and later to 412 Temecula Valley.

Before long, Thompson became a fixture at far-right rallies across the state. He spoke at the state Capitol in 2019 to a group opposed to sex education in public schools and returned a few weeks later to speak at another protest over California’s Health Education Framework. Days later he attended another rally on the matter outside of the Riverside County office of the California Department of Education.

So he probably attended at least a year of high school, attached himself as a chaplain (do you need no qualifications whatsoever to be a police chaplain? I guess not) to the conservative sheriff’s department, and mastered everything he needed to know to found a church, make life hell for gay people, and steadily move into the orbit of the Trump crime family.

I told you it’s an easy formula that works.

If you want to find the most horrible, awful, evil people in your community, all you need to do is pop into the fundamentalist church in your town on a Sunday morning, and there they all are, growing fat as ticks on the blood of your fellow citizens.

It’s too bad we don’t have any laws prohibiting non-profit, tax-exempt entities from lobbying for political causes.

The Washington Post gave a lot of attention to Kali and Joshua Fantanilla today, for reasons I can’t comprehend. It’s another example of the press featuring otherwise unnotable nobodies with far right views and giving them a neutral treatment.

The story is about a couple who were, once upon a time, public school teachers who were so offended at the liberal agenda of the schools that they quit their jobs, moved to Florida, and founded their own online Christian school. They were “displeased by some colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, which both thought was wrongheaded and hateful for what they saw as its anti-police stance.”

So now they offer a YouTube curriculum for $2000-$8000 a head which, to my surprise, is accredited and offers the equivalent of a high school diploma. I don’t know how they get away with it — is Prager U going to be handing out diplomas soon?

There are way too many red flags in the article, like this photograph caption.

“Researching” “online” — those two words together are already a problem. The second sentence gives his game away. He was just looking for a religion that would accommodate his prior beliefs about the Bible, and was looking for the religion that would support his conclusion. And then to settle on the Seventh-day Adventists, one of the more batcrap looney Christian sects that certainly does promote prophecy…let us immediately call into question his rationality.

Furthermore, his concerns with the public school system were petty and bigoted.

Around the same time, Joshua Fontanilla said he was also spotting what he perceived as bias at school. His suspicions stirred, he said, when he noticed his high school always announced meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance club over the loud speakers — but not those of other clubs, like his chess group.

Joshua then began combing through the “American Dream” unit of the English curriculum, researching the politics of every author. He concluded that too many (at least 12 of 19) were “left-leaning,” including — as Joshua saw it — “leftist” historian Studs Terkel, “socialist” poet Langston Hughes and “Dem” Walt Whitman.

You know how you get your club meetings announced on the morning PA? You request it. You go to the school secretary and hand them your meeting details. I’m pretty sure schools aren’t biased to favor the Gay-Straight Alliance — if my local school is any example, school boards try to ban such organizations. The GSA was just a more activist organization than the chess club.

As for his categorization of authors he didn’t like — those are McCarthy-ite tactics. If you oppose indoctrination in the schools, don’t charge in and start banning authors whose politics you dislike.

Here’s another red flag:

The couple have ambitions to scale up: Kali and Joshua hope to eventually cross 1,000 students, at which point, they calculate, they will no longer have to pursue side jobs like Kali’s current gig as a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank. So far, Kali has found most success attracting clients through Instagram, despite the fact her account is regularly suspended for “community violations,” she said.

The Capital Research Center is an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, funded by well-heeled conservative millionaires and billionaires. She has a “gig” there? What does that mean? What does a “Senior Fellow” to a right-wing think tank do? I’m just wondering if there were a left-wing think-tank that would pay me a living wage for doing the equivalent of whatever the fuck Kali Fontanella is getting paid for. Somehow, I don’t think those kinds of sinecures exist on my side of the political fence, but I could be wrong. Let me know!

Every one of their complaints are absurd and pathetic, like this one:

…Kali passed a series of posters featuring student artwork, erected every spring as part of a public art installation. This year’s iteration included a painting of a book in chains — and another of a student wearing earrings that each bore the slogan, “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS.”

It was just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray. She sat beside her husband and closed her eyes. Together, they bent their heads to thank God.

Right-wing freaks are so easily perturbed by the most trivial phenomena. I guess praying is the modern substitute for the fainting couch.

I’m just left wondering what the point of the whole article was. I don’t care about the Fontanellas, I don’t want them arrested, but I also want them to fail and stop corrupting children’s education. I don’t think their story is particularly interesting, except as an example of America’s terrible standards for education. But yay, they get a front page feature in the WaPo!

The dingbats of Arizona were up to shenanigans recently. Here they are, speaking in tongues before denying women basic health care.

I put this on TikTok yesterday & it now has over 900k views + however many came from the hundreds of others (many with huge accounts) that downloaded it and put it on their own social. Here is a version without any text on it, just in case someone wants to put it on TV.

It’s… pic.twitter.com/NuwxTd30YH

— Tony Cani (@tcani) April 9, 2024

Although, you’ve got to have the right perspective on this bizarre behavior. It’s just signaling to their fellow apes that they belong, and that they’re not a member of that other ape clan. We tend to overlook the weird things other groups do.

Did you know most of our legislative bodies begin their sessions by talking to an invisible being they call a god? They’ve labeled this behavior “prayer,” and most people take it for granted as a perfectly normal behavior. Some few of us, like me, have our own distinctive behaviors, like refusing to “pray,” and it sets us apart and makes us look weird to the prayer people and the tongue-speaking people.

We need to look deeper. What, besides some goofy ritualistic behaviors, bonds these people into a group? What are their goals? Then we see people like Anthony Kern and Paul Gosar behind it all, and we should recognize that it’s not the silly babbling that matters, it’s the bigotry and authoritarianism. We should read that behavior as a flag to the rest of us, too — don’t let the speaking in tongues bother you as much as the bad ideas simmering underneath.

Look at that photo. Aren’t the red baseball caps also a signal? What about…neckties?

It’s aposematism all the way down.

Which is worse: 1) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who truly believes in that nonsense, or 2) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who doesn’t understand it or believe it? For me, it’s a toss-up; #1 isn’t lying to everyone, but is still a gullible ninny, while #2 is trying to convince everyone to buy something he doesn’t think is worth it. They’re both awful people.

Now Donald Trump has become a Bible salesman. He’s selling them for $59.99. Of course he gets a cut — he’s not doing this because he wants to save everyone, but because he wants to save himself. He’s #2.

These are special Bibles, the Lee Greenwood Version. Greenwood is the folksy singer who got rich off one song, a patriotic country-western anthem that gets the good ol’ boys tearing up and cheering, while I’m leaning over to puke under the bleachers. What makes his Bible special is that it’s in easy-to-read large print (it won’t get read much, though), and also includes copies of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and among those immortal words, the lyrics to Greenwood’s best-selling country song, “God Save the USA.” It’s also The God Bless The USA Bible is the ONLY Bible inspired by America’s most recognized patriotic anthem, God Bless The USA. It’s not just divinely inspired, it’s Lee Greenwood inspired, which makes it just that much better.

They have a FAQ page for this grift, with one question that did set me back a bit.

WHAT IF MY BIBLE HAS STICKY PAGES?

This is not something I usually worry about when I buy a book, but it just tells you how wonderful and exciting this Bible must be.

(They say it’s just because of the gilded edges, but we all know what it’s really about…)

I was curious to know who was running the Alabama Supreme Court after that ridiculous ruling that embryos are human children from conception. The chief justice is a man named Tom Parker, who is a rabid Christian Nationalist and QAnon fanatic.

During a recent interview on the program of self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.

Enlow is a pro-Trump “prophet” and leading proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy” that asserts that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.

Enlow has also repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, sometimes even connecting it to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Per Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed that world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices” and that “there is presently no real democracy on the planet” because over 90 percent of world leaders are involved in pedophilia and are being blackmailed.

How do such delusional Christian zealots rise to power? He was elected by the good people of Alabama.

Confederate Outfitters issued a slate of Dixie-friendly candidates a couple years ago. It put it like this:

Tom Parker – Friend of Confederates – Ideal Candidate.

There you go. Make America Gray Again. Or at least the uniforms.

I don’t usually write opinion about candidates this close to elections. I don’t pick or endorse candidates. I don’t trust any of them because as soon as you say something nice about one they turn into somebody else.
…
But there are exceptions to rules, and if Tom Parker is anything, he’s exceptional.

He’s more Roy Moore than Roy Moore. Parker is an activist judge who made his name campaigning against activist judges. Judges who disagree with his view, as Parker put it, should be considered terrorists like al Qaeda.

Tom Parker is not qualified to judge traffic court. He’s a good ol’ boy Southern bigot, and his biases make him anti-science.