It’s peculiar. We’re supposed to have a separation of church and state, but somehow we’ve ended up with not just a religious court, but a sectarian religious court. The answer, obviously, is money. Someone or someones has been skewing the court rightwards by sinking lots of money into it — buying the law, basically. But who?

Here’s a candidate:

Meet Neil and Ann Corkery, a pair of veteran Republican operatives who have cultivated a robust network of conservative and Catholic-affiliated nonprofits, charities and funds notable for their near-total opacity. For more than a decade, the Corkerys have leveraged this network to prop up conservative judicial nominees, most of whom have been devout Catholics. Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Salon that “while most Americans wouldn’t recognize their names,” the Corkerys “have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into federal judicial races.”

“They have the discipline to not talk,” Maguire explained, acknowledging the dearth of reporting on the duo. “They don’t have social media accounts. They don’t give public speeches. They’ve done a really good job of limiting the amount of public information on them.”

We do, however, know bits and pieces. It’s likely that the Corkery empire started around 2008, when Ann Corkery, a partner at the Washington law firm Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner, established the now defunct Wellspring Committee, a 501(c)(4) organization that took in tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds, of millions, from undisclosed donors for upwards of a decade. Wellspring was founded with the help of Charles and David Koch, and raised its first $10 million seedling donation from attendees at a Koch donor seminar.

The scary thing about the Corkerys is that they were smart enough to keep quiet about what they were doing, while cunningly recruiting millionaire donors to fund a campaign to make sure Catholics are packing the judiciary. They’re organizing horrid little pissant billionaires like the Kochs, and focusing interest in a particular direction. The worst thing to have is a clever enemy.

The Corkerys’ political influence, as Maguire pointed out, has a highly specific orientation rooted in religious faith. “When you look at the way money has flowed through the groups [Wellspring] is affiliated with,” he explained, “you see a long history of supporting groups that fought against marriage equality and anti-abortion.”

In 1990, the Corkerys gave an interview to the South Florida Sun Sentinel describing themselves as members of Opus Dei, an enigmatic and highly secretive society within the Catholic Church. According to a 2013 investigative report from the liberal group Catholics for Choice, members of Opus Dei “vehemently oppose legislation that allows divorce or civil marriages, as well as homosexuality and contraception.” Critics have also alleged that the group has internally supported various authoritarian world leaders.

If you’ve ever wondered how unqualified incompetents like Kavanaugh and Barrett ended up on the highest court in the land, just look at the Corkerys and their influence.

Hooray for Democracy, where it’s not people who shape the leadership, but the dollars that vote.

No Dr Oz today. There’s an even worse guy running for office in Pennsylvania: Doug Mastriano wants to be governor, and he’s a certifiable nutcase.

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania has done any number of things that would doom to Hades the political prospects of any mortal politician: wearing a Confederate uniform, doing business with a white nationalist website, calling Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust, associating with militia figures from groups such as the Oath Keepers, appearing at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and sharing QAnon conspiracy ideas, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Muslim hatred.

But though he walks through the shadow of the valley of defeat, he fears no evil — because he has his very own campaign prophet! Her name is Julie Green, and she personally receives messages directly from God, “sometimes … twice a day,” she says, when He instructs her to turn on certain recordings and then speaks to her through the music’s “frequencies.”

This is not that unusual in America since every conservative president seems to adopt a personal god-walloper. For many years — most of my life, it seems — it was Billy Graham. Julie Green, though, is particularly weird.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano has promoted and campaigned with Julie Green, a “prophet” who has claimed that God will execute political figures “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” The Mastriano ally and fringe religious commentator has also alleged a variety of conspiracy theories, including that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood”; the government is conducting “human sacrifices” to stay in power; and President Joe Biden is secretly dead and an “actor” is playing him.

…

Green’s prophecies are badly performed pro-Trump fantasies in which God has “chosen” Trump to be his “Moses” to “deliver the people out of the hands of these nowaday pharaohs.” In this telling, the “majority” of states will decertify their 2020 election results, Trump will “take back his rightful place of power,” and God will send his “Angel of Death” to take the lives of people who stole the 2020 election, among other alleged misdeeds.

Green’s prophecies justify the coming deaths of elected officials by alleging vast conspiracy theories. For instance, she claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar is “a spy sent from your land to get everything you could to give it back to the nation that you serve”; she said that Sen. Mitt Romney’s “fingerprints will be found all over the fraud of the 2020 election”; and alleged that Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Brian Kemp were also involved in stealing the 2020 election.

Her prophecies have a special place for Mastriano and Pennsylvania. On February 28, she prophesied: “Doug Mastriano, I have you here for such a time as this, saith the Lord. I know it seemed like I had forsaken you, all your hard work, and all the time you put forth to get to the truth in election integrity. You know the truth, and you have seen so much evidence of what really happened. It is now time to move forward with the plans you have been given. Yes, Doug, I am here with you. I will not forsake you. The time has come for their great fall and for the great steal to be overturned.”

I had to look to see what this Julie Green is all about…and I’m sorry, she is the most uncharismatic evangelical preacher I’ve ever seen. She has this rather flat delivery of nonsense, and her videos…well, I include one here just so you can see what I’m talking about. It’s strange. It’s random animal videos with Green in a corner, talking, but her voice is completely out of sync with her mouth. Don’t watch the whole thing, it’s boring and poorly done, and if you watch a few minutes (or seconds) of it you’ll have captured the flavor of her entire video catalog.

What’s also strange is that while she has 10 times the number of channel subscribers that I do, hardly any of them watch her video — the number of views is typically in the hundreds. It’s like how an American majority may claim to be church members, only a small minority actually attend church on Sunday. I think there are a lot of fanatical far-right old people who see a sermon by her on Facebook, click on subscribe, and then don’t bother to look up her work at all regularly.

To put it in perspective, my maggot video has had more viewers than most of Julie Green’s boring prophecies. I don’t know why no governors have attached me to their election campaigns. Hey, Tim Walz, for a small fee, I could feed you a steady supply of cool spider videos! Call me.

---

Oh wait — an explanation. Julie Green Ministries has said they have no videos on YouTube (for good reason, they’re banned), and the videos I saw were all made by some rabid fan who steals the official videos on Rumble and Telegram and Truth Social and hacks them up and splices audio recordings of her sermons with what seems to be an arbitrary recording of her face. If you check out those sites, there are no cute animal videos, her voice is in sync, and the number of views is much more representative of her popularity among the Q wackos. The content is still flat and boring, though.

“Pastor of anti-gay Alabama church gets 10-year prison sentence for molesting young boys.”

There are a lot of religious fanatics who are obsessed with gays and trans folk and genitals I expect to see appearing under a headline like that.

Oh gosh. We know what to blame for our current situation now. Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America! I heard this same claim back in the 1970s, although usually the argument was that it was the Satanic imagery that was going to invoke occult forces. This guy takes a different tack — he’s going to invoke Steve Bannon as an authority. I prefer the occult forces.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

“‘Now, who’s more real?’ Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax?” Senior writes. Bannon realizes that “some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

OK, this isn’t very interesting or surprising. Yes, people can be inspired by stories, can identify with a cause greater than themselves. This has always been true. It’s not unique to video games, but has been the foundation of religious and political movements for millennia. It’s just that occasionally someone decides that finding identity in a cause is bad when they dislike the cause (like videogames), while simultaneously saying that finding identity is a cause is good when it’s something they like (like Christianity). This article is the same old story — video games bad, Christianity good, therefore the only problem is which fantasy you choose to follow.

I can at least credit the author for realizing he could be walking into a trap. Why isn’t his Christian fantasy also dangerously seductive and misleading people’s lives? Easy. Because Christianity is different.

Yet the way of Jesus is quite different. A Christian vision of heaven is not Valhalla with wine (or grape juice) instead of mead. Valhalla—and almost every other pagan vision of an afterlife—looks backward. It’s the echo and celebration of the warrior’s success in the life that was.

The kingdom of God doesn’t find meaning there. It brings meaning by joining our stories with an altogether different narrative—the story of Jesus. His life is our life. His glory is our glory. And Jesus redefines what wisdom and power really are—by embracing an object found most baffling by the Romans and other pagans of his day: the cross.

When we start to really understand and embody that in our churches, maybe fewer Daves will find their identities in either accounts payable or Ajax online. Maybe more of them will see that there’s glory in the ordinary, in giving your life away for the people you love.

Except…he’s still saying that believing in religion is a way to find “glory”. It’s still a tool to trick people into thinking their mundane lives can be made “glorious” by layering on a belief in a fantasy. Maybe also he should take a look at some of the Christian iconography out there — these would fit perfectly into the imagery of a fantasy role playing game.

If World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons are hurting America, I think a better case could be made that the biggest role playing game of them all, evangelical Christianity, is destroying the country.

Larry Arnn, the president of a Christian bible college, Hillsdale, gave a little talk at a private reception that you weren’t supposed to record, because he felt comfortable saying the quiet part out loud.

Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, Larry, but Christian colleges are the dumbest part of the American system of higher ed. They’re the part that expects students to adhere to dogma, instead of questioning everything, and make the myths of magical beings that didn’t exist a key part of the curriculum. I don’t think Arnn is qualified to judge what is “dumb”, since he has a history of wallowing in dumb for all of his life.

His logic is bad, too. Some fields of study have “subjects,” like physics or literature (which is just about reading books), but education…doesn’t? Except that it does, since it’s the “study of how to teach,” but he rather feebly disqualifies that as not “a separate art”. Pedagogy, psychology, communication, and competence in a subject being taught don’t count, because Larry Arnn, shill for the Heritage Foundation, says they don’t.

We’ve got a good education program here at UMM — I guess Hillsdale doesn’t — and I have education students in my classes all the time. In order to get certified to teach science in a public school, they are expected to get a degree in a science discipline. The real thing. A full degree. No shortcuts. On top of that, they have to meet all of the requirements for an education degree, and it’s often a five-year program to complete. No, it’s not the “dumbest part” of my college. That title would belong to a theology department, which we don’t have, because we don’t teach inscrutable dogma and archaic magic.

There’s not a word of truth in anything Arnn said, but he really let’s slip the theocratic agenda of the Christian right.

Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.

That is absolutely not true. It’s a skill. It requires a solid foundation in knowledge. There’s a kind of arrogance in thinking you can just do it, or that all of education is an amorphous mass with no specialization required.

For instance, I teach college level biology, and no, I don’t think Larry Arnn could do it. He’d only miseducate his students. But I don’t think that implies that I could teach everyone and everything. My wife has a Ph.D. in child psychology, and is an expert in communicating with little kids and helping them learn. I don’t even compare with her in her domain, and she couldn’t do my job, and there ought to be some mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities…unless you’re Larry Arnn, who thinks he could teach everything. What an ass.

It’s all part of the Republican plan to destroy public education, though. You declare that education isn’t a thing, that teachers can be easily replaced by any old yahoo (although, preferably, stay-at-home moms who aren’t permitted to work anywhere else), and you can start declaring schools superfluous.

I do wonder how Hillsdale parents are going to react to that, since many of those conservative families were howling about how the pandemic meant the kids had to stay at home, and although they didn’t say it, were probably cringing at the thought of having to teach their lovely little third-grader math every day.

Next time some Libertarian tries to convince you that the government should not be involved in charity, let the churches do it instead, tell them to read this article about the Mormon church.

Near the start of the pandemic, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, visitors from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived at Danielle Bellamy’s doorstep. They were there to have her read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch LDS videos and set a date to get baptized, all of which she says the church was requiring her to do in exchange for giving her food.

Bellamy, desperate for help, had tried applying for cash assistance from the state of Utah. But she’d been denied for not being low-income enough, an outcome that has become increasingly common ever since then-President Bill Clinton signed a law, 25 years ago, that he said would end “welfare as we know it.”

State employees then explicitly recommended to Bellamy that she ask for welfare from the church instead, she and her family members said in interviews.

Get that? State employees told her to go to a church, and the church sent missionaries to her home.

She is not a Mormon.

She refused to get baptized as a Mormon.

So the church denied her the aid she needed.

It’s a shame. Utah is a beautiful state, but the Mormons have poisoned everything. I lived there for a few years, but would not go back.

We got another grand decision today. The Supreme Court decided in favor of a public school football coach who pushed Christianity in his games. After all, it was just “quiet prayer” and a “brief thanks” at his games.

Nothing wrong with that! I have no objection to anyone expressing their faith privately, or in church. The problem is leading a group in prayer, but if Coach Kennedy wasn’t doing that, no problem.

Photograph of Coach Kennedy’s “quiet”, “brief” prayer:

OK, that’s one and done. Now we await the courts decision to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Anyone want to guess how that one will go?

But he’s right.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes rejoices that in overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has laid out a blueprint for banning gay marriage, sodomy, and contraception and imposing "Catholic Taliban rule": "We're having something like Taliban rule in America, in a good way!" pic.twitter.com/ZhSxZMBTIh

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 27, 2022

That’s exactly what the Supreme Court is trying to do, impose a Catholic Taliban on us…although the “Taliban” part is totally redundant. This is exactly what a purely, strictly, orthodox, traditional Catholicism wants, we don’t need to blame the Muslims for it.

You know, the Founding Fathers would have been horrified at the thought of women and Catholics on the court. It’s odd how these fanatical Originalists can ignore that.