This week, a Christian podcaster offered up what might be seen as a permission slip – or a “get out of jail free card” – for Republicans who have been lying to the American people: “enjoy it.”
“It’s okay to use deception in service of defeating the left. It’s not sinning in order to do good. It’s being righteously shrewd in order to do good. It’s also okay to enjoy it. Lighten up.”
It’s okay to use deception in service of defeating the left. It’s not sinning in order to do good. It’s being righteously shrewd in order to do good. It’s also okay to enjoy it. Lighten up.
— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) September 17, 2024
Those are the words of Josh Daws, whose bio at Founders Ministries says he is “dedicated to helping Christians navigate the complex and rapidly changing cultural landscape through his biblically-based cultural analysis.”
Daws “strives to provide insightful and thought-provoking commentary on current events and cultural trends on his podcast and Twitter. He hopes to be a valuable resource for those looking to engage with culture in a meaningful and informed way.”
The tweet has been viewed well over a half-million times in just 48 hours, and it seems to sum up where the right and the far-right are at this moment in time – ethics be damned, the ends justify the means.
When a reporter for Politico on Wednesday confronted Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the U.S. Senator for Ohio who has been spreading racist and dangerous lies about his own constituents – immigrants from Haiti legally living and working in the city of Springfield – falsely claiming they are stealing pets and eating them, he dug in his heels.
Donald Trump during the debate had lied, saying infamously off the Haitian immigrants, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there.”
The reporter reminded Vance that the Haitian immigrants, whom he has been calling “illegal migrants,” are in the United States under a 1990 law signed by President George H.W. Bush, “so they are here legally.”
The freshman junior senator made clear he did not care.
“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works,” declared the defiant Vance, who holds a law degree from Yale and knows that they are, in fact, here legally and the Biden Administration’s decision to grant them protection means they are not, as he claimed, “illegal.”
In short, Senator Vance was lying, and lying to a crowd, however small, who ate it up, cheering, applauding, and at times nodding in agreement.
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“This is just shocking,” declared former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, now a professor of political science. “Mr. Vance is blatantly calling a legal action illegal. I’ve studied my whole life how democracies break down. This is how it happens folks. I hope he really doesn’t believe this. Politicians say a lot of crazy things during elections. I fear he might.”
Senator Vance has been lying since Monday of last week, when he first promoted the racist “pet-eating” lie.
“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Vance asked on social media, referring of course to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for President, who has never been the “border czar.”
Vance, or his staff, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday, knew he was lying, or at least knew after his remarks were posted. They remain up to this day, never corrected or removed.
Over the weekend, Senator Vance, now infamously, told CNN, effectively, that he is willing to lie to promote his agenda.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told host Dana Bash.
“You just said that you’re ‘creating’ a story,” Bash responded, as The New Republic reported. “You just said that this is a story that you created.”
“Yes!” Vance replied, before twisting his own words in a nonsensical defense.
“We are creat—we are creating … Dana,” Vance said. “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re ‘creating a story’ meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
The New Republic’s Greg Sergeant added, “JD Vance is also claiming that because of Haitians, communicable diseases in Springfield have ‘skyrocketed.’ I talked to the health commissioner in Clark County, where Springfield is located. Vance’s claim is nonsense.”
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Republicans outright lying have making headlines of late.
“The Real Reason Trump and Vance Are Spreading Lies About Haitians” (The Atlantic)
“How J.D. Vance Became Trump’s Pet Liar” (New York Magazine‘s Intelligencer)
“How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True” (Wall Street Journal)
“One of the Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies” (New York Times)
“The Grand Old Party of Liars” (The Nation)
There is, 0f course, Donald Trump, who lies so often the media stopped bothering to keep up. Questions have been flowing about his lies of late that are so off-the-wall and so provably-false, his grasp of reality is being called into question.
Wednesday night, in a rare on-camera, in-studio Fox News interview, Trump, (still talking about last week’s debate,) falsely claimed the ABC News moderators corrected him, “I think nine times, or eleven times.”
The right-wing New York Post reported Trump was fact-checked five times, not nine, not eleven.
CNN reported Trump made 33 false statements during the debate, Harris just one.
But it was Trump’s next remark, also false, that has many calling into question not just his moral character, but his mental health.
“And the audience was, they went crazy.”
There was no audience at that debate.
Trump on the debate: They didn’t correct her once and they corrected me, everything I said practically.. and the audience went absolutely crazy pic.twitter.com/H2SEsIDUg2
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 19, 2024
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols remarked: “How is it that Trump hallucinated an audience being present during the debate and we’ve just moved on as if this isn’t a sign of a serious mental problem? Biden – wisely – agreed to step aside for far less than that.”
On Wednesday, journalist and SiriusXM host Michelangelo Signorile wrote at Substack, “Why MAGA views blatant lying as a righteous and important act.”
Signorile highlighted this recent lie by Donald Trump: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”
“But uh the transgender thing is an incredible thing… your kid goes to school & comes home a few days later with an operation the school decides what’s going to happen with your child & you many of these childs 15 years later say “what the hell happened who did this to me?”
🤦🏻♀️ pic.twitter.com/BNyNscBgUB
— Jennifer Jenkins Brevard (@JenkinsBrevard) August 31, 2024
Signorile noted Trump’s claims were “so deranged and kooky—as if there are hospitals in schools or kids are being transferred to hospitals in the middle of the day from their classrooms—that many of us thought it was a clear example of Trump’s continued cognitive decline. He did, after all, say ‘many of these childs’ instead of ‘children,’ and that was more evidence of his faltering mental acuity.”
But.
“But Trump repeated the claim again days later at a rally, continuing to push something that was deemed false even by his staunchest supporters,” Signorile continued. “And that is a real tell.”
He explains, “the goal of the lying by Trump and his running mate JD Vance,” is “to hijack discussion and redirect it to issues they want to talk about, even if it means they are exposed as having told a lie.”
Signorile says, “the MAGA masses are perfectly fine with that strategy. They don’t care about the lies being exposed because the lies are a means to an end.”
As for Daws’ s defense of using “deception in service of defeating the left,” attorney Andrew L. Seidel writes, “I often speak about Christian Nationalism as a permission structure. For instance, CN gave the insurrectionists the moral and mental license they needed for the treasonous assault on our democracy on January 6th. Here is that permission structure laid out explicitly.”
SiriusXM host John Fugelsang remarked, “I have never read a purer distillation of MAGA Christianity than ‘thou shalt bear false witness.’”
Others have remarked simply, “Romans 3:8.”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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