Donald Trump and the Post-Christian Right

"Barstool conservatives," aren't the problem, we know who the problem is

via Gage Skidmore

There’s a lot of invective directed at the colorful types of people, basically post-religious, people who like to have a good time, who like Trump because of his sense of freedom. You see these people at his rallies a lot, sometimes they’re into QAnon. They’re not really the problem. In fact, the DOJ Inspector General released a report this week finding systemic mismanagement in the handling of child sex abuse cases, so their basic claim, filtered through a populist game of telephone, is basically true.

On the other hand, Trump is beginning to sell out pro-life voters, in part because pro-lifers don’t really have a good strategy going forward. Here’s what it should be:

• Support no federal legislation one way or the other

• Vote down all state-level referenda

• Protect life in state legislatures

The virtue of this approach is that it forces the pro-abortion side to have a conversation about where they want limits on abortion to be set, and come to a consensus about it. They will be unable to do that for some time because they don’t tend to have a sense of limits. This is the only strategy that keeps momentum on the pro-life side, which gets to continue looking like the reasonable one.

Donald Trump’s poor comments about Amendment 4, in which he says he doesn’t know how he’s going to vote, but six weeks, the current limit in Florida law, is too short. It doesn’t matter that Trump is pro-abortion. What he needs to agree to is the above strategy, that laws should be passed by legislatures. Ideally he would say he’s going to vote “No” on Amendment 4 on those grounds. It’s very simple.

There’s a lot of obfuscation of this by the people around Trump, who are constantly kissing his ass. Then there’s his comments about having the government cover IVF or forcing insurance providers to cover it. If the Obamacare contraceptive mandate was bad, this is worse.

In the case of the IVF proposal, this stuff is beloved by the post-Christian right, a harmony of tech people and much more unsavory elements. IVF opens the door to embryo selection, choosing which children live or die, and we don’t want to go down that road. Elon Musk loves it, because he loves the idea of having lots of children, just not with American mothers. Guys like Richard Banana also love it, because he is a eugenicist and likes that it opens the door to embryo selection. He was probably given a book deal with the Fox imprint HarperCollins because there are people at Fox who like eugenics, too.

I have been led to understand that one of the people pushing Trump in this direction, which was first voiced by Ted Cruz—another Canadian, like Musk—is Jason Miller, who used to work for Cruz. It is a matter of legal dispute whether Miller poisoned his own child by slipping his stripper mistress an abortion pill in a smoothie, and whether or not it’s true, he seems like the type.

One of Miller’s gigs outside of campaign work was at Teneo, the global consulting firm founded by two Clinton aides (not to be confused with Leonard Leo’s Teneo Network), which has a number of connections to the Tories. The Clintons have had many connections to population control over the years. There are people at Teneo, such as their head of U.S. strategy and comms, Andrea Calise, who have been active in population control work. One wonders if this fight is why Miller is kept close to Trump.

This is, of course, real sicko shit.