McMorris Rodgers is ideologically and educationally incapable of acknowledging human-caused global warming. Every time climate change comes up she dodges the question by pivoting to her support for the “clean power” produced by the Snake River dams. Even so, she and many of her fellow Republicans don’t dare be transparent about their scorn because a majority of Americans are concerned about climate change and are in favor of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. However, Republicans can opportunistically take a different tack: smear organizations that support renewable energy. That’s exactly what they are doing—with McMorris Rodgers in the lead.
McMorris Rodgers (R-CD5, Eastern Washington) is the ranking member (the most senior member of the minority party serving on a committee) of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the U.S. House of Representatives, her only committee assignment.
The E&C [Energy and Commerce Committee] Republicans maintain a website where they post “News”. On March 10, 2022, they posted “E&C Republicans Question Environmental Groups Over Possible Collusion with Russia—Were They Influenced by Putin’s Dark Money to Shut Down American Energy?” This headline alone is breathless propaganda. The “news” article announces that the E&C Republicans have “sent a letter” to the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club. The three letters are identical apart from addressees. Each asks a series of leading questions reminiscent of the old classic, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” For example, one question asks, “Does _____ currently or has _____ ever have received funds from the Russian government or anyone connected with the Russian government.” The basis for the question is an allegation posed in the passive voice:
It has been alleged that Putin is using a San Francisco-based eNGO, the Sea Change Foundation (Sea Change), to funnel money into U.S.-based environmental advocacy efforts designed to undermine American energy production.
“Has been alleged” is nothing but a smear. Who made the allegation? What is the evidence? The implication of the “news” is that the organizations questioned exist solely to undermine the fossil fuel industry. Of course, these organizations’ efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable energy are not acknowledged, since the Republican Party is ideologically opposed to even recognizing the threat. To the marginally informed reader who lacks the time and interest to dig into the details, the Committee’s “news” offers support for the decades of Republican framing of anything with the word “environmental” attached as toxic and anti-American.
A close reading of the the letters offers some clues about the origin of the allegations: references to articles in conservative media, mostly from five or six years ago, suggesting that Putin was funneling some money and using cyberspace to support the anti-fracking movement. That should come as no surprise, since it is abundantly clear that Putin has been undermining American society and politics since before (and then during) Trump’s 2016 election. The real question concerns the magnitude of and effects of the funding. The letters focus on the Sea Change Foundation, “a private family foundation currently dedicated to addressing global climate change”, co-founded in 2006 based on a considerable family fortune by U.S. siblings Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons . The E&C Republicans, without specific numbers, imply that somehow a meaningful amount of additional funding has come from Putin, and, furthermore, again without specifying, that somehow that money has funneled to and tainted the work of three environmental organizations.
The timing of the “news” is also rich. Now that Putin has invaded Ukraine and is on most people’s s-list, the E&C Republicans have suddenly resurrected allegations against Putin’s meddling in U.S. domestic policy. They were anxious to ignore these same allegations when the leader of their party, Donald Trump, was praising Putin, and, again, when, in a widely publicized telephone call, Trump extorted the President of Ukraine for dirt on the Hunter Biden by threatening to withhold already authorized defensive equipment to Ukraine. All but ten House Republicans determined that that egregious act of documented extortion wasn’t grounds for impeachment and voted against it, including McMorris Rodgers. (The other two Republicans from Washington State in the U.S. House, Herrera-Beutler and Newhouse, to their credit, voted to impeach, votes that look much better now to many Republicans.)
The E&C Republicans’ letters are a reach too far. They ought to be met with derision. The allegations and demand for funding details are particularly ironic when one considers the vast web of interlocking non-profits fueled by the Koch Donor Group that produce Republican position papers and talking points (as disclosed in excruciating detail by Jane Mayer in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right).
Every House Republican, including McMorris Rodgers, voted against the For the People Act. For the People would have required that any person or entity donating more than $10,000 to a campaign be identified. These same Republicans now demanding to know the details of the funding of (certain) non-profits apparently would rather not make it clear where their own funding comes from.
The smear of the E&C Republicans’ “news” was taken up almost immediately by parts of the Republican media machine. The very same day as the Republican Committee’s posting, Townhall, an online purveyor of right wing propaganda, published “Lawmakers Demand Answers From Leftist Environmental Groups Over Possible Collusion with Russia”. The allegation fans Republican confirmation bias against environmental groups. To be effective for this purpose such allegations require no basis in fact—only enough plausibility to plant the idea.
McMorris Rodgers and her minority E&C Republicans are shoveling coal for the fossil fuel industry. Being in the minority they are powerless to attempt greater damage by, for instance, holding public hearings, but in the meantime they can stoke their base while they wait on the sidelines for the next election.
Today I offer last Monday’s (March 14) email from Doug Muder on a topic that has gnawed at me for a long time. I was brought up in the United Methodist Church on the teachings of Jesus Christ. For decades now, if I listen to what emanates from many “Christian” pulpits I recognize the forms, but I am appalled by messaging, messaging I no longer recognize as those of the Christianity I was taught. In “How did Christianity become so toxic” Mr. Muder . (This post may arrive in truncated form in some gmail accounts. Just click on the title below to read Mr. Muder’s post on the website—and sign up for his Weekly Sift if you find his work as intriguing as I do.)
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Everything below is an extended quote from Doug Muder’s “Weekly Sift”—a weekly blog and email (every Monday) for which I highly recommend you sign up.
Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.
If you devote much of your time to trying to make the world a better place, you’ve probably noticed a paradox.
On the one hand, some of your most dedicated co-workers are church people. You may not have realized it right away, because they’re not the kind of Christians who say “Praise the Lord” whenever something good happens. Rather than preach at you or try to lead the group in prayer, they just show up and share the work: ladle the soup, stuff the envelopes, hammer the nails, make the phone calls. Only after you spend some down time talking do you start to understand what motivates them: They think some guy named Jesus had some pretty good ideas about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger.
But at the same time, when you look at the bigger picture, it’s hard to escape the idea that Christianity is your enemy. The loudest, best-funded, and best-organized groups working to make the world harsher, crueler, and less forgiving are the ones waving the cross. There’s nothing subtle about it. All their rhetoric is about what God wants, what God hates, and the “Christian values” that the law should impose on Christians and non-Christians alike.
And strangest of all, those “Christian values” seldom have anything to do with healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or welcoming the stranger. These followers of the Prince of Peace aspire to be “spiritual warriors“. They revere a man whose self-sacrifice brought forgiveness to the world, but their focus is on punishment.
The name of Jesus shows up in every paragraph of their rhetoric; his teachings, not so much.
The value of cruelty. Pretty much any time you want, you can pull examples out of the headlines. Recently, the people Christians want to punish have been kids who express the wrong gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as the adults who support them.
I know what the law says. And yet it is terrifying to have a [Child Protective Services] worker come into your home and threaten to take your children away for doing nothing more than loving them unconditionally.
Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay law will stop kids who are uncertain about their sexual orientation from confiding in teachers or school counselors: By law, school employees have to break their students’ trust and out them to their parents; otherwise, the school district could be sued. And if you’re a teacher or principal who sees elementary-school kids being bullied because of their gender expression, you can’t start a conversation about that without risking a lawsuit, because such topics are not “age appropriate”.
As soon as you picture either law in practice, the cruelty is obvious, and it’s hard to see who benefits. But if you ask the people behind these efforts what motivates them, one answer almost always comes up: their Christian values. The Tennessee version of Don’t Say Gay includes this in its list of justifications:
WHEREAS, the promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values” …
Where on Earth did these “Christian values” come from? Not Jesus.
Did Jesus have “Christian values”? If you’ve never read the gospels, but you’ve listened to the people who invoke his name, you might think Jesus talked about sex and gender constantly. But in fact you’d be wrong. Homosexuality never comes up in his sermons and parables, and Jesus never rebukes his followers for getting their gender roles confused.
If you believe that Jesus defines Christianity, then persecuting gay and trans people isn’t a Christian value at all.
Other Christian values. Those are recent headlines, but these last few weeks have been nothing special. If I’d written this article in a different month, I might have talked about the Christians who were doing their damnedest to help a deadly virus spread freely and kill as many people as possible.
“Religious liberty” now includes churches’ right to host superspreader events, which many of them have been eager to do. Rather than thank God for the scientists who found and tested a vaccine so quickly, many Christians spread lies and conspiracy theoriesabout the vaccines (“For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?’”). Wearing a mask in church became evidence that you didn’t trust God’s protection. (But if you really trusted God, wouldn’t you jump off a tall building?)
Making women bear their rapist’s child is a Christian value. (“As plain as day, God spoke to me. … And I said yes Lord, I will. It’s coming back. It’s coming back. We are going to file that bill without any exceptions.”) But miscarriage-inducing herbs have been part of women’s folklore since the beginning of time. Isn’t it strange that Jesus never mentioned them?
The Bible warns us not to bear false witness. But Christian churches have become the prime breeding ground for the most vicious and baseless conspiracy theories.
You know who’s also a Christian hero these days? Vladimir Putin. A Republican candidate for the Senate praised Russia as a “Christian nationalist nation” and told CPAC
I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.
As far back as 2014, Franklin Graham was lauding Putin for the even harsherRussian version of Don’t Say Gay:
Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?
How did this happen? You might imagine that the teachings of Jesus would be a pole star for Christians, and that any time they started to drift away, the Sermon on the Mount would guide them back.
Clearly that’s not happening. But why not?
The reason is simple: Jesus told stories and gave advice, but he never laid out a systematic theology or worldview. He used imagery that was designed to upend the way his disciples were thinking, but he never told them step-by-step how they should think.
Jesus hinted that you’re not really supposed to understand right away. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like yeast; it works on you invisibly. His images and stories are supposed to sit in the back of your mind and ferment, not proceed logically from axioms to theorems.
And while that’s a fine guru-to-disciple teaching technique, it leaves an opening for people who do lay out systematic theologies and worldviews, and do tell people what to think. Over the centuries that’s what’s happened. A conservative worldview has built up around Jesus’ teachings and almost completely sealed them off.
Here’s a simple example: According to John, Jesus once made this enigmatic statement: “The Father and I are one.” But he never explained exactly how that worked. The result has been centuries and centuries of theological battles about the precise nature of the Trinity, arguments that have occasionally erupted into gruesome executions or even warfare.
In short: People got lost in the mystery of that one line, and wound up on the other side of the world from loving their neighbors.
How conservative theology leads people astray. Today, when you come to an Evangelical church, the main thing you are met with is a worldview that contains simple answers about what’s going on in the world and how you should respond to it. Sometimes those answers are proof-texted back to something Jesus said (though more often they point back to Paul or Leviticus or some verse in Revelation that could mean just about anything). But invariably the logic only works one way: After the idea is presented to you, you can squint at one of Jesus’ more puzzling statements and say “Oh, that’s what he meant.” But you can’t walk that path in the opposite direction; what Jesus said would never lead you to the idea if some community-endorsed authority hadn’t already put it in your head.
I’m not claiming this is a complete list, but here are six ways that a conservative theology and worldview tilts Evangelical thinking in directions that eventually put a wall around Jesus and his teachings.
Focusing on the Devil opens a person to conspiracy theories.
Believing that we’re in the End Times justifies suspending normal reasoning.
Traditional religion values tradition more than religion.
A focus on individual souls and individual salvation makes systemic or social reasoning heretical.
Fundamentalism promotes bad-faith reasoning.
Christian imagery and rhetoric tilts towards autocracy.
1. The Devil is the prime conspirator. The conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and occasionally powerful people do conspire for nefarious purposes. But the problem with conspiracy-theory thinking is that it’s too easy: You can always come up with some way to fit current events into whatever story you want to believe. No matter what actually happens, you can make it prove that whoever you like is the hero and whoever you hate is the villain.
So if you want to live in the real world rather than some dramatic fantasy of your own choosing, you need some standards that filter out the crazy conspiracies. The most important standard is to realize that conspiring is hard. People all have their own motives and purposes, so keeping a large number of them on the same page is difficult, especially if you have to do it secretly.
So the first questions a rational person asks about a conspiracy theory are: How many people would have to commit to this, and why would they? What keeps them all pulling in the same direction? Why don’t they rat each other out?
Those questions sink most conspiracy theories. Take the central Q-Anon theory for example: that the world is run by a ring of child-sex traffickers, and has been for a long time. Now picture yourself as a rising star in the world of money and politics. At what point would the conspirators reach out to you? And what if child sex wasn’t your particular kink? It just seems really hard to make this work.
But now imagine you believe in the Devil. (Satan does show up in Jesus’ stories, but those references are easy to misread. Our current picture of the Devil stitches together diverse Biblical characters with different names, and didn’t fully congeal until a century or so after Jesus. Neil Forsyth described the process in The Old Enemy.) The Devil doesn’t need a motive to launch some evil plot, because for the Devil, evil is its own reward. Minions of the Devil, likewise, do things just for the sake of being evil.
If you can imagine a core of people like that, who don’t need the conspiracy to bring them wealth or power or status or any other visible benefit beyond the simple opportunity to do evil, then just about any conspiracy becomes feasible. The door to believing whatever you want is wide open.
2. Strange things happen during the End Times. In the summer of 2013, 77% of Evangelicals told the Barna Group that they agreed with this statement: “The world is currently living in the ‘end times’ as described by prophecies in the Bible.” Evangelicals not only believe this, they seem to enjoy thinking about it: The Left Behind series of novels (based on a literalistic interpretation of the Book of Revelation) has sold more than 80 million books and inspired six movies.
Paradoxically, a belief that the world is ending soon has always been prominent in Christian circles. As far back as the first or second century AD, St. John could close his Book of Revelation with
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
That’s Jesus’ second coming he’s talking about, the one Christians are still waiting for. Nearly two thousand years later, John’s “soon” has still not turned into “now”.
But in spite of this extended delay, the persistence of the end-times belief is not hard to understand. Basically, it’s a form of self-aggrandizement, because it makes our lifetimes special. Nobody, apparently, wants to believe that they live in a humdrum era.
Now think about the everyday significance of that belief: More than three-quarters of conservative Christians approach the evening news the way the rest of us approach the final chapters of a novel. They expect diverse plot threads to start coming together.Connections that would ordinarily be wild coincidences are almost required. (Of course the serving girl with amnesia is the Duke’s long-lost niece! I should have seen that a mile away.)
What’s more, as the final battle of Good versus Evil approaches, the participants should become easier to identify. So of course there’s an international conspiracy of blood-drinking child molesters. How could there not be?
3. Traditional religion is more traditional than religious. Religious teachings are one of the prime ways that a community maintains its institutions and passes down its folk wisdom. The practices in one part of the world may be completely different than those somewhere else, but you can be pretty sure that in both places, some local deity wants things to work that way.
New empires often bring new religions (which usually complete the circle by justifying the new imperial order). But community practices change much more slowly than military or political power structures. So old practices get woven into the new mythology and the new belief system, as if they had been part of the new religion all along. The annual fertility rite of a pagan deity continues, but instead is blessed by a Catholic saint. And no matter how many Islamic scholars say that the Quran does not endorse honor killings, many common people in Muslim countries keep on believing that it does.
In 21st century America, “traditional values” and “Christian values” are often used interchangeably, but they ought to be very different concepts. Countless varieties of bigotry are traditional in America: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anti-gay prejudice, and many others. Like any dominant religion, Christianity has often been co-opted to justify abusing “outsiders” (however that term has been defined at different times in different places). But custom shouldn’t turn prejudices into Christian values.
4. Bias towards individuality. One of Jesus’ most mysterious phrases is “the Kingdom of God”. He said it a lot, and anyone who claims to know exactly what he meant by it is kidding somebody, most likely himself. Sometimes it sounds like a vision of an ideal future. Other times it seems more like a metaphor for the state of consciousness Jesus had achieved and was trying to teach. Once in a while it resembled an afterlife.
Nobody really knows. It’s even possible that Jesus meant different things at different times, or that the gospels occasionally misquote him.
But in the conservative theology I was taught growing up, the Kingdom of Heaven was a literal place that I could hope to reach after death. I’d get there as an individual, because we all have individual souls, which will be judged at the end of time. There’s no such thing as a collective soul (except in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Wink’s creative reimagining of angels).
My teachers never admitted that all this stuff about souls is speculative. It’s not really spelled out anywhere in scripture. (If the sheep and goats story is supposed to be a description of literal events, it’s just about the only parable that is.) Heaven is speculative also, and (like the Devil) has meant different things in different eras.
Once you’ve made that speculative leap, though, any kind of social thinking is going to give you problems. If good and evil are only accounted for in judgments about individuals, then good and evil must only exist in individuals.
Systemic racism, then, can only be a heresy. If racism is evil, then that evil has to be accountable to individuals, not to systems. If stealing is a sin, then the man who steals a loaf of bread is guilty, and not the society that left him no other way to feed his family. If enslaving people is evil, then George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and many other people we might want to admire were evil. Slavery can’t be blamed on society, because society will never stand before St. Peter and be sent to Heaven or Hell. So maybe slavery wasn’t really so bad.
Theologians created these problems by going too far out on a limb. They’ve constructed a semi-logical structure around some hints in scripture, and that structure leads them into absurdities and injustices.
5. From apologetics to bad-faith denial. Apologetics is the art of using rational argument to support positions that originate in faith. It often looks like philosophy, but it isn’t, because practitioners aren’t reasoning in order to find truth. Instead, they believe they’ve already found truth through their faith, and are now just trying to persuade others. So apologists start with their conclusions already established, and try to tie them to convincing first principles via logic.
Apologetics can be an honorable practice if the apologists are open about what they’re doing. (And philosophy can even benefit if the arguments are sharp enough. Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae proudly claims to be apologetic, but philosophers still read it.) The practice goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages, and is still taught in seminaries.
But for most of its history, apologetics was an esoteric field of study. Parishioners in the pews might believe what they were taught or doubt it, but they didn’t really care whether St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God was sound.
That all changed in the 19th century, when geologists discovered a world far older than Genesis described, and biologists developed a theory of human origins very different from God shaping Adam out of dust. Science was now invading turf that had previously belonged to religion, and many religious people believed they had to fight back.
That was the origin of fundamentalism.
But a problem soon became apparent: If you restrict yourself facts and logic, Genesis is just wrong. If you’re going to argue that it’s right (without invoking faith), you have to cheat. You have to make bad-faith scientific arguments and hope you can sell them. So fundamentalists did that. They’re still doing it.
The result was that fundamentalist churches encouraged their members to reason badly, and to accept any kind of nonsense if it supported a literal interpretation of the Bible. In essence, they built a back door into their members’ reasoning processes. But in the long run, that kind of corner-cutting always has unforeseen consequences. In the subsequent decades, self-induced gullibility has made fundamentalists prey to intellectual hackers and conmen of all sorts.
Evolution denial established the notion that if enough people don’t want to believe some true thing, it’s OK for them to support each other in denying it. That genie is out of its bottle now, and it will work ever-greater mischief in conservative churches until they recognize the problem they have made for themselves.
The Divine Monarchy. When monotheism replaced polytheism, the Universe began to be viewed as a vast autocratic system. You can see the transition happening already in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, written in the fifth century BC. There are still many gods at this point, but the sky god is sovereign to the point of tyranny. In the opening scene, the personification of Power explains to Hephaistos why he must complete the disagreeable job of chaining Prometheus to the mountain: “Zeus alone is free.”
Jesus often talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, but St. Paul supported worldly kings in Romans 13:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
If we know that Heaven is a kingdom, then maybe Earth should be a kingdom too. Maybe we should find the godliest man we can (of course it has to be a man), and do whatever he says. (And by the way, have I told you about the lying, womanizing, unrepentant, Bible-illiterate conman all the other Christians are voting for? Maybe he’s the guy.)
Today, Christians talk about “Christ the King” and say “Jesus is Lord!” with the enthusiasm of football fans saying “We’re #1!” But again, Jesus never laid out his political theory. If you think you know what kind of theocracy Jesus wants you to establish, or even who Jesus thinks you should vote for, you’re standing at the end of a long chain of speculation.
I can’t tell you what Jesus would think, but I can tell you what I think: If that long chain of speculation has you supporting cruelty, and if it gets in the way of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, then you probably did it wrong.
Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-CD5, Eastern Washington) and, it appears, the entire Republican propaganda machine, are busy using the Ukraine crisis to lobby for the petroleum industry. Simultaneously, in a gross rejection of any understanding of the workings of the free market they claim to favor, they dismiss market forces and cast blame on Biden, environmentalists, and every Democrat for the rise in fossil fuel prices.
Many have accused McMorris Rodgers and the united Republican propaganda machine of cravenly doing the bidding of the oil industry because the fossil fuel industry has bought them off. That interpretation is not unreasonable given the facts, but it is not the whole story. McMorris Rodgers and many (or most) of her fellow Republicans are doctrinally incapable of acknowledging that climate change is a man-caused existential threat, doctrinally incapable based on a Fundamentalist interpretation of the Christian message.
There are a number of modern day Christians, particularly among Evangelicals, who are led to believe that God gave man dominion of the earth and all it contains at the time of Creation. According to this belief system, fossil fuels stand as an unalloyed good put in the ground by God for the benefit of man. Such a God certainly would not have offered man such a boon as fossil fuels while also making the use of such fuels a threat to life on earth. Such an idea is simply incomprehensible. It must be dismissed. Furthermore, if God put fossil fuels here for our use and if burning them doessomehow wreak havoc on the earth then that would just be part of God’s plan. True Christian believers, after all, can look forward to being raptured into heaven in the coming End Times.
Conversely, another segment of Christian belief quotes the Bible to argue that men must be stewards of Creation, that the science of climate change actually is real and convincing. In this line of thought, although God created all this that we see around us, He also gave us free will to make (or not make) intelligent choices that will help preserve His Creation. In this line of thought stewardship of Creation is one part of the effort for humans to do their best in encouraging the Kingdom of God on earth.
McMorris Rodgers was educated in private Fundamentalist Christian schools in which dominionist theological principles were articles of faith. Her commitment to fossil fuels as a God-given boon put here on purpose for our exploitation is genuine and heart felt. In a town hall McMorris Rodgers stated her conviction that the Earth was created by God in seven literal days. She sidesteps the question: “Do you believe the earth is more like 6000 years old or four and a half billion years old?”. That orientation renders her doctrinally incapable of comprehending the scientific evidence for climate change. Furthermore, it explains why, every time climate change is mentioned, she can only pivot to “Save the dams” while mumbling something about renewable energy. She knows better than to admit that she believes based on her religious convictions that climate change, if it is happening at all, has nothing to do with fossil fuels.
I am indebted to Dan Rather’s and Elliot Kirschner’s Substack column “Steady” from March 13 for the stimulus to write today’s post. We are at a crossroads facing an existential threat while “our” smiling Rep. McMorris Rodgers is incapable of seeing it. It is not just simply a matter of being bought by the fossil fuel industry, she is a “True Believer” in a doctrine that blinds her to reality.
Here we are again. We’ve been here before — trapped in what seems like an endless circle of petro-imprisonment. The United States economy is being threatened by high gasoline prices, exacerbated by the Russian assault on Ukraine and the resulting suite of economic sanctions. And we aren’t alone. Oil is a global commodity, and price spikes reverberate everywhere.
Vladimir Putin’s power to threaten the safety and stability of the world lies in two main areas: fossil fuels and nuclear weapons. Both can be considered remnants of the last century, left to fester and menace our present age. Of the two, arms control is the trickier to resolve, because it requires agreement between two hostile powers. But oil and gas? We have no one to blame but ourselves.
The dangers of running the world on a non-renewable resource that just so happens to be pooled in some of the globe’s most repressive and dictatorial countries have long been evident. From a geo-strategic and economic viewpoint, we have put the wellbeing of our nation at risk. We have invested trillions in our national defense but remain addicted to a product whose price and global supply can be in large part determined by our enemies, or at least by less-than-ideal “allies” like Saudi Arabia.
We, of course, are not alone. Western Europe has long been tethered to Russia for its oil and gas needs, to an extent that has shaped the strategic decision-making on the continent for decades. And every country that belongs to the world economy, in ways big and small, is vulnerable to shocks around oil.
We need to move beyond fossil fuels, as fast as possible. And I say this as a proud son of Texas, a state that has built its reputation and wealth in large part through the extraction of black gold. My father worked in the oil fields, and so did I, during summers growing up. I have nothing but respect for those who toiled in difficult and dangerous conditions helping make America go. We never would have defeated Nazi Germany if it weren’t for the roughnecks and coal miners.
But times change, and we must change with them. We have decades of data — from the fields of economics, geopolitics, public health, and environmental science — that point to one conclusion: The only future that makes sense is one fueled by alternative and renewable energy.
It is to be expected that Republicans looking to attack the Biden administration would hone in on current gas prices. But their goal is much bigger than merely scoring political points. They want to do the bidding of their deep-pocket backers in the oil industry, who are eager to leverage this crisis to push long-cherished objectives of more drilling, more pipelines, and a whole lot less environmental regulation.
While the immediate focus should be on ensuring that high oil prices don’t wreck the U.S. economy, we must also end this destructive cycle once and for all. There is a reason why President Jimmy Carter’s name often trends on Twitter at times like these. More than 40 years ago, he famously installed solar panels on the White House to demonstrate his commitment to renewable energy. Imagine where we would be if the United States, and the world, had built on that instinct. All the innovation that would have taken place — and potentially an alternate history. Would there have been war with Iraq? Would Putin have been able to solidify his grip on power? What would be the health of the climate?
Tragically, we are where we are. But that can’t become an excuse for inaction. We are better prepared than ever for a post-carbon future. Technologies around solar panels are light years away (no pun intended) from the ones Carter installed. We have also seen breakthroughs in wind power, geothermal, and other renewable energies. And the electric vehicle market is surging, with new options in many categories, including pickup trucks.
Those who are beholden to the dirty energy of the past would want to convince us all that we can’t have a healthy economy powered by new energy. They point to the short-term struggles and use them as rationale for shackling our future. We do need to solve the immediate challenges. We also need to recognize that any shift to new energy will be most disruptive to those who can least afford it. Many Americans are barely hanging on financially and have an old, gas-guzzling car as their only means of transportation and an uninsulated home as their residence. The change to a green future must work for them, too.
But how many times will we need to ride this merry-go-round of oil dependency, bouncing up and down on the rig pumps, before we realize that we need to get off? Let us absorb the shocks of the present as best we can. And let us also do the transformational work that will put us on the path of their never recurring.
A Belligerent Minority Seeks Power by Intimidation
Boards matter—a lot than we are aware. Sadly, we tend to pay them little mind and offer the people who serve on them little encouragement or credit—even as a board is taken over by a group pushing a narrow agenda. Consider the Board of Trustees of North Idaho College, where a far right wing takeover has damaged NIC’s administration and that damage now threatens the college’s accreditation.
As a local part of a national effort, a small group of religious conservatives pushing an anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-accurate history, anti-sex education agenda strove during the 2021 election cycle to accomplish a majority takeover of the Central Valley School District Board of Directors (i.e. the “School Board” of CVSD). They succeeded in electing one of their own, Pam Orebaugh, to one of the five Board positions, but failed (at least until 2023) in their attempt to take a second position with a write-in candidate and tried (unsuccessfully) to mount recall elections against the other sitting Directors, Keith Clark, Debbie Long, and Cynthia McMullen. These Directors are people who have donated their time to serve on the Board of this very successful district for 15, 19, and 24 years, respectively. For now, Ms. Orebaugh is claiming distance from the extreme ideologies of those with whom she closely worked in her campaign, but one can expect her tune will change if she becomes part of a majority in 2023.
Ms. Orebaugh nodded along during in a video of a meeting her group heldimmediately after forcing closure of a CVSD Board meeting with their belligerence on August 23, 2021. (For a transcript of the video click here.) Comments (mostly by Ms. Orebaugh’s ally, Rob Linebarger) included:
“We are under attack from globalist, Marxist forces, which include politicians!”
“We are in what’s called the 5th Generation War.”
“This is a direct attack on our morality, our hope, and our faith!”
“The masks, the shots. These are all part of the grand plan. They want to destroy our civilization by destroying the family!”
“No one can serve two masters…you cannot serve both God and money!”
Another angry parent added, “Why are we allowing the tyrant to win? David went up against Goliath with five stones and it took just one!”
Ostensibly, this effort was a protest against mask mandates, but, as you can see from the quotes, video, and the transcript, mask mandate opposition was only one of a litany of right wing cultural grievances of a type spurred on by extremist national Republican operatives including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Christopher Rufo.
The far right crowd that propelled Ms. Orebaugh’s campaign has made CVSD School Board meetings so toxic that some parents who are very satisfied with their children’s education are afraid to attend for fear of harassment.
The following letter was read at the Central Valley School District School Board meeting on February 28 by a woman who introduced it, saying, “I am reading this statement for a friend of ours who is also from a minority group (my family and I are practicing Muslim) and who is understandably scared to be here in person. She is intimidated by one of the electeds and her groups and followers [everyone in the room understood this was a reference to Pam Orebaugh and the deceptively named organizations “Washington Citizens for Liberty” and “Citizens for CVSD Transparency”]. Sadly, my friend is one of many voices who are being marginalized.”
To the Board:
I am a special education teacher, business owner, and parent in the Central Valley District. We moved here from Arizona 7 years ago. I must say that having my children in the district has been and still is an amazing experience. Having worked in both states it was refreshing to see a distinct and state put small class sizes, student needs, and educator value first.
Our district has proven its worth, potential, and character over and over again especially in the face of a deadly pandemic. Which is why it is so disappointing and frustrating to see a radicalized, fringe, minority group, targeting, threatening, and trying to manipulate our school board and it’s constituents. Many of us rational, ethical, and logic driven parents are often referred to as “the silent majority”. Well we are silent no longer. We want to encourage the board to continue to follow expert, scientific guidance when it comes to following rules, regulations, and standards set forth by its elected governing powers; OSPI and the Governor. Do not pander to or be manipulated by extremist groups who are funded by outside money and use politically motivated buzz words they don’t understand in the name of civil liberty. As a taxpayer and constituent I implore the board to continue to show strength of character and integrity in the face of those who choose to undermine and defund the public institutions our country was built upon.
We received a well funded mailer over the weekend from a local PAC group Citizens for CVSD Transparency. This messaging is so radical and divisive, and in a time when we are close to seeing an end to our pandemic. We should be modeling the great leaders of our collective history, not trying to break down the long standing foundations they created. Trying to break down or defund our public schools only hurts the children who need free public education.
Many of you do not have your children in public education but as an elected public servant to CVSD taxpayers it is important for you to remember that our schools are a safe haven for children from many different economic and cultural backgrounds. For many it is the only place they may hear a kind word, engage with same age peers, or even be provided with a meal. Those children, our children, are your stakeholders. Not a PAC driven minority group. Continue to fight the good fight for our children and know that you have our support. We are better than this.
It is time to show support—and keep showing support for local school boards. The Central Valley School Board is but one of many such boards harassed by this nationwide religio-political movement. Show up at meetings. Pay attention. Get involved—or we will soon lose the people who have held our schools together for years—and find them replaced by far right ideologues pushing a narrow agenda. Whether or not you live in the Central Valley School District consider attending one of their twice a month meetings (See P.S. below)
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Next CVSD School Board meeting 3/14 6:30 PM every 2nd and 4th Monday
Submit Written Comments to board@cvsd356.org Very important to use this email address so comments will be public record. If you’d like you can also copy:
Neo-Nazi doctrine is not a new to our region. The “Church of Jesus Christ–Christian” at the Aryan Nations compound north of Hayden Lake, Idaho, spread the ideology from the Inland Northwest throughout the nation for more than three decades, spurring a number of incidents of domestic terrorism. Founded in the 1970s and run by Richard Girnt Butler, the Aryan Nations drew followers from all over the country to the annual “Aryan Nations World Congress”.
The Aryan Nations Compound was bulldozed and the local group disbanded in 2001 after a civil suit bankrupted the organization, but its supporters did not just evaporate. Richard Butler himself lived on in Hayden Lake another three years in a home provided by a Sandpoint millionaire. He died peacefully in his sleep of congestive heart failure at the age of 86.
Neo-Nazi doctrine never goes away, it hides until the conditions once again turn favorable. It is no secret that former President Trump in part owed his office to his racist dog whistles to the extreme racist right. (the Charlottesville chant, “Jews will not replace us” responded to by Trump with “good people on both sides”).
Apparently, conditions in the wake of the Trump regime are now favorable:
This planned Hayden Lake white-power gathering has caused a stir in the Hayden Lake City Council. During the comment period at the February 22 meeting, Jeanette Laster, representing the Human Rights Education Institute, cited the white-power gathering and proposed that the Hayden Lake City Council pass a resolution condemning the doctrine of white supremacy. Apparently insulted by the proposal, a three and half year resident of Hayden Lake, Linda Putz, arose spontaneously to object to a condemnation of white supremacy, “The term nowadays, white supremist [sic] means you’re a Patriot. So I have a sign that I do carry sometimes and I say ‘Proud White Supremist’ because a white supremist [sic] is a Patriot.” Ms. Putz’ revealing commentary made the rounds on Twitter and on Reddit. The full context can be reviewed on Youtube. (That link opens to Ms. Putz, the proposal she was protesting starts at 22:16.) Laughably, Ms. Putz claims to be “probably the only minority in the room”. I recommend you click on any of the links and judge that for yourself.
White supremacy has a long history in the Inland Northwest. The area continues to beckon to those seeking a white homeland, sometimes thinly disguised behind appeals to survivalists and far right wing conservatives to move to the area and take over local politics.
The website, https://white-power.org/, of the group advertising the meeting tomorrow, the Aryan Freedom Network, is worth a look. Visit the Newspapers and Magazines tab where they offer links to “…newspapers and magazines that are Pro-White, Pro-Christian and Anti-Communist” or the Books tab, where you can read a breathtakingly twisted introduction to The Bible as seen through the eyes of white supremacy—or link with the famous Neo-Nazi screeds, Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, and White Power. Of course, all this exists in cyberspace. The shopping is online. The signups go to email addresses, no physical addresses given. However, with persistence, some brick and mortar connections can be found. Among the “White Power Stores” is “America’s Promise Ministries” featuring the works of Pastor Dave Barley(among others). America’s Promise Ministries has its physical outpost at 3000 GN Rd in Sandpoint, where “America’s Promise” has been festering since 1990.
Tomorrow in Hayden promises to top 54 degrees with partly sunny skies. Bring the family for an outing. Here’s the plan quoted from the Spokesman:
Love Lives Here CDA, a program under [the Human Rights] [E]ducation [I]nstitute, is holding a “Kindness Toss” from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at McIntire Family Park in Hayden in response to the white supremacist meeting, according to the group’s Facebook page. The event is intended to spread messages of kindness.
It asks attendees to meet at the park, 8930 N. Government Way, around 11:15 a.m. to split into two teams. One team will hold “LLH” and “kindness” signs on Government Way and the other team will hand out LLH Frisbees and stickers.
At 1:30 p.m., people are invited to the human right institute, 414 W. Fort Grounds Dr., Coeur d’Alene, for a discussion about how the community can address the threat of hate groups. A former white supremacist, a law enforcement officer and three students of color and different religious backgrounds will be part of the discussion.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Ms. Putz’ commentary came shortly before events in the Hayden Lake City Council meeting that led Mayor Steve Griffitts to resign from Council, a body plagued with controversy not unlike that of North Idaho College’s Board of Trustees. In an unsigned opinion piece in the Coeur d’Alene Press on February 25 Ms. Putz’ commentary and Mayor Griffits’ resignation are linked on a “slippery slope”.
The urge to fragment and undercut public education is not new
There will always be those who, for one reason or another, denigrate the public schools. The schools don’t adhere to this or that parent’s view of how certain things should (or shouldn’t) be taught, often sex education, evolution, or race relations; the public schools cost too much; the public schools are administratively top heavy, teachers are paid too well, they get too much vacation. The direction of these complaints are two fold: either, as we’re seeing now at school board meetings across the country, an activist minority decides they will bend the curriculum to suit their particular ideology—or such a minority wants to establish private schools of a particular bent—and wants public money to fund them.
Public funding for private schools takes two forms. The most obvious is “school choice”. With school choice public funds follow the student to whatever private or public institution parents choose. Schools either succeed or wither based on parent choice, a choice inevitably based on factors that include the slickness of the school’s advertising, the religious bent of the parents, and profits to be made. More subtle, but equally damaging, is legislative underfunding of public education. As outmigration from public schools cuts into enrollment, funding diminishes, and the children of the least engaged parents are left to be educated in under-supported schools—producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of academic underachievement that supports further outmigration.
Private education with a subtle economic twist has a checkered history in this country. After the desegregation ruling of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 public education in the American South was undermined by “segregation academies”, schools that overtly excluded students based on race. Although not directly funded by public money, in many Southern communities tax levies for public education were starved—after all, one wouldn’t want one’s tax revenue to fund “them”. Overt segregation in such academies and private schools was found unconstitutional in 1976 in Runyon v. McCrary, but, for those originally segregationist academias that survived, the pattern of segregation was culturally perpetuated—and the established pattern of underfunding for public schools still echoes today.
The push for public funding of private schools lives locally. Chris Cargill is a writer funded by the right wing Washington Policy Center (WPC) and a recently elected City Council Member in Liberty Lake. Lately, thanks to his position with the WPC he has been offered a platform on the opinion page of the Spokesman Review every two weeks. His March 4 opinion column titled “The opportunity to re-think public education is now” is little more than an advertisement for public funding of a private school, the “Liberty Launch Academy” in Liberty Lake, a school that isn’t even open yet. The school motto, “Disrupting Education for Good”, is, perhaps, both apt and honest. In a familiar argument, Cargill first trash talks the costs and educational results of Washington State schools in general and the Central Valley School District schools in particular. Then he moves on to compare the average statewide per student expenditure in public schools ($17,000) to the $12,000 “cost” (actually the proposed charge, not cost) of a year at the Liberty Launch Academy, a school whose economic viability and educational success is, at this time, pure speculation.
Any doubt as to the sectarian tendencies and political bent of Liberty Launch Academy is dispelled by a visit to their website. There you can listen to the founder, Luke Kjar, start his video ad with a question, “How cool would it be to disrupt education, to change it forever?” That is a statement that assumes that public education is hopelessly valueless. You can read the school’s “Statement of Faith”:
Just as faith and freedom are deeply woven into the ethos of the United States of America, Liberty Launch Academy believes in medical, religious, and educational freedom.
The “View Full FAQ List” section of the Liberty Launch Academy notes that “As a private school we are not required to adopt or follow state curriculum,” regarding “state mandated CRT curriculum” or WA State Sex Education. (Please note there is no “state mandated CRT curriculum.”) In case one wonders whether vaccines would be required the prospective parent is reassured: “We will accept waivers.” Clearly, Liberty Launch is cleverly advertising a political and religious agenda even as they claim, “Our curriculum is planned to align with multiple faiths.”
On the platform the Spokesman offers for his opinion piece Mr. Cargill presses his case for funding such schools as Liberty Launch Academy with your tax dollars. He highlights four different bills in the Washington State legislature, each of which would provide public funds for private education. He whines that “every single one” of them is blocked by “legislative leadership”, by which Mr. Cargill means, of course, the Washington State Democratic legislative majority.
Beware of those who would trash and defund public education to further a political and sectarian agenda. Such trashing is the educational equivalent of Trump’s shouting “Fake News!”
Are you connected with the Liberty Boys Academy? Yes. The Liberty Boys Academy was Luke Kjar’s first iteration of his vision to improve education. The pandemic revealed a wider need for a more engaging curriculum encompassing both genders, so he expanded and refined his vision, culminating in the Liberty Launch Academy (LLA).
This is an interesting spin, considering that the “Liberty Boys Academy” website comes up “This site can’t be reached”, the site of the Academy in Liberty Lake is seen on google maps as bare ground, and a google search turns up information that the Academy will be “a privately-funded rugby academy focusing on innovative tactile and engaging learning strategies for young men” founded by Luke Kjar, “Utah Warriors co-founder and partner Lucas Kjar, founder of the Autosource Dealerships.” Mr. Kjar is clearly a man with a lot of money and a singular mission he wishes to accomplish, which he is having trouble realizing, and, which, at the present time, seems to consist mostly of aspiration visible on a slick website.
Last Tuesday I watched CNN’s streaming coverage of President Biden’s first State of the Union address. As CNN’s camera panned the crowd I searched in vain for “our” representative to Congress, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (CD-5, eastern Washington).
As Biden spoke of cancer-producing toxic exposures of our troops it was clear to anyone paying attention that he was leading to a reference to his son Beau. Beau died in 2015 at age 46 of brain cancer years after just such toxic exposure as he served in our military in Iraq. Just after the words “a cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know [pause]” a woman’s voice from the crowd was heard shouting, “You put them there! Thirteen of them.” The crowd responded with booing. To those not present in the chamber it unclear at whom the booing was directed. (The incident can be reviewed just past the middle of this video.) During the booing the camera showed Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) looking pained.
The next day the origin of the heckling voice and, apparently, the target of the disapproving booing were made clear: Marjorie Taylor Greene and former gym rat Lauren Boebert had been heckling the President a little less audibly from the Republican side of the floor during the entire speech, their idea of a fund-raising spectacle for themselves and the Republican Party. Shameful.
McMorris Rodgers’ official reaction to the State of the Union speech was, as one might expect, the Republican talking points: blame President Biden for weakening the U.S., essentially accusing him of inviting Putin to invade Ukraine (recent coziness of CMR’s “positive disruptor” with Putin notwithstanding) and call for casting off all caution and regulation of the domestic fossil fuel industry.
Where was McMorris Rodgers that evening? How was she reacting in real time to the speech and to the heckling? The answer appeared the next morning in the Getty image posted below. There we see our Mrs. Milquetoast smiling her toothy grin as Boebert and Greene engage in their heckling. To be fair, KXLY reported, in CMR’s defense, that at the moment depicted Boebert and Greene were shouting “Build the Wall”. Perhaps at the moment that Boebert screamed her interjection about coffins, CMR disapproved, but, given the glee on her face in this photo, we ought not bet on it. A photographic impression is hard to erase—and this one should go down in history.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. If you glance at the right wing “news” outlets you will find them equating Boebert’s and Greene’s heckling and interruptions of the Biden’s speech to Nancy Pelosi act in 2020. Then, after listening to the most divisive State of the Union speech in living memory, she silently tore up the paper copy of Trump’s speech while standing on the dais behind Trump’s left ear. Pelosi later said it was “the courteous thing to do, considering the alternative.” I agree. Making a silent action of disapproval is very different from trying to rattle a speaker by heckling. Republican spokespeople have latched on to a false equivalence.
