When did "pro-life" become "pro-death"? An extreme political variant

This echo essay resonates with me! My cynical take about the "pro-life antivaxx" political party is a spin on stupid Sarah Palin*, who made a brouhaha about "death panels" when President Obama was promoting policy to bring quality and affordable health care to people, by passing Obama Care. So, Palin falsely accused the Obama Care plan of including "death panels" because, obviously, there would be some extreme circumstances where certain expensive treatments might not necessarily be covered, due to having the outlier costs driving up the costs borne by everyone. In fact, all private health care plans have exclusions, that's why people who can afford to do so will buy supplemental insurances. So, where is Sarah Palin's propaganda now that her Growing Old Party is denying the medical science that can save hundreds of thousands of lives with free vaccines?  

This echo opinion was published in the History News Network (HNN) electronic magazine.

Steve Hochstadt is a scholar of the Holocaust, who taught European history at Bates College and Illinois College. His most recent book is Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions (Ocala, FL: Atlantic Publishing Inc., 2020).

The Republican Party promotes itself as the “pro-life” Party of God. But contemporary Republicans are the Party of Death.

Every year about 15,000 Americans die from gun murders. The multiplication of mass murders and school shootings in recent years has had no impact on Republican refusal to consider restrictions on guns, even though a majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws. Republican legislators are now removing the last vestiges of regulation on the public brandishing of guns: in Texas, adults can carry a handgun without a license, training or background check. The most extreme Republicans deride survivors of mass shootings as “actors” and reporting of those massacres as “false flag operations,” while the rest of the Party tolerates them.

The National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2019, that each year over 100,000 Americans die prematurely from air pollution that Republicans refuse to prevent or even mitigate. 

In fact, the (Growing Old) Party allowed the Trump administration to reduce regulation of lead in household water supplies, even though Republican politicians in Michigan were criminally charged, some for involuntary manslaughter, for refusing to deal with the lead crisis in Flint.

As deaths caused by hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding pile up across America, Republican continue their denial of climate science. Climate change causes about 1000 deaths annually from heat. Hurricane Ida killed over 40 people in the Northeast through flooding early in September, while Tennessee suffered more flooding deaths in 2021, than ever before.



Estimates of the number of Americans who died annually because of inadequate health insurance before Obamacare went into effect range from 25,000 to 45,000. Republican policy since 2010 has paired unrelenting efforts to get rid of the ACA and refusal to create anything in its place. Party policy under Paul Ryan’s leadership tried unsuccessfully for years to cut Medicare, while Republicans at the state level consistently refuse to expand Medicaid.

Death from environmental pollution, climate disasters and inadequate health insurance is concentrated among minorities and the poor, Americans whose welfare the Republican Party has disdained for decades. Their assumption that these less deserving Americans are Democratic voters is now being demonstrated again by nationwide Republican efforts to limit their votes.

Unlike the more murderous parties of death in modern history, such as the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the Argentine junta and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, Republicans could rely on the defense that they didn’t kill anyone. Many people may have died, but ideology is more important.

COVID changed everything, raising the stakes of both conventional daily behavior and national policy. Unified Republican adherence to lies about science, opposition to the regulation of destructive business practices, and disdain for Americans who aren’t rich continued right into the onset of pandemic. The early news focused on the disproportionate deaths of urban minorities.

But this year, Republican politicians ventured into new, possibly unprecedented territory. Every day, more than one thousand unvaccinated conservative Americans die of COVID, while the Republican Party insists ever more strongly on anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and anti-life policies which are killing off their own voters.

The blinkered view of life and death common among so-called “pro-lifers” was illustrated in the September 9 NYT op-ed by Prof. Karen Swallow Prior, which argued for the virtues of Texas’ new anti-abortion law. She wrote: “The highest purpose of human law is the protection of human life, from its beginning to its natural end.... A law preserving the life of a human being at any stage can be considered ‘extreme’ only within a distorted social context.” In the distorted politics of Republican “pro-lifers”, the beginning counts much more than the end.

Led by the most extreme death-dealers, Republican politicians, with few exceptions, have transformed themselves into a unique party of death. The vaccinated Republican elite hides behind a perverted rephrasing of Patrick Henry’s courageous motto: “In the name of liberty, we’ll give you death.”

*Footnote Commentary Echo published in The Colombian, by Danny Westnest: Remember “death panels”? Well, they’re back, and this time, they’re real. “Death panels” was a phrase coined by Sarah Palin, the folksy-talkin’ right wing former Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate. Palin fabricated and imagined that Obamacare would cause health bureaucrats to ration out medical care, after first sitting in judgment of who was most deserving to receive it. This stupidity was awarded the “Lie of the Year” in 2009, as it was nowhere in any legislation. It was a right-wing fever dream. But, now a version of it has come true — in Idaho. Hospitals in northern Idaho are so flooded with COVID-19 patients that the state has declared an emergency, called “crisis standards of care.” It means when you show up to the emergency room, you may get treated based preferentially on who is most likely to live.

“If your mother has a heart attack, someone will have to assign her a point score designating how likely she is to survive,” the Idaho Falls Post Register wrote, describing the scheme last winter when it was first being contemplated. “If it isn’t high enough, she might not get an ICU bed, and a COVID patient will get it instead.

“We will ask the nurses and doctors who’ve broken their backs trying to save us to make that Sophie’s choice over, and over, and over.”

This past week the 200-bed hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, had 218 patients — so many it was treating patients in hallways and running out of oxygen to help them breathe, The Associated Press reported.

Death Panels will be Sarah Palin's legacy, The Atlantic.

Conspiracies theories are rooted in evil intent

Excellent opinion essay published in the History News Network!

Thank you Professor Steve Hochstadt!

My brother emailed me to make sure I knew that we Jews had space laser technology capable of starting wildfires out West. Naturally he wondered who controlled it--Orthodox or Reform? But here’s the question I asked him as we corresponded about the suggestion by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that we, the Jews, in the guise of the always convenient Rothschilds, pointed a laser from the sky to start fires in California: “If we could burn up any place in the world, why would we pick California?”

Greene is absurd to publicly broadcast an idea that stupid. But many people where she lives sent her and her message to Washington. She imagines a plot reminiscent of those scary 1950s movies about some impossible bogeyman. Now the bogeywoman sits in Congress, and everybody is listening.

She is one sharp thorn on a much bigger political club wielded by American conservatives so they can run our governments. That club is the invention and propagation of weird tales of horror, often called “conspiracy theories,” where the monsters are liberals, or even better, Jewish liberals.

If Jews, whatever group of humans that label might bring to mind among her fans, had so much power, why would we burn California, where one out of every six American Jews live? Explaining the central absurdity of that idea, or of the idea that mass shootings whose blood and death we all know about were actually a hoax, or of the idea that Democrats stole a national election, is where these theories fail.

Holocaust denial created a model for modern absurdity theories by focusing on facts. Millions of words and photographs and diagrams and scientific-sounding analyses have been created to explain why any particular known fact about the Holocaust is made up. David Irving, the premier Holocaust denier with historical credentials, sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, because she labeled him “a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot,” who “manipulated and distorted real documents”, as Wikipedia puts it. Richard Evans, the British historian who advised Lipstadt’s defense, made an official report: “Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.”

Like most other crazies who go public, Irving was eventually unmasked, but he screwed around with facts for decades, because his political message about Jews was welcome in many corners of the Christian world. But abstracted from the slippery “facts” that dominate Holocaust deniers’ writings, the most absurd part of their message is rarely addressed. For 75 years, “the Jews” enlisted millions of the most prominent and powerful people across the world to recreate history in word and location, and to promulgate in every way that impossible history as truth.

Antisemites have never underestimated our cleverness, although denying the evidence that some of us actually are smart. So how do they explain how we did that? I don’t mean how we got some old man to talk about non-existent gas chambers in Auschwitz or how we forged a document enumerating the people whom Nazis had just shot. How did we bring that immense conspiracy into being and how have we maintained it all these years? We must be really powerful, beyond the imagining of Greene and her ilk, if we could create these enormous conspiracies without leaving a trace.

Where are the letters, emails, photographs, diagrams, and web pages, even self-constructed á la Irving, showing us, the Jews, creating and leading that conspiracy? Or creating the magic laser to incinerate our friends instead of our enemies? How did the libs manage to both rig elections in Republican states and then create the worldwide spectacle that Biden won?

Mike Pompeo spent two months since the election pretending that Biden’s victory was not legitimate. For years, he has exercised vast control over a network of highly trained people around the world, many of whom had been sent out as emissaries of Trump’s ideology. But none of them sent back a bit of evidence explaining how or why every government in the world has dismissed the stolen election fantasy. If Pompeo had anything that could be bent, twisted, chopped up and regurgitated as proof that Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Justin Trudeau all signed on to the plot to rig the election and defend it afterward, why hasn’t he produced it? Is he waiting for his next political campaign?

No, I think there is another reason. It seems to work quite well to just assume that central absurdity without explanation. Somehow it is not important to explain how a group of people, many under constant scrutiny by all forms of media, could be so secretive, so organized, so depraved and evil, to run a vast child abuse ring underneath a pizza place in Washington DC. The original Reddit post that touched off this particular conservative flight into absurdity, claimed in fact the abuse was easy to spot: “Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.”

The absence of any explanation of the origins and inner workings of these great conspiracies, the successful veil of utter secrecy that the world’s official bodies have cast over their diabolical plans, implies a much larger conspiratorial network. Pizzagate and Holocaust denial and our space laser require full participation from police and security forces at all levels. Recent conservative absurdity theories have thus transformed the FBI from heroes of the fight against crime into co-conspirators. Trump had no choice but to include denunciations of the FBI in his flights into the absurd.

Holocaust denial is co-terminous with antisemitism. The people whom the deniers reach already believe that Jews are capable of unimagined evil, that we are all in it together, that we exercise unbounded but secret power. They don’t have to be convinced by some sleight of hand of the theorists. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have to explain to her voters why we Jews would dream up a remarkable plan to burn out our own. Her followers are already there. They just want to know the details. In this case, Greene may be up a creek. No “space expert” has jumped in to explain our technological blueprints. She might have to walk away from that one entirely. She can blame this one on her “team” of social media producers, probably the same people who shared a video on her Facebook page where Nick Griffin, a well-known British Holocaust denier, says an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

The seemingly less absurd absurdity theories that are twisting our national politics, “Stop the Steal” or “I wasn’t defeated, I am really President,” have just enough details to obscure the more potent, unspoken, and fundamentally preposterous idea behind them. The Dems stole the election, they created a Disney spectacle of victory in an endless loop, and they convinced tens of millions of ordinary Americans, everyone’s neighbors and relatives, to go along. I swear this is true, because some people I don’t know, with no inside knowledge, say it’s true, and I share their hatreds.

The believers in new undetectable conspiracies by vast numbers of satanic people overlap with the generations of promoters of Holocaust denial. That denial began with the perpetrators themselves as they were killing millions of satanic Jews, who were trying to take over the world. Without lasers.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
February 1, 2021

Steve Hochstadt is a professor emeritus of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. He joined the faculty in 2006 after teaching for 27 years at Bates College in Maine.

Evangelicals and Donald Trump's Hollywood Access tapes - failure of morals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZcTnykYbw
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html

Why didn’t an irreligious and publicly immoral candidate present moral difficulties to a religious group which has traditionally emphasized the close connection of faith and character? 

Many skilled researchers and analysts have tried to understand how people who profess such devotion to Jesus and the Bible could see Trump as their prophet. 

Unfortunately, I have no better explanation than anyone else.

Matthew Avery Sutton in the New Republic explained the Christian nationalism behind the evangelical political program, embodying “assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at Calvin University, minimizes any contradiction between evangelical Christianity and Trump. In her book Jesus and John Wayne she similarly argues that evangelicals embrace a militantly white patriarchy. Thus the revelations of Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes in 2016 made only a ripple among his evangelical supporters.

My own reading of many evangelical statements of support for Trump is that they universally deny his personal moral failings, by focusing, for example, on hoping that he would tweet less, rather than paying attention to his long-standing behavioral patterns and policy initiatives.

I believe that evangelicals have become increasingly desperate, as their more appropriate religious and political leaders failed to preserve the white Christian world they imagine is their birthright. Public opinion polls show that the evangelical agenda continues to lose popular support in America. One political scientist estimates that the “public mood” in 2018 was the most liberal since 1961. That measurement from two years ago does not reflect the further shift towards the left in 2020. On issues of race, gender, government regulation, and taxation, evangelicals have become an even smaller minority. That might explain why they are so eager to attach themselves to a leader with authoritarian tendencies who is systematically dismantling our traditional democratic processes and norms. Democracy has not been favorable to hatred of homosexuals, white supremacy, and traditional gender norms.

But let’s put side for the moment the conflict between the white evangelical political agenda and the narrowness of the white evangelical understanding of how to be a good Christian and a good person. Even in their own self-interest, I see the white evangelical community’s political strategy as a major error. Their “victories” during Trump’s presidency and their continued adulation of Trump as their political savior come at great costs they have not reckoned with.

If this minority ever really believed in their own moral transcendence, they have given that argument away by hitching themselves to a remarkably amoral and immoral personality. Their defense of Trump reveals how many supposedly bedrock Christian principles they willingly sacrifice to achieve their political agenda. The self-proclaimed “Moral Majority” has become a frankly political minority, a partisan interest group shorn of the trappings of ethical righteousness.

I never accepted the Christian right’s claims to the moral superiority of their religious teachings. My family’s immersion in and escape from the Holocaust, my young life in a still Christian supremacist society, and my close study of the past thousand years of white Christian persecution of Jews, made me skeptical of Christian contentions that they practiced a unique path to grace. But that was a powerful internal argument for all believers, perhaps the fundamental argument for them.

If loving someone of your own sex is so sinful that the practice must be forbidden, what should one think of a man who loves and grabs and insults random members of the other sex? The concept of sin itself has been so politicized that it can only be transmitted to the next generation as dogma, despite Jesus and the Bible.

Separating white right-wing Christian political ideology from their theology will forever impair their incessant proselytizing, even among their own children. While 26% of Americans older than 65 were white evangelicals in 2017, that was true of only 14% of 30- to 49-year-olds, and 8% of 18- to 29-year olds.

Externally, this evangelical error threatens the very nature of American politics and society, in which such an ideological minority could flourish. White evangelicals have tolerated the undemocratic politics of the Republican Party for decades, but kept some distance from it. In these last weeks, Trump has escalated his open warfare on the traditional American political system, the system that evangelicals have so vociferously defended against the modern willingness to talk about white supremacy instead of American exceptionalism. All the basic lessons of middle school civics courses and high school history textbooks are being violated in public by the man of whom they so overwhelmingly approve. Proclaiming hypocrisy is beside my point: if their champion wins, the democratic structure they count on may be damaged beyond repair. Unless most evangelicals actually believe that our nation and our world are about to go up in smoke and that Jesus will smile on their part in destroying it, their short-term strategy of taking whatever Trump gives them may doom them in the long run.

I hope the white evangelical political program fails. I look forward to an America where race and gender are no longer political categories; where religion is a personal choice, not a national prescription; where particular interpretations of ancient texts do not damage the lives of people who do not accept them.

My understanding of American politics during my lifetime encourages that hope. The conventional thinking I grew up with about racial differences and gender norms based on centuries of Christian teaching is no longer dominant. I’m sad that so many Americans choose to hate homosexuals, shun people with different skin color, and condemn other kinds of believers to eternal damnation. My allegiance to personal and political freedom in our democracy is stronger, though. I would defend their right to believe as they wish.

The white evangelical subculture appears to me to be drifting into outer space, as QAnon spreads its nonsensical “discoveries.” It is possible that more evangelicals believe in QAnon than in mainstream media. They are not America at its best, yet America at its best protects their rights.

Trump is trying to destroy that America in his own interest. His allegiance to the evangelical cause is purely transactional. If white evangelicals do not recognize the difference between waving a Bible and believing in it, their long-term future will be just as dire as ours.

Steve Hochstadt, Springbrook WI

Steve Hochstadt has been writing weekly op-eds since 2009. His collection, Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions, will be published this fall. He taught history at Bates College and Illinois College for 37 years.