Attorney Michael Farris, speaking on behalf of a Virginia church, said the IRS had investigated it for alleged violations of the Johnson Amendment, which requires churches to refrain from participating in political campaigns if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. Representatives from Liberty University and Grand Canyon University also claimed their institutions were unfairly fined because of their Christian worldview.

Additional allegations included the denial of religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for military personnel, biased treatment of Christian Foreign Service Officers, and efforts to suppress Christian expression in federal schools and agencies. Critics further accused the Biden administration of marginalizing Christian holidays while giving prominence to non-Christian observances, and of sidelining faith-based foster care providers.

Speakers also alleged that Christian federal employees were retaliated against for opposing DEI and LGBT-related policies that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

Recent Federal and State policies have undermined this right by targeting conscience protections, preventing parents from sending their children to religious schools, threatening funding and non-profit status for faith-based entities, and excluding religious groups from government programs.

"Conscience protections" is another favored construction, as in "my conscience tells me that I shouldn't treat Those People like people and how dare you infringe on my right to do that."

The modern rejoinder to someone claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about state's rights is to ask, "The state's right to do what?" The answer, of course, is "The state's right to perpetuate a system of enslavement." 

When someone on the far right starts talking about religious liberty, the question is "The liberty to do what?" The answer is, "The liberty to enjoy a position of high privilege from which we can decide which people we think are worthy of civil rights." Or more simply, "The liberty to discriminate against others without consequence." 

It all makes me sad because it is the worst testimony ever for the Christian faith. It's the kind of thing that makes my non-believing friends and relatives point and say, "See? Religious people are just as awful as anyone." There are actual Christians in the world, and they deserve better than this. There are people who daily wrestle with how to live out their faith in the world in challenging situations, and they deserve better than this. If your assertion is that you can't really, truly follow Christ unless you are freely enabled to treat certain people like shit, then you are talking about some Jesus that I don't remotely recognize. You are not talking about religious liberty; you're talking about toxic politics with some sort of faux Jesus fig leaf.

These are dark times, but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

🪱RFK Jr’s Brain worm Says Subscribe!🪱

It’s hard to surprise me these days. Piss me off? Yes. Disgust me? Come on. Have you MET a fucking Republican in the last twenty years or so? They’re repulsive. But honestly, truly surprise me? Maybe when a Republican shows an ounce of integrity or a shred of humanity.

That ain’t what today is about, though.

There are two parts to this story. One, just how completely fucking deranged RFK Jr. is. And, two, how the legacy press fucked us all by enabling Kennedy because they thought he would hurt Biden. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because they looked the other way.

Now, it’s common knowledge that the Republican Party wants to roll back human advancement a century or more. Civil rights - gone. Education - gone. Safe food and water - gone. The fascist right has never stopped relitigating the Civil War and I promise you, if they win, they WILL legalize slavery again. White nationalism is their ideal.

Turns out, though, that turning back the clock on public health was always part of the GOP agenda, too. Not just stripping people of their health care, but killing modern medical science because it’s too “woke.” And that brings us to RFK Jr.

I was never clear on what caused Junior’s swing to the far right. Was he desperate for power? Was it audience capture after recieivng so much attention from Nazis? Was it a natural extension of his anti-vaxxer bullshit?

It might have been a combination of all of that, but the anti-vaxxer stuff is key. You see, Kennedy doesn’t just not believe in vaccines. He doesn’t believe in the foundation of modern medical science. At all.

Not only does Captain Brainworm reject a scientific theory that all of modern medical science has been based on for the last 160 years, he’s rejected it in favor of a mishmash of two theories, Miasma and Terrain, that have been definitively debunked since before the slavers and traitors of the Confederacy waved the white flag and started their 150 year campaign of being whiny sore loser bitches. Miasma Theory? Terrain Theory? This is what Kennedy believes in? Here. Now. In the 21st Century. Yes, that’s just as fucking stupid/crazy as it sounds.

Quick refresh of high school biology! Germ Theory was developed back in 1862 by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. If the name “Pasteur” sounds vaguely familiar, he’s the same guy who developed pasteurization. That’s the process that makes milk safe to drink by killing, yes, the same microorganisms RFK Jr. insists do not make us sick.

It’s important to note that this motherfucker, Kennedy, is also demanding we stop pasteurizing milk because “raw milk,” AKA “filthy disgusting milk brimming with creepy crawly bacteria and germs,” is better for us and 100% safe. If by 100% safe, Kennedy means “Frequently makes people violently sick and has a history of killing babies before we started sterilizing it?” Then, yeah, raw milk is fucking awesome!

Just so we’re all on the same page here: It’s called “Germ Theory” and it always will be, even though it’s a fact. This is a thing I’ve run into with Creationists multiple times over the years when it comes to the theory of evolution. “It’s just a theory, so you don’t know if it’s true!”

These people are fucking imbeciles and I love to torture them. But real quick: It’s a “theory” because in science, that’s the word used to describe a series of facts, laws, and observations that all support an explanation of a particular phenomenon. Colloquially, we use “theory” interchangeably with “guess,” but that is not the same thing in science. There’s no guessing about germs and bacteria. It’s a fucking fact.

So if you should ever come across a drooling inbred dumbshit insisting that germs or evolution or climate change is just a “theory,” tell them that gravity is a theory, too, and they should immediately prove it wrong by stepping off the closest roof.

Moving on!

So how do we know that Kennedy rejects Germ Theory? He fucking wrote in a book:

It's important to note here that our understanding of Kennedy's disbelief in germ theory isn't based on speculation or deduction; it's based on Kennedy's own words. He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled "Miasma vs. Germ Theory," in the chapter "The White Man's Burden."

Naturally, Kennedy couldn’t even get his own theories correct, butchering both Miasma and Terrain and inventing some amalgamation of the two:

In the chapter, Kennedy promotes the "miasma theory" but gets the definition completely wrong. Instead of actual miasma theory, he describes something more like terrain theory. He writes: "'Miasma theory' emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses."

If you want to understand more about the long-discarded theories, read the Ars Technica article. They explain it. I didn’t bother because it’s not really important for the purposes of this piece, other than Kennedy believes nonsense, and he fucked up even that.

Here’s the important bit:

The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to "the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition."

According to Kennedy, germ theory gained popularity, not because of the undisputed evidence supporting it, but by "mimicking the traditional explanation for disease—demon possession—giving it a leg up over miasma."

To this day, Kennedy writes, a "$1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by 'Little Napoleon' himself, Anthony Fauci, fortify the century-old predominance of germ theory."

Got that? So it wasn’t the success of Germ Theory and the medicines it produced in curing and preventing diseases and illnesses that made it “popular.” It was the fact that it appealed to people’s belief that we could be possessed by demons. It’s all superstition, yo! We just need to get back to clean air, clean water, and clean food!

Which, of course, makes one wonder why RFK Jr. works in a regime that is working day and night to give us filthy air, filthy water, and dangerously tainted food. Actually, I have an answer for that, which I will get to in a moment.

It’s really REALLY important to understand that Kennedy wrote this book, as Ars Technica points out, back in 2021. Isn’t it curious that the legacy press didn’t notice it for the entire year he was running?

I’m going to make this perfectly clear: RFK Jr. had so many enormous red flags, it’s a miracle he wasn’t gored to death by a rabid bull years ago. It was all out there for any journalist to find if they looked for more than ten seconds.

But they didn’t. The only thing they mentioned was that he was kind of sort of an anti-vaxxer, but was he really? He said he wasn’t, so they took him at his word even though Kennedy had made an awful lot of public statements that clearly said he was, in fact, an anti-vaxxer.

Why did they do this? Because RFK Jr. was running against Joe Biden in the Democratic primary and anyone running against Biden got the kind of fawning coverage from the legacy press you cannot buy. If Vermin Supreme had run as a Democrat, he would have been on the front page of the New York End Times with the headline: “Will Supreme Be The End Of Joe?” It was THAT fucking ridiculous.

It was only when RFK Jr. started to eat into Trump’s numbers that the legacy press “suddenly” started to “discover” all of this bad stuff about him. The abuse of his first wife. The one he drove to suicide. The creepy weird stuff with dead animals. The sexual assaults. The literal brain damage from both a worm and mercury poisoning. The legacy didn’t notice ANY of that until Kennedy threatened Trump.

Oh, and not one of them noticed that he literally rejects the foundation of modern medical science. Whoopsie! Might have mentioned that when Trump was promising to put him in charge of America’s healthcare during the campaign, no? Of course not. That might have hurt Trump, and well, the legacy press wanted their golden goose back.

We now live in a world where hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because the person controlling America’s health care is a retrograde crazy fuck who does not understand basic science or history and does not want to.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

I hated Kennedy before it was cool.

Like all right-wingers, Kennedy disregards history when it’s inconvenient. We’ve tried all of this before. Raw milk. No vaccines. No psychiatric drugs. No regulations on food companies. We lived it. It was terrible. People were sick all the time. Children died by the thousands. Disease was rampant.

Kennedy wants to bring it all back.

He’ll never say it out loud, but RFK Jr., like so many in the GOP, believes in eugenics. This is why he’s so comfortable in a regime that opposes everything he pretends to stand for. He’s a eugenicist. Have you seen how he talks about the autistic community?! Straight up Nazi shit.

In Kennedy’s sick and twisted world, the strong survive; the weak get sick and die.

But that’s not really true, is it? The WEALTHY survive because they have access to clean food and water and the medicine that RFK Jr. will deny to the rest of us. The poor and the middle class, what’s left of it, are poisoned and left to rot while the rich wag their fingers at us. Why don’t you take better care of yourselves?

Can’t happen? Bullshit. We literally do it now to poor people who live in food deserts. They’re forced to eat junk food loaded with fat and salt because they can’t afford fresh fruits and vegetables that are a 40-minute bus ride away, anyway. We’re more than happy to subsidize the sugar industry with billions in government money but spend a few million to make sure poor kids get a healthy meal? Fuuuuuuck youuuuuuuu! If they eat healthy food, they might not grow up desperate and THEN who will the cops have to shoot?

This is who they are. This is who they’ve always been. The difference is that they no longer think they have to hide behind a mask of compassion or being “pro-life.” The American right is a death cult and they want to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible to “purify” the country.

I will continue to say this because it is critical: When this is over, and we have won, because it WILL end and we WILL win, all of these soulless monsters must pay for what they’ve done. No “moving forward for the good of the country.” They all have to be dragged into a court and put on trial for crimes against humanity. If they don’t end up in front of a firing squad, they have to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

As for the rank and file fascists in this country? They have to live in fear, realizing that we are done tolerating their treason and hate. No more coddling racist white men and their attempts to overthrow democracy. They can leave the country, spend life in prison, or swing from a rope. But they cannot walk among us as a cancer, poisoning everything good and worthwhile about America. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. Go back in your closet and fucking stay there. Come out again at your peril.

RFK Jr. is going to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people. Everyone involved with enabling him has to pay the price for their evil. We can’t heal this country until justice is done and the victims have their day.

This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s, and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 185 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Let’s say you and I and every bank robber serving time in federal prison and every con artist behind bars for fleecing suckers out of their life savings and every Bernie Madoff-style-Ponzi schemer and every Mafia don who ever blackmailed a bodega owner or ran a crooked dice game – let’s say we all got together in a room and tried to come up with a brand new scam to rip people off and separate people from their money…and get away with it free and clear.

I’m here to tell you that even with all that criminal talent, we couldn’t come up with a masterpiece of thievery that compares to what Donald Trump and his family are running right now, today, out of the White House. Our President, the one 77 million of our fellow citizens voted for and put in the Oval Office for another four years, the one who told the Atlantic earlier this week that “I run the world,” has decided that he will spend his time in office fleecing that world of every dollar and nickel and dime he can get, and he’s doing it with crypto.

It’s so complicated that you can barely wrap your mind around it, and yet it’s so simple, not even Trump and his two dullard sons could fuck it up.

The New York Times published a story on Tuesday that makes a brave attempt at explaining how they’re doing it: Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm. It’s written by three of the Times’ top investigative reporters, and it’s thick with details of shady foreign investors from dark corners of the money-world like Abu Dubai and the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong, and the reporters do their best to describe the whacko-crypto-Rube-Goldbergo thing called “World Liberty Financial” the Trump family has established to run their scam, and it’s so impenetrable, I guarantee your eyes will cross and then roll back into your head as you try to make sense of it.

This is what the New York Times is so good at: they get out there and make a record of who’s involved and how many times they’ve been indicted and how much time they’ve done in prison. Then they make the connections between the three card monte pasts of the crypto scammers and the Trump family in the White House, with Eric and Don Jr. flying around the world to Pakistan and the Emirates and taking meetings with Silicon Valley zillionaires and coming up with new scams like the pay-to-play crypto dinner Trump is planning to put on at one of his golf clubs for anyone…and I mean anyone…who spends some of their millions on a fucking meme coin called “$TRUMP” in order to be on the guest list.

The Times reports that World Liberty Financial – in reality, behind a very, very thin corporate veil, Donald Trump himself – made $550 million selling its first digital token, “$WLFI,” to a bunch of crypto scammers who recently settled cases brought against them by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At least one scammer, Justin Sun, the guy who bought the banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6 million, had his SEC case dropped, right after – you guessed it – he spent $75 million buying $WLFI “coins.”

And here’s the beauty part. I’m going to do my best to describe the scam the Times calls “partnerships” between the Trump company, World Liberty Financial, and other crypto firms. Here it is, in all its glory, and you tell me if this doesn’t sound like a crypto protection racket. The smaller crypto outfits agree to buy, say, $20 million to $30 million of World Liberty’s “coins” like $WLFI. The Trump company then agrees to buy a smaller amount of their crypto currency. This “investment” of World Liberty in the smaller crypto firms is supposed to give them credibility in the world of crypto, and for this generous endorsement, the Trump company gets to keep the difference between what the little guys spent on $WLFI, and what the Trumps spent on the little guys’ coins, amounting, according to the Times, to as much as a 20 percent premium. All of the specific details like names of the crypto firms and amounts they “invested” is kept confidential, so nobody in the greater world of crypto can discover how badly they’ve been taken to the cleaners.

Got that? You give me a quarter, all your lunch money, and not only do I promise not to beat the shit out of you with the SEC and DOJ and FTC and all the other regulatory and prosecutorial departments I control, I’ll even give you two dimes back and not tell anybody how I held you up.

And oh, by the way, buy a few million of my worthless crypto “coins” – of which I already own 80 percent of the world’s entire stock – and I’ll feed you some rubber chicken at my New Jersey golf club and give you a tour of the White House after hours.

Wow, what a deal.

There are other scams, because of course there are. Trump pardoned one guy who got convicted of violating banking laws with his crypto business. In return, he permitted the Trump company to buy some of his crypto currency at bargain basement prices. And then Trump turned around and announced the U.S. government will put its power and prestige behind a so-called “crypto reserve” that will store up a bunch of crypto currency just like it stores oil in “oil reserves” against a future shortage of that precious resource, and you’ll never guess whose crypto currency the U.S. government has chosen as one of the currencies it will store in its reserves, along with the grandfather of all crypto, Bitcoin. Yep. The crypto currency that Trump bought from the guy he pardoned, the value of which has now shot straight up like a rocket.

Remember how corrupt we thought Spiro Agnew was when it was revealed that after being elected Vice President, he continued to take cash from contractors he had extorted when he was governor of Maryland? Just the image of the Vice President reaching across his desk and physically accepting a paper bag full of twenty-dollar bills was enough to get him to resign in return for a plea bargain on a tax evasion charge that gave him no jail time.

How much do you figure Donald Trump will scam in crypto by the time he leaves office? The Times didn’t attempt an estimate of the amount he has made so far, but just running through the hundreds of millions and tens of millions mentioned in their story, along with the tens of millions in the stories that have been written about the pay-to-play golf club crypto dinner, he’s approaching a billion dollar take…after just 100 days.

It's no wonder he doesn’t give a shit about the damage to the world’s economy his tariffs have done. The only economy he cares about is the blue-smoke-and-mirrors illusion of crypto. Like his hair, nobody but him knows how much of it is real, or how the elaborate scam is held together, but it got him elected, and it’s going to make him richer than he ever dreamed.

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Nature Is Being Disrupted in Two Accelerating and Alarming Ways

The problem with climate change isn’t just the temperature – it’s also how fast the climate is changing today.

Historically, Earth’s climate changes have generally happened over thousands to millions of years. Today, global temperatures are increasing by about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) per decade.

Imagine a car speeding up. Over time, human activities such as burning fossil fuels have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases trap heat from the Sun. This is like pressing the gas pedal. The faster the driver adds gas, the faster the car goes.

The 21st century has seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of climate change, with global temperatures rising more than three times faster than in the previous century.

The faster pace and higher temperatures are changing habitat ranges for plants and animals. In some regions, the pace of change is also throwing off the delicate timing of pollination, putting plants and pollinators such as bees at risk.

Some Species are Already Migrating

Most plant and animal species can tolerate or at least recover from short-term changes in climate, such as a heat wave. When the changes last longer, however, organisms may need to migrate into new areas to adapt for survival.

Some species are already moving toward higher latitudes and altitudes with cooler temperatures, altering their geographic territory to stay within their optimal climate. Fish populations, for example, have shifted toward the poles as ocean temperatures have risen.

Pollinators such as bees can also shift their ranges.

Bumblebees, for example, are adapted for cooler regions because of their fuzzy bodies. Some bumblebee populations have been disappearing from the southern parts of their geographic range and have been found in cooler regions to the north and in more mountainous areas. That could increase competition with existing bumblebee populations.

Plants And Pollinators Can Get Out Of Sync

Plants and their pollinators face another problem as the rate of climate change increases: Many plants rely on insects and other animals for seed and pollen dispersal.

Much of that pollen dispersal is accomplished by native pollinators. About 75% of plant species in North America require an insect pollinator – bees, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, birds and bats. In fact, 1 in 3 bites of food you eat depend on a pollinator, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

So, even if a species successfully migrates into a new territory, it can face a mismatch of pollination timing. This is known as phenological mismatch.

During the winter, insects go into a hibernation known as diapause, migrate or take up shelter underground, under rocks or in leaf litter. These insect pollinators use temperature and daylight length as cues for when to emerge or when to migrate to their spring and summer habitats.

As the rate of climate change increases, the chances of a timing mismatch between pollinators and the plants they pollinate rise.

With an increase in temperature, many plants are blooming earlier in the spring. If bees or other pollinators emerge at their “normal” time, flowers may already be blooming, reducing their chance for pollination.

If pollinators emerge too early, they may struggle to survive if their normal food sources are not yet available. Native bees, for example, rely on pollen for much of the protein they need for growing and thriving.

Wild Bees are Emerging Earlier

This kind of shift in timing is already happening with bees in the U.S.

Studies have shown that the date wild bees emerge in the U.S. has shifted by 10.4 days earlier over the past 130 years, and the pace is accelerating.

One study found wild bees across species have been changing their phenology, or timing of seasonal activities, and over the past 50 years the emergence date is four times faster. That means wild bees were emerging roughly eight days earlier in 2020 than they did in 1970.

This trend of earlier emergence is generally consistent across organisms with the accelerating rate of climate change. If the timing mismatches continue to worsen, it could exacerbate the decline of pollinator populations and result in inadequate pollination for plants that rely on them.

Pollinator decline and inadequate pollination already account for a 3% to 5% decline in global fruit, vegetable, spice and nut production annually, a recent study found.

Without pollinators, ecosystems are less resilient − they are unable to absorb disturbances such as wildfires, adapt to changes, and recover from environmental stressors such as pollution, drought or floods.

Managing Climate Change

Pollinators face many other risks from human activities, including habitat loss from development and harm from pesticide use. Climate change adds to that list.

Taking steps to reduce the activities driving global warming can help keep these species thriving and carrying out their roles in nature into the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.

Photo: David Kosling, U.S. Department of Agriculture, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND

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The post Bees, Fish, and Plants Reveal the Toll of Climate Change appeared first on DCReport.org.

It has been three years and change since the Great Furry Panic first swept school policy circles. 

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🎤The Ogre Nation Needs YOU!🎤

100 days of fascism, crime, incompetence, and stupidity. But America still stands and we the people are fucking angry. The fucking fascists are hard at work destroying everything but it’s getting harder every day and now they’re getting sloppier and more desperate as time runs out.

Join me and Shannon as we go over the damage they’ve done and what comes next.

Ogre Nation News Update!

1:45 - 29:22 Trump wanted to be Hitler and overthrow democracy in less than 100 days and failed utterly. He broke a lot of stuff and hurt a lot of people but not enough to get the job done and he’s running out of time.

29:23 - 38:46 What are the fascist failures going to do next now that their agenda is in jeopardy? Nothing good.

38:47 - 42:20 Florida has decided that if Trump can ignore the courts, so can they and that is going to be a problem

42:21 - 51:37 This Week in Republican Racism

51:38 - 1:00:35 Headlines for Short Attention Spans!

1:00:36 - 1:08:24 Our Self-care for the Week

Things We Discussed During The Show

CNN Poll: Trump’s approval at 100 days lower than any president in at least seven decades

Trump says he’ll blame Biden again for 2nd quarter GDP after blaming him for Q1 drop

Empty shelves, trucking layoffs lead to a summer recession in Apollo’s shocking trade fight timeline

Three US citizen children, one with cancer, deported to Honduras, lawyers say

In rare rebuke of Putin, Trump urges Russia to ‘STOP!’ after deadly attack on Kyiv

Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency

Trump’s counterterrorism czar says Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s supporters could be charged with ‘aiding and abetting’

‘Color me surprised and shocked’: Judge blasts Florida AG for defying order on immigration law

Trump says he ‘could’ bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, but won’t

ICE Invades Wrong Home, Steals Their Life Savings, and Then Leaves

Utah Farmers Signed Up for Federally Funded Therapy. Then the Money Stopped.

Wide-ranging crackdown on abortion pills passes Texas Senate

Literal fake news - ‘Abortion pill’ found to have ‘severe adverse effects’ for 1 in 10 women, study finds

A DOGE Aide Involved in Dismantling Consumer Bureau Owns Stock in Companies That Could Benefit From the Cuts