I believe I have found something to be hopeful about, or at least less pessimistic. It appears there is turmoil in the fever swamps, and the alligators are turning on each other. Drew Harwell writes at WaPo, Since Jan. 6, the pro-Trump Internet has descended into infighting over money and followers.

After months of failing to disprove the reality of Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss, some of the Internet’s most popular right-wing provocateurs are grappling with the pressures of restless audiences, saturated markets, ongoing investigations and millions of dollars in legal bills.

Two of the alligators, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dan Crenshaw, are opening feuding with each other. Last week Rep. Crenshaw (R-nación liberada de Tejas) suggested using FEMA to set up covid testing sites, which was a remarkably normal idea coming from Crenshaw, although I believe FEMA had been doing that already. Rep. Greene (R-Anglo-Saxon) dismissed the omicron variant as “sneezes, coughs and runny noses,” adding that Crenshaw “needs to stop calling himself conservative, he’s hurting our brand.” She tweeted this right before her Twitter account was, blessedly and permanently, suspended.

Crenshaw fired back, “Hey Marjorie, if suggesting we should follow Trump policy instead of Biden mandates makes you mad, then you might be a Democrat – or just an idiot.” These two will never be mistaken for the Algonquin Round Table.

Getting back to Drew Harwell —

The result is a chaotic melodrama, playing out via secretly recorded phone calls, personal attacks in podcasts, and a seemingly endless stream of posts on Twitter, Gab and Telegram calling their rivals Satanists, communists, pedophiles or “pay-triots” — money-grubbing grifters exploiting the cause.

The infighting reflects the diminishing financial rewards for the merchants of right-wing disinformation, whose battles center not on policy or doctrine but on the treasures of online fame: viewer donations and subscriptions; paid appearances at rallies and conferences; and crowds of followers to buy their books and merchandise.

Do not doubt that a whole lot of people, from the likes of Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani to the local guys still selling off Trump 2020 campaign merchandise, jumped on the Trump train mostly to fatten their own wallets. Much of the American Right has been a grift for a long time.

But it’s backfiring on them now. Trump is still raking in money from various sources, but he’s not sharing it. The Trump enablers who aren’t in jail yet are facing many lawsuits that could wipe them out. And I can’t imagine anybody is paying Rudy Giuliani to do anything right now, except maybe to keep quiet.

Kyle Rittenhouse is feuding with Lin Wood, who appears to be feuding with just about everybody else. QAnon followers are angry with Michael Flynn for calling their beliefs “total nonsense.” Some are angry with Donald Trump because of his recent statements encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Harwell interviewed Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher unrelated to the famous bankers and author of a book on QAnon. The conflicts among the Trumpers and their factions are keeping the rubes engaged, Rothschild said, and giving them a chance to prove their loyalty by buying the books, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other merch all these grifters are selling.

QAnon is “the easiest money that you could possibly make if you don’t have a conscience, but there’s only a certain number of people you can fleece. It’s not a renewable resource,” Rothschild said.

QAnon has been drifting since Q went silent and Trump got kicked off social media. Right now they don’t know who they are supposed to be following, which may be why hanging around in Dallas for the second coming of JFK and Junior might seem like as good an idea as any. It’s always possible a living being will step into the vacuum and take over, but otherwise QAnon is likely to dissipate. How long that might take, I cannot say.

Qanoners, unsure where to go next.

But if you really want Sidney Powell drink tumblers, maybe they’ll go on sale soon.

Speaking of merch, Melania Trump is auctioning off a hat she wore to welcome President and Madame Emmanuel Macron of France to the White House in 2018. She is also selling art in the form of nonfungible tokens. I don’t know what those are, either. Apparently it’s digital stuff she acquired while in the White House that’s not covered by the Emoluments Clause.

Melania hopes to raise at least $250,000 from the auction, “a portion” of which will be donated to Melania’s “Be Best” initiative, it says here. In other words, Melania is keeping the money.

I want to say that I’m looking forward to Merrick Garland’s speech tomorrow on the January 6 investigation. Maybe he’ll announce that the Justice Department really is pursuing criminal cases against the Trumps and their enablers. I hope I’m not disappointed. See also Merrick Garland Needs to Speak Up at Lawfare and Trump’s Legal Fate Haunts Garland’s DOJ a Year After Jan. 6 Riot at Bloomberg.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote, America gave up on truly educating all its kids. Then Jan. 6 happened. Coincidence?

Some background — In Pennsylvania there’s a court battle going on about whether disparities in public school funding across the state violate the state constitution.  The lawyer representing “budget-crunching GOP lawmakers” actually argued that children in poor districts don’t need the same education as in well-to-do-districts.

PA school funding lawsuit really illuminating what policy makers think of poor kids’ career potential: “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?”https://t.co/r4YpGh2DIw

— Samantha Melamed (@samanthamelamed) December 28, 2021

Note that this isn’t just a black versus white disparity, but also an urban versus rural disparity. I believe the specific area being short-changed of school funding, north-central Pennsylvania, is overwhelmingly white. And a majority of voters in this area supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Will Bunch writes,

I’ll even go way out on a limb here to argue you can draw a straight line between the country’s collective decision — hardened somewhere in the late 20th century — to stop seeing education as a public good aimed at creating engaged and informed citizens but instead a pipeline for the worker drones of capitalism, and the 21st century’s civic meltdown that reached its low point nearly one year ago, in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

A word that gets thrown around a lot these days is “meritocracy.” A “meritocracy” is supposed to be a system in which the most skilled and accomplished people are put in charge of things. The problem is that we’ve created a system that gives the children of upper-income white people, especially the boys, easy access to aquiring skill and accomplishment, but puts up barriers to everyone else. This explains how so many of our political and business leaders are mediocrities with Ivy League degrees. (See “Our Decadent Aristocracy” from 2019.)

The issue of school funding is an old one. Across the nation many school systems are primarily funded by local property taxes, so obviously schools in areas with higher tax assessments are funded more generously. Attempts to make the system fairer are usually slapped down by the aristocracy, who are often able to bamboozle the poor badly educated peasants into supporting the aristocrats’ position.

I’m thinking now of New Jersey. Back in 1990 a court decided that the state must ensure that as much money would be spent educating the children of the poor as it did the children of the wealthy. To accomplish this, Gov. Jim Florio proposed a very progressive income tax increase that would have sent lots of money to schools as well as pay down the state’s debts and provide property tax relief. The graduated tax increase kicked in at $55,000 annual income, which in 1990 was equivalent to about $114,000 today. The state also added 1 percent to the sales tax.

And the whole state went crazy. I wrote about this back in 2007:

My state income taxes didn’t change at all, because my income wasn’t all that glorious. But people all around me were going nuts over the tax increase, whether it affected them or not. I saw “Dump Florio” bumper stickers on cars of people who appeared to make even less than I did. In fact, at one point a secretary where I worked was going around with a big “Dump Florio” pin on her chest, and I knew good and well she made less than I did. When I told her that her taxes weren’t going to go up, and explained to her how much one actually had to make before they did, she was dumbfounded. She’d been worried she wouldn’t have enough money left over from the new state taxes to live on.

Then what’s everyone so worked up about? she asked. You tell me, I said. You’re one of the people who is worked up; I’m not.

A “grassroots” citizens’ revolt was organized by John Budzash, a postal worker from Howell Township. Budzash was a very useful tool and got a lot of attention from media, no doubt nudged by the aristocracy. When it was pointed out to him that his own children went to schools that were to benefit from the tax increase, he still wasn’t swayed from his campaign.

A few years later, when Republican Christie Whitman became governor, she lowered the Florio income and sales taxes. But to pay for this she cut the amount of state money going to public schools, fiddled a bit with state pensions, and outsourced the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles to demons from the Fourth Circle of Hell. In many parts of the state property taxes had to be cranked up even more to make up the difference.

Note that Whitman didn’t just fiddle with state pension funds, she raided them to balance the budget as required by state law, setting up problems the state probably is still dealing with. But this is why we can’t have nice things.

The roots of Republican disparaging of public schools really goes back to the desegregation era, 1950s-1960s. As I am sure I’ve mentioned before, I can remember when conservative white people in the Bible Belt were mostly supportive of local public schools. Then came the end of “separate but equal,” and all of a sudden they wanted their kids to go to (white) Christian schools. That was about the time that it became an article of faith among convervatives that “throwing more money” at public schools didn’t make them any better, even though copious data argued otherwise. Since then Republicans have figured out how to divert tax dollars into “charter” schools and “voucher” programs that have failed to live up to promises of better educations. Note that some of these programs have been in effect for decades; if they were going to work, they would have done it by now.

And speaking of educated mediocrities, Betsy DeVos comes to mind. DeVox cut funds to already struggling rural schools, among other atrocities. She was big on “educating the workforce,” as I recall.

But schools aren’t just educating the Amazon warehouse workers of the future. They are educating citizens and voters. And what’s crystal clear after recent years is that a ton of U.S. citizens and voters have no grasp of science or history and don’t know how their own government works. And they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag. Will Bunch:

True, that carpenter hammering drywall wouldn’t have to call on a knowledge of basic genetics, presumably — but education isn’t only about facts, but also about developing respect for the wider processes of knowledge, and how we find it. When I poked around, I wasn’t shocked to learn that McKean County — where a school superintendent concedes that math and science education is struggling — also has one of the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Pennsylvania, just 38.1%, compared with 52.7% statewide. …

… He [Stephen Rodriguez, president of the Pennsylvania League of Urban Schools Caucus of superintendents] told me that, of course, a would-be carpenter would benefit from “a foundational knowledge of biology” — in a world where being a good citizen depends on honing an ability to understand what is true and what is misinformation.

“If we do not give our children a good basis for an understanding of their world, how will we know if our government lies to us about anything?” added Rodriguez, who specifically mentioned the spread of QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory centered on child sex trafficking that animated so many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

One thing I’ve noticed in online “discussions” over covid mitigation is that righties have absolutely no concept of risk assessment. If masks don’t work 100 percent of the time, there’s no point to them. If a small percentage of vaccinated people get “breakthrough” cases of covid, then vaccines are junk and not worth taking. You can give them data about odds and percentages, and they can’t or won’t understand it.

And, of course, a big, dumb, angry, undereducated population can be manipulated by just about anybody with enough money and clout to get mass media access.

Now schools are under fire for teaching history, for Pete’s sake, and a loud faction of ignorant white bigots is threatening to take over school boards and replace what history is taught with white supremacist myths. And these people are, of course, the same ones who can’t grasp covid risk assessments and think climate change is a hoax. I don’t see education getting any better in the U.S. any time soon.

Following up my post from earlier this week, here’s some much ignored but significant data. In 2017, white Christians became a minority in the U.S. for the first time. And current projections say that Christians of all races will be a minority in the U.S. by 2050.

This is a shift that’s been going on for some time, driven partly by immigration but mostly by millennials. There is a long-standing pattern of young people skipping church attendance when they first leave home, but in the past they’ve returned to religious affiliation when they marry and have children. Millennials, however, are leaving religion and not coming back.

We’ve reached a point at which a reactionary faction among Christians appears to have taken over a large part of state and federal government, including the Supreme Court. They are now actively campaigning to either destroy or take control of the public school systems in conservative states. One wonders if this backlash to secularism and modernity isn’t partly driven by shrinking church memberships. Christians are losing control and feeling threatened.

A few years ago, there was much hand-wringing because the older, non-evangelical Protestant churches were losing members. Catholicism and evangelical denominations were doing fine. But Catholicism has benefited from immigration from South and Central America, which kept its numbers stable in spite of a loss of young adult members. And now evangelicalism is eroding.  “Only 8 percent of young people identify as white evangelical Protestant, while 26 percent of senior citizens do,” it says here.

A big reason for this shift, according to several researchers, is changing views on morality. Younger people are less likely than their parents to be knee-jerk homophobes, for example. Sex before marriage is now openly normal.  Conservative Christianity, with its rigidly absolutist Bronze Age moral code,  is increasingly out of touch with 21st century western culture. And culture is winning.

“Changing views about the relationship between morality and religion also appear to have convinced many young parents that religious institutions are simply irrelevant or unnecessary for their children,” it says here.

Those of us old enough to remember the Eisenhower Administration can probably remember when white Protestant Christianity was simply assumed to be America’s Religion, and white Protestantism dictated America’s accepted moral sensiblities.

How white America saw itself, 1950s

Needless to say, between then and now there’s been a huge erosion of white Christian hegemony. Some People aren’t ready to accept this.

I suspect much of the corrupt state of U.S. Christianity can be traced to the rise of televangelism. Let’s face it; most televangelism is a freak show. It also made some well-known televangelists fabulously wealthy. This no doubt encourages them; religious freak shows make money. A kindly pastor tellng viewers to love their neighbors can’t compete with the likes of flamboyant Jimmy Swaggart, or with Joel Olsteen’s feel-good, guilt- and sacrifice-free prosperity gospel. But while these sideshow acts draw a lot of followers, they repel many more. If all you knew of religion is what you saw on television, you’d probably stay clear of it, too.

Earlier this week I wrote about the weird phenomenon of white evangelicals refusing to get covid shots. Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson agrees that there is no Christian religious doctrine that discourages taking a covid shot. Just the opposite, actually; there’s an overwhelming argument to be made from Jesus’ words that people should just get jabbed.

Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote that “in the upside-down world white evangelicalism has become, the willingness to act in self-sacrificial ways for the sake of vulnerable others — even amid a global pandemic — has become rare, even antithetical, to an aggressive, rights-asserting white Christian culture.” Golden Rule, anybody? Love your neighbor? Love your enemy, even? I guess not.

This objection to vaccines includes the widespread belief that the vaccines either contain aborted fetal cells (not true) or were originally cultivated in fetal cells. This is true of Johnson and Johnson, but the Pope says take it anyway. It’s not true of Pfizer or Moderna. And, anyway, whether Some People agree or not, there is no explicit biblical teaching forbidding abortions.

The objections of evangelicals to vaccine mandates is framed in the language of religious liberty. But, Gerson argues, that doesn’t fit. What the evangelicals are really arguing for is libertarianism, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. They have replaced Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings (which, you might recall, emphasized taking care of our neighbors, and everybody is a neighbor) with a libertarian position that individual rights supercede everything else, including the well being of others. And that the greatest evil in the world is government coercion, no matter what purpose is being served. “This is heresy compounded by lunacy,” Gerson says.

Writing in Salon earlier this year, an evangelical minister named Nathaniel Manderson said pretty much the same thing.

Over the last 70 years, Christian theology has been steadily replaced, within the evangelical world, by Republican or “conservative” ideology. … This shift is most obvious around the issues of gun rights and immigration. If you want to reject the foreigner, build a wall and own a private artillery, go right ahead. That is your right. But it is not your right if you sincerely want to follow the teachings of Jesus. We are not gun owners; we are pacifists. We are not provided with the gift of freedom and independence by God just to make sure no one else can have it.

As I wrote in the previous post, evangelicalism wasn’t always like this. Originally it was a big and very diverse movement. In the 18th century evangelism was defined by its emphasis on a personal relationship with God — without priest and church as intermediaries — and on a “born again” experience in which one makes a personal commitment to that relationship.

There have long been tensions between conservative and liberal movements within evangelicalism. In 19th century U.S., white southern evangelicals were marked by their support for slavery, while northern evangelicals called for Abolition. Some denominations split apart, some permanently.

But now some are beginning to wonder if evangelicalism is sustainable at all. Evangelicalism is breaking apart writes Peter Wehner at The Atlantic.

“The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.”

Wehner talked to many ministers and church leaders, many of whom have walked away from their former churches. “How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?” one said.

Wehner’s is a really excellent analysis of how contemporary evangelicalism came to be hollowed out of Christian doctrine and replaced by politics and grievance. Churches have been putting more effort into being entertaining — which keeps people in their seats and puts money in the offering plate —  than in teaching.

And large numbers of conservative white Americans who happen to be evangelical are insisting that their churches perfectly reflect their political views, or they will take their offering plate money elsewhere. This is more likely to happen among evangelicals, who have a long tradition of anti-institutionalism, than “mainllne” Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, sees itself as a kind of confederation of independent churches rather than as a single hierarchichal organization.

Finally we get to Jennifer Rubin, who writes that Trump idolatry has undermined religious faith. Worth a look. Trump really is the Golden Calf.

Getting back to the projection that Christians will be a minority of Americans by 2050 — for a long time I’ve heard that Europe is “post Christian.” This doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of Christianity in Europe, but it’s no longer the default. For some time, a growing majority of younger Europeans are “nones” — no religious affiliation. This is especially true in western Europe. The “nones” are not necessarily atheist. They just don’t consider themselves to be Christians or part of any other religious tradition. This is happening in the U.S. also, although the U.S. is a tad behind Europe. This phenomenon is not happening in places dominated by other religions, however in particular Islam and Hinduism. Globally, Christianity is expected to experience a greater net loss in the coming years than other religions.

Between 2015 and 2020, Christians are projected to experience the largest losses due to switching. Globally, about 5 million people are expected to become Christians in this five-year period, while 13 million are expected to leave Christianity, with most of these departures joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

I could be wrong, but it’s possible that the influence of Christianity on culture and events peaked in the 19th and 20th centuries and is about to go into a decline. If so, it has only itself to blame.