Tell me ’bout the damage you left behind

Last updated on: April 3, 2022 at 3:09 pm by Fred Clark

Tell me ’bout the damage you left behind 2022-04-03T15:09:20-04:00 Fred Clark

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• Since we just revisited an old post about the business model of things like the “Manhattan Declaration Direct-Mail Fundraising Inc.,” here’s Hemant Mehta with a look at another version of this same lucrative scam: “Why is the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue making $1,000,000 a year?”

Almost all of Donohue’s income is derived from the donations of the old white people he has nurtured to be perpetually frightened and resentful. He keeps them scared and unhappy, they keep him rich.

Donohue’s success is partly due to his focus on a particular niche of old, frightened, resentful white people. He fleeces old, frightened, resentful white Catholics, and is thus not in direct competition with groups like the Family Research Council or the Liberty Council or the Alliance Defending Freedom, all of which derive most of their income from fleecing old, frightened, resentful white Protestants.

But all of these groups — the Catholic League, FRC, ADF, Manhattan Declaration, etc. — operate within the same right-wing ecosystem that benefits from the additional financial support of corporate foundations, billionaires, and “dark money.” The rules governing that support are quite simple: Keep as many old white people as possible as scared and resentful as possible and we’ll ensure that you get to keep skimming your share of the take, because as long as we all work together to keep most old white people scared and resentful, we’ll always be in charge.

• “The Rise and Fall of a Prison Town Queen” is a remarkable piece of writing and reporting by Keri Blakinger. It’s an intimately particular profile of one person’s life that serves as a window into an entire community and a vast, broken, cruelly destructive system.

Blakinger writes with an extraordinary mixture of candor and kindness, which keeps the small-town gothic elements of this story from turning it into a freak show. I felt like I was being introduced to a cast of characters from a show like Justified or Fargo, and I realized that what I’d really like to see is that kind of story but with a protagonist who’s a local small-church pastor rather than a sheriff or marshal. Set it in Huntsville and cast Carrie Coon or Allison Tolman as the pastor.

Anyway, just go read Blakinger’s article. You’re welcome.

• This is cruel and does nothing to protect children:

In Georgia, Melissa Henderson, a single mother of five, was charged with criminal reckless conduct after she left her children under the care of her 14-year-old daughter when COVID shut down their daycare center. While their sister cared for them, the youngest left the house and was found within 10-15 minutes playing at a neighbor’s home. Another neighbor called the police and two weeks later Henderson was arrested in front of her children and charged with criminal reckless conduct. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. This, in a country that has no national child care program and, for far too many working parents.

And this is going to become exponentially more intrusive, cruel, and counter-productive as post-Roe “personhood” legislation begins governing the lives of anyone who is pregnant, or potentially pregnant, or legally redefined as “potentially pre-pregnant.”

See, for example, this: “Conspiracy Sites Once Again Insisting Dems Want To Legalize Murder Of Newborn Babies.”

• “The cover-up cannot succeed here anymore than it could in Dublin or in Jerusalem.”

Walter Brueggemann sees a parallel between the rotten biblical king, Jehoiakim, and the white reactionaries desperately trying to ban telling the truth about American history, “Thus it is my quite practical thought that in venues where teaching ‘Critical Race Theory’ is banned, that the church may have an obligation to engage in just such teaching in order to overcome such aggressive denial.”

This thought may not seem at all practical if the only kind of church you’re familiar with is the sort of white evangelical or white fundamentalist congregation that wants to help Jehoiakim burn the words of the prophets. But that’s not the only kind of church that exists or that can be imagined. There are also churches where Brueggemann’s call to speak truth and do justice is recognized as a canonical, biblical imperative and not reflexively dismissed as a “woke” threat to the anti-Reconstruction agenda that governs every Sunday gathering.

• The title for this post comes from this infectious romp from local heroes Catbite. Can’t wait until the weather gets just a little bit warmer so we can drive around with the windows down blasting songs like this one.

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