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They’re not laughing anymore

They’re not laughing anymore

Last updated on: February 26, 2025 at 5:08 pm by Fred Clark

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They’re not laughing anymore 2025-02-26T17:08:25-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

• Here is a story that is both hopeful and constructively instructive for the days ahead: “MI Republican Flees Own ‘Ban Gay Marriage’ Presser, Gay Dem Helpfully Takes Over!”

The Republican here is Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver, who: “a little over a year ago lost his committee assignments, his staff, and even his office in the state Capitol after he endorsed the racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory.” It’s not so much that he was too racist for his MAGA Republican colleagues, but that he was racist without any dog-whistling veneer of plausible deniability.

So Shriver’s mostly symbolic new campaign to repeal marriage equality in Michigan seems to be his attempt to win back the white “social conservatives” whose support he lost by openly hanging around with white supremacists and neo-Nazi types.

His press conference announcing this repeal effort did not go well because, well, here is a picture from Michigan Bridge reporter Jordyn Hermani that will show you why it did not go well:

The man in that front row seat is not a reporter. It’s Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is openly gay. Moss did not say anything. He did not interrupt, or heckle, or in any way directly interfere with Shriver’s press conference. He simply sat right there in the center of the front row and forced Shriver to say it to his face.

And Shriver did. Or, at least, he tried to — but bearing false witness directly to the neighbors you’re bearing it against is a lot harder than it is when they’re not there. You know that they know that the hateful lies you’re spewing are false. They don’t have to denounce you or rebut you or shout that you’re full of shit. They just need to be visibly present, reminding you that they know that you know that you’re full of shit.

Shriver rushes through his prepared statement, flop-sweating exactly like someone who is being forced to at least semi-consciously acknowledge, “My God, I, Joshua Shriver, really am full of shit.” And then he fled the room as quickly as possible without taking any questions.

At that point, Moss stepped up to the podium and took questions from reporters himself.

“Say it to my face” or “Look me in the eye and say that” are sometimes said with a hint of physical threat. But the real power doesn’t come from forcing someone to repeat their lies within punching distance. The real power comes from forcing them to recognize that you both know they’re full of shit. And from doing it without having to say a word.

• I used to work for a newspaper owned by Gannett. When I got there, it was a good paper and I loved my job. It was such a good paper and such a great job that I was terrified during the first round of layoffs, then joyously relieved that I survived them.

I was mostly relieved when I survived the second round of layoffs too. After those initial layoffs, the “belt-tightening” and the realization that “doing more with less” literally didn’t add up meant we were no longer producing a good newspaper, but we were still managing to produce an OK one. And even though it was harder to do my job, it still seemed important and meaningful and was still sometimes enjoyable.

I realized I wasn’t relieved when I survived the third round of layoffs. The job I used to love no longer really existed. I couldn’t tell you if the newspaper was good or OK or no good at all, because I hadn’t read it. Nobody had. The handful of people struggling to make all those unread words fit on the page darkly joked that our readers had the privilege of being the very first people to read some of the articles we were printing and that we hoped they’d tell us whether or not they were accurate.

Losing that job in the fourth round of layoffs was financially devastating, but also liberating. By that point, the paper was a hack-work rag and the job I had once loved was frustrating hack-work. We weren’t doing more with less, we were doing less and less. Every round of layoffs had made our work harder, with some of that work becoming impossible to do at all. The newsroom wasn’t “streamlined” or made “more efficient,” it was mutilated and butchered down to an inefficient, struggling stump. Tasks that had once been simple, swift, cheap and efficient had become complicated, slow, expensive, and wasteful.

Gannett didn’t make it’s newspapers more “efficient.” It strip-mined them.

So that’s the experience and the lens through which I view Steven Chung’s question, “Is Laying Off 15,000 IRS Employees the Best Way to Improve the Agency’s Efficiency?”

The answer, obviously, is No. And also that none of these layoffs have anything to do with a goal of “efficiency.” The goal is strip-mining, liquidation, destruction, and the selling off of the parts.

Nobody ever says “Gee, I wish I’d invested in Gannett stock back in 2000.” The pillagers who destroyed that business were foolish, short-sighted, and destructive. But, in their defense, at least their leadership-by-layoff scheme was not also illegal and unconstitutional, like Musk’s usurpation of congressional powers is.

• The Pledge of Allegiance is creepy af.

Expecting and/or requiring children to swear a daily loyalty oath to flag/country/Caesar is just deeply twisted, no matter how you frame it. “Stand, place your hand on your heart, and swear that you love me” is just skin-crawlingly creepy.

• I’ve long been a fan of Joel Duff’s blog Naturalis Historia, where he does the hard, patient work of taking young-earth creationists claims seriously and engaging them in detail. The effect is devastating — a calm, earnest, politely friendly demolition of the nonsense, misinformation, and dishonesty that creationists have been selling.

Duff has been on a tear lately focused entirely on a single biblical site: the Dead Sea. Everything about this salty sea below sea level offers undeniable evidence of geological time. Like fish, creationism cannot survive in its waters.

Duff’s multi-post series on the Dead Sea briefly turns away from salt deposits and stromatolites and such to also consider the abundant history of continuous human habitation in the area: “Below Sea Level, Beyond 6,000 Years -The Jordan Valley’s Ancient Urban Landscape.”

It was exactly this “ancient urban landscape” that sparked a severe crisis of faith for an evangelical classmate of mine when we visited the Dead Sea during a month of study abroad in the West Bank and Israel. I wrote about his crisis here: “The walls came tumbling down.” See also “You can’t have a 10,000-year-old house in a 7,000-year-old universe.”

• The title for this post comes from the Call’s “The Walls Came Down“:

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