AT&T backs One America News

The Walter J. and Ermalee Hickel House

Two years ago I found myself in a low-cost, motel-like residence for families of patients at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.  It's called the Walter J. and Ermalee Hickel House.

My husband had suffered pulmonary emboli while we were on a cruise to see Alaska's glaciers.  

I spent many evenings in my room with very few television options.  There was no MSNBC.  

At least there was CNN, the channel that reports both sides.  "The sky is blue.  Now let's hear what QAnon and the Proud Boys think."

While searching for access to national news, I came across One America News Network.

"This is more far-right than Fox News!" I reported to my husband on my visits back to the hospital.

It was incredible, but I figured the hospital's connection to the Catholic church was the cause.  Either that or all of Alaska is being fed this hogwash.

I didn't do any research on OANN when I got back to Los Angeles, but now in October 2021 it has popped up in the news as being founded and funded largely by AT&T.

Should I stop paying $128 to AT&T each month?

I'm afraid the answer is yes.  

That's what Rick Stengel of Media Matters told listeners a few days ago while being interviewed by Nicolle Wallace on Deadline: White House--on MSNBC.  (See my previous blog post.)

"AT&T is allegedly One America News Network's biggest backer" says a report on The Verge on October 6, 2021.  

Reuters Investigates was the first to report the connection between Trump TV: the AT&T Connection.

I'm grateful to be back in a part of the world where I have access to news that is not far-right propaganda.  I'm sorry I need to find another cell phone provider.

Will this be like the time in 1995 when I heard about Shell Oil's actions in Nigeria and cancelled my Shell credit card? 

Within a few years I learned that Mobil and all the other oil corporations were doing equally bad things elsewhere--but I didn't stop buying gasoline and driving my car.

Maybe all the owners of the media corporations are buddies.  Maybe I won't be able to find a cell service that's not enslaved to the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, pro-billionaire, pro-Trump forces behind the January 6 insurrection.

3 Ways to Boycott Murdoch

Rick Stengel of Media Matters on MSNBC

"When are they going to admit there was no insurrection?" asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News on September 16, 2021.  Another anchor, Laura Ingraham, made similar claims.

Thanks to Nicolle Wallace in her Deadline: White House news hour today on MSNBC for reporting on the cumulative lies spoken on Fox and even printed in today's Wall Street Journal.

She interviewed Rick Stengel of the nonprofit Media Matters on reports that Fox is about to release a "documentary" claiming that the attack on the Capitol and its police officers was a false flag--an action set up by the FBI to make the right look bad. 

Fox is "supporting people who committed the earlier insurrection, and they're motivating people to do another one," says Stengel. 

Even Geraldo Rivera, another Fox anchor, spoke out against lies by Carlson today, calling his words "inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated." 

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal today published a Trump letter to the editor repeating his false election claims.  

The Fox "documentary" makes the false flag claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection was planned by the FBI to make the right wing look bad.

"There are dozens and dozens of people who are on trial for their crimes in participating in that riot,  " he observes.  "They are testifying about their planning and their actions that day."

"The myth of the great fraud is his platform for 2024 if he runs again, and they promote it because the audience wants to hear and loves it," explained Stengel.

"I think if they aired porn, they'd like that too," replied Wallace, "There are some things that are not suitable to air, that violate norms and standards."

 Can lies like this qualify as speech protected by the First Amendment?

"The one kind of speech that is not protected is speech that leads directly or indirectly to violence," notes Rick Stengel, citing the Brandenburg decision by the Supreme Court in 1955.

Enough summarizing of current lies, whether on heard on Fox News or printed in the Wall Street Journal.

How can we, the people, protest these lies on Fox News and in the Journal, both owned by the Murdoch family?  

"One way that people can protest is to boycott all the products and outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, which fuel and support Fox News," Stengel says.  Read his call for a boycott on the Media Matters website.  

• Cancel your subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal or anything owned by the Murdochs.
• Don't watch the NFL on Fox Sports
• Don't use the products advertised on Fox Sports or in the WSJ.

"That's the sort of thing that will get Rupert Murdoch's attention," advises Stengel. "There's a very traditional form of protest and boycott that's available to people.  Grassroots public protest is perfectly acceptable and very effective."

Most of us can only boycott Murdoch's media empire partially, though, because his NewsCorp owns so much of what we watch, from Hulu to American Idol.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote: Both News Corp and the Fox Corporation, News Corp's sister company and successor to the former 21st Century Fox, are owned and controlled by the Murdoch family.

.

Cancel Facebook?

Should I stop posting my dog photos and feminist Christian news on Facebook?

I took a 4-year vacay from FB after its reader-enhancing formulas helped elect Donald Trump, and now I'm considering whether to leave again because of its role in the lead-up to January 6 insurrection against our usual peaceful transfer of power in the USA.  

To get more eyeballs, FB looked the other way as Stop the Steal and QAnon worked around its weak efforts to ban them.  It also cut back on its Civic Integrity team and ignored the team's advice.

What do you think?  Should we give FB-Meta a time-out?  All we have to do is treat it like a violent child in the family, shutting them up in a room until they calm down and find a way to play nicely with others.  

This report in the Washington Post reveals how half-hearted Facebook's efforts to stop enhancing hate have been.  Thank you, Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Reed Albergotti.

Politico also revealed in Andrea S. Levine's article on Oct. 22 that Facebook took down the original Stop the Steal group in November, but it did not ban content using that phrase until after the Jan. 6 riot.

Facebook felt like such a safe space that a Capitol police K-9 officer exchanged messages with one of the insurrection planners before January 6.  Afterward, he tried to delete those posts and get his friend to delete them too.  Now he's facing a possible 20 years in prison and had to resign from his job.

Listen to NPR's report on how Stop the Steal evaded FB's weak efforts by affiliating with other FB groups.

Thank you to FB whistleblower Frances Haugen for her courageous testimony to the Security and Exchanges Commission on Capitol Hill, reported in the above media and first reported by Buzzfeed.

Exvangelicals, post-evangelicals and other evolving creatures

Some born-again Christians are running away from the e-word as fast as they can.  

Check out this link to the article on Rachel Held Evans by Eliza Griswold posted Oct. 26 in The New Yorker in the section titled On Religion.  

You may have already seen the Washington Post article by Sarah Pulliam Bailey Oct. 22 on post-evangelicals and exvangelicals.  

Bailey attended an ad hoc gathering of a hundred post-evangelical pastors in mid-October in Indiana.  She  reports that some younger evangelicals are moving away from views often associated with evangelicals, tending to be more LGBTQ-affirming and more opposed to racism and Trump..

Some of us older evangelicals have been moving in a more tolerant direction for years.  

After all, this book Evangelical Feminism: A History was published in 2005.  There was a thirty-year history of evangelical feminism back in 2005.  

Another example is the group founded in 1974 as Evangelical Women's Caucus, now known as Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus - Christian Feminism Today.  EEWC-CFT has been LGBT affirming since 1986.  People didn't hear much about the Q back then.

Our website is full of thoughtful articles, book and film and music reviews, original poetry, and a useful FAQ.

Some in EEWC-Christian Feminism Today have tossed the e-word in the trash bin, but others like me still consider themselves evangelical, even if we don't look like it to the run-of-the-mill evangelical today.

Because the word evangelical just means "good news," eu-angelion in Greek, I see no reason to hand it over to right-wing folks who don't seem to me to be living out that good news.  

I'm a Bible-thumping, gospel-believing follower of Jesus, like Beth Moore.  She's been sending out some powerful tweets lately after being dinged by the Southern Baptist Convention for standing up against its all-male control.  See her on Twitter @BethMooreLPM

These positive signs remind me of that Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

John MacArthur: Keeping women down

John MacArthur in 2013
born in Los Angeles in 1939

 John MacArthur is a sad case.

I used to see him as an opponent.  But now I realize he's 82 years old, a year older than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, three years older than Mitch McConnell, and four years older than President Joe Biden, the seniors who govern our nation.  He's nine years older than I am, bless him.

Oh, I forgot Senator Joe Manchin, who is 74, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who is 45, a junior to them all.  She won her seat in 2018 when Senator Jeff Flake stepped out of Arizona politics after criticizing Trump.  Manchin and Sinema actually govern the US as much as Pelosi, McConnell, and Biden do.  Being passive-aggressive gets them attention.

Anyway, Johnny has been serving at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, since 1969, when he began as the junior pastor there.  His father was a Baptist radio preacher in Los Angeles, educated at Bob Jones College in South Carolina.  Johnny began college at Bob Jones but returned to Los Angeles to attend a now-defunct church college.

The point is that he is who he is, and he's not going to change.  Misogynists, like racists, only vanish by dying off.  They don't change their minds.

If you check out Wikipedia's page on MacArthur, you see who he is:

MacArthur has been involved with multiple controversies regarding his outspokenness on certain topics. MacArthur is very open about opposing same-sex marriage, against female pastors, and the social justice movement.^[37] He has delivered multiple sermons where he discusses these issues.^[38]

In 2012, at The Shepherd's Conference, MacArthur was participating in a word association questionnaire where the moderator gave him the name "Steven Furtick." MacArthur proceeded to argue that Furtick, pastor of Elevation Church, was "unqualified".^[39] Furtick responded to this comment in his 2016 book Unqualified: How God Uses Broken People to Do Big Things.

In 2019, at the Truth Matters Conference, where, during a word association questionnaire, the name "Beth Moore" was given. Reiterating his stance on 1 Timothy 2:12, MacArthur responded by stating that Beth Moore should "Go home" and that "There is no case that can be made Biblically for a woman preacher. Period. Paragraph. End of Discussion."^[40] Moore responded to this stance by stating on her Twitter account, "I did not surrender to a calling of man when I was 18 years old. I surrendered to a calling of God. It never occurs to me for a second to not fulfill it. I will follow Jesus - and Jesus alone - all the way home. And I will see His beautiful face and proclaim, Worthy is the Lamb!"^[41]

In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 global crisis, MacArthur denied the existence of a pandemic, ignored orders from Los Angeles County public health officials regarding services at Grace Community Church, and insisted that no one from the church had become seriously ill.^[42] Los Angeles County sued the church over its refusal to close down, and the church counter-sued, claiming religious freedom discrimination. Eventually the lawsuits were settled out of court with the county and state paying $400,000 each to Grace Community Church. In August 2021, MacArthur admitted to congregants that "many people" contracted COVID-19 while it "went through" the church in December 2020 and January 2021, including both he and his wife.^[43][44]

I thought of picketing his church to protest his recent statements against women pastors, but then I reconsidered.  

Why bother?  He's not going to change.  His church may change out from under him while he still lives.  

In an article for Sojourners magazine, I interviewed women there who had no idea that he believes women should submit to their husbands.  Grace Community Church downplays that theology when recruiting young members.  Apparently it doesn't sell well. After a few years when a woman is deeply involved in the church, she learns these doctrines.  Or dicktrines.

Grace Church doesn't teach Galatians 3:28.  Or Acts 2:16-21.  In its Bible studies, you'll learn about Ephesians 5:22, but nothing about Ephesians 5:21. 

Johnny and his buddies at The Master's Seminary like to ignore the women who worked with Peter and Paul preaching the gospel in the earliest years of Christianity: Prisca, Lydia, Junia, Phoebe, Mary of Magdala, and others.  

Note: The seminary began as Los Angeles Baptist Theological Seminary in 1927.  The new name hides its Baptist roots and plays up its masculine identity.  No women are allowed to enroll. 

The website says: "One word sums up the legacy that is entrusted to the men who come to TMS: faithfulness."

I could think of other words: Sexist.  Patriarchal.  Misguided.  Non-biblical.  Would Jesus exclude half the human race from a college to train preachers?  

I mean the guy denied the existence of the pandemic during 2020 and lied about whether his congregants had become seriously ill with the coronavirus of 2019.  

He was lying like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was recently exposed by Rep. Adam Schiff in a blatant lie.  Read about it in Schiff's new book, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.

Schiff told Morning Joe:

“One of the stories I tell about Kevin McCarthy is, I was sitting next to him on a plane having a private conversation and then him going to the press and telling the press the exact opposite of our conversation, and when I confronted him on the House floor about this and said, ‘Kevin, you know I said the exact opposite of what you told the press,’ his answer was to me, ‘Yeah, I know, Adam, but you know how it goes.'”

Pastor MacArthur, you lied to us about whether your members at Grace Community Church were getting seriously ill with Covid-19 because you encouraged them to keep attending indoors during the worst of the pandemic.  "Yeah, I know, folks, but you know how it goes."

McCarthy, MacArthur.  Both big-time liars, both deeply into preserving and gaining power for their side.  One claims to follow Jesus; one doesn't even pretend to be a man of values.

Like Trump, John MacArthur deserves our pity, not our attention as a worthy opponent.  

I won't bother to picket Grace Community Church to counter the wacky views of this guy.  

Instead, I will pick up the pen and use my social platform.  

I will also pray for him.  He followed his father's footsteps obediently, but millennials and their grandchildren won't buy his opposition to women's equality, to marriage equality, and to the rights of women and gays to serve the church.

As Jesus prayed, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Of Morons, Choir Boys, and Peril

 

Buy these books for yourself and for your great-grandchildren:

Fear by Bob Woodward.* 

Rage by Bob Woodward.*  

Peril by Bob Woodward* with Robert Costa.  

They document what Trump and right-wing Republicans did to our nation from 2015 through 2021.  They're on my Christmas wish list.

This review in The Guardian explains why we need to read and remember what's in these books.

Written with Robert Costa, another Washington Post reporter, Peril caps a Trump trilogy by one half of the team that took down Richard Nixon. As was the case with Fear and Rage, Peril is meticulously researched. Quotes fly off the page. 

The third book, just out, documents Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election, starting long before November, climaxing with the coup attempt on January 6, and continuing today.

It contains lots of behind-the-stage gossip, gleaned through hundreds of interviews.

Here's a tidbit from The Guardian's review:

“Do you know why [former secretary of state Rex] Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” the Senate Republican leader [Mitch McConnell] asks.

“Because he called him a ‘fucking moron’.”

By contrast, McConnell has kind words for Biden – a man he is dedicated to rendering a one-term president. America’s cold civil war goes on. Some, sometimes, still send messages across no man’s land.

Buy Peril, the last in the series, now.  Keep it on the shelf you have labeled for your survivors to read: "Keep.  History as it was happening."  

For further proof of the urgency of this trilogy, read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.  (See this review.)

Just hope that no future US government puts a ban on these books.

               ~     ~     ~

*Footnote for those who didn't live through the Nixon years:

While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.

As many news analysts have said in 2021, Trump makes Nixon look like a choir boy.

Ambiguous loss - Dr. Pauline Boss

Dr. Pauline Boss

Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Pauline Boss, the professor who wrote several books on this problem, including The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic.

She has also appeared on programs like NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett (see link). 

See her brief introduction to the subject in a video on YouTube.

The term "closure" implies acceptance of a definite loss.  

An open-ended feeling of loss can be easier to bear, a protection from finality: "He or she is gone, but not for sure."  Or it can be harder, haunting.

"The tolerance of ambiguity is what we are trying to increase," Dr. Boss says. 

Some of her central points: 

😔Sadness and even the condition of complicated grief are different from major depression.

😔"Sadness is treated with human connection." 

😔Grief is complex and varying, not something that comes in a prescribed number of stages or in a linear timeline.

Thank you to my friend Letha Dawson Scanzoni for calling the work of Pauline Boss to my attention.