This photo has been circulating on social media this last week:

This is the cover of the July 1983 Moral Majority Report, a newsletter conceived and published by Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, a Reagan era mouthpiece of what has now morphed into the American Taliban.  At that time, the HIV crisis was arising, and predictably, right-wingers were judgmental about the outbreak, but worse, even then they got the virology wrong, donning masks in an effort to scare the shit out of people about a virus that didn’t transmit through the air, but by bodily fluids.

Back then, the mask was used as a weapon against science and one of their targets, the gay community.  Today, once again masks are being used as a weapon against common sense and science, but in the opposite of the use in 1983.  Back then, right-wingers donned masks to push their message; today they accost people wearing masks and rail against mask mandates to push whatever their message is today. The obvious conclusion is that conservatives are not only totally corrupted; they have been corrupted for decades, moving facts around to fit their narrative.  Add the cancer of Donald Trump, and the corruption is complete, and political conservatism becomes a toxic soup of lies, distortions, disinformation, and cruelty for the pure sake of cruelty.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in the case of the American right wing, it gets worse.

File under: What took you so Long?

The ugly split between Liberty University and Jerry Falwell, Jr. just got uglier as university brainwashing camp filed suit demanding $10 million in damages for concealing damaging personal information even as he negotiated a lucrative employment contract.  Jr., capitalizing on his father’s fame delved into politics even further than Sr., who was one of the founders of “The Moral Majority” which was neither moral or a majority.  After Sr.’s passing in 2007, Jr. took over, went all-in hypocrisy and ended up all-in for Trump.  While embracing conservative ideology and conspiracy theories, he looked the other way a plethora of times to rationalize Trump’s many scandals and character flaws.  He even started the pro-Trump Falkirk Center at Liberty, which was nothing more than another Trump campaign mouthpiece, hiding behind a non-profit 501(c)3 tax status.

Falwell is the textbook example of everything that’s wrong with Big Church, the multi-billion dollar mega church industry which is all about God, warmongering, guns, bathrooms, hating gays, and deploring Democrats.  Liberty is a billion dollar enterprise that uses its clout in the ever judgmental evangelical subculture in the US, and Falwell Sr., followed by Falwell Jr., tsk-tsked at scandals like Clinton’s, but suddenly became sympathetic when Trump’s multiple sex and criminal scandals emerged.  What Jr. was hiding, though, is that he and his wife were also neck deep in their own scandals, including a multi-year affair between Becki and their pool boy.  Apparently, Jr. liked to watch.  Yeah.  The Falwell’s reportedly gave the pool boy $2 million for a business venture, which is questionable whether it was financial help or extortion to stay quiet.  And apparently this was all going on as Jr. was negotiating his next contract.

In a fit of late to the party guilty conscience, the board of Liberty wants their money back, and Falwell, who just dropped a defamation suit against Liberty in December, is now recycling the same denials and assertions now that they are after him.

The Arc of the Moral Universe does bend toward justice; and in this case, toward irony.  And the irony is entertaining .

Christianity Today, mouthpiece of the evangelical movement since Billy Graham founded it in 1956, finally turned on Trump last week when its editor in chief, Mark Galli, published “Trump Should Be Removed from Office” laying out the case against him that most normal people have understood for years.  While lying that Trump “…didn’t have a chance to offer his side of the story…,” Galli did say,

The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

This is not the first time that the magazine has weighed in on impeachment, but the first time it has come down of the side against a Republican.  In 1973 it offered milk toast support of the process but remaining neutral on Nixon’s impeachment, and in 1998 supported Clinton’s removal.  Galli used the same reasoning this time to call for Trump’s removal.  At least he’s being intellectually honest, which doesn’t hold with other publications like the Christian Post, which stubbornly remains in Trump’s corner.

The piece in the Christian Post published on Monday repeats the willful blindness we’ve come to expect from evangelicals who’ve been happy to look the other way on Trump’s moral bankruptcy and criminality just because they’re getting judges who believe that the Earth is flat and only 4,000 years old as well as in the subjugation of women.  In their piece, the senior editors bashed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, AND Beto O’Rourke, calling their words on Trump supporters and religions a “…toxic emotional and spiritual stew…”  Their ultimate justification for overlooking Trump’s conduct? He was elected.  Essentially, they repeated Trump’s own argument that, since he was elected, he is immune from all legal scrutiny or even investigation of his criminality and corruption.

The piece is so poisonous that Napp Nazworth, another editor at the Christian Post, threw up his hands and abruptly resigned, tweeting out, “Announcement: Today, rather abruptly, I was forced to make the difficult choice to leave The Christian Post. They decided to publish an editorial that positions them on Team Trump. I can’t be an editor for a publication with that editorial voice.”  He continued that editors had in the past worked through disagreements, but now has “chosen to represent a narrow (and shrinking) slice of Christianity.

What we’re witnessing is actual Christians beginning to find their voice against the falsehood of Falwell’s political lobbying company masquerading as a church.  Although evangelical support of Trump remains over 80%, Trump is starting to lose that edge he’s enjoyed up until he got caught red handed extorting a foreign government to gain domestic political advantage.  Evangelicals (I know many personally) have been hijacked by the Fox Noise version of Republican Jesus filled with the spirit of assault rifles, anti-vaxing, gay bashing, and Bible thumping.  It’s high time that actual Christians find their voices and speak up against this corruption of Christianity, or at least vote against it in the voting booth.