... after the Republican convention this weekend, the influential conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr. wrote, in a confidential memo obtained by Politico’s Adam Wren, that there’s a “serious threat” to the party’s nominee for governor, Senator Mike Braun.Here's are just a few of Beckwith's public pronouncements:
That threat is Micah Beckwith, a Pentecostal pastor, podcaster and self-described Christian nationalist who was just chosen, despite Braun’s wishes, to be his running mate.
The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Beckwith said that God had told him: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” He’s said that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and promised that if he wins, he’ll be a thorn in the side to the governor.Also:
Before his victory this weekend, Beckwith was probably best known for leading a campaign to purge the young-adult shelves at the Hamilton East Public Library, where he was a board member until January. (He resigned after a policy he’d promoted, which removed books that included sex, violence or repeated profanity from a section for teenagers, was reversed.)During that fight, Beckwith made an enemy of John Green, author of the massive bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, which Beckwith sought to remove from the Young Adult section of the library. But there's a lot more ideological extremism where that came from, as I'll explain below.
Goldberg sees the political rise of figures like Beckwith as a consequence of Trumpism:
I’ve written about this in Minnesota, where delegates to the state convention endorsed the Alex Jones acolyte Royce White for Senate, and in Colorado, where the state party recently called for the burning of Pride flags. Cadres of true believers inspired by Donald Trump, and by the religious movement that sees him as divinely ordained, are seizing the party from the bottom up, much to the consternation of more traditional Republicans who thought they could indulge the MAGA movement without being overtaken by it.But Trump shouldn't get all the blame. Another factor at work here is the replacement of ordinary news outlets with social media sites as the main source of information (or "information") for much of the country. Trump was a Twitter ranter for years before he became a politcal candidate, but while a great deal of right-wing social-media discourse is bellicose in a Trumpian way, there's also an emphasis on memes that's largely independent of Trump. Right-wing meme culture has many influences other than Trump: Alex Jones, QAnon, and Fox News, to name three. Younger right-wingers such as Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro pump memes into the discourse every day. Crackpot cartoonists such as Ben Garrison do the same. This culture would exist even if Trump had never entered politics, and it will outlive Trump.
Beckwith loves memes. Nearly everything he posts on Facebook and Instagram is a meme. The memes cover a range of topics, including at least one topic on which Beckwith is at odds with Trump (vaccines), but there are some common threads: The enemy (us) is unspeakably evil, on par with the worst villains in human history. Powerful people are in a massive conspiracy to conceal plain truth. And each meme is presented as a perfect nugget of wit and incontrovertible truth -- anyone who tries to refute it is obviously dull-witted and stuck in the Matrix.
Here are some examples from Beckwith's social media:
The future of the Republican Party will be in the hands of people who only think about political issues at this superficial, us-good-them-bad level. The party eventually won't have a "governing wing." It will be focused on pure revenge. And yet it will run possibly half the states in the union, and probably the federal bench, while it's also able to win the White House and Congress.
That is, unless Democrats focus voters' attention on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this party, and learn to push back against "Democrats are the embodiment of pure evil" messaging. I hope I live to see that happen. But I'm not sure any of us will.
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