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Fox News’ Erickson: ISIS And Gay Activists Are Pretty Much The Same, Except For The Killing Part

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Fox News contributor Erick Erickson issued his most strident attack on the LGBT community this week, comparing gay activists to ISIS.

Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor, the Editor-in-Chief of RedState.com, and was recently named the “Most Powerful Conservative” in America. That last honor is a stretch at best (anyone hear of the Koch Brothers?) but it’s a clear indicator that Erickson, God help America, is a thought leader on the right.

On Thursday, Erickson published an editorial he wrote that claims the “divide between Islamic extremists and gay rights extremists is at death.”

He goes on to lament the news about a Washington florist who refused to arrange flowers for a same-sex couple’s wedding, citing her deeply-held religious beliefs. Erickson, falsely, states “Barronelle Stutzman is now going to lose her business, her life savings, and possibly her own home for putting her faith into practice. Both her customer and the State of Oregon are taking everything she has for not bowing at the altar of sexual sin.”

(In fact, the fines, if any, have not been determined. Even the Kleins, the Oregon bakers who lost their case, have had no fines determined, years after they refused to bake a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.)

“Islamic extremists take lives because of the Islamic extremists’ beliefs,” Erickson continues. “They will take life for being offended. There will be no magnanimity and there will be no mercy.”

Never mind the fact that ISIS repeatedly has thrown people they accused of just being gay off the rooftops of buildings, then stoned them on the ground – just in case the impact or the terror didn’t kill them. The analogy between gays and ISIS is mind-bogglingly false.

UPDATE: Fox News Contributor Erick Erickson: ‘I Don’t Think Barack Obama Is A Christian’

Calling gay rights activists “the Imams of America’s cultural ghetto,” Erickson notes they, for the most part, “have not turned physically violent. But they are intent on destroying any who disagree with them. They will take the homes, businesses, and life savings of any who defy them. They will use the tools of the state and mob action through boycotts, fear, and intimidation to make it happen. They will not kill but they will threaten and scare.”

One might think every baker, florist, and photographer in America has been sued and lost their businesses, life savings and their homes for refusing to follow the laws enacted not by gay people, but by state legislatures and local city councils. In actuality, none have.

Dissatisfied at comparing gays to ISIS, Erickson takes one last swipe at the LGBT community.

“Christians have more children than homosexuals. We also have a God who stands with us, loves us, and will see us through to eternity.”

In Erickson’s eyes, gays are terrorists, there are no gays who are Christians, those children Christians are having aren’t gay, and God does not stand with or love gay people.

This is the thought leader the right has chosen.

 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Erickson as RedState’s founder.
Hat tip: Joe Jervis

 

More on Erick Erickson at The New Civil Rights Movement:

Top Tea Party Site: Michael Sam And ‘Pencil Neck Boy Toy’ Should Go To Iraq And Stand Up To ISIS

Today’s Vile Tweet Of The Day Brought To You By Ignorance-Embracing Tea Party Extremism

Listen: Fox News’ Erick Erickson Says Gays Are ‘Terrorists’

Fox News Contributor Slams ‘Absurdity’ And ‘Insanity’ Of Homosexuality And Transgenderism

 

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Peter Doocy Admits No ‘Concrete Evidence Joe Biden Personally Profited’ From Hunter’s Business

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In a report focused on House Republicans’ plan to vote on a resolution to open an official impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy told viewers there is no evidence of impeachable offenses.

“The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business but they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry set to start next week,” Doocy, who often criticizes President Biden in White House press briefings, said Friday on Fox News Business.

Other news outlets this week have also stressed Republicans have come up empty-handed.

The right-leaning news outlet The Hill, reporting on the resolution Thursday, noted Republicans’ current investigation “has struggled to connect President Biden to the activities of his son, and they’ve failed to prove their most salacious allegation — and the one that would be most key for impeachment: that the president accepted a bribe.”

READ MORE: Jobs Report Forces Fox News to Admit Biden Economy ‘A Lot Stronger Than Anybody Understands’

One of the main pillars of Republicans’ allegations against President Biden, the “narrative that President Biden pushed Ukraine to fire its prosecutor to help his son, who served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burimsa, has largely been refuted,” The Hill also reported.

“Republicans have engaged in wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Biden for months,” The New York Times reported Tuesday, “hunting for evidence to back up their allegations that he corruptly profited from his family members’ overseas business dealings and accepted bribes. To date, they have failed to deliver compelling evidence to back up their boldest claims.”

Watch Doocy below or at this link.

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Jobs Report Forces Fox News to Admit Biden Economy ‘A Lot Stronger Than Anybody Understands’

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The monthly jobs report released Friday morning is being heralded as “robust,” “upbeat,” and “stronger than expected,” as unemployment again dropped to a near-50-year low (3.7%) while the economy added another 199,000 jobs.

“It’s the little engine that could, and this little locomotive keeps a chugging along…” declared professor of economics and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers.

“So the last three months have seen jobs growth at a very healthy average rate of +204k per month,” he added. “For context: Average monthly job growth from Jan 2000 to Dec 2019 was +87k.”

“If I had asked you a year ago to sketch what you thought a soft landing might look like,” he said, praising America’s post-COVID pandemic economy, “it’s likely you would have pretty much drawn the current economic data.”

On Thursday, Wolfers had discussed the incongruence between what economic data consistently shows about the strength of the U.S. economy, and what Americans are telling pollsters.

READ MORE: ‘Straight Up Flout the Law’: Trump Declares Judge Chutkan No Longer Has Power Over His Case

“There’s no question people are telling pollsters they’re miserable about the economy. But riddle me this,” he asked, “Why can’t we find evidence of this pessimism in anything other that public opinion polls? Every non-poll based indicator of confidence suggests folks are optimistic.”

Heather Long, The Washington Post economic columnist, offered this view in response to Friday’s jobs report.

“Step back for a minute and look at this US job market,” she wrote.
“4.7 million more jobs than pre-pandemic
Below 4% unemployment for two years
Wages growing faster than inflation
Women (ages 25 to 54) at an all-time high for labor force participation”

Even Fox News was forced to deliver positive comments while reporting on Friday’s monthly numbers.

READ MORE: Jim Comer Decimated by NBC Reporter in ‘Under Two Minutes’

“Overall you’ve got to look at this report as a big positive,” admitted pro-Trump Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’ve got more jobs created than expected.”

Speaking to the former chief economist of The White House National Economic Council under President Trump, Bartiromo said, “Joe LaVorgna, you’ve been saying this, the economy is a lot stronger than anybody understands.”

Watch below or at this link.

 

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Right Wing Evangelicals Are ‘Marinating’ in ‘Information Aimed at Making Them Fearful, Hostile’: Journalist

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Evangelical support for former President Donald Trump, despite his own lack of devout faith, is no accident, author Tim Alberta told former CNN anchor Brian Stelter in an interview for Vanity Fair.

Rather, he argued, it is part of a deliberate campaign to radicalize and terrify them into loyalty — and part of what’s driving that is a “disproportionality crisis” of the information they are receiving.

““If you go to church on Sunday morning, you are going to be in the word with your pastor for, you know, 30 minutes, maybe 40, 45 minutes, and you sing some songs, and you say the prayers, and then you are out in the world for the rest of the week,” said Alberta. “And for most of these folks, as they’re out in the world, they are marinating in talk radio, in cable news, in social media—all of this information that is aimed at making them angry, fearful, hostile.”

Whereas they may hear Jesus’ message of tolerance, love, and forgiveness “on Sunday morning for 45 minutes, but then for 4, 5, 6, 10 hours during the week, you’re hearing the exact opposite. And it’s that ratio being so far out of whack that I think is really at the heart of the crisis here.”

And that’s assuming they’re at a church that will even give them messages of love and forgiveness in the first place — many pro-Trump pastors, like Greg Locke of Tennessee, have messages that are far angrier.

“[Trump] may not share their views, he may not sit in the pews with them, he may not read the good book like they do, but in some way, that’s his superpower,” Alberta explained. “He is free to fight in ways that are, you know, unrestrained, unmoored from biblical virtue. And that relationship with Trump has obviously evolved over the last eight years. What started as this very uneasy alliance for a lot of evangelicals with Trump has now morphed into this situation where, look, desperate times call for desperate measures. The barbarians are at the gates and we need a barbarian to keep them at bay.” This means that Trump’s increasingly dictatorial rhetoric is a natural outlet for the rage and frustration these evangelical voters are being fed.

None of this is to say that Trump has completely unified the evangelical world. Cracks have appeared in recent months, with prominent evangelical leaders like Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis out of concern about Trump’s electoral viability.

 

Editor’s note: Tim Alberta is an award-winning g journalist, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” and “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.”

 

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