This week, a Christian podcaster offered up what might be seen as a permission slip – or a “get out of jail free card” – for Republicans who have been lying to the American people: “enjoy it.”

“It’s okay to use deception in service of defeating the left. It’s not sinning in order to do good. It’s being righteously shrewd in order to do good. It’s also okay to enjoy it. Lighten up.”

It’s okay to use deception in service of defeating the left. It’s not sinning in order to do good. It’s being righteously shrewd in order to do good. It’s also okay to enjoy it. Lighten up.

— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) September 17, 2024

Those are the words of Josh Daws, whose bio at Founders Ministries says he is “dedicated to helping Christians navigate the complex and rapidly changing cultural landscape through his biblically-based cultural analysis.”

Daws “strives to provide insightful and thought-provoking commentary on current events and cultural trends on his podcast and Twitter. He hopes to be a valuable resource for those looking to engage with culture in a meaningful and informed way.”

The tweet has been viewed well over a half-million times in just 48 hours, and it seems to sum up where the right and the far-right are at this moment in time – ethics be damned, the ends justify the means.

When a reporter for Politico on Wednesday confronted Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the U.S. Senator for Ohio who has been spreading racist and dangerous lies about his own constituents – immigrants from Haiti legally living and working in the city of Springfield – falsely claiming they are stealing pets and eating them, he dug in his heels.

Donald Trump during the debate had lied, saying infamously off the Haitian immigrants, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there.”

The reporter reminded Vance that the Haitian immigrants, whom he has been calling “illegal migrants,” are in the United States under a 1990 law signed by President George H.W. Bush, “so they are here legally.”

The freshman junior senator made clear he did not care.

“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works,” declared the defiant Vance, who holds a law degree from Yale and knows that they are, in fact, here legally and the Biden Administration’s decision to grant them protection means they are not, as he claimed, “illegal.”

In short, Senator Vance was lying, and lying to a crowd, however small, who ate it up, cheering, applauding, and at times nodding in agreement.

RELATED: ‘Straight Up Fascist Project’: Vance Slammed for Vowing to Call Legal Immigrants ‘Illegal’

“This is just shocking,” declared former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, now a professor of political science. “Mr. Vance is blatantly calling a legal action illegal. I’ve studied my whole life how democracies break down. This is how it happens folks. I hope he really doesn’t believe this. Politicians say a lot of crazy things during elections. I fear he might.”

Senator Vance has been lying since Monday of last week, when he first promoted the racist “pet-eating” lie.

“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Vance asked on social media, referring of course to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for President, who has never been the “border czar.”

Vance, or his staff, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday, knew he was lying, or at least knew after his remarks were posted. They remain up to this day, never corrected or removed.

Over the weekend, Senator Vance, now infamously, told CNN, effectively, that he is willing to lie to promote his agenda.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told host Dana Bash.

“You just said that you’re ‘creating’ a story,” Bash responded, as The New Republic reported. “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

“Yes!” Vance replied, before twisting his own words in a nonsensical defense.

“We are creat—we are creating … Dana,” Vance said. “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re ‘creating a story’ meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

The New Republic’s Greg Sergeant added, “JD Vance is also claiming that because of Haitians, communicable diseases in Springfield have ‘skyrocketed.’ I talked to the health commissioner in Clark County, where Springfield is located. Vance’s claim is nonsense.”

READ MORE: GOP Furious Trump-Appointed Fed Chair Cut Interest Rates ‘This Close to an Election’

Republicans outright lying have making headlines of late.

“The Real Reason Trump and Vance Are Spreading Lies About Haitians” (The Atlantic)

“How J.D. Vance Became Trump’s Pet Liar” (New York Magazine‘s Intelligencer)

“How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True” (Wall Street Journal)

“One of the Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies” (New York Times)

“The Grand Old Party of Liars” (The Nation)

There is, 0f course, Donald Trump, who lies so often the media stopped bothering to keep up. Questions have been flowing about his lies of late that are so off-the-wall and so provably-false, his grasp of reality is being called into question.

Wednesday night, in a rare on-camera, in-studio Fox News interview, Trump, (still talking about last week’s debate,) falsely claimed the ABC News moderators corrected him, “I think nine times, or eleven times.”

The right-wing New York Post reported Trump was fact-checked five times, not nine, not eleven.

CNN reported Trump made 33 false statements during the debate, Harris just one.

But it was Trump’s next remark, also false, that has many calling into question not just his moral character, but his mental health.

“And the audience was, they went crazy.”

There was no audience at that debate.

Trump on the debate: They didn’t correct her once and they corrected me, everything I said practically.. and the audience went absolutely crazy pic.twitter.com/H2SEsIDUg2

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 19, 2024

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols remarked: “How is it that Trump hallucinated an audience being present during the debate and we’ve just moved on as if this isn’t a sign of a serious mental problem? Biden – wisely – agreed to step aside for far less than that.”

On Wednesday, journalist and SiriusXM host Michelangelo Signorile wrote at Substack, “Why MAGA views blatant lying as a righteous and important act.”

Signorile highlighted this recent lie by Donald Trump: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?'”

“But uh the transgender thing is an incredible thing… your kid goes to school & comes home a few days later with an operation the school decides what’s going to happen with your child & you many of these childs 15 years later say “what the hell happened who did this to me?”

🤦🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/BNyNscBgUB

— Jennifer Jenkins Brevard (@JenkinsBrevard) August 31, 2024

Signorile noted Trump’s claims were “so deranged and kooky—as if there are hospitals in schools or kids are being transferred to hospitals in the middle of the day from their classrooms—that many of us thought it was a clear example of Trump’s continued cognitive decline. He did, after all, say ‘many of these childs’ instead of ‘children,’ and that was more evidence of his faltering mental acuity.”

But.

“But Trump repeated the claim again days later at a rally, continuing to push something that was deemed false even by his staunchest supporters,” Signorile continued. “And that is a real tell.”

He explains, “the goal of the lying by Trump and his running mate JD Vance,” is “to hijack discussion and redirect it to issues they want to talk about, even if it means they are exposed as having told a lie.”

Signorile says, “the MAGA masses are perfectly fine with that strategy. They don’t care about the lies being exposed because the lies are a means to an end.”

As for Daws’ s defense of using “deception in service of defeating the left,” attorney Andrew L. Seidel writes, “I often speak about Christian Nationalism as a permission structure. For instance, CN gave the insurrectionists the moral and mental license they needed for the treasonous assault on our democracy on January 6th. Here is that permission structure laid out explicitly.”

SiriusXM host John Fugelsang remarked, “I have never read a purer distillation of MAGA Christianity than ‘thou shalt bear false witness.'”

Others have remarked simply, “Romans 3:8.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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JD Vance, the junior Republican U.S. Senator who represents the people of Ohio, is on his tenth day of attacking the twelve to fifteen thousand legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, after he spread the lie that 20,000 “illegal migrants” from Haiti were dropped on the city and started to steal the pet cats and dogs of its residents, and eat them.

The claims have been so thoroughly debunked that The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a report: “How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True.”

“Estimates of the number of immigrants vary, but Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said Monday that roughly 15,000 Haitians immigrated to Springfield over the past four years,” The Journal reports. “They were able to immigrate legally under a Biden administration policy granting Temporary Protected Status to Haitians as part of a program created by Congress in 1990 to protect immigrants from countries deemed too dangerous to return to.”

That 1990 law, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), was signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush.

But according to Senator Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who has a law degree from Yale, the law is illegal and so are the Haitian immigrants, which is false.

READ MORE: GOP Furious Trump-Appointed Fed Chair Cut Interest Rates ‘This Close to an Election’

At a small rally in North Carolina on Wednesday (full video), a Politico reporter told Senator Vance, “the majority of the Haitians in Springfield came under TPS, so they are here legally. And I know you’ve expressed a lot of your issues with the TPS program and wanting to change that under a Trump Vance administration, but I guess my question for you is, if you become the vice president under a Trump administration, what will you guys do about the migrants that are already there since they did arrive legally? And a follow up to that, if you plan to deport them, how would you do that legally?”

Vance did not answer any of those questions.

“Well, look,” he replied, seemingly frustrated, “this is, this is a media and Kamala Harris fact-check that I want to, I want to clarify and clear up right now.”

“Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants, hundreds of thousands of them, by the way, 20,000 in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of them all across the country, they are here legally.”

“And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs, mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, ‘we’re not going to deport those people here.’ Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

Senator Vance is wrong.

First, that is exactly how it works.

The Biden administration extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) (not temporary protective status, as Vance called it) twice, given the dire circumstances in Haiti.

There is nothing “illegal” about the program, nor are the immigrants here under the program “illegal,” as the Ohio freshman senator falsely insists.

Vance continued his remarks, to applause, calling the TPS program “completely bogus,” and “straight out of George Orwell.”

“That makes her border policy a disgrace and I’m still going to call people ‘illegal aliens,'” Vance vowed, attacking Vice President Harris, as the audience cheered.

“Who in this room, who in this country, consented to allowing millions of aliens to come into this country?” he asked, as some in the audience shook their heads no.

READ MORE: Vance Demands Fact-Check on ‘Pet-Eating’ Lie Despite Knowing Truth Pre-Debate

Vance is taking more heat over his latest comments.

“Bro needs to give his law degree back,” remarked MSNBC legal contributor and correspondent Katie Phang.

“What a phony loser @JDVance continues to be. He used to love immigrants. Now he blood libels them. Just like how he used to call his idol Trump ‘an American Hitler,'” commented The Nation’s Dave Zirin.

“This is just shocking,” declared former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. “Mr. Vance is blatantly calling a legal action illegal. I’ve studied my whole life how democracies break down. This is how it happens folks. I hope he really doesn’t believe this. Politicians say a lot of crazy things during elections. I fear he might.”

“When you hear people refuse to make distinctions between legal and illegal immigration, it’s safe to assume they want to use the latter as a tool to go after the former,” observed attorney Mark R. Yzaguirre.

“This is a straight up fascist project from JD here,” exclaimed Dante Atkins, an expert in strategic communications and campaign management.

Watch below or at this link.

“I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien” — JD Vance on Haitian migrants who are in Ohio legally pic.twitter.com/phe5yjiUyd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2024

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In recent years Republicans have been accused of making up rules or redefining existing practices and policies across at least a dozen areas – including voting rights and gerrymandering, their use of the debt ceiling as a “bargaining chip,” and the conservative U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” all to push through their agenda or gain a short or long-term advantage.

For example, in 2016 then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell infamously refused to allow even a hearing on President Barack Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. He falsely claimed it was a “rule,” but in 2020 apparently rescinded the non-existent rule when President Donald Trump nominated his third Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation process was rammed through in near-record time, despite the COVID pandemic – just before the election Trump would go on to lose.

Fast forward to today.

According to U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), there apparently is another never-before-heard-of practice that says the Federal Reserve cannot lower interest rates before an election.

And he is outraged.

READ MORE: Vance Demands Fact-Check on ‘Pet-Eating’ Lie Despite Knowing Truth Pre-Debate

To tame inflation and protect the U.S. economy, Fed Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell Wednesday afternoon, after signaling for months a rate cut would be coming, and after four long years of interest rate increases and holding rates at a two-decade high, for the first time since the COVID pandemic hit announced he is lowering interest rates by a half-point, as Bloomberg reported.

“Hard to see how #Trump can keep saying #Biden has brought us the ‘worst economy ever’ — yesterday the Dow broke ALL records, hitting 41,622.08,” remarked Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret. “And now that the Fed has cut interest rates by 0.5% the Dow is climbing higher. #Bidenomics has worked:
– record high employment
– inflation heading to 2%
– interests rates down, forcast by FED to possibly go below 4% by January
– equity markets are record highs”

Powell’s decision comes after his judicious, and some have lamented far-too-slow, responses to economic conditions. Many experts had not only predicted a rate cut months earlier, but weeks ago when the jobs report came out worse than some expected, some economists and top U.S. lawmakers fearing recession, demanded Powell call a special session to immediately cut rates by three-quarters of a point.

Not Senator Tuberville.

“The Fed’s drastic rate cut is shamelessly political,” the former college football coach and freshman lawmaker, who once was unable to name the three branches of government, declared just after Powell’s announcement. “Our nation’s central bank has no business moving rates this close to an election and is clearly trying to tip the balance in favor of Kamala Harris.”

As many responded, mocking the 70-year old Republican senator, Donald Trump nominated Powell, a Republican, to the chairmanship in 2018.

He was confirmed in an 84-13 vote, “one of the widest margins of confirmation for a Trump nominee,” The Hill reported at the time. “Nearly all Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats supported Powell’s confirmation.” In 2022, President Biden re-nominated Powell to a second term, despite strong criticism from the left flank of his party. He was confirmed in another strong bipartisan vote, 80-19.

Senator Tuberville is not alone in his criticism.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also expressed his dissatisfaction.

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“The timing is a little suspect,” the GOP Speaker said, according to Capitol Hill reporter Jamie Dupree. Johnson’s remark flies in the face of Powell having been extremely transparent in his intentions.

“The European Central Bank has cut rates twice over the past three months,” remarked The Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland. “Inflation is at its lowest since early 2021. The real question is why Powell, a Trump pick Biden idiotically kept on, didn’t cut rates when we knew corporate [price] gouging was what was keeping prices high.”

“Everyone knew a cut was coming at this regularly scheduled meeting,” added political commentator Brian Normoyle.

“First off, Powell is a Trump appointee,” remarked former U.S Ambassador Luis Moreno. “Secondly, this has been talked about and predicted for months as the inflation data kept going down. Jonson should be worried about keeping the government running and stop auditioning for his master in Mar a Lago.”

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) joined Senator Tuberville and Speaker Johnson.

“GOP Sen. Ron Johnson told me the Fed should have waited until after the election to cut interest rates,” reports Semafor congressional reporter Joseph Zeballos-Roig, “but they didn’t because ‘they’re political.'”

Fox News also suggested the decision was political. Chairman Powell “shut down Fox’s question about election-driven ‘political motivations,'” Media Matters reported.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Watch Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell shut down Fox’s question about election-driven “political motivations” for rate cut: “Nothing else is discussed. … Our job is to support the economy on behalf of the American people” pic.twitter.com/jFnplS92KU

— Media Matters (@mmfa) September 18, 2024

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’