Right Wing Round-Up: The Fall of Rome

In print, radio and on television, Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, frequently disparaged homosexuality, according to KFile’s review. He advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and went so far as to partially blame it for the fall of the Roman Empire.

Johnson does a very familiar routine, cherry-picking a few select quotations from the Founders to imply that they basically wanted a theocratic government, and ignoring the many other quotations from them making clear that these Enlightenment figures absolutely did not want that.

Couple dominionism with the rise in Christian nationalism and you have a dangerous combination of religious belief with nationalism that politicians will certainly exploit in the 2024 election cycle.

But over the next year, Riley would witness firsthand — again and again — how misinformation and right-wing attacks on the transgender health clinic severely restricted the kinds of care they could provide at Vanderbilt.

Gabrielle Hanson, the MAGA mayoral candidate in Tennessee who was sent packing last week, has unsurprisingly pulled a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook—decrying her resounding loss as election fraud.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Anna Perez devoted the Oct. 30, 2023 episode of her Wrongthink Primetime show to claiming that Christians are the “most persecuted group” of people. During the episode she also claimed that “discrimination” — particularly against gays and lesbians — is a “key tenet of the Bible” and that Christians have been “too tolerant.”

Peinovich’s rhetoric is an example of how far-right antisemites are trying to use the pro-Palestine movement, hijack some of its language criticizing the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, and then use that as a vehicle to push anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and tropes into the mainstream.