The Republican here is Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver, who: \u201ca little over a year ago lost his committee assignments, his staff, and even his office in the state Capitol after he endorsed the racist \u2018Great Replacement\u2019 theory.\u201d It\u2019s not so much that he was too racist for his MAGA Republican colleagues, but that he was racist without any dog-whistling veneer of plausible deniability.<\/p>\n
So Shriver\u2019s mostly symbolic new campaign to repeal marriage equality in Michigan seems to be his attempt to win back the white \u201csocial conservatives\u201d whose support he lost by openly hanging around with white supremacists and neo-Nazi types.<\/p>\n
His press conference announcing this repeal effort did not go well because, well, here is a picture from Michigan<\/em> Bridge<\/em> reporter Jordyn Hermani that will show you why<\/em> it did not go well:<\/p>\n The man in that front row seat is not a reporter. It\u2019s Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is openly gay. Moss did not say anything. He did not interrupt, or heckle, or in any way directly interfere with Shriver\u2019s press conference. He simply sat right there in the center of the front row and forced Shriver to say it to his face<\/em>.<\/p>\n And Shriver did. Or, at least, he tried<\/em> to \u2014 but bearing false witness directly to the neighbors you\u2019re bearing it against is a lot<\/em> harder than it is when they\u2019re not there. You<\/em> know that they<\/em> know that the hateful lies you\u2019re spewing are false. They don\u2019t have to denounce you or rebut you or shout that you\u2019re full of shit. They just need to be visibly present, reminding you that they know that you<\/em> know that you\u2019re full of shit.<\/p>\n Shriver rushes through his prepared statement, flop-sweating exactly like someone who is being forced to at least semi-consciously acknowledge, \u201cMy God, I, Joshua Shriver, really am full of shit.\u201d And then he fled the room as quickly as possible without taking any questions.<\/p>\n At that point, Moss stepped up to the podium and took questions from reporters himself.<\/p>\n \u201cSay it to my face\u201d or \u201cLook me in the eye and say that\u201d are sometimes said with a hint of physical threat. But the real power doesn\u2019t come from forcing someone to repeat their lies within punching distance. The real power comes from forcing them to recognize that you both<\/em> know they\u2019re full of shit. And from doing it without having to say a word.<\/p>\n \u2022 I used to work for a newspaper owned by Gannett. When I got there, it was a good paper and I loved my job. It was such a good paper and such a great job that I was terrified during the first round of layoffs, then joyously relieved that I survived them.<\/p>\n I was mostly relieved when I survived the second round of layoffs too. After those initial layoffs, the \u201cbelt-tightening\u201d and the realization that \u201cdoing more with less\u201d literally didn\u2019t add up meant we were no longer producing a good newspaper, but we were still managing to produce an OK one. And even though it was harder to do my job, it still seemed important and meaningful and was still sometimes enjoyable.<\/p>\n I realized I wasn\u2019t relieved when I survived the third round of layoffs. The job I used to love no longer really existed. I couldn\u2019t tell you if the newspaper was good or OK or no good at all, because I hadn\u2019t read it. Nobody had. The handful of people struggling to make all those unread words fit on the page darkly joked that our readers had the privilege of being the very first people to read some of the articles we were printing and that we hoped they\u2019d tell us whether or not they were accurate.<\/p>\n Losing that job in the fourth round of layoffs was financially devastating, but also liberating. By that point, the paper was a hack-work rag and the job I had once loved was frustrating hack-work. We weren\u2019t doing more with less, we were doing less and less. Every round of layoffs had made our work harder, with some of that work becoming impossible to do at all. The newsroom wasn\u2019t \u201cstreamlined\u201d or made \u201cmore efficient,\u201d it was mutilated and butchered down to an inefficient, struggling stump. Tasks that had once been simple, swift, cheap and efficient had become complicated, slow, expensive, and wasteful.<\/p>\n Gannett didn\u2019t make it\u2019s newspapers more \u201cefficient.\u201d It strip-mined them.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s the experience and the lens through which I view Steven Chung\u2019s question, \u201cIs Laying Off 15,000 IRS Employees the Best Way to Improve the Agency\u2019s Efficiency?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n The answer, obviously, is No. And also that none of these layoffs have anything to do with a goal of \u201cefficiency.\u201d The goal is strip-mining, liquidation, destruction, and the selling off of the parts.<\/p>\n Nobody ever says \u201cGee, I wish I\u2019d invested in Gannett stock back in 2000.\u201d The pillagers who destroyed that business were foolish, short-sighted, and destructive. But, in their defense, at least their leadership-by-layoff scheme was not also illegal and unconstitutional, like Musk\u2019s usurpation of congressional powers is.<\/p>\n \u2022 The Pledge of Allegiance is creepy af<\/a>.<\/p>\n Expecting and\/or requiring children to swear a daily loyalty oath to flag\/country\/Caesar is just deeply twisted, no matter how you frame it. \u201cStand, place your hand on your heart, and swear that you love me<\/em>\u201d is just skin-crawlingly creepy.<\/p>\n \u2022 I\u2019ve long been a fan of Joel Duff\u2019s blog Naturalis Historia<\/em><\/a>, where he does the hard, patient work of taking young-earth creationists claims seriously and engaging them in detail. The effect is devastating \u2014 a calm, earnest, politely friendly demolition of the nonsense, misinformation, and dishonesty that creationists have been selling.<\/p>\n Duff has been on a tear lately focused entirely on a single biblical site: the Dead Sea. Everything about this salty sea below sea level offers undeniable evidence of geological time. Like fish, creationism cannot survive in its waters.<\/p>\n Duff\u2019s multi-post series on the Dead Sea briefly turns away from salt deposits and stromatolites and such to also consider the abundant history of continuous human habitation in the area: \u201cBelow Sea Level, Beyond 6,000 Years -The Jordan Valley\u2019s Ancient Urban Landscape<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n It was exactly this \u201cancient urban landscape\u201d that sparked a severe crisis of faith for an evangelical classmate of mine when we visited the Dead Sea during a month of study abroad in the West Bank and Israel. I wrote about his crisis here: \u201cThe walls came tumbling down<\/a>.\u201d See also \u201cYou can\u2019t have a 10,000-year-old house in a 7,000-year-old universe<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 The title for this post comes from the Call\u2019s \u201cThe Walls Came Down<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2025\/02\/BearWitness.jpg\")
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