Three lethal threats to democracy: where did they learn this stuff?

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Among the many beloved features of The New York Times, in addition to its toxic stew of white op-ed columnists and its habit of selling section fronts on Sunday to flacks trying to wrangle some free publicity for their washed-up clients, is its weekly news quiz.

We don't have an original idea in our heads, so we thought we'd try one ourselves.  

Here it is: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common?

Answer below.

But to help you, let's introduce the three schmucks in question.

Our first threat is a household name, sort of, not because of anything he did, but because he is a survivor of America's greatest political dynasty.  Say hello to Bobby Kennedy, Jr.!

Bobby's running for President.  Like his dad.  Unlike his dad, who ran on a platform of social justice, Bobby Jr. is relying on lethal anti-vax drivel, plus spouting insane pro-Putin talking points.  In 2023 America, that's a crowd pleaser, at least if the crowd is drawn from the Republican base.

More specifically,

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of a US Attorney General and nephew of a president, has turned the Kennedy legacy upside down. Beginning in 2003, RFK Jr. abandoned his promising career as an environmental advocate to embrace the libertarian agenda of anti-vaccine and anti-science activism—a fascinating and dangerous U-turn from self-sacrifice to self-serving. 

There are a lot of self-serving politicians out there. But only a few have embraced ideas that have led to the deaths of countless innocents (Although to be sure George W. Bush qualifies in that league and may even top the table.):

[Bobby] Kennedy[, Jr.] continued to spread anti-vaccine hysteria, emerging as a walking public health hazard. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, appearing in public with a prominent local anti-vaccination figure.

By that September, the island nation was in the grip of a measles outbreak that eventually took the lives of more than 80 people. Experts blamed the outbreak on a sharp drop in measles vaccination rates, which had fallen to about 34% in 2018 from 74% the year before.

While the epidemic was still in full cry that November, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister denying that the outbreak could be blamed on "the so-called 'anti-vaccine' movement," and pointed his finger instead at "a defective vaccine" that failed to target a "mutated" virus and allowed it to spread to children.

"It is a regrettable possibility that these children are [casualties] of Merck's vaccine," he wrote. The veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski described the letter as "a masterpiece of antivaccine dissembling, misinformation, distortion, and lies," seemingly aimed at providing cover for anti-vaccine quacks trying to deflect responsibility for "discouraging people from vaccinating their children."

The grief-stricken parents of Samoa must be excited about Bobby's candidacy.

It's no wonder that the greatest support for Bobby's candidacy comes from Republican plug-uglies and social media hacks with a demonstrated record of subverting American democracy:

This week RFK Jr., with the blessing of no less than agent provocateur Steve Bannon filed papers with the Federal Election Commission stating his intent to oppose President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nomination, 

And of course the perpetually clueless forced-birther Ross Douthat believes that the remedy for Bobby's toxic anti-vax insanity is to debate him [link removed due to pisspoor content], which would of course not at all have the paradoxical effect of bringing his drivel to a broader audience of stooges.

If you are so interested in hearing Bobby's ravings you will have an opportunity to do so at this no doubt Chautauqua-like event:

 

Moms for Liberty being of course the extremist anti-knowledge hate mongers financed by Charlie Koch and other great plutocratic contributors to fair and free debate.

The Republicans behind Bobby's campaign intend to use him as a spoiler to take a bite out of Joe Biden in the hopes that it will be sufficient to peel off enough Jill Stein voters to rig the 2024 election.  Who's to say they're wrong?

Moving along, let's meet our next horrible subverter of democracy, Mark “Lumpy”Penn.  Your first understandable reaction might be: who tf is Mark Penn?

He's been finagling around politics for decades now, supposedly in the service of responsible “centrism.”  He once found a willing audience in Bill and Hillary Clinton (when they were not taking advice from whore-toe-polisher Dick Morris), but was kicked to the curb by Hillary Clinton in 2007 when she realized what everyone else had known for years: he was full of s***.

The New York Times story gives a handy capsule of his corrupt loathsomeness:

Mark Penn, the pollster who has advised Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1996, stepped down under pressure on Sunday as the chief political strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign after his private business arrangements again clashed with her campaign positions.

Mr. Penn, who was widely disliked by Mrs. Clinton’s fiercest loyalists and had bitterly feuded with many of them, sealed his fate last week by meeting with officials from Colombia, which hired him to help secure passage of a bilateral trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, a senator from New York, opposes.

Mr. Penn met with the Colombians in his role as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. He has refused to sever his ties to the company, which also represented Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and through a subsidiary represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq.

He sounds nice.  

Since that time he has nursed his grudge against the Clintons and by extension all Democrats, all the while pocketing a pantload of cash from his flackery.  His latest act of vengeance is a dirty tricks operation disingenuously called No Labels, which he runs with his no doubt charming wife Nancy Jacobson and buckets of dark money from Republican plutocrats eager to undermine Biden's re-election prospects:

Jim Messina, the Montana-bred Obama reelection campaign manager prone to colorful language, suggested that Jacobson and Penn were straining for power and attention. They “are sort of no longer relevant within the party,” he told me, “so now they’re going outside the party looking for relevancy.” Messina also trashed the group as essentially fronting for Trump. “Besides giving directly to Donald Trump’s campaign, the best thing you can do to elect Donald Trump is to support No Labels,” Messina said.

Update – maybe his wife Nancy Jacobson isn't that nice after all:

Ex-aides said there is incredibly high turnover. And according to one former staffer, No Labels executives would ask employees to write positive reviews on the job-posting and workplace review site Glassdoor to counteract the more numerous bad ones. Asked if that was the case, Jacobson simply shrugged and casually said, “yeah.” 

Oh.  And sounds like she married the right guy:

But politics these days is merely Penn’s hobby. Even while he worked for Hillary, he was an executive inside a PR firm owned by WPP. He left in 2012 after it became clear that Sorrell, then CEO, would never let him run the giant holding company. (Sorrell remarked pointedly that Penn’s successor was “collegial with good people skills.”) 

Copy that.

But the issue is not Lumpy's repellent personality.  It's that he is one of the chief conspirators in a shadowy scheme to mobilize dirty Republican money behind running a third party candidate to swing the election to Donald Trump (or if the Twice-Indicted Sex Offender strokes out before Election Day or whatever equally abhorrent stooge the Republicans nominate):

And Penn’s wife, Nancy Jacobson, runs No Labels, the purportedly hard-core moderate outside group currently working to prop up a serious third-party “unity ticket” in 2024. That ticket could spell doom for Joe Biden and Democrats hoping to keep control of the White House—and keep Donald Trump out of it.

Our final entry in today's news quiz is a much quieter but in his own way even more dangerous and subversive figure: Chief Justice John Roberts.

What's he doing lumped in with Bobby and Lumpy?  Is it just that he presides benignly over the most corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court since, oh, maybe, the one that tried to chuck out the New Deal or the one that said Black persons weren't – persons? Sure, that's part of it, not to mention his own persistent grotesque conflict of interest: his spouse trousers (or I'm sure like the good Catholic girl she is, skirts) millions in placement fees from the same monstrous Washington law firms that appear every f***king term before her husband.

We're sure she doesn't kiss and tell her hubby which of those firms have been naughty or nice, because they're all lining up to get in good with Mrs. Chief Justice.  Wouldn't you?  Anyway, thanks to the laughably lax Supreme Court ethics rules, us plebeians will never know.

That's not the real problem though.  The real problem is that Roberts has spent virtually his entire legal career, first as a right-wing bureaucrat, then as a Bush campaign mouthpiece, and now in his current gig working feverishly and successfully to undermine American democracy:

 More specifically, according to the Brennan Center:

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court eviscerated a central component of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision removed the requirement for jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval for new voting policies — a process called “preclearance.” Without this guardrail, voters lost a bulwark against discriminatory voting policies, and states previously subject to preclearance were free to implement discriminatory restrictions on voting access without advance checks. Many states did exactly that.

Along with a prior decision narrowly interpreting constitutional protections for voting rights, Shelby County also sent a message to the nation that the federal courts would no longer play their historic role as a robust protector of voting rights. In the years since, the Court has repeatedly confirmed this, signaling to states that they could pass restrictive voting laws without fear of legal consequence.

And who wielded the knife?  John Roberts, that's who:

 

Politico's takedown explained that Roberts's ludicrous Shelby County opinion voided in effect the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that lots had changed since Congress first specified which parts of the country had to preclear changes in voting laws with the Justice Department.  (As the Brennan Center's data, supra, established, maybe they haven't changed that much).  He also cried about the cruelty endured by states and counties who had to preclear their changes while watching tearfully places like Massachusetts that were not subject to preclearance.

As a result Southern states, ruled by white supremacist Republicans, have passed many laws intended to limit the ability of Democrats to vote without oversight from the Justice Department.  And it's worked great – for white Republicans.

And now the moment America has been waiting for.  The question was: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common? 

The answer is – and we must have absolute silence [The Spy is often greeted by absolute silence – Ed. McMahon]: all three scourges entered Harvard College on the same bright September day in 1972.

Which gives rise to (but does not beg, thank you Dartmouth) the question: is Harvard to blame?

Alas we only have photos of John Roberts' freshman year

We think in large part yes.  We will attest that Bobby and Lumpy entered Harvard as egregious a**holes.  We don't know about John Roberts, alone in his room with his bong.

But Harvard certainly played a major role in their shameful deportment since.  There they learned to speak authoritatively on subjects about which they knew nothing.  There they learned to ignore the views of others, especially non-white non-male non-Harvard graduates.  There they learned that they were entitled to impose their ridiculous views on others, no matter what harm resulted.

And there they learned, even though Professor Henry Kissinger had already left his office in Littauer for a career as a war criminal and Nixon prayer partner, that they knew best and if others didn't understand that, it was a sign of their third-rate intellect.  And therefore, according to the great Prof. Kissinger, they better duck.

We humbly suggest that Harvard take a break from selling off its schools and paving Allston to ensure that this doesn't happen again.  Perhaps to their Core Curriculum they should add courses like “Just Because You're Here, You Don't Know What You're Talking About,” “Shut Up and Listen,” or even “Try Not To F**k Everything Up For The Rest of Us.”

The chances of this happening are in our estimate slim to none, because courses like this might get young minds to think the same things about their professors, whom they observe at a respectful distance from the 82d row of Sanders Theater.

And if there's one lesson known to every faculty member of the Finagling Plutocrat (formerly Harvard) School of Arts & Sciences, it's that humility is for losers.

Nick Kristof discovers the real threat to America: arrogant liberals!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

We spend a lot of time wailing about the idiotic ramblings of New York Times columnists like Maureen Dowd, Soprassata Dave Brooks, Bretbug, Pamela Pill, Six-Months Tom, and Ross, the boy no one would have lunch with in Leverett House.  

We owe them an apology, because there is no reason to single out these hacks for obloquy while ignoring the crap churned out by former Oregon Gov. Nick Kristof.

With democracy under attack, the republic hanging by a thread, and generations of social progress being rolled back by white supremacists and a blatantly illegitimate and corrupt Supreme Court, Gov. Kristof says today that the real problem is, wait for it,

Gov. Kristof has some thoughts about liberals

Wait some more.

Better sit down with a stiff drink.

OK, it's liberal arrogance.

And it's not just liberal arrogance today.  It's liberal arrogance since we don't know the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, apparently:

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about. Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism.

We're a boomer, too. In fact we may even be older than Gov. Kristof.  

And unlike the Governor, we remember the 1960's.  We remember a lot of old white guys, Democratic and Republican, lecturing us endlessly about Soviet Communism and the threat of what they called Red China.

Their solution to that threat was Vietnam.

Opposing the pointless, bloody, counterproductive, unwinnable, and essentially stupid enterprise of Vietnam was held out to us for years as a requirement for showing we were serious about opposing global totalitarianism and Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

It was all bollocks, as history shows.  Over a million died in Southeast Asia to prove to Nick Kristof's satisfaction how serious liberals were about the “threat” of “global totalitarianism.”

In fact, when confronted by the real specter of Soviet Communism on the march,

 serious white men so very concerned about stopping global totalitarianism did -- nothing:

By the way, not sending in the Army to resist the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was of course the right decision.  But you can't blame it on liberals.

And fun fact: the anti-war critique of Vietnam was right in 1965 and every year thereafter.  If you resolutely opposed the insanity of Vietnam and its spinoffs in Cambodia and Laos (brought to you by beloved serious centenarian Henry Kissinger), you were liberal.  You were right.  And if you want to take a victory lap, by all means do so.

Why weren't they fighting global totalitarianism?

Gov. Kristof must have been too busy measuring the drapes in the Oregon State House to remember the second great battle of the 1960's: the struggle for civil rights.  If you were a liberal who supported desegregating the South, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and then actually did not go ballistic when someone proposed building moderate-income housing in your lily-white suburb or busing Black children into your beautiful schools, you were right again.

Where are we so far?  

Anti-war and pro-civil rights liberals were right about everything in the 1960's.  Let's now focus on the Governor's attack on modern-day progressives.  Guess what: it's also bollocks!

What are liberals wrong about today?  You'll never guess (if you have wisely chosen not to read the last five years of the Times's pisspoor Op-Ed page):

I fear that liberals react to all this by inflating with self-righteousness. One lesson of history — and of ancient Greek playwrights like Aeschylus — is that it’s dangerous to become too full of yourself. Just ask Oedipus. (But hurry, because there are progressive calls to cancel classics.)

Yeah, liberals are too full of themselves, says this extremely humble bloviator.

Although it's hard-right extremists that are yanking books out of school libraries because they are “pornographic” (like Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Day poem delivered to an audience of millions without apparent harm), it's those insufferable progressives that want to throw Homer in the dumpster.

Quick quiz: name a liberal arts college in America today where you can't read Homer or Plato.  We'll wait.  At Gov. Kristof's beloved University of Oregon, you can study:

 

Where did Kristof get his stupid point about the liberal attack on classical literature?  Click on the handy link he provided and you get an essay attacking some academic who argues that the classics can only be understand by placing them in the context of a culture that he says engaged in systematic racism and sexism.

Well, maybe that's one way to look at it.  You can agree or disagree.  But no one is saying you can't read Homer.  He's saying that the proper way to read Homer is in the context of his culture, which is hardly a radical, liberal, or progressive idea.  It's just an idea that's been around a long time.

Speaking of understanding the Greeks, it's remarkable that the same people who love to attack progressives as so woke are also the ones who love to attack the sexual practices of people like Plato and Aristotle.  To them, Plato's Symposium is nothing more than a grooming party. Is it any wonder that Xantippe was so irritable?  If Florida Gov. Ron “Puddin' Fingers” DeSantis can censor books about penguins with two daddies, wait until he gets his mitts on Socrates and his boys.  But you don't hear Gov. Kristof talking about the arrogance of the anti-gay right.

We actually had a fine classical education, starting with Latin in seventh grade.  After years of exposure to thrilling tales of Caesar, hard pressed on all sides by the Gauls, bringing up his legions by means of forced marches, we decided that the purpose of taking Latin (rather than something useful and important, like Spanish) was to brand the student as a member of a small elite who could study obscure and exotic things because they would never have to worry about making a living.

Then we got to college and read (in translation) the Greek classics.  As Bertie Wooster would say, they were cracking.  You should read them.  They have lessons for us, but they aren't about how we should be more humble in dealing with Republican extremism. And they certainly weren't about passing off tired clichés as daring original thought.

There's more but you catch the drift: his attack on supposedly arrogant liberals is a falsified both-sides litany of tired tropes. 

People say dumb s*** all the time.  The New York Times Op-Ed page proves this every day, and 12 times on Sunday.  That doesn't mean there's any equivalence to be drawn between occasional clangers served up by those on the left and the well-funded widely-supported Republican attack on free inquiry, thought, and history itself.

Maybe not being able to grasp this very obvious point was the reason that Nick Kristof was not chosen by the people of Oregon to serve as their Governor.

It could also be because he wasn't an Oregon resident under state law, which he thought didn't apply to the great moderate minds of the Times Editorial Pages.  You can talk about Icarus all you want, but it was Nick Kristof who had to be fished out of the drink off the coast of Oregon.

Special Bonus Edition: A Republican Double Play

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

Although Henry Kissinger inexplicably remains alive (see infra), the Grim Reaper finally collected two of his most loathsome Republican contemporaries: insane bigots Pat Robertson and James Watt.

Pat's infamy proved more durable than Jim's, but the passing of both is well worth celebrating because their despicable deeds, and the undeserved respect they were accorded by journalists that should have known better, shine a brilliant light on the intimate relationship between evil Republican bigotry, plutocracy, and subversion then and now.

At a time when our new Wonderful Republican Allies are maintaining with a straight face and a handsome home-studio backdrop that everything was grand in their old party until it was unaccountably hijacked in 2016, let's take a look at the two Republican stiffs and how they helped create the Republican world that now cheers every indictment of their treasonous Tangerine-Faced Leader.

We'll start with Jim Watt, an egregious Western whack job in the mold of Dick Cheney, whom St. Ronald of Bitburg installed as Secretary of the Interior to undercut the halting progress that his predecessor, the then-reviled and now-beloved Jimmy Carter, made toward energy conservation.  (In an early example of the kind of crowd-pleasing performative spite that is the sole animating force of all Republican acts today, St. Ronald removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.) 

Lovable St. Ronny brought Jim in to strip mine if not sell our national parks and wilderness.  According to The New York Times, he did his level best:

But it wasn't just his relentless pursuit of environmental degradation that marked him as a pioneering modern Republican.  It was three other loathsome qualities that paved the way for today's indicted Republican front-runner:

1.  Claiming his terrible selfish deeds were inspired by God Almighty.  It wasn't just that ol' Jim hated the natural world; it was that as a devout Christian, he was expecting to be raptured up to Heaven at any time and so why not let Exxon drill next to Old Faithful while we're just hanging around:

James Watt had a bold vision for Yellowstone

After taking office in 1981, Mr. Watt was asked at a hearing of the House Interior Committee if he favored preserving wilderness areas for future generations. ...

He replied, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

Mr. Watt’s response startled some committee members, but seemed to explain his intention to ease restrictions on the use of millions of acres of public lands. 

Jesus H. Christ.

2. Impugning the patriotism of his political opponents.  Some people might think we should save our wilderness; others think that we should strip mine the Grand Canyon.  People can disagree.  Not according to Watt:

Mr. Watt attacked critics aggressively. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he said in a favorite line. “It’s liberals and Americans.” He became the Republican Party’s third most sought-after speaker, after President Reagan and George Bush, who was then vice president. 

That's the punch line: the Republican yahoos ate this stuff up. Scoundrels from George W. Bush up to and including Ted Cruz noticed.

3. Crude insult comedy. Like every other aspect of his miserable Adderall-addicted life, the Tangerine-Faced Victim stole his insult comedy bit.  Republicans have been working on their Jack E. Leonard routines for 40 years.  Jim Watt thrilled the Republican faithful with his crude attacks on those who wanted to protect the environment from Watt's big money owners.

St. Ronnie didn't blink when Watt pioneered today's common Republican threat to shoot their political opponents: “If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box,” he remarked flippantly, “perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” [Wait for laff]

But back in the pre-Trump 1980's it was still possible for Republicans to go too far:

He committed his last gaffe in a talk to a business group. Upset by a Senate vote barring him from leasing any more federal land for coal mining, he described a panel reviewing his coal-leasing policies as having “every kind of mixture — I have a Black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

Even though the line killed in the room, his boss, who knew how to pitch the dog whistle so only the white dogs could hear it, had had enough.  Watt was out, but the Reagan Administration's war on the environment continued under the able leadership of one of St. Ronnie's favorite enforcers, Bill Clark.

By the way, even during the Reagan Administration, the threat of global warming was clear:

An atmospheric greenhouse effect caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels will make the Earth a hotter and more difficult place to live during the next century.... As concentrations of [greenhouse] gases increase in the atmosphere, global temperatures will rise, changing precipitation patterns and raising the sea level, probably causing droughts across the nation's agricultural heartland, as well as coastal flooding. The climate expected by the end of the 21st century resembles none that man has ever experienced, warming by an average of six degrees Fahrenheit or more.

Disruption of human habitat, agricultural patterns and ocean productivity could interrupt food supplies in some areas, change relationships among nations, generate large population shifts and lead to bitter global conflict. Entire ecosystems, such as the Arctic tundra, may be destroyed.

The Republican position, then as now, was to do nothing and drill, baby, drill.  But it was more fun to focus on Watt's feud with the Beach Boys.

As odious as he was, Watt's influence pales in comparison to the bigot lunatic Holy Roller who made a fortune dispensing supposedly Christian bigotry on TV while transforming the Republican Party into a tool of his fellow white racists.

Despite his profuse schmearing of religiosity, Robertson was a child of privilege who after graduating from Yale Law School parlayed a Korean War draft deferment through the efforts of his politically powerful father (no doubt inspiring ol' Bone Spurs' draft-dodging years later) into many years of louche fun as a NYC lounge lizard. 

Figuring out that the safest path to wealth and power was pretending to profess Christianity, he turned an obscure UHF TV station into a $1,900,000,000 media empire.  Talk about the wages of sin!

As Greg Sargent and Ron Perlstein recapitulated in a memorial, um, tribute, the results were catastrophic:

[Sargent:] Robertson relentlessly demonized gay people. Between that and him making abortion central to GOP politics, his influence on the party is felt today in the end of abortion rights, in extreme anti-choice laws on the state level and in the right’s attacks on LGBTQ people.

[Perlstein;] Yes, yes, yes. Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow.

If you want to talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and women who are dying because of it, look at his response to 9/11, when he and Jerry Falwell go on camera and say that God has given us what we deserve. The villains they cite are the ACLU, the “paganists,” the “gays and lesbians” and the “abortionists.”

Pat Robertson was the world's greatest Christian

You should read the whole column for yourself, which make an irrefutable case for the historical fact that Republicans have mobilized bigotry and greed for decades to debase our country and destroy democracy, no matter how many ex-Republican flacks and shills try to tell you otherwise, Rick Wilson.

The hypocrisy was world-class.  But that's not really the point.  The point is that neither Watt nor Robertson could have done nearly as much harm had not the press, ever eager to burnish its pretense of “objectivity,” refused to tell the truth about these corrupt bigots.

Watt was eulogized by the Times after his departure thusly:

Mr. Watt's policies and his administrative procedures affecting the public lands and resources placed under his stewardship at the Interior Department, along with his aggressive style in carrying out those policies, also generated an erosive tide of ill will against him and the Administration he served, a tide that had been rising almost since the day he took office. But Mr. Watt had the support of many, especially in the West and on the Republican right, as an able administrator and successful advocate of developing public resources as an impetus to economic growth.  

Watt's bigotry was treated not as a shocking indictment of the Reagan Administration's casual racism and plutocrat-lovin' white supremacy but as a harmless “gaffe” while his failure to save us from global warming while there was still time was a matter of “style.”

But the media's failure to call out the nonstop eructations of religious hatred from Robertson and fellow bigot grifters like Jerry Falwell was far more profound.  Here's a representative sample from The New York Times in 1980, which described a busy and influential gang of nice devout Republicans until you got a long way down:

Equal rights for sexual perverts?  Whatever do they mean by that?  And what's so evil about Gloria Steinem? Or indeed equal rights for women?  Back in 1980, the Times's deep reporting didn't take that plunge.

By allowing hatemongers to pass themselves off as ordinary friendly Christians, the media first whitewashed and then legitimized the injection of this insane hatred and bigotry into the political bloodstream.  Once there, like untreated syphilis, it infects, inflames, and sickens every part of the body politic.  

And they're still at it!  Here's a bog-standard sample from The New York Times in March, 2023:

Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curriculums in schools and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shaped by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom.  

This language appears to be a long euphemism for the following facts about white supremacist Christian Republicans: 1) they are opposed to teaching the truth about America's shameful history of systemic racism because that truth undercuts their unearned grievance, 2) they seek to shame, shun, discriminate, and torment LGBTQ individuals purely on the basis of their own bigotry, and 3) a large number of them propagate lethal unscientific anti-vax anti-public health lies that prevent the country from protecting itself against a fatal disease that has thus far claimed 1,400,000 human lives.

That's the objective truth.  If only the media could bring itself to report it, the skies over Manhattan might not be glowing orange with choking lethal smoke.  That prospect would be limited to Watt's and Robertson's new home for eternity.