As painful as it might be, it is fascinating to watch a Frank Luntz focus group to understand the Trumpian base in Alabama.
They are an interesting example of confirmation bias among other things, as though divergent media had no intersecting areas of truth.
In a Pensacola, Florida rally Friday evening, Republican state Senator Doug Broxson suggested to supporters of Donald Trump that the president’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem may usher in the biblical end times.
“Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard about Jerusalem — where the King of Kings [applause] where our soon coming King is coming back to Jerusalem, it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be capital of Israel,” Broxson predicted. The crowd cheered.
This week, theological scholar Dr. Diana Butler Bass wrote a Twitter thread explaining the link between recognition of Jerusalem, evangelical Christians, and the apocalypse. That is important because rebuilding the Temple is the event that will spark the events of the Book of Revelation and the End Times.”
According to Bass, the counsel of evangelical adviser that Trump surrounds himself with take such “End Times” prophecies literally
George Thomas Wilson, a retired magazine-marketing and P.R. professional now living in New York City, has never forgotten his first criminal-law class, at the University of Alabama School of Law, in 1974. It was taught by Clint McGee, who graduated from the law school himself, in 1940. Early in the class, McGee called on one of Wilson’s classmates, a United States Military Academy graduate named Roy Moore. “And, for the entire hour, McGee kept him standing and talking, standing and talking,” Wilson told me recently. “Finally, at the end of the hour, McGee said to him, ‘Mr. Moore, I have been teaching in this school for thirty years, and in all of that time you’re the most mixed-up person I’ve ever taught. I’m going to call you Fruit Salad.”
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Guy Martin taught Moore in a seminar titled Discrimination in Employment. He, too, served in Vietnam. Veterans told him that Moore demanded that he be saluted on the ground in Vietnam, Martin said, which everyone knew was a foolish thing to do. “When you go to Vietnam as an officer, you don’t ask anybody to salute you, because the Viet Cong would shoot officers,” he explained. “You’ve heard this a million times in training.” If Moore indeed violated this rule, Martin went on, “There’s nothing more telling about a person’s capability and character and base intelligence. It’s crazy.” In September, shortly before the Republican primary runoff, Martin, a self-described moderate, wrote an editorial in a local paper warning voters about his former student. In it, he describes Moore as a pupil so immune to logic and reason that he forced his exasperated teacher to “abandon the Socratic method of class participation in favor of the lecture mode.” (Martin remembers giving him “a C or a D. He did enough to pass.”)
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