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Mike Pence Has “Militant Agenda” Against Women, the Poor, Immigrants

Jeremy Scahill talking:

I’ve been covering Mike Pence for almost a decade, and my initial gateway into covering Pence is because he was one of the candidates that received the most funding from Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, who during the Bush-Cheney years operated what amounted to a Christian supremacist neo-Crusader militia. And Pence was actually the member of Congress that invited and welcomed and threw a party for Erik Prince in the aftermath of the Nisoor Square massacre in Baghdad in 2007, when Blackwater operatives killed a dozen and a half Iraqi civilians, including small children. So, Pence sort of was on my radar because of looking at who Erik Prince and his family were funding.

You look at Pence’s evolution as a political figure, and in many ways it is the story of how the radical religious right gained such prominence and now is in an unprecedented position to wield power. Some may say, “Oh, well, wasn’t George W. Bush the same mentality?” These guys are more extreme than George Bush on issues of religion, on issues of women’s right to choose, on immigrant rights, on gay marriage—a slew of issues. I mean, they really make Dick Cheney look like a reasonable guy on some of these policies. And, in fact, Mike Pence says that Cheney is one of his mentors and examples and whose footsteps he wants to follow in as vice president, combined, though, with a really radical Christian agenda.

part of what I was doing with this article was playing with the way that so many people have used these terms to describe people that are perverting the religion of Islam in the name of ISIS or al-Qaeda, etc., and I sort of did it as a social experiment, and I got inundated with people demanding that I retract these labels. And some of those people, in their emails to me, actually use these same terms to describe the religion of Islam.

So, but what I’m getting at is that Mike Pence is not just against gay people being together in a relationship; he wants to legislate a ban on those issues. He wants to repeal Roe v. Wade. As he said, he wants to put it in the ash heap of history. Their primary agenda, on a social level, is basically taking us back to medieval times when it comes to the rights of women, the rights of immigrants, the rights of the poor, the humanhood of all of these sort of vulnerable, targeted groups.

And, you know, Mike Pence, his personal history is interesting. He was raised in an Irish Catholic, Kennedy Democrat household, and then he was converted, on the spot, at a Christian music festival in Kentucky while he was in college. And he sort of now describes himself as an evangelical Catholic. But his sort of intellectual role models within this, what I call a Christian supremacist world, are people like the famed radical right-wing Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus, who was an evangelical and converted to being a Catholic, Gary Bauer and James Dobson, you know, ferocious right-wing, anti-woman activists. These are the people that sort of populate the world that Mike Pence comes out of. And Pence has always been viewed as one of the prized warriors of the radical religious right.

In Indiana, his state was one of the most—had one of the most restrictive, draconian rules on abortion, in the criminalizing of abortion. He actually tried to ram through a law that would have required fetal tissue or fetuses that were aborted to receive a proper burial. And, you know, a judge intervened, a federal judge intervened, the day before this was to take hold, and said this is quite likely unconstitutional. He denied—he held up HIV medication and treatment funding, trying to put on it a requirement that it come with a therapy that would preach against the evils of gay sex. He has said that he believes that the only safe sex is no sex, and he chided former Secretary of State Colin Powell for suggesting that people should use condoms when having sex.

– Plan Parenthood has called Vice President-elect Mike Pence, quote, “the anti-women’s health crusader,” noting that Pence has already passed extreme anti-abortion, anti-Planned Parenthood, anti-LGBTQ laws. Since the election, the group says it has received 20,000 donations made from its supporters in the name of Mike Pence.

even like liberal pundits and major newspapers have sort of referred to him as like the adult in the room, and this is going to be the reasonable guy who will be able to have a conversation with the Democrats. I mean, Mike Pence is anything but reasonable. I mean, this is a guy who has a militant agenda against women, against the poor, against immigrants. But also, remember, he is going to be running both domestic and foreign policy, according to Donald Trump Jr. Now, the Trump campaign walks that back and says, “Oh, we didn’t say that.” I think it’s very likely they did say that. And that becomes extremely important when you look at the composition of the Supreme Court right now. You know, the Republicans have effectively stopped Obama from putting Merrick Garland in as a Supreme Court justice. We have the potential for these guys to be putting in two, maybe more, Supreme Court justices. The court will tilt as sharp to the right as it’s been certainly in our lifetime and could actually raise the prospect of a full attempt to criminalize abortion.

Just quickly, also, on foreign policy, you know, Mike Pence is an extremely hawkish neocon when it comes to redrawing maps in the Middle East. He is now coming to terms with the fact that he loves torture. He was one of those Republicans who was sort of saying John McCain is right on this; now he’s walking that back. The strategy that they’ve said they’ll employ against ISIS is just like bomb the blank out of them, as Donald Trump put it.

Mike Pence, though, is an interesting guy. The few areas where I actually think he has decent policy ideas, he’s now slowly backing away from them. One is, Mike Pence was one of the only members of Congress to support a shield law for journalists to protect confidential sources. And Mike Pence actually had a very strong position on that. The language of the bill that they ended up putting forward, that of course did not pass, was weak in its exceptions for national security, which is what they use against, well, The Intercept and other places to conduct surveillance on journalists. But it was there. He also has walked back his opposition to warrantless wiretapping. In the state of Indiana, he tried to require probable cause in order for local law enforcement to use Stingray surveillance devices against people. But he wants a permanent PATRIOT Act, and he doesn’t want federal law enforcement to have a warrant. So, on these issues where he may have had some logical, sane policy ideas, Trump has all but destroyed that. And Pence is now a foot soldier in this lunatic agenda, that joins his own lunatic agenda. So, it’s kind of like the worst of both worlds from the right.

Mike Pence has suggested that the United States should pass a law, or pass a resolution, rather, supporting an Israeli attack on Iran, should they decide to do that.

You know, Pence, also, on climate change, I call him sort of climate change curious. He once said it was a fraud and wrote that, and that was part of his political campaign, was to say climate change is a total myth, and it’s a fraud. Now he’s sort of saying, “Well, yeah, I guess that human actions and pollution contribute to this, but I don’t want us to do anything about it, because jobs.” You know, there’s this whole thing about Trump restarting coal. First of all, they’re lying to those workers, you know, that they’re going to be reopening this booming coal industry. You know, for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment, they’re going to lose that. But to have a—to have two people running this country who have either dog-whistled or blatantly said that climate change is a hoax bodes very, very dim for the prospects of our environment and the world that we’re going to leave our children and our grandchildren.

It’s a frightening administration on a number of levels, because it combines the buffoonery of Trump’s public persona with nuclear weapons and being the most powerful economic force in the world right now, second maybe to China, with this radical right-wing Christian supremacist agenda. They want to wipe out Muslims. That’s the clearest definition of a religious supremacy: You want to wipe out another people because of their religion. ANd Pence is in good company in the emerging Cabinet in terms of viewing Islam as an ideology that needs to be exterminated, along with its followers.
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Jeremy Scahill
co-founder of The Intercept. His latest book is The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.

— source democracynow.org

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