Truth Is Scarce During Campaign Season

[0:00] If a candidate at a debate lies through their teeth, can we even call it a debate? Trump is so corrupt, he politicizes disaster recovery, and his cult members regurgitate the lies. And one Ohio school board stands up to LifeWise Academy, and it was glorious. I’m Doug Berger. And this is Secular Left.

[0:33] Music.

[0:44] As we barrel towards election day in November, the political ads, I’ve talked about the political ads before, most of them are lies. The big ticket packs, the ones that have the unlimited funds, you know, the Congressional Leadership Fund, or American Prosperity Fund, or whatever. And then it always has the disclaimer at the end that this isn’t endorsed by any candidates, or approved by any candidates. Of course that’s BS. When these big huge packs put out ads, they don’t probably outrightly or out in the open coordinate with campaigns, but you know they’ve got to be coordinating something. Because the wording and the message are always similar to what the candidate talks about. So sometimes you can’t tell.

[1:50] The thing that I like to point out to people is that unlike regular advertisements for businesses, where if a business puts out false advertising, they can get in trouble by the Federal Trade Commission, and state trade commissions, too, can also penalize companies for false advertising. Political ads are covered under the First Amendment. That means that there can’t be any punishment for it. That means that the ads can lie. They can bold-faced lie.

[2:31] And many of them have this season. Well, every season. And I’m sure that there are people on the conservative side who are agreeing with me and saying, oh yeah, that Kamala Harris ad, blah, blah, blah, that was a lie, da, da, da. I’m talking about demonstratively false. That means that they actually say something that is entirely false. Such as, there was this one, I forget who the candidate, it might have been Derek Maron, because he’s my favorite. Derek Maron put out this ad, or a PAC associated with his campaign put out this ad, And it’s this truck driver, supposed truck driver, claiming that it cost him almost $500 to fill up his truck. And then he says, because Kamala Harris worked with Joe Biden to pass the Inflation Act.

[3:26] And it has it on the side of the truck. Well, that’s a lie. Because the name of the act that they’re referring to is not called the Inflation Act. It was called the Inflation Reduction Act.

[3:40] But see, they leave that part out. In these fact-checking websites like Snopes and PolitiFacts, they’ll see something like that and they’ll say, it lacks context. And they’ll say, partly true. Because what they’re saying is, yes, they passed a law, but it wasn’t this name. Rather than the whole context. That the candidate is lying. We had the vice presidential debate. the week that I’m recording this episode. And I don’t watch the debates live. I just don’t. I tape them. I record them to watch later. And the reason why I do that is because I think they’re boring. Debates are boring. I don’t think that the debates do any good. You know especially I’m talking about presidential debates I’m not talking about dog catcher debates or or school board candidate debates and things like that where you may not have heard of them but you know this whole election season it’s like there shouldn’t be any undecided voters there shouldn’t be anybody on the fence there really shouldn’t and I don’t think there is and if there is it’s a very small percentage percentage.

[5:06] And so basically what it is, is these debates are put on so that candidates have clips that they can then use in more political ads. Either for good or for bad. You know, if your opponent says something wacko, you cut it and put it in an ad. If you say something inspiring, then you cut it and put it in an ad. So basically, I think of the debate as just a big, huge political ad, essentially. And we know from the analysis after the vice presidential debate that C.F. Vance did an excellent job. He was polished. And he basically polished a turd. Everything that came out of his mouth was a mischaracterization, a missing context, or outright lies.

[6:09] I know some of the outright lies have been talked about, such as claiming that Trump saved Obamacare, which is further from the truth than anything. Thing, it just stunned some of the political pundits that night that he would say that, because that has been refuted. Just looking at history, you can tell that that’s been refuted. So basically, anything that came out of his mouth was a lie. The whole debate, debate. Just he didn’t tell the truth once. Well, no, he did say that he did tell the truth once when he knew who the candidate was and everything. The other thing that was swirling around, too, was that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who is prosecuting former felon Trump Trump, for his election interference case, came out with a brief for the indictment that pretty much has the smoking gun. He did interfere with the election.

[7:31] And the question was whether or not his actions were official actions, Because his buddies on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this summer that if a president has an official action, it is always immune from prosecution, criminal prosecution. And so the question was, what acts that Trump did to interfere with the election in 2020…

[8:01] Which was private and which was part of his official function. And Smith made a very good case that anything that he did, trying to, like, when he called the election people in the different states to try to get the votes thrown out, when he pressured the governor, when he told Pence to not certify the vote, All of those actions, Smith alleges, were private actions as a candidate for office. Because, and this is the important part, the President of the United States plays no part in the election process. There is nothing that he does as his official job that has anything to do with the elections. Because the elections are not federalized, for one thing. It’s dependent on the states. Each individual state runs it. Now, I have talked about this before here, that I don’t agree with that. I think the presidential elections should be federalized. We should all play by the same rules in every single state for national, congressional, Senate, and presidential elections. I don’t think you should leave that up to the states.

[9:27] But in this case, it works out because the president has nothing to do with elections. So he shouldn’t be calling states to complain. He shouldn’t be trying to get Pence not to certify the election because that’s not part of his job.

[9:44] And so I’m hopeful that that’s going to help. Now, of course, now the next thing that needs to happen is Trump needs to lose in November. November, because he’s already stated that should he win in November during his second term, he is going to get rid of any legal case against him by the Justice Department. You know, so that’s why he needs to win, so that he can possibly stay out of jail. Now, it won’t have anything to do with his state conviction. However, I highly doubt that the New York state judge is going to put him in jail should he be the president in 2025. It’s more like they’re going to, I forget what the term is, set aside the conviction until he leaves office. So he’ll still be hanging over him, but he won’t have to go to jail or do anything. Before the end of his term. So the main thing is that Trump needs to lose in November for any of this to happen. Of course, one of the highlights of the vice presidential debate was when Governor Walz explicitly asked C.F. Vance if Trump lost the 2020 election.

[11:12] And CF started blathering on about, I’m here about the future, da, da, da. And Wallace comes back with, that’s a damnable non-answer, damnable non-answer, which it was. And the thing is, I guess he was at a rally, CF Vance was at a rally the next day, and he answered a question about it from, I believe it might be from the audience. I’m not sure because I haven’t seen the whole video that this is taken from, but I’m assuming it was like a town hall type thing. And he’s answering questions from the audience. Why didn’t you answer the question last night during the debate about who won the 2020 presidential election? Well, look, here’s the simple reason. and the media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office. And that’s all well and good, except that the guy at the top of the ticket hasn’t gotten the memo because he just can’t shut up about the 2020 election.

[12:28] This is a clip of the former felon, or not the former, why do I say the former felon? The convicted felon, Trump, at a rally in Michigan, also the day after the vice presidential debate. You know, last time, last election, we did great in 2016. A lot of people don’t know we did much better in 2020. We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election. You have to tell Kamala Harris, that’s why I’m doing it again. If I thought I lost, I wouldn’t be doing this again. You know where I’d be right now? On the beaches of Monte Carlo, maybe, or someplace. So it’s going to be interesting to see. Like I said, I listened to some of the pundits and stuff after the debate.

[13:21] And I probably want to talk about some of that, probably do that in another segment in the future. But, yeah, so I agree with the general political establishment that Governor Walz was, he won on the substance of the debate.

[13:45] Now, the polling is showing that it was tied. It was a draw. And I just don’t agree with that. I think if you lie, if you’re in a debate and you lie, you lose. You’ve lost the debate. I mean, that’s how it works in university. C.F. Vance should know that. that if you lie, if you misstate an opponent’s position, or if you offer false information during a debate, you’ve lost the debate. But of course, like I said, the debate really doesn’t mean anything in the whole scheme of things. Again, it’s just to have clips for your future election ads. And so that’s what they’re going to do and I know probably I think like the next day the Democrats were using some of those, bon mots from CF Vance as part of their political ad package so that’ll be interesting the election’s going to be interesting, For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us.

[15:10] Music.

[15:15] So we experienced a major hurricane in the past week, or last week, late last week. Yeah. On the 30th, was it the 30th? Yeah, the 29th, 30th, that weekend, a major Category 4 hurricane hit Florida, Haleen, and it ripped through the panhandle of Florida, up into Georgia, and then through South Carolina, and up to western North Carolina and Tennessee. to see.

[15:55] Now, the storm, and I watch some of the Weather Channel stuff and Jim Cantor, you know, when Jim Cantor shows up in your area, it’s probably a hurricane. That guy, he’s just ambiguous. Anyway, so I watch most of the coverage, you know, and I’m always, you know, I feel for the the people that have to go through all that and the damage that it causes and the disruption in their lives. And it’s just, you know, just wild, just mother nature at its worst. And of course, then on the other hand, too, I understand that at least in Florida, they have some regulations and stuff for houses and buildings to withstand hurricane winds, which is the most deadly part of a hurricane are the winds. Unfortunately, this time the deadly part was also the water. And not in Florida. Because when the hurricane ended up as a tropical storm, ended up in Western North Carolina, it dumped up to two feet of rain. Okay. 24 inches of rain within a 24-hour period.

[17:23] And, you know, this is Western North Carolina is is a rugged area. It’s hilly foothills. It’s got mountains, mountain communities. And when you have this rugged terrain, you have limited ability to get into these this rugged area. The road there aren’t a lot of roads.

[17:46] They’re placed in certain areas that are next to rivers. So when the rivers flood, sometimes the roads are washed out. And that’s what happened here. Even a major U.S. highway was blocked. It turned into a river because the river just exploded out of its banks and devastated Asheville and other communities. And they’re having trouble getting help because they have to fly it in by helicopter. Or they have to get all-terrain vehicles and things like that. And so when you have this disaster happen, if you have a lot of time ahead of time, you can pre-plan and have your stuff ready to go. And that’s what FEMA and the government usually does, is they usually put people in certain places and they’re ready to go. So, well, they were expecting most of the damage to be in Florida. So they pre-positioned a lot of their stuff to use in Florida. They had no idea that western North Carolina was going to get hit as hard as it did. You know, it was shocking. Even to old grizzled weather nerds, it was shocking.

[19:13] Although, it wasn’t really shocking because climate change, that’s what it does. It takes, it intensified the rain because of the warming environment. And so, that’s one of the hallmarks of climate change is that severe weather becomes more severe. Or the damage becomes worse. So, it wasn’t necessarily the wind. And it was the rain that was the bad part in this part in North Carolina. So this week, I started seeing in my feed from some of my conservative friends, they were bitching about the federal government only giving people $750 for disaster relief. Oh my gosh, they were just, oh, outraged, just outraged that we would give billions of dollars to Ukraine and we’d only give somebody in North Carolina $750. Well, I knew that that wasn’t true.

[20:26] And because that’s not how disaster relief works. They just don’t cut you a check for $750 and say, see you later.

[20:38] But because my conservative friends tend to listen to Trump more often than reality, then they have this selective outrage. And so after seeing it in my feed on Facebook again, Again, I went ahead and found some information to refute it, and it was refuted. In fact, Newsweek, which is not known as a liberal bastion of journalism, they fact-checked it and found it. Well, they said it lacked context, which means that it was partially true. The only part that was true was, and it was in a speech that Kamala Harris gave, And who was forwarding this false information was Donald Trump Jr. That’s where it came from. And they were playing selective clips of Kamala Harris speaking in Augusta, Georgia, after the hurricane. And she had said, you know, we’re going to get these people their $750. And he was outraged. Well, if he had stayed for the whole speech, or actually shared the whole speech, it would make sense.

[21:59] Because she also said that she outlined the additional longer-term emergency funding made available, adding FEMA is also providing tens of thousands more dollars for folks to help them to be able to deal with home repair, to be able to cover a deductible, when and if they have insurance, and also hotel costs. So what it was is the $750, that was walking around money. That was if you needed anything today. Today, they gave you $750. So if you needed to eat, if you needed diapers, medicine, whatever, boom, you’re good today. Because the other relief takes some time. You have to fill out forms. They have to process it. They have to have an insurance adjuster come out, blah, you know, the whole spiel. So the other relief is going to be down the road. But this $750, boom, that’s yours today.

[22:58] And that’s how disaster relief works in this country. But Don Jr. Wants to turn it into politics, and so they selectively quote Kamala Harris and make it out to be that the federal government was only going to give them $750 and send them on their way. And to show you how much of an asshole these conservatives can be when they politicize disaster recovery, that Democrats were requesting that Congress pass an aid package for the people that need help in the path of Helene. And Speaker Johnson refused to do it now. He said it can wait until after the election. And you know why he said that? So that Trump can cut more political ads and bitch about the disaster recovery and politicize it. And they’re doing that on the backs of people who really need help today. And that is just sad like I said these guys lie every time they talk these conservatives lie every time they open their mouth.

[24:09] And they can’t be trusted. If you would like to buy some Secular Left swag to show your support and to express your politics, then check out our merch store. We have branded items for sale, such as t-shirts, hats, mugs, and many other unique items. Check it out at secularleft.us slash shop.

[24:36] Another issue that I want to talk about in this episode is is LifeWise Academy. As people who follow this podcast know, LifeWise Academy is an evangelical group that is heavily funded by the same people who wrote Project 2025, like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. Academy. Some other people support it. And basically, LifeWise, again, this is the group that goes into a public school, disrupts the public school day, and mass removes kids to go to a Bible class in the middle of the school day. And as I’ve said before, that Joel Penton, who is the founder of LifeWise and the main cheerleader for the group, he has explicitly stated on several occasions that LifeWise is not a before or after school program and it refuses to operate in a school district unless they can go in during the school day. And we’ve gone over why that’s a problem for many reasons. I’ll throw up in the show notes a link to a previous episode that goes into more detail because I want to talk about what happened recently.

[26:01] In the past week or two, at the time that this is being recorded this week.

[26:07] The Westerville, Ohio School District, and that’s down as a suburb of Columbus, rather affluent suburb of Columbus, since I am familiar with the area, they announced in late August that they were considering resending their released-time religious instruction policy.

[26:33] The Release Time Religious Instruction Policy is part of the Ohio Revised Code that was passed in 2014 that said that if a program, an outside program, met these certain conditions, then kids would be able to go to these programs and not be considered absent at school. And as long as they make up their work, it wouldn’t be detrimental to their work. And if you were in high school, some of these programs could even give you credit, high school credit, towards graduation. That was the original intent. LifeWise comes in and manipulates this policy to take out, in this case in Westerville, they were reporting 300 students participated in LifeWise Academy. Probably not all in the same building, probably all in different buildings. But it’s younger kids, like before junior high in most cases, and some of these programs also have high schoolers, but I don’t think Westerville did.

[27:43] And so, you know, 300 kids were being clawed out of school once a week to go to a Bible class and then released back into the school. Well, the Westerville School Board indicated in August that they were going to consider rescinding the program and rescinding the policy because of the disruption that it wasn’t, you know, and the resources that were being used to facilitate this program. Program, and also there was a question about liability, which we’ve talked before about this. And something else that came up during this consideration was that in some cases this was happening during lunchtime, and some of the kids that were supposed to get free or reduced lunches weren’t getting their lunches. And that could be a problem for the school because they could get in trouble with the USDA.

[28:49] So that’s what they did. Well, they had a first reading of rescinding the policy and… You know, dozens of LifeWise supporters, not very many from the district itself, although there was quite a few there. But they bust in a lot of people, all wearing their nice LifeWise red shirt. They all said, oh, this is so great for my kid, and doing their testimony and everything.

[29:18] Now, the parents that are opposed to LifeWise, they showed up in black shirts. And they said, yes, we agree with the school board that this is disruptive. There’s other questions like vetting the volunteers and the liability issue and everything. Well, LifeWise decided that they didn’t want to see this program rescinded, so they relented on the liability issue. They stopped because what they used to do is have the parents sign a waiver. And the school was like, I don’t think you can do that. And the Ohio Revised Code said they can’t do that. So they changed that so that they could stay. Then the lunch issue, they got their friends in the Ohio Statehouse, LifeWise did. I’m fairly certain they did. Because in August, late in August, the lunch policy changed. The reimbursement changed. See, the USDA will not reimburse for lunches that are given to students who consume them off campus in a program that is not a school function. And LifeWise is not a school function. The state came in and said, well, we will reimburse it.

[30:38] All right, so they got rid of the two major obstacles for this school board. Well, the school board still wasn’t having it. and this week they voted to rescind it. Now, when they were having this vote, they had to move it to a bigger location because there was literally hundreds of people that showed up, pretty much divided up between LifeWise supporters and LifeWise opponents. And the board voted unanimously to rescind their policy. Now, what this means is, by rescinding the policy, and according to state law right now, the school districts may have a policy, they aren’t required to have one, is that LifeWise would not have the ability to take kids out of school in the middle of the school day.

[31:35] Individual parents could take their kids out because there still is policies in the school district for absences related to religious observances. But see, LifeWise doesn’t want to do that. They also don’t want to operate before or after school. So, of course, at this meeting where they’re resending the vote, the parents are now crying, well, you’re going to take this away from my kids. They’re going to lose this, which isn’t true. They’re not stopping them from attending LifeWise. They’re just stopping LifeWise from operating during the middle of the school day. They can still go to LifeWise before or after And the thing is, in their early start, when they first started infecting some of the school districts here in Ohio, some of the times they did operate after school.

[32:35] But because they have all this big funding now and the friends in the statehouse and it’s part of their part of the religious right agenda to blow up the public schools. And Joel Penton has talked about that as well, that the public schools is his mission field, and he’s trying to turn all public schools into religious schools. You know, that fits, where they wedge themselves into the school district in the middle of school day and disrupt the education of many, many more students who don’t attend. Not to mention the fact that they coerce some students to attend, either because the kids that do attend bring back candy and other fun things that the other kids are like, oh man, I’m missing out.

[33:32] And then we still have the question of liability. We still have the question of vetting the volunteers. And the theology. That doesn’t get as much play. And I know, I’m a secular humanist, so I don’t care about the theology. But there’s many… Well, I still oppose the theology on philosophical grounds anyway. But there’s a lot of religious people who also oppose LifeWise’s theology. Catholics, for example. There’s a couple of letters from Catholic dioceses around Ohio that have told their parishioners not to have their kids attend LifeWise because LifeWise isn’t teaching the Bible according to Catholic standards. And then you have some of the more radical evangelical churches churches in the state, the ones that are really by the book, they are telling their people not to attend LifeWise because it’s not teaching the Bible the way that they think it should be taught. And LifeWise comes across as, they keep saying that they’re non-denominational. They’re not non-denominational. They have a specific denomination that they’re teaching.

[34:56] So Westerville rescinded their policy, and within a day or two I think it was probably the next day LifeWise came out with a video YouTube video, talking about how they were cancelled in Westerville that’s what they titled it The Cancelling of LifeWise, and it was just so sad but it’s on message, because when you have these evangelical extremist groups that want to get things their own way when they don’t get what they want then they claim martyrdom they claim to be victims.

[35:46] They claim that these school board members And there happened to be one Muslim member of the school board who had just been appointed like two meetings before this one. And there was quite a few people that just said nasty things about her during the public comment section. One, I know at the meeting where they voted to rescind the policy, they had some bigot get up and start making disparaging remarks about Muslims. And they had to ask him to leave because it had nothing to do with what the meeting was about. You know, some of these conservatives, they try to take every opportunity to hate on people. And the Muslim member of the school board had nothing to do with rescinding the policy, but she voted to rescind it as well. Anyway, so LifeWise does this video claiming to be victims of a conspiracy. Well, I don’t think they said conspiracy.

[36:53] But it was just funny because I watched the video and they had this guy that works for LifeWise who did not identify himself as from LifeWise. He was pretending to be a content creator who was just asking questions. And he kept trying to ask questions from people who opposed LifeWise. He tried to ask questions from people who opposed LifeWise. And so I’m thinking, well, that’s what they were going to do, is they were going to clip it and put it in there and make it seem worse than it was. And luckily, some of the people that attended this meeting knew that this guy worked for LifeWise, and they warned people.

[37:36] And so he got really no use. According to the video that I saw, the finished video, he didn’t get any useful clips from the people who opposed it. All they just said was, we oppose it. But he did interview people from LifeWise and they were like, oh, it’s going away. They’re taking this away from the kids and this does such a good job. And the other thing that I knew that this was, the other reason I knew that this was a setup, this video was a setup and that they knew that that policy was going to get rescinded was they brought a drone and they had drone shots of the parking lot to show all the cars at this meeting. Why would you bring a drone to a public meeting unless you were planning on using it for your own ends?

[38:25] The video from it.

[38:30] So, it was still a good outcome because schools really need to decide whether or not they want to go through all this trouble having LifeWise in their district. Because it’s nothing but trouble.

[38:48] Unfortunately when you do that in the way that it was made real public and, was that now LifeWise is going to claim victimhood. And they’re going to go running to their state legislature friends. And Reverend Click over in Fremont, he’s already indicated that the state legislature will have to do something. Which isn’t true. They don’t have to do anything.

[39:19] It should be up to the local school districts whether or not LifeWise operates. rates. And I just think that LifeWise needs to be before or after school, like all the other religious education classes that happen in this state. And it was just too bad that they weren’t able to stay in Westerville. And now 300 kids are probably going to spiral into despair and become burdens on society because they can’t talk about human sacrifice in Bible class, which isn’t true. That’s not a good thing. So kudos to Westerville for rescinding the policy. And just to let everybody know, and the rest of the country, LifeWise is on its way to you. And so you need If you don’t want LifeWise to come into your public school, you need to organize and get your ducks in a row and find out in your state what the law is about release time religious instruction and stick to your guns about it. Because, like I said, LifeWise is well-financed.

[40:39] They use their extremist conservative connections for their benefit. And they’re going to show up in your school one day and they’re going to be ready to go because they’re secret about it. They keep it behind the scenes because they don’t want any backlash.

[40:57] In the places where it was found out that they were trying to come in, there was backlash. Backlash even though a lot you know 90 percent of the parents who have kids in school are religious they just don’t want religion in the public school they know that it’s separate the school is not a place to be having religious education that is to be done in the home and at church and most parents Parents know that. But these religious extremists like Joel Penton and LifeWise, they don’t care. They’re out for the bucks. Millions and millions of dollars they’ve collected in the last couple of years.

[41:44] And that’s the other ironic thing, too, is they have received millions and millions of dollars, and they still require local groups, local LifeWise academies, to raise money to run their class, or to purchase their buses, or to build their buildings. The national group does not help them at all. With money. So it’s like, where is all this money going to? And the local group has to pay LifeWise for the privilege of teaching these kids. According to them, privilege. So like I said, LifeWise is shady. They lost, the ability to operate when they wanted to operate in Westerville, but parents can still will send them to Bible class if LifeWise operates after school like they should. Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content.

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[43:36] Music.