Political Infidel

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alright ladies and gentlemen welcome back from lunch if you're outside you can hear me and you want to come in and take take your seat please do we were getting very close to God's message of blocking out the Sun to let us know that we're all wrong before that before before the Eclipse we have a fantastic speaker fantastic human being too by the way your next speaker is what I think Christians dream about as as if you say atheists to a Christian hymn on a flaming motorcycle in a cape is what I picture I am ha ha ha that's how I picture our next speaker who is a science communicator a secular secular activists with roughly a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel his videos promoting scientific skepticism secular politics and humanism values humanist values have been mirrored featured and referenced and recommended by many professional scientists secularists and educators and against highly improbable odds he's also running for the Texas State Senate yes [Music] in a conservative Christian area of course so guys give it up nice and loud mr. Arnoff okay thank you for being here I've been asked to abbreviate this so that my presentation will not eclipse your looming lunar event yeah so when they announce my candidacy to run for Texas State Senate a number of secular groups asked me to talk about what it's like to run for office it has an open atheist in one of the most regressive a reddest conservative Christian Republican religious right reactionary southern states otherwise known as the Bible Belt and as bad as that sounds it means that I must now also talk about my political position before an audience of atheists I don't know if you've ever experienced on social media what it's like to share your opinions on socio political matters with a bunch of atheists just because we agree there's no God doesn't mean we're agree on everything else and if we disagree on anything else we will be sure to let you know that despite all the religion bashing that I get on my channel or that I do on my channel I don't get hate mail from believers I only get it from other atheists for example one time I made one video years ago where I described myself I thought pretty clearly as a second wave or equity feminist by the modern terms that people feel necessary to use and I described what that means to me is that I think that unfair double standards should not be arbitrarily imposed on the basis of gender and I thought that was pretty clear and concise easy to understand and nobody would argue against that but because I identified with the f-word every video I uploaded or that had my name attached to it for four years after that more comments to the effect or accusing me of being an extreme radical third wave regressive irrational sjw Chuck worshiping the cancerous religion of feminism and as if that wasn't bad enough this is not about equality it seems according to Wyatt detractors but the feminism was really secretly it was all about myths and rest's dominating us for just disadvantaged men and my detractors somehow think all these have all these pejorative supply to me and that I think it's an awful lot of wild ass assertion since I just said I never said anything to to support or validate or indicate any of that at all why are we so polarized we take everything to an extreme dichotomy of hyperbole and for another example if you without any nuance it's all completely wrong for another example if I think that the only reason that government exists at all anymore is because it has some few jobs to do out of some minimal responsibility to its citizenry then the anarchists chimed in to tell me that I'm a state theist that I worship the state that I believe in big government and I'm probably communist it doesn't matter that I'm actually a anti-authoritarian and that I actually want a smaller government than those on the right who pretend to want that but who really want the state to legislate everything going on in our bodies and in our bedrooms thank you very much and then there's that whole left versus right thing I understand it you have conservatives on the right who are longing for the good old days which should make them regressive right and then you have progressives on the left right and because they're yearning for the future and liberals are supposed to be the middle ground at least according to the political compass but now you have conservatives calling themselves or traditional or what is it classical liberals while otherwise everybody in the conservative South hates liberals for being leftists so I can't tell what the hell liberal is anymore and regardless what you may have been told about the left I am left of center myself and I have never considered myself a victim instead I empathize when I see bad things happening to other people and my own life has been pretty sweet all things considered although a lot of that may have to do with my having a positive attitude which means of course and I don't hate anybody either I may be outraged by injustice or dishonesty and I may be disappointed if I'm insulted by someone I respect but that should not impact my respect for that person and I've never been offended otherwise honestly I can't even imagine what it's like to be offended so I don't know how anybody figures me for a social justice warrior there seem to be multiple definitions of that and some of them do not apply to me but you understand that if I run as a Democratic candidate then Human Rights advocating Human Rights is kind of part of the job description so even if I didn't care about anybody about myself I'd run as a Republican [Applause] now I have to admit the caveat that I know that there are a few good Republicans not all Republicans just like there are a few bad Democrats where rare exceptions exist on many sides many sides and I hear an awful lot of demonization of the left we forgotten that is a that that is an economic axis being opposed as I am to corporatists and to the very idea of the Federal Reserve as Thomas Jefferson was also forces me to be on the left because I value human rights above the rights and profits of corporations someone appropriately said that I'll believe that a corporation is that corporations are people when Texas executes one I live in Texas which has twice as many executions then the next most lethal state but I don't support the death penalty for a number of reasons one of which is that it's barbaric and we're super and this is what frustrates me about some other people on the Left giving up the moral high ground to add to the hatred and vicious attacks that I used to usually only see on the right like this thing in Charlottesville where neo-nazis were trying to unite the right which I think means to unite the religious right with the alternative right neither of which has a reputation for benefiting humanity as a whole so right-wingers brought guns and shields while Leptis brought cudgels in clubs and if you bring weapons to a protest we should assume that you intend to use them if you bring non-lethal weapons then I think you're there looking for a fight without a felony I went to Standing Rock last year before Trump was elected and all hope was lost and the Native American trainers there we're training the volunteer water protectors and not to go meet the police at the front line with anything that looked like it could be used as a weapon because that might incite a lethal response understand that in my opinion at least and I think I hope it's shared by everyone here lies and violence are both abusive in despicable acts which are possibly excusable only as a last resort of desperate defense and if you bring any kind of a weapon to an already charged public demonstration then you don't understand your right to peaceful assembly you're doing it wrong so when this highly divisive environment we lived in now I have people say that I agree with everything or 90% of everything that you just said but there's that one thing you said that I disagree with and so now I have to hate you forever in campaign against everything you ever do okay but that's not how I am your politics don't have to be mine mine don't have to be yours and I will not disrespect any possible ally just over some relatively trivial difference of opinion just or because they voted for a crazy person the enemy of my enemy is my friend and some of the my enemies friends are my friends too which means they should be reasoned with you're usually just so you know within the Atheist community there are people who voted for Trump who are not only still my friends but some of them are even helping with my campaign there is even a Christian Republican Party delegate in Texas who's a dear old friend of mine and he wants to help my campaign too even though I'm an atheist you know running as a Democrat because one thing we still agree on is that the establishment of both parties needs to change and I understand that things [Applause] thank you very much I understand that things do change I'm aware of the Southern Strategy and how Democrats and Republicans effectively switched platforms at some point in the 1960s so if this were 50 years ago I would have been a Republican then and I've never identified as a Democrat before but if you're running in Texas and you're not one of the two main parties you're not gonna get on the ballot most likely and I need all the help I can get it's bad enough that I'm running in a largely rural district full of religious fundamentalists and that the odds would still be against me even if I didn't look like a Klingon Disney villain I realize I'm supposed to kiss the babies and not eat them but everything is different now look at Steve Hill I don't know if you know Steve Hill he's a six foot five black stand-up comedian he and he ran for the California State Senate and got still got 20% of the vote even as an open Satanist and that tells you there's a substantial proportion of the population who are less afraid of the devil than the people who are already in charge I predict and this is sincere I predict a significant improvement in the image of atheists by this next election and I'm already seeing that starting to happen I want to go to California New York Washington State I don't they don't understand why there are so many atheist activists have charged up in the south but with the Trump pence administration now affecting us nationally I think they're starting to figure that out because they're seeing what we've been putting up with in the Bible Belt for so very long and my strategy is that after a couple of years of ultra right-wing religious Christian dominionists dominating everything at every level of federal government and the majority of most of our state governments and every level of my state government that people are going to want something a little bit more moderate maybe a bit more to the left if I do nothing else in this election I'm going to drag this district to the left because they can't go any further to the right we'd have to go a long way to the left to get back to the center the incumbent in my district who will be my opponent in this election is as far to the right as he possibly can be he describes himself as a tea party believer and his priorities are to build that wall and to make sure that trans people can't pay he's too far right for most Republicans and I'm seeing a lot of division there too you know where I'm finding moderate Republicans I'm finding people who were willing to listen to me the Freak rather than the guy the elegantly elected and I realize that no one's really gonna look at me and call me a moderate let's just say it's never happened before but that's to my advantage and I'll explain why in my immediate vicinity there are a couple dozen Republican senators and one or two Democrats that's how offset everything is in the last few elections Republicans in my districts have run unopposed I was the first Democratic candidate in this decade imagine going to the ballot box and there's just the Republican and nobody else showed up now and there was a primary in the last election where these two up Republicans are running against each other and one of them accused the other of not having paid his taxes back when that mattered to Republicans and the other responded by saying that my opponent is inspired by Satan that's the Tea Party believer that I'm gonna be running against so we live at a time that Christian fundamentalists can accuse each other of witchcraft what are they gonna say about me and hit it you want to see that political debate don't you however my campaign platform is not about more relevant to my position on religion except perhaps that no one is a better defender of the First Amendment than an atheist activist the US Constitution states in article 6 paragraph 3 no religious test shall ever be required for any office or public trust in the United States but the Texas Constitution says in article 1 section 4 no test shall ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust in this state nor shall anyone be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments provided he acknowledged the existence of a Supreme Being the case of terkoz versus Watkins over rules that sections 6 & 7 read that no man shall be compelled to attend erect or support any place of worship or to maintain any ministry against his consent nor shall property belonging to the state be appropriated for such purpose our Christian constant congressman consistently ignored that part but I'm going to hold them to it not only do we defend freedom of religion better than any Christian organization but we also understand freedom of speech freedom of press and freedom to peaceably assemble to air grievances against our government these are things that are not understood by many of the right especially in Texas where they seem to have forgotten that there is another amendment before that second one let me tell you how bad it is in Texas they tried to pass a law prohibiting Sharia law not realizing that the First Amendment already does that because they don't read the First Amendment where they don't like it or they want to ignore the rest of it because they also want to rattle a bunch of laws promoting Christianity and Rick Perry signed a law that would have the effect of outing teachers religious beliefs to their students and when he signed that law he he expressed a message that I'm certain was did it mean when he said that freedom of religion is not freedom from religion because he was opposing a message that was quoted in the newspapers by me as the sole voice of opposition to that bill we've already seen how the GOP are pushing laws across the country that limit both our our speech and our assembly while demonizing the press yet they pretend to defend the Constitution just likely defend the Bible when they don't seem to have read or understood either one the almost exclusively Republican Congress in Texas is a villainous regime but a lot of their constituents seem to be waking up to that I went to a rally at the State Capitol where Republican speakers admitted to everyone that in order to fix the problem they were going to have to be prepared to put aside party loyalty and vote for members of the other party note Texas Republicans think that they are born into their party and that they owe at some how allegiance this is an attitude that I doesn't I don't think appears in any other political party in any other country that I'm aware of Republicans at that rally and said that they would only vote for someone with a strong record of support for public education and in my district that's me however incumbent legislators criticize education advocates as edu Kratz this is because our Republican Congress hates public education they cut the budget by four billion dollars in 2011 effectively chopping it in half which means they laid off half our teachers and overcrowded our classrooms yet they keep cutting it even more and the way they do that has the peripheral effect of raising our property taxes which also goes against their expressed values by 2020 the state's education budget will be millions in arrears and billions in the read just a couple years after that at the same time they've been pulling for vouchers to route money away from public schools and to charter schools which can't be regulated or and our subject to corruption or the money goes to private schools which were almost exclusively religious and actually teach the Bible as the only source of truth in our world advocating the idea that the whole of reality could be dismissed as a lie or an illusion neither private schools nor charter schools have any legal obligation to provide for students with disabilities nor low-income students either both can legally discriminate against any pupil for any reason and that's not all they've done to public education in 2012 the Texas Republican party platform actually said that they are opposed to critical thinking specifically the platform read and I quote they are against any higher-order thinking skills that might challenge parental authority or threaten a student's fixed beliefs just think about the notion of having fixed beliefs that must never be challenged that statement got a lot of bad press so it doesn't say that anymore but it is still implied the Texas Republican party platform still says that they want to teach theories of origins as if they were questionable and they're not just talking about a biogenesis evolution cosmology they're also talking about anthropogenic climate change because remember Texas is an oil state and nothing can ever threaten the fossil fuel industry this isn't about any eternal god but the is limited only to the myopic god of profits for the next fiscal quarter and remember that even when the polar ice caps melted for the first time in human history there was no admission that this was evidence that global warming or climate change was really real this was dismissed as God opening up new opportunities to drill for oil Texas injects counterproductive religious nonsense into every classroom whether it's science sex or social studies we have history books teaching that Moses was a real person that he was born some 3,200 years ago even though that is only a faith-based belief and those believers can't agree on when he was supposed to have lived our history books even imply that the United States Constitution was based on a covenant between God and Moses they held doggedly on to abstinence only sex education such that some high school students didn't even know that sex causes pregnancy consequently for years we've had the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies of any state in the country this the Republicans made even worse by restricting access to any means of birth control and minimizing or eliminating any programs that would have benefited unwed mothers with infant children thus expanding the divide between the haves and the have-nots such that a third of Texas children now live below the poverty line the goal appears to be to eliminate the middle class which would make my state the equivalent of a third-world country think how different all of that would have been if we taught sex ed provided birth control and at least helped out those few remaining students who didn't pay attention in class we'd be much better off but under the rule of the Religious Right the maternal mortality rate has doubled such that more mothers are dying in childbirth in Texas than in any other developed nation we could have fixed all that we had this heroic state senator named Wendy Davis in 2011 she managed to save a billion dollars from a substantial budget cut in their education and a couple years later she had herself fitted with a catheter so that she could hold another filibuster to preserve or to defend women's reproductive rights and she was successful in lat in that but our then Governor Rick Perry held a special a second special session just to push through his restrictions anyway and when Perry signed that bill into law he referred to it as an honor to women on the same day he also signed his 500th execution order and it was also a female president so Perry is this horrible villain no seriously this guy's bad and he was the very first thing he ever did as governor was to store toxic waste in an aquifer that fed four states and then when Texas chemical plants failed inspections he deregulated them so they wouldn't have any inspections anymore and the result of this was the two of them exploded one of which in a suburban neighborhood so Perry had delusions of adequacy and decided to fail a second campaign for president leaving the position of governor open meanwhile Wendy Davis ran for governor and could have won had it not been for all the people whining that your vote doesn't count don't contribute to a broken system protests by abstinence as if rolling over in submission complicit submission serves as any kind of protest but one thing yeah one thing our last presidential election did was wake a lot of those people up and they say go what you mean if we don't vote this is what happens because whenever there's low voter turnout Republicans always win because they tend to vote as a bloc just like their pastors tell them to even without the Johnson amendment they were already illegally illegally burning his lobbies and now without the Johnson amendment those super dose of mega churches have become super PACs to give you an idea how bad that is there are over 90 mega churches in the dallas-fort Worth Metroplex alone so we elected a new Reich of the religious right and the Texas economy dropped from third place to twenty first place while Texas tuition has risen by a hundred and forty seven percent we're now 46th in the nation for education and forty ninth place only behind Mississippi in states that accommodate people with disabilities and so what are the priorities of the Republican Congress in Texas and it seems to be the perpetuation of prejudice there's very little constituents can do about that because Texas legislators suspended the rules for public hearings and even posting bills that are to be presented so you have to go and see for yourself the last time I was in a state capitol they were pushing a bathroom bill which judges everyone's gender expression it didn't pass so I'm not going to go into the morose details about it this would have required everyone to carry their birth certificate to prove that they're using the toilet of their original sex and one of the things that somehow these congressmen did not immediately see was that if your email cousin or son you know it doesn't swagger with the the bravado somebody compensating for sexual insecurities or if your aunt looks too much like mrs. Doubtfire they better both have theirs birth certificates on them to prove that they're using the right bathroom and how embarrassing is that if you had a child with special needs and it's a different gender if one of you was gonna have to break the law to go in the wrong bathroom log that wasn't a problem before then there was the show your papers bill and this allowed racial profiling by police who would doubly serve as immigration agent such that anyone who might look foreign in any place walking between classrooms in your campus if the cop looks at you and thinks maybe you don't belong here he could demand that you show me your papers of naturalization and immigration or be arrested on the spot if you can't prove you belong here if these bills had passed Texas would be just like the old Soviet Union and the only thing that's missing is our version of the Berlin Wall and the Republican Congress is trying to do that to us to this while continuing to criminalize marijuana for the sake of our largely privatized prison system which can't make a profit otherwise we don't have the kind of crime rate that would justify having 5% of our population in prison the United States has more of its percentage of its population in prison than any other country and one out of five of those prisoners is in Texas and that's just part of the problem we're also disproportionately convicting black citizens they may only be 12% of the free population but they are more than three times as many blacks in prisons as there are whites and these statistics indicate a systemic prejudice and I have to explain this for the people who tell me that blacks are committing all the violent crimes that's not true but even if it were blacks are stopped and detained more often than whites and they're statistically more likely to be convicted and served longer sentences than whites for the same crimes and I have to repeat that because nobody ever catches it if I write it down in social media I said for the same crimes most of the time we're not even talking about violent crime we're talking about drugs usually marijuana specifically which is not a crime and a growing number of states and shouldn't be a crime anywhere anymore everyone knows that blacks aren't the only ones smoking dope right yeah they're just the ones being busted for it disproportionately and despite what some might judge based on my appearance if marijuana were legal everywhere I still would not partake I just don't happen to enjoy it myself I've tried it I didn't like it so what but the data is in and every state that had where marijuana has legal is has reaped a huge amount of revenue and seen their crime rates drop and their suicide rates drop and if we did this across the country this would also kill the drug cartels to the south where the where trumps cost prohibitive and pointless Wall does no good at all and that's one reason I'm running because I'm neither a bigot nor an idiot because I understand opposing explanations and I can extrapolate ramifications all of my own better it seems than many of our current congressmen and I'm running as a Democrat because it seems that the solution to so many of our problems is to do the very opposite of everything the GOP wants to do to our education to our economy and to the environment everything they propose only complicates compounds or causes the problem and I know the odds are against me but one other reason I'm running is now the one reason I'm running now is also the reason I became an activist in the first place when evangelicals were we're telling me 20 years ago on Usenet I mean I'm bragging about how their churches had lobbied together and everybody voted the way their pastors told them to and they've elected certain judges and certain senators in key positions so that they could have this culture war that they imagined they were having and at that time many of these people were the people that were electing were from the calcetin Institute following RJ rush dooney's reconstruction ISM and they wanted a government that would enforce Levitical law and we're so close to that now that it's way past time for secular candidates to jump into politics and turn that tide in Texas already has a religious freedom constitutional amendment which allows religion special privileges and even exceptions from the law or programs applicable to everyone else so I I had to do something even though it meant getting into politics into politics that would look for me to get into politics would look like a freak show but then Kid Rock jumped into and there's a couple of guys who looked like me who were running for office there's a guy who looks like a Viking biker his name is Thor he's a drummer in a rock band in Austin and he's running for governor there's another guy another gubernatorial candidate who runs a gay bar in Dallas he's running for governor also his name is Jeffery Payne but he was most recently nominated or crowned international mr. leather so can you imagine that presidents is the buttless chaps governor both of these guys are in the news but I'm not why when Justin Scott called some of the newspaper reporters and other agencies to try to let them know about me that was one that he reported as an example of the kind of response he was getting he said that there was one group that were one newspaper that was interested in telling the story of a Democratic candidate for the first time in like 15 years or however long it was until he mentioned that I was an atheist activist and then the door slammed shut with the explanation that we're never going to run a story about an atheist our readers are Christian and Jamie Ferran another atheist activist in Amarillo told me that he'd asked a panel of state senatorial candidates how they would represent their unbelieving constituents to which there was a bit of confusion as all of these senatorial candidates looked at each other and can you know confused and then finally answered back our constituents are Christian so it's like we don't even matter we don't even exist so as any tabash and other speakers I think have already implied it's way past time for all of us to consider running for office because if we don't we could be running for our lives thank you very much our raw ladies and gentlemen please nobody the beer all right so straight out these doors you'll see there's a you go to the left and you'll see there's a the pool the terrorists thing of whatever this is out here their client you'll see their have the glasses and the oh gosh I forgot the room but I will find out anyway they're giving you glasses and right out here it's it has begun dr. Proctor will be out there walking us through it as well so see y'all outside

Info

Channel: AronRa

Views: 41,619

Rating: 4.8792868 out of 5

Keywords: American Atheists, National Convention, North Charleston, South Carolina, Texas, State Senate

Id: u0MzOJxaEds

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017

Reddit Comments

Excellent move. Authentic guy and a really good speaker. He has been a popular figure in the atheist community for a long time. This is the type of people that should step up to fix the political sys.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/brihamedit 📅︎︎ Aug 31 2017 🗫︎ replies