#darrell lucus

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trump's idea of 'frankness' means degrading women and lying about it

Once again, Trump shows why he is unfit for office.

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

I make no secret that I do not and never will have any respect for Donald Trump. One big reason is that he seems to find it acceptable to not only degrade women, but revel in it. We got another reminder this week, when Trump not only found it acceptable to degrade a female reporter, but had the audacity to claim—through his press secretary—that he was just being frank with the reporter. If that wasn’t enough, he lied about it.

By now, most of you have heard how Trump blew his stack at last Tuesday’s press gaggle aboard Air Force One. A female reporter asked Trump what seemed like a common-sense question—why had he backtracked on his initial promise to release the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”? Trump responded by pointing at the reporter and barking, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!” The reporter was later identified as Bloomberg White House beat reporter Catherine Lucey. That was bad enough. But the White House’s response to the predictable firestorm of criticism was even worse. At Thursday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said—with a straight face—that reporters should be grateful for Trump’s “frankness and openness.” She added that Trump’s frank style was one of the biggest reasons he got back in the White House, and reminded them that Trump had no qualms about calling out “fake news” about him.

We’ve heard variations on this theme for a decade or more. For instance, we’ve been told that Trump’s often boorish behavior is something we should expect for a guy from Queens. I find this insulting on a personal level. My father’s side of the family is from North Jersey—specifically, Newark. Essentially, my roots are in a different part of the same country as Trump. Anyone who has known me for any period of time knows that bluntness is my default setting. And yet, I would never find it acceptable to act like a boor and a bully all the time. And I would never even consider degrading women and reveling in it. Quite the opposite, actually—anyone who knows me knows that I do not tolerate degrading women. There’s a difference between being a plain speaker and being a jerk. It has been more than amply established that Trump is the latter. A number of my friends from the New York area are of the same mind, with one of them going as far to say that New Yorkers don’t claim him.

We’ve also been told that Trump appeals to people because he’s authentic while typical politicians aren’t authentic. Apparently in Trump’s world, being authentic means acting in a manner that most people without MAGA hats glued to their heads would make you an asshole. And in that world, pointing this fact out is a sign that you have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Gee, I thought I just wanted to hold Trump to the same standards as the rest of us. You would think the GOP wouldn’t have a problem with that. After all, that’s been one of their standard talking points since at least the Clinton era. Oh, that’s right—to put a twist on a common phrase among longtime Kossacks, IOKIYMAGA (it’s okay if you’re making America great again).

Darrell Lucus delivered some very hard-hitting truths in this Substack column about Donald Trump’s sexist and callous treatment of women.

See Also:

The Good In Us (Mary L. Trump): The Misogyny Runs Deep

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Tulsi Gabbard has the most to lose from Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth running aground in the Senate

With Gaetz no longer taking up oxygen, it's becoming more likely that Gabbard will be in for tough sledding in the Senate--a prospect which

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

On the surface, Matt Gaetz was the biggest loser of the week in politics. When Donald Trump tapped him as his nominee for attorney general, it was clear that Trump intended Gaetz to be his hired gun in his campaign of retribution against those who had the temerity to do their jobs and attempt to hold him to account over the years. But Gaetz was forced to withdraw his bid when it became apparent his nomination faced a humiliating defeat in the Senate. In the wake of a House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz alleging that the now-former congressman from the Florida Panhandle had engaged in staggering misconduct—possibly criminal—NBC News reported that at least five Republicans had already decided to vote against Gaetz on the Senate floor. The New York Times put the number of hard nays at four.

While it was beyond dispute that Gaetz had lost more than the three Republican votes he could afford to lose if he wanted to be confirmed, both outlets reported that a number of Republicans had already quietly decided to reject Gaetz’ nomination. NBC reported that anywhere from 20 to 30 Republicans—close to half of the Senate GOP caucus—had serious misgivings about voting for Gaetz, while North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer told the Old Grey Lady that enough of his colleagues were “a ‘hell no’” on Gaetz to put his nomination on life support.

Apparently Gaetz was banking on Trump’s sans-culottes bludgeoning Republican Senators into line much like they bullied his House colleagues into opposing Trump’s second impeachment. That’s the only way to explain why he resigned his safer-than-safe House seat shortly after breezing to a fifth term. Now he has no intention of running in the special election for his own vacancy, and the near-certainty that the full Ethics report will be leaked could potentially kibosh his rumored run for governor in 2026 before it starts. By any standard, Gaetz is now the definition of a dead loser. But believe it or not, one of Trump’s nominees may have lost a lot more than Gaetz. Namely, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, newly minted Republican Tulsi Gabbard. How’s that, you ask? Well, with attention no longer focused on Gaetz, Gabbard could potentially be in for a rough ride when her nomination comes before the Senate. And said ride could get even rougher given the increasing likelihood that Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth’s bid to become secretary of defense will implode before January.

Conventional wisdom in the immediate wake of Trump’s impending return to the White House held that the Democrats as well as the few Republicans who still have spines couldn’t go DEFCON 1 on all of Trump’s nominations. As Chris Cilizza put it, “If all you do is yell, you lose your voice.” But that assumed Gaetz would last long enough to get a hearing. As we now know, his nomination didn’t even last for a week.

All of this probably ought to have Gabbard quaking in her boots. After all, with Gaetz no longer tying up most of the available oxygen, Gabbard is likely to face a lot of time in the barrel. When Trump announced her as his pick for intelligence chief, officials across the spectrum were alarmed that Trump would even consider picking someone who is at best—AT BEST—a useful idiot for Russia. While no evidence has emerged that she has collaborated with Russian intelligence, her willingness to parrot Kremlin propaganda is reason enough to raise concerns about her fitness for the post. For instance, while most of us see Ukraine as fighting for its freedom against Russian aggression, Gabbard would have us believe that the United States and NATO caused the war by pushing for Ukraine to join NATO and ignoring Russia’s “legitimate security concerns.” She has also claimed the Biden administration operated secret biological research labs in Ukraine that were capable of releasing dangerous pathogens.

[...]

The chances of Gabbard getting a full-on grilling zoomed exponentially with the prospect that at least one other Trump nominee might not last until January. In case you missed it, Trump’s transition team got word that Hegseth was investigated for sexual misconduct in Monterey, California in 2017. The allegation was concerning enough that White House Chief of Staff-in-waiting Susie Wiles and Trump’s lawyers summoned Hegseth for a meeting. According to Vanity Fair, Hegseth maintained the affair was consensual. But Hegseth’s version became far less credible when it emerged he’d paid his accuser hush money—after denying he’d done so. It’s hard for me to see any scenario in which Hegseth survives at this point, and it’s at best 50-50 whether he’ll even be in the picture by the time the new Republican-controlled Senate convenes. It’s hard to believe that Hegseth, who retired as a major in the Minnesota Army National Guard, doesn’t know that security clearances get denied for far less than this.

Reading a report by The Washington Post on Trump’s approach to filling his second administration, it’s surprising that more land mines haven’t gone off besides Gaetz and Hegseth. Trump hasn’t relied on the FBI to vet potential appointees, even those whose jobs involve matters of national security. Instead, he has relied on his campaign lawyers to vet appointees when he conducts any vetting at all. That probably explains why Hegseth’s sexual misconduct case broadsided the transition team. And it may also explain why Trump had no qualms about picking Gabbard despite the well-documented concerns about her willingness to give succor to conspiracy theories. Gabbard has undergone one of the most opportunistic political morphs I’ve ever seen. When she left the Democratic Party, her idea of being “independent minded” meant endorsing MAGA Republicans and chest-beating election deniers. While in Congress she blasted Trump for being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” not once, but twice, by 2024 she sounded like a dark-skinned version of Laura Ingraham or Marjorie Taylor Greene. That opportunism may have seemingly gotten her well rewarded with the prospect of being the first person of color to be the nation’s intelligence chief. But now that she has lost one piece of insulation and is likely to lose another, it may well come back to bite her. And it will be well deserved.

Darrell Lucus has a good column on how the Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation could be in serious danger in the wake of the Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth’s debacles.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trump's deranged social media behavior shows why he is unfit for office

Anyone who wonders why so many Democrats and never-Trump Republicans despise Trump should look at the way he acted on social media on Easter

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

One of the few diehard Donald Trump supporters among my friends often says that I shouldn’t let my disgust at Trump’s behavior blind me to what he’s supposedly doing for the country. She frequently says, “You’re not inviting him to dinner!” She also suggests that I’m letting my outrage at Trump’s outrages—something that has once again become an almost daily occurrence since his return to the White House—override my love for the country. Like most of us who have recoiled in disgust at Trump ever since he came down the escalator, I despise Trump because I love my country. And like most of us who have recoiled in disgust at Trump over the years, I despise Trump because, time and again, he has shown that despite his ranting about how Democrats and their handmaidens in the “FAKE NEWS media” don’t let him do his job, he hasn’t even begun to understand what his job is. Yet another reminder of this came with Trump’s displays on social media on Easter Sunday.

As much of the East Coast was gearing up to go to church, Trump fired off this on Truth Social. Before you ask—this is real. So, once again, we have another deranged holiday social media post from Trump. Posts like this are why I have never even considered supporting him, and why I will never vote Republican for anything, anywhere again until the GOP shakes itself loose from him. You don’t need any special training to know that anyone who posts something like this is not well. If anyone else posted something like this, people would rightly be questioning their sanity. Why should Trump get a pass for this? I’ve asked this question for a decade every time he fires off a deranged post along these lines—and I’ve yet to get an answer that makes any kind of sense.

This is especially personal for me, as someone who has been taken advantage of by a lot of people in my 47 years on this planet. Most of my longtime readers and friends know about two of the most outrageous examples. In my freshman year at Carolina, I was tricked into joining an abusive and outright cultish hypercharismatic group. It took me six months to get out of there—a little over 180 days. By my reckoning, they lied to me 180 times, if not more. Years later, I spent three years being married to an abusive and controlling woman who yelled, screamed and cursed at me so often that when I finally left, I was as beaten down as anyone who had been slapped or punched by their spouse. Even worse, I discovered that this woman had willfully concealed her history of abusing her own children—a history that, as far as I’m concerned, rendered that marriage morally null and void. More recently, I discovered not long after I got married for the second time legally and the first time morally that my father—or rather, my sperm donor—had willfully stayed on third shift as a city bus driver in order to facilitate cheating on my mother. I had wondered why he would stay on third knowing that he had a teacher for a wife and two sons at home. He claimed the timing of first shift didn’t work—an argument that didn’t cut ice, given that he was the union rep there for years and could have lobbied for changes. Now I knew why he hadn’t done so. While I’ve expressed my feelings about these matters on social media, I would never, ever, do so in a manner as deranged as Trump has done. It’s part of the reason I bristle at the times that people excuse Trump’s behavior because at bottom, he’s a guy from Queens. I’m half North Jerseyan—basically from a different part of the same country as Trump. There’s one big difference, though. Unlike Trump, I know how to control my tongue—and my thumbs. Granted, a few of my friends on both sides of the aisle have been concerned about how I turn the screws on abusive churches. But I would never, ever talk about them in the manner that Trump talks about people whom he thinks have wronged him. [...] That Trump found it acceptable to make a post this deranged was bad enough. But to pile obscenity on top of insult, he ordered it on the official White House social media channels. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s how it looked on Instagram. [...] Think about it, folks. The president of the United States found it acceptable to fire off a deranged attack against his foes—and then found it acceptable to post it on official social media channels.

Darrell Lucus is right: Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to continue holding office, as his Easter temper tantrum post on Truth Social is more evidence.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

You can still extend grace to Trump while calling him out

While it would be wrong not to extend grace to Trump in light of the abomination in Pennsylvania, it would be equally wrong to deny that he

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

If you listen to Donald Trump’s diehard supporters, we aren’t supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. That’s about the only conclusion you can draw from their reaction to Trump being shot at during a rally this past Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. With the notable exception of a staffer for Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi who either resigned or was fired after telling the shooter, “don’t miss next time,” Democrats have risen with one voice to condemn this for the abomination that it is. As I write this, a little over 50 hours have passed since the shooting. In that time, the Democrats have extended more grace to Trump than he ever has extended to them in the eight-plus years since he came down the Trump Tower escalator. The same people whom Trump attacked as enemies of the American people and targeted with degrading and sometimes blatantly racist language showed Trump a concept that he hasn’t even begun to understand—mercy and compassion. As the messages from Democrats poured in, I was reminded of passages in Scripture that liken showing compassion for your foes to pouring “hot coals,” “burning coals,” or “coals of fire” (depending on the translation) on their heads.

[...] While digging into this, I learned that the reference to coals came from an old Egyptian custom in which penitent men carried bowls of burning coals on their heads as a sign of repentance. Supposedly, showing kindness and compassion to an enemy could lead to shame and repentance. Unfortunately, any hopes of Trump showing any sense of shame were put to rest on Monday when he named Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Vance is part of a long list of never-Trumpers who have morphed into full-on Trump diehards since 2016. If Vance’s morph isn’t the most opportunistic, it’s pretty close. In 2016, he told PBS Newshour that from where he was sitting, part of Trump’s appeal was based on racist tropes.

[...] But that doesn’t go far enough for a number of Republicans. A number of them have claimed that Democrats from President Biden on down bear responsibility for this tragedy for spending the last three-plus years attacking Trump for his not-so-veiled authoritarian inclinations. That rings extremely hollow from a party with a smorgasbord of elected officials who openly traffic in violence. But on a more practical level, Trump’s diehards expect Democrats to ignore the facts. They expect us to ignore the mountain of evidence from the published record that shows Trump was ranting about the election being stolen from him when he knew or reasonably should have known that he had lost. Specifically, it has been amply demonstrated that as early as a week after the election, Trump had to have known he had lost. Specifically, Trump campaign lawyer Steffan Passantino told The New York Times that his colleagues had known by then that talk of Dominion-powered voting machines in Georgia switching votes—the very basis for the Big Lie—was complete, unadulterated bullshit. He certainly knew by November 20, when the Republican leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature told him that they had no information that could overturn Biden’s lead there. The lawmakers later told The Washington Post that they believed at that moment, they believed Trump’s “blinders had fallen off.” This is critical, because Trump absolutely, positively, could not win without holding Michigan. They also expect us to ignore people like Roger Stone. In the Danish documentary “A Storm Foretold,” a film that figured very prominently in the January 6 hearings, Stone was caught on tape admitting that he knew Trump had lost. 

Darrell Lucus wrote a solid Substack post on why it’s imperative to both call out Donald Trump for the bad he’s done while still extending grace to him in the wake of the assassination attempt against him Saturday.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The leader of The New Evangelicals has become a liberal Steven Crowder

Just like Crowder found it acceptable to churn out content with his marriage on the rocks, TNE leader Tim Whitaker is still pushing out cont

Darrell Lucus at The New Evangelicals:

Almost two years ago, right-wing influencer Steven Crowder came under well-deserved fire from all sides when Yashar Ali surfaced video of him from 2021 viciously berating his pregnant wife, Hilary, for not wanting to handle his dogs’ medicine. Ali released it after Crowder publicly announced their pending divorce despite Hilary pleading for him not to do so. The video had even some of the most rock-ribbed conservatives putting Crowder on blast. And yet, in the face of all of this, Crowder continued churning out podcasts and videos as if nothing else had happened. That made a lot of people on all sides of the aisle want to shake him and ask, “What the hell are you doing?” This writer was one of them. Seriously, folks. If Crowder were serious about getting help, churning out content would rank pretty low on the list of priorities. And considering that he holds himself out as a born-again Christian, churning out content shouldn’t even be on the list. Well, it looks like we on the left have our own answer to Crowder—Tim Whitaker, founder and executive director of The New Evangelicals, a collective of moderate and progressive Christians of which I was a supporter until last month. However, I, along with quite a few others, walked out when it was apparent that TNE was willing to condone an obvious pattern of abusive behavior on Whitaker’s part. In case you missed it, last month, we learned that Whitaker was under fire for a disturbing pattern of behavior towards TNE’s former creative director, Adele Mulford. While running late to a documentary shoot, Whitaker engaged in “rage driving”—something which put Mulford on edge since she is dwarfed by the 6-4 Whitaker. After all efforts to mend fences went nowhere, TNE called in GRACE in August. However, Mulford and another TNE contractor, Cherri Rodriguez, resigned in September.

GRACE finished its work in early March. However, the first anyone even heard about this came when Mulford teamed up with Rodriguez to release the report via a site called TNE Reckoning. Mulford was known as the “Reporting Victim,” or “RV,” in the report; Rodriguez was “Witness 1,” or “W1.” Its findings were unsparing—Whitaker, or “Individual 1,” had engaged in “behavioral misconduct” and demonstrated “a lack of self-control, controlling behaviors, and holding double standards.” GRACE recommended taking the focus off Whitaker and diversifying the board. Both the board and Whitaker committed to implementing GRACE’s recommendations. As troubled as I was that we learned about this second-hand, it looked encouraging that TNE recognized that its rapid growth in a short time meant it was no longer just a startup. This needed to be addressed in a way that showed it was willing to hold itself to the same standards it held others. I was concerned, though, that Whitaker was churning out videos and shorts as if nothing happened—not exactly a posture consistent with his initial promise to “embrace repentance.”

[...] It didn’t have to end this way. Any doubt that this could have had a better ending was put to rest when Rodriguez shared an email she and Mulford received from Bruce Johnson, then a member of the TNE board, shortly after she and Mulford resigned. Johnson revealed that as soon as Mulford and Rodriguez filed a formal grievance about Whitaker’s behavior with Mulford, he “pushed hard” for an independent investigation, believing it was necessary to show that TNE had to put action behind its talk about finding “a better path forward in faith.” Johnson has since disappeared from the list of board members; it’s not clear whether he left on his own. Clearly, Johnson believed that TNE needed to meet the moment, and how it did so mattered. Mulford and Rodriguez are of the same mind; indeed, Rodriguez tells me that if TNE’s board had more members like Johnson, it’s very likely she and Mulford would still be on the payroll. I know that if TNE had met the moment in the right way, it’s very likely I would still be there as well. As it stands now, the board doesn’t appear to have the guts to realize Whitaker has no business churning out content—and for that matter, being TNE’s leader at all. It may not quite be like the situation with Crowder, who by all accounts has surrounded himself with “yes men” who were probably echoing a number of Twitter comments saying that Hilary was the aggressor, not him. But it’s no less disturbing.

Darrell Lucus is right: Tim Whitaker is NOT fit to lead The New Evangelicals.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Clarence Thomas must resign or be impeached

The revelations about Thomas' failure to disclose luxury vacations and gifts bankrolled by wealthy executives make it untenable for him to r

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian Substack:

Like many Black political junkies of my generation, I cringe whenever Clarence Thomas opens his mouth or puts pen to paper. As I write this, Thomas has served on the Supreme Court for 11,614 days—the 12th-longest tenure in the history of the Court. By my estimate, he has found at least that many ways to disgrace the seat Thurgood Marshall held for 24 years.

Thomas has authored some of the most ill-informed and tone-deaf sentiments to have ever emerged from an American jurist. This is a man who believes slavery didn’t amount to a loss of dignity, believes domestic violence convictions shouldn’t strip you of your right to own a gun, and would give state legislatures carte blanche to draw districts any way they please. He was also the lone justice who found any merit in Donald Trump’s claim that allowing the National Archives to turn over records related to the Capitol insurrection would be merely serving “political objectives.” But those pale in comparison to recent revelations by ProPublica and The New York Times that Thomas has been showered with vacations and gifts by ultrawealthy executives—and in many cases, failed to disclose them as required by federal law. According to a ProPublica estimate that is “almost certainly an undercount,” Thomas has taken at least 38 luxury vacations, 26 private jet and helicopter flights, and a dozen VIP passes to sporting events. But worst of all, he allowed a high-dollar fundraiser to take place in the Supreme Court building—an act that, to my mind, demands that Thomas be impeached. [...]

It’s bad enough that Thomas either cannot or will not comply with rudimentary requirements about financial disclosures. That would be enough to prove that he is one of the most, if not the most, corrupt individuals ever to serve on a federal bench. But selling access to the Supreme Court building is another thing altogether. If that’s not an impeachable offense, what is? For the sake of the integrity of the Supreme Court, Thomas must go, and he must go now while he can at least appear to be doing so decently. Failing that, he must be impeached and removed. I’d be saying the same thing if Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, or Ketanji Brown Jackson had done even a fraction of what Thomas has done. But we cannot tolerate a Supreme Court justice who finds it remotely acceptable to even appear to be selling access to the Court. Granted, it’s not likely an effort to impeach and remove Thomas will succeed in this hyper-polarized era. But we have to at least try for the sake of the historical record. Both Trump impeachments were necessary to show that we at least tried to hold Trump to account. Similarly, impeaching Thomas is all but essential to restore trust in the Supreme Court.

As usual, Darrell Lucus nails it: SCOTUS "Justice" Clarence Thomas should either resign or face impeachment.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Inquisitr exposed the Duggars as unfit parents in 2015, but doesn't get enough credit

We may think that "Shiny Happy People" exposed the Duggars, but they were actually exposed eight years earlier.

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian Substack:

Unless you have fundie blinders on, there is no way you can watch the Amazon Prime docuseries “Shiny Happy People” and not conclude that America’s most famous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, are manifestly unfit parents. For the better part of two decades, Jim Bob and Michelle led us to believe they were helming a very quirky and very conservative Christian family in the Ozarks. But in truth, they were But in truth, they subjected their 19 children to an environment of retrograde views on gender and sex, reinforced by heavy-handed discipline to the point of abuse. And of course, they not only failed to do what they were morally and legally required to do when their eldest son, Josh, molested several girls—including his own sisters—as a teenager. They also failed to get him to a mature understanding of what he had done. Those failures ultimately put Josh on the path that ultimately got him sentenced to 12 years in prison and 20 years of supervised release for possessing and receiving child sexual abuse material.

Incredibly, the Duggars managed to retain a modest reservoir of support even after Josh’s teenage depravities came to light. Indeed, when the mainstream media, along with a number of bloggers like yours truly, called them out, invariably it was dismissed as just another case of those godless libruls ganging up on Christians. It took Josh’s arrest for the scales to fall off the eyes of all but their most diehard defenders. The release of “Shiny Happy People” is just part of a long-overdue reckoning. But to the mind of this writer, this reckoning should have started far sooner than that—as in August 2015, three months after the nation learned about Josh’s teenage depravities via a report from In Touch Weekly. In an article for entertainment news site Inquisitr, Rita Fox revealed that at the time of Josh’s misdeeds in 2002 and 2003, he and his siblings were living in conditions that can most succinctly be described as unsafe, unsanitary, and unlawful.

While reporting on the news that one of Josh’s non-family victims was about to sue him, Fox noted that a key factor in that suit would be “the environment in which (Jim Bob and Michelle) raised their children at the time.” That environment wasn’t the Duggars’ now-famous abode in Tonitown, Arkansas. Rather, it was a three-bed, two-bath house in nearby Springdale. The Duggars had lived there since March 1993, when their clan comprised Jim Bob, Michelle, five-year-old Josh, three-year-old twins Jana and John-David, two-year-old Jill, and four-month-old Jessa. By the time Parents magazine ran a feature on them in September 2003, nine more kids had been born. In the time that Discovery Health filmed three specials about them, Michelle gave birth to two more. Do the math—at one point, 18 people were crammed into a house designed for six people at most. It should come as no surprise that this led to a smorgasbord of logistical problems. With just two baths, there wasn’t nearly enough time for all of the kids to take showers. Jim Bob and Michelle had to write out a schedule in which the kids took showers in shifts over two days; some showered on Monday, the others on Tuesday. Even things as mundane as going to the bathroom and brushing teeth turned out to be an adventure. The house’s water heater was nowhere near adequate for the sheer amount of dishwashing, laundry, and diaper changing needed to care for such a large family But most seriously of all, there were only two bedrooms available for a brood that had grown to nine boys and five girls by 2002 (Michelle would give birth to one more boy and one more girl by 2004). Jim Bob and Michelle opted to have boys and girls share the same bedrooms—and even the same beds.

Darrell Lucus's Loud, Liberal, Christian Substack noted that the 2015 Inquisitr article about the Duggar Family exposed them as unfit to parent. The 2023 Amazon Prime film Shiny Happy People confirmed Inquisitr's reporting.

Read the full story at Substack.