In previous posts I have mentioned that whenever I take a road trip I view it as an opportunity to imagine myself a social anthropologist conducting
Rush Limbaugh
primary research on what people are listening to out in the hinterlands.
Thus, when I am not listening to a favorite CD, I am tuned in to either conservative talk radio or local Christian programming (not for the music but the news, commentary, sermons, or call-in Bible answer man shows).
My most recent trip confirmed not just the close similarities, but the near
Shaun Hannity
identity of political-social views on secular and Christian broadcasting. There is no difference whatsoever. And that should send a chill down every disciples’ spiritual spine.
Of course, every talk show was a monolithic barrage of “Stop the Steal” nonstop — usually, asserted with ranting, anger, and fear-mongering, not to mention the repeated threats of looming violence if “the radical, leftist cabal” that stole the election from Trump didn’t move over and get out of the way.
I could not find a single instance of rational, evidence-based conversation or
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: Jay Sekulow, personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference during the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
debate, much less analysis, about the presidential election, the recounts, the court challenges, or the future of this country on a secular radio station.
Worse yet, the Christian broadcasts were no different.
Whether the programming was syndicated or regional, Christian commentators were reading from the same hyper-partisan play book: anger, fear, threats of armed uprisings, calling hell fire onto the leftists, socialists, Marxists, antifa-ists, critical race theorists, and Black Lives Matters communists who are determined to destroy America by turning it into a totalitarian, anti-Christian nation.
The ignorance and misinformation spewed like sewage from a fire hose.
Pat Robertson
The Christians had no more interest in honest conversation, or an examination of the facts available, than the did the Rush Limbaugh crowd. I doubt if a single one of them had even a rudimentary understanding of what socialism really is or that the United States is already highly “socialist” in many ways – highly unjust ways that favor the rich and corporations almost exclusively.
Everyone is convinced that Joe and Kamala are raging socialists chomping at the bit to outlaw private property and confiscate everyone’s guns. Obviously, not a one of these people (broadcasters and callers both) knew the first thing about Biden’s or Harris’ careers.
The truth of the matter is that both Biden and Harris are dyed in the wool crony-capitalists, corporatists, center-right party stalwarts so heavily indebted to Wall Street that I’m surprised either of them has an independent thought in their head.
Jan Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, with Oral Roberts
Their souls are owned by the same brand of neoliberal economics that continues to fuel the gaping chasm of income inequality that curses sick Americans – especially people of color – to wait in bread lines longer than anything seen in this country since the Great Depression, and to die of covid19 at higher rates than any other country in the civilized world.
The American evangelical church has become nothing more than cheap, shallow reflection of the cultivated ignorance, narrow mindedness, and xenophobia that has always marked American conservatism.
That ghoulish political contortion has become the face of the Republican party AND the Religious Right (read: evangelicalism).
This post is my brief introduction to short series I will write in the next few weeks.
David Brody, political reporter for CBN, author of the book, “The Faith of Donald Trump”
In this series I will have a great deal more to say about the incestuous mánage à tois that has developed between evangelicalism, the Republican party, and American anti-intellectualism.
I will begin by focusing on the role that virulent, Republican racism has to play in both (1) the Republican demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement and (2) Donald Trump’s campaign to persuade his base that this election was stolen.
With the exception of president-elect Biden’s verbal commitment to rejoin the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — the nuclear arms agreement president Obama signed with Iran — I see little reason to be optimistic about Biden’s approach to foreign policy and America’s endless wars.
Joe has predictably stacked his cabinet picks with corporate war-mongers who never saw a new weapons system or a foreign intervention they didn’t love.
Below you can watch Abby Martin’s survey (about 10 min.) of these individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
As Abby notes, “You just couldn’t find a nicer gang of war criminals.”
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
For a more wide-ranging analysis, listen to Aaron Mate’s interview with retired Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson (22 min.) below or click here:
Today’s Opinion piece from journalist Chris Hedges is entitled “The Great Delusion.”
Personally, I do not fear the end of the world.
I do fear the increasing magnitude of human suffering that will inexorably pave the way for the final Apocalypse.
And I deeply lament the sinister role now played by the evangelical church in advancing Satan’s goals.
By only reading the book of Revelation as if it were a human history horoscope, the evangelical church (in league with the Religious Right) remains blind to the fact that it has long been conquered by the Beast.
John the Seer warns God’s people that only those “who overcome” will stand victorious in the end.
And that charge ain’t describin’ much of evangelicalism today.
Below are a few excerpts from Hedges. You can read the entire piece here:
Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away.
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead”. . .
. . . The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. . .
. . . The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.
Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged. . .
. . . One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion. It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy.
After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.
Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept. This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country. . .
. . . The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us. . .
. . . We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.
I am not a virologist so I will not pretend to know more than I do (which is very little) about the new covid19 vaccines now becoming available to the public.
What the average person can know is that these will be the first RNA-based vaccines ever administered to the public. Rather than explain what that means, I will refer you to a few good articles explaining the differences between older vaccines (e.g. polio and small pox) and the newer, genetically manufactured vaccines built upon DNA and RNA (see here, here, and here).
Apparently, the new covid19 vaccines will not prevent you from becoming infected with the covid19 virus. But they will prevent you from developing the physical symptoms that typically arise after infection.
In other words, the vaccine will prevent you from getting sick, but it will not prevent you from catching the virus, being infected by the virus, and carrying the covid19 virus in your body.
This, of course, raises a very important question: will the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, of people being vaccinated all become asymptomatic carriers of the covid19 virus?
Will a vaccinated person be able to infect an unvaccinated person, causing them to become sick (and perhaps die)?
I posited my questions to a friend the other day whose son is a doctor in a busy Philadelphia hospital. He called his son on the phone and talked with him about my concerns.
Simply put, his answer to my question was: THAT is THE BIG unanswered question about this vaccine.
And no one knows the answer. Because this has never been done before.
“It’s all one enormous experiment,” says Dr. Peter Doherty, a Nobel Laureate and professor of immunology at Melbourne University.
Indeed it is.
I have not yet decided what I will do. What are your plans?
I have not written anything so far about the election broo-ha-ha mainly because I hate to waste my time dealing with such blatant absurdity.
However, as the Christian Right/Republican/Trump mania continues — not just to the bitter end, but undoubtedly well beyond, all the way to the dregs of this seemingly bottomless tankard of paranoid, right-wing swill — I find some aspects of the nation’s tumult rather interesting.
I don’t know the numbers of confessing Christians who believe that Biden “stole” the election from Trump, or are now marching in “stop the steal”
An election worker places a ballot in a counted bin during a hand recount of Presidential votes on Sunday, Nov.15, 2020 in Marietta, Ga. (John Amis/Atlanta Journal & Constitution via AP)
protests.
The entire movement, if you can call it that, looks very much like a new religion, and not simply because so many evangelicals are a part of it.
But I intend to reflect more on that element in a future post…I will only say for now that, even setting aside all the partisanship and divisiveness, it is an extremely unhealthy approach to any sort of belief, whether political or religious.
I do know that, according to a Reuters p0ll, over half of all registered Republicans believe that Trump actually won the election. Almost 70% of Republicans think it likely (or definitely believe) that the vote count was “rigged” or fraudulent.
While I am as willing to believe in potential election fraud as the next person, the main problem with these accusations is the complete lack of evidence.
Yes, many stories are being told, but accusations alone are not evidence, and accusations based on second-hand stories, often without substantiation, are not evidence, either.
Though Trump acolytes repeatedly insist on having such evidence, they never actually produce anything even remotely relevant, much less convincing. So, it is extremely noteworthy that when Rudi Giuliani is in court, he NEVER says he is arguing a fraud case.
In fact, he claims the opposite when standing before a judge. He only uses the word fraud when speaking in public…where no one has the power to disbar him.
Below is a video clip of only one example illustrating just how flimsy are the Republican claims to possessing evidence of fraud.
Ms. Bee Nguyen is a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. Recall that the state of Georgia had not one but THREE recounts. NONE of them produced any evidence of election tampering or fraud of any sort.
All of these recounts have been a huge waste of time and tax dollars.
Watch Rep. Nguyen debunk the so-called evidence a state colleague claims to provide as proof of Georgia election fraud. She dismantles this Republican fraud quite handily.
It would all be very funny were not so pathetic to see such partisan dimwits as her Republican opponent sitting in political office, misrepresenting the facts of the case, and fomenting the rising tide of political hatred.
As the late Senator Patrick Moynihan once reminded his senate colleagues: We are all entitled to our own opinions. But we are not entitled to our own facts.
First a quick update: I have been away for a while for several reasons.
First, I have finished the manuscript for my next book which will tentatively have a title (I hope) along the lines of Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism, Israeli War Crimes, and Palestinian Suffering.
While I wait to receive the remarks of my outside reader (an expert in the field selected by the publisher; it’s often called “peer review”) I have been slaving away at the marketing questionnaire given to me by the publisher. Yikes! What a task…
Second, I just returned from a multi-day trapping excursion trying to capture a new falcon. My peregrine was tragically killed by a coyote a few months ago in eastern Montana. So I am currently birdless. I was able to trap one falcon of the sort I want, but she was an adult and we are only allowed to keep immature birds taken from the wild.
Anyway, I have a bundle of posts I intend to make in the days ahead reflecting on the current political-evangelical-Donald Trump industrial complex and its implications for the immediate future of American Christianity.
But for now I want to thank my friend Steve Tompkins, a pastor in Seattle, for sending me an article by Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative. It’s entitled, “What I Saw at the Jericho March.”
I have no affinity for Mr. Dreher’s politics, but he is a fellow Christian with important insights into the feverish pagan ceremonies now consuming certain “evangelicals” — at least, that’s what they call themselves.
Selected excerpts appear below or you can read the entire piece here:
Alex Jones speaking at the recent Jericho March in Washington D.C.
For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.
Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.
. . . What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.
. . .It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.
See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.
. . .Retired Gen. Michael Flynn came onstage, saying that his MyPillow gave him the best sleep of his life. Then he recited the Our Father. Jesus, America, hucksterism: that was another theme of this rally. At times during the webcast, the screen would split, with the speaker on the left, and a My Pillow commercial on the right.
This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”
Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.
He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won. You watch: this movement is going to end up demanding that Gen. Flynn become the military dictator of America.
Rudolph Hess
Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address. Every time they attack Trump, he said, they’re attacking you! Total identification of the collective with the individual man, Trump. I despise facile comparisons, but this is a core fascist trope. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, Nazi functionary Rudolf Hess told the faithful, “The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”
As American democracy continues to circle the drain, the future of our body politic looks increasingly grim.
Chris Hedges
I had planned on writing a post about the long-term social effects of “Trumpism” and the president’s faux-legal efforts to overturn a democratic presidential election, but then I received Chris Hedges’ latest editorial in my inbox.
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times.
Reflecting on his years as a foreign war correspondent, he also wrote an important book describing the addictive qualities of war-making entitled, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If you haven’t read it, you really should.
Hedges is one of my favorite journalists and political writers who offers a cogent analysis of America’s unhappy future in words far more eloquent than anything I would have written.
So, here is an excerpt of Hedges’ very insightful and very bleak forecast. Or you can read the entire article here:
Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. . .
. . . The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world’s largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.
The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.
Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.
All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.
Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.
This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. . .
. . .The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, “once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.”
This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.
The Washington Posthas a good article today summarizing the current state of Trump’s numerous legal challenges to overturn the election results in 6 states. Again and again, judges continue to dismiss these cases as frivolous and without warrant.
Yes, the Right Wing propaganda machine continues to work overtime. But it is important to remember that bare assertions (like those repeated by Rudy Giuliani) are not arguments, nor are they evidence. Convincing arguments require evidence — especially in court. And that is what Trump’s lawyer continually fail to provide.
Listening to people who repeat the things we want to hear is not the way to LEARN anything. Nor is it the way to craft public policy.
However, rote repetition IS a pivotal tool for political propaganda. It can convince people of almost anything, evidence free. Just repeat it over and over again…
Sadly, this is the nature of “public discourse” in our country for the foreseeable future. All information is now “stove-piped.” The stovepipes consists of the individual’s political ideology.
Conservatives watch Fox, OAN, and Newsmax. Democrats watch MSNBC or CNN. Each group is fed tailored information conveniently packaged in the way they each prefer to consume information.
Ideological preferences determine what pieces of select information, often distorted and manipulated, viewers/readers receive. People pay attention to the information outlet that tells them what they already believe and want to hear.
As long as these patterns of media and personal, social behavior continue, the American people will remain hopelessly divided. There is no way around it, and our political, regulatory powers are too ineffective, feckless, and greedy to do anything about it.
Since The Washington Post article is hidden behind a subscription wall, I will post the entire article here. Or you can read it here. It is written by Anna Brugmann, Keith Newell, Tobi Raji, Aaron Schaffer and Maya Smith:
President Trump and his allies faced a crush of defeats in post-election litigation Friday, a further sign of their ongoing failure to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory through the courts and to gain traction through baseless claims of widespread fraud.
Just over a month after the Nov. 3 election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans suing over Biden’s win were dealt court losses across six states where they have tried to contest the results of the presidential race — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Judges ruled decisively that Trump’s side has not proved the election was fraudulent, with some offering painstaking analyses of why such claims lack merit and pointed opinions about the risks the legal claims pose to American democracy.
“It can be easy to blithely move on to the next case with a petition so obviously lacking, but this is sobering,” wrote Justice Brian Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, agreeing with the court’s decision not to hear a lawsuit filed by a conservative group that sought to invalidate the election in that state.
“The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen,” added Hagedorn, who is part of the court’s conservative wing. “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. . . . This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”
Two of the biggest defeats took place in Arizona and Nevada, where judges tossed full-scale challenges to the states’ election results filed by the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, respectively. Both judges noted in their opinions that the plaintiffs did not prove their claims of fraud.
In a detailed, 35-page decision, Judge James T. Russell of the Nevada District Court in Carson City vetted each claim of fraud and wrongdoing made by the Trump campaign in the state and found that none was supported by convincing proof. The judge dismissed the challenge with prejudice, ruling that the campaign failed to offer any basis for annulling more than 1.3 million votes cast in the state’s presidential race.
The campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin of victory, which was about 33,600 votes, Russell wrote.
During a court hearing Thursday afternoon, Trump campaign lawyer Jesse R. Binnall said the Nevada election had been “stolen” from Trump and claimed a “robust body of evidence” supported his conclusion.
Among its allegations, the campaign claimed that more than 61,000 people voted twice or from out-of-state.
In his ruling, Russell concurred with election officials and academic experts that there is no evidence for this, and specifically dismissed witness declarations that had been touted by the campaign, calling them “self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value.”
The judge added that the campaign’s so-called expert testimony “was of little to no value,” and called a claim of ballot-stuffing in broad daylight — made by one anonymous person and not corroborated by anyone else — “not credible.”
In a statement, the Nevada Republican Party said it intended to immediately appeal the ruling to the state’s highest court.
For his part, Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford, a Democrat, cheered the decision and called on members of Trump’s team to submit a formal complaint of voter fraud to his office — accompanied by details and evidence.
“Absent such a complaint and supporting evidence, these claims of widespread voter fraud remain baseless,” Ford said in a statement.
“This election is over,” he added. “President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris won Nevada, and Nevadans can remain confident that their voices have been heard.”
The Trump campaign’s strategy of using the courts to change the result of the presidential election — which has involved dozens of lawsuits in six states — has so far been a complete failure, as lawyers for the president and his allies repeatedly failed to present credible evidence of wrongdoing that would justify invalidating millions of votes in swing states. Trump and his allies are approaching nearly 50 losses in four weeks, according to a tally by Democratic attorney Marc Elias.
In an interview with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs on Friday, Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani dismissed the Nevada loss, saying the campaign would appeal but that “Nevada’s not critical to us.” Instead, he said the campaign was pinning its hopes on efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and, “boy, on Wisconsin.”
However, the Trump campaign already suffered defeat at the Wisconsin Supreme Court this week. And in federal court, District Judge Brett H. Ludwig expressed skepticism Friday about Trump’s arguments as he held an initial status hearing in a suit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory there.
While the hearing largely dealt only with setting a rapid schedule of filings and hearings next week, Ludwig — a Trump nominee who took the bench only in September — noted that the president has requested “extraordinary” relief.
He added that he had a “very, very hard time” seeing why Trump brought the action in federal court. Ludwig also termed a Trump request to “remand” the election back to the state legislature “bizarre.”
Meanwhile, in Arizona, Judge Randall Warner of the Maricopa County Superior Court ruled Friday that he found “no misconduct, no fraud and no effect on the outcome of the election” in a suit brought by the Arizona Republican Party and its chairwoman, Kelli Ward.
Warner found that GOP lawyers had identified nine mistakes during an inspection of 1,626 ballots that had been duplicated because the originals were damaged or could not be scanned. But those few errors did not amount to a widespread problem that cast doubt on Biden’s winning margin of more than 10,000 votes — or demand the “extraordinary act” of annulling the more than 3.3 million votes cast by Arizonans, he ruled.
Ward is expected to appeal the ruling to the Arizona Supreme Court.
But other Republicans in the state have made clear the election is over. On Friday, the GOP speaker of the Arizona House firmly rejected calls from Trump’s campaign for the legislature to disregard the popular vote and declare Trump the winner of the state’s 11 electoral votes.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” Speaker Rusty Bowers said in a statement. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”
The Trump campaign faced several other legal defeats around the country on Friday — including in Minnesota, where the state’s highest court dismissed a Republican lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the election results. Biden beat Trump there by more than 233,012 votes.
Despite the cascade of losses, Trump and his allies pressed forward with new cases. In Arizona, a second formal election contest was filed in state court Friday by a group of plaintiffs represented by the conservative Thomas More Society, the same organization whose request to overturn the election results was roundly rejected by Hagedorn, the Wisconsin judge, on Friday. The campaign also filed a new lawsuit in Georgia state court seeking to invalidate the state’s election results.
Gideon Levy, intrepid Israeli journalist for Haaretz newspaper
Gideon Levy is one of the bravest and most honest journalists in Israel. He writes for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Here is his most recent article on the Israeli army and its brutal treatment of Palestinian children.
I have visited the Al-Arroub refugee camp and spent a pleasant afternoon with a family there. All three sons had been arrested, beaten by Israeli soldiers. One had been shot. All for no particular reason:
Last week, we were in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, searching for an open area in which to sit, for fear of the coronavirus. There wasn’t one. In a camp in which house touches house, whose alleys are the width of a man and strewn with garbage, there’s nowhere to sit outside. One can only dream of a garden or a bench; there isn’t even a sidewalk. This is where Basel al-Badawi lives. A year ago, soldiers shot his brother dead, before his eyes, for no reason. Two weeks ago, Basel was snatched from his bed on a cold night and taken, barefoot, for questioning. We sat in his family’s cramped home and realized there was no “out” to go to. While we were there, Israeli soldiers blocked the entrance to the camp, as they occasionally do, arbitrarily, and the sense of suffocation only grew.
Basel Al Badawi in his home, with photo of Omar hanging on the wall, in Al Arroub refugee camp, November 2020. Credit: Alex Levac
This is Basel’s world and this is his reality. He is 16, a bereaved brother, who was abducted from his bed in the dark of night by soldiers. He has nowhere to go to except for school, which is closed for part of the week due to COVID-19. Basel is free now, more fortunate than certain other children and teenagers. Around 170 of them are currently detained in Israel. Other children are shot by soldiers, wounded and sometimes killed, with no distinction made between children and adults – a Palestinian is a Palestinian – or between a life-threatening situation and a “public disturbance.”
On Friday they killed Ali Abu Alia, a 13-year-old boy. It was a lethal shot to the abdomen. No one could remain indifferent to the sight of his innocent face in photographs, and his last picture – in a shroud, his face exposed, his eyes closed, as he was carried to burial in his village. Ali, as he did every week, went with his friends to demonstrate against the wild and violent outposts that sprouted out of the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, taking over the remaining land of his village, al-Mughayir. There is nothing more just than the struggle of this village, there is nothing more heinous than the use of lethal force against protesters and there is no possibility that shooting Ali in the abdomen could have been justifiable. In Israel, of course, no one showed any interest over the weekend in the death of a child, one more child.
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian teenager Ali Abu Alia during his funeral in the village of Mughayir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on December 5, 2020. Credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP
Up until the current school year, around 50 children from the shepherding community of Ras a-Tin studied at the school in al-Mughayir, the village of the deceased boy. They had to walk about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) each day, round trip, to attend. This year their parents, with the help of a European Commission aid organization based in Italy, built them a modest, charming school in the village. Israel’s Civil Administration is threatening to demolish it, and in the meantime it is harassing the pupils and teachers with surprise visits to check whether the toilets had been, God forbid, connected to a water pipe – in a village that was never connected to the power grid or the water supply. The children of Ras a-Tin must have known Ali, their former classmate, now dead.
The children did not know Malek Issa, of Isawiyah, in East Jerusalem. The 9-year-old boy lost an eye after it was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer. On Thursday the Justice Ministry department that examines allegations of police misconduct announced that no one would be charged in the shooting, after 10 months of intensive investigation. It was enough for the policemen involved to claim that stones had been thrown at them, perhaps one of them hit the boy. But no video shows stones being thrown, nor is there any other evidence of this. Ali’s killers can also sleep in peace: No one will prosecute them. All they did was to kill a Palestinian child.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy who was wounded in Isawiyah at Hadassah Ein-Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, on February 18, 2020.Credit: Ohad Ziegenberg
These and many other incidents are taking place during a period that is among the quietest in the West Bank. This is the terror taking place, committed by the state. When we hear of such incidents in vicious dictatorships – children who are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, one boy who was shot in the eye, another who was shot and killed – it sends shivers down our spine. Shooting at demonstrators? At children? Where do such things happen? Not in some faraway land, but rather just an hour’s drive from your home; not in some dark regime, but in the only democracy.
What would you think of a regime that allows the shooting of children, that abducts them in their sleep and razes their schools? That’s exactly what you must think of the regime here in our country [Israel].
Several news outlets have reported on General Flynn’s agreement with a Trump-supporting organization that is calling for the president to impose
Michael Flynn
martial law, to repeal the Constitution, and to give Trump a do-over in a new election.
Before he was replaced during an FBI investigation (which I also believe was unjust and never should have happened) in which he was convicted of perjury, he was Trump’s National Security Advisor.
We are living in strange political times. Donald Trump has cast a spell over conservatives. His word is inviolable. No evidence, coherence, or confirmation is ever necessary.
Long before the election happened he publicly stated that he could only lose if there was “massive fraud.” He never explained how he knew this or how it would happen. Only that he would.
Now that he has lost, his followers continue to belief his false prophecy, clinging tenaciously to nothing other than Trump’s declaration.
His minions continue to insist that their was fraud, despite the fact that 38 of Trump’s cases have been dismissed from court due to lack of evidence — courts often ruled by Trump appointed judges.
Though Giuliani continues to claim in public that he has evidence of fraud, it is important to note that when he is in court before a judge, Giuliani has always denied that he was bringing a fraud case. He admits that he does NOT have evidence of voter fraud!! [here, here, and here, for starters].
And every judge has agreed.
Below are several excerpts from different reports about Flynn’s call for civil war:
[Newsweek] Former national security adviser Michael Flynn—controversially pardoned by President Donald Trump last week—on Tuesday retweeted a call for the White House to declare martial law and re-run last month’s presidential election.
The appeal—made by the Ohio non-profit We The People Convention in a Washington Times advert Tuesday—urged the president to declare “limited martial law” in order to hold a new election.
The advert cited President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War as precedent, adding: “Then, as now, a President with courage and determination was needed to preserve the Union.”
WTPC claimed the “threat to our United States by the international and domestic socialist/communist left is much more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has faced in its history—including the civil war.”
. . . The retired general Flynn tweeted a link to the appeal, writing alongside it: “Freedom never kneels except for God.”
[WND News] Former national security adviser Michael Flynn promoted a petition Tuesday calling on President Donald Trump to temporarily suspend the U.S. Constitution, declare martial law and order the military to oversee a national re-vote for the 2020 presidential election. . .
. . . The letter said Trump’s declaration of martial law and temporary suspension of the Constitution must be for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote that “reflects the true will of the people.”
Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood also promoted the petition on Tuesday, tweeting that Trump should “declare martial law” to avert a civil war spurred on by bad actors led by communist China.
[The Independent] The retired general tweeted out a full-page ad that ran in The Washington Times that claimed the extraordinary executive actions were necessary to avoid the alternative of an imminent “shooting civil war”.
. . . President of the We the People Convention, Tom Zawistowski, said in a press release accompanying the newspaper ad that the group wanted to express its concerns that their rights had been infringed by the “massive” election fraud that stole the presidency for Joe Biden.
His claims echo the repeated allegations of election fraud that have come from the president since Mr Biden was projected to be the winner of the election almost four weeks ago.
A day after Mr Flynn tweeted out the calls for martial law, Mr Trump published a 46-minute video to Facebook calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the results in the key swing states that delivered the projected victory to the Democrats.
He also suggested a “re-vote” be held, as had been suggested in the ad on Tuesday that called for the military to run the re-lection.
“When the legislators, courts and/or Congress fail to do their duty under the 12th Amendment, you must be ready Mr President to immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote,” the ad said.
individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
What the average person can know is that these will be the first RNA-based vaccines ever administered to the public. Rather than explain what that means, I will refer you to a few good articles explaining the differences between older vaccines (e.g. polio and small pox) and the newer, genetically manufactured vaccines built upon DNA and RNA (see 
busy Philadelphia hospital. He called his son on the phone and talked with him about my concerns.
states. Again and again, judges continue to dismiss these cases as frivolous and without warrant.
