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Life is Only Sacred to Evangelicals as Long as They Are Unborn Americans

CBN News reported on one of president Trump’s final edicts in declaring

Pro-life demonstrators participate in the 47th annual “March for Life” in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2020. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

Friday, January 29 National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

Below is an excerpt of the article, or you can read Trump’s entire statement at CBN:

“The pro-life organization Operation Rescue named the president its pro-life person of the year for 2020, saying:

“The Malachi Award is given by Operation Rescue every year to recognize individuals who sacrificially work to advance the cause of protecting the pre-born. …during President Trump’s administration, he has done more to protect unborn lives than any other president in U.S history.”

NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY, 2021

– A PROCLAMATION BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA –

– DONALD J. TRUMP –

“Every human life is a gift to the world.  Whether born or unborn, young or old,

(Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

healthy or sick, every person is made in the holy image of God.  The Almighty Creator gives unique talents, beautiful dreams, and a great purpose to every person.  On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we celebrate the wonder of human existence and renew our resolve to build a culture of life where every person of every age is protected, valued, and cherished. . .

“. . . Since my first day in office, I have taken historic action to protect innocent lives at home and abroad. . .

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: People gather for the 47th March For Life rally on the National Mall where U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the crowd. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

“. . . As a Nation, restoring a culture of respect for the sacredness of life is fundamental to solving our country’s most pressing problems.  When each person is treated as a beloved child of God, individuals can reach their full potential, communities will flourish, and America will be a place of even greater hope and freedom.”

The hypocrisy of this statement is glaring, even though the same accusation could be laid at the feet of every presidential administration. After all, hypocrisy is at the heart of American politics.

However, as an American evangelical, I am always troubled by the anti-abortion movement’s hypocrisy in calling itself pro-life. For, as I and many others have said before, groups like Operation Rescue are anti-abortion activists NOT pro-life activists.

It is no small difference. Words matter.

Standing up for the sanctity of all human life everywhere is nowhere to be found on the agenda of evangelical activists. Neither was it a concern of Donald Trump’s.

In fact, Donald Trump’s total disregard for human life — other than his own — has been obvious over the past 4 years. The list of his anti-life actions is too long to cover here, so I will give only a few examples.

I could begin with his cluster of hurried federal death penalty executions in

Lisa Montgomery, the first federal prisoner executed in 67 years. She also suffered acute mental illness.

the final weeks of his presidency.  Trump’s last minute execution spree has killed more federal prisoners (including one mentally ill woman) than any previous president. (Yes, I believe every Christian, every American, must object to the death penalty.)

I could talk about Trump’s anti-life border policies — separating refugee families; losing track of children taken from their parents; keeping children in holding pens; arresting legitimate asylum seekers, labeling them as illegals, and then sending them back to their countries where they will face certain death.

These are not the actions of a pro-life president.

But I want to focus my attention on only one specific humanitarian scandal that has been enormously worsened by Trump’s policies: the war in Yemen.

As Kathy Kelly writes at Common Dreams:

For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.

Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.

Her bruised eyes still swollen shut, Buthaina Muhammad Mansour, believed to be four or five, doesn’t yet know that her parents, five siblings and uncle were killed when an air strike flattened their home in Yemen’s capital. The air strike, which killed at least 12 civilians. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah SEARCH “STRIKE MANSOUR” FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH “WIDER IMAGE” FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY. Matching text: YEMEN-SECURITY/AIRSTRIKE – RC1BFFB8F240

All of this blood is on American hands.

And if American church-goers were genuinely pro-life, we would be emphatically anti-war. We would be marching in the streets, pressuring the president to stop the bloodshed anywhere and everywhere that American power is killing, maiming, and suppressing the Image of God in this world.

But, then, that behavior would require us first to truly believe in the “sanctity of all human life” — which we obviously do not.

Sadly, few American evangelicals care about places like Yemen because we are a painfully provincial and ignorant people, too distracted by the obnoxious glitterati of commercialized, Christian success stories to look beyond our own self-centered existence.

The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).

In this case, the real enemy happens to be Iran, even though it’s the Yemeni people who now have the privilege of suffering from American terrorism in their own country.

Our sub-contractor in this horrific proxy war is Saudi Arabia, a long-time enemy of Iran — which makes outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s audacious accusations about Iran now providing safe harbor for Al Qaeda terrorists a laughable, buffoonish statement that should not only have set his pants on fire but left his body an ash heap on the podium.

(Perhaps I should stop being so surprised when infamously dishonest people like Mike Pompeo attend DC Bible studies and offer smiling testimony to their devout, evangelical, Christian faith.)

Even worse, the State Department has recently declared the Houthi/Yemeni group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.

This is another long, sad story, because the truth is that the US is now allied with Al Qaeda (remember the 9/11 guys?) in Yemen.

The fact of the matter is that WE, the good old US of A, are the real terrorists who are destroying, not just Yemen, but a host of suffering nations around the globe.

As a radical, Salafist, jihadist, Sunni organization, Al Qaeda originated in Saudi Arabia. They are sworn enemies of the Shia nation, Iran.

So, Al Qaeda now happily works with us (as we happily work with them) in assisting their countrymen, the Saudis, to destroy the people of Yemen.

Saudi Arabia has been slaughtering people in Yemen, largely civilians, since 2015. Its #1 financier and weapons supplier is none other than the USA.

In March 2019 both houses of Congress passed a bill requiring the US to end its financial support and military involvement the Yemen war.

But President Donald J. Trump vetoed that bill as an “unnecessary” and “dangerous” attempt to weaken his powers to make war.

How very pro-life of him…

Thus, the slaughter in Yemen continues with the help of US intelligence services, covert ops, training, money, fighter jets, missiles, bombers, and other US military equipment.

As Ahmed Abdulkareem writes in his recent Mint News article, “Yemen’s Leningrad: The Unforeseen Consequences of the State Department’s Houthi Designation:”

A malnourished Yemeni infant

The war-torn country of Yemen is in the midst of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world thanks in large part to a Saudi-led war fueled by American weapons. Now, as the war nears its six-year anniversary in March, any hopes for a diplomatic resolution have faded faster than the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outgoing administration recently announced plans to designate the Houthi rebels, the principal force battling both the Saudi-led Coalition and al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, as a foreign terrorist organization. The move effectively eliminates any ray of hope for the more than 24 million people struggling for survival amid war, siege, famine, and countless diseases and epidemics, according to the United Nations.  

The largest humanitarian crisis in the world, made possible and sustained by United States of America. (Also see Juan Cole’s article at Informed Comment.)

Yemeni mother and child.

These tragic events illustrate the obscenity which lies at the heart of American politics, our foreign policy, and the evangelical, Christian nationalism that perpetuates the anti-life lies of American exceptionalism.

While purportedly Christian news organizations such as CBN prostitute themselves by offering establishment propaganda about a pro-life president and American evangelicals, here are a few hard, cold, truths to be faced:

  • Evangelicals, by-in-large, are not pro-life people. We may be anti-abortion people. But we then use that pro-life label like an infant’s pacifier to sooth ourselves into a comfortable, conscienceless coma allowing us to ignore the slaughter of foreign innocents.
  • American is not a great, humanitarian nation. Rather, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The United States is the greatest purveyor of death, violence, and destruction in the world today.” (My favorite line from his anti-Vietnam war speech; a speech that is rarely included in the bastardized memorials touted on MLK Day).
  • No, electing Christians to political office does not improve anything. In fact, it only confirms the doctrine of total depravity. Mike Pompeo is only one of millions of Donald Trump’s loyal, evangelical enablers.

Christian support for Trump was the equivalent of an anti-spiritual hysteria spread like a virus within the church. I pray that the fever will break soon.

For years, the Religious Right insisted that voting Christians into high office was the solution to America’s problems. But Mike Pompeo (and his numerous minions now scattered throughout DC bureaucracy) is only the latest poster-child for how very, very wrong-headed that idea has always been.

  • We may debate when exactly life begins. But we can all agree that a fully human life has entered this world with the delivery of a new baby.

Sadly, however, evangelical pro-lifers behave as if life ends at birth. Why else would anyone care more about the unborn than those who have been born?

Genuine members of the Kingdom of God will honor the sanctity of all human life everywhere; will work to defend those lives globally; and will seek to stop the deliberate destruction of human life anywhere and everywhere.

No. Neither president Trump nor the evangelical church in America have ever been noteworthy defenders of the sanctity of human life.

In fact, American foreign policy relishes trampling upon the Image of God without a second thought.

And that is our shame.

What Would America’s Karma Look Like? Caitlin Johnstone on the Bogus Nature of US Complaints

Many have taken to warning about the internal threats to American democracy.

I do believe those threats are real.

But Australian blogger, Caitlin Johnstone, has some insight into the American proclivity to misidentify the real threats to our society while also

Caitlin Johnstone

polishing our national myth of American exceptionalism.

I like Caitlin because she always goes for the juggler, which would be obnoxious were she not so good at offering such precise diagnoses of our national problems.

You can check out Ms. Johnstone’s blog here.

Below is her latest post:

To stop the exacerbation of Trumpism the talking heads are recommending internet censorship, regulations on media, new domestic terror laws, literally anything they can possibly think of except changing the conditions which gave rise to Trumpism.

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The most imminent threat to US democracy is not Russia, nor fascist insurrectionists, but the fact that US democracy is entirely fictional. Saying US democracy is being threatened is like saying Grinches are a critically endangered species.

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The previous president intervened in the primary to appoint his right-hand man as his chosen successor. That successor will be installed in a five-day, star-studded celebration surrounded by a sea of barbed wire and heavily armed soldiers. What “democracy” is under attack, exactly?

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No, the Capitol riot was not “karma” for America’s international coups and regime change interventions.

Karma would be the US actually reaping what it sows.

Karma would be the US government toppled and replaced with a foreign puppet regime, and millions of Americans killed.

Karma would be tens of millions of Americans displaced by widespread violence.

Karma would be the US becoming a failed state where people are again sold as slaves.

Karma would be nuclear bombs dropped on US cities.

Karma would be America’s forests soaked with Agent Orange.

Karma would be mass executions of Americans in sports stadiums.

Karma would be massacres of entire towns.

Karma would be foreign soldiers raping and killing civilians with impunity.

Karma would be foreign-backed extremists mutilating Americans to death and publicly displaying their corpses.

Karma for US interventionism would be for America to collapse and burn in chaos and torture.

That would be “karma”.

That would be the chickens coming home to roost.

I am not saying it would be a good thing if this happened. It most definitely would not.

I am saying the US must cease brutalizing the world.

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We now know for a fact that monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations can be pressured by the plutocrat-controlled political/media class to silence political factions online. Good thing there’s no way this can possibly go wrong.

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When you realize that corporations are America’s real government, the whole “it isn’t censorship if it’s a private company doing it” argument is seen for the joke that it is. It’s also completely specious, because the government is directly involved in the censorship.

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Soon social media will just be an app that sends everything you say to the FBI and gives you regular notifications that the government is your friend, and then everyone will finally be happy.

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Back before he was silenced Assange tweeted “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

I think of this quote often.

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The mass media have earned every bit of the contempt the public has for them. Every little bit of it.

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Rightists suck at conspiracy analysis because their worldview requires an elite cabal planning and orchestrating all evil dynamics, whereas leftists understand that many (though not all) of those dynamics will unfold on their own in a system where human behavior is driven by profit-seeking. In situations where you are ideologically prohibited from blaming the obvious culprit capitalism, you’ll come up with all kinds of other wacky explanations.

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The best most reliable way to accurately predict what will happen in a given situation is to ignore whatever laws, trends and dynamics everyone else is pointing at and just assume the most powerful people will find a way to get whatever it is they want somehow. Doesn’t mean elites always win, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should stop fighting. It’s just the most reliable way to accurately guess what will happen in a given situation, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Sectarian feuds in the online left always boil down to “the whole system is rigged against the people” lefties versus “we can work with the oligarchic empire to advance our interests” lefties.

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The US empire has two faces: the plastic smiling one based in Hollywood, and the blood-spattered one based in DC, Arlington and Langley. If you live in wealthy western nations you’re presented with the former. If you live in the Middle East or the Global South you get the latter.

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One of the weirdest things in my life these days is watching people enthusiastically arguing that they should receive less assistance from their government. Never until I began commenting on US politics was this ever a part of my life. The brainwashing there is out of this world.

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If a political party always succeeds at advancing sick agendas and always fails at advancing healthy agendas, it’s because it only exists to advance sick agendas.

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Victory for your revolutionary political goals won’t be a victory for the ego. If you are sincere about this, you want your marginalized viewpoint to become mainstream and mundane. You want your insight and understanding to become as common as grass. You can’t be in this for you.

A lot of revolutionary-minded types get a sense of coolness and specialness from their marginalized ideology. It makes them feel good to be uniquely right about things. But that attitude will actually get in the way if your goals are attained and your views become mainstream.

If you are sincere about this stuff and not just in it for egoic masturbation (many are), you can’t keep a lot of identity wrapped up in being the underdog, in being fringe and marginalized. Because the ultimate goal is to be the exact opposite.

Christianity Today: “Humoring the President Was Not Harmless”

The editors at Christianity Today have hopped aboard the mea culpa train with many other conservative, Republican, evangelical news outlets.

However, I don’t know whether to say, “Better late than never,” or “Too little too late.”

On second thought, I think I’ll go with option two. Because it’s all way too little and much too late.

It’s too late because the inevitability of violence, fueled by Right-Wing lies about the election of Joe Biden, was as clear as the nose on your face for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Trump eagerly and persistently fomented it over and over again, every time he opened his foul mouth.

Right-Wing radio and television, a category which includes ostensibly “Christian” broadcasting networks as well, only intensified the already high levels of anger and resentment among Trump’s base over the president’s mythical conspiracy stories.

Yet, I never saw nor heard a single, Christian conservative fact-checker offer even minimal push-back against the bogus election fraud charges cooked up by the Trump-Guliani-Sekulow-Powell-Mitchell cabal of greedy, power-hungry, “legal” opportunists.

Not one.

Yet, now the editorial staff and talking heads at such bastions of Trump- mania as Fox, Newsmax, the Trinity Broadcasting and the Christian Broadcasting Networks (check here, here, and here) have all joined hands to sing kumbaya and condemn the violent assault on our nation’s capitol.

An assault that their reporting had helped to stir up and create.

Christianity Today has now joined this circle of lame repentance at the evangelical campfire.

Yet, it is far too little. In fact, it is grossly inadequate.

Remember, as far back as October 2016, candidate Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton was going to rig the election. He insisted that she could only win if she “stole the election” from him.

Where was this newly discovered evangelical moral fiber then? Trump’s long-term plans were obvious then and there. Why wasn’t he called on it?

Early on in this more recent presidential campaign, Trump was replaying the same old tune warning that “the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged.”

The remarks below were made in August.

Trump was clearly previewing his strategy for contesting the outcome of the election should he lose.

Figuring this out was not rocket science.

So, where was the Christian wisdom and warning about these obvious presidential shenanigans last fall, when it might have made a difference?

Where were the serious Christian warnings about the dangers of conspiracy theories, and the irrational behavior they can cause, when Trump first initiated his ultimate conspiracy theory that is now tearing the country apart?

I don’t have time to run through the litany of impeachable offenses committed by this president over the past four years, but they began in the first week he sat down in the Oval Office when he refused to divest himself of his business interests.

Where were the evangelical voices then, ready to condemn his refusal to abide by the Constitution?

Trump’s habitual violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses were only the beginning of his presidential criminality. And, believe it or not, we see that it his theft has never stopped as his staff now steals — yes, steals — historical artifacts from the White House (see below)!

Where was this evangelical moral concern in January of 2017?

Or. how about the Muller Report’s thoroughly documents claims that Trump had committed obstruction of justice at least 10-12 times in the aftermath of his phone call with the Ukrainian president?

Where was the evangelical worry about telling the truth then? Who was calling out William Barr’s lies for Trump then?

No, “humoring” this president is THE LAST thing his conservative, Republican, evangelical base has been doing.

Rather, they have been enablers, sycophants, co-conspirators, and mindless cheerleaders for the most incompetent, criminal, and psychologically dangerous president in American history.

So, finally I get to it. Below is Christianity Today’s wholly inadequate editorial. It’s facile references to the Bible offer only a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise shallow attempt at self-criticism:

The administration officials and members of Congress who enabled President Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election did not truly believe he won. They chose to coddle the president’s deception (and, I suspect, self-deception) because they thought it would endear them to his most loyal voters, and they assumed no one would get hurt.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an unnamed senior Republican official told The Washington Post in November. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

I think Trump will indeed leave, as he finally said he would in a brief video Thursday. But that doesn’t mean there was no downside. It doesn’t mean no one got hurt. In Washington on Wednesday, we witnessed a “failed insurrection,” to use the phrase of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in which pro-Trump demonstrators, some armed with guns, stormed the Capitol and rioted inside. The chaos claimed multiple lives as it made credible all but the direst warnings about what Trump’s elevation to the highest office in our country could bring.

Humoring him was not harmless.

For Christians, this should be no surprise. Scripture warns us that small patterns and habits grow to shape our lives in large ways. This is true of both faithfulness and sin, virtue and vice. “Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?” Paul asked the Corinthian church, incredulous at their acceptance of open, incestuous adultery in their congregation (1 Cor. 5:6). . . 

. . . What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.

It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”

Well, some of them did do something. This is what the dough looks like leavened. This is where dishonesty in the little things leads.

In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s events, I’ve seen defensiveness over assignment of responsibility to white evangelicals because of our unusually high support for Trump at the ballot box. Is it fair, some have asked, to blame all evangelicals for actions (storming the Capitol) many would never condone, or for the election of a president many backed for policy reasons if at all?

ScheerPost: “Israel’s Latest War Crime: Medical Apartheid”

Professor Juan Cole, who manages one of my favorite news blogs, Informed Comment, has written an article exposing apartheid Israel’s refusal to

Professor Juan Cole

distribute the covid vaccines to Palestinians in Israel or the Occupied Territories.

Yes, as I demonstrate in my forthcoming book on Christian Zionism, Israel is an ethnocratic state that prioritizes Jewish lives above all others.

Several of my friends in the West Bank have already contracted covid. Thankfully, none of

Journalist Robert Scheer

them have died, and all seem to have recovered fully.

Due to the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and its perennial lack of funds (largely due to American and Israeli economic restrictions), the rate of infection is much higher than officially reported.

People are afraid to tell their bosses and supervisors when they do become sick, because they fear losing their jobs and being ostracized.

Cole’s article can be found at Robert Scheer’s new journalism site, Scheerpost.

The piece is entitled, “Israel’s Latest War Crime: Medical Apartheid.”

I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire piece here:

Some ten percent of Israelis have already been given the coronavirus shot, showing what an efficient government can do for its citizens with the right medical and administrative infrastructure. The Trump administration has not been able to ramp up the actual shots in arms, despite shipping millions of doses of vaccine to states and localities.

There’s just one problem with Israel’s success. It is only within Israel proper.

Israeli medical teams in Israel welcome the vaccine’s arrival…for them

Israel militarily occupies the Palestinian West Bank and keeps the little Palestinian Gaza Strip under blockade. In international law, Israel is responsible for the health and well-being of the people it militarily occupies. Not vaccinating them against a pandemic is a war crime.

You know how many shots Israeli physicians have given the Palestinians under their rule? None.

This, even though Israeli squatters who have stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank are being given the shot.

There has been a dangerous spike in cases and deaths during the past two months in the Palestinian Territories.

The ministry of health of Occupied Palestine announced on Friday that 18 people died of COVID-19 that day, and 1,450 new cases were recorded, this for a population of 5 million.

These statistics are almost certainly missing many cases and deaths, since Palestinians living under the Israeli boot have lost tens of billions of dollars in potential income and their medical infrastructure is ramshackle. There is a severe shortage, for instance, of intensive care units. On top of all that, the Trump administration has cruelly and ruthlessly slashed aid to the Palestinians and has knee-capped the UN Relief and Works Agency that used to help out Palestinian refugees. These are families ethnically cleansed by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967.

As far as the health ministry can tell, 13% of the Palestinian population tests positive for the virus and about 1% of those stricken end up dying. That would be 650,000 people stricken, of whom 6,500 will die. They wouldn’t die at that rate if they were getting the vaccine.

Matt Taibbi: “We Need a New Media System”

“If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences”

Exactly.

The despicable figure of anchor and journalists (so-called) at Fox and CBN (especially!) now condemning the violence in DC last Wednesday pushes the limits of professional hypocrisy.

These “reporters” have faithfully pushed the Trump narrative of a stolen election from day-one. Hyping the hysteria to increase their ratings.

To now condemn the actions of those true believers (sadly misguided as they are) who were willing to put their money where their mouths are; believers the incorrigible right wing echo chamber helped to create by promoting Trump’s lies and misinformation about the November election, is really beyond the pale.

One thing such people will never do is take responsibility.

Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite investigative journalists.

Journalist, Matt Taibbi

His books Griftopia, The Divide, and I Can’t Breathe (among others) are well worth your time.

Today he offers a good analysis, largely drawn from his excellent book, Hate, Inc., explaining the role of America’s broken system of “news” coverage in fostering the turbulence we see in today’s political climate.

I have posted an excerpt below, or you can read the entire piece (by subscribing here).

The cover of Taibbi’s latest book, Hate Inc.

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections. . . 

. . . The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.

Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump’s voters for four years. . .

. . . The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted. . . 

. . . Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

The Strange Nature of the Current Conversation About Censorship

Since the attack on the Congressional building last week, talk about censorship has increased markedly.

The most notable example has been the Parler app which became the conservative alternative to Twitter after that site began to moderate, and sometimes censor, political postings.

After Wednesday’s Trump rally/demonstration, several support platforms (such as Google) that make programs like Twitter and Parler available online, have refused to support the Parler app any longer.

Congress has been calling the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram into its chambers for months to give lengthy testimony before comically ill-informed congressional people. Representatives and Senators primarily scold these men and women for not implementing the particular species of censorship that they happen to believe is needed.

The CEOs bow and scrap appropriately and then go home to do as they please.

Now conservatives are whipping themselves into a panic over targeted, corporate censorship directed specifically against them and their movements.

In fact, Joe Biden has already begun to discuss the need for new laws to clamp down on “domestic terrorism,” which will certainly include additional provisions for warrantless surveillance, wiretapping, and censorship for “inappropriate” political speech.

But there is a deep irony in these conservative complaints about corporate giants like Facebook monopolizing online communications, and the growth of government censorship.

Oddly enough, politicians, journalists, and the public commonly discuss these issues as if Facebook and Twitter were public service providers!

They are not.

They are private companies that can do anything they darn well please in the area of content control. Their only real obligation is to make more money for their shareholders.

It’s called capitalism, remember?

And conservatives have always insisted that markets should not be regulated, unless of course it somehow improves the bottom line for the corporations we are now complaining about.

As a result, the American people face a barren, public communications landscape dominated by a few behemoth-sized corporations that have consumed and destroyed all competition.

It’s called unregulated capitalism. The kind conservatives adore.

People forget that all of these companies became the giant monopolies they are today because of government DE-regulation policies going back to the Reagan presidency — deregulation policies dear to the heart of conservatives.

Now everyone gets to reap what “they” have sown.

A Capitol Display of Systemic Racism and White Privilege

Many people are pointing out the gross disparities between the way DC police handled the “Stop the Steal” mob that attacked Congress and looted Congressional chambers this week, and the way police responded to Black Lives Matter demonstrations this past summer.

Of course, the Right-Wing media bubble will never talk about this disparity. They are too busy inventing stories about mythical “bus loads” of antifa infiltrators invading DC in order to give violent Trump supporters a bad name.

NowThisNews has compiled video clips illustrating the very different responses mustered by the DC authorities last summer and this week.

Watch:

David Sirota: “The Insurrection Was Predictable”

The Daily Poster has another good article by investigative journalist, David Sirota.

His piece, “The Insurrection Was Predictable,” makes the case for what any informed citizen should have known:  the Right-Wing violence that occurred in the nation’s capitol this week was entirely predictable. In fact, it was a foregone conclusion.

And we can expect to see more of this violent behavior from The Right in the future.

I have excerpted Sirota’s article below. Or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the link above.

Two months ago, The Daily Poster published a series of reports on the growing threat of a coup attempt, wondering why it wasn’t being taken more seriously by Democrats and the media. We were scoffed at and eye-rolled, as if such things could never happen in America. 

Nobody is scoffing or eye-rolling anymore after today’s events at the U.S. Capitol. There, insurrectionists stormed the building and halted the certification of the national election, as security forces allowed them to breach the Senate chamber and shut down the proceedings. There was a notable difference in the way federal security forces met last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with a show of force, and the way they allowed the Capitol to be overrun by right-wing authoritarians that they knew were coming.

About a decade ago, I wrote a book called “The Uprising,” which described how we were entering an era of chaos where right-wing groups would try to seize power under the guise of populism. Clearly, that has been happening — we saw it speed up during the Tea Party backlash and it was further accelerated by Donald Trump, who is a unique president in his willingness to use the White House megaphone to foment and destabilize. 

Today’s events were the result of all that incitement. It was a culmination that happened inside a culture of total impunity — and it is worth considering five points of context to understand what we’re really dealing with here, because it will likely continue after Trump leaves the White House.

1. We have long known that the far-right — and specifically many Trump supporters — are hostile to democracy. 2019 polling data from Monmouth University found about a third of the strongest supporters of Trump scored in the highest ratings for authoritarian tendencies. In all, Democracy Fund data show that roughly a third of Americans “say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.” That’s what was on display today.

2. While Trump has tried to blame violence on the left, his administration has been trying to downplay the threat of right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy. In a whistleblower complaint, a former top Homeland Security official alleged that Trump officials ordered him to modify an agency report’s section “on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” Politico reported earlier this year that Homeland Security officials have “waged a yearslong internal struggle to get the White House to pay attention to the threat of violent domestic extremists” — but they gave up because Trump wasn’t interested. Instead, federal security forces were focusing on deporting immigrants and investigating environmental activists.

3. The Capitol Police have a $460 million budget and 2,300 personnel to guard the U.S. Capitol complex. For comparison, that is twice the size of the budget of my own city’s police department, which is used to secure an entire metropolis. Somehow, this army of Capitol security forces was unable — or unwilling — to stop insurrectionists from breaching the building and taking over the floor of the U.S. Senate. And it’s not like they were caught by surprise — they had advance warning of the potential for unrest. So it’s almost as if they weren’t trying to stop the mayhem.

4. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request to send National Guard reinforcements to the Capitol was initially rejected by the Defense Department — the same department whose leadership was recently purged and then replaced with Trump loyalists. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence, considering Trump initially refused to call for the insurrectionists to disperse.

5. The insurrection clearly fed off months of misinformation by Republican Party officials who continued to push the lie that the national election was plagued by fraud. Those lies spread: A survey last month found that three quarters of Republican voters believe the election was fraudulent. Even though nobody has produced evidence of systemic fraud, Republican lawmakers in Washington continued to fuel the conspiracy theories, ultimately pressing Congress to overturn the national election. One photo caught Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raising a fist to the oncoming insurrectionists as he headed to the Capitol to try to halt the certification of the election. 

Manuel Quinones @ManuelQ

From our Francis Chung, Sen. Josh Hawley greeting protesters in the east side of the Capitol before riots began.

January 6th 2021

15,425 Retweets

As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican Party officials who fueled and abetted this insurrection did so because they assume they will feel no political, social or legal consequences for their behavior. On the contrary, they will likely be rewarded with higher approval ratings and support from many Republican voters. And if the Look Forward Not Backward™ crowd gets its way and makes sure there are no legal consequences for any of Trump’s many crimes, then these Republicans will know they have a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for their own extremist behavior.

After all of this, if nothing changes, then I tend to agree with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s aide Dan Riffle, who today said that “it always — even in moments like this — can get worse. If recent history is any guide, it almost certainly will.”

But things can still change — and they must. 

In “The Uprising,” I argued that the best way to counter the rise of right-wing populism and to prevent it from proliferating is for an opposition movement and party to not just issue vague paeans to democracy and the soul of the nation. The opposition must also deliver tangible, material gains for working people — rather than continuing to be an elite and effete caretaker of a let-them-eat-cake establishment that right-wing provocateurs can forever burn in effigy.

The New Deal delivering such gains to the working class helped tamp down the outbreak of right-wing fascism in America. Nearly a century later, the Georgia elections this week proved the same point. There, two right-wing Republican authoritarians were defeated by the Black reverend who runs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church and by a Jewish guy — and the Democratic duo won by relentlessly campaigning on a simple promise to deliver $2,000 checks to millions of people in their state facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy.

Of course, no matter what Democrats might deliver — survival checks, a higher minimum wage, guaranteed medical care, massive investments in job creation, a crackdown on abusive corporations, etc. — there will always be a right-wing authoritarian movement in America willing to weaponize racism and illiberalism for its cause. 

So it’s not simple: there is not a straightforward 1-to-1 relationship between enacting policies that improve people’s lives and instantly snuffing out the kind of fascism that reared its head at the Capitol today. But delivering for millions of people who’ve been economically pulverized for generations is the best and probably only way to try to halt fascism’s wider spread to more of the general population over the long haul. 

That work must begin now. 

Not tomorrow. Not in a few months. 

Right now.

Photo credit: Doug Mills-Pool / Getty Images

The Intercept: “Far-Right Violence Is Going to Be a Threat With or Without Trump’s Calls to Action”

Natasha Leonard has written an article at The Intercept analyzing Trump’s weaponization of the Right and its long-term effects. Below is an excerpt or your can read the entire article here:

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s craven loyalists in Congress plan to disrupt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Whether cynical or delusional, their plan to reject swing-state electors will fail to overturn the election results. Meanwhile, Trump has called upon his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., that day to demand that Congress hand him a second term. The protest, he tweeted, “will be wild.”

Trump supporters gather for the “Stop the Steal” rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/AP

Under the auspices of Trump’s “last stand,” violence from his furious supporters seems all but inevitable. For Black communities and other communities of color in Washington, thousands of white supremacists amassing in their city is in itself a threat of violence. For far-right groups, the president’s call represents a follow-up to his earlier, perturbing suggestion that the Proud Boys “stand by.” Now, they are being activated.

Posts about Wednesday’s protests shared on Telegram and Parler, the social media platform preferred by the far right, include promises of “boots on the ground” and anonymous tips for smuggling guns into Washington, where gun laws are strict. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted that his group would turn up “in record numbers.” The last major “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in December ended in four stabbings as Proud Boys attacked passersby and anti-fascist counterprotesters after dark.

Yet the “last stand” narrative surrounding Wednesday’s planned protests is no more than the rhetoric of escalation. There should be little doubt that Trump, desperate and wretched in defeat, will continue to call upon his base of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, and other fascists to rally after the election is certified — perhaps long after Biden is inaugurated.

Even without Trump’s direct incitements, though, the far-right violence emboldened under his presidency is not going away. While the stated aim of die-hard Trump supporters may for the moment be to reverse a “stolen” election, these groups will continue to exist and spread violence as a central part of their ethos when they gather en masse. That ethos, of course, is white supremacy. It is no accident that in addition to the stabbings, December’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington saw members of the fascistic group vandalize two Black churches and tear down and burn Black Lives Matter flags — an act of destruction for which Tarrio was arrested in Washington on Monday.

An exclusive focus on far-right attacks in response to Trump’s loss risks overlooking the ways already extant white supremacist violence will remain the core extremist threat under Biden. Attacks might come from far-right vigilantes, but we should also be wary of violence perpetrated by government agencies, such as immigration authorities and police.

Armed militia members watch members of antifa during a “Stop the Steal” protest at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

It’s clear that white supremacy undergirds the commitment to restoring Trump as president. While the fight to overturn the election could well dissipate, the racist, fascistic ideology driving the effort will remain intact.

White Mob Plants Bombs, Trash Congress, Police Response Minimal

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

You tell me how very differently the situation would have been handled had a Black Lives Matter rally behaved like this in the nation’s capitol…

You have just viewed picture after picture of what white privilege looks like.