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Is Billy Rolling Over Yet?

Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Cissie Graham Lynch, spoke at the Republican National Convention last night to recite the predictable pablum of the Religious Right.

No, it was worse than that. Mrs. Lynch spewed rank idolatry for the Republican party. It’s the kind of behavior that got Old Testament Balam scorched by the Lord.

But nowadays, she is only one among many, for Trump seems to keep a kennel of false prophets on hand for every conceivable occasion.

Lynch opened her speech with a declaration on the importance of “our faith.”

She didn’t mention whose faith happens to be our faith, but the confusion was quickly clarified. She meant the pagan, American faith placed in our blasphemous civil religion.

This became evident as she listed her topics of concern. They were all the gems of Religious Right activism: abortion, the Supreme Court, and transgendered civil liberties.

Lynch’s flawless interweaving of (1) her descent from Christian evangelist, Billy Graham, (2) a rote recounting of Religious Right political priorities, and (3) the themes of American civil religion all stamped Mrs. Lynch as yet another immoral Siren working hard to bewitch the innocent, the ignorant, and the depraved into shipwrecking themselves against the rocks of bogus national piety.

Alas, if only the Christian faith WAS being persecuted in America today! Perhaps the genuine church could finally shed itself of this dead wood and dull-witted false teachers.

Notice that Mrs. Lynch’s examples of what she means by the Christian faith being “bullied” in the public square all consisted of threats, not to Christian faith or practice, but to the various privileges that church institutions enjoy at public expense.

I am fairly certain that Jesus never commanded his disciples to build religious institutions like schools or hospitals while demanding tax breaks or other special dispensations denied others operating in the same public arena.

Tax breaks and exemptions are nice, if you can get them.

Just as religious institutions (operating in a world unto themselves, ignoring the standards to which others are held) are beneficial, if you can build them.

But PLEASE stop pretending that those things have anything to do with either religious freedom or practicing the Christian faith. They don’t.

Just as losing those privileges has nothing to do with a loss of religious liberty.

So, Cissie, listen up:

No one is stopping you from following Jesus through the American public square.

No one is prohibiting you from living out your faith to your heart’s content.

Stop confusing religious privileges with religious freedoms. They are very different animals.

And please stop the horrible confusion of American civil religion with the Christian gospel.

I fear that you’ve set your grandfather spinning in his grave.

The 75th Anniversary of Nuclear War

Today is the 75th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States remains the only nation to have used

Hiroshima after the bomb

nuclear weapons in warfare.

Brett Wilkins, an independent journalist who often writes for Common Dreams, has a good article at Antiwar.com which tells the story, I suspect, from a new perspective for many readers. It is entitled “Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Every American should also know and remember that we used nuclear weapons offensively when it was unnecessary.

With the passage of time comes more and more evidence about the past.

Over the years, a great deal of evidence has come to light underscoring the

Nagasaki, September, 1945.

fact that almost everything Americans have always been told about America’s justification for wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth in two nuclear conflagrations are lies.

In fact, not only has the story always been false, it was known to be false at the time but was perpetuated as a part of a US domestic propaganda campaign.

Below is an excerpt of Wilkins’ excellent article:

Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.

“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”

Read the entire article here.

Ilhan Omar Continues to Speak Truth to Power

Rep. Ilhan Omar is someone I deeply admire. She is a woman of principle who does not hesitate (as far as I can tell) to speak out on behalf of the

Rep. Ilhan Omar

oppressed, whether in this country or abroad.

Rep. Omar is up for reelection in November. But as someone who defends the rights of the Palestinian people to live freely as equal citizens in the land of Palestine; as someone who condemns Zionist Israel’s continuous oppression of the Palestinians, she is coming under heavy attack from pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobbying organizations in this country.

This opposition includes a growing number of death threats.

The online journal Mondoweiss has a recent article entitled “The Israel lobby has spent $2 million to defeat Ilhan Omar.”

With all the baseless hysteria in the media nowadays worrying about Russian election interference, the continuing Big-Money election influencing efforts on behalf of Israel make other complaints pale in comparison.

But don’t say that out loud in public. You will be attacked as an antisemite by someone connected to AIPAC.

Here is an excerpt:

But the reaction to Omar has been especially hostile. Many charged that the furious response to her comments quickly devolved into Islamophobic attacks on one of the nation’s first Muslim Congresswomen. Trump capitalized on last year’s uproar, leading chants of “send them back” at his rallies, fanning phony outrage and prompting serious death threats.

The lobby and its allies have zeroed in on Omar for several reasons, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights attorney and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Omar “unabashedly” has called out the lobby, supports BDS, has taken up Israeli human rights abuses, “and hasn’t backed down regardless of how many times folks have come at her with charges of antisemitism.”

“She has come out strongly in support of Palestinian human rights and she has not been afraid of calling what Israel is doing in terms of its control over Palestinian lives ‘apartheid’ — that’s what sets her apart,” Hassan said.

Still, other lawmakers and progressives are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel, and they haven’t faced an onslaught of attacks from the president, his supporters, Israel and centrist Democrats.

Hassan pointed to Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, a white woman who represents a district next to Omar’s, who has similarly denounced Israel as an “apartheid” state but doesn’t face the same criticism.

That’s likely because Omar is an African-American, Muslim woman, Hassan said.

“She presents an easier target for some folks who want to delegitimize that kind of speech about Israel in terms of accountability and conditioning aid and those kinds of issues,” Hassan added.

Beyond that, Omar has become a leader of the pro-Palestine progressive movement, and knocking her out of office in August would represent a major win for Israel. The lobby’s willingness to spend over $2 million on that objective highlights its importance.

You can read the entire article here.

Gideon Levy: Making Hypocrisy and Violence Sound Nice and Inescapable

Gideon Levy has a new piece in Haaretz newspaper calling for national self-awareness in Israel.

Gideon Levy

Mr. Levy is a modern day prophet; the lone voice calling for national repentance in the Israeli wilderness.

Although this article focuses on the retired general, and now leading Israeli politician Benny Gantz, you don’t need to know much about Gantz or Israeli politics to grasp Levy’s point.

Think of the way our government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia so the Saudis can continue their treacherous attacks in Yemen.

Or look at the Federal agents attacking demonstrators with bats, gas, and

Benny Gantz

pepper spray across this country. All in the name of “restoring order.”

Here is an excerpt:

What the state can do, the individual cannot. Let’s leave aside the jargon where everything the other side does is terrorism and everything Israel does is for the sake of security. It’s common wisdom that what the state does is never considered violence, only self-defense. The state and the army can act as violently as they please, as much as they want, and go as crazy as they want. The state will always do this in the name of lofty values of defense. An individual who acts violently is an anarchist, a serial disrupter of law and order. There are laws that are also supposed to apply to countries, but Israel decided a long time ago that it is not bound by such laws.

And yet, is it possible that in one breath you can threaten violence and stand against it? Knowing the impact that state violence has on the way individuals act? One needs a special lack of self-awareness or a special degree of double standards to make such a claim. What Israel threatens to do in Lebanon is immeasurably more violent than anything the most dangerous anarchist could imagine. Israel’s actions in Lebanon have sowed much more anarchy and destruction than any demonstration. And so Gantz, and all his colleagues have no moral right to speak against violence. It’s almost the only language they know and it’s their bread and butter.

You can read the entire article here.

Trump Appears to Believe in “Mass Human Sacrifice”

President Trump torpedoed son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s, plan for a federally organized, covid testing program because he believed that it would primarily benefit “blue states” (the states that he did not carry in the 2016 election).

A recent investigative article at Vanity Fair explains what happened. I have posted an excerpt below:

Despite the Rockefeller Foundation’s round-the-clock work to guide the U.S. to a nationwide testing system essential to reopening, the foundation has not yet been able to bend the most important curve of all: the Trump administration’s determined disinterest in big federal action.

On July 15, in a video call with journalists, Dr. Shah looked visibly frustrated. The next day, the Rockefeller Foundation would be releasing a follow-up report: It called on the federal government to commit $75 billion more to testing and contact tracing, work to break through the testing bottlenecks that had led to days-long delays in the delivery of test results, and vastly increase more rapid point-of-care tests.

Though speaking in a typically mild-mannered tone, Shah delivered a stark warning: “We fear the fall will be worse than the spring.” He added, putting it bluntly: “America is not near the top of countries who have handled COVID-19 effectively.”

Just three days later, news reports revealed that the Trump administration was trying to block any new funding for testing and contact tracing in the new coronavirus relief package being hammered out in Congress. As one member of the Rockefeller coalition said of the administration’s response, “We’re dealing with a schizophrenic organization. Who the hell knows what’s going on? It’s just insanity.”

You can read the entire story here.

President Trump’s mismanagement of the US pandemic have been largely motivated (above and beyond his gross incompetence) by his partisan efforts at reelection.

Members of Kushner’s task force reveal that Trump was disinterested in their plan because he believed that “blue states” would be hardest hit by covid.

In other words, if he didn’t carry a state in the 2016 election, he didn’t feel the need to help the people who didn’t vote for him.

Let that fact sink in…

Numerous outlets are reporting this story in one form or another (here, here, here, here, and here for only a few examples).

Ironically, the current resurgence of the virus is now hitting red states the hardest, and seems to be a major cause for the current nose-dive in Trump’s approval ratings.

Now that the “mass human sacrifices” are including Republican voters, what will Trump do?

Personally, I am not holding my breath. Trump remains Trump, a gross narcissist who is too ignorant and stupid to care about anyone but himself, even when the nation is dying.

 

Don’t Believe Network News About Portland

One of my daughters lived in Portland, OR for many years.

She keeps in touch with many of her friends in the area, a good number of whom have been out in the streets protesting. Some of them have been arrested. All of them tell the same story.

You can read much of this for yourself on Facebook. Just check out the hashtags #WallOfMoms, #WallOfVets, #WallOfDads.

The story goes like this:

Mixed groups of demonstrators have been in the streets regularly ever since George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.

The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful. When unknown agitators destroyed property, group leaders told them to stop and to go away. They were damaging the cause.

Then Federal troops appeared on the scene and began arresting people for no apparent reason, putting them into unmarked vehicles, and locking them up without charges. Some have been kept jailed in undisclosed locations for several days, while family and friends wondered where they were.

These unconstitutional actions by the Feds energized more citizens to march in the streets. Yes, a small group of agitators ramped up their property destruction. But both black and white organizers regularly tried to stop their activities, and were typically unsuccessful.

It is not surprising that this small minority of agitators garner most of the headlines and nearly all of the time on the TV networks, making it look as if Portland is in chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Feds have escalated the confrontations unnecessarily, with their rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, unnecessary aggression and violence against protesters.

It is totally unnecessary.

This is when the Wall of Moms was created, intentionally putting themselves between the demonstrators and the Feds. At this point, a

This protester-mom, was standing, linking arms with fellow demonstrators, when a Federal agent shot her in the face with a rubber bullet

portion of the protests became focused around the Federal courthouse, because that was were the Federal agents were concentrated.

Now the focus of the demonstrations became bifurcated.

The movement’s leaders worked to maintain their focus on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. You don’t have to watch many Facebook videos and pictures to see and hear large crowds chanting “Black Lives Matter.”

But, with the unsolicited intervention of Federal agents, another section of the movement gave their attention to demonstrating against the “police state” activities of Trump’s anti-demonstration forces. The increase in violence is due entirely to the brutal behavior of these Federal marshals and Border Patrol agents.

Yes, a minority of people get out of hand. After the Feds erected a fence in front of the courthouse, a few people focused their anger there and began to build fires under the fence. Again, the organizers consistently tried to stop this from happening.

But, get real! Have you seen the fires? They hardly pose a real threat to anyone, especially to the courthouse!

As the Feds continued to attack both the BLM demonstrators and the Wall of

The bruises on this mom’s body were made by the many rubber bullets fired at her by Federal “police.” Obviously, the Feds don’t hesitate to shoot a woman at close range when her back is turned

Moms, two additional sectors of society began spontaneously to appear: military veterans and dads.

Many veterans, understandably upset at what they were seeing, began to show up in support of the protesters and the moms. A number of videos show how brutally they too have been treated by the Federal agents, beaten with clubs for simply trying to speak to the officers.

Then dads appeared with leaf blowers to fend off the clouds of tear gas being fired by the Feds at unarmed civilians.

Naturally, conservative outlets such as Fox hate all anti-establishment movements, especially when they call for racial justice and condemn police violence.

By definition, conservatives support the establishment.

That is what conservatism means. It’s who they are. Their reporting is pure propaganda, tailored to anger their like-minded viewers, and to condemn the protesters.

Also, remember the old journalistic motto: “if it bleeds it leads.” All the news networks succumb to this principle. They would rather show us the few violent clashes than the masses protesting peacefully. It’s the way news/journalism has always worked in this country.

So, if you want to get angry, then get angry at our government. Get angry at “law enforcement” run amuck, attacking fellow citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Get angry at our president for intentionally making a difficult situation worse, as he manipulates civil unrest for his own personal, political advantage.

Trump is using the predictable FASCIST strategy of generating violence so that he can run on a “law and order” platform in November. You can count on it. This is how he hopes to win reelection.

Don’t fall for it.

We are already well underway to authoritarianism.

When is a Revival Not a Revival?

John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. Professor Fea has an excellent blog called “The Way of Improvement Leads Home” which I follow regularly.

He recently offered a post with this title: “Is a Spiritual Revival Leads to More Christian Trumpism, Is It Really a Spiritual Revival? Or is It Something Else?” I encourage you to read the entire piece, if you haven’t already.

Evangelicals tend to believe that “spiritual revivals” or “Christian awakenings” will provide the ultimate solution to all of society’s problems.

Christian media promotes this story-line regularly:

Protests aren’t the answer. Boycotts aren’t the answer. New laws aren’t the answer. What we need is a spiritual awakening! If everyone will only come to Jesus, then all our problems will begin to solve themselves!

Or so we are told, over and over and over again.

Professor Fea’s important post draws from the story of a great American, Frederick Douglass.

Douglass’ autobiography tells the story of his own conversion to Christianity, and why he did not see “personal conversion” as the cure all for the the sins of slavery.

Douglass was a slave who witnessed his master’s spiritual conversion. And then marveled at how the master’s new-found faith in Christ made him a more abusive master than he had ever been before.

Quoting from a recent biography of Douglass, Fea notes:

“A recent convert himself to Christian faith, although now struggling to

Frederick Douglass

understand whether God intended any justice on earth, Frederick witnessed the spectacle of master Thomas’s wrenching emotional breakdown and confession in that pen. Blacks were not allowed in the pen, nor in front of the preacher’s performances, but Douglass tells us that he imposed his way close enough to hear Auld “groan,” and to see his reddened face, his disheveled hair, and a “stray tear halting on his cheek.” Here festered the dark heart of the moral bankruptcy of slaveholders that the future abolitionist would make his central subject. . . 

“Douglass converted this memory into angry condemnations of the religious hypocrisy of the entire Christian slaveholding universe, especially the little microcosm of Auld’s household, where the young slave now had to listen daily to loud praying and testifying by the white family, and to participate in hospitality extended to local preachers who were sometimes housed at Auld’s home, all the while enduring the good Methodist’s verbal and physical cruelty. For Douglass, the proof of any sincerity in Auld’s ‘tear-drop’ manifested in his actions. In his deeds and his glances, wrote Douglass, it was as if the pathetic master had concluded, ‘I will teach you, young man, that, though I have parted with my sins, I have not parted with my sense. I shall hold slaves, and go to heaven too.’”

I am sorry, but the naive, ignorant belief that “spiritual revival” alone will solve all of society’s problems is merely another symptom of our crippling addiction to American Individualism.

More than that, it reveals an extremely simplistic view of both human nature and the work of the Holy Spirit.

All of these intellectual and theological mistakes serve as chains locked around the ankles of American evangelicalism. They prevent us from genuinely following after Jesus as we should.

When the church ought to be in the lead of the Black Lives Matter movement, talking about the Image of God and His new kingdom come, most evangelical leaders sit on the sidelines calling for more prayer and waiting for revival. The exceptions to this hackneyed response are extremely admirable but very, very few.

Sometimes the best way to pray is to get off your butt and march with those who suffer, publicly condemn the “masters” who want to control us, and work for social revolution — all in the name of Christ.

Ali Velshi on Democracy and Public Protests

Ali Velshi is a reporter/host for MSNBC. Granted, I bash MSNBC quite often because they are the establishment Democratic equivalent of the Republican party franchise called Fox News.

But Velshi recently offered an editorial piece about the importance of public demonstrations in a liberal democracy, something that the Right and Donald Trump never seem to understand.

In the past I have argued that the Department of Homeland Security should never have been created. Its mere existence pushes this country closer to fascism.

The fact that president Trump’s decision to send unrequested federal “forces” to cities such as Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Chicago is unconstitutional should be enough reason for all Americans to object to Trump’s illegal extension of executive power.

But no. Conservatives overwhelmingly approve.

We are all in trouble, folks. Please take a few moments to hear Velshi out. He is wise in this clip.

An Important Word from Mehdi Hasan on Fascism

Mehdi Hasa is a British journalist who wears many different hats. I always try to listen to him when I can. Over the years he has done reporting for the British version of the Huffington Post, Al Jazeeera (which I also watch regularly), The Intercept, and MSNBC.

He recently did on editorial on American fascism that I believe is worth watching and digesting.  I hope you will listen to what he has to say:

A Christian Man Who Understands the Civil War

Scott Hancock is a history professor at Gettysburg College. He is also a serious disciple of Jesus Christ.

Hancock regularly goes to the Gettysburg battlefield to talk with visitors, hoping to educate them about the roots of the Civil War and the southern states’ investment in defending slavery.

It is amazing to me how often his critics repeat the Confederate propaganda created by the United Daughters of the Confederacy catechism for southern children. (Check out my post on the UDC here).

(I am indebted to John Fea’s blog for directing me to this video).