Jack Jenkins has written a good article for the Religious News Service again discussing the dangers of Christian nationalism among Trump-devotees and Christian conspiracy theorists.
Sadly, I don’t think this problem is going away anytime soon.
One issue that jumped out to me as I read the article is the utter inadequacyof the way most evangelical churches approach adult education and “discipleship development” within their congregations.
Throwing a handful of Christians into a room together so that they can “share” their thoughts on the Bible is about as productive as giving a typewriter to a room full of monkeys and expecting them to produce the Declaration of Independence.
It ain’t gonna’ happen.
The Holy Spirit does not guarantee the gift of wisdom to those who will not study widely, do not read frequently, and will not begin humbly to confess their own misguided inclinations.
What DOES happen, quite predictably, is what we see today: the country-wide display of nationalistic, political idolatry erupting from huge swaths of the conservative, evangelical religious community.
Here is the excerpt:
As insurrectionists began the attack on the Capitol, a banner waved above the throng. It read: ‘Proud American Christian.’
Trump supporters climb inauguration scaffolding outside the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Moments before the assault on the U.S. Capitol began Wednesday (Jan. 6), a mass of Trump supporters gathered at a northwest entrance. They were angry: Footage highlighted the presence of Proud Boys, an organization classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who were
Women blow shofars during the Jericho March, Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2020, in Washington. RNS photo by Jack Jenkins
shouting one of their favorite chants: “F— Antifa!”
As throngs surged toward a barricade manned by a vastly outnumbered handful of police, a white flag appeared above the masses, flapping in the wind: It featured an ichthys — also known as a “Jesus fish” — painted with the colors of the American flag.
Above the symbol, the words: “Proud American Christian.”
It was one of several prominent examples of religious expression that occurred in and around the storming of the Capitol last week, which left five people dead — including a police officer. Before and even during the attack, insurrectionists appealed to faith as both a source of strength as well as justification for their assault on the seat of American democracy.
While not all participants were Christian, their rhetoric often reflected an aggressive, charismatic and hypermasculine form of Christian nationalism — a fusion of God and country that has lashed together disparate pieces of Donald Trump’s religious base.
“A mistake a lot of people have made over the past few years … is to suggest there is some fundamental conflict between evangelicalism and the kind of violence or threat of violence we’re seeing,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”
“For decades now, evangelical devotional life, evangelical preaching and evangelical teaching has found a space to promote this kind of militancy.”
A form of this faith was on display in front of the Capitol the day before the attack, when hundreds of Trump supporters massed near the building for a “Jericho March.” The event’s name was a reference to the biblical account of Israelites besieging the city of Jericho in the Book of Joshua, a religious tale liberal religious activists have also invoked for their own events. . .
I recently posted a blog entry describing the Southern Baptist Convention’s decision to issue a wholesale condemnation of Critical Race Theory without ever consulting a single African-American Southern Baptist (yes, they do exist).
How could that happen? It is astonishing.
I have a number of thoughts on this question which I will explore in a future post in this series on Critical Race Theory (for previous posts on this subject, see here, here, here, and here), along with my continuing observations
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib
about the problems of systemic racism in America (for a recent example see here).
I am a huge fan of all the members of the group of junior congressional women the media have dubbed “The Squad.” This includes Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and now Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Each of them continue to demand that those involved in the Capital attack on January 6th must be held accountable. Anyone who understands the nature of justice must agree with them. There ought to be broad bipartisan support for their calls of accountability.
Instead, many members of the Republican party are telling these representatives, and especially the women, to “move on,” that they are making a mountain out of a molehill.
More than that, several Republicans have publicly denounced these women
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
as liars, making easily refutable statements about them never being endangered at all.
I realize that a major factor in this argument is political partisanship, which teaches you to never give your opponent a break. Add a dash of simply bullying and we have a good explanation of the human behavior now on display.
However, I am convinced that there is another powerful factor involved — white, male privilege.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley
White, male privilege thrives in situations allowing women’s feelings and experiences to be minimized or dismissed. Admittedly, the deeply damaged and incompetent congresswoman from Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is not a man. But there are always exceptions to every rule. I won’t pretend to know how to explain her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has recently told her story about being a rape survivor.
She, together with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rahida Tlaib, and you
Congresswoman Cori Bush
can bet your bottom dollar that Cori Bush is now experiencing this as well, have received numerous death threats since arriving in Congress.
These women have good reason to feel traumatized after the events of January 6th. They are the physical embodiment of everything that violent mob of Trump supporters would love to eliminate from this country: emigrants, Muslims, people of color, and outspoken women who voice their disagreements loudly in public.
The heartless people now calling these female, public servants liars; accusing them of overreacting; or insisting that they just need “to get over it,” are behaving like abusers themselves. As AOC has said repeatedly, these are the things that abusers say to their victims.
It is no accident, then, that the majority of these voices come from white men. Men who have always enjoyed all the implicit and explicit advantages of being white men in American society.
Such men rarely have any reason to fear that they may be on the receiving end of a beating, or rape, or verbal assault from one of the other authoritarian men in their lives.
Such men are usually far too comfortable exercising power over others, especially when those “others” are powerless themselves.
Below is a video of the two, recent congressional speeches offered by AOC and Rahida Tlaib as they continue their calls for Congressional accountability.
If you can listen to these speeches impassively, without sympathy, without empathy, without concern, then I ask you to check your chest cavity, for you have no heart. I ask you to check your mind for your conscience has withered.
One of the primary qualities of a truly Christian life is the exercise of empathy.
It is the ability to see life from the other person’s perspective and to try to understand why they feel the way they do.
Jesus of Nazareth was extraordinary in the deep, deep levels of empathy that he possessed for the people he met. In fact, empathy is what led him to sacrifice himself on the cross at Calvary.
Let’s all pray for such divine-human empathy as we listen to these women describe their very legitimate fears on January 6th.
John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah College. He also maintains one of the best blogs I know of. He writes prolifically at The Wayof Improvement Leads Home.
I am convinced that he either keeps a closet full of hyper-active minions near his office to work on his blog, or he is a much more industrious man than I am.
Yes, revivalmeeting is the most accurate descriptor here. I grew up in churches where we had them regularly. I know what they look and sound like.
I also happen to pass through the town of Hamilton often when I am looking for a new falcon to trap. I listen to what passes for Christian radio in that community.
Upsetting is too weak a word to describe what I hear. Thus, as sad as it is, this story is not the least bit surprising to me.
But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t disturbing and lamentable.
[I am very interested in hearing from you my readers. Are you familiar with similar tent revival type pro-Trump, stop-the-steal evangelistic events like this in the churches of your area? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a note, please! Thanks.]
Here is Fea’s post in full:
Last week we called your attention to an event at Calvary Chapel-Chino Hills featuring pastor Jack Hibbs and Trump wonder boy Charlie Kirk. Today, I want you to see a video from The River, a Southern Baptist church in Hamilton, Montana.
The video captures a special Saturday night service devoted to “education,” “learning,” and “unity.” The topic is the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The speaker is Dr. Kevin Horton, the director of the Institute for Biblical Authority, “a Biblically based nonprofit organization dedicated to upholding and strengthening the principle that the Bible is the life-changing authority for human lives.” The Institute promotes creationism and recently hosted a conference featuring David Barton. The website includes an “American History Quiz” that repeats the widely debunked, and frankly absurd, claim that 29 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “pastors.”
Watch the video of Horton’s appearance at The River Church on the Facebook page of Montana state senator Theresa Manzella or on the church Facebook page.
The video begins with the congregation milling around the sanctuary while a song called “Potter’s Hand” by Hillsong plays over the speakers. Here are the lyrics to that song:
Beautiful Lord, wonderful Savior I know for sure all of my days are held in Your hand And crafted into Your perfect plan
You gently called me into Your presence Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life Through Your eyes
And I’m captured by Your Holy calling Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself Lead me Lord, I pray
Take me and mold me, use me, fill me I give my life to the Potter’s hand Call me, You guide me, lead me, walk beside me I give my life to the Potter’s hand
You gently call me into Your presence Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life Through Your eyes
I’m captured by Your Holy calling Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself Lead me Lord, I pray
Take me and mold me, use me, fill me I give my life to my Potter’s hand Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me I give my life to the Potter’s hand
Take me and mold me, use me, fill me I give my life to the Potter’s hand Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me I give my life to the Potter’s hand
The display screen at the front of the sanctuary says “Inciting the Riot?”
Horton takes the stage at about the 5:45 mark after pastor Allen James offers a “prayer for the United States of America” in which he asks the Lord to make us “truly be one nation under God again.” (Italics mine). Horton begins by telling the audience how the Lord prompted him to go to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 to protest the election results. He laments the fact that social media companies removed Trump from its platforms, closed Parler, and even suspended his own accounts for merely “witnessing to the truth” about what happened in Washington D.C. After taking a few required shots at Congress for impeaching Trump, Horton describes what he saw at the U.S. Capitol.
The central argument of Horton’s presentation is that Trump did not incite the riot on the U.S. Capitol. Horton bases his argument on pictures and videos he took at the insurrection. He tells this evangelical congregation that the rioters were not “true Trumpers” and then attempts to distinguish between the “peaceful” evangelical Trumpers and the evil insurrectionists. (Along the way he takes a shot mask-wearing).
At about the 47:00 mark Horton tells the audience that he is boycotting Amazon, Walmart, and Google until they “repent” for their support of Senators who refuse to investigate who was really behind the insurrection. Then he complains about how CNN is trying to “close down” Newsmax and One America News. Horton speaks in a friendly, easy-going style as he defends these conspiracy theories before an evangelical congregation led by a pastor who provided him with the platform to do this.
At the 52:00 mark he describes the election fraud protests as a “fun time” until the “cloud of evil” emerged in the form of the rioters. (If his pictures are any indication, Horton appears to have spent most of the riot only feet away from the doors of the U.S. Capitol).
Horton ends by telling his pro-Trump evangelical audience that we are now “all targets” and are no longer “safe” as Americans. (The assumption is that the insurrections were a demonic force working against the God-honoring supporters of Donald Trump. He stops just short of saying that the Democrats were somehow behind the insurrection. Or at least that is how I understood him). The only way to find peace and safety, he says, is by accepting Jesus Christ as savior. He then moves into a brief Gospel presentation.
As a fellow evangelical, I am disgusted by the way this man stoked fear, lied about voter fraud, and used his presence at the Capitol insurrection as a platform for preaching the Gospel. Apparently the audience at The RiverChurch disagrees. They gave him a standing ovation. Pastor Allen James endorsed everything Horton said, going so far to tell his congregation that the election was rigged. James then calls his congregation to separate the Gospel from politics. This is admirable. But everything about this event sent the exact opposite message.
The wealthy Republican is evicting tenants despite the eviction moratorium passed by Congress. Once again, rich property owners do as they wish while others suffer.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., drew ire for voting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, as well as for refusing to wear a mask to keep COVID-19 from spreading when lawmakers locked down during the U.S. Capitol insurrection. His nonchalance about the coronavirus did not end there: Eviction notices have been filed against residents of two rental properties associated with Mullin during the pandemic.
The eviction filings come as coronavirus case counts have steadily increased in Oklahoma and the United States. So far, Oklahoma has seen 3,323 deaths from the coronavirus. In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a national moratorium against evictions as a public health measure to prevent the spread of COVID. . .
. . . Mullin’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The CDC took action to curb evictions by issuing an eviction moratorium, which took effect on September 4. But the moratorium has been criticized as weakly enforced and has allowed evictions to continuedespite the pandemic. The moratorium was set to expire on December 31, before Congress took action and extended the moratorium until January 31. President Joe Biden then extended the moratorium until March 31.
History professor Loretta Ross published a provocative article at Counter Punch magazine yesterday addressing the increasingly anti-democratic
Professor Loretta Ross of Smith College
tendencies of the Republican party.
Four years ago I would have labelled her thesis a serious exaggeration.
But over the past four years, since the Republican party’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, I have found myself saying more and more often that Republican politicians do not really believe in democracy.
The entire “stop the steal” movement was nothing but an hysterical eruption of antidemocratic values among white devotees of Donald Trump, the Republican president.
Truth be told, I am not convinced that today’s Democratic party really believes in democracy, either.
We need look no further than the party’s coordinated efforts to rob Bernie Sanders (twice!) of the Democratic presidential nomination to find prima facie evidence of this fact.
Bernie Sanders would certainly have become the Democratic presidential nominee had he not been the target of manifold dirty tricks from the Democratic National Committee.
So much for the absurd accusations of conservative pundits who describe the Democratic party as a bastion of Marxist, socialist, radical Leftist revolutionaries. I don’t know what planet those people live on, but it’s not earth.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a “far left” party/movement in this country.
However, nowadays I must confess that given the Republican party’s behavior over the past 4 years, including its scandalous actions (or inactions) during and after the January 6th attack on Congress, I have come to believe that professor Ross’s words are very, very pertinent to our current situation.
Below is an excerpt of her article entitled “The Nazification of the Republican Party.” Or you can read the entire article here:
. . . Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United
Neo-Nazi insignia at the capitol on January 6
States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.
The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a
Neo-Nazi flag at the capitol riot
deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth (my emphasis). To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized.
The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated
Confederate flag inside Congress
with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests.
If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing.
Hitler led an insurrection against the German government in 1923 and was sentenced to five years in jail, served one, and used that leniency to commit the
Trump supporter wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt on capitol steps
Holocaust. Never forget that premature forgiveness before accountability is dangerous. Fascists are violent because of who THEY are, not what WE DO–like the ordinary Germans who underestimated the Nazis and thought they were just another political party on the right. Germans who weren’t Nazis passively went about their normal affairs by denying the realities of their Jewish neighbors, all for the sake of “unity.”
Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement
White nationalist insignia worn among pro-Trump rioters
of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party.
I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years.
The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future.
I’m calling them American Nazis, who adapted the playbook of the Third Reich. Trump may be gone but Trumpism is not. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, they prioritized their “whiteness over democracy.” This is highlighted by their
More neo-Nazi flags among rioters
implacable attack on voting rights. Republicans who encouraged this dangerous resurrection of fascism are already trying to erase what happened or describe it as simply a “First Amendment Protest.” These apologists trying to launder their shredded reputations should be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities to spread their contempt for democracy. As philosopher Karl Popper observed in 1945, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people.
America’s tattered global reputation is at stake in this unending Civil War. Instead of denouncing the traitors in 1865, we allowed them to be rehabilitated and enshrined in monuments across the country. Will our descendants look back and see that we flinched yet again when it was time to hold insurrectionists accountable? If not, we’ll have the shortest Reconstruction in history.
Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them.
“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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Daily Poster is the blog of investigative journalist David Sirota. A few
David Sirota
days ago he posted an article reminding his readers of the gross economic inequities that characterize the US. Inequities that have only gotten worse during the pandemic.
For the Old Testament prophets, long-term disparities between the haves and the have-nots — that were ignored or caused by the rich — was a primary identifying trait of a wicked society.
Truly righteous rulers worked to close such economic chasms.
By Old Testament, prophetic standards, the United States (including the majority of its leaders) is an extraordinarily wicked place, heaping more and
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate elites; enemy of the American people
more guilt upon itself while racing towards divine judgment.
I have excerpted Sirota’s article below:
As the fight to provide one-time $2,000 survival checks crescendos in Washington, it can be difficult to grasp the size of the figures being thrown around. Can our country afford the proposal? Is the cost worth it?
Let’s look at the economic and social devastation unfolding throughout the country. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of Americans were struggling to afford at least one basic necessity and a stunning 78 percent of full-time workers were living paycheck-to-paycheck according to figures from 2017. Half a million people were counted as homeless in 2018 alone.
The pandemic has made things worse: In the spring, 22 million jobs were lost which could take as long as four years to recover without significant relief. As of June, roughly 14 million workers and their dependents had lost employer-based health insurance. The number of Americans impacted by food insecurity is now projected to hit 54 million — up from 35 million pre-pandemic. More than 14 million American households are at risk of eviction and more than 336,000 Americans have died from the virus. . .
. . .So, with all of this in mind, can the world’s richest nation afford one-time $2,000 survival checks? Should Congress filibuster the defense bill for as long as it takes to force Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on the aid? Is there a double standard at play when it comes to government largesse for rich people and support for everyone else? Are $2,000 checks good policy? Is Congress even listening to the public?
Read these ten stats and then you decide.
1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).
2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).
3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).
4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.
5. It took Congress less than a month to pass legislation giving a $700 billion bailout to bank executives during the financial crisis. It has taken Congress more than 8 months to even seriously consider a far less expensive bill to give $2,000 checks to millions of Americans during this economic crisis.
6. A $2,000 survival check would give the average soldier more money than the proposed 3 percent military pay increase that is included in defense legislation that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey are filibustering in order to force a vote on the survival checks.
7. The richest 5 percent of Americans received more in Trump tax cuts in 2020 ($145 billion) than Congress is spending on increased unemployment benefits for millions of Americans during the economic crisis ($120 billion).
8. In 2016, “children, elderly, disabled people, and students made up around 70 percent of the poor,” according to the People’s Policy Project. Unlike unemployment benefits, $2,000 checks would help them.
9. About 60 percent of Georgia households make less than $75,000, meaning Georgia Republican senators allowing $2,000 checks to be blocked would deny aid to roughly 2 million of their state’s households as they run for reelection.
10. As Republicans try to block the $2,000 check legislation, a new national survey found that 78 percent of Americans support it, even as some pundits insist that the proposal is “divisive.”
[This is the second in a series looking at the growing carnality of American evangelicalism through its assimilation to right-wing politics. You can read the first post here.]
Politicians rarely if ever tell the you the bare-naked truth. They know that if they did, they probably would not get (re)elected. No, politics is not about honesty. It’s about power – gaining power, keeping power, using power, and accumulating more power.
Power and influence are the coin of the realm.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It all boils down to how is this power used, and who benefits from the use of this power?
The real beneficiaries of this political power are those who give power hungry politicians the most money. Because money wins elections. No, money is not “speech,” as the wealthy, powerful members of the Supreme Court have ruled (for their own partisan purposes).
No, money is power.
Those with the most money have the power to become the most influential. This is why the American political establishment works, not as a democratic body, but as a plutocratic oligarchy, which means the American people are ruled by an elite cabal of rich people (mainly CEOs and corporations).
One of the practical consequences of our political reality is the fact that most political discourse happens in code. Coded language hides the truth. Code talk lets a politician tell people what they want to hear while leaving him/her free to do something entirely different.
Some of the oldest political code language in this country has to do with race, specifically the place of African Americans in our society and how they are treated by the powers-that-be.
The murder of George Floyd sparked a racial upheaval in America, an upheaval that both the political status quoANDthe Religious Right are now working very hard to stamp out.
Future posts will examine the ongoing evangelical backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.
For now, I want to explain the historical background to Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud and how it is actually another example of code language for “too many blacks have the right to vote.”
It’s one more train wreck that no Christian should be riding.
History:
Lee Atwater with Senator Strom Thurmond
Lee Atwater (1951-1991) was a cutthroat Republican party campaign strategist who got his start in North Carolina politics working with men like Sen. Strom Thurmond (who actively opposed all civil rights legislation in the US Congress).
He would eventually work for both presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
Atwater with president Reagan
helping them to win their presidential campaigns with something called “The Southern Strategy.”
In 1981, when he worked in the Reagan administration, Atwater gave an anonymous (at the time) interview where he explained how he used coded language to divide voters along issues of race.
Below is the relevant excerpt from that interview. Take a listen:
Atwater explains how using “more abstract language” about taxes or forced busing or states’ rights will hit the same racial/racist nerves that are plucked by using the N word.
Atwater with George H. W. Bush
In this way, white Southern voters understood that the candidate who wanted their vote was as concerned as they were (i.e. were as racist as they were) about maintaining white privilege and keeping “uppity” black folk in check when they heard about policies that they knew would continue to undermine development in the black community.
Opposition to forced bussing was code talk for “we have to keep black people segregated and away from our white children.”
“The War on Drugs” is another example of political code talk deliberately used to fill in for openly racist strategies attacking the black community (and political protesters).
In 1971 president Richard Nixon first declared his “war on drugs.” Almost
John Ehrlichman with president Nixon
immediately, America’s prison population skyrocketed from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. Two-thirds of those new prisoners were African-Americans. (See this article from the Equal Justice Initiative).
Many people know that story. What fewer people realize is that the war on drugs was another instance of code language for “let’s disrupt and oppress the black community.”
John Ehlichman was president Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor. In 1994, Ehlichman gave a very candid interview to Harper’s Magazine. During that interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.
Here is Ehrlichman in his own words (all emphases are mine):
“You want to know what this [the war on drugs] was really all about?”
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Voila! The war on drugs became more code language for shutting down social protest movements and breaking up black communities.
Fast forward to 2020.
President Trump had a similarly candid moment setting up his intended code talk for subverting the 2020 election.
This past March (8 months prior to the election!) Trump gave an interview to Fox News where he loudly objected against the generous voting provisions that Democrats wanted to include in the COVID19 stimulus bill.
Provisions such as expanded mail-in voting, scheduling election day on a week-end, or making it a national holiday.
Why was Trump opposed to making it easier for more people to vote?
As he said (I have also listened to the original TV interview), “If you ever agreed to it [the expanded voting provisions], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
One Democratic strategist noted, “The official position of the Republican Party for decades has been that they can’t win if people vote. Trump is just dumb enough to say it out loud.”
We will return to this issue of Republican voter suppression in future posts.
Republicans well understand that the majority of African-American voters in this country vote for the Democratic candidate. Therefore, it is in their political interests to prevent black people from voting. They just can’t say it that bluntly, or honestly.
So they talk in code. Like Trump.
It is no accident that all of the contested states where Trump has called for repeated recounts and gone to court in order to overturn results are states with large African-American communities.States in which the black vote for Biden undoubtedly played a large role in defeating Trump.
Political code language is frequently and intentionally used to hide racist intent.
It has a long history in this country.
In a similar vein, the long-standing Christian, evangelical concern for such things as Law and Order and social stability — i.e. the conservative defense of the white, privileged status quo — has always hidden the latent racism of the white church and provided its members with a conveniently “safe way” to express their inherent distrust of black America.
It’s happening again, right now, as evangelical leaders applaud Trump’s damaging efforts to overturn this election and disenfranchise millions of voters (largely people of color). We see it in evangelical leaders who condemn the Black Lives Matter movement, and as entire denominations call damnation down onto “critical race theory.”
I will have a great deal more to say about all of these things. Stay tuned.
He recently posted an article entitled, “
others suffer.
interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.