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.
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.
[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.
In previous posts I have mentioned that whenever I take a road trip I view it as an opportunity to imagine myself a social anthropologist conducting
Rush Limbaugh
primary research on what people are listening to out in the hinterlands.
Thus, when I am not listening to a favorite CD, I am tuned in to either conservative talk radio or local Christian programming (not for the music but the news, commentary, sermons, or call-in Bible answer man shows).
My most recent trip confirmed not just the close similarities, but the near
Shaun Hannity
identity of political-social views on secular and Christian broadcasting. There is no difference whatsoever. And that should send a chill down every disciples’ spiritual spine.
Of course, every talk show was a monolithic barrage of “Stop the Steal” nonstop — usually, asserted with ranting, anger, and fear-mongering, not to mention the repeated threats of looming violence if “the radical, leftist cabal” that stole the election from Trump didn’t move over and get out of the way.
I could not find a single instance of rational, evidence-based conversation or
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: Jay Sekulow, personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference during the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
debate, much less analysis, about the presidential election, the recounts, the court challenges, or the future of this country on a secular radio station.
Worse yet, the Christian broadcasts were no different.
Whether the programming was syndicated or regional, Christian commentators were reading from the same hyper-partisan play book: anger, fear, threats of armed uprisings, calling hell fire onto the leftists, socialists, Marxists, antifa-ists, critical race theorists, and Black Lives Matters communists who are determined to destroy America by turning it into a totalitarian, anti-Christian nation.
The ignorance and misinformation spewed like sewage from a fire hose.
Pat Robertson
The Christians had no more interest in honest conversation, or an examination of the facts available, than the did the Rush Limbaugh crowd. I doubt if a single one of them had even a rudimentary understanding of what socialism really is or that the United States is already highly “socialist” in many ways – highly unjust ways that favor the rich and corporations almost exclusively.
Everyone is convinced that Joe and Kamala are raging socialists chomping at the bit to outlaw private property and confiscate everyone’s guns. Obviously, not a one of these people (broadcasters and callers both) knew the first thing about Biden’s or Harris’ careers.
The truth of the matter is that both Biden and Harris are dyed in the wool crony-capitalists, corporatists, center-right party stalwarts so heavily indebted to Wall Street that I’m surprised either of them has an independent thought in their head.
Jan Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, with Oral Roberts
Their souls are owned by the same brand of neoliberal economics that continues to fuel the gaping chasm of income inequality that curses sick Americans – especially people of color – to wait in bread lines longer than anything seen in this country since the Great Depression, and to die of covid19 at higher rates than any other country in the civilized world.
The American evangelical church has become nothing more than cheap, shallow reflection of the cultivated ignorance, narrow mindedness, and xenophobia that has always marked American conservatism.
That ghoulish political contortion has become the face of the Republican party AND the Religious Right (read: evangelicalism).
This post is my brief introduction to short series I will write in the next few weeks.
David Brody, political reporter for CBN, author of the book, “The Faith of Donald Trump”
In this series I will have a great deal more to say about the incestuous mánage à tois that has developed between evangelicalism, the Republican party, and American anti-intellectualism.
I will begin by focusing on the role that virulent, Republican racism has to play in both (1) the Republican demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement and (2) Donald Trump’s campaign to persuade his base that this election was stolen.
Today’s Opinion piece from journalist Chris Hedges is entitled “The Great Delusion.”
Personally, I do not fear the end of the world.
I do fear the increasing magnitude of human suffering that will inexorably pave the way for the final Apocalypse.
And I deeply lament the sinister role now played by the evangelical church in advancing Satan’s goals.
By only reading the book of Revelation as if it were a human history horoscope, the evangelical church (in league with the Religious Right) remains blind to the fact that it has long been conquered by the Beast.
John the Seer warns God’s people that only those “who overcome” will stand victorious in the end.
And that charge ain’t describin’ much of evangelicalism today.
Below are a few excerpts from Hedges. You can read the entire piece here:
Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away.
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead”. . .
. . . The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. . .
. . . The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.
Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged. . .
. . . One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion. It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy.
After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.
Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept. This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country. . .
. . . The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us. . .
. . . We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.
First a quick update: I have been away for a while for several reasons.
First, I have finished the manuscript for my next book which will tentatively have a title (I hope) along the lines of Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism, Israeli War Crimes, and Palestinian Suffering.
While I wait to receive the remarks of my outside reader (an expert in the field selected by the publisher; it’s often called “peer review”) I have been slaving away at the marketing questionnaire given to me by the publisher. Yikes! What a task…
Second, I just returned from a multi-day trapping excursion trying to capture a new falcon. My peregrine was tragically killed by a coyote a few months ago in eastern Montana. So I am currently birdless. I was able to trap one falcon of the sort I want, but she was an adult and we are only allowed to keep immature birds taken from the wild.
Anyway, I have a bundle of posts I intend to make in the days ahead reflecting on the current political-evangelical-Donald Trump industrial complex and its implications for the immediate future of American Christianity.
But for now I want to thank my friend Steve Tompkins, a pastor in Seattle, for sending me an article by Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative. It’s entitled, “What I Saw at the Jericho March.”
I have no affinity for Mr. Dreher’s politics, but he is a fellow Christian with important insights into the feverish pagan ceremonies now consuming certain “evangelicals” — at least, that’s what they call themselves.
Selected excerpts appear below or you can read the entire piece here:
Alex Jones speaking at the recent Jericho March in Washington D.C.
For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.
Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.
. . . What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.
. . .It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.
See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.
. . .Retired Gen. Michael Flynn came onstage, saying that his MyPillow gave him the best sleep of his life. Then he recited the Our Father. Jesus, America, hucksterism: that was another theme of this rally. At times during the webcast, the screen would split, with the speaker on the left, and a My Pillow commercial on the right.
This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”
Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.
He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won. You watch: this movement is going to end up demanding that Gen. Flynn become the military dictator of America.
Rudolph Hess
Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address. Every time they attack Trump, he said, they’re attacking you! Total identification of the collective with the individual man, Trump. I despise facile comparisons, but this is a core fascist trope. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, Nazi functionary Rudolf Hess told the faithful, “The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”
As American democracy continues to circle the drain, the future of our body politic looks increasingly grim.
Chris Hedges
I had planned on writing a post about the long-term social effects of “Trumpism” and the president’s faux-legal efforts to overturn a democratic presidential election, but then I received Chris Hedges’ latest editorial in my inbox.
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times.
Reflecting on his years as a foreign war correspondent, he also wrote an important book describing the addictive qualities of war-making entitled, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If you haven’t read it, you really should.
Hedges is one of my favorite journalists and political writers who offers a cogent analysis of America’s unhappy future in words far more eloquent than anything I would have written.
So, here is an excerpt of Hedges’ very insightful and very bleak forecast. Or you can read the entire article here:
Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. . .
. . . The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world’s largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.
The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.
Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.
All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.
Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.
This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. . .
. . .The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, “once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.”
This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.
Dr. Francis Collins is a devout Christian who has never been hesitant in talking publicly about his faith. Thoughtful, responsible churchgoers ought
FILE – In this May 7, 2020 file photo, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins speaks during a Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool, file)
to pay attention to his advise.
NPR has posted an article by Tom Gjelten accompanied by a 4 minute video describing Collins’ advice to the country.
The fact is that both rates of infection and death from covid19 are MUCH higherthan they were earlier in the year when the initial lockdown orders were issued.
This past Wednesday, more than 3,500 Americans died of covid….in a single day. The virus is running rampant in large part because people are ignoring medical advice and listening to right-wing disinformation campaigns instead.
Why are any churches continuing to hold on sight congregational services right now at a time when the virus is infecting and killing more people than ever before?
All those who continue to insist that the new infection rate is itself proof that lock downs and isolation don’t work are conveniently ignoring the fact many locations across the country have never abided by the lock down measures or mask wearing from the beginning.
Below is an excerpt of the NPR article, or you can read the entire story here.
With COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths at record levels, a top public health official called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders.
“The virus is having a wonderful time right now, taking advantage of circumstances where people have let their guard go down,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Churches gathering in person is a source of considerable concern and has certainly been an instance where super spreading has happened and could happen again.”
Collins, himself a regular churchgoer who speaks often about his Christian faith, discussed measures that church leaders can take to protect their congregations in a Zoom conversation on Thursday with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Most churches really ought to be advised to go to remote services, if they’re not already doing so,” Collins said.
Below is a 2 minute video showing Israeli soldiers randomly firing tear gas and rubber bullets in a West Bank Palestinian neighborhood.
I have witnessed and photographed identical behavior many times. I have also watched a video filmed by one of my friends showing Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas onto a neighborhood playground, causing little children, mothers, and grandmothers to flee.
The soldiers do not need “a reason” for doing these things. Their only reason is the fact that Palestinians are not Jews (even though there are Arab Jews in Israel called Mizrahis).
The fact that Palestinians dare to live on land that the Zionists want for themselves is all the reason Israel needs for making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible.
The Israeli army calls it “the searing of consciousness.” It’s similar to the torture techniques used by the CIA to reduce detainees to a state of “learned helplessness.”
Israel’s theory is that, eventually, the entire Palestinian population will learn that resistance is futile. They will learn to always do exactly as they are told; or, better yet, move somewhere else so that Israel can take all of their property without a struggle.
The wildly different responses of the Republican party and the Religious Right to the religious convictions of Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Rev. Raphael Warnock demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political debates over religious liberty.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett that she was worried about how” loudly the dogma lives within” Judge Barrett, Republicans went bananas in deriding Feinstein’s “assault” on Barrett’s religious freedoms.
Barrett became the latest poster-child illustrating the supposed liberal hatred of Christianity and the Democratic party’s continuing attacks on religious liberty in America.
But now the tables have turned.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock is a Democratic senatorial candidate in Georgia,
Rev. Raphael Warnock
where he is waiting for the run-off election in early January. He has been the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since 2005.
Now, the Republicans are deriding Rev. Warnock as unfit for office because . . . wait for it . . . you guessed it: because the dogma lives too strongly within him.
Having gone through the pastor’s old sermons, the Republicans are calling him unfit for office. Listen to Warnock’s most offensive words:
Setting aside the abortion issue, the simple fact of the matter is that pastor Warnock is being condemned for proclaiming the words of Jesus. Jesus’ teaching is clear: no one can serve both the military and God, neither can anyone serve both God and money (Matt. 6:19-34).
The conservative hypocrisy in this backlash is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
CBN News continues to demonstrate that it is nothing more than a “Christianized,” civil religion cut-out of Fox News as it carries water for the Republican party.
The whole escapade is really quite disgusting.
I have very clearly demonstrated in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America, (Eerdmans, 2018), just how biblical Rev. Warnock is when he decries Christian involvement in the military. He represents an ancient Christian tradition.
And Jesus’ condemnation of excessive wealth is a signature trait of his teaching. Remember, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).
In this respect — not forgetting that Warnock is an African-American running for office in the southern state of Georgia — those who condemn this southern, black pastor are imitating the godless leaders who condemned Jesus of Nazareth to hang on a cross.
We are seeing a vivid example of what happens when the truth of the gospel confronts sinful human beings.
It also exemplifies how difficult (if not impossible) it is for a faithful, Christian witness to flourish in the midnight garden of political power.
interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.
biblical Rev. Warnock is when he decries Christian involvement in the military. He represents an ancient Christian tradition.