The failure of the liberal class to halt the corporate assault on working people has spawned an ascendant Christian fascism that is poised to seize power and radically reshape America.
Well, no. Write to me. Come to Kansas and meet people and learn something about this country. This is finger pointing, and hyperbolic. Most people in the plains sates and in rural communities live in what Edward Hall calls "high context" cultures, valuing relationships, hard work, nature and spirituality. Many rural folk are aware of the dangerous the uniparty and fascism and are nobody's fool. The rhetoric of "exclusion, cruelty and intolerance" is from the powerful who manipulate the press and politicians and a small number of emotionally vulnerable people. It is NOT AT ALL how most red state Christians Americans think or feel. It is time for solidarity, Chris, not hysterical demonizations of whole groups Americans. I'm unsubscribing.
I believe we have been and already are fascists. The corporate coup d'etat has been complete for decades. Authoritarianism is rearing its head and the leaders of it are the liberals - they embrace and demand censorship, surveillance and the continuing denigration of civil rights and civil liberties. Trump is a symptom. The problem is both parties being beholden and ruled by the corporate elites.
Lord knows that I detest Trump, but it isn't Trump that is for censorship and "formal re-education" of political opponents. It wasn't Trump that instigated the persecution of Julian Assange.
Fear mongering about a Trump-inspired Christian fascist takeover really distracts from the current fascist movement under Democratic Party control. It is the Democrats that vote for endless war, demand censorship, promoted the four-year mass brainwashing of the Russia-gate hoax, bailed out the Wall Street banksters while crushing the middle class though millions of fraudulent foreclosures, prosecuted whistleblowers via the Espionage Act, excused the criminal mass government surveillance exposed by Snowden then made it legal, crushed the recent railroad workers strike, provides endless aid and comfort to the racist apartheid state of Israel, and finally it is Hillary Clinton calling for the mass formal “deprogramming” of the Democrats’ political enemies. It doesn’t get more fascist than that.
The "Christian fascists" you so fear are overwhelmingly NSA and CIA employees in costumes. It is time for you to give this up, Chris. They want an excuse to remove rights because "Christian fascists" are marching and tried to assassinate the governor of Michigan. Please stop playing their game. You need to be wiser than this.
Agree with elizabeth. Gimme a break! Who is censoring academics who question covid lockdowns, vaccinating pregnant women, etc? Who closed schools for a year? The woke liberals are the authoritarians. Soros funded, Omidyar funded. We are supposed to be scared of rural christians?
Good points about demagogues. I will say, however, that the current political climate reveals the Democrats to be more fascistic than the Republicans or Trump supporters. I know there are nuances within the Republican party. My job was threatened with termination due to the merger of state and corporate pharmaceutical power. Vaccine mandates, censorship and the Ukraine war push are children of the Dems. The idea and logical fallacy that one is a 'Putin Puppet' and traitor if one is against this Ukraine/Russia corporate war underscores the adoption by the Dems of right wing McCarthyism. The Dems/neocons use the term 'unpatriotic' to label those who don't fall in line, similar to the neocons during the Iraq war, and similar to Germans who failed to support 'Fatherland Germany.' Ironically the actual Nazis in the Ukrainian military, who wear various SS and other Nazi patches/ insignia on their uniforms, are ardently supported by the Dems.
"The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement."
I am not a licensed therapist but I can see clearly the problem Chris is having and I could absolutely help him if we would spend some face time together.
Chris is frustrated with his realization that his old political tribal identity has been hijacked, monetized and corrupted beyond recognition.... that left, liberal and progressive are all now political labels representing things he absolutely opposes. But he is stuck in the matrix here... still unwilling to accept that the primary opposition to the modern mutated form of left, liberal and progressive is comprised of anything but sinister devils bent on subjugating people into forced Christianity worship at the end of a whip.
Chris needs to move on. He is correct that his old party and related ideology has been hijacked. His is outside their castle and moat and rightfully sniping to take out a few from their towers. However, he is also catapulting boulders at the advancing army that supports his interest to defeat the enemy and open up the castle for the people.
The reason for this is that Chris is clutching history. He is unwilling to let go of the political "family" he once belonged to but that rejected him... and unwilling to embrace the new political family that would embrace him.
Chris needs to read Hiadt's "The Righteous Mind" to understand where he is mistaken about conservatives and where liberals have a fundamental shortfall of moral interests that can cause them to be inauthentic and dangerous in their mass drift. Chris does not really need to buy in to all conservative principles to see that they must be returned to some level of political power if only to help steer the left, liberals and progressives back to a rational and beneficial trend line.
I have a lot of experience working with left and right leaning government, politicians and activists and my conclusion is that we absolutely require a system where conservatives dominate but liberal-progressives are always nipping at their heels demanding they don't allow unchecked greed to pollute the system and humanity. When liberals accumulate too much power there is nobody to stop the greed from polluting the system and humanity.
I went to high school in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, in the second half of the 1980s. Our nascent fascism was hard at work then, the previous decade's foundational work of establishing "think tanks" and other propaganda machinery culminating with Ronald Reagan. When Pat Roberts got a quarter of the 1988 Republican primary vote, even a dumb teen like me could figure out what was happening.
The megachurches were well on their way in the 1980s, too. The decade's televangelist clown shows fizzled in the 90s and have been more careful since, but their schizophrenic ideology--steeped in barely hidden racism and overwhelming fear of sexuality or anything different from a suburban white two-car ideal--infected millions. Clinton just allowed the infection to spread, as those same millions saw their material support evaporate, replaced with nothing.
History loves irony. That Trump, incompetent child that he is, will likely be President again is even more absurd than Hilter's rise. Nobody in society's upper echelons saw Hitler as a threat or even legitimate, even making fun of his hick accent. Americans, and the Germans almost a century ago, have been so impoverished, sickened and killed by their overlords that they're grasping for any savior. It doesn't matter that Trump is a crook and a fraud: he's been chosen. The fascist machinery had digested his first term, come out in the black, and made adjustments to put him back in.
I don't see what makes the Trump "fascists" any more lethal or anti-democratic or certainly war mongering than those who now run the Democratic Party, as well as a great many politicians in that party. The Democrats have been far more Russophobic than the Republicans. I say this as one who has been a Democrat all my political life (I am now 79). What has most frequently angered and alienated me in the Democratic Party has been their war mongering. This goes all the way back to Vietnam, which the Democrats kept escalating until Nixon became president and, in the face of a great and growing antiwar movement, began to withdraw troops and move towards ending American involvement in that unspeakable carnage. Now it is the Democrats (mainly right wing neocon Democrats) who have picked a fight with Russia, a Great Power with nuclear weapons and a very efficient military. And what is this war about? The US, in response to the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the nineties, began expanding NATO, the anti-Russian alliance, to the Russian border. That is what brought Russia into Ukraine. The CIA had done a coup there in 2014 which took out a Russia-friendly government, replacing it with one that is a puppet of US neocons. And now, these lunatics have finally provoked the war between Russia and the US that more rational governments in the US had scrupulously avoided since the end of WW2. If the world is going to survive, the neocon Democrats must be voted out in favor of a peacemaker. RFK, Jr. is running for president on a peace platform. He sought to run as a Democrat, his family's party. But the Democrat War Party will have nothing to do with him. Hence he, like Cornel West, will be running as third party candidates. This may put the Republicans in the presidency. But the Democrat War Party deserves it. The world may not survive their continuation in power. Biden and Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan and all the rest of the warmongers must go.
The Biden administration will have to immediately replace idiot, Antony Blinken, with Ex-CIA, realist 'democratic socialist', William Burns, as an Anti-Empire (and Anti-War) sane Diplomat --- rather than either the Trump megalomaniac, or 'empty-suit’ Byeden --- to avoid Global Empire WW3
Regarding the resent situation of squeezing people into the death chambers of destitution and death, I wrote this advice to "The Quiet American" duopoly Empire of our people as a UBI, Wealth Reform, or Revolution to 'small ds' (Democratic Socialism) before we're all dead:
DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALISM
LOVE FOR
PEOPLE
vs
INEQUALITY
CAUSED BY
BILLIONAIRE
BASTARDS
BTW, 'Negative Externality Cost' LOOTING is the death engine of all societies, ---- while
'Positive Externality Profits' for the PEOPLE, are the LOVE Train to EQUALITY AND PEACE
Chris, I too would fear and loathe a Conservative Christian theocracy in America. But right now it seems to me the danger is at least as great that fascism is coming hard and fast from the insane radical Left... We need to reject and resist extremism from all sides. (Don't we?)
"The billionaires and corporations, whose sole obsession is the greater accumulation of wealth and power, will accommodate themselves to the Christian fascists, as the German industrialists did to the Nazi Party." -- Chris, what evidence do you or any of us have for this? It would seem none at all. The billionaire class has clearly coalesced around the Obama coalition & is working with tech & the DOJ to imprison many of the Jan 6 people on questionable grounds. Wondering also as to the "Christian" part. Could you elaborate a bit more? I really value your insights & positions, but I don't follow you here, as this view seems to give too much power to people who don't actually hold institutional power, people with whom the corporations, NGOs, billionaires will never align. The threat seems to come precisely from the pro-war, greed consumed & lie consumed main stream.
Well, Chris, I suspect that the real problem is that the structure of our governance is such that it's all too easy to take away people's choices. When we first started getting broadcast media back in the beginning of the 20th century, the government promulgated rules limiting the number of radio and TV stations you could own to try to ensure diversity in what you could listen to. We changed the rules and now broadcast media is owned by only a tiny handful of corporations. The same thing is true of the political system. All too often we have no choice when we vote. The classic was the 2016 presidential race. I had no intention of voting for either of those two idiots. So I voted 3rd party. Why don't more people do that? The system is rigged in favor of the two wings of the uniparty and until we break that we will not improve.
Well, no. Write to me. Come to Kansas and meet people and learn something about this country. This is finger pointing, and hyperbolic. Most people in the plains sates and in rural communities live in what Edward Hall calls "high context" cultures, valuing relationships, hard work, nature and spirituality. Many rural folk are aware of the dangerous the uniparty and fascism and are nobody's fool. The rhetoric of "exclusion, cruelty and intolerance" is from the powerful who manipulate the press and politicians and a small number of emotionally vulnerable people. It is NOT AT ALL how most red state Christians Americans think or feel. It is time for solidarity, Chris, not hysterical demonizations of whole groups Americans. I'm unsubscribing.
I believe we have been and already are fascists. The corporate coup d'etat has been complete for decades. Authoritarianism is rearing its head and the leaders of it are the liberals - they embrace and demand censorship, surveillance and the continuing denigration of civil rights and civil liberties. Trump is a symptom. The problem is both parties being beholden and ruled by the corporate elites.
Lord knows that I detest Trump, but it isn't Trump that is for censorship and "formal re-education" of political opponents. It wasn't Trump that instigated the persecution of Julian Assange.
The list goes on.
Fear mongering about a Trump-inspired Christian fascist takeover really distracts from the current fascist movement under Democratic Party control. It is the Democrats that vote for endless war, demand censorship, promoted the four-year mass brainwashing of the Russia-gate hoax, bailed out the Wall Street banksters while crushing the middle class though millions of fraudulent foreclosures, prosecuted whistleblowers via the Espionage Act, excused the criminal mass government surveillance exposed by Snowden then made it legal, crushed the recent railroad workers strike, provides endless aid and comfort to the racist apartheid state of Israel, and finally it is Hillary Clinton calling for the mass formal “deprogramming” of the Democrats’ political enemies. It doesn’t get more fascist than that.
The "Christian fascists" you so fear are overwhelmingly NSA and CIA employees in costumes. It is time for you to give this up, Chris. They want an excuse to remove rights because "Christian fascists" are marching and tried to assassinate the governor of Michigan. Please stop playing their game. You need to be wiser than this.
Agree with elizabeth. Gimme a break! Who is censoring academics who question covid lockdowns, vaccinating pregnant women, etc? Who closed schools for a year? The woke liberals are the authoritarians. Soros funded, Omidyar funded. We are supposed to be scared of rural christians?
Good points about demagogues. I will say, however, that the current political climate reveals the Democrats to be more fascistic than the Republicans or Trump supporters. I know there are nuances within the Republican party. My job was threatened with termination due to the merger of state and corporate pharmaceutical power. Vaccine mandates, censorship and the Ukraine war push are children of the Dems. The idea and logical fallacy that one is a 'Putin Puppet' and traitor if one is against this Ukraine/Russia corporate war underscores the adoption by the Dems of right wing McCarthyism. The Dems/neocons use the term 'unpatriotic' to label those who don't fall in line, similar to the neocons during the Iraq war, and similar to Germans who failed to support 'Fatherland Germany.' Ironically the actual Nazis in the Ukrainian military, who wear various SS and other Nazi patches/ insignia on their uniforms, are ardently supported by the Dems.
Left liberals have destroyed America and now in spades they will pay
"The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement."
I am not a licensed therapist but I can see clearly the problem Chris is having and I could absolutely help him if we would spend some face time together.
Chris is frustrated with his realization that his old political tribal identity has been hijacked, monetized and corrupted beyond recognition.... that left, liberal and progressive are all now political labels representing things he absolutely opposes. But he is stuck in the matrix here... still unwilling to accept that the primary opposition to the modern mutated form of left, liberal and progressive is comprised of anything but sinister devils bent on subjugating people into forced Christianity worship at the end of a whip.
Chris needs to move on. He is correct that his old party and related ideology has been hijacked. His is outside their castle and moat and rightfully sniping to take out a few from their towers. However, he is also catapulting boulders at the advancing army that supports his interest to defeat the enemy and open up the castle for the people.
The reason for this is that Chris is clutching history. He is unwilling to let go of the political "family" he once belonged to but that rejected him... and unwilling to embrace the new political family that would embrace him.
Chris needs to read Hiadt's "The Righteous Mind" to understand where he is mistaken about conservatives and where liberals have a fundamental shortfall of moral interests that can cause them to be inauthentic and dangerous in their mass drift. Chris does not really need to buy in to all conservative principles to see that they must be returned to some level of political power if only to help steer the left, liberals and progressives back to a rational and beneficial trend line.
I have a lot of experience working with left and right leaning government, politicians and activists and my conclusion is that we absolutely require a system where conservatives dominate but liberal-progressives are always nipping at their heels demanding they don't allow unchecked greed to pollute the system and humanity. When liberals accumulate too much power there is nobody to stop the greed from polluting the system and humanity.
I went to high school in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, in the second half of the 1980s. Our nascent fascism was hard at work then, the previous decade's foundational work of establishing "think tanks" and other propaganda machinery culminating with Ronald Reagan. When Pat Roberts got a quarter of the 1988 Republican primary vote, even a dumb teen like me could figure out what was happening.
The megachurches were well on their way in the 1980s, too. The decade's televangelist clown shows fizzled in the 90s and have been more careful since, but their schizophrenic ideology--steeped in barely hidden racism and overwhelming fear of sexuality or anything different from a suburban white two-car ideal--infected millions. Clinton just allowed the infection to spread, as those same millions saw their material support evaporate, replaced with nothing.
History loves irony. That Trump, incompetent child that he is, will likely be President again is even more absurd than Hilter's rise. Nobody in society's upper echelons saw Hitler as a threat or even legitimate, even making fun of his hick accent. Americans, and the Germans almost a century ago, have been so impoverished, sickened and killed by their overlords that they're grasping for any savior. It doesn't matter that Trump is a crook and a fraud: he's been chosen. The fascist machinery had digested his first term, come out in the black, and made adjustments to put him back in.
Is it just me or does this essay contradict literally everything Chris has written in the past?
I don't see what makes the Trump "fascists" any more lethal or anti-democratic or certainly war mongering than those who now run the Democratic Party, as well as a great many politicians in that party. The Democrats have been far more Russophobic than the Republicans. I say this as one who has been a Democrat all my political life (I am now 79). What has most frequently angered and alienated me in the Democratic Party has been their war mongering. This goes all the way back to Vietnam, which the Democrats kept escalating until Nixon became president and, in the face of a great and growing antiwar movement, began to withdraw troops and move towards ending American involvement in that unspeakable carnage. Now it is the Democrats (mainly right wing neocon Democrats) who have picked a fight with Russia, a Great Power with nuclear weapons and a very efficient military. And what is this war about? The US, in response to the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the nineties, began expanding NATO, the anti-Russian alliance, to the Russian border. That is what brought Russia into Ukraine. The CIA had done a coup there in 2014 which took out a Russia-friendly government, replacing it with one that is a puppet of US neocons. And now, these lunatics have finally provoked the war between Russia and the US that more rational governments in the US had scrupulously avoided since the end of WW2. If the world is going to survive, the neocon Democrats must be voted out in favor of a peacemaker. RFK, Jr. is running for president on a peace platform. He sought to run as a Democrat, his family's party. But the Democrat War Party will have nothing to do with him. Hence he, like Cornel West, will be running as third party candidates. This may put the Republicans in the presidency. But the Democrat War Party deserves it. The world may not survive their continuation in power. Biden and Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan and all the rest of the warmongers must go.
The Biden administration will have to immediately replace idiot, Antony Blinken, with Ex-CIA, realist 'democratic socialist', William Burns, as an Anti-Empire (and Anti-War) sane Diplomat --- rather than either the Trump megalomaniac, or 'empty-suit’ Byeden --- to avoid Global Empire WW3
Regarding the resent situation of squeezing people into the death chambers of destitution and death, I wrote this advice to "The Quiet American" duopoly Empire of our people as a UBI, Wealth Reform, or Revolution to 'small ds' (Democratic Socialism) before we're all dead:
DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALISM
LOVE FOR
PEOPLE
vs
INEQUALITY
CAUSED BY
BILLIONAIRE
BASTARDS
BTW, 'Negative Externality Cost' LOOTING is the death engine of all societies, ---- while
'Positive Externality Profits' for the PEOPLE, are the LOVE Train to EQUALITY AND PEACE
Chris, I too would fear and loathe a Conservative Christian theocracy in America. But right now it seems to me the danger is at least as great that fascism is coming hard and fast from the insane radical Left... We need to reject and resist extremism from all sides. (Don't we?)
"The billionaires and corporations, whose sole obsession is the greater accumulation of wealth and power, will accommodate themselves to the Christian fascists, as the German industrialists did to the Nazi Party." -- Chris, what evidence do you or any of us have for this? It would seem none at all. The billionaire class has clearly coalesced around the Obama coalition & is working with tech & the DOJ to imprison many of the Jan 6 people on questionable grounds. Wondering also as to the "Christian" part. Could you elaborate a bit more? I really value your insights & positions, but I don't follow you here, as this view seems to give too much power to people who don't actually hold institutional power, people with whom the corporations, NGOs, billionaires will never align. The threat seems to come precisely from the pro-war, greed consumed & lie consumed main stream.
Well, Chris, I suspect that the real problem is that the structure of our governance is such that it's all too easy to take away people's choices. When we first started getting broadcast media back in the beginning of the 20th century, the government promulgated rules limiting the number of radio and TV stations you could own to try to ensure diversity in what you could listen to. We changed the rules and now broadcast media is owned by only a tiny handful of corporations. The same thing is true of the political system. All too often we have no choice when we vote. The classic was the 2016 presidential race. I had no intention of voting for either of those two idiots. So I voted 3rd party. Why don't more people do that? The system is rigged in favor of the two wings of the uniparty and until we break that we will not improve.