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Showing posts with label Katherine Stewart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Katherine Stewart. Show all posts
"Be Joyful!" The implication that all this hate and violence must be done joyfully as to the Lord...NOT...
Imagine my surprise when, in the next portion of this book, MONEY, that I am reading, was an actual overview of many of those individuals, families, or organizations who actually provide what we now call "dark money." Meaning that "nobody" (i.e., those of us who don't have the technical skills) really can trace where the actual money that is funding political activities is coming from. Except of course from E. Musk who publicly advertises to give away money to buy elections or spending his money loudly and often in other ways... while having no problem firing and taking away money from we who actually need our income to daily live our lives.
Given the number of footnotes by this author, readers will discover that this book has been more than well researched! Can you imagine "following the money" back to the sources of the millions/billions of dollars that seem to be supplied routinely, especially to the MAGA side of our government? For me, losing a year of my life trying to ascertain how/when/where millions of dollars in capital money was spent and who got that money, I can tell you, it is mind-boggling and a major work effort. Thank you Katherine Stewart for this extraordinarily well written book and the effort it has to have taken to search out needed information and then to share it!
Because I was, and I believe also many readers. will be shocked to learn of the "whys" behind wanting to give money away to politics. They can be narrowed down to, in my opinion, wanting recognition, wanting power, and being lied into thinking you are doing something good...for whatever purpose you've accepted...
First, at the end of Part 1, I asked you to think about which group you might fit into... I realized that in reading that might have been a rhetorical question rather than a request... So, let me be clear, if you are NOT part of or support this plan (formally called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership--and I just did a search! You can download a pdf copy for free if you care to do so), you are not part of the dark money investigation that was undertaken... You can be sure that I'll be referring to passages of Project 2025 in the future! Have you heard the word Mandate thrown around by Trump?! Well this is the mandate he is referring to! NONE of what is being done was the brainchild of the president of the United States... think about that! Further, as we have been finding out, NONE of what is being done by this administration is as reported are priorities for US--the Citizens of This Country! Instead it is a plan that was created by Trump supporters and other far right conservatives who...are...funders and supporters of what is happening right now!
Wallbuilders president (one of the formal groups) Tim Barton creates and provides "bogus" Christian National history to conservatives audiences. He quickly throws out facts and stats so as to imply that this is and has been a legitimate religion which just happens to be made up of MAGA supporters and all in support of Project 2025, including Funders. The intent of Barton is to make the audience believe what he is saying is true since he knows it so well and speaks fluently... Barton blames the decision by the Supreme Court for banning prayer in schools... Now if I remember correctly, at first prayer was not banned, it went to a silent moment of prayer, which would allow those of different faiths to act based upon their personal beliefs. In any event, I was there when the separation of church and state came into existence... After I thought about it, I realized that, while religion might be a part thought about, it was primarily to allow stores to remain open on Sundays (the Christian holy day) so that the millions of people who worked swing shifts could buy groceries, etc., on their days off...You know, those working in hospitals, cleaning staff who were required to work when the business was not open...school staffs at all levels... Many Christians are working in such jobs. And was it not Jesus who said to us put away the rules and simply love your neighbor? Something that never really happened since the Old Testament is still considered by many the Word of God, even though it has been translated from one language to another, edited by individuals who proofread it for content--you get the idea, especially since there have been many inconsistencies already discovered, questioned, and, simply, ignored by some...
The following might not be the song referenced, but it seemed appropriate since Christianity is being used by thousands of different groups who are calling themselves Christian Nationalists with goals of hate, action against non-white or minority people, and...violence...
Issue 1. This is what they have done,” Robert Busch writes to me with weary outrage as he forwards a photograph of a group of nuns, one of them wearing a STOP THE STEAL button, cheerfully joining President Trump’s rally outside the White House on the morning of January 6, 2021.1 Busch, who lives in Redwood City, California, recently formed a study group on economic justice within the Thomas Merton Center, which is affiliated with the St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Palo Alto.2 Like most of his fellow study group members, he calls himself a Francis Catholic, in deference to Pope Francis. You could also call him a Nuns on the Bus Catholic, after the progressive Catholic group, which he supports, that advocates for a range of social justice issues. He is as earnest in person as he is passionate in his emails. He usually has at the tip of his tongue or typewriter a citation from any number of writings in the long tradition of Catholic social teachings. He remains personally opposed to abortion but rejects its political use as a wedge issue. Robert Busch reached out to me online just as I was returning from the March for Life, an annual gathering of antiabortion activists and their supporters that takes place every year on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. While the march draws in a religiously diverse crowd, it is heavily Catholic and includes hundreds of busloads of kids from Catholic schools, for many of whom attendance is all but mandatory. But many other Catholics are morally opposed to the politicization of the abortion issue and are horrified by the takeover of the Supreme Court. Busch and members of his study group are among them. They were determined not just to go on record with their opposition but also to do something to get their message and their vision of Catholicism out. Robert Busch works as an administrator in a development office at Stanford University. Edna Jamati, one more of the dozen-odd members of the Thomas Merton study group, is a retired nurse. Another member, Vicky Sullivan, is a grandmother who attends mass several times a week. Shannon Griscom is a retired teacher. Their group represents a cross section of the Catholic laity in their community, says Busch, which is to say that they are mostly middle-class, if rather whiter, older, and more educated than the median resident...
Editorial note: After the following few lines, I have reached the publishers limit on use within copyright restrictions. I will henceforth depend upon my own writing skills to discuss this book. I hope you will continue with me...and if you'd like any clarifications on what I share, please feel free to leave questions as comments and I will try to clarify sufficiently for you to understand my thoughts and response to the content...
I wanted to leave these few lines because this excerpt is from Chapter 2 of the book. As I said earlier, I was shocked with what I was reading... this was the most shocking for me... I'll explain after the following short excerpt...
Just a few miles up the road, in the bucolic wine country of Napa, is one of the luxury hotels managed by a company whose founder and CEO is a man named Timothy Busch—no relation to Robert. Timothy Busch is also a Californian...
Some of us--maybe many of us--who are protestants have from time to time wondered why there are so many different churched under the umbrella of protestants... Through reading a variety of books, one of which is The Book of Thomas with commentary, which I'll talk about soon... is that I'm discovering what is really meant when Jesus spoke...
But, prior to this time period, other than the ongoing sexual issues that have long been hidden and then began to be addressed within the Catholic Church, I had never thought that the Catholic Church could be "splintered..." Until Project 2025 and Trump and the Funders Group behind dark money... It seems that, now, in that church there is a wide division between those who support Pope Francis' teachings...and all the rest, who are now in the majority... If you want to know more, I urge you to consider buying the book--this is just one shocking issue that I discovered. Very specifically, my reading of this book states that there is now a divide of leadership within the Catholic Church who have chosen wealth and power over the program activities of Pope Francis, who, as you may know, had a recent major hospital stay, but is now back... Thank God...
Issue 2 The Secretary of Education in the former Trump Administration is from an extremely wealthy family and their source of wealth, at least from a professional job standpoint, is running private schools... Here's Project 2025 plans...
Issue 3 This is actually a part, but in my opinion, a very important part of what is happening related to public education. MAGA churches, groups, formerly created "topical" groups are encouraging members to not only run for school boards, but to cause friction and dissent at the meetings by members or just by attending meetings. There are many videos available at YouTube showing specific issues, such as bullying, prejudice against minority students of all kinds, as well as working to change control of curriculum and books to other than professional teachers, librarians and more... Velshi on MSNBC has been covering the banned books issue from the start and is a good place to learn about specific books, sometimes banned purely on the complaint of one or two individuals??? A great example was given on how banning can occur. The writer was visiting a meeting where one woman talked about a book in her local school. She referred to The Diary of Anne Frank. Stewart was surprised and sat thinking when the woman went on to say, I like the book, but it was the homosexuality inclusion that I could not tolerate... Ok, I'm not going to explain the rest of that conversation. But if any of you know the story about the young Jewish girl who had to hide from the Germans during WWII, and you can't remember anything to do with homosexuality...there's a reason to call these people...FAR Right!
I decided to include just one video where a young girl died because of what was happening in schools!
You are correct that the above video is not necessarily related to this book and actions now underway to destroy public education. However, doesn't that make it even worse? Because, NOW, we have an organized announced movement toward DEI in all manner of issues... including creating schools that will not be available for those with low income.
Issue 4 - Quickly, I want to highlight a son of immigrants who finished university and, during the depression, went into business selling electronics. When personal computers started to surge in sales, there was a concurrent almost insatiable demand for power strips, ultimately resulting in his being able to sell his main company for $1.65 billion dollars. His personal political view was “basic libertarianism.” But then this man was, shall we say, identified as a potential funder, with a capital F... An "adviser" took him under his wing, and then the now multi-billionaire made a $1,6B contribution to a trust controlled by Leonard Leo, the right-wing moneyman best known for stacking the Supreme Court via the Federalist Society. That is, he's the coordinator of all groups related to imposing a Christian Nationalist and right-wing agenda into existence (now happening under the republican administration.
The remaining part of the Money chapters very specifically provides names of donors of dark money, sometimes the why they donate, and people like Leonard Leo and others who work to influence, coordinate, and create false disinformation by which manipulation of former libertarians might be seduced of large chunks of money to give to "good" causes... making a name for themselves and surely going down in history of the time as a group of Funders decided they wanted to destroy democracy, the order of law, any regulations that reduced profits, and people who would prevent them... from... making... more... money... and, of course, to gt more tax breaks for the wealthy!
I don't know what the next section, Lies, will involve, so I thought I'd give you the latest--and catastrophic--set of lies that has come out of the republican administration... Perhaps you've heard of "Signalgate?" Days go by and still people are talking, upset and filing law suits... while lies or alternative news items are pushed, trying to get past the most dangerous security breach that has occurred by a president...
Note: I have not watched this movie series. These are selected based upon relevancy
There is no world in which America will become the “Christian nation” that it never actually was; there is only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values. These visions turn out to be thin cover for an unfocused rage against the diverse and unequal America that actually exists. They are the means whereby one type of underclass can be falsely convinced that its disempowerment is the work of another kind of underclass. They are expressions of pain, not plans for the future. Perhaps for the same reason, some of the movement’s political projects often have a strangely performative character. Fantasy, cosplay, snark, the validation of heroic self-images, and the ritual infliction of pain on their political opponents—not changes in policy or material conditions—seem to be the point. The best label I can find for the phenomenon—and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label—is “reactionary nihilism.” It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind—a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.
~~~
If it has not yet sunk into your thinking, the above is a great way to start thinking clearly... Which political party is ALWAYS voting against issues that concern the majority of us? Gun laws immediately come to mind!
Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom. But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state. How did such an anti-American movement take root in America? That is the question I aim to address in this book. As a reporter, I like to look first and theorize later. I am interested in facts, not polemics—though I won’t stand in the way of facts when they lead to pointed conclusions. This book is therefore a collection of dispatches from the front lines of the current assault on American democracy. My goal has been to record what I have seen and heard from the leaders and supporters of the antidemocratic movement in the auditoriums and breakout rooms at national conferences, around the table at informal gatherings of activists, in the living rooms of the rank and file, and in the pews of hard-line churches. The story features a rowdy mix of personalities: “apostles” of Jesus, atheistic billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations. I don’t pretend to cover all the angles. Others have found new and important ways to report on the subject, and I reference or cite the work of as many as I can throughout the book in the hopes that it will inspire further study. Even so, I think I have scouted enough of the territory to say something about the origins and nature of the antidemocratic movement in America. In this preface—the last of the pages to be written for this book—I will offer a handful of principal findings. Let me begin by repeating the obvious: this movement represents a serious threat to the survival of American democracy. Even at this late date, I continue to hear feel-good suggestions that the political conflicts of the moment are the result of incivility, tribalism, “affective partisanship,” or some other unfortunate trend in manners that affects every side of the political debates equally. All will be well, the thinking goes, if the red people and the blue people would just sit down for some talk therapy and give a little to the other side. In earlier times this may have been sage advice. Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house. It isn’t the product of misunderstandings; it advances its antidemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation. In the pages that follow, I will bring the receipts to support these uncomfortable facts. For now, I will venture that few who have familiarized themselves with this movement will be tempted to minimize the danger it represents to our collective well-being. What are the root causes of this development? There is no simple answer. But I will get the ball rolling with an observation about time frames. It can sometimes seem that the antidemocratic reaction snuck up on us and suddenly exploded in our living rooms. I confess that when I look back over the decade and a half that I have spent reporting on the subject, the escalation of the threat appears breathtaking. In 2009, I was reporting on an antidemocratic ideology focused on hostility to public education that appeared to be gaining influence on the right. By 2021, I was writing about an antidemocratic movement whose members had stormed the Capitol—and about a Republican Party whose leadership disgracefully acquiesced in the attempted overthrow of American democracy. In the 2024 election, that party was rewarded for its betrayal of American values. Yet the swiftness of the fall should not distract from the long duration of the underlying causes. The present crisis is deeply rooted in material changes in American life over the past half century. The antidemocratic movement came together long before Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. The outcome of the 2024 election only confirms the fundamental calculus described in this book. The forces hurling against American democracy will long outlive the current political moment, and they will continue to feast on the carcass of the Republican Party. Their various elements have emerged along the fissures in American society, and they continue to thrive on our growing educational, cultural, regional, racial, religious, and informational divides. Of particular note, the antidemocratic reaction draws much of its energy from the massive increase in economic inequality and resulting economic dislocations over the past five decades. In the middle of the twentieth century, capitalist America was home to the most powerful and prosperous middle class the world had hitherto seen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, capitalism had yielded in many respects to a form of oligarchy, and the nation had been divided into very different strata. At the very top of the wealth distribution arose a sector whose aggregate net worth makes the rich men of earlier decades look like amateurs. Between 1970 and 2020, the top 0.1 percent doubled its share of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, lost a corresponding share.3 For the large majority of Americans, the new era brought wage stagnation and even, within certain groups in recent years, declining life expectancy. In the happy handful of percentiles located just beneath the 0.1 percent, on the other hand, a hyper-competitive group has managed to hold on to its share of the pie even as it remains fearful of falling behind. I do not mean to suggest that the political conflicts of the present can be easily reduced to economic conflicts. Far from it. My point is that the great disparity in wealth distribution is a significant contributor to the wave of unreason that has swept our politics and our culture. It has fractured our faith in the common good, unleased an epidemic of status anxiety, and made a significant subset of the population susceptible to conspiracism and disinformation. Different groups, of course, have responded differently. The antidemocratic movement is not the work of any one social group but of several working together. It relies in part on the narcissism and paranoia of the subset of the super-rich who fund this movement, having decided to invest their fortunes in the destruction of democracy. They appear to operate on the cynical belief that manipulation of the masses through disinformation will enhance their own prosperity. The movement also draws in a sector of the professional class that has largely abdicated its social responsibility. Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below, from the anger and resentment that characterizes life among those who perceive, more or less accurately, that they are falling behind. As these groups jockey for status in a fast-changing world, they give rise to a politics of rage and grievance. The reaction may be understandable. But it is not, on that account, reasonable or constructive. Although the antidemocratic movement emerged, in part, out of massive structural conflicts in the American political economy, along with investment, by antidemocratic forces, in the infrastructure of their movement, it does not represent a genuine attempt to address the problems from which it arose. The new politics aims for results that few people actually want and that ultimately harm everybody. Grounded in resentment and unreason, the new American fascism is more a political pathology than a political program. What are the main features of this pathology? In America, just as in unstable political economies of the past, the grievances to which the daily injustices of an unequal system give rise inevitably vent on some putatively alien “other” supposedly responsible for all our ills. America’s demagogues, however, have a special advantage. They can draw on the nation’s barbarous history of racism and the fear that the “American way of life” is slipping away, abetted by an out-of-touch elite. The story of this movement cannot be told apart from the racial and ethnic divisions that it continuously exploits and exacerbates. The psychic payoff that the new, antidemocratic religious and right-wing nationalism offers its adherents is the promise of membership in a privileged “in-group” previously associated with being a white Christian conservative, a supposed “real American,” with the twist that those privileges may now be claimed even by those who are not white, provided they worship and vote the “right” way. At the same time, I will also show the movement is the result of the concerted cultivation of a range of anxieties that draw from deep and wide roots. Another glaring and related attribute of this pathology is perhaps already in evidence in the description above of the man with the SIZE MATTERS T-shirt. Anxiety about traditional gender roles and hierarchies is the rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism. Among the bearded young men of the New Right, it shows up in social media feeds bursting with rank misogyny. In the theocratic wing of the movement, it puts on the tattered robes of patriarchy, with calls for “male headship” and female subordination, and relentlessly demonizes LGBT people. On the political stage, it has centered around the long-running effort to strip women of their reproductive health rights and, in essence, make their bodies the property of the state. That effort has had significant consequences at the ballot box—which is why a sector of movement leadership is starting to speak openly about stripping women of the right to vote. The tragedy of American politics is that the same forces that have damaged so many personal lives have been weaponized and enlisted in the service of a political movement that is sure to make the situation worse. This movement rejects the primacy of reason in the modern world at the same time that it rejects democracy. This is the darkest aspect of the phenomenon, and I describe it only after having grimly ruled out more charitable explanations. The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy rather than what it proposes to create. Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story. Its members resemble the revolutionaries of the past in their drive to overthrow “the regime”—but many are revolutionaries without a cause. To be sure, movement leaders do float visions of what they take to be a better future, which typically aims for a fictitious version of the past: a nation united under “biblical law”; a people liberated from the tyranny of the “administrative state”; or just a place somehow made “great again.” But in conversations with movement participants, I have found, these visions quickly dissipate into insubstantial generalizations or unrealizable fantasy. There is no world in which America will become the “Christian nation” that it never actually was; there is only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values. These visions turn out to be thin cover for an unfocused rage against the diverse and unequal America that actually exists. They are the means whereby one type of underclass can be falsely convinced that its disempowerment is the work of another kind of underclass. They are expressions of pain, not plans for the future. Perhaps for the same reason, some of the movement’s political projects often have a strangely performative character. Fantasy, cosplay, snark, the validation of heroic self-images, and the ritual infliction of pain on their political opponents—not changes in policy or material conditions—seem to be the point. The best label I can find for the phenomenon—and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label—is “reactionary nihilism.” It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind—a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate. Though this be madness, to borrow from Shakespeare, yet there is method in it. Too often, the analysis of the antidemocratic movement comes to an end with psychological and sociological observations about the voters who lend support to it. But what I have found in my reporting is that this is a leadership-driven movement, not merely a social phenomenon. A central finding in this book is that the direction and success of the antidemocratic movement depends on its access to immense resources, a powerful web of organizations, and a highly self-interested group of movers and backers. It has bank accounts that are always thirsty for more money, networks that hunger for ever more connections, religious demagogues intent on exploiting the faithful, communicators eager to spread propaganda and disinformation, and powerful leaders who want more power. It takes time, organizational energy, and above all, money to weaponize grievances and hurl them against an established democracy—and this movement has it all. To be clear, there is no single headquarters for the reaction. There are, however, powerful networks of leaders, strategists, and donors, as well as interlocking organizations, fellow travelers, and affirmative action programs for the ideologically pure. That matrix is far more densely connected, well-financed, and influential at all levels of government and society than most Americans appreciate. History shows, however, that better organization does not always flatten the contradictions. On the contrary, it can sometimes amplify the conflicts. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the antidemocratic movement to appreciate and the source of both its weakness and its strength. This movement is at war with itself even as it wages war on the rest of us. It consists of a variety of groups and organizations, each pursing its own agendas, each in thrall to a distinct set of assumptions. Viewed as a whole, it seems to want things that cannot go together—like “small government” and also a government big enough to control the most private acts in which people engage; like the total deregulation of corporate monopolies and also a better deal for the workforce; like “the rule of law” and also the lawlessness of a dictator and his cronies who may pilfer the public treasury; like a “Christian nation” that excludes many American Christians from the ranks of the supposedly righteous. It pursues this bundle of contradictions not merely out of hypocrisy and cynicism but because the task of tearing down the status quo brings together groups that want very different things and are even at odds with one another. To sort a complex grouping of people into admittedly simplistic categories in the interest of making this project manageable, I have divided the principal actors of the antidemocratic reaction into five main categories: the Funders, the Thinkers, the Sergeants, the Infantry, and the Power Players. It is the interactions and tensions among these groups, I have come to think, that are key to understanding the origins and evolutions of the American crisis. Before getting on with the reporting I will therefore say a few more things about each of these groups. The Funders come from the minute ranks of beneficiaries of the massive concentration in wealth over the past five decades. Some of the Funders you will meet here are already quite famous: former secretary of education Betsy DeVos, the Wilks brothers, Rebekah Mercer, Tim Dunn, and the Koch brothers among them. Others are less well known, and quite a few make a point of hiding in the rooms where dark money lives. There you will find the secretive Chicago billionaire who likes to go by the pseudonym Elbert Howell (a mash-up of references to the Midwestern anarchist Elbert Hubbard and the millionaire from Gilligan’s Island?); a minor-league California real estate scion who has taken it upon himself to join in the destruction of the system of public education in the name of Jesus; his neighbor, the wife of a Pepsi heir, who helps fund election disinformation operations; a Wall Street hedge funder whose think tank sustains ideological extremists caught up in the January 6 coup attempt; a number of energy tycoons; some tech bros; and a surprisingly diverse cast of eccentrics that are transforming our country in ways you likely never thought possible. The distinguishing feature of the Funders is that they have chosen to invest their fortunes in the subversion of democracy. Given their successes in business and the cultural power of money in America, they are often pictured, even by their critics, as masterminds overseeing an intricate and well-conceived plan to rule the world. I regret to report that they do not appear to be, on balance, geniuses. Too often, they operate on the basis of remarkably simplistic, reactionary ideas about politics and society. And they are dangerously wrong in their biggest idea—that destroying democracy is a means of creating wealth. Apart from the cognitive and emotional limitations that at times accumulate alongside unmerited wealth, the main reason why the Funders are confused about their own genuine interests is that they have outsourced much of their thinking—just as they have outsourced so much else—to other people. The Thinkers are a subset of the increasingly insular professional elite that has emerged in the modern American economy. They spend much of their time shuttling around a number of densely connected institutions with anodyne names, often drawn from grand figures or moments in history: the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the James Madison Center, and so on. Many of the Thinkers can boast of credentials from the nation’s elite educational institutions, though they may consciously have set themselves against their former teachers. They are the “anti-intellectual intellectuals,” as it were. Quite a few are amphibious; they travel freely between the genteel world of reactionary think tanks and the alt-right spaces where young men who deploy the “Pepe the Frog” emoji in their social media monikers trade misogynist, racist, and anti-Semitic aperçus. In revealing moments—like when the academically well-polished leader of the Heritage Foundation declared that the “second American Revolution” that he and his fellow Trump supporters are leading “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”4—it becomes clear that the Thinkers’ credentials are often thin cover for ferocious levels of aggression and insecurity. I will pay special attention here to the men of the Claremont Institute—they are almost all men—whose erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support for Donald Trump’s attempted coup against the United States. Many of the Thinkers subscribe to an ideology that now fits mainly under the label of “the New Right”—even though it is neither new nor conservative. Their core doctrine isn’t so much a political theory as an unwavering conviction about the root of all evil in modern society. That root, they say, is a supposedly all-controlling “woke” elite that cancels right-wing speakers at campus events and controls the rest of the nation from the back rooms of diversity offices. In the real world, the Thinkers themselves represent a far more powerful professional elite, sustained in a lavish welfare system at a network of think tanks and advocacy groups, and serving at the pleasure of the billionaires who pay their salaries. When you peel back their intellectual claims and political programs, or so I have found, it becomes clear that many of these Thinkers are primarily engaged in an intra-elite struggle with their real nemesis: the group at the other end of the faculty lounge. The Funders and Infantry are, for them, useful fodder in a psychic conflict driven by a highbrow form of reactionary nihilism. The Infantry are drawn mostly from the millions of Americans in the middle and lower-middle sections of the nation’s widening economic, educational, and regional divides. This group is large and diverse, and includes many different identities, ideas, and agendas. You will meet some of the Infantry in these pages at school board meetings, where they hope to save the nation by banning books with LGBT or sex-related themes from school libraries (even when such books are nowhere to be found), or by suppressing instruction on the brutal history of slavery and segregation in America. You’ll come across others on the ReAwaken America Tour—a traveling Christian nationalist series of events that offers to prepare American patriots in “fifth generation warfare” so that they can take on an ever-rotating cycle of conspiracies. You will find many of them in the pews of America’s hard-line churches, where radicalized pastors nurture a cohort of “spirit warriors” intent on waging battle with the moderate-liberal-left “demons” that have purportedly commandeered the culture. The Infantry includes many of those that the knowledge economy left behind, the people who get riled up with rhetoric about “elites.” Satisfying the economic and emotional needs of this group is always the ostensible source of legitimacy of the antidemocratic movement, but it is never the actual goal. The real role is to supply the Funders, Thinkers, and key players with enough votes to win (or, as we saw in 2020, enough to pretend to win) power. Within the Infantry there’s a special group of unit leaders, or “Sergeants,” that turn the movement’s money and messages into votes and political action at the local level. This group includes culture warriors moonlighting as school board members and “moms” who think “liberty” means banning books they don’t like. But the least appreciated subset consists of the tens of thousands of pastors at America’s conservative churches. Many belong to groups with militant names like the Black Robe Regiment, Watchmen on the Wall, Faith Wins, and Pastors for Trump, and some number encouraged or defended the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. But not all Sergeants are evangelical. Indeed, they are not all Christian; among the Sergeant cohort you will find some people who are not religious at all. Stitching the movement together is a tiny elite I will call the Power Players—leaders of the Christian nationalist movement’s policy and networking groups, legal advocacy organizations, messaging initiatives, and other features—who amass tremendous personal power by mobilizing others around their agendas. Some are celebrity preachers that outgrew their local congregations and took on a national profile, on the model of Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority or D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries. Others are super-lobbyists with tremendous influence on elections and elected politicians, like Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Many of them get together at Council for National Policy or Ziklag gatherings, or at the National Prayer Breakfast, where they trade favors on the path to still greater power. Most sit astride organizations with budgets in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, command media and pastoral ministries that reach tens or hundreds of millions of Infantry, and have the ear of presidents and other political leaders. They are the operational masterminds of the antidemocratic movement, and their organizations turn the Funders’ money and the Infantry’s votes into political power. The dominant ideology they cultivate among the rank and file of America’s antidemocratic movement is Christian nationalism. But this label can be misleading. Christian nationalism is not a religion. It is not Christianity. It is a political identity with a corresponding political ideology, and the ideology in question doesn’t have a lot to do with the way many if not most Americans understand Christianity. You don’t have to be a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, and plenty of patriotic Christians want nothing to do with Christian nationalism. “White evangelical,” as I will show, should no longer be regarded as interchangeable with “Christian nationalist.” Sectors of other varieties of Christianity and other religions, along with members of other racial and ethnic groups, are moving in, while at least some of the old members are moving out. More importantly, what matters is not formal or denominational religious identity but partisan political identity—and this partisan identity has in turn become something like a substitute religion. Christian nationalism does not just draw on old strands of a diverse religion but has also fabricated a radically new, intensely politicized religion centered on a newly concocted “pro-life” theology and—among a large number—the idea of “spiritual warfare.” Although it is at bottom a political ideology, moreover, Christian nationalism is not merely a policy program; it is perhaps best understood as a political mindset. That mindset, as I explain in further detail below, includes four basic dispositions: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex. Catastrophism in this context is the foreboding conviction that the nation is doomed and that the blame falls squarely on the faithless. The persecution complex rests on the belief that conservative Christians are the principal victims of discrimination in America. Identitarianism is the belief that a “real” or “authentic” subset of Americans are entitled to rule over the rest. And the authoritarian reflex always calls for a strongman savior, on the grim assumption that only the cruel and lawless survive in a cruel and lawless world. The chief limitation of the label “Christian nationalism,” however is that it represents only one end of the antidemocratic movement. It is a tool for mobilizing the grievances of the people; but a stadium crowded with resentments would not add up to a political program without a tremendous amount of financial and organizational support. This is where the Funders and the Thinkers come in. The Funders might share the Christian nationalist mindset with their followers but they certainly don’t have to, and many do not. Some identify with other religious traditions, and some appear to have confessed to no religion more than the worship of money. The core of their belief system is that democracy in its current configuration threatens their power and privilege—as well as freedom and prosperity for all, or so they like to add. Some of the Thinkers are even less committed to specific faith traditions than their rich patrons. One branch is essentially atheistic, another espouses hard-line Catholicism; some are Jewish, and many don’t appear to have much personal interest in religion. They leave the Christian nationalism and all that for the little people whom they half-heartedly pretend to care about. They may be against the “woke” elite, but they aren’t against elites as such. Indeed they see themselves as members of a new elite, destined to rule over a population that can never be brought to virtue on its own. In brief, what the Funders are buying is not always what the Thinkers and Sergeants are selling or what the Infantry is hearing. Each gains power by deceiving the others. Inevitably, they attempt to deceive the rest of us, too, and then they begin to deceive themselves. The interactions among the elements of the antidemocratic reaction bring out the worst in each, as it were, and ensure that the whole will be worse than the sum of its parts. It would be nice to think that the movement will crumble under the weight of its internal contradictions, but that may be wishful thinking. Many such movements throughout history have destroyed the nations from which they arise before getting around to destroying themselves. The chief threat to American democracy comes from a kind of collective psychosis. The age of economic and cultural fracture has yielded a politics of unreason. But the politics of unreason is not a random walk. It unravels in a particular direction. Unreason is the first and last resort of the enemies of democracy. In the final analysis, the antidemocratic movement is a symptom, not a cause, of the American crises. This fact, as I will lay out in a brief afterword, can be a source of hope for the future. It can serve as a guidepost for the deep structural and organizational solutions that this crisis demands. In the meantime, I invite you to leave behind the land of political theory, buckle up, and join me on a journey through the madness and the beauty of the American political landscape.
I know there are a lot of non-biblical arguments for the separation of church and state. Some Christians also support it on biblical grounds, but I've never looked into the matter myself. Which passages of the Bible support the idea? (if you need more info, click over to Wiki link!
Many people cite the phrase as if it was included in the founding documents of the United States (Declaration of Independence or Constitution or Bill of Rights), when in fact as your link shows, it comes from Thomas Jefferson's personal correspondence. It is also not intended to keep religious faith and civic involvement completely separate (as some suggest), but to insure that government does not interfere with religious worship. In this light, the question can be read "what is the biblical basis for making sure government does not interfere with religious worship?
@DanielStandage I disagree. The separation of church and state goes far beyond the de-regulation of worship. Many of our forefathers came from societies that used protection of religious values as a mask for political and economic oppression, even war. For example, while England and its neighbors worshiped the same God, they warred for centuries because the monarchs of England (recognized as the religious as well as political authority there) sought to prevent Catholics from recognizing the Pope.
@HedgeMage Are you implying that religion itself is not used as a mask for political and economic oppression and even war? The majority of the founding fathers were deists. Who didn't want to be forced into a specific religious dogma. It is one of the big differences between America and other countries - that you can be the religion of your choice and practice it as long as you do not harm or impede others. If we force people into a religion or dogma, we're doing a disservice to America and the religion which we are pushing AKA tyranny of the majority
17 And Jesus answering said unto them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." And they marvelled at him. This has always been the easiest clarification for me...
The argument goes something like this: The government is here to govern the society here on Earth. God give to us Spirit to govern our hearts, minds, and souls. So, we should allow the government to do what it does best and allow God to be in control of all the other things.
The argument is generally followed with the idea that we need to elect Christians into government and pray for our government officials, but that religion should be separate from the state.
Personally, I think this is a bit of a stretch. The more solid arguments are the non-biblical ones (prevention of the majority overriding the minority, insuring freedom of religion, etc.)
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I don't know about you, but I've reached my "Too Much Information" (TMI) Point... In fact I feel totally saturated and drowning... I have to assume that this is just what is intended by the present presidential administration as they act first and then get hauled into court afterward, much to the detriment (and financial costs) of the fears and frustration of most Americans. Let's face it, when the republican legislators are being told not to talk to their constituents or face hatred and derision...
Soooo, I decided that I would have to take a hard look at what I was reading, including emails, and/or newscasts. I'm limiting time for TV news to no more than 2 hours daily and being very selective who/what I tune into. I'm deleting all political emails, most of the substacks who have found their way to my email address, along with all the crappy ads that are run/allowed...And, still, I feel overwhelmed!
I have recently purchased two books, one of which is Money, lies and God by American Journalist, Katherine Stewart. Many of you will already know that I picked up on the "God" issue during the 2016 election and have read a number of books, as well as shared many videos about those who have either left religion, altogether, or who have written books and/or developed a YouTube Station to discuss the part of the political crisis which is rarely actually spotlighted, even by the political parties. Could it be because more and more is being found out that what many (Christians) were told has since been proven to be lies?
Well, if you have a similar interest in the role God actually does or doesn't play in politics, I highly recommend you get this book if you can. What I have read so far is much more devastating than I ever could have imagined! For me, it is both fascinating reading as well as quite, frankly, disgusting... The book is thoroughly researched with a ongoing reference listings. The presentation is logically presented, so that you learn about the structure, as identified by the author, but which are totally understandable even with any level of political knowledge you may possess. And, most importantly, provides the basic answers that you've been possibly searching for, but not able to find, as to why the body of Christians has become divided over political objectives related to American Democracy.
Unlike the recent serialized activities for Fantasy Five by Harold Michael Harvey, which included authority to include as many excerpts as I felt important, I will be limited for this book. So, I will be reading and regurgitating through discussion what was important to me, which, in turn, may be responsive to those you may have. If you have specific questions, just leave them on below comments and I will do a search in the book to see if I can find a response and how it fits into your concerns... Hopefully, we can work together to dig deep into three of the primary issues for me that has been so frustrating...
The Total Lack of Truth in the present (and 2016) administration and the subsequent abuse of the legal system and its officials...
The use of big, possibly dirty, money to have resulted in the re-election of a convicted felon, as well as an impeached (twice) and insurrectionist who incited the attack on our Nation's Capitol... Plus the total acceptance (forced) of all new cabinet members and more...
And, most importantly for all of us, the falsification and creation of disinformation of what God/Jesus says about the role of religion within a nation...
To begin her presentation, Stewart identifies the groups of characters which will be discussed:
As he prepares me a cup of tea, he relates a story from his childhood. “I shared a bedroom with my older brother who loved to terrorize me with stories about ‘the bogeyman’ who would attack me in the middle of the night.” He laughs at the memory. “And I think it’s very interesting that there are political and religious forces in America that want to make this debate about religious freedom or religious liberty the new bogeyman in American politics. What they are trying to do with their scare tactics is create a myth they can hold up and say, ‘This bogeyman is coming after your religious freedoms, and pretty soon we’re going to be communist Russia or communist China or communist Cuba, where faith is exiled.’ ” We bundle into Baines’s car, and after a short drive we arrive at the sanctuary of the Community Baptist Church. We pick up our Chick-Fil-A breakfast sandwiches and take our seats. I am one of only four or five women in the room, and I feel relieved to be Baines’s plus-one. He is the official attendee; I am just there to smile and nod affirmatively. While I am putting on my best smile, however, he is fidgeting. He seemed comfortable enough on the ride over, but this setting seems to trigger something in him. “Just a little PTSD,” he whispers. He grins bravely, but I can see that the wounds from a childhood lived in shame for who he is are still tender. Then the meeting comes to order, and an organizer calls on the first speaker. Chad Connelly bounds onto the stage bursting with energy.
“We are in the middle of doing over forty cities, just like this, in sixteen states between Labor Day and Thanksgiving,” he says breathlessly. He rattles off some statistics from an earlier leg of his “American Restoration Tour”: eighty-nine meetings with 2,965 pastors across the country who command flocks totaling 741,000 potential voters. A former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party and director of faith engagement under Reince Priebus at the Republican National Committee for four years, Connelly is both a political veteran and a key player in the Christian nationalist movement. In 2017 he appeared on a membership list of the United States Coalition of Apostolic Leaders (USCAL), a group associated with a religious movement that argues that conservative Christians should control all aspects of government and society.13 Notably, Connelly serves on the CNP, where he sits on the board of governors. (Joan Lindsey, presumably by virtue of her open pocketbook, is a Gold Circle Member.)14 The council was founded by Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and others at the dawn of the Reagan era. Today it is one of the movement’s key networking operations, the apparatus that connects the “doers and the donors,” as Rich DeVos, Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law, put it, of Christian nationalism and the conservative political machine.15 “You’re about to hear a presentation that’s going to elevate your ability to understand what’s going on, and it’s also going to inspire you to say, ‘I’m not doing enough,’ ” Connelly says, his voice cheerful but firm. “Everybody you know needs to have voted. Everybody you know needs to go vote early. Every church you know needs to do voter registration. Every pastor you know needs to make sure one hundred percent of the people in their pews are voting, and voting biblical values.” As in most Christian nationalist gatherings, “voting biblical values” is a transparent euphemism for voting Republican. Connelly happily makes clear that his work owes everything to the generosity of Joan Lindsey and her family foundation. “Joan Lindsey just started talking to me about this,” Connelly tells the crowd. “So a couple years ago we really started this thing called The Church Finds Its Voice.” He nods. “If y’all have ever seen Christian leaders on television, Joan Lindsey’s likely trained ’em. She’s a media guru. An expert.” There is a part of Connelly’s message, both here and in his social media presence, that will be familiar to anyone who has taken in a minimum dose of Christian nationalist rhetoric. But it’s worth paying attention to the language because it reveals something about what Christian nationalism is and is not. There is a tendency on the outside to characterize the movement in terms of faith identities (“the evangelicals”), political doctrines (“America is a Christian nation”), and policies (like abortion bans). But on the inside, it looks more like a specific collection of feelings. What unites its varied constituencies is a certain mindset, or a common way of reacting to specific features of the outside world. And the first element of this mindset, as Connelly understands intuitively, is that America is going to hell real fast. A refrain heard across the movement, in various forms, is a hyped-up fear of the modern world meant to get people to the barricades, even if the enemy is illusory. “This is a crucial time in our nation’s history,” Connelly says. “Is this our 1776 moment? Or is it 1944?” He adds, “I’ve never voted for a pro-death person. Never voted for anybody of any stripe that was okay with killing a baby in a mommy’s tummy.” In Christian nationalist circles today, every election is a contest against absolute evil, and the consequences of failure almost too dire to imagine. Only radical action can stop the apocalypse just around the corner. A second element of the mindset is the conviction that we face the immediate reality of persecution. The “we” here refers to conservative Christians—and mostly to white conservative Christians. A 2023 survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which conducts research at the intersection of faith, culture, and public policy, shows that 85 percent of people who subscribe to Christian nationalist ideas also agree with the proposition that “discrimination against white people is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.”16 An earlier report, this one a partnership between PRRI and the Brookings Institution, shows that three-quarters of Republicans and Trump supporters and nearly eight in ten white evangelical Protestants believe that discrimination against Christians is as big of a problem as discrimination against other groups.17 Indeed, as PRRI founder Robert P. Jones, author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (Simon & Schuster, 2023), tells me, “The protection of white Christian dominance, rather than the advancement of policy priorities, is the animating force among the political conservative movement today.” In essence, as he notes, it’s identity and not policy that drives divisions—and creates opportunities for movement funders and strategists to curate identitarian grievance and then exploit it on a wave of cash! It is important to add that, whatever their ultimate causes, both the catastrophism and the persecution complex find expressions more frequently in status or cultural anxieties than in economic anxieties. “Compared to cultural factors, economic factors were significantly less strong predictors of support for Trump” in 2016, according to Jones. “Trump’s ‘Make American Great Again!’ slogan tapped anxieties that were less about jobs and economic mobility but more about a deep sense of protecting a white Christian America from what they perceive to be a foreign and corrupting influence.”18 A 2018 study from the National Academy of Sciences agreed that fear of status loss was a major driver of support for Trump. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country overall,” said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania.19 While political uprisings are often about downtrodden groups rising up to assert their right to better treatment and more equal life conditions relative to high-status groups, she said, “the 2016 election, in contrast, was an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance and by those in an already powerful and wealthy country to assure its continued dominance … Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended—with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women—were most likely to support Trump.”20 Connelly certainly appears to feel the threat. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote that “government leaders decided—in their flawed wisdom—that church gatherings were not ‘essential’ to society. You heard that right.”21 In religious right circles, the pandemic was a radicalizing event. It confirmed many Christian conservatives in their conviction that they are the most persecuted group in American society. It made many feel that they would soon be arrested, injected, and/or poisoned on account of their beliefs—that the tyrannical, Orwellian government long familiar to them from their bedtime stories suddenly had a very real face, and it looked a lot like Dr. Fauci. A third element of the Christian nationalist mindset is the conviction that “we” have a unique and privileged connection to this land. The “we” here, again, is not “the people” mentioned in the Constitution; “we” are conservative Christians, mostly white, the supposedly original and authentic population of the land. (Wrong) It all starts, as Connelly understands, with the belief in a golden age of yore. “This place has been ordained by God,” he said in a September 2020 podcast episode. “When the founders determined that, of course they were reading the Bible, and they were believers of the word of God," (doubtful given the final document on freedom of religion) he explained. “And so America became unique and special because the founders understood that the founding had to tie in to God.” (Really?Why does it say that ALL men are created equal, not just white people?) 22 The idea that conservative Christians therefore have the right and the duty to rule the nation and impose their values on others, by force if necessary—all this follows closely upon this mindset.(Keep saying a lie and somebody's going to believe you.) A fourth and final piece of the mindset of Christian nationalism involves a rather dark picture of the nature of the world: Jesus may have great plans for us, but the reality is that this is a cruel place in which only the cruel survive. In the more self-conscious exercises of Christian nationalist thought, this perspective expresses itself in explicit critiques of the social gospel, or the idea that Christianity has something to do with cultivating empathy, loving thy neighbor, and caring for the least of these.Each of us has a part of God within us and were asked to love our neighbors; this totally contradicts Jesus who Lives Today Within Us!)Nineteenth-century versions of populism sometimes made use of social gospel Christianity, typically as a prelude to wealth redistribution programs, and progressive Christians today continue to draw on scripture in their pursuit of a more just society. But today’s Christian nationalists have no time for the Jesus-is-love crowd. They want their Jesus to lift weights and carry a sword, and they are counting on Him to come down hard on the moochers and layabouts and those who challenge supposedly righteous hierarchies. The belief in cruelty in a cruel world finds expression in radical economic doctrines that embody a cold and punitive spirit, favoring total deregulation of exploitative monopolies and the elimination of the social safety net. (A Lie of the Worst Kind!) As Connelly puts it, the other reason for America’s uniqueness and specialness—apart from the fact that it was ordained by God—“is the free-market system, which of course is God’s biblical economy.”(Didn't Jesus say that a rich man must give up his wealth and help the poor to enter God's Kingdom...Definitely a Lie) Exactly where in Deuteronomy one is to find the commandments of hyper-capitalist orthodoxy, he does not say. No matter—next comes the fear and loathing. Connelly says on the podcast. “It’s actually a godless, communistic, Marxist style of government.”23 It would be hard to find a mindset more at odds with the spirit of the American founding and the actual foundations of the American republic.Have you noticed that republicans choose lies about democrats that exactly or nearly represent what the party is actually doing? Nobody should be fooled by their lies) Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney and author whose books include The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American (Sterling, 2019), told me bluntly: “America was not built on the Bible, and that book had little to no influence on the creation of the American Constitution. The framers almost never referenced the Bible when they were debating the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. The separation of church and state, on the other hand, is an American original—that idea was born in the Enlightenment and first implemented in the American experiment. That separation ensures that we all have freedom without favor, and equality without exception.” There is no room in Christian nationalism for the separation of church and state encoded in the Constitution, however, no recognition of the pluralism that characterized the American experiment from the start, no interest in the rationalist, scientific spirit of America’s founders. But there is also relatively little self-awareness, and if there is a heavy irony hanging over Connelly’s bombastic claims about America’s uniqueness and specialness and his defense of Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the “sacred” Constitution, no one in Chantilly—perhaps with the exception of Steve Baines—appears to detect it. The bottom line for Connelly—hardly surprising, given his past as a Republican Party operative—is to harvest votes. More precisely, his goal is to get the pastors present to harvest the votes. The Faith Wins website encourages event attendees to help lead voter registration in their churches with the help of a “Pastors Tool Kit,” become poll watchers, and assist “with Voter Integrity Efforts” and other actions. “Every Christian in every church in America needs to be registered to vote—and then needs to SHOW UP and vote Biblical values on Election day,”(Folks, you know what this reminds me of? The story of when Jesus threw out the money people in front of the temple, to me, meant that a church was the sacred place to worship our God and NOT to deal with earthly things, like elections... (all highlights, italics, responses are mine...)
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Finally, here are the groups of characters in the plan to destroy Democracy in America:
I have divided the principal actors of the antidemocratic reaction into five main categories: the Funders, the Thinkers, the Sergeants, the Infantry, and the Power Players. It is the interactions and tensions among these groups, I have come to think, that are key to understanding the origins and evolutions of the American crisis.
Think about where you think you fit in this list and we'll start discussing Part 2 next time!
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