And everyone here hates everyone here for doin’ just like they do
And it’s best that we all keep it quiet instead
-Matchbox 20, “Back To Good”
“New Rule: …if you believe that the world is going to end, then you don’t get to vote on next year’s budget, BECAUSE IT DOESN’T CONCERN YOU.”
-Bill Maher, Oct. 11, 2013
The early mail-in ballots for Nevada elections came in this week. And if Republicans take over at least one house of Congress, as seems likely, they’re going to do that much more to wreck this lousy economy than they already have, in order to blame a Demonrat Party that is still nominally in charge as long as Biden and Harris are still in the White House. And if they win certain state governments, they will have charge of who certifies elections. And that will make it that much more likely that they will be able to reinstall their boss, Donald Trump, meaning, Vladimir Putin, in order to turn the United States back into Russian North America, and make it that much harder for Ukraine, and thus Europe, to resist Putin’s expansion.
I was trying to find this article I read in Politico or some place, where somebody mentioned the experience of trying to talk to their Trumpnik relative and being told “I don’t care” about all the stuff one could say for the Democrats or against Trump.
Trumpniks, what you all haven’t figured out is that I don’t care if you don’t care. If nothing will persuade you, I’m not going to try. I’ve written you off.
Don’t try to tell me I don’t know where you’re coming from. I mean, I AM you. I am a cis het white guy. I actually do ask myself, “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?” I have no idea why everybody became transgender and vegan all of a sudden. And while I wasn’t old enough to vote for Reagan, I was old enough to remember when the Republicans really seemed to know what was going on and how to run the country, while Democrats were completely clueless. And I’ve said, in my posts about the Trump Organization, that as long as Trump superficially held to the fiscal conservative policies of earlier Republicans, the economy was good, at least for certain people, and I can certainly understand how those people could support Trump as long as their ox wasn’t gored.
But then coronavirus happened, and Trump and his Republican governors wanted to pretend it didn’t happen. And as a result almost a quarter million Americans died by the time Trump lost his election (News Flash: Trump lost the 2020 election) and over a million have died in total. But don’t worry, it will all work out well, thanks to President Xi.
Needless to say, quite a few Republicans got more than their ox gored, including Herman Cain. Not only that, the low-wage, low-demand economy that the conservative business class had been leaning on was at least temporarily wrecked because the virus threatened those service industries whose employees couldn’t just sign in at a workstation from home. You want to know why all those jobs now have to pay more than (oh no) ten dollars an hour, that’s why. Because the Law of Supply and Demand actually works for labor, too.
If you want to know why I, as a member of my demographic, became a race traitor and commit daily blasphemy against Our Lord and Savior, it’s for more reasons than I can really count, but what’s relevant here is however bad you think the economy is now, we aren’t nearly at the point of catastrophe that we were under Trump and his Party of enablers.
Under Trump, Republicans lost the House, then the White House, and eventually the Senate. And a lot of them lost their lives. And the economy, the main thing people give Republicans credit on, was lost too, and there is little objective reason to believe they will do a better job if we let them back in charge. There is in fact every reason to think that in the short term they will make it worse. And whatever you think you’re getting from Trump, you’re really not getting it, unless what you want to get from him is more rage and hatred and justification for those emotions, because those are the only things he really delivers on. In which case, that is the only thing that justifies your loyalty.
Because you are that much more loyal to Trump, who has lost you everything, than you were to prior Republicans under whom you had a good economy and renewed national standing.
Like I said, if the Republican Party was still more benefit than drawback I could understand your rationalization. But this is not the Party of Reagan. This is not like Chik-fil-A, where liberals can go, “Yes, the company is run by a family of homophobic fundamentalists, but I REALLY LOVE THE SANDWICHES!” Your boy is serving chicken vomit sandwiches and shit nuggets, but you’re still lining up around the block.
The other huge reason I oppose the Church of Trump is because I’ve seen this happen before. Bill Clinton, already known to be a pathological liar, ended up committing perjury over Monica Lewinsky. (Liberals would say Ken Starr set up a ‘perjury trap’, I think Bill was just that much more scared of Hillary than everybody else.) So he ended up getting impeached. And the liberal Democrats all went “it’s nothing”, “it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment”, “it’s a political attempt to thwart the will of the voters”… y’know, all the stuff that the Church is saying to defend their Lord and Savior from crucifixion. Where do you think they learned it? The difference being that Clinton’s perjury, while still perjury, was perjury over an affair, whereas Trump committed obstruction over an attempt to strongarm a head of state who was himself pressured by another head of state (Putin) in order to get dirt on his potential election opponent Joe Biden. The other difference being that however much I hate them, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were somewhat competent.
So if I hated the Clintons that much, and you want to act like the Clinton Party on steroids, you better believe I’m going to be hating you like I hated them, on steroids.
And when I say I hate you, I don’t mean Trump, I mean you. If you weren’t defending him, Trump would be just another bum at the gas station hollering conspiracy theories at strangers while begging them for change. At least he would have an excuse for that haircut.
The only reason that we haven’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because the contingent claiming to represent “real America” says he’s their hero. Not Reagan. Not Goldwater. Not even Ted Cruz. Trump.
I’m sure you know that line in social media that Trump has repeated himself: “They’re not after me. They’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” By the same token, YOU wouldn’t be the issue if you weren’t supporting someone who is so uniquely malignant, and by treating him seriously, giving him power completely out of scale to his merit. Kamala Harris is not going to send the Food Police after you to make sure all your food is vegan and gluten-free. The government does not have the absolute power that you want it to have under Republicans and fear under Democrats, otherwise both Trump and Biden would be able to get away with a lot more than they have. If anyone is after YOU, it is because you’re the only thing keeping this colon cancer of a politician viable. He’s not “in the way”, YOU are. That’s how he likes it, because that is what sniveling cowards do: Shove their flunkies in the way so they take the hits instead.
Look, nobody HAS to do anything. In life, the only thing one HAS to do is die. You don’t serve Trump because you have to, you do it because you WANT to. Because he’s what you wish you could be but can’t. After all, you’re Good Christians. (TM)
And that seems to be what it comes down to. Because no way can you justify this anti-sense unless you believe that the world of cause and effect is secondary to a world that we can’t prove but we’re supposed to take on faith.
For example, the Georgia US Senate election, which pits Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, an actual black Christian minister, against Herschel Walker, whom the Republicans nominated mainly because he is black. And an acolyte of Trump. And being an acolyte of Trump, it is probably not a surprise that at a critical moment in the campaign, Walker got accused of paying for a girlfriend’s abortion even as he now opposes abortion in most or all circumstances. And yet the Church embraces him that much more strongly as if his martyr status made him that much more a Christian than the incumbent Senator who is an actual Reverend.
It’s of a piece with their attitude towards the Clintons and Hunter Biden, whom they abominate even as their Leader does all the nasty shit they did and worse. If you’re going to ban abortion, yet your lawmakers have abortions, and you’re going to demand consequences for corruption, yet the people demanding prosecution are even more corrupt than the people they’re accusing, clearly you’re not focused on the sin, but the sinner. You don’t care that the people you’re replacing are even more evil than the ones they replace. You just want your team in charge.
I had seen some talking head recently say that Walker’s position on abortion might actually help him with some voters, because a large plurality of Republicans are actually pro-choice personally. They see this as much the same thing as their own position, endorsing a “pro-life” stand in public while doing what you want in private.
But then anybody with enough fame, money and influence has always been able to get past the law. Trump certainly teaches that, and so do people like Herschel Walker. And if a Republican politician is a hypocrite on moral issues, that is hardly a shock anymore. It may actually be a membership requirement. What is relevant is the practical consequence of electing such people. Herschel Walker is expecting, as a man and as a Christian, to be forgiven for something that was not illegal at the time he did it, but he is asking voters to elect him to a position where he will support laws that will criminalize women for doing the same thing he did, and in that scheme Christian forgiveness will be irrelevant. The fact that he doesn’t believe in saving poor, innocent unborn life any more than Trump does is irrelevant, because those women do not have the fame, money and influence that he does to get away with what he did. In any case the cult is sending a message to the entire rest of the country who are not in the Church of Trump: “Rules are written to control you other people. Rules never apply to US.”
There is no better word for that position than injustice.
I’ve often talked about Rod Dreher, the columnist and author who is nominally a Christian apologist but often seems more motivated to deliver apologia for this “post-liberal” “traditional conservative” mindset. He is probably most famous for writing a book called The Benedict Option, inspired by Benedict of Nursia, the monk who first developed the Benedictine Rule. Dreher’s thesis was that the world of secularism is now sufficiently omnipresent that the Christian community will not be able to prevail in what liberalism calls the marketplace of ideas, so the solution, at least until the worldly culture burns itself out, is not to compete with it but to withdraw and find or create committed spiritual communities. Historically, Benedict was born just after the end of the Roman Empire in the West; by that time Western Europe had been Christian for at least a century but the temporal authority behind the Church was gone.
But then Benedict was experiencing the end of a world, not necessarily THE world. Christians have gone through “the end of the world” several times, and yet, it never actually ends. And believe it or not, Christianity hasn’t ended either. It changes like the rest of the culture, but there have been two main apostolic church organizations since at least the Middle Ages, there have been numerous Protestant churches since the Middle Ages, and yet Catholicism and Orthodoxy still exist.
In the Wikipedia entry on The Benedict Option, the book’s title is an allusion to a quote by philosopher Alasdair McIntyre: “If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” But McIntyre later spoke out regarding the book saying that Dreher had misinterpreted his meaning as advocacy for traditional conservatism while his own “virtue ethics” are neither liberal nor conservative. “This is not a withdrawal from society into isolation of a certain sort; this is actually the creation of a new set of social institutions that then proceed to evolve…So, when I said we need a new St. Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.” In practice, Dreher would seem to agree, as more recently he had been given a paid fellowship in Hungary by the government of strongman Viktor Orban. “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” Dreher told The New Yorker‘s Andrew Marantz in 2022. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.” And while professing to be appalled by Trump, he was so much more appalled by the Left’s response to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that he sided with Kavanaugh: “I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.” (Because, as the experience of Trump should educate us, it doesn’t matter what calendar age a man is if he continues to act like a 17 year old lout.)
If Dreher were serious about his thesis, he wouldn’t have counseled a Benedict Option, he would have counseled a John of the Apocalypse option. John, of course, was the mysterious writer of the Book of Revelations who is also thought to be the author of the fourth Gospel. Revelations, cutting out all the mystical allegory, is really about the message that we don’t know when the Day of Judgment will be and we have to act as though it’s today, because some day, it will be.
The cult doesn’t believe in the Kingdom of God. They believe in what Christ called “the world.”
And why shouldn’t they? In Matthew 6, Christ also says ““Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. “
Have you ever tried to get your daily bread by just praying for it and hoping God would provide? I do NOT recommend it.
All the real accomplishments of Christianity – the Byzantine Empire, the monasteries and universities, the Puritan settlements, global evangelism – were because Christians rolled up their sleeves and did the hard work to make things happen in this world before they could focus on the next one.
But then I follow another book of Scripture: Atlas Shrugged. And in the later acts of that novel, Ayn Rand has John Galt use his weird science to commandeer the national airwaves to give a marathon speech explaining Objectivist philosophy, and at one point he tells the audience:
“Do not remind me that (my position) pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you. “
I mean, if your religion tells you to focus on the world to come, why are you so obsessed with controlling this one? If the afterlife is better, why do you cling to this one so desperately? Because, frankly, y’all don’t believe in this stuff any more than I do. You can’t be surprised that I, and increasing numbers of other Americans, don’t believe in religion when clearly you don’t.
Religion might teach some positive virtues, like forgiveness, charity, and dis-attachment from a temporal universe that we are going to leave quickly enough anyway, but taking it literally is potentially deadly. And I am starting to think that anybody who still has a working brain but does take religion literally is just trying to sell something to people more gullible than they are.
As I’ve said, the irony of the Electoral College in practice is that it was intended to act as a screening mechanism against an angry mob being gulled by a demagogue and “creature of foreign powers”, yet the only reason that result actually occurred is because we had certain states swing the EC for Trump. And of course the priests of Trump in the US Congress who wailed that impeaching him would be “thwarting the will of the people” had to eat their words when Trump lost even with the Electoral College, and to defy it, he resorted to a gullible angry mob.
This is why the Church is so (ahem) hellbent about controlling those state governments and election systems, in order to control the Electoral College, and why they are so fanatic about the shahada that “Trump didn’t lose, and Biden isn’t the real President.” This despite the fact that most of them are willing to say their OWN elections were perfectly lawful, because the Electoral College had nothing to do with them. And if they still lose an election, all they have to do is say they won! “I’ll accept the results, cause I’m gonna win.” “What if you lose?” “I’M GONNA WIN!!!” Well, that’s a great way to solve all your problems. I mean, I’m a Las Vegas Raiders fan, that would make things so much easier! We’re going to the Super Bowl!!! What do you mean we’re not 15-1? What do you mean Tom Brady is still the winning quarterback! Fake news! I roll to disbelieve! Save versus illusion!!
It’s amazing how much stuff in life we do not assume we can resolve with fantasy and wishes, yet something trivial like who’s going to run the country is a case of “you create your own reality.” This despite the fact that politics is the exact opposite of living in your own subjective world. This is why we need laws. But laws are what the Church of Trump want to destroy.
The problem with throwing out the rule of law is that you have to resort to having the biggest gang, and the whole reason Trumpniks are so existentially afraid is the fact that they are not the biggest gang. Even when their Messiah was in the White House, he had done so much to alienate the military brass that they were starting to pull back from being involved in his various political stunts.
Which means that while the cult doesn’t want the rule of law, it really doesn’t want rule by brute force either, cause they ultimately don’t have it. What do they want, then? What they really want is a “civilized” population that can be bullied and cowed into doing what they say, because then you have all the advantages of arbitrary brute force without the danger of confronting a larger enemy.
I again refer to the great quote by Robert E. Howard: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
The villain is actually better protected under the rule of law than under chaos, because he has a right to an unpopular opinion. If you want to throw out the rule of law and rule by the Law of the Jungle, you better be able to back it up.
Again, the Ukraine situation is a good analogy here. Czar Vladimir I clearly does not believe that Ukraine deserves to exist as an independent nation and probably doesn’t think Ukrainians deserve to exist as a people. And he was proving it by biting off little bits of the country, one by one. And because Russia was (perceived as being) such a large and powerful country, Ukraine, and the West, had no choice but to accede. But then for whatever reason escapes me, Vlad decided that wasn’t enough, and decided to “de-Nazify” Ukraine by sending his army to conquer the nation so his secret police could liquidate the Jewish head of state. And at that point, Ukraine started fighting back because Putin was clearly aiming to destroy Ukraine as a country. And when they did, the big, bad Russian military was revealed as being not up to snuff. And the result of that is that Putin Russia has become the junior partner to China in the We Hate America coalition, and even Russia’s satraps in far-off places like Azerbaijan are losing stability, because their patron is no longer able to back them up.
And again: All it took was fighting back. But when did Ukraine start fighting back? When it became clear that any further concessions would only be annihilation. When there was nothing to save by NOT fighting back.
While you pay your worship to Donald Trump, your true spiritual model is Vladimir Putin. And like Putin, you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, but it was Putin who ended up getting backed into a corner. Now the civilized world is trying to find some way to return to peace and normalcy while at the same time knowing that Putin has given up on being a civilized human being who can be trusted to co-exist with others.
The same situation is going to happen with you people in America, because you will not peacefully co-exist with others, and while the political system will help you win elections, it will not give you a mandate, much less a majority. And as with Ukraine, we can only hope the denouement does not involve nukes.
And it’s over now
And I don’t know how
Guess it’s over now
There’s no gettin’ back to good