Today's GOP is Captured by its own Propaganda
America cannot compromise its way to unity. We need to understand the adversarial, Messianic GOP for what it is and hold fast to our own humanity to save the American experiment.
As we are learning in Ukraine- intelligence provides great advantage. Understanding the enemy, President Biden outed Putin’s false flag efforts, exposed his illegal and unprovoked barbarity, and gave Ukraine time and arms to prepare for the fight.
Domestically, we have failed to understand the threat.
For weeks on my WCPT 820 AM show and in news stories across the country people have been talking about the right-wing assault on democracy. The state-by-state effort to suppress voting, to create mechanisms for election nullification, and to draw districts so outrageously gerrymandered that no matter the vote, the results are pre-determined.
I don’t think the right hates democracy. I think they are trapped.
Decades ago, the right created a permanent negative branding campaign. They used their fit-for-purpose propaganda channel- FOX NEWS and they launched the Christian coalition to organize through churches. They created a message targeting white voters that goes something like this:
Be afraid! Democrats want you to feel guilty about being white, they want to recruit your children to be gay, they murder babies, they will take your earnings and give them to the underserving, oh and they hate business.
This is the dishonest father of the Big Lie.
You see, they were so successful in painting Democrats with their false branding that the base wants an evangelical nation, with their own beliefs and prejudices enacted into law and enforced by special police trained for that purpose. They do not have the numbers to win a fair election. But orthodoxy must prevail. So the democracy must fall.
Wrecking the democracy is now the only a means to a long-sought end.
Look at what they have done in state after state:
Enacted laws to review and ban books from libraries and schools.
Passed the “don’t say gay law”
Made it a crime to talk to doctor about gender affirming health care for trans youth
Banned trans girls from sports.
Censored teachers to keep them from teaching history or discussing social issues.
Extended government censorship to the private sector- now restricting how private companies discuss diversity and inclusion.
These things are being imposed upon citizens in the name of freedom of religion. But, of course, this is the opposite- an imposition of a narrow orthodoxy on us all. It is intolerance enacted into law. And like the inquisition of old, they have passed laws to intimidate those who dare object:
Removed any oversight and licensing requirements when it comes to concealed carry of firearms
Immunized drivers who run down protesters with their vehicles
Created an election police force- which is like Wisconsin’s subversive Gableman Commission, only now with preemptive powers and side arms.
Florida is the biggest offender. But Tennessee, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana have enacted many of these laws. And, as I have previously covered on this show, we should expect no protection from a now illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court.
The impact of these laws is already very real:
In Harris County Texas, that’s Democratic Houston- the impact of the voter suppression laws they passed turn out to be just what we said they would be- nearly 30 percent of Absentee ballots were rejected. That means their votes were not counted. The historical average is about 1.5%.
They have, in fact banned books. Gone Girl, for example, is now, well, Gone. In some schools, so is Harry Potter.
In Florida J
ack Petocz, a high school student from Flagler Palm Coast High School, was suspended for organizing a rally against the state’s Don’t Say Gay bill and distributing LGBTQ pride flags.
In Idaho Boise State University suspended teaching 52 sections of a required ethics and diversity course to 1,300 students because it received a complaint from a person outside the university.
I could go on….
We should have seen this coming and done more to prepare. But as I said, we did not know our adversaries. Maybe that’s because Democrats are not often found in the small set of radical political evangelical churches that spawned this evil. And to be clear: this is not the view of most religious Americans, nor even of most evangelicals. On the campus of Bob Jones University, students protested the political radicalization of their church during the last election.
My son is taking a college course that required him to read some of the evangelical critiques of the Harry Potter books. I took the time to read them too. Digging into these essays is a deep dive into obscure and radical interpretations of Thesalonians 2, the Rapture, and the coming of the lawless man. It is not mainstream theology, it is pent up agony, the ache of unfulfilled prophesy that now 22 years after the millennium the second coming has yet to be.
We need to understand that Americans, our fellow citizens, are the victims of an historically unprecedented propaganda campaign where special interest money was used to politicize houses of worship and to push an intolerant, frightened, angry, ignorant, dogma. It benefits the wealthy and powerful because enraging the base lets them tie their anti-tax and anti-regulatory agenda, to a new social orthodoxy.
Now they aim to enforce that orthodoxy by any means possible.
I worked for years in Saudi Arabia. I saw the Mutawa at work. The Mutawa is the force for the preservation of virtue and the prevention of vice- otherwise known as the religious police. For years this cadre enforced the separation of the sexes, the rules about headscarves and abayas. They policed curriculum and they counted attendance at prayers.
Now, the Saudis have disbanded the Mutawa in favor of modernity. And American States are criminalizing reading.
I listened to Steve Banon. His video is filled with religious iconography as he tears America down. It is millennial madness that has festered for two decades. Surely the Messiah will come soon. You can hear his palpable hunger for the Rapture. But first, the true believers must purify the landscape. The only deference to modernity is that Instead of burning us sinners at the stake he will make our conversations illegal, our individuality a crime, our love for one another an apostasy punishable by time in prison.
Fydor Dostoyevsky described it best in The Brothers Karamazov… when the messiah returns the faithful who waited for moment will be too busy worshiping idols and loathing their neighbors to notice.
What Mr. Banon and monsters like him fail to see is that God cannot be found in burned books or in hating your neighbor.
So now, like the Ukrainians, we understand our adversary. But we come late to the fight. They have been organizing for decades.
What’s at stake and how do we win?
This week, two amazing men answered those questions. Barak Obama and YoYo Ma were honored at centennial celebration dinner for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The former President has always been a man who sees over the horizon. Not entirely without worry, he cautioned us all that in an ever more tightly interconnected world, humanity’s future hangs in the balance of the American experiment. After reflecting on our diversity, he said that in every country, allied or adversarial, people notice how our democratic experiment is going. He told us that when it is going less well, the world is a darker place. Conversely, people are lifted when we are doing better.
The American experiment, he seemed to be saying, was the world’s experiment, and the question being studied was nothing less than can different people come together to build a just society. Can folks with different histories, backgrounds, racial identities, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, family structures, personal stories, share their common humanity with sufficient respect and appreciation to lift each other up?
If the former President told us how important our work is, YoYo Ma taught us how to get it done. He spoke of the courage of empathy and the power of listening. As he described it, empathy was tool of transcendent creation. The more we attend to individual voices, the more we are connected at our core. His solution is not an elite one, it requires all our voices to be heard. Then he picked up his cello and proved it by playing he Ukrainian national anthem followed by American hymns.
They are right, not just for ourselves, but for humanity everywhere we Americans need to come together. We do that by hearing each other. But we must also understand the courage that will be required…
We cannot make America whole by appeasing the intolerant. We cannot heal by offering a compromise that makes us a little more racist, a little more intolerant, a little more angry.
We heal only by courageously holding to our deepest humanity. And, secure in this, inviting the lost souls back into our common destiny.