31 Comments

So let me get this straight: caring about people and trying to do right by them makes one an authoritarian? Tyrannical? My head is spinning worse than the girl's head in The Exorcist. I had no idea what I've missed out on by not watching Fox "news", but I will continue to miss out because I can't deal with their constant jackhammer style of presentation. That gets me stirred up, but in very unpleasant ways.

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Turn your anger into action!

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Reminding us of these essays from a couple of years ago is good strategy. It allows everyone to see how prescient you were. I hope more readers will sign up for paid subscriptions and support this work.

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The right-wing media bubble is still pushing the same narratives as they were 3-4 years ago. The disturbing thing is that their audience is still lapping it up.

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They do seem to have an endless thirst for jackassery.

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And hold a lot of dumbassery too.

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The acceptance of this nonsense by tens of millions of Americans points to the deep alienation that these people must feel towards the government, and to their ignorance. Supporting politicians that will do nothing for them. I remember during the tea party era seeing a poster held up at a tea party rally that said “ keep the government out of my Medicare” !!

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Attacking the basic social safety net as Marxist/socialist, yet never addressing corporate subsidies nor complete industry bailouts, our tax dollars going to private energy, big oil, big pharma, and big insurance; nor bailing out the banking and finance industry is a double standard. Notice the language and which descriptors are utilized. Money and programs to help the individual is labeled “welfare” while money and programs to help industry is labeled a “subsidy” or “ bail out”.

It seems to me unAmerican to judge and demean a fellow citizen down on their luck. That our “Christian” right wingers fall for the “welfare queen” tactic time and time again is more than upsetting. The right thing to do is to provide a pathway out of poverty and into human flourishing that is the American Dream. That takes investment in education, job training and/or retraining and so much more. Government has a big role to play in democratic society and “every reform is not Communism”- President Kennedy

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Perfectly stated....

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Well said!

Once capitalism had morphed from an economic system into a potical system, the game was over. The capitalist class had overwhelmed the political class. Any politician going against the capitalist class will be stifled.

The ultimate in business power is a fascist cartel. This is what our GOP is pushing.

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Biden as an authoritarian is the ultimate "I know you are but what am I?" childishness. I encounter replies citing Biden's tyranny often when I post comments to Wall Street Journal articles. But here is the most encouraging thing I've heard in a long time: Chris Quinn, the editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote an editorial that is the most sane, most real, most true thing I've read perhaps ever in a newspaper: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/03/our-trump-reporting-upsets-some-readers-but-there-arent-two-sides-to-facts-letter-from-the-editor.html. I hope that this can be shared far and wide. Thank you for all you do. Thank you for amplifying truth in this dark night of lies that surround us all.

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It is childish because they are children in adult bodies, still incapable of understanding the world around them.

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You know, on second thought, probably children are smarter than the adults who walk around literally brainwashed, marching to the drumbeat of an "overlord" (conservatives also like to talk about liberals bowing to their overlords) ...

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I just read the referenced Cleveland Plain Dealer letter. Great read!

It brought to mind an interesting dilemma. Trump supporters get all their news from right-wing media, and then turn to the Mainstream and question why they're treated so poorly.

UPDATE:

Digby also quoted the letter and offers her further thoughts:

https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/31/bravo/

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I love the comment this: "This is the only truthful, authentic, factual way to see the situation we’re confronting with Donald Trump and the Republicans having become unmoored from reality." When I read Quinn's letter the first time an incredible sense of peace came over me -- just that someone, an editor of a respected media outlet, was able to articulate what has seemed so obvious. Why has no one yet said this and said it so clearly?

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The fantasy of fascist movements can, in most cases be attributed to the sociopathic/psychopathic mind of the leader and the tendancy of followers to have some aspect of the Dark Tetrad personality (sadism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism).

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Excellent point regarding Trump and his backers regarding their mindsets - Dark Tetrad. His followers may well have these mindsets or have been raised in families where these mindsets predominated the family atmosphere. So a child’s security lay in complying with the Dark personality to avoid punishment or being thrown to the streets - literally. Many people I have dealt with in recent years tell horror stories of growing up. They all have some similar relative who impacted their lives. They also admire Trump “attitude” - HOWEVER - what the Republican Party doesn’t understand is that these same people will turn on them because just like that dark parent figure - withhold food (SNAP), housing, money (social security etc. and that element will move to the authority figure that is offering food, shelter and hope. It’s why the Unions are winning again. The GOP doesn’t offer anything but lies and cruelty. There isn’t anything about what they are presenting that matches what Jesus Christ actually said. Not all the Republican masses can see “The Truth”, but start hammering on what The New Testament actually says and some of those white Evangelicals will (and already are) starting to listen. Trump and the current Republican Party are antithetical to everything that Jesus taught. This truly is a fight between Dark personalities and The Light. Also, anyone who believes in The Bible knows how it ends already - what does God do to liars?

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In 2006 Chris Hedges wrote the book, "American Fascists". It was a deep dive into the Dominionist Christian movement and their war on America. It showed the morphing of traditional Christian thought into a new radicalized Christianity he called Christo-fascism. These people made an easy transition into political fascism and tRump. Hedges was clearly disturbed by this transition, as he is a Harvard Seminary graduate.

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I looked at it. I have been horrified by what I have been hearing has been done to “The Church”. The book “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism” by Tim Alberta was written about the church I used to attend on occasion. Tim’s father was an excellent minister. To hear about the discord that has been sowed through the churches is an attack on Christianity itself.

Everything these Republicans and those Christian Nationalist as a whole is so antithetical to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ that it brings up “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of Heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those who are trying to.”

Matthew 23:13

I had a Near Death Experience when I had cancer in 2008. Millions of people have since Covid. Heaven isn’t what the Christian Nationalists are saying. It’s all about love. There’s even scriptural reference for NDE’s, John 10:9.

They are wrong and they are going to lose.

Joe Biden seems to have taken the warning to heart with his actions. He is helping the vulnerable.

Feed my lambs

Tend my sheep

Feed my sheep

Those were the instructions of Jesus to Peter.

The Republicans want to cut food stamps and go after the homeless.

“Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but The Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” Matthew 8:20

Jesus was homeless.

Trump has put out his version of The Bible??? He let an author called him Donald John Trump: The Second Coming of Christ

Really ??

Ask someone who came back to life and was allowed to see the other side.

No - the Republicans are following a false prophet just as Jesus Christ said would happen.

Christian Nationalism - the forced mix of church and state in violation to the Constitution is 2Peter2.

God HATES liars.

Look at who the Republicans are following and what they are doing.

I am a Lazarus as in Lazarus and the rich man.

Because with God all things are possible.

How is the weather in Texas?

How about Florida?

Who controls the weather?

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I just finished viewing the documentary God and Country - all about Christian Nationalism which I highly recommend (it's on Amazon Prime). In the film they mention the role that Christian nationalists in Weimar Germany played as the heaviest backers of Hitler and the backbone of the electorate that voted him into power. I had never heard this history before but in watching God and Country and reading up more on Christian Nationalism in our country I can see how powerful this movement has been in indoctrinating and politicizing working class voters on steroids who are so resentful of liberal "elites" and who feel that their country has been taken from them. The narrative of Christian nationalism tells them that their country will be destroyed if they don't take it over. It's an us vs them of biblical proportions and so well supported by the massive organizational infrastructure funded by billionaire ultra free market extremists as well as their hard earned grass roots contributions. How do these mega churches which seem less focused on religion and more on indoctrination of MAGA extremism get away with having a non profit status? How is that possible? They are focused on getting all their members out to vote passing out voters guides of MAGA candidates up and down the ballot. This seems so illegal to me and I dont understand why there aren't multiple lawsuits fighting to take away their non profit status.

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The German Christian Church was very pro-Nazi in Hitler's rise. The connection between Dominionist Christianity in this country and fascism is spelled out in Hedges book, "American Fascists". Hedges calls them Christo-fascists.

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Phony people are good at making phony talking points!

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“Designed to take polarization to the next level.” Ominous and true.

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Mar 31·edited Mar 31

President Biden as an authoritarian? Really now, how much more absurd can these Trumpists get?

For any members of the Lucid community who have not yet seen it, this reader would recommend an article by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik that first appeared online March 18 and in the print edition dated March 25. Titled "The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers/The Nazi leader didn't seize power; he was given it.", the article is a thorough – and thoroughly frightening – review of historian Timothy W. Ryback's new book, "Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power," which Mr. Gopnik describes as "an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932." (Which for us could be 2024.)

Here's a passage worth sharing:

"Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power."

Referring to Germany's demagogue, Mr. Gopnik writes, "The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left ... thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader." (Sound familiar?)

Mr. Gopnik concludes his essay by saying, "Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do."

It's now 219 days before an election that may be fatal to our own democracy. And we've been warned.

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"Unlike Democrats, Republicans have a formidable media machine that dispenses disinformation such as this to hundreds of millions every day. "

I will say it again: the failure of the executive and legislative branches controlled by Democrats at all levels of government to take any meaningful action to suppress demonstrable lies and punish the sources has made our liberal constitutional democracy extremely vulnerable to takeover by Trump and his gang of authoritarians.

Democrats and those who want to protect our form of government have made little or no progress in changing MAGA minds by shouting down or yelling over the Republican propaganda machine. That marketplace of ideas? It's now the abandoned mall that blights its surroundings. Those incisive newsletter opinion pieces that never-Trumpers regard as game-changers? At best they're speaking to the Democratic choir.

But shouldn't we be worried about the slippery slope? Well, our jurisprudence has found ways hold wrongdoers responsible for the consequences of their lies for centuries without creating an totalitarian censorship state. The law provides remedies when, among other things, falsehoods harm the reputations of people and products; when one party to a transaction relies to their detriment on the other party's misrepresentations; and when a wrongdoer's pattern and practice of providing false information has yielded him ill-gotten gains. A party seeking relief in a defamation case must prove that the offending statement was indeed false. That's what protects us from the much-feared slippery slope.

In the political arena today Trump and his enablers are burying the truth under a never-ending avalanche of demonstrable, patent lies because we have failed to protect the integrity and accuracy of political speech as zealously as we protect people's reputations and business transactions from falsehoods. If there ever was a time when it was appropriate to extend charity to political fibs in the form of First Amendment protection, those days are long gone. The Ivy-League educated free-speech Brahmins who continue to counsel restraint in the face of total information warfare must surely know that.

This oversight isn't just negligent. It is reckless and extremely dangerous. Our democracy is facing an aggressive adversary in Trump. He is actively taking advantage of our inexplicable unwillingness to hold him and his allies accountable for polluting our political discourse with lies. He is enjoying tremendous success.

The time to try to stop him is now.

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The danger of not countering fascism in its infancy is that the audience of its rhetoric is conservative; and with this mindset comes the social psychological aspect of the Backfire Eeffect. Once the conservative mind has formed a so called truth, it becomes nearly impossible to reverse that thought, even with corrective information.

Having spoken with many that have embraced tRump, I see them living a politcal fantasy. This is what fascism sells to the gullible.

Some of us on the left saw tRump's sociopathy early on and saw his proto-fascism. The news media on the left was caught totally flat footed on this. Dr Bandy Lee tried to warn everyone about tRump's mental state and was punished for it. Ruth, Jason Stanley and others tried to warn about the rise of fascism. So now we're stuck with a movement that views democracy as a threat, while accepting fascism.

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Very well put. Thank you!

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I don’t think I’ve predicted anything in my own life so accurately :-)

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Ruth, thank you for your Zoom presentation this evening… I found it very informative and enlightening. One fact that I really zeroed in on was your statement that even though Orban portrays himself as the protector of white Christendom he in fact closed 300 churches… And Orban gives advice to CPAC and the GQP…scary events to say the least.

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Every time I see Kayleigh McEnany I want to vomit.

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This is really spot on as is all of the essays that Ruth writes. Truly a remarkable woman.

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