Elon Musk, a quirky humanoid glitchbot who does his best to appear human, recently corrected his AI creation Grok to stay away from the woke virus of political correctness. Ooops, over-correction (or maybe not).
Fucking Nazi glitchbots, the future of Artificial Idiocy, modeled on the moral obtuseness of their glitchy creators.
Hannah Arendt pointed out that Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann’s inability to speak, except for cliches, revealed his inability to think. Language is an indispensable tool for discussing and understanding the world around us. Fascists deliberately distort and oversimplify language. This destruction of language is an essential part of destroying the ability to think critically. Critical thinking, like Critical Race Theory, is a deadly threat to would-be tyrants. Here’s a small, insignificant example of the blurring of language in the service of a point of view.
A MAGA podcaster interviewed Kash Patel, just before he became FBI director, Kashyap wearing a grey T-shirt with K $ H in large letterboxed letters, over the words “Fight with Kash”.
Interviewer: “You say the FBI has Epstein’s list. They’re sitting on it. That doesn’t seem like something you should do. You’re protecting the world’s foremost predator. That seems like an evil thing, regardless of who may be embarrassed in the release of that list. Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast, in human history?”
Kashyap Pramod Patel: “Simple. Because of who’s on that list.”
I was surprised to learn that Kashyap wasn’t always a revenge-fueled man of infinite ambition. In fact, back in the day, the upper caste Indian Hindu, son of an immigrant from Uganda whose family tree is traceable back 18 generations in Gujarat, was kind of woke. Wikipedia informs us: Patel attended Garden City High School and his senior-year quote was “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason”, by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Make of that what you will. Patel has obviously evolved a long way from his quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend Abraham Heschel days.
To set the record straight on language, though. Words have specific meanings and uses. Losing nuance is a step toward incoherence, especially dangerous in an age where a solid 40% consider passionate incoherence superior to a reasoned factual argument, for purposes of moving masses of confused people to concerted action. This solid incoherence embracing 40% owns most of the guns in America.
The words pedophile and pederast are not interchangeable, though both describe adult men who sexually prey on often unwilling underaged victims. These fuckers have very specific tastes. Epstein and his guests were powerful, lust-crazed monsters who did terrible, lifelong damage to many vulnerable, groomed, underaged young women and girls, but I’ve never heard it alleged, except by a MAGA podcaster, that serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein was a pederast.
Not that it makes much difference to the abused boy or girl. If you’re raped as a child, do the sexual predilections of your rapist really matter?
Words and nuance do matter, though, especially in this incoherent age of MAGA and its worldwide analogues. Incoherent, fervently believed rationales for doing things generally lead to bad endings for everybody involved.
More on FBI director Kashyap Pramod Patel, from his most recent incarnation (from Wikipedia):
In April 2017, Patel began working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Representative Devin Nunes.[5] As an aide to Nunes, Patel investigated the theory that Ukrainians were promulgating information about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[13] The New York Times later reported that he was the primary author of the Nunes memo,[9] which alleged that Federal Bureau of Investigation officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials, seeking a warrant for Carter Page, an advisor to Donald Trump, and relying on claims made by Christopher Steele, a British intelligence officer who was allegedly paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.[14] The memo’s veracity was highly questioned, but it bolstered Patel’s standing among Trump allies.[13] In April 2018, the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, asked whether Patel had traveled to London the previous year to interview Steele; according to the Times, he did not provide a definitive answer.[15]
and
Documents provided to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack and accounts of officials allege that Patel discussed security at the Capitol before and during the January 6 Capitol attack, and that he repeatedly contacted Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on the day of the attack.[40] He was in [Gauleiter Stephen] Miller’s office during the attack.[41]
In April, Trump devised a plan to oust FBI director Christopher A. Wray and to appoint William Evanina to lead the bureau, while Patel would become deputy director. Attorney General William Barr halted the plan, threatening to resign.[42] In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump sought to appoint Patel as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2020. In response, CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign.[43] At the annual Army–Navy Game that month, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confronted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, repeatedly and loudly asking whether Patel was going to replace Wray or Haspel.[44] In the final days of Trump’s presidency, Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of My Pillow, went to the White House; Jabin Botsford, a photographer for The Washington Post, captured a document Lindell was holding that read, “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting”.[45] In April 2022, Patel told an audience that he had advised Trump to fire senior Department of Justice officials.[46]
This is from Steve Bannon’s ad for a movie, based on a book by Kashyap Pramod Patel that contains a partial enemies list, produced by Steve Bannon:
From Steve Bannon and the visionary team behind “Clinton Cash”, this groundbreaking film will leave you on the edge of your seat. “Government Gangsters,” based on the best-selling book by Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, pulls back the curtain on the sinister world of corrupt bureaucrats, government officials, and their media accomplices, as they conspired to bring down a sitting President, Donald J. Trump, and all those who support him. This explosive film uncovers the depths of deceit and manipulation they employ daily, betraying the very system they vowed to protect. “Government Gangsters” is not just a film-it’s a revelation that will forever alter your perception of government. May we never need another film like this.
The Jeffrey Epstein client list, clearly used for political blackmail, that was on Pam Bondi’s desk recently, as she told reporters, turned out not to exist. Poof! No Dershowitz, no Clinton, no Trump, no matter how many times these creatures were guests on Epstein’s plane to his sexual paradise island in the sun (paradise for his clients, that is.) Epstein’s suicide? Not suspicious, AT ALL! Case closed. So saith one of the megaphones of Australian salt water crocodile Rupert Murdoch. And why would he lie, he owns FOX for fuck’s sake? Conspiracies debunked, by Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, bitches!
There is something very sinister, and wildly unlikely, about a widely hated, corrupt, incompetent, often incoherently weaving almost eighty year-old ‘very stable genius’ sweeping every swing state in 2024, swinging 88 crucial districts blue to red, while zero went the other way. This was after lackluster rallies during which he repeatedly told his sparse crowds not to bother voting, that the election was in the bag. What bag? This organization lays it out in grim detail (and still more detail here).
Not included in their detailed analysis is the 20,000,000 “drop” in mail-in voting (first non-increase in mail-in since 2008) supervised by Trump megadonor/postmaster Looey DeJoy. This persuasive YouTube video, posted 3 months ago, has 6,100 views. The organization has posted just this one video.
On the other hand, this video, posted a week ago, funny as it is — well, check it out and look at the numbers.
All I can think of to say about this is “USA! USA!!!”
This is the reason Project 2025, Koch, Heritage, the Federalist Society, et al (really all the same entity), need to turn up the heat on ordinary American citizens, make them hungrier, more insecure and out of work. Publicly, brazenly terrorizing innocent “illegals”, and roughing up opposition elected officials (without consequence) is a great way to increase general fear and outrage. Have masked ICE agents spray a landscaper with mace, tackle and repeatedly punch him once he’s in handcuffs, let his US Marine sons make their pleas on social media — the thirty year resident of the US, a taxpayer, is going to Sudan, Louisiana, Texas or maybe Alligator Auschwitz.
Once you have created and normalized this kind of mass outrage and stirred public panic, rounding up peaceful immigrants and rendering them to war zones in Africa and elsewhere, or Central American torture prisons (CECOT) or outdoor concentration camps (GEO Group and other private prison and detention corporations just got billions in the One Big Nazi Bill to build a network of concentration camps), you’ve lit the fuse for resistance. It is very easy to turn that resistance violent for purposes of Mike “Q Anon” Flynn becoming head of weaponizing martial law.
A gigantic masked secret police force with massive funding, and under the exclusive control of the (OK, admittedly insane) Unitary Executive — the perfect stick with which to stir the shit pot the far-right has been filling for years, lately with high powered firehouses of fecal mendacity.
This is what happens when Nazis take power (not that our American Nazis have done so just yet, but they are lurching toward seizing all power, now with a vast budget for secret police and privately owned concentration camps). Every arm of government and state-allowed media is quickly used to convince citizens that the Nazis have their backs, (the better to prepare those backs for the long knives, these are Nazis, after all). This email arrived at 11:38 pm last night, not long after the glorious “The Act” won by a massive four vote landslide in the House. The subject line was:
This email quotes the encouraging, if not entirely trustworthy, words of the new CEO of Social Security, a man worth a mere $547,000,000. Here’s the skinny on Mr. Bisignano from Wikipedia (Commie Front Group almost as dangerous as NPR and The New York Times!):
Bisignano is consistently rated as one of the highest-paid CEOs in the United States. In 2017, The New York Times reported that his compensation exceeded $100 million.[20] In 2019, his compensation was estimated at $40 million.[21] In December 2022, Bisignano signed a new contract with Fiserv to remain as president and CEO until 2027.[22] In 2023, Bisignano’s total compensation from Fiserv was $27.9 million, up 57% from the previous year and representing a CEO-to-median worker pay ratio of 380-to-1.[23] source
Who better to run Social Security than a man of the people from humble beginnings in Brooklyn? It’s not as though there’s any doubt that a great CEO is needed to oversee this gigantic federal spending program. His credentials are sterling. From the same Wikipedia entry (and please recall the source, these people, many of them atheists and criminals, no doubt, hate America and the 1%, irrationally):
In December 2024, president-elect Donald Trump named Bisignano as his nominee for commissioner of the Social Security Administration.[25] On January 28, 2025, the Senate had received the message of withdrawal of nomination from the President, who later restored the nomination. Bisignano’s cold-hearted reputation towards his employees at Fiserv was raised many times, along with his hire and fire approach, as likely predictors of how he would be as a government leader. [26][27]
The Senate Finance Committee scheduled March 25, 2025, for Bisignano to speak and answer questions about his qualifications to be the commissioner for the Social Security Administration.[28] The Senate voted on May 6, 2025, to confirm Bisignano as commissioner of the Social Security Administration, by a party-line vote of 53-47.[1] and he was officially sworn in on May 7, 2025.[2]
Bisignano had stated, according to an article in the Federal News Network:[29]
[A]fter being tapped by the Trump administration to lead the agency, I don’t think the commissioner of Social Security is like a globally known title. It is to you, right? But, like, it wasn’t to me. I’m like, “Well, what am I gonna do?”. So I’m Googling “Social Security”. That’s one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast…. I’m like, “What the heck’s the commissioner of Social Security?”
Political commentator Steve Benen said that “the fact that the new Social Security commissioner, up until recently, had no idea what the Social Security commissioner’s responsibilities entailed does not inspire confidence”,[30] but “[a]n SSA official said Bisignano was ‘clearly’ making a joke about needing to Google the details and responsibilities of his new role”.[31]
It’s not like Bisignano is another Trump mega-donor receiving a quid pro quo appointment like Looey DeJoy. It was his wife, HIS WIFE!
Bisignano is a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and of Donald Trump in particular. He has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including a $125,000 contribution to Trump Victory in 2019.[32]
His wife, Tracy Bisignano, also made significant contributions to the Trump 47 Committee, Inc. totaling $924,600 in October 2024.[33]
We are all now in a harder fight, with increased political violence to be expected from newly deputized Klansmen and their ilk ($10,000 bonus to sign up for ICE, trade in pointy hood for face mask and get to brutalize those you hate under color of law, yee ha!) who will be part of a vast army of what, prior to Trump’s second term, would have been his Brownshirts, but now they can wear any shirt they want and get paid (with full health insurance) by the taxpayers of non-debtor states, those anarchist jurisdictions like NY, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.
[Example of “irony”] Example of the kind of brazen lies so-called “fact-based” Wikipedia peddles, when will the administration take steps to force youTube to stop amplifying its anti-Trump hate under videos falsely accusing loyal, America-loving Trump supporters of criminal activity?
Hey, yo, Happy Fourth of July, y’all. Or more precisely, Happy Trump Day — the giant, spiteful baby must be very proud of what he’s accomplished to celebrate our nation’s 249th birthday, in less than six months, with nobody’s help except for a cabal of America’s most fascistic billionaires/CEOS, far-right think tanks, extremist judicial fraternity appointees and a cult of true believers who love his shtick, which never gets tired for them. He can shoot a woman he just raped, in the face, on Fifth Avenue and they’d still buy his perfume, sneakers, bibles, NFTs, steaks, gold plated crypto coins, etc. The Supreme Court ruled that Trump can commit any crime he wants, as long as Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, RFK Jr. or Pete Hegseth is nearby (making it an official act, LOL!) USA! USA!!!
Jennifer Rubin used a phrase in a recent Substack piece that really puts the entire Trump political brand into a great frame. “In other words, coherent policy is impossible without an accurate understanding.” Trump reflexively makes coherent policy impossible by erasing the possibility of understanding with constant lies over mass media, threatening, bragging and bringing about the “complete and total obliteration” of fact for a large swath of Americans.
The reason MAGA gets away with doing all these objectively incoherent things (take from the nation’s poor and elderly, while creating American carnage, to give more to Koch, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, $Trump et al) is because they “totally and completely obliterate” any grounds for accurate understanding of the forces involved by indignantly insisting on their right to be incoherent (see, for example, Lisa Murkowski).
Trump claims that the US “totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program with its illegal bombing of three sites after Israel disabled Iran’s air defenses. No discussion of war crimes or Trump’s flagrant violation of the War Powers Act because… complete and total victory! Pam Bondi answers questions, under oath, about her department’s shady, partisan, unethical behavior by bellowing about Biden’s supposedly weaponized DOJ, Benghazi, trans athletes, whatever other Fox talking point comes to mind. I forgot until the other day that she was one of Trump’s lawyers during his second impeachment; it makes perfect sense when you hear her yelling at senators and accusing them of being partisan commie hacks. Incoherence is MAGA’s brand, coherent policy is not a consideration, enforcing their collective will is their only priority.
Incoherence is professional conman Trump’s natural milieu, stoking confusion, lying and attacking, while strutting in a childish display of “strength” as he threatens violence he knows the more unhinged of his cult will eagerly carry out, when the moment is right. His constant dance of rage destroys the possibility of any productive discussion, let alone one based on an accurate understanding of discernible facts — the facts are his deadly enemy, like anyone who honestly reports them.
This is what tyrannical personalities always do. Control the discourse by framing the terms and, in the case of a Hitler or Trump, making the frame as incoherent, chaotic, threatening, distracting, terrifying and enraging as possible. Instead of Trump on the spot, the news cycle focused on the president forced to defend himself to Congress for his blatant violation of the War Powers Act and his war crime bomber attack on Iran, he strikes poses on TV, bragging, threatening and twisting arms to get all media attention on his arbitrary deadline for his Big, Beautiful “let’s make the poor so desperate we can provoke them to violence and have the police state we all want” bill to his Resolute desk so he can claim another big win, another 51-50 mandate.
Tanking the economy for working people and increasing general fear and anxiety are necessary ingredients for the completion of the determined lurch toward American fascism that has been Charles Koch’s well-funded project since at least 1980. Without economic despair in Germany, no Hitler. Without similar conditions here, no American fascism. Turn up the heat enough on poor Americans, let enough of them go hungry, force them to care for elderly, sick parents at home, die of treatable diseases, use enough heavy handed Gestapo-like tactics against innocent immigrants and political opponents, openly weaponize the Department of Justice, and people will eventually begin to freak out. Time to bring in the troops, led by Mr. Insurrection Act, General Mike “Lock Her Up” Flynn.
Trump’s claim after Mueller laid out ten prosecutable instances of obstruction of justice was also “complete and total exoneration.” The overemphasis is always a tell that he’s lying, as Jen Rubin points out, although his mouth moving is another tell. Of course, like obliteration, there’s only one kind of exoneration, it means — beyond being found not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — you were deemed innocent of the charges because evidence ruled out your guilt or the guilty party was found, tried and convicted of the crime you were accused of. That we are in the hands of an insane, perpetually enraged and emotionally needy two year-old, does not speak well of our culture.
On our culture, I recommend Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal. The book really lays out the toxic nature of our kind of normal.
Trump’s perfectly normal, in this upside down world that normalizes people like him. Hannah Arendt described Eichmann’s behavior during the Third Reich and pointed out that everything he did was perfectly normal, in Nazi Germany where an insane megalomaniac’s every spoken word was, literally, the law.
One of the psychiatrists who examined Eichmann before the trial was asked by the court if Eichmann was sane for purposes of standing trial. “Saner than I am, at any rate, after talking to him for two hours,” the shrink said. Eichmann’s inability to think for himself (reflected by his inability to express himself, beyond cliches), to consider anything beyond what was “normal” at the time, is what marked him as the perfect Nazi bureaucrat.
Here’s another perfect Nazi bureaucrat, a violent rioter tasked with helping to weaponize the government against all enemies of the Leader. You can’t make this stuff up…
Today’s profile in spinelessness goes to Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski who voted “yea” effectively casting the deciding vote for The Act [1], a bill she said repeatedly she didn’t support. A senator who raised his fist to an insurrectionist mob, Josh Hawley, can be counted on to sincerely express grave concerns about the serious damage a bill will do to working poor people in his state and then follow his conscience and vote to pass the bill, but Murkowski, it seemed (until today), still wanted to be seen as a person of independent judgment, integrity and good character. A sturdy spined, independent woman, like the senator from Maine, one of three Republicans who voted to kill the killer bill. Thank you, Susan Collins, 75% of our nation — and a legitimately frightened world — is grateful for your reality-affirming vote. As for Ms. Murkowski, read the transcript of her incredibly idiotic answer (and confession) to the accusation that she’d sold out the country for a deal that helps her state.
After she cast what amounts to the deciding vote (a vote any one of the remaining 50 Republicans could have made, of course, Lyin’ Ted, Lindsey, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Joni Ernst) in favor of a brutally unfair budget that punishes the poor and vulnerable to enrich the already obscenely rich, she was asked by NBC reporter Ryan Nobles what her response was to senator Rand Paul’s statement that she’d bailed out Alaska at the expense of the country:
“Oh my God… (then there was a long silence, and a long glare from Murkowski, then the reporter clarified that Paul had said that, repeated it, and asked for her response) …
“… my response is… I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska and I live up to that every single day. I fight for my state’s interests and I make sure that Alaskans are understood. I work hard to take care of the state that has more unique … situations … more unique people, and it’s just different. And so, when people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our fifty states in a quote “bail out”, I find that offensive. I advocated for my state’s interests, I will continue to do that and I make no excuses for doing that.
“Do I like this bill? No, because I tried to take care of my state but I know, I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that. I don’t like… the fact… that we moved to an artificial deadline, an artificial time line to produce something to meet a deadline, rather than to actually try to produce the best bill for the country. But when I saw the direction it was going, you can either say ‘I don’t like it’ and not try to help my state, or you can roll up your sleeves… [and lick the Leader’s ‘ring’, as required, and get the best possible deal in exchange for my vote]”
And Lisa Murkowski doesn’t like that, not at all. Also, she didn’t like the artificial emergency and the pressure to pass the bill before the Fourth of July, didn’t like any of that at all. There hadn’t been time to fully debate the bill and make the best amendments to it, or even to read the final version in full. She didn’t like that. At the same time, when the moment came, she rightfully considered only the best quid pro quo she could get to make sure Alaskans, unique among the citizens of all fifty states, were not among those Americans who were “not going to be advantaged by this bill.”
No, Lisa. You roll up your sleeves, vote “nay” and get back to work drafting a better bill if you believe millions of Americans will “not be advantaged by” a viciously cruel bill. All it would have taken to defeat “the direction it was going” was to say no to the naked quid pro quo (which you admitted to in your answer, fool) and vote to return the bill for further revision.
Imagine a person as dumb as a pile of shit. Ask it to respond to a critical comment about how it made a special deal that sold out the American people. I expect its answer would be something like “Oh my God … of course I made a special deal that sold out the American people, because I work for Alaska, which is unique, and not like the rest of those Americans who are, unfortunately, not going to be advantaged by this bill.”
Hard to ignore the smell of the thing as it gives its idiotic response.
It’s now time to call Congress members as this highly toxic shit sandwich heads back to the House and root for the dysfunction of the slim MAGA House majority and the political genius of one of Trump’s most loyal and delusional lackeys, MAGA Mike Johnson. I’ve got to write a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, waiting to respond at a time and place of his choosing, tomorrow, remind me.
[1] Chuck Schumer officially got the name of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, an abomination and obscenity by any name, changed, to The Act. Small, symbolic victory, I suppose.
I recently watched an excellent documentary, Facing Tyranny, on PBS [1], about one of my heroes, Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a brilliant, fearless thinker and writer who was universally attacked for her frankness and irony in assessing Adolf Eichmann’s actual role in the industrialized mass murder of European Jewry (amidst the mass murder, and general slaughter, of tens of millions of others).
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial, a masterpiece, was condemned and dismissed by critics from every part of the political spectrum. Arendt commented that she understood, in hindsight, that her ironic tone about Nazi horrors (and Jewish complicity in some cases) that the public was just confronting graphically for the first time, may have led to much of the criticism. The public, she now understood, had not been ready for her ironic tone in laying out such horrors. She took a drag on her cigarette, and said “if I had it to do over again, I’d have done it the same way.” My hero.
In a traumatized society obedient to the will of a madman, where führerwortes haben gesetzeskraft (the Leader’s word has the force of law) and every one of Hitler’s brain farts immediately became the law of Germany, an unquestioningly obedient, ambitious government worker like Eichmann was completely unremarkable.
Arendt noted that Eichmann’s inability to speak with any degree of coherence, outside of defending his duty to obey the laws foaming out of the Leader’s rabid mouth, reflected his inability to think. Remove critical thinking and every monster you can imagine springs to life. Society can then be dominated by the indecent, monstrous will of unreasoning, calculating, all-powerful psychopaths.
The evil done by these evil fucks is rendered banal by the lack of thought with which they commit unspeakable atrocities and their absence of awareness and conscience as they commit their, now legal, even praiseworthy, crimes. A guy like Eichmann, Arendt noted, was simply an efficient, hard-working, unthinking member of a bureaucratic lynch mob, not the demonic architect of mass murder the Israeli prosecutor made him out to be. People tried to rough Arendt up over that banality of evil idea. Good luck, I say, take a glance around Congress.
The Senate is currently debating a big, sadistic, hideously “beautiful” bill (beautiful only for our 801 billionaires, their cumulative $6,500,000,000,000 and their corporate alter egos) that will pay for the billionaires’ massive tax cuts by removing health care from millions of working, elderly and disabled Americans and starving poor children by the millions while closing rural hospitals and nursing homes, increasing taxes on the lowest earners by an audacious 73% as it drastically cuts taxes on the wealthiest, while giving fossil fuel climate deniers (currently already subsidized $700,000,000,000 annually) infinitely more profit by squashing cheaper, sustainable American renewable energy and allowing Koch and friends to drastically raise energy prices nationwide. Oh yeah, and since the BBB will “pay for itself” by cutting the social safety net half of Americans rely on, we also need to raise the debt ceiling by $5,000,000,000,000.
There is so much ugliness in the Big Beautiful Bill (example of Orwell’s Newspeak [2], like “Truth Social”) it’s impossible to know or itemize all of it. Why would a faithful follower of Jesus Christ want to see millions of American children and old people go to bed hungry, lose health care, die unnecessary deaths in the richest country in the world? How would Jesus feel about giving more to the already obscenely rich while the poor, and their children, are immiserated further? Christian MAGA supporters will not ever confront this clear moral question, which their MAGA pastors and ministers will proactively protect them from ever asking.
Remember, MAGA would not be in power without the organized support of millions of Evangelical Christians and radically reactionary Catholics (think Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, Sammy the Bull Alito, Clarence and Ginny Thomas). How did those two groups of Christians do in Germany during the rise of the New York Times’ Mr. Hitler?
I stumbled on a Chris Hedges video discussing the work of Eric Voegelin, who studied the Nazi era (after running for his life from the Nazis in 1938) and made certain chilling connections, which are summarized in this bit from a search for Voegelin’s Hitler and the Germans.
Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Eric Voegelin [in Hilter and the Germans] discusses the historian Percy Schramm’s “Anatomy of a Dictator,” along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.
Here we have an American Evangelical Church whose leaders embrace a radically strange interpretation of the teachings of their Savior in flagrant conflict with those teachings, a radicalized American Catholic Church whose political leadership denies the humanity of girls and women who are rape victims (in the name of protecting the sacred fetus of the rapist), and a legal profession that… well, in Germany the doctors were the first professional group to voluntarily Nazify — being an “Aryan” and Nazi party membership were required to practice medicine in Hitler’s Germany — and, most certainly, the fucking lawyers were the second professional group to become loyal Hitlerites.
The horror, the horror. Makes me want to holler.
[1] Public Broadcasting, of course, is a deadly enemy to Trumpworld. How dare they make documentaries about radical left antisemitic Jews like Hannah Arendt? They harm innocent young white Christian children by recounting tired stories of so-called racism, slavery, and centuries of terrorism against Blacks. They don’t hate and reject gay people, as Jesus urged every Christian to do. They oppose book banning, book burning, they challenge propaganda itself sometimes! DEFUND PBS! (But watch the Arendt documentary first).
[2] In 1984, Orwell introduced the concept of Newspeak, a controlled language designed to eliminate any possibility of rebellious thoughts. By systematically reducing vocabulary, the ruling Party ensured that individuals could not even conceive of dissent, let alone articulate it. Words like “doubleplusgood” replaced more complex expressions, stripping language of nuance and ambiguity.
Newspeak operates on the principle that if certain words do not exist, the concepts they represent cannot be thought about. The language was deliberately constructed to remove any potential for subversive thought, thereby eliminating free will at the linguistic level. The ultimate goal? To make independent thinking impossible by restructuring language to serve only the Party’s ideological needs. By shrinking the range of thought through a diminishing vocabulary, Orwell emphasized how linguistic engineering could erode cognitive freedom. source
Trump and the rightwing propaganda machine have done such a good, proactive, preemptive job of accusing Democrats of the crimes they themselves commit (weaponizing the DOJ, partisan hack activist judges, etc.) that it’s unthinkable for a Democrat to point out how fossil fuel billionaire Koch and Co. (with the help of Putin, Musk, Thiel, et al) almost certainly rigged the mathematically impossible 2024 election results.
These super-wealthy fascists were undoubtedly aided by harsh voter suppression laws in many states, (brought to you by a lying John Roberts/Federalist Society/Kochtopus 5-4 decision overruling a 98-0 Senate reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act). Questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s highly improbable “mandate” (he won every swing state, a rare feat, even states otherwise swept by Democrats, with virtually identical margins, just out of automatic recount range, flipping 88 strategic counties blue to red while none flipped the other way) would make the Democrats look like whining, pouting, evidence-denying, democracy rejecting “election deniers” like Kari Lake, Trump and co.
I find this short series very convincing, but then again, I can’t find an explanation for the 20,000,000 vote drop off in mail-in ballots (after mail-in voting increased in the 8 straight elections), except as the nefarious plan of a shameless, pugnacious Trump megadonor postmaster who retired, job done, shortly after the election.
Let me know what you think, and share this with your group, see what they think.
gratuitousblahg 