Here's a link to this must-read article:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/06/us-conservatives-pushing-russian-spin-ukraine-war
I suppose they also adopt Putin's terminology that it's a Special Military Operation and not a War. Would they punish American's who call it a war?
Do they not consider bombing residential sections a war crime?
This support of Russia over Ukraine alone should rightly cost them any seat at the table -- and in electoral office!
By JIM SMITH
At a recent open house, I had an
interesting exchange with a professed Christian woman and Trump supporter. I
asked her if she was concerned about the anti-democratic and fascist actions
and statements coming from the Trump wing of the Republican Party.
She replied that she was not
concerned because “God
is in control. It will all turn out fine.”
Really? Is Jesus’ hand on the wheel, and he’ll keep
us from crashing and dying? (Oops, I
forgot — our afterlife with Jesus will be better, so why worry about dying?)
But let’s say we don’t want us, our country, or democracy
to die. Can we really count on being saved by divine intervention? I don’t
think so, and my answer is, like hers, rooted in my Christian and spiritual
training. It has to do with “free will.”
I was taught that God may forgive us for our sins,
but he gave us free will to commit them. Jesus certainly didn’t have his hand on the wheel when
Hitler implemented the “final solution” of exterminating all Jews.
I believe, for example, that God
charged us with stewardship of the our planet, but we are free to destroy
it. And therefore I believe that those
fighting to address pollution and climate change are the ones doing “God’s
work,” as
he commanded us to do.
When asked by the wife of
Philadelphia’s mayor at the time of the constitutional convention whether we
have a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The mayor’s wife, Elizabeth Powel,
shot back, “And why not keep it?” to which Franklin replied, “Because the people, on tasting the
dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”
Social media have supercharged that
“over-eating” because it allows and encourages our God-given free will to
spread lies that destroy trust in government, blur or purposely distort facts,
and, when combined with the current misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment,
embolden the kind of armed insurrection we saw on January 6th and likely will
see again.
Karl Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people,” and there is no better
manifestation of that dictum than the Christian right and “Christian
nationalism.” As
with opium, they can’t be talked out of their addiction.
To
quote the headline of my May 28, 2020, “Talking Turkey” column, “Forgiveness is an important trait,
and Trump supporters get to practice it a lot.” They have forgiven Trump, I wrote,
for failing to criticize the Charlottesville demonstrators who chanted “Jews
will not replace us.” They forgave him for the Access Hollywood tape and having
his fixer pay off a porn star with whom he committed adultery. And that was
just the beginning of his trespasses for which he never attended church to
confess his sins — only
losers would do that! —
and seek God’s forgiveness.
But it does no good to criticize
the man. We need to focus on those who propagate his insanity, like Steve
Bannon, or who, as elected officials, refuse to disavow Trump’s Big Lie because
they fear retribution if they acknowledge the facts as they know them.
We have countless Republican
candidates running for election and re-election who are committed to the Big
Lie, and committed to lying about the next election if they lose. I recall that
shortly after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump began asserting the election
was stolen, one astute TV commentator said that what he feared most was that
Trump would run again in four years, lose again, and say again that the
election was stolen.
We have always trusted our
electoral system — until one president with a cult-like following said it could
not be trusted. Enough people believed his lie that a statistically significant
percentage of the population no longer trusts our electoral system. And those
people are armed to the teeth with assault weapons! We “trusters” haven’t seen
the need for assault weapons, so we are at their mercy if they assert the next
election was stolen and choose to stage a coup.
God may save the King, but only we
can save ourselves. When the “other side” controls the courts (they already
control the Supreme Court) and get elected to the positions responsible for
certifying elections, we are all screwed. They’ll call it God’s will. Yes,
because it will be man exercising the free will with which God endowed them.
Click here to read comments on this column from my own minister and from a retired Lutheran pastor who read this column prior to publication. Your comments are welcome too!
(https://www.jimsmithcolumns.com/TalkingTurkey/Sept22Comments.pdf)
By JIM SMITH
We learned last week that Donald Trump conned his small-donor followers out of $250 million on the pretext that the money would be used by an “election integrity committee” to fund challenges to Joe Biden’s election, when in fact no such committee existed and none of the money was even used for ballot recounts. It went to his hotels, the Jan. 6th rally, and mostly to his political campaign. His donors are, simply, suckers, reminding me of how he said that he loves uneducated voters and his “deplorables.” (Yes, although he attacked Hillary Clinton for using that term, he used it himself to describe his rightwing and racist followers.)
Whether or not he intended to use it long-term, when Trump saw the fundraising potential of the Big Lie, he decided to double down on it. Money, however, is not the only way the Big Lie has paid off for him.
Because his supporters believe anything Trump tells them and have been inoculated to dismiss any fact-checking as “fake news” paid for by the likes of George Soros, the Big Lie has generated the kind of misguided enthusiasm that could propel the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) to victory. The Democrats don’t yet have as much get-out-the-vote enthusiasm, and turnout is what wins any election. Besides, will getting the most votes even matter?
Steve Bannon brilliantly conceived a precinct strategy built upon the Big Lie and has already showed impressive success in getting Trump’s true believers to take over grass roots Republican precinct committees and school boards and to win nominations for the Secretaries of State who run elections.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative (and Catholic) majority is dismantling abortion rights and the separation of church and state. Five of those six were nominated by presidents who did not win the popular vote.
The Trump Party is following the playbook of fascist movements in the past, convincing supporters that any fact-checking by mainstream media is part of the conspiracy against their beliefs because those media are owned by the “radical socialist Democrats.”
The latest strategy is to include a mention of Snopes and Factcheck.org within their emails, warning readers that they “will tell you this is not true, but don’t believe them!”
How can that many Americans be so easily conned into believing what the rest of us know to be obvious untruths?
Have we passed the tipping point in the rightwing takeover of our country? We’ll know that for sure if the Trump Party takes control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and wins Secretary of State races in battleground states. That’s all that’s required to steal the 2024 presidential election. After all, the US Constitution does allow for state legislatures to go against the popular vote and send their own electors to the Electoral College.
If they pull that off, Americans will be “up in arms” figuratively, but they will be outgunned literally by the storm troopers armed with AR-15 rifles, so I suspect it won’t matter. Death threats and the threat of violence are highly effective political tools.
Consider the following item from Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, June 20, 2022, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Missouri, disgraced former governor Eric Greitens, released an advertisement threatening those Republicans he considers too moderate, the so-called Republicans In Name Only… In the ad, Greitens is armed with a shotgun and flanked by military personnel as they burst into a house. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked with the stripes of cowardice,” he continues. “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Of course, it’s the Trumpers who are the true RINOs. The above excerpt is a tacit acknowledgement that only the non-Trump Republicans can save us, but will they? On June 6, 1954, Boston attorney Joseph Welch brought down Sen. Joseph McCarthy with his televised line, “Have you no decency, sir?” When will other Republicans join Rep. Liz Cheney and speak out? When will they defy the death threats, stand up and say, “Have you no shame, sir?”
————
My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com
You have probably noticed, as I have, the increasing talk about whether the intractable divisions within America are going to lead to a new civil war. However, war isn’t limited to armed conflict, and it’s time to recognize that we are already in a civil war and to consider how it might evolve over the coming months and years.
As I write this, Russian troops are encircling Ukraine. Cyber attacks have been launched and disinformation is a potent weapon of choice. The parallels with America seem obvious. American democracy is in the not-so-early stages of an “incursion” by anti-democratic forces that is a prelude to a complete takeover. We saw an early skirmish on Jan. 6, 2021, but there will likely be more violence as time progresses. Violence against others shows the rest of us what could happen if we resist non-violent attacks — that’s how terrorism works.
The new civil war is being waged on several levels. Politically, non-compliant Republicans are threatened with primary challenges by Trump-endorsed candidates. Members of his “base” reinforce the demands for compliance with death threats against them and their families.
Also on the political level is the “precinct strategy” of Steve Bannon, the former president’s close political adviser whom Trump pardoned of federal fraud charges. On his “War Room” podcast the night before the Jan. 6th insurrection, Bannon rallied his millions of listeners, saying, “We’re on the point of attack. All hell will break loose tomorrow.” As reported by Pro-Publica on Sept. 2, 2021, while the insurrection was happening, Bannon said, “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
After that uprising failed to keep Trump in office, Bannon’s strategy evolved, producing results we can all see. To quote the ProPublica article,
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
It’s called “asymmetrical warfare,” a term coined by Andrew J.R. Mack in a 1975 article, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars.” Disinformation, supercharged now by social media, was rendered mainstream if not invented by the Soviet KGB, which created a “special disinformation office” in 1923. Disinformation, such as "the big lie" and “critical race theory,” is a primary tool of the forces within the Republican Party which want to supplant our liberal democratic heritage with an autocracy rooted in racism and white supremacy.
There are enough Americans with expressed and unexpressed racial animus to provide a boots-on-the-ground army to intimidate and, if necessary, attack opponents in a guerrilla war against the rest of us. The anti-racism movement has only empowered and inflamed those elements of our society.
Democracy worked fine for those forces when they were in the majority, but as America diversifies and they find themselves unable to win free and fair elections, stronger measures are needed, starting with voter suppression.
Of course, ultimately a war requires arms, and the rightwing forces are well armed, as the rest of us are keenly aware. The majority of weapons, especially assault rifles, are in the hands of the right wing and its militias, making verbal threats a highly effective weapon. Brandishing arms often suffices. Although we could see assassinations and other violence, this may be a war which the right wing wins without much armed conflict.
Death threats and threats against their families have been highly effective at getting non-compliant school board members, election workers and elected officials to cut and run, surrendering our schools, election boards, city councils, state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to the forces of autocracy.
Effective manipulation of voting laws provides an air of legitimacy to the new autocrats. Thanks to the lifetime appointment of like-minded judges to our courts, especially the Supreme Court, repressive and anti-democratic laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past (think Plessy v. Ferguson et al.), and we could see that again.
It’s sad and disheartening to see the disinformation spouted on rightwing media repeated by ordinary citizens. I see it in my inbox regularly. If these forces prevail in 2022 and 2024, I fear that the “American Experiment” will have failed.
My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com.
