Tag: Evangelicals

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Low-Rent Gods and Men — Does Trump reveal God’s Purpose?

Low-Rent Gods and Men

Does Trump reveal God’s Purpose?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 27th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

 

A survey conducted by Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe found around 30 percent of Americans believe Trump “was anointed by God to become president.” Thirty percent.

Now, I don’t know anything about the methodology of this poll. Frankly, I doubt the number is anywhere near that high. Ten percent, tops. Trump’s support among the religious is pretty much limited to evangelicals, and they only make up 25% of the population. And the same Economist article that cited that number also reported, “In a Pew poll in 2021, more than a third of white evangelicals said the government should stop enforcing the separation of church and state.” Outside of that group, the notion that scrapping separation of church and state and making Trump some sort of god/emporer drops through the basement. I doubt very much 10% of Catholics buy into that, much less mainstream Protestants, non-Christian and unaffiliated/secular.

Still, there’s a lot of Americans who do believe that nonsense. One of the stranger ones is the notion that there are seven “mountains” to a godly life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government. Daemons controlled those, but Trump has already climbed and taken over entertainment, business, media, government and family. This group thinks he’s taken over religion, as well. That would leave education to surmount.

OK, let’s take a pause while you get your breath back. Those of you still laughing, imagine being in bed with Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Yes, that’s a cruel thing to do to you, but if you don’t stop laughing you might hurt yourself.

There’s a saying popular amongst us secular sorts: “Science asks questions that demand an answer. Religion provides answers that demand no questions.” Obviously, that’s a simplification. There are many people of faith who do ask questions, including of their own beliefs. And some scientists are as hidebound and rigid in their intellectual structure as any 16th century preacher. But the fact remains that the true first commandment in many branches of religion is “Thou shalt not question.” Obviously, this is a fertile demographic for opportunists and demagogues.

Let’s see about those mountains that Trump is supposedly climbing. I’ll start out by noting that you’re far more likely to find a sea slug at the peak of Everest, just so you aren’t burdened by any suspense about the following.

Entertainment: Trump was a B-list celebrity with a reality TV show. The highest Neilson rating it ever got was 7.0. It never was anywhere near the most popular show in its timeslot.

Media: Trump had Faux News, and now, having cost them $787 million in costs from lying on his behalf, he doesn’t even have that. He has Truth Social, which is pretty pathetic, and lunatic-fringe outfits like Newsmax and OANN, both of which face massive defamation suits of their own.

Business: Until Elon Musk came along, Trump had lost more money than any individual in the history of America. He took over three casinos and they all went bust within a few years. Casinos are licenses to mint money! He’s been found guilty of tax fraud and is awaiting sentencing. He settled a vast class action suit for fraud for Trump University days before he took office. He is banned from running charities after he was found to have stolen from a children’s cancer charity he ran. Business attracts thieves, con artists and other filth, and it certainly attracted Trump. But he never was any good at it.

Entertainment: Well, his venality and endless personal scandals kept cartoonists and humorists busy for decades, so I suppose there’s that. And he attracts eyeballs, although the leading reasons are “What’s that idiot done now?” and “Oh, fuck, NO!”

Family: he’s had three wives and at least a dozen mistresses. He was banging Stormy Daniels while Melania was carrying his youngest son. His niece, Mary Trump, openly despises him. He buried one of his exes in an unmarked grave on one of his golf courses, and its rumored that her coffin contains incriminating evidence Trump wanted to go away forever.

Government: Yes, he was a one term president. He won despite losing the popular vote, and never has won a popular vote. The economy contracted during his term, the worst since Hoover, and the deficit exploded. He turned the Supreme Court into a sad joke. And because of the cowardice of mainstream Republicans, that party is now home to traitors, religious nuts, violent extremists, and the most ignorant fools America can scrape up.

Religion: Well, define “religion.” If love of money, power and self-aggrandizement is a religion, then Trump qualifies. Claiming to have god on his side doesn’t count. Nearly every dictator and tyrant in the history of this sad world has claimed to have god on his side. Fundamentalists cannot question and cannot learn. They are fodder and feeding ground for monsters. In stressful times, they are enough to put a Hitler or a Cromwell in power.

That leaves Education. Again, the term is subjective. When the evangelicals talk about that particular mountain, they have something entirely different from what most people think of when you mention education. Math and science are not a part of that particular equation. For that matter, the word ‘equation’ isn’t, either. Learning biblical writ, obeying and never questioning are considered virtues, and a child who questions is a child who must be beaten. So Trump may surmount Education, although, like Religion, it might be in a form none of us would recognize as such.

If ten percent of the population swallow the nonsense of Trump being “the Will of God,” that’s disturbing and a sad reflection on humanity in general. Thirty percent would be catastrophic, a certain sign that a culture has fully decompensated and slid into madness. Mass jailing and mass executions will follow, along with widespread misery. So that’s why I don’t buy that poll. America is having problems, but it isn’t in hospice.

But never forget that this type of religious fervor is toxic, and an infection in even the healthiest of societies.

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Trump’s Cross to Bear — or why cross people can’t bear him

Trump’s Cross to Bear

or why cross people can’t bear him

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 22nd, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

It’s not clear why Donald Trump decided to start attacking the Christian evangelicals who had been the backbone of his support. Perhaps it was Trump’s well-known propensity for shooting himself in the foot. Or perhaps it was because he always regarded the evangelicals as idiots and had an unguarded moment. He does that a lot, recently furnishing prosecutors for a motive for stealing all those classified documents (he apparently was looking for evidence to support the ludicrous “crossfire hurricane” election theft conspiracy theory). When his lawyers got fined nearly a million bucks for frivolous abuse of the legal system, he promptly withdrew another, similar case against Hillary Clinton et al, a tacit admission that it, too, was frivolous and would be seen as a waste of the court’s time. He does that a lot, too.

But I suspect that it’s mostly because the evangelicals have been souring on him. The flock are finally noticing that he isn’t really the second coming of Christ (and yes, a few of them literally believed that) and in fact, he might not be all that godly at all (paging Captain Obvious!). The evangelical leadership, safely inured from such inconveniences as faith or belief, saw that not only was Trump’s power slipping, but he was dragging the entire evangelical movement down. Yes, the evangelical movement had always been viewed from outside with a mixture of pity and disgust but that didn’t bother the leadership as long as their political stock remained firm. Now that it isn’t, it suddenly bothers them a lot.

The blob squad, the vicious biblical demagogues who hilariously characterize themselves as ‘pro life,’ have lost a certain amount of interest in the presidential race. They only supported candidates who promised to put anti-choice zealots on the courts, and Trump obliged them, giving them what they wanted. Now, they have a brighter fascistic zealot to worship: Ron DeSantis, who is intent on getting rid of all that “individual liberties” and “personal freedoms” shit and make the right people safe in the arms of Jeezus. At a recent blob squad convention, DeSantis outpolled Trump for President by about 54% to 20%. After all, he’s most likely to destroy women’s rights and keep the ‘lower races’ in their place.

Without the zealots, Trump is going nowhere. He didn’t have a prayer in ‘16 or ‘20 without them (and in fact lost the popular vote in both elections anyway) and even if he stays out of jail, he won’t have their support in ‘24.

Sic transit gloria mon dieu.

The MAGA crowd are evaporating, as well. That decline began the evening of January 6th, 2021, when the implications of what that mob in Washington were trying to do started to sink in with those followers who weren’t completely nihilistic zombies. That unease has slowly snowballed since, with the January 6th Select Committee erasing any and all doubt that these were not just enthusiastic Trump tourists agitated by dark AntiFa forces. Or that Trump didn’t really mean to have Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi hanged for daring to oppose his attempted coup.

As the legal system closes in on Trump himself, the legal penalties his hirelings and supporters face have sharply increased of late. A lot of the defendants haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, offering excuses that are ridiculous on the face of it (Just wanted to go to the bathroom and somehow wound up with his feet up on Pelosi’s desk) and some are just cowards. A lot of them blamed Trump for misleading them into their predicaments.

Then there’s the matter of the sorts of people who have infiltrated the Republican party and turned it into a grotesque unintentional parody of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s brownshirts. While a lot of that indisputably preceded Trump (Newt Gingrich did much to create the present face of the GOP) he has encouraged and empowered the likes of George Santos (or whatever the hell he calls himself) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Then there’s Trump’s basic personality. We got a sample of that just today. There was a horrible mass shooting in Los Angeles at Monterey Park, where ten were killed and ten more wounded when someone attacked a Chinese New Years’ party. He wrote on his fake Twitter, “10 dead in California shooting, horrible gun wielding ANTIFA protest against our great police in Atlanta – Nothing will happen to them despite night of rage and destruction.” Yes, he really compared largely peaceful (and unarmed) protesters to a gunsel who massacred innocent people. He went on to say things like that wouldn’t happen if he was president, even though many of the nation’s worst mass shooting DID happen during his four years in office. But he was too busy trying to get the Army to teargas peaceful protesters in front of a church he was using as a stage prop.

A lot of people, myself included, believe that at this point, to support a man like this means you are utter filth yourself. And that view, increasingly, is becoming widespread, and Trump supporters are finally realizing that not only are their views unpopular, but many people see them as vile and anti-American. Yes, even the evangelicals, who pride themselves on being cruel, disagreeable and anti-American in the name of Christ.

Unfortunately, this crowd is impervious to the concept of “a learning experience.” Some other opportunistic demagogue will come along for them to glom on to. Church of George Santos, anyone?

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So How Would You Like Your Fascism? Secular or Religious?

By on Thursday, May 24, 2018

May 24th 2018

A lot of people are puzzling over the fact that 80% of Christian evangelicals in America support the Trumpenfuhrer. After all, with his swindling, cheating, lying, whoring and corruption, isn’t he the very antithesis of the values that evangelicals claim as their own personal turf?

It reveals a dark and dirty facet of religiosity that most people either don’t notice or refuse to acknowledge: all fundamentalist religions are deeply authoritarian in nature, and they are attracted to any powerful political figure whose aims correlate with their own, or at least might work to their advantage.

Trump knows this because he is a student of Hitler’s “New World Order”, which is a collection of the German tyrant’s speeches and a how-to manual on how to manipulate diverse groups to his ends. He knows that Hitler got support before and even during the war from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and widespread support from Lutherans and other German protestant groups. I

t’s not by mistake that the unofficial slogan of the German military, emblazoned on their uniform belt buckles, was “Got Mit Uns” (God is With Us). Hitler’s speeches are littered with religious invocations that were designed (successfully) to leave his religious followers dewy-eyed and damp with patriotic religious lust.

All religious fundamentalists are authoritarian. The ones that state that they have no formal religious hierarchy but instead answer directly to God tend to be more socially dangerous than the regular kind, because Bishops and Imans are human can can be swayed by social needs, but God is an obliging doormat who is willing to lend his name to any cause espoused by his followers, no matter how horrible.

The religions that are “non-authoritarian” often are the worst of all, since while they won’t officially interpret God’s will for their followers, they carefully “assist” followers in “understanding” the holy writings. And literalistic religions are the worst of all. You have to be an intellectual train wreck to be a bible literalist, with its contradictions, absurdities, and talking snakes, but utter belief is demanded, and as Voltaire acidly observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Got Mit Uns.

Theocracies are all authoritarian in nature, as political entities purporting to represent the will of God must be. Dissent is Blasphemy. There hasn’t been a theocracy in the history of the world that wasn’t an utterly shite place to live, and pay attention, you Dominionists: A “Handsmaid’s Tale” type of America would include most of you as Jesus fodder. You wouldn’t like it, no matter how god-struck you are right now.

Fascism itself is best defined as government by corporation. Mussolini, one of the original fascists, said that you might as well call fascists corporatists, because that was where they wanted the power to lie.

Anyone who thinks businessmen should be running the country is a fascist. Authoritarian corporatists have spent billions over the years trying to dress it up as conservatism or libertarianism, but it is, at its very foundation, fascist. When was the last time a “conservative” in America sided with American workers against their bosses? American consumers against corporations? Environmental or safety concerns ahead of corporate convenience?

People who look to business leaders expecting to find John Galt are far more likely to find, at best, the dodgey characters flogging questionable junk on late-night TV, and at worst Donald Trump.

Libertarians are great at assuming that all public servants are endlessly corrupt and inept, whereas businessmen are paragons of integrity and competence because Invisible Hand, but the fact is business is simply better at hiding stupidity and criminality. The Mueller probe will be shining a light on the vast corruption and cover up of the vaunted private sector, much of it revolving around the poster children for gangsterism, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Both of whom, of course, are fascists.

Fascism has a bad name, and not just because people conflate it with Hitler (who, ironically, wasn’t much of a fascist). Like theocracies and for similar reasons, it tends to be authoritarian, because its goals and objectives not only don’t dovetail with the public good, but often are diametrically opposed.

So there’s two flavors of fascism: the one’s that hide their corruption behind God, and the ones who hide it behind lawyers. One purports to worship God, the other Economic Growth, but in the end, both the means and the ends conjoin, and so it’s not surprising to see Donald Trump appealing to Evangelicals: both worship the same thing: Power. And they will stop at nothing to do it.

Americans are glassy-eyed and supine from decades of propaganda, and despite all evidence, believe “business leaders” have their best interest at heart and should be running the country.

As Trump and his cartel implode, hopefully that delusion will die with them.

But don’t hold your breath.

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War Games — Bribery, Corruption, Land Grabs and Swindles, Oh My!

By on Saturday, May 12, 2018

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 12th, 2018

 

I had been treating the whole Stormy Daniels thing as an amusing sideshow. Anyone who ever watched “The Sopranos” knew that Trump was just a real-life version of Tony Soprano, and knew that he spent a lot of this spare time banging porn stars, hookers, and any woman unlucky enough to catch his attention. I didn’t have any reason to want to contemplate Trump’s sex life (ewwww…) but after nearly thirty years of listening to Republican whining and hypocritical, pious moaning over Bill Clinton, it was fun watching these same proctors of public morality proclaim that Trumps self-whoring and harassing was Different, somehow.

Even better was seeing the despicable Evangelical movement implode over Trump. Franklin, son of Dead Billy, asserted that it was nobody’s business who Trump was banging, and finished off the little credibility that sanctimonious pack of Mrs Grundies possessed.

With Trump enjoying an approval rating from these Falangists who wish to assert Dominion over us once and for all of 80%, it marked the absolute end of the reputation of evangelical Christianity as any sort of ethical or moral force, to the delight of everyone sick of their pious mewlings and scared of their designs to take over the country.

Against the background of the Mueller investigation and the sheer vicious criminality of the Trump regime, it seemed like small beans. I thought the prime effect would be the self-destruction of the puritans.

Then Avenatti started talking about the ‘fees’ that were pouring into Michael Cohen’s shell company for explications from Cohen on how the mind of America’s first RICO-American president actually worked. That had to be pretty tawdry, but was not, in itself, particularly illegal. While the intent (‘pay to play) was illegal, the fiction behind the fees was not. So it didn’t take any of the entities named, such as AT&T long to admit that they had, in fact, paid such fees to Cohen. In AT&Ts case, they stated they paid roughly double what Michael Avenatti knew about.

The media was aghast; it was a major story they had entirely missed. They were, of course, presuming that because they hadn’t noticed it, it probably didn’t exist, and of course the GOP ratfuckers went right to work, triumphantly announcing that the Avenatti claims where riddled with errors, including payments made to another Michael Cohen altogether.

It was that which sealed Cohen’s fate; examination showed that while there were some errors on his list, Avenatti had an accuracy rate of some 97%. What was worse was that more and more payees were coming forward (remember, they faced no legal jeopardy for this) and the pay-for-play system Cohen had erected was even bigger than Avenatti had discovered.

The next question was, “Why hasn’t Mueller acted on this?” Leaving aside the issue of whether any actual laws were broken (in Citizens United States, bribery is basically legal) it came to light that several of the biggest donors had already been quietly interviewed by Mueller’s people several months ago. Mueller runs an incredibly tight ship, and nobody in the media was bright enough to realize that rather than asking Mueller’s people what they asked various donors, they should ask the donors themselves, since they were under no obligation not to discuss the questions and answers.

In most countries, Trump and Cohen would be facing massive criminal charges and decades in prison.

In the roiling sewer of capitalist America, it’s not clear that they broke any laws. Financially, America is a bit like Deadwood, where the only consequence to murder is to make sure the victim didn’t have any buddies who might come looking for you for killing him.

Meanwhile, Trump unilaterally reneged on the Iran agreement, and Israel promptly began strafing some of the remaining Arab population on the Golan Heights under the guise of “attacking Iran outposts”. Syria fired their own rockets, promoting howls that they had attacked Israeli territory.

They hit the Golan Heights, which is Syrian. For decades, Israeli land thieves, squatters calling themselves “settlers” had been infiltrating the occupied area (never referred to as such by Israel because occupation is illegal under UN treaty, although occupation is exactly what it is) and stealing land and displacing the residents. That Israel was attacked is a lie.

Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia wants to see Iran embroiled in a major war, but neither see any need to spend money and manpower themselves: they have a perfectly good puppet state, America, willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and uncountable lives to fight the war for them.

And Trump desperately needs a major war to save his presidency. The ginned-up war in Iraq got the undeserving Bush reelected, and even though thousands of Americans died and it has cost nearly a trillion dollars, Americans didn’t mind because the economy stayed stable and they weren’t rationed.

Iran is far more powerful than Saddam’s Iraq. And far far more powerful than Afghanistan, a third-world country that has had America locked in a hopeless, expensive struggle for 17 years now.

There’s also the fact that outside of the evangelical community and Wall Street, nobody likes or trusts Trump, and won’t go all glassy-eyed and patriotic when he starts waving the flag and getting Americans killed.

But it’s the only thing he has left to save his presidency.

Expect the most disastrous war in America’s history to ensue.

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