cult met death personality

originally just devil term, but maybe useful?

SEE CULT 2 dear leader 1 25 FASCISM 6

primary post insurrection

merri ok

see big lie

see magical thinking

see auth nazi fascism

trump the CHOSEN ONE?! always male? strict fr?

this used to be for most extreme but now merging with trumpista and qanon

now literally a cult that needs depgm?

neglected?

see Qanon and trumpistas

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AN 10 26

A prominent group of conservative Christians are denouncing President Donald Trump's top military official, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for ordering that convicted terrorist and mass murder Nidal Malik Hasan — who committed the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that led to 13 deaths and 32 injuries — be executed publicly by firing squad. It is the first public execution in modern American history.

"The National Association of Evangelicals (along with several other religious groups) are now joining the USCCB in condemning Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth’s plans to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan, also saying doing so promotes a 'culture of death,'" reported journalist Jack Jenkins of the religious news outlet RNS on Friday.

In an excerpt from his report, Jenkins wrote that "Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told RNS that while he affirms the 'need for justice' regarding Hasan’s crime, 'at the same time, a live-streamed execution by firing squad risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being.'"

Evangelical Christian organizations are not alone in slamming Trump and Hegseth for choosing to publicly execute Hasan. On the social media platform X, prominent commentators from all sides of the political spectrum expressed disgust with the decision.

Billy Binion, reporter for the libertarian magazine Reason Magazine, posted, “This is sick. You can support justice for Nidal Hasan’s victims without making his execution a source of entertainment. This administration so often governs for the online mob. It’s depraved.”

Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept and ideologically heterodox, argued, “There are a very small number of countries that still carry out public executions. Those are the countries we are constantly told are uniquely primitive, barbaric, sick and evil. It’s revealing that Pete Hegseth wants the US to join that group but also entirely unsurprising.”

Wajahat Ali of the liberal Substack The Left Hook stated, “Public lynchings will be next.”

Trump and Hegseth are also under fire for terminating the employment of dozens of top staff at the Pentagon, amounting to more than 900 years of combined experience, and replacing them with partisan loyalists.

"Since January 2025," Michael N. Schmitt, a law professor at New York University, wrote for Just Security in June, "the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. Among them are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Army, and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who concurrently serves as director of the National Security Agency. Most recently, Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated and combat-experienced officers of his generation, has been forced out as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, in his NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) role, as commander of Allied Land Command. Public explanations have been sparse and, to the extent they have been offered, largely general."

Schmitt added, "The question regarding these departures is not whether the president and secretary of defense have broad lawful authority to reshape the senior officer corps. They unequivocally do. Nor is it a question of whether personnel decisions of this kind are ever warranted. Sometimes, they certainly are. Instead, at its core, a central question is their impact on the combat effectiveness, indeed the lethality, of our armed forces."

Even Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Hegseth’s senior military aide, indirectly admitted the mass firings could become a problem.

“Every shortcut in training and lapse in discipline will be paid for in blood,” LaNeve wrote.

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TRUMP EMBRACE MASK OFF SHUTDOWN 10 25

an 10 25

In a late-night social media posting spree, President Donald Trump promoted a meme that declared Democrats are the “party of hate, evil, and Satan.” The attack on his political opposition comes just weeks after the President and his allies blamed Democratic rhetoric for the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, despite providing no evidence to support their claims.

The meme the President posted also stated that the Democratic Party is “dead,” and has “no leadership,” “no message,” “no hope,” and, “their only message for America is to hate Trump.”

In an Oval Office address just after Kirk’s assassination, Trump declared:

“It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

“For years,” he continued, “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

IFrame Content

HuffPost reported on Friday that Trump “presumably” had been in “a snit over the continued partial government shutdown,” and “literally demonized his political opponents while his allies promote lies about Democrats wanting to give health insurance to undocumented migrants.”

Overnight, the President also posted several other memes and videos, including one that The Daily Beast on Friday described as “presumably an AI-generated cover of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1976 hit ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,’ portrays … OMB director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought as the reaper in question.”

“The visuals, which are also AI-generated, show Vought as the Grim Reaper, cavorting around Washington, D.C., while wielding his scythe. Interspersed throughout are shots of a band led by Trump playing a cowbell—one is famously used on the original track—accompanied by Vance on the drums.”

Trump, who had disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 throughout his 2024 campaign, on Thursday announced he was meeting “with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

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an 4 25

Critics of President Donald Trump often describe the MAGA movement as a "cult," arguing that Trump supporters behave like cult members when they express their relentless devotion to him and explode in anger at even subtle criticism.

But Salon's Amanda Marcotte takes the MAGA/cult analogy a step further in an article published on April 10, comparing the GOP of 2025 to a suicide cult in which Republicans avoid criticism of Trump no matter how bad his "idiocy" becomes.

"History's most famous cults are known primarily for their final suicidal acts: the mass poisoning at Jonestown, the self-immolation of the Branch Davidians, the self-asphyxiations of Heaven's Gate," Marcotte explains. "We know these things happen, but it's still a mystery to most of us how cult members get to this point. Why didn't they hit the eject button sooner, as their leader descended further into his incoherent megalomania? Why did they stick by him, even as it became increasingly clear he was putting the whole community on a pathway to self-destruction? Why didn't more people voice doubts or even confront the cult leader before things got this bad?"

Marcotte continues, "We're getting a compelling illustration on the national stage of how a cult leader can induce his followers to stick by him, even as he loses his mind and his behavior becomes too erratic and dangerous to defend. Almost every Republican on Capitol Hill knows that Donald Trump's tariff plan is political suicide, but few are willing to admit that Dear Leader fully intends to see this idiocy to the very end. Instead, most resemble the residents of Jonestown, many who hoped Jim Jones was testing their faith with all this poison-Kool-Aid talk, which allowed them to play along until it was too late to save themselves."

IFrame Content

Some right-wing conservatives and libertarians aren't shy about offering scathing condemnation of Trump's policies, from tariffs to his obsession with the U.S. acquiring Greenland. But those on the right who bash Trump frequently are likely to be MSNBC or CNN pundits or writers for The Bulwark — and they have long since been banished from Fox News, Fox Business and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Nonetheless, Marcotte notes that there is a caveat with Trump's "Jim Jones fantasies": Some of his supporters are expressing their frustration with tariffs, including GOP Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana — albeit in a "passive" way. And Republicans in Congress, according to Marcotte, have a "collective action problem" when it comes to Trump policies that trouble them.

"Few are willing to be the one seen questioning the infinite wisdom of Dear Leader, lest they draw his ire and be singled out for punishment," Marcotte observes. "Instead, they resort to passive language, in hopes they can convey their concerns without daring to question whether the MAGA prophet is not the wisest man who ever lived…. What ties all this together is a fear of criticizing Trump directly, and instead hoping that all this gentle hand-holding and blame-shifting will give their leader the space he needs to stop the madness."

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am 12 24

Trump's second term as president is less than a month away, with the president-elect scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. And when he is sworn in, Republicans will have small majorities in both branches of Congress.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega hasn't minced words in his anti-Trump articles, many of which have attacked him as a dangerously authoritarian.

In an article published on December 27, DeVega offers a "Words of the Year" listicle for "Donald Trump’s imminent return to power and the very dark and challenging times that may lie beyond in the country's worsening democracy crisis."

The terms in DeVega's listicle include: (1) "weathering," (2) "witnessing," (3) "dread," (4) "corporeal politics," (5) "anticipatory obedience," and (6) "malignant normality."

DeVega describes "weathering" as "the impact of chronic stress and other negative factors on a person's mind, body and overall wellbeing."

"The American people are going to experience great weathering from a resurgent Trump Administration, the MAGA Republicans and the larger 'conservative' movement and its allied forces," DeVega warns. "This weathering will also impact those people who voted for Trump — his 'working-class' supporters in red state America will be particularly vulnerable."

DeVega describes "corporeal politics" as "the relationship of the body to politics" and "anticipatory obedience" as "a temptation to surrender in advance" when " societies that are under siege from fascist and other such authoritarian, illiberal, and antidemocratic forces."

READ MORE:[GOP trifecta to feature legislative attacks on voting rights

"The reasoning here is that preemptive surrender and compliance will somehow create safety," DeVega explains. "This is largely an illusion."

According to DeVega, the "malignant normality" concept "helps to explain Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and larger right-wing's hold on power and the country's political imagination."

The Salon journalist laments, "This state of malignant normality will likely endure long into the future because the collective relationship between truth and reality has been so disrupted by right-wing malign actors and such forces as disinformation, propaganda, social media, the algorithm, digital media echo chambers, conspiracism, closed epistemes and alternate realities, a failing public education system, a weak Fourth Estate and the death of local newspapers and other legitimate news sources, and perhaps most importantly the Trump-MAGA political experience-infotainment machine and pseudo-religion."

===

an 8 24

Psychotherapist/author Steven Hassan, an ex-member of the Unification Church, is known for his expertise on cults. And he views former President Donald Trump as much more than a right-wing politician: Hassan sees Trump as the leader of a cult-like "authoritarian" movement.

During an interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega, Hassan (author of the book "The Cult of Trump") warned that "silencing critics" will be a key part of Trump's far-right agenda this election year.

"Steven Hassan possesses a deep understanding Donald Trump's power and control over the MAGA people and the larger Republican Party," DeVega explains. "He has been warning, for at least eight years, that Donald Trump is not a normal politician, but instead, the leader of an extremely dangerous authoritarian personality cult."

READ MORE:[JD Vance suggested America should 'punish' people for not having children

Hassan didn't mince words during the interview, laying out some reasons why the United States is "in a lot of trouble."

"The silencing of critics is an example of authoritarian control," Hassan told DeVega. "Information control has several basic elements such as deception, overt lying, withholding vital information and/or distorting it. Authoritarian control also involves telling members to not talk to ex-members or critics, only believing in the propaganda and information that is approved by the leader and the cult organization. We are seeing that play out in front of us with Trump and the MAGA movement."

Hassan continued, "The attempt on Trump's life has just amplified and spread it. There are too many powerful people in too many different positions of influence in America and around the world for the MAGA movement and Trumpism to collapse. The anti-democracy movement is too widespread now for it to just dissipate quickly. It will take lots of work to do that."

When DeVega mentioned that some political pundits consider it "not polite" to describe Trump supporters as part of a cult, Hassan responded, "I would tell them that the MAGA movement is, in fact, an authoritarian cult."

The anti-cult expert continued, "It is dangerous, destructive, anti-human rights, anti-woman, racist and white supremacist, anti-gay and has many other antisocial values and beliefs. The Trump authoritarian personality and the larger anti-democracy movement are very dangerous. People tried to stop these evil forces in the 1930s and 1940s. We can learn from them and rise to the challenge today. It is the very definition of being responsible to tell the truth about these dangers."

*Chauncey DeVega's full interview with Steven Hassan for Salon is available at this link.

===

an 6 24

alternet-no lnx

We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Experts explain the 4 main psychological factors that drive Trump's rabid fan base

Seth D. Norrholm June 16, 2024

I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.

—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.

It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.

—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol

In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name, cult, and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.

RELATED: A neuroscientist asks what Jason Aldean, Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley are so afraid of

Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”

Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.

How does this apply to today’s politics?

There was a time when the two major political parties in America could exhibit bipartisanship by moving across the aisle to compromise on the issues on which they were legislating. Tried and true Republicans who favored small government, lower taxes, and national security could find a middle ground with Democrats who pushed for things like universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and progressive tax reform. The abortion issue in America has been an area of debate between the parties as they debated elements like when life begins, is a heartbeat a heartbeat, and what to do about post-birth abortions (which is murder and not actually a thing). There were largely two sides of the issue and some areas for compromise.

This is no longer possible in today’s sociopolitical climate. Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.

RELATED: Neuroscientist sounds the alarm on the GOP’s 'contagious sociopaths' who live among us

Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.

Here are a few examples in today’s socio-political environment in which cultism has contributed to a lack of middle ground.

There is no middle ground on treasonous, conspiratorial, fraudulent behavior – these are crimes and, arguably, the worst crimes one could commit against their own country.

There is no middle ground on slavery.

There is no middle ground on allowing Americans to die through inaction in response to natural disasters and global health crises.

There is no middle ground on gunning down school children or wearing an AR-15 rifle pin and throwing away a pin to remember a Uvalde victim.

There is no middle ground on jeopardizing national security and retaining and sharing classified documents.

There is no middle ground on breaking campaign finance (i.e., hush money schemes) laws.

There should be no middle ground on tolerance of crime, period.

And so many know this. Tim Scott, Jim Jordan, and Marco Rubio (the last two having gone to law school), all know this and are smarter than they are acting – which takes us back to cult dynamics – if you are a dyed-in-the-wool cultist or pretending to be a cultist – but the outcome is the same – harm to the Country and its people – there is no difference. Whether you actually have a personality disorder or are pretending to be a sociopathically or psychopathically disordered person – if the result is the same – harm to your constituents and your country – what’s the difference? As noted in the opening paragraphs, there is a voluntary submission to cultism – Rubio, for example, identified all of the reasons why the 45th President was not qualified when he himself was running for President in 2016. However, perhaps due to his own intolerance of uncertainties in his life, volunteered for Trumpism.

What can be done?

There are exit strategies for people ensnared in a cult. One factor is accountability or repeatedly seeing the adverse consequences of the group’s behavior (e.g., indictment, incarceration, job loss) which we started to see even more of this week.

But until one party and its ardent followers can admit they are in a domestic terrorist cult and as Rep. Eric Swalwell said are “unserious” people, there is no hope of unification on the horizon. The first step is getting through to people who can’t or won’t see the truth.

ALSO IN THE NEWS: Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America

About the Author:

Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (Threads: neuropsychophd; X, artist formerly known as Twitter: @SethN12) is a neuropsychologist and independent socio political columnist. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and has published over 135 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Politico.com, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, WebMD, The Atlantic, The History Channel, Scientific American, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo.com.

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see story 1

an 12 23 no lnx

What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP

John Stoehr

December 28, 2023

The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.

Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”

“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”

More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.

To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”

That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.

To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”

“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”

There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.

While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.

In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.

JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?

DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.

And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.

The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.

JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.

DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.

But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.

In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.

JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?

DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.

The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.

JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?

DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.

The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.

JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?

DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.

One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.

At far-right roadshow, Trump is God's 'anointed one,' QAnon is king, and 'everything you believe is right

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omfg, recall polls on 30%(?) GOP thinks violence inevitable/justified

6 22 an CDV

it has been almost a year and a half since Jan. 6, 2021, when Donald Trump and his cabal attempted to nullify the results of the presidential election, and by doing so effectively bring an end American democracy. By any reasonable standard, this was the greatest crime committed by an American president in the country's history.

Last Thursday night, the House committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6 and the larger threat to American democracy held the first in a series of televised hearings. Its preliminary findings are that Trump and numerous allies, including Republican members of Congress, orchestrated a sophisticated, well-funded, nationwide effort that included the Big Lie and other propaganda about "election fraud," dozens of spurious legal challenges designed to subvert the electoral outcome and undermine public faith in democracy, and other attempts to rig the outcome in Trump's favor.

The coup plot also involved premeditated political violence and terrorism as seen in the attack on the Capitol by right-wing paramilitaries and thousands of other Trump followers. Trump's coup plot also involved proposals to invoke martial law and use the military and other security forces to "confiscate" voting machines and presumably engage in other nefarious tasks as ordered.

The ultimate goal of this elaborate plot was for Trump to remain in power indefinitely as an political strongman who rules by declaring a perpetual "national emergency" or finding some other quasi-legal justification to end democratic government.

Trump and his cabal's plan came much closer to succeeding than most people recognized at the time. In that sense, the events of Jan. 6 were practice for a future coup attempt — one far more likely to succeed, given that America's pro-democracy forces are being defeated at almost every turn.

There are many people who would prefer to erase this fact from memory and history: Russian President Vladimir Putinordered his intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, with the goal of putting Donald Trump in power and thereby undermining and destabilizing American democracy. As confirmed again by the House Jan. 6 committee's presentation, Putin's plan was remarkably successful.

In fact, none of this is a revelation; with the exception of a few new details, all this information has been public knowledge for some time. The real power of the House committee's first hearing lay in efficiently connecting the dots, navigating a mountain of evidence, and ultimately framing a devastating case that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators should be prosecuted and convicted on numerous criminal charges.

In just over two hours, the committee provided new information that confirmed some of the rumors and rumblings around Trump's coup plot and the events of Jan. 6. Some of Trump's Cabinet members, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power following the attack on the Capitol. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly refused to consider this despite ample justifications given Trump's erratic and dangerous behavior.

Trump was reportedly elated that his followers wanted to kill Mike Pence for refusing to cooperate with the coup plot. But Trump cannot plausibly claim that he didn't know he had lost the election: He was repeatedly told by political advisers and legal experts, including Attorney General Bill Barr, that Joe Biden had won the election and that voter fraud had not played a role.

At least one Republican member of Congress sought a pardon from Trump for his role in the coup plot, a de facto admission of criminal culpability. As for the violence on Jan. 6, to a significant degree it was premeditated and planned well before Jan. 6 and Trump's speech urging his followers to march on the Capitol. Members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have now been indicted by the Justice Department on charges of seditious conspiracy.

In total, as outlined by the House select committee during their first public hearing on Thursday, the unifying theme so far is that Donald Trump is a criminal mastermind, with a remarkable ability to corrupt the people around him by ensnaring them in a web of antisocial and pathological values and behavior.Donald Trump is a political cult leader, an apparent sociopath and an incipient fascist strongman who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans.

To discuss the current state of the Trump cult I recently spoke withSteven Hassan, one of the world's leading experts on cults and other dangerous organizations, as well as how to deprogram people who have succumbed to "mind control." Hassan was once a senior member of the Unification Church, better known as the "Moonies." He is now founder and director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center and has written several bestselling books, including "Freedom of Mind," "Combating Cult Mind Control" and, most recently, "The Cult of Trump."

In this conversation, Hassan discusses Trump's enduring power over his followers and why it has outlasted his presidency. He argues that right-wing Christian churches, Fox News, conspiracy theorists, right-wing social media and other propaganda machines are keeping Trump's cultists loyal and further radicalizing them. He warns that the cult is actually bigger than Donald Trump and may outlast him, because "today's Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom."

Hassan also reflects on his own experience as a cult member who was conditioned to be willing to kill on command. He warns that Trump's most loyal followers would likely obey such orders targeting Democrats, liberals, progressives, Muslims, black and brown people, or other designated enemies.

Donald Trump is a political cult leader, but he is no longer president. How does that influence his power over the cult members? What happens next?

My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt.

I agreed to write "The Cult of Trump" with the knowledge that Trump was a malignant narcissist.He fits the stereotypical profile of a cult leader. I viewed him as the leader of a cult of personality. His business is also part of his cult. As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs.

What is the role of the Big Lie in Trump's cult and the larger movement?

The Big Lie operates on the assumption that the more extreme the lie, the average person cannot even imagine making up such a lie. The average person then rationalizes the Big Lie as being true because the opposite somehow cannot be true. The Big Lie is ultimately bigger than most people's ability to contemplate it. It is just too much of a lie to not be true. What solidifies it is constant repetition, and it also works because the leader projects the Big Lie onto some type of enemy. Mind control cults always need an enemy — a devil to focus people's anger and negative emotions on.

What is the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump's cult? So many journalists and other professional politics-watchers still do not understand that Trumpism is much bigger than one man, or that it's a mistake to say that the Republican Party was "taken over" by Trump and his cult.

Today's Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom. They want blind obedience. They want people to distrust science and reason and critical thinking. Another example of how cults work is the belief that a person can create their own reality, where if a person truly believes something then it must be true. Of course that is ridiculous.

That is why it is important for the Department of Justice to prosecute Donald Trump and the other top Republicans who were involved in the coup attempt. A message needs to be sent to the cult members that reality exists and that there are consequences for criminal behavior. Right now, these Trump Republican cult members believe that manmade laws do not apply to them, because they exist on some higher plane or alternate reality.

The Trumpists and other fascists are now burning books they deem to be "dangerous" or "un-American," and targeting books by Black and brown authors or by and about the LGBTQ community. What is the role of book-burning and book-banning, in terms of cults and mind control?

Book burnings are an example of information control. That is a key part of the authoritarian cult. Book burnings are part of an escalating pattern that ends with arresting and killing journalists and other truth-tellers.

Republicans and other right-wing authoritarians have wanted to destroy public education for decades. Why? Because an educated citizen is what a democracy needs. To have a theocracy, for example, or some other type of authoritarian regime, you need uneducated citizens, especially young people. That is one of the main reasons why the right wing pushes for homeschooling and charter schools. The dumbing down of Americans is a hugely important part of their anti-democracy project.

Donald Trump has suggested that his followers must be ready to kill and die for his cause. He praises the Jan. 6 terrorists as patriots, victims and political prisoners. Michael Flynn has told people at his events that they should be prepared to "charge machine-gun nests" to defend their children against "critical race theory." How does this fit into the relationship between the cult leader and his followers?

I was taught such things when I was in the Moonies. I was told to be prepared, if North Korea invaded South Korea, to go to the front lines and die. I was later trained to die or kill on command without hesitation. Michael Flynn is an expert on military intelligence. He knows exactly what he is going to do. Flynn is creating an army of people to engage in a civil war.

Who do you think is likely to follow such orders?

We need to start with the military vets who feel betrayed by the U.S. government. Some of them may also have emotional or psychological issues as well. There are many veterans in the cult of Trump, and they're trained killers. If you make moral appeals and claim that you are acting in the name of God and country, then it is easy to get people to sacrifice their comfort and even their money, their marriage and their families for the cause. Once you make it into a matter of good and evil, and then psychologically condition a person that the other side are not really human, it is easy to get people to engage in lethal violence.

How do you explain Trump's enduring power over his followers, and over Republican voters as a whole?

The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.

If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult.

How have Trump, the Republican Party and other right-wing leaders been able to successfully create an alternate reality for their followers?

It started with an increasingly extreme Republican Party and right-wing movement. They have their own media, churches and so forth. The members are just voting for the party now, without doing much critical thinking. It was incremental at first, but now the Trumpists are the hardcore base of the authoritarian political movement. These diehard Republicans and other conservatives are in Christian religious cults, or they've been sucked into QAnon and other apocalyptic, "end of days," great-reset conspiracy theories.It is all related.

Outsiders often say that Trump is dumb or stupid and make fun of his rallies. They say his speeches are incoherent. When I listen to Trump and observe his rallies, I see a dangerous and sophisticated propaganda machine and brainwashing operation. The use of repetition and the manipulation of emotions and violent imagery is highly intentional.

If they are already indoctrinated, these rallies and other repeated messaging are just more confirmation, reinforcement and community-building. It makes these Trump cultists feel like they are not alone, that they are part of a big powerful movement. Fox News is an integral part of this as well. When Fox News keeps claiming that it is the most powerful cable news network, that makes the viewers feel like they are part of a powerful community and movement. It is very strategic.

Many experts on national security, terrorism and related topics are warning that the United States is on the verge of a second civil war or a sustained right-wing insurgency, and that Jan. 6 was just the beginning. What is your estimate of the likelihood of Trump's cult members engaging in widespread violence?

Ninety-five percent. I am certain there will be a civil war or other type of massive violence. I say this as a former cult leader who wanted to take over America and thought that democracy was Satanic, and that we must take over the world for God. Part of that mission was getting rid of Satan's army.The likelihood of a second civil war in America, because of Trumpism and these other authoritarian cults, is very high.

Will the average Trump supporter participate in this violence?

I'm going to apply the rule of thirds: One-third will double down and engage in acts of violence. Another third will not follow the commands. The middle third will make their decision based on what their peers are doing. I wish the news media would understand the danger we're in. The people who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God are going to be the ones committing most of these violent acts.

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left says trump is mafia boss psychopath and trumpistas gullible/ not bright ppl who fell into cult; nazi? but some proudly publically are?

qanon says pedos who drink blood adenochrome, so asymmetry? if satan is real then these attrocities are possible/plausible?

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NOTE ECHO:

raw story 2 22 https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/trump-cult/

:{:{The statement by the}:Republican National Committee arguing that the Jan. 6 insurrection was " legitimate political discourse:{" has sparked a renewed conversation on whether Donald Trump's MAGA movement is a :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:**cult.}:

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell began his examination of the issue with quotes from two Democratic Party leaders.

"You know, the 'C' in RNC doesn't stand for 'committee,' it stands for 'cult.' It's not the Republican National Committee, it's theRepublican National Cult," Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said.

"They seem to have reached rock-bottom with their statement that happened on January 6th was normal political discourse," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. "I say to Republicans all the time, take back your party from this cult."

Those quotes raised questions for O'Donnell, who wondered, "Is it a cult or is it stupidity? And what's the difference?"

For analysis, O'Donnell interviewed Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard.

Dodes said, "I think the word cult is probably correct.

"What a cult is — especially a charismatic cult, which is the kind we're talking about here where you have the all-powerful leader, Trump, who is seen as a god-like figure — thosecults are self-contained, intentionally,"he explained. "If you are in one, you are required to believe the belief system of the group. And a part of that, which is important to understand, is that you are also required to deny or ignore or attack those people who challenge the belief system, which is exactly what we see from many of these Trump followers, who simply act as they cannot hear and they attack those people who challenge it, which is what happened to [Liz] Cheney." [MARXIST CRT]

"The advantage of being ins such a group is that you have anecho chamber of people who are admiring you and affirming you. It is a self-affirming system, everyone agrees on the same things and they all follow and worship the leader," he continued. "On the other hand, to stand up against that, therefore, means that you aren't an outcast, you are a pariah." [BUT AMPLIFY INCREASE DOSE TRUMPIER THAN THOU?]

O'Donnell wondered about the role intelligence plays in susceptibility to joining a cult.

"Doctor, it seems that one defense against cultism, one personal defense that we might all possess — many of us might possess — is intelligence, you're simply too smart to fall for the stupidity of what's the cult is selling," O'Donnell said. "What is the difference between adherence to a cult and stupidity?"

"It helps to be stupid, but I think that they're different because there are intelligent people who are members of cult, you know? As much as some of these people who are republicans that don't seem to care about either democracy or morality are odious to us, they may be intelligent. Unfortunately, intelligence doesn't help you when you've got these enormous internal and external pressures to stay in line with the leader.

"I think it has, certainly, a moral quality. People who have high moral qualities and values do stand up, we sometimes consider them heroic. They finally say this is not right, as Liz Cheney did. I think we have to question the morality of the Trump followers because their morality is not strong enough to overcome their self-interest of staying in the cult," Dodes concluded.

Watch:

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/fox-news-screed/

grt pix robes hillary, joe fauci]

no lnx fox News host delivers 7-minute screed calling Democrats a ‘cult in a never-ending fight with reality’

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement December 10, 2021

Fox News is auditioning hosts for its 7 PM “Fox News Primetime” show, and on Thursday night longtime Fox contributor Tammy Bruce went full-force far-right extremist to get the job.

Bruce is no stranger to controversy. In the mid-1990’s she exited as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) after being accused of “racially insensitive comments.” Later, during the first months of the Obama presidency she remarked, “We’ve got trash in the White House.”

But on Thursday night for seven minutes and 13 seconds Bruce was on fire, berating the left and Democrats – blaming them for just about everything by using everything that’s wrong with the right. It was an example of epic projection.

According to Bruce, the left “is a cult in a never-ending fight with reality, hell-bent on making the world bend to their lies, all while trying to silence and destroy anything and anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy.”

READ: Justice Sotomayor blasts the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority: ‘Should have put an end to this madness’]

Sound familiar? Like the right wing of America, who refuse to accept the reality of the coronavirus pandemic, the fact that vaccines, masks, and social distancing work? Refuse to accept that climate change is real and massive voter fraud is not?

Bruce actually uses the word “cult” eleven times in seven minutes.

“I know you’ve heard that the cancer of woke-ism is the left new religion, but it’s actually not. It’s their cultic foundation, a set of rules and instructions met to manipulate and control,” she claimed, never offering up any actual concrete evidence. “Now keep in mind a cult has some basic tenets and behaviors we see not just with the so called progressives, but now being applied by the Biden administration itself, among other aspects, including groupthink as its foundational requirement, questions are not encouraged, and even punished followers are to worship a group leader.”

Here’s a question: Does the left worship President Joe Biden? Hillary Clinton? No.

READ: 'Their sphincters will tighten': Matt Gaetz goes after the FBI

Does the right worship Donald Trump? What do you think?

[pix djt on cross]

:{:{}:

“The cult follows and controls all aspects of members lives, fear and paranoia are instilled to keep followers close and trusting only a fellow members,” Bruce continues. “Outsiders, those who escaped, and opponents are smeared and cast as evil and dangerous and members are monitored constantly to ensure conformity and allegiance to the cultic system. Sound familiar? Yeah.”

Yes indeed.

We need no more recent example than the Fox News Christmas tree, which a 49-year old homeless man set on fire just past midnight on Wednesday. Fox News spent two days declaring it was an attack on America and an attack on Christianity – both of which are false. Police even said it was not a political act. But Fox News got so ramped up they literally compared the attack on their tree to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

READ: Tucker Carlson’s ‘baseless conspiracy theory’ about the Jan. 6 rioters has been forcefully debunked]

“Or what about on COVID?” Bruce asks, somehow pretending it’s not a deadly airborne disease that’s killed 800,000 Americans, “Where double-masked big city liberals meander aimlessly around Manhattan using facial coverings as some sort of partisan signaling exercise, despite being double-vaccinated, many with their boosters, while being socially distanced? That’s not science. That’s insanity. It’s also a way to condition people into having every aspect of their daily lives controlled by a faceless bureaucratic cult. And what about young children still being forced to suffer under masked learning, despite no science to back it up?”

That’s just plain coronavirus disinformation unworthy of any “news” organization. Maybe Bruce should chat with her co-workers over at The Wall Street Journal, who published a report detailing two studies showing students and staff in schools need to be masked. Or the CDC.

After her lie-filled rant Fox News immortalized her fallacious attack by posting the text of part of her speech online, as if it were a valid news story.

It’s not.

See for yourself:

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thot we were done w/ this BS post trump?!

omfg, HOW MUCH OF THIS WAS TEED UP BY CPP BS? ANTI-GUBMINT

no lnx an 11 21

'Pro-death cult strikes back': Right-wing judges block Biden’s vaccine rule for big companies

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams November 08, 2021

Progressives concerned about workplace safety and public health responded with dismay after a federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's attempt to require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly.

Citing "grave statutory and constitutional" problems with the rule, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued the stay in response to a joint petition filed Friday by a coalition of businesses, conservative advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.

That legal challenge, and separate lawsuits from Republican-led states, came just one day after President Joe Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would begin enforcing its newly unveiled Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) in the coming weeks. Companies with at least 100 employees have until December 5 to require unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors, and by January 4, they must require vaccinations or administer weekly tests.

Decrying the decision of the "right-wing Fifth Circuit," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse said on social media that "it's terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden's... new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested."

"OSHA's mission is to protect workers' health," Greenhouse continued, "but the appellate judges seem to forget that Covid has killed thousands of meatpacking, retail, and other workers."

More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started last March, and the disease continues to kill nearly 1,100 people per day, most of them unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Recent studies confirm that vaccines save lives.Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services analyzed the relationship between county-level inoculation rates and Covid-19 outcomes among U.S. seniors and found that vaccines helped ward off 265,000 infections, 107,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths during the first five months of 2021.

And in September, CDC researchers found that individuals in the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated last spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die after being infected with the coronavirus—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.

Greenhouse said that "the judges evidently sympathize with [Texas Republican Gov.] Greg Abbott's let-people-die stance—that it'soverreachfor OSHA to act strongly to protect workers from Covid."

David Michaels, a leader of OSHA during the Obama administration, also rebuked the federal appeals court, describing its decision as legally dubious and politically motivated.

"The same activist court that refused to stay Texas' law that permits bounty hunters to sue anyone who aids an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy has stayed an OSHA rule that is clearly within OSHA's authority, will save lives, and make workplaces safe," he told the New York Times.

According to the Times, "At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress."

The newspaper reported:

The suit against the mandate stated that President Biden "set the legislative policy" of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and "then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines."

"That is a quintessential legislative act—and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety," the suit said. "Nowhere in OSHA's enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics."

Corporate executives asked, and the Biden administration agreed, to delay implementation of OSHA's new ETS "until after the New Year, citing concerns about worker shortages during the important holiday season," Reuters noted.

Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, meanwhile, said in a statement that the Labor Department, home to OSHA, is "confident in its legal authority" to issue vaccine requirements.

The vaccine rule for companies with 100 or more employees "applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers," Reuters reported. "OSHA estimates that 31.7 million of [those] workers are unvaccinated and 60% of employers will require vaccinations, up from 25% today, resulting in another 22.7 million employees getting vaccinated."

Several million additional workers are covered by the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employees of the executive branch, federal contractors, and staff at healthcare facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding. OSHA officials say they are considering expanding the jab-or-test rule to include companies with fewer than 100 workers.

"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," Nanda said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court."

The Fifth Circuit panel's two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. ET Monday.

As the Times noted, it remains unclear whether the court's stay "would be a procedural blip for the Biden administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate."

The newspaper explained that "after both sides have filed briefs, the court will decide whether to lift the temporary injunction, allowing the rule to proceed as planned, or whether to grant a permanent injunction. OSHA could then take the case to the Supreme Court."

While some legal experts argue that the Labor Department has the regulatory authority to compel private employers to protect the health of workers and the broader public through mandatory vaccination amid a deadly global pandemic,Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told Reuters that "there will be so much litigation it will never see the light of day."

Twenty-four attorneys general threatened to sue the Biden administration over the rule back in September, and several followed through immediately after it was published in the federal register on Friday.

In addition to the petition filed with the Fifth Circuit, attorneys general in 11 states—Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

And in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia sued, with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis saying at a press conference that "the federal government can't just unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation."

Roughly 70% of U.S. adults are fully inoculated against Covid-19, and about 80% have received at least one shot, according to the CDC. Recent polling shows that a majority of U.S. adults favor Covid-19 vaccination requirements, with only about one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents opposed.

OSHA, Reuters pointed out, is "fighting history. The agency has issued 10 ETS over its 50 years. Of the six that were challenged in court, only one survived entirely intact."

Donald Verrilli, U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's administration, however, told the news outlet that the Biden administration "wouldn't move forward unless they thought that they could defend it legally... I think the constitutional challenges are all going to fail."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-2653811907/

"Death Wish" was a hit movie in 1974, starring Charles Bronson as a violent vigilante. Now it's the primary motivation for the Republican Party. As of this week, in 13 states you have a legal right not merely to have a death wish but to inflict it on others by refusing to get vaccinated against COVID. In 21 more states, bills have been introduced that would limit any requirements that individuals produce evidence that they have been vaccinated. In six of those states, the laws specify that schools, including public primary and secondary schools and public colleges, cannot require coronavirus vaccines, even while the same schools continue to require vaccinations against whooping cough, polio, measles and chicken pox.

"It seems to be kind of a mixed bag of all the things going on here — there's the limiting of requiring proof of vaccine, there's the limiting of requiring the vaccination itself, the prohibition of the mandates. So, there's a lot," Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CNN.

These bills are being called "vaccine freedom laws," as in, you have a right to be free of the vaccines against COVID. What's not a mixed bag is the political leaning of the states. All the states where such laws are in effect are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

You could call them the death wish states, or the Kevorkian states, after the infamous Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was jailed for eight years after assisting a man to commit suicide who suffered from ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. So if you want to enjoy your freedom to catch COVID and possibly die, those 13 states are the states for you. In six of them, you are guaranteed the freedom to subject your unvaccinated children to the virus as well.

At the same time the Republican Party is moving to protect your right to refuse the COVID vaccine, rates of infection are on the rise across the country. According to Johns Hopkins University, the new case rate is 10 percent higher in 46 states than it was last week. According to CNN, "In 31 states, new cases this past week are at least 50% higher than new cases the previous week."

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN that more than 99 percent of deaths from Covid in June were unvaccinated patients. CNN reports that "the vast majority of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths … are among unvaccinated people, doctors say."

The Delta variant of the virus is causing more infections among children and young adults than before. In Missouri, where just 39 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, the situation is so bad that the CDC and FEMA have sent teams of specialists to the state to help stop the spread of the disease."We've been seeing a much younger population," Dr. Harold Jarvis, an emergency physician in Springfield, Missouri, told CNN. "We're seeing a lot of people in their 30s, 40s, early 50s. We're seeing some teenagers and some pediatric patients as well."

Missouri is one of the states that has passed a law forbidding the requirement of a COVID vaccine or evidence of vaccination such as a so-called vaccine passport.

In Mississippi, where the vaccination rate is only 33 percent, seven children are in intensive care with COVID disease and two are on ventilators, according to the state health officer, Thomas Dobbs. On Monday, Dobbs tweeted "Pretty much ALL cases in MS are Delta variant right now. Vast majority of cases/hospitalizations/deaths UNVACCINATED." By Wednesday, Dobbs was tweeting that the state had suffered a "Big jump," and reported 641 new cases and five deaths in one day, along with 36 new outbreaks of the virus in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.

Mississippi has three bills pending before the state legislature that would prohibit issuing a "vaccine passport" and prohibit businesses and state facilities from requiring proof of vaccination.. One bill has passed both houses of the legislature and is awaiting the governor's signature.

But it's in Tennessee that promotion of the Republican death wish has reached its nadir. On Monday, the state fired its top immunization official for her efforts to get teenagers vaccinated against the COVID virus. "This is about a partisan issue around covid vaccines and around people in power in Tennessee not believing in the importance in vaccinating the people, and so they terminated the person in charge of getting it done," Michelle Fiscus told the Washington Post. She was director of all immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. "The government is sacrificing public health to be in the good graces of our legislators; it's a horrid dereliction of duty," she said on Monday. The Tennessean, the state's largest daily newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the state would stop promoting vaccinations for all teenagers, and would cease sending out reminders for teenagers who had received one vaccination to get their second dose.

That's more than a death wish. With 99 percent of all deaths from Covid among the unvaccinated, that is more like the organized and state-sanctioned killing of children.

I've been reading these stories all week and trying to figure out what's driving this madness. The evidence is out there for everyone to see. There can't be a state legislator or governor in this country who isn't aware that virtually all people who come down with COVID today, and 98 or 99 percent of those who die from the disease, are unvaccinated. They have to be aware of the fact, and it is a fact, that if you want to avoid being hospitalized with this disease and dying from it, a vaccination will not only help, it will absolutely prevent both outcomes.

They're not just standing up and speaking out against the COVID vaccines, they are passing laws with the express purpose of making it easier for people to refuse vaccinations. In some cases, these laws are specifically aimed at school-age children. It's one thing to put your adult neighbors and employees and fellow workers at risk. It's quite another to put not only your children, but allchildren at greater risk of getting sick with a virus that, with the spread of the Delta Variant, is showing signs of being deadly to children as well as adults.

The only answer I've been able to come up with is the obvious one. It's about politics, and not just any politics. These Republican death wish laws have one purpose: they are designed to make President Biden's push to get all Americans vaccinated fail. Republicans at the CPAC gathering last week in Dallas were laughing at references to Biden's goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population by the Fourth of July. One speaker received an ovation when he told the crowd, "The government was hoping they could sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated. And it isn't happening."

"The government," of course, is no longer being run by the man the whole CPAC conference was designed to celebrate, former president Donald Trump. It's run by the man who beat him, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party seems determined to do as much damage to his vaccination program as they can, even if that means enacting laws that will surely cause more people to get sick from the virus and die.

Republicans have become the death wish party. Unsatisfied with passing laws to take away people's right to vote, they have moved on to passing laws that will, without a doubt, take away people's right to life.

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no lnx https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/republicans-trump-reinstated/

A disturbing number of Republicans actually think Trump will likely be 'reinstated' soon: poll

New analysis finds Trump’s support among white voters is slipping

Aldous J. Pennyfarthing

and Daily Kos

June 10, 2021

I'll never understand why anyone listens to Donald Trump on any subject. He wanted to nuke hurricanes. He wanted to put alligator-filled moats along the southern border. He thinks windmills cause cancer, asbestos is swell, and exercise is bad for you. He seriously suggested pumping our bodies full of UV light and disinfectant. He thinks we have planes that are literally invisible, for God's sake!

Nevertheless, millions of Trump fans have bent their brains into pretzels trying to make his doofus proclamations sound presidential—or even marginally nonsimian (see also: hydroxychloroquine).

We've pretty well established that Trump's brain is, at best, masticated circus peanut and, at worst, Lucifer's molten boom-booms, and yet when he dry-heaves utter batshit nonsense, plenty of his fans seem all too ready to lick it up like feral purse poodles.

Case in point: Fully 29% of Republicans think Donald Trump is returning before the year is out—possibly riding in on a cloud or a flaming chariot or (more likely) a golf cart with a cupholder and custom-installed deep fryer.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll asked survey respondents this straightforward question: "How likely do you think it is that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated as U.S. President this year, if at all?" The question was no doubt included in the poll because Trump himself has been telling insiders that he thinks he'll be back in office by August. (Narrator: He won't.)

The results? (You still have time to bail if you've had your yearly quota of frothing insanity. You're still here? Okay, gird your loins.)

Among Republicans surveyed, 17% think it's "very likely" that Trump will return to the White House this year, 12% think it's "somewhat likely," and 10% don't know or have no opinion. Taken together, this shows that two-fifths of Republicans have not yet accepted that Joe Biden won the presidency.

Of course, that wasn't the only eye-opening result. Asked whether things are going in the right direction in the U.S. or on the wrong track, only 15% of Republicans thought things were going in a positive direction, while 85% said we're veering off course. Guess 85% of Republicans prefer raging pandemics and collapsing economies to Democratic presidents.

Is this what it's like to lick hallucinogenic toads for breakfast in lieu of frosted Pop-Tarts? At some point, do you just surrender to the unreality of your environment?

Over at Civiqs, even more Republicans report they're worried; a stunning 93% of card-carrying GOPers think we're all gonna die.

If you enjoy watching Donald Trump eat the Republican Party from within, like a genetically modified tropical eyeball worm, you'll be happy to know that the Politico/Morning Consultpoll found that 80% of Republicans want to stick around so they can see him play either a major (59%) or a minor role (21%) in the party going forward. If you'd prefer he stay in Florida chucking oyster shells at flamingos from his balcony, you'll likely be disappointed by the 13% of Republicans who want him to slink away.

There's also some good news, of course. President Biden's approval rating is at 53% among all registered voters, with 28% of respondents "strongly" approving of the job he's doing, 25% "somewhat" approving, 43% disapproving, and the rest offering no opinion.

Meanwhile, 66% of registered voters want Congress to pass an infrastructure bill—so maybe we should get that done, huh?

There's still some sanity left in the world, so long as you look in the right place. And that right place is clearly nowhere in the vicinity of the right wing. I invite Republicans to hurry on back to planet Earth. The water's fine. At least it is for now—unfortunately, only 12% of Republicans consider passing a bill to address climate change a "top priority."

Go figure.

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---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/deprogram-trump

aha: it's a wicked problem? meme virus has defense mechanism built in?! lack of evidence is evidence

no lnx vid

Global politics expert explains why it’s so hard to ‘deprogram’ Trumpian conspiracy theorists

Supporters of Donald Trump near the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, Tyler Merbler

Alex Henderson January 26, 2021

The word "deprogramming" is typically used in connection with extremist religious cults such as the Unification Church, the Tony & Susan Alamo Christian Foundation or Jim Jones' the People's Temple, but cults can be political as well — for example, the QAnon movement. Political science expert Brian Klaas, in a Washington Post op-ed published on January 25, lays out some reasons why it is so difficult to "deprogram" Americans who have embraced far-right political cults and outlandish conspiracy theories.

"For the past four years, the United States was governed by a conspiracy theorist in chief," explains Klaas, who teaches global politics at University College London. "Whether by retweeting QAnon accounts from the Oval Office or painting himself as the victim of shadowy 'deep state' plots at rallies, President Donald Trump injected the toxin of baseless conspiratorial thinking straight into America's political bloodstream. On January 6, America saw how far that venom had spread as a ragtag group of militias, racist extremists and flag-waving disciples of Trumpism stormed the Capitol."

The January 6 "insurrectionists," Klaas adds, had certain things in common: they were "unified by their support for Trump" and were also "conspiracy theorists."

"There is no doubt: the United States has a serious problem with pathological political delusions," Klaas warns. "So, do we have any hope of deprogramming the millions of Americans who are devoted to dangerous lunacy? Don't hold your breath….. Once people have gone far enough down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, it can be nearly impossible to get them back out."

Klaas goes on to list some reasons why it is so difficult to "deprogram" conspiracy theorists. According to Klaas, "First, conspiracy theorists are far more likely to have a Manichaean worldview, meaning they interpret everything as a battle between good and evil….. Second, those who seek to debunk conspiracy theories are precisely the people that true believers distrust [WICKED PROBLEM?]…. Third, these organized mass delusions are designed to resist debunking."

There's a joke among critics of far-right conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones that goes something like this: what did the Alex Jones listener say when told that there is no New World Order? The listener said, "Yeah, that's what the New World Order wants you to think." It's a joke, but it speaks to one of the important points Klaas makes in his op-ed — that when someone pushes back against conspiracy theorists, they sometimes respond by digging in even more.

A variety of media outlets, from CNN and MSNBC to Mother Jones and The Nation, have been relentless when it comes to debunking the far-right conspiracy theories that came from the Trump Administration and its sycophants. But Klaas notes that "if someone believes the media is controlled by sinister but unseen puppet masters, fact- checks from CNN will never convince them they're wrong."[// CLIMATE SCI, IF EXPERTS SAYS IT IT IS WRONG]

"For the past four years," Klaas notes, "those who have worked hardest to dispel QAnon believers of their fantasies are the very people that 'Anons' trust least: anti-Trump academics like me, news outlets such as the Post and politicians who they believe to be co-opted by the 'deep state.' Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have documented the risks of a backfire effect, in which correcting misperceptions actually ends up entrenching them. In the world of conspiratorial thinking, the harder the pushback, the greater the proof that a coverup is afoot."

According to Klaas, the "rise of social media" has made it much easier for far-right conspiracy theorists to live in a bubble.

"Bowling alone has been replaced by tweeting together — a cardboard cutout for real social interaction, but one that has a seductive allure to millions of people," Klaas warns. "Many of the fanatics who stormed the Capitol were neither poor nor social misfits, but rather, had found a digital community to augment or replace their offline one. We can no longer pretend that conspiracy theorists are beneath our attention. They've shown they have tremendous capacity to inflict damage on society."

Klaas discussed his Post op-ed during a January 26 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Watch the video below:

'Coalition Of Reality' Needed To Combat Conspiracy Theories, Says Writer | Morning Joe | MSNBC

www.youtube.com

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---

post insurrection

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/if-republicans-cant-tell-the-truth-about-the-2020-election-they-are-enemies-of-democracy-columnist/

aha2 covid plague not scourge of god for gay sex but chicomm.

aha CNP is everywhere in trump/ crazytown slide into polarization in this case dobson; satan usage getting pretty common/casual, it's manichean light/dark tribalism, you're with us or THEM; they are so evil/irrational only settle/cure with war; they hate america and freedom; armageddon is the final orgasmic punishment /vanquishing of coastal elite who looked down on us and called us crazy (ghost dance) aha3: this is the dark side of magical thinking vs prosperity gospel.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-evangelicals-2649541067/

alexh

Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.

Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.

Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.

Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."

Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.

"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."

Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."

Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.

[twt]

if Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.

The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.

The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.

To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.

Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.

The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.

---

new 'Heaven's Gate' series looks to Christianity to explain the method to the cult's madness

Ashlie D. Stevens Salon

Many people first became aware of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997, when — after an anonymous tip was called into the San Diego Police Department — the bodies of 39 men and women...

---

death cult?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/stanford-study-links-18-trump-rallies-to-over-30-000-cases-and-700-deaths/

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/pulitzer-winning-author-chris-hedges-warns-biden-and-the-democrats-will-dig-themselves-deeper-fueling-a-fascist-comeback/

note nuance compassion:

...

Watching the reaction from the mainstream media has been very instructive. They appeared to be shocked by the deep levels of support for Donald Trump. The polling errors appeared to flummox them. For me, as a working-class black person in America, nothing surprises me about this country and its reservoir of white supremacy. I also grew up with these Trump voters. I know and understand them. How do the commentariat and mainstream media types convince themselves of things about America which are simply not true?

I know them. I hate to admit it. But I was at their prep schools as a scholarship student. I went to their elite universities. I've sat in their elite newsrooms. As a class they are smug, arrogant, self-referential and so out of touch. They look down on the entire working class, and that includes the white working class. The Democrats under Bill Clinton thought, "We'll take the corporate money, because labor, and in particular people of color, do not have anywhere else to go. They are not going to the Republicans." Democrats took those voters for granted, and as exit polls show, the Democrats have made a fatal mistake in that regard. The Democrats' strategic calculation about those voters may have been true then, but it is not true anymore.

I think they were in fact really shocked. In many ways the elite class is clueless. The pundits and the commentariat and others in the establishment news media were just as off with their predictions as they were in 2016. They do not spend time in these communities. They do not speak to these people at all. They move from one exclusive bubble to another. They're not in touch with the suffering and the angst.

Donald Trump, at least, is completely transparent as to who he is. He doesn't hide it. He's as repugnant as he looks. And yet all sorts of groups, including white women, voted for him. And I think they voted for him knowing full well who he is, but also confident in the fact that the two ruling parties — and in particular the Democratic Party, which at one time pretended to watch out for their interests — have sold them out.

The two main parties have lost credibility, the Democrats in particular. The press has lost credibility. And once democratic institutions no longer have any credibility left, then people just start believing whatever they want to believe. That is how you get conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Too many Americans do not have social and political institutions they believe in and see as trustworthy. On that point, they are not wrong. Ultimately, I do not see how where we're going in the United States at present is anywhere good. The result will be a type of corporate totalitarianism.

There was this widely circulated image of three white women who were praying and laying hands on the door of one of the locations where the votes were being counted. There are also these "Christian" right-wing con men (and women) trying to summon angels to defend Donald Trump, their anointed and chosen savior. These people are widely mocked, as they should be. They are laughed at by rational people. But when I see such deranged behavior, I also take it seriously. Such people are deadly sincere in their beliefs. Trump's followers view him as a deity.

As I learned doing research for and writing my book "American Fascists," what happened in essence is that the world of "secular humanism," as such people call it, almost destroyed them. It is deeply personal. "Secular humanism" destroyed them because they became alcoholics, or they became crack addicts or opioid addicts or gambling addicts, or they lost their jobs and were evicted. A number of women in the Christian right that I interviewed had also suffered either sexual or domestic violence. So they entered a world of magic, the figure of magical Jesus, what anthropologists call acrisis cult. One cannot try to free them from the cult by using rationality and reason.

The only way to break the back of such a movement is to reintegrate such people into the economy, to give them stable jobs, a place where they can have a sense that through work and their societal position they can have hope for themselves and their children's lives.

And of course, the whole situation for such people has only gotten worse. Once they become hermetically encased in that ideology, you cannot really break them out of it unless you are going to create a society where they have a place, andrebuild the social bonds which were ruptured. That is not going to happen under Joe Biden. Such people on the Christian right, the praying-for-Trump types, will become more common especially as the country reels under the effects of a pandemic that is out of control and all the economic consequences of the crisis.

The other dynamic that the mainstream news media was not prepared for is that in places where the pandemic is worse, Donald Trump is more popular. This is an example of Trumpism and conservatism more generally being a type of political religion, a death cult. The more death and suffering that takes place in America, the more popular and powerful Trumpism and its variants will become.

It is a death cult. With the rupturing of social bonds and a sense of place within society, Trump's followers and the Christian right invest their energy in self-destructive behaviors, both as individuals and societies. The sociologist Émile Durkheim made an astute observation about right-wing groups, that those types of groups which seek the annihilation of others are really at the core driven by a desire for self-annihilation.

We see that throughout American society with the opioid crisis, the suicides, which are highest among white middle-aged men, and other types of addictions such as morbid obesity and gambling and the like. Those types of behaviors are all in response to the breakdown of social bonds and a sense of place and meaning within a society.

What springs forth from this moment?

What springs forth is that half of this country, who to this point have been treated by the ruling elites, and tacitly by the liberal class, as if they are human refuse, are going to strike back. We have already witnessed them trying to do this. They have not been particularly successful. People in this country are going to start getting killed. It is going to get worse especially as the ruling elites display the kind of paralysis that I expect Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell to display.

---

an 920

Herd developed’: Trump’s death cult would rather get COVID-19 than admit they were wrong

Amanda Marcotte / SalonSeptember 16, 2020

Donald Trump was doing spectacularly bad science again, this time during a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night. The event went about as well for the…

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/republican-voters-say-american-19-rate-is-acceptable/

republicanism is now nothing more than a cult. That’s the takeaway message of a new CBS News poll splitting out Republican voter sentiments from those of the rest of the nation. Taken together, America’s registered voters now say America is not better off than four years ago by an overwhelming 65%-35% margin. Republican voters, however, believe it is—and by a 75% to 25% spread.

Republicans believe the United States’ battle against COVID-19 is “going well”, also by a 3-to-1 margin; among all voters, 6 in 10 say it is in fact going “badly.” Republicans believe COVID-19 deaths are being exaggerated; a plurality of all voters believe it is being undercounted. And, most troubling at all, Republicans are split from the country in whether the now 180,000 United States COVID-19 deaths and rising are “acceptable.”

Republicans say the number of deaths has been “acceptable,” 57-43%. Other voting groups believe 180,000 pandemic deaths are not acceptable, and by very wide margins.

Even a sociopath would know to at least lie, when asked whether the death of 180,000 people was a reasonable and acceptable outcome. For these voters, however, protecting conservatism, even crooked and incompetent conservatism, from the consequences of its failures is all-consuming. And it continues to break a very large number of brains.

what we’re seeing here is a segment of America that has divorced itself from reality—a now-cult that simply denies any news, from economic collapse to mass deaths, that might cause Dear Pasty Leader to look bad. The cult’s extent can be gleaned from the 82% of Republicans who, when askedwhythey believe America is better off than four years ago, cite their own “confidence in Donald Trump.”

That’s it. America is doing “better” because Donald Trump is in charge, and he says so, and so the same Fox News-primed cult that sent themselves into a froth over ebola, over Benghazi, and over a dozen or more conspiracy theories about the nation’s first Black president and first woman to be nominated, say that America is “better” now. Even a pandemic non-response that the rest of the world finds horrifyingly incompetent is in fact Good, with 180,000 deaths are an “acceptable” price to pay in exchange for the nebulous whatever Trump and his allies are doing inside Republican voter heads.

Modern Republicanism is, to repeat, at present a fascist movement. It is willing to forgive mass death as price for ideological purity. It is not just willing to lie about everything, all the time, to protect the movement’s floundering “leaders,” but aggressively purges those who refuse to embrace the lies themselves. Lawbreaking is considered good when those of the movement do it; laws elsewhere are tightened to more vigorously punish movement opponents. It is obsessed with the national purity of the white, especially over immigrants, and demands not just that immigrants be blocked, but punished. That the police state be made more aggressive, not less. That lives matter only in accordance with Dear Ignorant Crooked Leader.

To self-identified Republicans, 180,000 pandemic deaths are “acceptable” for whatever reasons can be lazily mustered. Perhaps it is a hoax; perhaps they were all old, and vulnerable; perhaps 180,000 people would have died of something, so what’s the point of keeping track. But it will not be different when the numbers top 250,000. The numbers in the polls will barely change.

There are Republicans, and there are Americans, and the two no longer share the same reality. The former will do nothing, no matter which laws Trump might break to stay in power or which lies he might tell to brush off the next 100,000 deaths. The willingly corrupt Senate proves that much.

note moving from metaphor to empirical diagnosis:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/americas-march-even-beating-trump-wont-stop-the-empires-terminal-decline

the terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy,which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before....

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-presidency-is-a-cult/

no lnx

Trump’s presidency is a death cult

Written by Sonali Kolhatkar / Independent Media Institute August 7, 2020

When President Donald Trump was challenged by Axios national political correspondent Jonathan Swan to respond to the fact that, “a thousand Americans are dying a day” due to COVID-19, the president responded as though the grim tally was perfectly acceptable, saying, “They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is.” While observers were aghast at the callousness of his statement, it should not have surprised us. Trump had warned that the death toll would be high, and he had asked us months ago to get used to the idea. In late March, the White House Coronavirus Task Force had projected that 100,000 to 240,000 Americans would die from the virus. Rather than unveil an aggressive plan to tackle the spread and prevent the projected mortality figures, the president had said, “I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.”

The New York Times saw this warning as a contradiction to Trump’s stance in February and early March when he had said that “we have it totally under control” and “it’s going to be just fine.” The paper seemed to heave a sigh of relief that a few weeks later, “the president appeared to understand the severity of the potentially grave threat to the country.” But the report’s authors failed to grasp that Trump is willing to accept anything—including mass deaths—in service of his political career.

In fact, mass death appears to be part of Trump’s reelection strategy as per a July 30 Vanity Fair report on the administration’s strategy to contain the pandemic. The investigative piece explained that Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was part of a group of White House staffers that corresponded frequently to discuss the rapidly spreading virus. According to a public health expert who was described as being “in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force,” one of the members of Kushner’s team had concluded that, “because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.” The unnamed expert told Vanity Fair, “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

If it is true that Kushner embraced the idea of COVID-19 deaths as part of a political strategy for Trump’s reelection, there can be no clearer evidence that the Trump presidency fits the definition of a “death cult.”

But Trump’s team is also deeply inept, and its macabre tactics appear to have backfired. If Kushner expected a highly contagious virus to follow his political rules and relegate itself to Democratic-run states, he was proven very wrong, very quickly with Republican-run states like Florida, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Arizona being among the hardest hit.

For years, the Republican Party has cast itself as a self-righteous force for morality, embraced the “pro-life” movement, and claimed to align with “Christian values.” But just as Trump—arguably the most criminal of all U.S. presidents—has adopted a mantle of “law and order” with no hint of irony, the GOP as a whole has also shown time and again that its embrace of morality and law is a purely political tool. Now, as the nation grapples with mass deaths from a disease that a Republican president spectacularly and willfully failed to contain, conservative politicians appear willing to simply accept it. Their silence is deafening compared to the angry denunciations many Republican lawmakers hurled at President Barack Obama over his response to the Ebola epidemic—a crisis that resulted in a nationwide total of 11 infections and two deaths.

Ultimately it may be Trump’s own base that suffers as it internalizes the president’s mixed and confused messaging on ignoring social distancing guidelines, eschewing protective masks, swallowing hydroxychloroquine preventatively, and even accepting the inevitability of their own death (because “it is what it is” according to Trump). Even after more than 150,000 Americans have died from the virus, a majority of Republicans trust Trump’s coronavirus comments.

When Trump loyalist and former presidential candidate Herman Cain died of COVID-19, testing positive 11 days after attending Trump’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally without a mask on, his death did not change minds. The 74-year-old was reportedly on a ventilator during his last days, but conservatives are vehemently opposed to “politicizing” Cain’s death. Right-wing commentator and talk show host Ben Shapiro slammed those who made a connection between Cain’s refusal to take the virus seriously and his own infection and death. Shapiro said, “The kind of dunking on people after they die of COVID is pretty gross.” Certainly, Cain did not deserve to be vilified for his own sad fate. But his death offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of the Trump death cult—a point Shapiro of course refused to acknowledge.

We should hardly be surprised at this acceptance of death as inevitable. For years, conservatives have responded to gun violence with angry renunciations of any links to gun proliferation or lax gun control laws, offering instead “thoughts and prayers.” The one exception where Republicans express outrage is over the “death” of fetal cells inside women’s bodies—indicating that the fight is less about “murder,” as the anti-abortionists like to call it, than it is about controlling women’s bodies. By and large, the nation’s right-wing factions have for years wanted us to accept mass deaths and preventable mortality as a price for our “freedom.” They expect the same during a pandemic.

But we do not have to all be members of the death cult. According to a new study, states where people live the longest also have the strictest environmental laws, stronger gun control and stronger protections for minorities. These are also states that tend to be run by Democrats. California, for example, which has among the most stringent protections for minorities and the environment, also has one of the highest average life expectancy rates in the United States.

COVID-19 infections and deaths are hardly inevitable, and Americans are starting to see it. A Texas woman named Stacey Nagy penned an obituary for her late husband David that has garnered widespread attention. She wrote in her local paper that, “Family members believe David’s death was needless. They blame his death and the deaths of all the other innocent people, on Trump, [Gov. Greg] Abbott and all the politicians who did not take this pandemic seriously and were more concerned with their popularity and votes than lives.”Nagy also blamed “the many ignorant, self centered and selfish people who refused to follow the advice of the medical professionals, believing their ‘right’ not to wear a mask was more important than killing innocent people.”

Perhaps the only way out of Trump’s death cult is to speak out as Nagy has done.

The Washington Post, which interviewed Nagy, explained, “Feeling helpless, Stacey approached her husband’s obituary as a chance to speak out about how she felt her country had failed her family.” While Trump’s most loyal supporters might choose death in his service, the rest of us need not be bound by their blind, cultish and suicidal ideology.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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ref

no lnx ya ceap bastard

Los Angeles Times

POLITICS

People live longer in blue states than red; new study points to impact of state policies

States that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have a longer life expectancy.

States such as California that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have seen a swifter rise in life expectancy than more conservative states. Above, the California Capitol in Sacramento.(Los Angeles Times)

By NOAM N. LEVEY STAFF WRITER

AUG. 3, 2020

WASHINGTON — Weak environmental protections, safety rules and labor and civil rights protections may be cutting lives short in conservative states and deepening the divide between red and blue states, according to a new study on links between life expectancy and state policy.

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The report, published Tuesday in the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly, finds that states where residents live longest, including California, tend to have much more stringent environmental laws, tougher tobacco and firearms regulations and more protections for workers, minorities and LGBTQ residents.

Since the mid-1980s, the gap among U.S. states in how long their residents live has widened, reversing decades of progress toward greater equality.

One group of states, mostly in the Northeast and the West, have seen average life expectancies rise relatively steadily, placing them on par with the wealthiest nations of Western Europe. Those states tend to have more stringent regulations.

By contrast, the life expectancy in states with more conservative health, labor and social policies — concentrated in the South and Appalachia — have stagnated in recent decades, according to the study, which adds to growing research on health and political disparities between states.

California has among the highest average life expectancies in the country, at 81.3 years. It also had the most liberal policies in the nation in 2014, the most recent year the study analyzed, according to the system the authors developed to rank states.

Although the study’s authors note that they can’t prove that state policies caused the gap in life expectancy, the correlation is a persistent one across multiple states and several decades.

“It’s disheartening to see another example of a missed opportunity by policymakers,” said David Radley, senior scientist at the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund who studies differences in state health policies and the effects on people’s health. Radley was not involved in Milbank report.

[pix Bakersfield, CA., March 4, 2020 - Jenny Morones, 26, of Bakersfield poses for a portrait on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 in Bakersfield, California. Morones is working mother struggling to raise three children on a low income. Morones fled an abusive relationship and though in her twenties, has dealt with health challenges.Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Morones had health insurance that protected her from financial ruin. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)]

Coronavirus widens healthcare divide between red states and blue states

May 25, 2020

The new report may help shape efforts to rethink government policy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. as well as yawning gaps in many state safety nets.

“The overarching conclusion is clear: States that have invested in their populations’ social and economic well-being by enacting more liberal policies over time tend to be the same states that have made considerable gains in life expectancy,” the study’s authors wrote.

Even before the current public health crisis, life expectancy in the U.S. had been declining, setting America apart from most other wealthy nations. That decline has fueled tough questions about domestic policy.

The opioid epidemic, which has had a devastating impact on regions of the country already hit hard by economic stagnation, has been the focus of a lot of the discussion about that shift.

But Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez, the lead author of the new study, said the impact of opioids may be only part of the story.

“When we look at what is happening with life expectancy, the tendency is to focus on individual explanations about what Americans are doing,” she said, noting obesity and smoking behaviors as well as drug use. “But state policies are so important.”

To assess what role these policies may be playing, Montez and other researchers reviewed more than 120 policies enacted by states over the years and assessed whether each policy choice in each state was more liberal or more conservative.

Policies included housing rules such as rent control; health and welfare policies such as Medicaid eligibility and welfare limits; labor protections such as paid sick leave and minimum wages; and civil rights policies such as gender discrimination bans, hate-crime laws and same-sex marriage.

They also looked at state abortion restrictions, tax policy, education spending, immigration rules and gun control laws.

Each state was ranked by how liberal or conservative its policies overall have been, going back to 1970.

The researchers then compared these findings to trends in life expectancy in all 50 states.

Montez said the trends they saw were unmistakable. They also correlated with important points in the nation’s political history.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, for example, state life expectancies generally converged. That trend began to reverse in the mid-1980s, around the same time that a conservative movement, led by President Reagan and mirrored in many state capitols, became ascendant.

The gap between states accelerated further after 2010, when sweeping Republican victories in state elections shifted policies further to the right in many places.

By 2017, residents of the state with the highest life expectancy — Hawaii — were living on average seven years longer than residents of the state with the lowest life expectancy — Mississippi.

By contrast, the gap between the best- and worst-performing states in 1984 was less than five years.

The gap is not only about policy: States where people live longer tend to be wealthier and have better educated populations, for example.

But Montez noted that decisions by state leaders have helped shape those factors.

“States like Connecticut are investing in their population, investing in schools, setting an economic floor for their workers, discouraging behaviors like smoking that kill people,” she explained. “You have other states like Mississippi and Oklahoma that aren’t doing any of this.”

In Connecticut, whose policies have become steadily more liberal over the last half century, life expectancy increased 5.8 years between 1980 and 2017 to 80.7 years.

In Oklahoma, which has become markedly more conservative, life expectancy increased only 2.2 years over the same period, reaching 75.8 years in 2017.

Identifying which state policies may have the most impact on how long people live is difficult, the researchers concede. But the study points to a group of policies that appear to correlate most closely with longer lives.

These include some unsurprising candidates such as tougher environmental laws, which the authors note may protect people from toxic substances. The authors also found a correlation between longer life expectancy and labor policies that increase economic security, such as a minimum wage.

Tougher gun laws appear to track with longer life expectancies, the study notes, as do stricter tobacco controls.

The authors also point to civil rights laws, which they suggest may protect residents from ill health related to persistent stress.

And they found a correlation between longer life expectancy and better access to abortion, which the study notes may reflect other research that has linked abortion restrictions to women’s poverty and ill health.

Noam N. Levey writes about national healthcare policy out of Washington, D.C., for the Los Angeles Times. He covered passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and has written extensively about the landmark law and reported on its implementation from around the country. A former investigative and political reporter, he is a Boston native and a graduate of Princeton University. He joined the newspaper in 2003 and has reported from Washington since 2006.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/experts-fear-trump-supporters-will-be-dangerous-if-he-loses-the-last-gasp-of-a-dying-party/

The United States has a long history of bitter, divisive presidential elections being followed by gracious concession speeches. But Journalist Andrew Feinberg, in an article published by The Independent on July 7, examines the possibility of far-right violence if Donald Trump loses to Joe Biden in November.

“Even by the hardball standards of American presidential politics,” Feinberg explains, “Trump’s reelection bid stands out in history as the sole example of an incumbent president who is pushing his supporters to view a loss as the end of the republic rather than the end of his political career. This unprecedented strategy is raising concerns among experts on extremism and authoritarianism, and even veterans of Republican politics who say it is likely to result in violence should Trump lose in November.”

Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to play hardball during his reelection campaign. President Richard Nixon, in 1972, slammed Democratic nominee George McGovern unmercifully and was reelected by a landslide. Had Nixon lost to McGovern, however, he would have no doubt congratulated him and moved on; for all his corruption and ruthlessness, Nixon knew when to quit. But as Feinberg points out in his article, Trump’s rhetoric has been historically over-the-top.

“While speaking last Friday at the foot of Mt. Rushmore as part of an official, taxpayer-funded celebration of American independence,” Feinberg notes, “Trump characterized the anti-racist protest movement that has swept the country in recent weeks as ‘a new far-left fascism’ and a ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ that is ‘designed to overthrow the American Revolution’ and ‘would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery and progress.’"

Feinberg adds that on July 4, the day after his Mt. Rushmore speech, Trump gave a White House speech in which he railed against “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters” and asserted that defeating them in November would be akin to “the process of defeating” the United States’ enemies during World War II.

Brian Klaas, a politics professor at Universal College London in the U.K., told The Independent he “would be surprised if there is not at least some sporadic low-level violence around the election” if Trump loses.

Klaas warned, “In modern American history, there has never been a major mainstream political figure who has argued that his opponents are not legitimate.” And the things that worry Klaas about the hardcore MAGA bass, he told The Independent, include the “high concentration of weapons among Donald Trump’s supporters” and the “steady diet of information that tells them that they are the last defense for America against some conspiracy against them.”

According to Klaas, “People who have really worked themselves up in this vortex of disinformation… and have really gone down the rabbit hole…. may take Trump’s tweets literally and say, ‘OK, they’re my enemies. They’re committing treason, they’re part of the Deep State, and it’s time to be a patriot and stand up against them.’ That would be very, very dangerous.”

Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, who was a Tea Party favorite befor he became a Never Trumper, also fears the possibility of violence from the far right if Trump loses. Walsh, interviewed by The Independent, described Trumpism as “the last gasp of a dying party” that will become “even more desperate” if Democrats retake the White House and the Senate in November.

“They will engage in violence,” Walsh warned. “They will engage in trying to stop the machinery of government from even working.”

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an 620 wa mon? // trms prod The Imposter bk (pence fired all policy and replaced w/ PR [thus wants to be prez?!]

i've already written twice about Donald Trump’s decision to kind of/mostly move the 2020 Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. In my last installment, I noted that it would be difficult to meet the president’s goal of having a full house for the television cameras, in part, because people cannot be in two places at the same time.

The Republican Party is contractually obligated to hold its national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, but Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would not guarantee that state health restrictions could be lifted for the Aug. 24-27 event. The solution, then, was to keep the convention in Charlotte in a strictly legal sense by holding all the regular business meetings there, but to find an alternative location for the speeches and pageantry…

… People can’t simultaneously be in Charlotte holding a meeting on the Republican platform and in Jacksonville listening to Mike Pence or Melania Trump give a speech. Trump might have to hire “extras” to fill the gaps.

I suppose I was a bit naïve. There was an obvious solution but I didn’t see it because I don’t have enough of a criminal mind.

Now, mind you, I didunderstand that the only reason the Republicans were keeping part of the convention in Charlotte was to provide a legal defense against reneging on their contracts. As the Charlotte Observer reports, there will be wrangling over the decision:

Ed Driggs, one of two Republicans on the Charlotte City Council, had once hoped for an exciting week-long convention that would show off his city and his party.

On Thursday, as news dribbled out about just how scaled-backed Charlotte’s piece of the convention will be, Driggs said, “I guess I’m disappointed it’s so little.”

Now that the Republican National Committee has officially voted to move most of the convention out of Charlotte, Driggs said, “the big question is: How do we (the city) deal with the contracts in place? Who is responsible for those? (The parties to the contracts) are still trying to work it out.”

The Charlotte host committee, for example, has “an interest in not being saddled with liabilities and expenses,” Driggs said.

On Wednesday the committee, charged with raising almost $70 million for the event, said the move to another city violates contracts with the city and other local groups.

“This decision is in clear violation of the agreements made with the City of Charlotte, the County of Mecklenburg, Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, and the Charlotte Host Committee,” the committee said in a statement Wednesday.

To maintain the fiction that these contracts are being honored, the proceedings in Jacksonville are being called a “celebration” rather than a “convention.” Whether this will be convincing in court is for lawyers, judges, and perhaps a jury to decide, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of people having to be in two places at the same time. The elegant solution was sitting right in front of my face and I couldn’t see it.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

On Wednesday, the RNC’s executive panel voted to leave the 2016 party platform in place, with absolutely no edits. This will have the absurd result of leaving in place language about the president that clearly refers, in a critical manner, to Barack Obama. It will leave harsh language about deficit spending that applies with more force to the Trump administration than its predecessor. It will keep descriptions of the Middle East that no longer have any application, and in some cases it will pledge Trump to promises he has already kept. It also means that there will be no adjustments made to reflect an evolution of the party or national culture over the last four years.

The decision by the Wednesday means the GOP will maintain positions in the 4-year-old policy blueprint — including opposition to same-sex marriage and a nod to gay conversion therapy — and decline to stake out new positions on topics such as police reform, gender identity and third-trimester abortions.

Of course, both moderates and social conservatives are furious. They’ve both been gearing up to battle over the party platform, and now there will be no debate at all. Yet, by eliminating the most important piece of party business, the RNC no longer has to worry that people will be in Charlotte hashing out party principles when they should be in Jacksonville adoring the president.

The Republican National Convention is officially on the move to Jacksonville, Fla., after it will spend just a single day in Charlotte this August, the RNC committee announced Thursday night.

It will host what the Republicans are calling a “celebration” of President Donald Trump’s re-nomination…

…The convention was once expected to span four days in Charlotte — bringing in 50,000 people and pumping more than $150 million into the local economy.

Instead, around 336 delegates will conduct the convention’s official business Monday, Aug. 24. Then they’ll head to Jacksonville — and join more than 2,000 other delegates for three days of speeches and celebrations, a top GOP official said Thursday.

So, in order to manage the limitations of the time/space continuum, there will be no changes to the Republican platform in 2020, and anyone who cares about the platform will just have to suck it.

This is a final confirmation that the Republican Party has become a cult that stands for nothing and exists only to fluff Donald Trump’s ego. It was completely predictable but I failed to foresee it because I was still operating in the world where contracts are honored and political parties are made of up people who care about policy.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/we-need-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult

wa mon

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.

But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality,forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.

But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle.

But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.

Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)

But things have gotten even worse in the few years short years since the Trump era began. Once a far-fringe conspiracy theory relegated to 8chan and neo-nazi filled knockoffs of Reddit, the QAnon conspiracy theory (which, among other things, posits that a wide swath of prominent Democrats, celebrities and assorted rich people are engaged in pedophilia and adrenochrome harvesting of children, and that the Trump Administration is always just a few weeks away from conducting mass arrests and summary executions–but only once QANON followers have awakened enough of the “normie” public) has become so pervasive that not only do “Q” signs pop up at almost every major conservative rally or protest, but a true believer is now the GOP nominee for Senate in Oregon. When her campaign attempted to backtrack, she doubled down, saying “”My campaign is gonna kill me…How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.” This conspiracy theory is destroying families, relationships, and the mental health of its adherents.A healthy and normal political party would inoculate itself from it and debunk it quickly. But the GOP is not a healthy or normal political party.

It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers—the core of the GOP—believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them. And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama.

Go to any conservative event and you’ll notice a shift from even the raucous detached weirdness of Tea Party rallies. They feel less like political events than cult rallies. Cult experts like Steven Hassan have taken note of this, calling it exactly what it is: a cult built around manufactured realities, shared grievances and us-against-them insular extremism. The increasing dependence of Republican politicians on a shrinking, embattled white evangelical base already given over to faith-based belief systems and racism-tinged “city on a hill” ideology has only exacerbated the phenomenon.

It’s long past time for even the venerable pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to start calling this what it is, and stop normalizing it as standard partisanship. It is deeply dangerous in a democracy whose constitution functionally guarantees a two-party system, for one of those two parties to become a conspiracy cult.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the first step to fixing it is to call it what it is, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for institutions and journalism professionals who find that sort of language loaded with unprofessional bias. The truth is what it is, even if it requires rethinking therole of a responsible press in an era of white anxiety and mass social-media-fueled disinformation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/irish-author-fintan-otoole-explains-the-suspension-of-disbelief-that-made-trumps-destruction-of-america-possible

...I recently spoke with O’Toole about the end of American empire, the decline of the country’s democracy and its abdication of its preeminent global leadership role. O’Toole also shared his views on the appeal Donald Trump holds, as an authoritarian and con man, to his cult members.

In this wide-ranging conversation, O’Toole also reflects on the rise of Donald Trump and global neo-fascism, how and why that movement’s appeals to fake populism and political sadism, and the cruel logic of the right-wing’s gangster-capitalist death...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-gop-has-become-a-death-cult

no lnx

The GOP has become a death cult

March 4, 2017

// About 700 people gathered at the Minnesota capitol building to show support for Republican President Donald Trump. This was part of "March 4 Trump events around the country. Around 100 people were also there protesting against Donald Trump. // This man was yelling, "TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMMMMMP!" // 2017-03-04 ]

Written by Mike Lofgren / Common Dreams April 17, 2020

A decade ago, in my first public writing since leaving Capitol Hill, I warned that the Republican Party, in its evolution towards an extremist conservative movement allied with extremist Christian fundamentalism, was becoming like “one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” After Donald Trump’s enthronement as the decider of our fate, I analyzed the GOP’s descent into a nihilism that belied every one of its supposed “values.” They value only absolute power or ruin.

It is now long past time to cast off highfalutin’ Latinisms and simply call the Republicans and their religious and secular conservative allies what they are, and in unadorned English: a death cult. As the country reels from the coronavirus pandemic, our national government might just as well be run by the infamous People’s Temple of Jonestown.

By now we are benumbed by the all-pervasive arguments over relaxing workplace shutdowns and stay-at-home orders due to coronavirus. In any sane society, the issue would be how to institute the most efficient measures to defeat the pandemic in the shortest time and with the lowest loss of life. Instead, Trump and his merry band of lunatics have hijacked the national debate into a faux-serious discussion of when, oh, please, how soon, can we “reopen the economy?” Naturally, the media gamely continue to play along with this calculated bit of dezinformatsiya.

This has led to extreme callousness, like that shown by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who opined that grams and gramps should be eager to shuffle off this mortal coil for the sake of their grandchildren.

There is abundant empirical evidence against this notion: voters in Florida, known as “God’s waiting room” for its geriatric population, are notoriously averse to paying one cent in state income tax to fund education or child health, let alone lay down their lives. In any case, the 69-year-old Patrick, who claims he’s willing to die for his proposition, did not relinquish the burdens of his office to volunteer as an emergency room orderly.

There’s also Congressman Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, who put a patriotic gloss on his Malthusianism, decreeing that “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

Then, striking the pose of the Serious Adult in the Room correcting mischievous children, he intoned: “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils.” This encapsulates the stereotype of the economic conservative: Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid, condescending, and heartless pedagogue.

But some pronouncements from the Trump coalition offer more ethereal rationalizations than the mere pursuit of lucre. The news is replete with stories about evangelical ministers packing their megachurches like sardine cans in defiance of state orders for social distancing, as well as contempt for common sense.

We all know about that harebrained medicine man in Louisiana, Tony Spell, already arrested for violating the state’s prohibition of large gatherings, who continues his antics nonstop. Spell, who sounds as socially responsible as a blood tick, is proclaiming his parishioners ought to choose death: “Like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear.”

So much for fundamentalists’ vaunted “culture of life,” a slogan which the prestige media never presume to critique.

For a more socially upscale version of this sentiment, let us turn to First Things, a pretentious journal of alleged theology that dresses up its non-stop shilling for the GOP with high-toned words like “numinous” and references to the philosopher Erasmus.

Last month, its editor, R.R. Reno, wrote a piece called, “Say No to Death’s Dominion.” It is an extraordinary performance. Contrary to the title, he actually argues that death should be embraced. He does this by weaving an imbecilic theology that includes falsifying the history of the 1918 flu epidemic to make his basic point:

“In our simple-minded picture of things, we imagine a powerful fear of death arises because of the brutal deeds of cruel dictators and bloodthirsty executioners. But in truth,Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts.”

Oh, I get it! So Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day were more depraved than Josef Stalin! Reno ends with this:

“Fear of death and causing death is pervasive—stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. “

This insane rant against materialism would seem to contradict the crassly materialistic assumptions underlying economic conservatives’ advocacy for letting a deadly virus “wash over” the population, as Trump would say. But these views, at first sight blatantly opposed, can be reconciled.

And who better to reconcile God and Mammon than a grifter like Jerry Falwell, Jr., ringmaster of Liberty University and testifier to Donald Trump’s status as an emissary of the Almighty? Not only has Falwell continued the school year, virtually alone among American universities, and despite pleading from students and parents to close, he has now been sued for failing to refund fees for student activities that have been suspended.

Fundamentalist preachers’ love of money is no secret: it is only by packing churches that the collection plate will yield a bounteous harvest so that their missionary work can continue – perhaps logistically aided by the purchase of a$65-million Gulfstream executive jet.And why not? It would upstage Pat Robertson, who had a mere Learjet, and a rental at that.

Political observers often wonder about the bizarre conservative coalition of plutocrats and theocrats, believing it to be unstable. But the intersection of the heartless pecuniary motives of religious and economic conservatives is no coincidence. And beneath the Ebenezer Scrooge façade of economic conservatives is the same kind of perverted idealism that we see in Tony Spell or R.R. Reno.

The most cost-efficient industrial process is one that wastes the fewest resource inputs. Likewise, internal combustion engines have evolved to get better mileage even as they pollute less. And electric motors are even more fuel efficient and less polluting.

So how do we explain conservatives’ perverse hatred of the environment, even when there are no profits at stake, as well as their tenacious denial of climate change in the face of irrefutable data? Is it not much the same as the Bible thumper who bitterly condemns stewardship of the environment as Gaia worship?

There are other similarities. Since the 1970s, oil shocks (and coincident with the rise of the New Right) an abiding feature on the American scene has been the survivalist, hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands. This dovetails with fundamentalists’ weird enthusiasm for the prospect of world annihilation that animates belief in the Rapture, the only difference being the technique by which the elect avoid the mass slaughter.

Firearms fetishism and a fascination with violence, war, and armed insurrection are also mainstays of right-wing ideology, hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell Sr.’s, proclamation that God is Pro-War.And how about the Ultimate Fighting Jesus? The NRA neatly intersects with “muscular Christianity,” revealing both ideological kinship and some very embarrassing gender insecurities that frequently irrupt in misogyny and homosexual panic.

There is no longer the slightest doubt in any sane person’s mind that not only are the GOP’s fundamentalist-extremist religious allies a death cult disguised as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organizations. The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

“¡Viva la Muerte!”

“Long live death!” That was the defiant cry of José Millán-Astray y Terreros, a general in Francisco Franco’s fascist army during the Spanish civil war.It could just as well suit Trump’s foot soldiers.

Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff memberwho served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government” and “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leading-cult-expert-explains-how-trump-trained-his-followers-to-believe-no-one-but-him-and-why-his-mind-control-cult-now-faces-an-existential-crisis/

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Leading expert explains how Trump trained his followers to believe no one but him — and why his ‘mind control cult’ now faces an ‘existential crisis’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 7, 2020

During the 1970s, Steven Hassan was a senior member of the Unification Church, an offshoot Christian sect led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Hassan was so loyal to the Unification Church that he pledged to die or kill at Moon’s command.

After escaping the Unification Church, Hassan dedicated his life’s work to freeing other people from mind control organizations and destructive cults. He is now one of the world’s leading experts on mind control and cults.

Hassan is a direct personal witness to the way cult leaders are defined by their use of money, power, greed, sex, lies, charisma and violence to control their followers and empower themselves. In 2016 Hassan saw those traits personified in the form of Republican nominee Donald Trump. He then tried to alert the public to the danger that a cult leader would become president and that ruin and despair for the United States would be the inevitable result. Hassan’s new book “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control” attempts to explain how this all came to be.

While many pundits and others have remained in denial about the existential threat posed by Donald Trump and his movement, Hassan warned early on that Trump’s followers were effectively cult members and would not be swayed from supporting their leader for any reason. With the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s power over his followers is on full display, as he and his spokespeople are now suggesting that older and other vulnerable Americans should be willing to risk their lives in order to “save the economy” — and of course to aid Trump’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

I recently spoke with Steven Hassan about Trump’s death cult and the power the president has over his followers. Hassan also explains how Trump resembles notorious cult leader Jim Jones and why Trump’s followers remain in love with him even as his decisions are literally making them sick. Hassan also explains how Fox News and other parts of the right-wing disinformation machine are key elements of Trump’s mind control powers over his political cult.

Hassan also warns that Trump’s followers are capable of committing acts of great violence against their fellow Americans, should their leader command it.

You can also listen to my conversation with Steven Hassan on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

As usual, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Donald Trump continues to make ridiculous statements, such as claiming he was the first person to call the coronavirus a “pandemic,” or that there will be a magical flash of light and all will be well. It is clear he is mentally unwell. How do you make sense of his behavior?

Trump grew up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale. Peale taught magical thinking and that if a person just believed something 100%, God will magically make it come true. Trump was trained to be amagical thinker as a child. It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not. That is a type of thinking which is very common to cults.

In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong.

How does Donald Trump fit the profile of a cult leader?

Donald Trump fits the stereotypical profile of all destructive cults. These traits include malignant narcissism. Trump can easily be compared to Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, and other cult leaders. Trump always had a cult of personality around him in terms of his businesses and his social interactions with people. But once Trump attained the presidency, he took over the Republican Party and instituted a fiefdom where he rewards loyalty and punishes anyone who displeases him.

As for definitions, a “destructive cult” is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group with someone at the top who claims to know all things and says God is working through him or her. Trump does that as well. Donald Trump is also trying to control people’s behavior, the information they have access to, and their thoughts and emotions, to make them dependent and obedient and under his control. Consider the novel coronavirus pandemic and how Trump has all these followers who do not trust real experts and only take what Trump says to be true. Trump’s followers also don’t believe in science and medicine.

Do members of cults know that the leader is lying but convince themselves it does not matter? Or have the cult members totally lost the ability to think rationally?

Unfortunately, when a person is in a mind control group, critical thinking does not take place. Thinking in a cult does not depend on independent verifiable data. Information about the world — empirical reality — goes through a filtering system where the default is to support the cult identity and the cult leader and what they tell you to believe. The way to escape a mind control cult’s power and influence is for a person to find a way to access who they were before they got involved in the cult. A person in that situation needs to separate themselves from the ongoing indoctrination.

In the case of Trump and his movement, that can be through Fox News, right-wing religious TV or radio shows, the internet, smartphones,etc. Phones are a key part of how these Christian and other religious cults work where they send the members emails and texts. The brain needs a respite from all that communication. To escape Trump’s cult, the members need to regain perspective on reality and develop the cognitive tools to say, “Yes, Trump lied to me.” They need to say that to themselves and realize that Trump is not for the average person. He’s not making America great. He’s making things worse. He’s dividing us. He’s enriching himself. He’s undermining the separation of church and state. He’s undermining the rule of law.

What is the role of Fox News in Trump’s power over his followers, especially during this pandemic?

Fox News is the main propaganda arm of Donald Trump and his true believers. Fox News is continually disseminating and reinforcing Trump’s messages. Fox News is a dangerous entity.

Donald Trump and his Republicans, right-wing media and various churches have been saying that older people should be willing to get sick and die for the sake of the “economy.” Moreover, they suggest that to die from this disease is an act of “patriotism” and “piety” and “love.” This sounds like human sacrifice to an ancient mythological being. Specifics are critical here: is Donald Trump leading a death cult? And how are death cults different from other types of cults?

A death cult is a type of cult where the leader is telling the followers to kill themselves. A death cult also does not cherish the sanctity of life. It is very simple in terms of how it views the world in binary black and white terms. If the “last days” are here and God is going to return to somehow magically renew the world and send true believers to heaven, then it does not matter if those people who are not in the death cult die.

I would say right now it is premature to say that Donald Trump leads a death cult. But at the point where the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the health care system, Donald Trump would then be the leader of a death cult.

For people outside Trump’s cult and the Republican Party, it seems ridiculous and evil to suggest that people should go out and die from the novel coronavirus to save the economy. But Trump’s followers seem willing to do so. What is going on in their minds?

If you are in a cult where the leader is claiming to be some type of apostle or prophet who gets revelations directly from God, and who says “just believe in me” and tells you to reject reality or outside information, then you believe that you will be fine. You will be “saved” and go to “paradise.” Therefore, if Trump or his other spokespeople tell people to go out, get sick and then die, it is fine because the cult members believe they are going to heaven.

Unfortunately, there are millions of Americans who believe that Donald Trump is doing a good job with the coronavirus pandemic because they are not looking at any other source of news or reality testing. These people are doing a lot of praying and they have put their faith in an authoritarian leader who continually tells them, “I know better than everyone else, the experts, the doctors, etc.” Trump says that all the time. He always tells his followers that he knows better than the scientists, generals and other experts. Trump is telling his followers that he is omnipotent.

What happens to a person’s mind when it becomes subsumed by the cult leader?

As someone who was in a cult, the way I try to explain it is that mind control is a type of dissociative disorder where there is a split between who you really are and the cult identity. Cult members do have moments where their real authentic self re-emerges. For example, they miss their families. But then the cult part of the mind reasserts itself through fear or thought stopping or any number of other techniques to suppress the authentic self again.

As long as a person stays in the cult, they are receiving constant reinforcement of the cult identity. What is happening at present is very different from my experience in the 1970s. Then, you had to be taken to an isolated place to have your brain conditioned and programmed by the cult. Now the Internet, YouTube, Facebook and other types of media can program a person into a cult identity. Fox News and right-wing talk radio are obvious ways that Trump’s followers are indoctrinated into his cult. Sleep deprivation by having people constantly tuned into the cult programming is another form of programming.

Trump’s policies are actually causing real, measurable physical and economic harm to his “white working class” followers, as well as others. Yet those people remain among Trump’s most devoted supporters. The coronavirus pandemic is a literal life and death example of the harm that Trump is causing his cult members. Yet they still love him. How does a person’s mind reconcile such an outcome?

Donald Trump constantly tells his followers that he loves them. His people need and want to believe that Donald Trump loves them. Trump’s followers have a deep investment in him emotionally and personally.I would tell Trump’s true believers the same thing I would tell people in other mind control cults: Think back to what you thought you were getting involved with, and now think about where you are now. If you knew then where you would be three and a half years later, would you have ever gotten involved with Donald Trump in the first place?

I would also tell Trump’s cult members to think about his lies. They need to realize that they made decisions based on things proven to not be true. Now Trump’s followers know better. It is time for them to leave his cult. I would tell his cult members that it is time for a new chapter in their lives. They need to reboot their minds and behavior. Trump’s followers need to think about the future, how they want to live and how they want to raise their children.

How will the coronavirus impact how Trump’s cult members think about reality? How do they reconcile their love of Donald Trump with seeing people die all around them?

The cult part of their psyche is going to say it was their time. If Trump’s followers are religious, they will simply rationalize it as the dead are going to a better place in heaven. These people will believe that the deaths are good because it is the end times or something of the sort. As they see their loved ones die, the authentic self may reassert itself. If it does, those people are going to get very angry and upset at Donald Trump.

Trump and his mouthpieces are now trying to blame Barack Obama and the Democrats for the coronavirus disaster. Trump and his media are also blaming Asians and Asian-Americans. There has been a rise in hate crimes as a result. What comes next as the pandemic continues?

One of the main things that cult leaders do is to project outward on to false enemies, to deflect their own irresponsible behavior and blame others. I can imagine scenarios where Trump’s cult members, his followers go out and hurt other Americans. They would even go so far as to hurt their neighbors if Donald Trump and his spokespeople told them to.

I’m an idealist at heart. I want to have hope. I want people to rise up to their higher self and not descend down to barbarism and tribalism. Unfortunately, it really takes a great deal of energy to think critically, to look at data and not allow emotions to sway you to doing things that you will regret later.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-death-cult-finally-says-it-time-to-kill-the-useless-eaters-for-capitalism/

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Trump’s death cult finally says it: Time to kill the ‘useless eaters’ for capitalism

Brit Hume Fox News Screengrab

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon March 27, 2020

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Donald Trump has given the Democrats a gift — if they are brave enough to use it.

Last Sunday, Donald Trump declared on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

This slogan, imported from the libertarian far right, signaled an important shift toward ending social distancing and “reopening” the economy, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread Trump’s mouthpieces at Fox News and elsewhere then began to parrot the same macabre and disturbing argument.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, told Fox News: “Let’s get back to living… And those of us that are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”

Right-wing propagandist Glenn Beck told viewers of his BlazeTV show that Americans who are older should just go back to work and prepare to die: “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country.”

Brit Hume of Fox News told Tucker Carlson that he supported Dan Patrick’s view of this potentially lethal transaction:

What we’re living in now, this circumstance as we try to beat this virus, is not sustainable — that the utter collapse of the country’s economy, which many think will happen if this goes on much longer, is an intolerable result… [H]e is saying, for his own part, that he’d be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that’s what it took to allow the economy to move forward. And he said that because he’s late in life, you know, that he would be perhaps more willing then he might’ve been at a younger age, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint.

What are they really saying? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be “useless eaters” — in this case older people, people with pre-existing health conditions and anyone else who may die from the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday, Trump said the quiet part loud, basically admitting on Twitter that his electoral fortunes are tied to the pandemic’s impact on the American economy:

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

To paraphrase the character Ivan Drago in the movie “Rocky IV”: “If they die, they die”. Or as another famous Russian, Joseph Stalin, is reported to have said: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

For Trump and his allies, worsening the coronavirus pandemic, even at the risk of many lives, is of little importance compared to keeping him in office to continue a regime of looting, extortion and massive corruption.

The Democratic Party needs new slogans for the 2020 presidential election, I would suggest these:

Trump wants you to die — so he can stay in office forever.

Trump and the Republicans are trying to kill you — for money.

Are you 60 or older? Have a pre-existing health condition? Donald Trump and his Republican Party don’t care if you die from the coronavirus.

Donald Trump could have stopped the coronavirus. He lied, and people died.

Yes Trump and the right are embracing and celebrating death. It is ghoulish. It is also one more illustration that the Age of Trump is an American dystopia where what was previously unimaginable (for most decent people) has become “normal.”

Yes, Trump and his movement’s death impulses are part of a natural progression in which an authoritarian regime maximizes its power by terrorizing the public.

These calls by Trump and his allies for millions of Americans to sacrifice themselves for such abstractions as “the country,” “the economy” and “the market” should not be a surprise. Such madness and cruelty are the logical and inevitable result of decades of right-wing strategy and policies.

These plans were never hidden. Indeed, they were clumsily obvious. Since the 1970s, predatory gangster capitalism has been accepted as either “normal” or “inevitable” in the United States (as well as the United Kingdom and elsewhere). To that end, the “free market” was presented by the news media, many Democrats and virtually all Republicans, and most of the educational system as somehow synonymous or interchangeable with “freedom” and “democracy.”

This form of predatory gangster capitalism, now often called “neoliberalism,” rests upon several basic tenets:

Profits are more important than people.

Every part of human life and existence should become a commodity or a financial instrument.

Society should be organized around the “survival of the fittest,” in Malthusian or social-Darwinist terms: Those who cannot survive and prosper under “free markets” will be abandoned, quite likely to die.

Notions of the collective good, the commons, the social safety net and other aspects of social democracy, as well as the very idea of government and collective action, are to be undermined and eventually eliminated in service to “freedom” and “individual liberty.”

There should be few if any restrictions on the behavior of corporations, banks and the ultra-rich, or on the financier class.

There are “winners” and “losers” in society, “makers” and “takers” in society. These are natural and almost inexorable categories. The winners are to be subsidized by the state and the public. The losers are to be punished, and if possible eliminated.

Capitalism and democracy are the same thing.

Of course the harsh realities and negative consequences of predatory gangster capitalism have been effectively concealed from the public, which has come to accept this ideology through the use of anodyne language like “entrepreneurship,” “efficiency,” “transparency,” “accountability,” “public-private” and “opportunity.”

All claims that this system has been successful are dubious. Serious economists and other intellectually honest policy experts have repeatedly proven that its premises are fundamentally incorrect.

Gangster capitalists exploit system shocks and other crises (sometimes crises they themselves have caused) as a means of advancing their agenda.

Consider the coronavirus relief bill as originally submitted by the Republicans, which proposed creating a $500 billion slush fund to subsidize the richest corporations and wealthiest Americans, with no accountability and no oversight – a fund that Donald Trump and his vassals could loot at will — while handing out much smaller sums to ordinary Americans who are struggling to survive in a moment of economic calamity.

The moral obscenity of that bill even included petty cruelty: The poorest Americans would receive little if any money in direct payments, while money flowed to corporations and the ultra-rich by the billions.

These disparities have been somewhat painted over in the Democrats’ counterproposals in the House and Senate. But on a grand scale, the picture is not that different: The largest corporations will still receive at least $500 billion — with minor oversight and a few insignificant restraints — that they will inevitably use to enrich their shareholders at the expense of their employees and the public.

In practice, neoliberalism amounts to socialism for the rich and the powerful and the harsh medicine of the “free market” for everyone else. The coronavirus relief bill is more proof of that fact.

This is the logic of “too big to fail.” It’s also a function of the moral hazard that allows a plutocrat like Donald Trump to gain control over a so-called democracy with the goal of funneling resources (through tax policies, government subsidies and other laws) to themselves and other members of his class, while denying resources and opportunities to the vast majority of Americans.

Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget is a statement of values. As with the coronavirus relief bill, it punishes the poor and vulnerable by gutting the social safety net and transferring more money, both in the form of tax cuts and direct subsidies, to huge corporations and the richest Americans.

As documented by Dr. James Gilligan in his book “Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others” the policies of the Republican Party on issues ranging from health care to guns, the environment and tax policy have shortened the American people’s lifespans and caused other forms of physical harm.

Predatory gangster capitalism needs agents and other actors to advance its goals. The corporation is one of the primary means through which this form of capitalism wages its “revolutionary” struggle against a humane and democratic society.

As has been widely noted, if the corporation was a person, it would be a sociopath. This makes the corporation an indispensable part of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult.

James Gamble, a retired corporate attorney who is now director of the National Center for Access to Justice, offered a warning, in a recent article at Medium, about “the extraordinary power of corporate ‘persons’ who are legally obligated to act like sociopaths”:

Sociopath? Yes. The corporate entity is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money. Pretty close to a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder. And corporate persons are the most powerful people in our world.

The “maximize rule” does its damage in two ways. Corporate entities are direct actors in the world. A decision to build a factory in a place with weak environmental laws, low wages and poor worker protection matters. Preferring share buybacks to increased wages or lower prices matters. Lobbying for taxpayer subsidies that transfer wealth from poor to rich matters. They contribute to the problems listed in paragraph one in obvious ways. More damaging: the maximize rule infects real people with tragic faith in the magic of markets.

A recent Business Insider article sheds further light on the corporation as sociopath:

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is only just beginning. But it’s not too early for some Americans to flout social distancing and isolation guidelines and return to work, according to some executives.

Dick Kovacevich, the former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo, told Bloomberg News that healthy workers under the age of 55 should return to work in April if the outbreak is controlled, saying that “some may even die” with his plan.

“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, a current executive at Cisco and Cargill. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

While this iteration of capitalism sells itself to the public as indispensable to “liberty” and “freedom,” its ultimate tendency is authoritarian and fascistic. Such traits and goals make it a natural tool and weapon for Trump and his allies.

While the American people and the world are paralyzed the coronavirus pandemic, Attorney General William Barr is refusing to let a good crisis go to waste. As reported by Betsy Woodruff Swan for Politico, the Trump regime wants to use the coronavirus to enact a de facto state of martial law where basic legal rights are suspended:

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States….

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could deploy right now to try to slow the coronavirus outbreak.

Swan explains that these Justice Department requests “span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated,” and appear to have important implications for habeas corpus, “the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.”

According to Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, this means that “you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government. … That is something that should not happen in a democracy.”

This union of neoliberal gangster capitalism and authoritarianism can result in a society ruled by “inverted totalitarianism.” In his seminal book “Democracy Incorporated,” philosopher Sheldon Wolin explains how this happens:

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. …

It works indirectly.

Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

Will the American people follow the commands of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult? Are they willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of “the economy” and Trump’s re-election campaign by returning to work, ending social distancing and ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts?

Some will. Trump’s cult members will follow his commands without question. They have been systematically programmed by Trump’s cult and its disinformation machine. They understand that protecting and defending the cult leader must always come first.

Many Americans who do not have sufficient savings, live on stagnant wages, have little if any job security, are not union members, cannot work from home and are otherwise stuck in a precarious economic conditions may well be coerced into risking their lives, because they lack other options.

If public opinion polls are correct, Trump is becoming more popular because of the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying stagecraft and spectacle of his lie-filled “daily briefings.” Despite his incompetence, a new Gallup poll reports that 60 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic. (Including nearly all Republicans, of course.)

This evidence suggests that Trump, the Republican Party, the right-wing media and their corporate allies are effectively leveraging decades of programming in which most Americans have been taught to believe that patriotism, capitalism, freedom and consumerism are inexorably connected, if not in fact the same thing. In the Age of Trump and his pandemic, such beliefs can kill.

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Republicans are willing to accept millions dying because they have ’embraced’ Trump’s death cult: conservative columnist

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story March 24, 2020

In a blistering column for the Daily Beast, conservative Matt Lewis ripped into the Republican Party for demonstrating it really does stand for putting profits before people if its response to the coronavirus pandemic is any indication.

According to the author of “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump,” the GOP has joined the president’s “death cult.”

Starting with a blunt, “In the last 24 hours, it has become clear that, despite warnings from experts like Dr. Fauci, Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice lives to try and save the economy and his chances for re-election,” Lewis suggested Republicans are not only backing the president — they’re proudly and publically embracing it.

Pointing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) proclaiming, “We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu,” the columnist expressed his disgust by writing, “I’m pretty sure Johnson just said he was comfortable with millions of Americans dying of coronavirus—so long as it doesn’t disrupt economic activity.”

“This logic is spreading among Republicans,” he continued. “Consider the comments Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Monday night on Fox News: ‘No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren. And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.’”

“I’m old enough to remember when conservatives worried that Obamacare rationing would lead to “death panels” whereby older patients would be deemed too sick and expensive to help,” he wrote. “After all, why throw good money after bad? A few short years later, and it is Republicans who are making a shockingly similar rationalization.”

Stating, “This is a weird turn of events for the party of life,” Lewis lamented, “We have skipped over that nuanced discussion and gone straight to Republicans rationalizing the idea that we can just wipe out a million or so people to fix the economy.”

“Ultimately, we have a political party that has shown its true colors. Look no further than its standard-bearer. Consider his selfish motivations and petty behavior. Consider his long-held worldview that sees some people as genetic winners and some people as losers,” he explained. ” This is a man who responded to a pandemic by thinking, ‘How can I be on TV more?’ It’s truly depraved.”

“If human life and GDP become mutually exclusive for a pandemic-stricken America, which one do you think he’s going to choose? I think we already know the answer to that one,” he concluded.

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