#and virulent bigotry by the average citizen

[chaosordoffl]

"you're falling for propaganda and propping up a terrorist group in doing so" well maybe if the other guys' pr wasn't ass :/

[confrontingbabble-on]

By Sarah Posner, March 20, 2017...Illustration by Brian Reedy Back

“ in August 2015, when Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor. The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.

Moore, a boyish-looking pastor from Mississippi, had positioned himself as the face of the “new” religious right: a bigger-hearted, diversity-oriented version that was squarely opposed to Trump’s “us versus them” rhetoric. Speaking to a gathering of religion reporters in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia, Moore said that his “first priority” was to combat the “demonizing” and “depersonalizing” of immigrants—people, he pointed out, who were “created in the image of God.” Only by refocusing on such true “gospel” values, Moore believed, could evangelicals appeal to young people who had been fleeing the church in droves, and expand its outreach to African Americans and Latinos.

Evangelicals needed to do more than win elections—their larger duty was to win souls. Moore, in short, wanted the Christian right to reclaim the moral high ground—and Trump, in his estimation, was about as low as you could get.

“The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues,” Moore wrote in Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, a book he had just published at the time. “

But too often we do.

”As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore began to realize that the campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy.

The election, Moore warned in a New York Times op-ed last May, “has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and bigotry all over the country.” Those who were criticizing Trump, he added, “have faced threats and intimidation from the ‘alt-right’ of white supremacists and nativists who hide behind avatars on social media.”

Trump, true to form, wasted no time in striking back against Moore. “Truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for,” he tweeted a few days later. “A nasty guy with no heart!”

In the end, conservative Christians backed Trump in record numbers. He won 81 per- cent of the white evangelical vote—a higher share than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. As a result, the religious right—which for decades has grounded its political appeal in moral “values” such as “life” and “family” and “religious freedom”—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda. Evangelicals have traded Ronald Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a “shining city on a hill” for Trump’s dark vision of “American carnage.” And in doing so, they have returned the religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist “way of life.”

“The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact that the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values.’

”For more than a generation, the Christian right has sought to portray itself as a movement motivated principally by opposition to abortion and the defense of sexual purity against the forces of secularism. According to its own creation myth, evangelicals rose up and began to organize in opposition to Roe v. Wade, motivated by their duty to protect “the unborn.” Albert Mohler, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian, described Roe as “the catalyst for the moral revolution within evangelicalism”—the moment that spurred the coalition with conservative Catholics that still undergirds the religious right.

In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy. Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute and the alt-right’s most visible spokesman, argued during the campaign that GOP voters aren’t really motivated by Christian values, as they profess, but rather by deep racial anxieties. “Trump has shown the hand of the GOP,” Spencer told me in September. “The GOP is a white person’s populist party.”

Until now, the alt-right has presented itself largely as an irreligious movement; Spencer, its outsize figurehead, is an avowed atheist. But with Trump as president, the alt-right sees an opening for its own religious revival. “A new type of Alt Right Christian will become a force in the Religious Right,” Spencer tweeted on the morning after the election, “and we’re going to work with them.”

To alt-right Christians, Trump’s appeal isn’t based on the kind of social-issue litmus tests long favored by the religious right. According to Brad Griffin, a white supremacist activist in Alabama, “the average evangelical, not-too-religious Southerner who’s sort of a populist” was drawn to Trump primarily “because they like the attitude.” Besides, he adds, many on the Christian right don’t necessarily describe themselves as “evangelical” for theological reasons; it’s more “a tribal marker for a lot of these people.”

Before the election, Griffin worried that white evangelicals would find his “Southern nationalist” views problematic. But Trump’s decisive victory over Russell Moore reassured him. “It seems like evangelicals really didn’t follow Moore’s lead at all,” Griffin says. “All these pastors and whatnot went in there and said Trump’s a racist, a bigot, and a fascist and all this, and their followers didn’t listen to them.”

There is no way of knowing how many Americans consider themselves to be alt-right Christians—the term is so new, even those who agree with Spencer and Griffin probably wouldn’t use it to describe themselves. But there is plenty of evidence that white evangelical voters are more receptive than nonevangelicals to the ideas that drive the alt-right. According to an exit poll of Republican voters in the South Carolina primary, evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.

That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s most influential strategist, knows that the nationalist coalition alone isn’t big enough “to ever compete against the progressive left”—which is why he made a point of winning over the religious right. If conservative Catholics and evangelicals “just want to focus on reading the Bible and being good Christians,” Bannon told me last July, “there’s no chance we could ever get this country back on track again.” The alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; the Christian right supplied him with his votes.

For alt-right Christians, Russell Moore is the embodiment of where the religious right went wrong—by refusing to openly embrace racism. Throughout his youth, Griffin says, he felt alienated by Christians like Moore who were intent on “condemning racism.” He was only drawn back into Christianity when he married the daughter of Gordon Baum, a far-right Lutheran leader who co-founded the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a virulently racist group.” Griffin says he joined the CCC, as well as the white nationalist League of the South, because both groups embody the elements he views as integral to his faith: They are “pro-white, pro-Christian, pro-South.”Moore has become a popular target among alt-right Christians. The white supremacist and popular alt-right radio show host James Edwards, himself a Southern Baptist, regularly disparages Moore on his program, calling him a “cuck-Christian.” In June, after the Southern Baptist Convention banned displays of the Confederate flag, Edwards hosted Nathanael Strickland, proprietor of the Faith and Heritage blog. In a recent post, Strickland had argued that white Southerners “have faced a widespread and determined assault on our heritage, symbols, monuments, graves, and identity by secular and governmental forces,” and likened such supposed attacks to what Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf: that Germans faced “cultural extermination and ethnic cleansing.” Edwards seconded that analysis, declaring the Confederate flag “a Christian flag,” and arguing that to attack it “is to deny the sovereignty, the majesty, and the might of Lord Jesus Christ in his divine role in Southern history, culture, and life.”

Strickland recently told me that alt-right Christians see “racial differences” as “real, biological, and positive,” a view he insists is “merely a reaffirmation of traditional historical Christianity.” He argues that many on the alt-right who consider themselves atheists or pagans only lost their faith in Christianity “due to the antiwhite hatred and Marxist dogma held by the modern church.”

Strickland considers himself a “kinist,” part of the new white supremacist movement that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “uses the Bible as one of the main texts for its beliefs,” offering a powerful validation to white supremacists for their racism and anti-Semitism. Strickland sees kinism as a successor to Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement dating back to the 1960s that played a key role in the rise of Christian homeschooling. The movement’s primary goal was to implement biblical law—including public stonings—in every facet of American life.

After Trump’s victory, Edwards ferociously attacked the president-elect’s critics, Bible in hand. “The Bible says, ‘There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ and I want there to be that,” he said on his show. “Now is the time for retribution, and I want them to suffer. I want them to feel the righteous anger of a good and decent people. I want Trump to drive them into the sea.” He called on the “degenerates, perverts, and freaks,” and other “criminals who shilled for Hillary” to “make good on your promise to leave the country.” He added: “They can take Russell Moore with them on the way. That’s for sure. Good riddance. Please leave.”

Alt-right Christians like Edwards see their movement as part of a global battle for ethnic nationalism. Days before the election, neo-Nazis assembled at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to show their support for Trump. Matthew Heimbach, an alt-right Christian leader who founded the Traditionalist Worker Party, told the crowd they were in a worldwide struggle for the preservation of “ethnic, cultural, and religious integrity,” a battle that has been joined by “nationalists around the world that are fighting the same enemy.” That enemy, Heimbach said, is made up of “Jewish oligarchs and the capitalists and the bankers” who “want to enslave the entire world.” He ticked off some of the movement’s international allies: President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has overseen a Hitler-inspired campaign of extrajudicial killings, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has displaced and slaughtered millions of his own citizens. To Heimbach, Assad “is fighting to defend his people against the globalist hydra of Saudi Arabia, of the terrorist state of Israel, and United States interests.”

Heimbach, who made headlines last March for shoving a Black Lives Matter protester at a Trump rally, also draws inspiration from the far-right Russian writer Alexandr Dugin, whose book, The Fourth Political Theory, he considers “suggested reading” for all Traditionalist Worker Party members. Dugin’s writings reinforced Heimbach’s belief, he says, that “we must reject the failed and flawed concepts of democracy, capitalism, equality of ability, and multiculturalism.” To alt-right Christians like Heimbach, democracy itself is a failed and flawed concept.

Some, in fact, believe that Trump does not go far enough in defending the faith. Strickland, for example, views Trump as merely a “civic nationalist,” not a full-blown racial and ethnic nationalist like those on the alt-right. “There are four legs supporting the table of civilization,” he says. “Blood, religion, culture, and language. Civic nationalists only acknowledge the last three of those.” In Strickland’s view, the alt-right must now become Trump’s “loyal opposition,” prodding the president even further to the right. “The alt-right’s job in the coming months and years will be to solidify nationalism’s place in the Republican Party and push the importance of the fourth leg—blood.

”With the religious right now at the service of the alt-right, conservative evangelicals who opposed Trump find themselves at odds with the movement they helped to build. Reverend Rob Schenck was one of the leaders of the religious right’s war on abortion, famously getting arrested in 1992 at a women’s health clinic while carrying “Baby Tia,” a preserved fetus he claimed had been aborted. Through his organization, Faith and Action, Schenck has long provided spiritual counsel to top Washington officials, including Supreme Court justices and members of Congress like Mike Pence. Trump, he says, has no spiritual side whatsoever. “He has no facility in the language of faith,” Schenck told me in November, a week after the election. “At all. It’s not natural to him. It’s not even known to him. It’s alien.”

Two days before we spoke, Trump had announced his selection of Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist. To Schenck, the religious right’s support for the appointment was another “screaming alarm to American evangelicals that we must do some very deep soul-searching.”

But such soul-searching does not appear to be forthcoming. So far, President Trump has drawn little but praise from religious right leaders. From his first days in office, he moved swiftly to shore up their support. He quickly brought back George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” signing an executive order that bars federally funded groups not only from providing abortions to pregnant women, but from even discussing abortion as an option. And his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court thrilled even Russell Moore, who hailed the selection of “a brilliant and articulate defender of Constitutional originalism.” Trump’s strategy makes sense: He’ll keep evangelicals happy and unified by moving some of their key priorities forward—and use their support to push for what is ultimately an alt-right agenda. Schenck fears that “Trump and his gang” have exposed an evangelical culture “that doesn’t know itself.” Sitting in his Capitol Hill townhouse, Schenck picks up his copy of Ethics, by the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus was a “man for others,” Christians are called “not to hold the other in contempt, or to be afraid of the other, or contemptuous of the other.” Yet when Schenck visited evangelical churches during the Obama years, he lost count of how many times he was asked, quite earnestly: “Is the president the Antichrist?”

Schenck still holds out hope, as does Moore, that a new generation of evangelicals will ultimately reject what Trump and the alt-right represent. “I do think something is going to emerge out of this catastrophe,” he says. “It’s going to help us to define what is true evangelical religion and what is not.”

But for now, he concedes, the religious right has forfeited its moral standing by aligning itself with the alt-right’s gospel of white supremacy. “Evangelicals are a tool of Donald Trump,” Schenck says. “This could be the undoing of American evangelicalism. We could just become a political operation in the guise of a church.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/140961/amazing-disgrace-donald-trump-hijacked-religious-right

[ramrodd]

Why do so many liberals pretend the deep state does not exist?

COMMENTARY:

The structure of this question suggests that Steve Wetzel is Conservative in a crypto-Nazi agitator kind of way: it is constructed to misdirect attention away from the GOP Deep State.

There is both a Democrat Deep State and the GOP Deep State.

The Democrat Deep State is horizontal and is a broad coalition of philosophically aligned interests that Howard Dean was able to mobilize in 2008 with his 50 State Strategy to elect Obama. Rahm Emanuel took more credit for it’s performance than comes close to reality and he, Emanueal, squandered Obama’s first two years lining up his next political career like Andrew Cuomo did when he was running HUD for Clinton. His people, Emanuel’s, are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez most virulent opponents and includes Obama.

The Democrat Deep State is a shadow of the Democrat machine LBJ left for Herbert Humphrey, which almost won thanks to George Wallace, and more or less totally disintegrated with McGovern. With the exception of Carter’s administration, the Democrats haven’t had a coherent or sustained domestic program since Watergate. Obama’s election proved that the Democrats don’t need an FDR-LBJ deep state political machine to place quality people in office and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents a re-boot of the Nixon-Carter “Affirmative Action” process that was transforming the Military Industrial Complex to an Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix that is a legacy of the Democratic Socialism of Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform that Reagan inherited and the crypto-Nazis around him began replacing with the predatory Tory Socialism of Reaganomics that created the 2008 economic crises and promises to do the same as a result of the 2017 Tax Reforms. Tory Socialism is the core economic paradigm that Obama and Clinton share with Trump, McConnell, Ryan and the House Freedom Caucus, the singular difference being that Obama/Clinton structure their policy around “altruism” as defined by Ayn Rand and Trump/McConnellRyan/Freedom Caucus structure their policy around Ayn Rand’s “Virtue of Selfishness”.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic Socialism is based on the economics of Jesus. That’s why it’s radical.

After 13% of the voting public migrated out of the Democrat Deep State with George Wallace, they began to drift into the GOP Deep State, attracted to the enthusiastic racial bigotry 0f Nixon’s cultural warfare being generated by people like Pat Buchanan, who was obviously influenced by George Lincoln Rockwell during the protests at Glen Echo Park in 1954 and the success of McCarthy-Cohn in creating a lynch mob, and G. Gordon Liddy, who was an example of the crypto-Nazi element in J. E. Hoover’s FBI and all the other plumbers and 43 future felons. And, in 1972, with the rise of the Corleone family values in the collective ethos of the Harvard Business School, most of the rising generation of crime families began to migrate into GOP politics and Wall Street. And this migration was preceeded by the 1971 Powell Memo that outlined the operational agenda of the GOP Deep State, which was preceeded by the 1960 Sharon Statement, which is William F. Buckley’s crypto-Nazi manifesto establishing the modern Conservative movement and organizing the Young Americans for Freedom, which is a farm system for developing corporate crypto-Nazi career activists distributed generally through business schools and political activism at the grass roots.

And all this was in place when the crypto-Nazis that came to town with Reagan and before the GOP Deep State, as it now exists (that Steve Wetzel’s question attempts to shift attention to the Democrat Deep State) began to coalesce around Donald T. Regan as Secretary of Treasury, who was manipulating markets as SecTreasury and put it on steriods as Reagan’s Chief of Staff until Nancy recognized his treachery against her husband and America, and fired his ass.

But she couldn’t destroy the GOP Deep State that Regan left in place. Hedrich Smith’s “Who Stole The American Dream” interview captures the important elements of his book and fills in my outline of the formation of the GOP Deep State after 1971.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26HKiCR_VJA&t=8s

Noiw, elements of the GOP Deep State are identical to the Democrat Deep State and are legitimate structures of a democratic process in the context of the Hegelian synthesis of the US Constitution (the fact that the Framers anticipate Hegel reflects the especial qualities of that instrument and how Trump is trying to sabotage it for his narrow personal benefit should not be lost in the gabble of the crypto-Nazi disinformation I associate with the NRA’s version of the 2nd Amendment). Newt Gingrich copied the tactics of the Trotsky insurgency process the SDS was using as a Conservative community organizer to create GOPAC and hijack Congress with the Contract with America, which was modeled on Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Newy brags about it and GOPAC is just as legitimate as moveon.org.

But beneath these benign structures, the people behind Roger Stone, Gover Norquist, Steve Bannon and even behind Robert Murdoch and Steve Koch, are the elements which manage and distribute the Dark Money made possible by Citizens United and the enormous cash flows of the Pro-Life/Creationists Evangelical Calvinists who share John Piper’s business model and has become an essential conduit for the money laundering of Eurodollars moving to Wall Street hedge funds which employ the fiction of algorithms to hide the sources of their above average performance and cash distributions. And, at this Dark Money level, the conspiracy between the Russian criminal elements that are conducting the cyber-attack that the late election exposed hooks into the GOP Deep State. This is a transnational agenda that is engaged in destabilizing constitutional authority all over the world to create the social collapse Steve Bannon thinks is neat and John Galt makes the $ign of the Dollar over.

And this is another one of those things Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disrupts with her cash free primary victory: Democrats have never had to rely on the big money advertising-communication strategy that the Conservatives have, because their agenda is to enrich the culture and not to polarize it, but the Democrat leadership, the Obamas and Clintons and all the down-ballot old boys, have gotten a bit too cozy with this dark money cash flow and that’s why Ocasio is considered a radical: she isn’t on the payroll and all the major players are fully vested in the status quo.

Personally, as an Eisenhower Republican, I am all in for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically because of the progressive Democratic Socialism of Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform, where he doubles-down on the New Deal,

The fact that Obama and Clinton don’t recognize this is far more important than any Democrat collusion to ignore the Democrat Deep State. From what I know of the intellectual pretensions of Democrats over the year, I can believe they don’t know any better, but the fact that Steve Wetzel is trying to misdirect the conversation away from the GOP Deep State is connected to Trump’s “witch hunt” attempt to suborn Mueller’s investigation.

The good news is that Steve Wetzel probably isn’t a Russian bot.