#much less the role of blackwater in the war on terror and anything blackwater did in that role

[totodiletears]

Going through some nonfiction added to my list forever ago. I just now started Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Nonfiction about topics like this is always harder to get through because... well, shit's real. Bad shit in fiction isn't worth thinking too hard about because it's all imaginary, but this? Yeah. Serious shit.

I don't like talking too much about it when I'm reading nonfiction, but I did just read this about the state of right-wing Christian politics at the time of Blackwater's founding:

"[T]he Clinton administration was viewed by the theocons as a far-left 'regime' that was forcing a proabortion, progay, antifamily, antireligious agenda on the country. In November 1996--the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won reelection--the main organ of the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhau's journal First Things, published a 'symposium' titled 'The End of Democracy?' which bluntly questioned 'whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.' A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the 'regime,' at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities 'ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.' Erik Prince's close friend, political collaborator, and beneficiary Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays of the issue, as did extremist Judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. 'Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have,' asserted the symposium's unsigned introduction. 'This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word 'regime' we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.'"

And it's like... damn, the only thing that has changed about right-wing rhetoric is how they no longer think anything of using the word "regime" when talking about a president they hate. It's used so routinely now I doubt it would even occur to anyone to defend their use of the word. Literally everything else has stayed the same. A presidential election not going the way they want it to is THE END OF DEMOCRACY and they believe that means they are morally justified in attempting revolution.

Makes me sad, and worried too. Because it's so clear, so so clear, that this rhetoric has been around for decades. That while it may have gotten worse in the Trump era, it's not the extreme shift that it feels like. This stuff was around in basically the same form when I was a kid; I was just too much of a kid to notice. But my parents and all their church friends were still listening to it.

It's no wonder they aren't concerned about January 6th at all.