Category Archives: Politics & Religion

A Crusade of lies against the Clintons

Rush Limbaugh was very popular among the American right, particularly in rural America. But Limbaugh was not a sterling example of a man with good character.

On the David Lettermen television show Rush Limbaugh attacked the Clintons as he always did but he even attacked their daughter Chelsea who was only 12 years old. He made a joke by comparing her unfavorably to the family dog. Nothing was too low for Limbaugh, particularly when attacking liberals. No tactics are off the table in a religious war.

He attacked them bitterly over the death of Vince Foster.  He said on his show that a Washington consulting firm was about to publish a story that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton! Foster was a childhood friend of Bill Clinton and joined the White House administration as counsel and was involved in scandals that in hindsight were pretty minor.  Nothing compared to the later Trump administration scandals. Foster was depressed, anxious and over worked. His death was investigated by 2 police agencies, a coroner, 2 independent counsels, and 2 Congressional Committees. All said his death was a suicide. But all this was nothing beside the fax that was sent to Rush Limbaugh.  The implication of the fax was clear—Clintons were murderers!  This brought polarization into American politics at a whole new level of extremism.  And Limbaugh was proud of his efforts.

Of course, there were many right-wing conspiracies about Foster. One of those was that Foster was assassinated to keep him from testifying against the Clintons. Or that he had been blackmailed by Israel over a secret Swiss bank account. Or that his death was the consequence of a secret tryst with—you got it—Hillary Clinton. Who else? Once more there was no evidence to support this. It was all lies manufactured somewhere on the right where these things are spawned. (and I am not denying that there have been lies on the left as well) But they have really found a congenial home on the right.

Rush Limbaugh helped embed conspiracy theories permanently inside the Republican party. Conspiracies were there to stay. They are still there in abundance. He had gone a long way toward convincing American conservatives that their president and a future presidential candidate were murderers who would stop at nothing to get their political way.  This was a religious crusade. And religious crusades always end badly and don’t allow truth to get in their way.

The crusade against the Clintons has been a remarkable phenomenon in American politics for about 2 decades.  And it is not ending any time soon.  Crusades can do that. American right-wing talk radio has been a big part of that.  Now I do not claim the Clinton’s were entirely innocent political actors.  I am saying though that they have been the object of an unprecedented massive campaign of lies that has been building for decades. Such a mountain of lies would be difficult for a saint to overcome, and for the Clintons it was impossible.

Many of us did not appreciate this when Hillary ran for the presidency in 2016. No matter how absurd, the lies accumulated and had tremendous effect.  After all, how could she combat a campaign that painted her as the leader of a cabal of pedophiles operating out of the non-existent  basement of a pizza restaurant basement in Washington D.C.?  No possible evidence could refute such a massive lie.

Rush Limbaugh played an important role in manufacturing, spreading, and solidifying this campaign of lies.

As Justin Ling said in his podcast series on CBC “The Flamethrowers”,

“The conspiracy theory was here to stay, thanks in large part to Rush Limbaugh. No longer were the Clintons conventional political villains. They were murderers! But whether or not the Vince Foster story really took hold in the minds of Limbaugh, he was leading a political crusade—and he was winning.”

 

 

The result was what one political commentator called “a seismic shift to the right tonight in American political thinking. It is measuring 10.0 on the political Richter scale.” It was massive; it was powerful; and it was created by Rush Limbaugh and his revolutionary cabal of right-wing radio commentators around the country.

It was intensely visible in 1998 in the American mid-term elections. The Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954. They picked up 54 seats in the House and enough seats to claim the Senate as well. It was the worst loss suffered by a sitting President in 50 years.

There was one clear lesson from all of this: Conspiracy theories work.

And the Republicans did not forget that lesson then, and have not forgotten it since.

Hooray for Our Side

 

Stephen Stills wrote and sang  a wonderful song when he was with the band Buffalo Springfield. It is a classic embodying a lot of the good from the 1960s which I still think of as my time.  The song is very appropriate for the current times.  Here are the lyrics:

 

For What It’s Worth

There’s something happening here

But what it is ain’t exactly lear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop

Children, what’s that sound?

Everybody look – what’s going down?

 

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Young people speaking’ their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

 

It’s time we stop

Hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look – what’s going down?

 

What a field day for the heat

A thousand people in the street

Singing songs and carrying signs

Mostly saying, “hooray for our side”

 

It’s time we stop

Hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look – what’s going down?

 

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 

We better stop

Hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look – what’s going down?

I think this song written in the 1960s sums up a lot of what’s happening in the Middle East now.

Religion has declined in much of the world. In fact, I would argue it has declined most strongly in those areas where it appears to be most vociferously present. My wife Christiane used to have a pin that said something like this “When religion turns to hate, it is no longer religion.” When religion declined it transformed into politics and became hate it turns into the most ugly form of politics imaginable.  A long way from the holy. When that happens the “other side” is transformed from the other side to the devil. This is what demonization does. By definition it dehumanizes the other.

Sometimes this is done by ignoring the other. For example, when Israel ignores Hamas or treats them with disdain as it has done for more than 15 years, it dehumanizes them. Hamas of course, treated Israel with vicious hate when it attacked them on October 7th of this year.   Dehumanization again.

The first step in the process of dehumanization, as happened in Rwanda in the 1990s is to call the other side non-humans. Like pests as happened there. It happened again in Israel when their defense Minister called Hamas “human animals.” That gives them the license to kill.

This is what leads to the conflagration in the Middle East. Now we all have to live with it.

The Demon on the other Side

 

 

Both sides in the Hamas/Israeli war are governed by religious extremists. And both are doing a very bad job. When such leaders are in charge it is a near certainty that the “other side” will be demonized. That is what extreme religions are all about. After all, the other side is by definition “of the devil.”

 The other side becomes non-human when extremist leaders are in command, as they are on both sides in the Israeli/Hamas fight.

As Fintan O’Toole said in his article in the New York Review of Books,

 

“The Hamas incursion, in which more people died violently in Israel in a single day than ever before in the turbulent history of the state, is frightful. Even in the present state of the world, the murder, wounding, and kidnapping of so many defenseless civilians is shocking in its depravity. Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend, shows that it cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s. The dehumanization of the whole population of Gaza by Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who said that “we are fighting against human animals,” and his explicit threat to deprive civilians of food and electricity are also profoundly disturbing. Retaliation against noncombatants has been established as Israel’s equal and opposite reaction to Hamas’s crimes and it foreshadows horrors even greater than the many hundreds of Gazans already killed by Israeli air strikes. Yet none of this is truly surprising. Nothing justifies these assaults, but when violence has become the only means of communication, everyone knows that its language will be spoken—and not in whispers but in screams.”

 When you are on the side of God fighting,  the others are on the side of the Devil it is impossible to see anything other than black and white. There are no longer any colours, let alone grays.  All other vision is dimmed by blood and hate and certainty. All truth and right is on “our” side and all falsehood and evil on the this of “them.”

Both sides in this awful fight in the Middle East are making the same mistake because they are both led by the same type of people—religious extremists. As Bob Dylan said, and as I keep quoting, “You don’t count the dead with God on your side.” Both Hamas and Israel are convinced—absolutely convinced—that God is on their side.

Religion has declined in much of the world. In fact, I would argue it has declined most strongly in those areas where it appears to be vociferously present. My wife Christiane used to have a pin that said something like this “When religion turns to hate, it is no longer religion.” When religion declined it transformed into politics.  The most ugly form of politics imaginable. When that happens the “other side” is transformed from the other side to the devil. This is what demonization does. By definition it dehumanizes the other.

 

Sometimes this is done by ignoring the other. For example, when Israel ignores Hamas or treats them with disdain as it has done for more than 15 years, it dehumanizes them. Hamas of course, treated Israel with vicious hate when it attacked them on October 7th of this year.   Dehumanization again.

 

The first step in the process of dehumanization, as happened in Rwanda in the 1990s is to call the other side non-humans. Like pests as happened there. It happened again in Israel when their defense Minister called Hamas “human animals. That gives Israel the license to kill.  We should not be surprised when the license is used.

This is what leads to the conflagration in the Middle East.

The Blood-dimmed Tide

 

The problem in the Israeli/Hamas conflict that is not present in all conflicts, is that  where religious extremists are in positions of influence or power, is that matters are exponentially worse when both sides are led by religious zealots. Neither side wants to compromise with the devil. That is crucial to making the conflict there a wicked problem.

 

Fintan O’Toole in his article in the New York Review of Books, described the situation this way in his article:

 

“In the Book of Judges, where we find the Samson story, God has delivered the children of Israel into subjugation by their enemies as punishment because they “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.” As it happens, Hamas’s forebearers, the Muslim Brotherhood, held the same belief. The Harvard scholar of the Middle East Sara Roy tells us that, after Israel’s victory in the war of 1967, “the Brethren in Gaza especially remained convinced that the loss of Palestine was God’s punishment for neglecting Islam.” It seems that God has a peculiar way of chastising his various chosen peoples in Israel and Palestine: by inflicting them on each other. With millenarian religious believers in power on both sides of the Gaza wall, it seems that this blood-dimmed vision is again being played out as reality.”

 

This reference to “blood dimmed vision” may be an allusion to the words of an Irish Poet, William Butler Yeats in his famous poem “The Second Coming.”

 No one understands the toxic blend of religious extremism and politics better than the Irish. Sadly, they have a wealth of experience that informs the opinions of people like Fintan O’Toole and William Butler Yeats and others.  Yeats put it this way in that poem which he wrote nearly almost exactly 100 years ago:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

That is precisely the point. When the religious zealots are left loose the innocents will indeed be drowned. Vision on both sides will be blinded by blood.

There was a powerful example of that today. Israel bombed a refugee camp—the largest in Gaza—when it was “aiming” at a place where a Hamas leader or two was believed to be. They missed. I don’t yet know how many civilians were killed.as a result. How many civilian deaths  would it take before such an attack would be a war crime?

 

Religious Extremism in Israel and Gaza

 

When religion morphs into politics, or politics into religion, there is likely nothing that produces uglier results. As, perhaps no one understands this better than the Irish.

Something that is too often ignored in the incendiary Middle East is the enormous and shattering effect of religious extremism. The problem is that both sides ignore it in their own tribe, while lambasting it in the other.

Fintan O’Toole, an Irishman writing regularly in the New York Review of Books, knows this better than most and he  asked a crucially important question: “What lessons do people actually learn from the cruelties they applaud and the ones they suffer in return?” We should remember the wise counsel in Matthew 7:3-5: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”  And no one ignores this advice more and also needs it more. than religious zealots.

O’Toole’s article centred around a story in what we call the Old Testament and others call the Hebrew Bible.  That article referred to what he called a

 “a Jewish legend” in which “the great warrior Samson ends up, as John Milton famously puts it,eyeless in Gaza.” He is blinded by the Philistines and harnessed to a huge millstone, forced to drag himself around and around in circles, always moving but unable to go anywhere. Eventually, in the most spectacular of suicides, he gets his revenge by pulling down their temple on top of the Philistines, killing both them and himself. The story is apparently supposed to be heroic, but it feels more like a fable of vicious futility. Cruelty begets cruelty until there is nothing left but mutual destruction.”

 

The current horrid war between Israel and Hamas is exactly that—”a fable of  vicious futility.” The story is a cautionary tale to those of us who are too quick to say revenge is justified, or retaliation a duty. If we can understand that nothing is gained by a thirst for revenge perhaps we can learn a better way. Israelis were attacked by cruel and vicious butchers who targeted women, children and old people and Israel sought revenge. The Israeli’s say that unlike the Palestinians they do not target civilians or children or women or old people, but they know that by attacking the Palestinians in Gaza where 2 million people live in one of the most densely packed places in the world, they will hurt, injure and kill women, children, old people and innocent bystanders. That is unavoidable.

 Saying “we are not aiming to kill them” is not enough. Rather it shows that Israel really doesn’t care if civilians are hurt.  Some Israelis have said as much publicly. Such indifference to suffering can be summed up in the words of that great American philosopher Bob Dylan: “you don’t count the dead with God on your side.” In other words, it shows—clearly shows—that the problem with handing over war policy to religious zealots is that unnecessary harms will follow as certainly as night follows day.

Religious zealots are truly, inevitably, indifferent to the suffering of those in the “other” religious camp. That is because there is no reason for them to count the dead.

 Israel has democratically elected the religious extremists that now wield the vital votes Netanyahu needs to hold onto power in order to deflect attention from the corruption charges he is facing, or perhaps, better yet, the votes he needs to dissolve the charges against him. For the better part of 2 decades now Israel has reliably elected extremist political leaders knowing, but ignoring, the fact that this would certainly lead to a bonfire of violence. So the Israel population is deeply complicit.

The Palestinians on the other have had religious extremists baked into Hamas DNA right from the outset of that organization in 2006.  It has never been without controlling religious extremists. They elected the religious extremists more than a decade ago, and even though they have not had a second chance to vote them out in a democratic election, their acquiescence in the continued leadership of religious extremists makes them complicit as well.

Neither nation can claim innocence. The people on both sides have chosen extremism and the people are now paying a huge price for this mistake. Both sides should eject their extremists at the helm. There is no other way except mutual destruction.

 

A Safe Place to Hate.

 

There had been a lot of social change just before Rush Limbaugh arrived on the scene. There was gay liberation, women’s rights, and liberalism. Many felt they could no longer say what they wanted to say. Political correctness was seen as a stifling chain. They also thought no one was speaking like them or to them. They were ignored and invisible. As Justin Ling said in his CBC. Radio series , “In the universe of right-wing media compared to the Wall Street Journal and like the later Fox News Limbaugh’s listeners were older, whiter, more conservative, and more religious. For this slice of America Limbaugh created a safe space.” He created a safe place to hate.

Surprisingly, because there was a Republican in the White House, as Ling said, “he convinced these old, white, conservative, and religious Americans that they were disenfranchised!” Even though they were in the majority! It was pure alchemy. He told them they were looked down on. He milked them for their resentment—the elixir of devils. As Ling said, “He formed a kind of counterculture; a resistance against the liberals, and the progressives, and the feminists.”

In the mid-80s he syndicated to about 50 stations across the country but by 1990 he got 450 affiliates. He was the rock star of talk radio and the conservative movement. He led a Rush to Excellence Tour to various stadiums around the country with as many as 10,000 people.  As Justin Ling said, “Limbaugh declared a culture war”. Limbaugh put it this way:

“We are in the midst of a culture war. What are rights? This culture war illustrates precisely what is going on. We in America are in the midst—it’s an exciting time to be alive—we are in the midst of a redefinition of who is going to define right and wrong, what the punishment is going to be for those who violate the limits that we place on our behavior. We are arguing about who has the right to tell us what is right and what is wrong. We’re arguing over what censorship is And to me its pretty scary.”

 

And there it is again—fear—the secret sauce of paranoia and right-wing hysteria.

Like Trump later, Limbaugh went from being a spoiled rich kid to a champion of the working class. People all over America were starting to take notice of Limbaugh. I remember at the time hearing about him from a friend of mine, a trucker. Truckers loved Limbaugh, just like they later loved Trump and basically for the same reasons. They liked to have a wrecking ball in their corner as did my friend the trucker, and much later the truckers convoy in Ottawa in 2022. They got a rush from Rush Limbaugh.

As Justin Ling said, “On his radio show he was the voice of God on a one way street. And he loved nothing better than to run over liberal women. On his radio show he said, “this is a show devoted to what I think.” On the Dave Lettermen show he said people were bugged by him because “I have almost a monopoly on the truth.” No one could ever accuse Limbaugh of humility. Humility was a liberal vice. And his fans loved it.  He also said “This is a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator. There is no first amendment here except for me.”

Now he was entitled to be the dictator of his own show. If we don’t like it, we don’t have to listen to it.

 

A New Religious War

 

Carl McIntire was an important part of this wave of talk radio in America. According to Justin Ling in his podcast Flame Throwers, as absurd as this sounds to the modern listener, McIntyre, like Coughlin before him,  gave the people what they wanted—lengthy sermons.” Most modern listeners would rather go for a root canal than listen to long sermons, but at the time in the US in particular they were very popular.  Yet, McIntire provided what he called “The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” and it was immensely popular. Religion and politics is often considered a poisonous stew, but in right wing radio it is magic. Black magic perhaps, but magic.

 

Much of right-wing talk radio was driven by fears.  The first of those fears was creeping socialism or even worse, communism. The second fear was the rise of ecumenism or the progressive wing of Christianity.  Those 2 fears would not generate much fear today, but in the early 60s that was real and scary stuff. Often the two fears were tied together to make the fears exponentially more explosive.  The National Council of Churches was representative of this opposition and McIntire obsessed over it. According to Ling, when he used the word “secularism” you could hear and see the venom in his speech. It was like spit being ejected with extreme distaste. Both of these of course, were generated by conspiracy theories that pointed to a takeover by these forces. Secularism was liberalism—evil in other words. He did not hesitate to suggest, without evidence of course, that they were Communist sympathizers. Fellow travelers in other words. Religion and politics in other words in unholy matrimony.

 

Ling’s podcast brought us Clarence E. Manion, another religious zealot and right-wing true believer,  bellowing, “This is not a political war, this is not an economic war, this is not even a military war, this is a religious war at bottom.” And this brought together religion and politics into a constantly heated toxic brew. In America at least, it is still today a religious war—i.e. the worst kind of war. Manion of course was a committed Catholic who loved to use radio. He said “Communism could not succeed in atmosphere of religious belief and practice.”

 

Another militant in this spirit was Billy James Hargis who led “the Christin crusade.” The name of course is important and tells us a lot all by itself. He said, “I believe that the National Council of Churches is an instrument of Satan.” Right-wing extremists always go after those in their own movement who are not extreme enough often with more hate than their liberal enemies.  To many of us this seems rather extreme. Because it is extreme. But in its day, this was dynamite. Such attacks were what Ling said was “a very successful formula.” The Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians ate it up. In 1956 Carl McIntire was on two national radio shows, one in Pennsylvania and another in Georgia. By 1960 he was on more than 100 radio stations and more than 400 by 1964.

 

Even though many of us (like me) have probably never heard of him, according to Justin Ling, “It was staggering how much affect McIntire had on the conservative movement in America. The National Review magazine, a prestigious right wing journal,  had 73,000 subscribers while McIntire had 23 million listeners! I have definitely heard of the National Review and their influence paled in comparison. Radio not literature was the King of the Right-Wing movement in America.

 

People like McIntire were instrumental in what became the “Southern Strategy” the movement to take the American south from liberal democrats in favor of conservative Republicans. Ling said “McIntire played a kind of John the Baptist role preparing the way for a kind of partisan transformation of the south from deep Democrat to deep Republican. They do so by playing on racist segregationist fears.”  He was important in convincing them their support of segregation was not racist. It was valid. It was ordained by God. Even though he was based in the north, half of his stations were in the south. By playing on racist fears, they helped move the south from the Democrats to the Republicans. This strategy proved very effective in getting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan get elected. Fear and religion always play a vital role in this right-wing  movement. Race and fear go together like love and marriage. Or pee and porcelain to quote a friend of mine.

 

The Religious  Mob

 

In the amazing novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it is discovered that a slave has escaped from his master, a mob of white people—mainly good Christian white people—got excited and gave horrific chase to the slave aided and abetted by his young white friend. These were good ordinary citizens of America. They believed it was their religious duty to give chase to an escaped black slave and return him to his owner. Of course, it helped that they might reap a $40 reward from the owner. Is that all it takes?

 

Azar Nafisi was a Muslim woman living in Iran who taught Huckleberry Finn to young Islamic men and women.  By and large these students were respectful of the tyrannical regime in their country. Like good American citizens, they were good citizens and good Muslims? What would they think of Huck Finn?

The book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is as I have been saying a book about freedom and resistance to authority.  Those are both characteristics that have usually been absent in Iran. At least that was true until recently, when there have been some rebellion led by young women resisting the authority of the government to impose dress requirements upon them, as well as other even more important impositions on their freedom. The women have demonstrated uncommon bravery in the face of that tyranny. A number of them have been killed by the government for their opposition.

Mark Twain in that brilliant book showed how an uneducated white boy and his black slave friend revolted against the “conscience” of the nation. Most people in America, at the time, believed in the racial superiority of whites and in their absolute right to do as they saw fit with the inferior black race in their midst.

Nafisi said this about the book:

“It looks at how ordinary decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been the question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran”.

 

How can good people wreak such havoc on other more vulnerable good people? Is a $40 reward all it takes?

Yet the young students of Iran largely supported the rebellious position of Huck. They applauded his actions in refusing to return the slave to the master.

Even though they were good Muslims, they did not support the religious mob! I found that interesting.

The Other War in Ukraine

 

In north eastern Italy an Orthodox Ukrainian Church leader in Budinay (SP) is leading a revolt by his flock of Ukrainian and Russian immigrants against its mother church in Moscow to join the Istanbul based Orthodox church instead whose leader has criticized the war. The leader of the Russian based church has taken a very different approach. There are roughly 100 million Russian Orthodox, the largest church within Orthodox Christianity. Their leader is “Patriarch Kirill who has framed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in holy terms.” Kirill has been publicly preaching against the decadence of the western world including its excess consumption, “gay pride parades.”  He said, in talking of the Ukraine war “we are talking about human salvation. Andrey Sonitsyn from Russia says “Krill is supporting the war in Ukraine.”

 

Father Cyril Hovorun said “the church is the main supplier of Putin’s ideology.”  He was ordained by Krill. He says the weapons for the war come from the Kremlin but the ideas come from the church. He believes that for Putin this was is  “a sacred operation…a mission from God to purge the world of the western ideas and western values.” He saw this ideology emerging when he worked in Russia. He protested against that but lost that battle.  During the Communist era, the church was required to push Soviet ideals and it is widely believed in Russia that Kirill was in fact a member of the KGB.

 

Hovorun believes that Krill was not enthusiastic about being part of the Soviet government. He calls it a “marriage of convenience not love.”  They have to tolerate each other because each uses the skills and resources of the other. Rather than fighting each other, they co-operate with each other, “each for their own end.”

 

The resources of each of those two major powers in Russia are vast. Sergei Chapnin  also worked for Kirill. According to him, Kirill is “by rough estimations a billionaire and is in fact one of the oligarchs.” He sees him as just like the other oligarchs with financial interests.  He also sees the church as “a state propaganda machine spreading Putin’s message as the defender of conservative values against a morally corrupt west. Chapnin even sees his expansionist ambitions as even exceeding those of Putin.”  He thinks Krill’s main goal is power and influence.

So power and influence is being purchased by a church leader joining forces in an unholy matrimony—sounds like Christian fascism to me as Timothy Snyder called it in his book The Road to Unfreedom.

All of this proves once again, that when politics and religion mate they can breed monsters.

Christian Hate

 

To me it is a fundamental position that Christians should not hate. They should love. Yet often that is not true. Often they hate.

In the United States far right groups traditionally attack racial minorities, but those are large groups. If you want support from non-whites you have to attack smaller groups such as trans-gender Americans. That is what the current far right is doing in America. Many of those are of course Christians. Take almost any hated group and away you can go. It does not take much for Americans to join an anti-racial parade. Vilify a small group and soon you will have wide-spread support for your cause.

If you attack a tiny group you can gather a large group  against them.  This is what Americans have been doing.  Then you can gather a lot of people to join our hateful attacks on very small minorities. Unfortunately, there are often many Americans who want to do exactly that.

As Jason Stanley an American philosopher and expert on fascism said,

“In the United States the audience includes white nationalists who very prominently want to return to a white state that prioritizes white Christianity. So they say they have black Americans who join them in their antipathy against LGBT citizens. It is always about gathering a larger coalition by ever greater vilification  of a small minority while winking to the large  part of the coalition that this is really helping. In the case of the United States that would be white Christianity.”

 

One should never underestimate the power of hate among small groups. Smart politicians know how to enlist such power and amplify it. Often such tactics are used to enhance the interests of white Christianity. Hence we get what Timothy Snyder referred to as Christian fascism which often attacks small sexual groups that are easy to dominate and quick to catch the attention of haters.

There was a recent piece in the New York Times by Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham that reported on The growing religious fervour in the American right. They call it a Jesus movement.”  The far-right movement is increasingly drawing in devout Christians.

As Stanley said,

“That’s because the global fascist movement presents itself as a defender of traditional values. And this is not new. This is textbook fascist politics. If you look at Joseph Goebbels’s speech, “Communism with the masks off,” in 1935, Goebbels says that Jewish Bolshevism is threatening religious faith in Christianity and that the only protection is National Socialism.”

 

Once more, this is Christian fascism. So what Putin is doing is reviving these themes. He is saying liberalism is a threat to tradition. Of course liberalism is not a threat. Liberalism says my Orthodox Jewish brothers may live as they want and other people who aren’t religious can also live however they want. Tolerance for other views is the bedrock of liberalism. However, Christian fascism says Judaism is a threat to its hegemony and must be resisted.

 

Of course, this is not about truth. This is about creating fear among people who chose to live traditionally that they are under attack and this approach in the US, Russia and many other places has been very successful.  As Stanley said,

 

This is about persuading people that other people’s choices threaten them and in particular, threaten their children, and then they say to them, ‘Look they are going after your children. You need us to protect you.”

 

This is a very effective strategy and has been used by authoritarians and fascists many times. It is so effective because it is so easy for us to fear our children are in danger. In its most extreme and absurd recent incarnation this has been the strategy of QAnon followers.  They get people to believe their children are in danger of pedophiles. That is guaranteed to arouse quick and hostile response especially in countries where such fears are rampant such as the United States and Russia. Sexual insecurity adds an existential edge to such fears. It is so effective people are quick to believe totally absurd claims.

 

In both countries conservative members of society are easily convinced that their children are in danger because traditional values have been undermined by liberals. As a result, traditionalist are quick to abandon democracy in favour of the protection of a strong autocratic leader.

 

This is what Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on April 6, 2022:  “Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophilia politics.”  It doesn’t matter that it is absurd. It matters that it triggers fear.

Hari Sreenivasan who interviewed Jason Stanley on PBS quoted this: “In a recent poll 49% of Republicans said it was definitely or probably true that top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”

These are now going viral in conservative Christian circles in particular in the US and elsewhere. This is not a small group of people in the US.  Congresswomen are part of it. This is widespread hair-brained thinking.

As Stanley reminded us, QAnon is clearly descended from “blood libel” and the “protocols of the elders of Zion”,  the conspiracy theories that Jews were stealing Christian babies for their religious rituals. It is a conspiracy theory that there is a global cabal of elites and they are seeking to conquer institutions to get at your children.

To these conspiracy theorist if “their men” cannot stand up to this they are not real men because they are going after women and children and all real men must stand up to defend them.  As Stanley said, “It is that level of fear and paranoia that has seeped into…and permeated much of American politics.”

 American Christian fascism, the ugly American twin of Russian Christian fascism.