Foxes in charge

The hunger for power is never satiated.  This unfortunate dark side of the human psyche has been illustrated in countless myths and folk legends; it was described succinctly in the episode of Doctor Who called "The Face of Evil," wherein the Fourth Doctor says, "You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.  They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views.  Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

It's the danger with voting in leaders who are motivated solely by power.  They may start out seeming to have your best interests in mind, but there's no guarantee that things will stay that way.  The fact is, they owe no allegiance to you at all.  As history has shown over and over again, their only allegiance is to their sole guiding star, which is the acquisition of more power.

The people in Afghanistan are finding that out about the Taliban.  And I'm not talking about women and non-Muslims and dissidents, who were already being persecuted; I'm talking about observant, law-abiding Muslim men, who are still running afoul of the Taliban leaders' desperate desire to control every last detail of everyone's lives:

[N]ewly empowered religious morality officers, known for their white robes, have been knocking over the past four weeks on the doors of men in some parts of Kabul who haven’t recently attended mosque, according to residents.  Government employees said they fear they’ll be let go for having failed to grow their beards, and some barbers now refuse to trim them.  Increasingly, male taxi drivers are being stopped for violating gender segregation rules, by having unaccompanied female riders in their cars, or for playing music.  The new laws give the morality police authority to detain suspects for up to three days.  In severe cases, such as repeated failure to pray in the mosque, suspects can be handed over to courts for trial and sentencing based on their interpretation of Islamic sharia law.  Violations of the new rules are expected to be punished by fines or prison terms.  But people found guilty of some infractions, for example adultery, could be sentenced to flogging or death by stoning.  Amir, a resident who lives in eastern Afghanistan, said he supported the Taliban up until the latest restrictions.  But he now feels bullied into submission by their morality police.  "We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not.  But it’s unacceptable to use force on us," he said.  He added, "Even people who have supported the Taliban are now trying to leave the country."

Which immediately made me think of this:

The parallels with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are obvious.  How anyone, at this point, can think that Donald Trump is interested in anything besides the continuing glorification of Donald Trump is beyond me.  He has made it clear that his agenda is to destroy anyone who won't buy into the DJT-worship cult, by whatever means necessary.

If you think this is all bluster, all you have to do is read the manifesto of Project 2025, which explicitly mandates a reformulation of America into a straight, white, Christian, conservative, male-dominated oligarchy.  (Or simply listen to one of J. D. Vance's speeches -- there's no soft-pedaling there.  He brings "saying the quiet part out loud" to new heights.)  They've even recommended "head-of-household voting" -- giving a single vote per household, where the husband casts the vote, effectively disenfranchising women completely.  (Although they graciously say they'll allow single women to vote.)  And yet there are still women who support this candidate and this party, which baffles the absolute hell out of me.

The problem is, once you give people like this power, they seldom stop where you think they will.  Okay, so maybe you're a devout Christian, and you think having a theocratic government based on Christian ideals is a nifty idea.  What happens when it turns out that the people you elected think you're not the right kind of Christian?  Or that you're not Christian enough?  The Puritans found that out the hard way.  They started out as a movement against corruption and laxity in the church at the time (which were not undeserved criticisms), but found themselves on the receiving end of the attentions of people who made it their life's work to punish everything and everyone that didn't fit their harsh, narrow views of morality and religion.  (Witness the law in colonial America requiring people to attend church twice a day.  The penalty for breaking that one was a public whipping.  Around the same time, one Captain Kemble was sentenced to the stocks for kissing his wife in public -- after being away at sea for three years.)

If you think the architects of Project 2025, and the MAGA movement in general, have the least concern for your own personal well-being, you're fooling yourself.  Maybe at the moment your beliefs and behaviors are in line with their vision for the country, but don't count on that lasting.  Give these people power, and that vision will constrict further and further.  Anyone left outside the circle will find themselves unexpectedly becoming targets -- as Amir and his friends in Afghanistan have discovered.

But by that time, there's nothing that can be done about it.  Through their own free choice, people put foxes in charge of the henhouse, then they wonder at the slaughter that follows.

This is the heart of the famous quote by Pastor Martin Niemöller.  Niemöller was a Lutheran minister, and initially supported Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism.  He only began to wise up when he saw that the Nazis, once in power, weren't content with what they had, but moved to take over every institution and every facet of public life, including the churches.  At that point, he began to object, but it was far too late.  During the war years he was imprisoned in various concentration camps (he was one of the lucky survivors), and afterward, spent the rest of his life working to atone for the mistakes he'd made.  After the war, he wrote the lines that have since become deservedly famous:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and by then, there was no one left to speak for me.

In our case, it's not too late.  Make no mistake; the people behind Project 2025 are deadly serious, and given the opportunity, they will no more put the brakes on their power grab than the Taliban have.  And once in charge, they will be equally hard to dislodge.  This goes way beyond liberal versus conservative, or even religious versus non-religious.

Just as the people in Germany found out eighty years ago, and the people in Afghanistan are finding out today, this is about the destruction of democracy and its replacement by an authoritarian dictatorship.

Make the right choice when you vote in November.  It's the only chance we have.

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Empowering lunacy

The whole "they're weird" thing seems to be getting under the Republicans' skin.

J. D. Vance took the opportunity in an interview with Dana Bash a couple of days ago to object to the characterization, saying the whole thing is happening only because Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are "uncomfortable with their policy positions."

"They’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better," said Vance, whose running mate didn't comment because he was too busy shaking his fist and shouting at Crazy Kambala, Sleepy Joe, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, Gavin Newscum, Shifty Adam Schiff, Deranged Jack Smith, Crooked Hillary, and Pocahontas.

The thing is, a great many of the most fervent Trump supporters are weird.  Dangerously so.  Take two just from the past week, which are good examples but hardly the only ones. The first is from the program Flashpoint on wildly popular evangelical Christian Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel.  Copeland has been a consistent and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, which still strikes me as bizarre given that Trump's main claim to fame is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in a single person.  But if you think that's strange, the pronouncement made by "Prophet Joseph Z" on Flashpoint a few days ago is more peculiar still.

In fact, Joseph Z seems to be so far from reality that he would not be able to see it even if you handed him a powerful telescope.

Here's what Joseph Z said about vice presidential nominee Tim Walz:

I believe very clearly the spirit of the Lord is making a way for the body of Christ to go through in this time.  And you know even when we bring up guys like Tim Walz and look at what’s going on, people say he’s you know midwestern folksy, I have another word for him, being from Minnesota myself, and it’s weird.  The guy’s just weird.  You see the way he hugs his wife.  You see the way he does everything.  I believe the Spirit of the Lord is letting them overextend their reach.  I believe he’s giving them a sense of confidence that’s actually going to be a surprise silver lining turnaround in this whole narrative.  I believe the spirit of the Lord is going to bring victory and breakthrough.  And you know it’s interesting how the spirit of Antichrist just loves to pick these people that fit right in with the wicked overlord lizard mafia that is really driven by their goblin masters, and when you’re looking at this, I believe that’s exactly what we’re facing right now—a spirit of Antichrist that wants to have its way.

Sure!  Of course!  Goblin masters and the lizard mafia!  But Tim Walz is the weird one, we promise!

You would think that after something like that, the moderator would have realized that it sounded like lunacy ('cuz it is), and would have been at least a little embarrassed, or inclined to backpedal on what had just been said in order to reassure listeners.

You would be wrong.

Instead, the moderator, Gene Bailey, vouched for Joseph Z's credibility, and said "we take what we put on the air very seriously."  Not a hint of "... but this dude is nuttier than squirrel shit."

The second one revolves around Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025 and author of Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, both of which should scare the absolute hell out of everyone who's not to the right of Attila the Hun.  The Trump campaign has finally acknowledged that Roberts and Project 2025 are dangerously extreme ('cuz they are), and have tried to distance themselves from it -- with Trump saying publicly that he had no idea who put the plan together, despite the fact that 140 of the collaborators on the project worked for his administration, and six were Cabinet members. 

Of course, he also swore that he had never met Roberts in his life:

So maybe trusting anything Trump says is not such a hot idea.

To say the content of Dawn's Early Light is one long paean to paranoid fascism is, if anything, an understatement.  America is in peril, Roberts says, because of "pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally-voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros-funded police abolitionist district attorneys, [and] hipster trust fund socialists."  He decries what he perceives as the loss of Christian hegemony in the United States (despite the fact that around seventy percent of Americans still self-identify as Christian, and in some parts of the country it's damn near impossible to get elected unless you do).  Mankind, he says, "is made to worship, and our republic depends on the moral strength and habits of heart brought about by piety."  Before you get your hopes up that he might be including other religions in this assessment, it's explicitly stated that he's not talking about just any kind of piety, but a specific one.  "American society is rooted in the Christian faith," he writes.  "Certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of 'religious freedom' or 'diversity, equity, and inclusion.'"

You're free to worship as you choose, apparently, but you damn well better choose right.

How will he and his cronies accomplish all of this?  Well, he's going to start with destroying "every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy."

This stuff is so extreme that I feel obliged to state for the record that I didn't make up any of these quotes.  (If you're curious, he apparently singled out the Loudoun County Public Schools because of a rape case that he says was committed by a male student dressing like a female to access a girl's bathroom -- a claim that was not substantiated at the hearing.)

Now, don't @ me about how you're a Republican and you don't agree with this stuff.  I'm sure that's true.  I have conservative-leaning friends who probably would say the same.  However, in this election, you need to realize that if you vote Republican you are empowering and legitimizing the people who do believe all of this, and who if elected will do their damndest to make sure it's all set in place.  

The fact that there are people who have a conservative approach to governance doesn't bother me in the slightest; we may disagree, but we can discuss it civilly.  But there is no discussion with people like Kenneth Copeland, Gene Bailey, and Kevin Roberts.  They don't want to work with the opposition and come to consensus.

They want the opposition eradicated -- violently, if necessary.

I usually don't frame things so starkly, but this November we have a choice.  One side of the ticket has inextricably allied itself with the extreme right-wing lunatic fringe, which is comfortable talking about the Antichrist's lizard mafia and Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, and act as if what they're saying is completely rational.  The fact that "some members of the GOP don't believe this" is actually irrelevant, because they're not the ones who are going to come out on top if Donald Trump wins.

This fall we have a choice between sense and nonsense, between empowering reasonable policy and empowering lunacy.  Whatever party you belong to, whatever your political leanings, there's nothing more to it than that.

I know which way I'm voting.

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