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The Oxytocin of the Masses

Largely forgotten—unless we look back at countless photos and footage of the violence—are the Christian banners and flags, the wooden crosses, the impromptu praise and worship sessions, the “Jesus Saves” signs, the Christian t-shirts, and the infamous corporate prayer in Jesus name in the Senate Chamber. Having stormed the sanctum of American democracy, the “QAnon Shaman” thanked God for “filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ,” allowing them to send a message to their enemies “that this is our nation not theirs.”

TIME, “January 6th May Have Been Only the First Wave of Christian Nationalist Violence”, January 6, 2022.

I don’t know what he means about poetry, but the trust in the scientific process must be soberly accepted. But in a pandemic where it is an article of religious faith, Meanwhile, in the country of my birth, an erupting real (soon to become bloodier) civil war is being spoken to by a sitting President of the United States of America — about a former “defeated President“, he says! — this astounding clip from today’s commemoration of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol — the first operation of the continuing right-wing insurrection which definitely WILL, I sadly can guarantee you, will spiral into armed conflict. Dangerous dangerous instability in a nuclear power facing off with autocratic governments and their territorial expansionism. Wow – – what a time we are in. We really really must wake up.

Read the entire article here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/30/most-white-americans-who-regularly-attend-worship-services-voted-for-trump-in-2020/

So, there is a coordinated assault against rationality. We have seen the consequences of the fervor they harbor for the End Times, the biblical “tipping points” which our climate apocalypse is all too happy to supply: pestilence, heat, drought, fire, Death. And the majority of this mindset wishes the Rapturing would get started soon.and wish to arrive quickly, in their own lifetime.

I remember distinctly a segment on “Real Time” immediately following the election where Bill Maher showed how actually — factually, scientifically population sampled — the counties that voted the most for Trump in 2016 were also among the counties with the highest rates of opioid addiction. Nihilism, fed by the opiate of the masses.

An important article in “Time” yesterday said exactly what I have been perceiving and saying about this regressive right, with their guns and their patriot-fetishisizing. I have said to many that we are in the beginning stages of a civil war founded out of the anti-rationalistic, anti-humanistic, anti-democratic force of a certain kind of religion. And of course this exists in other cultures and in other religions. But these dudes are armed with guns, and have proto-military thinking and pride in that, too. “ Second amendment solutions“ with an imperative that is sanctified by the End Times that are beginning.

Read this, and see the video in the article:

Read the rest here:

https://time.com/6132591/january-6th-christian-nationalism/?amp=true

And there is this short state-of-the-conflict piece by Michelle Goldberg in today’s NYT:

And when prominent conservative Norman Ornstein calls these right-wingers “a radical cult”, then that diagnosis sticks:

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