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Unholy Alliance 2

In this short video is revealed the true, ugly face of the snowballing theocratic movement in America, which has already ignited a Civil War now still in its low-burn stage, metastazing by the Tweet, by the second. This religious cancer is rapidly on its way to full inferno status – – these guys are throwing buckets of fuel on their already overheating “base”. It’s a clip of intimidation, which this fierce but deeply principled judge handles with balance yet righteous rage channeled back coolly through citation of constitutional passage:

God’s servant and Vicar to 140 million in Russian Orthodoxy, good Patriarch Kirill, would agree fully with this kind of inflammatory dog-whistling, this blowing on the embers, this generous ladling of the biblical hydrocarbon all over it in a demonic baptism. Is there anyone out there still idiotic enough to not clearly understand the reason why the traditionally anti-Russia GOP has been for years now so fervently acting as a handmaiden — and cheerleader — for the authors of the murderous theologies unleashed apocalyptically in Ukraine? I am confounded why otherwise perceptive lasers like Bill Maher and other commentators are not answering the question of right-wing American support for Russia by referencing these self-dealing affiliations hiding in plain sight: the common striving towards a nationalistic theocracy. Both the GOP and Russia want some version of that empowered Christendom appropriate to each his culture and history. A return to an imagined purity. Hatred of foreigners. A sense of inferior classes. History of brutality. Worship of a false nationalism and fetishizing the Old Testament military which carries it all out. Pure nihilism, in both countries, dressed up with the icons and successful business suits of the protectors of Holy Christendom worldwide. I don’t know why Bill Maher scratches his head over this seeming conundrum. They are both happy if the other succeeds, but why so different? It is all about co-Christianists allying for the purposes of maintaining power at all costs, to stave off progress and evolution and adaptation and freedom and change.

Politics per se is seldom conversation topic for me. But when European friends have asked this American, “How Trump could happen there?“, “Why only social and political deadlock?“, “Why this weird right-wing media support for Russia?“, I invariably find myself replying, half joking but more deadly serious than I would wish to admit, “There are many different things you can argue for or against, but this partnering is theo-nationalistic shotgun marriage of convenience between (mostly evangelical conservative) Christians and Russian fascism, and it was energized to its current blast-power East/West primarily as a sequelae to one significant legal ruling. This was given force because of something called Obergefell v. Hodges. This is the landmark 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage in the USA. For it is then — along with Ireland’s unique public referendum affirming this right and thereby rejecting Church authority and tradition on the isle, when American conservative Christians — and traditionalists of the world — realized their world might be irrevocably slipping away after all. And these blind Bibleheads truly don’t want that, and have no means of handling it, in light of the brutally punitive instructions in their non-updatable Iron Age books. (And so, too, with Islam’s stance on the subject.)

The reasons for the years of GOP/conservative/right-wing American kowtowing to Russia and even taking Ukraine policy out of its party’s avowed political plank, during an election year, and denying them the protection they pleaded for, are only for this tired, tired, tiring Jesus-thing and its strange alliances. Kirill and Putin have violently prevented gay pride gatherings in their cities, and made it illegal to speak of homosexuality in classrooms, even instructionally. There is no robust, unfettered public critique of the nationalistic regime in Russia (whose American theo- /and ethnonationalists represented by Lindsey Graham, above, most certainly salivate over). The idealized traditional family is emphasized. Strong patriarchal State is fetishized as a decisive, hard-knuckle low-free-speech-rights order. Cops unchecked; courts carrying out crass enrichment, a worse and worst Darwinian “Squid Game” for those not connected, not willing to go along. And foreigners kept out to the extent that it’s possible.

I’m not here thinking myself capable of providing geopolitical commentary (though it sure looks and quacks like a duck). And I do not spend such considerable time on presenting my sense of this most most cynical fraternity East and West, merely from . I’m not commenting so extensively here merely through some limbic animus towards Christianity and the whole Abrahamic project (though I do reflect straightforwardly on their toxicity in other places, it should be known).

But it is absolutely clear to any reasonable inspection that these two parties representing antagonistic nationalisms (antagonistic to each other) and competing economic and historical aspirations, have clinched each other and supported each other because of an acknowledgment (hang in there with me) by each of them — plus a Bolsonnaro, an Orban, Duerte, a Cardinal Burke, Rush Limbaugh, or Steve Bannon —that world is always updating towards interaction not always approved by their vellum-based moralisms, and that — whether inspired by theology or using theology as a cover for troglodytic thinking — the aims of both deep-seated prejudices and sicknesses of mind need old moldy words to organize and authenticate the moral power of their destructiveness and their nihilism.

That these two teams both support each other – – the lawyerly theocracy of the religious right in America and the daemonic kineticism of religion and politics in Russia, unleashed on poor Ukraine with Biblical fury! — is not at all unclear to me.

It’s symbolized by two dudes marrying. Now, the Obergefell v. Hodgess decision is not some cause for this blood pact they made. But it (and Ireland and the up to 30 nations now which legalize that natural possibility) certainly catalyzes, in their faded imaginations, the sense that we are at the end times, or else they must act quickly to put maybe accelerate or at least not mind if that is unleashed.

This is why I really shouldn’t read the news anymore. This stuff really leaves a pit in my stomach, an unfillable fear and also a kind of rage at the ignorance we must contend with.

This is especially frustrating when we realize that there are original architects of the USA hammered into its construction ideas quite skeptical of the role of religion and public governance:

The Most Segregated Hour in America - Martin Luther King Jr.

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