I’m Moving to Substack

I’ve been here on WordPress for a rather long time. My first post dates back to 2008, fifteen years ago. I talk a little about the reason for the move on the new site, https://themonthebard.substack.com.

This will likely be my one of my last posts to this site. At some point, I’ll stop paying for the site, and it will go away. I’ve already moved all of the old posts to Substack.

Substack works a little differently than WordPress.

You can simply go to the site and read my posts, just like you do here.

You can also sign up for a free e-mail subscription plan. This is to your advantage. If you subscribe (using your e-mail address) you get a copy of new posts in your e-mail. Automatically. It costs nothing and you can unsubscribe at any time.

You can also sign up for a paid subscription for premium content. This is good for me. Or may be good for me. We’ll see. I’m more curious than hopeful at the moment. I’ll be experimenting with dividing free posts from premium posts.

The ability to comment on posts is a premium feature. This means that you won’t be able to comment on my posts without a paid subscription.

HOWEVER…

For all of you who have been reading my posts and offering your comments and support over the last fifteen years (and longer, you know who you are): I want to give you a forever no-cost paid subscription to the substack site.

To get this, subscribe through this link: (oops). Again, you can cancel the subscription at any time, so please DO take advantage of this.

Drop me a comment on the new site to let me know you arrived!

I’ve put an expiration date of Aug 31 on this offer, since it’s kind of an open door swinging in the wind. If you miss the deadline, post a comment on this page, and we’ll sort it out.

The above didn’t work out very well in practice. Still intent on offering this, but working out the details.

The Fourth Turning is Here

I just finished reading The Fourth Turning is Here, by Neil Howe. It’s an update to his 1997 book, The Fourth Turning (co-written with William Strauss) which has aged quite well over the last 25 years.

The book is both terrifying, and comforting. The terrifying news is that we are coming up on a potentially civilization-ending crisis within the next ten-to-fifteen years, and no, it is none of the “usual suspects” that the media yammers on about. The comforting news is that this has happened before — four times that Howe documents, going back to the War of the Roses. It apparently goes back into antiquity, though Howe confines himself to the US American (and pre-US Anglo-American) civilization in relatively modern times.

The basic concept is something Howe calls the Saeculum, which (going back to the Romans) represents a long human life, roughly 80-100 years. It’s broken into four pieces, representing generations (20-25 years), which in turn are largely based on social definitions of responsibilities for age-groups (e.g. childhood, young-adulthood, mature-adulthood, elders). Each generation has a particular nature that is created by the natures of the three older generations that shape the civilization the child grows up in, which creates a recurring constellation of generations roughly every 80-100 years. He refers to these changing constellations as “Turnings.”

It’s worth mentioning that these “generations” are not locked to particular birthdates and ages, something I found confusing in the first book, which Howe clarifies in this one. People are being born all the time, with no meaningful gaps, so how do distinct generations form? I’m seeing it as being like a ground-fog settling into cool hollows. There is the same amount of fog over the hollows and the ridges between, but as it settles, it is pulled into one hollow, or the other. There were “old hippies” as well as youngsters who never made it to Woodstock who all belong solidly to the Boomer Generation. But distinct generations will have a typical age-cluster, as well as a typical “character” defined by the three older generations that already exist.

We are now in the Fourth Turning of our current Saeculum.

Comparable Fourth Turnings in history are pre-WWII, pre-Civil War, the pre-American Revolution, and pre-War of the Roses. Our Fourth Turning will be named the pre-Something by future historians. That something hasn’t yet taken its full form.

This allows a unique kind of analysis of where we are right now.

We need to honestly ask the question of why so many American citizens are considering fascism as an alternative to democracy. The answer is simple, and needs to be said out loud.

Our government — our US democracy — no longer functions.

  • We have a former president openly trying to become dictator-for-life, who cannot be definitively stopped, even if he is convicted as an insurrectionist and criminal.
  • We have a deadlocked Congress that cannot function at all, and we cannot fix it.
  • We have a corrupt, bribe-taking, favor-granting Supreme Court, and can do nothing about it.
  • We have state governments openly defying the federal government, and nothing can be done.
  • We have profit-driven propaganda services (e.g. Fox, OAN) providing a continuous stream of lies as our national news, and cannot shut any of them down.
  • We have an economy that reliably serves only the hyper-wealthy, and we cannot fix this.
  • We have a huge and growing class of people living on the street, and we can do nothing for them other than offer blame and empty moral advice.
  • We have a global climate catastrophe following the science very nicely, and we cannot do one damn thing about the lifestyle and entrenched economic players that drive it.
  • We have an absurd and lethal gun problem, and can do nothing about it.
  • We have racists rewriting our history, saying that slavery was good because it taught the black people useful skills, and this is passing into law.
  • (…the list can be extended indefinitely…)

Biden is doing everything he can (quite adroitly, given how little he can actually do in the face of all this) to patch up a crumbling government that was constructed in the 1940’s and 1950’s, using the vision of the First Turning of our Saeculum. He’s keeping the boat afloat, but it’s listing hard to port, the sails are in shreds, and there are pirates in the hold, bellowing and banging on the doors. He cannot fix this.

It’s frightening to say aloud, but the US is failing as a nation. Our First Turning government is reaching end-of-life.

We all know this. Allies know this, and re-affirm their commitments, but are drawing up contingency plans. Opponents know this, and are watching very closely for the right moment to take advantage.

Knowing that this has all happened before makes it much easier to face.

Look at the 1920’s and 1930’s in the run-up to WWII. Look at the run-up to the American Civil War. Look at the run-up to the Revolutionary War. People of those times were, and we are now, in a Fourth Turning and moving inexorably toward what Howe calls a Saecular Crisis. It is inevitable at the end of a Fourth Turning.

The Trumpites are panicking and running like lemmings toward a Strong Man Leader, foolishly thinking he can (or has any desire to) resolve the coming Crisis.

The Conservatives have either aligned with the Trumpites, or retreated into cowardly, impotent silence.

The Liberals are mostly whining. There is some effort to organize, but there is an enduring ennui underneath it, because seriously, what is the point? We can’t even address the moronic gun problem, much less climate change or our version of robber-baron capitalism.

Howe guesstimates we will enter the Crisis in the early-to-mid-2030’s, picking 2033 as a sample number. The driving factors are the die-out of the last of the G.I. generation, the replacement of the Silent Generation by Boomers as elders, the replacement of Boomers by GenX as mature-adults, the replacement of GenX by Millennials as young-adults, and the formation of the next generation — which Howe has tentatively named the Homelander generation — as children/teens.

The Saecular Crisis is not something to be taken lightly.

If it goes badly, our civilization ends. The United States government falls, and breaks into pieces. The pieces war over resources — rivers, land, currency, right-of-way — accompanied by tariffs and taxes and funky laws that make inter-region commerce difficult or impossible; by the return of slavery and debt peonage; by lawless roving militias, mass death by starvation, and worse. Foreign powers will likely take over parts of the former United States, and we will thank them for providing order.

If it goes less-badly, we remain intact as a nation, but are crippled by the Crisis: for instance, we might lose a world war, but then receive support from the winners, as the Marshall Plan provided for Germany after WWII, or Reconstruction for the South after the Civil War. Should the winners of the war offer such rebuilding support, it would likely take at least a full Saeculum — a century — for the US to recover.

On the other hand, each Saecular Crisis the US has faced to date has resolved favorably, and there is good reason to believe that could happen this time. The key is having Boomers in the position of elders, GenX as the mature adults, and the Millennials as young adults. Each generation has strengths that serve well during a Crisis: indeed, those different strengths are what drive the Crisis in the first place, which re-invigorates a society that is crumbling.

If we meet the Crisis successfully, we move into the First Turning of the new Saeculum as Boomers begin to die out, GenX becomes the elders, Millennials become the mature adults, and Homelanders become the young adults. That combination will rebuild the US into something as unrecognizable to us as the 1950’s were to Americans of the late 1930’s, full of new hope and community spirit. Being who they are, they cannot do otherwise.

Little Red Wagon

Today, I was sitting in the waiting room at an eye surgeon’s office, waiting for them to call my wife back for her follow-up exam for cataract surgery, and someone came through the waiting room towing a little Radio Flyer red wagon.

They use these down at the pumpkin farm where we get our Halloween pumpkins. It’s the pumpkin-farm shopping cart. They never really triggered any strong memories for me.

This one did. I think it was because it was new and shiny.

I grew up in an outlying housing development of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It had five long, parallel streets lined on both sides by 1960’s-style single-family houses, with an elementary school on one end, and a runoff ditch on the other, and an old two-lane blacktop highway on the other side of the ditch. Street #1 was the oldest, where houses were larger than ours, were set on relatively spacious lots at a pleasant angle to the street, and had actual trees. We were on street #4, and the houses were packed together in straight lines along the soon-to-be-paved road, separated from each other by the width of a driveway and a path just large enough for a lawnmower. The houses were small but well-built, with brick veneer exteriors and hardwood floors: the basic 1500 sq. ft. three-bedroom crackerbox, with a front yard and a back yard.

It was solidly middle-class.

The Radio Flyer red wagon was all the rage among my peers when I was young, and I wanted one for Christmas oh-so-badly. But when it eventually arrived, it was not the little red wagon all the other kids had. It was the Upgrade. It had a white-enameled extension around it that stood maybe four inches tall, with a rolled-steel top rim.

This presented a number of problems. For one thing, it made the wagon quite a lot heavier: hauling it up a hill was, for a painfully-skinny seven-year-old, an ordeal. For another, it made it difficult to put things into it, and take them out. The normal red wagon is low enough that if you are seven and are carrying a big rock, you can walk over and just drop it into the wagon. With this higher rim, you would have to walk over, then lift the rock and drop it in. You couldn’t easily use an old board as a lever to slide something into the wagon, because it was too tall. If you filled the wagon with dirt, or small rocks, it was almost impossible to dump. The rim also made the wagon top-heavy, which caused problems on turns.

But the worst problem with this wagon was that it was elegant. Stylish. Two-toned. It was Deluxe.

I don’t really know why my parents bought it. But I can speculate.

My father grew up in lower Manhattan, the son of Hungarian immigrants who met and married in the US. When his father died, about the time my father was in high school, the family fell on very hard times and all six kids had to pitch in to survive. Dad never talked much about that period of his life. Men of his generation didn’t.

My mother grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, and while her father was a reasonably successful farmer, it was a farm life, where nothing went to waste. On top of that, their religion — a little prairie fundamentalist sect — put humility and thrift on flagrant display.

They both came of age during the Great Depression. Neither of them grew up with Nice Things. They kept a tight budget on my father’s income, and lived according to the ethic of frugality they had grown up with.

They did want Nice Things for their children, however, and so we usually got the upgrade. I don’t think they ever understood how much trouble it caused.

I grew up in the 1950’s. Not literally: I actually grew up in the 1960’s. But Cheyenne — Wyoming in general — has always been at least a decade behind America, when it isn’t a half-century behind. So it was the 1950’s. It was the era of the Organization Man, the Corporation, the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Those “damn hippies” and that “damn rock music” were all objects of scorn and anger. We had no homosexuals. We had no Communists. We didn’t have school uniforms, but boys were in the Cub Scouts, (girls in the Brownies), with uniforms and meetings and ranks. We saluted the flag every day, though most didn’t know what “indivisible” meant. We did jumping-jacks and squats. We had Atom Bomb drills where we would file out into the hallways and sit with our backs against the wall and hands over our heads. A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962, with its ghastly scene of children all bouncing a basketball in uniform rhythm, the same year the song Little Boxes was written.

It was a time that celebrated absolute conformity.

A top-end, flashy Radio Flyer Deluxe wagon just did not play well. It was the stuff of which grade-school pariahs are made.

Not that I didn’t have other troubles fitting in. I’m sure the toys were really the smallest part.

I think all this came to mind in part because the so-called “right-wing conservatives” who are sucking up all the air in the newsrooms these days seem to be trying to resurrect the 1950’s.

There was a strong fascist push in the US in the 1950’s, an attempt to drive people back into a state of “conservative Christian piety” that has never (ever) existed. Books were banned and burned (mostly the same books being banned now, curiously enough). Waves of black lynchings and other racial violence erupted. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare ruined careers and lives, eventually including Senator McCarthy’s. Anti-gay propaganda abounded in government, known as the Lavender Scare. Chowderheads took to the airwaves to explain the Trilateral Commission and the Jewish Plot and the Rise of the Antichrist and how it was all wrapped up in Franklin Roosevelt’s secret identity as a 33rd Degree Mason.

And here it is, all over again.

When this sort of thing comes up, it’s always a mistake to dismiss it as, “We’ve seen this before and it came to nothing.” That’s dangerous.

But dear God, it is tiresome.

Troll Season (again)

I’ve noticed an uptick in Internet trolling. It’s a bit earlier than I expected, but there’s a lot of money behind the trolling, and a lot of people doing it.

See: https://themonthebard.org/2021/05/01/a-field-guide-to-trolls/

I just re-read this, and it still seems sound.

I’ve noticed a new varietal coming out this Spring. The poster will go on the attack, accusing posters of making things worse because they are calling out the bad actors instead of concentrating on the problem that “both sides” are equally guilty.

Where it becomes obviously trollish is when one side is killing people, and the other side is trying to keep them from killing people, they both get tarred with the “both-sides” brush, and YOU get attacked because you are calling out the people killing people and don’t spend equal time criticizing the people who are trying to stop the killing. Apparently you are supposed to just stay quiet. Mmmm hmmmm.

Basic response remains the same: DON’T ENGAGE.

If you’re in a group and a lot of other people are getting sucked in, it may be worth taking one for the team and calling out the Troll. You will be attacked, of course. Ignore it. It’s a Troll. They aren’t your audience. You’re talking to the people being sucked in, and once should be enough. If they still want to engage the Troll, it’s their thing.

A City Upon a Hill

US Politicians since Ronald Reagan have referred to the greatness of the modern self-styled Rome, i.e. the United States of America, as a “shining city upon a hill.” As is typical of political speech, it’s a glowing turn of phrase misused to mean something quite different from its original intent.

The original phrase comes from a sermon by John Winthrop, written in 1630. Winthrop was a Puritan minister, and the word “shining” does not appear in his sermon. His meaning was that the Puritan colonies in the US would be highly visible, and carefully watched by other Christian sects in Europe and the Colonies. “[T]his sermon called Puritans to model radical communal solidarity.” And indeed, the Puritans were quite successful at this. “[T]he commitment to a higher cause and the dedication to God had made the Puritan community unusually successful, and the success of their venture—the wealth it generated—had eventually undermined the venture itself. When Puritans started making money, their purposes collapsed.”

In other words, they started out as an idealistic communal hippy sect, and once it started to turn a nice profit, they degenerated into a pack of greedy bastards. It’s the age-old story.

See https://www.neh.gov/article/how-america-became-city-upon-hill if you are curious about this.

Reagan’s public revival of this expression, repeated by every President since, calls to mind the great cities and high towers that appear in works of fiction and lore: Tintagel where Arthur was conceived, Camelot where Arthur ruled, Minas Tirith where the last kings of Middle Earth reigned.

People forget something basic.

When you build a shining tower, it casts a shadow.

I read a story a long time ago, that went something like this:

Once upon a time there was a kingdom in which everyone was happy, healthy, and successful. A nobleman from a distant land arrived one day, and was astonished by the health and industry of the people. The King received him, and accompanied him around the kingdom, showing him wonder after wonder. They returned to the castle, and as they walked together, the traveler saw one dark door in a shadowed hallway, strangely out-of-place in this bright kingdom. He inquired about it. The King ignored him and moved quickly to the next wonder. Late that night, the traveler stole quietly from his room to the dark doorway, consumed by curiosity, and found it unlocked. A stone stairway lead downward from the door. He descended the staircase, and at the bottom, he found an old man, and a locked cell containing a small, naked figure of a child curled on the floor, covered in dark bruises.

“What is this place?” he asked the old man.

“This is the Heart of the Kingdom,” he replied.

“I don’t understand,” the traveler said.

“There is an enchantment on the land,” the old man said. “This is the price. You see the child within the cage? Every month, a child of less than ten years is selected by lottery from a family in the realm, and is brought to this place, to be stripped, beaten, and left to die of hunger and thirst in that cage. So long as this continues, the realm will prosper.”

The traveler, horrified, did not even return to his room for his possessions before fleeing the castle and the kingdom.

As I read about the chaos taking the Republican Party in the House right now, I keep coming back in my mind to the question of what drives the far-right Republican base. It’s a fringe, nut-case political ideology, yet it has substantial popular support. Why?

I think the answer lies, in part, within the parable above. I will explain with another story, this one a personal account.

The other night, I ordered take-out from a local Italian restaurant. I arrived early, and pulled into a parking spot in the storefront lot facing the restaurant to wait until the order was ready. At the outdoor table right in front of me was an older man in a khaki jacket. He didn’t like me being there; apparently, I had intruded on “his” space, which apparently extended into the parking lot. He started shouting at me, calling me a “white nigger” (he was also white), and a “son-of-a-bitch,” and making repeated reference to his military service; then he’d round back to the beginning and start over, getting angrier and more physically agitated every time as I continued to ignore him.

I eventually pulled out and moved the car to a spot further down the row, and he didn’t pursue. I called the restaurant to let them know this guy was out there, harassing customers. When I went in to pick up my order, the owner apologized to me. She said it was like this most nights: there was a homeless shelter nearby, and the crazies would come out and sit in front of the restaurant and shout at people. The police would do nothing, and there was no one else to call. They had to start closing the restaurant at 6:00 pm because of it.

The United States sacrifices its people without concern, some through military service in wars of geopolitical adventurism, some through unquestioning support of business downsizing and outsourcing in the name of “economic efficiency and profits,” and nearly all of us through a banking system that allows real inflation to outpace wages while juggling the numbers to make the argument that this just isn’t so.

All of us are racing upwards toward that “shining city on a hill,” but most of us will drop from exhaustion long before we get there.

As a nation, we shrug. Leaving the unfit behind is the sacrificed child, the Heart of the Kingdom. It’s the way we roll. Pick yourself up and try harder, soldier. If you can’t make it to the top, it’s your own damn fault. It’s not our business to offer you handouts. Pull your own weight. Reimagine yourself.

I believe what drives the far-right Republican voters is an awareness that they have already been abandoned as “unfit” to live in the shining city. They’ve lost the game. Many are retired and being devoured by rising prices. Many are young and did not inherit wealth to let them start somewhere above the bottom of the hill. Many did their best, but had their industry collapse, or their job eliminated, or a health or financial issue that buried them alive.

Of course, they can’t accept that they were unfit. There’s obviously been a mistake somewhere in the paperwork. They’ve been cheated. It was an immigrant that took their job. It was a government handout to a lazy person. It was discrimination against veterans, or against white people, or against their Christian religion, or against their maleness.

They are right that it wasn’t their fault, any more than it was the fault of the child chosen by lottery to be beaten and starved in a dungeon cage. It fell on them because their number came up in the lottery. They had to be fired so that Elon Musk’s financials would look better this month. It wasn’t personal.

So why do these folks turn to the Republican Party?

I think it’s really pretty simple, which it would have to be.

Donald Trump gave them a job.

When you are starving in the middle of a large city, unable to find work, and someone offers you a little pay and some respect for roughing up dead-beat borrowers, maybe breaking an arm or two, maybe making someone “disappear” — you take it. It’s food. It’s rent money. It’s new shoes. It’s dignity.

Donald Trump gave them legitimacy, because he was listening to their discontent. He had his own agenda, a criminal agenda, but he was listening, and that’s something no one — no one — on the Democratic side was doing.

Nor are the Democrats listening now.

I’m thinking of that guy outside the Italian restaurant the other night. What good will it do him to have lots of federal money dumped into “the economy” for dams or roads or solar energy plants? How long would he last on a road crew before he took a shovel to some “white nigger” he was working next to? What about a black worker? Is it even possible that he could ever “pull his weight” again after whatever trauma put him into this state? How could a capitalist justify the return-on-investment?

The basic problem with the Democrats is that, since Reagan, the Democratic Party has been the whole-hearted supporter of the capitalist Heart of the Kingdom, the very system that manages the kingdom’s dungeon and its ghastly lottery. They seem to believe that if they just feed the capitalists enough government money, the money will start to “trickle down” to the people they hire. They have a lot in common with some of the Republicans — their differences are … nuanced. They aren’t listening to those who have already fallen.

The rest of the Republicans, the far-right Republicans, are following Trump’s lead, and they are listening to the discontented, but for their own purposes. Like Trump, criminal purposes. Mad purposes, in some cases.

No one will like what they create if they ever take power again.

So what is the solution to this conundrum?

Well, I have a modest suggestion. We had a not-entirely-dissimilar situation in the late 1900’s, and what resolved it was “trust-busting.” I believe the modern terminology would be “nationalizing” certain industries, starting with industries that exhibit the “economics of second best.” These are industries that cannot be optimized, because — put very simply — profits compete directly against the value of what is produced.

The medical insurance industry is a good starting place. No other civilized nation rations medical care according to ability-to-pay. Hell, no other uncivilized nation (or tribe) rations medical care that way. Medical bills, or fear of medical bills and medical bankruptcy, touches every person, young and old. Medical insurance actuaries perform a valuable statistical function for planning costs, but all of the actuaries should be employees of the Federal Government, and all of the current profit-taking from the medical insurance industry should shut down entirely. They should all be “downsized.” Absorbed and regulated by law. And the top administrators? Suck it up, and “reimagine yourself.”

I’m pretty sure most physicians would be good with this. The current system isn’t working for them, either, because the insurance industry is draining a huge amount of money out of the profession, both by profit-taking, but also by rationing care, putting pressure on clinics to get rid of services and doctors, and overloading the rest.

I’m picking the medical industry as a low-hanging fruit, as it is probably one of the most unethical and dysfunctional applications of capitalism that it is possible to imagine. If someone has a better example, I’d love to hear it.

But the goal is to go back to John Winthrop’s original idea: that we are a “city on a hill” that others are watching, and we must stand for something better than swagger and bad manners and naked greed.

Solar Part II

We’re finally through the permit maze.

July 11, 2022: Initial paperwork done, financing acquired, we’re moving forward.

July 31, 2022: Official notice that the process is beginning.

Aug 19, 2022: Site survey done, official plans drawn up, permitting begins.

Oct 17, 2022: Permit process completed.

Nov 16, 2022: All materials procured, work scheduled to begin.

Nov 16, 2022: Installation starts.

Tomorrow, the power goes off as they replace the breaker-panel, which is in good shape, but looks like it was installed in the 1950’s. It’s common for the area, and I’ve been informed before that it would be one of the first things replaced if we ever had a major electrical problem. Or, in this case, an electrical upgrade.

I was assured that we would have power back on by the end of the day.

Tomorrow may be a little chilly. I’m taking the day off, since I can’t do the remote-office gig. Sweater weather. Maybe brunch out.

Nice.

Though we’ll need to pay attention to the dogs. They’ll need reassurance.

A Tale of Two Nations

It was the worst of times. And it was the worst of times.

There are two visions of America — that is, the United States of America — that both agree the nation is failing. But they agree on almost nothing else, and that is real reason that the nation in such deep discord and danger as a republic.

Most people who are likely to be reading anything I write are well aware of the national problem that one vision sees, but I’ll outline some of the main features. The problem this vision sees in America is that it exists in a world that is facing a rapidly accelerating climate crisis, combined with rapidly depleting energy resources, species extinction, chronic drought, rapid viral evolution, and a significantly dysfunctional government/private-sector “engine” that cannot seem to even discuss these matters. Instead, the government and private-sector are united only in minting new billionaires. Our democracy is being torn apart by dishonest politicians, corrupt businesses, demagogues, and is on the brink of collapsing into complete chaos.

It was the worst of times.

There is another vision of America — that is, the United States of America — that many of you are only partially-aware of. This is the White Christofascist vision.

The “white” portion refers to racism based upon a core belief that people with pale skin and European ancestry are, on the whole, mentally and spiritually superior to people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. They believe that you can dress up a black man and put him in the White House, but he can at best only go through the motions of being a President, because he does not have any greatness in him. It isn’t in his genes, or as they used to say, in his blood.

By contrast, any white man can lead, or govern, because it is in his genes, his blood, his inherent superiority. In this vision, when the Declaration of Independence declares “all men are created equal…” there is a silent whisper afterward, “… according to their kind.” But the kinds of men are most assuredly not equal, and the kinds are divided by skin color. All white men are created equal. All black men are created equal. But white men and black men are not equal to each other.

The Christo- portion of this represents the belief that Christianity is the One True Religion. The -fascist portion of it means that a uniform code of “Christian values” must govern all American behavior, and form the “standard” against which all custom and law must be measured. These Christian values can be enforced by legal penalties, including fines, intimidation and beatings, incarceration, exile, or execution, as necessary. It’s called “discipline.” Even white people need a firm hand at the tiller, and the rest require governance.

The problem that this second vision sees in America is this: an “invasion” of dark-skinned non-Christians into the nation, a decline in Christian church affiliation and attendance, a culture that violates “Christian values” with impunity and even with government protection — violations such as same-sex fornication and marriage, acceptance of sexual abominations like medically-facilitated sex changes, acceptance of abortion, acceptance of birth control and sexual license, teaching of non-Christian concepts in public schools to children, a “woke” abomination that denies the inherent superiority, under God, of white people, and “confiscatory taxation” of the successful, which is thrown away on poor people, non-whites, and non-Christians, resulting in government-run “socialism.” Our nation is being torn apart by all this un-Christian behavior, and is on the brink of falling into chaos.

It was the worst of times.

I apologize in advance if I was less than flattering in my description of the White Christofascist world-view. I find it completely appalling, and at least made an effort at objectivity.

But I’m not going to go into a critique of either world view here.

What I wanted to point out is that, while a lot of politicians and religious leaders are two-faced, lying cowards seeking to steal from the public, a lot of them are deeply sincere.

You need to pay attention to what they are sincere about.