Another wake-up call to rein in the American deconstruction project 2025

 Specialization, as opposed to wokeism, can be a limiting perspective…

And a platinum example is playing out south of the 49^th parallel…

Language, tradition, history, ethics and protocols of both journalism and law have so far failed to penetrate the armour and the conscience, and the shame and the guilt and the hate of the current administration….and while the street protests are far ahead of both the administration and the public mainstream media, the language that is filling the airwaves and the print columns are like a predictable merry-go-round of the uroborus snake, cutting an ever deeper circle with it head in its tail.

What is happening, among other things, is that a social, cultural, and quasi-pseudo religious cult has taken over the American state, headed by a confirmed cult-leader, obsessively-compulsively entombed in the vagaries of his own mind. And millions of Americans are feeding off this ‘faux-food’ of lies, deceptions, perversions, distortions, anger, hate, bigotry, sexism and nativism, all wrapped up, in a phoney iteration of the American flag, the Pentagon, the deconstructist determination to “bomb” the American government. While no literal bombs are falling, metaphoric bombs are raging a scorched earth campaign on the men and women who have served their homeland in various government capacities, while institutions are being eviscerated, the MAGA cult is either openly injecting steroids into the reservoir of bile that fuels this movement, or cheering from the sidelines, in confirmation of their conviction that they vote was well placed.

Political rhetoric that uses words like reason, trust, reliability, predictability, scientific graphs and statistics of dollars, numbers of people, legalities of defiance of the courts, Congress, law suits that effectively knee-cap CBS, Harvard, Columbia, University of Michigan, and political appointments that are designed to put totally incompetent, sycophantic, and cult-addicts in charge of departments they are sworn to destroy, appears from this perch north of the 49^th parallel to be a disconnect of both the perspective of ‘the attack’ on this cult, the language deployed and the potential impact of its thrust.

What does that last sentence mean?

It means that a literal, empirical legal, political science epistemology is so many ‘feathers’ in  a gang-land war against men who are essentially anarchists. The anarchists will laugh at, tease, ignore and insult the ‘feathers’ in a derisive vocabulary of character assassination, rational and demonstrable lies, and dig deeper into the Project 2025, ‘trump-kampf’ that hangs over the roof of every government building, every religious sanctuary, and every kitchen table.

Please, while the courts will do whatever they can, (all the while over 250 judges have received pizzas delivered in the name of Daniel Anderi, the murdered son of a Judge Esther Salas, as threatening intimidation), it is not enough to rely on the courts to rein in this avalanche of societal, governmental, religious, scientific and intellectual ‘death’ that is raging across the airwaves, the social media and the classrooms in America.

There is not a single ‘aspirational vision’ that American and the world has been striving to attain, and to take steps in those directions that this administration is not prepared, funded and committed to derail. And the people responsible, as well as the institutions that supported and sustained those ethical, moral, social and cultural aspirations are falling by the wayside as the avalanche rolls over them.

Religious cults, by the definition, have a kind of power and influence that exceeds that of a political party, or even a scientific theory, or a movie script. American culture is replete with cults:

·      People’s Temple with Jim Jones

·      The Manson family

·      Heaven’s Gate and the Branch Dividians

·      Church of Scientology

Cults, by definition are considered to have religious roots, overtones, practices and leaders and yet a national administration is never considered, conceived of or perceived as a ‘religious cult’ especially as it enters office under a false rubric of Republican Party. Cult leaders customarily position themselves as absolute rulers, all-knowing, all-powerful, and highly punitive and vindictive. Followers, think those who consider the president a messiah sent by God, are often smitten, seduced, converted to the ‘faith’ of whatever the cult leader is selling.

Described as a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object, and a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs of practices regarded by others a stranger or sinister and a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing, a cult of personality surrounding a leader (Oxford)….

Although this horde cannot be considered small, (over 70M voters), the other descriptors seem to apply almost fully.

Some of the ways to identify a cult include:

ü Glorification of the leader

ü An answer for everything

ü Restrictions on travel or movement

ü Pressure to make quick decisions

ü Exploitation of members

ü Closed groups

ü Demonization of outsiders

ü Claims of divinity or special powers

ü Rejection of critical thought

ü Documented abuses

 

And members, too, display some common traits:

§  Persecution complex

§  Dependency

§  Loss of self

§  Rationalization

§  Isolation     

 (Recognizing and Combating Cults, Allen Faulton, Medium, Nov. 1, 2019)

 The conventional approaches to reducing the influence of cults is directed to those seeking to help a single person free himself or herself from the cult….Another maxim is never criticize the cult….

Oops!….well, special times require special approaches…

And while the legal and political, the law enforcement agencies have their work cut out for them, the language and perception, attitudes and clear depiction of what it is the U.S and the world is now dealing with has to be starkly stated.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church which essentially revolved around the charismatic clergy, whose words were never challenged, whose ‘success’ was measured in dollars and bums in pews, and with an overflowing sanctuary, spilling from Sunday mornings in to Sunday evenings, and even down to the town dock for public revival meetings in summer, there were a small group of men (no women)who behaved as if this leader was a messiah-clone, religiously, psychologically, and culturally.

So, perhaps, some of the words here are ‘penned’ as part of an overdue catharsis for this scribe. Nevertheless, the parade of literal and damning evidence of wrong, whether legal, moral or ethical, is likely only to embolden those engaged in the preservation of this American scourge.

And we must not permit language or formulas to prevent the ultimate ‘take-down’ of this cancer. We cannot treat it as a medical problem or a psychological problem or a media or an economic problem or a ‘fairness’ problem (we hear the argument droned on daily, hourly, that the world has been taking the United States for granted and abusing the nation for years, by ripping it off in trade practices)….

We have to see this as a social, political, intellectual and moral and ethical epidemic needing the responses of the whole world, lest it inflict its heinous thoughts and attitudes, perceptions and actions on the planet’s ecosystem, the political stability, the social and legal frameworks that protect humans removal of human rights, and institutions from their legal, moral, ethical and social responsibilities.

Even ‘beheading’ politically, legally the leader through some process such as impeachment, or constitutional removal of some sort, will only provide opportunity for other ‘heads’ to pop up in replacement. And the scourge will continue.

This is evil incarnate….and the world has been struggling to ‘minimize the impact of sheer rock-solid evil for centuries.

Uriel Abulof, in Psychology Today, in  piece entitled, ‘What makes evil and how do we defeat it?’, October 27, 2023, writes:

But what is evil? My working definition of evil is simple enough. Evil means treating humans as things. Evil means seeing and treating people as obstacles to be removed or assets to be abused for one’s benefit or pleasure (Kant’s self-conceit)/Either way, evil treats humans as things to be discarded. The implication is clear and troubling enough: We all harbor evil. This ‘banality of evil’ drives some to resigned nihilism; we’re all bad; nothing matters. But it should motivate us in the opposite direction to be involved, to think things through, to devise our own conscience, individual and public and to act accordingly.

When we treat evil, we tread with caution. The more we think in dichotomous go(0)d-(d)evil, the more we become prone to becoming evil ourselves. To state the obvious, if fighting monsters means becoming one, and defeating evil means becoming evil, we fought for naught…..

Realizing morality though a non-binary lens reveals a paradox; a main impediment to defeating evil if believing it exists—and can be defeated. Like pure righteousness, omnibenevolence, pure evil—the uppercase Evil—is a Metaphysical construct. Actual human beings are not Evil, and thus, unlike mortal people, Evil can never be killed or defeated.

Even early in this piece, political rhetoric on steroids, metaphors of epidemic, scourge, cancer, are inflated in order to prompt some wake-up among those honourable and reasonable men and women who seem quite comfortable sleeping through or walking away from their/our shared responsibility to bring this administration to heel. They are not designed or delivered to eradicate Evil.