RSN: Harvey Wasserman | How Hippies Won the Culture War...and Drove the Evangelicals to Fascism

 

 

09 August 21

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | How Hippies Won the Culture War...and Drove the Evangelicals to Fascism
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right."

In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”

Yippie!!!

He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy – and the human race – may actually survive.

Weyrich was mourning …

… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.

The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.

Weyrich died in 2008. A cohort said he was nasty enough to “get hate mail from Mother Theresa.” His Calvinist fervor helped inspire the bumper sticker “Mean People Suck.” Had he been alive, he would’ve loved Trump’s Brown Shirt assault on the Capitol.

His reincarnations are the likes of Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Ben Shapiro (the King of Lashon Hara).

Like them, Weyrich was a 1630s Puritan, a medieval relic. He demanded that rich, straight, white, male, evangelical theocrats run a “Christian” state … but without all that turn-the-other-cheek / love-thy-neighbor / feed-the-poor hippie stuff that Jesus was always spouting. In fact, if Jesus Himself had spoken up at any Weyrich-style rallies, he would have been immediately re-crucified.

Weyrich’s astounding surrender 22 years ago served notice that the pot-smoking, sex-loving, tree-hugging, Digger/Leveller egalitarian, feminist, LGBTQA+, pro-choice, rock ’n’ rolling, multi-ethnic/racial left had won the hearts and minds of two new generations: the Millennials (b. 1981-1997) and the Zoomers (b. 1998-2011).

The Millennials today are 72 million strong; their younger-sibling Zoomers are 67 million. Together they comprise more than a third of the American population. They are the most diverse generations in history, with strong predilections for social justice and for saving our democracy and our ability to survive on this Earth (after all, it’s THEIR future).

If just Millennials and Zoomers had voted in 2016 and 2020, they would have buried Trump both times by more than 400 Electoral ballots.

Which is exactly why the Republicans are trying to keep them from voting.

But there’s more. Since 2009, the aging evangelical movement has been losing strength … by some estimates as much as half their numbers. Similar polls are coming from the Catholic Church.

As the geezers die off, young people aren’t buying in.

Maybe it’s that evangelicals demand sexual abstinence and monogamy but produce a steady stream of predatory preachers and pederast priests … not to mention Trump himself.

Or that the evangelical movement loves the “unborn” at the same time as the death penalty and the military budget … while also hating birth control and sex education, which have peacefully prevented millions more abortions than the “Right to Life” movement has by shooting doctors and forcing women to act as Handmaidens.

Or that the evangelical movement sees vaccinations and masks to prevent the COVID as “government interventions into human freedom,” but demand that the government seize womens’ reproductive organs and control of their own pregnancies.

For whatever reasons, Weyrich’s culture war surrender two decades ago resonates today with the demographic declines of America’s extreme right wing, in both general population and evangelical troop strength. It helps explain the desperation of their assault on democracy.

Sometime in the 2040s or earlier, the US will become a majority non-white nation (many states are already there). The “un-churched” will dominate. So will women, whose 57% showing for Biden in 2020 ousted the Christian right’s beloved Titan of Testosterone (whose primary mobster function was to let the fascist priesthood launder big donor money without being taxed).

Thus the ferocity of the White Supremacist, straight male, “Christian” assault on the right to vote. Having lost America’s youth and culture, only a dictatorship can keep this Lost Cause minority in power.

Just ask Paul Weyrich.

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Harvey Wasserman’s The People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org. He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zooms (www.electionprotection2024.org) every Monday at 5 p.m. EST.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | As Roe Heads Toward Extinction, How Many "Pro-Life" Cultists Will Celebrate the Death Penalty While Refusing Masks and Vaccinations?

 

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | As Roe Heads Toward Extinction, How Many "Pro-Life" Cultists Will Celebrate the Death Penalty While Refusing Masks and Vaccinations?
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "Right-wing hypocrites are lining up for an expected Supreme Court nullification of Roe v. Wade."

As restrictive anti-abortion state laws head to the six anti-choice fanatics on the Court, the Trump Cult’s simultaneous attack on anti-virus vaccination grows ever-more stunning in its hypocrisy.

In short: they claim official mandates for masks and vaccinations in places where they could spread the virus violate their personal freedoms. As “anti-government” activists, they claim such mandates invade their sacred bodies.

And at the same time, they also demand that women who want to control their own reproductive lives must be denied.

So let’s try to get this straight:

These “pro-liberty” anti-government fanatics portray masks meant to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic as a dictatorial plot to curtail their freedoms. One lunatic congresswoman says masks are the equivalent of the yellow star forced on Jews by the Nazis. Others proudly resist demands by local governments that likely spreaders take steps to weaken the pandemic. This, they say, is an invasion of their civil liberties.

So they refuse to cooperate with a community effort to save lives.

And yet … these very same people demand that the very same government invade the female uterus to prevent women from controlling their reproductive options.

It’s the ultimate hypocrisy, indulged with actual violence by a fanatic right-wing demanding an authoritarian regime that hates our freedom.

It gets even worse.

It is definitively known, through long experience, that where abortion is made illegal, women who cannot afford quality health care in other states get inferior – or self-administered – procedures that kill them and their unborn.

Many abortion opponents further oppose easy access to sex education and birth control, which would prevent these unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

These “pro-life” advocates also support the death penalty. There is zero doubt that the death penalty kills innocent people. Unless you believe our trial system is 100% perfect, and ignore substantial research into many specific cases where innocent people have been executed, it’s an absolute certainty that numerous humans have been and will continue to be wrongfully murdered by the state.

Indeed, as Donald Trump put the “pro-life” Amy Barrett onto the Supreme Court, he indulged in a killing spree that wrongly and illegally took thirteen lives. It was morally no different than if he had walked into their cells and gunned them down with an assault weapon.

These people were on federal death row. Their various appeals still had legally mandated time to play out. They’d harmed no one for years. There was no legal, moral or spiritual imperative for them to be killed.

Quite the opposite. One was a father of two children whose conviction had come from a tangential role he’d played in a random killing as a teenager. There is little doubt that if he had not been black, he would not have gotten the death sentence, which was on appeal when Trump intervened.

Other convictions had serious issues of guilt or innocence. All shared time on the clock until the full appeals process was finished.

Yet upon receiving notice that he’d been fired by the American people, Trump summoned a deadly riot that killed at least five people at the nation’s capitol.

He also went on a hideous rampage leading to an inexcusable bloodbath, trashing the appeals process for the thirteen people on federal death row that he could reach, ordering them all to be slaughtered for no reason except his own amusement.

No “pro-life” Trump lovers so fervently opposed to abortion pleaded with him to save those innocent lives.

These murders were appealed to the US Supreme Court. The sanctimonious “Justice” Barrett is an outspoken opponent of the Roe v. Wade protections for a woman’s right to choose, claiming with crocodile tears that legal abortion allows the “murder” of “innocent children.”

Here was a perfect chance for Barrett to prove her “pro-life” credentials. But thirteen human beings, whose lives she could save with a stroke of her pen, did not move her.

Indeed, there was no hesitation on her part: along with her “pro-life” cohorts on the Court, she refused all appeals on behalf of these condemned death row victims. Trump then killed them all.

Everyone familiar with the American justice system and the research done on the death penalty understands that numerous citizens innocent of any crime have been “lawfully” executed by this country.

As there is no evidence that the death penalty discourages crime – in fact, it’s quite the opposite – such ritual executions cannot be justified under any circumstance.

So how do these“pro-life” warriors hell-bent on “saving babies” by denying women control of their own bodies also come to love the death penalty, a known killer of innocent citizens?

How do these Trump Cult “freedom fighters” refuse vaccinations and mask-wearing, known to save innumerable lives, while using violent force to allow a dictatorial government to seize control of a woman’s reproductive organs?

There’s now every reason to believe the six “pro-life” cultists on the Court will soon overturn Roe and allow the states to deny women control of their own reproductive organs.

How many Trump Cultists gleefully celebrating this “pro-life” decision will also be happy to execute innocent Americans with the death penalty – and at the same time refuse mask and vaccination mandates that could also be saving innocent lives?

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Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org. He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition zooms each Monday at 5 pm EST.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | 30 Ways Trump-Fascists' Assault on Democracy Threatens Us All

 

 

16 July 21

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | 30 Ways Trump-Fascists' Assault on Democracy Threatens Us All
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "The Trump Death Cult has fired up a brutal juggernaut meant to defeat American democracy once and forever."

If we do not dismantle it, this nation will never know another real election.

Joe Biden has finally spoken about how serious this is. But history tells us we cannot rely on the corporate Democrats to bring us a fair electoral process.

The real movement to win an actual democracy must come from the grassroots. Here is some of what we face:

• The ultimate battle is demographic, religious, and cultural, thus running as deep as it gets.


• The evangelical/Trumpist upsurge is based on those who identify as straight white male Christian “patriots” reacting in terror to a rapidly transforming population led by a Millennial/Zoomer tsunami of multi-cultural, multi-racial diversity that the old guard simply can’t handle.


• Thus the fight takes on an apocalyptic dimension that goes far beyond just winning an election or two.


• The old demographic has built a blitzkrieg assault machine that stretches from the courts to the precincts to the militias in a desperate all-out attempt to disenfranchise the future, bringing with it levels of fear and ferocity that must not be underestimated.


• Fomenting the “Big Lie” of a stolen 2020 election, Trump mimicks Hitlerian Nazis who said they’d won World War I, but were “stabbed in the back” – the Dolchstosslegende – by Jews and liberals.


• With an iron grip on the Supreme Court and key legislatures, the GOP assault on democracy has leapt to a truly menacing level, quite capable of installing a fascist autocracy that will be very hard to root out.


• Gerrymandered state legislatures, captured by Koch-sponsored Republicans in the 2010 RedMap Coup, stand in fascist unison as a rump junta.


• Control of the swing state legislatures was engineered in 2010 by Karl Rove and his Koch-paid cohorts to buy key legislatures and thus control the gerrymandering that has guaranteed their state-based strongholds – and vast advantages in the US House – ever since.


• The Trump-fascists may have the ability to re-take the US House in 2022 just through gerrymandering.


• In 2010, the corporate Obama Democrats said virtually nothing about the de facto coup that had just taken place.


• Obama did quip that he’d just taken a “shellacking,” while proceeding to surrender to the GOP roughly a thousand elected offices.


• Key victories against gerrymandering – installing transparent multi-partisan districting commissions in California 2008/2010, and in Michigan 2018 – involved strong support from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and were strongly opposed in California by Nancy Pelosi and other corporate Democrats.


• With control of the state legislatures, the GOP has inherited the ability to overturn future presidential elections, as they nearly did in 2020.


• Only paper ballots, demanded by election protection activists since Ohio 2004, provided incontrovertible proof that Trump had been defeated in 2020.


• Had the 2020 election been conducted primarily on electronic touchscreen machines, Donald Trump would have easily won.


• GOP control of swing state legislatures has given them the ability to propose hundreds of bills – many of them already passed into law – aimed at disenfranchising tens of millions of non-millionaire citizens of youth and color.


• Anti-democracy efforts against vote-by-mail, paper ballots, sufficient precincts, food and water for those stuck in line, early voting, same-day registration, souls to the polls, help bringing ballots to the polls, provisional ballots, sufficient times to vote – and efforts to establish street address requirements, disenfranchise people voting in neighboring precincts, eliminate drop boxes, eliminate drive-through voting, require photo ID, and much more – have been rammed through gerrymandered state legislatures with alarming ease.


• Assaults on the ability of citizens to make changes by referendum have escalated.


• Stripping of supervisory electoral powers from duly-elected state officials and governors has escalated in gerrymandered Republican states.


• Corporate Democrats have been hesitant to guarantee full enfranchisement of citizens of youth and color for fear of losing primaries to progressives like Bernie Sanders, Ohio’s Nina Turner, and others.


• The 6-3 anti-democracy majority on the US Supreme Court has certified its support for fascist assaults on the rights of citizens of youth and color to vote.


• Like Chief Justice William Rehnquist before him, Chief Justice John Roberts has built his career around suppressing the right of non-millionaire citizens of youth and color to vote, and he continues to work to make sure that happens.


• The Electoral College, originally designed to protect small states and slaveowners, today tilts heavily toward rural Republicans, making it likely another Republican could soon win the White House with a minority of the popular vote.


• The fifty Republican senators in today’s Upper House represent 42 million fewer citizens than do the fifty Democrats.


• The idea that the filibuster provides some kind of “bi-partisan balance” thus becomes ludicrous in light of the GOP’s inherent hyper-representation.


• In Arizona and elsewhere, absurd fake “recounts” have been staged to question Trump’s loss, with the primary purpose of sabotaging this and future elections.


• The denial of statehood for the District of Columbia disenfranchises more than 700,000 citizens – more than inhabit Vermont or Wyoming – denying the Democrats two Senate seats and a House seat, plus guaranteeing DC has no governor to call out the National Guard when the next fascist assault is launched at the Capitol.


• Trump Fascists have begun running for Secretary of State positions, which would allow them to degrade, manipulate, and steal upcoming elections.


• Trump Fascists are pushing for the ability of partisan thugs to intimidate voters and election officials without recourse in all federal, state, and local elections.


• Fascist legislatures are stripping powers from elected state and local election boards and giving them to gerrymandered legislatures meaning to guarantee future Republican victories no matter what the true vote count.


• The Omnibus FOR THE PEOPLE election reform bill has been stalled by the filibuster, denying the public the ability to rectify many of the worst abuses aimed at our democracy.


• The JOHN LEWIS Voting Rights Act has also been stalled by the filibuster, denying the Department of Justice the ability to counteract obvious disenfranchisement abuses on the state level.


• The power of money to derange our elections remains unchecked due to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United and other decisions overturning public attempts to limit the ability of rich corporations to buy what’s left of our democracy.

The collective danger of all the above – and there is more – cannot be overstated. It is clear that the American public’s desire for a diverse, tolerant, truly democratic system is shared by a majority of the nation.

It’s also clear that the danger of a truly fascist coup has never been greater.

To find out what you can do, join our Monday Grassroots Emergency Election Protection (GREEP) zoom calls at 5 p.m. Eastern and check out The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, now being read on the air by Thom Hartmann.

Remember that the election protection movement was scorned and ridiculed for years, before now becoming absolutely critical to the future of our nation.

Please join us!!!

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Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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