Oct 1, 2021
The New Right Is Coming For Us All
An unexpected bonus of growing up in a little slice of the old Confederacy transplanted to Northern California is a deeply ingrained understanding of why and how the New Right aims to destroy the Constitution.
The Atlantic, ever keen to give voice to the intolerant so long as they publicly adhere to the dead faith of Liberalism in following its rules of debate, has published a revealing summary of a conversation with a leading member of the Claremont Instititute.
This organization is determined to give Trumpism the kind of intellectual sheen conservatives used to have, in the days of capable (if often wrong) thinkers like William F Buckley.
There is, as is typical of this set, a deep obsession with the Founders and Founding Era— usual trick of people like Williams to start America’s history there. And the phrase “preeminent authority” in the mission statement is designed to lay out in polite terms what they believe — that the Constitution is Scripture, a product of Christianity.
Here’s a direct quote from Williams:
“The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.”
It’s always nice to know my military service and oath I swore to the Constitution was utterly meaningless. I’m not a Christian, so clearly, America is not for me.
He goes on to say, “I would modify that a bit and say a majority Christian people could maintain that. But if you don’t think your rights ultimately come from a Creator, you’re halfway down the road to our modern confusion.”
This is a basic lie all Christians tell, of course, to cover for their true goal: assert their vision as “natural” and fight so no one can ever dispute it. Natural is code for God, the Christian God in particular — though ironically Evangelicals often don’t accept other Christians as even being Christian.
Growing up LDS (Mormon to most people) in a rural part of northern California I learned firsthand just how narrow most Evangelicals’ view of Christianity really is. Both Mormons and Catholics were constant targets for the Evangelical majority, which would subject non-Evangelical kids at school to prayer circles in hopes of bringing them to Jesus.
If you wanted to teach in the area, you had to attend a certain church — one that in 2020 sparked a major Covid-19 outbreak, surprise surprise. Needless to say, evolution was not taught extensively in biology at my high school. Having spiked hair made you a target for harassment by the local rent-a-cop. History courses were largely diatribes about the good and bad immigrants — watching Schindler’s List constituted our entire World War 2 segment.
All I can say is thank goodness I grew up in California and not Alabama. There were, at least, some limits.
America stands on the edge of a knife — progressives and liberals believe in a long arc of history that bends their way, but there is no scientific evidence this is the case. Liberalism, like its parent, Christianity, schisms over interpretations of truth every few generations and spawns a conflict.
The outcome of that conflict playing out today will determine the future trajectory of Liberalism’s racist, wealth-worshiping society — will the elite of society be selected from the wealthy, or must they be Christians?
And the New Right is determined to win this war at any cost. They seek to install a totalitarian Christian regime that refuses non-Christians basic rights.
The New Right, or Trumpism, itself a mutated form of Liberalism, is dead set on defeating its parent and taking its place, Sith Lord style. Its adherents know that so long as there is this thing called Western Civilization we are expected to believe in and defend, they have an opportunity to establish total control over anyone subject to it. Williams and others constantly use the language of Liberalism against it, calling any attempt (like this) to reveal their true nature “wokeism” or “critical theory” or whatever scare term they’ve seized and redefined this week.
This has always been the fundamental goal of American Evangelical Christianity. That, and the subjugation of anyone who doesn’t agree with their particular take on Christianity and the Bible.
American Evangelical Christianity is at its heart a twisted bastardization of Calvinism and Lutheranism. Its core belief is that God has a personal plan for us all and will make our lives easier if we believe in Jesus and get others to join the Evangelical club. Sin is bad, but strangely easy to escape so long as belief in Jesus is strong — life is mostly a test to see if you can stay true to Jesus in a kind of strange philosophical monogamy that only boils down to belief.
Hitler gets to go to Heaven in an Evangelical’s mind so long as before he died he accepted Jesus into his heart — that’s the promise of salvation in their worldview, basically a check box to mark prior to death to make God happy.
What you actually do in life (like, say, get vaccinated) isn’t all that important because God has pretty much ordained everything anyway — but how good your life looks to others is a way to show others how blessed you are. Those less fortunate than you deserve their fate — clearly they failed to work hard enough to please God or were secret sinners.
This sound eerily familiar after nearly two years into the Pandemic Era?
It’s basically why America is still getting slammed by Delta — that and its decrepit, under-funded, often predatory social, economic, and political institutions.
Evangelical Christianity is a weird hybrid of mob and cult that essentially boils down to a glorification of ego.
If your life looks blessed, that’s because you are intrinsically better than others — your prosperity is God’s sign of approval. To understand God you read the Bible, which in every instance on this Earth is a magical translation of his Will.
Preachers and pastors will naturally among those most closely attuned to God and Scripture, who will lead the masses in worship and guide them in proper understanding of God’s words. However, if a person doesn’t like their pastor they are free to find another — ensuring that an Evangelical rarely has to deal with competing ideas, yet can pretend all Evangelicals believe and practice the same way and are the majority group in America.
Anybody with a lick of sense ought to be able to perceive the scheme for what it is: an incitement to the worst kind of self-selection bias. Naturally, the preachers most able to reflect what their audience wants to believe about themselves —often rank con-men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — rise to prominence in the same way Trump did: Tell a lot of people whatever they want to hear.
Evangelical Christians ate him up and power his election lies to this day because he legitimizes all their worst fears and impulses. They, in turn, see him as the vehicle to total power they’ve always believed they deserved. Tens of millions of Americans hold beliefs not all that different than the Taliban and are steadily being mobilized to seize control of whatever governments they can in America.
This is a slow-motion disaster, and it is the straightest road to outright fascism in America.
I no longer see myself as any variety of Christian, but I have an implicit understanding of the Evangelical worldview and how it impacts the world.
And this is my warning: the majority of American Evangelicals cannot and will not tolerate pluralism. They embrace a vision of the Constitution that is utterly authoritarian, just with special carve-outs for the right people.
Read the Claremont Institute dude’s own words — under their ideological paradigm, non-Christians are fundamentally alien to America, which is an inherently Christian nation. Too many people who aren’t truly American is the country’s problem, which is why patriotic Americans are now forced to contemplate civil war to protect the Constitution. They don’t want one, he assures us, but they are being forced into one unless the rest of America caves to their demands.
Look, folks, this is the kind of rhetoric that tells you really bad things are coming down the pipe. The civil war talk is a threat, in public twits like Williams just say they don’t want one when in fact they’ve been waging one for decades.
American Evangelicals are gearing themselves up nationwide to issue the rest of us an ultimatum: submit to our interpretation of the Constitution willingly, and we will let you have whatever silly laws you like in your cities. Everywhere else, good Christian Americans rule — and always will, whether they call America a Republic or a Democracy.
And if you don’t submit, then maybe one day soon a Proud Boy or Three Percenter will come knocking on your door to tell you why you’re wrong.
Fascism in America won’t be proclaimed on national television. It will be a rising tide of indignities and outrages until suddenly everyone realizes the trap is already sprung and they are stuck.
The armed guy harassing you in your yard will defend his actions using the First Amendment. A Black man brutalized by the police for wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt will be told this was not what the Founders intended when they said Freedom of Speech.
Because Evangelical Christians have no true grounding other than whatever pops into their head as being what God wants or doesn’t want, they will adopt whatever belief suits them in the moment. Rule of law? Subject to the interpretation of an elected Judge who is probably part of the Evangelical community.
Like their National Socialist cousins in Germany, who almost a century ago found their own ego-boosting messiah, politically active American Evangelicals have long focused on colonizing key social institutions. They seek to control school boards, chambers of commerce, county commissions — anywhere a petty tyrant can wreak some havoc in the name of their ego — oh wait, “God.”
Their aim is to create a self-worshiping society that mimics secular Liberalism in every way, replacing the ideals of tolerance —already too rarely realized in practice— with the Christian version. Which brooks no knowledge other than scriptural knowledge and tolerates science only because it is useful, rejecting any science that threatens the Christian mythos.
Never in my life have Evangelicals held such power at a national level. Even as they are slowly dying out in Pacific America and the Northeast, the Midwest and South are falling under the grip of a new iteration of fascism, old wine in a new bottle.
While the elite champions of Liberalism busily scold progressives and social anarchists and really anyone on the left for not being adequate team players, Liberalism’s twisted rebel child, Neo conservatism, is expanding its base and mobilizing the third of Americans it can hope to appeal to to seize power.
Debate, discussion — these won’t accomplish a damn thing with the two-thirds of Evangelicals lost to this nascent American Nazism. Groups like the Claremont Institute should not be given such even-handed treatment as The Atlantic offered in this piece.
Far too many people who call themselves centrists or moderates are so determined to include everyone in the debate — itself an activity intended to promote conversion to the proper understanding of the faith, since Liberalism is inherently Christian —when some of the participants are only there to legitimize their mad views. University professors seeking alternative perspectives to show their balance constantly give voice to members of the New Right who are never arguing in good faith.
There is a need for conservative voices and perspectives, a dire need I’d say, as no one else seems to want less government involvement in people’s lives and a bureaucracy that is efficient and effective. Too many people across the left have forgotten that just as corporate bureaucracy is often predatory, government isn’t usually that much easier to work with.
Liberalism is fast degenerating into a simple club that uses tired excuses to avoid responsibility for making the kind of hard decisions the world absolutely requires right now. Almost every thinkpiece published these days by a scion of Liberalism is concerned with saving it from populism, never fixing the critical defects in the worldview itself — lack of true pluralism — which have been directly complicit in sustaining racism and white supremacy.
Too many old white men with tenure at universities or columns in fancy northeast magazines or jobs in the Beltway are fighting to preserve a crumbling system. This is a classic systemic rigidity trap, and the longer it continues the worst the crash to come will be, as the resources we desperately need to fight are being drained away by inflation and government dysfunction and eternal infighting among the left.
And so it is being eaten alive by an alternative vision of that thing everyone calls Western Civilization committed to seizing power at any cost. History really is repeating itself, though it is yet to be determined whether America’s fall will be more tragedy or farce.
That’s why an alternative philosophical paradigm is so desperately needed right now. We are all being frog-marched towards an American repetition of the 1860s coupled to the 1930s that cannot end well for anyone.
We have to rediscover the power of geographic fixes, of redefining borders and governing process to create a firewall against the whole country being taken over by these religious madmen. The entire world needs to take notice and work out how to intervene soon— the closer we get to the impending disaster of the 2024 Presidential election without a major shakeup the more perilous the situation becomes.
Liberalism’s defenders are free to fight for it all they like. But the time has come for true pluralism, and governing institutions to match.
Some places will fall under Evangelical rule. We cannot stop that, they are the majority in much of the country. The movement will fade, however, in time.
What we can do is work out ways to keep their laws from affecting us. Unity is just not possible when one faction is after total power.
That does not mean we leave them be, of course. Once isolated, they can be subjected to all the harsh discipline the hard borders they adore so much enable.
If there is someday a Red Dollar and Blue Dollar, I know which one will have greater value internationally. Which is of course why the Evangelicals will seek to conquer Blue America eventually if they do seize power.
Without the wealthy coasts, America’s economy has all the value of a dung heap. And given that Canada and Europe are more than happy to accept well-educated immigrants and host ethical companies, it will be interesting to see Evangelical America retain its affluent population.
The best victories are won without violence.
But we have to accept another truth if we want to get through the coming decade alive.
Sometimes, violence cannot be avoided.
A free society is impossible when the intolerant are tolerated. Their refusal to respect the rights of others negates their just claim to their own. Whether they refuse to get a vaccine or wear a mask or follow the rules of the road, it’s all the same — an assertion of superior rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than the rest of us.
Death to fascism, in whatever form it takes.
