For By Thy Sorcery Were All Nations Deceived (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Seventeen)

And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of Harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorcery were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth. ~Revelation 18:21-24

Do you even America, bro?

No, seriously, you Orangutan in a suit, this is America and the Constitution I once swore to defend says we elect our leaders by voting, and by as many people as want to voting.

What my state is doing, as we voted to do in the 2018 election, is mailing out applications for absentee ballots, this is because of the COVID-19 crisis, because people shouldn't have to choose between exercising their freedoms and rights and staying alive.

More to the point, this is a decision I agree with now and would have agreed with 20 years ago as a Republican as well. If we don't have the vote, we don't have America, we don't have civilization, and we don't have any of the powers as a people and the rights collectively and individually that flow from that vote.

And voting by mail is not illegal or wrong. Hell, Trump voted by mail.

If we do not both have, and exercise that right, well, Trump himself is basically coming right out and saying one morning we'll wake up and be not citizens, but slaves in our own country, and that both he and his Republican stooges expect to be our masters.

What they are saying, as I have said before, is that they think Democracy is for rich white men only, and it's the killing fields or the slave pits for the rest of us, if they can't figure a way to manipulate us all into dying from the virus first. The only other people they really want around are those who will give them money, or protect them, or tell them how great they are.

And that's why they hate medical science and people having self preservation instincts, and social distancing...because the rest of us aren't out murdering each other in the streets like they thought we would be. Because people who have the sense to protect themselves that way will have the sense to exercise their rights and protect themselves in other ways...and that's aside from the fact that the entire country right now is getting a lesson in why progressive policies work and why science matters.

The reasons Republicans really loved the guns was because they thought if something happened, we would all be out killing each other and they would profit from us dying and ride to the rescue of those hiding from the dark hordes and kill people that they don't like and get power and praise and thanks for doing so. Now that the reality is that most of us recognize that there's not much less useful than guns, that not only is everyone affected but that the demographics that support them are some of the most at risk...well, if you can't tell Republicans are very angry about that.

And I believe the time will come when these fucking people, who crave death and destruction, will simply try to create it themselves, because death and guns and hate are what they believe in.

But don't worry, they'll find somebody who will make a big fuss and tell people how good and right and Christian the people fighting America's evil godless secular liberal society and its armed forces and lawful government are. Oh yes they will. I'm both a former conservative Christian and a student of Civil War history. If I had a dollar for every homage to what a good "Christian" that slaver traitor General Robert E. Lee was...chances are real good I'd be living in a bigger house and have a nicer car.

Robert E. Lee was a good Christian in about the same sense that Osama Bin Laden was a good Muslim. He wasn't.

I saw yesterday that it's come out that Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, who supposedly had a change of heart, converted to Fundamentalist Christianity in 1995, was baptized in Flip Benham's backyard pool and then spent 20 years being waved around like a bloody shirt by the "Pro-Life" Christians never really had that change of heart. She was paid...to the tune of over $400,000...and when she got old and sick and stopped being useful and the money stopped coming, both sides dropped each other like a hot potato. According to what I read she confessed all this to a documentary filmmaker before her death in 2017, and the film is just now coming out.

And there's somehow a couple of elements that make this whole thing worse. She was gay, and she had a girlfriend, who she left because of these motherfuckers, because the money was more important to her. And how much of this time did these oh-so-pious "Pro-Life" Bible-Thumper jack-offs use this gay woman...this mercenary bitch...to beat up on normal everyday average gay people who simply wanted nothing more than to live and love openly and be left in peace?

And oh yes, when the time comes...and given these people's now openly-stated opposition to the very purpose of America, it will come...they will find no shortage of people willing to take the money...or the fifteen minutes of internet-fame...who will preach it from the housetops and shout it in the streets to the mob they've ginned up that it's their Christian duty to kill us all.

What's even the fucking point, when I can now safely assume that everything that's come out of these people's mouths for the last 25 years has been a lie?? I'd spend another dozen or so years as some level of Believer after the McCorvey conversion scam. It's real easy for me to imagine, at this point, that there's a lot of Sunday mornings I could have better spent doing something else.

And these motherfuckers think they should have credibility because, why, exactly?

I wrote last fall, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that these fucking people fear social change more than they feared Red Army divisions swarming across all those fortified Warsaw Pact borders and crashing like a tidal wave against US Army Armored Cavalry Regiments and infantry brigades in the Fulda Gap and shooting it out with American and NATO forces in Frankfurt and Hamburg and Brussels. They fear equality more than they feared slaughter at sea as Carrier Battle Groups and Military Sealift Command convoys duke it out with Long Range Aviation bomber regiments and Red Banner Northern Fleet submarines that always seemed to know just exactly where they would be, for years. They fear loss of convenience and social status more than they feared the wail of air raid warnings, the scream of jet engines and trails of fire in the night sky above, and they fear losing elections...and people voting, the very purpose of America itself...more than they feared blinding flashes in the night as the ICBM's of Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces strike America's cities and military bases and kill millions and Strategic Air Command retaliates by turning much of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a vast self-lighting glass parking lot.

More to the point, they fear the exposure of their shitty hypocritical politics and religion and social beliefs as nothing more than shitty hypocritical bullshit and lies more than they feared...more than they still fear...a slow death by disease, radiation poisoning and starvation in the middle of a blasted wasteland.

And they still fear irrelevance more than their own deaths, more than they fear the end of every life on Earth.

It was never about Communism in far-off lands, it was never about anything they said it was about. These people have taken the years-long sacrifice of John McCain, the quiet courage of generations of Strategic Air Command guys, the long Cold War that the Black-Horse and the Buffalo Soldiers won without a shot fired, and the peaceful victories of Reagan and George H.W. Bush and turned them all to ash when Donald Trump and the Republican Party kissed the asses of Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin and decided they hated the Bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney.

I mean, sure, to Eisenhower and Nixon and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes it was all about that, to generations of Republicans who were on the up-and-up, it was all about that.

But there were others like Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn for whom it was all nothing more than a vast kabuki play to overawe the liberals and stun the blacks into submission and try and wrench things hard enough to get "Communists" like Eisenhower out and try to install hardliners like Barry Goldwater who they hoped would turn back the dial on civil rights. Hell, while I'm at it, Soviet spy John Anthony Walker was a member of the John Birch Society (And how the fuck does that work, exactly?) There are others, like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, who explicitly decided that the enemy wasn't the Soviets or Saddam or Al Qaeda but their own fellow government officials of the other party, their own neighbors, Americans who didn't vote for them. Yes, the far-right is, and always has been anti-American and I say that as somebody who spent most of two decades as a conservative Republican.

And if you don't think those fucking people long for the chance to break off a piece of America for themselves, to turn the culture wars into some kind of shooting war, and for the same reasons, you have another thing coming.

And when the Michigan Army National Guard and the Michigan State Police are shooting it out in the streets of Detroit and Lansing with the Michigan Militia, will FOX News admit responsibility for spreading the endless fear and paranoia that led to the conflict? No.

When some bunch of idiot dude-bros in Hawaiian shirts live-stream chalking "For Constantinople" on an old Soviet mortar tube before they pop off some rounds toward the flight line at Barksdale Air Force Base, will Facebook put the kibosh on that immediately and clean up its act and get rid of all the "Boogaloo"groups on the platform? Or will they claim ignorance, let it ride for half an hour, bask in the flood of outrage-clicks, then bask in it again from the second-order effects of resulting articles and posts, that result and then half-ass the cleanup and claim "Hey, we didn't know?"

People have already tried this on a smaller scale, Christchurch, Texarkana, it keeps happening and they don't do shit.

When old Soviet-era T-72's flying Confederate flags are shooting it out with US Army M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks in Iowa cornfields, will the mainstream media pontificate solemnly about the gravity of this historic struggle while the comment sections fill up alternately wit "MAGA, Bitches" or "People are dying, you assholes!" Or will they wonder if they should have just told the truth instead of encouraging the horse race and playing instigator to the culture wars for their own profits?

When people like Donald Trump talk about thinking that Americans need guns to guard their potatoes, what they're actually telling you is, they don't give a shit about the world we have now. That's the world they want, a world where somebody who digs up a tomato from a rich conservative Boomer's garden so they can eat that day might get shot down for no fucking reason.

They're talking about a divided, fragmented America where it's victory gardens and solar panels and vast recycling programs not from some civic spirit or environmental consciousness, but because the country is divided, its infrastructure damaged and its power grid destroyed by the fighting. Donald Trump is right here saying that he wants people to have to stand guard over a truck full of potatoes because he's imagining a divided America robbed of resources with its people turned against each other when he's escaped justice and is building Trump Tower Moscow...or for that matter being spoon-fed chocolate pudding out of a cup by a nurse while watching Tucker Carlson's new show on Russia Today.

These fucking people don't give a shit about your guns. Hell, they don't give a shit about the military's guns and assorted other weapons. They don't really give a shit about America. Wealth is global. Why? because they could always just hire their own or get their allies...like the Chinese or the Russians for example...to step in on their behalf, to train their army of idiot redneck wannabes and equip and supply it, if not to the level of something that could win against the United States Armed Forces [either fragmented or as a whole] then certainly into something that could make it enough of a bloody, slow grind to bring Republican traitors and the Trump family to justice that the politicians on the other side of the line might decide not to bother. Hell, keep a low-intensity conflict simmering long enough, and everybody makes money off it and the incentive to actually end that mess, let alone do it quickly, slowly evaporates.

Far too many people, Democrat and Republican, liberal or conservative, seem to either grudgingly or enthusiastically accept the idea of permanent conflict. These fuckers did that shit for a goddamn reason.

I am here to tell you that just as modern conservatism is far more The Turner Diaries than Atlas Shrugged, so too will the battlespace of this conflict be more Gonzo Afghanistan with all the drugs than a rerun of Gettysburg and Appomattox. These people's own space will be far more a right-wing version of Khmer Rouge Cambodia...where a pair of eyeglasses was seen as "Western" and therefore a sentence of death for the wearer...than it would be some gaudy tax haven or goose-stepping fascist state.

When some stupid Trump Supporter just automatically assumes the Never Trump guy drives a BMW and far-right is just as likely as far-left to come after another Never Trump guy on the grounds that he's (Gasp!) a Capitalist, that's what that is. It's the same kind of murderous paranoia that fueled psychotic murderers from Charles Manson to Pol Pot.

Throw in some ethnic cleansing and a largely-ineffective United Nations response and it's Bosnia, on acid, with nukes. You do the math.

Hell, right now these fucking fools are still trying to connive a way to end social distancing and "reopen" the economy (and how they would do this without forcing people to shop at gunpoint since consumer confidence is in the toilet, I don't know.) But their thinking is, that gives them the Killing Fields without them having to shoot anybody and they can find ways to profit from all the deaths, until the sheer number of bodies wrecks the economy even more, I'd guess.

And somehow, they think people would just let this pass? I don't think so, Newt.

Hell, we don't even have a reliable testing or contact tracing regime in place yet and it's a safe bet that if things go like it looks like they will and Republicans get their ass kicked it'll be next year before we have what we need to get things back on track safely. And like I said, chances are, we'll be not only having to manage a still-ongoing public health crisis, but very likely deal with some kind of internal conflict as well.

I don't know what the future holds past a feeling of dread and the certainty I feel that there will be some sort of conflict because of these motherfuckers. But I do know it's a safe bet to assume that the Evangelicals and the Republicans are lying at this point.

Not least because it's been a long goddamned time since most of them have ever done anything else.

Yes, Evangelicals and Republicans, you earned that by your own conduct. I'm not really sure what the fuck else you were expecting.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Part Sixteen.
Part Eighteen.