Whom shall I send? (Immanentizing The Eschaton, Intermission.)

I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. ~Isaiah 6:8

Today was the funeral of Congressman and Civil Rights legend John Lewis in Atlanta, Georgia.

Barack Obama spoke at his funeral, as did George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Donald Trump wasn't there.

The Bible verse I quoted was from Bush's speech.

John Lewis, activist, Baptist minister, civil rights leader, freedom rider, preacher and teacher of nonviolence, and Representative for Georgia's 6th Congressional District, was born in 1940 to poor Sharecroppers in Alabama, and by his teenage years he was a Civil Rights activist, a freedom rider working to desegregate busing in the South, an organizer of Civil Rights marches who was beaten during the "Bloody Sunday" attack on the Selma To Montgomery marchers and one of the "Big Six" organizers of the March on Washington. He was elected to Congress in 1986 and served long enough to become Dean of Georgia's Congressional Delegation. He was also one of the few Congressmen who voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. John Lewis never wavered in his commitment to freedom, to nonviolence and to peace.

In these days of the Trump administration actively trying to start a civil war while gravely mishandling the COVID-19 Pandemic response I cannot help but feel John Lewis will be missed, and should be.

On the very day that Donald Trump Tweets some stupid shit about trying to delay the election, only to be told "No" by pretty much everybody including members of his own party, we need more people like John Lewis.

Herman Cain passed away today as well, and of course Republicans can wax eloquent about him, saying that he exemplifies the American story, but so does John Lewis...to rise from utter poverty and powerlessness in a State and time where he was by custom and by law a second-class citizen, to the halls of power and the leadership of one of America's two great political parties is to me the archetypal example of American greatness...and I say that as a person who was of the other party for a majority of my adult life, and who definitely skewed conservative before that.

The truth is, there are some things that fame is no good for, that money cannot buy, and that worldly power cannot achieve on its own.

John Lewis understood that.

And we are a poorer nation and people for the fact that much of America does not.

As Republicans like Bill Barr and Tom Cotton seek to Immanentize the Eschaton of their shitty beliefs, to make a god of Self and Selfishness, the life and truth of John Lewis points us to a better way. Either we are all free, or none of us are. The chain that is "Us" is only as strong as its weakest link. We are all in this together.

Together we rise, or none of us do.

The life and work of John Lewis shows the conservative Eschaton to be nothing but a lie. Of course Trump wasn't going to go to his funeral. Of course Bill Barr was going to lie to Congress while John Lewis lay in state in the same building.

That's what these people are. Their contempt for everybody else is shown in the mirror that is people like John Lewis.

Nearly two weeks ago, John Lewis passed into the afterlife and strode through the gates of the heavenly city, on the day after Federal agents began attacking and abducting protesters in Portland at the behest of the Attorney General.

I cannot help but think he chose this time to check out so that we might take a look at his life and be reminded in this time of lies and fake presidents and quack doctors that there is such a thing as the Truth, and grow stronger from that recognition.

Goodbye, brother, rest in power.

Our nation is founded on the principle that we do not have kings. We have presidents. And the Constitution is our compass. When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?' For some, he concluded, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history. ~John Lewis

Part Five.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction (Immanentizing The Eschaton, Part Five.)

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stops thou me?

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May'st hear the merry din.'

He holds him with his skinny hand,

'There was a ship,' quoth he.

'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'

Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years' child:

The Mariner hath his will.

~The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

So, Demon Alien sex, now? Seriously?

That's what you've got? That's your big plan. Blame all this on some woo woo bullshit, and then what? Make up something else when people keep dying.

If this lady is so religious...and a doctor, to boot...why don't y'all tell me what Book of the Bible describes Alien DNA and Demon sex and lizard people as some element of Christian truth?

Or what peer-reviewed, published medical journal or text describes any of this. Go ahead, I'll wait.

When I've cracked jokes about these people's descendants being the savages dancing around a fire in the ruins of civilization, shouting "Unga Bunga" while they wait for the witch doctor to come out of his hut and bless their overcooked cannibalistic repast of grilled member-of-the-other-tribe, this is exactly what the fuck I'm talking about.

In all seriousness, let me ask you a question; In matters of religion, according to any Holy Book, do you have to get it right or can you just fuck around and miss the mark and maybe, just maybe hit the same side of the barn and still get that nice spot in the afterlife?

Let me tell you what I was taught about how one goes to heaven in Christianity. You have to believe in God, you have to believe in Jesus Christ, and you have to be sorry for your sins and at least try to live a moral life at the same time as you understand that neither Right Action nor Right Belief is enough on its own. Christianity is not, technically, a works-based or practice-based faith, but yet faith without works is dead...and you have to know this stuff. Without Truth, somebody could try and claim that the Bible is an auto-repair manual and what could you do about it?

You have to believe in Truth, and that there is such a thing, in order to do this properly.

Likewise, biology and medicine and science are based on the scientific method. If you want a specific result, you have to go about things in a specific way, you have to follow what is known, what is scientifically proven, what is True, or people die. There is a whole body of ethics and law about this.

Much the same as there is in religion, interestingly enough.

If you accept some stupid bullshit that's dressed up as religion, according to the Bible, your eternal soul can be destroyed. Fear not he who can destroy the body, but fear He who can destroy both body and soul in hell.

If you accept some bullshit quack medicine, you can die, in a number of cases painfully while all some stupid bullshitter has to offer your family is excuses.

It seems like somebody that's both a Christian pastor and a doctor would know all this stuff.

Unless of course it's all a lie and she just doesn't care and only wants to get famous.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

He cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner.

'The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,

Merrily did we drop

Below the Kirk, below the hill,

Below the lighthouse top.

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

These fucking people know they're in trouble. Social change, time and tide and their own refusal to roll with all of the above all but guarantees that. The fact that they picked an incompetent like Trump, who chose a comic-book henchman like Bill Barr to try and cover his ass, all but guarantees that there's going to be consequences. The current situation cannot continue for long without things blowing up.

And that's the idea, isn't it?

They know that, and they do want to make things blow up.

I've been saying for awhile, that they probably figure they can't win an election...but they figure they might win a civil war.

Trouble is, the economics and the numbers and the simple calculus of what's where don't stack up in their favor. The side that wants to maintain the global economy will always be able to find more resources to make finished products and weapons and be able to import food. The side that's going to end up with all the rural areas that depend on the cities is going to have to learn how to do a lot of the stuff they seem to hate the very idea of real quick. It's hard to fight a war when you have a bunch of guns but no way to manufacture ammunition on a massive scale and fewer people to trade with to get it. Not that they give a shit.

And don't ask how hard it is to "clear out" cities of hundreds of thousands on up to millions of people with agencies whose total number of troops on the rolls is in the low tens of thousands, not least when the citizenry is pretty close to as well armed as you are. That's eventually going to end badly.

Sure, you can bolster those numbers with a bunch of contractors and rent-a-cops for a short period of time...but it's virtually guaranteed they're not going to be in it for the long haul. Yeah, you can strip-mine your own followers for those young and strong and able to fight, but when your followers skew older and less healthy and less well educated and more prone to certain problems you're eventually just plain going to have to lower standards...and when you've already made yourself the champion of only one group, doing things that way is going to deplete your numbers faster than it wears down those of the more-diverse and more numerous other side.

Especially when you've already found out that the military isn't in your corner and you're already reduced to using contractors and security guards.

Even more so when, due to your own machinations and tribal partisanship, the deadly virus has reached its hand far enough up your ass that it's infecting your own senior leadership.

I'm not really sure what the plan is here, and the preponderance of the evidence points to the fact that there really isn't one, and they're just hoping they get lucky or whatever.

Another thing that I'm slowly becoming more and more sure of is that this isn't really about winning, to these fucking people, or at least it isn't anymore.


You could make the argument that it's about money and power, on a certain level it seems to be that, for Trump. But, he's not really doing a lot of smart things or planning very well if that's the goal. Of course, all that is consistent with his known history.


Certainly enough people have made that argument and done so convincingly. I just think among other things, whatever plans they had have not survived contact with reality, and Trump himself seems to be living in his own little world. So, like strategic forces whose command center has been hit, they're falling back on outdated plans and preset strategies because it's what they have, or what they were trained to do. You punch in the codes, you turn the key to launch your weapons, and you take your chances.

And it's not working.

And they don't care.

In point of fact, they seem to no longer know what the words mean. Like futuristic death cultists who can't innovate or repair their crumbling technology because they've forgotten the basis of it all and don't know how to make the things that make the things anymore, they just keep marching blindly forward while the priests babble grimly about some mythical Time of Ending while they serve the long-brain-dead Emperor.

And in point of fact, despite the fact that these End Times are pretty much the basis of their whole belief system, these death cultists have in place an economic system whose main purpose appears to be to distract people from the fact that everything is broken and nothing works anymore and that when the lights go out, they may never come back on again. Alone in the darkness, Man does terrible things and chaos beckons.

This isn't Warhammer 40k, this is American capitalism and the Republican Party in the year 2020.

The Sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon—'

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,

For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;

Nodding their heads before her goes

The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,

Yet he cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

It's not about winning, it's about trying to make a God of their shitty beliefs, and then martyring themselves before that very God.

To what end, I cannot say and do not pretend to know anymore.

It's about Immanentizing the Eschaton. They don't want to live in this world, but they don't want you to either. They believe they have the perfect ideological construct, and apparently they somehow believe that this will somehow live on after them, of its own devices. Remember, this is conservatism we're talking about. They believe that humans are just shadows on the cave wall in the flickering firelight, but it's the ideas that are the real Things.

That's kinda hard on the locals and the wildlife, though.

And it's even worse when you find out that you had shitty ideas all along.

Where the Communist red Hammer and Sickle flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics comes in, I have no bloody idea, and from what I can tell, neither does anybody else.

Unless...unless...it was all a lie to begin with and all the bullshit crazy histrionics and dumb ass crazy shit and all this much speaking were never anything but Weapons of Mass Distraction so that politicians and rich people could get more power and steal more money and maybe their simpering cowardly followers could work up the guts to go out and kill some people.

Then it makes perfect goddamn sense.

Part Four.

Fighting The Monster (Immanentizing The Eschaton, Part Four.)

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ~Nelson Mandela

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

I personally find it interesting that "Conservatives" these days have inverted the quote, and basically decided that justice anywhere is a threat to injustice...and thus their power and profits...everywhere.

Here we have an armed, armored and gas-masked police officer pointing a shotgun right at the throat of a peaceful protester armed with nothing more than a yoga mat. This picture was taken recently in South Carolina.

At that range, damned near anything is a kill shot.

Yet here's the thing, the young lady with the yoga mat seems unafraid. Certainly, if she feels fear she is controlling it well.

And the guy with the shotgun hardly seems to be the one in control of the situation. As I've said before, if you are not by nature a courageous person, if you do not have an internal morality that is something you can speak about, if you don't have the courage of your convictions...or for that matter believe in something worth believing in...all the guns and money and political power in the world will not help you. If your beliefs are shit, sooner or later people will figure it out and they will get tired of it. Sooner or later, they're going to get tired enough of it that they're not afraid of your gun, and then what do you have?

Nothing.

You're an empty son of a bitch with a uniform and a weapon who forgot that authority without morality or power without responsibility is meaningless, and all the sudden there's more people on the street than you and your buddies have shells in your shotguns. Then if things go the way you're trying to push them to go, all the sudden it doesn't end in your favor.

Oops.

Sooner or later, you end up like this fucking guy, Donald Trump, mouthing a bunch of stupid slogans even as you gotta know that fewer and fewer people give a shit about what you say.

Leave it to the scam artist to accuse everybody else of being a scam. Leave it to a man who has spent five years sowing anarchy and violence to accuse others of doing the same, but then hide in his bunker or go golfing when the bill comes due and it's time to pay up, or step up and lead, or do...well, anything other than make accusations about it and talk shit on Twitter.

And there are people who think Donald Trump is some kind of great leader? Seriously?

By definition, a leader isn't...cannot be...somebody who just repeatedly tells you what you want to hear. Sometimes inconvenient or uncomfortable truths have to be dealt with. Doubling down, responding to protests against police brutality and racism with more police brutality and racism isn't a strategy that's going to work.

But maybe that, right there, is the key.

Republicans don't want it to work. They want to burn it all down so they can squat in their bunkers with their Bibles and their guns and shit on their own shoes in the dark, and so that their idea of government can justify giving away the store to weapons manufacturers for a bunch of crap that doesn't work, and then they'll call that mess "righteous."

Yesterday Tom Cotton, a Republican, defended slavery as a "necessary evil." That's quite a fall for a Party that when it was founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, was specifically the anti-slavery party. Slavery was a blight on American civilization, but I guarantee you that the wealthy, the people who fund assholes like Tom Cotton, have never forgotten that they could once own other human beings, and profit from their free labor, and they resent that the world took that away, civilization be damned.

And people like Tom Cotton will happily sign on to these kind of shitty beliefs in return for a little piece of the money and power, again, civilization be damned. These fools don't care that civilization is what enables them to have their power in the first place, they want more.

The reason Republicans are against civilization is because they think without it, they'll be the Lord in his castle or the Planter in the manor house or the warlord with his army, rather than the beggars in the gutter, the slaves in the fields, or the catamite strapped to the back of the truck until the local warlord gets fucked up smoking opium and decides he wants a piece.

Republicans don't want to live in America anymore, they want to be the Bosnian Serbs, but running Gonzo Afghanistan with bigger, more expensive guns, more violent ethnic cleansing and a lot more drugs. They just think they're going to be the warlords doing the drugs, not the victims of somebody who turned out to be meaner and more ruthless than they are.

And they don't care if all the Christians, pregnant mothers and veterans and everybody else they've ever claimed to support starve to death or die of disease in the process of them getting this nightmare world, either.

Because fuck you, that's why.

That's their entire program, really.

And they'll say whatever goofy bullshit they have to, to get some dumb ass people behind them to serve as cannon fodder and meat shields so that they're not the ones getting shot in the head or fucked up the ass or chained to a drill press or whose only consolation in their miserable life is a vial of white powder cut with god only knows what, although they'll gladly sign up for the idea that they want to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. They don't want to live in America, they want the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a golf resort and a Mall.

And that's what Q-Anon and stirring up all this racism and Trump trying to spark a civil war really is. It's an exit strategy. They know, or at least strongly suspect they're going to lose the election. They know if they stay in place consequences will come. That's why they're trying to set it up so they can break off a piece of America for themselves or at least get us all fighting each other so they can sneak out the back door to a comfortable exile in Russia or Saudi Arabia and steal a bunch of money as they slip out the back door.

These people are so hooked on their fear and hate, so hung up on the idea that somebody else might do something they somehow disapprove of or don't understand...which is basically almost everything at this point...that they'd rather burn down the country, if not the world, than let somebody else have a piece. They don't care if this ends in fire, or with them lined up against a bloodstained, pitted wall posing for rifle shots. It doesn't matter if all they end up with is on a better level of hell or a nicer spot in the Underworld than somebody they don't like. The Fuck You Is The Point.


These fucking people see themselves as the only holders of Truth in a world that they consider fallen and sinful....mostly because it doesn't conform to their shitty ideas and give them the kind of power and recognition that they think they should have, or because it includes people they don't like as something other than automatons who are forced to obey their every whim.

Don't ask what these fucking people would consider an ideal world...you don't want to know.

Or, if you do, just look at the worst parts of human history and see if you can figure it out. There really are people in the world who think the Crusades were a good idea, or who think genocide against Native Americans, or slavery, or the Holocaust, or the Iraq War or a host of other wrongs were somehow justifiable.

And the reason for that, is that they'd rather burn the world than look in the mirror and realize what cowardly, shitty people they are, or face that they are not the protagonist of reality like in their bullshit imaginings.

They are overwhelmed by their fear, yes, but the truth is that most of these people learn this stuff from some nasty dualistic theology and they fear nothing more than having to face their fears and come out the other side and change in so doing. Sure, they might still be shitty people, but even the thought of having to be shitty in a different way fills them with existential dread. The thought that "It's not all about me?" fills them with a horror deeper than the pits of hell.

And these fucking people think they have some kind of a right to inflict their chthonic longings, emotional issues, existential fears, racial insecurities and shitty social beliefs on the rest of us.

That is the essence of the conservative Eschaton, right there.

If we want to continue to live in this world, in any way even close to what came before, we are going to have to stand up and show these people that they are not gods, but men.

Part Three.
Part Five.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Let the weak say "I am strong." (Immanentizing The Eschaton, Part Three)

Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. ~Joel 3:10

A friend of mine posted this earlier today. Evidently, Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema has been wearing colorful wigs to work, and "Conservatives" are losing their shit over it.

My reaction? "So? Why does this matter?"

It shouldn't, but as somebody pointed out, apparently conservatives are terrified of non-standard hair colors.

I'd just like to point out that these fucking people tend to be the all go no quit big nuts capitalist in-your-face gun nuts...and they're losing it over...a Senator wearing a wig?

I mean, the fuck?!

These are the very same fucking people who are basically one stupid incident or a couple more outrageous statements away from potentially plunging the United States into a civil war because they're trying to suppress protests against police brutality and racism with...more police brutality and racism and it's not working and they keep getting angrier and angrier about it...

And they can't handle a woman wearing a wig because she can't get her hair done thanks to a pandemic they're also doing their hell-bent level best to do nothing about.

I'm going to be honest, the longer this farce goes on, the more I keep thinking that this is not going to turn out the way they think it's going to turn out.

They don't have the support of most of the people they need to have the support of to make this play, nor the support of the public nor the courage of their convictions and if they can't even manage to control peace-loving hippie Portland, what makes them think they won't get their ass kicked up between their shoulder blades in rough-and-tumble Chicago or nasty-as-fuck-when-it-wants-to-be New York City?

I'm telling you, what of these assholes survive will cry like little girls as they are led to the gallows, or they'll have to be carried to be put up against the wall for the firing squad.

And none of it will fucking matter in the end, at least not for long.

Because while that's happening those rich fat cat motherfuckers who bankrolled these assholes and all this garbage will be sipping margaritas and getting blowjobs from teenage hookers on the beach in some tropical non-extradition-treaty country.

And, unless we can learn very quickly to all pull in the same direction and drown out this madness before it gets out of control and show up in sufficient numbers that we vote the Republicans out down to the local County Road Commissioner and shit...if we insist on fighting out an internal conflict in the middle of a global pandemic...millions of people are going to die.

Mostly for no good reason, because if you think the mere fact of the conflict itself would be devastating enough...there's a million second- and third- and downward-order effects to consider because there will be disruptions in the supply chains for every imaginable thing and we're already having that because of Coronavirus. You do the math.


And here's the bloody truth, as best I can tell it to you.

The Republican voter base, the people who will actually do the fighting and the dying are just fine with that.

They don't care if Grandma can't get her medication or if Papa dies because he can't get his insulin or if Swiper the Ferret dies for lack of proper food, so long as they get to kill some Black people or some liberals or have their boot on someone else's throat or assert their white conservative manhood with rape and war crimes before they die. They'd rather burn down America than see Black people get a share.

And as the political situation starts to spiral out of control and the George Floyd protesters refuse to back down and the Trump administration has to turn to low-rent contractors and rent-a-thugs to try to suppress it and the virus comes roaring back, that is exactly what's going on here. Lots of These Fucking People seem to think they're losing, don't take my word for it, look at the shit they post.

Unsaid, but strongly implied, is that apparently lots of these people don't seem to think Trump is going to save them anymore.

And they don't care about that, either. They just want to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. All they really needed Trump for was to wind them up and give them permission.

Like I said, Immanentizing their shitty right-wing Eschaton requires sacrifices...and their political and thought leaders and radio talkers and smarmy Fox News talking heads and various ideologues and wealthy backers are ready and willing to sacrifice as many of them and their families as it takes to get the job done.

If they can't have some kind of unchallenged hegemony that (mostly) exists only in their own heads and their own idealized reminiscences of the 1950's they want to burn America and civilization down around their ears, and break off a piece and try to found some shitty little banana republic or something. And then, in their minds anyway, they'll basically declare war on the rest of the world, starting with their fellow Americans. Fortunately (for us anyway) most of us don't conform to their stupid stereotypes.

But ya know, even if we did...they've literally decided to pick a fight in probably the city that is the closest one in America to meeting the right-wing stereotype of "liberals" as a bunch of peace-loving pot-smoking dirty unwashed weirdo  hippies...and the weirdo hippies and assorted other Portland residents aren't backing down.

And of course, these fucking people can't understand why. Seems like the wannabe fascists and shitty fucking racists never do.

And then there's people like this idiot, Randy Hoff, who seems to think that Democrats should "take a stand" against their local elected officials (that they voted for) and who thinks Democratic-run cities are somehow "more dangerous than Iraq." Ya know, that was after my time but I know several people including some of my own bros that went to Iraq and none of them are saying that those cities are "More dangerous than Iraq.

But on the other hand, what Acting Deputy Ken and Chad "The Tennis Pro" Wolf are saying is that Americans shouldn't have a right to defend themselves, or to protect themselves from chemical weapons or from getting shot in the face, that we should, for the greater glory of Donald Trump, just lie down and take it.

Like hell.

Protesting is a human right, and to resist is human nature. I can't put it any more simply than that.

Listen, assholes, if you fail at America that hard, that's not on me, and I'm not going to lay down and take it, and I think such an idea is Un-American to tell you the truth.


This operation in Portland, and whatever other efforts like it actually materialize, though I find the prospect doubtful, are not legit law enforcement or even recognizable counterinsurgency operations even under our own laws. It's in fact, an effort to get around those very laws in the search to find a Cassus Belli so these fucking people can start a civil war.

And if it helps with Trump's reelection, great. Thing is, if anything it seems to be hurting him.

But here's the kicker. Nobody's going for it, and it's getting them worried or pissing them off, if not both.

Not one damned bit of any of this is necessary. Trump's base that he ginned up into a mob right out the gate has been talking this kind of shit a lot longer than Trump has been in politics.

They don't care about laws or legality or needing a reason.

The only way we defeat this crap is to show up in such overwhelming numbers that they're afraid to try and pull some bullshit. Otherwise, they probably won't get all of America, but they're going to get somewhere...and they will use that as a base from which to attack the rest of us and turn their Culture War into a shooting war.

We can stop this, but only if we all pull together and stand up against this bullshit.

Part Two.

Part Four.

Canceling Christ (Immanentizing the Eschaton, Part Two.)

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. ~John 3:16

I saw this earlier today.

It was, apparently, written by an anti-mask, anti-vaccine nut who believes in the modern, secularized End Times beliefs of the conspiracy theorist movement.

It posits, automatically, that for all of their power, for all of the political power they have stored up like crazed squirrels stocking up nuts for the wintertime, for all of their guns, for all of their constant violent rage every time they're ever confronted with anything they don't like or which inconveniences or offends them, conservatives, by their own logic and according to their own battle plan, are going to lose.

More to the point, they're going to lose to some made-up caricature of "The Left" that only exists in their own heads.

It also posits that the conditions that exist with the current pandemic will continue forever, which is something I'm pretty sure nobody wants, least of all the people trying to protect us for Coronavirus, and none of these kind of conditions the author of this post posits exist in any of the countries that have managed to get ahead of the curve on this thing.

But the author thinks...apparently wants to think...that the current conditions will go on forever when by definition they can't. Something will boil over, and we'll either cure the virus or it will kill us. No one but her wants this shit to go on forever.

But this writer posits that it will.

And that they, the conservatives, gun nuts, religious people, etc. will then somehow meekly accept this, when they never have before. They certainly haven't now, and I've got the pictures of chuckleheads screaming at cops in my state's capitol building to prove it.

Trust me, I was a conservative in the 1990's when the Left Behind novels were absurdly popular and the Christian End Times Prophecy Movement was riding high and needed...and had...no secular wannabe imitators. I know things. We didn't meekly accept shit and yet Bill Clinton, for all of his flimflam Slick-Willie adulterous ass bullshit was nowhere near as bad as Trump is and nobody with a brain in their head thought he was the Antichrist. I've written rather extensively about this.

Bear with me, for a moment, because this snipped bit of text bears special consideration.

First of all, bitch, nobody wants to arrest you for being an anti-vaccine dumb ass, we'd just like you to stop believing in stupid shit and trying to get the rest of us killed.

Second, nobody is trying to take away your coins, or any other form of money. Just most people find it easier to use debit cards and shit, or order stuff online, and sure as hell nobody is trying to implant a chip in you.

And that's the kicker, the Mark of the Beast shit, again. And the unsaid admission that she took it. That right there is what tells you that these people's religion, their desire to "Meet in churches and sing to God" is all crap and their churches are nothing but social clubs.

The author posits that the End Times are well advanced, but no Rapture, no Jesus, none of the massive social disruptions that are themselves, or let alone result from the judgments of God upon the Earth.

Seriously, does this dumb person think that God is powered by publicly-offered praise? Does Jesus get all soggy and hard to light if you don't sing "The Old Rugged Cross" every Sunday? Or does she think her God is Donald Trump, or a narcissist like him? Or does she simply buy into the notion put forward by some editions of Dungeons & Dragons, that Gods and the various planes of the Multiverse are powered by or archetypes of human belief?

Nobody expects, or wants, social distancing and shit to go on forever. Why in the hell do you think states and various cities and towns are mandating masks and trying to clamp down on anti-mask idiots like you, lady?

Nobody wants this crap to go on forever.

Except you, apparently.

And somehow this garbage always comes down to these fucking people believing they'll have to hide their Bibles under the floorboards and talk Bible in secret when nobody else is around. It's almost like they don't think the very First Amendment to the United States Constitution, nor the vast bodies of law around it nor the entire massive industry of manipulative Evangelical crap that exploits it really exists...or that somehow, all of this could just be whisked away by the flip of a switch into whatever some mysterious "Leader" wanted.

Bitch, the Trump era itself is mostly putting the lie to your stupid conspiracy theorizing.

I'm going to sound real harsh here for a minute.

Here we have a supposedly Evangelical Christian woman basically saying that when you die you're nothing but bones going into the Earth, that it's literally all crap, that nothing matters, that beliefs and causes that people have literally...rightly or wrongly, sincerely or otherwise...dedicated their lives to, that armies and guns, and weapons that could destroy the world itself, and cultures and religions and every other thing you can think of, that God Himself, will not matter in the face of the All Powerful Conspiracy Theory, and that defeat is inevitable.

Who the fuck wants to live in a world like that, with no hope? Even if the hope is wrong, I'll take it. I'm just saying, this fucking person is basically saying she's willing to live in a Godless, grim, hopeless world to be proven right about some bunch of conspiracy theories that are obviously bullshit.

She wants to make sure her grandchildren can sing to God, but she herself has canceled Christ.

"For God so loved the world..." those words alone imply a far more hopeful universe than this person can even imagine. It's a pretty revolutionary thing to imagine, let alone actually believe, that the force that maintains the Universe from moment to moment loves its Creation, and thus in some way cares about you. How does that never enter these people's consciousness?

"...That He gave his only begotten Son." Even in the most hopeful of times, or universes for that matter, life requires belief in truth, and sacrifice, and work. Being a spectator in life and sitting on your ass collecting checks ain't an option. Freedom isn't free, citizenship requires doing the hard work of life, not outsourcing your agency to any given yahoo that comes along and says "Follow me" but then goes and plays golf until it's time to go to a rally and say dumb racist shit and thrill to the roar of the howling angry mob.

"...That whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Your bones go into the Earth, true enough, but the entire basis of this stuff...the entire reason that people believe in things like religions...is that you are not there. Whether you've crossed some mythological river and paid the ferryman to go to Elysium or the Underworld, or passed on to some shiny or verdant Heaven or simply reincarnated as something else, or maybe even just ceased to exist altogether as you achieve Enlightenment or Oneness with the Universe and broken the cycle of death and reincarnation, the whole damn idea is that you're not there, that dead flesh is not you, anymore, your soul is eternal.

Why is it easier to believe in some stupid conspiracy theory than it is to believe in that?

Mind you, I learned every single word of this as a conservative. Agnostic that I am, I would not want to live without that knowledge. I believe there's something there, logic dictates there has to be. I don't know what it is, but I'll find out when I get to the Other Side.

I find it sad, that the people who for most of my life claimed the knowing of All Truth have discarded theirs...and for Donald Trump?

Something doesn't compute here, I'm just saying.

Why is it easier to believe the endless vapid prattle of Donald Trump than 25 words in the Book of John?

Why is it better to defend four years of Donald Trump than the 65 years of relatively-established conservatism that happened before he decided to run for President?

And that these fucking people will throw anybody under the bus in these times who defends those that are trying to do their job and protect the people from the virus, or who disagrees with Trump even a little bit, damned well ought to tell you everything you want to know about the people who are all like "Hey, remember when you could think whatever you wanted?"

Yes, I do, I remember when I was a Republican and could think whatever I wanted. I had to become a Democrat to keep the freedom to do that. I bet AOC and Liz Cheney remember, too. To her credit, Liz is not backing down. I'll take it.

And Ted is denying he said what he said when he called AOC a bitch for questioning policing tactics.

It pisses me off that the people who taught me to believe in Christ, to believe in truth, to be intellectually curious to find that truth, to question the power of the State, and to not be a boot-licking suckass have abandoned all that in favor of a level of worshiping the Leader and the Party and the State that would not have been out of place in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like I keep saying, these people are trying to impose their shitty beliefs, which are the thing they truly believe is divine, on the rest of us.

And then they'll call anybody who doesn't bow down and lick the boots of their chosen enforcers of the authority of the Transcendent State a 'Fucking Bitch' or worse, or just beat you for asking them to remember their oaths to the Constitution.

But ya know, they're basically coming right out and saying they don't believe in their own God at this point, that God that they've spent most of my life trying to impose belief in on everybody else.

Immanentizing the right-wing Eschaton requires eliminating all the other Gods first.

So what the hell else can you expect?

Part One.

Part Three.

God Of War (Immanentizing the Eschaton, Part One)

Our nation is founded on the principle that we do not have kings. We have presidents. And the Constitution is our compass. When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?' For some, he concluded, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history. ~John Lewis

This week, unknown and unmarked Federal agents driving unmarked, and apparently rented vans started snatching peaceful protesters and random people off the streets in Portland, Oregon. Far from some "Dirty War" disappearing people type of shit, they're apparently interrogating people and/or charging them with assorted misdemeanors and then letting them go, claiming vandalism and assorted other minor crimes as a justification. I know this because I read several articles about what's going on that quoted these people or referred to their stories. It's like the Argentine Dirty War, but run by Cartman from South Park.

As I've written previously, this is just another bullshit war dance attempt to intimidate people because conservatives and the Trump administration are freaked out by the George Floyd protests and seem to be positively terrified of Black Lives Matter.

But perhaps more to the point, they're freaked out that the protests have gone on for as long as they have. Normally, Americans get bored and move on to other things and shit, as we saw with COVID-19 when the protests started in the first place.

They can't count on people getting bored and going away, and using force not only doesn't seem to be working...but is, generally speaking, making things worse for Republicans in the counts of public opinion.

And as usual these fucking people have no goddamned idea what they're doing.

They have no idea what they're doing or where they're going, because they refuse to stop and think about how they got here in the first place. More to the point the absolute last thing that these fucking people want to do is address the root cause of how we got here in the first place.

Because that would mean confronting their own racism.

If you're afraid of Black Lives Matter, you're a racist. It doesn't get much simpler than that. The same people who bitch endlessly about "Cancel Culture" have been trying to cancel Black people for years. After all, what the hell do you think "All Lives Matter" was really about. 

This is especially interesting, considering that the actual main thrust of Republican policy at this point is that No Lives Matter, and when these fucking people can even convince their followers to not care about their own lives or have basic survival instinct to the point where we have to make laws telling people to do the most basic stuff (like wear a damn mask) to protect themselves from a deadly virus.

And in part, because lots of these people simply don't understand human nature or people other than themselves, they live in echo chambers, and their own followers are so easily manipulated...they can't or won't or outright refuse to understand why anybody would resist them in the first place.

And it's not a stretch at all, at this point, to say that the boot-lickers, cultists, dead-enders and next of kin who make up the Republican Party in general and Trumpism in particular at this point collectively have no conscience.

Thankfully, they've apparently lost the support of much of the government and the military, and they've outright demonized and othered a number of other Federal agencies such as the FBI and the wider Intelligence community. Hell, there's even a number of large, active groups of Republican former partisans and voters who are against Trump, not to mention the rest of us.

That's why they're using a bullshit ass collection of assorted Federal cops for this shit, because that's what they've got left.

But of course these fucking people can't or won't see that. Let them beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears and let the weak say I am a mighty man. That is exactly what's going on here.

If Trump gets voted out and tries to stay in power anyway, we're basically going to wake up the next morning and find that we live not in a United States of America, but rather in 50 little countries...and we'll have to work our way back up from there.

Note that the Chinese, the Russians, and a host of others would love nothing more than to see us shatter ourselves on the egos, insecurities, and venality of people like Donald Trump.

But of course these fucking people don't see it that way. They see themselves as Immanentizing the Eschaton, as I wrote the other day. They want to bring about [their version of] God's kingdom on the Earth, create heaven on Earth, yes, but only for themselves.

But see, you can't do that, because everybody's concept of God or heaven or whatever is different. Historically, such things always eventually fail and usually leave a hell of a lot of dead people in their path. Trumpism won't be any different, lunatic dreams create a nightmare for the sane, always.

And I can't stress it enough that these people don't have the slightest idea where they're going, because they don't know how they got here. Oh, they know where they think they're going, but when your beliefs have no basis in reality...well, you can believe whatever you want...but reality is under no obligation to play along. That's where we're at.

But even that's on purpose. Fools universally see "Ass backwards into the unknown" as some kind of a good thing. In my experience, they quite often think it's funny.

Do you think if Mike Pompeo knew anything more than how to be a suckass and yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir like a good junior line officer...that he'd even still be here?

But right here, in talking about the 1619 Project and calling it a "Dark View Of America" well that right there tells me that Mike Pompeo is just another fearful racist right-wing scumbag who probably was never worthy to wear the uniform in the first place.

People who are secure in their own beliefs are not threatened by the beliefs or the history of others. Unlike the Great White Men narrative of history, or for that matter the Lost Cause, nobody is trying to impose the 1619 Project on everybody else, least of all not the people who actually did it.

But these fucking people are so afraid, and so racist, and in possession of such a guilty conscience, that simply acknowledging slavery or the fact that Black people might have their own history here in America threatens not only these people's self-esteem but even their very concept of reality.

There was a time when you could be a conservative without being a fearful idiot or a racist or some kind of fanatic, but those days are long past, apparently. That's a damn shame and I say that as somebody who used to be a conservative.

But these fools don't understand that, because they don't care about the past, nor do they care about the future. It's always right now and whatever they have to do or say to make it through the day.

And because they're so overwhelmed with fear, having set everything they ever said they believed on fire for Donald Trump, then lost whatever mojo they'd cast over this country for so long, and ultimately given up their own soft power and even basic survival instincts, they're going to try to bring forth their own demon-haunted world so that they can immanentize their own shitty little eschaton and bow down in worship of the all powerful Transcendent State. Not a state of actual transcendence, but the government, as they imagine that it's totally under their control. This is what happens when the religious people don't really believe in their own gods. And they'd rather kill the rest of us than have us find out that most of them never actually believed in any of this stuff anyway, except for racism and shitty nihilism.

They'd rather start a war than lose an election, and they'd rather destroy themselves and kill everybody than actually face who and what they are.

Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Vote them out.

And then be prepared to fight them off.

That's really all there is to it.

Part Two.

Gnosis (My American Dark Age, Part Ten.)

Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? ... He said "War is too important to be left to the generals." When he said that, fifty years ago, he may have been right. But today war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. ~Colonel Jack D. Ripper, from the film Dr. Strangelove

I had a thought early this morning at work, specifically after reading the snipped quoted Tweet.

As regards Trumpist "Conservatives" and all that goes with them, we're no longer dealing with a political party here. We're dealing with a movement of ideological and racist fanatics that's trying to Immanentize their particularly shitty Eschaton.

Which is an ironic thought for me to have, given that I'm familiar with this stuff and used to be a conservative. The phrase "Immanentize the Eschaton" itself was popularized by William F. Buckley and his followers in the 1950's and 1960's. To "Immanentize the Eschaton," which means 'trying to make that which belongs in the afterlife happen here and now, on Earth, was exactly what Buckley and other conservatives at the time accused the Left of trying to do. In so doing they equated Leftism and Liberalism with Gnosticism, that is the belief that the chaos, disorder and untruth of the world could be transcended by extraordinary insight, knowledge or learning.

Of course, looking at it now, that view implies a certain tolerance for chaos, disorder, and injustice on the part of conservatives, but I digress. It's like if Buckley and the National Review would have gone whole-hog in supporting Ayn Rand and all the cranks and crypto-cultists instead of demonizing them and kicking them out of conservatism.

Never mind that in today's "Conservatism" the cranks and crypto-cultists, right down to Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society themselves, along with Q-Anon and every other damn nut you can think of, are the ones driving the bus.

And it's funny how this crap always seems to come back to racism.

The heirs of William F. Buckley on the other hand, up to and including actual National Review alumni like David French and Jonah Goldberg, are Never Trump Republicans, cast into the outer darkness along with people like George Conway and Rick Wilson and their Lincoln Project ad guys, and actively working toward getting Joe Biden elected.

If I had to guess, there's probably a reason for that.

Also, Speaking as a former pro-life conservative myself here I'd just like to point out that if even one person needs to die for your statue to have meaning, you probably need a better philosophy of life.

Need a better philosophy of life, you say?

KW Miller: Hold my beer, son.

So, not only is this dude a flaming Q-nut and a racist, he's apparently got some kind of mental issues and a persecution complex on top of that.

Wow, Republicans can really pick 'em these days, can't they?

It's like Idiocracy, but with even dumber people.

Trump Republicanism is full of people we'd never have heard of without Donald Trump, the dead enders whose next professional statement, without him, would be some variant of "Would you like fries with that?"

Without Donald Trump, Brad Parscale would be designing porn websites or something and still riffing (badly) on his Star Wars related opinions.

And these fucking people are going to fight like hell, and rub their dicks all over the country while they're at it, to preserve their...well, being relevant at all.

Every last one of these goddamned idiots, with their eyes shining with messianic fervor, would happily bring American empire and American power and international prestige crashing down around their ears just to have something they could say "Look at me, Look at ME!" about. It doesn't matter what it is. These fucking people don't believe in anything. But God sent them, as if that's not the oldest fucking trick in the book when it comes to trying to silence an argument against yourself. I mean, fucking seriously, it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

These fucking people don't believe in God. At least not in the sense that I understand what those words mean.

They just want to get famous, and to get money. If that means doing the bidding of Chinese Communists, Vladimir Putin or the Devil Himself they'll do it. It doesn't matter what it is. If Brad Parscale or KW Miller could get rich by singing old Frank Sinatra songs while wearing women's clothing they'd do it. If Angela Stanton King has to sell out every other Black person in the country, she'll do it and shed all type of crocodile tears if she's ever called to account. If they have to pretend they have a divine mandate and work up an affect full of messianic fervor that's just part of the tactics of trying to bullshit and flimflam their way into power.

And, as the current state of Trump's 2020 campaign shows, they'll shank each other right in the back just as well as you or me. And most of them have some sort of an ax to grind against their fellow Americans, mostly because we exist. I strongly suggest you should adjust your expectations accordingly.

These people see Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Party, anybody else who's trying to not die from COVID-19, and hell, the very concept of justice itself (social or otherwise) as detrimental to their holy work of Immanentizing the Conservative Eschaton to bring about Heaven On Earth for themselves alone.

If they'll otherize somebody like George H.W. Bush, John Bolton, John McCain, Mitt Romney or Rick Wilson, who all helped to get them where they are, to do it they'll sure run over you or me and not think twice about it. In point of fact, you can be the Trumpiest Trumpster that ever tried to Own A Lib and they'll gladly throw you right under Tommy Tuberville's burning campaign bus just because you went against Donald Trump basically one time. Oh, hi Jeff. Fuck you too!

The thing is, what I've seen of actual working for the greater good, or even simply doing your job, not to mention actual spiritual power or transcendent anything has mostly come from the other side, while the religious right bows down before an increasingly orange-hued Golden Calf.

And the entire Conservative mentality these days could be summed up as "Never mind what your conscience tells you, what the people want or what the Word says, just watch my Youtube video!" While they sit there counting their money and pondering shady investment schemes and pricey villas in non-extradition countries. Or worse, since they're facing an increasingly hostile electorate; How, when and where they can break off a piece of America for themselves so they never have to face the consequences of all this bullshit, not without a few million more deaths, anyway.

Seriously, we really need to stop paying people for being nuts.

I'd very much like My American Dark Age to end. Until we stop monetizing and tolerating cruelty, injustice and madness, that shit ain't gonna happen.

Part Nine.