As I write this, election officials across the country have been getting death threats from Trump Supporters, including sexualized threats aimed at their wives.
A lot of people, especially Republican election officials who were legitimately just doing their jobs, seem very justifiably shocked by this and are asking where did this Bacchanalia of evil even come from?
Well, the internet, for one. I'm dead serious about this.
Dear whatever-sensible-Republicans-are-left;
Back in the early to mid aughts, I was a still at least technically conservative and Christian college student, going through a divorce, and at the start of a long journey that led to me being pushed out of both Christianity and conservatism. I was an information technology major. I was that scruffy often-unshaven slightly older guy in the dorms, wearing a raggedy-ass Woodland Camouflage BDU jacket with my name on it and a Senior Airman's rank on the shoulders who always had a joke or an opinion or a story to tell, and the good cigarettes or pipe tobacco, the direct result of me and a clique of my friends all being in good with the owner/operator of the tobacco shop that was downtown, down the hill from our small Northern Michigan community college. For whatever reason, for a few years that combination of things got me pretty far with the ladies, too.
And I was online all the time, way before it was cool, well before it was a fact of life for virtually everybody.
And I saw this moment coming, I really fucking did. Let me tell you why.
See, being that my Christianity, along with my finances and my soul, had pretty much been repeatedly kicked in the teeth and then set on fire by my ex-wife and her troupe of Holy Roller human malfunctions, I was in the middle of a full-blown crisis of faith which I was doing my level best to turn into a search for answers, religion giving way to spirituality, and perversely for the not-quite-ex Christian, it was all the non-Christians...and even just straight up non-Believers...who were actually helpful. The Agnostics and Atheists and Muslims and Pagans of various sorts actually seemed to care.
The Christians, not so much. I mean, filing for divorce meant I was no less radioactive to the local Evangelicals...who had sided with my ex-wife...than I would have been had an SS-18 nuclear missile actually hit the ground I was standing on and all the warheads detonated right there. I'd tried going to the local Catholic church a couple of times, but their main thrust of effort was to try to tell me that the Protestant Christianity that had influenced most of my life functionally didn't exist...a canard that I found empty and pointless and at odds with even my own previous few years as a Catholic.
But, like I said, I spent a lot of time online. So, naturally I turned to the internet and online forums in my search for answers and truth be told, it didn't disappoint, not one bit. I posted on several different Christian forums, and the Internet Infidels Discussion Board, an Atheist website.
As regards the "Christian" forums; As long as you weren't an Atheist or Agnostic, or considering an abortion, or bisexual, or gay, or "liberal" (then as now, a catch-all-term for anyone to the Left of Girolamo Savanarola) or poor or in possession of any one of these qualities while possessing a complexion darker than a sheet of computer paper and you said the right words, you were, and I quote "Saved." I should note that any of these things could also be Forgiven if accompanied by the right amount of Jesus-y moping around and wearing the Official Hair Shirt, what can I say, it was a glorious, more forgiving time.
But none of that crap was any good for providing actual answers to any actual questions, and an insane amount of this shit presaged the god-awful soup sandwich we find ourselves stuck with today.
I mean, there was the old guy who solemnly posted "AMEN" in response to Every. Single. Prayer. Request. On. ChristianBBS. I don't know if the dude had a life, I don't know if he did anything else, or what he'd done before that, but goddamn if there was anybody online more than me it was that fucking guy, and goddamn it, I don't remember him ever posting anything else.
There was the Unhinged Calvinist Fanatic who'd go full bore fire and brimstone at the slightest hint of mention of homosexuality.
There was some random Islamophobe who knew a little Arabic and would lie in wait like a steel trap for any Atheist or Muslim person to show up on that forum, and a couple others he haunted, before unleashing endless nonsensical screeds.
And there were, actually, a few people I could talk to.
And most importantly, there were the End Times conspiracy theorists, Oh Lawd were there ever the End Times conspiracy theorists. Y2K had crashed and burned but then 9/11 happened and these fucking people went crazy...and then...nothing. The collective "Oh shit" seriousness of the moment had precluded silly bullshit and though there was a couple weeks of frenzied religiosity it had sort of flamed out after that.
This was a couple months previous.
There literally was no major End Times insanity going on at the time, but there was no end of effort to try and create it.
There was this little known British occultist dude named Benjamin Creme, AKA Maitreya who claimed to "Channel" everybody from Buddha and Jesus to Alice Bailey and probably Aleister Crowley, and who looked for all the world like a white-haired, British-accented Yoda, and made considerably less sense.
But a few of these morons had latched on to the idea that this person was the Antichrist because something-something one-world religion. (As if anybody who's ever observed an argument between two Baptists of slightly differing streams doesn't know such an idea is complete and utter bullshit.)
Cue the "OMG OMG THE WORLD IS GOING TO END" hysteria from a whole bunch of gullible easily-scared idiots that anybody who's made it this far through 2020 can easily recognize as mostly-unnecessary, probably-conservative absolute bullshit.
The Unhinged Calvinist Fanatic, of all people, immediately and very simply responded "These aren't the Droids you're looking for." I have to say I was impressed.
The next guy, also a Calvinist, interestingly enough of Korean descent and one of the few people I could actually have a conversation with came back with "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."
I said my say, figuring too early that this was how it was going to go, simply asking, as I often did, just where one might find any of this mentioned in the Bible.
Well, then I had to go to work, shame on me for having a life. I changed into my work shirt, grabbed my coat and walked down the hall, through the lobby, out the door and across the sidewalk. My (most days) daily commute to work of less than 100 meters. By the time I got back from eight hours of work and an hour-and-a-half of class that my work schedule flexed around., my inbox was overflowing with hate-mail and bubbling over with glowing acidic green drool to the point where I was seriously like "What the fuck?"
All because I'd asked a question, exactly the kind of question I had been taught to ask, as a Baptist, all these years before.
And there was a death threat and the person calling me a minion of the New World Order for mocking them, which I reported, which the admins in turn reported to the police wherever that person lived.
I wasn't the only person this poster threatened to murder, either.
It was my first one that I remember, and I say that as somebody who'd had a rifle pointed at my by a hostile person once before...and who at the time still daily thanked God that nothing more had come of it than excessive foul language, only some of which could be understood by either side.
I almost thought it was funny. And, to be honest, pretty stupid.
But these dumb-shit fanatics are everywhere, and anonymous, too often invisible, and I'm here to tell you lots of them love them some Trump, and most of the rest are Okay with him. Most of the time, it's farcical, a problem eliminated with a quick report and use of the block button.
But this kind of fanaticism, often stripped of any claim of Christianity or even religion, has already caused real-world violence and gotten people hurt or killed. And Trump somehow personifies these people's shitty hate. Don't take my word for it, ask them, they'll tell you.
Starting in 2009 with the Tea Party bullshit, Republicans thought they could take advantage of this crazy shit and use it to their own ends. Well, Republicans, I'm here to tell you it's not gonna work out that way. These people's need for anger and outrage hits will far outstrip most other people's tolerances eventually...and then you're the enemy, even if all you do is ask a simple question, even if it's the kind you were all taught to ask.
Nothing is ever good enough. No one can ever go far enough, most especially not within the limits of the United States of America's constitutional, federalized system. The howling mob's need for more anger, more hate, and eventually for blood, will not only never stop, it will get worse until it is either glutted in an orgy of blood and murder or until it is slapped down hard and confronted on a national and societal level. We're starting to do that, but it's been piecemeal enough that at least some of these shitty haters can just ignore it all.
You can't take advantage of these people, without them eventually looking to take advantage back, to hate and otherize somebody else, up to and including you.
Why? Because that's all they believe in, it's all they want or understand. Anti-intellectualism, hate, and paranoia. Trying to play along or stay quiet or hope it'll go away won't help. Ignoring Nazis is how you end up with more Nazis.
The only thing you can do, is switch sides, and stand up and fight this shit.
No one's asking you to become a liberal. You can believe in humanity and still be a conservative. But you have to stand up. You're likely in the same boat as the rest of us anyway, or you will be soon enough. But self-preservation is heresy to Trumpers.
Doesn't matter, get out, while you still can.
One last thing;
These people may be functionally turning against religion now, but they'd never have gotten here, never reached the point where they would be attempting to enthrone Trump as God, without conservative religiosity, and the glorification thereof. This current Christ-less Christianity would not be possible without that.
Jesus, or their idea of Jesus at least, built this house for them and then they threw him under the bus in favor of Donald Trump.
What do you think that says about where you stand?
And just what the fuck are we even doing here?
Ur-Fascism depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values. ~Umberto Eco.
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