American Revelation: The Goats Stand Justified.

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:  ~Matthew 25:31-41

I saw this the other night. Some idiotic Trump Supporter saying that when Trump is "reinstated" in August (a thing for which there is no Constitutional or legal mechanism) that John F. Kennedy Jr. (A Dead Guy, who is known to be a Dead Guy and has been so since he was killed in a plane crash in 1999) will be his Vice President.

Ya know, I'm pretty sure that literally the most fucking important fucking job requirement for the fucking Vice President is that they fucking have a fucking pulse because their entire fucking job is to fucking be there to take the fuck over if the fucking President fucking dies, do you fucking understand me?!

Now, I'll be honest, none of this Q-Bullshit has ever made any goddamned sense to me. 

After all, JFK Jr. was a Democrat. He was never in government above the municipal level (and that as an employee, A NYC city-government lawyer, not an elected official) and he was never particularly political beyond a brief appearance at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. He's mostly known, in fact, for a brief acting career and for being the publisher of George magazine. He was mostly just famous for being famous and he checks absolutely none of the typical Republican boxes. Mike Pence has better conservative credentials. Hell, so did Donald Trump in 2016. So yeah, that's not saying much.

But here we are.

There's people who believe more in this dead guy, and more to the point that this dead nominally liberal non-politician...will somehow arise as some kind of conservative avenging angel? Do I have this right so far?

As if the Vice-President could be that, in any case.

They believe in this shit more than they believe in the reality that's right in front of their faces every day.

I'm a gamer, More to the point I run stuff like Dungeons & Dragons and Vampire the Masquerade. I write crazy screwed up shit for fun. If a player came at me with a character concept that convoluted, I'd make them try and make it make sense and tell them no when they couldn't fucking do it. Then I'd make them go and fucking get another one. 

Q, whoever the fuck they really are, fucking sucks at character concepts and world-building.

But yet, to refresh my own memory concerning anything other than Junior's death (which I remember well, having been in New Jersey visiting a friend then-stationed at McGuire Air Force Base when that plane crash happened off Martha's Vineyard) I Googled him real quick and nine of the top ten results were Q-Anon related bullshit. I mean, are you fucking kidding me?

Data point noted.

Now, I'd like to stop and make particular note of something here.

Noor Bin Laden and a few West Coast Yoga people aside, it's been my experience that non-Christians do not believe this crap in any significant numbers. 

In point of fact, my own rather unscientific polling (mostly of co-workers) over the past couple of nights seems to slant heavily in the direction that the more vehemently a given person answers in the affirmative to the questions "Do you believe in Jesus Christ" and "Do you think most people believe in Jesus Christ" the more likely they are to be a Trump Supporter.

And being a Trump Supporter seems to be a prerequisite for being a damned Q-Nut. I don't make the rules. And what are the rules?

Well, Four Spiritual Laws (I've linked to the original concept by way of comparison) seem to govern the modern Right in general, and right-wing Christianity in particular.

#1 Exclusivism: Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go. America isn't America if Black people get a slice, and so on. The entire point of these people's religion...and thus everything else...is this idea what they'll be whisked away by the Rapture or something something Gazpacho and then get to sit up there in Heaven with Jesus and watch the rest of us burn in hell. There's a reason for the hate and the racism, the cruelty is the fucking point for these motherfuckers.

And the whole 1990's/Y2K End Times Prophecy narrative was one big not-subtle-at-all dig against liberals, LGBT folks, mainstream conservatives, technology, the United Nations, and what was even then a very rapidly changing world.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

Speaking of, also note that to these fucking people, the rest of the world essentially does not exist unless it suits their purposes. There's a questionable exception for Israel in the mix, but a majority of these people's talk on that subject contemptuously ignores (or gleefully expects the destruction of) the people who actually live there.

#2 Gnosticism: God is a remote supreme being aloof from a lost and dying world, but *I* can show you how to reach Him. Just send me $20! (You can also refer to this as the Televangelist rule.) Or, more recently, "Send Mr. Trump $20 to help Stop The Steal/Fight Big Tech/Go Golf and click 'repeat' on the donate button or we'll tell him you're a Socialist."

Again, see also Rule #1. God isn't God if there is but one mediator between God and Man, that is the Lord Jesus Christ (see also the link to the original Four Spiritual Laws above.) We are essential here, our authority, our opinion, blah blah blah. (It gets real awkward and inconvenient once you ask "Why does God need a Starship?") The Truth isn't The Truth if it's available for free in pretty much every language known to Man and easily found in whole volumes via the Internet at the touch of a couple of buttons on a touchscreen. 

There always has to be some extra-special, super-secret Unga Bunga song and dance to go with it, otherwise THEY wouldn't be important, would they? 

Ever notice how just being a Christian, or a conservative, or whatever isn't good enough for these people? They always have to one-up, and therefore have a shot at out-grifting, the next person.
What good is being all holy and righteous if you don't get the perverse joy of rubbing somebody else's nose in it?

#3 Greed: Give Us Money.

That's followed up by "Give us power, so that we can use it to make more money."

#4 Iconoclasm: Ever notice how with these people, these days, there's no sound Biblical exegesis, no doctrinal teaching, and little or nothing in the way of theology? There's a reason for that. I was taught that a sound view of life rested on revealed truth and the wisdom of our ancestors...these are things that modern Christians and conservatives seem to despise and reject outright, unless of course it can be twisted to fit their worldview, which has little, if anything, to do with Christianity in a traditional sense, but rather it was a thing to be hollowed out and used as a trojan horse to get into places they otherwise could not. Otherwise, old beliefs are to be abandoned, set on fire and left in the middle of the road to burn while the mob walks away laughing. These fucking people abandoned everything they ever said they believed in for Donald Trump. Think about that for a second.

Then, they were determined to ride that tiger to power, as if such was the only way (ever) to achieve it.

And once there, they very quickly drew a line, like the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot's Cambodia, between the "New" people who accepted their doctrines and bought into all this bullshit, and the "Old" people who did not. The New people were to be put to work for, basically, the glory of one man (Donald Trump. The Old people on the other hand, were simply there to be used up and destroyed.

And they thought they were going to be able to keep it going forever. Oops.

See Also: Trump Administration, COVID-19 Response. There's a reason I say these people don't want America...they want the Killing Fields with a mall.

And that's another thing, since Trump lost, the Hitler references keep piling up.

Same with the COVID-19 denialism, and they're mad as hell that anybody who wants to get a vaccination can and that a majority of people so far have done exactly that.

These fuckers can't find one good thing to say about any Democrat, but they can find the time to praise Adolf Hitler himself, a man once hated by conservatives and liberals alike as the ultimate in human evil.

But these fucking people #1 Thought they were going to be able to use the virus to kill off the rest of us and #2 Thought the rest of us were just going to lay down and die because they said so.

And apparently, as of a couple days ago, evidence has come out that Trump said similar things, praising Hitler. Seriously, after all this, what's it going to take to drive home the point that these are people who shouldn't be allowed to exercise power over what's for lunch?

Instead, throughout all this crap, it's been the people the Conservatives and the Evangelical Christians said were going to hell who've fought to keep this country together, who've helped their neighbors, who lined up to vote, marched and protested and saw to the beginnings of a reckoning on racism, stood up to protect democracy, and so on. While these fucking people, the Christians and the "Conservatives" did everything possible but hold orgiastic sexual rites in Trump's name (up to and including building a literal golden idol of him) others did the work of life and kept America moving forward, if only slowly.

It's as if  someone took and flip-flopped the roles of the Sheep and the Goats from the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

And what's worse is the sheep seem not to have even noticed, Nor are they even questioning where their leader may be trying to take them.

Hell, even many of the non-Trump Supporting Christians are so fucked in the head with conspiracy theories, false doctrines, and ravening mental illness that we may never get the mess sorted out.

Meanwhile, others carry on the work they should have been doing, while they try and make it harder for the rest of us. American conservatism has pretty much become a cesspool of some of the worst ideas ever to enter the minds of sinful, unregenerate men.

And yet again, this, they call righteousness.

In American Revelation, the sheep get marched off to hell and slaughter, while those traditionally considered to be the goats stand justified.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Part Ten.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan