American Antichrist (Fallen, Three.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

Ya know, 20 years ago, I used to be a Republican. 

I was a Christian, a member of the End Times Prophecy Movement...and I was still a person who believed in equality and freedom.

And I've written on this blog how I was chased out of both Christianity and Conservatism over the decade of the early 2000's by ravening fanatics who seemed to believe in nothing more than ravening fanaticism for the sake of ravening fanaticism.

People who, if offered this kind of power, would take it:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:16:18

And then These Fucking People have the nerve to call themselves "Conservatives."

Thing is, as I wrote yesterday, while the Trump cult seems to be receding a bit, that just means the Evangelicals are coming back a bit too...and they've learned from the last several years and completely unmoored themselves from any previous beliefs or morality. If Kayleigh McEnany's comments are to be believed...they've gotten worse.

And they may have found a new god.

Think I'm kidding?

I saw this earlier tonight as well.

At least some Evangelical Christians appear to be operating on the theory that Trump is some kind of "Last World Emperor" who will bring about Revelation.

In other words, These Fucking People literally think Trump is the Antichrist, and they're following him anyway.

Like I said, I was a member of the End Times Prophecy Movement...and doesn't this shit completely turn all that on its head? According to what I was taught, according to...well, basically everything I ever read on the subject...it was generally assumed automatically that while there would be others who would resist the Antichrist, they would lose the war and then Christians would become the primary...if not the only...force in the world resisting the Antichrist.

In all that, I don't recall anybody who ever said that Evangelicals would not only vote for but politically support the Antichrist on the specific basis that he would cause the world to be destroyed. But if anything, what's more galling about this stupid bullshit is that These Fucking People seem to think they can manipulate God.

Hell, it sort of offends something in my brain that these people want the Antichrist to be an American. According to the End Times narrative I learned back in the 1990's that was supposed to be the purpose of the European Union.

You know, I've only been reading and studying this stuff to one degree or another since I started learning how to read. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that if you say you're a Believer and you don't start from the premise that the Creator of the Infinite Universe is smarter than you are and unlikely to fall for your petty manipulations, you're probably in the wrong business.

And more to the point, the people who believe this ridiculous garbage are proud of the fact that they believe it, they won't shut up about it. Hell, Evangelicals talk about Trump with a fervor that Jesus only wishes they directed towards Him.

It seems like there's something very wrong here.

Just today, I've seen Fox News complain about how we don't need the Anti-lynching bill that President Biden signed today, and I've heard endless bullshit about Hunter Biden's laptop...which, so far as I can tell, probably isn't even a real thing. But in over a month now, I've not heard one damned word out of Fox News or Republicans about how the Russian Army is flying the Soviet Flag or about how Vladimir Putin seems to be hellbent on turning Russia back into the Soviet Union.

You'd think, for Republicans anyway, that this would be a bigger news item.

But the truth is that all too many Americans...especially most "Conservatives" and Republicans...are all too happy to outsource fighting for freedom to the Ukrainians and those who fight with them, and to conveniently ignore all the European and US soldiers who are prepared to do so should things escalate further...while they're trying to take away everybody else's freedom and rights.

Over the last couple of days, I saw a stupid altercation between Chris Rock and Will Smith become the big news item even more than the fact that there's a fucking war going on.

People literally grabbed onto the first, and likely dumbest, escapist thing they possibly could.

When Trump's term was winding down and the election was in full swing I wrote that a lot of people wanted it to be over and him to be gone because they figured things would go back to "normal" whatever that is. 

Well, things didn't, but a lot of people were determined to keep on believing things were going back to normal anyway.

How's that been working out?

But now we're in the middle of a full-blown global crisis, with Russia, you know, one of the world's major powers effectively becoming a Black Hole. An Event Horizon of authoritarianism like North Korea...that, if it wasn't invading another country, would be utterly isolated from the rest of the world. As big of a deal as this is to a lot of us, it seems like it should be a bigger deal to all of us.

It seems to me like a lot of people are real desperate for some illusion of normalcy and pretending everything is OK, and thus they want to go back to the way things were 20 years ago. In 2002 my cousin sent me a picture of a handwritten sign at a US Marine Corps combat outpost right smack in the middle of Nowhere, Afghanistan that said "America is not at war, The Marine Corps is at war, America is at the mall."

And if you don't think various bad actors, Evangelical and otherwise, are going to exploit that tendency of some of us, you have another thing coming.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen...and this ain't it.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Two

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.

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