https://scheerpost.com/2022/05/09/hedges-jesus-endless-war-and-the-rise-of-american-fascism/
Jesus, Endless War, and the Rise of American Fascism
The Democratic Party is hoping to thwart an election rout by running against the expected Supreme Court decision on abortion. This is depressingly all that is left of its political capital.
The Democratic Party – which had 50 years to write Roe v Wade into law with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama in full control of the White House and Congress at the inception of their presidencies – is banking its electoral strategy around the expected Supreme Court decision to lift the judicial prohibition on the ability of states to enact laws restricting or banning abortions.
I doubt it will work.
The Democratic Party’s hypocrisy and duplicity is the fertilizer for Christian fascism. Its exclusive focus on the culture wars and identity politics at the expense of economic, political, and social justice fueled a right-wing backlash and stoked the bigotry, racism, and sexism it sought to curtail. Its opting for image over substance, including its repeated failure to secure the right to abortion, left the Democrats distrusted and reviled.
The Biden administration invited Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls and union workers from Starbucks and other organizations to the White House at the same time it re-awarded a $10 billion contract to the union-busting Amazon and the National Security Agency (NSA) for cloud computing. The NSA contract is one of 26 federal cloud computing contracts Amazon has with the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Interior, and the Census Bureau. Withholding the federal contracts until Amazon permitted free and open union organizing would be a powerful stand on behalf of workers, still waiting for the $15 minimum wage Joe Biden promised as a candidate. But behind the walls of the Democratic Party’s Potemkin village stands the billionaire class. Democrats have failed to address the structural injustices that turned America into an oligarchic state, where the obscenely rich squabble like children in a sandbox over multibillion-dollar toys. The longer this game of political theater continues, the worse things will get.
The Christian fascists have coalesced in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump. They are bankrolled by the most retrograde forces of capitalism. The capitalists permit the stupidities of the Christian fascists and their self-destructive social and cultural wars. In exchange, the billionaire class gets corporate monopolies, union busting, privatized state, and municipal services, including public education, revoked government regulations, especially environmental regulation, and can engage in a virtual tax boycott.
The war industry loves the Christian fascists who turn every conflict from Iraq to Ukraine into a holy crusade to crush the latest iteration of Satan. The Christian fascists believe military power, and the “manly” virtues that come with it, are blessed by God, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary. No military budget is too big. No war waged by America is evil.
These Christian fascists make up perhaps 30 percent of the electorate, roughly equivalent to the percentage of Americans who believe abortion is murder. They are organized, committed to a vision, however perverse, and awash in money. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, mediocre jurists and Federalist Society ideologues who carry the banner of Christian fascism, control the Supreme Court.
Establishment Republicans and Democrats, like George Armstrong Custer on Last Stand Hill, have circled the wagons around the Democratic Party in a desperate bid to prevent Trump, or a Trump mini-me, from returning to the White House. They, and their allies in Silicon Valley, are using algorithms and overt de-platforming to censor critics from the left and the right, foolishly turning figures like Trump, Alex Jones, and Marjorie Taylor Greene into martyrs. This is not a battle over democracy, but the spoils of power waged by billionaires against billionaires. No one intends to dismantle the corporate state.
The ruling class in both parties told lies about NAFTA, trade deals, “reforming” welfare, abolishing financial regulations, austerity, the Iraq war, and neoliberalism that did far more damage to the American public than any lie told by Trump. The reptilian slime oozes out of every pore of these politicians, from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to Biden, who backed the 1976 Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortions and in 1982 voted to support a constitutional amendment that would allow states to overturn Roe v Wade. Their hypocrisy is not lost on the public, even with their armies of consultants, pollsters, courtiers in the press, public relations teams and advertising agencies.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is clueless and unhinged. She claims Hillary Clinton was involved in a child mutilation and a pedophilia ring and several high-profile school shootings were staged. But weaponized, like Trump, she is a political cruise missile aimed straight at the heart of the discredited centers of traditional power.
Hate is the fuel of American politics. No one votes for who they want. They vote against those they hate. Black and brown marginal communities have suffered worse assaults than the white working class, but they have been defanged politically with militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation. The erosion of due process, the world’s largest prison system and the stripping away of all rights, including often voting rights because of felony convictions, as well as a loss of access to most social services and jobs, reduced them to a subsistence level on the lowest rung of America’s caste system. They are also the primary targets of Republican-sponsored voter suppression and redistricting.
The glue holding this Christianized fascism together is not prayer, although we will get a lot of that, but war. War is the raison d’être of all systems of totalitarianism. War justifies a constant search for internal enemies. It is used to revoke basic civil liberties and impose censorship. War demonizes those in the Middle East, Russia, or China, who are blamed for the economic and social debacles that inevitably get worse. War diverts the rage engendered by a dysfunctional state towards immigrants, people of color, feminists, liberals, artists, anyone who does not identify as a heterosexual, the press, antifa, Jews, Muslims, Russians, or Asians. Take your pick. It is a bigot’s smorgasbord. Every item on the menu is fair game.
I spent two years with the Christian right reporting and researching my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. These Christian fascists have never hidden their agenda or their desire to create a “Christian” nation, any more than Adolf Hitler hid his demented vision for Germany in Mein Kampf. They prey, like all fascists, on the despair of their followers. They paint gruesome portraits of the end times when the longed-for obliteration of non-believers presages the glorious return of Jesus Christ. The battle at Armageddon, they believe, will be launched from the Antichrist’s worldwide headquarters in Babylon once the Jews again have control of Israel. The closer we get to Armageddon, the giddier they become.
These people believe this stuff, as they believe in QAnon or the election fraud that supposedly put Biden in office. They are convinced that a demonic, secular-humanist ideology propagated by the media, the United Nations, elite universities, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission along with the US State Department and major foundations are seeking to destroy them.
Violence is embraced as a cleansing agent, a key component of any fascist movement. The Christian fascists do not fear nuclear war. They welcome it. The insane provocations of Russia by the Biden administration, including the decision to provide $33 billion in assistance to Ukraine, target ten Russian generals for assassination and pass on to Ukraine the intelligence to sink the Moskva, the guided missile cruiser that was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, supercharges the ideology of the Christian right. The marriage of the war industry, determined to make war forever, with the Christian fascists yearning for the apocalypse is terrifying. Biden is sleepwalking us into a war with Russia and perhaps China. The Christian fascists will accelerate the bloodlust.
The political deformities we have spawned are not unique. They are the product of a society and government that no longer functions on behalf of the citizenry, one that has been seized by a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, to serve its exclusive interests. The airy promises politicians make, including the announcement by candidate Barack Obama that the first thing he would do in office was sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which during his eight years as president he never got around to doing, are worthless. The scheduled vote next week in the Senate on a bill asserting that abortions are legal in the United States, which is expected to be blocked by the Republican’s use of the filibuster, a Senate procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation in the 100-member chamber, is another empty gesture.
We saw the consequences of this dysfunction in Weimar Germany and Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. Political stagnation and economic misery breeds rage, despair, and cynicism. It gives rise to demagogues, charlatans, and con artists. Hatred drives political discourse. Violence is the primary form of communication. Vengeance is the highest good. War is the chief occupation of the state. It is the vulnerable and weak who pay.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-seeks-muzzle-doctors-who-tell-truth-about-covid/5779470
Bill Seeks to Muzzle Doctors Who Tell the Truth About COVID
One of the most stunning parts of this pandemic has been the denial of basic science, and one of the most shocking developments from that has been the attack on medical doctors who try to set the record straight.
As reported by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — professor of health policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable1 — a California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with.2
Bhattacharya’s Personal Battle
Bhattacharya has first-hand experience with this kind of witch hunt. He was one of the first to investigate the prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020, and found that by April, the infection was already too prevalent for lockdowns to have any possibility of stopping the spread.
Bhattacharya has called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake ever made,”3stressing that the harms caused have been “absolutely catastrophically devastating,” especially for children and the working class, worldwide.4
After Bhattacharya co-sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and his former boss, now retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, colluded behind the scenes to quash the declaration from day 1.5
To that end, they set out to smear and destroy the reputations of Bhattacharya and the other coauthors of the declaration. In one email, Collins referred to the three highly credentialed and respected scientists as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a press “takedown” of the trio.6,7,8,9 I detailed this treachery in “Authors of Barrington Declaration Speak Out.”
“Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them ‘misinformation,’” Bhattacharya writes.10 “I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats.
Despite the false, defamatory and sometimes frightening attacks, we stood firm. And today many of our positions have been amply vindicated. Yet the soul searching this episode should have caused among public health officials has largely failed to occur. Instead, the lesson seems to be: Dissent at your own risk.
I do not practice medicine — I am a professor specializing in epidemiology and health policy at Stanford Medical School. But many friends who do practice have told me how they have censored their thoughts about COVID lockdowns, vaccines, and recommended treatment to avoid the mob …
This forced scientific groupthink — and the fear and self-censorship they produce — are bad enough. So far, though, the risk has been social and reputational. Now it could become literally career-ending.”
Do You Want Your Doctor To Be Muzzled by the State?
California Assembly Bill 209811 — introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, a Silicon Valley Democrat, and coauthored by Assembly members Aguiar-Curry, Akilah Weber and Wicks, and Sens. Pan and Wiener — designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license.
Misinformation or disinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation — by the state. As noted by Bhattacharya:12
“Doctors, fearing loss of their livelihoods, will need to hew closely to the government line on COVID science and policy, even if that line does not track the scientific evidence.
After all, until recently, top government science bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci claimed that the idea that COVID came from a Wuhan laboratory was a conspiracy theory, rather than a valid hypothesis that should be open to discussion. The government’s track record on discerning COVID truths is poor.
The bill claims that the spread of misinformation by physicians about the COVID vaccines ‘has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk.’ But how significant is this problem in reality? Over 83% of Californians over the age of 50 are fully vaccinated (including the booster) …
What is abundantly clear is that this bill represents a chilling interference with the practice of medicine. The bill itself is full of misinformation and a demonstration of what a disaster it would be to have the legislature dictate the practice of medicine.”
The Shanghai Model
We don’t have to guess at what life might look like if this and other bills like it are implemented, Bhattacharya warns. The drama currently playing out in Shanghai offers a clear look into what can happen when public health is dictated by the state rather than by qualified medical professionals rooted in sound science.
“Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials,” Bhattacharya writes.13 “The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown.
For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care — all to no avail. COVID cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing COVID persists.
In America, many of our officials still have not abandoned their delusions about COVID and the exercise of power this crisis has allowed. As the Shanghai debacle demonstrates, of all the many terrible consequences of our public health response to COVID, the stifling of dissenting scientific viewpoints by the state might be the most dangerous.”
The Science Deniers Are in Power
As stressed by Bhattacharya, the California bill includes a number falsehoods and fails to acknowledge basic science, starting with natural immunity. High-quality studies have repeatedly shown that natural immunity is equivalent or superior to the COVID shots. Were this bill to pass, a California doctor could lose his license for taking a patient’s COVID history into account when recommending the shot.
It also negates doctors’ ability to prescribe off-label drugs for the treatment of COVID, even though this has been a common and uncontroversial medical practice for many decades. It’s not uncommon for a drug intended for one condition to be used off-label for another. But for some reason, when it comes to COVID, this practice is now deemed hazardous and unprofessional.
The bill also falsely asserts that the “safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have been confirmed through evaluation by the federal Food and Drug Administration.” Anyone who has followed this circus over the past year realizes that the FDA has completely ignored loud and clear warning bells showing the shots are far from safe and nowhere near as effective as initially claimed.
The bill also ignores the fact that the safety depends on the individual patient’s medical history and current state of health. “For example, there is an elevated risk of myocarditis in young men taking the vaccine, especially with the booster,” Bhattacharya notes.14
Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health.
“The false medical consensus enforced by AB 2098 will lead doctors to censor themselves to avoid government sanction. And it will be their patients, above all, who will be harmed by their silence,” Bhattacharya warns.
Californians, Vote NO on COVID Tyranny Bills
California Bill 2098 isn’t the only bill seeking to enshrine tyranny into law. Other pending California bills include:15
If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO. In a Substack article, Margaret Anna Alice, offers the following guidance to Californians:22
“If you are a resident of California, please consider taking the additional step of contacting your respective senators and assembly members in addition to filling out the online portal. See Californians for Medical Freedom for step-by-step instructions on how to contact your local legislators as well as what to say if you decide to call (which is recommended).
The PERK website is also a very helpful way to track the hearing dates and status of these bills. In the comments, Donald Tipon has provided additional links for opposing AB2098 and AB1797 from A Voice for Choice Advocacy.”
Front Groups Marshal the Ignorant
Regulating the medical views a doctor can and cannot have is dangerous in the extreme, and hopefully the Californians who are left to vote in that state will quash such efforts. On the national level, we must also stay vigilant against similar legislative proposals, and push back against phony front groups that promote this kind of medical tyranny.
This includes the No License for Disinformation23 (NLFD) group, which promotes the false information disseminated by the dark-money group known as the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
As most now know, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a medical doctor in his own right, has been the primary challenger of Fauci’s lies, and the NLFD has been instructing individuals to report him to the Kentucky Medical Board, with the aim of getting his medical license revoked.24
Just who are the NLFD?25 In November 2021, I wrote about the NLFD, pointing out that the bottom of their website declared, “Created & Developed by EverydayAmericanJoe.”26 At the time, I took a screenshot of it, in case they’d wise up and change it. Good thing, because that notice has since been deleted.
And, no wonder, because it leads right back to the Biden White House. EverydayAmericanJoe, created by a marketing strategist named Chris Gilroy, was a website dedicated to supporting Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. (That website has since been disabled.27)
According to his LinkedIn profile,28 Gilroy created EverydayAmericanJoe.com — “the largest Biden-Harris grassroots website online” — as a freelance senior marketing consultant and designer for the Biden campaign. Since 2007, he’s been the president of The Microtechs LLC, an online marketing, web development and digital advertising firm that produces custom websites and apps “that our clients can manage themselves.”
Aside from the EverydayAmericanJoe clue, there’s no indication of who is actually running the NLFD. It simply claims to be a “nonpartisan grassroots coalition of Americans” whose goal it is to get state medical boards to “protect the public” from medical professionals “who spread medical disinformation.” In all likelihood, the NLFD is run by a coalition of one — Gilroy himself — who is far from nonpartisan.
Not surprisingly, the NLFD has promoted and relied on the CCDH’s fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report, which has even been denounced as biased and flawed in the extreme by Facebook.29
It’s quite clear that the CCDH exists to fabricate “evidence” that is then used to destroy the opposition in order to control the information, and the NLFD uses the CCDH’s fabrications as justification to suppress First Amendment rights.30 Indeed, Biden himself has publicly promoted and relied on this dark money CCDH report.31
The point of all this is that the censorship is being authorized and directed from the very highest level of our government, and there’s only one reason for that. Democracy flourishes under free speech and dies under censorship, and anyone who claims differently has an ulterior motive for trying to confuse these simple truths.
In my view, the war against “misinformation” and “disinformation” is nothing less than a covert war against the citizens of planet Earth. It’s an attempt to seize power by controlling what people can know, and a number of high-profile world leaders, past and present, have shown their true colors.
Among them, former president Obama, who in April 2022 gave lectures at the University of Chicago and Stanford, arguing for the regulation of information — what people can and cannot view on social media and elsewhere — “to protect democracy.”32
However, as noted by nonresident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), Mark Jamison, “Such controls have done the opposite throughout history and would this time too.”33
An Open War on the Public
We find ourselves in a situation where asking valid questions about public health measures are equated to acts of domestic terrorism. It’s unbelievable, yet here we are. Over the past two years, the rhetoric used against those who question the sanity of using unscientific pandemic countermeasures, such as face masks and lockdowns, or share data showing that COVID-19 gene therapies are really bad public health policy, has become increasingly violent.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a virologist who for years has been at the forefront of promoting vaccines of all kinds, for example, has publicly called for cyberwarfare assaults on American citizens who disagree with official COVID narratives, and this vile rhetoric was published in the prestigious science journal Nature, of all places.34
Doctors and nurses are now facing the untenable position of having to choose between doing right by their patients and toeing the line of totalitarianism. This simply cannot go on. It’s profoundly unhealthy and dangerous in a multitude of ways.
While frustrating and intimidating, we must all be relentless in our pursuit and sharing of the truth, and we must relentlessly demand our elected representatives stand up for freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights, including, and especially, the rights of medical doctors to express their medical opinions.
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