Stephan: When I say christofascist, that's what I mean, and here is why. I don't capitalize the first letter by the way, because this religion is not Christianity, which I always capitalize.
An anti-abortion protester in front of the supreme court as it hears arguments in case seeking to overturn Roe v Wade in December. Credit: José Luis Magaña / AP
The supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric.
Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.
At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.
How did this conviction come to have such influence in the courts, given America’s longstanding principle […]
Stephan: Increasingly Americans are feeling overwhelmingly alienated from their government with a significant percentage expecting it to come to gun violence. Basically a new civil war. When you add that to what amounts to a second attempted coup, this by the Supreme Court with its recent decisions, and the Republican blockage of the Senate so that nothing gets done, and the cultivation by Republicans of the most radical MAGAt world morons, it becomes clear that for a host of reasons the United States is sliding into becoming a christofascist anocracy.
When the citizens of a country turn against their government, no longer trust it, no longer feel they can rely on it, because the government has become dysfunctional history suggests you have a country sliding into authoritarian rule. It all hinges on the November election and I, frankly, do not think Americans are smart enough to understand the Democrats must be given a larger majority in each house. Not because the Democrats are perfect, or anything close to that, but they are the only party actually working to preserve democracy in America.
As Independence Day approaches, more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their government that they believe it may “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, according to a new poll released Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP). That startling finding, which comes in the midst of congressional hearings into the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was just one of several reflections of the dangerous level of estrangement many Americans feel from each other and our democratic institutions.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters, conducted last month by Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson with input from students at the Institute of Politics (IOP), was designed to probe polarization and its relationship to the news sources upon which Americans rely in a fractionated media environment.
The portrait that it paints reveals not only the growing divides we have witnessed in recent years but strong sentiments that the majority of media outlets contribute to these divisions by intentionally misleading their audiences to promote a political point of view.
Stephan: I wrote this because, as the poll discussed in the previous article, I realized that when you deal with facts and understand that one in five Americans can only read at the most basic level -- about third grade -- and they are also innumerate. That 34% of the American population has an IQ of 98 to 85. That 27% have overactive right amygdalas and so are trapped in their fears, resentments, and hates. That the U.S. is becoming a majority-minority nation with all the racial fears that are stimulated in Whites. That gender equality and non-heterosexual sex are freaking out White men who believe in male dominance. When you add to that deliberate campaigns of weaponized misinformation you see what is happening in America. The Great Schism Trend is now the most important cultural restructuring force at work in this country. We have seen nothing like this since the Civil War.
Lies – misinformation or disinformation in its polite academic and media dress – fills the news today. Endless stories of lying Congress members, dark money PACs spreading conspiracy theories, media’s deliberate use of misinformation. Not a day goes by without some headline in this realm. The use of such information, however, is not new, although it has never been as prevalent as it is today. Promoting fake news is an ancient tool of power. The weaponization of misinformation for such purposes dates back to Babylon at least 3000 years ago according to research done by Martin Worthington, a fellow at St. John’s College at Cambridge University. Worthington is an Assyriologist who specializes in Babylonian grammar, literature, and medicine, and he describes the first example he found in Babylonian literature, “Ea (a Babylonian god) tricks humanity by spreading fake news. He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. What the people do not realize is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: it is a sequence […]
Stephan: The United States is the world's leading polluter, this EPA decision by the christofascist cabal protects the polluters and will harm the planet's ecosystem. There is nothing random about this. It is the culmination of 50 years pursuing a christofascist strategy to pack the Congress and the Court to protect the carbon corporations. They have poured $500 million dollars over those years to get to this place, and what it all comes down to is six people in service to the corporations that got them where they are today, have condemned 7.753 billion (2020) to a more miserable life.
A West Virginia coal-fired power plant. The case, brought by West Virginia, was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky. Credit: David Hawxhurst/Alamy
The US supreme court has sided with Republican-led states to in effect hobble the federal government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis, in a ruling that will have profound implications for the government’s overall regulatory power.
In a 6-3 decision that will seriously hinder America’s ability to stave off disastrous global heating, the supreme court, which became dominated by rightwing justices under the Trump administration, has opted to support a case brought by West Virginia that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector.
The case, which was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky, was highly unusual in that it was based upon the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants that never came into effect. The Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless given the plan […]
Stephan: Bill McKibben lays out the case for the implications of the Supreme Court decision very well. This is really an appalling decision, and when you see it in the context of overturning Roe, the concealed carry decision, you see a cabal of five christofascist who see themselves as untouchable and capable from that position to restructure the United States into a fascist anocracy. The only way to remove a Supreme Court justice is through impeachment, and the Senate as constituted is never going to do that.
Credit: Mitch Epstein
Credit where due: the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. E.P.A. is the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo. Lewis Powell’s famous memo, written in 1971, before he joined the Supreme Court—between the enactment of a strong Clean Air Act and a strong Clean Water Act, each with huge popular support—called on “businessmen” to stand up to the tide of voices “from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” calling for progressive change. He outlined a plan for slowly rebuilding the power of industrial élites, almost all the elements of which were taken up by conservative movements over subsequent years: monitoring textbooks and TV stations, attacking left-wing faculty at universities, even building a publishing industry. (“The news stands—at airports, drugstores, and elsewhere—are filled with paperback and pamphlets advocating everything from revolution to erotic free love. One finds almost no attractive, well-written paperbacks or pamphlets on ‘our side,’ ” […]
