It is not merely rotting from the inside, though. The body politic was deliberately poisoned. There was a decades-long campaign by right-wing billionaires taking advantage of religious extremists (and vice versa) to impose an apocalyptic millenialist theocracy as cover for oligarchy, autocracy, and corruption.
A toxic soup of: televangelism; Lenard Leo and the Federalist Society; the Koch brothers; controlling the sheep-minded by stirring them up over abortion and using the resulting group loyalty to convince them to vote against their own social and economic interests; a drip-drip-drip of inserting religion into the public sphere (In God We Trust and One Nation Under God added to the culture as if they were eternal; lies about the religious intent of the Founders; 10 Commandments in courthouses and schools; complaints about gay marriage/BLM/wokeism, etc.); the radical underfunding of education; a campaign to stack local school boards with religious extremists, for its own sake and as a trading ground for higher offices; and so much more.
The ideological capture of the Supreme Court, Jan 6, and Project 2025 are all direct consequences. We are living in a version of the U.S. that began as the fever dream of Christian Nationalists. It is only going to get worse if we don’t do something. NOW.
Books by Katherine Stewart and many others (e.g., Andrew Seidel, Bradley Onishi, JY Sexton) lay all this out in painful, ugly detail. It will only make you more furious, but I think it is the key to what is happening now.
It is not merely rotting from the inside, though. The body politic was deliberately poisoned. There was a decades-long campaign by right-wing billionaires taking advantage of religious extremists (and vice versa) to impose an apocalyptic millenialist theocracy as cover for oligarchy, autocracy, and corruption.
A toxic soup of: televangelism; Lenard Leo and the Federalist Society; the Koch brothers; controlling the sheep-minded by stirring them up over abortion and using the resulting group loyalty to convince them to vote against their own social and economic interests; a drip-drip-drip of inserting religion into the public sphere (In God We Trust and One Nation Under God added to the culture as if they were eternal; lies about the religious intent of the Founders; 10 Commandments in courthouses and schools; complaints about gay marriage/BLM/wokeism, etc.); the radical underfunding of education; a campaign to stack local school boards with religious extremists, for its own sake and as a trading ground for higher offices; and so much more.
The ideological capture of the Supreme Court, Jan 6, and Project 2025 are all direct consequences. We are living in a version of the U.S. that began as the fever dream of Christian Nationalists. It is only going to get worse if we don’t do something. NOW.
Books by Katherine Stewart and many others (e.g., Andrew Seidel, Bradley Onishi, JY Sexton) lay all this out in painful, ugly detail. It will only make you more furious, but I think it is the key to what is happening now.