This is simply, my perhaps feeble attempt, to explain the why and how we have arrived at the edge of the cliff overlooking Dante’s “Inferno.” And while I have no official expertise or credentials, I have been studying these particular factors for well over 30 years. Moreover, this isn’t a claim that these are the sole factors but I believe they are some of the most significant factors.

 

In no particular order, Christian fundamentalists were among the first social phenomenon that began to worry me in the early 1980s. A little later, my close analysis of Richard Hofstadter’s classic, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was a real eye-opener & helped me to see connections with other destructive forces in American society. Furthermore, when I read or basically dissected John Taylor Gatto’s brilliant, “The Underground History of American Education,” I began to realize the depth & scope of America’s decline into a state of nearly complete corporate capture & rule. Of course the corporate domination of the media market only sped-up the avalanche of destructive forces & personalities that reached its nadir when Trump became president.

 

I feel that Trump’s election is prima facie proof that Richard Hofstadter & John Taylor Gatto were absolutely correct & prescient in their analysis of American culture & society. Our primary challenge now is to wake the somnambulant members of our country & to take on the Herculean work before us necessary to do so.

 

The most difficult challenge for me in writing this essay is how to condense the thousands of pages I’ve written on these subjects into a relatively short essay. So, here goes starting with the wolves in “Christian” sheep’s clothes.

I stopped attending church around the age of 14 because of the blatant hypocrisy I witnessed of what they preached & what they practiced. And like most other rational people, I dismissed them as religious “nuts.” This was our collective oversight because while we had ignored them & written them off as harmless loonie-tunes, they began building their empires of influence on our society.

 

The once small portion of “Christian” extremists, fundamentalists, evangelicals or whatever you want to label them, grew in number & power in terms of influence with their own media primarily in radio & cable television. Hence the term, “televangelist” was created with Pat Robertson becoming one of the richest of these hyenas feeding off the ignorance & gullibility of millions of his flock.

 

Moreover, these soldiers of Christ established their own colleges & with their religious fervor & blindness to the greed & grifting of their star preachers like Jim & Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, etc. they just kept building their religious base of followers. And because of the intellectual laziness & unwillingness of most of the Democratic Left in our political power structure, this steady threat to our democracy grew like a deadly virus on our body politic.

 

The fervor of the far right “Christians,” has never waned & their absolute belief in their righteousness has enabled them to become a major voting block in local, state, & national politics. In fact, it has become an absolute prerequisite for all political candidates to declare their unquestioning defense of & belief in Christianity if they wish to be elected. And talk about the theatre of the absurd, somewhere around 74 million American “Christians,” not only voted for Trump, clearly the worst example of a Christian, & they sing his praises. I see many parallels between these American “Christians,” & the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as the Iranian theocracy with its complete subjugation of Iranian women.

 

Furthermore, it’s equally important that we don’t ignore the Jewish extremists in  Israel that believe it’s righteous of them to steal the Palestinians’ land, persecute them, & to kill them in their agenda of expansion & rule. Ironically, America’s “Christian” evangelicals are in complete agreement with Israel’s fundamentalists even though the Orthodox Jews believe it’s their duty to slaughter the Christians.

 

Marching right along in this parade of horror that claims to be about spreading peace, love, & democracy around the world, the subject of anti-intellectualism plays a major role. This is why Hofstadter’s book was a true eye-opener for me in many many ways. At first I thought, maybe this anti-intellectualism is a relatively recent phenomenon but I soon learned that it goes back throughout the history of western civilization.

 

Copernicus and Galileo are two of the most infamous examples of anti-intellectualism & if you are familiar with these two cases, you know that it was the Church who prosecuted & persecuted these two great scientists. And if you reflect on it for a bit longer, it’s obvious that the “Church” has been rabidly anti-intellectual ever since their version of the Garden of Eden story.

That Tree of Knowledge that existed in Eden & Eve giving that apple to Adam, against God’s wishes, represented or symbolized that knowledge is Evil & women are wicked or more prone to Sin because Eve tempted Adam & was seduced by the snake aka Satan. Moral of the story? Knowledge is Evil so avoid it at all costs.

How convenient this “rationale” or religious logic is for not only setting the Church fathers up as the righteous leaders but also rulers over women & this too, parallels with the Islamic & Jewish fundamentalists’ teachings & beliefs.

 

A brief review of western civilization’s history reveals that the Church & the State have struggled & fought for control over their subjects or citizens for centuries. But the worst periods of human history were when the Church & State cooperated in their dominion over the people.

This brings us to the present crisis in American politics because the Church & the State have once again united to suppress us into a sort of hybrid theocracy & oligarchy. Our Founding Fathers were students of the Enlightenment and knew only too well, the destructive consequences of these two powerful forces. This is why they were very clear about the necessity of separating Church from State. Yet, like Trump, the dark forces believe that if they keep repeating their lies denying this fact, the public will eventually believe them.

Speaking of persuading the public or shaping their beliefs & opinions, the general “dumbing-down” of the American public, a term I believe John Taylor Gatto originated, is the sad state of our public education system. I have already mentioned the motivation for the Christian far-right in keeping the American public in the dark or away from that tree of knowledge, but it also benefits the corporate cockroaches’ (my phrase) agenda of keeping the American consumer dumb so they’ll continue to believe that the corporate rulers who dominate nearly every aspect of our lives, are their benefactors.

 

Of course, the corporate (I’m referring to the behemoth corporate conglomerates that dominate the globe) agenda is far more complex in its methods, tactics, & strategies but again, this essay is meant to serve as a sort of broad overview of our present crises in the struggle for survival of our species.

I hope I’m crystal clear here when I say that no, this isn’t one grand conspiracy but rather a confluence if you will, of several dirty or polluted tributaries flowing into one river, the river of life so-to-speak, that all of humanity drinks from. When you dive into that sea of conspiracy theories, you begin to drown in terms of reaching people &  you are ready for the Qanon funny farm.

 

You see, corporations haven’t exactly hidden their true agenda which is to control their work forces & a big part of that control involves having employees intelligent enough to keep the business running efficiently & generating ever increasing profits for the owners. The major threat to corporate owners is a work force that is well-educated because they start organizing their fellow workers & demanding safer working conditions, a fair share in the profits they generate, etc.

Here is where my intellectual and moral hero, Noam Chomsky, fits in. I’d argue that of the hundred or more books he has written, his perhaps most significant & most influential book is, “Manufacturing Consent,” written with Edward Hermann. In Noam’s trademark objective & factual writing style and backed-up with copious footnotes, sources, & references, he lays out how the corporate-owned media distorts, misinforms, & ignores a significant amount of the hidden facts in news reporting that is broadcast on what used to be the public’s airwaves.

 

I believe the major turning-point for the worse in American news media came when corporations were allowed to ignore their responsibility to present one hour per day of news entirely in the public’s interest. They feigned as if they were still adhering to this rule but news programs were allowed to devolve into what is now referred to as “infotainment.”

In short, the news departments of major media conglomerates used to be accepted as not profit generating because they were honoring their obligation to inform the public in exchange for the other 23 hours per day in which they created profits. But with the advent of cable television, corporate owners began to realize they could make great profits creating news personalities like Rush Limbaugh, FOX “news,” talking heads who spewed a steady stream of fear & hate, etc. and the standards of objective, factual, & honest reporting were allowed to wither & die.

 

The death blow to American journalism came with the introduction of FOX “news.” And their destructive power & influence became most evident when during Bush “Dubya’s) reign of terror as president, FOX “news” would literally receive their daily list of “talking points,” that the White House wanted them to bombard the public with.

Moreover, the rest of the corporate media, even those who used to have a semblance of journalistic integrity grew envious of the profits that FOX was bringing in so they followed suit. MSNBC was supposedly the liberals or the democrats counter to FOX’s obvious “conservative” bias but soon revealed their shallow or hollow principles. Phil Donahue hosted one of MSNBC’s first & most popular talk/news programs but because he dared to have on one “liberal” or anti-war (pre-Iraq invasion) guest for every two, pro-war guests, he was fired.

Yep! So much for the so-called, “liberal media bias,” decried by the phony “conservatives,” who bear no resemblance to true political conservatives. But again, like Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels knew, just keep on repeating the lies or the propaganda ad nauseam & the herd will eventually accept it as a fact. Oh yeah, I can’t leave without pointing out the fact that the New York Times, the most famous newspaper in America & that sets the standard daily of emulation by the overwhelming majority of America’s newspapers, beat the war drums for our invasion of Iraq every bit as strongly as did FOX “news.” And they have supported every war the U.S. has been in from the get-go.

One last point regarding “our” national media before I conclude, the ultimate irony that Trump represents in terms of his destructive reign in Washington D.C. In the beginning of Donny’s run for the highest political office in the U.S., the corporate media dismissed him, mocked him, called him a moron which was obvious to most people. Yet, because he knew all too well how to remain in the spotlight by being & saying the most outrageous & absurd things day in, day out, they kept giving him the lion’s share of the media’s attention.

 

Estimates vary, but some claim that overall, Trump received something like five billion dollars worth of free media attention & this was far more than Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, & all the other presidential candidates combined. What was the corporate media’s reward? Trump denounced them as “fake news,” in his never-ending fear & hate rallies throughout his tenure in office. Sometimes he even turned his zombie-dogs on them & reporters covering his rallies left in fear for their lives.

 

In conclusion, Trump & the entire G.O.P. have revealed their true colors & don’t even bother to hide their fascist, democracy hating, racist, & authoritarian worshiping. It seems the label “Dictator,” has been replaced with the more benign “Authoritarian” label these days? Trump is clearly a traitor yet he is worshipped by “Christians,” and White Supremacists alike? He defends, apologizes for, & sings the praises of his fellow authoritarian thugs like Putin, M.B.S. of Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un of N. Korea, Mubarak of Egypt, Xi Jinping of China, Erdowan of Turkey, Duterte of the Phillipines, Mussolini of Italy, Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, the 1980s Chinese Communist Party who massacred Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, etc.

 

In brief, Trump has never heard of or met a murderous dictator that he doesn’t respect. What does this behavior say to all our soldiers past or present? How in the Hell can soldiers defend & idolize Trump? I am and have been opposed to every war the U.S. has been involved in during my lifetime & I was born in 1952 but I am absolutely disgusted at Trump’s pissing on the memory, the sacrifice, & the death of all of America’s soldiers! Tell me I’m wrong about the level of ignorance & immorality in the United States today.

Every living human being alive that isn’t starving to death or dying of easily preventable diseases that are the result of the corporate cockroaches’ greed, apathy, & complete indifference, has a responsibility to fight against these tragic consequences. And if you don’t join in the struggle to save humanity & our planet, you are in the same, non-human species that aren’t even worthy of being classed as a reptile or insect that Trump is!

 

We are well on our way towards a one world authoritarian order, will you join in the fight or sit on the sidelines amusing yourself to death with your smart phone?

 

Rob DeLoss  October 22, 2022