Saturday 5 October 2024

Post No. 2,893 - A religious coup in the USA?

To answer the question in the title of this post:   

no - not quite, at any rate, but a great deal of influence.

Religious influence in the USA has always been present - starting with the religious group who left the UK so they could live under their own religious rules, rather than someone else’s, centuries ago. 

Since then, religious views or fanaticism/fervour that is akin to religious have been present and show in a number of ways - the frequent and obvious acknowledgements of a patriarchal deity, the obsessive dedication to a particular view of capitalism and against Marxist-Leninist communism, blind devotion to and adulation of the USA as allegedly being “exceptional” - which it most definitely is not. 

Some of those problems are indicative of a failure to acknowledge the desire for religious discipline, ideology, or structure, or a meaningful sense of purpose in life ... which leads to that fervour making other areas of life feverish. 

In addition, the failure to acknowledge something, makes one more susceptible to that thing. 

So ... one becomes open to the influence of covert religious activities - especially if they align with self-praising ideologies, along the lines of, say, the USA being (claimed wrongly to be) “exceptional”, or with views that individualism at the expense of others is acceptable as it allows temporarily embarrassed millionaires to move towards being rich.

And those millionaires and billionaires who make claims along the lines of rags-to-riches or the impossibility of “lifting oneself up by the bootstraps” (a term which was invented to illustrate exactly how absurd that notion is) will be more likely to be taken at their face value by the credulous and the wounded-by-life who desperately want some - any - sense of agency and hope over their own existences. 

And, while being vulnerable to covert religious influences, there has been a great deal of overt religious influence as well (as there has been - and still is - in my nation), with the peculiar wrangling with abortion in the USA which led to an indirect establishment of legality based on a completely separate and, to most people, unrelated right (privacy) combined with a refusal to simply directly legislate to legalise abortion - as done (as far as I am aware) everywhere else in the world that permits abortion. 

The USA’s highest court has now banned, or enabled the banning, of abortion, and given the USA’s president - whoever that is (and it is currently Joe Biden, who has chosen not to exercise these powers their supreme court has given him) powers that match or exceed a monarch - which is contrary to one of the most fundamental, key propositions of the USA’s establishment, that it shall have elected leaders, accountable to the people of the USA (or those allowed to vote) via elections (albeit the ludicrous presidential electoral college system the USA has allowed to persist long past any reasonable use-by date).

And it now turns out that those changes are the result of a very long, very covert religious campaign. 

Before I start providing links for allegations against L__nard L_o and Op_s D_i (I will follow my policy of not naming extremists - or alleged extremists), I want to emphasise a few points: 

  • firstly, not all Christians are bad people - some are truly attempting to live their life by the message of love that came via their Christ; 
  • secondly, the existence of these activities is why terms such as christo-fascist, christian nationalist, neochristian, etc have been developed over the years (one of which has been claimed by the people involved in these activities); 
  • thirdly, some people have known or suspected such activities/influences for decades (the Correllian Tradition being probably the first I came across to identify this threat to society - almost two decades ago now, when I first became aware of that); and 
  • finally, this is a separate set of abuses to those committed against children, women, Indigenous people, and other minorities (including left handed people, and people of the Jewish or other faiths), although the intersectionalities of hate mean there may well be a considerable amount of overlap with some of those categories (e.g., the misogyny being enacted legally against women in the USA).

The news links I have found, including the YouTube video that led me to this, follow - and note that some of them are years old: 

  • “What G_nni Th_m_s and L__nard L_o wrought: How a justice’s wife and a key activist started a movement”   https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/10/ginni-thomas-leonard-leo-citizens-united-00108082   “Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a trove of so-called “dark money” was about to be unleashed. Two activists prepared to seize the moment.”   A Politico exclusive from last year examining activities back to 2009      

and 

I am not sure as yet whether I will buy the book - or even look at a sample, when it comes out (estimated to be on 8 October, 2024) ... but I do want to find out what influence that group has in my nation - the overt evangelicals are bad enough. 

For anyone who does want to consider buying the book, the details are: 

“Opus: dark money, a secretive cult, and its mission to remake our world”   by Gareth Gore, pub. Scribe, ISBN 9781761385773, pre-order Scribe, Kobo, Apple Books, Amazon



Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

  • there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
  • I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.

 

 

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Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here. 

(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)  

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/  




 

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