This essay is one of the shortest on the website, but it might be the most timely during this moment of impeachment inquiries. Questions like the following are being asked on forums around the internet and the world:
Would you rather have Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren run against President Trump? September 2019 on Quora.com
The problems that President Trump creates are the most serious to face Americans in my lifetime. Three exceptions might be the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and 911.
As a people, we are at this moment completely dependent on our elected representatives. Nothing any civilian does can make any difference; we are helpless in the face of an alleged sociopath who holds the most power of any human on Earth.
Tony Schwarz wrote Trump’s Art of the Deal and split the profits 50-50. He has said that Trump is a sociopath capable of initiating a nuclear conflagration.
The following is an answer to the Quora question, which I hope people who matter carefully consider. And yes, the answer is somewhat oblique. I don’t think whoever runs against Trump will make much difference in the events that will come after.
Does anyone believe that Trump is the kind of man who relinquishes power?
The surest way to remove Trump is through impeachment, but it’s not clear that he will step down if he is convicted by the Senate. Waiting for clarity is not a valid reason for caution. Inaction will bring catastrophe. Too much is at stake.
I know it’s difficult for many Americans to remember, but Trump insisted that the 2016 election was rigged by Hillary Clinton; many believed he planned not only to challenge the election in the courts but to lead an insurrection or even a revolution if the result turned against him.
Trump is allied with the NRA—an armed, insurrectionary group of lunatics dedicated to revolution should they fail to get their way. The NRA has been swarmed by Russian intelligence. The Russian objective is to destabilize the United States by fanning the flames of paranoia in a politically influential organization known to be susceptible to manipulation by conspiracy theorists.
Southern evangelical Christians are the backbone of the new Confederacy, which Trump leads; he is their modern day Jefferson Davis who plans first to reestablish legalized segregation under the guise of, I don’t know, “right to choose”, maybe.
Other atrocities will follow. The suppression of non-whites (like immigrants) is in full-swing, which white-supremacists, among others, support.
White evangelicals don’t preach against the ethnic-cleansing of America; they endorse it. Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University has encouraged his students for years to train in the use of firearms so that they will be able to kill Muslims if given the opportunity. For years he has advocated for violence against those he hates by inciting unaccountable, non-state actors — like the students who attend his so-called “university”.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
I think most reasonable folks are at a point where they can figure-out that the coming election might amount to no more than a simple diversion — a shiny object to pull people’s attention away from what might turn out to be the only course of action with any chance at all to remove the president — an impeachment in the House of Representatives followed by conviction in the Senate.
Many people are in denial; people withdraw their attention from events that disturb them. Seizure of American institutions has already taken place by people working for the other side. Some people seem to have unrealistic expectations that a media owned by oligarchs like Trump will warn them.
Very few are able to face head-on a reality that includes loss-of-country. People sleep better at night if they pull their heads inside their shells and pretend everything is OK when it isn’t.
Some resort to a version of the Stockholm Syndrome to help them cope with the sickness that tears at their stomachs when they remember that Trump grabbed them by their electoral colleges; they embrace the tormentor to maintain their sanity.
Stockholm Syndrome is at the core of Trump’s power. Trump is right that he can kill, and his supporters will stand with him. He has nothing to fear from so-called “church-goers” who love him because he is bad.
Trump has put into place policies that seem designed to terrorize sick children; ICE puts them in cages where they risk death from neglect and illness; the president’s policies strike fear in families who are running from gangs to search for safety north of the southern-border.
Everyone wants to believe that a shining-city-on-a-hill exists somewhere in the world that they can crawl to during hard times. It’s a myth, unfortunately. Trump has shredded people’s dreams for a better future. Impoverished freedom-seekers are neither welcome nor safe in Trump’s America.
A bad election result is the easiest thing for a thug who already holds power to cast aside. An election can be rigged; it can be ignored; it can be challenged in stacked courts; it can be won in the electoral college.
Trump ought to know; he lost the popular count in 2016 by a record 11 million votes; 3M from Hillary; 8M from third-parties. No president has lost the popular vote by a larger margin. The president knows he will lose the popular vote in 2020; it didn’t stop him in 2016; it won’t stop him next year, either.
Losing the popular vote by a wide margin is not going to be a problem for President Trump. Who doesn’t agree that it’s true?
If Americans wait for the 2020 election to make the change that everyone with sense knows we must make, then our country could be lost for a long time, perhaps forever, at least for us, the little people who depend on it to breathe free.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editorial Board: We recommend that readers view each video in Billy Lee’s essay. The short videos are historical in nature. Current confirming videos can be found on YouTube and other websites. Billy Lee included the older videos to remind people about where they’ve been. He wants to encourage folks to reflect about what they imagined was going on when first they saw them.
Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.
Way back in the olden days it happened twice.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.
The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.
81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.
From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties.
To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.
The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.
Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement.
The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.
The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America.
From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.
Whites once suppressed the black vote by killing black voters. Later, they charged blacks with felonies and convicted them before all-white juries. Felons lost their right to vote for life. Today, 26% of the black population in Kentucky are felons who can’t vote. In Florida, nearly two million black citizens are felons.
After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.
Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post.
The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.
Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.
The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”. Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.
In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more.
Think about it.
Trump is president? Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right?
Well, I do, for one.
According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.
Are we going to believe them?
What if they’re right?
The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?
No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.
Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.
Pipe dream?
As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”
The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
Seriously.
Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.
The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.
Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?
Cooperate.
Who wants their kids to land big jobs?
Collaborate.
Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?
Capitulate.
These are the choices.
Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should.
Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.
The time is now.
The time is come.
It’s time for parents to eat their children.
It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.
Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.
Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.
The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.
Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?
What are the chances?
A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.
The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities.
It seems fair, doesn’t it?
Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it.
The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans.
Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.
To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.
Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.
Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.
Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?
Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.
Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.
We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.
Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.
No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.
Guess what?
If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.
Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.
The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Dissent. Resist. Boycott.
In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.
Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.
I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.
Set a record.
35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.
Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice.
Some are saying that Trump has been a Christian for years. Leaders of southern fundamentalists inside the United States like Franklin Graham joined forces with Russia and Israel to make him president.
I’ve written several essays on the takeover of America by southern evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. who made a deal with the president to advance his vision of an America submitted to GOD’S WILL — as he sees it. Links to these articles are provided at the end of the essay for those who might want to review them.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
I’m writing this essay, because it seems like the entire country is in denial about what is going on. People driven crazy by religion have embedded themselves into the politics of USA! USA! and are working overtime to transform the country into their own twisted vision of what they think God wants.
While rabid wolves circle disguised as sheep, the rest of America is starting to understand that it is being enveloped and smothered by a Jim Jones style cult, which some fear will get us killed, because these hypocrites (and they are hypocrites) plan to force their despised and unloved flocks to swallow a strychnine-laced Kool-Aid of evil that will poison Earth with the trauma of mass-suicide and murder.
These sycophants of power want to hasten the “end-times” as foretold in the book of Revelation, which comes last in the Bible. It is an incomprehensible tract, which is the capstone of their “eschatology.”
They hope to mess-up the world so thoroughly that it will force a “rapture” that will sweep them up into Heaven as their enemies are tortured and killed.
The imaginations of pedophile pastors and sexually-abusive presidents make the book of Revelation a mirror to the worms that crawl through the chambers of their raging hearts.
If you aren’t scared, you should be.
Their inspiration comes from the book with passages they don’t memorize or quote, because they are blind guides. They just kind of skip over as they slip their way into paradise and leave the rest of us behind.
Your merchants were the world’s important people. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.Revelation 18: 23b(NIV)
They seek the power and glory of wealth that is too often hidden in the folds of a prayer shawl.
…the deceitfulness of wealth chokes the word, making it unfruitful.Matthew 13: 22b (NIV, Jesus speaking)
They plot to overwhelm the heathen opposition — a cabal of Hillary supporters more often than not.
The more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both… A whirlwind will sweep them away… Hosea 4: 7, 8, 19
Note from the Editorial Board: Every member of theBOARD advised Billy Lee not to publish his latest tome, because it might be misunderstood, which would be bad; or it might be understood, which is worse.
In defense of Billy Lee, during its first year the single victory in law of the current national leadership was to lower its own taxes, which were already too low by half.
It was reminiscent of one of the parables: the rich young ruler. Obviously, our billionaire leaders read the parable and modeled their behavior after this eager-to-please young man of the Bible. For those not familiar, click on the link.
In fairness, we would be remiss not to mention that the president continues to repeal everything ”Obama.” So, it isn’t all bad inside the USA — at least for those Americans who hate Kenyan-born, Muslim presidents who misplace birth certificates.
Our current president led the crusade to expose ”truth” about President Obama — many Americans sucked it up like mother’s milk. Think of the good causes the president pushed forward to expose the vile and evil first Negro president.
He exposed crooked Hillary too, and lying Ted, and little Rubio, and sloppy Steve, and — as we just said — that other low-life he hates, nigger Barry.
The president’s righteousness exceeds even Hillary’s pussy-grabbing husband. Women line-up to receive a shake from his groping hands. The people love him. They flocked to DC to give him the most highly-attended inauguration in human history, he likes to tell people.
No wonder southern evangelicals and the GOP love him. He is our leader — our president — and we all, every single one of us, must learn to love him too, right?
We must abase ourselves before him — because he is a stable genius anointed by himself, if for no other reason.
For those puzzled about why so many evangelical leaders were willing to endorse Donald J. Trump, the most openly irreligious major-party presidential candidate in our history, Jerry Falwell Jr. provided the answer in his singularly graceless speech at the Republican National Convention:
”Mr. Trump has added a plank to this party’s platform to repeal I.R.S. rules sponsored by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 barring churches and nonprofits from expressing political free speech.”
Mr. Falwell assured his audience, ”Trust me, the repeal of the Johnson Amendment will create a huge revolution for conservative Christians and for free speech.”
Before anyone starts to read this essay, which was inspired by Kevin Baker’s editorial, let me offer a controversial truth, which could dissuade some people from reading further. Why waste time with truths that are disagreeable? some might be thinking.
Here it is: The United States is the one country on Earth where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is forbidden by law to conduct operations against civilians inside its borders. It’s the reason controversial people come here. The USA is a safe place for dissidents. The concept of freedom (whatever that is) has nothing to do with it.
In other countries, men and women who have run afoul of USA strategic objectives have sometimes disappeared. Enough said.
It’s a violation of US law to discuss the CIA and its associations with American institutions. I can’t be more specific other than to say that the CIA, like other super-sized organizations, must train and equip, house and deploy hundreds-of-thousands of people (the actual number is classified) to work for, with, or under its guidance. It’s a huge undertaking.
The CIA is TEAM USA. It’s big, and it’s complicated. It’s on our side. Some good people work there. Some of them would like to have more say about what happens here in America where we live. Enough said.
If you are still reading, let me get on with it.
Of the 195 countries on Earth, only 75 do not have intelligence agencies. Of the 120 or so countries that do, 15 to 20 conduct operations extensive enough to influence the policies of their adversaries and, yes, their allies. Influencing public opinion is a big part of what these two dozen intelligence services do — especially when conducting operations in competing democracies.
With most foreign intelligence agencies the United States keeps certain agreements that delineate the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Russian intelligence agents don’t assassinate our civilians, nor we theirs — things like that. The details of the agreements differ depending on the country.
The “Temple” or “Church” or “Mosque” — call it whatever — was always the primary institution used by intelligence services in the past to influence public opinion and monitor people’s behavior. Hundreds of books and histories have been written about it. Those who don’t believe, read a book; learn something.
I don’t want my essay to go off the rails, but let me remind readers about the Divine Right of Kings doctrine, the institution of confessionals, the Inquisition, and secret monastic orders imbedded in populations, and on and so on. These intelligence structures and systems existed in the past and persist in most major religions and denominations to this day.
This is what the real Divine Right of Kings looks like. Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist Pastor, won the Nobel Peace Prize almost one year after Birmingham police took this mugshot in 1963 and jailed him. The kings who receive divine missions from God don’t always look like some Christians think they should. King called on the USA to repent of its sins involving segregation and racism. Like all prophets of God, haters killed him; his call remains unanswered to this day.
In the past, each country had its own state-sponsored religion. In many parts of the world state religions are still encouraged and supported.
In the United States, people fought a revolution to get religion out of government; it was an institution that the founders thought would rot our new republic from within by gutting the values of freedom-of-thought and speech for non-enlightened extremists whose purpose was earthly power, not the salvation of souls.
In the 1950s, a form of right-wing extremism got a grip on the American public that was truly frightening. (Remember McCarthyism?) It cloaked itself in the Constitution and the Bible. Its stated purpose was to defeat Communism, which it portrayed as godless and authoritarian.
What the leaders of the John Birch Society and other like-minded extremists wanted most was the political power to turn back trends that they believed would unravel the social order — trends like pop music (rock and roll), integration of the races, the rise of unions, voting rights for minorities, and things like that.
It’s why Lyndon Johnson, a powerful liberal Senator from Texas, tacked an amendment on a bill in 1954, when Republican Eisenhower was president and the GOP controlled Congress. Representative government would be ill-advised to permit charitable groups like churches to lobby for political candidates by spending their flock’s flood of tax-deductible money on elections.
If folks want to hear a reason why this separation of church and state is important, look to media to see what has happened there. Many of our news-outlets are owned and operated by foreign nationals, for example.
In those few media outlets where foreign nationals (some dual-citizens) are not owners, the rest are billionaires; you know, the kind of people who own football teams.
Diversity of political thought among billionaires is notoriously limited; they have the reputation of Neanderthals; it’s why Congress set up public broadcasting stations like NPR — diversity of opinion might be a good thing, they thought.
In the year 2000, Fox News helped throw the election of Al Gore to the defeated George W. Bush. An Australian businessman and his Chinese wife owned Fox News. They each had an ideological stake in the outcome of the election. Their assault against the election of Al Gore became an exercise in bullying on a grand scale.
I watched Fox News in real time spew their venom and lies with an intensity that shocked me. After thirty-six days of lies and propaganda, on December 12, the Supreme Court stepped in where they had no legal jurisdiction and put an end to it — they stopped an ongoing vote recount in the state of Florida to avoid the long court fights and violence the folks at Fox News promised and delivered, in some cases, through their surrogates in the GOP.
The election result doomed America to suffer terrorism, endless war, and a financial collapse that sucked dry one-third of the money in people’s retirement accounts. The financial meltdown led to world-wide destabilization, especially in Europe and the Middle-East.
Imagine Pastor Jerry Falwell Jr.’s church buying Fox News and pushing candidates and right-wing causes consistent with his twisted vision for America. It’s a lot of tax-free political power for a preacher.
With the repeal of the 1954 LBJ rules, these predator-preachers will multiply to become tens of thousands. The repeal will provide temptations to actors who might not necessarily be Christian or even religious to use the power of the church to corrupt our politics, establish a caliphatic vision, and seize power.
If these religious politicians get their way, they will create an American caliphate; a nation under a Christian version of Sharia law. They will make war between the world’s great religions more likely.
What bothers me is that leaders of religions or cartels (or foreign governments, for that matter) influence our discourse and choose our leaders. It doesn’t seem democratic, at least to me. It doesn’t seem to be a dynamic of governance that our founding-fathers would approve.
The hacking of secure computers and other information technology during the current election by hostile states is demoralizing; especially when Russian intelligence is directing it, as the Department of Homeland Security has said.
Let’s face facts. Some in our country have gone over the edge. We have a billionaire, self-funded, running for president. He took control of the Republican Party by pandering for the votes of white supremacists (some call them the alt-right) who fly the Confederate flag in their front yards and on the back of their trucks.
Go to Charlotte, Michigan and drive through white, working-class neighborhoods, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
After WWII, Michigan was the northern state with the largest population of Ku Klux Klan members. White supremacists are obsessed by fire; especially burning crosses. People haven’t changed much in some places. Many supremacists plan to vote for the GOP nominee.
Worse, these haters adore the orange-man with floppy hair who married two women born and raised in communist countries allied with Russia. His current wife grew up in a province of communist Yugoslavia — renamed Slovenia in 1991.
Give me a break.
The biggest intelligence coup a foreign government can achieve is to place a sympathizer in the bed of a powerful man — one who has publicly aspired to be president for twenty-five years. She only has to spill one secret at the right time to be worth her weight in gold; to change the course of history — and not in a good way; not for our side, anyway.
Melania Knauss; born April 1970. Melania is 46. Her husband is 70.
Is Melanija Knavs (she Germanized her name to Melania Knauss) a Russian sleeper agent? Of course not. The idea is preposterous. Her father was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which had ties to the Soviet Union. He administered a state-run business enterprise. No problems there.
But wouldn’t everyone sleep better at night if Donald turned over his tax filings, balance sheets, and income statements? Wouldn’t the country be reassured if he disclosed the details of Melania’s immigration to the United States and her personal history; especially the history of her life before he dumped his second wife (with whom he bore a child out-of-wedlock) and brought Melanija Knavs to America to become his third wife? The two married in 2005. Melania became a US citizen in 2006.
Clout craving Christians, like the Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr., seem to believe that they can make a Faustian bargain and come away with the power and influence they covet. They can make a deal with a man who seems to lack a track record in any church to turn their right-wing political agenda into an army for God.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
It’s the offer Satan made to Christ during the forty days and nights Jesus lived in the desert without food or water. He got physically weak. His defenses crumbled. He lay in the dust weak and vulnerable. All he had to defend him were the words of Almighty God.
Who knows the story?
… Satan took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I will give to you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus said to him, Get away from me Satan. For it is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only. Then Satan left Jesus, and angels came to care for him.
Whatever this election is about, it should not be about power. Why not make it about doing what is right?
Why not make it about helping people and preserving peace? Make it about about forgiving and being forgiven. Make it about loving others — even enemies; especially our enemies.
Love wins.
Is anyone left who believes it?
Billy Lee
4 July 2018: The 2016 election is nearly two years past. Billy Lee asked us, The Editorial Board, to add an addendum to his essay. It’s a kind of warning lifted from the ancient scrolls of the Bible, of all places.
The more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both… A whirlwind will sweep them away…
