After the Insurrection Failed January 10, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
I am not a political Nostradamus but, as my father liked to say, “even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.” On the first week of April in 2016, just as the presidential primaries were starting in earnest, I published this warning as an op ed in the Springfield NewsLeader. Please forgive me the vanity of reading my own column to you here but I believe that the events of the past week make it relevant, and please remember, this was written when Trump was only one of many candidates in 2016:
Mary Shelley metaphorically offered her fearful criticism of the burgeoning scientific age in the early 19th Century in her classic novel, Frankenstein. In the end, the monster, created by the scientific genius of Victor Frankenstein, returns to his birthplace and tells Victor, “You are my creator, but I am your master; Obey!” Though science fiction and the cautious warnings from the field of medical ethics have treated dangers akin to Shelley’s imagined monster, the real threat of modernity has come to us through the technology of the machinery of warfare and now through the mass media’s ability to manipulate the psyche of the general population.
The pampleting of earlier centuries has given way to the much more passive communication of TV “news” and it’s nearly indistinguishable kin in paid advertisements. (and now also the even darker influence of social media) How does an absurd conspiracy theory such as “Obama is coming for our guns,” get sustained in the absence of any evidence of any abatement of the inexplicable growth of privately own lethal weapons?
The simple explanation is the nearly fact free drum beat of corporate news stations that have found punching the buttons of paranoia to be easier and more profitable than basic journalism, such that they have elevated lies to the status of reality.
An excellent case is point is the current trend among southern politicians to use the dis-ease felt among many by the prospect of encountering a transgender person in the close quarters of a public restroom. The anxiety is often articulated as a fear of sexual assault though there have been, in the history of our nation, exactly ZERO cases of a transgender woman or man sexually assaulting anyone in a restroom. The obvious truth is that there is no one more uncomfortable in a public restroom than is a transgendering woman or man. And so far as crime statistics go, the real prospect of assault is against the transgendering person. Currently, about half of all fatal hate crimes are against transgendering women, a fact that renders all of the hysteria about who uses which public restroom to be obvious hypocrisy.
Conservatives have used dog-whistle topics to manipulate a fearful population to vote for the candidates that would protect them from the imagined ravages of gay marriage, the prospects of Muslim immigrants imposing Sharia Law in their American cities, the outlawing of guns, and the undocumented immigrants who harvest our crops, lay our bricks, and shingle our roofs. For more than thirty years, from the days of the Moral Majority, the uninformed have been played by the Republican party in every election cycle, continually feeding their fears of non-existent threats while actually rigging the economic system to transfer the wealth of the poor and middle class into the hands of those at the top of the economic ladder.
The voices of party sages such as Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney decrying the popularity of Donald Trump gives evidence to the anxiety felt by traditional Republicans, but their warnings have only fueled the fire that their predecessors started. Richard Nixon blew the dog whistle of fear of Communism, Reagan picked up the refrain with renewed fear of Communists, flavored with substantive fear of the poor. Thirty years of constantly motivating their voting base by fear and prejudice has come home to roost. Though party elders want to declare that Donald Trump is not a true conservative and even try to libel him by calling him a Democrat, the truth is that he is their propaganda inspired creation and now, a la Mary Shelley, the monster has become the master, and, as the novel unfolded two centuries ago, this is bound to end tragically for the Republican Party. We can only hope that they do not take our nation and the rest of the world into the flames of the monster’s funeral pyre with them.
Again, I am not claiming any unique political prognostication power but, I was right. Long before Donald Trump was declared to be the Republican nominee in 2016, it was evident to me that he was in danger of winning that race.
Several of the people he was running against have either failed to distinguish themselves since then or they have gone on to become even more frightening than they were in 2016. But Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, along with the Bush’s favorite son, Jeb, all warned voters, just as I did in this article, that Trump would be a nightmare president, and if nominated, he would destroy the Republican party . . . and that he was dishonest, greedy, and unprepared to hold office.
Unlike me, several of them did still end up working in his administration or trying to attach their political fortunes to his coat-tails, but still, they were certainly not wrong when they warned us that he was unprepared, dishonest and greedy. And, today, I think we can see that the Republican Party is in shambles, an embarrassment to what they were in the days of Eisenhower.
After the events of Wednesday afternoon, when thousands of Trump supporters, at his direction, stormed the Capitol building, overwhelming the Capitol police, occupying, looting, and desecrating this symbol of Democracy, most of his Republican sycophants are trying to distance themselves from Trump, except, of course, Ted Cruz who has no evidence of a conscience, and the senator who really cued this event up, our own jr. senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, seen here with fist raised outside of the Capitol building, giving an affirming power salute to the hooligans who were marching towards the Capitol.
You might want to say that he didn’t know how far they were going to go . . . he didn’t know that they would be violent and that their protest would become an insurrection, but, folks, after order was restored and the joint session of congress and the senate reconvened at midnight Wednesday night, our Josh Hawley rose to double down on his entirely evidence free conspiracy theories, forcing our legislators to earn their exorbitant salaries, staying up all night in meaningless debate and votes so that Hawley could cater to the insurgents. He knew what he was doing and is so bereft of character, that he was proud of the outcomes.
Thursday morning, FBI agents in Washington put out this very sincere sounding tweet, asking for leads to help them find those who instigated the violence around the Capitol on Wednesday.
As if they did not already know who the primary instigators were . . . they need only knock on the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, and arrest Donald J. Trump, and his son, Don Jr., and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and on Capitol Hill, they will find Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and a whole . . . may I say “basket of deplorables”? Do you remember when that term seemed to be unnecessarily harsh and inappropriate to use ?. . . even though it falls far short of terms like traitor, sedition, and insurrectionists . . . all of which seem to fit quite nicely today.
Unlike the British invaders who set fire to the Capitol building in the War of 1812, these insurrectionists didn’t set fire to the Capitol but they did, just as I warned in my newspaper column months before Trump was nominated in 2016, they did set fire to the Republican Party. . . I saw it coming and I’m just a dumb country preacher. They should have seen it coming, because I am no fortune teller, it was just that obvious.
Trump is no politician; he is merely an attention seeking little man who is the Frankenstein’s monster that two generations of Republican dog-whistles had created. From Nixon to George W Bush, Republicans had manipulated the uneducated, the fearful, and the paranoid, with images of black murderers and rapists, of welfare queens, drug addicts and illegal immigrants, of communists and socialists. Nixon, Regan, Bush senior and W, all knew what they were doing. They blew these dog-whistles because they needed the votes of the gullible, voters who were easily manipulated. You don’t really believe that all of these people had epiphanies after they left office and were no longer opposed to gay marriage . . . or that in spite of all of their catering to the religious right, none of them ever really attended church or practiced any religion . . . well, the Regans were into astrology but that’s another issue.
But decades of practiced manipulation produced generations of voters who really were afraid of black and brown people, who actually did feel that they were being impoverished by the poor immigrants who crossed our borders, or that their fragile marriages were somehow threatened by the gay couple down the street, or that they were victims because their cherished symbols of white supremacy were being challenged by removing Confederate flags, monuments, and names from public places, and even taking away cherished racial slurs used as the names of popular sports teams.
Trump is the Frankenstein’s monster that they created through years of insincere manipulative whistle blowing. Trump is the monster who really does hate black and brown people, immigrants, homosexuals, and Native Americans. They finally got the candidate they had been trained to follow, and they followed him right into the heart of American Democracy to destroy it.
Trump and associates have tried to dial it back after the insurrection failed but don’t believe their disclaimers.
If you have not seen it, let me share this brief clip with you. - For our podcast audience, let me tell you that you can find this on YouTube, just search for “Trump family watching demonstration” and you will see the whole gang of family members and staff, literally dancing and singing as they watch the crowds gathering before Trump went out to speak, literally sending them marching on the Capitol. Don Jr. sends out thanks to all of the supporters who were fighting for Donald Trump. Five people died in this stupid stunt. One Capitol Hill policeman was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher and then kicked to death. The governor of Maryland repeatedly offered to send in National Guard troops to help rid the Capitol of these violent thugs, but the Trump administration didn’t want the invasion stopped. It was what he had planned.
Much has been made about how differently Black Lives Matter protests have been handled but, honestly, the tolerance shown to this mob was not because they were white, it was because they were the invited guests of President Donald Trump. It even appears that some of the Capitol police force was in on the invasion and both helped them get through check points and even took selfies with them. They thought they were starting a revolution and were going to take over the government of the United States of America. They are traitors, but, men and women, as dramatic as the events of the past week have been, this is not new and it isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
I have been trying to turn the page, to focus on the future, to accentuate the positive things that are ahead of us, and still, there are many. I was shocked that a young, white, Jewish, journalist, and a black, liberal preacher won senate seats in Georgia on Tuesday, giving the Democratic party a thin majority in the Senate. I am ready for the Biden administration to be installed and to kick up our pandemic response and get real relief to the unemployed and impoverished in our nation.
I am ready to move on, but the fact is that 77% of Republicans still believe that the November election was rigged. Joe Biden has a huge job ahead of him, but he starts with 40% of Americans not believing that he was fairly elected. And now, almost half of Republicans are glad that the Capitol was invaded and desecrated. It is difficult to even know how to respond to this level of ignorance.
Social media has a lot of blame to bear in this level of anti-fact, conspiracy driven public opinion. Twitter and Facebook suspended his accounts forever after the invasion of the Capitol but that was after he had told more than 30,000 lies while in office, 10,000 of them, according to the Washington Post, in the past 6 months. An army of fact checkers will become unemployed on January 20th when this psychopath leaves office.
Like you, I am gravely worried about what might happen in the next ten days. Wednesday’s insurrection was a failure but that may only mean that he will try something more dangerous this week. Many of us have feared that he has been cuing up an attack on Iran and I am afraid that he might use nuclear weapons to throw the whole world into disarray so that he can stage a military take-over of the United States.
Rational people knew that Trump was dangerous before he was elected in 2016. He should have been impeached after his insane inaugural speech four years ago and for almost countless crimes since that time but he has been protected by a power hungry Republican party that has now found itself at the mercy of a moral monster.
I didn’t watch any of the Game of Thrones, but my friend Paul Thomlinson shared with me a quote, applying it to Trump, “He would burn down the whole kingdom if only he could rule over the ashes.” Trump and nearly one third of Americans would destroy democracy and shred our constitution if only they could stay in power and that level of dysfunction will not simply go away when we inaugurate a new president.
I am not going to tell you that everything is going to be OK. Existing Republican leadership lacked the moral courage to remove Trump from office during last year’s impeachment, and they lacked the courage, even after the storming of the Capitol, to use the 25th amendment to declare him to be incapable of leading. They have left a desperate madman in possession of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. The next week very well may be the most tragic week in the history of the world.
We can do little more than hope, at this point, that we make it to January 20 intact. And then, then, when sanity returns to the executive branch of the government, we still will have a public that has been fed lies, fear, and prejudice for 50 years and we have to try to figure out how to begin to reverse the damage.
There is dishonesty and corruption in politics, regardless of the party, but we cannot afford to wallow in false equivalencies. The Democratic party is not exactly a MENSA club and they are subject to way too much corporate influence, but the fact that you can point to a dozen times when Joe Biden exaggerated or lied in public does not make him the same as Donald Trump who has lied so much that he can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what he wishes might be true. He is a con man who has fallen prey to his own cons and so have a solid third of gullible Americans.
I have been asked several times this week what we can do in the face of such public delusion and self-congratulatory conservatism and paranoia. It is often true that you cannot use reason and evidence to change someone’s beliefs if they did not arrive at their beliefs through reason and evidence. But I need to remind you of what I have point out to you before:
Not many of us where raised in progressive families. Most of us were brought up in churches that taught fairy tales as facts. Though Walter Cronkite tried to just tell us what happened that day without interpretive spin, our families often believed the conspiracy theories of the day. We did not spring into the world as insightful, critical thinkers. We had to learn how to discard what was not true and have the courage to interrogate our own beliefs critically. We evolved into greater compassion, more progressive and inclusive views. We are still fighting the shadow of racial prejudice and partisanship. We just have to keep holding open the door for others to discover their own path towards greater reason.
With kindness and with patience, day after day, we need to engage people from every tribe in meaningful dialogue, both listening and speaking. Demand evidence. Think critically. Don’t compromise with conspiracy theories or religious myths. Challenge others and be willing to be challenged. Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.
Many times over the years I have quoted Voltaire to you, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” We have seen that this week. Trump has pilloried his largely uneducated and gullible followers with lies and conspiracy theories for years and this week, at his suggestion, at his insistence, they committed atrocities. And the worst may be yet to come.
It is our job to keep countering the absurdities with a steady supply of unvarnished truth. We cannot stop people from spewing absurdities, but we can make rational facts and ethical deliberation a part of the public conversation. That is what our country needs the most and we are obligated to do everything we can to try to recover a healthy democracy for the sake of America and as a standard of hope for the world.
