Voting in an Empire of Lies

Voting in an Empire of Lies     

 

November 3, 2024    

Dr. Roger L. Ray 

 

click here to see the video

 

I was awakened one day this past week by a text message from one of my very few conservative friends. He is my age, an educated professional, and a pretty fair racquetball player, who regrettably gets all of his environmental, financial, and political information from Fox News. He was sending me a video clip which he believed would justify his support for Donald Trump. It was an interview with representatives Wesley Hunt & Byron Donalds from the great states of Florida and Texas. They were passionately telling an entirely apocryphal story about how President Biden was so weak that adversaries had confidently attacked seven of our embassies which Biden was then forced to close. 

 

Donalds and Hunt insisted that this had never before happened in American history. They then went on to relate a fictional story about how Donald Trump had stood up to the Taliban and had left them shaking in their boots. I watched the video and went to Google and found their stories to be entirely false and, what is more, while no embassies have been lost, there have been evacuations due to unrest at 29 embassies during Biden’s time in office, but this happened 37 times while Trump was in office. 

 

So, I asked my friend, “based on your standard of strength, Trump was a much weaker president than Biden, so I am sure that you won’t be voting for Trump now?” To which he replied, “I’m not changing my vote,” he declared, “I already pay too much in taxes!” 

 

He is a mostly retired CPA, so I pointed out to him what he already knows, that unless you make over $400,000 a year, your taxes will go down under Harris. I asked, “Do you make more than $400,000 per year?” I have not heard from him since I asked that question. 

 

I am certain that if this was a two-way communication medium, that many of you could tell a similar story. Similar in that someone has told you something with great confidence which you demonstrated to be entirely false, and the person who shared the Russian propaganda with you, even when confronted with contrary facts, refused to change his or her views. 

 

More than 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift, said in a letter to friend that you cannot use reason to change a person’s opinion if they did not use reason to arrive at that opinion. We are going to the polls on Tuesday, November 5, if you have not voted already, and we will wait up on Tuesday night to see if the election is conclusive enough to be decided on that day. Other than the Bush v Gore contest of 2000, we’re used to getting the conclusion pretty soon after the polls close on election day, but our nation is so evenly divided these days, that it is almost impossible to know who will win.

 

I know who should win. Most of the people who served in Trump’s first administration have said that he has neither the intellect nor the character to be president. Several members of his family have said the same thing. Prominent members of his party have announced their intentions to vote for Harris. 

In short, no one who cares about our economy, about civil rights, who cares about democracy, foreign policy, or who loves America should vote for Donald Trump and yet, knowing all of this, about half of American voters will vote for Trump. . . and no amount of honest information can persuade them to do otherwise. 

 

Republicans have spent decades gerrymandering voting districts to try to keep people of color and minority votes from counting for much and I hate that but I’m about ready to also propose that we restrict voting but I would like to restrict voting to people whose IQ is over 140. It would make election day pretty simple since that would be less than half of 1% of the population and it would mean that candidates like Trump would never be in danger of being elected. However, our system allows virtually everyone to vote, no matter how little they know about our government or how much they have been influenced by propaganda, lies, and misinformation. 

 

I knew that my racquetball partner was entirely mistaken about what he says about Trump, but I also knew that he was going to vote for Trump, no matter how much factual information I shared with him. I wish that people reasoned their way into their convictions, but I have been a pastor long enough to know that even smart people believe completely ridiculous things because it pleases them to believe obvious lies, even when they know they are lies. 

 

I don’t want to discourage you from trying to talk your crazy uncle off the cliff but, sadly, in all but very rare cases, you cannot use reason to persuade someone to change a conviction they did not come to by way of reason. 

 

I have always heard that politicians lie. 

I have tended to believe that they generally are not lying but that they are either exaggerating or simply engaging in wishful thinking but in this year’s campaign, there have been a lot of lies. They were not all lies told by Republicans, but I think that it is safe to say that more than 90% of them were Republican lies. 

 

Writing about 50 years ago, the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote: If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

 

She wrote that as a German Jew who had escaped the holocaust and made it to America, obviously, she was reflecting on how the Nazis had managed to take control of Germany, not by convincing people to believe their propaganda and their lies, but by leaving them bereft of a willingness to believe anything. And that was a long time ago.

 

We had reason to hope that with the advent of the internet and then smart phones, such that we all carry the information superhighway in our pockets, we have constant access to any published information that could be found in all of the libraries in the world, right in the palm of our hands, but rather than make us more informed, it appears to have shortened our attention span and made it seems like finding out what is true is just too hard, too time consuming, requiring too much energy, so that people brag about not reading newspapers, not watching reliable news sources, and instead our minds are filled with propaganda, pornography, and videos of talking cats and dogs. It doesn’t mean that most people are stupid, but it does mean that they are stupid adjacent. 

 

They could be more informed, but they hear that Biden has closed seven embassies and they like believing that Biden is a confused, and weak man, so they will believe that he closed seven embassies and not allow themselves to be bothered by better information. And learning that Trump actually evacuated embassies more often than Biden is equally meaningless because they never cared about embassy evacuations in the first place. Such issues are useless except for what my mother called, “mindless beauty shop gossip.”

 

Nazis also used a great deal of fear in their propaganda. It doesn’t have to be true if the threat you mention presses a hot button of a familiar fear. Governments often try to unite and control their populations by stoking fear of a common enemy, anyone that they can portray as being “other.” Of course, the Nazis were the ultimate racists and homophobes. I don’t know if Trump is imitating Nazis or if his natural prejudices just make him a terrible racist and homophobe such that he just looks and sounds like a Nazi.

 

It is no great mystery why he has continued to beat the drum about the entirely legal immigrants from Hati who have settled in Ohio. Hattians are black, they speak with an accent, and their cuisine, while delicious and wonderful, also smells different from hamburgers and fries. Republican politicians in Springfield, Ohio have refuted all of Trump and Vance’s lies about these Hattians but, again, facts don’t matter when you are  just using racism to stoke fear. 

As Harris has risen in the polls, in these past few weeks, Trump’s lies and name calling have just gone off the rails. He started months ago accusing her of only recently identified as being black when, in fact, she went to a historically black college and joined a famous black sorority when she was a teenager. But it has gotten ugly. He says that she is mentally impaired. He calls her “Comrade” Harris. He says that she is a communist and that, if elected, she will turn America into a 3^rd world country. He claims that she has promoted open borders and stopped prosecution of violent crime. He has even said that if she is elected that an illegal immigrant will come into your kitchen and cut your throat. 

 

If facts mattered, voters would know that violent crime is down, illegal immigration is down, and our economy is the envy of the world. He throws out this libel only to hit fear buttons in a gullible public. There is no information here. Trump is the one who bows to the will of communist dictators. Trump is the one who played golf more often than any other president and who didn’t even attend briefings, nor does he read classified reports, not even the ones that he steals and leaves unguarded in his hotel bathrooms. 

 

Pollsters never want to infer why but they always note that Trump gets more support from people who do not have a college degree and Harris gets more support from educated people. They poll the demographic, but they never just say that education makes a person less inclined to fall for the lies and largely Russian and Chinese propaganda that Trump and Vance so often repeat.

 

But, there is very little time left before the polls close on Tuesday and I can only implore you, my listeners, friends, supporters, and peers, to make sure that you vote before the polls close on Tuesday if you have not already. There are virtually no undecided voters left to persuade in this highly divisive election year. Now it is a matter of voter turnout and, please, you just can’t sit this one out. 

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

October 20, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray            click here to see the video

 

For a decade now, the satirical news site, the Onion, has run this same headline every time there is another large mass shooting. They change the article very little, placing the news story in a fictitious town but always including the quote

 

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.”

 

Of course, maybe the Onion should make a joke about any mass shooting just as many right wing politicians and gun fanatics always insist, in the wake of a shooting, that “this is no time to talk about politics.” They will feign concern for grieving families, insisting that this is a time to mourn, not to debate gun legislation. It is, of course, a ruse. They know that the public’s attention span is very short. 

It was almost 12 years ago now when a lone gunman with an AR-15 went into the Sandy Hook Elementary school and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were six and seven year old children. President Obama thought, surely now the nation will get behind serious gun reform. 

But even the bodies of 20 little children, torn apart by the battlefield force of the bullets from an AR-15, even though many parents have tried to keep their children’s memory alive, continually lobbying Congress for serious action . . . but nothing happened. People get distracted, they forget, and they move on.

The deadliest mass murder came less than five years later when a man with an AR-15 killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 others from his hotel window in Las Vegas, randomly shooting into the crowd at a country music concert. It was symbolic, really, but at least after that incident the infamous “bump stock” was outlawed…. A device that used the recoil of the rifle to turn a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle, a virtual machine gun. But this summer, in June, our out-of-control Supreme Court overturned the legislation that made bump stocks illegal. 

 

Machine guns were outlawed in the United States almost a century ago, but this Supreme Court put them back on the streets. 

 

Then, six years ago, when a former student from the Parkland High School in Florida went into his school and killed 16 people, that seemed to ignite an organized protest that featured several amazingly articulate students who went on a speaking tour of the country, I tried to get one of them booked to come speak at our church and couldn’t even get the booking agent to return phone calls because they were so in demand. But still, nothing changed. 

 

Defenders of the gun industry have tried to tell us that we have these shooters because our young people play violent video games all of the time. But, folks, kids in Japan play video games more than American kids. Do you know how many school shootings there were in Japan? Zero. None. Nada. 

 

Like it or not, the Onion is still right, we are the only country where this regularly happens. We know why it happens here. And we lack the political will to do anything about it. 

Of course, school shootings are just a small fraction of the gun murders in the United States ever year but they are among the most noticeable. Just over 300 students were killed in school last year and 288 of those were in the USA. 8 in Mexico. 6 in South Africa. 5 in India. 4 in Pakistan and Nigeria. 3 in Afghanistan. 2 in Brazil, France, and Canada. Only one each in China, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Kenya, Greece, Azerbaijan, Hungary, and Estonia. None in most of the rest of the world. But we lost 288 students. Unimaginable. Indefensible. Isn’t it fair to say that it is insane? 

 

Of course, the death toll is the worst but the beyond the dead and wounded, there is to be considered how every school child in the country is traumatized by these constant “active shooter” exercises. Bullet proof backpacks for your kids is now a thing. Schools, which are always strapped for resources, are now having to spend precious dollars on security guards, metal detectors, hardened doors, additional staff.

 

And what’s more, schools and police departments are now always on edge and our schools are awash in cell phones so that anyone who wants to create some excitement or get their school closed down for the day just has to make a call. Late last month, April Ruben reported in Axios that:

 

• In a single afternoon last week, schools in Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Texas, Michigan and Maryland all received threats.
• In Volusia County, Fla., the sheriff's office received 54 tips about potential threats in a single night this month. All the threats turned out to be false.
• In Springfield, Ohio, schools closed over hoax bomb threats following the GOP presidential ticket's amplification of a debunked conspiracy theory that immigrants in the city were eating pets.

The threat of gun violence is real. We have nearly 300 dead students every year to prove that, but then schools across the country are regularly disrupted by fake reports that, regardless of the fact that they are fake, have to be taken seriously and investigated. Is it any wonder then that so many of our schools have become so ineffective in performing their primary mission which is to educate?

Law enforcement officials across Florida have started to arrest students who call in threats and they perp walk the student and the student’s parents hoping that public humiliation will help to curb this dangerous trend. School has just started and they have already arrested dozens of kids between the ages of 11 and 15. One 11 year old turned out to have a small arsenal of guns and swords in his room, stockpiled for when he actually would attack his school. 

 

Nothing can be done, says the only nation where this regularly happens.

We used to hear the NRA claiming that gun laws don’t work, except for the fact that they do work in every other nation of the world. They point at murder rates in Chicago and New York, where there are strict gun laws, as their proof that they don’t work, when, obviously, a city law doesn’t keep someone from just outside the city from bringing a gun in. 

 

I have pointed out before that Mexico only has one legal gun store in the whole country and they only serve members of police forces but there are more than 6000 gun shops in the United States, just across the border from Mexico so that our gun shops are literally arming the drug cartels in their civil war in Mexico. You know, a lot of the undocumented immigrants to the USA are coming here because it is so dangerous in Mexico but, come on, why are there so many guns in Mexico? Where there are a lot of guns, there are a lot of shootings. This is how it works.

 

The NRA has said for years that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but the truth of it is that people with guns kill people, particularly people with assault rifles and hand guns, both of which are made solely for the purpose of shooting people. You don’t deer hunt with a pistol. You don’t shoot pheasant with an AR-15. If you need to defend your home, get a shot gun. If you need to shoot a duck, get a single shot rifle. If you need to shoot a duck four or five times, that bird is probably too tough to eat anyway. 

 

I have no idea how many credible assassination threats are made against presidents, candidates, politicians, and celebrities. The secret service doesn’t give out that information. We only hear about it when shots are fired, or a gunman is apprehended. 

Naturally, when Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt, Trump allies tried to blame Kamala Harris and those of us who have been warning for years that Trump is a danger to democracy. But the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans who have made it absolutely certain that almost anyone with enough money can buy a battlefield styled assault rifle. 

 

I don’t think that the USA has a much larger population of crazy people compared to other countries. Probably, we have an average number of crazy people, it is just that this nation is so awash in guns that crazy people, kids, angry people, or just lonely teenagers who want attention, can get their hands on lethal weapons, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition and in that context, it is a wonder that we don’t have more people killed than we do. 

 

Look people, the Second Amendment was written when the arms they referenced where highly inaccurate, single shot, muskets. There is no rational argument that the authors of the constitution could have imagined assault rifles with a 100 round capacity. It should also be noted that the Second Amendment was added to the bill of rights as a concession to slave owners who were frequently dramatically outnumbered by their slaves and in constant fear of a very reasonable revolt. This was a very real fear of George Washington’s. 

 

I know it will get some people all twisted up like a pretzel to hear me say it, but the Second Amendment is in sore need of amendment. Jesus didn’t write the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment was written by paranoid slave owners. 

Our children and grandchildren should not be traumatized every school year with active shooter drills and seeing armed police officers storming the building because someone called in a fake threat. Every other developed nation in the world has found a way for people to own the arms they actually need, and to store their hobby guns at shooting ranges so that our kids can feel safe when they go to school without having to wear a bullet proof vest on the school bus. 

 

The NRA, thankfully, does not have the political clout they once had, and they no longer have the financial resources to buy politicians that they once had. But still, we have a shortage of courage among our legislators but here is the good news:

The majority of Americans favor sensible gun laws, and so if we just stop voting for the politicians who refuse to give us sensible gun laws, we will have sensible gun laws, much like the rest of the world, in a single election cycle. It is just that easy, if only people would begin to vote in favor of their children living long enough to graduate. 

 

The only reason that the most common cause of death among children in our country is being shot is because of the indifference of voters who will not vote for change.

Gaza One Year Later: The Publicity War

Gaza One Year Later: The Publicity War   

October 6, 2024       Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

One year ago, Hamas terrorists launched an attack within Israel. It started on that Sabbath morning with more than 2000 rockets being fired into 21 communities in Israel. Then 6000 militants poured through, over, and under the border, killing more than 1000 men, women, and children. Elderly people were gunned down as they ran to take shelter in bomb shelters. They attacked day care centers, brutally murdering children and babies. 

 

Some 250 men, women, and children were taken as hostages during the attack; taken back into Gaza and hidden in the tunnels for which Hamas is famous but also some were housed in the homes of Gaza residents who support Hamas. Both men and women were subjected to rape and sexual violence. There are accounts of prisoners being beheaded and people in Gaze literally playing with body parts. 

 

Bloodied, naked women were paraded through the streets of Gaza. Several were gang raped and at least one was apparently raped to death, dying with a crushed pelvis. Several captives have died in captivity. A few have been released. Now, one year after the attack, there are still about 100 people unaccounted for; but it is reasonable to assume that only a couple of dozen are still alive. Survivors reported having been beaten and starved and kept in darkness in tunnels too cramped to even stand up. 

It is unbearable to think that there are still young men and women in captivity, regularly being sexually assaulted and tortured by Hamas and, sadly, other residents of Gaza. The news often comes to us in a way that suggests that there are two kinds of people who live in Gaza: Hamas terrorists, and innocent Palestinians who happen to live in Gaza. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realize that this bifurcation of the population is anything but that clean. The children in Gaza are reared with school textbooks that tell them repeatedly that their highest moral obligation to their faith and to their families is to kill Jews however they can and to work for the end of the state of Israel. Obviously, everyone in Gaza is not supportive of Hamas but a lot of people are, and some are sometimes and not at other times and there is no way for spy satellites or Mossad intelligence to tell definitively who is Hamas and who is not Hamas. I will simply make the observation that while these hostages have been held in Gaza, none of the innocent citizens of Gaza has stepped forward with information to help these poor elderly and children to be returned to their families. We have to be honest about this.

 

Of course, it is impossible to ever be certain of any news accounts since both sides engage in repression of the media as they attempt to put their own spin on everything, portraying themselves as victims and the other side as being guilty of the worst war crimes and even the word “genocide” has been cheapened by how much it has been thrown about. 

 

The terrorist attack last October 7 was horrific but that didn’t keep partisan rumor mongers from trying to make it worse. Hamas did kill 38 children and infants in one daycare center but almost immediately it was reported that they were beheaded. They weren’t. Isn’t it bad enough that they were murdered? 

 

We depend on good journalism to fact check these things and to keep the public informed about what is really going on. But Israel doesn’t give journalist the freedom to report on their own in Gaza. They rarely take journalists into the war zone to show them what they want to show them and, of course, nether Hamas nor Hezbollah allow unfettered journalism to happen under their watch because they also want to control the narrative. Both sides are deeply invested in propaganda, and we are left to wonder what is happening.

 

I have just returned from a month in Thailand where I couldn’t easily access my usual news sources, so I was left to try to figure out what was going on my switching between Russian TV, Al Jazeera, Fox News, and some Chinese news services, all of which had their own agenda and spin. RT can be a pretty good news source until they talk about the war in the Ukraine. I like Al Jazeera on the whole until they talk about Israel and the war in Gaza. Maybe they can’t help themselves but we, as news consumers, have to try to filter out the propaganda and work hard to understand the partisan world we live in.

 

Remember, this is not just a war about land and political power, it is also a war for public opinion, for sympathy, and for support. Even President Biden said that he had seen evidence of beheadings of children, which his administration had to walk back because he hadn’t seen any evidence because it didn’t happen. 

 

The Hamas led attack was an unspeakable act of terrorism, aimed at forcing a response from Israel that Hamas leaders hoped would draw other Muslim militias and nations into a final battle with Israel. You have to understand, Hamas made their attack as outrageous and heinous as they possibly could in order to provoke a similar response out of Israel because they then use Israel’s retaliation both to draw other Arab states into war with Israel and more importantly, to try to turn the world against Israel. 

 

Iran has been funding and supplying Hamas all year and Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel from Lebanon, threatening an all-out attack which has become increasingly likely since Israel’s technologically surprising response with explosive pagers and walkie talkies used by Hezbollah leaders and militants. 

 

If you are a regular listener, you know that I have spoken out against the way that Israel has prosecuted its war against Gaza. I have decried the civilian casualties, the inhumane blockade of food, medicine, water, and fuel from Gaza.

Israel’s tactics have been reprehensible but, even with such unreserved military attacks, Hamas members have made it clear that they would repeat October 7 anytime that they could muster the men and material to do it. They plead for a ceasefire but still have not returned the hostages they are still torturing daily. 

 

Likewise, Hezbollah has called the pager bombs an act of war, but they don’t want you to think about the rockets they indiscriminately fire into population centers in Israel on a daily basis. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have raised gaslighting to an art form that would be funny if it were not being offered seriously. 

 

They want to attack and murder in Israel without reprisal, knowing all the while that reprisals are guaranteed. Again, those of you who have been consistent listeners know that I am a very reluctant supporter of the existence of Israel. Land should never have been taken from Palestinians to establish a Jewish homeland when the Holocuast was a European crime…. Engineered by Germany but assisted in ways that Poland, Russia, and other states want to deny now, but at the time . . . well, more Jews died in Poland than died in Germany and it is debatable how many Jews were killed by invaders and how many were killed by neighbors. There is always the war that is fought on the battlefield and the later war that is fought in the pages of history books and the two can be in open conflict with one another. 

 

I will add as a footnote to the initial theft of land to establish Israel that America and Great Britian did not give the small parcel of land they took very defensible borders. When their neighbors later attacked Israel, Israel’s armies pushed the invaders back and annexed land that gave them control of the high land from which Israel suffered constant mortar attacks in early years. There is no legal defense for their expansionist settlements in the West Bank but the current borders of Israel, if you ever bother to go and see for yourself, were established to give the country security from constant attacks. All of this is more complicated than the media stories we are fed in seconds on TV.

 

I am sympathetic with Palestinian anger over the theft of land that was theirs for generations before being taken to establish Israel. It was a bad idea based on Sunday School nostalgia and it should not have been done but we are at least 50 or 60 years past being able to undo that crime. Palestinian terrorism now, which is motivated by a desire to wipe Israel off of the map, only makes things worse.

 

Even though I think that reparations should be made to descendants of African slaves in America, realistically, we know that no dollar figure will actually fix that sin. Nothing we can do for Native Americans who have managed to survive the occupation of Europeans on this continent could ever unravel what we did to them. 

 

Similarly, there are things that the world should do to help Palestinians to have self-governance and an equal place in the modern world but driving the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea, as the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” suggests is not how Palestinians will get justice. Palestinians want the sympathy of the world, and they have won a lot of the propaganda war, but, terrorism is still terrorism and you can’t have a seat at the table if you are still stabbing the other people at the table with your steak knife.

Last spring we saw a lot of pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the United States. Outrage about the Israeli assault on Gaza led to demands that the USA stop supplying Israel with arms and financial support. The protests often went pretty far beyond calling for a cease-fire and waded, knowingly or unknowingly into anti-Semitism.

 

Now, let me be clear, you can criticize the state of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. There are those who seem to want to play that card the minute anyone objects to anything that Israel does and that is not honest and no one should be afraid to speak up when the war is being prosecuted directly against a civilian population. 

I think that we should applaud student protests that were focused on war crimes being committed by Israeli forces without trying to whitewash the terrorist provocations of Hamas.

 

However, when students began rallying with chants of “Gays for Hamas,” you realize that enthusiasm has drowned out rational thought. The LGBT community is still violently and often lethally oppressed in most of the Arab world, and no one should kid themselves about how bad it is. 

 

I’m excited to hear young adults taking a passionate interest in world events and protesting for social justice but when they try to make Hamas out to be heroes of some sort, they just look like there are being manipulated and used in the propaganda war. Clearly, we can rationally protest Israel’s excesses without having to forget about the terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

 

Again, let’s be honest about this: If the government of the Bahamas started shooting hundreds of rockets into population centers on the Florida coast, would you think that we should respond? If Mexico started firing hundreds of mortars and rockets across the southern border, or Canada was attacking American cities across our northern border, if a thousand rockets flew into apartment buildings in New York, would you think that America should respond? 

 

Historically, we stole a lot of land from Mexico. We invaded Canada and tried to take it over. We participated in a virtual genocide of indigenous people in the Caribbean and replaced native populations with African slaves. But, in spite of that history, if a hot war started between our neighbors and Americans living on our borders, you can bet that our response would hardly be as measured and restrained as many of us expect Israel to be. Israel doesn’t get a green light on war crimes but, folks, Israel has a right, an obligation, to defend itself and if it ever stopped then they would be driven into the Mediterranean Sea and that is a fact. 

 

The reasonable discussion in America should not be about whether or not Israel should defend itself, but we have reason to talk about when and how we will help them to defend themselves and when they have gone too far, and we have reason to withdraw our support. 

 

In my opinion, asking for a ceasefire while there are still hostages being raped, beaten, and starved to death is a non-starter. If Hamas and Hezbollah cannot sign onto any peace accord which accepts the fact that, no matter how wrong and poorly conceived its creation was, Israel is where it is and it is going to stay there, then there is no peace to be had in Palestine. 

 

The current government of Israel doesn’t want a two state solution to this problem because they don’t want a shared border with a strong Palestinian government. The Palestinians don’t want a two state solution because they just don’t want Israel to exist, at least not in the Middle East. But folks, there can be a two-state solution and I insist that nothing less than a two state solution can bring permanent peace to this region of the country. There is a way for Palestine to be free, self-governing, and successful but that way must include making peace with Israel. 

 

I am certain that this talk will be offensive to many of my progressive friends. I still hate war and I even wish that I could figure out a way to be a solid pacifist but in the Middle East, powerful self-defense still seems to be necessary. If you have a workable solution to suggest, I would love to hear from you. 

Misogyny in 2024? Unbelievable!

Misogyny in 2024? Unbelievable!   

 

Dr. Roger Ray   Sept. 22, 2024

 

click here to see the video

 

My sincere apologies for using this obviously fake photo of a bikini clad Kamala Harris in an embrace with Jeffry Epstein but, I assure you, it was the least offensive example of how people rushed to try to ruin Kamala Harris’ credibility with sexual innuendo as soon as she became the heir apparent of the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

 

I’ll remind our long-term listeners that I have referenced more than once the night of the 2008 presidential election when I publicly wept when Barak Obama won the election. Obama was not an ideal candidate in my mind. He was too inexperienced and, frankly, way too conservative for my tastes, an opinion that was certainly validated in the looming housing crisis when he rushed in to save the banks while throwing vulnerable homeowners under the bus, and by calling for a military surge in Afghanistan rather than an immediate withdrawal of occupation forces. 

 

But I didn’t weep because I was sorry that he won the election, I wept because America had, by popular vote, elected a young black man to the highest office in the country and the most powerful position in the world. I would have loved to have been able to give him the benefit of some pastoral guidance in 2009, but who he was, an intelligent, honorable, trustworthy man, in my opinion, would make him one of the two or three greatest presidents in American history. How much better off would the world have been if he could have had three terms rather than two? 

I feel that history validated my concerns about his tendency to favor big corporations over lower income working Americans, but I was terribly wrong in my rather naive interpretation of the meaning of his having won the 2008 Election.

I thought Obama’s win stood on the shoulders of a dawning post-racist American public. I feel kinda stupid about that now, but I was so hopeful. 

 

Maybe it was because many younger voters were eager to help move past racism that Obama won, but younger white men were certainly not united in that hope. The election of Barak Obama sparked a resurgence of racism in America that shocked even this southern boy. I had no idea how deep the racist roots were, not just in the south and not just among old white trailer park dwellers. Obama’s election provoked age-old beliefs in white supremacy, it struck fear in the hearts of people who had never consciously been aware of how much their white privilege meant to them.

 

I will even go so far as to say that most Americans, prior to Obama’s win, knew that Donald Trump was a pathetic, narcissistic, conman, little more than a carnival barker for America’s Id, but Obama’s popularity, exceeded only by his wife’s popularity, made Donald Trump the standard bearer for everything that is despicable and embarrassing about American culture. Maybe everyone who voted for Trump is not a racist, or a homophobe, or a xenophobe, or an Islamophobe, but those rare exceptions can hardly make us give up the generalization that is demonstrably based in the other 95% of Trump’s supporters. 

Let me postulate that without the racist vote, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election by the largest margin in American history.

And if it makes you mad to hear me say that, I will further postulate that you are angry because, in your heart, you know that I am right. 

 

While Obama’s election to the office of the president was not the sign of the end of American racism, it was siren that showed us how much work remained to be done. And I implore you not to be naive enough to believe that another decade of funerals will finish the job. It isn’t just retrenched old people who are keeping racism alive, the most frightening proponents of racism are among the young. 

Stephen Miller was just 31 years old when he joined the Trump administration. He is the one who thought putting the children of illegal immigrants in dog cages was a good idea. One of the meanest and most dangerous ideologues of the Trump administration is several years younger than some of my favorite shoes. 

 

If it were possible to hold a public vote on a proposal to reinstate African slavery in America, do any of you doubt that this little brown shirt would vote for it? I realize that the art of preaching often rests on plausible exaggeration and hyperbole, but you need to be able to tell the difference between fiction and painful reality orientation. America’s ID is strong and there is no shortage of people of all ages, genders, and even races who are prepared to normalize the most deplorable aspects of our national character. 

 

So, when it became apparent that Kamala Harris was going to be the democratic candidate for president, I wasn’t surprised to see the immediate misogynist backlash. I was disgusted, I was disappointed, but I sure couldn’t be surprised.

Of course, entirely unlike what I was saying earlier about the surprising resurgence of racism after Obama was nominated and then elected, we cannot say that the nomination of Kamala Harris was the fuse that lit a sudden resurgence of misogyny.  

It has now been 2 years since the unthinkable happened, when a radically Catholic and Evangelical Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, taking civil rights away from women of child bearing age. Not since the days of slavery have we seen a court that would take away civil rights and literally give control of women’s heathcare to right wing men who have no medical training. Would I be going too far to say, “gave control over women’s bodies to weak men?” Because a strong man doesn’t need to control women; strong men are not threatened by women having civil rights. Strong men want to give women equal rights. It is frightened men, weak men, insecure men who are not certain of their own masculinity who have a need to kill, abuse, or control strong women. 

 

Just yesterday I was in Qatar and walking through the airport and the downtown area of Doha, when I see women covered in black either almost entirely or entirely in 100 degree weather, right down to just having a peep hole in their face coverings, well, I don’t have very charitable feelings about modern Islam. The need to hide women, to disguise and cover up their femininity, that’s not respect for women, is it? Isn’t that fear? Maybe I shouldn’t say things that promote anti-Muslim sentiments, but we have all seen the pictures that show Iranian women in the 70’s and Iranian women now:

Please forgive me if this is too strong, and certainly there is way too much misogyny in Catholicism, Fundamentalism, as well as in Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism: but much of Islam looks to me like a religion for really weak men. Men who love women, desire women, but who are terrified of them at the same time. 

 

All organized religions are in desperate need of modernization and moral reforms but Islam, I am afraid, is marching towards extinction by insisting upon marginalizing the women whose genius and industry they so desperately need. I will have more to say about this in a couple of weeks but, I will tell you honestly, it isn’t that I hate Islam, it is that I am sad for people who fall into this absurd fear of women taking their rightful leadership roles in the world. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan have just made it illegal for women’s voices to be hear in public…. It is not illegal for Afghan women to sing or to read aloud. This is not faith. This is fear. The Taliban defend their ruling saying that the voice of women is bewitching. I’ll admit that I’ve been bewitched by a woman more than once in my lifetime but I don’t think I can blame women for the fact that I was bewitched . . . I’m pretty sure that’s on me. I don’t think that Muhammad was afraid of women. In fact, for his time and in his world, the Prophet was a liberating force for women, at least for the most part. But Islam in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in Afghanistan, this is not Muhammad’s faith, this is the irrational fear of weak men. 

 

So Kamala doesn’t get the blame or the credit for the fearful reactions of weak men in the face of her candidacy. It was going on before her name became known to us, but boy, you sure can’t miss it now.  I live in Florida, which is not, I am sorry to say, the MENSA Club capitol of the world. I am surrounded by grumpy old Trump supporters, many of whom couldn’t wait to suggest to me that Kamala should be portrayed wearing kneepads because, they insist, she climbed the political ladder by randomly giving out sexual favors to powerful men. 

 

The hypocrisy should be obvious, but I am going to spell it out anyway: I have no idea who Kamala dated before she was married. I have no interest in knowing her intimate history because, whatever it is, it isn’t any of my business just like it isn’t any of yours. The implication that she is morally bankrupt because she was probably not a virgin when she got married to Doug Emhoff when she was 49 years old is nothing short of idiotically pathetic. 

 

There have certainly been times when we expected male politicians to show some sexual discretion and more than one career has gone up in flames when it became publicly known just how rapacious their libidinal appetites had been, but in the era of Donald Trump, sexual infidelities have apparently become more of a badge of honor than a political liability. Trump’s history with child molester, Jeffery Epstein’s, fantasy island, his comments about wishing that he could date his daughter, the disgusting bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood recording, along with rape trials and assault charges…. Drunk frat boys in the 1960’s showed more circumspection than Trump has shown in recent history. 

Still, he has the temerity to cast aspersions on Kamala Harris whose is class and character personified compared to Trump. Republicans now seem to be comfortable with the middle-school assumption that sexual conquest is something men brag about and the same sexual encounters are a source of shame for women. None of us should be so primitive that we give such hypocrisy the slightest bit of credibility.

 

But even progressive talking heads on MSNBC just said, without hesitation or qualification, that when the subject of choosing a VP running mate came up, that Kamala would have to pick a white male, which, in my opinion, and you all know that I am right, that just makes oblation to the residual racism and misogyny of the American voting public. I like Tim Waltz, in fact, I like him a lot, but his selection lost some shine for me just knowing that Kamala was being told not to consider picking a woman, a gay man, or a person of color. As a woman of color, if she is successful in her bid for the presidency, she is breaking through some very tough barriers but the fact that she is doing that should absolutely mean that we have evolved beyond having to “balance” any political ticket by having at least one white straight man on the ballot to legitimate a person who happened not to have used white male privilege to get there. 

 

But let’s be honest, equality of the genders is not the same thing as sameness. Men and women are equally intelligent and talented, but we can make some observations about the factual differences between them. Women tend to be shorter. Men tend to be physically stronger.

 

It is also true that almost all mass shootings are committed by men. Almost all terrorists are men. Men are much more likely to be criminals, with 13 men in prison for every incarcerated woman. Men committed more than 80% of the violent crimes in the United States.  So, sure, there are some obvious differences between men and women, and it is a bit odd that being male is not seen as being more of a liability in elections. 

 

We cannot overstate the importance of the fact that Kamala Harris may break the gender barrier for the highest office in America while simultaneously becoming the first woman of color to be president.

 Other nations have elected women heads of state, famously, we remember Indira Gandhi of India, and Golda Meir of Israel, and Isabel Perón of Argentina who came to office in the 1960’s and 70’s. And while many nations have elected women as head of state since then, it is notable that not many have managed to do it twice, with the notable exceptions of Great Britain and Iceland. 

 

Women were not even allowed to apply to go to most medical schools or law schools within my own lifetime but now women make up the majority in both medical school and law school and, in fact, them seem to be excelling beyond their male peers. But while the struggle for equal rights has seen notable successes in recent decades, breaking into politics has been a tough slog. Women make up more than half of our population but in the senate, they hold only a fourth of the seats and women occupy the governor’s office in only 12 states.

 

So, as a thought exercise, may I ask you if you believe that this nation would have universal healthcare, sensible gun laws, and stronger environmental protections right now if we had a majority of women in the congress and the senate? I know what I believe, but what do you believe? Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who, by the way, despise each other, do not represent women’s potential for statesmanship but they do represent the kind of women that Republicans seem to like, gun toting, conspiracy theory loving, lunatics who are best known for lewd behavior in public and talking about Jewish space lasers.  

Women are not like men. They tend to do better in higher education. They tend to be less violent, more compassionate, and on the whole, they tend to be more kind and more moral. So, is America ready to have a women president. Well, in my opinion, it’s about damn time.