🧵 We live in dangerous times principally because rapacious oligarchs have weaponized ignorance for political gain.
John Stuart Mill nailed it more than 150 years ago that stupidity is inherently right wing.
For decades, Republicans have leveraged this fact to gain political power through manipulation of people who are uneducated and/or ignorant.
Now, they have re-birthed the "Satanic Panic" to gain votes in a very dangerous move...
In the latest episode of my podcast Theory of Change, my guests Julie Millican and Olivia Little discuss in great detail how the very highest levels of right-wing media feed QAnon lies about demons controlling Democrats and trans people to millions of people.
Telling ignorant and superstitious people that Satan is personally controlling trans people puts lives at risk.
But Republicans are desperate for votes as their hardcore base of White Evangelicals is dying off.
https://theoryofchange.flux.community/p/theory-of-change-082-julie-millican#details
Listen now (64 mins) | Rather than persuade new potential voters, reactionary elites decided to terrify their shrinking electorate
Every single day, people who watch Fox or Newsmax, or listen to talk radio are told that #trans people are demon possessed and that anyone who supports trans rights is a servant of Satan.
People who are trans know this, but it's vital that those who are not become aware of the vicious and evil smears being used against the trans community.
This is a small sample of what right wing media tells followers hundreds of times a day.
These lies about trans people, which mirror lies about antifascists, racial minorities, poor people, and non-Christians are carefully crafted by Republican political elites to appeal to a paranoid fundamentalist sensibility in which extremist Christians believe they are personally battling Satan and demons on a daily basis.
This is not an exaggeration. Millions upon millions of people believe this stuff, in the United States and other countries.
Much more here: https://theoryofchange.flux.community/p/theory-of-change-023-christopher-9c2#details
Listen now (63 mins) | Far-right Christians think they’re living in a Bible story, and that you are as well
Trump and his lackeys wholesale merged this paranoid and superstitious right-wing Christianity into the Republican party.
Here's one example in which a "Moms for Liberty" speaker tells followers that God has ordained them as his servants
The phrase "for such a time as this" is in the prayer and on the backdrop behind the speaker in the video.
It's a reference to the Biblical Esther myth in which a Jewish woman is told that perhaps God destined her to save her people from a genocide.
Normal Jews & Christians know that Esther never existed and that "for such a time as this" is a question rather than a declaration. Using that verse to sacralize contemporary political actions is astonishingly offensive and ignorant.
But Republican elites don't care.
Rather than admit their ideology failed, right-wing oligarchs have decided to tell their shrinking & elderly base of voters that they are personally at risk of being murdered by communist Black trans antifa atheist super soldiers.
Make no mistake, as many people have documented, the Capitol Putsch of 1/6/2021 was a religious act, one its perpetrators saw as a 21st century crusade to install Confederate Christian dictatorship.
There is zero doubt that this was their motivation. https://theoryofchange.flux.community/p/theory-of-change-033-bruce-wilson-7ee#details
Listen now (56 min) | The January 6th Capitol attack was the inevitable product of the Christian Right’s hatred of America
Alex Jones and people like him set the agenda for the Republican party far more than sites like the Free Beacon or National Review.
Now, he is telling his audience to pray that God will obliterate the entire planet if Democrats win elections.
This is how terrorists are made: Cynical, power-craving elites fill the heads of impressionable, low-intelligence people with the idea that they and their families will be murdered by the opposition. Therefore, ANY act of resistance is permissible.
Doesn't this guy owe more money than he's worth to Sandy hook victims? How does he still have a platform?
I hope the victims do get something... if only for added insult to injury they endured. But what I was really hoping was that it would have been the end of him and I know the Sandy Hook parents really took one for the team to try to silence him.
Matthew Sheffield
Chu 朱