The Five Ways Conservatism Fails America

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Over the last five decades, I’ve closely studied the promises and outcomes of politically conservative economic policy. This graphic breaks it down to a “meme” level, but there’s more to these issues than a few facts and figures. Let’s look at the factors involved in how conservatism fails America.

  1. The lie of pure capitalism. While many conservatives are fond of quoting the likes of Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago “economist” who strongly believed in unfettered free market capitalism, the consistent outcome of unregulated markets is industries monopolized by players gobbling up smaller companies to grab market share and eliminate competition. Way back in Teddy Roosevelt’s days in battling Robber Barons, America learned that allowing aggressive players free reign results in economic imbalance as shared in a Los Angeles Times story: “When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, tycoons had grown fabulously wealthy through monopolistic manipulations of industry, and the economic deck was stacked against the common man and woman. T.R., the scion of a prominent New York family, was no stranger to wealth, but he was also raised with the conviction that those who came into life with great advantages had a moral responsibility to improve the condition of the disadvantaged. Believing that America could not thrive unless all Americans had a chance to thrive, Roosevelt used his epic energy, intellect and reformist zeal to confront the rapacious robber barons and offer the rest of the citizenry a “Square Deal” that promised the federal government would be a fair arbiter that would not favor the rich over everyone else.” So yes, whether it involves a Square Deal or a New Deal or a Green New Deal, the United States of America needs government to defend the interests of the middle class and poor. Some call these actions “socialism,” but in fact it’s quite the opposite.
  2. Conservatives love the idea of “privatize the profits, socialize the losses.” We often hear conservatives complain about “social welfare” and “social programs” as being unsustainable expenditures. Yet corporate welfare handouts are just as common from government to small businesses all the way up to massive entities the size of Elon Musk’s organization. Yet in turn, many of these same companies, having absorbed taxpayer dollars to guarantee productivity and then profits, love to avoid paying taxes because the “corporations are people too” mindset of the Mitt Romney’s of the world maintain it is fair and just for companies to avoid paying taxes at all costs. These “free speech rights” include the ability to pay lobbyists who sell their interests to government officials in exchange for campaign funding toward re-election. The entire system is rigged toward corporate largesse. Yet when companies become “too big to fail” (such as the auto or banking industries), Americans are forced to pay for the losses of speculative management, outright corruption, or predatory corporate behavior. These losses form the other bookend of corporate socialism. Yet conservatives love to gaslight about labor or social programs being “socialism” while supporting the elitist function of corporatism as a patriotic ideal. It is no such thing.
  3. Conservatives regard labor as a “necessary evil.” From the labor-busting policies of Ronald Reagan to the corporate “downsizing” trend popular among hardline managers during the 80s and 90s, it is labor and the middle class that have borne the pain of economic loss in the form of flat wages, job insecurity, and reduced economic mobility. Combined with the offshoring of American jobs and manufacturing to capitalize on cheaper foreign labor, which often involved harsh conditions nearing slave labor, the American Heartland was gutted to deliver profits to shareholders of companies without seeming to care about the fate of the nation or its citizens. The conservative despise of labor also swings the opposite direction, maligning immigrant populations brought in to farm the fields, work in meat-packing plants, or do millions of jobs that Americans need to get done but feel the work is beneath their cultural status or pay-grade. That populist hatred for immigrants is now a political mainstay among political conservatives leveraging fear for votes. This is an immoral reality, and we’ll address that in section #5.
  4. Conservatives consistently refuse to accept responsibility for the costs of pollution or climate change. During the Nixon administration, several laws were passed to clean up American air, water, and the environment. These bipartisan initiatives improved conditions across the nation, reducing acidification of lakes and streams, cutting smog in urban areas, cleaning up rivers used as dumping grounds by manufacturing and industry, and protecting critical habitat for wildlife. In addition, Superfund money went to work cleaning up dangerous pollution zones, and lawsuits brought against big polluters put money to use in massize accidents like the Exxon Valdez and other environmental calamaties. If not for these initiatives supported by our government, the costs of pollution in health and safety terms would have sunk into the lives of millions more people. And yet today, conservatives say the costs of fighting anthropogenic climate change are “too high” or claim that there isn’t a problem at all. Some of that denial comes from a different sort of conservative belief system. People possessed of a fundamentalist religious worldview deny that humanity can affect such change, believing that only God can affect things on a global scale. Yet that pursuantly denies the religious tradition that it was humanity that brought about the “fall of the world.” Such “logic” is thus fallacious and hypocritical. But whoever said Christianity contradicts itself? Well, let’s take yet another look at one of the most egregious examples of that.
  5. The “money is not the root of all evil” conservative mindset. Despite the many admonitions of Jesus against the love of money found in the Bible, today’s ‘fiscally conservative’ Christians love to find ways to deny that aspect of the Lord’s ministry. There is nothing in the life and ministry of Jesus that suggests a broad tolerance for the pursuit of earthly wealth. A simple AI summary says it best: “Jesus taught that people should not store up riches on earth, where they can be destroyed by moths, rust, and thieves. Instead, he encouraged people to store up riches in heaven, where they would be safe from destruction.” Yet from the Reagan era through both Bushes and into the Trump Era, an accelerated fascination with avarice consumes conservative Christianity. The so-called Prosperity Gospel of televangelists is the ultimate ironic expression of this bad theology. Uber-wealthy TV preachers fly around in private jets while dunning their parishioners for their last dimes on the promise that such wealth will return to them tenfold, or whatever. It’s all lies about money packaged in legalistic religion from which people are afraid to break fear due to the fire and brimstone warning that they won’t get into heaven if they don’t “pay up.” The Catholic Church worked this scam a few thousand years ago with indulgences and purgatory, but religious suckers and fearfully conservative populists love the idea of monetary returns and heavenly rewards. Christian conservatives often deeply desire to have their cake and eat it too. If the two are combined in one package, all the better. And, if someone appears to stand in the way of these aims, the conservative instinct is to leapfrog the earthly obligation of Christ to serve others and claim salvation well in advance of Judgement Day. There is even a massive faction hoping for judgment day to arrive sooner than later, and an entire industry of Christian apologetics is devoted to predicting when the End Times will come, and how those who don’t play along with the rules of Christian legalism will pay with suffering in this life and beyond. It’s all a transactional game, this conservative religious instinct. Religious legalists have long understood how to extract wealth from those fearful of the Great Beyond and eager for vindication against their perception of evil in this life. The Internet is flush with dichotomous so-called Christians claiming that the upcoming election between Trump and Harris is the epitome of “good versus evil.” Wouldn’t Jesus be surprised to come back and study those claims?

So here we are today, dealing with the five main lies of fiscal conservatives gutting the American economy while claiming to love God and Country. Some go so far as to claim that one cannot be an American and be a Liberal. Or to be a Democrat and be a Christian.

Yet, when you look at the ministry of Jesus, who fought the moneyed religious conservatives of his day because they sought control of the economy and ruled the lives of the masses through laws and traditions only they could implement, we realize that conservatives are not only on the wrong side of economic truth, they are on the wrong side of God too. Plus, the truth of the matter is that the economy almost always does better under Democrats. Sometimes that’s because fiscal conservatives actually play ball with Democratic leadership to cut costs, and I’m all in favor of that. Hell, elite accounting firms were brought in to examine our nation’s military budgets and could not determine a first step at economic accountability. Yet conservatives love military spending and protect it at all costs. That goes for blowing millions on Israel because the Zionist wishes of Christian Conservatives want that nation to serve as the foundation for Armageddon and the Return of Christ. Too bad if you’re Jewish, it seems. You get left out on that deal. These are just a few of the ways conservatives have perverted the tenets of Christianity to work against the teachings of Christ on every front.

That even holds true on the abortion issue, where the economics of child-bearing and child-rearing are ignored in favor of blaming women for getting pregnant in the first place. Ex-President Donald Trump insists he “did the thing” in getting abortion rights tossed down to the states where inconsistency is the norm, and women are the people who suffer.

Why is it that conservatives never speak about the role men play in causing those pregnancies? And why do conservatives avoid the logical tactics of birth control, especially male birth control, in pregnancy prevention? That is the sure cure for abortions nationwide.

It is clear that conservatives don’t genuinely own the authority on abortion. Their sole goal seems to be proclaiming self-righteous grievance against women and claiming the right to assert that they’re “saving babies.” In fact, they’re only saving themselves the problem of having to care enough and get involved in the lives of women just as Jesus would tell them to do. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When it comes to abortion, “If you must depend on the law to bring about the will of God, you have already failed.”

When it comes to economics, it is classic liberalism that owns all the “good things” done to bring about the promises of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Liberals, including Christians devoted to the teachings of Christ about equality in humanity, emancipated people from slavery and bondage. Liberals also worked to grant women the full rights of citizenship and voting, and to advocate for the well-being and normalcy of gay love and marriage in society. Liberals (including Christian liberals) work to protect the Earth from the chronically sinful ways of humankind. That’s all in keeping with the best aspects of the Bible while dispensing with anachronistic laws of patriarchal origin and the crueler facest of “kingship,” which is just another word for plutocracy and unrepentant capitalism.

We should never forget that the “kings of industry” are just as susceptible to character flaws as the biblical King David, upon whose life God cast a shadow by telling him at the end of life, “You cannot build a temple in my honor. You have too much blood on your hands.” That is not an excuse to claim, as too many evangelical Christians do, that “God works with flawed people to accomplish his aims.” To that I say, “Well, you don’t have to actively seek flawed people and support them no matter how many ways they sin, and refuse to be repentant.” That’s Donald Trump. He’s many sins packed into one Big Sin, that of unrepentant pride and hubris. God doesn’t like those kinds of people. The Bible shows many of them getting their just desserts, although Trump always seems to want a second helping.

Let that be a lesson to all who allow greed, violence, and adultery to rule their hearts. And I’m talking about you, Donald Trump, and everyone who supports you. God does not favor the unrepentant.

Hatriotism: Unveiling the Political Strategy of Hate

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

You’ve seen the trucks with American flags flying on one side while a Trump 2024 flag flaps around on the other. You’ve seen the Red Hats and the Rallies, where people applaud the hate-filled language of their leader, who mocks the disabled, and whose patent distrust and disdain for immigrants is evident despite the dog-whistle language meant to cloak the hate behind it. You’ve heard the MAGA Candidate threaten his political opponents with prison time and, worse, the death penalty if necessary to dispatch those daring to question his authority. You’ve watched the former President Trump mug obsequiously for the camera with that smug smile backed by the phony victimhood speaking style. “They hate me!” Trump gaslights the world in quasi-religious fervor. “They are persecuting me, and they are persecuting you.”

Trump is the face of an American movement claiming to represent patriotism, but it is not. Instead, it is Hatriotism, a political strategy that thrives on vicious accusations against liberalism, the true foundation of democracy and the Republic, our laws, and our government. Yet according to Hatriots, these institutions are the enemy of the people. The conservative members of the Supreme Court, all of whom hate the rule of law if it contradicts their ideology and political alliance, just proved that.

Supreme Hate

The conservative Supreme Court demonstrated that it is a tool of the Hate Machine that was once the Republican Party. The SCOTUS granted Hatriotism full approval by granting immunity to Donald Trump, the man who disrespects our nation’s laws and resists their natural limits at every turn. Given that judgment by the six conservative members of the Supreme Court, there is now no limit to what hate will be allowed to do to anyone the GOP decides to punish, with Trump leading the way.

Russian collusion by imitation

Indeed, Hatriotism looks much like the power politics of regimes run by the vicious whims of authoritarians. Over in Russia, Vladimir Putin has ordered his perceived enemies extinguished at will. Some fall out of high windows while others face the silent death of poison. Do we think Trump will act any differently here in America? When it comes to international politics, Putin’s hate-filled paranoia deemed Ukraine part of Mother Russia. To prove it, he’s tried to beat his perceived child into submission.

Trump’s feverishly transactional style is no different. His admiration for dictators is apparent, as is his disdain for what he brands “shithole countries.” Hate is the political blood running through Trump’s veins.  

Daddy issues

History is also rife with the childishness of world leaders running around with parental bugs up their asses. Hate-filled despots and insecure wannabe kings all seem to have Mommy and Daddy issues driving their furious need for approval. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq to show his father that he could do what Daddy could not, which was to capture Saddam Hussein. The torture committed in Iraq under the son’s watch was the hate-filled byproduct of that compensatory need for approval.

The Trump Saga is driven by Daddy Issues too. That dynamic holds a far worse menace for us in America and abroad. A Washington Post story about the Trump Family history reveals the source of the insecurity on display in everything Trump does, “We know that many presidents have had daddy issues: dreaming of their absent fathers, chafing at their judgments or struggling under their legacies. When discussing his father in his memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump stresses the business savvy he gleaned from the late Fred C. Trump. “I learned about toughness in a very tough business, I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency.”

Tough to take

In Trump’s case, that pursuit of “toughness” is mostly about covering up his long line of grandiose mistakes. His many failed business ventures. His bankruptcies and fraud. His three failed marriages that succumbed to his infidelity. Now he’s a convicted felon hiding behind claims he’s never done anything wrong, all while hiding his vanity behind a prodigiously dyed blonde combover shading a face painted to disguise a complexion that without makeup resembles a pale grocery store tomato.

Faux Christians

Despite all this vacuous dishonesty, Trump refuses to confess any flaw, a trait that his Christian evangelical supporters seem to adore despite the call to repent of sins founding their tradition. Instead, they excuse Trump’s hateful attitudes by comparing him to the likes of King David, the genocidal despot whom God refused to honor at the end of his life because he had too much blood on his hands.

That murderous legacy already exists in the latter-day interpretation of the Second Amendment, a law split in half by conservatives on the Supreme Court so that hate can be armed in its battle with cultural progress and peace in America. The first half of the Second Amendment, the part about a “well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state,” has been hijacked by hate-filled anti-government soldiers of fortune that spend most of their time blasting cement-filled Home Depot buckets with ammunition hoping someday they’ll have an excuse to turn the slogan “How Doers Get More Done” into a full-blown takeover of the American government.

Hate on the march

Those were the same disturbingly small-minded militants of Hatriotism invading the Capitol on January 6, 2020. They waved American flags but also Confederate banners, proving their cause was nothing more than treason disguised as a righteous cause. They were called to arms and used sharpened flagpoles to thump and stab Capitol police, all while welcoming into their ranks the racists and anti-Semitics, the Bison Heads and suburban nutcases, many of whom wound up arrested and convicted for their crimes of obstructing governmental business and destroying government property.

That’s Hatriotism in a nutshell. It lacks the consciousness and conscience to realize it has the entire American Experiment wrong. That’s why Make American Great Again fits Hatriotism so well as a slogan. It calls the nation back to a time when prejudice was “normal,” and when bigoted forms of religion held sway everywhere from town hall meetings to public school systems. Hatriotism wants––indeed needs––to lurch backward in time because it is a form of hate that Americans embracing principles and conscience seek to leave behind.

Right now the haters seem to have the upper hand, but the Union fought slavery and bigotry in the past. We’ll do it again in the present to resist the deplorable, despicable nature of Hatriotism. That’s our only choice as Americans.

An artistic attempt at a scam

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

A couple weeks ago, an email arrived through my website with a request for an illustration job. The creative brief was quite complete, albeit for an interesting subject. Apparently, some “client” of the emailer wanted to produce a presentation to warn youth about the dangers of monkey pox disease.

I found the request a bit odd because I didn’t think monkey pox was much of a threat these days. I’m no expert on infectious diseases, but if someone wants to help spread the news on the value of vaccinations, I’m all for it. The creative brief came with illustration descriptions that were quite detailed. Still, I responded requesting more information about the job. The potential client proposed compensation for the sixteen illustrations inviting at one thousand dollars per 8 X 10” full-color panel. That’s higher than most jobs I’ve done in a 40-year creative and illustration career, but again, some clients just want the work done and don’t care about the budget. If luck would have it, I wasn’t going to turn it down.  

There were however Red Flags about the assignment. The person contacting explained that he was hearing impaired and would communicate via email and text. “Okay…” I thought to myself. “We’ll see how this goes.”

Progress

I did one quick sketch that took fifteen minutes and sent it to the client for approval. He said yes with hardly any feedback. That made me suspicious, but the money still sounded good.

Within a week after our initial contact, the “client” requested my address to send a check for a down payment. I stated that 25-50% as part of the initial $4000 first phase of the project was sufficient. I don’t start a job these days, especially one received online, without receiving earnest money. A few days later, the client confirmed that he’d sent a message to arrive through UPS and the US Mail.

Something in the process still felt funny to me. “I’m not sure this is real,” I told my wife and son. They agreed that I should proceed with caution. “Wait until you get a check and cash it before doing anything for them,” my wife advised.

The check arrived in a big USPS envelope. Again, the check was just floating around inside a 15″ X 12″ shipping envelope. “Who does that?” I thought. At a glance, the check looked legitimate enough. I investigated the company listed on check on Linkedin and did a search online to corroborate its location and it lined up. My wife and I joked that I should “run to the bank” to test it all out. A part of me wondered if that was the right thing to do.

Text talk

Then I received a text from the client:

“Hi Christopher, usps confirmed the successful delivery of the package to you…Kindly confirm you have received it so that we can proceed. I await your response.”

I confirmed receipt of the check and immediately got another message. “Thanks for the update. Kindly go ahead and deposit the check and let me know as soon as you do…” I took the check to the ATM machine and paused to take a photo of the document before depositing it. I had no idea if that was legal, but I did it anyway in case something odd happened with the deposit. The check had a small iridescent seal on it that looked a bit like a chip you’d find on a credit or debit card. Not having seen that on a check before, I paused before depositing it. I wondered: could that chip somehow send information back to a potential scammer? One never knows these days…

The check slipped into the ATM machine and the bank showed that the deposit registered.

The next morning I received another text: “Hi Christopher, How are you doing today? I would like to know if you successfully deposited the check. I have to give feedback to my sponsor on the payment. How’s the project coming along? Warm regards.”

To this point, nothing about these interactions felt right or authentic to me. While I was relieved in some sense that the check deposited the night before and a deposit showed up as deposited in my account, that chip on the check still made me nervous. The ATM spit out a receipt showing my prior balance and the new deposit combined. I still wasn’t convinced the check was real or that the “job” wasn’t a scam.

Then another communication came. This one raised my suspicions to another level. “Okay, thanks for the update. I’d be glad if you could confirm funds availability in your account now and get back to me. I await response.”

At that point, every red flag I’d learned in online scam training had been checked. I was no longer convinced anything about that check was authentic. Then came the text that confirmed all my suspicions. “The sponsor has requested that the 2nd phase of the project be cancelled due to a family emergency,” the message read. “We will only work on the first phase and ensure to keep up with its deadline date.”

This scam is being exposed on Reddit

I decided to play along and draw the scammer out in full fashion. “Okay, so what’s that mean on refunding the money?” I asked. “I’m not using any of it until the assignment is completed,” I added. My thinking was that for legal reasons and self-protection I should construct a line of defense about ‘acceptance and intent.’ I’m no lawyer, but I’ve come to understand that exhibiting intention is sometimes as bad as actually doing something wrong. I live in the state where former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was caught shopping political promises under the mantle “This is Golden.”

Refund defund

The scammer (of course) welcomed the conversation about a refund. “Yes, that sounds good. The sponsor has provided me with her Zelle and PayPal details for the refund of the 2nd phase. Please advise which of the information I should provide you with so you can proceed with the refund now for $4000. Thank you.”

I responded. “This is quite strange to me. I’m going to check with the bank first.” That is what I proceeded to do. Then I wrote: “I’m not comfortable with any of this process. I will inform you of the next steps when I’ve checked with the bank.” Frankly, by that point, I was hoping to gather information that might somehow track back to the sender.

That communication engendered a different tone in response. “I am sorry about the inconvenience. Yes, you may check the bank, but the bank has already confirmed the check and funded your account. She decided to cancel phase 2 for a family emergency and until the vaccination exercise has concluded. Therefore, the second phase of the workshop has been moved to a later date next year. I’m giving you $200 more for your stress and canceling of the project. This is just to compensate for the dashed expectation.”

The real question is why scammers like this cannot be caught? I contacted my bank. I called the police.

That communication was received while I was on the phone with my bank, first through a local branch and then through the Fraud Alert national network. They didn’t indicate they’d do anything but did suggest I not send the money. The guy on the line also congratulated me on being cautious in that respect. Still, I asked, “Don’t we do anything right now?”

The Fraud Alert guy replied that the bank has to let the check clear or bounce, or “come back” as it was explained to me. My thinking was much different. Shouldn’t we get the FBI be involved? Wasn’t this an attempted crime in progress? It sure had all the marks of an outright scam.

Meanwhile, the scammer kept up his pressure to refund money. I responded, “I’m not sending you any money. I am on the phone with the bank now.”

“What did your bank say?”

I wrote back again. “Just got off. They said don’t send any money.”

Then came the emotion-based plea: “Chris, please. I hope this doesn’t affect the project in any way because your feedback is top-notch, and professionalism is impeccable. You have been been giving me the best service ever since my very first message to you. I don’t want this to affect my relationship with my sponsor.”

For all of you out there reading this, I hope you recognize the problem here: This brand of broken English is a sign that things are not right with the contact.

I replied, “Unless that check clears inspection by my bank nothing is happening. I talked with them already. I’m perplexed and suspicious by refund requests. I’m not doing that. If your sponsor is legit they can wait.”

At that point my only purpose was holding him at bay in hopes of getting some kind of investigation going. It wasn’t until that evening that I had a chance to Google “Peter Welsh illustration scam” and immediately found the thread on Reddit where a discussion about the same guy doing the same scam in various forms was shared by many others. The people behind these multiple personas and versions of the scam are apparently prodigious in their craft.

Here’s another version of the same scam.

The scammer tried one more time to get me involved: “I’m so sorry this happened, and don’t feel bad. The check is legitimate, and the payment has gone through, so there’s not a compelling reason to put a hold on it. Please, I would appreciate it if you can send the money out today. You can also use money order.”

I read that message and muttered to myself…”F you…”

And after that, it was radio silence from the scammer for five hours. It is highly likely that he sensed my suspicions and moved over to another “account” that looked more promising. In the interim, I went about my business as a substitute PE teacher for the day, and drove home glad that the scammer had let up and that I’d called the authorities. On the way home, I set up and appointment to make a police report. Then I opened the original Gmail message to look closer at the photo attached to the Sender. As others noted, perhaps he’s some kind of real person. More likely not. In the age of facial recognition, this photo is probably stolen from somewhere else. Just like the check I received. It’s a fake.

I looked up the name of the company from which the check was issued. I’m not sure what to think about that. Their Glassdoor and Google reviews feature a long string of one-star reviews. They ostensibly sell automotive parts, but they must also be missing stacks of checks or else someone is creating fake ones using their company’s name.

Of course, that check that I “cashed” did not clear the bank and it immediately caused other problems. Admittedly, I did not protect myself well enough in this instance. That said, I filed the police report against this scammer. The officer shared that their department gets 8-10 calls for different kinds of scams each week. “It’s sad,” the officer shared. “People lose tens of thousands of dollars sometimes. Especially older people.”

One last shot

In late afternoon I received a phone call from the scammer. He talked in some sort of Eastern European accent, possibly Russian. Over the years I’ve worked with numerous Eastern European caregivers for my late father. These accents are often difficult to tell apart. It wasn’t a surprise to me that this guy was from some odd origin. That’s often how all of this works. Even the 2016 presidential election was impacted by fake social media accounts run by Russian interests. Meta recently announced the 4000+ fake accounts pumping out political disinformation were removed from Facebook. Scamming works at a global level these days.

My caller, whose working name is “Peter Welsh” started right in talking about whether the check had cleared or not. I was ahead of him on that, having already called the bank and checked online to see that it was “Oh Hold.” Our conversation veered from one place to another over the course of a minute. My goal was to get home off the line asap. He tried to manipulate me by telling me I was “acting weird” about the refund. I outright told him to stop gaslighting me and hung up. Then I Blocked any remaining calls from his number. I admit that I could not resist sending him a semi-nasty text. Father, Forgive My Sins.

Just think: this guy and his ‘operation’ is doing this kind of thing to dozens, perhaps hundreds of people across the country. He’s probably had success too. Even if he works 10-12 marks a week, $4-10,000 isn’t bad pay for a week’s work.

It’s a scammy world

Clearly I’m not alone in this being exposed to this scam experience. I’m sharing this in hopes that other people will be wiser and keep their guard up. To be honest: I’ve always been too trusting person in this world. That has cost me in many ways, including in business where even the people you work with have “agendas” that in some cases qualify as “scams” when seeking internal favor just grabbing additional compensation.

The love of money really is the root of all evil. I think back to a time when a fellow salesperson sandbagged his cumulative ad sales during a competition. He waited until the last minute to turn them in so that he could a $250 sales prize. Working hard in my little territory, I’d led the contest all along. Meanwhile, this jerkwad sold just enough to say ahead of me in his better territory, then walked over the board on the last day and filled in his totals. He scammed me, in other words.

Big picture fraud

There’s a ton of fraud taking place in this world. Along with scammers like this scuzzy Peter Welsh, scams take place in all kinds of places. Most common these days are online scammers (Facebook Marketplace, etc.) and cryptocurrency crooks, to name just a couple. The scams and fraud in this world include those concocted by deceptive CEOs or financial crooks (remember Enron, or Bernie Madoff?) Even seemingly “upright” corporate directors collect millions in salaries wrought from real or imagined profits while the workers driving productivity struggle to make ends meet. Wealth inequality is at a disturbing level in the United States of America.

We also see political scammers collecting millions in fund raising dollars while making all sorts of false promises to bilk money from supporters. One notable scammer in George Santos just got booted from Congress yet the likes of Trump (“Mexico is gonna build that wall…and if they don’t, we will!) still walks free. Trump excels in stealing support from millions of people even though his own University has been held culpable for fraud. The same holds true for his main business which is facing banishment from the State of New York for decades of scamming banks and the government with falsified financial reports and inflated and deflated property values. Trump is a proven crook and scammer. Now he’s on trial for host of other alleged yet well-documented crimes including attempts to steal an election, conduct an insurrection, and theft of Classified documents that include exposing national secrets to domestic and foreign sources.

Trump knows that his supporters don’t care that he’s a scammer. He’s their scammer for bragging that he’d “drain the swamp” while his administration turned out to be one of the most corrupt in US and World History.

A sucker born every minute

It’s often been said that there are “suckers born every minute” (P.T. Barnum, at right) Much has been made of this fact by huckster of many kind. Somehow, the general public never figures out who to trust. Mark Twain once said, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.”

All it takes to deceive people is a bit of swagger and a carefully leveraged appearance of credibility. It’s been true since the dawn of recorded history. The Serpent in Genesis used the Word of God (“You will not surely die…) to lead Adam and Eve into temptation. According to scripture, they were the first suckers in history. But the real suckers are those who take the Bible narrative literally. Because, where did the wives for Adam and Cain come from? We’re supposed to ignore those casual details somehow?

The shocking thing is how so many people to this day seem eager and willing to be deceived. They’ll open their wallets and place their wholehearted trust––even their religious faith––behind proven scammers as if their life depends on it. There is nothing more disheartening that seeing otherwise good people get caught up in propagandistic schemes that are nothing more than artistic scams. All while the sociopathic crooks in power dishonestly insist they’ve got their victims’ best interests in mind.

Reverse prosperity gospel

None other than Jesus Christ warned against this kind of “reverse prosperity” scam system. He castigated the religious authorities of his day for taking money and gaining power by manipulating the masses through guilt and tradition. Today we have “Prosperity Gospel” preachers raking in millions in contributions while bilking people into thinking their donations will return prosperity to them. They’ve stolen pages from religious scammers of the past and modernized them through media.

These forms of religious scams are blatantly obvious, but people fall for them every day. Hell, even the Catholic Church ran a purgatory scam with its ‘indulgences’ program before one of their own priests, a guy named Martin Luther, called them to account. Purgatory and the collection of indulgences served as a money funnel to “protect” people from a place that existed only in the minds and bank accounts of the religious authorities. The many scams concocted by televangelists (End Times supplies, anyone?) and politicians claiming religious affiliation (Mike Johnson is now Speaker of the House) are no different. They are all working against the original truth and goodness that the Bible depicts in the person of Jesus.

Roped in but not duty bound

The attempted scammer successfully roped me in, but his last-minute try at gaslighting me into guilt didn’t work. Still, he knows those psychological bonds and ploys are what help him succeed. The more emotional a scammer can make a potential victim feel, the more chance they’ll get their hands on their money––and their soul.

While I nearly got tricked by the scammer, I’m grateful for having received direct training on how to identify scams before they take full effect. I was misled at first, but as the Red Flags added up, I wised up. My father wasn’t so lucky many years ago. He got roped into a network marketing scheme that cost our family $5000 in early 1970s money. I’ve had keen antennae up against such schemes ever since.

So beware. Scammers are real. They are all around you in this world and they’re committed to putting all their intellect and artistic deception to work in building “real relationships.” In fact, they’re merely trying to win your approval, steal your money, steal your vote, or steal an election they’ve already lost to escape prosecution for the crimes they’ve already committed.  All while presenting themselves as a salvation from the evils of this world. These

The sad thing is that so many people embrace these scams as absolute truth. Even worse, they gaslight the rest of us for holding fast to honesty while claiming that we’re the liars. Meanwhile the security of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all stand at risk because so many people fall for scams and never realize they’re the mark, not the wise ones.

Christopher Cudworth is the author of several books including The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith in the Modern Age (out of print) and Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How To Make It Happen (Amazon.com)

We feel no remorse when lies catch up with dishonest people

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

About a year ago, I wandered down a rabbit hole while researching conservative attitudes about the January 6th insurrection. Along the way, I stumbled upon comments by Scott Adams, the cartoonist responsible for the Dilbert comic strip. He was raving about politics and blaming everyone for the problems of America but those most likely causing them. At that point in time, I stopped reading his comic strip in the Chicago Tribune, one of the newspapers to which I subscribe.

Like millions of other Americans disgusted by the vagaries of corporate life, I found Dilbert funny in some ways, and tragic in others. Adams is certainly adept at pointing out the fact that lousy bosses often rise to the top, and that middle managers have a hard time getting them to understand, much less embrace the truth.

And yet, Adams himself appears to have a hard time understanding the truth about many things. Most recently, he branded all Black people a “hate group” in one of the biggest gaslighting faux pas of all time. His Dilbert comic strip is now getting canceled right and left. Even the company responsible for getting Adams’ content out to newspapers had heard and seen enough. They dropped him too.

Sinking lower

As reported on the website Popverse, this is how it all went down. “On February 22, Adams posted a live YouTube stream in response to a Rasmussen poll that asked Black Americans whether or not they agreed with the phrase, ‘It’s okay to be white’ — a phrase that is a known slogan for alt-right and racist groups. 53% of those polled agreed, with 26% disagreeing and 21% unsure.

Adams’ response to the poll was vehement. “If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people… that’s a hate group,” Adams said during the broadcast. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people… because there is no fixing this.”

Adams deserved to get popped for making those racist remarks. Perhaps like many people claiming some sort of free speech clause… he’s now feeling like the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Popverse notes: Adams continues to be glibly unrepentant for his comments and their effects., “I’ve lost three careers to direct racism so far. Crocker Bank, Pacific Bell, and cartooning. All three were perpetrated by White people for their own gain,” he tweeted on Monday. “No Black person has ever discriminated against me. That’s partly why I identified as Black for several years.”

Drunk with power

Mr. Adams seems like a massively conflicted character, almost a cartoon of his own making. That self-conflicted nature reminds me of the time that I was sitting in a hospital emergency room with my daughter when she scratched her eye and was in some pain. We waited a long time to see a physician. While we sat there together a man strapped to a gurney in an open area was moaning and groaning loud enough for everyone to hear. “I want my booze!” he kept bellowing. “I want my f******* booze!”

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When people get too belligerent, they sometimes need restraint.

This went on for a half hour at least. A security guard stood by his side keeping watch over the obviously inebriated man. Finally, the angry drunk turned his head to the policeman nearby, while saying, “Why did you do this to me?”

The officer leaned close enough to speak quietly to the man, and said: “We did not do this to you, sir. You did this to yourself.”

That’s a lesson that Scott Adams is learning right now. His self-inflicted punishment is costing him in terms of national image. There are financial implications as well. He’s lost comic strip revenue that once included income from 2000 newspapers in 65 countries. Even his book publisher is dumping his book project titled Reframe Your Brain. Why would anyone buy a book like that after learning the way Adams thinks?

Possible markets

Actually, there are probably millions of people eager to buy Adams’ book because they think just like the guy. Racism in the United States of America has gained stature among Right-wing activists enervated by the likes of Donald Trump, who blessed them on several occasions, even inviting them to be part of the January 6, 2020 attack on the United States Capitol building.

The most disturbing part of the type of dishonesty that leads to social injustice of this order is how many supposed Christians embrace Trump and by proxy, the racism that goes with it. That favoritism emerged during his 2016 campaign when the likes of high-profile Christian evangelicals such as Franklin Graham branded him God’s favorite candidate and stood by him through all sorts of scandals that would have tanked any other politician. The only thing that helped Trump survive his own power-drunk surge toward the White House was evangelical dismissiveness toward his clearly corrupt nature.

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The not-so-Reverend Franklin Graham

Graham is now starting to show regrets about his Trump support, but the harm done poisons his legacy and has damaged democracy in the United States of America. As reported on WNYC, “Like his father, Rev. Billy Graham, before him, Rev. Franklin Graham is one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, influential in the evangelical world and in the highest echelons of Washington. But where Billy Graham came to regret that he had “sometimes crossed a line” into politics, Franklin Graham has no such qualms about showing his full-throated support of the President. An early advocate of Trump’s candidacy, he has remained stalwart even as scandals pile up. Graham tells the New Yorker staff writer Eliza Griswold that Trump’s critics have forgotten that “he’s our President. If he succeeds, you’re going to benefit.” Of Trump’s many personal scandals, Graham says only, “I hope we all learn from mistakes and get better. . . . As human beings, we’re all flawed, including Franklin Graham.”  

Hypocrites and legalistic zealots

But evangelical Christians that follow the likes of Graham are nothing if not devout once they make up their minds that God is on their side. Even after two well-deserved impeachments and a massive set of lies about the threat of Covid, about 30-35% of Americans refuse(d) to give up support for Trump.

There is effectively a 1:1 relationship between the percentage of people that vote for Trump and those that adhere to a biblically literal worldview on subjects such as creationism, the contention that the earth and all life were conceived in just six literal, 24-hour days, that a literal flood once covered the entire earth and that all “kinds” of living creatures were preserved aboard an ark that floated for nearly a year.

There is zero scientific evidence supporting any of those contentions, yet nearly 1/3 of Americans eagerly defend such untruths as absolute truth. To put it more bluntly, they are quite used to lying to themselves to defend their belief system and other equally shallow and self-centered priorities, often based on anachronistic ideology and traditional understanding of scripture failing to allow for scientific or cultural advancements debunking the so-called biblical version of reality.

The culture and lifestyle devoted to literalistic, fundamentalist, and legalistic religion also spends considerable effort trying to turn their belief systems into law, even demanding that religious beliefs such as creationism be taught in public schools. These attempts at imposing Christian law ignore the Constitution’s clear ban on imposing a state religion. The pursuant retort is that the Constitution itself is based on so-called “Christian values,” and that America is by design a “Christian Nation.” None of this is in the least bit honest.

Pushback is not persecution

When the American public conducts pushback against attempts to turn religion into law, the hard-Right Christian community loves to cry “persecution.” This version of victimhood is a gaslighting attempt of its own kind. That’s why Trujp was successful in garnering the right-wing Christian voting bloc. He plays the victim himself, and earns sympathy as a result. Before Trump, the Christian Right voted for George W. Bush on the dog-whistle hopes that an authoritarian embrace of Christianity would win the day.

This push toward American theocracy was predictable. The signs have been there for decades, as “Rock musician Frank Zappa once said, “The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happened during the Regan (sic) administration is steering us right down that pipe.”

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Musician and iconoclast Frank Zappa had it right about the threat of right-wing theocracy.

The ironic aspect of all this theocratic favoritism is that President Barack Obama is a practicing Christian with a healthy family in comparison to Trump with his multiple wives, porn star associations, and lust for his own daughter. Yet the Right Wing eagerly branded Obama as a “Muslim” as if that religious affiliation disqualified him from office. In specious fashion, the dog-whistle goal was to associate President Obama with Islamic extremism with hints of abject racism mixed in.

Speaking of Democratic Christians, President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic man that has seen suffering and sorrow in life and approaches challenges with compassion and contrition. Former President Jimmy Carter devoted his entire life to service after occupying the highest office in the land, yet the Right-Wing still refuses to recognize his true Christian nature versus the dishonest puppet-play religiosity of a man like Trump who couldn’t quote a Bible versus when asked about it. Yet he promised to ban abortion and gay marriage, and that trumps all other qualities among conservative Christians.

An ugly history

Looking back 150 years or so in American history, this political zealotry disguised as Christian righteousness is sort of ideological monstrosity that once pushed the notion that Manifest Destiny granted White Christians absolute dominion over the North American continent. The grand excuse that God favored white people was used to wipe out Native Americans through wars, theft of land, distribution of disease and alcohol, broken treaties, and when all else failed, outright genocide.

That same brand of Christian gaslighting supported slavery for centuries, in part because the Bible didn’t specifically ban it. Never mind that Jesus preached love and spiritual equality for all souls regardless of race. That truth was too inconvenient for pro-slavery fascists and ostensibly devout Christians that ultimately seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.

This pattern of hypocrisy and denial of culpability for hideous outcomes wrought by hate-based religion is consistent. It leads to dishonesty about social justice and produces the worst offenses against humanity, all while claiming that Christianity is one of the most persecuted religions on earth. That brand of gaslighting and dishonesty is beyond disturbing. That is why Christianity as a religion needs a reality check. If the tradition can’t handle honesty about its own corruption of scripture to justify selfish actions, then it doesn’t deserve to have the word CHRIST in its name. Jesus specifically fought that kind of religion during his ministry, yet legalistic Christianity persists in its sins of power to this day.

The not-so-anonymous hate club

All this dishonesty allows racism to persist to this day as well. That’s why a big market remains for the brand of hate espoused by Scott Adams. A stubborn segment of American culture has refused social change for centuries. That means some conservative publisher will pick up the rights to Adams’ book and it will sell well among deplorables eager to embrace the high-profile confirmation bias offered by Adams.

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A rioter openly carrying a symbol of secession, racism, religious bigotry, and social injustice invading the United States Capitol.

That love for famous people spouting hate and lies is the same reason people have flocked to Fox News for decades, where Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and other well-known “commentators” preach right-wing talking points even when they know it is damaging to the nation they claim to protect. That makes them liars and hypocrites of the same order as dishonest Christians, which makes ugly sense because biblical literalists and constitutional originalists adhere to the same brand of a belief that anachronistic texts hold never-changing truths.

It has taken a while, but the like of Fox finally got caught red-handed after perpetrating the lies of Trump and the Republican Party for decades. Now Rupert Murdoch is plotting ways to avoid culpability for his corrupt regime of liars by trying to throw them under the bus. Murdoch and Fox (and by proxy, the GOP and Trump) are addicted to the money and power they gain by lying to the world. But they sure don’t want culpability. They’re the same sort of addict as the guy strapped to the gurney crying out, “I want my booze!” They are addicted to the thing they most need to leave behind.

The lesson behind all of this is that while it is hard to be honest, it is even harder being honest and ethical at the same time. In a perverse way, Scott Adams passed the honesty test with his racist comments. Yet he fails miserably at being a person of good character with an ethical foundation worth imitating. By his own confession in fact, the cartoon Dilbert was (also) always about hatred for the world and a self-righteous indignation at being wronged in his employment. One now wonders if the people firing him had an incredibly just cause. As in, “Was Scott Adams always an unemployable jerk?”

About this whole enterprise of Right-wing hate and dishonesty, and how it eventually catches up to people we can honestly say, “We did not do this to you. You did this to yourself.”

This article was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn Site Honest-To-Goodness.

Christopher Cudworth is the author of the book Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs a Reality Check and How to Make It Happen.

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The pain of being right all along about Trump’s corruption

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

It is with little consolation that I write the title above this article, or share the graphic that I created to describe how Trump moved from slogans to fascism. Way back when Trump announced his candidacy for US President I lit into the man for his brutish behavior well before he gained a single vote. From that time forward, I observed that Trump had more in common with the fake sport of professional wrestling than anything else. I also observed that he behaved like a pirate with his thieving, grifting ways.

Beyond theorizing about his awful character, the regular news about his behavior was far more damning that anything I conceived allegorically. He threatened to withhold pre-approved funding for military assistance to Ukraine by trying to force the President of Ukraine to generate dirt on Hunter Biden. For that offense, Trump was rightly impeached for abuse of power.

The more time he spent in office the worse it got for America and the world. Trump lied to Americans about the threat of Covid-19 to public health, a fact recorded for posterity by journalist Bob Woodward. Millions of Americans pursuantly defied medical directives to mask up and get vaccinated. Trump’s supporters worsened and then prolonged the pandemic as Covid spread and killed hundreds of thousands of people, many of who would not have gotten infected if appropriate mask precautions were taken, and many that would possibly have lived if they were indeed vaccinated.

But people kept giving up their lives for Trump, whose lies kept piling up and whose behavior became more extreme and corrupt by the day. His public support for racist and para-military organizations led to violence while his refusal to hold police accountable for brutality on Black citizens drove protests that led to even more violence from activists defying Trump’s fascist approach to government.

Thus it was not surprising that Trump welcomed the fascist attack on the United States Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of results from a legitimate election. Trump’s people brought 60+ lawsuits trying to demonstrate election fraud, and all of them failed for lack of evidence. And still, Trump’s lies turned into the Big Lie, a propagandist tactic directly adopted from other fascist regimes whose success in nationalistic populism appears to be Trump’s main playbook.

After his failed attempt at re-election due to his moral depravity and lack of personal or governmental accountability, Trump retreated to his pirate’s lair in south Florida with goods and records stolen from the US Government. Now he’s being investigated for all kinds of crimes against the nation, and his prized Trump organization just got convicted and slammed for tax evasion. That only confirms his prior fraudulent behavior with his “Trump University” which got fined $25M for lying to its customers.

But what did we expect from a proven misogynist and sexual abuser that cheats at golf and claims that he hates exercise because it will “wear down his battery.” He’s an ignorant fraud whose vision of reality is skewed by a narcissistic need to be “right” all the time even when he’s been proven completely wrong. Who else stares up at a solar eclipse?

The pain of being right about Trump all along offers no solace. His Republican Party has zero conscience when it comes to political or civil morality. They are a depraved band of pirates who claim that women should be happy they were raped and whose history of blocking environmental legislation and climate change action means they’ll willingly rape the world if it somehow keeps them in power.

And that’s why being right about Trump is absolutely no fun at all.

A chapel talk for the ages

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment
The Chapel at University of Chicago

My son attended the University of Chicago. We both like visiting Hyde Park so we took a trip to have a meal at Medici’s (a salmon burger for me) and a walk around campus. Toward the end of our wanderings we walked through the University Chapel, one of the largest such institutional structures in the United States.

I picked up one of the plain brochures documenting the history and features of the Chapel that was originally funded by more than $34M in contributions from John D. Rockefeller. The structure was completed in 1928, one year before the collapse of the economy and the beginning of the Great Depression.

I’ve visited one other great cathedral the size of the University Chapel. That was in Barcelona, Spain, where we toured the Sagrada Familia Basilica constructed under the guidance of Antonio Gaudí. As I wrote in my recently published book, the theology behind Gaudi’s architecture unifies spiritual concepts of God with representations of creation.

The ornate and organic exterior of Sagrada Family celebrates nature as a part of God

“The Spanish words “sagrada familia” mean ‘sacred family.’ That concept is the central motif across the many tall towers forming the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, Spain. Construction of the massive structure began more than a century ago. It is scheduled for completion in the year 2026. That culminates the plans originated by late Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí, whose organic style of architecture fuses symbols of Creation’s glory with God’s spiritual transcendence as symbolized through the Sacred Family. 

  “A time.com2 article describes how Gaudí developed his masterwork, explaining that the architect had a grand concept in mind: “It didn’t take him long, however, to transform the Sagrada Familia’s original plans into an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking: a structure that would combine natural forms and Christian symbolism into a temple that, as Faulí puts it, “expressed meaning not only through the sculpture and other decorations but through the architecture itself.” Gaudí was not a practicing Catholic when he received the assignment. But he became increasingly devout as he worked on it, eventually coming to see the very structure as a vehicle for Christian evangelism.”

The relationship between God and creation goes into even deeper symbolism, as expressed in a piece written about the basilica on a travel website:

Sagrada Familia interior showing its tree-like columns

“An earnest and down-to-earth description on the website Culture Trip outlines the practical aspects of its design: “The central tower in the middle will reach 170 meters tall. Despite having a powerful height, Gaudí believed that nothing human-made should ever be higher than God’s work. It is no coincidence that the ultimate height will be one meter less than Montjuïc, the mountain in Barcelona, which is also the city’s highest point. There are tons of symbolism in each part of Gaudí’s structure. Aside from the religious symbols, there are two you should look out for. First, the interior pillars resemble trees, and when you look up at them, their shapes constantly change, as real trees appear to do. There is also a tortoise and turtle holding up these pillars, representing both the earth and the sea.”

A lizard detail from Sagrada Familia

Having previously absorbed the wondrous symbolism of Sagrada Familia, I was struck by the parallels found in the University Chapel. There are many sculptures of holy figures including apostles and prophets along with heroes and heroines of faith. “The whole design suggests the march of religion through the centuries,” the Chapel brochure documents.

There are also statues of political figures and coats of arms from major state and private universities in America and around the world. These secular representations meld the academic legacies of the college to other forms of philosophy, especially science, demifigures of the Poet, the Thinker, the Merchant, the Craftsman, the Builder, and the Teacher, “since the work of all is, in the broad and deep sense, religious.”

“Demifigures of Faith and Love flank the upper windows,” it is explained, “The birds of wisdom and of Inspiration, the owl and the eagle, appear near the top.”

Along the ribs of the Chapel are fourteen subjects; as noted: “Bird, Beast, Fish, Reptile, Sun, Moon, Star, Tree, Flower, Man, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, which, as the objects of man’s study, reveal God.”

Such wonderful parallels exist between these two great expressions of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. The University Chapel and Sagrada Familia potently remind us that while many seek the halls of heaven in the great beyond, the presence and reality of God is best known through our daily and organic encounters with life, while we live it.

This article contains excerpts from Christopher Cudworth’s new book Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs a Reality Check and How to Make It Happen.

What we can learn about America from Nashvegas

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

The scene outside the main entrance of the Kid Rock establishment in downtown Nashville could serve as the poster scene for the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. People wandered the streets in various states of drunken cognizance, which is just another way of saying cognitive dissonance. Some clung to each other in human chains while acting like they were free of the burdens that bind us most. Mostly these were members of Bachelorette parties. Some wore sashes indicating their Bride-To-Be status and others debauched in sashes designating their subservient roles.

The Bachelor parties were best-identified by their Bro Behavior, stumbling along in groups of five-to-ten wide, passing through the crowds like the Dark Matter of human existence. Don’t bump into one of them or the world around you could explode. We all live on a vigilante street these days.

Outside the doors of the Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk and Steakhouse, a man stood holding a cardboard sign with the words “Let’s Go Brandon. Fuck Joe Biden. God Bless” in handwritten defiance as he faced the crowds, sucking on a cigarette as if it contained the elixir of life itself.

I pondered his mission and realized that he most resembled those doomsayers bearing signs about the end of the world. They’re forever warning us about the End Times, and they’re always wrong.

The Let’s Go Brandon folks think they’re clever disguising the phrase Fuck Joe Biden behind the banal cheer they bellow and brandish on tee shirts. Of all the modern-day attempts at conspiratorial political subterfuge, this one proves the fatal instincts of the terminally deceived. Following Trump has proven to be nothing but a dishonest and brutally dismissive brand of folly from the beginning of the ex-President’s campaign to his current tempestuous residency as a deposed despot clinging to the hope that he can return to office to dismiss the vast record of crime and corruptions left in his wake. That is Trump’s only hope for salvation in this world: he needs power to even feel like a human being.

Surely he’d have been one of the ringleaders in the days of Sodom, when men nearly beat down Lot’s door so that they could abuse the strangers inside. Trump loves the look of terror in people’s eyes and the fear he engenders by proclaiming slogans such as “You’re fired!” That was Trump’s form of verbal rape back in the days when he was given license to formally torture people on “reality” TV. But it was never about reality it all. Trump’s entire world is a crazily concocted contrivance of his appetites and insecurities. He wraps himself in the clothing of self-aggrandizement and prances down the avenue in a sash just like those Bachelorettes he’d love to grope and fondle, since that’s his ilk.

Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down.

And that’s what I learned during a venture into the heart of Nashvegas. America is obviously possessed by a self-consuming desire to abuse and be abused. To millions of Americans, the two are not even separable concepts. And when their self-indulgently abusive nature worships at the feet of men like Trump, the threat to all of us is real. Trump caters to the desire for abuse with his downtalking style and claims of victimhood that fuel the sense of entitlement this new-age confederacy of disenfranchisement finds so appealing, and so absorbs slogans like Make America Great Again that make their conflicted spirits feel whole again.

States where Trump is popular love that style of whining deprecation. Those trucks bearing flags abusively redesigned with black and blue stripes alongside those flabby Trump banners indicate a cult-like obsession with alt-authority that dominates the Trumpian mindset. It is significant that the same tactics used by the socialist-fascist tropes of old are so effective on the religio-fascists now vexing America. Trump has convinced millions of people they are the “free thinkers” in this world when every aspect of their behavior speaks to the exact opposite mindset.

The same depressing cultural gutspeak washes over cities like Nashville and Las Vegas every damned day of the year. These places are a grand excuse to lower the moral bar as far as one wants to go, and never feel the need to apologize for it. Nashville was the city of choice for a bachelor friend of mine, and we had a dose of fun without trashing ourselves or anyone else around us. I’ll admit. We had fun. We drank some. Listened to some good music. Chatted up some ladies to pass the time and got back home by 3:00 a.m. But that’s not what many people chose to believe about “reality” when it comes to visiting Nashville or any place like it. The phrase “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…” speaks to a brand of willing self-indulgence and truth denial that indicates a disturbing tendency lack of responsibility that can’t help spill into other aspects of life. Are we on the way to replacing the United States of America with the Untidy States of Vegas?

We all need to cut loose once in a while and lose our cares. I like a good glass of whiskey as much as the next person. We toured a distillery and learned the art of making fine spirits from grain to mash to swan-neck distillation. But there’s a lesson in how whiskey is made. The first vapors through the process are too toxic and dangerous to drink. They can make you go blind and half-crazy if you’re not careful, and kill not just brain cells, but the whole damned body associated with it. That’s what I really learned in Nashvegas, Tennessee. It seldom pays to consume the first of anything whether it comes out of a still or from the mouth of a man telling everyone else to keep still because he considers himself the biggest expert in the room.

But Trump and his people are drunk on the notion that their primary notions and instincts are good for us all. A trip through the streets of Nashvegas on a Saturday night exemplifies the madness afoot across so many sectors. This is hardly what America needs to become great again. While it’s not all about sobriety, there should always be room for sober consideration of what greatness actually, really means. And this is not it.

This isn’t so much about the core issues of morality as it is about recognizing that wherever morality is twisted into shapes of personalities eager to dismiss and abuse others, we’re facing a real danger to society. That means the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah needs to be studied more closely. The lesson never was that gay people or strangers far from home are the real threat in this world. The actual moral is that people with authoritarian domination on their minds are evidence of the breakdown of society. They are banging on the doors of civility in this nation, and around the world. It is our holy and moral duty to keep these fascist monsters at bay.

Trump is their leader here in America. We must never forget that.

The Red Letter commonality between MAGA and MRGA

/ Christopher Cudworth / 2 Comments

In which we study the similarities between Make America Great Again and Make Russia Great Again

MAGA rioters attack Capitol police on January 6, 2020

We all watched the outcome of MAGA (Make America Great Again) in the United States of America. Four years of MAGA propaganda by the Trump Administration led to an insurrection against the nation by a manic mix of pro-fascist “demonstrators” claiming the 2020 election was stolen.

That was a horrific moment in American history. But the worst part of the Trump years was the support provided by the Christian evangelical community who cheered on Trump’s often lawless campaign to use the office of President as his personal stomping grounds for whatever enemies he chose to attack.  All of Trump’s vengeful behavior was dismissed as necessary because he was ostensibly acting for the “greater good” by literally carrying out the will of God. According to populist notions of Trump’s rise to power, he was the one anointed to advance the idea that the United States of America is a Christian Nation under God.

That was one of dog-whistle (or God-whistle) messages driving Make America Great Again. It carried with it the promise to ban abortion and block gay people from civil rights, two key social issues to conservative Christians tied to the anachronistic dogma of the religion when it dominated American society. And this despite its demonstrated history of supporting institutional slavery and racism in the likes of ‘Christian-based’ groups like the KKK.

MAGA’s ugly underbelly

MAGA’s ugly underbelly revealed itself during Trump’s first campaign for president as he embraced racist organizations, complimenting them as “good people.” Those groups and others coalesced into the aggressive branch of MAGA whose militias broke down barriers, attacked police, and threatened to murder the Vice President, Mike Pence, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

And while all this happened, the evangelical leadership in America either remained silent or cheered on the events while justifying Trump’s reign of terror by claiming that “God works with flawed people.”

The terrifying fact of the religious rationalization is that it is now being extended, in a brutally ironic fashion, to the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, during his military invasion of Ukraine. And here’s the kicker: Putin is carrying out this mission for much the same religious reasons that the American evangelical community wanted to Make America Great Again. Putin views Ukraine as a necessary iconic element in the re-establishment of a Christian-dominated Russia and for all we know, the rest of Europe. This war in Ukraine is an attack on a sovereign nation that values free and fair elections just like the United States of America and other democracies around the world. But Putin wants to install his Christo-fascist version of power over the nation’s people and its resources and call it Russia+. This is Putin’s version of MAGA. So we can legitimately brand it MRGA: Make Russia Great Again.

American Christian’s support for Putin

Conflating God with country is a favorite pastime of the Christian conservative community

Thus it is no coincidence that America’s evangelical Christian community and their conservative friends seem to support Putin. There are also whispers in the halls of End Times Theology that “this is the big one,” because religious zealots hoping for the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ to rule it all pray that this is their moment of vengeance against the heathens and humanistic believers who want to solve the world’s problems, not turn them into an excuse for Armageddon.

Even Israel can’t make up its mind what to do about Russia, because Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself a Jew. There are political and economic striations to consider as well, so the nation perpetually caught between Jewish and Christian interests is now stuck between the rocks of conflicting ideologies, convenient loyalties, and funding to protect its own people.

MRGA and the Taliban

But MRGA will stop for no one under Putin’s direction. His army might be exhausted by the time he overcomes Ukraine, but the people of that occupied nation will keep fighting back. The frightening truth is that if anyone else gets involved beyond sanctions, Putin has threatened nuclear retaliation, even aggression. He also took control of nuclear power plants in Ukraine, and he’s such a despot that he might just let some radiation leak to cow people to his will.

The really sinister part here is that MRGA has been cheered on by some of Trump’s high-profile fans and supporters, including Tucker Carlson at Fox News––and others. In an interview on Fox News, retired Army Colonel Douglas McGregor, who served under Donald Trump and apparently remains loyal to the cause, opined on behalf of Putin telling host Stuart Varney: “The first five days Russian forces I think frankly were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So, I would say another ten days this should be completely over.”

Macgregor went on to say that the war could have “ended days ago” if Zelensky had acquiesced to what Russia wanted.”

Those statements drew a rebuke from a noted Republican purist Liz Cheney: “Douglas MacGregor, nominated by Trump as ambassador to Germany; appointed by Trump as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, says Russian forces have been ‘too gentle’ and ‘I don’t see anything heroic’ about Zelensky,” Cheney wrote. “This is the Putin wing of the GOP.”

So we can see that the militaristic nature of the latter-day GOP willingly dismisses any notion of international principle in favor of personal opinion, purpose, and priority. It is the classic example of the “ends justifies the means” approach to gaining and retaining power.

This fealty to power when fueled by aggressive conservative and Christo-fascist instincts is devastating to the health of democracies around the world. It is also brutally ironic given the resistance in the Christian sphere to similar efforts by conservative Muslim sects to establish religious control over entire countries. The entire American occupation in Afghanistan, the “war” that lasted more than twenty years–– was driven in part by attempts to rid the country of the religiously driven motives of the Taliban, an arch-Right brand of Islam. And the United States of America failed to quell that influence.

Ugly convenience

None of this surprises us because the ugly convenience of justifying social control and even conducting wars on religious grounds is as old as civilization itself. But consider the irony: It was Jesus that resisted the legalistic control of society by the religious authorities of his day. They killed him for trying to promote a more liberal and socialistic brand of religion based on love, compassion, and a personal relationship with God. None of that was evident in the conduct of the MAGA revolution in America, whose selfish conduct resounded in the halls of Congress when thousands of fascist-minded people beat the police and raided the Capitol.

Nor is there any sign of Jesus Christ in the Russian MRGA attack on Ukraine. This is also a selfishly narcissistic and vainglorious attempt by Putin to grab respect through brute force rather than earn it by respecting international law and having the confidence to build a nation that does not depend on corruption, dirty dealings, and graft to survive. Like Trump, he’s both immensely calculating and lazy at the same time, and sure enough, Trump initially complimented Putin’s military move into Ukraine as “savvy.” God Forbid if Trump was still President. He’d probably be cheering Putin on as Ukrainians died because Trump no doubt has a chip on his shoulder toward Ukraine’s President, who stood up to his corrupt effort to bribe him into doing some political dirty work on Trump’s behalf. To Donald Trump, there is no sweeter feeling than gaining revenge, and now we can see how bad the situation would be if Trump were still in control.

Functionally, we now recognize that MAGA and MRGA are essentially the same thing, twisting religion to serve despotic needs. That is the Red Letter commonality between two equally fascist movements. It also bears strong resemblance to the motives behind the second World War. And that’s bad news for everyone in the world.

The Trumpism Spectrum explained

/ Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

A HANDS-ON LOOK AT HOW WE GOT FROM THERE (2016) TO HERE (2021) UNDER THE RULE OF EX-PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

However we define Trumpism, there is no denying its existence in the United States of America. Its effects were on full display during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. The question we now face is whether Trumpism should be primarily defined as a political or personal condition.

The tactics used to promote Trumpism began with the political slogan Make America Great Again. Those four words symbolized the Trump campaign’s claim that the nation was in desperate need of recovery.

The MAGA slogan worked wonders with those already convinced that Donald Trump represented something “great” about America. His purported wealth and worldwide brand delivered a pre-packaged sense of competency and vision.

Yet that is not what Donald Trump ultimately wound up selling. Instead, he saw an opportunity in convincing people that the nation had abandoned them. That gave millions of already disgruntled people the idea that they had something genuine to complain about. Whether they knew the true sources of their purported misery, or whether they were justified in their self-proclaimed victimhood did not matter. Trump tapped into their anger. That was all that mattered.

To his retinue of pledged supporters, Trump added the support of the evangelical Christian community by choosing a dogmatically zealous Mike Pence as his running mate. The implicit promise in that action was banning abortion and installing some form of Christian theocracy on the nation.

Safely delivered from political criticism by his religious associations, Trump engaged with far-less-admirable brands of populists. Specifically, he offered approval to avowed racist groups as “good people” and chortled with glee as militia groups and violence-prone police threatened to bust heads as a means to maintain order.

All the while, he continued the drumbeat against illegal immigration and repeated his warlike call to ‘build the wall.” That brand of xenophobia resonated with Americans convinced that brown people were freeloaders and stealing their piece of the American pie. Others welcomed Trump’s dog-whistle racism as justification for their own terminal prejudices. Meanwhile, the wealthiest MAGA supporters happily embraced Trump’s “I’ve Got Mine” mentality because it promised a return to tax policies favoring their economic status.

As illustrated in the Trumpism Spectrum, it is easy to trace the initial migration from slogans to tribalism, and from religious legalism to populism. All these tactics were designed to cement a coalition of committed collaborators in the Make America Great Again cabal. Anyone that criticized that cabal was accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a supposed mental condition that caused people to act irrationally in response to the ex-President. But that invented term was itself a form of gaslighting, an attempt to make sane people feel crazy about their grip on reality.

Adding to the mix was the rising influence of conspiracy theorists including QAnon, a willfully ignorant and semi-mysterious source of insane accusations and outright lies invented by some Internet gnome lurking on the outskirts of humanity. While Trump griped and whined about the supposed lies contained in the campaign-driven Steele Dossier, he did nothing to counteract rumors that Democrats were involved in human sex trafficking or the daily piles of Right-Wing garbage pumped out by the political right, including but not limited to Fox News.

As Trump’s presidency proceeded, he relied on an increasingly aggressive mix of propaganda to cover up his many illegal activities and political graft in defiance of the emoluments clause and bans on pursuing campaign aid from foreign governments. He was impeached twice for his corruption, but excused by Republican henchman in both the Senate and the House. A few freely admitted that he’d cheated and even broken the law on several counts. But they are power-driven hypocrites and political whores of the worst kind. They are loyal to their party and traitors to our nation.

The only place that Trump’s lies and cheating seemed to catch up with him was during the Covid pandemic when it became obvious that he was both incapable and unconcerned about protecting Americans from a deadly disease. Rather that amend his ways, Trump’s authoritarian instincts drove him to evolve from a man in a perpetual state of denial of his real performance to a man recognizing his failures. Those he feared more than anything else, and in an effort to protect himself from legal and financial jeopardy, he began to plot ways to steal the election in 2020.

This was nothing new, as even before the 2016 election Trump refused to commit his approval for results if he lost. He merely expanded on this tactic in 2020, denying in advance that he could possibly lose. When he did, he launched the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him. This lie was invented to foment unrest among his deplorable cabal of truth-denying bigots and zealots. It also appealed to the selfishly wealthy along with the fearful politicians that stood by him through two legitimate impeachments for corruption.

But the sickest loyalty of all is the continued support for Trump even after the acts of sedition conducted by Trump supporters at his direction. The violent, multi-front riots brutalized police officers and left people dead as a result of the insurrection. In the end, Trump invented a brand of fascism that entirely suited him, as he stood watching it all transpire on television even while his violent mob sought to capture and kill the Vice President of the United States. Trump didn’t care. Like his fast-food mentality dictates, he was “having it his way.”

That’s how we got from There to Here over the last six or so years. Looking back at the progression as illustrated on the Trumpism Spectrum graphic, it is pretty clear that it will be too hard to go back through time and fix things. Instead, we need to race forward in the near term to prevent it from happening all over again in 2022 and 2024. Trumpism is a toxic brand of hate-driven politics that was used to beat the nation over the head with an American flag. Despite his ugly pleas, we owe Donald Trump nothing in the way of compassion or compensation. He has done nothing to earn either privilege nor does he deserve it. He is no longer an American in any sense of the word. He is nothing but a greedy traitor, a perpetual con man and an abusive sociopath with nothing to offer the United States of America but an end to the great experiment that launched a democracy worthy of admiration by the whole world.

But under another four years of Trump, that great experiment would cease to exist.

What Jesus would say about the Texas abortion laws

/ Christopher Cudworth / 1 Comment
Texas has unlocked a Pandora’s box of vigilantism with its new laws allowing citizens to sue and persecute abortion providers

The Bible offers some fascinating insights into how laws should be implemented and enforced in this world. Given the passage of strict abortion laws just passed along in Texas and forgiven by the Supreme Court of the United States, it is helpful to look at how these new laws work, and why they are so ardently anti-biblical by nature.

Suits and vigilante justice

As a starting point to examine these issues, the new Texas anti-abortion laws are atypical in that they won’t be enforced in a traditional fashion. The police aren’t going to go out and round up abortion providers or medical clinic leaders. Instead, they place the power to report and enforce the law in the hands of everyday citizens. This brand of vigilante justice is unique in many respects because the Texas law opens the door for people to sue anyone who performs abortions or even “abets” the choice of a woman to pursue or receive and abortion.

To examine the verity of this brand of justice, it helps to look at a passage from the Book of John, in which Jesus deals with a street confrontation where a group of citizens drags a woman accused of adultery before him to see how he would handle her punishment.

8 Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, 2 but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. 3 As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

4 “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery.5 The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

6 They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. 7 They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” 8 Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

9 When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.10 Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

Vigilante mobs

The prescribed punishment for women accused of adultery in those days was death. Yet Jesus did not view the woman’s accusers or the “teachers of the law” as the ultimate authority or judge of her sins. He decried their tactics.

In his actions, Jesus also challenged the legitimacy of religious rules as a whole. He was tired of watching the religious authorities of that era control and manipulate people through tradition while refusing to minister to the needy or sick that needed God’s mercy the most. He’d be just as sickened by the way that religious authorities and their political allies operate while imposing theocracy on society today.

It is highly likely that Jesus would tell the people passing laws in Texas that their vigilante laws and actions are wrong. He would admonish them, “If you must depend on the law to implement the kingdom of God, you have already failed.”

Compassion instead

Jesus would counsel the people of Texas and the rest of the world that it is compassion they should offer women seeking abortions. The real moral argument is not about why women are seeking abortion services, but how all of us can help prevent unwanted conceptions or pregnancies. It is interesting to consider that the real sinners in the Bible story above… are the men walking away without a response about their own sins. For all we know, many of them might have been adulterers themselves. The same goes for abortions. Every woman seeking to end a pregnancy was placed in that position by a man either willingly or irresponsibly impregnating her. It is highly likely that Jesus would turn the question of pregnancy around to indict the men that are too selfish to take responsibility for their own actions.

Jesus also perhaps recognized the dangers in how men in that era viewed women as their property. The patriarchal society in those days pinned women with all kinds of “unclean” labels, such as being ostracized for normal bodily functions including menstruating. Fear and lack of understanding about women’s bodies are still a problem to this day. Until recently, many aspects of medicine including pharmaceuticals were based on men’s anatomy.

The twisted morality of men making laws about women’s bodies has persisted for two thousand years. But it is not godliness that drives their motivations. It is instead acting like God that Jesus most despised. “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone,” should be the operative morality applied to the Texas laws on abortion. The Supreme Court has several members claiming “conservative” values, mostly based on the brand of so-called Christian morality that pre-emptively condemns women seeking an abortion just as vigilantes in the street once condemned the woman “accused” of adultery. Even Chief Justice John Roberts provided a dissent against the six essentially corrupt judges engaging in judicial activism by allowing fifty years of established law (Roe vs. Wade) to be overturned in a single swipe by a batch of moral zealots acting without concern for the lives of women they are impacting.

Jesus would call out their vicious hypocrisy, especially those on the Supreme Court whose past behavior demonstrates willing sinfulness. Yet even those with seemingly less to hide should be ashamed of hiding behind the veil of “constitutionality” in upholding the Texas abortion “laws” that are nothing more than permission for bands of aggressive snitches to persecute the women who most need compassion and support in this world.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/13/the-female-problem-male-bias-in-medical-trials