Freemasonry is at the core of Western politics. As progressives become more clear about the shortcomings of this system, they are shocked to see Freemasons ending the democratic experiment. This is clearly the result of Freemasonry’s dependence on Plato’s anti-democratic notions. We see this dependence in US politics when Kyrsten Sinema demands unity and civility at all costs. We also see it when a presidential candidate, Hilary Clinton, tells a rival faction to respect authority. This is about the role of politics in our season of creation.
It’s beginning to look like the New Age was created by a committee of the political establishment. This might explain why they are so determined to protect their reign in Washington DC–they are true believers. The establishment’s ‘ownership’ of the New Age is especially glaring in the video series Changing of the Gods, a slick presentation of the last 60 years which showcases the counter-culture revolution of the 60s It showcases Gloria Steinem, and her magazine, Ms., among other events. It soon becomes clear that the New Age was going to include trans-rights, regardless of what anyone might say. This article will explore the phenomenon of combining the new age and gender rights.
An article in Ms. Magazine illustrates how the liberal establishment has used trans-rights, to equate women’s issues with unrelated issues. This article by Alexandra Wilson-Mcdonald combines concerns about attacks on reproductive freedom with LGBTQ-rights. It also criticizes far-right politicians in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland who from 2015-2022 opposed gender studies as an academic discipline. Wilson-Mcdonald laments that similar policies are sweeping across the U.S. today.
Apparently, attacks on gender equality are to share the limelight with attacks on democracy. In addition, gender equality and democracy are on equal footing with anti-racism. By citing Ron DeSantis’s Don’t Say Gay bill, the author lumps the issues of slavery and racism with gender ideology.
But some of us respect the new age enough to know that it can’t be harnessed for a particular ideology. Combining the new age and gender rights is one example of this attempt.
Sam (Mooney) Giancana’s move to Mexico coincides with the time period of the Blue Ocean strategy1 of American organized crime. Blue Ocean refers to a business strategy. For the Mob, it refers to branching out beyond American shores. It involved not only geographical diversity, but the attainment of higher education by Mob figures. These figures would eventually became CEO’s, attorneys and bankers. Today we can only guess at the degree of mob infestation around the world.
Organized crime has political goals in addition to its business strategy. It wasn’t understood that organized crime operated like a business until quite recently. Its political aims took longer to be recognized. The Mob pursues many of the same goals as governments. This has been understood for twenty-five years.
The Testimony of James Woolsey
In 1999, when James Woolsey was CIA director, he appeared before the Committee on Banking of the United States House of Representatives. He testified that it had become difficult to tell mafias, businesses, and states apart.
If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian in, say, the restaurant of one of the luxury hotels along Lake Geneva, and he is wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian Trading company and wants to talk to you about a joint venture, then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organized crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three–and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement. 2
Mob Infestation is a Global Phenomenon
This is not unique to the United States. Boris Yeltsin admitted in 1993 that the Soviet Union had become a ‘mafiya’ power on a world scale. Over the next decade several former Soviet regimes evolved into mafia states. Under such regimes, organized crime groups work as a complement to state structures. Their purpose is to do everything the government can’t legally do as a government. This includes trafficking arms, carrying out domestic assassinations, extortion, money-laundering, drug trafficking and controlling offshore investments in strategic industries.
By 2012 analysts were warning of the convergence of criminal, political and business power in Latin America Africa and Asia. The warnings were issued by analysts such as Moises Naim, Misha Glenny, Douglas Farah and John T. Picarelli.
Signs of a Worldwide Convergence of Organized Crime
Signs of a worldwide convergence of organized criminal activity have been identified in North Korea and the Middle East. Armed groups are found in Afghanistan, Colombia, Mali and Myanmar. These groups traffic drugs, sometimes with the help or participation of state actors.
The traffic in minerals and wildlife fuels conflict in Africa, and organized piracy has emerged as a central factor in Somalia’s political economy. It goes without saying that it aggravates Somalia’s politics and civil war.
In the Sahel and North Africa, terrorist and militia fortunes have been tied to organized hostage markets as well as drug, oil and cigarette smuggling.
In the Balkans, there is cigarette smuggling, organ trafficking, human trafficking and a trade in stolen cars. All of these activities factor into the region’s bloody past and post-war politics.
The Death Toll Rivals War Deaths
Homicide rates in Central America are higher than Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan. The high death rate is the result of struggles by locals to control drug, human trafficking and extortion markets.
The Blue Ocean Strategy
It’s important to mention that government collusion with organized crime is not the fault of a single administration. We have talked about the Kennedy Administration’s dealings with the Mob, but JFK and his brother, Bobby Kennedy, inherited the problem. However, the Blue Ocean strategy began after the Bay of Pigs operation failed to oust Castro.
Of course the Mob kept this strategy to itself. Previously, the Mob had been counting on its American partners to help recover its investments in Cuba. With the Blue Ocean strategy, this became less important.
Making Sense of the Collaboration
When the Castro government came to power, it hurt the interests of the Havana Mob, the American Mob and the US government. So, these three entities cooperated in the attempt to remove him. But there were complications.
The Mob had more autonomy in international affairs that anyone realized at the time. However in spite of this relative freedom to maneuver, its manipulations may have contributed to the failure of the Bay of Pigs.
Before Kennedy was elected, the Mob was a participant in the larger Cold War. So, the Kennedy’s continued to believe it would assist in removing Castro after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Unfortunately, the Mob had lost interest in Cuba by 1961 or 1962. It did not keep its partners informed of this fact.
The Kennedy Administration
US relations with Cuba had already soured when Kennedy became president. Cuba had turned to Soviet protection in the mid-50s as a result of Eisenhower’s coercive policies. Then, in February 1960, Cuba signed a five-year trade and investment deal with the Soviet Union. In response the US pressured Esso, Texaco and Anglo-Dutch Shell not to refine Soviet Oil. The government also blocked sales of Cuban sugar to the US. It wasn’t long before Cuba began accepting arms shipments from the USSR.
On July 9, Khrushchev threatened to provide military support to Cuba in the event of an invasion. In September Castro moved against US commercial interests in Cuba by nationalizing $1 billion worth of industries.
In October 1960, Eisenhower imposed an embargo on US trade with Cuba for anything other than food and medicine. This embargo lasted more than 50 years. This history is covered in detail in Cockayne’s book, cited below.
What Went Wrong at the Bay of Pigs?
JFK was concerned about Soviet escalation from the beginning of his presidency. As a result, he was less hawkish on Cuba than the previous administration. This was another factor in the failure of the Bay of Pigs. An additional factor was the plot between the CIA and Mob to assassinate Castro. Although the two efforts were separate, some of the participants assumed the assassination was one part of the effort to overthrow the regime.
The two plans had actually been combined at one time, but as subsequent plans developed the connection was lost. The aim of the invasion changed. It was now supposed to create a political shock inside Cuba. This would trigger an uprising or a failure of the Cuban military.
Both the CIA and the Mob failed to inform the US administration of their collaboration. The partners had originally planned to assassinate Castro before the operation began, but as planning progressed the Mob dropped this plan. Unfortunately, Richard M. Bissell, CIA agency officer, continued to believe Castro would be dead before the Brigade hit the beach.This may explain why the CIA did not inform the President that landing exiles at the Bay of Pigs would not hurt Castro’s popularity. Bissell still depended on the assassination.
TheKennedys Chose the Wrong Friends
Both the Kennedys and Eisenhower were more involved in plotting the overthrow of Castro than they admitted. Plausible deniability was an important reason for covert action for all of these actors, the administration, the CIA, and the Mob.
The Kennedys’ may have been more culpable however. They knew exactly how the Mob worked, but they continued to work with them. Removing Castro was the bigger priority.
The administration’s plans switched to covert methods after the Bay of Pigs, which made the Mob’s methods seem even more important. What the Kennedy administration didn’t understand was that the Mob-CIA partnership was the main problem. Because JFK did not understand this, he refused Castro’s offer to negotiate. He chose to continue working with the Mob.
What Bobby Kennedy Knew
Bobby Kennedy knew Operation Mongoose involved working with Cuban gangsters. (Operation Mongoose was a covert operation to cause a popular uprising in Cuba as a pretext for US intervention.) He also knew that the lead military planner, Lansdale, had previously cooperated with criminal groups in Vietnam. Last but not least, he knew the CIA was working with Sam Giancana. Bobby didn’t object to any of this. However, he did order the FBI to watch Giancana. As a result he learned that Giancana was sharing a mistress with JFK.
What Bobby Kennedy Did Not Know
As it happened, the CIA omitted choice bits of information from their briefings with the Kennedys, just as the Mob withheld information from the CIA. They all had incentives to do so. For example, aside from plausible deniability, the Mob had a domestic incentive to string the CIA along. The CIA provided protection against prosecution.
As Cockayne put it, they were all practicing the mafia’s omertá. They were conducting themselves by the internalized code of the covert operator’s governmentality. The end result of all these factors was inoperability. (Cockayne, p. 243).
The Situation From Castro’s Point of View
As complicated as things were for these participants it was even less clear to Castro, especially since he was not able to distinguish between plots of the CIA, the US government and the Mob. There was a good reason for his confusion. The goals and methods of these actors did not really differ from each other. Castro began to call American diplomats and officials ‘gangsters’. In retrospect it seems inevitable that he would allow the USSR to put nuclear warheads in Cuba.
One effect of Soviet intervention was that it made killing Castro irrelevant to the US Government. Castro’s death would not solve the strategic threat posed by the Soviets. Kennedy formally suspended sabotage or militant operations during negotiations with the Soviets. But after an agreement was reached, Castro remained concerned that the US would continue covert attacks.
The US Government Limited its Covert Actions But its Partners Did Not
At this point, Kennedy shut down support of Cuban exiles from within the US as well as cooperation with the Mob. However, killing Castro remained relevant to the CIA. Agents promptly sent commando teams to Cuba by submarine without clearing it with the President.
And of course, the Mob was determined to reestablish its gambling colony in Cuba. American mafiosi worked with Cuban exiles to create another government in exile. They planned to install it through force. The CIA-Mob collaboration raised the possibility that Castro would view Mob freelancing as US strategy. Suddenly the Mob was a wildcard in geopolitics.
The US Finally loses faith in its Mob Partners
The US distanced itself but did not try to prevent the Mob’s activities. It did however break up a planned air raid on Cuba by Santo Trafficante Jr. The US government was beginning to understand that criminal groups could be self-serving and unpredictable. Military forces would clearly be more effective, especially when the objective was to send a political message.
All along there had been warnings to the US Government about the costs of collaboration with the Mob. In January 1961, a US assistant secretary of defense warned the Eisenhower administration what might happen in Latin America if the Castro assassination plans became known. J. Edgar Hoover warned Bobby Kennedy of political blowback caused by the CIA’s collaboration with the Mob. William Harvey warned his CIA superiors of the possibility of the mafia blackmailing the CIA. However, no one considered the possibility that the ‘monster’ would turn on its former master.
The Mob’s ‘Frustration’
When he became Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy continued his attempts to shut the Mob down. He was establishing the existence, structure and activities of the mafia Commission, and its record of political activism. This threatened to disrupt the Mob’s connections with the political establishment and it caused Mob leaders much frustration.
When JFK was assassinated, there were immediate suspicions about the Mob. Both Bobby Kennedy and LBJ voiced these suspicions in private, but they could never be proven. There was even talk that Castro may have collaborated with the Mob. This possibility had been a major concern of the Navy at the beginning of the Underworld Project. If the US could collaborate with the Mob, what would stop other countries from doing the same?
Blue Ocean andThe Birth of Offshore Capitalism
The Mob apparently had a centrally directed strategy. In the Mob’s case, the Blue Ocean plan involved criminal relocation and strategic learning. The ambition was far-reaching. It sought to shape political developments amidst the changing geography of power.
There had been signs in 1958 and earlier that Batista was losing his grip on power. As a result, Lansky had begun to consider other locations where they could duplicate the Havana joint venture. This eventually led to the birth of offshore capitalism in the Bahamas.
Haiti had been the first target, but it didn’t work out. The Bahamas on the other hand were ruled by a small, white establishment clique, the Bay Street Boys. They did not mind breaking international law.
Globalization, Deregulation and Money Laundering
Under globalization, state power does not depend so much on territory. It depends on deregulation to attract transnational capital. Under such a regime, state leaders can use arbitrage by legalizing or licensing goods that are illegal nearby. For example, using casinos and financial institutions as money laundering services.
The Nature of State Power
State power is like mafia power. In Cuba, a CIA-Mob collaboration operated between organized crime’s coercion and state covert operations. In the Caribbean and Atlantic City it operated between the strategic logic of organized crime and economic statecraft.
The Weakness of Global Financial Regulations is the State’s Downfall
For the state, international power depends on controlling sovereignty and governmental institutions to broker between international capital flows and local jurisdictions. However, the weakness of global financial regulations means there are few checks on shady deals.
In subsequent decades offshore tax and banking havens proliferated. This was due to the Mob’s strategic vision. It was important to them to create venues for private accumulation of capital without losing capital to public governmental purposes. In the presence of a functioning state, private accumulation would be limited through redistribution, social welfare, or provision of public goods.
The Bahamas became an ‘exemplar’ of the offshore plaza.
The strategic logic of organized crime and the economic logic of states seemed to be converging. The stage was set for the merger of criminal groups’ political strategies with states’ economic strategies. [This Merger] was hinted at by the term ‘mafia states’. ( Cockayne, p. 262)
Ideally, Capital in a Democracy is Public. In the Underworld, Capital is Private.
Contrary to the ideal use of capital in a democracy, capital in the underworld economy is always private. Criminals deny that it has any relationship at all with the public order. It follows that any rules and regulations that would restrain capital accumulation or allocate it to those less fortunate is firmly resisted (criminologist Alan Block, cited by James Cockayne).
The Blue Ocean Strategy and Atlantic City
Atlantic City was one of several places where rules were relaxed. It was developed to bring weekenders from Philadelphia’s steel mills and New York’s tenements by railway to New Jersey seaside amusements. Grand Bahama on the other hand, involved bringing the middle class and professional criminal class in by airliner. And then there was Las Vegas.
Resorts International
Legalizing gambling in Atlantic City was finally accomplished by a constitutional amendment. But not without a struggle. The 1976 referendum campaign was bankrolled by a Bahamian company, Resorts International. This was the old Mary Carter Paint Co. which partnered with the Mob in Bahama.
Resorts lobbied for political influence to get the license approved and contributed to political campaigns. When this didn’t work, they switched to coercion. For example, a private security subsidiary of Intertel with connections to U.S. law enforcement, sent politicos to jail. However, civil servants uncovered Resorts’s link to organized crime and recommended against it. In response, Resorts bought blocks of advertising. This made Governor Byrne comfortable with approving it. The new Resorts Casino opened May 28, 1978.
Donald Trump and Resorts Internatinal
(The following is not included in Cockayne’s book.) Donald Trump bought a controlling interest in Resorts International Inc. in 1987. There was another bidder, but the family of the late Resorts Chairman James M. Crosby, believed Trump was more able to complete the massive Taj Mahal casino project. (Crosby held the controlling interest in the company.)
The company was later sold, and Trump became the owner of the Taj Mahal casino. The casino was also sold later. Other properties that previously used the “Trump” name, are no longer affiliated with him. One example is the former Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver.
Donald Trump’s Ballroom in the White House
To conclude we have to go back to the Mob’s development on Grand Bahama. DevCo’s new resort, the Lucayan Beach Hotel, had a mysterious, giant 9,000-square-foot handball court at the center of its plans. It was eventually revealed to be a gambling floor.
James Cockayne, Hidden Power: The strategic logic of organized crime, C. Hurst and Co. Publishers ltd, Sept. 2026. ↩︎
I have deleted the post I published yesterday. It may have been accurate, but subsequent information made me think the best thing would be to delete it. The main problem was not the subject of my post, it was what appears to be a fake news story in Britain. I had included links to that story in my article to correct one aspect of my main source, but then the second story fell apart.
I’m talking about a video on my YouTube feed claiming that Prince William and King Charles had rebuked Keir Starmer. As the day wore on, I wanted to learn more about the dispute. But instead of more details, I found a complete absence of corroboration on channels that would be sure to report such a thing. Finally, I found the opposite of corroboration. I found a story that called the whole dispute a fabrication.
If it was a fabrication, it was a thorough one. There were even reports that the British markets were collapsing due to fears of a constitutional crisis–also that the British Reform Party was rising in popularity. Last but not least there was a quote from Barack Obama voicing support for the King.
Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson are two young men who were sucked in to someone else’s nightmare. Charlie’s nightmare is over; Tyler’s nightmare is still very much in charge of his world. As I write, the same nightmare lords it over the the rest of us. We are all helpless spectators. But my hope is that we are not entirely helpless. This is important because Kirk’s death has been weaponized against the Left.
Problems With the Official Story
Many convincing videos have called into question the weapon that killed Charlie Kirk. I’ve linked two of the videos below and I hope you will watch them. However, I don’t want to focus on the videos. (I deleted one of the videos. I appreciated the work he did on the ballistics, but his other content is unpredictable. I’m sure we can all handle these ideas when necessary, but if I can’t guarantee his content I can’t leave his link on my website. If you want to learn about the Tyler Robinson saga there will be plenty of updates on your favorite platform. Who knows, maybe this guy will mellow out with time.)
I want to focus on a few parallels with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The first parallel is the overall messiness of the scenario as presented to the public. No one has bothered to clear up the official story.
Bolt-Action Rifles
The police found Tyler Robinson’s rifle in the woods wrapped in a towel. Sheriff Eugene Boone found Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle in an upper room of the Texas School Book Depository. They were both older model bolt-action rifles.
In Robinson’s case, they say he disassembled the rifle in order to climb off the roof, and then he reassembled it before leaving it in the woods. But the videos that show him climbing off the building don’t indicate that he had the rifle at that time.
Oswald told reporters he was a patsy.
Ballistics
People who know about guns say that the report of this shot did not sound like the rifle that Tyler Robinson supposedly used. And that’s not the only problem. Judging by the sound of it, the gun that killed Charlie Kirk was not far from the camera that recorded his death. If the shot had come from the building on the other side of the grounds, as law enforcement personnel claim, it would have had a different sound. And then there is the wound in the front of Charlie’s neck. It appears to be an exit wound, based on the size of it and the amount of blood. Therefore, it seems likely that the shot came from behind him and to his right. That would make more sense. He fell to his left.
The direction of the shots that rained down on the Kennedys were not consistent with the story the authorities provided. They said JFK was hit in the back of the head. That’s the only thing that would have been consistent with their story that Oswald was firing out of a window above and behind the Kennedys’ car. But the bullet that killed JFK actually exited from the back of his head. Those who saw his body afterward said he had an exit wound there. Strangely, it was no longer there when his body arrived back in Washington D.C.
Please Don’t Repeat the Assassination of the Accused Killer
The parallel I am most worried about has not happened yet. It’s the main reason I’m writing this article. Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at close range before Oswald could be tried. This took place in the basement of a police station. Oswald’s guilt is now a permanent part of the official story.
I hope this article will dissuade anyone who might be thinking of doing the same to Tyler Robinson.
See the following video:
Israeli News Live: Sound Signature Pinpoints Charlie Kirk’s Shooter’s Location
I was going to summarize an article on the history of right-wing violence. I actually spent quite a lot of time on it, but I decided that I don’t want to include all of the information. As bad as things are now, they have been worse in the recent past. I believe the right will find new ways in it to torture people.
All I really wanted to do was show the Left how closely the administration is following the right-wing playbook on taking power. People on the Left suffer when the Right accuses us of assassinations, or of celebrating when someone on the right dies. But there’s no need to take it personally. They don’t really think we are responsible. They just want to get people riled up. They may be responsible for the deaths themselves.
How Do We Know if Violence is From the Right?
Movements can be identified as right wing when they accept human inequalities and when they act as if violence is a legitimate way to defend hierarchies. Right-wing violence is violence that supports right-wing goals.
Right-wing violence generally has two targets: the primary target is an ‘inferior community’; the secondary target is the government.
Why Does Right-wing Violence Happen?
Right-wing violence goes hand-in-hand with democratic mass politics. The problem from the Right’s point of view is that public opinion becomes more important when the public can vote. And mass communication influences public opinion with information about the government and the candidates. So, wherever there are mass publics there will be radical movements around the edges trying to drag public opinion in their direction.
The United States
In the American north, industrialists have always been able to hire private bodies to keep workers in line. Organizations like the Pinkertons and the National Guard have acted like their private militia. The system in the Deep South has been even more brutal. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized the black population until they had built a new caste system. This system lasted for another hundred years.
World War I
After World War I there were waves of violence across Europe. Elites used both high and low roads to take power. The violence was either elitist or mass-action. High roads involved coups, assassination, and strategies of tension. A strategy of tension is an attempt to ride chaos to power.
The low route to power is the conquest of the streets or mass mobilization. Bombing (or shooting) attacks might continue under this strategy.
Conclusion
There’s more. Much more. And believe it or not, it only gets worse from here. The main point is that we are in the world of rightist tactics. Lies and accusations of the Left are not meant to be true or accurate. They are meant to stir people up.
Wilson, Tim. Rightist Violence: An Historical Perspective. International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2020. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep23578. Accessed 15 Sept. 2025.
Our YouTube pundits still think the great question of our time is, Does Donald Trump know Putin is using him? But I think it’s clear that Donald Trump is a willing errand boy for the entities who purchased his presidency and continue to enrich him. In other words, the worst has already happened. The coup is complete.
Yet we continue to hope. Therefore, it’s important to think in detail about what this means. The evidence suggests that the United States has been sold to the highest bidder. Trump’s bowing and scraping to Putin is evidence of this. When Trump whinnies to his MAGA followers about how they’re not going to have a country any more unless… he’s telling lies on two levels. Trump was never concerned about saving the country for MAGA. He wants it for the new rulers of the universe.
If the Coup is Compete, Can We Get the Country Back?
What we should be asking is whether we can get the country back from its new owners: Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and various others.
To answer this, we need to consider how the coup happened in the first place. It took time and planning. The entire enabling structure was already in place before the 2024 election, including the Supreme Court and corrupt members of Congress. However, it is now much worse than we realize thanks to collusion by the legacy press. They make it hard to see the whole picture.
Trump is the Immediate Danger
Trump didn’t orchestrate this. He is merely the final piece of the puzzle. However, his presence in the White House is the immediate danger. His very presence in that office is our undoing. Each moment he remains in power we sink deeper into the abyss.
Why? It’s a Question of Who Trump Serves
Why do I say this? Let’s look at who Trump serves. He does not serve the people. We know Elon Musk literally bought the presidency for Donald Trump, but we fail to think beyond that point. No one mentions for example that Musk has had regular meetings with Vladimir Putin since 2022, and probably earlier.
Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine
Musk demonstrated what he’s capable of doing and for who when he shut down Starlink during a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022. This cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim. The Ukrainian army’s operation failed as a result, although it eventually reclaimed some of the territory. This is the first known instance of Musk shutting off Starlink coverage over a battlefield during a conflict, and it potentially allowed him to control the outcome of a war.
Elon Musk’s Russia-Centered Geopolitics
Also in 2022, Musk proposed a peace plan that echoed Moscow’s positions. Crimea should be formally recognized as part of Russia and votes should be held in Russian-occupied regions under UN supervision. More recently, Musk criticized the provision of US aid to Kyiv and suggested that Ukraine can’t win the war.
Elon Musk’s Technological and Financial Barricade
Of course Ukrainian leaders strenuously object to this, but the US isn’t listening. There have been calls for investigations into Musk’s contacts with Russian officials, but according to the BBC, Musk has too much value as a contractor and too much control over critical technologies.
And it continues. Since the August 2025 summit between Trump and Putin, Trump has been plastering the airwaves with messages about Putin’s dislike of mail-in ballots. This is obviously in line with Trump’s efforts to manipulate U.S. elections.
Elon Musk, Israel, and Gaza
The Israeli entity is another influence that contributed to Trump’s success in the 2024 election. Naturally, Musk has been meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu at least since September of 2023. Although Netanyahu is a war criminal and Musk openly performs Nazi salutes, they have discussed antisemitism on X, among other topics.
Musk met Netanyahu again in November of 2023 and visited a kibbutz that was raided by Hamas fighters on October 7. After this trip Musk backed Israel’s war on Gaza.
While it may be relevant to mention that Musk’s trip to Israel was self-serving, the selfish motives of an oligarch don’t improve the odds that democracy will survive. Musk went to Israel because of a post on X that triggered withdrawals of advertisements by corporate giants like Apple and IBM. Musk was also allowing advertisements from major corporations to appear next to Neo-Nazi and white nationalist content. Finally, the European Union was probing X because of disinformation and violent content about Israel’s war on Gaza.
But regardless of Musk’s reasons for this visit, it had real consequences for Israel and Gaza. Musk reached an agreement with Israel ‘in principle’ that internet access to Gaza may only be provided to Gaza with units operated by Israel and with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of communications.
Additional Enemies
The Kochs are another part of the coalition that has brought the United States to its knees. The Kochs and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have had a long relationship. When Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson was thinking about running for president in 1968, he had the backing of the 1976 Committee, of which 14 of its officers and members were on the National Council of the John Birch Society. This committee included Fred C. Koch.
More recently, Mike Lee, Congressman from Utah, raged over Trump’s loss in 2020. Then, when a man impersonating a police officer killed Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Lee chortled on X that this is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way. The assassin was not a Marxist. He was not even a Democrat.
The Federalist Society
Mormon leadership was instrumental in establishing the Federalist Society. This is the organization that has filled the Supreme Court with right-wing justices who indulge Trump. They have aided his destruction of American immigration law, election law, education, and medicine. Yet the Church continues to enjoy tax-free status.
To the Oligarchs and Their Minions
This article is not a condemnation. It is a reckoning. I have no doubt that those of you who are tearing down our institutions and terrorizing our citizens are on the wrong track. For one thing, you are unrealistic about the nature of leadership and authority. The ideal leader, whether king or president, rules with the consent of the people under his rule. Barking orders and causing physical harm are the actions of brutes, not leaders. Your behavior is not admirable and it won’t inspire the loyalty of those you rule.
You seem to be trying to emulate dictators of times gone by, but all you communicate, other than your own fury, is fear and loathing. What is your ideal world? We see no light at the end of the tunnel. Do you? You seem to have no vision other than your own supremacy. Meanwhile, in your determination to be supreme, you violate the creeds you claim to live by and encourage your loved ones to follow you in this behavior. There is no justification in law or religion for your actions.
Do you have in mind a common, mean, cruel, stingy, sordid, ugly existence that will require your constant vigilance to stay in control? If so, this vision has no redeeming qualities. Even if you carve out a privileged haven for yourself in the midst of this strange creation, the harm you have done will hover over it like a dark cloud.
Stop this now. Work to undo the harm you have caused and ask the people to forgive you. You can still reverse your course and earn the trust and gratitude of your fellow citizens. Work to foster the new world that is being born. Don’t bring it all crashing down. Give it a chance to bloom.
I wish this was just paranoia, but it’s real. It seems to me the current political environment is calculated to stomp all over everything we stand for. It is eery how well-aimed certain activities appear to be in this regard. But the most disorienting thing about it is that Trump has no legal authority and yet, like a bad penny, he remains at the head of our country.
Trump’s election in 2024 was not legal. He was only allowed to appear on the ballot thanks to ‘conservative’ manipulation of the Supreme Court. Therefore, his presence in the White House is nothing more than insubstantial hocus pocus. We betray the Constitution every time we talk about him as though he belongs there.
However, there is a more horrifying part of this–the shadowy cabal in the background with plans to duplicate Trump when he’s gone. The cabal is helped along by the silence of our news media, which is supposed to be helping us. Meanwhile, the media’s pundits harangue us for not doing anything to stop the bad guys. What exactly are they suggesting I wonder? I assume they mean we should protest even though protests are ongoing.
Counting Our Blessings?
If this was the wild west we would form a posse and hang the bastards–anything less would be futile. But I don’t think that’s what the pundits have in mind. If they dared to suggest such a thing, they wouldn’t remain in their cushy jobs for long.
Then there’s the famous progressive tactic of fighting the bastards through the electoral system. Sadly, the only positive effect I can see from our participation the 2016 and 2020 elections is that we forced them to show their hand before they were ready. They have actually been here for decades betraying us in small increments in hopes that we wouldn’t notice what they were doing. Now we see them.
There is a problem with the progressive conversation. Progressives have apparently forgotten everything that has happened since the 2016 election. Maybe that’s why they keep trying to help the Democratic Party. They started doing this while the Biden administration was still in control and they continued through the Harris campaign. Now they’re scratching their heads over what they see as Democratic incompetence in dealing with Trump. This is very frustrating.
Progressives are ignoring certain facts, which I list below. Those with knowledge of American politics will have to decide if the following facts are helpful. It’s important to mention that improving the conversation may not improve the political situation. But if the alternative media channels insist on talking about politics they should consider all the facts. Otherwise they will just add to the chaos.
The 2016 Election
Progressives’ ability to remember certain important facts would improve the conversation.
The Democratic Party demonstrated its ability to keep a candidate out of the White House. Yet Trump is the President.
Some Democrats openly admitted during Bernie’s campaign that they preferred Trump to someone like Bernie.
The DNC’s frantic and obvious effort to destroy Bernie’s candidacy–twice– was suspicious. In my opinion the Democrats chose suspicious behavior over decorum, even though the best competitors they could offer clung to an establishment worldview rejected by progressives.
In the 2016 campaign, the DNC styled Hilary Clinton as the Democratic version of an emperor. Think white pantsuit, golden lighting, arms raised like a prizefighter. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t communicate to the voters why she wanted to be president.
Donald Trump announced his candidacy after a meeting with Bill Clinton.
Hilary received enough cash after her loss to Donald Trump to purchase the estate next to her New York residence.
The 2024 Election
Since Trump’s second inauguration, the Democratic Establishment has continued to act as though they are watching a play. It took Elon Musk’s outrageous behavior to jolt Congressional Democrats out of their stupor.
During Bernie’s campaign, Members of Congress didn’t need an unelected billionaire to wake them up. They were united in their contempt for Bernie. This attitude filtered down to state Democratic parties. I believe the Maricopa County Democratic Party is a good example of the DNC’s thorough organizing effort.
We shouldn’t forget that the DNC did not stand behind Joe Biden in 2024. In addition, they failed to inform the electorate of the Biden/Harris administration’s strengths.
Why did it take so long for Congress to become ‘aroused’, as Chuck Schumer put it? Were they waiting for their cue from the DNC?
At least one Democratic Representative may have received a cue. This is Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives. He claims the Republicans are in control and the Democrats can’t do anything about it. Jeffries almost sounds like he’s calling for someone else to step in. But maybe it only seems that way to me because of my own background.
The Enemy From Within
Donald Trump has told us that the problem in America is ‘the enemy from within’.
The Mormon Church has been warning its membership about the enemy from within for decades. There will come a time, the Church claims, when the Constitution will be hanging by a thread. At that time Mormon leaders will be called upon to step in and rescue us.
The Church also predicts that it will be put in charge of ‘poor relief’. This is the exact term used for the Catholic Church when it was still a European institution. At its height, the Catholic Church owned a third of the land of Europe. We don’t know how much land the Mormon Church now owns worldwide because it is often bought furtively. But we know it’s a lot.
The Church in Utah uses the US welfare program to pressure recipients to be active in the Church. This aspect of the current crisis makes me believe these actors are no joke. There is a takeover in progress and its exact characteristics, while not known to us, have already been worked out.
Jonathan Rauch has been making the rounds of certain alternative media channels to promote the Mormon Church as an authority on civic religion.
Those of us who are not true believers in Fox’s propaganda are constantly amazed that this company is allowed to practice its virtual mind control in the United States. At a time when Donald Trump feels free to broadcast threats about what his administration will do to our system of government, Fox broadcasts his every word to the American people. But it’s even more outrageous than we know. Fox News was born in Nazi Germany. In 1932, the German newsreel subsidiary of Fox News Channel’s corporate ancestor, Fox Films, intervened in national elections in Germany. This was reported in an article entitled: In 1932, Fox Helped Make Propaganda Films for Hitler. The article was written by Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D. in 2010.1
Tarpley begins by pointing out how strange it is that a television network carries so many political candidates and propagandists on its payroll. He lists GOP and “Tea Party” partisans Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Sean Hannity. Considering his revelations in this article, we would have to conclude that Fox was born bad.
Fox and Weimar Democracy
For the following brief history of Fox’s wartime activities, Tarpley cites three different works. The first is Hans Mommsen’s authoritative study entitled The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. In 2010, Mommsen was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Bochum. His study goes into some detail about the methods used by Nazi propagandists. Under the leadership of Goebbels, the Party used the political propaganda film as early as 1930. In places where Hitler and other prominent Party leaders were not able to appear, they would show films instead. The American company Twentieth Century Fox manufactured the outdoor sound film for the NSDAP.
Fox Films, Corporate Ancestor of Fox News. Credit: urbancow
The Methods of Joseph Goebbels
Tarpley also cites Scholar William G. Chrystal, who confirms Mommsen’s account. Crystal provides further important details in his 1975 article on “Nazi Party Election Films, 1927-1938.”
Support for two additional 1932 election films, Der Führer (The Leader), and Hitlers Kampf um Deutschland (Hitler’s Struggle for Germany) came from the German-based subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Tönende Wochenschau (Fox Weekly Sound Newsreel [i.e., Fox Movietone News]). In addition, they also supplied some mobile sound film vans to be used during the campaign. Thus at least part of Hitler’s support in that critical time was the result of Fox’s help.
The background for this assistance is unknown since Fox Tönende Wochenschau records were destroyed during the war, according to a July 9, 1974 letter to Chrystal from Joseph Bellfort, who was at that time the vice president of the Twentieth Century Fox International Film Corporation.2
Hitler’s Use of Grievance
Der Führer (The Leader), one of the two sound films subsidized by Fox Tönende Wochenschau, was originally titled Volk und Führer (Nation and Leader). It was a relatively short film, but it provided many people with their first opportunity to hear Hitler speak.3 In it Hitler, speaking in Berlin on April 4, 1932, develops his characteristic theme that the German army was betrayed and stabbed in the back in November 1918 by the Weimar politicians, especially the Social Democrats.
This speech was part of Hitler’s campaign for president. He was defeated in this campaign on April 10, 1932, by von Hindenburg. Nevertheless he received almost 37 Percent of the votes. This represented a new high in Nazi support up to that time.
In the subsequent parliamentary election held on July 31, 1932, the Nazis added 19 percent to their previous totals to emerge for the first time as the largest single party in Germany with 38 percent of the votes — thanks in part to the assistance rendered to Hitler by Fox Movietone News.
Of the second film Fox made for Hitler, Chrystal writes: “…new Reichstag elections were called for November 6, 1932…. The second of the Fox-subsidized productions, Hitlers Kampf um Deutschland (Hitler’s Struggle for Germany), appeared on August 30. It comprised 606 meters of Hitler’s July, 1932 Eberswalde speech. An indication of the effectiveness of this speech and its film record can be found in its later use. When Reichstag elections were held again in March 1933, this same film was re-issued under a new title, Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler Spricht (Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler Speaks).4
Hitler Tailors His Speeches to the ‘Psychotic Public Mood’
Hitler’s speech in the Brandenburg Stadium in Eberswalde on July 27, 1932, one of three he gave that day, is a classic demagogic performance. As Mommsen points out, “in the hectic 1932 election campaign” the Nazis organized mass rallies featuring “speeches that Hitler tailored specifically to the psychotic public mood that had been created by the deepening crisis” (Mommsen, p. 338).
“We are intolerant,” raved Hitler, promising to drive more than thirty other political parties out of Germany. “We have one goal before us, to fanatically and ruthlessly shove all these parties into the grave,” he added. This was the message which Fox Movietone News helped deliver to the German public. Six months after he gave this speech, Hitler seized power as chancellor and began consolidating his power as dictator — once again thanks in part to the help of Fox Movietone News.
Fox Made ‘Illicit Contributions in Kind’
Tarpley emphasizes that Chrystal describes Fox as having “subsidized” Hitler’s critical 1932 election campaigns. He says this can be considered as the 1930s equivalent of illicit contributions in kind to a politician under current US election law. This charge is often made against Fox News today. As an example, he cites a recent filing by the Democratic Governors’ Association in regard to the Kasich gubernatorial campaign in Ohio.
Benito Mussolini Speaks to America
The Italisn fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was a big fan of Fox Movietone News. He was given the opportunity to make one of his famous bravura speeches for the Fox camera. According to Robert Edwin Herzstein, one of the first sound newsreels shown in the United States depicted Mussolini in March 1929 speaking in English directly to the American people, saying: “Your talking newsreel has tremendous possibilities. Let me speak through it in twenty cities in Italy once a week and I need no other power” (Herzstein, p. 318). In the mind of the Duce, newsfilm was already the handmaiden of fascist power.
Herzstein’s survey of the Fox Movietone archive for 1930-1935 was extensive. However, there is no record of criticism or unfavorable coverage of the fascist dictator.5
Fox News Channel Owns and Manages Fox Movietone’s Collection Today
The last Fox Movietone newsreels appeared in the United States in 1963. According to the Wikipedia article on Movietone News, parts of the Fox Movietone newsreel collection are still “owned and managed by the Fox Film Corporation’s corporate successor (and namesake), Fox News Channel. The majority of the collection is stored in New Jersey, mostly unseen since the newsreels were originally shown in theatres. During its early years, Fox News Channel had a weekend show which played the newsreels.”6
Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 339. emphasis added. Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century Fox in May, 1935. ↩︎
William G. Chrystal, “Nazi Party Election Films, 1927-1938,” in Cinema Journal XV:1, Autumn 1975, p. 32, published by the University Texas Press for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, emphasis added. See also Hans Barkhausen, “Kurzübersicht: Filme der NSDAP, 1927-1945,” and “Die NSDAP als Filmproduzentin,” in Günter Moltmann and Karl Friedrich Reimers, Zeitgeschichte im Film- und Tondokument: 17 historische, pädagogische, und sozialwissenschaftliche Beiträge, edited by Günter Moltmann and Karl Friedrich Reimers (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1970). As Cited by Tarpley. ↩︎
Christian Churches have a problem. Right-wing ideology with claims to Christian orthodoxy is converting young people, mostly men, all over the world. This problem has become more noticeable since the Covid lockdown. Apparently, young people who were not able to talk to each other in person socialized online. Right-wing ideology associated with Christianity was the introduction for many of them. Afterward, many of them joined churches in an effort to further the right-wing agenda. Steve Hayes’s video on YouTube traces the progression of this increase in right-wing members. This article is a summary of his speech. I am calling it the radical Right’s Siren Song.
Hayes is an Orthodox deacon and a freelance editor, writer, teacher and missiologist. (Missiology is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into Christian mission or missions that utilizes theological, historical, and various social scientific methods.) He lives in Pretoria, South Africa.
An Ideological Split has Developed Between Christian Males and Females. Men are More Right-Wing.
If his speech seems mixed up, Hayes explains that he’s throwing a stone into the bush to see what comes out. He is concerned about a recent phenomenon. This information is important and I didn’t want to leave anything out, so I’ve tried to write it in the same order. I hope the reader doesn’t lose interest. The information gets more disturbing toward the end.
Quarantine at home, Credit: baranozdemir
In the years 1996 to 2015, male and female Christians experienced an ideological split. Many young people who had just come into the church suddenly started spouting right-wing ideology. This has not only affected Gen Z in North America. It includes Generation Zed outside of North America as well. The Orthodox Church is also affected. All Christian churches are experiencing this. The situation was intensified by the covid lockdown.
In a recent survey of conversion respondents aged 21 to 30, seventy-five percent of respondents were male. The sexual gap narrows somewhat among older people, but respondents are still majority male. Previously, the sex gap was a characteristic of mainline Protestant churches, but it has increased in the Orthodox Church since 2019. It now affects all Christian churches, except for Evangelical. The sexes are represented equally among Evangelicals.
The Orthodox Church is Attractive to Some People Because it is Pre-Modern
Hayes speculates that so many right-wingers join the Orthodox Church because Orthodoxy places a high value on tradition. The perception that the Orthodox Church is pre-modern in its theology and ethos might explain the difference.
But today, many consider modernity to be superior because it is newer. For example, modern people say no one can possibly believe that in 2024, whatever that might be. Some people do not feel at home in this kind of atmosphere and they look for more tradition.
The Orthodox Church did not Experience the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment
The Orthodox Church is pre-modern because it did not experience the three main characteristics of Western modernity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. These three events shaped Western modernity and spread throughout the world as a kind of culture and worldview. One of the features of modernity is that it does not like tradition.
Modernity, Pre-Modernity, and Post-Modernity
History as an academic discipline came about really in the 19th century among Western Historians. This resulted in the division of history into three time periods and worldviews: modernity, pre-modernity, and post-modernity. (Therefore, these divisions and the corresponding worldview is a Western phenomenon.)
Modern history covers the period from 1500 on. Antiquity is everything before the year 500. Historians did not know what to do with the years in between. They called them the Middle Ages because they came between those other ages, which were more historically important. These developments shaped the idea of modernity as a worldview and a thing. And there was another influence that shaped modernity: printing.
The Invention of Printing
Printing Helped Shape Modernity, Credit: ilbusca
Today when you think of the holy scriptures, you think of the Bible. But the Bible didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. It only came about after the invention of printing. Before printing, people heard the holy scriptures read in a community setting.
Printing meant that people could take the Bible away and read it individually. Therefore, modernity meant that individuals could follow ideas that they got from books. One result was that the way people experienced the Christian faith changed.
Covid
Because of Covid, churches did not meet. Individuals went online and heard one voice telling them what to think. The people who were were unhappy with modernity and threatened by change heard about tradition and thought it might give them a sense of security.
Tradition
Where does the word tradition come from? Our English word comes from traditio. It means to hand over tradition. In the sense used by the Orthodox Church, this means handing over the good news, the message of Jesus Christ. You hand it over to other people, or pass it on.
But now, tradition is also a difficult concept. We sometimes wonder if something is a bad tradition. Tradition can be good or bad. The word tradition also leads to the English word traitor. For example, someone who hands their country over to the enemy. Or someone else who handed Jesus over to be crucified. So, tradition can be good or bad.
Traditionalism
You also find that people become Traditionalists, which is different from tradition. Traditionalists think tradition in itself is good and should be valued for its own sake. Rene Guenon and his followers, who taught early in the twentieth century, were the precursors of the people who are joining the Churches now. Today, new converts are bringing these Traditionalist ideas with them.
Rene Guenon was very unhappy with the modern world. And it’s true that modernity has its problems. One problem is that modernism is its own kind of ideology. Modernism teaches that modernity is good and everything else before it is inferior. It also teaches that things are getting better all the time. (In my opinion, we saw an example of this in Steven Pinker’s defense of liberalism.)
Modernism can put some people off. However, Steve Hayes argues that modernity is neither something to be worshipped and regarded as the best way, nor completely rejected. As Christians, we can look at modernity and evaluate different aspects from the point of view of Christian faith. We can see what’s good and bad, what we can cultivate and what we can try to reject. But to Traditionalists like Guenon, the modern world is altogether bad. For him, the earliest forms of religion were better.
Eugene Rose
Guenon thought primitive forms of religion were better. He influenced Eugene Rose, a young American. Rose converted at the age of 14 to the Methodist Church. The following information about Eugene Rose is from Wikipedia.
Rose studied Chinese philosophy at Pomona college. He also studied under Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies before entering the master’s degree program in Oriental languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated in 1961 with a thesis entitled “‘Emptiness’ and ‘Fullness’ in the Lao Tzu”.
While studying at Watts’ Asian institute, Rose read the writings of French metaphysicist René Guénon. He also met a Chinese Taoist scholar, Gi-ming Shien. Shien emphasized the ancient Chinese approach to learning, valuing traditional viewpoints and texts over more modern interpretations. Inspired by Shien, Rose took up the study of ancient Chinese so that he could read early Taoist texts in their original tongue. Through his experiences with Shien and the writings of Guénon, Rose sought out an authentic and grounded spiritual tradition of his own. He became interested in the Russian Orthodox Church sometime after 1956.
Rose eventually became an Orthodox monk with the monastic name of Seraphim Rose. He and Gleb Podmoshensky, a Russian Orthodox seminarian, began a community of Orthodox booksellers and publishers, the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. In March 1964, Rose opened an Orthodox bookstore next to the Holy Virgin Cathedral on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. In 1965, the brotherhood founded the St. Herman Press publishing house, which still exists. Rose and Podmoshensky became monks in 1968 and transformed the Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood into a full-fledged monastic community.
Traditionalsim Found its Way Into the Writings of Seraphim Rose
Now we return to Steve Hayes’ narrative. The books published by Seraphim Rose’s St. Herman Press were in demand, as there were not many books and magazines about the Orthodox Church for the English-speaking world. So, Seraphim Rose’s publishing house made the Orthodox Church more widely known. But Guenon’s traditionalism shaped the presentation of the Herman Press. Seraphim Rose did not teach wrong doctrines. (According to the Wikipedia article, some of his teachings were controversial in his lifetime.) In fact, he warned against Traditionalism. But he made more of tradition than is generally done in the Orthodox Church. He taught Orthodox doctrines in a Traditionalist way. (My own Interpretation of Hayes’s narrative is that Traditionalist ideas are what had attracted Rose to the Orthodox Church in the first place and that’s how he understood it.)
Frank Schaeffer
Another teacher influenced by Guenon was Frank Schaeffer. Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Frank’s father and mother, were co-founders of L’Abri community in Switzerland. They were trying to enable Christians to witness to the Christian faith in the modern world. Francis wanted Christians to see how the Christian gospel could be presented to people who had a modernist understanding of the world. Francis was an American evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor.
Frank eventually went to America to study, and found that the modern world went against his values. As a result, he moved to a kind of right-wing understanding and tried to persuade his father to do the same. His father chose not to move in that direction, but Frank went on to write a series of books criticizing American culture as he saw it. The titles were catchy, in the words of Hayes. The title of one book was Sham Pearls for Real Swine. Frank believed that American culture was real swine. He attacked American culture until he discovered the Orthodox Church, which was more traditional. But because he had become a Traditionalist before joining the Orthodox Church, he continued to preach the same anti-modernist message he had preached when he was a Protestant.
An Orthodoxy With Teeth: Orthodox Bolsheviks
Steve Hayes heard him speak in 1995 at the Orthodox Mission Conference in Brooklyn. At that conference, Frank called for an Orthodoxy with teeth. He wanted the Orthodox Church to have teeth and attack American modern culture.
However, there was a Russian Orthodox Bishop in attendance who didn’t speak much English. Someone was whispering a translation in his ear. At the end of Frank’s speech the bishop said, You call for an Orthodoxy with teeth, but what will you do if those you want to bite grow bigger teeth and bite you back?…No! We have people like you in Russia who want to grow teeth like that and we call them Orthodox Bolsheviks.
Hayes explains that the Bolshevik period in Russia had ended just four years earlier. After Bolshevism ended, a survey showed that of all the Russian institutions in the early 1990s, the people trusted the Church the most. They did not trust politicians or academics, only the Church. Thousands of people were baptized in Russia after the fall of Communism, including a lot of people who had been in the KGB. Unfortunately, some of the new KGB converts’ practiced a method of persuasion that went, you do what we say and you believe what we say, or else. That was what the Russian bishop saw in Frank Schaeffer.
Frank eventually changed sides in the American culture wars. Now he calls himself a Christian atheist or an atheist Christian. He had joined the Orthodox Church not for what it was, but because he thought it would prop up what he already believed about the ordering of society. And when he stopped believing that, the secondary thing was less important and he drifted away from the Church. That’s the problem with anyone who comes to the Christian faith with an ulterior motive. They think Orthodoxy will provide a spiritual home for their already held beliefs, which already may be nationalist, racist, and exclusive. They think, we are in a group that is better than anyone else.
This has spilled over into quite a few Orthodox podcast groups.
Ortho Bros
Among the podcasters are people who come across as very arrogant, abrasive, and thinking, we are better than anyone else and you’d better follow us or else. It’s an Orthodoxy with teeth. People who follow them call themselves Ortho Bros and they come across as very abrasive and attack people.
But the Orthodox are not the only ones. There were other Traditionalist groups present in the 2020 riots. For example, Nick Fuentes preaches this right-wing message, often attacking conservative Americans and saying they should be radical.
Some Christian Traditionalists tend to be radical Right, racist, nationalist, and in some cases, neo-Nazi. Hayes calls out Jay Dyer in particular as being especially abrasive and attacking other people. Apparently, Jay promotes an orthodoxy with teeth, and if anyone disagrees with him he will dox them. This means getting documentation of everything a person has done and putting it online. People they approve of, they call ‘based‘. People they don’t approve of, they call ‘degenerate‘ or ‘gay‘.
When Right-Wingers Join the Orthodox Church
Some people who talk in this way joined the Orthodox Church when covid ended. The priests taught them, but they don’t really know where the new converts are coming from. They don’t realize the converts have a different lens.
The teachings of Father Seraphim Rose, who got the teachings from Guenon, were a milder version. but Traditionalism is no longer mild.
The philosophy of Traditionalism also came into the Orthodox Church through Alexander Dugin. Dugin is Russian, and during the Soviet period, he belonged to a circle of people who studied esoteric or occult religion. At that time, they studied East Asian religions in the light of Western occult understanding. But Dugin soon realized that Western occultism is modern–because it had appeared in the Renaissance. So, he followed Guenon in looking for the earliest versions of different religions. Another name for this focus is the Perennial philosophy. The Perennial philosophy teaches that there are basic ideas that underly all religions. Religion must keep these basic ideas.
When the Bolshevik regime fell in the 1990s, Dugin decided that the Traditionalist form of religion was identical with the Orthodox Church. He joined the Church, and he brought his Traditionalist ideas with him. In Russia, Traditionalism has spread to some of the clergy and also some of the people in government.
Dugin and Heidegger
According to Hayes, Dugin expresses his notion of the Russian world as, Russkiy Mir. (In the following article by Serghei Sadohin, Russkiy Mir is a doctrine. Sadohin compares it to the ideology of Martin Heidegger, which I have already warned against here.)
The German existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger, who profoundly influenced the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin – an ardent proponent of the Russkiy mir doctrine – argued that there is only one ultimate truth: the truth of being. “The human is the place of the truth of being,” Heidegger says in his characteristically poetic, and sometimes obscure, way. Dugin found in Heidegger the philosopher who speaks to him about istina, but in a German way. “We have our special Russian truth,” he once told a baffled BBC journalist. Truth for Dugin is relative. As it was for Heidegger, who relativised truth to being, before anything else. Even Nietzsche before him said that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”
Hayes tells us that Dugin in particular spreads this doctrine. He has influenced people in Russia with the doctrine of Traditionalism. To be a Traditionalist, means you think tradition, regardless of its origin, is a good thing in itself.
Traditionalism is not the Same as Christian Tradition
Christian tradition hands on what it has received. It does not start again from scratch in each generation. It means following on from the generations before. Acts 2:42 reports the baptism of three thousand people. These people continued in four things: the apostles’ teaching; the apostles’ fellowship; the breaking of the bread; and the prayers. The Orthodox traditional understanding is that the Orthodox Church has continued in those four things from that day to this, without a break. There is continuity and that is what we call holy tradition. But not all tradition is holy, especially not all tradition of the Traditionalist philosophy is holy.
Christian Nationalism, Fascism, and Nazism
South Africa, Credit: LorenzoT81
There is also a third well-known traditionalist, a guy called Julius Evola, who was an Italian fascist.
Now we come to South Africa with something that in our day we regard as discredited. But it is suddenly having a revival in North America. That’s Christian Nationalism. In 1942, B. J. Vorster, one of the prime ministers of South Africa, said, ‘We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism.’
We can call anti-Democratic governments ‘dictatorships’ if you like. But in Italy it was fascism, in South Africa it was Christian Nationalism, and in Germany it was Nazism. Christian Nationalism, as a philosophy or idea gave birth to apartheid, which eventually became an ideology in its own right. The word apartheid appeared in the 1930s from a Dutch Reformed missionary. In 1948 by D. F. Malan’s National Party adopted this word. It already had the philosophy of Christian Nationalism, but not the word. Apartheid was originally a slogan of the National Party, which was looking for a way to soften segregation.
Integralism is not Gospel. It is Ideology.
Christian Nationalism is growing today in North America. Hayes has mentioned its Orthodox roots, but it has other roots as well. In the Roman Catholic Church, Integralism wants to revive Christendom. By Christendom, they mean Christianity in alliance with secular power. They want to integrate the Church into the state. The state should be the instrument of imposing Christian values on everyone. But Hayse says this is not actually gospel. It is not good news because Christian values without Christ become an ideology. It’s no longer good news, just a set of ideas that you must accept or face the consequences.
In the Protestant world, there is a guy called Rushdoony. He believed that Christians should seek to control the government and the economy and have a kind of theocratic society. They call this idea Theonomy, which means applying God’s law. (Theonomy is a hypothetical Christian form of government in which society is ruled by divine law.) Rushdoony wanted to apply the Old Testament law to the state and make the commandments the constitution.
The New Apostolic Reformation
Another movement is the New Apostolic Reformation. This started as part of the Charismatic Revival in the 1950s and 60s, where a lot of people outside of traditional Pentecostal churches rediscovered the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There was a group that developed this new ecclesiology based on St. Paul’s list of some ministries in Ephesians. (here is an article about this Revival. It was a central influence in the January 6 riots.)
Ephesians says ‘he gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.’ But they rigidified these five ministries and claimed they had disappeared after the apostolic age. One missiologist, Ralph Wimber, called this the BOBO theory of Church history: It teaches that the light of the gospel blinked off after the apostles died and blinked on again after the Reformation.
Ralph said the origin of this teaching was the Mormons. They called themselves the Latter Day Saints because they believe there were no saints in the middle. This is the same attitude as the historians who despised the middle. Winter said the idea that there are no saints in the middle is wrong, and he helped people see that. But people who held this ideology resisted Winter. They said pastors and teachers had disappeared and then restored during the Reformation. They said the Reformers were the revived pastors and teachers.
The New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains Mandate: a Long History
In the 18th century, there were people like John Wesley and other people in North America, traveling Evangelists, who said the Great Awakening was the Revival of the evangelists. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a Pentecostal Revival of the prophets. But now in the middle of the 20th century, they had a Revival of apostles. These people appointed themselves as apostles and started the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
Steve Hayes reports the following from one of these apostles, Bob Mumford. Mumford was a popular preacher in the 1970s. He taught this doctrine at the Hatfield Baptist Church and appointed the pastor as the apostle of Pretoria. God had given him Pretoria, according to Mumford.
The New Apostolic Reformation dealt with the Revival of these ministries. Then, in the 1970s, three evangelical leaders found that they had a common vision. The three men were Loren Cunningham, founder of YWAM; Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; and Francis Schaeffer. Their vision came to be called Seven Mountains. The Seven Mountains were things in society that needed Christian influence, such as government, family, education, and various social institutions or centers of power.
Francis Schaeffer spread this teaching through L’Abri. He said he was helping people look at these things in the light of the Christian faith. Then, twenty-five years later, a man called Lance Wallnau said these seven mountains needed to be conquered, not just influenced. Christians must take them over.
The Cult of Donald Trump
At some point, Bob Mumford admitted to Hayes that these teachings had been wrong and that he repented for starting this movement. But someone named Peter Wagner, another missiologist, soon became the leader of the NAR. Lance Wallnau adopted the Seven Mountains theory. A lot of the people who accepted this teaching are now in what Hayes would call the Cult of Donald Trump. They were with the others in the January 6 riots.
Summary and Conclusion
So, this right-wing movement is in both the Orthodox and Western Churches. It seems to affect Generation Z in North America and Generation Zed all over the world.
The Seven Mountains Mandate (it’s called a Mandate in Wikipedia) has echoes of the Christian nationalism that we know from South Africa. If you follow it back, you will find that a Reformed theologian in the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper, spoke about the spheres of sovereignty, and said that every social institution should have sovereignty in its own sphere. In other words, the Church should have sovereignty in religion, government, etc. This idea became very popular among the Christian Nationalists in South Africa. And the Seven Mountains Mandate is reworking it. Their roots are all intertwined. The tree that we are seeing grow from these roots is a lot of young Christians, from 15 to 30 or 35, especially males, who are right-wing.
Hayes has a question for the converts: What is primary? Is it the Christian faith? Is Jesus Christ the center of their lives? Or is it a political ideology and a political outlook?
He sees this as a kind of missiological and evangelistic problem, and it effects the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Churches. This ideology is particularly influential because the young people are online and come from all over the world. Pastors and priests might not know what ideas they are bringing. They might find that the new converts seem to be speaking sound doctrine but then they go off into some conspiracy or anti-Semitic rant. These people largely got these ideas online and are coming into the fellowship of the church just as the church is reviving after covid, and it’s important that the Church realize where they are coming from and what kind of distortions they might be bringing to the understanding of the Christian faith.
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