Three bullies are competing to punch each other in the mouth: Trump, Bannon and the so-called Freedom Caucus in Congress. It would be fun to watch the GOP self-destruct post “Trumpcare” except for the fact they risk taking us all down with them. I’m not speaking of political theory here, but about my grandchildren’s future. This is personal!
As the fallout from the failure of “Trumpcare” cascades down on our country these bullies emerge as the instigators of chaos rather than governance.
- Trump is just about Trump… not governance.
- Bannon is an overgrown high school student and sophomoric wannabe mini Hitler, too wrapped up in his own childish love of war (and obsessive hatred of Muslims) to be effective at more than causing needless pain. He never picks on anyone his size but on immigrant women, children and families. He once read a silly book The Fourth Turning about “cyclical models of history” –in other words pure pseudoscience that “explains” everything to the sort of simpletons that think anything can explain everything. He sees himself in the role of the murdering power broker Thomas Cromwell: “I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.” (Cromwell helped Henry the VIII get away with murdering his wives and pillaging the Roman Catholic Church, destroying art, attacking religious enemies.)
- The “Freedom Caucus” are a bunch of white male evangelical theocrats into terrorizing America.
These three bullies want to turn America into their version of Iran with themselves as the mullahs. They also love war… as long as other people’s children volunteer to fight.
In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon described how he ran Breitbart, the far-right news site he chaired at the time. “It’s war,” he said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”
To confront the “threat” from Islam, China, Mexico… you name it, Bannon argues, that the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in… 1453.
What this high school student enthusiast follower of crackpot “history” theory fails to mention is that the only reason the Byzantine Empire fell was because their fellow Christians from Europe attacked them in 1204 and sacked their capital city! The Byzantines then never recovered. So in fact the advance of Islam at that time was because of stupid greedy Western white Christians… sound familiar?
These three moronic bullies spent the last years doing nothing but obstructing Obama and lying about him. Taken together these bullies are the incompetent fist of the movement I helped build in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was a religious right leader waking up white evangelicals to the power of hate.
Please watch my new video commentary on these bullies and what to expect from them…
https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16/videos/1000252126771560/
4 Comments. Leave new
Frank, I live in a small blue pocket of the very rural, very red north country of New York State and an witnessing an upswelling of grass roots political activity. We need to keep building energy until all of these local riffles across the country to become an unstoppable wave. Do you do live speaking engagements?
Yes, I do speak at many places… to contact me just email frankaschaeffer@aol.com and mention speaking in the subject line… thanks! F
Having just read Jane Mayer’s article in the March 27 New Yorker, Trump’s Money Man, I think you may be missing another bully: Robert Mercer. His ideological drive, his fluency in computer algorithms, and his billions have significantly supported and carried forward both Trump and Bannon, not to mention Brexit.
I live in Mo, which is now governed by supermajority republicans. Our new republican governor is an ex navy seal who’s only qualification to govern is he can shoot a machine gun. He hired a cfo to run the state while he runs to Washington on private planes to visit Trump. Passed a right to work bill and he signed it. Trump carried him in on his coattails.