Intellectualism Is A 4-Letter Word To Republicans

• Ignorance, or an aversion to reason, has allowed things like gun violence and racism to define American culture.
• Anti-intellectual societies fall prey to tribalism and simplistic explanations, are emotionally immature, and often seek violent solutions.
• Corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance.

Click on the link below for more. Oh, this was published BEFORE Trump was elected. It's only gotten worse:

The exaltation of ignorance in America

Homeschooling: It's Diversity. Threat, And Warning

"Homeschooling has become America’s fastest-growing form of education, according to a Washington Post analysis. This form of education, which largely has roots within evangelical Christian households, has grown into a broader movement, especially since the pandemic. Laura Meckler is a national education writer at The Washington Post and is co-author of a series for The Post called “Homeschool Nation,” which takes an in-depth look at the surge in homeschooling in the U.S. and motivations for its rise, which include concerns over school shootings, curriculum ideologies and more. She joins WITHpod to discuss how this mode of education has evolved, the forces that have driven its growth, recent declines in public school enrollment, the increasing popularity of micro-schools, and more."

Click on the link below for the details of this important presentation signaling major issues in US education:

"Homeschool Nation"

Christian Nationalism: The Death Of The USA?

"So, a high-ranking Republican speaks to a secretive Christian Nationalist conference…no big deal, right? Unless the person is 2nd in line for the Oval after the VP…are you hearing warning bells yet?"

Click on the link below for a concise but deep dive into the greatest threat to the representative democracy of the USA. The country is acting like the frogs in a slowly boiling pot!! Wake up and

VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO!!:

Will the GOP’s Self-proclaimed “Moses” lead the destruction?

Ponder the courage of the Founding Fathers when they fought against religious factions that wanted another Christian theocracy based on THEIR brand of such.

A Medical Problem Below The Radar

"Today I want to talk with you about an uncomfortable topic that needs much more open discussion than it’s receiving: America’s extraordinarily high level of anxiety.

"A panel of medical experts has recommended that doctors screen all patients under 65, including children and teenagers, for what the panel calls 'anxiety disorders.'

"Lori Pbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, who serves on the panel, calls mental health disorders 'a crisis in this country.'

"Today’s New York Times has a lead article about what’s called 'persistent depressive disorder,' or P.D.D., which an estimated 2 percent of adults in the United States have experienced in the past year.

"Nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives to suicide last year, according to a new provisional tally from the National Center for Health Statistics. (The agency said the final count would likely be higher.)

"The suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 Americans has reached its highest level since 1941, when America entered World War II."

"What’s going on?

"Maybe the widespread anxiety and depression, along with the near record rate of suicide, should not be seen as personal disorders.

"Maybe they should be seen — in many cases — as rational responses to a society that’s becoming ever more disordered.

"After all, who’s not concerned by the rising costs of housing and the growing insecurity of jobs and incomes?"

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Click on the link below for more:

America's Anxiety Disorder

There Is NO Equivalency Between The Two Major US Political Parties

Anyone who watches Rachel Maddow knows her political views. The same can be said about Lis Cheney. There is no better example of polar opposites in political views. However, they agree 100% on ONE important matter: DONALD TRUMP MUST NEVER RETURN AS POTUS!!

Click on the link below for one of the best exposes of the dangers of Trump and his cult to the future of US representative democracy:

He is not the lesser of two evils’: Cheney emphasizes the severity of Trump threat

A Look At US Tax Policy History

"Tax policy shows what a society values.

"Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Moore v. United States. The case illustrates today’s Supreme Court’s tendency to hear cases based on fictional stories to shape society to a right-wing ideology."

Click on the link for details. Ironically, the Republican Party today is against policies that many of them initially supported.

The lies of the Republicans to support economic inequality

Chris Hayes & Rachel Maddow Tell It As It Was, And Still Is

THE USA WILL BE A DICTATORSHIP UNDER TRUMP

"We just wrapped up our fall 2023 national tour. We’ve so enjoyed taking WITHpod on the road and it’s been so good to hear feedback from so many of you. We couldn’t think of a better person to have for our tour culmination than the one and only Rachel Maddow. It was a fascinating conversation all about what we can do to save American democracy, how we got to this particular political moment and her amazing New York Times bestselling book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.” We’re thrilled to share the full recording of the event with you."

Click on the link below for 90 minutes of American history and current events that everyone needs to know:

WITHpod Live with Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow

Ronald Reagan: The Creator Of What The USA Is Politically Today

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” ~ Ronald Reagan 

THE lie that is perpetually embedded in conservatism, with its associated isolationism and individualism.

"Today, we take a look at the life and legacy of President Ronald Reagan, the last transformational U.S. president whose regime we are still living in. Between his neoliberal economics, anti-government ideology, and white supremacist appeal to authoritarians, he did more to shape the last 40 years of the politics of the country and conservative movement than anyone else."

Click on the link below for a better understanding of the present US Republican Party:

Ronald Reagan, It Turns Out, Was Bad

Neoliberalism And Libertarianism: They Must Be Defeated

"The Supreme Court turned the table on average, working people back in the 70s when they empowered wealthy individuals and corporations to have an outsized role in our politics. Now we're trapped in the reality that shift in power created and are dreaming of a better way to manage our economic and political systems for the benefit of all people."

Click on the link below for a vision of a future where Neoliberalism and Libertarianism are 4-letter words:

Beyond Neoliberalism: Dreaming a new economic system into being

Politicide: What Is Happening In The USA,The Middle East, And Around The World

"Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. It is a type of political repression and one of the means used to politically cleanse populations, another being forced migration. It may be compared to genocide or ethnic cleansing, both of which involve the killing of people based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group rather than their adherence to a particular ideology." (Wikipedia)

Click on the link below for an interview with an expert on this form of discrimination/killing. It is essentially what Trump and the Republicans are doing in the USA and what both factions are doing in the Middle East:

From Trump’s Speech to Israel-Gaza: Jason Stanley on the Politics of Language

The Supreme Court's New Code of Conduct Is A Paper Tiger

"In this excerpt from the CAFE Insider podcast, Preet Bharara and Joyce Vance break down the Supreme Court’s newly adopted Code of Conduct.

"In the full episode, they discuss the leaked video of former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis’ proffer session with Georgia prosecutors, the positions taken by federal prosecutors and Donald Trump on the issue of publicly broadcasting Trump’s upcoming election interference trial and the New York Attorney General’s ongoing civil fraud trial against Trump."

Click on the link below for a scathing review of the toothless/paper tiger Code of Conduct recently established for the US Supreme Court and the way Trump is being handled in the legal system:

Supreme Conduct & Trump Trials

No, Only One Major US Political Party Is "Small D" Democratic

"The conservative movement, born in opposition to an overwhelmingly popular New Deal order, has always taken a dim view of popular self-government. But the American right’s latent contempt for democracy has grown more unabashed in recent years. As its white, rural, Christian base has rapidly lost demographic weight; as the GOP has lost the popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections; as conservatives have managed to retain outsize influence over public policy on the strength of their coalition’s overrepresentation in Congress and on the Supreme Court; and, of course, as Donald Trump turned hostility to the peaceful transfer of power into a litmus test for conservative purity, the Republican Party has become a forthrightly anti-democratic political institution."

Click on the link below for a presentation of the history of the Republican and Democratic Parties since the US Depression supporting the claim of this post:

The Democratic Party is America’s only small-d democratic party.

The Republican War On Critical Thinking

"History has shown us repeatedly what happens when tyrants take education away from the public. Can the Republican led war on public schools turn generation Z, from Doomers to dumber? OR, will we learn from history so as not to repeat it?"

Click on the link below for the details of the Republican effort to end public education so that ignorance, unsupported ideology, and autocracy reigns in the USA:

The Frightening Reason Behind the Republican War Against Critical Thinking in Schools

Antisemitism: It's Not Partisan But, - - -

"Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a “horseshoe theory” in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center. However, there is little quantitative research evaluating left-wing versus right-wing antisemitism. We conducted several experiments on an original survey of 3500 U.S. adults, including an oversample of young adults. We oversampled young adults because unlike other forms of prejudice that are more common among older people, antisemitism is theorized to be more common among younger people. Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right."

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"Right-wing antisemitism and left-wing antisemitism are not identical. In the far-right mentality, Jews are viewed as people pretending to be white—“a faux-white race that has tainted America”13—or disloyal white people—“the ultimate betrayers of the white race” (Weiss, 2019, 68). American Jews are distinctive in that they are high in socioeconomic status and mostly identify as white, but unlike others with those attributes, they are liberal in their social views and supportive of racial equality and immigration (Smith and Schapiro 2019; Smith 2013). Prior work has argued that American Jewish liberalism is not a coincidence, but in fact, a political manifestation of Jewish identity—the distinct history of Jewish oppression may have led to prioritizing equality and support for marginalized groups (Forman 1998; Brodkin 1998). Conservatives might feel negatively towards Jews if they perceive Jewish religious values to be in direct conflict with their preferred conservative policy stances."

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"Research on left-wing antisemitism suggests some commonalities with antisemitism on the right. As mentioned, populism and anti-capitalism may trigger anti-Jewish tropes and scapegoating on the left just as on the right. The political left—typically sympathetic to oppressed minorities—may see Jews not as an oppressed religious group but instead as oppressors due to stereotypes of Jews’ involvement in capitalism or to solidarity with Palestinians in the Israel/Palestine conflict (Lerner 1992)."

Click on the link below for the results of recent research regarding this "othering" thinking and behavior:

Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum

The Deep & Wide Republican Plans To Dismantle US Democracy

"Today, we take a look at the strategies underway to systematically dismantle democracy in the United States including installing Big-Lie™ believers in elected and poll-working positions, preventing state-level Supreme Courts from holding GOP-dominated state legislators to the state constitutions, and wiping out tens of thousands of career civil servants from the federal government to be replaced by right-wing extremists loyal to the Republican Party."

Click on the link below for a podcast from last year that needs more exposure. Pay attention, they are up-front, committed, and are carrying this out presently:

Installing Loyalists: The Multi-Pronged Destruction of Our Democracy Already in Progress

Why Jews Have Been Hated For 2,000 Years

The conflict in the Middle East between the State of Israel and the Palestinians is relatively new in the history of the Jewish people. After the beginning of Christianity, there was a movement called the Jewish deicide:

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"Jewish deicide is the notion that the Jews as a people will always be collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, even through the successive generations following his death.[1][2] A Biblical justification for the charge of Jewish deicide is derived from Matthew 27:24–25. Some rabbinical authorities, such as 12th-century scholar Maimonides and, more recently, ultranationalist Israeli rabbi, Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982), have asserted that Jesus was indeed stoned and hanged after being sentenced to death in a rabbinical court.

"The notion arose in early Christianity, the charge was made by Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis as early as the 2nd century.[3] The accusation that the Jews were Christ-killers fed Christian antisemitism[4] and spurred on acts of violence against Jews such as pogroms, massacres of Jews during the Crusades, expulsions of the Jews from England, France, Spain, Portugal, and other places, and torture during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions."

"In the catechism that was produced by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century, the Catholic Church taught the belief that the collectivity of sinful humanity was responsible for the death of Jesus, not only the Jews.[5] If one were to claim that only the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death, the logical corollary to this would be that Jesus’ redemptive suffering, death and resurrection was for the sins of Jews alone and not all of humanity, as is taught by the Church. In the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issued the declaration Nostra aetate that repudiated the idea of a collective, multigenerational Jewish guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus. It declared that the accusation could not be made 'against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today'.[1]

"Most other churches do not have any binding position on the matter, but some Christian denominations[which?] have issued declarations against the accusation.[6][7][8]"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_deicide)

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"CHRISTIANITY’S UNDERSTANDING OF ITS ORIGINS centers on the New Testament, particularly the poetic rendering in the gospels of the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, which is traditionally known as the Passion.5 In the gospels’ rendition and as interpreted for centuries, the Jews are perceived as 'the Christ killers,' a people condemned forever to suffer exile and degradation. This archcrime of 'deicide,' of murdering God, turned the Jews into the embodiment of evil, a 'criminal people' cursed by God and doomed to wander and suffer tribulation to the end of time. No other religious tradition has condemned a people as the murderers of its god, a unique accusation that has resulted in a unique history of hatred, fear, and persecution. When it came to Jews, the central doctrine of Christianity, that Jesus was providentially sent into the world to atone by his death for mankind’s sins, was obscured."

(https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781403979124_2)

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"After a few centuries of freedom from harassment during the Carolingian period (800-1000), the Jews of western Europe began to suffer new indignities as the crusades came on. The Muslims were the 'infidel' targets in the attempted recapture of the holy places in Palestine. However, the pillage and slaughter committed by Christian mobs against Jews on the way linger long in Jewish memory."

" - - - Martin Luther in his early days naively imagined that the Jews, to whom he was attracted by his studies, would flock to the Church in his reformed version. When nothing of the sort happened, he denounced them in a set of pamphlets written in vituperative fury. He had produced the early, favorable "That Christ Was Born a Jew" in 1523, but after he turned on this so-called "damned, rejected race," he wrote Against the Sabbatarians (1538) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)."

"Germany was populated with more Jews than any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power. It also had the same ugly heritage of anti-Jewish sentiment as all Christian Europe. The short-lived Weimar Republic could not deliver Germany from the severe economic hardships it experienced after World War I. Jews had been the Republic’s strong supporters and a few of them were the architects of its constitution, a fact that Hitler capitalized upon. Huge inflation in 1923 and the depression of 1929 increased Germany’s problems. Some leading capitalist families, gentile and Jewish, managed to escape these problems, but the eyes of the angry populace were trained on the Jews rather than the gentiles."

(https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/initiatives/ethics-religion-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries)

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My comment on the above:

It is clear to me that, without Christianity, the Jews would not have been subjected to the horrors of the last two centuries. Ah, religion. Isn't it wonderful?

It is also clear to me the irony of the strongest supporters of the State of Israel, besides conservative Jews, are conservative Christians. Could it be because of how they interpret Scripture regarding "The End Times?"

Citizens United: The Root Of A Major Problem In The USA

"If America is to recover any semblance of meaningful democracy in our country, we have to cut out the cancer of big money in our political system. We MUST overturn Citizens United. It won’t be easy, but it’s the most important thing we can do over the next two or three years. This one action alone will have a huge impact on, and must necessarily predate, positive action on pretty much every other issue."

Click on the link below for a concise video on this important historical decision that has to be overturned.

Citizens United Has Destroyed America: Why Is Nobody Talking About It?

The Coup Is Complete

Last night, the Republican Party was finally totally hijacked by the Trump/Christian Nationalist wing. Against the hope that the majority of Republicans would prevail over the radical minority in the vote for House Speaker, they UNANAMIOUSLY chose the worst of the worst of them, Mike Johnson.

In light of the above, the rest of the USA will be watching with much fear and trepidation for the Republican Party's attempt to fully control all branches and levels of government:

• "Red Caesar and Project 2025: A fascist fever dream being given a vaguely respectable coat of paint by the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation paving the way for an unconstrained, lawless, authoritarian Republican president."

• Wikipedia: Project 2025

Republicans Have A Correct Concern, But The Wrong Answers

The US national debt continues to get worse and neither political party nor many economists seem to treat it as the crisis it is. Traditionally, the Republican Party says that they are the fiscally responsible party but the image below belies that claim. With two wars going on and the US Congress (that controls the purse) deadlocked, it's more than time to shape up and get things in order financially. I have posted on this issue before but I thought that the article below presents data that emphasizes the crisis:

"According to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) measure of central government debt, the U.S. federal government is among the most indebted governments in the world. As of 2021 (the latest available data), federal debt reached 115 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), ranking 16th highest out of 164 countries for which the IMF has data. Japan tops the ranking with central government debt of 221 percent of GDP, followed by Greece, Sudan, Eritrea, and Singapore. Not long ago, the U.S. was among the least indebted countries. In 2001, U.S. federal debt was 42 percent of GDP, lower than debt levels found in 100 other countries."

How America’s Debt Problem Compares to Other Countries—and Why It Matters

Conservatives And Child Welfare

"Spanning the gamut of terrible policy choices and their impacts on children, we look today at the perverse reality at odds with conservatives' claim to be standing up for 'family values' and saving children from the abuse of Democrats."

Click on the link below for a podcast presenting the details of how, in many ways, conservatives are child abusers:

What Conservatives Think of When They Think of the Children