A Tale of Two Nations or One Nation Divided

Election day has passed, and the results are as fearful and ignominious as the political pundits predicted it would be if Trump were reelected. While I was surprised at the results, I wasn’t really shocked. I had already written an article recently about how we live in a world of stupid people. My opinion was corroborated by an interesting exit poll that was performed during the election. The results are quite easy to understand.

“According to the final NBC News poll of the 2024 race, 76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. The poll showed Harris winning among that group by 5 points over Donald Trump, 52%-47%.

But among the remaining quarter of voters who said they don’t follow politics closely, Trump was ahead by a much greater margin — 14 points, 54%-40%.”

What this exit poll indicates is that those who were engaged and followed public affairs voted to elect Harris as president, and not Donald Trump. While this an aggregate poll, it is likely to have helped Harris to win the battle-ground states and to be the president-elect. The other group couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to what was happening, and they didn’t seem to be disturbed by Trump and the fact that he was a convicted felon, attributed rapist, twice impeached, and attempted to overthrow the last election, as well as held and misused classified documents, jeopardizing our national security. This is a candidate who declared that he would order to set up detention camps for illegal aliens, sneered at the idea of upholding the constitution, and promised to function as a dictator on the first day of his presidency if elected. All of these items would have killed anyone else’s candidacy, and even the factor that he will soon be 80 years old and is obviously suffering from the beginnings of dementia did nothing to deter these low information voters from voting for him. The fact that Biden was pressured to drop out because of his age demonstrates how Trump always gets a pass for his speeches and weird behavior.

I am not questioning the intelligence of those who voted for him, but I am calling to attention their obvious lack of civic responsibility. Some of them ardently belong to the Trump cult of personality, and some of them are hardened right-wing aficionados or Christian Nationalists, but that would be only be around 30% of the electorate, so the rest are just plain too busy living their lives to really engage with their civic duty to be informed. Yes, in a word, these people are ignorant, and they are selfishly motivated to be this way. I can only hope that they rue the day they voted for Trump as president, and then, maybe if it's not too late, get more involved in knowing what is really happening to their country.

We are all going to be victimized by an angry, aggrieved Trump and his cadre of lick-spittle lackeys, but as for those who unwittingly voted for Trump, they bought it and they now own it. Hopefully, they will actually realize their folly so that things can be rectified in the next two election cycles. I won’t hold my breath expecting that to happen anytime soon, but I can at least hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

As you can no doubt see, I belong to the first group of people who are engaged and follow public affairs and politics closely. I live in a media world where I get my information from a number of different news sources including ones from Europe. Yet it seems that I live in a different country and hold ideas and beliefs that represent a stark contrast to what the average American believes.

My fellow Americans have always lionized the country hick, the urban troglodyte, and the hosts of average although stupid people as the “common man” over the intellectual, the academic, or the expert. In American culture, common sense was always considered to be of greater value than what was believed or expressed by scientists, academics, and experts, who have been classified as elitists. Uneducated folks were seen to possess common sense in greater amounts than those who were highly educated, and that being average and ill informed was a badge of honor. I believe that it is now revealed as our Achilles heel, and being ill informed in the advent of the cyber age is likely suicidal.

Americans seem to mistrust mainstream news outlets, and although they are all biased to some degree, using critical thinking skills can extract the truth from the bias. News that is based on conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation, inexpert opinions, hearsay or propaganda is not so easily parsed, especially if one possesses a woefully inadequate base of knowledge. In fact, it appears that most Americans are getting their news these days from news influencers instead of accredited news sources. Here is an interesting study of that phenomenon by Pew Research.

“A unique Pew Research Center study provides a deeper understanding of both the makeup of the news influencer universe and its audience. The project includes an in-depth examination of a sample of 500 popular news influencers and the content they produce, derived from a review of more than 28,000 social media accounts. We also conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans to better understand who regularly gets news from news influencers.

Key findings about news influencers

•    About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
•    News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).
•    Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
•    A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).
•    Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.”

I can tell you with all sincerity that I don’t trust news influencers, and in fact I use a factual and skeptical approach to viewing the news. Still, a large percentage of Americans get their news from You Tube, X, Instagram, Google News, Tiktok, or various other obviously tainted right-wing sources too numerous to list here. It has been suggested that reading and listening to news sources that are misleading or completely spurious can dumb-down a population. People who watch Fox News are so less informed than others who watch other networks and that they seem to be less intelligent over time. This kind of misinformation noise will make a national public less able to perform their civic duty, such as voting as a properly informed public, if one bothers to vote at all.

This is a calamity that is happening right now for all to see. And the biggest victims are young, single men, who are showing themselves as being the most gullible for hard right-wing propaganda. These are a group of people who over-all are less educated and underemployed, but who consume the internet media at a greater level than anyone else. They are also more likely to be single without much chance of finding a partner, and also having the means to buying their own home. What they have going for them is that they are W.A.S.P.s, and so there is a desperate need to maintain and expand their entitlement and white privilege, and Neo Nazi groups are happy to oblige and make them feel valued and important. They also get a nod from Donald Trump who they assume is like them. He has become a role model for what the underemployed white males see as the definition of a rich, entitled, and powerful man. Elon Musk is the same kind of role model for them, even though the very wealthy did not start out as poor folk. They had the benefits of being born into a position and were given financial help that greatly aided their pursuit of wealth and power.

All of these factors played a role in helping to elect Trump to a second term. Biden was poorly represented in the news, and his accomplishments and competent governance were fully ignored. Biden probably should have declared himself a one term president and then allowed the Democrats to vote for his replacement, instead of bowing out after undue pressure and giving his running mate only a hundred days to run for office. So some of the blame goes to Biden for making some poor choices and not promoting his accomplishments. The Democratic Party was also to blame for not promoting all of the things that they did during the last two terms to help the American people.

Exit polls showed that people had made up their mind much earlier about who they were going to vote for in the election, and that the electorate was angry about Covid19, the post pandemic inflation hike, the border crisis caused mostly by the instability in Venezuela and Haiti, and of course, the war in Gaza and Lebanon. It created a perfect storm of bad press for Biden, and dropped his approval levels to the high 30's. While Harris sought to overcome that headwind, she was not successful, largely due to a press that devalued her abilities and contributions. However, the greatest amount of blame goes to the low information and disengaged idiots who voted for Trump. Despite everything that went against Biden, and later Harris, Trump represented a far, far worse choice. And my stupid American brothers and sisters went ahead and voted for him because of various, unsupported and spurious reasons. They were angry, afraid, and blamed the incumbents, especially Democrats, and spitefully voted them out of office in sufficient numbers to give the Republicans a ruling trifecta. What awaits our nation will only truly benefit the oligarchy, the rest of us are going to be screwed royally.  

So why am I writing yet another politically inspired diatribe about the latest election that so dismayed me? Does it make any difference to the practice of magic, occultism, and being a Witch and a religiously polytheistic person? As a well-paid IT professional, will I feel the effects of four more years of the nihilistic wing of the Republican Party? The answer to all of those questions is a definitive yes! I am writing because I am concerned about our future nation, one which I love and respect, but also acknowledge as flawed and a work-in-progress. I believe that four years of Trump will be an even greater disaster than the first four years. My only hope is that his inherent incompetence and laziness, and the feckless stupidity of his minions, will attempt a grand scheme to make this country into a one party state, but who will fail in the end. I fervently hope that the incoming regime has only two years to do its worst before the midterms shut them down.

Those are my hopes, but my “hopium” has been severely challenged over the last ten years in a way that I never imagined it would. It is based on my optimistic belief in humanity and my fellow Americans. It is with this in mind that I face a future that is potentially darker and more desperate than I believed it would be, just because of one man and his sick, vindictive, and delusional pursuits, all in the name of making the world a better place just for him.

Still, millions of people voted for Trump and the Republican party, and the will of the people is now known. Many think that Trump is the lesser evil in our political civil war between the two parties. They see the Democrats as elitists and out of touch with the common folk, even though there are many of us, such as myself, who are not at all elitist who voted for them as the obvious choice. Trump has made his dystopian world view quite plain, and his plans for rectifying the ills of an imaginary failing country that doesn’t even exist will be far worse than the world we have at present. Many think that nothing really bad will happen, and that the Democrats have painted Trump as some kind of vicious and vile autocrat, when he is just an entertaining politician who likes to say crazy shit to shock the liberals. I disagree, it will be as bad or worse for the next two years, and maybe slightly better in the next two years, and maybe we will recover after the Trump presidency has finally ended. Democrats are always having to clean up the mess that Republicans make when attempting to govern. I hope that there is still be some semblance of a representational democracy in this nation when the Democrats get back into power.

So, just in case you still don’t believe that a Trump presidency will impact you and your family very much and you might be thinking that I am being too pessimistic about the future of our nation in the hands of Trump and his minions. Here is something to think about, and it’s coming to us all starting early next year.

“Trump has named three deportation hardliners to key positions in his administration, including Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, Kristi Noem for secretary of Homeland Security and Tom Homan as ‘border czar.’  

Miller is likely to be especially influential and especially brutal. [...]

...even ‘documented’ immigrants will not be safe, because Miller has declared that he will pursue the seldom-used process of ‘denaturalization’ to go after people who have been citizens for years or decades, based on suspicions about purported fraud on their naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of citizenship will then be subject to deportation along with Miller’s other targets.”

Everyone knows that immigrants and illegal aliens who work in this country take the jobs that nobody either wants or can manage on the very low wages that they are paid. Agriculture, construction, food processing, cleaning, janitorial and low-level maintenance, and many other jobs are performed by these people who faithfully perform these low paying jobs and don’t represent a threat to anyone. Take them out of the economy and you have some pretty steep inflation, when commodities, construction, cleaning and maintenance become too expensive or non-existent. Add tariffs into this toxic brew and you have a recipe for a very heavily impacted economy, certainly a recession, but maybe even a depression. Angry because of previous inflationary prices? A Trump economy might actually make prices drop after they go sky high, but by then no one will be able to afford the basics except for the rich.

This is just a preview of what is in store for us next year. Trump will have two years of unlimited power before the body politic realizes their mistake and punishes the Republican incumbents and possibly, changes the balance of power in Washington. A blue wave for the mid-terms would likely become a tsunami at the end of Trump’s final term in office. It is doubtful that anyone can replace him, and it is likely that the worst elements of our population will crawl back into the woodwork where they came. I can at least hope that is the outcome we will experience. Yet living with such stupid fellow Americans has taught me that the best possible outcome will likely be diluted or nonexistent as the siege of online disinformation continues without any kind of mitigation, and people become less curious and more ignorant.

Until that time of reckoning, I will live in one world, founded on facts, critical thinking, skepticism, and rational reasoning. It is a world of inclusion, love, unity, diversity, tolerance, and freedom; where my freedoms are guarded and guaranteed by government institutions and the fourth estate. My other fellow Americans will live in world founded on lies, epistemic closure, conspiracy beliefs, fear, loathing the “other,” exclusion, White Supremacy, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and unfounded hatred. It is a tale of two countries, divided by the ideals of light and darkness, compassion and anger. I believe that my concept of America will win over the other, darker and dystopian version; but what is left after four years of Trump, and how readily the damage will be fixed, is the great undecided question.

If this evil that “we the people” have evoked onto ourselves continues after Trump is gone, then those who are not white Christian Nationalists or their religious allies will find themselves in grave jeopardy and may have to either leave this once great country, or suffer unwarranted persecution, imprisonment and even execution. You’ve been warned, the outcome of our future is in the hands of stupid people, so let’s help them to understand that the future could be bright if we unite and give up fear and darkness and embrace the greater good.

Frater Barrabbas

Politics Influences Magical Practitioners

Once again we find ourselves participating in an election where the potential impact is existential to our republic. Yes, DJT has not disappeared after being fired by most of the American people almost four years ago. He has persisted simply because it is the most rewarding grift that he has been able to pull off. Why stop doing something that can make him so much money, and if he succeeds to regain the presidency, he could also eliminate most of his legal problems as well. It might even be possible that he could end our republic and replace it with an oligarchy governed authoritarian regime. While Trump himself is a cunning, unintelligent, and ruthless tyrant, he has individuals around him who more than make up for his errant stupidity. Still, at least 46% of the population will vote for him, and due to the electoral process, he might even win.

I have asked myself the question that is why do so many people like Donald Trump and would vote for him when he represents everything that is against the principals, norms and legal precepts of a representational democracy? He doesn’t care anything for those who are powerless and without material wealth, including his ardent followers. He is a typical rich asshole, and is only interested in those who could transactionally benefit him. He is the kind of lout that the fathers of our country worried about when they were formulating our republic and writing the constitution.

I have discovered for myself that the reason why some folks are MAGA adherents is because they find Trump and his over-the-top outrageous statements to be a great source of entertainment. They know that he isn’t a politician, but they identify with his grievances, paranoia, and fear, and they laugh at his crazy and deluded statements. He is a presidential version of the TV show “The Apprentice” and as long as the MAGA crowd is entertained, they will believe his lies, delusions and despicable racist and misogynist rantings. He is their mirror, and they see themselves in his beliefs and actions. He is also incredibly lucky and has been able to avoid self-destruction and incarceration through the most amazing occurrences and the help of various friends, allies and a system that favors the rich and famous.

However, I think that this time, Trump’s luck and being fortune’s favorite will fail to help him to regain his role as a world leader and banish the consequences of his illegal activities and felonious proclivities. I believe that Trump will fail to be elected president again, and he will then succumb to the various indictments that have been levied against him for his nefarious activities. Trump will fall, but he will also cause many others to fall with him. He may even bring down the entire Republican party. Of course, that is not a reason to be complacent, we need to ensure that this event does happen.

Meanwhile, between now and then, before that pivotal moment which I believe will trigger Trump’s fall, there is something of a concerning and nail-biting period of worry and insecurity. This is because, I, as a ritual magician and a practicing and even public Witch, have much to be deeply concerned and worried about a potential Trump electoral victory. Thinking about the nation remade by Trump’s minions is a fearful exercise, since I am one of the vulnerable populations living in our country. This change, and the institution of Project 2025, will profoundly affect many people, but occultists, pagans, witches and magicians will be especially vulnerable to a renewal of persecution and even forms of penal punishments. I suspect that those who are part of the various LGBTQ communities and other minorities will also suffer under a Trump regime. That is why we must as a group, vote against Trump and the entirety of the Republican Party and act as if each our votes are critically important, because truth be told, they are.

If you think that Trump’s rhetoric is just an empty threat, and that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been disowned by him, you should seriously rethink your position. In 2016, after Trump won the election, the Heritage Foundation came out with a set of directives in a document named “2016 Mandate for Leadership” and Trump’s administration managed to institute over two thirds of those directives. It is inconceivable that Trump would ignore the directives of 2025, since they were developed by his former administration officials and were guided by Trumps beliefs and rhetoric. Project 2025 is a vision of a MAGA American where there is little or no room for those of us who do not represent the ultraconservative mainstream. Let me quote a paragraph written by Beau Breslin from the Boston Globe, who has pretty much defined what that remaking of a MAGA America would look like, influenced by Project 2025.

“If actualized, Project 2025 envisions a nation where abortion is universally outlawed, free exercise of religion is enjoyed only by certain worshippers [sic], procedural safeguards for the accused are relaxed, previously protected categories of speech are reconsidered, diversity initiatives are forbidden, environmentally conscious programs are shuttered, same-sex couples are threatened, drag shows are banned, and true stories of our racist past are ignored. It’s not a pretty place for the tens of millions of citizens whose identities are affected, or for the tens of millions more who align with these voiceless neighbors.”

Of course, I would consider myself amongst those ten of millions whose identities are affected and have been made voiceless by a vicious, ruthless, and aggressive ultraconservative minority. Anyone who espouses or practices an occult, pagan or witchcraft tradition would be highly vulnerable to this theocratic regime. It is like the book “Handmaid’s Tale” where a pluralistic nation becomes a theocratic religious tyranny. While that might be extreme, it is what the majority of the Supreme Court envisages for our nation, and it is what Project 2025 is vigorously seeking to promote, which is a unitarian president with the total powers of authoritarianism. Wittingly or unwittingly, they all seek the end of our democratic republic, because somehow, democracy is bad, especially when your party loses.

You might be asking yourself, why does Trump seek to undue the bonds of democracy and put into its place a religious autocracy? The strange truth is that Trump doesn’t care or even understand the nature of the job of a unitarian president. He is seeking the abrogation of his many indictments and his own enrichment. For Trump, it is personal and transactional. He will leave the hard part of governing and dismantling the laws and powers of the constitution of the United States to others simply because he wants to be kept an unaccountable, powerful and a wealthy oligarch. He has proven himself to be a failure at every business venture that he has undertaken except one, the grift and empowerment of a corrupt and power-hungry political minority that is the Republican Party. Trump has broken that political party, and he intends to break our democratic republic, all simply for the power to help himself to the wealth of this nation.

I know that some who call themselves Pagans, Witches, Magicians, Mystics, or Occultists find politics to be worldly and boring, that both parties seem to be the same and therefore, they do not engage and vote as a way of expressing their disdain for all forms of politics. However, the last three elections, including this one, have been quite different. Not voting, or voting for the Republicans and therefore, voting for Trump goes against our steadfast requirement for freedom of religion and the press, which would protect us from unwanted prosecution. If Trump gets reelected, you can be certain that those rights will disappear for anyone who is not the proper kind of religious adherent. It might even affect Jews, Mormons, Catholics, and anyone else who is not a member of a conservative Protestant Christian church. It will certainly impact those of us who are not members of that kind of ultraconservative Christian movement.

Then there is the positive messages of Harris and Waltz, with the hope and freedom that such an alternative choice offers us. The difference is quite stark! On one hand is a dystopian failed nation state full of grievances and the desire for racist redetermination and ethnic cleansing, and on the other hand, a nation that has a place for everyone, including immigrants, and treats everyone equally, allowing for diversity, freedom of speech and religious practice. The choice is really that simple. I am not saying that there are problems and issues both within our country and in how we deal with the world, but at least with Harris and Waltz, there will be the opportunity to make our nation and the world a better place. With Trump, that is not a possibility, as he has made abundantly clear in his various rally rants and word-salad speeches.

So, we need to step up and vote! I have already voted, but I would like my sisters and brothers to vote when they can and help move the nation past the dark vision and potential tyranny of Donald J. Trump. Never give in to complacency, cynicism, or disdain for politics, since our freedoms depend on being vigilant and active.

Frater Barrabbas

The Worst of Times

Welcome to the Oligarchy!

I have been holding back since the election, for obvious reasons, to say anything about what happened on November 8. In my previous article I warned against the incipient fascism of Donald Trump and urged my readers to vote against him and the kind of regressive policies and overt mendaciousness that he and his followers represent to our body politic. I had hoped that enough people would see Trump for who he was, and reject him as completely unfit for the highest office in our country. The fact that Trump narrowly won the presidential election is a calamity that will profoundly impact us for decades to come. I predict that we will look back at this time as the beginning of the worst of times for most of us.

We, as a nation, have chosen someone who is so unprepared and unfit to be president that we cannot emerge from this catastrophe with our nation completely intact. He and his minions will do considerable damage to our country and our way of life, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deceiving themselves. A Trump presidency represents the end of the struggle of the people against an American oligarchy. Those who are not obscenely wealthy will also not prevail in this new order, and those who are powerless and vulnerable will be egregiously hurt regardless of color, economic condition or region. The promises made by Trump to his political followers will be shown to be false and merely convenient rhetoric, to be changed and conformed in a manner that will uniquely benefit his class. The rest of us are more or less, screwed.

So, what happened? How is it that the Democratic party was defeated when the pollsters were predicting a narrow victory for them? Who is to blame for this debacle? Certainly, what happened was unusual and unique. For Hillary Clinton it was a perfect storm of weighted political obstruction, media persecution, misogyny, outright lies, misinformation, faux scandals and even foreign intervention. None of this excuses her and her campaign for the responsibility for losing what was supposed to be a hard won victory. If anything, the election of 2016 was the year of outsiders and populist based change, at least for the presidency. Trump managed to promote himself as the populist outsider, and he narrowly won the Electoral College based on that messaging.

The Clinton campaign started out with the wrong message, since she was as an elite insider with little popular appeal outside of the Democratic Party. If she would have been smart and understood the popular consensus happening then she would have concluded that her time for running a successful campaign was in 2008 and not 2016. Things have changed in the last eight years, and Democrats needed a credible outsider populist to defeat Donald Trump. It is difficult to state whether anyone in the Democratic Party could have filled that role, even Bernie Sanders, when dealing with an overall rejection and dissatisfaction with the current administration. While President Obama is relatively popular at the end of his eight year term, his policies, both foreign and domestic are not so popular, either with the political left or the right. Perhaps it is nothing more or less than the dissatisfaction that typically happens to a President through the duration of two terms. The fact that Obama had incurred the wrath and disdain of a large swath of the conservative electorate, most likely because he was the first black president, and that this groundswell of anger was enabled and encouraged by Trump is one of the main factors that I attribute to his victory.

We also need to keep in mind that the outsider populist ploy didn’t apply to the rest of the election results, as the victory of Republicans in many of their local and state-wide elections showed the proclivity of the electorate for the conservative status quo. Now we have two branches of government under control of the Republicans, and the third, the courts, will soon follow suite. We can also expect that all of the moderate policies and progressive gains that were established in the last eight years will be reversed. We might also see such safety net programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security also eliminated, not to mention insurance reform via the AHCA. We will also likely see the end of government regulations that have safely guarded our public resources, consumables and also protected us from the avarice and mendaciousness of corporations.

Even though the Republicans have scored a very modest electoral victory in 2016, where Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin and his Electoral College win was by a slim majority in three rust-belt states, not to mention that a few senate and congressional seats were lost to the Democrats, they have decided to push forward massive changes to our way of life. They have absolutely no mandate, but they will engage in overreach because that is what they do. If they successfully eliminate most of social service programs as they appear poised to do, then the resultant pain and suffering that such actions will produce will be completely their own work. If they make a wreck of our nation and its economy, and Trump engages in some incredibly stupid foreign policy blunders that humiliate us to the whole world, then you can expect that those misguided folks who voted for these clowns will likely change their opinions about where their real economic and social interests lie. The Republican majority may very well find itself defeated by its own ambitions and hubris, and when the American people have had enough, they will turn against those in power.

It will be at that point in time that the Democrats will field a cadre of progressive politicians led by an outsider populist presidential candidate. We will see the entrenched right-wing politicians and their supporting alt-right minions get annihilated in the pols. I think that people by that time will have had more than enough right-wing rhetoric, lies and deceit and they will finally see the results of the oligarchy coup that has dominated them since the early 2000's. They will rightly hate what has become of our nation and they will use the power of their vote to overrule and destroy this cabal. The Republicans will undergo an electoral shellacking, and they will likely lose control over congress and the presidency. This might even start happening in the 2018 elections, but I have my doubts about that happening so soon. 

My only question is how long will this take? How much damage will Trump and the Republican party do to our country and the world. How much more inequality, injustice, neglect, disenfranchisement will people take before acting against the real status quo. Will it be soon enough to make a difference, or will voter suppression and other legal mechanisms be employed to ensure the perpetuation of this offensive and destructive oligarchy. Will I even live to see the day when this terrible tide will be reversed? Until this situation changes, we will be steadily and regressively pushed back until all of the social changes that produced the Middle Class are completely eradicated, and new Gilded Age will resume for the ultra-wealthy elite. We will be forced to engage them only as a service class of slaves, to be exploited until no longer needed. Until that time of progressive change and the renewal of our social contract, we will be living in the worst of times.

Frater Barrabbas

Standing at a Political Precipice

We are definitely living in interesting times, unfortunately for us. The 2016 U.S. election campaign for president has been one of the strangest that I have witnessed in my lifetime. I have seen and recalled fifteen of them, so I have something to compare against. We have on one side of the two-party divide a long-time politician of notable experience and achievement, although not without some negative public disapproval, and on the other side we have a self-proclaimed messianic businessman without any political experience or achievement. Some have said that Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, is the most unprepared and unfit individual to ever run for a national political office. However, he seemed to easily defeat over 16 other political opponents and became the most controversial and divisive candidate ever nominated to a political office, at least in my memory. So, there must be a reason why he has been such a successful candidate so far.

We are used to politicians mostly talking and behaving in a genteel and polite manner. When they don’t, it’s considered a verbal gaffe. It can actually doom the one who commits it to political obsolescence. When conservative politicians speak to their political base they tend to do it using insinuations and innuendoes, which the press calls “dog whistles” even though most people understand what was really being said. Now, we have a presidential candidate who comes right out and says what’s on his mind at the moment, although what has been communicated so far is vile, racist, bigoted, crass, and demeaning. He bullies his opponents, incessantly brags about himself and talks about making America great again. What he is really talking about is making America a place where white privilege can be made irreversibly prominent, just like it was before the Civil Rights era. This message is a kind of opiate for some people, and that is why he has been so successful in his campaign up to this point.

To those of us who are opposed to Trump’s message and who find him a vulgar and ignorant plutocrat, we are mystified as to how anyone could support and vote for him. He is obviously so transparent, at least to us, in his naked lust for power, his need for public adoration and his not so subtle personal avarice that not to see him as such, at least to us, is just short of astonishing. However, there were quite a number of people who voted for him in the primaries and who attended his rallies, where all sorts of disturbing and angry displays of loathing, fear and hatred were on display. This is still occurring at Trump’s rallies for the general election.

What could possibly have happened over the years in our nation that has made part of the population succumb to such angry and outrageous displays of racism, misogyny and bigotry? Why do people eagerly support a man who is so clearly unfit and unprepared to be president of the United States? Has part of our population gone completely mad, making them unable to dispassionately and critically see through the lies and deception that the would-be emperor Trump has no clothes? However, if over a third of the population of the country sees something relevant and meaningful in what this man represents, and that it emotionally resonates with them, then it is doubtful that they are mad. They are more likely deceived, or more accurately, deceiving themselves out of a scornful need to be heard and their grievances given due consideration.

Arlie Russell Hochschild has penned a thoughtful and insightful article that recently appeared in “Mother Jones” entitled, “I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You.” In that article, the author spent five years performing research in the heart of Dixie, most notably in the state of Louisiana, where she met and interviewed many of the very people that support Donald Trump for president. While their reasons might vary from person to person, each of them had specific grievances about the way the country was being run, its current course and likely future. She noted that people are pessimistic about the future, and that many have personally experienced a profound decline in their standard of living over the last couple of decades. They have a steadfast belief on how things should be that is in stark contradiction to the way things are, but they see the source of their dilemma as the loss of social privilege and the intercession of the Federal Government in helping blacks, immigrants and other minorities at their expense.

While it is true that the manufacturing infrastructure has more or less collapsed in various parts of the Southeast and the Midwest, depleting local economies of good paying jobs, those affected don’t see their problems as the result of the forces of economic transition and the arising of a global economy. They see the rich and powerful as members of an exclusive club that they too, because of their race and its intrinsic privileges, should be able to join through hard work, education and self-improvement. The fact that such efforts have been thwarted and shown to be fruitless is the whole basis of their pessimism and malaise. To them, the U.S. has already fallen from its greatness and is now controlled by liberal-minded political elites and their various constituents. The common blue collar worker seems to have no voice or consideration in the political process whatsoever. This, of course, belies the fact that for the last several years the Republicans have controlled the House, and the Senate for more than two years. The obstacle appears to them to be the doings of the President, the Federal bureaucracy and some of the Federal courts.   

The author talked to a lot of people and she was able to distill their perspective about America in the following brief narrative. 

“You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.”

There are quite a few problems with this story, but the most striking is that the “unmoving line” is immobile for two reasons not at all implied by the thinking behind it. The first is that the wealthy 1% are already at the destination - the American Dream - and they are the one’s who have effectively worked against the possibility of social and economic mobility. The “line of people” is unmoving because the 1% have taken steps to frustrate mobility and to ensure that they maintain their status as the wealthy and powerful. Secondly, immigrants typically start at or near the bottom, since in most cases they come to this country with very little capital and lack the ability to immediately integrate into our economy. There are some who come here because they have a desired expertise, such as medical doctors or IT specialists, but these are a minority. Still, all immigrants ultimately have to go through the process of legally becoming citizens, which is neither easy nor quick.

Also, the tax dollars that are supposedly being largely redistributed to the poor are actually going into the pockets of the wealthy. What is given to the poor and disfranchised by the Government is really a pittance when compared to what is given to the rich. Finally, ensuring some degree of economic equality has been part of the American psyche only since the 1930's. What all people really want is a level playing field and a chance to earn their way, slowly and steadily, into the economic classes above them. This kind of mobility gives them a goal and an incentive to work and better themselves. Hope encouraged by fairness is the counter force to despair and neglect.

Additionally, the “people standing in the middle of a line” assumes a kind of ranking based on the level of privilege that one is born into, and is only occasionally and easily abrogated by someone who is more intelligent or capable than the average person standing in line. That ranking has to do with one’s economic situation and also, unfortunately, race, ethnicity and less so, one’s religion. This isn’t a meritocracy, as far as assumptions go (even though the American Dream would assume that it is all a meritocracy), so when someone who is gifted or has specific talents achieves the American Dream before the others supposedly standing in line ahead of him, those who are still in line are justifiably envious and resentful. This is particularly true when that person is not a proper white Protestant Christian. A black man in the White House seems like an ironic and terrible inversion of the proper order of things, which is based on the privileges and prerequisites of the white Christian populace. These assumptions are ridiculous because the real opponents to the middle and lower classes aren’t the same people who are part of those classes, but who look different or practice a different religion. The truth is that we are united in our new-found victimization caused by social oppression and economic stasis. The real opponents are the wealthy 1% who are seeking to protect their wealth and power by making certain that the rest of the classes are kept in their place whatever the means. 

       

We should also keep in mind that this social and economic mobility (called the American Dream) is a recent phenomenon in the history of the U.S. It really began at the start of WWII when the Great Depression effectively ended. That mobility began to slow down during the early 1980's and for most people, ended completely in the late 90's. Social and economic mobility was not something that was an expected feature of American culture, from it’s founding in the 18th century and through the middle of the 20th century. The status quo meant that the rich and powerful were the privileged “better folk,” and the teaming masses of the lower classes were meant to be servants and laborers for the upper class. That attitude began to disappear when government and unions joined together to deal with the issues of economic and social inequality during the 1930's. It was due to progressive policies that became the law of the land as put forth by FDR and Congress that actually changed this equation. Prior to the 1930's there really wasn’t a true middle class in the U.S. Most people were essentially blue-collar laborers, and only a few had college educations. That radically changed in the 1930's, but it wasn’t until the 1940's that economic equality and fairness began to become a reality. It was also a time when the top wages also had very high tax brackets. Those high tax brackets continued through the 1950's and helped fund the Federal Government to make massive changes to the nation’s infrastructure, such as the Interstate Freeway system, the space race, the military build up of the Cold War, and many other major changes that benefitted nearly everyone. Government spending was the great mover that pushed corporations and state and local governments to achieve great and lasting changes, many of which we take for granted today.

Since the 1980's things have been going the other way, as wages for the 85% stagnated, and it finally caught up to the rest of us so that only the top 1% have achieved all of the wage and wealth increases for the past 20 years. This change is not coincidental, since it was fostered by crafty legislation bought and paid for by wealthy corporations and individuals through their lobbyist handlers and political operatives. It would seem that some of the wealthy and powerful have an agenda; they want to put the middle class back in the bottle with the lower classes where they resided previously. Fundamentally, it doesn’t make much economic sense overall because if the middle and lower classes don’t have much in the way of disposable income then they will hardly be able to buy anything except the basics. That would seriously diminish our economy, which is based after all on consumerism. It isn’t rational, but it is very human for those on top to ensure that they remain on top by controlling and suppressing those who are below them. That kind of economic feudalism was a staple of Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century, but it had been eliminated (so we thought) in the 1930's.

You see, the wealthy belong to an exclusive club and they really don’t want the rest of the citizens of the U.S. to be able to reap the rewards of our corporatist society as they did, and thereby become members of that exclusive club - making it not so exclusive. That would dilute their wealth and power! Now, the road to the American Dream is just empty rhetoric, and it has been functionally a myth since the 1970's. There was a brief period when our country saw a tremendous movement of multi-generational social and economic mobility that gave people a sense of purpose and hope. Prior to that the lower classes had to know their place in life and live within the status quo. So, it would seem that there are social and political forces that are pushing the U.S. back to the way things were before the American Dream and economic equality gave the lower classes a sense of hope and purpose to their lives.

If we wish to reinstate that upward economic mobility that we briefly experienced as a people after WWII then we need to unite and fight the 1% on both the political and economic fronts. If we are divided by bigotry and racism then we will only make ourselves more vulnerable so we can be manipulated and controlled by the rich. There is still a chance to make our nation a better and more fair place to live and work in. We can, by being united, fight to get the line moving again so that many more Americans can achieve the American Dream. This is because we are stronger, obviously, when we work together as a people than when we are divided.

This brings me to talk a bit more about Donald J. Trump and his campaign for president. I won’t talk about the typical and usual complaints about his supposedly policy ideas, nor his rather vulgar and obnoxious perspectives when it comes to people who are racially, ethnically, or religiously different than the typical WASP American. In fact there is very little of any kind of substantive policy that the Trump campaign is actually promoting. Still, Donald Trump has arrived on the political scene as the savior of the supposedly disenfranchised white working class. He alone can single-handedly change the national economic equation so that the declining middle class (of privileged white people) will once again thrive, or so he has declared to one and all.

It is curious to note that while Trump vilifies non-white and non-Christian folk, he isn’t talking about getting rid of the very programs that are helping the economically disadvantaged white middle and lower classes, such as food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of public relief. He has, therefore, subtlety made it acceptable for these white people to feel good about taking Government assistance as long as it is given to their privileged race. Trump has said that he will bring back all of the good paying jobs lost over the last few decades, although such a promise is unrealistic and empty. He is called the Blue Collar Billionaire simply because he is vulgar, ignorant, brash, ostentatious and intemperate. However, Trump was born of the wealthy elite, and he is just as interested in keeping himself that way whatever the consequences. He is also a ruthless, thoughtless, bullying, mendacious and dishonest businessman, which is hardly a model that our country needs to assist it to overcome the current crisis. Anyone who thinks that Trump is our potential savior has succumbed to their own wishful thinking, since even a cursory glance shows that he is everything that is wrong with our country today.

Those who are planning on voting for him because they think that he will restore prestige to the white race are just fooling themselves. If anything, once in power, Donald Trump would enable the previously promoted Republican legislative agenda of completely gutting the government sponsored safety-net, thereby rolling back all of the perks for the indigent and working poor, not to mention those who are aged and retired. It would represent the final nail in the coffin for the lower and middle classes, since not only would the poor be screwed, but the rest of the middle class as well. They would be forced to pay greater amounts of their income as taxes to offset the massive tax breaks given to the 1%. It would turn our country into a dystopia of Libertarian neglect and selfishness, similar to such great failed states in our global hemisphere as Guatemala or Honduras. The only way that the rich could maintain this social structure would be to enforce a rigidly controlled police state backed by a regime consisting of aggressive authoritarianism. None of us would be safe or secure within that nightmarish scenario, and I suspect the rest of the world would feel a bit frightened as well. The only ones who would be safe and secure would be rich and powerful, and such a regime, once established, would be difficult to either circumvent or overcome.

A Trump presidency with the Republicans fully in power would create a nation where only the elite or the occasionally gifted (white) individual would be able to achieve the American Dream. For the rest of us, we would be living the American Nightmare, where any avenue to self-improvement or economic mobility would be completely shut down. Colleges would be too expensive to even consider attending, and the economic classes would be closed to anyone who aspired to greater things. Entrepreneurism, inventiveness, creativity, and futuristic envisioning would be completely suppressed, replaced by a static and strictly ordered society where the workers would be completely enslaved by their corporate masters. Democracy would be a wistful dream, since the power to make laws and enforce them would be solely in the hands of the rich and their instruments of enforcement, the police and the military. Some would be given undreamed of privileges in this dark world, while the masses would be severely restricted. Gone also would be our representational form of political government, our constitution and our freedoms as outlined in the Bill of Rights. That means that all of those most important amendments, from the 1st to the last, including the so-called “sacred” Second, would be abrogated. Cartels that hold absolute power cannot tolerate any social phenomenon that might ignite a possible rebellion. The people would fear their government, and that fear would be the key to keeping the lid on any kind of dissent or counter movement. That, in my opinion, is the terrifying ultimate conclusion to the right-wing fever dreams for some of the wealthy and powerful players backing the Trump political phenomenon. It would be the dawn of a Fascist America, where inequality and coerced anonymity would reign from sea to dismal sea.

Think that I my words are hyperbolic about this crisis that besets our nation? Look at the people who are eagerly promoting Trump’s campaign. The Republican Party seems to have been taken over by the fringe politicos of the far-right wing. When Trump made Stephen Bannon his campaign CEO, who was the chairman of the ultra-right wing online news site, Breitbart News, it seemed that he was going all in on the fringe right-wing political perspective. Breitbart News is an organization that has been labeled a right wing hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, declaring it as the “media arm of the alt-right.” This is a new term for an old social malignancy consisting of extreme nationalism, racism and bigotry. You can find that article here. Trump is also cultivating and enabling the support of such fringe right-wing radio stars such as Alex Jones, who is considered one of the most prolific right-wing conspiracy mongers in our country. You can see what the SPLC has to say about him at this web page.

The Wall Street Journal, a steady conservative news outlet, has defined the alt-right movement as one that completely rejects mainstream conservatism and seeks to replace it with white nationalism, where any form of multiculturalism or immigration is considered threatening to the white social identity. Bannon is not someone who wants to unify the Republican Party as much as he wants to destroy it completely, and then replace it with a form of American fascism. Now that he is the head of Trump’s campaign, he is bringing into the mainstream what should have been kept at the very fringes of our society, where it can become a powerful social force. The press isn’t really being very critical of this movement yet, nor are they making any critical judgements of this troubling situation occurring in a presidential campaign. It is a frightening escalation of a process that seems to be “goose stepping” our nation into a cloudy future. We must, armed with our votes, reject this emerging dangerous political situation by voting against Donald Trump and his down ticket supporters. It is hoped that a humiliating election defeat will force the Republican Party to reject fascism and move more towards the political center. However, I believe that it will be a close election, and this emerging social power of the alt-right will be a major problem for our nation long after Trump has faded into the history books.   

This is what the right-wing wealthy plutocrats have in mind for our nation, and it has become nearly an unstoppable force in our culture today, simply because it has stealthily emerged into a kind of respectability to those people whose grievances makes them credulous and easily manipulated. Donald J. Trump is just a manifestation of this problematic body politic, but it can and must be stopped before it becomes fully realized at the voting booth. This is why I will be voting for the Democrats in the fall to help make this a wave election. They are certainly not the ideal party, but the stark differences between them and the Republicans couldn’t be more pronounced at this time. As a pagan and a witch, I find Trump to be quite disturbing and inimical to my interests. We, as a united people, this time need to truly vote our economic and political interests, since only this kind of conscientious counter-measure can actually thwart the looming take-over long in the planning by the alt-right and their wealthy sponsors.

Frater Barrabbas

New Normal - An Impoverished Future

Recently, Jason posted a blog article that pretty much said what I have been brooding about for quite some time. What Jason has stated is that the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 has so pounded most people around the world that the new future view is one that is a lot poorer and less bright than it might have been. You can find Jason’s article here. I would like to add some actual figures to this argument to show that he’s correct about his assumptions. The financial situation is not going to improve at some point in the future simply because the amount of wealth that has been vaporized out of the economy recently is so great that it will take a very long time to replace. What this means is that the job market, the real-estate market, and the ability for many to retire early has been irreparably changed, and not for the good. Hunkering down and waiting for the crisis to blow over is actually wishful thinking. The situation for the middle and lower classes isn’t going to improve for many years to come (if it does at all), and we are going to have to adjust our plans to accommodate to that dismal fact.

Let me put some real numbers to Jason’s claim and demonstrate that what he’s saying is absolutely correct! It’s just that many of us haven’t adjusted to this new reality, but looking at the numbers is quite sobering. According to an online article in the Center for American Progress, the U.S. economy between June 2007 and March 2009 lost 19.4 trillion dollars. You can find that article here. According to that article, over 6.4 trillion dollars were lost just in the housing market alone. That’s a lot of money that has disappeared out of the economy in such a short period of time. It is comparable although not quite the same as another crisis endured by my father’s generation, which was the Great Depression. Additionally, not everyone were losers during the recent period of seismic decline, since the really sharp and savvy investors either knew what was coming and prepared for it, or they were bailed out by the government. Some few individuals even made a huge amount money off of the market’s decline. The rest of us little people saw their retirement portfolios diminish profoundly, or lost their jobs and their homes during this terrible time. That much money leaving the market will have very dire and long term effects on all of us who are neither wealthy nor powerfully connected.

Many of the members of the “Boomer” generation won’t be able to retire in their late 50's or early 60's like their parents did because they lost too much of their retirement investments and savings. This will make the competition for jobs even more difficult, since there will be fewer people retiring to make room for the next generation.  For those who became part of the permanently unemployed, the future outlook is extremely bleak. Because vulture capitalists (like Mitt Romney and his ilk) have outsourced and off-shored, and pretty much destroyed, most of the manufacturing infrastructure in the U.S., there aren’t a lot of good paying jobs to soak up this labor surplus. Those who have jobs will take all sorts of abuse and stress, and even have to swallow a reduction of benefits, pay and vacation time just to keep what they have. This scenario will only make the rich even richer, and the rest of us will become nothing more than the unwilling members of the working poor.

What is most amazing about the world that we live in now is that the very wealthy 1% play by a different set of rules that exclude the rest of us, and these rules are rigged to ensure that they remain wealthy and fully empowered. While the average working stiff is lectured about being completely and altruistically ethical and loyal to his or her employers, the ruling class is able to bend or even distort the rules so that they can literally get away with lying, cheating and even legally pillaging what little money or material security the middle class has left. We are living in a plutocracy and a kleptocracy where the rich and powerful call all the shots, and the rest of us are doomed to follow them. The wealthy 1% believe that they are entitled to their role as the petty gods of a rigged economy, and they are given the tools and rules to steal from the rest of us. It would almost seem that they are seeking to enslave us for the sake of a little handshake of gold.

This is a very old story, and one that our great grandparents bitterly experienced well before labor unions and pension funds made work tolerable and retirement possible. Yet the dirty little secret is that we are not completely helpless. What we can do about this growing social problem is to fight back and empower ourselves at their expense. So it would seem that Magick is even more important in this tightening world economic drama, and it can and should be used to help, in whatever way possible, to even the playing field with those who have rigged the system in their favor. As Jason has stated in his article, all of us have at least some creative knack or ability, and we should use that to invent or create something that gives us a boost in these trying and difficult times. If nothing else, this is a time where all of us should be prepared to retool and reinvent ourselves. This is no time to be complacent!

Certainly, not voting for corporatist politicians whatever political party they espouse would be a good start to regaining some power and say in the national discourse. (This is one of the reasons that I have found the whole Republican party to be toxic and completely inimical to the economic interests of the middle class.) So would occasionally joining a massive protest movement that gets a lot of press, decrying the social injustice that economic marginalization has caused the middle class. We don’t have to support the rich who want to rule us as aristocrats, and we can find a certain solidarity in the fact that there are far more of us than there are of them. If many of us who are middle class magicians can find a common cause with each other, then maybe we can start projecting some of our combined magick powers to changing the world from the course that it seems destined to follow. However, since most magicians are rather insular and anarchistic, this is probably just a whim on my part, which will never become realized.

Still, I am making these suggestions because I really see an economic class war already in progress, and we of the middle class are the ones who are being brutalized and marginalized. All we have to do in order to throw a boot into the machine and halt its progress is to just opt out of the system and live by our wits and creative genius. Instead of hunkering down, hoping that things change, or even trying to find common ground with those who would seek to enslave us, we should just adapt and make our lives commercial free and distinct from the rat race that seems about to overcome us. Magick is, I believe, the key to a true spiritual and economic revolution, and I think that our country is long over due for this kind of change.

Frater Barrabbas