Monday, September 21, 2020

What Keeps Me Up at Night

Variations of this tweet are what run through my mind during the times at night when I am not asleep:

The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting. —William K. Wolfrum

Speaking of which, check out this thread from Dartmouth professor Jeff Sharlet about "patriotic education" and its connection to extreme forms of Christian fundamentalism, which are now being mainstreamed by evangelical Protestants in the Republican party (Betsy DeVos, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz) and connected with reactionary Catholics (Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Clarence and Ginni Thomas) around the idea of Dominionism.

I try to tell myself that maybe this Dominionism stuff is just the Left's version of Q or the Protocols of the Elder of Zion, and we're just being paranoid. But there seems to be a lot more evidence that it's true than there is for those conspiracy theories, such as the large number of rational adults — like journalist Lyz Lenz or writing professor Jared Yates Sexton — who say they were raised in fundamentalist households and attest that this is what people were taught and believed, and that leaders of the movement are trying to bring it to fruition.

 Whee! We don't have enough to worry about. We also have to have the Christian Taliban at work, too.


2 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

No, these people are real. In downstate Illinois, this is the air I breathe, at least sometimes. It goes with blanket training and parents raising a “quiverfull.” It’s up to the rest of us to be as defiant and irreverent and free-speaking as we can.

Daughter Number Three said...

Right, I know they're real, but as I was reading the linked Twitter threads, I was trying to look at what they were saying from "the other side" and it started to sound like a Left-wing conspiracy theory.