Some of our members have received a flier in the mail from a Lee’s Summit area politician who is running for the fourth district seat in the US House of Representatives. He says that he is running for “Congress,” presumably to keep from confusing his constituents with the details of how the US government works; it’s extremely vague, but accurate. Boone County (including all of Columbia) is part of the fourth district, as is a huge amount of rural territory, which effectively eliminates the influence of liberal Columbia on the choice of Representative for the fourth district. The fourth district reaches all the way to the Kansas border, and stops just south of Lee’s Summit. (Looks like the candidate probably lives in or near Harrisonville.)
The flier is a treasure trove of today’s fascist dog whistles. A dog whistle calls out to an entire body of knowledge, making it an excellent form of communication — and also extremely hard to counter. To counter a dog whistle, you have to counter the entire body of knowledge it represents. Of course, I’m not saying that Bill Irwin is a fascist; I’m just commenting on the fact that the content of this flier is extremely similar to what a fascist would say.
Irwin is “the fighter”. Coincidentally, fascists always portray themselves as under attack, even though, typically, they are the ones attacking and any kind of politics aimed against them is typically defensive. As an example, the whole reason Pride month (with the barrage of pro-LGBTQ+ events and messaging) exists is specifically because LGBTQ+ people were being victimized by fascists (still happening), and yet, fascists still try to turn this around and say that Pride (and all it encompasses) somehow makes them into victims. If people didn’t want to hear about LGBTQ+ people so much, they could have just not attacked them in the first place.
There are seven major points on the front of this flier. Let’s take a look at each of them. The order won’t be the same as it is on the flier.
Preserving Our Constitutional Freedoms
According to the flier, “The radical left is waging an all-out assault on our freedoms. I swore an oath to defend our constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. I will not back down from this fight.” Neat. OK, first off, there are no representatives of the radical left anywhere in the US government. It’s not clear who he would be referring to, but based on the information on his website and information about the church he attends (Abundant Life in Lee’s Summit), we can see that he subscribes to the “one-world government” conspiracy theory wherein Satanists (who in other places have also been described as socialists, Jews, and other hobgoblins of the far-right mind) are secretly manipulating things to create an anti-Christian, united world government that will treat white people the way they have historically treated everyone else. This would be the Christian version of the one-world government conspiracy theory, but there’s very significant overlap with the racist version.
Related: The Other Fascists
In truth, the globalists fighting for control of the world, minimizing the power of individuals, and impairing democracy at every turn are… capitalists. They have nothing to do with the left. However, when you’re standing on the far right edge of the map, everything else probably seems like the extreme left.
On his website, Irwin identifies the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitutions as representing freedoms that are under threat from these supposed radical leftists.
From the perspective of the far right, the First Amendment is under threat because market forces are working to convince corporations (and, more importantly, the capitalists who own them) to marginalize far-right opinions and culture. The fascists want those corporations to be required to allow fascists to use their private property (e.g., social networking websites) to promote their ideas (including genocide).
While anti-discrimination laws are Constitutional, the interesting detail here is that you can’t use anti-discrimination logic to force a publishing platform to promote discrimination. You also can’t use it to force a publishing platform to promote lies, falsehoods, or violence. The First Amendment protects the right of Christians to promote Christianity on Facebook, for example, but not to promote the idea that liberals are pedophilic crypto-Satanists who drink the blood of babies, and therefore must be killed. Fascists understand this, and that’s why they convert their introductory-level ideas to vague narratives that can’t be clearly identified as genocidal.
As a leftist pro-gun organization, we clearly sympathize with Irwin’s concern about his Second Amendment rights. However, the way the left sees the Second Amendment is fundamentally different from how fascists see it. The left is about punching up — the weak defending themselves against the powerful. In contrast, the right is about punching down — attacking the weak before they can get organized enough to defend themselves or take control.
In either case, they are going to need military weapons to do it; that is the essence of how they see the Second Amendment. As was the case with the January 6 insurrectionists and the murderer in Buffalo, they assume that most of the military and police will be on their side (they might be right; Irwin is former military, for example). Most of them live outside of urban areas and literally believe that there will be some Event that will start the Apocalypse, and then dark-skinned people will stream out of the cities into the surrounding suburbs and rural areas to murder everyone. Someone tried to make a joke about this on Twitter in 2017, and it got entirely out of hand because the joke perfectly corresponded with what “conservatives” actually believe.
Break Up Woke Corporations
Our capital-controlled society has decided that a corporation is a person and just as the far right would execute actual human people who oppose their ideology, they of course also would execute corporations who oppose their ideology. The way we execute a corporation is by destroying its legal existence — breaking it up or decorporating it. The far right goal is that any legal person who refuses to support the far right agenda will be executed. Those that support the far right agenda would probably get some nice federal handouts.
Maintain America as THE Superpower
In 2021, the USA spent almost 3 times as much as the nation in second place on the military. Specifically, the US spent over $800 billion, and second place went to China at $293 billion. In third place is India at just under $77 billion. China’s increase in military spending is certainly a great indication that they intend to do something horrible in the next decade (it was closer to a quarter of US military spending in 2012), but the US still eclipses its military might. Right wingers always claim to be opposed to government spending, but that really means they are opposed to any kind of government spending on kindness — that is the fruit of the devil. They’re always happy to support more government spending on suffering as well as tax cuts for the wealthy, and that is reflected in the fact that the US government always has a bigger deficit when right wingers control it.
Fiscal Responsibility & Accountability
The flier says, “In times like these, politicians and bureaucrats should do more with less. I will oppose all new taxes and only vote for budgets that cut frivolous spending.” Basically, he’s promising to cut the social safety net as much as he can. In terms of economic outcome, money cut from the social safety net means less spending by people because rich people hoard most of their money while poor people (and even the middle class) spend almost all their money. Less spending hurts the economy. Money trickles up, not down. If you want to help the economy, you’ve got to put more cash in the pockets of people who have less.
Right wingers don’t really want to help the economy; they want their enemies to suffer above all else. We can predict that he will also vote to cut taxes on the wealthy (see below) and increase military spending (see above) even if it isn’t fiscally responsible to do those things. Ultimately, this kind of thinking would lead to the functions of the US government being replaced with either a kind of theocratic monarchy or a corporate feudalism; the former is what the US far right wants.
Far right Christians support cutting taxes on the wealthy because they believe in a variant of Calvinism that says that our economic successes are a reflection of how much God favors us, and that a secular government interfering in that natural order (via taxation or regulation) is anathema. The so-called “prosperity gospel” is a variant of this idea. The economic ideas of Calvinism directly oppose the ideas of Jesus Christ who said:
I’ll say it again-it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of A needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!
Matthew 19:24
Many of today’s Christians find Christ’s teaching against the wealthy to be off-putting. First, they would really like to be wealthy. Second, having no earthly indicator of your odds of getting into the Kingdom of God is very inconvenient and a source of much anxiety. The Calvinist view of economics solves both of these problems by 1) letting you be wealthy as long as you keep claiming to be a Christian and 2) allowing your wealth to indicate how likely it is that you’ll go to Heaven. Note, though, that for non-Christians, your degree of wealth becomes an indicator of how evil you are, and how likely that you are in congress with Satan.
Secure Our Border
The flier says, “Foreign drug cartels should be treated as terrorist organizations. I will vote to build the wall and equip law enforcement to rid our communities of these criminals.” It should be clear that he’s talking about our border with Mexico, not the border with Canada. Immigrants coming across our border with Mexico are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens, but they are more likely to have brown skin. They take the necessary jobs that don’t pay enough for US citizens, like farm labor, and then the people that hire them pretend they did the work themselves.
The flier makes it sound like all the people coming across our southern border are associated with drug cartels, which is preposterous, but it prompts certain questions. Why would we treat drug cartels as terrorists when they don’t do terrorism? Is it because we are racist? Are we just going to call everything that we don’t like terrorism? Can we treat the US churches who promote domestic terrorism as terrorists instead? How can we build the wall — which would cost something like $400 billion (that’s a guesstimate; finding hard figures on this seems nearly impossible [source]) — and still be “fiscally responsible”?
The guns flowing south through the US-Mexico border are much more harmful to Mexico than the drugs flowing north through it. Moreover, the wall has been demonstrated over and over again to be ineffective. Fascists are always happy to spend more money attacking the people they hate and don’t really care about fiscal responsibility or even practicality.
Rebuild American Energy Independence
The logical way to rebuild American energy independence would be to end our dependence on oil, and switch to renewables that don’t have to be shipped in from other countries. That isn’t what the far right means by energy independence, though, because renewables are somehow a plot by Satanists rather than a gift from God from the perspective of the far right. The far right wants to increase the rate that we are extracting oil and other fossil fuels from the US and its territories. It’s not clear whether Irwin would be in support of nationalizing that oil or even simply requiring that any fuel extracted in the US is also sold in the US, which is certainly not the case now (in 2021, corporations exported 2.9 million barrels of oil per day and imported 6.11 million barrels of oil per day). What’s interesting is how propaganda from big oil has become part of the religious right’s anti-commie worldview.
Restore Traditional Christian Values
Interestingly, this point is not on his website! Perhaps, he doesn’t want evil liberals to google him and find out that he is a Christian dominionist, and he probably wants to court the votes of libertarians by making it less clear what exactly he’s up to. By leaving out the details, he creates a Rorschach test where the reader can project their own ideas onto him. The website even says that he wants to, “Allow every American to worship God as they choose.” What if they want to do that in a non-Christian way? What if my god is named Brigid and not Jesus?
Irwin’s church (Abundant Life in Lee’s Summit) is a Christian millenarian sect hoping for Christ to establish his dominion (their word) on Earth as soon as possible. They believe there’s a literal war for dominion of Earth going on and that Lucifer is literally leading the bad side of the war. It seems like they’re using part of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as actual theology, but I’m not certain. “The reason we look around today and see the chaos and confusion and the destruction is because there are two kingdoms that are colliding. Two kingdoms of opposition and they’re in a place of collision,” according to the head minister of the church.
One of those kingdoms is God’s (which is obviously represented by Abundant Life church) and the other of those kingdoms is Satan’s. Satan wants to be worshiped as God and steal His throne. We (the people in this room, he implies) are going to see the prophecies of the End Times fulfilled any day now. Some of us are pretty old, so this must be happening very, very soon. The Bible is like a giant puzzle and you have to project your opinion of reality onto it to understand what it really means, he says — but also, he will tell you what it really means if you just hold on a sec.
Islam seeks worldwide dominion (according to Abundant Life, but also according to many Muslims — it’s no different from Christianity in that way), but Muslims are also ripe for conversion to Christianity. At Abundant Life, they’re clear on their desire to convert Muslims to Christianity; they even travel to predominantly Muslim nations to convert people. The war isn’t a three-sided affair, though — the war for the world is between the forces of God and the forces of Satan and Islam is part of the forces of Satan. Again, this is directly from the head minister guy at Abundant Life. (Yes, I’m watching one of their horrible videos for you.) Now, if you stop a random Muslim on the street, I’m pretty sure they’ll be in strong disagreement — I’m pretty sure they’ll say that Islam is the side of God.
Specifically, the guy at Abundant Life is saying that Islam is the Fourth Beast (with it’s ten kings; are there 10 Islamic “kings”?) from Bible prophecy. He pauses his narrative for quite a while to go off on a weird tangent, building up suspense before he drops the bass and tells the assembled crowd this. Satan is behind the scenes, see, “pulling the strings” so the forces of evil might not even know that they are working for Satan! Abundant Life appears to be a dispensational premillennialist church, meaning that they believe in a literal seven-year tribulation; in essence, the “Left Behind” books are a better representation of their beliefs than the actual Bible. He notes that some Bible Scholars think the EU is the Fourth Beast, but they’re wrong because Arabs. He seems like he’s talking out of his ass a lot, but this might all be standard LaHayean Christianity at this point. You can watch the whole thing about the Abundant Life take on Muslims here.
What does restoring Christian values mean in the context of this open bigotry and insanity? On his website, Irwin says he would vote to:
- Stop the teaching of critical race theory in our schools
- Stop the radical gender ideology which is currently permeating our schools
- Parents must have a voice and choice in the education of their children
- Stop COVID vaccine mandates
- Stop mask mandates
You probably know enough about critical race theory to know that they aren’t teaching it in “our schools” (i.e., K-12) and that the far right is just using the CRT label to refer to any situation where a teacher taught an accurate version of important parts of US history, like the part where European Christians invaded the continent and stole the land from the people who already lived here, or the part where Christian Americans took part in the slave trade, literally owned other human beings, and that it took a war to end slavery, and yet horrible treatment of Black Americans continues to this day. In essence, anyone who says we need to stop teaching critical race theory in our schools is a fascist.
The radical gender ideology… is that “permeating” our schools? I have three kids that are in school right now and it seems like they’re just being taught to be nice to people, including LGBTQ+ people. If a kid comes out as trans, they use their new name and pronouns, but that doesn’t count as “permeating” in my book. Let me consult with a child… I’ve just been informed that the teachers never mentioned anything about gaiety or transness to this particular child and that all of the “radical gender ideology” that they experience at school was perpetrated by the children themselves — not anyone who worked for the school. This is interestingly similar to what happens in colleges: very few college instructors are anything close to “radical” — college students are radicalized by other students and through their own independent exploration of the world.
Irwin clearly wants tax dollars to be funneled to religious schools, and he also wants parents to be able to (essentially) vote on the curriculum of the schools.
The whole COVID-19 thing has been a huge issue for far-right Christians, so of course he addresses this. Essentially, they thought that the pandemic was exaggerated for the purpose of empowering the one-world government, and every time the government tried to make them do anything, they imagined this as the hand of Satan trying to gain a permanent increase in domination of their lives. Irwin takes it a step further and promises to vote to force businesses to serve and employ people who refuse to be vaccinated and/or wear a mask; his website says, “We should never have to prove we are vaccinated to attend a concert, visit a restaurant, seek a job, or carry on in our normal life.” Fascists do not respect private property and don’t actually care about capitalism or the free market. (Just so I’m being clear, I don’t care about those things either, but I’m very consistent about that.)
Here’s the thing: Forcing your religion on other people is a form of fascism. You can restore traditional Christian values all you want, but the moment you start using government to restore traditional Christian values, you have become a fascist. I’ve already covered Christian fascists in a previous post, but I’ll say it again: It’s the Christian fascists — not the racist fascists — that are the immediate danger and the rhetorical attacks we’ve used against racists aren’t necessarily going to work. Christian fascists aren’t just a threat to non-Christians; they are even a threat to other Christians through their rigid dividing of people into God’s army or Satan’s army. There is such a thing as the Christian left — and they would end up victims of Christian fascism the same as Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, Buddhism, and, yes, Satanists.
I often find myself reflecting on that poem by Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communists.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I’ve noticed that the far right is constantly switching around the order of who they’re coming for first, and that when society as a whole pushes back on the latest declaration, they simply switch to a new group. With Trump, it started out with “Mexicans” and then he switched to Muslims. Right now, the imminent threat is to LGBTQ+ people and especially trans people. This week there have been a lot of thought leaders on the far right:
- calling for trans people to be “rounded up”
- calling for people who take children to Pride events or a drag queen story hour to be “rounded up”
- declaring the Pride flag to be the flag of “a hostile enemy”
- saying that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles or, more specifically, “groomers”
Those first two are obvious genocidal statements. The “flag of a hostile enemy” thing is building a justification for rounding people up; the idea is that it is a hostile enemy, so if you fly that flag, you’re a traitor, and that justifies your incarceration, torture, and execution. Similarly, the constant barrage of pedophilia accusations toward LGBTQ+ people and their allies is a justification for incarcerating, torturing and killing them (never mind that the greatest pedophilia threat to the children of conservatives comes from other conservatives, including family members).
To get back to the content of this political flier, if these people are successful at winning elections, they will be able to commit acts of genocide and it will be legal. The Holocaust was legal. I emphasize this because when the January 6 thing happened, there were just so many smug liberals saying, “Oh, Mike Pence can’t do that because it isn’t legal.” If you have power, you can make it legal. Legal isn’t an interesting issue to a fascist, and it is fully irrelevant if they have control of the government.