Tag: conservatives

Democracy, Conservatives & Pandemic Masks

By now, you’ve heard about the right-wing plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Unfortunately, this kind of foolishness is going to become the rule over the next year at least, and it’s probably a good idea for all of us to have a cursory understanding of what is going on in the minds of conservatives these days.

Regarding the plot, the main thrust of it wasn’t something about the incoherence of modern firearm law — in fact, Michigan is one of those states that uses a very light touch in regard to guns, which is why protesters armed with rifles were allowed inside the capitol building back in May of this year without any consequences. In both cases, the conservatives involved were not angry about anything that we might think of as a substantive attack on conservative values, but instead they were angry about being forced to wear a mask in public during a pandemic. Mask-wearing appears to be the thing that conservatives are ready to start a civil war over, outshining everything from abortion to the Second Amendment in importance (though, they might find those things to be sufficient as well). In fact, there was just another incident like this — a man was planning to kill the mayor of Wichita, Kansas over the mask ordinance there.

I don’t see any reason not to make fun of them about this. I mean, if they’re making us wear a mask in public during a pandemic, what will be next? They might make us wear seat belts, or require restaurants to pass a health inspection! They might even prohibit honest, God-fearing parents from murdering their own children! That it is asinine is no reason to ignore it, though. We need to understand their mindset, because it isn’t going away — and it has been this way for a very, very long time.

So these particular conservatives in Michigan planned to kidnap Governor Whitmer due to her tyrannical mask ordinance. To be clear, the ordinance isn’t squeaky clean — it was created by the state health department rather than going through the legislature, which would be the correct route — so they’re not entirely wrong about it being a problem. But they were going to try her for treason, which is fun for a couple of reasons: First, nothing she did can be defined as treason — insurrection, perhaps, but not treason. Treason requires that the crime was done to benefit an enemy of the United States (I’ll get back to that). Second, nobody outside of conservatives who have gone off the rails is going to respect the secret show trial that you had in your friend’s barn, and you’ve already decided that she is guilty, so the only point of having a trial is because you are somehow getting off on it. Basically, the whole thing was a childish fantasy by people who really don’t understand how the world works.

Regarding this being a childish fantasy: We’re likely to find out that this plot never really got beyond the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage, and so wasn’t really a plot after all. Federal law enforcement has a long history of jumping to conclusions or even inducing people to take the step that turns “wouldn’t it be cool” into an actual plot, and we already know that federal informants provided first-hand accounts that led to these arrests. It wouldn’t be surprising at all to find out that the plotters were induced to do or say things by that informant that ultimately resulted in their arrests — and that has somehow become legal.

Beyond the infantile nature of their plot against the governor, another clear reason why these plotters are jackasses is because they opposed wearing a mask in the first place. Wearing a mask and physically staying away from each other are reasonable things to do with a pandemic like this one, but they and their ilk simply would not do the right thing. That’s what induced Michigan’s health authorities to mandate that people wear masks.

You may know about T-Rex Arms, a small-arms-related company in Centerville, TN. Their founder is a relatively young man named Lucas Botkin, who is one of the most impressive shooters on YouTube right now. He and his brother Isaac are experts in small arms, but, like everyone, they have blind spots. Their biggest blind spot would be religion.

A post on “Gun People Who Hate Gun People” linked to a story about the father of Lucas and Isaac ( The Cold, Unforgiving World of Geoffrey Botkin ) and summarized Lucas thusly:

I’m still surprised that people don’t know that Lucas Botkin, head of T. Rex Arms is a gay-hating cult member. His dad, Geoffrey Botkin, is a leader of the quiverfull movement, and there’s this maelstrom of allegations of sexual abuse surrounding this cult that basically says that America needs to return to Biblical law to defeat satanism. The kicker? Lucas Botkin is listed as a staff member at the Botkin Conservatory, so it’s not like he’s keeping his distance.

As male Quiverfull children, Lucas and Isaac were literally born to kill; children are arrows in the quiver of God, and they’re not meant to just stay in the quiver. They’re meant to fly into whoever opposes their conception of Biblical law. The girls are supposed to grow up to make more arrows. I’ll stop with describing this metaphor because I think you get it.

Still, like I said, Lucas and Isaac know about guns, and even though their motivation is being prepared to murder everyone that doesn’t agree with them during the Apocalypse, I hate to see good knowledge go to waste, so I’ve watched some of their videos. The most recent one I saw was When and How to Resist Tyranny. This video starts out just fine, with Isaac talking about a relatively new pistol brace called the Honeybadger and the legal insanity surrounding it. This is a bizarre kink in US gun law that I’ll devote a whole post to some other time, but for now I’ll say that Isaac makes good points about the pistol brace controversy. The problem is that early in the video, Isaac jumps right off the side of the whole thing and starts talking about the Bible and says that the remainder of the video will be devoted to an interview with some conservatives who got arrested in Moscow, Idaho for blatantly refusing to comply with the local mask ordinance.

The Moscow, Idaho anti-maskers are an organization called CrossPolitics, whose logo features a US flag bowing before a Christian cross, indicating that their primary allegiance is to their interpretation of the Bible, and not their country. They went to the town hall without masks and sang hymns as a protest against the local mask ordinance. As you probably know, singing is the most effective way to spread a respiratory virus like covid — it’s even worse than coughing because it is sustained. The police showed up and arrested them for endangering public health. CrossPolitics is portraying it as two different violations of their First Amendment rights. The first violation would be to their practice of religion, even though they could have gone and practiced it somewhere else that didn’t endanger the public. The second violation would be to freedom of expression (and protest), even though the right to protest doesn’t give you the right to break the law while you’re doing it and conservatives are the first to point this out when centrist or leftist protests include violations of the law.

Obeying is obviously extremely important to conservatives, and yet here they are protesting having to obey a relatively simple and reasonable ordinance. And no discussion of a bodily-autonomy issue can happen without pointing out that conservatives deny the right of women to have bodily autonomy.

What are the factors that determine whether conservatives see a particular law as one that should be obeyed or rebelled against? In either condition, they are prone to getting homicidal. It all comes down to the social hierarchy that they believe is legitimate. Rules that emerge from what they believe to be a legitimate hierarchy must be obeyed, and rules that emerge from an illegitimate hierarchy must fought against. And the thing is — this is exactly what every reasonable person with a spine believes. The problem is the factors that make them believe a given hierarchy is legitimate or not.

For example, we would say that the elected governor of Michigan has some degree of authority by nature of having been elected through a fairly democratic process. But if that governor is a woman and a liberal/Democrat, they are not going to consider her to be a legitimate authority. This was the same situation with the Obama presidency — he was Black and a Democrat, therefore no matter how conservative his actions were, his authority was not legitimate and should not be obeyed. In terms of the pandemic, more conservatives would have gone along with the mask mandate if someone they considered to be a legitimate authority had clearly supported it from the outset. However, since part of that social hierarchy involved God, there are some conservatives that would never support doing anything about the pandemic other than praying that the Angel of Death pass over their house and kill the Muslims down the way instead.

Would they have been more likely to obey the ordinance if it had been enacted by the legislature? Yes, and really that’s how it should have been done. But many of them would have still refused because they see the authority of the entire government as illegitimate. In fact, many conservatives don’t even see liberals like Whitmer as American citizens, which is how the idea of “treason” starts to make sense in regard to the mask ordinance. Citizenship is the right-wing’s preferred way of manipulating human rights, and conservatives generally want to remove the protection of citizenship from everyone except straight, white, Christian, property-owning men. They literally do not think anyone else should be allowed to vote, and then they definitely want a republic where a group of elite men (who they might say were chosen by God) consider the votes of the rest of the men and then decide what to do.

Women’s suffrage was a mistake, they say. The civil rights act — including voting protections — was also a mistake, they say. Only people with “skin in the game” (property owners) really ought to be able to vote, they say. Only Christians have the moral authority to be trusted with voting, they say. LGBTQ people are criminals at best or perhaps not even human, they say. These are all aspects of the hierarchy that they believe to be legitimate, and when power is wielded by an illegitimate hierarchy it is no different from a puppet government installed by a foreign nation. Therefore, the actions of the Whitmer government are “treason”.

When an illegitimate hierarchy, run by women, black people, and “perverts”, doesn’t even bother to get permission before enacting an ordinance related to disease — something that is the will of God — this is pretty much the worst thing a government can do. We’ve seen this with problems other than the pandemic, including vaccinations and helmet laws. Just this year, Missouri revoked the law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets because the Missouri state government is currently controlled by conservatives. I’m betting that if you went back and looked at the implementation of nationwide seat belt laws, that the same arguments were used against it. (No need to take that bet, I just took a minute to look it up, and yes, we had the same kind of resistance to seat belt laws.)

We have these people who don’t think most Americans are citizens, and who don’t respect the religious or metaphysical beliefs of other people. Should they be determining how we all live? Aren’t these exactly the people who are apt to create a “tyranny of democracy”? I’m too much of a fan of democracy to say that they should be excluded from it, but we certainly can’t negotiate with them. If your position is that women have the same rights as men, and their position is that women are non-citizens who should be required to obey their husbands (or fathers), what is the middle ground? If your position is that LGBTQ people can live and love as they choose, but their position is that they should be executed for violating the will of God, what is the middle ground?

The biggest factor in the rise of fascism in the US today is that the hierarchy conservatives see as legitimate is threatened by various demographic trends including the increase in non-religious people (threatening the rule of Christianity), the increase in Latinx and Hispanic people (threatening the rule of white people), and the ongoing gap between the the educational achievement of boys versus girls, which is leading to women having dramatically more power at every level of society. And, of course, there are political changes that have been anathema to the conservative hierarchy, like the dramatic increase in women and non-Christians in elected positions, and marriage equality. Fascism represents a desperate attempt by the group that holds power to maintain that power in the face of what seems like an insurmountable challenge. It is inherently genocidal because it acknowledges that mass murder is likely the only way to stop the power shift from happening. Again, what is the middle ground?

The most important thing to remember, however, is that though concerns of executive or judicial branch overreach are completely legitimate, conservatives are not sincere when they bring them up. As we’ve seen, they will happily use any position of power to usurp the law or accepted operating procedures if it benefits their preferred hierarchy. These are arguments made disingenuously, meant to convince an audience that genuinely believes in, for example, the rule of law or the separation of powers. Conservatives themselves are really only interested in maintaining power. Though we should demand better behavior from government, we should not believe that conservatives would ever hold themselves to the same standard that they demand from Democrats.

Christianity is completely compatible with democracy, but only if Christians respect the right of other people to reject Christianity, and only if government policy reflects the country’s diversity of religious belief. Thankfully, many Christians do believe in religious liberty. (Here’s an argument for why Christians should support religious freedom.) Conservatives have made themselves crystal clear: They do not support democracy.

Paul Kengor and the New Satanic Panic

I noticed an article in the National Review today — a rebuttal by Paul Kengor of a negative review also published in the National Review about his book The Devil and Karl Marx. You can already tell from the title that it is yet another element of conservative culture’s inevitable return to freaking out about “Satanism”.

Back when I was a kid, we had a lot of Satanic panic. I’ll just hit a few interesting examples. One narrative was about Dungeons and Dragons “turning you to Satan”. At the time, I had a group that I played D&D with that included two Evangelical Christians – both remained Christian and one grew up to become an Evangelical minister; if it was a gateway to Satanism, it didn’t work very well. I remember a girl I met my freshman year of college telling me that a Satanic cult had kidnapped her friend, tortured her, and then healed her wounds with the power of Satan (conveniently destroying the evidence of abuse) before returning her home. Candy and/or apples full of razor blades given out by Satanists at Halloween is something that never happened, but it took decades for me to learn that it had all been bullshit. Now, thanks to Bernie Sanders doing quite well in the last two elections, the people who lie awake at night worrying about Satanism have decided that the Devil is socialism.

The review by Cameron Hilditch did the smart thing, and dismissed the book entirely. That’s smart for conservatives because the more you look at it, the more insane conservatives look. I want you to look really closely at it. Get a copy and read it. Make Paul Kengor lots of money so he can write more unhinged books and bring these colorful delusions out into the light. But in the meantime, I feel compelled to make a half-hearted defense of these attacks on Marx and add a criticism of Kengor’s criticism to our national conversation.

First off, he says, “This is why our side loses.” (in reference to Hilditch failing to show enough conservative solidarity). But the thing is that Kengor’s side — that of using religion as an excuse for the exploitation of human beings — is winning and has a long history of winning. Yes, those who want justice and liberty have been losing a bit less in the modern era, but to suggest that Kengor’s side is involved in a pattern of losing is a paranoid delusion.

Next, we learn that the book’s perspective isn’t just that of a conservative, but a conservative Roman Catholic. Left-leaning Catholics have been among the most moral and courageous of proponents of freedom and justice not just in the US but in the world, while simultaneously, conservative Catholics have long had a tendency to see Satan in everything that makes them uncomfortable. It’s clear which one Kengor is.

Then, he starts to become unhinged. No surprise. He goes on at length about how Marxism is “obviously unworkable and astonishingly asinine” and an “evil” that “creates mass poverty, despair, and death”. (I disagree.) Just when you think he might cite a fact or a statistic, he regurgitates the 100 million figure. If you’re not familiar, there’s something called The Black Book of Communism that says communism has killed 100 million people. Not even the co-authors of that book agree with that figure, and accepting that figure requires you to blame various communist governments for natural disasters, economic warfare waged against them by capitalist nations, and wars against fascism and invaders. Nazis killed by the Russians are literally included in that figure. Taking a similar approach with capitalism would give it a much higher death toll – certainly higher than “communism”.

But let’s talk about whether Marxism is “workable”. The majority of the writings of Marx are criticisms of capitalism. Marx’s writings are boring, overly wordy, and highly hypothetical, yet no legitimate expert on politics or economics dismisses those criticisms; they may disagree about some details, or believe that capitalism can be reformed to work in a way that is beneficial, but they don’t dismiss those criticisms. Anyone who dismisses those criticisms of capitalism — which again are most of what Marxism is — is an ideologue and clearly up to something. So it isn’t about whether it is “workable”.

Regarding the last 10% or so — the part where Marx suggests solutions to capitalism — and whether it might be workable or not, I can tell you that even self-described Marxists are constantly debating solutions to the problems of capitalism. It’s just like how Sigmund Freud was a brilliant analyst of human minds and we all agree that he is the Father of Psychiatry, but no psychiatrist today would follow his advice for treating a patient. So what proposed solutions of Marxism is Kengor even criticizing? Marx himself famously said, “I am not a Marxist,” because he wasn’t a fan of the more violent approach to achieving communism that was popular in France (around 1880), so if it is soviet communism he is up in arms about, Kengor is barking up the wrong tree.

The critic of Kengor’s book (Hilditch) makes a good point, that the way to persuade people away from the left is to somehow convince them that an ideology based on unbridled selfishness (capitalism) is somehow more morally good and effective toward achieving morally-desirable ends than an ideology based on the concept of community good. No matter what type of Marxist ideology you choose, I don’t think it can be done – which is why Kengor would rather rave about Satanism than take that approach.

Finally, we get to the real meat of Kengor’s argument: That Marx was a Satanist! He says there are a bunch of poems and plays by Marx that are “rife with satanic elements”. To be clear, he’s not saying that Marx promotes Satan directly or that Marx claimed that his religion was Satanism — no, just that his more arty works were “rife with satanic elements”. From the perspective of American conservatives, a man choosing to sit to pee is a Satanic element, so pardon me if I don’t care.

During Marx’s time there was, in fact, a big uptick in the popularity of “the occult”; these were pseudo-recreations of older pagan religions that had long been destroyed by Christians beyond the potential for recovery. They aren’t Satanism, but some Christians like to conflate the two. Marx was an atheist and as such didn’t believe in Satanism; it’s Christians who believe Satan is real (and most Victorian era occultists were also Christians). If Marx’s artistic projects contained occult elements, it’s because all the artistic writing of the time (early 1900’s) contained them and it doesn’t indicate that he was promoting Satan; it was just the fashion of the time. Saying that Marx is Satanic because he used these kinds of ideas is the equivalent of saying that Cardi B, Trace Adkins, or Destiny’s Child are Satanic for talking about butts in their work — which is honestly something Kengor probably also does.

One of my pandemic masks is a reject from my wife’s collection because she doesn’t like how it fits. The fabric is a print with tiny little occult objects on it: a book, a chalice, magic wand, dagger, Ouija board pointer, and many others. My wife says it is “spoopy” which she tells me is a combination of “cute” and “spooky”. Are these “satanic elements”? Satanic panickers quite often cite child rape as a satanic element, and yet the institution that is associated with more of that than any other on this entire planet is the Roman Catholic Church that Kengor is so fond of. I find a few spoopy things on a mask or sprinkled through a poem to be a lot less serious than child rape. So which is the most Satanic: Marx’s poems and plays, my pandemic mask, or the Catholic church?

And which person is more Satanic? Marx, me, or Kengor? Before you answer, please consider that until May of this year, 60% of Catholics still supported Donald Trump, who is truly one of the most immoral leaders of the modern era, so there’s no relationship between identifying as any particular kind of Christian and being a moral person. Kengor undoubtedly still supports Trump because he’s under the false impression that Biden secretly has a (Satanic?) altar to Marx in his bedroom.

Please don’t think I am disparaging Catholics, though. As I said, Catholics have been some of the most moral and courageous fighters for liberty and justice. I think the answer here is that while it would be hard to find a better teacher to follow than Jesus, there are plenty of Hypocrites around, loudly announcing their faith, claiming that their specific faith is the most pious, and accusing others of heresy. If you want to identify the people whose ideas you should listen to, look at their actions. Who is actually doing something to make the world a better place? It isn’t Paul Kengor – he’s busy spewing bullshit about things he doesn’t understand and sewing the seeds of conflict. The Pope himself noted that it is better to be an atheist who does good works than a Christian who does not, even going so far as to say that atheists who do good are redeemed through Christ. I don’t know if that applies to Karl Marx or not, but I can say that he saw human suffering and wanted to do something to make the world a better place. The approach of Paul Kengor – to tell people that this is as good as the world can be, so you should just shut up and stop complaining – does not lead to good works.

This post is a response to It’s High Time We Tell the Truth about the Evils of Marx and Marxism by Paul Kengor.

Censorship Under Late-stage Capitalism

There are a lot of things conservatives almost get right, and the nature of censorship in these times — under late-stage capitalism — is one of them. We love to laugh at them when they complain about Twitter or Facebook censoring them, but it isn’t because they’re wrong about the censorship; rather, it is because they actively promote a world that allows this kind of censorship.

If you were around in the ’90’s and early 2000’s, you witnessed the beginning and end of a truly free Internet. Back then, the Internet was likened to a new world that people were colonizing, but colonialism means destroying a civilization that was already there — this was something much better. It was as if we’d discovered a whole new world, lifeless but aggressively supportive of new life. In those early days, the Internet was real freedom — not the fake freedom of right-wing libertarianism, but the very real freedom of libertarian socialism. People built incredible things that were not dependent on huge corporations — even going so far as to use their home computers as servers.

All that changed when capital realized it could use the Internet to make money — huge piles of money. Now, normal people cannot afford to have a truly independent web presence, and the most effective platforms are controlled by neoliberal corporations and their billionaire owners. (Almost no one will see this post, for example, if it doesn’t end up trending on one of those platforms.) It’s not surprising that those platforms are hostile toward anything that threatens capitalism. Today, the flow of information has been returned to the preferred model of the elites, flowing from the elites down to the common folk, and containing a mixture of truth, strategic omission, and outright lies. They’ve again managed to poison the meanings of words so that it is difficult to even talk about what it would be to oppose their power.

Anarchy does not mean chaos. Socialism does not mean fascism. Freedom does not mean the freedom to oppress other people with your economic might. Neoliberal is a real word despite what your spellchecker might claim. And yet, if you use any of those words, you have to spend a great deal of time explaining what they mean or most people (both liberal and conservative) won’t even understand what you are talking about.

So what is censorship? From the perspective of neoliberalism (the ideology of late-stage capitalism), censorship is when the government prevents the expression of an idea; so, only the government is capable of censorship. In contrast, individuals — not matter how powerful — and corporations — which they define as an extension of individual power — can never be guilty of censorship. This perspective is part of culture that most people take for granted, so they don’t even see it. It’s based in “property rights” — the idea that you can do whatever you want with your property no matter who it hurts — and “the invisible hand of the market” — the idea that market forces are always morally good. On closer examination, these are silly ideas. Clearly, if I have a club that is my property and I hit someone with it, I’ve caused harm. Clearly, if the market promotes slavery (which it does), the market is not morally good.

The true meaning of censorship is whenever anyone is stopped from expressing an idea, and that includes expressions of ideas that are blocked from reaching an audience. The claim that economic power can’t be oppressive is ridiculous. The claim that only government power can be oppressive is ridiculous.

Capitalists have managed to convince normal Americans that the rights of capital are the same as the rights of working class people, even though working class people don’t control the staggering power of capital. In terms of Internet censorship, the result is capital censoring people even while most of those same people are demanding the right of capital to censor people. As with anything else, it’s this dramatic power differential between capital and the people that is the problem, but in late-stage capitalism this differential is magnified because elected politicians are controlled by capital, and so the state itself is a tool of capital (rather than of the people). If conservatives would take the position that censorship is wrong no matter who does it, that the power of capital should be curtailed because it allows the wealthy to oppress the rest of us, their cries wouldn’t be so funny.

What I’d propose to you, though, is that we should stop laughing at them and instead admit that their outrage at corporate censorship in service of an oppressive ruling class is completely valid — it’s their deeply troubling misattribution of blame for this censorship that we need to address. That brings us to Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

There’s a lot of subtlety in that paragraph, but I think it is clear that some people are not “prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument”; however, there are still some conservatives out there who are, and it’s imperative that we try to talk to them. On the other hand, genocide, slavery, and other end-goals of fascism are not “rational arguments”. When Facebook chose to lump anti-fascist organizations in with fascists and conspiracy theorists, this was censorship and an escalation of the conflict between the established neoliberal order and — literally — democracy, justice, freedom, and morality. It’s yet another sign that the super rich would rather risk social collapse caused by destructive neoliberal policies than do the right thing and give up even a little of their enormous, oppressive power.