Dan Rather Asked What's Up with Evangelicals

Here's my answer from his Substack comments section

MAGA folk were asked to offer this salute to Trump at a rally in 2023. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

To me, it is, plain and simply, the MAGA notion that Trump as sent by God and is possibly the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is a mask for militant white supremacy. The problem with privilege is that when you're born into it as a white person, as a rich person, as a male, it FEELS right because it's all you've ever known. You FEEL entitled to it. After all, if you weren't, why do you have it in the first place? God must have meant you to have it--and it's nobody's to take away!! It's mine, and if I'm forced to share it--if the unworthy others are demanding it--I'M THE ONE DONE WRONG HERE! I'm the victim. ...

We know already that children learn racism at a preverbal stage (see Anderson Cooper on The Doll Game). We know that the basic set-up between men and is also taught us early through the observed behavior between our parents and by our social relations generally. Attitudes towards Jews, people of other religions, foreigners in general--the tendency to see migrants as loser no-loads and possibly criminals--the tendency to view people of poor African nations as unintelligent bunglars who don't deserve our help--all are attitudes that are learned young. And because our brains are not developed enough to evaluate these attitudes rationally, they do not settle in us as concepts we can ponder: they take up residence deep in the personal unconscious as EMOTIONS, becoming knee-jerk instinctual responses to external stimuli.

This is how a privileged white-supremacist group with strong tendencies to bow to males (women can be chauvinists, too!) come to feel God is on their side, especially if their religion preaches it (!), and develop a towering rage over the advancements of women, people of color, religious minorities, and foreigners. They feel every advance that others make is TAKING something from them ($$$$$$$), and it is: it is taking the privilege of never having to be responsible for your negative impact; it will make a white man compete for a job with a woman and maybe a person of color; it means that racial and sexual insults won't go unchallenged; it means people will eventually demand to be paid fairly, and they'll get it.

The response of such people is that they feel demeaned, humiliated and enraged, and they are out for revenge. It is this GRIEVANCE-CULTURE COLLECTIVE POWER (and there's a lot of it) that Trump taps. He knows it's there. He's not, strictly speaking, intelligent. What he does have is the INSTINCT for where the weaknesses are in systems, and because he is completely amoral (as well as immoral), he is willing to exploit them. Meanwhile, MAGA folk will NEVER let go of their religious connection. If they don't work this out mentally, they instinctively will know they have to keep the connection because RELIGION IS THE ENFORCING AGENCY OF RACIAL SUPREMACY AND MALE PRIVILEGE and bestows the right to extra-judicial punishment outside the sphere of law.

This is why a MAGA person yesterday felt fine about calling for E. Jean Carroll to be raped and murdered for demanding justice from Donald Trump.

Religion is also always, always, always a load-bearing wall in the edifice of fascism. This is also why the *social* movements of Pan-Arabism and Ikhwan / Muslim Brotherhood terrorism became rooted in Southern Arabia and Egypt in the early part of the 20th century--and it was a new form of Islam, never seen before. And it followed the unveiling of women in the Egyptian religion, the appearance of Princess Soraya in a flapper dress in the 1920s with her hair let down, and the forced modernization of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who fought the veil with every fiber of his being.

But religion didn't modernize: it became more conservative. Why? Because religion has to make a living, too (she said, acidly). And one of the ways religions sell themselves to a power base (in this case white Christian male, in the Middle East, Muslim males) to ensure their survival is to promise to keep enforcing an organic view of women, keep them out of the work place (ka-ching!), keep them under male control, and elevate the ruling skin-color-based "race" (yes, that's just as nauseating as it sounds).

And that's why, for both MAGA people and the religions that support them, Donald Trump is the Second Coming: because if he wins again, he'll declare himself dictator and enforce every one of their most passionate desires and manifest their every dream by divine incantation!

Another way to read that is: he will use the 54,000 Evangelical apparatchiks he already has in place at every level of government, the Supreme Court he stuffed with religious supremacists, and the script written for him (in big print using small words) by Leonard Leo, declare democracy over, pass out Handmaid's Tale uniforms to the girls [sic] and ... pardon himself. Then he'll build those concentration camps for liberals he's been promising, ban Muslims, jail E. Jean Carroll, and probably do far, far worse to Smith, Engoran, Willis et al. He will boot out the weakling John Roberts and make Aileen Cannon the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

And ... as Mary Trump has pointed out, it will never be enough. He will become one of the worst tyrants the world has ever seen as his longstanding verbal sadism goes physical. And his ambitions will not remain national.

We have to keep those tiny hands off that red phone.