The capacity of Americans to deny reality is unsurpassed. The right wing is routinely accused of living in a world that is completely separated from reality, and that part is true in many ways.
But the Left is just as adept and committed to denying reality, furiously doing that cowardly thing of legend that ostriches don’t actually do: bury their heads in the sand when faced with unpleasant realities.
One of those realities is the right wing “culture wars.”
Religious tyranny is one of those things that most Americans don’t think can ever happen here. Primitive, barbaric religious regimes only emerge in places like Afghanistan or Iran, so we believe. A brutal religious regime could never happen here, could it? “It can’t happen here! We have the Constitution!!!”
It’s tine to stop pretending. The right wing’s culture wars are not “just a distraction” to draw attention away from what the right wing is “really doing,” supposedly making themselves richer. Wealth is a means to MAGA’s goal of medieval religious dictatorship, but wealth is not the goal in and of itself.
The right wing IS the culture war. Culture war and religious oppression is the right wing’s entire reason for existence. It can happen here, and it has been trying for over 30 years to happen here.
This is what the 40-year mission to pack the Supreme Court with right wing kangaroos has been all about – packing a court that will refuse to respect and protect the Constitutional rights of Americans by devising devious ways to interpret our rights out of existence.
This is what the 30-plus of right-wing revisionist history about our nation’s founding was all about: If they could spread the lie that our nation was originally intended to be a religious dictatorship, then they could set the stage for their future tyranny.
How do I know this? They say so. They call their political crusade for totalitarian government the “dominion mandate” or the “cultural mandate.”
The late but not lamented theocrat D. James Kennedy, former pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries, says it plainly: “As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”
“Vice-regents of God.” These people believe that God appointed them to be God’s enforcers over the entire earth.
That hate-ridden theocrat of Focus on the Family fame, James Dobson, said in a July 1996 letter to his supporters, “the scriptural principles which our founding fathers incorporated must again be brought to bear on every aspect of life, including education, government and law.”
They come right out and say it: total, complete, overarching, overbearing, Iran-like, Taliban-like religious government that regulates every cubic millimeter of our lives is what they openly SAY that they seek.
The late conservative columnist (and eventual Press Secretary for President George W. Bush) Tony Snow warned us about these people in 1999: “The Taliban Republicans take a darker view of human nature. They consider the rest of us a bunch of potential dupes and regard society as a stew of corrupting influences. They look upon government as the ultimate street cleaner and see nothing untoward in declaring the moral equivalent of martial law: Jail the sinners, elevate the saints, establish the rule of the righteous, and do it all before the next sunrise.”
In 1999, a conservative Republican of the Bush era likened today’s right wing to the Taliban. He was right.
Does the right wing put great value in the pursuit of staggering wealth? Of course they do!
But wealth is not their goal or the objective. Wealth is merely a useful accessory to the acquisition of the unlimited power needed to carry out their actual objective of religious brutality. Wealth is not an end; it is only a means to buy the power to achieve medieval religious government. It is power that they seek, and wealth is merely a path to that power.
The entire right wing empire – the right wing’s trillion-dollar media machine that pumps out millions of tons of lies and hatred into the public consciousness, their “think tanks” geared toward rewriting American history and redefining key concepts in the Constitution until they mean the opposite of everything that we were taught, and all of the the ivory towers of right-wing extremism that attempt to give oppression an academic, intellectual and collegiate veneer – this entire multi-trillion dollar empire of disinformation exists because of the right wing’s singular fixation with what people do with their private parts.
MAGA amounts to one gigantic, unhealthy sexual obsession with a trillion-dollar addiction to feed. And that’s what Project 2025 is: one huge, all-consuming sexual obsession.
It really is that simple.