Theocralypse Now

Every day, America edges closer to a total christofascist takeover

The results of Super Tuesday, though unsurprising, were nonetheless horrifying. That a vile degenerate like Donald Trump is now assured of becoming the Republican candidate for president is an ugly confirmation of the spineless capitulation and total surrender of the Republican party to a fascist cult.

Trump again this week called for mass deportations of immigrants and foreign-born U.S. citizens; on February 29, he said he would use local police as well as federal troops to round people up and move them to camps for deportation. Asked yesterday by a Newsmax host if he would “order mass deportations if you win the White House,” Trump answered: “Oh, day one. We have no choice. And we’ll start with the bad ones. And you know who knows who they are? Local police. Local police have to be given back their authority, and they have to be given back their respect and immunity.” 

He is literally promising a police state — and that’s exactly what Republicans want, as long as it’s their police, given the authority and immunity to do anything they choose to anyone whom Republicans deem to be ‘bad’ — or ‘unpatriotic’ or insufficiently “christian.”

Along with Trump, a new crop of hateful, anti-semetic, misogynist bigots won Republican primaries. A prime example of this group of sick trumpsuckers is one Mar"k Keith Robinson, now the Republican candidate for Governor of North Carolina.

Robinson once put the idea that six million Jews died in the Holocaust in quotes, as if it were in doubt: “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” he wrote. “There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”

Robinson further played upon the Jewish-communist conspiracy trope. “It’s hard for me to understand how so many can remain blind to the fact that COMMUNISM, not Nazism was, and still is, the BIGGEST threat to American freedom,” he said, urging his followers to “wake up and see the REAL enemy.” He concluded, “After all, who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?”

At one point Robinson claimed that the idea that Hitler disarmed six million Jews and marched them off to concentration camps was “foolishness” and “a bunch of hogwash.”

Robinson has claimed a First Amendment right to denigrate and dehumanize the LGBTQ+ community openly, calling its members “devil worshiping child molesters” and “sick, deranged sexual degenerates who promote this demonic behavior.”

Of pregnant women, Robinson said, “It’s not your body anymore." 

Anyone sane who who pays attention to politics today must recognize how precisely Orwell predicted the future; how entirely the discourse has succumbed to doublespeak, how every up is now upside down.

The most obvious illustration of this is the Republican dogwhistle, “freedom.” Which in actual practice, has come to mean rigid religious control and domination/captivity to the sadistic whims of zealots and wannabe-witch burners.

We are increasingly seeing red state enforcement of fanatical fundamentalist dogma, Taliban style. Nowhere is this more glaringly apparent than the cold iron grip on women’s bodies and the ongoing extinction of women’s rights, autonomy and self-determination.

The latest salvo in this assault is so-called “fetal personhood,” the novel theocratic notion that a microscopic clump of cells [even frozen in a petri dish is fully equal to a thinking, functional human being, with all the same rights.

This is the predictable slippery slope on which we embarked as soon as Roe v. Wade was abolished by the opinion of Supreme Court cleric Samuel Alito — relying on the medieval chin-strokings of a 17th century fellow zealot named Sir Matthew Hale.

Alito, like the others of the Fascist Five on the Supreme Court, arrived at this particular juncture in history through the decades-long machinations of the billionaire Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, with the complicity of Mitch McConnell and the entire Republican party, to serve this intended purpose.

Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, the rabidly anti-choice justice whose nomination was rammed through during the initial outbreak of Covid in the US, was chosen for her religious extremism, including her stated view that life begins at fertilization.

She supports an organization — the St. Joseph County Right to Life — that advocates for the criminalization of discarding unused or frozen embryos created in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process.

Jackie Appleman, the executive director of St. Joseph County Right to Life, when asked whether doctors who perform abortion ought to be criminalized, said: “We support the criminalization of the doctors who perform abortions. At this point we are not supportive of criminalizing the women.”

“At this point.” Which certainly suggests that at some point they will — at the whim of half-a-dozen wack-job judicial appointees on the most fanatically far right Court this country has ever seen.

And of course, if you are unlucky enough to live in a benighted state of moral torpidity like Alabama, this dystopian nightmare is already coming true.

In an Alabama Supreme Court decision that has rattled reproductive medicine across the country, a majority of the justices said the law was clear that frozen embryos should be considered children: “Unborn children are ‘children.’”

But the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, drew on more than the Constitution and legal precedent to explain his determination.

“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote in a concurring opinion that invoked the Book of Genesis and the prophet Jeremiah and quoted at length from the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians.

“Even before birth,” he added, “all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Parker’s words were a stunningly open embrace of Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States should be an explicitly Christian country.

“He framed it entirely assuming that the state of Alabama is a theocracy, and that that is a legitimate way of evaluating laws and policies,” said Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida professor who studies religion and culture. “It looks like he decided to just dismiss the history of first amendment religious freedom jurisprudence at the federal level, and assume that it just doesn’t apply to Alabama.”

Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, described the opinion as a “beautiful defense of life and the Alabama Constitution.” But critics viewed it as dangerous and deviating from the U.S. Constitution. “Welcome to the theocracy,” wrote Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post.

“At one point, he described the embryos — frozen within a few days of fertilization, when they consist of perhaps a few hundred cells — as “little people.”

“Little people” which are too small to see without a microscope. Or maybe Judge Parker can see them. Maybe they talk to him — you can be pretty sure he thinks God does.

Look at all the little people!

“The very God of Holy Scriptures, the Creator, is the source of law, life, and liberty,” Parker declared at his swearing-in.

One of his ardent fellow-travelers in the crusade to elevate the rights of embryos over the rights of their “vessels” — the person carrying the pregnancy — is, of course, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Holy Mike Johnson.

The day after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June last year, Mike Johnson of Louisiana celebrated his home state’s new penalties for abortion providers. “The right to life has now been RESTORED!” the Republican crowed on X, formerly known as Twitter, on 25 June. “Perform an abortion and get imprisoned at hard labor for 1-10 yrs & fined $10K-$100K.”

Johnson is a loyal supporter of Donald Trump – to the point that he served on Trump’s legal defense team during Trump’s first impeachment – and a social conservative fueled by his evangelical Christian faith.

Johnson backed a bill that would have established that life begins at conception and redefined fetuses as human beings. So-called “personhood” bills could upend vast swaths of US law. For example, Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, which includes personhood language, lets people claim fetuses as tax dependents.

It surely can’t be long before the Republican party runs a fetus for Congress, can it?

Footage of Johnson circulating on social media shows him speaking at a House hearing linking the availability of abortion to the health of the economy.

“Roe v Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America, period,” Johnson said in the clip. “You think about the implications of that on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

You heard it ladies — get to work and fix that economy now.

The text of the bill to enshrine fetal personhood as federal law, as reported by CNN:

The Life at Conception Act – which was introduced in January 2023 by GOP Rep. Alex Mooney of West Virginia and has 125 total Republican sponsors in the House, including House Speaker Mike Johnson – defines the term “human being” to include “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

“the moment of fertilization”

That’s the moment when your uterus becomes the property of the all-knowing, all powerful Godstate. And just to make sure that you don’t try to get tricky and circumvent your duty by using contraception, or any means of wasting precious personhood eggs, maybe next they will pass a law to make your body property as soon as you are born a female. Sound familiar?

Maybe not at this time, but you know with certainty that they will be going after birth control methods and reproductive technologies. Will fertility clinics be permitted to dispose of unused frozen embryos? Will states prohibit IVF altogether? Will IUDs, birth control pills and the morning-after pill be banned? Literally all of it is on the chopping block now.

That’s what they are coming for … your body, your choices, your life.

As wannabe Alabama GOP governor Robison said of pregnant women, “It’s not your body anymore.” For a lot of ‘conservatives’ it’s not your body EVER.