Here's what I learned writing my new book.
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But it's necessary to understand them and their history.
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It shatters the very myth of America.
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Confederates worshiped a Confederate God.
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They were called to humiliate themselves. Fast for the racist God's mercy. Their churches were temples to this racist, white supremacist God.
It was the culture itself.
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The preachers continued preaching divine white supremacy. They continued the Confederate ideology for a perverse "second coming" - the South "rising again."
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The white supremacist view was hidden behind rhetoric and a streamlined Southern Strategy. And the Evangelical Right embraced hypercapitalism.
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That has held throughout the centuries and capitalism stands as "proof" of white supremacy.
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In this, the Confederate, racist God became a capitalist.
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To say people were poor or criminals because of lesser morality is a scam.
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The Confederate faith continued casting the blame on those suffering and again urged humiliation.
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See how this runs through. See how it has evolved into this diseased cult.
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That was Reagan's religion.
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This was a myth. A demonstrably fake myth. But it has become the foundation of the Republican Party
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People of color. Poor people. Women. LGBTQ Americans. Everyone challenging the white patriarchal order.
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It wasn't geopolitics anymore. It was spiritual war.
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Over time, they merged.
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Surely there was conspiracy.
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It was the New World Order, Satan's organization.
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The NWO/Obama/Satanic conspiracy thing is nuts, but if you grew up in this you recognize it instantly.
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Before we get back to Obama and Trump and the Cult of the Shining City. It's necessary to go back to Germany in the 1930's, where the National Socialist Party was merging with something called "Positive Christianity."
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It also provided a means of control.
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Hitler embraced this and over time the Nazis announced all faith was unnecessary as Hitler was the new prophecy moving forward.
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All you need to do is to grasp control and use it to your own ends, establishing a new cult of personality.
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People within the cult don't recognize they're in the cult. It's simply their world.
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And it doesn't hurt that he willingly embraces the cult.
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It is a message: I am battling a conspiracy of evil as a messiah.
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This is a death cult.
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They'll kill themselves and take us with them.
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The problem is they took control of the country and we've been steeped in their madness for decades. It became part of our history
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Here's a distillation of my work in @newrepublic that has the framework.
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newrepublic.com/article/157062…
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