In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot

File copy from Washington Post

In Georgia, a Biden supporter realizes the power of her ballot

By Stephanie McCrummen
NOVEMBER 6, 2020

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — She had made sure her sons voted and her daughter voted, and she kept pressing friends and people in grocery store lines. “Did you go vote?” Cynthia Kendrick had asked them over and over, and in the last hours, she said to her procrastinating daughter-in-law, “Come on, let’s go.”

She drove over to a polling station in a library, her final effort to turn out every single Democratic vote she could in her corner of Atlanta’s Fulton County, and now that voting was over, she settled in front of the television to find out what kind of country she was living in.
“Turn it up, baby,” she said to her husband, Gabriel, a disabled veteran who sat next to her in their house in the mostly African American community of East Point, where the voting lines had been long and enthusiasm so high that at one polling station, volunteers cheered as the last people hurried through the doors to cast their ballots Tuesday night.
“Please, Lord,” Cynthia said now, leaning in as a CNN anchor began talking about Georgia.
“Georgia seems to be giving Trump a run for his money,” the anchor said.
“My mind is going all over the place,” Cynthia said in response.
She thought of what a Joe Biden victory could mean: “In terms of pure humanity, he can relate to us. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has compassion. I saw this morning where he went to the graves of his children.”

She thought of what a President Trump victory could mean: “We’re going to be a white supremacist nation. We’re going back to before the civil rights era. We’re setting up for that.”
“Georgia, too close to call,” the anchor was saying now. “North Carolina, too close to call.”
She was 60, worked as an industrial buyer and was the center of a large, blended family of six grown children, including a teacher, a soldier, an account rep for a credit card firm, a nurse, a heavy equipment operator, and the youngest, Chance, a college student, who was now coming through the front door — past the word “love” that Cynthia had stenciled on a wall — and into the living room, where she had hung posters of jazz musicians and otherwise tried to make her home a welcoming place that valued family, responsibility and all of the things she was trying to keep believing her country valued, too.
“Who’s winning?” her son Vaughn, the heavy equipment operator, called from the kitchen table.
“Still the same,” she called back.
“Y’all got it done?” she asked Chance.
“Yep,” said Chance, who had driven a friend four hours to vote in Tennessee, where he was registered, and then drove him back, and now he sat in the living room watching the returns, too.
“All right, baby,” said Cynthia, returning her attention to the television, where the anchor was saying, “In Michigan, Trump leads… In Ohio, Biden leads,” and she tried not to think about another four years of waking up every morning asking, “Lord, what did the Trumpers do now?”

It was Trump and everything that had come with him. Charlottesville. The Proud Boys. A White former classmate who felt free to lecture her about how Black men got killed by police because they did not behave properly. It was the White woman in the grocery store going on a racist rant until Cynthia finally said, “You know you don’t have Secret Service protection, don’t you?” It was the footage she watched over the weekend of a Biden bus being surrounded by Trump supporters on a Texas highway, all of which was forcing her to reconsider the seminal memory of her childhood, when her grandparents took her with them to vote at an event hall in New Orleans in November 1964.
She had always focused on certain details: her grandfather polishing his tan shoes the night before, her grandmother dressing up in a gray suit and cardigan embroidered with flowers, and all the pride and possibility that moment contained.
Now her mind focused on the rest: The jar of dog feces a White man threw at them as they were leaving the hall. The Black man who fired a gun in the air after that. The rifle her grandfather used to hold when he sat on the front porch in the evenings.
She thought again about a Trump victory: “I’ve been considering carrying a firearm. I’ve been to the shooting range. I’m beginning to feel like we need to be able to protect ourselves. I’ve got to protect my family. I think he wants to start a civil war.”
She switched to another news channel where Trump’s face filled the screen. She switched to another channel. She scrolled through her phone and read more results out loud to her husband. Louisiana, Trump. Alabama, Trump.
“How did so many people think this man is qualified?” Cynthia asked.
“This is too much, baby,” said Gabriel, who decided to go to bed to avoid further stress, and soon, Vaughn went to bed, and Chance went to bed, and it was only Cynthia still awake in the house in East Point, an African American woman among the millions of African American women whom the Democratic Party had always depended on in moments like this, and who listened as the anchor said, “You see Georgia here.”
“Oh, Lord,” Cynthia said.
“And we’ve got Fulton County over here — the Democrats are going to need something massive out of the metro area,” the anchor continued, pointing roughly to the spot where she was sitting in the glow of the television near midnight. Rather than staying awake another hour imagining all the scenarios whereby Trump might try to steal the election, she took half a sleeping pill and tried to go to bed.
But she couldn’t, not right away. She found herself thinking about the night in 2016 when she went to bed and woke up to Trump. She thought about the fences now installed around the White House and the plywood covering the storefronts in downtown Atlanta, and she soothed herself by telling herself what she always did: “We’ll survive. We’ll go on with our lives.”

She woke up Wednesday and tried to do that. She went to work. She went to the gym to blow off stress. She came home and returned to the couch. Chance sat next to her.
“Georgia,” the anchors were saying again.
Cynthia put on her glasses. She leaned forward.
The president’s lead was shrinking, and now analysts were talking about Trump filing lawsuits to stop the counting.
“They’re going to stop counting the votes?” Chance asked, sounding incredulous.
Cynthia told him that was only a “desperation tactic” by Trump as she realized that whatever Trump might declare was becoming less and less important in America. What mattered was what the maps were showing on her television screen, and now those maps were zooming in again on Georgia, and then zooming in farther to Atlanta, and then farther still to Fulton County, and now a split screen was showing live video of workers counting ballots.
“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said as she realized that it was Chance’s vote, and Vaughn’s vote, and her daughter-in-law’s vote, and her husband’s vote, and her own vote that could put Biden in the White House.
She began to feel herself relax, and as Trump’s lead shrank further, she relaxed some more, and as the anchors kept talking about what seemed to be happening, she found herself saying the most hopeful thing she had said in four years: “It’s over."

Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results

 Once again I attempted to post something to my Facebook page and the algorithms decided to keep it off my "newsfeed" (which I keep open and frequently refreshed). But the "home page" got it, so sooner or later it may or may not get the same distribution as a cartoon, food recipe or cat video. In any case, I have this blog to keep up with stuff like this so here is the backup copy of a very timely message tossed across the transom by one of my Facebook friends.

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Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results

The United States has never had a nationwide general strike.
Here's what that would look like

MATTHEW ROZSA
NOVEMBER 1, 2020

In the event that President Donald Trump loses in the upcoming election but refuses to give up power, some American unions are contemplating a general strike — meaning a major strike in which a significant percentage of workers from every sector of the economy withhold their labor. 

Many analysts, psychologists, the president's advisers and even the president himself have suggested that he will not accept the results if he loses, which could trigger a larger political crisis or unrest for those who want to force him out. Back in 2016, Trump infamously refused to accept the legitimacy of the election results if he did not win.

Historically, mass strikes have been effective means of forcing political outcomes; such labor actions can effectively shut down all economic activity, crippling business and factory owners who rely on their workers' labor in order to profit across all sectors.

"Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers," the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, declared in a resolution approved earlier this month. "The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America's labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic."

They added, "We are determined that the next president of the United States will be the person who is the choice of the people of these United States through the process our Constitution and laws provide."
The resolution also warned individuals who "seek to prevent eligible voters from voting, to prevent our votes from being counted, to prevent the electors we choose from being seated, or to prevent those electors' choice as president and vice president from being inaugurated" that "we will not let you take our democracy away from us. America's working people are determined and prepared to defend our democracy."

That message was reinforced on Oct. 22 in a phone call by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka with various union leaders, according to The Guardian. During that call, Trumka reportedly explained that until the election on Nov. 3 labor leaders should focus on maximizing turnout for Trump's opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. If Trump loses and resists a peaceful transition, Trumka added, the AFL-CIO should then consider its options in terms of how unions can compel him to leave office.

"We believe democracy is stronger than Trump," Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to Trumka, told The Guardian. "We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We're getting ready if they're not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters." He also added that for the time being "a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy."

It is a slogan that many American unions are starting to embrace, however. Local labor federations in Rochester, Seattle and western Massachusetts have already approved resolutions saying that they should consider a general strike if Trump steals the election or loses but refuses to step down.

So what exactly would a general strike look like? Such a thing has not happened in the United States in a very long time.

Speaking to Salon in April, labor activist Steve Early said there has never been a nationwide and comprehensive general strike in the United States, but noted that there were smaller general strikes — or at least work stoppages comparable to general strikes — in Seattle in 1919, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934 and Oakland in 1946.

"There are no cons—just a lot of formidable obstacles to making this happen, such as too many unions telling their members they can't participate because they are covered by binding contractual no-strike clauses and general strike participation would expose their unions to damage suits by employers," Early said.

Unfortunately, general strikes have often been crushed by law enforcement. For instance, the 1919 Seattle General Strike — which was prompted by Seattle businesses refusing to increase workers' wages despite wages being kept down during World War I — ended with police officers and vigilantes rounding up the labor leaders responsible behind it. General strikes can also lead to violence, such as when police in Greece clashed with strikers in 2012 when Greek workers protested austerity measures.

While there has never been a nationwide general strike in the United States, Trump refusing to accept the results of an election defeat could be the catalyst to set a new precedent. The president has repeatedly stated that he may not accept the election results unless he is declared the winner, a prospect that has alarmed many constitutional scholars.

"History teaches that would-be dictators should be taken at their word when they declare an intent to remain in power regardless of election results," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email last year. "That's a strong reason for patriotic citizens of all political persuasions to work toward an electoral landslide that would minimize Trump's opportunity to cling to power. But nothing could reduce the probability of that abnormal behavior on Trump's part to zero. If Trump refuses to leave, even judges appointed by him could well align with the legitimate winner's predictable request for an emergency injunction to pry him from his lair in the White House."

He added, "If Trump defies judicial orders to give up power — including the nuclear codes — there could well be a military coup, backed by tens of millions of citizens taking to the streets, leading to Trump's forcible ouster. Failing that, there might be a massive popular uprising, backed by Fox along with the other cable networks and social media platforms, that could well erupt in terrible bloodshed. However, one defines a 'constitutional crisis' — a much-overused term — Trump's refusal to abide by the electoral outcome would certainly qualify as such a crisis."

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Donald Trump: The End-Times President

Alex Morris is a Senior Writer for Rolling Stone covering culture, subculture, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and various other social issues. Her work has appeared in New York (where she was a Contributing Editor for over a decade), Glamour, Marie Claire, Billboard, Details, Southern Living, and many others.
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in NYC with her husband, her two children, and her firm belief in the Oxford comma.

Donald Trump: The End-Times President

How fundamentalist Christians who believe in the apocalyptic myth of “the rapture” could be shaping Trump’s agenda — and American life

By ALEX MORRIS

Last month, as infernos raged across the West Coast and President Trump countered scientific consensus on climate change, saying, “I don’t think science knows, actually,” Americans of various persuasions got a glimpse of the apocalypse. For many on the left, the fires presented Armageddon in microcosm, proof of the destructive, ongoing processes that imperil humans and the planet alike. For many on the right, however, the fires were a different sort of sign, and Trump’s comment was a dog whistle reassuring those in the know that science would be allowed to imperil neither God-given profits nor God’s plan for his own creation and how it might come to an end. Not with Trump in charge, anyway.

It would be hard to decisively connect the dots here if you weren’t raised, as I was, to believe in a very specific idea of Armageddon. Well before I learned the history of all of America’s actual wars, my conservative Presbyterian church taught me about the battle that would bring about the end times. I was taught that the 38th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel prophesized that one day — any day now, really — a “place in the far north” (interpreted, naturally, to be Russia) would team up with “many nations” (certainly including Iraq and Iran) to attack a “peaceful and unsuspecting” Israel. This would lead to a cosmic battle in which God would come to Israel’s defense, true Christians would be “raptured,” or spirited away to heaven, and the wicked of the Earth would be left to suffer the trials and tribulations of God’s wrath during a horrific seven-year period when the Antichrist would reign supreme and a totalitarian world government called the New World Order would be established. Finally, Jesus and his raptured church would return, vanquishing the Antichrist and ushering in a thousand-year golden age, at the end of which Satan would be permanently defeated and all Christians would live in glory in a newly created heaven and Earth. “The generation that saw Israel become a state will witness Jesus’ return,” I was repeatedly told by those who saw, in the tea leaves of recent history, the end times drawing near. Sometimes, if my house was especially quiet, I’d momentarily panic that everyone had been raptured up without me.

These ideas have been called heretical by Catholics and mainline Protestants (of which, it should be said, I am now one). But to the roughly 80 million evangelicals in the U.S., they have become a dominant — one might even say the dominant — strain of the faith. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans think that Jesus will definitely (23 percent) or probably (18 percent) return to Earth by the year 2050. A full 58 percent of white evangelicals hold this view. The Left Behind series, a collection of novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late fundamentalist minister Tim LaHaye that dramatizes this theology, has sold more than 80 million copies (as of 2016) and has been made into multiple feature-length films. “When I first started researching, I had this idea that I would be studying a subculture,” says Amy Frykholm, senior editor at The Christian Century and author of Rapture Culture. “And then Left Behind happened, and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a subculture. This may be the dominant American culture, and the rest of us are subcultures.’ I mean, this is mainstream.”

And never has it been more mainstream in American politics than under the Trump administration. Unlike Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Trump does not appear to believe in end-times theology or even in Christianity in general, but his lack of apparent belief in anything has freed him up to seek out and uniquely cater to whatever group would show the most allegiance. It’s therefore unsurprising that he has filled his administration with fundamentalists, whose devotion to his presidency may be based on a conviction that they’re playing for the highest of possible stakes — that their actions on the political stage could play a role in bringing about the Second Coming and that their fight for Christian values affects how God will judge them when that day comes.

Until Trump took office, Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries, which organizes bible studies for political leaders (and, according to the organization’s Statement of Faith, teaches rapture theology), held group meetings in the Senate and House, but not the executive branch. With Trump in office, Drollinger saw an opening, starting a bible study for White House staff in March 2017 that a number of Trump’s Cabinet members have attended, including former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and former EPA head Scott Pruitt. The organization’s public list of sponsors includes Vice President Mike Pence (who has described himself as a “born-again, evangelical Catholic”), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. David Jeremiah, the protégé of Tim LaHaye whose own series of nonfiction tomes attempt to present rapture theology in a more academic format, serves on Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board (LaHaye himself served as the spiritual adviser to former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, but did not make it into the White House’s inner sanctum).

“Never have evangelicals had the access to the president that they have under President Trump,” Robert Jeffress, a prominent rapture theology pastor, told me in 2019. “He has made a unique effort to not just win their votes in 2016 but also to listen to them afterwards. If anything, [access] has increased. He has certainly made good on his promise to have an open-door policy.”

In lending such unprecedented credence to a fundamentalist strain of evangelicalism, Trump has not just sanctioned its worldview in the halls of government, but he’s allowed it to become further politicized. “George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, was a minister’s [son], but he didn’t overtly bring that to bear on how he doled out justice,” says John Fea, a scholar of Christian nationalism and author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Indeed, Ashcroft maintained that “it is against my religion to impose my religion” on people. One does not get the same separation-of-church-and-state vibe from Trump’s end-times acolytes. “Here, we have Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence literally making appearances in front of the home crowd, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Salem radio shows, Liberty University,” says Fea. “It’s not even a wink, wink. It’s an overt appeal to this kind of evangelicalism.”

At a 2015 “God and Country Rally” in Wichita, Kansas, Pompeo endorsed a prayer that had condemned multiculturalism and homosexuality, telling those assembled, “We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.” In a 2019 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, when asked whether he believed that God might have put Trump in office to save the Jews from Iran, Pompeo replied, “I am certain that the Lord is at work here.”

In numerous speeches, Pence has likewise catered to the rapture theology idea that America’s fate is tied up with that of Israel. “We stand with Israel because we cherish that ancient promise that Americans have always cherished throughout our history: that those who bless her will be blessed,” he told Christians United for Israel, a conservative Christian organization led by the televangelist John Hagee. For his own part, Hagee’s website has this to say about the end times: “Gravestones will be toppled over. Funeral homes from every region will report that those who were dead have resurrected and suddenly disappeared. Cars will be parked beside freeways, their engines left running, their passengers mysteriously missing. Airplanes will fall from the sky as pilots who are Believers are called home. The news centers report that churches around the world are flooded with people who are sobbing uncontrollably. They know. They have missed the rapture.” Not coincidentally, Hagee has been calling for the U.S. to enter a war with Iran for at least the past 15 years.

Certainly, the most overt proof that these beliefs are influencing policy can be seen in the administration’s actions in the Middle East. For those not steeped in rapture theology, the decisions to move the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, and assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen Qasem Soleimani may have seemed risky at best, nihilistic at worst — potentially destabilizing acts with little geopolitical upside. Yet many fundamentalist evangelicals rejoiced, presumably seeing in these actions proof that Trump is on their side even if he isn’t in their pews. Lest any of these believers missed the point, Jeffress gave the opening prayer at the dedication ceremony for the new Jerusalem embassy; Hagee was chosen to give the closing benediction.

End-times theology’s influence doesn’t end there, however. As with any worldview, it is comprehensive, creating its own internal logic and compelling its followers to adhere to it. To limit its scope to Israeli relations and to equate it with a collection of pulpy novels is to fail to see rapture theology’s true pervasiveness and the growing role it is playing in American domestic politics and the fabric of American life. It’s to fail to see its awesome power in the here and now.

The concept of a second coming of Jesus has been central to Christianity since the earliest days of the church. But the idea of the rapture — that Christians will magically be spared the trials and tribulations preceding the Second Coming — didn’t exist until the late 19th century, when a British preacher named John Darby reportedly borrowed it from the visions of a teenage girl he knew. During Darby’s five trips to America between 1862 and 1877, the country was in the throes of, or still recovering from, the Civil War, and the escapism of the rapture appealed to white Southern Christians who were only too pleased to learn that “‘Oh, we’re going to be taken back to the glory land where we have our plantations in heaven,’” says Zack Hunt, a former minister and author of Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong. “That’s where you begin to see the ball rolling with a lot of this end-times theology. Before that, it doesn’t exist in the church.”

For much of the next century, then, rapture theology was about escapism — creating a subculture with its own schools and rules and focus on personal salvation — and was concentrated in the South within fundamentalist communities, finding a home among those who rejected evolution and women’s lib and adhered to a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. It wasn’t until about 50 years ago that the ideas started to take on an unhealthy political bent. The 1948 creation of the state of Israel meant that the end-times clock was ticking, and the founding of NATO and the U.N. foreshadowed the emergence of a New World Order run by liberal elites in cahoots with the Antichrist, who might be anyone from Gorbachev to Obama. The end-times Christian’s main calling had once been to save as many souls as possible before the rapture occurred, but after the advent of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority — a political crusade initiated by anger at the government for its attempts to desegregate private Christian schools — the mission became more overtly political and wrapped up in the idea that God would judge not just individuals, but also nations. As the world sunk further into depravity, a Christian’s charge was to push back against that depravity, to fight evil at every turn, and at every level of government.

“Instead of wanting to escape, they get this need for control,” says Diana Butler Bass, a religious historian who specializes in American fundamentalism and grew up in the evangelical church. “There’s this idea that safety isn’t possible unless they have some ability to shape policy.” Godliness would not be achieved through fights for equality or social-justice reform, as some 19th century Christian social movements had attempted, including abolitionism. Rather, America would be saved by adhering to a sort of biblical legalism, an interpretation of “holiness” that attempts to force the values of the group (God, family, and country, in that order) on those who don’t share those values, or don’t share them in the same way. “It’s this slow putting into place policies of order,” says Bass, “policies of control, policies of authority, policies of hierarchy as a way of containing chaos, trying to create a biblical world in order that we can move into whatever that next phase will be, when Christ will return.”

Adherents of rapture theology view almost every issue through that lens. “It pervades people’s thinking,” says Larycia Hawkins, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who formerly taught at the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois. And this is true not only when it comes to politicized issues, but also when it comes to simple interactions, daily duties, how one perceives current events. Rapture Christians look to the world for signs of what God is doing and what God is telling them to do, and in looking for signs, they inevitably find them. “The wars, the rumors of wars, the fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the earthquakes in places that have never had earthquakes,” Hawkins says, “these are signs of the Earth groaning to be restored — not because the Earth is broken, but because people are broken, and it takes Jesus to come back and redeem the soul.”

Understanding this unlocks an understanding of much of the Trump administration’s agenda, which seems tailor-made to appeal to this theological mindset. Inside this worldview, environmentalism is a lack of faith in God’s power over his own creation, so gutting the EPA, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, and scoffing at climate science makes perfect sense. Conservative judges aren’t just saving the unborn, they’re also bulwarks against all manner of Satan-sanctioned liberalism, protecting the faithful from persecution and reversing LGBTQ protections. Socialism is a plan to subvert God’s dispensation of riches, so it’s not wrong to kick more than a half-million people off of food stamps amid a pandemic. Women’s rights seek to subvert the hierarchy God created for the home, while immigration leads to pluralism, a watering down of America’s Christian essence. The coronavirus is a punishment that entered America through its most liberal cities, and a proactive response to the virus is an overreach of a government that would emasculate men by usurping their God-given autonomy over the safety of the family. Inequality is proof of mankind’s brokenness, which only Jesus can heal. “Whether or not you believe in the rapture or tribulation or any of this stuff, the reality is it affects all of our lives in very tangible ways,” says Hunt.

The Trump administration’s pursuit of this agenda has been so thorough that the president has become emblematic of this belief system to many who adhere to it. The rise of “Patriot churches” and televangelist Pat Robertson’s recent assertion that “Trump is going to win the election … and the fulfillment will take place of Ezekiel 38’s prophesy” are not about simply bringing Christian principles to bear on governance, as politicians have certainly done throughout America’s history; they are inserting Trump into the narratives of Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism (the belief that restoring the Holy Land to the Jews is a prerequisite to the Second Coming), respectively. And Trump’s appeal to both of these ideologies, despite their unpopularity with a majority of voters, shows the extent of his compact with his evangelical base.

In fact, the very unpopularity of much of what Trump has accomplished is part of the point, allowing fundamentalists to find political success and primacy while still casting themselves as persecuted and oppressed. Under the guise of a crusade for “religious freedom,” they have indeed found a perfect companion in Trump, whose popularity thrives on the politics of grievance, and who has inherited (and squandered) a fortune and yet still manages to see himself as a put-upon man of the people. “Part of Trump’s appeal to this demographic is his embrace of vengeance toward his enemies. That’s a huge component of end-times theology,” says Hunt. “The idea is that the church or the faithful is going to be raptured up into heaven, and then there will be this seven-year period of tribulation where all these terrible plagues and bowls of wrath are going to be poured out on Earth? Well, what’s really happening is all of the faithful are sitting there watching their enemies get their comeuppance. They’re finally seeing all the people who made fun of them for going to church or ridiculed them for being pro-life or told them they were wrong for opposing gay marriage are now getting their just due. So there’s this carnal appeal to end-times theology. And you see Donald Trump kind of prefigure that in a really perverse way.”

And he’s only too happy to do so. Trump understands the inherent power of a worldview that delineates a stark line between good and evil, that preaches of persecution at the hands of imagined foes, be it the mainstream media or the liberals making up the fictitious international ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles central to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Put another way, he understands the allure — and utility — of framing everything as an epic fight.

Such a framing not only distorts truth and objectivity, but “it also tells the person who holds the truth that their truth is more important than other people’s truth. And it frames it as benevolence,” says political analyst Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People. End-times Christians are often what Hunt calls “otherwise good people,” those trustworthy souls who stock their church’s food pantries and leave a note on your windshield if they accidentally ding your car. Their political aims may seem impossibly selfish and short-sighted from the outside, but they wholeheartedly believe that they are fighting on the side of angels. “One of the problems of this mindset is that it creates an alternate reality — and also a permanent state of artificial austerity to fund schools and infrastructure and health care and have better lives, because we’re being treated like we’re in the middle of a world war that doesn’t actually exist,” says Sexton. In other words, policy decisions that would improve people’s earthly lives pale in comparison to those that continue the fight for American holiness. “We’ve been looking for apocalyptic battles because we believe ourselves to be the champion of God in the universe,” Sexton continues. “We’ve been fighting phantoms.”

And Trump, more than any previous president, has been egging evangelicals on in that fight, whipping up a fervor that will not go away no matter what happens in November. Whether Trump gets another term or not, America can expect the myth of the rapture to continue to influence U.S policy through his court appointments. We can expect a re-litigation of concepts that were settled long ago, from Roe v. Wade to prayer in schools. We can expect other conservative candidates to continue to overtly cater to this group, but possibly with a political competence even more effective at achieving the ends the rapturous believe are necessary to American salvation. We can expect political losses, no matter how significant, to be challenged, because democracy is not as important as the supposed will of God.

More than anything, we can expect that rapture theology will not go away, will not cede the privileged position Trump has granted it. And from that privileged position, we can expect that it will continue to tear Americans apart. “I mean, you have one group of folks who are trying to expand health care coverage and another who are fighting a cosmic battle between good and evil. What conversation can be had?” Hunt sighs. “There’s not one.”

Trump Rally one week before Election Day

This is being posted about five hours after appearing on the web. The source, Iowa Starting Line, scores well for factual reporting but is definitely "Left Biased."
Overall, we rate Iowa Starting Line Left Biased based on story selection that favors the left and High for factual reporting based on strong sourcing.

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Trump Supporters Left Stranded At Freezing Omaha Airport
Posted October 28th, 2020 at 12:26am 
By Paige Godden

President Donald Trump left several thousand of his supporters stranded at Eppley Airfield after his event in Omaha Tuesday night.

After the President boarded Air Force One and departed the state, many of the attendees, some of whom waited more than four hours to listen to him speak, stood in the freezing temperatures on a private road in the middle of the airport.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny reported “thousands” of people were stuck in the cold more than an hour after Trump took off from the airport.

According to a Twitter account named “Omaha Scanner,” police officers located two groups of elderly Trump supporters shortly after the event ended who were struggling in the cold. One group was reportedly frozen in the cold and unable to move.

Another complaint included a call for a medic to assist a 68 year-old man who complained of hypothermia and possibly had an altered mental status.

The event itself seemed poorly planned from the beginning.

Trump’s campaign told his rally-goers to arrive at Eppley at 4:30 p.m. By then, cars were lined up for miles trying to get into the airport, and the security team was directing people in circles.

At one point, security said the South Economy parking lot where the cars were being directed to was full, and pointed people toward the north lot. Security at the north lot then directed the cars of people, who had already waited in line once, back to the South Economy lot.

The security team then told people who started parking in a cell phone lot across the street from the South Economy lot that they may be towed.

Most ignored the warning and proceeded into the South Economy lot, where they found thousands of people standing in four separate lines to get onto charter buses.

A group of people in the cell phone lot gave up their place in the long line to go offer to move their cars somewhere else so they wouldn’t be towed, but the security team then said their cars wouldn’t be towed out of the nearby lot.

People were directed to stand in the long lines to get on charter buses that would drive them to the event. It took well over two hours to get through the line.

While thousands of people stood in the lines, the flow of buses was not at all constant.

At about 6:45 p.m. (the Trump event was scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.) YouTubers Camille & Haley showed up to sing songs like “Back the Blue” and “Vote Trump 2020” for the people still the lines in the South Economy lot.

Once on the buses, people were transported more than 3.5 miles down a private road to another part of the airport. It took more than half-an-hour for the buses to get from the South Economy lot to the place where they could be unloaded.

Once at the event, people walked a few blocks toward tents where volunteers took everyone’s temperatures.

Attendees were led through another one- to two-hour long queue to get inside the event.

Trump landed at the airport and began speaking while thousands of people were still waiting in the queue to get in the event.

Some started shouting for the line to move faster, and some began saying they needed to use the restroom and threatened to relieve themselves while waiting in line.

While Trump left the event quickly in Air Force One, attendees were stuck for hours outside in freezing cold temperatures in the dark.

Trump was visiting Nebraska to secure his standing in the state’s 2nd congressional district (largely Omaha-based), which could flip to Joe Biden next week as Nebraska awards some of its electoral votes per congressional districts.

Some Iowa politicians were on hand for the rally, which was right over the Iowa border. Sen. Joni Ernst, however, did not get a chance to speak to the crowd despite being locked in a very tight reelection race.

by Paige Godden
Posted 10/28/20

Washington Post noted this event a few hours later.

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear that something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the withering cold, as police scrambled to help the most at-risk get to warmth.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner, which monitors official radio traffic. Police and fire authorities didn’t immediately return messages from The Washington Post early Wednesday and declined to provide reporters on the scene with precise numbers of how many needed treatment.

The Trump campaign said it had provided enough buses but that traffic on the two-lane road outside the airport was throttled to one direction after the rally, tweeted Aaron Sanderford, a political reporter at the Omaha World-Herald. The campaign didn’t immediately respond to a message from The Post early on Wednesday.

The confusion and the freezing weather added to the health risks that accompany every Trump rally during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In Omaha, an estimated crowd of more than 6,000 people jammed into risers outside the airport. Though the campaign checked temperatures and provided masks, many people didn’t wear them, the World-Herald reported.

In the lead-up to the rally, police warned that parking lots were full. With buses taking a half-hour to ferry people more than three miles away to the rally site, hundreds of attendees were late to get inside, reported Iowa Starting Line, a liberal news site.

After Trump’s speech, where he promised that “we’re making that final turn” on covid-19 in a state where positivity rates now exceed 20 percent, per the World-Herald, Trump flew away on Air Force One around 9 p.m. Attendees began lining up for buses to return to their cars.

By nearly 10:30 p.m., though, they were still waiting.

“President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally,” tweeted CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.

Zeleny wrote that he watched one Omaha police officer shake his head at the “chaotic cluster” and say, “We need at least 30 more buses.”

Soon, officers were radioing in about numerous elderly attendees struggling in the cold, according to Omaha Scanner. Police began shuttling some people to their cars to get them out of the elements.

“As we were walking, I saw at least two @OmahaPolice officers helping people who were getting cold, one elderly lady and a young boy,” Sanderford tweeted.

The crowds didn’t fully clear the rally site until after 12:30 a.m. — more than three-and-a-half hours after Trump departed — Sanderford reported.

Some local Democrats blamed the president for the scene.

“Supporters of the President were brought in, but buses weren’t able to get back to transport people out. It’s freezing and snowy in Omaha tonight,” tweeted Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt (D). “He truly does not care about you.”

Rosa Luxemburg Note

I never paid close attention to Rosa Luxemburg other than noting in passing that she was among the many Marxist/Communist figures that lost their lives in the development years of Communism. But until I came across this Twitter link I didn't appreciate that she was actually anti-war and cherished a really critical attitude about Marx and the Communist legacy.

Video via Twitter.

This clip at the Wikipedia article was all I needed to find.

She was an anti-war activist which put her at odds with the notion of a violent revolution. I'm by no means any expert on Marxist history (and this late in life I'm not tempted to become one) but I have found enough about Luxemburg to resonate with this part of her thinking. She was instrumental in the formation of The Spartacus League in 1918.

The question today is not democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has put on the agenda reads: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy. For the dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots and anarchy, as the agents of capitalist profits deliberately and falsely claim. Rather, it means using all instruments of political power to achieve socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class, through and in accordance with the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat.

This Wikipedia article caught my attention. 

Since the more primitive times in which Rosa Luxemburg lived, the exploitation of workers by big companies and bosses, has been displaced. Those "workers" are now small countries exploited by big ones. The old global order produced a power arrangement called colonialism which has since grown into a modern economic system of trade and commerce, supported by a global economic arrangement. Modern economics now involves a more reliable banking system which coexists with an elaborate complex of trans-national quasi-banking arrangements. These include organized legal, quasi-legal and outright illegal operations, cobbled together by whatever means possible according to which among them wields the greatest power. This arrangement is cobbled together in ways transcending geo-political boundaries as well as outright military might. The Al Capone rubric covers it: You can get so much farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.

The Accumulation of Capital was the only work Luxemburg published on economics during her lifetime. In the polemic, she argued that capitalism needs to constantly expand into non-capitalist areas in order to access new supply sources, markets for surplus value and reservoirs of labor.[44] According to Luxemburg, Marx had made an error in Das Kapital in that the proletariat could not afford to buy the commodities they produced and by his own criteria it was impossible for capitalists to make a profit in a closed-capitalist system since the demand for commodities would be too low and therefore much of the value of commodities could not be transformed into money. According to Luxemburg, capitalists sought to realize profits through offloading surplus commodities onto non-capitalist economies, hence the phenomenon of imperialism as capitalist states sought to dominate weaker economies. However, this was leading to the destruction of non-capitalist economies as they were increasingly absorbed into the capitalist system. With the destruction of non-capitalist economies, there would be no more markets to offload surplus commodities onto and capitalism would break down.[45]