I want to pause for a moment, soften around my tightening chest to breathe deeply. We have reached a terrifying moment here in the US. The fear and dread we feel confirm how dangerous it is. This was not an easy write. It’s nothing you don’t know, or sense already, but we must all keep naming truths. To name facts is an act of resistance against fascism. I aim to call in truths, as I see them, to support the final push these last weeks before the watershed of this election.
The journey of naming exorcises Trump’s defiling influence by placing his psychopathy and fraud under the spotlight. Speaking truth breaks the spell. It has power. It affirms what we are voting for. Our vote is our voice expressing that power.
The news of the New York Times bombshell of Trump’s Tax evasion (surprising no one), revealed his pimping of the U.S. to manage his bankruptcy and debt. It also broke the spell. As did his crashing the debate, employing the same venomous, bullying tactics he’s using to crash democracy.
As the spell breaks, I remember when the Communist block, which seemed impenetrable, fell so unexpectedly. I saw the moment on TV when Nicolae Ceausescu, the brutal Romanian dictator, realized the crowd he bussed in had turned against him. Standing on his balcony, it was the look on his face when he knew it was all over that stayed with me. Trump is a wannabe dictator. Aided by the GOP, he is grooming America for their Fascistic Theocracy. But he will fall; let’s do all we can to make sure it’s this November.
This is a treacherous moment for America. Trump’s calling on the white nationalist Proud Boys to take up arms is his last best strategy. Trump, and his use of brute violence, should not be underestimated, but neither should, “We the People.” We the people are not about to let freedoms won through extraordinary acts of courage like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, be signed away.
Ruth worked on through multiple cancer diagnoses, chemo, radiation, broken ribs, her beloved husband’s death, and she didn’t stop until her last breath. Let’s be Ruth leading up to this election, adding our courage to the lineage of warriors and change-makers. Courage isn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to stand our ground. As RBG lived, speak you mind, even if your voice shakes.
WE THE PEOPLE VOTE FOR DEMOCRACY
The Threat to Equal Rights
The untimely death of RBG was crushing. The loss of such a bastion of justice, whose unrelenting fight for universal rights not only underlined the colossal stakes of the coming election but also plunged the country ever deeper into the bottomless, mendacious chasm forged by the GOP. Hardly did we take a breath before Trump, McConnell, and their attack hounds denied due decency that such a passing demands by announcing their intention to ram through a new supreme court justice. Their hypocrisy is just one more assault thrown on the mountainous pile of craven strategies to upend democracy and abandon America to their daily diet of gaslight, shredded reality.
In replacing RBG, Trump and the GOP aimed for a likely destroyer of hard-won rights, attempting to whiplash us back decades, overturning everything RBG fought for. According to the New York Times, Trump’s nominee, Amy Comey Barratt, is a member of an extreme Christian sect, the People of Praise. They teach, “husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.” They also mandate that “members are accountable to personal advisors called a “head” for men and “handmaiden” for women.” The GOP’s use of a female judge to devolve us into theocratic patriarchy would be in line with their decades-long hateful attack on women’s rights to their own autonomy. Barrett’s nomination is the GOP’s revenge on RBG and, therefore, all women. It is also the clearest statement that the GOP has devolved into a theocratic, dogmatic cult.
Neither does this nomination bode well, given Trump’s ban on diversity training, race theory, and education on the US’s racist origins, for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Also in danger is the Marriage Equality Act as attests Barrett signing a letter to Catholic bishops that “marriage is founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.” Most likely, the first casualty, if her appointment succeeds, will be the Affordable Care Act, leaving millions of Americans afloat in the middle of a pandemic. Without a shred of empathy, destroying the best of Obama’s legacy is Trump’s revenge.
WE VOTE FOR RBG & TO STOP THE GOP
Trump’s Nazism & QAnon
Trump’s presidency has incrementally pushed us into a war. It’s taken a while to accept, here in the land of “American Exceptionalism.” Yet, here we are, confronted by a disturbing mix of society’s extremists galvanizing themselves under the banner of Trump’s Army, many showing up with QAnon insignia. Trump endorsement of QAnon chills those who know it’s a recycled anti-Jewish trope, written in 1902 as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazi’s reproduced its central lies, kidnapped children, the anti-Semitic “blood libel,” and a devious conspiracy against the white race, to mobilize their “Storm Troopers,” helping Hitler rise to power.
Fast-forward to now and the Texan Republican Party’s new slogan “We Are The Storm” reveals their allegiance to Nazism. Concerned founder of Genocide Watch, Gregory Stanton, has this to say about QAnon, I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.
Trump is no ordinary Banana Republic President. With concentration camps cemented on the Southern border, Trump is weaponizing himself as Hilter’s heir. Trump’s “evil genius” is his ability to induce a spell-like trance, so people whose violence and hatred was held in check by social mores have permission to project their raw emotions on whoever Trump scapegoats. Carl Jung spoke of how the archetypal power of the unconscious could overwhelm civilization, causing a mass psychosis that can lead to genocide. A demagogue, evoking primitive instinctual forces in the masses, who have no possibility to transform those instincts, could “sweep everything before them like a torrent, and turn men into creatures for whom the word “beast” is still too good to name.” All it needed was for a demagogue “to set himself up as a megaphone“, which is enough “to precipitate a catastrophe.”
WE VOTE TO STOP NAZISM
Trump’s Subversion of American Power & His War on Truth
Trump’s war is psychological. So far, it is not actively militarized, though he toyed with the possibility, as we saw when his violent Militia disappeared people off the streets of Portland. Instead, he has subverted American power to give free license to the worst totalitarian regimes, particularly those he has business dealing with, enabling their war crimes and violations of international humanitarian norms. Trump has lent American power to the Saudi led genocidal war on Yemen. He emboldened the far right in Israel under Netanyahu, helping crush Palestinian rights. Trump delivered up American allies, the Syrian Kurds, to Putin, Assad, and Erdogan and weakened Ukraine’s freedom struggle. Over and again, he undermined the US’s closest allies in Europe in favor of repressive regimes, delivering a blow to democracy around the world.
Trump’s ascendency in 2016 heralded a new kind of global war. To bring down democracies, like the US and UK, an act that delights nationalistic governments and totalitarian regimes, you don’t need an army. Instead, you need a massive assault on reality. Trump can stand on a presidential podium and state disinfectant cures Covid, which is easy to dismiss as just more inane idiocy in the litany of Trump’s pandemic lies. Good fodder for social media jokes. But then one day, you wake up and find factual information from the US Center for Disease Control has been corrupted into another portal for Trump’s propaganda war. This strategy is how, step-by-step, lie-by-lie, almost all government departments protecting democracy and the environment have been destroyed under Trump. The consequences are measured in real-time deaths.
WE VOTE TO STAND FOR TRUTH
To Abandon Facts is to Abandon Freedom
Trump’s war on reality, and his groundless inversion of facts, has been alarmingly effective. Fascists win the war on the truth when people keep quiet. Instead, it’s essential to speak out. The small handbook “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale, offers 20 succinct tips on overcoming fascism while protecting fact-based democracy. Tip 8. Stand Out. “Without unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks, the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken.” Tip 10. Believe in Truth. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, no one can criticize power… the biggest wallet pays for the most blinding light.”
Trump’s daily mugging of truth to build his rotting castle of lies inverts an effective response to the enormity of a mortal threat out striping every other peril faced by humanity. The dire impact of our heating biosphere and the immense on-going collapse of bio-diversity is speeding up. From California’s firestorms to an enormous ice melt in Greenland, the effects are clear examples of what is now impossible to ignore.
Just as Trump unleashed violence against American citizens enacting their First Amendment rights, he will have no qualms about unleashing climate genocide. It dovetails into the Nazi theory of “race hygiene,” which he touted at his recent rally to a white audience in Minnesota. “A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it” Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory,” Trump said. “You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” Far-right ethno-nationalists see global warming as a rallying point for protecting white supremacy while abandoning the rest of the world. All Trump needs to do to inflame and energize eco-fascism is to repeatedly promote climate denialism, block an urgent response, and deregulate all environmental protections.
WE VOTE TO STOP ECO-FASCISM
Trump’s Tactics Stifles Response to Threat
On September 17th (2020), New York installed a clock in Manhattan’s Union Square that counts down the time remaining to avert climate disaster, which is about seven and a half years. When the clock runs out, global temperatures will have moved to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. At this point, many natural systems begin to traverse points of no return, transforming life, as we know it. Living in or near evacuation Zones in the last three years, as fires storms raged around us in California, demonstrated how extreme weather events reduce normal life to continual crisis management. It’s simply not possible to function well when in shock.
Trump continually activates trauma and shock in the population to maintain control by destabilizing the norms of civil society. Keeping attention diverted and people unbalanced, as they try to deflect the daily round of abusive tweets, incoherent ramblings, and sadistic pronouncements, is his weapon for overturning the moral order. Trump’s shock tactic is immobilizing America’s ability to strategize a coherent response to the climate threat. His attack on science, progressive education, bi-partisan collaboration, and democracy sets the stage for the US to deteriorate into violent tribalism and inhumanity in the face of our unraveling world.
WE VOTE FOR A CLEAR RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
The Battle for Earth
In the battle for Earth, the immediate front line is the upcoming US election. We are in a dire struggle for America’s soul and what kind of future it will shape for itself and the world. Under Trump, the conditions have been created not only for fascism, civil unrest, perhaps even civil war, but he has also tacitly endorsed the rise of nationalistic governments. These tend to be the least willing to tackle climate change, demonstrating what happens in the US still vastly influences the rest of the world.
Trump’s unrelenting cudgel against truth has drastically subverted the moral imperative globally, sabotaging decisive action needed to curtail descent into civilizational collapse. One of Trump’s first heinous acts ensured that at lightning speed, hope from the Paris Climate Accord, which passed on November 4th, 2016, was turned to dust. Trump’s ripping it up severely undermined the possibility of global collaboration. Instead, it gave a green light for psychopathic leaders and predator capitalists to throw the world into a sickening battle for our collective survival.
In the wake of this, despite the herculean efforts of multiple climate movements, mass demonstrations, and the IPCC report of October 2018 (by 91 scientists from 40 countries who received over 6000 references and 42,000 experts, peer-reviewed publications), we are witnessing a growing psychotic break from our urgent reality.
This break is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategy generated by some powerful players in the political, media, banking, and corporate worlds, alongside fossil fuel and animal agro-factory interests that continuously spawn and nurture a denial culture. Instead of using their goliath powers for the common good, they hide their malignancy by deflecting attention from themselves while sowing confusion and division. These are the untouchable “high priests” of the Church of Power and Greed. They generate a storm of media misinformation, climate denial propaganda, and manipulative green-washing memes to obfuscate the facts.
WE VOTE TO END CLIMATE DENIAL
The Forces Using Trump
Climate denialist and kingmaker, Rupert Murdoch, has merged Trump into his 24-hour right-wing network Fox News and his all-pervasive global media machine. Two men of no morals in a transactional deal giving Murdoch an extraordinary degree of influence over America’s democracy, and Trump the means to cement his cult following.
In the face of such a swift descent into a shadowy mire orchestrated by political arsonists and their enablers, it’s clear those of us holding and working for the higher dream of a green, sustainable, just, and equitable future are losing the battle. We turn up with science-based data, loving-kindness, wise mindful practices, and passion to implement workable solutions. While those determined to control the planet’s destiny, grabbing whatever spoils left for themselves, turn up with billions of dollars, media empires with tentacles into the highest reaches of power, and a nuclear arsenal. In their wake are battalions of lawyers, lobbyists, think tanks, and data mining companies distilling mass information into psychological profiling to drive opinion and manipulate behavioral change.
We see the results in our teetering democracy, and in the deregulated environmental protections radically changing Earth’s landscape, drying up aquifers, decimating rainforests and wildlife, poisoning rivers and lakes, all for the sake of power and profit. Those driving this ecocide are, for the most part, completely unaccountable.
The motivation for this unrelenting attack on mother nature, whether evangelical rapture, owning the planet, sitting it out on Mars or in a bunker in New Zealand to take what’s left, leads to only one possible conclusion. Immoral narcissistic criminals and psychopaths are currently controlling the destiny of the planet.
They care absolutely nothing for sustaining a living Earth. They care only for themselves. Some don’t even care for their children. Murdoch ruthlessly pitted his two sons against each other from their childhood as rivals for his empire. This coterie of transactional, pitiless wheelers and dealers, who know the facts and don’t care, are the men that are willing to let the world crash and burn. They don’t mind that our exquisitely beautiful mother in all her gracious abundance is being doomed to become a barren desert devoid of life, wandering cold space, and weeping for her death at human hands.
Perhaps that sounds extreme, but the impact of global warming, which is unraveling the web of life, has left Mother Nature fighting to survive. We read ecosystems are “dying.” But nature isn’t “dying.” She is being killed. While conscious lifestyles are, of course, critical, it’s not the average person, trying to recycle, reduce energy consumption, and animal products that are holding a knife to Her throat.
Primarily it is extractive, predatory corporations crashing through pristine ecosystems and indigenous lands, destroying everything in their path. From the US, Russia, and China vying for the Arctic, to the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada, to India’s Adani’s massive coal mine in Australia, an environmental nightmare that aims to steal 270 billion liters of groundwater, for free, over 60 years.
Many of these companies, further enabled by Trump’s “Tax Acts and Jobs Act,” pay O% tax, including Chevron who was party to one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters. An oil dump roughly 30 times the Exxon Valdez spill in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They never cleaned up or paid damages.
WE VOTE TO STOP PREDATOR CAPITALISM
Biden’s Green New Deal Up Against Trump
In the coming election, Biden, in alliance with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, has unveiled a $2 trillion energy plan firmly focused on the Green New Deal agenda fronted by the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. This is not the moment to give a vote to Trump because we don’t approve of Biden, the Democratic Party centralists, or because of ideology. A vote for Biden, Kamala Harris, and the DNP is a vote to stop fascism and a step toward a workable, survivable future. It’s as simple as that right now. I am on my knees to beg against throwing a vote to Trump by punching the ticket of a 3rd Party candidate.
By contrast, Trump is a vote for chaos and death. He is the perfect vehicle for extractive predator capitalism. His turning the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Predatory Agency and his sadistic assault on wildlife delivered yet more blows to decades of hard work to secure protections for nature. While the majority world is grappling with climate change, Trump is doing the exact opposite. McConnell’s defense of Citizen’s United in 2018, a ruling that put democracy up for sale, ensures interest groups can buy political power and plunder at will.
WE VOTE FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL
Patriarchy’s Last Gasp: The GOP’s Kakistocracy (rule by the worst.)
This week Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. In response, Bernie Sanders stated, “This is not just an election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is an election between Donald Trump and democracy – and democracy must win.” The GOP is using Trump to push through their archconservative agenda. To do that, they are abandoning democracy.
Trump is their perfect vehicle to bring about that end. Regardless of how egregious his lies or how dangerous his actions, a racist and misogynistic GOP have utterly failed to restrain him. Instead, they are destroying the government and replacing it with rapture intoxicated and extreme “Christian” theocrats, criminals worthy of the Mafia, and Trump’s cold, heartless, thieving nepotistic relatives. All buddies, it seems, of Putin’s poisonous reach. This craven Kakistocracy personifies the dinosaur of patriarchy’s last gasp. They have only one reptilian drive. To control and loot by the use of all means foul. In their necrotizing march for domination, they have set the stage for mass upheaval and death, gruesome migrations, and unimaginable suffering.
In the figure of Trump himself, we see the personification of a graceless, heartless, cruel, and sadistic destroyer of the best of human nature, disabling the higher dream of humanity, so needed to guide these times, at every turn. Trump’s vacuous soul makes him a perfect vessel for those propagating the decade’s long war on the truth of anthropocentric climate change to deadly effect. We cannot let such a depraved man determine the destiny of so much.
WE VOTE TO BRING DOWN PATRIARCHY
Truth is Truth
Regardless, however, truth is truth. Global collaborated science lays bare the brutal reality before us. We have almost no time to turn around this nightmarish trajectory. We also have virtually no time, and few moves left to stop Trump and his decrepit fascistic, supremacist, misogynistic political coup.
By now, it’s clear how dangerous Trump’s psychotic cult is. It’s also clear we cannot afford to descend further another four years of Trump’s barbarism. We also know there’s a radically different new world trying to be born that we must lend every effort to midwife and protect. However, where we falter is galvanizing mass mobilization to preserve our beloved Earth. But if democracy starts to fall in November, we must take courage and mobilize.
WE VOTE TO MOBILIZE TOGETHER
Meeting the Challenge
If your heart is breaking with all this, you’re not alone. But, that is better than entering this critical decade of the 2020’s asleep. In the Ayurvedic medicinal model, which inspired the template for the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the first step to overcoming suffering and ignorance is to diagnose the sickness. The second step is to meet the illness directly rather than hoping it will magically disappear. It tends to be easier to diagnose the problem than activate the third and fourth steps, which are finding the cure and applying the remedy. The difficulty is that however harmful the circumstance, our default mechanism habitually resists change. To cure ourselves, we have to clear out any last illusions and commit fully to the remedy.
My primary Buddhist influence, the Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah, said, “when you can’t escape, you can’t go up, down, or to the side then the real practice begins.” When up against a wall with no apparent means of escape, there is no other option than to face the challenge directly.
With the challenge of Trump, it’s important to remember that the point of malignant narcissism, which is Trump’s mental disposition, is to create victims and render them powerless. Unrelenting abuse is a tactic to ingrain the belief in beleaguered minds that an all-consuming ascendency of evil is unstoppable.
Therefore, the initial battle, to counter his toxic virus, is an inner one. However much we wobble, we must energize and bring to life our inner warrior who stands for truth. For that, it’s helpful to focus on what we are fighting for and against. We fight for a sustainable, just, equitable, and compassionate society. We fight against patriarchy, the umbrella dominator system within which all other oppressive systems exist and thrive.
WE VOTE TOGETHER AS WARRIORS
The End of Vampire Trump
Trump, like Hitler, is a vampire. He feeds off hate, fear, violence, and the pain he inflicts through his unrelenting, cruel abuse. The destructive power of Trump, extracted from the shadow energies he unleashes, is dangerous, catastrophic, and overwhelming. His weakness, though, is that he believes himself to be invincible. However, the power Trump is tapping into is not enduring. Malignant energies ultimately consume those wielding them. One way or another, Trump will be defeated. It’s inevitable. The question is how much damage will he inflict in the process, so we must do all we can to end his reign quickly.
WE VOTE TO DEFEAT TRUMP
Trump, the US’s Mirror
Trump, reflects America’s violent and racist psychotic shadow. He is like the decrepit, twisted, ugly portrait in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Gray, the leading character, exchanged his soul for youth, indulging his every impulse. He is seductive and charming. However, his sinister deeds, reflected in the ever-fouling portrait in his attic, states the truth of who he is. Whatever happens to Trump, he has underlined the extreme urgency of working for a more just and equitable society.
WE VOTE TO UNDO WHITE SUPREMACY
Another Kind of Power
There is another kind of power, which endures. The power of the human spirit, with its ingenuity to overcome challenges regardless. This spirit is capable of extraordinary achievements. It can marshal love and compassion and has a yen for truth. The truth eventually wins out. Lies do not. The power of love, as the Buddha stated, overcomes hate. “This is the eternal law.” Love isn’t weak. It endures beyond time and space. After all, isn’t that the central message of Christ? Not bibles to bash people, or guns. Wasn’t unconditional love his real power?
In Buddhist lore, the guardian of the world is conscience. It can discern what is harmful and what is not, and fears wrongdoing. These all are superpowers, alongside so many others, that we employ at this time. We saw these powers at Standing Rock. The Elders invited People of Prayer from all over the world to join them in their act of resistance. At dawn on those cold frozen lands, every day began with honoring ancestors, invoking protector guides, and offering prayers to the spirits of the Missouri River.
We, too, can create a shrine to Mother Nature with representations that inspire. We can set the alarm and get up earlier, and like RBG, do some strengthening exercises. We can align with the warrior lineage of justice, truth, and love for Earth and all. We can offer prayers for all. The Elders at Standing Rock said their prayers are for everyone, even those fighting against them. This is the superpower of the heart.
We can make daily offerings, so our shrine is a supportive space for contemplation. Every day, we can vow to serve as Her protector and the protector of the human realm. In doing so, we join the Great Spirit’s lineage, the deep intelligence of mother nature, and the intuitive impulse of reality itself.
WE VOTE TO PROTECT MOTHER NATURE
Put On Your Warrior Cloak
We are here to heed the call. It’s time to midwife the beautiful new world of our higher dream. Let’s not dream small. Instead, keep that higher dream alive and assert its reality, over and again, and not doubt it.
Let’s put on the warrior’s mantel and get to work. We, the majority, join the spirit and struggle of Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, Greta’s School Strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and all non-violent Resistance Movements.
Let’s do everything we can to stop Trump and the GOP, and overturn all they stand for by delivering a Democratic landslide. And, most important, let’s keep naming the truth of what is happening. It undoes the lies of fascism and it gives courage.
So, let’s roll up our sleeves for this last push. Let’s follow the example of RBG and to fight to the end.
Let’s do this because a revolution is at hand.
“WE THE PEOPLE” ARE POWERFUL. WE WILL CRUSH FASCISM
Thanissara, 9.28.20
Guardians of the Sacred Prayer Circle for Peace. Join us for a daily online gathering for protective mantras, chants, meditation during this election cycle. The focus is to contribute to a frequency of safety and wellbeing for all, dedicated to protecting goodness, wisdom, and compassion, and dispelling the forces of harm, division and delusion. DETAILS HERE