​Onward Fake Christian Soldiers

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Who will write “The Rise and Fall of the Third Trumpidiotocracy?”

Chicago-born William L. Shirer was 30 when he covered a major Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, Germany in 1934 for theNew York Herald Tribune. By 1938, he had become one of Edward R. Murrow’s “Murrow’s Boys” of CBS Radio and was covering Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March of 1938. By 1940, he had become so well-known in Germany that the Nazis kept feeding him propaganda to use in broadcasts and print. He refused to be “used” or censored. Tipped off by a German friend that the Gestapo was building a “spy case” against him, a possible death penalty crime, he secreted his diaries, files and notes and returned to the United States in 1940.

CBS arranged a national tour for him in 1941 so he could meet the press about his book “Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent.”He hosted a CBS weekly news and analysis program until he was fired in 1947 for being too liberal. He had arguments with Murrow until they split for life. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Shirer of being a Communist. Shirer survived while McCarthy ended up dying of alcoholism and reportedly a case of syphilis.

He spent almost four years writing “The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich,”still considered the first serious non-scholarly narrative history of the entire Nazi regime. The book won the 1961 National Book Award, sold over a million hardback copies and completely restored his reputation as newsman, broadcaster and authority on Nazi Germany and Hitler. After the Rise and Fall, he wrote another “Berlin Diary”from his old notes, published his Berlin broadcast scripts, and then wrote a multi-volume autobiography. Shirer died in Boston in 1993 at 93.

How have Germans recovered from Nazism? By studying history!

At age 25, Shirer graduated from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and had worked his way to Europe on an old cattle boat with the intent of becoming a journalist to cover the history of Europe. Let us remember Hitler formed the Hitler Youth in 1926 and had gained worldwide exposure through newspaper photos of 30,000 books burning in the middle of a German street in 1933.

I still have my 1,599-page paperback copy of Shirer’s magnificent work I paid $1.65 for in 1962. A bit tattered after all these years, it is “The Book that Shook the Conscience of the World” as described on the back cover.

Hans Frank, Governor-General of Poland before being hanged for his crimes at Nuremberg, admitted this fact: “A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.”

If you have not read it, you now have the citizen’s responsibility to do so. The book may keep us from moving our democracy to Trumpistan. More than a half century ago, the New York Herald Tribunerecognized it as “a searchlight thrown with terrible intensity on one of the darkest dramas in the history of mankind.”

Sounds like hyperbole, right? Wrong. There’s nothing else like the Holocaust in what may be our million years of history.

Does it matter if a President has any brains?

I have been around for fifteen presidents, ranging from those who couldn’t keep their zippers closed to a couple who didn’t know what war was. According to IQ experts using the scale 1-200 (with research completed before Obama, Biden, and Trump served), IQ scores for previous presidents varied from 91 for George W. Bush and 98 for George Walker Bush to 175 for Jimmy Carter and 182 for Bill Clinton. My sister Beatrice was a secretary on Capitol Hill for 30 years and insisted that Gerry Ford (121) was the dumbest man in Washington. Lyndon Baines Johnson (126) often repeated the line that Ford had played too many football games without a helmet.

I have always thought the younger Bush wasn’t dumb, he just didn’t give a damn about knowing anything. He had life by the tail, was made by his grandad and old man, and loved to get drunk until 40. So, why be curious enough to study anything? Besides, he had a “brain.” His name was Karl Rove (who was always called “Bush’s Brain”).

Among the latest presidents, Barack Obama was certainly the smartest. “Average” Joe Biden knew he had to follow the advice of lots of other people and Donald Trump is so mentally disabled by malignant narcissism plus dementia he follows the last “loyal” guy he talked to (preferably Putin or 800 billionaires). Like George W., he has a personal “Brain.” His name is Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and his actual office is in the Eisenhower Office Building which is on the White house grounds. Vought (pronounced “Vote” instead of “Voyt”) proudly claims he is a “Christian” nationalist, not a Republican. That’s almost hilarious. Millions of people came to the Americas to escape religion, not to join one.

Let’s examine Vought’s “Christianity.” In Trump’s first term, Vought used billions of Defense Department money to fund part of the border wall that Congress refused to fund. Vought froze $214 million pledged when Ukraine refused to “investigate” Joe Biden for political reasons. The Lyin’ King “loved” Vought, because as OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta said: “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.” (Because this was what Vought also wanted to do!)

And then came the second term of Trumpidiotocracy!

Vought supported all those “tourists” who visited the Capitol on Jan 6, opened desks in both chambers of Congress and researched the offices of many senators and representatives. He supported the pardons of 1,500 who joined the tour, plus those who had “accidently” beaten and killed several members of the Capital Police. The noose prepared for hanging Vice-president Mike Pence was just a symbol for tourists having lots of fun at his expense. The tourists trying to find Nancy Pelosi to shake her hand and kill her with kindness failed because she was at a retreat sponsored by the House.

Vought earned the support of the Lyin’ King during Joe Biden’s term by spending thousands of hours preparing Project 2025, a 900-page roadmap for the subjugation and domination of the American people. Of course, Trump said he knew nothing about Vought’s project, although many conservative think tanks helped to develop the reformation plan. Vought organized and wrote more than 350 executive orders, hundreds of changes to regulations and developed financial plans for each member of the Cabinet. He is also in charge of two million federal workers.

Here are just a few examples of what Vought wanted the Trump administration to support:

Slash all foreign assistance programs to the greatest extent possible.

Cease all overseas anti-malaria programs because buying mosquito nets for Black foreigners does not make Americans safer!

Ban support for all international vaccine programs.

Wrote an executive order for Trump that eliminated all support for Ronald Reagan’s non-profit United States Institute for Peace, which he had created to help prevent armed conflicts overseas.

Eliminated the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, which spent about $8 billion on humanitarian assistance, foreign disasters, support for refugee programs and food and medical support people in combat zones. Vought had promised his jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist and socio-psychopath and now demented Great Leader he would eliminate foreign aid to zero. (Elon Musk bragged he had helped Vought by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He could have added he had sawed it up with a chainsaw given him by the Dictator of Argentina Milei.)

Assigned Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog unit over banks and corporations to assure citizens they were following the laws.

He has a $100 million slush fund at his disposal.

What is Christian about Vought who often appears on Fox Lies?

Jesus Christ had two major beliefs and thousands of other moral messages often based on the two: Love your neighbor and money is often the root of evil. Bible experts say there are about 2,000 references to the poor. Vought has been told that in five years about 14 million people will die because USAID funds have been cut from foreign aid. Well, Vought, Christian of the day! How many kids did you kill today?! More than 300 million are at risk of starvation today.

Vought is a believer in two “Christian” denominations: The Christian Identity Church of Timothy McVeigh and the Christian Dominionist Church of Senator Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann, former Minnesota representative. Both denominations believe that Blacks were created by God to serve whites, whites are the superior race and whites inherit the power to rule from God. Both churches hate their non-white neighbors and love the smell of green money and what it can buy, like superyachts and thousand-dollar dinners. Perhaps you remember that Tim McVeigh of the Christian Identity Church blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 visitors, workers, and children in a daycare center.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who considers himself a religious conservative, wrote a defining article, “The Use and Misuse of Religion,” about a month ago. He makes several powerful points: (1) There has to be a proper relationship between faith and politics. (2) Humanism focuses on tangible human needs but religion focuses on the unknown and the unseen. (3) Religion has been a powerful force for good, but it has poisoned politics and given rise to many extremists who target “others.” (4) Religion has become a divisive and explosive force. (5) Christian nationalism, the religion of Vought, is not faith enriching politics but politics hollowing out faith. (6) When Christianity is fused with a political party platform, faith is reduced to a tribal marker and politics becomes spiritual warfare. (7) Political enemies are often cast as satanic, compromise is treated as betrayal and the Christian virtues of humility, charity and restraint are replaced by enmity and domination. This is what Vought, Trump’s satanic brain, has done for politics in the Divided States of America.

The world keeps changing and so does the population

No wonder the world is such a mess. We are all different. But we are all Homo sapiens.

We presently have 8.2 billion neighbors on planet Earth. We have about 2.2 billion people living in scattered areas impossible to survey. However, let’s remember they are all neighbors.