Lately I feel like I’m living in an episode of the “Twilight Zone” or the Netflix series, “Black Mirror”. The television news is filled with dreadful stories; social media has unbelievable claims and ridiculous debates with ignorant people; and my everyday conversations are spent lamenting or debunking nonsense. This is what happens when delusional thinking takes hold of enough people to elect leaders who not only prorogate the delusions but demand their prominence and acceptance and worse, make decisions based on them.
The saddest part is that these delusions feed uneducated insecure people with visions of prosperity and white grandeur while simultaneously causing real life hardships to themselves and many others. The advocators of these delusions expect reasonable people to suspend their reliance on what their eyes, pocketbooks, and scientific evidence tells them. At the same time, they are pushing the masses to reject learned values like empathy, equality, fairness, and care for others. So, where is the massive pushback? My guess is that some citizens are too scared to speak while many others are too busy to recognize the danger. And then there are the prayers who believe God or the Universe will take care of it all. I’ll just quote that scripture that says, “Faith without works is dead.” (James 2;17). It’s time to resist in earnest.
The promoters of these delusions want people to believe that white “Christian” men are in every way superior to everyone else by virtue of God’s favor upon their skin color and gender. They argue that this makes them destined to dominate. They want everyone to accept that women as young as 14 years old are designed to be submissive sex toys, mothers, and house servants who live under their protection and that only then can women be happy and fulfilled. They want all humans to reject the humanity of LGBTQ people, targeting them as deviants to be eradicated. If you listen to the rhetoric of prominent white “Christian” male spokesmen, like Charlie Kirk, you will hear these messages loud and clear.
The problem is that they are nowhere near superior. In fact, they are incompetent. At every turn, their shortsighted, misguided and uninformed decisions have led to economic chaos, wars, job losses, public health uncertainty, mistrust of the news, insurrection, kidnapping people off the streets, flawed disaster relief, wasted tax dollars, military policing on the streets, closed hospitals, rising inflation, a breakdown in international relations, defunding medical and scientific research, farming disasters, destruction of education, increases in mass shootings, and now legalized discrimination. Imagine having to walk around with papers to prove you are legally allowed to be here if you have brown, yellow, or black skin. They are re-creating 1930’s Germany before our eyes.
Their weapons are scapegoating, gaslighting, terror, confusion, and guns. Yes, they lie, they cheat, they threaten, they extort, they hide information, they rewrite history, ignore the Constitution and laws, ban books, withhold research funding, and they fire the experienced workers and the experts in government positions, replacing them with loyalists. And now their bigotry-fueled incompetence led to an outrageous ICE raid where they detained (in cuffs and chains), imprisoned, and then deported 300 South Koreans who were “legally” here to help build a battery plant and train U.S. workers. Of course, last minute pleas by Trump to keep them here failed. They just insulted another ally as well as South Korean investors, kissing thousands of good paying jobs goodbye in the process!
It is disturbing that a third of the country is backing all of their incompetence simply because they are more comfortable with white men in charge. Sadly, some are even people of color who struggle with an inferiority complex. The weak-minded feel threatened by the rising prominence of women, people of color, and religious minorities. They are convinced that homosexuality and transgender are contagious and may diminish their numbers and influence. The narrative they were fed since childhood convinced them that whiteness coupled with Christianity are virtues that entitle white people to assume leadership and to secure the best homes, the best jobs, the highest pay, and entry into the best schools. They’ve been told that this nation belongs to white people and the rest of us are merely guest workers. They were led to believe this nation is the white man’s birthright because God favored them by allowing them to steal the land from its original inhabitants. They choose to ignore the horrors of the white ancestors’ actions and the subsequent enslavement of black people, denying their humanity. I think a line in the song, “Colors of the Wind” says it best when describing white suprematists: “You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you.”
Charlie Kirk, a community college dropout, embodied this kind of delusional thinking and was hellbent on spreading the delusion of white Christian male superiority and their right to dominate. He took his message to white college students across the country under the guise of “free speech” and “debate”. He promoted the 2nd Amendment as a necessary tool to defend what he called his birthright. The irony of his comment that some guns deaths are “worth it” to maintain the right to bear arms is not lost on me.
It wasn’t surprising that his rhetoric stirred up a lot of anger. It was repulsive. And it wasn’t surprising that his violent death stirred up so much vitriol against those who want to uphold a multicultural democracy that aspires to equality and justice for all. Kirk was an effective mouthpiece for the delusion. However, I was surprised by how lightening quick MAGA leaders and media outlets were to sanitize his message while pointing their fingers at those of us who do not buy into their white supremacist delusion. Their message was that the left must be held responsible for the death of one of their most beloved young leaders (not their loud propogandist). Of course, they blamed the left without evidence. But once again, their incompetence was on full display, quickly followed by their blatant hypocrisy when it was discovered that the killer was “one of their own”.
I wasn’t surprised about that. In fact, I told my husband that I would lay wager that the shooter was a Trump supporter who had reasons to hate Charlie Kirk. I can only speculate that perhaps Kirk offended Mormons as lacking an acceptable “Christian” pedigree to lead. Maybe it was something else. Perhaps we’ll soon learn his actual motive. In any case, Charlie Kirk’s murder was yet another alarm sounding. His actual agenda and hateful rhetoric have been blasted throughout social media around the world, exposing him for the hateful sexist, racist, homophobe, and xenophobe that he actually is. He pushed the delusion for fame and got rich doing it. So sad for his wife and young children.
Ultimately, what will save this nation from a full-blown takeover by this utopian delusion under white “Christian” male rule is a greater number of citizens realizing the horrific economic, social, and healthcare consequences that come from allowing bigoted white men who continually display their cruelty and incompetence to lead us. It’s time to wake up the collective sleeping giant that demands competence, truth, justice, and decency as the humane path to a more prosperous American way of life.