Odds & Ends: Bourbon Talk, Oligarchical Control, and the Christian Exodus
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Happy Sunday, everyone! Like me I assume you’re either watching the World Cup Final or else anxiously awaiting the whole thing to go away so your social media will not simply read “MESSI” over and over. But in other programming news, tonight at 8pm eastern, I’ll be hosting the last Bourbon Talk Political Q&A Livestream of 2022.
This is a very, very special episode where we’re not only going to celebrate the year’s wins, but we’re going to address 2023 and how it’s the beginning of our defeat of fascism. I’ve got plans for the new year that I’m going to begin addressing, and we’re going to talk more in-depth about the things you and I can do. Signs are clear that ‘23 will be a pivotal year leading into 2024 and the national election. Any and all work begins next month and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Oligarchical Control of Media
This is both about Elon Musk but it also isn’t. In recent days Musk has gone on a rampage of sorts, suspending without warning journalists he’s accused of providing “assassination coordinates” by doing nothing more than reporting his movements and travel. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then removed Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz for the high crime of…asking him a question.
Musk’s disturbing public breakdown is one thing, but there are more important issues at stake here than one man’s lashing out. The economic and media landscape as it stands is a precarious house of cards that anyone paying attention absolutely saw coming.
The 1990’s neoliberal wave created a perfect storm for monopolistic control over the media, allowing wealthy barons to gobble up telecommunications and print outlets and all but destroying news in the local and any remaining objective sense. Since then we have been fed a steady stream of putrid propaganda that buries us under a corporatist and wealth-friendly mountain of misinformation. That was bad enough, and has done incredible damage to our democracy and society as a whole, but it also set the table for a future scenario in which an oligarch like Musk or Jeff Bezos could leverage their historic wealth (created by the massive redistribution project that moved trillions from us to them and their rich friends) and achieve almost total information control for a pittance.
For years now the Conservative Right has been screaming about a twisted version of this concern. Their protest has been that “woke” media outlets and “communist corporations” had been using their power in pursuit of spreading liberal and leftist ideas, an absolutely ludicrous claim. At the heart of that claim, however, is a measure of truth. There are reasons to be concerned. The world is largely controlled by algorithms we have absolutely no understanding of and absolutely no control over. Everything else, however, is nonsense. There are no woke media outlets. There are no leftist ideas being perpetuated by the corporate wealth class. And corporations are, I can’t believe I have to say this, not communist.
The solution proposed by the Right is to seize the means of communication (an ironic coopting, by the way, of Marxist principles) and use the algorithms for their own purposes. In other words, to grab the signal and use it to indoctrinate and control. They reason, and possibly correctly, that the only way they can possibly control society with their reactionary, outdated ideas is to weaponize information.
As we have seen, Musk has become more radicalized by the day. His rejection by liberal circles following claims of sexual improprieties and the earned criticism following his purchase of Twitter and spreading of conspiracy theories has only made that radicalization worse. Now, he is literally carrying out a version of the Right Wing plan to use social media for their own purposes, and the same people who screamed for years about people being banned or “shadow banned” for ideological reasons are cheering him on.
This is an untenable situation. Musk’s monopolistic control is the most aggregious example of a larger, systemic problem. A beginning of a solution would be to roll back the deregulation of the 90’s, but any actual addressing would have to begin with embracing the anti-trust / anti-monopoly energies that brought the age of the Robber Barons to an end.
The Christian Exodus
In related news, the outlook for America’s Christian churches is increasingly bleak. Studies show that people are leaving Christianity in record-setting numbers and that, decades from now, the religion may be firmly a minority within the country. This has fueled a good deal of the anxiety that has led to the radicalization and paranoia mentioned above, creating a religious/faith-based element to a larger terror of unwanted change.
The answer for the Right and the evangelical community is largely this: to force people to return to Christianity or convert. This has been a long-held and terribly oppressive plan for generations (I detail this in THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS) and always, always, always leads to terrible tragedies, including wars, coups, and genocides. It can work, unfortunately, when a people are ground down and a dictatorial regime gains total power, which is the ultimate and inevitable goal of this movement.
But for a realistic appraisal, it needs pointed out that this problem is completely self-created. The evangelical community in America has destroyed itself by allowing charlatans to pervert the message in pursuit of wealth and profit. As I talked about in AMERICAN RULE: HOW A NATION CONQUERED THE WORLD BUT FAILED ITS PEOPLE, the legacy of white supremacy that helped ensure the Civil War has continued into the modern era, leading to a continued alliance between Christianity and racist capitalism. This is occasionally a backburner issue (though it never goes away) and occasionally the focus of the community almost in totality, as it was under Jerry Falwell and the Reagan Revolution that served as a reaction to the failed social revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
What Christianity offered, as other religions do, in the way of community building and direction, was undercut by pure, unadulterated prejudice and greed, creating a massive cult of power that many have rightfully turned away from. In other words, and sorry for the bleakness of this statement but it remains true, the branding of Christianity is understandably toxic.
Who wants to be a part of this garbage?
Who wants to spend their time being attacked by their families and neighbors and community?
Who wants to continually have themselves and their friends threatened and demeaned?
The rightful response here is a necessary self-introspection, but that is exactly why this problem exists: an angry unwillingness to ever consider the need for change or reform. And, as I’ve found in my research, Christianity’s components of martyrdom and apocalyptic thinking only make the problem worse. The aggrievement of losing these numbers and purchase within society will only increase their radicalization and acceptance of authoritarianism.
And, in the end, it appears that Christianity, which began as an isolated cult and grew into the dominant religion and reality of the world, will follow the trend of the decline of Western Civilization, which it helped to create in the first place, and return to its original status as an isolated cult. That is, unless Christians of good faith can settle the matter internally and reform the religion itself.