Trumpism Is Getting Bad Press-- Everywhere

Tom Nichols is author of The Death Of Expertise and that video above was recorded before Trumpism really took hold in America as Trumpism. The Know Thing impulses were always around, but not focused and ascendant as they became once they were in the Oval Office. Yesterday, writing for USA Today, Nichols addressed the problem as it stands now: As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult. "America," he wrote, "has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.

It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis-- a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic-- would snap people back to reality.

I was wrong to be so optimistic.

Endangering others as empowerment

Some states (including Rhode Island, where I live) have had great success in asking their citizens to cooperate for the common good. Other communities, unfortunately, have had to endure shouting matches with bellowing ignoramuses who think it is intolerable that they be asked to wear a mask while shopping or ordering food-- two things people in other countries would gladly do wrapped in aluminum foil and with prayers of thanks on their lips if they got to do it in the United States of America.

There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.

When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues-- masks, no masks, closing, opening-- from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift.

Not all of those who have been reckless and irresponsible are Trump supporters. There are, as always, young people who believe they are invincible. And some experts inflicted a huge wound on themselves right in the middle of this crisis by blessing the Black Lives Matter protests rather than repeating stern warnings they gave to other Americans that such events are dangerous.

But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

Reject expertise and trust Trump

So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.

The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump-- a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars-- as the gospel truth.

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

But that is how cults work, and woe to anyone who crosses them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over 35 years, has endured attacks from the White House and some members of Congress because some Republicans believe that he is somehow trying to use the pandemic against the president. Worse, Fauci now has to travel with security, as Americans treat the rest of the world to the shameful sight of one of the most accomplished scientists in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world having to be guarded against unhinged cultists in his own country.

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them.

The concern goes beyond our borders. And, as Roger Cohen editorialized in the NY Times Friday, "No people has found the American lurch toward authoritarianism under President Trump more alarming than the Germans. For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the 'American catastrophe.' A recent cover of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel portrays Trump in the Oval Office holding a lighted match, with a country ablaze visible through his window. The headline: Der Feuerteufel, or, literally, the Fire Devil."

By The Time We-- As A Society-- Figure Out Trump Is Hitler, It Will Be too Late To Do Anything About It. Has That Train Already Left The Station?

So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

-From "Choose Something Like A Star," Robert Frost (1916)

A little over a year ago, civil liberties attorney Burt Neuborne released a book, When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, which described how our constitutional system of checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by Trump and his shameless enablers inside all three branches of government. At the time, author Steven Rosenfeld explained how Neuborne-- who began his career by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, became the ACLU’s national legal director in the Reagan years and was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School in the 1990s-- came to write a book comparing Trump and Hitler.

“Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.”

A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches-- spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric-- as a candidate and in office-- mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne’s analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not “equating” the men-- as “it trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them to Trump’s often pathetic foibles.”

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances-- Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College-- can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.

Here’s how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, “But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals-- individual dignity and fundamental equality-- upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes-- internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance]-- become hugely important because Donald Trump’s political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It’s a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.

“Give Trump credit,” he continues. “He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here.”

20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies

Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump.

1. Neither was elected by a majority. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag-- mounted a serious effort to stop him.”

2. Both found direct communication channels to their base. By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway-- the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.

“Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios,” Neuborne says. “Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never ending-search for scapegoats.”

3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines. As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”

4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents. “Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”

5. They unceasingly attack objective truth. “Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet-- ‘fake news’-- cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”

6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media. Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

7. Their attacks on truth include science. Neuborne notes, “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”

8. Their lies blur reality-- and supporters spread them. “Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”

9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status. “Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”

10. They embrace extreme nationalism. “Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”

11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece. “Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”

12. They embraced mass detention and deportations. “Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”

13. Both used borders to protect selected industries. “Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”

14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites. “Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power—both political and financial-- to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment-- and enrichment-- of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.

“Hitler despised the German labor movement, eventually destroying it and imprisoning its leaders. Trump also detests strong unions, seeking to undermine any effort to interfere with the prerogatives of management.”

15. Both rejected international norms. “Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”

16. They attack domestic democratic processes. “Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. “Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating-- if not fomenting-- massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”

17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law. “Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”

18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths. “Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”

Trump has also demanded loyalty oaths. “He fired James Comey, a Republican appointed in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama, for refusing to swear an oath of personal loyalty to the president; excoriated and then sacked Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general, for failing to suppress the criminal investigation into… Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in influencing the 2016 elections; repeatedly threatened to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel carrying out the investigation; and called again and again for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, leading crowds in chants of ‘lock her up.’” A new chant, “send her back,” has since emerged at Trump rallies directed at non-white Democratic congresswomen.

19. They proclaim unchecked power. “Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”

“When Congress refused to give Trump funds for his border wall even after he threw a tantrum and shut down the government, Trump, like Hitler, declared a phony national emergency and claimed the power to ignore Congress,” Neuborne continues. “Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop him. Five justices gave the game away on the President’s unilateral travel ban. They just might do the same thing on the border wall.” It did in late July, ruling that Trump could divert congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon budget-- undermining constitutional separation of powers.

20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles. “Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”

Me The People by Nancy Ohanian

Whither Constitutional Checks and Balances?

Most of Neuborne’s book is not centered on Trump’s fealty to Hitler’s methods and early policies. He notes, as many commentators have, that Trump is following the well-known contours of authoritarian populists and dictators: “there’s always a charismatic leader, a disaffected mass, an adroit use of communications media, economic insecurity, racial or religious fault lines, xenophobia, a turn to violence, and a search for scapegoats.”

The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population-- epicenters of Trump’s base-- can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values-- and creates a brick wall for impeachment.

The House of Representatives is not much better. Until 2018, this decade’s GOP-majority House, a product of 2011’s extreme Republican gerrymanders, was also unrepresentative of the nation’s demographics. That bias still exists in the Electoral College, as the size of a state’s congressional delegation equals its allocation of votes. That formula is fair as far as House members go, but allocating votes based on two senators per state hurts urban America. Consider that California’s population is 65 times larger than Wyoming’s.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents—and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War-- in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda.

Neuborne wants to be optimistic that a wave of state-based resistance, call it progressive federalism, could blunt Trump’s power grabs and help the country return to a system embracing, rather than demonizing, individual dignity and fundamental equality. But he predicts that many Americans who supported Trump in 2016 (largely, he suggests, because their plights have been overlooked for many years by federal power centers and by America’s capitalist hubs) won’t desert Trump-- not while he’s in power.

“When tyrants like Hitler are ultimately overthrown, their mass support vanishes retroactively-- everyone turns out to have been in the resistance-- but the mass support was undeniably there,” he writes. “There will, of course, be American quislings who will enthusiastically support an American tyrant. There always are-- everywhere.”

Ultimately, Neuborne doesn’t expect there will be a “constitutional mechanic in the sky ready to swoop down and save American democracy from Donald Trump at the head of a populist mob.” Whatever Trump thinks he is or isn’t doing, his rhetorical and strategic role model-- the early Hitler-- is what makes Trump and today’s GOP so dangerous.

“Even if all that Trump is doing is marching to that populist drum, he is unleashing forces that imperil the fragile fabric of a multicultural democracy,” Neuborne writes. “But I think there’s more. The parallels-- especially the links between Lügenpresse and ‘fake news,’ and promises to restore German greatness and ‘Make America Great Again’-- are just too close to be coincidental. I’m pretty sure that Trump’s bedside study of Hitler’s speeches-- especially the use of personal invective, white racism, and xenophobia-- has shaped the way Trump seeks to gain political power in our time. I don’t for a moment believe that Trump admires what Hitler eventually did with his power [genocide], but he damn well admires-- and is successfully copying-- the way that Hitler got it.”

Steven Hassan has made a name for himself as someone who rescues-- gently and without coersion-- victims of cults. An author and mental health counselor, Hassan is now widely recognized as one the the country's leading experts on mind control and cults. His newest book is The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control. Maybe he can help? But can anyone rescue 40 some-odd percent of a country... that doesn't want to be rescued?

Beto O'Rourke wrote that a friend of his reminded him the other day "of how despair spread across Germany in the 1930s--  of all the people who were not Nazis, but neither were they simply passive observers of the Nazis of all that transpired… the countless thousands who were completely devastated by what they saw happening to their country, felt utterly powerless to stop it, and, over time, quietly retreated from the world into darkness and despair. And today? How many millions are so heartbroken by what has come to pass in America that they have already retreated from the world? I refuse to be one of them. I still have faith in this country, faith that we can follow the optimism of our founders, faith that we can follow the example of El Paso… but it will take all we have from all of us who are willing to fight to save this country to make it so. And in this struggle, as Lincoln said at another defining moment in our history, 'we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.'"

Notorious closet case and inveterate liar Lindsey Graham sashayed over to Fox News yesterday to lisp into a microphone how when she goes "to meet God at the pearly gates I don’t think he’s going to ask me, 'Why didn’t you convict Trump?' I may be wrong, but I don’t think that’s gonna be at the top of the list." Yes, he may be wrong because maybe he raped hundreds of children in his day. Otherwise, his role in "acquitting" Trump very much will be one of the reasons that conspires to cast him into the fiery pit of eternal damnation.

BETO!

"Beto" is enough. Or, better, BETO. No one has to say O'Rourke. I worked at Sire Records and it was very convenient, to say the least, to have artists with one word names, like Madonna, Enya, Seal, Morrissey. No one has to wonder who Bono is or Cher or Flea, Prince, Beck, Divine, Drake, Björk, Ringo, Adele, Sting, Oprah, Joni, Moby, Eminem. People from my generation know exactly who Neil is.

I like referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as Alexandria, to Bernie Sanders as Bernie, to Ammar Campa-Najjar as Ammar. When I write "Kara" on my blog there's no need to write Kara Eastman. One word names are great for familiarity (and marketing). I wish there was a way to do it for Elizabeth Warren. It just doesn't work. No one needs the "Harris" after Kamala and either Cory or Booker works for the New Jersey senator. "DiFi" isn't meant to be endreaing, but it's worked for Dianne Feinstein for decades, long before she was elected to the Senate.

Any doubt who this is?

Crackpot right-wing Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott claimed yesterday that Beto's following-- most Texas voters at this point-- is "cult-like. He was on Fox & Friends and claimed that Beto has "been a cult-like, very popular figure the way that he’s run the campaign, but you don’t vote on cult, you don’t vote on personality when you get to the U.S. Senate. You vote on the issues." Beto talks about issues all the time; that's practically all he ever talks about. That's why he's caught fire and why he's so popular. Cruz and his lame, dysfunctional campaign probably helped by ignoring issues and talking about Beto non-stop, claiming he wising punk rock band when he was a teenager and that he... get the smelling salts... skateboards! If he's looking for a cult in politics, look at Trump's opioid addicted followers at one of big hate-fueled rallies. That's a cult.

This campaign has made Beto into a political rock star, which he hasn't really been in Congress. I mean, I know, El Paso loves him but he has been a kind of middle-of-the-road backbencher in the House. That phase is probably over for him now and if he gets into the Senate, he's going to have a big national footprint. To be fair, Cruz does too-- but in a horrible, negative way. Everyone hates him.

If I write "Sherrod," "Lindsey" or "Tammy" people know I'm talking about the senator from Ohio, the senator from South Carolina and the senator from Wisconsin (even though there are 2 Senate Tammies). Last week I made a speech here in L.A. and no one had any doubt who I meant when I was talking about "Ted," even though it's such a common name. That's unusual; it normally works best for uncommon names (like Rand, Mazie, Angus, Orrin), but in a political context, "Mitch" is enough, right?

And if you say "Kav," who would have to think twice-- at least this month?

Facebook Launches TV News Feed; Fox News Prominently Featured

 The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire

by Gaius Publius

The very rich aren't like the rest of us, but they're a whole lot like each other. That puts people like Rupert Murdoch, David Koch (who is ailing, by the way), Donald Trump, Russian gangsters and oligarchs, Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg in a much more shared world than most of us care to think about.

For example, recent reports show how money from Russian oligarchs, $21 billion between 2010 and 2014 alone, and laundered through places like Moldava and Latvia, ends up at places like HSBC and Citibank. It makes sense: banks are in the business of acquiring money, and global criminal-political activity is where great big piles of it are found. Banks go where the customers are.

The money-laundering bank BCCI, now defunct, didn't set that pattern, but they were the most prominent to get caught at it. Not too long ago, Jamie Dimon's bank JP Morgan Chase was also caught with its hand in the money-laundering till, but no one thinks of Dimon and his operation as a money-launderer. The BCCI scandal was back in the 1990s, when banks could be accused of crimes. Starting in 2009, that flaw's been fixed.

I suspect at this point that the whole of Donald Trump's operation, or at least the major part of it, involves money-laundering, and that this will be seen by historians as his actual crime. It's also the reason he could be blackmailed out of office, if his enemies would want to go that route. ("Planning to return to that nice little business you have? Want it to exist when you're done here? I think we can work something out; consider this an exit interview.")

The Koch political machine, of course, is a massive money laundering operation, since its donors are invisible and there's so much money involved. Whose money is being hidden? Who knows? Can any source be excluded? None, not even foreign money from who-knows-where.

(There's an obvious side story here, but no one with real power wants to tell it. The global big-money network is also a bad-money network that encompasses almost every one in it. Not just Trump; everyone who floats on money floats on dirty money to some degree or another. Why aren't they all prosecuted? Maybe they're all in the game, including owners of the media that might do the reporting.)

Mark Zuckerberg's News Shows

This brings us to Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch.

You wouldn't think these fellow billionaires would have much else in common. After all, Murdoch is in charge of the massive right-wing propaganda machine known as Fox News, Trump's favorite network and a fortress of evil and destruction to many observers, while Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley billionaire, one of the brightest lights in a culture with a largely left following.

Like Steve Jobs, high tech billionaires supposedly see the better future first and will lead us there. As the poster at the top makes clear, they're seen by many as the better angels of our aspirations.

Thomas Middleditch, actor and star of the hit series Silicon Valley, taking "sellout money" (his phrase) and shilling for Verizon, the company most strongly associated with killing net neutrality

The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire is remarkably similar to the "cult of the airman" from the early 1900s, airmen and women being the supposed far-seeing, kindly futurists of a previous era. For more on that earlier cult, see the introduction to this piece: "Google Scores a Pro-Monopoly Seat on Trump Transition Team."

If you thought, though, that Murdoch and Zuckerberg had little in common but their money, you'd be wrong. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are launching a TV news feed called Facebook Watch.

Facebook’s First Wave of Funded News Shows Will Debut July 16, With More on the Way

The first fruits of Facebook’s multimillion-dollar investment in news programming from brand-name TV networks and digital media companies will go live next week — and the social giant has announced another half-dozen news shows that it’s funding.

Starting on Monday, July 16, programming from CNN, Fox News Channel, Univision, ABC News and others will be featured in a dedicated news section in Facebook Watch, its recently launched video platform for episodic programming. The Watch news section will feature news videos from national and local news orgs, and users will see a personalized feed based on the publishers they follow and what their friends are watching. (Facebook users also can access the shows directly from their show pages.)

The first lineup of previously announced shows from news publishers include those from ABC News, Advance Local, ATTN:, CNN, Fox News, Mic, Quartz, and Univision. Over the course of the next few months, Facebook will bring out additional news shows from ABC-owned stations, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, McClatchy, Group Nine Media’s NowThis and Tegna.

And guess whose programming is prominently featured? The above report, from Variety, might lead you to believe the mix of shows would be fair and balanced. That's true, but only in the most ironic sense. Here's their schedule:

Facebook Watch's initial programming schedule (click to enlarge)

The very rich aren't like the rest of us. But they're a whole lot like each other.

GP
 

Can Jeff Flake-- And Perhaps Mitt Romney-- Bring The Cult To A Grinding Halt?

Incipient tyrants and fascists always seek to destroy media and the judicial system before their authoritarian assault begins in earnest. One would have to have been in a coma for the past 19 months not to have noticed Señor Trumpanzee's attack on the mainstream media. He's also been remaking the judicial system by rushing through the worst judges every nominated in recent history. And he's still on the attack against the judiciary. This tweet was from yesterday:

I'm guessing that every Republican politician noted how effortlessly Trump disposed of Mark Sanford, a tepid congressional critic, a couple of weeks ago-- all it took was one tweet on primary day and Sanford was upended by a relatively unknown self-funder in a moderate South Carolina district. That was a warning shot across the bows of any Republicans who were thinking of separating themselves from Trump, his regime and their fascist agenda.

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney wrote an OpEd for the Salt Lake Tribune, Where I Stand On The Trump Agenda. "I will," he wrote, "support the president’s policies when I believe they are in the best interest of Utah and the nation. I have noted, the first year of his administration has exceeded my expectations; he made our corporate tax code globally competitive, worked to reduce unnecessary regulations and restored multiple use on Utah public land. In addition, I am pleased that he backed away from imposing a 35 percent tariff on all foreign goods."

But I have openly expressed my disagreement with certain of the administration decisions such as the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); I want more markets open for Utah and American goods. I also oppose broad-based tariffs, such as those proposed on steel and aluminum, particularly when they are imposed on our allies. I agree, however, with narrower penalties levied on companies or nations that employ unfair trade practices, such as China.

I have and will continue to speak out when the president says or does something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions. I do not make this a daily commentary; I express contrary views only when I believe it is a matter of substantial significance.

Meanwhile, Trump can't do much to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. Flake, who's been far more of a critic of Trump's than Sanford, decided to retire, so he won't be facing a primary, a primary that will now result in one of three Republicans who are each polling behind Kyrsten Sinema, the putative Democrat in the race.

On Sunday, Flake told ABC-TV's George Stephanopoulos that he and what he called a "number of senators" are serious about blocking Trump's lousy judicial nominees if his headlong rush into a trade war, among other things, isn't stopped. Flake: "I do think that unless we can actually exercise something other than just approving the President's executive calendar, his nominees, judges, that we have no reason to be there. So I think myself and a number of Senators, at least a few of us, will stand up and say let's not move any more judges until we get a vote, for example, on tariffs."

Flake is on the Judiciary Committee which only has an 11-10 Republican majority. If he starts voting with the Democrats on Trumpy-the-Clown nominees... the Judiciary Committee will come to a grinding halt.

No light
No people
No speak
No people
No cars
No people
No food
No people
Stopped
Short
Grinding halt
Everything's coming to a grinding halt

Flake told Stephanopoulos "The Mark Sanford loss clarified something if it wasn't clarified before. You can't, as a Republican these days, stand in-- in-- you know, in opposition to some of the president's policies or-- or not condone his behavior and expect to win a Republican primary. That's the reality and then we're seeing that played out."

Yeah, Corker was right-- it's a fucking cult! Academic cult expert and author Janja Lalich: "The people around Trump, and the Republicans in Washington, absolutely kowtow to him, either out of fear they're going to anger him, or out of adulation. That behavior is very typical of a cult... I think you have to look at the effect of Trump's behavior and language on his base. He readily ridicules and chastises people. He readily pushes people aside if they're not worshipping him. We've all seen the videos of his aides praising him to high heaven. That's the kind of adulation cult leaders expect and demand... Cult leaders constantly need to rev up their people. That's one of the challenges of being a charismatic leader. You have to keep people enchanted with you. Him holding these rallies is both a recruitment technique and a way to keep his followers happy. He's showing him in their presence-- being there for them, talking to them, relating to them. All of that helps to solidify their cult membership, so to speak. It reinforces the idea that they're a special group of people following this very special man. With Trump, it's not a religion, but there's the same kind of fervor."

Trump is happily making these pronouncements and expecting everyone to go along with him, and he's not getting much flack. Most of his followers have bought into his fear-mongering, which creates an us vs. them mentality that is typical of a cult.

...Separating the cult from the rest of the world is pretty much what all cults do. That doesn't mean you have to live in a compound. It just means that, in your thinking, you're part of this special elite, separate from the unworthy... Once you internalize that, you're done for.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow if you live in New York, Maryland, Colorado, Oklahoma or Utah. Try bringing some friends along. I doubt Flake-- or even Romney-- is going to stop Trump or turn the GOP away from their dedication to fascism and their ugly new cult. But you know who could? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DuWayne Gregory, Michael DeVito, Jeff Beals, and Dana Balter in New York, Levi Tillemann, Saira Rao and Emily Sirota in Colorado, Tom Guild in Oklahoma and Maryland's Ben Jealous.

Daniel Webster-- Now A Florida Congressman Without A Cult

Last night I took old friend, Wisconsin Democratic Senate Leader Chris Larson, for dinner at the best vegan restaurant in the area, Crossroads. Unfortunately, all the desserts are made with sugar so afterwards, we went down the road to Cafe Gratitude for some sugar-free, gluten-free desserts. As we were parking and walking over to the restaurant, I explained to Chris that the place was run by a cult. He seemed stunned. "Oh, they're harmless enough," I assured him. He seemed skeptical and I explained that I thought they were affiliated with Landmark, a group that grew out of the wreckage of est after that popular cult's founder, Werner Erhard, was accused of having incest with his daughters. Larson seemed totally creeped out and didn't want to go in. I was eager for the apple crumble with cashew nut milk "ice cream." Larson's instinctual revulsion for a cult was something I thought about later. And it drew me back to a time when we were looking at the frightening connections between Christo-fascist cult leader Bill Gothard and extreme right Florida politician Daniel Webster.

A little political background: In 2010, the Florida legislature carved up central Florida around Orlando in such a way to create 4 relatively safe Republican seats for John Mica (FL-07- R+4), Bill Posey (FL-08- R+9), Dennis Ross (FL-15- R+6), and Daniel Webster (FL-10- R+6). To accomplish this, they had to squeeze as many Democrats as possible into one district-- FL-09, which gave Alan Grayson a super-safe D+8 seat. Ungerrymandered, the area would probably send either 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans or, in a really bad year, 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats to Congress, not 4 Republicans and one Democrat-- even if Alan Grayson alone is the equivalent of, at least, 4 Republicans.

The weakest of the 4 Republicans is Daniel Webster, a deranged religious fanatic that many normal people in Orange County and Lake County and some in Polk County are saddled with. Under the old lines, Obama won the district (FL-08) in 2008 by 5 points. The new 2010 boundaries would have had Obama losing the district by 5. In 2012, the district went to Romney 54-46%. Webster was reelected on that day 52-48%, underperforming Romney significantly. Webster is the most politically prominent member of Gothard's deranged Illinois-based cult. Part of Gothard's sick vision that Webster takes so much inspiration from includes "stoning as a form of capital punishment for rape, kidnapping, murder, heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, 'sodomy or homosexuality,' incest, striking a parent, extreme juvenile delinquency, and 'unchastity before marriage'." Worse, Webster has used Gothard's hateful fanaticism as an inspiration for legislation. His degenerate Covenant Marriage bill and his attempts to outlaw divorce in Florida come right out of Gothard's pseudo-religion/cult. Webster doesn't believe in public education; he opposes it and subscribes to Gothard's homeschooling precepts. Webster has a gaggle of uneducated, unemployable offspring who were home-schooled and now work in his air-conditioning repair business.

This week, Kathryn Joyce did a spectacular job in explaining the sex abuse scandals rocking the milieu the Quiverfull Gothard-Duggars-Webster cult exists in, By Grace Alone for The Prospect. Sexually m and raping young women is almost standard operating procedure for cult leaders. Gothard has been forced out of his own cult for multiple rapes of women and underage girls. Dozens of women have come forward with testimony about Rep. Dan Webster's spiritual guru harassing and molesting them.

For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response. Mission fields, he says, are “magnets” for would-be molesters; ministries and schools do not understand the dynamics of abuse; and “good ol’ boy” networks routinely cover up victims’ stories to protect their reputations. He fears it is only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces and threatens the survival of powerful Protestant institutions.

In the past couple of years, Tchividjian has begun to look prophetic. Reports and allegations of sex abuse, rape, and harassment-- and a culture that has badly mishandled them-- have become more and more frequent. In fall 2012, former members of Sovereign Grace Ministries, a “family” of about 80 conservative churches from various theological traditions, filed a class-action lawsuit against the ministry for failing to report allegations of sex abuse in the 1980s and 1990s-- including abuse perpetrated by church leaders’ immediate family members-- and discouraging victims and their families from going to law enforcement. (The lawsuit was dismissed last year because of expired statutes of limitations and jurisdictional questions, but an appeal and criminal investigations are under way.) This spring, an exposé in the New Republic revealed that Patrick Henry, the college of choice for evangelical homeschoolers, has covered up alleged campus rape and sexual assault, thanks largely to its victim-blaming emphasis on women’s purity. Allegations of similar practices soon surfaced against other Christian colleges, including Pensacola Christian College in Florida and Cedarville University in Ohio. A documentary released in February, No Place to Call Home, recounts the systematic sexual abuse of children in the 1980s at Jesus People USA, an evangelical commune in Chicago. The empire of Bill Gothard, founder of the fundamentalist Institute in Basic Life Principles, crumbled earlier this year after bloggers revealed dozens of sexual-harassment and molestation claims against him.

…Tchividjian delivered a scary set of facts: If general statistics apply-- a quarter of U.S. women and a sixth of men have been sexually abused before age 18… Congregations need to understand that churches are targets and havens for abusers. One study has found that 93 percent of admitted sex offenders describe themselves as religious. Offenders who report strong church ties abuse more often, with younger victims. That’s not because Christians are inherently more abusive, he said, but because they’re more vulnerable to those who are. Tchividjian repeated what one convicted sex abuser told clinical psychologist Anna Salter in her book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders: "Church people"-- always looking to see the best in people, to welcome converts, to save sinful souls-- are “easy to fool.”

Tchividjian rattled off ways in which Christians’ openness can allow abuse to go unchecked: Perpetrators tend to use scripture to coerce, justify, and silence. If they’re clergy, they will exploit their positions; if they’re laypeople, they will take advantage of a church hungry for volunteers and rely on the trust given to members of a church family. “The reason why offenders get away with what they do is because we have too many cultures of silence,” Tchividjian said. “When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’"

Although Webster is the Republican most frequently associated with Gothard and his crackpot cult, the serial rapist has, according to the Washington Post rubbed shoulders with Republican luminaries, from GOP presidential wanna-be Mike Huckabee and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue to Ms Republican herself, Sarah Palin. Gothard's tale of woe sounds exactly like cult leader Werner Erhard's back in the '70s and early '80s when his followers included Yoko, Diana Ross, Cher, Joe Namath, John Denver, Jeff Bridges, Patrick Swayze, Peter Gabriel, Ida Rolf (the creator of rolfing) and several members of the 5th Dimension.

The allegations against Gothard dovetail with financial woes. In recent years, IBLP’s net revenue has dropped significantly, and the ministry is losing money. In 2009, it reported a net income loss of $1 million. It lost $4.1 million in 2011, and $3.5 million in 2012, according to its most recently available tax forms. Its net assets dropped from $92 million in 2010 to $81 million in 2012.

Since it started as a class at Gothard’s alma mater, Wheaton College, in 1961, more than 2.5 million people have gone through his “basic seminar” training on authority, success and other issues. IBLP held 504 seminars in 2010, but that number dropped to fewer than 50 in 2012.

The financial decline came around the same time that the whistle-blowing website Recovering Grace was formed in 2011. A string of allegations has been posted on the website, including one alleging Gothard molested a woman who was underage in the early 1990s. Four articles allege Gothard engaged in sexual harassment, and four articles allege his failure to report child abuse to Child Protective Services.

Calls placed to IBLP Thursday and Friday were not immediately returned.

Gretchen Swearingen, who goes by her middle name “Charlotte,” wrote on the website that Gothard requested she come work for him in 1992 at IBLP’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., when she was 16. During her time there, she said Gothard would play footsie with her and hold her hand. At one point, she said, he had coordinated a ride from the airport for them to be together. “That’s when he first put his hand between my legs and felt me all the way up,” she wrote.

Now 38, she said the statute of limitations has expired, leaving her unable to sue. She said she told her mother, who told her that she was lying, so Swearingen assumed there was nothing she could do.

“No one was there when the molestation was happening,” she said in an interview. “I never had the guts to say anything. I thought if my mother didn’t believe me, who would? You’re not to bring home false witness against someone at headquarters.”

She said that she and her mother have reconciled since she wrote her story.

Swearingen said she reported her story to the Hinsdale (Ill.) Police Department a week ago. A police spokesman said no investigation has been opened at this time.

“It’s not about revenge, not about suing him or taking him to court,” she said. “It’s about my healing and giving other people voices.”

Gothard would create an emotional bond with several women during counseling, said Rachel Frost, who also worked at IBLP’s headquarters when she was 16.

“There was a very common grooming pattern of creating emotional bonds and physical affirmations, the footsie, the leg rubs, the stroking of the hair, the constant comments on physical appearance,” she said.

She also wrote about her experience on the Recovering Grace website.

Julie Terrell, another woman who worked at IBLP’s headquarters, said Gothard sexually harassed her when she worked there in 1998. But before stories were posted at Recovering Grace, she never thought to say anything.

One woman behind the Recovering Grace website, who declined to be named because she did not want to hurt the reputation of her husband who is a pastor, said 34 women told the website they had been sexually harassed; four women alleged molestation. She said she refers anyone whose story is within the statute of limitations to the police.

Daniel Webster (FL-10) on Gothard's demented teachings: "They are the basis for everything I do today." He brags about using Gothard's sick, corrupted rants in the political life of his district:

Scientology-- Joke's-On-You-Cult Or Dangerous Criminal Conspiracy?

Unlike the shady Church of Scientology, Republican Congressman Charles William Boustany, Jr of Lafayette, Louisiana has never been lampooned on South Park. He should be. The right-wing loon and ex-medical doctor drowning in malpractice suits, who was just reelected for the 4th time (running unopposed), once attempted to buy an English title of nobility. He shelled out $18,500 to a couple of hucksters hawking take Lordships to naive and grandiose Americans. Canadian film industry legend Paul Haggis shelled out a lot more to buy the Scientologistic equivalent of a lordship before he woke up and quit the fraudulent-- and very dangerous-- pseudo "church."

A winner of an Emmy (for thirtysomething), a Golden Globe (for Crash) and three Oscars (for Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and Letters From Iwo Jima, Haggis is an A-list screenwriter, director and producer. He was also an active member of the Scientology Cult for 35 years, leaving as an Operating Thetan VII (which costs between $300,000 and half a million dollars in "donations"-- a lot more than Lord Boustany paid for his fake title), because of an argument involving the cult's refusal to take a position against California's homophobic Proposition 8. Tuesday he told the Washington Post in regard to the insidious nature of the cult that "These people have long memories. My bet is that, within two years, you're going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church." And that brings us to the must-read new issue of The New Yorker, which broke the story about the acrimonious parting on the ways between Haggis and the powerful and dangerous cult that dominates Hollywood far more than the Catholic Church dominates the rest of L.A.

In L.A. you could drive around some areas and get the idea the Scientology Cult is as powerful here as Mormons are in Salt Lake City. I mean it. And they have a unique way of penetrating the entertainment business here. They put up open calls for actors to be in ads or films and then they badge them into joining the cult to get ahead in the Biz. But Haggis isn't from L.A. originally but from London, Ontario. He was on his way to a record store one day when a Scientology recruiter accosted him on the street.

“You have a mind,” the man said. “This is the owner’s manual.” The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, “Give me two dollars.” The book was “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, Dianetics had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.

Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”

“Take me there,” Haggis said to Logan.

Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn’t bother him. In fact, he said, “it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don’t understand.” When he arrived at the church’s headquarters, he recalled, “it didn’t look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth’s.”

At the time, Haggis and Gettas [his girlfriend] were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. “It was pitched to me as applied philosophy,” Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.

The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan—an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as “the source” of the religion. Hubbard’s writings offer a “technology” of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides “the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality.” A church publication declares, “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.” Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. “As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities.”

In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: “It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it.” At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. “Without Scientology, I would be dead,” she has said.

In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, The Devil’s Rain, in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of Dianetics. “My career immediately took off,” he told a church publication. “Scientology put me into the big time.” The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors “make it in the industry.”

...Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading Dianetics; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions “about life, people, and behavior,” and said that Katselas “said some things in class that were really smart.” Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. “I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works.’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”

Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers... Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.

...[A]sked why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged Haggis said, “I identify with the underdog. I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”

...“There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced—all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join.”

Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.

...[Haggis:] “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.

Just like any other two-bit huckerism. Except this one has been spectacularly successful since it was first cooked up in 1952. Although the U.S., where there are around 25,000 believers, buys into it as a tax-exempt "religion," the cult is simply treated as another money-grubbing cult preying on the weak-minded in most of the world, including the U.K., France, Canada, Belgium, Israel, Mexico and Germany. It's pretty perfect for L.A. though, where the weak minded think the world revolves around them because they escaped whatever frozen hellhole they come from to the warm, balmy weather.