Something that one can learn about corporate America from watching it closely is that there is a remarkable consistency into how companies behave. We know that they exist to make money, but this is not about money, but behavior, and this behavior crosses into police interactions, neighbor interactions, and all facets of social life. It is, for lack of a better term, a form of disloyalty and even what one might call treason masquerading as secular, social moralism in substitution for genuine religion and morality.
If this could be described in one sentence, it is “everybody is friends until they are not”. This is not to say that friendships do not change, or people’s opinions, but that in the US, Americans are almost expected (a) to get along and accept all people and (b) express some sort of like for all groups, with the exception of groups socially classified as “bad”. Once a person, group, or idea is classified as “bad”, there is no redemption, one cannot associate with it, if one associated with it in the past one must deny or violently denounce to the point of near complete ridiculous behavior one’s past, and nothing can ever be said to come that is good from the “bad” thing.
Now this is not saying there are not bad things- ideas, people, or places -that need to be denounced. For example, to paraphrase the beautifully written words of Ven. Pius XII and his predecessor Pius XI in Mit Brenneder Sorge, he who values blood and soil over the dignity of all men is far from God. However, this condemnation is (a) not unforgivable, since a man can always change his past- just ask St. Paul -and it is also (b) based on objective morality, not a social morality rooted in popular sentiments that while having political effects and applies to society, does not depend on the fickle whims of men to justify itself.
And this is the problem with this social moralism masquerade so common in the US, for while people may claim they are Christians (of any denomination), Moslems, Pagans, Jews, or something else, the fact is that this social moralism is the true national religion, since it acts as the final de facto arbiter of social conduct, and all people are expected to adhere to it and if they do not, they are cast out as apostates.
I am making this point here because of the recent treatment of former President Trump in the media over this charade of an ‘impeachment trial.
I have made my position clear on Trump before, and to say it again, Trump had tremendous potential but squandered it on himself and his own ego, he was a genuine disappointment as much as much as he has been extremely dishonest. This has been my main point of contention with Trump- all he had to do was follow through on simple, common-sense, very achievable objectives, and he would have won not only a second term in a landslide, but would have objectively made the lives of people in this country better for all. Instead, he made decisions that only furthered the chaos of the current time, and his only real achievement was legitimizing identity politics and political violence again.
Now with the second Trump impeachment trial taking place, and all of it on legally questionable grounds (which has many political conseqeunces), many of Trump’s former allies- people and groups -who supported him are all denouncing him and blaming him for “the riots” on January 6th, such as the Proud Boys.
As Trump faces trial in the Senate on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection, a lawyer for the Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola, filed a memo in federal court in Washington on Wednesday making an argument Democrats have stressed repeatedly in the impeachment proceedings: that the riot was the culmination of weeks of conspiracies and misinformation spread by the president to overturn the election results.
When he stormed the Capitol, Pezzola was responding to “the entreaties of the then commander in chief, President Trump,” according to the filing by lawyer Jonathan Zucker. “Defendant did not act out of criminal intent but out of conscience, albeit a frighteningly confused and distorted sense of conscience.”
So far, law-enforcement authorities in Washington have arrested more than 200 people in connection with the Capitol siege. Pezzola was charged with conspiracy and civil disorder, among other offenses. And he was accused of confronting a Capitol police officer, Eugene Goodman, at the foot of a staircase inside the building.
Pezzola was featured at the trial on Wednesday, as impeachment managers for the House of Representatives gave a minute-by-minute narration of the breach of the Capitol.
“You can see Pezzola in the mob, chase Capitol officer Eugene Goodman through the building,” said Representative Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands. “They were out to murder anyone they could get their hands on,” she added, citing an FBI agent’s affidavit.
In Pezzola’s filing on Wednesday, he asked a judge in Washington to release him from jail pending trial.
The filing said Pezzola would learn from his mistakes. “As a result of this experience he has learned not be so gullible and will not be so easily duped again,” it said. (source)
I’m not saying I like the Proud Boys. Shoebat.com has been against them for many years, and now our additional suspicions were recently confirmed when it came out that one of their main leaders is a known FBI and police informant- something that was not a surprise.
The point here I am making by mentioning this group is that all groups, even the “radical” ones that supported Trump, are denouncing him publicly. This is not something that can be merely described as conspiratorial, but is a reflection of the above American ethos. All people are “friends”, even enemies, until somebody is identified as a “bad” person or thing. When that happens, the knives are pulled out, because it immediately changes from “friends” to “seek and destroy as violently and aggressively as possible,” then put the knives away and go back to pretend to be friends with everybody.
It’s not just Americans who get this treatment. For example, whole countries can get it, such as the nation of Iraq. As I have mentioned many times, Iraq was visited by St. Thomas the Apostle and has one of the world’s earliest Christian communities. It also was one of the first nations invaded and conquered by Islamic armies, in the year 636, just four years after Mohammed’s death. Iraq has been under the yoke of Islam for fourteen centuries, and even there, surrounded by millions of Muslims, the Christian population not only survived, but on the eve of the American invasion in 2003, stood at about 1.5 million and was a respected group that held positions in government at the highest levels, such as with Saddam Hussein’s former foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. Fourteen years later, after America decided that Saddam Hussein and Iraq was “the enemy”, with hordes of American Boomer and Gen X evangelicals and their soon-to-become-atheist Millennial and Zoomer children waving their hands in the air and practically convulsing to cheap pop-music worship songs while proclaiming how God was going to send the US military to “save” Iraq, the real Christians- the Catholics, Orthodox, and Assyrian Church of the East -were annihilated first by war, and then by the US-supported ISIS terrorist through Operation Timber Sycamore.
Today, there is practically no more Christianity in Iraq, and what is left are old people that once they die, it is gone, since the younger people have fled to Europe or America because they do not see a hope. What the Muslims could not and in many ways, refused to destroy in fourteen centuries was annihilated by the Americans in fourteen years. Either the Muslims are “dumb and incompetent”, or- as it seems the better answer to me -it says a lot about the character of many of the Muslims than it does about the Americans and many of the so-called “Christians” whose form of love seems to be giving a kiss of death.
This is not new either. The US does this to many countries where she goes, that in the name of this supposed secular morality, she commits genocide. She has done it in the US too, albeit usually through economic means. That is, she will not necessarily commit murder, but will strip a person of all his ability to live so that he cannot survive and the succumbs to his environment, and when asked, says ‘I did not do anything, but he was a bad person so I do not care what happens to him.’
This is what I see happening with Trump. I have my issues with his policies, but the demonization of the man in the way it is happening is wrong. However, this is not a surprise. It is just the real American morality on display, and people enforce it because it is the ‘right thing to do’. ‘Right thing’, that is, from this social moralism. It is the same reason why in the 1950s, ‘ultra conservatism’ was good and communism was unforgivable, and then in the 1960s, ‘ultra conservatism’ had to be mocked while communism was a ‘cool thing’, because the nature of the social morality changed. It is the reason why 40 years ago, the LGBT was hated, but now, if one does not practically declare his love of all things sodomitic, one is an evil and unforgivable monster. It has nothing to do with truth- the social morality changed, and people are expected to change with it.
This is why the Catholic Church, and really all Christianity, is experiencing decline in the US and has for a while, and why the Church will never be accepted, because as long as the social moralism concept remains, it is a competing philosophy to the social moralism, and the two, if followed to their logical conclusions in good faith, are inherently going to clash because they cannot agree with each other. This ultimately is the fight between being a “good Catholic” and a “good American”, and since far too many want to simply “get along” with others, they choose to social moralism over their own religion, which they relegate to a second place. Since as some people say, “second place is first loser”, eventually their own religious convictions pass away and they simply become secular Americans, albeit with at most a Christian cover.
So it is unfortunate what is happening to Trump, but it is expected. He has been found guilty by the priests of American social moralism to be guilty of an unforgivable sin, and as such, he is being condemned as a heretic. But unlike the Church, where punishment for heresy and heretics is meant to bring repentance and even in the case of death, to make a temporal punishment that there may be a possibility of saving one’s soul, the American condemnation never ends, nor do the punishments cease, nor will any forgiveness be accepted, because it is not about correcting a wrong, but about indulging in sadism with the cover of moralism while waving the flag and declaring oneself to be a good person unlike “those guys”.