Faith Pimps, Secular Conspiracies

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In American politics, patriotism, race-baiting and faith-based pandering are the last refuge of a scoundrel.  And this political season militant GOP appeals to white Christian evangelicals have veered into neo-Cold War hysteria. One of the most powerful scenes in Orwell’s 1984 was when Party member O’Brien succeeds in brainwashing protagonist Winston Smith into believing that 2+2 equals 5.  The Religious Right has been practically virtuosic in its 2+2=5 mass doublespeak; convincing mainstream America that Christians are the new minority and that commie pinko “secular progressives” (Bill O’Reilly’s preferred “smear”) are at the helm of a socialist conspiracy.  The latest salvo in right wing doublespeak comes from Rick Perry, playing the Christian victim card in a desperate bid to remain relevant in the hinterlands.  Primed for the Iowa caucus, Perry’s new campaign ad opens with an alpha male declaration that he is not “ashamed” to say he is a Christian. The ad then blasts the very Christian-identified Obama’s “war” on religion, the indecency of allowing gays to serve openly in the military and the prohibition on prayer in schools. 

When Newt Gingrich coined the term “secular socialist conspiracy” to flog his new book in 2011 he was just another overpaid neo-con on the rubber chicken circuit.  In the years since he was forced out of the House in disgrace, he sleazed up to evangelicals with a Ted Bundy-esque conversion/redemption line—“humbly” laying his sins as a serial philanderer and ethics violator at the feet of God.  Now his rise as frontrunner in the GOP race ensures that Glock force culture war rhetoric, diverting attention from the GOP’s war on the working class, will continue to command center stage.  Good Christians know that poor children, who, according to Gingrich, never see anyone working in their crack-ridden, pimp-patrolled, drive-by riddled urban jungles, should rightfully be shoveling the shit of the bootstrapped middle class.  This is what God intended.  Poverty doesn’t speak the language of hard work, thrift and enterprise and poor children mean lazy Blacks and Latinos, shuffling from classrooms to prison cells.  In a rigidly segregated downwardly mobile society the GOP’s moral assault on workers’ human rights and protections for poor children is the perfect template for a fascist Christian nationalism.    

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Faith Pimps, Secular Conspiracies
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8 thoughts on “Faith Pimps, Secular Conspiracies

  1. 3

    You took no prisoners here. Two of the most prominent features of social privilege seem to be 1) not recognizing you have such privilege and 2) the ludicrous tendency to claim persecuted victim status as a member of the privileged group.

  2. 4

    Well Gingrich wants to get rid of child labor laws so that when janitors are laid offf children can do their work.
    Of course there is the minor matter that “character building”(Gingrich style) will affect minority children dispropotionately. But Newt doesn’t seem to mind.
    That is how he is planning to protect the volunerable and generate employment.

  3. Art
    5

    Pardon me if I’m not on current events but last I heard the US was in a recession and the unemployment rate was something north of the agreed ideal and optimal level. Which makes me wonder exactly how bringing a couple million underage kids into an already crowded workforce is supposed to help. Given that one would assume that at present the floor sweeping and toilet cleaning duties are currently filled by adults working as janitors, and that these adults would likely face being fired after being replaced by children working for a sub-minimum wage, one wonders how this will help the overall level of unemployment and the fortunes of the poor. It also might be assumed that those adults currently employed acting as janitors, and soon to be unemployed, are, possibly, coming from the same families as the children hired at a lower wage.

    Can someone please explain how having poor adults compete with their own children for jobs helps the poor. Sounds more like a plan to systematically screw the underclasses and drop the cost of labor and value of work while claiming to help them develop a work ethic.

    1. 5.1

      Yes, that idiocy is central to the Orwellian anti-human rights posture of the GOP — replace lazy indigent janitors with lazy indigent poor children (who of course could never insist on being unionized or represented) as an instant panacea to the problem of ghettos as havens for shiftlessness welfare recipients. It’s atrocious how Reagan’s 1980s “welfare queens” rhetoric has morphed into 21st century demonization of the working poor.

  4. 6

    Writer Hutchinson,thy name is Hyperbole. Others within your black secularist echo-chamber choir may be reflexively, roboticaly, even dutifully awed by your brilliant evisceration of the Menacing Fanatical Religious Right, but not me, I declare. A fellow African American of discernment and intelligence, I’m not afraid to lift the rock and see what squirms and crawls in the Leftist, Stateist muck your proffer. In a few thousand alphabet characters, you managed to huff and puff, shuffle the acorns while slyly palming the ball, pull the levers behind the curtain, and generally manage to say nothing at all. What the heck were you trying to say? What typical effluvia of regurgitated socialist spew was it that you upchucked for mass consumption by the gullible anyway? Hell, I don’t know. But what I DO know is that I was raised Christian, I adhere (ignorantly, you’d undoubtedly say) to Christian principles, that if anyone at all is guilty of “race-baiting” it would be you and your ilk in typical Marxist, psychosis-projection fashion, and that Conservatism works, has worked, is working, and will always work, to the betterment of all peoples everywhere. You work diligently to destroy the very edifice that allows you freely to rail and calumnie and babble on against it. Ingrate. So there. Bamboozle as you will, but not every Negro is gonna drink your kool-aid.

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