CHRISTIANITY NEEDS to have a real knock-down,drag out fight with the Republican-fascist Mammonists who the mass media refer to, I'd guess well over three quarters of the time, as if they represent Christianity. The media goes along with those fascists claiming the mantle of "Christianity" for themselves even more often, never seeming to have on people to refute their self-anointing.
They are not Christians. By their fruits you will know them, their fruits are not Christianity - there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about that. An abundance of what has been called "Christian" in the history of Christianity is obviously opposed to the Gospel of Jesus.
I think to a large extent anti-Christian and anti-religious people in the media are happy to have the fascists and neo-Nazis, the Republican-fascists, the gaudy TV style preachers, the cargo-cult prosperity "gospel" circus be what is "Christianity" for the media addled masses. They are happy because they want Christianity to be discredited and diminished in numbers by it becoming unfashionable. Fashion is the primary god of so many of us under materialism, especially of the college-credentialed class which stupidly provides us with most of those who comprise "the media". That is what they want even risking the already obvious dangers that giving the Mammonists the upper hand and corrupting our society and our politics as they have successfully done.
To a large extent, even those in the media who don't have strong feelings hostile to Christianity or religion in general have adopted the practice, probably in most cases as unthinkingly as some has-been Hollywood actor turned talk-show-host recites the expected lines they know they're supposed to. The practice of thinking most of what's said in the media has all the intellectual substance and sincerity of an ad is probably the beginning of wisdom about it. I think most of "the press" and media are that unthinkingly automatic in promoting attitudes not even ideas. As I believe I've mentioned recently, I think that kind of casual desire to be part of the in-crowd for professional benefit is behind much if not most of the academic anti-Christianity that is more than typical of that milieu. And the media doesn't even have the degraded professional requirements of our pathetic excuse for academics, these days.
On the second of December RMJ reminded us of the four martyrs murdered by the US trained and supported fascist military in El Salvador, Ita Ford, Maura Clark, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel, four voluntary servants of the poorest people in Central America, four martyrs who were murdered by a military at war with the poor. Martyrs who were subsequently slandered under oath by Al Haig and Jean Kirkpatrick, on behalf of the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration conducted a vicious terrorist campaign in a number of countries, against the law of the United States. I will point out that Reagan, certainly one of the most active terrorist leaders of his time, is automatically lauded by the American free-press whose freedom has seldom led to widespread telling of inconvenient truth. Even the liberals mouth those empty pieties regarding one of our worst presidents.
I have to wonder just why it is that those who might believe in the Gospel of Jesus are so shy about defending it against the false prophets warned about in it. It could be the habits of mistaking the essential administrative secularism in government for some idiotically assumed requirement that restricts us from defending Christianity from pseudo-christians, hallelujah peddlers, white supremacists, etc. An inhibition I'll note none of those white supremacy sepulchers feel restricted by at all. Or it could be that a watered-down notion of Christianity is superseded by the old rule of etiquette that you don't talk about politics or religion among those who put superficial niceness, the best to go along to get along, over all else. I seem to recall Miss Manners once yearning to hear such fights at a dinner party, so false is that namby-pamby niceness rule. If there is one thing that niceness liberalism of that kind proves to be, it is totally impotent when it comes to fighting against fascists (white supremacy being our indigenous form of that), neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, etc. Such "christianity" is certainly useless to the effort expressed in "thy Kingdom come, they will be done," such as, no doubt, many of them might occasionally pray for. The idea that such a thing might come to humans without human agency in doing the will of God is absurd. It is certainly useless to the least among us such as those who the four martyred church women gave thier lives for.
Jesus told the truth and it got him killed in the sadistically brutal Roman Imperial way, so with so many of those who followed him. Reagan's agents in Central America practiced the same kind of terror murder. Jesus said he came not to bring peace but strife that would divide people. He used the most violent of metaphors to tell his followers that it wasn't all going to be church socials, prayer breakfasts and faculty luncheons, that they were going to get killed for spreading the Gospel. I will note that the earliest martyr generations of Christianity were pacifists, they weren't reticent or especially nice when it came to asserting the Gospel. The willingness to at the very least be shunned and looked askance at, being considered uncouth or not invited to go on a chat show for saying the unfashionable is the very least that should be expected from someone who really believes in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles, the testimony of the martyrs, etc. I think calling anyone who isn't willing to do that a Christian is probably false labeling. Though maybe like the words "socialism," "democracy," and "republic" the word "Christian" has come to mean nothing, so distorted in use has it become. From the mouths of M.T. Greene, Nick Fuentes, Kanye, Donald Trump, etc. the word means not only less than nothing, it means Mammon worship of the worst kind.
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"Right's" Too
I think along with the brawl advocated above, we need a real knock-down, drag-out over just why, against all experience, we are to revere the "right" of "freedom of the press" when they use that freedom to peddle so many lies on behalf of billionaires, millionaires and other evil guys who hate equality and democracy.
Jefferson's idiotic 1780s slogan about preferring newspapers to governments - you wonder why Jefferson spent his life in government instead of starting a newspaper if he really believed that - is certainly a lesson in the folly of that kind of idolatry of the free press. With that idolatry you get things like the Reagans and George W. Bush's they peddle as idols and with them terrorist campaigns in Central America and the illegal invasion of Iraq, the consequences of which we are still paying for.
Not so publicized in the media is the more mature quote from Jefferson in 1807 when his experience of "the free press" led him to say, " "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." Which demonstrates the stupidity of his earlier, unconditioned proclamation.
Since there is no requirement to serve the truth to be considered and to peddle yourself as a journalist, a requirement that the alleged profession of journalism would be universally hostile to because "the First Amendment", it is the height of absurdity to hold journalism as if it lived by that professional requirement. As things are, they are more likely to profit from lying. The Warren Court stupidly, no doubt thinking of the slogan of Jefferson just slammed by me, made that situation far, far worse by allowing journalists to lie about, as it turned out, Democratic politicians. For which journalists ever since have praised that emancipation from the requirement to serve the truth a carte blanche to tell some of the most consequential of lies.
If journalism doesn't choose the side of telling the truth, it has to be required to serve the truth. As it demonstrates, it has to be required to serve its only legitimate function. They should have the privileges stupidly denominated as "rights" in the First Amendment taken from them except to be used to tell the truth. As I've said before, only natural born creatures have rights endowed by their Creator, human invented entities don't have rights. But such man-made things might be granted what are honestly called "privileges" but doing so without requirements is too stupid for any responsible democracy to do. There is no right of the press, there is a privilege and if the First Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights really was stupid enough to give the press a privilege to lie - as people today are stupid enough to believe - they were even more callow amateurs than I suspect they were. Remarkably, the subsequent congresses and courts, till the Warren Court, didn't see fit to knock down libel and slander laws.
Now that, under "free press" that has come to include the total degeneracy of "social media" - Twitter's popularity among journalists is certainly indicative of that profession's degenerate state - things have gone to hell in ways that the epically myopic Supremes in 1964 could not have imagined. Even more so now that a whimsical and stupid white South African-libertarian-fascist billionaire owns it. I haven't noticed the automatic exodus of professional journalists from it. I would like to see Elon being deported, by the way. He is a clear and present danger to American democracy.
Even among natural born humans, there is no such a thing as a right to do what's wrong. There is no such a thing as a right to lie, especially the most consequential and damaging of lies that fill the most free media in the history of the world such as in the United States. There's a good reason the beneficiaries of lies, Republican-fascists,neo-Nazis,fascists, our indigenous fascists of white supremacy have taken up the mantle of the ACLU which represented so many of them in court.
The Warren Court, encouraged by the ACLU and the media paid lawyers pretended to think the First Congress were that stupid, though the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have taken full advantage of that opportunity given to them to lie fascists into power in perpetuity and to destroy democracy only cited the Warren Court. Anyone who thinks the Republican-fascists, the owners of large media care about the consequences of this for equality and democracy is an idiot. They couldn't care less about good government or equality or democracy, they are all about the amassing of power by the rich and privileged, it was exactly that which the Warren Court stupidly enabled in their "free speech-press" rulings. That is proven by the subsequent history of the country under their rulings, real life is the proof of that, the fruits by which you will know the actual nature of things, the actual truth of the matter outting itself. If the Warren Courts theory of "free speech-press" was valid in an egalitarian democracy the consequences would be greater equality, greater democracy instead of Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, perhaps DeSantis next. There should have been no prospect of any of them gaining power if the ACLU's theories of "free speech-press" were right. That has lead to the steady worsening of things, not things getting better.
