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Patrick Barwise and Peter York must be miffed that the phantom controversy in August over patriotic songs at the Last Night of the Proms came too late to feature in their new book. Here was a classic souffl of an outrage, whipped up from the flimsiest ingredients, which enabled newspapers and ministers to wave the flag in the face of the BBCs incoming director-general Tim Davie for several days. Meanwhile the government floated Charles Moore, a man with no broadcasting experience who once appeared in court for not paying the licence fee, to be the next chair of the BBC. After Moore bowed out, attention turned to Sir Robbie Gibb, who went straight from heading BBC Westminster to working for Theresa May and is currently raising funds for the new right-leaning channel GB News. Other candidates are in play, but Rule, Britannia!, if nothing else, will be safe in the next chairs hands.

The BBC, Barwise and York claim in this staunch defence of the corporation, is the whole British nation in all its untidy variety and, at the same time, one of its glories. This books value lies in its steady accumulation of myth-busting data. In 2015, 99% of households used at least one BBC service at least once every week. It remains by far the most trusted source of impartial news. Nineteen out of the 25 most-watched programmes of the last decade were broadcast on BBC One. The BBC is still, to quote the old Radio 1 slogan, the nations favourite.

The rise of streaming, funding cuts and a 'hostile prime minister' make the BBC's current predicament particularly grave

At the same time, it is a punchbag of limitless utility, so large that even the clumsiest blow will land. Even 50 years ago, director-general Hugh Greene called it the universal Aunt Sally of our day. Barwise and York argue that a cluster of factors, including the rise of streaming, funding cuts and the most hostile prime minister the BBC has ever faced make its current predicament particularly grave, even now that Dominic Cummings is no longer a fixture at No 10: Most people would now agree that the Corporation is in real, perhaps existential, peril. The usually cautious Andrew Marr recently warned of a drive to destroy the BBC.

The war is fought on two fronts. The commercial argument is that the corporation is simply too big: funded by the licence fee, it overpay stars and bureaucrats in order to hog ground that the free market could cover. But this is a catch-22. If the BBC continues to produce critical and commercial hits, then it is unfair to competitors; if it does not, then it doesnt deserve the current licence fee (which has risen by just 12 since 2010). To cave in would be ruinous. The less the BBC did, the less money it would deserve, the less it could do, and so on until it became a shell of itself.

Running parallel to this is the political critique that the BBC is unacceptably leftwing. Not economically you could not claim that it is anti-business or pro-union but in the nebulous cultural sense. It is the mothership of snooty, decadent, avocado-eating liberal elites (as opposed to the benign conservative elite represented by Lord Moore of Etchingham). Gutting one of the UKs most beloved and unifying institutions, and a major generator of soft power, is therefore the patriotic thing to do.

Once you are committed to seeing the BBC as an alienatingly woke monoculture, you are prone to looking foolish. In 2018, the Spectators James Delingpole derided the BBC One drama Bodyguard as Social Justice Warrior propaganda for casting people who arent white men in positions of authority, even as, the authors note, Britain had a female prime minister, and a Muslim home secretary and mayor of London. My prediction is that the BBC is going to become increasingly marginal, partisan and irrelevant, fumed Delingpole, as Bodyguard proceeded to become the biggest hit of the year apart from the World Cup.

It's hard trying to bring down the BBC when the masses trust its output the wheels of grievance require constant oiling

It is hard work trying to bring down the BBC when the masses stubbornly insist on enjoying and trusting its output, so the wheels of grievance require constant oiling by newspapers, thinktanks and opaquely funded pressure groups such as News-watch. Governments have been growling at the BBC for decades. Winston Churchill never forgave it for remaining independent during the 1926 general strike, while Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have all forced the departure of troublesome directors-general. The current assault is in line with US-style backlash politics, neatly summarised by a series of 2004 blogposts published by Cummingss short-lived thinktank the New Frontiers Foundation. The author argued that the right should aspire to end the BBC in its current form while enabling more partisan outlets in the vein of Fox News. One post described the BBC as a mortal enemy of the Conservative party, which can only prosper in the long-term by undermining the BBCs reputation for impartiality.

The effort has already paid off. In polls, accusations of bias, whether left/right or leave/remain, roughly balance out, but Barwise and York call this a symmetrical illusion. While comedy and drama may skew to the left (as the arts tend to do), the BBCs political coverage consistently favours the government of the day, with a more pronounced bias when that government is Conservative. Taking its cues (and many of its guests) from the conservative-dominated print media, it overrepresents the right - shows such as Question Time, Politics Live and, most egregiously, The Papers. Spooked by accusations of metropolitan leftism, the BBC is desperate to appease those who hate it.

The Tories treatment of the BBC is reminiscent of the movie hoodlum who says you have a nice place here and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it. The aim is to instil fear. The BBC has belatedly abandoned false balance when covering the climate crisis but it is still nervous about calling a lie a lie, or wading into any story that might inflame the right. Thats how it has ended up with absurdly strict new prohibitions on staff expressing personal opinions on social media. The left cannot inspire the same anxiety. It may mount Twitter sorties against Laura Kuenssberg or Panorama but it wants to reform the BBC rather than diminish it, perhaps realising that it would fare poorly in a post-BBC media landscape.

No serious defence of the BBC can be uncritical. Barwise and York dutifully address its 21st-century blunders, from the prank-call Sachsgate affair in 2008 to major institutional failures such as the gender pay gap and the Jimmy Savile scandal, and recommend finding a viable alternative to the licence fee. They call out the BBCs timidity in the face of power, its rather odd current reading of the political continuum [and] its tendency to nannyism. Every reader (including this one) can mentally add their own complaints.

Still, the rights attacks on the BBC are not a sincere and proportionate response to actual mistakes, such as, most recently, the alleged historical misconduct of Martin Bashir. Its campaign is deliberately unwinnable because, like most culture wars, it relies on granting righteous victimhood to the powerful. There will always be a fresh affront to the delicate sensibilities of Middle England, or at least enough raw material to manufacture one. The right would be lost without its perpetual indignation machine.

Yet it can still inflict immense damage. If you want to see a news broadcasting ecosystem that conforms to the Tory blueprint, look across the Atlantic, where the barely regulated free market has enabled partisanship, distrust, disinformation and conspiracism to erode the shared reality on which a healthy democracy depends. This books urgent conclusion establishes just how much Britain stands to lose if the BBC as we know it falls.

The War Against the BBC: How an Unprecedented Combination of Hostile Forces Is Destroying Britains Greatest Cultural Institution ... And Why You Should Care is published by Penguin (10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The War Against the BBC review in defence of a national institution - The Guardian

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In the spring, when the coronavirus outbreak was concentrated mostly in the liberal Northeastwith a particularly vicious assault on New York Cityconservatives balked at the idea of economic aid and mandatory mask-wearing. President Donald Trump didnt even believe that the city was running low on personal protective equipment for its beleaguered health care workers. Why should the rest of the country be forced to live by so-called New York rules, was the question that some conservative intellectuals posed as they distilled the resentment of the Republican masses. It was frustrating to watch, since clearly the virulence of the virus meant that no region would be spared. And yet, I found some solace when I imagined that once the virus appeared in the states mostly run by Republicans, red state leaders and their constituents would realize the error of their ways and quickly dial back their indifference to mandatory public health in orders to save lives.

Wrong again!

Fast forward eight months. More than 250,000 people have died, daily infection rates are the highest on the planet, and the possibility of Republicans taking the gravity of the science seriously seems like a drug-induced dream.

The second wave that every public health expert told us would come crashing down in the fall and winter, overwhelming our hospitals and killing thousands of people each week, has arrived. And yet, despite the dire straits that the entire country is in, and will be in for the foreseeable future, many Republican elected leaders across the country have followed their presidential role model and completely abdicated responsibility.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a clear way to combat the rate of infection as the world awaits a vaccine: Pay business owners and workers to stay home, make mask wearing mandatory, and restrict activities that are known superspreader events. But the so-called most powerful country in the world (declining fast) made an inhumane political calculation. Whats a couple of hundred thousand deaths in the name of keeping the economy and the Republican party robust? Of course, this has led to a predictable outcome: The United States is now at the intersection of economic calamity and mass death. But as infections skyrocket and the bodies pile up, it appears that the Republican Party has gone from being indifferent to the suffering and death toactually embracingit.

Trump has been stunningly indifferent to the death toll and instead has engaged in a bender of baseless claims of voter fraud while blocking president-elect Joe Biden from getting a running start on a comprehensive, scientifically-based, public health response and vaccine distribution plan. Meanwhile, Trumps counterparts on the state-level have behaved just as badly. On Wednesday, the White House offered Republicans a deadly playbook. After the Senate adjourned for the Thanksgiving recess without passing legislation for desperately needed economic aid (Enjoy your vacation! Well just be over here dying!), Stephen Moore, one of Trumps economic advisers parroted the same line from the spring, implying that all this suffering and death is simply a blue state problem; everything is just fine in red states.

Dear reader, everything is not fine in the red states.

According to the New York Times, the top five states with the worst outbreaks are run by Republicans. In North Dakota, the situation isespecially dire. Approximately one out of 1,000 resident has died from the coronavirus. Infections spiraled out of control and Republican Gov. Doug Burgum finally implemented a mask mandate, eight months into the public health crisis. By the time he took action, there were only 18 ICU hospital beds available in the entire state and nearly 800 people had died.

The virus is also out of control in South Dakota. Gov. Kristi Noem, who could certainly medal in the best Trump-like response olympics, has downplayed the seriousness of the threat, denied that masks work despite the mounting scientific evidence, and has essentially abandoned South Dakotans to fend for themselves. So far, more than 700 deaths have been reported there. The state, which is home to just 885,000 people, has the highest test positivity rate in the country at 60 percent. In Michigan, which is led by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmire, some Republicans in the state legislature proposed impeaching her for the crime ofimplementing coronavirus restrictions.(When theyre not busy protesting life-saving measures, the Michigan Republicans can be found at the White House, trying to help Trump overturn the will of the voters in their own state.)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott infamously opened up his state much earlier than public health officials advised and tried to ban cities from implementing their own mask mandates before relenting and ordering a statewide mandate in July. Even as infection numbers trended in a dangerous direction, Abbott resisted another a lockdown. This strategy has led to disastrous results. In El Paso, Texas, the situation has become so dire that local officials hired inmates from the county jailat $2 an hour to help move bodies from overflowing morgues. Hospitals are so choked with patients that health care workers are rationing care and sending patients to other facilities. In an effort to slow the spread, city officials implemented a shut-down order. But a group of restaurants and the State of Texas took the city to court, where the order was thrown out. Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is being investigated for a litany of white collar crimes, praised the decision saying its important that we do not shutdown the economy ever again.

Their economic policies with generous tax cuts to the wealthy have yet to make prosperity trickle down to the masses, but the selfish antics of the GOP have certainly reached the wider public. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, public health officials and some elected officials are warning people to stay home and avoid large indoor gatheringslest dinner turns into a superspreader event. But because the GOP has weaponized every facet of American life into a cudgel for their ridiculous culture wars, there was a revolt among conservatives. Why? you may reasonably ask. Because being told to stay home is an infringement on one of the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving: the right to spread disease. After all, the Pilgrims also shared their germs with unsuspecting Native people at the very first Thanksgiving.

How dare the government take away the right to accidentally kill grandma while eating flavorless potatoes with 25 of family members? Sensible people will skip big celebrations, but conservatives are planning giant indoor celebrations that will certainly lead to more death, with the collateral benefit of owning the libs. One looks in vain for a single responsible Republican leader with enough sway, not to mention courage to distance him or herself from Trump, to convince these people that their lives and the lives of their loved ones are worth more than sticking it to liberals.

While the Democratic Party has had its public fumbles (California Gov. Newsom had to apologize for attending an indoor dinner at a high-end restaurant) and have sowed confusion with restrictions, the Republican Partys inaction shows the level of disdain for the people who didnt vote for them and even those who did. (The virus is shockingly non-partisan.) Despite their outward messaging of being the party of freedom, of a strong economy, and ardent pro-life policies, their dereliction of duty has revealed them as the party of mass death. After a quarter million lives lostand many more to cometheir debased version of freedom is akin to a pitch from a crooked salesperson: For the low, low price of your life, you too can be free.

Originally posted here:
The GOP's COVID Response: Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death - Mother Jones

File photo by Stephanie Costello

On any given day, a sizeable band of hardy swimmers take to the sea across Dublins riviera: in Dollymount, Sandymount, South Wall, Seapoint, Vico Road, Hawk Cliff, White Rock.

For many Dubliners, these are the names of summer afternoons, but for this disparate group of water worshipers, they are locations of choice in both summer and winter, come rain or shine.

The benefits of cold-water treatment are legendary. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used it as part of their bathing regime, and hydrotherapy was revived by the Victorians and later used to treat mental-health issues and alcoholism.

In fact, Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill W. to his friends was apparently a proponent, and more recently, an as-yet-unpublished study by Cambridge University researchers suggested that it might help protect the brain against degenerative diseases like dementia.

With lockdown, a whole new generation of adherents to the benefits of a daily short, sharp cold-water endorphin shock mean that jostling for space to dry and change, while keeping a respectable two-metre distance, can be a challenge.

But in Sandycove, home of the famous Forty Foot, a new struggle is emerging. Its not between male and female bathers that battle was fought over 40 years ago. Nor is it the regulars and locals versus the day-trippers that is more evident at the weekend, when the locals get their fix early, and then concede the space to the hordes.

This new struggle is between new money new arrivals and old-money seasoned swimmers. Specifically, its between the people who use trendy, pricey brand-name changing robes, and those who think that flaunting money in that way is gauche, even offensive.

This is, of course, not really about the robes. Its about socio-economic changes taking place in the neighbourhood.

Given the Irish geography, climate and weather, an item of clothing that facilitates a quick change while in public, and in the open, and possibly in the wind and rain too, sounds like a winner.

It is an improvement on the traditional habit of trying to hide your modesty behind a towel or a dressing gown. But the changing practice of choice, at least in Sandycove, has become a cultural weather vane.

While taking my daily dip one recent morning, a printed notice pinned to the wall caught my attention: This is a dryrobe free area, it read, referring to a specific brand of changing robe.

Being a blow-in, I had wanted to fit in with the locals, and so I had been having discussions with my wife about buying her such a garment.

That is, until I saw the price, which was north of 150. And she, in no uncertain terms, told me that her uncle, who had swum in the Forty Foot every day of his life, would have scorned such an item of clothing.

The requirement for a swimming costume since the 1970s was one thing, but if you are hardy enough to swim in the sea, you are hardy enough not to need an expensive and flashy coat to keep you dry and warm.

The dryrobe yes, the brand-name is styled with a lower-case d is the item of clothing of choice (other brands exist, though seemingly not in Sandycove), and this printed A4 notice uncovered a lot more about social tensions in the neighbourhood than any voluminous (and shower-resistant) changing robe could cover.

In the traditional, old-money corner, is the tradition of sea-swimming. For decades considered to be a pastime to be enjoyed in the company of your own sex, the Forty Foot was for males, and around the headland, the Sandycove for females and families.

Wealth, as with semi-naked bodies, was not for flaunting in public. That all changed with the action by the Dublin City Womens Invasionary Force in 1974, which the said-uncle attended and is visible in RT footage of the day, and since then mixed swimming is the norm.

Similarly, it seems that decadent public expressions of wealth which might have been previously socially unacceptable are now more prevalent, and with this, the seeds for culture wars in suburbia were sown.

In the new-money corner, certain upwardly mobile youngsters in their thirties and forties (young for this neighbourhood), see having gone wild-swimming as the new dinner-party boast or that it will be when dinner parties are allowed again.

For them, the outlay of 150 on the robe is a worthwhile investment, which goes far beyond the useful physical garment, but is a uniform a symbol providing what Pierre Bourdieu called social recognition and a statement of belonging.

This divide here is superficially economic, but at its heart is cultural and perhaps territorial too.

Its like when someone wins the lottery, and suddenly has money but not the social status they desire, so they buy expensive items to signify belonging to that higher social class they aspire to.

It might have been a pocket watch when Sandycove was built, an outsized mobile telephone a decade after mixed swimming had been finally allowed, or a branded, all-weather changing robe today.

After four years living in Sandycove, I am undecided I dont want to be part of suburbias culture war and the weather really isnt really that bad. Also, 150 can go a long way feeding a family for a week and providing a formerly homeless person with a moving-on pack from Crosscare as they move into a new home.

While cold dips were once considered an antidote to alcoholism, nowadays this activity encourages a post-dip drink, alcoholic or otherwise. In these Covid-19 times, whether you culturally identify as a wild-swimmer or a sea-swimmer, a splasher, or a dipper, or indeed a sceptic, or a non-swimmer, perhaps the warm glow of charity might be the better course of action?

For those of you considering taking part in the annual Christmas Day dip, a major charity fundraiser, maybe you can do both. A bathing suit, nowadays, is advisable. A changing robe? Well, that is up to you.

Read more:
Paul: On the Sandycove Swim-Robe Wars - Dublin Inquirer

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

From a global pandemic and nationwide protests to a contested presidential election, this year seems tailor-made to expose Americas partisan fault lines. Those hoping for a blue or red wave to unite the country on election night were undoubtedly disappointed. What the returns revealed instead was a divided electorate.

Even before the election results underscored Americas political gulf, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her faith became something of a national Rorschach test for where Americans line up on the partisan spectrum. Some viewed Barretts Catholicism, and her involvement with the charismatic Christian community, People of Praise, as tantamount to Margaret Atwoods dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale. For others, Barretts faith was evidence of her character and integritya signal that shed live up to her oath to impartially discharge the dutiesof the office.

What explains this divergence?

The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanshipit involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nationnor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the countrys cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.

According to our recent survey report sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, a non-partisan research center at Brigham Young University, slightly less than one third of the U.S. population is deeply religious, frequently attending church services or engaging in other religious activities in their homes. Another third is fully secular, never participating in any sort of religious practice, whether its prayer, reading holy writ, or attending services. Meanwhile, a final third of Americans are nominally religiousattending services infrequently or engaging in other practices with varying levels of devotion.

These findings align with the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey from the NationalOpinion Research Center as well as findings from the Pew Research Center, which estimates that roughly a quarter of American adults today are religiously unaffiliated.

The story of secularisms rise is well-documented. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the worlds more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little, notes political scientist Ronald Inglehart in Foreign Affairs. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. The Atlantics Derek Thompson similarly notes the rapid ballooning of the religiously unaffiliated, tracing its relative size from around 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1991 to more than a quarter today.

So, what happened?

Theres no simple answer. And, certainly, people stop affiliating with their religious tradition for many reasons. However, sociologists Michael HoutandClaude Fischer have published research suggesting that an aversion to the religious rights involvement in politics throughout the 1990s (and beyond) may have influenced the decision of self-identified moderates and liberals to disaffiliate from religious institutions during this period.

Organized religion, they write in their 2014 study, gained influence by espousing a conservative social agenda that led liberals and young people who already had weak attachment to organized religion to drop that identification. The scholars note a causal link between the religious rights entrance into public conservativism and disaffiliation among certain pockets of the population: Political liberals and moderates who seldom or never attended services quit expressing a religious preference when survey interviewers asked about it.

These findings are significant, but they dont tell the full story of American faith in the twenty-first century. Much like the bifurcated reaction to Amy Coney Barrett, the same trends that seem to push some toward secularism may also help crystalize faith in others. Indeed, even as the nation is becoming more secular, in another sense, its also becoming more religious as well.

For example, a 2017 study from Indiana Universitys Landon Schnabel and Harvards Sean Bock suggests that intense religion has persisted even as more moderate religion has seen declines. In other words, ascendent secularism is accompanied by a deepening of religious intensity. Speaking to The Washington Post, Schnabel compared this phenomenon to a container getting smaller, but more concentrated. So, yes, the steady stream of cable news chyrons on waning religious affiliation are accurate (the religious landscape is shifting) but the real story is more complicated.

The fact is that the highly religious in America havent gone away. Theyve remained steady as a percentage of the population, which means their overall numbers have grown with the population and their higher-than-average fertility patterns are one sign that the trend probably wont reverse. Thus, those anticipating a full conquest of secularism in the United States shouldnt hold their breathneither should those rooting for a modern-day Great Awakening.

It may be that recognizing the nations religious and secular demographics as both stable and balanced could broker the kind of dtente that recognizes cooperation and the search for genuine understanding as a productive path forward.

Pluralism, after all, has always been what makes America exceptional on the world stage. In our report, we analyzed data from more than 16,000 survey participants in eleven countries, looking specifically at how religion in public life varies across populations. In Latin American nations like Columbia and Peru, most respondents were both religiously affiliated and active in their faith. As you would expect, in European countries like France or the United Kingdom, religious affiliation and participation were much lower. Whereas religion was once predominant in these nations, today, secularism reigns.

The United States, meanwhile, stands out for its unique demographic mix of both seculars and the highly religious. Of the eleven countries analyzed, only in the United States do these two groups have to deal with each other on somewhat equal grounds.

Specifically, we estimate that there are a little more than 100 million American seculars and about 85 million Americans who might be considered highly religious. In other words, there are more seculars in the United States than there are people in all of the Nordic countries combined plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Austria, and Switzerland. Likewise, the church-attending population of the United States is larger than the combined populations of Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Thats a lot of seculars. And thats a lot of religionists. So, its easy to see why one side or the other might feel like they own the country and they should control the nations levers of political power. An October poll showed that Christians, particularly white evangelicals, supported Donald Trump by a very wide margin (78 percent) whereas atheists and agnostics supported Biden by an even larger margin (83 percent).

Seculars and religionists may share this much in common: a mutual fear (and misunderstanding) of the other. This idea explains why they often fight so hard to gain and maintain political advantage. The phenomenon is also likely exacerbated by geographical segregation. Seculars often live on the coasts or in other urban settings, while religionists are more commonly found in the rural South and Midwest. According to a 2017 survey from The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation, fully 78 percent of rural Republicans said, Christian values are under siege. If these geographically separated groups bump into each other, its usually through the less-than-humanizing lens of social media.

With these interests so evenly spread, knowledge of the nations demographic balance cant help but prompt seculars and religionists to see the culture wars as a battle with little prospect of a full victory. But, given the current political environment, moving from an acknowledgment of demographic realities to actual political cooperation may be asking for a miracle of biblical proportions. And yet, at least we know that there are many Americans who might be willing to pray for one.

Spencer James, Hal Boyd and Jason Carroll are faculty members in Brigham Young Universitys School of Family Life. They are each affiliated with the Wheatley Institution.

See the original post here:
Why the Partisan Divide? The US Is Becoming More Secularand More Religious - Religion & Politics

As I write this, most world leaders, the media, state election officials across the country, and the majority of American voters now agree that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election by a clear margin. Joe is now acting more presidential almost two months from his inauguration than the orange menace has in four years

But beyond the obvious, who else has come out of this strange election in a better or worse place? In other words, who really won? In a word, the oligarchs, 1-percenters, or billionaires, choose your label. Just look at how much money theyve raked in during our mismanaged pandemic ($10.2 trillion worldwide).

Many people saw this election and the Trump presidency as the main problem and the only solution to what ailed America. Wrong. Trump is just a very orange, very visible symbol but by no means the cause.

Systemic racism has always been here; he just made the racists comfortable enough to come out in the open. Income inequality is now at world-beating levels. But thats just an acceleration of what Reagan started.

The true winners right now are the super wealthy. The eight individuals (and others we never hear about) who now hold more wealth than the next billion folks on the planet. That group. The shadowy folks who fund the right-wing think tanks, Fox News, Breitbart, the Federalist Society, One America News, and so on.

This crew, folks like the Kochs, the Walton family, Betsy Devos and her brother Eric Prince of Darkness have been funneling money and buying influence for decades all in hopes of ultimately taking over everything. In their world, our only purpose is as replaceable wage slaves whose lives are devoted to making them ever wealthier.

The level of division in our country now and in many other countries, is a direct result of their influence played out over mainstream media, social media, and general propaganda channels. The more divided the populace is and the more divided government is, the less likely it is that the oligarchs will be encumbered by irritants like higher taxes, environmental regulations, strong unions, and strong governments. Make no mistake, we are at war with the 1-percent and they are winning in many places.

One of the big things to come out of the disaster that is/was the Trump presidency is the widespread recognition of the incredible racism that rules our country. And why did it finally come to such a head? Was it just Trump and his dog whistles and overtures to the Ku Klux Klan? Was it police violence against people of color?

Trump and his father before him were avowed racists. To have a racist in the Oval Office was a David Duke wet dream.

Now we see much more clearly just what our Black and brown neighbors have been dealing with for a couple of centuries and just how far we are from true equality. Folks, theres a ton of work still left to do.

But keep in mind that the oligarchs are behind a lot of the racism in terms of funding and messaging. Again, it keeps us divided.

And lets not forget the constant attacks on women and their rights by the Rapist in Chief and the right wing of our society led by rabid evangelicals and demagogues of all sorts. But the right-to-life folks (forced-birth people) have always been in it to control women, not save lives.

If they truly cared about lives, theyd do away with the death penalty, fund social programs, and come out strongly for gun control. Never happen. These are gun-toting, bloodthirsty misogynist bigots hiding behind the Bible and the flag.

And again, these folks are funded in large part by dark money funneled through fronts and fake charities directly from the coffers of the oligarchs. Its just another way to keep the culture wars going and keep us divided.

Look at every divisive issue in our society and you will find wealthy people funding the divide to keep us from paying attention as they rape and pillage the planet. Bernie Sanders has been saying all this for the past 30-plus years and only recently have people picked up on it.

But for now, there is some light. Joe and Kamala are two real people with our interests first and foremost, and that gives me hope. But dont kid yourselves, they are imperfect and their efforts will be compromised by our broken government. Moscow Mitch McConnell has already gone public saying he would not allow Joe to appoint just anyone to his cabinet and approve them if theyre too radically left for his tastes. Of course, Mitch may be on shaky ground if he loses the two contested Senate seats in Georgia.

Its nice to look forward to four years during which it is unlikely our leaders will be a daily embarrassment on the world stage and a living menace to our rights and our democracy. I think Joe and Kamala will govern much like Obama did, with class, humility, professionalism, and a commitment to doing the right thing whenever possible.

Their opposition is secretive, well-funded, dug-in, and willing to break any laws or norms to stay on top. That is our fight now.

Never forget that the wealthy are typically apolitical, amoral, areligious, and sociopathic. They worship the twin gods of money and power and thats it. But it also makes them vulnerable and obvious after a fashion and weve seen the naked depravity, greed, and violence they wielded in the past four years.

Lets keep that in mind, folks. Your enemy isnt the guy in the MAGA hat or the person with the Biden sign on the lawn. Your enemy is the guy who pays Moscow Mitch to load the courts with unqualified political hacks who will reliably rule against unions, womens rights, the environment, clean air, clean water, equality and public education. The people who would clear-cut the Amazon rainforest for profit while we all choke on dirty air and the seas rise.

Thats public enemy number one and with Joe and Kamala on top, maybe, just maybe, we can get these folks where they live: tax them hard and regulate their criminal behavior. If they win, we all lose because our country and our planet are doomed.

Michael Seinberg is a columnist, social critic, and professional cynic. But he says hes sharpening his word processor and making new protest signs as the fight is just getting interesting.

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The winners, the losers, and the rest of us - The Altamont Enterprise