From The VORACS: I just sent this message out this week to my church-going friends & family. I thought this group might find it interesting, particularly relevant one year removed from the insurrection...
Recognizing Our Stark Reality on the One-Year Anniversary (highlighting our ongoing, pivotal & epic battle between democracy & autocracy)...The insurrectionist riot on the Capitol Building did not mark the end to the unconstitutional coup attempt, but rather the dire dangers have only increased. This authoritarian movement is being spearheaded by Trump loyalists & his compliant conservative media, empowered by their base which prominently features white supremacists, domestic terrorists....& (shockingly) Evangelical Christians! Nothing can be more damaging to our faith than cloaking it in a sinister/extremist political crusade. It takes a special kind of naivety, shortsightedness & misguidedness to justify a far-right fascist movement that's disparaging the name of the Lord in blind pursuit of illegally-obtained raw political power. Nothing less than our country, the major conservative political party & the evangelical church are being placed in real mortal jeopardy.
As Christians we must hold true to our faith & values, being discerning enough to not be influenced by those who've fallen into a tyrannical cult. That's really what it has become among Trump's most fervent & agitated supporters. And being pro-life is not a valid excuse. Would Christians vote for Hitler or some similar wannabe dictator if they ran on a pro-life platform? I actually predicted prior to the election the various ways Trump would try stealing the election, much like I predicted violence prior to the Jan. 6th insurrection, but their faulty mindset has turned out far worse & long-lasting than I ever could have imagined. The evidence of the dangers is overwhelming, so these quotes below from prominent Americans contain some facts way too many conservatives continue to ignore, distort & deny. Those who get all their news from the hyperpartisan far-right media, either directly or through family/friends, simply are not privy to the truth. For rational-thinking people who haven't been brainwashed, the fake news on Fox primetime has become unwatchable!
On this solemn day, nothing is collectively more important to Americans than these warnings. Only the truth can set us free & overcome the lies, from which the stakes & threats to our nation in our lifetimes have never been higher...
Thomas Friedman...If you're not terrified by what's going on, you're not paying attention Reed Galen...We're one election away from the end of democracy if we don't defeat trumpism Steve Schmidt...American democracy is in the greatest crisis we have faced since the Civil War Jennifer Rubin...The white evangelical political movement has done immeasurable damage to our democracy. Its descent into MAGA politics, conspiratorial thinking and cult worship has had catastrophic results for the religious values evangelicals once held dear. If these trends continue uninterrupted, we will wind up with a country rooted in neither democratic principles nor religious values. That would be a mean, violent and intolerant future few of us would want to experience. Jon Meacham...A genuine national emergency Michael Beschloss...If we lose our democracy this year, we are unlikely to get it back during our lifetimes. I can't think of anything more important than that.
Doris Kearns Goodwin...Democracy is at peril. We are now in a situation, voting rights is the most important fight (for our nation) in my lifetime.
Joseph Ellis... We are facing a historic crisis. The fate of the republic really is at stake.
Timothy Snyder...This is how coups work, a failed attempt at a coup is always practiced for a successful attempt at a coup.
Ray Dalio...30% chance of civil war in the next 10 years
Peter Wehner...(The GOP is) a grave threat to American democracy
Beth Moore...I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.
David French...Christian Leaders Who Supported Trump Must Denounce "Dangerous Religious Fanaticism"
Michael Gerson...It is clear that this lawless, reckless man (Trump) has a perfectly realistic path back to power (in 2025). The GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious and their enablers. Any reaction (by the rest of us) must begin with a sober recognition. Catastrophe is in the front room. The weather forecast includes the apocalypse.
Tom Nichols...The GOP now stands for nothing. A party that doesn't believe in anything ends up believing only in its right to rule.
Chuck Todd...The single biggest problem for our country is the broken information ecosystem
Jonah Goldberg...I know that a huge share of the people you saw on (Fox News) TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don't merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on.
Stephen Hayes...There were people making arguments on Fox News… in the post-election period that I think were deeply irresponsible… That gave people the impression that Trump had won an election he had lost and it contributed to the environment on Jan. 6, no question about it.
Karl Rove...The GOP has a duty to condemn the riot and those who refuse to acknowledge it. There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy. Love of country demands nothing less, that's true patriotism.
Bill Kristol... So the guardrails of liberal democracy and civic sanity are not stronger than they were a year ago. We did prevent the destruction of those guardrails, which is no small thing. But we haven’t succeeded in repairing or rebuilding them. Or to construct new ones. The forces of democracy remain beleaguered, the forces of sanity on the defensive.
George Will...The Capitol riot on January 6 deserves to be "burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11, because it was that scale of a shock to the system.
David Frum...Those who minimize January 6 are increasingly accepting of violence. The response from everyone else should be citizen involvement: A real commitment to participating in the institutions of your society and not accepting lies as legitimate or normal or tolerable behavior.
Michael Steele...I’m concerned people believe in the big lie, because why would you ever want to believe a lie? There was no corruption in this last election, there was no fraud.
Liz Cheney...We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.
Anthony Gonzalez...Trump has evaluated what went wrong on Jan. 6 and is making moves to install the right people to make the right decision in the most difficult times...He’s going systematically through the country and trying to remove those people and install people who are going to do exactly what he wants them to do. Daniel Goldman...Many people from both parties thought Jan 6 was rock bottom and we would begin to rebuild democracy after Trump was impeached again and left office. But anti-democratic laws have spread in the past year. Jan 6 marks the beginning - not the end - of the fight for our democracy. Carl Bernstein...The GOP has become a party of sedition such as we've never seen since the Civil War & even then no president ever committed the kind of seditious acts as Trump did on January 6th
Bob Woodward...(About Trump's plot to steal the election) A crime on the Constitution John Dean...(About the Jan. 6 probe) Donald Trump and his co-conspirators should not sleep well! Jimmy Carter...We are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy George W. Bush...Both foreign and domestic terrorists "are children of the same foul spirit. It is our continuing duty to confront them." Mitt Romney... We ignore the lessons of January 6 at our own peril. Democracy is fragile; it cannot survive without leaders of integrity and character who care more about the strength of our Republic than about winning the next election. Barack Obama...While the broken windows have been repaired and many of the rioters have been brought to justice, the truth is that our democracy is at greater risk today than it was back then (a year ago). We can't set an example when our own leaders are willing to fabricate lies and cast doubt on the results of free and fair elections.