Behind all of these steps towards apartheid and unprecedented corporate domination within American society is Prince's agenda of codifying free-market fanaticism into the policies of a theocratic state. Mandatory prayer in schools, the banning of same-sex marriage, the abolition of reproductive rights, the intensified persecution of marginalized groups, the censorship of anti-Zionist sentiments, the state promotion of a narrative about a "Christian nation," and funding for pseudoscience are all part of how Christian nationalists aim to fortify settler-colonial rule. The Biden administration's facilitation of a key part of this agenda through its conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism shows how far they're likely to get during the coming decades of escalating social crises. And as Mike Kuhlenbeck of The Humanist has written, it's families like Prince's that are at the forefront of this Christian authoritarian push:
Surrounded by those who share their belief in Christian-based politics, the Prince family has used its fortune to help build the conservative Christian movement. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Richard Nixon's disgraced former special counsel Charles Colson (who became a born-again Christian after serving seven months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal) were family friends. Edgar and Elsa Prince were major contributors to the Family Research Council and founded the nonprofit Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation in 1979, substantial funds from which have gone toward the effort to abolish the legal wall separating church and state.
These nationalists don't just want to make the church synonymous with the state; they want to bury the historical atrocities that the settler-colonial state was founded upon, and that therefore call this state's legitimacy into question. Last year, major far-right and pro-Zionist commentator Ben Shapiro claimed that "the United States did not commit genocide against Native Americans. That's a lie. The notion that the United States committed genocide against Native Americans is based on a false equivalence between disease spreading across the United States, decimating the Native American population"-- which is not a genocide -- and an actual forcible genocide."
These and similar statements ignore how the colonists deliberately spread disease to the natives via smallpox blankets, how forced relocations, slavery, and concentration camps were the approaches used for making room for white settlements, and how the U.S. has set fire to the homes of natives and destroyed their crops in parallel to how Israel has demolished Palestinians' homes and deprived Palestinians of water to sabotage their agriculture.
This kind of casual disregard for the evils settler-colonialism has committed against indigenous peoples is naturally reflected in how these types of reactionaries portray the colonization of Palestine. Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton has rationalized the occupations of both this continent and of Palestine by arguing that "might makes right" supersedes the very concept of land sovereignty:
"We were here first" often has a strong legal foundation in civilized courts and governments. But not always. Just because a tribe or nation occupies a certain plot of land hasn't historically assured its future ownership... I was in Israel. And wouldn't you know it--they're dealing with the same thing! Kinda. Several other Secretaries of State, and myself, spent the better part of a week learning about the small nation of Israel and all the nuances of living in a region where different tribes and nations really don't like each other. Trying to allocate land and property based upon who was there 'first' doesn't always work very well, to say the least.
This is the narrative on which the tightening of Christian nationalist control is taking place, and that is being used to justify the parallel colonial warfare and discrimination against Palestinians. A narrative that erases the indigenous nations by claiming that they either don't exist, or might as well accept their subjugation due to already being weakened so much. When these nations are believed to not even be real anymore, the idea of anti-colonial revolution within both Palestine and the land the U.S. exists upon gets to be far removed from the cultural consciousness, letting fascism fill the void.
Pushing towards an evangelical-backed Israeli nuclear war with Iran
At the same time that Christian nationalism expands its control, the range within which it can exercise this control is shrinking. Since Washington's reckless invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military and economic primacy have been dwindling, a fact that even the Pentagon recognized in 2017. The empire's decline has grown so serious that Dr. Eran Lerman, a prominent Israeli conservative defense thinker, stated last year that "American hegemony is crumbling before our eyes," and that this fact should motivate Israel to annex the West Bank to secure its existence in a near future where Washington has been forced to retreat from the region.
Because the perceived legitimacy of the Zionist state is also crumbling, Israel hasn't been able to carry out its West Bank-annexation plans. It also hasn't been able to pacify the Palestinian population amid its recent siege against Gaza, or to stop the negotiations towards restoring the Iran nuclear deal the Join Comprehensive Plan of Action; as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists concluded this week, "As long as the United States continues to fully implement its commitments under the JCPOA, the next Iranian administration, regardless of its political affiliation, is likely to abide by the terms of the agreement. Joe Biden need not lose any sleep over this in the coming weeks." As Mehrnaz Shahabi of Consortiumnews wrote last month, Israel's escalatory reactions to this threat of further losing their strategic interests could produce a nuclear war:
On April 28, Israel's intelligence minister, Eli Cohen, repeated the Israeli threat that should the U.S. re-enter the JCPOA and remove the sanctions on Iran, Israel would hit Iran's nuclear plants with long-range missiles. This threat too was met with silent acquiescence on the part of the U.S. and its Western allies, the same kind of silence that has met. Israel's continued acts of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, house demolitions, settlement building, administrative detention of children, Gaza blockade, use of phosphorous bombs, flooding and contamination of agricultural land, raiding Al-Aqsa Mosque in the holy month of Ramadan, torching trees and agricultural crops and bombarding residential apartment blocks in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel's free license to act with impunity is fast sliding into war. Only fools would believe that attacking Iran's enrichment plants, its critical infrastructure, shipping, and scientific and military personnel, would remain unanswered, and could not spill over into a destructive regional war with global consequences, from which use of nuclear weapons can not be excluded.
This would be the war that the evangelicals have long been praying for. John Hagee, the lobbyist whose organization has close ties to Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, has predicted that Israeli nuclear missiles are going to make it so that "inferno will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon." Now that Biden is deviating in the slightest from this camp's policy by bringing back the Iran deal--which is itself designed to fortify imperialist influence over Iran by constraining its actions under threat of continuing Trump's genocidal sanctions--the Zionists are racing to make Hagee's murderous vision a reality. Iran isn't the rogue state in the region, Israel is.
If this rogue state carries out a nuclear attack, or if it ignites a conflict even more destructive than the Iraq War, the Biden administration is no doubt going to enable it and whitewash its crimes--just like how Biden has been continuing military aid and rhetorical protections for Israel despite its world-shocking recent atrocities. At the center of mass backing for this omnicidal war will be the religious death cult that colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism have cultivated.
This is a cult that disregards its own doctrines about helping the poor and the oppressed in favor of a fascistic allegiance with capital and empire. That rewrites history, to the point of whitewashing coup-regime atrocities and denying a genocide many times larger than the Holocaust, so that its repressive policies can be rationalized. That proliferates paramilitary violence from unaccountable mercenaries, whether for the sake of profit or for the perpetuation of the colonial genocide. That's even eager to cheer on a potential nuclear rampage from a genocidal settler-colonial regime because it expects this to bring a moment where the cult's believers have their conviction in a doomsday prophecy vindicated.
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