Patriotism requires Country over Party.
Fake patriots see it the other way around
Today’s TAT and food for thought as you go about your week, is an intersection of the topics I talk about frequently in my TAT articles. The general categories of those topics include at a minimum:
Our failures in protecting the nation from professional influencers both foreign and domestic.
The hyper-partisan nature of politics
Fundamental misunderstanding of our founding values and constitutional principles.
Oligarchy
There are plenty more national security threats as well, that play into the four items above, but even these four, will be challenging to get into one TAT article. Since I tend to write longer articles, today I will try and be more succinct so that the complexity of the issues does not overwhelm readers. For the record, they often tax my brain too.
Our failures in protecting the nation from professional influencers both foreign and domestic.
The bottom line here is that there is no way, for the US government to effectively protect our citizenry from what is called, malign influence, or in plain language, those who wish to do our nation harm. So that I do not rehash what I have written previously on this topic, the links are below.
The US National Security Community has left us a critical vulnerability in US national security. (truthaboutthreats.com)
Protecting our nation from Mis and Disinformation, requires true expertise at Ethical Influence (truthaboutthreats.com)
Dear America, I dare you! - by Paul Cobaugh (truthaboutthreats.com)
Without a core, shared, national identity, there is no national security. (truthaboutthreats.com)
Hyper partisanship will sink our Republic, especially when one side has fully abandoned honesty, integrity and morality. (truthaboutthreats.com)
The reason that this category is part of today’s piece is that US citizens have been victimized by the unscrupulous and sometimes downright evil professional influencers and marketers from a variety of sources, such as:
Oligarchical donors buying influence in both politics and US defense spending.
Propaganda media like FOX, NewsMax, Breitbart, MSNBC and more
Foreign adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, extremist and violent extremist organizations like MAGA, AQ. ISIS, Anarchists, Boogaloo Bois, Accelerationists, pro and anti-Abortion extremists etc. Of all of these, only MAGA presents an acute national security threat at the moment due to Jan 6th, treasonous violent extremism and their command of the House of Representatives under Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
CYBER operations and hackers/ mercenaries working for adversarial nations and their domestic partners.
Most of those named, use their skills to isolate and encourage dissention, often violent dissention between political parties and their supporting organizations. An example, the NRA in supplying Russian money to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
The hyper-partisan nature of politics
Our constitution says nothing about political parties or what were often called political, “factions” at the founding of our nation. Our first and only truly independent POTUS, George Washington abhorred factions and warned decisively of the threat to our fledgling republic in his published Farewell Address when voluntarily leaving office after his second term. He had seen the threat by factions historically and in the eight-year timeframe since he took office as our first POTUS. He was adamant about this threat and recent events since the Trump administration, have been validated beyond challenge.
In recent years and during the Reagan administration, Newt Gingrich began the era of scorched earth politics where no compromise was acceptable. This set the style of the hyper-partisan battlefield that now perfectly describes the American political landscape. No democracy can survive such unethical and especially un-American thinking.
Trump, riding the coattails of such thinking and supported by Russia, took the 2016 election and ever since, the current version of the MAGA controlled GOP is now entirely sustained on conspiracy theories that do more for enemies like Putin, as well as American and foreign Oligarchs. They don’t advance American values and our constitutional principles at all. Read this last sentence out loud until it tastes as bad in your mouth as it does mine. Sadly, this is demonstrably accurate to anyone, not under the spell of party influencers.
Fundamental misunderstanding of our founding values and constitutional principles.
Americans receive some or a great deal of public-school teaching about CIVICS, Government and history, yet those under the spell of political parties have very different views of what our constitutional principles are as well as what those principles mean. As the son of a history and government teaching father who had a large library at home on the subjects, my interest in such have only grown from deep interest over the ensuing years but those subjects now frame my perspectives regarding national security threats.
There is inherent danger in what most so-called “red-states” are doing over the past couple of years with their efforts to rewrite or omit history that doesn’t suit their fake-patriotism agenda. In fact, their aggressive campaign for vouchers is an attempt to have the state pay for education in private schools that would be of lesser quality and permit rabid Christian Nationalism to be taught on taxpayer dollars. This is precisely the attitude of the Texas Republican Party who have ensconced such this as part of their most recent party platform. Nothing is more fundamentally unconstitutional than this.
I am not a partisan at all but work actively against concepts that constitute an acute national security threat. In this phase of US history, that means working against a GOP that has professionally skewed the definition of patriotism over nearly three decades with FOX News being the primary cheerleader for fake patriotism.
Oligarchy
The correlation of oligarchy to hyper-partisanship is as follows:
In order for a political party to have a loyal base, they must be convinced that only their party has the answers.
The way to convince party members of this requires influence, or in this case, professional influence operations.
Such influence operations, run more or less ethically or the anti-American narrative selling done by the MAGA/ GOP influencers requires money… lots and lots of money.
Oligarchs or what we used call, “captains of industry” use this to their advantage.
These oligarchs purchase influence in Congress that helps to keep them more profitable, pay less taxes or like big oil, buy themselves less environmental and operational interference from the US government. As a Texan, I see this every single day. Big oil operates with impunity here in the Lone Star State. Case-in-point, also why huge banks and other oligarchical persons and entities pay so little tax compared to most Americans.
To sum up today’s short lesson on why and how hyper-partisanship has saddled our republic with party over country issues, it’s important to remember that there are several contributing factors. The four primary factors are the ones touched upon in this TAT piece.
The most serious threat among this group of issues stem from the fake patriotism of the US MAGA controlled GOP. They have reshaped their version of American identity into something unrecognizable to true patriots. According to the GOP today, in order to be a patriot requires being a white male, carrying a gun, imposing their Christian Nationalist views on all Americans. Nothing… absolutely nothing could be further from US values as described in our founding documents, including our constitution.
The professional influencers and other hired guns are paid for by oligarchs, foreign and domestic who pay to keep our nation, artificially divided in order to wield influence in congress for their own selfish interests. For the record, during Soviet times and also with Putin’s regime, dividing the US along existing cultural fault lines, was the primary focus of our primary adversary. Add to this that these influencers prey on American voters completely out of touch with how our republic works, and a national security community incapable of defending citizens from adversarial influence and we can all see how January 6th occurred. A party built on fake American values and a party that struggles to remain united and inspired to come out and vote, are all part of the combined effects of malign influence.
It’s up to congress to begin doing their job, based on our founding principles. It’s up to courts to codify those principles rather than doing what our current SCOTUS seems intent on doing, undermining those principles and what apathetic voters, swayed by conspiracy theories and wildly divergent agendas vote for. Democracy in our republic is a team sport. When one part fails, the rest follows, unless we demand a return to what our nation was designed for.
The bottom line: Send voters back to CIVICs class, legislate protections against oligarchical, political influence and for heaven’s sake, dictate to the national security community, who is the primary reason that we’ve failed at defending the minds of our citizens, that it’s time to stop listening to the so-called experts that have produced four decades of failure.
My very best for everyone’s week,
Paul