Human Rights

The President Was Elected 

To Serve the People, Not The 

Other Way Around  

 Essential Values For A Leader: Truth, Honesty, Empathy

By Steve Rensberry 

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    RP News – 1/20/2025 – The euphoria that supporters of the new administration most likely feel is going to be short lived. Salvation is here, they can feel it. The bad guys have been held at bay, and justice – meaning they get more money and freedom for things they value, and everyone else gets less – is just around the corner. Euphoria is blinding though, talk is cheap, and the unintended consequences are unpredictable. There's also a word called NO, not to mention a long list of other measures and resistance efforts that people and authoritarian governments have never successfully curtailed, and never will, including this one.

 

    The president was elected to serve the people, not the other way around.

 

    Forward thinking Americans may have lost a battle last November but the war is a long way from over. For more than two centuries the United States has been a nation of laws, with a legal system built on established precedent and respect for the rule of law. Not all of those laws have been right or good, but the principle has generally held. Not so much anymore, given the make-up of what has become an untouchable Supreme Court, which make the future more uncertain and our lives more at risk. Mobster rule, tradition-makes-right, authoritarian words in books wrongly deemed holy and sacred – all seem more and more to be prioritized over reason, over mountains of facts acquired over centuries even. How can that last?

    What is sacred when authoritarians and ideologues are in the driver’s seat? Greed, selfishness, money, exclusion, hatred of immigrants, to name just a few things. In religion-speak, greed and selfishness are easily justified as “prioritizing one’s family, church, and country,” extreme wealth and material riches as “blessings,” and discriminating against people who have different lifestyles than yours, though legal, as “exericising one's religious freedom." Flat out ignoring contrary evidence and rational arguments is deemed courageous or justified if the person has decided “in their heart” or believes “by faith” that something is true. The reasoning process and all the associated facts and elements with it get short circuited.

 

    Most of us assume we need to learn more to understand more, but there's also a great many who seem to think they know all the truth they need to know before they even crack open a book or conduct an experiment. They just know, intuitive, instinctively, via a revelation to them personally or implanted in them at birth, and if you don’t believe them, you’re the stupid one.

    Ruthlessness in business, no breaks given to the persecuted or downtrodden, a minimal social safety net lest any one person cheat -- all are virtues rather than vices to a certain kind of group and individual, the kind that does not feel what other people feel; nor, if they do, care about those feelings; or at least imagine it acutely enough to feel sadness at other people’s pain.

    The People's March in D.C. on Jan. 18, 2025, and at other locations around the county in support of democracy and the protection for people's civil and human rights, was an inspiring show of force and a civil and Constitutional act of joyful resistance. Don’t give up. Things will change and those of us who are committed to it will make it happen, sooner or later.

    The current individual in the White House would not be president if not for a corrupt legal system and corrupt representatives who have failed to hold him accountable, purposefully delaying proceedings until it was too late. If the system is rigged against anyone, it's rigged against the people. 

 

Photos by S. Rensberry (taken on Jan. 18, 2025, Washington D.C.)

Commentary

Age-Old Saga Rears 

Its Ugly Head Once Again   

Christo-Fascist Movement A Threat to Peaceful Society

By Steve Rensberry

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    The age-old battle of brutish impulse vs compassionate intelligence has reared its ugly head once again in the American saga, like some kind of sadistic reality show where the fun thing to do is kick people out of the country, take away their civil rights, or tell them they can't do things they've had a right to do for decades. As a former evangelical, what has happened in the religous sphere of life is equally horrific. Do modern-day evangelicals want to save people's souls anymore, or are they merely participants in a sleeper cell, practicing religion and baking cookies in fellowship halls while plotting to overthrow a good, honest, secular democratic government?

 

     As one Quora post regarding evangelicals noted: "Their embrace of Trump shows they are a political group not a Christian group. They have economic policies that hurt the poor and help the rich. They hate programs that help the poor or sick. They are exactly the opposite of what Christ taught. If he came back today he would hang out with the atheists because they are MUCH better Christians. He would send the evangelicals somewhere else."

    

    For your education, here's a good site about the current Christo-fascist wave we're all suffering through, from The Fulcrum, "Project 2025: A Christo-fascist manifesto."   --  1/10/2025

MAGA Delusions

MAGA-inspired Attack on Capitol 

Was A Despicable Act

Lack of Shame, Remorse Make Recovery Impossible for Some

By Steve Rensberry

    EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (RPNews-OPINION) -- 1/7/2024 -- I don't care which way you try to spin it, the attack that took place at the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, was disgusting and stupid. A noble cause? A movement to "save the country" from "evil Democrats" and "woke liberals"? A spiritual awakening or prophetic occurrence? Sorry, but it was none of these, as much as the black-and-white-thinking folks who either defend or participated in it would like to think. The full report.

    There is no need to tell the story, yet again, because we all know what we saw with our own eyes. For those who still values facts over ideology, one source of data among many is the organization American Oversight, which has provided an update on the investigation and news on all of those involved, including on state and local levels. See: The January 6 U.S. Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    But here we are in 2025, while many of us are hoping for peace and some degree of civility, when an angry, hyper-political, vengence-filled veteran like Matthew Alan Livelsberger loses it mentally and kills himself while intentionally blowing up a Tesla truck, all to make a point that we should embrace the "hegenomy" (Livelsberger's chosen word) and aggressive type of toxic, bullish masculinity represented by Trump, Musk, and Robert Kennedy Jr., showing zero empathy toward other Americans who think differently, and that Dems should be violently removed from power along with anyone else deemed a threat. Are we still living in America, a Constitutional Republic built on democratic principles and a desire to live in peace? 

    Why are people not straight up arrested and charged when they make threats of violence against others like this, like Trump himself has done? We'd be naive to think such terrorist-style leadership was not influential with Livelsberger, fueling the idolization of such behavior. Do those who voted for him have an answer? Does it matter? Do free speech rights include the right to slander someone or make death threats (direct or implied), which Trump has done repeatedly? No.

    I sometimes wonder if the entire nation is preparing to go over the edge in one big mass cultish end-it-all scenario, similar to what happened with James Warren Jones. Everyone will be gone, but it'll all be okay because they'll just be resting comfortably in heaven, or perhaps hell. Up is down. Down is up. Life is hell. Death is good. Fundamentist evangelicals believe their God thinks liberals and "woke" Americans are evil, so anything goes, right? Is that how the new Domination-At-Any Cost MAGA radicals think?

    The irony is that those making and encouraging this type of thinking appear to many of us more as bullies than tough guys. Whatever toughness they hope to project is negated by their overwhelming bigotry and phony masculinity. Like made-up and choreographed World Wide Wrestling matches, they lack integrity, emotion, and humanitarian elements. It's a show, a disingenuouis, threatening,  violent-when-necessary show that helps them get their way.

History and Politics

 

Bonhoeffer's Warnings

About the 'Dangers of Stupidity'

Spark Comparisons

By Steve Rensberry 

------ RP News ------

    EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. -- 11/30/2024 - A recent piece published on Daily Kos about the current political dynamic carried the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who every student of WW II history has probably heard of, and who paid with his life for his beliefs and opposition to the Nazis during WW II in Germany.

    "Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was an active opponent of Nazism and involved in the German resistance movement. He was arrested and sent to Buchenwald in 1943 and on April 9, 1945 he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp just two weeks before it was liberated by U.S.forces," the article states.

    The writer draws numerous parallels between now and then, citing in part the theologian's comments about human stupidity, and how it poses a greater barrior to the common good than does a person or group with obvious malicious intent. Why? Because, in part, the stupid person is both too easily satisfied AND too easily irritated, and too often goes on the attack against those who try to reason with him or her, making even the attempt to seek common ground a dangerous game. They will hate you just the same.

    Bonhoeffer: 

    “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force.

    "Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease; (however) against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed - in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical - and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

    "For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will (should) we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous”

     It's a sobering quote, and the DailyKos piece asks a difficult and sobering question: Is America worth saving? If you define America primarily as "it's people" rather than merely the land -- maybe so, maybe not -- given how far we've fallen, that's the fear. "Party loyalty has morphed from fanaticism into cultism, and finally blossomed into mass cultural stupidity, as Bonhoeffer observed and described," the writer states. "Bonhoeffer correctly observed that attempting to approach stupidity with reason is dangerous — and mostly results in the exact opposite of the desired outcome. This particular passion play will have to run out of steam on it’s own volition."