Katherine Stewart recently penned an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “Christian Nationalists Are Excited for What Comes Next.” While this piece received extensive treatment by Dan K yesterday, there was something in the article not mentioned by him that I wanted to bring out, because I think it goes to a parallel that otherwise might go unnoticed, something I think is key.
Stewart makes note of a passage that Donald Trump made as keynote speaker to the Road to Majority Policy Conference:
The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be. The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.
(My emphasis.) This is an easy enough passage to gloss over, as it appears pretty innocuous. But Theodor Adorno, social scientist and prominent figure of the Frankfort School, analyzed the speech patterns of totalitarians. In his “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” written in 1946, he informs us of the following (again, bolding mine):
One of the intrinsic characteristics of the fascist ritual is innuendo, sometimes followed by the actual revelation of the factshinted at, but more often not. … It seems likely, however,that innuendo is employed, and enjoyed, as a gratification per se. For example, the agitator says “those dark forces, you know whom I mean,” and the audience at once understands that his remarks are directed against the Jews. The listeners are thus treated as an in-group who already know everything the orator wishes to tell them and who agree with him before any explanation is given. Concord of feeling and opinion between speaker and listener, which was mentioned before, is established by innuendo. It serves as a confirmation of the basic identity between leader and followers.
A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted this amazing essay by Adorno in my diary “This IS the movement.” Therein, I argue that fascism’s signature symptom is the fever, the enthusiasm that accompanies the movement. The diary as a whole serves as a treatment of the Adorno essay (which I encourage everyone to read in total). Another passage that I brought attention to is the following, where Adorno furthers his elucidation of how gratification affects the audience:
[T]his type of propaganda functions as a gratification. We may compare it with the social phenomenon of the soap opera. Just as the housewife, who has enjoyed the sufferings and the good deeds of her favorite heroine for a quarter of an hour over the air, feels impelled to buy the soap sold by the sponsor, so the listener to the fascist propaganda act, after getting pleasure from it, accepts the ideology represented by the speaker out of gratitude for the show. [...]
This ceremony, however, is merely a symbolic revelation of the identity that he [the leader] verbalizes, an identity the listeners feel and think, but cannot express. This is what they actually want him to do, neither being convinced nor, essentially, being whipped into a frenzy, but having their own minds expressed to them. The gratification they get out of propaganda consists most likely in the demonstration of this identity[….]
Just to make clear: to gratify someone is to please them. In many ways, propaganda of this type can lend literal, physical (not merely psychological) gratification.
So this reinforcement of this identity is what is being shared between leader and audience, a reciprocal strengthening. This back and forth heightens the sense of the in-crowd, in this case the MAGAness of it all. The innuendo is key here to this sense of being on the inside and having access to this special knowledge.
RELATED: Just what are conspiracy theories, and how do they work? Why is the GOP swimming in them?
Most importantly, Adorno reveals just what the fascist rally means, what it does.
The performance of the ritual as such functions to a very large extent as the ultimate content of fascist propaganda. Psychoanalysis has shown the relatedness of ritual behavior to compulsion neurosis; and it is obvious that the typical fascist ritual of revelation is a substitute for sexual gratification. Beyond this, however, some speculation may be allowed with regard to the specific symbolic meaning of the fascist ritual. It is not wide off the mark to interpret it as the offering of a sacrifice. If the assumption is correct that the overwhelming majority of accusations and atrocity stories with which the fascist propaganda speeches abound, are projections of the wishes of the orators and their followers, the whole symbolic act of revelation celebrated in each propaganda speech expresses, however much concealed, the sacramental killing of the chosen foe. At the hub of the fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda ritual is the desire for ritual murder.
(My emphasis.) As I mentioned in my previous diary, this goes to explain what ultimately is being squeezed out of such material as Eric Greitens’s RINO-hunt “advertisement”, or pastor Aaron Thompson’s “sermons.” These are meant to symbolize the actual destruction of perceived enemies, the same enemies referred to by the type of innuendo Trump used in his keynote speech.
When I penned the diary two weeks ago, I left in Adorno’s mention of how the ritual stands in for sexual gratification, but it stuck out somewhat. Adorno himself did not elaborate on what that meant or why that might be. Another leading thinker of the time, Wilhelm Reich, specifically articulated why.
In several passages from The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich asserts this central thesis:
Man’s authoritarian structure—this must be clearly established—is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses. (p. 30)
When sexuality is prevented from attaining natural gratification, owing to the process of sexual repression, what happens is that it seeks various kinds of substitute gratifications. Thus, for instance, natural aggression is distorted into brutal sadism…. (p. 31)
And make no mistake: Reich lays this firmly at the feet of religion—in this case, organized Christianity.
Every form of mysticism derives its most active energy and, in part, also its content from this compulsory suppression of sexuality. (p. 55)
There is a direct correlation between mystical, sentimental, and sadistic sentiments on the one hand and the average disturbance of the natural orgastic experience on the other hand. (p. 138)
Though this may seem a bit like squaring the circle, Reich explains his train of logic as he makes his case.
The emotional structure of the genuinely religious man can be briefly described as follows: biologically, he is subject to sexual tensions just as all other human beings and creatures. Owing, however, to his assimilation of sex-negating religious conceptions, and especially to the fear of punishment that he has acquired, he has completely lost his ability to experience natural sexual tension and release. Consequently, he suffers from a chronic state of physical excitation, which he is continuously compelled to master. ... In view of the fact that he is a biologic creature and cannot under any circumstances forego happiness, release, and gratification, he seeks illusionary happiness. This he can obtain from the forepleasure of religious tensions…. (p. 147)
In reality, therefore, his intense longing for God is the longing that derives from his excitations of sexual forepleasure and clamors for release. (p. 148)
The deep longing for redemption and release—consciously from “sins,” unconsciously from sexual tensions—is warded off. States of religious ecstasy are nothing other than conditions of sexual excitation of the vegetative nervous system, which can never be released. (p. 149)
(Bolding mine.)
Reich goes so far as to mention the unintentional physical gratification that some unbalanced priests experienced during their service, due to becoming “more and more excited under the influence of religious conceptions” when they reached “the height of religious ecstasy” (p. 148). I bring attention to this to compare it to a footnote in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism regarding the the assumption of the administration of Nazi concentration camps by the SS:
[P]erversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: “Usually I keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to be perfectly normal. That’s what they’ve made of me.” (p. 454, footnote 159)
I note this to firmly bring home the fact that the repression of sexual feeling is transformed under the aegis of religion and canalized, as Reich plainly stated, into forms of sadism and brutality; and that sometimes this energy still manifested itself as being sexual in nature.
This may, again, seem to be a bit far afield, somewhat theoretical (though dressed in psychological garb). But let me direct you to a clip I came across on YouTube, on the TellTale Unfiltered channel.
This channel originally sprang from the host’s focus upon cults and other high-intensity groups, as he is reformed from Jehovah’s Witnesses. Owen, the host, has since branched into some aspects of politics, considering the trajectory of MAGA and QAnon, especially. One of his latest videos involves a treatment of a revival-like conference of charismatic preachers which took place last year. The group of preachers included Kent Christmas, Robin Bullock, and five others. To give you an idea of who Kent Christmas is, last year he claimed that a “demonic spirit” caused children to be gay by “taking them over”.
In the clip, Christmas, addressing the audience, explained that Christians of all stripes, Episcopalians, Charismatics, Catholics, Methodists, Pentacostals and others, would all be “gleaned” by God in order to create this undercurrent that would help feed the revival that would spread all over the United States. He predicted tent revivals, because “a liberty and a freedom [exists] in tents that there’s not anywhere else.” Then he said this about the envisioned tent meetings:
There’s a just a release of the presence of God. People that are radical, that’ll take a chance, that will get out of the boat(?), that are not intimidated, they’re not afraid of what other people are going to say. But they just want their release. So there is a release. And we’re in it. And by the end of this year, we’re going to be in full swing of what God’s going to do.
(cued to 14:03)
Hank Kunneman, another self-styled prophet, went on to say this in a voice that is meant to reflect God’s pronouncements:
There shall be the stench of death that shall fill the air across your nation. Do not be moved by that which will take place in the natural. For many smokescreens shall arise in the moment of the shift.
“The shift” harkens to QAnon terminology, a way of saying “the Storm” without using so many words. But see the type of language used here. “The stench of death shall fill the air.” This is being spoken in a religious service.
Kunneman went on to refer explicitly to political events.
Robin Bullock (who recently adlibbed with Roger Stone about a demon portal being situated above the White House) added this:
Now I must tell you something, and I’ll try to be as brief as I can… When the angel came to Gideon and said, “You body man of power,” Gideon, that’s the first time he knew that he was a body man of power. He told him something he wasn’t, he didn’t know. But I want you to look at Gideon. He was threshing wheat in a wine press. He was doing the right thing in the wrong place.
… After the war started and Gideon started redeeming the land and bringing God’s people to freedom, you’ll find he … dealt with two spirits, Oram and Zeeb. Oram they killed on the rock ore; but Zeeb they slew in the wine press. What people have forgotten is, is the church is special. That the wine press is for trampling enemies in. That the wine press is the place for us to start trampling our enemies. So you see these two things happening right now, don’t you? You can see this taking place.
Not only are these so-called prophets declaring that enemies must be trampled underfoot so that the stench of death shall fill one’s nostrils, but that this will bring a release, a great release.
Christians of all kinds will assemble under one banner to bring this about. This is what is being exclaimed to these followers, who are deriving a sense of gratification from this rhetoric. They are being pleased, both psychologically but also, in a transformed and diverted way, physically.
They are being edged toward some final act that will bring ultimate orgiastic release.
A bloodbath. A ritual sacrifice of enemies.