Well, I've always known that this was what they wanted, but I'm surprised they'd come right out and say it:
https://www.wjhl.com/news/regional/tennessee/tennessee-lawmaker-calls-for-removal-of-higher-education-to-cut-off-liberal-breeding-ground/
They need a dumb, misinformed, complacent populace to stay in power. And staying in power is more important to them than having an intelligent population.
Meanwhile, that kind of thinking gets you this:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/false-idol-why-christian-worships-110057000.html
This is why they install people like Betsy DeVos, who want to weaken public schools ( https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-18/donald-trump-and-betsy-devos-budget-destroys-public-education-for-kids ) and concentrate on private school... because private schools can push religion. The one I went to certainly did. Lucky for me it didn't take. Unluckily for me, they didn't teach much else, so I had a lot of catching up to do when I got to college, compared to people who'd gone to the local public school. The public school was waaaaaaay ahead of us in every single subject. But, we got a devotional piped through the P.A. every day, so... yay?
To continue:
You can't untangle them, because they aren't even tangled anymore... they're replaced. There is nothing about Jesus in right-wing Christianity anymore. They despise what Jesus actually taught, because that's too close to socialism.
They got duped and led and now we are where we are: people who honestly think they're "good people" making excuses to themselves to prop up an evil idiot who's doing great harm. Trump has shoved Jesus aside.
You can look at any successful cult. Almost every one of them starts out using an existing religion, because it's easier to work on people who have all the rest of the mechanics of worship in place, and are used to a life of "faith." Then all you have to do is unplug the godhead and replace it with yourself.
Charles Manson didn't start from scratch; he started out by telling his followers he was Jesus.
David Koresh also preached Jesus... but then slid himself in there as the "interpreter of Jesus's word."
Jim Jones' church was a Christian church until he got 'em out in Guyana and slowly substituted himself for "the Father."
The Heaven's Gate cult leader started with Revelations to justify all their actions.
The Moonies see Sun Myung Moon as a "continuation" of Jesus.
ISIS and similar radicalized branches all co-opted the Muslim faith... they didn't try to start a brand new thing.
On and on it goes. Scientology is one of the few that started from scratch.
And Trump followers are very obviously a cult now. They fit all the criteria. They mistrust anyone who tries to wise them up. They see themselves as "persecuted." They explain away any facts that contradict what their leader tells them.
And the more educated and well-read you are, the more likely you are to see through this scam. So, of course they want to kill off education.
Just keep watching 'em. The more desperate they get, the more they're going to attack anything that can wise people up, be it school, media, you name it. Intelligence and the ability to research things and logically interpret facts is their enemy.
https://www.wjhl.com/news/regional/tennessee/tennessee-lawmaker-calls-for-removal-of-higher-education-to-cut-off-liberal-breeding-ground/
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Republican Tennessee lawmaker says he supports getting rid of higher education because he argues it would cut off the “liberal breeding ground.”
Sen. Kerry Roberts of Springfield called for eliminating higher education while speaking about attending a recent abortion legislative hearing on his conservative radio talk show on Sept. 2.
Roberts specifically called out one activist who testified in favor of protecting abortion rights. He asserted without evidence that the woman’s beliefs were a “product of higher education” and claimed that getting rid of higher education would “save America.”
The senator did not immediately respond to a request for further elaboration.
Roberts also questioned funding higher education with tax dollars. He voted in favor of the state’s $38.5 billion budget earlier this year, which included money for colleges and universities.
They need a dumb, misinformed, complacent populace to stay in power. And staying in power is more important to them than having an intelligent population.
Meanwhile, that kind of thinking gets you this:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/false-idol-why-christian-worships-110057000.html
I’m not sure exactly when my family got the idea that we were at war with larger American culture. But I know that at some point our lessons about God’s love became peppered with the idea that we were engaged in spiritual warfare, inhabiting a world where dark forces were constantly attempting to sever us from the will of God. The devil was real, and he was at work through “gay” Teletubbies and pagan Smurfs, through Dungeons & Dragons, through the horrors of MTV. At one point, my parents forbade TV altogether, and disconnected the stereo system in my car. We still loved Uncle Robert, but believed that the AIDS he’d contracted was a plague sent by God, just as we believed that abortion was our national sin, for which the country would likewise be held accountable. We awaited the Rapture, when Christians would be spirited away and Jesus would return to deal (violently) with the mess humans had made of things. Over time, and even before the introduction of Fox News, whatever nuance we might have seen in the culture evaporated into a stark polarity.
Zooming out, that cleaving was by design: It created a powerful us-versus-them mentality that mobilized the Christian base fiscally and politically. We were Christian soldiers, and the weapons we had were our votes and our tithes. “The persecution trope is a hell of a fundraising pitch,” says Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. “For evangelical activists and leaders, many of whom run nonprofits or rely on charitable contributions, that is the most direct and successful way to captivate conservative Christians.”
The wedge issues created during the culture wars of the Eighties and Nineties were thus not matters of equality and social justice or anything that might evoke the liberalism of the Social Gospel (though Jesus spoke on such matters abundantly). Rather they were divisive, pushing the Republican Party further to the right and exacerbating Christians’ sense of being a people apart.
By the time Trump came along, the gulf was so wide that criticizing Trump’s behavior seemed beside the point. There was now a scorched-earth policy, and any leader who tackled the wedge issues with Trumpian ferocity was on the side of righteousness. Which also happened to be where the money was.
This is why they install people like Betsy DeVos, who want to weaken public schools ( https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-18/donald-trump-and-betsy-devos-budget-destroys-public-education-for-kids ) and concentrate on private school... because private schools can push religion. The one I went to certainly did. Lucky for me it didn't take. Unluckily for me, they didn't teach much else, so I had a lot of catching up to do when I got to college, compared to people who'd gone to the local public school. The public school was waaaaaaay ahead of us in every single subject. But, we got a devotional piped through the P.A. every day, so... yay?
To continue:
Unlearning one’s religion is not a task that is easily accomplished; I had to leave America to manage it. I was in my early twenties, living in London, when my mother called to inform me that if I did not cast my absentee ballot for George W. Bush, I could not possibly be a real Christian. She was adamant, unyielding. So entwined had the policies of the Republican Party become with her faith that it seemed to me she could no longer untangle them.
You can't untangle them, because they aren't even tangled anymore... they're replaced. There is nothing about Jesus in right-wing Christianity anymore. They despise what Jesus actually taught, because that's too close to socialism.
They got duped and led and now we are where we are: people who honestly think they're "good people" making excuses to themselves to prop up an evil idiot who's doing great harm. Trump has shoved Jesus aside.
By creating a narrative of an evil “deep state” and casting himself — a powerful white man of immense generational wealth — as a victim in his own right, Trump not only tapped into the religious right’s familiar feeling of persecution, but he also cast himself as its savior, a man of flesh who would fight the holy war on its behalf. “There’s been a real determined effort by the left to try to separate Trump from his evangelical base by shaming them into, ‘How can you support a guy like this?’ ” Jeffress tells me. “Nobody’s confused. People don’t care really about the personality of a warrior; they want him to win the fight.” And Trump’s coming to that fight with a firebrand’s feeling, turning the political stage into an ecstatic experience — a conversion moment of sorts — and the average white evangelical into an acolyte, someone who would attend rallies with the fever of revivals, listen to speeches as if they were sermons, display their faithfulness with MAGA hats, send in money as if tithing, and metaphorically bow down, again and again, at the altar of Donald Trump, who delivers the nation from its transgressions.
You can look at any successful cult. Almost every one of them starts out using an existing religion, because it's easier to work on people who have all the rest of the mechanics of worship in place, and are used to a life of "faith." Then all you have to do is unplug the godhead and replace it with yourself.
Charles Manson didn't start from scratch; he started out by telling his followers he was Jesus.
David Koresh also preached Jesus... but then slid himself in there as the "interpreter of Jesus's word."
Jim Jones' church was a Christian church until he got 'em out in Guyana and slowly substituted himself for "the Father."
The Heaven's Gate cult leader started with Revelations to justify all their actions.
The Moonies see Sun Myung Moon as a "continuation" of Jesus.
ISIS and similar radicalized branches all co-opted the Muslim faith... they didn't try to start a brand new thing.
On and on it goes. Scientology is one of the few that started from scratch.
And Trump followers are very obviously a cult now. They fit all the criteria. They mistrust anyone who tries to wise them up. They see themselves as "persecuted." They explain away any facts that contradict what their leader tells them.
And the more educated and well-read you are, the more likely you are to see through this scam. So, of course they want to kill off education.
Just keep watching 'em. The more desperate they get, the more they're going to attack anything that can wise people up, be it school, media, you name it. Intelligence and the ability to research things and logically interpret facts is their enemy.