The video clip above is one of my favorite examples of Progressive misdirection. The first point I’ll draw from it is that none of the preceding posts is meant to suggest that Democrats are in some way copying from the Scientologists. All of the weapons and tactics employed by President Bartlet were in the Democrat playbook at a time when Scientology was still acquiring a foothold in the U.S. after its controversial offshore years. Rather, the value of looking at Scientology in some detail illustrates a simpler view of what the Progressives are working toward on an immensely grander scale. L. Ron Hubbard’s concocted mythology is very different from that of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What is virtually identical between them, however, is the strategy of using incantationally repeated falsehoods to secure and sustain absolute power over everyone they pretend to lead but intend to rule in every aspect of their personal lives. 

The first and indispensable requirement is to banish the Judeo-Christian God from the scene. Why? Because he is a dangerous rival potentially fatal to the exercise of tyranny. Another way that the West Wing clip is ironically instructive. President Bartlet desires to charm the assembled press with an Obama-like spiel of liberal platitudes and cultural observations. But he cannot abide the presence of an outspokenly critical — though politely silent on this occasion — evangelical Christian advocate. He feels a compulsion to humiliate her in this White House setting, to display his superior knowledge of scripture in demeaning ways, in order to, well, destroy her utterly. Which he proceeds to do.

His dissection of the Book of Leviticus is a masterpiece of self-aggrandizing rhetoric. His is the post-modern message of those who ridicule the”flying spaghetti monster,” which is parochial, obsolete, and mostly absurd to any rational human being. His presentation is also so disingenuous as to be laughable in its own right. Yes, long lists of picayune regulations with onerous penalties for noncompliance are outrageous. Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Sinai, then all his heirs went into the commandment-making business. Folly writ large. Why the Christian reformulation of mankind’s covenant with God reduced (replaced) the original Ten Commandments with just two, liberating the human spirit to assess matters of right and wrong as individual moral beings. Thus was modern consciousness born. 

How can we see the difference between Bartlet’s Leviticus version of the Judeo-Christian God and the enlightened version of the Christian Era? Easily. Draw your own side-by-side graphic comparing the Ten Commandments to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Both are chock full of “Thou shalt nots,” but the Laws of Moses are aimed at controlling individuals while the Ten Amendments are aimed at controlling government. That’s the only necessary refutation of Leviticus. But Bartlet’s more enlightened liberal vision is of creating its own post-modern version of Leviticus, building an increasingly insurmountable edifice of laws, regulations, and government mandates that reach into every part of individual American lives, always for a common good that is every bit as fictitious as Hubbard’s sci-fi fairytale. Why do you think Bartlet’s progressive heirs are so openly disdainful and hostile to the Constitution of the United States? Because of that effing Bill of Rights, which stands in the way of the smart ones who are trying to save the planet from the vile scourges of America and humankind itself.

Do all the Progressive acolytes feel this way? Probably not. Another place where the Scientology example is helpful. Hubbard’s original American recruits, back there in the sixties, were disenchanted idealists — flower children, former political and environmental activists, well meaning middle class drones — who wanted to save the whales, the rainforests, the billions of non-Americans with incomes of $20 a year, the globe itself from nuclear annihilation at the hands of evil war-mongering capitalists. As a God substitute, Hubbard persuaded them that all of recorded human history was a lie, and he alone knew the alien source of all our misconceptions. He redefined right and wrong in simple terms; what he thought was right was infallibly right. Any questions? Hubbard’s real scripture, the one that matters to his subjects, is his own long book of Leviticus, with so many regulations and prohibitions it’s impossible not to run afoul of them here and there, with the inevitable result that you will be punished, severely, in every way the human mind can conceive.

The American Progressive tradition has an analogous if bumpier history. It begins officially in 1912, but its antecedents go all the way back to Andrew Jackson, who founded the Democrat Party as an attractor for people resentful of the Virginia-New England monopoly on running the country. Jacksonian Democrats started by smashing Hamilton’s national banking system, then moved on to a concept called ‘Manifest Destiny,’ which postulated that since we were in North America and the Democrat-Republican precursor to the Democrat Party had made the Louisiana Purchase, we should, well, own all of North America. This kept them busy, in defiance of the New England model of American democracy as a calm example to the rest of the world, until the slavery problem hotted up.

See, Progress is the American Way since Jackson. No matter who you have to kill, or abandon on some trail of tears. Not all bad. The thing smuggled into all the conquered territories was the Bill of Rights. God’s own version of Manifest Destiny. A real complication for what continued to be, as it always has been and still is, the Negro Problem.

Truthfully, Progress had its ups and downs for quite awhile. The Civil War. You know. Well, Democrats know. Looting and burning and shooting and lynching and assassinating. Democrat traditions all by now. After the war, it was necessary to protect the south and the white race. Klan Time. Which actually lasted all the way through 1924, though those in the know were starting to think the Klan thing was a little over the top. New strategies were called for to keep the peons of every stripe in line.

KKK Vermont. The Dem Convention narrowly defeated a plank in 1924 denouncing the KKK. Not politic, you know.

Jim Crow laws became their own new book of Leviticus after Democrat Rutherford B. Hayes (Harvard!) stole the 1876 election from Samuel Tilden (Look it up) and repealed Reconstruction.

Which brings us, somehow, some way, to the 20th century. Klan still active, but not that popular. People want positive, not negative. Time to fix what ailed the human race. Not by killing but by sterilizing and aborting the “feeble-minded.” The best answer? Science. In the form of Eugenics!

The biggest and most influential Eugenics advocacy group was organized in 1910. Democrats thrilled. Many of them. When Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913 (year of the first ever federal income tax), he was still lagging behind somewhat. He showed the landmark film Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1914. He also re-segregated the army and made his virulent ant-semitism known. Because, you know… Democrats. For example, I was taught by my intellectually superior liberal teachers in prep school that Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest American presidents, maybe the very greatest but for FDR. Princeton certainly thought so, and named its graduate school of government after him, because the Progressives were the leading lights of the American Century, which was all about science and technology as they understood it. Meaning in their usual science-fiction terms. 

Wilson thought the old ways were bad, because not science-fictional, and he was sure that smart people from Princeton and Harvard should run everything in the whole damn world. Why he jumped into the World War Europe was having at the time. He figured only Progressive Democrats knew how to end the war and end ALL wars in fact, the Princeton Way, with no Jews or coloreds and a fancy Eating Club called the League of Nations. Which didn’t work, leading to a pretty long diversion for the American Progressive Movement while Wilson went insane and died of disappointment.

In fact, as the Hitler thing got underway in the 1930s, even the Progressive name was suddenly unpopular. People, American people, got the idea that Eugenics was an embarrassment Hitler had borrowed from Americans. And he was gassing people for having bad genes. Why FDR couldn’t call himself a Progressive when he got elected to try curing the Great Depression with Progressive economic science fictions his enemies called just socialist. 

FDR smoked cigarettes in a holder and replaced, in his own mind and the minds of the Democrat cult he was building, the Bill of Rights with something called the Four Freedoms. Cleverly consisting of two old freedoms and two new ones. Cool. Making government your friend against ALL the hardships of life. Screw the Constitution.

The optimal time to build a cult is when people are down in a hole.

And if you don’t have an economic answer, as Democrats never do, the best thing is to rally the people to go fight a war. Which FDR did.

It worked. FDR got credit, incomprehensibly, for taking only 12 years to end the Great Depression. His constituency of all the people who had learned to become dependent on government stayed with the ‘New Deal’ Democrat cult, even the black people Democrats had always hated and used.

But there was a price. Some Republicans became president for awhile, and the cult constituency had to be appeased in new ways. Fortunately for Progressives, the cleverest FDR heir (eerily close to Republicans in his policies) was assassinated, and his replacement figured out how to reestablish the old southern plantation model in major American cities. Bulldoze their neighborhoods, break their families apart, and pay them for being promiscuous, unemployed, uneducated, and lawless.

Long lead time stuff though. Need another war. Veet Nam. Veet Nam will do. Perfect. Paves the way for the revival of the Progressives. The ones who love to pretend to hate war, love minorities of every stripe, and always show up with a government paycheck to buy your next election vote. The revival almost failed. That Nixon guy stopped the necessary war. Like Eisenhower before him stopped the Korean War. Those damn Republicans. Always stopping wars we need to keep the faithful in line.

But the new Progressives knew what to do with Nixon. Destroy him utterly. Which they did. And then it’s just all waiting, through Reagan (ugh, who refused to be destroyed utterly), and then the comparative balm of RINO Wing Republicans named Ford and Bush and McCain and Romney. While the Progressive edifice was in the process of becoming monolithic, invincible, inevitable.

Until this is accomplished, the Progressive cult cannot even dream of electing a total idiot figurehead to the highest office in the land. You can’t get a Clinton or an Obama or a sad sack dodderer like Hillary Biden unless you own the whole effing shooting match of government, the media, the universities, the unions, the public schools, the fiction writers, the European intellectuals, the scientists and doctors and technological seers (dumb as they come), and the Hollywood celebrities (dumbererer). The stoopids are our friends. They can’t be fixed and they will never see how we are using them to keep the Negroes down, the women powerless and and pantyless, and the hard working millions working hard for peanuts. You know you’re winning when even Lois Lerner comes to work Commando.

Scientology? Keep the inferiors in their place. Take what you want. Give the peons an enemy or a phony apocalypse to fear. Take their money, keep them dependent on your fake generosity.  Destroy the opposition by any means necessary. Don’t EVER give in to what stupid people call conscience or scruples. Remember, there is no God but you. Never forget that Leviticus is your best friend. And sniff the hell out of that little girl hair.