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Steve Bannon’s Therapy II: The Bookend of the Reagan Era?

In Steve Bannon’s world, we are at the end of an age, the end of a forth turning of American history, completing a cycle that began during the Great Depression and World War Two. He saw this “Greatest Generation” of heroes lead to a Golden Age of Capitalism of the 1950s, only to be spoiled by liberal baby boomers of the 1960s leading to Civil Rights Movement, war protesters, feminism, and the moral decay of the narcissistic Woodstock generation. While Reagan saved America from Communism, these Woodstock degenerates would help destroy America with their hedonism, selfishness, multiculturalism and godlessness. They are basically the New Democrats. Bannon, politically awakened after the 2008 crash, which he saw as the fault of Wall Street’s managerial class of libertines, got a hold of a book called “The Forth Turning,” and bought into a prophetic vision that the millennial generation was given the short end of the stick economically and culturally. Left with a gutted economy in the heartland, unattainable and expensive education, and the moral decay of Hollywood libertinism, drugs, secularism and multiculturalism, had no opportunity. Bannon’s prescription is to save the Millennial Generation from the pernicious effects of globalization which opened the doors to these sins. Bannon’s therapy prescription is to close the borders, return the nation to economic isolationist integrity, boom the economy, and rally the nation to a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam, and possibly against North Korea and the conflict zone in the South China Sea.

The trouble with this theory is basically it’s a political ideology that bears little resemblance to the real world and is replete with laughable factual errors.

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There is no such thing as climate change denial

Despite all of this happening in the real world, there are always those who portend to cast doubt on anthropogenetic global warming, who claim it is an elaborate hoax. Much of this blog has been dedicated to analyzing various cultural myths and ideologies of our post truth landscape – but climate chance is not one of these. It is real. Science and facts are real. But what is mythical here is the strange inner world of the so-called climate denier.

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Dinosaurs in the Ark: Beyond Fundamentalism, Creationism and the Divine Logos

The recent efforts of creationism are an effort to restore not only an anachronistic worldview, but represent a quixotic attempt to corral all meaning into the parameters of an authoritative text. The awkward insistence on textual authority and Biblical inerrancy enact a cultural regression that is indicative of a reactive culture and a failure of expanding notions of faith that Christian ethicists desire.