Can We Turn the Other Cheek?

As a theocratic authoritarian movement gains power in the U.S., is it enough to build local resilience and maintain kind hearts?

Please watch Part One of my reaction video to Right Wing influencer Nick Freitas’ “Coexistence with Leftism Is No Longer Possible,” from his podcast. A Christian Nationalist and former Green Beret, Freitas declared all-out war on “the Left” after Charlie Kirk’s shooting. As I watched this video, I realized that Right Wing ideologues have spent a huge amount of time studying Leftist ideas and ideology (even assimilating Left ideas such as Gramsci’s “hegemony”), while progressive intellectuals generally ignore what influencers on the Right are saying or their intellectual background.

I had so many problems with Freitas’ video that I felt compelled to analyze and dissect his ideas, as well as his use of language. Please “like”, “subscribe”, and “share.” Let me know what you think in the comments — where this is a useful exercise or not. I am not sure, but I felt the need to give it a shot.

My friend Douglas Rushkoff just published a piece, “The Intentional Collapse,” that looks at some harsh realities and propose some friendly-sounding ideas — but, I must admit, the solutions he offers in his essay bothered me. I feel the need to explore why this is so.

I apologize for being such a critical curmudgeon. Deep down, I think that criticism is an act of love — I tend to believe:“It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.” Douglas is a fantastic writer and thinker. He provides trenchant analysis of media and technology. He even coined the term “viral media,” according to Wikipedia. But we don’t have to agree on everything.

Douglas writes that the Trump regime is undertaking an intentional demolition of the U.S. economy, Shock Doctrine style, to further centralize power and control. We agree on this. I have been beating this drum for a while. The incoherent, ever-changing tariffs, for instance, are devastating for farmers, small business owners, independent entrepreneurs who import materials or finished goods from overseas, and so on. This is all intentional.

As small enterprises fail and the middle class collapses, this leads to further wealth consolidation. J.D. Vance, for instance, is an investor in a real estate platform, AceTrader, that buys up bankrupt farms and has been called “like Uber for buying U.S. farmland.” Masses of farmers who voted for Trump in states like Nebraska and Arkansas are going belly up, putting more money in the pocket of Vance and his millionaire friends. Variants of this are happening across every industry, due to Trumponomics.

My problem is not with Douglas’ analysis but with his answers, which, sadly, I do not believe will work for us at this point. He writes: “The solution… is to meet our neighbors, reduce our dependence on big corporations, and establish local resiliency. We all get to make it. When we survive together, we thrive together.”

This is, obviously, inarguable, to a degree. People will read it and feel hopeful. This seems like something we can do — an aspect of our lives we can control, whether we actually do it or not. But this is far from a “solution.” In fact, when we look at the current trajectory of our political culture, it may be wrong. The danger is we fool ourselves by underestimating the threat we’re facing.

My sense is that Douglas’ solutions reflects Judeo-Christian moral conditioning, particularly the Biblical ideal of “turning the other cheek:” We want to believe a violent enemy or an abuser can be dissuaded through love and compassion. He writes:

Instead of buying into the elite’s nightmare and accepting their limited vision of how things could be, we embrace the stranger, share our food with them, and together build the reality we all know is possible, and even probable.

Rather than confronting those who hate you as their enemy, just do the opposite of what they do. Don’t hate them, or you become them. Instead, meet their hate with love. Counter their selfishness by sharing. Instead of building walls to keep out the others, open doorways that welcome them home.

Obviously, this sounds really good. “We” certainly can try to do that. On the other hand, “we” might find that “we” open our doors, love our enemies, and share our stuff, but “we” still get steamrollered, herded into concentration camps, tortured, and eventually killed.

Perhaps we will only be enslaved, since Right Wing influencers, such as Joshua Haymes, are now openly defending slavery. As Right Wing Watch reports, Haymes recently “beseeched his fellow Christian nationalists to learn to defend the institution of slavery because the Bible makes it clear that “it is not inherently evil to own another human being.””

The Archonic Deception

As an aside, I recommend John Lash’s Not In His Image, on Christianity and Gnosticism. Lash argues that the Judeo-Christian religions actually represent an “Archonic deviation.” According to Gnosticism, the monotheisms were clever traps designed by supersensible beings that the Gnostics recognized as the “Archons” to throw humanity off our proper path of development. Religions shift our focus from undergoing individual initiation to “faith,” as well as hierarchical control and indoctrination. Gnostic cosmology appears in disguised form in many science fiction films, from The Matrix to They Live.

Lash argues that the Gnostics were not a heretical sect of Christianity. They were the inheritors of the ancient Mystery School traditions. Gnostic intellectuals like Hypatia tried to warn the people of the mistakes embedded in monotheism, and were killed for their efforts. For Lash, one of these deviations was Christ’s idea of “turning the other cheek.” He writes:

Jesus was wrong on a lot of counts but perhaps supremely so on one issue. Of all the dubious advice pronounced in the New Testament, one commandment is particularly harmful: the famous injunction to “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek.” If everyone did this what kind of society would result? If everyone turned the other cheek, who would be striking the blows? Well, obviously, no one. If everyone in the world followed the command, “turn the other cheek,” there would be no need to turn the other cheek, because no one would be acting harmfully toward anyone else. The principle is patently absurd and cancels itself out, but taken on faith it serves an unmistakable purpose: to give total liberty to the perpetrators.

… the ethic of cheek turning is utterly wrong because it obliges people who are not inclined to harm others to rely on those who do harm to embrace the same practice of nondefense. But will people who are inclined to harm and abuse others change their behavior voluntarily, just because they are confronted with someone who does not resist them? In what instances in history or social life has this occurred? Examples, please!

That’s the problem with turning the other cheek or meeting insane hatred with kindness and love: When you are dealing with a violent abuser, you can’t simply turn the other cheek or meditate it away. They will hit you again, and again, until you are incapacitated and, finally, dead.

Let’s face facts: Tens of millions of people in the U.S. have been brainwashed by a Far Right Christian Fascist ideology. They currently possess the vast majority of the guns. They have been indoctrinated to believe they must win an Apocalyptic Holy War against those (the Democratic majority) who do not share their beliefs, who they increasingly consider “unhuman” (in the book Unhumans, blurbed by Trump and Vance, the authors propose the U.S. needs a Pinochet or Franco). They control the Federal Government. They are coming at us like a freight train.

There may be no possible escape at this point. But we should at least be honest with ourselves and admit, if we are giving up on large-scale strategic and tactical planning to enjoy feel-good idealistic localism for a little longer, this is very likely how it will end for us. If there are other possible strategic and tactical approaches to the situation that might work (like, for instance, large-scale economic boycotts, grassroots mimetic warfare, general strikes, intensive grassroots mimetic warfare, building alternative digital and economic infrastructures, even minority populations arming themselves in self-defense as Don Lemon has advocated, etcetera) we should identify those — and support them with everything we’ve got.

ProPublica has a new essay, “The Shadow President”, on Russell Vought, who spent decades studying the intricate workings of government to prepare for his golden opportunity to destroy the functioning of the government as part of a second American Revolution. Vought and his allies want to establish permanent autocratic control using AI, high-tech surveillance, and every other tool in the book to cement permanent dictatorship, ruled by ideologues hellbent on wealth concentration and mass mind-control, under a fanatic ideology of Apocalyptic Christianity.

Executive Function

The problem is, on the other side — on our side — we still lack our “executive function.” It isn’t coming from the leadership of the Democrats.

In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, executive function refers to the set of higher-order mental processes that enable self-regulation and goal-directed behavior for an individual organism. These processes coordinate attention, working memory, planning, decision-making, and inhibition—essentially the “management system” of the brain. It is associated with the prefrontal cortex, which integrates information from sensory and emotional regions to guide action. Because of our individual executive function, we can shift between tasks, control impulses, resist distractions, hold goals in mind, monitor outcomes, and so on. Vought holds the role of executive function for MAGA and the increasingly unilateral Executive Branch, with Trump more or less a performing jester, distracting and misdirecting the masses.

Another problem, on our side (by “our side,” I mean basic sanity, humanism, universal health care, progressive taxation, etc), is that we are addicted to being liked by our peers. Progressives enjoy holding the moral high ground. We seek to win little popularity contests and status games among our own people. We enjoy getting the little “coos” of approval from the likeminded. These also lead to public appearances, book sales, and the like. Why are we stuck in this trap?

One reason, I suspect — and it is uncomfortable to speak about it — is the “great feminization” of progressive culture over the last half century.

What’s Wrong with the “Great Feminization”?

I sympathize with elements of the Conservative critique of “woke,” which they see as an expression of what turns out to be a larger societal trend they have named the “Great Feminization”. I believe there is an uncomfortable, painful truth in this that progressives and Leftists need to reckon with, in a hurry. I say “in a hurry,” because we are almost out of time.

In her essay “The Great Feminization”, Helen Andrews proposes that “wokeness” is not an ideology: It is the social and institutional expression of a new phenomenon: I don’t agree with Andrews entirely, but I feel we need to examine and explain her thesis first, before I critique it.

Due to large-scale demographic shifts over the last half-century, women attained power and parity across various institutions and professions. I do not have any problem with women taking power. However, I agree with Andrews that there are shadow sides of the “feminine” that cause negative consequences. The negative aspects of the feminine work subliminally or unconsciously. They are more subtle, more difficult to name and address than the masculine shadow.