JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
SINS OF OCCULT WORSHIP
DEUTORONOMY 18:10-12
10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire,(OCCULT SACRIFICES) or that useth divination,(NEW AGER AND CRYSTALS ETC) divination n. The art or act of foretelling future events or revealing occult knowledge by means of augury or an alleged supernatural agency.) or an observer of times,(Meaning of observer. ... for sketching it. horoscope - Comes from Greek hora, hour, time, and skopos, observer.) or an enchanter,(The word enchant is derived from the Latin word incantare which refers to uttering an incantation or casting a spell). or a witch,(WITCH. Definition: [noun] a female sorcerer (SORCERY IN THE BIBLE IS DRUGS OR OCCULT ACTIVITY) or magician.)
11 Or a charmer,(charmer means a dealer in spells, especially one who, by binding certain knots, was supposed thereby to bind a curse or a blessing on its object.) or a consulter with familiar spirits,(function as mediums or psychics) or a wizard,(MALE WITCH-influence; a magical spell WITH WANDS) or a necromancer.(one seeking unto the dead.)
12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
ISAIAH 8:19-22
19 And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?
20 To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
21 And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.
22 And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.
REVELATION 9:20-21
20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils,(OCCULT) and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries,(DRUG ADDICTIONS OR SELLING DRUGS) nor of their fornication,(SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE)(PROSTITUTION FOR MONEY) nor of their thefts.(STEALING)
SINS OF PEOPLE
ISAIAH 5:20-25
20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:
23 Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!
24 Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
25 Therefore is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
2 TIMOTHY 3:1-5
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous (DANGEROUS) times shall come.
2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
1 TIMOTHY 1:9
9 Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,
10 For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;
ROMANS 3:13-18
13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:
14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
15 Their feet are swift to shed blood:
16 Destruction and misery are in their ways:
17 And the way of peace have they not known:
18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.
2 TIMOTHY 4:3-4
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
DECIEVERS WAXING WORSE AND WORSE.
2 TIMOTHY 3:13
13 But evil men and seducers (RAPERS AND SEX SIN DOERS) shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
MORE SIN SIGNS
EPHESIANS 5:5-8
5 For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
6 Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.
7 Be not ye therefore partakers with them.
8 For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light:
1 CORINTHIANS 6:9-10
9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers,(sex while married) nor effeminate,(HARDENED SODOMITES) nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards,(ALCOHOLICS) nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
JEREMIAH 17:9
9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
LUKE 6:43-45
43 For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
44 For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.
45 A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.
MATTHEW 15:17-20
17 Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?
18 But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.
19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:
MARK 7:21-23
21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,
22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness:
23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
GALATIONS 5:19-21
19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,
21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
REV 22:15
15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers,(DRUG ADDICTS-PUSHERS) and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
ALCOHOL
ISAIAH 5:21-22
21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:(HARD ALCOHOL)
PROVERBS 4:17
17 For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.
PROVERBS 20:1
1 Wine is a mocker,(THIS TELLS ME WINE ADDICTS MOCK GOD THE WORST) strong drink (HARD ALCOHOL) is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.
WELL WE SEE IN 2016 THE LIBERALS ADDED DOG THERAPY WITH DOGGY JACKETS ON. TO EASE THEIR PAIN OF TRUMP WINNING.WHAT NEW THERAPY WILL THE LIBERALS NEED ON NOVEMBER TUE 3RD. AFTER DONALD J TRUMP HANDS THEM ANOTHER 4 YEARS TO CRY AND FLOOD THE LIBERAL MEDIA WITH TRUMP HATE AND ACCUSATIONS.ALL FALSE OF COURSE JUST LIKE THE LAST 4 YEARS. AND THE LOLINUTPOP LIBERAL MEDIA LEAD BY CNN AND MSNBC AND THE REST.YOU CAN BE ASSURED WILL TRY TO FALSELY IMPREACH HIM FOR THE 100TH TIME OF NO SUCCESS.ISN'T MENTAL ILLNESS DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER. TO MAKE LIBERALS FEEL GOOD. BUTB END UP IN THEIR CRY ROOMS EVERY TIME. SO WE SHALL SEE WHAT NEW THERAPIES THE LIBERALS COME UP WITH AFTER NOVEMBER 3RD. TO EASE ANOTHER LOSS TO TRUMP AND TO MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THEY CAN MAKE IT THREW THE NEXT 4 YEARS. BUT IF THE LIBERALS WOULD WIN.THAT WOULD FULFILL PROPHECY ALL RIGHT. BY THE 4TH YEAR. THE LIBERALS WOULD HAVE ALL AMERICA SOCIALISED. GAYS WOULD BE LEGALLY NAKED IN THE STREETS. ABORTION MURDERERS WOULD HAVE ABOORTION CLINICS ON EVERY BLOCK. RIGHT BESIDE A STRIP JOINT AND A MUSLIM MOSQUE. SO THE MUSLIMS COULD BEHEAD IN THE NAME OF THEIR FAKE MOON GOD ALLAH. AND THEIR SEX FOR MURDER PEDOPHILE PROPHET MOHAMMAD.
Distraught students get therapy dogs to cope with Trump’s win-By Emily Smith-November 15, 2016 | 4:02am | Elite schools offering coddled kids disaster counseling after Trump win.
New York City schoolchildren still unable to process Donald Trump’s victory are getting more help — from therapy dogs.The Post revealed last week that coddled kids at elite schools were being offered disaster counseling to deal with President-elect Trump and their depressed liberal parents.Now we’re told that “pettable” pooches were brought to private school Avenues, which said in a letter that its faculty had backed Hillary Clinton, and “our students brought a great deal of emotion, anxiety and strong feelings” after Trump won.One source said, “On Friday, there were dogs in little ‘therapy’ jackets to help the kids, which was sweet, but highly amusing to parents who support Trump.”
Coddling campus crybabies: Students take up toddler therapy after Trump win-By Brooke Singman, | Fox News
Tucker to prof: Shouldn't students toughen up over election? Tucker Carlson tries to get professor to explain her approach to students hysterical over Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in the election, define 'safe spaces' and the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses-Teddy bears, Play-Doh and coloring books are staples of nursery schools, but now they are showing up on college campuses to help distraught students cope with the election of a president they don’t like.Around the nation, students are turning to the tools of toddlers as a bizarre form of therapy in the wake of Donald Trump's election last week. Colleges and universities are encouraging students to cry, cuddle with puppies and sip hot chocolate to soothe their fragile psyches, an approach some critics say would be funny if it weren't so alarming.“This is an extreme reaction from millennials who are being forced to come to terms with the fact that we have a president that they don’t like –this is what losing feels like,” Kristin Tate, the 24-year-old author of "Government Gone Wild," told FoxNews.com. “We are grooming our students to be sensitive crybabies when we need to be showing students how to deal with world situations and how to be adults –there are no ‘safe spaces’ in the real world.”HARVARD STUDENT PENS LETTER TO 'DELICATE' IVY LEAGUERS-Among the top-notch schools sending devastated students back to their early childhood:Cornell University recently hosted a “cry-in,” complete with hot chocolate and tissues for disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters.University of Pennsylvania brought in a puppy and a kitten for therapeutic cuddling.Tufts University held arts and crafts sessions for students.University of Michigan Law School scheduled an event for this Friday called “Post-Election Self-Care With Food and Play” with “stress-busting self-care activities” including coloring, blowing bubbles, sculpting with Play-Doh and “positive card making.”University of Michigan spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen told FoxNews.com the law school was providing these programs based on requests from the students on campus. But on Thursday, following media scrutiny, the event was scrubbed from the school’s website and replaced with a more age-appropriate discussion of the “limitations of executive power.”In an email, Broekhuizen declined to say why the original event was scrapped, and said the Ann Arbor school often faciilitates similar stress-battling activities.“These kinds of events are scheduled throughout the year including during high-stress times such as finals, mid-terms and presidential elections,” Broekhuizen wrote. “The event was scheduled before the outcome of the presidential election was known.”At University of Michigan-Flint, students are able to visit “safe spaces” and receive counseling for their post-election needs, a program that Business Professor Mark Perry called “disturbing.”“Institutions of higher learning have gone from being places that might be described as ‘intellectual boot-camps,’ where [students] are challenged with a diversity of new ideas, to being places that might now be, more accurately, described as ‘kindergartens’ for adults where they are no longer challenged, but instead treated as fragile, intellectual children and coddled with a ‘safe place’ response to anything challenging or unsettling,” Perry, who also is a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, told FoxNews.com.Boston University skipped the hot chocolate and therapy animals, but scheduled a set of post-election discussions aimed at helping students process a democratic election that didn't go their way.“Because the results of this election differed so dramatically from pre-election polls and the expectations gleaned from national media coverage, many people had difficulty comprehending how it came about,” Boston University spokesman Colin Riley told FoxNews.com. “These programs are helping students and others to sort through the results –it is more than how to deal with one’s feelings.”Discussion and debate is certainly more in keeping with academic tradition than coloring books. But one BU student told FoxNews.com that a Nov. 9 email from the University, titled “Tips for engaging in self-care,” sent the wrong message.“It is crazy that the school is handling the outcome of an election more than a serious terror attack,” the student told FoxNews.com. “We didn’t get a ‘self-care’ guide during any of them –not even after Paris last November while I was studying abroad.”Cornell Psychology Professor Katherine Kinzler said not all students at the Ithaca, N.Y., Ivy League school are handling the prospect of President Trump like babies.“My students tell me they are having conversations about their role as young adults in driving civic engagement, and the implications of the election for their nation and for their futures,” Kinzler wrote in an email to FoxNews.com. “Students thinking through the issues and coming together can help us create productive solutions for the many critical problems of our times.”Brooke Singman is a Politics Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeSingman.
Identity politics isn’t hurting liberalism. It’s saving it.Modern liberalism is weak and under siege. Its path to revival is clear — if liberals are willing to take it.By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Feb 20, 2020, 8:20am EST
American liberalism is in desperate need of renewal. Its ideas too often feel stale, its nostrums unsuited to beating back the authoritarian populist tide.Yet there is an opportunity for revival — if liberals are willing to more forthrightly embrace the politics of identity.To many liberals, such a suggestion will sound like blasphemy. Since mere days after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, an unending stream of op-eds and books have accused “identity politics” — defined loosely as a left-wing political style that centers the interests and concerns of oppressed groups — of driving the country off a moral and political cliff.These critics accuse identity politics of being a cancer on the very idea of liberalism, pulling the mainstream American left away from a politics of equal citizenship and shared civic responsibility. It is, moreover, political suicide, a woke purism that makes it impossible to form winning political coalitions — evidenced, in critics’ minds, by the backlash to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the popular podcast host Joe Rogan.The idea that identity politics is at odds with liberalism has become conventional wisdom in parts of the American political and intellectual elite. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values.” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss argues that the “corrupt identity politics of the left” amounts to a dangerously intolerant worldview. And New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan claims the “woke left” seems “not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion.” This line of thinking is practically the founding credo of the school of internet thought known as the Intellectual Dark Web.It is also deeply, profoundly wrong.What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality. A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status.Manique Beckman wears a sash that reads “The Future is Feminine” as she walks to the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017. Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images-But identity politics is not only important as a matter of liberal principle. In the face of an existential threat from right-wing populists in Europe and the United States, liberals need to harness new sources of political energy to fight back. This is not a matter of short-term politics, of whether being “too woke” will help or hurt Democrats in 2020, but a deeper and more fundamental question: what types of organizations and activist movements are required to make liberalism sustainable in the 21st century. And there is good reason to believe the passions stirred by identity politics can renew a liberalism gone haggard.To say that liberalism and identity politics are at odds is to misunderstand our political situation. Identity politics isn’t merely compatible with liberalism; it is, in fact, liberalism’s truest face. If liberalism wishes to succeed in 21st-century America, it shouldn’t reject identity politics — it should embrace it.What is identity politics? All politics is, in a certain sense, identity politics. Every kind of political approach appeals to particular aspects of voters’ identities; some are just more explicit than others.But critics of identity politics have a very particular politics in mind — a mode of rhetoric and organizing that prioritizes the concerns and experiences of historically marginalized groups, emphasizing the group’s particularity.To understand why this kind of identity politics is so controversial — and what its critics often get wrong about it — we need to turn to the work of the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young.In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.In her view, mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means: “that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards.” Securing “equality” on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups.This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can’t eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one’s admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth.Young sees an antidote in a political vision she developed out of experiences in social movements, which she calls “the politics of difference.” Sometimes, Young argues, achieving true equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same. “The specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a more comprehensive system than for others,” Young writes. The goal is identity consciousness rather than identity blindness: “Black Lives Matter” over “All Lives Matter.”She did not like using the term “identity politics” for this approach, arguing in her 2000 book Inclusion and Democracy that it was misleadingly narrow. But two decades later, what she sketched out is what we understand “identity politics” to mean.People hold hands during a rally lead by faith leaders in front of City Hall in Baltimore, Maryland, in response to the death of Freddie Gray on May 3, 2015. Andrew Burton/Getty Images-Young’s philosophical precision allows us to understand what’s distinctive about contemporary identity politics. It also helps us understand why critics see it as such a threat.Identity politics’ dissatisfaction with formal equal treatment is, in their view, fundamentally illiberal. Its emphasis on correcting structural discrimination can morph into a kind of authoritarianism, an obsession with the policing of speech and behaviors (especially from white, straight, cisgender men) at odds with liberalism’s core commitments to individual rights, so the critics fret. They see college students disinviting conservative speakers for being “problematic,” or “canceling” celebrities who violate the rules of acceptable discourse on race or gender identity, as evidence that identity politics’ fundamental aim is overturning liberalism in the name of equality.This approach is not only illiberal, the critics argue, but self-defeating. The more emphasis that is placed on the separateness of American social groups, the less space there is for a politically effective and wide-ranging liberalism.“The only way to [win power] is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together,” Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in his recent book The Once and Future Liberal. “Identity liberalism does just the opposite.”Many of these critics see themselves as coming from a relatively progressive and firmly liberal starting point. They tend to profess support for the ideals of racial or gender equality. What they can’t abide is a political approach that emphasizes difference, shaping its policy proposals around specific oppressions rather than universal ideals.It is a philosophical argument with political implications: a claim that the essence of identity politics is illiberal, and for that reason its continued influence on the American left augurs both moral and electoral doom.Why liberalism needs identity politics-It’s hardly absurd for someone like Lilla to see tension between liberalism and identity politics. Young herself described the politics of difference as not a species of liberalism but a challenge to it.But her stance notwithstanding, political philosophers have come to see the politics of identity as part of a vibrant liberalism. In 1998, Canadian scholar Will Kymlicka identified an “emerging consensus” among political philosophers on what he calls “liberal multiculturalism,” the idea that “groups have a valid claim, not only to tolerance and non-discrimination, but also to explicit accommodation, recognition and representation within the institutions of the larger society.”If we examine liberalism’s core moral commitments, Kymlicka’s consensus shouldn’t be a surprise.The quintessential liberal value is freedom. Liberalism’s core political ambition is to create a society where citizens are free to participate as equals, cooperating on mutually agreeable terms in political life and pursuing whatever vision of private life they find meaningful and fulfilling. Freedom in this sense cannot be achieved in political systems defined by identity-based oppression. When members of some social groups face barriers to living the life they choose, purely as a result of their membership in that group, then the society they live in is failing on liberal terms.Identity politics seeks to draw attention to and combat such sources of unfreedom. Consider the following facts about American life:The median black family’s wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family.The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight and cisgender peers.There is no law saying black people can’t own houses, that women married to men must do the cooking and cleaning, or that LGBTQ teens must harm themselves. These problems have more subtle causes, including legacies of historical discrimination, deeply embedded social norms, and inadequate legislative attention to the particular circumstances of marginalized groups.Identity politics’ focus on the need to go beyond anti-discrimination works to open new avenues for dealing with the insidious nature of modern group-based inequality. Once you understand that this is the actual aim of identity politics, it becomes clear that critiques of its alleged authoritarianism miss the forest for the trees.Two women watch demonstrators marching during the fourth annual Women’s March on January 18, 2020, in Washington, DC. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images-It is of course true that one can point to illiberal behavior by activists in the name of identity politics: Think of the student group at the City University of New York that attempted to shout down a relatively mainstream conservative legal scholar’s lecture out of hostility to his views on immigration law. But instances of campus intolerance are actually quite uncommon, despite their omnipresence in the media, and the idea that a handful of student excesses represent the core of “identity politics” is a mistake.One can say the same thing for social media outrages. It’s certainly true that many practitioners of identity politics send over-the-top tweets or pen Facebook posts calling for people to be fired without good cause. It’s also true that some practitioners of every kind of politics do these things. Holding up an outrageous-sounding tweet as representative of the allegedly authoritarian heart of identity politics is a basic analytical error: confusing a platform problem, the way social media highlights the most extreme versions of all ideologies, with a doctrinal defect in identity politics.Merely because a liberal movement contains some illiberal components doesn’t make it fundamentally illiberal; if it did, then slave-owning American founders and bigoted Enlightenment philosophers would have to be booted out of the liberal canon.The key question is whether the agenda and aims of identity politics’ adherents advance liberal freedom compared to the status quo. On this point, it’s clear that the practitioners of “identity politics” are on the liberal side.In recent years, we have seen champions of identity politics rack up impressive accomplishments — victories like defeating prosecutors with troubling records on race at the ballot box, getting sexual assault allegations taken seriously in the workplace, and securing health care coverage for transition-related medical care.These are hardly examples of woke Stalinism. They are instead victories of liberal reform and democratic activism, incremental changes aimed at addressing deep-rooted sources of unfreedom.Time and again throughout American history, from abolitionism to the movement for same-sex marriage, members of marginalized groups have refused to abandon liberalism’s promises. They put their lives on the line, risking death on Civil War battlefields and in the streets of Birmingham, in defense of liberal ideals. When they demanded change, they won it through the push-and-pull of democratic politics and political activism that constitute the heart of liberal praxis. In essayist Adam Serwer’s evocative phrasing: “The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises.”A collage-based illustration displaying elements of protest images and the Statue of Liberty.Christina Animashaun/Vox-Today’s practitioners of identity politics are the proper heirs to this tradition. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent defenders of “identity politics” in American public life, has devoted her post-election career to an unimpeachably liberal cause — fighting restrictions on the franchise, particularly those that disproportionately affect black voters.In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, Abrams made the case that one of the central aims of identity politics is bolstering liberalism — that it is “activism that will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.” In Abrams’s view, the persistence of structural oppression, and in particular the Trump-era backlash to social progress, requires careful attention to identity, and in particular what marginalized groups want from their political elites.“By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours,” Abrams wrote, “Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”Why identity politics is good politics-The critics of identity politics have another complaint: that its hold on the Democratic Party can only lead to electoral perdition. Abrams, as inspirational as many find her, did lose the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Maybe identity politics can be defended theoretically but in practice alienates too many people to be put in practice.It’s possible to challenge the specifics of these arguments. Abrams didn’t win, but it was a very tight loss in a historically red state (in fact, 2018 was the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in the state in more than 50 years). And you can point to many examples that go in the other direction — at the local, state, and national levels.But it would be myopic to tie ourselves up in these near-term (and frankly inconclusive) tactical arguments. We have a broader crisis to worry about.Debating the interests of the Democratic Party confines the imagination; rising illiberalism in the United States is a deeper problem than the Trump presidency. To reckon with it, we need to take a longer view, looking at the beliefs and sources of activist energy that define the contours of what’s possible in American electoral politics.Since World War II, liberalism and its core beliefs about rights and freedom have served as something like the operating system for democratic politics. But in recent years, this consensus has come under severe stress. Elite failures and global catastrophes — particularly the one-two punch of the financial and refugee crises — have caused Western publics to lose faith in the liberal order’s guardians. Illiberal right-wing populism has emerged as a potent alternative model. The West’s fundamental commitment to liberalism is coming into question.Liberals are in the midst of war — and in it, giving up identity politics amounts to a kind of unilateral disarmament. Today’s political contests, in both the United States and Europe, are increasingly defined by conflict surrounding demographic change and the erosion of traditional social hierarchies. These are the central issues in our politics, the ones that most powerfully motivate people to vote and join political organizations.A mural featuring former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams seen in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 25, 2019. Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThe anti-liberal side has pegged its vision almost entirely to backlash politics, to rolling back the gains made by ethnic and racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community. The challenge for liberals is not primarily winning over voters who find that regressive vision appealing; no modern liberal party can be as authentically bigoted as a far-right one. At the same time, liberals should not write off entire heterogeneous demographic blocs like “the white working class” as unpersuadable. Instead, the main task of liberal politics should be mobilizing those from all backgrounds who oppose the far-right’s vision — knitting together in common cause a staggeringly diverse array of people with very different experiences.The 2017 Women’s March is a concrete example of how identity politics can help in this struggle.The march was billed, at the time, as both an expression of feminist rage and the major anti-Trump action the weekend of the inauguration. Some liberal identity skeptics fretted that these goals were antithetical; that the particularism of the event’s feminist rhetoric would end up dividing the anti-Trump coalition.“I think many men assume the ‘Women’s March’ is supposed to be women-only, which is why it was a bad name for the main anti-Trump march,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote. “There are many grounds on which to object to Trump. Feminism is one. I think [the] goal should be to get all of them together.”Chait’s concerns were clearly unfounded. The 2017 Women’s March was by some estimates the largest single day of protest in US history, with somewhere in the range of 3 million to 5 million people attending the various marches nationwide. Feminism, far from being a divisive theme, served to mobilize large numbers of people to get out and demonstrate against America’s illiberal turn.But what happened next is particularly interesting: The experience of attending Women’s Marches seems to have galvanized a significant number of people — overwhelmingly women — to engage in sustained activism for both gender equality and the defense of liberalism more broadly.In the years following the 2017 demonstrations, Harvard researchers Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol conducted extensive fieldwork among anti-Trump activists. They found that the march helped mobilize many new activists — the bulk of whom were middle-class, educated white women in their 50s or older. “Following the marches,” they found, “clusters of women in thousands of communities across America carried on with forming local groups to sustain anti-Trump activism.”The Women’s March seems to have played a crucial role in turning these women into activists who not only opposed Trump but aimed to defend liberalism’s promise of equal freedom. Activists interviewed by Gose and Skocpol frequently cited a concern for the health of American democracy as a reason for their engagement. Despite being heavily white, they also worked on issues that are of particular concern to racial minorities — organizing against (for example) the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and child separation.“As before throughout American history,” Gose and Skocpol write, “women’s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.”In a recent working paper, political scientist Jonathan Pinckney took a close look at the impact of the Women’s March on three metrics: increase of size in Democratic-aligned activist groups, ideology of Democratic members of Congress, and the share of the Democratic vote in 2018. He found that areas with larger attendance at the 2017 marches later saw “significantly increased movement activity, left-ward shifts in congressional voting scores, and a greater swing to the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.”The Women’s March itself seems to have largely petered out, succumbing to fatigue and leadership infighting. But its true legacy will be the activist networks it helped create, ones that contributed to sustained and impactful challenges to an illiberal presidency.This kind of thing is what, in the long run, liberalism needs: a way to make its defense fresh and exciting, mobilizing specific groups toward the collective task of defeating the far right. Doing so will require meeting people where they are, engaging them on the identity issues that matter deeply and profoundly. Knitting this latent energy into a durable and electorally viable coalition will be the work of a generation, but it’s hard to see how American liberalism can get off its heels without trying.Indigenous women participants walk walk during the 2019 Women’s March in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on January 19, 2019. Robert Alexander/Getty Images-It’s true, of course, that the interests of members of marginalized groups are not always aligned, and that such groups also contain a lot of internal disagreements and diversity. There are always hard questions regarding building coalitions. Should Sanders have denounced Joe Rogan’s endorsement? Is former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s dubious record on race and policing disqualifying? These are important questions, and there will be more like them. They will lead to more fights among liberals and the broader left.But political factions of all ideologies have to make tough judgment calls when it comes time to engage in electoral politics, and there’s nothing about identity politics that makes it uniquely poorly suited to the task.While the politics of difference is attuned to the specific experiences of social groups, it also contains a universalizing impulse: a sense that all structural injustices — stemming from racism, sexism, class structure, or whatever — are to be opposed. There’s a core commitment to solidarity, to not only listening to the members of other groups but seeing their struggle as linked to your own.“Having to be accountable to people from diverse social positions with different needs, interests, and experience helps transform discourse from self-regard to appeals to justice,” Young writes in Inclusion and Democracy.An anti-oppression framework gives people a moral language for articulating their disagreements and perspectives, for constructing a sense of unity and shared purpose out of difference. That we’re having these conversations at all, and are agonizing over what exactly our liberalism should look like, is all to the good — because rebuilding liberalism around anti-oppression values, no matter how difficult it might seem in the moment, is its best hope for an enduring revival.Toward a liberal radicalism-If all of this is right, and liberalism needs identity politics not just to survive but to succeed, then an obvious question looms: How can it be adapted to take issues of identity more seriously? What might the ideals and aspirations of an identity-focused liberalism be, and how might it imagine making them possible? One good place to start is the work of CUNY philosopher Charles Mills. Mills’s most famous book, The Racial Contract (1997), is a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment political tradition, arguing that racist attitudes expressed by philosophical giants like Immanuel Kant are not some alien parasite on their theories, but vital to their intellectual enterprises.It’s the kind of thoroughgoing dissection you might expect from a socialist or black nationalist, someone willing to scrap liberalism altogether. Yet at the end of his most recent book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills explains that his project is not aimed at supplanting liberalism but rather rescuing it — by developing what he calls “black radical liberalism.”Central to black radical liberalism is the idea of “corrective justice”: the notion that liberalism as it has been practiced historically has fallen badly short of its highest ideals of guaranteeing equal freedom, and that the task of modern liberalism ought to be rectifying the racial inequalities of its past incarnations.Mills’s approach is refreshing because it moves beyond the strange conservatism in so much liberal writing today. His work is not an uncritical valorization of the Enlightenment nor a paean to dead white thinkers; it does not aim to Make Liberalism Great Again. It is instead a harshly critical account of liberalism’s history that nonetheless aims to advance liberalism’s core values and secure its greatest accomplishments.The animating force of identity politics, what gives it such extraordinary power to mobilize, is deep wells of outrage at structural injustice. Millions of people see the cruelties of the Trump administration — its detention of migrant children in camps, the Muslim ban, the plan to define transgender people out of existence by executive fiat, the president’s description of Charlottesville neo-Nazis as “very fine people”— and want to do something.Today’s liberals often focus their arguments on bloodless abstractions like “democratic norms” and the “liberal international order.” I don’t deny that these things are important; I’ve written in their defense myself.But people aren’t angry about norm erosion in the way they are about, say, state-sanctioned mistreatment of migrant kids. By making identity politics something not outside of liberalism but at the center of it, liberals can enlist the energies of identity to the defense of liberalism itself.Doing that successfully requires a level of Millsian radicalism. While this sort of identity liberalism would not reject the accomplishments of the past, it requires admitting their insufficiency. It means accepting that liberalism is a doctrine that has failed in key ways, and that repairing its errors requires centering the interests of the groups that have been most wronged. It means appealing to the specificity of group experiences, while also emphasizing their shared interests in the twinned fights against oppression and for liberal democracy.This approach will require compromises from some mainstream liberals, who will need to start welcoming in people and ideas they might not like. They’ll need to get over squeamishness about student activists and their pain regarding political correctness, to recognize that their vision of balancing competing political interests won’t always win out. That’s not to say they can’t argue for their ideas; this type of liberal can and should be entitled to make the case for more cautious political approaches. But liberals need to stop trying to play gatekeeper, to banish ideas like intersectionality to the illiberal wilds.Because the practitioners of identity politics are not illiberal. They are, in fact, some of the best friends liberalism has today. The sooner liberals acknowledge that, the closer we will be to a liberal revival.
America’s Therapists Are Worried About Trump’s Effect On Your Mental Health-His candidacy is sowing fear, distress and anger across the country, they say. Here’s what one psychologist is doing to try to stop it.By GAIL SHEEHY-October 10, 2016
Gail Sheehy is the author of 17 books, including a biography of Hillary Clinton, Hillary’s Choice, and a current memoir, DARING: My Passages.What is Donald Trump doing to Americans’ mental health? It came up in the debate Sunday night, when Hillary Clinton pointed to a “Trump effect,” an uptick in bullying and distress that teachers are noticing in classrooms as their students are exposed to a candidate who regularly attacks his opponents in bombastic, even threatening terms. The new revelation of Trump’s crude boasts in 2005 about being able to kiss and grope women and “move on” a married woman “like a bitch” gave new fuel to the charge that his candidacy might be normalizing aggressive, disparaging talk and behavior.This all might be another political attack, just stacked up on top of the familiar charges that Trump is a danger to national security, an impulsive and erratic personality, and indifferent to the Constitution. But thousands of therapists are worried that it’s something more—and they’ve been saying so for months.Over the summer, some 3,000 therapists signed a self-described manifesto declaring Trump’s proclivity for scapegoating, intolerance and blatant sexism a “threat to the well-being of the people we care for” and urging others in the profession to speak out against him. Written and circulated online by University of Minnesota psychologist William J. Doherty, the manifesto enumerated a variety of effects therapists report seeing in their patients: that Trump’s combative and chaotic campaign has stoked feelings of anxiety, fear, shame and helplessness, especially in women, gay people, minority groups and nonwhite immigrants, who feel not just alienated but personally targeted by the candidate’s message.The manifesto also made a subtler point: that all the attention heaped on Trump is actually making it harder for therapists to do their jobs. Trump’s campaign is legitimizing, even celebrating, a set of personal behaviors that psychotherapists work to reverse every day in their offices: “The tendency to blame ‘others’ in our lives for our personal fears and insecurities, and then battle these ‘others,’ instead of taking the healthier, more difficult path, of self-awareness and self-responsibility,” as Doherty wrote. Trump also “normalizes a kind of hyper-masculinity that is antithetical to the healthy relationships that psychotherapy helps people achieve.” Not to mention that his comments in the 2005 tape, Doherty says, are consistent with the behavior of a “sexual predator.”To some, the therapists’ campaign might sound a little touchy-feely, a worried cry from a group whose job is to be sensitive. But their effort is also an attempt to understand something bigger about what's happening to the country. There’s good reason to believe that demagogic, authoritarian leadership has a profound effect on citizens’ mental health—yet we know very little about what that effect is, Doherty says, because such repressive regimes tend to punish those who would dare to publicize findings of psychological damage. Doherty sees this moment in American politics as an important test case.In fact, it was a recent trip to Austria, where a neo--fascist is leading in the presidential election, that inspired Doherty’s interest in Trump. He first thought to study what psychiatrists had done in 1930s Austria and Germany—some had collaborated with the Nazis, others remained silent—and then turned his attention to the present-day United States. Doherty sees in Trump echoes of the cults of personality wielded by strongmen throughout history—and amplified by Trump’s use of social media for self-propagandizing: appeals to fear and anger, blaming people seen as “other,” humiliating opponents, fomenting distrust of the media and the political system, projecting an image of exaggerated masculinity, and ridiculing women while claiming to idealize them. For that reason, Doherty sees Trump as a threat not just to the American people but to the democratic tradition, which he believes fosters the kind of openness that is essential to the work that therapists do.Last month, to put some research heft behind his concerns, Doherty commissioned a national poll of 1,000 voting-age Americans and found that 43 percent of the respondents—not limited to people in therapy—reported experiencing emotional distress related to Trump and his campaign. Twenty-eight percent reported experiencing emotional distress related to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Ninety percent of those feeling emotional distress say it’s worse compared with any previous election. But Trump has drawn the bulk of Doherty’s attention, both because of the GOP nominee’s overt aggression and because his name comes up more often in therapy sessions, Doherty says.Trump’s bombastic approach, of course, has been intoxicating and persuasive to a significant portion of the electorate. He has a kind of roguish charm, and plenty of downtrodden Americans feel energized by his message that the country needs to be made “great” and “safe” again. And certainly, not all therapists attribute their clients’ anxiety to Trump or the election. In the conservative bastion of Newport Beach, California, for instance, psychologist Michelle Matusoff, a Republican whose practice focuses on children, teens and parenting, told me she was aware of the pervasive discussion on social media about misogyny, xenophobia and racism in the presidential election. She’s not a fan of Trump (especially after the release of the 2005 tape). But she criticizes him gingerly—“He doesn’t censor himself well,” she recently told me, meaning he says what he really believes but he doesn’t disguise it in coded language—and she calls analyses like Doherty’s letter “subjective.” “There’s a lot of disapproving and eye-rolling among my colleagues [about Trump], but we don’t notice a significant mental health impact on our clients,” she says.But Doherty is deadly serious about trying to make psychotherapists across the country aware of the psychological threat of what he calls “Trumpism,” and to equip them to counter it in their practice. In his online manifesto, he urged American psychotherapists to become “citizen therapists” by actively discussing Trump with their clients and communities. I spoke to seven of those therapists, who described the effects of Trumpism they are seeing in their clients—from fear of being ostracized or stripped of legal protections they now enjoy, to suffering the terror of a childhood trauma reawakened by a candidate whose father trained him to think of himself as a “killer” and a “king.” They also spoke about how Trump—with his evident lack of self-reflection and frequent scapegoating—is making it harder for them to do their jobs.Although it’s fair to assume that most of Doherty’s therapists skew liberal, not all of them do. Carrie Hanson-Bradley, a therapist in Lincoln, Nebraska, says she has voted for Republican presidential candidates her whole life. These days, she says, when her clients report increased anxiety and insecurity, they often point not just to personal troubles but to things they hear about in the news, including the Islamic State and the presidential election. Most of those clients, white males who skew low- to middle-income, don’t want to talk specifically about whom they’re voting for. But they do express concern about “not having a candidate that represents them and their problems,” explains Hanson-Bradley, who says she will not be voting for Trump. “It’s really hard when your conservative values lean one way, and the candidate”—Trump—“doesn’t represent that.”Some therapists say their clients are pinning their worries much more squarely on Trump himself. Fran Davis, a Boston psychologist with 30 years of experience, told me that the day after Trump’s stunning primary victory on Super Tuesday, six of her seven regular clients said they felt acute anxiety just imagining that Trump could be president. Parents talked about their distress over eruptions of hateful talk and taunting in schoolyards. A legal immigrant parent reported her child asking, “Do we have to get out of the country?” Others had uglier worries. One of Davis’ patients, David Heimann, told me in an interview that Trump’s racist threats against Mexicans and Muslims triggered for him fears of persecution reminiscent of his family’s experience in the Holocaust.Women have been a repeated target of Trump’s, particularly of late, with his crude hot mic comments, his revived body-shaming attacks against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and his not-so-veiled threats on Hillary Clinton’s life—suggesting that Second Amendment supporters could take up arms against her, or that Clinton’s bodyguards should disarm to “see what happens to her.” Those comments have touched a nerve in many women, sometimes even more alarmingly among those dealing with the post-traumatic effects of physical or sexual abuse by husbands, boyfriends or fathers. Michelle Shauf, who works in the male-dominated high-tech and financial sectors in Atlanta, grew up with an abusive father and has recently sought therapeutic counseling. Shauf told me it depresses her to see Clinton’s experience and qualifications wielded as negatives to keep her from taking on a job held only by men. Plus, Shauf, who has a 9-year-old daughter, fears that Trump’s shaming of women for being “fat” or “flat-chested” can be primal injuries to adolescent girls’ self-esteem.Trump’s suggestions that he could roll back civil rights gains for gay people—by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn same-sex marriage, for instance, and backing North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law (HB2)—are similarly triggering fears in some LGBT therapy patients. Susan Blank, Shauf’s therapist in Atlanta, told me about one gay male client who was married in Vermont when same-sex marriage was first legalized there and moved back to Atlanta when Georgia recognized it. He told Blank it was similar to the movie Jaws: “Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, Trump was nominated.” Margaret Howard, a licensed clinical social worker in St. Louis, said one of her lesbian clients was unnerved while traveling for work through what she described as “Trumpish areas” of the South with her same-sex partner. To register in a hotel, they hid their relationship and pretended to be roommates. “Having to go back in the closet has come as a real shock to my younger clients,” Howard told me. “They are used to acceptance.”Patrick Dougherty, a trauma therapist in the Twin Cities who is a longtime colleague of Doherty’s (no relation), has found that even his mostly white heterosexual male patients—Trump’s demographic sweet spot—are experiencing anger and fear as a result of Trump’s campaign. Partly it’s that many of the men Dougherty treats grew up in dysfunctional families—a violent or alcoholic parent, or one who was depressed or negligent. Trump’s aggressiveness is triggering for them personal childhood traumas, says Dougherty, himself a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War. For others, Trump is contributing to a sense of “collective trauma,” a blow that tears at the basic tissue of social life. The videotaped police killing of Philando Castile in Minneapolis this summer and the recent stabbing at a mall in St. Cloud already have parts of Minnesota on edge; Trump’s antagonism toward minorities and others is only making matters worse, Dougherty says: “Even here in the upper Midwest, our sense of community is disappearing.” One client told Dougherty: “I work with Muslims—what’s going to happen to those people?” The client added, “I’m afraid some white motherfucker is gonna go down to the West Bank”—a part of Minneapolis that has a large population of Somali, mostly Muslim immigrants—“and shoot people up.”Therapists, of course, must tread lightly when it comes to discussing politics, and for some particularly vulnerable patients, the fear that Trump incites can be attractive. Mary Kelleher, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle and another signatory of Doherty’s manifesto, experienced panic attacks herself just thinking about how her patients—most of whom are legal immigrants of Latin American, African or Caribbean descent—might respond to Trump’s branding of immigrants as a danger. But she was shocked to hear some of her immigrant clients say they were drawn to Trump. On reflection, she concluded, “His strongman persona represents safety to them, even if his policies could be personally destructive.” Still, Kelleher is careful not to engage in a political argument with her patients. “Their traumatization could go back decades, and that’s where I would focus,” rather than going directly to the subject of Trump, she explains. “Their alignment with Trump is a symptom of their trauma.”Trump’s emergence in therapy sessions presents a powerful conflict for some therapists between their professional norms—which include not imposing their political beliefs on their clients—and what some describe as a strong, even historic sense of moral obligation to keep this candidate out of the White House. Kirsten Lind Seal, a therapist who teaches ethics at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and signed Doherty’s manifesto, assured me, “I am not going to diagnose Trump from afar, but I have an ethical obligation to make my voice heard [outside of the consulting room] about how bigotry, xenophobia, racist and sexist speech is ripping apart the fabric of our social and political life.”That’s where Doherty sees his work coming in. The thousands of signatories to his open letter have become an online community that shares ideas about how to counter “Trumpism.” And in August, he invited 14 of his most committed followers to brainstorm steps they can recommend to therapists in the trenches. They discussed ideas like easing into a conversation by first asking what the Trump campaign means to the client, if the client doesn’t bring up Trump on his or her own. If the answer suggests acute anxiety, then the therapist can suggest action steps, like disengaging with non-stop TV coverage of the campaign and engaging instead with friends and community. Doherty’s working group also discussed how patients who feel threatened by Trump can take action as citizens rather than feeling helpless—for instance, by registering new voters—rather than turning to passive coping mechanisms, like having another glass (or bottle) of wine.The Marine veteran therapist Dougherty, for one, is experimenting with raising the question of political stress more directly among his regular clients. “I wrote a letter about the prevalence of hate speech in the campaign, about terrorism and mass shootings, and left it in my waiting room. I closed by saying, ‘If these things are troubling you, I want to invite you to bring it into your therapy session.’” Out of 30 patients, 20 raised those concerns, and Dougherty is working to help address them.It isn’t enough to defeat Trump the candidate, some signers of Doherty’s manifesto say, and that’s not really the point. They believe they have to fight Trumpism—the emotional pain they say he has already caused. “There is a real and present danger for a national mental health crisis,” Doherty says. “And regardless of the outcome of the election, it will continue to need our attention.”
