Who the hell is Alexander Dugin?

A SPECTACULAR PRESENTATION ON WESTERN LIBERALISM'S CRISIS (as seen by "Putin's Brain," Alexander Dugin.

I've been obsessed attempting to figure out WTF is happening in America since Trump won the presidency in 2016. I've "met" the most outlandish characters from Julius Evola to to Carl Schmitt to Moldbug Mencius, etc. Came across Dugin early on. Having searched high and low, I think this video is "one stop shopping" for Dugin. I'd go farther and say that you can get a good part of the way understanding the MAGA movement - from batshit crazy General Flynn to Steve Bannon to your insufferable uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, by re-listening to the video and substituting "MAGA" for Russia. How Dugin feels about the West (and the many specific targets of Dugin's criticism) is how our (non-crazy, at least) family, neighbors, friends, and co-workers who voted MAGA consider those of us of a liberal or progressive persuasion. Like the presenter, one need not accept Dugin's answers but we ignore his criticisms at our personal, national, and worldwide peril.

Alexander Dugin: The Philosopher Shaping Russia's Destiny

Who the hell is Emmanuel Swedenborg?

Bad news. I just purchased "The Collected Works of Emmanuel Swedenborg" (190,544 pages!!) as part of my studies of Trumpian occultism.

Better news. It's on Kindle so the house won't open up a sink hole.

Best news. It costs $0.00.

I've heard about Swedenborg for years and when I was at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bethlehem Pennsylvania our church secretary - who was not a member of our church - belonged to a Swedenborgian church. (Swedenborg, himself, did not form a church.)

He was a scientist and an engineer before becoming a Christian mystic (albeit heretical, as most mystics in ALL religions are considered).

I'm developing a theory that, while occultism and esotericism has always existed, its flowering in America was the result of a broader backlash against the Enlightenment's restriction of reality to that which can be confirmed through a consensual process of reason and evidence AS WELL AS the American genius of separating church and state.

With tolerance, America's entrepreneurial spirit could invent its own homegrown religions, many of which focused on the direct experience of the divine rather than on authoritative holy books and creeds. (Emerson's trancendentalism is a good example.)

And the separation of church and state meant that, absent funding from the state, a religious entrepreneur or snake oil salesman, well. had to hustle to pay the rent. 😀

Emanuel Swedenborg (Wikipedia)

THE MAGA MYTHOS

America is in moral and physical ruins, but God has set apart a champion of TRUE Americans, as unlikely an agent of God as was Moses, Gideon, or David, and given him charismatic powers of persuasion and all but magical political skills as well as the divine authority to make him uniquely qualified to “make America great again.”

• Champion (see “Demigod”)
  “A demigod is a half-god and half-human offspring of a god and a human,[1] or a human or non-human creature that is accorded divine status after death, or someone who has attained the "divine spark" (divine illumination). An immortal demigod often has tutelary status and a religious cult following, while a mortal demigod is one who has fallen or died, but is popular as a legendary hero in various polytheistic religions. Figuratively, it is used to describe a person whose talents or abilities are so superlative that they appear to approach being divine.”
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demigod 

• Charisma
  “...attribute of astonishing power and capacity ascribed to the person and personality of extraordinarily magnetic leaders. Such leaders may be political and secular as well as religious. They challenge the traditional order, for either good or ill.”
  https://www.britannica.com/topic/charisma 

• Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.[9] Chaos magicians subsequently treat belief as a tool, often creating their own idiosyncratic magical systems and blending such different things as "practical magic, quantum physics, chaos theory, and anarchism."[10]
  
  Scholar Hugh Urban has described chaos magic as a union of traditional occult techniques and applied postmodernism[11] – particularly a postmodernist skepticism concerning the existence or knowability of objective truth.[12] Namely, according to him, chaos magic rejects the existence of absolute truth, and views all occult systems as arbitrary symbol-systems that are only effective because of the belief of the practitioner.[12]
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic 

THE TRUMP DOCTRINE

1. MAGAfy the Republican party such that elected congressional representatives, senators, and executives (e.g., governors) appease Trump rather than risk him punishing disobedience by denouncing them via tweet to his base voters, thus endangering their prospects for re-election and quite possibly putting their family in physical peril. [LARGELY DONE ALREADY]

See How Trump’s intimidation tactics have reshaped the Republican Party

2. Consolidate political power in the presidency, substituting incompetent sycophants (whose function is to allow direct presidential control of those powers necessary for his political agenda while simultaneously rendering them too dysfunctional to restrain his use of those powers) for the competent professionals constrained by law, regulation, and norms in the civil service.

See 'Assume the worst' from Trump's 'menagerie of misfits': ex-GOP lawmaker 

3. Abolish the norm that, following the Senate’s confirmation of a president’s Attorney General, the Department of Justice operates independent of political influence.

See Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies

4. Exploit the loopholes within (and ultimately abolish) the Posse Comitatus Act restricting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

See Trump confirms plans to use military to deport migrants after declaring national emergency

5. With these dramatic extensions of the already awesome power of the presidency, wield power by attacking minority communities (especially immigrants) unpopular with the culture warriors of his base; attacks where the cruelty (e.g., child separation, a “bloody day” of migrant round-ups) is the point.

See Court orders feds to pay $6M as family separations lawsuit ends

6. Realign America’s foreign policy, discarding the alliance-based, and rule-governed Western liberalism that has prevented another world war for the past 80 years, to engage if not actively ally with autocracies such as Russia and China to increase his personal political power and wealth.

See One year of Trump’s praise for authoritarians - POLITICO ,  All the President's Profiting • OpenSecrets