The Founders' Covenant with God; and MAGA-Nazis "Guard the Vote"

Is Substack Scraping the Way to its Bottom Line?

Does this image violate the Substack Terms of Service? How does either a human or an AI moderator decide the intent of this graphic image?

---

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Klingons, Romulans, and my fellow Vulcans.

These past two weeks have been very distracting for me due to the recent revelation that Substack has been hosting monetized publications that are being operated by authors who believe in and actively promote Nazi ideology, antisemitism, and White Supremacy beliefs.

Like many other publishers I disapprove of the Substack website leadership’s decision to allow these vile ideologies and worldviews to propagate here at Substack while at the same time earning significant income streams via paid subscriptions; and also at the same time provide for these enemies of Democracy a means to coordinate, congregate, and continue to advance their unwelcome violence prone rhetoric to flourish, and provide radicalization centers via which to develop private militia-like groups who openly plan and speak about disrupting our country’s long-standing democratic goals of voting in safety and security.

For instance in the context of fighting the presence of Nazis on Substack how about taking notice of the fact that a soft-Nazi is present on Substack who actually constitutes a more serious threat to America by way of his outsized influence and concerted efforts to subvert the election process by way of soft-intimidation and leading a cult following of Christian nationalists. Who is this soft-Nazi you ask? Why none other than retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.

Flynn was recently in the news again when media outlets looked into a new phrase, “guard the vote” being used by Trump in his rally speech rhetoric, as reported by the Associated Press:

Former President Donald Trump is urging supporters to “guard the vote” during next year’s election, a phrase that has set off alarm bells among pro-democracy advocates who say it signals permission to take extreme measures that could intimidate voters and threaten election workers.¹ [Special emphasis added, RJR]

Flynn has a Substack newsletter and back in June he posted a brief statement using the phrase, which you can check out for yourself at the following:

Guard The Vote

Mike clearly and obviously is not a “Techno-Optimist!”

I will be writing about Mike Flynn and his part in the MAGA rebellion network in the near future. In the meantime you can read about him and his plans at the PBS article linked to at the end of this excerpt,

The retired lieutenant general, former national security adviser, onetime anti-terrorism fighter, is now focused on his next task: building a movement centered on Christian nationalist ideas, where Christianity is at the center of American life and institutions.²

Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn ‘at the center’ of new movement based on conspiracies and Christian nationalism

After I had signed the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter and posted a copy with a brief commentary on my newsletter’s webpage I then began to do some research to try and understand the reasons behind the silence of the founders of the website about this issue. While I most certainly did learn a great many new things about Substack and numerous other pertinent things relating to the issues in view of tonight’s newsletter, it occurred to me recently as I was looking through my notes-stream that I have been so distracted by all these things that I have digressed significantly away from my purpose in writing here at Substack in the first place. I also realized quite a few other things that actually, in hindsight, have helped me to understand just how focused I must become in order to be able to continue providing my subscribers with the writing content that they have come to expect and have encouraged me to pursue.

The issues of the past two weeks, as important as they might be in the grand scheme of things, are only a small part of the much larger problems our country is plagued with, such as I have endeavored to make known to anyone who is truly concerned with how our country has come to be in the grips of a major political party and its open contempt for our democratically developed liberal way of life, and our hard won civil rights—in their efforts to convert our society from its secular foundations into a bastardized, Christianized, Nationalized, White Supremacized Neo-patriarchy.

All because they think with their fixed-metaphysical epistemology that America as a nation has a so-called “covenant with God”. This “covenant theology” to be sure is something that theologians discuss—in the abstract most of the time, but there are many who are not so highly educated that adhere to a pedestrian level theology preaching that promotes doctrines from the pulpit that advance the superstitious idea that if a person has great wealth it is because God has blessed that person. Thus, according to their reasoning, that person has obeyed God and made an effort deemed acceptable which results in their reaping the material wealth they have come to possess; whereas if a person is mired in poverty then that person has been disciplined, and as a result of the discipline applied against him by God, has not reaped any material wealth and will remain impoverished until they make an acceptable effort to obey God. And so then that is how religionists explain the cycles of any persons’ life—obey God and go to church, tithe, read the Bible, pray, present one’s self as being morally virtuous and thereby win God’s stamp of approval as evidenced by material gains, whereas those who do not obey God and do not go to church, do not tithe, do not read the Bible, do not pray, do not present themselves as morally virtuous persons, they lose God’s favor as evidenced by their lack of material gains.

After all that is how many of the founding fathers generally understood reality, even if a significant measure of them were simply deists who put no stock in religion.

Congress was guided by "covenant theology," a Reformation doctrine especially dear to New England Puritans, which held that God bound himself in an agreement with a nation and its people. This agreement stipulated that they "should be prosperous or afflicted, according as their general Obedience or Disobedience thereto appears." Wars and revolutions were, accordingly, considered afflictions, as divine punishments for sin, from which a nation could rescue itself by repentance and reformation.

The first national [Confederated] government of the United States, was convinced that the "public prosperity" of a society depended on the vitality of its religion. Nothing less than a "spirit of universal reformation among all ranks and degrees of our citizens," Congress declared to the American people, would "make us a holy, that so we may be a happy people."³

Now as many who read my writings might remember there are numerous significant leaders of the Christian nationalist movement here in America who believe that the thinking, theologies, and thoughts of our country’s founding fathers should also be the same for all Americans living today⁴⁵ in a modern reality that would be unfathomable to the founders; who when they penned the Constitution could not have possibly envisioned the situations that currently exist today, that must be addressed with modern thinking and rightfully should not include any presence of deities or religiously based morality. The simple fact of the matter is that morality does not fall under the sole province of religion alone, but rather it is an invention, of the minds of human beings, that has undergone a continual and still continuing evolution.

This brings us to an important point of observation, which is that in the unvarnished view, above, of the founding fathers perceptions of reality, we can see the motives of today’s modern day religionists—zealots—in Government and many of the obscenely wealthy—”zero sum game”⁶—citizens, who are the patrons of these zealots in government, and who are determined to maintain control of their abilities to continue to accumulate wealth without limits or restraints, whatever the consequences or costs to their lesser-than wealthy fellow citizen neighbors as being justified by an appeal to the “democracy of the dead”⁷ an appeal that works because of the brainwashing effects of the cult-like behaviors and thinking of religious persons on both sides of the pulpit throughout the land from “sea to shining sea”⁸.

And so in conclusion, and in recognition of the unsatisfactory answers finally posted by the Substack founders recently in response to the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter and in light of their somewhat insincere and disingenuous replies coupled with what I have come to learn about the website as a business as well as other factors, I can only reason that the primary motive for the leadership team to answer in the affirmative for the presence of Nazis reaping a profit plying their agendas and propaganda, is that the company—Substack—too is reaping profits from the entire controversy, especially in the light of the possibility that the Substack company business model might include producing data-scraped novel GPT AI training datasets, made available to entities unknown, from which to make unaccountable amounts of money. This is also something that I will be writing about as it has relevance on many levels and applies to numerous matters relating to all the information that is written and produced here on substack as one of the most unique and valuable of novel datasets currently available via the internet.

Prompt: Create an image representing the Substack website as a giant experiment within a laboratory setup, focusing on Large Language Model (LLM) datasets. This scene includes silos, each with a representation of an individual publisher on top, actively typing and writing, symbolizing content creation. Additionally, include a small, prominently featured group of venture capital investors, depicted with money flowing from them towards the scientists. This element represents the financial investment and support for the experimental and innovative endeavors within the platform. The laboratory is filled with scientific instruments and data screens, emphasizing the data-driven and experimental nature of managing and utilizing LLM datasets in the digital publishing world of Substack.

(DALL-E Chat GPT4 generated image, prompted by Robert J. Rei)

Please feel free to cross-post, re-stack, share, or take all three of these actions to spread and support my work. The more people that know what they are dealing with in the cold civil war our country is experiencing the stronger we will be unified together.

Robert J. Rei, December 29, 2023

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” -Aldous Huxley

1. “Trump tells supporters, ‘Guard the vote.’ Here’s the phrase’s backstory and why it’s raising concern” Ali Swenson and Michelle R. Smith, December 6, 2023, Associated Press, https://apnews.com/article/trump-guard-vote-election-2024-flynn-39d41fe4f7229d4ab7e1956efc428e10

2. "Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn ‘at the center’ of new movement based on conspiracies and Christian nationalism” Michelle R. Smith, September 7, 2022, News Hour PBS, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/former-trump-adviser-michael-flynn-at-the-center-of-new-movement-based-on-conspiracies-and-christian-nationalism

3. “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Religion and the Congress of the Confederation” Library of Congress, undated, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel04.html

4. In the words of Glenn Ellmers the Claremont Institute’s Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, “Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.” The “Claremont [Institute] was one of the very few serious institutions on the right to make an intellectual case for Trumpism. This is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that Claremont has never identified with any of the conservative (or liberal) factions. When commentators try to label us, they usually just say “Claremont conservatives.” “True MAGAs” is another label—occasionally used by those who think Trump voters inhabit yet another enclosure in the conservative zoo.” ““Conservatism” is no Longer Enough” Glenn Ellmers, March 24, 2021, The American Mind (A publication of the Claremont Institute), https://americanmind.org/salvo/why-the-claremont-institute-is-not-conservative-and-you-shouldnt-be-either/

5. In the words of Kevin D. Roberts Ph.D. (President of the Heritage Foundation) during an interview for The European Conservative in December of 2022, “it was clear to me then that we had to create a parallel set of institutions—and this is why I sometimes call this the ‘Second American Revolution.’ So, to answer your question: what does America need now? Or what do American conservatives need to focus on? We need to mentally transport ourselves back to the 1770s and 1780s…”, “Fighting for Our Institutions: An Interview with Kevin Roberts” A.M. Fantini, December 23, 2022, The European Conservative, https://europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/fighting-for-our-institutions-an-interview-with-kevin-roberts/

6. A basic definition of the fallacious “zero sum game” thinking in relation to finance and wealth is that wealth as a fixed quantity means the only way someone gets wealthy is at someone else's expense. What follows are three sources that discuss the fallacy from different perspectives; “The Zero-Sum Fallacy in Negotiation and How to Overcome It” , Thomas Hills Ph.D., April 13, 2018, Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/statistical-life/201804/the-zero-sum-fallacy-in-negotiation-and-how-to-overcome-it; “Zero-Sum Game Definition in Finance, With Example” Will Kenton, August 22, 2022, Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero-sumgame.asp; “The Seven Deadly Fallacies of Bad Economics” (#3 The Fallacy of Static Wealth and the Fallacy of the Zero-Sum Game), John K. Williams, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), https://fee.org/articles/the-seven-deadly-fallacies-of-bad-economics/

7. See note #1 at the following essay:

Religious Knowledge Creation versus Scientific Knowledge Construction

8. In light of the understanding presented here within this essay, as to the lopsided inequalities propounded by religious thinking individuals, the following verse from America the Beautiful takes on a decidedly unpalatable sense in today’s current crisis of disunity fostered and nurtured by Christian nationalist efforts to subvert our country to their deity’s plans and will, which in reality are nothing more than expressions of their own covert desires to have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the animals of the land, and over all the world and every living thing that moves on the earth. Genesis 1:26

America, America, God shed his grace on thee / And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea