A recent commentary on the current presidential election begins with this headline: “Donald Trump’s MAGA Death Cult Is Coming for Us All.”
And the subtitle to the article reads like this: Any serious discussion of Trump leads to one conclusion: something terrible, vast, and irredeemable has befallen us and we have no language to describe our predicament.*
The author is Phil Wilson, and his article appears in commondreams.org. I agree with his headline, but I disagree with his second observation. We do have a language for describing our predicament: It is found in the title of my new book, Trump & MAGA as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.
The word Antichrist names the “terrible, vast, and irredeemable something that has befallen us all.” That archetype names evil succinctly.
Who is Phil Wilson and what is his message? He describes himself as “an outreach mental health worker with very poor clients” in small town Franklin County, Massachusetts, a region of “mostly decaying mill towns.” He tells us that “my clients never felt that they had a shred of agency—they knew damn well that voting would never improve their lives.”
In an article on “Hope, Doomers, and the Climate Emergency,” he speaks bluntly about how our economic system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses” and “capitalism is feeding on our ‘courageous’ sense of optimism—as it swallows the planet whole.**
Wilson believes the greatest holocaust of the 20th century was not WWII or the Nazi Holocaust. Rather, “the bloody deeds of leaded gasoline” spread “acts of boundless destruction that make Hitler and Pol Pot into evil children by comparison.”
Global warming is traceable to that source when “leaded gasoline unleashed an episode of unabated horror upon the entire biosphere, with no government protections for half a century.” Body counts amount to “the tens of millions conservatively, along with the cognitive destruction of children” because lead is a neurotoxin perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry.
It set loose an assault upon inner city children in particular whose brains were so poisoned that violent crime spiked in urban crime waves. Racist political narratives followed and resulted in the vast prison industrial complex as incarceration spiked. When leaded gasoline was finally phased out, murder rates dropped by 50%.
But the “ultimate fossil fuel industry crimes” await us in the “total erasure of the biosphere” that we are face to face with today, a “probable and looming genocide of all living things” beckons us.
Decades ago, GM executives had a choice. Grain alcohol—which belonged to the public domain and “would not have murdered countless millions and destroyed the minds of children—or tetraethyl lead—which GM had a patent on.” We know the choice GM made.
GM executives knowingly committed mass murder for profit and hired “credentialed academic whores to confuse the public with bullshit research. Leaded gasoline butchered millions.” Capitalism won.
And now fascism is on our doorstep and “a society driven by the collective power of the public will inevitably collide with corporate hegemony.” Wilson tells the story of the great soul singer Sharon Jones who suffered a stroke while watching the presidential election returns in 2016.
She died ten days later but told her friends and bandmates that it was Donald Trump that killed her. “You might think of her as American fascism’s first casualty,” comments Wilson.
*Phil Wilson, “Donald Trump’s MAGA Death Cult Is Coming for Us All.” Common Dreams, October 16, 2024.
**Phil Wilson, “Hope, Doomers, and the Climate Emergency.” Common Dreams, September 23, 2024.
See Matthew Fox, Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.
And Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, pp. xxxviii, 300, 290-292.
And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine.
And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Banner Image: Smog and clog: “World Class Traffic Jam, NJ Turnpike Edition.” Photo by BJ on Flickr
Queries for Contemplation
Do you recognize global warming as a present-day holocaust and the corporations who covered it up to make powerful profits as worse than Hitler and Pol Pot? Can we move beyond such antichrist antics before humanity destroys itself and the Earth as we know it?
Recommended Reading
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election
Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox. He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.
5 thoughts on “Phil Wilson’s Blunt Truths on Global Warming, Fascism, Trump”
I suffered from a sinus drip in the back of my throat due to bus exhaust when I was in San Francisco near Union Square forty-one years ago.
Yes! I am presently reading a realistic and spiritually sensitive book about our world climate crisis by contemplative Brian D. McLaren – “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for A World Falling Apart” (2024).
Thank you, Matthew. In my opinion, this is a crucially important article.
Yes to the early warning about worshipping The Golden Calf, the god of the elites.
Reminds of building the un-natural Tower of Babel and finding that we can’t communicate with each other.
And then there was, Noah’s Ark. When I was about seven I learned about the biblical world flooding but I didn’t believe that the whole world could flood….but here we are now……flood tides rising around the world and wondering how to save the human and animal species………………
Matthew, your posts are always profound and I’d say apocalyptic. Today’s is just plain downright scary.
Bless you, bless you, bless you for your prophetic pronouncements, shouts, screams, blogs and books. Yes, I read “Antichrist,” and your logic is well-founded.
I await the Great Turning, when a highly visible event or situation truly wakes up the populace of the planet and we begin the loving, albeit difficult, process of re-greening Mother Earth and all her children.
Onward and upward!