Thank you Chris and Michelle, for all the work you're doing to shed light on the sinister phenomena in our midst.

This movement has been growing for a long time. I know, because I grew up with it. I remember as a child specifically asking my Grandfather how his totalitarian vision of a Christian Nation Under God was any different than the totalitarian precepts of any other form of fascism. His answer was simple: while others may have been led astray by false gods or secular fantasies, his path was righteous and true. You cannot reason with the blinkered thinking of an idealogue who considers their idealism divinely ordained.

My grandfather was a radio engineer who did a great deal of work to help his church and others broadcast their services to the community. I don't believe most urban liberals have any idea how vast and sophisticated the machinery of the extreme right's propaganda machine really is. They have mastered every form of media. They are extrememly politically savy, and have an acute sense of how to target their outreach to the most vulnerable demographics.

Courtesy of the connections of relatives I'm embarrassed to admit I have, I'm one of the few people who's had the pleasure of seeing the 700 club being filmed; because you see, no one really watches it being filmed. The intimate "in you living room" setting is a charade just like any sitcom; filmed in a dark empty studio warehouse, with no one around but a few camera grips. Not a shocking relevation, but certainly emblematic of how society can be so easily manipulated by a small cabal of extremists with their modern-day megaphones and light shows.

I don't quite buy the intimation that the ringleaders of Christian right are cynical hypocritical manipulators though. I think that by and large, they actually believe in the justice of their causes. Don't doubt their sincerity.

Hitler and his ilk are almost always portrayed as insane madmen, subhuman, monsterous. I believe such characterizations are extremely dangerous, because they belie how close we are to the danger of our own best intentions. People with totalitarian mindsets don't think of themselves as evil; they just want you be become part of the better world that has been revealed to them; and they get very angry when people try to stop them from where they think they should be going. We all do ourselves a disservice if we don't admit that we can all feel that way sometimes. The enemy is just like us.

But how far are we willing to go to settle our differences? How easily can we be manipulated into segregating ourselves into opposing war camps?

I don't think the problem is a particular breed or type of person or religion or belief. I think the problem is the institutionalization of belief systems into large hierarchical organizations. I'm more afraid of the institutions than of any particular cause.

I don't think we should be surprised that when society builds large hierarchical organizations, that totalitarian tendencies will emerge. Such structures promote monoculture and stifle dissent. We can see it happen in our own government. The difference between our government and institutions like the Church is that our government has a regular rotation program in place for its core.

Not to go all George Lakoff here, but one of the most important victories of the "Christian Right" has been to get the mainstream media to refer to them by that term. As Hedges points out, they're not really Christians -- they're a political movement that should be so designated. There have been beginnings of this (like Hendrik Hertzberg and some others calling them "Christianists"), but someone needs to hang a sign around their necks with a really pithy, accurate term describing them. I propose "Kristian" or "Kristianist," which deprives them of abusing the name of Christ and also chimes with both "Amerika" and "KKK." The KKK also claimed to be a Christian movement, incidentally, but I think part of why they're no longer taken seriously is that they didn't manage to convince the mainstream of that -- maybe in part because they picked a stupid name.

Speaking of the KKK, I think Hedges -- if this interview accurately captures his argument -- overlooks the extent to which this stuff is regionally specific. Of course there are Kristianists everywhere, but in states like California they've won only Pyrrhic victories: They managed to take over the Republican Party, but this just made Republicans unelectable (except in freak circumstancces a la Arnold) and cemented Democratic control of the state.

It would also help if the left could come up with better names for itself and for non-Kristianism generally -- something to replace "secular humanism" (another of the Right's coinages). Any ideas? "Progressive" is getting old.

I'd like to take a moment to try to head off the inevitable argument over whether it's useful to use terms like fascism in contexts other than Nazi Germany.

It was Orwell who pointed out that the term 'fascism' has lost completely all of its original meaning, now being used solely to mean "that which is undesirable". So the average person who uses this term applies it indiscriminately to totaliarian communism, fundamentalist Islam (hence the utterly idiotic "Islamofascism"), etc. Of course, most of us reading this and posting are intelligent enough and care enough to actually know the original, more precise meaning, but among the masses, that sense of the word is irretrievably lost to history.

Now, if you believe that language is static and that words mean what they are formally defined as in the dictionary, then there is no problem with using fascism in its original sense to describe certain modern elements. However, if you take the organic view of language now embraced by many linguists and concede that a word's definition is, more or less, its most widely accepted meaning, then I think it might be time for us to give up on the word. Involving it in a discussion generally does more harm than good to getting your point across. This latter option would be more attractive if we had some roughly equivalent word for fascism, but not such an abused one.

Not that I really know a good way to get the point across to the people of which you speak. Talking slowly and having lots of pictures might help.