Once we see it, we can never be un-woke. And if you don’t see it, dear friend, you are probably caught inside it, religiously, politically, or both. It is not your fault, but if we don’t vote these people out of their positions of power, we are in real danger of becoming a fascist nation where none of us will have basic rights or basic protections.

You know the men who stormed the Capitol building in 2021? And the men who marched with torches through Charlottesville in 2017? This is White Nationalism, American Fascism, and they are everywhere. In recent years they have taken control of the Republican party. In the 1980s they took control of Southern Baptists, the largest protestant denomination in the country.

Have you ever wondered why people stay in cults. How could women believe that God wanted them all to have sex with the cult leader? Why did everyone drink the poisonous Kool-Aid? Because it happens slowly and methodically. What they hear, what they read, even what they sing, are so controlled that it becomes all they know, and they are indoctrinated to believe that those who speak against their reality are of the devil.

The children born into the system never knew anything different. Many of us are those children.

Have you been indoctrinated to believe that God says men are to be the head of their wives? Have you been indoctrinated that Roe v. Wade is primarily about babies, or that LGBT people are sinners destined to hell? Do you believe God is partial to America, or that college education is detrimental to spirituality? Do you use the word liberal (from the same root as liberty) as a slur? Do you believe that black people and Hispanic people are hardworking good people but created a little lower than you? Dear friend, these indoctrinations are not of God. They are of White Nationalism and White Fascism, and they are about Power and Control. Yes, I know this is not what you have always been told . . . That’s what we are both saying.

Once we see it, we can never be un-woke. And if you don’t see it, dear friend, you are probably caught inside it, religiously, politically, or both. It is not your fault, but if we don’t vote these people out of their positions of power, we are in real danger of becoming a fascist nation where none of us will have basic rights or basic protections.

Kathy Vestal