This week I have been mostly reading . . . Chris Hedges

The man has a scary story to tell. I'm very aware of the danger of the Cristo-fascist movement, having attended a British grammar school I was exposed to some particularly fundamental nutbags with no respect for secular humanity of the enlightenment that had made their way of life possible. I have never met anyone who scared me more than some of the Jesus freaks who taught at my school. Their brutality and intolerance of any attempt to question their dogma was terrible to see. I saw pupils dragged from class rooms by their hair for yawning without covering their mouth.

The Online Journal picked up on the story and added some trimmings to it in their own inimitable style. I'm not so sure that their predictions of an imminent American totalitarian theocracy are that true. The Christian fuckwit squad in the US might be a deciding force in an election but the real extremists, such as those engaging in the horrendous child-abuse chronicled in the film Jesus Camp, are still a definite minority. I remain confident that their attempts to re-write the American Constitution will fail and that liberal, educated America will prevail over these apocalyptic-porn-merchants. If the Democrats win the next election, that is. Otherwise I'll start to get scared.

One interesting aspect of the rhetoric that frequents such anti-theocratic articles as these are the bald statements that secular humanism is allowing itself to be the framework within which the Cristo-fascist movement can grow. We are told that these people have no respect for the tenets of the enlightenment but are prepared to work the system until they achieve positions of authority from which they can start to impose their god-bothering philosophy upon others. This is far more worrying to me- read some of the quotes in Hedges' article and check over his description of George Bush's "ascendancy to the first regent". (!)