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Concern for the needs of children, however, has not been the norm in human history. Rather than a commitment to providing the material and societal resources which would allow children to flourish, Republican strategists chose to produce children's books to indoctrinate young minds with conservative political and religious messages that constrain human potential within the confines of a White patriarchal worldview. THE PROJECTTO PROPAGANDIZE AMERICAN CHILDREN For over two decades, conservatives such as William Bennett, Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly have worked assiduously to instill their values into American children.4 One of the most prominent of those who have embarked on this project is conservative Christian Tim LaHaye. \"17 Even liberal Dr. Seuss' work has been impacted, as publication of six of his 56 books have ceased-out of concern for what journalists Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris describe as \"racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Individuals or groups targeted for sacrifice function as poison containers for the split-off emotions of the privileged, i.e., White males who tout patriarchal prerogatives and racial superiority as justification. Like nothing in over a century, the past five years have demonstrated the fragility of American democracy and the importance of We the People as author and director of the collectivity's efforts toward a more perfect union. Since the founding, the answer has been, White males, and as Daniel W. Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has noted, our Trumpian experience has elucidated nothing if not the ways in which the United States has stacked the deck against minorities.3 We have begun to talk about systems rather than individuals--about White privilege and White patriarchy-the notion that White people and especially White males have benefitted in American history at the expense of minorities.4 To improve our imperfect union, psychohistory prescribes empathy and introspection as a means for comprehending problems and a pathway to working toward solutions.5 With these concerns in mind, and taking into account New York Times columnist Ezra Klein's suggestion that many of America's success stories \"didn't come from merit alone,'\"11 set out to understand and explain how privilege worked in the most consequential career event of my life, when I was admitted to Harvard University.7 Since educational opportunity is a primary mechanism of upward mobility,8 such an approach seemed a particularly apposite focal point to examine how privilege was accorded at a critical juncture to a White male. The goal of the project was to connect the psychohistorian-to-be to the history in which he was embedded, to use psychohistory to demonstrate how social laws and norms-premised on group-fantasies-shaped social reality to benefit a particular White male, while denying opportunity to African Americans.9 The goal is to illuminate the macrocosm by contrasting it to the microcosm. The segregated way of life in Gadsden was decades old, originally constructed by Jim Crow laws which were passed just before the end of Reconstruction-doubtless using the Bible as the justification.27 In 1875, Article I, Section 33, of the Constitution of Alabama provided \"separate schools 'for children of African descent.

White evangelical religion and its advocacy of patriarchy, combat parenting, corporal punishment, and chauvinism-and the resulting fear induced in children- are assessed, as are the results-a personality primed for the group-fantasy of Racist Nationalism and for restaging childhood trauma by cleansing the homeland of Evil Others at national borders-the Central Purification Ritual of Trumpism. A THREAT TO AMERICA New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow contends that the U.S. is 1 N fighting a \"soft civil war,\" and a former Democratic president and scores of liberals and conservatives fear that our democracy is in peril.1 The malefactors responsible are an unindicted co-conspirator, his co-conspirators and enablers, and Vladimir Putin's Russia.2 The country is facing the most daunting circumstances since the Civil War: the worst health emergency in over 100 years-with more than 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths projected by January;3 and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression-with more than 100,000 small businesses permanently closed,4 and millions of Americans filing for unemployment,5 fearing the loss of their homes,6 concerned about their next meal,7 and cities and states on the brink of financial ruin.8 In the midst of such turmoil, the country confronts a reckoning with White racism centuries in the making,9 and an ecosystem threatened by existential calamity.10 At the center of this national calamity is Donald J. Trump, a man described by his niece Mary L. Trump as \"the most dangerous man in the world;\"11 a president who, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward reports, deliberately misled the American people about the severity of the coronavirus,12 who, according to a bipartisan Senate report, colluded with Russia in the 2016 election13-and some believe may be a Russian agent14-and who twice solicited interference in the 2020 election.15 Can America contain the poison16 loosed by the cult of Trump? TRUMPISM AS A CULT, MESMERIZED BY A GROUP-TRANCE For all his malignancy,17 however, Trump himself is not the problem plaguing the country. Fueled by \"a near-existential fear\" of Democrats in power and \"resentments and grievances over being the object of the left's contempt,\" the base views the president \"not just as their defender,\" but as \"their avenging angel\" against the Evil Other, and hypnotically follows the dear leader,27 even when his policies hurt them the most.28 Editorial cartoonists often capture the nuances of political reality and present them in compelling images. In the 2016 election, 81 percent of White evangelicals voted for Trump,32 constituting \"one-third of GOP voters\"33-which translated into over 20 million of the nearly 63 million votes for Trump.34 Their backing is fueled by childhood trauma.3S Religious indoctrination, reliant on fear induction and corporal punishment, produces in evangelical children a reactive rage at their bad-child alter36-their Evil Other, which is restaged politically37 in attacks on women, immigrants, and racial and ethnic others. Or, she can identify with the wayward child, forego spanking, and form an alliance against the husband/father (and Heavenly Father), possibly intensifying Oedipal rivalry and perhaps putting her soul in jeopardy.

Lloyd sees such change beginning with child care and the helping mode as the most evolved stage of childrearing,12 but how do the realities of contemporary society-daycare, divorced parents, two working parents, the omnipresence of television and personal devices, and now, sheltering in place-fit into the evolution of childhood? Perhaps even more radically, is it possible that the inclusion of extra-familial entities in family life-such as day care workers and preschool caregivers-furthers the wellbeing and potential of children, liberating them from parental hegemony? True to Freud's general perspective on the human condition, he has sidestepped his pessimistic conclusions by applying the spirit of psychoanalytic technique-intense, prolonged and accurate observation and introspection-to human history, instead of the life history of the individual, and has concluded that, over time, history is more than the return of the repressed. No writer of science fiction, Mills was a hardnosed sociologist, the originator of the now widely utilized concept of \"the sociological imagination,\" a description of the quality of mind that enables a sociologist to connect personal problems to social issues, life history to the history of society.

More carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere now than at any time in human history, reaching 415.26 parts per million (ppm) in May, 2019.24 The last time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere was 400 ppm, sea levels were \"nearly 100 feet\" higher than today.25 There were no humans then.26 U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann, warns that the planet's carbon problem might be much worse than the IPCC has estimated, making it even more mandatory that countries transition to renewable energy with the same urgency that \"drove the U.S. industrial mobilization in World War Two. By 2100, one study puts the total number of properties submerged at 2.4 million, at a cost of $1 trillion.29 According to scientists, greenhouse gas emissions accelerated like a \"speeding freight train\" in 2018.30 If warming is held to 2.7 degrees F, 1.5 degrees Celsius (C), the UN makes the conservative estimate that the cost of climate change will be $54 trillion, but the cost would grow to $69 trillion if warming reaches 3.6 degrees F or more.31 (1 degree C = 1.8 degrees F) The IPCC, which includes more than 1,300 scientists from around the world, \"forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5-10 degrees F over the next century.\" To provide historical perspective to the magnitude of such a global temperature change and its climatological consequences, \"at the end of the last ice age, when the Northeast United States was covered by more than 3,000 feet of ice, average temperatures were only 5 to 9 degrees cooler than today. Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman found an 11 percent chance of six degrees C of warming just by repeatedly running models of warming.39 A \"worst-case\" business-as-usual model of climate change could yield a rise in temperature of eight degrees C. At eight degrees the oceans would eventually swell to two hundred feet higher, flooding what are now two-thirds of the world's major cities; hardly any land on the planet would be capable of efficiently producing any of the food we now eat; forests would be roiled by rolling storms of fire, and coasts would be punished by more and more intense hurricanes; the suffocating hood of tropical disease would reach northward to enclose parts of what we now call the Arctic; probably a third of the planet would be made unlivable by heat; and what are today literally unprecedented and intolerable droughts and heat waves would be the quotidian conditions of whatever human life was able to endure.40 And there is one more turn of the screw.

[...]Trump's techniques of trance induction are described, including the importance of lying, repetition, invidious comparison, and growth panic. ...there is a direct correlation between traumatic childhood and the ability to go into a trance.1 NARCISSISM, PROJECTION, AND SOCIAL ALTERS: \"Just over 57 percent of the general American population believes that 'right and wrong in U.S. law should be based on God's law,'\" while \"59 percent of evangelical protestants believe that the Bible should be taken literally.\" [...]a huge swath of the populace is susceptible to the appeal of a religious total-ism intent on destroying the separation of church and state and on making the U.S. a Christian nation. Since fundamentalism is also associated with concern that \"one's own group is threatened by outside enemies,\" the potential audience for totalistic appeals from the religious right dovetails with right-wing political ideology.42 The Southern Baptists are the prime example, with politicians preaching Christian nationalism at the 2018 denominational convention.43 The 2017 Baylor Research Survey studied 1,501 adults to discover why Christians are such avid supporters of Donald Trump. The sadism and arrogance of Trumpism is on display for a world aghast at what has become of American freedom and democracy, perhaps nowhere more shockingly than in the zero-tolerance immigration policy that separated 3,000 parents from their children.109 The notion of the United States as an exceptional nation-a proverbial city on a hill, has been exposed as a sham on the world stage. [...]we find ourselves in \"a foul sort of trance\" with a president who is \"staggeringly ill-informed, erratic, reckless and dishonest\"110 and supported by a shockingly unpatriotic and immoral gaggle of moralists, racists, and the ultra-wealthy.

As Part II of the 3-part series that examines support for Trump, fundamentalist childrearing, and the social trance, this article describes the childrearing beliefs and practices among fundamentalists and those influenced by them that create the formative mechanisms for the group trance that engulfs the Christian right. The issue is how, amidst the unprecedented malfeasance surrounding this administration, Donald Trump maintains his presidency against the opposition of more than half of the country. It is argued that fundamentalist immersion in a social trance is crucial to maintaining Trump's political support, and that childrearing and alter formation are key to understanding the basis for the Right's acquiescence in Trump's abhorrent behavior and policies. It is suggested that fundamentalism is engaged in a purity campaign to cleanse America of non-Christian elements, a fanaticism so pronounced that one professional has proposed the existence of the Religious Trauma Syndrome. Using religious beliefs to terrorize and corporal punishment to chastise, fundamentalist parents dominate their children, generating in them authoritarian personalities, i.e., predispositions to obey authority unhesitatingly and defend against anxiety by switching into social alters. It is proposed that in adulthood, alter formation is transformed into political group-fantasies, which are crucial to trance induction. A network of conservative and religious groups, institutions, and individuals promote and elaborate these illusions to benefit conservative political and religious interests and maintain Donald Trump's presidency. Part II concludes by focusing on moms who function as proxy patriarchs in the family and the political repercussions of childhood trauma as evidenced in the behavior of Trump supporters. Part III will focus on the social trance and trance induction.

Transfixed by the dilemmas and distractions of postmodern life, the apocalyptic fears and fantasies of fundamentalist religion, and the malevolence and pathological narcissism of Donald Trump5 and his \"basket of deplorables,\"6 a significant portion of the American populace fiddles while the Republic burns, mesmerized by a painstakingly-fabricated social trance.7 We are mired in a religio-political witch's brew, created by decades of propagandizing by Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and iHeartMedia and Entertainment (formerly Clear Channel),8 and by the efforts of pundits, personages, politicians, and preachers such as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Charles Colson, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Paul Pressler, Paige Patterson, Richard Land, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Tim LaHaye, Beverly LaHaye, Grover Norquist, Dick Cheney, Michelle Malkin, Jerry Falwell, W. A. Criswell, Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Richard Viguerie, and Rick Warren,9 and the machinations of Christian nationalists,10 the funding of wealthy GOP donors11 and the advocacy and research institutions they have subsidized.12 Fueled by childhoods replete with pain and religious terror, Christo-capitalist warriors, fighting for some version of God the Capitalist Father against fears of emasculation and feminine engulfment, are staging a no-holdsbarred struggle to insure that patriarchal privileges, chauvinist pretensions, and racist prerogatives triumph over forces of enlightenment, modernity, and feminine inclusiveness. \"18 They have contempt for and applaud attacks on immigrants, women, Latinos, and African Americans,19 and swagger with \"manly-he-man\" masculinity.20 They seem unconcerned with Russia's attack on democracy in the 2016 election,21 with President Trump's attempt to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation,22 or with Trump and the Trump family's efforts to benefit financially from his presidency,23 or with GOP efforts to take health care away from 13 million Americans,24 or with a tax bill that gave 87 percent of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the rich and corporations,25 or with indicators of massive climate change,26 or with Trump's racist xenophobia.27 Wittingly, at the corporate and institutional level, and unwittingly, at the personal level, the Christian right has both helped fabricate and fallen into a social trance.28 Ironically, they have become the beautiful female (victim), enabling and, so far, approving Trump's \"You can do anything.\" [...]manly participation in the world of athletic competition, an arena that separates winners-Charles Atlas, he-man, who gets the girl, from losers-the skinny guy at the beach with sand in his face. [...]evangelicals see the dedication as a step toward \"the greatest battle ever: the 'End Times.\"

[...]his body will be brought to... the county seat, nine miles from here, and hung in the court house square for all to see... [...]as historian Jacquelyn Hall has observed, \"it may be no accident that the vision of the black man as a threatening beast flourished during the first phase of the southern women's rights movement, a fantasy of transgression against boundary-transgressing women. Teenage girls found their pleasures similarly coopted by their mothers, and while some rebelled against their tyranny and ended up in reform school or sterilized under discredited eugenics theories,58 others chose to play the role of the wronged southern belle in lynching dramas. [...]the domestic frustrations of life in the middle class contributed mightily to the emotional agenda that expedited the lynching of black men. According to Billy's mother, her husband never punished in anger, but when he did, she winced and reminded herself of a Bible verse, \"Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.\" [...]the children didn't die!\" (Italics in original)88 Disguised as the will of God and the essence of morality, Biblicallysanctioned corporal punishment provided the prototype and the excuse for the abusive upbringing southern children endured. Since white south- erners relied on the scriptures as a guide for rearing their children, a survey of the Bible's teachings on parents, children, and discipline is in order.

In the psychohistory of the antebellum South, the extent of child abuse in slaveholder families is important for understanding how members of the southern elite were reared and the extent to which they were infected with the toxic residue of their elders’ passions and rages. It is argued that the Old South was a developing region, rather than an already developed one. Consequently, the rate of child abuse that is characteristic of contemporary postindustrial societies is not the proper paradigm for conceptualizing the abuse rate in slaveholder families. It is proposed instead that the rate of child abuse in contemporary developing societies is a better fit for estimating abuse in the antebellum South. Societal and familial variables impinging on the abuse of slaveholder children—corporal punishment, alcohol consumption, hyper-masculinity, a traumatogenic culture of violence, wife abuse, maternal ambivalence and neglect, miscegenation and incest are discussed, as is the likelihood of maltreatment by slaves. Using a study of child abuse across 28 nations, tentative rates of abuse are proposed.