If Bill O’Reilly is gone, can Donald Trump be far behind?

It is only a matter of time. The case against Trump is growing and growing. Nothing said against him before he took office has changed. He has only proven his duplicity and craven immorality the more.

Let’s be clear about what brought O’Reilly down. It was his contemptible disregard for other human beings, his objectification of women to the point he felt entitled to render them helpless in the face of his sordid appetite.

The very concept of morality, that which those adhering to religious institutions value the most, was cynically deluded and thrown under the bus by the kind of behavior O’Reilly exercised repeatedly.

He apparently rose to his elevated social status not in spite of his immorality, but because of it. That’s the conclusion one must draw from the fact that his superior at Fox, Roger Ailes, was forced out for the exact same kind of thing.

Want to get rid of Trump, then zero in on his culture of immorality. As for Vice President Pence, don’t expect his aura of holiness to exclude him from this culture. How many times have we seen the most devout to fall the hardest? Are we forever going to fall for such charades?

Pence’s big giveaway is his horrid disrespect for women from a public policy standpoint.

There are very common threads who what’s wrong with our society to permit the rise of an O’Reilly, a Trump and a Pence. It’s amazing to me how few people actually see the obvious on all this.

From personal behavior to public policy, the common thread is that it is all based on the degradation by white male chauvinist pigs of women.

None of us is perfect, but in terms of the kind of society we’ve allowed ourselves to become since the days of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, for example, it can be traced to the rise of a form of authoritarianism and rancid entitlement that exists not for everyone, of course, but at its core, for stupid white males, only.

The only thing that allows this to work is cultural assimilationist tendencies. That is, it’s how the victims of this brutality identify with it and reinforce it, because doing otherwise would simply be too frightening, or possibly more likely, simply too demanding.

So it is women, fully entrapped by their own co-dependency, the children, the elderly, the immigrant, the ethnic or racial minority, and the LGBT person, who work the hardest to “fit in” to the male dominated paradigm, who make this all work.

White male dominion hates feminism, racial and ethnic equality, pathways to citizenship for immigrants, and LGBT equality. As individuals in isolation, any person may be susceptible to a repudiation of these prejudices. But taken as a cultural whole, they represent a formidable, intimidating peer reality.

Since the first election of Obama as president, these impulses were fed by ill-intentioned elites seeking to reclaim ground they feared they were losing.

They became merchants of hate, and their primary targets were white males at all levels of society. They flooded these targets with opioids and “the opiate of the masses,” irrational fundamentalist religion, to cause these men, and their desperate wives, to ignore the mess of their own lives and to zero in with hatred and prejudice against their perceived enemies.

The application of the nihilist philosophy of post-modernism, substituting rebellion and power for any notions of love and responsibility, helped fuel this dystopian game plan. In myriad ways through the popular culture since the 1970s, post-modern nihilism and its accompanying anti-civil social behaviors, have come to dominate our popular culture.

Use of degraded potty-mouth language on TV sitcoms is just one deliberate aspect, and O’Reilly and Trump rose through the ranks of our culture by capitalizing on rude and ugly behavior that post-modernism made permissible, indeed made them almost mandatory.

Excesses in professional sports is another. No one wants to face up to how pro football is mashing up the brains of its players, for example.

All this needs to change if we stand a chance as a civilization.