WWJD?

Remember those bracelets that were so popular some years ago–the ones that had “WWJD” on them? It stood for “What Would Jesus Do?” Granted, I’m not a Christian (and I certainly don’t play one on TV), but I’m pretty sure the White Supremicists and Nationalists posing as Christians are definitely not doing what Jesus would do.

I’ve previously posted about the book “The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory,” written by Tim Alberta, an authentic and clearly devoted Evangelical who spent two years visiting Evangelical congregations and interviewing pastors. I’ve also posted about the film “Bad Faith,” a documentary which traces the takeover–and transformation– of American Evangelical Christianity by the (very) far Right. Those investigations are being joined by a number of other inquiries into a movement that has been some fifty years in the making, but has only recently become too obvious, too powerful and too frightening to ignore.

Persuasion recently published an essay by Jonathan Rauch focusing on the dilemma faced by the pastors who are clinging to their convictions about the centrality of Jesus message to their religion in the face of congregants who reject Jesus’ “wokeness.” As Rauch explains, in his conversations with these pastors, the words have varied “but the tune is the same. Christian witness is in trouble in white evangelical America. And the biggest challenge is not from the secular world; it is sitting in the pews.”

Many prominent evangelicals (and some ex-evangelicals) believe the same thing. Writes Peter Wehner: “In important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many—is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.”

I have long believed that the rise of the MAGA Christian Nationalist movement is rooted in fear. As American demographics have shifted and the broader culture has become more accepting of women, gays, and people of color, White Christian males have panicked over their perceived loss of dominance and status. As the author notes,

Don’t be afraid is one of the Bible’s most frequently repeated commands. Yet today’s white evangelical world seems consumed by fear. There is fear of the left: “Fear,” as historian Paul Matzko has said, “that if Donald Trump doesn’t win in 2016, isn’t reelected in 2020, that is the end of American Christianity as we know it, that the godless humanists and feminists and civil rights activists are going to swamp America and destroy what makes us great.” There is fear of cultural change. More than three-fourths of white evangelicals say the country is in danger of losing its identity and culture—by which they mean their identity and culture.

Above all, there is fear of loss of status. “They realize they no longer have numbers on their side,” the historian Kristin Du Mez told me. “They see that the democratic process will not secure their aims for them. We’ve lost the culture; they’re coming for us; we’ve got to defend the right to live as obedient, faithful Christians.”

Christians have been told to emulate Jesus, but the pastors interviewed for the article report that the transformation of their religion into a political movement has caused their parishioners to ignore Gospel messages. Exhortations to love the marginalized, love the foreigner, “Those words, said one, fall on deaf ears.”

The essay describes a new wall of separation, but it notes that this wall isn’t between church and state, but between what Rauch terms “personal Christianity and public Christianity.”

This wall rationalizes political conduct whose cruelty Christians would abhor in their church lives; it sets up two incommensurable moralities, an absolute one in the personal realm and an instrumental one in the political realm.

Roush quotes one Southern Baptist pastor for the belief that the next great “mission field” will not be abroad or among nonbelievers, but within the American evangelical church and its members.

Given the transformation of much of the Evangelical church into a MAGA political cult, Rauch asks the obvious question: has White Evangelical Christianity, in its embrace of MAGA values, repudiated itself? It certainly seems that way, and if that is the case, can we expect the secular world not to notice?

MAGA “Christians” no longer ask what Jesus would do, because the answer is obvious. And very inconvenient.

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When Ignorance Meets Arrogance

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton wrote

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Reflection and choice require something entirely absent from Trump, Musk and their respective clown shows: knowledge and understanding.

MAGA’s ferocious assault on knowledge, expertise, and factual communication has given us today’s constitutional crisis–a crisis that reflects not just the massive civic ignorance of the general population, but the arrogance of the White Christian Nationalists who can–thanks to the Internet–choose such “facts” as they want to believe. Of course, as Hamilton would tell us, choosing false facts is not “reflection,” and ignoring both inconvenient facts and laws does not facilitate rational choice.

There is a chasm between the world inhabited by people who are capable of recognizing the current coup and the credulous souls and MAGA cultists who combine profound and visible ignorance with a wholly unearned arrogance–who take the laughable pronouncements from Trump and Musk at face value.

In a recent Substack letter, Paul Krugman described that chasm. 

Here’s where we are as a nation right now:

1. We may be in the middle of a trade war. Or maybe not

2. We’re in the middle of a constitutional crisis. No maybe.

3. We may be in the midst of a sort of digital coup, which might as a side consequence cause large parts of the federal government to cease functioning at all.

The unifying theme here, I guess, is that the federal government has been taken over by bad people who also are stunningly ignorant.

Krugman referenced the “concessions” made by Mexico and Canada, in return for Trump backing off his ridiculous tariffs.  Neither country agreed to do anything it wasn’t already doing--indeed, as Heather Cox Richardson has noted–these “concessions” confirmed agreements previously reached with the Biden administration.

As Krugman wrote,

The U.S., on the other hand, agreed to crack down on weapons shipments to Mexico. Trump will spin this as a victory; low-information voters and some intimidated media outlets may go along with the lie. But basically America backed down.

So is Trump the classic bully who runs away when someone stands up to him? It definitely looks that way.

Let’s be clear, however: this isn’t a case of no harm, no foul. By making the tariff threat in the first place, Trump made it clear that America is no longer a nation that honors its agreements. By caving at the first sign of opposition, he also made himself look weak. China must be very pleased at how all this has played out.

And as I argued the other day, the now ever-present threat of tariffs will have a chilling effect on business planning, inhibiting economic integration and damaging manufacturing.

Krugman described Musk’s effort to abolish USAID (which the man-child called a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,”) pointing out that Musk not only isn’t president — he isn’t even a government official. Trump’s approval is irrelevant: shutting down an agency established by Congress is both illegal and unconstitutional.  Only Congress can legally abolish it.

This isn’t about saving money–USAID is responsible for a tiny fraction of the federal budget, although few voters understand enough about the federal budget to recognize how small a portion it is. Krugman observes that “in Musk’s worldview the mere fact of trying to help people in need makes you a radical-left Marxist who hates America.” And helping people is what USAID does; it funds humanitarian programs around the world. It feeds, medicates and vaccinates people. It saves lives.

Its termination–or even a pause–will cause many deaths.

And how many voters understand the enormity of the threat posed by the takeover of the Treasury’s computers by Musk’s interns?

Those systems control all federal payments, from grants to nonprofits to Social Security checks to salaries of federal workers. The potential for mischief is immense. 

Imagine that you’re a federal contractor who has made campaign donations to Democrats; suddenly the government stops paying what it owes you and brushes off inquiries by saying that they’re working on the problem. Or you’re a federal employee who, according to somebody in your office who has a personal grievance, has expressed sympathy for DEI; somehow your regularly scheduled salary payments stop being deposited into your bank account. Or even imagine that you’re a retiree who canvassed for Kamala Harris, and for some reason your checks from Social Security stop coming.

Don’t say they wouldn’t do such things. We’ve seen these people in action, and of course they would if they could.

As I type these words, America is in thrall to people who disregard the law, disregard court orders to stop, and whose arrogance deprives them of any understanding of the immense and long-lasting harm they are doing, as they play to the cheers of an equally ignorant cult.

Instead of “reflection and choice,” America is submitting to “accident and force.” And the rest of the world is watching.

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No More Rule Of Law

Talking Poiints Memo has been considering what the publication calls “Musk’s Little Green Men.”

The little green men are the Musk operatives who have been taking over the top federal administrative agencies–the Office of Personnel Management, the OMB, GAO, the Treasury Department…).  TPM asks “Who are these guys?” and the answer turns out to be far from comforting. These Musk flunkies are young men between 19 and 24 years of age. Several are college dropouts who left to go into tech and are currently interning at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies. At least one is a “Thiel fellow.”

They know a lot about computers–and nothing, obviously, about the Constitution or the rule of law.

These interns have gained access to the private information of millions of government employees. They have connected insecure computers to the secure ones used by the federal agencies, allowing them access that could allow them to cut off payments to government vendors, Social Security recipients, humanitarian NGOs and state governments.

Like Musk, these young “techie nerds” are unelected, unappointed and unauthorized– and happily violating numerous laws.

As Josh Marshall writes,

In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.

Musk is claiming that they’ve “found” $4 billion dollars of “waste” a day, and is threatening to turn it off. Of course, what Elon Musk considers “waste” is undoubtedly similar to the version of “free speech” with which he destroyed Twitter’s utility and credibility. 

Whether Musk’s version of “waste” is accurate or not, however, is beside the point. What he and his band of techie hackers are doing is illegal. Monumentally illegal. 

Senator Ron Wyden has challenged the hacking–noting that Musk lacks a security clearance and has multiple conflicts of interest. (The full text of his letter is available here.) 

To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems … The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China — a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems — endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Americans did (narrowly and with the help of significant voter suppression) elect one megalomaniac, but no one cast a vote for Elon Musk. No voter, no legislative chamber, no public official was empowered to authorize his takeover of vital federal agencies, or the substitution of his opinion about expenditures for that of Congress.

While Trump diverts public attention by undermining what had been the world’s strongest economy, terrorizing immigrants and making the country safe for White Christian Nationalists, Musk is managing the coup.

Neither respects–or obeys–the law.

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About Those Alternative “Realities”

Trump and Musk are engaged in a takeover of the federal government, and MAGA folks have no idea it’s happening or what it means.

A recent Letter from An American— Heather Cox Richardson explained why–explained the peril at the very heart of this time in America’s history. That, of course, wasn’t her point–in her usual, immensely important fashion, she was deconstructing Trumpian propaganda by providing a factual context to yet another “Big Lie.”

It was one relatively small example of the flood of lies being facilitated/echoed by rightwing media.

In this case, it was the President’s recent lies about his threats to Colombia. Trump’s version of events was that, in the wake of Colombia’s refusal to accept two military planes filled with deportees, his threat to impose tariffs on goods from that country had caused an official retreat. His bullying had won! See how great he’s making America??

As usual, with Trump, reality was…different.

It turns out that Colombia and the U.S. had reached an agreement under President Biden, under which it had accepted 475 deportation flights from 2020 to 2024– 124 flights in 2024 alone. The Biden administration had used commercial and charter flights and scheduled them; Trump used a military plane that arrived unannounced.

As Tim Naftali of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs explained: “If a foreign country tries to land its military planes—except in an emergency—without an existing agreement that is an infringement of sovereignty.” Colombia rejected the military planes without prior authorization and offered the use of its presidential plane instead.

Colombia also asked the U.S. to provide notice and decent treatment for its people, an issue that had been raised and resolved in 2023 after migrants arrived in hand and foot cuffs. Colombian president Gustavo Petro noted that the U.S. had committed that it would guarantee dignified conditions for the repatriation of migrants.

Note that Colombia actually accepted the migrants; after the plane landed in Honduras, Columbia sent its presidential plane to pick them up.

America’s Bully-in-Chief not only lied about what had occured, he deported Colombian staff members of the World Bank who were working for international diplomatic organizations in the U.S., and canceled visa appointments at Colombia’s U.S. Embassy.

Not only did he lie and overact–Trump is nothing if not performative-his threat to levy a punitive tariff led Colombia’s President Petro to threaten a retaliatory one. If that occurred, American farmers would bear the brunt.

Colombia imports 96.7% of the corn it feeds its livestock from the U.S., putting Colombia in the top five export markets for U.S. corn. According to a letter written by a bipartisan group of lawmakers eager to protect that trade, led by Senator Todd Young (R-IN), in 2003 the U.S. exported more than 4 million metric tons of corn to Colombia, which translated to $1.14 billion in sales. “American farmers cannot afford to lose such a vital export market,” the lawmakers wrote, “especially when access to the top U.S. corn export market, Mexico, is already at risk.”

Trump’s White House–never tethered to honesty–declared “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again.”

Really? Do you “respect” the drunken uncle who disrupts family get-togethers and infuriates everyone?

And that leads to the major peril referenced in my opening paragraph. As Richardson put it, “The administration’s handling of the situation with Colombia reveals that their power depends on convincing people to ignore reality and instead to believe in the fantasy world Trump dictates.”

Richardson noted an announcement by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that “[d]eportation flights have begun.” But–as she also pointed out, in the real world, nothing is “beginning.” In 2024, Colombia accepted more than two U.S. flights of migrants a week on average, and everyone on this particular deportation flight had been arrested and detained by the Biden administration.

Richardson’s Letter provided details of the migration and deportation agreements forged with Latin American countries during the Biden Administration, details which demonstrate the dishonesty of Trump’s characterizations of these events. But most Americans won’t see those details. Most–even those who detest him– will take Trump’s outright lies at face value.

Use of “the big lie” technique comes to us from Nazi Germany. Wikipedia defines it as a “gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.” The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe how people could be induced to believe colossal lies. He wrote that people would believe big lies because they would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Trump and his unelected sidekick Musk consistently demonstrate that “impudence.”

These are perilous times for “non-Aryans”– and for all people of good will.

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And In Trumpy Indiana

I’ve been seeing calls for a national protest on February 5th–to take place at all 50 statehouses. I believe from noon to 2:00. If anyone can confirm, or identify the original sponsors, please post that information. If you need something tangible and Hoosier to protest, today’s post should deliver…

If you wondered whether Indiana’s new Governor, Mike Braun, would follow the agenda of his running mates–Beckwith, Banks and RoQuita, all of whom are “out and proud” White Christian Nationalists–there’s no longer any doubt. Braun is slavishly following Trump’s assault on anyone who isn’t a straight White Christian Male.

Mike Leppert has accurately described Braun’s assault, which consists of “othering” any group that doesn’t fall into that slice of Hoosier citizenship. Braun immediately followed Trump’s lead by purging state government of any DEI efforts. Then his budget proposal took an ax to disfavored “others.”

He began with the Indians.

In 2025, new Governor Mike Braun, in his first budget proposal in office, proposes to end funding for the Native American Indian Affairs Commission. The cut comes as part of his 15% cut to the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. That may sound like a lot of money, but it isn’t. The state is spending less than $3 million a year on the ICRC in the current budget.

It got worse from there.

As Leppert quite accurately noted, budget proposals from a newly elected governor are a marker, defining his priorities– and in this case, defining his character as well.

In addition to withdrawing from his predecessor’s agreement with the Pokagon Indians, Braun’s budget eliminates funding for the Indiana Commission for Women, an organization created to assess the needs of Indiana women and their families and promote their full participation in Indiana society. Also gone is $10 million earmarked for Martin University, and the College Success Program. Martin University is Indiana’s only predominantly Black institution; the Success program assists minority and first-generation college students.

These cuts by Braun won’t change the lives of any white, male, Christian. Except for those comforted by real or perceived harm to the other. It’s a foundational change in governing philosophy that is still taking shape…

Braun isn’t managing money with these cuts, he’s managing messaging. These moves are proclamations of what he supports, or in these cases, what he opposes. And the fallout is not simple addition and subtraction in this one document.

As Leppert says, the message is obvious: Native American, Black and female populations are now officially “the others” in Indiana. Those populations now join the GOP’s ongoing attacks on trans people–and by implication, all LGBTQ Hoosiers.

We certainly won’t see any pushback on “othering” from a legislature that owes its GOP dominance from persistent gerrymandering. Senate Bill 235, for example, co-authored by the odious Mike Young, gleefully prohibits “state agencies, recipients of state contracts or grants, state educational institutions, and health profession licensing boards” from taking account of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Indiana’s legislature has also continued and deepened its all-out assault on education. Senate Bill 202–a sweeping bill attacking academic freedom in Indiana’s public colleges and universities– has been joined by HB 1002, a “high priority” of the Republican leadership. Its 130+ pages includes three especially noteworthy efforts to dumb down public education in the Hoosier state:

  • It removes all prerequisites for a person to be appointed to be Indiana Secretary of Education, paving the way for the Governor to appoint a non-educator or non-resident. 
  • It removes a requirement in current law that requires a governing body to provide a non-charter school that students of the same age or grade can attend.” This should be seen as a companion bill House Bill 1136, which would dissolve IPS and other urban districts and turn all of their schools into charters.  
  • HB 1002 also removes an existing responsibility of charter authorizers to ensure that the school is in compliance with applicable law. One of the ways charter schools currently differ from the private schools that accept vouchers is that they are subject to more stringent legal oversight; this provision would dramatically undermine that oversight–which is entirely absent from the voucher program.

It is impossible to miss the GOP’s agenda, both nationally and at the state level. That agenda follows the anti-democratic, anti-civic-equality prescriptions of Project 2025: ensure that straight White Christian males recover social dominance; continue and strengthen the anti-majoritarian systems (gerrymandering, electoral college, etc.) that facilitate governance by the Republican minority, make it difficult or impossible for higher education institutions to maintain intellectual integrity, and destroy the public schools that bring different students together, replacing them with religious schools that harden tribal affiliations. 

And while all that is going on, eradicate sources of information inconsistent with White Christian nationalist dogma–not just educational institutions, but media outlets unwilling to bend the knee, and government websites that might accidentally contain factual information about the composition of the American polity.

Blue states might resist Program 2025, but not the racist, misogynistic, homophobic troglodytes in Indiana government.  

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