Category Archives: Random Blogging

Scary Psuedo-Christians

I would hide under my bed, but it’s a platform bed. There isn’t enough room.

As America barrels toward November 5th (or, as I’ve come to call it, Judgement Day), I encounter vastly more reporting on the people who form the MAGA base, a Christian Nationalist cohort that I just don’t encounter in my daily life. Without those reports, I would probably agree with my husband, who insists that there simply can’t be that many voters who aren’t repelled by Trump and his weird, disjointed fascist rhetoric.

I really, really want to believe that. I want confirmation of my lifelong belief in the good will and good sense of the  American public. But then I come across articles like a recent one in The Atlantic.

In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.

“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”

The event had been cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, but it was entirely political–amplifying (as if we needed amplification) the reality that fundamentalist Christianity has morphed into a political, rather than religious, identity.  This particular effort targeted “souls” in swing states.

It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.

So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.

This particular series of events was organized by an influential “prophet” named Lance Wallnau, best known for having urged his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, and who described that day’s efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.”

The article describes what happens when the organizers get people under the tent. Attendees will be met with intense pressure to move them “from passivity to action” and to enlist them into “God’s army.” According to the article, there are loudspeakers,  drums, lights and “a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high.”

It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.

“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”

Because Jesus–according to these pastors–wants them to go to the polls and elect Donald Trump.

There’s much more in the article, if you have the stomach to read it in its entirety. The “Christians” portrayed have nothing in common with the Christians I know, or the churches with which I am familiar. It’s hard for me to believe that thousands–millions–of people do subscribe to this massive distortion of a faith tradition, but then I recall that some seventy million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and another eighty million didn’t bother to vote at all.

Most of those non-voters probably weren’t Christian Nationalists , but they also weren’t sufficiently concerned about the possibility of a Trump victory to cast a ballot. How many of the apathetic will vote this year–and for whom?

If I lose some weight, maybe I can crawl under that platform bed.

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It Can Happen Here

Most sentient Americans know this election isn’t normal–and that it’s pivotal. And from all indications, it is very, very close.

If there was ever any doubt about the basis of Donald Trump’s appeal, his recent speeches should dispel them. As his mental faculties–such as they were– continue to deteriorate, he has become less inhibited, engaging more directly in appeals to fear and– especially– hate.

As a recent article in The Bulwark reported,

The Two Minutes Hate was a famous feature of Orwell’s portrayal of Oceania in 1984. The Two Months of Hate is now a notable feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Donald Trump and his allies are closing this campaign with two months of hate in a way we’ve never seen before. And it could work.

 Trump has “abandoned any pretense of debating real issues or proposing serious programs. “In the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.” He hasn’t just accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country, he has also accused Americans who disagree with him of being “the enemy within.”

Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”…

Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.

It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.

If this seems chillingly unAmerican to most of us, it’s because we’ve opted to ignore the long history of American Nazism. That history was traced in a 2021 Washignton Post article.

Even during World War II, as the United States mobilized to defeat Nazi Germany and portrayed itself as an “arsenal of democracy,” Americans remained divided about who deserved to be treated as a full citizen. In an era when restrictive nationalist and authoritarian movements took power across Europe and Asia, even explicit appeals to Nazism attracted adherents in the United States.

As the article pointed out, the idea central to Nazi fascism — the argument that “real” Americans  needed to be protected from those threatening “others” — was hardly foreign to Americans steeped in deep traditions of racism and nativism.

Trump recently announced that he will be holding a rally in Madison Square Garden–bringing to knowledgable ears an echo of  the Bund’s February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. That rally drew more than 20,000 enthusiastic supporters under banners that included swastikas and images of George Washington.

It wasn’t just the Bund.

Father Charles Coughlin — a Roman Catholic priest with a popular radio broadcast in the 1930s — went even further, mixing anti-semitic rhetoric with direct support for Adolf Hitler. Eventually forced off the air in 1942 and nearly defrocked by the church for his pro-Nazi politics, Coughlin’s near-decade of national popularity reflected the appeal those beliefs had for a measurable segment of the American public.

The Post profiled a number of other prominent Nazi sympathizers, for whom “democracy was worth sacrificing to preserve the dominance of the White race — as they defined it.”

Just as the revived KKK in the 1920s enjoyed mainstream support, the ideas animating U.S. fascist groups were hardly fringe. In April 1940, when asked whether “Jews have too much power and influence in this country,” a national majority answered, “yes.” After U.S. entry into the war, public participation in pro-Nazi organizations ceased, but the sentiments remained. In July 1945, the number of Americans who responded “yes” to this question about influence had risen to 67 percent.

The war drove American Nazis underground, but nativism, anti-semitism and authoritarian tendencies did not vanish, even in the fastest-growing city in the country, Los Angeles. Los Angeles had been one of the largest centers of Klan activity outside the South in the 1920s and 1930s. A Klan member had been elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1923.

Polling tells us that America’s Presidential race is essentially tied. If that’s accurate, it can happen here.

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Those “Indoctrination” Charges

In a recent New York Times essay, Jamelle Bouie considered the accusation–increasingly leveled by the Right–that educators (especially but not exclusively at the university level) “indoctrinate” students.

When I first stumbled across that accusation, I found it ludicrous. As any professor will confirm, teachers are lucky to “indoctrinate” students sufficiently to get them to read the course syllabus. Like so many of the loony-tunes beliefs that have currency on the MAGA Right, this one is prompted by the conviction that no one could really disagree with their perspectives, so if many younger Americans reject their world-view, that rejection must be due to pernicious activity by those hated “libruls.”

As Bouie notes, they’re paranoid. He began his essay with examples:

According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.

“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.

This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”

And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”

As Bouie concedes, ordinary Americans often worry that, as their children find friends and have experiences outside the home, they will adopt ideas that differ from those with which they’ve been raised. But as he says, that is not what we have here. “What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.”

After all, the ideological defection of one’s children couldn’t possibly be attributable to their encounters with reality. It must be a result of nefarious “grooming” and “indoctrination.” As Bouie points out,

To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people….

If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.

These students haven’t been indoctrinated; they’ve encountered reality–facts, evidence and experiences at odds with the beliefs of the cult. As Bouie says, “It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.”

But Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

Why consider the possibility that you might be wrong about climate change denial, or the government’s right to force a woman to give birth?

In the real world, professors lack the ability to indoctrinate, Jews don’t have space lasers, and liberals don’t control the weather.

The kids are just sane.

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President Vance?

Those of us who have been obsessively following the political campaigns have been struck by Trump’s increasingly precipitous mental decline.  In just the past week, he has turned in truly bizarre performances. At a rally, he stopped taking questions and stood for 39 minutes silently “dancing” to music from what was evidently a playlist; in interviews, he refused to answer questions, instead going wildly off-subject, lobbing insults and demeaning journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

With less than three weeks left until November 5th, we seem to be in a race to see whether Trump’s meltdown will be too complete–and too impossible for even MAGA to ignore– before the election, or whether America will risk the unthinkable by electing him and then waking up to the reality that we’ve really elected JD Vance.

Heather Cox Richardson has focused upon that prospect, noting that–even if Trump wasn’t so obviously losing it–he’s 78 years old. The likelihood of a senile 78-year-old serving a full term is, to be charitable, low.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Richardson described several other “tech bros” who subscribe to that world-view and support both Trump and Project 2025, which–to use academic language–“operationalizes” it. It is a worldview and a plan that JD Vance wholeheartedly endorses.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Vance would continue the Right’s war on education; Richardson notes that Vance has called American universities “the enemy.” But there’s much more.

Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages.

The available evidence suggests that MAGA folks are far less supportive of Vance than they are of Trump, despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that Vance is a far more articulate communicator of their Project 2025 worldview. I wonder how many of them will knowingly vote for a Vance presidency– assuming they are capable of recognizing that probability.

I also wonder how MAGA voters are processing Trump’s increasingly public deterioration. How are they explaining away the bizarre comments about sharks and the “great” Hannibal Lecter, and Trump’s own “beautiful body?” Do they worry about the fact that every economist–liberal or conservative–says Trump’s love-affair with tariffs would tank the economy, increase inflation and impose a huge tax on American families?

Or does their loyalty to Faux News and its clones protect them from even hearing about these things?

And most obsessively of all, I wonder how many of these fearful, angry, and irrational people are there–and how many will vote?

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TPM Says It All

I often refer to Talking Points Memo, one of the most credible and professional online sources of information. But the other day, the site’s Morning Memo blew me away–it was as if David Kurtz, the author, was describing my own fears and moods as we count down to November 5th.

The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.

It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.

Kurtz writes that everything seems “frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.” Frozen in place is precisely the way I’ve been feeling–as though I am in suspended animation until I know whether the world I will leave to my grandchildren will be habitable and governable–whether I will leave them an admittedly imperfet society that is nevertheless working toward greater fairness, or one hurtling into another Dark Ages.

Because that concern isn’t hyperbole. That is the choice we face. As Kurtz put it,

Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.

He conveyed his “unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.”

It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.

As the essay repeatedly reminds us, Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to American democratic institutions–but the reality and immediacy of that threat tends to obscure what we have already lost–what the last 8 years have cost us, the “vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.”

The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.

The essay mourns the multiple ways that the persistence of older journalistic constructs has operated to normalize Trump–how it has created false equivalencies, and allowed anti-democratic forces to denigrate, undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions.

What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.

I’m holding my breath…

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