“Pretty boy” Pete Hegseth left a stinking path of adulterous cheating in his marriage path
Most of you have likely seen photos of an amped-up Pete Hegseth, covered in tattoos signifying various belief systems he adheres to. The documented laundry list of right-wing delusional markings imprinted on his body includes:
“Deus Vult”: This Latin phrase, which translates to “God wills it” and was a battle cry during the Crusades, is tattooed on his bicep. This tattoo was reportedly a reason a fellow service member flagged him as a potential “insider threat,” leading to his removal from duty at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
Jerusalem Cross: Located on his chest, this large cross surrounded by four smaller crosses is a historic Christian symbol representing the five wounds of Christ and the spread of the Gospel.
“Kafir”: Hegseth got a new tattoo in Arabic that reads “Kafir,” an Arabic word meaning “infidel” or “non-believer,” which has sparked outrage and criticism from some Muslim advocacy groups.
“We the People”: He has “We the people,” the opening words of the U.S. Constitution, emblazoned on his forearm.
1775, 13 stars, and an AR-15/American flag design: Above the “We the People” tattoo, he has “1775” in Roman numerals, representing the year of the Second Continental Congress, surrounded by 13 stars and an image combining an AR-15 rifle and an American flag.
Sword with Bible reference: A tattoo of a cross and sword referencing the Bible verse Matthew 10:34, which he interprets as “not peace, but a sword”.
All these religious undertones in ink became religious overtones in Hegseth’s public life. But it’s all pathetically hubristic garbage if you analyze it with the least bit of theological and historical context. The “five wounds of Christ” allusion is in reality a gory testament to excessive government authoritarian cruelty in the Roman Empire, which Trump and Hegseth seek to emulate. His cultural appropriation of the Kafir word meaning “infidel” aligns with the inane “not peace, but a sword” ideology of the Christian Crusades that wrought nothing but insane, warlike trips to the Middle East based on religious zealotry and political jealousy. That manic tradition of killing for dominance continues to this day. We saw it in two Iraqi Wars and the continual military-industrial support of Israel to our own country’s impoverishment.
Pre-Constitutional fervor
Even Hegseth’s claims to Constitutional fidelity, borne in the tattoo 1775, take an anachronistic off-ramp by celebrating a period before the United States was a fully formed nation. Combining that purposeful gap in patriotic fulfillment with an image of a deadly AR-15 rifle, created 200 years later, illustrates the irreconcilable inanity of Hegseth’s radical notions of what constitutes American ideals.
Proving that while Pete Hegseth is educated, he’s also willfully stupid. A Dumb Bro with a higher education degree is still a Dumb Bro.
The sick part of all this ill-educated symbolism is that the disgusting little prig had every opportunity to use his education and background to do somegood in this world. Instead, over time, he’s become a man addicted to many things; alcohol, sex, rule-breaking, adultery, lies, aggressive hyperbole, and death. He’s a fraud on par with his boss Donald Trump, and just as woefully bigoted, ignorant, and incurious. It
Selfishness as a worldview
But most of all, Hegseth is a selfish prick. He cares nothing about other people, other than to use them for his self-aggrandizing thirst for power and control. He stood before our nation’s generals spitting out threats amid calls for loyalty without having done a single thing to earn them.
Now, after retitling his responsibilities to the “Department of War,” he’s a man out of control and murdering people on the world’s oceans based on vague notions of “war” against the United States by people in little boats who could never reach our shores carrying drugs, if they were carrying any such cargo at all. We’re supposed to “trust the word” of the people carrying out the murders at sea that these boats are filled with dangerous drugs. But everyone allied with the Trump administration or forced to function in subservient roles is a demonstrated liar. Every. Single. One.
Turning Point terrorism
Another “pretty boy” fascist eager for death and destruction to bolster his sense of manhood
Thirst for Death
Hegseth’s addled-brained supporters love his unapologetic thirst for death. As reported by historian Heather Cox Richardson, “This evening, Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA posted on social media: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.”
To which Hegseth turned around, quoted Kolvet, and commented: “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.” Richardson notes: The U.S. Southern Command confirmed the strike against a small boat in the eastern Pacific, saying that “[i]ntelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route…. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”
But even after they blow up the boats, they return to kill any survivors floating on the wreckage. These are war crimes by any definition of the word. But to Pete Hegseth, they are offerings to the Religion of Death he has tattooed across his body. This campaign is Pete Hegseth’s international Crusade, his Inquisition, and his Christo-fascist lust for bodies floating in blood to make himself feel like he’s serving the God of Destruction and Chaos. Hegseth is inked on the outside and hollow on the inside.
But he loves death, and he’s good at that it seems. Perhaps it was even Hegseth who did Turning Point’s “dirty work” in murdering Charlie Kirk? Who knows? There’s so much wanton killing, masked abduction and brutality, illegal ICE raids, warrantless beatings, and detention centers bordering on torture chambers that we can’t tell who’s killing who, or why?
It’s just “business as usual” in Trumplandia.
Like Father Trump, Like Son Hegseth
As long as we’re touching on Hegseth’s callow interests and Trumplike qualities, he also reportedly paid $50,000 to a woman who alleges he sexually assaulted her. Hegseth never effectively denied the encounter, only its nature. He insists it was “consensual.
As noted on the website 19thnews.org: “She reported the matter to police, but no charges were ever filed against Hegseth. He and his representatives have maintained that the encounter was consensual. At the time, Hegseth was still legally married to his second wife and had recently welcomed a child with the woman who would become his third.
“But you acknowledge that you cheated on your wife and you cheated on a woman by whom you had just fathered a child? You have admitted that,” pressed Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
“I will allow your words to speak for themselves,” Hegseth said.
Some contend that rape (or sexual assault) is as bad as homicide because of what it kills in the life of its victims. The National Library of Medicine seems to think so.
Recently I researched how Wheaton College felt about its graduate Russell Vought, whose fealty to Project 2025 is now on full display in his job serving the Trump Administration. I found a column by Timon Cline, whose bio reads: “Editor in Chief at American Reformer. He is an attorney and a fellow at the Craig Center at Westminster Theological Seminary and the Director of Scholarly Initiatives at the Hale Institute of New Saint Andrews College. His writing has appeared in the American Spectator, Mere Orthodoxy, American Greatness, Areo Magazine, and the American Mind, among others.”
I’ve dissected Cline’s column in the American Reformer attacking Wheaton College graduates for criticizing Vought and his version of Christianity. Cline’s writing in his column is featured here in bold. My analysis of his claims follow.
Wheaton Alumni Issue Attack on Russ Vought
Last week, Wheaton College did a very normal thing: it issued a congratulatory statement on social media to one of its graduates, Russ Vought (‘98), who was recently confirmed as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
The author of this piece, Timon Cline, opens with a vapid attempt to normalize Russell Vought’s goal of replacing the Constitutional Separation of Church and State* with Project2025’s legalistic version of Christianity as law in the United States of America.
Cline ignores the fact that Vought’s views on religion ought to have nothing to do with his duties as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. But legalistic religious authorities have a long history of blurring the lines between religion and government. The Bible shows that John the Baptist and Jesus fought the Pharisees and Sadducees over legalistic scriptural interpretations used to create stumbling blocks to God and turn the temple into a commercial enterprise. We can draw a straight line from the practices of those religious authorities to the political and religious objectives of Project 2025 today. They are practically the same people in different eras.
Here’s the sad part. Christians were supposed to learn from Jesus’ example not to fall into legalistic worship patterns created under the “traditions of men.” But once legalistic Christianity consolidated with the Roman Empire, the course was set to impose authoritarian, persecutorial religion for millennia to come. Over time, conservative Christianity became the one thing Jesus most despised, a legalistic religious institution bent on absolute power and authority. Even Reformation attempts failed to eradicate these instincts, and Evangelical Protestant legalism with its literalistic Bible interpretations and “apologetics” are just as bad, if not worse, than the original Catholic model of absolute authority and political control.
That hypocrisy is evident in all of Russell Vought’s attempts to impose a controlling version of religion in the name of Christian nationalism here in America. That’s why Wheaton College alumni protested when the school casually congratulated Vought for his “success” in government. Cline finds that ethical accountability offensive, and seeks to dismiss the corrupt nature of Voughts political theology by heightening the importance of Vought’s position. This is Cline’s attempt to overwhelm resistance to Project 2025’s objectives. Cline writes:
“Few people reach such a high level in American government, and Vought has done it twice. Certainly, this is something worth celebrating for any college, especially for a small evangelical college. Wheaton graduates have done impressive things, but very few have served in such an elevated position as Vought. Though a not insignificant amount have served in government, most of Wheaton’s well-known graduates are theologians and evangelists–think Billy Graham, John Piper, and William Lane Craig. Perhaps, Dan Coats, former Director of National Security, and Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, are the only Wheaton alumni to rival Vought in achievement in government service.”
Wheaton has long claimed Billy Graham as a celebrated graduate, and that’s fair enough. He wasn’t a perfect man, we must note. At one point he stated that Jews had a “stranglehood” on America that must be broken, and Graham tolerated segregation at his rallies to mollify whites offended by integration. Such are the habits of many so-called conservative Christians, who always seem willing to compromise their biblical principles to satisfy political allies and “save face.” But many also have disturbingly secret skeletons in their closets. Dennis Hastert is one such notable Wheaton College alum. Hastert’s political career ended in disgrace when his hush money payments to cover up a child sexual abuse case became known. Yet Cline casually dismisses that corrupt behavior out of deference to people in powerful positions. One has to ask, is that what Jesus would do?
From this theologically corrupt standpoint, Cline begins his line of questioning (he is a lawyer, after all) why Wheaton College removed its post about Russell Vought. Given the shallowness of Cline’s premise, the argument seems to be, “He’s certainly no worse than any other conflicted Christian hypocrite.”
In fact, there’s no stopping Cline’s vacuous strains once he’s gained momentum. He tries justifying Wheaton’s complicit honoring of Vought as a “simple congratulatory statement.”
Wheaton’s post was a simple congratulatory statement including a call to prayer for Vought—a standard 1 Timothy 2:2 practice, it must be said. A day later, the post was removed and replaced with a new one. The “significant concern expressed online” led Wheaton to delete the post. The College did not want to make a “political endorsement,” it said. The College explained to Fox News that the post had led to thousands of “hostile comments,” which prompted them to remove the post “rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction,” adding that said removal did not constitute an apology for expressing congratulations to Vought.
What Cline chooses to ignore is that Wheaton College recognized (or was forced into admitting by its protesting alumni) that its announcement constituted patent approval of Vought’s Christian hypocrisy in turning legalistic scripture into law. Jesus once warned:
25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
Despite such clear scriptural warnings that legalistic religion used for political purposes offended Jesus, Cline whines that Wheaton’s action was “unfair” to Vought somehow, and proceeds to malign its graduates for standing up to Vought’s brand of Right-wing Christian nationalism. He writes:
In other words, what Wheaton itself characterized as a typical announcement was rescinded because enough people dislike the recipient. As Chase Davis posted on X, this is a “glimpse into how Christian colleges and seminaries have been captured by emotional sabotage. Is that really the standard under which Wheaton wants to operate? Vought appropriately commented with one word: “Sad!”
Even this backpedaling was not enough. Wheaton alumni have begun circulating an Open Letter against Vought which American Reformer has obtained and is printed in full below. As is usually the case, Wheaton’s capitulation to the mob has not satisfied it. Now it must be rebuked.
Let’s consider what Cline is trying to accomplish here. It’s nothing short of gaslighting to advance the notion that Vought is somehow theologically and constitutionally “pure,” which is what conservatives always love to claim. But let’s be clear: Project 2025 is a patently extremist view of American government, if you can even call it that. But consider this view from the Global Extremism Project website:
“Within weeks of taking office, Trump issued sweeping executive orders, attempting to grab more power for himself and the executive branch. The dismantling of federal agencies and firing of tens of thousands civil servants has accelerated the far-right and authoritarian takeover of government institutions that will hurt ordinary Americans. And this is just the beginning. Christian nationalist ideals are set to shape this administration, and this country, as Project 2025’s architects work to consolidate power, dismantle progressive policies, and entrench their agenda.”
The ”agenda” Cline supports is rife with bigotry and authoritarian construction and the Project 2025 mission is both vicious and dauntless. The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That’s a threat, not diplomacy. Whe Roberts insinuate violence if people don’t fall into line, he’s not exaggerating.
The Kettering Foundatio analyzed Project 2025’s goals: “The plan is ambitious. The Mandatefor Leadership is both specific in detail and vengeful in tone. Its central agenda is to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States. Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs. Christian nationalist ideas are woven through the plans of Project 2025 and the pages of Mandate for Leadership. Its thousands of recommendations include specific executive orders to be repealed or implemented. Laws, regulations, departments, and whole agencies would be abolished. It portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic.”
Cline likes to pretend that this agenda does not threaten the nation. But speciously, he’s never done whining either. He winces at objections to his call to install Trump as king.
Predictably, the Letter picks up media narratives about Project 2025.
What exactly is it about Vought’s contribution to Project 2025, “Executive Office of the President of the United States,” that is offensive, misguided, or unbiblical? Likely, none of the signatories have read the 900-pageMandate for Leadership, but surely, they have perused Vought’s chapter, right? The Open Letter denounces Vought and Project 2025 as authoritarian. Strange given that the first citation on the first page of Vought’s chapter is to Federalist No. 47 wherein James Madison warns against the accumulation of all governmental powers into the same hand or hands. Vought proceeds to argue for constitutional restoration over and against bureaucratic theft of power.
Cline’s argument that Project 2025 is “constitutional restoration” is a patent lie, and he gaslights by quoting James Madison when the Project’s goals have no intention of respecting those limits. There is also no “bureaucratic theft of power.” What he’s calling “bureaucracy” is regulatory agencies created by Congress to protect human and consumer rights, manage financial industries, and protect environmental health and sustainability. Those are basic governmental principles aligne with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” without monopolistic industries trashing the country, stealing money through Big Pharma and privatized health insurance, and raping the environment from shore-to-shore.
But Right-wing autocrats want those protections out of the way principally to reward the super wealthy with the right to “privatize the profits and socialize the losses.” Cline goes on to play dumb in the face of his own specious arguments. Instead, he replaces bureaucracy with autocracy. Listening to his ugly rationalizations we find a series of contradictions that current forms of government are “overreaching.” Instead, he says Vought and Trump and Musk and Johnson deserve the “whole hog” right to do whatever they want to Americans. But especially Trump, for whom Cline seems to have a political hard-on.
In truth, everything in Vought’s summation of the constitutional power of the executive is mainstream and unsurprising. An executive acting like an executive may seem odd to us now—so accustomed are we to neutered figureheads in the Oval Office, to a “feeble executive” and thereby a “feeble government.” Checks and balances, separation of powers, requires not only that each branch does not encroach upon the power of the others, but also that each one fully exerts the power granted to it. Effective government is hardly unconstitutional. Neither is a well-managed budget according to the actual priorities of government. That is, use of taxpayer dollars for things more pertinent to their safety and flourishing than DEI operas and comic book campaigns in Europe or gender studies programs in the Middle East or spreading atheism in Asia–all things prioritized by the previous administration to the tune of millions.
In those last few lines, Cline paints himself into a partisan corner with his spoiled and possibly uneducated punk attitude. He’s so desperate to hate on liberalism that his word salad denigrates Black history and human equity enlightened dramas here and abroad as “DEI operas.” Apparently, the only programming, theater or movies Cline can handle are Christian-oriented biopics of blabbering demagogues like Reagan and Bush, albeit with a litany of Trump’s Greatest Hits thrown in as croutons on a Christo-fascist salad.
The entire concept of gender also seems to frighten Cline, who also adopts the idea that atheism is “the enemy” of justice and culture. For icing on the cake, Cline attempts a swipe at the “previous administration” by appealing, in the early part of the paragraph, that any initiative aimed at promoting factual history and human rights is a waste of taxpayer money.
Then comes the really ugly part of Cline’s petulant essay. He appeals to anachronism and Federalism as justification for his “winner-take-all” version of triumphal nationalism.
Moreover, an energetic executive is exactly what Alexander Hamilton presented in Federalist No. 70. Indeed, a single executive exercising control over the executive branch was the only path to true vigilance on behalf of the people, said Hamilton. A “vigorous executive” was not inconsistent with republican government but rather its guarantee. “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Surely, “all men of sense” would agree with this proposition, thought Hamilton.
To answer Hamilton’s question, we can turn quickly a personal, political, and economic analysis of Trump, who is not a man of “good sense” by any human standard. Certainly not morally, where Trump is a massive failure, having cheated on a series of wives, often with much younger women, as an NBC News story reported, “Trump was at one point friends with Epstein. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002, before there were any public allegations of wrongdoing against multimillionaire money manager. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said then. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Trump also lacks truthful financial sense, as his own Trump University paid $25M in fraud fines. His Foundation closed after Trump was found guilty of stealing its funds. His business enterprises earned a $400M+ fine for lying about property valuations. Famously, he also bankrupted Atlantic City casinos. None of these habituated losses point to Trump as a “man of sense.”
He also led attacks on American democracy and the Republic, claiming that he lost the 2020 election due to voter fraud, all while conspiring to create “fake electors” to steal the election for himself. When his supporters came to Washington at his request, they responded to his urgent call to “fight like hell” and invaded the Capitol in a specific attempt to block the certification of Electoral College votes and install himself as President. Trump watched on TV as the rioters bearing Trump and Confederate flags bludgeoned Capitol police, broke into the building and vandalized the property while insane militia members led chants to “Hang Mike Pence,” which Trump never declined. Instead, he insisted Pence did not have the courage to “do the right thing.” You normally don’t get to just walk away from events like that, but Republicans declined the rightful impeachment of Trump for the insurrection, and Right-wing judges excused and delayed justice for high crimes. These were seditious actions.
All of this proves that men like Timon Cline know exactly what they’re doing by insisting that Trump has the right to absolute power. They throw his abuses right back in our faces, proving that Cline is a sycophantic Christian nationalist and an avid fascist. He denies this in “theory,” but he admits it in practice.
The so-called unitary executive theory is not a theory; it is not authoritarianism. It’s just Article II of the Constitution. Russ Vought’s crime, then, is that he wants a well-functioning, secure constitutional order, the only path to ensure, in his words, “the survival of self-governance in America.” And the big reveal over the past few months from outlets like ProPublica is that Vought is aligned with the presidential administration in which he is now serving. Shocker.
It is clear that Timon Cline would suck at the game of poker because he always overplays his hand. He goes on to re-write biblical and American history in revisionist fashion.
If Project 2025 proposed a true monarchy, the Wheaton alumni have a problem. If such a model is “unbiblical” then King David is in trouble. But, in fact, Project 2025 is, in large part, a repudiation of the trajectory set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s long tenure which was as close to a monarchical “restructuring of society” as America has ever gotten. (Indeed, FDR was quite effective in his use of the OMB itself.) If anyone is responsible for the omnipotent, unaccountable bureaucratic deep state, it is FDR and his progeny.
First off, King David was a genocidal, adulterous asshole, whom God disavowed at the end of his earthly life telling him, “No you can’t build a temple in my honor. You have too much blood on your hands.” But Cline seems not to care that his supposedly “biblical” heroes are everything America is supposed to resist. We are supposed to learn from David’s example not to act like him. But evangelical American Christians love to proclaim that “God works with flawed people” because secretly, they understand their entire theology is a hypocritical trashpit of cherry-picking creationism and longstanding bigotry based on tiny bits of scripture that amount to a house of cards.
And so predictably, Cline also chooses to ignore the fact that FDR came into power after Robber Baron capitalists crashed the economy in a spectacularly speculative fashion. Unemployment reached 25% during the Great Depression, while the Dust Bowl raged across the American plains because lying Christo-fascists dismissed the environmental realities of arid country to promise hapless farmers that “rain would follow the plow.” God hates liars, but liars hate to admit they’re ever wrong. Look at Trump.
Amidst these 1930s Right Wing failures, FDR used the government to restore a sense of balance and security in the face of rampant abuse by free market capitalists whose “privatize the profits, socialize the losses” approach was the perverse form of socialism preferred by greedy capitalists. Trump and Project 2025 seek to return to those failed policies again in America and are proceeding with fascist fervor led by the corporatist Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation’s murky band of bigots, economic terrorists, and Libertarian hustlers.
I read Project 2025 and found it grossly unpalatable in tone and objectives. It is a fascist document much like Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There are similarities to its authors, and Trump, and one other famous fascist. As the United States Holocaust Museum website note, “Mein Kampf promoted the key components of Nazism: rabid antisemitism, a racist world view, and an aggressive foreign policy geared to gaining Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe.” Do you note the similarities to Trump’s approach here? He’s trying to annex Canada and Greenland for “living space” and “security” for America.
There’s also similarities between Hitler’s economic aims and Trump’s constant grift of selling Trump Bibles and other crap bearing his image. The parallel is that Trump spent time as a political exile, and like Hitler, rose to power again due to populist rhetoric of hate and malignant dog-whistle racism. “Hitler began writing Mein Kampf in 1924 in Landsberg prison, following his conviction for high treason for attempting to overthrow the German republic in November 1923 in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. Although his coup failed, Hitler used his trial as a pulpit to spread Nazi propaganda. Largely unknown before this event, he gained immediate notoriety in the German and international press. The court sentenced him to five years imprisonment, of which he served less than 9 months. With his political career at an all-time low, he hoped that publishing the book would earn him some money and serve as a propaganda platform to air his radical views and attack those whom he accused of betraying him and Germany.
I created this timeline to show how we’ve moved from MAGA to fascism.
Cline doesn’t recognize it as such, but he’s an avowed fascist. He openly attacked Wheaton College grads for not sharing his brand of Christo-fascist hatred. He also tears at the fabric of scripture itself to score points with his Right Wing audience.
Apart from this fearmongering, the Open Letter lodges a litany of leftwing complaints. The issues? Vought’s goals do not sufficiently prioritize illegal immigrants, homosexuality, and abortion, and do not pay adequate homage to the altar of “racial injustice.” All these typically left-of-center hobbyhorses, apparently, have biblical precedent, according to the Wheaton alumni.
The alumni also complain that Project 2025—the entirety of which they pin on Vought—is insufficiently “concerned with governing faithfully as Christians.” A speech from Wheaton president Phil Ryken is quoted wherein Ryken elevated the type of Christian who can “carry forward the Great Commission.” And I had thought Christian Nationalism was the problem, not the solution. Curious.
The ardent cynicism with which men like Cline engage with these subjects borders on pathological. So there’s an instructional moment here. Pathology is “the study of disease, including its causes, mechanisms, development, and effects,” and Cline’s version of religion and politics is a virus feeding on its host of religious and political conservatism.
At the end of the previous paragraph, Cline conflates the Great Commission with political authoritarianism, perhaps believing that the call to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” is a political call to action. Cline and his ilk take that “commission” to mean “convert or die,” which is why the Crusades took so many lives, and why the Wheaton College mascot was once the Crusaders. But the Wheaton College alumni questioning Vought’s nationalistic tactics invite believers back to Jesus’ original intention: Offer love, not law. Welcome all, not just the chosen few.
But Cline is the unrepentant type, so he cherry-picks some targets much like his hateful hero Trump.
Since Wheaton alums seem so concerned about the OMB all of a sudden, where was the outrage over Shalanda Young, President Biden’s demonstrably unqualified director, and her enthusiasm for federal funding of abortion? Of course, Young isn’t a Wheaton alum. But what about when Michael Gerson (‘86) went soft on gay marriage? Did a very concerned alumni letter circulate then?
Cline leaps to ardently ignorant conclusions here by trotting out terms that appeal to right-wing hypocrites. He maligns those who protect abortion rights, yet where is the right-wing call for men to stop impregnating women rather than blaming women for getting abortions after the fact? The ignorance of the so-called Pro-Life movement is going on fifty years of public whining when in fact, Jesus would tell them, “If you must depend on the law to bring about the Kingdom of God, you have already failed.” Birth control is readily available to prevent the need for abortions, but right-wingers oppose that too. See how lies add up to more lies?
But Cline isn’t with his brand of dishonest apologetics. Not yet. He blames honest Wheaton College alumni for holding “rigid ideological lines” defined as “too liberal” for Cline’s tastes. You’ll get to read that letter at the end of this piece, and will find that many of Wheaton’s graduates do understand scripture, and point that out in their letter protesting Vought’s perverted brand of dismissively bigoted religion.
But, clearly, alumni status is not the determinative criteria for alumni outrage. Wheaton students had no problem weighing in on Jerry Falwell Jr’s views on guns and Muslims, especially when the Washington Post was willing to publish their complaints. Nathan Heath, an analyst at NSI and the second signature on the Open Letter, was one of the authors on the Post piece along with Ciera Horton McElroy, the former editor of the Wheaton student paper and another signatory.
What is clear is that the Wheaton alumni opposing Vought possess their own “rigid ideological lines.” Vought and the Trump administration generally represent a rolling back of the status quo in which the largely millennial and obviously left of center Wheaton alumni are quite comfortable.
Their problem with Wheaton College’s congratulation of Russ Vought is not that he is a political figure; it is that he has the wrong political views.
So yes, Timon Cline. Let’s be clear. Russell Vought is the exact kind of religious authority that Jesus would find (and did find) disgusting for the love of power, self-righteous status, and personal aggrandizement. And you don’t get that?
And yet, Timon Cline is all about the language of victimhood and self-proclaimed persecution.
Obviously, congratulating an alum for achievement in government service does not constitute an endorsement of any policy or view. Deplorables like Vought, however, can receive no such treatment. Again, wrong politics. Wheaton couldn’t stop celebrating Michael Gerson whom they pronounced “God’s wordsmith.” Was this sacrilege? Too political? But then again, Gerson had the right politics.
To be clear, colleges should celebrate the accomplishments of their graduates. This is natural and appropriate. By any measure, Gerson was accomplished, but so is Russ Vought. Objectively so.
Cline’s claim here is not sophisticated. He avows fealty to triumphalism, not morality. Then he goes on to gaslighting the Wheaton alums once more by accusing them of Christian Nationalism.
The authors and signatories of the Open Letter should drop the pretense and simply admit that they would like their alma mater to support their vision for the country and not Vought’s. That is all that they are saying. This has nothing to do with decorum or precedent or norms. Indeed, the vision cast by the Open Letter is decidedly Christian nationalist, just of a different variety. The Open Letter is, in fact, asking Wheaton College to take a stand on policy, their policy. The College should not capitulate. Last I checked, Russ Vought, for all his alleged “authoritarianism,” had issued no such demand to his alma mater. Who is the better liberal here?
These word games from Cline are passive-aggressive instincts at play, defined as, “expressing negative emotions indirectly, often through subtle acts of resistance or defiance instead of directly addressing the issue, such as through sarcasm, procrastination, or withholding information.” Many passive-aggressive individuals are manipulative, abusive gaslighters who try to make other people think they’re the crazy ones. It’s a bit surprising that Cline didn’t see fit to insert the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” here. It certainly fit his other methods.
Or perhaps he accomplishes the same aim by claiming that the “marginalized and vulnerable” MAGA populace, including, of course, the avowed racists, anti-Semitics, Trump-flag waving militias and bitter CEOs having to recognize DEI policies that are so beset that they can’t function in this world? Cline seems to think so.
For all their moralizing about the “marginalized and the vulnerable” and government “accountability,” the Open Letter includes exactly no mention of the American people who have suffered under the unaccountable government of the past four years, or the past decade, for that matter. It is rich indeed, in the wake of the USAID revelations, to charge the incumbent administration with “authoritarianism,” unaccountability, and neglect of the public good.
The link he includes in that paragraph begins with deranged accusations that USAID promotes aggressively “anti-Christian” agendas. It reads: “While we shouldn’t celebrate the loss of anyone’s job, we should celebrate the dismantling of USAID, which for decades has been squandering our tax dollars to sow sinful corruption in other countries and indoctrinate the world with transgenderism, homosexuality, atheism, and eugenics.”
The amounts of money ascribed to these supposedly horrific aims are pittances, small amounts to support cultural diversity and realities that hard-line, dichotomous religious bigots love to deny. But there are practical solutions to which they object too.
$1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”
$70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
Despite what numbskulls like Cline and his audience like to proclaim, transgender people are real, human beings. Recognizing their humanity is not “sinful,” nor is producing a play about the potential difficulties of dealing with rampant bigotry in places where intolerance and ignorance often rule. But Cline seems to think that’s what Wheaton College is nowadays.
Wheaton used to produce serious, thoughtful, and accomplished graduates, and it may do so again, if it can overcome evident mission drift. Where, on the present political spectrum do these infantile alumni think Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry, for example, would have landed? If Vought is unpalatable, then so are they. (Then again, there’s a reason Franklin Graham recalled his late father’s library from the College years ago.)
Cline doesn’t realize that Franklin Graham is frequently the opposite of everything his father ever stood for. He’s a mean-spirited cuss whose political instincts overwhelm any good work he does.
For example, based on Graham’s own words, we see how and why Right-wing Christians are now “pro-Russian.” Graham stated: In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” He dismisses the fact that Putin is a murderous thug and war criminal to equate the supposed “sins” of gay people with the likes of a man frequently throwing political opponents out of tall hotel windows. If Cline had any honesty in his soul, he would disavow such narcissistic self-aggrandizement as Jesus did. But Cline is not about Jesus. He’s about using fear and hate to control his little world. He even issues economic threats to the college in hopes of dunning them into submission. Cline is a brute.
In any case, Wheaton College has a choice: succumb to emotional terrorism or get back to the business of cultivating faithful national leadership on behalf of American evangelicals. The crop of alumni represented in the Open Letter reflects poorly on the College. Should we expect more of the same from Wheaton or more of the older produce like Vought?
At bare minimum, surely the Ryken administration recognizes the Michael Jordan rule: conservatives pay tuition too. But they won’t much longer if liberal alumni can force a denunciation of people who work in the White House.
Here’s the letter Wheaton College alums wrote to their alma mater.
An Open Letter from Wheaton College Alumni on Project 2025 & Endorsing Russell Vought To the Wheaton College Community and our American Neighbors,
We, the undersigned alumni of Wheaton College, write with deep concern over fellow alumnus Russell Vought’s role in forming and implementing Project 2025 on behalf of the current presidential administration. As Wheaton graduates, we were shaped by an education grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which states that the Kingdom of Heaven is known by the Fruit of the Spirit and made manifest by feeding the hungry, giving the stranger a place to sleep, clothing the naked, and caring for the sick. Our Wheaton education taught us that to serve the hurting and broken in our world is to serve Christ himself (Galatians 5:22-23, Matthew 25:31-46). It is precisely because of our commitment to these values that we find Vought’s vision for government, as outlined in Project 2025, to be antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the mission of Wheaton College—and moreover, we are concerned by the college’s quick and public proclamation of support in social media posts on February 7th, 2025.
Institutional Endorsements Wheaton’s own statement, after removing their original post, says: “Our institutional and theological commitments are clear that the College, as a non-profit institution, does not make political endorsements.” However, it has been repeatedly clear that the institution is making public-facing posts that are divisively partisan, including its affirmation of Russell Vought on February 7th, 2025. Wheaton College also gave Fox News a very different response on February 10th, 2025:
“The social media post led to more than 1,000 hostile comments, primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought, in just a few hours. It was not our intention to embroil the College or Mr. Vought in a political discussion or dispute. Thus, we removed the post, rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction. This was in no way an apology for having expressed congratulations or for suggesting prayers for our alumnus.”
Wheaton’s student body, and thereby its alumni family, have always encompassed a broad spectrum of social and political affiliations. What unites us is Christian orthodoxy. We ask that the college be mindful of public proclamations that translate as political endorsements—especially in cases where the issues, as in Project 2025, are antithetical to Christian charity.
Christianity and the Temptation of Totalitarianism Project 2025 is a blueprint for consolidating executive power to remake American government and society along rigid ideological lines. The plan proposes dismantling independent institutions, purging thousands of career civil servants in favor of political loyalists, and centralizing authority under one person. Such a system is not only dangerously authoritarian but also profoundly unbiblical. As fallen and sinful people, we acknowledge the need for accountability, regardless of how high or prestigious one’s position or office; indeed, leaders are held to a higher standard and are accountable not only to the people they lead, but to God himself (1 Timothy 3:1-10, Ezekiel 34:10). Project 2025 is less concerned with governing faithfully as Christians than with cynically using Christianity’s majority status to establish political dominance, remake the United States in their own image, and further marginalize at-risk populations.
The pursuit of unchecked political control dismisses the humility of Christ and the servant-leadership model that Wheaton instilled in us. In Philip Ryken’s plenary address at the Fourth Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization, Wheaton’s president was forthright: “There is only one kind of Christian who is able to carry forward the Great Commission…and that is someone who embraces Christ-like servanthood as a way of life. We are all called to be servants.” The cost of service was high for Christ and his Apostles and is high for us as his followers today. As alumni of Wheaton College, we cannot lend credibility to a rejection of servanthood and an authoritarian restructuring of American society.
Marginalization of the Vulnerable Project 2025 promotes policies that target marginalized communities in ways that unequivocally contradict the biblical command to care for the least of these (Matthew 25:40). Among its stated goals are:
Gutting protections for undocumented immigrants and refugees, despite Scripture’s consistent call to welcome those same persons and condemnation of figures who do not (Leviticus 19:33-34, Deuteronomy 10:17-19, Hebrews 13:2, Matthew 25:43).
Dismantling civil rights protections, dismissing the reality of racial injustice, and refusing to seek the biblical vision of reconciliation and justice (Isaiah 1:17, Amos 5:24, 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, Acts 10:28, Colossians 3:11).
Rolling back opportunities and protections for people with disabilities and LGBTQ individuals, failing to treat all people with the dignity and respect that every image-bearer of God deserves (Genesis 1:26-27 & 5:1, Psalm 8:4-6, Ephesians 4:29-32, Matthew 22:39, 1 John 4:20-21).
Going far beyond humanitarian restrictions on abortion, by limiting access to contraception, daycare, and medical interventions for life-threatening pregnancies; prioritizing surveillance and control of women in crisis situations. (1 John 4:18, Luke 8:43-48, Deuteronomy 31:6, Psalms 46:1-3, John 14:27, Isaiah 41:13).
Slashing educational resources and healthcare for families of little financial means, ignoring the Bible’s emphasis on honoring the poor the same as the rich, Christ’s statement that the poor are blessed and that the kingdom of God belongs to them, and his assertion that those who reject the poor reject Him and are in danger of judgment (James 2:3-4, Proverbs 22:2 & 31:8-9, Luke 14:13-14, Ezekiel 16:49, Luke 6:20, Matthew 25:41-43).
These policies seek to enforce a narrow and exclusionary vision of American identity that aligns with political imperialism rather than biblical Christianity. As Wheaton alumni, we worship in accord with people of all tribes, tongues, nations, and languages, in anticipation of celebrating side by side, as one Church before the throne of God (Revelation 7:9). We celebrate and exhort a return to Wheaton’s foundation as an institution committed to the defense of fundamental freedom for all peoples. Under the guise of limiting government, Project 2025 instead proposes consolidations of presidential power. We believe the design of our government, as reflected in the US Constitution, reflects healthy ideals such as the limitation of human power in order to protect the vulnerable. It would be disastrous to subvert such designs.
Moreover, Christ-like values and character, not raw notoriety and power, are critical to the witness of the Church. We celebrate the God-given differences and unique abilities that make up one Body of many parts (1 Corinthians 12:12-27). Different social, economic, racial, and cultural identities are brought together by faith in Christ so that we as Christians can effectively live out the Great Commission and spread the good news to all peoples (Galatians 3:28, Mark 16:15). The domination of one American tribe and invalidation of all others undermines the Church’s global role. If not in agreement, we are nonetheless called to live together in unity, edifying each other and standing together as one Church (John 13:35, Romans 14:19, Psalm 133). Project 2025 espouses an abusive authority that is fatally misaligned with the Word that stands forever (Isaiah 40:6-8).
A Call to Faithfulness Wheaton College has stood as a beacon of Christian higher education, committed to rigorous intellectual engagement, faithful discipleship, and responsible citizenhood. To align, even indirectly, with a political vision that prioritizes power over service, exclusion over love, and coercion over conscience would be to abandon the very heart of our faith.
As Wheaton alumni, we publicly distance ourselves from Russell Vought’s work and reaffirm our commitment to the Gospel’s radical call to justice, mercy, and humility. Silence in the face of such an anti-Christian vision is complicity.
Over the last five decades, I’ve closely studied the promises and outcomes of politically conservative economic policy. This graphic breaks it down to a “meme” level, but there’s more to these issues than a few facts and figures. Let’s look at the factors involved in how conservatism fails America.
The lie of pure capitalism. While many conservatives are fond of quoting the likes of Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago “economist” who strongly believed in unfettered free market capitalism, the consistent outcome of unregulated markets is industries monopolized by players gobbling up smaller companies to grab market share and eliminate competition. Way back in Teddy Roosevelt’s days in battling Robber Barons, America learned that allowing aggressive players free reign results in economic imbalance as shared in a Los Angeles Times story: “When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, tycoons had grown fabulously wealthy through monopolistic manipulations of industry, and the economic deck was stacked against the common man and woman. T.R., the scion of a prominent New York family, was no stranger to wealth, but he was also raised with the conviction that those who came into life with great advantages had a moral responsibility to improve the condition of the disadvantaged. Believing that America could not thrive unless all Americans had a chance to thrive, Roosevelt used his epic energy, intellect and reformist zeal to confront the rapacious robber barons and offer the rest of the citizenry a “Square Deal” that promised the federal government would be a fair arbiter that would not favor the rich over everyone else.” So yes, whether it involves a Square Deal or a New Deal or a Green New Deal, the United States of America needs government to defend the interests of the middle class and poor. Some call these actions “socialism,” but in fact it’s quite the opposite.
Conservatives love the idea of “privatize the profits, socialize the losses.” We often hear conservatives complain about “social welfare” and “social programs” as being unsustainable expenditures. Yet corporate welfare handouts are just as common from government to small businesses all the way up to massive entities the size of Elon Musk’s organization. Yet in turn, many of these same companies, having absorbed taxpayer dollars to guarantee productivity and then profits, love to avoid paying taxes because the “corporations are people too” mindset of the Mitt Romney’s of the world maintain it is fair and just for companies to avoid paying taxes at all costs. These “free speech rights” include the ability to pay lobbyists who sell their interests to government officials in exchange for campaign funding toward re-election. The entire system is rigged toward corporate largesse. Yet when companies become “too big to fail” (such as the auto or banking industries), Americans are forced to pay for the losses of speculative management, outright corruption, or predatory corporate behavior. These losses form the other bookend of corporate socialism. Yet conservatives love to gaslight about labor or social programs being “socialism” while supporting the elitist function of corporatism as a patriotic ideal. It is no such thing.
Conservatives regard labor as a “necessary evil.” From the labor-busting policies of Ronald Reagan to the corporate “downsizing” trend popular among hardline managers during the 80s and 90s, it is labor and the middle class that have borne the pain of economic loss in the form of flat wages, job insecurity, and reduced economic mobility. Combined with the offshoring of American jobs and manufacturing to capitalize on cheaper foreign labor, which often involved harsh conditions nearing slave labor, the American Heartland was gutted to deliver profits to shareholders of companies without seeming to care about the fate of the nation or its citizens. The conservative despise of labor also swings the opposite direction, maligning immigrant populations brought in to farm the fields, work in meat-packing plants, or do millions of jobs that Americans need to get done but feel the work is beneath their cultural status or pay-grade. That populist hatred for immigrants is now a political mainstay among political conservatives leveraging fear for votes. This is an immoral reality, and we’ll address that in section #5.
Conservatives consistently refuse to accept responsibility for the costs of pollution or climate change. During the Nixon administration, several laws were passed to clean up American air, water, and the environment. These bipartisan initiatives improved conditions across the nation, reducing acidification of lakes and streams, cutting smog in urban areas, cleaning up rivers used as dumping grounds by manufacturing and industry, and protecting critical habitat for wildlife. In addition, Superfund money went to work cleaning up dangerous pollution zones, and lawsuits brought against big polluters put money to use in massize accidents like the Exxon Valdez and other environmental calamaties. If not for these initiatives supported by our government, the costs of pollution in health and safety terms would have sunk into the lives of millions more people. And yet today, conservatives say the costs of fighting anthropogenic climate change are “too high” or claim that there isn’t a problem at all. Some of that denial comes from a different sort of conservative belief system. People possessed of a fundamentalist religious worldview deny that humanity can affect such change, believing that only God can affect things on a global scale. Yet that pursuantly denies the religious tradition that it was humanity that brought about the “fall of the world.” Such “logic” is thus fallacious and hypocritical. But whoever said Christianity contradicts itself? Well, let’s take yet another look at one of the most egregious examples of that.
The “money is not the root of all evil” conservative mindset. Despite the many admonitions of Jesus against the love of money found in the Bible, today’s ‘fiscally conservative’ Christians love to find ways to deny that aspect of the Lord’s ministry. There is nothing in the life and ministry of Jesus that suggests a broad tolerance for the pursuit of earthly wealth. A simple AI summary says it best: “Jesus taught that people should not store up riches on earth, where they can be destroyed by moths, rust, and thieves. Instead, he encouraged people to store up riches in heaven, where they would be safe from destruction.” Yet from the Reagan era through both Bushes and into the Trump Era, an accelerated fascination with avarice consumes conservative Christianity. The so-called Prosperity Gospel of televangelists is the ultimate ironic expression of this bad theology. Uber-wealthy TV preachers fly around in private jets while dunning their parishioners for their last dimes on the promise that such wealth will return to them tenfold, or whatever. It’s all lies about money packaged in legalistic religion from which people are afraid to break fear due to the fire and brimstone warning that they won’t get into heaven if they don’t “pay up.” The Catholic Church worked this scam a few thousand years ago with indulgences and purgatory, but religious suckers and fearfully conservative populists love the idea of monetary returns and heavenly rewards. Christian conservatives often deeply desire to have their cake and eat it too. If the two are combined in one package, all the better. And, if someone appears to stand in the way of these aims, the conservative instinct is to leapfrog the earthly obligation of Christ to serve others and claim salvation well in advance of Judgement Day. There is even a massive faction hoping for judgment day to arrive sooner than later, and an entire industry of Christian apologetics is devoted to predicting when the End Times will come, and how those who don’t play along with the rules of Christian legalism will pay with suffering in this life and beyond. It’s all a transactional game, this conservative religious instinct. Religious legalists have long understood how to extract wealth from those fearful of the Great Beyond and eager for vindication against their perception of evil in this life. The Internet is flush with dichotomous so-called Christians claiming that the upcoming election between Trump and Harris is the epitome of “good versus evil.” Wouldn’t Jesus be surprised to come back and study those claims?
So here we are today, dealing with the five main lies of fiscal conservatives gutting the American economy while claiming to love God and Country. Some go so far as to claim that one cannot be an American and be a Liberal. Or to be a Democrat and be a Christian.
Yet, when you look at the ministry of Jesus, who fought the moneyed religious conservatives of his day because they sought control of the economy and ruled the lives of the masses through laws and traditions only they could implement, we realize that conservatives are not only on the wrong side of economic truth, they are on the wrong side of God too. Plus, the truth of the matter is that the economy almost always does better under Democrats. Sometimes that’s because fiscal conservatives actually play ball with Democratic leadership to cut costs, and I’m all in favor of that. Hell, elite accounting firms were brought in to examine our nation’s military budgets and could not determine a first step at economic accountability. Yet conservatives love military spending and protect it at all costs. That goes for blowing millions on Israel because the Zionist wishes of Christian Conservatives want that nation to serve as the foundation for Armageddon and the Return of Christ. Too bad if you’re Jewish, it seems. You get left out on that deal. These are just a few of the ways conservatives have perverted the tenets of Christianity to work against the teachings of Christ on every front.
That even holds true on the abortion issue, where the economics of child-bearing and child-rearing are ignored in favor of blaming women for getting pregnant in the first place. Ex-President Donald Trump insists he “did the thing” in getting abortion rights tossed down to the states where inconsistency is the norm, and women are the people who suffer.
Why is it that conservatives never speak about the role men play in causing those pregnancies? And why do conservatives avoid the logical tactics of birth control, especially male birth control, in pregnancy prevention? That is the sure cure for abortions nationwide.
It is clear that conservatives don’t genuinely own the authority on abortion. Their sole goal seems to be proclaiming self-righteous grievance against women and claiming the right to assert that they’re “saving babies.” In fact, they’re only saving themselves the problem of having to care enough and get involved in the lives of women just as Jesus would tell them to do. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When it comes to abortion, “If you must depend on the law to bring about the will of God, you have already failed.”
When it comes to economics, it is classic liberalism that owns all the “good things” done to bring about the promises of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Liberals, including Christians devoted to the teachings of Christ about equality in humanity, emancipated people from slavery and bondage. Liberals also worked to grant women the full rights of citizenship and voting, and to advocate for the well-being and normalcy of gay love and marriage in society. Liberals (including Christian liberals) work to protect the Earth from the chronically sinful ways of humankind. That’s all in keeping with the best aspects of the Bible while dispensing with anachronistic laws of patriarchal origin and the crueler facest of “kingship,” which is just another word for plutocracy and unrepentant capitalism.
We should never forget that the “kings of industry” are just as susceptible to character flaws as the biblical King David, upon whose life God cast a shadow by telling him at the end of life, “You cannot build a temple in my honor. You have too much blood on your hands.” That is not an excuse to claim, as too many evangelical Christians do, that “God works with flawed people to accomplish his aims.” To that I say, “Well, you don’t have to actively seek flawed people and support them no matter how many ways they sin, and refuse to be repentant.” That’s Donald Trump. He’s many sins packed into one Big Sin, that of unrepentant pride and hubris. God doesn’t like those kinds of people. The Bible shows many of them getting their just desserts, although Trump always seems to want a second helping.
Let that be a lesson to all who allow greed, violence, and adultery to rule their hearts. And I’m talking about you, Donald Trump, and everyone who supports you. God does not favor the unrepentant.
You’ve seen the trucks with American flags flying on one side while a Trump 2024 flag flaps around on the other. You’ve seen the Red Hats and the Rallies, where people applaud the hate-filled language of their leader, who mocks the disabled, and whose patent distrust and disdain for immigrants is evident despite the dog-whistle language meant to cloak the hate behind it. You’ve heard the MAGA Candidate threaten his political opponents with prison time and, worse, the death penalty if necessary to dispatch those daring to question his authority. You’ve watched the former President Trump mug obsequiously for the camera with that smug smile backed by the phony victimhood speaking style. “They hate me!” Trump gaslights the world in quasi-religious fervor. “They are persecuting me, and they are persecuting you.”
Trump is the face of an American movement claiming to represent patriotism, but it is not. Instead, it is Hatriotism, a political strategy that thrives on vicious accusations against liberalism, the true foundation of democracy and the Republic, our laws, and our government. Yet according to Hatriots, these institutions are the enemy of the people. The conservative members of the Supreme Court, all of whom hate the rule of law if it contradicts their ideology and political alliance, just proved that.
Supreme Hate
The conservative Supreme Court demonstrated that it is a tool of the Hate Machine that was once the Republican Party. The SCOTUS granted Hatriotism full approval by granting immunity to Donald Trump, the man who disrespects our nation’s laws and resists their natural limits at every turn. Given that judgment by the six conservative members of the Supreme Court, there is now no limit to what hate will be allowed to do to anyone the GOP decides to punish, with Trump leading the way.
Russian collusion by imitation
Indeed, Hatriotism looks much like the power politics of regimes run by the vicious whims of authoritarians. Over in Russia, Vladimir Putin has ordered his perceived enemies extinguished at will. Some fall out of high windows while others face the silent death of poison. Do we think Trump will act any differently here in America? When it comes to international politics, Putin’s hate-filled paranoia deemed Ukraine part of Mother Russia. To prove it, he’s tried to beat his perceived child into submission.
Trump’s feverishly transactional style is no different. His admiration for dictators is apparent, as is his disdain for what he brands “shithole countries.” Hate is the political blood running through Trump’s veins.
Daddy issues
History is also rife with the childishness of world leaders running around with parental bugs up their asses. Hate-filled despots and insecure wannabe kings all seem to have Mommy and Daddy issues driving their furious need for approval. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq to show his father that he could do what Daddy could not, which was to capture Saddam Hussein. The torture committed in Iraq under the son’s watch was the hate-filled byproduct of that compensatory need for approval.
The Trump Saga is driven by Daddy Issues too. That dynamic holds a far worse menace for us in America and abroad. A Washington Post story about the Trump Family history reveals the source of the insecurity on display in everything Trump does, “We know that many presidents have had daddy issues: dreaming of their absent fathers, chafing at their judgments or struggling under their legacies. When discussing his father in his memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump stresses the business savvy he gleaned from the late Fred C. Trump. “I learned about toughness in a very tough business, I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency.”
Tough to take
In Trump’s case, that pursuit of “toughness” is mostly about covering up his long line of grandiose mistakes. His many failed business ventures. His bankruptcies and fraud. His three failed marriages that succumbed to his infidelity. Now he’s a convicted felon hiding behind claims he’s never done anything wrong, all while hiding his vanity behind a prodigiously dyed blonde combover shading a face painted to disguise a complexion that without makeup resembles a pale grocery store tomato.
Faux Christians
Despite all this vacuous dishonesty, Trump refuses to confess any flaw, a trait that his Christian evangelical supporters seem to adore despite the call to repent of sins founding their tradition. Instead, they excuse Trump’s hateful attitudes by comparing him to the likes of King David, the genocidal despot whom God refused to honor at the end of his life because he had too much blood on his hands.
That murderous legacy already exists in the latter-day interpretation of the Second Amendment, a law split in half by conservatives on the Supreme Court so that hate can be armed in its battle with cultural progress and peace in America. The first half of the Second Amendment, the part about a “well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state,” has been hijacked by hate-filled anti-government soldiers of fortune that spend most of their time blasting cement-filled Home Depot buckets with ammunition hoping someday they’ll have an excuse to turn the slogan “How Doers Get More Done” into a full-blown takeover of the American government.
Hate on the march
Those were the same disturbingly small-minded militants of Hatriotism invading the Capitol on January 6, 2020. They waved American flags but also Confederate banners, proving their cause was nothing more than treason disguised as a righteous cause. They were called to arms and used sharpened flagpoles to thump and stab Capitol police, all while welcoming into their ranks the racists and anti-Semitics, the Bison Heads and suburban nutcases, many of whom wound up arrested and convicted for their crimes of obstructing governmental business and destroying government property.
That’s Hatriotism in a nutshell. It lacks the consciousness and conscience to realize it has the entire American Experiment wrong. That’s why Make American Great Again fits Hatriotism so well as a slogan. It calls the nation back to a time when prejudice was “normal,” and when bigoted forms of religion held sway everywhere from town hall meetings to public school systems. Hatriotism wants––indeed needs––to lurch backward in time because it is a form of hate that Americans embracing principles and conscience seek to leave behind.
Right now the haters seem to have the upper hand, but the Union fought slavery and bigotry in the past. We’ll do it again in the present to resist the deplorable, despicable nature of Hatriotism. That’s our only choice as Americans.
A couple weeks ago, an email arrived through my website with a request for an illustration job. The creative brief was quite complete, albeit for an interesting subject. Apparently, some “client” of the emailer wanted to produce a presentation to warn youth about the dangers of monkey pox disease.
I found the request a bit odd because I didn’t think monkey pox was much of a threat these days. I’m no expert on infectious diseases, but if someone wants to help spread the news on the value of vaccinations, I’m all for it. The creative brief came with illustration descriptions that were quite detailed. Still, I responded requesting more information about the job. The potential client proposed compensation for the sixteen illustrations inviting at one thousand dollars per 8 X 10” full-color panel. That’s higher than most jobs I’ve done in a 40-year creative and illustration career, but again, some clients just want the work done and don’t care about the budget. If luck would have it, I wasn’t going to turn it down.
There were however Red Flags about the assignment. The person contacting explained that he was hearing impaired and would communicate via email and text. “Okay…” I thought to myself. “We’ll see how this goes.”
Progress
I did one quick sketch that took fifteen minutes and sent it to the client for approval. He said yes with hardly any feedback. That made me suspicious, but the money still sounded good.
Within a week after our initial contact, the “client” requested my address to send a check for a down payment. I stated that 25-50% as part of the initial $4000 first phase of the project was sufficient. I don’t start a job these days, especially one received online, without receiving earnest money. A few days later, the client confirmed that he’d sent a message to arrive through UPS and the US Mail.
Something in the process still felt funny to me. “I’m not sure this is real,” I told my wife and son. They agreed that I should proceed with caution. “Wait until you get a check and cash it before doing anything for them,” my wife advised.
The check arrived in a big USPS envelope. Again, the check was just floating around inside a 15″ X 12″ shipping envelope. “Who does that?” I thought. At a glance, the check looked legitimate enough. I investigated the company listed on check on Linkedin and did a search online to corroborate its location and it lined up. My wife and I joked that I should “run to the bank” to test it all out. A part of me wondered if that was the right thing to do.
Text talk
Then I received a text from the client:
“Hi Christopher, usps confirmed the successful delivery of the package to you…Kindly confirm you have received it so that we can proceed. I await your response.”
I confirmed receipt of the check and immediately got another message. “Thanks for the update. Kindly go ahead and deposit the check and let me know as soon as you do…” I took the check to the ATM machine and paused to take a photo of the document before depositing it. I had no idea if that was legal, but I did it anyway in case something odd happened with the deposit. The check had a small iridescent seal on it that looked a bit like a chip you’d find on a credit or debit card. Not having seen that on a check before, I paused before depositing it. I wondered: could that chip somehow send information back to a potential scammer? One never knows these days…
The check slipped into the ATM machine and the bank showed that the deposit registered.
The next morning I received another text: “Hi Christopher, How are you doing today? I would like to know if you successfully deposited the check. I have to give feedback to my sponsor on the payment. How’s the project coming along? Warm regards.”
To this point, nothing about these interactions felt right or authentic to me. While I was relieved in some sense that the check deposited the night before and a deposit showed up as deposited in my account, that chip on the check still made me nervous. The ATM spit out a receipt showing my prior balance and the new deposit combined. I still wasn’t convinced the check was real or that the “job” wasn’t a scam.
Then another communication came. This one raised my suspicions to another level. “Okay, thanks for the update. I’d be glad if you could confirm funds availability in your account now and get back to me. I await response.”
At that point, every red flag I’d learned in online scam training had been checked. I was no longer convinced anything about that check was authentic. Then came the text that confirmed all my suspicions. “The sponsor has requested that the 2nd phase of the project be cancelled due to a family emergency,” the message read. “We will only work on the first phase and ensure to keep up with its deadline date.”
This scam is being exposed on Reddit
I decided to play along and draw the scammer out in full fashion. “Okay, so what’s that mean on refunding the money?” I asked. “I’m not using any of it until the assignment is completed,” I added. My thinking was that for legal reasons and self-protection I should construct a line of defense about ‘acceptance and intent.’ I’m no lawyer, but I’ve come to understand that exhibiting intention is sometimes as bad as actually doing something wrong. I live in the state where former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was caught shopping political promises under the mantle “This is Golden.”
Refund defund
The scammer (of course) welcomed the conversation about a refund. “Yes, that sounds good. The sponsor has provided me with her Zelle and PayPal details for the refund of the 2nd phase. Please advise which of the information I should provide you with so you can proceed with the refund now for $4000. Thank you.”
I responded. “This is quite strange to me. I’m going to check with the bank first.” That is what I proceeded to do. Then I wrote: “I’m not comfortable with any of this process. I will inform you of the next steps when I’ve checked with the bank.” Frankly, by that point, I was hoping to gather information that might somehow track back to the sender.
That communication engendered a different tone in response. “I am sorry about the inconvenience. Yes, you may check the bank, but the bank has already confirmed the check and funded your account. She decided to cancel phase 2 for a family emergency and until the vaccination exercise has concluded. Therefore, the second phase of the workshop has been moved to a later date next year. I’m giving you $200 more for your stress and canceling of the project. This is just to compensate for the dashed expectation.”
The real question is why scammers like this cannot be caught? I contacted my bank. I called the police.
That communication was received while I was on the phone with my bank, first through a local branch and then through the Fraud Alert national network. They didn’t indicate they’d do anything but did suggest I not send the money. The guy on the line also congratulated me on being cautious in that respect. Still, I asked, “Don’t we do anything right now?”
The Fraud Alert guy replied that the bank has to let the check clear or bounce, or “come back” as it was explained to me. My thinking was much different. Shouldn’t we get the FBI be involved? Wasn’t this an attempted crime in progress? It sure had all the marks of an outright scam.
Meanwhile, the scammer kept up his pressure to refund money. I responded, “I’m not sending you any money. I am on the phone with the bank now.”
“What did your bank say?”
I wrote back again. “Just got off. They said don’t send any money.”
Then came the emotion-based plea: “Chris, please. I hope this doesn’t affect the project in any way because your feedback is top-notch, and professionalism is impeccable. You have been been giving me the best service ever since my very first message to you. I don’t want this to affect my relationship with my sponsor.”
For all of you out there reading this, I hope you recognize the problem here: This brand of broken English is a sign that things are not right with the contact.
I replied, “Unless that check clears inspection by my bank nothing is happening. I talked with them already. I’m perplexed and suspicious by refund requests. I’m not doing that. If your sponsor is legit they can wait.”
At that point my only purpose was holding him at bay in hopes of getting some kind of investigation going. It wasn’t until that evening that I had a chance to Google “Peter Welsh illustration scam” and immediately found the thread on Reddit where a discussion about the same guy doing the same scam in various forms was shared by many others. The people behind these multiple personas and versions of the scam are apparently prodigious in their craft.
Here’s another version of the same scam.
The scammer tried one more time to get me involved: “I’m so sorry this happened, and don’t feel bad. The check is legitimate, and the payment has gone through, so there’s not a compelling reason to put a hold on it. Please, I would appreciate it if you can send the money out today. You can also use money order.”
I read that message and muttered to myself…”F you…”
And after that, it was radio silence from the scammer for five hours. It is highly likely that he sensed my suspicions and moved over to another “account” that looked more promising. In the interim, I went about my business as a substitute PE teacher for the day, and drove home glad that the scammer had let up and that I’d called the authorities. On the way home, I set up and appointment to make a police report. Then I opened the original Gmail message to look closer at the photo attached to the Sender. As others noted, perhaps he’s some kind of real person. More likely not. In the age of facial recognition, this photo is probably stolen from somewhere else. Just like the check I received. It’s a fake.
I looked up the name of the company from which the check was issued. I’m not sure what to think about that. Their Glassdoor and Google reviews feature a long string of one-star reviews. They ostensibly sell automotive parts, but they must also be missing stacks of checks or else someone is creating fake ones using their company’s name.
Of course, that check that I “cashed” did not clear the bank and it immediately caused other problems. Admittedly, I did not protect myself well enough in this instance. That said, I filed the police report against this scammer. The officer shared that their department gets 8-10 calls for different kinds of scams each week. “It’s sad,” the officer shared. “People lose tens of thousands of dollars sometimes. Especially older people.”
One last shot
In late afternoon I received a phone call from the scammer. He talked in some sort of Eastern European accent, possibly Russian. Over the years I’ve worked with numerous Eastern European caregivers for my late father. These accents are often difficult to tell apart. It wasn’t a surprise to me that this guy was from some odd origin. That’s often how all of this works. Even the 2016 presidential election was impacted by fake social media accounts run by Russian interests. Meta recently announced the 4000+ fake accounts pumping out political disinformation were removed from Facebook. Scamming works at a global level these days.
My caller, whose working name is “Peter Welsh” started right in talking about whether the check had cleared or not. I was ahead of him on that, having already called the bank and checked online to see that it was “Oh Hold.” Our conversation veered from one place to another over the course of a minute. My goal was to get home off the line asap. He tried to manipulate me by telling me I was “acting weird” about the refund. I outright told him to stop gaslighting me and hung up. Then I Blocked any remaining calls from his number. I admit that I could not resist sending him a semi-nasty text. Father, Forgive My Sins.
Just think: this guy and his ‘operation’ is doing this kind of thing to dozens, perhaps hundreds of people across the country. He’s probably had success too. Even if he works 10-12 marks a week, $4-10,000 isn’t bad pay for a week’s work.
It’s a scammy world
Clearly I’m not alone in this being exposed to this scam experience. I’m sharing this in hopes that other people will be wiser and keep their guard up. To be honest: I’ve always been too trusting person in this world. That has cost me in many ways, including in business where even the people you work with have “agendas” that in some cases qualify as “scams” when seeking internal favor just grabbing additional compensation.
The love of money really is the root of all evil. I think back to a time when a fellow salesperson sandbagged his cumulative ad sales during a competition. He waited until the last minute to turn them in so that he could a $250 sales prize. Working hard in my little territory, I’d led the contest all along. Meanwhile, this jerkwad sold just enough to say ahead of me in his better territory, then walked over the board on the last day and filled in his totals. He scammed me, in other words.
Big picture fraud
There’s a ton of fraud taking place in this world. Along with scammers like this scuzzy Peter Welsh, scams take place in all kinds of places. Most common these days are online scammers (Facebook Marketplace, etc.) and cryptocurrency crooks, to name just a couple. The scams and fraud in this world include those concocted by deceptive CEOs or financial crooks (remember Enron, or Bernie Madoff?) Even seemingly “upright” corporate directors collect millions in salaries wrought from real or imagined profits while the workers driving productivity struggle to make ends meet. Wealth inequality is at a disturbing level in the United States of America.
We also see political scammers collecting millions in fund raising dollars while making all sorts of false promises to bilk money from supporters. One notable scammer in George Santos just got booted from Congress yet the likes of Trump (“Mexico is gonna build that wall…and if they don’t, we will!) still walks free. Trump excels in stealing support from millions of people even though his own University has been held culpable for fraud. The same holds true for his main business which is facing banishment from the State of New York for decades of scamming banks and the government with falsified financial reports and inflated and deflated property values. Trump is a proven crook and scammer. Now he’s on trial for host of other alleged yet well-documented crimes including attempts to steal an election, conduct an insurrection, and theft of Classified documents that include exposing national secrets to domestic and foreign sources.
Trump knows that his supporters don’t care that he’s a scammer. He’s their scammer for bragging that he’d “drain the swamp” while his administration turned out to be one of the most corrupt in US and World History.
A sucker born every minute
It’s often been said that there are “suckers born every minute” (P.T. Barnum, at right) Much has been made of this fact by huckster of many kind. Somehow, the general public never figures out who to trust. Mark Twain once said, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.”
All it takes to deceive people is a bit of swagger and a carefully leveraged appearance of credibility. It’s been true since the dawn of recorded history. The Serpent in Genesis used the Word of God (“You will not surely die…) to lead Adam and Eve into temptation. According to scripture, they were the first suckers in history. But the real suckers are those who take the Bible narrative literally. Because, where did the wives for Adam and Cain come from? We’re supposed to ignore those casual details somehow?
The shocking thing is how so many people to this day seem eager and willing to be deceived. They’ll open their wallets and place their wholehearted trust––even their religious faith––behind proven scammers as if their life depends on it. There is nothing more disheartening that seeing otherwise good people get caught up in propagandistic schemes that are nothing more than artistic scams. All while the sociopathic crooks in power dishonestly insist they’ve got their victims’ best interests in mind.
Reverse prosperity gospel
None other than Jesus Christ warned against this kind of “reverse prosperity” scam system. He castigated the religious authorities of his day for taking money and gaining power by manipulating the masses through guilt and tradition. Today we have “Prosperity Gospel” preachers raking in millions in contributions while bilking people into thinking their donations will return prosperity to them. They’ve stolen pages from religious scammers of the past and modernized them through media.
These forms of religious scams are blatantly obvious, but people fall for them every day. Hell, even the Catholic Church ran a purgatory scam with its ‘indulgences’ program before one of their own priests, a guy named Martin Luther, called them to account. Purgatory and the collection of indulgences served as a money funnel to “protect” people from a place that existed only in the minds and bank accounts of the religious authorities. The many scams concocted by televangelists (End Times supplies, anyone?) and politicians claiming religious affiliation (Mike Johnson is now Speaker of the House) are no different. They are all working against the original truth and goodness that the Bible depicts in the person of Jesus.
Roped in but not duty bound
The attempted scammer successfully roped me in, but his last-minute try at gaslighting me into guilt didn’t work. Still, he knows those psychological bonds and ploys are what help him succeed. The more emotional a scammer can make a potential victim feel, the more chance they’ll get their hands on their money––and their soul.
While I nearly got tricked by the scammer, I’m grateful for having received direct training on how to identify scams before they take full effect. I was misled at first, but as the Red Flags added up, I wised up. My father wasn’t so lucky many years ago. He got roped into a network marketing scheme that cost our family $5000 in early 1970s money. I’ve had keen antennae up against such schemes ever since.
So beware. Scammers are real. They are all around you in this world and they’re committed to putting all their intellect and artistic deception to work in building “real relationships.” In fact, they’re merely trying to win your approval, steal your money, steal your vote, or steal an electionthey’ve already lost to escape prosecution for the crimes they’ve already committed. All while presenting themselves as a salvation from the evils of this world. These
The sad thing is that so many people embrace these scams as absolute truth. Even worse, they gaslight the rest of us for holding fast to honesty while claiming that we’re the liars. Meanwhile the security of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all stand at risk because so many people fall for scams and never realize they’re the mark, not the wise ones.
A HANDS-ON LOOK AT HOW WE GOT FROM THERE (2016) TO HERE (2021) UNDER THE RULE OF EX-PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
However we define Trumpism, there is no denying its existence in the United States of America. Its effects were on full display during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. The question we now face is whether Trumpism should be primarily defined as a political or personal condition.
The tactics used to promote Trumpism began with the political slogan Make America Great Again. Those four words symbolized the Trump campaign’s claim that the nation was in desperate need of recovery.
The MAGA slogan worked wonders with those already convinced that Donald Trump represented something “great” about America. His purported wealth and worldwide brand delivered a pre-packaged sense of competency and vision.
Yet that is not what Donald Trump ultimately wound up selling. Instead, he saw an opportunity in convincing people that the nation had abandoned them. That gave millions of already disgruntled people the idea that they had something genuine to complain about. Whether they knew the true sources of their purported misery, or whether they were justified in their self-proclaimed victimhood did not matter. Trump tapped into their anger. That was all that mattered.
To his retinue of pledged supporters, Trump added the support of the evangelical Christian community by choosing a dogmatically zealous Mike Pence as his running mate. The implicit promise in that action was banning abortion and installing some form of Christian theocracy on the nation.
Safely delivered from political criticism by his religious associations, Trump engaged with far-less-admirable brands of populists. Specifically, he offered approval to avowed racist groups as “good people” and chortled with glee as militia groups and violence-prone police threatened to bust heads as a means to maintain order.
All the while, he continued the drumbeat against illegal immigration and repeated his warlike call to ‘build the wall.” That brand of xenophobia resonated with Americans convinced that brown people were freeloaders and stealing their piece of the American pie. Others welcomed Trump’s dog-whistle racism as justification for their own terminal prejudices. Meanwhile, the wealthiest MAGA supporters happily embraced Trump’s “I’ve Got Mine” mentality because it promised a return to tax policies favoring their economic status.
As illustrated in the Trumpism Spectrum, it is easy to trace the initial migration from slogans to tribalism, and from religious legalism to populism. All these tactics were designed to cement a coalition of committed collaborators in the Make America Great Again cabal. Anyone that criticized that cabal was accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a supposed mental condition that caused people to act irrationally in response to the ex-President. But that invented term was itself a form of gaslighting, an attempt to make sane people feel crazy about their grip on reality.
Adding to the mix was the rising influence of conspiracy theorists including QAnon, a willfully ignorant and semi-mysterious source of insane accusations and outright lies invented by some Internet gnome lurking on the outskirts of humanity. While Trump griped and whined about the supposed lies contained in the campaign-driven Steele Dossier, he did nothing to counteract rumors that Democrats were involved in human sex trafficking or the daily piles of Right-Wing garbage pumped out by the political right, including but not limited to Fox News.
As Trump’s presidency proceeded, he relied on an increasingly aggressive mix of propaganda to cover up his many illegal activities and political graft in defiance of the emoluments clause and bans on pursuing campaign aid from foreign governments. He was impeached twice for his corruption, but excused by Republican henchman in both the Senate and the House. A few freely admitted that he’d cheated and even broken the law on several counts. But they are power-driven hypocrites and political whores of the worst kind. They are loyal to their party and traitors to our nation.
The only place that Trump’s lies and cheating seemed to catch up with him was during the Covid pandemic when it became obvious that he was both incapable and unconcerned about protecting Americans from a deadly disease. Rather that amend his ways, Trump’s authoritarian instincts drove him to evolve from a man in a perpetual state of denial of his real performance to a man recognizing his failures. Those he feared more than anything else, and in an effort to protect himself from legal and financial jeopardy, he began to plot ways to steal the election in 2020.
This was nothing new, as even before the 2016 election Trump refused to commit his approval for results if he lost. He merely expanded on this tactic in 2020, denying in advance that he could possibly lose. When he did, he launched the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him. This lie was invented to foment unrest among his deplorable cabal of truth-denying bigots and zealots. It also appealed to the selfishly wealthy along with the fearful politicians that stood by him through two legitimate impeachments for corruption.
But the sickest loyalty of all is the continued support for Trump even after the acts of sedition conducted by Trump supporters at his direction. The violent, multi-front riots brutalized police officers and left people dead as a result of the insurrection. In the end, Trump invented a brand of fascism that entirely suited him, as he stood watching it all transpire on television even while his violent mob sought to capture and kill the Vice President of the United States. Trump didn’t care. Like his fast-food mentality dictates, he was “having it his way.”
That’s how we got from There to Here over the last six or so years. Looking back at the progression as illustrated on the Trumpism Spectrum graphic, it is pretty clear that it will be too hard to go back through time and fix things. Instead, we need to race forward in the near term to prevent it from happening all over again in 2022 and 2024. Trumpism is a toxic brand of hate-driven politics that was used to beat the nation over the head with an American flag. Despite his ugly pleas, we owe Donald Trump nothing in the way of compassion or compensation. He has done nothing to earn either privilege nor does he deserve it. He is no longer an American in any sense of the word. He is nothing but a greedy traitor, a perpetual con man and an abusive sociopath with nothing to offer the United States of America but an end to the great experiment that launched a democracy worthy of admiration by the whole world.
But under another four years of Trump, that great experiment would cease to exist.
This blog fits here too. “Personally, I don’t think the United States has ever been any different. There is a strain of obstinance––the “wrong kind of pride”––woven into the American populace from the beginning. The wrong kind of pride is responsible for horrific moments in history such as proliferation of slavery and a secession in an attempt to protect it. The wrong kind of pride also fuels white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and anti-gay bigotry. The wrong kind of pride drives religious hatred, wars of choice and resistance to truth of all kinds.”
The single most frustrating aspect of living through this pandemic is the persistent strain of obstinance evident in so much of the population.
Obstinance: is a characteristic of being impossibly stubborn. Like a bull that won’t budge, obstinance keeps people from going with the flow.
We’ve seen obstinance from people refusing to wear masks.
Obstinance from people refusing to get vaccinated.
Obstinance by arrogant people gathering in social gathering without masks to create super-spreader events.
It’s been one bit of obstinance after another.
Obstinance is mostly a matter of false pride. Clinging to a belief that is tightly held, often for all the wrong reasons.
Image credit: The Guardian
Like mask-wearing. Was it ever a question of personal freedom? Is asking people to wear a mask any different than asking them to wear pants in public? It’s not. But people chose to fight the idea of masks rather than…
It’s interesting what happens when you go “behind the scenes” and actually visit the page of a Trump Troll busy trying to defend the indefensible actions of a President compromised by his multiple breaches of constitutional law.
All while holding a Bible in a supposed demonstration of his pure conscience.
The fact that Trump Trolls support all this corruption because the President excels at political theater is quite an indictment of the overall greed for power. Those that support Trump refuse to confess that these confused ethics and the moral hypocrisy that drives them are a danger to the nation. Instead they spout platitudes such as Make America Great Again as if those four words have any meaning at all.
The fact of the matter is that Trump knows better than anyone that slogans sell even worthless products. HIs “You’re Fired” statement fueled a reality TV show that covered up his bankruptcies and bankrolled his brand despite its many failings. Without that $200M or so that he gained from playing a a business mogul on TV, he might have been exposed and deposed for financial fraud a long time ago. How ironic it is that his fake world saved his real ass.
Do like the Russians do
So we should not be surprised that the content posted on their the Facebook pages of Trump supporters is often comprised of fake attempts to justify the Trumpian appetite for power over purpose. The typical tactic of Trumpian memes is to purposely present a falsely black-and-white contrast on social conscience and civil rights. This happens to be exactly how Russian interference in the election proved most effective. It is no surprise that this type of disinformation was eagerly shared by Trump supporters to make the case that their preferred candidate holds the key to American prowess and success.
In fact, what Trump holds most dear to his heart is the authority to undercut the rule of law and democracy. This is exactly how Vladimir Putin conducts business. Trump supporters and to a large degree, the entire Republican Party is complicit in this behavior. The Party of Lincoln has become the party of Do Like The Russians Do.
Divide and Conquer
By way of exploration on this tactic, I explored the wall of a Trump support who was busy chirping at a friend of mine that about a post concerning the debt owed by Trump and how it might lead to a conflict of interest if foreign interests controlled loans to Trump totaling nearly half a million dollars. The Trump woman insisted instead that the “facts” were not in on Trump’s taxes and that no one should be allowed to pass judgment on the man until Trump himself released his tax records.
It’s pretty clear why Trump is not eager to let that happen. He’s spent five years avoiding the issue and doing everything he can to keep his tax records secret. To distract attention from this and other issues that indict his behaviors, he spends most of his time stoking up social and civic fears among his base, a sector of society that seems to prefer distraction over the substance of reality.
Here’s one of the memes that the Trump Troll woman posted on her page.
The group that claims to be the creator of this meme is called Keep America American, an apparel company whose About Us page states, “Our main goal at American Nation is to promote patriotism and love for our homeland no matter the occasion. It’s okay to be a NATIONALIST. It’s okay to be AMERICAN. ” The. slogan that adorns its logo is “Peace through superior firepower.”
Those statements are rife with the barely concealed racism of words such as “homeland” and the tradition that says America is originally and foremost a white nation. Thus it also supports the “whatever it takes” mentality of KKK tactics that define and defend that homeland. The apologetic headline “If the KKK is a hate group” pretends to admit that fact, but only as a precursor to claim that Black Lives Matter is a far greater threat to public safety.
Dismissing the fact that the KKK tortured, raped, persecuted, lynched or murdered thousands of Black Americans in order to claim that Black Lives Matter is its counterpart is a sick attempt at moral equivalency. The KKK emerged in direct response to the abolition of slavery. For 100 years until the Civil Rights Act was passed in the mid-1960s, Black Lives were subject to Jim Crow laws and harsh discrimination all across America. That institutionalized racism bled into law enforcement, filled American prisons with a disproportionate number of Black American citizens, and led to the serial murder of dozens of Black citizens at the hands of police across the nation.
That trifecta of corrupt outcomes is why Black LIves Matter was conceived and introduced as a protest against the American system as a whole. Its original premise is that respect for life was not being shown to Black members of society.
Trumpism is destructive
Into this conflicted scene marches the Racist In Chief, President Donald Trump. His own history of racist statements are not confined to Black Americans. His appetite for racial taunts and discrimination emboldens Trump supporters to espouse racism as a normal and legitimate state of mind in America. Trump has leveraged that approval as a tool for political power. Though this blog posted prior to the Presidential debate on September 29, 2020, it is worth this revision on September 30 to note that Trump refused to disavow white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys. Instead he instructed them to Stand Down and Stand By. By any normal measure of law and order, those words constitute a threat and an act sedition against the United States of America. So much for the Second Amendment, which begins, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state.” Trump prefers vigilante fear and injustice instead.
The Trump administration builds its rhetoric from the foundations of racist advisor Stephen Miller. Trump and his followers seek to turn back the clock on social progress to a period when intimidation based on race was an acceptable tool of social dominance. While many Trump supporters adamantly insist they are not racist, and Black conservatives claim to love the politics and policies of Donald Trump on matters of economics, trade, housing and healthcare, the inescapable burden of such support is that racism is strapped to the backs of all those who carry water for Trump.
Confusing racism with patriotism
The sickest thing about in all this social conflict is that these brands of closeted racism are now considered a brand of patriotism. Racism and a cultlike brand of nationalism is what Trumpism promises to carry out through its slogan Make America Great Again. What else could it mean? Trump loyalists eager to dismantle American institutions such as the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency have worked to dismantle the purposes for which those governmental bodies were established.
Their efforts are succeeding, especially with Covid-19 gutting even normal educational processes thanks to Trump’s disaffecting response to the pandemic and wildfires burning away millions of acres of land in California even while Trump disavows any possible effects of climate change on dramatic environmental disasters. Trumpism is destructive of every type of public trust and responsibility. All of this destruction is backed by religious ideology that claims white people are the Chosen People of God and that the earth is doomed by Original Sin, and isn’t worth saving even if we wanted to try.
Nothing really changes
This is the America in which we now live. It is probably the America in which we have always lived. Civility and justice owned the stage for a while, but the reign of the Great Entertainer Donald Trump is indeed a fulfillment of the self-indulgent wishes of the Great Communicator and Original Dog-Whistle President Ronald Reagan, who started the destruction of America rolling in the early 1980s.
Now Trump has turned the fight for the survival of the American ideal into a real-life nightmare. The only real concern of the Reality Show President is saving face and saving his own skin from indictment and conviction. He knows from his TV experience that pitting Americans against each other in a war of survival is an ideal distraction while he sucks money from the nation through his ill-earned position as President of the United States.
That’s why Trump loves the racist memes and hate spouted by his supporters. It is his only hope for some kind of redemption against the fraud and corruption he’s already committed and plans to expand upon with a second term. Trump knows that gaining fascist control of the nation is worth the kind of money that even money can’t buy. It all lines up under Donald J. Trump.
a man who controls prostitutes and arranges clients for them, taking part of their earnings in return.
“What can I say?” Trump seems to be asking. “That’s how this business works.”
This week marks the start of the Republican National Convention. In a story posted on the Marketwatch website, it was noted that some unusual shifts in normal convention and nomination procedures have been implemented basically by direction of President Donald Trump. The story notes: “The Republican National Committee will go without a traditional policy platform at the upcoming GOP convention, saying instead that it “will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.”
In a statement issued Sunday, the RNC said it adopted a resolution Saturday to go without a platform due to the difficulties presented by the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced the convention to significantly scale back.
“The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement,” the RNC said.
The irony of that last sentence should not be ignored. Claiming that the RNC “did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without a breadth of perspectives” is beyond absurd. The RNC is doing one thing: the will of the President. He is their pimp and their controller. He arranges their clients and takes a portion of their earnings for himself.
Nothing more need be said about the nature of the Trump administration and its behavior. The Republican Party entered into a relationship with a pimp, and they’ve now been pimped.
The definition of a cancel culture is a society in which the past or present acts of a person are used to undermine their credibility to silence their voice and even end their career.
While the term “cancel culture” is fairly recent, the concept of canceling someone out based on supposedly scandalous behavior or wrongful ideas is as old as human history. And it has been a particular weapon of religion for thousands of years.
Cancelling Jesus
An Anglo Saxon Jesus scourged before crucifixion
The most prominent example in religious history is the cancel culture of religious legalism that followed a man named Jesus around to dig up dirt on his teachings. Religious authorities fearing for their own positions in society and eager to defend their notion of “tradition” gathered everything they could find on Jesus to conduct a severe cancellation of his message and ministry.
They succeeded in the short term by collaborating with political forces in the Roman world to conduct a cancel culture trial, mocking his claim to be “King of the Jews” while casting blame for calling himself the Son of God. The religious authorities did everything they could to cancel Jesus, and he notably offered little resistance to their aims. That led to the crucifixion now celebrated by the sign of the cross, a holy symbol to Christians the world over.
Many Christian denominations love to lay claim to that cross as a symbol of their salvation. Yet these same Christians in many cases choose to aggressively ignore the cancel culture habits of those who brought that event about.
Legalistic culture wars
As a result, the most powerful branches of the Christian tradition became the one thing Jesus most despised about religion. By the third century A.D., the institution of Christianity was dominated by religious legalists whose adherence to rules and regulations were no less severe than the people who conspired to crucify Jesus in the first place. Anyone that did not adhere to the tenets of Christian religion could be “cancelled” and banned from society outright.
Christianity took cancel culture mentality to its extreme, engaging in pogroms and purges against all those who opposed its authority. The principal target was the Jews, on whom literalistic Christians placed blame for the death of Jesus. That was a necessary and calculated leap in gaslighting the world to distance themselves, at least in terms of perception, from their legalistic forefathers.
The worst cancel in history
Thus the greatest lie in all of human history took over a religion that started with disciples wandering two-by-two and town to town.
As it gathered political power, Christianity became a force for evil through a cancel culture carrying out inquisitions, crusades, witch hunts, and torture to enforce the authority of its traditions and its gathering wealth.
These efforts to suppress or cancel other cultures were “successful” in the sense that they led to the death of millions of people at the direction of the church. Entire nations succumbed to the brutality as claims of providence were veiled behind facetious terms such as Manifest Destiny to justify the cancellation of any culture that stood in front of the Christian Way. The same perverse mentality was used to justify slavery, and the Bible served as the tool to cancel others as well. From homosexuals to women, from immigrants to scientists, Christianity has embarked on cancel campaigns against all of them.
The Holocaust cancellation of Jews
Even that despot Adolf Hilter recognized the irony of these behaviors by the Christian religion. When asked about his vendetta against Jews, he stated, “We are not doing anything to the Jews that the Christian religion has not been doing for 1500 years.” Christians sought to “cancel” all Jews that refused to convert and confess Jesus as the Messiah. The same rage and cancel wars were brought against other religions and cultures as well. From the shrines of Islam to the huts of indigenous tribes in far flung regions of the earth, Christianity sought to cancel those faith systems outright.
The greatest lie in history is that Christianity as a religion was somehow an “improvement” over the legalistic traditions favored by the religious authorities whom Jesus came to resist in the first place. Too much Christian history involves bloodshed and merciless domination of cultures around the world. Let us recall that even King David was denied the right to build a temple to honor the Lord because, as God warned him, “You have too much blood on your hands.” God may work with flawed people, but in the end, there is still conscience to consider.
Modern Times
MAGA seeks to cancel social progress to replace it with an anachronistic, racist version of national religion
That brings us to modern times, in which the President of the United States is backed by a Christian cabal all too eager to conduct culture wars to impose their worldview on the nation it claims as its sole possession. With dismissive aplomb, the President engages in daily attempts to cancel out voices and destroy the careers of his perceived opponents. Some of these people served in his own administration. He hailed them for their service when they joined, yet assailed them mercilessly if they left. From his personal attorney Michael Cohen, the “fixer” who did Trump’s dirty work, to men such as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump praised them for perceived loyalty. But when they part ways, the sociopathic side of Trump uses Twitter to cancel those he sees as disloyal. All the while, Trump engages in well-documented corruption and collusion with despots around the world.
And predictably, Trump has in his corner a phalanx of highly calculating religious zealots who view it as their right to cancel anyone they deem enemies to the cause. As noted, this approach has a long, sordid history.
John Lennon was right
One of the biggest demonstrations of Christian cancel culture occurred when John Lennon of The Beatles made an accurate yet widely misunderstood statement about the nature of popularity. He wisely stated, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
Cancel culture volunteers in the 1960s sought to ban the Beatles for their popularity claims
Lennon was right. Across the mainstream denominations in America, Christianity is shrinking because much of the religion and its legalistic foundations are anachronistic. That’s what makes so many religious authorities fearful of future irrelevance. Yet we should recall the response back when Lennon made those cogent remarks. All across the Bible Belt, buzz-haired teenagers and screaming girls threw records onto bonfires in an attempt to cancel The Beatles on the spot.
Fifty years later, The Beatles are more popular than ever. The timelessness of their music and the importance of their social commentary during a time of great social change has grown in significance with the passing years. A deranged fan jealous of Lennon’s fame and talent canceled his anti-hero’s life with a bullet to the head, a haunting reminder that the artist once wrote a song titled Happiness is a Warm Gun.
Smoking guns and gaslighting
Cancelled lives. JFK. RFK. MLK. John Lennon.
So the Christian haters of John Lennon ultimately got their way. How ironic it is that so many hard-Right Christians seem to love and embrace their weapons as much as they love Jesus. Thousands of people die each year from gun violence in America, their lives cancelled by a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment that ignores the requirement for a well-regulated militia in favor of a selfish claim to bear arms at any cost.
How ironic it is that a religion in its most conservative form celebrates the value of law, yet when it comes to protecting the lives of millions of people in history, it has dismissed the most important law of all, Thou Shall Not Kill in favor of a worldview that says it’s okay to cancel the lives of anyone who stands in the way of imperial or populist religious power.
Christianity is gaslighting the world by claiming loss of religious freedom when its own agenda for millennia has been aimed at canceling the freedoms and rights of people who don’t share the same belief system.
In my forthcoming book Rescuing Christianity from the Grip of Tradition, the issue of religious legalism is dissected and traced back to the earliest words in the Bible, where the Serpent in the Garden of Eden first adopts the Word of God to serve its own purposes.
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