Ghosts Of The Before Time: May 2005 and Those Chick Tract “Christians”

If you want to get instantly blocked by all your Never Trump allies who have now elevated the late Michael Gerson to sainthood, my advice to you is to remind them of Gerson's actual record.  

His actual writing.  

Not the way Peter Wehner' remembers it:

A beautiful writer with an even more beautiful soul

Not the way Christianity Today summarized it:

Gerson crafted the language of faith-inspired politics for president George W. Bush from 1999 to 2006. He fused a theological vision of moral purpose with a practical policy agenda—and in the process produced some of the era’s most memorable phrases, including “armies of compassion” and “axis of evil.”

Not the way The Wheaton Center for Faith, Politics & Economics memorialized it:

God’s Wordsmith: Michael Gerson Remembered by Peter Wehner, David Brooks, and Scott Baker

Because of course his Conservative friends and fellow travelers remember him as angelically humble and high-minded ... because the bile that poured out of his keyboard every week and into pages of the Washington Post wasn't aimed at them.  

It was aimed at us.  

More specifically, it was aimed at President Barack Obama, and it was fucking relentless.  If you are interested in the details, back in 2019 I wrote a little over 16,000 words about it here, breaking down year after year of Gerson's baseless, scurrilous, often borderline-racist attacks on President Obama, and his slanderous attacks on you and me for voting for Obama.  You see,  according to Mr. Gerson, many of us were either idiots or idolaters or both for supporting him.

Two Faces of Obamamania 

Some Obama supporters aren't the brightest of bulbs.

However, this is not a column about the late Michael Gerson, per se.  His story just gets us where we are going, which is 20 years ago.  May of 2005.  This is about all those good, God-fearin', morally superior Christian Conservative men who held enormous sway within the Republican party while holding themselves willfully and disastrously blind for decades as to what was really going on with their Conservative evangelical cult and their despicable political regime.   

It's about how so many of these God-fearin', morally superior Christian Conservative men had their Road to Damascus moment 30 years too late.  How their recognition of the size and shape of the monster they had created only arrived, grudgingly, once that monster had grown large enough to cast its terrifying shadow on them personally.  

It's about what savvy Conservative Evangelicals like Gerson, and Peter Wehner, and David French should have seen coming long before a Midwest bumpkin like me did.  And despite the fact that these  men of faith were so consistently and catastrophically wrong about the one thing they were being paid to opine about -- the one thing they had their noses pressed right up against for their entire adult lives -- they either retained their positions of influence and authority in the media, or, in the case of David French, actually gotten promoted all the way up to The New York Times.

All while those who had been sounding the alarm all along are still treated like crackpots and pests.  

So let's take a little walk into the Forbidden Zone of the Before Time to see a world that some of us dirty fucking hippies had seen all along, and a whole lot of revered and highly-paid Conservative pundits and thought leaders held themselves heroically ignorant of until it was far, far too late.   

From me, May 16, 2005:

Another exciting page from The Fucktard Bible

Chick Tract “Christians” and why Nick Kristof is an idiot.

Let me tell you a couple of mostly-true stories, and then explain why Nick Kristof is an idiot.

First: My Mom had spent a week at an ashram in Pennsylvania and was positively bubbling over with joy. It was a traveling summer, so after her face-time with Buddah, her sojourn took her west to visit family we have out there. This particular evening she was visiting with my cousin and his family who are deeply Fundmentalist. Every other phrase out of his mouth on any topic is “Well Praise the Lord!” or “God is good.” They’re in church every few days. Bookshelves are stocked with “Left Behind” fiction. The whole deal.

In other words, Right Wing Evangelicals who spend a good part of their waking hours relentless pushing their particular, ossified version of Christianity to anyone who comes within earshot.

So my Mom is over having dinner, and Cousin Fucktard and his family are practically stuffing Chick Tracts into her pockets…and she’s listening politely to their idiotic hard-sell drivel, because that’s what nice people do. Then came a lull in the conversation, and since the topic was God, she stared to share with them her deeply moving and ecstatic experiences at the ashram, and Cousin Fucktard immediately cut her off.

“Excuse me, Aunt Driftglass,” he asked, “but do these people believe that Christianity is the only True Faith, and have they accepted Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Savior?”

“Weeell,” she began diplomatically, “they believe Jesus was a great spiritual leader. As an incarnation of the Divine. You see, they believe…”

And that’s when Cousin Fucktard cut her off again.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Sorry, Aunt Driftglass, but I’ll have to ask you not to talk about that in my house. We don’t approve of blasphemy here.”

And that was that.

Second: My brother and I were at our family reunion last summer down in the wilds of Missouri. It was Red State Central, and the 2004 election was heating up, and as it happened, Bill Clinton’s autobiography had just come out. My uncle – the patriarch of the tribe – held forth these opinions, and spoke for most of the family when he said:

There was no need to read anything from Bill Clinton’s autobio, “’cause Clinton’s just a liar. Lied about ever’thang.”

The reason every right-thinkin’, God-fearin’ person must re-elect George Bush was equally simple. Bush was “a plain-spoken man, and a per’fessed Christian.”

Period.

No engagement with factual reality of any kind. No discussion of policy or nuance, or comprehension that there even are such things. A level of cultural, political, historical, global and just-plan-factual illiteracy and detachment – and a smug self-satisfaction with being this pig-ignorant -- that was absolutely Medieval.

This was when I figured that Bush would probably win. Because these members of my family – and millions of other Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists – have no higher reasoning functions with which you can engage. They don’t believe facts. They are cultists who have been relentlessly programmed to believe “Liberal = Satan” and “Republican = Christian”. Period.

Now on to this slice of simpleton cheese from Nick Kristof:

Liberal Bible-Thumping

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 15, 2005
Even aside from his arguments that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that St. Paul was a self-hating gay, the new book by a former Episcopal bishop of Newark is explosive.
John Shelby Spong, the former bishop, tosses a hand grenade into the cultural wars with "The Sins of Scripture," which examines why the Bible - for all its message of love and charity - has often been used through history to oppose democracy and women's rights, to justify slavery and even mass murder.
…
This book is long overdue, because one of the biggest mistakes liberals have made has been to forfeit battles in which faith plays a crucial role. Religion has always been a central current of American life, and it is becoming more important in politics because of the new Great Awakening unfolding across the United States.
Yet liberals have tended to stay apart from the fray rather than engaging in it. In fact, when conservatives quote from the Bible to make moral points, they tend to quote very selectively.
…
"Can we really worship the God found in the Bible who sent the angel of death across the land of Egypt to murder the firstborn males in every Egyptian household?" Bishop Spong asks. Or what about 1 Samuel 15, in which God is quoted as issuing orders to wipe out all the Amalekites: "Kill both man and woman, child and infant." Hmmm. Tough love, or war crimes? As for the New Testament, Revelation 19:17 has an angel handing out invitations to a divine dinner of "the flesh of all people."
…
Bishop Spong particularly denounces preachers who selectively quote Scripture against homosexuality. He also cites various textual reasons for concluding (not very persuasively) that St. Paul was "a frightened gay man condemning other gay people so that he can keep his own homosexuality inside the rigid discipline of his faith."
…
Liberals can and should confront Bible-thumping preachers on their own terms, for the scriptural emphasis on justice and compassion gives the left plenty of ammunition. After all, the Bible depicts Jesus as healing lepers, not slashing Medicaid.

Apparently Mr. Kristof has never heard of the Presbyterians. Or the Unitarians. Or any of a dozen flavors of Protestantism that aren’t run by completely deranged big-haired Mussolinae (isn’t that the plural of Il Duce). Or the Liberal and/or Liberation Theologians of the Catholic Church. Or the fucking Jesuits. And he has never read any of the rich body of literature that has taken on the Christian Right over just these issues, over and over again, for at least the last twenty-years.

So since he has decided to plop himself down in the middle of this busy intersection as innocent of any knowledge of his own culture as a dung beetle is of ballistics, let me help the poor man out by hipping him to a few facts, the central two being these:

1. We are not talking about “Christians” generally, but that fiercely and proudly ignorant cult called Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists.

2. Being “biblical literalists” – believing that the Bible is the “literal and inerrant Word of God” – means that Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists are by definition unable to admit doctrinal or dogmatic error in the slightest degree. On a practically molecular-level they are incapable of allowing themselves to think even for a second that there are parts of the Bible that are historically absurd or physically impossible…or just poorly translated or misunderstood.

On no issue of any kind, to any degree large or small, are Conservative Evangelicals capable of or willing to engage at all. All discussion begins with the predicate that their beliefs are 100% correct in every detail, and that anyone who disagrees with them is either misguided and in need of conversion, or a minion of Satan in need of Armageddon.

Or to put it a little less abstractly, Jerry Falwell was a lying, hater-mongering, heap of wormy shit twenty years ago and no amount of engagement by anyone on any issue in any venue on any topic has succeeded in budging his fat ass one micron.

Ditto the rest of the Heroes of Evangelical Ignorance: Pat Roberston. James Dobson, Don Wildmon., Paul Wyrick, Randall Terry, Phyllis Schlafly…and so on with a list that extends well out past the vanishing point.

And for the record, Nick, we had a Democratic President who was as steeped in scripture as any one of these thugs; could out-cite them all and did engage them on the spiritual as well as the policy level. And do you remember how they reacted?

The howled for his blood.

The Masters of the Antebellum South looked to the Bible to justify their fascist Plantation States and generations of the faithful fought them from the pulpit. And failed.

Further generations confronted Southern Segregationists and lynchers in the same pulpits and with the same Good Book. And failed.

Another generation fought them over interracial marriage and property rights and voting rights and civil rights. And failed

We engage them now over a woman’s right to her own body. Over stem cell research. Over fucking Evolution. And we fail.

No amount of moral suasion has ever softened the hearts or opened the minds of these motherfuckers one iota; over and over again history has shown that it is only the naked power of a religiously neutral Federal Government coming down on their necks that ever forces them to quit abusing and murdering people their perverse faith has taught them to hate in the name of White Male Privilege and actually behave like Good Christians.

Which is not really surprising; Christians of all species have been talking right past each other for, well, around 2000 years. Same book, same language, same Savior...and you still get the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Anglicanism, Evangelicalism. You get schismatic warfare. You get internecine murder on a massive scale. You get the Inquisition, Salem, the Crusades and the likes of the Albigensian heresy (“Kill all. God will know his own.”)

So no thank you, Nick. I’ll go right along reading my Bible for a variety of reasons, but trying to engage a Fundy in a serious discussion about faith as opposed to simply enduring a set-piece, memorized-by-rote monologue is a fool’s errand. For your own edification, I urge you to sit down one evening over a beer with a couple of Jesuits and let them tell you about Evangelicals and how thoroughly reviled and discredited their inbred-idiot-cousin version of the Gospels is among serious theologians. How their Pop-Up Hate Book version of the Bible is laughed at by anyone not in their hillbilly cult.

Finally remember that the Bible is a Big Book. A whopping great, intimidating Moby Dick of a book that scares the crap out of most people who either don’t read at all to begin with, or read only monosyllabic Twinkie news with brides running away to Neverland to fondle young boys (I’m probably getting the details wrong. Following the Twinkie news is hard work.)

And like pre-IraqWar intel, it is cherry-picked by the Falwells and the Robersons of the world to fit their pre-existing bigotries…and always will be. They only see what they want to see so Nick, to save you a little time, let me summarize what the Fundies actually look at when they read the Good Book.

The Fucktard Bible

Old Tes’mint:
Gen’sis. God make everything on October 9th, 4004 B.C. ‘Round 9-ish.
Ex’dis. Chuck Heston saves some good Christians, some animals and his guns.
Buncha stuff
God killin’ people what don’t look like me, which is always cool.
God hates fags.
Bunch faggity poems or somethin’
God wastes Lot’s whole family, ‘cause he’s a fag or a libril or somethin’. Sooo cool.
Buncha other stuff.

New Tes’mint.
Jebus Kick’s Ass!
Stinkin’ Jews kill Jebus.
Buncha stuff
Buncha faggity stuff about “forgivin’ and camels and ‘the least of these.’”
Jebus Keeps Kicking Ass!
Buncha Letters.
Letter about God Hatin’ Fags, which is Excellent.
Buncha other stuff
Jebus Comes Back and Blows Shit Up and Kills alla them Librils and Queers and ay-rabs and Jews.


And Christ wept.

Here ends today's sojourn to the Before Time.

I Am The Liberal Media.

Saint Babbitt of QAnon

The subject today is why persuasion no longer works, why the art of political compromise is dead, who killed it, and why.  And to do that, we’re going to start off with a thing I did not know about until I was today years old.  That there are a few Christian churches out there that canonize Pontius Pilate as a saint.  

Which is wild.  

Even if you're not a Christian, you've probably heard of Pilate -- the first century A.D. Roman governor of the province of Judea after whom "Pilates" is named who presided over the sentencing of Jesus of Nazareth, just as he had presided over the crucifixion of hundreds of men adjudged to have broken one Roman law or another.  The execution of Jesus was nothing out of the ordinary: just another, bog standard example of Roman rule, handled in bulk with the speed and indifference of the average big city traffic court on any given Monday.

And yet in the Coptic Church, and in some Ethiopian churches he’s considered a saint. And not just any old kind of saint.  They believe he and his wife converted to Christianity and he was executed by the emperor, which makes him a martyr. 

Of course, this is all just goofy post hoc religious fiction, but so is so much of the New Testament.  

For example, there is zero chance that a high ranking roman army officer would be attending the crucifixion of a handful of troublemakers and criminals, much less declare out loud that "Truly, this was the Son of God!"  And yet, the gospel writers penciled in at least one (or possibly two, or maybe they're the same guy) centurion -- a commander of 100 men -- in attendance at this minor event.  

If you want to know the long version of how and why Christian origin stories got scripted this way, there is no lack of literature on the subject.  The much shorter version is marketing.  Specifically, how to take a minor Jewish apocalyptic cult and go looking for converts among much wider, gentile audience.  An audience that likes the brochure, but very definitely weren't on-board with the whole "gotta convert and be circumcised and keep kosher" thing.

Step 1:  Have a vision that says the whole "gotta convert and be circumcised and keep kosher" thing is no longer necessary.  Come one, come all!  Credit that to the very active and prolific, Paul of Tarsus.  

Step 2:  Since the wider, gentile audience you're trying to convert are going to mostly be Romans, you start rewriting your origin story so that, even though Jesus was a practicing Jew, the Jews become the  villains.  They're the ones who shout down Pilates' offer to release Jesus because Passover (this never happened, and there was no such "custom") 

The Barabbas episode is a well-known story in the Jesus Passion narrative. But it has, however, been debated as to matters of its historicity and viewed with suspicion on several grounds. The following arguments are usually provided:

Beyond the Gospels there is no mention of this event in primary sources for Pilate. There are a few sources attesting to Pilate’s governorship over Judea. For instance, from Philo of Alexandria (C. BCE 20-50 CE) and Josephus Flavius (c. 37-100 CE), historians have enough information to learn about Pilate’s character and his attitude towards the Jews over whom he ruled. Neither indicates the custom central to the Barabbas episode. 

Based on what Philo’s and Josephus’s sources tell us of Pilate, the critic argues that Pilate would never have released a murderous insurrectionist against Rome, let alone this be a custom. Rather, Pilate was brutal and ruthless, and would use his soldiers to beat people into submission. This perspective finds support. According to Philo, Pilate “was a man of inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition…”...

Moreover, for Pilate to release an insurrectionist would likely bring the Empire down on himself, which Pilate certainly would not have wanted.

Conversely, the Romans slowly evolve into, if not the heroes, at least sympathetic characters.  The centurion at the cross.  Pilate being bullied into executing Jesus by a Jewish crowd.   Matthew 27:24

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”

This first century propaganda push to shift the blame for the Romans arresting Jesus as an insurgent against the Roman empire and executing him in accordance with Roman law planted the seeds from which modern, murderous antisemitism sprang.  Matthew 27:25

All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”

From The Centre For The Study of Bible and Violence:

But important as it is, such historical contextualisation is not enough to deal with the legacy of Matthew 27:25 – the way in which it has been weaponised against Jews, and ‘has haunted Jewish-Christian relations for almost sixteen hundred years’.[3]  The accusation that all Jews everywhere, and down the generations, are ‘Christ-killers’ can be documented from the mid-second century:  Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho, told the Jew Trypho that at Christ’s first coming ‘he was pierced by you’.[4]  And Melito, bishop of Sardis, preached a powerful Passiontide sermon in which he rhetorically addressed ‘O lawless Israel’, saying, ‘you cast the vote of opposition against your Lord … over whom even Pilate washed his hands: for you killed him at the great feast’.[5]  Melito has been called ‘the first poet of deicide’, for making the explicit claim that ‘God has been murdered.  The King of Israel has been destroyed by an Israelite right hand.’[6]  Christian anti-Judaism later fused with racial antisemitism, and the deicide charge featured, for example, in the Nazi school curriculum.[7]  

Note that last part about this grotesque perversion of the truth eventually became so embedded in the culture that it was party of Nazi school curriculum as you read this from Reason magazine:

New Oklahoma Curriculum Requires Students To Learn 2020 Election Fraud Conspiracies 

The new standards are "the most unapologetically conservative, pro-America social studies standards in the nation," according to State Superintendent Ryan Walters.

n the new school year, thousands of Oklahoma students will be required to learn about 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories as part of a new curriculum developed by the state's controversial superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters, who has come under fire in recent months for an effort to require Oklahoma classrooms to stock Bibles and display the Ten Commandments, has said that the addition "empowers students to investigate and understand the electoral process." 

While it's not necessarily unreasonable to want students to learn about the dispute over the 2020 election, the standards' framing of the controversy (which turned up no evidence of election interference) and Walters' comments about it make it clear that teachers are meant to shed doubt on the veracity of the election. 

"The purpose of the standard is simple: we want students to think for themselves, not be spoon-fed left wing propaganda," Walters said in a statement to The Washington Post in March. "Students deserve to examine every aspect of our elections, including the legitimate concerns raised by millions of Americans in 2020."

Put a pin in that terrifying development for one minute while I send another fun Roman fact your way.

Did you know that, in Roman theology, emperors could be declared divine?  Well, of course you knew, because you watched I, Claudius, but maybe some other's didn't.  It's true.  It's the original meaning of the word "apotheosis".  Through a formal vote in the Roman Senate an emperor or other august person (usually deceased) could be elevated to the status of a divinity. 

These days there is a great deal of frustration and confusion abroad in the land about why the Republican party has divorced itself, not just from policies which the base never gave a shit about anyway, but from reason itself.  Why do they all believe such goddamn stupid lies?   Why do they persist in putting their faith in the same liars over and over again even as the lies fall apart over and over again?  

Whatever happened to art of political compromise and the power of persuasion?  

The answer is that Republicans have left the realm of politics altogether.   Sure, Republicans still have titles and elected offices and ribbon cuttings.  And, sure, every now and then there is some attempt to put on a show for the cameras about passing a bill or a budget.  But those are just the trappings and relics of an age that has now passed, because they are no longer a political party.

They are a religion.  And, yes, you'll hear a lot of critics (myself included) calling them a "cult", so I won't quibble except to say that there really isn't that much that separates a cult from a religion.  A.I. Jebus says it's more of a spectrum, and the distinction is often a matter of social and cultural perception. For example, has the group gained recognition from mainstream society as a religion?  Some people still think of Mormonism as a cult, most people would call it a religion?

Money is also a big consideration.  Bring enough gold to the table, and you can sit with the big boys.  

Social acceptance is also a factor.  Do you have enough people in your tent to be recognized by the mainstream culture as a legitimate religion.  Consider that, in the 1st and 2nd centuries, there were between 59 and 76 million people in the  Roman empire.  And at the end of the 1st century, the number of Christians in the empire amounted to nothing more than a rounding error.  Based on the modeling of Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity, there were approximately 7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);

Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity has a very interesting model that starts with 1,000 members of the Jesus Sect in 40 AD and projects a growth rate of 40% per decade up to the fourth century. As Stark lays out, this tallies with the available historical evidence, both the more impressionistic kind,[1] and a remarkable study on the growth of Christianity in Egypt, where we have the nearest approximation to births, marriages, and deaths records in the Roman world.[2]

Starks model means the trajectory was, roughly[3]:

7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);

40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)

200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)

2 million by 250 AD (2%)...

By 300 AD, there were six million Christians, and by 350 AD there were approximately thirty million, with Christians now a clear majority of the Empire.

Deciding at what point Christianity stopped being a cult and start being a religion really comes down to a matter of taste, so whether you prefer the term "cult" (since it sounds more transitory and personality-based) or "religion", something profoundly dark and disturbing that has been rumbling around in the guts of the GOP for decades has finally emerged fully into the open, and it is not a political party anymore.  And now that all internal opposition has been snuffed out and the faithful are in command of their own media platforms, they are proceeding with even greater vigor in doing what Republicans have been doing all along anyway: rewriting history to suit themselves.  

Just as the heroes and villains and martyrs of the Christian origin story were rearranged to suit the changing needs of the expanding church, so too are the heroes, villains and martyrs of the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 terrorist attack on the American capitol being rewritten to suit the Right's new religion.  

It is now the official canon of the Church of MAGA that the 2020 election was stolen, and any statement to the contrary is heresy that can cost you your job with the regime.  From Fortune Magazine, March 6, 2025:

Trump team tests job candidates by asking who won the 2020 election

The White House is giving potential job candidates litmus tests in interviews to make sure they are sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump and his second-term agenda, according to people familiar with the process.

Among the questions asked of multiple candidates: Would you be willing to serve as a spokesperson for mass deportations? Which of Trump’s executive orders is your favorite? Who won the 2020 presidential election? And which Trump policy do you disagree with?

Job seekers are asked their views on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump pardoned hundreds of people convicted of crimes linked to the assault, which killed at least seven people and injured 150 police officers. He has called the day’s events a peaceful protest.

The insurgents have been recast as hostages and heroes...

    -- liberated from their durance vile by the divine intervention of the godhead of their new faith -- 

-- which comes alongside promises of terrible retribution against the sinners who dared to defy the servants of the godhead:

And of course, story of the traitor Ashli Babbitt who fucked around and found out has been magically transformed into the tale of a Martyr to the Holy Cause.  From ABC News:

DOJ reaches agreement in principle to settle lawsuit brought by family of Ashli Babbitt

Babbitt's family sued the government in January 2024 seeking $30 million. 

The Department of Justice has reached an agreement in principle to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who was shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The details of the proposed settlement were not made clear during a Friday hearing before federal Judge Ana Reyes, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Babbitt's family members sued the government in January 2024 seeking $30 million for what they allege was her wrongful shooting death by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd.

Here's what actually happened.  Again from ABC News:

Byrd was cleared of any wrongdoing following an internal investigation into the actions leading up to his shooting of Babbitt as she tried to climb through a broken window that led to the House Speaker's Lobby, where several lawmakers and their staff were sheltering from rioters.

And here's the official doctrine according to the infallible leader of the Church of MAGA:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his solidarity with Babbitt's family and called for "justice" for what he has said was her "murder" at Byrd's hands -- in line with his broader vocal support for the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol to overturn his 2020 election loss.

In March, Trump said in an interview with Newsmax he wasn't aware of the lawsuit brought by Babbitt's family but promised he would "look into" it.

"I'm a big fan of Ashli Babbitt, OK, and Ashli Babbitt was a really good person who was a big MAGA fan, Trump fan, and she was innocently standing there -- they even say trying to sort of hold back the crowd," Trump said. "And a man did something unthinkable to her when he shot her, and I think it's a disgrace. I'm going to look into that. I did not know that."

As an emergent religion, the Church of MAGA checks all the boxes.  It has its saints and martyrs and a godhead.  

It has has the Republican party's age-old contempt for the existing order of things, and now, under Trump, that evil old temple is being torn down.  And in its place shall be a paradise on Earth for the faithful.  Revelation 21:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.  I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

From The Atlantic, July 21, 2016:

‘I Alone Can Fix It’

Breaking with two centuries of political tradition, Donald Trump didn’t ask Americans to place their trust in each other or in God, but rather, in Trump.

From Yahoo News, March 10, 2025:

Trump: 'We're going to become so rich, you're not going to know where to spend all that money' 

Miracles are now performed on a daily basis.  Sometimes on an hourly basis.  Through faith alone, rising prices have stopped being a bad thing and become a good thing.  Who needs so many dolls and pencils anyway?  

And who says they're rising anyway?  Trump has declared that:

"The cost of eggs has come down like 93%, 94% since we took office, and they’re pretty much normally priced now.”

Also I am told that somewhere out there in Real America gas now costs less than $2 a gallon.  From CNBC:

“Gasoline just broke $1.98 a Gallon, lowest in years,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday. “Consumers have been waiting for years to see pricing come down. NO INFLATION, THE FED SHOULD LOWER ITS RATE!!!”

And once Trump had been re-elected, the Church of MAGA had it's very own story of symbolic betrayal, death and resurrection.

Take a long look at the groveling deference and sycophancy of Trump's cabinet and the Republicans in congress.  Doesn't that look an awful lot like an act of "apotheosis" -- of elevating Trump to divine status?

And now that it has its hands on real, state power, what would a new, bloody-minded religion be without the declarations of jihad against blasphemers and heretics.  This is from the April 9, 2025 Presidential Memoranda FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

Title: Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship

...Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority. Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic. CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Krebs, through CISA, promoted the censorship of election information, including known risks associated with certain voting practices. Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines. Krebs skewed the bona fide debate about COVID-19 by attempting to discredit widely shared views that ran contrary to CISA’s favored perspective...

This July will mark the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey trial.   Care to guess how many Christian evangelicals still refuse to believe in evolution?  According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey indicated that 66% of white evangelical Protestants hold a creationist stance, believing humans have always existed in their present form.

What about refusal to believe in climate change despite the fact that the consensus of 97-99% of all scientists is that it is real and man-made?  Or belief that the Bible is the literal an inerrant word of God despite mountains of historical, geological, paleographic, forensic and chemical evidence to the contrary?

Like it or not, for the Right this stopped being a political contest over policy questions a long time ago and  became a Holy War against us infidels and heretics on the Left.  That’s what all of their culture war bullshit adds up to: Church of MAGA articles of faith that their leaders have told them,  are under siege by us godless, commie scum.  

Long past time for Dems to wake up and stop pretending what is broken about this country can be fixed by bringing a House resolution to a Holy War.  

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 898: Why Today's Politics Is A Holy War

"One man's cult is another man's religion." -- Annie Parisse

Links:  

• 
  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Jerry's Kids (Test)

I just did a post about Jerry Falwell which you can reach here if you make it past the Scary Content Warning that Google slapped on it the minute it went up, and which was replicated on two of the 8000 social media sites on which we lil' folk must hawk our wares if we want to see any traffic at all.

As an experiment, I'm making the title of this post -- "Jerry Skids" -- a slight variation of the title of the flagged post to see it that's what triggered the warning from the Google Decepticons.

I also tagged the previous post with a lot of naughty labels, so I'll test that next. 

Anyhoo, here's the note Google sent me:

     Hello,

     As you may know, our Community Guidelines 
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we 
allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Jerry's Kids" was 
flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers 
because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at 
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2023/07/jerrys-kids.html. Your blog readers 
must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

     We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If 
you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content 
to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, 
you may republish it at 
https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=11363027&postId=6958696997669486806. 
This will trigger a review of the post.

     For more information, please review the following resources:

     Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
     Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy

     Sincerely,

     The Blogger Team

Or maybe they objected to my call to...

Burn The Lifeboats

Phase One complete:  No flag is I change the title.

Phase Two begins:  What happens when I add bawdy labels to this post like "Christian Sex Toys,Patriotic Christians for Against Socialism,Sex Dolls for Christ,The 10 Hour Orgasm Diet,Get your handjob certificate in under 16 weeks"?  Let's find out!

Phase Two complete:  Labels added.  Still not flagged.  Hmm.  Alright, I'm going to let it cook for a bit, then remove the bawdy labels and change the title to the same title as the flagged post.  Scientific method people!  Happening right here!

Phase Three begins: Removed bawdy labels, and changed name to match original, flagged post.  I'm  going to let this simmer and see what happens.  If nothing happens...

Phase Three complete: No change.  So...

Phase  Four begins:  Add the bawdy labels back in to see if those + the original title is sufficient to get this post flagged.  If nothing happens, add the Falwell video to the top of this post to see if that plus everything else triggers a flagging.

Phase Four complete: No change.  So, adding the Falwell video to the top of this post.  and then, once again, the waiting game begins!

Phase Five begins:  Falwell video added back.  Other than a few pics and word, this now replicates the conditions of the original post that was flagged.  

Plan Nine from Outer Space:  Create an entirely new post, also with the same name as the original and with, I dunno, pictures of puppies or something.  This is currently underway.

Plan Nine results:  I have, step-by-step, altered a cat pic post to be an exact replica (except for this sentence) of the original post that Google flagged as violating community standards.  

So lets find out what this does in 3...2...1...

Well, nothing happened.  So, as the old programmer that I am, there remains one more test to conduct.  Rather than starting with an innocuous post with a cat pic and gradually building it into a replica of the original, flagged post one "Update" at a time, what happens if I do it all in one shot, as I did with the original?

Well, we're about to find out.  

Final results:  Again, nothing happened.  Theory #1 was that, starting with an innocuous post and building it up to community-standards-violating post was a way to beat the Google flagging system.  Great theory, until I created an exact copy of the original post in one shot and nothing happened.  So my guess is that either some troll told Google that I was up to naughtiness and, out of an abundance of legal department generated caution, they flagged it, or there is a glitch in the A.I. which causes it to be over-cautious so that *anything* with "Kids" in the header gets flagged.  And maybe that has since been tweaked, but the flagging can't be undone except by a Google flunky who has better things to do.

Anyway, it's been a journey!   I'm deleting all the test posts but this one so as not to confuse my future self as to what the hell I was doing back in summer of of 2023.  Also, as fate would have it, my next post will riff on the original, flagged post for entirely different reasons that this now-completed experiment.  

Jerry's Kids

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Gun Nuts and Creepy Fundamentalists

Turns out, at least two of the Five Pillars on which Modern Conservatism stands (Ammosexuals and snake-handling Christopaths -- the other three being Bigotry, Corporatism and, most important of all, Dogmatic Denial That The Other Four Pillars Exist) don't fare so well when cable teevee fame and big money are in the mix.

From The Daily Banter:

The Duggars Deliberately Covered Up Child Molestation in Their Ranks

 Chez Pazienza on May 22, 2015

The schadenfreude would be absolutely delicious if the story weren’t so sickening. 27-year-old Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the Duggar family — the Christian zealots who parlayed their unwillingness to stop churning out children into a multi-media empire — now admits publicly to molesting several little girls when he was a teenager, many of them his own sisters. He was forced to come clean after an In-Touch magazine article, published earlier today, detailed a 2006 police report revealing that Josh had confessed his acts to his father, Jim Bob Duggar, but the family patriarch withheld the information from police for a full year. Five young girls apparently had their breasts and genitals forcibly touched and groped by Josh, both while they were sleeping and while they weren’t. According to In-Touch, the report had remained hidden until the magazine filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation treated Josh’s crimes as felonies.

From Fox411 (emphasis added):

Trouble just keeps mounting for former “Sons of Guns” star Will Hayden.

10 Years After: 2006 -- Dead Center

In the service of fundraising and nostalgia, I am using the occasion of my 10th blogiversary to bring some stuff out of the archives -- probably a few representational samples from each year. 

By 2006, the Bush Regime had moved past the point of wingnut bullshit equilibrium where it's myriad sins and impeachable crimes could be kept out of the spotlight by wishing or screaming or Roving them away.   And so, as BushCo continued collapsing along the fault lines of corruption, fascism and stupefying incompetence about which the Left had been warning for years, there began a mad scramble by the Very Serious People of Washington D.C. -- who had cheered on President Fiasco right down the line -- to distance themselves as fast as their Guccis and Ferragamos could carry them.

But immediately they ran into a seemingly irresolvable problem:  How could they possibly start criticizing the Bush Administration like Dirty Hippies, using a vocabulary expropriated from the Dirty Hippies, without acknowledging at some level that, yes, the Dirty Hippies had been right all along?

Vexing!

Fortunately, being in the making-shit-up business, they had a solution right on their doorstep.

The Very Serious People of Washington D.C. would buy ghost town called "Bipartisanship" -- a swath of barren ideological real estate which had been bombed to splinters by Republican Ronald Reagan, napalmed to ash by Republican Newt Gingrich and nuked from orbit by Republican Karl Rove -- and create a brand-new, Disneyfied theme-park called "Centrism".  They would repopulate it with...themselves!  Their watchword -- their shibboleth -- would be "Both Sided Are To Blame (Always, and for Everything)" and it would be the happiest place on Earth!

They'd have a mayor and rules of good conduct and leading citizens who would command the nation's teevee camera and ruthlessly frame every national conversation so that no Very Serious Person of Washington D.C. would ever lose their sweet, sweet gig, or have to ever admit that Liberals had ever been right about anything.

For you students of history, this column used a creature named "Ralph Reed" -- as odious a pile of lies and hellflesh as ever stank up a teevee green room -- as its jumping off point.  In case you were wondering which federal graybar hotel you might be able to write to Ralph in care of, worry not.  He was never brought up on charges! and now spends his days promoting wingnut Christopath candidates for higher office in the name of Almighty God, appearing on various Sunday Morning talk shows as one of the Very Serious People of Washington D.C. and unironically hawking books like, "Awakening: How America Can Turn From Moral and Economic Destruction Back to Greatness".

And so...

“What monsters would walk the streets, 

if men's faces


were as unfinished

as their souls.“ -- Quote by Eric Hoffer 

The Specter at the Banquet

Miss Me Yet?

In 2004, 62,040,610 of our fellow Americans voted to renew their subscription to the The Bicycle Chief and the Worst Administration in History.

We told them it would wreck the place. We told them it would break the nation's back. We told them it would take a generation to clean up the mess they were in the process of underwriting.

They told us that were dirty, foul-mouthed, America-hating surrender monkeys.

Now, two short years after the Worst Administration in History shambled off to the scented crypt of yesterday, those same fuckers who stripped the flesh off of Liberty to make drum-skins for George W. Bush and Company now swear on the graves of their ancestors that they never even heard of the guy.

That recorded time began on January 20, 2009 and before that all was darkness and chaos.

They're entire strategy for seizing power once again for long enough to finish this country off once and for all depends on a conspiracy of forgetting...forgetting...forgetting.

And no matter how many pearls it may cause to be clutched to powder, I for one have no intention of letting their depraved past slip softly and silently away.

Next Up: David Brooks wrote a column. Oh boy!

The Voice of Empire, Ctd.

Skipping like a flat rock here there and everywhere today building up an impressionistic picture of the Common Beltway Wisdom, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the "Presidents of both parties deserve credit" and the "wherever you stand on the water-boarding question" Centrist, Both-siderist (But-always-skewing-Rightward) Beltway claptrap memes were being frantically jack-hammered into the nation's airwaves.

Feathered in-between ads for penis creams, Natural Gas, anti-psychotic drugs (Warning: May cause dry-mouth, eye-fires, psychosis) and rotoscoped human cartoons talking about their portfolios, it was a virtual Bush Regime Dead-Ender


Reunion Extravaganza

on every channel of Imperial teevee.


The Cheney's -- war criminal Daddy

and his ethically stillborn mutant child -- were both let out of the box for the occasion.

The mortal remains of

George Will butt-scooted his Calvin Coolidgisms all over the floor.

One of those irrepressibly wrong Kagan Kids showed up on video.

Skeletor dropped by.

Ghouliani

used this 9/11-related moment to run back into the spotlight one more time, suck up to Dubya once more time, and show a little presidentia leg now that it has become clear that any bedbug with a pulse and a press agent can become s "serious presidential contender" in today's Republican Party.

Condoleezza "Across two presidencies!...We-We-We!" Rice was there.

Bloody Bill Kristol --

The Dark Priest of smirking, unaccountable, blood-soaked incompetence -- was there.

Sample Liz Cheney: The "torture" debate is over. O-v-e-r. It's not torture. It works. It's awesome. Period. Fuck you. And yes, the blood of Americans that my Daddy got killed paid for this power-suit of mine. Capitalism, bitches!

Thomas Ricks preceded this cannibal shrike's despicable remarks with an honorable "I can't believe I live in country where we are debating torture", but following her unbroken string of wingnut bullshit declarative, predictably no one challenged her.

No one said a fucking peep.

No one at all.

Because Empire requires that the media keep pretending that Neocon opinions are something other than part of the ever-churning Gulf Stream of lies in the vast, partisan, America-loathing open sewer of Conservatism.

As if their Movement is anything other than a rat's nest of cowards and sociopaths.

As if their souls were anything other than damned.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Reports from the Ghost Town:



On “Face the Nation” Bob Schieffer has some Democrats on to tell us about some "election" that all the kids are talking about. Bernie Sanders is one of them (along with Ed Rendell and Bill Richardson) and while I like Bernie, I must assume that his presence at the Mouse Circus means that all 27,115 people specified by the Constitution to precede him in the Talking Heads Line of Succession have all simultaneously met with fates too grim to mention.

Very sad.


“Meet the Press” took back seat to golf.

So, basically, no difference.


On “Fox News Sunday” The Republiteabagger (Rand Paul) and Democratic (Jack Conway) Senate candidates from the retrograde state of Kentucky tried to out-sprint each other running away from Cap-and-Trade.

When it came to worker safety, however, Conway thinks that perhaps miners should not die in coal mines in huge numbers and that the regulations which protect their lives are a good thing.

Paul, on the other hand, appears to believe that such regulations make Capitalist Jesus cry, and the blood of honest laborers makes coal fires burn a little brighter and cheerier.

So there you go.

On a side note, I am still waiting for some reporter somewhere to ask even one of the Ayn Rand whelplings who are now running for office in deeply red, fundamentalist states their opinion of the fact that their High Priestess was a hard-core, pro-abortion-during-any-trimester.

“…by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."

-- Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975.

, atheist

who thought that Bible-beaters were every bit as evil and dangerous as the imaginary “collectivist/Marxist” Left which America’s staggeringly ignorant Right fetishistically blames for every one of their problems.

Later...

...Brit Hume continues to opine that the Obama White House is some kind of Radical Liberal Icarus that flew too close to the Marxist sun and will now be brought low.

...Mara Liasson was sure that, after the election, Barack Obama will have to “adopt a Clinton model” and Pivot To The Center.

...Bill Kristol noted that President Obama is quietly getting rid of all the clever “smart-alecky” people who “knew it all", like Rahm Emanuel. In fact, Kristol believes that Rahm running for Mayor of Chicago is just some kind of cover story and that if you “Googled Rahm Emanuel” you’d probably find that he had never even mentioned Chicago before now.

I assume that Kristol made this an assertion because, as a FoxNews employee, he could not be bothered to type all 12 letters (space included) in "Rahm Emanuel” into Google and hit "Enter" to find out if what he just pulled out of his lying, Neocon ass happened to be true or not. Like everyone else at FoxPAC (h/t Keith Olbermann) Kristol long ago abandoned the cramped, unhappy, left-biased world of “facts” to dive completely into the spacious and profitable art of Conservative reportorial scatomancey: pooping into a teacup, swirling it around and around until the letters “Liberals Hate America” begin to form, and “reporting” it as truth.


On “This Week” Christiane Amanpour did a town hall meeting on "Islam: A Bunch of Scary Brown People Out to Kill Us All...or not?"

I only caught a little of it, just enough to learn that Sharia Law, is (according to Billy Graham's weird, creepy kid) on the verge of taking over Christian Murrica (I guess Reverend Doctor Franklin Graham believes that his Omnipotent Cloud-Sitting Old Bearded Guy God is kind of a pussy to let that happen in an overwhelmingly Christian-identifying nation) and which, according to my typically Murrican Christian understanding of such things, I am led to understand works something like I this:

Or maybe that's "Burke's Law"?

Which, as I remember it, was part of a massive conspiracy to bury Murrica under a ten-foot layer of Aaron Spelling teevee shows and stunt our collective IQs to the point where we started taking the goofy opinions of teevee preachers seriously.

Hey, speaking of whackjob Jebus-hucksters, I also saw Gary Bauer -- the Fundy's own Snarling Christopath Gnome -- Quantum Leap in from 1987 to more-or-less hijack the conversation from the audience, calling all the way back to his glory days as a failed Republican Presidential candidate and card-carrying member of the Moral Majority to point out that Christians never rioted over Andres Serrano ("Piss Christ").

Brief, driftglass aside --

Man, the 80s never get old for these people.

And so strange that all of these Good Conservative Christians can seem capable of effortlessly remembering every little slight -- real or imagined, and in fucking molecular detail -- that has ever happened to them since the Hippies Lost Vietnam ...while at the same time forgetting vast and inconveniently bloody, incompetent, criminal and treasonous swaths of the depraved history of their Conservative Movement and Republican Party?

Something about straining at gnats and swallowing camels would probably be appropriate here.

It would also probably be appropriate to mention here that I am in possession of some video footage of New York Times columnist David Brooks lying rather spectacularly about his own past in exactly this manner: footage that I'm pretty sure no one else has and around which I will be wrapping some words and posting in the next day or two.

So Watch This Space...

-- end brief, driftglass aside.

Sure, Conservative American extremists might occasionally blow up a building or two in the name of Wingnut Jesus or the Turner Diaries, but the vicious little twats in the Christopath leadership caste have gotten smart enough to realize that it doesn;t need to waste its human cannon fodder like that.

They didn't call their ignorant armies to riot over offensive art because, like Teh Gay, uppity women who want to control their own bodies, the ACLU, Liberals and various scary brown people, they immediately recognized that this obscure piece of bad art could at least temporarily join the pantheon of Greatest Fucking Things Evah: another upgrade to that Bottomless Wingnut Outrage ATM that can be milked for tens of billions of dollars worth of ratings, contributions and votes apparently f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

One truly uplifting moment was the speech by Donna Marsh O'Connor (who lost her daughter in the 9/11 attacks) near the end of the town hall meeting about her sadness over how this did not seem "like an American conversation at all". How deeply the anti-Muslim Right violates the spirit of the America that they claim to love so much every time they open their hateful pie-holes. How consumed by rage and completely blinded to their own hypocrisy they are, and how little they seem to care.

I'm sure the video will be up soon.

In the meantime, its Sunday. Time to enjoy a cartoon. Hey how about the triumphantly brilliant "Right Wing Radio Duck" (h/t Gene)

which I'm sure will be available until the inevitable legions of Disney lawyers drop from the sky.


Also too, for anyone who is interested, I will be Live!Live!Live! on Kink on Tap this evening, Sunday, October 3rd at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific.

Clothing optional.