The Christian Nationalist Hydra (TPM)

The Christian Nationalist Hydra: In Era of Trump, Christian Nationalism Has Many Faces

 From traditional Christian-right figures to secret societies envisioning a ‘national divorce,’ a growing contingent of radical activists is planning for Christian supremacy.

By Sarah Posner     April 12, 2024 9:54 a.m.

I am a journalist who has covered the Christian right for two decades. Over the past three years, I began to more frequently use the term “Christian nationalism” to describe the movement I cover. But I did not start using a new term to suggest its proponents’ ideology had changed. Instead, the term had come into more common usage in the Trump era, now regularly used by academics, journalists, and pro-democracy activists to describe a movement that insists America is a “Christian nation” — that is, an illiberal, nominally democratic theocracy, rather than a pluralistic secular democracy.

To me, the phrase was highly descriptive of the movement I’ve dedicated my career to covering, and neatly encapsulates the core threat the Christian right poses to freedom and equality. From its top leaders and influencers down to the grassroots — politically mobilized white evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the Christian right — its proponents believe that God divinely ordained America to be a Christian nation; that this Christian nation has come under attack by liberals and secularists; and that patriotic Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to rid America of demonic forces, and in political action to restore its Christian heritage. That includes taking political steps — as a voter, as an elected official, as a lawyer, as a judge — to ensure that America is governed according to a “biblical worldview.”

If you want to see that definition in action, look no further than the career of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Seventeen years ago, when I interviewed Johnson, then a lawyer with the Christian right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, I would have labeled him a loyal soldier in the Christian right’s legal army trying to bring down the separation of church and state. He is a product of and a participant in a sprawling religious and political infrastructure that has made the movement’s successes possible, from politically active megachurches, to culture-shaping organizations like Focus on the Family, to political players like the Family Research Council, to the legal force in his former employer ADF. 

In today’s parlance, Johnson is a Christian nationalist — although he, like most of his compatriots, has certainly not embraced the label. But Mike Johnson the House Speaker is still Mike Johnson the lawyer I interviewed all those years ago: an evangelical called to politics to be a “servant leader” to a Christian nation, dedicated to its governance according to a biblical worldview: against church-state separation, for expanded rights for conservative Christians, adamantly against abortion and LGBTQ rights, and especially, currently, trans rights.

That mindset is still the beating heart of the Christian right, even as the movement, and other movements in the far-right space, have radicalized in the Trump era, taking on new forms and embracing a range of solutions to the apocalyptic trajectory they see America to be on. Different movements imagining a version of Christian supremacy exist side by side — different strains that often borrow ideas from one another, and that fit comfortably under the banner of Christian nationalism.  

The term “Christian nationalism” became popularized during Trump’s presidency for a few reasons. First, Trump, who first ran in 2016 on a nativist platform with the nationalist slogan “Make America Great Again,” was and still is dependent on white evangelicals to win elections and maintain a hold on power. He is consequently willing to carry out their goals, bringing their ambitions closer to fruition than they’ve ever been in their 45-year marriage to the Republican Party. They have been clear, for example, in crediting him for the downfall of Roe v. Wade, among other assaults on other peoples’ rights.

Second, the prominence of Christian iconography at the January 6 insurrection, and the support for Trump’s stolen election lie before, during, and after January 6 by both Christian right influencers and the grassroots, brought into stark relief that Christian nationalist motivations helped fuel his attempted coup.  

Finally, sociologists studying the belief systems of Christian nationalists pushed the term into public usage, as did anti-nationalist Christians, especially after January 6, in order to elevate awareness of the threats Christian nationalism poses to democracy. (The paperback edition of my book, Unholy, which was published in mid-2021 and included a post-January 6 afterword, reflected the increasing usage of the term Christian nationalists by including the term in a fresh subtitle.)

The Trump era, along with the rise of openly Christian nationalist social media sites like Gab, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, have given space for otherwise unknown figures, like the rabidly antisemitic Gab founder Andrew Torba, co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, and Stephen Wolfe, author of the racist book The Case for Christian Nationalism, to enter the Christian nationalism discourse. Although Torba and Wolfe have made waves online, and extremism watchers are rightly alarmed that their tracts could prove influential and radicalizing, they remain distinct from the Christian right. Torba’s antisemitism is so extreme, for example, that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — himself extreme — was forced to create some daylight between himself and his supporter Torba in his 2022 run. Torba’s site platformed the antisemitic rantings of the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, and Torba himself has said Jews aren’t welcome in his envisioned Christian nation. The Republican Jewish Coalition called Gab “a cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism.” Mastriano’s move seemed motivated more by self-preservation than contrition (and he lost the race anyway). 

That’s not to say, of course, that the Christian right and the conservative movement more broadly haven’t tolerated racists and other extremists in their midst — Trump’s endurance as their savior itself proves just how much that tolerance persists. Their entire alliance with Trump is one of sharing political and ideological space with the overtly antisemitic, racist, Islamophobic, nativist extremists he elevated to mainstream status in the GOP. But the Christian right is also committed to Christian Zionism, an ideology that claims to love the state of Israel while imagining it as the locus of Jesus’s violent return, and which is, in its philosemitism and bloody apocalyptic fantasies, antisemitic. Still, it would make it difficult for them to form explicit alliances with someone like Torba, a self-described Christian nationalist who repeatedly and unabashedly promotes some of the world’s oldest and ugliest antisemitic tropes like the Jews killed Jesus and secretly control the world. 

What’s more, Torba advocates for a “parallel society” for Christians to escape the supposedly debauched America he deplores. This is not unlike the Benedict Option advocated by conservative Christian (and Viktor Orbán admirer) Rod Dreher, or the secret, hyper-patriarchal Society for Civic American Renewal exposed by TPM’s Josh Kovensky, which is recruiting “unhyphenated” men of only certain denominations to run a Christian government after an anticipated “national divorce.” The language of SACR’s internal documents, to me, as a student of evangelicalism, is quite distinct from the sort of statement of faith you’d see from a church or evangelical organization, which would emphasize one’s salvation in Jesus Christ, commitment to the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, and the imperative for Christians to preach the gospel around the world.

The conventional Christian right does not want a parallel society or a divorce. They believe they are restoring, and will run, the Christian nation God intended America to be — from the inside. They will do that, in their view, through faith (evangelizing others and bringing them to salvation through Jesus Christ); through spiritual warfare (using prayer to battle satanic enemies of Christian America); and through politics and the law (governing and lawmaking from a “biblical worldview” after eviscerating church-state separation). Changes in the evangelical world, particularly the emphasis in the growing charismatic movement on prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, and Trumpism, has intensified the prominence of the supernatural in their politics, giving their Christian nationalism its own unmistakable brand.

For decades, Christian right has been completely open about their beliefs and goals. Their quest to take dominion over American institutions by openly evangelizing and instituting Christian supremacist policies sets the Christian right apart from other types of Christian nationalists who might operate in secret, or imagine utopian communities as the ideal way to save themselves from a secular, debauched nation. 

The fact that far-right extremists like Torba or Wolfe embrace the Christian nationalist label gives the more conventional Christian right leaders and organizations space to disassociate themselves from it. Some also berate journalists who use it to describe them, accusing them of hurling a left-wing slur at Christians. 

The bottom line is that Christian nationalism takes on different forms, and despite organizational or even ideological differences, ideas can penetrate the often porous borders between different camps. Someone who receives the daily email blast from the Family Research Council might also be drawn to Wolfe’s book, for example. On a more unnerving, macro level, major right-wing and GOP figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and the CEO of the Daily Wire, the podcast consortium run by conservative influencer Ben Shapiro, have embraced the rabidly antisemitic, Hitler-admiring antagonist Nick Fuentes, who is Catholic but also is accurately described as a Christian nationalist. The increasingly influential Catholic integralist movement, which seeks a Catholic-inflected replacement for the “liberal order,” is yet another unique form of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism is a serious threat to democracy, because it is premised on the supremacy of Christianity and rejects the democratic values of freedom and equality for all. It is crucial to understand that it takes various forms, how its numerous proponents differ, and how they intersect. Some pose a threat because of their proximity to political and legal power; others because they accelerate racist and antisemitic rhetoric; and still others because they might incite violence. These distinctions show how Christian nationalism is varied, very combustible, and critical to combat.

Fascist Things My Friends Post On Facebook: Native Americans

dear straight, white men

Snagged from tumblr:

dear straight, white men:

i love you, i respect you, but some of y’all need a little reality check. you’ll probably know whether or not this applies to you.

you can refer to yourselves as oppressed when:

• you are murdered solely for being white
• you are murdered solely for loving someone
• you are murdered for saying “no”
• you are murdered by law enforcement for being white
• you can’t depend on law enforcement because you are white
• you receive unfair prison sentencing because you are white
• you are denied voting rights because you are white
• you are denied certain medical services
• you are sold as a slave
• you are deemed incapable on a daily basis
• you aren’t allowed to hear all options regarding your health
• something regarding you is illegal
• you are paid less because of your gender (it’s real, the wage gap literally exists whether you want it to or not)
• you see yourselves portrayed as weak and fragile in the media
• your children are ripped from your arms and treated like dogs because you weren’t born in a place

no, I don’t want any of this to happen to you, and I truly hope that it never does.

we know men are more likely to commit suicide. we know men are more likely to be homeless. and that isn’t good, and we want to fight that. we want to fight anything that makes the world more shitty and less equal. but you aren’t more likely to commit suicide because you are white or because you are straight. you aren’t more likely to be homeless because you are white or because you are straight. you may be more likely because you are men, but not because you are white or straight. this isn’t said to discourage the issues MEN as an entirety face—LGBT+ men, black men, asian men, Latino men, minority men, yes, even white men—but saying you are oppressed for being white or for being straight considering what others have gone through and continue to go through on a daily basis is incredibly ignorant. we’re not saying your problems don’t matter or that your life has been easy, we’re saying you aren’t oppressed in the way that minorities are. part of your job in helping to fight for rights and encouraging people to support you is recognizing that, despite what may negatively affect you, you don’t have it the worst of everyone. your privilege is a platform: use it to reach out to men struggling with depression and suicide. use it to do something about the level of homelessness in America. use it to actually do something about the issues you bring up in debates. don’t just use it to complain and be counterproductive. use it to benefit people that need it. that need you.

sometimes you have to be the one to spark change.

https://feministism.tumblr.com/

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People
Kayla Chadwick

Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue.

I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).

I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.

There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.

I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.

The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling.

Perhaps it was always like this. I’m (relatively) young, so maybe I’m just waking up to this unimaginable callousness. Maybe the emergence of social media has just made this heinous tendency more visible; seeing hundreds of accounts spring to the defense of policies that will almost certainly make their lives more difficult is incredible to behold.

I don’t know if what’s changed ― or indeed, if anything has ― and I don’t have any easy answers. But I do know I’m done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.

Futility can’t be good for my blood pressure, and the way things are going, I won’t have health insurance for long.

Richard Socarides

I'm From Driftwood posted this on Facebook today. While watching When We Rise last night, I told Gaby that I'd seen this video. I was going to look it up and play it for him.

Last night you may have seen the story of Richard Socarides coming out to his father--one of the founders of ex-gay conversion therapy--on ABC’s When We Rise. Now you can see the real-life Richard Socarides share his first-person account of the experience. “[My father] had a tendency for the dramatic.”

PBS News Hour

Definition

Political correctness is "a sort of catch-all term we apply to people who ask for more sensitivity to a particular cause than we're willing to give — a way to dismiss issues as frivolous in order to justify ignoring them. Worse, the charge of "political correctness" is often used by those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people — to say that their concerns don't deserve to be voiced, much less addressed."  -- Amanda Taub

Kool-Aid

This is not my story. My story began because I started learning about economics and about the joys of fact-checking, and then continued because the nature of what the Republican party had become was put on display on Facebook, in the emails I get from my Dad, and in the mail I get from the Party. My best friend from High School, the man I've called my best friend for most of my life, says that I've "drunk the liberal Kool-Aid."  He hasn't spoken to me in four years because of it.  My Mother asked me recently if I was a Democrat, and I told her that, no, I was a RINO (and I had to explain what that was.) For reasons that are hard to explain, I am still registered as a Republican, and plan to be for a while.

Why I left the GOP                      

I grew up in a rich, Republican household, but after Katrina and Iraq, I realized my priorities were out of order

Jeremiah Goulka, TomDispatch.com                                         

George W. Bush

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics.  But I am a Republican no longer.

There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently.  After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.

 

This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.
I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious.  Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their deserts.  As I came to recognize that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people.
No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party, not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless than the one I had previously accepted.  The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted.  Had I always known what I know today, it would have been clear that there hasn’t been a place for me in the Republican Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.

Where I Came From
I grew up in a rich, white suburb north of Chicago populated by moderate, business-oriented Republicans.  Once upon a time, we would have been called Rockefeller Republicans.  Today we would be called liberal Republicans or slurred by the Right as “Republicans In Name Only” (RINOs).
We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes.  We were financial conservatives who wanted less government. We believed in noblesse oblige, for we saw ourselves as part of a natural aristocracy, even if we hadn’t been born into it.  We sided with management over labor and saw unions as a scourge.  We hated racism and loved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly his dream that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  We worried about the rise of the Religious Right and its social-conservative litmus tests. We were tough on crime, tough on national enemies. We believed in business, full stop.
I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday.  In the meantime, I founded the Republican club at my high school, knocked on doors and collected signatures with my father, volunteered on campaigns, socialized at fundraisers, and interned for Senator John McCain and Congressman Denny Hastert when he was House Majority Whip Tom DeLay’s chief deputy.
We went to mainstream colleges — the more elite the better — but lamented their domination by liberal professors, and I did my best to tune out their liberal views.  I joined the Republican clubs and the Federalist Society, and I read theWall Street Journal and the Economist rather the New York Times.  George Will was a voice in the wilderness, Rush Limbaugh an occasional (sometimes guilty) pleasure.
Left Behind By the Party
In January 2001, I was one of thousands of Americans who braved the cold rain to attend and cheer George W. Bush’s inauguration.  After eight years hating “Slick Willie,” it felt good to have a Republican back in the White House.  But I knew that he wasn’t one of our guys.  We had been McCain fans, and even if we liked the compassionate bit of Bush’s conservatism, we didn’t care for his religiosity or his social politics.
Bush won a lot of us over with his hawkish response to 9/11, but he lost me with the Iraq War.  Weren’t we still busy in Afghanistan?  I didn’t see the urgency.
By then, I was at the Justice Department, working in an office that handled litigation related to what was officially called the Global War on Terror (or GWOT).  My office was tasked with opposing petitions for habeas corpusbrought by Guantánamo detainees who claimed that they were being held indefinitely without charge.  The government’s position struck me as an abdication of a core Republican value: protecting the “procedural” rights found in the Bill of Rights.  Sure, habeas corpus had been waived in wartime before, but it seemed to me that waiving it here reduced us to the terrorists’ level.  Besides, since acts of terrorism were crimes, why not prosecute them?  I refused to work on those cases.
With the Abu Ghraib pictures, my disappointment turned to rage.  The America I believed in didn’t torture people.
I couldn’t avoid GWOT work.  I was forced to read reams of allegations of torture, sexual abuse, and cover-ups in our war zones to give the White House a heads-up in case any of made it into the news cycle.
I was so mad that I voted for Kerry out of spite.
How I Learned to Start Worrying
I might still have stuck it out as a frustrated liberal Republican, knowing that the wealthy business core of the party still pulled a few strings and people like Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe remained in the Senate — if only because the idea of voting for Democrats by choice made me feel uncomfortable.  (It would have been so… gauche.)  Then came Hurricane Katrina.  In New Orleans, I learned that it wasn’t just the Bush administration that was flawed but my worldview itself.
I had fallen in love with New Orleans during a post-law-school year spent in Louisiana clerking for a federal judge, and the Bush administration’s callous (non-)response to the storm broke my heart.  I wanted to help out, but I didn’t fly helicopters or know how to do anything useful in a disaster, so just I sat glued to the coverage and fumed — until FEMA asked federal employees to volunteer to help.  I jumped at the chance.
Soon, I was involved with a task force trying to rebuild (and reform) the city’s criminal justice system.  Growing up hating racism, I was appalled but not very surprised to find overt racism and the obvious use of racist code words by officials in the Deep South.
Then something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to climb the economic ladder.  It happened on an official visit to a school in a suburb of New Orleans that served kids who had gotten kicked out of every other school around.  I was investigating what types of services were available to the young people who were showing up in juvenile hall and seemed to be headed toward the proverbial life of crime.
My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to participate in some school programs.  One of these was a field trip to a sit-down restaurant.
This stopped me in my tracks.  I thought: What kind of a lame field trip is that?
It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before.  The teachers had to instruct parents and students alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip.
I was stunned.
Starting To See
That night, I told my roommates about the crazy thing I had heard that day.  Apparently there were people out there who had never been to something as basic as a real restaurant.  Who knew?
One of my roommates wasn’t surprised.  He worked at a local bank branch that required two forms of ID to open an account.  Lots of people came in who had only one or none at all.
I was flooded with questions: There are adults who have no ID?  And no bank accounts?  Who are these people?  How do they vote?  How do they live?  Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?
From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality.  I noticed that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people who were getting swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew so little about.  Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanors, getting pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic stops, being pulled over in white neighborhoods for “driving while black”: these are things that never happen to people in my world.  Not having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people.  (Maybe that’s why we middle-class white people collectively freak out at TSA airport pat-downs.)
I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on.  It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the “trial tax,” the “poverty tax,” and on and on.  Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.
Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility”?  That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed.  But I had assumed that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity.  It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series.  Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.
The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in.  Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal.  For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets.  Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people.  My values shifted — from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.
How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs
In order to learn more — and to secure my membership in what Karl Rove sneeringly called the “reality-based community” — I joined a social science research institute.  There I was slowly disabused of layer after layer of myth and received wisdom, and it hurt.  Perhaps nothing hurt more than to see just how far my patriotic, Republican conception of U.S. martial power — what it’s for, how it’s used — diverged from the reality of our wars.
Lots of Republicans grow up hawks.  I certainly did.  My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.
To me, military service represented the perfect combination of public service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness.  As a child, I couldn’t get enough of the military: toys and models, movies and cartoons, fat books with technical pictures of manly fighter planes and ships and submarines.  We went to air shows whenever we could, and with the advent of cable, I begged my parents to sign up so that the Discovery Channel could bring those shows right into our den.  Just after we got it, the first Gulf War kicked off, and CNN provided my afterschool entertainment for weeks.
As I got older, I studied Civil War military history and memory.  (I would eventually edit a book of letters by Union Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.)  I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that “war is hell,” it was frequently necessary, we did it well, and — whatever those misinformed peaceniks said — we made the world a better place.
But then I went to a war zone.
I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers to help the detainee operations command figure out several thorny policy issues.  My task was to figure out why we were sort-of-protecting and sort-of-detaining an Iranian dissident group on Washington’s terrorist list.
It got ugly fast.  Just after my first meal on base, there was a rumble of explosions, and an alarm started screaming INCOMING! INCOMING! INCOMING!  Two people were killed and dozens injured, right outside the chow hall where I had been standing minutes earlier.
This was the “surge” period in 2007 when, I was told, insurgent attacks came less frequently than before, but the sounds of war seemed constant to me.  The rat-tat-tat of small arms fire just across the “wire.”  Controlled detonations of insurgent duds.  Dual patrolling Blackhawks overhead. And every few mornings, a fresh rain of insurgent rockets and mortars.
Always alert, always nervous, I was only in Iraq for three and a half weeks, and never close to actual combat; and yet the experience gave me many of the symptoms of PTSD.  It turns out that it doesn’t take much.
That made me wonder how the Iraqis took it.  From overhead I saw that the once teeming city of Baghdad was now a desert of desolate neighborhoods and empty shopping streets, bomb craters in the middle of soccer fields and in the roofs of schools.  Millions displaced.
Our nation-building efforts reeked of post-Katrina organizational incompetence.  People were assigned the wrong roles — “Why am I building a radio station?  This isn’t what I do.  I blow things up…” — and given no advance training or guidance.  Outgoing leaders didn’t overlap with their successors, so what they had learned would be lost, leaving each wheel to be partially reinvented again.  Precious few contracts went to Iraqis.  It was driving people out of our military.
This incompetence had profound human costs.  Of the 26,000 people we were detaining in Iraq, as many as two-thirds were innocent — wrong place, wrong time — or, poor and desperate, had worked with insurgent groups for cash, not out of an ideological commitment.  Aware of this, the military wanted to release thousands of them, but they didn’t know who was who; they only knew that being detained and interrogated made even the innocents dangerously angry.  That anger trickled down to family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.  It was about as good an in-kind donation as the U.S. could have made to insurgent recruitment — aside from invading in the first place.
So much for surgical precision and winning hearts and minds.  I had grown up believing that we were more careful in our use of force, that we only punished those who deserved punishment.  But in just a few weeks in Iraq, it became apparent that what we were doing to the Iraqis, as well as to our own people, was inexcusable.
Today, I wonder if Mitt Romney drones on about not apologizing for America because he, like the former version of me, simply isn’t aware of the U.S. ever doing anything that might demand an apology.  Then again, no one wants to feel like a bad person, and there’s no need to apologize if you are oblivious to the harms done in your name — calling the occasional ones you notice collateral damage (“stuff happens”) — or if you believe that American force is always applied righteously in a world that is justly divided into winners and losers.
A Painful Transition
An old saw has it that no one profits from talking about politics or religion.  I think I finally understand what it means.  We see different realities, different worlds.  If you and I take in different slices of reality, chances are that we aren’t talking about the same things.  I think this explains much of modern American political dialogue.
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality.  To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.  I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it).  It explains why study after study shows — examples here, here, and here – that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.
Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful.  I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned.  I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer (because those weren’t mentioned in the media we read or watched).
My transition has significantly strained my relationships with family, friends, and former colleagues.  It is deeply upsetting to walk on thin ice where there used to be solid, common ground.  I wish they, too, would come to see a fuller spectrum of reality, but I know from experience how hard that can be when your worldview won’t let you.
No one wants to feel like a dupe.  It is embarrassing to come out in public and admit that I was so miseducated when so much reality is out there in plain sight in neighborhoods I avoided, in journals I hadn’t heard of, in books by authors I had refused to read.  (So I take courage from the people who have done so before me like Andrew Bacevich.)
Many people see the wider spectrum of reality because they grew up on the receiving end.  As a retired African-American general in the Marine Corps said to me after I told him my story, “No one has to explain institutional racism to a black man.”
Others do because they grew up in families that simply got it.  I married a woman who grew up in such a family, for whom all of my hard-earned, painful “discoveries” are old news.  Each time I pull another layer of wool off my eyes and feel another surge of anger, she gives me a predictable series of looks.  The first one more or less says, “Duh, obviously.”  The second is sympathetic, a recognition of the pain that comes with dismantling my flawed worldview.  The third is concerned: “Do people actually think that?”
Yes, they do.

The White People of Foxworld

In Foxworld, white people are an oppressed minority.

Bacon Wrapped Shrimp

Mike Huckabee Compares Same-Sex Marriage to Cussing, Drinking and Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp
The rest of the 2016 Republican hopefuls have a lot of catching up to do in order to compete with Mike Huckabee’s obvious head-start on race-baiting and gay-bashing. We’ve barely heard from the other clown-car passengers and already Huckabee has navigated his way through at least three major new cycles in which he says something obnoxious then walks it back, but only after the GOP base scarfs it down like, I don’t know, whatever it eats. Rind? We’ll circle back to this.

It’s been yet another weekend and another Huckabee television appearance that included yet another deliberately awful statement from the former Arkansas governor. This time, Huckabee popped up on CNN’s “State of the Union” for an exclusive chat and, when he was asked about same-sex marriage, he likened it to drinking and using profanity. In other words, it’s an indulgent or obscene lifestyle choice, rather than the way many of us are genetically formed.

I don’t drink alcohol, but gosh — a lot of my friends, maybe most of them, do. You know, I don’t use profanity, but believe me, I’ve got a lot of friends who do. Some people really like classical music and ballet and opera — it’s not my cup of tea.

Even if, gosh!, Huckabee was right in his paleo-moronic reasoning (he’s not), no one’s insisting that Huckabee become gay or to marry another man, in the same way no one’s forcing him to drink or to swear. So, who cares if it’s not his “cup of tea?” Then fine, governor, don’t have sex with another man. Just because it’s not his personal “cup of tea,” it shouldn’t forbid anyone else from being who they are, or from marrying another consenting adult. Not only does Huckabee erroneously believe that being gay is a choice, he also believes it’s a totally frivolous and undisciplined choice not unlike blurting obscenities or getting hammered, which is both an offensive and a reductive metaphor. He continued:

"This is not just a political issue. It is a biblical issue. And as a biblical issue — unless I get a new version of the scriptures, it’s really not my place to say, OK, I’m just going to evolve."

We’ll skip the often-repeated primer on Leviticus. What Huckabee said here is an example of a newly resurgent excuse in support of anti-gay discrimination: the government can’t force Christians to not discriminate against the gay community because doing so is a violation of religious freedom. In other words, the First Amendment guarantees the freedom to discriminate against gay people. Religious freedom, they say, ought to allow Christians to ban gays from businesses and churches, or to vindicate bullies who use anti-gay slurs in school. Somehow, and not for the first time in history, by the way, faith is being exploited as a justification for hatred and bigotry.

What’s especially peculiar about this excuse is that if they truly followed the teachings of the Bible, then they’d have no choice but to support the death penalty for gay people (Leviticus 20:13). But I’m fairly certain Mike Huckabee doesn’t support such a policy, especially since he said he has “friends who are gay.” Therefore, fact: Huckabee has already evolved from scripture’s requirement for the execution of gays. Since he’s already evolved, it was clearly dishonest and deceptive when he said it’s an impossible task.

But wait, there’s more:

"It’s like asking someone who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli."

Here we go.

"We don’t want to do that — I mean, we’re not going to do that. Or like asking a Muslim to serve up something that is offensive to him, or to have dogs in his backyard."

And why won’t that happen? Because not serving bacon-wrapped shrimp doesn’t deny equal protection and basic human rights to an entire community of Americans. Now, if not serving bacon-wrapped shrimp somehow caused George Takei’s marriage to be dissolved, then we’d have to chat with Jewish deli owners about possibly adjusting their menus. Primarily, though, we’d have to figure out a way to unravel the inconceivably bizarre linkage between bacon-wrapped shrimp and same-sex marriage. But since we’re living in the real world, and not Huckabee’s cartoonish alterverse, his metaphorical association of bacon-wrapped shrimp, Jewish delis and telling Christians they can’t gay-bash because of scripture doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Now, if my theory is correct, part one of Huckabee’s usual routine has been successfully accomplished. The GOP base’s nipples should be capable of cutting glass right about now. Up next, it’ll be the predictable and suddenly affable Huckabee walk-back.

Here’s how Mike Huckabee operates. He says something over-the-top crazy or offensive when he thinks no one is paying attention, forgetting that there’s such a thing as The Internet allowing literally everyone to pay attention. Then, in the aftermath, he shifts gears, and worms his way onto shows like The View where has gregariously backpedals while flashing his Jim Nabors smile and Arkansas duhhh-yuk-yuk-yuk charm. But for the GOP base in states like Iowa and South Carolina, the original race-baiting message was received loud and clear.

You might recall this strategy from such stories as Huckabee’s recent slut-shaming of Beyoncé. In his book, God, Guns, Grits and, Gravy, Huckabee accused the Obamas of being rotten parents because they allow Sasha and Malia to listen to Beyoncé. Again, I seriously believe Huckabee confused Beyoncé for more risque African-American recording artists such as Nicki Minaj or Rihanna, because Huckabee’s supporters likely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway, so why the hell not? Afterwards, when he was rightfully chastised for it, he almost immediately walked it back, telling anyone who would invite him on television (to promote his book) that Beyoncé has “a great set of pipes,” is an “unbelievable dancer” and the Obamas are fantastic parents. Meanwhile, damn the torpedoes, his people heard what they needed to hear. African-Americans are rotten parents and their favorite pop-stars are whores. Roger that.

Frankly, it’s a really clever way to say horrendous things. In fact, when he drops out of the presidential race after New Hampshire, he can use his campaign notoriety to sell another book: “Clever Ways to Say Horrendous Things, And Also Gravy! By Mike Huckabee.” Seriously, if the far-right chooses to pick up Huckabee’s strategy — if they begin to use his gosh-golly tone, rather than the usual fire-eating we see all over Fox News and AM talk radio, the normals who occupy the center-right, middle and center-left might have a serious problem on their hands: reasonable-sounding extremists. - Bob Sesca