( Tomdispatch.com ) – Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” nearly 2,000 years ago for the extravagant entertainment the Roman Empire used to distract attention from imperial policies that caused widespread discontent. Imagine the lavish banquets, gladiatorial bouts, use and abuse of young men and women for the pleasure of the rich, and so much more that characterized the later years of that empire. And none of it seems that far off from the situation we, in these increasingly dis-United States, find ourselves in today.

Although the Roman Empire described itself as being in favor of life and peace, the various Caesars and their enablers regularly dealt death and destruction in their wake. They spread the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), including a taxation system that left the poor in debt servitude, a military that caused terror and violence across the then-known world, and a ruling authority that pitted whole communities against each other, while legislating who could associate with whom (passing marriage laws, for instance, that banned gay, inter-racial, or even cross-class marriages). The emperor in power in Jesus’s time, Caesar Augustus, was known for ushering in a Golden Age of Moral Values that went hand in hand with that Pax Romana, and it meant war and death, especially for the poor.

Fast forward millennia and that world bears a strange resemblance to the media distractions, violence, and regressive policies that MAGA and other extremists are pushing forward in our times. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s assertion that “I alone can fix your problems”; Supreme Court and state legislative attacks on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and trans youth in the name of family values; cuts to welfare, healthcare, worker’s rights and other life-sustaining programs to protect corporate interests; the militarizing of endless communities by allowing guns (especially AR-15 rifles) to proliferate, while offering only thoughts and prayers to the victims of violence, the MAGA movement is promoting culture wars and extremist policies under the banner of Christian nationalism. In doing so, its leaders are perfecting a disdain for the excluded, exploited, and rejected that hurts the poor first and worst, but impacts all of society.

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And now, after decades of neoliberal plunder and the coronation of an avowed Christian nationalist — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — to the third most powerful position in the government, the Christian Right and its wealthy patrons have their eyes set on an even more ambitious power-grab: Project 2025. Articulated through the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, it’s a sprawling plan to maximize presidential power with hundreds of newly trained and deployed political operatives during Donald Trump’s next presidency. It was seen in full display recently at the Republican National Convention and made all the more likely by the recent assassination attempt against him with (yes!) an AR-15! The nearly 900-page document outlines a plan to ramp up U.S. military might, slash social welfare programs, and prioritize “traditional marriage.” A reflection of the Republican Party today, including several Christian nationalist organizations and billionaire funders listed among its 100 institutional sponsors, Project 2025 is a roadmap for what could be thought of as a new Pax Romana.

The Formal Project 2025 Takeover

As Project 2025’s official website explains (and doesn’t this sound like it could come directly from the mouth of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance?): “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Although its authors unabashedly deploy the language of conservative populism — decrying wokeness and “cultural Marxists” — the plan is chiefly concerned with how to put ever greater control of both people and resources in the hands of a small minority of mostly white, mostly male, wealthy Christians.

The wholesale capture of the state is the ultimate goal of its Christian nationalist architects. Project 2025 simply clarifies just how they plan to implement their drive for power.  Each of its sections — from “taking the reins of government” by centralizing executive authority in the office of the President to securing “the common defense” by expanding every branch of the military — is worth reviewing.

The longest section focuses on “general welfare” and it should be no surprise that the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development are subject to significant cutbacks, including:

• Imposing yet stricter eligibility standards, work requirements, and asset tests to constrain access to Medicaid, even though more than 23 million Americans have been unenrolled from that program since 2023;
• Revisiting how the “Thrifty Food Plan” is formulated to minimize food-stamp allocations, while imposing onerous work requirements on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), even though most of its recipients work and/or are in households with children, elderly people, or people with disabilities;
• Ending universal free school meals by removing the “community eligibility provision,” which allows school districts with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch programs to all children in need;
• Eliminating Head Start, which has served 39 million children and families since 1965 and currently serves more than 800,000 poor families with young children, while shuttering the Department of Education;
• Ending “Housing First” programs and prohibiting non-citizens, including mixed-status families, from living in low-income public housing; and
• Imposing a “life agenda” and a “family agenda” that will restrict access to abortion and reproductive rights, and otherwise curtail LGBTQ+ rights.

Such proposals would undoubtedly be deeply unpopular. In fact, as people learn more about Project 2025, opposition is growing, even across party lines. Most Americans want a government that would provide for the down-and-out, who are a growing segment of the population and the electorate, as well as one that supports abortion rights, voting rights, and the freedom of expression. At least 40% of us — 135-140 million people — are either poor or one emergency away from economic ruin, including 80 million eligible voters. Project 2025’s social welfare cuts would, in fact, push significant numbers of people across the poverty line into financial ruin.

Even Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as attention has moved toward its distinctly (di)visionary agenda. However, more than half of the project’s listed authors, editors, or contributors were once part of his administration — and no one doubts that his vice-presidential nominee is 100% pro-Project 2025!

The Informal Takeover Already Underway

Perhaps scarier than either Trump’s or Vance’s connection to this regressive plan, however, is the fact that, despite popular distaste for such policies, it may not take a second Trump presidency to implement significant parts of Project 2025. In this sense, it reflects the ancient world of the Pax Romana.  Rather than being dependent on particular emperors, its “peace” was a political and ideological program that punished the poor and marginalized so many, while keeping all its subjects in line.

From its recent rulings, it’s clear that the Supreme Court is hastening Project 2025’s agenda judicially, both in terms of specific future policies and the executive power grab at the heart of that mandate (and now of that court’s rulings). In June, for instance, it ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which enacted a law to fine, jail, and ultimately expel its unhoused residents. That precedent will only exacerbate the already hostile terrain confronting unhoused people, seeding firm ground to 2025’s plan to eliminate even more housing projects.

Worse yet, as the Nation’s Elie Mystal recently made clear, in just a few weeks of rulings, the court “legalized bribery of public officials, declared the president of the United States absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for ‘official acts,’ and made the power to issue regulations subject to the court’s unelected approval.” As he warns, “There’s no legislative fix for the problems the court has created… [and] they will continue to do all the things Republicans want that nobody elected them to do.”

In addition, in the legislative arena, Congressional debates around the Farm Bill echo Project 2025’s plan to cut food assistance by limiting updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, the current formula that determines SNAP allocations. For example, at the state level, a Republican supermajority in Kansas voted last year to override the governor’s veto and enact work requirements for older recipients of SNAP benefits.

Overall, various Project 2025 priorities are already being implemented at the state and local level, with reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, social welfare programs, and unhoused people under serious threat in Republican-run states across the country. Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, 21 states have enacted full or partial bans on abortion. Meanwhile, far-right groups like Moms of Liberty are seeking to capture local school boards as part of a “war on wokeness.”

There is also a multi-state strategy underway to preempt community-led efforts to implement guaranteed income programs. At least 10 states have challenged basic income programs with legislative bans, funding restrictions, constitutional challenges, and court injunctions, while four Republican-led states — Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and South Dakota — have already completely prohibited such programs.

And in lockstep with Project 2025’s call for military expansion, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker recently released a report proposing that $55 billion be added to the Pentagon’s already humongous budget in fiscal year 2025 while raising military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in the next five to seven years. The report, “Peace Through Strength,” revives the false idea that spending ever more on war preparations makes us safer. Not only is Wicker distorting Cold War history, but his prescriptions ignore our experience of the past 20 years of military buildup and the disastrous Global War on Terror. According to the Costs of War Project and the National Priorities Project, this country’s post-9/11 wars have cost at least $8 trillion, taken millions of lives, and displaced tens of millions of people globally, while precipitating climate chaos through their polluting emissions. If implemented, Wicker’s plan would only increase the risk of yet more destabilizing conflicts, offering a modern Pax Romana promise for yet more war and death.

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

While extremist Republican politicians and appointees are leading the way on Project 2025, both major parties align around building up the war economy. Indeed, bipartisan support for military aid to Israel is contributing to what the United Nations has labeled a genocide in Gaza.

Nor is this new. Every year, the Pentagon budget invariably passes with widespread bipartisan support, even if a few representatives vote otherwise. Since the 9/11 attacks, in fact, $21 trillion has been funneled into war, surveillance, policing, border control, and incarceration. In Fiscal Year 2023, nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget funded the military-industrial complex and militarized spending. This year, a Democratic amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act will automatically register every male citizen and resident aged 18-26 in the selective service database. This measure has only passed in the House of Representatives, but it suggests interest across party lines in increasing the number of individuals who could someday be called up for military service. While this is not (yet) a draft, it hints at one — and it was introduced by Pennsylvania’s Democratic Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan.

The state and local counterpart to militarism is support for the police. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers seem intent on adopting “tough on crime” legislation, including hiring more police officers, deploying the National Guard more widely, expanding surveillance measures, and recriminalizing drug possession. Of course, the 1033 program allows local police forces to be armed and trained by the U.S. military.

This remarkably bipartisan consensus for a war economy shouldn’t just be considered another “issue,” but an approach to governance that relies on force and violence, rather than consent, to establish social control. And as noted above, the nation may have automatic registration for the selective service system before we have automatic registration to vote. After all, the same Congress that supports ever more resources for war has failed to stop voter suppression, expand voting rights, or adequately protect our democracy.

Jobs and Homes, Not Death in the Streets

The greatest violence of the Pax Romana was always borne by the poor, who were often ripped from their families, enslaved in back-breaking labor, and dispossessed of their land and resources. To maintain its authoritarian rule over millions of people, the Roman Empire relied on its military might and the fear inspired by its brutal army. And yet it was from the ranks of the poor that Jesus and his disciples led a non-violent revolution for peace.

Today, tens of millions of poor people in this country are on the front lines of our failing democracy and increasingly militarized society. They are the true canaries in the coal mine, already living through the violence of a society that has prioritized war and profits over addressing the pain and toll of low-wage jobs, crushing debt burdens, polluted water and land, and lives cut short by poverty, the police, and the denial of basic human rights. They can undoubtedly also foresee the drive toward an ever-deeper warfare state and the possible fallout from Project 2025 if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance win this year.

Forged in the crucible of violence, the criminalized and impoverished still call out for a true peace.

On June 29th, Reverend Savina Martin, a military veteran and formerly homeless mother, took to the stage of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Assembly in Washington, D.C., and shared these thoughts:

“I am a US Army veteran and I was impacted by homelessness many years ago. Today, thousands of homeless veterans are fighting for [their] benefits, housing… navigating a complex system while sick and suffering, trying to survive the war waged against the poor. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson permits cities to criminalize homelessness by enforcing bans on sleeping outside when no shelter is available. How can sleeping while homeless be against the law? If you sleep, you get arrested?

“This system depends on us to fight their wars, but we can’t depend on [our government] to guarantee housing or healthcare? Instead, [our government] allocates $1.1 trillion to war, weapons, and a system that criminalizes the poor, leading to mass incarceration, deportations, and detentions. We want jobs and homes, not death in the streets.”

Savina was speaking of the war on the poor, the power of the military-industrial complex, and an extremist agenda that will connect her in unsettling ways with 140 million poor and low-income people in this country — and billions more around the world. As in other moments of history, the struggle of the poor for life and dignity in a world that denies them both is a struggle for the best that we can be as a society. In their leadership lies the hope for us all — not in Project 2025, a future Trump administration, or the all-too-devastating version of a Pax Americana that would go with it, but in the peace (and justice) that Savina and so many others are demanding, and will continue to push for, until it is ours.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes

Via Tomdispatch.com

That pace, of course, would only speed up with the launching of the war on terror and the disastrous conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet, even then, triumphalism remained the note of the day in Washington, as this country poured ever more tax dollars into the Pentagon budget (a phenomenon that even the debt-ceiling dispute has hardly affected).

But don’t think that nobody noticed. To my mind, the most striking thing about Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the slogan that’s become such an acronym (MAGA) that no one even thinks about what it stands for anymore. Trump, I suspect, won that year in large part because of that slogan, Make America Great Again! (yes, with that very exclamation point attached!), which caught the mood of all too many Americans, even if no other politician would then admit that America was no longer “great.”

As I wrote in April 2016 in a piece I headlined “Has the American Age of Decline Begun?”:

“With that ‘again,’ Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that… represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the ‘sole’ superpower of Planet Earth, is an ‘exceptional’ nation, an ‘indispensable’ country… Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline.”

Now, after his own decline, he’s once again running for president, this time under the unspoken slogan MTGA! (Make Trump Great Again!). With that in mind, let Astore bring us up to date on just where on the downhill slope this increasingly chaotic country now finds itself. Tom

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

The End Stage of American Empire

By William J. Astore

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

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Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

Copyright 2023 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s craven capitulation to virtually every demand of the Israeli far right, including recognizing the illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, which brazenly contravenes the United Nations Charter, which forbids the acquisition of territory by warfare. You see, the Nazis used to do things like invade and annex territory from their neighbors, and the UN was attempting to avoid that sort of behavior in future, not use it as a model.

Pompeo said,

“The previous secretary of state ran back and forth from Tel Aviv to Ramallah and tried to draw lines on a map. We said: ‘That’s not in America’s best interest. Let’s go create peace,’ and we did.”

According to the UN, while Trump was in office, 536 Palestinians were killed and 57,909 were wounded by Israeli security forces and squatters on the Palestinian West Bank. At the same time 40 Israelis were killed by Palestinians and 490 were injured.

Indeed, it was on Pompeo’s watch that Israeli snipers shot down unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations, killing 214 of the protesters in the first two years and wounding 36,100 (8,000 of them children), hundreds of whom were crippled for life by deliberate shots to the kneecap. Investigations by human rights organizations found that almost none of the killings or woundings could be justified under the international law of war. It was just shooting fish in a barrel for the purposes of repression.

And that, friends, is Pompeo’s definition of “peace.” Of course he is referring to the “Abraham Accords,” an opportunity for the United Arab Emirates, which has never de facto been at war with Israel, to invest in the Israeli high tech sector and vice versa, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The Roman historian Tacitus quoted an enemy lambasting Rome and saying, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Tacitus didn’t agree, but ironically it has become one of his most famous lines. It could as easily have been directed against Mike Pompeo.

As for the Israeli Right’s [illegal] claim to the Palestinian West Bank — “Judea and Samaria” — being a “Christian” position, that is just incorrect.

If Pompeo is saying that contemporary Jews have a biblical right to the lands of ancient Israel because of God’s promise to Abraham, he is contradicted by Jesus and St. Paul.

Jesus was not interested in territory, as shown by Matthew 22:

“17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” 21 They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

He talked about the kingdom of heaven instead, as did Paul.

Genesis 12:7 says that after God brought Abraham from Ur in what is now Iraq (i.e. he was not indigenous but an immigrant), “The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

St. Paul wrote in Galatians 3,

15 Brothers and sisters, I give an example from daily life: once a person’s will has been ratified, no one adds to it or annuls it. 16 Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, “And to offsprings,” as of many, but it says, “And to your offspring,” that is, to one person, who is Christ. 17 My point is this: the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. 18 For if the inheritance comes from the law, it no longer comes from the promise, but God granted it to Abraham through the promise.

Paul held that God’s promise of the land to Abraham was only that he would have a descendant, one, Jesus Christ, who would be the fulfillment of the promise. It was therefore Christians, including non-Jewish Christians, who were the true heirs of Abraham. And they were not interested in land or territory but in salvation and entry into the kingdom of God, which they thought was near.

Paul was involved in polemics with Peter and other Jewish Christians based in Jerusalem, who could not imagine that someone could be a real Christian who was from a gentile background, whose parents worshiped Jupiter and Venus, and who did not practice Jewish law or halakhah

Paul was contemptuous of this demand for the practice of Judaism to precede receiving the blessing of Christ and through him of Abraham. (He was not anti-Jewish, as Luther interpreted him, nor anti-law, he just insisted that gentiles could convert to Christianity without converting to Judaism first.) He pointed out that the promise to Abraham came hundreds of years before Moses received the tablets of the law on Mt. Sinai, implying that law could not possibly have been the crux of faith or else it would have come simultaneously with the promise to Abraham.

Paul had declared earlier in Galatians 3, “6 Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” 7 so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. 8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would reckon as righteous the gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the gentiles shall be blessed in you.” 9 For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.”

So from Paul’s point of view, the promise was only through Christ, so that Jews who rejected Christ deprived themselves of the blessing of Abraham’s one central offspring, and former pagans who accepted Christ received the blessing instead.

That is, from Paul’s point of view, it is the Palestinian Christians, some ten percent of the Palestinian population, who are the rightful heirs of the promise to Abraham. And Muslim Palestinians believe in Mary and Jesus. Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council says that non-Christian religions such as Islam “often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men” and praises Muslims for “revering” Jesus and calling on Mary “with devotion:”

“The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself . . .

3. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.”

Could a Catholic Pauline theology of Abraham’s promise see Muslims also as partial recipients of the promise to Abraham through Christ?

In any case, Pompeo’s cynical and genocidal Christian Zionism reverses Paul’s abandonment of physical territory for the spiritual Kingdom of Heaven, and ignores Galatians 3:15-17, which sees faith in Christ as the way to participate in the promise to Abraham rather than adherence to Judaism or Judaic law.

I say this only as a student of the History of Religions — I don’t personally believe in a God who is a real estate broker or favors some human beings over others. I’m just pointing out that Pompeo is departing from 2023 years of Christian teaching and doing it in the name of a made-up far right wing cult.

Book excerpt: A pastor comes to terms with the Church’s idols of Trump, money and power

Red State Christians:  A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage it leaves behind,” available everywhere books are sold.

( Minnesota Reformer ) – On Sunday, January 10, 2021, I woke up early, stepped out my back door into frigid, biting air, and drove from one America into another.

I drove from leafy, liberal southwest Minneapolis, west from metro Highway 62 onto US Route 212, which runs from Minnesota into South Dakota, dead-ending in Yellowstone National Park in wild, ultra-conservative Wyoming.

I wasn’t going that far today. Just fifty-five miles or so through purple Carver County, which flipped in 2020 to Biden from Trump in 2016, helping ensure that Minnesota stayed blue, into further west and rural McLeod County, where Donald Trump won 67 percent of the vote two months earlier.

I drove into red America to lead a tiny rural church in worship that Sunday morning, but before I did so, I took a deep breath and  told my church members about the time that I was a victim of right-wing white Christian terrorism.

Maybe terrorism is too strong a word, but I was terrified when Breitbart News took a screenshot of my interview on CNN in December 2019 and blasted it across their front page. They initially called me a “liberal pastor” who said American Christians had “lost the gospel of Jesus Christ” and instead embraced a gospel of wealth, power, and Christian nationalism.

Breitbart didn’t misquote me, but their framing of the interview led to a barrage of online harassment and threats, from the bizarre (a message suggesting my “swollen, lumpy throat” indicated cancer) to the scary (bleak and violent threats).

I combed my online presence and made sure my home address wasn’t visible anywhere. I ensured Facebook posts with pictures of my kids were no longer public for the most part. But Breitbart’s goal wasn’t actually to harm me or my family. 

It was to silence me. 

My clear analysis of the distortion of the gospel in American Christianity posed a threat to the right-wing white Christian empire of wealth and power, an empire encompassing publishing houses, TV networks, churches, colleges, universities, and schools. It shakes hands with corporate America to ensure that no one upsets the apple cart of an agreement first made in imperial Rome some 1,700 years ago, when Emperor Constantine first attempted to colonize Christianity under the guise of empire.

For all these years since, biblical Christianity — forged in the cross, humility, and poverty — has been at war with a co-opted Christianity that forgets Jesus’s gospel of liberation and instead seeks to use his story to entrench wealth and power in the hands of a few white men.

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This battle has ebbed and flowed over the years through the Reformation in Europe and the colonization and subjugation of Africa by so-called Christian missionaries. It has continued through the rise of the Black Church in America, abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement, the reckoning of clergy abuse crises in the Catholic church, to America in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with a white American Church that blatantly sold itself out on the altar of power and money, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

My rural church members weren’t really thinking about any of this when they jammed their Trump flags into the ground next to their cornfields in September 2016. For them, mostly farmers, factory workers, medical workers, teachers, and police officers, voting for Trump was axiomatic. To be a rural, white American Christian obviously meant being a Republican. And Trump gave them permission to have a little fun, to stick their thumb in the eye of those annoying liberal elites in Minneapolis and Washington, DC, who had no idea how hard it really was to work for a living. 

For them, Trump wasn’t like that. He said the quiet parts out loud, cursed, and laughed. But also, they earnestly hoped, he prayed and really did care for the “rights of the unborn.”

With a halting voice, I told my congregation anyway how it felt when I watched would-be insurrectionists carry Bibles and Christian flags into the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, suggesting that their violent overthrow of a democratic election was God-ordained. 

I felt vulnerable saying these things, but I also trusted that my congregation would listen. We had a shared bond, a shared trust, a shared relationship. I baptized their babies and stood vigil in my clergy collar at the local cemetery as a military band played taps and a veteran’s ashes were laid to rest. I led prayer at the local Memorial Day picnic after rounds were fired into the air, the names of lives lost were read, and children scattered into the street to grab the spent bullets.

They knew that I’d marched with clergy for racial justice after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin just six miles from my home. They hadn’t all liked it very much that their pastor was out there supporting “the Blacks,” as some people put it. But others sent me messages about their Black family members and the racism they’d faced in rural Minnesota. They were glad I was bearing witness on behalf of a Savior who did not come to redeem only white Americans.

We’d settled into an uneasy truce, my church and I. They tolerated my NPR and CNN appearances, but they preferred it when I quoted country songs in my sermons and we could joke together about my former career as a sportswriter. Gingerly, we trusted each other, forgave each other, and listened to each other.

Even though I knew better — that the roots of rot in American Christianity went far deeper than Trump — I briefly retreated into my white, middle-class privilege and imagined that an election could make it all go away. 

When Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election on November 7, 2020, four days after Election Day, I naively thought the raging battle could finally end. The big orange albatross around the neck of the American church could be sloughed off, and we could return to debates around liturgy and music. 

I knew deep down that what had been revealed in the past four years meant we could never return to what was, but nostalgia tempted me to believe that maybe the hatred and division and racism wrought into white American Christianity weren’t as bad as I had thought. The trouble in the church and in our country was somewhere else, some other Christians — but not most of us, or not the people and churches I knew. Surely, I could insulate myself from feeling further pain or distress, maybe pretend it had all been a bad dream.

On Sunday, January 10, I couldn’t believe that anymore. I’d known deep down that Trump was a symptom, not a cause. I’d known the idolatry of wealth and power had deep, deep roots in American Christianity, and that our worship of whiteness was just conveniently claimed by Trump, revealed by him, and that his absence from the Oval Office would not absolve our sins.

A part of me thought the very good Christians of my church’s little rural Midwestern town would take down their Trump flags on their own after the attempted insurrection. I thought they’d see the lives lost at the Capitol, the willful assault on American democracy, the shouts of the n-word at the Capitol police officers from the Trump-supporting rioters, and decide that simply wasn’t the association they wanted to claim any longer.

Like I said, I was naive. For many of the good white Christians I knew — not only in my church’s little town but across America, whom I’d interviewed for this book throughout 2018 — and for my dear friends and family members, January 6 was nothing to be ashamed of. Violence had always been necessary to sustain wealth and power for the white ruling class, and violence was also required to sustain the support of the rural white Christians who’d tied their fate to their economic overlords in New York City, California, and DC, with Rs behind their names.

As I concluded my story about the threats I’d received for simply suggesting that Jesus would not condone the violent and racist Christianity lifted by Trump and the Republican Party, I made a request of the Christians I loved in this little Midwestern church.

I asked them if now, two months post-election, maybe they’d consider taking down those Trump flags. I asked them if maybe they could see now what those flags had come to represent: much, much more than merely conservative politics. I asked them to see that by continuing to fly those flags, they were condoning violence and hatred.

They were saying to me, to Black people, to immigrants, to LGBTQ people, to anyone who didn’t fit into their desired white Christian box, that we did not belong and were not welcome in their town. I honestly didn’t think it was that much to ask. The election was long past. I’d spent a lot of time now not just in this little town but in red states and counties across America, and I’d trusted that the Christians and Christian leaders I’d met really didn’t want to send a message of violent exclusion and hatred. So, I thought if I could just explain it in the right way, show them how much it hurt ordinary people like me, for example, maybe the insanity could end. We could rebuild the American church again on the foundation of civil rights, and children’s rights, and the dignity of the human soul.

No one said much to me that Sunday. Most of the church was watching online due to the raging pandemic of COVID-19 that had hit our county hard. When it was time to go back home, I realized I was almost out of gas. There was a little double-sided pump just a block away from church, across from the Congregational church that no longer had a pastor, next to a vending machine that sold cans of pop to schoolkids who drove up on four-wheelers after class.

I pulled up to the pump and opened my door, aware of a prickly sensation running up and down my arms as I stepped out of the car. I shivered as the icy air hit my cheeks, but this feeling was not limited to the Minnesota winter weather. Here, in this little town where I knew almost everyone and almost everyone was related, across the street from the police station where I had the chief’s cell phone number, I tasted the bleak metallic tang of fear.

I’d just had the audacity — me, a woman pastor of all things — to suggest to these people that they needed to smash their idols, to tear down the objects in which they’d placed their faith. They wouldn’t like it. They’d be mad. They had guns.

Reading this now and thinking about the kindly elderly folks who attend my Bible study, I feel a little embarrassed that I was afraid. No one was going to do anything to me. Right? Right?

Probably not. But like Breitbart News, the intention of the still-flying Trump flags in this little town was not really to hurt me. It was to make me be quiet. To question my words. To refrain from telling the truth about what happened to the gospel in white Christian America.

I began writing the first version of this book almost four years ago, a year after leaving my Southern California megachurch, when it became clear that my writing critical of Trump would not be tolerated by my church’s biggest financial backers. I had approached my travels across red, conservative Christian America with an open heart and a desire for empathy, hoping that I would somehow find reason and understanding, common ground and forgiveness. I found those things in pieces: in a dying congregation while receiving the Eucharist in Appalachia; at a youth group worship service in tony Newport Coast; and finally, while praying with my own Trump-supporting family members in rural Missouri. 

Four years later, my earnest and open heart has been torn in two.

Bright red “Make America Great Again, Again!” signs are popping up all over my church’s little town. Two families, whose homes I’d visited earlier that year, left the church without telling me. They left for male pastors and a more conservative denomination, saying they just didn’t “connect” with me and the “politics” were always an undertone of discontent. 

No matter how many times I prayed for military members and law enforcement officers and veterans, it didn’t matter. I prayed “too much” for racial justice. I’d had the audacity to talk about the Trump signs two months after the election. I’d stepped out of my prescribed place, so there was no longer room for mutual understanding or shared peace.

Sunday after Sunday, I’ve come back anyway to bow at the altar and lead the confession and forgiveness, even on the Sunday after I presided over my unvaccinated forty-three-year-old brother-in-law’s funeral, after his death to COVID-19. In these years of white Christian denialism and betrayal, the smell of death hangs in the air of all white American churches.

At the front of the church, behind the simple wooden altar, is the simple wooden cross. A condemned and dying Jesus watches us worship and listens to our economic anxieties and fears for our children and our planet. He judges our anger and violence, even while he is righteously angry at a church that has bought and sold his image for fame, power, money, influence, and Twitter followers.

With this Jesus in mind, this Jesus who is decisively not American and wholly not white, I invite you to read the rest of this book with his instructions in mind: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

When I first wrote this book, I asked liberal readers to open their hearts to understand conservative Christians. I also held out hope that conservative Christians would read this book, appreciate its empathy towards them, and consider its conviction that the white American church’s idolatry of money and power and white supremacy was taking it further away from Jesus.

Four years later, I no longer hold much of that hope. How can I think my writing will do what nearly one million American deaths due to COVID-19 have failed to do? How can I imagine that people unmoved by a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and an attempted assassination of the vice president will somehow read this book and rethink their entire belief system?

No, I am resigned that many have become irredeemably lost, left only to the work of the Holy Spirit. My hope is for the rest of you. The ones who aren’t yet convinced that Christianity is a fairy tale devised only for the wealthy and powerful, who worship white Jesus on Sunday and steal from the poor on Monday. My hope is for those of you who have abandoned hope that your salvation lies in the American church, but who still believe that somehow, somewhere, love, hope, faith, and — ultimately — truth really do exist. 

Rev. Angela Denker is a Lutheran pastor and journalist based in Minneapolis. She has written for Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and FORTUNE magazine. Denker has appeared on CNN, BBC, SkyNews, and NPR to share her research on politics and Christian Nationalism. Her book, “Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump,” was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. Subscribe to Angela’s Substack, I’m Listening, at angeladenker.substack.com.

Minnesota Reformer

While I hadn’t seen the person under investigation for years, my memories of him and of some of the things he’d done scared me. For example, when we were young teens, he threatened to bury me alive over a disagreement. He even dug a hole to demonstrate his intent. I knew that if I were to cooperate with this investigation, my testimony would not be anonymous. As a mother of two children living on an isolated farm, that left me with misgivings.

There was also another consideration. A neighbor, herself a retired police officer, suggested that perhaps the investigation could be focused not just on him, but on me, too. “Maybe it’s because of stuff you’ve written,” she suggested, mentioning my deep involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I co-founded as a way of dealing with this country’s nightmarish wars of this century.

Indeed, the American version of the twenty-first century, marked by our government’s devastating decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks with a Global War on Terror — first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then in other countries across the Middle East — has had its grim effects at home as well. It’s caused us to turn on one another in confusing ways. After all, terror isn’t a place or a people. You can’t eradicate it with your military. Instead, as we learned over the last couple of decades, you end up turning those you don’t like into enemies in the bloodiest of counterinsurgency wars.

I’ve researched for years how those wars of ours also helped deepen our domestic inequalities and political divisions, but after all this time, the dynamics still seem mysterious to me. Nonetheless, I hope I can at least share a bit of what I’ve noticed happening in the conservative, privileged community I grew up in, as well as in the military community I married into.

Around the time I co-founded the Costs of War Project in the early 2010s, I fell in love with a career military officer. Our multitrillion-dollar wars were then in full swing. At home, the names of young Blacks killed by our police forces, ever more ominously armed off the country’s battlefields, were just seeping into wider public consciousness as was a right-wing political backlash against prosecutions of the police. Anti-government extremist militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom would storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to violently block the certification of an elected president, were already seething about the supposed executive overreach of the Obama administration and that Black president’s alleged foreign birth. But back then, those guys all seemed — to me at least — very much a part of America’s fringe.

Back then, I also didn’t imagine that men in uniform would emerge as a central part of the leadership and membership of such extremist groups. Sadly, they did. As journalist Peter Maass pointed out recently, of the 897 individuals indicted so far for their involvement in the January 6th violence, 118 had backgrounds in the U.S. military and a number of them had fought in this country’s war on terror abroad. Nearly 30 police officers from a dozen different departments around the country similarly attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot and several faced criminal charges.

What also sends chills down my spine is that federal law enforcement agencies turned their backs on the warning signs of all this. Had the FBI acted on information that extremist groups were planning violence on January 6th, it might not have happened.

A Nation Rich in Fear

If one thing captured the spirit of the post-9/11 moment for me, in retrospect, it was the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has defined itself as a “whole-of-society endeavor, from every federal department and agency to every American across the nation.” Expenditures for that new department would total more than $1 trillion from 2002 through 2020, more than six times expenditures for similar activities at various government agencies during the previous 20 years.

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With its hundreds of thousands of workers, DHS often seems susceptible to overusing its authority and ignoring real threats. Case in point: of the approximately 450 politically motivated violent attacks taking place on our soil in the past decade, the majority were perpetrated by far-right, homegrown violent extremists. Yet all too tellingly, the DHS has largely remained focused on foreign terrorist groups — and homegrown jihadist groups inspired by them — as the main threats to this country.

Thanks to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, federal authorities were also empowered to obtain the financial and Internet records of Americans, even if they weren’t part of an authorized investigation. In the process, the government violated the privacy of tens of thousands of citizens and non-citizens. Authorities at government agencies ranging from the FBI to the Pentagon secretly monitored the communications and activities of peace groups like the Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists. Worse yet, in June 2013, Americans learned that the National Security Agency was collecting telephone records from tens of millions of us based on a secret court order.

Such practices only seemed to legitimate vigilantism on the part of Americans who took seriously the DHS’s mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Incidents of racial profiling directed towards people of Muslim and South Asian background spiked early in the post 9/11 war years and again (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn!) after Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017.

Sometime before that, a relative visiting me noticed a darker-skinned man, a tourist, taking photos of historic buildings in my community, while speaking on his phone in Arabic. To my shame, she began questioning him, based on “a feeling that something was wrong.” In other words, well before the Donald put “fake news” in the contemporary American lexicon, feelings and not facts all too often seemed to rule the day.

“Is that the Russia?” or Dangers Near and Far

Terrorism was at once everywhere and nowhere for those who were supposed to be fighting that war on terror, including members of the military. In 2013, when my husband was on a months-long deployment at sea, another wife, whom I had texted about having a party for the crew on their return, texted me back a warning. I had, she claimed, jeopardized the safety of my husband and other crew members on his boat. After all, what if some foreign enemy intercepted our exchange and learned about the boat’s plans?

Four years later, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, it only got worse. A stressed-out, combat-traumatized commander, who took over the vessel to which my spouse was next assigned, emailed us wives weekly warnings against sending messages just like the one I had dispatched years earlier. He also ordered us not to email our husbands anything that could be imagined as negative, even if it reflected the realities of our lives: sick children, struggles with depression, financial troubles when we had to miss workdays to single parent. According to him, to upset our spouses in uniform was to jeopardize the security and wellbeing of the boat and indeed of America. He could read our e-mails and decide which ones made it to our loved ones. It was an extreme atmosphere to find myself in and I started to wonder: was I an asset or a threat to this country? Could my harmless words endanger lives?

One summer evening toward the end of another long deployment at sea, a fellow spouse tasked with disseminating confidential information about the boat our spouses were on arrived at my home unannounced. I was feeding my older toddler at the time. She whispered to me that our husbands’ boat was returning to port soon and swore me to silence because she didn’t want anyone beyond the command to know about the vessel’s movements. It was, she said, a matter of “operational security.” Then she took a glance out the window as though a foreign spy or terrorist might be listening.

“Oh! That’s great!” I replied to her news. Later, I tried to explain to my bewildered child what “operational security,” or keeping information about daddy’s whereabouts away from our country’s enemies, meant. He promptly pointed toward that same window and said, “Is it the Russia? Does the Russia live there?” (He’d overheard too many conversations at home about nuclear geopolitics.) The next day, pointing to a mischievous-looking ceramic garden gnome in a neighbor’s yard, he asked again, “Is that the Russia?”

It was not Russia, I assured him. But six years later, in a weary and anxious country that only recently gave The Donald a true body blow, I still wonder about the dangers of our American world in a way I once didn’t.

The 2020s and the Biggest-Loser-in-Chief

Eventually, my family and I settled into what will hopefully be our final stint of military life — an office job for my spouse and a home in rural Maryland. But somehow, in those Trump years, the once-distant dangers of our world seemed ever closer at hand.

This was the time, after all, when the president felt comfortable posting a meme of himself beating up a CNN journalist, while his Homeland Security officials detained peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. I soon began to wonder whether returning to something approximating normal civilian life was ever going to happen in this disturbed and disturbing land of ours.

Motorcyclists sporting confederate flags drove by on the rural highway in front of my house. Blue Lives Matter flags fluttered in a nearby town after the police murdered George Floyd. Even years after Trump left office, as the polls leading up to the midterm elections seemed to indicate a coming red wave, I wondered if I had been wrong to imagine that our fellow Americans would choose democracy over… well, who knew what?

As part of that election campaign, I wrote nearly 200 letters to Democratic voters in swing states urging them to get to the polls as I was planning to do. Remembering a trend my friends and I had started on social media in 2020, I considered posting a funny photograph of my sweet, excitable rooster, Windy, sitting next to piles of letters, with the caption, “Windy is vigilant about the state of our democracy! Are you?”

Then I thought twice about it, another sign of our times. It occurred to me that if I did participate in an investigation against an angry person in uniform, the one I had once known, I risked retaliation and — yes, I did think this at the time — what better target was there than our strange outdoor pet? On realizing that it was I who was now starting to think like some fear-crazed maniac, I forced myself to dismiss the thought.

Of course, that predicted red wave turned out to be, at worst, a ripple, while election denialism and voter intimidation seemed to collapse in a post-election heap. None of the most extreme MAGA candidates running for top election positions in swing states won. Was it possible that Americans had started to see the irony, not to say danger, of voting for public officials who attack the basic tenets of our democracy?

In the end, I told the guy investigating my childhood acquaintance that I couldn’t help him, feeling that I had nothing new to add for a crew with such sweeping powers of surveillance. To my relief, he simply wished me the best. The normal tenor of that conversation changed something in my thinking about the government and this moment of ours.

I found myself returning to an older (perhaps saner) view of our times, as well as the military and law enforcement. Yes, our disastrous wars of this century had brought home too many unnerved, disturbed, and damaged soldiers and small numbers of them became all too extreme, while over-armed police forces did indeed create problems for us.

However, it was also worth remembering that the military and the police are not monoliths. They aren’t “blue lives” or “the troops,” but individuals. They are part of all our lives, as fallible as they are potentially capable of helping us form a more perfect union instead of the chaos and cruelty that Donald Trump exemplifies. Were Americans — all of us from all walks of life — more willing to stand up to bigotry and extremism, we might still help change what’s happening here for the better.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Toronto (Special to Informed Comment) – The November edition of First Things, a magazine of the Christian Right, features a lengthy statement from a group of theologians called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The church friend who spontaneously sent me a link indicated that the statement is about Christian citizenship and that he is proud to be one of the signatories. Its title is “Fear God, Honor the Emperor”. The reference is to 1 Peter 2, which advised early Christians on how to relate to hostile Roman authorities. While the recommendations of St. Peter, first bishop of Rome, appear sensible and practical enough – show your contribution to society through good works and be respectful – the vanguard of the American Christian Right thinks a more radical strategy is needed.

Concerns for American democracy are absent from “Fear God, Honor the Emperor,” even though recent research indicates that only 9% of Americans believes it is functioning well. A simple word search of the roughly 4,800-word document results in no matches for “democracy”. By contrast, the word “authority” (of God, the moral law, and civil government) appears 46 times. Freedom, ten times and almost exclusively in the sense of religious freedom or excessive freedom that should be restrained. The emphasis throughout is on obedience to a government that imposes a moral order with a heavy hand and on age-old spiritual authorities recommending that governments should favor religious virtue. This represents a political model the Western world left a long time ago, following the American lead expressed in the Constitution. By contrast, authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and other places still like it and use religion as their prime support structure. One wonders who the emperor might be who the statement wants to have honored. Emperor-wannabe Vladimir Putin comes to mind.

Although most of the ideas in “Fear God, Honor the Emperor” go back decades, it is also a document that further demonstrates the American Christian Right’s decisive shift towards authoritarian and anti-democratic ways of thinking. Still, only by engaging these Christian ideas it is possible to understand why political Christians have aligned themselves with the most unsavory and deceitful elements on the American the political scene, including the intellectual heirs of segregation and the cultivators of lies and conspiracies over scientific method, to the point that they would even throw in with a decidedly un-Christian figure such as Donald Trump.

First Things is the magazine to which the intellectually inclined segment of the Christian Right would ‘turn for their marching orders’, as one earlier commentator put it. It briefly became notorious under its founding editor, the late Richard John Neuhaus, because of a special issue of 26 years ago titled “The End of Democracy”. Its editors then wrote, “Perhaps the United States, for so long the primary bearer of the democratic idea, has itself betrayed that idea and become something else. If so, the chief evidence of that betrayal is the judicial usurpation of politics.” The same 1996 issued of First Things carried an essay by former Watergate felon and born-again evangelical Charles W. Colson that appeared to call for violent Christian revolution against the secular American state.

The specific incident that incensed Neuhaus and his collaborators back then has been long forgotten, but judicial usurpation of politics is still very much with us. In fact, by the time the special issue came out, the Catholic-conservative takeover of the U.S. courts was already being planned, as observers of the movement such as Damon Linker and Katherine Stewart have shown. And not only the courts, also local churches and whole denominations have been victims of hostile takeover in an effort to crush the social justice wing of American Christianity and recruit foot-soldiers for conservative efforts.

The appropriately titled Steeplejacking by John Dorhauer movingly describes the process whereby the Right infiltrated churches, and the damage it did. And these practices are still ongoing, as this past summer, right-wingers in the Christian Reformed Church of North America succeeded in forcing a polarizing vote on elevating opposition to same-sex marriage to a confession, that is, a declaration of faith. Some faculty at the Church’s Calvin College have reportedly responded by looking for jobs elsewhere.

The Evangelical-Catholic manifesto in First Things contains several offhand remarks suggesting that democracy should be exchanged for a better system — presumably a theocratic system with a total abortion ban, and that loyalty to the American government is conditional on a narrow set of pre-defined moral values. Consider these quotes: “Moreover, the Church has functioned in a remarkable variety of regimes. There is no Christian system of government.” “A society that fails to deter murder [read: abortion], theft, and other crimes does not deserve our loyalty.” “Although prudence requires us to adapt to circumstances, Christian political witness can be pursued under any type of government, righteous or unrighteous.”

On the contrary, most contemporary Christians feel that the gospel upholds freedom and human dignity and that democracy serves those values best.

This new statement is a dangerous document, because the alliance advocated by Evangelicals and Catholics Together is really the linchpin holding the American Christian Right together. In its present political context, Evangelicals and Catholics Together continues to cement and fuel the accord between the Christian Nationalist Right and the Republican Party. These Christian leaders selectively reinterpret and narrow Christianity in a misguided and self-destructive attempt to defend it from a perceived “liberal” cultural onslaught. Probably most of them are not aware that it is exactly an extreme form of laissez-faire, nineteenth-century British-style Liberalism that motivates neoliberal attackers of American democracy. Nancy MacLean, a professor of history at Duke University, has described this process very well in Democracy in Chains, including the origins of today’s Right in the organized racism known as segregation.

Whatever the merits of First Things and Evangelicals and Catholics Together in overcoming prejudice between the two branches of Christianity in the 1990s, they have now become partisan hacks in cahoots with the libertarian Right that funds their institutions. In effect, these Christians have worked to seduce American Christianity into worshiping a golden calf, be it authoritarianism or Donald Trump. The Christian leaders involved in this movement would do much better to cultivate connections to their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. For example, continental Europe has developed electoral systems that accommodate traditional religious views and allow them contribute to a democratic system.

In other words, it is self-defeating for conservative Christians to subvert the American political system just because they feel threatened by other people’s political liberalism. The state is not requiring them to get abortions or accept LGBTQ people into their congregations, and if they cannot democratically persuade the majority of Americans of their values, they will simply have to tolerate diversity. Further, white evangelicalism is in steep decline. The U.S. will likely not even be a majority-Christian society for much longer, and an authoritarian system that imposes a state religion whether people want it or not would replicate the British Anglican-monarchy alliance of the 18th century, which the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution to avoid.

The protests in Iran are not only about compulsory veiling but about compulsory everything. Veiling has become a symbol for the government’s determination to control the bodies and private lives of citizens. That determination is behind a Draconian law passed last fall that severely restricts access to abortion. If you can’t tell whether I’m talking about Iran or Texas, it is because both are in the grip of theocracies.

The theocratic government of Iran wants to control the bodies and personal lives of women, just as Republican lawmakers in the United States do, with their anti-abortion stance. The Republican Party has come to be so tightly intertwined with the evangelical Christian community of the Bible Belt that it is a theocratic party itself, similar in some ways to the Principalists or hard liners in Iran. Just as Iranian hard liners are hostile to democracy, fearful that the people cannot be trusted to vote for the theologically correct position, so US Republicans have increasingly turned against democracy. Evangelicals are only 17% of the US population now, and are rapidly shrinking, so the only way they can impose their religious precepts on the rest of the population is through minority rule– enabled by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the legalization of dark money politics. The US wealthy for the most part have thrown in with the evangelicals to get tax breaks, since they can fly their wives to blue states or abroad for unwanted pregnancies and do not care what happens to the little people.

Just as Mahsa Amini was arrested by morals police in Iran, Brittney Poolaw and 1200 other women over the past fifteen years have been arrested in the United States for having a miscarriage, even where fetal failure to develop has been noted by medical examiners as a possible cause for the miscarriage.

Once the state legislates intervention in your body, you are not allowed to clothe it with tight jeans or to terminate an ectopic pregnancy without the state’s permission, even if that puts your life in danger. Once a political party becomes an instrument of theocracy, it feels a compulsion to impose its theology on everyone. In liberal (with a small ‘l’) political thought, which includes parliamentary conservatism, law is an expression of the majority of the elected representatives of the people. One can dislike a law, but a classic liberal must admit the validity of the law if it derived from that majority.

Theocracy is profoundly anti-liberal. Theocrats believe society must be governed in accordance with God’s will as they interpret it. Many theocrats are not clerics. Many of them wear tailored business suits. From a theocratic point of view, Roe v. Wade was illegitimate even though it was the ruling of a majority of a Supreme Court that had been appointed and voted in by the elected president and Senate. Roe was illegitimate despite being the law of the land because it violated God’s law, the theocrats said. They like to substitute themselves for “God.” Moreover, it had been rooted in a legal theory of the constitutional right to individual privacy, a theory that had itself to be razed to the ground if illiberal theocracy were going to prevail. Theocracy does not recognize a right to privacy, i.e., to individuals’ control over their bodies.

The office of Iran’s clerical leader operates under the theory of the “Guardianship of the Jurisprudent” (Velayat-e faqih). The origins of this ideology, adumbrated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989), lay in Shiite Muslim canon law concerning widows, orphans and other individuals in society who needed a male guardian but had no family member to serve in that capacity.

Earlier religious jurists had stipulated that a qualified cleric should step in to fill this role of guardian. Khomeini expanded this conception, arguing that the cleric is the guardian of all the state’s subjects. All of them, including free adult males, are by this theory wards of the state where clerics control the state. Ideally, the guardian would be a vicar of the Prophet Muhammad, but Twelver Shiites believe that the Prophet’s line ended with the Twelfth Imam, who went into occultation and would one day emerge to restore the world to justice. The return of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, for Shiites is analogous to the Christian belief in the return of Christ.

Until that time, Khomeini argued, clerics should rule in the stead of the Twelfth Imam, since their study of the Qur’an and of the sayings and doings of the twelve Imams made it likely that they would do best at approximating the decisions he would take if he were present.

Likewise, more that 3/4s of Republican evangelicals want to declare the United States a “Christian” state, essentially repealing the First Amendment with its Establishment Cause. They want to control people’s bodies in the U.S., even if they have to do it undemocratically, just as the ayatollahs have the same goal in Iran. Iran has the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent. America’s Red States have the Guardianship of the Pastor and Priest. In neither case are we autonomous adults. We are wards of the state, reduced to being juveniles in custody.

Because of evangelical Republican rule of some US states, we already have elements of the Christian Republic of America, to mirror the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – Christian missionaries are now settling in the occupied areas of Palestine, and benefitting from Israeli land grab policies. American Evangelicals have allied with far right Zionist settlers to further entrench an imperial presence in occupied Palestine. Missionaries have been in Palestine since 1819.

Though the United States was founded on freedom of and from religion, Evangelical Americans set out to “save” American Indians, Jews, Catholics and other non-believers since before the Salem Witch Trials. They imported a narrow interpretation of Biblical myth, which they implemented in the name of Jesus. Non-believers were to be converted or smote. Jews are to be rounded up so the Apocalypse can commence. While they aid and abet the Jewish state in solidifying the occupation of Palestine, they fantasize about an Apocalypse, during which Jews must convert to Christianity or suffer in hell.

Har Bracha, is an Orthodox Jewish settlement staffed by American evangelicals from HaYovel, to support their mutual interests in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank.* Hayovel (The Harvest) is a “faith-based service organization” of Christian missionaries that recruits young Evangelicals to Israel to “plant trees, harvest grapes and prune vines.” They position this as an opportunity to “fulfill Biblical prophecy.” This supports Israeli imperialism and defies international law at the same time. Planting trees is a noble act to support and enrich the earth. In this case, it’s also a front to further entrench the Israeli occupation of Palestine; this time for the benefit of Christians, not Jews. It is an unlawful land grab occurring on land owned by Palestinians.

That land had been regularly cultivated by Palestinians until the 2^nd Intifada ended in 2005, at which point they were banished from their own land. It was vacant; it wasn’t abandoned. Hayovel filled that vacuum as if no one ever claimed title to it, thereby contributing to Israel’s unlawful occupation. Some Jewish settlers used to be squeamish about sharing Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel) with their Evangelical brethren, until they recognized their common ground. A press release states, “One of Hayovel’s main beliefs is that Judea and Samaria are part of Israel’s biblical heartland, which is why they are focusing their tree-planting efforts specifically in these areas,”

The Greening Israel Project is a tree planting project started by Norwegian Christian missionaries. Hayovel has become its most visible and active proponent, and is an American organization with 501 (c) 3 status. Arguably, this activity violates the terms of their status, as they have to be registered as a 501 (c) 4, to legally engage in political activism. They acknowledges that they don’t have legal rights to plant this land and say,” We do not own any of the land where we plant trees. We work closely with individual farmers, local Jewish communities, and local municipality governments. Most of the Greening Israel Project forestry sites are located on land owned and controlled by the State of Israel.” The problem is that the local farmers are Palestinians banished from their land, so the land is not “owned and controlled by the state of Israel.” Even Israel claims to own only 10% of that land.

Hayovel founder Tommy Waller said, “From our perspective, they (Palestinians) don’t have jurisdiction over that land.” He added, “I don’t want you to think we’re some sort of evil people who want to hurt Palestinians. That’s not who we are. We’re just all about the land. For us, seeing the land come alive is what the prophets spoke about, and this is like a biblical mandate for us.” Waller and his family live on Har Bracha.

Evangelical imperialism is a new dynamic. The economic brand goes back to the Romans and other empires that have come and gone. Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are men of ice cream and Jews of principle. They don’t want their products sold in the occupied areas of Palestine. But Unilever, the company that bought the brand defied its founders, by resuming sales in the occupied territories in June. Ben and Jerry’s thoughtful objections have elicited allegations of “anti-Semitism”. Right-wing settlers and Evangelists love their Chunky Monkey too.

The new licensee for B&J’s in Israel is American Quality Product, owner Avi Zinger. He said, “There is no place for discrimination in the commercial sale of ice cream. It has always been important to me to ensure that all customers – no matter their identity – are free to enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.” As it turns out, Unilever was blackmailed into resuming sales in the settler territories by Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, who warned of “severe consequences” for all Unilever Israeli food brands, if they didn’t resume sales.

This is a reaction to the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement. Thirty-five states have anti-BDS legislation in effect, which infringes on First Amendment-Free Speech rights. This is constitutionally troublesome because it directly conflicts with Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. Ultimately, anti-BDS laws enable local governments to quash political dissent. Israel’s Evangelical supporters have been a huge contributor to the anti-BDS movement, and now require allegiance to Zionism as a tenant of faith. The common thread is an oppressive right-wing dynamic to solidify right wing power in Israel and deny Palestinian self-determination.

*Revised 1 Sept. 2022 to acknowledge the difference between the two.

( Otherwords.org ) – Barely a month ago we lived in a world where all Americans had the right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy. For much of the country, that’s now history.

Just weeks ago, states could implement at least some common-sense limits on carrying guns. Public school employees couldn’t impose their religious practices on students. And the EPA could hold back our climate disaster by regulating planet-heating carbon emissions from coal plants.

Thanks to an appalling power grab by the Supreme Court’s conservatives, all that’s been demolished too. And they’ve hinted that the right to take contraception, marry someone regardless of your sexual orientation, and even to choose your own elected representatives could be next.

How did we get to this place? Because Republicans spent decades cheating their way to a right-wing Supreme Court majority that enacts an extremist agenda, rather than interpreting the law.

When the very close presidential election in 2000 turned on Florida, five GOP justices halted the vote count, stealing the election for the man most voters rejected, George W. Bush. In return, Bush appointed right-wing judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

In 2016, the Republican Senate defied the Constitution by refusing to let President Obama fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, they let another voter-rejected president, Donald Trump, install right-winger Neil Gorsuch. Finally, even as voting was underway in the 2020 election, Republicans rush-approved Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment.

So we now have a hard-right Supreme Court drunk on its own power.

We need a fair balance — and we don’t have decades to set things right. We need to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices right now, so we have judges who believe in privacy, who allow our government to protect our children from gun massacres, and who allow common sense steps to protect our future from climate change.

Republican politicians will say that changing the number of justices represents “politicizing” the Court. But it is the Republican-appointed justices who have entered politics, unleashing gun lovers to run wild, vetoing climate change regulations, canceling abortion rights, and threatening other personal freedoms.

The danger from the Republican judges is only growing.

Their latest project is destroying the power of regulatory agencies. We will be left with a government that cannot protect babies from dangerous cribs and hazardous toys, cannot prohibit unsafe drugs and contaminated food, cannot protect workers from dangerous workplaces, and cannot limit climate-ravaging carbon emissions.

If we allow this to continue, our political system will look a good deal more like Iran’s theocracy. Like the United States, Iran has elections. But reactionary, fundamentalist religious leaders there set election rules, decide who can run, and often override the decisions of the elected government.

The Supreme Court’s six conservative justices seem dead-set on playing this role here in our system. So the best way to curtail the power of our own black-robed fundamentalists is to increase the size of the Supreme Court.

Under the Constitution, it is for Congress to decide how many justices there will be. Over the years Congress has changed the number six times. It’s time to change them again.

For much of American history, there’s been one justice for each judicial circuit. Today we have 13 circuits, so we should have 13 justices. We cannot simply accept the unfairness of the Republican judicial takeover. We can and must act to restore balance to protect our rights, our lives, and our planet.

em>Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Via Otherwords.org