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Tracing the evangelical roots of white nationalism
The seeds of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were germinating for decades, posits religion scholar Bradley Onishi in “Preparing for War.”
Review by David Conrads, Contributor to the Christian Science Monitor
March 7, 2023
It has been over two years since a violent mob attacked and occupied the United States Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. While blame has been laid at the feet of then-president Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, religion scholar Bradley Onishi takes a close look at the historical events and forces that led up to the attack.
In “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next,” Onishi examines the history of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. and the movement’s increasing involvement with political extremism since the late 1950s. Examining cultural and political movements that reshaped society, he shows how conservative evangelical Christianity has melded with political extremism to exert an outsize influence on contemporary society. His thorough research, close observation, and clear writing are invaluable in helping to understand the insurrection as well as some of the many puzzling aspects of the Trump presidency.
“January 6 was not an aberration or even some historically bewildering event,” he writes. “It was the logical outcome of the Trump presidency and election defeat but also of the long history of White Christian nationalist rhetoric, organizing, and influence across the United States.”
Why We Wrote This
To fully gauge the dangers posed by white Christian nationalism, a religion scholar and former evangelical shares his insights into the connection between some strands of evangelicalism and political extremism, such as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Onishi brings an insider’s perspective to his subject. He became a zealous convert to evangelicalism as a teenager in Orange County, California. He later served as a full-time youth minister, before leaving evangelicalism and becoming a scholar of religion (he is currently a professor of religion at the University of San Francisco). In 2018, he melded his scholarly projects with his personal history. His desire was to help people understand one of the most perplexing and contradictory aspects of the Trump presidency.
“How could those who touted the Bible at every turn support a man who had clearly never read it?” he asks. “How could the pastors who called on Bill Clinton to resign for his sexual misconduct support a thrice-married president who paid hush money to a sex worker and gleefully described sexually assaulting women?”
Onishi makes the distinction between white evangelicalism and white Christian nationalism. While the terms are not the same, they are closely linked. Evangelicalism teaches that “the Bible is the errorless Word of God,” which “should be read and followed as literally as possible.” White Christian nationalism goes further, embracing the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and, as such, is superior to all other nations, and one chosen by God to play a central role in world history. Other foundational components of Christian nationalism are nostalgia for past glory – when white men were most highly privileged – and an apocalyptic view of the nation’s future.
Onishi explains that white Christian nationalism is not so much an established ideology or a cogent theological belief system as it is a marker of cultural identity. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with personal religious practice or identification with a specific denomination. This goes a long way to explaining the proliferation of Christian imagery and symbols at the Jan. 6 insurrection. Among the various religious banners on display, one of the most popular read “Jesus is My Savior – Trump is My President.”
How did things get to this point? Onishi points to the 1960s and the immense transformation of American society that decade ushered in. While many welco
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Helping the poor has been one of the great triumphs of the progressive movement
Author Kevin Drum
Published on March 9, 2023
Matthew Desmond has a very odd op-ed in the New York Times today. His topic is the lack of improvement in poverty despite 50 years of effort:
What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people.
....A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.
Desmond is perplexed that social welfare programs distribute money to the poor but somehow poverty doesn't go down. And that is indeed perplexing.
Or it would be, anyway, if Desmond were using a measure of poverty that accounts for social welfare programs. But he's not. Here's what happens when you do that:
This comes from Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy, which calculates historical poverty using several different measures. This one is the Supplemental Poverty Measure Desmond mentions, but counting social welfare benefits and then adjusting for inflation. When you do that, you find that poverty has dropped from 19% at the start of the Reagan era to 8% today. Child poverty has dropped even more dramatically.
One of the things that's baffled me for a long time is why liberals are so resistant to the idea that social welfare benefits have helped people. We're the ones who fight for them! Shouldn't we be thrilled to see evidence that they've lifted millions of families out of poverty?
Instead I mostly see complaints about how our "tattered" safety net and our "fragile" benefit structure are being constantly slashed by Republicans. But this isn't true. Our safety net has been steadily improving for many decades, and Republicans—to their chagrin—are routinely unable to shred it the way they'd like to. Partly this is because Democrats fight them and partly it's because aid to the poor is surprisingly popular.
I have issues with the way we handle poverty, though they revolve as much around the complexity and randomness of our programs as they do around the amount we spend. Regardless, there's not much question that programs to help the poor have been one of the great triumphs of the progressive movement over the past half century. Why are we so reluctant to brag about it?
https://jabberwocking.com/helping-the-poor-has-been-one-of-the-great-t
riumphs-of-the-progressive-movement/#comments
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
...there's not much question that programs to help the poor have been one of the great triumphs of the progressive movement over the past half century. Why are we so reluctant to brag about it?
But by all means.... Let's give child rapist Zelensky some more billions on top of the $125+ Billion we gave him last year.
Get fucked, Kevin.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:6ix, the Pentagon squandered $trillions in the 21st Century and has no victories to show for all that money, but you whine about the far smaller amount spent in Ukraine, where an actual enemy of the US, the Russians, are being slaughtered methodically, efficiently, competently. The world is better the more Russian soldiers fall dead in Ukraine. Here is a little story about how incompetent the Pentagon is at winning wars. Too bad the US military can't learn something from Zelensky about how to kill only your enemies, not women and children and toothless old men in Afghanistan and Iraq:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
But by all means.... Let's give child rapist Zelensky some more billions on top of the $125+ Billion we gave him last year.
Get fucked, Kevin.
Trump’s Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets — But Not About Jan. 6
by Peter Maass / March 11, 2023 at 05:10AM
When bureaucrats get big promotions, they tend to receive congratulations from their friends, but after Christopher Miller landed the biggest job of his life, his wife and some of his colleagues were horrified.
It was November 9, 2020, the day President Donald Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. But just as Miller’s journey to the top is atypical, so too is his obscenity-flecked memoir, because the retired soldier emerges as a scorched-earth critic of the institution he served for more than three decades and presided over for 73 days.
After more than two decades of the forever wars, Miller is pissed off in the way a lot of former soldiers are pissed off — and, I have to say, in the way a lot of former war reporters are pissed off too. It’s hard to have been a participant in those calamities and not feel betrayed in some fashion, as pundits attempt to whitewash the disaster and promotions are announced for officials who masterminded it. Miller’s evolution from Special Forces operator to Trump Cabinet member is a forever wars parable that helps us understand the moral injury festering in our political corpus.
Miller’s 9/11 journey got into literal high gear when he roared into Kandahar in a Toyota pickup with blown-out windows. It was December 2001, he was a 36-year-old major in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, and this was his first combat deployment.
Miller didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the cusp of a profound disenchantment with the country’s military and political leaders, a disillusionment he shared with a lot of soldiers, thanks to the deceptions and errors embedded in the wars they fought. Miller is exceptional only in his Cabinet-level end point.
Miller noticed omens of dysfunction in the American war machine. It began, he wrote in his book, with a visit to the airport that U.S. Marines seized outside Kandahar a few days after the Special Forces sped into town in their four-wheel-drive vehicles. Miller and one of his sergeants had to pick up supplies at the airport, and they saw Marines putting up a big tent. The sergeant told Miller, “Sir, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.” Miller asked why, and the sergeant replied, “They’re building the PX. It’s time for the Green Berets to leave.”
He meant the military was settling in for the long haul. Sprawling bases would be constructed with Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets, staffed by workers flown in from Nepal, Kenya, and other countries. There would be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the peak of President Barack Obama’s surge, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country, yielding decades of full employment for generals and executives in the weapons industry. Miller had a front-row seat at this carnival. “We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater,” he told me. In other words, quickly arrange a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban rather than try to eliminate the Taliban and leave a small number of special operators to find and kill Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda.
I don’t think
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Another stupid reply.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:6ix, you won't understand, but one of those videos you included is a carjacking that did NOT occur in the US. I have had a problem with Trumptards all my life. They never learn if the lesson is given nicely. There has to be real and concentrated and prolonged pain to get a Trumptard to change their ways. (I've known people when they were kids that grew up to be Trumptards.) I'd introduce them to a simple concept when they were kids, they would misunderstand or, even worse, be unable to understand what non-Trumptards learn almost instantaneously. What concepts? Things like not smoking, not getting drunk, not stealing, not lying, not being lazy, not being piggish. Then in time the simple concept that the Trumptard should understand, but doesn't, would wreck their lives. The way to teach a Trumptard a new idea is NOT to use praise or reward, but to punish them. Since this is the internet, there is really no way to get a new concept into the brain of a Trumptard.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another stupid reply.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you won't understand, but one of those videos you included is a carjacking that did NOT occur in the US.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another stupid reply.
Oh. Nitpick now. Go fuck yourself, Second. If I wanted to, I could have posted 10,000 video compilations of GTA and other smash and grabs all over the country in Democratic ran shitholes, and you know it.
The rest of your post isn't even worth replying to, so I won't bother. We've already been through that bullshit a billion times here.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Hopefully this gets mirrored on rumble and bitchute
Cramer once again telling persons to go out and buy garbage stocks
maybe I will find a mirror of these clips seen as u tube is known to censor
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Yeah. That's awesome. He was telling people to buy Silicon Valley Bank right before the collapse too. And there's videos of him telling people to hold on to Lehman Bros back in the day.
The guy is either an idiot or has no soul.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.
Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.
Nery Cutzal was 13 when he met his sponsor over Facebook Messenger. Once Nery arrived in Florida, he discovered that he owed more than $4,000 and had to find his own place to live. His sponsor sent him threatening text messages and kept a running list of new debts: $140 for filling out H.H.S. paperwork; $240 for clothes from Walmart; $45 for a taco dinner.
“Don’t mess with me,” the sponsor wrote. “You don’t mean anything to me.”
Nery began working until 3 a.m. most nights at a trendy Mexican restaurant near Palm Beach to make the payments. “He said I would be able to go to school and he would take care of me, but it was all lies,” Nery said.
Nery eventually contacted law enforcement, and his sponsor was found guilty last year of smuggling a child into the United States for financial gain. That outcome is rare: In the past decade, federal prosecutors have brought only about 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied minors, according to a Times review of court databases.
Children are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
More at https://nyti.ms/426ntE5
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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