Wrapped in a Flag

and Holding a Bible

McClure’s Magazine, 1893 Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Hello, Friend,

(Notes: If you’ve been here for a moment, you’ve likely already seen a version of the following essay that I originally shared back in September. It was deleted along with a handful of others after the election. I have been planning to update and repost some of them. Here is the first of the batch.)

I watched Bad Faith, a documentary about the Christian Nationalist movement in America, a couple of months before the election. I’d been putting it off because I knew it was going to be shocking.

I was gobsmacked.

I do my best to remain informed and aware, but like the frog in the proverbial pot, I didn’t feel the water heating up quite as much as I should have. I had hoped we might somehow make it if enough of us kept sounding the warning bells. Then the election happened and we’re in the thick of it now.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and holding a bible.” Unknown

Project 2025 only scratches the surface of the political shift that has infiltrated every aspect of American culture from politics to media to social media to education. This is a long game that has been played with tactical planning and surgical precision. It is so outside of the awareness of most American citizens, liberal, moderate, or conservative, that it has been able to operate mostly under the radar for decades. Reagan embraced this movement and his policies reflected many of their goals. Back then it was the ‘moral majority.’ Then came the Tea Party, not a Christian based group, but a right wing group with similar goals. Fringe fanatics, not the mainstream. Right? Not so much anymore. These forces combined their efforts. With Trump they found a charismatic populist who would set them up for success. They’ve managed to take over the Supreme Court and right wing media airwaves after years of grooming and promoting conservative judges and media personalities through the Federalist Society. They have taken over the Republican Party from the local to the national levels. They plan to crown the president a king, and they have been working towards this with recent pre-election lower and higher court decisions and the dismantling of our current government. This is not a drill and I am not Chicken Little. I believe that every American should read Project 2025, watch Bad Faith, and educate themselves and their family and friends about the dangerous reality in which we find ourselves at this precarious moment.

The Dominionists’ “Seven Mountains Mandate” dictates that Christians must take over the “seven mountains” of American life, including: religion, family, education, media entertainment, business, and government. This is the core goal. They aren’t just interested in having further reach and power. They want to control every aspect of our society to ensure that future generations are brainwashed to obey through ignorance, mis-education, and micro-targeted disinformation via media and social media. The Seven Mountains Dominionists are working towards ushering in Armageddon or the Biblical ‘end times.’ House Speaker Mike Johnson is a Dominionist, as are Mike Pence, Lauren Boebert, Michele Bachman, and Paula Jones (Trump’s spiritual adviser in his first administration.) Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito, and Barrett are Christian Nationalists. Betsey Devos and many of the members of Trump’s former cabinet (including Michael Flynn) are Christian Nationalists. Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025 as the head of The Center for Renewing America, is currently being vetted to run the OMB for a second term. He is a Christian Nationalist. JD Vance holds many of the religious and political views of Christian Nationalist and adjacent groups, as does newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The fundamentalist Christian movement is not just gaining traction in the US, it’s gaining traction around the globe. Victor Orbán, the darling of the far right media and friend to Putin who met with Trump at Maralago before the election is a Christian Nationalist.

“The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.”

Bernard Beckett, Genesis

What we are facing at this moment is an unholy alliance between extremist ‘Christian’ factions, MAGA and far right extremist groups, and the wealthiest of the wealthy (Robert Mercer, Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, Elon Musk, Peter Theil, David Sacks, the John Birch Society, The Heritage Foundation, Charles Koch, etc.) It is a coterie of dark forces aligned with slightly different, but compatible agendas.

Peter Thiel, right wing extremist billionaire and one of the founders of PayPal, is a major financier of the GOP. He and former business partner Elon Musk were instrumental in Trump’s choice of Vance as his VP. It isn’t difficult to see why if you scratch the surface. Musk regularly receives lucrative government contracts and both Musk and Thiel would continue to benefit from increased tax breaks. Musk seems to have even greater ambitions post-election, which is, if I’m being frank, terrifying. Thiel once wrote that he feels freedom is not compatible with Democracy. When he speaks of freedom he means freedom from government oversight, laws, and taxes, which is freedom for the uber wealthy, not freedom for the masses. Thiel, Musk, and the Broligarchs want to reshape America and the entire world in which we live into their Dark Enlightenment fantasy. They have the social media and media platforms, financial resources, and government connections needed to achieve their goals.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer (his daughter) have been major financiers of a plethora of right wing shenanigans, including Cambridge Analytica (source of much of the social media disinformation in the 2016 US election), Breitbart News, Brexit, Parler, and the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump. Robert and Rebekah are Christian Nationalists. Robert Mercer believes that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major mistake and the only remaining racists in the US, according to him, are black racists.

It is also clear that Vladimir Putin has his hand in much of what is transpiring in the US and globally in terms of the advances of far right wing politics. Trump, Putin’s pal, promised to end the Ukraine war if elected, by allowing Russia to annex Ukrainian territory. Trump also stated that he would do nothing to stop Putin from attacking our NATO allies. (Though they may not be official allies for long as Trump plans to leave NATO.) This isn’t just an America First agenda, it’s an oligarch first global takeover.

Finally, there is the disruptive duo comprised of the longtime chaos agents that dance around the edges of this story, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. These two shady characters go all the way back to the Nixon era. They’ve had their sticky fingers in most of the messiest GOP political activities of the past fifty years, including Watergate. They were key players in the less than savory aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns. Through connections they made in the early 1980s with the notorious NY lawyer Roy Cohn (whose origin story reaches back to the McCarthy Era) they cultivated a years long relationship with eventual GOP presidential candidate Trump. The Bush/Gore election and the Brooks Brothers Riot? WikiLeaks and Hilary’s emails? The rise of dark money funded super PACs post Citizen’s United? The torturer’s lobby? Russia and Ukraine?

Are you exhausted yet?

Now do you see the multi-faceted pickle in which we find ourselves at this tenuous moment?

What kinds of fun do the folks from Project 2025 have in store for us? No abortion under any circumstances including rape, incest, and life of the mother, no birth control, little or no divorce, no rights for LGBTQ+ people, roll back of voting rights for women, privatization of education-which will limit access for members of the middle and lower classes, rolling back of women’s rights and The Civil Rights Act of 1965 (already accomplished with the stroke of a Sharpie marker), dismantling of federal government including all intelligence agencies and NOAA (yes, no more National Weather Association as global warming continues to impact major weather events), total takeover of news and other media to reflect the Christian Nationalist world view (40% of local news stations in the US have already been taken over by Sinclair), mass deportations using camps to house illegal and also legal immigrants who might appear to be illegal based on their ethnicity, selling off our national parks and native lands to the highest bidders, dissolving unions and labor rights including removing restrictions on child labor, undoing government protections of clean air, water, land, food, medications, removing government oversight of quality and safety of goods and services, dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, or government assistance of any kind.

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Add to this the reality that the import tariffs Trump and Vance are proposing would make the cost of imported goods astronomically more expensive for consumers. This would create another major shift of the tax burden to the working class. Their ‘simplified’ tax plan will put the final nail in the coffin of the middle class, reverting us back to the society of haves and have nots of The Gilded Age. ( Trump is calling this The Golden Age, in case you hadn’t heard.) If all goes to plan, there will only be the wealthiest of the wealthy and the poorest of the poor. Neat trick, turning us into hyper consumers who hyper consumed our way right back into the days of yore, when there were no labor protections or social safety nets and people (including children) worked until they fell over and died. The GOP has already been busy rolling back child labor laws. Making America Great Again, right? Added bonus, if the Dominionists have their way, the end of days will be upon us. The future these forces envision is as dystopian as any fiction one might write, but it is real and it is here.

If you aren’t ‘political’ that’s code for you thinking this won’t impact you, but you are mistaken. It will impact every single living creature on this planet. Even if you’re a billionaire, this will impact you. If you aren’t a billionaire or at least a millionaire, according to the tenants of the Christian Nationalist movement, God does not favor you. What kind of a world will it be after the holy wars have ended and we’re left with a hellscape of pestilence, starvation, devastation, and destruction? Who would want to rule over such a broken world? It is baffling to contemplate. For the ‘Christians’, this world is temporary, and their reward lies in the afterlife. The prosperity gospel folks can live it up with their worldly gains right now courtesy of their benevolent, materialistic God. For the billionaire oligarchs, there’s always Mars or New Zealand bunkers or other strange escapes.

“The world I remember was tired and racist and volatile as hell, ripe for a hostile takeover by a shit regime.
We were already divided.
The conquering was easy.”

Tahereh Mafi, Restore Me

It is labyrinthian in complexity and the sheer scope of it all is difficult to grasp. Yet, we have to try to not only grasp it, but help other people grasp it as we seek to find effective, collective ways to overcome it.

I remain ever and always hopeful.

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(Today was an uphill slog and any typos or other errors are merely the detritus of the struggle. Please don’t bite the lady, she’s doing her best here.)