Donald Trump shared an unspeakably racist meme about President Obama and Michelle Obama on social media.

With our nation stretched to its breaking point by a litany of Constitutional crises and human rights emergencies, just a hair’s breadth from exploding into inexorable chaos, our sitting president used the unrivaled platform he has been given to perpetuate one of the longest-running and most dehumanizing stereotypes about people of color.

It is a historic dereliction of duty, a gross and unprecedented failure of leadership; it is dangerous, damaging, deadly.

And before you start thinking anything crazy, I just want to remind you (and myself) that we’ve been here before:

This is gonna end him.This will be the tipping point.This is the red line.He’s finally gone too far.

How many times over the last ten years have you said this or thought this?

How many times have you heard this from well-meaning friends, trusted journalists, beloved podcasters, or even from me?

How many new additions to his vast resume of filth convinced us all that this would be the moment when our friends, family members, and neighbors finally had the scales removed from their eyes, when their buried humanity would show itself, when they would be broken from their mindless cultic stupor and reject him?

When he mocked a disabled reporter.When he urged rally protestors to be beaten.When he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia.When he mocked a decorated prisoner of war.When he called veterans suckers and losers.When he talked about a female reporter’s menstrual cycle.When he shrugged off hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths.When he incited a violent insurrection at our Capitol.When he screamed about immigrants eating family pets.When he slandered citizens executed in the streets of Minneapolis.When he berated a female journalist for asking about the burying of a human trafficking investigation, his name appears in thousands of times.

If I had space here, I could easily list a thousand such moments when reasonable human beings were positive that we’d arrived at a nadir of morality, a political Waterloo, one that would precipitate the exodus of the brainwashed sycophants and empty-headed disciples who allowed him to ascend to a place he was never worthy of.

And yet, here we are, with this snarling, repugnant cesspool of a man once again slumped upon the highest seat in our nation and almost by the hour, tearing apart everything our forebears and ancestors spent two hundred and fifty years building.

And we’re here because tens of millions of people with whom we share this beautiful land have deemed every single bit of moral filth that has erupted from within his dead and blackened heart acceptable.

No violent rhetoric toward individuals or people groups has been a moral dealbreaker. No vicious attack on women or people of color or immigrants or queer people or Democrats has proven beyond the pale.No lawless or immoral word or act has been the catalyst for their defection.

And so, no, his targeting of the Obamas with the kind of vulgar white supremacist propaganda that has forever poisoned our national bloodstream will change nothing for the people we know and love who have spent ten years fiercely tethered to him.

They will cling tightly to his side as he sinks rapidly like a bloated whale carcass toward an ever-deepening moral bottom, because they either harbor that same bigoted ignorance or they lack the courage to oppose it.

If they were people possessing the decency and goodness we still give them credit for, they would have abandoned him long ago.

They will have no great awakening.They will not publicly condemn him.There will be no epiphanies or moments of clarity.He is them, and they are him, and that’s just how this is.

And since they will not part from him, we will need to part from them.

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You hear it, don’t you?

The conspicuous silence?

The supposed pro-life Christians have gone awfully quiet lately.

In fact, come to think of it, they’ve virtually vanished ever since the Epstein files began floating up from the depths of billionaire-birthed hell and into the national discourse (at least, once they realized some of the names within them).

As the Trump Administration worked tirelessly over the last year to suppress, withhold, and redact the unspeakable horrors the files contain, the alleged church-going, God-fearing, self-identified life-lovers said nothing; sudden conscientious objectors in the war for the sanctity of all they claim God has fashioned.

And right now, as millions of pages filled with the most despicable, depraved atrocities human beings are capable of, cover every square inch of America’s collective consciousness, the pro-life Christians are nowhere to be found.

To them, these lives are not sacred; they are worthless.

The thousands of girls and young women whose childhoods, innocence, dreams, security, and very bodies were violated in ways that decent human beings cannot comprehend receive no fierce advocacy, merit no anguished outcry, and earn no passionate defense.

That’s because their massive moral burden immediately expires outside the womb.

You see, Conservative Christians don’t love life; they love embryos.

They tell us all the time.

They speak effusively about them in conversation, publicly revere them at rallies, shed crocodile tears over them in Op-Eds, accost strangers entering clinics over them, viciously troll people on social media because of them, and sermonize on street corners about them.

They even claim to have voted for a reprehensible monster whom they’d never otherwise tolerate to lead, solely on their behalf.

Republican people of faith regularly fall all over themselves, carrying on in performative grief over embryos, unleashing all manner of histrionics at those of us who believe in a woman’s right to have autonomy over her own body.

And they do all of this (they claim), because they believe that embryos are human beings, and they want those beloved in-utero human beings to be cherished, defended, and protected at all costs.

The problem with their breathless, tearful zealotry is that once these embryos are no longer embryos, these supposed life-lovers often don’t treat them like they’re at all human.

Before departing the birth canal, they’re sacred.

After that, they’re screwed.

We don’t see this MAGA Christian hypocrisy in the Epstein files alone, but in their ambivalence toward ICE’s brutality, and their silence regarding the elimination of SNAP funding, expansive Medicare cuts, or Veterans benefit reduction.

Over and over, when human beings are pressed up hard against the nightmares and staring down the demons, when people who respect and revere life should be the loudest voices and the most fervent presence, they refuse to speak.

We can’t allow these people to claim moral high ground and cosplay as defenders of life when it suits them and then disappear when it threatens their political affiliations and religious institutions, when it requires them to confront their own.

We have to hold these sanctified frauds’ feet to the fire of the convictions they claim.

We have to confront our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, classmates, and social media contacts. We cannot allow them to look away, deny awareness, or hide in the shadows. Most of all, we cannot allow them to label themselves pro-life while showing such contempt for so much of the living.

I wish white Christian Conservatives had the same passion for victims of assault, migrant children, school shooting victims, sick toddlers, young black men, Muslim families, and LGBTQ teens that they claim to have for embryos.

Then they’d actually be pro-life, and then we’d all be able to go about the work together of caring for humanity and defeating the monsters.

Yes, white Conservative Christians love embryos.

Disparate sentient human beings who suffer in their midst?

Not so much.

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Dear ICE Agent,

This morning, I woke up abruptly after another night of disrupted sleep and replaying nightmares.

My mind and body, though exhausted, could not rest, plagued by a parade of horrifying visions of unthinkable violence that passed in front of me the night before:

A disabled veteran, intentionally targeted by an SUV and knocked to the ground, the driver opening his door only to add insult to terrible injury.An unarmed teenage boy, riddled with rubber bullets, the force blowing apart the clothes covering his back.A mother of three, ripped through the smashed window of her car and thrown to the pavement.A young man, his face forcefully driven into the street while being pepper-sprayed from inches away.A hysterical child, watching his grandfather being gang-tackled and beaten by masked thugs.A church minister, bloodied and bruised, his assailants laughing and mocking.A shell-shocked college student, taunted by a man with a gun pointed at her face, asking if she’d “learned anything from that b***h in Minneapolis.”

And as this sickening storm of blood and broken glass and whistles and screams swirled around inside my head, a question suddenly stopped me in my tracks:

What kind of person does what you do?

I reminded myself that none of this chaos and bloodshed is happening without you.

You are the face concealed behind the mask.

Yours are the hands delivering the blows.

Yours are the feet stomping on people’s necks.

It’s your voice spitting out the taunts and threats.

I began to try to put myself inside your head.

I tried to imagine how it feels to wake up every morning, knowing that you will hurt other people, and that you will do so, not begrudgingly but joyfully.

I wondered, as you strap on layers of armor, adorn yourself with weapons that you barely know how to use, and reach for the thick mask that will allow you to terrorize your neighbors in anonymity, does it make you feel a strength you never otherwise feel?

Does it soothe your fragile ego to be able to inflict suffering on a world you believe has wronged you?

Does all of this power and control silence those voices in your head that have always told you that you were useless and stupid?

Do you tell yourself a story where the hell you’re going to put people through is for a righteous cause, that you’re working for the greater good, or do you simply get off on it all?

I thought about you with your family in the morning, and other questions came:

Do you kiss the heads of your kids as you prepare to leave, so willing to brutalize other people’s children?

Do you enjoy the tranquility and safety of your home for a few quiet predawn moments, as you ready yourself to invade the homes and the peace of strangers?And as you head out for the day, do you embrace the people you love one more time before violating the lives and bodies of someone else’s loved ones?

I also wondered about your faith.

Do you believe in a God of love?

Do you pray to a Jesus who commands you to care for your neighbor?

Do you sit in a church on Sunday, hearing sermons about a compassion that clothes the naked, feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, and protects the vulnerable?

And if such things are true, how are you seemingly so able to leave all of this at home as you become a willing instrument of such cruelty and malice against people made in the image of God?

Actually, maybe that's your secret.

Maybe that’s how you do what you do all day long and still sleep at night.

Maybe you don’t see the people in front of you as people at all, either because of the color of their skin, the accents they use, or the place they were born.

Maybe you’ve dehumanized the human beings in your path to the point that their suffering, their sorrow, their injuries, and even their executions can all be justified:The fathers whose heads you break open, The high school students you shower with tear gas,the young mothers you toss around like rag dolls, the screaming children whose tiny wrists you zip-tie,the battle-scarred former soldiers you throw handcuffed into a van for daring to ask you to respect the Constitution and the nation they fought and suffered to defend.

Maybe in the darkened and desolate space inside your head, they’re all simply the enemy to be destroyed, the poison to eradicate, the sickness to drive out.

Maybe you really do somehow believe in the middle of the blood and broken glass and whistles and screams that this is all making us safer, but I can’t fathom how.

But after a few moments of this, I realize it’s a losing proposition. I’m never going to understand you.

No matter how many questions I ask and no matter how hard I work to imagine what it is to be you, I can’t—and I thank God for that. If I were able to, perhaps I would be the lawless, violent coward behind the mask that you are. Maybe I would be causing the trauma that you are.

Instead, today, I will step out into my neighborhood, hoping to be the opposite of you, to live in such a way that I undo the damage you are so happily doing. I will be a healer and a helper and a lover of all my neighbors.

And at the end of this day, I know I will again find it difficult to sleep, as the monstrous images of this day will once again replay in my head. I will likely wake up tomorrow still weary from a fatigue that refuses to leave.

But I will welcome this constant restlessness as the cost of my compassion, I will give thanks for a faith that compels me to love fiercely, and I’ll be grateful that the life I live, the path I take, the work I do, and the person I am never need to be hidden behind a mask.

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Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are.

Sometimes they out themselves.

Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of performative histrionics in protest.

Since then, they’ve continued their tortured pearl-clutching unabated, with the white supremacist stalwarts at Turning Point USA recently announcing an “alternative” halftime show (called, of course, The All-American Halftime Show), featuring Olympic-level cultural appropriator-turned MAGA bootlicker Kid Rock and an undercard of similarly pigmented, patriotism-peddling, Bible-brandishing, shameless deep South virtue signalers.

You see the “alternative” they’re offering here, right?

If you’re over 25 and, like many older white folks, have remained permanently trapped in the amber of Classic Rock radio, you may have never even heard of Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. (I’d be willing to bet my house that 90 percent of the Conservatives who are currently rending their garments online hadn’t, either.)

Born and raised in Puerto Rico (which a terrifying number of MAGAs don’t seem to know is an American territory), his father was a truck driver and his mother a school teacher. He spent his formative years singing in the choir in a Roman Catholic Church his family attended, and began writing his own music at the age of 14. Bunny was signed to a record label at the age of 20 after being discovered online.

Today, Bad Bunny is an international superstar, the second most-streamed artist of all time, with 100 billion streamed songs. He is a multiple Grammy winner, has crossed over into professional wrestling and acting, is a coveted brand ambassador, and does millions of dollars in philanthropic work through his Good Bunny Foundation (Fundación el Buen Conejo), which he started in 2018.

Ocasio is the literal embodiment of the American Dream that the GOP has spent decades waving in our faces and flying up the flagpole.

So, what’s the problem?

Let’s just say it’s primarily a melanin issue, with a side order of MAGA cultism, a heaping portion of Christian nationalism, and a healthy dash of homophobia thrown in.

As a self-described gender-fluid Latin musician who sings predominantly in Spanish, has previously criticized Donald Trump, and repeatedly lamented the inhumanity of ICE as recently as during his Grammy acceptance speech last week, Ocasio must be condemned, vilified, and eradicated because membership in the mindless death cult of white American intolerance they now call home requires it. This asinine mob mentality vitriol is what Trump’s movement has fostered and fomented, and what it demands.

Ocasio opened his recent Grammy speech with these words:

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

This is supposed to be what America stands for: decency, diversity, humanity, and yet it is precisely the message MAGA is burdened to shout down and suffocate.

The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”

But whose faith are they celebrating?

Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.

Whose families are they talking about?

Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.

And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday?

Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.

The Turning Point halftime show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue.

This isn’t about Bad Bunny.This isn’t about a halftime show.It’s about who we collectively want to be, the kind of nation we dream of living in, and the future we want those who follow us to inherit.It’s about the cost of standing up to the bullies, of rejecting racism, of being intolerant of intolerance.This is about what we will demand and what we will not accept when it comes to the rights and voices of people of color.

Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.

In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.

It’s time we all got in the game.

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I’m not with them.

Hundreds of times every day, I feel compelled to break into strangers’ conversations on social media or in the checkout line or in my neighborhood, whenever I see them encountering professed Christians who support this president, his platform, and his actions—and I want to apologize profusely to them.

As someone who seeks to follow Jesus and aspire to his teachings of compassion, generosity, and radical hospitality, I’m burdened to publicly distance myself from their unrepentant cruelty, to tell the goodhearted people bearing the brunt of their disfigured MAGA religion that this is not the Jesus I know; to remind them that a vast multitude of faithful people are as horrified by them as they are. I want them to know how much I grieve alongside them and that it makes no sense to me, either.

As a thirty-year local church pastor, the most tragic part of the rapid erosion of decency and empathy in America is knowing its source; it’s admitting that the exponential rise in aggression toward immigrants and people of color flows from alleged followers of a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern Jesus whom they would fully abhor.

It’s a stomach-turning realization because I know what a confounding, anti-Christian Gospel they’re preaching to the world right now and how they are violently driving decent people from religion and derailing their spiritual journeys—because the cognitive dissonance of Jesus’ words and their responses defies comprehension.

I am so sorry for MAGA Christians.

I’m sorry for them, because I know they have no idea who Jesus is.

Perhaps they once did, but because of some toxic cocktail of fearful theology, partisan media, inherited racism, anti-science rhetoric, and political tribalism, he has been all but entirely squeezed from their hearts and replaced with some terrible, sneering white abomination that bears his name, but little else.

The Jesus of the Gospels is nonexistent in them:

His overflowing compassion that fed a hillside multitude, not because they agreed with him or earned their free meal, but because they were hungry.His heart for the alone, vulnerable, and invisible, that declared he resided with them in their suffering.His tenderness toward the hurting and the afraid who were drawn to him because they recognized they were seen and safe in his presence.His quiet humility and soft-hearted peacemaking.His perseverant love for his neighbor and for the least and for his enemies.

There is none of that in these people or the religion they impose on the world, and that is a flat-out sin.

There is only this boasting, angry, greedy “don’t tread on me” bravado.There is only their callous revelry in the suffering of others.There is only an insular, protective, territorial hoarding of blessings and opportunities.There is only this snarling, middle-finger contempt for so much of the hurting, scared, sacred humanity that crosses their paths every day, needing healing and finding greater injury.

I am so sorry for angry MAGA Christians, because of how much damage they are joyfully doing to so many in the name of a Jesus who spent his life being radical hatred’s beautifully defiant counterpoint.

I’m sorry because I know the dilemma earnest people of faith are facing in these moments: they are drawn to Jesus’ teachings and repelled by hateful Christians. I feel the same way. I am exhausted from trying to perpetually overcome MAGA believers to find any sign of the fierce lover of people that they say they believe in.

And since I can’t seem to reach these people, all I can do is to declare as often and as loudly as I am able that I am not with them.We are not of like heart or like faith.We are not doing the same work.I do not share their fear of their neighbor.I do not echo their contempt for the least of these.I do not co-sign their prolific malice.

MAGA Christians don’t represent me.They don’t represent millions of followers of Jesus.Most of all, they don’t represent Jesus.They have no use for him.

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Whew, this is a tough one to write, but I’ll try to get it out if you’ll bear with me.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching, have spent hours in quiet reflection, and faced some hard truths.

I need to come clean now and get this all out in the open.

I confess that all those MAGAs in my mentions have been right all along: I am woke.

“How woke?”, you ask.

I hope you’re sitting down.

I'm so woke, I want the complete Epstein files released so every rapist and pedophile, regardless of their political affiliation, faces accountability, and so all survivors of abuse know they matter.

I’m so woke, I don’t believe people should be rounded up like animals simply for the color of their skin or the language they speak and thrown into concentration camps, just to placate insecure white bigots.

I’m so woke, I believe it’s disgusting to take away healthcare and food from the old, the poor, and the sick, because no one should lack in a land of such abundance

I’m so woke, I think banning books is a sign of intellectually insecure, religion-addled fascists who are afraid of progress and want to control what people learn and experience.

I’m so woke, I think actual physicians should be in charge of national health, TV hosts shouldn’t be running our Military, and Russian assets shouldn’t be overseeing our national security.

I’m so woke, I think women and their physicians should decide what happens to their bodies, not a group of knuckle-dragging politicians who want to legislate their Jurassic values onto them.

I’m so woke, I believe every child deserves an education, even non-wealthy, non-white people, and that they all be free from religious indoctrination in their classrooms.

I’m so woke, I don’t believe someone’s gender identity and sexual orientation are anyone else’s damn business, and that people should be able to live in peace in their own skin.

I’m so woke, I believe in full LGBTQ rights,that we should protect the planet,that everyone deserves healthcare,that a nation cannot be Christian,that the world is bigger than America,that to be "pro-life" means to treasure all of it.

I’m so woke that I believe America isn’t a white birthright,that we are all one interdependent community,that people and places are made better by diversity,that no one’s religion should be compulsory,that non-American human beings have as much value as American ones,that there is no such thing as an “illegal.”

I’m so woke, I believe generosity is greater than greed, compassion better than contempt, and kindness superior to derision.I’m so woke, I believe there is enough in this world for everyone: enough food, enough money, enough room, enough care, if we unleash our creativity and unclench our fists and treat people like we want to be treated.

I’m so woke, I think it’s a pathetic disgrace that America's president is an incoherent convicted felon and court-adjudicated rapist who has contempt for the Rule of Law and the Constitution.

I’m so woke, I’m embarrassed that one of our political parties continually votes against healthcare, against free speech, against body autonomy, against public schools, against due process, against the Bill of Rights, all because they are compromised and beholden to a career criminal.

I’m so fully, hopelessly, and unrepentantly woke that I actually give a damn about people other than myself.

I confess that the Woke Mind Virus has left me empathetic toward suffering, welcoming of diversity, generous toward those with less, allergic to discrimination, sickened by bigotry, and intolerant of intolerance.

In saying all of this, I am the antithesis of MAGA Americans and certainly disappointing, irritating, and confounding them.

And that’s how I know I’m doing life right.

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I’m sorry to break it to you, MAGA Christians, but America isn’t a Christian nation.

In fact, God doesn’t bless it, either.

That’s not how this works.

Now, I know this blows up the convenient narrative you’ve been selling for the past 250 years (and pretty violently the last year or so), but honestly, that nasty bit of heresy is straight-up of the devil, and it needs to go.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I know it isn’t from the Bible.

Your beloved John 3:16, which you always have ready to throw out like a grenade, is pretty darn clear.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God loves the world.The planet.Like, everyone here.Everyone.God is in the world-loving business, not the America-blessing business.

You remember the world, don’t you? That massive, spinning sphere of 8 billion beautiful, disparate human beings: white Christian people, sure, but brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ folks, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and lots and lots of non-English speaking, non-Americans?

Check out the Old and New Testaments again.Read through any of the Gospels.Put your finger down randomly at any Jesus teaching.Use any translation you’d like.No America First.No Making America Great Again (or at all.)No flags to pledge allegiance to.

And a few other annoying bits of news from the Scriptures:Jesus was born in the Middle East.He didn’t speak English.He wasn’t white.He wasn’t Evangelical.He wasn’t a Republican.He wasn’t American.Heck, he wasn’t even Christian.

Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi who spent his days as an itinerant street preacher, living off the generosity of strangers and speaking in parables about a new “Kingdom of God,” a radical way of living where the poor were cared for, the oppressed freed, and the outcasts welcomed in.

Jesus came to usher in a countercultural kind of interdependent community, directly confronting the oppressive Roman Empire he stepped into. It was a diverse, barrier-breaking, border-transcending, nation-defying movement of generosity and mutual affection. It had nothing to do with blessing a Government or building an army, or creating a gated community of white folks in North America two thousand years in the future.

To claim that America was at all the point of the Gospels is to prove you’ve never read them or want to disregard them for your own gain.To assume any God-ordained supremacy based on religion, nation of origin, pigmentation, orientation, or native tongue is a perversion of the work of Jesus and idolatry of the worst kind.

There’s no way America could be a Christian nation, and that’s really good news for you.

You wouldn’t want America to be a Christian nation anyway (if such a thing were even possible). That would mean you’d be living in a country that embodied Jesus’ teachings; a country where the hungry would be fed and not shamed or starved; where the sick would be made well without needing to earn it or justify themselves.If America were a Christian nation, that would mean that the assailed would receive rest and refuge, that the foreigner would be warmly welcomed, that every human being would be treated like a treasured neighbor made in the image of God, and that you would be compelled by your faith to make sure this all happened.

Kinda glad you don’t have to do that, huh?

Loving the least of these, well, that just ain’t your M.O.

In fact, if this nation were truly rooted in Jesus’ teachings, you couldn’t call yourself a Christian while allowing genocide, celebrating the harassment of immigrants, or worshipping a serial predator.

A nation cannot be Christian; only individual people can be, but they actually need to be inconvenienced with Jesus’ teachings. Bummer, I know.

I’m sorry to break all this bad news to you.

I understand the actual words of the Gospel are problematic, given the story you’re selling to those whose fears and phobias you’re leveraging in America right now.

I’m sorry to tell you that it’s impossible to be devoted to the Jesus of the Scriptures while refusing refugees, expelling immigrants, demonizing Muslims, vilifying people of color, worshiping political power, and neglecting the poor.

And most of all, I’m sorry to have to remind you that your Christian Nationalism is a sin of the worst kind.

As long as you continue to conflate God and America, you’re going to be whitewashing the Good News, shrinking God into your own image, and bastardizing the message of Jesus in ways that can only be described as fully and violently heretical.

No one needs America to be a Christian nation, but it would be pretty cool if you American Christians, like you tried to be Jesus Christians.

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I can understand why Conservative men support a serial predator like Donald Trump.

He embodies the fragile masculinity that so many are afflicted with. He validates their misogyny, giving voice to the antiquated, knuckle-dragging sexist garbage they save for mindless locker room monologues and man-cave hangs with other neighborhood Neanderthals.

Trump is the unsurprising idol of teen and college-aged young men whose distorted view of manhood has been shaped in Conservative churches, incel message boards, and dudebro podcast episodes.

They are predatory birds of a feather, and their advocacy, though sickening, almost makes sense. It is an act of self-preservation, a propping up of one of their own. He is a monstrous avatar who can represent them in the places of power they can never hope to enter.

And it’s completely expected that Republican men in Congress would fiercely obstruct the release of the Epstein files, as many of them risk exposure themselves, as well as the crumbling of the brutal empire they sit atop and benefit from.

All in all, knowing that over eighty percent of women have experienced sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes, it’s understandable that tens of millions of men in this country would be among the rabid, cultic base of a serial scumbag like the sitting President.

As pathetic and sad as that is, there is still a perverse logic to it.

What I can’t fathom are women who have seen all they have seen over the last decade: the “genitalia-grabbing” bravado, the incestuous remarks about his daughter, his extensive adultery, his porn star affairs, and his ubiquitous presence in the Jeffrey Epstein files, and who remain unwavering.

It’s impossible to make sense of mothers with daughters who’ve witnessed him being found liable in court for sexual assault, watched him gleefully take away women’s body autonomy under the law, and work tirelessly to prevent the release of evidence that would expose decades of his pedophilia, rape, and child trafficking—and who’ve chosen to double down.

But perhaps most stomach-turning of all are women like Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Megyn Kelly, Tulsi Gabbard, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham; women with the power and platform that few are given, and are using them to perpetuate the pain of other women.

Their willingness to serve as a mouthpiece, a cheerleader, a proxy, and an instrument of injury for him boggles the mind of anyone still capable of compassion and critical thinking.

These women surely know damn well that Donald Trump is a rapist and a pedophile. They’re fully aware of the absolute horrors he and his Epstein collaborators have put hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls and young women through.They have both the knowledge of the prolific evil this man is responsible for and the ability to make him accountable.Yet, they are willing to deny those survivors justice, to exacerbate their trauma, and stand in the way of justice, all to line their own pockets, and build their brands, and keep their party in power.

When the full, unredacted truth of the Epstein files and Trump’s complete resume of abuse is finally dragged into the raking light of public access, so will the degree of their obstruction and the gravity of their gaslighting of the American people.

History will declare them shameful mothers, betrayers of victims of violence, and disgraces to our nation. They broke through the glass ceiling and are wounding other women with the jagged shards.

The Jesus of the scriptures that nearly all Conservatives loudly claim to treasure asks the question, “What can it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?”

Rest assured, that he is asking that of these women, too.

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As I watch men on the Right arguing against the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, I am reminded again how weak they all are, what a pathetic joke MAGA manhood is as an idea.

Despite all their performative Don’t Tread on Me bluster, they are morally impotent in the moments that truly matter.

When the opportunity arrives for them to put their money where their mouths are and make a courageous stand, they’re suddenly struck by performance anxiety.

Given the choice between exposing reprehensible men who have committed unspeakable violence against children and young women, or protecting a guy they voted for and find identity in, they are choosing the latter.

Guys who never shut up about protecting girls from harm immediately fold when called upon to step up and actually advocate for them.

Self-identified alpha males, fully aware that women, not unlike their wives, partners, sisters, and friends were trafficked and assaulted, shrink back into the shadows.

Supposed faithful Christian men, knowing girls just like their daughters and nieces have been brutalized, fall silent, their religious convictions proving powerless.

For all their showy, chest-beating tough-guy bravado, when the rubber meets the road, MAGA men lack the guts to demand that Epstein and his partnering abusers and sexual predators be made accountable, for fear that it will reveal the object of their emotional allegiance is a monster.

And if that were to happen, they’d be faced with a moment of real toughness that they know they aren’t up to.

I hear guys on the Right constantly waving the flag for “real manhood.” I don’t know what the hell that means, and I don’t think they do either. I prefer to aspire to be a decent human being who happens to be male, but hey, I’m just a soy boy, cuck, beta male who believes perverts and predators should be outed and condemned regardless of their political parties.

Here’s what I do know about strong men: There is nothing strong about turning your head from the trauma of women.There is nothing strong about falling in line to avoid conflicts with your tribe.There is nothing strong about being so emotionally tethered to a politician that you would sacrifice survivors of assault on the altar of your adulation.There is nothing strong about saying nothing when speaking is the right thing.There is nothing strong about harboring rapists.

The sad irony here is how terrified the quivering coward who professes to lead this nation is: how much he hides behind a phone screen, how he abdicates accountability, the way he runs from reporters, how he uses our military as a shield; his complete inability to stand in the raking light of criticism without withering like a tiny orange flower in the scorching midday sun. He is a man fully lacking humanity, absent of strength, and devoid of decency.

Sadder still is that a generation of American men who've so placed their identity in him that they have lost the ability to criticize him or oppose him, men who cannot stand up for their loved ones or strangers, men who are so enamored with this fraudulent man-child that they will do anything to defend him, even allow criminals to avoid justice.

I’d love to see a massive move of Conservative men stand up and demand that Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborators all be dragged into the light of full accountability, but the bottom line is, they’re just not strong enough.

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There is no shortage of people to be enraged about right now.

I’m angry at this vile, repugnant, cognitively-addled despot urinating on our Constitution and driving our nation into the moral abyss.

I’m furious with his complicit collaborators in Congress who could have so easily prevented this at any time, including this one.

I’m sickened by genuflecting media members, gutless public servants, and God-forsaking pastors who’ve trafficked in fear on his behalf.

I’m disgusted by a legion of strangers who’ve spent the last decade in sycophantic, cultic adoration to a slithering, spray-tanned pile of excrement whose contempt for this nation and its people is complete.

But do you know the people who piss me off the most?

The people I know who voted for him, and who still don’t have the courage to admit they made a horrible mistake, who will not publicly voice any dissent.

The people who are turning off the news, looking away from the horrors, and muting people like me who refuse to stop reminding them where we are and where we’re headed as a nation.

There are literally hundreds of people following me on social media who are extended family, former friends, and people in the churches where I served, who haven’t said one critical thing about this Administration.

Not a peep.

Children kidnapped and thrown into detention camps.

Young men blinded by rubber bullets.

Thousands of people terrorized, beaten, left bloodied, and traumatized.

Entire cities thrown into chaos for nothing.

Reporters arrested for documenting war crimes.

Thousands arrested, detained, and deported without due process.

Ministers tear-gassed and arrested for bearing witness to bloodshed.

Mothers and nurses executed in the damn street.

Politicians slandering their names.

A daily nightmare reel of chaos and bloodshed.

And from them, from these self-identified lovers of God and country, complete f*ckin’ silence.

People who never shut up about their faith and patriotism are nowhere to be seen.

And I’m never going to forget what they’ve done and what they are failing to do.

As heartbreaking as these days have been, they have also been emancipating.

I used to feel guilty about my confrontational nature and the directness of my words, but that was usually because these very same people convinced me that I should feel guilty.

I was told that I was the problem, that I was overreacting, that I was too emotional and too angry, that I was stoking division.

On many days, I allowed myself to be gaslighted into believing them.

And yet here we are, in the throes of the kind of brutality at the hands of our government that we have not seen in my lifetime, and these people, many of whom have the audacity to call themselves Christians, are silent and invisible.

They’re either brokenhearted and too cowardly to speak out or they agree with what is happening. Either option is disgraceful.

One day, this nightmare will be over, at least in its current form.

Trump will soon be gone, his regime will fall, and I’ll be left knowing that I learned about all of these people.

That I can’t ever forget.

That my heart will never be free from.

That will never get fixed.

And that really pisses me off.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe