we may be turning off the lights soon, but there are still three Fridays left before the end, and this is one of them. I hope it's currently a good one for you. here's the week as it looked from my keyboard:
thanks for reading tgirl journalism!
#christian nationalism
first off: David Roth fires on all cylinders at Defector again, this time about Rufo and his ilk, and their reaction to Walz acting like a regular human being. (content warning: transphobia, but not in my excerpt below)
This is the conflict that Trumpism can't resolve, the thing that makes even the most gently lobbed of softball questions impossible to handle and what makes an assertion like Walz's — other people are just as real as you, and they deserve respect — not just unanswerable, but incomprehensible. It's not just the idea that Walz is expressing but the very idea of someone like Walz expressing it that is so fundamentally confounding to operators like Rufo; the concept of a normal, empathetic, passably happy heterosexual white man who is not constantly afraid and angry and arguing with everyone around him simply does not compute.
Roth is probably my favorite modern political writer for a variety of reasons and this is one of his better pieces IMO
the second piece is a review in The New Republic by a writer I haven't seen before (Colin Dickey) of the book written by the head of the Heritage Foundation, the one that's based on Project 2025, and the one where the public backlash has been so intense that they pushed the publication date back to after the election so it is less likely to hurt Trump's chances in November. oh yeah, and the intro of the book was written by JD Vance. it's exactly the kind of Christian Nationalist garbage you would expect, given the modern state of Heritage, but it's important, I think, that we understand exactly what is going on with these people
(content warning: about what you'd expect)
Dawn’s Early Light tells in many ways a familiar conservative story—the brain trust at the Heritage Foundation, as it happens, doesn’t have an especially new or compelling narrative to offer. America is in decline, apparently, due to “pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros-funded police abolitionist district attorneys, [and] hipster trust fund socialists.” These are some of the “least impressive people in the history of the world,” though it’s actually not their fault; they are all secretly controlled by what Roberts calls the “Uniparty,” which he never quite explicitly defines but is a loose, fungible cabal of neoliberals, corporate bureaucrats, hedge-fund managers, public school unions, antifa activists, and George Soros. (Roberts loves a scary epithet; in addition to the Uniparty, the villains of his story also get termed “The Conditioners” and “the Party of Destruction.”) This Uniparty has been poisoning the minds of good, upstanding, ordinary Americans, conditioning them to dye their hair, get dogs, develop nasal voices, and work in advertising. They must be stopped, for some reason.
[...]
This repopulation will take time, of course. In the meantime, what weapons do we have at our disposal to fight China? “I don’t think we will succeed without the return of a practice absolutely antithetical to everything CCP and its Uniparty sympathizers stand for: widespread prominent public prayer.”
Yes, that’s right: Prayer is going to be an essential factor in fighting globalization. For Roberts, the path back to economic independence involves putting public prayer
in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.
This appears to be the best strategic policy advice Roberts has to offer, a literal Hail Mary against China.
so yes, they're completely disconnected from reality, but that just makes them more dangerous. and I think this is a well-written piece on top of being an important warning
I wrote this in a multi-paragraph youtube comment, stood back, and went........... 'no one will read this here'" lol.
Content warnings for the usual things Republicans are into (racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc...... oh yeah and eugenics)
I am staying logged out of social media and not looking at news sites for a while, because all of this shit happening while I was adjusting my anxiety medication has not been great, but part of not being able to stop thinking about the current situation is occasionally managing to think something through. so I'm going to share this and log out again for my own sanity; I'm starting new meds tonight so we'll see how things go over the next few weeks
so...
if we fail to escape a second Trump administration, it's going to be very bad on many, many levels, there is no argument there, but I think that we need to properly understand the goals of these people so that we can better prepare. our instinct, being Americans, is to think of a Trump presidency as being like the classic cinematic fascist enemy of the United States, Nazi Germany, but I feel that this is the wrong comparison
Trump wants to emulate Putin's Russia, and everything he and his immediate circle have done up to this point supports this theory, I believe. what he wants is Putin-style authoritarian kleptocracy, and everything he will try to do in office (if he gets there) is going to be in support of that goal, increasing the personal wealth and power of Trump himself and whatever nomenklatura he hasn't yet fired (and/or defenestrated). he'll say whatever he can to get elected, and we should absolutely believe what he says, but when it comes down to it, his own wealth and power is all he actually cares about
mind you, this is still fascism. it's still the belief in a chosen people who deserve to hold power over everyone else, the drive to return to a golden age that never actually existed. but the chosen people is Trump himself, plus whoever hasn't gotten on his bad side recently, and the golden age is when Trump had good ratings on TV
American wealth tends to back Trump for the same reason that Russian wealth tends to back Putin: their goals align and he is just as corrupt as they are. and it will always be some other guy who ends up tossed out the 15th floor of a Moscow apartment block, right?
but the enemy is not unified in their goals. the Project 2025/Christian Nationalist people think (with good reason) that they can use Trump, because they know that a kleptocracy needs a constant stream of scapegoats to blame for the constant failures of the leadership, and they will step up to provide that in the form of queer people, pornography, etc. but the moment they are no longer useful to Trump, or they threaten his ability to just do whatever he wants, he will kick them to the curb and come up with a post-hoc justification why (although damage will already have been done)
the white supremacists like Stephen Miller will press their own desires on him for the same reasons as the Christian Nationalists, and they are equally subject to Trump's whims. I think it's much less likely for him to ditch the white supremacists (Trump's abject racism is perfectly genuine while his piety is not) but it's possible; a sufficient bribe from a petrostate would probably do the job
and the recent SCOTUS rulings have given their game away, I think. within a handful of days the court has ruled both that 1) the president is basically immune to prosecution for criminal acts done while in office, as long as the court agrees that something was an "official act", and 2) the executive branch has no actual power to set administrative policy that cannot be overruled by the courts. SCOTUS is telling Trump that he can be as corrupt as he wants, he can take bribes and send the DoJ after his enemies and all of that, but that they are actually in control here, and he will be immune to prosecution as long as he plays their way and lets them dismantle the administrative state for their own highly corrupt ends
all of these groups (and others) could work together very effectively, but the factor that renders all of this hard to predict is that Trump is a fucking idiot. he was an idiot before he started going senile and he's a even bigger idiot now, and there's absolutely no way to predict what he's going to do. it's likely that he simply does not understand that things like deporting millions of workers or replacing the income tax with import tariffs will crash the US economy and therefore harm his own personal wealth and power. these are ideas that other fascists have told him are good and he believes them
this went on longer than I intended
so. what we're going to see in 2025 if Trump wins is not necessarily going to resemble Nazi Germany, I think. it's going to be much more like Russia if Putin was crazier and stupider. and I think we need to prepare for that possibility in a different (if substantially similar) way