CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 146th Edition. What does the SAVE Act, Groypers, A coup in progress, Dominionism, Women staying barefoot and pregnant, and the Lumpenproletariat have in common? A movement, it's leaders, and it's really dim backers. More labels.

Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei? Can anything good come out of Donald Trump's Dictatorship?

Quite a while back we ran this: 

Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?: A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too ...

Which essentially raises and addresses the same topic.  

When I first went to post this topic, I was going to limit it to the war, and the war will be principally what this addresses. But in thinking about it, the question is a bit broader than that.

Much broader.

Going to war, however, war is one of the worst evils that nations impose upon each other.  They invoke the worst of human suffering and bring about the worst human behavior.  The worst human abuse, or at least one of the very worst,  homicide, is the very essence of war.  Wars inflict death. Death upon combatants, but death upon the wholly innocent.  And not only death by armed military violence, but also by accident and starvation.  That alone makes war a horror.

But the horrors of war are not limited to death.  No war has ever been fought that did not visit rape upon women.  Not one single one.  Wars are fought mostly by men, and mostly by young men.  Men are taught to hate the enemy and dehumanize them.  Sooner or later, some of them become wartime rapist.  This is true in every single war, some wars more than others, and in every single army.  Logic holds that if you can teach men to kill, you will have some break the bounds of any decency.

Wars also involve theft on an epic scale.  Western armies have, for many years, banned looting by soldiers but it happens anyhow . Beyond that, wars sanction state theft to at least some degree.

Indeed, war simply visits mass immorality on the cultures that fight, and the location of the fighting.  I was listening to We Have Ways, the excellent British podcast on World War Two, the other day (I'm still in the early episodes of the podcast) when a general question episode came up, and one of the topics that was addressed was the wide scale licensing of prostitution.  Both the Germans and the British not only tolerated prostitution, but they basically organized and licensed it on a the basis that they needed to in order to address the health concerns it gave rise to. In Amsterdam there were enormous lines to brothels after it was liberated.  We've already touched on this in regard to the Japanese government, post occupation, creating brothels specifically for U.S. servicemen.  We've often touched upon the post 1953 decay of American morality in this area which gave rise to porongoraphy and the Sexual Revolution and wondered if it was tied to World War Two. Well, here's more evidence that it very much was.

The Trump interregnum likes to pretend that this war started 47 years ago, which is a complete fable  But the precursor to it, the Hamas attack on Israel, brought rise to it directly.  And that attack featured murder and rape right from the onset, by Hamas.  The Israeli response brought about mass homicide.  Now we're fighting Iran, for Israel, with Iran having been involved in the Hamas Israeli War. There's no reason at all to sympathize with Iran.  That doesn't amount to, however, sympathizing with everything Israel did, including what amounted to genocide in Gaza, and getting the United States into a regional war with Iran.

We don't really know where this will all end, but we can predict a lot of it with some certainty.  One certainty is that a war launched with an erroneous belief that it would start an internal revolution badly miscalculated that, and it won't result in one. Iran may have lost what little air force it had and what pathetic navy it had, but it's not defeated.  It's a land power to start with.  The US is going to have to go into Iran on the ground, which Israel will not do.  So we're going to fight a ground war in Iran for Israel.  Moreover, that war will not be a series of raids.  It'll be a real ground war and it will last, first as a conventional war and then as a guerilla war, for years.

Wars change everything.

And that's not all this incredibly corrupt administration is visiting upon us.

This summer provides plenty of proof, as if it was needed, that we're in a climate emergency, and yet Donald Trump grins and smiles as he guts alternative energy projects, and people like Harriet Hageman watch their family homestead burn and still refuse to acknowledge reality.  Money is flying into the pockets of the Trump family and his associates with nobody really questioning it yet.  The status of women as coequals in humanity is retreating as a creepy octogenarian comments on them openly in press meetings while keeping the perpetrators of rape at Epstein Island potentially secret.

Things are bad.

Catholic theology addresses the problem of evil with the partial answer that we know that God will not allow an evil to occur unless a greater good can come out of it. That does not mean that God sanctions the war, but rather that when humans cause such evils, God doesn't arrest our behavior if a greater good can come out of it.

Can a greater good come out of this?

I think a series of them can.

First and foremost, this war is achieving right now an acceleration of something generations of environmentalist have striven for  By boosting the price of petroleum to epic levels, which stands to get worse, it will reduce the consumption of it, and it will accelerate the conversion of energy generation to renewable green sources.  The US was a leader in this until troglodytes and reactionaries insisted that global warming was a fib and longed for the giant car era of the 1950s.  Well, Trump has killed that, and probably forever.  

Nations that were going to renewable energy are nearly gloating about it now  Those that trailed behind, save for the United States where the MAGA troglodytes are in control, are now rushing towards it, knowing that something Trump has said, that the prices will go right back down, is either a lie or amazingly ignorant.

Petroleum prices will not go back down for a generation.  An oil and gas infrastructure that took three generations to build cannot and will not be rebuilt overnight.  Moreover, the destruction of it, which is already disastrous, will get worse as the war goes on.  It took all the way into the mid 1960s to rebuilt Europe after World War Two.  This will be no different.

Moreover, the US doesn't have the money to do it.  A good that may come out of this war is that the drunk sailor/roaring 20s level of spending the US has engaged in will now come crashing to an end.  Nations like China that have funded it are stopping.  By 2027 the US will be forced into a financial reconciliation that Trump pretended he was going to bring, but which he lied about, along with everything else  We will have to get our financial house in order.

As part of that, this war is very likely to be the end of a bloated military that has become partially rogue.  Before Trump II Americans could always depend on the loyalty of the military to its laws.  It can't now . The military has engaged in two fully illegal wars with far right Evangelicalism being prominent in the military in the current one  

This war is going to be so big that the nation will have to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight it.  We've had to do that for every war since Vietnam.  After the Vietnam War the military was held in contempt, even though it had done nothing to deserve it.  This time, it will be again, but it will deserve it. The contempt will go right into the Guard and Reserves.  The nation's ability to engage in these foreign "adventures" will be reduced because the nation will have a very low ability to fill the ranks of the forces necessary to do it, and on top of it, we just won't have the money.  Our military will start fitting in with those of our European allies, smaller, professional, and regional.  We'll need to depend on our Allies just to defend ourselves, and all of that will be a good thing.

The Trump interregnum has seen the nation, moreover, completely betrayed by the capitalist class.  Donald; Trump, Elon Musk, and a host of the rich and powerful have not been there for you and that's finally obvious.  Indeled, we learned, as we should have known, that the avarice of greed would turn, in many instances, to avaricious lust, with some of the rich and powerful flying offshore to fuck teenage girls.  Rather than bring them to justice, Trump has hid their names.  And, frankly, at this point, in spite of what Trump's supporters claim,there's plenty of evidence that he may have fucked teenage girls himself, and its pretty hard to believe he didn't know about that going on even if he didn't.  So we learned that not only are the rich and powerful detrimental to our economic welfare, they're detrimental to our environmental welfare, and even detrimental to the security of our daughters.  With the bloom off the rose of the worship of the rich, and after watching the nation fast forward into economic ruin, there's some rational hope that the rich will be brought to heel by having their wealth significantly reduced.

And then there's the weirdness of the far right Evangelicals.  The Trump Administration is likely to bring that to an end, and it needs to end.

Various members of the Administration, most notably J. D. Vance but also including Marco Rubio, have lectured Europe on it losing its culture, by which they mean, if they will not openly state it, it's Christian culture.  There's some reason to make that criticism, but it cannot really be made by a country governed by an authoritarian serial polygamist assisted by a Speaker of the House whose sympathetic to the New Apostolic Reformation and in which Paula White is a spiritual advisor.  The crash of the Trump administration, and it will crash, will bring the NAR down with, and most likely damage the Evangelical Right beyond repair.

Every time the world in general has faced an existential threat since the dawn of Christianity, if not before, there have been those who concluded that the world itself was ending.  There are those who have concluded that right now.  There are those who seriously wonder if Donald Trump is the Antichrist.  Peter Theil, the billionaire Evangelical (and homosexual) had oddly found a voice in First Things expressing the view that the Apocalypse is here citing much of what I just did.

Is it? 

Well, who knows.  But what we do know is that every age that featured such crises brought that view about.  Christians during Attila's day though the end had arrived, and for some, on a very persona level, it had.  When the Vikings started raiding European coastlines many presumed the same thing.  By the 1970s Hal Lindsey was scaring people with The Late Great Planet Earth.

What we also know is that true moments of crisis can be transformative.  Europe, once it became the center of Christianity, has wandered away from the Church repeatedly, with the Protestant Reformation being only one such example.

Already a huge portion of Americans are disillusioned and disgusted.  This can be seen socially, culturally and politically.  Most Sundays now I can hardly find a seat at Mass and confession lines are like what I used to only see at Easter.  Here in "Red" Wyoming, there's a significant movement to take the Wyoming Freedom Caucus out of office.  The Democrats appear slated to regain the House, and maybe the Senate, in November, to no doubt be followed by a Custer like last stand by Trump in the Oval Office in which he refused to recognize the game is up.  Republicans, and some Democrats, are fretting about the small-scale rise of Social Democrats, but capitalism is being allowed to run roughshod over average people and needs to be restrained, and certain "social" policies present everywhere else on Earth are long overdue here, such as "socialized" medicine.  And fascism always gives rise to the opponent of socialism, and the GOP has turned largely fascist.

All of this is to suggest maybe some good will come out of this.

 Tragic Prelude, a mural in the Kansas State Capitol. Brown carries in one hand a Bible and a rifle in the other.  Union and Confederate troops are fighting and dying in the background and foreground.  Tornadoes and a prairie fire approach. An era, really, not unlike our own.

In some ways, the first Trump administration was the opening campaign of a second Civil War, this one a Cold Civil War, by the same forces that brought about the first in 1860-65.  The nation's great failure after winning that war was to pass on extremely severely punishing those who brought it about, the slave owning oligarchs of the South.  That opportunity is going to present itself here a second time, in very short order.

The first time caused legal reforms to the Constitution. This one needs to as well.

The first one, perhaps ironically, also caused a major religious shift in the county and brought about the downfall of the southern Episcopal Church.  This one needs to bring about the downfall of far right Evangelicalism, and probably will. The Episcopal Church in the South fell of its own accord for supporting the Confederacy.  The NAR will fall for helping bring about and advancing Trump.

The United States is a conservative nation, mixed with classical liberal aspirations.  That will reflect what comes next, and we need to return to that.

Trump's simply a very bad person, declining into senility. Who is backing him?

And by backing him, let's leave MAGA to the end of the discussion, although we'll address it.

Last week we saw Donald Trump at his outright worse.  He delivered a speech in what would normally be prime time, although it wasn't covered on two of the major networks in what seems to have been an extraordinarily late acknowledgement that he's a lying liar who lies and a danger to  humanity.  He's been trying to subvert democracy for years.  The speech this past week was an open declaration of war against the franchise.

This has been oblivious to the point of absurdity now for months and to anyone who cared to pay attention for years.  We've discussed this several times over the past couple of years.  For those of certain age, the rise of Trump has been an almost indecipherable phenomenon, although we've discussed and tried to decipher it quite a few times (and frankly, we've been largely correct).

Where we were wrong, however, is in predicting that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him. . . by now.  We still feel there's a good chance, but its fundamentally different than it was previously. At this point the non fanatic elements around him, such as they are, must be talking.  It could take any number of roads, from a Curragh Mutiny to a type of the Blue Flu.  We'll see.

What's very clear, is that the non MAGA forces, mostly in the Democratic Party, but elsewhere, must, and will, start mobilizing. Trump's a menace to humanity.  And to add to that, the speech fell flat and even m many Republicans have openly admitted that it not only failed to miss the target, the gun was never loaded.  It came across as the pathetic ramblings of a demented old man.

What's crystal clear at this point is that Donald Trump is working right now on stealing the 2026 elections.  He's doing everything he can, with a major effort being the SAVE act which would have the immediate effect of wiping out the ability of huge numbers of Americans to vote.  So far it appears unlikely to pass, although that cannot be assured.  The next step is going to be a direct attack on the polls themselves. Trump will station his SA and perhaps even the military at polling locations he wishes to disrupt and following the election he's going to proclaim the results invalid.

That's not a maybe. This will occur.

Trump's goals are personal.  He's mentally ill and he's never been mentally right.  He was a bully as a child which caused his parents to send him to military school.  He helped his father deride his troubled brother.  His life has been based on greed, greed for money and greed for a certain profile of women.  He's been a frequent failure at business and frankly he's not that smart.  He is a good salesmen, however, and he sold his image and reputation multiple times over the years, finally selling it to viewers of American television stupidly, a sales job that got him into office.  He lost the 2020 election and cannot personally stand to be thought of as a loser.

Stealing the election for him is personal, not political.  

So, with that being the case, why would any sane person support him, and who are they?

The Useful Idiot

Let's start with what's really the case with Trump. Why are people surrounding him willing to put up with him?  Why are they willing to soil themselves with lavish heaps of praise on the man?  Do they really adore and admire him the way they say they do?

Not likely, save for a very limited few.

No, he's a useful idiot.  And he's a useful idiot for two of the camps in his circle.  They are, however, two camps.  And their goals are not the same.

The Francoist

The coat of arms of the Spanish Francoist state.  The motto is "Una Gran de Libre", a Latinized version of the motto in Spanish which was "Una Grande y Libre"; "one, great, and free".

Back in 2024, not long ago, an intern to Harriet Hageman, Gabe Saint, lost his position when his social media contest was discovered.  It included links to Francoist, as well as to Groypers, like Nick Fuentes.

What's this have to do with Trump?

Quite a lot.

Now, Trump wouldn't know Saint from Adam, but the fact of the matter is that a far right Wyoming politicians had somebody on her staff who was effectively a Francoist Groyper, and only the seeming embarrassment of that, at the time, cause Saint to drop off her staff. Saint, however, didn't disappear.  He remained in the background, associated with Charlie Kirk's organization, and popping up every now and then in the far right Wyoming Freedom Caucus camp. 

Now, I bet it'd make hardly any difference at all.

Una Gran de Libre.

Groypers are, to a certain extent, the SA or the Roter Frontkämpferbund.  Some have a grasp of what they're fighting for, but that grasp is on a big scale from fully committed Ernst Röhm's who very much do, to single basement dwelling 20 something men who are mad at the world because they can't get a date.  There's every scale in between.  But the Francoist element has tapped into a real movement, and that movement, small though it is, is National Conservatism.

National Conservatism is very closely aligned, in some quarters, with Christian Nationalism.  It has a real thesis, and it has a real set of intellectuals behind it. Those intellectuals are Rod Dreher (who now seems to be questioning it), Patrick Dineen, and Kevin Roberts, amongst others.

J.D. Vance is a close associate of Roberts. Vance is in this camp.

The thesis is this.

The United States is a Western Nation.  All Western Nations are defined by the Edict of Thessalonica (380 A.D.) accepting Christianity in the Roman Empire.  That makes Western Europeans a Christian culture.  Similarly, the Christianization of Russia in 988 makes that region a Christian culture as well.

So far so good .That is essentially correct.  The United States is undoubtedly a Western Nation and in fact Western European culture is undoubtedly defined to an enormous degree by the Roman Empire accepting Christianity (and it is additionally enormously defined by having been in or under the influence of the Roman Empire).

Beyond that, however, National Conservatives (and Christian Nationalist) do not believe in democracy at all.  The reason varies, with some willing to ground it historically in the  French Revolution and its aftermath which is much less connected with religion of any kind than they think.  The French Revolution was, in the cities, definitely opposed to religion, but it was effectively, at its start, mob rule until Napoleon turned cannons on the mob.  The French revolutionaries were operating effectively on the same ethos as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause.

Not all of the French populace as like that at all. And what was occuring in France had been effectively predicted by the writings of the Agrarian Jefferson about large urban populations.

Anyhow, that experience left some in this camp distrustful of democracy to this day.  In their view, democratic states always turn to mob rule, and they always feature declining morality.  And there is evidence they can site to, starting effectively with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade and carrying it through to 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges.  They feel that "liberalism", meant in the classic sense, and liberal democracy, have failed.

The solution, in their mind, is illiberal democracy. That was the political thesis that Viktor Orban operated on, which explains why Rod Dreher had decamped to Hungary (he's unfortunately returned.  Democracy of this type would sort of exist, but in the same fashion that it did, sort of, in Imperial Germany. There would be elections, but what you could really vote on would be predefined in a way.  Serious cultural issues would never be on the ballot.  Those would have been dictated.  So you could only decide matters in a sort of narrow, non cultural, sense.

You can see a lot of that in the warp and woof of the Trump Administration where these figures have had serious influence.  It explains not on the opposition to the fraud of transgenderism, but also the periodic insistence that everyone have more children, by which is meant those of very direct Western European ancestry have more children.  If you look carefully in the background you'll fine that not only are they opposed to abortion, but also to pharmaceutical birth control (and maybe to birth control of any kind).

Now, some conservatives hold these views as well.  I'm not far from some of them, or I outright agree with some of them. But the real difference here is that as National Conservatives do not trust or believe in democracy, these things would be dictated.

Effectively they are for a Francoist state.  

Trump isn't their Franco.

J. D. Vance is.  But they can't get to Vance, or complete their project of illiberal democracy, directly  It has to be camouflaged.  And Donald Trump is a giant orange clown who serves that purpose.

The Roundheads

The second group surrounding Trump are members of an Evangelical Right movement, the New Apostolic Reformation.  Not all precisely aligned, the generally see the United States as a Protestant nation that has gone badly astray and in need of being taken back over so that Puritanism can be restored.  Many hold to Seven Mountains Dominionism holding that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to and must dominate, those being: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.  If they succeed, and many believe that they will as God has ordained it, the United States will become, effectively, a Calvinist theocratic state.  In that state, only those who closely adhere to a Calvinist world view will really have right, and everything will center around that.  

It's important to note that those holding this view are constantly improperly described as "Christians" or "Christo Fascist".  Most Christians in the United States and the vastly overwhelming number elsewhere do not hold the political or theocratic views that the NAR does by any means.  Indeed, most Christians on earth are Catholics, and the second largest group are Orthodox, with both groups being Apostolic Christians.  Apostolic Christians do not see any country on Earth as ordained with a Christian mission and never have.  NAR adherents are not, we might observe, reading City of God.

They don't, in many instances, even regard Apostolic Christians, who are the original Christians, as Christian.  In this sense they are not only radical, but ignorant.  But as a small radical group, they're reinforced in their ignorance, only tending to lose it when they start to widely associate with other Christians.  

What exactly the NAR would seek is not completely clear as there's enough diversity amongst the Evangelical right to force it to be unclear.  They don't all see things the same way.  But we have major glimpses of it from some of their major figures.  If they had their way, they'd be like the Puritans were in New England, forcing the state to adhere to their religious views.  A lot of what they seek, or rather oppose, is pretty clear, but only where it overlaps with other conservatives.  They're opposed to abortion, transgenderism, and the like.  But there's a lot beyond that.  They generally oppose women being involved in politics and some would remove the right to vote from them.  They don't approve as minorities as not only is this nation to be a Calvinist one, it's to be strictly white one, what it should have been, in their view, had the original 1620 landing formed the complete demographic future of the country.  

When a person realizes what they want, Mike Johnsen's view that he was to be a new Moses makes sense.  He meant it.   

This group does not see Trump as a figure adhering to their movement, but many do see him as divinely ordained.  They believe he's a latter day Cyrus the Great, delivering them but not part of them.  

Trump, accordingly, is their man.

The NAP cannot bring the country into a Calvinist promised land without Trump and they cannot do it within the next two years. They also can't do it with J. D. Vance at the helm.  Vance is a Catholic who hangs around with traditionalist Catholic intellectuals and they don't like Catholics or intellectuals  This is why a figure like Rod Dreher, who helped get us to this disaster, is now worried about the glidepath into what he brought about.  This also helps explain why the 25th Amendment has not been invoked. Vance would actually have the impact of terminating this movement in a major way and they know it.  They need Trump to stay in office.

And by stay in office, I don't mean until 2028, I mean beyond that.

They believe he's protected by God.  They believe that its morally justified to steal the election this year as that's what they need in order to bring their goals about, and they believe that God has decreed that it shall come about.  The wrong people, in their view, do not have rights anyhow.  

Oliver Cromwell, who held very similar views.

Who succeeds Trump in 2032, or even later than  that, is something they aren't focused on.  It's not Johnson.  Moses was not allowed to enter the Holy Land.  It'll be somebody else, after all the corrupt and debased influences of liberalism are put to rest.

Fellow travelers.

Those are the two main forces in Trump's cabinet and orbit.  Vance is the primary National Conservative in the cabinet, with Rubio tilting towards it.  Behind the scenes you have people like Bannon, Fuentes, Bishop Robert Barron, and others.  The NAR is better represented, with people like Johnson being prominent.  The conflict between the two, as noted, is what I think is keeping our prediction of the 20th Amendment from being invoked from occurring. The National Conservatives aren't strong enough to bring it about.

But  there are others who are in the orbit.  That keeps this nightmare going as well.

• The Confederates.

Diehard ignorant racism has always been there, but it actually increased in the first half of the 19th Century, and ultimately of course gave rise to the Civil War.  The losers in that war never accepted the results, and unfortunately a forgiving nature in American culture allowed them to get away with that. Had Radical Reconstruction being carried out, much of what we're enduring right now would not be occurring.  The 1877 abandonment of Reconstruction allowed Southern oligarchs to restore a condition of near slavery over blacks in the South.  The Lost Cause Myth was developed and glorified in the late 19th and early 20th Century.  In spite of the post World War Two Civil Rights movement, people with a Confederate mindset have never given up.

This movement is crude and really only has as its central points a hatred of everyone who isn't lily white and a sense that "liberty" means whatever they say it means.  This group also intermixes with the NAR but it also includes members of other Protestant denominations, often in sort of a ignorant fashion.  The American Civil Religion is strongly represented, in which a person can conceive of themselves as a decent person as long as they're not having gay sex.

Groups like the Wyoming Freedom Caucus have a large element of Confederates in them.  Generally they're better defined by what they hate, than what they actually support.

This group's spark was ignited by two things, one being the election of Barack Obama and the other being the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.  I didn't vote for President Obama.  I voted third party.  But I did mistakenly see Obama's election as the sign that the country had made it past its racist past.  It hasn't,  It sparked a renewal of it by those shocked that the country would elect a black man.

I thought and still think that Obergefell was a horrible decision, devoid of legal support, and demonstrating a complete lack of the understanding of the history of marriage and natural law.   Obergefell was the wake up call for National Conservatives and the NAR as well.  But with this group it was more primitive.  National Conservatives basically have the view I just stated as well as a belief that its contrary to Christian beliefs.  The NAR believes the latter as well.  But most Confederates really don't care who you fuck, as long as they're of the opposite sex.

Trump is their man as well, as he's the NAR's man, and because he speaks well of them.  Profound ignorance of history, religion, and culture tend to dominate in this group, and always have.  That makes them easy to command. . . up until a  point.

The line of departure for many of them is when things become really personal.  If they're hurt economically, or if Trump policies hurt locally, they start to awaken.

• Opportunists, the ambitious, and cowards.

Sen. Dr. John Barrasso, who probably doesn't believe most of the crap he's shoveling.

This may seem like a summary of three groups, but it's basically one.

The GOP right now is packed with politicians and figures who have no love for Trump at all, aren't National Conservatives, and who haven't darkened a church door in years.  But they'll express undying loyalty to Trump. 

They don't mean it.

The problem with the political class is that many of them are hyper ambitious, some are lazy, and others are outright cowards.  Many of them combine all three of those characteristics.   Their primary motivation is just to keep their job.

Lots of currently serving Republicans expressed disdain for Trump before it became imprudent to do so.  J. D. Vance is one of them, so is Marco Rubio.  Chances are that neither of them have actually changed their views one bit.  Lindsey Graham sacrificed his dignity by become a Trump apologist, and didn't live long to restore his reputation.  All of these figures profited politically by supporting Trump.

Indeed, the entire current Wyoming Congressional delegation fits this category.  John Barrasso has mastered the art of never giving you a clue of what he's thinking at any one time, so he didn't have to live any statements down, but to people who are close to him, it's well known that he doesn't agree with what's going on even as he acts as the majority whip.  That makes him both ambitious and cowardly.  Cynthia Lummis was open about her disdain for Trump at one time.

And in the current political field, hoping that you fit into the Confederate or NAR groups, lots of local politicians are on the Trump bandwagon when you can strongly suspect that some don't actually support him at all.  Megan Degenfelder has her endorsement by Trump on her signs.  Steve Friess sends out endless flyers with his love for Trump, when what he probably really is would be much closer to Reagan's views, mixed in with some lingering Confederatism.  Reid Rasner, whose flyers have dried up, loudly proclaimed his undying loyalty to Trump while is gadfly reels have gone after Democrats but also the transgendered.  Rasner is a homosexual and there's no real good reason to believe that he believes what he's saying, or that he is what he proclaims to be in terms of his image (gun toten' horse likeing, Frontier type).

Which brings us to a real problem of the political class in general. As it can become a career, and as careerism itself means compromise, something needs to be done to keep it from being a career.

• The besotted and the ignorant.

Finally, some of MAGA is made up of people who are just amazingly ignorant or completely besotted by Trump, the latter of which is completely creepy.

The ignorant are pretty strongly represented in the rank and file MAGAs.  They are extremely poorly informed and believe that Trump is in their camp as he says he is.  Frequently there's something they know they like, or they know that they hate, and based their decision on something very narrow.  Because of very strong prejudices, wants or the like, they're willing to go along with everything else.  They don't really think anything through.  I have friends I see in sporting goods stores who fit this definition.  As long as the Second Amendment is protecting firearms, which in spite of the way they may see is a strong hobby interest for them, they don't care about anything else whatsoever.

And then there's the besotted, the most pathetic of all of Trump's supporters.  They love him because they love being in love with him. He's their Frank Sinatra and they're his bobbysoxers.  He's their Elvis.  He's their Beetles.  They don't look at anything else, as they don't want to.  They don't want to know about Sinatra's personal life or connections with mobsters, they don't want to remember Elvis as sweaty and fat, and they don't want Yoko Ono coming in and messing things up.  They love him, and they always will.

Which says more about them, than him.

Some of these people have, I think, an odd deficit to their lives and this is what they fill it with.  Chuck Gray seems to fill it with Trump and hatred, for example.  Looking at his life, it seems as if there's a big gaping hole he's trying to fill.  Only child of a divorced couple, spends summer in Wyoming, etc.  Anyhow, if  Trump turns out not to be their beloved, they'll be crushed, so they'll go on imagining that he loves them as they need to..

The Cold Civil War and the uneasy alliances.

The US hasn't faced a crisis analogous to this, ever.  The closest we actually come is the English Civil War that was fought from 1642 to 1651, before we were a country, but still part of our overall history.  Indeed, the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 already expressed the tensions that would lead to that horrible event.  Post 1776, the only crisis that's semi analogous is the American Civil War, which has the distinct difference of the pro democracy forces being solidly in charge of the government, as opposed to what we're experiencing now which is the opposite.  Still, lessons are there as well.

The English Civil War saw what we could regard as populist religious zealots seizing control of the government and struggling against the forces of tradition and true conservatism.  The war isn't commonly fully portrayed that way, but it's a fair way to look at it.  Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan religious zealot whose views did not represent the majority of Englishmen.  He succeeded in deposing King Charles and installing himself as Lord Protector over a theocracy so extreme that to this day the location of his head is kept secret.  As hated as he came to be, Mike Johnson, the Huckabees, and Pete Hegseth would all recognize the man as a kindred spirt.

It didn't last, however.  The monarchy was restored in 1660, along with football on Sundays, and the like.  In a lot of ways, while the Parliamentary forces won the Civil War, the harshness of the following regime resulted in an appreciation of what the Puritans were not, and that set the country, including the country's colonies, on to what they later became.  Not only that, but the Puritan figures who were still living were hunted down by restored monarchy.

In the American example, which is different for the reasons noted above, the wrongdoers really weren't hunted down, which preserved the evil we're confronting today.  If the English Civil War suggests that people won't endlessly endure a regime like Mike Johnson wants to install, the American Civil War suggests that after this is over, the perpetrators of an assault on democracy should be marginalized beyond the point of return.

And one final thing.  An attempted revolution with two completely separate sets of goals is unlikely to succeed long term.  The Dineens, Roberts, Drehers and Vances are not going to be able to make common cause with the Johnsons and Hegseths.  And that may be MAGA's Achilles heel.

Johnson, Lee, Hegseth and the like are just as much religious zealots of minoritarian sects as Oliver Cromwell was.  If they get within reach of their goal, they'll begin to enact laws accordingly.  MAGA members of the American Civil Religion will be fine with reversing Obergefell, but they really won't be keen on reversing Griswold v. Connecticut, something already being discussed in right wing circles, let alone Eisenstadt v. Baird.  Defining citizenship by a person's whiteness might be okay with far right populists who regard the country as Puritan, but it's not going to be with people whose predecessors came from Galway, Lebanon, or who founded Santa Fe.  MAGA, at the end of the day, is a ragged tent in which numerous small factions are gathered under the banner of Trump to either use him or be besotted by him.  He won't last forever.

But he'll try to, which makes from now until January extremely dangerous.

Labels: 1870s, 1877, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, 2028 Election, 2032, Catholic, Christian Nationalism, Christianity, Curragh Mutiny, homosexuality, Orthodox, Protestant, Reconstruction, religion, Viktor Orbán, Wyoming Freedom Caucus,1640s, 1642, 1650s, 1651, 25th Amendment Watch List, Chuck Gray, Civil War, French Revolution, Kevin Roberts, Moses, Patrick Dineen, Puritans, Rod Dreher, Roman Empire, Stuart Restoration, The Lost Cause, The Madness of King Donald

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military. The back currents of religion in the Trump administration and the New Apostolic Reformation.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military.: The Department of Defense scaled back its list of recognized religions.   There were 211, now there are 31.  Here is the full list: Agnostic...

So, in our last installment of this, we sort of defended Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense.  But we have to ask, is there more to this story?

Probably not.  The classification is correct.  Mormons are in fact not Christians in the fashion that Christians would define the faith.  Mormons of course disagree, which is there right.

And some feel that more is going on.

Dem Saints

@LDS_Dems

Under new military guidance from Pete Hegseth, the LDS Church is officially classified as a non-Christian religion. My fellow Saints, you can love these Christian nationalists all you want, but they will not love you back.

6:13 PM · Jun 5, 2026

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"Dem Saints" is a really good and irreverent group made up of Mormon Democrats.

Yes, there are Mormon Democrats.

Branding their irreverence is the use of the "Dem Saints" name, which is really borrowing from Louisiana Catholics, whom minstrels' lampooned with the line "Who dat, who dat, who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?"  In the second half of the 20th Century it got picked up as a line boosting the New Orleans Saints football club.

That there are Democratic Mormons shouldn't be surprising.  In most regions of the country they are actually a little known faith, but where they are strongly represented they are in all walks of life and all stations of education.  Most Mormons are fairly conservative of a rule, but in no way shape or form does that mean they're all part of the far right.  "Dem Saints" are probably what used to be regarded as middle of the road Republicans in the West.  Of those I know fairly well, all are in the GOP but none of them are in the far right.

Dem Saints aren't the only ones taking note of this. Deseret Mike Lee, whose radical right wing political positions are highly informed by his being a devout Mormon is absolutely freaking out, noting:

I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints My church membership is inextricably intertwined with my Christianity, as it is for 17 million other Latter-day Saints Regardless of what the Pentagon thinks

Last edited10:01 PM · Jun 6, 2026

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Lee has absolutely hitched his wagon to Donald Trump.  I've written about him here before, but his views are radially different than Dem Saints, and probably for the most part radically different in terms of religious views.  We've discussed Mike Lee in that context before, and won't replough that ground, but a good guess is that Lee, like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth, is highly informed and often extremely motivated by a unique religious view of the United States and its mission, as he conceives of it.  He'd fit into a minority group of Mormon's in that sense, just as Hegseth and Johnson do as to Christians.  The difference here is that his view, if I'm correct, and I may not be, would be vastly different than the overwhelming majority of Americans, and probably the majority of Mormons.

Hegseth in particular has been the public face of the New Apostolic Reformation and there's no place for Mormons in it.  For that matter, there's no place for Catholics or Orthodox in it either.

The question is whether Deseret Mike is too besotted with Trump to realize that.  Based on his surprise to this reclassification, which likely isn't motivated by people like Hegseth viewing Mormons as really not counting, it would appear so.

Lee just totally freaked out and posted over 37 time over 24 hours on Twitter.  Eventually he got an audience with Trump on the telephone, and reported back.

Mike Lee

@BasedMikeLee

I just got off the phone with President Trump We discussed the Pentagon’s “Christian list” I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief Stay tuned

Based on that, Trump will probably issue some babbling change to the list, but the wake up call should already be there.

Trump isn't a religious man.  Trump loves himself and at this point Mormon's don't really matter to him most likely.  He shouldn't presume  that Trump "loves Latter-day Saints" or members of any other religion.  And we're not fortunate that he's the commander in chief.  If he's going to order the list changed, it's to gain a little support from a group right now that's likely shocked, and frankly to address a situation in a state, Utah, that has shown a surprising willingness at the grass roots level to rebel.

But now Lee is out there.  If his shameless sycophantly doesn't pay off, it's a lesson for people who think that Trump is carrying water for you.  He isn't, you are carrying water for him.

And in terms of the back channels in the administration, it's the view of Doug Wilson on what sort of religion the Latter Day Saints is that may matter more than what Trump thinks, who doesn't really have any deep thoughts about religion at all.