Showing posts with label Playboy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Playboy. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Blog Mirror: You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator. And, also, What's in those files?
You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator
How much longer can Republicans pretend not to see?
We of course also wrote on this just yesterday.
Lex Anteinternet: The dog that hasn't barked.: By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog. None of this will matter. People will say this doesn...
What is going on here? Something sure is. Trump's called out all the stops, even bringing in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room to pressure her. Beobert, who is somebody in the MAGA camp, is apparently refusing to go along with Trump.
That in and of itself is remarkable.
What we know is that up to 1,000 girls were raped in association with Epstein. We don't know all of the details of that by any means. Some of the rapes were pressured "statutory rapes", but others may have been physically violent rapes of female minors, based on what little we know. In either instance, the entire thing is horrific.
Was Trump a rapist? So far we have no reason to believe that, other than the "where there's smoke there's fire". Trump has, a long history of hanging out with those who have an interest in screwing teenagers and who have carried out their interest. Epstein wasn't the first in that category. The first that we know of, and probably the first significant person, was John Casablancas, who owned a modeling agency. Frankly, modeling agencies tend towards being morally dubious in some instances, but Casablancas was personally so. He divorced his first wife due to an affair with model Stephanie Seymour whom he began seeing when she was 14 years old. At age 50 he married 17 year old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger.
Casablancas represented Ivanka Trump when she became a fashion model at age 15.1
It's worth remembering here that Trump is nearly 80 years old. He was born in 1946, which means he turned 20, as a rich man, in 1966, and 30, in 1976. Trump, therefore, had wealth right in the era in which American sexual morals really began to plummet and he was in his 70s when the clubbing scenes in New York was in full swing.2 People complain about the US being a moral sewer now, but that's because their memories are bad. The 70s were really a decade of rank libertinism.3
They were also one which winked at Hebephilia and Ephebophilia, or rather, more accurately accepted the gross sexualization of early teenage girls and men preying on them, with that getting advanced at first by Playboy which really flirted with the lines of illegality with its centerfolds.4 Advertising in the era really dipped down into the younger years, for girls, in a way that you couldn't and wouldn't now, for instance:
How old do we think that girl is? Not old.
Brooke Shields as a young woman was shown only in her "Calvin Klein's" and portrayed a 12 or 13 year old prostitute in the 1976 film Pretty Baby (which she now detests) and a castaway in Blue Lagoon who grows into, I guess, a teenage common law marriage portrayed as the natural ideal. Shields regards herself as having been exploited, which she truly was. Only slightly older, 1968's Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli featured Olivia Hussey' topless visage, albeit briefly, in a quite sexualized portrayal of the Juliet character. She was 14 years old and later sued.5
In spite of the horrors of such things as transgenderism, the re-creation of the lower class Victorian "common law" marriage arrangement in a new form in the American lower middle class, and the overall breakdown in sexual standards in the Western world, the outright aggressive exploitation of women sexually has really retreated. Retreating with it was a fairly open acceptance of what we'd now call "date rape". The concept that pressuring women into sex by way of position and power constituted rape flat out didn't exist. Even as a teenager myself in the 1970s, I can recall that jokes based on "get 'er drunk" were really common with the suggestion that happened relatively commonly, and that it wasn't regarded as rape. For that matter, as early as the early 1980s, I can recall instances of men in certain positions being caught in sexual relationships with underaged teens and simply losing their positions, quietly, over it.6
The point of all of this is that maybe a person could party down with John Casablancas while being a self admitted libertine and avoid picking the teenage fruit that others were picking, but most people who would find that morally reprehensible, which would be most people, would avoid hanging out with such people pretty quickly. For one thing, the behavior is gross and disgusting. For another, hanging out with kiddy diddlers would cause a person to run the risk of being regarded as a diddler.
Be that as it may, Trump went from Casablancas on to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he started hanging out with in the 1990s, some twenty, more or less, years after Casablancas. Epstein shows up in a Mar A Lago party's video footage in 1992. That party featured NFL cheerleaders. Trump flew on Epstein's private jet at least seven times in the 1990s. In 1997 Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria's Secret "Angels" party in New York. In 2002 Trump made his now infamous comment that Epstein was a "terrific guy" they shared interest in "beautiful women". Trump noted that Epstein's interests were in women on the "younger" side. In 2003 Trump drew a nude figure, with oddly small breasts, in a birthday card for Epstein, with a really enigmatic comment, and signed his name as, basically, pubic hairs.7
Now we know that Epstein had commented that Trump knew about the "girls" and that Epstein claimed, in a private email, that Trump knew this due to Virginia Giuffre, the teenager who would be supplied to Prince Andrew.. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property and helped Giuffre obtain a job there. Maxwell recruited her to Epstein from Mar A Lago.
None of this proves in any fashion that Trump was diddling. Indeed, Giuffre states that Trump never touched her. Other women who were associated with Epstein have claimed that, but all of those claims have remained basically on the fringes of this story. So all that can really be said is that Trump has lead a life of moral dissolution with adult women, and he's hung around with men who had an extremely creepy attraction to girls in their teens, but there's no evidence that Trump personally crossed that line.
But there sure is a lot of evidence that he doesn't want the Epstein files released.
Indeed, he's downright desperate about it.
Why?
Earlier on Trump indicated he wanted the files released. Releasing the files became sort of a MAGA crusade, with MAGA's convinced that they'd provide damaging information on Bill (and maybe Hillary) Clinton. Indeed, as recently as a couple of months ago a MAGA I know maintained that the files were being kept secret due to what they'd show about Clinton, and maybe Obama (who is in no way implicated in any of this), thereby making the bizarre assertion that the Republicans are keeping material secret to protect a former Democratic President they detest.
Eh?
Given Trump's change in tune, what probably is in there is one of two things. One, the most likely, is that it's been pointed out that some rich and powerful person in the Trump circle is implicated, and badly. Trump may be protecting that person or persons, and if he is, there's some connection either with Trump or the GOP that must really be needed for protection.
The other possibility is that he knows, which he didn't before, that he's implicated as somebody who really knew something grotesque. Epstein himself, in his emails, noted that he apparently told Ghislaine to knock something off, and Trump has maintained that had to do with raiding staff from Mar A Lago. But what if what he knew is something worse, that women were being recruited to be sex slaves, which is basically what these poor girls were.
Whatever it is, we don't know.
The files are going to be released, which brings up these two things.
Trumps willingness to act illegally is now so pronounced that there has to be a strong suspicion that the files are being scrubbed. When they are released, and they will be, there's a good chance that some of the contents will be gone. This did occur to some extent with the files on the Kennedy Assassination, although I personally don't believe in the various conspiracy theories in that area, so it can definitely be accomplished.
For that reason, and for others, I also feel that the files should be released as is, complete with names of the victims. I know that's not the norm, and why, but the whole truth here is never going to come out if we don't know who was subject to this barbarity. And, ironically, in this instance releasing the names protects them. As noted earlier, Trump was sued by an anonymous woman who withdrew her suit after being subject to much pressure. There may perhaps be nothing to those claims, but the fact is, at this point, that we're dealing with men who are enormously wealthy and powerful, and have the means to threaten their victims as long as their identities remain unknown.
Footnotes:
1. On this, Trump has famously remarked about going back stage in, I believe, Miss World, competitions, or some such competitions, while the competitors were topless. These young women would, however, be of age. This is still pretty creepy.
2. The New York club scene was famously a cesspool, and heavily associated with drugs. There is, however, no reason to believe that Trump has ever taken illegal drugs. Indeed, due to the exposure to alcoholism provided by his brother, Trump does not drink.
3. As a minor note, the culture of the times reflected back in the form of music.
Rock music has been regarded, probably pretty inaccurately, as sort of countercultural. More accurately, when it was really popular, it reflected the cultural influence of people ranging from their teens into their thirties. Real rock music is pretty much dead now.
The 1970s and early 1980s saw a fair amount of rock music that outright endorsed ephebophilia and hebephilia. Ted Nugent's 1981 Jailbait outright did, with the female subject (victim) declared to be 13 years old. Kiss' 1977 subject was a bit older in Christine Sixteen. The Police hit the subject with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in 1980, which involves a teacher being attracted to a female student. That song is particularly creepy given its reference to Lolita and due to the fact that one of the members of The Police had been a teacher who admitted to having been attracted to female students, but not having acted upon it.
ABBA, which is regarded as sort of a bubblegum rock band, touched on the topic in 1979's Does Your Mother Know?, with the protagonist outright expressing torture over the advances of an underaged girl. The Knack's 1979 song Good Girls Don't at least kept the behavior down at mutual teenage level. Aerosmith broke into popularity with 1975's Walk This Way which is a tour de force of sexual double entendres all celebrating teenage sex. The story was flipped in Rod Stewart's 1971 Maggie May in which a teenage male regrets being seduced out of school by an older woman.
So that's a bunch of song, but were they that popular? Some really were, at least by my memory. I don't recall Nugent's song at all, but the only song of Nugent's I recall being popular wsa Cat Scratch Fever, which is about prostitutes. And Kiss was regarded, where I lived, as sort of juvenile joke more popular with junior high kids than us mature high schoolers, so I don't remember their song either.
The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me, however, was hugely popular, although not with me, mostly because I can't stand that band. ABBA's Does Your Mother Know? was also big. Walk This Way was so big that even though it had been released in 1975, it was still really popular in the early 80s, which at the time was amazing as songs aged quickly. Maggie May shares that status as it was popular over a decade after its original release. Good Girls Don't didn't age well at all, in contrast, but it was huge in 1979.
Almost all of these songs, or maybe all of them, are outright reprehensible, which is the point. Amazingly, they were heard all the time in the 70s and 80s, and nobody really said anything about it. The only time I recall anyone condemning the lyrics of a song was in 1977 when a Parish Priest lambasted Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel from the pulpit. I don't know where he'd learned of the song, but the Church was associated with the school, which went up to 9th Grade, and I now wonder if it was there. I was in junior high myself at the time and I had no idea what he was talking about. My father didn't either, and asked me about the song after Mass. It'd be years before I heard it, and like every Billy Joel song, I was underwhelmed.
4. We've touched on this before, but Playboy got in trouble in Europe as it was viewed as encouraging ephebophilia and hebephilia, and moreover being in that category while barely disguised as not being. It actually changed some of its content, notably its cartoons, as a result. Nonetheless, some Playboy models, such as Frances Camuglia were barely legal teens when photographed, and in fact a few were younger than 18 years old. One model's photographs went to press when she was still 17, with it apparently being the case that Playboy was unaware of her actual age, while it still played up that she was just out of high school. Another was outright known to be 17 when she was photographed with the magazine holding her photos until she turned 18.
5. All the then teenage actors in these films later maintained, probably correctly, that they suffered lifelong emotional trauma for having been in these films. Shields has been particularly critical of her mother for pushing her into them.
6. More specifically, I can recall three high school teachers in this category. Neither was arrested, they were simply let go. Another was a National Guard officer who was a local businessman. He was quickly discharged from the National Guard and there was as criminal proceeding, but the charge never hit the news and the resulting sentence was minor.
7. Trump has denied this, of course, but there seems to be no doubt. Assuming that it is Trump's, it's impossible not to conclude that he at least knew of Epstein's unrestrained lustful conduct. There was at least one other drawing, by somebody else, that alluded to the same thing. The thing here is that Epstein was strongly attracted to teenage girls, and if you know that the guy is strongly attracted to females sexually, and his targets are. . . well.
Postscript:
I thought about predicting this, but thought it too icky.
The last few days, as this has been breaking, I thought that, at some point, MAGA commentors would come out and basically start excusing ephebophilia. I should answer the question, first, on "what's that" although its been explained here before. According to Wikipedia:
Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19 and showing Tanner stages 4 to 5 of physical development.
And now its happened.
Megyn Kelly "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old…”
Well, yeah, there is, in more ways than one. A 5 year old is particularly gross as a victim and technically that's pedophilia. But ephebophilia is pretty darned disgusting as well, and rape in that context, which much or all of this would be by modern definitions is horrific. Moreover, according to some of the testimony, some of these girls were 14, or even 13, which is hebephilia and creeping right up n the edge of pedophelia.
And it's being excuse. That's what I thought would start to happen.
So, what we're starting to see, so that it's clear, is "yeah. . well, sure, they were jumping little teenage girls, but that's okay. . "
It's not okay.
And not only is it not okay, these people are starting to make the excuses now, without anything actually saying that Trump did that. We know of course that somebody was. . . but we don't know who.
What a moral sewer.
Related threads:
The dog that hasn't barked.
Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Monarchy, Oligarchy, United Kingdom, United States
The Epstein Files. What's in them that Trump wants to keep them hidden?*
Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Sex, Teenagers, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist
Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, Ezra Klein, J. D. Vance, National Conservatism, Populism, Republican Party, Scandal, Stupidity, Teenagers, The Madness of King Donald, The written word, Women, Zeitgeist
Sunday, September 28, 2025
A Protestant Dominionist Dictatorship brought to you by Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation or the End of the Reformation?
When Trump was elected President, people, for the second time in a row, thought "oh he won't be so bad".
He's been as bad as expected, and worse.
A large segment of the politically aware American demographic is wondering, nearly every day, "what on Earth is going on here" as the Trump administration does something odd day after day.1 A second group, his core MAGA adherents, ignore the oddities and assume that a lot of the nonsense about lurking Marxist must be true, and assume that Trump is doing what needs to be done to save the Republic.
Well, Trump is demented, which explains a lot. But there's something else going on. And that something else is Christian Nationalism with a strong Protestant Dominionist focus.
Round Head flag, English Civil War. Takinginterest01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. There were several varieties of this standard, as there was no standardized Parliamentarian flag.
Trump himself isn't really a sharp enough tool in the shed to do what's occurring. quite frankly, and at any point in his life, he probably wouldn't be interested enough to care anyway, as long has people are praising him and he seems to be getting what he wants.. To the extent he has any deep thoughts at all, and he likely doesn't, many of his real thoughts and desire run contrary to much of what's occurring. Trump, after all, is nothing much more than a wealthy playboy. He likes money, women, and has bad taste. M'eh.
But Trump was savvy enough to know he needed muscle and backing to get into office and moreover back into office. The intellectual muscle has been provided by far right populist, Protestant Evangelicals and their fellow travelers, the latter of which will live to regret ever being associated with the movement. Trump supporting Catholics are going to come to particularly regret traveling on this bus.
We've often said here that the United States is a Protestant country, culturally. It's so Protestant that people who aren't Protestant often are, culturally. Right now we have a really good example of that in the form of Stephen Wright, who is Jewish by heritage and perhaps by practice, but who in views is a raging Calvinist. It's pretty easy to find run of the mill, and even some non run of the mill, Catholics in the Trump fold who likewise culturally looked not to Rome, and not even to Luther, but to John Calvin.
The very first religiously significant group of English colonist in North America were religious dissenters, something very much worth remembering. The Puritans were Calvinists, not members of the dominant and official religion of England, the Church of England. Their landing in 1620 came in the context of an ongoing struggle in England over what England was to be, in terms of its faith. The Anglicans were in control at the time the Puritans left for North American shores and they were also suppressed for their religious radicalism in their native land. England was now solidly Protestant, sort of, with latent Catholicism seemingly having been beaten down with the peasants losing the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, but whether England would be radically Calvinist or sort of looking back at its Catholicism with the Church of England had not been determined. That question would provide much of the background to the English Civil War in which the parliament sought to depose an Anglican king, while being lead by a Calvinist who would be declared the Lord Protector. Ultimately, Calvinism didn't sit well with the English, and while parliament won the war, the crown would be restored and playboy king seated on the throne, who would convert to Catholicism sometimes prior to his death.
Calvinist would flee to North America upon the crown being restored.
The early English colonies in North America were frequently religiously intolerant. They were commonly sectarian and aggressively enforced the religion of their founders. The Puritans did not come to North America for religious freedom in the manner in which so often portrayed in grade school when I was a kid, but rather to avoid suppression under the crown and enforce their version of Christianity where they lived. People living in Puritan colonies had mandatory worship requirements at the local Calvinist church. It's not as if, if you lived in one, you could sit that out, or for that matter declare that you were a Catholic and would worship elsewhere.
Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was executed in Massachusetts for preaching her variant of Protestantism in that colony.
Christian Dominionist look back to the Puritans and the 1600s for their concept of what the state should be like. Not to the 1770s to 1790s. They may not all do so consciously, but they do. When they say that the United States is a Protestant nation, they mean its a Puritan one.
We all know, of course, that 1st Amendment protects the freedom of worship. That text states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
When that law, and that's what it is, was added to the Constitution in 1791 the infant United States was much different that the loose group of sectarian colonies of the 1600s. Indeed, the mother country itself was much different than the one that had fought the English Civil War. Having endured that experience, and with its own history of sectarianism, what the drafters of the Bill of Rights wanted was to avoid there being a Church of the United States, which if it had been created, would have been a branch of the Anglican Church. The amendment protected the right of various people to worship as they saw fit, or not at all. Modern conservatives have decried the Courts for decades about this amendment being misinterpreted, but it isn't. The Bill of Rights inserted religious tolerance ito the law.
Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the country remained a Christian nation. Other religions made an early appearance, setting aside native religions, very early on, but they were a distinct minority. A Jewish house of worship existed in New York, for example, as early as 1654. But overall, non Christian religions were practiced to a very small degree. And early patterns of settlement meant that the sectarian nature of the colonies continued to reflect itself into the early 1800s, and even into the mid 19th Century, although patterns if immigration began to heavily impact that, particularly the immigration of Catholics, who were largely detested by everybody else for a very long time. Be that as it may, American culture reflected Protestant Christianity well into the 20th Century and still does today.
This began to break down, as so much in our modern culture has, in the 1960s with the Baby Boom generation. Baby Boomers, or at least many of them, outright rejected many of the basic tenants of Christianity and brought in the really loose cultural Christianity, although with a leftward tilt, that we see today. One religion was a good as another, Christianity was basically "be nice". The warnings that St. Paul had given in his letters were ignored.
Things decayed.
On this site we've tracked some of that decay. While not meaning to spark a mass debate, we've noted the erosion of hetrosexual religious standards starting in the late 1940s and which were in full bloom before the Baby Boom generation with the massive success of Playboy magazine, and the concept of the loose moral big boob dimwit and sterile "girl next store", who was always ready to have sex. By the 1960s the erosion was becoming generational. By the 1970s it was becoming part of the culture and homosexuality began to openly emerge. Marriage started taking a big hit by the 1980s, with divorce becoming increasingly common by the late 1970s A culture in which divorce had been hard to obtain had evolved into one where marriage wasn't necessary at all, and ultimately into one where same sex couples could marry, the original meaning of marriage having been pretty much lost.
Enter (Evangelical) Christian Dominionism.
In 1975 Evangelicals Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright had a meeting in which they claimed to receive a divine message related to the culture. They were shortly thereafter joined in their infant movement by Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer.. They claimed a mandate from the Devine to invade and achieve dominion over the "seven spheres" of society identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. The New Apostolic Reformation is informed by this movement. And this is the Evangelical wing that is active in the Trump Administration and which have heavily influenced Christian Nationalist.
Dominionist, no matter what they may say, are not democratic. They are part of the Illiberal Democracy movement, and in the United States, they are the very core of it. Believing that the culture has been hopelessly corrupted in the seven spheres, they do not seek to convert by example, but to seize control of the culture, force a reformation of it, and bring about a Puritan nation on the model, sort of, of the original Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Puritan flag of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This heavily aligns with the concept of Illiberal Democracy. You can have a democracy, the Dominionist and Illiberal Democrats hold, as long as it fully accepts the predominant cultural world outlook. No countering that is allowed.
Now, something careful observers will note is that this movement is now all over the European world. And some of the early Christian Nationalist are most definitely not Evangelical Christians. R. R. Reno is a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church. Patrick Dineen is a Catholic, although he's notably moved away from the Republican Party and is now openly part of the American Solidarity Party. Rod Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and then converted to Orthodoxy. He's also now moved on from the Republican Party to the American Solidarity Party. The head of the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025, is Kevin Roberts, who is Catholic. And of course, J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert.
How do we make sense of this?
Well, one way in which we can makes sense of this, although not in the case of Dineen, Reno or Dreher, is to admit that a large segment of Catholics are heavily Protestantized, although this notably excludes younger Catholics and recent converts who most definitely are not. Gen. Jones Catholics and Gen. X Catholics were often very poorly catechized and therefore you can find quite a few who have gravitated to the far political right and who will state very Evangelical views of things which they have picked up from it, sometimes theological views that Catholics don't hold at all. Boomer Catholics went through the entire Spirit of Vatican Two era and are sometimes pretty beat up by it, and the younger ones experienced the Kennedy betrayal of religious adherence which caused many Catholics to follow suit. Some Boomer Catholics were on the very liberal Church end as well to the irritation of nearly everyone else in the Catholic sphere, who are glad to see their waning influence, but who contributed to the atmosphere the same way that poorly catechized late Boomer/Jones/Gen X Catholics were, but with a certain added massive whineyness on some occasions.
Anyhow, while it happened later than the birth of the Dominionist movement, intellectual and younger Catholics have moved towards an increased conservatism for quite some time, and it is now really visible in the Church. Overall it's a very good development, because it's so Catholic, and it reflects the view expressed in the letter to Diognetus more than any Seven Mountain tract. But the decay in the culture, which is particularly evident from the much more informed Catholic perspective, has caused some intellectuals, notably Dineen, Reno and Dreher, to despair of the culture and, in the case of of all three, to openly maintain that liberal democracy is an experiment that has failed.2
Integralism argues that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible. It formed out of the chaos of the late 19th Century in Europe and was strong in traditionally Catholic Romance language speaking countries. It never supported the concept of a state religion, but rather subordinating the state to the moral principles of Catholicism, rejecting morality from the state, and, in its European form, favoured Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the state
Integralism really fell away from Catholic thinking as a discussed topic after World War Two for a variety of reasons, one being that modern liberal democracies quite being hostile to religion, which frankly most had been before the Second World War. Indeed, over time, the Church increasingly disapproved of clerics being in politics, and ultimately banned it. But in 2014, with an essay by Dinneen, it started to reappear. It's adherents claim that its the official position of the Church, but fail to acknowledge that on many things the church's "official" position can be pretty nuanced. Even prior to the Second World War it had always been the case that integralist took the view that imposing a Catholic view of things on a population couldn't be done on a non Catholic culture. In more recent years the Church has really emphasized that there's a civic duty to participate in elections, which while not rejecting integralism, does demonstrate a view accepting democracies and requiring Catholics to participate in their democracies.
The revival of integralism came about the same time, however, that dominionism started to gain steam, and for same, but not identical, reasons. Dineen's essay came out in 2014, but the following year the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and just as we predicted here, thing have really gone off the rails. Justice Kennedy's decision lead directly the populist outrage and right on to Donald Trump.
Obergefell was just a bridge too far for many Americans, but the drift towards societal libertinism it expressed had been going on for a long time. As we've noted, you can trace it back at least to 1953 and the release of Playboy, but savvy students of culture would point out that perhaps the signs were there as early as the very first movies, which took a run at pornography right from the onset until being reigned back in. Mass communications of all types, including mass media, had a big role in this no matter how much society attempted to restrain it. The moral shock of the First World War lead to the Roaring Twenties which foreshadowed the 1960s, interrupted only by the economic deprivation of the 1930s and the Second World War. At any rate, the decay had set in pretty deep even by the early 1970s.
Anyhow, Integralism and Dominionism are not the same thing. Pope Francis, noting a rising connection between Integralism and Christian Nationalist, approved a publication criticizing the drift in this direction. Catholics getting tied up in the far right Evangelical movement's goals are going to be in for a surprise when they learn that many in that community would not even regard Catholics as Christians. The re-Puritanization of the country would not be a good thing for Catholics, who after all hold a very broad view of Christianity rather than a nationalistic view of it, and who don't share the same millennialist views of things at all.
Dominionist, for their part, would be shocked to learn that Integralist hold a lot of things that Dominionist frankly accept as abhorrent. They may be united on abortion being evil and transgenderism being contrary to the moral law, but modern American Evangelical Christians would be surprised that the mass of the Catholic Church holds divorce to be a great moral wrong and condemns easy remarriage. They'd also be surprised to learn that Catholics condemn sex outside of marriage, including all sexual acts outside of the unitive type, to be grave moral wrongs, and that's the Catholic concern with homosexuality.
Rod Dreher, who seems to have joined the Christian Nationalist movement, or who had joined it (I'm not sure about his current position, given that he's a member of the American Solidarity Party), early on advocated a sort of walled in approach to societal moral decay in his book The Benedict Option. I criticized that approach here, and he seems to have retreated from what he seemed to indicate that book espoused. Anyhow, looking at the situation overall, this is a really dangerous moment in American history, but also one from which Western societies might emerge into something new, and better.
Much of this comes in the context of the collapse of the Reformation, and it stands to accelerate it. At the end of the day, holding Donald Trump as any sort of "Godly Man" is absurd. The direct attack on American democracy, which is occurring as we write, is highly dangerous, but probably won't succeed. Forces on the other side have taken forever to react, but are finally starting to, including a reassessment of the really radical and downright goofball positions the left has advocated for some time. The New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionist movement carrying the flag is causing "Christianity" to be condemned, but among thinking Christians is causing a reassessment of the Reformation churches and a massive movement away from them back into the Apostolic fold, as the theology of the Reformation churches simply can't be defended.
Roman society was reformed by Christianity, but not by operation of law, but by operation of the faithful members of the "one Catholic, Holy and Apostolic Church". We're in the death throws of the Reformation, of which this is all part. If that's right, it'll be a blessing in the end.
Footnotes:
1. In fairness, a lot of the odd things that Trump does is because he very obviously has dementia, which nobody is doing anything about. He's really not mentally stable enough to occupy the office he's in.
2. Evangelicals of the far right are particularly focused on transgenderism and homosexulaity, but just completely ignore almost all of the remaining actual Christian tenants on sex. Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals have really adopted, is a serial polygamist. White House "faith advisor" is on her third husband. Evangelical churches have pews fill up on Sundays with people who are living in what St. Paul very clearly condemned as states of mortal sin.
Related threads:
A Protestant Country. It's history, and what it means.
Labels: 1940 Wyoming Legislature, 1941, 1970s, Blog Mirror, Evolutionary Biology, Long Posts, Marriage, Monday at the bar, religion, Sex, Sexual Revolution, Social Issues, Sociology, The relationship between men and women
Labels: Agrarianism, Commentary, Conservatism, Democracy, Distributism, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Populism, Progressivism, William F. Buckley
Labels: 2020s, 2022, Christian Nationalism, Conservatism, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Politics, Populism, trends
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