These are the times we live in. Similar to the 1920s and 1930s when Fascism and ultra-religious nationalisms led to the atrocities of World War II. Our world is going, again, through one of those moments in its history when religious barbarians, who fear the loss of their power over the herds of their ignorant faithful, fear change, fear the future, fear progress..., regress back into the comfort of their traditionalist conservative cocoon, and wax nostlagic of a time that no longer exists and that can never exist again. Islamic fundamentalists are all about "Salafism" (an Arabic word that stems from As-Salaf - the ancestor, the predecessor, etc.) in reference to the desire of these barbarians to live exactly as the prophet Muhammad lived some 1300 years ago. That is also what American literalist readers of the US Constitution think modern America should be: Fixed, frozen in the mindset of 1776 America, if not in the Bronze Age Middle East when the garbage of the so-called Scriptures were written by stinking hallucinating self-glorifying desert nomads.
This first story below is about the connection between Donald Dumb and Christian Nationalism which aims to establish the Christian equivalent of the Taliban in America. Excerpts are from [https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2025/what-is-christian-nationalism-definition-meaning/]
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Story 1 - The Rise of the Christian Taliban in America
Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch
I spent the first six months of 2024 investigating Matthew Trewhella, a militant pastor known in the 1990s for his antiabortion activism.
Trewhella had a reputation for public stunts that raised eyebrows and generated letters to the editor. He had urged an audience to buy their children rifles for Christmas. He even defended the murder of abortion providers. Surely, someone with that record would be a political pariah today, right? But the investigation found that Trewhella’s manifesto of open defiance has influenced Republicans across the country, at all levels of government.
Like others on the Christian right, Trewhella has called for defying the separation between church and state, arguing that officials must answer to God’s law first and the Constitution second. School board members, county officials, state legislators, congresspeople, even former members of Trump’s Cabinet, we found, had praised “the doctrine of the lesser magistrates,” which Trewhella claimed gave them biblical permission to disobey or defy any law, policy or court opinion. For his part, Trewhella dismissed the extremism label, telling me only those with “mundane, self-absorbed lives” would consider someone like him an extremist.
... I reported on a conservative activist who had used the doctrine as the basis of a nationwide tour, in which he said elections officials should refuse to certify equipment and results on the basis of debunked conspiracy theories. I recounted how a state senator marshaled the doctrine when urging electors to refuse certification. And I discussed the idea’s embrace by some members of the constitutional sheriffs movement, who were also stating their intent to investigate elections.
...It revealed the larger theme that would become the subject of the series: the Christian right’s influence on elections. It was a defining feature of the 2024 presidential election, one Trump acknowledged during his inaugural address when he claimed: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
The stories reported for Faith in Power, for the most part, took one small aspect of it at a time. We looked for gaps in the national conversation and dug into what we found, building on previous work as we went along. I had read dozens of stories about the potential intervention of poll watchers, for example, but few on poll workers. Yet soon after discovering one self-described Christian nationalist recruiting poll workers, I noticed more, and further reporting revealed a pattern.
What made this worth an investigation was not their Christianity, as one critic claimed, but rather their regurgitation of election conspiracies, disdain for the separation of church and state, and stated goal of helping Trump win office. It was the combination of prophecy and proclamations — that Trump had a divine mandate to become president — and the way they used that to enlist support from hundreds or thousands of people on the ground.
To report these stories, to get the theology and context right, required extensive reading. We decided, in the end, to try to help memorialize what we learned and transform it into a more permanent resource for readers in a “guide” to Christian nationalism. It’s not a traditional investigative piece, but rather a meta-report that helps orient the public, helping to explain how we got to the point where the investigations we broke about poll workers or sheriffs claiming a divine right to disobey the government was even possible.
As the new administration takes office, I’m reflecting on the political trends of the last decade. First, media rushed to cover the “alt-right.” Then, the coverage seemed to subside. But the movement didn’t disappear — its ideas just became integrated into the larger political right. Same, too, with conspiracy theories about elections being rigged. Once Trump won, the skepticism about elections seemed to vanish overnight. A focus on “extremism” may go the same way.
As those who attempted a violent insurrection get pardoned and walk free, extremism has moved from the margins to the mainstream and taken power. It’s up to journalists to draw the public’s attention to what they do with that power.
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Story 2 - Turkiye's Erdogan is destroying the foundational secularism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Turkey dismisses 5 military academy graduates for taking discontinued secular oath
Associated Press
Fri, January 31, 2025
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Five military academy graduates and three of their immediate superiors were dismissed from the Turkish Armed Forces for taking a pro-secular oath during their graduation ceremony, the defense ministry announced on Friday
The Ministry of National Defense launched a disciplinary inquiry into the graduation ceremony after a video emerged showing about 400 graduates raising their swords and chanting “We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal” — a reference to the secular founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — after the formal ceremony had ended.
The graduates also took the Officer’s Oath about defending a secular and democratic Turkey, which was discontinued in 2022.
The Ministry’s High Disciplinary Board ruled in favor of the dismissals, stating that no actions contrary to discipline would be tolerated, the ministry announced. It didn't name those who were dismissed.
The investigation into the Aug. 30 ceremony was initiated after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who attended the event, vowed to purge those responsible for the oath.
Turkey has become more overtly religious under Erdogan, shedding some of the secularist traditions introduced by Ataturk.
Turkey’s military has traditionally viewed itself as the guarantor of secularism, which has resulted in a series of coups. It led three takeovers between 1960 and 1980 and toppled a conservative government in 1997.
In 2016, an attempt to overthrow Erdogan and his religious-conservative administration was foiled, and thousands of people were purged from the armed forces, the judiciary and other public institutions. Erdogan's government blamed the coup on the followers of U.S.-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who died last year.
In addition to the oath controversy, this year’s graduation stood out for being the first time in Turkey’s history that women graduated at the top of their respective classes in all three branches of the military — the army, the navy and the air force.
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