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A Wake-up Call for White Americans

As noted in previous post, the Felon's regime and MAGA in general are waging war against empathy as they push their ugly agenda. Unfortunately, too many Americans already lack empathy for others and look the other when others are mistreated and abused based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin.  The mindset is that so long as racist and abusive policies do not directly impact them, these people close their eyes to injustice and even violence. Indeed, those pushing ugly policies rely on this largely white segment of American society ignoring things that they would never tolerate if they themselves were the targets of cruelty and mistreatment.  As a piece at Salon sets out, this blindness to the suffering of  others is foolish because as events in Minneapolis have made clear, white skin and so-called white privilege will not protect you from the brutality and misogyny of the Felon's regime.  This is a reality long known by blacks, Hispanics and other demographics that have faced discrimination and abuse.  Here are article highlights:

None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is. 

American citizens are being arrested and brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights — recording ICE, standing nearby or simply being the “wrong” color in the wrong place. The Trump administration has labeled these Americans “domestic terrorists,” claiming they posed existential threats to heavily armed federal agents, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. Immigrants are hiding, afraid to go outside. Entire neighborhoods and communities are under siege. Even though it’s only January, at least eight people have died from their encounters with ICE.

The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.

Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”

Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.

And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”

“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. . . . . White racial innocence, in its various forms, is exhausting for those of us on the other side of the color line. But after allowing myself a moment of exasperation with the woman on the television, I turned to the lessons of history.

The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement understood that images of those who were often referred to as “respectable white people” being beaten, arrested and even killed would move white moderates — and, crucially, white elites — to oppose Jim and Jane Crow apartheid.

“Their simple but straightforward calculation was that Black suffering wasn’t new,” journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in “Waging a Good War,” “but white suffering was, especially when it was inflicted by Mississippi officials on middle-class college students from the North. And so [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] decided, John Lewis wrote, to bring ‘an army of Northern college students into Mississippi….If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children.’”

Now, 60 years later, similar images of “respectable white people” being abused by police and other law enforcement are having a powerful impact on public opinion.

Polls released in the aftermath of Good and Pretti’s killings show that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s immigration policies. According to a YouGov poll, more Americans (46%) want to abolish ICE than support it (41%). A small but growing number of Republicans also want ICE abolished or reformed with far stricter oversight.

The struggle for America’s multiracial democracy needs — and has always needed — everyday white people of conscience who are prepared to make good trouble.

If I could talk to the older white woman I saw being interviewed — who appears to be what my grandmother and other elders would describe as “good white people” — I would tell her that she was in love with a country that never really existed but that she truly thought was real. Now is the time for her and others like her to broaden their lenses and accept our new reality. What is happening now to white people like her has been the norm for Black, brown and other marginalized communities throughout American history. This is the moment for us to lean into solidarity — to learn from our shared history of struggling for a better society and democracy on both sides of the color line. 

A white freedom rider — a real American hero, though he would never use that language — once told me that he decided to join the Civil Rights Movement after asking himself a basic question: What type of white person do I want to be? More importantly, what type of human being do I want to be? . . . .As Trump’s authoritarian vise continues to tighten, Americans on both sides of the color line will be forced to answer that question.

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The Felon Needs New Targets for Distraction: Bad Bunny, Iran, and Gavin Newsom?

Friday the Felon's corrupt DOJ released three million documents relating to the Epstein scandal some of which had allegations of sexual abuse by the Felon and some of which suddenly disappeared, seemingly once the DOJ hacks realized just how bad the accusations looked for the Felon.   The Felon has insanely claimed the released files exonerate him yet if one reads the since deleted materials that claim - like most of what comes from the Felon's lips - is clearly a lie and detached from objective reality.  He even has threatened to sue the Epstein estate - something that would open discovery and arguably force the Felon to have to be deposed. Add to this the fact that his poll numbers are plummeting, the economy is still struggling with high prices, and the ICE invasion of Minneapolis is losing its value as a distraction from the Epstein scandal.  The fact that Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick and others in the Felon's regime were also named in the documents released by DOJ has failed to take focus off the Felon.  What's a pedophile to do?  A piece at Vanity Fair muses that new targets will be needed to keep the media from fully focuses on the damning allegations now all over the Internet and ponders who/what the new distractions will be.  Here are article highlights:

Sleep with one eye open, Gavin Newsom; brace yourself for more verbal abuse, transgender athletes; and watch your back, Xi Jinping: President Donald Trump needs a new target.

This was true even before ICE and Border Patrol agents shot and killed two protesters in Minnesota in the past two weeks, violence that has provoked widespread revulsion. CNN’s most recent polling shows ICE with a net approval rating of negative 27; Axios found the steepest shift in opinion was among independents, with 67% saying they have little confidence in ICE; and more than one third of Trump’s own voters disapproved of his deportation tactics—even before the shooting of Alex Pretti. Those events came as voters soured on Trump’s economic record; the right wing is still frustrated by the Justice Department’s foot-dragging on the Epstein files; and Trump’s poll numbers have continued sinking.

Declaring a new main nemesis is how Trump tries to reset, how he attempts to change the media narrative. Previous distractions have included claiming that Barack Obama conspired to tie Trump to Russian election meddling and floating the possibility of stripping Rosie O’Donnell of her American citizenship. Enemies are Trump’s oxygen, both personally and politically.

Trump’s team ended his first year back in the White House with an aggressive flourish: snatching President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, threatening to seize Greenland, and launching a criminal investigation of Fed chairman Jerome Powell. Now the Minnesota outrages have put Trump, for once, on his heels, and badly in need of someone else to beat on.

So who’s next?

Last weekend, Trump took shots at Bad Bunny and Green Day, the musical acts performing at this year’s Super Bowl—both of whom are vocal Trump critics. But those slights are mere sugar highs for the president, and they won’t last past the end of the game.

Trump loves insulting Newsom, who is both a leading contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination and an eager troll himself. The California governor showed up at Davos last week with kneepads he said were intended for CEOs groveling to Trump. Newsom was looking to get under the president’s skin, and he succeeded . . . .

But the Trump-Newsom sparring is also a tired rerun, and could go the way “Sleepy Joe Biden” has grown equally stale. “I did a focus group with MAGA types recently,” a veteran political strategist tells me. “And even they said, ‘Give it up already—the guy isn’t president anymore.’”

Recently sworn-in New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani once seemed positioned to be the perfect foil for the president . . . But Trump tossed gushed over Mamdani during the mayor-elect’s visit to the White House in late November. “The party was gearing up to make Mamdani the Democratic poster boy,” says Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist turned Trump critic, “and then Trump has that meeting where it looks like he and Mamdani are going to get engaged.”

Trump recently did a mocking “impression” of a transgender weightlifter during a speech to House Republicans, and in an Iowa speech this week he claimed immigrants might “blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.” In advance of the midterms, Trump will likely ramp up his rhetoric about Democrats “rigging” elections. He will keep playing these and other greatest hits because they continue to work with his MAGA base. . . . . “As long as he can keep reminding them that they hate the same people, they will continue to support him.”

Yet Trump’s attacks and distractions may be yielding diminishing returns beyond his base. Polling at the end of his first year back in the White House showed a strong majority of independents believing the country was worse off, with the economy driving the unhappiness. Trump’s revived threats against Iran and his continued slagging of Ilhan Omar won’t satisfy those concerns. “These recent poll numbers are rough, but I think he can get some of it back,” Steinhauser says. “The way to do that is to focus more on jobs and the economy.”

Which is why, as he searches for new sparring partners, blaming China presents an intriguing option. “A foreign enemy is always better for rallying support,” Madrid says. “And China could tie together a lot of things for Trump: They’re a military threat, they’re sending us fentanyl, they’re the cause of our economic problems!”

The president has a trip to Beijing scheduled for April. Trump could either amp up the antagonism or claim to have pulled off a brilliant America First deal—though neither approach would, or should, put the Minnesota mess behind him completely.

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MAGA’s War on Empathy and Decency

Like many in the LGBT community I have a complicated relationship with Christianity as practiced by many on the political right and right wing evangelical circles.  These individuals and the toxic form of Christianity that espouse have long targeted LGBT individuals - and many others, especially racial minorities - as deserving of hatred and condemnation, citing cherry picked Old Testament verses as justification.  Passages from both the Old and New Testaments that call for empathy and kindness (or at least a rejection of cruelty) towards others are utterly ignored.  Enter the Felon, the new high priest for MAGA "Christians", and what was ugly before has become truly hideous with cruelty and brutality towards others (including young children) almost being celebrated. Indeed, empathy and seeing common humanity in others is condemned and viewed as evil.  The irony is that as "conservative Christians" have become the most commonly viewed public face of Christianity, younger Americans have walked away from organized  religion  and "Nones" now comprise the largest religious category.  Yet, rather than adjust their agenda of hate and cruelty, the far right and white Christian nationalists and "Christian influencers" have doubled down in their attacks on empathy and other Christian denominations as they push for a theocracy.  A very long column in The Atlantic looks at the MAGA war on empathy and what was once considered decency.  Here are highlights:

When I first saw the video of the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, I immediately thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Federal agents shot Pretti after he tried to help a woman they had thrown to the ground and pepper-sprayed. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need. “Do this and you will live,” he says. Not in Donald Trump’s America.

Americans have now seen with their own eyes the cost of President Trump’s abuse of power and disregard for the Constitution. Videos of the killing of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents have exposed the lies of Trump-administration officials who were quick to smear the victims as “domestic terrorists.” Even Americans who have grown habituated to Trump’s excesses have been shaken by these killings and the reflexively cruel and dishonest response from the administration.

This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?

That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.

“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.

The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right “Christian influencers” who are waging a war on empathy.

Their twisted campaign validates Trump’s personal immorality and his administration’s cruelty. It marginalizes mainstream religious leaders who espouse traditional values that conflict with Trump’s behavior and agenda. And it threatens to pave the way for an extreme vision of Christian nationalism that seeks to replace democracy with theocracy in America.

The rejection of bedrock Christian values such as dignity, mercy, and compassion did not start with the crisis in Minnesota. The tone was set right at the beginning of this second Trump presidency. The day after taking the oath of office last January, Trump attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, directed part of her sermon at the new president: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She spoke of children of immigrant families afraid that their parents would be taken away, refugees fleeing persecution, and young LGBTQ Americans who feared for their lives. It was an honest plea . . . .

Bishop Budde was immediately vilified. One Republican congressman said she “should be added to the deportation list.” The pastor and influencer Ben Garrett warned his followers, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.”

This is certainly not what I was taught in Sunday school, not what my reading of the Bible teaches me, and not what I believe Jesus preached in his short time on Earth. Yes, I went to Sunday school. In fact, my mother taught Sunday school at our Methodist church in Park Ridge, Illinois.

I’ve never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve . . . . I am not a disinterested observer here. I believe that Christians like me—and people of faith more generally—have a responsibility to stand up to the extremists who use religion to divide our society and undermine our democracy. . . . . No less a religious authority than the late Pope Francis called out the Trump administration’s war on empathy.

With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that one survey found a quarter of Republicans and nearly 40 percent of Christian nationalists now agree that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” MAGA rejects the teachings of Jesus to “love thy neighbor” and care for “the last, the least, and the lost.” It recognizes only a zero-sum war of all against all. The world may look gilded from the patio at Mar-a-Lago, but the MAGA view is fundamentally fearful and impoverished. MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity.

The whole exercise is suffused with barely disguised misogyny. The extremist pastor Joe Rigney wrote a book called Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Rigney is an ally of the influential Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, who thinks giving women the right to vote was a mistake and advocates turning the United States into a theocracy. (Would it shock you to know that Pete Hegseth is a big fan of Wilson’s?)

Rigney declared that Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy was “a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness.” Manipulation by wily women is a sexist trope as old as Adam and Eve, but this is an ugly new twist. Instead of women tempting men with vice, now the great fear is that women will tempt men with virtue.

Christian nationalism—the belief that God has called certain Christians to exercise dominion over every aspect of American life, with no separation between Church and state—is ascendant in Trump’s Washington.

The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical organization for mainline churches in the country, has warned about the dangers of Christian nationalism. “In this quest for political power, Christian humility is lost, as is the message of God’s love for all humanity,” the council said in a 2021 statement. “Where the Bible has at its core the story of a people committed to welcoming aliens and strangers because they themselves were aliens and strangers, and to defending the oppressed because they themselves were once oppressed, the Christian nationalist narrative rejects the stranger and judges the oppressed as deserving of their oppression.”

Empathy does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity. It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength. . . . I disagreed with President George W. Bush about many things, but I respected his sincere belief in a more “compassionate conservatism.” There was no greater proof of this commitment than the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a mission of mercy that helped save an estimated 26 million lives. It was a public-health miracle. Many of the program’s most ardent champions were evangelical Christians inspired by Jesus’s teachings to heal the sick and feed the hungry. That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from slashing PEPFAR and other lifesaving assistance to people in need around the world. Experts predict that 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result—including millions of children.

In the 1980s, right-wing firebrands such as Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant claimed that the AIDS epidemic was a plague sent by God to punish gay people. There was no shortage of rhetoric that I would call dehumanizing or un-Christian. These reactionary religious forces led a decades-long campaign against women’s rights and gay rights that helped turn the Republican Party against democracy itself. The rise of unabashed Christian nationalists is their legacy.

But what we’re seeing today feels different—and more dangerous. The question of who deserves empathy, and the rights and respect that flow from our shared humanity, has always been highly contested in our politics. But until now, no major American political movement has ever seriously suggested that empathy and compassion themselves are suspect.

The decline of mainstream Christian voices in recent decades left a vacuum that the most extreme ideologues and provocateurs eagerly filled. The Catholic Church and the old mainline Protestant denominations have been weakened by destabilizing scandals and schisms, and have seen declining attendance. . . . All of this has left room for upstarts such as Douglas Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a growing network of more than 150 Christian-nationalist congregations.

Another factor is Trump himself. No one mistakes him for a devout Christian or a person of faith or morality. But his corruption isn’t just a personal matter—it taints everything he touches, including his Christian supporters. The conventional wisdom is that Trump says out loud what many others think privately, that his blunt bigotry gives permission for people to throw off the shackles of political correctness and woke piety. That may be partly true. He does bring out the worst in people. But it’s more than that. He makes people worse. Cruelty and ugliness are infectious. When they become the norm, we all suffer.

Reagan cultivated a distinctly American mythos: the aw-shucks cowboy working his ranch and standing up to tyranny. Trump, especially in this second term, has styled himself as a gold-plated Caesar, the farthest thing from an American ideal. Instead of the decency of Washington we get the decadence of Caligula; rather than the humility of Lincoln, the cruelty of Nero. You’d think good Christians would see the irony of throwing their lot in with a wannabe Roman emperor, but the whole point of a cult of personality is to leave you blind and afraid.

We can stand firm without mirroring the cruelty of our opponents. These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.

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