America's holy war

In their own words

There’s so much to talk about, and so much to process. But I wanted to take a moment to post two videos that everyone who values the American republic should take very seriously.

First, we have a group of “faith leaders” surround Trump in the Oval Office, praying for God to give him guidance in the war with Iran. Included among them are a variety of evangelicals and Christian Nationalists, and Paula White-Cain, leader of Trump’s White House Faith Office.

In cast you have any doubt about Paul White-Cain (the woman directly to Trump’s right):

Next, we have Pete Hegseth talking to a group of Western leaders, with a partial transcript that describes his white Christian nationalist perspective. And note that Hegseth is the man known for drunkenly yelling “Kill all Muslims!” in a bar in 2015, and whose book “American Crusade” describes America’s “holy war” in defense of freedom, faith, and patriotism. As described here:

Hegseth’s statement:

“All the nations represented in this room are offspring of Western civilization.

Our nations are and always will be united by our heritage, history, and geography in this New World. We share the same interests, and because of this, we face an essential test.

Whether our nations will be—and remain—Western nations with distinct characteristics—Christian nations under God.”

The Trump administration has presented numerous and constantly shifting justifications for the war with Iran. They’re all bullshit, and instead, I would submit that there are several reasons that have nothing to do with what’s best for America or the world. I won’t go into all of those reasons here, except for this one: there are important people in this administration (and in Israel) who see this as a holy war of Christians versus Muslims. Some of them (far-right Jews in Israel and certain dispensationalist evangelical Christians in the United States) even believe that such a conflict is necessary to bring about the end times, albeit their vision of the end times differs.

If you’re still trying to hold onto the idea that there was some rational basis for starting this war — including “Iran bad! Must destroy Iran!” — then I submit that you’re only fooling yourself. And there never was a good reason to assert that floating abstraction disconnected from the facts, in the first place.

Please restack this. Everyone should be aware of the things these people are saying.

UPDATE: As often happens, I just came across this video from January. Here, Lindsey Graham talks about a religious war, only it’s between Muslims and Jews for control of the Middle East. That's not quite the same as what I’m referencing here, but it’s in the ballpark.