Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Something to Know - 11 February and Army of God Part 2

Heather Cox Richardson gathered yesterday's push backs on Trump's Anti-Constitutional rumble.  The forces against the bombastic bomber come from federal judges and even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  I would predict that if the general election, held in November 2024, were to be redone today, Trump would be soundly defeated.   This is one big reason the sound and fury of his shock and awe hits first and hard.  His intent is to crush and roll over public sentiment until he absolutely can claim total control.   One thing that stands in his way is the Law of the United States Constitution.   This is why we fight!   The next chapter of the Army of God follows HCR.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 

Feb 10, 2025, 10:43 PM (7 hours ago)
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As soon as President Donald Trump took office, his administration froze great swaths of government funding, apparently to test the theory popular with Project 2025 authors that the 1974 law forbidding the president from "impounding" money Congress had appropriated was unconstitutional. The loss of funding has hurt Americans across the country. Today, Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta, and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post reported that farmers who had signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure and who had paid up front to put in fences, plant different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise the government would provide financial assistance are now left holding the bag.

With Republicans in Congress largely mum about this and other power grabs by the administration, the courts are holding the line. Chief Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island today found that the Trump administration has refused to disburse federal funding despite the court's "clear and unambiguous" temporary restraining order saying it must do so. McConnell said the administration "must immediately restore frozen funding" and clear any hurdles to that funding until the court hears arguments about the case. This includes the monies withheld from the farmers.

This evening, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the Trump appointees at the National Institutes of Health from implementing the rate change they wanted to apply to NIH grants. But, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes, the only relief sought is for the twenty-two Democratic-led states that have sued, keeping Republican-dominated states from freeloading on their Democratic counterparts. As Josh Marshall noted today in Talking Points Memo, it appears a pattern is emerging in which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump's cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions.

As soon as he took office, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025 and who is also acting as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced he was shuttering the agency. That closure was a recommendation of Project 2025, which called the consumer protection agency "a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits." Immediately, the National Treasury Employees Union sued him, saying that Vought's directive to employees to stop working "reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress's decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers."

MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President J.D. Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law, but before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance's hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as "dangerous suggestions" that "must be soundly rejected."

Today the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration's "wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself" as it attacks the Constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress "without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law."

"The American Bar Association supports the rule of law," president of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. "That means holding governments, including our own, accountable." He cheered on the courts that "are treating these cases with the urgency they require."

"[R]efusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government," Bay wrote. "This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop."

He called on "elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law…. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent…. We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law."

Today, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that "our democracy is under siege." Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton; Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama; and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury's nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency."

That DOGE team "lack training and experience to handle private, personal data," they note, "like Social Security numbers and bank account information." Their involvement risks exposing highly sensitive information and even risks the failure of critical infrastructure as they muck around with computer codes. The former Treasury secretaries noted that on Saturday morning, a federal judge had temporarily stopped those DOGE workers from accessing the department's payment and data systems, warning that that access could cause "irreparable harm."

"While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning," the former secretaries wrote, "the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming." The executive branch must respect that Congress controls the nation's money, they wrote, reiterating the key principle outlined in the Constitution: "The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent."

The Treasury Department cannot decide "which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not," the letter read. "The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside."

That warning appears as Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday, on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the United States might "have less debt than we thought." The suggestion that the U.S. might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that "[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." That amendment was written under similar circumstances, when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the federal government.

Lauren Thomas, Ben Drummett, and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that "for CEOs and bankers, the Trump euphoria is fading fast." Consumers are losing confidence in the economy, and observers expect inflation, while business leaders find that trying to navigate Trump's on-again-off-again tariffs is taking all their attention.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued his purge of government employees he considers insufficiently loyal to him. On Friday he tried to get rid of Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Elections Commission, who contended that her removal was illegal. He also fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the government agency that handles presidential records. The archivist is the official responsible for receiving and validating the certified electoral ballots for presidential elections—a process Trump's people tried to corrupt after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

It was NARA that first discovered Trump's retention of classified documents and demanded their return, although Shogan was not the archivist in charge at the time.

The courts happened to weigh in on the case of the retained classified documents today, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the FBI must search its records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from journalist Jason Leopold after Leopold learned that Trump had allegedly flushed presidential records down the toilet when he was president, and later brought classified documents to Florida. The judge noted that the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties and is "at least presumptive[ly] immune from criminal prosecution for…acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility" means that there is no reason to hold back information to shield him from prosecution. Indeed, Howell notes, that decision means that the FOIA request is now the only way for the American public to "know what its government is up to."

Howell highlighted that the three Supreme Court justices who dissented from the Trump v. United States decision described it as "mak[ing] a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law." In a footnote, Howell also called attention to the fact that presumptive immunity for the president does not "extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president. The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of 'just following orders' has long been rejected in this country's jurisprudence."

Today, Trump fired David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the department that oversees political appointments and helps nominees avoid conflicts of interest.

On Friday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. That office enforces federal whistleblower laws as well as the law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity: the Hatch Act. Congress provided that the special counsel can be removed only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," and today Dellinger sued, calling his removal illegal.

Tonight, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked Dellinger's firing through Thursday as she hears arguments in the case.



Army of God


American Christians are embracing

a charismatic movement known as

THE NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION

which seeks to destroy the secular

state.   Now their war begins


PART TWO


By Stephanie McCrumment

the Atlantic

(...continued)

If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white  flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right.  The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state. And if you are wondering where all of this is heading now that Trump has won the presidency, I was wondering the same thing.  That is why I was sitting in the circle at Gateway House of Prayer, where, about 20 minutes into the evening, I got my first clue. People had welcomed me warmly. I had introduced myself as a reporter for the Atlantic. I was taking notes on Earthheaven alignment when a woman across from me said, "Your writers have called us Nazis." 


She seemed to be referring to an article that had compared Trump's rhetoric to Hitler's. I said what I always say, which is that I was there to understand. I offered my spiritual bona fides—raised Southern Baptist, from Alabama.  The woman continued: "It's an editorial board that is severely to the left and despises the Trump movement." A man sitting next to me came to my defense. "We welcome you," he said, but it was clear something was off, and that something was me.  The media had become a demonic stronghold. The people of God needed to figure out whether I was a tool of Satan, or possibly whether I had been sent by the Almighty. 

"I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray," a woman said. "We won't hurt you," another woman said. "We just take everything to God," a woman sitting next to me said. "Don't take it personally."  The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.


How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, the most 

immediate of which is Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump's. He needed a way to rally evangelicals, so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, a wilder world where he was cast as God's "wrecking ball" and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, people long regarded as the embarrassing riff raff of evangelical Christianity. But the DNA of that moment goes back further, to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. 


He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife.  They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and '60s, when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia.  The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.  


In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. Wagner, by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, rose to the occasion. In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that aimed to counter these trends. He wrote a book— Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?— which was handed out to all participants, and which argued that concern with social issues "may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God." Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell. 



(continued tomorrow in part three)

--
****
Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

"The Current State of The Union"
9 February 2025

Think of how dumb the average person is, and realize half of them are dumber than that." — George Carlin
 


Monday, February 10, 2025

Andy Borowitz via Robert Reich

Content Alert - this is a phantasy conversation created of Richard Nixon sending a letter to Elon Musk.   It contains some really awful language that may offend.   If that is the case for some of you, let me know and I will research some videos of Richard Prior, George Carlin, or Wanda Sykes for you to laugh with:

Robert Reich robertreich@substack.com 
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12:48 PM (3 hours ago)
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Nixon's letter to Elon Musk

From the Borowitz Report (February 9, 2025)

Feb 10
 
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Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Since his death in 1994, Richard Nixon has refrained from public comments. Today, however, he has broken his silence in a letter from Hell.

Mr. Nixon offered TBR the exclusive right to publish his letter on one condition: that his expletives not be deleted.

Dear Elon,

One thing people don't realize about life down here is that Satan has CNN playing around the clock. It's his way of ratcheting eternal torment up a notch. After a while, the spectacle of Wolf Blitzer claiming that something you've already heard nineteen times is "BREAKING NEWS" makes the white-hot flames incinerating your body seem like a spa treatment.

So it should come as no surprise that I caught your Inauguration Day speech in all its fascistic glory. And let me say this: that was some fucked up shit.

I realize that you didn't exactly grow up in the cradle of civil rights, but even by South African standards, that "straight-arm gesture," as the mainstream media politely called it, seemed a tad extreme.

Don't get me wrong: back in the day, no one was more racist than Dick Nixon. But I tried to be subtle about it. I said, "I've got a Southern Strategy." I didn't say, "Hey, let's suck off the voters who want to bring back slavery."

If I'd ever fired off two Nazi salutes like you did, those bastards at the Washington Post would have had my head on a stick. (Excuse the dated reference—there used to be a newspaper called the Washington Post.)

And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I've got no beef with Germans. When I was president, the White House was crawling with them. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger—my Cabinet sounded like the cast of a Wagner opera. Still, those Teutonic fruitcakes somehow managed to get through a public appearance without turning it into the Nuremberg Rally.

I know what you're thinking: of course Kissinger would never march around like an S.S. officer, because he was Jewish. Well, so is that sweaty weasel Stephen Miller, and that fucker seems to have gone straight from his bar mitzvah to the Hitler Youth.

Which raises another question: who the fuck is making the personnel decisions over there? I mean, no one despised Bobby Kennedy more than I did, but that commie never drove around with a whale's head on his Volvo like his idiot spawn did.

But let's get back to you.

You've probably deluded yourself into thinking you're the Second Coming of another Nazi who liked to fire off rockets: Wernher von Braun. Well, I knew Wehrner, and, believe you me, that sneaky Kraut did everything in his power to hide the fact that he was a Nazi. When people at NASA asked him what he did during the war, he'd say he wrangled heifers at a dude ranch in Montana.

Think I'm being too hard on you? Look, if all you were doing was planning Martian colonies and enjoying the occasional goose step, I'd leave you be. But that jagoff Jake Tapper just informed me that you've got a ragtag team of amateurs in DC breaking into places they don't belong. Why does that sound so familiar to me?

Mark my words, fuckface: this won't end well. I'll keep a place warm for you down here. Very warm.

Yours,

Dick

 

--
****
Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

"The Current State of The Union"
9 February 2025


 


Something to Know - 10 February and Army of God Part 1

Beginning with this issue, and for the next seven days, there will be the usual presentation of timely news articles and opinions, then followed by a serialized presentation of an article that appears in the February issue of The Atlantic Magazine.   The article is entitled Army of God.   I am sure readers will find it interesting and provoking.  The cover page and the first installment follows the end of this HCR article.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 


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On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order "protecting Second Amendment rights." The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don't infringe on any citizen's right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment "is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans."

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds "all legislative powers"; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper."

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through "electors," by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such "impoundment" illegal.

Since the Supreme Court's 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of "judicial review," the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency," they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans' records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. "Outrageous," Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had "the feel of…a judicial" coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it "[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state."

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: "Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are 'legitimate' can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance." Of Vance's statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: "this is the sort of thing you post when you're ramping up to defying lawful court orders."

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk's participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have "a lot" of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump's MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk's own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk's companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country's nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country's citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S.

Army of God


American Christians are embracing

a charismatic movement known as

THE NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION

which seeks to destroy the secular

state.   Now their war begins


PART ONE


By Stephanie McCrumment

the Atlantic


On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the corn fields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. 


Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan— government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. 


Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning.  The Kingdom was coming. 


"Hallelujah!" said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o'clock "government watch," during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God's dominion over the nation. 


"Now the work begins!" a man said. 

"We have to fight, fight, fight!" a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump's election watch party had launched into the hymn "How Great  Thou Art."


"They were singing that!" another man said. 


Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram's horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor. 


Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!" a man declared. "The will of heaven is being done on Earth." 


What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism.  At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is trans national, multiracial, and unapologetically political. 


Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement's central ideas.  These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets.  That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions.  That the Church is not so much a place as an active "army of God," one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times. 


Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice. 

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. 



(part two will follow tomorrow)
--
****
Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

"The Current State of The Union"
9 February 2025