Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth continue to violate the Constitution now using religion to justify the illegal war in Iran

Reprinted from The Other 98 percent social media page site here.
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28 Democrats just demanded an investigation into Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete) after hundreds of troops reported commanders pushing end-times Christian fascism as justification for the Iran war.
Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan led the charge, requesting DoD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III investigate reports of commanders "invoking religious prophecy and apocalyptic theology to justify the United States' military actions in Iran."

Lawmakers want to know whether Hegseth's "extreme religious rhetoric has metastasized into segments of the military chain of command" in ways that violate the Constitution and DoD regulations.

What triggered this? Over 200 service members across 50 installations and every military branch filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reporting that their commanders told them the Iran war is divinely ordained, that Trump was chosen by Jesus to bring about Armageddon.

Seriously❗

Hegseth sponsors a weekly White House Bible study and has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military. His monthly Pentagon prayer gatherings have featured Doug Wilson, a far-right Christian nationalist who has defended slavery and called for America to become a theocracy.

The Democrats laid out six specific areas for investigation, from whether commanders violated DoD religious neutrality policies to whether whistleblowers faced retaliation. The Pentagon offered no direct response when asked about the complaints.

The Constitution is crystal clear: service members swear an oath to defend a secular republic, not to carry out anyone's end-times fever dream.

If the Secretary of Defense is turning the world's most lethal fighting force into a Christian dominionist project, that's not just a policy failure, it's a national security crisis, potentially even a global one.

Maine Writer Response: This radical religion strategy failed during the Crusades, Hitler invoked this as justification for the “final solution” and he failed, the Spanish Inquisition built a torture campaign around this myth but think about how many thousands of lives were lost to prove this strategy is never going to work❓ 

Meanwhile, the whack-a-mole reason behind this war changes with the ocean tides. Was the purpose regime change❓ Is this the fulfillment of Netanyahu’s long wished for war❓ Is the purpose to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or is the purpose to bring Christianity to this eons old Iranian civilization❓ Multiple choice! Just my opinion❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must push back against the Nazi Nick Fuentes while Tucker Carlson stokes his antisemitism

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Bret Stephens

Meet the New Antisemites, Same as the Old Antisemites- Tucker Carlson reaches to find journalist relevance by creating his own news.

😡The good news from the recent donnybrook over Tucker Carlson’s (dangerous⚠️) interview with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler fanboy with a sizable❗❓ social-media 💢😡 following, is that it has at last forced conservatives to reckon with the sewer pipe of antisemitism bursting through their walls.

Better news: Many have risen to the occasion. That includes Senator Ted Cruz, who called out his fellow Republicans for being too timid to condemn Carlson; The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which denounced “this poison in their own ranks”; and Heritage Foundation people who resigned in disgust after Kevin Roberts, the organization’s president, offered a lickspittle apologia for Carlson. Even Roberts felt compelled to disavow his own performance, though he persisted in describing Carlson as “my friend.”

(Maine Writer- IMO Carlson has become a media grabbing opportunist. He does not know how to regain his jounalistic footing after he was fired by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch.)

The bad news is that none of this is going away anytime soon. If ever.
Antisemitism was supposedly banished twice from the conservative universe: first in the 1950s, when William F. Buckley Jr. decreed that nobody on the masthead of the antisemitic American Mercury would appear in the pages of his own National Review; second in the 1990s, when he said it was “impossible to defend” Pat Buchanan from charges of antisemitism.

Such was Buckley’s prestige on the right that none other than Carlson issued his own denunciation of Buchanan: “I’m not hysterical on the subject,” he said on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” in 1999, “but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews.”

Now the Heritage Foundation and various conservative publications are pressing the Trump administration to award an unrepentant Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (So,❓ let me get this❓: Donald Trump awarded the late Charlie Kirk the Freedom medal after the man's tragic assassination in Utah, but there was no merit in this presentation. Mr. Kirk spoke in "Trumpian tongues", but he did it with a smile, while he caused discrimination against homosexuals, transgender people and innocent immigrants. Now, Trumpzi he is looking to award the Freedom medal to Pat Buchannan❓ There is obvioulsy no bottom to Donald Trump's low morals.)

The notion that Winston Churchill, not the German Führer, was the villain in World War II — another of Buchanan’s hobbyhorses — is again gaining ground on the right.

Buchanan’s obsessive loathing of Israel, along with his conviction that the pro-Israel lobby dictates U.S. foreign policy, is also gaining ground — a mirror image of the views of the anti-Israel left and a reminder of the French aphorism “Les extrêmes se touchent.” Extremes meet.

How did this happen❓ Cynicism is one reason. “The fact that antisemitism is the socialism of fools is an argument not against, but for, antisemitism; given the fact that there is such an abundance of fools, why should one not steal that very profitable thunder?” Leo Strauss, the philosopher, observed in 1962. 

Bluntly, his point was that a bigotry for morons — a.k.a., “The Jews did it” — will always be political gold in a world of morons. Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster, gets this: Her popularity has soared as her Jew-hatred has become more overt.

A second factor is the forced merger of Christianity with conservatism.

Mainstream American conservatives used to believe our sacred texts were the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Road to Serfdom.” 

Now it’s the New Testament. We once thought that religious convictions should be a little more respected in our secular Republic. Now this is supposed to be a Christian regime that tolerates Jews. (Others, not so much.) 

When Carlson, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, compared the slain conservative to Christ brought down by “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us❓’”😡🤢 the inference could have been lost on nobody. Among conservatives, he paid virtually no price for it.

Then there’s political ideology. The MAGA movement is not antisemitic. But many of its core convictions are antisemitic-adjacent — that is, they have a habit of leading in an anti-Jewish direction.

Opposition to free trade, or to a welcoming immigration policy, or to international law that crimps national sovereignty, are legitimate, if often wrongheaded, political positions. 

Nevertheless, they have a way of creating and melding with hoary stereotypes, about “the International Jew” working across borders against the interests of so-called real Americans. 

You can be sure that, somewhere on social media, someone will respond to this column by pointing out that my Kishinev-born grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens — evidence, supposedly, of sneakiness in my DNA. (Both of Stephens' parents were secular Jews. His mother was born in Italy at the start of World War II to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.)

Unfortunately, it's the type of right-wing identity politics you inevitably get where the question of where you are from matters more than the question of where you are trying to go.

Finally, it bears reminding that antisemitism isn’t merely a prejudice. It’s a conspiracy theory about Jews. Who actually killed Christ? Or brought on the bubonic plague? Or got America embroiled in unnecessary wars in the Middle East? Or replaces American workers with cheap immigrant labor? The idea that modern politics amounts to a malicious scheme organized by an insidious cabal of deep-state insiders and globalists at the expense of ordinary people is now received wisdom on the right, paralleling far-left convictions about the purported evils of Zionists and their billionaire backers.

Jews don’t have the luxury of being indifferent to either threat. The tsunami of progressive antisemitism that hit after October 7, is being followed by another wave, just as tall.😥✡️

Listen up idolotrous Republicans! Donald Trump is not Jesus

To the editor: What has Donald Trump ever done to suggest that he is in any way aligned with Jesus? Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times:

Comparing Trump to Jesus. This is the definition of idolatry.

Trump is not our Savior💢❗

It is one thing to say that King David was also imperfect, but to be totally flawed and proud of it does not reflect Christ. (“Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate. Ex-president’s backers say he shares faith, values,” May 20) 

Obviously the MAGA cult believe in the Word according to Donald Trump. Oh-My-God❗

Rather, it is becoming an ever more glaring reality that what passes itself off as “conservative Christianity” is not remotely Christian at its core.

What did Jesus ever say to justify the forceful suppression of other beliefs? What did he say that justifies the denial of urgently needed medical care to women? Did he actually tell his followers that the Samaritan was good because he didn’t stop to offer help?

This is the Catholicism of the Spanish Inquisition or the murderous insecurity of Iran’s Islamic theocracy. When people insist that their security requires that anyone who is not on their team be subject to their every whim, I see it as the furthest thing from Christ.

The Golden Rule is not limited in application to one’s own culture, race, gender or any other group.  

(Maine Writer- In the minds of the Christian Nationalists, the worship of Donald Trump is the false idol equivilent of idolotry.)

From Jack Quirk, Porter Ranch, Los Angeles, California