Donald Trump is so libertarian he's free of compassion

 

Hardheartedness, is an essential in the character of a libertine.

-- Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Clarissa [according to Samuel Johnson]

What say the augurs?

They would not have you stir forth to-day:

Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,

They could not find a heart within the beast.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2 

 

Rod Dreher calls dishonest essay honest, I guess because it features him

"Wonderful essay. Really honest and thoughtful."

Does an honest person claim to be charismatic when only his parents were?

The author was never a charismatic Christian like his parents became. He was raised as a dispensational Baptist kid whose parents then moved on from that and became charismatics and embarrassed him. He was preoccupied with the end of the world, not with the gifts of the Spirit.

Dispensationalists, of course, were not charismatics before the so-called neo-charismatic movement. They were instead strong cessationists. They believed the gifts of the Spirit ceased with the deaths of the apostles, whose job it was to be guided into all the truth by the Spirit and write it all down in the Bible. The Southern Baptists were a stronghold of cessationists, among the least likely to be . . . open. 

Ryan Zickgraf's essay was originally entitled "I was a charismatic Christian", but he changed it to 

 My father went to war with a demon bird: I miss my parents’ enchanted world .

... I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird? ... The quasi-megachurch we first attended, Calvary Temple in Springfield, was one of many congregations that got swept up by the Third Wave. It was once a more staid Southern Baptist church ...  I shudder when I recall being haunted by A Thief in the Night, a quartet of evangelical films released across the ’70s and ’80s, the precursor to the Left Behind novels of the ’90s. I was one of tens of millions of kids who saw them at church watch parties, disturbed to see characters unlucky enough to sleep through the Rapture and wake up in the Great Tribulation, where the United Nations was running guillotines for anyone who refused the Mark of the Beast. I didn’t need Freddy Krueger or Friday the 13th movies; that was fake. I had eschatology, and it was real; at times, it was difficult not to approach every service with a sense of both thrill and fear. Would someone at church prophesy that the Rapture would occur next week? Maybe. ... By my teen years, I was forced to attend three-hour revival services ... There is a reason why I felt like an outsider in my tight-knit religious community until I left the church at age 30. ... What my parents had, what they tried to give me, what I received and then rejected, and what I am still sorting through wasn’t a set of beliefs that happened to be wrong. It was a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of openness to the possibility that the world might be, in some sense that resists clean explication, for you. ...

 

https://unherd.com/2026/06/i-was-a-charismatic-christian/?edition=us

 

While it's hard to say what will become of Ryan Zickgraf, one thing sure has stuck with him from his childhood Southern Baptist days.

  ... Pastor Johnson preached constantly about the coming Rapture, once speculating that the Antichrist would be incredibly gay ... 

 

The baleful influence of Norman Vincent Peale and Paula White on the thinking of the president of the United States is in evidence almost everyday

The Strait of Hormuz is open.

Iran is in submission.

He calleth those things which be not as though they were, as if he were God.

 

Elections have consequences

 Fools into the notion fall,

That vice or virtue there is none at all:

Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain,

'Tis to mistake them costs the time and pain.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

The welfare of us all

 The welfare of us all

Hangs on the cutting short that fraudful man.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1  

When you surround yourself with toadies and sycophants

 Some valuing those of their own side, or mind,

Still make themselves the measure of mankind:

Fondly we think we honour merit then,

When we but praise ourselves in other men.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

The Trump type has been known for centuries

  It is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs.

 -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Trump Doesn't Care If He Wrecks Global Economy

Alex Shephard, The New Republic

 

Such men as he never be at heart's ease, whilst they behold a greater than themselves

 

Trump Posts New AI Image of Himself Embracing Jesus

D. Stableford, Yahoo News 

 

 

Like Iran, America has its own religious lunatics in its military and very close to the commander in chief who believe he is hastening the end of the world and the return of the messiah

 US commanders tell troops Trump 'anointed by Jesus' to start Iran war...

... Non-commissioned officers (NCO) who attended a briefing Monday told the MRFF that a combat-unit commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”

 

The commander also argued that Trump “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth" and that the Iran war is part of God's plan, the NCO claimed. ...

 

It doesn't matter what latest excuses Trump gives for attacking Iran

 What matters is that an apocalyptic death cult is prevented from getting nuclear weapons.

 

This guy evidently never heard of voluntary martyrdom and the zeal for it in early Christianity

Christian Nihilism is Taking Over American Life

Luke Lyman The Spectator

 ... A saint isn’t supposed to ask to be martyred. ... 

Let's see: Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, the Voluntary Martyrs of Asia under the Proconsul Arrius Antoninus, the Martyrs of Palestine, Perpetua, Saturus, and Felicity, Timolaus and his companions . . . 

They were a big problem in early Christianity, but the author doesn't seem to know that, either.

Meanwhile, the article feels overwrought and hysterical, erecting a giant straw man of leftists all over the place consciously copying Christianity in thrall to some kind of mad death wish, when what we're really talking about is just liberal Minnesota, which we wouldn't be talking about had the Trump administration not deliberately targeted it and murdered two protestors there, one shot in her left temple through the side window of her car, the other shot multiple times in the back.

The nihilism on display is all the government's, not the people's.

There may be Christian nihilism aplenty in Minneapolis, I don't really know, but this author never establishes the actual Christian bona fides of any of the principal nihilistic actors so that he may legitimately call any of them "Christian nihilists" who self-consciously pattern themselves on the religion in their confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. 

How anyone could do that though is a mystery, since nihilists reject all religious and moral principles. 

Christian nihilism is an oxymoron, coined by a moron.

Trump is already the living embodiment of the root of all evil, what more do you want?

 

 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

-- I Timothy 6:10

 

St. Augustine well spoke of the Donald Trumps of the world, the Vladimir Putins, the Xi Jinpings, who molest the land and the sea, whose modus operandi is robbery

 Trump on Venezuela: "We Are Going To Run The Country"

U.S. in Prime Position To Unlock Venezuela's Vast Oil Reserves

Eaton, et al., WSJ

 

 

 Kingdoms without justice are similar to robber bands.

And so if justice is left out, what are kingdoms except great robber bands? For what are robber bands except little kingdoms? The band also is a group of men governed by the orders of a leader, bound by a social compact, and its booty is divided according to a law agreed upon. If by repeatedly adding desperate men this plague grows to the point where it holds territory and establishes a fixed seat, seizes cities and subdues peoples, then it more conspicuously assumes the name of kingdom, and this name is now openly granted to it, not for any subtraction of cupidity, but by addition of impunity. For it was an elegant and true reply that was made to Alexander the Great by a certain pirate whom he had captured. When the king asked him what he was thinking of, that he should molest the sea, he said with defiant independence: “The same as you when you molest the world! Since I do this with a little ship I am called a pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor.”

-- St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans IV 

That was kinda sudden, but wherever he has gone now, may Donald J. Trump forever rest in peace lol

 What a complete nincompoop.

 

Boasters' shams are the worst shams

 Boasters are naturally falsifiers, and the people, of all others that put their shams the worst together.

 

-- Roger L'Estrange 

Trump is the greatest . . . murderer

 

 

Like some rich or mighty murderer,

Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold,

Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,

And dares the world to tax him with the old.

 

-- John Dryden 

This puff piece in Crisis Magazine about the Catholic Steve Bannon never mentions that Bannon is an ex-con who advocates Trump 2028, which is unconstitutional

The Catholic Case for Steve Bannon’s America

John Mac Ghlionn, Crisis 

 

... his sentiments spring from conviction, not contempt ...  

 

I mean, holy cow, he was convicted of contempt.

 

Steve Bannon loses his appeal of his contempt of Congress conviction

 

Steve Bannon fuels latest talk of third Trump term

 

When The Devil makes a deal with Hamas, this is what you get

 

The Devil, flanked by Famine and Death

 A Devilish Photo of Trump Sparks an Online Firestorm

Should he not know better by now?

 

I mean, the gaudy gold ornamentation above the "horns" in the current photo from the Cabinet Room is new. It is missing in the 2020 photo, so he's aware of this setting and what happened to him last time, isn't he lol?

 

The Devil has only himself to blame.

 

October 9, 2025

July 9, 2020