Last week, social media (at least, that side I’m interested in) was buzzing with hilarity at a conference announcement. The Kairos Christian Alliance had proudly advertised a weekend event, titled “Muscular Christianity”, and just the title was enough to clue everyone in on what it was going to be about: a domineering religion full of tough guys who were going to put women, Muslims, and brown people in their place. Little did we expect how cartoonish these people were going to be until we saw the poster.

It was going to be a bunch of white male dweebs strutting around, thumping their chests. These were all losers, and I hadn’t heard of most of them, except for Sean Davis, who was a founder of The Federalist, so I didn’t post anything. It looked predictably stupid. I figured I’d wait until after the conference and look for some reviews.

There weren’t any. This conference wasn’t at all newsworthy.

However, someone did an analysis of the speakers. She goes through each of the men on that poster, and they were, without exception, deplorable Christian nationalists who hate immigrants and think women should shut up, stay home, and take care of the kids. Follow that link if you’re curious about who they are.

For instance, David Schrock:

Conspiracy theories are also at the heart of some of the scheduled speakers, especially with David Schrock. Schrock is the editor in chief of Christ Over All. His X feed is filled with how to minister to Muslims, critical analysis of Islam and anti-Sharia laws in America, anti-vaccine posts, concerns that the church is too effeminate, and celebrations of the Southern Baptist Convention further restrictions on women in pastoral roles.

They’re all that pathetic. For a short summary of the whole group, consult this revised poster:

And here’s a more serious summary:

What we find in the speakers under the misleading title of muscular Christianity, is instead a MAGA Christian nationalism, whose men are the victims of progress, feminism, LGBTQ2SA, and democrats. The speakers are a convergence of conspiracy, racism, hate, extremism, and anti-LGBTQ2SA, hoping to mobilize Christian men to support their metapolitical movement. In the past when we have dismissed these movements it has been to the detriment of society, as distasteful as these groups are, they are having an impact. We may make fun of them, we may meme their posts, but we have to be aware and respond to them.

We do have to closer eye on these people, because the media won’t do it for us. These are jokers who have managed to work their way up into the highest levels of power.

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.

I’ve been on TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist since 2016, and I was quite proud to be mentioned on Charlie Kirk’s hate list. All the best people are on it, you know.

Kirk created the Professor Watchlist 10 years ago on Turning Point USA’s website. Users were able to search college professors based on themes including “racial ideology,” “LGBTQ” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

According to a video on the website describing the watchlist, “The Professor Watchlist uncovers the most radical left wing professors from universities that are known to suppress the conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

Sadly, it has been taken down.

But this month, the News4 I-Team found the Professor Watchlist had been taken down. Why is unclear, as no one from Turning Point USA is saying.

Also unfortunately, I never bothered to make a copy of my entry, so I don’t remember exactly what it said. It never really had any impact on me, but some people described the annoyance of the harassment they received.

For 10 years, the watchlist remained online, and the News4 I-Team spoke with local professors who said they were greatly impacted once their names were added to it.

Earlier this year, the I-Team spoke to Professor Bethany Letiecq with George Mason University, who said she received harassing and threatening messages on social media after she appearing on the list.

Letiecq recalled when it began: “It was shortly after I published a piece in March, February, March of 2024, and it got picked up by the alt-right media, and it was distorted in sort of a rage bait-y kind of way.”

Letiecq said the harassment she faced moved offline into her everyday life.

“That started just this bombardment of, you know, social media hits that were incredibly vitriolic and quite gross. I started getting emails to my work, voicemails to my work phone, calls for my firing […] and then I received several death threats,” she said.

I got a few nasty emails, which I still get anyway, but that was about it. A few student TPUSA members at UMM accused me of stealing their terrible student paper, which didn’t happen and for which there wasn’t and couldn’t be any evidence, and that prompted a bored campus police officer to ask me questions. There was no concern expressed by my colleagues or administrators.

The whole list was stupid, petty, and ineffective. Maybe TPUSA took it down because it was a reminder that Charlie Kirk was also stupid, petty, and ineffective.

The latest architectural horrors dictated at us by a man with no taste is the Trump Arch, which is being built real soon now with no authorization from any of the officials in charge or preserving the city and its history.

The proposed arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington, including renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, building a huge new White House ballroom, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on X, “befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.”

Along with the announcement on X, Burgum posted artistic mockups of the planned 250-foot-tall (76-meter) memorial arch, which will stand between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Those capitalization choices were Burgum’s, which should put you on alert. Morons think that capitalizing Crap makes it majestic.

The administration really is just rushing ahead with Trump’s nightmare vision.

Historic preservation experts have long criticized the Trump administration for seeming to rush the arch approval process, including by moving to weaken protections for historic sites altogether. This latest development raises concerns that the White House seeks to sidestep the process, which it denies.

“Work will begin that does not require approval, but rather helps in the process,” the White House told NPR in a statement on Friday. “We will of course continue on our path of seeking final approval from all applicable entities.”

Surprise: they won’t. You know it and they know it.

Our capitol is going to be wrecked and left with cheap glittering gilt garbage, demolished historical sites, and hideous monuments to an asshole’s ego. He is going to die, eventually, and we’re all going to be left with the clean up. What shall we do?

Simple solution: BLOW IT ALL UP.

The author has been touring Germany, and seeing what the German solution to the ugly history of the Third Reich has been. Hitler’s bunker has been paved over and is a parking lot. The site of the Nuremberg rallies has been allowed to crumble and “looked like garbage.” They dynamited the Berghof and “flattened Göring’s house, Bormann’s house and the rest of the Nazi colony, hauled away the rubble and planted trees over the site.” And, of course:

Unfortunately, the latest German elections suggest that there’s more yet to be done.

Blundell has specific recommendations for what the next administration must do. Unfortunately it’s a long list.

Believe in the Directive. Not a review. Not a blue-ribbon commission on the future of the ballroom. A firm belief, stated in the campaign and executed on day one, that a monument built by a President to himself is not a public work and does not get grandfathered in as one. Germany was handed this belief at gunpoint. America has to choose it.

The arch comes down, or never goes up. If it’s excavation, fill the hole. If it’s steel, cut it. If it’s finished, do what the Seventh Army did at Nuremberg and let the cameras roll. It sits between Lincoln and the war dead. It was built for “me.” There is no version of American reconciliation that leaves it standing.

The name comes off everything. The Trump Kennedy Center reverts to the Kennedy Center before lunch on inauguration day. Any ballroom, any coin, any banner, any federal building, any portrait hung by executive fiat. Street signs came down across Germany in 1946. This is the American version, and it takes a pen.

The ballroom is the Eagle’s Nest. Ninety thousand square feet of gold leaf where the East Wing used to be, with a bunker underneath. You can raze it and rebuild the East Wing. Or you can do what Bavaria did and turn it into something so ordinary it can’t be worshipped. A visitor centre. A public cafeteria. A daycare for federal workers. Serve the pretzels in it. Either way, no one is ever allowed to say his name in that room with reverence.

Restore the referees. Reinstate an independent Commission of Fine Arts and a National Capital Planning Commission that doesn’t answer to a staff secretary. Repeal the beauty order. Write into law that no sitting President may initiate a monument to himself, ever, which is a sentence nobody thought America would need.

Preserve the evidence of the victims. The detention records ICE stopped publishing. The names of the people who died in custody. The facilities. The Germans preserved Dachau’s ovens because the alternative was letting grass grow over them. Keep the camps as museums and tear down the arch. That’s the whole formula.

Trump’s people will scream that it’s petty. That it’s revenge. That it’s erasing history. It isn’t. Germany erased Hitler’s monuments and became the country with the best memory in Europe. You erase the shrine so there’s room for the museum. Nobody in Bavaria is confused about what happened on the Obersalzberg because the Berghof is gone. They know precisely because it’s gone, and there’s a documentation centre where a tour bus used to park.

I approve. Let’s elect people who will have the stamina to implement this plan.