The natalist plan hits a snag

Abortion bans are always about control. Always.

The religious right lawmakers who push them don’t care about women, children or families. If they did, they’d support paid family leave, or universal health care, or laws to stop gun slaughter. They want to ban abortion for one reason only: to force women into fulfilling what they believe is God’s purpose for them, to be wives and mothers. As long as women are getting pregnant and giving birth like they’re “supposed” to, these theocrats don’t care what happens after that.

The problem, from the anti-choicers’ perspective, is that women know this too. American women can see that they’re in danger of being forced to carry pregnancies they don’t want, threatening their lives, their health and their futures. To reassert control over their bodies, they’re making the logical choice.

According to a new report in JAMA, after the Dobbs decision, the number of reproductive-age women getting their tubes tied spiked across the country. In blue states that protected abortion access, those numbers quickly tapered off. But in states hostile to abortion rights, they kept rising:

In states that enacted total or near-total abortion bans following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, the rate of sterilizations among reproductive-age women that July spiked 19 percent. A similar initial spike was seen across the nation, with states that either limited or protected access to abortions seeing a 17 percent increase.

But, after that, states with bans saw a divergent trend. The states that limited or protected abortion access saw sterilization procedures largely level off after July 2022. In contrast, states with bans continued to see increases. From July 2022 to December 2022, use of sterilization procedures increased by 3 percent each month.

The religious right got their win on abortion, and now they want more. They’ve made their goals clear: They want to ban contraception. They want to ban divorce. They want to imprison women in anti-choice states, preventing them from traveling elsewhere to get an abortion. They don’t care whether a pregnancy comes about through rape, or whether it endangers the woman’s life, or whether the fetus has severe abnormalities that will result in a short life full of suffering.

In fact, they don’t care if women can get medical care at all. Red states have passed anti-abortion laws that are both draconian and intentionally vague, making doctors and hospitals guess at what they can and can’t do. It seems that the religious right wants to intimidate health care providers so that they’re afraid to help pregnant women in distress. If doctors flee and those states become maternity care deserts, they count that as a victory.

But, apparently, the religious right didn’t count on women being able to read these same headlines for themselves. They assumed that they could pass whatever laws they wanted and everyone else would just keep doing whatever they were doing before. Without abortion, they believed, women would have no choice but to bear more children.

In reality, they’ve created a powerful disincentive to get pregnant, and people are responding accordingly. In this sense, the natalist agenda is self-defeating. People are accustomed to freedom, and they’re not willing to give it up, whatever religious zealots with their heads in the Middle Ages might think.

An added tragedy is that anti-choicers are preventing the birth of wanted children. Of course, many people who get sterilized are childfree. But it’s also likely that among this group, there are some women who aren’t dead-set against having kids – or who already have kids and, in a better world, would consider having more.

However, they’ve made a rational calculation of the risks and the benefits. They’d prefer to get sterilized to ensure that they’ll be alive. That’s better than the prospect of an unwanted pregnancy they can’t do anything about – or even a wanted pregnancy where they’re barred from medical help if something goes badly wrong. Given the extreme hostility that red states have shown toward women needing medical care, it’s impossible to blame them.

It pays well to be a useful idiot

A microphone similar to the kind used for recording podcasts

I’ll admit it: If a wealthy benefactor offered to pay me millions of dollars a year to write this blog, I’d be tempted.

As you may know, it’s almost impossible to earn a living in media anymore. Even successful writers and artists have to hustle, and almost none get rich unless they were rich to begin with. Prestigious media outlets have gone bankrupt, and others are resorting to AI-generated filler.

So yes, the temptation is understandable. A rich person who’s willing to fund your journalism and punditry startup is priceless in these turbulent times.

However, the very unfriendliness of the climate ought to spark at least a little skepticism. Specifically, if you find an investor who wants to fund you handsomely, when most outlets are struggling for survival, you should wonder why they’re being so generous and what they hope to get in return. And that’s especially, especially true when this backer doesn’t want their identity known.

That’s a lesson some American right-wingers learned too late.

According to a newly unsealed indictment by the Justice Department, Russia’s state-owned media outlet, Russia Today or RT, was kicked out of the U.S. after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In response, RT hatched a covert plan to influence American public opinion, laundering money through shell companies to evade sanctions, and funding a Western media outlet to push Kremlin-friendly content.

(Full disclosure: In 2013, I was on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, a progressive TV show which at the time aired on RT.)

The indictment doesn’t name this outlet, but it’s widely reported to be Tenet Media, a conservative agitprop site founded in 2022 by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan. Tenet employed right-wing influencers like Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. It’s hosted “high-profile conservative guests, including Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake.”

To be the supposed wealthy backer, the RT employees named in the indictment invented a persona named “Eduard Grigoriann”, supposedly a Belgian banker with a generic resume and no Web presence. However, notwithstanding the clumsy attempts at deception, Tenet Media’s founders seem to have been well aware who they were really working for. According to the indictment, they referred to their funders as “the Russians”, and Googled “time in Moscow” while trying to decide when to send a message in order to get a quick response.

Russia paid $9.7 million to Tenet Media, which, according to the indictment, is almost 90% of all the money it took in. In exchange, they got a stable of American right-wingers to parrot Kremlin propaganda on command.

Commentators like Tim Pool denounced Ukraine as the enemy and raged against American military aid. When Tucker Carlson went on a pro-Putin propaganda tour of Russia, RT urged Tenet Media to promote it. One of the producers resisted – “it just feels like overt shilling” – but gave in after pressure from Tenet’s founders. After the deadly Crocus City terrorist attack in March 2024, RT urged Tenet to ignore ISIS’ claim of responsibility and blame the bloodshed on Ukraine and the U.S.

When the indictment was unsealed, Tenet Media immediately shut down. YouTube also deleted their channels. Pool and other affiliates of Tenet claimed that they were innocent dupes and that they’re the real victims. (None of them, so far, have announced any plans to give away the Russian blood money in their bank accounts.)

The notable thing about this indictment is that none of these right-wingers seemed especially hard to buy. None of them questioned why they were being asked to push pro-Putin content. None of them proved too principled to go along with the scheme. It raises the question: When it comes to the American right’s friendliness to Russia, how much is organic – born of Donald Trump’s love for right-wing dictators because he yearns to be one of them – and how much is astroturf – purchased by Russian rubles and amplified by conservative pundits who’ll say anything they’re told to say for money?

If anyone on the right has a conscience, the exposure of this plot should be an occasion for remorse and soul-searching. Whether knowingly or not, they were doing the bidding of a brutal foreign dictator. They were spreading propaganda to blind and confuse Americans, to turn us against each other and weaken our collective will to fight tyranny. They’re modern-day Moscow Roses. Just call them Putin’s rose garden.

However, I doubt they’ll be unduly bothered. Trump’s M.O. is to always deny, never admit fault, and double down whenever you’re caught, and that attitude has been adopted by his fans and followers. They’ve learned that the only sin in modern-day conservatism is to apologize. As long as you deny everything and keep yelling that the accusations against you are concocted by the deep state and the liberal media, there are legions of Trumpist true believers who’ll lap it up. This means that Putin’s cronies are sure to try again, and they’re likely to find many more receptive targets.

What kind of person moves to Russia?

Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square

[Previous: Uncle Vladimir wants you]

Vladimir Putin is encouraging Western conservatives to move to Russia to escape oppressive liberal values. He’s gone so far as to exempt them from immigration quotas and waive language tests that were previously required. The real question is how many people will take him up on that offer.

Notwithstanding enthusiasm from people like Alex Jones, I suspect the answer will be “not many”. Conservatives moving to Russia is like progressives moving to Canada. It’s something that a lot of them fantasize about, especially when an election doesn’t go their way, but few follow through on.

Here’s one who actually did it.

His name is Joseph Gleason. By his account, he was born in America, raised as a Protestant and became a pastor, then converted to the Eastern Orthodox church. In 2017, he moved to Russia with his wife and eight (!) children.

In an interview he republished on his Substack site, he explains why he took this drastic step:

In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America upheld the “right” of all states to recognize same-sex “marriages”. Of course, the acceptance of homosexual behavior is the primary reason why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God. I believe that the foundation of any society and any nation is based on what people think about God, what they believe in, and how they feel about the institution of family. If these fundamental values — faith in God and family — are destroyed, then the whole country will come to destruction. I think that either America will repent of this monstrous sin, this idea of same-sex marriage, which destroys the family, or this country will be destroyed.

He sounds pretty confident about that. So here’s my question: what’s taking so long?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in the U.S. for almost ten years, and LGBT people have benefited from societal acceptance for longer than that. Massachusetts has had marriage equality since 2004, over twenty years now. Vermont has had same-sex civil unions since 2000, almost a quarter-century.

Where’s the brimstone? Why hasn’t God destroyed all these places yet, if he hates gays so much? Is he procrastinating? Is he asleep at the switch?

Here’s his list of reasons to move to Russia. There’s some normal-sounding stuff about how taxes are low, land is abundant and cheap, Russian culture is great… and then, in the middle of it, you come across this:

The GloboHomo LGBT Rainbow Mafia is not allowed to force their views down your throat here. Homosexual “marriages” are not permitted in Russia, nor are there any civil unions. LGBT propaganda for minors is illegal. And they are now working on putting a new law on the books, which will make LGBT propaganda illegal nationwide, regardless of age.

In a perverse way, you have to respect the bluntness of his bigotry. There’s no tiptoeing around the subject, no “hate the sin, love the sinner” evasions. He just says it flat out: LGBTQ people shouldn’t exist, they should have no rights, and it should be illegal for them to speak out, punishable by gulag or deportation. The law should favor his views and crush any opposing views.

Just in case you thought this profound homophobia was the only personality flaw in someone who’s otherwise a lovely person, here’s another of Gleason’s reasons to move to Russia:

You won’t get called a “racist” every five seconds. No riots. No “Black Lives Matter” marches. Lots of white people live here, and we aren’t aware of any particular reason we should be ashamed of it.

Obviously, Russia doesn’t have the same history of plantation slavery and Jim Crow segregation that America does. That doesn’t mean it’s free of racism.

On the contrary, racist attitudes are widely reported to be omnipresent. There’s widespread racism by ethnic Russians against migrants from Central Asian countries, as well as against foreign students from African countries. Immigrants in Russia report discrimination like “Slavs only” signs on apartment buildings. Russia has committed mass deportation so brutal, it’s been called a form of ethnic cleansing.

It’s safe to assume that Gleason hasn’t experienced this kind of treatment himself. Therefore, in his eyes, it doesn’t exist. Judging by his attitude toward Black Lives Matter – where his disdain is clearly for the marchers, and not for the racism they’re protesting – he doesn’t care what racism exists in his society, just as long as he doesn’t have to hear about it.

Here’s yet another of Gleason’s reasons to move:

There are gazillions of Orthodox churches and vibrant Orthodox Christian communities here. For example, in Rostov Veliky there are five monasteries, numerous churches, and zero mosques.

He doesn’t state the reason for this. Do mosques just happen to not exist near where he lives, or are they not allowed there? Is he concerned for religious freedom at all?

Last but not least, there’s this reason that should provoke bitter laughter at his shameless hypocrisy:

The American military industrial complex has no power here. No need to worry about the United States arriving on the doorstep to overthrow another national government.

Gleason felt no compunction about republishing this interview while Russia was waging an unprovoked war against its historically Orthodox Christian neighbor, Ukraine. The Russian invasion has included torture and mass slaughter of civilians, kidnapping of children, leveling cities with artillery barrages, and indiscriminate bombing of churches and cathedrals along with other civilian targets. It’s a level of brutality and callous destruction that American colonialism never reached, even at its harshest.

Most notable about his list is what’s not there. He admits that Russian bureaucracy can be slow and unpleasant to deal with, and that the Russian language is difficult to learn – but that’s it. He says nothing whatsoever about Russia’s lack of freedom, its oligarchical government, its corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement, or Putin’s habit of imprisoning protesters and murdering dissidents. It’s not listed, even euphemistically, in reasons not to move.

In summary, what kind of person moves to Russia? The answer is: a violently homophobic, white supremacist, Christian dominionist who decries American imperialism but cheerfully turns a blind eye to even more brutal and violent Russian imperialism. He doesn’t want to live in a free country where people have rights. He wants to live in a dictatorship, just one where he’s on the same side as the dictator. In Russia, that’s what he’s found.

New on OnlySky: When we abolished borders

I have a new piece of short fiction today on OnlySky. It looks forward to a future where declining birthrates and global warming have become serious problems for the industrialized world, and explores the obvious solution – abolishing borders so that people can move from climate-change-ravaged areas to cooler lands where labor is needed. It imagines what a post-border world might be like for those who live in it, both the positives and the negatives.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full story:

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our numbers as a species were declining every year. Capitalist economies premised on the assumption of infinite growth couldn’t cope. Stock markets stagnated, inflation surged out of control. Governments had belatedly tried to address the problem, but every means of encouraging people to have kids—longer parental leave, tax breaks, cash payments, religious scolding—had failed.

Rural villages were emptying out, becoming ghost towns. Grass and weeds pushed up through cracked pavement in silent streets. Abandoned cars decayed on the roadside. Vacant houses were overgrown with vines, dry leaves and birds’ nests. Trees sprouted like the vanguard of an invading army as forests spread and reclaimed the urban areas humanity had ceded.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Pause for joy

When was the last time you were genuinely happy?

You may be a fortunate soul who has no trouble answering this question. You may have led a charmed existence free from trouble, or you may be a natural Zen master, who suffers like everyone else but lets those pains roll off leaving without a mark.

Or it may require some thought. You may have happy memories in the past, but they’ve grown misty with time. It may take an effort of will to recall them.

Or this may be a difficult question. Your life may be scarred by regret. You might strain to recall even an instant of joy.

Either way, I’d suggest that if your life is lacking, you schedule more happiness into it.

It sounds absurd, because you can’t conjure emotions into existence by willpower. But what you can do is create the conditions for happiness. If you put yourself in the right circumstances, the emotion often follows.

We all know this works in the opposite direction. If I’m tired or hungry or stressed, a minor inconvenience can put me in a bad mood. Our emotions are more dictated by circumstance than we might realize. You can use this to make yourself happier as well.

It doesn’t have to be a peak experience. It can be a simple thing that brings you joy: a party with music, a neighborhood cookout, a gathering with friends or family, a walk in nature, an afternoon in a coffee shop with a good book.

Only you can decide what holds meaning for you. But whatever it is, you should make a deliberate effort to have more of it in your life. Happiness will only come if you leave a space for it to show up.

Happiness is what we should be fighting for

In my view, happiness is the only thing a moral system can sensibly be based on. If you accuse me of being a utilitarian, I’ll gladly plead guilty to the charge.

The alternative to utilitarianism is a morality that’s based on either virtues or rules. You can hold up martial courage, or adherence to tradition, or obedience to duty, or honoring your elders, or religious faith, or any of a thousand other qualities as the supreme guiding principle of life.

However, those moral systems all fall short because they have no explanation for why we should prefer one rule, or one virtue, over a different one. Why tradition, rather than innovation? Why sobriety, rather than hedonism? Why the family rather than the state, or vice versa? Why one church rather than another? If there’s no answer to the “why”, all these choices are ultimately arbitrary.

By contrast, when happiness – or well-being, or flourishing, or whatever you choose to call it – is the key to your morality, you have a guide for how to choose among priorities. You go by what produces the best outcome for human beings, rather than maximizing some impersonal measure of goodness, like getting the high score in a video game.

That doesn’t mean morality is always easy. People can argue (and do, at length) over what the rules should be, when we should hold firm and when we should make exceptions. It will always be difficult to judge between mutually exclusive claims. But if we agree on what the goal is, and if we agree that arguments have to be based on evidence that everyone can see for themselves, it is possible to reach consensus. The expanding circle of moral progress across history testifies to this.

However, a utilitarian philosophy comes with an important asterisk. That’s that we have, in a sense, a duty to be happy. If happiness is the desired state for everyone, doesn’t that mean we should try to nurture it in our own lives?

A duty to be happy

In a society built on capitalism, it can be hard to make time for happiness. Our jobs tend to demand everything we’re able to give and then some. Even among those of us who don’t have bosses to report to, there’s the insidious “hustle culture” mentality that we should devote every waking moment to “productive” (read: money-making) pursuits.

There’s also a political angle to unhappiness. In my experience, where conservatives are prone to disastrous overconfidence, atheists and progressives are habitually gloomy and downbeat. That’s because we look at the world and imagine how it could be, and reality comes up short by comparison.

We dream of a world without violence, exploitation, or suffering. Yet those evils persist, and often it seems like they’re multiplying. We hope for change, but those hopes have so often been dashed – whether because the powers that be strangled reform in its cradle, or because people were kept divided and powerless by their worse impulses of bigotry, ignorance and greed.

When fascism and climate change are knocking at the door, it can seem like the only moral response is to redouble your activism. But if the struggle demands all we have, then leisure and happiness can seem like luxuries you can’t afford. At best, they seem like inexcusable selfishness; at worst, a betrayal of your comrades. Some leftists act as if we have a positive duty to be discontented, the better to motivate us toward rejecting the present order and creating a better one. When the world is so bad, how can you be happy, unless you don’t care?

However, I see a problem with this outlook. If we have it so bad, what about previous generations, who lived in even worse poverty with even fewer rights?

When should past generations have been happy?

What if you were born a medieval peasant, legally bound to a feudal lord, in a rigidly stratified society ruled by kings and churches? The common people in those times had none of the rights we take for granted, and starvation was rarely more than a bad harvest away. Or what if you were born into a Jewish family in that same era, when the entire Christian world was viciously antisemitic?

What if you were born a woman, in any of the patriarchal societies of the past and some that still exist today, that grant women far fewer rights and freedoms than men? Or what if you were a Black person in America in almost any era of the past – or for that matter, America today? (If you’re not American, you can substitute whatever minority is in disfavor in your country.)

What would we say to people born in those repressive, unenlightened times? Was it their duty to be miserable their entire lives, hoping that the far future would be better? Or did those generations have a right to find happiness where they could get it?

To my mind, any morality which claims that happiness is an unaffordable luxury isn’t worth advocating for. It’s a morality that, literally, offers us nothing. No one should be expected to sacrifice their entire life for the sake of others – not a capitalist ruling class, and not their descendants in the distant and uncertain future.

As much as struggle is necessary, you can’t build your entire life around it. We need to make room for joy.

We have to work, and we should fight for a better world. But life can’t be all duty and work and obligation. We also need time and space for ourselves. We need music and art, we need love and beauty, we need rest and celebration. Our lives should partake of all the colors in the palette.

On Catholic integralism

A statue of Pope Paul V in a position of domination

[Previous: We will tell you what you want]

We need to talk about Catholic integralism.

In American politics, it’s usually evangelicals – especially so-called “seven mountains” dominionists – who believe that the Christian church should control and run the state, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens or worse. However, Roman Catholics have their equivalent to this:

The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.

Like evangelical dominionists, Catholic integralists despise secularism. They want to demolish the wall of separation and replace it with an authoritarian order where the state tells people what to believe. The individual freedom to choose your own beliefs would be heavily discouraged, if not punished.

(The classic problem of theocratic societies is which Christian sect would get to run things and make its particular dogmas into law. Integralists tend to be vague on this point, but it’s not hard to guess who they have in mind.)

This isn’t a new belief – far from it. It’s a medieval idea, literally. It’s the position that Pope Boniface VIII expressed in 1302, in the bull Unam sanctum, which arrogantly proclaimed that the Catholic church should rule the world and all political leaders should bow down to the Pope:

Therefore, both are in the power of the Church, namely, the spiritual sword and the material. But indeed, the latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.

The philosophy of integralism came up in this post about Edgardo Mortara, a nineteenth-century Jewish boy who was kidnapped from his family by the Inquisition and forcibly indoctrinated into Catholicism because a Christian servant secretly baptized him. First Things, a conservative religious journal, published an article – in 2018! – defending the church’s behavior in the Mortara case as right and proper. It all but said outright that the Vatican should still do this kind of thing today, if not for the regrettable inconvenience that the Pope no longer has an army to do his bidding.

As I wrote at the time, First Things‘ stance on the Mortara case is a symptom of the sharp right turn that the Catholic church has taken. Pope Francis notwithstanding, the Vatican is stuck firmly in the past. It hasn’t changed its dogmatic stance on any of the issues that people care about – no contraception, no divorce, no abortion, no women’s equality, no gay rights. As a result, it’s hemorrhaging members by the millions, as young people who reject these cruel and irrational teachings leave the church or never join in the first place.

This is a good thing, to be sure. But it means that the remaining Catholics, both the laity and the clergy, tend to be the most conservative ones. They’re the hardcore traditionalists who want to turn the clock back seven hundred years. And in a shrinking church, they have more influence without liberal members around to counterbalance them:

They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.

They attend confession regularly and adhere strictly to church teachings. Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense, more Gregorian chants.

These traditionalists don’t stop at bringing back Gregorian chants or Latin, of course. Many of them want to restore the medieval worldview, not just its trappings: medieval views on women’s equality, on human rights, on law, and how society should be run.

On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Then there’s the priesthood.

Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have “all but vanished,” said a 2023 report from The Catholic Project at Catholic University, based on a survey of more than 3,500 priests.

You can already see the influence of the integralist right on American bishops. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is far-right-wing, so much so that Pope Francis fired one of them last year for insubordination. (Conservatives are all in favor of hierarchy until they disagree with the guy in charge.)

It’s also influencing American politics. Kevin Roberts, one of the architects of Project 2025, is Catholic and has close ties to the reactionary Catholic group Opus Dei. Roberts’ dream of America as a libertarian theocracy where Christian morality is enforced on everyone is the end goal of integralism. J.D. Vance has also argued for integralist ideas, including at a 2022 conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

It’s not likely that these wannabe theocrats will realize their medieval dream. Their numbers are dwindling and their goals are simply too unpopular. In all likelihood, the only thing they’ll achieve is to accelerate the decline of the Catholic church. But they can still do damage in the meantime, with politicians and Supreme Court justices in their back pocket.

That’s why sunlight is still the best disinfectant. When Project 2025 was publicized, the voting public was appalled by its noxious ideas, and even Donald Trump felt pressure to publicly back away from it. The same way, the more that ordinary people know about Catholic integralists and other theocrats, the more prepared they’ll be to stand up against religious encroachment on their rights.

Image credit: Herbert Frank via Flickr; released under CC BY 2.0 license

New on OnlySky: The future is a prisoner’s dilemma

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about why progressive change is so difficult to achieve, why grand utopian dreams often come to grief, and why people stubbornly persist in lives of misery and dissatisfaction when a better solution is right in front of them.

All these evils are tied together by the moral framework called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s the fear that motivates people to resist change – even change they’d benefit from – because they fear someone else will take a bigger piece of the pie.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece:

Humans are naturally conservative. Small c.

Not in the sense of a political ideology, but of an inclination. We Homo sapiens are contradictory creatures. We dream of change, but we also fear it. We’re full of hopes and wishes for the future, but all too often, instead of buckling down and doing the work to make those dreams a reality, we fall into a rut of doing what’s familiar and comfortable. Everyone’s familiar with the lies we tell ourselves: “I’ll quit tomorrow,” “I’ll make a New Year’s Resolution to go to the gym more,” “When I get that next promotion, I’ll really turn my life around.”

What’s true of individuals is also true of society as a whole. Everyone wants a better world for themselves and for their children. And it’s not as if we don’t know what we’d need to do to make this happen. The solutions to most of our problems aren’t mysterious.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Uncle Vladimir wants you

Conservatives love Russia.

That was true well before the invasion of Ukraine. Russia under Putin has spent years positioning itself as a defender of traditional Christian values, a bulwark against the weak and decadent West, and a pure white ethnostate.

This 2017 report from Right Wing Watch shows how both white supremacists and the religious right noticed what Putin was doing, and liked it:

For Richard Spencer, the coiner of the term “Alt-Right” and a leader of the emerging white nationalist faction it represents, Russia is both the “sole” and “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party—and someone who, like Spencer, desires the creation of a whites-only nation-state within the U.S.—believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world,” one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.” Harold Covington, the white supremacist head of the secessionist Northwest Front, recently described Russia as the “last great White empire.” And former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

…Since he returned to the presidency in 2012, Putin has made a concerted effort to establish his country as a center for religious, especially Christian, conservatives throughout the world, most notably for those who oppose any legal or public support for same-sex relationships. This shift has taken the form of legislation that prioritizes the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church, that rolls back abortion rights, and that sidelines attempts within the LGBT community to obtain any kind of societal acceptance.

While they’ve praised Putin on many occasions, most American conservatives had to admire Russia from a distance. Those few who tried to move there have had a bad time, largely because of the language barrier and Russian bureaucracy.

But those days may soon be over. Good news for anti-woke Western conservatives: Russia’s state-owned news agency, TASS, has announced that Putin is throwing open the doors.

Russia offers safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals

…Moscow will provide assistance to any foreigners who want to escape the neoliberal ideals being put forward in their countries and move to Russia, where traditional values reign supreme, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin.

Under the document, such foreign nationals will have the right to apply for temporary residence in Russia “outside the quota approved by the Russian government and without providing documents confirming their knowledge of the Russian language, Russian history and basic laws.”

Some American conservatives are ecstatic. Alex Jones, for example, was overjoyed:

BREAKING: PUTIN JUST DROPPED A BOMBSHELL DECREE—INVITING PEOPLE FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE WHO ARE FED UP WITH THE GLOBALIST, NEOLIBERAL NIGHTMARE TO SEEK SANCTUARY IN TRADITIONAL RUSSIA!

This new decree blows the lid off the establishment’s agenda, letting freedom-loving folks bypass the usual bureaucratic nonsense like language tests or history exams. If you’re ready to reject the insane policies of your home countries that push these destructive, anti-human, neoliberal agendas, Russia is rolling out the red carpet!

The Russian government is about to compile a list of countries poisoning minds with these twisted ideals, and the Foreign Ministry is gearing up to issue visas to true patriots as soon as September! It’s time to stand up for spiritual and moral values!

Yep – if you love freedom, move to Russia! Forget those twisted, neoliberal ideals like “the right to protest” and “the right to oppose the government” and “the right to practice your own religion“. Russia has something much better: the freedom to agree with the Great Leader about everything at all times. And if you disagree, you’re free to “mysteriously” die by falling out a window!

Could Alex Jones be serious about moving? If so, how many others feel the same way? Are we going to see an exodus of religious-right figures packing their bags and buying one-way tickets to Moscow, fleeing Western liberalism for Putin’s warm embrace?

If they really want to go, I won’t stand in their way. (Insert Willy Wonka meme here.) However, for the sake of my own conscience, there’s one thing I’d encourage them to consider first.

Putin’s three-day invasion of Ukraine is dragging on into its third year, and Russia is reeling from a casualty toll that now surpasses 600,000 dead and wounded. Russian soldiers are dying in the trenches every day, getting blown up by Ukrainian drones and artillery, or being sent to their deaths in human-wave assaults. There’s no doubt that Putin desperately needs more bodies to fight his war. Where better to obtain them than to throw open the doors to willing Western dupes? Entice them to come, and once they’re settled in, inform them that they’re subject to conscription.

The fate of Russell Bentley is instructive. He was a Texan who admired Vladimir Putin and believed Russian propaganda about how Ukraine was under the thumb of Nazis. He emigrated to Russia and joined the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. Then he had a falling out with his fellow soldiers (for reasons unclear, although I’ve seen reports suggesting they suspected him of being an American spy). According to Ukraine war journalist ChrisO, they arrested him and tortured him to death.

Any conservative who’s tempted by Putin’s offer isn’t likely to listen to me. Still, if you’re thinking of moving to Russia, you’d better ask yourself: is there even the slightest possibility that Putin isn’t doing this out of altruism, but because he needs fresh meat for the grinder? Are you willing to risk that for yourselves – and your kids?

We will tell you what you want

If you want to understand Project 2025, the Republican plan to rewrite the DNA of America, you should start with Kevin Roberts.

Roberts is president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and one of the creators of Project 2025. He’s written a book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America (with a foreword by J.D. Vance) in which he describes the world that would result from Project 2025’s policies.

Alas, you can’t read it yet. Roberts’ book was originally set for publication in September, but for some inexplicable reason, its release was delayed until just after the 2024 election.

However, some reviewers got their hands on it early, like Colin Dickey at the New Republic. His review is worth reading in full to get a sense of how radical and regressive the modern right has become.

According to the review, Roberts and Project 2025 want to destroy, basically, all of modern society. They want to scrap all institutions of higher education, the entire federal government, the public school system, unions, corporations, and most nonprofit foundations.

In place of these things, they want to turn back the clock to a semi-imaginary era – half colonial frontier, half medieval theocracy – where Christianity reigned supreme, where women were broodmares with no rights, where families worked the land or labored in sweatshops while pumping out huge numbers of kids, where all law is vigilante justice enforced by whoever can gather the biggest armed mob, and where the role of government is a bully pulpit telling people to go to church.

This isn’t an exaggeration for emphasis. He says all this in the book. For example, here’s Roberts saying we need to get rid of religious freedom, which is “offensive to Christian morals”, and establish a society where Christian belief overrides other rights:

A man’s religious tradition is a matter of his conscience, but that we have a faithful people is a matter of public concern. Accordingly, the state must not discriminate against religious organizations in government programs, and freedom of religion should take precedence over the enforcement of other rights. Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Here’s him saying that we should ban divorce and contraception, coerce people to marry early, and then coerce them into having as many children as possible, regardless of their willingness to do so or their ability to care for them:

“Men and women,” he explains, “should marry (and do so younger than most do today). They should marry for life and should bring children into the world (more than most do today).”

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

…But Roberts admits these solutions won’t be enough to fight the anti-natalist cabal; the biggest headwind against fertility, he notes, “is not this or that government policy but prosperity itself: the wealthier a society is, the greater the opportunity cost involved in raising kids.” Having children is thus “not an economical calculation but an act of faith and love.” Which is to say, not only should you be having more kids, but you should be prepared to go into poverty to do so…

The biggest problem, from Roberts’ point of view, is that nobody wants any of this. Americans are increasingly secular and nonreligious. Americans overwhelmingly support contraception, IVF, abortion and other reproductive technologies that are anathema to the religious right. Americans marry later, have fewer children, and desire comfort and prosperity over shotgun weddings, overcrowded hovels, and lives of manual labor and poverty.

All the ideas Roberts proposes are massively unpopular among everyone outside of a tiny minority of religious fundamentalists. And he knows this, which is, of course, why the publication of this book was delayed until after the election. He doesn’t want to tip his hand too early, lest these unpopular ideas become known to voters and swing the election against Republicans who want to implement them.

The problem he can’t get around is that we live in a democracy. Roberts isn’t ready (yet) to call for burning the Constitution and installing a king who rules by absolute decree. He still has to explain how these ideas will triumph despite their being electoral poison.

To square this circle, his preferred solution is a massive, shadowy, world-girdling conspiracy (he calls it the “Uniparty”) whose only purpose is to trick people into voting for these things. This is intolerable to him, because in Kevin Roberts’ mind, only Kevin Roberts is entitled to decide on other people’s behalf what they really want. And once Republicans take over the country, demolish every legal and cultural institution established in the last hundred years, and force people to live the way Project 2025 wants them to live, everyone will be grateful.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same argument as Ayn Rand saying that only Randian protagonists have dreams, feelings or beliefs, and everyone else is a vacant flesh-suit mindlessly echoing words they’ve heard elsewhere. It’s Christian evangelists declaring that no non-Christian is sincere in their beliefs because everyone feels the Holy Spirit in their hearts. It’s the fallback of every religious fundamentalist who, having failed to persuade anyone, simply declares that everyone already agrees with me, and it’s only the wickedness of sin that keeps them from admitting it.

As the review says:

Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at “a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature”; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims “our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones.”

When it’s just a ranting street-corner preacher, this paranoia is comical. It’s an implicit admission of defeat. It says that they can’t convince anyone and they’ve given up trying, so spite is all they have left.

When this paranoid conspiracy mindset is espoused by those in power, it’s less amusing. It leads straight to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work, because people don’t know what they want, so they need to be coerced and brainwashed for their own good. And if your opponents aren’t ordinary, decent people with their own sincerely held views, but the fingers of a sinister worldwide conspiracy, then no measure is too extreme to stop them.

There’s a straight line connecting this mindset to Republican election denial and election theft, to the January 6 insurrection, and all their unveiled threats of civil war and bloodshed. (Roberts has also said that “a second American revolution is coming” which “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)

Democracy, to the religious right, isn’t valuable in itself but only a means to an end: the end of them being in charge and getting to do what they want. If it doesn’t give them that outcome, they’re willing to throw it overboard and impose their views at gunpoint. They’ve said so many times, and this is only the latest example. They’re eager to be dictators if they get the chance.

Totally not a cult

Evangelical Christians are having a very good and normal one in 2024. For example, here’s one who wrote a worship song about Donald Trump:

The song, titled “The Chosen One”, was written by Christian musician Natasha Owens. She released it in June, after a New York jury convicted Trump of 34 felonies. The video features his mug shot and video clips of him walking into court, interspersed with shots of the Statue of Liberty, cheering crowds and soldiers saluting. The lyrics say that he’s “imperfect” and “gets in trouble bigly”, but he’s been appointed by God as a “warrior” to lead and save America.

Lest you think it seems a little, well, blasphemous, to worship Donald Trump in song – don’t worry! The lyrics reassure listeners that Trump isn’t divine. He’s just God’s chosen one on Earth. Totally different!

I have to emphasize, this isn’t satire or parody. It’s in dead earnest. Natasha Owens isn’t a comedian or a leftist, she’s a successful evangelical Christian musician who’s recorded several albums of praise and worship songs. She says that she got into music to heal her grief after her father accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun (yes, this is 100% true).

After listening to this song, if you can stomach it, you may have questions. For example, if Trump is God’s chosen one and there “ain’t no stopping what the Lord’s begun”… why did he lose in 2020?

Well, no worries, Owens has you covered. She has another song with the self-explanatory title “Trump Won”, explaining that Trump did win, including California and New York, but the election was stolen by Democrats. (So why did God permit that to happen? Sorry, you only get to ask one follow-up question.)

You might think, from a believer’s standpoint, that it’s risky to declare on God’s behalf who the chosen one is. After all, the Bible is famous for insisting that God’s ways are not our ways and that humans can’t grasp the divine plan. To appoint yourself God’s spokesperson, informing everyone else what he wants and what he’s planning, seems more than a little arrogant. After all, if you’re wrong (as many “prophets” were in 2020), you not only look foolish, you risk incurring the punishment that the Bible decrees for false prophets. You would think a Christian wouldn’t want to chance that.

However, if there was a time when American Christians considered humility a virtue, it’s long past. They’ve decided that God isn’t speaking loudly enough, so they’re going to do it on his behalf. As with the Jericho March, where one speaker after another announced that God personally revealed his will to them, they’ve crowned themselves infallible messengers proclaiming God’s wishes to the rest of us.

I’m an atheist, but if I were religious, I’d say that all this worshipful iconography Christians have constructed around Trump looks just like idolatry, which the Bible emphatically warns against.

After all, Owens’ song contains a perfect example of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much denial. She includes the lyric “I’m not saying / He’s something divine”. Why would she write that unless she knew other people were saying that, or might reasonably interpret her as saying that? Do Christians normally feel the need to add a disclaimer that their leaders aren’t God incarnate?

It’s not even the first time the religious right has done something like this. In 2021, CPAC unveiled a literal golden idol of Trump to cheers and applause. At least one person was photographed bowing down to it.

Evangelical Christians have constructed a cult of personality around Trump in the most literal sense. This greedy, lying, racist, pussy-grabbing felon has become the focal point of the religious right’s zealous worship and devotion. They’ve literally deified him, in the same way ancient people believed that their kings were either appointed by the gods to rule, or else were gods themselves.

But whether they realize it or not, they’re facing a problem: the subject of their worship isn’t a conveniently ethereal messiah, but an elderly, out-of-shape man. When he dies, and he will die some day, they’re going to go into a tailspin. How do you cope when God’s chosen one dies a failure, without accomplishing all the things you believed he’d do?

When that time comes, it’s going to be a full-blown theological crisis. Just as with other failed messiahs through history, I won’t be surprised if Christians cope by inventing a new mythology that Trump sacrificed himself for the sins of the world.

Ironically, we could be witnessing the birth of a new religion in real time. In a thousand years, if Christianity is still around, it may have mutated into a messianic religion of Trumpism. We might well see a certain orange tycoon shoehorned into the Trinity; or written into the Bible with his own set of gospels that bear only a tenuous resemblance, if any, to the actual events of history; or made the subject of prophecies that he’ll return to earth one day.

(Imagine the apologists: “We know for a fact that Donald Trump miraculously healed COVID using blessed bleach, and multiplied Trump steaks and paper towels at his rallies, because we have five hundred testimonies from people who saw it happen! If they had been lying, there would have been critics who would have pointed it out!”)

It’s probably a tribute the man would enjoy. But it will be proof of the moral decay and terminal collapse of Christianity.