Salt City Sinner

Posted on 11/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner What does it mean to love God, what does it mean to love power, and what does it mean to love Donald Trump? Are these separate questions, or have they become scrambled together? Given that 81% of Evangelicals voted for Trump , it’s safe to conclude that the latter is the case. Unpacking the tangled webbing of fear, greed, superstition, and credulity that binds white Evangelicals to Donald J. Trump, the most profane and libertine President in United States history, will be the project of generations. Religious conservatives didn’t get here overnight, and it’s an odd place for them to have arrived at, but the journey isn’t as mysterious as it might seem at first glance. A good place to start is Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump , by John Fea . Fea’s book is an attempt to answer these questions in a serious way, and from the standpoint of one who shares many of the values and presuppositions of the average parish...

( This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here .) Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists . That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed...

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching. That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advanceme...