Unbetitelt

[craymor1]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Pete Hegseth dreams of holy war. Meet his spiritual adviser.

Doug Wilson preaches iron discipline and male dominance. One of his disciples runs the Pentagon.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:

On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson. We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The ­emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants. Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-­profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.

A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”

He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families. For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a “commie publication.”

As Hegseth was bragging about his “kinetic strikes” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like. I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilson’s realm, but also witness aspects of his faith’s exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegseth’s enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of War’s defining ethic.

[...] They married in 1975; by then, Wilson was involved in a new Moscow church. Deeply influenced by the hippie-adjacent Jesus People Movement, he strummed a guitar during services and taught Sunday school. Two years later, he became the pastor of a congregation that would eventually become Christ Church. Over the next decade, though, Wilson grew wary of the wishy-washy elements of evangelicalism—some of his congregants had even begun questioning whether God could be omniscient. He was drawn instead to the more absolutist theology of Calvinism, which emphasizes an all-knowing God who has already preordained who goes to Heaven. His own brother ended up leaving Christ Church over their theological differences and started his own congregation. But for Nancy, the conversion to Calvinism was “wonderful.” She recalled, “I thought, ‘It’s not all gray and muddled anymore.’”

The Wilsons officially became “reformed”—another word for Calvinist—in 1988, and in the following years, Doug’s influence grew. Logos School became a robust K–12 institution, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools. He started Canon Press, which published his popular homeschool curricula, in 1988 and in the ’90s launched the nationwide Association of Classical Christian Schools and helped found New Saint Andrews College. A series of new churches planted outside Moscow grew into an entire neo-Calvinist denomination, now known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. During the pandemic, Wilson and other church leaders flouted public health restrictions, organizing maskless outdoor psalm sings. These protests garnered media attention, which helped grow their flock as remote work allowed people to relocate to Moscow. Doug estimates that the church has doubled in size since the pandemic. At the Wilsons’ compound, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal of the Kirker life. Nancy showed me a display she had made of her 18 grandchildren’s Logos graduation announcements and brought me up to speed on Judah, who had just graduated from New Saint Andrews and planned to work in DC. Belphoebe, sharing a name with a huntress character in Edmund Spenser’s classic poem “The Faerie Queene,” was now a mother of two. All the grandchildren remained devout and were raising their own kids—Doug and Nancy’s great-grandchildren—in the faith.

[...] The idea of empathy as a sin is having a moment. Conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, elaborating on the same theme. JD Vance hinted at the notion of misplaced empathy in 2025 when he talked about the Christian idea of ordo amoris, Latin for rightly ordered love. “I think it’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” he said in a Fox News interview. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” (Pope Francis disagreed with Vance’s interpretation, describing the concept instead as “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”) In an appearance last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk famously said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Hegseth, too, has waged war against empathy, Wilson told me. “The woke military, the DEI military—all of that was possible because people had accepted as an ethical responsibility to be empathetic, to step into other people’s shoes without judgment,” he said. “Hegseth has emphasized the job of the military is lethality, developing a warrior ethos, not to feel sorry for the guy who wishes that he could wear a dress.” Ostensibly, Wilson was referring to one phrase in Hegseth’s proclamation at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, “No more dudes in dresses…we’re done with that shit!”—a statement that has a distinctly Wilsonian ring to it. Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, de-­wokifying the military has been the focus of Hegseth’s tenure. He has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female and Black military leaders from being promoted. But it is in Hegseth’s unapologetic assertions of hypermasculinity that Wilson’s influence is most apparent. In his Quantico speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the military being “tough as shit” so it could “completely destroy” adversaries.

Wonder where Pete Hegseth is getting his idea of denying promotions to women from? Doug Wilson and his hyper-Calvinist and Christian Patriarchy-tinged worldview.

[caytoniccox]

lol

[comeonamericawakeup]

Another Republican Cunt.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Carte Blanche

Now that Todd Blanche is confirmed as attorney general, we need a roadmap to assess the principal risks and prepare for what’s coming.

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

Cronyism, politicization and outright weaponization of the Justice Department have become so routine in Trump’s second term that the scale is hard to comprehend. New abuses, attacks and crimes by the White House and its enablers land in rapid succession, and they usually register individually rather than as parts of a pattern. That pattern is why Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general carries such grave weight. Critics and former officials warn that Blanche now effectively has free rein at the Justice Department, now that he is no longer angling for the job and forced to appease critics and skeptics in the Senate. He is fully empowered to pursue Trump’s agenda, and there is little to hold him back. We already know where his priorities and loyalties lie. Asked at an April press conference whether he wanted the attorney general job permanently, Blanche said, “I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump.” Pressed on what would happen if Trump chose someone else, Blanche said he would respond, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”

Cultish devotion of that sort—from the man who spent 16 months as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before joining the department—is an organizing principle. It will underlie all of the DOJ’s decisions in the coming years about prosecutions, self-dealing, transparency and even our elections. Rather than throw up our hands and surrender to the storm, we can chart a path above its dark clouds. From there, we can make some predictions about what’s coming straight for us and our democracy now that Blanche is helming the DOJ. We can in fact sort his likely behavior into four large buckets.

But first, in order to get our bearings, it’s helpful to remember what the DOJ is supposed to be. We begin some 50 years ago, in the wake of the previous worst scandal of the modern U.S. presidency.

The reforms Blanche is dismantling

Historically, the Justice Department has not had a clean track record. Even before Nixon, the DOJ was implicated in abuses and scandals. As Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer noted, Woodrow Wilson’s AG targeted socialists and communists, imprisoning thousands without due process. Harding’s AG was forced out amid allegations that he failed to investigate a corruption scandal linked to the interior secretary accepting bribes from oil interests. Bobby Kennedy, serving under JFK, authorized the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. Under Richard Nixon, however, the DOJ truly became an instrument of the president’s personal grievances. Attorney General John Mitchell, who had also run Nixon’s re-election campaign, oversaw illegal wiretaps of anti-war activists, leaked damaging information about Nixon’s political opponents and worked to block publication of the Pentagon Papers before resigning to lead the Nixon re-election committee later implicated in the Watergate break-in.

Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left the department’s credibility in ruins. Gerald Ford’s response was to install Edward H. Levi, a University of Chicago law scholar with no political ambitions of his own, specifically to rebuild the DOJ as a nonpartisan institution the public could trust. At his 1975 swearing-in, Levi told the department that “our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” and warned that nothing could more endanger the country than failing to make that true by word and deed.

Levi spent the next two years building the guardrails that defined DOJ independence for the next half-century. He established early limits on White House contacts with a policy limiting communication between the department and the president on pending matters. He created the Office of Professional Responsibility to police the DOJ’s own attorneys. And he initiated the work that led to the Principles of Federal Prosecution, implemented later by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, which hold that charging decisions should follow the evidence rather than the target’s politics. Every administration since Ford maintained some version of these guardrails for the next 50 years. Until Trump came along.

Weaponized prosecutions and the Principles of Federal Prosecution

The first Blanche bucket carries the slop of Trump’s personal grievances against his political enemies. Here, the Principles of Federal Prosecution bear directly on the pattern we are seeing from this DOJ. And those principles will likely continue to expose Blanche’s politicized prosecution decisions for what they are. Under those principles, a charging decision is supposed to arise from the evidence, not the defendant’s politics. But Pam Bondi, and now Todd Blanche, moved in precisely the opposite direction. Since Blanche took the deputy attorney general post in 2025 and the acting AG role in April, the department has pursued criminal investigations or prosecutions against a lengthening list of Trump’s perceived critics: former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, former FBI Director James Comey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

Bondi’s failure to get any charges to stick against the people on this list contributed to her being pushed out of the job. Blanche no doubt understands that he has to deliver more than Bondi did in order to keep his boss happy. That may not be so simple. The problem both Bondi and Blanche face is institutional. Politicized prosecutions don’t go very well when career prosecutors won’t cooperate. The case against New York Attorney General Letitia James is a good example. After the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia resigned rather than press charges on a politicized case against James that lacked sufficient evidence, Trump installed his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. But she had no prior prosecutorial experience and little support from the office. She personally presented mortgage fraud charges against James to a grand jury and secured an indictment—though it was rife with issues. Not long after, however, a federal judge threw it out on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment itself was invalid. The department returned to a grand jury in Norfolk to refile the charges, but jurors there refused to indict—a rare rejection. Prosecutors tried a second time in Alexandria, before a different grand jury. Jurors refused again. Career prosecutors in New York also invoked the Principles of Federal Prosecution in the corruption case against then-Mayor Eric Adams. They were fired or resigned rather than carry out the DOJ’s order to drop corruption charges against Adams as part of what was reported as an arrangement trading dismissal for Adams’s cooperation with the White House on immigration enforcement.

The DOJ also struck out in its attempt to prosecute sitting lawmakers who challenged Trump’s unlawful military orders. Prosecutors asked a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. to indict Sens. Kelly and Slotkin, along with four House members, over a video in which the lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, reminded service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders. The grand jury refused, demonstrating that regular citizens can also smell a political witch hunt and abridgement of speech when presented with one. This year, while serving as acting attorney general, Blanche extended the White House’s target list beyond individual political enemies of Trump to include groups working to oppose his agenda. The DOJ brought charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization whose prosecution the ACLU describes as touching on nothing more than SPLC’s long-standing work tracking extremist groups. Disturbingly, a federal judge in Alabama, appointed by Trump, refused to dismiss the case, allowing the targeting and weaponization to continue while raising the stakes for organizations everywhere that stand against white supremacy, Christian nationalism and the abridgement of civil liberties.

[...]

The greatest risk of all

After losing the 2020 election, Trump and his allies pushed a series of escalating claims that the national vote had been stolen through systemic fraud. Attorney Sidney Powell alleged that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from Trump to Biden as part of a coordinated international conspiracy. Trump pressed the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, and at one point a group discussed federalizing the effort outright. Advisers even went so far as drafting an executive order that would have appointed Powell as a special counsel with authority to seize state voting machines, while Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, publicly suggested the military could be used to “rerun” the election. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s response was a rare example of the department’s principles actually holding. The DOJ investigated the voting machine-tampering claim specifically and found nothing to support it. Barr told the AP in December 2020 there was no evidence machines had been programmed to skew the results, and separately said he saw “no basis right now for seizing machines by the federal government” when pressed on whether the DOJ would act on the executive order under discussion.

Barr testified to the Jan. 6th Committee that he told Trump directly the fraud claims were “crazy stuff” that were “doing a grave disservice to the country.” Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, independently rejected the machine-seizure executive order as a “terrible idea,” telling colleagues in a late-night West Wing meeting, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.” In short, at least with respect to Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election, Barr continued to recognize the Principles of Federal Prosecution and required that evidence rather than politics guide his decision. That baseline produced an attorney general willing to tell the president no, even under direct pressure, because the department’s institutional integrity mattered more than the president’s preference. It held in 2020, albeit imperfectly and briefly, under a president who would go on to try to overturn the outcome anyway.

Ty Cobb, who served as special counsel to the president during Trump’s first term, argues the guardrail will not hold this time. Referencing Barr’s refusal directly, Cobb told Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo’s “Mehdi Unfiltered” that there is “no circumstance under which we shouldn’t expect Blanche to seize ballots and seize voting machines and try to interfere in the process of the upcoming election.” That warning must be our guiding assumption, and the documented record already points in that direction. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub in Union City, Georgia, seizing between 656 and 700 boxes of materials from the 2020 election, including original ballots, tabulator tapes and ballot images. In April, a federal grand jury convened by the DOJ subpoenaed the Fulton County elections board for the personal information of election staff and volunteers. Notably, the DOJ has now lost 20 consecutive lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, including a Colorado case dismissed with prejudice this month, out of lawsuits filed against more than 30 states and D.C. in total. Twelve of those 20 losses came from judges appointed by Republican presidents, and eight of those 12 came from judges Trump himself appointed. Unable to force compliance through the courts, Trump has turned repeatedly to the SAVE America Act to try to reshape voter eligibility rules ahead of the midterms. That effort has hit resistance in the Senate, where it has twice failed even to reach a simple majority: The vote was 48–50 in April and again in June, with the same four Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) — joining every Democrat in voting no, well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Beyond the courtroom record, the DOJ continues to defend Trump’s anti-mail-voting executive order. Bondi and Blanche have both sent letters pressuring state officials over voter roll compliance, including one to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tying compliance to concerns about unrest in his state.

Jay Kuo, writing for The Big Picture, details how the DOJ under recently Senate-confirmed Todd Blanche’s reign will ramp up the politicized prosecutions of the Trump Regime’s enemies.

See Also:

Lucid (Ruth Ben-Ghiat): Todd Blanche, the Latest Tool: How Autocrats Use Personal Lawyers

[gremlininho]

looking. at you

[maswartz]

[bowlby4]

[bowlby4]

[furryprovocateur]

lmfaooooo

[juicetrump2]

Judge blocks Trump’s order aimed at using USPS to restrict mail-in voting

Ruling expands on earlier order that prevented implementation in 23 mostly Democratic-led states

[posttexasstressdisorder]

[juicetrump2]

Progressive Peggy Flanagan sweeps Minnesota Senate primary in race defined by anti-ICE anger

State’s Democratic lieutenant governor bests Angie Craig in another election contest pitting a progressive against a moderate

[bavovniatko]

This is a true masterclass in historical gaslighting

Oh, ruzzia preserved cultures all right...

Only by aggressively trying to pave national cultures with a monolithic ruzzian identity.

Language Replacement: They loved native languages so much they outright banned them. Under the Russian Empire, decrees like the Valuev Circular (1863) and the Ems Ukaz (1876) literally banned the publication of books, religious texts, and even sheet music in the Ukrainian language. During the Soviet era, ruzzian was strictly enforced as the language of success, administration, and "brotherhood." If you wanted a career, you abandoned your mother tongue.

The Surname Makeover: To help non-ruzzians feel more "included" in the empire, authorities frequently altered indigenous surnames. Across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia, traditional names were forcefully modified to include Russian suffixes like -ov, -ev, and -in. It was administrative erasure disguised as clerical standardization.

"Nurturing" the Cultural Elites

You claimed the empire developed these nations. Indeed, they developed a highly efficient system for murdering anyone who remembered they were a distinct nation.

The Executed Renaissance: In the 1930s, Stalin's regime systematically arrested, deported, and executed a whole generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and intellectuals because their vibrant cultural revival threatened moscow's control.

Katyn and Beyond: When the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, they didn't develop the Polish intelligentsia; they took over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals into the forest of Katyn and shot them in the back of the head. Similar purges decimated the intellectual elites of the Baltic states, Belarus, and the Tatar populations. If you were a local leader, a poet, or a thinker who didn't enthusiastically bow to moscow, you were given a one-way ticket to a Gulag or a mass grave.

They Are "Still Doing It"

And that this isn't just history, it is current geopolitical policy.

In the occupied territories of Ukraine today, the ruzzian state is systematically burning Ukrainian history books, forcing schools to switch entirely to the ruzzian curriculum, and dismantling monuments of local cultural figures.

They are actively deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to ruzziia to be "re-educated" and given ruzzian passports—a textbook tactic of cultural genocide meant to sever the next generation from their heritage.

You are pointing fingers at the horrific histories of the British and Americans. But empire is empire. Ussr/ruzzian empire was a totalitarian meat grinder. It used the excuse of "economic equality" to justify mass murder, systemic oppression, and the complete suppression of human rights. So yes, they definitely "developed" those colonies—straight into the ground.

[mentalhellonline]

[moldspace]

hungry critters

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Russia just bombed the Odesa stadium. The Olympics just invited them back by the way.

Caolan on Twitter

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Federal judge blocks Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order again — this time nationwide

"The federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO’s directives,” Talwani wrote.

Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

A federal judge in Massachusetts Tuesday issued another order blocking the United States Postal Service (USPS) from implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting and his attempt to create a national voter registration list before the midterm elections. District Judge Indiria Talwani agreed with a coalition of voting-rights groups led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts that Trump’s March 2026 anti-voting executive order (EO) was likely unconstitutional, noting that the administration didn’t even attempt to argue otherwise.  “Throughout the multiple actions before district courts, courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO’s directives,” Talwani wrote. “Instead, the federal government has asked this court and others to postpone judicial review on standing and ripeness grounds, arguing that no party may challenge the EO’s constitutionality until the USPS promulgates a Final Rule.”

Despite the government’s requests to the contrary, Talwani decided to review the EO because less than 90 days remain before the midterm elections and millions of Americans who “rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November,” she wrote.

This is the second time Talwani has blocked implementation of Trump’s EO. But unlike the first, this preliminary injunction will now cover the entirety of the nation. In June, the judge ruled in a separate lawsuit and prohibited the order’s implementation in 23 states and Washington, D.C., which she alluded to in her order Tuesday. After the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that earlier decision, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which accepted briefing on an emergency stay request last week and could issue a ruling any day now to either suspend Talwani’s order or affirm it. Meanwhile, in two separate lawsuits, the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia has allowed the federal government to continue implementing the order. 

Great news: The USPS’s enacting of Donald Trump’s highly unconstitutional order restricting vote-by-mail has been blocked… this time, nationwide.

[camelidae]

If you’ve been wondering why getting a dragon as your wizardly familiar is so often discouraged, please understand that it isn’t so much that alchemical experiments and curious dragons don’t mix, it’s that they WANT to mix SO badly.