2025-12-27 01:09:13
As the clock struck midnight on Christmas morning at one Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, at least one someone was stirring.
Starting in the early hours of December 25 and ending in the evening, President Donald Trump posted over 100 times on Truth Social.
Hours before Trump sat alongside first lady Melania Trump to answer the calls of children dialing into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, during which he told kids from Oklahoma that “we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa,” the president shared posts attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and former President Joe Biden, amongst several others.
At 12:01, Trump began the spree by sharing an over-eight-minute video by someone explaining “The DEMOCRAT FRAUD PYRAMID.”
Throughout the day, concluding around 7 o’clock, the president repeated many times that the 2020 election was stolen. He also shared a post that praised White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news,” another of someone who called Democrats a “criminal organization,” and one where Trump said, of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), “Throw her out of the U.S., Now!”
Many times, Trump would post a photo or video to his platform and then immediately after post a screenshot of how a supporter responded to his post. For example, around 1 in the morning, Trump shared a video of White House border czar Tom Homan at a press conference, discussing the administration’s mass deportation campaign. Less than one minute later, there’s another Trump post of a user called “RWB_American” on X quoting the video and writing about “the success ICE is having at nabbing illegals that need to be departed.”
The official Christmas presidential message from the White House, though, had a different tone.
“The First Lady and I send our warmest wishes to all Americans as we share in the joy of Christmas Day and celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” it began. The message contained religious messages about “the gift of God’s only begotten Son” and Trump’s vow to always remain one Nation under God. (There was a lot of religious messaging across the administration on the 25th, spurring critiques from those saying the various posts skirted the US’s separation of church and state.)
President Trump ended his posting spree with a Merry Christmas message to constituents. It read, in part, “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to “drop him like a dog” when things got too HOT.”
Then, as a somewhat ominous sign off, Trump wrote: “Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!”
2025-12-26 20:30:00
Have you ever reached out to a customer-service helpline and fallen into a vortex of bad phone-tree options, all AI-generated, none of which have anything to do with your problem? There’s no capable human to help—even after you beg for a “representative!” across the automated line.
That’s how Jennifer M., a lifelong resident of Astoria, Queens, felt when her 66-year-old mother-in-law was widowed and fell behind on paying her rent in 2023. Debilitated by severe arthritis and addled by grief, an eviction loomed in less than two weeks. Surely, Jennifer thought, her mother-in-law qualified for some government assistance. But figuring out what kind and from which agencies took her through the frustrating and often-futile process of trying to navigate New York’s byzantine bureaucracy.
“Everyone we would call, they would give us the runaround and send us right back where we started,” she says, asking not to share her last name to protect her mother-in-law’s privacy.
That is, until she requested help from the office of then-New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now mayor-elect of New York City, and reached his constituent services director, Mariela Ortiz.
Ortiz has served in this role for the last three of Mamdani’s five years in the state legislature and has become well-versed in helping the people of New York’s District 36 battle slumlords and unresponsive government agencies. To prove a housing complex was illegally turning off the heat in the middle of the night, for instance, Ortiz once secured a building inspector to do a surprise inspection at midnight. (She hasn’t received complaints about heating there since). After a year of chronic outages, she pushed the city to restore gas to 20 residential customers and a beloved Mexican restaurant. She has even personally accompanied worried constituents to their traffic court and social security hearings.
“Our agencies are here to provide services,” Ortiz says of her job, which entails helping dozens of people per week. “This is what they’re supposed to be doing.”
But in treating constituent problems as urgent and solvable, Ortiz actually provided an answer to a strangely radical hypothetical question: What if every day government services actually worked?
Right now, most New Yorkers don’t think that they do. In fact, only 27 percent of residents rate government services as excellent or good, according to a 2025 report from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC); in 2017, 44 percent gave satisfactory scores. During outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s tenure, for example, most city buses received “failing grades” on metrics such as arrival and wait times. Bad landlords cost city taxpayers an estimated $300 million per year in incurred expenses, such as emergency shelter and legal services. Roughly 35 percent of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps) took longer than 30 days to process.
“This is a wake-up call that things are not where they need to be in New York,” CBC President Andrew Rein told local news site amNY. “New Yorkers are telling their leadership to focus on these priorities.”
Members of Mamdani’s incoming team—which Ortiz expects to join in some capacity—promise that they will. While the administration’s goals include free city buses, rent freezes, and city-run grocery stores, they also want clean and safe public transit that runs on schedule, and the imposition of immediate consequences for landlords, businesses, and agencies that fail to abide by code.
“There is often low trust in government because our processes are just too hard to navigate.”
“There is often low trust in government because our processes are just too hard to navigate,” Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff in the assembly, and soon in his mayoral office, tells Mother Jones. “It’s really important to us that there are fewer barriers for New Yorkers to get what they need from the government, which is supposed to serve them.”
A prerequisite for addressing constituent problems, however, is knowing what they are. On a recent Sunday, leading up to his January inauguration, Mamdani wanted to find out, so he brought a pen and notepad to a series of 3-minute sit-downs with over 100 New Yorkers.
During his 12-hour “The Mayor is Listening” event at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on December 14, New Yorkers vented about the kinds of grievances that come across Ortiz’s desk every day: difficulty communicating with New York agencies; road construction work during rush hour traffic; apartments without sufficient heat or hot water in the winter; illegal price gouging in rent-controlled buildings.
I reached out to Mamdani’s incoming deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who has served in many high-ranking roles across New York City and state government—including as deputy mayor once before under Bill de Blasio—to learn about what the team took away from these brief meetings. There was genuine excitement about the campaign platform, he said, but also earnest demands concerning basic needs.
New York City is “the most expansive major local government in the country,” Fuleihan says. “So the school districts, the water and sewer, streets, traditional city services that we’re going to deliver—excellence has to be achieved [because] New Yorkers will feel that on a day-to-day basis.”
Even with his long experience, Fuleihan, who is 74, says he’s learning a new approach to governance from Mamdani. “He has made clear to us that we’re all going to be part of the effort of listening to New Yorkers,” he says. “That’s not something that somebody in my role would traditionally do, right? They would be in City Hall.”
As an assemblyman, Mamdani took cues from the community when working on advocacy and legislation. When roughly a quarter of constituent complaints pertained to the high Con Edison electric and gas rates, he joined as a party in the New York State Public Service Commission case against the utility company, which helped secure lower rate hikes and more transparency.
According to Ortiz, Mamdani also inserted himself into email chains and joined virtual meetings to push along individual constituent issues. A perk of her boss’s recent mayoral win, Ortiz says, is that agencies seem to be even more responsive to her requests.
Jennifer M’s family crisis was quickly resolved. Given the pressing eviction deadline, Mamdani’s office escalated her mother-in-law’s case with a government housing agency and helped her to apply for a grant that covered her rent so that she was able to remain in her home. As a result of a thorough case assessment, Ortiz also discovered the woman was eligible for a rent-increase exemption for senior citizens and approximately $350 more in monthly Social Security benefits—money the widow has been able to use to stay current on her rent.
After he is sworn in on January 1, the struggle for Mamdani and his team will be expanding this approach for a constituency that will have increased seventyfold, from 122,000 to 8.5 million. He’s made his loftier ambitions clear. But, even before those big plans can be realized, he is determined to expand his previous strategies to improve the efficiency of existing government services.
In that work, Mamdani’s team may discover what so many major corporations seem to forget: Even without bells and whistles, customer service that simply does what it is supposed to do can go a long way to ensure brand loyalty. The same is likely true for voters.
When I asked Jennifer M. which mayoral candidate received her vote in November, she didn’t miss a beat: “Who do you think?”
2025-12-26 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Pete Hegseth, who has taken to calling himself the Secretary of War, says the Defense Department “does not do climate change crap.” Just last week, he asserted that the agency “will not be distracted” by climate change or “woke moralizing.”
But a new report suggests that the Pentagon is engaging with the issue in one serious way: As it stockpiles dozens of critical minerals, it is threatening the energy transition by hoarding resources that could be used to decarbonize transportation, energy production, and other sectors.
President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated $7.5 billion to bolster the Pentagon’s reserves of critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, and graphite that are held in six depots nationwide, an effort supervised by the Defense Logistics Agency. Such materials are used in everything from jet engines to weapons systems and often are mined or processed in China or other nations. The materials in the stockpile are only accessible during times of declared war, or by order of the Undersecretary of War, a Defense Logistics Agency spokesperson said.
The report on potential peaceful uses for those materials was released by the Transition Security Project, which analyzes the economic, climate, and geopolitical threats posed by the US and British military. Lorah Steichen, a strategist who prepared the document, said America is essentially facing a choice between missiles and buses. The Pentagon’s planned cobalt and graphite stockpiles (7,500 metric tons and 50,000 metric tons, respectively) could electrify 102,896 buses — dwarfing the 6,000 or so currently operating in the US. Or they could be used to produce 80.2 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, which is more than twice the energy storage the country has now.
The International Energy Agency also has said such minerals could be used for peaceful ends, like building batteries, wind turbines, and other technologies underpinning the green transition. But designating a mineral as “critical” allows the government to fast-track mining and procurement for military ends. “The term ‘critical minerals’ originates out of military stockpiling—the criticality of a mineral is linked, in part, to its significance to national security,” Steichen said.
“It creates an accountability gap and obscures a clear understanding of military resource use.”
The last time the Pentagon hoarded nonfuel materials was during the Cold War, when the government sought to create storehouses of industrial raw materials (like metals and agricultural supplies) and limit dependency on other nations. By the late 1990s, the United States began to see other countries—particularly those in the Caribbean—as generally reliable suppliers, and by 2003, the stockpile was reduced to nearly nothing. During Joe Biden’s presidency, there was some movement toward reviving the stockpile specifically to fight climate change. (That plan, according to a DLA spokesperson, never came to fruition.) This year, however, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $2 billion for expansion of the hoard, and $5.5 billion toward the supply chain infrastructure needed to secure those minerals.
Even some military and governmental experts have agreed that expanding the government’s stash is concerning. A Department of Defense report from 2021, for example, said that if the supply chain for rare earth elements—a subset of critical minerals—is disrupted, “the civilian economy would bear the brunt of harm.”
“The point here is to push back against some of the bellicose associations of critical minerals and the different assumptions that go into that,” Steichen said. “What are the materials that are actually necessary for the energy transition, compared to this other definition of criticality?”
Militaries aren’t required to report their greenhouse-gas emissions—and the US military, in particular, is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and accounts for about 80 percent of the US government’s overall emissions. They also generally aren’t required to report the quantities of minerals they’re procuring and using.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin who studies extraction and resource frontiers, says these things deserve more scrutiny. “Particularly as we’re moving into a time where there is much more overt taxpayer-funded support of critical mineral mining and processing projects, the taxpayer does need to have quite a bit more information,” she said.
The Defense Logistics Agency made an unusual admission when it released exactly how much cobalt and graphite it is working to procure. Often, Steichen said, such information isn’t easily available to the public. Some numbers are known—for example, a single F-35 warplane reportedly requires about 920 pounds of rare earth minerals for its engines and weapons-tracking systems. But across the Pentagon’s vast web of suppliers, it’s not clear where all the minerals are going.
“It creates an accountability gap and obscures a clear understanding of military resource use,” Steichen said. “We know this is the amount they’re seeking to stockpile—but we don’t know the specific volume of those materials going into different military sectors, or to different military contractors.”
The Pentagon has been investing in mines that produce some of these minerals in places like Alaska, Idaho, and Saudi Arabia. Right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Rand have spent the past five years urging the government to stockpile these materials to ease its reliance on adversaries like China, which currently dominates the global critical minerals market.
Researchers like Klinger question the federal decision to prioritize military stockpiling—in part because most critical minerals, like graphite, have the potential to be recycled when they’re used in batteries, but are lost when made into, say, bombs. One thing sustaining demand for fossil fuels is the fact that they are consumed through use, Klinger said. Critical minerals like lithium and cobalt, on the other hand, can, when used for civilian purposes, be reclaimed or recycled.
“The one application of critical minerals that destroys them through use is literally blowing them up,” she said. “Are these critical minerals going into energy technologies, which then have a whole host of societal benefits, or are they simply being dug out of the ground in one place to be blown up in another place?”
2025-12-24 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Get in, losers, we’re going grocery shopping. And we’re headed for everything but the perimeter of the supermarket. Past the righteous bundles of Swiss chard, the grim towers of beets, the piously arranged persimmons in their little foam cradles, we’re charging right into the belly of the beast, RFK Jr.’s personal hellscape, the subject of a new lawsuit in San Francisco, the source of unending maternal guilt, the interior aisles of ultra-processed snacks, cereals, and frozen foods. Come with me as we embark on a tour of only the finest causes of chronic disease. Here is our shopping list:
Fruit Loops: If you really want to troll your MAHA friends, this is your jam. The beautiful food dyes are set to be phased out by the end of 2026, so stock up while you can. A soon-to-be collector’s item!
Carnation Instant Breakfast: Does your kid both love milkshakes and take 11 years to eat breakfast, by which I mean lick the butter off some toast? Do I have the convenience food for you! In a wide assortment of natural—Strawberry Sensation!—make that “natural”, flavors.
Instant ramen: Move over, Guy Fieri, and make way for the real mayor of Flavor Town, monosodium glutamate, the unsung hero of ramen spice packets’ blood-pressure-raising saltiness. I could write a whole other essay about the virtues of MSG. And while we’re on the subject of MAHA bêtes noir, don’t even tempt me to sing the praises of Roundup, which I want to do with every contrarian bone in my body. (But also, Roundup and GMOs really are the reason you can afford food at all these days, I am being so for real right now—just look at my previous work.)
Oat milk: I thought I would throw this one in here like a little grenade. Did you think you were being healthy by enjoying some plant dairy instead of your cherished raw milk? Surprise, it’s ultra-processed!
Frozen potstickers: If you don’t have a bag of these in your freezer, do you even deserve to have a freezer? Really look deep inside your soul and ask yourself this question. Also, don’t you think it’s kind of racist of you not to have food from other cultures in your freezer? Who are you, some kind of “heritage American”?
Frozen saag paneer: See above, freezer groyper. Your frostbitten ground meat from barbecue season just cannot compete.
Lorna Doones: Unleash your inner 85-year-old and indulge in this classic Nabisco treat! If you really want to know what makes this bland baddie sing, it’s unbleached enriched flour, sugar, soybean and/or canola oil, palm oil, corn flour, salt, high fructose corn syrup, baking soda, soy lecithin, cornstarch, and artificial flavor. You’re welcome.
The little yogurts with the yogurt on one side and the sprinkles or cookie crumbs on the other: Ew, just kidding, everyone knows these are disgusting.
Frozen latkes: Do you want your house to smell like a Denny’s for the next year? No? Allow me to recommend not making your Hanukkah latkes from scratch. Another option, but requires more effort, is to take frozen hash browns and mold them into little patties.
Boxed mac and cheese: Look, I’m no nanny state, so I’ll leave it up to you whether you want the neon orange kind or the wan one with the sad little virtue-signaling bunny. But you should know that the main difference is that one is a nostalgic childhood classic, and the other is designed to make you appear to be a better parent.
Once you are done procuring the items on this list, head on over to that pharmacy, where you can fill your Prozac and Ritalin prescriptions, stock up on Tylenol, and of course, get your vaccines while you still can. Like Fruit Loops, soon to be collector’s items.
2025-12-24 19:00:00
Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it.
So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.) But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.”
On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2025.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: So you got a new book out, but wait, before we get to that, before we get to that, I should tell my listeners that I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve been following you for a while and I think I came across your work because I’m the son of a preacher man, grew up in the church and definitely have my own religious beliefs. But what I love about the work that you do is you are just kind of demystifying the Bible and putting it in context. How did you end up doing this type of work, for lack of better term, fact-checking people’s conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram?
Dan McClellan: Yeah, that was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school. In fact, I think from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else. Because I have taught at some universities, but never on a full-time basis. I don’t have a tenure-track position or anything like that. But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There’s a very big gap between those two.
And the more I learned about the Bible and an academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me and the more I wanted to be able to share the insights that come from that expertise with the folks on the street and in the pews, which is not an easy thing to do, not only because it requires packaging frequently very complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there tends to be a lot of pushback from the streets and the pews when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.” Because of how deeply embedded in their worldviews their own understandings of the Bible are. And so I’ve always tried to engage on social media with the discourse about the Bible and religion.
And I’ve always tried to combat the spread of misinformation and speak out against hoaxes and fake artifacts that people try to pawn off as real, have been doing this for a long time on blogs and on message boards and on Facebook and things like that. And the reach is just not that great on those channels. And then for whatever reason, I stumble across TikTok and suddenly I’m able to find an audience that is interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity over and against the other. And I’m very happy to be in a position where I say that I combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion for a living. And I wouldn’t take a university position right now if somebody offered me one. So very happy to be in the position I am right now.
If any of our listeners have not seen you on TikTok or Instagram and they’re just listening to this conversation and they’re being introduced to you for the first time, I think they would be surprised to know that you’re also a huge pop culture nerd, like myself, a specific type of nerd though. You’re a comic book nerd. I mean, I’m sure you cover many nerddoms, but the one we definitely have in common is comic book and so which makes your videos fun.
I think, from what I gather, there are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed shirt, Ivory tower academic. I’m just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and likes to read comic books and stuff like that. And so I mean, how much better off could things be for me that the things that I enjoy are things that my audience enjoys and that I get to just riff about?
So when I think about you on TikTok, I mean, basically you’re fact-checking people who are bending the message of the Bible for their own purposes. I mean, people have been doing this since the Bible was written. But today with social media, those interpretations are now being delivered in a new and really effective way.
Yeah. I think the Bible for a long time has been viewed as the highest authority, and particularly after the Reformation when a lot of Christians got rid of everything else and now all we have is the Bible. But if you have something, a text that is supposed to be God’s very word and inspired and inerrant and that is the ultimate authority, if you can leverage that in support of your identity markers, in support of your rhetorical goals and everything like that, that’s a powerful tool in structuring power and values and boundaries. And so it becomes the… That’s the holy grail. That’s what you need to have on your side.
But because it’s a text, it has no inherent meaning. It has to be interpreted, which then means whoever best interprets the text in support of their ideologies is going to be able to leverage that ultimate authority. And so I think an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to read their own ideologies and their own identity politics into the text because that is a very attractive instrument that they can then leverage to serve their own ends. And unfortunately, far too often that means powerful people using that as a tool against less powerful people and groups. And I think that’s particularly true today.
I would say that when we look at the way religion is being used to fight against things like homosexuality, the way the Bible is being used to reframe slavery. There was one clip where Charlie Kirk was a person that you were taking his, I wouldn’t say misinformation, I would say disinformation because I think that he actually knows the truth of what he’s saying, as someone that knows the Bible a little bit, even I can look at the things he’s saying and be like, “What are you talking about?”
Yeah, he’s an example of somebody I get tagged in his videos a lot and I try not to engage unless there’s a plausible case to be made that what he’s talking about overlaps with the Bible. That’s an example of somebody who right now is trying to leverage the Bible in defense of Christian nationalism because that’s the hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians.
And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way and structuring everything to serve the interests of already privileged and powerful groups over and against the interests of already vulnerable groups. I think folks who love power more than they love people are the actual problem that is causing a lot of the social ills that we have today. And unfortunately, the Bible is very frequently one of the main instruments that we find in the hands of those people.
A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there’s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy?
Certainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, “Show no mercy,” or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, “You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.” And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that’s a bad narrative and that’s a bad message. There’s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we’re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling.
That is what allows us to cooperate. That’s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful.
But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they’re trying to convince others it’s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It’s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It’s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity.
This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that’s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they’re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power.
Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It’s good for them to… I mean, sometimes when I’m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand.
With an AK, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. It’s like that’s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image.
Yeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you’ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They’re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they’re doing, are very intentionally doing it.
So tell me about your book. why’d you write it? All the things.
All the things. It’s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I’m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says.
And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they’re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, “I’m going to set that aside and I’m going to try to understand what would’ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.” And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible.
All of your studies that you’ve… And you’ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things?
I think there’s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that’s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn’t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it’s about trying to establish who’s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles.
You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, “I don’t like the way you do it. I’m going to do it this other way.” And they’re trying to make different points. But yeah, they’re definitely rhetorical texts.
They’re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it’s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors.
Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, “You step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don’t mess around. There’s no mercy.” Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that’s true?
I would agree that that’s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we’re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there’s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it’s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible.
And this is one of the reasons that I’ve tried to point out there’s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there’s still war and conflict, but there’s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it’s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it’s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible.
I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you’ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it’s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center.
This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I’ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would’ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It’s the blind spot, I don’t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that’s the power of what you do on social media.
And that’s something that it’s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody’s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there’s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, “Oh, no, it’s Old Testament Santa.” And I was like, “Aha.” And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, “Bad form. Here’s why this is bad.” And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what’s being expressed there, I couldn’t unsee that.
It’s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel.
Yeah, it’s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, “Oh, eye have the needle doesn’t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what’s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.” And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don’t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament.
And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, “I’ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that’s where Jesus goes, “Tsk, tsk. It’s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it’s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it’s not impossible.
But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And so people say, “Aha. It doesn’t say… That’s not about economic poverty, that’s about humility.” But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, “Blessed are the poor.” Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we’re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that’s generating the meaning.
And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you’re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It’s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, “This is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.” That’s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, “I was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.” And that’s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible.
Tough question that you’ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn’t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s a wrinkle. That’s something there.” So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things?
Well, and this is something I’ve for a long time said, I don’t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that’s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn’t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically.
So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that’s where I say, “That’s above my pay grade.” I don’t take a pastoral approach to this. I’m not here to hold anybody’s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I’m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate.
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2025-12-24 06:12:05
The Supreme Court blocked President Trump on Tuesday from deploying National Guard troops in Chicago as part of his campaign to use the military to police the streets of Democratic-led cities.
The Trump administration had argued that Chicago was in chaos—referring to protests against immigration enforcement—but the Supreme Court’s order reads, “At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”
In October, Trump called 300 members of the Illinois National Guard into federal service to protect federal agents enforcing immigration policies in Chicago under a federal law that allows the president to federalize members of the Guard if they are “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.” He federalized members of the Texas National Guard the next day.
The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Trump abused that federal law to punish his political opponents.
Lower courts ruled against Trump. On October 9, U.S. District Judge April Perry said she “found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion” and issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the state.
The Supreme Court agreed with the decision, saying that the president can only call on the National Guard if regular military forces couldn’t restore order.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
“There is no basis for rejecting the President’s determination that he was unable to execute the federal immigration laws using the civilian law enforcement resources at his command,” Alito wrote.
Trump has also tried to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Portland.
A federal appeals court ruled last week that the National Guard deployment in Washington can continue, but a federal judge blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Portland in November, and another judge ordered the National Guard to leave Los Angeles earlier this month.
The Trump administration has often gone to the Supreme Court for help when its policies have been blocked by lower courts. In this case, Trump is trying to normalize military policing of protests against him.
This is the first time the high court has weighed in on the president’s use of the National Guard to enforce immigration policies. While the decision only applies to Illinois, it will likely support similar challenges from other cities.
