"You Shall Know Them By Their Deeds"


Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News/Getty Images via CNN Newsource

They did it again.

They simply cannot help themselves, and despite their incessant name-dropping, it doesn’t seem like God can, either.

These people are seemingly beyond saving.

As a fierce Blue tsunami renovated the entire political landscape of the United States on Election Day, bringing with it a searing repudiation of the Trump regime’s abject barbarism, white Evangelical Christians were the most notable holdouts—again.

For the sixth time in ten years, in numbers far exceeding every other substantial demographic across this nation, they have elected to co-sign cruelty, amen exclusion, and knowingly harm their neighbors. 

In nearly unchanged percentages, White Conservatives who claim faith have reiterated their allegiance to a Godless career mobster and rejected the open-hearted namesake of their religious tradition. It’s been a wholesale betrayal of biblical proportions.

Despite every human rights atrocity committed by the Republican Party since their bloated orange messiah of misery began his now ten-year campaign of boundless brutality, insatiable greed, and peerless perversion, they have remained prostrate before him.

Proven sexual violence, documented acts of treason, a litany of war crimes, and an unrelenting, decade-long torrent of lies, vulgarity, and dehumanizing rhetoric were not enough to extricate them from complete cultic adoration.

And speaking as a former pastor and for the tens of millions of people across this nation who genuinely desire to embody Jesus’, it’s been both heartbreaking and blood-boiling.

The good news is that the “nones,” religiously unaffiliated voters, have eclipsed white Evangelicals at the polls, and these are the people who helped elect Christians Talarico and Hamilton, and powered the blue wave that deeply faithful and fiercely anti-religious people are celebrating together.

And this is where we’ve gotten things a bit twisted.

One of the leading storylines in the wake of the election has been the perceived emergence of a new kind of Christianity taking hold in America. Historic wins by openly Christian Democratic candidates in Texas and Kansas have been widely hailed by pundits, the media, and progressive Christians throughout the country as the sudden rise of “the Christian Left,” but that isn’t quite accurate.

Yes, at long last, the Democrats have seemingly realized that they don’t have to cede faith to the Religious Right; that a sizable portion of their base are deeply spiritual people who have felt orphaned by the political poisoning of the Conservative White Church. The political Left has seemingly widened their tent in a way they may have been reticent to in the past.

But the simple truth of the matter is that what we’re seeing right now isn’t the arrival of progressive Christianity; it’s the arrival of… well, Christianity. 

I mean, the Jesus kind, the love your neighbor kind, the kind the MAGA movement has jettisoned, the kind that the Evangelical Right has all but eradicated from its buildings, its messaging, and its collective aspirations.

This may seem like an exercise in semantics, but it is a critical distinction and should serve as a pivot point for us as we think and talk about faith in America moving forward.

For decades, White Evangelicals here have perpetrated the greatest religious fraud in modern history; rebranding something that began a couple thousand years ago as a compassionate community of disparate, mutually invested human beings—into a gated, guarded neighborhood of whiteness, straightness, and America First selfishness

For too long we have allowed the Right to self-identify as followers of Jesus, something that has been both heresy and lunacy. This election reminds us again that when it comes to regaining the theological plot they’ve lost, these people cannot be saved. 

They are not moved by the suffering around them or infuriated by the barbarism of their political allies in the way the rest of us are, religious and nonreligious alike. They have spent thousands of Sundays in churches drinking from a corrosive cocktail of nationalism, narcissism, and fear that has left them unable to embrace the open-hearted, loving religion people like Talarico and Hamilton successfully campaigned on.

It’s time we named what’s really happening here in America. 

It isn’t that the Democratic Party has finally created some novel, politically viable, left-leaning version of Christianity to compete with the Right; it’s that the empathy of Jesus is finally being platformed by Democratic candidates. And in doing so, White Evangelicals are being exposed as having hijacked and sinfully misappropriated an entire faith tradition.

The Christian Left is simply Christianity as Christ modeled it: compassion-centered, justice-focused, table-expanding, peace-seeking. That this all feels new here says everything about the heartless, loveless garbage the Religious Right has spent decades selling us.

It’s time we boycotted it for good.

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Released 51 Years Ago Today

Damn I feel old.

Chicago: Chicago IX (1975)

This was my first real exposure to Chicago. Oh sure, I was aware of the band (I mean you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing them), but this was the first album of theirs I actually bought. I remember putting the record on my turntable, plugging in my headphones and falling in love. From that point on I was a huge fan, and as recently as the 2000s I was still backfilling my catalog with the earlier albums I'd previously brushed off.

To be honest, however, I did lose interest in the majority of their work after Chicago X, the album that came out immediately after this one.

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It’s certainly been a perfectly goddamned delightful week, hasn’t it?

One by one, the worst shitheads in the world lost their elections. Corruption-factory Ken Paxton. Political tourist Darline Graham. Barrel-bottom slimeball Vivek Ramaswamy. All gone fuckity-bye, replaced by actual, fundamentally decent people. 

Pinch us, we must be dreaming, am I right?

But one thing’s been missing, through this entire week. One familiar noise that’s been conspicuously absent from the national discourse. What could it be?

Oh right — it’s the tiresome sound of a colicky piss-baby with a freshly power-loaded diaper, bellyaching about a stolen election.

Does anybody really believe that this “Election” was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting “dumps” were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote.
It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter! President DJT

Wait a minute. Hold on, what in the actual fuck is this half-baked, weak-tea bullshit?

Donny, you’ve had seven whole days to work yourself up into a thermonuclear lather, and this is the pathetic mewling you end up farting out? Come on. This is a stolen election, man — it’s right in your wheelhouse. This is the shit you live for.

Couldn’t you have put more effort into this post? Where’s the all-caps hysteria? Where are the multiple exclamation points? This is so low-energy. ‘Sleepy Dear Leader,’ is that what you want us to call you now? Bro, did you fall asleep in the middle of writing this? Did the Diaper Nurse have to finish it for you, and click ‘send’?

Where are the clownish misspellings? Remember “RIGGED AND STOLLEN” from 2020? Six years later, we’re still pissing ourselves with laughter at that dumbfuckery.

Come on, dude. Give us something to work with here. You didn’t even bother to thank us for our attention.

And why just one post? Why not a dozen, each one that much more hysterical than the last? Come on, bro. This is the best you can do? I’m so fucking disappointed in you, Donny. I expected so much better. We all did.

This is just sad.


Actually, the best part of Donny’s post was the reaction from the rest of the world, which pretty much rose up as one to tell him to shut the fuck up.

Massachusetts Rep Jim McGovern, am I right?

This is getting so old, so fast. You lost. Get over it.

Rep McGovern is right. Donny lost, and he really needs to stick a fucking sock in it.

Governor Pritzker knows what I’m talking about.

The first stage of grief is denial, Donald.

Even MAGA’s reaction to Dear Leader’s post was muted. Everyone’s so tired of this shit. MAGA knows the election wasn’t RIGGED. Nor was it STOLLEN. They themselves voted for James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and Annie Andrews and Abdul El-Sayed, and on and on.

No one has time for any of Donny’s clownfuckery right now. We all just want it to end. January 3rd can’t come fast enough.


Oh, but Donny wasn’t finished with us, after his whiny ‘stolen election’ post. He had lots more crazy left in the tank. At around four in the afternoon, he summoned the media for a hastily-thrown-together, unscheduled press conference starring none other than The Wrong Dana White™.

The premise of this slapdash dog-and-pony show? That Donny, irrepressible madcap scamp that he is, was just funning with us, when he claimed to have offered the job of White House Press Secretary to the Wrong Dana.

Get it? HA HA HA.

Dana White: “I don’t tell brothers ‘no’ to anything, I know. I didn’t say no. I literally— everybody— every media outlet was calling me, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful and say anything until he— he— he, uh, said something first, so—”

Donny: “We were having a very bad press day. And I said— I don’t know why— I thought of his name. Been my friend for a long time. I said, ‘you know, I think I’m going to get— DANA WHITE to be my new press secretary, sent it to a group of— of— press. And that was it. I sent it to them. And then, they wrote the story as if I wasn’t kidding. And you were INUNDATED and I was inundated. He was here anyway, with— we thought we would have a little fun, and we brought Dana in. He would be— fantastic.”

I have two words. Bull and shit.

Oh please. That’s not what happened at all. I will go to my final resting place convinced that the actual story played out as I wrote it up the other day. Someone in the White House suggested naming the actual trained media spokesperson Dana White be the new Press Sec, and dumb demented Donny got it wrong and mistakenly offered the job to his crony Dana White, the dude who arranges human cockfights for money.

That’s what happened, I’m sure of it. Donny doesn’t make jokes. He has no sense of humor. 

Yesterday’s unscheduled presser was a face-saving operation. The Wrong Dana™ had been in London, and they flew him all the way across the ocean so just he could stand at that podium and pretend to have been joking right along with Donny. An actual joke doesn’t need that much explaining attached to it.

The fact that Donny’s handlers put this much time and effort into denying that Donny was making a serious offer is all the proof you need that Donny was in fact making a serious offer.

And look at all the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press, falling for it and laughing. How fucking embarrassing for everyone involved.


But wait — the crazy lasted all the way into the evening.

Shortly after 9pm, a very surprised Mimi Geerges, the host of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Primetime, announced to her audience, ‘it looks like we’ve got a call from the White House.’

What the hell? Did you notice that? As Geerges takes the call, a woman is heard giggling in the background, followed by the grating sound of Dear Leader’s voice.

What the fuck was going on? Were Donny and his diaper nurse tickling each other, going, ‘you call C-SPAN,’ ‘No, YOU call C-SPAN. TEE HEE HEE’? 

Where are the adults? What if it hadn’t been C-SPAN? What if Donny and Natty had been daring each other to phone in the nuclear launch codes? Don’t laugh, you know damned well it could happen. 

Donny then proceeds to ramble incoherently for eight entire minutes, his putrefying brain pinballing from immigration, to Piss-Drunk Pete Kegstand, to Venezuela, to Iran, and back and forth and back and forth. Mimi Geerges keeps trying to interject and steer the conversation, and he just barrels right over her. Eventually, Donny exhausts himself, and Geerges manages to get him off the phone.

It’s fucking batshit. What in god’s name is going on? Donny and Natty should not be left alone, unsupervised. Who knows what they’ll get up to next? 


Let’s palate cleanse with some Thomas Massie.

Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Piss-Drunk Pete Kegstand yesterday — and then he went out to do a victory lap on C-SPAN,

“The Secretary has scheduled his own press conference, that they’re going to let him deliver a rebuttal. And to that point, I hope he addresses the eight articles, and doesn’t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion, and do some pull-ups, and, you know, call everybody fat and gay. I may have just given you half his speech, I don't know.”

Look, let’s be clear-eyed. Thomas Massie is not our friend. He’s against most of the things we’re for. The Heritage Foundation gives him a 96% rating.

But he loathes the same people we do — and he’s so fucking good at throwing shade, so let’s just enjoy that.

Reporter: “Have you spoken to Sen. McConnell about this effort?”

Massie: “I have not, but if it were possible to have a conversation with McConnell...”

Oh man. I only wish Mitch McConnell had been alive to hear himself dissed like that.


this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Does anyone actually believe he'll show up after the shellacking he took on Tuesday??

Yeah, I know he's legally obligated to give that SOTU, but when has he ever let laws stop him from doing something he did—or did not—want to do?

And if he does show up, you know it's going to be nothing more than airing of grievances and the incoherent ramblings of a mad man.

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR GRIEVANCES.

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Released 52 Years Ago Today

Damn, I feel old.

Carpenters: Horizon (1974)

What struck me most about this album back in the day was the audio quality. I don't know what magic the recording engineers used, but Karen's voice was crystal clear, front and center. It was as if she was on stage right in front of you, and it seemed you could hear every instrument used in the arrangements.

Their take on "Please Mr. Postman" remains one of my favorites.

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