- Humans live by stories: comparing the story of Jesus to the story of the stolen 2020 election;
- Short items about Cracker Barrel; RFK Jr the vax quack; how women are not people; erasing the existence of gay people from public education; how Trump is delusional and thinks the world loves him;
- And how crime rates are higher in the red states than in the blue state cities they are sending their National Guard troops to.
Here’s a piece that might seem cheeky, or offensive (to the easily offended), but is actually a reasonable concern, given how history works and how people create the stories they need.
Free Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, 28 Aug 2025: The Resurrection of Jesus and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
Although there are some who claim Jesus was not even an actual person, I believe the more likely reality is that there was a guy from Galilee who attracted a small, dedicated following by making apocalyptic religious pronouncements, which may have included claims about bodily resurrection—a belief held by several Jews at the time. His early death, by execution or otherwise, left his followers momentarily distraught, but unable to accept his death, they subsequently “saw” him alive.
If you think people would not claim to have seen someone who wasn’t really there, remind yourself how many times people claimed to see Elvis alive after his death. (The number was in the thousands.)
Our desires, hopes, and prejudices influence our perceptions and ultimately can shape our beliefs.
This is a common take among non-believers. There were, are, lots of apocalyptic leaders who attract followers who believe them to be spokesmen for God. Virtually all of them have been forgotten, to the point where most people don’t realize how many there have actually been. But every once in a while, chance circumstances save one from oblivion.
The Jesus cult was small at first, but its message of life after death had some obvious appeal. What really helped the cult take off, however, was its embrace by Constantine and subsequent emperors, who then used the powers of the Roman state to coalesce the various stories about Jesus into an approved, orthodox account and ruthlessly eliminate competing religions or skeptics.
So even though the claim that Jesus was resurrected is wildly implausible, well over two billion people today hold this belief.
Note the “approved, orthodox account” assembled partly to eliminate competing religions. All the big stories, history itself, gets manipulated and boiled down this way. To think any story in the Bible or anywhere else is literally true is to be naive. And I have kept in mind, ever since I read the New Testament myself several years ago, that many of the tenants of “Christianity” were proscriptions by Paul.
And sometimes these stories don’t take very long to solidify into, er, gospel.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election was not rigged, and Joe Biden won that election. Those are facts—facts as certain as the fact that the bodies of the unmummified dead from two millennia ago, including that of any Galilean prophet—long ago decayed into dust, with perhaps a bone fragment or two. But immediately after the election, many Americans could not emotionally accept that result. The cult of Trump blinded them to reality. And, of course, they were reinforced in their erroneous belief by repeated ‘round-the-clock pronouncements of a stolen election by the guardians of that cult.
And so by 2024, Lindsay says, 36% of Americans didn’t accept that Biden won the election. Isn’t 21st century US different than the first century Middle East? Well, now:
Social media and podcasts now peddle as much nonsense as the most religion-intoxicated illiterates of the first century.
It’s *easier* now to spread false narratives now than it has ever been. Lindsay concludes:
Will Trump’s false claim eventually become the “official” version of what happened in 2020? Seems unlikely, doesn’t it. But prior to Constantine, it would have seemed unlikely that the absurd Jesus death cult would become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Don’t bet against the propensity of all too many humans to “see” what they want to see, especially when the coercive weight of the government bolsters their belief.
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Salon, Brian Karem, 29 Aug 2025: As America implodes, Trump can do anything he wants, subtitled “And we can watch it all from a Cracker Barrel rocking chair”
Thank God. Donald Trump has saved us. The old Cracker Barrel logo is returning.
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NY Times, opinion by Maureen Dowd, 30 Aug 2025: Vax Quack Lacks Facts
It’s infuriating to see Bobby Kennedy Jr. be so benighted about vaccines, risking the health of all Americans. How can the most powerful country on earth sow the seeds to make people sick again with preventable, even once-eliminated diseases?
And
NY Times, guest essay, 30 Aug 2025: Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign
And
Axios, 3 Sep 2025: More than 1,000 HHS workers demand RFK Jr.’s resignation in new letter
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Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 28 Aug 2025: Women are not people, and Karoline Leavitt is just fine with it
The Trump Administration is not OK with anyone who mistakes “women” for “people.” Also, it is “disrespectful” to say prayer doesn’t stop mass shootings.
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JMG, 30 Aug 2025: Franklin Graham Blames Satan For MN Mass Shooting
JMG, 30 Aug 2025: MAGA Host Busted In Lies That His DC Home Was Burned In Arson, That He Filmed Murders On His Street
JMG, 1 Sep 2025: Trump Demands To Know If “Covid Drugs” Really Work (He’s lying; he’s channeling anti-vaxxers.)
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Conservatives think that if you never mention a subject, that you shield your children from the real world, they can control the reality those children live in. And it actually works, a lot of the time. (That’s why home-schooling.)
Slate, Lyanne Wang, 3 Sept 2025: “It’s a Direct Attack on Our Identities and Communities”
Subtitled “Historian Don Romesburg has spent his career building LGBTQ-inclusive programs at all levels of education. Now he’s watching them be rapidly dismantled.”
Because conservatives *don’t want their children to know* anything but the approved narratives. (As I’ve said over the years: just knowing about gay people might distract children from their purpose in life: having more children.)
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 3 Sep 2025: Trump’s long weekend of humiliation, subtitled “The harder he tries to be a dictator, the more he’s mocked by both Americans and foreign leaders”
He’s clueless and he thinks the world loves him. Here’s a telling example of his superficiality.
Donald Trump‘s favorite movie is supposedly “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ revolutionary tale about the rise and fall of a wealthy newspaper magnate. Famed documentarian Erroll Morris interviewed Trump about his love of the film in 2002, and watching their conversation now, it seems likely that the president has never even seen the film. Throughout the interview, he employed his usual BS method of pretending he knows what he’s talking about by drawing on half-remembered details he heard from other people. (It’s also his go-to move when asked about the Bible.)
“The word ‘Rosebud,’ for whatever reason, has captivated moviegoers and movie watchers for so many years,” Trump said. “Perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing, it wouldn’t have worked.” Real top-level criticism from a guy who totally saw that movie!
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Here’s the ironic truth about Trump’s claims of crime in cities in Blue States.
NY Times, 1 Sept 2025: Crime Festers in Republican States While Their Troops Patrol Washington
Subtitled: “Republican governors who have mustered National Guard troops for deployment in blue-state cities may re-examine their deployments if federal intervention significantly brings crime down.”
Clearly, this is not about reducing crime, which is higher in red states than in blue states. It’s about antagonizing blue states. The piece opens with examples.
When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines.
Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well.
And,
Mr. Trump denied statistical reality last week when he was asked whether he might send federal forces into high-crime cities in Republican-led states. “Sure,” he said, “but there aren’t that many.”
There are that many: Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield, Mo.; Birmingham, Ala.; Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo, Ohio; Tulsa, Okla.; Memphis and Nashville; Houston; Little Rock, Ark.; Salt Lake City; and Shreveport, La., all have crime rates comparable to Washington’s, according to F.B.I. statistics.
But who believes statistics? Right, MAGA folk? You just *know* that blue cities are crime-ridden hell-holes. Those statistics were just made up by coastal elites. Right?
