Apropos of nothing else in this post, but anyone following social media will understand. Maybe.
Once or twice a year, there is a TV show that I follow obsessively, and watch a second time, at least. Adolescence. House of Dynamite. Now, Heated Rivalry. For a different reason each time.
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The big story of the week, which I’m not quite letting this go. This could be a growing story that actually has consequences. Unlike so many scandalous incidents by Trump and his MAGA acolytes.
This Christian lies.
JMG, 10 Jan 2026: Christian Site Mocks “Toxic Empathy” For ICE Victim
Quoting Ryan Helfenbein in the Christian Post: “This tragedy was entirely avoidable, but because a mother decided her duty to obstruct law enforcement, try to flee, and accelerate straight at them superseded her duty to comply, she is now dead.” Then he quotes scripture, where you can find justification for absolutely anything you want to believe.
She did *not* “accelerate straight at them.” It’s there over and over, in the videos. Why does he lie? Because religious ideology trumps evidence and reason; and everyone not on Trump and MAGA’s side is assumed to be evil and culpable?
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Stepping out, but illustrating the same broad point.
The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, 6 Jan 2026: MAGA’s Foundational Lie, subtitled “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”
Which is as I described yesterday.
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Stepping out even further.
The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman, 10 Jan 2026: What Stephen Miller Gets Wrong About Human Nature, subtitled “The Trump adviser’s assertions about the ‘real world’ reflect a deep misunderstanding of Thomas Hobbes’s dog-eat-dog worldview.”
Once again, there’s the famous dichotomy about the views of human nature as stated by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
The 17th-century philosophers each offered a picture of human nature in its rawest form, and they came to different conclusions. Locke, whose ideas were central to the birth of modern democracy, thought that people were capable of reason and moral judgment. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that we were vicious creatures who needed to be protected from ourselves by a powerful king. Whether a leader is Lockean or Hobbesian really does set the table for the kind of government they want.
And, once again, it’s not one or the other. Humans like to divide issues into bipolar opposites, one or the other. Whereas reality is always a mix of the opposite patterns that humans perceive. (This is the subject of Rutger Bregman’s HUMANKIND, who takes Locke’s side; and Steven Pinker’s books, who considers both sides, but especially how Hobbes’ Leviathan brought order to the world.)
One way to understand the head-spinning nature of being an American over the past couple of decades is that this debate—one that history seemed to have settled in Locke’s favor—is alive again. Barack Obama was a Lockean through and through—insisting, repeatedly, that if citizens were just given accurate information and a fair hearing, they would converge on something like the common good. Then came Donald Trump, Hobbesian extraordinaire, who has often portrayed life under anyone’s leadership but his own much as Hobbes describes the state of nature: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Nasty is even one of Trump’s favorite words.)
Comments this week from Stephen Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff often cast as the president’s “brain,” only reinforced this impression. Miller might have been Hobbes in a skinny tie as he confidently articulated what he understood to be the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” His monologue was like something out of the English philosopher’s 1651 political treatise, Leviathan: “We live in a world, in the real world,” he said, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
But his is the dog-eat-dog world that the idealists, from Jesus to the Founders, sought to overcome. There *can* be a better way. But base human nature is never going away.
