The most significant evangelical contribution to fiction in the past 20 years was the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series. The books are riveting, but their core message is that corrupt, evil elites have gone to war against Christians. Some version of this idea — whether delivered in church or on TV — finds its way into many topics in a modern evangelical sermon: Evolution is a lie that secular science tells to counter the biblical creation story, the gay rights movement usurps God’s law. Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world’s money supply.
.. A younger teacher, listening intently, sighed: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but so many of them are raised by wolves.”
.. In the white working class, there are far too many wolves: heroin, broken families, joblessness and, more often than we’d like to believe, abusive and neglectful parents.
.. Confronted with those forces, we need, most of all, a faith that provides the things my faith gave to me: introspection, moral guidance and social support. Yet the most important institution in our lives, if it exists at all, encourages us to point a finger at faceless elites in Washington. It encourages us to further withdraw from our communities and country, even as we need to do the opposite.
.. It’s hardly surprising that into that vacuum has stepped Donald J. Trump. For many, he is the only thing left that offers camaraderie, community and a sense of purpose.
.. Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains.
9/11 conspiracy theorists responded to refutations by alleging more cover-ups.
Facts alone are insufficient to destroy a conspiracy theory, of course, and in many ways a theory’s appeal has more to do with the receptiveness of its audience than the accuracy of its details.
.. The Popular Mechanics article may never have been published were it not for a $3 million national ad campaign by an eccentric millionaire to promote a self-published book called Painful Questions. The campaign posited that the World Trade Center was brought down in a controlled demolition and that the Pentagon was never hit by a jetliner, and asked questions about whether the fires in the Twin Towers were sufficiently hot to bring about their collapse or whether the hole in the Pentagon was big enough to fit a commercial airplane. When Popular Mechanics Editor James Meigs saw the ad, he says, “I thought, well, we’re Popular Mechanics and we’ve been reporting about what happens when planes crash, how skyscrapers are built, for 100 years. Let’s actually answer the questions.”
Brexit Should be a Warning about Donald Trump
“Even people who truly hate me are saying it’s the best they’ve ever seen,” he said.
.. Didn’t he know that a continent was in crisis? Would this finally expose him as unacceptably unserious? In some of his tweets, he seemed not to acknowledge that the sentiment in Scotland was for Remain—did he understand the political structure of the United Kingdom?
.. During the Leave campaign, Johnson played Paul Ryan to Farage’s Trump—the more socially acceptable peddler of destructive ideas.
.. You know, when the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.”
But only the right kind of people, it seemed. “You’re going to let people that you want into your country. And people that you don’t want, or people that you don’t think are going to be appropriate for your country or good for your country, you’re not going to have to take,” Trump said.
.. there are structural economic issues that have left both Leave sympathizers and Trump voters with real grievances, and it will be disastrous if bigoted nationalists are the only ones who engage them.
.. Both Trump and Farage and his allies have made openly racist and ethnic appeals.
.. (For those who are not regular viewers of Trump’s speeches, this is a reference to the idea that Obama is blackmailing Clinton with the threat of jail for supposed crimes related to her e-mails.)
Donald Trump and the “Amazing” Alex Jones
Infowars and its proprietor, Alex Jones, who is a conspiracy theorist and radio talk-show host in Austin, Texas.
.. Jones’s amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, “false flag” ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns).
.. Jones believes that no one was actually hurt at Sandy Hook—those were actors—and that the Apollo 11 moon-landing footage was faked.
.. Does Donald Trump actually believe any of this? Or is he laughing up his sleeve as apoplectic fact-checkers throw themselves into the thankless work of disproving his absurdities? To cover himself, he prefaces his more outlandish remarks with disclaimers like “I hear” or “A lot of people think.” (To back up his contention that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims publicly celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, he tweeted a link to Infowars.
.. Trump is playing a different game.
.. He is playing to Americans who do not trust the media or traditional information sources, such as the government. He offers alternative narratives, fantasies that shock and satisfy. He entertains. On “Meet the Press,” after Chuck Todd asked him for evidence supporting his claim that a protester at one of his rallies had ties to the Islamic State, Trump said, “All I know is what’s on the Internet.” He said that.
.. In a GQ profile of Hope Hicks, his spokeswoman, by Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s daily news briefing is described as printouts of “30 to 50 Google News results for ‘Donald J. Trump.’ ” Trump goes at the items with a marker and, according to a GQ source, “He reads something he doesn’t like by a reporter, and it’s like, ‘This motherfucker! All right, fine. Hope?’ He circles it. ‘This guy’s banned! He’s banned for a while.’
.. He has gut instincts for pleasing members of a fact-averse crowd—for speaking what’s on their minds. He seems to be a narcissist of bottomless insecurity and need
.. “I know more about isis than the generals do,” he said at one of his rallies. “Believe me. I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war.”