• Philip Jenkins on “Donald Trump, Canada, And The Deep Roots Of American Empire“:
So here I am innocently writing a book on religion and the US empire throughout the country’s history, a theme on which I have posted on many occasions at this site. Suddenly along comes the 2024 election and the victor starts reviving issues that I thought were neatly consigned to earlier American centuries. Annexing Canada? Greenland? Panama? Suddenly my academic interests are oddly newsworthy.
Trump’s obsession with invading/occupying/annexing Canada is just one of many Very Bad 19th-Century American notions being revived by the Man of Lawlessness.
Jenkins’ breezy summary of the northward aspects of “manifest destiny” is fascinating, but I’m especially glad I took his advice here:
But Canada… it is still a miracle that the US failed to annex it during the war of 1812, which I like to call the War of Canadian Independence. Had it not been for a brilliant and sneaky British commander named Isaac Brock, the Americans might well have seized the country then. At the Wikipedia entry, do read the account of Brock’s capture of Detroit, and marvel.
• Canada is a good friend and a good neighbor to America. America is not a good friend and a good neighbor to Canada:
There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an ICE detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.
This was a pretty white lady. She was “detained” — jailed without charge or cause — for two weeks.
ICE — which hasn’t existed as long as Monster energy drinks — is an indefensible institution that cannot exist except as a threat to the Constitution and the nation it purportedly serves. Abolish ICE. Burn it down and salt the earth.
• Republican Minnesota state Sen. Justin Eichorn is a co-sponsor of “a bill that would allow anyone to accuse a female athlete in school sports of being transgender. Any player accused of being trans would then have to get a signed physician’s statement indicating the athlete’s sex that is based solely on their internal and external reproductive anatomy; their naturally occurring level of testosterone; and an analysis of the student’s chromosomes.”
We’ve often noted here how creepy such laws are in practice as well as in intent. This bill would codify genital inspections — on demand — of schoolchildren. It treats their private parts as a public concern and a matter of public record.
It wants a peek.
Yuck.
What kind of lawmaker supports this kind of legislation? Well, this kind: “GOP Lawmaker Who Said Liberals Are Attacking ‘Our Way of Life’ Arrested After Allegedly Soliciting Sex from Minor.”
Eichorn, 40, is married, has four children. He now faces bipartisan calls to resign. But the creepy, icky, Let’s Look At Children’s Privates legislation he supported has not been withdrawn.
• Richard Beck on the inconsistency of End Times Rapture Folklore politics. He notes that Rapture Christians do not seem to notice or to mind that their politicized “Bible prophecy scholars” toggle their prophecies in opposite directions depending on whether or not Republicans are winning. That’s not really surprising, since overlooking such inconsistency seems easier than overlooking a more than 100-year unbroken streak of failed prophecies.
In any case, the only thing you really need to know about the End Times is that they will absolutely arrive for you, personally, at some point in the next threescore and ten years.
• Hemant Mehta looks at “How Aaron Renn’s ‘Negative World’ myth fuels Christian victimhood.” He focuses on how the theory comforts and flatters right-wing white Christians by shielding them from ever having to think about how their own actions, choices, and behaviors influence others’ perception of them. Renn’s approach is to say, “Everyone thinks we’re acting like jerks who seek to harm our neighbors — this must be the start of a new historical epoch and could not possibly be a reaction to us acting like jerks who seek to harm our neighbors.” It really is that dumb.
• Charles Kuffner shares a Houston Chronicle story about a very cool idea — “Repair Cafés” at public libraries:
The Harris County’s Katherine Tyra Branch Library [was] crowded with toolboxes, sewing machines and piles of spare parts from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m on Saturday, as volunteer fixers help area residents mend everything from broken appliances to family heirlooms.
“I’ve seen everything from a bingo ball to a metronome,” said Glen Rhoden, a county employee who has volunteered at similar meet-ups in his free time since Harris County kicked off the events in 2023.
“I love everything about this,” Kuffner says, and I second that. Knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.
• The title for this post comes from the lyrics to John Lee Hooker’s “Serves You Right to Suffer,” recently employed by Kuffner in this FAFO/Leopards-Eating-My-Face story — “You Reap What You Sow” — about how Trumponomics are harming the Texas farmlandlords who supported him.
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