Let's get something out of the way. Yes, I voted for Kamala Harris. I wrote that FAQ up out of my sincere feelings and intentions as of September and early October, but the more I heard about and reckoned with the Springfield Haitian migrant story, the angrier I got that national political figures were exploiting and harming people with legal status in this country, regardless of whether they got that status from a stupid app. Haitians come from one of the poorest countries on earth facing a hellish civil war and were being exploited for political profit. After I reluctantly pulled that lever, I took a full two months off from the news (and the broader internet). I voted for several Republicans for statewide office and voted for Libertarian Don Kissick for Senate.
What do you do when you have conservative inclinations on many subjects but you find the Republican party to be an abomination to biblical morality? "Conservative Democrat" has only been a contradiction in terms since the 1990s. I can say that, as I said in my FAQ, that I still ID as a Christian Democrat in the European ideological sense, but the ASP's momentum has been frustratingly slow, only gaining 4,000 votes between 2020 and 2024. If you can't win against the all-out communist Claudia De La Cruz, and Cornell West, who can't distinguish himself from Jill Stein in any way, is CD a meaningful movement? That's an open question.
I was listening to Brief History of Power, a theological and political podcast popular within the LCMS, with Pr. Jonathan Fisk and Dr. Adam Koontz. I respect Dr. Koontz's perspective on many things theological and cultural, but he and Jonathan are pretty standard conservatives, so naturally I have disagreements with them. Adam opined on the issue of whether or not churches should shield immigrants from ICE. His argument comes down to basically this:
Point one. Let's read Leviticus 19:33-34 from the NET Bible:
This is difficult, because I respect Dr. Koontz's theological credentials so much but he's allowing his desire for right-wing political clout to cloud his judgment on a pretty basic issue. He's regarding treating the stranger among you well as the same thing as eating shellfish or mixing fabrics. This is pretty clearly a part of the *Moral Law*, not the Ceremonial or Judicial law; it even says right in the text, "Love them as yourself." Ask yourself: Is treating the stranger well among you part of the holiness codes of ancient Israel, designed to set the people apart from nearby tribes, or is it a reflection of God's immutible moral character and a pretty direct application of the second greatest commandment, which is to love your neighbor as yourself, observing in part what we now see in full as the breakdown in the distinction between Jew and Gentile?
Point two. True. Romans 13 does make it clear we are to obey the civil government. The church also doesn't have any obligation to validate one's legal status to offer help. Personal conscience also plays a heavy role in the decision to help such a person, as he or she is likely being sent back home to face war, gang violence, or famine (which may or may not be an indirect result of late 20th century US foreign policy), or possible mistreatment in a US internment camp of some kind, such as is being set up at Guanatanamo Bay. That is, unless one were to dismiss the underground railroad or the hiding of Anne Frank to be violations of Romans 13 (and Confederates and Nazis can and did make such an argument). At the very least, helping such a person to keep him or her from harm is no sin, and refraining from violating the law is also no sin; it is a matter of conscience. I just find it a shame that conservative Christians now have the broad reputation as being too callous to help.
Point three. This is tribalist ad hominem and can be discarded. The internal logical consistency of US political factions have no bearing on Christian ethics.
Point four. Migrants in the US come here illegally because there is some kind of barrier to legal status hindering them. They don't break US immigration law because they are just inherently bad people. They would very much rather not have the ICE Sword of Damocles hanging over them at all times, but they have decided the alternative back home is much worse. The difference between them and your German and Scot ancestors is the fact that they were born in the right century on the right side of the ocean, and the contemporary Guatemalan and Honduran were not. All of this was understood by the GW Bush/John Kasich/Mitt Romney faction of the Republican party before it was smashed to bits by Donald Trump. This knowledge does need to be tempered by a recognition for the need for public order. As much as I feel for the Springfield Haitians, it was not the best idea to put ten thousand of them in one small white town. The application of wisdom is crucial. Foreign policy and aid interventions in those countries migrants are fleeing from are going to be more cost effective than attempting to resettle all of them here. As I said before, the destabilization of much of central America was collateral damage from the Cold War, where we installed and supported authoritarian dictators in order to crush communist movements in those countries, so we do have some responsibility to clean up the mess.
Moving on. I'd like to talk about the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who gave the sermon at the Washington National Cathedral interfaith prayer service after Trump's inauguration.
To get this out of the way, as it seems like all anyone wants to talk about: Yes. She's a female pastor. No, female pastors are not valid Christian pastors because of the clear admonition of Paul in 1 Timothy 2:12. I am, first and foremost, a believer in Biblical inerrancy. I will not be joining the Episcopal Church, now or ever, and I find such "interfaith" services where we pretend to all worship the same God worthless and ridiculous.
Now we can actually talk about what matters.
Who were the Samaritans? The Samaritans followed their own, corrupted version of the Torah, the first five books of the bible, and they ignored the books of the major and the minor prophets. They followed a different faith, but Jesus chose them to illustrate the questions of 1. who is my neighbor? and 2. what does being a neighbor look like? in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Did Jesus say "and the Samaritan was not a neighbor to the man on the road, as he did not recognize Mount Sinai as the Holy Mountain on which God spoke to Moses?" No. He was the one who loved his neighbor best, not the scholars and teachers of the law who passed by the man on the other side of the road and went about their business.
People of different faiths can teach us well how to love our neighbors even as the biblical Christians around us are committed to hard-heartedness. Now that we've established this, what did she actually say?
What is wrong with this? I could nitpick and say that crossing the border and violating US immigration law is a criminal act. They often do pay payroll taxes and sales taxes, but sometimes are paid under the table in such a way payroll taxes are avoided. But the overall thrust of her statement is correct. We need to be good neighbors to those around us and not put them in harm's way. We should not join together with a mob who scapegoats immigrants as the cause of our nation's problems and seeks to foment hatred towards them. It is just to send immigrants back who broke our immigration laws, just as it was just for the unforgiving servant to throw the fellow servant into jail who owed him 100 denarii. It is merciful to focus ICE's efforts on deporting violent criminals, sex offenders, and others who would do our citizens harm, to punish companies who lure migrants here to be exploited, and to extend forgiveness to the migrants themselves who simply crossed the border without authorization.
As I mentioned, I had taken a two month internet and news break after the election. After I returned, there are still two services I have not returned to: Telegram, and Nitter, a X/Twitter anonymizer service.
Telegram was my main means of talking to many people. I set up a number of groupchats there, including for my church and for people to connect with those who used to work at Aultcare. My problems with it were mostly about a) the one-time privacy benefits of the service that were revealed to be a sham, and b) the compulsions I felt on the service that were too close to those I felt on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. I've reestablished a couple of my chats from Telegram on Signal and they've been much quieter and more manageable than before.
Reading Nitter wasn't nearly as bad as when I was on live Twitter, but having a way back into that world did make me check and recheck a number of accounts multiple times a day, and read the threads that followed these accounts, becoming invested in interpersonal drama between online figures that was not profitable. Staying away from it has been a blessing and I will continue that.
I've also tempered my Youtube use with a tool on my phone called YTDLnis. If I want to watch a video, I now have to download it in full and watch it in VLC. If I can't be bothered to do that, I can't be bothered to watch it at all.
My next internet break will start Ash Wednesday, and I will be pairing that with some dietary restrictions.
To the matter of birthright citizenship: Donald Trump thinks he can abrogate the 14th Amendment by executive fiat. No he can't, and that will be demonstrated in the courts.
I don't think I need to talk much about the pardon of the 1500 January 6th rioters, including those imprisoned for violent crimes. Obviously this is a heinous quid pro quo. Do crimes the president likes, and you will get a pardon for them. Joe Biden made similar (but relatively lesser) self-interested pardons. I think it's time for the Presidential pardon power to go.
I'm not too bent out of shape about Trump's hirings, firings, and security clearance revocations. I'd expect any president to do the same and those actions are within his ability as the head of the executive. Some of them seem kind of mean-spirited, such as revoking John Bolton's security detail after he masterminded the attack on Iran's Sulemani, but what do you expect when you cross a thug?
The end of all foreign aid seems very mean-spirited. It's such a miniscule part of the budget and harms so many people in poor countries overseas who depend on it for a meager living. They'll have no choice but to beg from Russia and China now.
The nomination of Kristi Noem for Homeland Security is inept. The nomination of RFK Jr. for health secretary is dangerous. (I once supported him for president before I read more about his past and the aftereffects of his anti-vaccine work.) The nomination of hyper-isolationist Tulsi Gabbard for DNI is unserious.
I'm generally supportive of keeping transgender students out of women's locker rooms and sports, and as I said before my problem with the anti-LGBT movement is mostly attitudinal, not on policy (so far).
I'm very wary of the anti-DEI movement within the administration as it can very easily be, and likely will be, exploited as a means of keeping women and minorities out of positions of authority. Two things can be true at once: The excesses of the DEI world can be wild, and some caution does need to be taken that positions of power are not run by 100% white males, who are most likely to have means to obtain that power. There is a reasonable way to go about this.
The Greenland/Panama Canal idiocy is simple flailing about for attention. No, we are not invading the sovereign territory of a NATO ally. No, we are not going to violate the terms of the Torrijos–Carter treaty. This is not worth anyone's time or attention and is just as laughably discordant with Trump's dovish and isolationist tendencies as his ideas to invade Iran or Venezuela to boost his reelection numbers. (And the fact we know that is party of why Trump took Bolton's security detail away, by the way.)
I have long been in favor of incoming presidents divesting themselves of all their financial entanglements, and never have I been a fan of crypto, so naturally I'm not in favor of President Trump's crypto shenanigans.
Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day and did not make good on this promise. I've long understood he wants the war to end yielding the existing gains for the Russian Federation in Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk, which is a massive victory in Russia's favor and emboldens them to make their next move in Transnistria. If this is Trump's plan, I hope at least what remains of Ukraine can be installed into NATO and the pro-Western faction in Moldova can take power to do the same. Their time is running short. It's certainly not going to be due to strong NATO leadership in the short term.