LeavingMAGA.org, Silicon Valley's Secular Rapture, Stop Calling CECOT a ‘Prison'

Plus, the clear-eyed hope of Good Friday

Hi Everybody!

My apologies this is showing up in your inbox a day late. I had conflicts with some other work. Assuming none of you are overly furious with me, I’m going to jump right in because this is a longer one.

Here’s what I’m covering:

- Trans women and children in this political moment

- LeavingMAGA.org

- Why we shouldn’t call the Salvadorian Terrorism Confinement Center a prison

- Silicon Valley’s secular rapture fantasy

- And staying grounded on Good Friday with a Holocaust survivor

Trans Women and Children in This Moment

Some things about the present moment in the trans rights movement feel very familiar. Twenty years ago, I was coming out of high school steeped in conservative Evangelicalism. the conversations happening around me about gay marriage were complicated by the sheer volume of myths about gay people. We had serious and retrospectively ridiculous discussions about whether people chose to be gay; if traumatic family relationships “changed” people’s orientations; how quickly the “gay agenda” would destroy the country; and so on. There were always rumors that gay people were more likely to be predatory and pedophilic. And fears circulated around what they would teach children if they became culturally influential. In short, today’s MAGA talking points about trans people are made of 100% recycled queerphobic materials. But they’re having the same effect. Preventing discussion of factual issues, which are decidedly less susceptible to bigoted interpretation.

The silver lining of all this, however faint, is we have a general sense from history of what works to combat the nonsense over time. The first and most important thing are stories of trans people themselves. Personal testimonials from gay people were the first thing to alert me and many others that something was wrong with the received wisdom from our churches. So I’m hoping a recent piece from Mother Jones about the experiences of trans kids and their families during the first few months of Trump’s administration spreads as widely as possible. It’s not an easy read, but it will give people a real sense of the danger these children are facing and the desperate determination of their loved ones to keep them safe. It also implicitly highlights the absurdity of thinking that these children “chose” this life, or that they have nefarious, ideological motivations. Or any motivation besides survival and self-acceptance.

In the past few years, Republicans have coalesced around a real wedge issue when it comes to trans rights: trans women and girls in sports. This campaign has had significantly more cultural purchase than previous runs at galvanizing anti-trans forces, like bathroom bills or military banns. My guess is this subject, on the surface, appears to be a distinct issue from other questions of LGBTQ+ rights. It feels like there’s a real problem to address here. We’re not just discriminating based on stereotypes and dehumanization, right? I wrote years ago in this newsletter about how the stories conservative campaigners tell about trans athletes dominating their cisgender competition “range from highly misleading to entirely fabricated.” Last year on Shake the Dust, we discussed the paranoia and the idolatry of power infused in Christian anti-trans-athlete advocacy. But for a more recent treatment of the same issue, I’d recommend, for those unopposed to some profanity and occasional off-color jokes, the recent episode of Last Week Tonight on trans athletes. John Oliver and his team of researchers have an obvious point of view. But they acknowledge where there is complexity and how emotional the arguments get, while still centering the most important people here—the trans kids themselves. And crucially, they do some systematic fact checking of the narratives around trans women in sports.

- Read the Mother Jones story and watch Last Week Tonight

LeavingMAGA.org

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Freedom Road where the host, veteran activist and minister (and past Shake the Dust guest) Lisa Sharon Harper, interviewed Rich Logis, the founder of Leaving MAGA. A former full-blown MAGA pundit, Logis founded the organization to reach those within the movement finding themselves in the position he did: questioning Trump, but afraid of walking away. Leaving, Logis says, is isolating. Joining MAGA often destroys existing relationships with loved ones, and replaces them with conditional relationships. MAGA shuns its deserters. The website is a great resource for that audience, offering community and a plausibility framework for leaving. It has a letter on the homepage expressing empathy and encouragement for the reader to follow their doubts and prioritize integrity. It has a page with 13 stories from around the country (and one from Nigeria) of other people who left. Those stories also give people outside MAGA a better sense of the motivations for both entering and exiting Trump’s crowd. Logis is Catholic, and there are some spiritual elements woven throughout the work, but he doesn’t define his audience along religious lines. This is for anyone under Trump’s influence, and I hope you all share it extensively.

- Check out leavingmaga.org

Stop Calling the Terrorism Confinement Center a Prison

A helpful recent article from Talking Points Memo observes that the media has consistently referred to the now-infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador where Trump flew hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants as a “prison.” That gives the facility too much credit. It implies due process, a definite sentence, or the ability to challenge the legality of one’s confinement. What the facility should be called is hard to pin down. It’s certainly closer to a penal colony or prison camp. It even meets the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s definition of a concentration camp. There is no need to lend Trump or the Salvadoran dictatorship any credibility. Let’s respect the gravity of the circumstances faced by the men inside, and the prospect many people in both El Salvador and the US are facing.

- Read the article

A Secular, Silicon Valley Rapture

An article in the Guardian recently detailed the rise of what it calls “end times fascism.” This is a descendant of European 20^th-century authoritarianism, but with a key difference. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and others had a vision for national prosperity. A horizon where things got better after a time of struggle. Of course, it would only get better for members of the White race and the “superior” ethnicities therein. But today’s wannabe oligarchs, particularly the tech-broligarchs, increasingly see no prosperity in the future. They see inevitable social collapse, chaos everywhere, and a fortunate few surviving in fortress-like communities run by rich people. The article tracks the worldview’s similarities to American evangelical eschatology, and the timing of its increase in popularity just as the political distance between northern California and the Bible Belt is shrinking. The American church is spreading the gospel of apocalypse paranoia, and tech CEOs are ready to rapture their people to libertarian bunker heaven. “You will know them by their fruit,” said Jesus, warning against false prophets. We in the church have to dedicate ourselves to dismissing wild theological misfires like our modern interpretations of Revelation, and avoid the temptation to dismiss them as unserious. They are unserious, but they have real consequences when enough people believe them.

- Read about end times fascism

Staying Grounded on Good Friday with a Holocaust Survivor

I recently went through my Twitter account, which I haven’t touched in some time, to grab what I wanted before deleting it. I ran across an article from three years ago that I had posted and never forgotten. It was by Charlotte Clymer, who wrote about her time in 2014 working at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in visitor services. She got to know a Holocaust survivor named Henry Greenbaum. He came to the museum every day, not as an employee or volunteer, but simply to tell visitors his story. He saw the world differently than many Americans did back then, including Clymer. His experience taught him that complacency was one of the most important conditions for Nazism. The critical mass of people who do not realize or acknowledge how very close society perpetually is to brutality against vulnerable people. He understood how far the American dream of persistent peace and prosperity strays from reality in a broken world. He knew our insistence on the truth of the dream—that it is not in fact a dream—is itself an enormous danger.

How is this “grounding?” you might ask. Isn’t the purpose of this last section to be hopeful? Well, yes. And I think we need to train ourselves to find hope in the actions of people like Greenbaum. People who dedicate their time and energy to truth telling. People who can provide solace to those who see the world for what it is. Who resist complacency. I don’t think God wears rose-tinted glasses. Becoming clear-eyed about the world is hard. The scene in the Garden of Gethsemane makes that plain.

But Clymer also writes about Greenbaum’s joy. There is a hard-won peace people can find when they choose to keep moving through that discomfort (or, like Greenbaum, have no choice in the matter) to acceptance of what the fall implies about our world.

Today is Good Friday. It was for the joy set before him that Jesus endured the cross. We can admit to ourselves what the world is. We can work through what that means for our lives. And we can find joy on the other side, knowing the truth set us free. Knowing about resurrection. And then, I think, we will be much more effective in fighting whatever comes our way in this time.

I hope you all have a joyful Easter.

Sy