The Addiction of Ignorance, and the Revolution We Should Have Seen Coming

I have definitely written about this before. Many times. 

America has a drug problem nobody wants to talk about honestly. Not fentanyl. Not alcohol. Ignorance. Specifically, the cultivated, deliberate, chosen variety. Selective ignorance. And like any addiction, the longer it goes untreated, the more it takes from you, and the more dangerous the addict becomes to everyone around them. 

What makes it an addiction rather than a simple deficit is the active, continuous work required to maintain it. Psychologists call it motivated reasoning: the cognitive process by which people do not reason toward truth but toward conclusions they have already decided they want. This is not passive. 

People running motivated reasoning are working hard, filtering incoming information, discarding what contradicts the preferred conclusion, amplifying what confirms it. The ignorance in America's current crisis is not a shortage of available information. 

We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. This is a shortage of willingness to receive information that costs something. That is a crucial distinction, and it changes everything about how we diagnose what is happening to us.

We did not stumble into this. We chose it, repeatedly, at every turn where knowing something inconvenient would have cost us comfort, privilege, or the warm bath of tribal belonging. We chose it in churches, in school board meetings, in voting booths, and on social media feeds algorithmically tuned to feed us exactly what we already believed. The addiction metastasized in plain sight.

And it is worth understanding why the social cost of knowing is so high. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established decades ago that human identity is inseparable from group membership. We do not just belong to groups. We are our groups. 

When the group's shared worldview requires the rejection of expertise, accepting expertise becomes an act of betrayal. You do not just change your mind. You lose your people. In communities where the group is the whole of a person's identity and social world, that cost is existential. Ignorance becomes the price of admission, and people pay it willingly, even gratefully, because what they are buying is belonging.

There is a phenomenological dimension here that goes deeper still. Willful unknowing is not a passive state. It is an active, lived experience requiring continuous maintenance. On some level, the person who chooses not to know is aware of the choice. Reality keeps pressing in, and the relief of not engaging it has to be re-administered, reinforced, re-confirmed by the group. That is the addiction structure exactly. The substance is not a chemical. It is the relief of a world simplified to the point where you and your tribe are right, and everyone with credentials and data and uncomfortable questions is the enemy.

I was in high school in the early 1970s when my teacher (I've previously written about my high school Civics and World Problems teacher, the amazing Mrs. Wotton) walked us through what Mao Zedong had done to China with his Cultural Revolution. We sat there, American teenagers, shaking our heads at how stupid those people must be. 

How could an entire society follow a megalomaniac into the deliberate destruction of its own intellectual class? How do you purge universities, persecute doctors, imprison professors, and silence scientists, and have a population that either cheers or says nothing?

We were very smug about that. Very confident it could never happen here.

What we did not understand then, and what the psychology makes clear now, is that Mao's Red Guards were not simply destroying expertise. They were building community through that destruction. The shared rejection of the intellectual class was a bonding ritual. 

The public humiliations, the struggle sessions, the denunciations: all of it created solidarity among participants. You proved your belonging by performing your contempt for knowledge. The crowd that cheers when a professor is fired, when a doctor is silenced, when a library is purged, is not just expressing hatred. It is renewing its membership in the tribe.

Here we are.

Donald Trump did not invent American ignorance. He weaponized it. He handed it a flag, a cross, and a grievance, and told it that everything it didn't understand was the enemy. White Christian nationalism became the operating ideology of a federal government. Not a fringe. Not a protest movement. The government.

The psychological engine underneath that movement has a clinical name: Terror Management Theory, developed from Ernest Becker's foundational work and extended by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. When people feel their mortality, their significance, or their cosmological worldview under threat, they do not open up. They contract. They cling harder to the group identity that gives them meaning and to the enemies that justify their fear. 

White Christian nationalism offers exactly the right package for that psychological state: a cosmology, a tribe, a hierarchy, a villain, and a promise of eternal significance to people who feel they have been made small. Trump did not build that. He found tens of millions of people already running that psychological program and gave them permission to act on it.

Agencies gutted. Scientists fired or sidelined. Educators targeted. Health agencies hollowed out in the middle of a century that has already demonstrated what happens when you let preventable diseases find an opening.

And it is worth knowing that much of this ignorance is not organic. It is manufactured. 

Historian Robert Proctor developed the field of agnotology, the formal study of culturally induced ignorance and doubt, after studying how the tobacco industry spent decades deliberately producing uncertainty about the link between smoking and cancer. 

They did not need people to believe cigarettes were safe. They only needed people to believe the science was unsettled. The same machinery runs today on climate research, vaccine safety, election integrity, and pandemic response. Engineered doubt is not a side effect of the information age. It is a product, developed, funded, and distributed with precision.

We are watching infectious disease rates climb back toward numbers we were told we'd never see again, because a meaningful portion of the population has decided that the people who study disease are the enemy, and the people who spread misinformation about it are the heroes.

We are watching professors lose positions. Researchers lose funding. Federal employees purged for the content of their emails and their perceived politics. Libraries challenged. Curricula sanitized.

And we haven't even gotten to the imprisonments and murders...yet.

I say yet with full awareness of what I'm saying. Because if you had described the current state of American governance to me in 1973 in that high school classroom, I would have told you it sounded exactly like what we were being warned about. 

Except we were being warned about them.

The Soviets. 

The Chinese. Cautionary tales on the other side of the world.

The cautionary tale was always us, waiting to happen.

Ignorance is comfortable. Too comfortable. Selective ignorance is ecstatic. 

You get to keep your prejudices, discard inconvenient facts, belong to a community of the like-minded, and feel righteous about all of it. 

The MaGA movement did not recruit stupid people. It recruited comfortable ones. 

It recruited people who found the drug of chosen ignorance, of selective ignorance, more appealing than the cost of knowing things that challenged their worldview.

Fascism does not need jackboots on day one. 

It needs an addicted population that has practiced, for decades, the discipline of not knowing what it does not want to know. That population is ready-made for whoever arrives with the right story.

It would seem we learned nothing from what we studied. Or we have simply...purposefully...forgotten it.

Worse, we were too arrogant to think we needed to remember it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Purpleism opposes all human irritants. Trump has consumed that space so completely everything now runs through him.
That distortion of daily life is itself a Purpleism issue.
Exhausting.
Malignant Narcissism does that

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Militias We Stopped Talking About

Wishing you and yours a very pleasant Memorial Day!

I hope we're approaching a time when we can celebrate it without the disdain, frustration, embarrassment, and outright abuse our own government has been inflicting on its citizens. We've earned more than this. We've also let our greatness lull us into a false sense of safety, and some are more than happy to fill that void.

It will get better. We will come out of this stronger. And wiser.

A few years ago, illegal paramilitary militias were widely described by federal law enforcement as one of the most serious domestic security threats in the United States. The FBI repeatedly warned about anti-government extremist groups, armed militias, and politically motivated violence. News stories were common. Congressional hearings were held. Arrests made headlines.

Then something curious happened.

We stopped hearing about them.

That silence does not mean the militias disappeared. It means the story changed.

Today I saw a news piece: "War widens as Israeli and US planes pound Iran and Tehran and its proxies hit back"

Iran is attacked by a foreign enemy. Militias respond in defense of their homeland. That is how militias are supposed to function historically.

In the United States, too many private militias have turned inward, seeing their own government as the enemy. Instead of national defense, they reflect a toxic subculture of anti-government extremism.

A militia that prepares to fight its own country is not a defense force. It is something else entirely.

The Quiet Threat

By 2024 and 2025, federal assessments still categorized militia-style extremists under the broader heading of domestic violent extremism, a category that includes anti-government groups and individuals who believe violence against the state is justified.

Security experts continued to warn that domestic extremism posed a greater day-to-day risk than foreign terrorism.

But public attention faded.

Large groups stopped marching as openly. Fewer armed demonstrations made national headlines. The big militia names that dominated the news after January 6 became less visible.

It looked like the problem had gone away.

It hadn't.

From Organizations to Individuals

One major change is structural.

Earlier militia movements often organized in visible groups with leadership hierarchies, training events, and public messaging. Today, the movement is more fragmented.

Instead of large organizations, analysts increasingly describe:

• Small independent cells

• Loosely affiliated networks

• Individuals radicalized online

• Informal local groups

This makes the threat harder to track and easier to overlook.

When there is no central organization, there is nothing obvious for the public to notice.

But decentralized movements can be more unpredictable than organized ones.

Less Attention Does Not Mean Less Risk

Another reason militias faded from the headlines is that government priorities appear to have shifted.

Some federal programs that monitored domestic extremism have been reduced or reorganized. Staffing and resources directed at domestic terrorism investigations have reportedly declined.

This does not necessarily mean the threat is gone.

It means fewer public briefings, fewer press releases, and fewer visible investigations.

In other words, less noise does not equal less danger.

Anti-Government Extremism Remains

The core ideology that drives militia movements has not disappeared.

Militia movements historically form around a belief that the federal government is illegitimate or tyrannical. That worldview still exists and in some cases has spread more widely than before.

Ironically, the less visible militias become, the more their ideas may blend into broader political culture.

Formal organizations may shrink while the mindset survives.

History suggests this pattern is common. Extremist movements often become less visible before they reappear in new forms.

Private militias made sense in the 18th century, when the United States had no real standing army.

They became obsolete once America developed a professional military and especially after the National Guard was created as the official organized militia.

Today the United States already has what the Constitution envisioned: a trained militia under civilian control.

Private militias are not a necessity. They are a leftover idea from a country that no longer exists.

To make it painfully clear to these groups and to Americans at large:

Once the National Guard became the constitutional militia, private militias became unconstitutional. Illegal.

The Constitution authorizes militias under government authority, not private armies acting on their own. This is reflected in the Second Amendment itself:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

For most of American history, the Second Amendment was understood as supporting a well regulated militia under public authority, not independent armed groups. Courts, historians, and legal scholars generally treated it as a civic responsibility tied to national defense.

That interpretation began to change in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, political movements and gun-rights organizations promoted a new interpretation that emphasized an individual right to bear arms independent of militia service. This shift was partly a reaction to social unrest, distrust of government after Vietnam and Watergate, and fears of federal overreach.

Advocacy groups funded research, legal arguments, and public campaigns to promote this view. Over time, the new interpretation moved from political activism into legal theory and eventually into court decisions.

The result was a major historical shift: the Second Amendment increasingly came to be understood as an individual right rather than primarily a framework for a regulated militia.

But the Constitution still provides for militias under government authority. It does not authorize private armies acting on their own initiative.

Then the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind. What happened to him and the NRA? 

When people say “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind,” they’re usually talking about two different things that happened at the same time:

1. A political and ideological shift

2. A leadership and corruption collapse

Both are real — and together they explain what happened.

A New York jury found LaPierre liable for financial mismanagement and misuse of millions of dollars, ordering him to repay large sums. For wealth and power, he weaponized the NRA using and abusing the 2nd Amendment. 

He resigned in 2024 shortly before the trial began.

A court later banned him from NRA leadership for ten years.

This is going on in our government today with toxic conservatism running amuck. 

It is the same pattern that can be seen again today under POTUS 47, Donald Trump...a convicted felon, long associated with criminal investigations, and an increasingly autocratic political figure. He has also been found liable in court for sexual abuse, and further revelations may yet emerge regarding his associations and the Epstein investigations.

We are seeing the presidency used in ways that test constitutional limits, while a Republican-controlled Congress largely falls in line with his agenda rather than acting as an independent check on executive power.

The result is a level of corruption and concentration of power unprecedented in modern American history.

The Real Question

The real question is not whether militias exist.

They do.

The real question is whether we are paying attention.

Only a few years ago, illegal paramilitary groups were described as one of the leading domestic threats facing the United States.

Today, they receive far less attention.

But quiet movements do not necessarily mean peaceful ones.

Sometimes it just means they are preparing.

Something Worth Watching

Illegal militias occupy a strange space in American law and culture. Many states prohibit private paramilitary activity, yet armed groups continue to organize in gray areas of legality.

They do not disappear simply because the news cycle moves on.

If anything, history suggests that movements ignored too long tend to return in unexpected ways.

The militias we stopped talking about may still be there.

And that may be exactly the point.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

New Worlds, Unknown Histories -- What Is Anchor Field's Expanding Vision?

I want to share something that has quietly been one of the most ambitious creative projects I've had the privilege of watching take shape.

It's called Anchor Field -- and it's a museum to the imagination of someone close to my heart, who has decided it's time to stop keeping his work to himself.

AnchorField.org is a living creative archive unlike anything I've come across.

At its heart, it's the work of one person with a genuinely rare combination of gifts:

• WorldBuilder
• Philosopher
• Storyteller
• Visual Artist
• Musician
• Lyricist

-- all rolled into one.

The site spans original science fiction and fantasy universes with fully developed alien species, histories, cultures, and timelines. Philosophical and theological essays explored through AI-powered podcast discussions featuring multiple distinct voices. Original artwork expanded through AI tools. RPG campaign journals written as literary prose.

And even an original theoretical physics framework.

What makes Anchor Field stand out in an era saturated with AI-generated content is the intentionality and transparency behind how AI is used here. Every idea, every world, every argument originates from the creator.

AI serves as the brush, never the painter.

That distinction is spelled out plainly on the site -- and you can feel it in every corner of the work.

This is a human imagination that simply refuses to stay small.

There are even recordings of his own piano and guitar on the site -- a reminder that the artist was always there, long before the brushes.

The site is still growing, which is part of what makes it exciting. If you love speculative fiction, deep ideas, music, art, or creative experimentation at the edge of what's possible right now -- Anchor Field is worth your time.

Go. Explore:

https://anchorfield.org

Shooting in a Ghost: Lincoln High's Rifle Team and the Old Aquarium at Point Defiance

I had been in that building before.

As a kid, I'd gone to the old Point Defiance Aquarium on the waterfront more than once, the one down near the water, below the bluffs. I remember the fish, the glass, the particular quiet of that kind of place. Puget Sound creatures behind thick panes, and kids pressing their faces in to get closer. There was a small amusement park next to it. I remember that fondly, too.

1970-71 Lincoln High School Rifle Team Yearbook page - Tacoma, WA. Some members missing.

In the fall of 1970, as a Lincoln High sophomore, I was driven to Point Defiance for my first rifle team practice. We pulled up above the boat house and I knew this building. It was the aquarium. But no, someone said, it's not. 

We walked into what was by then just one long bare room with targets at the far end. Nothing on the walls. No tanks, no glass, no trace of what it had been. Just wood and distance and the smell of a place that had been repurposed and forgotten. No trace of what it had been. I stood there a little stunned. Things change.

Photo at least a few years before I was visiting in 1960 or shooting there in the early 1970s.

Point Defiance Park was established in 1888 when President Grover Cleveland authorized the federal military reserve to be used as a public park. As early as 1895, the Park Board leased space for a boat stand, restaurant and float at Point Defiance Park to J. Olson for $5 a month. The first permanent boathouse was built in 1903 by Edwin Ferris. Ferris agreed to pay for the construction of the boathouse if he could run it for ten years, at which time he would turn the building over to the Park Board for their use. Ferris’s beautiful octagonal boathouse/pavilion was an immediate success. - Parks Tacoma

The aquarium existed only in my memory now, not in the room itself, now turned into a firing range. We were going to be shooting in a ghost held only in my mind. I seemed to be the only one on the team who knew what it had once been. A journey into the deep of Puget Sound. Apparently, the aquarium burned down in 1974 and the boathouse ten years later in 1984.

I'd be curious who owned the building as Tacoma had a series of criminal arsons back in those days. I wrote about some of it in my award-winning screenplay, The Teenage Bodyguard, set in 1974. It details an attempted arson at the Top of the Ocean restaurant along the waterfront on Ruston Way, a few miles southeast of there. A local crime family had burned down or tried to burn down more than a few buildings in those days for fun and profit.

---

Lincoln's rifle team was not a glamour operation. We shot .22 caliber rifles donated by the Army — heavy, worn, some broken. The 1972 yearbook records them diplomatically as "worn out or broken." I struggled with the bulk and weight of those old surplus rifles from the start, and never quite made peace with the aperture sights either. I was not, I'll tell you honestly, a natural range shooter. Equipment that fits you matters, and nothing about those rifles fit me particularly well.

Our coach was Mr. Williams, ex-Army turned teacher, a genuinely humane man with great stories and a clear understanding of what his kids were working with and working against. When I complained about the rifles he didn't apologize for them. He just said: it's what you have, be proud and make the best of it. That was Mr. Williams. He knew something about making do.

Forty rounds counted toward your score, ten points each, four hundred possible. Hit three hundred sixty or better and you earned a varsity letter. Any member could earn one regardless of sex, which in 1971 wasn't nothing — we had girls on the team and they belonged there.

Every Monday afternoon the old aquarium became a gathering point for Tacoma's high school rifle league. Stadium, Curtis, Wilson, Mount Tahoma, and Lincoln all competed there, five city schools converging on one repurposed waterfront building with their rifles and whatever else they could get their hands on. One team, a school who was financially better off, had match competition pieces and won quite a bit more often. It was hard not to notice that fact.

We were the only school though with Army surplus rifles and our coach told me, "It's what we have, don't worry about those other schools, be proud of them, and shoot well." It was a real league, with real competition, and virtually none of it exists in any archive anywhere. The yearbooks are almost the only evidence it happened at all.

It is worth noting that today the idea of a Tacoma public high school rifle league — five city schools competing weekly, kids bused to a park facility with Army surplus weapons, earning varsity letters for marksmanship — would be unthinkable.

Not because the kids were dangerous, they weren't, we weren't, or because the sport wasn't legitimate, it was. Simply because the world changed. Hunter's safety courses still exist, and competitive shooting still exists, but the casual integration of rifle sport into public high school athletics, the same way you'd letter in swimming or track, belongs to a specific window of American life that closed quietly sometime after we did.

I've mentioned that from time to time in recent years when in a group and the topic came up and I have gotten horrified looks or comments like, 'Well, that wasn't a good idea." But WWII wasn't that far away back then. Certainly not for those who taught us.

I had a 20 gauge single shot shotgun and a British .303 bolt action WWII surplus rifle on a rifle rack in my bedroom in junior high. My older brother's as he traveled America on his motorcycle in the late 1960s. Yes, I had ammo. 

The .303 British bolt action on that rack had been my older brother's, given to him at fifteen. Later, when I was fifteen, he passed it to me — he didn't have a son and didn't know yet that he would. It was a serious weapon. The British used that caliber to hunt elephants in Africa. It was not a toy, and we never treated it as one. 

I eventually gave it to my own son when he turned fifteen. I did keep the bolt however, until he moved out and was legally old enough to own it. My brother died this year. I think about that rifle and what it carried with it — not just the weight of the thing, but the line of it, three generations each receiving it at the same age, each understanding what it meant to be trusted with something that demanded respect.

Mr. Williams was ex-Army. Mr. Eakes ran hunter's safety courses. For them, teaching young people to handle weapons carefully and compete honorably was simply good citizenship. None of us considered harming anyone, and none of us did. The newspapers from that era are proof enough of that. Compare those to the newspapers today and draw your own conclusions.

---

The best shooters on our team were the Hondle brother twins and the Eakes brothers. I already knew all of them from a private junior high rifle team coached by the Eakes boys' father, Mr. Eakes. They were older than me and they were crack shots, the lot of them — but the Hondles carried it differently than the Eakes did. The Eakes brothers were good but weren't on the high school team. They'd had enough of it with their dad, growing up, helping him as I had, teach hunter's safety courses a year or two previous.

The Hondles knew they were good. When you're a younger kid wearing a T badge around guys like that, you feel it without anyone having to say a word.

The T badge was my first year. Gold shield, black border, a T for Tyro — meaning beginner, meaning novice, meaning you're not there yet. In competitive shooting it's a legitimate classification for a first-year competitor. In that company it felt like wearing my inexperience as an announcement. Nobody said anything about it. That was almost worse.

---

My senior year I was working nights at the Auto-View Drive-In, where my stepfather was assistant manager for his night job. I missed matches. I showed up when I could, which was not always, and I watched my entire high school social life happen on the other side of the snack bar counter — friends and classmates coming in on weekend nights while I was working, every holiday, every Friday. I knew I was missing things that don't come back.

Mr. Williams saw the whole picture. At the end of my senior year he gave me a full varsity letter — a gold L, the real thing. I always figured it was for being on the team three years and holding down a night job through high school, both of which he understood and respected. He was that kind of man.

I never got the letterman's jacket. My parents couldn't afford it and neither could I on snack bar wages. So the letter sat. I still have the T badge somewhere. I'm not sure I was ever as dismissive of it as I felt at the time.

---

One of the faces in the 1973 team photo is my best friend Dave Henderson. Dave wanted to be on the team. So, I told him to get over for that day. He never fired a round that season. But he is in the Lincoln yearbook as a rifleman, which still makes me smile fifty plus years later.

---

The whole waterfront Pavilion complex at Point Defiance burned in 1984. The old aquarium building went with it — the shooting range, the ghost, all of it. Three lives for one building: aquarium, rifle range, ash. Almost none of it is documented anywhere. The yearbook pages are about the only hard evidence the league and that range existed at all.

I earned a letter in that building, for a jacket I never owned, shooting rifles I never fit, in a room I'd first entered as a child looking at fish.

I think about that sometimes.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote? No? Come on! Really?

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote?

He's got one, right?

So if he does have one, based upon his actions as president, or his decades as a miserable example of a "businessman" over his lifetime, WHAT IS IT?

What might, say...three of his favorite quotes be?

The famous moment: Trump was asked his favorite Bible verse in 2015 and couldn't name one. He later cited "an eye for an eye" as his philosophy -- which is real (Leviticus/Exodus), but notably Jesus specifically repudiates it in Matthew 5:38-39. So his "favorite" is the verse Christ overruled.

Three that actually fit his record:

1. Proverbs 21:6 "A fortune made by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a deadly snare." -- Six bankruptcies, Trump University fraud settlement, inflated asset valuations. The vapor part aged well.

2. Matthew 6:5 "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others." -- The Lafayette Square Bible photo op, holding it upside down. Scripture as prop.

3. 1 Timothy 6:10 "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." -- Covers pretty much the entire career arc and the current presidency-as-profit-center Raskin was describing above.

The brutal irony is that "eye for an eye" being his self-chosen verse is actually the most honest thing he's ever said about himself.

Trump's politics are pure Old Testament retribution politics with zero New Testament grace anywhere in sight.

Trump really seems to be an Old Testament guy, though.

Old Testament Trump?

The OT God is frequently wrathful, vengeful, tribal, transactional, and rewards loyalty above almost everything else.

So? Trump IS like the Old Testament, immature, vindictive, jealous "God"?

Punishment is swift and disproportionate. Enemies are smited.

The chosen people are exceptional by definition. 

Outsiders are threats. Sounds kind of like a five-year-old.

But it maps almost perfectly onto Trump's operating psychology.

The transactional covenant thing is key.

OT theology is largely "obey and prosper, disobey and suffer."

Trump runs the same deal -- loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty is destroyed.

It's less a moral framework than a power framework with religious language draped over it.

What Trump actively rejects from the New Testament:

• Forgiveness of enemies (he never forgives, or apologizes, doubling down, always)
• Humility ("blessed are the meek" -- not a Trump value)
• Turning the other cheek (see: "eye for an eye")
• Care for the poor and stranger (see: every immigration and social policy)
• The rich man and the needle's eye passage -- genuinely inconvenient for him

The dark irony is that evangelical Christians, who are supposed to be defined by the New Testament and Christ's teachings, have attached themselves to perhaps the most purely Old Testament political figure in American history.

See, white Christian Nationalism. Or the American Taliban.

Allow me... And there it is. The through line.

Why the OT fits WCN perfectly:

White Christian Nationalism isn't really Christianity in any theological sense. It's a tribal identity system that uses Christian iconography as its flag. The Old Testament gives them what they actually want:

A chosen people narrative
A promised land (America as covenant nation)
Divine sanction for conquest and dominance
Clear in-group/out-group boundaries
A wrathful God who punishes enemies
Tribal law over universal grace

The New Testament is genuinely problematic for them because Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew who preached radical inclusion, care for immigrants and outcasts, rejection of wealth and power, and forgiveness of enemies. That's essentially the opposite of the WCN political program.

So they quietly sideline Jesus as a theological figure while keeping the cross as a political symbol. The cross at January 6th wasn't about the Sermon on the Mount.

Trump as OT figure works for them because he's Cyrus -- the flawed pagan king God uses as an instrument anyway. That's literally the theological framework many WCN pastors use. It's clever because it immunizes him against any moral critique.

The deepest irony: They've built a political religion around the parts of the Bible their own Christ specifically came to supersede.

That's not Christianity. That's nationalism wearing Christianity's coat.

While we're on the topic of Trump's nonsense...

The Trump "Weave" Nonsense Unravels: A Decade of Cognitive Decline in Donald Trump's Public Speech

1980s — Coherent, even articulate in interviews; sentences complete, vocabulary precise, stays on topic. Fundamental life view pretty messed up, however. Still capable of hiding that.
1990s — Still functional but shallower; the braggadocio is increasing, substance thinning.
2011 — Filler words measurably increasing in recorded interviews; vague placeholder language creeping in.
2015 — Campaign launch; rambling style rewarded by crowds, masking deterioration with performative energy.
2016 — Tangentiality accelerating but mistaken for authenticity; wins the presidency.
2017 — First STAT linguistic analysis finds his speaking style has already worsened significantly since the 1980s.
2018 — Still capable of structured prepared remarks but unscripted responses increasingly fragmented.
2019 — Repetition of key phrases intensifying; same anecdotes recycled regardless of context.
2020 — Post-election loss triggers emotional constriction; all-or-nothing vocabulary spikes.
2021 — Negative emotional language dominates; "never," "always," "completely" becoming verbal tics.
2022 — Word retrieval errors becoming regular; confabulation harder to distinguish from deliberate lying.
2023 — Haley/Pelosi confusion; uncorrected errors normalizing; digressions no longer return to a point.
2024 — Abrupt unframed topic shifts more than double; changes exceed what stylistic continuity can explain.
2025 — Retrieval failures, disorganized sequencing, errors go uncorrected in real time; the compensating mechanisms are visibly breaking down.
2026 — Currently in office, 79 years old, mentally older, and the public record of any given week supplies fresh examples without having to look hard.

The baseline has shifted to where the episodes are no longer remarkable enough to dominate any news cycle.

By the way?

That normalization may be the most telling data point of all.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Kid Who Was Ready

Some people are shaped by a single defining moment. Others are shaped by a decade of unlikely preparation, each experience stacking quietly on the last until one day something extraordinary happens and they discover they were ready for it all along.

"Gordie" was that kind of kid.

He was born into an east coast family -- his mother a Brooklyn girl -- and spent his early years moving. There was a stretch in Spain that seemed like it might become permanent, until it wasn't. Family tensions built to an explosive final confrontation, and his grandfather threw his father out of the country. 

The now family of three moved to Philadelphia, back near relatives, trying to find solid ground. Eventually his mother remarried and the new configuration -- mother, stepfather, Gordie, his sister, and a new little brother -- who made their way back, across the country to Tacoma, Washington, to where the oldest brother, from another father, lived with his dad.

They moved around a lot before finally settling. Home, when it existed, was complicated -- a difficult stepfather, a mother doing her best, a household held together by obligation more than ease. That arrangement lasted until he graduated high school and eventually went into the Air Force. But long before that, home was somewhere to leave. 

So he left it, early and often, and in doing so stumbled into one of the most unusual informal educations a young American could receive in that era. Asking his mother decades later why she allowed him to always be taking lessons of some sort of another, she smiled and said, "I knew I had to tire you out every day, so you'd go to sleep at night. You were like that since birth. Always wanting to see the next new thing."

His sensei Steve Armstrong, ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos...in a style called, Isshinryu.

Sensei Armstrong ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos, a Marine veteran who had studied directly under the founder of Isshin-Ryu on Okinawa, eventually becoming his number two student. This wasn't a strip mall operation. 

This was the real thing, brought back from postwar Japan by men who understood it as a discipline and a philosophy, not a hobby. Gordie trained there from age twelve, rode the city bus in his gi, competed in tournaments alongside future legends of American martial arts, at least one who made the cover of Black Belt magazine, and on one occasion performed kata in a boxing ring at a main event in front of a packed international tournament arena.

He joined the Civil Air Patrol, eventually rising to cadet flight commander. He trained in search and rescue. He earned a ham radio license, a radio telegraph license. He learned first responder first aid. He went on mountain missions, rappelled cliff faces, and on one search and rescue operation found a downed aircraft and its frozen passengers -- an experience that stayed with him. He spent only a single year in a Catholic school in eighth grade where the class was taught Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and he graduated that reading at ten thousand words per minute. With a tested eighty percent level of comprehension.

He shot competitively, three years on the high school rifle team, earning his varsity letter. He got his SCUBA license in tenth grade. He went skydiving the morning after a birthday party, badly hungover, with his best friend and his older brother. On his second jump alone without his friends, he experienced a parachute malfunction at three thousand feet, fixed it himself rather than deploy his reserve -- because he didn't have the two dollars and fifty cents to pay for the repack, and landed hard, but safe. 

He managed the snack bar at a drive-in theater through high school. Once graduated, he got a job downtown Tacoma and was paying his own rent from the age of seventeen, driving himself to work in his 1967 red Camaro convertible.

By that age, Gordie had accumulated a set of capabilities that no institution had deliberately assembled in him. They had simply accrued, experience by experience, in the life of a kid who preferred being useful to being comfortable.

None of it was preparation for what happened in May of 1974. And all of it was.

A phone call from a friend. A woman who needed a ride. A newspaper clipping about a murder. A question that would have sent most teenagers running:

Do you have a gun?

Unbelievably, as it happened -- he did. A Ruger Blackhawk 357cal. magnum.

Would you stay with me for the week -- until I can get out of town?

What followed was one week in the life of a seventeen-year-old who found himself between a witness to an organized crime murder and the mafia crime family who wanted her silenced, in a city where the Sheriff, and others, were on the payroll and the police couldn't be trusted.

A mafia crime ring so pervasive and insidious -- its reach extending into local, county, and perhaps even state government -- that when the federal government finally moved in, aided by the very Sheriff's office deputies who had refused to be bought, the trial had to be moved to California. 

The case gathered newspaper headlines across the entire country for months. The corruption ran so deep that Pierce County voters eventually approved a new county charter abolishing the governmental structure that had made it all possible.

He wasn't a hero. He was just ready.

And nobody knew about his story -- for decades.

Until now --

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.