Old and busted: "Ultra-MAGA!" New hotness: "Christian nationalism!"

The mainstream media has chosen their narrative for the upcoming election season. In order to convince voters to support an increasingly senile Joe Biden, the Protection Racket Media has to panic them into believing that Donald Trump's election would be worse than an incapacitated incumbent who can't even face the media any longer, let alone a debate. So voilà – suddenly, Trump is a Christian Nationalist rather than a conservo-populist, as Trump governed between 2017 and 2021.

Or so Politico argues, anyway. They delve into the Trump campaign's plans to instill "Christian nationalism" into America in 2025. What specifically does that mean?

Er ... child support?

Wolfe, who has deleted several posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme outlook of what a government led by Christian nationalists should propose. In a December post, he called for ending sex education in schools, surrogacy and no-fault divorce throughout the country, as well as forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs” — a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives.

Has no one at Politico ever heard of child support? Courts routinely force men to provide support for their biological offspring and have for decades if not longer. Maybe its reporters are inexperienced enough to consider this novel, but one would think that an editor would have Googled it before allowing that passage to get published. The issue of "deadbeat dads" goes back to my youth in the 1970s, at least, as well as the myriad ways the government used to force them to pay support. 

What else frightens the reporting team at Politico? The reliance on "natural law" and "natural rights" by conservatives. No, I am not kidding:

In 2019, Trump’s then-secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, set up a federal commission to define human rights based on the precepts Vought describes, specifically “natural law and natural rights.” Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception.

Let's unpack this wealth of ignorance. First off, "natural law" is not a "pillar of Catholicism," as its pillars are the Gospels, the scriptures, and the Magisterium. To the extent that natural law flows out of religion, it's not limited to Christianity but is also part of the Judaic tradition and others. 

And it's also part of the American founding documents. The Continental Congress based its Declaration of Independence entirely on natural law and natural rights. That's what "unalienable rights" means in the second paragraph – that rights come from the Creator and that legitimate governments cannot infringe upon them:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Congress later crafted the Constitution to put that into foundational law. The US Constitution does not grant rights to citizens but rather restrains government from infringing on the natural rights that come from God: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, thought, self-defense, private property, and so on. 

The notion that this comes from a novel form of Christian nationalism is not just absurd but entirely revealing of the warping of the media and their hostility toward liberty. And don't think for a moment that this hostility will be limited to panic pornography (hat-tip Ace for that term) either. They will use whatever tools they can to shut down dissenting voices of liberty and have by declaring conservative commentary as either radical or misinformation to suppress it and scare off advertisers.

While we're speaking of support, you can help fight this corrupt media propaganda. We are rapidly approaching a crossroads where the collapse of mainstream media could take out all voices in its wake. The only way to keep dissent against the propaganda in place is through direct support by the people who value free speech and debate.

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Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:

•  Joe Biden's not the only one whose competence is in question. Andrew Malcolm and I discuss the Dylan Byers report that the White House press corps has colluded to keep Biden's cognitive crisis a secret out of "indelicacy."
•  We explore that issue at length, including a discussion of 2018's The Front Runner, an overlooked film about the Gary Hart scandal in the 1988 cycle.
•  We also discuss the media's false narratives about the monkey business (heh) at St. Patrick's Cathedral last week. 

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!