Facts, Opinions, and Lies: Dealing With MAGA Denials of Trump’s Lies

Dear subscribers,

Before I begin I need to apologize for my lack of production here. I was dealing with a back injury and two doctoral classes that were time consuming and exhausting. Thankfully, I am pretty much healed from the injury and done with the most difficult class in the program. I have a bit over a week before the next, and hopefully, last class before I begin my project for the program. Thank you for your patience and support.

In her 2017 TED talk regarding Holocaust Denial, historian and current U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism said that there are facts, opinions, and lies. She noted that Holocaust deniers had used a sophistry that presented their lies as opinions, maybe “edgy” opinions in order to make them a subject of legitimate debate, but what they were doing was lying, because their opinions were not based on facts, but lies. https://youtu.be/0ztdofPc8Rw?si=8pftu9Dvl6eE2nt1

The same has happened regarding the vociferous and outlandish lies of Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the media for the most part has not exposed those lies as what they are and continue to treat what he does as something normal. Trump lies so much that his supporters, especially allegedly conservative “Christians” believe and repeat them as if they were the Gospel.

I have been fighting this since 2015, and even had a member of the Navy Chapel where I served in 2018 try to get me tried by Court-Martial for criticizing the policy of separating families and caging children in warehouses with no climate controls, beds, or sanitation facilities in a sermon. I had to hire a lawyer and was supported by Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Because what I did was constitutionally protected religious speech based on my faith tradition, the charges were tossed, but the experience showed me that the MAGA Christians were more concerned with defending the actions of a would be dictator than the Christian faith.

The fact is that whether it is regard to Trump’s fairly thin number of accomplishments as President, his attacks on military members and veterans, his mocking of Christian beliefs, his betrayal of Ukraine and long term American allies, his election denial lies, the myriad of felonies he should stand trial for, his megalomaniac promises to destroy the Constitution and use the military and Department of Justice to political opponents and incarcerate millions of Americans or immigrants in concentration camps.

Unfortunately, one cannot convince people committed to the Trump Cult of any of this, thus, the fight needs to be waged in person through the political process, in houses of worship, and on every media platform. If we do not we will either become a perpetrator or bystander in Trump’s lies and future crimes. One cannot place their faith in the Republican Party, Trump controlled Courts, or much of the media or a large part of religious establishment.

In regard to Trump’s allegedly Christian supporters and apologists I can only restate the words of German General Henning von Tresckow regarding the Christians of the Third Reich when I think of American Christians and Trump: “I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.”

One must use facts to confront the lies and to dispel the myth that all opinions are created equal in a world where truth is under attack. All opinions are not equal. Elvis is dead, the earth is not flat, the climate is changing, the Holocaust happened, and Trump lost the 2020 election.

See you soon.