1. One of the things I've noticed in my time in leftist circles is that outside of abortion work we really don't talk about the Evangelical right very often, and I think that's an incredible mistake.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
2. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and @onesarahjones has done some really incredible work documenting how Evangelical groups and institutions operate but as someone who grew up in what in one of their intellectual strongholds I don't
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
3. think people understand how scary these people are. I'm not an expert on the Evangelical movement but what I can do is talk a bit about the incredibly fucked up stuff that I saw these people doing growing up and what they're doing now.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
4. One thing that I cannot emphasize enough is how unbelievably antisemitic these people are. There's a baseline level of antisemitism so pervasive I didn't understand that there was anything outside of it until I got to college. There'd also be
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
5. stuff that even at the time I thought was what the fuck, like the frequency and casualness with which people would be like trying to figure out what the cheapest tomato sauce or something is and someone else would go "that's so Jewish".
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
6. And it's not like these people were like pepe neo-nazis (though we had those too), these were old school moral majority neocons. They were also incredibly supportive of Israel, which didn't make any sense to me until my junior year of high
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
7. school when I would get into conversations with juniors and seniors about what they were going to do after college and they would casually say things like, and I'm directly quoting here, "I'm going to join the army to go kill Muslims".
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
8. I still haunted by those conversations. In the subsequent 5 years I've fought Nazis in the streets, had police officers point machine guns at my head, and had arguments with members of ISIS, and the Evangelical holy war fanatics are still, by
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
9. far, the people I am the most scared of. These are people who genuinely believe that they are going to go to war in the Middle East, bring all of the Jews to Israel, and bring about the fucking rapture. What haunts me is how calm they were
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
10. about it. It's not like they angry about it, which is pretty common with the neo-nazis or even sort of normal racist troops. They were so casual about what they were going to do, like it was a completely ordinary thing to say yeah I'm going to
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
11. to Iraq to wipe out the Muslims. It was fucking terrifying, and these people are in the army now. God knows how many people they've killed already, and these kind of holy war Dominionists are pretty common in the upper echelons of the American
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
12. military. Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos, for example, have deep roots in the Evangelical movement and you can bet your ass the people opening fire on Iraqi children during Blackwater deployments are too.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
13. There's also the seeds of some of the conspiracy theory wing of the modern far right that have sort of jumped shit to QAnon and Pizzagate now. Everyone was talking about Benghazi, of course, and the IRS tax scandal thing that everyone's
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
14. forgotten about now because it didn't matter, but we also had a kid who lost his shit because there was an ACLU sticker in a classroom and he thought that the ACLU was a communist front, threatened the principle if it wasn't taken down, and
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
15. eventually retaliated by calling anti-abortion/creationist protesters to demonstrate outside the school, which was, uh, highly entertaining but an interesting case of the extent to which all of these people were conspiracy theorists.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
16. Last thing I'm going to do is talk about the missionary complex a bit because obviously it's really fucked up but there are elements of it that are really sad. Basically everyone would go on mission trips with their giant mega-churches (which
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
17. just like had gift shops in them and literally covered the horizon because this is a normal fucking country) and come back with pictures of the people they were "helping" in like Honduras or Costa Rica, which was apparently a really powerful
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
18. experience for them, and you get a lot of this talk about how important "service" is for them. Obviously a lot of this is kind of bullshit but it's also deeply insidious in a lot of ways. Not everyone in these movements are genocidal holy
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
19. warriors or frothing neo-nazi berserkers, there's a lot of people who are genuinely kind and incredibly empathetic and whose goal in life is to help people. Those are the people who get drawn into doing missionary work once they get out of
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
20. college. Obviously there are people who do missionary work out of racism and there's probably always an element of that mixed in, but there's a lot of people who I knew growing up who would have been incredible socialist organizers who instead
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
21. really believe that the best way to help people is by the combination of charity and "saving their souls". And these people are in like Vietnam now doing god knows what because they believe with all of their hearts that they're saving people.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
22. Those are the people I really don't know what to do about, because they're not just like outwardly evil like a lot of the other people I've talked about here. They have this incredibly misplaced altruism and it's invariably going to hurt
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
23. people but it's harder for me to just write them off. And maybe that's just how unconscious class solidarity and racism works, which values the performance of niceness even in the face of the obvious damage they're doing to people I don't know
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
24. But I can't help but think that one of the saddest parts of how the Evangelical movement operates is how it leverages the sense of community and the desire to help people to draw otherwise kind and empathetic people into one of the most
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
25. dangerous and radical movements in the world.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
