God, Guns, and Gaslighting: The Gospel According to Grifters

Let us gather round the burning Constitution, children, and toast marshmallows over the ashes of what used to be a democratic republic. Because in this blessed year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Something-Odd, the administration—if we can still call it that without choking on the irony—has taken it upon itself to perform a moral colonoscopy on the nation. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ve declared the patient perfectly healthy… as long as you ignore the gangrenous racism, the fascist flatulence, and the small detail that they seem to believe “Christian values” were etched by Ayn Rand on the back of a bar napkin during a blackout.

They call it “cutting the fat.” That’s cute. Like burning your house down to kill a spider is “extreme pest control.” Only in this case, the spider is poor, non-white, speaks more than one language, and may have had the gall to flee persecution or—God forbid—dream of a better life. The “fat” being trimmed includes food assistance, healthcare, public education, and all those pesky federal agencies that try to stop us from dying horribly at work, drinking poison water, or catching fire from breathing too hard in East Palestine.

And while they gleefully deport brown people in the dead of night like they’re taking out the trash, they clutch their rosaries and hymnals and dare to use the word Christian. As if Jesus, that long-haired, dark-skinned socialist refugee who flipped tables at bankers, would co-sign Pete Hegseth’s maniacal admiration for tyrants and jackboots.

Ah, Hegseth. A man whose spiritual GPS seems to think Sermon on the Mount is a Fox Nation exclusive. He helped botch the Signal intelligence debacle with such flair, you’d think national security was a toddler’s Etch-a-Sketch. No surprise there—this is the same guy who thinks the military’s real problem is too much diversity and not enough jingoistic cosplay. It’s a masterclass in failure wrapped in a flag and baptized in a bucket of Bud Light.

The Signal Project—intended to be the conservative answer to a secure messaging app—was instead a bureaucratic blooper reel of paranoia and incompetence. They wanted an encrypted playground to swap memes and organize “God and Guns” brunches without the Deep State peeking. Instead, what they built was a Trojan Horse of hubris: insecure, mismanaged, and so easily penetrable it made Ashley Madison look like Fort Knox.

But what does it matter? Their base isn’t reading Signal reports; they’re too busy swallowing hate-flavored communion wafers from the pulpit of Newsmax and whatever unmedicated uncle runs their group chat. The mouthpieces—those walking, talking spam folders of slurs and scripture—keep churning out a theology of whiteness so pungent, it makes Pat Robertson look like James Baldwin.

And this is where the snake eats its own tail. Because their entire identity war is predicated on a lie: that to be American is to be white, Christian (their kind), male-adjacent, and terrified. Terrified of drag queens, books, pronouns, immigrants, women who don’t apologize for existing, and the vague sense that maybe Thomas Jefferson didn’t have all the answers. Spoiler: he didn’t. He had slaves.

The administration doesn’t want to preserve America. They want to curate it—like a museum of frozen Norman Rockwell paintings, where no one is gay, everyone is Protestant, and women say “yes sir” before they say “amen.” They are not leading us into a shining city on a hill; they’re digging a ditch and calling it holy ground.

And yet.

Here’s what they fear most: We are still here. Brown, queer, poor, loud, multilingual, angry, educated, hopeful, tired—and deeply, ferociously American. Because we are the ones who believe the words “a more perfect union” weren’t just PR fluff, but a contract—signed in hope and ink and struggle. We know the Beatitudes weren’t a manifesto for billionaires. We know that justice and mercy are supposed to be verbs, not loopholes.

They have the power now. But they also have the rot. And rot doesn’t build; it only consumes.

So let them preach their upside-down gospel of greed and cruelty. Let them ban the books, deport the dreamers, and surveil their shadows. We will write the truth in the margins. We will keep building the nation they are trying to shrink-wrap in white plastic and ship back to 1952.

They think they’re the voice of America.

But we are the soul.

And we’ve got better writers.