Christian nationalism is in vogue, at least for the people who are trying to hold on to power , the people who are trying to destroy American democracy. A case in point is Peter Thiel. He's the founder of Palantir. Palantir is a company that profits on systems that conduct widespread electronic surveillance of people, so that anybody who is not from here is being watched. The idea is that anybody who is not from here can be picked up by Palantir’s systems, identified, targeted for detention, for exile, being deported from the United States. In order to get that information, all of our information information needs to be searched through. That's an obvious violation of the Bill of Rights, which guarantees protection from unreasonable search and seizure of our persons and our papers, meaning our bodies and our records of our personal lives, of what we're doing. Peter Thiel seems to think that the Bill of Rights isn't really a valid form of law so he's created Palantir to help the government to violate the Bill of Rights and our protection from unreasonable search and seizure. But Peter Theil also is a big believer in Christian power in the United States of America. Christian power, as he sees it, is the same thing as power for big tech executives like himself. So Peter Thiel is giving a four-part lecture series, which is supposed to be secret. They punish people who even share notes of these lectures, and yet some of the content has leaked out. In this four-part lecture series, Peter Thiel is describing how he believes the Antichrist is on the move in the United States of America. Guess what: for him, the Antichrist is anybody who is attempting to stop big tech firms from doing whatever they want. As he describes it, regulation of generative artificial intelligence and other high-powered digital tools for social control , regulation of those things by the government is an effort by the Antichrist. It's anti-Christian to regulate artificial intelligence, according to him. In Christian Nationalism, what counts as Christian is really kind of flexible. It happens to coincide with what the people in power want. So it is that the chairman of the House judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, got on CNN just a few days ago and declared that he believes that Christianity, part of the will of God, is to have ice agents, put on masks, go roaming through American neighborhoods and dragging people out of their homes, out of their cars, out of their schools, sending them to secret detention camps without due process of law and keeping them there under inhumane conditions or deporting them. Here's what Jim Jordan had to say about that: “I think the ice agents are doing the Lord's work.” How is it that a secret police set up by a fascist government dragging parents, children out of their homes and their cars, their schools, their places of work, and putting them into prisons without any due process of law is the Lord's work. Well, the Lord's work is it turns out, whatever people in power want it to mean. So that actually, if you take a look at what Christ nationalists are doing in this government , they are defining what the Lord wants and what the government is willing to accept, not just in terms of being punitive in general against outsiders, but deciding which kinds of religion, worshiping, which kind of gods, which kinds of Lord, in a sacred sense, are going to be admitted into the United States of America? So it is that in the U.S. House of Representatives, we now have a bill numbered HR 5722 , the purpose of which is to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to prohibit the entry of aliens who adhere to Sharia law. It doesn't stop there. This bill also legalizes the deportation and the imprisonment of anybody who adheres to Sharia law. This is the really important piece of language to pay attention to: “Any alien in the United States found to be an adherent of Sharia law shall have any immigration benefit, immigration relief, or visa revoked, be considered inadmissible or deportable and shall be removed from the United States.” Not that they can, but that anybody who is not a U.S. citizen, even if they came here legally, you know, through all the paperwork, all of the procedures that are required for that, say, a university professor, say somebody who's working for a tech firm in San Francisco, if they are found merely to, "adhere to Sharia law,", they shall be deported, they have to be deported under this new proposed law. Well, what is Sharia law? Sharia law is merely the law, under the religion of Islam, as it is understood in Muslim countries. That actually means a lot of different things in different Muslim countries, in different varieties of Islam, which there are varieties of Islam. There are fundamentalist Muslims, yes, but there are also modern liberal Muslims, and they have a very different sense of what Sharia means. Sharia can mean justice, it can mean the body of laws. So, Sharia law is not just one thing. How would the U.S government even determine what that means? It's pretty clear how that would actually work, given our current state of affairs, given the way that the fascist government of Donald Trump is applying the laws that it already has to persecute people who are from other countries and other cultures. To be an adherent of Sharia law is merely to be Muslim, to belong to to the religion of Islam. To be an adherent of Sharia law doesn't mean that you're imposing Sharia law on anyone else. It's just a series of codes of conduct that you think that you ought to comply with. So if this law passes, the U.S. Congress, it will become mandatory for all Muslims who are not U.S. Citizens to be deported or detained to be kicked out of the United States of America for no other reason than what their religion is. Those of you who have actually read the Constitution, who understand the Bill of Rights, know that this is specifically prohibited in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But then again, here in the United States of America, the law doesn't really seem to matter anymore. The members of the U.S. House of Representatives who support HR5722, which would, effectively prohibit the practice of Islam or even Islamic beliefs in the United States, Randy Fine of the 6th Congressional District of Florida, Tim Burchett of the second Congressional District of Tennessee, Keith Self of the third Congressional District in Texas, Barry Moore of the first Congressional District in Alabama , Mary Miller of the 15th Congressional District in Illinois, Scott Perry of the 10th Congressional District of Pennsylvania, Sherry Biggs of the third Congressional District of South Carolina , Lauren Boebert of the fourth Congressional District of Colorado, Josh Breechen of the Second Congressional District of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of the 9th Congressional District of Georgia, Russ Fulcher of the First Congressional District of Idaho, Andy Biggs of the fifth Congressional District of Arizona, and Byron Donalds of the 19th Congressional District of Florida. In case you are wondering, yes, all of these members of Congress are Republicans. Another group of people who were all Republicans were those who were gunning for positions of leadership within the national organization of the young Republicans. They were organizing in a chat group, and Politico obtained the text of what they had to say. Repeatedly, this group of young Republicans praised Adolf Hitler. They called African Americans monkeys who liked to eat watermelon. Then they said, not once, not even just twice, but three times that they want to put all of their political opponents into gas chambers, like the Nazis used in Germany and Poland. There are some people who like to quibble when we call the government and the Republican Party that runs it right now , fascists. They say, oh, that's too strong a term. When we see see Republicans in Congress and out of Congress coalescing around ideas, like making it illegal for anyone entering this country to be Muslim, ending freedom of religion in America , praising Adolf Hitler, and threatening to kill their opponents in Nazi gas chambers, I really do't see how we can quibble with calling these people fascists.
