“Heretic”: After Trump spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain likens Trump to Jesus during Easter, right-wing media figures lash out
Tucker Carlson called it “so vile” and “such a sacrilege,” while conservative influencer Brett Cooper said, “Maybe these people should not be involved in our government”
Media Matters, by Payton Armstrong, 04/08/26
Right-wing media figures are lashing out at President Donald Trump’s personal spiritual adviser and senior adviser to the White House Faith Office Paula White-Cain for likening Trump to Jesus during an Easter event, labeling her an “unabashed heretic” and “batsh*t crazy.”
White-Cain is a televangelist, pastor, and Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser who has “long been a prominent and polarizing figure in evangelical circles.” White-Cain has an extensive history of extreme rhetoric, including declaring that opposition to Trump is equivalent to opposition to God. Now a senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, White-Cain is part of Trump’s effort to expand “the power and influence of conservative Christians in government” in his second term.
At an April 1 closed-door Easter speech at the White House, White-Cain spoke next to Trump and directly likened him to Jesus, saying, “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” The White House deleted video of the speech, which “was initially posted on the official White House website and YouTube channel,” and clips continued to circulate on social media.
On April 4, Fox host (and the president’s daughter-in-law) Lara Trump hosted White-Cain to share a message for Easter, in which she said it was her “favorite subject to talk about” to “give honor to God and to president Trump for being bold and unwavering with his faith.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/heretic-after-trump-spiritual-adviser-paula-white-cain-likens-trump-jesus-during
The Eve Of A Radical Evil
Trump, and especially the language he uses, is a particularly vile, vicious and sick example of American barbarity. But his behaviour so far has been consistent with other presidents who have bombed countries back to the Stone Age.
Nate Bear, Apr 08, 2026, https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-eve-of-a-radical-evil
We are on the eve of a radical evil.
Tonight Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender or be faced with the destruction of its critical energy and national infrastructure expires.
Just the fact that the president of the United States can set a ‘deadline’ for massive war crimes which leaves the world counting down the hours and speculating about nuclear weapon use, after starting a war of aggression, should be enough to end US hegemony forever.
This kind of ultimatum should be viewed as so unhinged, so beyond the pale, so outside the bounds of anything approaching normal diplomatic behaviour that no country in the world should want anything to do with it. Embassies should be closing, US troops should be ordered to leave the nearly 800 bases in 80 countries at which they’re stationed, and these facilities shut down.
The fact none of this has ever been a possibility shows us how US hegemony is a true plague on the world. It shows us how so few states are legitimately sovereign, and how so many willingly line up behind the crimes of empire. And it shows us that those states which are sovereign get targeted for regime change precisely because they are sovereign.
This, ultimately, was Iran’s only crime. It’s original sin.
When, nearly 50 years ago, the country ended a western-backed system of dictatorial monarchism and pursued a sovereign path, it brought to life a material reality that is forbidden under US empire. The material successes Iran has created over the last near 50 years, including independent financial systems, digital systems, and military systems, all achieved while under crushing western sanctions, are not allowed. And Iran is being punished for this.
Iran is being punished for its resistance, for its ingenuity, for its sovereignty.
This is the reason the US-Israel is bombing Iran’s premier universities and research facilities, and murdering its scientists.
The MIT of Iran was bombed this weekend.
These are centres of non-western excellence and learning which produce the minds that demonstrate what can be done outside the US-Zionist orbit. These places, and the people they train, have enabled Iran to successfully decouple from western hegemony. They have enabled modern Iranians to not just inherit a proud, 6,000-year-old civilisation, but to build on the achievements of their predecessors.
And because the Persian civilisation is such a successful one, because modern Iran has shepherded that civilisation so skillfully, Trump is threatening to kill it. Literally. In the most murderously deranged turn of a murderously deranged period, Trump said this morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Every journalist, every politician who reproduced anti-Iran propaganda led us to this point.
Every reference to “the regime,” every reference to “peaceful protests,” every failure to mention that the protestors were armed by the west to provoke an insurrection (which Trump just admitted), every fake “internet shutdown” story, every dubious angle used to foment anti-Iran sentiment led us to this point.
And every single person, from liberal politicians to journalists at the Guardian, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and all those Iranian exiles who demanded Iran be bombed and helped cultivate the ground for this war of aggression, are culpable.
Yesterday an Iranian exile who writes for the BBC, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, suggested, quite unbelievably, that Iranians actually want to be nuked.
After an outcry on social media, the quote was changed, which itself raises questions about whether those words were ever said or not.
Regardless, publishing a quote from someone in a country under a murderous assault saying they hope they get nuked is an extraordinarily depraved depth to plumb. And even if it was said, it is effectively the voicing of suicidal ideation and by any journalist ethic or standard should never be printed.
But this is the sickness of imperial stenographers.
This is where we are now.
And of course there is speculation in his threat to kill “a whole civilization” that Trump is hinting at using a nuclear weapon. Maybe he is. Maybe they will. They’ve done it before, after all, the only country to have ever done so. If he does, the world should never be the same again.
But even if the US doesn’t use a nuclear weapon, even if the US-Israel ‘only’ go through with the threat to destroy all of Iran’s critical national infrastructure, the world should never be the same again.
And even if he doesn’t go through with it and an unlikely ceasefire deal is agreed, the world should never be the same again.
Enough is enough of degenerate American empire and its crazed, out-of-control genocidal Jewish colony.
The impunity of empire has to end. It has to. Because while it remains an empire, the US will always be the greatest threat to global peace and stability. No president since the US became an imperial power has been able to sit atop such a massive amount of hardware and not order the mass murder of innocent people.
Not one.
It’s baked in.
Trump, and especially the language he uses, is a particularly vile, vicious and sick example of American barbarity. But his behaviour so far has been consistent with other presidents who have bombed countries back to the Stone Age.
And even if he uses a nuclear weapon, he won’t be unique.
Thinking about the long arc of American violence for two seconds should make us incredulous that the country was ever sold to us as a stabilising force, as the leader of the “free world,” as a symbol of humanitarian values.
Anyone who ever fell for this has been utterly hoodwinked and made a fool of.
It really is time to end empire, Zionism and the control it has over the world. Whether you’re in the US, the global north or south, a central task must be to find and elevate new leaders who can extricate us from this rule.
And doing this won’t be possible without breaking people out of their legacy media bubble and educating them about the huge lies they’ve been told regarding the benevolence of the US and the evils of the official enemy.
We’re all going to suffer when the fuel starts to dry up and the economic crisis coming down the pipe as a result of US impunity really hits. The crisis is coming, and it is certain.
And now we are at the precipice of a horror being loosed on Iran that would take the country decades to recover from.
For our collective humanity, such a horror would be an everlasting stain inviting the rightful judgement and condemnation of many generations to come.
We’re on the eve of a radical evil, and whatever happens tonight, nothing should ever be the same again.
Trump’s Genocidal Threats on Iran Are Enabled by a Vast Apparatus of Destruction
most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened.
By Negin Owliaei , Truthout, April 7, 2026
Somehow, in a war already bent on turning Iran into a failed state, Donald Trump’s threats against the country have become increasingly disturbing. For days now, Trump has threatened to bomb key civilian infrastructure in Iran, from bridges to power plants. On April 5, in a terrifying screed, he wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran.” He went on to say, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
He doubled down on that threat the next day, when a reporter asked how his threatened strikes would not amount to a war crime. “They’re animals and we have to stop them,” he said. He also attempted to justify himself by suggesting that he was calling for Iranian liberation. “They want to hear bombs because they want to be free.”
Finally, on the morning of April 7, he issued his most chilling threat yet: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These statements, from a man who directs the incomprehensibly lethal power of the U.S. military, should make the world stop. For me, personally, it does feel like the world has stopped: What do you do in the hours between the moment the president of the United States threatens to annihilate your homeland and the time he has vowed to conduct the actual act? Trump is holding an entire nation hostage. But, somehow, the rest of the world continues on. The markets chug along. Congress continues to be in recess, with dissent confined largely to social media posts. It is hard not to feel like we have failed some critical test of the bounds of our own humanity.
Now, as the entire world waits to see what kind of fate a single man will inflict upon an entire nation, we have entered new territory. As I type these words, most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.
The nuclear threat is animating for its sheer terror, and for good reason. Some military experts have cast doubt on the U.S.’s ability to use a nuclear weapon against Iran. Other political pundits, meanwhile, suggest that this is a perfect example of Trump making a maximalist threat in order to seek a better negotiating position.
But to pretend that this is the limitation of the threat — that, if a nuclear weapon is not deployed, we have somehow won something crucial — is to miss the point. The U.S. and Israel have already inflicted mass death upon Iran in the form of conventional missiles. In terms of specifically nuclear threats, Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr has come under repeated attack during this aggression. Mainstream U.S. media outlets have largely moved past the fact that Israel bombed fuel depots in Iran, causing oil to rain down from the skies — a chemical attack if there ever was one.
Trump’s threats to bomb power plants and bridges and civilian infrastructure more broadly are already terrifying enough as it is. And Trump’s language alone is monstrous. It is genocidal and should be treated as such; threatening genocide, legal experts are pointing out, is itself a war crime.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… On the first day of the war, we learned that the earliest reported casualties of U.S.-Israeli aggression were kids going to school, and eventually found they were killed while huddled together in a prayer room, their bodies hit with a U.S.-made and delivered missile. I wrote then that “we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.” We still need to do that, desperately.
We also need to address the dehumanization that persists in every single aspect of American life — from politics to culture to media — that has sent us down the path in which Trump can threaten to annihilate a civilization and we find ourselves with few answers about how to stop it. By calling for the death of a civilization, Trump is making the goal explicit. But decades of sanctions paved the way for his words. Politicians on both sides of the aisle who have and continue to frame Iran as a particular threat, even as a “cancer,” have made this possible. The media outlets that uncritically platform those racist tirades bear responsibility, too. Sadly, Iranians in the diaspora who insisted that their fellow country people were desperate for bombs — some of whom continue to call for further violence against their people — played a role here as well.
…………………………………………………………………………….. Trump might be able to threaten a civilization with mass death. But there is an entire apparatus that makes those threats credible — from the whole spectrum of the U.S. political establishment constantly voting to fuel the war machine, to the international organizations that shaped international law to favor the powerful, to the media that downplay and obfuscate the viciousness of U.S. empire. A civilization that allows these threats to repeat unabated should question whether, somewhere along the way, it was the one that actually died. https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-genocidal-threats-on-iran-are-enabled-by-a-vast-apparatus-of-destruction/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=ca3edbadaa-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_04_07_09_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-ca3edbadaa-650192793
Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza
Benjamin Anthony’s speech at New York’s influential Park Avenue Synagogue, where he argued that U.S. Jews need to support ethnic cleansing in Gaza, illustrates how the American Jewish community has embraced Israeli racism and brutality.
By Philip Weiss Mondoweiss, April 2, 2026
The American press does its best not to cover savage Israeli views of Palestinians, but a leading New York synagogue gave an honored platform to those views ten days ago. It hosted an Israeli advocate with connections in its government who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and said American Jews need to support that operation.
Benjamin Anthony said that all “Palestinian Arabs” in Gaza pose such a threat to Israel that the international community should use “muscular diplomacy” with Egypt so as force the population out of Gaza into an “enclave” in the Sinai peninsula.
“I believe the international community would very handily be able to create some sort of enclave for the…Gazans in the Sinai peninsula. And then we might have the breathing room to think about long-term solutions.”
Though those two million Gazans would likely be displaced again, into African countries, said Anthony, the leader of an Israeli think tank called the MirYam Institute.
“I think someone like [Egyptian president] Sisi would likely move the Gazans along from the Sinai peninsula in the event that he didn’t want to build a place for them there, and you would probably see them dispersed through the continent of Africa quite quickly.”
Anthony’s argument is widely shared by Israelis (according to a 2025 poll), and it only received mild push back from Eliot Cosgrove, a leading conservative rabbi in the U.S., who had brought Anthony, his first cousin, onto the synagogue dais.
Cosgrove called the scheme “very intriguing,” but protested that Anthony was conflating “Hamas with the entire Gaza population.” And that by creating a refugee population with a “narrative”, Israel was practically and morally kicking the can down the road. Speaking “as a proud Zionist,” Cosgrove said the scheme is not in Israel’s interest.
Anthony insisted that no Gazans could be trusted because Gazan civilians cheered the atrocities against Israelis on October 7. Cosgrove folded his hand: “Well, I love you, and I disagree with you, but let’s move on.”
Cosgrove ended the hour-long dialogue by thanking Anthony “for fighting the good fight” and “for representing our people.”
I must point out that if a speaker called for Israeli Jews to be displaced because Palestinians are unsafe with Jews living there, that person would instantly face serious, perhaps career-ending, repercussions. Recall what happened to Helen Thomas, an accomplished reporter of Lebanese ancestry, when she said that Israeli Jews need to “go home,” back to Europe. She was forced to retire in 2010.
Anthony’s toughness had a goal. He’d come to “implore” American Jews to support Israel and America’s war with Iran as a war for the Jewish future in America. Trump is a unique leader who has taken action, he said. The next president could be anti-Israel.
“My feeling is that the entire Zionist project, and dare I say the fate of world Jewry not just Israeli Jewry, but diaspora Jewry as well, rests on the outcome of this war against Iran,” Anthony said. “You don’t need to be a pollster to know where the [Israeli] people are. On the fight against Iran, there is near unanimity behind the idea that this regime needs to come to an end.”
In fact, Anthony’s militaristic view is echoed in the American Jewish community. The leading Jewish organizations have commended the U.S. and Israel for going to war.
But non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have opposed the war. The liberal Zionist group J Street has also done so and called on American Jews to speak out against the war so as to show Americans that Jews are not pushing the war. J Street’s leader acknowledged that pro-Israel groups played “a role in setting the table for Trump’s decision,” but warned that those lobbying actions could make Jews the “scapegoat for failure.”
American Jews must oppose “the overwhelming majority of [the Israeli] people” and declare that this war “was not in our interest, and that it was not pursued in our name,” Jeremy Ben-Ami said
No such concern was evident at the Park Avenue Synagogue on March 20. Benjamin Anthony called on American Jews to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Israeli Jews in an “absolute” war that will end all the other wars, so as to ensure “the long-term survival of the state of Israel.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. The marvel of Anthony’s appearance is that our press routinely gives Israelis and American Zionists a pass when they express extreme ideas. Anthony says he has consulted White House officials (he does not say which administration) and Israelis with similar views, such as Ron Dermer, who come and go at the Trump White House, according to Trump’s former counter-terrorism chief who lately resigned over the misguided U.S. policy.
The tragedy for me of this Passover is that the American Jewish community rolls out the red carpet for racist talk, because they are “proud Zionists.” So a thuggish Israeli endorses brutal policies against Palestinians in a leading New York synagogue, and the response is We love you. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/prominent-new-york-synagogue-hosts-presentation-on-why-u-s-jews-should-support-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-gaza/
How the neoconservative influence over U.S. war-making paved the way for Trump’s war crimes in Iran
Donald Trump’s naked threats to target Iran’s civilian infrastructure are the culmination of a strand of neoconservative thought that has defined U.S. war-making over three decades, from the Iraq war to Obama’s drone campaigns to the Gaza genocide.
By Abdaljawad Omar Mondoweiss, April 6, 2026
On Sunday morning, as Christians across Iran and the world marked Easter, Donald Trump posted a profanity-laced ultimatum on Truth Social. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”
The post was the latest in a week of escalating threats — to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” to destroy its power plants, bridges, and “possibly all desalinization plants” after a ten-day deadline issued on March 26 expires at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Over a hundred international law experts have already warned that targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Trump, characteristically, appears neither to have read their letter nor to care.
The language is Trump’s own: crude, performative, calibrated for the scroll. But the logic it serves is not his. It belongs to a longer and more deliberate tradition of strategic thought — one that was articulated, with far greater sophistication, more than three decades ago. It has been advancing, precedent by precedent, toward exactly this moment, and to understand how threats of destroying Iranian civilian infrastructure not only became thinkable but inevitable, one must return to the man who first laid the intellectual groundwork for it in the contemporary age: Eliot Cohen.
A professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins and later Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, Cohen was one of the most consequential war intellectuals of his generation. One of his more memorable and deliberately irreverent lines, first appearing in an article in Foreign Affairs in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, compared airpower to modern courtship, because it appeared “to offer gratification without commitment.” The Gulf War had produced a euphoria among politicians, commentators, and generals due to the emergence of airpower as an instrument of surgical precision, coming at negligible cost and with minimal political consequence. Smart bombs had entered the popular imagination, and press briefings started to feature grainy cockpit footage of missiles threading through ventilation shafts. The message of it all was unmistakable: war had been technologically redeemed.
Cohen’s essay dispelled this fantasy, not to restrain the conduct of war, but to liberate it. His first and most fundamental argument was that war is cruelty, and no degree of technological sophistication changes that. But where a humanitarian critic might have drawn from this the conclusion that force should be constrained, Cohen drew the opposite: the pretense of constraint, far from a moral achievement, was a strategic weakness. ……………………………………………………….
When Trump threatens to destroy Iran’s power grid and water desalination plants, an infrastructure upon which millions of civilian lives depend, he is speaking, whether he knows it or not, in the language codified by Cohen.
There’s a second argument in Cohen’s essay that is relevant here, and it followed naturally from the first. Cohen endorsed, without apology, the killing of the enemy leadership as the logical endpoint of airpower doctrine,………………………………
How Israel refined the Cohen doctrine
These two ideas — that war must be waged with unflinching cruelty against the full depth of the enemy’s society, and that leadership decapitation is airpower’s natural culmination — did not remain academic propositions. They germinated over the course of three decades in the operational doctrines of the states most invested in aerial warfare……………………………………………………………………
And so we arrive at Trump’s deadline: “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one.” The threat to destroy civilian infrastructure that sustains millions of lives is not an aberration, but the next room in a long corridor of precedent, each section built to make the next step feel less dramatic than it is……………………………………………………………………….
Cohen’s courtship metaphor promised gratification without commitment; what it delivered, in the end, was cruelty without limit — and a world in which the consequences of that cruelty fall not on the men who authorized it, but on everyone else. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/how-the-neoconservative-influence-over-u-s-war-making-paved-the-way-for-trumps-war-crimes-in-iran/
The bomb and the ayatollah: Islamic just war and the nuclear question in post-Khamenei Iran
What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades, publicly framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam.
Khamenei extended this logic to the nuclear realm. He first issued an oral fatwa in October 2003 declaring nuclear weapons as forbidden (haram) in Islam, and repeated this position in an official statement at the emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in August 2005.
April 5, 2026 , by Dr Sajid Farid Shapoo, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260405-the-bomb-and-the-ayatollah-islamic-just-war-and-the-nuclear-question-in-post-khamenei-iran/
The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening phase of the US-Israeli war against Iran has generated a striking argument in strategic and theological circles alike: that the killing may have removed not merely a political leader but a normative brake on Iran’s possible march toward nuclear weapons. Reports indicate that Iranian decision-making has since hardened under intense military pressure and an increasingly securitised internal environment.
What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades, publicly framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam. If that position represented a genuine religious constraint rather than mere diplomatic rhetoric, then his death may have removed more than a leader: it may have weakened the doctrinal restraint that helped keep Iran a threshold nuclear state.
Islamic just war theory places moral constraints on indiscriminate violence, constraints that Khamenei appeared to project onto state policy. With that authority now gone, the central question is whether a moral tradition can discipline a state that increasingly experiences its insecurity as existential. Whether the next supreme leader can impose doctrinal restraint on a system drifting toward hard security logic.
The Islamic just war theory
The Islamic conception of war begins from a premise different from the caricatures often projected onto it. Classical Islamic thought does not treat war as an unbounded field of religious violence. Rather, it regulates warfare through a moral-legal framework derived from the Qur’an, the practice of the Prophet, and the juristic traditions that developed in subsequent centuries. The foundational Qur’anic injunction is taken from verse 2:190: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress. Indeed, God does not love transgressors.” The verse both permits fighting and limits it: war is accepted as a political reality, but not treated as morally autonomous.
The duality of permission and restraint thus runs through the Islamic just war tradition. War may be legitimate in cases of defence, resistance to aggression, or protection of the community. But even a just cause does not license unlimited means. Islamic jurists emphasised proportionality, legitimate authority, fidelity to agreements, and the protection of non-combatants—including women, children, the elderly, monks, and peasants— developing a norm of discrimination that restricted violence to active combatants.
It is from this perspective that nuclear weapons become especially difficult to reconcile with Islamic ethics. A weapon whose essence is mass, uncontrolled devastation, sits uneasily with any tradition that treats non-combatant immunity as morally central. In Islamic terms, the problem is not simply the scale of destruction, but the very structure of the act: the means themselves are transgressive.
The fatwa: Genuine constraint or strategic cover?
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s reputed opposition to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War established an early precedent for this kind of doctrinal restraint. Iraq used chemical agents extensively, and Iran suffered enormously—some 20,000 Iranians were killed and over 100,000 severely injured. Yet the Islamic Republic did not respond in kind on a comparable scale. Whether that restraint was entirely theological or also strategic remains debated. Recent evidence suggests limited Iranian chemical weapons development during the war. Still, the episode reinforced the notion that certain weapons lay beyond the moral threshold that Iran’s clerical leadership was prepared to cross openly.
Khamenei extended this logic to the nuclear realm. He first issued an oral fatwa in October 2003 declaring nuclear weapons as forbidden (haram) in Islam, and repeated this position in an official statement at the emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in August 2005. Over subsequent years, Iranian officials repeatedly invoked his religious decree as evidence of the Islamic Republic’s peaceful nuclear intentions.
But the fatwa’s authenticity and legal weight have always been contested. Some have argued that no formal written fatwa was ever issued and that what Iran marketed as a religious ruling was, in origin, merely the closing paragraph of a message to a 2010 nuclear disarmament conference, later retroactively framed by Iranian diplomats as a fatwa. Others have documented that Khamenei’s pronouncements on nuclear weapons were inconsistent: at times he categorically forbade development, stockpiling, and use; at other times he appeared to permit development and stockpiling while forbidding use.
None of this entirely strips the fatwa of significance. In political systems where legitimacy is partly theological, a public prohibition articulated by the supreme jurist, even if ambiguous in its legal form, raises the political and doctrinal cost of reversal. As one scholar observes, such declarations make it costly for the Islamic Republic to overturn the publicly stated position even if they do not constitute binding juridical rulings in the formal sense.
Succession and the question of doctrinal inheritance
The critical question of whether Khamenei’s successor would inherit his political and moral authority looms large. On March 9, 2026, the Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Ali Khamenei as Iran’s third supreme leader. Whether he would inherit his father’s doctrinal commitments, especially on nuclear weapons, is far from clear. Not known as a jurist of comparable standing to his father, Mojtaba’s authority derives primarily from his revolutionary and security credentials rather than from the depth of his theological learning, a fact noted critically within Iran’s clerical establishment, which has historically resisted father-to-son succession as uncomfortably monarchical.
Khamenei’s nuclear prohibition carried weight because it came from the state’s highest religious authority. Mojtaba’s standing is far more contested, which means that any comparable prohibition would likely carry less doctrinal force—while any tacit relaxation would accelerate the erosion of the barrier his father maintained. The IRGC commanders who manoeuvred his appointment to power have long been among those pressing for a reassessment of Iran’s nuclear posture.
Rented Power, Borrowed Strength: The Illusion of Gulf Power in War
Islamic restraint vs strategic realism
This leads to the final and perhaps hardest question: would Iran, if acting as a pure realist state, pursue nuclear weapons regardless of the Islamic just war tradition? The realist answer is straightforward. States seek survival in an anarchic international system. When a state faces stronger adversaries, recurring coercion, and the credible prospect of regime-change violence, it has every incentive to pursue the ultimate deterrent. From this perspective, the logic of nuclear acquisition is not theological but strategic: a bomb would promise not battlefield utility but regime survival, deterrence, and insulation from future attack.
And yet Iran is not a pure realist state in the abstract. It is a political order where ideology, clerical authority, national security, and regime survival have long coexisted in uneasy combination. The more interesting possibility, therefore, is not that realism simply replaces theology, but that realism gradually colonises it. In that scenario, doctrine is not openly discarded; it is reinterpreted and subordinated to necessity, allowing the state to retain Islamic language while moving toward a posture that the older Khamenei publicly resisted.
The greater danger is that the Islamic Republic’s language of restraint may cease to anchor policy and instead begin to trail behind it. If so, Iran’s nuclear future will be decided not only in centrifuge halls or command bunkers, but in the struggle between theological limits and strategic fear.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Statement Condemning Trump
Marjorie Taylor Green’s Statement from X: April 5, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/05/marjorie-taylor-greenes-statement-condemning-trump/
On Easter morning, this is what President Trump posted. Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this. The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.
You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it. Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing. On Easter, of all days, we as Christians should be reminded that the son of God died and rose from the grave so that we can be forgiven once and for all of our sins. Jesus commanded us to love one another and forgive one another. Even our enemies. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace. Urging the President to make peace. Not escalating war that is hurting people. This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most. This is not making America great again, this is evil.
Flotilla coalition prepares renewed mission to break Gaza siege
The international flotilla of over 80 boats and 1,000 activists will sail from Barcelona to challenge Israel’s blockade on Gaza and demand humanitarian access
APR 3, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/flotilla-coalition-prepares-renewed-mission-to-break-gaza-siege
A coalition of pro-Palestine activists announced on 3 April that it will launch a new maritime mission from Barcelona on 12 April to challenge Israel’s blockade on Gaza, according to reports citing statements by the Global Sumud Flotilla.
The group said more than 80 boats and around 1,000 international participants will take part in the initiative in a renewed attempt to reach the besieged enclave by sea.
It follows a previous high-profile journey across the Mediterranean that drew global attention before Israeli forces illegally intercepted the vessels and detained activists near Gaza.
Organizers said the earlier interception, which involved arrests and reports of physical and psychological torture, came as Gaza faced severe shortages of food, water, medicine, and fuel.
Jailed activists described being subject to abuses ranging from starvation to physical assault, intimidation, and humiliation.
The new mission carries the same aim of breaking the humanitarian siege on Gaza, as conditions continue to worsen under Israel’s ongoing blockade.
“The cost of inaction is too high to bear,” the group said, warning that continued restrictions risk deepening deprivation inside the territory.
Parallel land-based mobilization is planned across multiple countries to increase pressure and expand international engagement.
Describing the initiative as a “principled, nonviolent intervention,” organizers said the effort aims to defend human dignity, secure humanitarian access, and push for international accountability.
The flotilla’s return comes after its first mission ended without reaching Gaza, despite widespread attention and condemnation following the Israeli illegal interception and seizure of humanitarian aid.
In mid-March, Palestinian officials warned that Gaza was once again being pushed toward famine as Israel strangled aid deliveries to just 10 percent of agreed levels, allowing only 640 of 6,000 expected trucks into the strip – deepening a crisis driven by its prolonged blockade.
The restrictions triggered severe shortages of food, fuel, and basic goods, disrupting hospitals, sanitation systems, and daily life, while prices for essential items surged by up to 300 percent, highlighting Gaza’s dependence on external aid.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said more than 1.5 million people now face food insecurity, with conditions worsening as Israel tightens control over the strip, exploiting global distraction with the US war on Iran.
‘Warhawks licking your lips’: Details on Iran’s nuclear program leaked
A UN diplomat has quit his post in disgust, claiming he “gave up his diplomatic career” to leak information about “warhawks” preparing for the unthinkable.
Alex Blair, 2 April 2026, https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/warhawks-licking-your-lips-un-diplomat-quits-in-disgust-leaks-alleged-iran-nuke-plan/news-story/b21aeb7adce9d1b0066de2d7b03d1ab6
The public resignation of a UN-affiliated diplomat has injected a new layer of controversy into the already volatile conflict in the Middle East.
Casting himself as a whistleblower, Lebanese Mohamad Safa stepped down with a damning list of allegations against what he describes as elements within the United Nations.
He claims some players in the pact are preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Donald Trump insists the war will be over in a matter of weeks, but the can of worms is already open. Iran’s anti-West rhetoric has been emboldened by the sudden and extreme escalation by the US and Israeli militaries, with officials now saying they will not accept the war is over until both nations are “humiliated” and forced into “deep regret”.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has done little to ease those fears, reposting comments today from Donald Trump about sending Iran “back to the stone age”.
In a now-viral post on X, Safa framed his departure as an act of protest, attacking the “warhawks licking your chops” at the prospect of civilian misery.
“I don’t think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran … I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity.”
He called on the world to consider the humanity of the 9.7 million people residing in the Iranian capital. While the ruling regime has severe human rights offences against its name, Safa pointed to one of the most tragic constants of war — the civilian toll.
“This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untravelled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It’s not some low population desert,” he continued.
“There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You’re sick to want war. Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons.”
His concerns reflect a real shift in global discourse. Since the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, nuclear escalation has re-entered the strategic conversation.
Reports that the World Health Organisation is preparing for a “worst case” nuclear scenario have also stirred up chatter amongst analysts.
However, as a representative of an NGO with consultative UN status, Safa was not a senior decision-maker. His claim that the UN is “preparing for possible nuclear weapon use” remains unverified.
He sent millions in the US a warning that “history will remember us”, urging them to prioritise what he says is the greatest existential threat of our time.
“Yesterday, nearly ten million people protested “No Kings” in the United States,” he continued
“The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons must be taken very seriously. It’s dangerous. Act now. Spread this message worldwide. Take the streets. Protest for our humanity and future. Only the people can stop it.
“History will remember us.”
Mohamad Safa’s full resignation letter:
Excellencies,
After much reflection, after three years of patience since I wanted to resign in 2023, and after it became clear to me that some UN seniors are serving a powerful lobby and not the UN, I have decided to suspend all my duties as PVA Main Representative at the UN in New York, Geneva and Vienna, and from all UN committees/groups of which I am a member.
I cannot in good conscience be part of or witness to what is happening at a time when the top UN officials refuse to describe what is happening in Gaza as genocide, what is happening in Lebanon as war crimes and ethnic cleansing, that the war on Iran is illegal under international law, that Iran posed no imminent threat to world peace, and clearly they do not want to accuse Israel and the United States of violating international law and committing war crimes — effectively shielding decision-makers from such designation — all due to pressure from powerful lobby.
Early this year, senior officials and influential diplomats, supported by global media and social media algorithms, deployed a misinformation campaign claiming an Iran nuclear threat and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran but throughout the region, further their own agenda.
This lobby was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to world peace. This was a lie and is the same tactic used to commit genocide in Gaza and the same tactic is being used now to ethnic cleansing and the occupation of Lebanon. The UN cannot make this mistake again. Until the reform process outlined by the UN Secretary-General is meaningfully implemented, I regret that I must suspend all my duties.
Yours sincerely,
Mohamad Safa, Executive Director and Main Representative at the United Nations.
US Troops Need To Start Disobeying Orders In Iran, And Other Notes
Caitlin Johnstone, Apr 06, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-troops-need-to-start-disobeying?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=193307504&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The president of the United States has a bat shit crazy post on Truth Social once again threatening to blow up civilian infrastructure in Iran, saying, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
At this point if you’re in the US military you have a moral obligation to start refusing orders. Desert. Become a conscientious objector. Ideally, get everyone together and launch a full-scale military coup. We’re in “Mad King” territory. Someone’s gotta do what needs to be done.
Promoters of this war told the world it was about liberating the Iranian people from tyranny to bring them freedom and democracy. Now that they got their war it’s about bombing them “back to the Stone Age”, stealing their oil, and blowing up their bridges and power plants.
The only people dumber than Americans who bought into Trump’s “ending the wars” shtick are the Iranians who believed the United States was going to bring freedom to their country.
The Jerusalem Post just ran an opinion piece on Zohran Mamdani which includes the sentence, “It is time for the mayor of New York City to stand in solidarity with Muslim leaders who eschew antisemitic tropes, such as ‘genocide’ and ‘occupation,’ and are committed to a new and broader regional alignment in the Middle East.”
It’s been fun watching Israel apologists invent “antisemitic tropes” in real time. The words “genocide” and “occupation” are antisemitic tropes now, apparently. According to pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League and B’nai Brith, the phrases “Epstein class” and “Operation Epstein Fury” are also recent additions to the no-no list.
In reality these so-called “antisemitic tropes” are just effective talking points used to highlight facts that are inconvenient to Israel and its allies. Every relevant human rights group on earth agrees that Israel is an occupying force in the Palestinian territories. Every relevant human rights group on earth has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. The phrase “Epstein class” makes the rich and powerful people who rule our society look as creepy and suspicious as they should look. “Operation Epstein Fury” highlights President Trump’s place in the Epstein Files, which a majority of Americans believe played a role in his decision to attack Iran.
We see this all the time. Effective pro-Palestine political slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are labeled antisemitic not because they express hatred toward Jews but because they are effective.
That’s all it ever is. Israel apologists see a phrase or slogan hurting Israeli information interests and go “Uh, okay so you can’t say those words anymore. Those words make Jewish people feel unsafe.”
And then the phrases get banned. Here in Australia we just saw the state of Queensland ban the phrase “from the river to the sea” on penalty of two years in prison. For no other reason than because it’s something people chant at pro-Palestine protests.
Antisemitism isn’t the target of these laws; the protests themselves are the target. They’re designed to shut down pro-Palestine demonstrations by making so many speech suppression laws that nobody would attend one without a lawyer present to advise them on what they may and may not say.
The very first time someone told me “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” was a hateful genocidal chant I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and to this day I still feel that way. It’s a completely counter-intuitive claim that makes no sense on first hearing it. It is only by the constant repetition of the assertion that it’s an antisemitic slogan that people began accepting this transparently absurd idea. They just said it over and over again in an authoritative tone until people started to buy it.
Nobody actually believes these words and phrases are hateful toward Jews, they’re just pretending to believe that to promote the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state. That’s all we’re ever looking at with this nonsense.
This fuel crisis really looks like it’s going to hurt. From a big-picture perspective it’s probably a good thing for westerners to feel some sting from their empire’s wars, and for US allies to start re-evaluating their relationship with Washington. But from a selfish perspective, damn this is gonna suck.
I’m done trying to convince people not to use generative AI. You want to kill your critical thinking faculties? You want to lose the ability to write and create art? You want to make people like me look special and amazing because we can create things with our minds? Be my guest.
Trump’s Divine War: How Christian Nationalists Are Running U.S. Policy in Iran and at Home
April 3, 2026 , ScheerPost Staff, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/03/trumps-divine-war-how-christian-nationalists-are-running-u-s-policy-in-iran-and-at-home/
As the Trump administration deepens U.S. military involvement in Iran alongside Israel, a new The Intercept briefing examines a dimension of the conflict often overlooked in mainstream war coverage: the growing influence of Christian nationalist ideology inside American foreign policy. In this episode, investigative journalist Sarah Posner joins host Jessica Washington to unpack how apocalyptic theology, evangelical political networks, and religious-right power structures are shaping decisions from the Pentagon to the campaign trail.
At the center of the discussion is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose public prayers for “overwhelming violence” and rhetoric about divine mission reveal how sections of the modern Christian right increasingly frame military conflict not simply as geopolitics, but as spiritual warfare. Posner argues that this worldview goes beyond symbolic religious language: it reflects a deeper ideological belief that biblical authority supersedes international law, civilian protections, and traditional diplomatic constraints.The conversation also traces the role of influential evangelical figures such as John Hagee, whose decades-long advocacy for confrontation with Iran ties directly into end-times prophecy and Christian Zionist doctrine. Far from fringe theology, these ideas continue to shape large sections of Trump’s political base, reinforcing a foreign policy culture where war, prophecy, and domestic nationalism increasingly intersect.
Beyond Iran, the episode links these religious currents to broader domestic agendas—from anti-LGBTQ legislation to voting restrictions and immigration policy—showing how the same ideological infrastructure behind foreign intervention is also driving a wider effort to redefine American law, citizenship, and family life. The result is a portrait of a political movement that sees no separation between spiritual destiny, military power, and state authority.
What began as another presidential justification for war has rapidly opened a broader debate about the forces driving American power abroad. In its latest briefing, The Intercept turns attention away from battlefield headlines and toward a political current that has long operated beneath the surface of U.S. foreign policy: the growing fusion of Christian nationalist ideology, apocalyptic belief, and state power inside the second Donald Trump administration.
The episode arrives as Washington’s military partnership with Israel in its confrontation with Iran enters a more dangerous phase, with rising oil instability, domestic political backlash, and widening fractures inside both major parties. Yet the discussion presented by host Jessica Washington and investigative journalist Sarah Posner argues that strategic calculations alone do not explain the intensity of current rhetoric coming from senior U.S. officials. Instead, they suggest that parts of the administration increasingly frame war through a theological lens—one in which military action is not only justified politically, but sanctified spiritually.
That argument becomes most visible in the conduct of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose recent public prayer at the Pentagon asking for “overwhelming violence” against enemies drew renewed scrutiny. For Posner, the significance lies not merely in religious language but in the specific worldview behind it. Hegseth’s association with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches reflects a current of Christian Reconstructionism that views biblical authority as the supreme legal framework governing both personal and public life. Under that framework, war can become more than a strategic instrument—it becomes part of a divine obligation to defend and expand what adherents see as a Christian nation.
The discussion carefully distinguishes this ideological current from more familiar evangelical support for Israel. Figures such as John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, have spent decades promoting confrontation with Iran through a different theological narrative: one rooted in end-times prophecy, biblical signs, and the expectation that conflict in the Middle East may accelerate events leading to the return of Jesus. While Hegseth’s rhetoric reflects dominionist ideas about establishing God’s authority through state power, Hagee’s message speaks to a broader evangelical audience that sees Israel’s wars through prophetic fulfillment.
What makes the moment politically significant is that these belief systems are no longer confined to pulpits, television ministries, or religious conferences. According to Posner, they now intersect directly with executive power, military messaging, and legislative agendas. Trump’s long alliance with white evangelical leadership has often been described by mainstream media as transactional—religious conservatives deliver votes, and Trump delivers judges. But the interview argues that the relationship has matured into something far deeper: an ideological partnership in which both sides reinforce one another’s vision of national restoration, civilizational conflict, and cultural authority.
That framework also helps explain why debates over Iran cannot be separated from domestic policy. The same religious infrastructure influencing foreign policy is also deeply involved in campaigns against abortion rights, transgender rights, immigration protections, and secular legal norms. Posner points to new policy blueprints emerging from The Heritage Foundation, where “natural family” doctrine and anti-LGBTQ language form part of a broader project to reorder public life according to conservative Christian definitions of family, gender, and citizenship.
The conversation also highlights an important tension emerging inside Trump’s own coalition. While evangelical support for Israel remains strong, some Catholic and nationalist figures on the populist right have begun openly questioning Israeli influence in American politics and criticizing the war with Iran. Yet even this fracture is unstable. Posner notes that some of the loudest anti-war voices on the far right often blend legitimate foreign policy criticism with conspiratorial or openly antisemitic narratives, creating a volatile ideological split rather than a coherent anti-interventionist bloc.
Underlying all of this is a warning about infrastructure. The Christian right’s political power, Posner argues, was not built overnight and does not operate election to election. Over decades, it developed legal institutions, media ecosystems, activist training networks, educational pipelines, and political organizations capable of shaping courts, legislation, and public discourse across generations. From judicial appointments to school boards to foreign policy framing, the movement works through a layered system designed for permanence rather than short-term victory.
In that sense, the Iran war becomes more than a foreign crisis. It becomes another window into how religious nationalism increasingly shapes the language of American power—where military force, prophecy, electoral politics, and cultural conflict are no longer separate debates but parts of a single ideological project.
For more from the Intercept Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home
Journalist Sarah Posner on how the Christian right’s end times views are shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policies.
or listen to the full interview
Kucinich Statement on President Trump’s Address on Iran
“The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sale pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.” — Dennis J. Kucinich
Dennis Kucinich, Apr 02, 2026, https://kucinichreport.substack.com/p/kucinich-statement-on-president-trumps?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1441588&post_id=192938298&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4ds0bd&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Former Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (1997 to 2013) challenged three administrations, Clinton (Serbia), Bush (Iraq), and Obama (Libya), over unauthorized military action under the War Powers Resolution, led Congressional opposition to the Iraq War, and delivered 155 speeches in Congress warning against war with Iran.
“The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sale pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.
Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance.
Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.
Iran is not an abstraction, nor just a target on a map. It is one of the great cradles of civilization, a society whose cultural and intellectual contributions long predate the rise of the modern West. To speak casually of bombing such a nation ‘back to the Stone Age’ reveals a colonial mindset that dehumanizes others and diminishes our own humanity in the process.
The extensive bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, along with Iran’s counterstrikes, is already taking innocent lives. The global economy is destabilizing as a result.
Energy markets are being disrupted. Oil and gas production is constrained. Fertilizer supply chains are impaired. Critical materials are being cut off.
These consequences will be felt worldwide. Yet the deeper crisis is not economic, it is moral.
We have seen this before. The repeated invocation of a nuclear threat echoes the false claims of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That war cost thousands of American lives, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and trillions of dollars, while leaving a legacy of instability and grief that endures to this day.
If the President truly sought to prevent a nuclear Iran, he would not have abandoned the JCPOA, an agreement that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, we are presented with a cycle of escalation that defies logic and invites catastrophe.
Political rhetoric is becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. This is not a question of partisan politics. It is a question of conscience with very real global and domestic consequences.
The American people are not called to accept this. They are called to stand against it.
Members of Congress must have the courage to exercise their constitutional authority and rein this in.
War framed as strength is destruction. Violence presented as necessity is gratuitous violence, with consequences already accelerating destabilizing shifts in the global order.
Congress must act. The Constitution vests in Congress the authority to bring this, and any war, to an end through the power of the purse.
The American people must immediately contact their representatives and demand a NO vote on any supplemental funding that would continue this war. Congress must VOTE NO.”
Christian Nationalists in US Government Push Attacks on Iran as Holy War
Hegseth’s prayer services at the Pentagon are a sign the guard rails are shrinking. On March 25, he prayed for “overwhelming violence” using carefully selected passages from the Bible to justify an unjust war. Head bowed, Hegseth intoned: “Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind…. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation…. Let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse so that evil may be driven back.”
Christian nationalists conveniently ignore the passages where Jesus commands his followers to serve the poor and love thy neighbor.
With Pete Hegseth leading the Department of Defense, the line separating church and state is increasingly blurred.
By Sara Gabler , Truthout, April 2, 2026
How Christian clergy talk about Jesus this Easter Sunday will tell you a lot about their politics. While parishioners in the U.S. are likely to be greeted by the traditional refrain, “He is risen,” at their April 5 Easter service, they’re just as likely to be met with the phrase, “Christ is King.” This rhetoric replaces the traditional understanding of Easter as a celebration of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection with a more aggressive vision of a warrior Jesus that resonates strongly with Donald Trump-aligned white Christian nationalists.
The phrase “Christ is King” isn’t new — it’s sometimes used by Christians to refer to the belief that Jesus’s divine rule goes beyond that of earthly leaders. But the phrase has recently become “a kind of rallying cry for Christian supremacy,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Truthout.
Over the last few years, the slogan has spread from far right provocateurs like Nick Fuentes to Trump’s cabinet and the military. In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used the phrase at a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, galvanizing Christian nationalists’ thirst for authoritarian rulers whose Jesus is defined by militant masculinity — more like a crusader or cowboy than the peace-loving, “sacrificial lamb” celebrated on Easter, who was executed for challenging the hierarchies of empire.
Along the way, the phrase has become a dog whistle for antisemitism, and it’s often combined with other Christian nationalist “holy war” rhetoric that has been spiking since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.
Popular Christian Zionist preachers like John Hagee came out of the gate praising Operation Epic Fury in a sermon from March 10. On March 23, Rep. Andy Ogles posted an AI-generated video of himself, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio dressed as crusaders with the caption: “This is a battle of good vs evil. We must reaffirm that our nation was built on Christian principles.” Their language and iconography distract from the fact that the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran were launched without congressional approval, are unpopular, and have killed more than 1,500 people.
Saddle Up Your Horses
Christian nationalists like Hegseth, Hagee, and Ogles have fashioned a messiah to look like the kind of earthly leader they desire, one who will uphold what Du Mez calls their ideology of “militant masculinity.” It’s a paradigm that “enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad,” she writes in Jesus and John Wayne.
Du Mez says: “Christian nationalists tend not to talk about Jesus very much. They’ll talk about biblical law, righteousness, or social issues. But if you really start talking about Jesus in the Bible, then you get into things that arguably undercut many of their core values.”
Christian nationalists conveniently ignore the passages where Jesus commands his followers to serve the poor and love thy neighbor. Instead, figures like the disgraced evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll promote militant masculinity through podcasts streams like “Built for War” and an Instagram account full of bull-wrestling cowboys.
The frontiersman protector of faith and “family values” hailed by Driscoll’s podcast saturates white evangelical culture. Even in the ’90s, this was theprimary message about masculinity………………………………………………………………………………………………
With Hegseth leading the Department of Defense, the line separating church and state is increasingly blurred. In February, he invited Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson to a prayer service at the Pentagon and has been holding these monthly prayer services since last May. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) filed a lawsuit over the meetings to “determine whether the departments are upholding their obligation to remain neutral about religious matters and respect the religious freedom of federal workers.”
Alessandro Terenzoni is the vice president of public policy at AU. He told Truthout that the Trump administration is “playing this long game” to “Christianize the federal workforce,” including the military, through measures like the executive order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” and the Religious Liberty Commission.
The December meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission that focused on the military was led by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick with a roster of members and speakers that Terenzoni says looked “like a commercial for the organizations who are pushing this sort of Christian nationalist agenda: the Heritage Foundation, First Liberty Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom who represent Christian nationalist plaintiffs in all these lawsuits.” Terenzoni says the meeting contradicted the mandate that the government not “single out one faith to privilege above others or turn the military into a mission field.”
White Christian nationalist messaging isn’t coming from Hegseth alone. In March, Trump appointed Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk to an advisory role for the Air Force Academy. She replaces her late husband, Charlie Kirk, who, in the one board meeting he attended in August 2025, insisted the academy finish repairing an on-site chapel because its closure has had a “depressing effect on the psyche of the cadets.”……………………………………………
Terenzoni warns that the leaders of the Religious Liberty Commission are promoting a persecution narrative in order to legitimize their work. ……………………………………………………………..
Du Mez also warns that Christians’ sense of embattlement is what’s behind their support of “preemptive” war. “With somebody like Hegseth, who in his own books, talks about setting aside the rules of warfare because that’s only for weak men. This kind of preemptive attack, aggression is always justified, because they’re going to come for you, so you need to get out in front of that,” says Du Mez. In their worldview, they’re the victims, not the civilians in Iran whom the U.S. and Israel are bombing, or the Palestinians whose genocide is funded by the U.S. government.
Wounded Masculinity
Generations of Christian nationalist men were raised on militant masculinity and its faux nostalgia, glorification of rugged individualism, and delusions of persecution. That’s part of what made Trump’s “Make America Great Again” vision so appealing to them — Black and Brown men are conspicuously left out. “Masculine power is dangerous if it isn’t in the hands of white Christian men,” says Du Mez. “In the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump campaigned on the threat of immigrants. That was really their bread and butter.”
The MAGA movement has also been swift at marshaling militant masculinity to pass anti-LGBTQ policies. “This administration is really fixated on gender. We knew during the campaign that the vilification of transgender Americans was a big piece of what they were doing,” says Terenzoni.
“One of the things that’s different now is that there seem to be very few guardrails anymore,” says Du Mez. “In many ways, the rhetoric doesn’t actually feel all that different. But their access to power is. The fact that now our Secretary of Defense has been steeped in this militant evangelicalism and has wholly embraced these ideas of militant Christian manhood and has absolutely thumbed his nose at the rules of warfare and, one might argue, human decency.”
Hegseth’s prayer services at the Pentagon are a sign the guard rails are shrinking. On March 25, he prayed for “overwhelming violence” using carefully selected passages from the Bible to justify an unjust war. Head bowed, Hegseth intoned: “Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind…. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation…. Let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse so that evil may be driven back.”
The prayer prompted a rebuttal from Pope Leo XIV, who wrote on social media that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” But such a rebuke is not likely to satisfy the warmongers in the U.S. government, making AU’s lawsuit over these Christian nationalist services even more urgent.
The Empire Is Losing Its Ability To Hide Its Ugly Nature
It used to be hard to help westerners see the depravity of the US empire. Now it’s just right in everyone’s face with raw genocide footage and insanely evil warmongering of direct economic consequence.
It took a lot of work to help the average westerner understand that NATO aggressions actively provoked the war in Ukraine, or that western interventionism played a major role in the violence and chaos in Syria, or that US economic warfare was largely responsible for the suffering of Cubans and Venezuelans. The murderous savagery of the empire was hidden behind layers of obfuscation, allowing the propagandists to frame the western power structure as a passive witness to the abuses of foreign regimes.
Now the propagandists have very little to work with, so those obfuscations can no longer take place. There’s no way you can spin a school full of children blown up by an American double-tap airstrike as anything other than what it is. There’s only so much narrative manipulation you can exert on raw video footage of a western-backed genocide playing out in full view of the entire world day after day for years. There’s no way to propagandize westerners into believing they want to pay a lot more more money for their fuel and groceries.
I saw former EU parliament member Luis Garicano complaining on Twitter that Trump’s actions are making it look as though leftists have been correct about the US empire this whole time, saying “Many of us, liberal Europeans, spent decades pushing back against the European extreme left’s cartoon version of America ( it’s all oil/ imperialism/getting rich at the expense of others) and then one dumb administration walks in and performs the caricature to perfection.”
Garicano’s entire worldview depends on his ability to avoid recognizing the obvious truth: that the so-called “extreme left” has always been correct, and that the empire he worships has always been evil. It’s just having a harder and harder time masking its true nature, because of the very evils it has tried to conceal.
Everything’s becoming more and more revealed. More and more transparent. What was once done solely by whistleblowers, investigative journalists, activists and dissident media is now being done by the empire itself, because there’s only so long you can hide the truth about something so malignant. An empire that is held together by lies, corruption and endless slaughter was never going to remain unseen. The brutality necessary to dominate the planet had to come out into the light eventually.
“May all be revealed” has been my prayer for our world for many years now. That dearly held wish is now being answered, and the truth is looking every bit as ugly as expected.
May all be revealed. May all that is hidden become seen. In the empire. In our governments. In our culture. In our community. In our interpersonal relationships. In ourselves.
All abusiveness ultimately boils down to a lack of clear seeing. Governments are able to abuse people because the dynamics of corruption and tyranny aren’t clearly seen by the public, who would violently revolt if they truly understood what their leaders are doing to them and to their world. Domestic violence and family sexual abuse can only continue when the rest of the community doesn’t see and understand what the abuser is doing. Our own abusive tendencies can only persist for as long as our trauma responses and maladaptive coping mechanisms remain hidden in the shadows of our subconscious mind
All of these dysfunctional dynamics will lose their durability as we become more and more conscious of what’s really going on, in ourselves and in our world. Things look ugly now because the truth is ugly, but it is only by truth revealing itself that we can move toward health and harmony as a species.
If you’ve ever done deep inner work on your own psychology you have seen this play out in your own personal experience. You can heal your inner woundedness if you can gather up the courage to plunge into your own darkness and face with uncompromising honesty the uncomfortable realities you’ve been avoiding within yourself throughout your entire life — but you kept those things unconscious for a reason. They’re scary. They’re painful. They’re shameful. Facing them can feel like the end of the world. Yet it is only by coaxing them into the light of consciousness that they can be fully seen, reconciled, and healed.
The whole world is like that. Humans as a collective cannot fix problems which we don’t clearly see and understand. Our rulers pour so much energy into maintaining influence operations like news media propaganda, Hollywood psyops, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and government secrecy in order to obstruct our clear seeing and understanding.
But it’s all coming tumbling out into the cold light of day now. More and more is becoming visible.
May the lies and obfuscations continue to unravel. May the truth continue to reveal itself.
‘We Won’t Die for Israel’: Military Members Seek a Way Out as U.S. War Expands
March 25, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/03/25/we-wont-die-for-israel-military-members-seek-a-way-out-as-u-s-war-expands/
In recent interviews on Clearing the FOG, Margaret Flowers highlights a sharp rise in military personnel seeking conscientious objector status, speaking with Mike Prysner of the Center on Conscience and War and revisiting an earlier conversation with James Branum of the Military Law Task Force on legal alternatives available to active-duty troops. The interviews point to growing concern inside the ranks as the Trump administration deepens confrontation with Iran and expands military deployments across the region.
As the Trump administration deepens U.S. military involvement in the expanding war around Iran—with troop deployments growing, Marine Expeditionary Units moving toward the region, and military families bracing for escalation—another story is unfolding inside the ranks: more service members are actively searching for ways not to participate.
In this episode Prysner who says requests for conscientious objector assistance have surged dramatically since the latest attacks began. According to Prysner, many of those reaching out are not motivated by fear for their own safety, but by refusal to be tied to another war they view as unlawful, catastrophic, and morally indefensible.
The conversation also revisits legal guidance from James Branum of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force, who outlines what active-duty troops can legally do when confronted with potentially unlawful orders, including the right to question commands, seek counsel, and in some cases refuse participation.
Taken together, the interviews reveal something often hidden beneath official war messaging: beneath patriotic rhetoric and televised escalation, dissent is growing within the military itself. For soldiers, sailors, Marines, and their families, the question is no longer abstract—whether this conflict expands further may determine whether conscience becomes a battlefield of its own.
At the center of the interviews is a striking reality rarely acknowledged in official coverage: the resistance is not hypothetical. Prysner says the Center on Conscience and War has seen a more than thousand-percent increase in military personnel seeking information about conscientious objector status since the war expanded, with inquiries coming from across branches and ranks—including combat units, intelligence personnel, officers, reservists and active-duty troops already positioned near the conflict zone. Many, he notes, describe the killing of civilians, bombed hospitals, and the prospect of participating in another open-ended regional war as the breaking point that forced them to confront what military service now demands of them. Branum adds that troops ordered into volatile deployments face serious legal and moral dilemmas, especially when commands intersect with actions many believe may violate both constitutional protections and international law. Together, the interviews expose a deep fracture beneath Washington’s war posture: while political leaders speak in the language of deterrence and force, growing numbers inside the military are quietly asking how far obedience can go before conscience refuses to follow.
What emerges from both conversations is a picture of an administration escalating militarily while confronting uncertainty not only abroad, but within the very institution expected to carry out its orders. As troop movements continue and naval assets expand across the region, Prysner warns that many service members are already discussing refusal, discharge options, and legal avenues long before receiving direct deployment orders—an early sign that this conflict may generate internal resistance faster than previous wars. Branum, meanwhile, underscores that military law still recognizes limits: orders are not automatically lawful simply because they are given, and service members retain rights even inside a rigid command structure. That tension—between command authority and personal conscience—has historically surfaced only after wars become prolonged disasters. In this case, it is appearing at the opening stage, suggesting that memories of Iraq War and War in Afghanistan remain close enough that many inside uniform no longer accept official justifications at face value.
If history offers any lesson, it is that wars begin to unravel politically when dissent crosses the line between civilian protest and internal refusal. The significance of what Prysner and Branum describe is not simply that individual troops are questioning orders, but that a wider moral fracture is becoming visible between official war policy and those expected to enforce it. From legal hotlines to conscientious objector filings, from families contacting advocacy groups to veterans publicly warning against another catastrophic escalation, the infrastructure of refusal is already taking shape before this conflict has fully matured. For the antiwar movement, that matters profoundly: public opposition gains force when it is echoed by those in uniform who understand firsthand what escalation means—not in speeches, but in bodies, cities, and generations marked by war. Whether that dissent remains scattered or grows into something larger may help determine whether another regional catastrophe proceeds unchecked or encounters resistance strong enough to alter its course.
1 This Month
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6 June – WEBINAR- Get Inspired by Protests Against Military Bases!
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PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
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