Yes Toto, it’s theocracy and Oz.

A week of big good v. evil stories, from Trump Crusader nominees, to the fall of Assad, to hunky killer Luigi Mangione, and Wicked, and a needed hero, NY DA Alvin Bragg.

Trump nominee Pete Hegseth’s Deus Vult Crusader tattoo – “God Wills It”

12.11.24. What a week it’s been. There are real headlines competing with Hollywood stories and it’s been a bit of swirl this week. Topping my list are the remaining Trump 2.0 nominees and more Trumpdom fuckery, the fall of the Butcher of Syria and the momentary mass joy of liberation there, the captivating manhunt for young thirst trap Luigi Mangione, and the sudden colonization of Manhattan with Wicked posters and little girls in green face make-up headed for the movies. I’m captioning it the drama of Good v. Evil, because that’s what’s been playing out in the media and our social media feeds, and because, underneath it all, everything feels big and raw in America, including our anger at what’s not right, and our hunger for heroes, even very flawed ones, to take on the baddies, to avenge us, to make it right.

Let’s start with Trumpdom. I am still wading through the astonishing list of his nominees, which I won’t detail here except to reiterate, as I note in my last diary entry, that they’re quite the bunch. They’re not just Fox TV contributors and reality stars, they’re just so much the product of America and our venal political culture. So many people repeat it, but it’s just a truism: you couldn’t make this up. Meaning, Hollywood cannot compete with the tabloid reality of the Trump show. It IS the Truman show, but writ large. And it IS our absolute staggering political reality. It IS a total shitshow, as we knew, and predicted, and yet, somehow, yes, it IS exceeding our expectations for the crass, the unqualified, the corrupt, the showy, the brazen, the ambitious and those wealthy enough to have donated to Trump’s campaign, enough so that he’ll consider rewarding you with a plum assignment in the coming administration.

Lots of media folks have noted three criteria for the nominees to date, but the fourth is the one that continues to capture my attention, demand my investigation. The three are: 1) total loyalty to Trump – the Don; 2) being a MAGA Fox news host or a reality star known to red America, and being good-looking enough in a plump-your-lips, have-a-fake-tan for TV way; and 3) be a billionaire donor to Trump or dark money investor in a Project 2025 advisory group. That would be groups like Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, or the America First Policy Institute where Pam Bondi and Linda McMahon are nominee recruits, or the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russell Vought, who’s emerged triumphant to lead the personnel-is-policy revolution at the heart of Project 2025’s radical plan to remake America, mass fire its workforce and put MAGA loyalists in charge.

But the fourth is the one that chills me, when I really take it in. That’s the criteria of being a Christian true believer, or what we now call a Christian nationalist. Someone who has pledged to turn America into a religious nation ruled by Biblical doctrine. I haven’t finished my tally yet of the percentage of true believers among the nominees, but’s it’s more than sobering: it’s a majority. And, I would argue, it’s the main, consistent criteria that unites these nominees who are being selected not only by Trump – flawed King Cyrus to MAGAland Christians – but Catholic end-times activists like Vought and Catholic activist Leonard Leo. He and Vought are paying special attention to place lawyers who are needed to help Trump 2.0 fight back against future grand juries, and defend radical breaches of law like the weaponizing of the Alien Enemies Act to mass detain and deport millions of immigrants.

This is theocracy, America. We have arrived. It is not Oz, but there is an Oz – Dr. Oz from Oprah, a promoter of dubious medical theories like RFK Jr., a conspiracy theorist. Both are excited to gut our health agencies, and our already frail health safety net.

Let me stay focused on theocracy, to make the point: we were not blind to the threat of the holy warriors. But the media aren’t reporting on this aspect: the arrival of US theocracy. The big media primarily discuss whether Cabinet nominees are qualified or totally unqualified while the Substack crowd let loose to make fun of the caricature of a Dr. Oz or worm-in-my-brain RFK Jr. Some do note the threat of Christian Nationalism of extremists like tatted Defense pick Pete Hegseth, but they are missing the rest of the crew. They aren’t reporting on the end-times prophecy beliefs of the less-known deputy picks, the policy wonks. Some also share white supremacy that fits hand-in-glove with Christian nationalism.

As many have noted, Trump 2.0 promises to be Jim Crow 2.0. Behind deportation plans and attacks on DEI and public education, what’s coming is a new chapter of US antebellum racism and white supremacy. Trump has given racism a passkey to the White House. That story needs to be reported, and now. We need deep talk about the policy vision.

Let’s get rich, y’all

The media do note the kleptocracy that is being installed: the billionaires being invited in, given the keys to the castle. Donald’s megadonors, who must be thanked, rewarded with ambassador posts – somewhere they can also do business, make some money. America’s richest man, Elon Musk, now teaming up with Vivek Ramaswamy, to help rewrite the rules and business regulations so that corporate America – well, a small class of 1% Americans – can enrich themselves spectacularly, while the federal safety net is gutted for mostly everyone else, from the middle class down. Could we write this Hollywood script? No, it’s outrageous. We do need to follow the money, and I hope reporters will capture the corruption afoot. I think they will.

But it misses the biggest story of religion, and I think that story continues to be ignored ‘cuz my many colleagues in the media don’t seem to know how to dig into religion or are reluctant or maybe afraid of being labeled in some way as critical of people of faith, or they’ve mistakenly viewed this as a question of faith versus a cabal of hardline far-right operatives who manipulate religion as a cover for power and money. They support authoritarianism; it’s autocracy over democracy. As many right-wing watchdogs have noted, Christian nationalism is a political movement masking as a prayer warrior’s revolution. It’s so frustrating, this absence of serious investigative reporting. They will cover the Islamic factions in Syria, but they cannot see the same threat here. They aren’t digging into the 990s and dark money flowing into and out of the megachurches. The economic side. Why?

I do want to note my colleagues at Political Research Associates and their Religion Dispatches news site. They continue to do great work, but we need mainstream coverage. We are arriving at theocracy. It’s a huge story. Jayzus!

I don’t want go to too far in the weeds here, either. I do plan to look into aspects of that theocracy in my reporter’s stack on the resistance. But it’s important to note here, as we bear witness, that a good number of nominees are members of the Christian pentecostalist offshoot New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. That’s the God army that Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation and Leo and his clan of Catholic activists have ably mobilized to gain votes for MAGA candidates. The megachurch NAR is in the White House, that is the take-home message.

There are a few exceptions, including Jewish MAGA warriors like Stephen Miller. But most are staunch Christian prayer warriors and that is why they were chosen, as a chief criteria, not trumping (sorry for the word pun) other criteria, but as a required dealbreaker one.

A related aspect of the incoming government is Christian Zionism. The media have written about Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, one of the many blonde Florida females who love Jesus and are slated to join the White House, and nominee for ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, as well as tatted Pete Hegseth. They’re all extreme self-identified Christian Zionists. But there are a lot of others in the Trump 2.0 bunch, too.

(I have to say here, too, that reporters have not taken much note of really why GOP Senator Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, a combat veteran who sits on the influential Armed Services committee, has now reconsidered and may back nominee Hegseth. She’s a holy roller too, a Lutheran evangelist, and a Christian Zionist. Hegseth may be a tough guy and alcoholic who’s accused of sexual misconduct with women employees, and he opposes women in the military, but they’re both in it for dominion. Hegseth wants the job, bad. So now he’s backtracked his opposition to women soldiers. He didn’t really mean it, y’all, that’s his new mea culpa.)

Once you look at the nominee resumes or public statements, and you see where they go to church, you realize, oh shit, these are some total end-times, Israel must exist for Jesus to return one day, Christian nationalists. They’re 100% behind the Abraham Accords, 100% behind Netanyahu’s scorched-earth decimation of Palestinian communities and Gaza cities and residents, 100% behind extending the territory of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forcibly removing more Palestinians. Trump 2.0 will be devastating for the cause of Palestinian land and justice in the Middle East, and will continue to use Israel as a proxy to fight the old enemy of the Crusaders: the Muslim world.

It's all there, if you dig into the nominees, and the vision of foreign policy laid out in Project 2025. There’s also Ukraine and Russia, and there, we know what’s planned. Many openly side with Russia; some like Bondi are viewed as near-Putin agents, and certainly Kremlin apologists. Smartly, Zelensky has met with Trump to directly plead Ukraine’s case, to argue that giving up Crimea is not acceptable, that he wants peace but it cannot be at the price of ceding the lands that Russia has invaded or wants. Whether Ukraine can join NATO remains a sticky wicket of negotiation. There, Trump hopes to score a foreign policy victory, and claim he brought peace to that conflict. He hopes the same for the Middle East, to bring the hostages back to Israel, unless Biden beats him to it. That would be a feather in the cap for Biden. But where does all this leave the Palestinians? It’s soon winter, they are starving, still. In Ukraine, the prospect of Trump 2.0 is terrifying for many, as in Gaza.

Across Europe, Trump’s return is also viewed as a disaster for democrats, while Europe’s rising autocrats, like Viktor Orban, are delighted and excited. Did I mention the Orban connection to some nominees? Oh, yes, it’s there. So far I’ve found almost every nominee has a connection to Project 2025, many direct.

The unimaginable has finally happened: Assad is gone. Photo: SJ News.

That brings me to the great news of the week – sort of. The fall of Bashar al-Assad, the joyous liberation of Syria’s people from decades of his cruel dictatorship. How many of you took in the crowds of Syrians taking selfies in the ransacked house of Assad? It personally took me back to the fall of the Baby Doc Duvalier regime in Haiti, when I was covering that pro-democracy movement as a starting reporter. I’ll never forget the sight of piles of human shit, dropped on the master bedroom bed, smeared on the walls, dotting the hallways connecting gilded bedrooms where the spoiled baby-faced dictator and his dragon lady wife Michelle Bennett had lived in splendor while the populace starved and his political enemies languished in jail. We saw this with the other Butcher too, Saddam Hussein.

The fall of a dictator is a modern spectacle, totally made for television, and it does, in fact, unite us in a moment of cheer for democracy, for the people, for the cause of fairness, for the end to cruelty and blind ambition empire.

But it’s not all cheers in Syria. The rebels are led by Al-Sham, an ISIS offshoot also known as al-Nusra, and they are no picnic. They’re militant Islamists and patriarchs and their view of women’s rights are as stunted and cruel as ISIS. So the liberation of Syria’s people is amazing, but so much work needs to still happen for women (and men) to be liberated, to gain a far greater measure of equality. Syria is still dominated by a theocracy, while we are about to get our first dose of one here.

How can we get America’s journalists, beyond the pundits on Substack, to really take this threat as seriously as we must? We need to explain to America just what a slim majority voted for, and what they actually are getting: a far-right Christian regime, primed for holy war.

Luigi Mangione, America’s new vengeful Robin Hood

That leaves the other good v. evil stories that kept popping up all week, making me look away from the nominees and their church affiliations, to the sight of smiling, often shirtless, Luigi Mangione, 26. He was viewed as hot-as-hell handsome by many gay male friends I have who posted and commented on his six-pack abs, while dutifully noting that it wasn’t cool to cheer for a murderer, while sympathizing with his hatred for bloodsucking insurance giants. America agrees, apparently.

The Mangioni crime hunt and saga has gone viral. Everyone views Magione’s cold-blooded execution of United Health billionaire CEO Brian Thompson as a tragedy, of course. The man had a wife and children, and that is truly awful, for them to lose their dad. Comments like that. But the mass sympathy lies with hunky Luigi. He was arrested, and now awaits the next step. It hasn’t been a week, and Hollywood is taking bets on the casting of Dave Franco as Luigi in a future TV series to be penned by the great Ryan Murphy because the internet has gone viral crazy for Mangione and is demanding that story.

Luigi is a modern Robin Hood now, who used a silencer to shoot Thompson with a possibly 3-D printed plastic and metal ‘ghost gun’ with a Glock magazine and a silencer and full metal jacket hollow-point bullets. They were engraved with the words deny, defend, depose. That’s the strategy that America’s healthcare industry uses to reject industry claims, say health activists. A banner with those words hangs over the Jones Fall Expressway in North Baltimore. I fully expect to see an inscripted 3-bullet-necklace jewelry swag come out in time for Christmas. I bet merch T’s are already designed and out or available for order, soon. We are a tabloid-thirsty nation.

Overnight, Mangione has become a flawed modern hero for the aggrieved and hurt. Some agree with the words he used in a three-page manifesto to explain his murderous action: “the parasites had it coming.” In it, he rails against the US health care system and its profiteering and its failure to help people in pain. It took a few days for us to collectively learn that Mangione suffered mental torture for years watching and listening as his mother screamed and suffered from agonizing nerve pain – neuropathy – and kept getting denied claims for medicine and care from United Health insurance. We learned Mangione himself suffered from debilitating back pain, which was hard to reconcile with the Hollywood swoon-worthy images of him walking, shirtless, muscle-fit, with his infectious smile.

Nothing unites America and the world like a national or global manhunt. Look at how many people fell into deep pools of amateur sleuthdom when Kate Middleton disappeared. I had a moment of that. It’s was so tabloid. Our lives practical stopped – at least for a lot of people. Even celebrities felt compelled to weigh in. Now, with Luigi, it’s David v. Goliath. When we read his manifesto, already viral online, we can too well imagine his agony at witnessing his mother’s pain, and his own, and the mounting frustration of being denied help, of being price gouged, by a faceless, indifferent, corporate insurance giant. We are all Luigi is the message that America delivered via retweets.

No, we don’t condone murder and would not attempt it, but we do collectively feel a cold rage at the failure of our health system, and how people are suffering in pain, while the billionaire CEOs keep enriching themselves. At least there, the media are taking note.

Which brings me to Wicked, the new film that’s out with a twist on the Wizard of OZ story.

Wicked recasts its myth of good v. evil in the land of Oz

In the new film, the Wicked Witch gets a re-do. She’s recast as young Ephaba, born with green skin versus pretty Galinda, with white skin and blond hair, who becomes the Good Witch, Glinda. In the movie, the two start out as friends, until things go awry for Ephaba. The film takes place before Dorothy’s saga in Oz.

When I stepped out to do my daily 10,000 steps this week in Brooklyn, in between muckraking about the holy believers, I kept seeing promo Wicked posters. They’re all over social media too, competing with Luigi Magione hiking pics. Then, when, I was on the subway, I overheard two young girls chatting with a third about Wicked. I assume they were going to see it, or had. They were very animated. There was an adult with them, maybe a parent. I couldn’t help but listen. I’m paraphrasing but the convo went something like, actually Ephaba is good or was, and she is friends with Glinda who is prettier, right? But Oz is bad and has mean people, and Ephaba is against that. So she rebels. That’s why they call her ‘wicked.’ They actually made her go bad.

It was clear to me then, that not only aggrieved America, but tween America, has been grappling with a morality story this week.

Last item for today: a true hero, since we desperately seek them. I woke to the news that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has managed to hold the line in his case against Trump, dismissing a recent Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling as irrelevant since Trump is not president now. Lawyer Joyce Vance offers a good write up in her morning ‘stack, Civil Discourse, one of my regular reads. She covers the legal issues of Trump 2.0 well. The last chapter hasn’t been written on the Bragg v. Trump case, but we may yet see Donald get sentenced. Whether he ever serves time or does community service if convicted, is another question for the unwritten future. Few would smartly bet on that.

So that’s the tally. With 43 days to go until dominion arrives to reclaim America, we have one big win for democracy in Syria (but not for women, really), a hard legal line drawn on Trump; Mangione is in prison, but fighting for his day in court, to tell his story, and the wicked witch is in our cinemas asking everyone to reconsider that maybe the people we cast out or view as freaks are actually good people turning a mirror on injustice. Maybe the real evil is coming from those too ready to shun others and cast the first stone.

I’m looking at you, end-times let’s-pray-on-it-crusading America. I’m eyeing the planned mass deportations of immigrants, the McCarthyite blacklists of political enemies, the criminalization of trans people, and the plans to decimate Medicaid, and to destroy the safety net for everybody but the billionaires. Short of six weeks in which we have to do so much to prepare to stop this. On the positive side, with so much shit coming out way, the heroes are also surfacing. I’ve been on webinars two, three times a day, listening to legal experts and others detail the threats, detail the plans to fight back. I’m learning of new groups, in new sectors. There is actually so much resistance activity it’s hard to capture it. Much of this is not public, either, but will be, soon enough.

A final comment. Tomorrow night I’m cohosting our Revisioning Democracy podcast with colleague Jay W. Walker, and our guest is Nina Burleigh, author and a reporter at The New Republic. She has a great Substack, too, American Freakshow and covers the carnival sideshow of MAGA extremism. We’re going to be talking about incoming Crusaders, breaking down exactly what to expect on Day One of Trump 2.0., and comparing notes on the resistance. I’ll be writing about that last part in the Resisting Project 2025 reporter’s stack, too. There is so much happening, counter-strikes are afoot. Stay tuned.

A final request: Please let me know if, what, how you are thinking, about this unfolding of autocracy and theocracy. I would love feedback and for this diary to become a place of shared conversation. People ask how they can support the cause. Subscribing and sharing this ‘stack and others noted above with people you know are mobilizing, or might, are helpful and welcome ways. Thanks. ac.