Worried about a Christian Nationalist takeover of the federal government? Good. You should be. Feeling helpless to block Project 2025 and Agenda 47, Trump’s Cliff Notes version of it, because you live in the Democratic Party–dominated “safe state” of California? Not so fast.
The outcome of this November’s presidential election is not likely to be decided by voters or the Electoral College. The heretics leading the unfolding coup want our next president to be selected by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and they’re far more organized and better funded than last time around.
Rather than waiting for Jan. 6, 2025, they plan to disrupt the democratic process statehouse by statehouse, swing state by swing state. What’s a San Joaquin Valley voter to do? That’s easy. Hold your nose and go to work for Congressional candidates Rudy Salas (D–Bakersfield) or Adam Gray (D–Merced), both of whom are seeking to unseat incumbent Republicans. Yes, Big Ag and Big Oil will win bigly with either of them, but it’s our most direct opportunity to stave off the MAGA takeover.
If your objections to the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza prevent you from working to reelect President Joe Biden (or his replacement candidate), then don’t. Work instead to restore, expand and protect women’s rights, immigrant rights, LGBTQIA+ rights. Ignore the top of the ticket and focus on Congress.
The 118th batch will be sworn in on Jan. 3. Three days later they’ll meet to receive the presidential election results of the Electoral College. If enough of those have been blocked back in their home states, it will fall to the House of Representatives to decide through a contingency election. Each state’s Congressional delegation gets only one vote. Whichever party controls the House controls the outcome. Granted, the California delegation would cast its lone vote for Biden, but control of the House is critically important, too.
Our only backstop—the contingency election—is a vulnerable one, according to no less than Thomas Jefferson: “I have no hesitation in saying that I have ever considered the constitutional mode of election, ultimately by the legislature voting by states, as the most dangerous blot in our constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will someday hit, and give us a pope and antipope.”
Jefferson might recognize the amoral Trump as an antipope and his anti-abortion running mate as a pope. Did he fear we could have both at once?
For their part, D.C. Democrats and the Beltway commentariat formed a circular firing squad in June following Biden’s poor debate performance. People are wrong to think debates win campaigns. Money, image and messaging do. Money spent on targeting, agitating and turning out your voters, “the base.”
And coup-backers have beaucoup bucks to do so. From Elon Musk pledging contributions of $45 million per month and Peter Thiel again backing his protege J.D. Vance with tens of millions, to nondenominational Protestant and Roman Catholic churches preaching MAGA politics, they’re expanding their base. But not by chasing after votes from suburban white women.
Instead, as is made clear by Trump’s choice of Vance, the plan is to turn out people who never vote but who can be identified by the technocrats and reached through their pastors and priests, even a few rabbis. One great irony in the backing of pro-Russia Trump and Vance by many in the U.S. clergy and their followers is how none of them would be allowed to practice their faith in Putin’s Russia and occupied Ukraine.
As reported by PBS News in April: “Since the occupation, evangelical congregations, Protestant churches, all the non-Russian Orthodox Christian faiths have been deemed undesirable and tens of thousands of believers have been forced to flee. Those who remain gather in secret in private homes for fear of angering the new regime. The head of that new regime makes himself out to be the defender of the faith, his faith. With the client patriarch of the national church at his side, Vladimir Putin and his supporters make little secret of their plans to put Russian Orthodox Christianity above all other forms of Christianity.”
Trump and Vance are riding to power on a similar vision for the U.S.A., thanks largely to the Catholic-dominated Supreme Court, but which church hopes to become this country’s official definer and enforcer of morals and ethics? Or would they meld into an amorphous state religion focused on punishing and banning nonconformists?
As always, local politics offer a microcosm of the political parties’ respective power. Resident MAGA politicians and clergy demonstrated their strength with a rally in front of Fresno City Hall in early 2022 when they forced the City Council’s Democratic majority to drop a resolution in support of “reproductive freedom.”
Brianna Calix reported in the Fresno Bee that Mayor Jerry Dyer and City Council Member Garry Bredefeld were joined at the rally by “former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry, the executive director of Right to Life of Central California, the Fresno Roman Catholic Diocese bishop, the Cornerstone Church pastor, and the president of the Fresno County and City Republican Women Federated.”
The popes and antipopes are to be found everywhere, aping what their leaders demonstrate as acceptable behavior. The November election, likely to be preceded and followed by the faithful’s violent intimidation of voters and elected officials, will be their biggest leap of idolatrous faith yet, all in service to their gold-plated icon of greed and lasciviousness.
