It makes you nostalgic for the days when it was just Fox News and of course its UK copycats – GB News and the Daily Mail – which tuned their violins for the annual “Easter cancelled” and “War on Christmas” symphony, where the absence of a nativity scene becomes a constitutional crisis.
Just when we thought US culture wars couldn’t get more surreal, Donald Trump has summoned his base with a new bizarre brief – to report anti-Christian co-workers.
Following the grim xenophobic visa crackdowns targeting students from Muslim-majority and African countries, team Trump has its sights set on the federal workforce with a mission to sniff out supposed anti-Christian bias.
An anonymous reporting system has even been put in place for federal employees to flag colleagues who they deem as too critical of Christianity.
Fronting this latest holy crusade is Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who convened a Department of Justice meeting last week to trumpet Trump’s new “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force.”
Bondi claimed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice “abused and targeted Christians.”
“As President Trump has stated, the Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses. The president is right,” she said
“President Biden declared Easter Sunday to be Transgender Day of Visibility. No longer.”
State Department staff have reportedly reacted with a mixture of disbelief and dread, warning it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbours anti-Christian bias to begin with, and that it could create a culture of fear as the administration pushes employees to report on one another.
“It’s very ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque,” said one State Department official.
Others said the order is a thinly veiled attempt to privilege evangelical Christianity over other religious minorities.
“If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of colour and other religious minorities,” the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser, said in a statement.
“This taskforce is not a response to Christian persecution; it’s an attempt to make America into an ultra-conservative Christian nationalist nation.”
The left-wing NGO, Interfaith Alliance, also criticised the executive order, arguing that “this effort may appear to address certain forms of stigma against Christians, particularly against Catholics. In reality, it will weaponise a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimise discrimination against marginalised groups like the LGBTQ community.”
It makes you nostalgic for the days when it was just Fox News and of course its UK copycats – GB News and the Daily Mail – which tuned their violins for the annual “Easter cancelled” and “War on Christmas” symphony, where the absence of a nativity scene becomes a constitutional crisis.
Bringing another surreal twist to such tangled MAGA theology, JD Vance, the far-right vice president who, like Trump, has a fondness of demonising migrants, was the last person to visit Pope Francis, to whom migrants were very dear.
You couldn’t script it better if you tried. God, of whatever faith, help us!
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