Stromata Blog

Stromata Moves On

After a twenty year run (since June 23, 2004), Stromata has been superseded by a substack, The Hesperian, which deals with the same range of topics from the same point of view but is easier for me to use. While Typepad is an excellent platform for blogs, it requires more effort than I am currently able to spare for it.

The content of Stromata will remain here until Typepad or I expire, and I will continue posting short items.

The Most Recent Posts on The Hesperian:

Kamala’s Five Freedoms and FDR’s Four: What “freedom” looks like to a “brat”.

The Baltic Job: The Wall Street Journal reveals (perhaps!) “The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage” (but perhaps not).

Kamala’s Emmanuel Goldstein: The “Campaign of Joy” stages a two-minute hate.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy?: The Kamala-Walz campaign preaches anger and calls it “joy”.

A Court Without Laws: If the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, the U.S. should designate it as a terrorist support organization.

Two Days to Remember: The 230th Anniversary of Thermidor, the End of the Reign of Terror

Kamala: The “Year Zero” Candidate: Robespierre and Pol Pot were “unburdened by what has been”.

The Puzzle of Hyper-Intelligence: Maybe big, efficient brains were just an evolutionary fluke.

A Vote for “First Past the Post”: Like democracy, it is the worst system imaginable, except for all the rest.

Joe Biden Kicks a Gift Horse in the Teeth: If he’s right about Donald Trump’s plans for “revenge and retribution”, the President will be grateful for immunity.

The End of a Strange Alliance: Progressive rejection of the Jewish state was long delayed but inevitable.

Inflation or Recession?: If you have to pick one, which should it be, why does it matter, and can you really choose just one?

The Collapse of the Biden Plan for Israel and Hamas: Its most probable goal was not peace but regime change in the Jewish state.

The Biden Peace Plan: Like offering Hitler a ceasefire in February 1945.

The Wages of Lawfare: Can America exit the highway to Bananastan?

The Trial of "Donald T": C’est magnifique (pour la gauche) mais ce n’est pas la loi. (Subhead inspired by General Pierre François Joseph Bosquet (1810-1861): “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre; c’est de la folie”, commenting on the Charge of the Light Brigade)

“Show Me the Man, and I Will Show You the Law”: The Gray Lady endorses an old Scottish adage.

Candidate of the Day: Mr. Literally Anybody Else

Jeffrey Blehar, National Review’s correspondent at the Democratic National Convention, wandered into a listless anti-Jew protest and came upon something out of the run-of-the-mill:

 

As I departed the thicket of quiet protesters, I strolled over to an American-flag tent set up on the outskirts of the crowd. I was feeling a mite low-energy myself after listening to all that cheerless sloganeering, and something written on the side of the tent grabbed my eye, printed in all caps: “LITERALLY ANYBODY ELSE FOR PRESIDENT 2024.” I couldn’t help but chuckle — heck I feel the same way myself after all, albeit for very different reasons. I told the guy standing underneath the tent that I wished he’d had a poster of that slogan; I’d pay for that.

 

And then he introduced himself, whipping out his driver’s license to show me: His name is literally Literally Anybody Else — he changed it in March of this year — and yes, that’s right, he is running for president. He came here because he figured it was as good a place as any to fish for votes. You have to at least respect the hustle; I don’t even know what his platform is, but he may have gotten mine today on principle alone.

 

Candidate Else’s web site is here.

Malapropism of the Day: Kamala Will Ban Price-Gauging

Words get confused now and then. Hardly anyone knows the difference between “gauntlet” (a glove) and “gantlet” (an American Indian torture). Englishmen often write “prevaricate” (mislead) for “procrastinate” (put off until tomorrow). And even Presidents of the United States think that “literally” and “figuratively” are synonyms.

Kamala the Joybringer therefore did nothing unprecedented yesterday when she firmly cackled that under her reign the federal government will crack down on “price-gauging”.

She has indeed much reason not to gauge prices. The gauge shows that the inflation rate, 1.4 percent when she and that other guy took office, is now 2.9 percent. That’s a slowdown from the nine percent peak that it reached. Nonetheless, it is a rate at which prices double in 24 years and nearly octuple over the Biblical three score and ten. That gauge doesn’t bring Joy. Ban it now!

How a “Brat” Reacts to Bad News

Here are the opening paragraphs of this morning’s begging letter from the Harris-Walz campaign:

 

Edward, do you remember how you felt the day after Donald Trump was elected?

 

I do. It was election night for me as well.

 

It was incredibly bittersweet. When I took the stage for my acceptance speech – to represent California in the Senate – I tore up my notes. I just said, “We will fight.”

 

Then I went home and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. Not even Doug. I just watched the TV with utter shock and dismay.

 

Here, incidentally, is the text of newly elected Senator Harris’s actual word-salad victory speech, delivered on Tuesday evening, November 8, 2016, well before the outcome of the Presidential race was known. She did indeed talk a lot about “fighting”. Then, by her own account, she went home and, when she learned that Hillary Clinton would not become President, fought a bag of Doritos.

 

Yeah, there’s a fighter: React to disappointment by gobbling junk food. That’s the brat our country needs to stand up to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the Iranian mullahs and the other villains who have grabbed more and more of the world stage during the Biden-Harris years.

 

I wonder what she will do when the shortages created by her price controls make it impossible to find Doritos at her local market. Switch to Cheetos?

Quote of the Day: Tim Walz in Iraq AND Afghanistan

The indefatigable Steven Hayward, writing at PowerLine, has excavated a striking paragraph from a speech Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the understudy in Kamala Harris’s “Campaign of Joy”:

I had the privilege of serving in this state’s national guard. I stood one night in the dark of night on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and watched a military ramp ceremony–a soldier’s body being loaded onto a plane to be returned home. And if you’ve seen it, you don’t leave the same. It makes you wonder, what are we doing? What are we trying to get to? And then watching as all of you have been, the confusing last few weeks with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Tim Walz, “Remarks at the Minnesota 9/11 20th Anniversary Commemoration, September 11, 2021”, reprinted in Minnesota in the Global War on Terrorism, Post-9/11 Profiles, p. 374 (394 of the PDF).

Mr. Hayward comments:

 

First, Bagram Air Base was in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Second, did Walz ever visit either Iraq or Afghanistan? If he did, it wasn’t on an official guard deployment – that much has been nailed down. It is exceedingly unlikely that he was ever present for a military ramp ceremony of a fallen soldier in either nation. He made this up out of whole cloth. Full stop. (Stay tuned: He’ll claim again that he “misspoke,” and was present when a plane from Bagram landed in Minnesota, if he hasn’t claimed this already.)

 

I think that the Walz “stolen valor” controversy has now been resolved.

Misgovernor Walz Summarized in Five Charts

John Hinderaker, CEO of the Center for the American Experiment, is a Minnesotan and has first-hand acquaintance with the state’s egregious governor Tim Walz. He has summarized the Walz record in five charts showing that –

• “Under Walz, Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever.”
• “Under Walz, student achievement tumbled even as spending on schools skyrocketed.”
• “Under Walz, per capita GDP in Minnesota fell below the national average, for the first time ever.”
• “Under Walz, increases in energy costs have far outstripped the national average.”
• “And under Walz, Minnesota has joined New York, California and Illinois as a state that people of all ages are fleeing.”

Additional commentary on the charts is here.

Quote of the Day: Paying the Dane-geld

That sixteen innocent Westerners, most visibly Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, have been released from Russian captivity is a happy occasion for them, their families and their countries, but it is not, as Jim Geraghty points out this morning, an untainted diplomatic triumph:

 

The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicholas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.

 

We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.

 

As the price paid for the prisoners’ release sinks in, expect to see this Rudyard Kipling quotation “again and again”:

 

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

   But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

   You never get rid of the Dane.

 

If you have travel plans in Russia, it might be prudent to reconsider.

Quote of the Day: Workers of the World, Unite – Against the Jews

On NRO’s Capital Matters thread, Dominic Pino calls attention to a new priority of Organized Labor:

Seven major U.S. labor unions have issued a joint letter urging President Biden to immediately stop all military aid to Israel. “Mr. President, the time to act decisively to end this war is now. Stopping U.S. military aid to Israel is the quickest and most sure way to do so, it is what U.S. law demands, and it will show your commitment to securing a lasting peace in the region,” the letter reads.

 

The Association of Flight Attendants, the American Postal Workers Union, the International Union of Painters, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the United Electrical Workers all signed the letter.

The timing of this démarche, which naturally bears no relation to the ostensible purposes of labor unions, is no surprise. As Seth Mandel observed yesterday –

The Democratic Party’s changing of the guard is almost certainly a milestone in American politics, a bold notch on the timeline marking a point of departure for the party’s approach to anti-Semitism and the Jewish state. The party’s standard bearer 24 hours ago considered himself a Zionist and routinely condemned – even if his administration took no appropriate action against – Jew-baiting mobs on campus. The party’s standard bearer today fears and admires those mobs for, in her preposterous words, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”

 

Members of the Biden-Harris administration who resigned over the president’s support for Israel against Hamas see Harris’s succession in that light. Lily Call, a former Interior Department staffer and member of the virulently anti-Israel group IfNotNow, expressed hope that Harris might enact an arms embargo on Israel. “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing,” Call told Politico. [emphasis added]

Analogy of the Day: The Deist Theory of the Presidency

Joshua Treviño, writing at Armas:

 

The managerial theory is that the discontinued President may persist in office, fully vested with its prerogatives, by virtue of the nature of the office. This is of course totally fictitious: Joseph R. Biden at midafternoon Sunday lost the ability to do nearly every meaningful thing intrinsic to the Presidency, including real cooperation with the Legislative branch, persuading the nation to make war, and representation of the whole American people in government. What’s left is a headless apparatus, dominated but not led – ruled but not governed – by the thousands of functionaries of the administrative state. It is a Deist simulacrum of government, the clockmaker having wound the mechanism, which will then inexorably tick forward undirected. But clocks break, God retains active sovereignty, and the American system requires a President. 

 

Once before in our history, when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke 17 months before his term ended, the White House stood empty de facto, but that truth was hidden from the public. This time the curtain has been drawn back, and the functionaries behind it can no longer fool anyone into thinking that the movements of the mannikin’s lips and limbs are its own.

 

If Joseph Robinette Biden does not resign the Presidency or, in the absence of a voluntary exit, is not removed by impeachment or the abstruse mechanism of the 25th Amendment, the American people will know that he and the Democratic Party have no taste for Constitutional government but are content that the nation be “dominated but not led”.

Quote of the Day: The Guilty Parties

Jeffrey Blehar:

I conclude for now – and we will all resume writing soon, the second we’re done catching our breath – with a feeling of intense resentment for Joe Biden, his handmaidens and collaborators within the administration and the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party as a whole for inflicting a national debacle upon America. (As a Chicagoan, I also harbor a very particular resentment.) I keep returning to the simple truth that Joe Biden’s decline was knowable long ago, as far back as the earliest days of his administration. The denouement to this civic drama has not been fully written yet, but at this point one thing is certain: It is being written as a tragedy.

My sentiments exactly. Joe Biden didn’t abruptly become unable to discharge his duties on the eve of June 27, 2024. His incapacity must have been obvious for a long time to those who interacted with him regularly. Yet they all lied about his condition until the President’s performance in a public forum made it obvious that they were lying.

Democrats keep saying that Donald Trump puts himself ahead of his country. Maybe so, but what were they doing for past twelve months or longer?

Quote of the Day: “No future for Jews in France”

After the results of the second round of voting for France’s National Assembly came in, showing that the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (“New Popular Front”; the only more ominous moniker would be “New Third Reich”) had become the largest grouping, the Chief Rabbi of Paris spoke: “It is clear today that there is no future for Jews in France. I tell everyone who is young to go to Israel or a more secure country.”

The parties of France’s center and center-right joined forces in the second round to defeat what they saw as the true menace, the “far right” Rassemblement National (National Rally) of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Irony abounds. From the French Revolution onward, the French Right was identified with antisemitism. Today its most popular component, the RN, is the country’s strongest supporter of Israel. Meanwhile, as Rabbi Sebbag laments, the progressive Left has become the home of Jew-Hatred.

Bizarre Subject Line of the Day: A Big Endorsement for Biden

“Only one person on that debate stage has the endorsement of their Vice President. And that's Joe Biden.”

That is really and truly the subject line of an email that I received minutes ago from the Biden-Harris campaign. The nominal sender is Kamala Harris. I wonder what her ghost writer was thinking.

That endorsement by the person whom a Presidential candidate has selected to run for Vice President is a rare and momentous accomplishment?

That email recipients need reassurance that Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential pick does in fact endorse him? After Thursday, there may be doubts in some minds.

That the absence of a Trump VP reveals that nobody wants to run with him?

That there is more than one Joe Biden? Note the conjunction of “one person” with the plural possessive pronoun.

That the campaign’s hack writers, who have sent me at least 20 emails since 11:00 p.m. last Thursday, are running out of material?

That Joe Biden has personally taken charge of writing campaign emails? This one makes as much sense as some of his answers to debate questions.

‘Tis a puzzlement.

Meme of the Day: Shades of Green

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President, has posted her platform in easy-to-read format, suitable for socialists who haven’t yet mastered complete sentences:

A friend has modified it to bring out the Green Party’s true colors:

By the way, does anybody know what the Greens have against drones? 

Quote of the Day: Discounting Our Blessings

Cole S. Aronson, an American who lives in war-torn Israel:

Americans live free from armed invaders under a masterful, basically peaceful constitutional system. Things have been good for a long time. The republic’s achievements seem commonplace, so commonplace they aren’t even recognized as achievements. The instinct to rip it all down, the declaration that everything is broken – it’s difficult to credit either when the wretched of the earth hand over their life savings to violent smugglers for a chance to make it to America. America has responded to its generous inheritance with a listless hysteria, palliated by sweet poisons that, if we get the doses just right, may help us sleep without finally killing us.

Quote of the Day: “We May All Be Banana Republicans Now”

J.D. Tuccille:

“Prosecuting current or past top officials accused of illegal conduct seems like an obvious decision for a democracy – everyone should be held accountable and subject to the rule of law,” James D. Long, Morgan Wack, and Victor Menaldo of the University of Washington's political science department cautioned in 2022. “But there are consequences to prosecutions of these officials – not just for them, but for their countries…. If the prosecution of past leaders is brought by a political rival, it can lead to a cycle of prosecutorial retaliation.”

I expect we’re going to see exactly that in the U.S. It’s a regular feature of some other countries’ political systems. Costa Rica, for example, more or less offers prosecutions as parting gifts to its former heads of state. It’s still a lovely country. And the bananas there are delicious.

An unstable political system in which laws and regulations are weaponized by the powerful against opponents isn’t the end of the world. But it delegitimizes the system, turns courtroom proceedings into an expected part of the election process, and poses serious legal dangers for dissenters.

By no means are all Americans sympathetic to the GOP. But we may all be banana republicans now.

Vexillological News of the Day

As you can hardly help knowing, the New York Times has devoted breathless reporting by multiple correspondents to Justice Samuel Alito’s taste in flags. Based on that reportage, a host of left-wing politicians and commentators are demanding that the Justice resign, be impeached or, at the very least, refrain from taking part in cases arising out of the January 6th “insurrection” or even all cases involving Donald Trump.

There’s no need to recount the jeremiads back and forth – not only because they have become repetitious and dreary but because Jeryl Bier of Pluribus has done the homework needed to fatally undermine the factual underpinning of the anti-Alito assault.

The Times claims that the flags hoisted at the homes of Justice Alito and his wife – an upside-down Old Glory and the Revolutionary War Pine Tree flag – are symbols of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Mr. Bier demonstrates that such is not the case, drawing his proofs from . . . the New York Times.

To wit, a week after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Times published a “Visual Investigation” titled “Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot.” Neither the inverted American flag nor the Appeal to Heaven/Pine Tree flag were mentioned in the article–the latter despite a brief appearance in a video clip accompanying the article. 

 

The following day, as part of the Times’s Learning Network, a suggested lesson for high school students was posted that promised “[i]n this lesson, students will learn about the people who participated in the violence at the Capitol as well as the flags, clothing and hand gestures they displayed and what they represent.” Neither the inverted US flag, a supposed “‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol”, nor the “provocative” Appeal to Heaven flag were mentioned in the lesson. They were apparently not worth including in the “dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images” the linked article discussed.

 

The more detailed Visual Investigation was preceded by an article that ran on Jan. 6 itself entitled “Stunning Images as a Mob Storms the U.S. Capitol”. It included no images of either of the purported far-right symbols either.

In short, the association of the Alito’s flags with the January 6th riots was a concocted smear. The story is as phony as the Rathergate memos and deserves the same scorn.

Quote of the Day: Common Points of Interest?

Steven Hayward of PowerLine quotes this from the Rev. Edward R Norman’s 1978 B.B.C. Reith Lectures, which were published under the title Christianity and the World Order:

Christianity today is preoccupied with social change throughout the world. But Christianity today is also notable for its lack of a distinctly Christian attitude towards the world it wishes to see changed. It has increasingly borrowed its political outlook and vocabulary, the issues it regards as most urgently requiring attention, and even its tests of moral virtue, from the progressive thinking of the surrounding secular culture.

That brought to mind a recent interview of a prominent Orthodox clergyman. I will not link to the interview, because I have no desire to spread scandal about my own Faith and do not doubt that the interviewee has good intentions, however foolishly expressed. Asked about having met with the secretary of the Communist Party of Greece, he replied:

First of all, let me tell you that I gladly welcomed the General Secretary of the Communist Party, as I always do with other political leaders who visit me from our country. Of course, in any case, I try to focus on common points of interest. The Church's message must promote unity, and we cannot cling to the outdated notion that the Church and communism can have no relationship at all. This is completely obsolete. As you can see, we would not discuss theological issues with Mr. Koutsoumbas; I preferred to expound on issues related to social solidarity, human rights, justice, and peace. On these matters, we find common ground with the Left, as we share a humanitarian perspective.

The “humanitarian perspective” of the Greek Communist Party, which tried to conquer Greece for Stalinism in the aftermath of World War II, is somewhat questionable. Yet more questionable is eschewing Christian witness (“theological issues”) in favor of finding “common points of interest” with men who want to change the world in ways that are utterly contrary to the Gospel. One imagines St. Paul sitting down with Nero to discuss common points of interest regarding the Roman Empire.

Cartoon of the Day

Steven Hayward of PowerLine reminisces about the era “Before the Babylon Bee”. The Bee had, he recalls – 

 

a predecessor of sorts, the Wittenburg Door, a Christian satire magazine founded in the early 1970s that often carried serious commentary and interviews along with madcap humor. Its heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, and it still exists today, having been taken over some time in the 1990s by Joe Bob Briggs, though it is not nearly the quirky and iconoclastic publication it once was.

 

What it once was was “way ahead of the curve”:

 

 

 

Honor Roll of the Day

Who is Michael Tracey? He describes himself as “Roving journalist, friend to all dogs”. That tells us that he isn’t a fan of the governor of South Dakota but not much else. Whatever can be said about him, he deserves credit for compiling an extensive, albeit incomplete, honor roll of “right-wing media outlets that are systematically, fanatically ‘pro-Israel’”:

-Fox News
-Daily Wire
-Newsmax
-The Post Millennial
-PragerU
-Breitbart
-Washington Free Beacon
-Rebel News
-Epoch Times
-Babylon Bee
-New York Post
-National Review
-WorldNetDaily
-Washington Times
-Washington Examiner
-One America News
-Real America's Voice
-Christian Broadcasting Network
-The Blaze
-Daily Mail
-The Free Press
-The Federalist
-Gateway Pundit
-Salem Radio Network
-Right Side Broadcasting Network
-Western Journal
-Human Events
-RedState
-PJ Media
-Hot Air
-Twitchy
-Townhall
-Drudge Report
-Daily Caller

Kudos to all! Stromata and The Hesperian are, alas, too obscure to have received this recognition. I will try harder in the future.

The United Nations Is Not Your Friend (But You Probably Know That Already)

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind is a fragment of a poem describing the United Nations headquarters in New York City as –

. . . that great glass palace
of mendacity, mendicancy and malice.

If you doubt that, mark the words of the U.N.’s “High Commissioner for Human Rights”:

The UN human rights chief on Tuesday said he was “troubled” by a series of “heavy-handed” steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests across university campuses in the US in support of Palestine.

 

“Freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly are fundamental to society – particularly when there is sharp disagreement on major issues, as there are in relation to the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel,” Volker Turk said in a statement.

 

Any actions taken by university authorities and law enforcement officials to restrict such expression must be “carefully scrutinized” to ensure that they go no further than what is demonstrably necessary to protect the rights and freedoms of others, Turk said.

 

He said such restrictions may be permissible for another legitimate purpose, such as maintenance of public health or order, adding: “I am concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts.”

 

Turk stressed that incitement to violence or hatred on grounds of identity or viewpoints “must be strongly repudiated.”

 

“Such conduct can, and must be, addressed individually, rather than through sweeping measures that impute to all members of a protest the unacceptable viewpoints of a few,” the human rights chief said. “Here, as elsewhere, responses by universities and law enforcement need to be guided by human rights law, allowing vibrant debate and protecting safe spaces for all.”

 

“It must be clear that legitimate exercises of the freedom of expression cannot be conflated with incitement to violence and hatred,” he concluded.

Anyone who has paid attention to the wave of anti-Jewish uprisings on college campuses and doesn’t get all his news from Al Jazeera knows how untethered to reality that accusation is. On the one side, we hear protesters (not just “a few” but crowds of hundreds) chanting slogans that demand a judenrein Middle East and a worldwide intifada against the Jewish people. We see them threatening Jewish students, building barriers to deny access to public spaces and, in the case of Columbia University, seizing control of the main administration building.

On the other side, we see that the police whom university officials belatedly and apologetically summon don’t employ deadly force, or much force at all. There is a little scuffling. Those trespassers who don’t flee are zip-tied and carted to jail, from which they are quickly released. There have been few reports of injuries. If anyone has been hospitalized, it hasn’t made the news.

The most serious breach of “human rights law” that any protester has claimed is that Columbia refused to deliver food to the students and non-students who occupied Hamilton Hall. Tiananmen Square? Soweto? Selma? The hands of authority in the United States are so light that it’s a surprise they haven’t floated away.

Herr Türk doesn’t base his accusations on even a scintilla of evidence. He needs no evidence, because he is certain in his heart that America is the crime lord of the world and Israel is its henchman. His malice is patent. He is probably a liar and a deadbeat, too.

Feel Good Story of the Day: Nobody Buys Tickets to Rob Reiner’s Latest Flick

Since Archie and Edith kicked the moocher out of their house, Meathead has drifted through life making movies whose appeal has become steadily more selective. His latest, God & Country, was released on February 16th. IMDB offers this synopsis:

 

From director Dan Partland and producer Rob Reiner, GOD and COUNTRY looks at the implications of Christian Nationalism and how it distorts not only our constitutional republic, but Christianity itself. Featuring prominent Christian thought leaders, GOD and COUNTRY asks this question: What happens when a faith built on love, sacrifice, and forgiveness grows political tentacles, conflating power, money, and belief into hyper-nationalism? Directed by Dan Partland. Produced by Rob and Michele Reiner.

 

Was the public waiting for this warning against the fearful menace of “Christian Nationalism”? Evidently not. On its opening weekend, the film grossed $30,415 in 85 theaters. Through this weekend, the gross is $60,464. Some high school musicals have done better.

 

Those who love to revel in schadenfreude can find it in abundance here.