I taught U.S. History for three years at Marymount California University in Southern California. Here is one of about 30 such lessons delivered in semester of 100-level history.

I’ve encountered some doozys over the years. Here are two that make the list:

The New Age meets Christian Spiritual Warfare. Nevermind the work of Jesus, YOU are the storm!

Sometimes…everyone does this, even the weakest people

Since Donald Trump got elected, I’ve gone back and forth on social media about his fitness for office and the crazy and indefensible things he continues to say. Based upon some of the responses I get in his defense, I suspect that some of my friends are Q’s. If you’re not familiar with this conspiracy theory, read the Atlantic’s pieces written about it here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/05/qanon-q-pro-trump-conspiracy/611722/

Here are the Cliffs Notes: The world is controlled by a cabal of pedophiles in the “Deep State.” Donald Trump is all that stands between this Deep State and our oblivion. Q is the prophet who leaves cryptic messages on websites such as 4Chan, and his followers glean clues and have even threatened violence, as in the “Pizzagate” debacle. The protests against Covid 19 lockdowns we see at state capitals in Montana and Michigan likely display Q symbols. The Senator recently elected from Oregon, Jo Rae Perkins, openly uses Q slogans such as, “Where we go one, we go all.” Roseanne Barr also hashtags this slogan in her tweets (and she’s certainly been a paragon of stability).

I posted on Facebook that I don’t wish to engage anyone who believes in this, as it is completely pointless. If your friends drive everything into a narrative of Deep State skullduggery and Our Savior Donald Trump, they might have caught Q.

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Two more, “Trump In His Own Words” for you–indefensible statements he’s made–so that his words are not gaslighted away.

I’ve been have some difficult interactions on social media regarding President Trump, the Michael Flynn unmasking, Obamagate, etc. I have always been most troubled by Evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump. I came from that world, and I’m a Christian, but I guess I don’t fall into that camp. I mean the Trump Koolaide Cult Camp. Everything I post gets spun into a “Deep State” narrative, or goes down the Hannity rabbit hole.

As such, between now and election day, I will just post direct quotes from President Trump. They’re quotes that he made publicly for which I believe there’s no justification or spin that can make them appropriate. I’m using the meme format because no one seems tomread the articles I post on social media, even though I post only from center right to center left of the political spectrum. Here are my first two memes.

If you like President Trump, God bless you, and nobody should object to verbatim quotes. My point is of course to move the needle away from Donald Trump toward Joseph Biden, not my ideal candidate by a mile, but the lesser of two evils.

I’d like to highlight two stunning flip-flops between the Clinton and Trump impeachments. One is from a political figure: Senator Lindsey Graham, and the second is from a religious figure, Dr. James Dobson, former chair of Focus on the Family. I’m calling a spade a spade, and sometimes I get some interesting blowback on social media for doing so, but we must be able to handle the truth and get out of our damned echo chambers.

Let’s start with Lindsey Graham. During President Clinton’s impeachment, he said the following on a recently surfaced video clip from CSPAN. “Why do you need a witness? The only point we’re trying to make is that, in every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment, witnesses were called…if you take them off the table, the next Judiciary committee, the next Independent Counsel, ought to do everything because they may lose the chance to present their case.” I agree. Let’s hear from the witnesses to follow the established precedents from Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and now Donald Trump.

Dr. James Dobson said of the Clinton Impeachment: “What has alarmed me throughout this episode has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior even after they suspected, and later knew, that he was lying. Because the economy is strong, millions of people have said infidelity in the Oval Office is just a private affair–something between himself and Hillary. We heard it time and again during those months: As long as Mr. Clinton is doing a good job, it’s nobody’s business what he does with his personal life.” In other quotes, Dobson didn’t mention the actual charges against Clinton—perjury and obstruction—just his moral turpitude, and that was enough to impeach him. Trump has turpitude in spades, if we hadn’t noticed.

Now Focus on the Family (in the words of Chairman Jim Daly) says the opposite of Dobson. They reject the recent call by Christianity Today that called for Trump’s impeachment, again, mostly for moral turpitude. Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Jack Graham, and others echo Focus, and said the same as Dobson in the 1990s, but are saying the opposite (opposing impeachment) now.

How did our mores and standards change so much in twenty years? Does the Bible read differently than it did then? This hypocrisy alarms me more than any other issue among Evangelicals. It speaks of situational ethics and the ends justifying the means, which is something I thought we didn’t do, if it still is a “we” within the Christian church.

According to Slate, “A majority of Republicans say Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln.” According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 53 percent of Republicans say Trump is a better president than Lincoln.” When I read this, I nearly soiled myself and I wondered how this could be true. As a thought exercise, I made a template to compare these two men, and here’s what I came up with. In fairness, it’s a mistake to write a sitting president’s legacy, and Lincoln didn’t have the media scrutiny that Trump does, though Trump openly courts controversy in the press. Do Republicans truly know Lincoln’s legacy?

“If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal,”

President Donald Trump, via Twitter, September 29th, 2019

In the above tweet, President Trump quoted Southern Baptist Minister and Fox News contributor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. Recently, Bill Maher, Real Time talk show host and satirist, also spoke about the potential for a second civil war, “We are going to have to learn to live with each other or else there will be blood,” he said in a November 15th, 2019 comment.

Why this rhetoric among quasi-intellectuals in America? Do these events resemble America before the Civil War? Well, not really. We live in an entirely different America now, and we are not divided over one issue (two, if you want to cite states rights as a secondary cause after slavery during the Civil War).

Prior to the Civil War, two events stood out as leading up to the general conflict between North and South: Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s, which was slavery and anti-slavery violence that included the likes of John Brown, and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Congressman Preston Brooks in the U.S. Capitol Building in May of 1856. This History.com video with Matthew Pinsker briefly unpacks both of these events.

History does not provide a clear road map to civil war in America, unfortunately. Since the 1960s, we’ve fought a culture war over values. The divide that began with the Sexual Revolution, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the hippie movement hardened on the issues of abortion rights and LGBTQ marital rights. One could refer to these issues as the Chick-fil-a wars because how one feels about Chick-fil-a restaurants position against LGBTQ marital rights probably indicates on which side of the cultural divide one sits.

MAGA red cap-wearing Americans at pro-Trump rallies occasionally committing violence versus Social Justice Warriors on American college campuses would be another way to picture the divide. Are there enough people on the far margins who would take up arms in service of their cause? It seems that most people sit clearly on the left or the right side of the political and cultural divide, but closer to the middle, and are unlikely to resort to violence, but maybe that’s the Pollyanna version of America where I want to live and not where I actually do live anymore.

November 9 is a fateful day in German history. It includes the following events:

The Last Emporer (Weimar Republic Formed after WWI) 1918

Beer Hall Putsch                                                                    1923

Nazi Party Form SS (Schutzstaffel)                                   1925

Kristallnacht                                                                          1938

Fall of Berlin Wall                                                                  1989

To learn more:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/november-9-fateful-day-german-history-014125012.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=tw via @YahooNews

As I type in my Southern California home, I hear the drone of traffic and see partially lit windows giving way to the marine layer, which in turn gives way to sunlight. Local weathercasters call these conditions May Gray. Neither the marine layer nor the sunshine has won out yet. This condition describes my life at the moment.

Life requires markers of time to keep a sense of order. Colleges run on quarters and semesters, punctuated by mid-term exams, papers due, and final exams. My life had those markers until last Christmas when my college teaching job ended, and my days now run together. I have weekly events like Boy Scout meetings, church on Sunday, music classes on Monday and Wednesday, and the late start on Tuesday (my son has late start at his middle school, and for some reason, I forget this and wake him up too early nearly every week). And then there’s the seemingly endless job search.

For the first time in more than twenty years I filed for unemployment because I lost my job due to “no fault of my own,” which is the standard for these benefits. Unemployment benefits fit the May Gray theme and live in the uncomfortable middle ground because they aren’t exactly welfare and aren’t exactly insurance because the employer pays into the system from payroll taxes (not from the worker’s check directly however).

Using these funds, I’ve taken Adobe Software training, paid for the LinkedIn Premium membership, subscribed to Flexjobs (a freelance and remote work subscription site)–basically anything that might improve my job prospects. Every week I apply for one to three jobs and record these details online with the Labor Department. I interviewed at small performing arts college in Hollywood to teach history, applied at a summer extension program to teach history to incoming freshmen (no word), and to write content on Study.com (another of those awful online writing gigs where they mine your intellectual property–I didn’t get an interview).

Today I will work on completing the training for the Adult Literacy Volunteer with LA Libraries. This work could definitely help someone in my community to gain literacy and function better in society, but I also want the experience on my resume for future adult education job opportunities. Again mixed motives and May Gray.