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Why MAGA Evangelicals Can Cheer Love and Hate at the Same Time https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/opinion/erika-kirk-charlie-trump-miller.html On Sunday afternoon, Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10, stood in front of tens of thousands of mourners in the State Farm Stadium and millions of others on TV and online and did something breathtaking: She forgave the man who murdered her husband. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.” The crowd cheered. Watching at home, tears came to my eyes. Erika Kirk personified what it means for a Christian to imitate Christ, and she did so in a moment of maximum stress and pain. Much of the rest of the rally was a worship service — full of Christians expressing love for the Kirk family, grief at his death and hope for eternal life in the world to come. But not all of the rally was the same. When President Trump and Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, spoke, the message was different. Speaking of Charlie Kirk, Trump said, “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.” Miller, for his part, had his own message for his enemies. Addressing those he said were trying to “foment hatred against us,” he said, “You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred.” “You are nothing,” he repeated, “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.” It wasn’t as though the crowd cheered Erika Kirk and booed or sat silently when Trump and Miller uttered words of pure hatred. The crowd cheered their comments, too. Particularly disturbing was the crescendo as Miller repeatedly declared other people — human beings whose lives are every bit as precious as those of every person in that stadium — to be “nothing.” Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God? My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity. The good is still very good. Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness should be remembered for a very long time. But MAGA Christianity is also rooted in a dangerous distortion of Christian theology, one that motivates otherwise good people to walk a dark and dangerous path. To explain, let’s discuss two of the most famous passages in the Bible — Matthew 5 and Romans 13. Matthew 5 contains the beating heart of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This is where you find the Beatitudes, such as “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The Sermon on the Mount contains the command that Erika Kirk repeated on Sunday, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.” Romans 13 is quite different. In that passage, Paul describes the role of the ruling authorities, and his language is vivid. A ruler, Paul says, “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” As a result, when you watch MAGA Christians cheering Kirk and Trump, they’ll argue that there’s no contradiction at all. Kirk and Trump occupy different roles, and they’re each fulfilling the roles that God intends. Kirk — as an individual — is loving her enemies. Trump and Miller — as the president and one of his chief advisers — are playing their divinely appointed roles as avengers. There is a kernel of truth here. Properly understood, the passages from Matthew and Romans work together to provide room for both grace and justice. The fact that Kirk forgave her husband’s killer doesn’t mean that the State of Utah should drop murder charges against him. The reality of personal grace does not relieve the state of the obligation to impose punishment and protect its citizens from a dangerous man. Or, in the context of wartime, there is no inconsistency between a soldier, say, forgiving the Japanese officer who mistreated him when he was a prisoner and yet still believing that the United States of America had no choice but to confront and defeat imperial Japan. But to look at Romans 13 as excusing Trump is to make what amounts to an astonishing category error, in two ways. First, Scripture could not be more clear that a ruler is obligated to do justice and that the sword (to the extent it should be wielded) exists to protect the innocent, not to punish your enemies. Consider, for example, the prophet Jeremiah’s admonition to the king of Judah, his officials and even the people who pass through the palace gates: “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.” Those same themes are present in other verses. For example, in Deuteronomy, Moses describes a God “who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires. There are endless examples of Trump’s malice, including a recent Truth Social post in which he declared Senator Adam Schiff, Attorney General Letitia James of New York and James Comey, a former director of the F.B.I., “guilty as hell.” He bragged about firing a U.S. attorney who didn’t do his bidding, calling him “a Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job.” But God commands both individuals and nations to care for the poor and to treat foreigners with dignity. From start to finish, the Bible condemns corruption and favoritism. Think of these biblical commands in light of Trump’s actions. Politically biased prosecution decisions and pardons are anathema to any conception of biblical justice; so are brutal deportations without due process; so are violations of constitutional rights; so is killing people without legal justification; so is the abuse of political power for financial gain. Cheering Trump’s hatred is tantamount to cheering Trump’s corruption and abuse because hatred is at the root of his administration’s poisonous tree. But that’s not the only theological mistake. You can’t apply Romans 13 to an American president because an American president is not a Roman emperor. He is not our ruler. Yes, he exercises authority, but the sovereign ruler of the American nation is the American people, and our rule is expressed through elections and — crucially — through constitutional law. Our founders intentionally created a republic that was as different from the Roman Empire as day is from night. When it comes to the obligation to act justly, the buck doesn’t stop with Trump; that responsibility extends to the crowd that cheered for his hate and roared its approval for Miller’s dehumanization project. If MAGA evangelicals cheer Trump’s hate, if they welcome it, if they adopt it and if they vote for it, then they are responsible for it. His malice becomes theirs. The bottom line is that American Christians inherit both Scripture’s individual obligation to love their enemies and the national obligation to do justice. That is a high moral calling. Hatred and dehumanization are not viable moral options for us. There is no scenario in which we can cheer for or empower either one. The opposite is the case. As coequal rulers of this republic — along with people of other faiths or no faith at all — we are not to sit idly by when a president abuses his power. The citizens, including evangelical citizens, have the responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his many grave wrongs. And the singular failure of MAGA Christianity to uphold this biblical obligation has helped unleash Trump’s hatred on our nation. I hope the lasting legacy of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service is found not in Donald Trump’s hate but in Erika Kirk’s grace. But when grace is relegated to the individual sphere while hate is an element of the political project itself, the results will always be dire. And so it is today. Countless Americans are enduring Trump’s vengeance. Far too few experience Christian kindness. It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see Trump’s malice as an instrument of God’s divine plan.

Fascistic Dream Machines: far right supporters know it's AI, but claim it shows a "greater reality" https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/september/fascistic-dream-machines A video making the rounds on far-right Telegram channels begins with the sound of bagpipes and a view of the Scottish countryside as three stern-looking white men in kilts wave the St Andrew’s Cross. The frame cuts to the streets of London, kilts are swapped for trench coats and bowler hats, St Andrew’s flag for St George’s. A red bus rushes past and now we’re on a Welsh moor, the bankers are farmers, and a Red Dragon flag and a herd of sheep trail along behind them. A woman with flaming red hair walks between rows of terraced houses as her male companion waves the Ulster banner. ‘Braveheart girl’, a disembodied voice sings, as a white child is shown wielding an axe in one hand, a knife in the other. (A twelve-year-old Scottish girl was charged with weapons possession in late August. Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk amplified false claims that she was defending herself against ‘migrants’.) Black men, their faces contorted with rage, speed towards the white cliffs of Dover as the voice sings: ‘arrive by boat, demand four star.’ A man with the flag of Pakistan on his shirt reclines in an armchair enjoying a feast. Outside, a homeless white man and his dog are begging on the street. None of these scenes are real and none of these people exist. Everything – the landscapes, the characters, the music – are AI-generated. The people sharing the video and dozens like it are clear-eyed about this. No one is duped: the comments praise the quality of the AI, and users marvel at how well a fake video can represent what they believe. It wasn’t so long ago that experts and media commentators were warning that deepfake technology was becoming so advanced that soon no one would be able to tell fact from fiction. Bad actors would flood information spaces with fake content so convincing that it would lead to violence and stolen elections. False information can lead to real-world harm. When an AI-generated ‘recording’ of Sadiq Khan appeared in 2023 – in which the mayor of London supposedly says ‘I don’t give a flying shit about Remembrance weekend’ – the mayor said it could have led to ‘serious disorder’. The clip was quickly debunked. When the BBC confronted an influencer who spread the recording, he accepted that it was fake but maintained that the clip conveyed some essential truth: ‘It’s what we all know Sadiq thinks.’ Ahead of the far-right rally in London on 13 September, I watched an AI-generated video of Elon Musk discussing the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory and urging white British people to ‘fight back’. Everyone in the comments knew the video was AI-generated, but they engaged with it and shared it with others, most of whom also knew it was fake. ‘It actually does not matter if this is AI-generated,’ one user wrote. ‘It is describing exactly what is happening in Britain right now to a tee.’ Debunking would have been of little use when, days later, the real Musk was beamed into the march to say more or less the same thing. Last summer, I spoke to dozens of right-wing rioters who took to the streets after the Southport murders. I wanted to see if the Daily Mail – which has spent decades vilifying migrants – was correct in blaming an alleged piece of ‘Russian disinformation’ for the riots. No one I interviewed believed the false narrative that the attacker was a Muslim ‘illegal immigrant’. They correctly identified him as a British-born son of legal immigrants. They wanted all migrants gone. This year, in the run-up to the 13 September rally, I spoke to new recruits on far-right Telegram channels. A woman from Norfolk explained that she shared AI images of young white women cowering under the gaze of leering migrants because ‘you can’t photograph them, or they’ll call you racist.’ A man in Leeds said he was creating images of blonde children smiling and holding signs that read ‘send them back’ because ‘this country belongs to our children, and they can’t speak for themselves.’ A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe ‘because of migrants’ told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’ (It’s worth noting that for all the talk of women’s safety, these networks get served a shocking number of ads for AI-generated sexbots. Docile and dead behind the eyes, feminised AI bots offer to transform themselves into ‘crushes, exes or colleagues’, inviting users to prod, poke and abuse them.) As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus, fascism in the 1930s was not fundamentally a problem of ignorance: ‘The masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.’ Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather than a problem of desire (or the material conditions that shape desire). The deepfakes proliferating across far-right social media, some of which were printed off and displayed on banners on 13 September, are fascistic dream machines. They offer clear, illustrative diagnoses of Britain’s alleged problems (Islam, people of colour, migrants), a theory of change (sealed borders, mass incarceration, deportations), and a vision of the future (hegemonic white masculinity, Christian revanchism). This vision is as ugly as the AI images – but it is at least a vision. Keir Starmer, who ran on an ill-defined slogan of ‘change’ and now enjoys a 174-seat majority, seems unable or unwilling to offer a diagnosis of Britain’s current condition or a vision of a better future. A speech is promised later this week, but it’s difficult to imagine the prime minister making a new commitment to more radical change. Ideologically and intellectually impoverished, the Labour Party’s neutrality on the racism of migration debates has allowed the right to set the terms. Perhaps this is why Starmer described his Immigration White Paper, which borrows Brexit sloganeering, as ‘absolutely central to my Plan for Change’. Or why the Home Office is conjuring phantasmic lists of ‘luxury goods’ that asylum seekers, who receive £9.95 per week, are ‘banned’ from buying. Or why Starmer told reporters that he, too, proudly flies the St George’s Cross as an ethnonationalist flag campaign swept across England. It would be easier if the march on 13 September and the affective infrastructure behind it were a problem of bad technology and bad information. But, as the far right’s use of deepfakes shows, fact-checking and correcting discrete lies is as unlikely to push back fascism as ‘stopping the boats’ is to fix the NHS. A more courageous Labour government could have helped with what might be called structural fact-checking: calling out the lie that migration is to blame for Britain’s declining social services and widening wealth gaps; insisting on a more accurate (and necessarily complex) diagnosis; and offering a vision for a better world that takes the need for change seriously. Instead, it chose to pander to fascist aesthetics, which – as Walter Benjamin argued – redirects discontent with the status quo into activities that do nothing to challenge existing configurations of power. Until Labour (or a left alternative) offers a different vision for the future, fascistic deepfakes will continue to be an affective conduit for feelings that do not care about the facts.

There was a ball headed back across the goal in the first half, Jorgensen shuffled across then proceeded to what only I can describe as 'try and catch a fly' he was about 8 foot from the ball and nowhere near it, the bloke is actually way worse than Sanchez and that's saying something

Saw a quote from Jose where he said they all, every player, had the win mentality.

the world class CB that we are waiting for !

Strasbourg CB Ismaël Doukouré could join Chelsea next summer. (@CyrilOlives)

Jorgensen is so shit, on any other night those crosses would end up in goal, very weak goalkeeping.

There are so many legends there ♥️; this current lot can only dream of achieving what many of those players achieved at the Bridge.

Clearly the people worrying have a point if we've been dire in a majority of the seven games played.

We all know Palmer does not like the tactics he is being instructed. His words after the Betis game were telling. So this could well and truly be Maresca or Palmer/any other quality player. Here’s hoping the board will choose wisely.

So, It begins...

I think we should wait until the end of the season to decide what is good and what is not. I still think they did a good job this summer. Especially when they had to balance the books because of UEFA restrictions. Last season we started kind of slow, and I expected the same because of the insane summer we had. We might finish the season strong again.

Hell NO!

He should be! BlueCo have ratfucked him hard.

Some people will say that Enzo Maresca has been handed the dream at Chelsea. I mean, the club…View the full article

This will be tough and can't see us winning this at all- scramble a point at best because everyone apart from us seems to be orgnaised and have a way of playing, we just seem to not have a fucking clue and hope for the best

Under the ownership of the consortium led by Todd Boehly, not one season has gone by without Chelsea…View the full article

Maresca is a one trick pony unfortunately. Even if players can do what he wants it is just not dynamic enough. His style takes away urgency from players in the way they approach the game . When we see crazy urgency in the last 15 mins of games while trying to win it or rescue a point it is because the players throw maresca ball out of the window and play football. I really really wanted to like this manager. Sad that he has not given me an opportunity to hold on to anything, any silver linings. The fact that almost all players massively regress under him speaks volumes.

I cant see how we will win.. They play fast direct football with fast passes between players and with our defence and slow football... Guess will be pain to watch + only Caicedo in mid..

Danny Welbeck scores...and water is wet

The football last night was fucking tragic, don't let the result fool you Drastic

Maybe they'll have a off day..seeing as we play Liverpool next surely we can get a point from here! Cause that one isnt going to go well so be nice to have something better in between

Just on the players i been saying for a long time regarding the players these sd's are bringing in. Half of them are simply not good enough. There's too much reliance on those top quality half a dozen or so players we have and in turn half of them are injured regularly. Its a no win situation.

In that case we should have just ignored those discretions. Assuming it was not possible for it to come to light .