- Trump’s crazy Gaza redevelopment plan;
- How conservatives use “corruption” (without evidence) as an excuse to undermine institutions they don’t like;
- And they would go after Wikipedia, if they could;
- Then a long sequence about JD Vance on Christian love, various responses, and my take;
- With a relevant quote by Bertrand Russell.
First, items about the Current Craziness.
Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Feb 2025: This Trump Plan for Gaza Is One of the Craziest Things I’ve Ever Heard
He proposed not only that the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza leave their homeland—because, he said, it’s “a hellhole” and always will be—but that the United States take it over, “own it” (he dropped that phrase a few times), and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Yes, he really said that.
And typical, I would say. He sees every situation as a potential opportunity to make money. And he has not the slightest concern for any of the people he would displace.
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The excuse they use is always corruption or abuse. Anything to their disliking must be due to one or another, while the real reason is that conservatives disapprove of the governments’ project. And that’s their excuse to attack.
Slate, Stephen Harrison, 5 Feb 2025: Project 2025’s Creators Want to Dox Wikipedia Editors. The Tool They’re Using Is Horrifying., subtitled “The Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it accuses of antisemitism.”
In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats. Revealing an editor’s personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user’s being permanently banned from the site. Although this behavior is strictly prohibited by Wikipedia’s rules, Heritage has endorsed these scorched-earth tactics in response to what it perceives as antisemitism among certain editors covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on Wikipedia.
They already have their Conservapedia, where they can live in their fantasy world in which relativity and evolution a merely conspiracies. Isn’t that enough?
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Also this:
The Atlantic, Lila Shroff, 5 Feb 2025: Elon Musk Wants What He Can’t Have: Wikipedia, subtitled “Musk and other right-wing tech figures have been on a campaign to delegitimize the digital encyclopedia. What happens if they succeed?”
Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack.
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Expanding the theme outward a bit, here’s a post several of my Fb friends have shared.
The point of interest is the comment by one Pastor Brandon, which I will quote in full:
As much as I don’t want to touch this one, JD Vance stepped inside the “love God and love others” conversation, so I felt compelled to respond.
Vance’s statement might sound like a Christian concept, but it’s actually the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. Nowhere in Scripture does Jesus command us to prioritize love based on proximity, nationality, or citizenship. In fact, He repeatedly destroys that kind of thinking.
In Luke 10, when a lawyer tries to justify who he’s required to love, Jesus responds with the Good Samaritan—a story where the hero is the very outsider Jewish society despised. The point? Love isn’t about who’s closest or most familiar—it’s about who needs it.
In Matthew 5-7, Jesus obliterates tribalism. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). No caveats. No hierarchy.
In Luke 4, Jesus stands in His hometown synagogue and reminds them that God has always shown grace to outsiders—and they try to throw Him off a cliff for it.
Vance’s “Christian concept” isn’t Christian—it’s a survivalist model. It’s what we were taught in disaster relief: start with family, then widen your circles outward. That’s practical for triage, but it’s not biblical love. Jesus doesn’t command us to rank our compassion. He commands us to love without restriction.
This isn’t a theological mistake by JD—it’s gaslighting and politically distorting scripture and the heart of Jesus. Christians are now being told that Jesus’ radical, all-encompassing love is actually a misinterpretation, and that the real Christian way is to love selectively, starting with your own tribe. That’s not the Gospel—that’s nationalism wearing a cross like a fashion accessory.
… and a comment to that comment from one Mei-Ling Johnson Eckman:
Tell me you didn’t actually read Thomas Aquinas or Augustine without telling me. Ordo Amoris – was not meant to be applied to a nation state, but to an individual.
So I Googled “Ordo Amoris” and found links to a bunch of sites, all religious sites, with variously tortured interpretations of what Christian love means.
The first one is inspired by the same JD Vance comments:
Catholic News Agency, 4 Feb 2025: What is the ‘ordo amoris’? JD Vance’s comments on Christian love spark debate
My first reaction is bemusement about how so many people can cherry-pick and stretch the words of the Bible into whatever they want them to mean, and to claim, for instance, that you can’t understand what the Bible meant without reading all these later interpreters, like Aquinas. (I don’t care what Aquinas said, except possibly as literary history. Was everyone who lived before Aquinas wrong, until he came along to set them straight?) And to notice that Vance, at least, is arguing in bad faith (and ad hominem) when he says, according to this CNA piece,
“A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”
Or, maybe they assumed Americans can take care of themselves, while others around the world need more help. It’s not as if Republicans are doing anything to advance assistance to the poor in the US, and they’re certainly not interested in helping those overseas. They are apparently endorsing Vance’s insular morality.
Not being a nit-picking Christian scholar, I can nevertheless align these attitudes with the range in human nature that has been recognized by the psychologists and biologists and other scholars in recent decades, and as I’ve read about in books by Wilson, Pinker, Greene, et al. And which I’ve tried to track here in this blog. On the one hand is what I’ve been calling “tribal morality,” which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to maintain the endurance and stability of small groups, the tribe. (Which Pastor Brandon calls “a survivalist model”.) The OT Ten Commandments are clearly best understood in that context, e.g. “that shalt not kill” didn’t apply to other tribes. On the other hand is the relatively advanced morality that has emerged, almost by necessity, as the world’s tribes have grown and interconnected and meshed into a global society, where you won’t get along and prosper if you don’t understand how to treat people in other tribes as ‘equals.’ This was the explicit intention of the US Constitution — “all men are created equal” (not all Americans) — which modern conservatives are apparently now rejecting.
And yet base morality hasn’t died, in most people, which is why so many want the 10 Commandments posted in schools, and not what Jesus said, which in this context advises his followers to take a wider view and treat everyone equally outside one’s tribe. So my takeaway from all this is that the OT represents basic, tribal human nature; and what Jesus said was to try to break out of that tribal mindset and take a more worldly view.
Which is urgent and vital in our modern world. Or we will all go down together.
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Here’s a relevant quote from Bertrand Russell
“All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”
