Sophie Libemday’s body had for years been trying to tell her something that she struggled to articulate in her mind. She was being abused, but her capacity to declare her husband’s brutality was clouded by the doctrine of “male headship” that her church professed.

We should be careful, here, in calling this particular “church” a church, since it can barely distinguish itself from a cult. We’re talking about the infamously hermetic Potter’s House church, one of a number of church’s in Wayman Mitchell’s “Christian Fellowship Ministries” lineage. The organization has been accused of “mind control” in various eruptions throughout many decades. Over the past three months, I’ve spoken with a large number of victims to try to understand how the abuse works.

This article focuses specifically on marital abuse and its possible causal connection with The Fellowship’s doctrine on “male headship,” which bases itself on an orthodox interpretation of Biblically defined gender roles in marriage. The husband occupies an exceptional role within the family, while the wife becomes a kind of glorified accessory. In The Fellowship, however, this definition is so much more complex. Therein, the paradigm for “wife” is so suffocated by holier-than-thou connotations regarding female submission that words like “coercion,” “abuse,” and “marital rape” are made illegible.

“This feels really awful,” Sophie said, as she recalled how she rationalized her abusive marriage. “It doesn’t feel like love. I’m not sure what I thought marriage would be. I didn’t think it would be this, but I guess this is how it goes.”

The Fellowship’s doctrine gave her nothing to think otherwise.

Wayman Mitchell, who founded Christian Fellowship Ministries in Prescott during the early seventies, developed his spin on the male headship doctrine in response to the Women’s Liberation Movement, which was in full-swing at that time. Ideas of female empowerment “boiled down to a sin problem,” he believed, according to one congregant-written biography, leading “women to rebel against the scriptural demand of submission” to men.

Sophie told me that her father found a sense of authorization in the church’s proclamations of men as the exceptional sex. Woman are simply not chosen by God to be leaders, they’re chosen to play an ancillary role to men who are divinely ordained by God to act as spiritual commandants in a Christian world revolution; or so Mitchell believed. Sophie was introduced to this idea as an infant when her father joined the church, which she would escape until she was 35 years old. For nearly three decades, her whole life was buffered by this outlook.

When her brother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia during her teenage years, instead of serving to empower him the church’s gospel on patriarchy became cause for her father’s intense frustration. It proved utterly useless against the intractability of a serious mental illness. His helplessness materialized as violence.

“My dad was just raging,” she told me, “just breaking everything in the house, hitting us, losing his mind.”

This first instance of paternal abuse would serve as Sophie’s introduction to the futility at the bottom of The Fellowship’s peculiar doctrines. From one perspective, her father’s desire to lead his family had lapsed into abuse — this was her “male headship.” On the other side of this was her pastor, whose authority proved only to perpetuate the violence — this was her “spiritual headship.”

“In the Potter’s House,” Sophie says, “you don’t go to the authorities, and you don’t go to therapists. You go to your pastor. He is your spiritual headship.”

So when her father’s abuse became too much to bear, Sophie did what she was taught: she sought help from her pastor, Bob Mammon, before anybody else. Mammon praised her for “doing the right thing by honoring [her] mother and father,’” she told me, by coming to him instead of going to the police. Together, they asked God for a help that never came. But where his prayers lacked efficacy, Mammon’s spiritual hubris worked exceptionally well to deposit her into a prolonged cycle of abuse.

“This man was abusing his children terribly, and this other man was in a place of authority, telling this fifteen year old girl, ‘Don’t talk about this to anyone, we’re going to just pray together,’ and he never confronted my dad or anything,” Sophie told me.

This part of Sophie’s story exposes us to a larger practice within the church that begets so much trauma. The organization encourages a deep distrust of outside bodies of authority, like social welfare services, mental health professionals or even the legal system, making it a trap for victims and a carnival for pathological narcissists to practice coercion under the cover of religiosity. The phrase “spiritual headship,” referring to a convention of rules and regulations requiring congregants to lend absolute obedience to their pastor’s “spiritual covering,” has deeply authoritarian origins, and runs as an undercurrent through every victim testimony I’ve taken.

It comes from Wayman Mitchell’s early embrace of what was called “The Shepherding Movement,” which was itself spawned by a handful of Charismatic pastors out of Fort Lauderdale in 1976, who incorporated a series of new and highly fascistic ideas into Charismatic Christianity at-large. The “Fort Lauderdale Five,” as they were called, convinced nearly 150,000 people around the country, according to reporting from The Los Angeles Times, that total personal submission to a “shepherd” was necessary for spiritual maturity. The movement developed as a pyramid-style network of ascending authority, where groups of “sheep” were beholden to “shepherds” who themselves were beholden to pastors above them, and so on.

Even the most intimate decisions, like changing living spaces, applying for a new job, choosing one’s friendships, or how to spend one’s money, could not be trusted solely to the individual making that decision. Such decisions had to be made in tandem with a shepherd, since only he has the power to interpret God’s will. When it comes to the believer’s vulnerability to sin and evil, the movement taught that there is no other protection besides their shepherd’s “spiritual covering.” He is the arbiter of divine decree, since any disagreement with a shepherd was equated to rebellion against Christ. In this way, “God” and “pastor” begin to coalesce into one overarching “Big Other” (to borrow a Lacanian term), and it becomes difficult to distinguish between the caprice of man and deity.

Naturally, this resulted in a wave of spiritual and emotional abuse throughout the eighties, including immense financial malfeasance under the cover of tithing. Bob Mumford, one of the “Fort Lauderdale Five,” would admit by 1990 that there had been an “unhealthy submission resulting in perverse and unbiblical obedience to human leaders.” Christianity Today published an interview with Mumford in which he issued an apology, saying, “People took something that began in the spirit and attempted to perfect it in the flesh. Ends began to justify means. The attitude became, ‘I’m going to help you walk straight, even if I have to coerce you.’ This is not the spirit of the Gospel.”

Many churches realized the error in the practice and discontinued it, but Christian Fellowship Ministries was not one of them. Before his death, Wayman Mitchell made no such apology for how he incorporated the movement’s ideals into his church. I’m told The Shepherding Movement began to appeal to him during a time when his “primitive and militant evangelism” (as The Church of the Foursquare Gospel once described it) was causing congregants to “rebel.” The Shepherding Movement offered itself as a kind of psychological bullwhip, one which still cracks through the practices of churches within The Fellowship today, those such as The Potter’s House.

Add to this arrangement Mitchell’s vehement anti-intellectualism, spawned by his loathsome experience at Seminary School, and you get something more hermetic and cultish than a typical church. In yet another deeply propagandistic biography, Go Ye: The Arizona Story, Mitchell says that “students who go off to Bible School get their heads full of homiletics and hermeneutics” and come back “embalmed in denomination deadness. They are filled with knowledge and deader than a hammer.”

Mitchell’s experience at Bible college resulted in his renunciation of sending pastors-in-training through seminary. Of greater significance, however, he seems to have extrapolated this ill-will towards erudition across the spectrum of institutional knowledge altogether. In doing so, he’s cultivated a space where accreditation by any organization that doesn’t gibe with his peculiar brand of fundamentalism is gleefully cast aside as quackery or even occult.

These brief historical observations expose us to a formula: the expectation of a strict and unhesitating congregational obedience to church leadership breeds a false sense of authority in pastors who, save for the church’s own internal folk-knowledge, are wholly unlicensed in anything. This formula shapes a sphere interaction where congregants are forced to take their every problem — whether it’s a porn addiction or a deadly mental health crisis — to church leaders who are as grossly under-qualified in devising solutions as they are falsely self-assured of those solutions.

In lieu of credible expertise, these so-called solutions are usually drawn from a sort of easy-bake dogma of “spiritual healing.”

“All sickness has its roots in the activity of the devil who exploits man’s fallen nature and involvement in sin,” writes Wayman Mitchell in his book on spiritual healing, Healing: Commission, Confrontation, Compelling Witness. “For many people,” he says in another section, “their healing revolves around emotional issues.”

“The devil exploits women through hatred of fathers, husbands, and sometimes men in general,” he writes. “Renouncing the hate often brings complete and instant healing from various kinds of cysts, ovarian and fallopian tube infirmities and dysfunction. Oftentimes lumps in the breast dissolve following prayers of forgiveness.”

In the same section, he says that “most women with scoliosis have been sexually molested as children or young girls,” and claims that “renouncing” the demon-triggered behaviors of “bitterness and un-forgiveness brings dramatic healing in most of these cases. Many female disorders are closely related to emotions associated with un-forgiveness, bitterness and resentment.”

“Un-forgiveness” is one “root cause” of spiritual sickness among an entire taxonomy of root causes that generate everything from “Blindness” and “Depression” to “Female Dysfunction,” Mitchell claims in the book. Other “root causes” are things like “Bitterness,” “Rebellion,” and “Fear of Rejection.” If a woman contracts “cervical cancer,” he reasons, then she must have unaddressed issues with “hatred of husband.”

What’s clear from the testimonies of abuse I’ve taken is that this set of obscene miscalculations has proven itself a mechanism for perpetuating violence, mainly because the spectrality of this demonic realm, which only pastors with the proper authority have the capacity to interpret, allows abusers to reorganize culpability in a way that alleviates them of responsibility.

Jenny Underwood, whose husband was horribly abusive, shared with me a disturbing experience involving she and her husband in a “marriage counseling” session with Greg Mitchell, Wayman Mitchell’s son and the de-facto leader of Christian Fellowship Ministries after Wayman’s death. While Jenny was expecting help from her pastor with confronting her husband’s sexual indiscretion and violent impulses, she told me that Mitchell instead ignored her husband completely, turned his gaze to her, and said, “I need to know everything that you’ve ever done in your life that you’re ashamed of.”

The implication was that Jenny’s abuse may not be rooted in her husband’s actual behavior, but in the fact that she’d allowed demonic influence into her life. Her abuse was her fault, apparently.

“The reason why my husband wouldn’t stop cheating on me, and being abusive,” she says Mitchell told her, “was because of my ‘unforgiveness,’ and if I would just forgive him correctly, he would change, you know. So it was like everything always was on me, and somehow always landed in my lap.”

This type of psychological coercion through demonology undergirds a broader culture of cognitive surveillance within the church. The idea of Satan’s agency here on earth makes the homogeneity of the group a matter of self-preservation, as if rigorously matching purity standards fortifies a wall against evil. This, we might take a second to recognize, is the classic tactic of all totalitarian leaders: seeking to subtract difference from the masses while promoting sameness makes groups easier to control psychologically. It eliminates safe spaces for dissent. What this ends up turning into, however, is a culture of paranoia where any difference at all is interpreted as disruption.

The explicit pronouncements of love and community that new congregants receive conceal a panopticon, where everybody is watching over one another all the time, ready and willing to pull the knives of shame and fear on one another to quell dissent and recover a semblance of equilibrium. In a ministry of “militant evangelism” where church-planting is seen as the highest good, such an action also shows loyalty and earns the respect of one’s spiritual headship that gets you closer to having your own church.

This culture of rabid anti-intellectualism; the prevailing ethos of skepticism towards worldly (or as Mitchell might have called it: “carnal”) things; the policing of thought — all of it comes together like bricks in a parapet that confines the “church,” while the hyper-fixation on a theology of spiritual warfare relegates the world beyond those confines into an infernal danger zone that stops one from stepping too far outside its boundaries. It’s as though the church has developed its own internal legal system, something which cannot be transgressed, besides by those who dictate the law. Those beneath the law are incarcerated to an intangible boundary.

The fact of its intangibility gave Wayman Mitchell plausible deniability through many periodic bursts of “mind-control” allegations over the decades. “We don’t force these people to do anything!” he said to one newscaster in the eighties. “They come and go whenever they please!”

The reality is that all ideological systems are as invisible as they are forceful in generating docility. God’s power over all must be interpreted by a bevy of trusted judges and truth-tellers. Ideological coercion is located within this trust. People believe that the necessary questions regarding what God wants from them are being answered by leadership, which makes them subject to impotent men wearing the mask of a deity. But the invisible strictures of this ideological formula impels people to believe that their subservience to leadership is of their own accord, allowing for a transference to take hold between the system’s subjects and its judges in the name of God.

Rather than morality, however, this internal legal system, more often than not, dispenses its influence to silence abuse victims while protecting the church’s reputation. This is evident from the many testimonies of abuse I’ve taken in the past months.

Returning to Sophie, we can now understand how the world in which she was raised restricted her field of view in regard to her own abuse. Going outside of the church was not an option, while on the other hand her pastors used their spiritual authority to silence her and to redirect her attention away from what was happening to her. This was the case with her father’s abuse, and it would come to be the case again when she married her next abuser right out of high school, John Foley, the son of her later pastor, Kevin Foley.

“My family felt like I was very lucky to get married to [John],” she told me, “I felt lucky. I felt like, yeah, I’m just this poor kid, and the pastor’s son chose me.”

They were married when Sophie was eighteen. She was pregnant three months later. Only two weeks after having their first child, John Foley raped her for the first time.

“When you have a baby, you are supposed to wait six weeks to have sex because you’re injured. And after two weeks, John said, ‘This is wrong. I waited 21 years to have sex, and now I can’t, and that’s wrong. And we’re going to have sex,’ and so he raped me, and he will admit that he did this. I mean, I was screaming in pain. There was blood everywhere.”

No sooner than this first instance of gruesome violence would the couple be named as directors for The Door church, a highly coveted position of leadership among The Fellowship’s subsidiary churches. At this point, Sophie’s life became a fragile balancing act. She was forced to juggle being a loving mother with displaying the bonhomie required of church’s leaders, all while repressing the crippling surges of panic and depression that come with an intensely abusive marriage.

“I just remember that was the first time I really experienced almost a psychotic break,” she said. “I felt like this is not real, my life is not real. I felt myself one night float out of my body, and I think I was just very traumatized from what had just happened to me.”

She again trusted her pastor’s spiritual headship for protection. But just like Bob Mammon, Kevin Foley placated her with prayer and silenced her otherwise.

“He told me, ‘Listen, you cannot talk about this with your family or other people, because you are going to forgive John, but they will not, and your marriage will not be able to recover from that, and so I want to ask you not to share this with other people, and I want you to just pray with me, and I will deal with John’.”

Sophie believed him, thinking his guidance came from a place of love and a desire to protect her. She was raised to believe this as gospel. Together, they prayed, and she ultimately decided, “I will just believe that my pastor is going to contend in prayer with me, which is just really heartbreaking.” She would later learn that Foley consciously refused to take any kind of action. He chose instead to protect, facilitate, and even rewarded his son’s sociopathy, allegedly paying for his legal fees and other expenses with church money after Sophie divorced him.

Foley’s response evinces why we should refuse to interpret Sophie’s prior abuse and Bob Mammon’s previous failure to act as something like an “echo.” Rather, we should look at it as the next rotation in a gearing device that makes the church tick in a more fundamental way. It’s hard to hear a story like Sophie’s — and there are many like hers — without concluding that Christianity is just a cover for some “obscene underside” of transgression, to borrow an idea from Slavoj Žižek, which props up the explicit laws and functioning of Christian Fellowship Ministries itself.

The Fellowship, and this statement is wholly within the land of my opinion, exists not to start a Christian revolution, but to build an ideological engine which allows men to transgress without consequence.

“Woman are conditioned from a very young age to be controlled and the men are told they are the head of the home,” Danae Rubke, another victim and ex-congregant, told me. “The power structure is being set up from a young age and often, when it’s all you know, you fall prey to the lie and jump on the hamster wheel.” One of the ways this conditioning happens, she told me, is through various reading materials women “are given when we get married.”

Books like Dr. Emerson Eggrichs’ Love and Respect and Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands are handed to girls as an instructional manual for how to fit into the archetype of “a good, Christian wife.”

Both books illustrate marriage as a profoundly superficial relationship of two-dimensional complementarity. The thesis of Dr. Eggrichs’ book, for example, boils marriage down to a simple equation: men need “unconditional respect”; women need “unconditional love.” Marital sex in his book is framed as “symbolic of [the husband’s] deeper need — respect,” while a women’s need for “unconditional love” has almost nothing to do with sex. For women, sex is relegated to the category of “duty.” If one knew nothing about sex before reading the book, they might think it was entirely vacated of pleasure for a woman, something done purely out of obeisance to God and husband with the wife’s body serving as hardly more than a vessel for her husband’s desire.

Eggrichs tells a favorable anecdote from one of his female congregants who’d resolved to stop having sex with her husband so long as he “failed to meet her emotional needs.” The “Lord spoke to her,” he says, prompting her to realize that her position against sex lacked maturity. “Who is supposed to be the mature one here? He is a new believer and you’ve been in Christ for many years,” Eggrichs says God told her. She realized that she was to “minister to her husband sexually, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she wanted to do it as unto Jesus Christ.” Is a woman supposed to believe that actively holding autonomy over her body is spiritually immature?

The author claims this woman got her “emotional needs” met in return, which reveals an overarching idea that lingers beneath the surface of both books this way: a wife gives sex to receive emotional peace at home. Sex is a transaction. At the same time, having sex with one’s husband, even as against one’s own natural inclination, is framed as necessary for satisfying one’s duty to Christ. From yet another direction, refusing one’s husband sex is framed as a way of inviting sin and evil into the marriage, thus victimizing him spiritually.

“A man who strays,” writes Eggrichs, “is usually given total blame for his affair, but in many cases he is the victim of temptation that his wife helped bring upon him.”

Schlessinger’s book is the same. She suggests that not giving sex should be interpreted as breaching one of the Ten Commandments, writing, “Don’t the marital vows include and imply words like love, respect, honor, protect, care for, and so forth? So when one breaches those vows by neglect, is that not also a form of infidelity? Perhaps we should start looking at the act of intentionally depriving a spouse of his legitimate need as infidelity, too, because it stems from being unfaithful to the intent of the vows.”

Next to her capacity for surrendering bodily autonomy, a woman’s ability to remain “silent” is highly glorified. Dr. Schlessinger dedicates a whole chapter to not being a “nag.” Dr. Eggrichs appeals to The Apostle Paul’s words in Corinthians: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home”; and in the book of Timothy, where Paul says, “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”

While it may seem counterintuitive, says Eggrichs, God rewards women who love “harsh and unloving” men despite their vitriolic behavior, adding that “a billion angels” will even celebrate her in Heaven for doing so. He advises women that the best way to deal with such unsympathetic behavior is to have a “polite and gentle conversation” with one’s husband. “Don’t repeat it for anywhere from ten to twenty days,” he prescribes. Should one’s husband fail to change, “mention it again, quietly and positively with the general tone of ‘just a positive reminder because of your importance.’”

“Quietness shouts loudly,” says Eggrichs.

In either book, there is a superficial sense of mutuality regarding the obligations of “husband” and “wife,” but the underlying loyalty is to a doctrine of male headship which at all times subverts any notion of true mutuality or complementarity.

In Christian Fellowship Ministries, as in all churches that practice this doctrine, “mutuality” is a veneer for an asymmetry that favors the needs of men as the exceptional sex. What is required of the husband is a certain level of emotional availability; what is required of the wife is that she relinquish her bodily autonomy, along with the individuality and self-assertion that the power of her voice offers her.

Looked at relatively, it’s nothing versus everything.

The goal as I see it with these books is to convince flesh and blood women that holding themselves parallel to what is clearly a male fundamentalist’s fantasy is somehow critical to her spirituality, and thus necessary. But because she is objectified by a strict set of patriarchal mandates, transgression against her is cast into a space where it’s less likely to be called out as immoral. The arbiters of morality are themselves the men, who speak for God.

Texts like these allow The Fellowship leeway in assigning sexual abuse to a “gray area,” Sophie told me, “because that’s not your body, and you were denying sex. What was he supposed to do? He was trying to not watch porn, and so it’s kind of your fault.”

The wife’s body devolves for the husband into a space of inconsequential transgression. Abuse itself becomes a way for a particularly narcissistic man to experience their “divinely ordained” status as the exceptional “rule-maker” or “leader,” their superiority in the realm of sex and gender that privileges them to a field of morality where traditional boundaries do not apply.

“John created a rule,” Sophie shared with me, “that if he didn’t have sex every other day, he found it impossible to be kind to other people, and he would excessively beat my children, or he’d be really cruel to people in the church as a punishment, and so I just started complying with that rule, so that he wouldn’t lose his temper with our very small children, and that he wouldn’t berate these young disciples in front of me…”

In the land of male headship, Sophie’s being became a proving ground for her husband’s superiority in the most vicious way imaginable. And there was no direction in which she could turn for help that would allow her to reprove of his actions without risking eternity in Hell. He was her male headship, a position in which she’d be placed by no less than the hand of God. Underneath this “doctrine,” however, men simply protect each other to continue enjoying the fruits of transgression. And it’s this hidden solidarity through transgression that props up the explicit laws of the church, which can be seen even more clearly in yet another horrifying moment from Sophie’s story.

“I found on John’s phone,” she told me, “in a hidden folder, he had been taking pictures of me while I was sleeping, and he had been recording us having sex, and he had been taking pictures of me in the shower that I didn’t know about, and it was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever felt. I felt this deep desire to just take my skin off. I didn’t want to exist in my body.”

When Sophie went to her pastor, Kevin Foley, to tell him what she’d found, he told her that it was out of his hands, spiritually speaking, at least, because he wasn’t “quite sure what the sin” was in such a scenario.

“I’m just not sure what the sin is, because you’re his wife,’” was Foley’s response, Sophie claims. “But it’s my body,” Sophie argued. “‘He said, ‘but it’s not…” Kevin Foley called Greg Mitchell for council, who allegedly said the same thing. “He’s not watching porn because it’s his wife,” was the prevailing claim.

Their doctrine of “sin” couldn’t account for what was so clearly a moral violation of Sophie’s bodily autonomy. This whole “if it’s not in the Bible it’s not wrong” mentality allows these men to experience lapses in morality as a privileged enjoyment. To admit to Sophie’s husband’s immoral behavior would have exposed the gap between religious leadership and authorized transgression which has over so many decades been covered over in sanctimoniousness. It’s by the mark of this privileged enjoyment that the bond between men within Christian Fellowship Ministries lies, and it’s the kernel from which sprouts the many stories of marital abuse I’ve heard.

The notion of the “Good Christian wife” does not exist in The Fellowship to protect men from sin, but as an instrument which allows men to cover over their desire to “sin” while still being called a Christian. In regard to the notion of “woman,” every element within the field of knowledge is seemingly invested into taking one’s voice away, replacing the vocabulary of marital abuse with epithets, like “Jezebel Spirit” and “Rebel,” which demarcate female self-empowerment as sinful.

Sophie would not be able to truly declare her abuse until she finally escaped the church’s boundary to see an outside therapist.

“I went to this therapist in Cambridge and had a session with him, and just told him about the coercion and the rape, and he just looked at me with just so much grief in his eyes, and he said, ‘I don’t ever recommend divorce. I don’t, that’s not my call to make, but I will tell you right now, what you are experiencing is terrible abuse, and it is my recommendation that you move out immediately, so at least you can have some distance from your abuser to gain some clarity. But this is this is really wrong, and you’ve been really traumatized.”

She’d hoped her therapist would simply say, “You know, this is just kind of how marriage goes,” she told me. His affection terrified her. So much so that she even went to a second therapist to get another opinion.

“This one was a woman,” she said, “also a Christian, and her reaction was exactly the same and more affected, which I knew would happen, and same thing, she just said, ‘This is first of all illegal, you’re being raped, and second, this is so anti-God, there’s nothing biblical about what’s happening to you.’ Because I’m married, and I didn’t know that could happen when you’re married.”

The Fellowship that had buffered her perspective for decades with its extremely narrow outlook on the field of feminine identity had given her no lexicon to lay claim to her trauma. “The marriage bed cannot be defiled,” as Danae put it for me. In one incredible moment from our interview, Sophie described to me the relief when she was given the opportunity to have an internal dialogue about her pain, one which could finally match the pain her body had quietly stored up for so long.

“Okay, so this feeling I have in my body, whenever this happens to me, is not just because I’m rebellious or I can’t just submit to my husband, it’s because I’m being violated and my body knows and is trying to protect me.”

Everything she’d suspected about what was happening to her was coming to the surface. It wasn’t part of God’s plan. The doctrine she’d been taught was morally reprehensible. The veneer of divinity by which she’d lived her life was covering over something more sinister. She just needed to breach the church’s strictures to lay claim to the fact that, underneath the doctrine of male headship in marriage, the moniker of “wife” wasn’t a sacred space. Indeed it fully eclipsed her place as “neighbor,” as in Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor as thy thyself, in the most violent way possible. Sophie’s life had not been dictated at the behest of Christian love, but by a vilifications of traditional notions of Christian love. Wayman Mitchell used these vilification as a way of bolstering his deeply fascistic, patriarchal positions.

A feminine mode of love was too often used to “mask truth” or “to keep people from being honest,” he believed, as stated in one congregant-written biography. In one sermon, he calls this the “feminization of the church.” Notions of Christian love holding to Christ’s “Great Commandment” to “love thy neighbor as thyself” couldn’t account for his desired level of militance in applying his church to “The Great Commission,” which is to go out and make believers of all nations. So he chose to manipulate the very definition of “Christian love” to force it into compliance with the command most satisfying to his own narcissism.

“Most of Christianity has been unconsciously dominated by the female,” says the biography regarding Mitchell’s beliefs on the matter. “Women have traditionally made up the largest numbers of converts. Sadly, this has shaped a gospel that is heavily feminine in its orientation.” As the seventies rolled on, and women began making headway in academics, business, and the church, Mitchell “dared to stand against the tide.”

“To him the gospel is the kingdom suffering violence and the violent taking it by force. He preaches love, but it’s a love that shows Jesus with a whip in the temple as well as playing with little children.”

Here we should remember Bob Mumford of The Shepherding Movement, and his apology: “People took something that began in the spirit and attempted to perfect it in the flesh. Ends began to justify means. The attitude became, ‘I’m going to help you walk straight, even if I have to coerce you.’ This is not the spirit of the Gospel.”

Mitchell went in the opposite direction of this. He embraced an expanded the definition for Christian love that allowed for the inclusion of its opposition: “love with a whip,” love by force, coercion, intimidation. If one wanted to defeat the demonic strongholds taking over culture and society, love couldn’t be feminine. It had to contain within it a permission structure for the coercion necessary for a truly militant evangelism.

This is the paradox of Mitchell’s “militant evangelism”: if one wants to embrace a “militant evangelism” in its full totalitarian weight — to go out and make believers of all nations — then some level of coercion is required. Love, then, becomes an obstacle to overcome rather than a core tenet to follow. When coercion is integrated into the definition of love (in a disavowed way, of course), the so-called “religion of love” implodes into a religion of contempt for human life. And that’s because when “love” and “coercion” are couched into the same definition, it gives narcissists a vessel through which to embrace their most sadistic desires while calling it Christian love.

At this point, the species of Wayman Mitchell’s “militant evangelism” subverts the genus of Christianity: if the definition of love can permit authoritarian coercion, so long as it can be rationalized as a weapon for fighting a spiritual war, then the seed has been planted for a culture of transgression to form. What holds the patriarchal community together is not their explicit love of Christ, but their place within this transgressive culture, the “boys club” as Sophie called it, where men “protect each other” by silencing victims as a way of protecting the solidarity rooted in allowing one another to transgress the laws they claim to hold dear.

“So this is the structure [The Fellowship] has created,” said Danae Rubke, “Is they create very narcissistic men, and narcissists need more narcissists to be able to — they all feed off of each other. And so that’s really what what they’ve created there is not godly men, they’ve created a bunch of narcissists and men who need constant stimulation, attention, and if they are not the center of your world, then they don’t understand what’s happening.” That pretty much sums it up.

Today, each survivor I’ve mentioned in this story —Sophie, Danae, and Jenny— all live happy and fulfilling lives outside of the church, though they’ve for the most part been shunned by friends and family still living within it. It’s a split hand. By leaving, they’ve lost everything and gained the whole world at the same time. Jenny is still happily Christian, but feels she has a better understanding of what it actually means to love one’s neighbor after what Christian Fellowship Ministries has put her through. She’s currently going to school to become a leader in the church. Danae is happily re-married and works for herself as a home designer and real estate agent in Arizona. Sophie is now the lone breadwinner for her household. She’s found success in the corporate sector somewhere in Massachusetts. Each is the leader of their own life.

For the past several months, I’ve been canvassing with a small, but mighty, non-profit organization called AZ Poder, fighting for marginalized communities while using it as an opportunity to learn how one communicates the importance of building working-class power pragmatically on the ground. As an organization, we excel at doing the grunt work that actually drives real, tangible change. (I use the plural pronoun “we,” but obviously my opinions are my own, here, separate from AZ Poder’s official claims) Slowly but surely, over the past three months we’ve knocked on over 13,000 doors. You can be sure that many of those doors were slammed in our faces. But an encouraging number of those doors have also opened to us, and given us the opportunity to listen to the issues the community faces from the actual people grounded in it.

We’ve all heard chunks of Gil Scott-Heron’s famous poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” somewhere in the zeitgeist. My work with AZ Poder has taught me something about why it is that the revolution will not be, and cannot be, televised. First of all, the revolution in its active state is immune to being televised because it’s a living, breathing mass of atomic interactions, each of its parts wholly singular in the way they move and activate. It’s a swarming motility of human behavior and emotion evolving into a miracle of human synchronicity. The medium of television, film, documentary, and especially not social media, cannot capture this without connecting its various pieces into a flattened out semblance, something fit for the market of exchange.

More importantly, however, is that a significant part of what we call “the revolution” happens when a conversation we have at the door gets people thinking for themselves about how much of their ideological agenda has been mechanized by discourses of power. I don’t mean we should chuck Michel Foucault at them. It’s enough that somebody who cares is asking them about how to approach change in a way that could improve the lives of their loved ones; that somebody who cares wants listen to their issues. Placing them in the discomfort of having to talk about one important issue is enough to plant the seed for future questioning. The revolution will not be televised because this maneuvering happens internally, after the doors close, lying in bed at night, as questions turn to curiosity; curiosity to anger; anger to action. This cannot be televised.

In his essay, “How To Look At Television,” Theodore Adorno observes that when complex moralistic ideals, such as those underpinning a revolution, pass through the television screen they are almost by necessity “overshadowed by the threat of inducing people to mechanical simplifications.” They distort “the world in such a way that it seems to fit into pre-established pigeonholes.” In order to make the revolution fit for television, it has to become digestible for a wide audience’s consumption, which means it takes the internal process described above, the domino effect of questioning, and twists it into a fit-for-all, one-dimensional track. If the would-be revolutionary fails to personalize the revolutionary spirit, then they are no longer “in the driver’s seat” of the revolution. This is why organizations like AZ Poder are so critical, because they challenge people to think about how they embody the issues they see on t.v. in real life.

I was listening to Van Jones talk on CNN about how Gil Scott-Hern’s poem, “The revolution will not be televised,” had been proven incorrect by the communications strategy of recent DSA candidates, who’d swept up a number of wins that night. “The revolution IS being televised,” he said emphatically, “and podcasted and streamed and elected tonight.” When he performed this pretentious spiel, though he didn’t mean to, he proved the case for why it is true that the corporatization of American politics is so vehemently loathed by Americans themselves: he and his fellows get paid an annual salary of a million dollars a year to supplant the real, embodied humanity inherent to the political sphere with a hyper-commercialized simulacra of “American life,” one which by the logic of infinite growth inherent to a capitalist system must necessarily be divorced from solutions and bound to the myriad crises, excesses, and wastes that regenerates capital.

It’s easy to see why Van Jones would butcher Gil Scott Heron’s underlying idea. He works in a space that splatters a false rendering of American life into ubiquity, and he’s done so for so long that he legitimately confuses it for the real thing. When he speaks to issues, he doesn’t even realize that he’s speaking to a facsimile of the issues. This is dangerous, somebody should tell Van Jones. It’s dangerous because it diminishes Americans who are people to “The American People.” It’s an empty signifier which allows the capitalist class to activate ideological positions. It’s dangerous because it serves the reproduction of capital over the reproduction of community.

The whole framework of 24-news networks, whether it’s Fox News or CNN or MSNBC, is fundamentally divorced from resolution. They want instead to drive long-winded catastrophes that have no end in sight. A “forever war,” for example, is more than just a discursive trope. It’s the capitalist’s investment in the people’s symptom. Fire and corpses pave a road of endless enjoyment that viewers can embrace, just like the obsessive compulsive welcomes the red rivulets of blood from their relentless nail-biting. “Forever wars” aren’t just foreign crises, their psychological and libidinal crises. They’re a pleasure-through-pain that distracts us from the anxiety of actually solving the problems themselves.

To say that journalism can balance its job to produce objective analysis with its job to reproduce capital has been proven false time and again. Every time Sinclair broadcasting manipulates narratives about black and brown violence creeping into the suburbs, the objective relationship between profit and journalism goes out the window. Every time Jake Tapper tries to trap Abdul El-Sayeed into saying something that makes him sound like a terrorist, it sounds more like an audition for Larry Ellison’s soon-to-be takeover than journalism.

In 2016, “news” networks gave Donald Trump an estimated $3 billion in free airtime, even though all he did was spout lies belligerently. His racist rhetoric has directly affected the lives of every minority group in harmful ways that cannot be undone now. We’ve seen that televised many times, too. The Trump problem has now escalated into a fascist’s wet dream, in no small part brought to you by CNN, Fox News, and others. But who should care less than a news network who gets to profit on it from both sides, the divisive lies and the hate crimes which it generates? Combined it makes for a good quarter.

The revolution cannot be televised because its television the revolution must break through. The two things are irreconcilable. As soon as the revolution has been televised, it’s been commodified and thus had its teeth removed and its nails plucked. As soon as the revolution is being advocated for by Van Jones on CNN, rather than Van Jones quitting his job at CNN to advocate for the revolution, then we know the forces of market exchange are trying to dismantle its radical spirit. Commodifying the radical philosophy that generates the antagonistic force which makes a revolution productive diminishes it to a vessel for false consciousness.

The revolution becomes a product, a narrative, something people can engage with by simply watching along, whether it be with Van Jones or Hasan Piker. Piker is fine. Whatever. But his eight hour streams daily inhibit the rise of class-consciousness because for many he is used to replace the nutrition of actually reading Gyorgy Lukacs with empty calories. When Piker talks about Mao, Cuba, or Lenin, nobody has time to know whether what he’s saying has any merit before he moves on to another reaction video. I’m glad Piker exists, because at least its something, I guess. But we should have no illusions about the fact that when people watch commentary they confuse their viewing pleasure with the gratification of embodied action.

When this is the case, the revolutionary spirit is transformed into a new creature-comfort brought to you by capitalism and hegemony. When integrated into the capitalist system, the antagonistic attitude of the movement falls out the bottom of it. A revolution can only take so many beatings by the hammer of narrative trope before it becomes something the system uses to exploit the working class. It can only be presented beside so many diaper commercials before it lacks seriousness.

“If mass communication blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator — the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship.” These are the words of Herbert Marcuse, from his book, One-Dimensional Man. “The music of salesmanship” is precisely that which, in my opinion, we’re trying to break through as we knock on doors at AZ Poder. We are trying to breach the “revolution” in its defanged, televised form.

I’ve never felt so naive as I did when canvassing endowed me with the realization that capitalism and its various channels have turned America into a society of suspicion; the halls of public service into a car dealership. So much of what I do with the organization is to first convince people I’m not trying to sell them anything, and then to break through the suspicion that the narratives of mass communications generate for people to give them an explanation for an unexplainably complex world.

Am I a communist who wants to implement Sharia Law? Am I trying to “trans the kids”? Even in regard to the progressives I speak with, those who agree with me, I still have to break through narratives to get them to participate in the conversation at a more pragmatic level. The neighborhood of Maryvale in Phoenix, Arizona has been presented for so long by local media outlets as a “high-crime, low-income” neighborhood that those neighborhoods which lie in the same district, albeit a few blocks apart — even those centrist liberal neighborhoods with the fancy historic homes and “Free Palestine” flags in their yards —  are set on treating it as foreign planet in outer-space.

“Don’t go there!” they tell tourists. “You’ll probably get shot!”

But did you know that Maryvale struggles with inordinate heat during the Phoenix Summers because they are underfunded and so have far less tree covering?, I’ll say. Did you know this adds an unnecessary pressure to the electricity grid, raising utility prices across the valley? Did you know your vote could directly relieve Maryvale’s heat crisis, and so lower your bills? So much of what we call “the revolution” is just this, an interaction between a person who cares and somebody who perhaps doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care, which exposes the ladder to the underlying connection between neighbors.

The revolution cannot be televised because the products of television necessarily mute this underlying connection with simplicity. When the revolution is televised, then the world in which the revolution exists is distorted, overshadowed by mechanical simplifications which transmogrifies autonomous morality and critical, independent thought into the pre-fabricated pigeonholes of “what sells.” The revolution does not sell. The grunt work it takes to fuel the engine of revolution does not sell.

It’s not sexy enough. It’s sweaty armpits and chaffing thighs, the sour stench of body odor. It’s the threat of heat toxicity in a Phoenix Summer. It’s silently comforting yourself as you wait in anxiety for somebody to answer the door, by saying under your breath, “I’m fighting for working-class families, I’m fighting for working-class families, I’m…,” only to have them tell you to fuck off. The revolution cannot be televised because it’s not and should not be sexy enough to sell.

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(I was asked to write an essay on why the journalist retains value in the age of Artificial Intelligence for a scholarship application. “What value does the human journalist have in an age where AI can write full pages of text on almost anything, etc. etc.” Because of a technical error in the application system, I was denied submission. So, I’m posting it here in the land of my own Substack, where all of my submissions are approved.)

Imagine if I answered the question, “What makes a journalist valuable in the age of AI?” solely by means of the most provocative, but elliptical, evasions. Sure, it would make for an acrid essay, but the answer to the question would be palpable in the reaction such evasions elicit in the reader: a confusion that merits further investigation.

In other words, it would engender the intuitive experience of knowing that there is something one does not know. The value of the journalist in the age of AI is located in this self-reflexivity.

The intuition of lack that emanates from the gap in our subjective knowledge spawns the human desire to interpret the world in new ways, but only if we listen to it. Lack can be discouraging, or it can be the procreative energy of human progress. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t lack. It cannot act upon the intuition of lack. For AI, the concept of knowing is a closed, totalized circuit. For humans, the concept of knowing is self-negating — we know we don’t know — resulting in an unbounded and instantaneous adaptability to change.

Consequently, we are capable of remediating between self and world amid the flux of time. This gives the journalist a unique ability to “bear witness” to an ephemeral world, which allows them as a human to endorse shifting paradigms in a way AI cannot.

To go a step deeper, bearing witness itself sits between a contradiction at the heart of both humanity and journalism: a compulsion to be heard and a tendency to repress.

The evolution of the social space that shapes the journalist’s occupation is mediated by these contradictory, psychological forces. The first flows from an unyielding desire to pierce the collective unknown by attesting to personal experience; the second from a desire to avoid what we can’t bear to know (or not know) by propagating false knowledge in the embrace of ideological delusion (e.g. Nazis propaganda, the witch-hunts of Salem).

This intersection is where the moral thrust of the journalist’s duty to bear witness lies. When I talk about “bearing witness,” I’m not talking about surface-level observation, but a grave moral obligation, the gravity of which is grounded in its potential to recalibrate truth’s relationship to the hallowed space of shared knowledge. The journalist plays “midwife” between truth and either side of the spectrum between attestation and repression. AI is precluded from engaging in the moral negotiations within this living dichotomy.

For Socrates, “midwifery” described the philosopher’s commitment to facilitating the “birth” of wisdom latent in others. In the realm of journalism, we shift the initial emphasis on the word “wisdom” to a word like “testimony.” The journalist’s relationship to humanity’s compulsion to tell and be heard is entrenched in the act of gathering the stories of people capable of testifying to history. So says Dori Laub, a victim of the Holocaust who spent her life gathering testimonials of the atrocity, and who fittingly raised the significance of testimony to the dignity of human survival.

Survivors do “not only need to survive so that they [can] tell their stories,” she said, “they also [need] to tell their stories in order to survive.” This is as true for the survival of the victim as it is for the survival of humanity.

A valuable journalist “midwives” wisdom among the collective by registering personal testimony into the framework of public discourse. Because our world is constituted by narratives that condition human cooperation, a victim’s silence-breaking testimonial can catalyze new contradictions amid social discourse that change how we cooperate to resolve them. One day, a general is well-respected for his years of service; the next, a journalist shows his record of commanding soldiers to murder innocent civilians in Mai Lai, and the conversation changes. As a journalist, one’s place in this framework is to transform a victim’s testimony into comprehensible insight (the Mai Lai child who survived the massacre).

Accomplishing this can suspend virulent ideologies, institutional myths, and collective repression. Bearing witness to, contextualizing, and sharing insightful testimony requires embodied presence that AI doesn’t have. A journalist who cares about their work will always reflect this humanity because they will see their responsibility as inverting the known by integrating the unknown into it. For AI, there is know “unknown,” no intuition of lack. A journalist sees the gap in the known, and searches through the unknown for its shape and size.

Admittedly, the peripheral blindness of human self-awareness is as much the root cause of corrosive social conditions as it is responsible for evoking the desire to positively affect them. If one is to retain their value in the age of AI, they must keep this duality close to their chest.

In other words, society’s problems are not always plain because people deny, repress, and disavow.

The gap in human self-reflexivity can just as easily manifest as a choice not to know as it can cause inspiration to know. Through mechanisms like propaganda, the manipulative requisition of religion, a deliberate desensitization to violence, and so on, an oppressive regime can manufacture the public’s consent to overlook problematic truths. AI doesn’t have self-awareness, but a good journalist can intuit mass delusion and work to penetrate it.

As a human, the journalist has access to a truth that negates ideological forces in real, ongoing time. AI’s “truth” is always already lagging because it is generated from historical training data. For this reason, AI cannot catalyze a “truth-event” (Alain Badiou’s term); a journalist can. A truth-event causes rupture in the existing order and opens the space for new possibilities. By obliging the ruling authority to prove itself relentlessly, journalists foster the space for revelations to break out which can puncture mass delusions.

By embracing epistemic humility and one’s physical immersion in the ebullitions of temporality, the journalist can inhabit the necessary conditions to affect the world with their work in a way that AI cannot.

John Hersey’s 1946 reporting on Hiroshima for The New Yorker makes a perfect concluding example. Early on, Americans wore the military’s annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a symbol of national victory, but Hersey knew that there was more to the story than pride. He walked around Hiroshima for days gathering testimony that illustrated the disastrous effects of the atrocity. American readers expecting to find their enemy in his article found human beings, like them. Pride transformed into disgust and public consciousness shifted.

As a journalist, one should always work to find the seeds of the unknown imminent to what is publicly known and act upon them with good old fashioned “shoe leather reporting” (which, lacking a physical body, AI cannot do).

Ironically, what makes AI “useful” makes it a flawed journalist. It knows everything. A valuable journalist knows there are things they don’t know, and that’s an advantage.

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Mark Driscoll, the head-pastor of the cultic Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ, and de-facto dictator of the desperately manospheric religious non-profit, RealFaith Ministries, seems ever on the lookout for new ways to turn Christ’s house into a den of exploitation. While he’s recently made the news for the purchase of a $15.5 million dollar office building, I’ve identified a separate, unpublicized transaction that deserves its own scrutiny.

Affidavits from The Maricopa County Recorder’s office show that in 2021 and 2022, Trinity Church used the money it holds in trust for religious purposes to buy two office spaces in Hayden Business Center, a premier commercial suite in the highly sought after market of Scottsdale Airpark/McCormick Ranch. By 2025 they were sold for nearly the same price, around $1.3 million dollars.

On the outside this looks like a simple investment strategy, but there’s something curious regarding how the value was transferred between entities by the time it was offloaded.

Only one of the properties Driscoll purchased stayed within the Trinity Church name. The other was sold by the church into the possession of Driscoll’s other non-profit, Mark Driscoll Ministries (referred to here as the name with which it does business, “RealFaith Ministries”), in 2022 at a loss to the church.

A transfer of value like this between related non-taxable entities, both of which Driscoll is at the helm of, raises red flags characteristics of private inurement fraud.

Private inurement fraud is when two related non-profit entities exchange something of monetary worth between insiders at a rate that is ethically unjustifiable.

Judging by market conditions and comparable valuations during 2022, the property we’re concerned with, a Unit C2 of Hayden Business Center, appears to have been sold from Trinity Church to RealFaith Ministries for a price that seems atypical, and certainly much lower than Driscoll used the church’s money to buy it for.

This means Driscoll may have overseen a transaction in which value was funneled away from the church he owes fiduciary loyalty to in order to benefit the non-profit he uses to build his celebrity-pastor brand and through which he pays himself a six-figure salary.

The fact that he pays himself is significant because it means any upside potential to this transaction could result in higher revenue for RealFaith Ministries and by osmosis create a direct or indirect personal benefit (i.e salary raises, bonuses, etc.) to Driscoll himself while Trinity Church is left with a bullet hole in its budget.

Without the proper excuse, like solid board oversight in regard to the transaction, which is almost laughable when it comes to Trinity Church and RealFaith Ministries, this transaction would reek of fraudulence.

Incoming revenue to nonprofits is (should be) heavily regulated by boards, the IRS, and state authorities like the attorney general because its non-taxable status designates it for charitable purposes only. Any irregular spending by a nonprofit organization should raise eyebrows.

The Money-Change:

In March of 2021, Trinity Church threw down $740,000 (all cash, I remind you), to purchase Unit C2.

The fact that this property was purchased with Trinity Church’s money implies that it was to be used as a space benefiting the congregation.

In a piece written by the business and real estate news organization, AZ Big Media, Peter Madrid catalogued the sale along with many others, writing that the building was meant to “serve as a multi-media facility for Trinity Church.”

“Trinity Church plans to utilize and expand the many features built into the facilities,” Madrid wrote, “particularly a studio for recordings and presentations of its ministries and development programs.”

However, a Deed of Trust from Chase bank shows that Driscoll’s RealFaith Ministries (Mark Driscoll Ministries in tax filings) took out a $500,000 loan attached to the space. An Affidavit of Value insinuates that this loan was used to purchase the property from his church about a year after its initial purchase.

After putting $100,000 down, RealFaith Ministries purchased the “multi-featured” property from Trinity Church for $600,000 in total, which means they left Trinity Church to foot a $140,000 investment loss. The real question is whether or not this was an instant $140,000 equity gain to RealFaith, or did the property really lose such a big chunk of value between 2021 and 2022? Or, perhaps, Trinity Church overpaid for the space and then sold it into a separate entity by the time the price was more stable?

According to a market report from AZ Big Media written in the second quarter of 2022, the period during which the transaction occurred, it seems unlikely that the property’s value would have dropped at this rate, especially since we know the property was purchased with the intent of making additions over the coming months.

“The Phoenix Office Market [Posted] A Healthy Q2,” the article is titled.

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“The Greater Phoenix office market posted the highest level of net absorption since the pandemic,” the article begins, referencing a 2022 report from the global real estate investment firm Colliers. The report even cites by name the area where the Hayden Business Center is located, the Scottsdale Airpark, as one of the top submarkets during Q2 of 2022 for “net absorption rate,” which hints at the fact that occupancy in the market area remained stable.

Scottsdale Airpark also saw “the largest decrease in vacancy during the quarter,” the report continues, having fallen by “2.8 percent,” further suggesting it held its demand. “The Phoenix office market is expected to remain stable,” the report says in its last paragraph, implying that it was and will continue to be a healthy market.

This description of the market conditions found in April of 2022 hardly evidence a $140,000 drop in the purchase price of the property that RealFaith Ministries absorbed from Trinity Church, which could mean that Driscoll, who signed as the buyer on the Affidavit of Value, gave his personal non-profit an ethically unjustifiable discounted rate.

Unless, of course, he bought it when it was highly overvalued, in which case he still saddled his congregants with the loss while allocating an insider-entity with the projected growth, exposing the church to foregone profit when it was sold for $1.35 million three years later.

Self-Dealing Between 501(C)(3)’s

While this kind of self-dealing may not sound controversial to us plebs, to the IRS this transaction could be a massive red flag with the potential to cost a non-profit its 501(C)(3) status and intermediate sanctions.

Regardless of market fluctuations, this is still an “insider transaction” because Mark Driscoll is the leader of the organization on either side. It’s a classic conflict of interest. Typically, these scenarios are regulated quite heavily, since the organizations are dealing with donations earmarked for public benefit.

Insider transactions need to be scrutinized by a board of disinterested observers, set in place to ensure the transaction is made at what the IRS calls an “arm’s-length” distance. This is to establish that the self-dealer isn’t simply mining their church’s coffers in order to transfer value to a project that benefits them at the church’s disadvantage.

Mark Driscoll’s History Is Marked By Financial Misconduct

Not long ago, Mark Driscoll, along with Trinity Church’s current secretary, Kerry Dodd, were listed as co-conspirators in a RICO case. The legal complaint accuses them of defrauding “thousands” of donors “through a pattern of racketeering activity, conducted or participated, directly or indirectly” through Mars Hill Church, Driscoll’s last church venture.

“Beginning in 2011, or earlier, and continuing through 2014, [Mark Driscoll] and his co-conspirators engaged in a continuing pattern of racketeering activity by soliciting, through the internet and the mail, contributions for designated purposes, and then fraudulently used a significant portion of those designated contributions for other, unauthorized purposes,” the complaint alleges, citing leaked internal communications and victim statements.

Spending around $200,000 of the church’s money to buy enough copies of Driscoll’s book from his publisher as a strategy to shove it onto the New York Times’ Best Seller List was said to be just one of those “unauthorized purposes.”

According to the religious news outlet, Sojourners, the case was dropped before a judge had the chance to consider it, but only because the plaintiffs lacked the funds to cover the cost of serving Driscoll with the complaint.

When Driscoll started Trinity Church in Scottsdale in 2016, he designed it like a good totalitarian and centralized power around himself, abdicating the standard of a “board of overseeing elders” that more reputable (he might say something like, “sissified”) houses of God utilize for checks and balances.

Driscoll’s RealFaith Ministries, on the other hand, does technically have a “board,” though as a supervisory body it looks to be about as legitimately disinterested as my dog is disinterested in a package of raw hotdogs.

According to the most recent public tax filings, it consists of Driscoll as president, his daughter, Ashley Chase, and his old pal Josh McPherson, a Washington pastor from Driscoll’s Mars Hill days and now a fellow traveler in the macho-Charismatic podcast-evangelist space. The so-called “CEO” of RealFaith Ministries is Landon Chase, Driscoll’s son-in-law, who’s baby-face carries the wry look of a man being held hostage to his own unbefitting handle-bar mustache as a way of gratifying his domineering father-in-law’s performative obsession with masculinity; but that last part is not important.

What’s important here is that there is a bevy of outside evidence that suggests Driscoll controls both organizations with an autocratic grip, indicating that there isn’t a single iota of business which doesn’t cross his path. If a large transaction occurs between his two entities, one can likely bet that Driscoll is there on both sides overseeing it.

An ex-congregant, Vince Manuel, who was a “Jr. Intern” at Trinity Church before he was ousted for kissing Driscoll’s daughter, wrote in his tell-all memoir, Kiss and Tell, that the other interns would often “brag about how Mark did not answer to anyone and how he could spend the church’s money however he wanted.” Driscoll once handed a check for over $2,000 dollars, written in Trinity Church’s name, to a member of the worship team to pay for his honeymoon. Manuele also says that Driscoll had him and his entire family followed by a 24/7 surveillance team after their fallout, which he paid for with church funds. This was fully corroborated by leaked text messages and the testimony of the security firm’s prior employee, Chad Freese.

These circumstances (among a catalogue of others) illustrate Driscoll’s laxity towards following regulations against private inurement. Such financial profligacy and a lack of board oversight casts a long shadow over the transaction we’re concerned with here.

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A “House of God” or “A Den of Thieves”?

By all appearances, Driscoll bought a property all cash with his church’s money, then sold it to his own non-profit for $140,000 less than market value just over a year later. In doing so, he knowingly allowed RealFaith Ministries to absorb a $140,000 instant equity gain to Trinity Church’s detriment. It bears repeating: without the approval of an objective oversight committee, which neither organization seems to have, this could be considered private inurement fraud.

When RealFaith Ministries sold the property in 2025, just three years after the transfer of value occurred, for $1.35 million dollars, the organization made a profit of over half a million dollars (minus fees, etc), which an aggressive non-profit lawyer might argue is “dislodged” profit over and above the initial $140,000 that was siphoned away from Trinity’s benefit during the initial transaction.

The Affidavit of Value regarding the 2022 transaction between Driscoll’s Trinity Church and his RealFaith Ministries brings another interesting angle to the story.

The signature of the seller is Brandon Andersen, who was a pastor at Trinity Church before allegedly being ousted during a tumultuous period. Mark Driscoll himself signed as the buyer, even though he was effectively the “buyer” the first time the property was sold to “him” through Trinity.

In Box 3b. of the affidavit, Maricopa County asks the question, “Are the buyer and seller related?” by which is meant, “Are the buyer and seller either family members or business entities?”

Mark Driscoll and Brandon Andersen had already worked together for years before 2022 when they filed the affidavit, so the fact that they checked the “No” box raises a number of questions.

One can’t help but to wonder if the two pastors knowingly lied about their relationship on a sworn affidavit. If so, why? What would they stand to gain by obscuring their relationship before the county?

This flies in the face of everything the IRS says about non-tax paying entities transacting between insiders.

“The standard to be applied in every case” of a transaction between two non-profits “is that of a taxpayer dealing at arm’s length with an uncontrolled taxpayer,” as paraphrased from the IRS website. This is because “if a controlled relationship between the parties exists (i.e. related party transaction), the result can be a transfer price that is not arm’s length.”

“Because identical transactions can rarely be located,” the IRS website continues, “whether a transaction produces an arm’s length result generally will be determined by reference to the results of comparable transactions under comparable circumstances.”

A Highly Comparable Transaction Under Highly Comparable Circumstances:

How convenient, then, that we can look to an affidavit dated March 3rd, 2022, just a month prior to when the C2 property’s value was transferred from Trinity Church to RealFaith Ministries, to find a comparable transaction within the exact same business center for an office space that nearly matches the C2 property — made again in Trinity Church’s name.

It appears Trinity Church purchased this property using a private loan. From a separate Deed of Trust, I found that the private lender is one “D.L. Dalton L.L.C,” which is incorporated to a Dan Duffus, an active real estate investor, owner of the Arizona real estate investment trust firm, SolTrust Capital, and one of Driscoll’s biggest financiers since the days of Mars Hill Church.

The unit purchased is known as Unit B4.

It’s within the exact same Hayden Business Park, with almost the same square footage (slightly smaller), and it cost $150,000 more than the Unit C2 that Trinity Church transferred to RealFaith just one month afterwards.

This “comparable transaction made under comparable circumstances” suggests that when Unit C2 was sold for $600,000, it could have fetched a higher price. Side by side, the $750,000 value of Unit B4 makes the $600,000 value of Unit C2 come across aberrant from the market.

Holding up the properties’ valuations from The Maricopa County Assessor’s Office side by side, though it only goes back to 2023, and the assessor typically lags behind real-time market appreciation value, we can still see that the valuations tend to match one another plus or minus about $30,000 around 2022, which doesn’t justify a $100,000 discount in a transfer of value between related entities.

It is also odd that the Unit C2 was purchased for $740,000 all cash in 2021, during the height of Covid’s market turmoil, when a similar property had apparently only just reached $750,000 by 2022.

Perhaps Trinity Church overpaid for the property in 2021 and transferred the value to RealFaith Ministries by the time it was more consistent with the market. Regardless, it would still mean that Driscoll created an all cash loss for his church and then transferred its potential away from the organization into his personal non-profit to realize the gain there instead of allowing the church the possibility of seeing its money again.

Still more odd, when it came time to sell these properties, the values were conspicuously similar: Unit B4 sold for $1.321 million in February of 2025, while Unit C2 sold for $1.35 million later that June. At this point in time, they saw a relatively small price variance of only $30,000. Indeed, Unit C2 which was valued far below B4 ended up going for the higher rate.

It strikes me as weird odd that a $1.32 million dollar unit would be let with a down payment of just $50,000 to “M&R RE LLC”. Incorporated to Mamoon and Reems Badwan. Why give them such a good deal? This alone smacks of a transaction between insiders, though we can’t be sure unless more information comes to light. It’s also interesting that even though this nondescript LLC put down only $50,000, and indicated on the affidavit that they applied for conventional financing, I cannot find that a Deed of Trust was ever granted by a bank for the loan balance. That document should exist in the recorder’s office. It does not.

These transactions have gotten virtually no news coverage, but they raise questions we should be demanding answers to, especially since both Trinity Church and RealFaith Ministries are led by a pastor infamous for his remissness in the face of financial transparency. While I’ve tried to restrain myself from making any definite statements, the question underlying everything is where the money went after the units were sold.

Grinning from the shadows is the fact that Driscoll has recently began the “Lives and Legacies Building Fund,” through which he hopes to raise $50 million dollars to renovate it into a behemoth of a church. I cringe to think of all the ways such an opaque “building fund” could enrich Driscoll at the cost of his donors. I’m willing to be completely wrong in my skepticism here, if only to make the point that we should be asking questions about each and every one of his public transactions.

(I reached out to Brandon Andersen and have yet to hear back.)

“Teamwork” was the theme at Tuesday night’s “State of The City Address” in Surprise, AZ.

“Here in Surprise, progress isn’t built by just one person, one department, or one organization,” said Mayor Kevin Sartor during his opening remarks. “It is built by many people, aligning around a shared vision of putting the work into building our city together. If you think about it, it’s a lot like a sports team. You need a strong roster, a clear gameplan.”

Sartor was dressed casually, like a dad at a soccer game; a loose-fitting baseball tee, denim jeans. He stood at the bottom of the stands in Surprise’s glimmering spring training baseball park, the beating heart of the city’s wholesome, all-American ethos.

In the distance behind the mayor, separated by 350 feet of center field, a scrim of agitated demonstrators could be seen shouting through megaphones and holding up picket signs. By my count, there was around eighty of them.

“No hate, no fear, no ICE detention here!” they shouted, abrading Sartor’s whole “We can do it with civic teamwork!” leitmotif with streaks of repression.

It was hard to miss the irony.

The mayor’s vision of future progress through cooperation palimpsest by what the protestors condemned as his non-cooperation in their measures to resist the ICE detention facility going up in their backyard.

“Right now, the mayor just seems hell bent on doing nothing,” said Brent Peak, the leader of Indivisible’s Northwest Valley chapter. He told me that out of four council meetings since the news broke on DHS’ purchase of the building, “there’s been no real discussion by the council” on the situation.

“They put it on the agenda item last time, but only two out of the seven had something to say about it, even though we know more of them are opposed to it because they’ve said so in other meetings,” said Peaks.

In an ostensibly earnest attempt to keep their roles non-partisan, Sartor and most of the Surprise city council members have held their cards close to their chest regarding the situation. For the demonstrators, though, this abdication of a clear position has only imbued the governing body with the stain of indecision.

“They’ve heard our voices,” said Natalie, one of the speakers at the event and the organizer behind a local group, Surprise Against Fear. “We’ve come to them with plans and with ideas. Thirty-eight legislators wrote a letter to the city of Surprise. It’s like a blueprint. And they are choosing not to make new policies.”

“Other city leaders across this country are taking real steps to put boundaries in place to protect their residents,” said Kayla Bishop during her protest speech. “Yet, it seems as though [Mayor Sartor] would rather just stand by idly to not ruffle any feathers than commit to protecting us. There are countless actions that cities and mayors actually are taking to fight back.”

Bishop cited the executive orders signed by Brandon Johnson and Jacob Frey, the Mayors of Chicago and Minneapolis respectively, which bar immigration officers from staging enforcement activities inside of city-owned properties. She also referenced the actions of city councils in both Denver and Seattle, who have approved legislation that curbs the power of federal immigration officers within their respective localities.

But during a conversation with KTAR’s Mike Broomfield in March, Sartor seemed to downplay strategies like these by saying, “I know there’s cities that have done things, whether that’s ordinances or letters of opposition, but a lot of those are in court. So, we don’t know if those are even going to hold up.”

As far as ordinances go, when certain tactics have failed it’s mostly been due to the fact that they were put forward in pro-ICE enforcement areas where conservative legislators outnumber liberal ones.

Conversely, many strategies have held up to court proceedings when enacted in states that harbor broad resistance to the Trump administration’s overreach. As is it stands, Arizona is one of those states. Phoenix has succeeded in putting certain precautions into place, like banishing ICE from city-owned property. This has been framed as simply embracing the city’s right to control its own jurisdiction.

Sartor has not commented on this directly.

Many local victories have relied on utilizing the “the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine,” which dictates that officials on the state or local level are not obligated to enforce federal operations.

What about a simple letter of opposition?

In the same conversation with Mike Broomfield, Mike Sartor said that he “couldn’t anticipate” writing even one letter of opposition, which undermines his “non-partisan” stance more than he realizes. Given this comment, it’s hard not to see Sartor’s inaction as complicity.

He has, however, presented a public concern for “transparency,” which is about as far as he’s gone. It was in the name of “transparency” that the mayor and the city council visited Washington in March to, in Sartor’s words, “obtain answers and protect our community.”

Upon his return, he gave a speech unpacking a catalogue of promises, featuring a potential Intergovernmental Service Agreement that included things like ICE’s commitment to NEPA compliance (which matters less now that NEPA regulations have been gutted by the Trump administration) and a cost recovery mechanism of $300,000 as a recuperation mechanism for the loss of tax revenue the facility will foreseeably cause. However, no enforceable agreement from DHS has been signed, suffusing the whole thing with the fragile standard of a “promise” made by a government most distinguished by accusations of flagrant corruption.

Council-members Johnny V. melton and Chris Judd are really the only two members of the body who have broken from the humorless mold of the “politician” to express their forthright opinions about the facility.

“I have a lot of concerns about these plans,” said Council-member Judd at the last city council meeting. “First and foremost is the fact that they wouldn’t put anything in writing.”

Council-member Judd’s most significant concern was about water use. A full build-out for a facility estimated to house 1,500 beds is estimated to use almost 270,000 gallons of water per day. That’s a lot of water for a desert city caught in a perpetual drought. (The average household uses 146 gallons per day, for reference).

Judd tentatively brought up a potential change in zoning laws targeting the facility’s proposed water usage. It’s unclear as to whether or not he conveyed this thought as a form of resistance. He received a barrage of applause from the audience as if it was, but he quickly silenced it. “Stop,” he said. “I’m not here for that.” A change in zoning laws could slow the build and put some authority back into the hands of the city council, though federal power outstrips local zoning laws based on the U.S. Supremacy clause.

Lisa Everett, who was in attendance at “The State of The City” address, thinks this would be an “excellent strategy.” She is the GOP district chair for Surprise’s LD29. Even as a Republican, she says she is “strongly against the ICE facility.”

“However, I also support the efforts of the Council and Mayor,” she continued. “As someone who has been in politics for decades, I understand situations like this are delicate and take time. I as everyone else want instant results but that is simply not reality.”

It’s been hard for me to come by any actual opposition to the facility in Surprise; but when I asked Everett if she knew many people who supported it, she said she knows “hundreds” of them.

“Many people on both sides of the isle want folks who are here illegally out of our country. I do my best to change their mind but they do have a point, our laws do not permit them to be here.”

Mayor Sartor once theorized publicly that the constituents he talks to are segmented into “50% for, 20% against and the rest don’t care.”

I asked Brent Peaks what he thought about these numbers. He said, “Hundreds of residents have shown up to protest repeatedly over months with almost no counter-presence. That’s not a vocal minority. That’s a community that keeps showing up because they’re genuinely alarmed.”

It remains to be seen whether Sartor has the political agility to rise to the considerably difficult challenge this ICE facility poses; not just to the city, but to his political career as well. In his words, a city needs a “strong roster and a clear game plan,” but any team also needs a strong leader who can create such a game plan by making strong demands and steadfast decisions, even if it means the possibility of striking out. Right now, it’s hard to tell if Sartor is even on the field.

Things don’t need to make sense to activate people’s decisions. The glowing briefcase in the movie Pulp Fiction is a good example of this. When opened, the brief case emits a glowing, golden light. Though we never receive an answer as to what it actually contains. Still, what’s hidden from us causes us to wonder and develop certain ideas regarding the briefcase’s existence. That sense of wonder is parleyed into us enjoying the rest of the film. By the film’s end, we never find out what’s in the brief case, and we leave the screening still wondering. (I still wonder about it to this day.) Never once do we assume that there’s no meaning at all pertaining to what’s in the briefcase. We have our suspicions, but the only thing we can all be sure of is that there is some tangible, discernible object in that briefcase.

However, it’s not what’s in the briefcase that grabs us and animates us, it’s the indeterminacy itself.

Let’s translate this to political authority: Donald Trump’s words don’t need to be coherent to charge up his followers, nor did George W. Bush’s. Kid Rock’s songs don’t need to make sense to be listened to. There’s a certain indeterminacy within the words of these figures that we assume will make sense underneath the edifice of gibberish. One sees their stature in the public eye, so one assumes there must be an answer behind the curtain. This moves us to buy their books; their other albums; to listen to their other speeches; to join their fan clubs; to go to their rallies; to talk about them with our friends who also wonder about them. The indeterminacy within their language creates the assumption that they know something we don’t, which is the mystique underlying their authority.

The lacking of sense which emanates from authority figures can often be exactly that which absorbs people into the gravitational pull of their power.

We, for the most part, come to see authority as that which can offer us a shot at finding place in the world. This is because we are born into a world where symbolic rituals, laws, and titles are meted out to us even before our birth at the behest of figures who appear to inhabit the role of symbolic authority (rockstars, the president, kings and queens, etc.).

By being inducted into this world, we are inducted into the assumption that authority knows what it is doing. It seems, even, that we owe our very survival to authority’s knowingness. The desire of authority, if we could just figure out what its signaling to us, seems like a compass vital to the gratification of our desires.

Our desire is oriented in relation to authority’s desire in such a way so as to make it seem that, if we could only thread the profusion of authority’s indeterminate signaling through the needle of our own understanding, we can conquer the perpetually re-lost grasp over what it is that we actually are within the milieu of our social context. In other words, we hope to find self-authorization within the gaze of social authority. Our desire for self-authorization under the scope of authority’s desire has the effect of turning non-sensible contradictions into lustrous mysteries worthy of interrogation.

This brings us to “Bawitdaba,” a consummate icon for the authority of indeterminacy.

What does “Bawitdaba” actually mean? Who are the “midnight glancers” and what are “gander freaks?” And, for the love of God, what makes “chicks with beepers” so damn “All-American?” The questions are the same for those who despise Kid Rock as they are for those who love him.

The difference between how Kid Rock as the purveyor of these enigmas mobilizes the MAGA universe versus how he annoys just about everybody outside of it is found by asking a question: Where do Kid Rock’s fans locate themselves in relation to the ostensible desire found in Kid Rock’s lyrical messaging as a MAGA authority?

We should take into account that the song was released in 1998, long before the political species of MAGA or Trump himself invaded the environment of American Democracy. Back then, the song was still just a “bit of inscrutable doggerel” and “pure confection” (to use Paul Simon’s description of his own song, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”), as many rock and roll songs are. But certain connections were still made between the song’s confusing lyrics and the listener which made the song a source for self-investment and fantasy creation, a way of identifying with “the Detroit Cowboy.”

A bit of anecdotal evidence:

My step-mom, for example, who took me to see Kid Rock when I was just nine years old, was incredibly inspired by “Bawitdaba” when it came out. She was a painter and a long-time adopter of the counter-cultural values and norms found in punk rock and grunge (genres to which Kid Rock was obliquely related long, long ago), even singing for a time in her own band. She was very smart, an avid reader and deep thinker, but also a semi-functional alcoholic and drug addict.

For her, the lyrics of “Bawitdaba” were representative of the notion that by embracing an alternative lifestyle one could break through the status-quo which so often threw people into the bin of “otherness” as a sort of societal procedure for spatial organization. For her, some people learned how to live life, not in spite of their drinking, partying, sex addictions, etc., but for those things as modes of artistic inspiration and even as expression. Kid Rock, with his song “Bawitdaba,” authorized this philosophy by writing a highly successful ode to “the crackheads,” the “shots of jack and the caps of meth,” and “his hoods of the world” who were oh so “misunderstood.”

I remember her saying how much she loved that Kid Rock was raised in a trailer park on the eight mile, close to where Eminem made it, where she herself experienced the touristic thrill of living for a while. Kid Rock seemed to be saying something to her with “Bawitdaba,” and it ultimately inspired her because if he made it this way, by using drugs, alcohol, rebelliousness and acting out as inspiration for musical and artistic creation, then she could do the same as an artist.

I learned only later that it’s not actually true that Kid Rock was raised in a trailer park, despite his personifying an arguably prejudicial stereotype of somebody who was. He was raised on something like a six acre farm with a beautiful apple orchard and a nice family. That’s not to say that he couldn’t still speak to counter-cultural values, but it does show how little my step-mother really knew about the person and the song she was interpreting; how we tend to invest parts of ourselves into the voids that enigmatic signifiers open up, using this space as a tool for making sense of our own symptoms as a mode of resistance to them. In my step-mom’s case, as I would argue, she used Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” as proof that she could go on drinking and smoking, and that it somehow contributed to her art. At this point, we might say that Kid Rock, as one who’d “made it,” was an authoritative representative of the rock and roll big Other.

But when Kid Rock became a star of MAGA, “Bawitdaba” came retroactively to hold political value, even decades after it was released. While some people shrug the song off as lazy, artless, and idiotic, there are other people who have come to identify with the song based on the potential it holds as a source of authorization from within the MAGA universe. Put differently, for those of whom the song captures ideologically, it does so because encrypted into the layers of meaninglessness are answers in regard to becoming a true MAGA warrior.

It’s as though the song was just hanging there, dormant in the web of culturally available meaning, waiting to be reactivated by the syntax of the MAGA movement’s social vocabulary. After MAGA, “Bawitdaba” no longer holds for certain people counter-cultural value, but rather it tells the story of what it means to be an “American” within the MAGA universe.

Embracing a rabid anti-intellectualism, for example, can be heard in Kid Rock’s lyrics: “You can look for answers / but that ain’t fun / Now get in the pit and try to love someone.”

While every lyric in Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” could arguably be considered a demand, this one comes closest to an explicit demand: “Get in the pit and try to love someone.”

The MAGA man, let’s say, who sees pictures of Kid Rock shaking hands with Donald Trump, signaling Mr. Rock’s success as MAGA’s artistic authority, might wonder about what they can glean from the music to put themselves in a higher position. What does it mean that we have to love somebody from a pit? Perhaps he means a mosh-pit, but will I really find love from a mosh-pit? Aren’t mosh-pits, especially Kid Rock’s mosh-pits, generally filled with angsty men with bald heads and goatees? Maybe he means I should get into the pit and love my Kid Rock brethren in a sort of fraternal way? Or maybe he means fraternal violence can serve as a chaotic expression of love? Or maybe by “pit” he just means the world, as in “the world is a pit of chaos,” a masculine, every man for themselves, the strongest survive, the bloodiest gets the girl, chaos?

It could mean all of these things or none of them, and it’s this excess scrap of desire within the demand to “get into the pit and try to love someone” that makes the messaging of Kid Rock impossible to penetrate, which is exactly the point.

Desire, as that which can only be articulated through the open-ended system of language, maintains futility when it comes to complete translation. Desire has no final articulation because it always transcends itself into a desire for something else. This is the central component within the authority of indeterminacy, the characteristic endlessness of desire — a desire to know, to understand, to achieve, to own new things, etc. — always becomes a desire for something else.

But this is also part of what makes the attempts at interpreting authority’s desire so captivating. It’s an endlessly meaningless mystery, the investigation of which seems to have some validity simply because it’s emanating from a figure of authority who’s “made it” in a MAGA circle the way supporters of MAGA could only ever dream of.

This is why the concept of some final translation of authority’s enigmatic messages are always mythical. Nobody can say what it means to “get into the pit and try to love someone.” We are always left asking, “You’re telling me this, Mr. Rock, but what do you really mean?”

The more we search through the lyrics to gain some understanding of what Kid Rock wants from us, we are faced with only more demands that veer us off into the realm of trying and failing to interpret the desirous underbelly of those demands. Those that willingly follow this mode of interrogation have in a way already admitted to themselves that this figure has something to offer. The indeterminacy of the messaging has itself captivated them, or to use the Althusserean term, “interpellated” them. It’s become a signifier “of” something, as well as one “to” somebody. They’ve connected to it on a psychic level which transcends the catchiness of the music itself.

They might think, “There’s some meaning here, I just can’t quite put my finger on it,” when in reality that meaning is always already deferred. It’s come to serve as what Gershom Scholem called “revelatory nothingness,” the same feature that keeps Joseph K. bouncing around in the gravitational pull of authority within Kafka’s novel, The Trial. The most prominently recurring feature of this novel is that authority shows itself as constantly offering tidbits of information that ostensibly validate the main character’s next move, but never enough to bring him to some final expression of meaning.

Scholem writes:

“You ask me what I understand by the ‘nothingness of revelation’? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity without meaning. A state in which the wealth of the meaning is lost and the appearing, as if reduced to a zero point of its own content, nevertheless does not disappear (and the revelation is something appearing), there its nothingness emerges.”1

In the same way that Joseph K. from The Trial embraces various sexual encounters with the women he meets who he interprets in some way to be a part of the Law, people can connect libidinally to the “nothingness of revelation” they find in a song like “Bawitdaba” as an agent of the MAGA Law.

The people for whom “Bawitdaba” holds some mysterious validity are the same ones who’ve taken part in rustling up a fantasy response to the unanswerability of enigmatic messages. These are the people for whom Kid Rock’s lyrics are something akin to a “lifestyle” choice. They’ve answered the unanswerable, and they did it by unconsciously submitting these questions to the “symptomatic agency” of the unconscious: the formations which arise from a traumatic, incessant encounter with one’s need to question one’s own “place and authorization within a meaningful order.”2

There is really no answer to what “Bawitdaba” actually means. It’s wholly meaningless. Anybody who wants to answer would have to stitch something together for themselves:

“Bawitdaba is a rock and roll anthem because it promotes a lifestyle of chaos as an expression of American liberty! It’s a response to the boring, overly-strict powers that be! Chaos can be the weapon of American liberty, and so we should act chaotically in order to destroy the system!”

This is a fantasy solution, and it claims for Kid Rock, as a representative of the MAGA big Other, a sensible cohesion that he simply does not actually offer.3

Kid Rock’s demands are for MAGA folks like a guidebook to being an American, but only because there is assumed to be sense under the nonsense. The listener fills out the missing links in Kid Rock’s contradictory messages as a harbinger for the MAGA big Other’s desire, making these things almost prescriptive. Kid Rock becomes something akin to a political philosopher; this as opposed to just being an idiot who helped to transform ignorance into a revolutionary act, as Zizek says about Trump. The listener has taken from the nonsensicality of Kid Rock’s lyrics a fantasy by which they can live their lives.

Those who find only gaps in his poetic license reject him, while others are mysteriously drawn into covering over those gaps with fantasy formations that guide their actions, life choices, and political beliefs. Suddenly, Kid Rock’s anthems for “the questions that don’t have any answers/The midnight glancers and the topless dancers/The gander freaks … The G’s with the 40’s and the chicks with beepers,” includes the fan themselves. Not so much because they’ve been specified in the above terms, but because they’ve reconfigured their own self-idealizations, their own “imagos,” in such a way so as to make the song fit the way they enjoy the symptom of their own inner-strangeness as if it were an identifiable trait.

“Le client n’a jamais tort!” — “The customer is never wrong!” — is a phrase sometimes credited to Cesar Ritz, the Swiss hotelier who is responsible for establishing the opulent Ritz Hotels in Paris and London in the early 1900’s, but the actual origins of the phrase remain suspended in debate. Some swear by Marshall Fields, the Chicago department store operator who mentioned the idiom as a bit of sage business advice in a Boston Globe article from 1905; others have attributed “the customer is always right” to an English pioneer of service standards, Harry Selfridge, who “revolutionized” retail shopping by turning department stores into orgies of chromatic excess.

César Ritz is perhaps the most celebrated of the three, however; and he’s the one that draws my ire, the reason I’m writing this now, because as a minimum wage service-worker I am forced to bear the brunt of his “The customer is always right!” philosophy every day. While the philosophy itself is celebrated by rich restauranteurs and hospitality managers as “game-changing,” it’s not talked about enough from the perspective of the worker, for whom it’s a form of structural violence!

In German, the phrase often used is, “der Kunde ist König,” meaning “the customer is king.” In Japan the common phrase is, “okyakusama wa kamisama desu” or “the customer is a god.” It’s no wonder the food and hospitality sector has one of the highest rates of both substance abuse and suicide.

As a server, not a day goes by where I don’t wish Mr. Ritz had taken a tumble down the long, spiraling staircase of the Parisian Ritz Hotel and bit through his tongue before he brought this thought into existence. In weaving together this buyer’s fantasy of omnipotence, César Ritz has inadvertently molded the most colossal army of entitled brats the world has ever seen: “The American Consumer.”

The phrase itself is an idiomatic reflection of how the dining room floor of any chain restaurant is replete with ideological fantasy. For the restaurant and hospitality industry to work at all it must be brimming with fantasy because it is the most inutile industry within the entirety of the capitalist system. How would restaurant chains be able to sell their crappy food and alcohol for such high prices if they weren’t formulating some ideological excess to create an excess profit?1

People need to eat, sure. But they don’t need to go out to eat. That’s something we desire. If a comet the size of, say, Maine, came hurling through the atmosphere and caused a nationwide blackout, I feel safe in assuming that the last thing we’d rush to rescue for the good of society would be the TGI Friday’s down the street.

The cave days, now those were the days. Nothing was disposable. They still glimmer like a reflective bit of scrap from the bottom of the primordial brine pool. We used to watch like rabid dogs as the chief of our Homo Erectus tribe caught a tiny rabbit in his hand and helicopter-whipped it around by its neck until the last vital energies dislodged from its quivering body, it’s soul floating off into the ether on the wings of a muffled snap.

"Arughhh! Arghhh! Ugh!,” our ancient kin would clamor out, pawing at his arms in the throws of innominate hunger pangs.

He would hold the rabbit upside down and peel the furry skin from its legs and down across the rest of its body with nothing but his naked, deft fingers. And he would do this it calmly as the modern person peels their tube socks over their ankles each night before bed. Homo Erectus didn’t even lay the rabbit over a fire. He would probably just suck frantically at the raw bones until they sparkled white. It wasn’t fancy, but it was all we needed. Life was about pure utility.

Then, at the pounding of some primordial gavel, the world of human experience cleaved itself into a disjunction between “the raw” and “the cooked,” to use Claude Levi-Strauss’ binary, or between “nature” and “culture,” to use another. “Homo Erectus” transmogrified into the powerful and articulate: “Homo Sapien!” Now, with a zillion years of evolution under our belts, the magic of capital has so fused itself to culture that the two have become indissociable.

Marketing departments have mastered the origami art of folding a strategic conflation between “need” and “excess” into a deep fried taco. The effect is that it feels only natural to call Taco Tuesday a “tradition,” like a Sunday morning church service or a blood sacrifice. John Winthrop would have strung us up by our swollen, diabetic toes. With our divinely bestowed powers of articulation all we did was go prancing over the boundary from nature into culture caviling to community councils about how we need a new Burger King.

“The customer is always right,” as a slogan, positions us to shed more light on this conflation between need and excess than one might at first realize. The philosopher Todd McGowan theorizes about how the most fundamental aspects of human subjectivity, our status as beings alienated from our own animality by language, splays us wide open to the machinations of capital like a trap spread out for the Grizzly’s benighted foot. “The customer is always right” drills down on this aspect of human subjectivity in the way that all slogans aimed at customer experience do: by aiding and abetting a certain (mis)perception of social reality.

Humans are animals who’ve develop the capacity to signify meaning through words, gestures, and images, or more simply referred to as “signification.” However, the point at which we developed this ability is the same point at which we were alienated from any wholly animalistic way of relating to the world around us.

While our terrestrial, earthen bodies are still planted in nature, our capacity for meaning-making is contrary to nature, and thus it constitutes a certain removal from nature. This departure from nature is precisely what opens us up to gobbling down useless ideological excesses.

“The customer is always right!” is one of these ideological excesses.

The customer is always… an alien! (A Short Detour Through Alienation):

When we become speaking beings our animal needs undergo a mediation via socially constructed signifiers. This is important because it opens up the space for us to even become an abstraction like “ the customer,” “consumers,” or the more degrading “human capital,” instead of just creatures of nature.

Signifiers, being that they are socially constructed, cannot represent the world of objects to which they signify in a one-to-one way. They aren’t of the world of objects, but of the conceptual mind. So all signifiers really do is make present more signifiers. The most common pedagogical example is a dictionary: when you open a dictionary to a certain word, what does it reveal to you but more words? Words paint a picture in the mind based on a differential constellation of other words. This is why poets can describe love for a person in an infinite number of ways, and yet not in some terminally “precise” way.

Think about when you go to a restaurant and see “pork” on the menu. There is nothing “piggish” or “porkish” about the word “pork.” “Pork” is an arbitrary sign for the meat that comes from a pig. We know what “pork” means, not because it’s pinned to the thing in the world in some exact, material or organic way, but because it conjures up the unconscious machinery of associations that makes “pork” reveal itself to our mind’s eye. Words like “cook,” “barbecue,” “salt,” “four-legged,” and “pig” serve to define “pork” for us in the absence of the word.

“The value of any sign (and of signifiers and signifieds) depends not on the sign itself but on reciprocal relations with other signs within the system as a whole.”2

All of this happens purely at the psychic level, having nothing to do with our material relation to the world except for the fact that it’s how we mediate our relation to the world. In the end, symbolic mediation is like a screen that alienates us from our animality by subsuming our bodily engraftment to the world into the boundless abstractions of signification. Signification makes it so that we occupy a space that is simultaneously in the world and detached from it.

Capitalism, as the ideological construct that’s produced the dreadful advent of the “chain restaurant,” infiltrates this screen of signifactory mediation by fusing the commodity to its own contrivances using symbolism, semantics, and interpretation. The system thrives on constantly inundating us with these symbolic formulas. It does so in a way that is so ubiquitous that it comes to shape our perception of social reality. When we see “pork” we don’t just see a hunk of lean meat for our own sustenance, but other, more conceptual things, like slogans: “Finger lickin’ good!” or “so good it will make you slap your momma!” (to quote the southern barbecue place down the street from my house). This is the direct effect of our being alienated into the world of language.

In a capitalist system, we come to associate these kinds of things with “pork” more-so than we do the actual animal. In fact, by taking our mind away from the image of the cute little pink piggy, these contrivances likely help to sell more pork by displacing the guilt. Ultimately, however, the symbolic elements of the capitalist system come to give the form of excess to how we process our need to eat.

Physical needs like hunger are channelled through the signifier. And when needs are thrust into the realm of signification, they become subject to the constant displacement of language — the metonymy of desire.3 The capitalist system’s extravaganza of songs and slogans, superimposed as they seemingly always are over slick bodies and glittering lips, come to shape the reality of how we process a need as atavistic as hunger.

When the human being is hungry, it’s not a cut and dry process. We’re always hungry for something (some signifier). And, as we’ve already pointed out, signifiers only lead to more signifiers. This is how need folds into the circuity of our endless desire. Capitalists profit from the endlessness of desire by working to make us ignorant to its endlessness with well-produced promises of gratification.

“There is a gap between the word and what it signifies,” Todd McGowan explains in Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, “between the name and the idea of the object or action, and no amount of precision can ever fill this lacunae. Capitalism, in contrast to signification, relies on the belief that the proper commodity will eliminate this absence and produce an enduring presence. But this presence never actually comes about within the capitalist economy. Capitalism presents itself as structured differently than signification, but it leads to the same failures that arrive with the signifier.”4

The “failures of the signifier” McGowan is talking about are why I find myself trapped in the perpetual hell of thoughts like, “I’m craving something, but I don’t know what…” I spend multiple hours scrolling through Yelp! reviews and digital menus on Google to find one food place after another at which to eat.

Panda Express might finally capture my desire by offering a plate that they promise “will taste good and feel good!” In other words, it claims to offer a meal in its perfect form: one that is both tasty and healthy. The ultimate satisfaction!

The reality, however, shows me something different than the image Panda Express created: I pick up my food to find it was closed while hot, so the steam softened the broccoli into a mush. I also find that it doesn’t necessarily “taste good” as advertised because in order for it to “feel good” it must necessarily come with a grievous paucity of sauce and salt. It’s mostly bland veggies and unseasoned, brown rice. Plus, due to the fact that I was served by a trainee, the portion size was much larger than advertised.

But still I shoved the whole plate down my mouth like Scooby-Doo unlocking his jaw to swallow an entire chocolate cake — “Ruh-Roh!” — so the enormous amount of calories made me “feel” like a human slug. Moreover, between the choice of the healthier white meat and the less healthy and much cheaper dark meat chicken, Panda Express, like a good capitalist wanting to buy cheap and sell dear, uses only frozen, ultra-processed and fatty dark meat.

Turns out the whole “it tastes good and feels good” thing was tethered to a big, fat asterisk detailing various caveats in small print at the bottom of the advertisement. The same symbolic premium I paid for something that “tastes good and feels good,” I pay for “the customer is always right!” — I tentatively call it the “omnipotence premium.”

The Omnipotence Premium

“The omnipotence premium” is the capitalist’s promise that our every desire will be affirmed and satisfied if we spend our money at the place which asserts the illusion that we are the king of menu permutations, or the queen of choice over 21 flavors and a bevy of “mix-ins” for our ice cream cone. We are paying a premium to feel as though our hard-earned money entitles us to “having it our way” no matter what anybody says. We are paying to inhabit the illusion of control over capital, which in reality has us in its grip. We are always right, no matter what we desire. So says the Capitalist. (But only if we have the cash to pay for it.)

In reality, it’s a modicum of absence that charts one’s maneuvering between commodities, because the presence of a totally fulfilling commodity is impossible to name. Due to our alienated state via signification’s endless lexical displacement, we are creatures for whom naming our desire is always a lost cause. Furthermore, since we are objects for ourselves with the ability to comprehend our own state of perpetual becoming, we are alienated on the side of subjectivity because we live in a perpetual state of non self-coincidence.

So not only do the objects of our desire always transcend themselves via the signifier, but there is also always a remainder (an absence) in the gratified desire we feel for every object we purchase because our own “thrownness” into a temporized social reality mandates an ever-changing interpretation of our own desire. There is always a minimal difference (a lack) between what we think we are buying and what we actually buy, which is instilled into it through the inherent excessiveness of the symbolic and via our place in an ever-forward sequence through time.

Something or other is always left out of everything we buy because we can’t obtain the symbolic excess we’re after in the object we’re chasing. Such an excess doesn’t exist, only a lack of it does. This assures that we will have to buy another thing. Capitalism formulates itself in relation to this excessiveness by serving up an excess of useless things, while at the same time falsely promising satisfaction.

As it turns out, the customer is never exactly “right” in what they want, because every symbolically mediated object transcends itself when our desire spills over it into some newly drawn signifier. The only thing I can truly say that I know for certain about myself is not that I was “right” in my choice of consumption, but that I am always already lacking something in regard to my choice.

The Customer Is Always Lacking:

A man walked into my restaurant “hungry as a horse!”

I told him, “Well, then, my good sir, what you’re going to want is The Monstrosity Burger. It’s two grilled cheeses made up of pepper jack and cheddar cheese on rye toast, used themselves as buns that sandwich a double-patty burger with bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and mustard. It’s sure to make you grow big and strong. Nobody has ever finished one entirely.”

“Yes!,” he said, “I accept your challenge. I’m as hungry as a horse and I want to test my skill on The Monstrosity Burger! I’ll have that.”

The Monstrosity Burger wasn’t just a burger, but a challenge. It became an object of desire in that moment because it was more than a burger. It was a way of defining oneself via its completion.

Americans are odd this way. We define success, sometimes, by being able to eat more than anybody else. By trying the burger, the man clearly wanted to satisfy something beyond his hunger. One thing is for sure: he remained wholly unsatisfied because he failed to finish the entire Monstrosity Burger, thus pushing the idea of its gratifying completion out to another date.

Every object of desire is in a way already a lost object disguised in the husk of what we thought we wanted. Our desire is always a desire for more than that which is in the object in and of itself. One object of desire inevitably underwhelms us and leads to an infinite chain of newly lost objects that come after it. We are never fully satisfied. With this in mind, it’s more logical to say that “the customer is always wrong.” What one “wants” only amounts to knowing that “want” itself is at its core a feeling of inexorability.

It’s more profitable for the capitalist to use the framing of “the customer is always right” because it implies affirmation, plentitude, and presence. “Whatever it is that you desire, you’re always right!” But the projection of affirmation and plentitude in the statement screens the more important term: “always,” which denotes the presence of inexorable lack at its core.

“Always,” here, implies an infinite regression in that the customer never stops wanting. It’s only from this angle that we can start to see the greed in César Ritz’s customer service philosophy. It gives the consumer’s desire a face of plentitude that obfuscates the fact that their desire always leads to a kind of failure, a cycle that implies a feeling of lack and then a subsequent resurgence of their desire. This is the cycle of enjoyment.

For Freud, “pleasure” is distinct from “enjoyment.” Pleasure is the reduction of excitations to reach an equilibrium. The pleasure principle, then, is to seek pleasure as much as is needed in order to find this equilibrium. This doesn’t, however, take into account the symbolic nature of being. If done so might, we might do better describing the pleasure principle in Lacanian terms: the pleasure principle is achieved by bouncing from one signifier to another until “the whole function of the psychic apparatus” has felt tensions sink to “as low a level as possible.”5 But this doesn’t answer the question pertaining as to why people almost universally tend to create obstacles towards such an equilibrium. Simply put: we enjoy a challenge, like the way that man “enjoyed” The Monstrosity Burger.

Enjoyment, in contradistinction to pleasure, is the rising of excitations or tensions, without which one could never garner pleasure. To elaborate on this idea, Freud used a joke about the man who wouldn’t stop hitting himself on the head with a hammer: “Why don’t you stop hitting yourself on the head with a hammer,” said the man who approached the scene. The man with the hammer replied, “Because it feels so good when I stop.” We gather an odd sense of enjoyment from causing some sort of pain or obstacle to our own pleasure.

What we don’t realize is that what we’re enjoying in the consumerism process is not the consumption itself, but the circularity that comes in chasing the objects of desire within our consumption. We’re enjoy the lack we find in the object of consumption and the resurgence of desire for a new object. It’s this lack that we’re ultimately chasing, not the “right” object, experience, or food.

In her book, The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupančič details how this lack itself is turned into its own sort of object when the human being undergoes alienation by entering into a world of language.

She says that the world of language itself has a “miraculous power … to transform the Nothing itself into something, to transform the lack itself into an object. Instead of the lack of an object itself becoming an object, the lack exists solely in the form of the inherent difference of an object, that is to say, in the form of the object not fully coinciding with itself.”6

What we’re enjoying is the non-coincidence of the object with itself because it pushes us to venture on in finding yet another object, and with every new venture we find new pleasures. This cycle raises the excitations that our consumption feeds off of by exposing us to a constant failure in finding ultimate satisfaction. This failure is enjoyable the way the obstacles of a video game are enjoyable before the pleasure of winning.

If the capitalist were to define “the customer” as a type of species, its most fundamental trait would be the fact that it has no clue about what it wants. It simply sustains itself on the enjoyable nature of wanting. This is profitable for the Capitalist, who masters the art of telling us what we want.

That’s why Steve Jobs types are always saying that the best capitalists are the one’s who “give the customer something they didn’t know they needed,” which translates to, “The best capitalist is the one who is able to convince people they want things they don’t need.” They do this by creating some sublime illusion of value, what Todd McGowan has called “the sublimity of excess,” where the imagined, useless quality of the commodity that the customer is buying is more valuable than the physical object itself.

This useless excess is what drives profit. Profit is money made from selling what is more than the commodity itself: an image, an idea, some symbolic investiture, something which pushes the customer to pay more for a thing than its actually worth, like the name “Apple” over the item made as cheaply as possibly in a sweatshop. The customer is paying for the sublime object of excess, not the thing itself.7

Fuerebach was on to this long before anybody else when he wrote in 1841, “The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence; this change, in as­ much as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihi­lation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”8

From “Buyer Beware!” to “The Customer is Always Right!” — A History Marked by Fetishistic Disavowal:

César Ritzs’ framing of the consumer as the omnipotent buyer, a “king” or a “god” who’s every desire should be affirmed as correct, is part of the excess illusion that the restaurant commodifies as value. Today, a whole industry of “customer experience strategy” has sprouted up to support this illusion.

McDonald’s, for example, has just removed the famous happy meal smile on their packaging and replaced it with a blank box, inside of which are crayons meant for a child to draw how they feel on the package. This new element is meant to promote the idea that “it’s okay to not feel happy all the time,” says McDonald’s.9

This is a great customer experience strategy to get children emotionally invested in a mega-corporation whose food will end up giving them cancer. In other words, it’s a wonderful way to keep the parents of these children from holding their guard up to the mega-corporation’s mischievousness machinations. By creating a marketing scheme which invests these parents into the more profitable idea of good mental health, they displace the fact that the content of McDonald’s food is designed to make their children unhealthy and addicted to sodium.

Before the dominance of “the customer is always right,” in the late 1800’s, the prevailing custom was for the customer to operate under the law of “caveat emptor,” which means “buyer beware!”

In the standard trading of goods via capital, the seller always has more information than the buyer. The seller knows how much they paid for the goods, the goods’ origins, and the legitimacy of the advertised quality. All of this knowledge is customarily dissimulated in the trade process. The seller, if s/he wants to buy cheap and sell dear, like McDonald’s does with its bargain-basement devil’s meat, must hold their cards close to their chest and point in the opposite direction.

The “caveat emptor” era customer had no recourse save for a flimsy reliance on their own intuition for the seller’s apparent honesty of character. And since we live in an economic lineage between Adam Smith, Milton Freedmen and donald trump (join me in never capitalizing his name as a form of protest), where self-interest is the driving force of the economy as opposed to the virtue of community building, the saying was “Caveat Emptor! Buyer beware!” because the assumption is that somebody is always trying to screw you out of your money in one way or another.

What’s so brilliant about “The Customer is always right” is that it has ultimately chloroformed “Caveat Emptor” and left it to die in some rotten ditch. It’s, of course, still true today, perhaps more today than ever, that the buyer should beware; and yet an odd obfuscation has occurred with “the customer is always right” that makes them more unaware than ever.

It was eventually realized that a more reliable profit stream could be created by settling customer complaints at “face value,” reinforcing a facade of trust between buyer and seller. We call it a “facade” because the trust was not necessarily forged in the name of doing the right thing, but because customer trust drives business success and longevity by creating the much sought after “lifetime customer.”

In other words, it’s a trust forged in the profit margin, which is to say it’s not “trust” at all, but a sales tactic. Moreover, it’s engendered that feeling of entitlement we’ve been talking about, where the customer is wholly entitled to obtaining their every desire as though they were a kingly body inhabited by real sovereign power.

Amazon entitles me to buying items so quickly and cheaply, and which are so far removed from the sweat shop where exploited laborers first created them, that it really does feel like my thumb is the digit of some omnipotent body. When that smiling box shows up at my door, I get the sense that I made something happen in the world. By the sheer force of my desire, I made wheels turn and bodies labor.

So dazzled by this “experience” of kingly consumership, the customer is more easily able to disavow the bad faith motives of the capitalist with the transaction: buying dirt cheap and selling extremely dear, the waste and pollution, the political upheaval brought on by cheapening wages, furthering wage and class disparities, and the fact that subsistence wages are a leading driver of suicide in adults.

The onus is not on the buyer to beware, but on the seller to dawn a mask of humanity that insulates the customer from the corrosivity of capital. Thinking of the customer experience at the forefront of a business isn’t a sunken cost, but a significant driver of revenue, a fact revealed by the growth of a whole industry of customer experience strategic planning.

Complex calculations now articulate with precision just how much and what type of “personalized attention” one should provide to a customer before they’re soft enough for that $90 wine bottle up-sell. I read somewhere that by remembering a person’s name a retail worker or server creates a 5% customer retention increase, which could draw profits higher to anywhere between 25% - 90% as it saves on marketing costs.

The Familial Fetishization of Breadsticks

This is an odd, but definitive version of commodity fetishism. The nature of the relationship between two human beings is reified into an equation, a relation between things marked by capital. The person becomes a “customer” when an exact calculation determines the plausibility of their return, based entirely on how closely the human capital (the server) follows the corporately designed plans for modeling certain manipulative behaviors.

But it goes further, because the relation between these two things is then again transformed to represent a human relation through something like “heritage branding,” where the server, following brand standards, treats the customer as if they’re “family” or a “true friend.”

In the restaurant industry, human relations are ultimately what we’re selling on top of the crappy food, and so you might say the reification of human relations into the relation between things is re-reified into a false human relation according to the corporately designed behavioral cues which transmogrify “the customer” into “the familial,” all of which sits under the structure of “the customer is king” illusion. This complex ideological system protects capital’s mischievous demands using the illusion of value that “the customer is always right” creates, allowing people to disavow the deficiencies of the system.

People know that when Olive Garden says, “When you’re here, you’re family!” (which is really just a variation on “the customer is king”) they don’t actually mean the customer is a family member, yet we servers play along anyways by treating them as such, and customers play along by buying Olive Garden’s crummy food at exorbitant prices.

We know all the while that the $20 bowl of mass-market-grade noodles was not produced by some Italian Nanna with love and care, but was probably purchased from an enormous food distribution conglomerate, where, after some complex miracle of mechanical engineering, they came oozing out of a steel pipe and into a plastic bag at about $1.75 a plate.

But it’s much easier to participate in the illusion that Olive Garden works so obsessively to create for us if we simply acquiesce to the images of twirling pasta and emotionally manipulative slogans.

“We believe relentlessly relevant brands need to obsess over their customers, so we took it a bit further: We became them. We ate bowl after bowl of pasta in the restaurants, talked to dozens of guests, and scoured the social media landscape. One thing became strikingly clear – the passion for Olive Garden stems from some of their most important assets – family and breadsticks. (C’mon… who doesn’t love those breadsticks?!)” — (A corporate statement from Olive Garden’s marketing team)

“We became them?” — As the Gorilla researcher intimates itself with the wild band by spilling Gorilla urine across her chest, the corporate manager must “become” the customer by ingratiating herself with the consumer-base in the wild bush of casual dining. The warped metonymy Olive Garden creates between, “Family,” “Breadsticks,” and “Assets” underscores the notion that brands so painstakingly segment and commoditize actual people that it mortifies them, “thingifies” them, into something vacuous and abstract like “the customer.”

Imagine: I invite my mother over for dinner and set a plate of microwaved frozen breadsticks on the table before serving the main meal. I then say to my mother, “Mom, there are a lot of things I love in my life, but I just want to let you know that my two most important assets are you and, of course, these lovely breadsticks.”

What’s more is that on Olive Garden’s website under a subheading that says “Caring: By the Numbers,” the brand says they donate over forty-nine million pounds of surplus food to homeless shelters a year, attributing a sort of backwards benevolence to your cravings for “bottomless pasta” and “endless breadsticks.”

This only contributes to the customer experience fantasy by enabling us to play along instead of asking, “Why the heck is there even forty-nine million pounds of surplus food in the first place?” Isn’t that a problem with the very foundations of the capitalist system which Olive Garden perpetuates?

I will never understand how we as human beings do not find it infinitely bizarre that a company could ever run a surplus of 49 million pounds of food while paying their 100,000+ employees subsistence wages so that they themselves are more likely to be the ones starving.

Feeding America, a non-profit organization that facilitates such food donations, says that 4 pounds of food per day is needed to feed one hungry person. There are approximately 47 million people in America going hungry each year. Olive Garden’s “49 million pounds of food” donation per year should, then, make a massive dent in the problem. Then why hasn’t this “pressing” social issue of American hunger been solved? Because donating their 49 million pound food “surplus” to a social program is an afterthought to generating capital through producing such rabid excess in the first place. It simply allows Olive Garden to stage a solution to the much larger, systemic problems it helps to create.

It’s not about the fact that donating 49 million pounds of food is not good enough, or that it’s not somehow benevolent. It’s about seeing it through the lens of what Slavoj Zizek calls “the species subverting its own genus”: Forty-nine million pounds of food is not so much a donation as it is a perpetuation fee dressed in the capitalist vestments of philanthropy. These are the same garments it uses yearly to wash its feet in tax breaks.

It’s an excuse that allows the system causing the hunger to persist in exploitation. It creates a permission structure to keep producing in overabundance. Somewhere Todd McGowan writes, “Capitalism serves to put the reproduction of capital before the reproduction of positive social relations,” (I’m paraphrasing), and this is the perfect example of that. The human species destroys itself through a sad misinterpretation of “the good.”

The very existence of the terms like “endless pasta!” and “bottomless breadsticks!” articulate the foundation of the problem: when the customer gets to order something into infinity, it reinscribes the idea that they are deserving of infinite satisfaction for cheap. This reignites the notion that Olive Garden must continue underpaying their employees, just as they must buy even cheaper ingredients through cheaper processing mechanisms. All the while, the world crumbles around them for reasons articulated in the fact that Capitalism can only work if it produces an alarming amount of excess in the first place.

No matter how many times you eat at Olive Garden, you will never actually be helping to end world hunger, and you will never actually belong to the brand as though you were “family.” $20 is a heck of a deal for unlimited pasta, but will you actually finish that second bowl? And if you do finish that second bowl, won’t you be in physical pain from all the highly processed calories you’ve shoved down your gullet in such a short period of time? (We’ve all been there.) You might see a commercial and crave the Alfredo, but the commercial image is never representative of the food, and you’ll likely always walk out wishing you’d cooked at home. And when you finally do cook at home, you’ll probably always end up feeling like it wasn’t quite like Olive Garden, but pretty close; or, for that matter, maybe it was better than Olive Garden, but not like Nanna used to make it, or whomever. This inkling of lack is the utterly inevitable outcome of buying into the symbolic gestures and excesses that Capitalism sells.

There is always an element of foreign, creaturely existence skulking beneath Capitalism’s promise of omnipotent consumership that ensures we fail to stake our claim to satisfaction. There is no level of magic in the customer experience that will ever make up wholesale for the fact that incompletion, what we’ve been calling “lack,” is structured into the most basic configuration of what it means to exist. While capitalism’s full-throated promise might be satisfaction, “The customer is always right!,” its spicy little secret is that it knows you’ll never be satisfied, you will never be “right.” This inevitable lack is what capitalism capitalizes on.

While the brand might facilitate a million and one ways for the customer to disavow the fact that the product or service they’re paying for remains inevitably unsatisfying, or the ways in which they are perpetuating the exploitation of millions, that customer will never be able to rid themselves of the small kernel of frustration rooted in the fact that they cannot get exactly what they want because who the hell knows exactly what they want?

Beneath the fantasy of “the customer is king,” the inevitability of our perpetual lack is always already there in a disavowed form, repressed by the false promises of Capitalism into the unconscious where it transmogrifies into a symptom. One day, it comes screaming out of the darkness like a bloody skull to snatch some poor service-worker off the line and back down into its murky depths.

I Would Like to File a Complaint With the Customer’s Manager, Please:

My claim is that the capitalist-enabled repression of the consumer’s inevitable lack, enabled by thing like the fantasy of “customer is king,” is ultimately what’s responsible for the customer’s perpetual aggression towards the American service worker. This traumatic repression is always there, ready to be displaced away from capital towards me, the service worker, at any moment.

This is all encapsulated in something one of my co-workers said to me years ago, which I will never forget:

“All we are is ‘bacon extra crispy’ to these people…”

Michelle, facing an ever-renewed frustration to find herself each day sweating over a flat-top in the back of a cramped kitchen at the age of forty, said this after a plate of bacon was sent back for not matching the customer’s radically particular definition of “ extra crispy.”

It was stiff, brown, and flakey, but not quite blackened to their liking. This is one small example of how breakfast service is an absolute nightmare to serve at U.S. restaurants. It is one of the most radically particularist meals in the world of dining.

In many ways, the all out war between customer and server that is “the breakfast/brunch service” is representative of how America’s problematic level of veneration for consumer-based individualism drives a certain wedge between members of the working class, enfolded as it is in the the “customer-server” binary.

Whether it be a Burger King, an Over Easy, or a Waffle House, thanks to César Ritz the American customer walks through the doors fully expecting to “have it their way,” to always be right, even when their order crosses the line from comically impractical into some delusion they saw through a commercial image.

Still, the kitchen is generally expected to “give the customer what they want!”

Having been taught by the capitalist class that they are entitled to their illusory morning repast, the American customer expects the cooks and servers to just, sort of, figure it out, or else they will more thank likely ask to speak to a manager and inevitably receive something for free. It’s a story as old as, well, probably as old as César Ritz’s “the customer is always right!” philosophy.

Again, this points towards how the average restaurant dining room is a space brimming in bourgeois fantasy: members of the working class participate in a sort of “pay-to-play” feudal lordship among their fellows, who’s literal job is to act as if they are the modern version of the king’s cupbearer. That’s ultimately what the customer is paying for with their tip, is it not?

It’s never just “scrambled” or “over-easy.” It’s “slightly runny, please… but not too runny. You know? How I had them last time! You remember, don’t you?” or “Can you please do one scrambled and one poached? But my son will have his scrambled, but make sure they’re not too hard or he won’t eat them.”

Certain restaurants provide little manuals to their employees that show photos of the various levels of bacon crispness — the qualifiers are almost pornographic: from flaccid to black and rigid — but the reality is that every customer has their own idea of “extra crispy bacon.” There are as many shades of “extra crispy bacon” as there are between white and grey.

I swear that some only pretend to care only to revel in the power-trip of calling me over to their table and watch me squirm after they ask, “Does that bacon look extra crispy to you?” Patronizing questions like these are almost always rhetorical, unless you get a particularly snotty customer who actually expects you to formulate a response.

There is, of course, no right answer, save for, “I’ll take the plate back and get you some new bacon right now! And this time it will be extra free and extra, extra crispy… just the way you like!” This is not so much a “conversation” as it is the recitation of a script that was written long ago when César Ritz, the star of bourgeois hospitality, said, “The customer is never wrong!”

I feel like a corporeal device onto which the restaurant owner projects the fantasy of the customer’s regal omnipotence, while the hand of capital that actually causes the problem by creating the illusion of the “perfectly cooked bacon” remains invisible to the customer.

I had a server once tell me that something went screwy with the point of sales systems. This caused the receipts to print out with a “suggested tip” section that was mathematically incorrect. The suggested amount, apparently, was 5% higher than it should have been according to the stated total. This sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories about how the servers were colluding to take money from unsuspecting customers on the Yelp! page.

While anecdotal, this serves for me as hard-hitting evidence for how capital has been able to successfully shift blame for its violence onto the service worker, who is (under)paid to act as the face of its wrongdoing. Serving food, paradoxically, isn’t what being a food service worker is about at all. It’s about acquiescing to the fact that you aren’t much more than a punching bag for capital’s never ending rein of transgressions.

We’re ultimately dealing with a kind of dialectic between different theories of alienation. While the customer walks in with a certain symbolic idea of promised perfection which will inevitably break down, the service worker walks into the restaurant and faces their own alienation in the Marxist form: that of alienated labor.

The Server Is Not Alright:

Crossing the ingress into the hellish landscape of minimum wage work, one must leave their dignity and identity at the door. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a brand-randy manager pull me aside to tell me about how I was there to “represent the brand!” The name on your name-tag is reduced to nothing more than a calling card. It’s not attached to childhood memories, or really anything at all besides a working knowledge of toilet-scrubbing, table numbers, drink dispensers, and expo lines, should the kingly customer request an extra ranch, a refill on their Diet Coke, or more toilet paper for stall #3 before he blows the toilet to pieces.

In order to keep a server job, whether it’s at Olive Garden, Papa Johns or McDonalds, you must bracket the idea that you are an individual with aspirations and self-respect. Precarious work is far less painful if you can learn to happily reduce yourself down to a bag of unmarked flesh with a few of vital energies. You are there to act the part of total subservience in a kind of faux, pay-to-play master-slave dialectic, except your “creation” is not life-giving in any way, since it was pulled from a plastic bag and prepped following a detailed sheet of instructions, which usually involves a microwave. Thus you fail to receive even the human dignity of making something with your own hands.

When customer’s are frustrated about capital’s failed promises, you, as the nearest human with capital’s name on it, are like the intern for the zookeeper who takes the monkey’s poo to the face. The corporate officer’s only hope is that the customer’s fecal pelting has diverted enough energy from that deep-seated alien outcry of exploitation that it won’t germinate into the desire for a free milkshake, a full refund, or the collapse of the system itself.

The days of feudalism may be long over, but the reduced cost of food by cheap ingredients and large scale factory production has allowed working class people of all backgrounds to go out and participate in the pay-to-play fun of mastery over the subservient waiter.

This is one way in which the capitalist ideology has come to pit the working class against each other. Due to the “customer is king” fantasy, which was developed, I’ll remind you, by millionaires, America’s consumer base has largely become a demographic of middle-class infants who want their babas before bedtime.

The server plays along with the “customer is king” fantasy, hoping that the job will simply be a stepping stone onto something else if one works extra hard at school or a “side-hustle.” It’s fine that all I am is “bacon extra crispy” to these people because it will not be forever. It can’t be forever. And yet, the more expensive the world gets, the less time I have for other endeavors, and the more it seems to feel like it will most certainly be forever.

Time-Poverty is Real:

In his final lectures, collected in a book called, Post Capitalist Desire, Mark Fisher calls this very thing “time-poverty.” “[Capitalism] produce[s] an artificial scarcity of time in order to produce a real scarcity of natural resources.”10 By paying the server $2.33 per hour, Capitalism produces a situation where the server must work their whole days and weeks away to make enough tips to survive. This creates a scarcity of time which takes away me and my fellow minimum-wage workers as a human resource with the potential to reproduce positive social relations. Instead, we simply reproducing capital for a capitalist.

A new and better world might be in store if my server friends and I had the time to commit to making it a better place through bettering ourselves within it by, say, reading books or taking classes. We, the human capital, are the scarcity of resources they are creating when they introduce a scarcity of time into our lives.

In order for Capitalism to remain stable, it is made necessary that the powers that be engender a workday which ensures that the employees have as limited an ability to think freely as possible. To intellectualize their situation within the system could raise class-consciousness, and that would be bad for biz.

And after a day brimming with the thoughtless tedium of things like scooping mayonnaise from out of one big jar and slathering it into a smaller one, the last thing I want to do when I get home is dig into Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness to learn about how I might bust myself out from the atomization of systemic awarenesses into which I have been plunged by the Moiras of fate.

I’d much rather lay in bed shoveling M&M’s into my mouth while hate-watching donald j. trump as he bloviates during another two-hour press conference on my iPhone. “The goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties,” writes Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization:

“In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue, which is the
awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.”11

I know I’m being exploited, but I’m too petrified from a long day of subservience, of cleaning human feces off of a toilet for a minimum-wage hourly rate (I don’t get tipped for that, and yet I’m expected to do it), to do anything about it. This petrification is continued into my free time, which is wholly commodified by the social media corporations who feed me mindless slop, and who whore me out to the data brokers who do God knows what with my personal information.

A Very Short Conclusion:

The customer-server relationship propagates and perpetuates one small variant of bourgeois domination over the working class by convincing the customer that they are entitled to being treated like a king, when in reality they are more like a child with a birthday hat swimming through a pissed up ball-pit. On the other side is me: the service-worker.

On the inside of the restaurant, I am the king’s cupbearer. On the outside, I am a misanthropic jerk who complains about his job pedantically on his own personal blog, more likely every day to commit suicide as the walls of senescence close in on my ability to achieve something better.

I am filled by my work with hatred towards the working-class patrons who come to see me, who, in a very real sense, are simply a spectral version of me, and thus I am made to hate myself.

“By their fruit you will recognize them,” says this TPUSA poster to the public, with “Matthew 7:16” written right down the side.

Through the slightest amount of self-exertion, we open the Bible to Matthew 7:16 to visit the context from which this quote is pulled. It is there that we notice a contradiction between what the Bible says and what Turning Point USA is using it to say.

The line comes from Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount,” which specifically refers to false prophets. The line directly before “by their fruit you will recognize them” is this: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Mark 7:15). Christ is here famously advising his followers on how to identify people who claim to speak for God, but are only using the power that comes through commandeering the authority of God’s voice for selfish reasons, such as a desire to hoard wealth or to cultivate fame.

Paula White Cain, the mega-church pastor, prosperity gospel leader, and head of Donald Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” at the White House, comes immediately to mind. She has leveraged the public’s belief in her “divine anointing” numerous times to turn around and sell “supernatural blessings” for about a thousand bucks a piece.

Turning Point USA as an organization is based on the strategic confluence of a perceived intimacy with the Holy Spirit and a willingness to spread falsehoods (i.e. spreading claims of election fraud, creating illusions about immigrant crime sprees, Covid-19 vaccination lies, etc.). Why do we think they do this? It could quite feasibly have something to do with the fact that it has enabled the organization to become a multi-million dollar non-profit group with large executive pay packages. Before his death, Charlie Kirk paid himself a salary of almost $400,000 per year, putting him into the top 1-2% of individual earners in America. Some reports say his widow, Erika Kirk, inherited a $12 million dollar net worth.

We could point out other contradictions from the section of the Bible TPUSA is using for this poster and what they actually do as an organization. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

We’re talking here about an organization that has elevated the pettiest man on the planet, he whose name I refuse to give the dignity of capitalization, donald j. trump, to the highest office in the country; a man who after Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman from Colorado, voted to release evidence which proves that he may have raped children, retaliated against her by vetoing a bill that would have given a town residents in Colorado’s 4th district clean drinking water. Instead of “turning the other cheek,” he made Boebert’s constituents pay with their health. Turning Point USA is built to support right-wing political actors who make decisions like this every day, by protecting them through propaganda almost always produced under the guise of “Christianity.” Christ says, ‘Don’t turn away from your enemies,’” but we should not take that as though he meant to join and enable them.

We could point out a million more contradictions between what Christ says to do in The Sermon on the Mount and what Turning Point USA actually does. But the fact that Turning Point USA’s propaganda is riddled with contradictions is not the point I’m trying to make. The point is to motivate people to think for themselves, and not as a part of the amorphous blob that is “the public.” Indeed, Turning Point USA’s job as an organization can be described as one which serves to create and solidify this amorphous blob of “the public,” which is precisely what this poster serves to do.

How so? Before moving any further, we should pause to recognize that the concept of “common knowledge” is serving as a protective layer for TPUSA’s fascistic tendencies. This organization is so confident that their followers won’t do any kind of heavy interpretive work that they are even willing to plaster the chapter and verse right next to the words they’re ripping out of context and using to support a mission that openly contradicts itself.

Everybody already knows that the phrase “By their fruit you will recognize them” comes from the Bible. If this were a Jeopardy question, I’m confident that even a child would know the answer. But isn’t this commonality amongst us what makes people feel that they don’t need to double-check that the context in which it’s being used matches Christ’s original intent? The fact that it’s “common knowledge” or “common sense” provides the first layer of disavowal that the public needs to disregard the gaping contradiction swirling at the center of the message. The fact that it comes from the Bible distracts from the context in the Bible where it lies, allowing people to miss the trees for the forest.

“I don’t have to look it up! It’s common knowledge!”, says the TPUSA follower, sure of themselves. This is the first move that allows them to embrace the fire of hatred that TPUSA serves to stoke.

And without looking up the quote to understand the intricacies regarding the famous phrase, its themes are diminished down to vague generalizations. The main point Christ is making in this section of The Sermon on the Mount, that of being able to identify false prophets, falls into oblivion when “By their fruit you will recognize them” is ripped out of context and plastered onto a poster by itself. We easily forget the point Christ was trying to make without the Biblical context when we’re distracted with the political context that TPUSA fabricates and shoves down our throats. In the moment we are made aware of the poster, “By their fruit you will recognize them” is broadened to represent only the simplest of Christian themes, like “good versus evil” or “us versus them.” This simplified overgeneralization creates an effect that is politically useful for the organization.

For that faction of the the public that takes the Bible as the objective word of God, this message dominoes into a plethora of other assumptions, founded upon Biblically based oppositions of “purity versus impurity,” and maybe others like “normal versus abnormal.” The very marrow of the statement, “By their fruit you will recognize them,” draws an internal frontier, a divide or chasm separating two opposite sides. To visualize this, it may be instructive to invert the statement:

“By the impure fruit of the other, we can recognize the pure fruit in ourselves.”

Suddenly, we’re pointing towards a system of values-based exclusion. The statement, then, branches out into a kind of meta-statement: “Whose side are you on?” The quote creates a sense for the crowd’s self-consolidation based on that which it excludes. Put more simply, it helps to structure a narrative of us versus them. This is, in a way, how the “public” is invented. The side who refuses to see the contradiction is the side who doesn’t ask questions, or who simply ignores the contradiction. This is what I mean by “the public,” those for whom questioning everything gets in the way of the pathological instinct to hate the other.

I’m sure the individuals within the public are fine people; people with distinctive middle names, beautiful families and funny pets; people who wake up on time for work, who sleep in on the weekends; people who care for their plants before they leave the house each day, who stand around thinking for themselves in their own singular way of being. You know: people — fine, individual people.

But the public? Everybody has seeds of the public planted within them. When they let those seeds grow, individual reasoning tumbles and group-think ensues. The public is a puddle of leveled-out minds that inhere via the indomitability of things like “common knowledge.” I truly believe that Turning Point USA’s core mission is to mold “the brainless public” together like a mud castle.

Think about this in the framework of myth-making, something in the vein of Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropology. Strauss was the first to point out the cultural instinct to map narratives onto oppositions, like that of “us versus them,” as a way of reconciling the contradictions we often face within a shared social reality.

Take the concept of “evangelization,” for example. For certain denominations of Christianity, the goal is to totalize the world’s religion into a single belief system. At the same time, is this not rather antagonistic towards the freewill bestowed by God onto the individual? Won’t there always be some people who refuse to believe? How do we count them into the evangelized total? How do we square this contradiction of the unwilling free with what God tells us to do through evangelization? We map a story of good versus evil over it to authorize force!

We, the good Christians, according to the word of God, will make you evil non-believers into one of us. A series of Biblically based stories come to overlap with the real conditions of existence, and suddenly the contradiction isn’t a contradiction, but a narrative to be traversed; a narrative where the Christian evangelist is the hero and whoever opposes them the demonic villains. In other words, God is made to have given his authority over to the believer. After all, sometimes the law must be broken to affirm the law! Isn’t that the messed up circle of civilization? Turning Point USA’s deployment of the Biblical statement, “By their fruit you will recognize them” plays into this game of myth-making.

Here we should remember that we are creatures endowed with a physical perception that comprehends figure and ground as a unity. What does that mean? It’s a way of saying that whenever we focus in on an object of perception, like the quote, “By their fruit you will recognize them,” we are never just comprehending that central object of explicit awareness by itself. It is always mediated by that which surrounds it, and no object of perception is never not surrounded by some broader context. That broader context always plays into what we know about the central object of perception. General Biblical values, such as those we’ve just mentioned, are of course a part of how the public might come to understand “By their fruit you will recognize them,” but, since in this case the line has been extracted from its Biblical context by Turning Point USA, it is also interpenetrated by the contextual fabric that Turning Point USA serves to create. Let’s re-write the sentence again, but this time incorporate the contextual, inherently political, fabric that Turning Point USA works to create around it: “By their evil, Marxist, Socialist, Radical, Transgender-loving, fruit, you will recognize the left.” This is really what they’re trying to say, isn’t it? (Or, is it what they’re trying to make God say?)

In this case, anybody who fights for the rights of workers, for a government which provides for its sick and its poor, for equity, for minimizing the wage gap between low and high earners, falls on the wrong side of the good vs. evil binary we’re working with here. And suddenly, through the work of Turning Point USA, “Christian,” which is already associated with “good,” comes into a direct association with “the Right.” And “Bad” or “Evil,” comes to be associated with “Left.” An enemy of the good Christian folks has been created.

This is Turning Point USA’s whole job as an organization. They exist to create a fellowship which coalesces through narratives of religious indignance, fear, and most importantly through the enjoyment of the sadistic satisfaction that’s bred through our hatred towards an enemy. We’ve all felt it! Some deny themselves the satisfaction; others embrace it. It’s precisely this type of thoughtless coalescence of a certain population around a narrative of good versus evil that makes the public ignorant; or, to put it a hair more gently, and perhaps more lucidly, that stupefies the public by forcing them over their threshold for things like truth and critical thinking.

Thus far, I’ve been dancing around this idea of “the public.” I don’t exactly mean this as a universalizing term. Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of “the crowd” is a solid jumping off point when it comes to understanding what I mean by “the public.” For Kierkegaard, “the crowd is untruth” in the sense that by losing one’s sense of individuality to the crowd, they lose their connection to agency, to deep thought, to virtue and empathy, and to their ability to take responsibility for their own lives. It’s the people who lose themselves to the crowd, who lose their humanity to the crowd, who come to actually match the presumption of what “the general will” is when dictatorial powers seek to create it. Recall when the Russian Empress, Alexandra Feodorovna, wrote in a letter to her husband, the Tsar of Russian, Nicholas II, to remind him that “The Russians like to feel the whip!” What I mean by “the public” are those Russians who said, “I support the Tsar! If he says I deserve the whip, well then I should enjoy the whip! After all, he’s the one who knows!”

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“A crowd,” says Kierkegaard, “not this or that, one now living or long dead, a crowd of the lowly or of nobles, of rich or poor, etc., but in its very concept is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision.”

Turning Point USA breeds “the crowd,” and they do it by making posters that steal phrases from the Bible, like, “By their fruit you will recognize them,” to sew hatred among communities. A “community” is different from “the crowd” or “the public,” because it is a group filled with individuals sharing a cause for good, for progress, for forward movement. By splitting a population into us versus them, TPUSA consolidates “the crowd” by creating a mindless “in-group” of people who don’t think to point out their displaced Christianity.

Sigmund Freud theorized that the individual unconsciously displaces the psychic intensity of traumatic experiences onto other objects of experience via “associative paths” (the word he uses in his Project for a Scientific Psychology). For the later psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who sees language as playing a fundamental role in our lives as that which links our most fundamental relation to social reality, displacement takes a linguistic turn in the guise of metonymy, a linguistic term that has to do with association and replacement.

When “the president” makes a decision, for example, instead of saying “the president” or “donald j. trump,” we might say, “‘the Cheeto’ has decided”, because donald j. trump is so heavily associated with the color orange on account of his disgusting, alien-like, orangish appearance. This is a metonymic displacement. Even though trump and the brand of chip named “Cheeto’s” have nothing in common aside from that one aspect, metonymy allows us to create a useful association by placing one concept next to the other and using them interchangeably.

A connection between displacement and metonymy reveals itself to have political value in our understanding of Turning Point USA and their contradictory statement, “By their fruit you will recognize them.” This is literally Christianity displaced in a political and socio-psychological sense. Turning Point USA desires the authority that comes with identifying their mission under the banner of Christianity. Yet they cannot actually use it in any legitimate way because of the many incongruities between the violence of their mission and the peaceful teachings of Christ. One cannot both “love thy foreigner” as one loves themself, as Leviticus commands, and support a mass deportation policy that is inherently riddled with potential for human rights abuses.

If Turning Point USA wants to claim Christianity for itself, statements like “By their fruit you will recognize them” must be displaced into a political context that fits a more easily achievable narrative without removing it from the political enjoyment the organization gains from using “Christianity” as a moral ensign. You might say that their pathological, un-Christian desire to succeed in the political space is so abrasive to the traditional Christian ethic, that it formulates a traumatic encounter. This is traumatic encounter is unconsciously displaced into the energy of warring with “wokeness” as a form of avoiding a reconciliation with the contradiction.

When we see “By their fruit you will recognize them” written onto a TPUSA poster, we find that what is said and what is meant slides away from one another like two blocks of ice down opposite sides of a frozen mountain. To face the glaring contradiction at the center of the TPUSA narrative would be far too traumatic a move for both the organization itself and its many followers. The group is simply too deep into the pathological enjoyment it garners from a narrative of “us versus them,” of taking God’s authority to mean that they can treat others like garbage as though they’re protecting the gates of Heaven, something they really do seem to ardently believe they’re doing. Their collective ego is built on this fantasy which covers over such a contradiction. Whole industries have been built on this fantasy.

I should stop here to say that when I reference “enjoyment,” I don’t mean “pleasure.” I mean “enjoyment” defined as a political factor which is crucial to anybody who wants to understand the alt-right. Again, I’m referencing modern Lacanian schools of theory here, mostly Todd McGowan’s book “Enjoyment Right and Left,” which builds on a definition of “enjoyment” using Freud’s pleasure principle; or, rather, that which goes “beyond the pleasure principle.”

For Freud, the human being’s natural mode of existence is to find an equilibrium of excitations. When we’re annoyed or nervous, excitations rise. Pleasure, on the other hand, is when we lower excitations back to equilibrium. When we have an orgasm, smoke a cigarette, or meditate, excitations go down. Enjoyment, then, is when excitations rise. The moments of exertion leading up to orgasm, the physical obstacle to orgasm, is enjoyment; whereas the release itself is pleasure. When we enjoy, it’s not the pleasure we seek, but the path of obstacles it takes to get there. That’s what we’re enjoying, not the pleasure itself, but the difficulty of getting there. We’re constantly looking for new modes of enjoyment. The levels of a video games which pose themselves as an obstacle to the pleasure of winning are enjoyed. The many hard nights of studying before seeing we’ve received an A+ grade or a promotion are a path of enjoyment. Lacanians theorize that it’s the enjoyment which is important to us, more-so than the culminating pleasure. Pleasure only leaves us in a state of lack. Enjoyment allows us to believe that we’re on the road towards total fulfillment, although a total fulfillment is impossible.

The right garners a significant sense of enjoyment by focusing on the left as an obstacle to a utopian, paradisiacal version of society, just like the Nazis saw “the Jew” as the obstacle to a of society of prosperity and purity. Of course, such a perfection doesn’t exist! The enjoyment of getting to that fantasized concept of perfection is as close as one can ever get to it in reality.

Every time Charlie Kirk filled his mug with “liberal tears” during a debate, he provided enjoyment to both his audience and himself through a false perception that he was making the world a better place through incendiary insults towards vulnerable people. Is there ever a point where he actually achieves a better world in this way? No. It’s not possible. The closest he could ever get to achieving this fantasy was through the enjoyment of raised excitations that came during his debates. His whole career was built on this well-structured mode of enjoyment, which relies heavily on there being a battle between the right and the left. Neither side ever wins because the point is the battle, not the culmination.

Enjoyment fulfills a sense of purpose and conviction that almost parallels that of a religion. We build around this endless path not realizing the terminus point, “success,” is a mirage. When we see posters like TPUSA’s “By their fruit you will recognize them,” it’s in a way proof that their battle with the left has replaced Christianity with a new mode of “Christianity,” one that’s been evacuated of its original contents. Biblical phrases like, “By their fruit you will recognize them” are not only subverted to harness the authority it holds over “the crowd,” but the overarching term, “Christianity,” is over time emptied of its value altogether. Suddenly the TPUSA “in-group” doesn't have to focus on the enjoyment that comes from overcoming the obstacles posed in the Bible, like loving the neighbor as thy self, to achieve the pleasure of purity; but the enjoyment rooted in breaking God’s Law, hating they neighbor, in order to re-affirm it in a way that fits the right-wing’s narrative of Christianity. It’s the shattering of the old Law to rebuild the new, reimagined law that the right enjoys, not Christianity as such. The law is only broken to be re-affirmed in a way that renders it circular and meaningless.

“By their fruit you will recognize them” simply defines the sides that perpetuate TPUSA’s framework for enjoyment. The quote is ripped out of Christ’s mouth, or “displaced,” to avoid the contradiction it creates for TPUSA’s mission. This sustains the enjoyment found in hating the left because it creates a narrative of Christian authority that calls for such hatred by a different name. It’s like when you hear right-wing figures talk about loving one another but without all of that “toxic empathy.” They’ve redefined love without empathy! Can we really then call it love?

In a way, Turning Point USA’s use of Biblical phrases in their propaganda is the perfect expression of Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “God is dead!” Turning Point USA profits significantly on the death of God, on the empty shell of dogmatism that the church constructed out of what God left behind. In fact, you could say that every time Turning Point USA creates some propaganda using decontextualized Biblical scripture, Turning Point USA kills God even more.

Signs that cry “Christian Persecution in the USA!”

Cries of Christian persecution in the U.S.A. are a tactic to cloak the Dominionist agenda in the facade of patriotism. This works, at least in part, by thieving the rewards of moral capital found in the rhetoric of victimhood. By coopting the moral capital of victimhood, the alt-right Dominionist obfuscates and depoliticizes the oppressor/oppressed binary, which distracts from the fact that their movement is inextricably tied to the motive of totalizing state power through silencing all forces of opposition, including the voices of those who actually are marginalized.

Of course, this places them in direct opposition to the kind of service Christ calls for in scripture. Things like helping the poorest among us, the sick, and the foreigner must be disavowed for the Dominionist. This is why, I argue, their cries of Christian persecution in the USA must be propped up by a form of fetishistic disavowal. In the structure of fetishistic disavowal, the theme of “persecution” is lifted from its context in scripture and expanded to seem as though it is more than the sum total of its parts. The nature of “persecution” comes to represent authentic belief in and of itself, which allows the believer to pass over blindly the content of Christianity which would expose what the supposedly “Christian” Dominionist’s theology lacks.

These two concepts, the cooptation of victimhood rhetoric and fetishistic disavowal, I will argue, are always working behind the power structure of Dominionism as it lays claim to the idea that evangelical Christians are being persecuted in the United States. I’m not saying that there are not certain isolated instances where Christians are persecuted in America. I am, however, saying that structures of power aligned with Dominionist ideology use the concept of Christian persecution as part of a highly propagandistic project.

What is Dominionism?

Dominionism is a theological and political ideology which gives credence to the idea that Biblical literalism should be the sole measure by which the state regulates and defines the functions of government, business, education, mass communications, culture, family values, and religion. These seven components of society make up what essentially amounts to the entirety of social reality.

Domionists call these the “seven mountains” (together making up “the seven mountain mandate”). For decades, Dominionists, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, in cooperation with certain figureheads of the alt-right, have put an enormous amount of effort into capturing every peak so as to transform America into a theocracy which would have control over even the most atomic spaces of our personal freedom. I often find myself asking this question: “Do Domionists realize that what they call ‘Dominionism’ is actually just plain old ‘Totalitarianism’?”

Depending on how strict one is willing to be in their approach to semantics, these two words, “Dominionism” and “Totalitarianism,” could be deemed as synonymous with one another. This is why, I want to argue, Dominionists are forced to lie and manipulate by constructing much of their messaging out of false claims like their claims of religious persecution. It seems to me that most Americans wouldn’t consciously commit themselves to the same Totalitarian principles that defined somebody like, say, Kim Il Sung, the deceased ruler of North Korea, or Pol Pot, the man responsible for the Cambodian Genocide. Knowing this, Domionists have to improvise to make it seem like their philosophy isn’t totalitarian.

Totalitarianism is a form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. (This sure sounds like the Seven Mountain Mandate, doesn’t it?) - Encyclopedia Britannica; my italics, my parenthetical addition

Who else was totalitarian?

Here’s a short list of totalitarian leaders who sought to institute “dominion” over vast swaths of people and land.

Benito Mussolini -

The Italian dictator who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people as part of the violent suppression of dissent and individualism. He also caused the Libyan Genocide.

Mao Zedong -

The Chinese dictator who, during his “Great Leap Forward” campaign, sought to suppress dissent and force total conformity to his perverse form of Communism over the population, inadvertently causing the largest famine that’s ever been credited to mankind, estimated to have killed anywhere between 15 million and 50 million people.

Augusto Pinochet -

This dictator was so afraid of non-conformity that he sent out “The Caravan of Death,” a band of ruthless military leaders, to capture, kidnap, kill, imprison and torture those of whom he retroactively re-defined as “extremists” after taking power; which in reality was any individual that found themselves unwilling to completely restitch their personal identity together according to his new ideological mandates.

The point here is this: there’s already a word for Dominionism, and it’s “Totalitarianism.” A group that wants to consolidate enough power to control the ideological agency of the population is a highly totalitarian group. Is this not precisely what Dominionists hope for by instituting their “Seven Mountain Mandate”?

So why don’t Domionists call themselves totalitarian if that’s what they are? Because the word leaves a sour taste in the mouth of any American who has Netflix and can throw on a documentary about World War Two. Up until recently, the one thing Americans could all agree on was that we were steadfastly anti... Mussolini, anti... Mao Zedong and anti... other things.

Those sects of Christianity, whether it be certain Pentecostalist preachers or leading members of The New Apostolic Reformation, who’ve chosen to stir Dominionism into the mix of their “theology” do realize how totalitarian their perspective is. This is why the work of Dominionism requires strategic messaging - propaganda - if they want their all-American followers to tag along on the totalitarian joy ride.

The Strategic Co-optation of Victimhood

One of the ways they do this is by claiming that they’re being religiously persecuted, whether that means claiming Charlie Kirk as a martyr, or by claiming that religious freedoms have been violated after, say, an elected official was kept from regularly starting school board meetings by reciting Bible verses in prayer. They do this because by co-opting the rhetoric of victimhood they are able to furnish their rhetoric with the moral capital found in grievance narratives.

In her excellent book, “Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood,” Lilie Chouliaraki illustrates this strategic obfuscation by using the example of Blasey Ford. After Brett Michael Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump, Ford went public with accusations of sexual abuse against Kavanaugh in order to stop who she saw as a violent criminal from attaining massive power. Kavanaugh, who has been accused of rape in three separate instances, has not only been heavily protected from these accusations since his youth, but has also been rewarded with enormous power for successfully deflecting his accusers (Chouliaraki 4).

In the media-obsessed environment we inhabit daily, “claims to victimhood are claims to power” because they can generate a moral reaction that’s hyper-effective in uniting online voices, a power which can be wielded to dominate certain political forces responsible for marginalizing parts of society (Chouliaraki 4).

Conversely, when accusations are negated by “public performances of righteous outrage,” as was the case with Kavanaugh’s response to Ford’s testimony, in which he painted her accusations as a “smear” campaign produced to foment his “grotesque and obvious character assassination,” the power of victimhood is not only subdued, it is reappropriated as political currency and used to reinforce the same sociocultural barriers that protect power by neutralizing the victim’s voice in the first place (Chouliaraki 4).

Chouliaraki calls this warring of claims to victimhood between disproportionate powers “a stand-off of victimhood.” A powerful figure (or group) is often able to leverage the sheer reach of their voice to manufacture the perception that they are in fact the one who is being victimized by having to suffer through the allegations against them (Chouliaraki 3). Using his influence to gain control over the messaging surrounding the controversy, Kavanaugh garnered massive right-wing support by framing himself as a benign and innocent man caught in the crossfire of a selfish she-devil.

Considering the fact that “one in four women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime,” Kavaunaugh’s subversion of the social relations regarding the dynamic between the victim and the accuser initiated the social construction of a kind of carapace, behind which a potentially enormous network of men who have been accused or who realize they may be at risk of being accused felt tacitly protected (Murphy-Oikonen, Jodie, et al. 2022). Meanwhile, Blasey Ford was inundated with death threats for even daring to accuse an upstanding patriot like Brett Kavanaugh of sexual abuse.

“A stand-off of victimhood is, from the perspective of power, an unequal struggle between claims to pain,” where the voice of the marginalized is muddied by the “personal grievances” of a group that holds such superior “social and political power” to the victim that they are able to transfigure the narrative through the deployment of their political-ideological alliance. The outcome is that the notion of “justice” is “depoliticized ... in ways that favor the powerful” (Chouliaraki 3). It’s precisely this war to reappropriate the rhetoric of victimhood that interests us in terms of the Dominionist’s claims of religious persecution in the U.S.A.

Victimhood as Commodity

In short, the depoliticization of victimhood has prompted the reification of the term itself. Members of the political elite have learned through the examples of people like Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, that by the sheer force of denial and message manipulation the cooptation of victimhood rhetoric can speak contrary to even the most compelling evidence.

In this way, “victimhood” has become detached from its denotation in the anatomy of power and transformed into an objectifiable commodity. Victimhood is valued as a thing in and of itself, external to the actual social relations that condition its being. It is a commodity which public relations departments can deploy on behalf of power to transliterate public sympathy for the accuser into public suspicion.

Much like African tribal communities believe that rubbing snake-stones can protect them from venomous bites, the cooptation and commodification of victimhood can protect a hegemonic system in falter when an accuser reveals publicly the marginalization inherent to its construction. This obfuscation is precisely what the top emissaries of Christian Dominionism seek to create by spreading the idea that their followers are being persecuted (by democrats, transgender people, Marxists, etc.), even though their speaking for a group which is upheld by so much wealth and power that they can easily sway both elections and legislation.

We should back up for a moment to place evangelical Christianity (of which Dominionism is a sub-set) within the framework of the American political landscape. Decades of established fraternity between the upper echelons of clergy and America’s corporate rulers have established a lucrative reciprocity between Christianity and Capitalism (Kevin M. Kruse writes about this in his incredible book “In God We Trust”). To this day, affluent political organizations, such as Turning Point USA, Alliance for Defending Freedom, Ziklag, and The Southern Baptist Convention, all of which can be tied to Dominionism, render as a service their ability to influence over 78 million Americans in support of an agenda benefitting, and manufactured by, rich, free market ideologues (PEW Research 2025). In return, said organizations receive gigantic rewards, not the least of which is financing for the expansion of their reach, which inevitably equates to more wealth for their figureheads.

These organizations are valued for their mastery at message manipulation. Many red-state voters, for example, cast a ballot for Donald Trump based solely on the fact that they were made aware of his “divine anointing” by figures such as Paula White Cain, a “prosperity gospel” pastor and long-time spiritual advisor to Trump himself. Such superficial religious thematics serve as an expedient distraction from the cruel intentions of a regnant political force because they need no proof, only blandishment and coaxing.

When “victimhood” acquires the magic of a commodity in the guise of religious persecution, the site of reality is forgone to a spiritual battle in which the good is always at risk of falling prey to evil. The bidding of political elites becomes conflated with the bidding of God. This allows the leaders of said organizations to shift focus in another direction while their followers vote against their own interests on issues like the funding-cuts to healthcare, SNAP benefits and public school funding, all of which help red states disproportionately.

Daniel A. Cox, a writer for The American Survey Center, reported in 2023 that sixty percent of evangelical Christians believed themselves to be the subjects of religious persecution, despite no clear evidence showing that to be the case. In reality, as Cox shows, the rise in belief that evangelicals are being persecuted correlates to the ascension of a more progressive culture which makes evangelicals uncomfortable, such as rising political and cultural visibility within the LGBTQ+ community (Cox 2024). Of course, emerging empowerment for marginalized voices does not equal religious persecution. But by invoking Biblical themes of persecution in their cooptation of the moral capital rooted in victimhood rhetoric, alt-right leaders devise a sort of smoke screen or lens through which people can believe they’re walking down the Christian road while heedlessly overlooking a reality which reveals otherwise.

In the context of what we do know to be true, that American Christianity is undeniably one of the most powerful, well-represented and formidable political forces in the nation, the idea that evangelicals and other large denominations are being religiously persecuted comes to sound hyperbolic. This gap between what the members of congregations are made to believe versus what is known to be true points towards that which anchors the weight of ideology itself, fetishistic disavowal, which is the very torsion of the Domionist’s propagandizing.

Religious Persecution as the Object of Fetishistic Disavowal

Fetishes aren’t always sexual. We might use the Prosperity Gospel leader as a hypothetical example. This is a religious leader who comes to adore the act of accruing wealth; so much so that it causes them to retroactively redefine scripture based on the enjoyment of making money. To “love thy neighbor” comes to be less about treating somebody with compassion than it is about sharing with them the “Five Divine Tips to Growing Your Savings!” or “Why God Wants Christians to Be Rich!” The very blessings of the Lord come to be synonymous with hoarding capital, increasing investment portfolios and jumping on initial public offerings rather than the immaterial gifts of living out the teachings of Jesus Christ (although its always framed as such). This Prosperity Gospel leader, we might say, has come to fetishize prosperity in spite of the gospel while still entertaining the false belief that they are abiding by it. The fetishization of the object of wealth hides a traumatic encounter within the Prosperity Gospel leader’s perspective that traditional theology exposes.

Perhaps in our example this traumatic encounter comes due to the fact that the leader grew up very wealthy, and thus, not ever having gotten used to the sight of poverty, they are made extremely uncomfortable by it. Horrified by their own guilty reaction at the discomfiting sight of tent encampments, starving children or wandering drug addicts, and their complicity within a system that breeds its reproduction, the Prosperity Gospel leader reinterprets scripture around themes of investment and wealth to protect themselves from what their reaction means for their Christian piety. Christian theology is very clear in asking believers to look poverty in the face. Finding that they cannot do this, the Prosperity Gospel leader creates an obsession with the object of wealth and uses it to fill in the gaps of their Christianity. Instead of facing up to the fact that systematic inequality exists, and perhaps trying to fix it, the Prosperity Gospel leader redefines scripture as something that can serve to “Make Everybody Rich in God’s Name!“ It’s as if they expand on one small aspect of scripture, such as Deuteronomy 8:18, “…it is He who gives you the power to gain wealth,” in order to eclipse the unexpurgated image which could reveal their true failure as a Christian.

By hiding their hegemonic intentions behind the moral capital of victimhood, is this not precisely what the theme of “persecution” does for the Dominionist? This strategy hinges on an outright perversion of the interpretive framework behind the Biblical theme of persecution, which can hardly be thought of outside of Christ’s death on the cross. This icon is held together by many other signifiers besides “persecution,” one of the main ones being “sacrifice.” But the totalitarian project of Dominionism simply cannot entertain the logic of Biblical “sacrifice” because it points to a philosophy of egalitarianism. Christ dies on the cross for everybody despite their differences. Christ died for the immigrant and the poor just as much as he died for the Roman who nailed his hands to the wood. He made no distinction between people, and his death signifies a universalization of human worth between all. To abide by such a theme would require an openness to difference and individuality, something the Dominionist theology cannot sustain. Deviation from majoritarian norms is like kryptonite to totalitarian regimes because it engenders individuality. So, “sacrifice” drops out of the interpretation altogether, and persecution is expanded to eclipse it, to hide what the Dominionist theology cannot sustain.

“I know I am not being persecuted, but I must act as if I am being persecuted because it enables me to enjoy the fantasy that my violent overthrow of society is pious even though it isn’t.” This is the structure of fetishistic disavowal that holds the Dominionist’s ideological framework together. When the alt-right Dominionist cries “religious persecution!”, they know very well that there is no persecution. If this were true, Christianity would probably not be the religion with the most churches in America; but it’s not true, and one can hardly throw a rock through any suburb in America without hitting a church of the Christian religion. But for the alt-right Dominionist, their cries of “religious persecution” paradoxically have nothing to do with religion, especially not the Christian one, and everything to do with acquiring power to push opposing voices into the margins.

Dominionists know this, and yet they act as if they are being persecuted in order to sustain the illusion that they are pious. “Persecution” becomes the fetishized screen through which they see their place in social reality, but it is an illusion used to protect themselves from the unconscious fact that their desire to be a good Christian is itself also an illusion. While what they think they are doing is God’s work, what they are actually doing is acting out the dynamics of a totalitarian power grab.

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Sources:

Chouliaraki, Lilie. Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood. Columbia University Press, 2024.

Cox, Daniel A. “Why Most Evangelicals Say They Face ‘A Lot’ of Discrimination - the Survey Center on American Life.” The Survey Center on American Life - A Nonprofit Organization Dedicated to Understanding the Way Cultural, Political, and Technological Changes Are Shaping the Lives of Ordinary Americans., 7 Sept. 2023, www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-most-evangelicals-say-they-face-a-lot-of-discrimination/#:~:text=Daniel%20A.,Christians%20are%20regularly%20discriminated%20against.

Hartle, John F. “Reification as Structural Depoliticization: The Political Ontology of Lukács and Debord.” The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2017, pp. 21–34.

McCabe, Nathan. “Are American Christians Persecuted?” Church Life Journal, 25 May 2022, churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/are-american-christians-persecuted/.

Murphy-Oikonen, Jodie, et al. “Unfounded Sexual Assault: Women’s Experiences of Not Being Believed by the Police.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, U.S. National Library of Medicine, June 2022. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9136376/#:~:text=Abstract,common%20practice%20amongst%20the%20police.

Smith, Gregory A. “Religious Landscape Summary.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 26 Feb. 2025, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-executive-summary/.

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I get the sense that the world is begging me not to think.

For example, I’ll sit down to write something that requires my critical thinking skills, something where it’s important to scan my emotions and my capacity to determine the logical outcome of a current event through a theoretical lens I want to better understand, when suddenly my phone dings:

“Hasan Piker has posted a new comment,” or “John Oliver just released a new clip.”

I open the notification. Now I’m listening to their thoughts instead of my own.

The interesting thing is that I’m clearly deriving a similar satisfaction from the conclusions they draw that I would have felt had I spent the day drawing my own. And it takes zero effort as opposed to one-hundred percent effort.

Before I know it, it’s 8 o’clock at night and I’m lying in bed, still scrolling, listening to opinion after opinion, none of them my own. But I can tell you that tomorrow one of those opinions will come flowing out of my mouth unconsciously as though it were my own. And I will again get a sense of stolen satisfaction for repeating somebody else’s intellectual prowess.

The external actor becomes a representative for my own thought -- because it’s how I would think after all!

This is an example of what Slavoj Zizek calls “interpassivity” - Sit down, relax, and let the “the Other” do the work for you.

His famous example is the Tibetan prayer wheel. You write down a prayer on a paper scroll, attach it to the prayer wheel, and let it spin by itself in the natural winds. In this way, the religious individual outsources the act of prayer itself to the spinning wheel, to an external object. The religious individual can go about their day without praying because they’ve transferred the act upon the wheel. They can enjoy the benefits of prayer without actually praying!

My outsourcing thought to John Oliver or even Slavoj Žižek himself, just like the Tibetan outsources the religious ritual to the object of the prayer wheel, makes it so that I can maintain my desired self-identity as an intellectual (or for the Tibetan as a religious individual) without having to do any of the work of intellectualizing (or praying).

Do you ever do this? Why is it important to realize when it happens?

Because when we let the world think for us, when we pass our most important work as human beings, which is to think for ourselves, onto the external object, whether it be the prayer wheel, the television, or the vertical screen, it creates a “cynical distance” between ourselves and ideology that cancels out real political action. Ideology grows stale, and yet we act as if we’re doing something about it by placing the work on some external object, thieving an enjoyment from it as if we’d created it ourselves.

This allows us to “act as if” we’re participating in progress, to “act as if” we’re becoming the religious individual we want to be, when in reality all we’re doing is floating along through a stale social reality.

This edition is about a TPUSA poster that says, “Tolerance is not a commandment,” stamped just above an illustration of Moses holding the Decalogue atop the blustery peak of Mt. Sinai.

This is propaganda.

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And you can tell it’s propaganda, not by what is said, but by what is left unsaid and why it’s left unsaid.

Let’s translate the unsaid syllogistically:

1. If “tolerance is not a commandment”

2. And I only have to live my life by Biblical commandments

3. Then, since the Bible doesn’t explicitly command me to be tolerant, I don’t have to live my life by a philosophy of tolerance.

Does it follow logically, then, that the statement “Tolerance is not a commandment” affirms intolerance?

If we’re guided by formal logic, then the answer is no. This leads us to an incredibly important distinction, however: “Tolerance is not a commandment” does not necessarily equal the affirmation of intolerance, which provides those who repeat it with the benefit of plausible deniability.

“Woah, woah, woah there buddy!“ says the Evangelical. “All I said was, ‘Tolerance is not a commandment!’ I didn’t say it’s okay to be intolerant did I?”

This is how propaganda works. Like fire needs oxygen, fuel and heat, all propaganda needs plausible deniability to breathe and spread. The messages are built with a blank space in mind, enigmatic and vague. The most important thing is for you to make a personal investment into saying the quiet part to yourself. It “interpellates” (Althusser) the person by summoning a personal response.

Statements like “Tolerance is not a commandment” don’t exist in a vacuum, but in a complex world of symbolic relations (e.g. religious rituals, social norms, commercial slogans, etc.). While logic plays a part in how we speak to each other, more often than not what really fills in the gap of the unspoken is the subjective logic of our own personal orientation towards metonymy.

The use of my syllogism above is actually rather foreign to how we understand one another. If we were to push the logic of “Tolerance is not a commandment” even further, we might say, “Well, okay, ‘tolerance is not a commandment’ is also not a commandment, and this organization believes I should frame my moral compass exclusively around the commandments. So, by their own logic, since ‘tolerance is not a commandment’ has nothing to do with any of the commandments, then it’s not advice I should listen to.”

And further...

“In fact, Christ himself said the most important commandment is to love my neighbor as much as I love myself. And, since I’m a wonderful and educated Christian, I know that this command is a reference to Leviticus, where just a few lines later God says that I should love the foreigner as though they were a native. With these things in mind, it would seem that a Christian organization who’s trying to convince me that tolerance is not a commandment is actually rather suspect!”

However, the people this statement grabs aren’t captured by it because they’re thinking it through logically, but because it connects on a level of self-identification. When they say in their heads what “Tolerance is not a commandment” hints at but doesn’t say, the speaker brings along other subjective components, like fantasy, desire, and enjoyment which allows them to integrate themselves into the space of the unsaid.

People who agree that “Tolerance is not a commandment” are often already unconsciously seeking a reason to affirm intolerance.

Much of what Turning Point USA bases their ideas on is rooted in the rhetoric of Great Replacement Theory. The last “Freedom Night in America” event I went to, which is a TPUSA sponsored event, featured Charlie Kirk talking to Nathan Finocchio about how Islam is trying to take over Europe, and about how the purpose of Islamic theology (although both Kirk and Finocchio denied it’s status as a religion) is to take over countries, either by force or by running for public office.

I’ll never forget Nathan Finocchio saying, “I know what multiculturalism is. Multiculturalism is the death of the dominant culture!”

Look it up. He said that.

This is Great Replacement Theory dog-whistling in its lowest pitch.

Of course, we know that Great Replacement Theory is a fantasy, created by white nationalists and based on debunked statistics and false claims.

“All of the black men are stealing the white women! The islamic community wants to take over the government and turn you into a terrorist! The transgender community is going to indoctrinate your kids and make them listen to techno music!”

And we can’t forget the classic: “The Mexicans are taking all the jobs away from white people!”

Soon, claims GRT, the white race will diminish into a fragile minority, at which point they will no longer hold a place of authorization and legitimacy in a meaningful order.

This fantasy is useful for those in power because it provides a way of controlling people. It provides enjoyment through a false sense of legitimacy, tucked into the folds of a special, authoritative, even divinely ordained place in the social order: they’ve been chosen to save the white race!

I’ll say it again, statements like “Tolerance is not a commandment” don’t just exist in a vacuum. They exist in a constellation of thoughts, fears, opinions, and rhetoric, all of which imposes itself upon the way the reader identifies with the claim. It’s an enigmatic message that leaves part of itself unsaid because they want you to invest yourself and all of your fantasies into its completion. This way, to quote Jacques Alain Miller, it’s not just a signifier “of” something, but a signifier “to“ someone. There’s something extremely powerful, here, about how the unspoken in propaganda plugs you into a group of people who tacitly share the secret of the unsaid. It’s as though you’re all drawn forth into a bond held together by an unspoken truth, a silent unity that holds the in-group together.

Propaganda aids in stitching this ideological fantasy together. It captures the desire of the viewer and mobilizes them to enforce some political position. The Christian who goes to church and sees his pastor has put up a poster that says, “Tolerance is not a commandment” and then thinks to themself, “Hey! That’s right! Tolerance is not a commandment! I don’t have to be tolerant if I don’t want to,” was likely already looking for a reason to affirm a yearning for intolerance in the first place.

For those with problems that they believe a less tolerant society would solve, like, for example, a man who feels like his voice in society is dwindling because immigrants are moving in from over seas, this may seem like the perfect solution — If only it weren’t for that pesky Bible! — That’s why the pastor’s role is so critical here as the one who puts up the poster.

As I stated above, this poster is designed to be sent to pastors who want to take on Turning Point USA’s mission. And when the pastor, the anointed representative of the Big Other himself (God), plasters posters all over the church’s bulletin board that say “Tolerance is not a commandment,” that pastor provides a divine fast-pass for his congregant to finally obtain an obscene enjoyment via the social transgression of intolerance, just without all that baggage of sin.

The Christian who believes this statement will likely argue this: “But tolerance is not a commandment! It’s not even a Christian value! Listen, I don’t know who you think you are, but the only Christian value I live my life by is L.O.V.E.! Love with a capital L! And I wouldn’t expect you to know this, but “love” and “tolerance” are not the same thing. I’m expected to love my neighbor, not tolerate them.”

We’re getting into the weeds here a little bit, but they’re ultimately correct. There is a semantic difference between “tolerance” and “love.”

Let’s look at two examples:

1. You don’t have to tolerate somebody doing drugs because you love them as a human being. You can try to force them into rehab out of love. Or you can say, “I love you too much to watch you do this to yourself. I’m leaving.”

2. I don’t have to tolerate listening to somebody’s political position if it disgusts me. I can walk away and not engage. But since I can separate their symbolic identity from their embodied existence in the natural world as a human being, I can love their humanity without loving their symbolic identity, as I decided upon doing with Charlie Kirk.

To love somebody or something is to care for them with a deep affection, to share with them your emotional bandwidth in the form of empathy, sympathy, compassion, and commitment.

To tolerate somebody is to allow their perpetuated existence, however they choose to practice that existence without trying to erase it.

But the subject is far more complex than it may seem. These two words might be different semantically, but they’re deeply connected dialectically. “Tolerance” and “love” are intertwined. They rely on one another in subtle ways for their own self-consolidation. Of course, propaganda (”Tolerance is not a commandment”) doesn’t ask you to think about these subtle complexities.

If you want to say, “I’m going to love you, but I’m not going to tolerate you,” the ladder part of the statement can only manifest to a certain extent before one violates the mandate of love’s definition.

When you force somebody into a rehab facility using aggression, you can do it out of love. Sure. I could even argue that, if I was killing myself slowly with heroin, I would want somebody to force me to stop because heroin is objectively deadly. We can prove this with scientific fact. Stopping me from using heroin would save my life. (I should know. I was addicted to heroin for almost a decade... As a small aside: forcing somebody to quit this way is not recommended.) As the person forcing me cares about human life, this would be an instance of loving me as they love themself.

But when you say, I’m going to force the Christian, Biblical, objective truth on these Muslims by, say, beating it into them with my knuckles until they change their ideology (as Pinochet tried to do to leftists in Chile during the early 70’s), because I love them so much that I’m not willing to tolerate their state of sin in worshipping a false idol, you cross a line. Whereas you can prove that using heroin is objectively harmful, nobody can prove the Bible holds an objective truth beyond feeling and belief. Thus, you’re equating entirely different concepts.

And when you cross that line, you’ll notice that suddenly a social construct is created, one which demands allegiance to a hierarchical framework based on standards that are in the last instance subjective.

But isn’t this exactly the point of “Tolerance is not a commandment”?

When you disavow tolerance completely, whether you like it or not, this tends to affirm intolerance. And to a certain extent you can’t really say, “I don’t have to tolerate. All I’m required to do is love” totally free of Biblical contravention, because by affirming intolerance one affirms exclusion and division, which reinforces and reinscribes existing power structures and majoritarian norms into social reality. This, in turn, gives white, Christian, heterosexual males a dominant place in American society, as demonstrated by a myriad of statistics.

Is this not sinful?

From Paul’s epistles: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3) When you reinforce social hierarchies based on religious belief by affirming intolerance through degrading the religious views of another, you push those who refuse to believe in what you believe into a space that is beneath yours in the hierarchy you’ve fortified, instead of putting them above yourself.

But, again, we’re in the weeds here.

Turning Point USA doesn’t care one bit about this logic. All they care about is interpolating you into their biopolitical machine so they can use your body, your vote, and ultimately your desire, to do their bidding. They do this by creating slogans like “Tolerance is not a commandment,” which, while they make zero theological sense, they impose themselves conceptually upon you as though they hold a place of social authority, and everybody wants to be noticed by social authority!

Propaganda notices you. It sees you, calls out to you. It knows what you’re already thinking, what you already desire. Slavoj Žižek (whose theory I use as a lens) calls this peculiar command the “injunction to enjoy.”

“Tolerance is not a commandment” speaks to people who already hear it, in a sense. From the position of social authority, a large multi-million dollar organization, with multiple pastors on staff and churches in their network, they command you to enjoy the social transgression of affirming intolerance, thus rein scribing a social order with a hierarchy that reinforces the position they already hold.