Season 3, Episode 1: What Could Go Wrong

In this episode, I explore more deeply the consequences of ignoring character in our leaders, in light of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Links:

https://twitter.com/departied

300,000 US COVID deaths could have been averted through vaccination, analysis finds: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/300000-us-covid-deaths-averted-vaccination-analysis-finds/story?id=84753284

Trump's faith advisor goes HEAVY METAL!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzIym0eZsH0

1/4/22 PRRI Study: https://www.prri.org/spotlight/anniversary-of-jan-6-insurrection/

Transcript

Departied - What Could Go Wrong

Hi, my name is Bill and I am a man without a party. Welcome to the Departied podcast. This is a place for those of you who may currently be politically homeless, but who haven’t forgotten your true home. Welcome in.

Season 3, Episode 1: What could go wrong.

Hi everyone. We'll, here I am, back in front of a mic, talking to you. It has been awhile.

For those of you who listened to either of the first two seasons of this podcast, you might logically conclude that the reason I started it was to share information. I really started it just because I was confused. I spent over a year, from 2019 till election day, podcasting my way through my own confusion. It wasn’t an attempt to make anyone else understand anything, it was an attempt to help me understand. I was kind of just talking to my confused self.

Some people I know think I over-reacted to the election of 2016, and that I’m still over-reacting. Others feel like, while I may have some good points, what has happened was all worth it now that Roe v Wade has been overturned. Full disclosure: I'm very happy Roe was overturned, because I’ve always thought it was a bad decision and the abortion question should be returned to the states, but I’m not as confident as I used to be about what happens next. I will hopefully share some thoughts on this in a future episode. But, as I said, this podcast wasn’t created as a way of giving people information, really, or of trying to change anyone’s mind. 

Maybe It was more just a cry for help. I’m glad some people listen to it, but at the end of the day it’s really just a baffled individual organizing his bafflement into a cogent form  and sharing it with you. Doing this has helped me. I hope you find it helpful too.

Let's catch up and, as they say, establish our baseline: the former President is a person I have never been able to admire. I blessedly didn't know as much about him in 2016 as I've been forced to learn since, but I knew he was a bully and a guy who proudly cheated on his many wives and that was enough for me. I thought that would be enough for most people. There was never one moment where I considered voting for him, and I naively thought that would be a majority opinion in my conservative Christian world. As a tribe we evangelicals were, or so I thought, very firm on the principle that Character matters. Were it possible, it would be fun to get in a time machine and go back to 1998 and ask any of us if character matters. For example, ask if it’s OK to support a leader with poor character but a good economy. Trust me, you'll get an earful. Just don't tell our past selves what's happened since. We won’t believe you.

To be fair, in the years leading up to 2016, the views of my tribe regarding character got a bit muddled and there was a sorting and reprioritizing of what aspects of character were the most important. In 2012 there were a number of evangelicals who wouldn’t vote for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon, but the biggest criticism that I heard of Mitt Romney in the years since his 2012 loss was that he wasn’t tough or nasty enough to do what it takes to win. His high scruples and honorable character were not a feature, they were a bug. Those character traits weren’t going to win the battles we wanted to win. Many of my friends in the evangelical right were pressing the panic button during the Obama administration, and particularly after the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage, and more frequently and increasingly more confidently, they began making the case that character never really mattered. In fact, good character can be a liability. What matters is results. Granted, this is  a utilitarian philosophy; If good character gets in the way of results, then good character is a liability, not an asset. If a person of bad character runs the country in a way that makes life better for the most people, isn’t that what’s important? Or, to narrow things down a bit, if a person with horrible character who is a tenacious and ruthless fighter, someone who disregards norms and sometimes even laws to make things better for our people and our issues, isn’t that what we’ve always wanted and needed? He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.

Evidently, in 2016 we really felt we needed an SOB. What could go wrong?

Some people answer that, really, all Presidents have bad character. I'm not sure what to do with that. To me it's just another form of gaslighting, a way of telling me that I'm nuts, that  I don't really have the discernment to tell the difference between the character of, say, a George W. Bush or a Barack Obama as compared to the reality TV celebrity real estate mogul from New York with his three wives, his affairs, his fake universities, his obsession with ratings and crowd sizes, his shady business practices, his business itself (still under his firm control while he was president) that profited off his office, and, of course, his narcissism, his abusive nature, and his absolute disregard - wait, that isn't the right word… His absolute disinterest in what's true versus what's false. My personal take on this is that if you can look at Donald Trump and compare him to almost any of our past Presidents, and not see a category difference in character, then maybe your moral compass needs adjustment. Or maybe you put your moral compass in that junk drawer out in your garage because you don’t really want to think about it.

The rebuttal to the George W. Bush comparison is that W got us into wars and a lot of people died and that's a lot worse than cheating on your wife or posting mean tweets. And that's a fair argument. It’s not a good argument, for reasons I will explain, but it’s a fair one. The people making this argument are right that starting an unjustified war, or running a justified war poorly, is a lot worse than those other things. But there are three problems with this argument that I'm going to spend the rest of this episode unpacking. 

The first problem is one of hypocrisy: the people making that argument in general wholeheartedly endorsed the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions of the early 2000s, even if they’ve conveniently retconned their own endorsement history. While I have many second thoughts now, I endorsed those invasions and I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t. Nearly everyone in my tribe endorsed them. We had been hit with a brutal terrorist attack on 911 and we were in the mood for protection, deterrence . . .  and payback. We were confident that we were on the side of the angels.

My first second thought on this was in 2004 when one of my friends was killed in action in Falujah. I still see his family at church, eighteen years later, and the pain and loss for them will never fully go away until they see their son, their brother again in the new heavens and new earth. 

My millionth second thought came upon meeting with some Afghan refugee families recently and reflecting upon how badly we screwed up our abandonment of their country, which we left status quo ante in the hands of the Taliban.

I'm really sorry. I think I was wrong.

The second problem I have with giving Donald Trump a character pass because really it’s only mean tweets, is that Donald Trump was the key player in the politicization of the Coronavirus pandemic response in this country. We've lost a million Americans to COVID. Now he certainly isn't responsible for every death or even most of those deaths. But I know at least five people in my immediate near circles who died of COVID and to my knowledge none of them were vaccinated. One of my friends told me about a funeral he attended of a dear Christian saint who had died of COVID. The funeral attendees included a number of people who had publicly chafed at taking simple precautions during a public health crisis such as wearing a mask. He pondered the probabilities; he wondered whether any of the people grieving over their dead friend and eulogizing his faithful life were the ones that infected him. And these are the good people.

I have no beef with anyone who decides they don’t want to take the vaccine. I understand that there are risks to all medications, and that it’s possible that the anti-vaxxers are right; maybe as one of those who have been vaxxed and boosted I will drop dead suddenly in a year or two, or perhaps I'll grow a third eye. And we've found that vaccination doesn’t necessarily keep a person from getting COVID. But there is plenty of evidence that vaccinated people have milder symptoms, lower viral loads, and die at a much lower rate than the unvaccinated. 

We've lost a million Americans to COVID. In March 2020 I don't think many of us thought that would happen. One million is a big number.  The former administration deserves the credit and our deep gratitude for accelerating the creation of the vaccines. The former President, however, did everything he could to downplay the disaster and to make sure people knew that he thought wearing a mask was for pussies. Pardon my language. There is a recent study that asserts that over 300,000 of the one million lost in our country might have been saved if they had been vaccinated. Let me quote from a recent ABC news report:

“The analysis used real-world data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The New York Times and was done by researchers from Brown School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Microsoft AI for Health. Their findings suggest that at least "every second person" who died from COVID since vaccines became available might have been saved by getting the shot.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/300000-us-covid-deaths-averted-vaccination-analysis-finds/story?id=84753284). 

But many people, perhaps you, don’t believe the studies, or think they are biased. Maybe you don't even believe that one million Americans died of COVID, and you still think that COVID is just a really bad flu. I would counter that to my knowledge I've never known anyone who died of the flu. But I know at least five people in my immediate circles who died of COVID, several others who died who were two degrees of separation from me, and others I know who didn't die but are permanently damaged by COVID and have to do things like hook up to oxygen every day. But, of course, anecdotes are not data. Let’s be generous to the suspicions about statistics; even if the truth is that “only” half that official number of Americans died, that’s still more people in two years than all the soldiers we lost in World War II. I'm not blaming the former President for all the losses. That wouldn't be fair, especially since most came after he very reluctantly left office. But I do blame his premeditated and skillful manipulation of the culture, in particular the culture of the evangelical right, that created the politicized opposition to public health precautions. This culture, skeptical of expertise, was a culture that already existed, but when one’s COVID response became yet another tribal/political marker, the die was cast, no pun intended. I will tell you that on the few occasions I discussed COVID protocols with an evangelical friend who was distrustful of vaccines, masks and social distancing, the focus semed always and entirely to be on themselves - their rights, their faith over their fear, their lack of concern for whether they might get sick or not. I rarely if ever heard a word of concern regarding the possibility of them infecting others. People will disagree with me but, from my point of view, this attitude never seemed particularly pro life. And I mean this sincerely: this was out of character. Something had changed. 

I’m old enough to remember when the models suggested that, with social distancing, masking, and the rest we might lose, what, 200,000 Americans, and many on the right were confidently mocking those models, because at the time we had “only” lost 20,000 people. I mean, what could go wrong?

I don’t know how many people were directly influenced by the former President to politicize their response to the virus. A study suggests that 300,000 Americans died who might have been saved if they had been vaccinated. Let’s be generous and say that only ⅙ of those 300,000 were influenced by the right wing messaging about vaccines which - ironically - was cultivated by Donald Trump, the guy who takes credit for the vaccines, trying to play down the pandemic and claim it to be a Democratic hoax. That’s still 50,000 people. That’s more than five times more American deaths than were caused by George W Bush’s wars. We have a wall in Washington memorializing the 50,000+  soldiers who died in Vietnam over a ten year period. 50l,000 is about 17 911s. And I think the 50,000 number I just proposed is smaller than the reality. How many people would still be alive if Donald Trump had seen the pandemic as a public health crisis that required putting aside partisan hackery and owning the libs to work through as a united people? But just going through this utilitarian argument, which also has the bad but common American trait of only thinking about American deaths, makes me want to take a shower. I’m not here to defend W and I’m certainly not here to be unfair to Donald Trump. 

Enough, for the moment, about COVID. Let me get to the third, and biggest, problem I have with the assertion that bad character is not an issue, or even that it is at times necessary to get things done: that it is more of a strength than a weakness. Here’s my problem: the biggest display of a category difference in the character of the former President to every other President in my lifetime, and maybe every other president ever,  is what happened after he was voted out.

My last podcast aired on October 30th, 2020, four days before the 2020 election. I had intended to perhaps continue podcasting, especially if the incumbent won (and I thought he had a pretty good chance of winning). But he was claiming fraud even before the votes were counted - heck, even before election day, and because he is an amazing and shameless - again, using the word "liar" doesn't really work… he is an amazing and shameless and absolutely relentless weaver of stories to speak his desired reality into existence - kind of like a word of faith preacher -  this may be, by the way, his primary skill, but I digress. Before long many other people began to echo his claims. I saw pictures of Christians praying outside of polling places. I heard groups demanding that all votes be counted in states where he was running behind, while ironically demanding that the vote count be halted in states where he was narrowly leading, and I really began to wonder if people understand how voting and elections work. It’s not like a sport with a game clock, and its not like watching a stock tick up and trying to decide when to sell. Back when things were normal we just always assumed you count all the votes.

The potential answers to the question "what could go wrong" began to multiply.

I saw a key spiritual advisor to the President deliver an absolute barn burner of a public prayer, at times speaking in tongues,  invoking the aid of international angelic forces to secure the election for the incumbent. You’ve got to watch it some time. I recommend the version of it that’s been set to Heavy Metal - just search YouTube for “Trump's faith advisor goes HEAVY METAL!”  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzIym0eZsH0). This spiritual advisor is Paula White, the female Word of Faith preacher that Trump put on the White house payroll. I only mention that she’s a female because she was hired and paid out of our taxes by the guy who was elected in large part by people who despise teacher and author Beth Moore because she’s a female who sometimes teaches men and women aren't supposed to do that. That is their firm Biblical principle and they are sticking to it, until they aren’t. I once got lambasted on twitter by some conservative Christian believers because I had the temerity to say something nice about Beth Moore. They all, by the way, think Trump is great.

I spent four years trying to understand the phenomenon of this man's sway over so many, and, while I can't say I’m surprised, I'm still baffled at how many people have bought into this new stolen election narrative. Because it's not new. He was setting up the same narrative back in 2016 leading up to that election. But back then the stakes were lower because he wasn't the most powerful man in the world. He didn’t have his own Executive branch, military, nuclear arsenal, and firm control of one of our major political parties. And, of course, in 2016 he won.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for any time at all, you know how skeptical I am of conspiracy theories. Many people are claiming to have solid evidence that the election was stolen. Funny, you’d think Fox News or even one of the more mainstream news outlets would want to pick up on that. Ideology aside, it would be the story of the century, and surely if there was a widespread effort on the part of the Democrats to steal the election you would think an enterprising journalist or someone in law enforcement could cement their place in history, and probably get rich in the process, by getting just one person to flip and expose the whole thing. Who wouldn’t want to be our generation’s Woodward and Bernstein? You’d think… if it was a widespread conspiracy, how many people would need to be involved? How many would need to keep it secret? Five hundred? Ten thousand? How likely is that?

Well, people respond, it was more that the drop boxes and mail in voting made it easier for Democrats to cheat. In other words, Trump didn’t lose those swing states due to an organized conspiracy. He lost in the vote count because Democrats made it easier to commit fraud. People who buy into this line of thinking are making, I think, the naive mistake of assuming that if voter fraud was easy only Democrats would commit voter fraud. I tend to think that the level of fraud would be balanced out on a bipartisan basis, but that’s because I think there are bad actors on both sides of the aisle and I don’t think the Republicans are on the side of the angels. As I mentioned earlier, I used to.

Of course, if you think the election was stolen and Donald Trump really won in a landslide I’m not going to be able to change your mind. You’re probably just hate-listening to this podcast at this point anyway. I’m still glad you’re here.

Before 2020 I never knew about all the red letter dates in the electoral process. Did you? I remember being blissfully ignorant of the “safe harbor” deadline which occurs 6 days before the state’s electors officially vote; this is when all election-related disputes must be resolved. That's six days before the Monday after the second Wednesday in December, which was December 14 in 2020. That's the day the real election happens. That’s the day the electors, who are the people we really vote for in Presidential elections, actually vote. I also didn’t know about the fourth Wednesday in December which is the deadline for the electoral votes to be received by “all relevant parties” - meaning the President of the United States Senate, who has the day job of being Vice President of the United States. That was Mike Pence in 2020. And, of course, there is January 6, which is the date Congress ceremonially counts and approves the electoral votes. I never knew about these dates before - I never had to. I have a bad feeling that in future elections these dates are going to be very much on our minds. In 2020 the approach of these dates was like the footsteps of doom as the narrative of a stolen election took over. The wise minds kept reassuring us that any minute now our norms and traditions would kick in, Trump would concede, and there would be a peaceful transition of power. It all ended, of course, in political violence and Trump supporters rioting at and inside the Capital.

I didn't know that was going to happen, but I knew Donald Trump was never going to concede. Funny story: during the 2012 election some on the right expressed fear that Barak Obama would refuse to leave office if Mitt Romney beat him. We were really concerned about that; it was just the kind of thing those power hungry, ruthless, amoral Democrats would do. A Republican would never, of course, do that, because we believe in the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and, because we're good people.

Life is funny.

This is, as I said earlier, the third problem I have with those who argue that character really isn’t important, only results. It’s a problem, because people with bad character do things that people with good character don't, such as refusing to concede an election and commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump's stolen election narrative and attempt to interrupt the counting of the votes on January 6, 2020, resulting in a sacking of our Capita is the worst thing any President has done in my lifetime and maybe in our history, at least when it comes to their oath to preserve the constitution and protect our representative democracy. He tried to overturn an election he lost and disenfranchise millions of Americans 

I’ll say it again: it’s the worst thing any president has done to our democracy in my lifetime. And we will be very fortunate indeed if the worst consequences of this selfish, destructive decision by our former President aren’t ahead of us. 

Sometimes I feel like a bit of a crank. I can almost hear people thinking "are you still going on about the Trump administration, the 2020 election, and character? Give it a rest!"

I can't tell you, I can't express how badly I want to give it a rest. But I can't because I'm not talking about a past event. I'm talking about now. The false narrative of the stolen election is doing horrific damage to our country now. The selfishness, narcissism, nihilism, and - not just lies, but the relentless, ruthless, seemingly unstoppable assault on the very idea that truth exists at all - this has led our former President and his many enablers, allies and followers to continue to pursue this path. People have already been injured and died for it. The threat of political violence is growing. This all is the result of many of us deciding that character never really mattered.

I mean, what could go wrong?

This is bad. All of this, the whole dirty business from 2015 forward (and really before then) has dire implications for our country and, for those of you like me who love Jesus and love the church, it has damaged and diminished the evangelical witness in America and dishonored the Lord we claim to love more than our politics, in ways we're only starting to see.  I’ll have more to say about this in later episodes.

Proverbs 29:12 in the BIble says that “If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials will be wicked.” Donald Trump, from the beginning of his political career, has both listened to and perpetrated lies. Non stop. The reason he does this is a character issue. He doesn't really care about the Truth. Even if you support him surely you must see this. And this sickness, this not caring about the truth, has infected almost the entire Republican party, a party in which in most places around the country fealty to the stolen election lie is the cost of getting yourself elected. More heartbreaking for me, it has infected many of his followers in the church. If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials will be wicked; if he is re-elected in 2024, and I expect him to be, there will be no more grown ups in the room - you know, all the “good people” who will speak to the press (anonymously, of course, or when selling a book) about how they prevented his worst impulses. Even those people, weak as they are, will be gone. Most of his supporters in our churches will believe they are on the side of the angels. And in our churches we'll teach about Jesus, the one who is the truth, while simultaneously believing the most ridiculous conspiracy theories about Italian Satellites and Hug Chavez and 2,000 mules and voting machines.

https://www.prri.org/spotlight/anniversary-of-jan-6-insurrection/

This next quote is from a January 2022 Public Religion Research Institute Study

“A majority of white evangelical Protestants (60%) and around four in ten white Catholics (40%) and white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants (37%) believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Smaller shares of other Christians (29%), Hispanic Catholics (19%), Black Protestants (18%), and religiously unaffiliated Americans (17%) agree.”

“Oh, that can’t be true,” you might be saying. And there is evidence that many people identify as “evangelical” more as a political tribal marker than as a faith marker. And this study is from January, which was seven months ago. So let’s be generous and say it’s only half that, 30%. That’s about ⅓ of the members, teachers, leaders in your neighborhood evangelical church who believe that the election was stolen. As time has gone on and I’ve watched the confident assertions of the stop the steal people melt away like cotton candy in a rainstorm, these numbers still seem to be holding. They are holding because they aren’t based on evidence; they are based on one fact: it is the one fact that Donald Trump keeps repeating, over and over, and it’s the fact that, as far as he’s concerned, he really won. As far as he’s concerned, he really won. That’s his evidence. Donald Trump doesn’t need facts. He is a word of faith preacher, his religion is himself, and - it breaks my heart to say it - a lot of people who follow Jesus believe what Donald Trump says, against all evidence. But wait a minute: does he himself actually believe it? I think one mistake people make is thinking in traditional terms regarding Donald Trump’s grasp of truth or falsehood. I can’t read his mind, but I don’t think those concepts really matter to him.

And we wonder why Gen Z and Millennials are abandoning the faith. It must be because they are liberals and something about atheist college professors. It can’t be because we’ve mixed political idolatry and verifiable untruths into the faith. 

It can't be us. We're good people.

If you’re my age you remember the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” movie. At the climax of the movie there’s a shootout. It is fantastic. It is one of those crazy, 1970s movie shootouts, and it happens on a busy city street packed with panicked, screaming civilians. Harry finally wounds the criminal he’s trying to arrest. The criminal is lying on his back, looking up at Harry and also side-eyeing his gun, which is within reach. Harry looks at him and says:

“I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? To tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But bein’ that this is a 44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and it would blow your head clean off, you got to ask yourself one question “do I feel lucky”. Well do ya punk?

The punk thinks about it for several tense seconds, and then resigns himself to his fate and withdraws his hand from his gun. Harry picks up the gun and starts walking off. At that point the wounded criminal shouts after him.

“Hey - I gots to know”

Harry turns, faces him, smiles, points his 44 magnum at his head and pulls the trigger. 

<click> 

Turns out he was out of bullets after all. Harry walks off laughing…”

To be honest, I don't know if there are any more bullets in the 44 magnum of the 2020 stolen election narrative. In all the excitement I kind of lost track. But if we’re not careful, our democracy is going to have its head blown clean off. 

Do I feel lucky?

Do you?

I started out in 2016 not understanding. My inability to truly fathom what was causing all the craziness of evangelical devotion to Donald Trump ramped up during the pandemic, and hit a peak after the 2020 election, the stolen election narrative, through December and into early January. I really was still trying to understand.

Then January 6th happened. (pause)

On January 6 I decided I didn't want to understand

And my podcast went silent as a result.

But now I'm back. Thank you so much for listening. I hope to put out another episode soon. If you want to discuss this episode, or really anything, you can email me at bill@departiedpodcast.com. 

I will leave you with another Bible verse from Proverbs 29 verse 2. This verse is about character.

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. 

God bless.