It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Christian nationalism and biblical literalism independently predict conspiracy thinking, study finds
2023/06/11
A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are independently associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. When people believed in both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism, their distrust of government officials increased significantly. The findings, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, provide insight into the sociocultural factors that contribute to the spread and persistence of conspiracy beliefs in certain populations.
The researchers were motivated by the growing concern over the harmful effects of conspiracy theories, such as the spread of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine and the belief in the stolen election narrative, which led to the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol. They sought to better understand the factors that contribute to the endorsement of conspiracy theories within specific religious and ideological contexts.
Biblical literalism refers to an approach to interpreting religious texts, such as the Bible, in a strictly literal and word-for-word manner. It involves the belief that the Bible is an accurate historical and scientific account, and every passage should be understood as directly and precisely true.
Christian nationalism, on the other hand, is a political ideology that combines Christianity with a sense of national identity and seeks to establish a close relationship between religion and the state. It views the nation as fundamentally rooted in Christian values and principles, and it often advocates for policies and laws based on those beliefs.
“Like many, we were deeply affected by the sharp divisions, fueled by conspiracy theories, that arose around COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election,” explained study author Brooklyn Evann Walker, an instructor of political science at Hutchinson Community College.
“We noted that conspiracy theories related to both COVID-19 and the Big Lie gained traction in religious communities that tended towards biblical literalism and Christian nationalism, leading us to wonder if either of these two aspects of American religion (biblical literalism and Christian nationalism) were related to a broader tendency for Americans to think in conspiratorial ways.”
To conduct the study, the researchers used data from the 2019 wave of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears (CSAF), which included measures of Christian nationalism, biblical literalism, and various demographic variables. The survey was administered online to a nationally representative sample of American adults, resulting in a final sample size of 1,219.
The survey asked respondents to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with the idea that the government is concealing information about different events. These events included conspiracy theories related to government cover-ups of extraterrestrial life, the belief that the 9/11 attacks were not solely carried out by terrorists but involved government involvement or a cover-up, belief in a secretive group or organization that controls world events (e.g. the Illuminati), and more.
The measure of conspiracy thinking including both popularized conspiracy theories as well as one contrived event, allowing the researchers to assess respondents’ adherence to a generalized conspiracy mindset rather than just specific theories.
The study found that there is a positive association between Christian nationalism and belief in conspiracy theories. In other words, individuals who held stronger Christian nationalist beliefs (e.g. “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation”) were more likely to endorse conspiracy thinking. This relationship held even when considering the fictional conspiratorial event introduced in the survey, indicating a general propensity for conspiracy thinking.
Furthermore, the study suggested that biblical literalism plays a role in shaping conspiracy thinking. Those who adhered to a literal interpretation of the Bible were more likely to adopt conspiracy thinking, and biblical literalism was found to amplify the effect of Christian nationalism on conspiracy thinking. This suggests that the elevation of religious authority over scientific sources and an anti-elitist sentiment within the Christian nationalist identity contribute to the adoption of conspiracy theories.
“Christian nationalism links being Christian to being American. In the view of many Christian nationalists, this linkage is threatened by secularization and other social changes. Biblical literalism is the belief that each word in the Bible should be accepted as God’s word spoken directly to readers, not to be filtered through religious elites,” Walker told PsyPost.
“Using survey data, we find that the sense of a threatened nation inherent in Christian nationalism and the anti-elite tendencies in biblical literalism amplify conspiracy thinking, and that the two have especially strong effects when they occur together. We conclude that Christian nationalist and biblical literalist support of COVID-19 and the 2020 election conspiracy theories are not a one-off; Christian nationalists and biblical literalists are likely to buy into future conspiracy theories, too.”
Importantly, the findings held even after controlling for demographic variables such as race, gender, age, education, and political leanings. The researchers found that conservative ideology was correlated with conspiracy thinking, while attending religious services had a negative relationship, possibly due to the social capital and trust-building aspects of religious engagement.
“We were surprised at the effect sizes we observed. When occurring together, biblical literalism and Christian nationalism had a much stronger effect than well-established predictors of conspiracy thinking, like education,” Walker said. “It’s also important not to lump all religious activity together — religious service attendance was consistently associated with less conspiracy thinking.”
However, the researchers acknowledge some limitations in their study. They were not able to account for certain psychological factors related to how people perceive and interpret information, such as the need to find patterns among events. They also note that their measure of conspiracy thinking focused on specific conspiracy beliefs and may not capture the full range of conspiracy thinking.
“We measured conspiracy thinking by respondents’ agreement with eight different conspiracy theories,” Walker explained. “Social scientists have developed other measures of conspiracy thinking that don’t rely on respondents’ knowledge of specific conspiracy theories. Replicating our models with one of these more general measures would certainly strengthen the findings.”
“Also, we can’t stop with diagnosing the problem — we need to think deeply about how Christian nationalists and biblical literalists might become less susceptible to conspiracy thinking.”
Note I didn’t say that “biblical manhood” (how that is defined is an open question, hence the quotation marks) is a scam. I said that the industry around it is a scam
And by industry, I am referring to a definition like this one in the Cambridge Dictionary: “something that is produced or is available in large quantities and makes a lot of money.”
Of course, not everything that’s produced or available in large quantities and makes a lot of money is a scam. So why would I say that the particular industry around “biblical manhood” (as well as “biblical womanhood”) is a scam?
First, because, as noted above, what constitutes “biblical manhood/womanhood” is not only not clearly defined, but its definition is highly contested. The term originated, after all, in order to make a boundary, strike a mark and create a brand as a reactionary move amid the culture wars. Furthermore, the tropes most commonly invoked within the discourse around “biblical manhood” distort (or even misrepresent) what the Bible teaches about virtue and character for men as well as women.
David wasn’t a warrior wearing armor; he was a shepherd with a slingshot guided by the Lord. Samson’s strength came not from bench presses and leg lifts, but from the Spirit of the Lord. Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 16:13 to “act like men” means in the original Greek to be courageous, and it applies equally to men and women, just as all of the qualities of Christlike character do.
Second, just as women’s fashion magazines exist by creating needs and desires women wouldn’t have otherwise and then offering the “solutions” to these manufactured needs, Christian publications can also operate on similar capitalistic and consumeristic principles. Certain topics — those that get at our core identities and callings, in particular — are more prone to manipulation. This vulnerability derives from basic human nature, but when a spiritual or religious layer is added on top of those basic human needs, the potential for exploitation rises considerably.
Stereotypes around manhood and womanhood are rooted in both nature and culture. Like all stereotypes, they emerge out of something truthful. But the calling of the Christian transcends culture. The church is the last place where cultural stereotypes should be upheld as biblical truth. The worship leader who doesn’t like football shouldn’t feel out of place in the church because of that. The sales manager who is a godly husband, father and Bible teacher shouldn’t feel less manly because he doesn’t enjoy the outdoors. The IT guy who does most of the cooking is just as masculine as the one who doesn’t
Steve Bezner, pastor of Houston Northwest Church, shared these examples with me in a recent conversation. He said that once he saw that machismo was being confused with spiritual maturity, it changed the way he taught and ministered to men in his congregation. Rather than relying on the warrior as a metaphor for manhood, he said, he extols the character of Christ in all its complexity and finds the men in his church doing better as a result.
(Photo by Jon Tyson/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Certainly, the line between offering a creative work or product and becoming an industry can be fine. Lessons and sermons on character and godliness in all our roles are good and necessary. I think in particular of someone who is teaching principles of manhood to prison inmates or the fatherless and, in doing so, changing lives in important ways.
Moreover, the people who speak, write and teach these things are certainly worthy of their pay. The fact that something costs something doesn’t make it an industry.
But messages that gather into a storm of books, conferences, videos, courses, workbooks, workshops, websites, podcasts and statements are inarguably an industry. Furthermore, when the industry is fronted by celebrities and personalities (often the sock puppets of bigger names behind the curtain), the message risks being lost behind the messenger. And when the people behind the industry don’t live up to or even believe the message themselves, then it’s a scam. Even if the message is true. Like all machines, industries can eat people alive. And such machines distort or destroy the gospel message itself.
In my recent book, “The Evangelical Imagination,” I devote an entire chapter to the notion of “improvement,” showing how this early modern concept contributed to the rise of the self-help movement in the 19th century and has spilled over into Christian thinking and practice today. Many of the publications centered on “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood” are just a continuation of this Victorian (and secular) movement.
Indeed, as Daniel Vaca shows in “Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America,” over the course of the 20th century the publishing industry created a “commercial religion,” one in which publishers and booksellers create consumers’ desires along with the authors and celebrities constructed to fill those needs. What follows is a vicious cycle that cultivates the demand that perpetuates the supply.
Thus arose the “evangelical industrial complex,” a term coined by Skye Jethani in 2012. The phrase alludes to a similar one made famous by President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 speech warning of the unintended consequences of America’s unrestrained expansion of the military and its self-perpetuating arms industry: the military industrial complex. Both the military industrial complex and the current-day evangelical version are driven by systemic economic forces, Jethani explains. In the case of the evangelical industrial complex, that driving economic power is the Christian publishing industry.
And the unintended consequence in this case is the endless proliferation of images of manhood (and womanhood) that ever expand an appetite they cannot satisfy yet lead further and further away from the one and only One who can.
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
How Christian Reconstructionism influences US politics: scholar
A Christian chruch service on July 8, 2024 (Paul Shuang/Shutterstock.com)
Christian Reconstructionism is a theological and political movement within conservative Protestantism that argues society should be governed by biblical principles, including the application of biblical law to both personal and public life.
It was born from the ideas of theologian R. J. Rushdoony, an influential Armenian-American Calvinist philosopher, theologian and author. In his 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” Rushdoony argued that Old Testament laws should still apply to modern society. He supported the death penalty not only for murder but also for offenses listed in the text such as adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, witchcraft and idolatry.
The movement helped knit together a network of theologians, activists and political thinkers who shared a belief that Christians are called to “take dominion” over society and exercise authority over civil society, law and culture.
These ideas continue to resonate across many areas of American religious and political life. Origins of Christian Reconstructionism
Rushdoony’s ideas were born from a radical interpretation of Reformed Christianity – a branch of Protestant Christianity that follows the teachings of John Calvin and other reformers. It emphasizes God’s authority, the Bible as the ultimate guide and salvation through God’s grace rather than human effort.
Rushdoony’s ideas led him to found The Chalcedon Foundation in 1965, a think tank and publishing house promoting Christian Reconstructionism. It served as the movement’s main hub, producing books, position papers, articles and educational materials on applying biblical law to modern society.
It helped train Greg Bahnsen, an Orthodox Presbyterian theologian, and Gary North, a Christian reconstructionist writer and historian, both of whom went on to take key leadership roles in the movement.
At the heart of reconstructionism lies the conviction that politics, economics, education and culture are all arenas where divine authority should reign. Secular democracy, they argued, was inherently unstable, a system built on human opinion rather than divine truth.
These ideas were, and remain, deeply controversial. Many theologians, including conservatives within the Reformed tradition, rejected Rushdoony’s argument that ancient Israel’s civil laws should apply in modern states. Christian dominionism and different networks
Nonetheless, reconstructionist ideas grew as people who more broadly believed in dominionism began to align with it. Dominionism is a broader ideology advocating Christian influence over culture and politics without requiring literal enforcement of biblical law.
The broad network of those who believe in Christian dominionism includes several approaches: Rushdoony’s reconstructionism, which provides the theological foundation, and charismatic kingdom theology.
Charismatic kingdom theology, which emerged in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, teaches that believers – empowered by the Holy Spirit – should shape politics, culture and society before Christ’s return.
Unlike reconstructionism, it emphasizes prophecy and spiritual authority rather than formal biblical law; it seeks influence over institutions such as government, education and culture.
Taken together, I argue that these strands have reinforced one another, creating a larger movement of thinkers and activists than any single approach could achieve alone. From reconstructionism to the New Apostolic Reformation
Christian reconstructionist and dominionist ideas gained wider popularity through C. Peter Wagner, a leading charismatic theologian who helped shape the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by adapting elements of Christian Reconstructionism. NAR is a charismatic movement that builds on dominionist ideas by emphasizing the use of spiritual gifts and apostolic leadership to shape society.
Wagner emphasized spiritual warfare, prophecy and modern apostles taking control of seven key areas – family, church, government, education, media, business and the arts – to reshape society under biblical authority. This is known as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.”
Wagner’s dominion theology, however, adapts Christian Reconstructionism to a charismatic context, transforming the goal of a Christian society into a spiritually driven movement aimed at influencing culture and governments worldwide. Doug Wilson and homeschooling
Another key bridge between reconstructionism and contemporary dominionist thought is Doug Wilson, a pastor and author in Moscow, Idaho.
He has promoted Christian schools, traditional family roles and living out a “Christian worldview” in everyday life, bringing reconstructionist ideas into new areas of society.
Through his writings, teaching and leadership within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – the CREC – network, Wilson encourages a vision of society shaped by Christian values, connecting reconstructionist thought to contemporary cultural engagement.
Wilson’s publishing house, Canon Press, and his classical school movement have brought these ideas into thousands of Christian homes and classrooms across the U.S. His local congregation – the Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho – numbers around 1,300.
The Christian homeschooling movement offers parents a curriculum steeped in reformed theology and resistance to secular education. Enduring influence
Some critics warn that the fusion of dominionist and reconstructionist theology with political action can weaken pluralism and democratic norms by pressuring laws and policies to reflect a single religious worldview. They argue that even moderated forms of these visions challenge the separation of church and state. They risk undermining the rights of religious minorities, nonreligious citizens and others who do not share the movement’s beliefs.
Supporters frame their mission as the renewal of a moral society, one in which divine authority provides the foundation for human flourishing.
Even among those unfamiliar with Rushdoony, the political and theological patterns he helped shape remain visible in modern evangelical activism and the ongoing debates over religion’s place in American public life.
MAGA claims of 'massive religious revival' meticulously debunked
CEO of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk reacts as she speaks during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 18, 2025. REUTERS/Cheney Orr
Christian nationalist themes were alive and well at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest 2025 gathering at the Phoenix Convention Center, which found Vice President JD Vance declaring that the United States "always will be a Christian nation." But that claim was debunked by MS NOW's Steve Benen, who noted what the Founding Fathers had to say on the subject — for example, John Adams, in 1797, writing that "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," and Thomas Jefferson saying, in 1802, that the U.S. Constitution created "a wall of separation between church and state."
Another prominent Christian nationalist theme at AmericaFest 2025 is that the U.S. is seeing a widespread evangelical renaissance, which is also what the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. claimed during the 1980s. But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in an article published on January 7, counters that the U.S. is moving in a more "secular" direction — not converting to evangelical Christian fundamentalism in huge numbers.
"For decades now," Marcotte explains, "the Christian Right has been the most powerful and influential force in the GOP, and yet even by their standards, this marked a dramatic shift toward the theocratic impulse. From a purely rational perspective, this is bad politics. Only 23 percent of Americans identify as evangelicals. Trump was able to win in 2024 only by convincing large numbers of people outside of evangelical Christianity that he has a secular worldview. This was aided by the fact that he quite clearly doesn't believe all the Christian language, both coded and overt, his aides coax him to say."
The Salon journalist continues, "But none of that seems to register with MAGA leadership right now. They've convinced themselves — or at least are trying to persuade their donors and followers — that the U.S. is undergoing a massive religious revival. Right-wing media has been pushing the view that huge numbers of Americans, especially young Americans, are converting to fundamentalist Christianity."
Right-wing media, Marcotte observes, are claiming that the murder of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in September is fueling a "tidal wave of Americans, especially young Americans, discovering or returning to Christianity." But that "imaginary religious awakening," she stresses, isn't materializing.
"There is no evidence-based reason to believe there's a religious revival among the young that is about to create massive election windfalls for Republicans," Marcotte writes. "On the contrary, a December report from Pew Research found that, 'on average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans. Today's young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago.'" Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Earliest mention of ‘Yahweh’ found in archaeological dump
The artifact, less than 1 inch in length and width, and known as a curse tablet, may spur renewed debate on the dating of biblical events, especially those told in the Book of Exodus.
This curse tablet was discovered by Mount Ebal, which is near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Photo by Michael C. Luddeni
(RNS) — An ancient tablet discovered near the Palestinian city of Nablus may contain the earliest known mention of God’s name in proto-alphabetic Hebrew.
Scott Stripling, director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, announced the discovery of the lead tablet Thursday (March 24).
He said it could push back the written record of the name “Yahweh” a couple of centuries earlier, to at least 1200 B.C. and perhaps as early as 1400 B.C.
The finding may also spur renewed debate on the dating of biblical events, especially those told in the Book of Exodus. A peer-reviewed article is in process.
The artifact, less than 1 inch in length and width and known as a curse tablet, also recalls the account of Joshua building an altar nearby, which Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal excavated in the 1980s.
The curse tablet was discovered near Mount Ebal, also called the Mount of the Curse in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. Stripling found it in a dump site, part of the structure Zertal identified as Joshua’s altar. Stripling said the finding was a confirmation of the biblical account.
In recent years, Stripling also announced the discovery of a Tabernacle platform during his ongoing excavations at biblical Shiloh.
Scott Stripling announces the discovery of an ancient lead tablet, March 24, 2022, in Houston. Photo by Jerry Pattengale
But the 2-centimeter-square (.78-inch) amulet may be the signature discovery of a lifetime. Professor Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa said this type of discovery is made only once a millennia.
Galil deciphered the hidden internal text with another paleographer, Pieter Gert van der Veen of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. A release from the Associates for Biblical Research press said they employed advanced tomographic scans to recover the hidden text.
The inscription reads: “Cursed, cursed, cursed — cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”
Stripling was joined by Museum of the Bible CEO Harry Hargrave, who noted, “This little artifact helpsus understand better the history, story, and impact of the Bible — all within one square inch.”
Gabriel Barkay had helped Stripling learn the wet-sifting technique in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Barkay made the remarkable discovery in 1979 of the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, which contain the earliest biblical text discovered (circa seventh century B.C.).
The Mount Ebal tablet’s text provides context outside the biblical canon but sheds light on the historical context six centuries earlier.
“Our discovery of a Late Bronze Age inscription stunned me,” Stripling said.
The dirt around the area of the discovery was discarded over 30 years ago. It had been dry-sifted before Stripling’s decision to run it through again using the wet-sifting technique.
Ancient curse inscription deciphered from tablet discovered during archaeological wet sift on Mt. Ebal
High-tech scans reveal ancient Hebrew script, centuries older than any other known tablets.
HOUSTON — Today, the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) announced the discovery of a formulaic curse recovered on a small, folded lead tablet. The defixio came to light in December 2019 when archaeologist Scott Stripling, Director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, led an ABR team to wet sift the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s excavations (1982–1989) on Mt. Ebal.
The ancient Hebrew inscription consists of 40 letters and is centuries older than any known Hebrew inscription from ancient Israel. Stripling formed a collaboration with four scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and two epigraphers (specialists in deciphering ancient texts): Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa. The scientists employed advanced tomographic scans to recover the hidden text. In collaboration with Stripling, Galil and van der Veen deciphered the proto-alphabetic inscription, which reads as follows:
Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW.
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.
THE LAW OF 3 (THREE) IN THIS CASE "CURSED" IS SAID THREE TIMES BY THREE TIMES MAKING NINE, THE ACTUAL POWER OF THE AMULET REGARDLESS OF THE GODS NAME OR APPLICATION (WHICH IS ONLY TWICE) EP
According to Stripling, “These types of amulets are well known in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but Zertal’s excavated pottery dated to the Iron Age I and Late Bronze Age, so logically the tablet derived from one of these earlier periods. Even so, our discovery of a Late Bronze Age inscription stunned me.”
Almost immediately Galil recognized the formulaic literary structure of the inscription: “From the symmetry, I could tell that it was written as a chiastic parallelism.” Reading the concealed letters proved tedious, according to van der Veen, “but each day we recovered new letters and words written in a very ancient script.”
Daniel Vavrik and his colleagues from Prague ensured the accuracy of the raw data which the team interpreted. According to Deuteronomy 27 and Joshua 8, Mt. Ebal was the mountain of the curse. Joshua 8:30 indicates that Joshua built an altar on Mt. Ebal. The defixio derived from previously excavated and discarded material from a structure Zertal believed was Joshua’s altar.
An academic, peer-reviewed article is in process and will be published later in 2022. The collaborative team consists of Scott Stripling, Gershon Galil, Ivana Kumpova, Jaroslav Valach, Pieter Gert van der Veen, Daniel Vavrik, and Michal Vopalensky.
For more information, media should contact the collaborative partners as follows:
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Religion News Service or Religion News Foundation.
Saturday, March 07, 2026
Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War
An Irgun poster from 1931 showing a map labelled “Land of Israel” covering the borders of both Mandatory Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan, which the Irgun claimed in their entirety for a future Jewish state – Public Domain
Israel and the United States have launched a war of aggression against Iran that has spread across the Persian Gulf and beyond, with Israel also attacking Lebanon and invading with ground troops. The brutal assassination of Iran’s supreme Shia religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, along with his wife, daughter and granddaughter set the stage for the unfolding zealotry. A coordinated assault that combines airstrikes on so-called military targets, though civilian targets have been hit causing widespread casualties.
The war has been framed by its architects as a defensive necessity, but the rhetoric reveals a deeper truth: this is biblical bloodlust dressed as geopolitics, with Zionist expansionism and Christian Zionist end-times zealotry driving the aggression toward the twisted fantasy of Greater Israel. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee set the tone in a February podcast with Tucker Carlson, declaring that Israel has a “biblical right” to vast swaths of the Middle East—from the Nile to the Euphrates—and adding, “It would be fine if they took it all.” This is not fringe rhetoric; it is the ideological engine of a fascist international that sees the Iran war as Armageddon’s prelude, with Trump cast as a modern Cyrus the Great anointed to usher in the apocalypse.
The vision of Greater Israel has deep roots in Zionist thought, evolving from early nationalist aspirations into a militant territorial program. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, sketched expansive territorial ambitions in his private diaries of the 1890s, envisioning a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine that could stretch from the “Brook of Egypt” to the Euphrates, encompassing parts of modern Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. While Herzl’s public focus in “Der Judenstaat” (1896) was pragmatic—securing any viable territory as a refuge from European antisemitism—his private notes reveal a broader imperial dream shaped by the colonial spirit of the era.
Map of Greater Israel
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism in the 1920s, radicalized this vision. His “Iron Wall” doctrine called for a fortified Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, including Transjordan, rejecting partition and insisting on military strength to “colonize” the land. Jabotinsky’s followers, including Menachem Begin, laid the foundation for Israel’s Likud party, whose 1977 platform declared: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The 1967 Six-Day War transformed this ideology into reality, with the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and Golan Heights hailed by Religious Zionists as divine redemption.
Today, ultranationalists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich openly advocate full annexation and Palestinian expulsion, while Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly framed his political mission as “historic and spiritual,” declaring in multiple speeches that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people by divine right and that settling “Judea and Samaria” is a sacred duty to fulfill biblical promises. This is no mere political posture; it is a messianic commitment that drives the current war of aggression on Iran and the relentless push for territorial expansion.
Christian Zionism provides the theological rocket fuel for this expansionist project. Rooted in 19th-century dispensationalism—popularized by John Nelson Darby and later the Scofield Reference Bible—Christian Zionists believe the return of Jews to Palestine fulfills Old Testament prophecies that must precede the Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Christ’s return. The 1948 establishment of Israel was celebrated as the “super-sign” of prophecy; the 1967 capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank was seen as divine restoration of “Judea and Samaria.” Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, embodies this fervor. His Carlson interview framed Israel’s claim to biblical lands as God-given, dismissing Arab objections as irrelevant. He and other evangelical leaders hail Trump as a modern Cyrus—the Persian king who freed Jews from Babylonian exile in 539 BCE, enabling temple rebuilding. Banners in Israel proclaim “Cyrus the Great is alive!” for Trump’s embassy move, Golan recognition, Gaza genocide, and Iran aggression. Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus in 2018; Huckabee echoes it today. For evangelicals, Cyrus-Trump fulfills prophecy: empowering Israel hastens Armageddon, where Jews convert or perish. This theology ignores Cyrus’ historical tolerance—his cylinder is hailed as the first human rights charter—twisting it into justification for conquest. Iran’s ambassador dismissed it: “Trump is no Cyrus,” but the fantasy drives policy, casting Iran as biblical foe.
This religious zeal infects the US military command. Over 200 complaints to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reveal commanders telling troops the Iran war is “God’s divine plan” to trigger Armageddon and Jesus’ return. One NCO reported a briefing where the commander urged, “Tell your troops this is all part of God’s divine plan,” citing Revelation and proclaiming Trump “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran.” Christian nationalists in uniform see the war as fulfilling end-times prophecy: Iran as biblical “Persia” in the final battle. With US forces now directly engaged, this zealotry risks turning tactical strikes into an apocalyptic holy war.
This all serves the warped Zionist concept of Greater Israel: biblical borders from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing “Judea and Samaria” and beyond. Huckabee’s “take it all” is no slip—it’s the dream of expansionists who reject Palestinian statehood as unbiblical and the existence of Palestinians outright. Greater Israel means ethnic cleansing, as seen in Gaza’s 75,000 dead and West Bank land grabs. The “ceasefire” is a farce: over 600 Palestinians killed since October 2025, famine weaponized. Israel’s aid ban on 37 groups (Oxfam, MSF, UNRWA) threatening no witnesses as further strangulation completes the genocide.
Europe’s complicity is sycophantic. In Munich, leaders gave Rubio a standing ovation for his “Western civilization” screed—ethnocentric drivel exalting whiteness while vowing no “moral equivalence” with the colonized. One by one EU governments are jumping the hurdles of international law to somehow hold Iran responsible for the lunatic aggression of Israel and the United States. EU governments are joining with Zionist zealots to codify IHRA laws criminalizing criticism of Israel. This is the fascist international: racism, crusader zeal, Zionist supremacy fused into one.
The Fourth Reich is here—in pulpits, Pentagon briefings, and boardrooms—wrapping aggression in scripture, conquest in prophecy, and genocide in “civilization.” Christian Zionism is its theological engine; Greater Israel its territorial goal. The zealots may pray for Armageddon, but the oppressed will outlast their prophecies. Empires fall. The people rise. United we can overcome.
“Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
–Bill Clinton, 1996 upon meeting Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu) for the first time.
“It would be fine if they took it all”
–Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel during an interview with Tucker Carlson, February 2026.
The bombs have started dropping and Netanyahu is rejoicing in the prize he has been so longing for. The region is now aflame and the regional contender to thwart Israeli power is receiving massive bombardment. As is always the case, children’s blood will flow disproportionately as the protected elderly warmongers give the orders from places of safety and comfort.
A girl’s school in Iran has been wiped out, and blood-spattered little backpacks show the wanton violence inflicted by the Israeli bombing. “We are fighting the Epstein class. They either rape little girls or burn little girls” says Dr. Izadifoad, a professor from the University of Tehran. He’s not wrong. And before you launch into a discussion about the religious zealots of Iran, know that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a 501 non-profit in the US, is fielding a reported 110+ complaints that different military units in the US are being told this war in Iran is part of a divine plan to cause Armageddon.
How have we gotten to this place? A situation where Israel essentially gives marching orders to the United States and those wishes are complied with posthaste? Those paying attention through history know the relationship has always been lopsided, but even Reagan pushed back in a very slight manner to Israeli aggression, keeping some semblance of autonomy in decision-making. What has taken away even that 1% of push-back?
Of course, the Israeli propaganda, the hasbara, has been very successful in labeling those against their apartheid state as antisemitic. The thing is, that label has been used so promiscuously that it has lost almost all meaning. The true antisemitism would seem to come from the Zionists who have tried to claim all of Judaism as their own and in so doing, put the Jewish diaspora at the risk of idiots who conflate the two. As the esteemed Dr. Gabor Mate has indicated, collective Jewish trauma has been exploited by Israel to justify the behavior in Gaza.
But the label of antisemitism alone has not been enough. We have all seen Jewish students at Ivy league institutions being brutalized during protests for showing sympathy for Palestinians. It’s hard to call other Jewish people antisemites (though they do sometimes try this). What else has been in place to completely remove the brakes on this out-of-control car?
Texas law (HB 89/SB 13) indicates that state agencies are prohibited from contracting with companies that boycott Israel. This law is not alone in the patrolling; multiple entities have similar clauses in their contracts. Why would such enforcement be necessary? I’ll come back to another noteworthy clause of this nature but know that even the smallest avenues of constraint and criticism have been addressed and banned here in the United States.
How does pedophilia factor into this? Obviously, the Epstein limited file release has sparked some questions about his relation to that nation and its intelligence agency Mossad. Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine’s dad, who basically controlled all your kids’ textbooks) and his proximity to Mossad is pretty damn established. Maybe we could ask him if he hadn’t done that header off his yacht. So many convenient deaths.
It’s not a leap to realize that a skilled and unethical organization like Mossad would be able to establish kompromat on those who could make the decisions about going to war. One can consider the about-face of so many politicians and surmise what likely caused the change. Of course, AIPAC money is no small thing, either.
But this pedophilia connection is strong and is just recently being examined in daylight. Allow me to take you down a rabbit hole, one if you will, that has been so thoroughly researched by Anna Christie of New Orleans. She has documented in a meticulous manner a pedophile ring that occupied the city starting back in the 70s. This ring focused on a Boy Scout troop that was infiltrated by multiple pedophiles, many from out of state, who preyed on boys from relatively impoverished families, often headed by single moms. This is always an effective plan to obtain victims, similar to the Epstein Mar-a-Lago adjacent pipeline.
Please look into Christie’s podcast “New Orleans Unsolved” for the intricate details of this pedophile ring and so much more. It may start in the New Orleans area, but it certainly has international implications. Her work is some of the most impressive investigative work I’ve come across. I would give this woman a massive budget and staff and let her solve all the mysteries if I could.
And please don’t let the fact that it’s in podcast form dissuade you from taking it seriously. It’s that there’s so much incoming data from her investigation that spans decades, it’s almost impossible to digest in any other form. The material is ongoing as the culprits are still around and having court dates during our time. Please listen and support her because I’m sure she’s getting some incredibly rough pushback for all of the truth-telling.
So she began with an unsolved murder of a teen boy whose body was found in the Mississippi River in that same era, and it led her to the discussion of the massive child rapes that occurred within the Boy Scout troop. A little more digging and the thing led to…well, let’s just say that the first season of True Detective looks to have lifted a lot of the story. It’s that disturbing, an otherworldly evil, really. But so far, nothing to do with Israel.
Where am I going with this? I’m getting there, be patient. So, in following all of the twists and turns of the pedophiles and murders (there were multiple teen boys found in that era killed or dead under suspicious circumstances) Christie looked into a company called OffenderWatch. This company launched in 2000 and became the largest sex offender registry in the US and is also utilized internationally.
The company was started in Saint Tammany Parish in Louisiana and due to its desired growth, became intertwined with private equity. Anna Christie digs into all of these relationships in the podcast and describes how OffenderWatch used a company called Rackspace to house all of its data, including things like fingerprints, cases, and the law enforcement members doing queries. So, who owns Rackspace? Christie found that it was none other than Apollo Equity Management, a company you might recognize as being run by CEO Leon Black of Epstein files fame until 2021. He stepped down at that time due to his relationship with Epstein, only to be replaced with Mark Rowan, who also had Epstein ties. The very company that holds the information as to who is looking into pedophile/sex offender info and researching cases is in the hands of an at least pedophile adjacent group of people…well, that’s concerning. They would also have the information on any victims who came forward as well, of course.
You know those clauses and laws I mentioned, like the one in Texas that doesn’t allow business with any entity that wants to boycott or divest from Israel? Well, OffenderWatch has one of those clauses, too. They clarified they won’t do business with anyone who boycotts Israel currently or in the future. So I guess if you don’t want to buy Israeli stolen land olive oil, you don’t get to keep track of where the pedophiles are? I’m sorry, but WTF?
Though the whole of the podcast is definitely not about Israel in any way, shape or form, I wanted to describe how it landed on exposing that OffenderWatch has some majorly sketchy connections to the protection of the state of Israel. It’s just a strand of Ariadne’s string to guide us through the labyrinth.
It would be foolish to think that a repository of information couldn’t be helpful for nefarious purposes. A witness ready to testify could be “dealt with”, information about powerful people being investigated could be utilized and they could be strong-armed into submission. Our ruling parasitic class does seem to have a taste for pedophilia that exceeds other demographics per capita. There’s simply so much that could be done with that data if desired. This is, of course, just speculation, but it seems like this isn’t a “if there’s smoke, there’s fire” issue but more of an if there’s a fire, it’s a fire kind of thing.
That’s a lot to digest and it needs more like 1,000,000 words to fully describe. I’m simply trying to give a quick glimpse of the fabric underlayment of our American society. Scratch much of anything and you will find that we’ve been fully infiltrated from numerous angles, not the least of which are the extensive pedophilia rings in place. Those rings that just so happen to be very capable in protecting the state of Israel in their individually small, but when viewed as a whole, significant ways.
It’s a bizarre place to land on, if someone had told me even a decade ago that I’d be giving credence to pedophile rings and that they could be instrumental in protecting the state of Israel, I would have proactively checked myself into the psych ward. But this is not Pizzagate nonsense. There are receipts. It’s almost so enormous that it’s difficult to even fathom. I can only imagine what the whole unredacted Epstein files would bring to light.
So here we are, we Americans watch the runaway train that is our nation, protecting pedophiles and we are just beginning to grasp the incredible evil that has been lurking below the surface. I’d say the veil is off; the scales have lifted from the eyes and it is now time to follow these paths wherever they may lead and to know at this moment–the nation is not our own.
Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.
In Iran, Israel’s Morbid Military Cult Now Has the US Fully in Its Grip
In this catastrophic war of choice, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, god only knows where Israel and the US will drag the world next
The admission this week by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.
Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing US soldiers to retaliation.
Rubio stated: “The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.
In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force – the “supreme international crime”, according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.
Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the US acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to US soldiers being harmed.
Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the US should have attacked Israel, not Iran.
Paper tiger
But Rubio’s comment begged a further question: Why didn’t Washington simply tell Israel it was forbidden from starting a war against Iran without US approval?
After all, Israel would be incapable of mounting any kind of attack on Iran without the critical support provided by the US.
Israel has had to rely on help from US military bases dotted around the region, as well as the Arab states that host those bases.
The attack would have been quite inconceivable without the backup of a massive armada of US war ships sent to the region by Trump.
Israel can withstand Iranian retaliation only because it gets a degree of protection from missile interception systems provided and funded by the US.
And on top of all that, Israel is regional hegemon only because it gets massive subsidies from the US – worth many billions of dollars a year – to preserve it as one of the strongest militaries in the world.
In other words, Israel would have found it impossible to wage war on Iran alone. It is a paper tiger without the US.
Rubio’s comment suggested one of two possibilities: either that the US, with the strongest military in world history, is under the thumb of the tiny state of Israel; or that Trump has made his own military, the strongest-ever, servile to Israel.
Whichever it is, it is hard to square with Trump’s repeated assertion that he is putting America First.
This point is so glaringly obvious it is presumably the reason why Rubio was forced to walk back his comments the next day. Meanwhile, Trump hurriedly suggested it was he who had forced Israel’s hand to attack Iran, not the other way round.
Geopolitical insanity
The more likely truth is not that Israel forced Trump’s hand. It is that he was seduced by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s false claim that an attack on Iran would be a cakewalk – if they struck at a moment when they could be sure of killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Such a decapitation strike, Trump was led to believe, would be a repeat of his Venezuela “success”, when he kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas to bring him to trial in New York.
In Venezuela, the flagrant flouting of international law by the US was intended to be the equivalent of pointing a loaded shotgun at the head of Maduro’s replacement, Delcy Rodriguez. Do as we say, or the new president gets it from both barrels.
Netanyahu knew exactly how to sell Trump, still giddy on the noxious fumes of this lawbreaking venture, the idea that he could repeat the exercise in Iran. The ayatollah’s successor would similarly be putty in his hands.
Which is why, in this catastrophic war of choice by the US and Israel, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore a little geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, or the US succeeds without paying a fearsome price, god only knows where Israel and Washington will drag the world next.
The world’s fate, in a real sense, is in Tehran’s hands.
‘Israelization’ of the US
What the joint attack on Iran demonstrates most clearly is how much Netanyahu has succeeded over the past quarter of a century in “Israelizing” Washington and the Pentagon.
The US has always waged illegal wars of aggression. It has always been more gangster than global policeman. But just because Washington was run by ruthless criminals, it did not mean it was incapable of getting still more deranged, still more psychopathic.
That is what Netanyahu has been working on. And Trump is now giving full rein to the Israelization of the US. The clues are everywhere.
On Wednesday secretary of war Pete Hegseth – the traditional title of “secretary of defense” presumably sounded too law-abiding – dropped any pretense of being the good guy.
He insisted US forces were acting “without mercy” and that the Iranian regime “are toast”. The US would deliver “death and destruction all day long”.
The previous day he had set out the game plan: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
This isn’t the traditional rhetoric of US administrations seeking to flaunt the West’s superior values, or claiming to be on a civilising mission to the rest of the world.
This is the rhetoric of colonial arrogance, of the same military medievalism long espoused by Israeli leaders.
Hegseth sounded all too much like General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister in the 1960s. He famously set out Israel’s overarching military doctrine: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
‘Mad dog’ tactics
Before its attack, the US had spent years trying to starve the people of Iran into an uprising, just as Israel blockaded and starved the people of Gaza for some 16 years on the assumption that they would be encouraged to overthrow Hamas.
The strategy failed in both cases. Why? Because it ignored the simplest of facts: that the people being abused are human beings, who will always choose freedom and dignity over degradation and subordination.
Now led by the nose into a humiliating war of attrition with Iran, the US is lashing out like a “mad dog” – just as Israel did in Gaza after it was humiliated by Hamas’ one-day breakout from the concentration camp Israel had created for Palestinians there.
Hegseth’s “no rules of engagement” means the US is now open about the fact that all of Iran has been turned into a free-fire zone, just as Gaza was.
Which explains why one of the first targets of the US and Israeli strikes was a primary school where more than 170 people were killed, most of them children under the age of 12.
According to reports even in the right-wing Telegraph newspaper, US and Israeli attacks have already created an “apocalypse” in Tehran. Essential civilian infrastructure is being targeted, such as hospitals, schools and police stations. Residential areas are being carpet-bombed, and food and medical supplies are rapidly running out.
The US has evidently been captured by the depraved logic of the Dahiya doctrine, which Israel developed in its repeated attacks on Lebanon and further refined over two and a half years in Gaza.
Smouldering ruin
The Dahiya doctrine goes much further than simply the idea of asymmetric warfare inherent to attacks by a stronger party on a weaker party.
Under the doctrine, civilian casualties are no longer unfortunate “collateral damage” from strikes against military assets. Rather, the civilian population are treated as no less legitimate targets of attack than military infrastructure.
For Israel, the Dahiya doctrine grew out of an acceptance that there were no meaningful war aims that Israel could achieve in its battles against the Palestinians it ruled over or against Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon.
Israel was unsatisfied simply with pacifying the Palestinians. It knew they could not be pacified indefinitely, given that it had no intention of ever arriving at a political settlement with them. The fabled two-state solution was purely for western consumption; it never had any meaningful constituency of support in Israel.
Rather, Israel’s goal was to use overwhelming and indiscriminate violence to terrify the Palestinians into ethnically cleansing themselves from the region, as had partially occurred in 1948.
Similarly, in Lebanon, where the Dahiya doctrine was first developed, the goal was not to reach a political accommodation with Hezbollah through a show of force. Hezbollah had made clear it would never resign itself to watching the Palestinians erased from their homeland.
The goal was to wreak so much pain on Lebanon that other religious sects would turn on Hezbollah and plunge the country into protracted civil war, leaving Israel free to get on with the expulsion – and now genocide – of the Palestinian people.
Under the Dahiya doctrine, Israel implicitly acknowledged that it was not fighting simply against militants but against the wider society from which those militants were drawn. It had to accept that there could be no victory, no surrender, assessed in traditional military terms. So what it had to do instead was leave a smouldering ruin.
Time and again, Israel has used massive firepower on civilian infrastructure and residential areas to break the will of a society – to drive it back into “the Stone Age”, to use the terminology of Israeli generals – so that the population would expend their energies on survival rather than resistance.
This is what Hegseth and Rubio are now declaring as Washington’s war aims in Iran. A wilful, savage demonstration of mass destruction to no purpose other than the demonstration itself.
Morbid pathology
This is not a winning strategy, military or political. It is not even a failed strategy. It is the morbid pathology of a cult.
Which explains a flood of complaints over the initial days of Trump’s war on Iran from US soldiers about their commanders. There have been at least 110 so far, according to reporting by Jonathan Larsen here on Substack.
In one to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a non combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.
The Department of War under Hegseth, an evangelical Christian who believes the West is on a “crusade” against Islam, appears to be riding roughshod over First Amendment rules against proselytizing within the armed forces.
The theocratization of US armed forces is not new. George W Bush spoke in terms of a “crusade” against terror nearly a quarter of a century ago. But the process appears to have reached a point now that the top ranks of the US chain of command are deeply imbued with an evangelical fervour for war in which Israel plays a central part.
Mikey Weinstein, the president of MRFF and an Air Force veteran who served in Ronald Reagan’s White House, told Larsen his group had been “inundated” with soldiers reporting the “euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”
In “End Times” beliefs, based on the Book of Revelations, a terrible battle between good and evil takes place at Armageddon – a site in present-day northern Israel – which leads to the Messiah’s return to Earth and a Great Rapture in which believing Christians rise up to be with God.
Weinstein added: “Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world eschatology.”
The word of God
Central to these beliefs is the gathering of Jews, as God’s Chosen People, into the Land of Israel – a much larger area than that covered by the modern state of Israel.
For Christian fundamentalists such as Hegseth and a growing number of US commanders, Israel is the catalyst for the End Times.
For very obvious reasons, Israel has been nuturing its ties with the huge numbers of Christian fundamentalists in the US. They are politically active – their vote secured the presidency for Trump – and they treat Israel as a critically important domestic issue rather than a foreign policy matter.
They are eager for Israel to seize wide swathes of the Middle East, and largely indifferent about what that entails for the Palestinians or the other peoples of the region.
This all neatly dovetails with the ideology espoused by Netanyahu and the Israeli military command, which years ago was taken over by the same religious-extremist zealots who lead the violent settler movement that systematically attacks Palestinians in the West Bank and steals their land.
As the Israeli military launched its genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu urged soldiers on by telling them they were fighting the nation of Amalek – the enemy of the ancient Israelites.
In the Bible, God commanded King Saul to carry out the total annihilation of the Amalekites, putting to death every single man, woman, child and infant, as well as all livestock.
As can be seen in the erasure of Gaza, Israeli soldiers accepted their mission quite literally. After all, they were not just carrying out Netanyahu’s orders, but an order from God.
‘Clash of civilizations’
Netanyahu has not relied solely on the sacralization of indiscriminate warfare by his own and the US army. He has also cultivated a wider, racist, anti-Muslim mood in the US and Europe to smooth Israel’s path as it levels large parts of the Middle East.
He has vigorously promoted the idea of a “clash of civilizations”, the idea that a “Judeo-Christian West” is engaged in a permanent, joint war against the supposed barbarism of the Islamic world.
The synergy between a US military in thrall to Christian fundamentalism and an Israeli military in thrall to a biblically inspired Jewish supremacism is all too clearly on show now in Iran.
This combined military juggernaut has no interest in safeguarding human rights.
It recognizes no distinction between civilian and military targets.
It prioritizes its own soldiers’ safety – as enforcers of God’s providence – over the civilians those soldiers are attacking.
And it believes, in crushing the life out of the people of Iran, it is advancing divine will.
This is the true face of the war machine that upholds “western civilization”. These are the real values the West is fighting for in Iran. The rest is a smokescreen.
