Deciphering the US Presidential race: Key reading gives clarity on the Donald Trump v Florida governor Ron DeSantis fight to gain the Republican Nomination for US President: Matthew Continetti in National Review pinpoints the differences between the two in this thoughtful analysis. He defines Trump as “populist,” and de Santis as a “technocrat” who will use state power to crush the left – which he describes as ‘woke’. (I don’t normally use that word, but it is integral to DeSantis’ rhetoric.)
The Other Cheek endorses neither – this is just to inform readers of what some Christians are doing across the Pacific.
“The contest between former president Donald Trump and DeSantis is not just over who will lead the GOP. It is also a struggle between two concepts of the New Right, pitting the former president’s MAGA populism against the Florida governor’s institutional culture war.
“No one needs a lesson in Trump’s impulses and grudges. They have been at the centre of our public life for six years. What’s important to recognize is that, despite his personal idiosyncrasies, Trump is an archetypal American figure.
“Tribunes of the people have sprung up to rail against the Eastern elites for centuries. Jackson, Bryan, Wallace, Buchanan, Perot, Palin — the list is long. All of them have identified scapegoats, indulged in conspiracy theories, and cultivated personal followings. All of them have spoken in straightforward, declarative language. All of them have drawn huge crowds by telling the dispossessed that social status can be reclaimed by throwing out the corrupt elite and replacing it with the leader’s steady hand.…”
“ DeSantis is more esoteric than Trump. Listening to him on Twitter Spaces was not easy. First, you had to figure out what Twitter Spaces is, then how to log on, then how to get back on when the servers kicked you off. The back-and-forth between DeSantis and Musk was no less complicated. They weren’t talking about how the elite has shipped jobs to China or how the war in Ukraine can be resolved in one day. They were talking about how government, tech platforms, and corporate media work together to suppress freedom and entrench progressivism. I hadn’t heard the word “collude” so much since I last tuned into MSNBC. This wasn’t Russian collusion. It was collusion involving Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden, YouTube, and Twitter’s previous owners.
“Musk and DeSantis aren’t fighting Democrats so much as they are fighting the media narratives that Democrats promote to stigmatize the Right and push the country to the left. ..
“DeSantis’s attitude isn’t the “LOL nothing matters” or “burn it all down” mentality you find among some MAGA devotees. He isn’t anti-institutional. He wants to use the institution he controls — government — to rescue or defang other institutions consumed by wokeness. He came across less as a populist than a shrewd technocrat.”
“This Right is more willing to use state power than 20th-century conservatives because it believes the state to be its only remaining leverage against decadent institutions.”
Religious News Service’s Jack Jenkins paints a picture of Desantis seeking the Evangelical vote: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis strode onstage in Orlando and stood before a podium, silhouetted against a giant American flag.
“The crowd, attendees at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, a Christian group, leapt to their feet. Some applauded, while others held up cell phones to record the moment.
“DeSantis began with a line he uses often—“Welcome to the free state of Florida!”—before launching into a stump speech recounting his proudest accomplishments as governor, such as removing books from public libraries and “waging a war on woke.”
“In a nod to his audience, he sprinkled his remarks with religious references, lauding churches that refused to close during the pandemic and encouraging listeners to “put on the full armour of God.”
It’s not just a one off. Jenkins reports “DeSantis beta-tested this approach in November, when the governor’s wife, Casey, tweeted out an advertisement that framed him as a ‘fighter.’ The ad featured images of DeSantis and his family while a narrator—who, observers noted, had the feel of a mid-20th-century Protestant preacher—declared: ‘On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.’”
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Don’t believe everything you read: Hans Kristensen gives a helpful warning about overblown archeological claims in a Gospel Coalition Australia article. An archaeological find, the 3200-year-old Mt Ebal “Curse Tablet” that maybe pushes the earliest here inscription back 200 years is accompanied by claims that Kristensen finds slim evidence for – such as “proving’ Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
“Here is why as an evangelical pastor I wrote this article: the authors’ overblown claims hurt Bible believers; they don’t help them. Imagine the teenager who watches a YouTube clip where one of the authors of this article makes some of their egregious claims.[8] The teenager then takes a course at uni where this find and the authors’ claims are analysed. The young Christian finds that the claims are bogus and, because of this discouraging conclusion, questions other beliefs they have. This scenario is not far-fetched. At least every few months, I chat with young Christians who have been told misleading historical information about the Bible, only to find that this information is untrue.”
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Maybe Aslan’s book is dangerous too: A reader, thanks Vic, has shared a BBC report about the Bible being a dangerous book. Max Matza reported, “A school district in the US state of Utah has removed the Bible from elementary and middle schools for containing ‘vulgarity and violence.’
“The move follows a complaint from a parent that the King James Bible has material unsuitable for children.
Utah’s Republican government passed a law in 2022 banning ‘pornographic or indecent’ books from schools.
“Most of the books that have been banned so far pertain to topics such as sexual orientation and identity…
“The Utah decision was made this week by the Davis School District north of Salt Lake City after a complaint filed in December 2022. Officials say they have already removed the seven or eight copies of the Bible they had on their shelves, noting that the text was never part of students’ curriculum.
“The committee did not elaborate on its reasoning or which passages contained ‘vulgarity or violence.’”
However, a report by the Utah tv station ABC4 gives useful context: “Copies of the King James Bible are being removed from school library shelves at elementary and junior high facilities in Davis County, Utah… The Bible will remain on library shelves at the high school level.”