Weaponizing the Human Soul

My 85-year-old dad passed away a few days ago, having finally succumbed to the cancer that he’d been fighting for the last year, and I took the task of cleaning up his email subscriptions. I got a chance to finally see exactly what floods his inbox: he was receiving literally dozens of MAGA and hard-right newsletters and fundraising appeals every day.

The MAGA propaganda machine is powerful and dangerous. More than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’ve watched it successfully weaponize the human soul, taking the worst primal human emotions and using them to wound and even kill our neighbors and fellow citizens and the most vulnerable among us.

Here’s a sampling of some of the language, just from today’s inbox:

HOUSE GOP EMERGENCY UPDATE! Clinton STOOGE James Comey headed for JAIL? Russia, Russia, Russia HOAXER John Brennan BEHIND BARS? BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, HIMSELF, could be next? PATRIOT, THIS MATTER REQUIRES YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION! Tulsi Gabbard’s NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL report just blew a hole in the DNC’s & the Deep State’s TREASONOUS plot to DECEIVE the American people. PLEASE, we’re running out of time to bring JUSTICE. READ & ACT ASAP!

This is sickening. President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has received death threats simply for enforcing our country’s immigration laws. The Left is hoping these threats will break Homan into submission and force him to call off the deportations. That’s the spine of steel America needs to start WINNING again. Thank God President Trump has put a true patriot in charge of securing the border and making America safe again. Tom Homan isn’t backing down. Instead, he’s DOUBLING down! That’s why – until every last illegal is deported, Homan wants to be sure that absolutely NONE of them are counted in the next United States Census. Simply put, this is a dire moment for our country. Because of the Democrats’ schemes to infiltrate the next Census – and our elections – now more than ever, we need to VERIFY every last voter profile!

AN EMERGENCY MEMO FROM REP. ELISE STEFANIK! With each passing day, our campaign to DEFEND President Trump’s House majority and SAVE New York from Kathy Hochul is gaining more and more momentum. But the Democrats have put a target on my back. They just sent Far Left radical Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to campaign in my congressional district, attack me personally, and LIE to voters about President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill! The Democrats have gotten so extreme and out of touch that they think a socialist like AOC is their party’s best chance of defeating me and winning more votes upstate. Make no mistake, this is a political GIFT that we can use to rally voters against the Democrats and their radical agenda.

Tulsi Gabbard just rocked the boat. What she brought to light last weekend has sent SHOCKWAVES through the Democratic Party. In a MASSIVE declassification, Tulsi Gabbard just exposed Barack Obama for TREASON. BARACK OBAMA CREATED RUSSIAGATE. We knew all along that the Democrats were behind the disgusting “Russian Collusion” theory, but now it’s been confirmed with hard data. In 2016, after President Trump’s complete & total victory over Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama ordered officials to “leak” false statements to media outlets, claiming that Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election. And now every single American knows the truth. But the cost has been high. Calls for Tulsi Gabbard’s RESIGNATION, IMPEACHMENT, and even threats to her LIFE have already surfaced. Simply for exposing the Deep State and showing the American people the TRAITOR that is Barack Obama, she painted a target on her back. And it’s growing larger every minute of the day. That’s why we need your help today before something disastrous happens.

Our best chance to stop George Soros Today – right now – you and I have our best chance to stop anti-America billionaire and globalist George Soros. And it depends on your rapid response to this urgent message – will you sign your STOP SOROS petition right away?

Effective in less than two weeks, our Pro-Trump House Majority will go down to 219 seats. Don’t forget: Our Majority is the FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE standing in the way of House Democrats having complete power to impeach President Trump, investigate conservatives, and stonewall the America First agenda. There are three upcoming Special Elections THIS YEAR and one more on the horizon. Democrats are favored to win all of them. If Republicans fail to overperform here, we’ll be closer than ever to surrendering control to the Democrats. President Trump needs us to hold the line. Without our Conservative House Majority, his entire legislative agenda will be dead on arrival in the House, his allies will be investigated to no end, and he could face impeachment on DAY ONE of Democrat control. I’ve been around long enough to say this with authority: The pressure is on like never before. If we fail to defend the House, we might as well kiss America’s Golden Age goodbye and brace ourselves for a torrent of Liberal Witch Hunts. But if we can mobilize enough Conservatives, we’ll have the resources to support our Special Election candidates, defy the odds, and keep the House in GOP control for all four years of Trump’s term.

TERRIBLE NEWS FOR AMERICA! The Supreme Court just CAVED to the ACLU – halting ALL new deportations. Why? Because the Democrats claim illegal aliens have a “right” to due process. The result? MS-13 thugs, cartel traffickers, and foreign terrorists are now roaming free in our country – on YOUR dime – waiting MONTHS to YEARS for their court dates.

Is the American Dream still alive? Will the next generation have greater opportunities, or fewer? Are we still a nation in which hard work leads to a better life?

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. And this is just an tiny example of what’s been in front of his eyes every day. It’s truly sickening, the hatred and fear that was pumped into him for years.

And I can identify at some level, even though I hate email lists: I listened to right-wing talk radio with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy for years. In much the same way, I now realize that it was a steady, daily diet of hate and anger and fear. They all talked about being the party of law and order and small government, but as things have played out in 2025, now I see that it was just a convenient talking point more than a true value.

So it’s obvious how Dad got trapped in that vortex despite his evangelical and conservative roots. When you spend all your time fearing what’s going on, being told that things you care about will be lost, it begins to be easy to shed some of the moral values that actually, truly did make America what it once was. Preserving, conserving, holding on to what we have becomes more important than the morals.

As for me, I escaped MAGA after J6. Perhaps the only reason I could get out like I did is that my THEOLOGY had changed as I deconstructed my evangelicalism. Now I am more empathetic, more open to seeing the world from others’ points of view. It became impossible to heartlessly write off others as inhuman. I gained an ability to see people who are different than me through God’s infinite love for them, not through my fear of their otherness. In a nutshell, my theology finally trumped my politics.

But MAGA thrives on creating and expanding otherness and fear. It’s easy to understand why a book like “The Sin of Empathy” is getting a lot of attention on the right: to reject compassion, you have to turn off the God-designed part of your soul that not only sees those around you as fully human, fully made in God’s image, but also can be aware of how they’re being affected by our policies and actions.

So all this makes me grieve for those who are sucked into that right-wing vortex. It feeds on itself. Hatred and fear are very effective tools, and they allow grifters to extract money and power from people like Dad. Good-hearted people listen and then become callous and fearful, willing to become haters of men just to keep what they value. Gone is any sense of giving up one’s cloak or walking the extra mile for someone different than them. The Sermon on the Mount is forgotten, or considered “woke.”

To be fair, the tactics of the left wing are really not all that different in some ways: they also utilize fear to motivate their followers to fight for a political position, and they encourage hate of opponents. But perhaps the one significant difference is that it’s not based on hating and fearing the marginalized.

But let’s be clear: I reject using hate and fear as a tool to motivate people, regardless of which political or religious institution is doing it. I even now recognize that a lot of the tactics used in institutional religion even rely on this same approach: create an enemy, and pour all the institution’s energy into being unlike that enemy, fearing it, attacking it, calling it demonic. And in some ways, perhaps that’s even worse than a political institution doing this: God is Love, and using hate and fear to build a church will never bring people to a true understanding of God.

The irony in this season, as Dad passed away, is that both Dad and Mom were finally truly beginning to walk back from Trumpism in the last few months as they began, slowly, to see the hate and fear and the harm that is coming to our nation from this administration. But Dad still kept his Epoch Times newspaper subscription, and dozens of daily emails arrived, all pumping in that dose of hate and fear. I’m convinced that if he had turned all that stuff off for a month, the spell might have been broken. Some clarity might have been able to form in his thinking. But fear and hate are powerful opiates to the brain, and he couldn’t let go.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s any solution to this problem. Dad never, never would have agreed to unsubscribe from all that ugly content while he was alive; it’s too well-crafted and creates an absolute urgency and a sense of guilt if you don’t continually engage (“our nation will be lost if you don’t act now!”). So I don’t see this problem abating for most MAGA adherents. The divide will just continue to deepen.

I usually prefer to end with some hopeful thoughts. But today I’m just sad. Dad’s gone, and I have to deal with an inbox full of hate, of a nature that I’d deliberately walked away from in 2021. My only consolation, perhaps, is that he won’t live to see his beloved America rip itself apart. He’s now discovering an eternal Kingdom view, and I imagine he’ll be surprised how different nationalism looks from the other side of death.

Truthfully, I’m certain that when we “shuffle off this mortal coil,” to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we all will discover how wrong we were in so many ways. But I suspect that as they enter eternity, MAGA folks will have a lot more repenting to do than their opponents.

But speaking of repenting, all of us ought to be repenting of teaching one another to fear or hate that which is different. Yes, let’s call out unrighteousness, let’s pursue good politics, but we need to be careful to do it without weaponizing the human soul against other humans.