Lex Anteinternet: Giving up completely on the GOP.

Lex Anteinternet: Giving up completely on the GOP.: I've noted my political history here before. I'm a Westerner and an Irish Catholic.  That informs my vote pretty heavily. When I fir...

Giving up completely on the GOP.

I've noted my political history here before.

I'm a Westerner and an Irish Catholic.  That informs my vote pretty heavily.

When I first registered to vote Ronald Reagan was President.  Marine Corps Raider veteran Ed Herschler, a Democrat, was the Governor of Wyoming.  D-Day veteran Teno Roncolio, also a Democrat, was our Congressman.  Republicans Malcolm Wallop and Alan Simpson were our Senators.  

That was sort of the political landscape here at the time.   More Republicans than Democrats, but there were still Democrats, and those Democrats tended to be pretty tough conservative people.  Republicans were already tacking off into batshit crazy economic theories but they weren't completely bathed in them yet.

I registered as a Republican.

I didn't stay a Republican for a really long time.  I don't recall when exactly I switched parties, but by the time I was at the University of Wyoming, I had registered Democratic.  I stayed in the Democratic Party for a long time.  I was still a Democrat when I became a lawyer and I know that I was when I was married.  However, sometime after that, I couldn't stand the sea of blood the Democratic Party had become.  I became an independent.

As an independent you missed the primaries pretty much, however, and starting in the Clinton era in general Wyoming Democrats began to drift over to the GOP.  After all, the mainstream of the Democratic Party wasn't all that different from the traditional mainstream of the local GOP.  After awhile, I registered as a Republican.

Little far right Dixiecrats like Chuck Gray like to scream that people like me are "RINOs", when in fact they're the malignant innovation into the GOP.  That element hadn't entered the GOP at the time I was first in it, and didn't for a long time.  Gray himself, who nobody really knew anything about, was probably the first, followed by Jeanette Ward, who served one term in the legislature before losing a bid to retain her seat.  While she lost, that showed the direction things were headed in.  Carpetbaggers who knew nothing about their state moved in and wanted to convert it into pre 1964 Alabama.

It's not as if the Democrats stood still.  As moderate Wyoming Democrats left the party, it too became delusional.  If the Republicans became increasingly fascistic or Dixiecratic, the Democrats lived intellectually in the Greenwich Villages' Stonewall Inn in 1969.  It made going back into the Democratic Party an outright impossibility for people like myself, particularly as they lashed themselves increasingly to abortion and perversion. 

More recently, I'll note, that seems to be wearing off.  The Democrats are still "pro choice", but they don't talk much about it.  For that matter Republicans who were really gung ho on being pro life have sort of lost their fire for that as well, following the lead of Orange Mussolini.

What the Republican Party, nationally, has become is flat out insane.  No thinking person can be a member of it and be comfortable.

There are still good Republicans here in Wyoming.  They began a big fight against the Dixiecrats prior to the legislature and largely prevailed this session, in spite of the fact that the diehard adherents of The Lost Cause were theoretically in control of the solons.  That should give local Republicans who aren't literally whistling Dixie some hope.

But with the current national Trumpites in control, the line has been drawn. 

For years people like Dixiecrat Chuck Gray, or Dixicrat Bextel, have claimed that the Republican Party here was infiltrated with Democrats. Well, it was. They're the Democrats.  Democrats from 1960 Alabama. They just don't know it.  But the screaming lunacy that they've espoused does have an effect after awhile.  Yell at people that "you are a RINO" for long enough, and they'll take it up.

I'm remaining registered in the GOP.  Chuck Gray's efforts to disenfranchise voters has been enough for me in and of itself not to change registrations.  Frankly, if I was to take a run at the House of Representatives, and I've thought about it, I would switch parties as right now that would give a person a place in the November election no matter what.  But I'm not going to do that.  I'm old, worn out, and very tired. 

So I'm remaining in the GOP in no small part so that I can vote for the decent primary candidates, of which there are some right now.

At this point, merely stating that you are "pro Trump" will be enough to cross my vote for you off the list.  At least three House candidates are promising to be Trump's biggest lover, and they're all of the list.  I hope I run into some of them during their campaigns.  I probably will.

And I've already quit giving MAGAs in my midst slack.  Frankly, since the start of the assault on Iran, that's been easy, as the "never war" MAGAs can't explain that one without sounding like hypocrites, and they know it.  Even a few have begun to look as if Valentines to Trump weren't a good idea.

But in the Fall.  I'm not voting for any Republicans for anything.

That won't exactly be easy.  So far here only one candidate from the Democratic Party has signed on to run for a statewide office.  He has my vote even though I like the only Republican whose announced for the same position.  And just because I'm not voting for a Republican doesn't mean I will vote for Democrats.  In my state house district a really decent Republican holds the seat and a young woman from the Democratic Party has announced against him. She's already on the sea of blood ticket.  I can't vote for her, but I won't vote for the Republican I've voted for many times before.

To vote for Republicans in 2026 you have to accept that a low IQ, deranged, octogenarian should have complete dictatorial control over the Federal Government, can start major wars on his own, can demolish parts of the White House as he has the tastes of a bordello owner, can cause the hiding of files on a major pedophile ring, and can have a domestic army occupy the streets.  It also means you have to be willing to sacrifice the environment of the planet for scientific denial.  You have to be willing to endorse lies at a never before seen rate, which makes you a liar yourself if you do. 

I can't go there.

Lex Anteinternet: The Making of the Christian Man By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Lex Anteinternet: The Making of the Christian Man By Charles J. Chap...:   The Making of the Christian Man By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

The Making of the Christian Man By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

 

The Making of the Christian Man

By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Churches of the West: Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.

Churches of the West: Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't s...:    Χαῖρε Μαρία κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ Κύριος μετά σοῦ, Ἐυλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξὶ, καὶ εὐλογημένος ὁ καρπὸς τῆς κοιλίας σοῦ Ἰησούς. Ἁγία Μαρία, μῆτερ...

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.

 

 Χαῖρε Μαρία κεχαριτωμένη,

ὁ Κύριος μετά σοῦ,

Ἐυλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξὶ,

καὶ εὐλογημένος ὁ καρπὸς τῆς κοιλίας σοῦ Ἰησούς.

Ἁγία Μαρία, μῆτερ θεοῦ,

προσεύχου [πρέσβευε] ὑπέρ ἡμῶν τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν,

νῦν καὶ ἐν τῇ ὥρᾳ τοῦ θανάτου ἡμῶν.

Ἀμήν

So, a big one that we didn't include yesterday, as it deserves its own post.  This may be the most significant post of this thread.

Don't lie and don's support liars.

Everyone has heard the old joke, “How do you know a politician is lying?” The answer.  Because their mouth is moving."  That stretches the point, but there's some truth behind the joke, as there is with any good joke.

Indeed, we've become so used to politicians lying that we basically expect it. The current era, however has brought lying, as well as truth telling, into a new weird surreal era.

Lying is a sin.  It's been debated since early times if it's always a sin, or if there are circumstances in which it may be allowed, limited though those be.  If it's every allowable, it's in situations like war, where after all, killing is allowed.  Most of us lie, but it's almost always sinful.

In Catholic theological thought, lying can be a mortal sin.  It's generally accepted that most lies are not in that category. So, "yes, dear, I love gravy burgers" is not a mortal sin.  But lies can definitely be mortally sinful.  Lying over a grave matter is mortally sinful, if the other conditions for mortal sin are met.

Donald Trump, whom some deluded Christians refer to as a "Godly Man", lies routinely and brazenly, and this has brought lying into the forefront, even as he's shocked people, rightfully, by following through on some of his promises, but not all, that were assumed to be lies or at least exaggerations.  He's advanced lies about who won the 2020 election, and many of his followers have advanced those lies as well.  Some people, of course, believe the lies and advance what they assume to be the truth, but some of that is being wilfully ignorant that they are lies.

Of course here, as always, I'm coming at this from a Catholic prospective.  I do not accept the thesis that some do that lies can be utilized to advanced something we regard as a greater good. Some hold the opposite view and I'm fairly convinced that some Christian Nationalist politicians hold the opposite view.  I frankly wonder, for example, if Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, hold the opposite view.  Johnson claims to be a devout Christian and if he doesn't hold the opposite view, based on the lies he spouts, he must despair of his own salvation quite frequently, unless he hold the completely erroneous "once saved always saved" view some Evangelical Christians hold, or if he's a Calvinist that figures that double predestination has the fate of everyone all determined anyhow, which is also a theologically anemic position.

A very tiny minority of Christians hold such views, however.  For the rest of us, it's incumbent not to reward lying, and not to advance lies.  It's dangerous and destructive to everyone.  It should not be tolerated by anyone.  And in this era, and for the proceeding several, it's destroying everything.

Last and prior editions:

Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 3.

Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing threadLabels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Camping, Climate Change, fishing, hunting, Politics, Public Lands, Questions for politicians, Right Wing Politics and Politicians, The Land Ethic, This is why we can't have nice things

Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.

Labels: 2026 Election, 2028 Election, Commentary, Democratic Party, Politics, Questions for politicians, Republican Party, Trailing thread

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenl...:   An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan. Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat An open call to Greenlanders I note this in part because she...

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 

An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.

Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.:   Today, of course, is Christmas Day. Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace...

Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

 

Today, of course, is Christmas Day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace tradition now for almost four decades, a scary thought in and of itself.  I'll admit that I've grown very weary of it and have been now for quite a while.  It involves going to lunch with my coworker professional colleagues and it usually involves having drinks, a delay in ordering, more drinks, etc.

We always go to Mass on Christmas Eve.  Indeed, even as a child my family always went to Mass on Christmas Eve, although not Midnight Mass.  I've never been a night owl and I just don't want to be up that late.  That's the same reason I don't like to go to alte Easter Vigil Mass either.

I am, rather obviously, an early riser.  That's about the sole reason this blog even exists.  Almost everything on here is written very early in the morning.

Anyhow, as I was noting, I've grown really weary of the lunch.  It's clear to me that it's a big deal for some of my colleagues, but in noting that, what I further note is that the more secular they are, or the more convivial, the bigger the deal it is.  And for some it's a rememberance of those who started the tradition, in a decade that is now long past, and which is from nearly another world, the world of men at work without women as colleagues.  I'm not going into that here, although I will in the future.  I've never lived in it, and I don't imagine that world nostalgically.  My best workplace colleagues are women.

For me, with a sense that things must be on time and on target, I get really worried about things dragging on too long to get to Mass on time.  It's never happened, although for the first time yesterday it nearly did.

Things have been really odd recently, for reasons I'll not go into.  I realized right about noon that people had left, save for me and the one coworker I'm really a friend of/with/to.  I noted to her that everyone had left and perhaps we should too.

When I arrived it was rapidly clear something was gravely wrong.  The whole meal had that feeling, and at the end of it, a massive argument broke out/resumed between two individuals who had been engaged in it prior to our arrival.  Indeed, in reality, it was the culmination of an argument that had broken out in a heated fashion after the company Christmas Party (which this was not) and which, in retrospect, has been burning hot and cold now for months and months.

The whole spirit of the country is like that right now.

Around here, where it should be extremely cold right now, it's nearly summer temperature warm. That's not only weird, it's a massive warning sign.  This morning Doug Burgum is posting on "clean coal".  That's moronic and anyone with the slightest bit of sense knows that this has to stop.  Donald Trump, for his part, posted his typical stupid comments oozing anger and this:

I note this as part of what I think I witnessed was both the nation's politics and the nation's political atmosphere bleeding into daily life.  You can feel it everywhere. This must be what it was like to live in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s.  The nation's gone insane, and a certain percentage of the nation is now angrily insane.

But it's more than that.  Part of it is, I"m sure, the inability to endure big changes and big expectations, combined with gross misunderstanding.  Part of it also is the anger that idol worshippers have when they realize their hero is human.  Maybe some of was the march of time on both parties.

Like several other things I've seen like this recently, I was so ill prepared for what I saw that my reaction time to it was just insufficient to deal with it.  It happened, nad was over, before I could do anything to stop it. And looking back, I should have stopped what I should have seen coming weeks ago. 

I've wearied and I'm not the man I used to be.  I'm too tired to put up with and endure such things. But why bring this up at Christmas? There must be some really hurt feelings today, and there must have been going into things.  For me, who has had to take up roles I never anticipated, it's a bitter failure and now a delicate matter to repair.

One thing I think I'm going to repair is the tradition.  It came out of the all male workplace past, and that day is over.  The tradition can remain in the past. The present and the passage of time overcame it.

More and more, the Mass part of Christmas, Christ's Mass, is the important part to me.  It always was really, but I managed to take the wrong road, the American Road, when I was young, even though I knew better.  The field, vette and prairie is what always appealed to me, and the book.  The courtroom not so much.  I've been dealing with the fact that its now too late to change that.

Or at least its too late to change the past.  Enduring the present and future of that, and the office, well not so much.  Sometimes the messages are clear.

"The man's done enough. Leave him alone."  Field of Dreams.

Lex Anteinternet: If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worried yet, you ought to be. Or maybe not. Or maybe.

Lex Anteinternet: If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worr...: The Defense Department hosted a Christmas service at the Pentagon. Now, if you are an Apostolic Christian, as the overwhelming majority of C...

If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worried yet, you ought to be. Or maybe not. Or maybe.

The Defense Department hosted a Christmas service at the Pentagon.

Now, if you are an Apostolic Christian, as the overwhelming majority of Christians around the world are, or if you are a member of a Protestant denomination that is closely based on the Catholic Church, or which even thinks that they are part of it, this service will come across very strangely.  But, as I've noted before, this is a Protestant country and a Protestant county in which the strains of Puritanism are deep.

The services of the Apostolic Faiths, i.e., the Catholics and the Orthodox, go back to the very origins of Christianity.  The Didache was written within a couple of decades of the Crucifiction and it shows Christians doing what Apostolic Christians do right now, which isn't a surprise to Apostolic Christians but which can come as a rude shock to Protestants.  The writings of the Church Fathers do the same.  If you read these text and remain a Protestant, while cutting a little slack for High Church Anglicans and conservative Lutherans, it's just a wilful decision to ignore the first 1,500 years of Christian practice.

But most people don't read those things and so they're going with what they learned as kids, or what they've sort of picked up, no matter how in error or ignorant it may be.  John Calvin, who influenced the Puritans, was flat out demonstrably wrong (and frankly not a nice guy) but most people don't know that if they're in one of the churches influenced by him, and for that matter they don't even know who John Calvin was.

The Puritans, because they were religious dissenters from the Church of England, which had militantly broken off from the Catholic Church in order that King Henry VIII could pursue a string of hopefully fertile bedmates, was not only pretty ignorant, but obstinately so in many ways, as it had a history of fighting with the Established Church.  The Church of Scotland was somewhat as well, particularly in its American form.  All of these churches have declined enormously in Europe while Catholicism has increased, reclaiming lost ground, but in the US their descendants are pretty numerous and strong.

Most Protestants aren't "Evangelical Protestants", but Evangelical Protestantism is really easy for people who want to be Christians without a whole bunch of Christian theology, want to escape the personally difficult aspects of Christian theology, or who just know that there's truth in Christianity and don't know where to go.  The do it yourselfism in them is pretty strong, and some, but not all, of them are pretty good at pointing out the sins of others while simply ignoring their own favorite  ones.  There's a host of ministers in this camp that are personally wealthy or who are married and divorced, and who have even engaged in affairs.  Flat out ignoring the Christian injunction against divorce and remarriage is pretty much the rule in most Protestant communities and it obviously is in some Evangelical ones.  Paula White is on her third husband, for example.  Joyce Meyer on her second.  Missouri pastor Rich Tidwell is a polygamist.

The point isn't to debate on all these topics, setting aside polygamy, Protestant denominations do not have, I think, the process of annulment, which can be controversial in the Catholic Church, and their ministers do not take vows of poverty, but rather the pick and chose nature of things is a problem, and it'll turn on Catholics and is already starting to.

The New Apostolic Reformation is an aggressive backer of Donald Trump and its openly a backer of Americanism.  Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is clearly aligned with the movement, and it's pretty clear that Secretary of Defense Hegseth falls in this camp.  Hegesth is practically the poster boy for ignorance in this category as he's festooned himself with tattoos that recall the Crusades while not realizing at all that Crusaders would have regarded him as a heretic.  But there he is, all emblazoned with sayings and symbols that properly belong to the Apostolic faiths, while living in what they'd all regard as an irregular marriage.

The same week that the Pentagon service occured Chip Roy took a direct swing at Catholics.

A lot of good Americans give their money to Catholic charities thinking they're helping people, and it turns out they're a part of a vast leftist network that is being used to undermine our country. 

Whether it's the open borders, Soros DAs, Arabella, or the 'Islamification' of Texas and this country—it's organized, and this is one example. Look at the Medicaid fraud up in Minneapolis. It was going to Somalis, and it was literally billions of dollars.

This administration is rooting it out; Congress needs to do more. That's why I called for a special select committee to follow the money of these radical groups. We need to do it.

Roy, who lives in Austin Texas, is a Baptist, something that isn't surprising both because the Baptist are a large Protestant religion in the United States and because Texas is part of the "Bible Belt" where the Southern Baptist are particularly strong.

The Baptists are not part of the New Apostolic Reformation as a rule and have a very large set of differing beliefs on different topics. The reason to note this, however, is that Roy's statement really brings out a certain strain of Protestant Anti Catholicism that's very deep in the country's history.  Setting aside any one thing he's complaining about, a strain of it is that Catholic charities don't seem to care very much where people come from.

And that's because Catholics aren't not supposed to view the world that way.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven

Letter to Diognetus.

For many years, the really strong Protestant religions in the US were the "mainline" Protestant faiths, of which the Episcopal Church was the strongest.  None of the Mainline Protestant Churches was friendly with the Apostolic Churches, but they ironically all had connections to it, with the Presbyterian Church having the fewest.  In truth, in spite of the Black Legends of the Reformation they'd spread, they all worried about how they were viewed by the Catholic Church, accepting large elements of the Church's views as correct, and particularly worried about whether they had Apostolic Succession, strongly suspecting themselves that they did not.  People have spoken much about the decline of Christianity in the West, but they've missed two elements of that story to a significant degree, one being that the Catholic church was persistently attacked by Protestant governments during and after the Reformation, and that this yielded to attacks by left wing secular governments thereafter.  The Catholic Church nonetheless endured in spite of all of it, and its' rebounding from that assault.  The Mainline Protestant Churches, however, are simply dying of their own accord.

All along there's been a strain of loosely organized Protestant churches that fall outside of the Mainline churches.  The Mainline Protestant Churches did not worry much about them, but as time has gone on, and the impacts of the death of the Reformation and the cultural revolutions of the Baby Boomers have played out, those churches have grown and are particularly infused with the American Civil Religion, which many barely churched Americans are as well. The New Apostolic Reformation is just a sliver of that set of beliefs, but Apostolic Christians should be concerned.  The Apostolic Faiths are growing in the US right now as people turn towards the truth, but this administration is infused with the NAR which leads to events like this.  Recognizing the Christian origins of the United States is fine, and saying something prayerful at the Pentagon in this season is as well.  But a performance such as this, combined with rumblings from somebody like Roy, should worry us.  Christianity is not an American thing.

Or, perhaps, something else is going on.

The Apostolic Faiths are growing and converts from Protestantism are part of the reason why.  The Mainline Protestant Churches are dying.  Evangelicalism remains strong, but things like this show the marked contrast with the Ancient Faith.  This may all be part of the death of the Reformation playing out before us.

There remains a danger in all of this, however.  There are prominent Apostolic Christians in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp.  People like R. R. Reno, Rod Dreher and Kevin Roberts are founding members, and J. D. Vance is the most prominent politician who travels in that camp.  The views that the backers of people like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth hold are not necessarily friendly towards Apostolic Christians at all.  While people in the Reno/Dreher/Roberts camp may rejoice as the seeming defense of Christian values by the administration (and I'm not sure that at least Reno and Dreher, the latter of whom has declared Trump unstable, hold that view), it's making common cause with people who are either inherently hostile to the Apostolic Faiths or, in the case of Trump himself, deeply immoral.  Being such a fellow traveler rarely works out and we'll be turned on.

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