An unexpectedly cheerful followup to “JD Vance Taps into Parental Rage.” The alt titles today could be: “Tim Walz Taps into Parental Goals,” or “Disarming the Disinfo of the Right is Great, But Have You Tried Dad Jokes?”
Across social media, liberal millennial women are tagging Tim Walz as the return of the dad they lost to Fox News. Matthew digs into that graveyard with a survey of the tools that we’ve used to examine the nature and function of patriarchal bullshit as it dominates conspirituality, cults, and QAnon. The result is a stroll through a Madame Tussaud’s display of fragile and toxic influencer fathers, from Jordan Peterson to Jim Watkins to RFK Jr to Donald Trump.
Tim Walz not only doesn’t do any of the things these guys do—he might be rooting around in his special tool drawer now to find just the thing it’ll take to fix what they’ve done.
Note: this is not a blind love-fest or blanket endorsement of as-yet vague policies. But there is something powerful going on with Walz’s new-old modeling of Big Dad Energy.
Show Notes
A Balanced Assessment of Tim Walz’s Record from the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy | lvgaldieri
Tim Walz’s green resume has an oily stain
Minnesota activists criticize Tim Walz for refusing to meet with Palestinians – Mondoweiss
Donald Trump Likens His Schooling to Military Service in Book - The New York Times
Tim Walz was my teacher in high school. Here's what I've carried with me about him all these years later.
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Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Embrace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon, to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
This is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
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When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
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So, I ordered a chicken and an egg online.
I'll let you know which one comes first.
Okay, okay.
What do elves learn in school?
The alphabet!
What do clouds wear under their shorts?
Thunderpants!
Hello everybody, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I can add to that tagline that if we want to understand the cults and extremism parts, I think it's good to look at where masculinity is most fragile on the right.
And if you want to push back on it, disinformation work is great, but you might also want to follow the dad jokes.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
This is an editorial brief called Big Dad Energy, and it's an unexpectedly cheerful follow-up to my last essay, J.D.
Vance Taps Into Parental Rage.
Now, I could have called this one Tim Walz Taps Into Parental Goals, but I thought Big Dad Energy was better.
I'm going to let TikToker PamelaWurstVitriney kick things off in very poignant terms.
So Tim Walz was selected as the VP pick, and I've been predicting this for weeks, but let me tell you why it's making me really emotional.
After getting to know Tim Walz for the last few weeks, I have realized something, and it's very profound.
He represents the dad that a lot of liberal women lost.
A lot of us had moderate to conservative, educated, sensible fathers that we lost to Rush Limbaugh, that we lost to Fox News, that we lost to Donald Trump.
And the cult of conservatism that has grown and grown and grown has driven a wedge between millennial women and her father.
So this sentiment has been circulating all over my feeds.
And in many threads, liberal millennial women are saying that their fox-pilled fathers actually died during COVID because they were convinced the vaccine was unnecessary or poisonous.
All of it's just too on-the-nose.
So, I think it's exceptionally lucid, and in one sense I have nothing to add, but what I can do is to develop Pamela's tag of the cult of conservatism by looking at a few models that we've used here to examine the nature and function of patriarchal bullshit as it dominates conspirituality, cults, and QAnon.
In other words, I want to get really specific on all of the things that Walz seems to just laugh away.
And to do this, I'll be strolling through Madame Tussaud's display of fragile and toxic influencer fathers from Jordan Peterson to Jim Watkins to RFK Jr.
to Donald Trump.
And I'll intersperse it and end with thoughts on how Tim Walz not only doesn't do any of the things these guys do, but that as Pamela suggests, he might be rooting around in his tool drawer to find just the thing it'll take to fix what they've done.
I'm also going to look at the significance of dad jokes.
First, some caveats.
I'm a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, still registered to vote in Lake Delton, Wisconsin.
I just submitted my request for a mail-in ballot.
I'm going to be voting Harris Walls, but this episode is not a full endorsement of policies or some sort of blind lovefest.
There are political implications, I think, to appreciating Walz's Big Dad energy, but they're not dependable.
Comparing Walz to Vance or Trump or Peterson in terms of affect and attachment theory or parental authoritativeness versus authoritarianism may translate into some progressive versus reactionary tendencies on the political level.
But I want to be clear that however good Walz makes us feel, he's sure to deliver in real life disappointments and betrayals.
We don't know how far walls and Harris's good vibes will cash out in policy, or how much the machine of capitalism will let them tinker with its gears.
We don't know what history will conclude about his handling of the George Floyd riots.
I've read some mixed reports from local Minnesotan environmentalists that tarnish his widely-touted green record, including his failure to stop the construction of a tar sands Line 3 through Ojibwe treaty land.
He campaigned on opposing it and then caved.
I'm also troubled by a report out of Minnesota that some Palestinian citizens tried to book a meeting with him for 10 months, and when they were finally successful in getting a time slot, they showed up to the office and told his staff that they wanted to discuss the state divesting from Israel, and then the meeting was abruptly cancelled and they were sent home.
Like many on the left, I have an instinctive skepticism for mainstream Democrat good guys, and this has only deepened as the party has logged year after year of bureaucratic apathy.
The report of the cancelled meeting follows a pattern.
You show yourself as willing to listen and empathize, but when the shit hits the fan, you shut it down.
I'm sometimes haunted by that old line from Malcolm X about conservatives being wolves who bare their teeth honestly, while liberals adopt similar bared-teeth policies, but they pretend they're smiling.
My point is, the following exploration of Walz's healthy parental Big Dad energy is not giving a pass on as-yet-unknown policy positions, especially nationally and internationally.
Big dads can make us feel great, but they can also make terrible, insensitive, ignorant decisions, and we shouldn't be shocked when they do.
Having said all that, there are definite core features of toxic masculinity driving MAGA conservatism and its reactionary fellow travelers, and Walls kicks every one of those features in the ass, and that's a good thing for everyone, full stop.
It might even model a better future.
Now, in no particular order, the toxic features of Trumpian patriarchy are charisma, if there is any, that's rooted in anxiety or grievance as opposed to confidence, an all-consuming or desperate need to control, the complete inability to be self-deprecating, an unfamiliarity with laughter, a pervasive and persistent projection of vulnerability onto scapegoats, Elaborate justifications, sometimes spiritual, for aggression and even violence, persecution complexes, and thick emotional armoring.
All of this adds up to terrible, terrible dad stuff.
So, I'm going to go through four models here that have been helpful for understanding how male leaders in the cultic and conspirituality sector wield their masculinity in such a way that can draw people in even as they are hurting and exploiting them.
I'll title them as follows.
1.
Premature or Immature Armor 2.
The Prodigal Prince 3.
Traumatized Narcissism 4.
disorganized attachment.
Okay, number one. Premature or immature armor.
So The Sex Evangelicals co-host Jeremiah Gibson was just on the show with his partner Julia Postema to talk about how gender roles dominate the psychosocial landscape of evangelical practice and politics.
And he described being seven in his evangelical church and sometimes being the only male present at Bible study.
And according to the gender laws of the subculture, that meant that he had to lead the room full of women in reading and prayer.
He had to perform manliness in his boy's body, assuming an anxious leadership role he didn't earn or risk being called a sissy.
It made me think about the general blueprint I have in my brain for recognizing the stuffed shirt, the man who blusters, who is clearly always overreaching, the man who explained things to Rebecca Solnit about the book she actually wrote.
Jeremiah's story provides a powerful model for how patriarchy trains up men to unearned leadership, and how this confers social power and keeps a boot on the neck of women.
And it's not just in religious contexts.
I know from my own gendered experience of being given too much responsibility too early, that it also fuels a semi-conscious anxiety, a terror even, that one is an empty husk with nothing to offer but the performance of authority.
When a boy pretends to be an adult, they are setting themselves up for lifelong imposter syndrome.
And in engaging with men around me in real life and in the Digisphere, I can smell this happening when I have certain niggling thoughts like, I don't believe that you believe what you're saying.
I don't believe you know who you are.
No wonder your instinct is to start yelling.
And have you noticed that a lot of these guys yell?
Peterson, Jones, Russell Brand.
I can still hear Rush Limbaugh yelling from the grave.
Now Tim Walls has a big voice and I'm sure he yelled a lot as a football coach, but I have the feeling it was different, that the yelling was balanced out by listening.
And that in itself might be a good measure of the difference between authoritarian versus authoritative parenting.
The authoritarian parent derives power from continuous demands.
If they stop being demanding, they don't know what to do.
But the authoritative parent earns power by stopping to listen, and Twitter is already filled with clips of Walls meeting children on the campaign trail and squatting his big frame down to talk with them at eye level.
In terms of rhetorical strategy and bodily presence, what we've seen with conspirituality influencers and leaders of cultic groups is a kind of cheap grandiosity that has to continually extrovert and fill up space, apparently to protect a hollow core.
Peterson and Jones and Brand are like nasty, jumbo-sized, inflatable lawn decorations trembling outside the mansions of Musk and Thiel, and the constant hum of the fans is their love for gishgalloping, their inability to shut the fuck up.
They can talk forever, and they must.
That is how they know they are alive.
Now, why does RFK Jr.
love the Long Form Podcast?
Because it gives him hours at a time to listen to himself in a trance state.
He doesn't have to take anything in.
Okay, the second lens is The Prodigal Prince.
Speaking of RFK Jr., there's a 1997 book called Prophetic Charisma, The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities.
It's by Australian sociologist Len Oaks.
He spent years interviewing patriarchal cultic leaders or their family members, and then he plotted out a kind of archetypal life story arc, which turns out to be really useful when we're thinking about how stuffed shirts think about themselves.
There are six stages in this model, and if you think of them in relation to RFK Jr., I think they'll track.
And they also track with other heroic journeys that dominate the Manosphere's neo-fascist myth of a faraway golden past disrupted by a fall from grace and then restored by a spiritual mission.
Stage one in Oakes' model centers storytelling about a blessed childhood guided by towering but conflicted parental figures.
So we can think about Robert Kennedy Sr.
and Ethel Kennedy and then that old battle-axe Joseph in the background shadows of Bobby Kennedy Jr.' 's childhood.
Oaks suggests that the future prophet will always measure himself against this memory and its expectations.
So Bobby's gonna try to restore or embody Camelot on his march to the White House, down to ripping off his uncle's 1963 campaign ads.
Stage 2 is an incubation period of wandering lost through the wilderness.
Bobby's dad is murdered while campaigning, his mom loses her mind, and he gets into heroin at the age of 14.
This is The Dark Knight.
Periods three through five are of radical autonomy, conflict with authority, and acquisition of practical skills appropriate to a later prophetic career.
And after that comes awakening and mission, and we can see this through Bobby's transition from water pollution advocacy to vaccine anxiety in the early 2000s, provoked by his son's life-threatening allergies, but also sustained by a kind of religious fervor.
Now, these prophetic, charismatic types tell their personal stories over and over and over again.
They have to, almost as if the storytelling makes them feel like they're really here, but there are always exclusions.
Bobby's addiction story is an open book, but not his second marriage, in which his wife died by suicide, reportedly bereft over his promiscuity.
And we also have to wonder how many accusations of sexual assault, as he's implied, and perhaps animal cruelty are yet to come out.
And all of that matters because he's running on a platform of honesty, moral integrity, and healthy character.
One thing about Oakes' arc that tracks against the investigative journalism I've done on cult leaders and conspirituality influencers is that the relational aspect is always abstract and isolated.
The idealized childhood, symbolic of when America was great, is abstract.
But then, the Dark Knight is suffered alone.
And when the Charismatic rises out of that aloneness and into his sense of mission, so RFK Jr.
gets out of rehab and decides to save the environment, Russell Brand gets out of rehab and decides he'll be a leftist political wonk for a while and he also takes up yoga, and JD Vance throws off the shackles of Appalachian self-sabotage, as he describes it, and joins the venture capital world, The mission is always gigantic, world-changing.
It's never about smaller, everyday acts of service.
Now, these are all men with children.
They're fathers.
But you don't really feel it on them.
You can't smell the baby powder.
You can't imagine them changing a diaper.
And meanwhile, Tim Walz talks about losing his hair because he supervised the high school lunchroom for 20 years.
Okay, the third lens is called Traumatized Narcissism.
Now, you've probably heard of the Goldwater Rule.
It makes a lot of sense.
We don't know if any given political figure is mentally ill simply from their public acts, so if you're a mental health practitioner especially, you should keep your mouth shut.
But in 2017, Robert Lifton and a bunch of other prominent clinical psychologists
felt compelled to break that rule with a book called, The Dangerous Case of Trump,
which offered up a raft of diagnoses for the president, personality disorders, malignant narcissism, and a lot more.
In the cult studies world over which Robert Lifton was very influential,
psychoanalyst Dan Shaw has done probably more than anyone to push at these same goldwater limits
as he tries to describe the internal life of the cultic leader from both his personal knowledge
and his clinical experience with former cult members.
I'm going to read a key passage here from his book, which is called Traumatic Narcissism, and maybe you can all think about Donald Trump as you listen.
Quote, This narcissist in real life, a myth in his own mind, is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him.
That he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior being in need of nothing he cannot provide for himself.
But to remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate.
These spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be, for fear of being banished from his exalted presence.
He is compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation.
To the extent that he succeeds in keeping inadequacy and dependency external, he can sustain, in his internal world, his delusions of shame-free, self-sufficient superiority.
Now, how does this happen to a person?
What is the developmental trauma that Trump winds up spewing out over everyone and bonding with enough people over to make him competitive electorally?
This is from a New York Times review of a 2015 book by Michael D'Antonio.
In the book, Mr. Trump emerges as a man largely unchanged from his childhood in the wealthy Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates, where an exacting father, Fred Trump, schooled him in the ways of self-promotion and encouraged a lifetime of fighting.
The senior Mr. Trump, a major real estate developer, counseled his son to be a killer and told him, you are a king.
Mr. Trump memorably told Mr. D'Antonio that, quote, when I look at myself in the first grade
and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same.
The temperament is not that different, unquote.
Now, in Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough, her study of her family's psychology,
and she's qualified to do it being a psychologist herself, she writes quite movingly about Trump senior, Fred,
wanting his namesake firstborn, Freddy, to be a killer as well in business as he was.
But he overwhelmed the boy with browbeating and shame, and Freddy died of alcoholism at 42.
Mary writes, quote, The situation was somewhat different for Donald.
With the benefit of seven and a half year age difference, he had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate his older brother and Freddy's resulting shame.
The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy.
Fred didn't respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald.
Fred thought Freddie was weak, and therefore so did Donald.
It would take a long time before the two brothers, in very different ways, came to adapt themselves to the truth of this.
It's difficult to understand what goes on in any family, perhaps hardest of all for the people in it.
Regardless of how a parent treats a child, it's almost impossible for that child to believe that parent means them any harm.
It was easier for Freddy to think that his father had his son's best interests at heart and that he, Freddy, was the problem.
In other words, protecting his love for his father was more important than protecting himself from his father's abuse.
And Donald would have taken his father's treatment of his brother at face value.
Quote, Dad's not trying to hurt Freddy, he's only trying to teach us how to be real men.
And Freddy's failing.
Unquote.
So Dan Shaw paints this picture of the traumatized and traumatizing narcissist.
And I think what stands out most to me is that it's a picture of hopelessly broken and merged boundaries and then the rage that spills out when you have no core self.
The son who cannot be himself because he must fulfill his abusive father by humiliating his brother.
The guy who goes on to literally build a business not out of things, but out of the brand of his own fragile personality.
The guy who pretended to be his own PR person and calls to New York journalists.
The guy who cannot stop thinking about what he looks like in relation to other strong men.
Or wondering what the celebrities are doing, what they're thinking of him and how his shows are performing against theirs.
This is the guy who's always on stage, always hitting his mark, always looking for the camera, never missing a beat, even in the moment after almost having had his brain blown out.
This monumentally empty man cannot leave anyone alone because he is capitalism personified.
He sees resources, not people.
And this is why, for all his personal libertarianism, he has no qualms if it brings him attention about intervening in the lives of migrant families or the bodies of women and the right for queer people to marry or trans people to receive health care.
And the J.D.
Vance wing of his movement takes that vanity and runs with it because they really do believe they should be meddling in people's bedrooms.
Meanwhile, at every rally, Tim Walz finds some moment to holler out what he calls the Minnesota Golden Rule.
Mind your own damn business.
Fourth and last theme, disorganized detachment.
Tim Walz has another standout line on the stump.
Here it is from that hangar in Detroit, August 7th.
All the things that make me mad about those other guys and all the things they do wrong, the one thing that I will not forgive them for is they're trying to steal the joy from this country.
They try and steal the joy.
To recap, with that premature armor dad, you get that rigid, self-defensive, emotional brick wall.
With prodigal prince dad, you get someone who can't stop telling his own story over and over again.
Are you part of that story?
Only as a plot point in his own mythology.
With the traumatizing narcissist, you're in even deeper because he has ultimate control and yet he depends on your attention and support.
And all of these dynamics have stolen the joy of the last eight years.
I remember Trump's Twitter glory days, how many women would say it's like living with your drunken father, ranting upstairs.
And that sentiment captured really the heaviest joy-stealing dynamic we studied amongst the dads and cult leaders of conspirituality and the MAGA movement.
They fostered something called disorganized attachment, in which the patriarchs maintain control by oscillating between promises of love and protection and threats of humiliation and destruction.
This summarizes the content of Jordan Peterson, the tweets of Trump, and the survivalist merch that Alex Jones sells on commercial breaks during Infowars.
That message is, the world is ending, I can save you.
Everyone around you is satanic, so take my hand and I'll lead you to heavenly safety.
As Alexandra Stein writes in Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, this is a book about cult dynamics that could also be about intimate partner abuse, quote, The caregiver is at once the safe haven and also the source of threat or alarm in the disorganized attachment constellation.
The child experiences the unresolvable paradox of seeking to simultaneously flee from and approach the caregiver.
In most cases, the need for proximity, for physical closeness, tends to override attempts to avoid the fear-arousing caregiver, so usually the child stays close to the frightening parent, while internally, both their withdrawal and approach systems are simultaneously activated and in conflict.
And nothing so keenly fostered this split affect than the drops and lore of QAnon, with Q offering his double-edged promise with every drop.
On one hand, the storm is coming.
On the other hand, trust the plan.
On one hand, nothing can stop what is coming.
On the other, don't let yourself be ruled by fear.
And who was behind it?
Jim and Ron Watkins.
The father and son team of ultimate alienation, hiding out in the Philippines, hosting a virtual rallying point for the dregs of the manosphere.
trolls and incels who cooked up an ironic but deadly LARP, governed by a fictional patriarch
named Q, whose fame, like God's, seemed to rise in tandem with his invisibility.
So I think we have a well-rounded picture of the influences for the Trump-era dad,
a modern lineage that Pamela in that opening TikTok tracked back to the talk radio days of Rush Limbaugh.
They bluster, defend themselves, they can't listen, they gishgallop with grandiose self-mythology, they're nothing without your support, and they make you feel guilty if you don't fawn over them.
They tell you they love you, and then threaten to leave you, or worse.
Of course their policies are right-wing.
There's nothing generous, empathetic, or pro-social about these psychological profiles.
They are fragile and aggressive.
But Tim Walz wouldn't be sending them all scurrying right now if he looked like me, an urbanite Gen X guy with long hair who would look really awkward carrying a hunting rifle and who can't repair his own car.
I'm the kind of guy it was easy to label as a cuck, an East Coast elite, a libtard.
What stands out about Walls in this spectacle of fatherhood is that by presence and sound, you'd expect him to carry these same wounds.
He's not retiring.
He's not overly intellectual.
He's not melancholic or introverted.
He looks like Rush Limbaugh's target market.
But look, to be any kind of politician in this landscape, he's gotta have some bombastic qualities.
He has to be grandiose in moments that the people who know him side-eye at and tolerate.
He didn't fall out of a coconut tree, to use Harris' line.
And we know that, unlike most timid Democrat lawmakers, he crushed out a huge progressive legislative agenda in Minnesota while carrying only razor-thin margins in the statehouses, so we know he can fight like a bulldog.
He has to be extroverted, and you're seeing that continually now on The Stump.
And so I wondered, what is it that kept the extraversion of this burly white dude from becoming aggressive, mean, and overbearing?
What kept him gregarious and seemingly positive?
And then I came across this thread from a woman named Megan Cooley Peterson.
Quote, Tim Walls was my teacher in high school.
Here's what I've carried with me about him all these years later.
Senior year, my creative writing class wrote poems and hung them on giant pieces of paper in the hallways.
After I hung mine, I decided to add a standalone line at the bottom that said, Sometimes people who don't speak have the most to say.
A few days later, Mr. Walls stopped me in the hall.
He said he'd read my poem and wanted to know about that single line.
Is that true, he asked me, about people who don't talk much having a lot to say?
Mr. Walls was outspoken, outgoing, and friendly to everyone.
I was shy, quiet, and bursting with ideas and opinions but too afraid to ever voice them.
He was genuinely interested in a point of view I don't think he'd given that much thought to until he read my words.
We had a good chat, and it meant a lot to me.
So what I notice most about this is that it shows a guy reckoning with his own largesse and questioning it, realizing that it might be only one of many ways of being in the world.
Now, if like Jeremiah Gibson, who I referenced at the top from the Sex Evangelicals podcast, there was any part of Tim Walz who grew up like so many other men, encouraged to adopt an unearned confidence that would play out in continual extroversion.
He also somehow maintained enough self-awareness to understand that that extroversion can make the introverted invisible.
And he wanted to correct for that.
And here's where the dad joke comes in.
And I think Walls knows this intuitively.
One of his tagline examples for the weirdness of Trump is that we never see him laugh or even smile.
Walls calls that weird, but the truth is worse.
It's actually menacing.
And the thing is, what do you do when you're a big guy and you come to realize that you have a lot of power and a big voice and for better or worse you've developed a gregarious way in the world but you know you have to use it responsibly?
Walls is 6 foot 2 and probably 240 pounds.
I'm that same height and I've been around that same weight and so I'm familiar with the big dad problem of how do you wield strength and authority without taking away the agency of others.
Let me put it another way.
How is my wallet like an onion?
Well, every time I open it, I cry.
Sorry.
One way to do this is with the dad joke.
And you're never going to hear Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, RFK Jr., or Donald Trump ever tell a dad joke.
Why?
Because the dad joke says, I'm big, but I'm also a clown.
I'm here to help, but you can also make fun of me.
And that in itself might be a form of help.
There's tension here, but I'm not wound up about it.
So the dad joke recognizes that authority is provisional and must be passed on.
My boys are 8 and 11, and they already take a lot of pleasure in poking fun at me.
I'm old.
I'm a loser at video games.
I'm cringe.
I sweat too hard when I run.
I repeat safety instructions too often.
I know that they love me, but are also rebelling against my size and my shadow over them, which, as kind as I try to make it, will still define their lives in ways they cannot control and therefore must resist.
And the dad joke is a way of me rolling with their eye rolls, a way of showing that I'm not in their way.
But I am there to support and I'll be self-deprecating if it will help that go down easier.
I guess I'll end by saying that in the background of all of this are the religious archetypes that have animated American politics forever.
I think that what Walls spotlights is that the God of the Old Testament, to whom Christian nationalists are constantly appealing, was terrifying.
He was a jealous God, a wrathful patriarch, and also a weird father obsessed with food purity and circumcision.
But the other vision might be to imagine God standing there like a big doofus dad, saying, pull my finger.
