'It eats him alive inside': Trump's latest attack shows endless obsession with Obama

CC™ News - David Smith 

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump once sat together in the Oval Office. “I was immediately struck by Trump’s body language,” wrote journalist Jon Karl in his memoir Front Row at The Trump Show. “I was seeing a side of him I had never seen. He seemed, believe it or not, humbled.”

It was November 2016 and, just for once, Trump was not in charge of the room, Karl recalls. Obama was still president, directing the action and setting the tone. His successor “seemed a little dazed” and “a little freaked out”. What the two men discussed in their meeting that day, only they know.

But what became clear in the next three and a half years is that Obama remains something of an obsession for Trump; the subject of a political and personal inferiority complex.

Observers point to a mix of anti-intellectualism, racism, vengeance and primitive envy over everything from Obama’s Nobel peace prize to the scale of his inauguration crowd and social media following.

Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security aide, tweeted this week: “Trump’s fact-free fixation on Obama dating back to birtherism is so absurd and stupid that it would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic.”

“Birtherism” was a conspiracy theory that Trump started pushing in 2011 (“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one but there is something on that birth certificate – maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don’t know.”) . Nine years later, he has come full circle with “Obamagate”, which accuses his predecessor of working in league with the “deep state” to frame Trump for colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election.

There is zero evidence for this claim. Indeed, a case could be made that the supposed “deep state” did more to help Trump than hurt him when the FBI reopened an investigation into his opponent, Hillary Clinton, just before election day. When questioned by reporters, Trump himself has struggled to articulate what “Obamagate” means. Ned Price, a former CIA analyst, dubbed it “a hashtag in search of a scandal”.

But his allies in the Republican party and conservative media are stepping up to build a parallel universe where this is the big story and Obama is at the center of it. Sean Hannity, a host on Fox News, demanded: “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?” Over the past week, the channel’s primetime shows have devoted more coverage to the bogus crimes of “Barack Hussein Obama” than to the coronavirus pandemic – and Trump’s mishandling of it.

Trump has a problem where I think he’s just jealous of the fact that Obama is still so admired

Tara Setmayer

Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Donald Trump always needs a foil. This riles up his base because they cling to anything that diverges responsibility for anything from Donald Trump over to someone else. And in this case Barack Obama is the boogeyman of the month.”

Beyond political expediency, there is a more profound antipathy at work. From the Iran nuclear deal to the Trans Pacific Partnership, from environmental regulations to the Affordable Care Act, Trump has always seemed to be on a mission to erase his predecessor’s legacy. With few deep convictions of his own, Trump found a negative reference point in Obama. Between 22 November 2010 and 14 May 2020, he tweeted about Obama 2,933 times, according to the Trump Twitter Archive.

There are a few reasons, argues Setmayer, host of the Honestly Speaking podcast. “First off, Donald Trump has a problem where I think he’s just jealous of the fact that President Obama is still so admired. Number two, I think he has a problem with people of color who are in authority that don’t do the kind of song and dance that he wants them to do.

“Barack Obama is not a ‘shuck and jive’ person of color, and those are the kinds of people that Donald Trump seems to be attracted to if you look at who he surrounds himself with as far as minorities are concerned.”

Third, Setmayer points to the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where Trump sat stony-faced and humiliated as Obama lampooned the Celebrity Apprentice host’s nascent political ambitions. Obama even pointed to a photoshopped image of a Trump White House with hotel, casino, golf course and gold columns.

“A lot of people think that this is where this all started,” Setmayer continued. “President Trump does not have a sense of humor, he’s not self-deprecating, and the White House correspondents’ dinner is a fun event where people make fun of each other, especially in politics.”

“This obsession, of course, is absolutely rooted in racism.

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, said: “This obsession, of course, is absolutely rooted in racism. Some of the accusations have been deeply racialized, from the questioning of Obama’s intelligence to talking about how much basketball he plays to questioning his birthplace and citizenship.”

Trump has shredded many norms, including that of presidents maintaining a respectful contact with their predecessors. He has dismissed the idea of seeking Obama’s input during the coronavirus pandemic. For his part, Obama has carefully chosen his moments to condemn certain decisions or policies without mentioning Trump by name.

But tensions flared last week when a tape leaked of Obama on a private conference call with about 3,000 alumni of his administration, describing Trump’s leadership in the pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster”. He also warned a justice department move to drop charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, indicates that “the rule of law is at risk”.

Trump has described Flynn as a wronged “hero” and argued that Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for November’s election, should “pay a big price” for supposedly derailing the retired general’s career. Critics suggest that the president is seeking to weaponise the justice department for electoral gain.

Matthew Miller, a former director of the office of public affairs at the department, said: “In terms of any real action against Barack Obama, he obviously doesn’t have anything to worry about. But when you look at what’s happened at the justice department with the complete politicisation of that department, I think it’s quite possible that they’re going to be coming after people from the Obama administration, using the criminal justice process any way they can.”

The 2016 rally chants of “Lock her up!” might be replaced by “Lock him up!”

It would be one of the gravest consequences of Trump’s Obama obsession. Miller added: “There’s some racism there but, most of all, it’s driven by the fact that Obama has the thing that Trump has always craved but never achieved, and that’s respect. I’ve always thought that the respect that Barack Obama gets from people in this country and around the world is something that just eats Trump alive inside.”

Obama issued a tweet on Thursday that contained one word: “Vote.” He is expected to campaign vigorously for Biden, wooing voters who crave a return to what they saw as the dignity and stability of his era. But his presence is also likely to be inverted by Trump to rally his base with dark warnings that, like Clinton before him, Biden would effectively represent a third term of Obama. The 2016 rally chants of “Lock her up!” might be replaced by “Lock him up!”

The 2020 election could yet turn into a final showdown between Obama and Trump, even if only one of their names is on the ballot.

It will be a clash of opposites: one a mixed-race cerebral lawyer who has been married to the same woman for nearly three decades and publishes annual lists of his favorite books; the other a white billionaire and reality TV star who wed three times and measures success in TV ratings. Where one is renowned for elegant turns of phrase and shedding tears after mass shootings, the other serves up jumbled word salads and schoolboy spelling errors and has struggled to show empathy for the coronavirus dead.

Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About Trump, said: “There’s so much that separates them, it’s hard to imagine two presidents more different. It’s very obvious Trump is continually comparing himself with Obama in his own mind. Obama’s over his head, over his shoulder, always looming as the guy who could speak in paragraphs and juggle more than one thing at once and deal with them effectively.”

Source: The Guardian

CC™ Flashback: Igbo leadership and their penchant for the absurd

Former Governor Raji Fashola of Lagos State

CC™ Conversation 

There has always been one constant with Igbo leadership. They have always had an obtuse penchant for the absurd while tinkering on the edge of provocation.

In a recent conversation with The Sun, a so-called chieftain of Igbo United Initiative (IUI) and Chairman of Win Peace Investment Ltd., Chief Amobi Nnadiekwe, stated unabashedly that the Ndigbo must produce the next deputy governor of Lagos State.

Chief Nnadiekwe stressed that his position was predicated on the 'fact' that the Igbo now constituted around 43% of the population of Lagos (I guess the Yoruba birthrate must be going down as well as that of the Hausa-Fulani in the state) and had contributed a lot to the growth and development of the state.

This is such obfuscated hubris and it is unfortunate that ethnic jingoists like Chief Nnadiekwe still continue to fight the civil war by preying on the guilty conscience of Yoruba liberals, in particular.

One wonders exactly why the fixation on Lagos State. I will delve into the politics of this in a follow-up piece and it will serve as a reminder to Yoruba leadership across the southwest, that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

As expected, it would seem that Chief Nnadiekwe's brethren across the bow does not share his notion of Nigerians "feeling at home" wherever they are, as an APGA (basically an Igbo party) leader declared that the APC (which most Ndigbo view as a Yoruba party) is a "stranger" in the same southeast Chief Nnadiekwe hails from.

Lagos State is a Yoruba state and will remain so. That the host ethnicity of that glorious state are welcoming and cordial, should not be misinterpreted for weakness. The Ndigbo remain by all accounts the most polarizing, parochial and unwelcoming of all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria.

It is time for there to be a realization that Nigeria does not owe the Ndigbo anything and the Yoruba in particular will not be blackmailed into sacrificing their birth-right on the altar of political correctness.

It is hypocritical that a man like Chief Nnadiekwe, whose political views have always been through ethno-tribal lenses should be the one clamoring for equity and egalitarianism, obviously when it suits him.

In this Sun interview, Chief Nnadiekwe speaks on various issues and claims that the Igbo constitute 43 per cent of the population in Lagos. 

Your group has been sensitizing the people of South-East to vote any political party that fields an Igbo as deputy governor of Lagos in 2015. So far, what has been the response?

The response was wonderful. We plan to visit town unions and markets in Lagos State especially, the ones dominated by Igbo. It is time to be part of the political process in the state where Igbo contribute over 52 per cent to the state's economy. Of course, you know that South-East constitutes 43 per cent of the state population. To that extent, we deserve the position of deputy governor. With the number of Ndigbo in Lagos, no doubt, if collectively we decide to vote for any party in Lagos, the party must win. Lagos State has continued to marginalize us politically, hence, Igbos have decided to demand for their right. We have written to all the political parties in the state, informing them of our resolve to vote any party that fields an Igbo as deputy governor.

We have given them early notice, so that they won't say we took them unawares as they are about to begin their primaries. Anything short of making an Igbo man deputy governor in 2015 will not be acceptable to Ndigbo. For the very first time, this vision has united Igbos in Lagos and in the Diaspora. This warning is extended to parties in the other states where Igbos are the second largest population. They should, as a matter of policy, field an Igbo man as deputy governor in 2015. The next stage is rally, which will be organized in the major centers in Lagos and in the affected states.

What other steps do you hope to take to make this happen?

Arrangements have been concluded to visit Igbo leaders and organizations including Ohaneze Ndigbo towards achieving this noble cause, because the population of Igbos in Lagos cannot be undermined in the forthcoming general elections in the state, even though we failed to realize this in the past. Our votes have always decided electoral victories in the state. Any party we vote for must win, hence, we refuse to be used to make up numbers in future elections in Lagos. Ndigbo will participate actively like never before in the 2015 general elections. We will continue to sensitize our people not to vote any party that fails to give the deputy governor slot to Igbos in Lagos. So, this is an assignment for parties jostling to win the gubernatorial race in the Center of Excellence state next year. We don't care about party, what matters most to Igbo is a party that has our interest at heart, whether APC, PDP, Labour or APGA. But if no party fields an Igbo man as deputy governor, we may be forced to boycott the governorship election in Lagos State.

Why the demand for deputy governor slot instead of the governorship seat considering the population of Ndgbo in Lagos?

It is possible for an Igbo to become governor of Lagos State. If you cast your mind back, you will remember that Zik won election as Premier of Western Region but was denied the opportunity and he ran back to become Premier of the Eastern Region. So, it is possible. If Ndigbo can come together, we will produce governor of Lagos State in the near future. We must start from somewhere, and that is the deputy governorship seat in 2015. Lagos is our second home. Majority of our investments are in Lagos and we have a good population. We are law-abiding citizens because there has never been any misunderstanding between Igbos and Lagosians. The relationship has been cordial, hence, even the indigenes wouldn't mind to elect Igbo as governor.

Don't you think that the issue of indigenization should be first enshrined in our constitution before making such demand?

Indigenization is one of the important issues addressed at the just concluded National conference. However, that won't stop us from making genuine demands such as the one at hand. Indigenization is welcomed by all Nigerians. What it means is that a Yoruba man can be governor of Anambra State; an Hausa can contest and win a senatorial seat in Ondo State.

And until we get to this stage, we are not yet a nation. Once again, I beg my brothers in Lagos State to allow Igbo participate fully in the 2015 political process in the state by zoning the position of deputy governor to Igbo.

We have paid our dues and have contributed in the development of the state which warrants this demand. Except they see us as slaves who don't deserve fair treatment. But if Lagosians are sincere, they would agree with me that Igbos are stakeholders in the Lagos project. 

We have developed virtually all parts of Lagos, a sign that we are not willing to leave the state or do anything to destroy or disrupt the relative peace in the state. If the truth must be told, Ndigbo have developed Lagos more than South East.

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Reorientation: A need for a new educational agenda for Africans

Professor Omoh T. Ojior, Ph.D.

The news that the former President of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has enrolled at Nigeria's National Open University is pleasing because there is no end to learning. However, the report, on the other hand is disturbing because of one of the reasons the former Nigeria leader opted to go back to school to study for an MA and a Ph.D. degrees at this time in his life.

The report states that Chief Obasanjo has registered to study Christian Theology in the School of Arts and Social Sciences. Further, the report reveals that Chief Obasanjo at 77, states that his primary reason is "to acquire knowledge, particularly in Christian Theology, not because I want to be a pastor but rather, to know God more and to be able to serve Him better." In other words, Retired General Olusegun Obasanjo is going back to school to study Christian religious theology to allow him to know God more in order to serve "Him/Her" (God) better.

To begin with, most of the Christian Theology is taken from the Bible. One is aware that the Bible, to most Nigerians is the word of God hence our former President want to study Christian Theology to know God more to help him serve God better. From historical records, we are able to state that the Bible is "Apart from its being a book of great historical and biographical interest, the Bible is, from Genesis to Revelation, in its inner or spiritual meaning, a record of the experiences and the development of the human soul and of the whole being of humankind; also it is a treatise on humanity's relation to God, the Creator and Father." (Read Charles Fillmore's Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, 1931, and Joseph Wheless' Is It God's Word?). 

So, the historical experiences as contained in the Bible will assist our Chief to know God more. Fine.

The purpose of this article is to show Nigerians that there is a serious need for an educational agenda that focuses on a new orientation of the minds of our people about what was before now. This is with a view to assisting in the development of new African perspectives of life as it relates to the type of Christianity that was brought to our land, Nigeria. Our effort here is not a criticism of any religion, rather the effort should be seen as trying to allow our people to see why our African ideas and ideals including our products and endeavors as a people should be respected.

You see, there is nothing wrong about one's desire to know God more with a view to relating and appreciating Him more. The problem one is having with Chief Obasanjo's choice is where he is channeling his focus to know more about the Divine nature of the Diffused Energies; the I Am that I Am; the Olorun Olodumare, and the Oluwa of the Yorubas; the Osinegba, Oghena, and the Omholua no ma mha kpo, of the Etsako people; the Chineke of the Igbos; the Ghanaians call Him/Her, Mau; of course, the Egyptians call Him/Her, Ra; the Chinese have their own name, the Jews call Jehovah or Yahweh, and the Indians have theirs. 

I am sure the Russians have their own name for the Phenomenon which only the Europeans and Americans call, God. They popularized their name which now makes it look as if their own name for Him/Her is the only One true God. One is aware that anyone should be able decide on where to find and interact with the One God of humanity, but it is not the high caliber of Chief Obasanjo's personality who should be telling Nigerians, young and old that he was going back to school to understudy the Christian Theology to allow him know God more.

Chief Obasanjo's reason, as he explained is not helpful to the young ones who are at this point in time, trying very hard to escape the harsh hardship and unpleasant conditions of life in the country, partly inflicted on the population through the dogmas taught by the Christian Church. At the level Chief Obasanjo has served Nigeria as its former Head of State and President, and with his maturity and dynamism, he had exhibited, he should have said or done something else to motivate the youths and people generally in the country; at least give a sense of direction.

When our rulers run away from what they are (our culture), what do we expect from the ordinary citizens? It is the same Chief Obasanjo who should have allowed the world to know that it was never a sin to have more than one wife when he was President. But he did not. Nigerians knew that the Chief was a true "Odape" a wealthy family man known in Etsako as Odape. 

The Moslems are able to marry four wives because they say that their Holy Book, the Quran decrees it. The Quran and the Holy Book of the Christians, the Bible came from the same source; one is a replica of the other. France is Christendom. The French and their leaders marry one wife but have many mistresses or concubines known to everyone else; and it is not an offence or sin against God and humanity in France. 

If this be the case, why should Nigerian rulers, some of who are Christians like Obasanjo continue to shy away from the truth, an apparent deception to destroy the Holistic cultural system of our African sub-region of the World? One man and many wives, as one can maintain is not a crime or sin, and it shouldn't be in Nigeria and Africa.

The Christian Church today in Nigeria could be said to be a curse. How else do we explain away the deceits, frauds, colluding with wrong dowers at the helm of affairs in the country, including the reported adulterous life of many of them? Some of the Church pastors ride about in private jets made of Gold. 

The former President Olusegun Obasanjo has earned my praises and confidence over the years; he still earns my praise and confidence because in his time he attempted to bring Nigeria out of the doldrums it has been in; hence one is trying to advise him and those like him in the country through this medium. He is also, in our time, the first to recognize the need and worth of the Nigerians abroad, and the impact they could have on the Nigerian economy. 

Another behavior one admires about Obasanjo is the fact that he remains as one of the Nigerian heads of state that have never put on a foreign dress such as English suite apart from when he wears his Military uniforms, in my opinion. He is always on our admirable native dresses outside his home. He deserves our advise like many other Nigerians on this type matters.

However, most of the Christian theological studies at any of our institutions, low and high, will be nothing more than the dogmas with which Africans have been deceived and held down over the years. This is not to say that there is no divinity in the Christianity. The facts are that the elements constituting the Divine nature of our Almighty Father, the I Am that I Am of us all, are omitted in the teachings of most of our Christian Churches who's many members and adherents of the religion, constitute a greater part of the servants of instructions in all of the esoteric or mundane institutions of ours. 

Our institutions and Theology are not where to learn to know God more.

The Nigeria Christian Church dogmas are not near the quality and potency of the African cultures, spiritually speaking. If Chief Obasanjo had opted for the studies on African cultures in any of our universities, it would have created some inspirations that bring about some attention to the need to streamline our cultural elements in our lives. Awareness and the importance of our culture would have been assisted thereby. It would have become something to emulate by many Nigerians including many of the youths who are roaming about in the country unable to obtain employment.

Having not been equipped with the psychological tools of self value and confidence which is a case against our social institutions and the foreign religious dogmas fed to their psyche.

Authentic African history informs us that the original Christianity came out of Africa from the traditions, but came back refurbished into Africa, (read "The Destruction of Black Civilization, 1987" by Chancellor Williams). Christianity as was imported back into Africa by the colonial overlords which is largely practiced today is nothing like the original one. The Christianity of today in Africa is a European culture refurbished from Africa's cultural doctrines or traditions. 

To acquire a wider knowledge of the world educationally is different from going to study Europeanized Christian doctrines that do not help an African to understand the world around him or her. This is because Christian beliefs and doctrines are opium that tranquilizes the adherents. Nigerian rulers do not need to promote such teachings or evangelism.

A conscious person, who wants to know God more, should be in-tune with the precepts of his or her own culture and traditions. If there are any of the cultural precepts that are no longer in tuned with the time they should be revised within the culture to meet the dictates of the time. It is not to be replaced with foreign culture, traditions, and dogmas. Take for an example, The Christian religious dogmas instruct Africans that the Ten Commandments in Christianity was handed to Moses by God atop Mountain Sinai. 

This is definitely not correct as a fact and it is the kind of what exactly Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, our former President will be taught in Christian theological studies in our universities. According to Chancellor Williams, "The great Lawgiver, Moses, was not only born in Africa but he was also married to the daughter of an African priest,"…. and "The religious belief in sacrifice for the remission of sins was an African belief and practice at least 2,000 years before Abraham." 

Chancellor Williams concluded further that "Practically all of the Ten Commandments were embedded in the African Constitution ages before Moses went up Mt. Sinai in Africa in 1491 B.C., a rather late date in African history," page 135.

 In his own historical account, Gerald Massey states that "the Mosaic commandments were borrowed from the wisdom of Egypt," (see Egypt: The Light of the World, Vol. II) Also, Maulana Karenga asserts that of the Ten Commandments, (9) were strictly African. 

This is because in my own opinion, the tenth of the Commandments was the one which says that "Thou shall not have another God before me." Africans could not have authored the injunction of "Thou shall not have another God before me." This cannot be in doubt because early in ancient time, Egypt like in any other African Kingdom or Empire was known as the land of the Gods as it was the practice at the time that every household has their own Shrine, Deity or God which they adored and worshiped. 

This being the case, such an injunction could not be made part of the Egyptian Laws.

Also, the condemnation of ancient African many Gods, as devils by the then new Christian Church have been proved to be wrong. We read "Instead of the plurality of Gods of the "pagan" religions it adopted the One God Yahweh as finally evolved from old Hebrew mythology, into Three-One-Christian Godhead. 

The other Pagan Gods became, in effect, the 'saints' of the new cult; or as quoted in the Catholic Encyclopedia: 'the saints are the successors to the Gods' (Vol. xv, 710)." (see Joseph Wheless' Is It God's Word? Or Jeremiah VIII, 8 Rev. Ver.) Is it impossible that these historical facts are not known to our educators, therefore will not be taught to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo? The answer will be YES.

Our leaders or rulers must become conscious enough to know that they need to be symbols for our emulation in our societies. They need to know that to know God and serve Him better is to serve man and woman better in our societies. When one serves man or woman, he or she is serving the One Supreme Being of the universe. Man know Thyself is a spiritual mandate. Man is the Microcosm of the Macrocosm. 

Our rulers should know this and if not, then they were not preparing to serve the people. The inadequate preparation and the dogmas imbibed by those who should have serve the people better, is the result of some of the inhumanity to man that pervade our environment. 

A reorientation to understand who we are as a distinct people is a greater prerequisite to solution sought by those Africans who have the need to expand their educational knowledge and human affairs. There is a need for a new educational agenda in Africa.

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Flashback: White Evangelicals Made A Deal With The Devil And Are Still In Bed With Him.

Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John's Church in Washington DC. Credits: Getty Images

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By Sarah Jones

In the end, white Christian America stood by its man. The exit polls present an imperfect but definitive picture. At least three-quarters of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in November, a figure largely unchanged from 2016. Evangelicals didn’t win Trump another four years in power, but not for lack of effort. While most of America tired of the president’s impieties, the born-again found in themselves a higher tolerance for sin.

And the sins are legion, lest we forget. He tear-gassed protesters so he could walk to a D.C. church and hold a Bible upside-down in front of it without interference. He lied and cheated, and smeared women who accused him of sexual assault. He separated migrant children from their parents and staffed his administration with white nationalists. Over a quarter of a million Americans died of coronavirus, while he railed against doctors and scientists trying to save lives. Not even a plague turned evangelicals from their earthly lord. For Trump, the consequences are political and legal. For evangelicals, the fallout has a more spiritual quality. What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?

Evangelicals had more to lose than Republicans, for reasons I learned in church as a child. You can’t evangelize anyone if your testimony is poor. If you disobey your parents, or wear a skirt that falls above your knees, how can anyone believe you’re saved? Another Sunday School lesson, conveniently forgotten? Be sure that your sin will find you out. Evangelicals bought power, and the bill is coming due. The price is their Christian witness, the credibility of their redemption by God. Evangelicalism won’t disappear after Trump, but its alliance with an unpopular and brutal president could alienate all but the most zealous. 

To be evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear. The world was so dangerous, and our status in it so fragile. The fossil record was a lie, and scientists knew it. You could not watch the Teletubbies because Jerry Falwell thought the purple one was gay. No Disney, either, and not because Walt had been a fascist; Disneyworld allowed a gay pride day, and in one scene of The Lion King, you could see the stars spell out “sex.” You were lucky to even be alive, to have escaped the abortion mill. The predominantly white evangelical world in which I was raised had created its own shadow universe, a buffer between it and the hostile world. Our parents could put us in Christian schools or homeschool us; if they did risk public school, we could take shelter with groups like YoungLife and the Fellowship Christian of Athletes, which would tell we to make the most of this chance to save souls. We had alternatives for everything; our own pop music, our own kids’ shows, our own versions of biology and U.S. history, and an ecosystem of colleges and universities to train us up in the way we should go: toward the Republican Party, and away from the left, with no equivocation.

Whatever the cause, whatever the rumor, the fear was always the same. It was about power, and what would happen if we lost it. Certain facts, like the whiteness of our congregations and the maleness of our pulpits and the shortcomings of our leaders, were not worth mentioning. You were fighting for God, and God was not racist or sexist; He was only true. The unsaved hated this, it made them angry, and that was proof you were doing the right thing. If “owning the libs” has a discernible origin point, it’s here, in the white evangelical church.

While I was in college and Trump was still a reality show star, evangelicals faced a crisis in the pews. Young people were leaving the church, and they weren’t coming back. The first signs arrived in 2007, in the last hopeful months before the Great Recession. A pair of Christian researchers released a study with troubling implications for the future of the church. Young people aged 16 to 29 were skeptical of Christianity and of evangelicalism in particular, concluded Dave Kinnaman of the Barna Group and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Group. “Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political,” they wrote. Among the unchurched, attitudes were even more negative. A mere 3 percent said they had positive views of evangelicalism, a precipitous decline from previous generations.

I interviewed Lyons about his research while I was a student journalist at Cedarville University, a conservative Baptist school in Ohio. By the time I graduated, I’d become one of his statistics, an atheist with a minor in Bible. Trump was not even a glimmer in Steve Bannon’s eye, but the evangelical tradition had already asked me to tolerate many sins. There was George W. Bush and his catastrophic invasion of Iraq; welfare policies that starved the poor; the dehumanization of immigrants, of LGBT people, of women who do not wish to stay pregnant, and my own, non-negotiable submission to men. At some point I realized that I had traveled some distance in my mind, and I could not go back the way I came. I was over it, I was through.

The years after my personal exodus brought with them more proof that the church was in trouble. Partisanship did not entirely explain why. Membership declined fastest in mainline congregations, even though they tend to be more liberal than the independent churches of my youth. Social media has expanded the philosophical marketplace; all Christian traditions face competition from new ideologies for the hearts and minds of the young. But conservative denominations are suffering, too. The Southern Baptist Convention said this June it had experienced its thirteenth consecutive year of membership decline. By age 22, two-thirds of adults who attend Protestant services as teenagers have dropped out of church for at least a year, LifeWay Research found last year, and a quarter cited political disagreements as the reason. An alliance with a president the young largely hated might not lure new generations to the fold.

Years of attrition have taken a toll on white evangelicals, said Robert Jones, the author of White Christian America and the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. “If you go back a couple of election cycles ago, into Barack Obama’s first election, they were 21 percent of the population, and today they are 15 percent of the population,” he told me. The share of Black evangelicals has remained relatively stable, he added, while the numbers of Latino evangelicals have grown. And while these groups ostensibly share a religious label, politically they are far apart.

“If I take the religious landscape, and I sort religious groups by their support for one candidate or the other, what inevitably happens is that there are no two groups further away from each other in that sorting than white evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants,” Jones said, adding that Latino evangelicals are “a little more divided.” (Indeed, Trump won significant support from this group in 2020.)

But white evangelicals are still outliers overall: They’re more conservative than other Protestants, more conservative than Catholics, more conservative, in fact, than any other demographic in the country. The implicit claim of the Moral Majority — that it embodied mainstream opinion — always lacked evidence, but it’s become even less true over time. By the time Trump applied Richard Nixon’s label of a “silent majority” to his own coalition, it barely made sense at all. A bloc that can only take the White House through the electoral college, and not the popular vote, only to lose it outright four years later, has no claim to majority status. They are a remnant within a remnant, a nation within a nation.

There are still dissenters. Last year, the outgoing editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, called for Trump’s removal from office. Galli wrote the typical approach for his magazine was to “stay above the fray,” and “allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible,” he wrote. But Trump had abused the power of his office and revealed a “grossly deficient moral character.” Galli has since converted to Catholicism, a decision he explained to Religion News Services as being more personal than political.

Others stay. But they can experience a painful friction between their spiritual convictions and political independence. My parents, both pro-life evangelicals, have now voted against Trump twice. I spoke to another by Skype, not long before the election.

I know Marlena Proper Graves from my days at that Baptist university, when I was an upstart college feminist, and she was a resident director and the spouse of a professor. Now the author of two books on faith and a doctoral candidate at Bowling Green State University, Graves worries about the influence of Trump, and Trump’s party, on her beloved church. The word “evangelical,” she noted, had always referred to a constellation of beliefs. “You have a relationship with God, God cares about you, God cares about all people, and Christ is central,” she said, ticking them off. “But now it seems to be something of a culture.” That culture is an exclusionary one. “I’ve been disinvited from events because of my views and activism for immigrants, because it’s controversial,” she said.

When Proper was young, she told me, she listened to Christian radio all the time, just like I did. Preachers and commentators like James Dobson, a famed radio personality and the founder of Focus on the Family, would opine on the issues of the day, on morality, and virtue. “All these people would talk about character,” she said. “How you can’t vote for Bill Clinton in particular because of Monica Lewinsky, because he had affairs.” Then came Trump. “People said, first, that they didn’t think he would win. Then it was all about abortion and judges. I felt like I was being punked,” she remembered. But many evangelicals are in on the joke. Faced with popular rejection and the humiliation of Trump, they declare themselves persecuted, and identify numerous enemies. The mission remains the same: Purify the nation, and pacify the barbarians.

Beyond the usual celebrity preacher scandals, the faith’s place in the broader Christian right required it to make moral compromises it never tolerated among the rank-and-file members of the flock. Our definition of morality narrowed the further up the pyramid you climbed. For the politicians we backed, it shrank to a pinprick point: Ronald Reagan was divorced. What mattered instead to the Moral Majority was his opposition to abortion, his hippie-bashing, his ability to trade in euphemisms about “states’ rights.” Two Bush presidents later, thrice-married Trump gave evangelicals the conservative Supreme Court of their dreams.

As hypocritical as white evangelical support for Trump may look from the outside, the president actually understood his base quite well. Eight years of a Black, liberal president threatened their hegemony. So had the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist and the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, told me that Trump managed to tap into two key evangelical tendencies. “Those two things were the racial grievances of the white base of the Republican Party, and how televangelism had changed evangelicalism from the 1970s onward,” she said.

Galli, the former Christianity Today editor, believes Trump also appealed to an entrenched evangelical sense of marginalization. By the time same-sex marriage was legalized, public opinion on LGBT rights had already liberalized; the gap between white evangelicals, and everyone else, on matters of sexuality is now wider than it’s ever been. “Here comes Donald Trump, saying it’s OK to be Christian, it’s OK to have your values, it’s OK to practice your values in the public square. And he does this in a very authoritative manner,” Galli explained. Trump didn’t know his Scripture, but he knew there was a war on, and that was enough. The nation’s culture warriors had found their general.

Evangelicals, Galli added, “are deeply suspicious of human authority,” but only to a point. What they may fear, really, is authority they don’t control. “Paradoxically,” he continued, “they are a group that’s attracted to authoritarian leaders, whether that person be a pastor of a megachurch or a dictator.” Those tendencies existed before Trump. With the help of the far-right press, social media, and alternative institutions, they will survive Trump, too.

“I think that the thing that we have to keep our eye on is the ways in which the infrastructure that they built gives them an advantage beyond what their numbers would tell you,” Posner said. Conservative evangelicals already know that they’re no longer the Moral Majority, and they’ve found a way to make it work for them. “They’ll recognize, for example, that they may be in the minority on LGBTQ rights, but in their view, that’s all the more reason that they should be protected by either the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or the First Amendment, in having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.”

That infrastructure still churns out new acolytes, who embrace the worst elements of the tradition we all used to share. The same movement that produced me also spawned Madison Cawthorn, a Republican elected to Congress last month. He was born the year the Southern Baptist Convention first apologized for slavery, and he will be the youngest member of Congress when he takes office in January. He’ll also be one of furthest-right Republicans in office, with a personal life that once again tests the bounds of evangelical toleration for sin. Women from his Christian homeschooling community in North Carolina and women who studied with him at the conservative Patrick Henry College have accused him repeatedly of sexual harassment and misconduct. A racist website linked to his campaign criticized a local journalist for leaving academia to “work for non-white males” like Senator Cory Booker, “who aims to ruin white males.” After he won, he celebrated with a tweet. “Cry more, lib,” he wrote.

There’s time for Cawthorn to self-immolate on a pyre of his own sins before he’s old enough to run for president. But there will be other Cawthorns, other white evangelical candidates who will try to master Trumpism-without-Trump. They might not need an army to win, either. The GOP already knows it doesn’t have to be popular to stay in power. They need a radical remnant, and a lot of dirty tricks. Republicans can get what they want by suppressing the vote, or by undermining our confidence in elections. They can protect themselves through the subtle tyranny of inequality, which empowers the wealthy while alienating the most under-represented among us. A party out of step with most voters must either reform, or it must cheat. This, too, is something the modern GOP has in common with the Christian right. Democracy is the enemy. People can’t be trusted with their own souls. Leave them to their own devices, and they make the wrong choices, take the easy way out, threaten everything holy. They need a savior, whether they like it or not.

INTELLIGENCER

Nigerians are one of America's best educated immigrant groups and Trump just banned them

Nigeria is Africa's tech capital

CC™ Introspective - By Yemi Akinwale

Last Friday, the Trump administration announced a new wave in its blanket bans on people from certain countries. And this time around, it includes one particular group of people — a group that tends to be very successful once it arrives in the U.S.

President Trump's original travel ban was one of his first acts in office, blocking people from several countries, most of which were majority Muslim, from coming to the U.S. altogether. This newest iteration explicitly bans people from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania from receiving immigration visas, but doesn't touch those who are just visiting temporarily. That leaves 13 total countries on the travel ban list.

The fact that the ban explicitly targets those who are here to stay is particularly confusing when it comes to Nigeria, seeing as its immigrants are among the most likely immigrants to receive college degrees once they come to the United States. 

In fact, an estimated 60 percent of Nigerian immigrants to the U.S. have college degrees, as opposed to only 33 percent of Americans that have the same, Census data has also shown that Nigerian immigrants are also much more likely to hold master's as well as doctorate degrees and work in highly skilled and specialized areas of the American economy.

What makes the Nigeria ban even more perplexing is that the country is a veritable U.S. ally and in fact has been since its independence from Great Britain in 1960. The country, in addition to being the largest economy in Africa is also a key trading partner of the U.S. and has cooperated militarily on a consistent basis in helping to snuff out the challenges of Islamic militants in Africa, especially in the West African region.

Nigerians are not, have never been and will never be a security threat to the United States, but this current White House, as we witnessed with the Ukraine issue that got President Donald Trump impeached is grossly ill-informed on foreign policy matters and essentially uses the President's personal and political agenda as a yardstick for conducting American foreign policy.

The sad thing for Nigerians is that the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari is ill-equipped to deal with the current U.S. administration from a stylistic and strategic standpoint, politically. When you have a supposed leader like Buhari that runs a rudderless outfit in Abuja and compromises the territorial and sovereign integrity of his own country at will, it is pretty easy to see why the Trump administration has absolutely no regard for Nigeria and Nigerians. 

The bottomline is the Nigeria ban is simply about race. Donald Trump is determined to ensure that no black ethnic group, especially not one as accomplished, aggressive, determined and impactful as Nigerians, becomes influential to the point where they begin to shape America's domestic and foreign policy. 

The unfortunate thing for Trump and his myopic allies though is that they may have succeded in alienating a key (and growing) group that has historically alligned with the Republican and moderate Democratic principles of hard work, commitment and dedication to excellence, through personal responsibilty and accountability.

THE GHOST OF JUNE 12: A REFERENTIAL TO "7 FATAL DELUSIONS AMONG SOUTHERNERS"

CC™ ViewPoint 

By Yahaya Balogun

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." - Saul Bellow

The way we democratize deliberate ignorance in the southern district of a failing Nigeria (i.e., the Southern part of what I call f-Nigeria) is beyond pale. The current agitation for the Oduduwa Republic is mused in the wrong footings. The agitators for the emancipation of the Oduduwa republic are Oduduwa patriots. But the method being used by them to liberate the intellectually resourceful geolocated region within a troubled Nigeria is wrong.

Some of the southern stakeholders are fully packaged in fool's paradise. They are languishing in a faded country that can be a bright light compass for other African countries. But Nigeria is now a dark compass for a beleaguered Africa and a seeming pariah continent. A sad commentary and development in our moments of history. Southern Nigeria has always been a contextual entity within Nigerian geopolitics.

Realistically, if you are a clear-sighted Southerner and you want to face facts and not be in the cocoons of delusional people, please, go and read the exposé titled: SEVEN FATAL DELUSIONS AMONG SOUTHERNERS authored by Mr. Moses Oludele Idowu. The article, dated June 5, 2021, is a brilliant exposition for thoughtful minds in Yorubaland and beyond. The writer couldn't have exposed our delusional state of being better in his masterpiece. I had similar intent to pen down the delusional unseriousness of some Southerners, but Mr. Moses Oludele Idowu did justice to the structure and substance of the article. The Southerners are now caught in the cobwebs of a failing state called Nigeria. 

Sadly, we are fighting a 'crude' and a "just war" to save ourselves from ourselves and the barbaric and heinous exploits of the Fulani herdsmen and the Nigerian state. We are fighting for a just course with once-upon-a-time (dis)honest warriors and traitors. From time immemorial, Our progenitors ignorantly sold a formidable race to invaders and brutish British with the bad taste of history. We got our independence without a thorough negotiation of severance or disunity from the constituency of fraudulent masters. 

Different people with different mores, cultures, religions, and ways of life were jam-packed for the administrative convenience of the colonial rulers. While their reigning periods were being dismantled at independence, the imperialists left us in false unity for future perils. The chicken of our forefathers who sold our generations to perfidy has come home to roost. Our current generation is reaping the sour milk of our forefathers' quiescent thoughts and deliberate ignorance.

Today, the conglomeration of Nigeria is a bitter union or entrapped marriage. Southerners are the worst enemies of themselves. Some Southerners cannot be counted on. It seems a generational curse that needs to be broken. The Northerners are very united at perpetrating evils and destruction against their perceived enemies. They suffer from the born-to-rule syndrome. Born-to-rule syndrome is a generational curse that the north must break. The Easterners are good at being used as an administrative convenience by the Nigerian rulers. Easterners have never been fully united for a common purpose and achievable course. It is a generational curse that needs to be permanently halted. Who will be the first to break the collective curses and unending condemnations plaguing each geopolitical zone in "a mere geographical expression" called Nigeria is a daunting task.

Meanwhile, we all remember how the late sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo's political efforts were thwarted by the six- unwise men in the Southwest(i.e., the Yorubas). Late Chief MKO Abiola and Late Chief Akintola were used against Awo's ideals and ideas that would have transformed the Southern and entire Nigeria for good. Southerners were used to impede Awo's laudable agendas for Nigeria. We remember how the man in Minna used some six unwise notable men in the Southwest to annul the June 12, 1993, presidential election. The debunk of history will reveal their names at the appropriate time. June 12 is the most peaceful and freest presidential election in the history of a contrived and troubled Nigeria. June 12, the late MKO Abiola's victory was invalidated using southerners to hatch the eggs of southern conspiracy.

Aiyekooto, but truth be told, some of us who supported Buhari's political (in)competency suffered from political amnesia, thinking Buhari will assuage the southerners to bring the much-needed change. We were deadly wrong. Buhari's orientation is tailored towards Western self-containment and preservation. With all evidentiary facts, it's obvious that Buhari loves Hausa-Fulanis first before Buhari loves other tribes in Nigeria.

What Mr. Moses Oludele Idowu, the author of the referential article, espoused are our delusional expectations that the Western world will come to African aid when African Africans roast or eat Africans. The Southerners' delusional fixation can also be juxtaposed with the delusional expectation that Buhari will leverage Southerners' interests for the sake of Southerners. Like Western countries against Africa, Buhari's tribalized persona and ethnicized administration will never leverage anything at the expense of the Hausa-Fulani's interests and oligarchy. Buhari is an unconcerned, stealthy, and unapologetic bigot. We hyped Buhari's integrity at the expense of our patriotism and blurry political eyes. Buhari's silence, ineffectual, and tired hands at handling and tackling the insecurity in Nigeria is one of the worst things to have happened to Nigeria. It is high time he woke up from his slumbering demeanor.

Nigeria is jinxed. Buhari, the perceived providential child, has morphed into a circumstantial child racing backward to align with the immediate past. The situation in Nigeria is imminently precarious pre and post-Buhari. After Buhari, what next? The delusional coexistence and utopian Nigeria now and after Buhari is obviously null and mirage. If I have siblings or family members living in Nigeria's Northern and Eastern parts, I will unequivocally ask them to begin sauntering back to base. Nigeria is an illusion, and our delusional unity is a question of time. Nigeria is at the point of inflection to deflect into the chasm of time. Unfortunately, our state of disequilibrium in Nigeria is a slippery slope to the unknown.

With no equivocation, all the 7 bullet points highlighted by the brilliant author, Mr. Moses Oludele Idowu, cannot be overlooked or overemphasized. This is the auspicious period we must begin to unite in the Oduduwa enclaves to liberate ourselves from a forced marriage of convenience. Nigeria as we know it is delicately sitting on k-legged tripod stands that may not stand the test of time. Mr. Moses Oludele Idowu's well-researched article, expectedly, may not be widely read by the Aiyékòóto?´ and apathetic Southerners who may not see themselves as the most delusional, confused and well-learned region in our false geopolitical conundrum called Nigeria. Until we appease the ghost of June 12 through the true national conversation, Southwestern Nigeria will continue to pour needless libations at the void entrance of a house of lamentations.