On Anishinaabe land (Woodbridge neighborhood, Detroit, MI).
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On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump got on social media and threatened Iran with civilizational obliteration:
Open the F*ckin strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell – JUST WATCH!
The President of the United States is demon-possessed – and I mean this quite literally.
It’s easy to overlook, but most of the ministry of Jesus was committed to casting out demons. In an episode that took place in a cemetery, he exorcised an unclean spirit called “Legion,” which was the name of the largest military unit in the Roman empire.
Jesus sent Legion into a herd of pigs who ran off a cliff and drowned in the sea. This really pissed off a lot of Gentiles. Because Gentiles love eating pigs.
I don’t think that the demonic is something that dumb, pre-scientific people believed in to make sense of mental health issues. I think that the demonic actually exists, and it is much different – and much more powerful - than what modern people imagine it to be.
Six years before George Floyd and I were born, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. diagnosed America as “a society gone mad on war.” He said that military adventures like Vietnam suck up all the country’s resources like “a demonic destructive suction tube.”
MLK specifically named racism, materialism and militarism as the “giant triplets of evil.” He said that America won’t stand a chance against the triplets without “a radical revolution of values.” The world is still waiting for this revolution to arrive.
I believe that racism, materialism and militarism – and ideologies like white Christian nationalism, settler-colonialism and Zionism - are not just beliefs, biases or opinions. They function far more like addictions, idols, and demons.
The bible calls them principalities, cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil.
Other examples include anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, hetero-patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, corporate careerism, celebrity culture, AI, American exceptionalism, social media algorithms, and blind patriotism.
These principalities do not just inhabit autonomous individuals. They are unseen elements that govern the whole atmosphere of America.
They are the air we breathe.
We did not opt in - and if we do not opt out, strategically, consistently and publicly, our lives will play out on their terms.
Our problem is much bigger than “fascism” or “authoritarianism” or MAGA. Our problem is that our country was built and is maintained by the violent extraction, exploitation and exclusion of the dark-skinned people of the world.
We inhabit a society possessed by Legion.
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I attend a 12-step “Recovery from Empire” meeting with a handful of comrades committed to being vulnerable, transparent and accountable. I am reminded every week that the price I pay for the privileges I enjoy as a citizen of this superpower is my full capacity for aliveness and humanity.
This is an excerpt from our opening reading:
…we seek freedom from the cultural mandates to toughen up, to deny our feelings, to hide our vulnerability, to disconnect from our bodies, to deny the truth of our collective political reality, to grease the social wheels at the cost of the truth, to keep secret and lie about our own suffering and failings - and the failings and sufferings of the world around us - and to limit our empathy and compassion to those deemed worthy of it, often those who look and live as we do.
We utilize an addiction-recovery model – which is not really any different than a demon-exorcism model. The person addicted to alcohol is constrained in the same ways as the person possessed by Zionism. Both are unmoved by appeals to facts, moral logic, international law, and the dictates of love.
Alcoholics and Zionists are not evil people. They are sick people. So are racists, misogynists and capitalists. When we learn to detach these people from their diseases, we can cultivate compassion while we stop cooperating with their crazy.
In 12-step, the key is to keep the focus on ourselves. Because we do not just live in the American empire. The American empire lives in us.
We struggle to see straight because we are inundated by imperial propaganda. Lies and distortions attack us from every angle. We often digest them without knowing it.
Who’s sponsoring all the counterfeit messaging?
The pedophile plutocrats who run the banks, corporations and media outlets. The billionaires who get wealthier on war and everything else that causes misery for the masses.
This is totally demonic.
A year ago, I heard a Palestinian student named Jenna at Cleveland State University say it like this:
We are dealing with people who are blowing up children and laughing about it.
Love does not deal with people like this by getting fidgety and silent, or by saying it’s complicated and both sides are bad, or by making it all about Trump.
Love deals with people like this by getting into a serious program of recovery that cultivates spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage.
What we are dealing with is not just a difference of opinion or a political debate.
Something Else is at stake.
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No doubt about it, Donald Trump is demon-possessed. But the Democratic Party is hooked up to the same demonic destructive suction tube. The libs are on the payrolls of pedophile plutocrats too.
Payrolls possess people. Because whoever funds you, runs you.
At the Democratic National Convention in 2024, Kamala Harris proclaimed that she would ensure that America would have “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
According to Dr. King, this is totally demonic.
At the end of the day, if Trump and his tools are defeated at the ballot box - and I hope they are - we will still be living in an empire, possessed by Zionism and other principalities. Fully loaded. Lethal to the planet. Lethal to ourselves.
For the past thirty-plus years, the liberal option has been operating on the assumption that it can win by being just a little less monstrous than the monsters. The Republicans move right. The Dems follow suit – but not quite as far. This ratchet-effect has further deteriorated the American political and spiritual landscape.
In his book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El-Akkad did not assess the situation in terms of left vs. right. He went vertical:
The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.
Liberalism is a spiritual force of evil. It possesses individuals and institutions with a kind of settled contentment of “being the good guys” in the u.s. culture war equation.
The dirty little secret is that the culture war runs on a Zionist consensus rooted in racism, materialism and militarism.
If you run for office, and you openly confront and resist the Zionist consensus, you will be excommunicated from the corporate-sponsored culture war. The pedophile plutocracy will pummel you with Super PACs, surveillance, and death threats.
This is totally demonic.
Over the past eighteen months, there’s been an awful lot of pressure placed on liberals and leftists to participate in lesser-evil voting and big coordinated rallies with signs and costumes. We have been told that the formula to defeat “fascism” and “authoritarianism” is to show up at No Kings rallies and vote blue no matter who.
I have serious doubts about whether this formula is electorally effective. But the biggest problem I have with this formula is that it does not deal with our core problem: empire. The corporate sponsors of the Democratic Party and No Kings rallies do not want us to deal with empire. Because they sponsor empire too.
I believe we must do Something Else.
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Sixty years ago, Dr. King’s urgent message about a radical revolution of values was rejected by the corporate sponsors of both parties. Since then, it’s been totally neglected by everyone except a few, rare radicals living below the radar of the u.s. establishment.
MLK said that we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. He said that we must stop making computers, profit motives and property rights more important than people.
MLK meant all people.
Palestinians. Iranians. The Lebanese. Cubans. Comanches. Black Detroiters. Undocumented and unhoused folks. Women. The working poor. Trans people. Stressed-out middle-class professionals.
Empire dehumanizes everyone – even those who benefit materially from it.
As I wrote in a recent post, prayer, fasting, contemplative practice and social analysis are vital practices for my own rugged, messy commitment to getting free from principalities, cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil. But I do not believe that exorcisms operate in isolation. They are embodied, emotional and communal.
During the summer of 2024, on the day before Benjamin Netanyahu received twenty-three standing ovations during his speech before a joint session of Congress, Lindsay and I joined about three hundred members of Jewish Voice for Peace in a packed humid church in DC. We were preparing for a nonviolent direct action on Capitol Hill.
It was the first day of the Fast of Tammuz, the start of three weeks of mourning. Tammuz begins on the day that Moses smashed the tablets after he came down the mountain to find the people of God worshipping a golden calf. It was also the same day that the invading armies of Nebuchadnezzar smashed the walls of Jerusalem.
On the Jewish calendar, Tammuz is associated with the idolatry, greed and violence that soak imperial theologies. It is a day to mourn, to scream, to pray. Jewish people know, better than most, that broken hearts have the power to crush principalities.
We came together from all over the continent on this holy day to publicly and dramatically demand that the u.s. government stop sending weapons to apartheid Israel.
Lindsay and I were there because we had watched these Jewish folks publicly break rank with members of their families and synagogues to courageously call out the Israeli government's occupation and genocidal violence.
These Jews were not rejecting Judaism. Just the opposite. They were tapping into the strength of their spiritual tradition to resist the principalities that are possessing it.
These Jews inspired us to tap into the strength of our own Christian tradition to resist the principalities that are possessing it.
As we left the church, we broke up into dozens of small affinity groups and entered the buildings that house congressional offices. We were dressed up like tourists.
When we met up in the rotunda at 3pm, we stripped off our button-downs to unveil bright red shirts that said “Stop Arming Israel.” We circled up and sat crossed-legged, chanting.
Let Gaza Live.
Let Gaza Live.
Let Gaza Live.
We gathered together to mourn and scream in the presence of a Power greater than empire. The acoustics were amazing.
Some of our crew went upstairs to the gallery above to unfurl banners that read “Mourn the Dead and Fight Like Hell for the Living” and “Jews say: Stop the Genocide.”
A dozen rabbis clustered in the center of the rotunda. One of them recited from memory Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die.” Alareer was a professor in Gaza who was murdered by the Israeli military eight months earlier, along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children.
She shouted each line and the rest of us echoed.
If I must die
You must live
To tell my story…
I was crying. A lot of us were crying.
It felt so liberating. Even after we got arrested.
Especially after we got arrested.
Something breaks free within people when they no longer care about the consequences that empire uses to get them to comply with its evil.
Something cosmic happens when we collectively and publicly refuse to cooperate with the demonic, when we creatively and strategically break rank with spiritual forces of evil.
The Tammuz takeover of the Capitol rotunda was not just a protest or a rally. It was an exorcism. We were casting out demons from the belly of the beast. We were also casting out demons from ourselves.
If the bible is right that our battle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against principalities, cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil, then we won’t win unless we utilize the right kind of weapons.
We won’t win unless we start seriously engaging with matters of the Spirit. We won't get free unless we deal with the demonic.
We need massive militant non-violent direct actions that tap into the depth and diversity of our spiritual traditions. We need politically-informed exorcisms.
If you are organizing one of these in the near future, please let me know.
I want in.
In July 20204, on the land of Nacotchtank, Piscataway and Pamunkey.
