A Call to Arms

Tangerine Twitler announced Karoline Leavitt is stepping down as White House Press Secretary at the end of the month but will still serve as his outside adviser

Her departure comes the same week that the DOJ issued a memo arguing that Trump can extend his executive privilege to cover conversations with advisers outside the White House stating that any communications that he has with advisers who don’t even work for his administration can be protected by executive privilege

“Restricting executive privilege to purely intragovernmental communications would foreclose the President from relying on an array of important sources that he may find necessary to the effective discharge of his responsibilities of office"

On a hot August night on the South Side of Chicago, Rate Field, home of the White Sox, turned into a church of baseball, filled to capacity with true believers who sang, passed the peace, cheered on a celebrity nun and, of course, wore their pope hats.

Excerpt:

The Trump administration has pulled federal funding for an annual report chronicling the changing environment of the Arctic, where rapid warming is upending ecosystems, reconfiguring trade routes and scrambling Great Power strategy.

Every year for the past two decades, the Arctic Report Card has provided a checkup on the health of the region, which is heating up at several times the pace of the rest of the globe. Sea ice has dwindled. Snow cover has shrunk. Glaciers are thinning out. Tundra vegetation has grown more abundant, leading to wildfires that burn through huge areas.

Now, the report’s coordinator and publisher, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is withdrawing its support for the report card. In a statement on Tuesday, Kim Doster, the agency’s director of communications, didn’t provide a reason.

“Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA,” Ms. Doster said. “All data historically contributed by NOAA to the product will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.”

In her statement, Ms. Doster said other NOAA programs would continue to support research in the Arctic that contributes to “national security, weather prediction, safety of navigation and the economic vitality of coastal communities.”

Each year’s Arctic Report Card compiled data collected by many researchers and multiple agencies in addition to NOAA. It drew on the expertise of hundreds of scientists and other specialists around the world. Its aim was to document the extraordinary transformation of a region where human activities — fishing, shipping and mineral exploration, to name just a few — are uniquely dependent on environmental factors.

The broad importance of climate and ecological changes in the Arctic is why NOAA worked to ensure that each year’s report would be relevant to many kinds of people and organizations, including Indigenous communities, businesses and the military, said Rick Spinrad, the oceanographer who led NOAA during the Biden administration.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:

On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson. We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The ­emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants. Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-­profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.

A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”

He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families. For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a “commie publication.”

As Hegseth was bragging about his “kinetic strikes” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like. I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilson’s realm, but also witness aspects of his faith’s exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegseth’s enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of War’s defining ethic.

[...] They married in 1975; by then, Wilson was involved in a new Moscow church. Deeply influenced by the hippie-adjacent Jesus People Movement, he strummed a guitar during services and taught Sunday school. Two years later, he became the pastor of a congregation that would eventually become Christ Church. Over the next decade, though, Wilson grew wary of the wishy-washy elements of evangelicalism—some of his congregants had even begun questioning whether God could be omniscient. He was drawn instead to the more absolutist theology of Calvinism, which emphasizes an all-knowing God who has already preordained who goes to Heaven. His own brother ended up leaving Christ Church over their theological differences and started his own congregation. But for Nancy, the conversion to Calvinism was “wonderful.” She recalled, “I thought, ‘It’s not all gray and muddled anymore.’”

The Wilsons officially became “reformed”—another word for Calvinist—in 1988, and in the following years, Doug’s influence grew. Logos School became a robust K–12 institution, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools. He started Canon Press, which published his popular homeschool curricula, in 1988 and in the ’90s launched the nationwide Association of Classical Christian Schools and helped found New Saint Andrews College. A series of new churches planted outside Moscow grew into an entire neo-Calvinist denomination, now known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. During the pandemic, Wilson and other church leaders flouted public health restrictions, organizing maskless outdoor psalm sings. These protests garnered media attention, which helped grow their flock as remote work allowed people to relocate to Moscow. Doug estimates that the church has doubled in size since the pandemic. At the Wilsons’ compound, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal of the Kirker life. Nancy showed me a display she had made of her 18 grandchildren’s Logos graduation announcements and brought me up to speed on Judah, who had just graduated from New Saint Andrews and planned to work in DC. Belphoebe, sharing a name with a huntress character in Edmund Spenser’s classic poem “The Faerie Queene,” was now a mother of two. All the grandchildren remained devout and were raising their own kids—Doug and Nancy’s great-grandchildren—in the faith.

[...] The idea of empathy as a sin is having a moment. Conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, elaborating on the same theme. JD Vance hinted at the notion of misplaced empathy in 2025 when he talked about the Christian idea of ordo amoris, Latin for rightly ordered love. “I think it’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” he said in a Fox News interview. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” (Pope Francis disagreed with Vance’s interpretation, describing the concept instead as “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”) In an appearance last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk famously said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Hegseth, too, has waged war against empathy, Wilson told me. “The woke military, the DEI military—all of that was possible because people had accepted as an ethical responsibility to be empathetic, to step into other people’s shoes without judgment,” he said. “Hegseth has emphasized the job of the military is lethality, developing a warrior ethos, not to feel sorry for the guy who wishes that he could wear a dress.” Ostensibly, Wilson was referring to one phrase in Hegseth’s proclamation at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, “No more dudes in dresses…we’re done with that shit!”—a statement that has a distinctly Wilsonian ring to it. Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, de-­wokifying the military has been the focus of Hegseth’s tenure. He has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female and Black military leaders from being promoted. But it is in Hegseth’s unapologetic assertions of hypermasculinity that Wilson’s influence is most apparent. In his Quantico speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the military being “tough as shit” so it could “completely destroy” adversaries.

One of those 3 fingers already hit the news. "A worm ate my brain." 5/8/24

2025, January-July 2026

August 2026

Trump is selling early access to his Truth Social posts [x]

Blanche rescinds fund for Trump supporters after GOP senators threaten to block his AG bid [x]

Trump once again threatens massive escalation against Tehran only to walk back [x]

The US bought a ton of Japanese currency [x]

Appeals court rules Trump must get approval from Congress on ballroom, ordering halt to construction [x]

Senate votes to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general [x]

Private prisons announce $1.4 billion in revenue as immigration detentions climb [x]

Trump to sign executive order calling for spacing out childhood shots [x]

Judge again bars Trump administration from implementing order that sought to limit mail voting [x]

ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks [x]