Editor’s Note: The Great Con II had a bad week. With the fall of Orban, the lie is exposed. Our phenomenal partners in Europe and Ukraine get a win while democracy in Hungary is pulled from the grips of autocracy. Freedom still rings.
The current president’s use of AI and social media to depict himself as God seems to have, dare I say, awakened a few. Being in a minister’s family, I grew up in a church. Three times a week. Bible lessons, potlucks, song nights, full immersion baptism. It was not a performative kind of worship, or at least not intentionally. The people around me genuinely believed, or wanted to, in something greater. Each in their own way practiced a faith that was active.
But since that time, there’s another side I’ve recognized. I would call it more of a show. Cars in the parking lot told the whole story before anyone opened a Bible. Rust panels of a second-hand family vehicle sitting next to a new truck triple the cost. Men who would share a pew on Sunday only to be adversaries on Monday. Women who had spent the week trading gossip about the same family now nodding along to a sermon about acceptance and grace.
I don’t see any of this done with malice. That's the part that is something harder to name. It was the gap between what people professed and what they practiced, and the remarkable ability to not notice that gap.
That gap has a name that we’ve all known for a long time.
The word hypocrite comes from the Greek hypokritēs. It meant, simply, a stage actor. Someone performing behind a mask. There was no moral judgment in it at first. It was just a description. The moral weight came later, when people noticed that the mask metaphor applied just as cleanly to civic and spiritual life as it did to the theater. Jesus used it quite a bit, aimed squarely at the religious establishment of his time. The kind of people who dressed and prayed in a ritualistic sort of way.
The word hypocrite exists today because every society tends to struggle between ideals and living by them. It’s a normal part of cultural living. The problem is what happens when the behavior becomes so structural, that the word loses its bite. When everyone is wearing a mask, calling someone a hypocrite loses any meaning.
I have watched the same parking lot logic play out everywhere I have worked. Belt-tightening announced in the same quarter as the executive director is brought on with an increase on an increase. Employees who toil everyday quietly and consistently while the people who made that decision flew to conferences to talk about…company culture. One of the most common items is the fraternal type groups who give quiet passes, nods, and winks while others receive public corrections for remarkably miniscule offenses. The rules, it turned out, were always for some people and not others.
This is not new. What is new is how openly it is now practiced, and how aggressively the mask has been abandoned.
The current administration did not invent American hypocrisy. It’s something ingrained even back to the constitution. The founding documents were written by men who enslaved other human beings. Every contradiction that followed has either been ignored or addressed, predominately depending upon economic outcomes.
Today we ration healthcare in the wealthiest nation on Earth, build the mightiest military in history while people skip meals, repairs, or prescriptions because of the cost, crack down on immigration across lands we took from people who were already here. What the current regime has done is remove any pretense of self-reflection.
We have a government openly fawning over billionaires while cutting social programs. We have leaders invoking Christian values while pursuing policies that target the poor, the sick, the foreign-born, and the vulnerable. All the people Jesus spent his entire ministry defending. The Sermon on the Mount is one part of the bible that is unmistakable. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers.
These are not suggestions. They are the blueprint of Christianity.
Individuals have frequently inverted Christianity for personal and political meaning. It’s the main reason we have hundreds of branches of churches. You keep sampling until you find the right Jesus for you. And the loudest Christian political voices in this country have spent a generation building power on specific types of indoctrination.
It’s not anything new. What is new is the deliberate institutional damage that is now occurring.
Project 2025 was real. People didn’t take it seriously enough. Courts packed not to interpret law but to predetermine it. Agencies hollowed out through firings, neglect, and crony appointments. Immigration built upon white values. Alliances that took decades to build being treated as inconveniences. Institutions designed to project American values and stability defunded or dismantled. The soft power, the thing that made American influence something more than just military reach, is being sacrificed for ego and brute force. Norms that held for generations, around the peaceful transfer of power, around the independence of prosecutors, around the basic dignity of public service, all gone.
You don’t really feel the loss until you need it. Until it hits personally. That’s what many voters counted on. They heard a certain kind of gospel that said it was about them. Now they are reaching for the old norms and discovering they were lied to.
This is what national hypocrisy gets us. Children watching adults in power lie without consequence. They are learning that deception is a winning tool. A generation raised on that lesson will not rediscover civic integrity just because someone tells them to. We will have to model it again.
A country that professes what it will not practice leaves the world searching for guidance elsewhere.
That’s not a world safe for our kids.
From last year, this remains one of the best explanations of the current regime that has been written.
When you base energy policy on something other than the sun (drill, baby, drill!), you fall behind.
If you want to understand how robots are being used now, watch this. You will not believe it. It’s only the beginning.
I miss my dad. If you’ve lost yours, this one will hit home a bit. The writer really captured the pain and frustration from seeing a loved one deteriorate into someone more challenging. This is the human condition, and though we have less control over our outcomes than we would like, it is a reminder to seek both peace and patience as much as possible. This includes being fair with yourself on things you really don’t have control over. I miss my father every day, and he was a person much like this dad who had a social and public nature. He enjoyed meeting people, and he liked being remembered at the places he went. The world always seems a little less cheerful when someone so full of life leaves us, but the only thing we can do is to honor them by continuing to bring joy and whimsy to other people’s lives.
“The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye is like dead and living bodies chained together.”
— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
While the world obsesses over oil, the resource that will actually determine who survives the next century is water. Desalination technology has gotten better and the cost of converting saltwater to drinking water has dropped enough that coastal desert communities can now make real use of what's sitting right next to them. California still needs to rethink water-intensive agriculture, and some western desert cities need to stop growing beyond their natural carrying capacity. But this is the kind of innovation worth watching. The salt has to go somewhere, and conservation should always come first, but this is progress. This is an area the United States could take a lead in and share with the rest of the world that is dealing with water shortages (and while you’re at it, think about getting a water bottle and using public resources instead of buying plastic bottled water).
Chavez-DeRemer will be the next to go. The Labor Secretary's top two aides resigned under White House pressure after an Inspector General investigation found oodles of nonsense. All this while she allowed DOGE to cut her own agency. She's a woman and self-centered. The woman part is enough for this President to give her the heave-ho and protect his bros.
The Middle East debacle pushing diesel above $5.80 will make the summer driving season more costly and aggravating. Regular will not be under $4.00 a gallon. More road rage will ensue. The White House will blame OPEC, NATO, or Mr. Rogers. Anyone but themselves.
July 4th will carry the highest terrorism threat environment in years. The FBI and DHS issued joint bulletins in June. We've made a lot more enemies externally and the current regime has given too much leeway to internal threats. Could be a lone wolf or a sleeper cell but the irony of celebrating freedom while causing havoc abroad is not lost on The Porcupine.
And Now….
Keep up your reading and your progress. While we need spiritual grounding we also need constant attention to increasing our knowledge.
Continue to practice your gratefulness.
Always strive to be a good human.