The Arc of the Moral Universe

by Phill Van Horn

Tuesday was a calamity for us all. There are many among us who greeted it with sickening adulation. I wish I could say with any confidence that they will go on to recognize the misery that will radiate from this day, but if there is anything to be learned from all of this it is that the human capacity for justifying self-destruction is without equal. I have gone through many stages of processing the reality of President Elect Donald Trump over the last few days, as I suspect many of us have. For me, it began with a vacuous dread welling up in my chest. I spent some time on Monday attempting to prepare myself for the possibility a Trump victory. That proved fruitless. At first, it was difficult to even form a series of sensible thoughts on the subject. Now that I feel my coping mechanisms taking over it is quite tempting to find assurance in assumptions of moderation. Things cannot really be as bad as they seem, right? Trump will rise to this occasion, right? Clinton said we owe him a chance, maybe I should give him a chance.

There are certainly a lot of voices on the left echoing these sentiments. I’ve read just about every opinion piece in every major paper since Wednesday morning. Even the venerable Paul Krugman, who dropped a late night blurb after the result became apparent predicting a protracted world-wide recession, walked back his dramatic reaction after a bit of sleep. It is quite a difficult day to be a liberal. After the defeat of Sanders in the primary, I lost confidence that the party would champion liberal precepts, but I gave staunch support to the Clinton campaign with confidence at least in their ability to effectively counter the heinously anti-factual populism championed by Trump. That confidence was naught but hubris. Today it seems optimistic to characterize the Democratic Party as a smoking pile of rubble. Some of our more even-tempered elders advise us to relax. This happened in 2000, and the minorities in each house were able to stage an effective legislative blockade. I don’t know how comforting that tidbit actually is. We are still feeling the repercussions of the spectacularly bad decisions made by President Bush 16 years later, and Bush looks like a deeply welcome friend compared to the man now set to occupy the oval office.

It could very well be the yet undiminished zeal of my youth talking, but I do not think it is time to relax. The more I read, the more I think the laissez faire message of our elders is the exact error that caused this calamity in the first place. The data is on our side, right? History is on our side, right? What if it is not? What if the data is wrong? What if this moment of history exists with previously unconsidered pressures? Above all, what is the opportunity cost of waiting it out? We all believe in the power of objective science and quality data, but on Tuesday our objective science and quality data failed spectacularly. Even in 2016, science is subject to human frailty.

I was reminded on Wednesday of a comforting quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that seems to sum up the solace we are being offered: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. I surely hope you are right, Dr. King, because hope is approximately all there is left of liberalism this week. Hope that we are on the right side of history. Hope that President Trump is not the tyrant he has characterized himself to be. Hope, perhaps, that the pettiness central to Republican politics translates into a squandered opportunity instead of a calamitous agenda. Hope against hope that our climate is not pushed irreparably toward our doom before we can mitigate what is about to happen.

In my mind, that is really the most momentous question before us. If we are to believe the science behind climate change, we have an extremely compelling reason to do something far more than wait this out. If we believe the projections, and we assume Trump is going to follow through with his climate-related policies, and that China (and probably others) will respond by tearing up the Paris climate agreement, we would not be engaging in hyperbole to assert that the human race cannot afford us to wait this out. That sounds like the ramblings of a madman, but there it is. Do you believe humans are causing global temperatures to rise through carbon emissions? Do you understand what that will do to the earth within this century? Do you know how much more carbon will be spewed into the atmosphere as a result of Trump’s policies? Putting aside for a moment all of the other misery that is sure to be wrought by 4+ years of Republican governance, this issue makes this moment in history without parallel. Humans have been doing deplorable things to each other since humans were a thing, but upon this issue our continued existence rests.

It is up to each of us to consider each of these questions carefully. How much are we willing to sacrifice to ensure our children have an Earth to live upon? It is quite clear now how colossal an error it was to make climate change a tertiary issue in this campaign. I suspect the gravest question facing our race has become ‘can the forces of liberal democracy respond quickly enough to counter the mortal threat of climate change?’ If the United States does not find a way to lead the other world powers away from fossil fuels, then surely the human race is doomed. If we lead the world in the opposite direction, how much more quickly will our doom arrive?

The story now unfolding here in America is the latest crescendo of an arc which began long ago. Across the planet, liberal democracy is under assault from a pair of dueling forces, each manifesting misery in their own way. The flavor which will become most acutely familiar to us over the next four years is that of illiberal democracy. One of the most spectacular lies woven into the psyche of modern America is that the liberal and the conservative can have equal footing in the context of democracy. The truth tucked away into footnotes of the addendum of history is that democracy itself is a liberal institution. Democracy is in many ways the most crucial institution of liberalism; the notion that all humans deserve equality of treatment and opportunity is the basis for both democracy and liberalism. Conservatism is, at its core, at war with democracy. Conservatism seeks to preserve the social order, and this is nearly always accomplished on the backs of immigrants and minorities. Conservatism can only gain or maintain power in the context of universal suffrage through manufactured consent and voter suppression, because it is concerned chiefly with maintaining the privilege of the favored class at the expense of the rest. The architects the Conservative movement are acutely aware of these truths, even if the more common aspirants would deny it with flowering rhetoric about conviction and responsibility. There existed for some time in this country a delicate balance between the concerns of the liberal and the conservative which served to strengthen both. Liberals successfully pushed for suffrage, equality of status and opportunity, and to establish a robust social safety net. Conservatives ensured these programs were viable and solvent, providing a moderating force to the harsh winds of liberalism that swept many less fortunate nations into extremism.

But we have both since gone off the rails. The neoliberalism that has dominated American politics for decades was dealt a mortal blow this week, and it should be allowed to die. The alt-right conservatism that has just been given the keys to our government is quite possibly the most dangerous development on the world stage since World War II. Yet the long path that we tread toward this day was full of liberal failure. Liberals have presided over the unrest that Donald Trump just harnessed to gain power, and liberals were content to address it with incremental change. Right or wrong, for better or worse, that is the path behind us. I do not presume to know what could have been done. But I am assured most confidently that we must now tread a new path.

President Obama is quite famous for his promotion of incremental change. It now seems clear how deeply and unfortunately mistaken this belief is. It is likely that nearly all of his accomplishments will be unceremoniously torn down in the next few years, and replaced with calamitous nonsense. I am struck at the grave error President Obama made in not heeding another of Dr. King’s famous quotes: “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” This must become one of our axioms. Neoliberalism squandered the precious time we had, and there is not an abundance of time left to act before it is too late to make a meaningful difference.

Neoliberalism has been utterly defeated. Its last president will be Barak Obama. From here on out something new must arise. The first agent of this new order rises before us as our President Elect. By his hand, the changes we witness will be truly awful, even in the most optimistic scenario. On the other side of this defeat, however, we must make something new. We must forge the rubble of the Democrat party into one of unabashed social democracy, and we must do it quickly. We must forge it through principled activism and serious policy. We must step up to this grave challenge, because the fate of the country and perhaps the world depend on it.

This party must be characterized by a commitment to justice. Not a perverse and vindictive or extreme and unreasonable justice, but justice that elevates the marginalized, that rights wrongs and stands as the vanguard of human rights. It must renew a bold commitment to the New Deal foundation laid down for us by generations past, but it must also look toward the future with urgency. It must rush to address the problem of climate change with all possible haste. It must be committed equally with securing social justice and enacting the sort of durable, decisive reform that cannot be ripped apart by any single defeat or setback. These are the broad strokes of a populist platform that has the power to defeat Donald Trump and repudiate the disgraceful conduct of his party. Perhaps the most audacious hope of this dream is that this force will materialize out of the ruin before us. This could very well be it. Liberalism could continue to tarry in tranquilized gradualism until the earth repudiates our very existence. But I, for one, with all the linguistic and intellectual fury I can muster, will fight to see this dream materialize.

I do not think it is time to relax. I do not know what President Trump is going to do, but there is no reason beyond unfounded optimism to think his presidency will be anything short of a calamity. If he tries to build his wall, we need to be there, standing in front of the bulldozers until they drag us away in handcuffs. We must work quickly, fervently, and decisively to be ready to make a serious run at all levels of government in 2018 and 2020, and to stem the tide of Republican-wrought horror that is set to emanate from the White House. I am young, zealous, and likely foolish, but I cannot bear the reality of looking into the eyes of my daughters one day and having to explain why I did nothing in the face of the manifold disasters looming in the near future. I have no experience in the nuts and bolts of politics, but I must become involved in a much more meaningful way. The most I can reasonably hope for is to become a small part of the immense machine that needs to be rebuilt, but I dearly hope that many more young people will join me in this work, because I do not think there is any more time to waste.

Johnson Weld 2016: The Libertarian Ticket

A Comprehensive Policy Guide

By Phill Van Horn
Edited by Jon Malinsky

Given the unprecedented nature of the 2016 presidential election, many people have begun to consider third party options for their vote. There is a widespread sentiment that both Trump and Clinton are so terrible in their own ways that many do not want to vote for either candidate. Still, there seems to be very little known about the third party candidates personally, professionally, or politically. For this reason, I have undertaken the task of compiling some available information about these candidates in hopes that this seldom-conveyed information will help the reader make a well-informed decision in this election.

This is not intended to communicate a personal stance about the efficacy or validity of Libertarian policies. Rather, it is to be an informative piece about Johnson’s policies and the relevant context I have been able to uncover, This will be the first article in a series detailing the Libertarian and Green party campaigns in 2016. In the next article, I plan to analyze Johnson’s Libertarian policies from my own political perspective.

Before I begin, I want to clarify: I am going to be directly quoting a lot from either the Johnson Weld 2016 website or from the transcript of their CNN town hall. Any quote not directly cited otherwise should be assumed to be from the town hall. The video of the town hall can be found here.

What’s a Libertarian, and who are Johnson & Weld?

There is, just like any other school of thought, a spectrum of beliefs within Libertarianism, so it is almost unavoidable to be reductive in order to broadly describe it. Johnson himself described Libertarianism at the recent CNN town hall as “fiscally conservative, socially accepting, tolerant. Look, people should be able to make choices in their own lives, [we] always come down on the side of choice.” It is a mix of fiscal conservatism with social liberalism, highly valuing ‘free market solutions’ to engender competition and espousing the belief that the government should be as minimally involved in people’s lives as possible.

Gary Johnson was the two-term Republican governor in New Mexico who became legendary for his prodigious use of the veto to slash New Mexico’s budget. Before that, in 1976 he started a handyman business called Big J Enterprises, which by 1999 had grown large enough to sell for millions. He is known to be a fitness enthusiast and athlete. He claims to have climbed the highest mountain on each continent and participated in a mind-blowing (300+) number of marathons and similar events. After his governorship, he became the CEO of the Nevada-based Marijuana conglomerate, Cannabis Sativa Inc., before undertaking his first presidential campaign in 2012.

Johnson’s running mate, William Weld, is a lawyer and career politician with his own storied history. He began as legal council for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate impeachment inquiry where he worked alongside, of all people, Hillary Rodham. Soon, Rudy Giuliani recommended President Reagan appoint him the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts where he developed a reputation prosecuting big banks for white-collar crimes. Reagan later appointed him as head of the Criminal Justice division of the Justice Department during the height of the War on Drugs where he supervised all federal prosecutions. He went on to run for governor of Massachusetts in 1990, winning two terms, and developing a very strong pro-business reputation. He later made an unsuccessful run at John Kerry’s senate seat, and was nearly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico by Bill Clinton, but his nomination was blocked in the Senate. He ran an unsuccessful primary campaign for governor of New York in 2005, and went on to co-chair Romney’s Presidential campaign in New York in 2008.

Economic Policy

Libertarians famously claim to be fiscal conservatives, and the Johnson/Weld ticket stays on brand. One of their most dramatic campaign pledges is to cut government spending by 20% overall. Weld said in the CNN town hall, “I personally have never seen a layer of government that I didn’t think had 10 or 20 percent waste in it, and the federal government is no exception.” They pledge to cut spending and run a balanced budget while remaining revenue neutral. They also want to “simplify the tax code;” eliminate the personal and corporate income tax, payroll tax, abolish the IRS, and enact a “consumption tax,” all while pledging to remain revenue neutral and that “Such a tax would be structured to insure that no one’s tax burden for the purchase of basic family necessities would be increased.” A consumption tax is functionally a large sales tax, and while Johnson was evasive about what exactly that number would be in the town hall, proposals he has supported in the past have been on the order of 23%.

De-regulation is another cornerstone of the Libertarian economic policy. In their words, “regulation should not be used to manipulate the economy,” but rather to “protect citizens from bad actors and the harm they might do to health, safety, and property”. They surmise, as one might expect, that “tens of millions of jobs will get created [as a result of tax reform and deregulation].”

A core principal of Libertarianism is that free-market competition is the best solution to most problems. As such, Johnson has advocated throughout his career, and continues in his campaign, for things like “school choice,” which is the privatization of education, and also for the use of private sector prisons. It is fair to say that Libertarians want to privatize as many public services as possible and to reduce the size of public services that cannot be eliminated. The Johnson campaign advocates for the elimination of the federal Department of Education, and for entitlement reforms including significantly raising the Social Security age, possibly to 75, but he was again evasive about the specifics in the town hall.

Domestic Policy

One of the prominent pledges of their campaign is to end the War on Drugs, citing it as “an expensive failure.” They plan to do this by legalizing marijuana across the country, and changing drug policy to align with their belief that “drug rehabilitation and harm-reduction programs result in a more productive society than incarceration and arrests for drug use.” Another common way of phrasing this is to change the way we view drugs from a criminal justice issue to a health care issue.

They are socially liberal: marriage equality, pro-choice, against mass-surveillance, and for internet freedom. They believe that people should be able to make their own choices without government interference, so long as they are not harming others. On immigration, their solution is to “focus on creating a more efficient system of providing work visas, conducting background checks, and incentivizing non-citizens to pay their taxes, obtain proof of employment, and otherwise assimilate with our diverse society”.

With regard to addressing government corruption, their proposal is to enact term-limits for elected offices. On the environment, they take a characteristically “free-market” approach, which means their administration would attempt to “prevent future harm by focusing on regulations that protect us from real harm,” which is exactly as vague as it sounds.

Foreign Policy

The foreign policy of Johnson’s campaign centers around denouncing interventionism while insisting not to subscribe to isolationism. They take the stance that the United States’ interventions in the Middle East over the last few decades have created more problems than they have solved. They seem to be attempting to walk the line between radically altering foreign policy doctrine and being accused of a weak national defense strategy. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what policies they would propose to replace the current ones, and when pressed about the topic, the only answer Johnson was able to give was that we should “involve Congress also in this process,” citing that we “find ourselves in these conflicts without an open debate and discussion on how we should move forward” seeming to imply that involving congress in foreign policy decisions would remedy the situation. Johnson is quick to say that “If we are attacked, we’re going to attack back,” but makes no substantial effort to explain the substance of how that is different from what we currently do.

When the issue of ISIS was raised at the town hall, Johnson made what could be viewed as a significant blunder in trying to explain his position. The moderator, Chris Cuomo, asked Johnson a great follow-up question: “If you believe that the United States should use military force to respond when attacked, and you say constructively we have been attacked by ISIS, then how can you not be involved in Syria, which is obviously a big swath of the Levant, where ISIS has its stronghold? How do you stay out of there?” to which Johnson replied “Well, because of our intervention, ISIS has grown as a result. I mean, you had Assad against ISIS, and now you take out — you know, we decided to go against Assad, and that’s ISIS. So, you know, that’s now our new ally?”

Granted, the conflict in Syria is very complex, but it is not unreasonable to expect a presidential candidate to know the difference between the various factions of Syrian rebels and ISIS. Johnson seems to think that we are currently (or were at some point) allied with ISIS in an effort to depose Assad, or that the crux of the Syrian civil war is a conflict between Assad’s government and ISIS, neither of which is true.

Johnson’s actual policy on ISIS is to set up a “thousand-person FBI task-force treating ISIS as a gigantic organized crime family, which is exactly what it is. And you have them add the probable cause bit by bit, just like the Justice Department does.” To be fair, this is almost certainly Weld’s policy, as it was Weld that issued this answer in the town hall, and it is Weld who spent a significant portion of his career as a prosecutor in the Justice Department. This is certainly a novel approach, but an apparent and problematic substantive difference between ISIS and an organized crime family is that, since ISIS are not protected under the US Constitution, we have no legal need to determine probable cause on them, which seems to be the entire substance of this bizarre plan.

Additional notes

Beyond the policies themselves, I uncovered some relevant facts about Johnson and Weld. As I previously mentioned, in 2014 he was the CEO of the marijuana conglomerate Cannabis Sativa. What is most interesting about this is the equity stake he received in lieu of a salary: 509,558 shares of stock. Johnson, who is running a campaign to nationally legalize marijuana, is the holder of significant stock in a publicly traded marijuana company. It is not wrong to own stocks or have a position on marijuana, but the combination amounts to textbook conflict of interest, which raises doubts about Johnson’s integrity on the issue.

On the subject of corruption, Weld used a very odd phrase in the town hall: “hyper gerrymandering.” Nobody says hyper gerrymandering; the term ‘gerrymandering’ by itself is wholly derogatory. This oddity spurred me to look into Weld’s history with the notorious practice, and it turns out that in 1992, he signed into law a redistricting plan in Massachusetts that cannot be characterized as anything less than gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is one of the gravest issues facing our democracy, and it is disturbing that Weld himself participated in it.

Perhaps the largest area of concern became apparent during the CNN town hall. The event was by far the highest profile event of their campaign, and throughout the night their answers on many critical issues run the gambit between evasiveness and stonewalling. When pressed about gun control, for instance, Johnson said “Believe me, these are really sensitive issues. And I’ll just point out that I kind of sort of want to pivot here. I mean, the death penalty…” Using the word pivot and changing the subject in the middle of a political discussion sends the message ‘I will absolutely not talk about this issue.’

On mass-surveillance, they seem to be attempting to avoid the subject as much as possible. Their policy page references “a national government that spies on private communications,” but by way of solution they offer the vague sentiment that they “want to get the government out of your life.” I find it interesting that their plan for ISIS is to set up a thousand-person FBI task force, but they expect us to believe that this task force would not make use of the mass-surveillance programs that are already in place. Given the immense political capital it would take to get rid of such a program, it seems unlikely at best that Johnson would be successful in doing so if the strongest campaign message he is willing to send is about getting government out of our lives.

I have already mentioned their vague or evasive positions about tax structures, cutting entitlements, and the use of military force. All of this combines to give one the sense that there are a lot of issues that the Johnson campaign is simply unwilling to address. The bottom line is, Johnson and Weld want us to trust them to dramatically reform our government, but they do not want to explain what exactly that reform would look like.

Finally, I want to draw attention to a particular part of Johnson’s history that should be of interest to us all. During his tenure as governor of New Mexico, he used his veto power more than his 49 contemporaries combined, a fact about which he seems to be incredibly proud. He pledges to do the same as President: “he pledges to veto any legislation that will result in deficit spending”. This is exactly the sort of exhausting obstructionism that this Republican congress has employed over the last six years, which has resulted in absolutely nothing of legislative substance being accomplished in that time. Johnson is a man of a single mind: to cut spending at all costs. As president, he very well might be able to balance the federal budget, but the question that comes to mind is: at what cost?

Responsible Citizens Cannot Vote for Donald Trump

By Phill Van Horn
Edited by Jon Malinsky

I participated in a protest at a Trump rally in town last week, and I noticed a woman on the Trump side carrying a large sign reading “Christians for Trump.” Curiously, she was not holding it high for all to see, as was everyone else who brought a sign. Rather, she was holding it tacitly at her feet as she progressed in line. Perhaps it would be foolish to read too much into that image, but there is something in it that rings true of Christians in this election cycle. There is not a good candidate to vote for, less-so than in any election I have yet experienced. Some want to support Donald Trump, but the man does not make it easy for Christians to support him. Nonetheless, there seems to be a rising movement of Christians seeking justification to do so.

Earlier this week, a close friend of mine posted an article on Facebook by Wayne Grudem entitled, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.” Shots fired, I thought. Tacit compliance begins its march toward moral imperative. Grudem’s argument can be summed up very concisely. In fact, if one versed in American political rhetoric formulated, without reading the article, the most Fox News-ey, rhetorically dubious, fear-based argument one could for a Christian to support Trump, and throw in the token bible references, one could reasonably duplicate Grudem’s article from scratch. The argument can be summed up thusly: Obama and Clinton are liberals. Liberals are bad. God says if you do a bad thing and you know it’s bad, you are sinning. Support Donald Trump.

Now, to anyone interested in the topic, I highly encourage you to read Grudem’s article for yourself; I am employing irony in being reductive about his incredibly reductive argument, not trying to misrepresent his position. I preserved the substance and stripped the scant subtlety he did employ to illustrate my point: the arrogance of Grudem’s position goes far beyond distasteful. It is disheartening to see such a respected theologian adopt a reductive stance on a complex subject. The lion’s share of his piece was standard political rhetoric about why Christians should support the GOP platform, but Grudem is dismissive of the massive problems with Donald Trump himself.

While there is much room for respectful disagreement among Christians in American politics (and in general), I think it would serve us all well to avoid the presumption that Christians who disagree with us are morally wrong to do so. Skipping over the substance of our disagreements and dubiously assigning morality to one side precludes the sort of meaningful discussion we desperately need to be having. Grudem was quick to claim that he wished to contribute to a conversation about the issues facing our country, but his presumption of partisan morality makes his claim seem insincere. While it would bring cathartic joy for me to pull apart the specific assertions Grudem makes at length, I think it best to resist that temptation. Instead, I intend to make the case that Donald Trump ought to be disqualified from consideration as President not based on his purported policies, but on the substance of his character alone.

Donald Trump is not a man that Christians should respect. By any standard. Grudem asserts that Trump is a good candidate with flaws. This is not a defensible position. The man’s flaws are unprecedented in the modern era, exhibiting a cacophony of disturbing character traits that should disqualify him even from consideration for the office of President. I am going to make the case that no responsible citizen can vote for Donald Trump, and I am going to do so without talking about a single political policy.

Trump’s business record is his strongest professed claim to respectability, yet his business record is not respectable. He has been involved in a variety of businesses, but he is perhaps most famous for his casinos. Over the course of his career, Trump has filed for bankruptcy no fewer than six times for his casinos. Just imagine, for a moment, the wonder of a single man presiding over bankruptcy for six different casinos. Were these bankruptcies wholly his fault? No, they were not. Yet for a man touting his business acumen as qualification for President of the United States, this is a monumental stain on his record akin, perhaps, to a quarterback negotiating for a $50 million raise after throwing 30 interceptions and sitting on the bench for half the season. Then there is the small matter of Trump University. This entity, currently the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, was a ‘school’ Trump set up in 2005 to impart Trump’s lauded savvy in the real estate market to customers. Trump University was the quintessential scam. It employed high-pressure sales people to convince customers to pour tens of thousands of dollars into this ‘education’ and delivered nothing of substance in return. There is a mountainous pile of additional examples of Trump’s business failures, for those who are interested. Trump Mortgage stands out as a glowing example of his glaring incompetence. Trump started a mortgage company in 2006 at the height of the housing bubble, promising it would soon become America’s number-one home-loan lender. It went under a year later when the mortgage industry collapsed. Interestingly, it turns out the man he hired to run Trump Mortgage had almost zero experience in the financial industry. This is the man who might appoint our next Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. Considering the rolodex of reality TV stars, hatchetmen, otherwise unqualified and mostly loathsome people his campaign has employed, one is forced to wonder which horrifying or unqualified individual might end up in any given cabinet position.

There is no explaining away this history. Trump claims to be qualified to run the country because of his incredible success in running his businesses. There has been no such success. Not only that, but the fact that he is willing to run a sham for-profit ‘school’ to take advantage of working-class people says a lot about his character. Namely, that he has no integrity. There are some Trump apologists who will answer the bankruptcy charge with the notion that the bankruptcies were a savvy business move. Bankruptcy is a social safety net intended to allow people a fresh start when their debts become overwhelming, not a tool for a trust-fund billionaire to escape his fiduciary obligations. Perhaps a single bankruptcy could be explained in terms of mitigating circumstances, but six over the span of several decades is not just a pattern but a character trait: Donald Trump is devoid of financial integrity. Any claim from him about his business acumen should be met, at minimum, with incredulity.

Trump’s perceived status as a political ‘outsider’ is his biggest strength in gaining popular support. He is running against a candidate that embodies establishment politics over the last several decades. Trump gained a lot of early acclaim in his primary race with the pledge that he would self-fund his campaign. He claimed that he could not be bought by lobbyists and special interests because he did not need their money. However, it became clear pretty early on that Trump was being dishonest about self-funding. He loaned, not gave, himself about $1.8 million initially, and he funneled a significant portion of the campaign’s expenditures directly into his own business interests. The moment it became clear that Trump would become the GOP nominee, he abandoned his main political advantage and began seeking donations from the standard crowd of business interests. The fact that he has had a hard time raising money so far is not from lack of trying, but because many traditional GOP donors find him so distasteful that they refuse to support him, including the most notorious of right-wing donors, the Koch brothers. Amazingly, after the Kochs refused even to meet with him, Trump thought it would be a good idea to publicly lie about it.

Trump has gone from independently funding; to lying about independently funding; to forgetting about independently funding; to being snubbed by donors; to lying about turning donors down. None of this lends any weight whatsoever to the notion that he is a political outsider. It does lend weight to the notion that he is an incompetent liar. Trump likes to claim that he is the man to fix the broken system. Not only is that obvious, complete nonsense, but clearly he does not even have the knowledge necessary to use the broken system to his advantage when he wants to, which appears to be as soon as he supposes it might be in his own interest. Trump’s rhetoric about reforming the system is transparently insincere.

My final denouncement of Trump is, in my opinion, the most disquieting of all his qualities. He revels in ignorance. He projects incompetence as strength. When Trump doesn’t know something, he makes up an answer and doesn’t back down from it. There are many examples. In a primary debate, Trump was asked a question about the nuclear triad, about which he was clearly completely ignorant. Rather than answering with a simple and honest “I don’t know,” he launched into an incomprehensible stream of nonsense culminating with the line “I think to me, nuclear, is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” A profoundly disturbing sentiment in its own right. Appearing on the Hugh Hewitt show last fall, Trump was asked if he knew the names of the leaders of any Islamic terrorist organization. Rather than admit he had no idea, he lashed out at Hewitt, amusingly offering the explanation “I think it’s ridiculous [to expect me to know their names]. I’ll have, I’m a delegator. I find great people. I find absolutely great people, and I’ll find them in our armed services, and I find absolutely great people…” Great people, I suppose, like the man he hired to run Trump Mortgage. Or his six bankrupt casinos. He didn’t stop there, of course. He launched into another incomprehensible stream of senseless garbage.

It is one thing not to know something; no candidate can know everything – but admitting ignorance is the first step toward making a competent decision, and it also has the virtue of being honest. Trump is not only ignorant about an incredible number of important topics, but is unwilling to admit his ignorance. I will finish with a final working example of the profound danger we face as a result of Trump’s ignorance. Just a few days ago, Joe Scarborough, a prominent right-winger and a man who has helped Trump’s campaign enormously, shared a deeply disturbing story on his show about a meeting Trump had with a “foreign policy expert.” During the course of the hour-long meeting, Trump asked three times why we could not use nuclear weapons. “If we have them, we can’t we use them?” he purportedly asked. It cannot be overstated how disturbing it is that Trump has to ask why we cannot use nuclear weapons. Combine this with his proven track record of self-congratulatory ignorance, his childish, ill-tempered tirades at the slightest provocation, and his disturbing proclivity to incite violence, it is not unreasonable for one to begin to fear that Trump would actually use a nuclear weapon if he became president, perhaps in service to his ‘secret’ plan to end ISIS.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of Trump’s disqualifications for being considered a responsible choice for President. It is more like a highlight reel. I write not as a liberal, or a progressive, or a Democrat, or in support of Hillary Clinton. I write as a citizen and as a Christian. I write in the strongest possible terms to warn everyone I know against voting for Donald Trump, not to advocate for a specific candidate. I write also to rebuke the notion that voting for Trump is a morally good choice. Surely we can resist the temptation to make the inane claim that God is on the side of a particular political party or candidate. Americans face a very difficult choice in November, and Christian leaders do an enormous disservice to the complexity of that decision by advocating for something as simple and comforting as moral rightness in this arena. I implore everyone to look into all the candidates available and choose what seems best. Check my work on Trump, weigh my argument. Look deeper into Hillary Clinton, and into Jill Stein, and into Gary Johnson. If you have questions, ask. Ask me, if you like, or ask your friends or whomever you think might have a new perspective. Above all of this: vote. Inform yourself, weigh the decision, and vote.

If anyone wants to talk policy with me I would be happy to do so. Nevertheless, my case today is such that policy is not a topic that should even be considered within the bounds of the discussion on the morality of voting for Trump. Trump has disqualified himself from office on such a basic level that bringing policies into the conversation is not even sensible. Grudem is deeply mistaken on this point. The fact is, there is every reason to believe that Donald Trump does not even know what Donald Trump’s policies are. I understand the hunger for change. I feel it as acutely as anyone, but the sort of change Trump is qualified to enact is the meandering, chaotic change of a uniquely incompetent demagogue. The change America desperately needs is the precise, decisive change of a reformer.

I will leave you with a beautifully apt phrase recently coined by Laurie Penny to describe this election: “It’s what happens when weaponised insincerity is applied to structured ignorance.” I can only hope that knowledge can be the sledgehammer we use to smash our structured ignorance before it becomes our tomb.