“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
For some reason, the Trump 2.0 Administration has become a death cult.
They’re a group of people who told the world for years that they believed, absolutely, in a few core things:
- God
- Family
- Guns
- Freedom
And they absolutely fooled us all.
Instead of religious conservatives, we might now feel the clarity to call them Religious Nihilists.
Those words don’t have much meaning if you take their separate definitions and put them together.
From ChatGPT:
- religious: relating to belief in—and practices oriented around—the divine or sacred (god/gods, ultimate reality), often expressed through worship, ritual, and moral obligations.
- nihilist: someone who denies that there’s any objective or inherent meaning, truth, or moral value—so claims about purpose or right/wrong are ultimately groundless.
If you put them together and look at people like Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Karoline Leavitt I think it has some coherence to it.
They all profess a Christianity that is highly moral and seemingly important to them. Vance and Leavitt do anyways.
Symbols are very important. Words are very potent. That’s how they signal their religious sensibilities.
But, as far as I can tell, the life that they are engaged in every day, through their leadership of this country, is deeply nihilistic.
I do not pretend to know who these people really are. Which is why the way you move in the world is important, especially if you’re the 2nd person in charge or the one charged with telling the story of the administration every day.
They would disagree with this Religious Nihilist label.
They might even label me a domestic terrorist for calling them a Religious Nihilist.
And this is my point:
A group of people who claim to believe in the constitution, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the freedom to own weapons are speedrunning the memory-holing of these realities ever existing.
Over the last 10 years, they’ve been (probably unknowingly) apart of constructing an apparatus that could tear them down in weeks.
When the day came to stand up in defense for a man killed by a masked tyrannical government force, they called him the tyrannical force.
Nihilistically, their behavior makes sense. They seem to hold no coherent value in the meaning of life; in the sacred. Their passion is one for winning the 2026 U.S. Midterms, by any means necessary, not building an enduring life that upholds the beautiful fact that bearing witness to anything that loves and loves you back is an unbelievable gift from God. It is life.
Religiously, their behavior makes little to no sense. They don’t seem to hold much sacred or venerable. They don’t worship something that transcends us. They venerate power and worship him who gives them their job.
So while they have the zeal of the most religious among, they carry the actions of the most apathetic nihilist one could fine.
They will gladly slap you until you comply with their worldview. Shoot you until you stop exercising your freedom. Propagandize you until you believe or give up caring.
They want to be O’Brien interrogating Winston.
Even more, they want to be Big Brother.
But I don’t think they’ll ever be. They won’t make it.
They’re Religious Nihilists.
this is a proto-thought. it’s in process. it was written without a lot of self-critique or planning or editing. its goal is to process something I’m trying to understand in my thinking. it may be wrong or off. that’s fine.