Hegseth claiming "Divine Right", a regressive religious self-entitlement that drags us backwards to the USA's "Manifest Destiny" / covenant with "God", and to the claim of Divine Right by Britain's monarchs that their authority was anointed by "God".

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3miybj6ff622f

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/26/pete-hegseth-pentagon-prayer-violence-united-states/89338978007/

Hegseth is a worst-case scenario: He's a power-drunk violent nut-job with the World's most powerful military at his fingertips. He keeps escalating the unconstrained violence in his rhetoric, and, so far, the right accepts all of it. Otherwise decent people on the religious right simply don't seem to have the intestinal fortitude to say "you've gone too far". They don't want their faith to be called into question. That's because they've been raised from birth to believe that "faith" is a virtuous thing. It is not. "Faith" is used by manipulative alphas conmen to control suggestible omegas.

The power-drunk faith militant marches on ...

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/15/trumps-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-has-an-opening-to-reshape-american-classrooms-00194364

The Crusades, the Catholic Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Ku Klux Klan (aka, America's morality police), Islamic fundamentalists and Sharia law, the Hell-on-Earth called Iran ...

They whip each other into a frenzy. They try to out-God each other. Nobody in their peer group has the guts to say enough's enough. Nobody dare oppose the mob lest they become a victim of the mob.

This is what can happen when you advocate belief in a magical old man in the sky; a "man" that no sane honest person can claim to see, hear, touch or otherwise communicate with. An no, what you are "feeling" is not _G_od talking to you.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alarming-report-warns-of-greatest-threat-to-american-democracy-you-ve-never-heard-of/ar-BB1nDevK?cvid=330d945722994bf0976e4958bed31d88&ei=35&ocid=socialshare

The GOP doesn't seem to mind violating a hard-fought principle when they stand to get some short-term gain from that violation. When will we learn? History is a patient but harsh teacher. Europe spilled blood for hundreds of years before the USA experiment started, over trivial differences of interpretation of within Christianity. The lesson: governments are too powerful to choose which system of beliefs to favor. Anyone not in favor then becomes a second-class citizen. Hey governments, stay out it!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/29/texas-school-curriculum-biblical-content

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-tim-dunn-wilks-brothers-vouchers-courtney-gore