I highly recommend taking five minutes to follow this story about Gregg Phillips, a high-up at FEMA who has dug into this ridiculous claim that he once “teleported” to a Waffle House. This is not, as you might imagine, meant as a euphemism for that time he got blackout drunk. Phillips insists he meant it literally, even after the New York Times interviewed employees at Georgia Waffle Houses, who said none of them had ever seen a teleportation. 

I have no idea why Phillips concocted this story, but his refusal to back down tells us everything about MAGA. It’s about people who want “truth” not to be about empirical reality, but about identity and authority. To them, if a white male conservative says it, it’s “true,” no matter how stupid it is. Meanwhile, no one else has a right to be believed, no matter the facts, as we’ve seen in their reaction to everything from the COVID-19 virus to the #MeToo movement. 

For Easter Monday, my colleague Chauncey DeVega published a fascinating, in-depth look at how Christian leaders in Chicago led the fight against ICE during the occupation of that city last fall and winter. This may come as a surprise to some, because the religious right has come to define what “Christian” looks like to many Americans: white supremacist, authoritarian and worshipful of Trump. But as Chauncey shows, there are still a lot of Christians out there who believe in the message of love and mercy that Jesus preached.  Similarly, I was happy to see Pope Leo XIV use his first Easter address to unsubtly call out Trump for the pointless war on Iran. 

I’m an atheist, so part of me resists this. If the loudest, most popular Christian ministers in our country want to define their faith as fascist and treat Trump like the second coming, it seems like the easiest response for decent people is to just quit Christianity altogether. As we covered in last week’s “Standing Room Only,” that’s exactly what increasing numbers of young people are doing. 

But perhaps I’ve softened in my middle age, because I can accept that there’s something about faith that draws a lot of people in. So I’m glad to see liberal Christians fighting back, and using the indisputable words of Jesus to shame right-wing Christians. 

It’s hard to measure, but I feel that a growing number of liberal Christians are coming off the sidelines. They realize it’s not enough to quietly disagree with the right. They have to stand up in public and take them on. The word “Christian” still has a lot of power in our society, and the right should not be able to seize that identity entirely, or without real pushback. 

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Trump’s ability to poison everything he touches has been on full display with the launch of Artemis II, the NASA mission that has sent astronauts around the moon. This should be a moment of pride for our country and its long history of investment in scientific advancement. But it’s muted, and it’s all because Trump ruins everything. 

It’s gross watching Trump take credit, when the reality is that he hates science and scientists. They remind him that he’s never done anything good or useful in his entire life. They also make him feel insecure about his paltry intelligence, which is why he reflexively talks about his uncle who taught at MIT when ever he’s around scientific experts, as if he could have absorbed smarts through osmosis. 

It’s also tough to revel in the science behind the Artemis mission when the same technologies that got us into space are being used to bomb Iran. It’s such a painful reminder that so many people do good work for good reasons, only to have evil nitwits like Trump come in and swipe it for their own terrible ends. 

I get why a lot of people on Bluesky want to reignite the tired debate over whether it’s OK to spend money on NASA when people need food and health care. (The correct answer is that we can do both — if we don’t waste money on crap like ICE and the war in Iran.) The questions I write about above are big and existential and not easy to grapple with, especially on social media. 

“Food v. rockets” feels like a way to express those feelings in a digestible format. The problem is, that’s a false dichotomy and a waste of time that would be better spent on more important issues. Unfortunately, social media tends to flatten out all complexity and destroy nuance. 

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