Prompted by a glowing review of a book written 20 years ago about the pandemic that my grandfather survived as he fought in France, I gained an insight on today’s politics. How can it be that Americans now hate one another - E pluribus NON unionem? 

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry masterfully explains how the “A variant” of influenza that spreads when birds defecate, can become a swarm when trillions of viruses burst from human cells. This variant’s lethality comes from mass mutation and mutants that cause spectacular pandemics.  

In 1918 this malady would kill 50 million people, more than double the 20 million killed by the Great War. A swarm begins where humans are closely crowded as they were in the army training base, Camp Funston, a few miles from my grandfather’s Kansas home. 

The book’s review bemoaned the wrecking ball destroying the century old, early warning system that is the 1918 pandemic’s greatest legacy. It is being overseen by a man who has a brain worm from eating roadkill.  Secretary Kennedy warns against vaccines and promotes Flintstone vitamins. 

The parasite’s authority comes from a President who, facing reelection, panicked and botched the Covid epidemic. As a result, Trump added 100,000 additional deaths to a count of one million. 

The idea of a swarm is the perfect metaphor for today’s mutant strain of spiteful Christianity that has perverted Jesus’s call to “turn the other cheek” into a call for a King Cyrus. 

Our Trump is the Evangelical’s Cyrus, cruel but wise and certain to give Evangelicals dominion over the faulty Democracy our founding fathers created. 

Our Declaration of Independence says God created us equal. Evangelicals, like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, believe all animals are created equal but Christian Nationalist animals are more equal. 

Just in case, Evangelicals own more gun lockers. Their swarm is an interconnected collection of mega churches and billionaires. Together they have purged independent-minded Republicans from the GOP by donating untraceable millions. It’s profitable. The rich regularly acquire trillions through tax reductions. 

The book explains a virus’s ability to swarm. The movie, Bad Faith, released in 2024, explains how a perverse Christianity seeks the political power that Jesus himself scorned when Satan offered to make him a Cyrus. The Evangelical swarm found its Cyrus in Donald Trump. 

Bad Faith doesn’t look as far back as I do. A decade after the Civil War’s end the defeated South ignored the Republican-passed constitutional amendments that gave voting rights to former slaves. For a century democracy was denied most black citizens. 

When I was 15 the 1965 Voting Rights Act put an end to this political theft. The white South gritted its collective teeth for six years until the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that tuition for all-white Christian (religious) private schools was not tax deductible. 

Establishing religious schools was how the white South separated white children, allowing states to reimburse parents for tuition maintaining segregation while black children and poor white children attended impoverished public schools. The Supreme Court ruled that state tax deductions for religious tuition were an unconstitutional subsidy of religion. 

It wasn’t unconstitutional for a church to betray Jesus but favoring one religion violated the First Amendment. 1971 is where the movie Bad Faith kicks in. We are introduced to the Christian racists who wanted all white schools and who called themselves the “Moral Majority.” 

1971 was the year I mulled over becoming a liberal Republican like my parents and spent a summer in the office of a mild-mannered Minnesota GOP Congressman. When I joined the College Republicans in 1972, I knew I would vote for whichever anti-war Democrat challenged Richard Nixon. 

I couldn’t help but reflect on how adamant my grandfather was about voting Republican. His one vote for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was the worst decision of his life, he told me, because Wilson lied when he promised to keep American boys out of World War I. And by God, Democrats had started every war since. 

Trust me, I’ve watched Republicans like a hawk in my “ever since.” The movie Bad Faith covers these years.

Blaming Democrats for school integration white southerners joined the Reagan revolution in droves. Reagan announced his candidacy mere miles from the site where a decade prior three volunteers registering black voters were brutally murdered. Was it a wink, wink? 

In a final stroke of genius, Southern Republicans latched on to an idea that could be as divisive as “abolition” which caused the Civil War. It even had a similar ring – “Abortion.”  

Remarkably, the doctrine calling it into question was Catholic from a church that had been a longtime target of the KKK. Although the doctrine was foreign to southern protestants, as politicians, they understood that calling it the murder of a baby could be powerful. 

In doing so they shrugged off the evils of conception by rape or incest. Nor did they worry about forcing impoverished mothers into 21 years of caring for unintended or unwanted children.  

Never mind, Jesus’s command to suffer the little children Evangelicals felt little necessity to raise taxes to care for the innocent. To me that was the crime. Not the immediate termination of an ovum before the Bible’s description of a quickening. 

The Duluth Free Thinkers are bringing Bad Faith to Duluth for free showings at the Zinema Theater on Sunday, April 13, at 1pm; Tuesday, April 15, at 7pm and Thursday, April 17, at 4pm. You can also livestream the movie online at Amazon Prime and Tubi (with ads).

The founder of the Thinkers is Dr. Bill Van Druten, now a venerable and sociable 92 years young. A psychiatrist who worked at the public Duluth Clinic he was ordered to ignore Roe vs. Wade and follow Catholic teachings when the Catholic Church-administered St. Mary’s merged with the Clinic. When Bill signed the order with a note explaining he would do so but only for consenting Catholics he was fired and the Free Thinkers were born. Look them up at LSFreethinnkers.org

Harry has been writing up a swarm at lincolndemocrat.com.