Friday, August 1, AD2025 — American Culture, Christian Shifts, and the Postwar Order
Today’s Fire Hot Takes cover the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end, denim and outrage, crypto in Washington, Western support for Israel, Baptist-Anglican drama, and why meditation still matters.
History - August 1945
August 2025, marks 80 years since Japan’s surrender concluded the Second World War. But what did it actually resolve? Plenty. I am contributing a reflection on the meaning and legacy of the end of the Second World War for Providence a foreign-policy journal that examines global statecraft using the principles of Christian Realism. Founded in 2015, Providence was inspired by Christianity & Crisis, the journal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr founded in 1941 to argue for the moral and geopolitical imperative of American leadership against totalitarian aggression.
It is tempting to ask what was the result of the war, but it is wrong to expect a static world. The world was never going to stay still in 1945. The gains of victory required maintenance, and for two generations, the United States maintained global primacy. But looking back now from four generations on, it’s clear that moral authority has atrophied. That does not make the victory hollow—it means time moved forward, and no one can coast forever. Each generation must earn and renew its inheritance. There is a growing sense that the Boomers did not.
Culture - My only comments on the Sydney Sweeney genes/jeans controversy are below:
29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. — Jesus Christ, Matthew Chapter 5
For the KJV only people I have it for you right here:
29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Sydney Sweeney is an actress whose goal is to make money because she grew up in poverty and she believes it split her family. She thinks her parents supporting her acting ambitions caused their divorce. That is rough. She comes from a family of addicts and fears addiction and poverty and is seeking attention to get money to keep her fears away. In many ways this a sad story of American demoralization and immiseration. American Eagle is just another deal to her. Now that you know that, proceed accordingly before making her an avatar of your social anxiety. She pretends to be nothing else and is honest about her drives and fears. In terms of society and culture, rest is on America to find better ways of spending our time rather than debating American Eagle or ogling Sydney Sweeney. What you reward, you get more of. American Eagle does not deserve attention or sales and Ms. Sweeney needs to be sympathetically ignored for this advertising campaign.
U.S. Politics - Uncle Sam Crypto currency Superhero?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s support for cryptocurrency marks a radical shift in how the U.S. imagines money and power. Once heralded as an escape from state control, blockchain now becomes a tool of the American state. The discontinuity of silence among much of the right-wing media compared to their rhetoric of the last 15 years since the emergence of the Tea Party movement is vivid: MAGA voters once warned of “globalist elites” controlling money, yet Bessent is George Soros’s longtime investment protégé.
Bessent, aged 62, is the second openly gay man to serve in the Presidential Cabinet, after Pete Buttigieg, and is a former top investment executive for George Soros, having worked closely with him for years and playing a key role in Soros Fund Management’s major financial moves, including the famous 1992 bet against the British pound where Soros got the nickname “the man who broke the Bank of England”. Soros even backed Bessent, who has been called Soros’ protege, with $2 billion to launch his own hedge fund. As you would imagine you do not give just anyone $2 billion. This relationship should give Trump supporters who oppose what rightwing media call the “globalist” agenda of George Soros pause. It appears they are barely paying attention. It shows how much the “Trump effect” increasingly means that what were presented as core concerns of rightwing America can be waved away if Trump is involved. This is quite fascinating. In regular times that would get Trump labelled as a figure that was subverting the rightwing. But these are not regular times. The story is not so much about blockchain itself but about how Trump is able to make the right feel like they are getting what they want when much of his domestic agenda and their drivers are actual at odds with, at least, the public desires of the right. And yet the Democrats cannot seem to find an opening to knock Trump’s coalition off-balance. Except for the Epstein files, but it remains to be seen where that goes.
World Politics -Recognizing What Does Not Exist: Europe, Palestine, and the Illusion of Statehood
This week the British and Canadian governments moved to join France in recognizing Palestinian statehood in the next couple of months if Israel does not do more to aid the civilians of Gaza. Israel and by extension the USA have lost the public image battle and now Israel is held primarily responsible for starvation in Gaza. The logic of the Europeans is simple, Hamas is evil but defeated. Hamas does not have the power to stop aid if the Israeli Defense Forces wish to ensure Gazans get humanitarian aid from abroad. It goes without saying any living hostages and the remains of the hostages killed because Hamas did not release them should be immediately returned to Israel. The two top European powers and Canada get that and not persuaded that it warrants what Israel is doing in Gaza.
However, the gesture is less a diplomatic solution than a political symbol. The State of Palestine does not have a functioning state. Gaza and the West Bank have not shared a government in two decades. There is no lawfully elected Palestinian government, as there have been no elections for twenty years. The Palestinian people have not been allowed to say who they want to govern them. Europeans should focus on an immediate solution to that problem before they recognize a regime that has stolen the right of the Palestinian people to decide their fate: do not recognize the Fatah led Palestinian Authority without a time table for election this year, 2025. Rather than cultivating a functional Palestinian Authority, the Europeans risk legitimizing a failed experiment: a non-state caught between corrupt administrators and jihadist rule in Gaza.
Israel, for its part, has also failed to identity and empower alternatives to Hamas or Fatah. Christian Palestinians have been ignored at best. The risk is Israel may face isolation like 1970s Rhodesia if the final dam breaks: Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany, since gaining independence 1949, has made support for the Jewish state, the survival of the Jewish state, the formal Staatsräson meaning the justification for the German government’s existence, because of what Germany considers the historic responsibility of the German nation for the Holocaust. Some have accused Germany of outsourcing its conscience to Israel and failing in its moral responsibility to speak out. If however Germany were to turn on Israel by recognizing a Palestinian state, ironically that would be the signal that international opinion was lost and we should expect a cascade of similar declarations. Bibi Netanyahu’s government has overplayed its hand and is in trouble. Israel needs a change.
