Opinion
The Apocalyptic Permission Structure: How Holy War is Bleeding America Dry
Written by Garrett Rhodes on
March 5, 2026 | Opinion
In a functioning republic, we expect to traffic in hard realities. We demand that our legislation and foreign policy be built on the physical, unyielding laws of cause and effect. We ask for the receipts. We track the financial records. We do not accept the official narrative simply because a politician in a suit demands our blind faith, and we know that a surviving democracy requires relentless, data-driven accountability.
But if you look closely at what is echoing out of Washington right now, and what is bleeding down into state governments across the country, you will not find math. You will not find logic, peer-reviewed science, or basic human empathy.
Instead, you will find the terrifying, medieval drumbeat of a holy crusade.
A profound and catastrophic ideological shift has taken root across American institutions. Seemingly disconnected horrors—the sudden, escalating war in the Middle East, the violent suppression of anti-war veterans on Capitol Hill, and the suffocating, unconstitutional squalor of America’s state prisons—are actually tied together by a single, blood-soaked thread.
We are witnessing the death of secular, rational policymaking. In its place, the ascendant forces of Christian Nationalism are reframing social and political conflicts as cosmic battles between absolute good and absolute evil. When political power merges with apocalyptic religious authority, the stakes of government are elevated from earthly logistics to spiritual warfare.
And at the center of this framework is a very specific, lethal mechanism: the total dehumanization of the enemy. By labeling adversaries as “demonic,” “savage,” or “enemies of God,” human rights are conveniently bypassed. Extreme cruelty is no longer a tragic necessity; it becomes a divine imperative.
The Blood on the Altar of “Epic Fury”
This theology of violence is not confined to fringe campaign rallies. It has permeated the highest, most heavily armed levels of the U.S. military apparatus.
Take a hard look at the Pentagon. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has long embraced the aesthetic of the historical Christian Crusades, quite literally wearing it carved into his skin. Sprawled across his chest is a massive Jerusalem Cross, and inked into his bicep is the Latin phrase Deus Vult—”God wills it.”
These are not merely symbols of private religious devotion. They are the historical battle cries of the Crusades, imagery aggressively co-opted in recent years by white supremacists and Christian nationalists to signal a holy war against non-Western, non-Christian civilizations.
We do not have to guess if the military considers this ideology dangerous. We have the paper trail. In January 2021, ahead of a presidential inauguration, a fellow guardsman and security manager flagged Hegseth to military leadership as a literal “Insider Threat,” pointing specifically to the Deus Vult tattoo and its widespread adoption by extremist hate groups, the guardsman warned his superiors that Hegseth posed a severe security risk. Hegseth was subsequently quietly pulled from his guard duty.
Today, the man deemed an insider threat by his own unit is running the Department of War. Under his watch, the U.S. military is being subtly recast from a secular defense force into an army of the Almighty.
We are seeing the terrifying real-time escalation of this ideology right now. Late last month, the United States and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury,” a massive, expanding military campaign against Iran. Taking the podium, Hegseth did not use the measured, strategic language of a defense official accountable to the public. He spoke like a crusader, framing the conflict as a righteous blood vengeance against a regime he described as being fueled by prophetic delusions.
The Cultural Inquisition and the Erasure of Empathy
Apocalyptic wars inevitably result in massive human suffering, which brings us to the next necessary phase of the Christian Nationalist playbook: total information control and the criminalization of empathy.
This week, the grim reality of Epic Fury came home. Six American soldiers were killed, and at least eighteen more were seriously wounded, when an Iranian drone bypassed air defenses and decimated a tactical operations center in Kuwait. When pressed on the timeline of this rapidly expanding war, Hegseth offered nothing but bravado, declaring that the U.S. would not stop until the threat was destroyed, while callously admitting that the military expects further casualties.
To protect the narrative of a flawless holy war, the Pentagon has essentially become a black box. The press corps is being frozen out, replaced by a hand-picked echo chamber that will not ask difficult questions about the human toll. Standing at the podium, military leadership has explicitly told the troops to ignore independent reporting, demanding absolute, unquestioning faith in the mission.
Because the geopolitical map is viewed through the lens of end-times prophecy rather than international law, the human cost is entirely ignored. Palestinian civilians are erased from the moral equation, generalized entirely as terrorists. Iranian citizens are cast as biblical antagonists—the literal forces of Gog and Magog. When you view a conflict as a prophesied prerequisite for the Second Coming, mass death is not a tragedy. It is a necessary trigger for the apocalypse.
And anyone who dares to humanize the collateral damage is immediately targeted by a cultural inquisition.
You do not even have to be a political dissident to fall in the crosshairs; you just need to possess basic human decency for the wrong group of people. Look no further than Rachel Accurso, globally known to toddlers and parents as the beloved YouTube creator “Ms. Rachel.” When Accurso launched a fundraising effort to provide basic humanitarian aid to starving children in Gaza—as well as Sudan and Ukraine—she was immediately targeted by StopAntisemitism and other hardline advocacy groups, who went so far as to demand a Department of Justice investigation.
A preschool teacher singing nursery rhymes was viciously smeared and accused of antisemitism simply because she acknowledged that Palestinian children are human beings who deserve food and safety. That is how the permission structure operates. The machinery demands absolute dehumanization. If you break that rule—even to save a starving child—you are branded an enemy of the state and an enemy of the faith.
The Sound of a Snapping Bone in the U.S. Senate
When the cultural enforcers fail to silence dissent, the state steps in with physical violence. If you cast a war as a divine mandate, any opposition to it isn’t just a political disagreement. It is treated as heresy.
We saw the shocking, physical reality of this on March 4, 2026. During a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing regarding the escalating war, Brian McGinnis—a former U.S. Marine who deployed during the invasion of Iraq—stood up to protest. Wearing his dress uniform, his message was desperate and clear.
“No one wants to fight for Israel!” he shouted, gripping the heavy wooden door of the hearing room.
Instead of listening to a veteran who had actually bled for this country, the reaction from the state was immediate and brutal. Republican Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana—a former Navy SEAL himself—rushed from his seat to join Capitol Police in physically dragging the former Marine out of the room. In the ensuing scuffle, Sheehy grabbed McGinnis by the legs, violently pulling him as the Marine’s arm became pinned in the doorframe.
A sickening, loud snap echoed through the chamber. Onlookers screamed in horror as a sitting U.S. Senator helped break the arm of a Marine veteran.
What was Sheehy’s response to a fellow veteran being severely injured while protesting an endless war? He took to the internet to strip McGinnis of his dignity. Sheehy publicly branded the Marine an “unhinged protestor” who came “looking for a confrontation,” absurdly claiming that his physical intervention was an attempt to “deescalate.”
When a combat veteran questioning a war is dismissed as “unhinged” and met with bone-breaking physical violence by a lawmaker, it proves the point. The machinery of holy war has no room for dissent. It will devour the very soldiers it expects to fight it.
Vessel Theology and the Cult of the Earthly Savior
How did a democratic republic get to the point where preschool teachers are smeared for feeding orphans, dissenting veterans have their bones broken in the Capitol, and defense secretaries wage apocalyptic shadow wars?
It starts at the top, with the cultivation of the political messiah. Within the most ardent factions of Christian Nationalism, the presidency is no longer viewed as a secular office. Through what sociologists call “vessel theology,” leaders are frequently compared to biblical figures like the Persian King Cyrus—flawed, earthly men handpicked by God to conquer His enemies.
Political campaigns lean heavily into this blasphemous idolatry. Propaganda videos cast the executive branch as a tool appointed directly by the Almighty to fight globalists, Marxists, and the media.
The danger of this god-like reverence is that it fundamentally alters the architecture of democracy. If the leader is divinely ordained, then political opponents are no longer fellow citizens with differing tax policies. They are literal agents of evil. This strips domestic rivals of their humanity and frames democratic debate as a spiritual war where the opposition must be eradicated, marginalized, and destroyed.
The Domestic Crusade: Ground Zero in Alabama
The exact same mechanism of dehumanization used to justify blowing up tactical centers in Kuwait and breaking arms in Washington is applied to our own citizens right here at home. We see it most starkly in the American carceral system, with Alabama serving as the ultimate grim laboratory for this ideology.
Christian Nationalism relies heavily on strict social hierarchies and retributive justice. It is an ideology deeply suspicious of rehabilitation, built instead on the foundational belief that harsh, unrelenting punishment is a moral imperative.
State officials frequently frame the crisis of our prison systems not around human rights, but as a moral battle against misplaced empathy. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has explicitly argued against bipartisan reform efforts, putting it in writing to the U.S. Senate. He sneers at what he calls a “misplaced guilt-driven, rather than data-driven, response to crime and punishment.”
Marshall publicly lambasts reform advocates, declaring that they “work across the aisle in the name of compassion to chip away at the prescribed punishment for crimes—always advocating compassion for perpetrators, never their victims.” He frames the foundational concept of criminal reform as an affront to “personal responsibility as the greatest guarantor of freedom.”
Through this highly punitive lens, the incarcerated are no longer seen as human beings deserving of constitutional protections, dignity, or a second chance. They are viewed simply as earthly sinners who have forfeited their humanity entirely. Once the public accepts that premise, they will turn a blind eye to unspeakable atrocities.
The Political Prisoners of the “Alabama Solution”
If political rhetoric provides the permission structure to treat incarcerated people as subhuman, the reality behind the barbed wire provides the horrifying proof.
Look no further than the explosive, Oscar-nominated documentary The Alabama Solution. Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, the film strips away the polished political talking points using contraband cellphone footage shot by the incarcerated men themselves. It bypasses the official narrative and exposes the rotting core of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC).
The documentary lays bare exactly how dehumanization seamlessly transitions into economic exploitation. It exposes the ADOC’s forced-labor program, a modern-day slavery apparatus that generates an estimated $450 million in goods and services for the state and private corporations. Men are forced to work grueling, dangerous hours for fast-food chains and poultry plants for literal pennies, entirely under the threat of extreme physical violence or solitary confinement.
Because the state operates on a punitive framework that views these men as disposable, ADOC facilities have become slaughterhouses. The footage tracks over 1,350 deaths in Alabama prisons between 2019 and 2024, documenting rampant, unchecked drug overdoses and fatal beatings by guards.
Authoritarian systems cannot survive the light of day. When the documentary premiered to critical acclaim, the state did not punish the abusive guards or address the humanitarian collapse. Instead, it retaliated against the whistleblowers. The incarcerated activists who risked their lives to film the abuse—specifically Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, co-founders of the Free Alabama Movement—were abruptly yanked from their cells and thrown into extreme solitary confinement at Kilby Correctional Facility in mid-January 2026.
Let us be absolutely clear about what this means. Council and Ray are no longer just incarcerated men serving sentences; they are political prisoners. They are being held in total isolation, cut off from their families and completely stripped of their basic human rights, not because they pose a physical threat to the facility, but because they committed the ultimate heresy in an authoritarian state: they spoke the truth out loud. They exposed the systemic violence and organized nonviolent labor strikes to disrupt the state’s slave-labor racket. The government’s immediate reflex was to crush the men who dared to show the outside world the blood on its hands.
Defending the Rational World
Whether the target is an independent journalist, a political prisoner suffocating in an Alabama solitary confinement cell, a beloved children’s entertainer, or an American veteran protesting a war with a broken arm, the ideological mechanism remains identical.
When human conflicts are elevated to divine crusades, humanity is the first casualty. By invoking the language of divine right, by wrapping themselves in the flag and the cross, these movements create impenetrable permission structures. They allow ordinary people to support mass incarceration, unchecked authoritarianism, and endless war without experiencing an ounce of cognitive dissonance.
We reject the crusade. We believe that human rights are non-negotiable. We believe that legislation and foreign policy must be based on economic reality, peer-reviewed science, and human empathy—not religious dogma or exclusionary nationalism.
Holding our institutions accountable starts with recognizing this shared framework. Identifying exactly how the “other” is being systematically dehumanized is the first, vital step in defending our democracy. We must demand the receipts. We must refuse to look away from the violence done in our name. And we must remember that a free society requires constant, defiant vigilance against those who claim to speak for God while doing the work of tyrants.
Citations and Resources
“Peace Through Strength: President Trump Launches Operation Epic Fury to Crush Iranian Regime, End Nuclear Threat”
The White House
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/peace-through-strength-president-trump-launches-operation-epic-fury-to-crush-iranian-regime-end-nuclear-threat/
“Pentagon names final 2 victims of Kuwait drone attack”
The American Legion
https://www.legion.org/information-center/news/security/2026/march/pentagon-names-final-2-victims-of-kuwait-drone-attack
“Trump Pentagon pick had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘Insider Threat'”
The Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-tattoos-extremism-insider-threat-national-guard-e3b9e4a3c8e4e9b8b6d3d0f0c0f8f8b8
“Pete Hegseth’s Tattoos and the Crusading Obsession of the Far Right”
New Lines Magazine
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/pete-hegseths-tattoos-and-the-crusading-obsession-of-the-far-right/
“WATCH: Wild Moment GOP Senator Helps Toss Ex-Marine Protester Out of Hearing”
Mediaite
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/watch-wild-moment-gop-senator-helps-toss-ex-marine-protestor-out-of-hearing/
“Did Tim Sheehy ‘break’ Brian McGinnis’ arm? Capitol Police shares update amid allegations”
Hindustan Times
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/did-tim-sheehy-break-brian-mcginnis-arm-capitol-police-shares-update-amid-allegations-101772690218368.html
“Protester, Three Capitol Police Officers Treated for Injuries After Scuffle in Senate Hearing Room”
The Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/senate-protester-sheehy-arrested-capitol-police-d40f7368ca30e995ebabad16561d4f76
“Pro-Israel group asks DoJ to investigate Ms Rachel over posts on Gaza children”
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/stop-antisemitism-ms-rachel-doj-investigation
“Incarcerated activists from Oscar-nominated documentary The Alabama Solution sent to solitary”
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/alabama-solution-activist-solitary-confinement
“After Exposing Prison Horrors, Incarcerated Whistleblowers Are Moved to Solitary”
The Appeal
https://theappeal.org/alabama-solution-solitary-confinement/
“Written Testimony of Steven T. Marshall, Alabama Attorney General, Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary”
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony%20of%20Steven%20T.%20Marshall%203.241.pdf
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