Transcription
Telly, how would this administration define what makes a Democrat agency, which agencies, and what constitutes being a Democrat agency?
I think this administration has been very clear, Kelly, that we're not going to tolerate waste, fraud, and abuse in our government. And we've also been very clear to point out when agencies or when programs do not align with this administration's values of putting our country first. You've seen that with USAD and in various other cases where uh there's been cuts made or funding has been slashed. And so again, unfortunately, we're having to do a massive review of the bureaucracy to be good stewards of the American taxpayer dollar. And it's the Democrats who have forced the White House and the president into this position by voting to shut the government down.
I just watched this entire White House press conference and almost had a panic attack. And it wasn't just the words coming out of Caroline's mouth that gave me anxiety. It's also the cross that she wears around her neck. It is inappropriately large. That's not just a cross that she wants the people right there in the room or her friends or family or if she goes for coffee or whatever. She doesn't just want the people around her to see that. She chooses to wear a massive cross every day that's big enough for everyone to see. And here's why we should all care about that whether you're a Christian or not. Because America is either a democracy or theocracy. We can't be both.
As a former MAGA gurly and Christian nationalist myself, I'm currently terrified because I've known for years what the rest of you are finally just now starting to see. That Christian nationalism is a virus that is designed to shut down the system, overpower our evil, worldly, man-made democracy, and replace it with the kingdom of God on earth. Our founding fathers already dealt with this in the colonies and they thought that inside the constitution they had embedded a firewall and malware and everything that we would need to protect us. We haven't updated the system for like 250 years. So we've been infected and now we're all screwed.
Today I'm going to dive into the threat this movement poses and how it was created to crash the United States of America. I'm Jenny Gage and this is Life Take Two.
Hi everybody. I'm Jenny Gage, former MAGA, former Christian nationalist, white supremacist, trader, all the things. And I know there's a lot of great stuff out there on YouTube. I always appreciate you stopping on one of my videos. I do want to give a little plug for my book club. This month, the Audible book is 100% free. There are a couple of videos in my playlist under book club and I'll put a link to one of those videos in the description. I've invited a special guest on for our first book club live stream on the first Wednesday of November. So, join me there.
Now, back to this virus of Christian nationalism that has infected the American system. Have you seen Alien, the movie with Sigourney Weaver from my childhood back in like the 80s? That's the playbook. We, the regular old people of the United States of America, Christian nationalism is the invasive species and it doesn't coexist with democracy. It just states bursts out and kills the host. And that's where we're headed. And yes, I'm saying that as someone who once cheered the invader on. It was my life. I was completely dedicated to overtaking the United States of America in the name of Jesus who was going to come back in the clouds and all the rest of y'all were going to be gone.
Okay, my favorite part of this video. We get to start in Jenny's confession booth. Look, this is the number one question I get on my channel. How did Donald Trump get you? Why in the world would a seemingly moderately intelligent woman like you fall for Donald Trump? Hook, line, and sinker. And I didn't just vote for Donald Trump. MAGA was my entire identity. Short answer, brainwashing, grooming. Longer answer, conservative America was an oil field without the pipeline. Trump built the pipeline to himself. Trump didn't invent the cult. He stepped into one. It was a merger. Mormonism that I came from, evangelicism, the hunting, gay-hating Southern Baptist, all the purity subcultures, the submission subcultures, he merged them all and Donald Trump became the CEO of conservative Christians.
We've seen this recently with two tragedies, the Charlie Kirk killing and the Mormon church attack in Michigan. With all of a sudden all of these groups that never got along, Baptists, Mormons, evangelicists, and everybody who's friends with Donald Trump, all of a sudden they're all holding hands and singing Onward Christian Soldiers together because Donald Trump merged the cult and became the CEO of conservative Christians across America. Do you know that 81% of evangelicals voted for Trump this last time around? 73% of Utah Mormons voted for him. I voted for him in 2016. I did not vote for him this past time around. Just so you know, I did go into the booth and vote for Kla Harris. That was my first time ever voting Democrat in my entire life. But I loved him.
Number one question you guys all ask me, why? Why did it work on me? Because I was already the perfect host. I was primed by children's ministry songs about obeying my leaders, girls camp lessons about America as the promised land, and Sunday school lessons about the latter days, hungry for belonging because I was a cult baby already trained to confuse authority and enthusiasm and purpose with truth.
If you don't already know it, let me introduce you to Steven Hassan's Bite model for authoritarian control. Bite stands for behavior, information, thought, emotion. Those are all areas that authoritarian groups control. I need you to know the bite model so we can map how people like me get sucked into Trump's pipeline. I'm focusing on I information because that's the lock that held me in the cage the longest. When the internet came out, when I was like in my 20s, I was taught that the internet was a spiritual booby trap. And I don't say that like jokingly. That is what I thought. I never in decades of Mormonism, born and raised, googled anything about my church. Never ever. I truly believed that Satan ran the internet.
Here's a story for you. I went online once in our little computer in our master bedroom and we had like dialup internet and I was doing a family history search. So, I was going to get on like the LDS Ancestry search system at the time, and as I was logging into my computer, this popup came on the screen for a porn site. I literally thought that Satan was trying to tempt me not to use the internet to find my cousins that my dad hadn't seen for like 60 years or something like that, only to learn later that the problem wasn't Satan. It was my husband's porn usage and the secrets and shame spiral that came with that. And what's funny is I told that story all the time. Like I found my cousins a couple months later. My dad had lost his father when he was four years old. So a whole side of the family was missing and that's who I was searching for that day. And I clipped out of that little porn popup, right? So I got up in Mormon fast and testimony meeting at the pulpit, took the microphone and told that story. You know, I was searching my family history and Satan popped up this banner that tried to get me to go to a naked site. I told that story for years in Sunday school classes and to like all of my Mormon friends. We'd have people over for dinner. We'd be talking about Mormony stuff. And I would bring that up because it was such proof to me that the internet was from Satan and that Satan used the internet to try to tempt us.
Here's another funny little nugget related to that. Um, years later, When I found out that Jake was cheating on me, he brought that up. Like, everyone knew I was using porn every time you told that story because that's why the pop-up came up on the screen. Well, I didn't know what he was doing with the computer, but I did know the internet belonged to Satan. And that experience really solidified that for me. By the way, if you were ever in my Mormon ward and heard me tell this story, will you leave a comment so we can talk?
That is information control. You fence the library, burn the books, and tell people that curiosity is sent. When Trump arrived, he didn't have to invent a lock. He just wiggled the key and everybody was caged up inside of his information echo chamber. If you guys understood how much people like me do not have access to any type of outside information, like I never turned on CNN. All of my information came from only trusted sources who were the leaders of the cult.
We also need to talk about the convert fetish to understand why Christians love Trump so much. Here's a real life post from my Facebook. I know I've read this before. I posted this picture of Donald Trump in like this Napoleon hat, Make America Great Again, and I write this little love poem to him. You know, like God has always used really rough men to serve his purposes. I don't want to read this whole thing again. You guys can put this on pause and read it, but it was comparing Trump to Napoleon and Moses and all of these great men. I loved Trump. Leaving MAGA was like a breakup for me. But he's a creep. And I was this good little Mormon girl, so how could I support him? Religious people love a convert. I actually loved how bad he had been. The abstain adjacency didn't repulse me at all. It reassured me. If the atonement worked on Donald Trump, the most depraved man like I'd ever known, then surely it would work on me, too.
In the Christian church that I joined after I left Mormonism, I heard my pastor say, "No matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter what's been done to you, God loves you and you are forgiven." And I applied it to trump like this sacrament. He's forgiven. He's chosen. He's ours. You see, Christians are already programmed with that. We're already groomed. were already indoctrinated to just forgive. He was the black sheep. He was the prodigal son and he had come to Jesus. I posted all these Facebook hosas about his boldness in choosing the Lord. I loved that narrative arc of Donald Trump from prodigal to president washed in blood and wrapped in a flag. It was so inspiring to me that I'm actually like having some weird flashbacks right now. And now that I'm outside, I know what he's doing. And he absolutely terrifies me.
So, let me tell you so you can be scared. He says things that sound totally wild to outsiders. But inside the system, they land like verses of scriptures. They're dog whistles, call and response. And he never breaks character. He's out there just saying all this random stuff that the rest of us normal people are like, "Why does he say all this random stuff?" He's dog whistling to his base. He never breaks character because the character isn't random. It's the Sunday sermon in a suit and tie on the lawn of the White House. I'm convinced there's a pipeline somewhere in the White House where speech writers harvest like pastor quotes, rephrase the buzzwords, and hand them a stack of just doctrinal sound bites and they're like, "Just say this again and again and again." The result, it feels like church. It's the Trump Bible without the binding just floating across X.
watch these church guys and tell me that Donald Trump isn't just harvesting their sound bites and then quoting them all the time. Adnauseium. >> So, we have to win this in the spirit because the flesh and the devil is manifest. President Trump does not need to concede. He won. This is now or never. This is it. I'm not going to let the enemy come in and steal my nation. And those on the left and others, even some of the Republicans that have sided with these demonic spirits are about to experience trouble from the hand of God. >> And it's strange to all of us who are used to our presidents just being presidential to see our little president marching around in his suit and tie just randomly spouting out Sunday sermon quips. But that is exactly what he's doing. And it's very viral.
Here's the most dangerous move that every cult starts off with. They redefine family. In one church I attended, the pastor preached that children of God means only those who accepted Jesus in our congregation. Everyone else, they were tears, black sheep, Judas, the worldly, the damned, evildoers, sinners. In Mormonism, we called it non-members, Gentiles, under the influence of Satan, sons of predition, things like that. That's how you shrink compassion. You rename your neighbors as enemies and outsiders. They're not part of our family.
Mormonism ran this weird play of really solidifying the family. I wasn't Mrs. Fiser. I was Sister Fiser. Anyone who's ever been to Mormon church, you know they call themselves brother and sister. Sister Fisher, brother Fisher, sister Smith, brother Smith. God was my father. Jesus and Satan were my brothers. The bishop was the father of the ward. There's a little primary song that we used to sing about. The father of the ward leads our family. That's what we called it, the ward family. And the president, we called him the father of the nation. When Trump stepped into that language, we're the family, they're the threat, the merger snapped into place in their minds.
Then there's the patriarchy stuff that used to make me salivate. Let me translate. Biblical stewardship. That's another word for patriarchy. Provider man, patriarchy, traditional family, patriarchy. It's men ruling over their stewardship. Adam in Genesis is given the earth and Eve as stewardship. Like he's a manager of the earth and Eve. He's supposed to rule over them. Then come a bunch of other anointed men. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Peter the fisherman. Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Jesus was giving Peter stewardship. Paul called and anointed despite his past. The pattern is power by calling.
American Christians retrofitted themsself into that story. Columbus was called to find America. George Washington was called to lead revolution so he could escape the Church of England. Joseph Smith was called and anointed to restore the gospel. Imperfection, having a sinful past, even if the past is sex with slaves or SA, is never disqualifying. It's actually proof of destiny because Jesus was tempting you. And that just proves how righteous you are. Moses murdered that one guy and was still chosen. Thomas Jefferson, as we all know, did all kinds of wacky [ __ ] And he was still chosen to lead the colonies out of British tyranny with his masterful mind. By the way, at this moment in time, I feel like King George and Hamilton was right. And I wish that England would actually take us back cuz I'd rather have King Charles in some tea sipping rugby loving Tony Blair type than literally anything we have over here right now. Will the UK reanax us? Is that still on the table? Vote for me for president. I'll let Greenland and Canada do whatever the hell they want to do. and I'll negotiate a reversal of the revolution and make sure we have Princess Kate and Prince Willie instead of JD Vance and Erica Kirk.
Back to Donald Trump and his Christian mega cult that has invaded and is about to choke out its host organism. Have you noticed all the war language everywhere? That's what I heard at church on Sundays. So, the crazy stuff he said meant nothing to me because it just sounded like going to church. A holy land to reclaim from infidels. Average Sunday. a war against satanic LGBTQs and women's liberals and socialists and atheists and leftwing extremists. That was just 10:00 a.m. Sunday school. And then I had had this experience that I hate talking about, but you guys have to know about this where at I believe it was the Republican convention when Donald Trump was speaking before the 2016 election, I was watching TV and whenever it was that I first heard Donald Trump introduce the Make America Great Again thing, I felt the mantle, that stewardship, that calling and choseness. I felt it fall at that Republican convention. The lights, the crowd, the music, all the stuff, right? And in my mind, I saw the light of Christ in his eyes. So, a couple weeks later, I bore my testimony of that to a group of like 10-year-old boys when my little nephew was making fun of Donald Trump one day with tears in my eyes. I saw the mantle fall on him. He is chosen. He's such a good man. That's how deep the virus had gotten into my brain.
So all of you normal people who were never MAGA, white supremacist, Christian nationalist, whatever, whatever, you think that this is all just aesthetic, but it's working. It's so effective. He has merged all of these people together into one giant mega cult. And the aesthetic itself is foundational. He looks the part. He has the regal wife, the photogenic family lineup. They all work together. The weird hair becomes a relic. It makes him stand out. The repetitive wardrobe becomes a uniform. My bishop growing up had one suit. Same suit every week. It was the bishop suit. Donald Trump doesn't get creative. He doesn't mix anything up. He is just like a closet full of the same suit. Power within a cult carefully disguises itself as consistency. The wife thing, by the way, that's a really big thing in Mormon theology. The best men receive the best wives. It's like beauty as a divine favor. That's something I've heard from my evangelical friends, too. So, Mormon teen boys will talk about how if you don't serve a mission, you get an ugly wife. Serve a mission, you get a smoke shop. Right? The Trump optics aren't random. They are ritual. And his mega cult is eating it up.
I've heard a lot of people this week talking about, "But Trump doesn't care about the Constitution. Magga seems like they're trampling it." Yeah, I didn't care about the Constitution. I cared about the Bible a little, the Book of Mormon a lot. What my prophet said, God was my king. His word was my law. And this is the problem. My allegiance was to God and the church. I lived in everyday functional treason because I trade the Republic of the United States for the kingdom of God any day. And I would fight to defend the kingdom of God, even against my neighbor any day of the week. And we had an arsenal to do just that if we needed to. If my non-member neighbor opposed God's plan, I could turn on them without even blinking. And not that I was ever violent, but there were people that I just stopped talking to because they were evil. I hate this video, but in the description, I will drop the video where I talk about how I shunned and my whole entire family shunned my young cousin when he came out as gay. By the way, for those of you who do watch that video, just know that I have now been shunned by that same family that I was part of shunning him. Last Christmas, my entire family had Christmas together and I was not invited just like I didn't invite him to Thanksgiving. So, karma. And the thing with my neighbors and my cousin is I thought I was righteous, but I was actually just a captive of the cult like everyone else. And I was activated and weaponized and ready to invade.
As a former Christian nationalist, here's what I can tell you. I could not coexist. In fact, I see that coexist bumper sticker with like the Star of David and the cross and I don't know all the stuff on it. And it actually made me furious because those were idols. Those were false religions. God had told me to destroy them. I didn't want anyone else to have freedom except me and my cult family. These MAGA extremists who are in power now, now that they have power, you all saw alien. This is not a roommate situation. It's a chest burster. We are the host. And if we don't build antibodies, laws, norms, voter turnout, this thing kills the host. Us, America itself.
Our founding fathers tried to install a firewall between church and state. But we left the system unpatched and didn't update it for 250 years. And our current leader has never read the instruction manual. and doesn't even know what the constitution is, so he's just doing whatever the hell he wants. Here are the vulnerabilities the virus exploits. Money and politics. Dark cash launderers theology into policy. Gerrymanders is a big problem. Minority rule hardcodes itself into the map. Evangelical Christianity is only like 19% of America, but they won. Court capture. Lifetime seats become the movement's immune evasion. We have these judges who are now just doing whatever the pi piper tells them to do. Propaganda engines, radio, TV, podcasts become a 247 IV drip of the infection. I have people who listen to Fox News 24/7. I would have it on all the [ __ ] time. I think that civic apathy, which is my last uh area of vulnerability to this virus, has been our biggest problem for a long time. How many of us didn't go out and vote against Trump because we just didn't care? Well, y'all care now, right? And once again, like, not to be mad at people out there. I get a lot of hate for ever being part of MAGA, but I have reached millions and millions of people and done every interview and podcast that I can for the past seven years telling people what was coming and nobody listened. We have to engage. The time to be apathetic is gone.
I heard a quote today that really hit me. At a time when hate is shouting, it's not enough for love to whisper. With what's going on right now, we can no longer just sit back and wait for things to correct themselves. We have to get out there and do something.
Here's the mechanics of infection and how it spreads from day to day. Churches double as campaign hubs. They drive turnout. They funnel v volunteers. They test lines. And the churches are spreading this propaganda and reinforcing it that I invite model that information every single week in church. I was having all of the MAGA stuff reinforced doctrinally in sacrament meeting in the Sunday school classes everything reinforced it. So what you guys see on the news, if you're not going to some of these churches, you have no idea. Bible study, Wednesday night youth group, podcasts from the ministers, the information is being beaten into them day after day after day spreading the viruses.
Nonprofits and think tanks write model bills and lawmakers just paste paste paste. some that apathy even in local lawmakers not really reading stuff and not resisting because they don't realize that this virus can shut us all down. School boards become beach heads. They ban books. They police gender. They launder ideology as safety. State houses pass culture war statutes that preempt local democracy. Courts then bless the statutes as religious freedom. Influencer pods are a huge problem right now. They translate rulings into talking points for mom's groups and men's ministries. Look at Turning Point USA. That's just a giant influencer pod and it is out there indoctrinating collegeage kids, very vulnerable children who are forming their own identities. I had more indoctrination at my Mormon college than anything before or after that the rest of my entire life. Look at the whole Charlie Kirk thing. influencer pods. Every piece is small enough to look reasonable on its own. Together, they are a viral life cycle and a damn long one that's very difficult to eradicate.
But there are antibodies. And no, the antibbody isn't trying to get your friends to leave MAGA like I left MAGA. There aren't that many people who leave their whole religion and everything like I did. So that's that's not the answer. Here's how we patch the system with some good civic hygiene. If this is a virus, we need public health and not just hot takes and inspirational videos. Don't just listen to me. Get out there and do [ __ ] please. I'm going to give you some practical antibodies that you can install this month.
Local antibodies show up at schoolboards and library meetings. Speak during public comment. We're playing the long game. We have to make sure that kids have access to information and that it's not controlled in the way that they are currently trying to control it. So, it may not seem like showing up at a schoolboard meeting to talk about books being banned is going to make a big difference, but we have to think about the future generation, too. I've been going to schoolboard meetings with a group called Secular Arizona. I protested a Mormon seminary that was putting a building on campus. Find something like that near you. Join your county elections office as a pull worker. You then become the guardrail. Back your local independent press. Journalists are are diagnostic tests. They're the canaries in the coal mine.
Here's some personal antibodies. Practice information hygiene. When a clip enrages you, source it before you share it. So important. Create exit ramps for loved ones on the very small chance that they do want to step away. Offer gentle, faith saving ways out of high control groups. Focus on community. This is the first step in my denim revolution. And this is the most important thing that we can do right now is build back our tribes and our villages. We need tight neighbor networks, have potls, care circles, child care swaps, local book clubs.
Lastly, here's some policy antibodies. We need to protect church state boundaries with transparent enforcement. Period. We need to expand voting access and fight intentional disenfranchisement. Eliminating mailor ballots disenfranchises the homebound, the elderly, people that are unable to travel to a polling place. That's unacceptable. We need to demand financial transparency for organizations that act like parties while claiming to be churches. And lastly, we need to release the Epstein list so that we can finally drain the swamp.
So, how did I get free that I in the bite model information when I when my world was collapsing and I lost my faith and I lost my husband and I lost my home and all this stuff. It was just quiet humiliating facts that didn't match the sermons. I was factchecking everything. I did a Google search of what do Democrats stand for? What do Republicans stand for just two years ago? Then I dropped little lists into my Google Docs so I could compare side by side and I realized I'm not a Republican at all. I then left my Christian church six years after leaving Mormonism and my hate groups disguised as Bible studies and I learned love. Love that didn't try to fix that terrors worldly damned box full of people. I had this realization that if my God needed a government to survive, that's not faith. That's a host. That's just politics with a big cross slapped on.
Leaving cost me all of my friends, all of my family, my entire identity. But staying would have cost me my mind. If you're waking up right now, you're not crazy. You're healing. If you need permission, let me give it to you right now. You can leave. I did. You can build a life on curiosity, consent, and shared power and respect for all womankind. You can live that coexist bumper sticker. And let me tell you, it is so beautiful from the inside out. Democracy is messy on purpose. Theocracy is tidy by force. The two cannot share the wheel.
But the good news, every time you volunteer, call a rep, help a neighbor, or show up to a boring school board meeting, you're generating antibodies to fight this deadly virus. A quick story. Last month, a tiny coalition organized rides to a schoolboard vote. Nothing glamorous. They won by 11 ballots. One meeting, 11 rides. That's an immune response. If Alien taught us anything, it's this. The crew doesn't survive by pretending the thing isn't real. They name it, fight it, and work together. Theocracy is not a roommate. It's a replacement for everything that is America. And if you haven't watched Alien for a while, then that's your homework for the weekend. Put on your PJs and give that a whirl. And tell me in the comments one patch you'll help install this month. An antibbody you can build where you live. Are you going to go meet one of your neighbors, take them some cookies, get to know people? Can you see what your school board's doing? Can you see what your local government is doing? Can you donate? And if you're inside the MAGA movement that I came from and you're starting to see the seams, you're not alone. There's a whole country out there waiting to welcome you back to humanity. I don't know what that voice crack was, but I don't have time to re-record this. Kevin's taking me country dancing. Thank you so much for watching. Subscribe if you want more confession booth plus investigative work like this. And then share it with someone who's asking how does Trump get to these people? Because my answer is a map. And maps help get people out.