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Tag: President Donald Trump

Our Love Affair with Confident Ignorance and Stupidity Has Reached Awful New Heights

climate science trump

By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission

Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.

That was January 2020.

Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.

For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.

It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.

Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.

As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.

Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.

It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.

That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.

Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.

Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.

A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.

And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.

We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We crave spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.

We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.

It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.

Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.

Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.

Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.

Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.

It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.

In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.

They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.

The clear intent of the bill is to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.

Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.

America’s love affair with swaggering ignorance and confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need to be paid. The damage will be extensive.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Bruce, If You Were Still an Evangelical Preacher, Would You Have Voted for and Supported Donald Trump?

i have a question

A reader recently asked:

I was wondering, Bruce, if you had still been an evangelical these past 10 horrible years, do you think you would have supported Trump?

Evangelicalism is somewhat of a big tent, encompassing people who are rigid Fundamentalists, such as those found in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement, liberal/progressives, such as those found in the emerging/emergent/red letter movements, and everything in between. I was born into, raised, and educated in IFB churches. I was as right-wing as you could be. I maintained this worldview until I was thirty years old.

Every preacher enters the ministry with a borrowed theology and worldview — that of his parents, family, tribe, church, and college. This is normal. Sadly, many Evangelical preachers never move beyond this point, believing the same things at sixty as they did at age twenty-five. In fact, these preachers pride themselves in not changing their beliefs, thinking they got everything right from the start. In my case, my beliefs slowly, gradually, at times imperceptibly, changed, usually moving to the left towards more tolerant, inclusive, nuanced beliefs. To those on the right of me, I was becoming a liberal. For those on the left, I was still too Fundamentalist for them.

I was a flag-waving Republican through and through. Vote for a Democrat? Never. (Though I did vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976, believing him to be an Evangelical Christian.) For the next twenty years, I voted Republican. As my beliefs continued to evolve, I slowly embraced progressivism, liberalism, socialism, and pacifism — though I was still Evangelical theologically. The United States’ immoral wars in the Middle East and the incessant warmongering by Republicans (and to a large degree Democrats too) challenged my continued support of the Republican Party. I voted Democrat for the first time in 2000, as I have every general election thereafter.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton faced impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I preached several sermons about Clinton’s lack of moral and ethical values, saying, that I could never, ever vote for such an immoral man. While I knew that no politician was a pillar of virtue and morality, I had, in my mind, a line that couldn’t be crossed if a candidate wanted my vote. I concluded that it would be better not to vote than to lend my support to candidates lacking basic moral character.

Fast forward to 2016 and the messianic arrival of Republican Donald Trump. By then I was an atheist and a humanist. I saw no possible way that I could vote for Trump and still sleep at night. Had I still been an Evangelical preacher, I do not doubt that my viewpoint would have been the same. Donald Trump is a jingoistic, bigoted, misogynistic narcissist and bully; a man lacking any sort of moral and ethical foundation; a man who only cares about money, power, and influence. Trump doesn’t care one wit about me, my family, and our needs.

If I were still an Evangelical, I still wouldn’t have voted for Trump. I probably would have either voted third party or not cast a vote at all. Trump is unfit for office, an ugly, vicious, small-dicked little man who cares nothing for anyone but the uber-wealthy and his bottom line. I could not and would not, in any circumstance, vote for Trump, no more than I could have voted for Bill Clinton decades ago.

The 2024 election finally taught me that the American political system is irreparably broken; and that it is time for a total overhaul of how we do elections. The system cannot be fixed, it must be burnt to the ground. We have reached a point where it is evident, at least to me, that both political parties are rotten to the core — a fact that became crystal clear to me when, in 2016, the Democratic National Committee deliberately manipulated the primary process to keep Bernie Sanders from becoming the party’s general election candidate. While I remain a Democratic Party executive committee member for Defiance County, I am not certain how much longer I plan to be so. I see no signs of life among Democrats, just a lot of finger-pointing and blame as they try to explain how Trump won another election. Sometimes, the only answer is to start over.

Twenty-five-year-old Pastor Bruce likely would have voted for Trump, mainly due to his “pro-life” stance on abortion. Those days of being a single-issue voter are long gone. Trump isn’t actually pro-life. He knows he needs Evangelicals to vote for him if he expects to win. So he tells them what they want to hear, hitting all the red meat, hot-button culture war issues. As far as I can tell, Trump has no moral or ethical values, Yet, it seems Evangelicals no longer care about morality. All that matters is political power and advancing their theocratic agenda (as we are seeing with Project 2025).

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Washington D.C. Episocopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde Speaks Truth to Power, and President Trump is Pissed

trump and budde

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde spoke truth to power during a sermon delivered at a prayer service attended by President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the Trump family.

Budde passionately said:

Let me make one final plea. Mr. President, millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people, the good of all people in this nation, and the world.

Trump later posted to social media:

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard-line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.

She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!

Conservative Christians, showing moral bankruptcy, attacked Budde:

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She’s the first woman to hold the position. She was given a great honor today, a chance to unify America around a Christian message at the dawn of a new administration. Instead, she disgraced herself with a lecture you’d hear on CNN or an episode of The View. What an embarrassment. (Charlie Kirk)

Liberal Protestant Pastor Mariann Edgar Budde blindsides Trump and Vance, weaponizing her sermon to attack them in front of their families by saying they should ‘have mercy’ on gay, lesbian, and transgender children. Unbelievable. (Catholic Voice)

[Budde’s sermon] is just the beginning of Democrats’ desperate attempts to race bait America back into the pernicious grips of DEI. The fact that President Trump demanded that God remain as the foundation of America should have received non-partisan praise from all of our nation’s clergy. We are addressing DEI and wokeness in our government and businesses and it’s time to address wokeness in churches as well. (Evangelical pastor Jack Brewer)

Ironically, the bishop used the pulpit and the service to not only lecture the president but to promote a secular worldview and her woke ideology. Unity can only be achieved through a commitment to biblical truth, not cultural assimilation. Her sermon was indicative of the heresy being taught by mainline denominations. Our nation was founded upon the truth that there is God, and he alone defines good and evil. (Evangelical pastor Rob Pacienza)

This Bishop asked Trump and his administration to have mercy on trans kids and immigrants. What I would like to know is why she didn’t ask for the previous administration to have mercy on these trans kids and immigrants? Where was she when it counted? We have children who are so young that they do not know the ways of this world and yet we are doing irreversible damage to their bodies — damage that many have since regretted. Where was she when Biden opened the borders and allowed millions of people who knew they were breaking the law to cross over. We knew a day of reckoning was coming. Yet where was her request for compassion back then. What the previous administration did was not compassion but ideological malpractice. They operated on children out of ideology. They allowed in people from other countries out of ideology. This was not compassion. Our compassion must be for our citizens first and foremost (Evangelical Corey Brooks)

This is what a religious pretender looks like. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde attacked Trump and told him to “have mercy” on gay, lesbian, and transgender children and illegal immigrants. President Trump rolled his eyes… (Evangelical Graham Allen)

NEW: Trump appears to roll his eyes as Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde begs him to “have mercy” on gay, lesbian and transgender children and illegal immigrants. These people are absolutely nuts. (Collin Rugg)

Woke pastor attacks Trump and Vance to their faces for scaring “LGBTQ kids” and illegals. (End Wokeness)

Are you kidding me? It’s people like this woman “pastor” who put this irrational fear into the heads of LGBT people. (Gays for Trump)

Who thought it was a good idea for this woman, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, to give such an outrageous sermon in front of President Trump at the National Prayer Service? First “protect the trans” and now this? This is NOT a church I would want to attend. (Gays for Trump)

When compassion divorces itself from truth, it becomes a counterfeit virtue—easily manipulated, shallow, and destructive. As Christ warned in John 8:44, the father of lies thrives where truth is discarded, twisting kind intentions into tools of hell. True compassion bows to the authority of law and justice-for his throne is established on Justice; without these, it is not compassion at all, but indulgence in sophistry that serves the enemy of God. (Evangelical pastor David Englehardt)

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. (Evangelical country music star John Rich)

I am an atheist, but let me shout out a hearty AMEN! to Bishop Budde for speaking truth to power. Her words will have no effect on Trump, Vance, or the president’s family, but maybe, just maybe, thoughtful, compassionate followers of Jesus will pause for a moment and weigh whether they want to continue to blindly support policies that are contrary to the teachings of not only the Bible, but Jesus himself. Evangelicals and other conservative Christians do not have a high moral ground on these issues. I suspect if Jesus were alive today, he would have plenty to say to President Trump about his treatment of “the least of these.” Trump’s response? He would have Jesus arrested and deported.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Billionaire JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon Tells Working Class People to “Get Over It”

get over it

Jamie Dimon, the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan, thinks that Trump’s tariffs will be good for our national security. If the tariffs are inflationary — and they will be — Dimon says, “So be it.” To the working class and poor people who will be hurt the worst by tariff-driven inflation, Dimon smugly replied, “Get over it.” Nothing like a filthy rich man telling poor people to shut the hell up and get on with their lives. Easy to say when you have billions of dollars at your disposal. Things look much different when you don’t have enough money to live from week to week.

Dimon, with a net worth of at least $2.7 billion, told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

If it’s a little inflationary, but it’s good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it. National security trumps a little bit more inflation.

As someone who has spent his entire life bouncing between, abject poverty, poverty, and working-class poor classifications, it angers me when people of vast wealth tell me how my life will be affected by government policies that reduce the amount of money my family and I have to live on. “A little inflation” for the Jamie Dimons of the world is no big deal, but to people living from paycheck to paycheck, inflation-driven price increases on everything from the cost of housing, utilities, food, gasoline, medical care, and taxes can and does cause harm. Such people turn to government programs for help to keep their heads above water, but what do Trump and his administration want to do? Cut the social safety net that provides food, utilities, housing, and medical care for poor people. Why? To pay for trillion-dollar tax cuts for the rich — especially billionaires.

President Trump has opened wide the henhouse door to the foxes, and slaughter is sure to follow. Oligarchs — very rich business leaders with a great deal of political influence — now sit at the helm of the U.S. government and will do everything in their power to maximize profits and enrich their wealth, even if it means stomping poor, working-class people underfoot. And sadly, the people who will most be hurt by tariffs and anti-immigrant policies, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. They literally voted against their own self-interest. We can only hope that when these MAGA voters feel financial pain as a result of their ignorant support of Trump, they will repent and vow to undo — if possible — the harm currently being done to our republic. Ha! Who am I kidding? It is just as likely we have crossed a line of no return, and, if unchecked, Trump and his fellow libertarians will destroy our once great nation.

And to Jamie Dimon, I say, “Go fuck yourself.”

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Donald Trump and the MAGA War on Transgender People

transgender people donald trump

Throughout the history of the United States, federal, state, and local governments have singled out specific groups of people for persecution. Indigenous people. People of Asian descent. People of German descent. Blacks. Muslims. European immigrants. Gay people. And now transgender people. Over our nation’s almost 250-year history, political leaders have used the power of the state to condemn, marginalize, and persecute people deemed a threat to the United States. We have locked up such people in internment camps, reservations, and prisons, and when the persecuted pushed back against their persecutors, they faced state-sanctioned violence, including beatings, rapes, and murders.

Thanks to Donald Trump and his MAGA mob, along with millions of Evangelical, Mormon, and Roman Catholic Christians, transgender people — who make up less than one percent (3 million) of our population — are targeted for persecution. Some Christians think transgender people should be arrested and incarcerated in internment camps, reminiscent of the days when Japanese and German Americans were torn from their homes and incarcerated during World War II. The goal, of course, is to drive transgender people back into the closet — out of sight, out of mind, never to be seen again.

It is easy for people with privilege such as heterosexual whites to say to transgender people, “Stand up for your rights!” However, demographically, transgender people are such a small part of our population that it is unlikely that they have the political and cultural power to stand their ground (without risking physical harm or death). Transgender readers of this blog have repeatedly told me that all they want is to be left alone. They want to live without being singled out for who and what they are. They want the same rights and protections as their non-transgender neighbors.

Sadly, bad times lie ahead for transgender people. Donald Trump and his merry band of bigots fully intend to erase transgender people not only from the government, but society in general. They will not rest until we return to the days when people didn’t understand the difference between biological sex and gender; back to a day when LGBTQ people were labeled deviants and child molesters.

So what are transgender people to do? They have little to no political power. I fear many of them will withdraw from our society out of fear of what could happen to them if they publicly lived openly and authentically as transgender people (no different from what heterosexual people do). Their small numbers are no match for angry mobs of transphobes who want to destroy their lives. It is up to non-transgender Americans to join with them if there is any hope for transgender people to ever have the peaceable lives they desperately wish to have.

Transgender people aren’t asking for special rights or to be treated differently from others. All they want is to be left alone so they can live lives free of persecution, harassment, and violence. Is that not all any of us wants?

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Russell Brand Says Donald Trump is an American Mystic and Prophet

donald trump dump truck

This series, titled Trump Dump, features outlandish, untrue quotes from Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and Right Wing media. If you come across a quote for this series, please send it to me with a link to the news story that contains the relevant quote.

Russell Brand, a professed Christian, recently had this to say about President Donald Trump:

Well I do feel optimistic about MAGA, MAHA, I do, because how I came to – not Christ – but how I came to Trump, was like, if they hate him this much there’s got to be something he’s doing right. I don’t know what it is yet, because I was on board with the ‘yeah, you can’t say Mexicans are rapists, that’s horrible,’ you know, but then I just slowly through realizing that the institutional Kafkaesque bureaucrats that ultimately tried to destroy me – I came to think, ‘now, this guy’ – and then more and more I think he’s, like, he’s an American mystic, that’s what I think. He’s like some sort of silverback creature of the American imagination. If there were an American prophet, of course he eats McDonalds, and drinks Coke, and goes around in a jet with his own name on it. What does the American myth demand of you? Of course you’ll have big, phallic, phallic towers with your name. America created him. America needed him. America got him. And I think that he might be the end of the kind of globalism that we were fearful of before when we were doing censorship-industrial complex and stuff, but just none of us knows what it will beget. And I say that without the one true God, I’d be concerned.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Quote of the Day: The High Cost of Donald Trump’s Plan to “Drill, Baby, Drill”

drill baby drill

Excerpted from France 24, Donald Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’ meets the reality of fracking in rural Pennsylvania, January 19, 2025

A double yellow line marks the centre of Route 29, expanding at the top of each rolling hill that sweeps across the frozen landscape of northeast Pennsylvania. From the former coal fields of Wilkes-Barre to the topmost border of the state, the road cuts through sleepy rural neighbourhoods littered with Trump signs and fading Christmas decorations. 

Pulling into Dimock, a majority-White township with just over a thousand inhabitants, wide tyre marks start to form on either side of the yellow line. Hundreds of trucks shuttling equipment and water to fracking wells in the area have become part of the decor. 

Joe Wilson pulls up to his neighbour Ray Kemble’s house in a pick-up truck hauling a 700-litre water tank he filled from a hydrant about a 20-minute drive away.

“You wouldn’t think that in America, people would be delivering water to houses just so they can take a shower,” he says. “This is the kind of stuff they do in Africa.” 

More than two kilometers below his feet, billions of dollars worth of natural gas runs through the veins of the Marcellus Shale – the largest gas field in the United States.

The surface and groundwater used to supply homes in Dimock have become so contaminated with chemicals used during the fracking process that residents have lost access to clean water. As a result, neighbours have had to jumble together innovative solutions to help each other out.

“I deliver to Ray’s house once a week. He lives alone so he doesn’t need as much water. But there are five of us back home, so I have to drive back and forth from the hydrant to my house four times a week,” Wilson says, his face marked with exhaustion. “It becomes a chore.” 

The 39-year-old construction worker siphons the water into Kemble’s basement tank using a long hose and waits for it to empty out. It takes about an hour to finish the whole operation and fill the reserve, which is normally intended for storing and transporting water for livestock.

The tank is attached to a pump which sends water to Kemle’s kitchen and shower, but it is not safe to drink. On top of the thousands of litres Wilson shuttles around each week, he and Kemble have to get additional jugs of bottled water to make coffee, brush their teeth or cook pasta. 

Fracking is slang for hydraulic fracturing, a method used to extract natural gas or oil found in shale by drilling into the ground, then injecting water and other chemicals at high pressure underground to crack open existing fissures. The first company to start drilling for natural gas in Dimock, Cabot Oil & Gas, arrived in 2006 – riding the wave of the US fracking boom that would eventually turn Pennsylvania into the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer.

But shortly after Cabot’s arrival, locals started to fall seriously ill and Dimock saw its water turn brown. The contamination was so severe that people could put a match to a running tap and it would light on fire due to the high levels of methane in the water. A well near a house in the township even exploded as a result. 

Enraged residents began filing lawsuits against the company in 2009 and kick-started what would become a litigation odyssey. A state investigation ultimately concluded that deficient gas wells drilled by Cabot had leaked unfettered amounts of methane into the township’s aquifer. The company was banned from fracking in Dimock in 2010.

Kemble, a former gas trucker who has been at the forefront of the fight from the very start, pulls out a printed report of the water testing done by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that same year. “I’m not worried about just the methane coming through. Here’s the other 60-plus chemicals that are coming in with that methane,” he says, puffing on his pipe. The report includes arsenic and uranium, the latter of which is an important risk factor for developing chronic diseases

A grand jury investigation found Cabot guilty of environmental crimes in 2020. But two years later, the situation regressed. Rebranded as Coterra Energy under a merger, the ban was quietly lifted and the company got permission to open 11 new fracking wells outside a 23-square-kilometre radius drawn around the township. In exchange, Coterra had to pay $16 million for a public water system set to be completed in 2027.

….

The majority of fracking wells are located in Republican counties across Pennsylvania, including here in Susquehanna County, where Trump won over 70 percent of votes in the 2024 election. Even though the environmental and health consequences fracking has had on Dimock shows a darker reality behind Trump’s promise to “frack, frack, frack” and “drill, baby, drill”, locals seem undeterred in their support for the incoming president.

Except for Kemble, who thinks Trump “is a lunatic anyway”. He is still registered as a Republican but contrary to most of his neighbours, Kemble did not vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election because “he is all in with the industry”. 

Along the main road, a colossal banner pasted on the front of a white, barn-like building reads “Trump coming soon”. Ironically, it was supposed to be a treatment site for fracking wastewater, but the project was put on hold because local authorities deemed it too dangerous. The building has been vacant for years. 

Back at Kemble’s house, the gun-carrying Craig Stevens slaps his contact card onto the long wooden table where Kemble is sitting. It is bright yellow and has a snake coiled around an oil rig in the centre, a reference to the flag used by the right-wing Tea Party movement. The card reads “patriots from the oil & gas shales – don’t tread on me”. Along with Kemble, he is spearheading the battle against Coterra. 

Stevens describes himself as a “former right-wing conservative” and insists that he is “not anti-drill” but rather “pro-clean air and water”, which is why he is also one of the few inhabitants here who didn’t vote for Trump either. 

“Locals here will not talk about fracking because most of them have their hands in the pockets of the industry. They’ve signed gas leases in exchange for money and are contractually forbidden to speak out due to non-disclosure agreements,” Stevens says. 

Trump made promises to boost oil and gas production by opening more drilling permits and increasing fracking leases on federal lands. But in the US, the vast majority of fracking takes place on state and private land. Gas companies can make deals with landowners to drill on their property, often in exchange for monthly payments in the form of royalties.

“It is a very sensitive subject here in Dimock,” a woman living in the community admits. She prefers to remain anonymous because her family has “had some problems” but “can’t talk about it”. There is a gas well close to her property that not only brought noise pollution but also caused “water issues”.

To solve the problems the family was having, they reached “a settlement” with Coterra, who installed a massive filtration system in their house so they could access clean water. In return, they agreed not to speak publicly about the contamination.

She says that money is the reason people will continue supporting Trump regardless of whether they are affected by the environmental and health consequences of the fracking around Dimock. “Some people get most of their income from the royalties [of gas leases on their property],” she explains. “[Those] with a ton of land like farmers have lots of wells on their properties,” and because they have a hard time making ends meet through agriculture, they sign gas leases. 

Coterra has not only put money in the pockets of residents but has also funded local schools and given over $1 million to Susquehanna County for scholarships. A red brick hospital complex located about a 20-minute drive north of Dimock bears an unmistakable Coterra logo on its façade. 

You may read the rest of the story here.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene Lets Her Christian Transphobia Hang Out for All to See

donald trump dump truck

This series, titled Trump Dump, features outlandish, untrue quotes from Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and Right Wing media. If you come across a quote for this series, please send it to me with a link to the news story that contains the relevant quote.

This groomer is lying to children. God created us in HIS image, male and female, he created us. No doctor, body mutilation, or lifetime of pharmaceutical drugs will ever change your sex/gender. Congressman Timothy McBride is a child predator and LIAR.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: If the Congress Doesn’t Give Rich People More Tax Cuts, Middle and Working-Class People will Suffer

donald trump dump truck

This series, titled Trump Dump, features outlandish, untrue quotes from Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and Right Wing media. If you come across a quote for this series, please send it to me with a link to the news story that contains the relevant quote.

This is the single most important economic issue of the day — this is pass/fail. If we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity and, as always with financial instability, that falls on the middle and working-class people.

We will see a gigantic middle-class tax increase. We will see a child tax credit cap. We will see the deductions halved … it has the potential for a sudden stop. And, as I said, traditionally with these sudden stops, it falls on working Americans.

— President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury chief, billionaire Scott Bessent, as reported by Raw Story

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Our Lord, Savior, and Deliverer Has Arrived

donald trump dump truck

This series, titled Trump Dump, features outlandish, untrue quotes from Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and Right Wing media. If you come across a quote for this series, please send it to me with a link to the news story that contains the relevant quote.

I felt then [assassination attempt in Pennsylvania] and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.

— President Donald Trump. as reported by The Scotsman

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.