Over the Labor Day weekend, I was kind of nervous during the final edit on a blog post about moral injury. (Yes, I realize my posts read like a first draft, typos and run-on sentences included. But as an old newspaper guy, I luxuriate in having enough time to edit my copy without immediate deadlines looming.) Moral injury is a clinical term that’s working its way into the popular culture, and I’m leery of words that cross over like that. (Remember “codependent?”) Monday I decided I’d dithered enough, and I uplinked it.
And, glory be!, at midweek I got a hint that maybe I’m on the right track.
In Monday’s blog post, I argued the Trump regime’s deliberate cruelty to Haitian immigrants violates my core “beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong, or good and evil,” thus incorporating a recent definition in the peer-reviewed Frontiers in Psychology. It’s exhausting, and each day’s news brings another outrage. I like to be careful about getting into pop pyschology in my own writing – I was a courthouse reporter and journalism teacher, not a shrink, and it’s not exactly in my lane — but on Wednesday I got validation (there’s one of those words again) from an unlikely source.
Russell Moore is the editor of Christianity Today, a center-right evangelical Protestant magazine. He and I differ on several important theological points, but he’s one of the “moderate” Republicans I can find common cause with. Wednesday in his newsletter, engagingly titled Moore to the Point, he got right to the point with a post headed “The Trump-Era Laughter at Immigrant Suffering Is Deforming Our Souls.” He didn’t use the term moral injury, but he said:
Did you hear the one about the Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs? Wasn’t it hilarious? Here’s the setup: A community of vulnerable people, escaping danger to their lives in their home country, are quietly minding their business in a community, working long hours at hard jobs. Lots of them are Christians worshiping Jesus in churches on Sunday. The punch line is that these people are stealing their neighbors’ pets for dinner. It wasn’t true, of course. It never happened. We all know that now; we all knew that then. But why take everything so seriously?
A joke is a joke, right?
But wait, it gets better. Here comes another laugh line. Roughly 350,000 Haitians sojourning among us—immigrants legally here—have had their Temporary Protected Status removed, and people are having fun with memes. These memes aren’t from cranks on the internet but from the official accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. [Links in the original.]
But Moore couldn’t be more serious when he gets to the punch line:
Just for a moment, let’s forget the policy disputes—how many people should be allowed in and how. Suppose you want zero immigration to the United States or wherever you live. Suppose you can make the case that the Bible’s command to care for the sojourner doesn’t apply. Suppose, even, that you set aside what happens to these vulnerable people—some of whom, in the case of the Haitians and others, have every reason to believe gang violence will now kill them. Even if you are okay with all that, why would you ever find it entertaining?
A social media meme is meant to be shared—sent to someone else with the implicit assumption This is the kind of thing that people like you and me find funny. We’re in on the joke.
And this: There’s no joking about it. This kind of humor degrades people who are made in the image of God. When we tolerate it, we demean not only one of the central moral tenents of Judaism and Christianity — the imago Dei, dating back to Genesis, “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him”; we change ourselves, not for the better, and we change our sciety. Says Moore:
Extremist groups have always known that jokes and memes can push the boundaries of what’s acceptable, and can link together those “in the know” while allowing them to escape detection by saying, “Come on, it’s just trolling.”
What we learn to laugh at disciples us. It trains our consciences to enjoy and not to recoil from what once would have shocked us. A lie becomes a joke which becomes a meme which becomes a game which becomes just the way things are. When cruelty and degradation are funny, something has happened to us. Something breaks, something not easily bound back up. We can laugh our way to hell.
In a word, we dehumanize our neighbor. We deny our brothers and sisters, like each of us, are made in the image of God. There’s just a whiff, a sulfurous whiff, of “blood-and-soil” Eastern European-style ethnonationalism here. How are the regime’s “heritage Americans” the same as19th- and early 20th-century German Übermenschen? How are they different? It’s exhausting to have to constantly think about things like this.
Back in January, Steve Rose, a features editor at The Guardian, ran a story featuring 10 memes issued by Trump’s White House; some merely showed Trump as a king, Trump as a pope, Trump as a Jedi master and other self-aggrandizement. But others were demeaning. I think they crossed a bright line into dehumanizing Latinos and immigrants in general.
Rose quoted editor Don Caldwell of a website Know Your Meme, who says “the publishing of deliberately crude, offensive content online to provoke a reaction, has reached the level of “institutional shitposting.” Rose said as early as March 2025, Trump’s White House jumped in with an OpenAI-generated meme celebrating the regime’s policy of mass deportation:
The White House applied it to a woman in tears as she was arrested by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents before being deported. The original photograph, and the woman’s name and alleged crimes, are also included in the post.
For Caldwell, this demonstrated just how up to date the White House is with online trends. “They’re hopping on brand-new, fresh memes,” he says. He suspects White House staffers might be regular visitors to Know Your Meme. “The Studio Ghibli meme trend kicked off on March 25 on X; we covered it the following day; and then the White House covered it the day after that.”
I’m not going to copy the meme here; I don’t want to further denigrate the woman’s image or likeness. Nor am I going to go down the rabbit hole opened up by Caldwell’s mention of Studio Ghibli, the acclaimed Japanese animation studio, or controversy over Open AI’s mimicking of its distinctive style. But another meme that Rose included in his story (see above) shows two public figures – US House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both D-NY, wearing exaggerated sombreros and holding tacos. The implied ethnic slur is obvious, and Rose says the meme perfectly illustrates why Trump’s trolling is so hard to counter:
Why did the White House choose to put the Democratic house leader Hakeem Jeffries and the senate leader Chuck Schumer in sombreros and have them holding plates of tacos? It doesn’t matter. They look a bit silly, and it’s provocatively offensive, and once again, the world’s attention is colonised.
The image illustrates how difficult it is to respond to this type of content. It’s part of a running joke, stretching back to a deepfake video Trump posted a month earlier, which slapped a crude sombrero and moustache filter over Jeffries. That video was roundly condemned as offensive and racist , not least by Jeffries himself (who replied by posting a genuine image of Trump with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein). The Trump administration then doubled down, playing the video on a loop on screens in the White House briefing room for several hours and creating more images in a similar vein, which kept the trolling going. [Link in the original.]
I think it also suggests, quite elegantly although covertly, how the Blacks-to-the-back-of-the-bus institutional racism I grew up with has broadened to target, with a wink and a sneer, not only Black leaders like Jeffries but Mexicans and Jewish officials like Schumer. We’ve come a long way since civil rights days, as we like to keep reminding ourselves, but so has our ability to craft dog whistles and jokey, plausibly deniable racial slurs.
When I was a freshman in high school, it required the presence of the Tennessee National Guard to admit 12 Black students to my county schools. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way since then. But when Barack Obama, a constitutional lawyer and ajunct professor at the University of Chicago who happened to be Black, was elected president, the scarcely concealed horror of so many white Americans made me question that.
And very little has happened since then to make me reconsider.
We had a brief respite from Jim Crow when President Biden was elected with crucial support from the Black community. But Biden squandered the opportunity, refused to step down, sandbagged the 2024 primaries and threw the Democrats into disarray, as the legacy media keep reminding us.
In the meantime, as Trump’s nasty posts about Mexicans, Haitians, immigrants in general, Iranians and alleged “narcoterrorist” fishermen off the coast of Venezuela make clear, Trump’s version of Jim Crow 2.0 has expanded its scope to dehumanize Black and brown people worldwide in ways more reminiscent of fascist Europe than the years when there were tanks in the streets of my county seat.
(It may be an urban legend, but when I was a kid we’d hear that Black people from Detroit or Chicago would wear a turban when they visited down South so they could eat in segregated restaurants.)
So basically I think Trump’s ethnonationalism draws on something — call it institutionalized racism, call it Jim Crow 2.0 — deep within our national DNA. But Trump has added something else, something I find deeply troubling. During his first term, he made clear his opinion of immigrants from the global South. The Washington Post reported.:
President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Tump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.
Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
To all of which, as a second-generation Norwegian-American, I reply: Nei takk.
Even so, hope springs eternal. We do have better angels, and they can be called upon. In fact, I kinda think they’re just waiting for us. I’ve started reading Sarah Longwell’s How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which came out this week. She’s the publisher of The Bulwark, a center-right “pro-democracy” website (with a lower-case d) I follow, and she has a running shtick with Jonathan V. Last, her managing editor, who contrasts his “dark JVL” cynicism with Longwell’s optimism on their joint podcasts. He writes a foreword titled “There’s Something About Sarah,” in which he says:
After many years of friendship, I have come to understand that her motivations don’t come from a place of ambition. That motor is powered by a belief that the world — that people — are good and worth fighting for.
All people.
Which is why you should listen to what she has to say. Not because she’s always right, but because people like her — people who can look past the present and see what’s possible — build the levers that allow us to nudge the universe a tiny bit more toward the good. (xiv)
Clearly there’s more here than banter between co-hosts on a political podcast. For all of his sometimes performative cynicism, he’s a practicing Catholic and has even coached a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) girls’ basketball team. So I’m going to give the last word to “dark JVL” here.
During a “mailbag” podcast back in July, he was asked by a viewer about JRR Tolkien’s concept of “the long defeat in the fight against evil,” a theme in the Lord of the Rings. JVL replied:
I am more familiar than I should be with Tolkien. I played D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] when I was a tween. You know, I rolled some 20-sided dice. I know this world. And yes, it’s all basically Catholic-adjacent. I mean, and the whole point of Catholicism is that you’re going to lose. You are going to die. But that’s in the long run; but in the very long run, we are all saved by Christ’s love and God’s love for us.
That combines quite a combination of sources, and it hits me pretty much where I live and move and have my being. I consider myself reasonably secular, but my spiritual formation in two Protestant denominations and the years I spent in Catholic spaces, with a little Zen philosophy thrown in, make me pretty much a mixed-breed puppy, a spiritual mutt.
I identify now as a Luther-o-palian in the ecumenical spirit of St. John XXIII, and that means I’m quite comfortable taking my cues on dehumanizing rhetoric and imago Dei from a Southern Baptist, a Catholic girls’ basketball coach and the Lord of the Rings. Besides, I think they come together, as Tolkien famously said: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” I’m quoting him here, by the way, from an essay by Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, a British journal “committed to historic Protestant orthodoxy” with an ecumenical flair. More spiritual muttery.
JVL goes on to cite the historic creeds of the fourth-century church — “Like, he sent his only begotten son to suffer and die the same death on our behalf so that we could be redeemed. And so eventually death itself will be conquered” — and an interview in which he sparred with livestreamer Destiny:
But you ain’t gonna win that fight right now, right here by yourself. I am very comfortable with the idea of fighting a losing war against authoritarianism. I’m not saying I want that. But Destiny was like, “You don’t think it’s hopeless, right? You know, you have to have hope that it’s all, you know, it’s all gonna work out.”
And that just does not compute for me at all. You choose a fight because it is right or wrong, not because you think you’re gonna win or lose. And this is the right fight, and so you have this fight even if you think you’re gonna lose.
So when my moral standards and core beliefs are exhausted by Jim Crow 2.0 and dehumanizing AI slop from the wannabe Übermensch of the Trump regime, I’ll cast my lot with the Russell Moores, the JRR Tolkiens and the editors and publisher of The Bulwark. Win, lose or draw.
References
Josh Dawsey, “Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries,” Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?utm_term=.352fcb5e0b5c.
Jonathan V. Last, “Fairness is Overrated,” The Bulwark, March 20, 2025 https://www.thebulwark.com/p/fairness-is-overrated.
__________, “Why Losing Battles Are Worth Fighting,” The Bulwark, July 31, 2026 https://www.thebulwark.com/p/why-losing-battles-are-worth-fighting.
Sarah Langwell, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 32026.
Jaake Meador, “The ong Defeat of History,” Comment, Sept. 5, 2024 https://comment.org/the-long-defeat-of-history/.
Russell Moore, “The Trump-Era Laughter at Immigrant Suffering Is Deforming Our Souls,” Moore to the Point, Sept. 8, 2026 https://www.christianitytoday.com/newsletter/archive/moore-to-the-point-9-9-2026/.
Steve Rose, “The slopaganda era: 10 AI images posted by the White House – and what they teach us,” Guardian, Jan. 29, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopaganda-era-10-ai-images-posted-by-the-white-house-and-what-they-teach-us.
Tyler J VanderWeele, Jennifer S Wortham, Lindsay B Carey, Brendan W Case, Richard G Cowden, Charlotte Duffee, Kate Jackson-Meyer, Francis Lu, Seth A Mattson, Robert Noah Padgett, John R Peteet, Jonathan Rutledge, Xavier Symons and Harold G Koenig, “Moral trauma, moral distress, moral injury, and moral injury disorder: definitions and assessments,” Frontiers in Psychology, March 5, 2025, in National Library of Medicine https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11919856/.
[Uplinked Sept. 12, 2026]
Steve Rose, “The slopaganda era: 10 AI images posted by the White House – and what they teach us,” Guardian, Jan. 29, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopaganda-era-10-ai-images-posted-by-the-white-house-and-what-they-teach-us
Ordinary Time 
Very good.
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