Steven Miller, I’m writing to you as a Stoic, an atheist, and a progressive: not to convert you, but to challenge you. I don’t share your faith, but I do share your humanity, and it’s on that common ground that I want to speak. My goal isn’t to mock or dismiss you, but to ask you to consider the consequences of your words and actions, and to reflect on whether they align with the values you claim to uphold. ...
Mike Johnson and the Problem of Bad Faith: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malevolence. He is something more dangerous and more explicable: a true believer of above-average intelligence who has substituted a closed theological epistemology for empirical reasoning, and who has proven willing to abandon democratic norms and institutional integrity when they conflict with his eschatological politics. In short, he is a competent ideologue operating in bad faith — not because he is incapable of recognizing truth, but because he has trained himself to reject it when it threatens his worldview. ...