denunciation

This warning from federal Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee, Fla., to Gov. Ron DeSantis and his quack state surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, may not be the most scathing denunciation of a litigant by a judge in judicial history, but it will do for now as a contemporary standard.

In fact, both the NAR and its predecessor fringe movements going back to the 1940s have been formally denounced by other Christians, along lines that echo Paul’s denunciation of the Colossian heresies: “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.”

His infamous Blenheim Palace speech of July 1912 bears comparison with the most inflammatory things Trump has ever said, beginning with his denunciation of Asquith’s coalition government — all of whose members had been elected by the voters — as “a Revolutionary Committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud”:

Donald Trump’s firehose of fabrication and grift has reached such a peak in recent days — from his ludicrous denunciation of Kamala Harris as “mentally disabled” to his hawking of cheap, cheesy watches for $100,000 in what has been widely interpreted as an invitation to bribery to his call for one “really violent day” of unleashed police action to fight crime — that choosing a single unhinged nugget to analyze is a true challenge.

We should not kid ourselves that denunciation is only possible in Putin’s Russia.