On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly made a provocative visit to an Israeli-held area that has been deemed an illegal settlement by the United Nations.

Axios reported that the Louisiana Republican and several other GOP lawmakers made an unannounced trip to Israel over the weekend amid growing criticism of the country’s government as it continues its deadly occupation of Gaza. On Monday, Johnson was photographed in the Ariel region of the occupied West Bank, and a pro-Israel GOP activist on the trip cited him as saying the territory is the “rightful property” of the Jewish people.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry reportedly condemned Johnson’s visit as “provocative incitement that encourages settler crimes and land confiscation.”

The trip’s timing certainly reveals a contrast between the speaker, who is a staunch backer of the Israeli government, and the increasingly outspoken number of Israel critics in Congress — a group that includes MAGA loyalists. (Johnson had planned a trip to address the Israeli parliament in June, but it was postponed because of the conflict between Israel and Iran.)

As I recently wrotemore than two dozen Democratic senators denounced the raft of settler violence in the West Bank against people of Palestinian descent that has also killed Americans. So while some members of Congress seem disturbed by settler expansion and the deadly violence it has involved, the House speaker’s propagandistic appearance at the Ariel settlement seemingly emboldens the purveyors of that violence to continue.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

Ostentatious religiosity is often an attempt to overcompensate for some decidedly less-divine behavior. The Trump administration’s draconian deportation regime’s defending such evil with Bible verses is a recent example of this timeless tradition.

Twice in the past month, the Department of Homeland Security has posted Bible-themed propaganda on its social media accounts. Isaiah 6 was the first passage DHS bastardized. As images of helicopters and tactical agents ominously scrollthe narrator says: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me.’”

The Department of Homeland Security has posted Bible-themed propaganda on its social media accounts.

The second hype video mirrors the first. Dark images of militaristic immigration enforcement actions are paired with Proverbs 28: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

In addition to the Bible memes, another recent DHS social media post displayed the painting “American Progress” with the caption “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” The 1872 painting is one the most famous images of Manifest Destiny, which gave a religious justification to the unchecked westward expansion of the United States and the genocide of Indigenous people.

These posts come as DHS begins a hiring spree to add an additional 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel authorized by the megabill Trump signed into law July 4.

Why the sudden biblical references from the militarized Trump immigration machine as it creates a concentration camp in Florida? As the brutal cruelty and injustice behind its actions comes more clearly into view, perhaps it feels the need to give the rank and file a sense of religious fervor.

Imbuing millions of deportations with a divine mandate acts as a sort of pre-emptive pardon for actions that would otherwise be condemned by basic morality. Nothing girds the conscience like saying you’re on a mission from God.

DHS’ Bible craze also arrives at a time when the department is facing increasingly vocal opposition from a broad spectrum of religious groups in the United States.

A growing number of Americans are souring on Trump’s deportation policies, according to an NBC News analysis of recent polling.

A fourth lawsuit from religious groups was filed last week in federal court demanding that ICE stop desecrating houses of worship by storming in to make immigration arrests. There’s already a federal order in place preventing ICE from targeting a group of Baptist, Quaker and Sikh houses of worship on religious freedom grounds. When the National Guard and the Marines were needlessly deployed in Los Angeles, faith groups protested. And Leo XIV, the first American pope, has consistently criticized President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

There is growing pressure on DHS to release two clergy members, Imam Ayman Soliman and Maryland pastor Daniel Fuentes Espinal, from immigration detention. Soliman served as a chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital before his asylum status was revoked. Fuentes Espinal pastored for 15 years and was detained for overstaying his visa. A growing number of Americans are souring on Trump’s deportation policies, according to an NBC News analysis of recent polling.

From “Alligator Alcatraz” to a South Africa refugee resettlement plan that reportedly welcomes only white peoplethe Trump administration’s blatant cruelty stands in stark contrast to the message of welcome consistent across faith traditions.

DHS’ attempt to cherry-pick Bible verses to justify its policies is a battle it can’t win. Anyone who has a basic understanding of the Bible understands that God’s concern for immigrants and refugees is clear throughout Holy Scripture. No fewer than 92 verses in the Old Testament refer to the Hebrew word for immigrant. In the New Testament, Jesus makes it clear that how we welcome immigrants is a reflection of how we would welcome him.

The Trump administration officials who created this propaganda either don’t understand basic concepts in the Bible or are attempting something much more sinister. What if they do understand the consistent call across faith traditions to welcome immigrants? What if they understand it so deeply that they need to create this propaganda to muddy the waters? The religious appeal would then become less than some benign Christian nationalism and morph into a state-sponsored attempt to undermine a core religious teaching.

Let’s be clear: U.S. immigration enforcement agents aren’t on a religious mission.

Let’s be clear: U.S. immigration enforcement agents aren’t on a religious mission. Implying so undermines the secular nature of government. But there’s more going on here: invoking God’s name is a desperate attempt to sanctify an agenda that is abominable.

DHS’ Bible-quoting recruitment video is a confession of moral bankruptcy. A government confident that its policies are just wouldn’t need to borrow God’s authority to sell them. By wrapping itself in scripture, the Trump administration has only confirmed what its critics, including many devout believers, have been saying all along: This deportation crackdown isn’t a divine mandate, it’s a national disgrace, and faith communities will not be fooled into blessing it.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons is vice president of programs and strategy at Interfaith Alliance and the author of “Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity.”

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about actor Sydney Sweeney’s controversial ad campaign for American Eagle. The ads, showing Sweeney in various scenes sporting blue jeans, flaunting her blond hair and blue eyes to demonstrate her “great jeans” (widely read as a pun on “genes”), has been widely criticized by viewers who say it references eugenics and spreads a white nationalist message of genetic superiority; American Eagle responded to backlash in a statement posted to Instagram saying that the ad “is and always was about the jeans.” Trump’s post, which was swiftly deletedpraised Sweeney and the ad, saying that jeans were “flying off the shelves,” while calling out several companies and celebrities the president said are “woke.”

Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men.”

Trump’s now-deleted post followed his comments on Sunday, when he was asked about his thoughts on Sweeney following reports that she was registered to vote as a Republican in Florida in 2024. “If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think the ad is fantastic,” Trump said, just before boarding Marine One.

Predictably, criticism from some folks on the left has been met with a torrent of backlash and abuse from the political right. Media watchdog Media Matters reported that Fox News spent 85 minutes talking about the ad last week. Trump joining in the fray with support for the ad is perhaps no surprise; he has been struggling with public approval as he tries to wriggle his way away from the Epstein scandal at the same time many of his deeply unpopular tariffs have gone into effect.

The Sweeney/American Eagle ad discourse offers Republicans a familiar line of attack on well-worn culture war grounds. The ad is just vague enough to be deniable, yet it gives the right an opportunity to paint leftists as out-of-touch and cancel-hungry.

Some in the center haven’t been able to resist taking potshots at the left over it. Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men,” despite the fact that the ad is not a political issue and that neither the Democratic Party nor its leaders have commented on it.

But a small handful of individuals on the left have appointed themselves as stand-ins for the Democratic Party. We see this approach play out repeatedly in culture-war attacks by the right. If one vaguely left-coded person says something that the right gets upset at, in this case a handful of liberals questioning the Sweeney ad on Tik Tok, and if it then goes viral, large portions of the media and the entirety of the right wing expect every rank-and-file Democrat to answer for that one person, as we see with everyone from the White House to the vice president to conservative columnists dumping this controversy at the feet of Democrats.

This dynamic does not appear to exist for the right and Republicans, who seem uninhibited to go around burning and pillaging anything that even remotely offends conservative ideologues.

Just a few years ago, the right melted down over a Bud Light Instagram ad featuring Dylan Mulvaneya trans influencer. A mass boycott was started that threatened Anheuser-Busch’s existence as a company and myriad videos from right wingers popped up online with influencers and celebrities alike using firearms to shoot at Bud Light cans. It was the childish political meltdown to end all childish political meltdowns.

I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be.

Yet I don’t recall seeing any reporters or commentators demanding that Republicans answer for the violent backlash toward Bud Light. Then-president Biden condemned bomb threats made against the company while Republicans defended the over-the-top reaction — but Republicans were never asked to disavow any of it.

And yet here we are today, with a couple of social liberals and lefties making media posts calling out this ad and a Columbia University professor analyzing it for eugenic language on TikTok. And it’s being spun into a legitimate political problem for Democrats, one that threatens to cost them a chunk of voters.

I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be.

My hope is that someday we can all recognize this inherent hypocrisy. Anyone who takes a handful of lefty social media posts and spins them into some grand problem with the entire left and the Democratic Party is not working in good faith. We can’t keep pretending that only Democrats have agency to respond and tamp down on their own base — and yet that they are also answerable for every stray comment some vaguely left-coded person makes.

Katelyn Burns

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.