News with Nuance: April 14, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hi Readers!

I’m back after a week away from News with Nuance for Holy Week and also a family trip to Arizona. I love the new trend where we distinguish travel with young kids as a “trip” as opposed to a “vacation,” because even though we had an amazing time in Arizona, we also drove up and down the state, stayed in four different hotel rooms, made up a couch bed for two elementary-aged boys in two of them, and I nearly gave myself a heart attack when I offered to drive our rental car straight back from the Grand Canyon to the Phoenix airport a week ago today.

Those of you reading from mountainous regions, feel free to laugh - but I was legitimately terrified as the cars and semi-trailer trucks zoomed past me at 85 mph and we descended almost 6,000 feet from Flagstaff to Phoenix. Meanwhile, we started the day at 25 degrees and ended it at 80 in Phoenix, which meant while on said drive, my sweatshirt-laden top half was dripping in sweat, while my hands gripped the steering wheel grabbing on for dear life to stay at 10 and 2. Like I said, feel free to laugh if you’re used to driving in the mountains. I guess I’m a native Midwestern flatlander and I’m definitely not used to Southwestern U.S. traffic anymore.

Joking aside, we had a great trip - there’s simply no substitute for intensive family time together in an era where we so often value productivity and performance over relationships - and I also got to visit my grandma and her husband, Carl, in Sun City West at the beginning of the trip. They’re in their 90s and still playing pickleball - so - pretty unbelievable.

This past week was also my first Holy Week in 10 years not to be an officially called pastor in a congregation, which I wrote about a little bit here.

With all of that emotion and excitement packed into one week, you can imagine that this week back at home I’ve been taking some time to process it all and think about how to make sense, as I imagine all of you do as well, of your one tiny life and its ups and downs, in the midst of a global news cycle that can often feel threatening and even more terrifying than those Arizona mountain roads.

I’m putting it all back together today in this newsletter, or at least attempting to do so. We’ll start with two big investigative stories from the Washington Post, one delving into the troubling backstory of the gun enthusiast, military base worker and possible National guardsman who leaked embarrassing and top-secret material about U.S. intelligence to a Discord server full of teenage boys who idolized him.

The second story tells of the troubling lack of safety precautions in labs around the world studying dangerous diseases, especially in China, a trend that possibly could have contributed to the accidental spread of COVID-19.

I grouped these two stories together because for me they reflect a broader story about the ways in which our technology and engineering and programming prowess as a human race has outpaced our ability to handle all this information and technology in a relationally human way. As in new discussions about AI technology, you start to wonder if the technology is going to rule us - instead of the other way around. I’ll include a short note here about a third story in this group, where a popular handgun has been injuring and even killing Americans, including members of law enforcement, because it seemingly fires without anyone pulling the trigger.

Finally, I have a book recommendation for you that continues to unpack the very human toll of Christian Nationalism, specifically the elevation of abusive male pastors and Christian so-called parenting experts, like James Dobson and Bill Gothard, and what they’ve done to destroy generations of Christian families in America, especially in undermining and abusing and sublimating the selves of women, mothers, and daughters - even while they continue to be championed by prominent American politicians and GOP leaders. Also in the corner on Christian Nationalism, you’ll read about a study that explains how even Christian music has been corporatized by megachurches and marketing.

Let’s get to the news - with nuance …

A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)

The Headline: Discord member details how documents leaked from closed chat group

As a journalist, I’m generally sympathetic to those who leak information, or share government secrets with the public. But as it tends to do, our recent news cycle has turned my general sympathy upside down in this case.

I found the backstory behind the National guardsman who leaked these stories actually the more important story than the leaked information itself, much of which had been previously communicated in other media stories, if not as painstakingly sourced directly from government documents.

See I read this news story, with much of its information taken from impressionable teenaged boys who liked to play video games, mostly through the lens of a mom who has two boys who aren’t that much younger than the boys (whose identity was hidden) interviewed for this story.

While my kids aren’t on Discord (yet?) they do like to play video games and occasionally chat with other people in the games. I’m constantly warning them that sometimes adults might pose as kids in games, or that they shouldn’t chat with people who they don’t already know offline - even if it’s just to crow about a touchdown pass in Retrobowl.

I could see some of the naïveté of my own kids in the comments made by the boys interviewed for this story about the government leaker. He had groomed the teens in a sense, showing videos of himself shooting guns, and talking hatefully and pridefully both about his role in the government and also his racist and generally intolerant views (you’ll notice too that this is very much a story about white American masculinity, and where it has gone wrong).

For this man, nicknamed OG, the conversations and his work were all-too-real. These really were government secrets, to which he had access. The guns he was shooting were real. His hateful comments were based on an ideology and worldview he’d honed as an adult, with its accompanying suspicion of “government,” that managed to mix together threads of Tea Party politics, libertarianism, as well as Christian Nationalism and a reflexive sense that God was on his side.

But you’ll notice that this man had to resort to cultivating a community of boys much younger than himself, for whom it seemed more like everything was still a video game. You can imagine that “OG” likely had few friends or relationships with people his own age. Ultimately he didn’t want relationships with equals but instead mastery over those who would follow him. And isn’t that the kind of masculinity too often taught in American churches? Alas, what bitter fruit our teaching has wrought.

Perhaps in this story we actually have to take solace that so far this man, OG, only wreaked havoc with his release of data, and not of bullets. Kyrie Eleison.

The Quote:

Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne.

The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows.

The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community.

“Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.”

He said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy, and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.”

To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.”

Story by Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford, Washington Post

The Headline: China’s struggles with lab safety carry danger of another pandemic

Well, this certainly isn’t the story that I - or I’m guessing any of you - wanted to read today, as most of us are still mired in COVID PTSD, and the staggering death of more than 1 million Americans to this deadly virus, including a close family member of mine.