Chris Abraham

I’m not saying this is what’s happening. I’m not claiming anything is staged. But I can’t help thinking about Wag the Dog.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the entire premise of the film is that a U.S. president is about to lose reelection because of a scandal involving inappropriate contact with an underage Girl Scout in the Oval Office. Two weeks before the election, a political fixer brings in a Hollywood producer to solve the problem the only way they know how: change the story dominating the news cycle.

Their solution is to invent a war.

They pick Albania because it’s obscure enough that the average American doesn’t know anything about it. The producer literally stages footage on sound stages—fake refugee scenes, patriotic music, heroic narratives—and feeds it to the media.

Suddenly the entire country is talking about the crisis overseas instead of the scandal at home. When the CIA tries to shut down the story by saying the war isn’t real, the PR team escalates the narrative by inventing a stranded American war hero and creating a massive patriotic spectacle around rescuing him.

The point of the movie isn’t that wars are fake. The point is that media attention is finite, and whoever controls the story controls what the public is thinking about.

So no, I’m not saying the 2026 bombing or confrontation with Iran is some Hollywood production with green screens and actors clutching kittens. Reality is usually messier than satire.

But I will say this: when a foreign crisis suddenly dominates the news cycle at exactly the moment domestic headlines are filling up with things like Epstein files, investigations, or politically dangerous stories, it does create a certain… cinematic déjà vu.

Not a claim.

Not an accusation.

Just a citizen remembering a very on-the-nose political satire from 1997 and raising an eyebrow at the timing.

When someone says “white Christian nationalism is an existential threat to democracy,” I can’t evaluate it without definitions, because two different accusations get blurred into one slogan.

First: what do they mean by white Christian nationalism? Do they mean a specific ideology asserting the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed that way, with laws and institutions reflecting Protestant values, often paired with the idea that white Christians should maintain cultural and political dominance? Or do they mean an identity bucket where anyone who is white, Christian, or patriotic/nationalist is treated as inherently suspect? Those are radically different claims. Conflating them turns debate into moral sorting.

Second: what do they mean by democracy? Democracy, as a mechanism, is descriptive. It doesn’t “correct” outcomes, it reports what the electorate chose. If it were prescriptive, we’d just install the “right” result and skip the election. The moral content people are usually defending is not “democracy” by itself, it’s the rights-and-limits framework that constrains what majorities can do.

Call that what it is: the American way of life. Constitutional rights, equal citizenship, due process, free exercise, free speech, and limits on state power. Voting is the mechanism operating inside that framework, not the framework itself. And the framework only holds when there’s cultural buy-in. The process is downstream of civic ethos, trust, restraint, and a shared willingness to keep playing the same game even when you lose.

So if the claim is “white Christian nationalism threatens the American way of life, equal citizenship, and constitutional limits,” say that and name the mechanisms: laws, institutional capture, rights restrictions, election rule changes, violence. If the claim is “a majority voting for illiberal policies is anti-democratic,” then democracy is being redefined as a moral outcome rather than a process. Either way, “democracy” is doing too much work here, and it starts functioning like a shibboleth: a prestige word that signals virtue while staying conveniently undefined.