Swearengin is an author, emotional & spiritual well-being coach, podcaster and content creator through his social media presence as Unconventional Pastor Paul. He talks religion and politics at times joined by his wife Ashley, a former elected official and community leader. Find him at Pastor-Paul.com.
I’m a recovering rightwing media addict. Whew, feels good to get that off my chest.
That fact makes me deeply interested in the recently revealed evidence of Fox News leaders knowing there was no truth to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies, yet they continued to platform guests and stories that fueled this misinformation. While distressing that a “news” organization blatantly lied, it may be even more worrisome that Fox News leadership were certain they would lose viewership if they told the truth. Fox demonstrated their understanding that the “rage porn” news/entertainment phenomenon has addicted their audience to big lies.
I know this is true, because I had to be healed from a Rush Limbaugh addiction.
Limbaugh’s brilliance enabled him to basically invent an entirely new genre of media and he made millions. But, I believe he did so at great cost to our culture. When mental health seems to be a nationwide struggle, how much does such culture war media add to negative impacts?
Years ago, I found myself extremely agitated while driving.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked my empty car out loud. A segment from Limbaugh’s show came to mind and I realized I was angry at some perceived “enemy” Limbaugh had pointed me towards. The drug of rightwing media angst was having its effect and it made me uncomfortable. I decided to try an experimental “Rush fast.” The results were stunning.
I’m only half joking when I say five days without rightwing, conservative media made the sky turn blue again. I quickly found that the constant anger thrown at me by Rush, Hannity and others had a profound impact. In my later work as an evangelical pastor, I’d find angry, anxious people who regularly took in heavy doses of rightwing media. Every time they followed my encouragement to give that media up for a week, that person found a significant improvement in their emotional and spiritual health.
But, I know it’s not easy for people to push away from rightwing media.
Media entertainment must drive people to emote. Emotion brings connection, and connection brings the follower back again and again. Hosts like Limbaugh, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and Howard Stern don’t care if you hate them, or hate the subject of their topic. As long as the emotions of anger or fear are stoked, they know they’ve locked in their followers. For a generation, Rightwing media has perfected the creation of emotional anger. They know their job is to get the audience angry and keep them angry – even at the cost of truth.
A 2014 University of Nebraska study found that conservative leaning people tended to carry a “negativity bias” in their lives. In other words, those of a conservative political bent were “physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.” The scientists had backed up what my experiment had revealed to me – heavy doses of conservative media is addicting as it creates false fears and enemies to prey on our primal need to survive.
I often say “The Religious Right is Religiously Wrong.” Isn’t it interesting that much of the rightwing media audience are Christians despite their Biblical encouragement to meditate on “…whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely…” (Phil. 4:8.) Does intake of copious amounts of rage porn, masked as news, line up with this spiritual instruction?” Partisanship requires enemies; the Bible says divine spiritual alignment will make “even our enemies to be at peace with us.”
Some might say Left-leaning media has the same impact and I’m not going to argue that point here. I’m just very aware how many Christians adherents follow these conservative outlets and I’ve seen first-hand its destructive nature. It’s a far cry from the spiritual edict to desire truth. I hope one day again Christians can believe their bible when it says “truth will set you free.”
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.