I spent the first part of this year back home in Michigan as my sister, Haniya, and I took turns staying with our mother, who’d recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I was with her for Ramadan in January. It was Eid al-Fitr just before the Iowa caucuses, and at sundown my mother turned on the television during dinner. Her obsession with cable news was such that she could not be away from it for long, particularly when all the talk was of the verdict in Minneapolis. As you recall, a year earlier, in February 2031, Shariz al-Bawadi and his daughter Eman al-Bawadi killed thirty-three people at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, the father flushing terrified shoppers down one hall with an AR-15 while his sixteen-year-old daughter perched in a rafter above a roller coaster firing guided EXACTO bullets from a high-powered rifle. Predictably, what followed was an outpouring of anti-Muslim vitriol. Muslims, Sikhs, and others of Middle Eastern or South Asian ancestry were attacked in cities around the country. The entire Somali population of Minneapolis has endured raids, arrests, and indefinite detention as the courts grow ever more comfortable with elasticizing the habeas writ. A year later, both al-Bawadis would receive life sentences.
I chose this moment to unburden myself. Haniya had admonished me that I tell our mother before she was too far gone. We’d finished our meal of stewed lamb, rice, and raisins when I told her I would be moving in with my partner, Seth. This was the first time she’d even heard of Seth, and it took me several attempts to explain who he was. She thrust her hand at me:
“Stop speaking. Stop speaking right now.”
She left the room, and I gave her some time, clearing and washing the dishes before attempting to approach her again that night. When I did, I found her downstairs in my father’s den, watching more TV in the dark.
From his opulent stage, translated to 2D from his Slapdish worlde, The Pastor excoriated: “When a prophecy comes true, when fire destroys a city, and the liberal media, who’ve been lying to you for decades, they say, ‘Don’t pay attention to that prophesy. Don’t listen to that man, he’s a charlatan’—who would you believe? And now he foresees great floods coming. Yet they are hellbent on turning you away from him. ‘The scientists tell us it’s this reason or that reason.’ They think you can’t see with your own two eyes. My friends, do you really believe these events do not directly reveal the hand of God?”
He stalked the stage, and his movements were leonine, his suit and hair impeccable, the enormous cross on his lapel gleaming in the stage lights. What drew my mother to this man’s incoherent gospel, I assumed, had to do with fear. Gently, I asked her if I could turn the channel, and she flipped a hand in acquiescence.
“He is so dangerous. If he wins then what happens to Muslims in India will happen here. To you, me, Haniya, Noor, Gregory. All of us. You don’t care about our people, and this man is what happens.”
Of course, she has already lost a good deal of her ability to understand current events. I explained to her that The Pastor was not a presidential candidate, that soon the Democrats and Republicans would begin their primary season in Iowa, but she would not hear this and kept insisting The Pastor was going to hurt Muslims.
While her fears might have been confused, they were not exactly incorrect. In my position as executive director at the US Global Change Research Program, Asia has become a vector of grave concern. Home to the vast majority of the world’s population, the continent is in the midst of a violent paroxysm of conflict and biophysical upheaval. It is greatly susceptible to extreme weather events, as Mumbai discovered during Cyclone Malwan, but also drought, flooding, food insecurity, sea level rise, and saltwater intrusion. There are few models left predicting benign climatological outcomes in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Nepal, Pakistan, or China. The catastrophic shortages of water are creating refugee flows, eruptions of conflict, and ethnoreligious carnage. Climatological calamity is driving widespread social and political unrest, which then manifests itself as conflict over ethnicity, caste, religion, race, gender, language, and other imagined communities. When my mother scolds me on my indifference toward “our people” she does so with the knowledge of the persecution Muslims in India are experiencing, all of it sanctioned by the right-wing Hindu government. Following the tens of thousands killed and displaced by Cyclone Malwan, spasms of extreme violence erupted, as disinformation spread that Muslims were hoarding food, water, and fuel.
As for The Pastor, I find him no more than a con man. After losing a string of roles to nonwhite actors, embroiled in scandal for decrying film and television’s politically correct culture, his movies increasingly ridiculed, his profligate lifestyle constrained, this former actor simply recalibrated his ambitions to a different style of performance. He saw that the captive audience of American Evangelicals was ripe for a hostile takeover and that he could generate income by preying upon a group already eschewing critical thinking. Internet sleuths love to point to a villain’s soliloquy in one of this man’s underperforming films, the plot of which includes a Silicon Valley corporation attempting to introduce mind control technology to the internet. By the time of the film’s streaming debut in 2024, this was hardly an original thought. More telling is the former actor’s investment history. He spent years as the primary financier behind a venture capital firm, pouring money into virtual reality and technologies of targeted persuasion. His ambitions were thwarted when he bet on one of Slapdish’s competitors, and his firm failed.
However, the villain’s speech from the subpar action movie remains trenchant, if appallingly scripted: “We live in a contemporary Tower Babel, and inside that tower is a sorcerer’s stone. But only a lucky few understand how to wield it. Those who do can feel its power, and that power is seductive.”
Dreck, to be sure, and perhaps too simplistic an explanation for the media empire he has built. He is tapping into real emotions of frustration and disillusionment, but a con it remains. None of this would comfort my mother, however. She now gestured to the TV, where The Pastor had been replaced by a commercial for collectible coins. She began to weep:
“It will be like in India. The women endure the worst of it. My friend—she and I grow up together—her daughter was raped in front of her children. The men cut off her breasts, stole every possession the family had, and left her to die. She survived, but this is not just some scary story. This is what is happening to Muslims every single day in my home.” She looked at me miserably. “Ashir, tell the people where you work, do not let this man hurt anyone.”