Dr. Randolph “Butch” T. Ware III
Dr. Randolph “Butch” T. Ware III was the Green Party’s 2024 vice presidential candidate and is currently running for governor of California in 2026. Ware is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on Islamic thinking, anti-slavery movements in West Africa and the African Diaspora, and the “intersection of race, religion, and revolutionary thought.”
Progressive commentator Briahna Joy Gray hosts the podcast Bad Faith, where Ware recently made an appearance. The episode was titled Democrats are never coming back after genocide support.
They began talking about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show. Both appreciated Lamar’s performance and felt it was intertwined with symbolism but disputed many analysts’ claims that it contained a profound political statement that was much needed following Donald Trump’s reelection.
According to Ware, the only meaningful statement made during the halftime show was by a performer who momentarily raised a Palestinian flag to remind the massive Super Bowl audience of the suffering in Gaza caused by Israel’s war against Hamas.
Ware went on to say that the Democratic Party will encourage their constituents to be outraged by Trump’s foreign policy. However, it was the Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris who were directly responsible for the genocide in Gaza by arming Israel.
During the 2024 presidential election, the Green Party attempted to pull votes away from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by denouncing her for not supporting an arms embargo on Israel. Harris supporters stated that she couldn’t disassociate herself from Biden’s policy without appearing weak on the international stage, but Ware insisted that every effort to protect the Democrats from facing accountability for “the evil that their own hands have wrought is equally evil.”
On October 7, 2024, one year after Hamas’ sneak attack on Israel, which became the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Ware did not condemn Hamas’ terror attack or express concern for the hostages Hamas still held captive; instead, he created a video to commemorate Hamas’ armed resistance to “oppression, white supremacy, genocide, and European barbarism.” Ware described October 7th as the equivalent of Nat Turner’s slave uprising in 1831.
On the Bad Faith podcast, Ware revealed that he predicted during the presidential race that the Democratic Party had no chance of winning the White House because the party had lost the Muslim vote in swing states. Ware further claimed that the Muslim vote will never return to the Democratic Party after the Biden/Harris administration aided Israel in perpetrating genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza.
Then Ware promoted the Green Party as the only viable option for voters who were sick of the two major parties but saw no meaningful alternative to challenging the warmongering duopoly.
The irony is that Ware is the one who supported genocide, not Biden or Harris.
After Hamas attacked, the Biden/Harris administration armed Israel but refused to provide them with specific weapons that would cause even more collateral damage. Additionally, Biden/Harris were extremely critical of Israel’s war tactics.
These were not the actions of a presidential administration involved in a genocide. These were the acts of a self-conscious administration that believed the high number of civilian casualties in Gaza caused by Israel’s retaliatory strikes reflected negatively on the United States.
The Biden/Harris administration also advocated that Israel should do all in its power to decrease the amount of collateral damage in Gaza. Despite Israeli compliance, most anti-war groups continued to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The large number of women and children among civilian casualties horrified anti-war groups. Because Gaza is such a small region, anti-war groups reasoned that if civilian casualties continued at such alarming rates throughout a prolonged war, the whole population of Gaza would be exterminated. Therefore, anti-war groups accused Israel of genocide, figuring that if the whole civilian population of Gaza was killed as a result of collateral damage, the outcome would constitute genocide, whether Israel intended it or not.
The anti-war groups’ claim of genocide was based on a projected outcome, but it was also a strategy to shame Israel into a ceasefire. The shaming went like this: Israel was established as a safe haven for Jews during the Nazi genocide, but its treatment of the Palestinian people makes Israel no different from the Nazis.
However, it’s the legal definition of genocide that determines whether or not it’s being committed, and genocide requires “intentions” to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part.
The legal definition of genocide does not use a degree system like that of murder.
A first-degree murder is always premeditated, whereas a second-degree murder, like involuntary manslaughter, involves an intent to cause harm, but the killing was unintentional. Israel is guilty of high rates of collateral damage, which is akin to involuntary manslaughter; however, Hamas is guilty of first-degree murder and genocidal intent following their Oct. 7th attack on Israel, in which they slaughtered over 1,000 civilians.
A month after Hamas’ attack, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, had a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon. He bragged that the October 7th attack by Hamas against Israel was only the beginning. He vowed that Hamas will launch a second, third, and fourth attack on Israel until it is completely annihilated because Israel has no place in their land.
Hamas’ genocidal intentions are clear, and the October 7th attack marked the beginning of a genocidal campaign.
Ware applauded Hamas’ actions on October 7, 2023, and commemorated them a year later. He rationalized his support for Hamas by calling them “resistance fighters,” but whether Hamas is referred to as resistance fighters, holy rebels, or terrorists, the genocidal intent of their actions remains the same.
If Biden and Harris are guilty of supporting genocide, it is only in the second degree, whereas Ware is guilty of supporting genocide in the first.
When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he vowed to usher in a new era of compassionate conservatism. One of Bush’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
The OFBCI’s mission was to help faith-based and community organizations increase their capacity to provide federally funded social services to local residents.
The American Civil Liberties Union argued that President Bush violated the constitution by using tax dollars to fund religion. They also suggested that faith-based initiatives were a GOP scheme to increase the Republican Party’s appeal to working-class voters.
At the 2009 National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama stated, “The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us.” Obama rebranded the OFBCI as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Obama assembled an advisory council comprised of religious and secular leaders, as well as specialists from several fields and diverse backgrounds. Obama’s OFBNP emphasizes social service outreach and aid to the disadvantaged.
This time, the ACLU argued that the Obama administration inherited fundamentally defective faith-based policies from the Bush administration, but the Obama administration denied that it had inherited detrimental policies.
Obama’s approval of Bush’s faith-based initiative revealed that it was a nonpartisan effort to assist religious organizations that were already serving the community, rather than a GOP ploy for votes. As long as faith-based organizations followed federal guidelines, they were considered just another non-profit organization that provided social services; therefore, the government was not funding “religion” like the ACLU implied.
The ACLU took an extreme position on the separation of church and state, which many mainstream Christian organizations interpreted as anti-Christian.
When Donald Trump became president in 2016, he did not nominate a director for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Instead, Trump formed the Center for Religion and Opportunity Initiatives, which acted as the Health and Human Services Department’s contact with religious communities and grassroots organizations while simultaneously pushing for religious liberty across all HHS programs.
President Joe Biden entered the White House during a global pandemic and after the worst rioting in the United States since the 1960s, when police killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in May 2020. Biden promptly announced he would relaunch the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Biden expanded the OFBNP’s scope.
According to a press release, the White House announced, “The Partnerships Office’s initial work will include collaborating with civil society to address the COVID-19 pandemic and boost economic recovery, combat systemic racism, increase opportunity and mobility for historically disadvantaged communities, and strengthen pluralism.”
Faith-based initiatives evolved from a compassionate conservative approach to reduce poverty and substance abuse to a progressive effort to reduce systemic racism and injustices. MAGA Republicans believed Biden’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships overemphasized social justice issues, making it overly “woke.”
Trump was reelected president in 2024, and he established the White House Faith Office to replace Biden’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. According to Trump’s directive, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities … to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, and other federal funding opportunities.”
That sounds like Bush.
“The efforts of faith-based entities,” Trump’s directive stated. “Are essential to strengthening families and revitalizing communities, and the federal government welcomes opportunities to partner with such organizations through innovative, measurable, and outcome-driven initiatives.”
That sounds like Obama.
Biden’s emphasis on tackling systemic racism was missing, but Trump’s executive order required the new Faith Office to prioritize combating anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, and other forms of religious intolerance. Trump’s executive order also stated that the Faith Office will work with the attorney general, who was authorized to form a Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.
Because Christianity is America’s largest religion, Trump detractors dismissed the idea of anti-Christian bias and denounced Trump’s new Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias as an unneeded pander to his MAGA base. However, Christian organizations argue that the task force is overdue because the Biden administration discriminated against them.
That sounds like a “woke-right” reaction.
For the past decade, the term “woke” has been used to define the radical left. The word simply means being aware of societal inequalities, inequities, and injustices. Far-left “woke” politics aimed to provide government solutions for victims of social injustices. However, “woke” activists frequently overstated the problems, played the victim card, and promoted inequities that did not exist in order to demand a federal or state response. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order titled Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.
The Christian right saw that “woke” was more than just a state of mind; it was also a set of tactics, and conservatives who adopted far-left methods to achieve a political end are the “woke right.”
MAGA Christians, according to critics of Trump’s Task Force to End Anti-Christian Bias, exaggerate their experiences with discrimination to play the role of victims.
These critics have a valid point, and their concern is warranted, as those who portray themselves as victims often seek out an enemy to blame and subsequently punish.
However, skeptics who say there is no anti-Christian bias because Christianity is the most popular faith in America are mistaken. The task force will uncover a hidden truth, which is that the majority of anti-Christian bias exists between rival Christian denominations.
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