The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
meghanboilard.substack.com
meghanboilard.substack.com
For example “kingdom giver” is not someone who gives kingdoms, it’s someone who gives to Christ’s kingdom. But the widow and her mite is an example of kingdom giving as much as the Greens.
The article doesn't claim that so it seems your Christian sensitivities have skewed your reading comprehension.
It's referencing a Forbes article using the term to distinguish between thoughtless arbitrary giving vs. giving with purpose:
"Even the most generous Christian philanthropists often don't see the purpose of their giving," says Dr. Mark Rutland, the new ORU president and founder of the Global Servants evangelical ministry. "There are impulse givers, people who give to their alma mater or their church or some particular ministry with which they become familiar—but the Greens are Kingdom givers. ... They consider it an honor; they consider it a mission."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2023/02/13/this-bil...
"While the total amount the Greens have made in charitable contributions has been kept private, former Oral Roberts University president Dr. Mark Rutland may have worded it best when he described the family as “kingdom givers”.
It doesn't link to the Forbes article's definition. Without more, I'd read that sentence to say "Kingdom givers" is a descriptor of the total amounts given by the Greens -- we don't know the amount, but they give kingdoms.
As I explained above, "Kingdom" is unrelated to the size of the gift, as made clear from the quote you cited.
For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly". And look, I'm an atheist who has felt acute harms from religion in some very specific ways, so I get it - a lot of times I believe that religion is backwards and silly. But Trump and MAGA came along and essentially said "you're not backwards and silly, you're the righteous ones, the ones who are condemning you are backwards and silly". And yes, Trump has been married 3 times, had an affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, values displays of material wealth above all else, etc. etc., so I struggle mightily many times to understand how a community that preached "family values" so stridently for my entire youth supports him now so unconditionally. But, IMO, it's because Trump really constantly drove home this message of "you should be proud, and the only people who should be ashamed are 'the other side'".
I know that may feel like a tangent, but I've seen the general dismissive tone of this article repeated so many times (e.g. in much reporting about the Chick-fil-a family) that it now feels easy to recognize.
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the nutjobs in power, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
The problem is not so much wanting to coddle up to the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. It's that a lot of people who used to have what would be considered "standard", middle-of-the-road religious views have been told, again in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they're stupid. Whether you believe this to be true is not the point. Calling a large portion of the country stupid is a great way to push them into the arms of an extremist.
No one is calling Christians stupid. The nutjobs that want to tear down our secular society and replace it with a white Evangelical ethnostate are telling Christians that their political rivals are calling them stupid. They're the suckers for the conmen, and at this point, it's not worth attempting to rationalize debate.
This demand for one sided niceness that amounts to submissivity was is is contraproductive.
The meat of the article are actual bad acts. You are just using the tone to distract from the actual accusations.
This is only really true on the political level, not the cultural/social level. Politicians on the left have been significantly more respectful than their counterparts for a long time now. But the same can't really be said for the sentiments of their voter base or the media/education curated towards them. For a large amount of people what they see and experience in their day to day lives does more to color their beliefs than what a politician says that they have no relation to and might see a few sound bites of here and there running up to an election.
The left has to learn that telling a prospective voter repeatedly that they are the enemy won't make anyone want to support them unless they're already believers. It'll just push them towards the side that's offering to call them an ally.
And that's why they're losing.
//edit//And I say this as an atheist.
I don't really blame people for speaking more cautiously about it, but that's because of how much savagery the mind-virus demands of its followers.
Happy?
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the peace trucks, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
Most of the criticism that I have heard and read is not about evangelicals being "backwards and silly" but is about their hypocrisy for claiming the mantle of Jesus Christ and then saying and doing things that are antithetical to his beliefs.
The problem is that this almighty dollar worship is far more corrosive and destructive to society and ethics of everyone involved, and ends up eroding any sort of moral high ground that the cojoined group has.
I think the only people in denial about it were those who view evangelical values as something other than the standing in the schoolhouse door values they demonstrated for centuries.
I did read the Wikipedia entry on "Anglican Realignment" though, thank you for that information.
The article could definitely be more professional and mature. But something seems wrong with blaming people who are horrified by bad behavior for the bad behavior.
A lot of them DO come off as backwards and silly. Christianity boils down to two commandments. TWO! Love God and love your neighbor. Who is your neighbor? EVERYONE! And you can't do one of those commandments without the other. And if you're calling yourself Christian, those are not OPTIONS - you can't choose not to do those. And yet, here we are...
"Silly" and "backwards" aren't the terms I'd use, though. What bothers me about a lot of it is that it is mean, even cruel, and utterly inconsistent with the character of Jesus given in the gospels.
Imagine saying this on the thread of an article that is literally about people using their faith to justify artifact smuggling and other crimes. The disrespect was entirely brought on by their insanely shitty and sociopathic behavior. Their faith isn't what is causing them to be disrespected. It's their behavior.
Plus, you mean, any criticism or anyone pointing out hypocrisy or frauds or lies? As in, we all need to pretend these people never do wrong, because otherwise they might turn berserk? The same people who scorn and mock frequently and regularly need to be treated with niceties they never awarded to own opponent? They are at MAGA camp, because their values are compatible with MAGA, because they don't mind any of what Trump does.
If a compliment is all that it takes for you to reject your claimed morals, you never had them. And to credit of democrats, but Musk and Trump tried to get power through that camp first. They tried to take progressive cloak to get power and again, to credit of progressives, their hypocrisy was noted. That Christian right embraced those people does not imply they are victims, they are perpetrators.
The perception of Christianity among people who don't identify with any religion or people who fall into more "liberal" circles has absolutely been tainted by sects/members of Christianity that do not at all represent the teachings in the Bible. There is justifiable resentment towards these groups that spills over into unjustifiable resentment towards Christians as a whole.
I can't count the number of times I've heard, living in California, either said directly to me by someone who didn't know I was Christian, overheard in a conversation, or discussed at some event completely out of pocket claims or insults towards Christianity that most people would find absolutely inappropriate to say about other groups.
It doesn't bother me because I understand where those people saying it are coming from. But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.
Rational or not rational, it just doesn't feel good as a human being to receive hate and disdain for something you consider an irreplaceable part of your life and worldview.
This doesn't apply solely to Christians and is really something the left has been doing for a long time and why it's been "losing" the propaganda war to the right and seeing so many people who formerly wouldn't want to associate with the kind of rhetoric found there today at least passively accepting it. Rhetoric of the left seems to far more often embrace (at least on a smaller scale between people) snark, putdowns, wholesale "intolerance" ie making individuals feel some combination of bad/guilty/stupid/backwards for "ignorant" views instead of engaging with them openly. The right uses an approach of playing the "reasonable" man that is open to discussion, support, of all views and then slowly getting people to get on board with the more radical ones.
If you're talking about Christians moving to right wing political groups because people were insulting them, then they're proving their detractors' points and actually encouraging this phenomenon.
Human beings don't tend to enjoy being insulted and ostracized. Telling someone to "put up with our abuse or you're one of the bad guys" is going to make you seem unhinged and unreasonable to anyone you are trying to win over. Saying "well, we bullied them into the arms of the opposition, so they've proved our point and we can retroactively justify all the hate we gave and will continue to give them" isn't a very strong argument to bring them over to your side either. People deal with perceived threats by banding together with others they feel have their back. The left gave up an appreciable chunk of the American voting base which is fine if they really don't want to pander to them, but complaining that a voting group is acting in their perceived best interests when their two options are between a group that's verbally and culturally hostile towards them and makes no indication that they aren't going to do anything but get MORE hostile towards them (just look at some of the vitriol posted in this thread) and a group that embraces them with open arms and puts on a reasonable facade is silly. What else do people really expect?
I don't doubt there are those who have had uncomfortable, rude encounters with anti-religious people, but I do doubt how frequently this occurs. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and we openly prayed before meals at restaurants and never had a single issue. I attended a public school and had plenty of friends who were remarkably tolerant of when I got a bit weird about religion (including calling a friend's family "heathens" for not following the right type of Christianity). Yes, there was one classmate in high school who was outspoken, a bit angry and sometimes rude about her "leftist" beliefs but she was one classmate among many! And yet every week in Church I heard about how the world was against us, we were so persecuted and hated, silly comments like "oh you'd get in trouble if you brought a bible in your backpack to your public school" which wasn't true at all.
In my experience it's an identity built on being "different", on believing that others want to tear you down because of your beliefs. And a narrative that pushes this identity, by amplifying anything that could come across as disrespectful or dismissive, setting it up for someone to come in and say "you should be proud of yourself." And when this includes stupid things like Starbucks changing their cups to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, I really don't think "be nicer" is going to help.
I would think the issue is not so much that they’re Christian, it’s that they’re hypocrites who use Christianity as a smokescreen for bigotry.
(The relevance being, they’re using Christianity as cover for capitalism in a way that Jesus himself, as depicted in the Bible, would certainly never have sanctioned.)
Jesus never opposed "capitalism" in secular life.
But - “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Jesus was very clear about how far worldly riches would get you.
The thesis of TFA is that their faith motivated the crimes. You can't tell the story without talking about how they choose to practice their faith.
"A fortune built on the sales of sewing notions and glitter has paid for many of the country’s most influential megachurches and scriptures delivered to the most remote corners of the world. A careful calculation of potential proselytized souls drives every financial decision."
"Perhaps the Greens, in their inexperience, did not understand the magnitude of their actions. Perhaps the Greens just didn’t care. Maybe when you believe that human souls are on the line, it’s easy to unshackle yourself to the ethical and legal trade guidelines that shackle secular academics. Maybe the money saved and the ancient items procured were powerful enough to make the risk worthwhile. "
This entire thread is among the most bizarre things I've ever seen on HN.
There might be real discussion to be had on Hobby Lobby and their actions however it is hard to get there because you are trying to pick through pure conjecture and speculation with the style of writing makes it look more like an opinionated hit piece.
The person you're responding to isn't acting in a curious manner, they're trying to poison the well.
- "Snide" is subjective. - It's a blog post not a news article or scholarly report. - The topic is a business run by people who ostensibly make decisions based on their faith to justify actions which cause various harm to others. Taking a critical view of those actions and the motivations is reasonable.
Edit add:
I find this entire line of reasoning to be odd: >It's a blog post not a news article or scholarly report. - The topic is a business run by people who ostensibly make decisions based on their faith to justify actions which cause various harm to others. Taking a critical view of those actions and the motivations is reasonable.
I am being asked to take a critical look at Hobby Lobby, the reasons are outlined in the linked Substack. However, if I have any questions or criticisms of the Substack article, please note that it is not a professional work it is just a guy with a microphone.
If I can't trust the source material, how can I trust the claims?
All I'm saying is it's a random site on the internet for a person who is a "Certified Bonafide Expert of Miscellanea"—no one is asking you to "trust the source material". If you think that aspects of the post bring into question the validity of the point being made, that's your right. I just think it's a weird expectation. The author even speaks to that: https://substack.com/@meghanboilard/note/c-102976235
I haven't read the article, but certainly the phrase "whose entire schtick" doesn't belong in journalism that purports not to be sarcastic or snide. That's the kind of thing that goes in a Tumblr post.
2) I take it HN is not familiar with a whole major subgenre of journalism in which "whose entire schtick" would be perfectly at home?
If people expect a level of quality of reporting rather than "guy with a blog" from things hosted on Substack that would explain the comments.
I will also note that the top of the thread really only said that if the author wanted to be taken as an even handed reporter than in the commenters opinion they need to change their tone. If the author doesn't want to come across as an even handed reporter, then the tone is fine.
I personally find the tone to be off putting as it seems to be not fact based at all and is often making a conclusion from the premise rather than giving me an argument to get me there.
I was waiting to read how it was possible that Green might have kicked a puppy or drown some kittens.
- Disabled people get paid (what is supposed to be, but not actually, a living wage) by the government, so they aren’t living on the wage.
- No company would hire them if they were forced to pay minimum wage, because companies are greedy and would always hire a more productive non-disabled worker.
- Many disabled workers want to work not for the pay, but because they enjoy the work and/or want to feel productive. As stated, they get paid by the government, so in theory they don’t have to work if they don’t want to.
With the caveat that disability payments outside of work should be raised, so that nobody (disabled or not) feels like they must work a too-boring or too-hard job to afford a decent standard of living (unless absolutely necessary for society to subsist, but that’s another discussion)…I think it’s a great practice.
Maybe there are good arguments against it, but a good argument needs to provide the full context.
If it is bellow ""living wage"" it should not be allowed.
(that was easy)
You can find other workarounds to incentive the hiring of disabled people and we (in italy) have a few:
-Requirement of medium and big firms to hire them (reduced ability, they can still perform)
For example where i work there is a janitor that has dawn syndrome and an IT guy with dwarfism
-tax breaks (so the worker still get paid minimum wage but to the company he costs less)
Can we justify giving disable people less rights?
Sure.
Let me tell you _a modest proposal_ .
However, tax breaks sound better.
I worry that requiring companies to hire disabled workers, instead of just making it profitable to do so, would cause more workers to be abused. Every method has some abuse from bad actors, but a requirement specifically influences companies who wouldn't hire disabled workers even if they could assign zero tasks to them and financially benefit.
If you think they should both be paid the same, who should pay the additional cost?
The taxpayer, in the form of a direct wage subsidy. Comes out to virtually nothing compared to the amount of corporate welfare we shovel out every day. The company still isn't compelled to hire the disabled person if they won't be effective on the job, but companies that were inclined to hire them before still will, pay the same amount as before, and we taxpayers will pay the price tag of a bomber or two to ensure that some people have some independence and dignity.
Which of course is why such a thing will never happen here.
This is not true though.. Most Americans have these benefits. Hobby Lobby just pushed for an extension of the existing Religious exemption to also apply closely held businesses. It affected a tiny portion of the population.
> According to a 2009 research paper from NYU Stern School of Business, these corporations account for 52 percent of private employment and 51 percent of private-sector output in the country. Those percentages might be outdated now but still give a sense of just how many workers are employed at closely held corporations. Fifty-two percent of today’s private sector employees comes out to approximately 60.4 million people, based on the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
https://slate.com/business/2014/06/hobby-lobby-supreme-court...
Of course it’s extremely unlikely that all of those companies are about to claim a religious exemption from providing coverage of contraception. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post points to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that found that 85 percent of large employers offered contraception coverage prior to Obamacare requiring it.
Regardless, this is nitpicking, and the grandparent claim that it blocked contraception converage for all Americans is wrong.
Also the grandparent comment correctly noted that all Americans lost rights in the ruling, which is accurate. Any American could get a job at a closely held company and not be extended contraceptive coverage.
The Green family wields a personal antinomianist doctrine reserved for the rich and powerful. Under their brand of Creationism, God has given them literal dominion over the world (Genesis 1:26-31), and not exercising that, whether or not in defiance of conflicting secular laws, would be a denial of the mission of their faith.
I remember my first time hearing them called "Wahabbi Lobby" in the mid-2000s after the FBI had "spoken to them" about ISIL targeting early (pre-)Christian sites to plunder artifacts, knowing the Greens had a taste for them.
Consider the implications. What would have happened if your local church had sent money or took a secret mission trip to aid Al-Qaeda?
If my local church was attempting to support African businesses by purchasing goods but the buyer was getting good from a factory that used slave labor, I would expect the FBI to come talk to the church as well.
If you discovered the clergy or elders in your church wanted a supply of something so badly that they secretly used your tithe or offertory to fund a warlord who then enslaved people to acquire it for them, how would you feel? That's a closer equivalent of what Hobby Lobby did to their customers.
Unrelated, but how would you summarize the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
> Less evident these charitable contributions equate to sizable tax breaks. These tax write-offs are calculated using the highest appraisals possible, which is not necessarily indicative of the actual sum of money paid out by the Green family for the land. Counterintuitive as it may seem, this practice frequently allows the Greens to save far more money than what they spend via hefty deductions.
Hobby Lobby is, according to this article, taking advantage of the nebulous valuations of artifacts to minimize tax burden in a way that is morally questionable at the least.
Matthew 19:24
>It's a blog post not a news article or scholarly report. - The topic is a business run by people who ostensibly make decisions based on their faith to justify actions which cause various harm to others. Taking a critical view of those actions and the motivations is reasonable.
and the author shares the same view....
I am being asked to take a critical look at Hobby Lobby, the reasons are outlined in the linked Substack. However, if I have any questions or criticisms of the Substack article, please note that it is not a professional work it is just a guy with a microphone.
If I can't trust the source material, how can I trust the claims?
It singlehandedly has held back the world for centuries, caused the suffering and death of millions if not billions.
It's completely made up, thousands of years before anyone knew anything about anything and then as science is learned the world is bent to its superstitions and not the other way around because it can never ever change because some ignorant dude said so way back when.
The only way religion survives is indoctrination, it makes ZERO sense to anyone who learns to apply the smallest amount of logic to it.
And Christianity might be the very worst of all abrahamic-rooted nonsense because it basically stole all it's practices and beliefs from every other religion at the time.
They didn't have microscopes, telescopes or even eyeglasses but yet not only do they insist on somehow knowing a specific exact god but all the rules and why such an all powerful being would give a damn about anything.
It's control, manipulation and very often a profit seeking scam.
I just assumed that they're doing this so they can falsify audits. Similar to how they purchase land and donate it, claiming a bigger tax write-off, I assume they're doing the same with their merchandise. How could you audit it if there's no real stock tracking system?
People deflecting in this thread are either ignorant or also batshit crazy and should be ignored.
For some stores it's part of the charm.
1. An organization with very deep pockets sets out to collect Near Eastern antiquities.
2. Due to turmoil in the Middle East, many relics of dubious provenance are hitting the market.
3. The org decides to buy as much of this stuff as they can, knowing that some of it will be dubious.
4. The org voluntarily has their purchases inspected, knowing they will not be compensated for things that have to be returned to their rightful places.
In outline, this sounds like the buyers doing the right thing in a bad situation.
And, as mentioned in the article, point five would be that they're effectively using this as a tax avoidance loophole.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hobby-lobby-settles-3-mill...
As long as they make everything available to the public and to researchers, I don't see anything wrong with it.
Also unclear on why this is a two-part story. Is there some big shoe to drop? Trying to avoid the impression that the author is not terribly fond of the Green family.
In doing so, I doubt that they broke any export regulations.
And entrance to the British Museum is free, for everyone.
[0] TFA links to https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/dead-men-tell-tales/148...
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2020/04/bible-museum-steve...
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-museum-bible-w...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/museum-of-the-bibl...
Without anything concrete, this seems more like innuendo then an explicit accusation. But finding someone to pay and claiming to make artifacts 'available to researchers' doesn't necessarily make archeological trafficking legal or ethical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
No innuendo.
The idea cited in a reply that such purchases are funding ISIS (chilling to say the least) kind of implies that ISIS (or a stooge acting on their behalf) is the seller so a trace on the transaction should lead investigators to their door where the items can be confiscated and returned to the museum or public collection from which they were plundered.
I'm probably being too naive about how all this works. But I certainly understand the article much better now thanks to the informative replies.
Why shouldn't it? People with money buy artifacts and art of note. The rest of us buy replicas and less noteworthy stuff. People from the Midwest can take interest in ancient Mesopotamia.
When writers casts the reader as dumb so they can twist it with an upcoming reveal, it's a signal I use to stop reading. If the twist was good I wouldn't need to be made to think little of the Hobby Lobby owners.
Virtual tour: https://museumandgallery.org/tour/
An unsolved problem of Internet discussions is that, for a variety of reasons, those with poor literacy and weak background knowledge are overrepresented in the comments (and responses to them may dominate, as well, since such posts tend to act as flame bait at best, and as very-effective classical trolling at worst) and that's something HN struggles with ordinarily, but this particular thread is really something special.
Briefly, why?
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.
For example, there is the idea of Theistic Evolution.
I definitely like evidence-based reasoning, but it doesn't answer everything.
Either it's bots, or we are all just tired and frustrated. I know I am and it doesn't help to stay civil..
My suspicions:
* The normie barrier has continued to lower, so more traditional and progress-reluctant religious people are now connected to social media.
* Some sects may be intentionally targeting online communities, just like they target IRL communities for converts. Beliefs that don't require a devotion of forcing the belief itself upon others will naturally fade into the background. Beliefs that don't claim to solve your problems will also fade into the background.
* Social media algorithms prefer religious posts. Religious posts often invoke some sort of emotional response. Religions are some of the oldest memes after all.
All of this is just a gut feeling based on the religious material I've been exposed to on the web. I think it's fairly consistent with how religions have spread throughout history. Secularism is squashed unless you specifically fight for it, which itself may require a kind of religious fervor.
This is possibly the natural result of any human community growing large enough. There will be those who ask unanswerable questions, and there will be those who have the answers to those questions. Those who need order, and those who need to order.
>What's the deal here?
Without making a jab at the bay area culture bubble, I dunno what to tell you.
I don't need religion to be bad, that was Capital-A atheism's thing. I just need it to leave me alone. And it does.
Some people are religious, and a lot of those who are would recommend it. When it comes to defending religion, as an atheist I still think bad takes are bad takes even if they're against the religion I left.
It'd be like smashing Fabergé eggs just in case one had something hidden in it.
“he staffed “cerebral palsy patients” to chop, glue, and bag for $.10 per piece.
Between the high demand and likely paying workers a subminimum wage, profits soared”
Nothing like exploitation to drive home Christianity.
She looked at what is legal but horrific and then claims that he did it without any proof.
Imagine having a family of ordinary children, plus God. And yes, the remainder of the article confirms the promise of this gaffe.
Two more examples:
> This begs an obvious question.
That's not what "begging the question" actually means.
> or participating in anything the Reverand [sic] Green deemed “worldly activities”.
What -- in 2025, no spell checker? By listing these examples I guess I'm being irreverent ... ant.
> Imagine having a family of ordinary children, plus God. And yes, the remainder of the article confirms the promise of this gaffe.
Imagine not being able to parse a sentence.
> > This begs an obvious question.
> That's not what "begging the question" actually means.
If you're referring to the logical fallacy, as a foreign English speaker it's the first time I hear about that "begging the question" sense.
You're going to have a hard time with English if you don't know its current universal de-facto sense (which the author employed).
> What -- in 2025, no spell checker?
The horror
> Imagine not being able to parse a sentence.
It was up to the author to parse the sentence in advance of posting it. And competent writers don't invite such obvious double meanings -- they undermine the value of the essay.
>> That's not what "begging the question" actually means.
> If you're referring to the logical fallacy, as a foreign English speaker it's the first time I hear about that "begging the question" sense.
Expressions change over time, but normally by consensus. Without consensus, one is entitled to wonder whether the writer knows what the expression means.
>> What -- in 2025, no spell checker?
> The horror
Some writers don't need a spell checker. Others require it.
The author? She can't do it for the reader; to my knowledge it's a correct sentence, just a a bit verbose.
> Expressions change over time, but normally by consensus. Without consensus, one is entitled to wonder whether the writer knows what the expression means.
Yes, you sure had trouble understanding it...
> Some writers don't need a spell checker. Others require it.
Some are trying to win a Pulitzer, others just to write a substack article.
Let's not pretend those were the reason why you didn't like the article, come on.
It contains a classic beginner's error -- object ambiguity. Rather funny in this specific case.
> Yes, you sure had trouble understanding it, come on.
Not at all -- but it was abundantly clear that the author didn't take the time to unambiguously identify the sentence's object, with a humorous outcome.
> Some are trying to win a Pulitzer, others just to write a substack article.
This is called a "false choice". But I think you know that. A vast middle ground lives between those extremes.
> Let's not pretend those were the reason why you didn't like the article, come on.
I have no stake in the article's topic, only its form. For all I know, these people are acting to protect irreplaceable historical artifacts. Just for the sake of argument.
I just noticed something. The article's title -- "The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist" -- is itself a classic example of begging the question, because it presumes the truth of what it should be proving.