Charlie Kirk: The Best Assessment of the Political Battlefield and our Marching Orders

Charlie Kirk: The Best Assessment of the Political Battlefield and our Marching Orders

Apr 30, 2023 | Politics

I try not to delve here into politics too often, but we live in perilous times when politics just won’t leave us alone, and the days of us expecting others to save us from the bad guys is over. Also, Christianity has been consistently losing culturally and politically since the turn of the 20th century, and those days are over. They must be over if we’re to have a country that resembles America, liberty and justice for all, for the generations to come. If our Christianity doesn’t affect the society in which we live in ways that honor God and lead to human flourishing, that’s a Christianity our forefathers would not be familiar with. For the Christian everything is spiritual, including the dirty business of politics.

All of this is why I would encourage you, strongly, to listen to the first hour of Charlie Kirk’s show from last Tuesday (I’ll explain why in a moment). To give it context, I have to share a story I’ve told many times, but it’s more important than ever for those of us who refuse to give up America to Marxist woke revolutionary totalitarians.

After the election of 2020 was egregiously, in-your-face-stolen from President Trump, I was deeply depressed. It wasn’t just that election fraud was committed, but that Democrats and RINO Trump hating Republicans didn’t care who knew it. Then if anyone was foolish enough to question the purity of the election, they were called delusional conspiracy theorists, and cancelled post haste. This response of the corporate leftist media and political establishment was enough to prove the election was in fact stolen.

In God’s providence I stumbled upon Steve Bannon’s War Room, and as I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors, he talked me off the ledge. More importantly, he gave me hope for the future of our country for the first time in my adult life, literally. The reason is that he preaches agency, that we can change things. We are free beings, not slaves or robots, or pinballs batted around by forces beyond our control. And all it takes to change things is action, action, action! The days of sitting on the sideline and complaining and voting as if that would accomplish anything are over. As “they” say, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I don’t care if you can’t stand the sound of Donald Trump’s voice, or spit on the ground when you hear his name: this isn’t about Donald Trump! MAGA is a movement that started in Europe with Brexit prior to his election, and began earlier in America with the Tea Party movement in 2009 in response to the election of Barack Obama and the Uniparty destruction of our economy. That movement was stillborn, but became MAGA and Trump was the right man at the right place at the right time to ride the wave. All the conservative Trump haters must at least thank God he saved America from Hillary Clinton, and they can thank him too that Roe was overturned.

I’ve written recently on the triumph of secularism and leftism, and how those peas in a pod bring death and destruction in their wake. We are in the rushing torrent of several hundred years of the growth of their ideas in Western culture, and the pair have achieved their apex in this third decade of the 21st century. In this is our opportunity because things are so bad it is causing tens of millions of Americans to finally wake up to the threat. And frankly, I’m tired of doomers whining and moaning about how bad things are. That’s another thing I learned from Bannon. We are in an existential war, culturally and politically, for America and Western civilization, and either we fight like it or go meekly to the gulags our enemies are preparing for us. Which brings me to the American Revolution.

Thomas Paine at the lowest point of the war wrote these immortal words in his pamphlet, The American Crisis, and they speak as powerfully in our day as we fight to take back our country, as they did in theirs to found it:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

These words turned a doomer and defeated army into victorious warriors against the most powerful military the world had ever known. I believe the odds against the American Founding generation were far more daunting than against us, but way too many on our side speak and act as if things are hopeless—they are not!

Now to Charlie Kirk. Again, please watch it. He clearly articulates that our enemies, the Democrats, are playing a different game than Republicans, a Marxist revolutionary game. While our team, the Grand Old Party, gets out the Tiddlywinks, the Democrats are playing MMA, and they fight to kill, remember that, take no prisoners. As Bannon always says, they play smash mouth politics, they play to win. We play representative republic niceties and we lose, all the time. Kirk explains all this, most importantly, how we win, clearly, better than anyone I’ve heard or read, by far.

Since the stolen election I call the conservative establishment (magazines, think tanks, consultants, etc.) Con Inc. because we were all conned by them for decades, that they really wanted to change things. In fact, all they wanted, and did, was conserve the secular and progressive gains of the last one hundred plus years. Con Inc. is a grift, and they caused me for entirely too long to be defeatist and depressed. That Fox News (which we haven’t watched in three years, thank God) would summarily dismiss Tucker Carlson like a minimum wage laborer is evidence where their loyalties lie.

My eyes, as for many of us and tens of millions of Americans, are fully wide open now, and as the great Roger Daltrey sang, We won’t get fooled again! No, no!

The Triumph of Leftism and the Destruction of America’s Once Great Cities

The Triumph of Leftism and the Destruction of America’s Once Great Cities

Apr 28, 2023 | Politics

In 2014 I took a business trip to San Francisco, and was excited because it had been a long time since I’d been there. I also had wonderful memories of visiting the city when I was a child on family vacations, and it’s one of the great cities of the world. Thus I had no idea my reaction this time would be disgust. I couldn’t walk outside the hotel without being accosted by what we now call a homeless person. In the olden days when we didn’t give people excuses for aberrant behavior, we called them bums, and the bums were everywhere. On the way to the airport for the trip home I asked the driver why, and he said the city council pays them, that’s why. Guess what happens when you subsidize perverse behavior? You guessed it, you get more of it! Go figure.

As I often say, everything the left (progressives, Democrats, socialists, all Marxists) touches turns to excrement (it’s a family blog). Progressives over one hundred years ago began with the best of intentions. Science and human knowledge had advanced to such a degree by the early 20th century that many thought no problem was beyond the ability of “experts” to solve. Something new called “scientific management” was all the rage, and if any body of knowledge had science attached to it, every obstacle to human betterment could be overcome. Only it didn’t quite work out that way.

The progressive era began with Teddy Roosevelt, but it didn’t start to become the monster it is today until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and even then it didn’t make real headway until Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Contrary to the accepted progressive version of history, the New Deal did not get America out of the Great Depression. In fact, and you won’t learn this in our government schools, unemployment in 1939—after eight years of New Deal “solutions”— was worse than it was in 1931 before Roosevelt became president. And the national debt grew more in those eight years than in the previous 150 years of America’s existence. Government, bureaucratic “experts’” response to the Depression was an abysmal failure, just like every other bureaucratic “experts’” response progressives have foisted on us ever since. If it wasn’t for World War II we might still be in the Great Depression!

The next great progressive experiment came when Lyndon Johnson declared “War on Poverty” in 1964. Only government bureaucratic “experts,” and the academics who feed their delusions, could believe it’s possible to rid America of poverty with government programs, but that was what they declared. What have their good intentions and over $30 trillion bought us? No more poverty? Human flourishing? Hardly. In fact, exactly the opposite. Broken families and dysfunctional cities are everywhere government largess has gone. Prior to Johnson’s “Great Society” upwards of 80% of black children were born to a married mother and father. Today, over 70% are born out of wedlock. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Kids who grow up in households headed without a father are far more likely to be poor, quit school, get pregnant as teens and end up in jail.

And if this didn’t create enough death and misery, the liberal lefties decided to turn themselves into cultural Marxists, and embraced the woke insanity that has enveloped American culture. We are now seeing the results in America’s once great cities when progressivism is taken to the next level of Marxist revolution. While some leftist progressives really do think it is compassionate to go easy on minority criminals, and that they are doing a virtuous thing, others are true believing Marxists who hate America and want to bring it down to create their progressive, Marxists, socialist Utopia. Nobody knows what that looks like because going back to Marx himself, no Marxist-communist has ever defined it. What they all know and are convinced must happen is that the current bourgeois capitalist traditionalist (read Christian) society must be torn down. In blue cities everything is going as planned.

Marxism as a cultural woke contagion has to be pure Satanic evil because to normal people it’s incomprehensible. The obsession with racial diversity and gender equality and identity (LGBTQXYZ), and environmental, social, and corporate governance (aka ESG) bring death, destruction, destitution, and misery wherever it goes. One of the great mysteries of this evil is that woke district attorneys in blue cities (many supported with the money of George Soros) change sentencing guidelines for hardened criminals so they get out of jail more easily. And what do these people do when they get out of jail? Commit more crimes! Who could have predicted that! The elegant perversity of this is that these leftists somehow believe that tolerating decadence, destruction, and chaos is compassion, and those who opposes such perverse tolerance are bigots. I mean, there has to be a devil because evil of this depth is beyond mere bumbling human imagination.

I thought San Francisco was bad in 2014, but now it is unimaginable. Elon Musk whose Twitter headquarters is in the city, and whose friend Bob Lee was recently murdered while visiting there, had this to say about the once great city:

Downtown SF looks like a zombie apocalypse. People who’ve not been there have no idea.

This, the poison fruit of progressivism (again, read Marxism).

Baltimore, a once vibrant and beautiful city I too visited several times years ago when it was still vibrant and beautiful now joins the zombie apocalypse:

Downtown Baltimore is plagued with shootings, carjackings, muggings, and out-of-control packs of teenagers wreaking havoc. Baltimore residents can thank five decades of Democrat politicians for mismanaging this once-thriving town.

Think about that, fifty plus years being run by Democrats, and it has been run into the ground. Watch the very short video of hundreds of young people running wild and it’s no surprise the city is dying and decadent.  

Then there is this short piece with the apropos title, “The Left Has Killed Our Great Cities.” The author writes about how Chicago kicked out its last mayor only to elect another mayor more radical and leftist than the last one! You might think people would connect the destructive policies of the leftist lunatics they elect to the destructive results they inflict, but alas they seem not to. And it’s not one or two Democrat run cities that have been ruined by leftist Democrat radicals, but all of them. The author points out the same is happening in Portland and Seattle, not mentioning that New York City is right with them. The Guardian, not exactly a right-wing rag, calls the homeless situation in Los Angeles, my once great hometown, a “catastrophe.”

Beyond the mad Satanic ideas of the woke leftists, Jesus tells us why this is all happening:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

It is Christ or Chaos. I wrote recently about how the school shootings in Nashville where a transgendered woman murdered six Christians, three children, in cold blood is the triumph of secularism. A God-less society, secularism, is perfectly encapsulated in blue city America where Satan and his minions run rampant like kids in a candy store. Unlike most Christians and conservatives this all gives me hope. God’s judgment against sin is in a way revelatory, and many Americans are waking up. The battle is engaged against leftism and secularism in a way it’s not been since the 1960s spilled into history, and I’ll have some thoughts on this in my next post.

 

The Lord Himself is Our Salvation

The Lord Himself is Our Salvation

Apr 22, 2023 | Theology

I’ve concluded over these four plus decades as a Christian talking and listening to many Christians, that no matter what tradition they come from or their theological convictions, they are all Calvinists. What I mean by that is they all realize, every single one of them, they can’t save themselves from their sins; it is God alone who has saved them and is saving them. It’s just too obvious to any honest person who has a real relationship with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, that they are sinners, hopeless, pathetic sinners in need of a Savior who actually saves, not a Savior who just makes salvation possible or theoretical. That is Calvinism. There is no need to try to figure out God’s sovereignty and free will. They’re both true and well beyond our ability to comprehend. Every Christian knows, every one of us, that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” (Luke 19:10), and that he was given the name Jesus “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). He will not try, he will.

This has become even more clear to me reading through the Old Testament again, now into Jeremiah. The message God is communicating loud and clear is the inability of God’s people to save themselves, the premise of the entire Calvinist theological system. Over and over God commands, and his people do the opposite. They are pathetic. As I wrote recently, the stories of the people of Israel have to be of God and true because no ancient people make themselves look so horribly bad unless it was true. And before we get all judgmental and feeling superior, those stories are about us! And deep down every true Christian knows it. The reason is because at Pentecost Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). His job is to reveal to us the guilt of our sin and that we can’t save ourselves, that we need a Savior. I’ve never met a true Christian in my life who thinks they are their own Savior. I’m not too concerned about how they think that all works, unless they’re interested in my opinion. I just know if Jesus is their Savior, if they realize they can’t save themselves from their own sin, we’re on the same team.

From the very beginning when God promised the seed or offspring of the woman would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3), the plan was for God to save his people from their sins, not make salvation possible for all people. Since He saved me, raised me from the dead when I was at the bottom of the spiritual ocean, I trust His salvation. I couldn’t choose Him, He chose me. Therefore, my confidence is wholly in Him. No matter how wretched I am, I know He has saved me from my sins, all of them, past, present, and future. I am Israel! I like them get to the end of the story in Malachi, and then silence. Until the messenger comes and points to the One, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Isaiah points forward to Jesus as God our Savior in Isaiah 7. The Lord is telling King Ahaz to trust him to save them from their geopolitical enemy, and to ask Him for a sign. Ahaz refuses to “put the Lord to the test,” and the Lord rebukes him saying, alright then, I’ll give you a sign whether you ask for it or not!

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

When you read these few verses about this son they seem completely out of place, but God is always interspersing prophetic utterances about a spiritual salvation to come with geopolitical Israel. The name given to this son the virgin conceives means “God with us,” and we now know this was the Messiah Jesus who was God himself in human flesh. Jews would never, ever have interpreted the name that way. The Messiah had God with him, along side him in battle like any king—he would never be God himself. That’s why Jews don’t make up Jesus of Nazareth, the word made flesh.

Then in a brutal passage in Isaiah 63, verses 1-6, the Lord is proclaiming himself coming in judgment “mighty to save.” A salvation of wrath drenched in blood is a very strange salvation, as He says, “the day of vengeance.” That doesn’t make any sense until you realize in Christian hindsight that the spiritual salvation to come includes both judgment, wrath, and righteousness. Here the Lord tells us only He can pull that one off:

5 I looked, but there was no one to help,
I was appalled that no one gave support;
so my own arm achieved salvation for me,
and my own wrath sustained me.

Notice the past tense. In the eternal sovereign council of the Triune God this salvation has already been accomplished. His prophetic words through His prophets are as good as already done.

Then in Jeremiah 23 we get a glimpse into the full picture of the nature of this salvation when we read of a Righteous Branch. The Lord condemns “the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of” his pasture, and says He in effect will become their shepherd, of course pointing forward to Jesus, the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Then we read:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.

No Jew could conceive that Yahweh himself would be the atonement, or propitiation, for our sins, even though Isaiah 53 gives a very strong hint of just that. And it isn’t only that he will pay the penalty for our sins, i.e., death, and take God’s wrath for us, but that he will be “our righteousness.” What does that mean?

I heard Tim Killer say many times, Jesus died the death we should have died, and He lived the life we should have lived. Jesus not only died for us, but He also lived for us. Just as our sin was imputed to Christ on the cross, his perfect sinless life was imputed to us as well. This is why the Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 1:

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

This became the most important verse in my life after more than three decades as a Christian when I finally realized I am Israel! No matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can’t pull it off. I fail over and over and over again. I am, I know it’s shocking, a sinner! And being a sinner I sin, also shocking. Sinning is what sinners do. But we are born that way, all of us. Isn’t it obvious? This is what makes “The Lord Our Righteousness” so powerful.

Here is the realization I came to: I can never be more acceptable to God than I am in Christ my righteousness no matter what I do or don’t do. I used to think, sort of, that God would like me a little bit more if I did this or didn’t do that. Nope! And I found that the gratitude that flows out of this grace, this unmerited favor, makes me want to be more righteous! I’m just not very good at it, but I keep trying. So I repent daily, and thank God that I don’t have to save myself.