Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Sep 25, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

When I read the title of this peace I knew reading it would not be good for my blood pressure: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” And it was worse than I thought. That it was on the Gospel Coalition website surprised me not at all. There are so many logical fallacies and theological misunderstandings in it that it’s almost impressive. Let me take them one by one and see how far I get. The sheer badness of it may require more than one post.

Before I get there, that something like this can be written and believed by a large contingent of Evangelical Christians is depressing. I’m convinced part of the reason people think this way, and think it’s the biblical way to think, is because of faulty eschatology, but that’s not all of it. There are many dispensational premillennialist Pentecostal Christians I have more in common with in this regard than my Reformed brethren, and to say the least I do not agree with their eschatology. Most Christians believe losing “down here” is baked into the gospel cake. They are convinced suffering and loss of cultural influence are the only and inevitable hallmarks of the Christian life. They are not! Taking up our cross and following Jesus doesn’t mean Christians are called to being thrown to the lions or burned at the stake. We know that suffering and dying to ourselves takes many forms, and none of it is pleasant. Let’s see what our young pastor, Justin N. Poythress, thinks.

He is addressing something called “The Seven Mountain Mandate.” Some Christians believe a passage in Revelation is a call “to retake seven spheres (or mountains) of cultural influence: religion, family, government, education, media, arts/entertainment, and business.” Well, yeah, the Christian worldview addresses everything in life, including these broad areas, and more. Jesus in the Great Commission said his followers were to disciple nations. That has implications for all these things, and more. I’ll start with this: 

The perspective is ultimately built on a dual misunderstanding of Scripture and of Christ’s purposes in the world. 

Those are some pretty big things to misunderstand! Here is what he believes the Seven Mountain Mandate misses in the passage in Revelation:

The passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss.

Well yes, it was. The Christians to whom the Apostle John was writing were often being perThe passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss. secuted violently, some giving their lives for the gospel. But are all Christians in all geopolitical and cultural situations throughout history facing the same kind of persecutions? Is Poythress saying that’s just the inevitable lot for Christians and there is nothing we can do about it but learn to “lose gracefully”? And notice he does something typical of such thinking, he spiritualizes it. Christianity supposedly applies primarily to “spiritual” things, not the mundane issues of life lived in culture.

He then commits a colossal non sequitur (the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), among many in this short piece. However one interprets the passage in Revelation he asserts:

the conquering warrior is always the crucified Christ, not a sword-swinging church. 

It does not follow that just because the crucified Christ is indeed the conquering warrior, that the church can’t be swinging swords. We’re just supposed to sit back and take it? I guess, be nice and loving and not fight for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God? What does this even mean? He says after this:

Even if you’ve never heard of the 7M mandate (and its strange reading of Revelation), it can still be tempting to think Christ’s kingdom grows by “winning” cultural power and influence. If this is where we place our hope, it’ll be hard to stomach the losses.

This is a perfect example of his sloppy thinking. To his mind “winning” cultural power and influence is antithetical to Christ’s kingdom. Somehow Christians living out Kingdom values found throughout the gospels are not supposed to have “cultural power and influence.” Really? How was it that the Roman Empire eventually fell to the “cultural power and influence” of Christianity? Was that a mistake? Unbiblical? Something God never intended when he came to earth in the person of Christ? Why then did Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Maybe because God wanted us to bring the influence of heaven into the cultures in which we live? Just maybe? In fact, the very nature of God’s kingdom, the kingdom of heaven is to bring it “down” to earth, and when it grows it will always gain “cultural power and influence.” How can it not! You wonder how he and those who think like him interpret the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in Matthew 13. It sure seems that Jesus is saying that the influence of the kingdom of heaven grows inevitably and inexorably, and it cannot help but have influence in cultures.

The next sentence is even worse. Because we desire the gospel to influence the culture and have “cultural power” therefore we’re placing our hope in that and not Christ? Really? We can’t want Christ to be glorified and obeyed in the societies in which we live? That’s not Christian? Frankly, that’s insulting. Then he asserts we need to be concerned with how we are seen by the culture:

Evangelicals increasingly run the risk of being seen as sore losers in the culture war. Our inability to let go, to relinquish positions of public prominence and power, reveals a misplaced faith. Too often, we’ve entangled Jesus’s name with a political agenda, as mainline Christians did when they made the church into little more than a social club for liberal activism.

Oh my. I could do an entire post just about this! So it follows that if we want “cultural power and influence” and we have a tough time of it we’ll be sore losers? We’re supposed to glory in our losing? Really? He must think we aren’t aware that we live in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. Losing and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming is called life! Personally or culturally. 

I wonder if the Apostles and the first generation of disciples cared about how they were “seen” by the Jews and Pagans of Rome. And the gospel calls us to “relinquish positions of public prominence and power”? Really? What kind of doormat theology is this! And he has the gall to compare those Christians, like me, who think our Christianity compels us to a certain political agenda to the liberal Christians of the early 20th century? Really? As you can tell, the old Italian blood gets boiling when I read such calumnies. For you youngsters, that word means insults. And everything about that paragraphs reeks of self-righteousness. He and his ilk think they are above such mundane matters as “the culture war.” I guess as I said above, fighting for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God is “misplaced faith.”

I’ve written here about Tim Keller’s unfortunate creating of a moral equivalence between left and right. I’ve heard this called “third wayism,” as if there is some middle way, a more gospel way, between the radical left and the radical right, as Keller said. In our day, there is no “radical right.” And everyone on the left, including most Democrat politicians, and the entire legacy media, are Marxists, thus by definition “radical.” The “culture wars” were started by the left against the right (conservatives) in the 1960s, and we decided to fight back. Now Christians like the young pastor Poythress want us to roll over and play dead because fighting back is “misplaced faith”? Apparently. 

There is much more fodder in the rest of the piece, so I’ll have to do that in another post.

 

Uganda Homosexuality Law Part 2

Uganda Homosexuality Law Part 2

Aug 15, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

In my previous post, using Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality law, I argued that Scripture is a legitimate source of authority for nations, that God’s law and rule (theonomy and theocracy) are something Christians should argue for in the public square, specifically regarding a nation’s laws. Everyone is religious; there is no such thing as an unbeliever, and the basis of any nation’s laws come from its fundamental religious (i.e., faith) commitments. As I argued, secular neutrality is a myth. All law comes from somewhere. Ignorant and unthinking people will say, “You can’t legislate morality,” when law is exactly that, legislated morality! So for Christians to say we can’t as Christians use Scripture as a basis for the laws of America is not only un-Scriptural, but self-defeating. It’s like going to fight a war but giving your most powerful and effective weapons to the enemy. Good luck! But it is critically important we realize in the culture wars in which we are engaged, that we are not in any way limited to Scripture in these battles. We have a powerful arsenal that complements Scripture. First is God’s created reality that corresponds to Scripture, and we have the One who made both, our Savior and God who sits at the right hand of the Almighty “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1).

I critiqued an article by someone who wrote a piece at American Reformer about the Ugandan law, and I was critical because he stated it wasn’t established “from Scripture, let alone for theonomic or theocratic reasons.” He further contended the law was “an imminently reasonable position compatible with Christian doctrine and ethics, but knowable apart from divine revelation.” The implied assumption is that divine revelation isn’t necessary for such a law to be passed. How else would people know homosexuality is wrong, immoral, and destructive of a flourishing society? The author claims it is “reason, nature, and tradition.” The problem with such an argument is that it is only because of Scripture, verbal revelation of God’s being and will, that “reason, nature, and tradition” tell us homosexuality is immoral and destructive. The ancient Greeks, of whom we Westerners are quite fond, had “reason, nature, and tradition” as well, but not Scripture, and they thought homosexuality was just fine, not immoral in the least. For example, according to Wikipedia:

Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged romantic relationship between an older male (the erastes) and a younger male (the eromenos) usually in his teens.

Kinda blows the whole “reason, nature, and tradition” argument out the door doesn’t it. Why didn’t the ancient Greeks treat homosexuality like the Ancient Hebrews? Scripture! God’s divine verbal revelation. God used words to communicate how his creatures, who also use words, should live so they can experience maximal blessing and flourishing in life. Homosexual activity mitigates against that. God would not have put warnings against homosexuality in his law if it were otherwise.

Contrary to popular opinion, and our natural sinful hearts, God is not a cosmic killjoy. That was Satan’s lie to Eve, and she bought it. All the horror in life goes back to that fundamental lie that we cannot trust God’s character. God didn’t warn us against homosexuality because he didn’t want people attracted to others of the same sex not to have fun or experience romance. He did it because that lifestyle doesn’t lead to true human happiness and flourishing, but misery and unhappiness. Are there happy homosexuals? Of course, but exceptions never disprove rules. And on a societal level the acceptance of homosexuality contributes to the deterioration of the family, as is readily apparent in America. If a homosexual drenched America is such a happy place, why did almost 50,000 people die by their own hands last year? Because America has thrown God’s law under the bus. Rampant sex outside of marriage leads to the dissolution of the family. Dysfunctional families then lead to dysfunctional societies and eventually widespread despair. Human happiness and flourishing is the reason God says sex is only moral and good and blessed inside a marriage between a man and a woman.

As I said above, though, as Christians we are not limited to Scripture when we come to the public square. We must bring Scripture to the debate and never shy away from it, but we also have things compatible with Scripture confirming it: “reason, nature, and tradition.” Christians are not to be Biblicists, meaning we think Scripture is our only source of authority. It is our ultimate and final source, but God hasn’t limited his revelation to just the Bible, but to creation as well. As the Apostle Paul says (Rom. 1:20),

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.

The “they” Paul is referring to is all of us, every single human being. And note Paul’s assertion, that this revelation of God’s invisible qualities, who He is, is “clearly seen.” It cannot be mistaken for anything else than what it is, a manifestation of God’s “eternal power and divine nature” no matter how much people deny that. Prior to this Paul says people suppress the truth because of their wickedness, meaning they love their sin so much they’ll gladly delude and lie to themselves and believe their lies as if they were true. Thus we passed homosexuality a while ago now, and the lie de jure is that biological sex is not hardwired and can be changed any old time we feel like it. So to the “enlightened” among us, boys can become girls and girls can become boys, and men and women are not fundamentally different. The thing about truth, though, is that it can only be suppressed for so long then the lies start being exposed for what they are, lies.

We are in a wonderful time in history filled with opportunities because the lies are becoming so obvious even people who are not religious or political (“normies”) now realize it. What they don’t realize, however, is that the normalization of homosexuality over the last 40 years has led us to the point where the newest Supreme Court justice doesn’t know what a woman is. Think about that! Reason and nature (creation) tell us exactly what the Bible does about human sexuality. It’s obvious to anyone not previously indoctrinated that each part of the human body has a telos, a purpose, an end for which it was designed. Specific parts are clearly meant for sexual pleasure and procreation, and other parts are not. I won’t belabor the obvious, but when we live according to God’s design in creation, blessings follow, but when we flout them trouble and misery inevitably will. Reason also tells us when we look at all the sociological data over the last 50 years (ignorance is no longer excusable), intact families, husband, wife, kids, are by far the best environment for raising children into emotionally and psychologically healthy functioning adults. Today, sadly, most children grow up without a married mother and father, and we wonder why things are so screwed up. 

We must always remember, everything God commands is for His creatures to flourish as His creatures in His world, contrary to 300 plus years of Enlightenment lies carried into secular lies that morphed into liberal, Marxist, progressive, and leftist lies. This false narrative is well ensconced in the average person’s mind and they believe it. Sadly many Christians buy into it and hurl theocracy around as an epithet. For all of them, if Christians have too much say, too much political power, the country will turn into a version of The Handmaid’s Tale, a book about a Christian fundamentalist theocratic America which was sadly turned into hit show on Hulu. It’s those kind of lies and false narratives that we fight.

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Jun 21, 2023 | Politics & Government, Theology

These stark choices confront us like a brick in the face as they haven’t for a long time in Western history. They offer us a moral clarity that comes from the blessing of leftist, woke cultural Marxist overreach that began when Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009. That’s not exactly true because the seeds of our current discontents go back to the fall with Satan’s temptation that if we just disobey God we can ourselves become God being able to call the shots about the nature of reality (“knowing good and evil”). That is man, we, could be a law unto ourselves, autonomy, sovereign self-rulers who get to sit on our own little thrones in our own little kingdoms. How’s that working out for us? The more proximate origins of the radical leftism of Obama that began to infect government in America and dominant the culture goes back to the Enlightenment out of which inevitably was to come the current secular Utopia of the modern West. Ain’t it grand!

I say blessing because the constant overreach of the left (they can’t help themselves) is opening eyes to the truth (and I would argue the Truth as well) like no mere words ever could. Events have a persuasive power all their own. When America and the West was nominally Christian as it was since World War II, it was easy for people to live in the mushy middle where the above questions were invisible, as if they were not the ultimate choices that confront us every day. Every person and society must choose Christ or Caesar (the state), God’s law or self-law, and those choices will determine whether we get liberty or tyranny. Christ and God’s law (theonomy) is the only true source of liberty as developed in the West through English common law and the “rights of man” eventually brought to fruition in America. The state ruled by man’s law apart from God can only lead to slavery and tyranny as we see all around us.

Christian Western civilization and the liberty it brought should have never happened. Of course, I’m speaking from a merely human perspective, but it’s a compelling one. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it is possible to get. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. On a societal level we witness a specific moment in Jesus’ ministry with mustard seed significance (Matt. 13:31-32).

Jesus is confronted by his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22) with what they thought was a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was normal with Jesus. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like, but it started that day.

Jesus was saying the state (the ruler, the king, the Caesar) could no longer be the ultimate source of authority because the state is accountable to God and whose role is to dispense justice based on God’s law. Prior to that moment everything belonged to Caesar. The entire messy history of Western civilization is the story of the triumph of Christianity and God’s law over paganism and man’s law, and justice based on the rule of law or the will to power, might makes right. We’ve come full circle in the twenty first century where the modern form of paganism, secularism, makes the same claims as Caesar did: everything belongs to the state. There are some Christians who think the Christian faith is not or doesn’t have to be “political,” that somehow it can exist apart from the political, how we are governed and by what standard. That is impossible.

We see an example of why it is when Christians of the early church refused to say, “Caesar is Lord,” and many paid with their blood. To say, “Jesus is Lord” is ultimately political because he is the Lord over all of reality, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 1, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” All means kings and presidents and prime ministers and governors, you name it, all. This was accepted and not in the least controversial in all of Western Christendom until the twentieth century when the Pac Man of secularism gobbled everything up and declared, thou shalt have no other gods before me! I wrote about Joe Boot’s response to the CBC hit piece against the Ezra Institute in my last post, and so loved his conclusion I wanted to share it here. Few Christians, let alone non-Christians, understand what Christ’s Lordship looks like over all of life, including the state and its laws and how we are governed. Boot does a great of distilling this in two paragraphs, and it applies not just to Canada or America or the West, but to the nations, all of them, as the Bible consistently declares.

The West has long been in revolution against God’s law, repealing it from the statute books for about seventy years i.e., divorce law, family law, sabbath law, blasphemy law, marriage law, abortion law, laws about euthanasia, murder, rape, taxation etc. Faithful Christians prophetically propose, not impose, a return to the Ten Commandments and the guidance of God in all Scripture for civil governments, which takes us right back to the first codification of English law and beginnings of the English Common law tradition under Alfred the Great. We do not believe that biblical truth and law can be imposed on a secular non-Christian culture unwilling to hear or obey. We believe in the need to evangelize, teach, engage and reshape socio-cultural and political life in faithfulness to Christ so that, over time, civil law will return to its biblical foundations as a Christian people insist on righteous laws.

Theocracy simply means ‘God’s rule,’ and the living God has always dealt with humanity in terms of a true or false theocracy – the worship of God or idols – in terms of the standards of His Word. As the Scripture says, “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34). Today’s Canada is the theocracy of a false god where ‘man enlarged’ in the state is the ‘divine voice’ and pretended source of all law and authority, redefining life, marriage, family, identity and sexuality by political fiat. If to oppose that pagan religious ideal makes us dangerous fundamentalists, so be it. Take your stand with Christ or Caesar.

 

Culture Is Downstream from Politics Too

Culture Is Downstream from Politics Too

May 5, 2023 | Politics & Government

Looks like I’m on a politics role of late. Always keep this in mind: if you want politics not to be important in your life, it first has to be very important. Our enemies on the left and the Uniparty deep state want to control and rule over us, and we fought a revolutionary war 240 years ago to not be ruled by a king, but to rule ourselves. It is now time to take back our rule, and as Christians it is important that we understand the interplay of culture and politics, something it’s taken me many decades to understand.

The late great Andrew Breitbart was famous for saying that politics is downstream from culture, meaning our entertainment, education, media, etc., determines our politics. That is of course true, but in fact one-sided. Just as significantly, culture is downstream from politics. This is something conservative Christians, and conservatives in general, either miss or completely dismiss. I know I did until not too long ago.

When I became a born-again Christian in the fall of 1978, I was apolitical, knew nothing about it. I was only 18, so that’s understandable. It was coming across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There a couple years later that made me realize I was a conservative, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 confirmed it. Given my penchant for grandiose ambition, after I graduated I figured I would change the world through politics. That didn’t last long. Living in southern California at the time, I got involved in the 1984 campaign of B-1 Bob Dornan for congress in Orange County. While Bob and his wife and staff were great, I got completely disillusioned with the Republican Party in California. The so-called moderates despised the social conservatives and were determined to shut us out of the party, and many of those I met were not attractive characters. That hasn’t worked out real well for the Republican Party in the once great state of California. Politics as a career option was no longer something I saw myself doing.

While I was no longer involved in politics, I still voted and thought the conservative movement was the means to real political and cultural change in the country. Only, there was really never any change in our direction. We’d put our hope in this or that politician, and be continually disappointed. In 2000, one of those politicians was George W. Bush, and in hindsight that was a big mistake. I was glad he was reelected in 2004, especially with Republican majorities in both houses of congress. Did anything change, of course not, but just like golf, politics seemed to be hope over experience. Then in the 2006 midterms we got wiped out. After 20 years of putting my hope in politics, nothing had changed for the better. That’s when I had my cultural epiphany.

I’d put my hope in politics for cultural change, not realizing the dynamic between the two. As Christians and conservatives we’d lost the culture first as it secularized, then that led to political defeat. So, I decided we needed to re-focus on the culture, and I started a non-profit to fight for cultural change called The Culture Project. I got a few guys on board and we did some conferences and writing and things, but it basically went nowhere. I was glad to see, though, over the next years that Christians and the conservative movement in general was finally starting to understand the importance of the culture in the battle for America. Politics, however, is the distribution of power in a society, and I realized in due course that just focusing on culture was naïve. Those who have power drive policy which in due course drives culture. How does it do this?

Throughout my life I’ve heard non-Christians declare that “you can’t legislate morality.” They clearly don’t understand that laws are morals backed up with the force of the state, so legislation is morality. And what is morality? Right and wrong, and laws are about what is right and wrong, morality, passed by legislators as the elected representatives of the people. What is perjury but thou shalt not lie. In this way laws do reflect the people, but law is also a teacher, it educates and instructs in what is right and wrong, in other words morals.

As secularism slowly took over the culture in the twentieth century, the laws began to reflect this. But secularism, like wokism in our time, was driven from the top down. It wasn’t average Americans who took prayer out of government schools, but lawyers, eventually nine of them who sit on the Supreme Court. It wasn’t average Americans who thought dismembering babies in their mothers’ wombs, literally tearing them limb from limb, was a good idea, a constitutional “right,” but lawyers, and again, eventually nine of them who sit on the Supreme Court did. In due course because of these laws (which a court has no constitutional right to pass), Americans came to accept that God wasn’t relevant to public life (the lie of the separation of church and state), and abortion is merely a “medical procedure” like any other.

In this way as laws are passed and courts distort laws or make them up, the plausibility structures of the people are affected. What seems real and normal, right and wrong, are changed. Homosexuality is just one very obvious example among many. First homosexuals and their lobby pleaded for tolerance. That was first given, then codified into law (at the same time becoming ubiquitous in culture, movies, TV, etc.—it’s a symbiotic relationship). Next it was insisted we accept it as normal as sex between two people of the opposite sex. Then it was demanded we celebrate it as wonderful and good. Anyone who didn’t was a bigot and hater. It was this process in law and culture that quickly made “marriage” between two people (why only two, we’re not told) of the same sex culturally acceptable, and now “the law” in all 50 states.

If we’re to counter this, then Christian morality must be codified into law, as it once was in America. Secular morality took over the policy and law in the latter half of the twentieth century and given us the disaster of the twenty-first. There is no such thing as political or moral neutrality. Some version of morality has to rule a society, and if it isn’t Christian morality, it will be anti-Christian. There is no escaping this fact of existence. Christians have been beaten into submission, sometimes literally, into believing our faith and worldview can’t impinge on the public square, separation of church and state and all that. That’s a lie of the devil. This won’t be easy, given we’ve ceded the public square to our enemies, but if we don’t things will only get worse.

 

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 & Government

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 & Government

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.