i deprecate the possibility, but aren't there two polities emerging here, one the northeast, the west coast and the desert, the other the old Confederacy plus the northern plains and mountain states thrown in? It would be a terrible thing to happen, and I'm afraid even suggesting it as a possibility is mischievous. But.
The two polities are really the polity of Cities (cities anywhere-- Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta belong to it too) and the Polity of the Countryside. In between are the suburbs, which are economically and by infrastructure tied to the Cities, but often have attitudes more in line with the Country.
Yeah people that say the red states & blue states should go their separate ways don’t understand it’s not red states vs blue states but rural areas generally red & urban areas blue. Bear in mind that both Kevin McCarthy & Nancy Pelosi represent congressional districts in California. Arlington County Virginia went 80% for Biden & Buchanan County in SW Va went 80% for Trump. Virginia has a Republican Governor, 2 Democratic Senators, a slim Republican majority in the House of Delegates, a one seat Democratic majority in the State senate, and 6 Democrats & 5 Republicans in the House of Representatives. So are we blue or red? It depends entirely on where you live but as a state I guess we’re purple.
Minnesota can be added to that list, since its state law now aligns with California's SB107 regarding loss of parental rights if you don't support your minor child's desire for gender affirming care. That includes surgery for minors without parental agreement.
Was 911 metaphysical? Maybe. I am certain metaphysical phenomenae occured in association with it. For example, there was an open Bible in one of the WTC towers that was fused to a steel girder. You can still read the page, where it is on display at the museum at the site today.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
Also, when I went on my mission trip to NYC last year, I was walking around with a few of my fellow missionaries, doing the tourist thing. We eventually found ourselves in the area of Wall Street, not far from the WTC, our destination. As we moved through the area, I started getting this sensation of...peace. Inexplicable peace. I was not the only one who noticed it, either.
And when we got to the area where the sites of the former towers, now reflecting pools were, the character of the area totally changed. NYC normally is busy, bustling, noisy. People going too and fro, just city life turned up to 11. You got within a certain radius of the area, things just...dialed down. People were still about, but orderly, peacefully. It had a hush resembling a library. Or a church. They were polite, courteous, orderly. Gave each other space and deference.
The aura of peace was palpable.
I was safe and comfortable enough to lay down and take a nap on a concrete slab outside one of the museums at one point.
9/11 may be metaphysical. It certainly was a stroke of luck for certain people.
Larry Silverstein, for example, who took out an insurance plan that covered terrorism just months before the attacks. After the attacks, he took the insurance company to court, claiming he should be paid double because there were two attacks. He made $4.55 billion.
It was also lucky for the Bush administration that one of the planes hit the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon's coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
I particularly like this speech made by GW Bush where he says the terrorists set explosives in the towers:
Somebody always seems to benefit from the misfortune of others. John F. Kennedy is assassinated and the result is that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon become president. John Wayne turned down the role of Dirty Harry and Clint Eastwood got the part. Buddy Holly took little-known Waylon Jennings' seat on a small plane. The plane crashes, kills Holly and two other singers, and Jennings become a big star in country music.
No. It was Al Qaida (Mohammed Atta and his unmerry men) that did the deed-- the evidence is overwhelming. That some people benefited from it is irrelevant. There is no event so dire that someone somewhere won't find profit in it.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn't handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon.
It is worth thinking about but many things that have happened in my 63 years are worth thinking about. For instance, for Americans of a certain age, Vietnam was a great tragedy. 9/11 happened because a Muslim fanatic understood that airplane security on American planes was very lax at the time so he had younger fanatics armed with box cutters commandeer the planes and wreck them into selected targets. Three thousand innocent people died on 9/11 resulting in many more thousands of Americans, Iraqis and Afghanis dying over the next two decades due to the actions of a very foolish president who had a messiah complex.
Re: Could there be a purer manifestation of hubris?
Teddie Roosevelt's "I'll teach them to elect good men" is in the running. And as I mentioned on another piece yesterday, American imperialism is of long standing, dating back into the early 19th century with Manifest Destiny and the war of 1812 (where our goal was to conquer Canada)
Jonathan Cahn's book The Harbinger is all about how 911 was a warning from God to America. From the book's blurb, "Before its end as a nation, there appeared in ancient Israel nine specific warnings and omens of national destruction – These same nine Harbingers are now manifesting in America". Unfortunately, it looks like we haven't heeded the warning.
God does use disaster, both natural and man-made, to try to get the attention of people and reorient them. God put free will into play, for it is an essential component of a moral universe. However, it is a fallen one as well. So rather than just be a place where bad things happen, OR just heal every wound or stop every bad thing and guy, He allows those things to happen for His purposes, which are, above all, to draw attention to Him, to bring souls into His fold. That situation is on a clock and will not last forever. But that He moves among that, mostly quietly, but sometimes spectacularly.
Re: God does use disaster, both natural and man-made, to try to get the attention of people and reorient them.
There are certainly lessons we can learn from such things and we should turn to God for those purposes. But I do not believe God promotes sin as a means to further his will.
Sure He does. I never said He promotes "sin". I said He uses misfortune, including the evil of men, as well as the infernal forces, for His purposes. Examples? Christ's crucifixion. Others? Persecution of Christians. And I can keep on going.
I never said that, either. I said God uses circumstances and is not paralyzed by the actions of Evil. But He does allow it. And that is why He does. There will come a time He will call a halt to all that. But in the meantime, that is how He uses it.
re: California - I was waiting to come up because frankly I'm just stunned. The idea that schools cannot tell parents when a child has transitioned to a new name/identity - if a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about? What if a student is found to be having same-sex relations with a teacher, and notifying the parents would effectively "out" the child? Shall the school keep that a secret as well?
If children have the right to gender expression no matter what the age - certainly they must have the right to sexual expression, right? So how can society impose an arbitrary age limit on sexual activity with children without violating the supposed civil rights OF the children?
The age of consent in Hungary is 14. And 12 was the age at which girls in the Middle Ages could be legally wedded-- and bedded. Look up "Margaret Beaufort" for an example (though I suppose she got the last laugh by sticking her son-- born when she was barely 13-- on the throne eventually)
No. I grew up with an age of consent of 16, with some legal protections against authority figures using their position to seduce of-age minors . And I do think Hungary's 14 is way too young.
Please do note that the pnly people resisting sensible age of consent laws are certain sectarian religious types who seem think girls should be married off as soon as they pass through puberty.
I think the problem is that Europe has much looser age of consent laws, and this fact will be used in favor of lowering our own once the minors themselves are pushing for it. There will be no lowering of the age if adults are lobbying for that, obviously, but that will not be how it plays out here ... it will be minors lobbying for it, and they will point to places like France (15) and Germany (14) as examples of places with lower ages of consent where there are specific provisions that prohibit sex between adults and people under their authority (parents, teachers, etc) or where there is mental coercion, bribery and the like. That will be the push here. I think many Americans will be shocked at the European laws on this, because they are shocking from an American perspective, and we generally see age of consent as being something that is universal on a human level, but it is not, and that fact will be used by the children themselves when they are demanding the laws be changed, unfortunately.
In the US, there's been a big push to eliminate "child marriage", without nuance. Seriously, there's a huge difference between, say, 17-year-olds getting married, and a 34-year-old wanting to marry a 13-year-old. In their minds, it's all the same though.
Thank you. When this talk of consent comes up marriage tends to get left out of the discussion (mostly because the people arguing over consent don't care about it).
"There will be no lowering of the age if adults are lobbying for that, obviously, but that will not be how it plays out here"
I think it'll play out differently here, all under the umbrella of LGBTQWERTY.
What's going to happen is that queer sexuality - and sex itself - will be deemed so vital to a young person's identity and character that the "civil rights" of the children require a reduction in the age of consent, or its abolition altogether - the parents will have to "exercise judgement," as those who insist we mustn't ban books with explicit gay themes now say in response to questions as to why "Gender Queer" ought to be available in the school library.
I think very much this push will come from LGBTQUERTY organizations "standing up" for queer youth. I saw a statistic at one point on the percentage of gay men who realized they were gay because of or after a tryst with an older/legal-age gay man - in other words, their sexual orientation was nourished by, their "identity" cemented by, the fact they'd had sex with an older man who could perhaps "show them the ropes."
If sex between teens/kids and older people is integral to discovering and "affirming" a person's sexual identity - how can there be an age of consent?
Why does the conversation always leap to "older people with kids"? Most teens have sex with other teens (when they do at all), usually with 2-3 years of their own age. For that reason some jurisdictions have "Romeo and Juliet laws" which either allow or go easy on young people close in age who do a roll in the hay.
It's a total myth that there are just these hordes of adults lusting to bed teens. At time I think it says more about those who posit the idea then about reality.
"If a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about?"
You're right, and this is the question that I think will turn the tide on this, as long as dissenters ask it, and ask it, and ask it, and keep asking the hell out of it, and show where this logic leads.
I mean, hell, if a kid decides to join a religious club, are we going to keep that from parents too? It's kind of fun to imagine all of my progressive neighbors aghast to find out that the school was preventing them from knowing that their kid attended meetings of the Mormon Student Club. If a girl from a devout Muslim family arrives at school every morning in a headscarf but changes in the girls' room into a hoochiemama outfit for the rest of the day, can—must? should?—teachers keep that from parents?
I don't even like the term "outing" for anyone other than the gay and lesbian kids, because sexual preference is a feeling (and an activity) that generally doesn't affect others. But when the teachers, the school administrators, and all of the kids know that Joseph is being Josephine at school and are all required (by policy and by law) to play along with pseudo-Josephine's damage, it's nuts that *only* the parents don't know.
24% of California voters are Republicans, and 23% are independents (most of whom would be Republicans but don't want the GOP stink on them). Where the hell are they on this?
I was so hoping you would repost your experience with the torn flag, and was happy to wake up to the retelling this morning. I was thinking about your story yesterday, and I do think 9/11 has metaphysical meaning. In some sense, the world many of us above a certain age knew, loved and were raised to inherit died on 9/11; and a new America has emerged over the past 22 years, one that may have all the familiar sites and sounds, yet is drastically not the America prior to 9/11.
Was 9/11 a metaphysical event or not? I want a third option on that. Being Christian means that superstition has no place in one’s worldview. Superstition is wholly a pagan concept. At the same time, to ignore the metaphysical and describe it as superstition is also not Christian. The pagan view is that there are events which are driven by forces that cannot be understood, while the secular view is that all things which happen originate from a physical explanation, even if the causes are not yet understood.
The Christian worldview is that what we see as anomalous behaviors have an explanation that is known but not fully understood in cause or meaning. Nevertheless, there is a framework that reconciles the physical and metaphysical. This is true at least for Christians who hold to an orthodox Christian worldview. Too many Christians point to rational events, like a child dying of cancer, as part of “God’s plan,” which is a superstition. Others refuse to even consider a supernatural cause for something or even accept the existence of evil in any literal sense.
Without laying out that framework, it becomes impossible take something like 9/11 and give it any substantive meaning like Rod has done above. On top of that, the things which do happen are often a lesson, whatever their origin. God can turn all things to good, even the wicked things, but it is not always in our definition of good. We want to see good as things which are pleasing to the senses, bringing comfort, or providing a reconciliation with our expectations. Often, what is seen is good is simply satisfying the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. We do not take an event such as 9/11 and see how God blessed it by revealing truths about us as both a warning and a reminder of the covenant that binds all Christians.
The warning was that God permitted evil to act in this way. The reminder of the covenant was both to see this warning and to see the small miracles that happened within that warning. The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation.
With regard to 9/11 itself, the warning was clearly to turn away from our excess and hubris and to return to the Christian values and nature of America. It is not saying that America is a Christian nation, for a nation is an earthly thing, but that a nation can be Christian in how it acts. It’s also not to say that America has ever at all been perfectly Christian, but that at least a Christian viewpoint has informed much of the character of American life.
I think that the rejection of Christianity happened after World War Two, when America found itself occupying what was essentially a deserted imperial stage and realizing that it had the economic power to conquer all around it. Materialism became the greatest virtue of a nation that had taken the first chastisement of the Great Depression and ignored it. Hedonism, both overt in popular culture, and hidden in the form of “swinging,” the embrace of Randian-style economic greatness as a virtue unto itself, sexual “liberation,” and so on, showed that we took the blessing of victory over evil and squandered it. On top of that, American life mocked the world and any sense of decency. Being able to eat to excess at all hours of the day while people make mud pies to fill empty bellies, to provide a better existence for our pets than many people would ever see, to consume and pollute a world shared by all, to engage in the worship of money and technology…and most of all to not just tolerate sins like pornography, abortion, gambling, and gluttony, but to promote them as being positive…I think you could make a good case for the values that many modern American hold as being wholly satanic in even a loose interpretation.
In that sense, 9/11 was a call to redirect ourselves to a Godly behavior, not any sort of call to defend American virtue, because that virtue no longer exists. In other words, everyone pretty much missed the point of the whole thing. The attackers had their own reasons - the significance of 9/11 as a historical date is lost on most people. In a meta sense, it also marked a civilizational reversal of an era of security for Christendom, because Christendom no longer exists.
The deepest meaning of all is perhaps that it is a sign of the end times. COVID showed that we are not secure, in spite of our belief in technology. Likewise, to see that much of the world rejected what we had to offer meant that we can no longer see our position as the most powerful and wealthy nation on the face of the earth as being any sort of shield against bad things happening. I tend to have a quiet unease about so many things these days, both big and small, and I am sure I am not alone in that. If you take that deeper meaning, then 9/11 was a wake up call and sign to find out way back to God before it is too late. Instead, we got further chastisement in the form of two disastrous wars.
I am wondering what the next chastisement is going to be. Maybe a simple implosion of our currency as the world standard. That would certainly do it. Whatever form it comes in, we Christians need to reject any superstitious or secular interpretation and discern if it is a sign from God, then act accordingly.
"The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation." Excellent, and I heartily agree with everything you have said. I would like to read more. Wish you had your own Substack.
it felt metaphysical. after the attack cities were very quiet. it felt as though a violent, brief cataclysm / conflict of spiritual proportion had just occurred. and that that cataclysm has re-ordered the world. or perhaps more accurately, the spiritual balance of power in the world (or both). since that day Christianity, and western civilization - have moved into a swift decline. where are we headed? well, if the west continues on this path - perhaps to the fall of the west as we know it and a new world where the west (and the rights it protects) will be subordinate to a digital/theocracy alien to historic western values. It feels as if Christianity has fallen and that fall is embodied in the events of 911. And the descent is continuing and the future is terrifyingly bleak (hence the cultural despondence in the west post 911). That despondence may be an unspoken reality we all live with contained in the unconscious/primordial brain. I feel it is there after 911. In a modern world, Christianity is now not as much a place as a constellation of believers across the earth, some (and increasingly more and more) practicing their faith in secrecy.
Yep. The quiet I mentioned in NYC was also present in Denton and Dallas the day of. Its character was different. Not peace. Apprehension. Like what it feels like in the eye of a hurricane, or that stillness before a tornado arrives.
In Canada that week the mood was one of grief. And it was moving to see so many American flags flying, and the "God bless America" signs in front of churches in the small Ontario towns. How many of us would be able to lay hand on a Canadian flag had some great atrocity been suffered north of the border?
I spent 9/11/2008 in Moscow - the one in Russia, not Idaho. At that point, the last 9/11 I had spent in the US was 9/11/2001. I went to a moleben at St. Catherine's (the OCA representation church) and it was a big deal, with lots of news reporters and the US Ambassador being in attendance. One of the bells outside the church is dedicated to the victims of 9/11. In my hotel room, I turned on the television, and watched things, like coverage of the towers coming down, for the first time since they had happened. (https://breathofhallelujah.com/2022/09/11/9-11-01-21/ for some pictures and stuff.) You can chalk up ulterior motives or what have you, but in some ways, it seemed like the Russians were doing more to "never forget" than the Americans.
Whatever happened that day certainly wasn't just a thing for the US. In some way, I think that the "Rich Men of Richmond" phenomenon captures a little bit of that feeling - that for a moment, the "common folk" of the world see each other as brethren, the way we ought to be in Christ.
I think that 9/11 could have been a transforming experience, and for a few days, it was - an America united. And then we got the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and two wars in which America was told that the best thing we could do to defeat the terrorists was to go shopping.
Had Bush had stopped with the eviction of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, things might have turned out favorably. But hubris and ignorance got the better of Bush and he overextended American military power.
We had the whole world behind the hunting of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Iraq was, as many of my students who were there, the 710 War (read it upside down and it makes sense). And all of them were very, very, very bitter.
Not to mention (and I am in no way defending Saddam Hussein) that #2 on Osama bin Laden's hit list, after the US, was Saddam Hussein. So we gave our #1 enemy HIS worst enemy... for what?
General Wesley Clarke said that in 2001 there was a plan to invade 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off with Iran.
Could be. Most countries' military have long-range plans to invade and/or defend against multiple countries. Of course, the real draw in the Middle East is the oil and the access to it through the Persian Gulf.
There's also the mind-game part of it. If someone like General Clarke says something like that, it also may be bluster to get someone, somewhere to cooperate with something.
and really, do you think any sane person would say (or sit in a room with someone saying): let's stage a massive fake terrorist attack, destroy downtown NYC, and murder thousands of people, to invade...Somalia, Sudan and Libya? Really?
Why not just plant a false flag somewhere in Mesopotamia, have CNN and the NYT sell it (like they sell every war) and go from there?
What kind of difference would it have made to you, Jon, if Kuwait became a part of Iraq? It might have lit a fire under us to become energy independent. The first Gulf War was the original sin. It was undertaken for bogus reasons. It was immoral. The old man is as guilty as his idiot boy.
The First Gulf War was an international effort and Bush 41 was admirable in not pursuing it to attempt regime-change in Iraq. As I have said about Russia on Ukraine, aggressive wars for territory need to be resisted as the crimes that they are. A free-for-all world of great powers doing as they please is a world on course for those terrible bright milliseconds that will leave billions of corpses by the time the skies clear again.
Agreed. Desert Storm was strategically smart and showed restraint, as well as drawing a line in the sand. And we got a good airbase in one of the few ME countries that really does not mind us being there. Then Dubya and his collection of morons and maniacs stepped in.
Hubris, ignorance, and--cowardice on the part of the opposition. Who besides Ted Kennedy saw what was really happening and said so. I mean elected official. Patrick J. Buchanan did.
My husband wrote to the new head of Homeland Security (who was from our city) and said he was a young father with young kids but he would do anything, ANYTHING, they came up with for people like him to do -- he suggested volunteer watchmen at major landmarks. We got nothing at all but the president saying we should shop and stay at hotels, and the unconstitutional "Patriot" Act.
In the second section of Rod's essay, he complains mightily about California's descent into tranny totalitarianism and quite specifically laments that the churches aren't doing enough to resist it.
Then in the third section he goes on to excoriate Christians who are resisting it. Because they're icky. And the way they go about it is icky. He won't go sit down with Wilson, less his presence offer Wilson and his accolytes some sort of endorsement.
However, at the end he goes so far as to admit that he has "a strong feeling that there are many people within the broader Christian community in Wilson’s church who are not Christians-and-mad-as-hell-about-it. I hope they prevail, somehow."
So we should want them to prevail against the Progressive cultural zeitgeist but not be icky in how they do it.
Rod wants people, especially Christians, to resist tranny totalitarian madness, to pick one issue. What forms of resistance to this are acceptable and not icky?
Pray against it privately. Sure. Not icky and something I'm sure Wilson and Isker would agree and probably do so in their daily prayers.
Pray against it publicly in front of facilities where the procedures are done, like the pro- lifers do. Sure, but you'll start running into the same resistance that they did from the legislators and the courts as you do it. In fact, the laws are already in place to blunt the effectiveness of those demonstrations because of the abortion wars so they'll immediately be turned on the anti- tranny prayer warriors.
Write letters to the editor, vote moar harder, use the courts (somehow), sign a petition. In other words, keep trying to make change using the tools of a broken system run by people who hate you. These people have the upper hand, politically speaking, on the Left Coast, the Northeast, and large swaths of the Upper Midwest and the backing of a Medical Industrial Complex that stands to make billions of dollars performing unnecessary medical procedures on healthy boys and girls with the added bonus of creating patients for life who have to pay for hormones and other medications to maintain the charade.
But at least you're not being icky.
If a man is serious about these procedures as being evil, then he shouldn't be afraid of getting icky to stop them. Particularly when so far the only method of of being icky currently on offer is Isker's rhetoric.
No, I think we must fight, while we can. We might win! But we need to be careful how we fight, that we don't turn into what we hate. And we also need to prepare to lose -- meaning, prepare for the possibility that for whatever reason, God has allowed us to be carried into exile, so to speak, and that we have to prepare to keep the life of faith going under these conditions.
While I understand that the left has won because of its 'long march through the institutions', I don't know how they were able to capture so many minds with what I consider to be foolishness. No matter what we do, they capture more minds every day. You have said many times that you thought that the gender battle would be the one that would cause us to finally rise and put a stop to the nuttiness. Well, some small battles may have been won by the masses yet the elites march on, undeterred.
I think the only way to win is to change minds (or, more specifically, that minds will change due to external forces because I don't see our efforts as being successful) and I don't think that will happen as long as we maintain some level of comfort. The question is how long will we be able to maintain? We are steadily degrading both economically and culturally, sort of bumbling and stumbling our way to ruin. Are we on the brink of a tipping point?
You know what's comin' next, doncha? Yeah, ya do.
We need it all. We need it now. We need it fast. Ruin must be so complete that all recognize the ruin and all realize the cause. Only then MIGHT we regain our senses.
Yeah I’ve wondered myself. When people say we have to resort to violence to oppose transing kids, what are they proposing? Killing the kids or their parents that allow it? Killing the doctors? Shooting up the California legislature? Bombing a hospital? I await someone explaining how that’s gonna work. To be just, force of arms has to be in self defense or defense of innocent people one is in a position to help with violence. Or a war declared by lawful authority. I just don’t think killing doctors and teachers & trans enablers is going to get anywhere except to get the perpetrators killed. Passive nonviolent resistance means you often go to jail but it has worked (Ghandi, MLK, a bunch of men in Argentina who surrounded a church to keep a bunch of wackos from desecrating it).
One of my favorite quotes: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.”
― I.F. Stone
I think back when the Bruderhof had its "Daily Dig" that this was paired with some sort of commemoration of Sophie Scholl. On the day before her trial and execution, she had a dream, "On a beautiful sunny day, I brought a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church was up a steep mountain, but I carried the child safely and firmly. Unexpectedly, there opened up before me a crevasse on the glacier. I had just time enough to lay the child safely on the other side before I plunged into the abyss." She interpreted the dream this way, according to her cellmate: “The child in the white dress is our idea. The idea will prevail in spite of all obstacles. We were permitted to be pioneers, but we must die early for the sake of that idea.”
I think that there are a number of parallels between the story of the White Rose and the story of the priest Eleazar and the mother with the seven sons which come up in 2 Maccabees (canonically and 4 Maccabees (semi-canonically). I got chills when I came across 4 Maccabees 1:11 - "All people, even their torturers, marvelled at their courage and endurance, and they became the cause of the downfall of tyranny over their nation. By their endurance they conquered the tyrant, and thus their native land was purified through them." It also drove home the point that often tyrants are put down more effectively through martyrs than armies.
You are really wrong here. There is a spirit of fanaticism and malice in Isker's book. You are taken in by the fallacy of believing that you cannot oppose evil if you aren't malicious and fanatical. I have sat face to face with Christian men and women who faced evil worse than anything Isker or I are likely to see, and they didn't oppose it with ferocious hatred in their hearts. Isker's rhetoric will not destroy anything, other than Isker.
I can tell you this. Take Benjamin J. Corey. I question he is even saved or actually knows the Lord, given that he seems to give left wing shibboleths far more credence than Scripture. That he may be one of those when the time comes who says, "Lord Lord," and Jesus says, "I knew you not." However, if he gave me an invite to dine and talk, I would probably take him up on it.
I'll ask you the same question I asked JonF311 below: Are you arguing the use of physical force and the use of directed (not broad) violence is always evil? A necessary evil, perhaps, but always still evil.
I would argue that force and violence are tools that can be employed, like all tools, to both righteous and malicious ends.
I completely agree. God consistently has used fighters and called those who believe in Him, believe in good, to fight evil and defend those who cannot defend themselves. The Apostles were armed and Jesus had no problem with that, just with their improper use. And told followers, "Buy a sword, sell your cloak if you have to." And when he returns, he makes it abundantly clear he will be there to establish a peaceful world. But first, he and God will be doing a LOT of violence.
Sometimes, you do have to fight. The actions of evil and its activities require it.
Let us be clear, violence is a last resort, and never to be something sought after for those who follow Jesus. Jesus made it VERY clear that love and peace, HIS peace, should be what we reach for. But also knew what those motivated by evil hearts and minds would do and knew we should prepare for that.
Christianity is not a pacifist faith. No, we are no warmongers seeking a fight. But we need to be ready to fight, should the fight become necessary.
That's what the Black nationalists and others advocating the use of force said in opposition to MLK's nonviolence in what looked to many to be a very righteous cause against determined, entrenched, violent opponents. Hard to argue against them, from within the framework you're offering.
No. Because the Black nationalists wanted a fight. Further, viewed those they opposed with hatred and, given chance, did not want to balance things, as it seems to be consistently the case with Left wing grievance mongers. If they had had their way and had the power, they would have flipped things, going from oppressed to oppressors. And, there was absolutely nothing of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, either to provide discernment or restraint.
MLK's nonviolent approach helped him to be viewed as a decent, peaceful person with good intentions. His assassination therefore caused outrage and moved more people toward supporting his cause, which helped start implementation of racial equality policies. At a minimum, more people starting thinking perhaps more should be done in that area.
On the other hand, people using violent measures, such as Black nationalists, alienated people and were counter productive, since more people could say to themselves "well, maybe the blacks are bad and undeserving of better treatment?"
The same situation can/will happen if Christians use violent tactics. So, we should use strong but non-violent tactics to show our commitment while staying true to our Christian views. Peaceful public protests for example (apparently blocking traffic is now considered a peaceful form of protest!).
If we use violence, we'll be lumped in with Far Right extremists and other unsavory radical groups. Keep in mind the vast majority of news media is not on the side of Christians. So, any acts of violence (or anything close) will be amplified by the media to show how terrible and dangerous Christians are.
All depends. Because things could get far worse than they ever did in the 60s. It could, at some point, literally become fight or die. Take Nazi Germany. Are you going to get into that boxcar and peacefully go to the camp? Or you going to fight? If things get that bad, you've worse things to worry about than bad pr.
Well, I hesitate to go up against the great Dukeboy01, but remember that what Isker did was write a book. What's the purpose of writing a book, specifically that kind of book? To convince people. NOBODY is convinced by a screed like that (no, I haven't read beyond the excerpts and I don't need to). As far as I can tell Isker is trying to firk up the troops into a lather. I believe it's called preaching to the choir. Nobody like me is going to change his mind based on this kind of vaporing. But it will get him airplay. And it got him mentioned here, which, I suspect, is a pretty well-read site by those who DON'T comment.
Long long ago John Henry Newman cautioned against "violent ultra parties" which damage the cause they fight for. Not quite so long ago T.S. Eliot said Christians needed to cultivate a new discipline of suffering. If that's where we're at, that's where we're at.
That's really true -- and that's 100 percent how Douglas Wilson operates. Wilson is truly an intelligent man. But his shtick is performative. He reminds me of one of my kinfolks who thinks every problem in the world can be handled by giving the malefactor a good cussin'. It changes nothing in the world, but it makes Cud'n Earl feel like he's accomplished something. When I read Wilson's stuff, I feel that I've just read an exceptional performance by someone who doesn't really care about persuading others, only about demonstrating his virtuosity in trashing an opponent. It's like he doesn't want converted hearts, only high-fives from his bros (and they're all bros).
I was that kind of writer when I started out. Then I became a Christian, and grew out of it, mostly. I am always tempted to malice and cleverness in my writing, so I know what that's like. Not being high-and-mighty here.
You know who is the master of tart, focused, direct writing that also can persuade like no other? Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan. I well remember reading in the New York Post one of his syndicated columns, this one about the desecration of the Sacrament at St. Patrick's (one of Big Buggery's more charming exploits). I sat down to read that column thinking I was some kind of liberal (a "wishy washy Social Democrat" as a friend of mine, who is one, likes to say). I got up from reading it knowing I was no such thing.
Sorry. It appeared in the New York Post. I don't think they're archived that far back.
I will say this much. If Buchanan wasn't a master polemicist there wouldn't have been half the hoo-hah over his courageous and completely correct line on the 1991 war.
He was the major sponsor of the football field at Gonzaga High School, his old high school. It is called Buchanan Field. I wonder when the name will be ordered down by the Archbishop. By the way, Buchanan used to attend the Latin Mass at St. Mary's in Chinatown. I don't know where he goes now. The Latin Mass was suppressed by Archbishop Gregory recently.
I am arguing the Wrath is a major sin- traditionally one of the Seven Deadly Sins
Also I accept my Church's teaching the we may indulge in violence in self-defense but it remains a necessary evil and hence a sin for which we must be cleansed.
Jesus made it clear that "attitudes" can be sins as well-- e.g., "lusting in one's heart". When I confess I generally go straight to confessing my dark passions even when not acted on since those are the source of any misdeeds I do.
Yes, and that's what I'm getting at. Violence is not inherently sinful. The purpose and reason for it is what makes it sinful, including acting out of "wrath."
The thing is, most of these Christian jihadis haven't done so much as run for school board, and a guy like Isker has never run anything bigger than a church with a couple hundred congregants, but somehow they think they have the force (and the wherewithal) to run some vast and mighty American Protestant kingdom, enforce laws, and maintain order. They're no different from Adrian Vermuele and his plan for a Catholic supremacist empire sketched out from his office at Havard—they're delusional LARPers.
The system, as messed up as any human system will inevitably be, seems to be functioning for those willing to go all in and act, rather than those who whine and dream behind podcast microphones in their crap-strewn basements.
YES! Thank you, Jonah! I remember back in the 1990s, First Things caused a huge row by publishing a symposium asking whether the continued legalization of abortion de-legitimized the US regime. Father Neuhaus concluded, more or less, "almost" -- saying that the one thing that saved us is that we still have the power, through sustained democratic action, to change things.
Part of the problem is conservatives' inherent but quite natural weakness: We don't *want* to be part of a system. We just want to be left alone as much as possible. And we're pushing for a less left-leaning society without the full institutional support of a political party.
We may sneer at people like Isker because they're gauche and we don't want to be associated with them, but they're also not useful, except, potentially, for (hypothetically) radicalizing a few lone wolves who would go do stupid things that only harm the whole effort in the first place. When the American right, broadly defined, hasn't really tried to persuade and hasn't even used some of the levers of power it does hold (see Missouri today as a welcome exception), it just seems too early to be like, "hey, let's debate the ethics of political and religious violence." (Hell, we've seen tons of illegitimate leftist violence in the past 15 years and conservatives don't even have the vocabulary for denouncing it and putting a stink on it. Can we at least try that first?)
But are they encouraging hating people, or as Jesus said, hating sin? Because the things they are targeting are certainly sin, moral rot, degeneracy. Nothing good, true, beautiful or honorable.
Christians are supposed to hate sin, but we are not allowed to hate sinners. Extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
But the life of virtue requires not being controlled by emotions. Stoking the furnace of anger (one of the most powerful emotions) can lead to that anger controlling us.
Sad to read about the strife within the Christian community of Dreher. This happens way too often.
But remember what Jesus said about judging others: "Judge not and you will not be judged. For with what judgment ye judge shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye and ignore the log in your own?" Matthew 7:1-3.
I say this because that guy from Moscow Idaho, and his padawan, seem to be fixated on Rods shortcomings while ignoring their own. And their own seem quite ghoulish if true.
Stay in the peace of Christ. Shake off the dust.from your feet.
Judge people, yes. For the most part, we cannot know their hearts, that's God's realm. But we CAN judge their actions. And call sin sin. We have to, in fact, speak truth. Some may be offended by that. They were in Christ's day. And remain so, thousands of years later.
Rod, Doug Wilson might be right about one thing. You tend too much to punch right and to believe the worst about people on the right. Your statement yesterday at EC about J6 protesters is typical:
"Don’t get me wrong: the January 6th riot was an assault on the American political order, one that deserves harsh punishment. We can argue over whether or not the heavy sentences being handed out to convicted rioters are proportionally just, but there’s not much real debate over the extraordinary villainy of the acts."
I am not one that thinks we should never punch right. But to paint Wilson as a Orwellian foot stomp totalitarian (and you have not apologized for that to my knowledge) or to call J6 an assault on American political order when they were protesting the rigging of the 2020 election, which really was an assault on the American political order, is out of line.
I love most of your writing. I am teaching Live Not By Lies to a Christian study group. But maybe Wilson is right. Maybe you do need to get a grip. I will be praying for you.
I think it must be amusing to most subscribers to consider that this newsletter, which nearly every day contains some outrage about woke, left-wing culture, spends too much time "punching to the Right." For some people, punching to the Right *at all* is too much. Second, I'm not going to apologize for calling the J6 attack on Congress an assault on the American order. I don't for one second buy the liberal freak-out claim that they were mounting a coup, or anything like that. It couldn't possibly have succeeded. But it was a terrible thing to break into the Congress and trash it as they did, and of course it was a symbolic attack on the American order.
Finally, I didn't call Wilson an Orwellian boot-stomper. Re-read what I wrote. I said if you want an image of the future Isker would like to see, then imagine Douglas Wilson's brogue stamping on your face forever. That's Isker, not Wilson.
I agree that in some sense 9/11 was the beginning of the end, and it is interesting to cast it in the light of 'God's judgment against a people'. I say this as someone who served in the (what would become) long, long wars following the attacks, who lost many a solid teammate in these wars, who met their widows and young children.
I remember in the days following 9/11 all of the talk was about "not letting the terrorists win". If you didn't do whatever thing was prescribed, often by GW Bush or the government more broadly, you were "letting the terrorists win." Mostly stopping the terrorists from winning comprised returning to pre-9/11 everyday life as quickly as possible. Go shopping, we were told. Only by doing this could we show they didn't rock us, bad. And it didn't take long--by the end of October of that year, if memory serves--for the enterprising amongst the government to seize upon the moment to pass the PATRIOT Act, and forever change our relationship to government, surveillance, and our Creator-endowed inalienable rights. Like many, I didn't know any better. I was a young man. I supported this stuff.
And now, more than 20 years later, I can't help but feel deep sadness in thinking that yes, indeed, the terrorists did win. In 2001, we said they'd win if they could knock us off our routine, cause us to falter, make our financial system collapse. It took a while, and, let's be frank, most of the damage was more due to an auto-immune response than anything the attacks directly did, but at the end of the day...I think they won. They caused the freest, greatest nation in the history of the earth to trade in its liberties for the security of an increasingly totalitarian state. The surveillance and forefeiture of rights at the center of the PATRIOT Act is directly linked to the social instability, lack of trust in institutions, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and all the rest that has convinced us that free speech shouldn't be too free, censorship is ok, everything we do should be surveilled, and that coming things like CBDC will be logical extensions of this mindset. These may seem like tenuous connections, but look carefully. The connections are there.
The terrorists did not overrun us on 9/11, but they did seed a slow and steady infection that, decades later, has achieved exactly what they'd hoped: the crumbling of the Great Satan they set out to take down that clear September morning. I pray our nation will repent while there still might be time. But who will risk, who will stand, against this new tyranny and against this rebellion against reality itself?
It was a massive 342 pages long, amending 15 separate federal laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.
Effective October 26th. A mere 45 days after 9/11.
Yes the appearance of the Patriot Act in such little time is almost as metaphysical as the Project for a New American Century policy document written in September 2000 which states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".
PNAC's policy document, "Rebuilding America's Defences," openly advocated for total global military domination. Most of the PNAC members held highest-level positions in the George W. Bush administration
Although the PNAC group has been discredited by the twin disasters in the Middle East, they still think they're real players. They are funding Nikki Haley's run for the presidency and are cheerleaders for the Biden Administration's policy of funding Ukraine's military. But the PNAC's problem in America is that fewer and fewer men wish to join the military. America's military relies on naive young white men from rural areas and small towns, usually sons of men who served in the military before. But the young men have wizened up to the scam which if the American military-industrial complex. The concept of conscription is now being floated by the Pentagon to provide the manpower needs of the military-industrial complex.
John Kerry had been pushing the Patriot Act since before the Oklahoma City bombing. After 9/11 he slapped a new name on his bill and got it passed. It was definitely pre-written.
The first WTC bombing was in 1993....that might be when the Patriot Act was drafted.
At the trial it turned out that FBI informant, Emad Salem, had built the bomb.
He claimed the bomb was built "by supervision from the Bureau (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and the D.A. (district attorney)."
He had hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers that he had secretly recorded, and transcripts were made available to the press but were not made public.
oh now the entire Congress was in on the conspiracy to destroy downtown NYC and mass murder their own citizens so they could...conquer Somalia and the Sudan?
So let me get this straight: the Bush/Cheney cabinet, the CIA, Congress, Israel plus Wall St were all in on the plan??
That's my main reason for not believing in these ridiculous conspiracy theories. After a career working in global, Fortune 500 companies I'm aware of how incredibly difficult it is to keep something major secret for even a couple weeks. The idea that so many people would be directly involved in something of that magnitude and still maintain the secret is INSANE!
I also think there is something deep inside human psychology that looks for an unseen agent behind every action (esp the most spectacular and disruptive ones): either because our Fight/Flight response is primed to detect agency behind every falling leaf (the ancestor who jumped first was the one not eaten by the hidden tiger), and also it threatens our sense of control and stability to think our world can be radically permanently altered at any moment solely do to CHAOS.
On 12/7/41 thousands of people went to San Francisco's Ocean Beach.. From accounts I've read, they stood quietly and looked east, bearing witness on what was to come.
And after 9/11/01, we were told to "go shopping", clutching our Open For Business bags, soon to be filled with more useless junk.
The terrorists showed us dumb Americans that we are not alone on this planet. There are many other ideological systems at play. Mostly there is a war between the East (Communist collectivism) and the West (democratic individualism). The 9/11 attacks didn't start the war, but it exposed it. Since then, America has been enduring a religious war that is transforming our society.
For Massachusetts, the battleground is in the schools. Public school curriculum have been changed to promote Marxist goals (through SEL, social and emotional learning). Teachers are being replaced by therapists, whose goal is to dumb down the students. Critical thinking skills are being replaced by Communist gobbley gook (SEL). Computers are replacing teachers, in the classroom. Now they are trying to get rid of MCAS altogether (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). They know that any form of accountability will embarrass them, because Marxists are not about being intelligent. They are about compliance to totalitarian goals. They need an uneducated population to achieve this. Marxists don’t wait. When they see an opening they run for it, grab the power and transform the system. Their ultimate goal is to make more Marxists. This means taking over the schools and transforming the people. The people are largely unaware of what is going on.
James Lindsay describes why Marxism should be classified as a religion. If the Supreme Court would do this, the whole mess could be undone with a single blow. (Teaching Marxism in the schools violates the Constitution's First Amendment, that ensures a separation of church and state.)
Why leftist Marxism is a religion, by James Lindsay:
By technically I mean by strict definition. Numerous writers, including quite a few heavyweights, have talked about its religious characteristics without necessarily calling it a religion outright.
Yes, we were always taught that Marxism is an economic system where the measn of production are owned by the people. It brainwashes people into a collective mindset, where they don't think of themselves as individuals, but as part of a group. They live to serve the group. This is their moral universe. Lindsay explains how this notion replaces "God" in their ideological system. Marxism is a Godless religion and it is taking over our country. America should lock it out of the schools.
There's a great book about this called "Politics as Religion" by Emilio Gentile (2001), and he calls these totalizing political-ideological movements "political religion", which he describes as:
"Political religion is the sacralization of a political system founded on an unchallengeable monopoly of power, ideological monism, and the obligatory and unconditional subordination of the individual and the collectivity to its code of commandments. Consequently, a political religion is intolerant, invasive, and fundamentalist, and it wishes to permeate every aspect of an individual’s life and of a society’s collective life. The resulting religion of politics is a religion in the sense that it is a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and end of human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme entity.
During the Modern Era, the relationship between the religious and political dimensions and between power and sacredness entered a new phase that gave rise to the sacralization of politics, which reflected the affirmation of the primacy of the sovereignty of the state, secularization of culture, the loss of the church’s spiritual hegemony in relation to the state and society, the subsequent separation of the church and state, the triumph of the principle of the people’s sovereignty and the creation of mass politics."
I had to post quickly before I completed Rod Dreher's post because I found Dreher's quoting of Karl Rove to be unusually amusing. What a hubristic fool. This was my first laugh of the day. Thanks!
It is fascinating that such a mediocre man, a struggling political consultant, can get to be the brains behind a failed Texas businessman who used his accident of birth- being a son of a president- to become Governor of Texas and then President of the United States. It should have been a novel rather than a disaster that became true.
I don't think Bush was malicious. He has a high degree of entitlement. If Bush was born George Davis, he might have become a bank president in Odessa, Texas.
At the VERY BEST, he's a is a tragically shallow man who does not pause to think things out. Is very much driven by his emotions and does not stop to think of second and third tier consequences beforehand.
Actually, I think a lot of it was Dick Cheney's manipulation... After all, he made himself VP, and then proceeded to make megabucks off of the Oil Wars.
It is unwise to wrap up metaphysical beliefs with secular events. Nobody really can know the ways of God. We can try to understand Him through religion but His power is so much more than ours that our musings about His interventions are pretty pointless.
I generally think God has turned His back on Western Civilization because Western Civilization has turned its back on Him. Remember, He does not need us. We need Him. And most people alive today ignore Him or even trash Him. But I could be wrong, too. I often am.
I totally agree with your first paragraph. Over time, I've come to understand that we rarely understand what the real (spiritual) purpose of almost anything was, including our own. What was important in our lives - to God - may be a moment that we barely remember or something that seemed unimportant to us: but we did (or didn't) do our job at the time.
I'll give you an example: back when I was very young, and living a frankly sinful life without thinking much about it, I had a sudden urge to go pray in a church. And for some reason I got up and went to find the closest church, which was a Catholic one. And I went up to the door, which was locked (this was almost 50 years ago!) and the priest came out, and asked, "What do you want?" And I said to pray in church. And he said, "Well, we're closed now. Come back ___ " and I don't remember when he said to come back, but it wasn't for a while, because I lost all desire and went back from whence I came. Well, it took me years to realize, long after my conversion, that God sent me there, not for me at all, but for the priest. I'd done what I was sent to do. He hadn't. And I often pray for him.
i deprecate the possibility, but aren't there two polities emerging here, one the northeast, the west coast and the desert, the other the old Confederacy plus the northern plains and mountain states thrown in? It would be a terrible thing to happen, and I'm afraid even suggesting it as a possibility is mischievous. But.
The two polities are really the polity of Cities (cities anywhere-- Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta belong to it too) and the Polity of the Countryside. In between are the suburbs, which are economically and by infrastructure tied to the Cities, but often have attitudes more in line with the Country.
Yep
Yeah people that say the red states & blue states should go their separate ways don’t understand it’s not red states vs blue states but rural areas generally red & urban areas blue. Bear in mind that both Kevin McCarthy & Nancy Pelosi represent congressional districts in California. Arlington County Virginia went 80% for Biden & Buchanan County in SW Va went 80% for Trump. Virginia has a Republican Governor, 2 Democratic Senators, a slim Republican majority in the House of Delegates, a one seat Democratic majority in the State senate, and 6 Democrats & 5 Republicans in the House of Representatives. So are we blue or red? It depends entirely on where you live but as a state I guess we’re purple.
Yes, this describes the situation exactly.
Minnesota can be added to that list, since its state law now aligns with California's SB107 regarding loss of parental rights if you don't support your minor child's desire for gender affirming care. That includes surgery for minors without parental agreement.
Was 911 metaphysical? Maybe. I am certain metaphysical phenomenae occured in association with it. For example, there was an open Bible in one of the WTC towers that was fused to a steel girder. You can still read the page, where it is on display at the museum at the site today.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
Also, when I went on my mission trip to NYC last year, I was walking around with a few of my fellow missionaries, doing the tourist thing. We eventually found ourselves in the area of Wall Street, not far from the WTC, our destination. As we moved through the area, I started getting this sensation of...peace. Inexplicable peace. I was not the only one who noticed it, either.
And when we got to the area where the sites of the former towers, now reflecting pools were, the character of the area totally changed. NYC normally is busy, bustling, noisy. People going too and fro, just city life turned up to 11. You got within a certain radius of the area, things just...dialed down. People were still about, but orderly, peacefully. It had a hush resembling a library. Or a church. They were polite, courteous, orderly. Gave each other space and deference.
The aura of peace was palpable.
I was safe and comfortable enough to lay down and take a nap on a concrete slab outside one of the museums at one point.
9/11 may be metaphysical. It certainly was a stroke of luck for certain people.
Larry Silverstein, for example, who took out an insurance plan that covered terrorism just months before the attacks. After the attacks, he took the insurance company to court, claiming he should be paid double because there were two attacks. He made $4.55 billion.
It was also lucky for the Bush administration that one of the planes hit the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon's coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
I particularly like this speech made by GW Bush where he says the terrorists set explosives in the towers:
https://gab.com/polesowa/posts/111048356003408941/media/1?timeline=video
It's lucky the passports of the culprits were found in the rubble, otherwise we may not have known who had done it.
Somebody always seems to benefit from the misfortune of others. John F. Kennedy is assassinated and the result is that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon become president. John Wayne turned down the role of Dirty Harry and Clint Eastwood got the part. Buddy Holly took little-known Waylon Jennings' seat on a small plane. The plane crashes, kills Holly and two other singers, and Jennings become a big star in country music.
But Cui bono? is a useful question to ask, is it not?
It's a question that good detectives and investigative journalists ask.
Right. We do not know for sure who shot King William II in the back while hunting in the New Forest. But Henry I became king as a result.
Do you think 9/11 is not worth thinking about?
No. It was Al Qaida (Mohammed Atta and his unmerry men) that did the deed-- the evidence is overwhelming. That some people benefited from it is irrelevant. There is no event so dire that someone somewhere won't find profit in it.
I know, Jon, it's a fascinating story.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn't handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon.
It is worth thinking about but many things that have happened in my 63 years are worth thinking about. For instance, for Americans of a certain age, Vietnam was a great tragedy. 9/11 happened because a Muslim fanatic understood that airplane security on American planes was very lax at the time so he had younger fanatics armed with box cutters commandeer the planes and wreck them into selected targets. Three thousand innocent people died on 9/11 resulting in many more thousands of Americans, Iraqis and Afghanis dying over the next two decades due to the actions of a very foolish president who had a messiah complex.
The thousands of deaths were indeed tragic.
i think 9/11 conspiracy theories are garbage trash that fall to pieces under the slighest interrogation.
Re: Could there be a purer manifestation of hubris?
Teddie Roosevelt's "I'll teach them to elect good men" is in the running. And as I mentioned on another piece yesterday, American imperialism is of long standing, dating back into the early 19th century with Manifest Destiny and the war of 1812 (where our goal was to conquer Canada)
It was Woodrow Wilson, not Roosevelt, who wanted to teach foreigners (in particular, Latin Americans) to elect good men: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1983/07/31/teaching-latin-america-to-elect-good-men/e8bed301-5802-49b8-be54-85d4e1dd12a3/
Ok- but TR was quite the imperialist too. See: Panama; Philippines.
Jonathan Cahn's book The Harbinger is all about how 911 was a warning from God to America. From the book's blurb, "Before its end as a nation, there appeared in ancient Israel nine specific warnings and omens of national destruction – These same nine Harbingers are now manifesting in America". Unfortunately, it looks like we haven't heeded the warning.
Re: Jonathan Cahn's book The Harbinger is all about how 911 was a warning from God to America.
Bad theology. God is never the author or even the accomplice of human-wrought evil.
God does use disaster, both natural and man-made, to try to get the attention of people and reorient them. God put free will into play, for it is an essential component of a moral universe. However, it is a fallen one as well. So rather than just be a place where bad things happen, OR just heal every wound or stop every bad thing and guy, He allows those things to happen for His purposes, which are, above all, to draw attention to Him, to bring souls into His fold. That situation is on a clock and will not last forever. But that He moves among that, mostly quietly, but sometimes spectacularly.
Re: God does use disaster, both natural and man-made, to try to get the attention of people and reorient them.
There are certainly lessons we can learn from such things and we should turn to God for those purposes. But I do not believe God promotes sin as a means to further his will.
Sure He does. I never said He promotes "sin". I said He uses misfortune, including the evil of men, as well as the infernal forces, for His purposes. Examples? Christ's crucifixion. Others? Persecution of Christians. And I can keep on going.
Yes, all things must ultimately rebound to God's purposes, but we must not conclude from that it doesn't matter what we do.
I never said that, either. I said God uses circumstances and is not paralyzed by the actions of Evil. But He does allow it. And that is why He does. There will come a time He will call a halt to all that. But in the meantime, that is how He uses it.
re: California - I was waiting to come up because frankly I'm just stunned. The idea that schools cannot tell parents when a child has transitioned to a new name/identity - if a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about? What if a student is found to be having same-sex relations with a teacher, and notifying the parents would effectively "out" the child? Shall the school keep that a secret as well?
Lowering the age of consent -- say, 12 -- is next on the agenda.
If children have the right to gender expression no matter what the age - certainly they must have the right to sexual expression, right? So how can society impose an arbitrary age limit on sexual activity with children without violating the supposed civil rights OF the children?
The age of consent in Hungary is 14. And 12 was the age at which girls in the Middle Ages could be legally wedded-- and bedded. Look up "Margaret Beaufort" for an example (though I suppose she got the last laugh by sticking her son-- born when she was barely 13-- on the throne eventually)
Not sure what your point is? That if we changed the age of consent here in the U.S. to 14 or 12 it would be no big deal?
No. I grew up with an age of consent of 16, with some legal protections against authority figures using their position to seduce of-age minors . And I do think Hungary's 14 is way too young.
Please do note that the pnly people resisting sensible age of consent laws are certain sectarian religious types who seem think girls should be married off as soon as they pass through puberty.
I think the problem is that Europe has much looser age of consent laws, and this fact will be used in favor of lowering our own once the minors themselves are pushing for it. There will be no lowering of the age if adults are lobbying for that, obviously, but that will not be how it plays out here ... it will be minors lobbying for it, and they will point to places like France (15) and Germany (14) as examples of places with lower ages of consent where there are specific provisions that prohibit sex between adults and people under their authority (parents, teachers, etc) or where there is mental coercion, bribery and the like. That will be the push here. I think many Americans will be shocked at the European laws on this, because they are shocking from an American perspective, and we generally see age of consent as being something that is universal on a human level, but it is not, and that fact will be used by the children themselves when they are demanding the laws be changed, unfortunately.
In the US, there's been a big push to eliminate "child marriage", without nuance. Seriously, there's a huge difference between, say, 17-year-olds getting married, and a 34-year-old wanting to marry a 13-year-old. In their minds, it's all the same though.
Thank you. When this talk of consent comes up marriage tends to get left out of the discussion (mostly because the people arguing over consent don't care about it).
"There will be no lowering of the age if adults are lobbying for that, obviously, but that will not be how it plays out here"
I think it'll play out differently here, all under the umbrella of LGBTQWERTY.
What's going to happen is that queer sexuality - and sex itself - will be deemed so vital to a young person's identity and character that the "civil rights" of the children require a reduction in the age of consent, or its abolition altogether - the parents will have to "exercise judgement," as those who insist we mustn't ban books with explicit gay themes now say in response to questions as to why "Gender Queer" ought to be available in the school library.
I think very much this push will come from LGBTQUERTY organizations "standing up" for queer youth. I saw a statistic at one point on the percentage of gay men who realized they were gay because of or after a tryst with an older/legal-age gay man - in other words, their sexual orientation was nourished by, their "identity" cemented by, the fact they'd had sex with an older man who could perhaps "show them the ropes."
If sex between teens/kids and older people is integral to discovering and "affirming" a person's sexual identity - how can there be an age of consent?
Why does the conversation always leap to "older people with kids"? Most teens have sex with other teens (when they do at all), usually with 2-3 years of their own age. For that reason some jurisdictions have "Romeo and Juliet laws" which either allow or go easy on young people close in age who do a roll in the hay.
It's a total myth that there are just these hordes of adults lusting to bed teens. At time I think it says more about those who posit the idea then about reality.
I agree, I think that's where this is heading: the mainstreaming of the sexual use of children, based on "children's rights."
"If a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about?"
You're right, and this is the question that I think will turn the tide on this, as long as dissenters ask it, and ask it, and ask it, and keep asking the hell out of it, and show where this logic leads.
I mean, hell, if a kid decides to join a religious club, are we going to keep that from parents too? It's kind of fun to imagine all of my progressive neighbors aghast to find out that the school was preventing them from knowing that their kid attended meetings of the Mormon Student Club. If a girl from a devout Muslim family arrives at school every morning in a headscarf but changes in the girls' room into a hoochiemama outfit for the rest of the day, can—must? should?—teachers keep that from parents?
I don't even like the term "outing" for anyone other than the gay and lesbian kids, because sexual preference is a feeling (and an activity) that generally doesn't affect others. But when the teachers, the school administrators, and all of the kids know that Joseph is being Josephine at school and are all required (by policy and by law) to play along with pseudo-Josephine's damage, it's nuts that *only* the parents don't know.
24% of California voters are Republicans, and 23% are independents (most of whom would be Republicans but don't want the GOP stink on them). Where the hell are they on this?
I was so hoping you would repost your experience with the torn flag, and was happy to wake up to the retelling this morning. I was thinking about your story yesterday, and I do think 9/11 has metaphysical meaning. In some sense, the world many of us above a certain age knew, loved and were raised to inherit died on 9/11; and a new America has emerged over the past 22 years, one that may have all the familiar sites and sounds, yet is drastically not the America prior to 9/11.
Was 9/11 a metaphysical event or not? I want a third option on that. Being Christian means that superstition has no place in one’s worldview. Superstition is wholly a pagan concept. At the same time, to ignore the metaphysical and describe it as superstition is also not Christian. The pagan view is that there are events which are driven by forces that cannot be understood, while the secular view is that all things which happen originate from a physical explanation, even if the causes are not yet understood.
The Christian worldview is that what we see as anomalous behaviors have an explanation that is known but not fully understood in cause or meaning. Nevertheless, there is a framework that reconciles the physical and metaphysical. This is true at least for Christians who hold to an orthodox Christian worldview. Too many Christians point to rational events, like a child dying of cancer, as part of “God’s plan,” which is a superstition. Others refuse to even consider a supernatural cause for something or even accept the existence of evil in any literal sense.
Without laying out that framework, it becomes impossible take something like 9/11 and give it any substantive meaning like Rod has done above. On top of that, the things which do happen are often a lesson, whatever their origin. God can turn all things to good, even the wicked things, but it is not always in our definition of good. We want to see good as things which are pleasing to the senses, bringing comfort, or providing a reconciliation with our expectations. Often, what is seen is good is simply satisfying the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. We do not take an event such as 9/11 and see how God blessed it by revealing truths about us as both a warning and a reminder of the covenant that binds all Christians.
The warning was that God permitted evil to act in this way. The reminder of the covenant was both to see this warning and to see the small miracles that happened within that warning. The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation.
With regard to 9/11 itself, the warning was clearly to turn away from our excess and hubris and to return to the Christian values and nature of America. It is not saying that America is a Christian nation, for a nation is an earthly thing, but that a nation can be Christian in how it acts. It’s also not to say that America has ever at all been perfectly Christian, but that at least a Christian viewpoint has informed much of the character of American life.
I think that the rejection of Christianity happened after World War Two, when America found itself occupying what was essentially a deserted imperial stage and realizing that it had the economic power to conquer all around it. Materialism became the greatest virtue of a nation that had taken the first chastisement of the Great Depression and ignored it. Hedonism, both overt in popular culture, and hidden in the form of “swinging,” the embrace of Randian-style economic greatness as a virtue unto itself, sexual “liberation,” and so on, showed that we took the blessing of victory over evil and squandered it. On top of that, American life mocked the world and any sense of decency. Being able to eat to excess at all hours of the day while people make mud pies to fill empty bellies, to provide a better existence for our pets than many people would ever see, to consume and pollute a world shared by all, to engage in the worship of money and technology…and most of all to not just tolerate sins like pornography, abortion, gambling, and gluttony, but to promote them as being positive…I think you could make a good case for the values that many modern American hold as being wholly satanic in even a loose interpretation.
In that sense, 9/11 was a call to redirect ourselves to a Godly behavior, not any sort of call to defend American virtue, because that virtue no longer exists. In other words, everyone pretty much missed the point of the whole thing. The attackers had their own reasons - the significance of 9/11 as a historical date is lost on most people. In a meta sense, it also marked a civilizational reversal of an era of security for Christendom, because Christendom no longer exists.
The deepest meaning of all is perhaps that it is a sign of the end times. COVID showed that we are not secure, in spite of our belief in technology. Likewise, to see that much of the world rejected what we had to offer meant that we can no longer see our position as the most powerful and wealthy nation on the face of the earth as being any sort of shield against bad things happening. I tend to have a quiet unease about so many things these days, both big and small, and I am sure I am not alone in that. If you take that deeper meaning, then 9/11 was a wake up call and sign to find out way back to God before it is too late. Instead, we got further chastisement in the form of two disastrous wars.
I am wondering what the next chastisement is going to be. Maybe a simple implosion of our currency as the world standard. That would certainly do it. Whatever form it comes in, we Christians need to reject any superstitious or secular interpretation and discern if it is a sign from God, then act accordingly.
Re: The warning was that God permitted evil to act in this way.
God never prevents us from sinning. He has given us free will and while there will be judgment for all that we do, he will not stop us from doing it.
"The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation." Excellent, and I heartily agree with everything you have said. I would like to read more. Wish you had your own Substack.
it felt metaphysical. after the attack cities were very quiet. it felt as though a violent, brief cataclysm / conflict of spiritual proportion had just occurred. and that that cataclysm has re-ordered the world. or perhaps more accurately, the spiritual balance of power in the world (or both). since that day Christianity, and western civilization - have moved into a swift decline. where are we headed? well, if the west continues on this path - perhaps to the fall of the west as we know it and a new world where the west (and the rights it protects) will be subordinate to a digital/theocracy alien to historic western values. It feels as if Christianity has fallen and that fall is embodied in the events of 911. And the descent is continuing and the future is terrifyingly bleak (hence the cultural despondence in the west post 911). That despondence may be an unspoken reality we all live with contained in the unconscious/primordial brain. I feel it is there after 911. In a modern world, Christianity is now not as much a place as a constellation of believers across the earth, some (and increasingly more and more) practicing their faith in secrecy.
Yep. The quiet I mentioned in NYC was also present in Denton and Dallas the day of. Its character was different. Not peace. Apprehension. Like what it feels like in the eye of a hurricane, or that stillness before a tornado arrives.
In Canada that week the mood was one of grief. And it was moving to see so many American flags flying, and the "God bless America" signs in front of churches in the small Ontario towns. How many of us would be able to lay hand on a Canadian flag had some great atrocity been suffered north of the border?
I spent 9/11/2008 in Moscow - the one in Russia, not Idaho. At that point, the last 9/11 I had spent in the US was 9/11/2001. I went to a moleben at St. Catherine's (the OCA representation church) and it was a big deal, with lots of news reporters and the US Ambassador being in attendance. One of the bells outside the church is dedicated to the victims of 9/11. In my hotel room, I turned on the television, and watched things, like coverage of the towers coming down, for the first time since they had happened. (https://breathofhallelujah.com/2022/09/11/9-11-01-21/ for some pictures and stuff.) You can chalk up ulterior motives or what have you, but in some ways, it seemed like the Russians were doing more to "never forget" than the Americans.
Whatever happened that day certainly wasn't just a thing for the US. In some way, I think that the "Rich Men of Richmond" phenomenon captures a little bit of that feeling - that for a moment, the "common folk" of the world see each other as brethren, the way we ought to be in Christ.
I think that 9/11 could have been a transforming experience, and for a few days, it was - an America united. And then we got the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and two wars in which America was told that the best thing we could do to defeat the terrorists was to go shopping.
Had Bush had stopped with the eviction of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, things might have turned out favorably. But hubris and ignorance got the better of Bush and he overextended American military power.
We had the whole world behind the hunting of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Iraq was, as many of my students who were there, the 710 War (read it upside down and it makes sense). And all of them were very, very, very bitter.
Not to mention (and I am in no way defending Saddam Hussein) that #2 on Osama bin Laden's hit list, after the US, was Saddam Hussein. So we gave our #1 enemy HIS worst enemy... for what?
General Wesley Clarke said that in 2001 there was a plan to invade 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off with Iran.
Could be. Most countries' military have long-range plans to invade and/or defend against multiple countries. Of course, the real draw in the Middle East is the oil and the access to it through the Persian Gulf.
In 1917, America had battle plans that had been written up to invade Saskatchewan. Why? Who knows.
There's also the mind-game part of it. If someone like General Clarke says something like that, it also may be bluster to get someone, somewhere to cooperate with something.
Then why didn't it happen?
Why murder all those people and abandon the plan?
and really, do you think any sane person would say (or sit in a room with someone saying): let's stage a massive fake terrorist attack, destroy downtown NYC, and murder thousands of people, to invade...Somalia, Sudan and Libya? Really?
Why not just plant a false flag somewhere in Mesopotamia, have CNN and the NYT sell it (like they sell every war) and go from there?
The Bush administration came into office desiring to "finish" with Iraq what Poppy Bush, very sensibly, had not.
What kind of difference would it have made to you, Jon, if Kuwait became a part of Iraq? It might have lit a fire under us to become energy independent. The first Gulf War was the original sin. It was undertaken for bogus reasons. It was immoral. The old man is as guilty as his idiot boy.
The First Gulf War was an international effort and Bush 41 was admirable in not pursuing it to attempt regime-change in Iraq. As I have said about Russia on Ukraine, aggressive wars for territory need to be resisted as the crimes that they are. A free-for-all world of great powers doing as they please is a world on course for those terrible bright milliseconds that will leave billions of corpses by the time the skies clear again.
Agreed. Desert Storm was strategically smart and showed restraint, as well as drawing a line in the sand. And we got a good airbase in one of the few ME countries that really does not mind us being there. Then Dubya and his collection of morons and maniacs stepped in.
Hubris, ignorance, and--cowardice on the part of the opposition. Who besides Ted Kennedy saw what was really happening and said so. I mean elected official. Patrick J. Buchanan did.
Robert Byrd?
OK.
Ron Paul & Dennis Kucinich. Yeah I know they were sort of cranks, one R one D. But they were right about Iraq.
I like them both.
My husband wrote to the new head of Homeland Security (who was from our city) and said he was a young father with young kids but he would do anything, ANYTHING, they came up with for people like him to do -- he suggested volunteer watchmen at major landmarks. We got nothing at all but the president saying we should shop and stay at hotels, and the unconstitutional "Patriot" Act.
Exactly. The tragedy should have led to more cooperation - instead, it was turned into Consumerism on steroids and the "Patriot" Act for "freedom".
In the second section of Rod's essay, he complains mightily about California's descent into tranny totalitarianism and quite specifically laments that the churches aren't doing enough to resist it.
Then in the third section he goes on to excoriate Christians who are resisting it. Because they're icky. And the way they go about it is icky. He won't go sit down with Wilson, less his presence offer Wilson and his accolytes some sort of endorsement.
However, at the end he goes so far as to admit that he has "a strong feeling that there are many people within the broader Christian community in Wilson’s church who are not Christians-and-mad-as-hell-about-it. I hope they prevail, somehow."
So we should want them to prevail against the Progressive cultural zeitgeist but not be icky in how they do it.
Rod wants people, especially Christians, to resist tranny totalitarian madness, to pick one issue. What forms of resistance to this are acceptable and not icky?
Pray against it privately. Sure. Not icky and something I'm sure Wilson and Isker would agree and probably do so in their daily prayers.
Pray against it publicly in front of facilities where the procedures are done, like the pro- lifers do. Sure, but you'll start running into the same resistance that they did from the legislators and the courts as you do it. In fact, the laws are already in place to blunt the effectiveness of those demonstrations because of the abortion wars so they'll immediately be turned on the anti- tranny prayer warriors.
Write letters to the editor, vote moar harder, use the courts (somehow), sign a petition. In other words, keep trying to make change using the tools of a broken system run by people who hate you. These people have the upper hand, politically speaking, on the Left Coast, the Northeast, and large swaths of the Upper Midwest and the backing of a Medical Industrial Complex that stands to make billions of dollars performing unnecessary medical procedures on healthy boys and girls with the added bonus of creating patients for life who have to pay for hormones and other medications to maintain the charade.
But at least you're not being icky.
If a man is serious about these procedures as being evil, then he shouldn't be afraid of getting icky to stop them. Particularly when so far the only method of of being icky currently on offer is Isker's rhetoric.
Yeah, there's a bit of "I have no wish to be associated with...those" going on.
Rod thinks we've already lost and there's no point fighting.
No, I think we must fight, while we can. We might win! But we need to be careful how we fight, that we don't turn into what we hate. And we also need to prepare to lose -- meaning, prepare for the possibility that for whatever reason, God has allowed us to be carried into exile, so to speak, and that we have to prepare to keep the life of faith going under these conditions.
"...we must fight, while we can. We might win!"
While I understand that the left has won because of its 'long march through the institutions', I don't know how they were able to capture so many minds with what I consider to be foolishness. No matter what we do, they capture more minds every day. You have said many times that you thought that the gender battle would be the one that would cause us to finally rise and put a stop to the nuttiness. Well, some small battles may have been won by the masses yet the elites march on, undeterred.
I think the only way to win is to change minds (or, more specifically, that minds will change due to external forces because I don't see our efforts as being successful) and I don't think that will happen as long as we maintain some level of comfort. The question is how long will we be able to maintain? We are steadily degrading both economically and culturally, sort of bumbling and stumbling our way to ruin. Are we on the brink of a tipping point?
You know what's comin' next, doncha? Yeah, ya do.
We need it all. We need it now. We need it fast. Ruin must be so complete that all recognize the ruin and all realize the cause. Only then MIGHT we regain our senses.
Is there another way? If so, what?
Yeah I’ve wondered myself. When people say we have to resort to violence to oppose transing kids, what are they proposing? Killing the kids or their parents that allow it? Killing the doctors? Shooting up the California legislature? Bombing a hospital? I await someone explaining how that’s gonna work. To be just, force of arms has to be in self defense or defense of innocent people one is in a position to help with violence. Or a war declared by lawful authority. I just don’t think killing doctors and teachers & trans enablers is going to get anywhere except to get the perpetrators killed. Passive nonviolent resistance means you often go to jail but it has worked (Ghandi, MLK, a bunch of men in Argentina who surrounded a church to keep a bunch of wackos from desecrating it).
One of my favorite quotes: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.”
― I.F. Stone
I think back when the Bruderhof had its "Daily Dig" that this was paired with some sort of commemoration of Sophie Scholl. On the day before her trial and execution, she had a dream, "On a beautiful sunny day, I brought a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church was up a steep mountain, but I carried the child safely and firmly. Unexpectedly, there opened up before me a crevasse on the glacier. I had just time enough to lay the child safely on the other side before I plunged into the abyss." She interpreted the dream this way, according to her cellmate: “The child in the white dress is our idea. The idea will prevail in spite of all obstacles. We were permitted to be pioneers, but we must die early for the sake of that idea.”
I think that there are a number of parallels between the story of the White Rose and the story of the priest Eleazar and the mother with the seven sons which come up in 2 Maccabees (canonically and 4 Maccabees (semi-canonically). I got chills when I came across 4 Maccabees 1:11 - "All people, even their torturers, marvelled at their courage and endurance, and they became the cause of the downfall of tyranny over their nation. By their endurance they conquered the tyrant, and thus their native land was purified through them." It also drove home the point that often tyrants are put down more effectively through martyrs than armies.
Thank you Katja.
That's a beautiful post.
It is a beautiful post.
The Izzy Stone quote is partially lifted from something George Eliot(Mary Ann Evans) wrote in the 1800s. But it is a fine sentiment.
Wow. Thanks for that post.
You are really wrong here. There is a spirit of fanaticism and malice in Isker's book. You are taken in by the fallacy of believing that you cannot oppose evil if you aren't malicious and fanatical. I have sat face to face with Christian men and women who faced evil worse than anything Isker or I are likely to see, and they didn't oppose it with ferocious hatred in their hearts. Isker's rhetoric will not destroy anything, other than Isker.
I can tell you this. Take Benjamin J. Corey. I question he is even saved or actually knows the Lord, given that he seems to give left wing shibboleths far more credence than Scripture. That he may be one of those when the time comes who says, "Lord Lord," and Jesus says, "I knew you not." However, if he gave me an invite to dine and talk, I would probably take him up on it.
I'll ask you the same question I asked JonF311 below: Are you arguing the use of physical force and the use of directed (not broad) violence is always evil? A necessary evil, perhaps, but always still evil.
I would argue that force and violence are tools that can be employed, like all tools, to both righteous and malicious ends.
Whenever people argue that violence is evil, I think of this quote by George Orwell,
“We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us"
But do not let necessary evils become so necessary that they cease to appear evil.
No, but we shouldn't pretend that we are not outsourcing our defence to 'rough men'.
On the contrary we should honour the rough men and be grateful that it's not us who have to sully our hands with potential violence.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
Dear old Rudyard Kipling!
I haven't thought of that poem in a long time, thanks for the reminder.
I completely agree. God consistently has used fighters and called those who believe in Him, believe in good, to fight evil and defend those who cannot defend themselves. The Apostles were armed and Jesus had no problem with that, just with their improper use. And told followers, "Buy a sword, sell your cloak if you have to." And when he returns, he makes it abundantly clear he will be there to establish a peaceful world. But first, he and God will be doing a LOT of violence.
Sometimes, you do have to fight. The actions of evil and its activities require it.
That's also playground 101.
Let us be clear, violence is a last resort, and never to be something sought after for those who follow Jesus. Jesus made it VERY clear that love and peace, HIS peace, should be what we reach for. But also knew what those motivated by evil hearts and minds would do and knew we should prepare for that.
Christianity is not a pacifist faith. No, we are no warmongers seeking a fight. But we need to be ready to fight, should the fight become necessary.
That's what the Black nationalists and others advocating the use of force said in opposition to MLK's nonviolence in what looked to many to be a very righteous cause against determined, entrenched, violent opponents. Hard to argue against them, from within the framework you're offering.
No. Because the Black nationalists wanted a fight. Further, viewed those they opposed with hatred and, given chance, did not want to balance things, as it seems to be consistently the case with Left wing grievance mongers. If they had had their way and had the power, they would have flipped things, going from oppressed to oppressors. And, there was absolutely nothing of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, either to provide discernment or restraint.
Which is why MLK was right and they were wrong.
MLK's nonviolent approach helped him to be viewed as a decent, peaceful person with good intentions. His assassination therefore caused outrage and moved more people toward supporting his cause, which helped start implementation of racial equality policies. At a minimum, more people starting thinking perhaps more should be done in that area.
On the other hand, people using violent measures, such as Black nationalists, alienated people and were counter productive, since more people could say to themselves "well, maybe the blacks are bad and undeserving of better treatment?"
The same situation can/will happen if Christians use violent tactics. So, we should use strong but non-violent tactics to show our commitment while staying true to our Christian views. Peaceful public protests for example (apparently blocking traffic is now considered a peaceful form of protest!).
If we use violence, we'll be lumped in with Far Right extremists and other unsavory radical groups. Keep in mind the vast majority of news media is not on the side of Christians. So, any acts of violence (or anything close) will be amplified by the media to show how terrible and dangerous Christians are.
All depends. Because things could get far worse than they ever did in the 60s. It could, at some point, literally become fight or die. Take Nazi Germany. Are you going to get into that boxcar and peacefully go to the camp? Or you going to fight? If things get that bad, you've worse things to worry about than bad pr.
Well, I hesitate to go up against the great Dukeboy01, but remember that what Isker did was write a book. What's the purpose of writing a book, specifically that kind of book? To convince people. NOBODY is convinced by a screed like that (no, I haven't read beyond the excerpts and I don't need to). As far as I can tell Isker is trying to firk up the troops into a lather. I believe it's called preaching to the choir. Nobody like me is going to change his mind based on this kind of vaporing. But it will get him airplay. And it got him mentioned here, which, I suspect, is a pretty well-read site by those who DON'T comment.
Long long ago John Henry Newman cautioned against "violent ultra parties" which damage the cause they fight for. Not quite so long ago T.S. Eliot said Christians needed to cultivate a new discipline of suffering. If that's where we're at, that's where we're at.
That's really true -- and that's 100 percent how Douglas Wilson operates. Wilson is truly an intelligent man. But his shtick is performative. He reminds me of one of my kinfolks who thinks every problem in the world can be handled by giving the malefactor a good cussin'. It changes nothing in the world, but it makes Cud'n Earl feel like he's accomplished something. When I read Wilson's stuff, I feel that I've just read an exceptional performance by someone who doesn't really care about persuading others, only about demonstrating his virtuosity in trashing an opponent. It's like he doesn't want converted hearts, only high-fives from his bros (and they're all bros).
I was that kind of writer when I started out. Then I became a Christian, and grew out of it, mostly. I am always tempted to malice and cleverness in my writing, so I know what that's like. Not being high-and-mighty here.
You know who is the master of tart, focused, direct writing that also can persuade like no other? Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan. I well remember reading in the New York Post one of his syndicated columns, this one about the desecration of the Sacrament at St. Patrick's (one of Big Buggery's more charming exploits). I sat down to read that column thinking I was some kind of liberal (a "wishy washy Social Democrat" as a friend of mine, who is one, likes to say). I got up from reading it knowing I was no such thing.
Do you have a link to that column?
I’ll try to find it. I’m on my phone now.
Sorry. It appeared in the New York Post. I don't think they're archived that far back.
I will say this much. If Buchanan wasn't a master polemicist there wouldn't have been half the hoo-hah over his courageous and completely correct line on the 1991 war.
Not only is Buchanan a brilliant writer, he has a strong historical knowledge of most of the world.
G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis were both pretty darned good at it, too.
I can’t stand this morph of GKC into a LARP figure. He was a major English writer, far, erm, weightier than a LibLab icon like Forster.
And Buchanan is a man of great personal charity, as is well known in Washington.
Another reason to hate him.
He was the major sponsor of the football field at Gonzaga High School, his old high school. It is called Buchanan Field. I wonder when the name will be ordered down by the Archbishop. By the way, Buchanan used to attend the Latin Mass at St. Mary's in Chinatown. I don't know where he goes now. The Latin Mass was suppressed by Archbishop Gregory recently.
If you turn to evil means to fight evil then evil has already won as you too have become a corrupt vassal of the Devil.
Are you arguing that physical force and the application of violence is always evil?
I am arguing the Wrath is a major sin- traditionally one of the Seven Deadly Sins
Also I accept my Church's teaching the we may indulge in violence in self-defense but it remains a necessary evil and hence a sin for which we must be cleansed.
Wrath is an attitude of the heart. Not an action.
Jesus made it clear that "attitudes" can be sins as well-- e.g., "lusting in one's heart". When I confess I generally go straight to confessing my dark passions even when not acted on since those are the source of any misdeeds I do.
Yes, and that's what I'm getting at. Violence is not inherently sinful. The purpose and reason for it is what makes it sinful, including acting out of "wrath."
The thing is, most of these Christian jihadis haven't done so much as run for school board, and a guy like Isker has never run anything bigger than a church with a couple hundred congregants, but somehow they think they have the force (and the wherewithal) to run some vast and mighty American Protestant kingdom, enforce laws, and maintain order. They're no different from Adrian Vermuele and his plan for a Catholic supremacist empire sketched out from his office at Havard—they're delusional LARPers.
The system, as messed up as any human system will inevitably be, seems to be functioning for those willing to go all in and act, rather than those who whine and dream behind podcast microphones in their crap-strewn basements.
YES! Thank you, Jonah! I remember back in the 1990s, First Things caused a huge row by publishing a symposium asking whether the continued legalization of abortion de-legitimized the US regime. Father Neuhaus concluded, more or less, "almost" -- saying that the one thing that saved us is that we still have the power, through sustained democratic action, to change things.
Part of the problem is conservatives' inherent but quite natural weakness: We don't *want* to be part of a system. We just want to be left alone as much as possible. And we're pushing for a less left-leaning society without the full institutional support of a political party.
We may sneer at people like Isker because they're gauche and we don't want to be associated with them, but they're also not useful, except, potentially, for (hypothetically) radicalizing a few lone wolves who would go do stupid things that only harm the whole effort in the first place. When the American right, broadly defined, hasn't really tried to persuade and hasn't even used some of the levers of power it does hold (see Missouri today as a welcome exception), it just seems too early to be like, "hey, let's debate the ethics of political and religious violence." (Hell, we've seen tons of illegitimate leftist violence in the past 15 years and conservatives don't even have the vocabulary for denouncing it and putting a stink on it. Can we at least try that first?)
Giving oneself over willfully to hate and advocating that others do the same is more than "icky," a word doing a lot of work in your comment.
But are they encouraging hating people, or as Jesus said, hating sin? Because the things they are targeting are certainly sin, moral rot, degeneracy. Nothing good, true, beautiful or honorable.
Christians are supposed to hate sin, but we are not allowed to hate sinners. Extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
But the life of virtue requires not being controlled by emotions. Stoking the furnace of anger (one of the most powerful emotions) can lead to that anger controlling us.
Sad to read about the strife within the Christian community of Dreher. This happens way too often.
But remember what Jesus said about judging others: "Judge not and you will not be judged. For with what judgment ye judge shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye and ignore the log in your own?" Matthew 7:1-3.
I say this because that guy from Moscow Idaho, and his padawan, seem to be fixated on Rods shortcomings while ignoring their own. And their own seem quite ghoulish if true.
Stay in the peace of Christ. Shake off the dust.from your feet.
Judge people, yes. For the most part, we cannot know their hearts, that's God's realm. But we CAN judge their actions. And call sin sin. We have to, in fact, speak truth. Some may be offended by that. They were in Christ's day. And remain so, thousands of years later.
Rod, Doug Wilson might be right about one thing. You tend too much to punch right and to believe the worst about people on the right. Your statement yesterday at EC about J6 protesters is typical:
"Don’t get me wrong: the January 6th riot was an assault on the American political order, one that deserves harsh punishment. We can argue over whether or not the heavy sentences being handed out to convicted rioters are proportionally just, but there’s not much real debate over the extraordinary villainy of the acts."
I am not one that thinks we should never punch right. But to paint Wilson as a Orwellian foot stomp totalitarian (and you have not apologized for that to my knowledge) or to call J6 an assault on American political order when they were protesting the rigging of the 2020 election, which really was an assault on the American political order, is out of line.
I love most of your writing. I am teaching Live Not By Lies to a Christian study group. But maybe Wilson is right. Maybe you do need to get a grip. I will be praying for you.
I think it must be amusing to most subscribers to consider that this newsletter, which nearly every day contains some outrage about woke, left-wing culture, spends too much time "punching to the Right." For some people, punching to the Right *at all* is too much. Second, I'm not going to apologize for calling the J6 attack on Congress an assault on the American order. I don't for one second buy the liberal freak-out claim that they were mounting a coup, or anything like that. It couldn't possibly have succeeded. But it was a terrible thing to break into the Congress and trash it as they did, and of course it was a symbolic attack on the American order.
Finally, I didn't call Wilson an Orwellian boot-stomper. Re-read what I wrote. I said if you want an image of the future Isker would like to see, then imagine Douglas Wilson's brogue stamping on your face forever. That's Isker, not Wilson.
1) Well, it's kind of Wilson, too -- or in any case not a stretch to see why he and others may have read it that way.
2) Given the kind of "pan-Protestant" integralism he longs for, would it really be so wrong to call Wilson a wanna-be boot-stomper?
I agree that in some sense 9/11 was the beginning of the end, and it is interesting to cast it in the light of 'God's judgment against a people'. I say this as someone who served in the (what would become) long, long wars following the attacks, who lost many a solid teammate in these wars, who met their widows and young children.
I remember in the days following 9/11 all of the talk was about "not letting the terrorists win". If you didn't do whatever thing was prescribed, often by GW Bush or the government more broadly, you were "letting the terrorists win." Mostly stopping the terrorists from winning comprised returning to pre-9/11 everyday life as quickly as possible. Go shopping, we were told. Only by doing this could we show they didn't rock us, bad. And it didn't take long--by the end of October of that year, if memory serves--for the enterprising amongst the government to seize upon the moment to pass the PATRIOT Act, and forever change our relationship to government, surveillance, and our Creator-endowed inalienable rights. Like many, I didn't know any better. I was a young man. I supported this stuff.
And now, more than 20 years later, I can't help but feel deep sadness in thinking that yes, indeed, the terrorists did win. In 2001, we said they'd win if they could knock us off our routine, cause us to falter, make our financial system collapse. It took a while, and, let's be frank, most of the damage was more due to an auto-immune response than anything the attacks directly did, but at the end of the day...I think they won. They caused the freest, greatest nation in the history of the earth to trade in its liberties for the security of an increasingly totalitarian state. The surveillance and forefeiture of rights at the center of the PATRIOT Act is directly linked to the social instability, lack of trust in institutions, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and all the rest that has convinced us that free speech shouldn't be too free, censorship is ok, everything we do should be surveilled, and that coming things like CBDC will be logical extensions of this mindset. These may seem like tenuous connections, but look carefully. The connections are there.
The terrorists did not overrun us on 9/11, but they did seed a slow and steady infection that, decades later, has achieved exactly what they'd hoped: the crumbling of the Great Satan they set out to take down that clear September morning. I pray our nation will repent while there still might be time. But who will risk, who will stand, against this new tyranny and against this rebellion against reality itself?
Ah yes the Patriot Act.
It was a massive 342 pages long, amending 15 separate federal laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.
Effective October 26th. A mere 45 days after 9/11.
It was almost as if they had already written it.
Hm.
Yes the appearance of the Patriot Act in such little time is almost as metaphysical as the Project for a New American Century policy document written in September 2000 which states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".
PNAC's policy document, "Rebuilding America's Defences," openly advocated for total global military domination. Most of the PNAC members held highest-level positions in the George W. Bush administration
Although the PNAC group has been discredited by the twin disasters in the Middle East, they still think they're real players. They are funding Nikki Haley's run for the presidency and are cheerleaders for the Biden Administration's policy of funding Ukraine's military. But the PNAC's problem in America is that fewer and fewer men wish to join the military. America's military relies on naive young white men from rural areas and small towns, usually sons of men who served in the military before. But the young men have wizened up to the scam which if the American military-industrial complex. The concept of conscription is now being floated by the Pentagon to provide the manpower needs of the military-industrial complex.
For what it’s worth however in 1993 I wrote a magazine article about the first World Trade Center
...bombing. This Pearl Harbor bit was common currency in national security circles.
People tend to forget the 1993 bombing. But the trial was very interesting.
John Kerry had been pushing the Patriot Act since before the Oklahoma City bombing. After 9/11 he slapped a new name on his bill and got it passed. It was definitely pre-written.
The Oklahoma bombing was in 1995 I believe.
The first WTC bombing was in 1993....that might be when the Patriot Act was drafted.
At the trial it turned out that FBI informant, Emad Salem, had built the bomb.
He claimed the bomb was built "by supervision from the Bureau (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and the D.A. (district attorney)."
He had hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers that he had secretly recorded, and transcripts were made available to the press but were not made public.
oh now the entire Congress was in on the conspiracy to destroy downtown NYC and mass murder their own citizens so they could...conquer Somalia and the Sudan?
So let me get this straight: the Bush/Cheney cabinet, the CIA, Congress, Israel plus Wall St were all in on the plan??
That's my main reason for not believing in these ridiculous conspiracy theories. After a career working in global, Fortune 500 companies I'm aware of how incredibly difficult it is to keep something major secret for even a couple weeks. The idea that so many people would be directly involved in something of that magnitude and still maintain the secret is INSANE!
Agreed!
I also think there is something deep inside human psychology that looks for an unseen agent behind every action (esp the most spectacular and disruptive ones): either because our Fight/Flight response is primed to detect agency behind every falling leaf (the ancestor who jumped first was the one not eaten by the hidden tiger), and also it threatens our sense of control and stability to think our world can be radically permanently altered at any moment solely do to CHAOS.
Yeah Ben Franklin once observed that “three can keep a secret if two are dead.” That’s why all the “moon landing is fake” stuff is BS as well.
On 12/7/41 thousands of people went to San Francisco's Ocean Beach.. From accounts I've read, they stood quietly and looked east, bearing witness on what was to come.
And after 9/11/01, we were told to "go shopping", clutching our Open For Business bags, soon to be filled with more useless junk.
The terrorists showed us dumb Americans that we are not alone on this planet. There are many other ideological systems at play. Mostly there is a war between the East (Communist collectivism) and the West (democratic individualism). The 9/11 attacks didn't start the war, but it exposed it. Since then, America has been enduring a religious war that is transforming our society.
For Massachusetts, the battleground is in the schools. Public school curriculum have been changed to promote Marxist goals (through SEL, social and emotional learning). Teachers are being replaced by therapists, whose goal is to dumb down the students. Critical thinking skills are being replaced by Communist gobbley gook (SEL). Computers are replacing teachers, in the classroom. Now they are trying to get rid of MCAS altogether (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). They know that any form of accountability will embarrass them, because Marxists are not about being intelligent. They are about compliance to totalitarian goals. They need an uneducated population to achieve this. Marxists don’t wait. When they see an opening they run for it, grab the power and transform the system. Their ultimate goal is to make more Marxists. This means taking over the schools and transforming the people. The people are largely unaware of what is going on.
James Lindsay describes why Marxism should be classified as a religion. If the Supreme Court would do this, the whole mess could be undone with a single blow. (Teaching Marxism in the schools violates the Constitution's First Amendment, that ensures a separation of church and state.)
Why leftist Marxism is a religion, by James Lindsay:
Session 1 https://youtu.be/YfwMpxhrCYE
Session 2 https://youtu.be/pTuqKOSQYdI
Except Marxism isn’t a religion. Get real.
It may not technically be a religion, but it's an ideology that in many ways has characteristics of one.
“Technically”? You mean it’s a matter of law. This is a really dumb idea.
By technically I mean by strict definition. Numerous writers, including quite a few heavyweights, have talked about its religious characteristics without necessarily calling it a religion outright.
BUT IT’S A NON-STARTER IN A COURT OF LAW! These cats want to litigate it. Sorry, that’s stupid.
Yes, we were always taught that Marxism is an economic system where the measn of production are owned by the people. It brainwashes people into a collective mindset, where they don't think of themselves as individuals, but as part of a group. They live to serve the group. This is their moral universe. Lindsay explains how this notion replaces "God" in their ideological system. Marxism is a Godless religion and it is taking over our country. America should lock it out of the schools.
I would call Marxism a "political religion".
There's a great book about this called "Politics as Religion" by Emilio Gentile (2001), and he calls these totalizing political-ideological movements "political religion", which he describes as:
"Political religion is the sacralization of a political system founded on an unchallengeable monopoly of power, ideological monism, and the obligatory and unconditional subordination of the individual and the collectivity to its code of commandments. Consequently, a political religion is intolerant, invasive, and fundamentalist, and it wishes to permeate every aspect of an individual’s life and of a society’s collective life. The resulting religion of politics is a religion in the sense that it is a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and end of human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme entity.
During the Modern Era, the relationship between the religious and political dimensions and between power and sacredness entered a new phase that gave rise to the sacralization of politics, which reflected the affirmation of the primacy of the sovereignty of the state, secularization of culture, the loss of the church’s spiritual hegemony in relation to the state and society, the subsequent separation of the church and state, the triumph of the principle of the people’s sovereignty and the creation of mass politics."
Highly recommend!
I had to post quickly before I completed Rod Dreher's post because I found Dreher's quoting of Karl Rove to be unusually amusing. What a hubristic fool. This was my first laugh of the day. Thanks!
I find that Rove quote highly revealing.
That's how our so-called government think.
It is fascinating that such a mediocre man, a struggling political consultant, can get to be the brains behind a failed Texas businessman who used his accident of birth- being a son of a president- to become Governor of Texas and then President of the United States. It should have been a novel rather than a disaster that became true.
Look at the damage these people have done, though.
I see them as a criminal gang who have laid waste to the middle east and destroyed the civil liberties of their fellow countrymen.
I don't think Bush was malicious. He has a high degree of entitlement. If Bush was born George Davis, he might have become a bank president in Odessa, Texas.
At the VERY BEST, he's a is a tragically shallow man who does not pause to think things out. Is very much driven by his emotions and does not stop to think of second and third tier consequences beforehand.
At very best.
Yes. He was no chess player.
Actually, I think a lot of it was Dick Cheney's manipulation... After all, he made himself VP, and then proceeded to make megabucks off of the Oil Wars.
Yes. Cheney is the Squire of Halliburton.
It is unwise to wrap up metaphysical beliefs with secular events. Nobody really can know the ways of God. We can try to understand Him through religion but His power is so much more than ours that our musings about His interventions are pretty pointless.
I generally think God has turned His back on Western Civilization because Western Civilization has turned its back on Him. Remember, He does not need us. We need Him. And most people alive today ignore Him or even trash Him. But I could be wrong, too. I often am.
I totally agree with your first paragraph. Over time, I've come to understand that we rarely understand what the real (spiritual) purpose of almost anything was, including our own. What was important in our lives - to God - may be a moment that we barely remember or something that seemed unimportant to us: but we did (or didn't) do our job at the time.
I'll give you an example: back when I was very young, and living a frankly sinful life without thinking much about it, I had a sudden urge to go pray in a church. And for some reason I got up and went to find the closest church, which was a Catholic one. And I went up to the door, which was locked (this was almost 50 years ago!) and the priest came out, and asked, "What do you want?" And I said to pray in church. And he said, "Well, we're closed now. Come back ___ " and I don't remember when he said to come back, but it wasn't for a while, because I lost all desire and went back from whence I came. Well, it took me years to realize, long after my conversion, that God sent me there, not for me at all, but for the priest. I'd done what I was sent to do. He hadn't. And I often pray for him.
Amen.