Just a quick post to thank those of you who have reached out in the comments or via email to let me know you’re praying for me. The symptoms have transitioned from being like a mild head cold to chills, aches, congestion and a surprising lack of energy. More flu-like, if you will.
I’m taking at least a couple of more days to fully recover, but am grateful it hasn’t been worse, and hoping that it stays that way.
Daily Verse | Luke 6:46
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?”
Thursday’s Reading: Luke 8-11
Happy Thursday, my friends. I don’t want to be there when pizza and pepperoni break up.
Well, the Kung Flu Sicken finally caught up with me. I tested positive for it yesterday. I’m in the early stages and have mild cold-like symptoms. I suppose the next few days will tell me just how bad a case I’ve caught. If you don’t hear anything from me on Friday, assume I’m laying prone somewhere as the Peking Lung Pox cycles through my body.
After nearly two years of virus-free living, having the Frankenvirus setting up shop in my lungs makes the situation super personal. It also thickens my already dark attitude about Dr. Faucistein and his communist collaborators in the Wuhan virus lab. That guy is an accessory to a crime and doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to the right protocols.
One of Trump’s biggest failures was letting Fauci stay instead of getting a real doctor in there.
Let’s go, Fau-chi!
And as much as I admired what Trump accomplished, I’ve always had misgivings about a vaccine that was rushed to production, breaking every protocol we’ve learned over the decades about how to safely roll one out. People who got any one of the vaccines are in the test group, and I’ve heard too many stories about people I know or are within one or two degrees of separation from me who have experienced devastating, life-altering results from the vaccine.
Of course, there are many who have taken the vaccine and have done fine.
The vax is just not for me, and I don’t regret not getting it. In fact, the more the government minders push us to get the vax, the more reluctant I am to get it. Listen, Fat, what’s with the pressure tactics?
Have you noticed that people who have been vaxxed are getting the WuFlu again? Did you know that natural immunity is stronger than the vaccine? Did you also know that the vaccine is good for, oh, about six months?
Statistician William M. Briggs has been tracking Covid and in one of his latest posts, he writes (emphasis his):
We mentioned these two items weeks ago, but it bears repeating.
One, the only two outcomes—and it’s really just one—worth studying are illness severity and death. All other derived measures are always a clue you are being fooled.
“Cases” are NOT an illness severity measure. Ignore ALL studies which invoke “cases”, whether they are on “our side” or theirs. “Cases” are NOT cases, but a combination of testing level (still at ridiculous levels), testing sensitivity (still too high), and multiple disease characteristics.
Look at hospitalizations for (and not after-admission-for-something-else-first either) the doom, or look at deaths of the doom. Nothing else.
Two, we cannot examine any study of efficacy without having removed from the data those people with prior infection who recovered.
How often is this done? Something close to never.
Why? Because many officials are still married to the noble lie that all should get vaccinated, even those who had the disease. And now we have the immoral, and deadly, vaccine mandates, designed to punish.
Obviously—to any scientist living before 2020—if a person has recovered and is vaxxed, you won’t know if his own body or the vax has kept him from dying. Vaccines should not even be administered before an anti-body test has been given, because of the very real possibility of harmful side effects.
I don’t care what you believe about the Wuhan Bat Flu and the vaccines—no one can deny that Big Pharma is getting filthy rich off of us. Any time you see a government pushing for something involving money, you know it’s about a transfer of wealth (usually from the middle class) to someone else or to some institution favored by the politicians, under the guise of “it’s good for you!”
You couldn’t convince me in 100 years that Joey Snow Cone cares about the American people. Neither do any of his henchmenpersons.
In the meantime, I’d appreciate your prayers for my family and me.
I’ll keep you posted.
Daily Verse | Luke 2:34-35
“This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”
Wednesday’s Reading: Luke 5-7
Thanks for joining me this Wednesday morning, Broadsiders. I think goat cheese is the black sheep of dairy products.
A student at Oberlin College in Ohio named Peter Fray-Witzer wrote a Karen-y note and published it as an Op-Ed in The Oberlin Review last week. The essence of his complaint is that he lives in Baldwin Cottage, “the home of the Women and Trans Collective,” which was recently scheduled to receive new radiators. The problem? “Cisgender men.”
In case you’re not hip to the new language our children are being indoctrinated with, “cisgender” means “normal.” A “cisgender male” is a man who knows he’s male and likes women, or a boy who isn’t confused about his sex and likes girls. But, because we’ve got the woke nonsense of the alphabet community infecting our society with all kinds of weirdness, we now “need” a new word to describe what was once considered normal by 99 percent of us (and the other 1 percent were lying).
It’s another Marxist tactic to break down society, making what has been normal for thousands of years just one category among many to choose from. The ground is level under the heel of the tyrants.
Back to Fray-Witzer. Xir writes that Them were sore afraid of normal men entering They’s sacred space to install the radiators.
I was angry, scared, and confused. Why didn’t the College complete the installation over the summer, when the building was empty? Why couldn’t they tell us precisely when the workers would be there? Why were they only notifying us the day before the installation was due to begin?
What was there to be “angry, scared, and confused” about? Pretty straight forward: new radiators will be installed in your room tomorrow.
The next day, I waited apprehensively. The workers began installing in common spaces, and I could see immediately that they were all men. It was clear that the College had not made a special request that male workers not be allowed onto the upper floors of Baldwin. Predicting when they would reach my room was pure guesswork. I was trying to anticipate whether I would be in class when they arrived, or if I’d have to welcome strangers into my room only to be ejected to allow them space to work.
The tension. So thick.
Fortunately, there was an out.
I left for class, and by the time I had come back, they appeared to be done, though Polo Man warned me that they would return later in the week to check the insulation. Sure enough, they were back the next day. I felt mildly violated and a little peeved.
I mean, is it over yet?
Can I just note something here that many others have noted? Oberlin College is a private liberal arts school with a student body of 3,000 — which costs $80,000 per student, per year, to attend. Glenn Greenwald scorches the irony:
That’s part of the insanity of this story. It’s a perfect illustration of how unhinged one can be when reality is considered subjective.
Fray-Witzer is demanding that the school coddle Xir’s frailty and weakness. Normal people would say, “OK, got it. I’ll make plans to either be away from my room or I can handle a 20-minute repair job while I study or read.”
This is making a problem out of nothing, based only on Xim’s imagination.
I don’t know, maybe Fray-Witzer was on deadline and didn’t have anything else to write about.
All I know is that I’ve already written too much about it. Here’s the deal:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
— Genesis 1:27
Stop pretending you’re something you’re not and deal with your issues instead of demanding the rest of the world bend to your version of reality.
Seriously. Enough.
Daily Verse | Mark 16:6
“You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.”
Tuesday’s Reading: Luke 1-4
Happy Tuesday, my friends. I had never imagined a hot pink bassoon — until just now.
I recognize that most of what I write about is the latest political or cultural outrage, of which there seems to be an endless supply. I’ve been blogging here five days a week for 18 months and I’m never out of material. I mostly decry the devolution of America, the greatest nation ever to exist on the earth, perpetuated by a degenerate generation of junior commies and their progeny who have trashed our inheritance as unworthy of them. Chief among them is the mentally unfit charlatan in the White House and his despicable entourage.
Saturating ourselves in the world of politics and culture can lead to stress, worry and anxiety if we don’t have a strong faith. That’s why I say that I write about faith, culture and politics, in that order, because politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of faith. As faith goes, so goes culture; as culture goes, so goes politics.
If a society has an abundant population of people who trust God and seek to follow him in their daily lives, the culture will reflect that. If a society has an abundance of people who believe in themselves and the power of the state, the culture will reflect that.
The less faith there is, the less a culture will embrace faith and the less the politics will reflect faith. That’s just logic.
However, it’s true that even in a culture that is outright hostile to the concept of God, there will be people of faith. For them, the diagram is going to look a little different. Instead of their faith influencing the culture at large (which is less likely, but not impossible, in a secular society), they will have to resist the corrosive effects of culture and politics on their faith.
I think this is true in two distinct ways. First, we need to prevent the corrosion of core doctrines.
[An elder] must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. (Titus 1:9)
For instance, the Bible says that all of human life is made in the image of God. Unfortunately, the world says that babies are expendable, based on the decision of the mother. Some Christians have embraced the definition of a child as a ‘choice,’ not as gift from God.
The creation of man and woman and a marriage joining them together is the example we see in scripture. Some Christians have adopted the world’s belief that ‘marriage’ can be between two or more members of the same sex.
These and other corrosive teachings have found their way into the church and need to be expunged.
The second way we need to resist the corrosive effects of culture and politics on our faith is by fixing our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 12:2). We see this most vividly in the account of Peter asking Jesus to call him to walk on the water during a storm on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 14:22-33).
And in the fourth watch of the night [Jesus] came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, “It is a ghost!” and they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.”
And Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
It is so easy to get caught up in the ‘wind and waves’ of the cultural storm we’re living in. If we take this account of Peter’s act of faith as a model, though, I imagine it would look like this:
We can notice the wind and the waves, but they don’t need to cause us fear or to be chastised for “little faith” if we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. Anyway, that’s how I try to manage my way through this season of our country’s history and hope that the blog reflects that.
As I place before you the latest outrage, remember that we live in a secular society that doesn’t know Christ, so we can’t expect something different from them. At the same time, it’s okay to point out the hypocrisy and double-standards and unconstitutional policies and actions we see.
Just keep your eyes locked on that horizon.
Daily Verse | Mark 13:37
“What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!'”
Monday’s Reading: Mark 14-16
Happy Monday! My parachuting school practices with 55-gallon black garbage bags while telling us to “roll like bananas.”
We live in a culture that is increasingly hostile and shows collective pathological gratification in the devaluing and destruction of others based on dubious moral claims and outright lies. We see it expressed in the violence of the BLM and Antifa movements, the cancel culture — and also in the hostility in the stands between fans of opposing teams.
NFL: Philadelphia Eagles and Baltimore Ravens
NHL: Nashville Predators and Seattle Kraken
NFL: Los Angeles Chargers and the Los Angeles Rams
MLB: San Diego Padres and Colorado Rockies
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall seeing fights this regularly between fans. There’s always been taunting, yelling and the occasional hat-flicking, but these are hard-core bare-knuckle brawls. And many of them include women, as in this altercation between Carolina Panther and Minnesota Viking fans:
I’m no sociologist, but I think these outbursts, along with the near-anarchy of Burn Loot Murder, Inc. and Antifa, are evidence of the coarsening of our culture: the loss of self-control, the application of force to trivial matters, the lack of compassion and the devaluing of human life. It is quite barbaric in some cases.
I’ve heard some commentators say that a lot of this is the result of pent up frustration over being locked down and being otherwise restricted during the Chinese Panic Plague of 2020. On the other hand, maybe people are just showing their true selves. Or maybe both.
Whatever it is, our culture is displaying a sickness — and not just the Peking Pox variety. We’re showing a soul sickness.
The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-21)
Of course, the Bible doesn’t leave us without hope. It also goes on to describe what a life led by the Spirit of God looks like.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)
What this implies is that our culture is not, generally speaking, led by the Spirit, i.e., we are a post-Christian society. I know most of us are aware of that, but I think it’s worth reiterating that whereas we still have with us the accoutrements of days gone by (e.g. the bas relief portrait of Moses in the House chamber that has hung there since 1950), they are mostly meaningless symbols to contemporary society except as irrelevant artifacts of an era long gone.
I used to say we were coasting on the fumes of our Christian heritage, but I don’t think even the fumes are with us any more — we’ve rolled about as far was we can go with the kinetic energy of our spiritual ancestors.
For believers, this presents a more difficult — but more illuminating — environment in which to demonstrate Christian character. Those who demonstrate love and joy and peace and the like will stand out like stars against a night sky.
The era in which we live is not ideal, but embrace it without ignoring the dysfunction, and watch for where God is at work around you. Who knows but that you were born for such a time as this?
Daily Verse | Mark 7:20-23
[Jesus] went on: “What comes out of a man makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.'”
Friday’s Reading: Mark 8-10
It’s Friday, my friends. Thanks for hanging with me another week. We’re halfway through October so you should start thinking about what you’re gonna be for Halloween. Unless it gets cancelled by Fauci or something.
The New York Post reported on Wednesday that Mark Zuckerberg, the uber-wealthy founder of Facebook, poured $419 million dollars into the 2020 presidential election. Not directly, but through non-profits that focused on getting out the vote for Democrats, i.e. Joey Sugar Cone.
During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters. But this wasn’t traditional political spending. He funded a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally nonpartisan — but demonstrably ideological — nonprofit organizations.
Analysis conducted by our team demonstrates this money significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states. In places like Georgia, where Biden won by 12,000 votes, and Arizona, where he won by 10,000, the spending likely put him over the top.
This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward.
The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used.
Four hundred and nineteen MILLION dollars. You do know that $500 million is half a billion dollars? Only $81 million more Zuck bucks needed.
Who can compete with that kind of money?
In an editorial by the Post Editorial Board, they write,
Of 25 CTCL grants of $1 million or more to cities and counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, 23 went to places Joe Biden won.
In Georgia, Doyle found, counties that received Zuck bucks were, on average, 2.3 points more Democratic in 2020 than 2016; non-funded counties barely moved.
All of this was happening in a close-fought race, with just tens of thousands of votes out of millions swinging the crucial Electoral College wins that sent Biden to the White House.
Also on Wednesday, Ann Coulter wrote about big money from George Soros swaying elections for District Attorneys across the country.
Liberal moneybags George Soros has spent millions of dollars installing criminal-friendly prosecutors around the country. (Back before it was “anti-Semitic” to mention Soros’ pro-murder campaign, The New York Times ran an article boasting of the old prune’s role in electing inert prosecutors, like Foxx.)
A few hundred thousand dollars dumped into a minor DA’s race is more than enough to decide an election. Soros has spent millions. [Kim] Foxx was Soros’ first success in electing DAs who would refuse to put another black man in prison.
An article at The Heritage Foundation explains what Soros is trying to do.
Foxx was a harbinger of things to come, when four years ago she became the first George Soros-backed rogue prosecutorial candidate to win.
The Washington Post said that, at that time, he had “plunked $300,000 into a [political action committee] created to elect Kim Foxx.”
Up for re-election this year, Foxx again is the beneficiary of Soros’ largesse, as he has already pumped at least $2 million into the Illinois Justice & Safety PAC to help her get re-elected.
But what’s all that money buying? And why is Soros so interested in county district attorney races? As we’ve written elsewhere, it’s because he and his prosecutorial puppets are seeking to “reimagine” and fundamentally transform our criminal justice system from an adversarial system pitting prosecutors against defense counsel, to a system where criminal defense attorneys, beholden to the movement, take over DA offices and enact non-prosecution policies.
So here we have two cases of liberal billionaires leveraging their wealth to procure electoral outcomes that they personally desired. Two guys are having an outsize influence on our elections, creating an unfair advantage for one political party over the other.
Again, who can compete with this kind of money?
Are you okay with this severe imbalance? Are you okay that, generally speaking, one person determined the outcome of the presidential election and gave us Joseph Robinette Biden?
Are you okay with basically one person ruining our cities by purchasing the election of rogue DAs?
Why are our elections susceptible to this kind of influence?
Where the heck are the GOP legislators? Why aren’t they raising hell about this?
How can we believe we have “free and fair” elections when they can essentially be determined by the uber-wealthy class, against whom the plebes can’t compete?
This is an outrage. We should demand that something be done to eliminate this kind of lopsided favoritism from billionaires who can essentially operate with impunity while degrading the voting process for all Americans.
This is part of the reason why America is being overrun by progressive Marxists. They’re being funded by partisan zillionaires.
Have a good weekend.
Daily Verse | Mark 3:5
“[Jesus] looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch our your hand.”
Thursday’s Reading: Mark 4-7
Happy Thursday, Broadsiders! Wearing name brand sports apparel does not make you an athlete. Just sayin’.
Resident Biden has been in office for just nine months and has managed to completely undo all that President Trump accomplished in four years. CNN headline: “Prices keep soaring: Inflation rockets to a 13-year high.”
Inflation is at a 13-year high. “The consumer price index, the nation’s key inflation measure, jumped 0.9% in June, the largest one-month increase in 13 years. Over the last 12 months, prices were up 5.4%, the biggest jump in annual inflation in nearly 13 years.”
The price of gasoline is fueling a large part of the increase. “Gas prices rose 45.1% compared to a year earlier.”
Food prices are rising. “Food prices are up 2.4% in the last 12 months, but prices for dining out rose 4.2%.”
The cost of used cars is up, too. “Used car prices were up 10.5% in June — the largest one-month jump in records that go back nearly 70 years, and a stunning 45.2% over the last 12 months.”
Your heating bills are going up this winter. “With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter.”
The number of foreigners trying to enter our country illegally is at record highs. Pew Research tells us, “The U.S. Border Patrol reported nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades.”
Supply chains are backed up. “[S]hipping a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles is currently six times more expensive than shipping one from L.A. to Shanghai.”
We’re quitting our jobs in record numbers. “Almost 3% of workers handed in their resignations in August, a record, the government reported Tuesday. The number of people quitting rose to 4.3 million, dwarfing the number of layoffs from employers, who cut 1.3 million jobs the same month.“
Healthcare workers who left their jobs rose year-over-year. “About 534,000 health care workers quit their jobs in August, up from about 404,000 during the same month in 2020.”
Women are quitting at a faster clip than men. “And women are quitting their jobs at a faster pace than men are, according to data from payroll services firm Gusto, which focuses on small businesses. Its analysis found that 5.5% of women quit their jobs in August, compared with 4.4% of men — a gender gap that’s the largest Gusto has seen since it began tracking the issue in early 2020.”
Our military is being degraded via discharging conservative soldiers and anti-vaxxers. “An estimated 350,000 of our military service members are being dishonorably discharged for refusing to take a completely unnecessary and experimental mRNA nanotech injection, which is now proven to degrade immune systems and cause many serious side effects.”
But at least we don’t have any more mean tweets!
Time is running out to confront the clowns wrecking our country.
Daily Verse | Matthew 28:19
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Wednesday’s Reading: Mark 1-3
It’s Wednesday, my friends, and thanks for reading. Never use a ferret’s tail to dust the drapes — unless you’ve first detached the tail from the ferret.
We continue to watch as the country formerly known as “the Land of the Free” collapses under the weight of the anti-American junta that is the Biden administration and the tyrannical Deep State that now operates openly as an enemy of freedom. From two weeks to flatten the curve, now in its 84th week, to Americans losing their jobs for refusing to take an ineffective, dangerous and experimental vaccine while being refused proven treatments for a virus unleashed on them, deliberately or not, by the Chinese, to a rigged election that installed a dim-bulb racist misogynist and compulsive liar in the White House, to the feds imprisoning misguided protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 on false charges of an “armed insurrection” and denying them due process, to the massive failure and humiliation of the Afghanistan retreat, to a Democrat (read: Marxist) controlled Congress trying to push us into permanent bankruptcy by adding $3.5 trillion to our $28 trillion of national debt, to the DOJ labeling parents who protest critical race theory at school board meetings as terrorists — we are teetering on the brink of an overthrow of our republic.
If you’re not concerned, you haven’t been paying attention. This is not a drill — this is the real thing.
Fortunately, some signs of life are starting to appear. Southwest Airlines had to cancel thousands of flights over the weekend as pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, baggage handlers and other staff staged a sick-out in protest of the vaccine mandates declared by Resident Biden, who told us a few weeks ago that he was “losing patience” with us recalcitrant peasants. Southwest (new tagline: “You are not free to move about the country”) announced on October 4 that its workforce must be vaccinated by December 8 or face dismissal.
It’s not just Southwest that is feeling the heat. According to PJ Media’s Megan Fox, an insider at Southwest said that, “there are 22 airlines, along with truckers and other transportation employees represented in their ranks and more disruptions are to come.”
Most of them have joined an organization called FreedomFlyers.org, a web community set up to connect like-minded individuals. You can see this video on their website.
Perhaps the greatest piece of advice comes from Joshua Yoder, co-founder of the FreedomFlyers website, who was interviewed on Tucker Carlson.
“If there’s a disruption in one part of the system, it has a catastrophic effect among the rest of the system, which is going to affect commerce, it’s going to affect trade, and ultimately it’s going to affect the economy. We have all the control and the control comes from a simple word and that’s ‘no.’ We just don’t need to comply.”
My emphasis. This is what all Americans need to be willing to do. Our ancestors, as perfect or imperfect as they were, fought to secure our rights and protect them from tyrants. We are seeing them slip further and further from us and if we don’t start refusing to comply en masse, we will find ourselves permanently under the heel of the oligarchy that already controls our major institutions, including education, business, politics, law, entertainment and medicine.
In the book of Hebrews, the author writes, “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (12:4). In other words, you haven’t suffered martyrdom for the sake of your faith like others have. It’s not as bad or as hard as it could be, so stop complaining and step it up.
In a similar fashion, Winston Churchill once said about fighting for what is right,
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
In my layman’s opinion, we are nearer “a precarious chance of survival” than we are “victory is sure.” For certain we “have not resisted to the point of shedding our blood.”
My prediction is that some of us are going to have to do so if there isn’t some kind of intervention sometime soon. Determine whether or not your freedom and freedom for your children is worth fighting for, then define your line in the sand and prepare to defend it.
I’m assuming by now that you’ve all heard about the newest chant at public gatherings, including college and NFL football games, MLB playoff games, a boxing match, the Ryder Cup golf tournament and at Trump rallies across the country. What started as a vulgar expression of contempt for Resident Biden earlier in September took on new life when a NBC reporter was interviewing Brandon Brown, the winner of the Talladega NASCAR Xfinity Series race.
As you can plainly hear, the fans are chanting “F*** Joe Biden in the background,” but reporter Kelli Stavast says they are chanting “Let’s go Brandon!” This is either an honest misunderstanding (yeaahh no) or an incredibly agile attempt to salvage the interview by gaslighting the public.
Either way, “Let’s go Brandon!” has become an viral sensation because it mocks the fake news media while shrewdly replacing the ribald chant with a non-offensive phrase that everyone knows is a euphemism for the original.
It’s shown up everywhere, including a billboard:
a paging system at a major airport,
and, of course, in America’s paper of record:
Love it or leave it, the chant shows the pluck of Normal Americans who resent the cultural elite’s ignorance, incompetence and destruction of America as founded. It’s poking them in the eye and it’s funny.
For now.
I still think you should have plenty of ammo on hand, so get busy.
Daily Verse | Matthew 20:16
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Monday’s Reading: Matthew 23-25
Happy Monday my friends. It may be raining cats and dogs out there, but at least it’s not hailing taxis.
Glad to be back in the saddle this morning.
One of the claims that we often hear from all sides in our cultural conversation is that human beings deserve “dignity and respect.” I agree with that notion. My affirmation of the dignity and respect of all people comes from my understanding of humans beings being made — created — in the image of God.
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
— Genesis 1:27
If humans were created by God and intrinsically exhibit his likeness, then every person has infinite worth and value because God himself has infinite worth and value. “Dignity” transcends race, sex, IQ, nationality, wealth, religion, social status, education and vocation, protecting all human beings from being considered worthless, the weakest among us in particular.
But not everybody believes that human beings were created by God (Steven Pinker’s article in the New Republic titled “The Stupidity of Dignity”) or that human beings even have a right to dignity (as Conor O’Mahony argues in the International Journal of Constitutional Law). For them, “dignity” is an ambiguous term that has no real place in arguing for or against a particular legal claim. (For instance, Pinker would argue that “autonomy” is a better term to use, but his reasons for using that term fail under the arguments he makes against the term “dignity” in his essay.)
Even so, the argument that all human beings deserve “dignity and respect” is undoubtedly used by people who are atheists or agnostics. Often they are using the point to argue in favor of some “right” or moral behavior that is not yet recognized in society but that, from their perspective, should be. “Gay rights” comes to mind, as does racial reconciliation.
Here’s the problem with advancing an argument on the basis of according someone “dignity and respect” in the absence of a Creator God: there is no intrinsic value on which “dignity and respect” can be based. If human beings simply evolved from primordial soup over billions of years, then there is no such thing as intrinsic worth, and “dignity and respect” are invented concepts that can only have utilitarian meanings.
In the absence of an external Source of value, claiming that human beings must be treated with dignity and respect is only an opinion. It may be a helpful opinion, but it is only an opinion that has no grounding in anything other than one person’s (or people’s) claim.
Further, if “dignity and respect” (or intrinsic value) isn’t grounded in some transcendent moral system, such as one created by God, then it cannot ever be considered irrevocable or “true” truth. Human beings are then consigned to living out the natural consequence of a life that rewards the survival of the fittest.
In other words, “dignity and respect” is a utilitarian tactic employed only to advance the interests of the person or group benefitting from that claim.
So when someone claims that a certain subset of people should be treated with “dignity and respect” as an argument for granting that group a new right or privilege that until then had been restricted, we might want to ask upon what they are basing their claim. And if they cannot offer more support for their position other than “my opinion,” we must point that out and ask them what makes their opinion morally superior to ours.
Once we establish that it is only their opinion and that their opinion is no more or less important than ours, we must also ask them to define what they mean by “dignity” and “respect.” For you will find that treating someone with “dignity and respect” means accepting what that person wants to do without interference or objection, even if what they want to do is contrary to your opinion (or society’s opinion) of what is morally right or wrong.