Monthly Archives: October 2021

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Daily Broadside | Care About Those Immediately Around You

Daily Verse | Matthew 7:21
“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Wednesday’s Reading: Matthew 8-11
Thursday’s Reading: Matthew 12-15
Friday’s Reading: Matthew 16-19
Saturday’s Reading: Matthew 20-22

It’s Wednesday and October is already 20 percent gone. I’ll have you know my grass skirt also serves as a pom-pom.

I’m traveling for the next couple of days, so there will be no Daily Broadside on Thursday or Friday. That’s why the Bible readings are listed through the end of the week.

Every now and then I touch a theme and then, voilà!, I see that someone else in the blogosphere has written on the very same or closely similar topic. That is the case with my topic yesterday, which was learning not to care about what others think about me.

Then today (voilà!) I found someone had written on the topic of three little words: “I. don’t. care.” and I want to share just a portion of what Jack Donovan wrote. Before I do, let me be quick to say that I absolutely do not agree with his conclusions nor is this an endorsement of his site. He seems to embrace a form of paganism, which is at odds with my own Christian worldview.

However, all truth is God’s truth, even if written or spoken by a pagan. And Jack Donovan makes an interesting observation and then proposes a solution to the problem it raises.

His observation is that (my emphasis):

Most appeals in the name of social justice rely on an underlying assumption of universal altruism. They assume that you care if something bad happens to anyone, anywhere, and advise you to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering.

People react by questioning whether or not that stranger, somewhere, is really suffering, or if they are suffering any more than anyone else. They examine the circumstances of the alleged suffering and the motives of the people bringing the alleged suffering to light.

They argue about the details and the proportion of the suffering and point out their own allegedly comparable suffering or the suffering of some person or people who are allegedly suffering more.

Once you’re arguing, they’ve already got you.

Once you’re arguing, you’ve agreed that you could care, or would care — that you should theoretically care — given satisfactory evidence and argumentation.

I believe this is true. We are fed a steady diet of emotional stories every day on multiple platforms including television, newspapers, the radio and social media. Somewhere a child has died in the crossfire or drowned while escaping with their family to America; some black man has been killed while being arrested or chased or confronted by white police officers; a gorgeous supermodel reveals that she was groped by a male singer while she gyrated provocatively and almost completely naked with him in his music video a few years back.

Stories like these, as tragic as they may be, are meant to produce moral outrage that will move us to act. That’s why the Biden administration threatened consequences for the mounted Border Patrol officers who allegedly used whips on Haitians crossing our southern border. Actually, the Border Patrol officers did no such thing, but the moral outrage generated by the fabrication helped further cement the image of an immoral nation that doesn’t care about “migrants.”

Donovan’s point is that once the social justice warriors have engaged you in an argument about whether or not it is a moral issue, “they’ve already got you” because you’re implying, by engaging, that you would care if it is true.

Donovan’s solution is to genuinely not care about some stranger’s suffering. His reasoning is that there is too much suffering in the world and we can’t possibly be expected to care about every single person who experiences some kind of injustice. “I see all of this propaganda online telling me what is NOT OK, and how I am supposed to feel about strangers and other groups of people,” writes Donovan. “If they get me to agree that I care about these strangers and their unhappiness, Im [sic] supposed to accept responsibility for that unhappiness and do whatever I can to alleviate it.

“This is all manipulation,” he continues, “a political plucking of one bit of human suffering out of an unimaginable expanse of human suffering, all to serve this agenda or that one.” Then he delivers this shocking admission:

I don’t care what happens to everyone, everywhere.

I don’t care what happens to strangers.

It’s an admission that sounds barbaric and unspeakably taboo.

It does sound barbaric and taboo.

He goes on to say that he cares about friends, family and people “who are like me, or who are like the people I like.” He resolves this tension of not caring for everyone with the phrase, “Care passionately, but discriminately.”

When a Syrian toddler washes up on a beach in Turkey, the shocking images generate sympathy and outrage for the plight of refugees. There is then the requisite plea for us “to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering” as Donovan wrote above.

Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children, said: “This tragic image of a little boy who’s lost his life fleeing Syria is shocking and is a reminder of the dangers children and families are taking in search of a better life. This child’s plight should concentrate minds and force the EU to come together and agree to a plan to tackle the refugee crisis.”

Because of my Christian convictions, I can’t honestly say (or even imagining myself saying), “I don’t care” about that little boy’s death. I do. It was tragic. But I can also honestly say that it is so far removed from me that there’s not much I could do about what happened.

I break with Donovan’s final conclusion, where he writes, “When, free from our attachments to everyone, everywhere, we find ourselves adrift in a staggering, confused mass of drooling and covetous humanity, we can make sense of it all and find our bearings only when we form discriminatory alliances and new tribes built on trust, common interests and mutual admiration — instead of being bound by the great lie of love for all neighbors.”

It’s not a lie.

Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves and told the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate what he meant. The story included a man who was beaten by robbers and the Samaritan stranger who took care of him. The punchline was the question that Jesus asked the Jews after telling the story: “Who was the neighbor to the man who had been robbed?”

Donovan refuses to care about what happens to strangers because he doesn’t want to be manipulated by emotional stories that serve the SJW agenda. So he draws a very tight line around him that includes family and friends, and others he “likes,” but excludes others who may live right next door.

While it’s okay and healthy to detach ourselves from responsibility for every distant tragedy we may read about in the news, we must also be ready to be a “neighbor” to those strangers who suffer tragedy or injustice right on our doorstep. That’s what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

See you on Monday.

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Daily Broadside | The indispensable quality of not caring what others think

Daily Verse | Matthew 4:17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

Tuesday’s Reading: Matthew 5-7

Happy Tuesday, my friends. “Civil war” is an oxymoron, just like “old news” and “only choice” and “deafening silence.”

There seems to be a mini-industry built around the art of not caring what others think. Just a brief perusal of the titles available on amazon.com support that theory, such as:

I haven’t read any of these books, but I’ve learned the lesson of their titles over the course of my life. I was born a pleaser (and still display some natural tendencies to be that), which meant that I cared a lot about what others thought about me when I was younger. That meant that I often subordinated what I thought or felt in favor of what others thought or felt so that I could avoid conflict and stay in their good graces. No one wants to be on the “outs” with other kids or friend groups.

Caring what others think meant that I was susceptible to being swayed by popular opinion or given to pretense. Being pretentious takes energy and, after a while, I got tired of pretending to fit in or trying to be someone I wasn’t (usually the person I thought would be accepted by the group I was eager to join).

It took being burned by someone I thought was a better friend than he turned out to be to really accelerate my conviction not to give a rat’s patootie.

In other words, I no longer care what others think about me. To use the (admittedly non-Christian) nomenclature above, I don’t give a f*ck.

Just to be clear, when I say I don’t care what others think, I’m not saying that it’s okay to be a jerk. I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t listen to feedback or others’ points of view. Some people might conclude that not caring what others think means they can disregard basic civility or relational duty.

But holding uncompromising convictions does not mean you can’t be kind or polite. I’m not advocating barbarism.

What I’m saying is that I no longer allow myself to be swayed by others’ opinions of me and my personal convictions just to fit in. You don’t like what I believe? You don’t like what I said? Boo hoo for you.

There’s great freedom in that.

Not caring what others think is actually biblical. After the apostles Peter and John were hauled in before the rulers, elders and teachers of the law, they were told not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. They declined the directive.

“Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:18-20)

They were not interested in winning friends and influencing people at the highest levels of political and religious power. They were not intimidated or fearful of the Jewish leaders, but held fast to their convictions. They didn’t cower, didn’t cave, didn’t subordinate their knowledge of Jesus to the demands of the most powerful religious group in Israel. They didn’t try to fake it or compromise with the Jewish authorities; they simply carried on with what they believed (and knew) to be true.

The reason I’m writing about this is that when it comes to the commie takeover of America, we need to develop strong political convictions based on biblical principles, common sense, and the founding principles of the United States of America.

For instance,

  • I don’t care if other people think I shouldn’t call Democrats the political enemies of freedom. They are.
  • I don’t care if other people think I’m racist for wanting English to be our national language.
  • I don’t care if other people think I’m xenophobic or racist for pointing out that we have no southern border and that we’re watching the white population be displaced by “the browning of America.”
  • I don’t care if other people think I’m deplorable for liking historical American culture.
  • I don’t care if other people think I’m hateful for not playing along with the fiction that a biological male can be a woman just because he says he is and demands I acknowledge him as such.

We can’t allow ourselves to be intimidated by the mob. When BLM yells, “America is racist!” we have to hold firm to our conviction that it’s not and refuse to budge an inch. We are too easily cowed by the loudest voices in society and we’re losing our country to them.

Not caring what others think can be isolating, too. You may be rejected for the convictions you hold.

Still, resist the lies.

Develop a spine.

Hold firm to the truth.

And don’t give a f*ck rip what others think.

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Daily Broadside | I Will Not Surrender to Anti-American Bullies

Daily Verse | Malachi 4:2
“But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”

Monday’s Reading: Matthew 1-4

Happy Monday, my friends. For those of you who have been reading through the Bible this year with me, we finished the Old Testament on Saturday and today we start the New Testament. If you haven’t been reading with us, today’s a great day to start. We’ll be done with New Testament on January 1, 2022. I’ll start putting the day’s passage at the top of each post from now through the end of the year.

I’ve been saying for the last 6 or 7 years that all the trendlines point to a new civil war in United States. I was predicting it long before opinion leaders and political commentators began sounding the alarm.

Frankly, we’ve been at war already for many years; it just hasn’t gone hot yet. But the last two elections have exposed how deep—and how hostile—the division is in our country between “red” and “blue” America. We really are two peoples living in the same geographic location called the United States of America.

Last week Ace over at Ace of Spades HQ shared three articles that justify my conviction that we were headed this way and that it might finally be reaching a tipping point.

The first is from the Daily Mail, where a new poll shows what looks like a near-majority of voters want red and blue states to separate:

“A new poll has revealed that political divisions run so deep in the US that over half of Trump voters want red states to secede from the union, and 41% of Biden voters want blue states to split off.”

If we go to the analysis itself, we read that “Illustrating the extent of the underlying divide, nearly 90% of voters on both sides agree that people like them won’t belong in America anymore if the “other side” has its way, and more than 1 in 5 say they “agree completely” that such is the case.”

This sentiment doesn’t surprise me at all. Democrats are the political enemies of freedom and prosperity. They really have no business being here.

Two-thirds of all voters on both sides of the aisle think the opposition voters “have become a clear and present danger” to their way of life.

Over 75% of voters on both sides agreed with the statement: ‘I believe that Americans who strongly support the [OPP_PARTY] have become a clear and present danger to the American way of life.’ Seventy-five percent of Biden voters at least somewhat agreed with the statement, as did 78% of Trump voters.

The second article is a blog post by David Reaboi titled, “National Divorce Is Expensive, But It’s Worth Every Penny.”

As with any breakup or divorce, even if we had a popular consensus for a National Divorce in principle, there are all kinds of details—and massive, very thorny ones, like who gets which territories, populations, industries or nuclear weapons caches—that could cause tumultuous and potentially violent negotiations. All these points of contention are very real and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand; they’re not going anywhere. The seriousness of these issues and their daunting solutions are meant to prove that the breakup of the United States will always be an impossibility.

But that’s not right. National Divorce or some other, more tragic and chaotic outcome won’t be impossible orever. Despite heaping dollops of patriotic propaganda—which, admittedly, is essential to maintenance of the citizens’ faith in the regime—one day, the United States will end. History teaches us that regimes, like all human creations, rise and fall—and world-bestriding empires fall harder, faster, and more surely than that. Admitting this is a possibility isn’t as accurate as understanding it as a certainty; yes, the timeline is hazy, but it’s coming.

Reaboi believes it’s only a matter of time before we endure a national break-up. He sees it as inevitable. In his post, he’s responding to his friend Karol Markowicz’s piece in the New York Post in which she writes that the idea of a break-up “has understandably gained steam — though it can’t possibly work and shouldn’t.”

Some people believe such a split isn’t in the cards; can’t be done. Others think it’s inevitable. I’m with the latter, but I believe there’s a solution to that coming split—we’ll have to fight to keep it from becoming permanent. More about that in a minute.

The third article is a conversation between Emma Green of The Atlantic, a very liberal publication, and Ryan Williams of The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. Here’s an excerpt that I think is accurate (with my emphasis):

Green: Glenn Ellmers wrote an essay for The American Mind about why the Claremont Institute isn’t conservative. One of the things he writes is that some people residing in the United States—“certainly more than half”—are not Americans in any recognizable sense.

What does it mean to declare that more than half of the people residing in the country are not truly American?

Williams: Glenn was, of course, being provocative and polemical. But if Claremont thinks real Americanism is a belief in the principles of the American founding, we have to acknowledge that a good portion of our fellow citizens don’t agree with our principles and conclusions about what politics is for. If we differ on those fundamental things, we’re really two Americas.

Even during the Civil War—I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.

I might come around but right now I am not in favor of dividing up the country, for a lot of reasons. First, I don’t want some “blue” country right on my doorstep. The radicals in Congress and the leaders of the Democrat Party have great contempt for our Constitution and seem to believe that socialism—the end result of which is hardcore communism—is the preferred governing system. If that’s true, then we should expect that a socialist democratic system will reach out for support to communist China and Muslim theocracies like Iran, which are both dictatorships. Do we really want some junior commies next door making deals with hardcore communist and fascist countries?

Another reason I don’t want to break up the country and divide the spoils with progressive commie Democrats is that the only reason they have the support they do is that they’ve deceived the fools who follow them. They’ve brainwashed our children, they’ve imported millions of impoverished people of the third world as dependents to keep themselves in power, and they’ve lied, lied, lied about everything. EVERYTHING. They live in an idealized fantasy world where they think that 4 trillion dollars will somehow make everything beautiful and morally right.

It will not. One only has to look at the track record of progressive Democrats to see that they ruin everything they touch. EVERYTHING.

My final reason for not wanting to break up the country flows from the previous one: the only reason we’re even talking about a “national divorce” is that the domestic communists in this country have poisoned the well. They’re the ones that are agitating for change. They’re the ones who have created the conflict, then blamed it on their fellow conservative (normal) Americans.

The Democrats, BLM, antifa and the mask Karens like Howard Stern have told us they don’t want us, that we’re homophobes, deplorables, xenophobes, racists and bitter clingers; that this country must pay for its sins. Stern actually said, “We want you to leave the country. Go somewhere where they have ultimate freedom, wherever that is, some bizarro world where you don’t have to take the vaccine.”

No, Howard. That’s not how this works. We were here first. If you don’t like this system of government or the people who respect our heritage, traditions, history and want less government and more freedom, then you leave. Go somewhere where your vision of communist propaganda fits—there’s plenty of them out there.

I will not be bullied into surrendering any of my country to these people. If they want it, they will have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers that are wrapped around the trigger of my Second Amendment rights. They don’t get to walk off with half the country of my birth, founded by men whom, in comparison to our modern-day junior commies, are intellectual giants.

If you want it, you’ll have to come and take it.

Molon labe.

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Daily Broadside | Now Do You Believe Me? Biden Nominates Soviet-Educated Commie to Run Nation’s Banking System.

Daily Verse | Zechariah 7:9-10
“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'”

Happy Friday and welcome to the first day of October. I work so that my cats can have a better life.

Yesterday I wrote about Australia and how their crazy is straining to come here. Well, here’s a new video putting the rhetoric and the reality into perspective for you.

It sounds like our own political class, no? Just a little reinforcement of yesterday’s commentary, although that’s not what I want to focus on this morning.

You want to know how bat-guano crazy our Dear Leader is? He and his ilk seem hell-bent on destroying this country as founded, mostly by turning it into some kind of pinko commie dictatorship, a la the Soviet Union. You know how I know (besides the literal socialists and commies in the administration and in the Democrat party)? Here’s how I know:

Terrifying: Biden Is Nominating Soviet-Trained Radicals Now

Not kidding. Resident Sugar Cone has nominated a woman who was literally educated at “the Soviet Union’s Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship,” according to Stephen Green’s article.

Omarova graduated from the Soviet Union’s Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, according to the Wall Street Journal. As recently as 2019, she was still praising the USSR’s economic system as in some ways superior to our own. “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”

What is it with these free radicals that can’t help gushing about how awesome some failed communist state was back in the day? Fortunately, Green knows more than I do about the glorious Soviet economy and torpedoes Omarova’s rosy recollections.

As a matter of fact, I will say what I will about the old USSR.

Teachers there were paid the same as doctors — because medicine was considered “women’s work” and both were paid crap numbers of worthless rubles. Sexism and central mismanagement, all in one murderously totalitarian package.

There’s a reason the USSR is defunct and the U.S. isn’t — at least until Omarova gets her way.

But does Omarova let some pesky facts stand in the way of her nutty ideas? Nah.

Omarova’s goal is the eventual elimination of private banking and the establishment of the Federal Reserve as the nation’s only bank.

In her own words:

“The core idea here is simply to allow all U.S. citizens and lawful residents, local governments, non-banking firms and non-business entities to open transactional accounts directly with the Federal Reserve, thus bypassing private depository institutions,” she wrote. “In this sense, it is a variation on the familiar FedAccounts — or FedCoin, ‘digital dollar wallets,’ etc. — theme. In principle, FedAccounts can be made available as an alternative to bank deposit accounts, upon a person’s request.”

Gosh, why haven’t we tried this before? What could possibly go wrong with digitizing your wealth and handing it over to a centralized, government controlled agency?

Nominating Omarova to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, as Biden has done, is worse than putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. It’s more like putting a convicted arsonist in charge of the Forest Service.

Here’s the takeaway from this: we have enemies of freedom in the White House, in Congress and in the judiciary. I’m not talking about some fringe wackos who are tolerated with good humor by American society. I’m talking about dyed-in-the-wool pinko commies who, at best dislike, and at worst hate the American social contract of freedom and personal initiative that was founded by white European males, creating the most free and powerful country the world has ever known.

We need more men who are willing to say what Joe Rogan says in a recent video — and then fight to preserve our nation (language warning).

“Up until 1776, every f***ing country that has ever existed was run by dictators. All of them. This is the first experiment in self-government that actually worked, and it created the greatest superpower the world has ever known.”

We are literally at the mercy of a bunch of full-on dictator wannabes. Now that they’ve had a taste of the power that comes with the authority and tools of government and business, they won’t give it up, just like Rogan says. Do I need to remind you of the lawlessness that we’ve witnessed over the last five years, much less over the last 18 months?

It’s hard to realize, but we are in an existential fight for the survival of America as we’ve known it. I honestly don’t know if we can last until 2024. The midterms in 2022 might give us a reprieve, but we really can’t count on anything right now.

I commiserated with a friend the other day that our kids will never know the America he and I grew up in. Yes, times change, but this is a radical and forced departure from what American society was. And it was destroyed by the Democrats, with the willing support of progressives and the media — and spineless Republicans who aren’t really conservatives.

The only thing that keeps me going is my hope in Jesus Christ.

Have a good weekend.