Monthly Archives: February 2022

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Daily Broadside | Poor Reasoning Poisons the National Discourse

Daily Verse | Leviticus 10:2
So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Monday’s Reading: Leviticus 16-17

Monday and I have an example of thinking that contributes to the noise in our society.

I am on a social media app on which a member was complaining about the heating bill she got from he energy company. She wrote:

Anyone get an outrageous bill from [the energy company]? I’ve had my thermostat set at 65 and occasionally bump up to 67. $170 bill for this is insane. I’m freezing!

Lots of people responded to her comment. Some expressed the same amount of outrage as she did. Some tried to help her figure out what was causing the high heating bill by asking her questions about her home. Insulation? Two stories? Good windows? How many square feet are you heating? Others shared their heating bills for the last three years and showed how they had increased. One suggested we vote for socialism so that the energy company wouldn’t be profiting off grandmas just trying to stay warm.

I responded,

Talk to Brandon in Washington, D.C.

That got a few reactions including 💗 😄  😼 . It also generated a few comments including this one:

Dave Olsson -talk to Mother Nature. She is RED & BLUE. & Purple. The January temps are in the teens. We are talking about weather so qwitcher [sic] tunnel vision.

This is a failed argument once you cut through the snark to the premises, and all of us–even if you agree with her–need to get good at recognizing poor reasoning and learn how to clap back at people like this to blunt their opinion from influencing others who may not be as thoughtful.

Her argument offers two premises and a conclusion which, broadly speaking, is a syllogism (associated with either deductive or inductive reasoning). I’ve provided my response to each.

  • Our climate affects everyone (no matter their political preferences). True.
  • January temperatures are in the teens. True.
  • (Implied) Therefore, it’s the colder temps that result in higher pricing. Does not necessarily follow.
  • Therefore further, stop seeing everything through political lenses. Irrelevant.

Do you see that neither of her premises support her conclusion absolutely? Her conclusion that colder temperatures result in higher pricing may be true, but it does not follow absolutely from her two premises.

The best she can say is that a factor in the original complaint is that using more gas results in a higher bill. Undeniably true. But it’s not the only thing that might lead to a higher bill. Gas might actually cost more per therm and therefore result in a higher gas bill. Indeed, higher prices and colder temperatures will likely result in a more expensive bill.

We can’t control the weather. Weather is variable and will do what it will do. There’s nothing we can do about how cold, hot, rainy or humid or snowy it gets (don’t @ me about climate change … that’s a whole different topic).

It’s not like we haven’t had temps in the teens before here in the Midwest. Some winters are colder than others. The best we can do is look at the average temperature across several winter seasons.

However, the one thing we can affect is the price of energy. That’s what we need to look at when we’re complaining about high gas prices. Low temperatures might be a factor, causing us to use more energy, but it’s the price of the energy that truly counts.

And who has affected the price of natural gas more than anyone?

Brandon.

Hence my suggestion. On average, the temperatures are not outliers this winter. They’re within a “normal” range of what we would expect.

My antagonist’s discourse is one of the reasons that we have such a fog in our national conversation. Don’t let poor logic go unchallenged.

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Daily Broadside | Whistling Past the Graveyard With Eyes Wide Shut

Daily Verse | Leviticus 5:5
When anyone is guilty in any of these ways, he must confess in what way he has sinned.

Friday’s Reading: 8-10
Saturday’s Reading: 11-15

It’s Friday and the end of the week, leaving January in the rearview mirror with February already plowing ahead. We dodged the threat of heavy snow in the Midwest this week, but I’m in the Northeast and it’s getting hammered by the same system. Have I mentioned that I hate snow?

Following on the heels of the post I shared yesterday comes this commentary about Whoopsie-Daisy Goldberg, née Caryn Elaine Johnson, who demonstrated last Monday either an appalling lack of knowledge or an appalling indoctrination to CRT in which there can be no racism unless it involves white on black oppression.

She said on The View that the Holocaust “isn’t about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about.” She later doubled-down, saying, “But these are two white groups of people,” implying again that Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews wasn’t about “race.”

She later apologized and was suspended for two weeks to give her time to think it over.

Seth Grossman picks it up here:

However, Whoopi’s statements perfectly reflect the narrative of the “woke” black history and Critical Race Theory that saturates our public schools, colleges, media, and Hollywood/TV entertainment.

That narrative goes like this: until about 600 years ago, most people in the world lived peaceful, comfortable, and environmentally sustainable lives.

Then, in the 1400s, a bunch of white men in Europe went crazy.  While abusing their women, they built ships and weapons to attack and exploit the rest of the world.  These crazy white men exterminated Native Americans, enslaved black Africans, and impoverished Asians.  They also started wars and polluted the planet to cause the catastrophic “climate crisis” we have today.

That summary is true about what’s happened in the West and in the U.S. in particular. But here’s where Grossman ties the incident to what happened in Nazi Germany prior to Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race off the European continent.

According to TIK History, Marxism is but one of many varieties of socialism.   However, all socialists to some degree blame a small “unsocialized” group for the problems of their society.  They all weaken or eliminate them and steal some or all of their stuff.  Some socialists are more extreme than others.  Revolutionary France killed its priests and aristocrats in 1792 and took their stuff.  Communists in Russia did that to land and business owners in 1919.  The Communist regime in China did it after World War II.

According to TIK History, it was politically easier for German “National Socialists” (Nazis) to select Jews rather than all rich businessmen and landowners, as their “unsocialized” group to attack and rob.

What he’s saying is that socialism, which is the dominant philosophy being taught in our universities under the guise of social justice and being woke, is also preparing the ground for a Nazi-like takeover. He writes, “There are many similarities between what Germans believed in the years before Hitler and what ‘woke’ culture is teaching black Americans today.” He goes on to list what blacks are being taught:

  1. Every problem and failure in their communities is caused by somebody else, namely past or present “racist” whites.
  2. Skin color makes every black American a special person who cannot be understood or represented by anyone with a different skin color.
  3. Only black Americans suffered from slavery years ago and only whites were slaveowners.  Only black Americans suffer from rude or unfair treatment and insults. Therefore, black Americans can never be guilty of racism or bigotry.
  4. Political power, not education, training, planning, or discipline is the only way black Americans can succeed.  Since elections have replaced wars, the Democratic Party is today’s black army.  “Ballot harvesters” are today’s soldiers. 
  5. Black Americans are entitled to use political power, violence, or “any means necessary” to take what they “need” from those with a different skin color who have more.  That can be through looting, higher minimum wages, “redistribution” or “reparations.”

The net effect of such a toxic narrative? A division of our country into competing tribes where one is the “oppressed” and the other is the “oppressor.” Jews were demonized in the same way during the run-up to 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland.

This thinking caused millions of Germans to embrace National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s.  Once National Socialists had absolute political power in Germany, there was no peaceful way to stop them.  While this was happening in Germany, very similar events were happening in Italy and Japan.  This thinking caused 14 years of world war and the deaths of some 85 million people — roughly 3% of the world’s population.  Sadly, this will happen again unless most Americans quickly understand and reject the lies and evil of this “woke” culture.

It’s too easy to dismiss this as fear-mongering and alarmist. But history proves that the pattern we see in the U.S. these days has led to catastrophic results. To dismiss such thinking out of hand or to ignore it because it seems like just a temporary tantrum being thrown by one segment of our society is to leave ourselves vulnerable.

The better question to ask is whether or not there’s an historical example of such a pattern being recognized and stopped. If not, what makes us so sure that our own case will be different?

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Liberal is Alarmed by “Satanic Level of Evil” Taking Root in West

Daily Verse | Leviticus 1:1
The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting.

Thursday’s Reading: Leviticus 4-7

Thursday and in case you missed it, yesterday was 2/2/22. Wondering what you were doing at 2:22:22? Can’t do that again until 2033, so start planning now.

Today’s post is very simple. I want to call your attention to an essay that Naomi Wolf wrote, the second in a series of three that she’s writing, on her observations of what’s happened over the last two years with the start of the Chinese Lung Pox. While both published essays are worth the read, it’s the second that is required reading because it begins to get at the uneasiness a lot of us, including me, are feeling.

Wolf is, as she openly admits, a progressive or, as she wrote in the first essay, a member of “[t]he progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — my people, my tribe, my whole life.” This is important to understand, because she is not writing from a conservative point of view, which makes her essay more honest (in my opinion) and more urgent. I’m going to quote her at length, but I highly encourage you to read the whole thing.

Here’s how she starts the second essay:

My first post in this three-part series, about how the evil that surrounds us has manifested, was about the elite global technocrat class and their distance from the people whose lives they may crush; I noted too their lack of belief in, or loyalty to, the nation-state. Added to this toxic mix, I argued, is the certainty of this class of people that they know best about your life.

I made the case in that essay that surrounding us now was a metaphysical, seemingly a Satanic, level of evil.

I am seeking to explain in this series of essays, how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be doing evil now, with whole hearts.

Her acknowledgement that the situation we find ourselves in because of the WuFlu is “evil” is also important to understand because, in that first essay, she admitted that while she “can’t say for sure that God and God’s helpers exist,” the current situation is so evil that she’s been forced to consider that God might be there because “an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.”

She goes on in this second essay to point out that we’ve seen this before.

Some leaders and commentators (including myself) have passionately and publicly been comparing these years, 2020-2022, in the West and in Australia, to the early years of Nazi leadership. Though we face criticism for doing so, I won’t be silenced about this. The similarities must urgently be addressed.

She explains that most of us associate the years of the Nazis with atrocities from their invasion of Poland in 1939 to the end of the war when the allies liberated the concentration camps. But that’s not what she’s comparing.

Rather, the vivid similarities between our moment in the West since 2020, and the earliest years of Nazi Germany’s civil society policies, are to the years 1931-33, when so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. But these were often culturally or professionally policed, rather than being policed by camp patrols. That’s the point that better-informed analysts of these similarities, are making.

That is to say, during these years, mass societal cruelty, and a two-tier society itself that perpetuated this cruelty, was built up and policed, as like today, by polite civil society institutions tasked with snarling and baring its teeth.

Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society, were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers — for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.

All emphases mine. She then draws a parallel to what we’re experiencing today across the U.S.

As today, emergency laws then were the benchmarks that would allow democracy to collapse. “Hitler wanted full powers like Mussolini’s in Italy,” writes Elon. “He knew exactly what was needed to turn a government into a ‘legal’ dictatorship: emergency powers under Article 48.” [Elon, 389].

See if you notice any echoes here. Currently, forty-seven US states are operating with emergency measures, which suspend or bypass normal legislative checks and balances, including New York, the state in which I am writing. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done.

The fact that people don’t seem to understand that most of the country is living under emergency measures, is what is stunning about our current moment. This is why I keep saying these days that the coup d’etat has already taken place in America. By definition, when you are living under emergency measures, you no longer have a functioning democracy.

After establishing the parallels, here’s how she sums up our current situation.

Let me just summarize where we are right now in America, as well as in the West, in case you have gotten too used to it to see it clearly. I warned in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, that democracies usually do not die with a cinematic scene of goose-stepping Brownshirts suddenly in the streets. They tend to die, rather, just as Elon described — incrementally, day by day, collapsing grotesquely in some areas of society and in regards to some institutions, even as other aspects of society and other institutions look and feel, at least superficially, exactly the same as they did before.

Just because the settings are familiar to us now, does not mean that a 1931-like reality, if not yet a 1933-like reality, isn’t upon us.

The rest of her essay, which, again, I strongly encourage you to read, is a long list of how a “1931-like reality” is manifesting itself among us, and then concludes, “What do you call all of this, if not an early Nazi-like set of practices?”

Wolf is Yale- and Oxford-educated, with a doctorate, and is a student of history. She’s no slouch and has been writing for years for progressive outlets. Yet, she is extremely concerned about what she sees happening in our country and in the West. It’s for that reason that she’s someone worth listening to.

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Daily Broadside | No, God Isn’t Safe, But He Is Good

Daily Verse | Exodus 40:35
Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

Wednesday’s Reading: Leviticus 1-3

The following is adapted from a Facebook post I wrote on January 29, 2017

It’s Wednesday, and if you’re reading through the Bible with me this year, we recently read Exodus 20:18-21. The Israelites are standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and are trembling with fear because of the trumpet blast, the shaking and smoking mountain, the thunder and the lightning—all manifestations of God’s presence—and they are terrified.

It reminds me of the disciples in the presence of Jesus when he calmed the storm on the lake: “They were terrified and asked each other, ‘Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'” (Mark 4:41). It must be overwhelming to be confronted with a manifestation of transcendent, supra-human power.

What struck me most is Moses’ response: “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”

Don’t be afraid, yet fear God? What’s going on?

Believers debate what it means to fear the Lord. Some suggest that fear means reverential awe and deferential respect. Others say that doesn’t go far enough, that it literally means to be scared of God, to be frightened of Him. I think, perhaps, the truth is closer to a combination of both.

We must accept that God is the Supreme Being, the One who spoke everything into existence, the great I AM, with no beginning and no end. Nothing—neither man, beast, nor nature—can successfully oppose his authority or will. God has the power to raise up and to put down, to reward and condemn, to create and destroy.

Remember God’s challenge to Job: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!” (40:2). Or Isaiah 29:16, “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘You did not make me’? Can the pot say to the potter, ‘You know nothing’?”

We don’t have words to describe the perfect power, wrath and justice of God. The writer of Hebrews says, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31) and Paul said, “God cannot be mocked” (Ephesians 6:7). This is why we must have “the fear of God” in us. 

But we don’t need to be afraid. Why?

Because God is love (1 John 4:8). We don’t have the words to describe the immense love and benevolence that God has toward us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God “is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

So we find these two properties held in tension: God’s unimpeachable and invincible authority on one side and his “great love for us” (Ephesians 2:4) on the other.

That is why Moses can say to the Israelites, “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t faint under the demonstration of God’s power; he doesn’t intend to destroy you. You will not die as you fear. But it’s also why he can follow that with “the fear of God will be with you” for the express purpose of keeping the Israelites from sin.

Perhaps the best explanation of this tension is found in C.S. Lewis’s novel, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. In one scene, Susan and Lucy ask Mr. and Mrs. Beaver if Aslan is a man. Mr. Beaver tells them that, no, Aslan is not a man, but a lion, “the great Lion.” Here is the rest of the conversation:

“’Ooh!’ said Susan. ‘I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.’

“’That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,’ said Mrs. Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’

“’Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy.

“’Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”

There it is: “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” God isn’t safe. Not by a long shot. But he’s good.

Just don’t take His goodness for granted.

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Daily Broadside | It May Take Even More Insanity for People to Quit Joe

Daily Verse | Exodus 35:21
… and everyone who was willing and whose heart moved him came and brought an offering to the Lord for the work on the Tent of Meeting …

Tuesday’s Reading: Exodus 38-40

Tuesday and the first day of the second month in the year of our Lord 2022.

A recent Marquette Law School poll claims Brandon beats both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis by similar margins in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups for the 2024 presidential election.

The survey … found that 43 percent of adults nationwide would support Biden if the 2024 presidential election were held today, while 33 percent would vote for Trump in a one-on-one match-up.

In a hypothetical race against DeSantis, however, Biden polls slightly worse: 41 percent of adults nationwide said they would throw their support behind Biden, while 33 percent would support DeSantis.

All I can say is that their survey sample has to skew Democrat. Seriously, who did they talk to—voters in Portland?

After record inflation, open borders, more COVID deaths than under Trump, and near-anarchy in our cities, you’re telling me that 4-in-10 adults would still vote for Biden over Trump or DeSantis?

C’mon, man.

I mean, 40 percent is not 70 percent, so we have that going for us.

But then there’s this Harvard-Harris poll, which seems to herald a realignment of political loyalty.

In the latest Harvard-Harris poll, former President Donald Trump’s net favorability rating is 17 points higher than His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s.
[…]
Trump’s favorability is eight points higher than Slow Joe’s. Trump’s unfavorable rating is nine points lower. Trump is three points above the water. Biden is 14 points under the water.
[…]
Oh, and if the election were held today, Trump would beat Biden 46 to 40 percent. Oh, and when asked who’s been a better president, Trump beats Biden, 53 to 47 percent.

So which is it? The Marquette survey (Biden over Trump 43-33) or the Harvard-Harris poll (Trump over Biden 46-40)?

Here are two more data points to consider: In the RealClearPolitics poll of polls on favorability, Brandon is down -12.2 net points and Trump is only down -9.0 net points. That seems to match reality better than the law school’s survey.

The second data point is how Americans perceive Congress right now. Monmouth University Polling found that “Few Americans believe that either political party truly cares about the average family’s pocketbook.”

Just 19% of the public approves of the job Congress is currently doing. Almost 3 in 4 (74%) disapprove – including 81% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats. Just 24% of Americans feel the country is headed in the right direction. Another warning sign for the party in power is a shift in self-reported partisan affiliation. Currently, 26% of American adults identify themselves as Democrats, a number that ranged from 30% to 34% in Monmouth polling throughout last year. Republican identifiers currently stand at 31% of the population, which is up from a range of 23% to 27% in 2021. Moreover, when these numbers are combined with independents who say they lean toward either party, Republicans (51%) have a decided advantage over Democrats (41%).

A political consultant recently told me that people identify more and more as independents and that those independents are increasingly favoring Republicans. Not because Republicans are offering a more compelling story, but because Democrats have embraced the crazy and are scaring citizens.

Finally, one other poll from Politico and Morning Consult that has some interesting findings. When asked “If the 2024 presidential election were held today, would you vote for Joe Biden or the eventual Republican candidate?” 46 percent said they’d vote for the eventual Republican candidate and 37 percent said they’d vote for Brandon.

But when a specific person replaced the “Republican candidate,” the story was different. If the Republican candidate was Trump, Brandon would beat him 45%–44%; if it was Ron DeSantis, Brandon would beat him 44%–39%. Apparently, people are willing to vote for the “eventual Republican candidate” unless it’s the party favorites.

The conflicting results from different polls tell me that people are frustrated with Brandon and would like to make a change, but they don’t seem to like the choices for 2024. It also tells me that it may take a lot more pain for them to quit Brandon.

That is the most shocking thing of all.