Tag Archives: douglaswilson

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The Broadside | We’re Awash in Illegal Alien Crime

If there’s one thing I will never understand—and I’m not one to throw absolutes around—I mean, never understand, it’s an American who not only supports, but argues and advocates for foreigners breaking our law and entering our country and thereby becoming illegal aliens.

Yes, yes, I know that most precious snowflakes will shudder in horror at the words “illegal” (“no one is ‘illegal’!” they shriek) and “alien” (“they’re ‘migrants'” they insist), but I literally don’t care. I don’t. The term “illegal alien” is written in our laws for a reason: such persons are present illegally and they aren’t American citizens; therefore, they are “illegal aliens.”

The Left has made it a moral imperative to drop such language because it somehow demonizes a class of people “who are just looking for a better life” (cue the quivering lip and outraged attitude). Apparently, because we are the wealthiest nation in history (Solomonic Israel notwithstanding), we are morally required to allow anyone from anywhere at anytime to come and partake of the world we have created.

It’s the rich paying their fair share, writ large.

But the utopia that progressives imagine happening (actually, I don’t think the ruling class imagines it at all—the poor, uneducated masses from third-world countries are simply a tool to accrue permanent power) is hardly what we’re experiencing as we’re overwhelmed by the invasion over our southern border.

It’s like watching the looters during the Burn Loot Murder riots of 2020. They simply broke into the local Target or CVS and stripped it bare, making off with large-screen TVs and cases of cigarettes or bottles of Tylenol or jugs of Tide detergent to sell on the black market. There was no transaction, no thankfulness, no relief from their poverty. It was criminal thuggery.

That’s what we’re getting in spades with the invasion of foreigners that Joey Waffle Cone has facilitated through the treasonous Alejandro Mayorkas who is anything but a Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

A wave of serious migrant crime continues to sweep across America as President Joe Biden and his surrogates defend the wide-open border policies drawing millions of aliens to cascade unvetted across our borders.

American citizens and their children are being stolen from, beaten, raped, and murdered by illegals in every corner of the country even as millions of illegal migrants gobble up federal and state welfare dollars for free housing, free health care, food, clothing, education, legal services and more.

Here are just a few examples of the crime America wave faces.

I can’t reproduce the whole article here, but I’ll give you some examples the author cites in the areas of retail theft, sexual assault and murder.

Early this year, authorities in the western suburb of Oak Brook noted an increase of thefts in multiple retail outlets were being perpetrated by illegals who have been traced back to migrant shelters in Chicago.

Other areas in the Chicago region have also reported gangs of illegals engaged in criminal activities.

Nearby Lake County, Illinois, located just north of Chicago, reported that a migrant gang was suspected of operating a theft ring targeting businesses.

[…]

Also in May, an illegal arrested and accused of raping a teenage girl in Prattville, Alabama, was simply released by Biden’s DHS despite the charges by local police that he had raped a girl in the bathroom of a local restaurant.

[…]

The latest outrageous crime was perpetrated against 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray of Houston, Texas, who was abducted, raped, and murdered under a bridge on June 23. Her murderers were two illegals from Venezuela, Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, and Franklin Pena, 26.

But little Jocelyn is just one of a long, long list of Americans whose lives have been snuffed out by Joe Biden’s illegal border crossers.

In Feb. Laken Hope Riley, a 22-year-old medical student, was murdered by an illegal alien who crossed the southern border in 2022. The murder occurred on the campus of the University of Georgia – Athens and officials arrested 26-year-old Jose Antonio Ibarra for the crime.

In another case, law enforcement officials accused an illegal immigrant of raping and killing Rachel Morin, a mother of five children, in Bel Air, Maryland. An illegal alien from El Salvador, identified as 23-year-old Victor Martinez-Hernandez, was arrested.

[…]

An illegal alien from El Salvador was accused of shooting two Chick-fil-A employees in Irving, Texas, this month. And a Mexican national was arrested and accused of murdering Ruby Garcia in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

That’s not the half of it. We are being assaulted as a people, as a culture, as a nation.

The people in positions of power have just about destroyed what used to be the United States of America. We’re now a banana republic and, as Doug Wilson says, “we don’t even have the climate for growing bananas.”

I regard anyone who supports illegal immigration as a domestic enemy of our country. I don’t see how it can be any other way, “moral imperative” or not.

Sorry not sorry.

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Daily Broadside | Speak Up and Call Evil What It Is

Yesterday I wrote that there seems to be a gathering consensus that now is the time to speak up about the cultural revolution that we’re experiencing in the U.S., and that by “speaking up,” I mean getting educated and not being shy to educate others or to take a stand contrary to the woke orthodoxy that currently reigns as virtue in our country.

One of the authors and speakers I follow is Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. I’m going to mash together what he wrote yesterday with a sprinkle of thoughts from Tucker Carlson and Naomi Wolf. First, here’s some of what Wilson said in his blog post:

All societies are grounded in the will of their God or gods, no exceptions. And when a society (like ours) pretends to be exempt from this iron law, the thing that results is massive amounts of confusion. In our case, the time of that confusion was lengthened and drawn out because we had an enormous amount of that moral capital. The prodigal son was truly disobedient, but he also had a really big inheritance to squander. It took him a while.

But our confusion about who is the god of the system does not mean that the god of the system is confused about it. We might think that we are all being decent bipedal carbon units in our Judeo/Christian faith tradition, when we are actually in the process of being enslaved to the service of Mammon. But our confusion is not shared by Mammon. Mammon knows all about it. Mammon knows the game.

So with that being the case, why am I being upbeat about our hot mess of a culture? The thing that has happened is this. Our situation has grown dire enough that when I now say it is Christ or chaos, an ordinary Christian can look at that and know exactly what I am talking about. Twenty-five years ago, this stark and very binary choice would have been very hard to explain to rank-and-file Christians—but now many of them are out looking for an explanation, and when someone gives it to them, they grasp it in under a minute.

This is an encouraging observation. He’s saying that people — and, in particular, Christian people — are beginning to notice that something is very wrong. And not only are they noticing that something is wrong, they are noticing that it is so wrong, so dire, that there’s really only two ways to go from here: continue into the chaos, or reverse course by throwing up roadblocks and barriers to any further progress down that road by intentionally standing on, and for, Christ.

In other words, Wilson says, we’re starting to pay attention.

But you know who else is paying attention and wondering what in the world is going on? Opinion leaders and influencers outside of the Christian faith. Neither Tucker Carlson nor Naomi Wolf would necessarily be expected to describe what is happening in distinctly Christian terms, but that is what has happened.

Carlson, by his own admission, is Episcopalian, “the shallowest faith tradition that’s ever been invented.” Yet, listen to what he says during his speech at the Heritage Foundation, the Friday night before his show was cancelled by Fox News.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice [abortion]? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

That seems like a courageous act to me. In a culture where “tolerance” and “diversity” and “inclusion” are the highest values, making a moral judgement about someone else’s behavior is tantamount to a declaration of war. It’s deeply offensive to a society that is steeped in moral relativism. Carlson’s observation comes out of a conservative political viewpoint with at least the trappings of a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, has been, for most of her political life, a hard-left feminist of Jewish extraction, who considered her faith unimportant and, anyway, deeply personal. But during the Chinese Lung Pox hysteria, she did her research and began to discover that there was something much bigger and darker going on. Here’s what she wrote more than a year ago:

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.

I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This — this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.

In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.

And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world, — to say these things out loud.

Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters — at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and are certainly are not supposed to talk about evil or the forces of darkness.

Here are two secular personalities who have both come to the conclusion that our society is so broken, so twisted, so upside-down, that they’re forced to conclude that there is a force at work that transcends what we can see, and they label it “evil,” a theological term associated with, at minimum, the Jewish and Christian faiths. What I find so remarkable is that they’re so awestruck by the sinister nature of what we’re experiencing that they’re forced to use a theological term that many in the Christian faith themselves aren’t willing to utter for fear of being labeled a nutter.

And that brings me back to Wilson’s commentary. It’s great that believers are waking up to the ugly reality of our situation, but we need to be willing to say so. We also need to not only recognize that what we’re seeing is evil; we need to articulate that it is so. Christians, of all people, have the theological language, history and book to back up our claims.

The other thing that both Wolf and Carlson admit to is that the power of evil is so overwhelming that they both suggest that prayer is essential. From the same linked sources:

Carlson: “[M]aybe we should all take just 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I’m serious. Why not? And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist, I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian, the Samaritans of our time. I’m coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I’m literally an Episcopalian. And even I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will.

Wolf: “I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.”

If secular types like Wolf and Carlson are willing to call evil, evil, and to call on God for help in resisting it, shouldn’t we be willing and ready to do the same?

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Daily Broadside | The Best Solution is the One that Seems Impossible

One of the men I read pretty regularly is Doug Wilson who blogs at Blog & Mablog. He had a post late in March that I wanted to circle back to because he has a way incisively getting to the point about what is going on in our culture from a (Reformed) Christian point of view.

The post, titled That Acrid Taste of Damnation, looks at what is happening across the country and says that it’s no longer about politics, but about wickedness. Let me quote one full section for you, but I encourage you to go read the the whole thing.

America’s Inchoate and Disintegrating Soul

This is what damnation tastes like. It is not the full damnation itself, but rather just one drop from the bottle, applied to the tip of the tongue. That acrid taste seems like it could never go away, and yet there is a full bottle of it left. There will always be a full bottle left.

It tastes like spitting loss, biting regret, venomous hatred, curdled resentment, dishonest blame shifting, and devouring lust, and all of it curved back on itself. To use Augustine’s phrase—incurvatus in se—it is like a snake biting its tail. Actually, it is not like a snake biting its tail; it is a snake biting its tail.

Instead of the soul turned outward toward God, the twisted soul bends back in upon itself. The idea is to believe in oneself, to reach deep down within one’s own heart, and there to discover a treasury of infinite riches. So goes the lie. But what we have discovered instead is that we have become a vacuous people with hollow souls, empty minds, and grasping hands.

Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands. They are in tatters, and pieces are all over the floor. When we try to pick up one piece, we drop other pieces, and all of them continue to tear and come apart. Not only so, but just as we buy our jeans pre-ripped these days, so also we try to treat our souls the same way—we try to introduce the artificial destruction early on. Christian parents send their fresh little girls off to a government school so that some bureaucratic flunky can start grooming her into taking hormone blockers, and then cutting off her breasts.

If you are reading this, and you are one of those who has been surgically torn apart by such lies, and you are still miserable, that misery has to do with your relationship to the God you are still rejecting. Your misery has nothing to do with the fact that some people in the red states disapprove of what you have done. They cut off your breasts in San Francisco, and you are not spiritually empty because somebody in Tulsa disapproves. You feel spiritually empty because you are spiritually empty, and Oklahoma has little or nothing to do with it. Not only so, but the surgeon who did this awful thing to you is spiritually empty as well, and the medical profession certified him is as hollow as a jug. Looking to them for answers is like drinking from the dry and broken cisterns of ancient Israel, the ones that were dry in Jeremiah’s day.

“Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands.” I can summarize this whole sentence into one word when it comes to what I’ve been describing so often in my observations and critique of the powers-that-be: soulless.

As in callous, heartless, cold, calculating, and cruel.

Name me any politician on the Left these days, and I think “soulless.” There are some on the Right, too, but they’re a minority. Whichever side of the aisle they are on, they don’t care about fairness, lawfulness, truth or those they harm with their insane policies. They care only about themselves and their power.

No one is really “soulless.” We all have a soul. But our souls are sick and unresponsive to what is right and good. So what is the solution?

When you are mired in sin, as America currently is, there is no option other than repentance. That repentance does not extricate us from the bog we have created, but it is the one thing required of us by the only One who can extricate us. The twin summons of the gospel consists of these two imperatives—repent and believe.

When I’ve said that there is only one way back from the coming confrontation, I’m wrong. One is to strenuously object; the other is to repent and believe. Where I am sure to ruffle some feathers is when I say that perhaps it will take both repenting and believing, and strenuously objecting.

The best case scenario is that we and our countrymen (and those living here illegally) come to their senses and repent before it’s too late. We must pray that the Spirit of God does that work.

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Daily Broadside | You May Soon Want a Fake Vaccine ID

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 35:15
“Each of you must turn from your wicked ways and reform your actions; do not follow other gods to serve them.”

Wednesday and we’ve hit the middle of the week. I think I’ve missed my window to try high-diving into a pool of jello.

One of the guys that I enjoying reading is Doug Wilson over at Blog & Mablog. He’s a theologian/philosopher of a reformed/evangelical bent and writes with clarity, wisdom and wit about God’s truth and its intersection with our culture and politics. He’s a careful student of our times and an expert at explaining the disease behind the madness.

In his post on Monday, he presented a biblical defense of fake vaccine IDs. (I personally prefer reading his posts, but he also records them as audio and, below, video.)

What he impressed on me is not so much the logic and biblical support of getting a fake vaxx ID (which is strong), but that he is convinced we are fast approaching a situation in which fake IDs will be necessary. In other words, he and I agree that we are unlikely to avoid further descent into the tyranny of the ruling political class. As he says, “things really are that dire.”

That means that Christians who oppose vaccine mandates will have to make a choice. For Wilson, “Believing Christians have three basic options—compliance, non-compliance with a guilty conscience, and non-compliance with a clean conscience. I am urging you all to the third option, and I believe that these principles below can help with that.”

He then goes on to outline seven principles regarding fake IDs. Let me briefly summarize them for you:

  1. Resist openly. “If massive numbers of people simply refuse to take the vaccine, there is nothing they can do.”
  2. Resist clandestinely. If you can’t resist openly, “then feel free before God to resist” using fake vaccine IDs.
  3. Fake vaccine IDs are not to be used just in the context of doing gospel work. “These are liberty issues, and any kind of lawful liberty is never a trifle.”
  4. You can be right with God and use a fake ID, but “there are wisdom issues involved also, and so you should do a reasonable cost/benefit analysis with regard to whatever it is you are doing.”
  5. “If you are a Christian elder or pastor … at least have the decency not to rat out Christians who do have that liberty in their conscience” to use fake vaccination IDs
  6. If you choose to “use a fake ID, then don’t settle for less. Use only the best” fake vaccine IDs.
  7. Think longer term. “Behave in such a way now as that you will not be ashamed to talk about it afterwards.”

I haven’t written about it for a while, but I still believe there’s a good possibility that our current cold civil war will go hot. I don’t particularly want that to happen, but I’m not the one forcing the issue. It’s our lying government and the lapdogs in the media who cover for them.

When it comes to dealing with leaders who deceive and take away liberties that have been long established, it is they who have broken “comity” as Wilson calls it, and we are then faced with a choice of being complicit in our own destruction or resisting sin, potentially to the point of shedding our blood (Hebrews 12:4).

Whether you agree with Wilson or not, he provokes thought, and now is the time to do your thinking.

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Daily Broadside | 1 May 20

It’s May 1, 2020 and we’ve been under house arrest stay-at-home orders here in Illinois since March 21. Gov. Pritzker has extended a modified order until May 30 to avoid a projected “second wave” of coronavirus deaths if the statewide stay-at-home order is lifted.

We’ll now be required to wear face masks in most public settings, but some businesses and state parks will be allowed to reopen, and hospitals will be permitted to offer elective surgeries again. That’s progress, although it’s strange that face masks are required now. Wouldn’t they have been better used as part of the original effort to flatten the curve? And if the curve is flattened, doesn’t that mean that significantly less people are getting the virus?

I don’t make the rules, but I do question them. Speaking of which —

I pointed out in yesterday’s Morning Links that it seems like some government mandates are exceeding their constitutional authority under these stay-at-home orders. The example I gave was from Wisconsin, where two officers were filmed confronting a mother over her daughter going to her friend’s house to play.

I had a visceral reaction to that, but not nearly as strong as the one I had to this from Paula Bolyard over on PJ Media:

It’s even worse in Knox County, Tenn., where the health department just announced that while churches may reopen on May 1, the Lord’s Supper is forbidden.

The order was announced by Knox County Health Department Regional Hospital Coordinator Charity Menefee, who announced that Communion is not part of “core worship.”

The immediate question is, “Who is Charity Menefee and who gave her permission to determine what is or isn’t part of ‘core worship’ in the church?!” It gets worse:

In addition, “The physical taking of communion/sacrament should not be performed due to the serial breaking of physical distancing across a congregation.” Churches are urged to “consider guiding parishioners in how to connect with the spiritual aspects of these practices during this phase.” Never mind that for Christians, Communion is a requirement, not an optional activity that can be transmitted over the internet.

Not only that, but church attendees are also banned from physically embracing or shaking hands with one another. And singing, while not banned, “is discouraged as it is thought to be an activity that expels significantly more virus than talking.”

Also banned by the Knox County order: “communal items (for example, tithe plates, hymnals, bibles, etc.).” Churches are told they should use a donation box in lieu of an offering plate. “Only core worship services are permitted in Phase One,” the order reads. “Activities such as groups and classes, youth services, social events, potlucks, communal snacks or food, and nursery, are not permitted in Phase One.”

The civil authorities in Knox County are clearly operating outside their jurisdiction. Local bureaucrats have no right to make such decisions.

Back in March, Douglas Wilson wrote about the nature and extension of civil government when it comes to the things of God:

In historic Presbyterian polity (all rise!), the civil magistrate had no authority in sacred things (in sacris), but he had definite authority surrounding sacred things (circa sacra). Put simply, the magistrate has no right to tell the church what to preach, how to pray, how to administer the sacraments, who to discipline, etc. That is not their assigned task. They need to stay in their lane.

But when it comes to questions of public safety (which is exactly what this is), preachers need to stay in their lane. It would be different if we were talking about a monastery with a bunch of recluse hermit monks, and the magistrate told them they couldn’t gather in their own chapel for prayers. That would be none of the magistrate’s business. But if great herds of Baptists head out to the Golden Corral after services, and they do this during the time of an epidemic, the magistrate has full authority and obligation to tell all of them “not so fast.” This is circa sacra.

There are so many areas where the church should be resisting statism, it would be shame to waste our powder on any issue where the state is acting well within its rights.

In Knox County, the state is most assuredly not “acting well within its rights.” While Charity Menefee rightly permits churches to reopen based on her authority “surrounding sacred things (circa sacra),” she violates the boundary separating church and state by assuming authority “in sacred things (in sacris).”

Miss Menefee may not have done so with malice; in fact, she may have considered her directive magnanimous. But such a violation is still a violation—and a dangerous one at that because it is done in the name of “safety.”

The concept of safety acts like a sedative on us—”you want others to be safe, don’t you?”—in which we lower our defenses as the natural impulse to care for others takes over. It’s subtle, seductive and smooth. Of course we want others to be safe.

But that’s not the right question. The question is, “whose domain?” The practice of communion is not based on whether it is considered “safe” to do so by civil authorities. Follow the progression of that thinking and in ten years communion will be declared “unsafe” because it reinforces religious dogma that increases the risk of perceived threats to some minority group.

No, communion is first and foremost based on the authority of Jesus Himself.

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. — 1 Cor. 11:23-26

More importantly for this discussion, the freedom to practice communion without government interference is grounded in the First Amendment, which protects religious belief and expression. With emphasis added, it reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” — The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

In 1940, the Supreme Court ruled that the Free Exercise Clause is enforceable against state and local governments. Miss Menefee, then, is abusing her authority and violating her citizens’ constitutional and God-ordained rights.

When it comes to the act of taking communion, the authority of the Constitution supersedes the authority of the Knox County Health Department Regional Hospital Coordinator. And the authority of Jesus Christ supersedes the authority of the Constitution, which protects our God-given right to worship as we see fit.

It would be unwise to allow this interference by the state to go unanswered, because it will set precedent. The churches of Knox County must unite and issue a kind but firm rebuke to the local “magistrate,” making it clear that the encroachment on their civil and religious liberties will not go unchallenged.

My guess is that their example will be needed in the not-too-distant future.