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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 Problem of Evil Is One of Belief

Daily Verse | Job 24:13
“There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths.”

Thursday’s Reading: Job 25-28

Thursday and yesterday I wrote that we are living in evil times. This is, of course, a biblical concept.

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
— Ephesians 5:15-16

What’s astounding to me is that even those whom we would consider coming at life from a secular perspective (i.e. following Jesus or seeking what God wants are not priorities) are seeing the evil and, more than that, sounding the alarm. As I mentioned, Dr. Naomi Wolf is on some kind of a spiritual journey, and it’s because she has no categories in which to explain what she sees happening in society.

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.

What does it say when the collective behavior of a society is so abhorrent, so unimaginable—so wicked—that someone who wasn’t taking God seriously is suddenly forced to reconsider their position and recategorize what they’re seeing in biblically moral terms?

And she’s not the only one writing about evil. Here’s noted columnist Daniel Greenfield in a piece called, “Uvalde and the Problem of Evil.”

What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Guns.

19 years ago, a middle-aged unemployed taxi driver carrying two milk cartons full of gasoline walked onto a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.

That was not a milk carton problem. Nor was it a gasoline problem.

6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a Bastille Day event in Nice, France killing 86 and wounding over 400 other people. Body parts were being pried out of his wheel wells.

That was not a truck problem.

Across the long stretch of human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, in often cruder and far more brutal ways. Back then we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of smithing, but the problem of evil.

The problem with evil is that it requires us to believe in good.

Modern people are unwilling to believe in G-d, and so they believe instead in government. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we only give it the power.

The trouble is that while people may not believe in evil, evil very much believes in them.

Another favorite essayist is Michael Walsh. He’s written about the moral collapse before in (dense) books such as The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and The Fiery Angel. (Be sure to set aside plenty of time to absorb his perspective.) He also writes at the popular level in opinion columns at The Pipeline. Here’s some of what he wrote in his most recent column, which focuses on the lack of masculinity in our society.

No, the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in our guns but in ourselves, and specifically in our men. For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed “toxic” by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.

Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not “baby daddies,” to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn’t exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an “X” for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons …

… No, the problem isn’t “gun violence,” it’s the enforced emasculation of teenage American males via liberalism, feminism, academia, psychiatry, pharmacology, and the media, which all too often explodes in inchoate rage. Innate female impulses and values are critical to civilizational formation, but they are antithetical to civilizational preservation, prizing collectivism over individuality, shared instead of personal responsibility, and constant, generally irrational fears for physical and emotional safety. (“Safety” on line? Twitter can instantly “suspend” you permanently and Facebook can send you to Sugarmountain Prison on the spot for unspecified “harassment,” but the Uvalde shooter can yap on social media about his desire to assault a school and nothing happens to him, algorithmically speaking.) There has never been a successful matriarchy in Western history and there never will be. Neither sex would or should want it. And as for the 19th Amendment and its effect on American history, don’t get me started…

… [O]ur forefathers would have dubbed such behavior as “evil,” which is what the shootings in Texas and in Buffalo—and the weekly carnage in places like Chicago—are. Please don’t “judge” him, said the Texas shooter’s mom, “he had his reasons.” No real man cares what his “reasons” were. Indeed, the sooner we get the shrinks out of the criminal justice system entirely, and replace them with morality, the more justice we’re going to get for criminals. Some people are just born to be bad and no amount of shrinking is going to help them; it only excuses them.

All of this reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote about relativism and “men without chests.”

In his book, The Abolition of Man, Lewis was prophetic in pointing out that relativism—the idea that there are no absolute truths—would lead to the decay of morality and a lack of virtue within society. Without a belief in and the teaching of universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with intelligent men who behave like animals or as Lewis puts it, “Men without Chests.” Read slowly to follow Lewis’s apologetic:

As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests …

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

What he’s saying here is that we can’t criticize and destroy our moral foundations and then turn around and expect men and women of integrity, dignity and honor.

When you lose any sense of moral structure, here’s where it leads:

Not only does the assailant not have a “chest,” but neither do any of the men on the train. Instead of intervening on behalf of the terrified woman, who whimpers “help me,” they whip out their phones and … take videos of the assault.

That situation infuriates me. Not because I’m a hero, but because none of them were. It was so unjust, so repugnant, so offensive to civil society.

Where are the men?

Back to Daniel Greenfield:

Evil is a human void. It’s the egotistical emptiness that remains in the absence of good. To defeat it, we would have to conceive of good. We would have to retell the stories of the mass shootings, of crime in general, as a struggle between good and evil. Not all that long ago, we had a society capable of telling that story. These days we are more likely to celebrate evil.

The Left believes that government is god and it conceives of evil as disobedience to government. The gun control debate reduces evil to the NRA and anyone who won’t obey and hand over their guns. “Do you want more kids to die?” the gun controllers demand.

But good and evil don’t come from a gun. Nor do they come from the government.

The reduction of individual choices to mechanical abstractions, shootings to guns, individual acts to society, is the mark of elites who want to rule the world, yet can’t understand people.

There’s no formula more likely to convince people that their acts have no value, their lives no purpose, and that whatever they do doesn’t matter in any larger sense. And so evil is born.

Here’s the truth: evil is a reality.

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:13-15)

There is evil in the world, and people are beginning to discover that truth. But as Christ-followers, we’ve known that truth for a long time, even as it’s gone out of fashion.

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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.