Imagine hearing that in 2026, over one million Americans would be murdered. Now, imagine that those lives would be lost on the southern border due to cartels or other external violence. There is no world in which this could happen which wouldn’t immediately trigger a response in every fighting-age man. This is a peculiar blind spot about the visual wiring in men. If men observed this violence in an external arena, the response would be quick, fierce, and devastating.

So, why is there so much apathy among men regarding the issue of abortion?​

I admit to being part of this guilty cohort. Recently my wife was invited by an influential pro-life group, Live Action, to join a small group of hand selected advocates. Live Action is training this cohort to combat the murder of children in many different cultural arenas: religion, media, law, and philosophy. I am fortunate to have a highly engaging intellectual relationship with my wife and we have been discussing the classes she is taking on this abortion issue. I painfully admit to having my eyes opened by our ongoing dialogue on this issue. One of the clear issues that we have noticed is the lack of male involvement.

As I’ve reflected on this issue, I believe the reason for male indifference can be traced to three major dynamics: the abstract nature of abortion, the power of feminism, and the full witness of the weakness and sinfulness of men.

Abstraction Advantages Evil

​Men are predominantly visual. Due to biological and neurological factors, men perceive reality primarily through visual cues. For better or for worse, and sometimes it goes both ways, men’s “interest” or door to reality is through the visual world. In this frame of thinking, the womb acts as a visual barrier. This might seem ridiculous, but I am constantly surprised by how little men understand about what takes place in a woman’s body until they experience their own children. As a father myself, there is still much mystery for me surrounding pregnancy. This is why men can watch two planes fly into towers in NYC and feel immediately compelled to put all differences aside and fly to a desert 6,000 miles away to fight and die for their country. Yet, right under their noses, over a million lives are taken every year, and they do next to nothing. Abortion is literally bypassing how the male brain processes evil.

Live Action has many testimonies highlighting this phenomenon. Men represent both the dominant group viewing abortion procedures and the group most likely to rapidly change their views afterward. When men see forceps pull apart a baby, and they see the baby responding, fleeing, and screaming, this creates visceral disgust and horror in normal men. Seeing the video illuminates something in men’s minds that had previously been darkened. Once this visualization threshold is overcome, they are unable to go back.

This is what happened to abortionist Bernard Nathanson. He was one of the greatest forces behind the legalization of abortion and had aborted over five thousand babies, including his own children. During one abortion, he saw the child screaming through the ultrasound. This silent scream completely changed his mind on abortion. Just visually seeing what he was doing turned him from being one of the greatest advocates for legalized abortion into a dynamic anti-abortion activist. It was only the visualization of the reality of abortion that was enough to overcome this grizzled abortionist.

If we want to engage men, then we need to find ways to humanize this “lump of cells.” This humanization will help men break into the parts of their mind that have trouble understanding what abortion is really doing. We need them to cross this visual Rubicon.

​Your Body, My Choice

The second major hurdle for men engaging with the pro-life movement is feminism. This ideology functions as an effective kryptonite, confusing and stymying the engagement of the warrior class in our culture. Feminism’s messaging has been extremely effective at disorienting men. The “my body-my choice”, “destroy the patriarchy-not the planet”, “girl-boss”, “the future is female” messaging has effectively removed men from the abortion fight.

Feminism also disorients men’s visual cues. Feminist rhetoric communicates to men that they are not needed in the fight for life. It tells them that this fight is taking place in a domain over which they have no responsibility. In this messaging, men are like bees that approach an artificial flower because of its stimulating, bright visual cues, only to leave disoriented because there is no real nectar or pollen in the flower. This has the effect of leaving men believing they have no real ownership over this deep darkness that is assaulting our world.

At the core of feminism is the belief that this Marxist ideology can better protect women than men can. And that is the heartbreaking lie that is wrecking society. This lie devastates both men and women in very different ways. Men are at their best when the most responsibility available is laid at their feet. One of the most fundamental layers of man’s hardwiring is the protection of women and children. Men were quite literally God-designed for this role. But what men hear from feminism is that they have no place in this fight. No uterus, no opinion, as they say. And to add to this confusion, men are being told this by women, which also crosses their wiring because women are the very thing they feel the need to protect. These women they are designed to protect are now murdering children and telling them that they shouldn’t protect either one of them.

Men feel stuck. Do they listen to this loud chorus of angry women, or do they ignore it? Will a rightly ordered version of a man’s protection overstep the woman to protect the child if that is what is needed?

Additionally, the messaging around the murder of children always avoids speaking to men. Amnesty International states that, “Everyone has a right to control their own fertility and exercise reproductive autonomy. This is particularly important for all women.” Planned Parenthood calls abortion for women, “a basic human right.” This language directed at women always presents itself as truly caring for women. George Orwell had this to say about this kind of political and propaganda messaging, “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Feminism and abortion both thrive on euphemism.

We can and should attribute this evil messaging that has disoriented men squarely at the feet of the feminist movement. This entire ideology has been wreaking havoc for over sixty years in this country. Thankfully, it seems like feminism is finally on cultural life support. And yet the core message of feminism, echoed deeply in the abortion movement, is that women can be just like men. But this is the lie feminists continue to sell. Abortion, then, promises to give women equality, to have their fertility mimic that of men. To quote Dr. Waterman Ward:

The assertion that women’s sexuality can be just like men’s, however sincerely proclaimed, is deeply mimetic and biologically oppressive. Such an unstable belief system requires sacrifice for its maintenance. If pregnancy is death to self, and sexual intercourse is required for self-fulfillment - both culturally conditioned notions - abortion seems to provide the only escape from the terrors of living in a woman’s body.

In other words, were feminism to make good on the promise that women can be just like men, this inherently means that children will be the sacrifice required for this devil’s bargain. There is no future for feminism without making good on this promise. The reality is that even in a post-Roe v. Wade world, abortions continue to rise. This shows that the answer to abortion was not just this landmark legal case being overturned, it’s a much deeper issue. As Dr. Carrie Gress notes in Something Wicked:

The overturning of Roe v Wade exposed the truth that Roe wasn’t the engine behind the abortion industry. The engine is and always has been feminism. Pro-life efforts have often treated the symptoms of an abortion-minded culture, particularly on a practical level, but what is missed is the root cause of what makes abortion make sense. Until we figure that out, the pro-life victory we seek will always elude us.

So, what makes abortion make sense for women? Simply stated, the Faustian-feminist promise that women can be just like men. But this is not naturally true, so it is by supernatural means this promise is held together. Every bargain has a price, and the price for this distortion is life itself. In the garden the serpent’s promise was that they could be like gods, feminism’s promise is that women can be just like men.

Whatever marginal good people think feminism has brought to the world, it is beyond rehabilitation when fully evaluated. The idea that there can be “Christian feminism” makes no more sense than saying there can be “Christian abortions”. Christianity and feminism stand in ontological contrast to each other. They are definitionally distinct. Men and women will never be the same and this is God designed. Believing that one can be kept without the other is like saying nazi ideology wasn’t bad, it was only the extermination camps that were the problem.

Feminism rightly understands that there are evil men in this world, but it has deceptively promised to protect women from these evil men. The answer to evil men is not feminism, or the removal of women’s vulnerability. The only thing that stops bad men is good men. We don’t need more feminism; we need better men.

Which leads us to our next point.

​Will The True Men Please Stand Up?

The third reality men face has no other blame than men’s own sin. In the previous two points, I have highlighted how there are two issues hijacking men’s processing of the issue of abortion. The first is the abstract nature of the womb; the second is the distorting messaging of feminism. Now, both of these issues are important to the equation, but there is a third factor that cannot be attributed to external stimuli.

There are many men who have no issue with abortion because it serves as the solution to a problem in their personal life. They use abortion to stop the consequences of their own sexual lust. They have become so desensitized to their own perversions that even this sacrifice no longer has any effect. Abortion, the morning-after pill, and artificial contraception are all wonderful tools in the lusty gentleman’s tool chest. Through these modern devices of sexual wizardry, there is no sexual consequence. I should know, in a past life, all these methods were presented to me as legitimate means to defy sex’s natural ends.

But it is not just the sexual culture that is corroding men. In the last year alone there have been a myriad of legal cases prosecuting men who have killed their children via the abortion pill. Through various means these men have tricked, force-fed, or lied their way into putting the abortion pill into their partners. The reason these men can murder their children with such ease is that the abortion pill can be taken without ever seeing a doctor in person.

Pornography is equally ruining multitudes of men and continues to decouple sexuality from meaningful, monogamous sexual relationship. I see what this is doing to many men that I know personally. The data is ever more disheartening, with American servers hosting more pornography than any other nation. According to the Barna Research Group, close to 80% of men will have used porn in the last month. Being a “Christian man” offers no inoculation from this statistic.

The proliferation of pornography, the cultural promiscuity, the sexual callousness and the susceptibility in which men become leaders in all of this is distressing. And it rightly appalls women. I regularly hear from wonderful young women who cannot find men not soaked in these sexual evils. In every case, it is a distortion of the godly masculinity in which men are called to partake, and the responsibility for this must be handed fully to men. Men have to call each other higher and elevate the godly standard.

This decoupling of sexuality from marriage and children started with artificial contraception, which disconnected the possibility of producing life from sex. Now, the charismatics will say the Catholics don’t know how to prophesy, but what Pope John Paul VI said in Humanae Vitae about what would happen when artificial contraception was introduced to culture was prophetic:

• a rise in marital infidelity,

• a general lowering of moral standards,

• a loss of respect for women by men,

• and governments coercing citizens to use contraception.

Tragically, each one of these points reinforces feminism’s claim as a solution to the ills of society because each point weakens men, which cascades down to women. And what is so tragic about feminism’s messaging on these points is that it does not demand that men overcome their base selfishness, lust, and sexual desire. It tells men that they aren’t needed, so men might as well turn themselves towards fantasy and lust. Men were made for war; they were made to fight and to overcome. Nothing brings this out in men like the communicated need from those they are supposed to protect. But feminism’s message to men is that they aren’t needed, so they might as well lose themselves in a pool of their own sexual cravings.

In Genesis, when the bible says that God created woman for man, a more accurate way of understanding this is to say, “God created woman to stand against man”. This “against” can be understood in relation to a mirror that reflects back to its viewer who they really are. There is something fundamental about the male-female dynamic that requires the reflection of the other to become the highest version of themselves.

In his oracle-like fashion, C.S. Lewis predicted this current future of men eighty years earlier when he said:

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 honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Lewis’ target for this statement was the failure of modern education to instruct and train men of virtue. In Lewis’ day, it was the educational fields that were experiencing this rot. In modern America, these same failures have seeped into the media messaging, religious institutions, family dynamics, and, of course, the education system. Is it any wonder that men are absent in places where the fighting is the thickest? Yet in spite of all of these factors, men need to rise up to this moment. Abortion remains a horrifying sin taking place in our midst.

There is a wonderful Instagram account called “tradiesforbabies” that is personal testimonies of blue-collar tradesmen telling stories of how they are fighting abortion in their lives. It is deeply moving, in part, because of the simplicity and rawness of these uncomplicated men. They don’t need a lofty philosophy to know something is wrong, and it lies at their feet to fix. It is the blue-collar army versus the ivory tower acolytes who are telling these men they have no place in the abortion fight. This is when we see the patriarchy at its best. The strength and role men were divinely given to maintain order and justice is for the protection of women and children. The sad reality is that when things go wrong in culture, it is primarily men’s fault. Men will no more be able to blame abortion on women or feminism than they were able to blame the apple on Eve. This is what the leadership role demands we acknowledge. This will only be recovered when awareness starts among men as fathers and husbands, raising up sons trained not in the way of the culture but in the ways of the Lord.

Can These Dead Man Walk?

​We are so intently steeped in the errors of modernity that we have become calloused to the depth of the wickedness of abortion. It has become so normalized that it might as well be the cultural water we swim in. The wholesale murder of a million children nationally and seventy-three million globally has become so normalized that we don’t even think about it anymore. This is truly shocking when one stops to consider it. But this error is far from over.

When society heads into error, there are many stops along the way before it reaches its final destination. With abortion and contraception, the first thing that society lost was the possibility that sex would produce life. When this connection was lost, marriage no longer provided a necessary framework for sex. Once we lost the necessity of marriage between men and women, we added marriage between matching genders. Once gender norms were crossed within marriage, we started to question the truth of gender. The final stop will be the cultural acceptance of pedophilia and the public sexualization of children, which is well underway. These are all predictable outcomes.

We can trace all this back to the acceptance of abortion in this nation. And this is a fight that we desperately need men in. Men need to recognize that it was a serious mistake to send women out alone to fight this ancient cultural Moloch. Abortion marshals the defense of women because it effectively misaligns the Godly empathy they are designed to carry. Peter Kreeft stated that unlike the true savior who said, “this is my body, given up for you” in an abortion, a mother (and often a father) says to her child, “this is your body, given up for me.” The sacrifice of this life is the uncompromising destination that feminism must maintain in the deeply disordered quest to make men and women “equal.”

It is noble and potent to hear the testimony of women speaking out against their past abortions. These testimonies penetrate the hearts of countless women who are struggling with this difficult decision. God’s grace is so good and vast that he allows the brokenness in all of us to be restored and properly directed. Yet after fifty years and the overturning of Roe-v-Wade, abortions continue to proliferate. This expansion occurs hand-in-hand with telling men this isn’t our fight. But it is our fight. To reorient this fight around the help of men, we need to speak into the awareness of our brothers, we need to ignore the message of feminism, and we need to take accountability and repent for the very real ways that we as men are failing culture.

To my brothers, the future day of accounting will leave our silence exposed, and the shade of women will offer us no shelter.

I want to interrogate this position and see if it holds true.

First, whenever someone says, “the Church Fathers believed,” it reveals that they have never read the Church Fathers, who frequently disagreed with each other.

I also want to define what I mean by Zionism. It is such a loaded term that I think most people have a hard time digesting it outside the current conflict in the Middle East. I’m going to use the term broadly to describe a future belief or expectation that the Jews would be regathered to the physical land of Israel. I am making no claims about Netanyahu, the ongoing conflicts, foreign aid, a political party, critiquing modern Israel, eschatology, or anything else outside the simple view that the Jews would return to Israel.

The outline of this essay will be 3 parts: evaluating whether there was any Zionist belief in the early church, examining the clearly anti-Jewish suppersessionistic beliefs in the early church and the presuppositions this belief was built on, and then attempting to reconcile these positions with the unflinching reality in front of us.

Question 1: Was there anything that could be reasonably described as Zionism in the early church?

Short answer: yes.

Some of this analysis will come down to the main eschatology of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.1

Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) is the first one to mention the return of the Jews to Israel when he says, “he believed that God would gather up ‘the people of the Jews’ in Jerusalem where they would repent of their rejection of Christ.”2 Martyr uses Zechariah to argue that the Jews will be gathered from the four winds to Jerusalem in which they will repent. At times he would voice this as both the inheritance of righteous Jews and Gentiles. He articulates this as well in his Dialogue with Trypho, when Trypho asks Justin whether he believes Jerusalem will be rebuilt and that the righteous Jews will have an inheritance there.

Tertullian (c. 155-220) has a great quote that I used in Chapter 1 of my recent book in which he says that Christians should “rejoice . . . at the restoration of Israel” because “the whole of our hope is intimately united with the remaining expectation of Israel”.3 It is not difficult to see what that expectation was, at least in part. John Chrysostom (c. 347 - 407) wrote about it when he said, “They never stop whispering in everybody’s ear and bragging that they will get their city back again”. 4

Irenaeus (c. 125-202) uses the same proof as St. Jerome regarding Jeremiah 16, where Israel will no longer call God the God who brought them out of Egypt, but will now call him the God who brought them back from all of the nations. He also speaks of the future regathering of Israel in multiple ways: “Now I have shown a short time ago that the church is the seed of Abraham; and for this reason, that we may know that He who in the New Testament “raises up from the stones children unto Abraham (Matthew 3:9) is he who will gather, according to the Old Testament, those that shall be saved from all the nations. Jeremiah says: ‘Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that they shall no more say, ‘The Lord lives, who led the children of Israel from the north, and from every region whither they had been driven; He will restore them to their own land which He gave to their fathers’” (Jeremiah 23:6-7). He then ties the God of the “Old Testament” to the regathering of Israel, when they will no longer call him the God who delivered them only out of Egypt, but will now call him the God who brought them back from the four corners of the earth. Irenaeus also believed that the Lord would construct the temple in Jerusalem, where the antichrist would eventually sit. In addition to Irenaeus, Victorinus of Pettau (c. 230–304 AD), the author of the first commentary on Revelation, also believed there would be a third temple.

St. Jerome (c. 347–420) wrote about the regathering of Israel when he said that “in the latter days” God would gather the called remnant from the people of Judah to Jerusalem.5 Jerome specifically distinguishes between the future restoration of Israel and the past Babylonian exile when he says: “Clearly he (the prophet) is predicting the future restoration of the People of Israel and (God’s) compassion for Israel after the captivity, which was fulfilled in part iuxta literam under Zerubbabel, Joshua the priest, and Ezra.” Jerome then uses the same description as Irenaeus: when this future event occurs, Israel will no longer call God the God who brought them out of Egypt, but the God who brought them back to Israel from all the nations. This is described as a future event. Jerome then ties this to what Paul says in Romans 11 about the future salvation of Israel, and sees these two events happening in the same era.6

Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) also believed that “the entire multitude of the Jews in the dispersion will (once again) possess the region of the nation” as a “sign of blessing from God.”7

Bede the Venerable (c. 672-735) believed that when Israel obtains it’s promised salvation that “it is hoped, perhaps not rashly, that it will also return to it’s native soil and rejoice in the possession and habitation of it’s former chief city.”8

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74) in his commentary on Jeremiah 31 stated that “there is hope for your (the Jews) future, to signify that in the last times the Jewish people shall be turned to the true faith and perhams even to their own land.”9 I understand that Aquinas is not the “early church” but his voice echoes loudly in our history so I thought it worth adding in his thoughts here.

In these views, you can get the basic contours of a minimal Zionism if we define that as the future regathering of the Jews back to the land. It certainly could never be labeled a fundamental belief among the Church Fathers, but it was discussed in certain ways.

Question 2: What about the witness of the early church that didn’t see things this way?

I am less interested in trying to show hints of the regathering of the Jews in the early Church than I am in showing why the rest didn’t see it this way. It is obvious that much of the early church held deeply anti-Jewish perspectives and generally thought the Jews were an accursed people who would be forced to endure eternal wandering. And it’s easy to see why. The “proof” for this belief was that the Jews had been scattered outside of Israel and had lost Jerusalem. When one reads the Church Fathers’ statements on the Jews, they are always predicated on the belief that the Jews being out of the land and the temple being destroyed was proof that God had rejected the Jews. In other words, being outside the land and losing Jerusalem was the entire crux of the argument.

To give some examples of this, Augustine discusses the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people in works like City of God (Books IV, XVIII) and his sermons, viewing these events as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and as evidence of divine judgment. Augustine went on to create an entire witness doctrine (doctrine of Jewish witness) around the belief that the Jews would be permanent wanderers.

We may quote John Chrysostom to get a sense of how this worked, “However, there is no longer any hope that they will recover Jerusalem”, Chrysostom argued, “for that city shall not rise up again in the future, nor will they return to their prior form of worship.”10

Didymus the Blind (c. 398), an authority at his time, explicitly stated that the Lord fights against the Jews “not for a brief time, but for every age to come, even to the consummation of the world”; and this is because “they wander as fugitives and captives among all nations, having neither a city nor their own region”.11

You get the idea.

What’s important to understand is that the Church Fathers’ argument against the Jews was a presuppositional argument. The argument’s substratum was always stated to be the loss of land and the destruction of Jerusalem, and that this was to be a permanent feature of the Jewish punishment. To quote the Orthodox Christian archimandrite and theologian Serafim Seppälä, “The rejection and forsakenness of Jews was strongly connected with their loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and the loss was presented as proof for the former.”12 What is funny about this view - or ironic - depending on your perspective, is that the Jews also believed that their diaspora and loss of Jerusalem was best explained by their own sins.

Everyone who wrote about the Jews in the early Church talked about the loss of land and Jerusalem as being the visible sign of God’s rejection of the Jews. Justin Martyr, Hippolytos, Cyprian of Carthage, Athanasius the Great, Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Augustine, etc. They all used the Jews’ dispersion as evidence for whatever negative thing they would say following this “proof” about the permanent forsakenness of the Jews. The argument was never “we inherited this witness or belief from the Apostles,” or even the murky “God told us so,” or “we can see the permanence of this rejection in the biblical text”. We must also be honest and say that none of the doctrine we now call “replacement theology” was ever mentioned or confirmed at any of the 7 major church councils. So, while it could be considered the consensus patrum of the majority of the Fathers, it was predicated on the belief of the permanent scattering of the Jewish people.

Now that this “proof” has been proven false in the light of history, what does that mean? To quote Seppälä again, as it relates to the Jews being back in the land, “Logically speaking, this must mean that either the Jews have recovered the Land in spite of God willing them not to do so, or that they have recovered it in accordance with God’s will.”13 Now, the former part of Seppälä’s statement, as he rightly knows, is a theological and logical dead end when compared to the fullness of what the patristic argument is. To quote Seppälä again, “This (regathering to Israel) cannot be dealt with by arguing that people do act against the will of God, and the establishment of the state of Israel is merely one of those kinds of acts. Because the patristic argument is that it is impossible for Jews, being forsaken, to return to rule the Holy Land, and this is due to divine oikonomia.”14

In other words, were we to be true and fair to the patristic argument, it was impossible, from their perspective, for the Jews to ever return due to divine judgment and the subsequent belief that God had permanently rejected them. This judgment cannot be overcome by the UN, dispensationalism, the Rothschilds, sympathy after the Holocaust, or any of the other modern fads that blame the Jewish return on the outward schemes of man. None of these is stronger than God’s judgment, if this judgment were actually true. To blame the return on these factors is to misunderstand the patristic argument. The patristic argument is that due to God’s divine judgment, it was impossible for the Jews to ever return to the land of Israel or Jerusalem.

To anyone honest enough to say it, this view was obviously mistaken. Possibly an understandable mistake from their perspective. But still mistaken.

To sum up the Church Fathers’ presuppositional logic:

Premise 1. The Jews have been kicked out of their land, and Jerusalem has been destroyed.

Premise 2. This means God has permanently rejected them.

Conclusion. When premise 1 is proven false, this inherently undermines the logic on which premise 2 rested.

This leads me to why I can’t stand when people use the Church Fathers in this discussion. The chief cornerstone of their entire argument has been proven wrong. This is not up for debate. And people who continue to use this argument against Zionism don’t seem to realize this. To be frank, they warp the Father’s own arguments. I actually believe that if the Fathers were alive, based on their own logic, they would recognize God’s hand in this very messy miracle called Zionism. If this feels a statement too far, what we can say is that their presuppositional argument no longer stands. What seems inherently dishonest is to continue to use their argument in the light of their entire propositional framework being false in the light of reality. Zionism does not require someone to ignore the witness of the Fathers; in fact, one can simply use their internal logic of the belief to strengthen the case for it.

To quote the Catholic theologian André Villeneuve on the idea that one must ignore the Fathers to hold a belief in Zionism,

This is not only a misrepresentation—it’s historically ironic. In reality, many Catholic Zionists—including this author—arrived at their position precisely because of a careful study of biblical law, the Fathers, and the long arc of church history. It is the weight of that tradition, not ignorance of it, that has led them to recognize the theological errors of supersessionism and the enduring legitimacy of Israel’s place in salvation history. What is often neglected, in fact, is the ugly underside of the Christian tradition when it comes to the Jewish people. For centuries, supersessionism justified contempt, marginalization, persecution, and silence in the face of antisemitic violence. The long and tragic legacy of Catholic supersessionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism is not a mark of doctrinal fidelity, but of theological error. This history does not reflect Sacred Tradition as defined by the magisterium but “tradition” with a lower-case “t.” It is, in fact, a counter-witness to the gospel. To accuse Christian Zionists of ignoring tradition is to ignore the church’s own call to repentance, renewal, and fidelity in how Catholics understand the Jewish people—and Israel’s enduring role in salvation history.

Question 3: Where does that leave us?

Well, to revert to Protestantism briefly, the Protestant witness around Zionism looks something like this, to quote Jon Harris, starting in 1500, “Martin Bucer (1491–1551) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605) emphasized the promises to ethnic Israel in Romans 11. The Geneva Bible (1560) reinforced this interpretation. Soon, major religious figures in England such as Thomas Brightman (1562–1607), Sir Henry Finch (1558–1625), William Gouge (1575–1653), and John Milton (1608–1674), all came to believe in the future restoration of Jews to the land of Canaan. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) convened the Whitehall Conference (1655), which readmitted Jews to England and positioned the nation as a divine instrument for Israel’s restoration.”15 (This belief was also echoed in George Washington’s inner circle regarding the hope that the new America would bring restoration of the Jews to Israel) “Historian J. Van Den Berg said that “virtually all Dutch theologians of the seventeenth century believed ‘the whole of Israel’ indicated the fullness of the people of Israel ‘according to the flesh.’” Theologians in that tradition, such as Jacobus Koelman (1633-1695) also believed ethnic Jews would return to “their land” and “rebuild Jerusalem” (Eschatological Expectations, 145). Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) said that “the kingdom of the converted Jews who, returned to the Holy Land, would govern the world together with Christ” (151).”16

For my part, I will simply say that many major protestant theologians - from Wilhelmus à Brakel the dutch reformer (1635-1711), Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) who, in my view, is both the greatest American philosopher and theologian, Charles Hodge (1797-1878) , Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), J. C. Ryle (1806-1900), Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)17, and many others, were all Zionist. If we define Zionism as the belief that the Jews will be returned to the physical land of Israel. Unless the point is to be rhetorically dishonest, people would be wise to stop blaming this belief on dispensationalism. (If someone would like a scholarly treatment of this issue, I can’t recommend Anglican scholar, Dr. McDermott’s work, A New Christian Zionism, enough.)

Contra to this belief, we may quote Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) who makes his claim based on the logic of the Church Fathers: “Listen, Jew, are you aware that Jerusalem and your sovereignty…. have been destroyed for over 1,460 years? . . . For such ruthless wrath of God is sufficient evidence that they assuredly have erred and gone astray. . . . Therefore this work of wrath is proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God”.18 Now we may safely say, in the light of history, that Luther’s entire presuppositional argument no longer stands.

To revert back to the Catholic witness that was produced out of Vatican II, I will simply quote this line regarding the Jewish people, “Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets.”19

To tease this our further I will pull from the Gifts and Callings are Irrevocable produced by the Catholic Church which also deals with the Church Fathers’ statements on this narrow issue when it says,

On the part of many of the Church Fathers the so-called replacement theory or supersessionism steadily gained favour until in the Middle Ages it represented the standard theological foundation of the relationship with Judaism: the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God. With its Declaration “Nostra aetate” (No.4) the Church unequivocally professes, within a new theological framework, the Jewish roots of Christianity. While affirming salvation through an explicit or even implicit faith in Christ, the Church does not question the continued love of God for the chosen people of Israel. A replacement or supersession theology…. is deprived of its foundations.20

I am not Catholic, so I tread these waters carefully, but on the issue of Zionism and the Catholic Church, this matter does not yet seem to be solved. It is certainly not as solved as the podcast-pundint-class would lead you to believe.

Catholic theologians André Villeneuve and Antoine Lévy, OP’s, through personal dialogue, have shared with me a statement regarding what they believe is a faithful interpretation of the Catholic Church’s theology on these matters:

• that the covenant between God and the Jewish people “has never been revoked,” for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”21

• that the Jewish people retain a historic and theological bond with the land promised to Abraham’s descendants. Indeed, Israel preserved “the memory of the land of their forefathers at the hearts of their hope,” and “Christians are invited to understand this religious attachment which finds its roots in Biblical tradition…”22

• that the re‑establishment of a Jewish homeland in the modern State of Israel bears significance in light of God’s enduring fidelity to His people, a point expressed by PopeBenedict XVI when he noted that “in the creation of the State of Israel the fidelity of God to Israel is revealed in a mysterious way.”23

• that Catholic theology should “include the recognition of the unique and unbroken covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish People and the total rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism as a more recent manifestation of anti-Semitism.”24

What we can say is, to reference the Church Fathers, and any argument put forth that rested on the claim that the Jews were permanently rejected due to their expulsion is a dishonest way to use the Fathers. By their own logic, they have been proven wrong. In regard to the Jews, the Church Fathers wrote faithfully about what they were witnessing in front of them - but that witness has now changed. To use their arguments as if the foundations of their arguments have not changed is fundamentally a misuse of those arguments.

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Conclusion: Reality Is A Stubborn Teacher

I want to offer what I believe possibly happened in this part of Church History. I am going to make this claim by pulling from Deuteronomy 28 and 29. The jew-haters should love this chapter as it deals with the curses that would be put on Israel if they disobeyed God. (Hint, God knew they would disobey) Part of the curse in 28, 29 is the response that the nations would have towards God’s judgment of the Jews.

Specifically it says two very interesting things:

“And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you away.” (28.37) In other words, the Jewish people would become a warning of what happens when you sin against God. Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness is a perfect example of this concept.

And

“The foreigner who comes from a far land, will say, when they see the afflictions of that land and the sicknesses with which the Lord has made it sick— the whole land burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout…— all the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger?’ Then people will say, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers….Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book, and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as they are this day.” (29:22-28)

In other words, part of the judgment on the Jewish people was not only the removal from their land, but the fact that the nations would see it and connect it to their unfaithfulness. This is exactly what the Fathers did; they just got the permanence wrong. I would invite people to read Deuteronomy 32 to see how this story ends for the Jewish people.

The hopeful end is a future salvation of the Jewish people reconciled with their messiah, which has been the great hope of the church. Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, along with all of the Protestant scholars I mentioned above, held this hopeful view.

At its best, theology and tradition help us map onto reality. But when tradition collapses in on itself - in the face of the stubborn reality before our eyes - it no longer serves us as a guiding truth. It must bow to Divine Truth. To continue to hold it just because it is tradition only reveals that we have become ideologically captured rather than formed by the unbending sturdiness of reality. We used to believe the Earth was the center of the solar system, then, upon new data, we learned it was in fact the sun. When our presuppositions towards reality are falsified, the least we can do is be honest enough to admit it.

“Chris, if I fly out to Nashville, would you drive me up to see my sister?”

I paused as I considered what he was asking. His sister lives about 8 hours north. That would mean two pretty full days of driving and overnighting somewhere. In a past version of myself, this would have been no problem. My new version is very different. These days include: unplanned and rapid changes at work, being in the middle of a book launch, selling our home, a very chronically sick wife, and a young son (if you want to hear a beautiful conversation on the goodness of God through the reality of suffering, I’d recommend my wife’s thoughts here). In other words, this trip would be a sacrifice. My reality is that for months now, I’ve been feeling like a sponge that has been squeezed out one too many times.

And yet, I knew I had to find a way to do it.

I can count on one hand the times my dad has asked me for help. He didn’t express why he wanted to see his sister. But I knew. She is in her late 70s, and my dad is just a few years behind her. They have both been dodging health challenges to varying degrees of success. But I’ve seen a change in my father in the last few years as he watches his friends and remaining family face the end of all things. It’s like that feeling of playing musical chairs and realizing there aren’t any chairs left. I can see that this slow train coming is causing him to reflect on his life in a very different way.

He wanted to go see his sister because, in his mind, he was wondering if he would get another chance. Knowing that he is thinking about this now makes me think about it. And that thought is hard. In my mind, my father is still the broad-shouldered man who never missed a single game I played in. He made it a point to never miss a game because he didn’t have a father growing up, and he knew what it was like to have no one at his games. My father never missed a day of work; he spent hours every week helping me memorize scripture for my classes, zealously felled trees for firewood, and held the flashlight up in the dark as my brother and I quartered an elk in a remote part of the Rocky Mountains. In my mind, he is a larger-than-life figure who was raised by John Wayne. I once saw my dad slice his finger nearly clean off, and in response to the gushing blood and cut bone he simply duct-taped the mangled flopping finger to his other three fingers. That’s who my dad is in my mind.

But that no longer tracks with his physical reality. At least some parts don’t. My dad moves more slowly every time I see him. The days of running 25 miles are over. His hands are starting to wrinkle. His hair is thinning out. His once golden beard has turned snow white. He has to go sideways down the stairs. His hip and knee replacements hurt when he stands too long. He doesn’t like driving at night. Through tier-1, hostage-esque negotiations, we’ve convinced him to stay off ladders and not use the chainsaw. You get the idea. But something more beautiful has taken the place of his aging earthly body. Something that wasn’t always present in his life. And that is a soul that seeks after God.

As we drive up to see his sister, I feel a sense of thankfulness. Thank you, Lord, that I can help my dad do this. I get the chance to be the man who is driving the man who used to drive me to accomplish my dreams. I feel the weight of the changes. I feel the fragility of our days.

We talk about forgiveness and death on the drive. Our conversational interactions are short, followed by long periods of silence. We listen to Father Brown, a first for me, and my father explains to me who Father Brown, Flambeau, and Valentine are. He has always been a ferocious reader.

In many ways, my father is a miracle. An act of God’s grace on a broken world. By all accounts, he should not be here, which means I shouldn’t be here. He talked more about his side of the family on this trip than I have heard in the rest of my life combined. Growing up, when I would ask him about his side of the family, he would grunt and walk away or simply tell me that I didn’t want to know. “It would be better for that family tree to be cut from the earth”, he would say. And that’s as far as the conversation went.

But on this trip, I think he told me everything he knew. Which still isn’t much. He told me about his Catholic grandmother, Anne Marie, who would nap him every afternoon to Bishop Sheen playing on the TV. He still remembers this vividly. It’s maybe the only happy thing he remembers from his childhood. This seems to be about where the good times stopped. His grandfather fell off a ladder and became paralyzed halfway down. His father died when he was two, which by all accounts was actually a good thing–at least as far as one man’s death can limit the pain they are able to inflict on the world. His father owned a tavern in northern Wisconsin, and this came with all the baggage that owning a blue-collar tavern comes with.

His father’s death brought a new man into my father’s home. It’s a cautionary tale about one bad man being replaced by, somehow, a much worse man. My father was the youngest of five. His mom was a good and decent woman, but like most good and decent women who find themselves on the ropes of life, desperate, lonely, and struggling. This new man, Curt, brought every manner of abuse into the family. He inflicted this abuse with unceasing creative energy on my father and his siblings. Curt never married my grandmother, and died married to another woman that my grandmother didn’t know existed.

My father’s siblings and their children have, by and large, all left this world in one of three ways: soaked in alcohol, suicide, or as permanent guests of a mental institution. One can imagine the gods taking every dysfunction that exists in domestic life and pouring it out on this one single family. It’s no wonder my father ran away as often as he could and joined the military the day he was able.

It would take him another 35 years to finally kick the ever-present demonic influence of alcohol. This great liquid legion that has plagued my family for as long as we have memories of being a family. But plague him it does no longer. My father’s sobriety came right after my sobriety. It is a heavenly grace that has been poured out on our family by the true God. Our sobriety is not a puritanical position. It is certainly not a religious position. It is the grand escape from the cruel master to whom we were born enslaved to. It is the defeat of a raging lion that has hunted my family for generations. And Lord willing, it is now a legion my son will never have to face. And maybe that’s how God’s restoration works. One generation at a time, fighting back against the ever-present domain of darkness.

Oh, the goodness of God that we stumble but do not fall!

It is with all of this in mind that we finally end our drive and park at Der Dutchman, an Amish restaurant that seemed to be at the end of all things. We enter this time capsule that sits in the northern windy fields of Ohio. 90’s Christian music is playing; they have a kitschy home goods section in the restaurant, and a bakery brimming with Dutch desserts. But none of this matters, this is not why we have come.

As we take a seat and look over the fading table, my father’s sister comes through the door, cane in hand, but a warm smile on her face. She sat slowly and reached out her hand to my father. “It’s good to see you, brother,” she says. My dad doesn’t respond, but his eyes light up, and a light smile crosses his face as he nods slowly and knowingly. With my father, a man of few words, one must read eyes, body language, and hope they stumble upon a bit of clairvoyance to really know what he is feeling. In his subtle movements, there is the recognition that within his generation and all who came before them, they are the last two standing. But not just standing. The conversation around this meal is full of accounts of the faithfulness and goodness of God, a conversation that, in their early life, would have been impossible. Yet, miraculously, here they sit. Through hell-or-high-water smiling, laughing, and praising our good God.

This was the moment I hoped would happen. It’s the moment that I knew life called upon me to participate in.

And more than anything, as I reflect on the fragility of life and my father, I want him to know that I believe he is finishing strong. That he was dealt a bad hand but has come out on top. That he overcame, not just the physical blows he endured that would eventually fade, but also the words that continued to speak to his heart - coldly assuring him he would never amount to anything. These words were spoken by a broken, evil man who never missed an opportunity to tear down any sense of identity and purpose in my father. And these words carried a lifetime of weight that no shoulders could bear. I want my father to know that these words are a lie, and that he turned the tide in his generation. Through 43 years of the ups and downs of marriage, he stayed committed to my mother, loved our family, and didn’t flee or collapse under life’s challenges. And in doing so, in true John Wayne fashion, he forged ahead into uncharted territory. He ran the race and is finishing well. And as his body shows signs of the end that we must all face, his spirit stands stronger than ever.

Lord, fill our hearts with the knowledge of the eternal that we may rest in your peace and say with our spirits, “Oh death, where is your sting?”

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Further evidence of this issue is the recent response I have seen to the work of Dr. Carrie Gress–a brilliant Catholic philosopher who has spent the last decade of her work focused on womanhood. She is a phenomenal author who has done some serious damage to the feminist movement. She has authored around 10 books, has a PhD, is a wife, and mother of 5. One of my favorite things about Gress is her Theology of Home project. Gress doesn’t simply lead the charge against feminism but also offers a positive vision. Attacking something is always easier than offering a prescriptive alternative, which is exactly what Theology of Home does. It’s a project that helps women embody what it means to be, well, a woman.

And lest you think Gress’s vision of womanhood is a mash up between The Handmaids Tail and the local manosphere pastor belittling his wife into “Godly submission” while he cracks open a cold one and watches football on the couch, may I remind you one more time, Gress has: authored 10 books, runs a successful business, has a PhD, a husband and 5 children.

Not exactly limiting herself in any way.

Recently, Word on Fire, via the writer Leah Libresco Sargeant, put out what I can only call a mediocre hit piece on Gress’s most recent book, Something Wicked. Now, even as a Protestant, I really like a lot of Word on Fire resources. I have also been blessed by Bishop Barron and his apologetic and online work. And I’m sure Sargeant is a wonderful person who I just simply disagree with on this issue. In other words, I have no bone to pick with my Christian family at Word on Fire.

But this article bothered me for three reasons that I’ll get into shortly.

I’m obviously aware that when we choose to produce content for the world, whether we are writing, podcasting, preaching, etc., we inherently open our work up for critique. That’s the nature of producing anything, and this is the reality that we all face when we choose to become the man (or woman!) in the arena. And it is infantile to think that we won’t all face many kinds of critique when we do public work and take on controversial issues.

A quick background on Gress is that her historical work refuting feminism has been broad and hasn’t really addressed the specifics of why Christian theology and feminist ideology can’t be integrated. I think this last point has kept her safe in most Christian circles. But Gress’s most recent book takes direct aim at the melding of Christianity and feminism, and this simply seems a target too far for some people.

So, here’s 3 things that bothered me about this article on Gress’s new book.

• It framed Gress’s work around evangelism

• The article did exactly what it accused Gress of doing

• It conflates ideological sources with the often innocent and unaware people who possess them

Evangelism as a Frame for Truth

This article frames the majority of its critique around evangelism. And specifically how Gress’s work turns all of us into “misinformed and contemptuous” drones while also leaving us her readers “poorly formed to reach out boldly in love.”

I can’t help but more or less despise the framing of this article for a few reasons. First, it has the tone and energy of “we can’t really argue with the points, but if we tie Gress’s work to how it will hurt evangelism, then maybe people will listen”. The underlying assumption is that because evangelism is clearly more important than everything else, including truth, and this book might hurt evangelism, then this book must be bad. This comes across as a kind of Chicken Little, the-sky-is-falling declaration.

I don’t accept that frame.

I’m also a Protestant who has watched “seeker-friendly” madness ravage the Protestant church, and bluntly, I see it creeping on the Catholic church too. There are whole swaths of the church that refuse to say hard but true things because it might turn people away. This is an absurd position and one that is costing the culture dearly. It ends up being a devil’s bargain where you lose influence within the culture and the church.

Additionally, it is also possible to see the good in a person and simultaneously declare a path they are on as faulty and dangerous. In fact, that is actually the most loving thing to do. From the prophets to Jesus, to all the major culture shifters, going against the grain is baked into the job description. We want culture to move, and that takes someone willing to stand as a force against it.

The truth is hard, and it will always turn some people away. So be it. That is part of the role of the true prophets. But framing something as “bad” because it might hurt “evangelism” is not the proper way to evaluate truth claims. Digging a little deeper into Sargeant’s claims, it seems that her fear is that Gress paints the origins of feminism so darkly that Sargeant assumes we will all see current believers in feminism as occult, devil-worshiping, polyamorist. We will touch on the silliness of that in our last point.

I also think the framing is kind of ridiculous because the book is clearly aimed at Christians/Christianity, people already in the faith, and why feminist ideology can’t be properly integrated with… drumroll… Christianity. This book isn’t for evangelism; it’s for those already in Christ who are navigating a world increasingly captured by this ideology. These are two totally different categories and if we are worried about evangelism, someone should write a book called How To Evangelize Your Feminist Daughter. But that’s not why Gress’s book was written, and critiquing it for that reason is like whipping a fish because it can’t climb a tree.

Wollstonecraft and the Sin of Generality

As far as I could see, the only substantive critique in the whole article was related to Gress’s view of Mary Wollstonecraft. And what I mean by substantive is not that the critique is right or wrong, it’s simply the only real argument put forth at all. This is the second criticism I’ve read of Gress’s work that focuses solely on Wollstonecraft. Turns out that for some reason it makes the Christian feminist big mad when you put Wollstonecraft on the docket.

Sargeant kind of mocks Gress’s view of Wollstonecraft by distilling Gress’s view down to a simple “bad mother, bad daughter” analysis. I think the author is implying (as I read it in another article, which makes me wonder if she even read the book) that they disagree with Gress’s view that looking at Wollstonecraft’s children is helpful for understanding Wollstonecraft. Now, looking at someone’s children can tell you a lot about a person, but let’s put that idea aside for a second.

I’m not an expert on Wollstonecraft, but it seems that the hangup with Gress’s view of her for the Christian feminists is that she wrote about the need for women to be virtuous. How can we denounce the first feminist if she espouses virtue as being of the highest value for women? After all, virtue is very important in the Christian life. However, Gress goes on to let Mary Wollstonecraft define “virtue” for herself and it falls very short from the Christian understanding of these ideals (you can read her definitions in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft). Especially for Catholics who have a high value for Church tradition and the work of the likes of Thomas Aquinas as it relates to virtue, this should be a problem.

I think Gress makes a concise but compelling case in Something Wicked, but it’s obviously possible that more views exist. What I find interesting is that even though Gress’s Wollstonecraft section is only 6 pages long, it paints quite a powerful vignette and includes significantly more than what Sargeant responds to.

Gress’s view is not simply related to Wollstonecraft’s kids; in fact, it is hardly related to that. Gress touches on Wollstonecraft’s alcoholic and abusive father. She highlights how Wollstonecraft’s own biography constantly tells stories of how she needed to protect the women in her life from the abusive and negligent men she encountered. It also discusses how she found her community amongst those who possessed radical anti-family, anti-Christian, anarchist views–even marrying anarchist William Godwin whose work was influential in the life of Karl Marx. It goes on and on, but you get the point.

Now, you don’t have to be Einstein to see how all of that “life mixture” would actually produce a pretty potent feminist. None of these topics Sargeant interacts with in a real way, instead choosing to create a straw man of Gress’s views on Wollstonecraft.

But this is what I find annoying about this being the only critique I ever see of Gress’s recent work. Wollstonecraft’s short role in Something Wicked is 6 pages long out of the 238 pages. Barely a footnote. Gress calls her out sporadically going forward, but this is hardly the thrust of the book. Yet it’s the only piece her critics ever point out.

Are we really supposed to believe that a disagreement about Wollstonecraft negates the final analysis of Gress’s book?

The goal of Something Wicked is to show the myriad of evil ideological roots that created feminism. It shows how this ideology is working itself into the Church, attempts to replace the sacramental life of the Christian, and, most importantly, Gress offers a path for restoring what was lost. Wollstonecraft is a small part of that larger story, and I would guess the Christian feminists have to try to rehabilitate Wollstonecraft because the other original sources of this ideology are so obviously evil that Wollstonecraft is their last defense against Gress’s sustained argument.

So, Sargeant’s critique of Gress actually does what it accuses Gress of doing. It provides a narrow rationale that centers on one minor point, as if to delegitimize Gress’s entire argument.

But here is a really easy way to pressure test this whole thing.

You want to know how to discern if the roots of something are wicked? Jesus already told us. You simply look at the fruit. The fruit of feminism is plaguing our entire society (as are many of the reactionary responses by men). The fruit I observe with my eyes tells me everything I need to know about the roots. Good roots produce good trees, which don’t produce bad fruit.

Conflating the Enchanter with the Enchanted

Lastly, Sargeant uses the highly anecdotal example of her mother to negate Gress’s larger points. Gress’s major claim in the book revolves around her belief that the feminist movement rests on three principles: an embrace of promiscuity, a hatred of men, and attachment to the occult. I actually find it fascinating that anyone with a cursory experience visiting a college campus could disagree with this, but I digress.

In this critique, Sargeant states that her mom was not any of these three things, so this shows that Gress is cherry picking the “worst feminist” to malign, which unfairly targets the “good feminist” like the author’s mother. Never mind that maybe it’s the author’s mother who is the outlier here; the bigger problem is that this isn’t Gress’s argument at all.

Gress’s argument is not that every person who has feminist sympathies is a blood-drinking devil worshiper sleeping with their boss. Reading Gress, one comes away with the understanding that she feels a deep sadness for those who have been enchanted by the feminist message, because it is clearly destroying their lives. At no point does Gress confuse the darkness of feminism’s origins with an inherent darkness in every person influenced by it.

I don’t see how anyone with a functioning frontal lobe could think this is Gress’s argument.

When we see a seventeen-year-old girl from a broken home at the abortion clinic, we can feel a deep sadness about the brokenness in our world. It is clear that this young girl has been offered an evil option by a broken world. But we can also consider what she is doing as an act of murder, while also comprehending that she probably does not conceptualize it as such. Or that her vulnerability is so great that all she can see in this moment is her own loneliness and vulnerability.

Contrast this vulnerable seventeen-year-old with Margaret Sanger, the mother of the abortion movement, who might actually have been possessed by a demon. In other words, as discerning humans, we can perceive an entire spectrum of evil and intent in the world. We can consider an act unconsciously evil and point to its origins, while having deep sympathy for those caught in its net who are completely unaware of the ideological roots.

Being able to distinguish between this kind of spectrum of truth and evil is not only an honest way to deal with reality but also incredibly helpful when evangelizing accurately and truthfully.

I’m familiar with this line of thinking because, as a man, I interact frequently with really good young men who have been animated by Nick Fuentes. The majority of these young men have legitimate grievances and concerns. They are lost, looking for a way out, and are legitimately really decent people who have been sucked in by a fundamentally evil person. When I interact with these young men, I don’t view them as evil; I see them as confused. They are simply enchanted in the wrong direction, but it is really the enchanter and the lies of this enchanter that I despise. It would do me no good to think that every one of them is a junior SS member who secretly has a poster of Hitler behind his door. But it would also do me no good to not understand the reality of the ideology that is animating many of these young men.

Gress’s argument is similar.

There was a terrific article by a woman who self-defines as an ex “Catholic Feminist” regarding using the term feminist on behalf of evangelism. In it, she says, “I cannot support the concept of ‘Catholic feminism’. The Gospel is sufficient in and of itself to compel us to protect the vulnerable and honor the dignity of each person. Any benefit that comes from using the term to evangelize in the world is lost in the extraordinary negativity and confusion of the association with its horrible secular counterpart.”

I wholeheartedly agree with her statement. The Gospel is sufficient in compelling us to treat and love each other with honor, dignity, and respect. Any perceived benefit in becoming overly winsome for the world is washed away by the overt negativity.

My takeaway from all of this is that Gress is in the unfortunate but necessary role of being a true cultural prophet. And like all prophets, she must face the wrath of those in power who cannot withstand her prophetic utterances.

Do yourself a favor and buy Something Wicked here.

*I have been on an unplanned hiatus. At the end of December, I took my rambunctious golden retriever to the dog park, where he was attacked by another dog. The dog’s owner just kind of stood by looking at the scene, then looked at me like he was equally surprised that he did, in fact, own a dog. I then had the distinct honor of ripping his dog off my dog, where my finger got stuck in his dog’s collar, which ripped the tendon on my finger, leaving me in a splint for the last 8 weeks.

I have found it exceedingly frustrating attempting to type in this condition. Hoping to get back in the saddle soon.

The right used to be aware of this.

Many on the right had the chance to sharpen their cultural sword by denying the waves of “Black Lives Matter”, “Eat the Rich”, “No Kings”, COVID-19 protocols, and other such cultural absurdities. As obnoxious as the word “nuance” can be, we’ve recognized it is needed in these complex political and social issues.

Recently, on the right, though, we have had our version of these cultural statements appear. These really function more as a cultural purity test than anything useful. We are going to examine three slogans on the right: “I’m just asking questions”, “Christ is King”, and “America first”.

First, it’s worth saying that all slogans have some apparent truth in them. And that kernel of truth is where those administering the purity test always want to nail you. For instance, black lives do, of course, matter. And they matter equally to white lives. But when you kick the tires on that idea, you quickly realize that the slogan-makers wouldn’t consider Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell’s lives to matters, nor the lives of the unborn black children who are disproportionately aborted. Nor is the statement truthful because those who make this statement actually want something more than societal equality— a reality which was achieved decades ago.

The important thing to understand about slogans is that their apparent virtue can quickly slip into vice.

Besides the kernel of truth, these cultural slogans are also typically a reaction to something. BLM exploded to fame on the back of multiple public deaths of black men. It doesn’t matter whether the deaths were or weren’t justified. This cultural tipping point is a key to why these slogans really take lift. And they act as blood in the water for the hordes of pack animals on the internet.

If you want to be a clear thinker in today’s world, you have to realize that both the right and left deploy these slogan statements.

“I’m Just Asking Questions”

This is quickly becoming my favorite cultural lie. This statement flies off the lips of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson faster than a belt gun ripping rounds on D-Day. They attempt to use it as a shield to their obvious propaganda aims. So, let’s break the statement down.

First, why is this statement useful? It’s useful because we live in a world of lies. And truth is very hard to come by. If people didn’t learn this through the COVID years, then they probably never will. When a person makes the claim they are “just asking questions”, what they are really doing is positioning themselves as the truth teller, the white knight fighting back against the darkness of lies.

It is also incredibly useful because it allows you to make clear insinuations without directly saying what you really mean. It allows one to take no accountability. Not only is it a lie that they are “just asking questions”, but it’s a cowardly lie. You want to accuse someone of something? Say it with your chest like a man. But this coy way of communicating is useful when you must later deny what you said.

But here is the real thrust of the lie. Everything can be gleaned from what questions a person asks. When someone implies they are asking questions, one would assume that they don’t have an outcome in mind. Isn’t the point of questioning to come to some kind of truth? People with the end in mind don’t ask questions. But people who want to look like they are after the truth, but in fact have a predetermined destination, hide behind this statement.

Imagine a courtroom. What happens when you frame your questions in such a way that the outcome is already defined? We call that leading the witness, and it is not allowed for obvious reasons. What those who are “just asking questions” are predominantly doing is, in fact, just “leading the witness”. But because they are doing it through subterfuge, half the population can’t see what’s happening.

Here is a great question: who has gained the most from Charlie’s assassination? Well, the obvious answer would be Candace Owens, who has seen her star rise over Charlie’s grave. That’s a motive question whose answer is Candace Owens, but obviously, I don’t think Candy-O killed Charlie even if she is becoming a grave robber in real time. Another great question is, why does Candace (a wife and mother) seem so romantically in love with Charlie (a husband and father)? It’s gross to watch. What seems very clear is that when clicks, clout, and coin are at stake, there is nothing this woman won’t do.

And what is great about this verbal maneuver Candace plays is that when someone questions her back, she gets to play the victim. She is now the victim of bitter and resentful attacks because she is just trying to “find the truth.” She is the white knight galloping on your horse as the arrows of de-platforming, censorship, and media attacks fall around her. Candace currently has the world’s number one podcast, which tells you a lot about the interests of the general population.

Tucker recently did an expose on the supposed intentional child murder of Israel against the Palestinians. He did this interview in his newly minted second home, Doha, Qatar. I made it through about five minutes of the interview before I couldn’t take his propaganda farming any longer. His “questions,” if you can even honestly call them such a thing, were all directed towards his desired outcome. Not once did Tucker bring up the indisputable fact that Hamas intentionally fights using human shields, and specifically locates their armaments deep inside hospitals and schools. I can’t remember a single interview Tucker has done in the last 2 years where he invited a counter opinion to whatever narrative he was trying to spin.

And here is the thing - I’m not against these guys doing this. I’m not trying to cancel them or take them offline, but I am against not saying out loud what they are clearly doing. We have to recognize that the media is like a restaurant. It’s food for the culture, and unfortunately for many people, it is the only way they feed their spirits. These talking heads make things, and the culture consumes them. It is completely reasonable to say that every time I eat at this restaurant, I get food poisoning. Candace having the number one podcast makes as much sense as McDonald’s being awarded a Michelin star.

What I am against, in a true sense, is the idea that these characters are neutral players. They are not “just asking questions”. Nor are they just trying to find the truth. They are attempting to subversively lead people to their desired outcomes. And the scary reality is that most people have shown themselves to have an IQ around room temperature and eat this stuff up.

I have always despised whatever Candace Owens’ online personality is. I am not going to comment on her soul, but whatever this charade is she presents online is dumbfounding. I have felt this way ever since she was doxxing conservatives in 2016. She is pure charisma untempered by wisdom. She is our cultural moment’s version of the Roman bread and circuses. And she is a magnet for the lowest form of thinking in her followers. In my view, Candace has always been an IQ test, but now she is also a spiritual discernment test. The best you can say about Candace is that she is a deeply unformed person; the worst is that she is a manipulator of the highest order. When she smirks at the camera and says, “I don’t know, but I know” in regards to some secret truth or complete slander that she and her audience are sharing in, one may safely understand she is a babbling fool.

In a recent takedown of Candace’s insane tirade, the legendary journalist Matt Taibbi (in a hilariously titled essay, Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case. With a set of boulders bigger than Brigitte Macron’s, Candace Owens is single-handedly restoring pride in American conspiracy-theory craftsmanship) highlighted the decoupling from reality of Candace’s style and content. Of course, someone responded to Matt’s piece critically, attempting to run cover for Candace. Matt took the time to articulately respond and I think what he said is worth repeating:

In other words, slander and malice are bad and even worse when they are being propped up by a bunch of Christians in the audience. And far worse when you are broadcasting your insanity over the entire planet.

Moving on to Tucker, he is probably just a CIA spook. In his most recent AmericaFest speech last weekend, in between his hyena laughs, he made constant attempts to shill for Islam. The irony of people defending Tucker as “America First” as he trojan-horses Islam into America is mind-numbing. You can add to this that Tucker did this on Charlie Kirk’s stage, who unequivocally stated over and over that Islam was the greatest threat to the West. Tucker is far more dangerous because he is slightly less crazy than Candace. I will take Shapiro’s overt, sometimes to a fault, support of Israel over Tucker’s greasy huckster act. No question. It is clear that neither Tucker nor Candace are in the truth business; they are in the entertainment business.

And this entertainment business is eating the truth business alive.

These two characters, along with many others, are poisoning the right by hiding behind the seemingly-good-sounding claim of “just asking questions.” We are a culture that values an open mind more than truth, or a foundation and epistemological capacity to discover truth. None of these people want the truth; they just want you to think they do.

There is a proverb that I think about a lot when it comes to the just-asking-questions crowd, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” Proverbs 18:17

These ideas floating around the internet fold like a cheap suit under any level of scrutiny.

Chesterton famously said, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” The people who say “I’m just asking questions” are proud of their open minds. But their minds are now so open that their brains have fallen out.

“Christ is King”

This is another slogan that seems to animate people in a contradictory way. What makes this statement difficult is that it is theologically true. Christ is King. And to his kingship every knee will bow. That is a theological statement I wholeheartedly believe.

But something strange happens when I see the majority of people use it. They wield this statement as a kind of verbal sword in their online crusade against whoever they are currently attacking. When a certain kind of person says it, they actually mean it as an attack of dominion over another person. What is obvious is that the statement has nothing to do with the Lord but everything to do with a person’s desire to crush another person.

When one observes a young man screaming with anger in his voice that Christ is King (usually into some Jewish person’s face), it is obvious that this person is not doing this on behalf of Jesus. The irony of weaponizing our Jewish savior against Jewish people is of course, lost on these people.

It’s funny that they never say, Jesus is Lord or some other version of this idea. It’s always the same statement, said with the same corrosive spirit because the statement is not made in tribute to the truth or to God, but to their own selfish aims. And it’s always made against another person.

Where this statement falls flat is that, in most cases, it takes the Lord’s name in vain. People mistake the word of God if they think that taking the name of the Lord in vain is related to putting a swear word before or after the name of God. Taking the name of God in vain is when you commit evil under the name of God. When you are intentionally trolling or attacking another person, and you decide that your verbal club will be the name of Christ, well, let’s just say those will not be idle words that I would want to give an account for one day.

I am reminded of the shocking words of Jesus: Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

And most importantly, this cultural statement loses its theological and spiritual significance in the hands of an internet barbarian trying to wield it against their enemies. In this case, when a person makes this statement, it tells you everything you need to know about them. Fundamentally, it tells you that Christ is actually not King of their heart.

“America First”

This is a statement that has returned to American consciousness over the last few years. It is not a new statement, but was popularized by Woodrow Wilson during his 1916 campaign and then revitalized by Pat Buchanan during the 1900’s in regard to foreign policy.

This statement is a response to clear problems occurring in America. I completely align with the problems this statement is responding to. A swollen debt system, endless immigration, a de-prioritization of American citizens, and a host of other problems. You won’t hear any demurring from me in regard to these very real problems. The reality is that American citizens have been shafted over and over by our government, and this statement is a demand to prioritize their citizens.

Hear, Hear!

In response to these problems, the “America First” statement shines brightly as a clear demand for justice for American citizens, and I agree with this entirely.

But then, something very bizarre happens: the statement turns ethnic, conspiratorial, and ignorant. And to some degree, I also understand why this is happening. On the race issue, when white people have been vilified for the last decade so it should not be surprising when the reaction to this comes with tints of “white power” influence. When JD Vance states in his AmFest speech over the weekend that it’s no longer a crime to be white, he is reacting to the clear push by the left to demonize white people. And this reaction against the demonization of white people needed to happen.

And on a national level, the “America First” slogan is a needed reaction to the overt pillaging of the nation on the backs of the citizens.

And yet as I look around, I see a lot of people in this camp who have become inflamed with conspiracy, hatred, and ignorance. The slogan is also basically running cover for people who hate Israel. Not everyone, but many. And I’m not opposed to a public discussion of foreign aid. That is a totally sensible discussion for a nation to have. Rand Paul recently said that all foreign aid should be cut until the debt problem is fixed. That’s a reasonable proposal to make. There are also extremely intelligent reasons (cultural, national and theological) for why we have allied with Israel, and it’s ok that all of these issues are weighed together to find out which direction is best for America.

But that is not the discussion that is happening. And it’s totally disingenuous when the “America First” crowd says the most insane conspiratorial and ignorant nonsense and then hides behind a foreign aid discussion. What causes a reaction in people like me is not related to foreign aid; it’s all the other insanity that comes along with this discussion.

The Jews and Israel continue to be both an intellectual and spiritual test for all humanity. The tendency for the “America First” crowd to be steeped in conspiracy around the “Jewish question”, rabid haters of anyone not white, and wholly un-Christian is becoming unmatched. They are also by and large dimwits. The argument for hating Israel because of how much money we send them is fundamentally unintelligent. It’s never Ukraine, NATO, or the thousands of other insane things we fund; it’s always only Israel.

The Israel issue has the power to completely split the right.

And over what? When you look at America’s debt problems, our aid to Israel is minuscule when you look at our overall spending, far less than what we spend the majority of our money on. You are free to ignorantly hate Israel, but are you really going to tell me that this issue is at the heart of the American debt problem? It would be like buying a G-Wagon, a home in Beverly Hills, and then complaining how expensive a Starbucks purchase is. The argument makes no pragmatic sense. Add to this the reality that 97% of all aid to Israel has to be spent with American companies, which keep tens of thousands of Americans in work. We are not simply sending Israel blank checks. This general hatred of the Jews and Israel only makes sense if you add to it the whole host of Jewish conspiracy theories, which is ultimately what is at play here.

The bottom line is that it makes no sense to split the right over such a non-issue. It’s obviously running cover for a deeper issue— the hatred of Jews.

But I refuse to cede ground on lies.

This divide was seen clearly at AmFest this weekend. Shapiro did the normative work of traditional leadership: imposing boundaries, calling out lies, demanding moral sanity, and decrying the moral decay within the internal movement. I’m not really for or against Shapiro. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full episode of his content, and I know him more as a cultural pillar than as someone familiar with his platform. In some ways, I have a more negative perspective on how he interacts with culture. But that might be just because I’m unfamiliar with his style. Some people see him as a beacon of light, while others see him as out of touch. I’m ambivalent, but Charlie Kirk said Shapiro was one of his three major life influences. What I can say is that this weekend Shapiro was functioning as William F. Buckley did when he fought the same anti-semitic spirit in the right back in the early 90’s. Shapiro delivered an incredible talk on moral sanity on the right. In a simple, clear fashion, Shapiro laid out 5 things audiences should expect from the voices they listen to on the issue of truth. It was simple, uncomplicated and clear.

You will either hate this or love this, depending on where you fall on this issue.

This obviously stirred reactions in Tucker, Candace, Bannon, and Kelley - all people that Shapiro lambasted. But what is at play is even deeper. It’s clear that MAGA has completed its metamorphosis from a political movement into a content-consumption audience. Truth no longer matters; it’s all about clicks and engagement. Colby Hall made a great statement on this:

In other words, MAGA has become a content system, not a political movement concerned about truth. Conspiracy sells; truth is boring. The cult of personality is consuming the right, and these are people primarily motivated by the exact opposite of what is needed to create a winning coalition. Godly vision is optional, but clicks are mandatory. Trolling, bickering, and dunking are what entertain; honesty is irrelevant. Let the clown show ensue.

The groypers fully embody this.

“A Big Tent & No Enemies To The Right”

What is clear after AmFest is that what was a strong undercurrent of tension on the right has now opened into a full-blown civil war. The new media landscape is unquestionably being won by those in the click farming camps. When you are willing to sacrifice principles and truth for engagement, you will be rewarded by the online audience. The maxim that the largest crowds contain the most idiots is also true here. The upside is that the more rope culture gives these voices, the more obvious their self-hanging will eventually be. Thankfully, these groups led by Tucker and Candace have almost no institutional power and very little political power. But that can all change in the next 10-20 years.

In the meantime, this is great for the left. While the right haggles over non-issues and cannibalizes itself, the left will undoubtedly capitalize on this.

The midterms and presidential elections will be disastrous if this open wound on the right is left to fester. Charlie saw all of this, and he seemed to be the glue that held all of these fragile egos together. But the reality is that none of these people are Charlie, and Erika is facing a deep onslaught of stupidity within this coalition.

Movements are large and varied things. They are often frequently reactions and thus carry a lot of different people responding in different ways. I realize you can’t tone-police everyones reactions, but the tone is not the important thing. The important thing is the obviously equally dark spirit animating the right that we have been fighting against the left.

To quote Colby Hall again, “Charlie was always deeply motivated by truth. But he was not nearly as soaked in conspiracy the way this new right has become. He understood that any political movement needed boundaries and structure to be successful. Now that he is gone, so is all constraint.” And no tent is big enough to contain some of the civilization-ending stupidity on the right. It is no good to fight off the left only to find yourself sharing dinner with the right’s version of the same village idiot.

Conspiracies, of course, exist, but not everything is a conspiracy, and many on the right don’t seem to get this. And there is a fundamentally detestable perspective on the right that finds the Jew as the source of all evil.

The idea that we can or should build a coalition with some of these people is insane. This moment is not just political but deeply spiritual. Our allegiances are not abstract when moral clarity is needed. America is great, and it’s the best country in the world, but God’s reality sits higher than any earthly kingdom. We will “win” nothing if “winning” requires us to become exactly like the thing we are trying to defeat.

In case you missed it, an asset manager named Michael Green made waves a few weeks ago via a pretty lengthy and sustained argument that families making less than 140k/yr are actually below the poverty line. He makes a pretty good case in my estimation. If you view his comments, they seem pretty split. If I had to guess, Michael’s subscriber demographics would skew affluent - something tells me not a ton of non-affluent people follow the substack of asset managers.

Anyways, after Green’s shot across the bow, “the man“ (all the think tanks, financial news puppets, state experts, and institutions) were trotted out to debunk all the minor details that Green might have gotten right or wrong, none of which was really Green’s point. His larger point was that we have a poverty line indicator that hasn’t been updated in 6 decades, and this creates a bizarre scenario that misaligns people that work and people who don’t. For the reader uninitiated about the boring details of state financial obscurification, the poverty number is officially $31,200 (for a 4-person family!) and hasn’t been updated since 1963. I know families who pay that number in child care, but that’s beside the point.

When I first read Green’s article, I was mostly interested in the “vibes” rather than whether he got every pedantic detail right. I was less interested in whether the true number of Americans in poverty was 140k, 130k, or 120k, etc. What is obvious to anyone living in the world with a family is that Green’s number is far closer to the “real” number than the “official” number.

I was interested in his article because the vibes it exudes are ones I experience every day. I see how difficult it is to stretch a dollar further. It feels like too little butter spread over too much toast. I say that as someone who is extremely thankful for my financial life, but I’m also seeing how challenging it is to truly move things forward.

Here is a really fun chart showing how the “financial stewardship” of our nation’s leaders has driven a knife into all our ribs over the last 90 years.

What I appreciated about Green’s article is simply noticing and talking about what is happening in a truthful way. Because the vibes are clearly off and the only people who don’t seem to get that are the boomers and the exceptionally affluent. Our culture is like a sandwich that’s been split: all the good stuff always ends up on one piece of bread. And if you have the side with the good stuff, the rest can pound sound.

But, I think things have started to deteriorate faster after the Covid years.

I see it in my friends who have been looking for work for months.

I see it in the price of homes, groceries, and basic necessities.

I hear it when I talk to Gen Z, and they convey why they aren’t getting married and having kids.

I see the fear when unfavorable medical diagnoses catch a family off guard.

I see it in the eyes of people at Church, the store, and those trying to scrape by during the holidays.

And I’m seeing this in an area of America where the average home price hovers around 800-900k. Most of the parking lots where I go are filled with Range Rovers, Porsches, and other signs of affluence. I’m not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks.

If you want a gentler take on the 140k/year threshold, here is a short read on why 150k no longer feels wealthy. It’s mostly a vibes read, but perception is the only thing that matters in a world of lies.

Here are some more vibes:

The Impact On Men

One thing I have noticed is that this seems to hit men particularly hard. And I get that. Especially if you are a man in the traditional role of providing for your family. Men in this role face two specific challenges beyond the obvious one of being priced out of everything.

The first is that they are also facing what men face: not wanting to talk or open up about the struggles they are having. The second is the crushing feeling that they are failing their family.

These are both terrible downstream feelings that many men are carrying around right now.

And these aren’t men that are gambling, drinking, socializing, and/or spending in some kind of assault on stewardship kind of way. It’s just the slow crushing reality of an economy that has been daily inflated away.

In this essay, the mother tells the story of her mechanical engineer son who can’t find work, has paid off his school loans, has no car, so she drives him to interviews, and he is living at her home and fixing mopeds in the interim. It’s highly unlikely that a man in this position is going to get a wife and have kids in this current situation. And this guy even received an education in a historically lucrative field.

Her basic plea is to simply crash the housing market, which I get. Even though this would wash out anyone who purchased a home between 2020 and now.

You don’t even want to look at the tech industry, and layoffs are coming for the developers/engineers as Silicon Valley moves everything over to AI. This has sparked calls from Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, and other skin-suit-walkers for America to prepare to implement UBI (Universal Basic Income). Who knows whether the AI promise is an illustrious pump-and-dump that fleeces middle-American shareholders, or whether it will actually become generative and intelligent. Never forget that it’s only the small thieves that get hung; large thieves get to fly first class.

I have recently had to take on an extremely mainstream health challenge. I thought I had pretty decent health insurance, though I didn’t really know. I don’t speak Mandarin, which is what these health insurance hoops feel like. I’ve always been healthy enough and lucky enough to never need to use it. Anyways, my doctor told me my cost with insurance, and I almost fell out of my chair. I couldn’t believe it. I then just happened to ask what the cost would be without insurance. She told me it would be half the cost she just quoted me.

What?!?

You are telling me that I pay an obscene amount for health insurance each month, and this completely mainstream health treatment is cheaper if I just pay you and don’t use insurance at all? I couldn’t believe she didn’t tell me about the lower price up front, but aside from that, this health insurance scenario is basically happening in every industry in America right now. When she told me this, I felt like I was being told to drive backwards to get forward.

Keep Your Politicians Close Enough To Kick Them

We are going to get to the point of this essay in a minute. This isn’t meant to be a financial rant, more of just an economic observation.

Some government moves are also not helping. It’s not helpful when Trump makes statements like “affordability is a Democratic scam”. This is from a guy who has a gold-plated toilet, so take his statement for what it’s worth. Thankfully, Vance has been much more clear-headed as he pleads for patience on the economy.

And fair enough.

Our economic problems aren’t particularly partisan. There is more blame than can be counted on both sides of the aisle. As DOGE and Massey/Paul have made clear to anyone honest enough to take account, it really doesn’t matter who is in charge; the money machine has a schedule to keep. Any attempt to stop the money machine will earn you a one-way ticket into irrelevancy-land.

This is why we get ideas around 50-year mortgages (30-year mortgages are already among the longest in the developed world) and calls for $2,000 stimulus checks for anyone making under 200k. You know what is cooler than a $2,000 stimulus check? A solvent economy. An economy where we can stop with all of this economic tomfoolery.

And we got this absolute banger of a head line from our local Con-Inc think tank, the Cato Institute.

You want to know how to create environments where a guy like Nick Fuentes can foster a legitimate audience of men under 30? This is how you get that. This kind of cynical evil thinking, where you pervert a first principle of justice in favor of misguided empathy. This is how you produce an environment where you get Fuentes. Even if Fuentes only exists as online troll with no real world application, his voice is heavily influencing discouraged young men.

The people in charge of these kinds of things, if there even is such a person or group, would do well to consider that the social contract is falling apart. The basic promise that has existed in our nation is that an honest man can go out into the world to work hard and, in return, provide his family with shelter and necessities. But this social contract is almost completely eroded at this point. Now it takes both an honest man and woman working, and even that is no longer guaranteed to cut it. I’m not going to say it is impossible, but it is pointed in the impossible direction.

We are a nation slowly waking up to the crushing mother-of-all-hangovers that is our financial decision-making over the last fifty years.

Here Is The Point

I am not a fan of cynicism in any form. I think cynicism might be the most corrosive thing that exists in a man.

The one thing I tell anyone who will listen is that you have to keep fighting. Keep trusting. Do not give up.

This year, my family is fortunate enough to be able to help some of the families around us who are really hurting. We know a particular family back in Colorado with 4 kids, where the husband has been trying to find work, and they are just up against the wall in a really hard way. We sent what we could to this family, and the next day, my wife received a message from the other woman.

In the message, she was just beside herself with tears. What struck me about this message was not her thankfulness (she was), not how hard their life is (I know it is), but the simple fact that someone saw her. More directly, that God saw her. She shared with us that she has been praying desperate, frustrated prayers, and that the thing she has been struggling with most with the Lord is that she feels like the Lord doesn’t see her. Not only is she up against all the practical hard things, but she also feels invisible to the Lord.

This help that came to her made her feel visible.

That is why I think an open conversation about the reality of the American economy is long past due. Not because I want to dwell here. Not because I think we won’t find a way out of it. But because a lot of good people are looking around, being gaslit into believing everything is ok and that they are the only ones struggling.

They are told that if you just work harder, or save harder, or buy less food for your family, etc, then you’ll dig yourself out of this hole. That’s a fundamental lie for most people. The cost of living is so far past the general income that the math aint mathing.

You know what is really needed right now on a national level?

The General who gets down into the foxhole with his men. Who refuses sleep, food, and comfort while his men are holding the front lines. The General that walks those lines and tells his men that he knows the order of socks, winter coats, and food rations is delayed, but that he is doing everything he can to get it there, and he isn’t going to leave this foxhole into help comes.

People need to be affirmed and told straight up the reality of the situation. The obscuring of data, and pushing off of responsibility, and the even worse sin of bold-faced lying to hard-working people is not going to cut it. Besides how demoralizing this is to people who are actually working hard, if we don’t acknowledge that there is a real problem, we will never find real solutions. At all costs, we should be telling the truth, at a bare minimum.

Maybe the most demoralizing and infuriating thing in all of this is the boomer think tank class running around with their fingers in their ears as they yell “la-la-la-la, none of this is real”.

These people should walk the plank.

So, I’m not here pointing fingers (because, frankly, I’d need a hundred hands to do that honestly), but I am here to encourage you to see someone in your life who is doing all the right things and still not making it work - encourage that person.

Make them feel seen.

Men, encourage your brothers.

Women, encourage your sisters.

Get out there and love someone who is hurting.

If you are even more fortunate enough to be able to financially throw in, throw in. It seems to me, now is the time. Generosity gives life to the soul. In a world that is becoming more tight-fisted, you can be salt and light by walking through the world with an open hand and an ear to the ground - listening for the pain of the downtrodden and weary-hearted.

We can’t take any of this garbage with us. Naked we came, and naked we will go.

C.S. Lewis once said, “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective…We shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main objective. We must learn to want something else even more.”

The world is hopeless without Christ. And in this hour I feel the pain of the men suffering around me. I feel their fear, their hopelessness, and their weariness. And this is all true if it weren’t for Christ. As the Psalmist says: I would have lost hope had I not believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

We all must keep rowing. Keep swinging. Keep hoping.

But we can get into the foxhole with those around us, validate what they are experiencing as real, and encourage them in any way we can. Chesterton has a statement that I have been meditating on for the last week as I consider those who are having a difficult time this Christmas season:

Three names have come to my attention in that quest: Jonathan Pageau, Martin Shaw, and Paul Kingsnorth. I’ve enjoyed Pageau’s work for a while. I attended a Jordan Peterson conference in London last year that Pageau spoke at. At that conference, Pageau called Paul Kingsnorth the greatest living storyteller. This gave me pause because it is a maddeningly enormous compliment. Pageau took the compliment even further by saying that Kingsnorth wasn’t just the greatest “Christian” living storyteller, but the greatest living storyteller, full stop.

It is not really surprising that these three cultural figures are all Orthodox Christians. One thing Orthodox Christianity has really cornered the market on is mythology. Symbolism, patterns, and the myth are deeply ingrained in Orthodox thought. The stories they tell are very different than the kind of stories that Tolkien or Lewis would tell. I’m not sure whether that has more to do with the mystical nature of orthodoxy or with the more structured faith expressions of Catholicism or Anglicanism. Maybe it is just because our world needs a different kind of story at this hour.

Anyways, I’ve recently started working my way through Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine book which he just released. The moment I read about this book, I knew it was going to be one I would love. Truth be told, though he is much further along in his thinking than I am, I knew this was the kind of book I would like to write one day. This book is like if you combined the philosophy of The Matrix, Brave New World, Wolf on Wall Street and then dissected all of that with Peter Kreeft’s Thomist philosophical analysis.

In Kingsnorth’s book, he takes on what he defiantly calls the Machine. The Machine is the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. It is the connecting, interdependent domination of technology and progress over every aspect of our lives. Still, more importantly, it is the war of the Machine over the human soul as the Machine tries to redefine what it means to be human. To be clear, Kingsnorth is not promoting the ravings of a “Luddite” or “Amish techno-denying fundamentalist”. There is something far different at play. It is all part of an ongoing spiritual disenchantment which is replaced by a secular enchantment that hides its true form. His thesis ties together the intersection of money, progress, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which, above all, can never be fully appeased and seek to uproot everything in their path. It’s basically all of modernity that marches towards us at breakneck speed.

This is the Machine.

The fallow earth that has allowed the Machine to take root, as Kingsnorth sees it, is my favorite part of the book so far. He argues that the Machine has been rising ever since we destroyed the sacred spiritual order after the Enlightenment. The sacred order is the unifying principle of any society. Kingsnorth’s claim, which I agree with, is that the Church was the sacred order the Enlightenment destroyed. Every culture has a sacred order; it can be Islamic, Hindu, Pagan, etc. And the fruit of the sacred order tree is the culture it produces. And we as people should judge sacred orders by the cultural fruit they produce. Without a doubt, for all of its flaws, it was the Church’s sacred order that created the civilization that we lovingly know as “the West”.

Kingsnorth is diagnosing culture in a similar way that David Foster Wallace diagnosed individual worship. In his analysis on the individual Wallace stated:

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it Jesus Chris or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. If you worship power, then you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. If you worship your intellect, being seen as smart, then you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

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Kingsnorth would obviously disagree with Wallace on the specifics of the God part, but they both tap into a similar idea: people and cultures will worship something. Kingsnorth, via the Christian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, ties this loss of the sacred order in the West to the Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment attempted to build a “morality loosed from theology.” In other words, it tried to create meaning and morality without the God part. This was the “project of constructing a whole new human being” post-God, in which the unaccountable individual human would form the foundation of society.

The Enlightenment turned our Western culture in on itself like an auto-immune disease. Before man became “enlightened”, concepts like atheism were more or less unimaginable. But the Enlightenment, with its demands on reason, skepticism, empiricism, and individualism, marked a shift. The culture of secularism (which is the source all the -ism’s) grew out of this ground. We lost our ability to sense and come into contact with the sacred. Not realizing what would fill that void. It’s not just money, technology, increasing state and global power; it’s the compounding influence of all of these things coalescing on a society that no longer has a true north. It’s like a man trying to walk around without a spine.

We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the winds blew all of these ideas. Or, to quote Bono from U2, “our culture desired the Kingdom without the King.” This taps into a feeling that I have been battling for years now. With the rise of both the vicious banality of the culture wars, combined with the ceaseless forward movement of the Machine, where does that leave us? What is left to save? How do we restore what has clearly been lost?

My wife and I were talking this week and she offered the analogy that our Western culture feels like the Tower of Babel after God separated the languages of men. We all speak the same English language, but we use very different cultural languages. The people around us, our own fellow citizens and neighbors, all have different cultural desires than we do. The marketplace of ideas is chock full of competing truths without any guiding Truth or foundational Principle. In a very fundamental way, I am different from many in the country where I live. And we no longer have the freedom, or at least the cultural ground, to say that some of these ideas that walk among us are profoundly stupid civilization-ending ideas. To look at how deep this divide is, my wife is one of the greatest pro-life apologists I have ever met, and her sister is currently traveling on an all-expense-paid trip in Europe, where she is promoting an abortion product. That is how deep the divide goes. Sister versus sister. This is my truth vs your truth, and the whole division of light that we see in culture.

This is all the groundwork thinking for Kingsnorth’s ideas around the Machine. All of this swirl is the precursor environment that leads to the rise of the Machine. Kingsnorth’s general belief is that neither Europe or America are Christian any more. We are still all just under the delusion that we are Christian because we are living among the ruins of the Christian West. This is important to understand. This vacuum allows all of these different cultural ideas to rise. And many ideas are orcs that used to travel at night, but now they are emboldened to walk across the ruins in daylight.

Or it’s like in Lord of the Rings when Aragorn passes by Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings. A culture can be deceived into thinking it is still the kind of culture that can produce these great statutes, because it lives among the ruins of the sacred order that once did produce these great marvels.

Regarding the culture, Kingsnorth poetically states:

This is a heavy idea.

The point of the above is not to lose hope. But it’s also meant to caution against seeking a steady footing in cultural movements that are inherently made of sand. So what does all of this have to do with the Machine? Well, the Machine is simply what has risen in the vacuum of our secular order. As we reach the fever pitch of exponential technological growth combined with man’s insatiable desire for power and money, things will undoubtedly get choppy as we surf these waves. This Machine, just like a black hole, sucks everything towards itself.

Where I really agree with Kingsnorth is on his analysis of what happened after the Enlightenment. I really like the way he thinks about the idea of sacred order and cultural myth. And I also agree that there is something swirling around the culture that feels like it is making everyone less human, less in touch with themselves, others, God, and whatever this “thing” is seems to be picking up speed.

But I don’t know if Kingsnorth’s prescription towards this problem is the solution. We all understand to some degree that Hollywood is garbage, and technology is rewiring peoples brains, and AI threatens mankind (in my view AI is the boy that cried wolf, I don’t believe we will ever reach generative AI), and we have a host of other economic and societal issues - all which Kingsnorth nails in his book. But what are our options?

Is our only option really to flee all of this?

As the Church do we not play the game at all?

Because we are so afraid to become like the culture that is becoming more and more demanding? And then cede all of this territory to secular humanist who will really destroy the whole thing? I have a hard time seeing how this worldview will function as salt and light in a world that desperately needs more of both.

I think if Kingsnorth’s book can do anything for us, it is less of the Rage Against the Machine worldview and more of the discipline it takes to walk the increasing high tight rope between a world that is losing it’s humanity and our call to influence and mold culture.

What does it mean to be human? 

Here is a fundamental reality. It is much easier to consume something (individuals or cultures) when one does not have a sacred order centered on God. And I don’t mean “God” in a lip service kind of way. I mean in a true renewing of the individual heart, that finds greater form in the family unit, and then comes to be displayed all throughout culture in the small-to-large holy tasks that each of us is called to as salt and light in the world. But this sacred order has to center around the highest ideals of the Christian order. We will never reappear as the Christian West if we don’t find a way to renew the Christian part.

Some of the prescriptive parts in Kingsnorth’s book that I like and agree with are:

• Put down roots and invest at a deep level in the people around you.

• Have kids and homeschool them. (If you don’t agree with the second part, at least do the first part. I am an advocate for homeschooling for numerous reasons but I get that it is controversial for some and impossible for others)

• Go to church.

• Support parallel institutions and opportunities.

• Discipline technology. This can’t be overstated. Smash your cellphone, limit app usage, create windows of silence and solitude.

• Don’t touch generative AI. (if it comes - which I personally doubt)

• Accept technological limitations. Yes, you will miss out on things occasionally, but you will gain much more than you lose by being reconnected to living things.

A few other things that I would add. Don’t get on your phone in the early morning or in the evening. Detox technology. Go hike and walk without your cellphone. Work with your hands in some way. Go the gym or do some version of this. I love to hunt, lift, work on my cars (because I enjoy the challenge), play piano, work with power tools, etc. All these physical actions embody you back into reality. Find some version of this that works for you. If you are more into the thespian stuff - go paint or something.

Become a disciplined person. Even better, become a moral disciplined person.

The profound Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft said:

Kreeft devoted his life to making the philosophical case for the virtues. But I love his analysis of rebellion. I am a born iconoclast, and it took me years to point this rebellious bent in the right direction. But true rebellion is to pursue light in the age of darkness. When the sacrament of a culture is abortion, having children is rebellion. When the sacrament of the individual is divorce, till-death-do-us-part is rebellion. When the sacrament of the culture is busyness and distraction, solitude and stillness are rebellion. When the sacrament of the culture is despair and depression, the cheerful warrior marches forward with a hopeful word. When the Machine demands we worship it and give it our strength, true rebellion refuses to bow.

Our hope is not going to be found in the MAGA movement.

It is not going to be found in America First.

It is not going to be found in Mamdani’s socialism.

Nor will it be found in the shrill demands of cultural woke-ism.

What becomes even more obvious is that our societal problems won’t be solved with politics or politicians. And it also means our cultural problems aren’t actually cultural. We have a sacred order problem. These other things are all just temporary distractions that spring out of the undeniable cultural void.

As Confucius said:

If there is harmony in the heart, there will be harmony in the family.

If there is harmony in the family, there will be harmony in the nation.

If there is harmony in the nation, there will be harmony in the world.

How do we become the kind of Western culture that can once again build the statutes, produce the ideas, write the sonnets, and build the cathedrals of our great ancestors? Getting down on bended knee might be a good start.

When Aragorn gazed upon the Pillars of the Kings, it was true that these were now ruins of an ancient past. But it was also true that Aragorn was in the midst of waging war against the encroaching evil of Sauron, which is a perfect metaphor for the Machine. To fight against what Tolkien also called “the long defeat” of man does not mean we flee from Middle Earth, it means we wage our war here. We can each choose to be Aragon in our daily lives, in our love, and in our cultural influence. But if the center is to hold, and more rightly said, take hold again, we have to restore the proper sacred spiritual order in our culture.

In the Abolition of Man Lewis says in regards to how the modern man pursues technology in a very different way than the ancient man:

Our task before us then, is not to flee the cultural ruins but to find the moral framework that will allow us to navigate our increasingly challenging world.

Everything else is mere vanity.

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But it’s fair to wonder what the appeal is of someone who constantly uses wrong information, incomplete facts, and grandiose ideas about influence to make their points. I know many young men who have been captivated by his message. These young men aren’t evil, misguided maybe, but certainly not evil. And when they explain what they like about Nick, it’s one of these things that if you squint just right, ignore whole bodies of evidence, and focus only on that solitary idea, the point could kind of make sense.

Fuentes obviously makes the simple error that every one of his beliefs ends with the Jews. This overly simplistic and frankly unbelievable filter on the world is one of his many errors. Are we really supposed to believe that all the world’s ills can be blamed on the smallest group of people—these 14 million Jews? Even if you hate the Jews, isn’t this a little too on the nose?

In Nick’s worldview, you sprinkle a Jew here, sprinkle a Jew there, and suddenly Jews are running the world everywhere. Isn’t this tired and recycled theory just a little too convenient? The obvious question is, what rational person could actually believe this? The unfortunate answer, looking at history, is far too many people will believe this. Dave Chapelle prophetically said: “Early in my career, I learned there are two words you should never say together. Those words are...’the’ and ‘Jews.’ Never heard someone do good after they said that.”

What’s far more interesting to me than the man-child Nick Fuentes is that so many young people willingly consume his fast-food digital slop. This is more telling than what Nick actually says, and this is the question that our society needs to respond to. Do we blame McDonald’s for committing a health crime against humanity, or the patrons who willingly pilgrimage to it?

Here’s what Fuentes gets right: he has struck a chord with the general hopelessness that young men feel. And who can blame them? When I take an honest account of their situation, no one can deny that things have taken a turn.

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These young men aren’t getting married. They’re in debt. They’re childless. They’re alone. Many have experienced familial disintegration. The economy has been inflated away. The job market is declining. They can’t afford homes. They’re primarily emotionally and intellectually fractured by a digital media onslaught that even the most devout Saints couldn’t have resisted. Culture has overpromised and underdelivered in every way.

This reality is undeniable, and it is the perfect breeding ground for a scapegoat. Enter the Jews. Through Nick’s not-so-subtle sleight of hand, we have the eternal scapegoat. You have pain? Nick has the solution. If you ride with him long enough, maybe it will even be the final solution.

Compare Nick Fuentes to Charlie Kirk to see the contrasting vision for young men. Charlie didn’t deny the difficulty, but he also didn’t believe it was hopeless. Would it be hard? Yes. Would it take immense work? Also yes. But you can overcome it without devolving into a desperate, godless, whining infant. You can overcome it without placing the blame for your ills on another person or race.

One can and should acknowledge the difficulty and challenges of this next generation while pointing them away from Nick’s dark vision.

As an aside, young Christian men should weigh Nick’s character carefully. His “accidental” streaming of gay porn, which he hilariously blamed on the IDF. (This is obviously dark but massively insightful, even his hidden sexual perversions he blames on ‘The Jews’ and Israel) The leaked images of his sexual hookup with the male streamer Destiny. His self-confession of never dating a girl and his debasement of women. His steady use of crass, vile, un-Christian language. His encouragement on Jan. 6 for people to assault and enter the Capitol—yet his mysterious lack of arrest (Fed much?).

This is not the leader of a sound moral and Christian ethic. This is not what will help the future. This is a child who feels pain but doesn’t understand why. I’m reminded of the Whites vs. Reds in early 1900s Red Scare Russia, in which historians said:

“Antisemitism became a kind of ‘surrogate’ for White ideology. The leaders and ideologues of the Whites proved incapable of coming up with convincing and effective slogans on their own. This was probably due in no small part to their lack of concrete goals. The Whites instead found that antisemitic slogans were much more effective in mobilizing the semi-literate and illiterate masses.”

The same pain, discontent, and hopelessness for the future that Nick is acting as the antenna for, Mamdani struck in NYC. Lightning can strike at the same place but for different reasons.

Depending on what poll you look at, 40%-66% of sub-40 people in America have a favorable view of socialism. This absolutely blows my mind. And I don’t blame these people. Not really at least. Maybe a small percentage of these people are actually die-hard socialists in an ideological sense. My guess, though, is that most are simply fundamentally stuck in life, and capitalism as we know it is not working for them.

Now, I could make the case that America is no longer capitalist, free-market, or whatever Rothbardian concept of the economy America once hoped for, as all of that is now just a very distant memory. And there is truth in all of that. But the bottom line is that whatever is happening right now is animating the right and the left. And they all have real concerns.

Peter Thiel recently commented on the rise of socialism (well, it was an email from 2020 recently made public). One point he made strikes me explicitly. The boomers seem strangely uninterested in why someone could find socialism appealing. Thiel calls this strange lack of curiosity one of the main problems. And yeah, it’s hard to get someone to care about a pain they don’t feel. Getting into the desperation of the young generation starts with not presenting 50 year mortgages and the bearer of such ideas as anything other than something that deserves a good stoning. Good luck trying to explain how that, and “you will own nothing and be happy” are any different from each other.

My takeaway from this is not that Fuentes is a dangerous idiot (he is) or that socialism is rotten (it is), but that America is shifting into the conditions that allow for extremism and totalitarianism to happen. When the sub-40 crowd looks out into what they believe is a hopeless future, combined with what they rightly or wrongly perceive as an older class of society callous to what they are facing, we are creating the perfect environment for terrible things.

What is interesting about this discontent is not that it is a creative discontent. It’s not a solution oriented discontent. It’s not the hard times create strong men discontent. Unfortunately, it is the opposite. This is the Joker discontent. Burn the entire money pile to the ground discontent. If we can’t have it, no one will have it discontent. There are no plans to rebuild civilization, just to tear it down.

And I don’t think it’s just simple envy or greed. To me, it looks like part resentment and part hopelessness, which is far worse than envy or greed. The “groypers” have no demands. They are like the Joker barking at a car as it passes by. They wouldn’t know what to do if the car stopped. They exist just to troll the culture. It’s funny (in a Jack Nicholson in The Shining kind of way) that the socialist and the fascist will end up at the same place. Scapegoating the Jews.

The socialist category, which should also be noted, is predominantly women, is also heavily resentful. The belief that ended up being the short end of the metaphorical “life” stick that they ran with was: don’t get married or have kids, pursue a career, take out loads of school debt, free sexuality brings happiness, etc. It’s similar to the groypers’ issues, but the groypers are the young male expression. Only these older women are now sadly aging out of the timeline in which they can fix the lie they have been sold. And for whatever reason, the socialistic response appeals to women more because they really do want to be taken care of. And instead of a man, the government will do just fine.

Here is the other part that we should all keep our eyes on.

We are in a time where everything is shaking. The foundations of civilization are shaking. The truth is shaking. The nation is shaking. The culture is shaking. When things are shaking, there is a desire to control the shaking. This often looks like a totalitarian personality stepping into the scene to offer a “steady hand.” Well, before long, that “steady hand” has a choke hold around the throat of society.

Another aspect I find interesting is how quickly support for Israel has faded. On its face, that is a relatively minor American issue compared to the other concerns American society faces. Our entire foreign aid is less than 1% of GDP, and Israel receives less than half that. Why does Tucker mention Israel 800x and Mamdani 3x over the last 6 months? Why is this issue fracturing the right? Out of all of the massive problems we are facing, why this issue? But when you combine this issue with a heavy dose of American Jewish conspiracy, for whatever reason, this has become a powder keg. That reason might have to do with the Jews somehow being the spiritual issue of our time (maybe of all time).

Society is going to have to find a way forward that diffuses this somehow. And it is not going to be by gatekeeping the questions or pretending this is all going to go away. Neither of those things will happen. But we cannot let this fester and grow. Rod Dreher recently made a killer post on this issue here. In it, he gives this remarkable parallel from Russia.

Dreher tells the story of Yuri Slezkine, who argued that parents’ willingness to indulge their radical children played a significant role in the eventual triumph of Bolshevism. Some of these parents comforted themselves with the thought that their adult kids would grow out of their revolutionary fervor. Others may have hated what their kids believed, but didn’t want to risk alienating them, so they stayed quiet and passively supported them, hoping for the best.

In the end, this issue will have to be bulwarked by the Church. The socialists are not going to solve this. The Church must acknowledge what is happening here and begin doing the work in both the pulpit and the family unit to address it. The Church must respond to all of this with a guiding light and strength. The easiest way through this is to figure out the housing crisis, get young people married, and start really caring about restoring a future that allows the next generation to thrive. I think we would be surprised at how quickly the so-called “Jewish question” would go away. Which is not to delegitimize the seriousness or the insanity of those who propagate it now, but it is simply to acknowledge that discontent is what allows insane ideas to animate normal people.

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Had a great discussion with my friend Jeremy Pryor. We discuss a few different hypothesis on why Woke-ism has overtaken American. Jeremy is one of the brightest guys I know and it was great to hear his thoughts on this. You can follow his Substack here.

You can check the podcast out here.

Suppose there is any solitary silver lining to the last two years of Biden. In that case, it's that his regime is performing so horrendously that it is making true defiant believers out of our whole country. Something needs to change, and everyone can see something is very wrong. But unfortunately, these are not the kinds of shifts one man can make alone.  

A consequential reality of every significant progressive policy is that you can't hide from the damaging outcomes. Not to be outdone, the GOP has plenty of harmful policies and double-crossing behavior as well. Our nation is on the road to reaping the whirlwind of a hundred years of bad decision-making if something doesn't change quickly. The current shaking can be a helpful crossroads, even if it brings transient pain. What the future holds if something drastic doesn't happen will likely be some version of an American collapse. Economic collapse, broken supply chains, the further atomization and isolation of society, fractured families, bankrupt spirituality, and a chaotic, violent end where China, Russia, or both descend upon America.  

I would argue that some version of the struggles mentioned above is instructive for society. Even necessary. Pulling the curtain back on something reveals its true nature. Like a father letting his son spend a night in jail after a wild weekend, a little pain could open our eyes to our actual position in the world. If we aren't wise enough to wake up because the water in the pot is becoming warmer, we will wake up when things start to collapse. As the situation becomes more tedious, the current regime will become more belligerent in its quest to hold onto power and the narrative. The old maxim that describes becoming bankrupt, slowly and then all at once, is true of our nation too. These harsh consequences are necessary for the following steps to occur. In step one, we experience some level of the previously described suffering because it wakes up our culture. Step two will be a phenomenon called the preference cascade.   

When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775 / 1776, no one talked openly about rebelling against Great Britain. Conversations were happening in the shadows, but public writing like Common Sense was the first of its kind, and it lit up the colonies like a Cinco De Mayo Parade in South Texas. The blinders fell off the eyes of the people, and they realized they weren't alone in their sentiments. Something similar happened with Covid and masks on the airplanes. Travel was the final CDC outpost, holding on to the last vestiges of their unlawful mandates. Airports were essentially untouchable by the state's regulations. The day after the Florida judge struck down the CDC mandate, I was on a flight. 95% of the plane I was on were people not wearing masks. I saw something similar in the airports; the spell had been lifted, even if people still looked dazed and shocked as though they couldn’t believe it was finally over. People weren't buying this nonsense anymore and had simply had enough. True mask believers were under 5%, which became evident when the law was overruled. We only believed there were more because the cultural and media hegemony kept force-feeding non-stop propaganda on the entire western population for nearly two years.   

These previous examples bring us back to the second step of the hopeful future. A preference cascade is when people behave a certain way because they think they ought to behave that way, not because they genuinely believe it. It's the "aha!" moment when you realize something is absurd and stop doing it. I think that most people understand this with the woke ideology; they know it borders on the ridiculous, but they can't publically say anything because they will get canceled, fired, or censored. The woke ideology has successfully infiltrated many institutions, media, entertainment, education, and even religion at this point. Their power doesn't lie in their arguments, common sense, science, or sound organizing principles. The power lies in the raw dominance of institutional takeover and the hijacked compassion of true believers.

Preference cascades need catalysts in society, and they typically happen at the level of the cultural elite and ripple out. People like Dave Chapelle, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and a growing list of outspoken people against woke ideology are a beneficial start to creating cascades. Money is the highest business motivator, and what is happening in entertainment might be the true springboard for change in the rest of the culture. The recent Top Gun movie was astronomically successful because it didn't moralize the audience and played into the timeworn but determined way Americans see themselves. It felt like we had gone back in time to a robust American identity, and the audience loved it. Of course, it didn't hurt that every moronic article from The Times to The Atlantic felt the need to write the same boring essay about how it wasn't because Top Gun was anti-woke that the movie was abundantly successful. I think the lady does protest too much. The flip side to this is the new Toy Story movie that flopped. Disney has lost 50 BILLION since starting their woke war in Florida (For those unfamiliar, Disney decided to make a public spectacle of standing against Florida's HB 1557 law that bans instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation, in the classroom, until third grade). These examples are too numerous to count. Woke entertainment doesn't make a good story. It's boring, predictable, and not an accurate picture of reality. It's becoming clear that woke ideology will eventually fall out of favor simply because there is no long-term money in it. It's a cultural grift that will ultimately fail.      

This subject brings me to my final thought on catalysts. Love him or hate him; you can't talk about catalysts without talking about Trump. Earlier this week, the internet exploded with news that the FBI had raided Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago. This is the first time the FBI has ever raided the home of a former president. This raid is just one more transgression on the back of years of offenses that feels like the regulatory component of the US government has been totally and completely weaponized. You could throw a rock in any direction, on any day, on any year in the last decade, and hit the hypocrisy of our government and its war on anything that isn't progressive or legacy GOP in nature. Hillary Clinton was literally illegally wiping her government hard drives, and Bill Clinton got off completely free from his Epstein travels with multiple real-life pedophile accusations; the true depths of Epstein's crimes are still not revealed. The FBI raided Project Veritas over Biden's journals. Who can forget the crackhead Hunter Biden laptop that was denied and then acknowledged or the numerous shady family Biden dealings with Ukraine before going to financial war over Ukraine (which has still never been explored)? There is so much well-established mainstream information about all of the above. These violations don't even scratch the surface of government agency violations. The years of Russia Gate hoax shenanigans with dual impeachments and other kangaroo court proceedings have been on full display for at least six years. We don't have time to go into the institutional capture of the CDC, the recent weaponization of the IRS, or the many other bureaucratic confiscations that have happened in our once great country. The roof is caving in. As an American, one has to realize that our greatest threat is not some foreign government; it is a weaponized DOJ, FBI, and other bureaucratic agencies who want to destroy our children, spy on us, protect their power, start senseless wars, partner with China and consolidate as much power as possible against the people of America. Here is the thing: even if you disagree with all or some of what I've listed, a hundred million people agree with some version of what I just laid out. There is going to be a reaction to all of this hypocrisy.     

Any talk about Trump is like dealing with explosives. It's so insanely polarizing in both directions. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms you can lay against Trump. Egotistical, de-humanizing, polarizing, morally questionable, and unclear guiding ethics and philosophy come to mind. Another prominent critique, and arguably his most significant political blunder, is who he surrounded himself with while in office. You don't run on a drain the swamp platform and place guys like Gary Cohn, Steve Mnuchin, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, and other legacy swamp creatures as chief generals in your cabinet. Is there anything more defining of Trump's term than the FBI raiding Trump at the behest of Christopher Wray, the FBI director that Trump appointed? It's almost a comical level of insanity. I don't think Trump is stupid, but I do think that he underestimated how corrupt this level of power is or that he felt he could negotiate with the power structure. When Trump took office, he lacked political relationships and was betrayed and sidetracked by the political circus that swarmed him. 

There is no question that from the start Trump had every tool of the opposition arrayed against him. A permanent feature against Trump for the previous six years has been the-skies-falling media rhetoric with the help of the DOJ, FBI, and Clintons. It's a miracle that they could not put anything on him after six years of these antics. I wouldn't even survive that level of scrutiny. So, either we are all watching a giant dismal charade, and the majority of what Trump said was a lie, or we just watched something called the cathedral conspiracy take place. The cathedral theory says you can't have two regimes within one regime. Therefore, a president can't create actual change within the system because the system is not theirs to change. This is because they don't hold real power. The true power structures might more accurately be described as the bureaucratic underbelly that is unelected and unaccountable. The fabled deep state that everyone can't stop talking about. This theory would explain why legacy presidents: Bush, Clinton, Biden, and Obama fired and hired over 3,000 people within the first year of taking office. Some of them did it even faster, within the first quarter. They built an entire government in their image. On the other hand, Trump didn't have years of experience in politics and didn't have this preselected cabinet in place for his term.  

The difference now is that Trump threatens both the left and the traditional GOP. Both legacy power structures lose if Trump retakes power and goes scorched earth on the administrative side of America. Even if Trump does effectively restore order, it is a grave process. The pendulum of power seems to swing in both directions. Extreme actions generate extreme responses. Unfortunately, I believe more and more every day that the best thing we can do is politically marginalize the people who are now destroying our society. Orienting oneself around the new reality is helpful– power is already being seized. Now, the question is who will retain it. I hope that one day we can unify again. I don't believe that unification will happen under Trump, and that's ok. This hour might not be the unity hour, and his purpose might not be unity. Hopefully, America will produce someone after Trump who can bring the healing we need as a nation. One benefit of a quickly degrading society is that the faster this happens, the more people magnetize towards Trump. People realize that someone needs to do something. Trump is bronze in his ability to withstand pressure, and he understands power dynamics. The long-term national victory will be for the leader who can unify when the time is right for unification. This hour is the time to fight for control of power.  

I believe the future unfolds in three steps. The first will be the visible societal collapse and other bellicose behavior of our government. This temporary challenge is necessary to shift people's preferences and I believe we are well into this first step. The second step will be a preference cascade rippling out, changing the attitude within society and shifting what they prefer. The shift in attitudes is necessary to garner the necessary support. The third and final step will be installing a leader with the strength to uproot the improper use of power that has possessed our nation. I believe this will be Trump. The fight against him over the last six years is freakish in its zeal. This display of targeting Trump has overplayed the hand of the opposition. Their pugnacious attempts to dethrone him and ruin him display their fear.   

Courage Among The Ruins

The danger of bringing up Trump is that he pulls all the attention into himself like a blackhole. I have concerns far past what happens with Trump, although it's clear he plays a unique role in the ongoing national drama. The right, conservatism, or whatever you want to call it, has lost its organizing principle. The mainstream GOP is just as bad as the progressive left– worse in some ways. Our nation slips closer to a breaking point every day. When the full intensity of the realignment and power shift comes, the right will need a new organizing principle. Or rather than new, a return to the founding organizing principles of our nation. Is something like that even possible where vast swaths of the population currently exist? 

One of the most incomprehensible and wearisome developments to observe over the last three years is the lack of courage in our culture. Society's feeble response to the not-so-slow march of the woke and tyrannical government has floored me. The abortion conversation is an excellent example of this cowardice culture. Roe V Wade might be the most historic legal case of our lifetime. This debate has been the primary cultural and moral fight of the last 50 years. Yet, I saw a meager amount of church and Christian influencers post positively about the Roe v Wade decision. These same groups are certainly making posts about other issues, Ukraine, BLM, and other new popular cultural issues. This is a microcosm of the more significant loss of backbone that has taken over the atmosphere. We have become impotent agents of change. Some outliers are boldly standing for truth, but what we have seen over the last few years is disheartening at best.   

Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, wrote in his manifesto some thought-provoking ideas about a society that becomes oversocialized. Notwithstanding his violent acts of terrorism, which I do not condone, his description of over-socialization was accurate. He described over-socialization as: "the condition wherein moral codes and social norms are so well-internalized into members of society to the point that attempting to think, feel, and act against social expectations imposes a severe psychological burden." In other words, people become so homogenized in their thinking that they cannot withstand or push back against societal norms because they fear what others might think of their contradictions. We all need some level of socialization to flourish as a society, but there comes the point where we can't think past the framework that society lays on us. In our culture, we can't be so afraid of rocking the boat that we become useless as salt and light. Our kingdom manifesto is to rock the boat. Our biblical history is one of cultural upheaval, and we should welcome that role. If we don't require their rewards, we don't have to live by their rules.  

An American golden age lies in our future. It will be a bumpy ride to get there, but a peaceful valley will be on the other side of this power transfer. It will be our Noah moment, and we will step off the boat and wonder how to rebuild civilization. This time is an invitation to a new reality. It will require the courage of all of us. It will require a new organizing principle. A return to foundational moral ethics. It will require the boldness to say that all people are created equal but not all ideas are created equal. It will be held as a duty that a society must not tolerate certain things. What would a nation look like that fit this characterization?  

“In future generations, people will find difficulty in understanding how at one time generations existed who did not regard the idea of God as the highest concept of which man is capable, but who, on the contrary, were ashamed of it and considered the development of atheism a sign of progress in the emancipation of human thought.”

Christian Schubart

This is part 2 of 2: Liberalism, Was It all A Dream. To read part 1 you can go here.

I would submit that as Americans, we’ve lost our societal meta-story. Our founding mythology. Our unifying battle cry. What was once at least a semi-cohesive set of core values is quickly shifting into a splintered dystopian hellscape with bad outcomes for our entire nation. The loss of our collective story is happening so rapidly, and the problem is so severe, that we stand on the edge of a cliff of Everest proportions while we navel gaze to the sound of Demi Lavato.

How did we get here? Is it the globalists? Is it the crazy Christians? Is it the steady stream of nonsensical lies and absurd politicians? Is it late-stage capitalism or the absolutely narcissistic society it produces? Or maybe it’s the race hustlers and tyrannical-woke police?  

What if it was liberalism itself that is producing the potential for the apocalyptic ruins that might stand before us? How could this be? How could the fundamental bedrock of what we call the American political philosophy be the source of what ails us now?  

We find ourselves in a civilization-defining hour. So it is; the orcs of Mordor are freely roaming our land in our Rohan LOTR moment. Or, for those of you who don’t follow the reference, if we do nothing, we are screwed. To the person with the proper perspective, life in this hour is an honor. History gives us rare moments like our current opportunity, and it is a glory for the courageous among us, the innovators among us, the iconoclasts, heterodox and faithful gritty warriors to be called up for such a time as this.  

The Neutrality Myth

The promise of liberalism was relatively simple. After a millennium of wars based on class, religion, secularism, and myriads of other differences, the liberal system promised to make peace with all of those differences. Liberalism says that the individual must be protected and that the best way to do this is through neutrality and tolerance. There is something almost biblically accurate about an idea like this.   A God given free will is a foundational teaching of faith.  Authentic faith inherently includes no coercion and the sovereign opportunity to make any decision, even the wrong decision.  Liberalism promised that it would remove all society's deep metaphysical inherent needs— our need for connection with God and His systems— and reduce them to the lowest common denominator so that we could focus on economic growth, expand our individual flourishing, and just not try to all kill each other for once.

Practically, the offer of liberalism is that we would have no gods before us— your gods, my gods, or your potential offense of using the term god. But, as we watch it play out in real-time, the reality is that the removal of a guiding moral ethic in America has been disastrous. Besides being fundamentally politically flawed and not actually in the constitution, our current church and state separation status quo has been hazardous for society. We were attempting to create a utopian society where we didn't bake our moral standards into our culture. While this appears relatively benign on the face of things and, frankly, a fair and good idea, it is radically flawed.   

The idea that any system can remain neutral is a lie. The system is built and populated with individuals who all have their own set of beliefs. Even more, many of our country's challenges are bureaucratic and institutional, which opens up a distinctly different set of challenges to overcome. My friend Jeremy has a great piece on that idea here. It was fatally flawed on the outset that we could ever truly achieve total neutrality. What we have successfully done instead is remove God or any moral ethic and replace it with tolerance and the myth of neutrality. We are now left with the worst possible societal ideas because we have removed any moral and religious ethics from the acceptable ideas allowed to compete in society— this is especially disastrous when considering most “objective” moral standards originated in a Mosaic religion. The moment we separated God and culture, it was only a matter of time before we ended up where we are now. This is a simple but honest statement.

People object to the idea of a culture that has a “God” morality integrated into it and I understand that. They want a neutral system even if that is an illusion.  I will address this apparent conflict in detail later. However, this idea becomes less offensive if one can at least acknowledge that we don't currently live in a morally neutral system, so at best, you only get to choose what kind of morality governs your society.  

The big questions of our day are moral in nature. They are civilization-defining questions. The questions we are dealing with as a nation are not minor issues. They aren't rounding error differences. We are now actively debating if men can become women or vice-versa. If nations should even exist. When life starts. The active sexualization of children. Where we will get our energy for the next hundred years. Should we have police and laws? How will we crawl out of inflation? Looming economic chaos and other significant structural challenges. These are not amoral issues, but we have created a power vacuum in liberalism by holding up tolerance and neutrality as the highest value.   

What if all ideas aren't equal? Can we say that? What if the idea that men can be women is such an unpalatable stupid idea that it has civilization-ending consequences? Carl Schmitt was a German political and philosophy writer post World War II. He wrote an excellent essay called The Tyranny of Values, in which he argues that:

"liberalism depends on systematic neutralizations—fictions by which all individuals and points of view are imagined to be equal, and by which the confrontations of political life seem to be transformed into peaceful, rule-governed debates with open-ended, undetermined outcomes."   (Schmitt, Tyranny of Values)

Essentially, he is saying that the whole point of liberalism is to neutralize every idea that says one idea or way of life is better than another and that the goal of liberalism is to make all opinions equal. Unfortunately, a prevalent idea in society is that you can just ignore something if you don't like it. This screenshot that has racked up 730k likes on Twitter is a perfect example of the idea.  

The naivety of a statement like this can’t be understated.  It's analogous to the idea that if you didn't like slavery, just don't have slaves. As if there is no moral stench in all of society when tolerating specific views. As if our ideas and actions don't have generational consequences. The main problem with these statements is that everything this woman listed is a moral judgment; they are just judgments with a godless guiding ethic.  

One of the many flaws of conservatism is that it doesn't understand that you can't be passive against an aggressive opponent. As a result, conservatism is fighting for things like free speech for its enemies and is bleary-eyed shocked when those same opponents systematically take them offline and censor them at every possible opportunity. Censorship is a perfect metaphor for what is happening within the power dynamics of our country at the moment. Conservatism doesn't understand power. It believes in the liberal ideal, which is why it is getting trounced by progressives who say they believe the same idea and do the exact opposite. It's why a teacher can sexualize children in schools but will get sued all the way up to the Supreme Court if they try to pray with those same students. Saying conservatism doesn't understand power is a scary statement for hopefully obvious reasons. Discussions around power are risky at best and it would seem wise to not take the idea of grabbing power lightly.

“I'm living in that 21st century, doing something mean to it

Do it better than anybody you ever seen do it

Screams from the haters got a nice ring to it

I guess every superhero need his theme music

No one man should have all that power

The clock’s ticking, I just count the hours

Stop tripping, I'm tripping off the power”

(Kanye West, Power)

We Want The Kingdom Without The King In It 

I'm hesitant to write any more about wokeness. If you are lucky enough to have not heard the term woke and are unclear about the meaning, author James Lindsay has a great definition of Woke, which you can read in full here. He writes that:

"woke" means having awakened to having a particular type of "critical consciousness," as these are understood within Critical Social Justice. To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call "Social Justice." That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems.  

I find the philosophy and movement so mind-numbingly ludicrous and reductive that I can't believe it even has to be addressed. Woke ideology can be learned in under 30 minutes, and I'm shocked at its power over society. Though, I do think that time is coming to an end. What concerns me a lot more is the issues that have been happening in free speech. How wokeness has weaponized itself against speech is a much larger problem. I also see this speech obstacle in health, economics, and education. Wokeness will be a fad that passes, but the losses in free speech are a much more chronic problem. Jordan Peterson makes a great observation when he says that we battle it out with ideas, so we don't have to battle it out with real weapons. Better to openly debate ideas in an attempt to find common ground than to go to war over its loss.   

What the speech issue has done in our country has created a weird synergy between unlikely bedfellows. You have the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) people who are now more or less allied with many people on the right. The IDW are people who would have been considered classically liberal: The Weinstein brothers, Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, and Glenn Greenwald, to name a few. The IDW are people who have been censored or taken offline in differing capacities. Typically, they get canceled because they said something that offended the woke police. As true believers in Liberalism, they all seem shocked when this censorship happens. They just can't figure out how the system they have championed for so long has effectively canceled them.  

The response to being taken offline is kind of funny, in a dark way. In their minds, if Liberalism is software that runs society, they just want to revert to the Liberalism of the 90s. Liberalism before wokeness, before people started changing definitions around and canceling each other for saying the wrong thing. They want Liberalism without all the petty puritan wokeism. Let's uninstall the corrupted version of Liberalism and return to the previous, superior version. They don't understand that it is because of Liberalism that we are where we are— their own ideology is the cause of their canceling. It was only a matter of time before we got here. So, while I'm sympathetic to what is happening to the IDW, and I'm thankful to have help in the free speech fight, it is clear that they don't have solutions to the problems that ail society. They also don't understand power, and they don't know how to deal with the metaphysical questions we are facing.    

Many have heard the adage, "I didn't leave the democrats; they left me!" Everyone from Reagan to Prager to the new conservative rainmakers like Dave Ruben has said it. This statement brings up an interesting thought; are we forever moving left, and the right is just older iterations of the left? Is the right just people from the left twenty years ago? If so, what does the conservative party, group, or whatever it is called stand for? What are the unmovable guideposts that we place in society? The organizing principles? From generation to generation, the ideals that safeguard the future of civilization? I would submit that as soon as you cede moral territory, you no longer have those safeguards. Ideally, you have individual responsibility as the primary safeguard, but it is evident that you also need societal safeguards. Once you cede moral territory, it is only a matter of time before everything else crumbles. So, how do we find our way back? We can. It is possible. What might that future look like?

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”

Thomas Sowell 

This is Part 1 of 2 of: Liberalism, Was It All A Dream. You can find Part 2 Here.

Mark Maggiori, What Lies Within Us

A hard and fast truth is that it is impossible to remain neutral to evil ideas. Evil ideas are becoming more commonplace and aggressively pushed on society; even if one wishes to, one cannot remain neutral. I have been resistant to this idea for a long time. Diplomacy and a desire to not overly influence others have been values I have believed in. The libertarian ideal of moral neutrality in society is another wrong idea that I had believed. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that neutrality is a mirage. The days of staying quiet and fostering peace are no longer days that are upon us. 

As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.

Matt Taibbi

Let’s suppose neutrality is impossible or puts you on the opposing side de facto. If neutrality is now a stance, we might as well take a real stand for what we believe in. Staying silent has made you their enemy. One might as well proactively— stand for something.

This is a very exciting time; it will force America to go through a renaissance because many people are waking up to the pronounced decay happening in all aspects of our society. This awakening will prompt the discovery of the old ways, ancient paths, and national transformation. My money is on a hard transition but a hopeful future— regardless of the process, there are new frontiers to be conquered. A new cultural, economic, family, philosophical, and theological vision will rise out of the ashes of this transition. People need courage now, which will hopefully be in greater supply than what we've felt the last few years. 

How does one go about the business of rebuilding civilization? What does a society that is in the process of being red-pilled do to avoid the black pill? What are the ancient ways and fallen ruins that must be rediscovered and rebuilt? Who will be the men, women, and families that will turn the tides? That opportunity is ripe for the bravest among us to take hold of. The old ways are still very much in the heart of America. The eternal way of the spirit is still very much alive as well. It beckons to all mankind.  Who will be the brave among us to seize what others fear?

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

CS Lewis

This is Ck1 - Thoughts On Civilization Rebuilding , a newsletter about Discovering the old ways.

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