Category Archives: Culture war

King Charles: a reactionary ruler

Our green, mystical monarch harbours a deep suspicion of modernity, science and freedom.

Article by Tim Black.

Excerpt:

The problem is that Charles’s ultra-reactionary worldview no longer provokes the ridicule it might once have done. Quite the opposite. Our political and media classes now seem in love with his reactionary rantings – albeit their more diluted versions. They may have no idea what Traditionalism means or stands for, but they certainly share his climate-change apocalypticism. They may not be yearning for a conservative revolution, but in the declinist ambience of Charles’s screeds and speeches, they see a dim reflection of their own green-tinged disillusionment with modernity. Their own disenchantment with liberalism and democracy. And so they have been actively calling for him to abandon the neutrality of his predecessor. They even claim that his views on the environment are ‘uncontroversial’ and that expressing them would not violate any constitutional protocols.

US president Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, says he hopes Charles will continue to press for action on climate, claiming it ‘is a universal issue… not ideology’. ‘King Charles has been an environmentalist for 50 years’, opines the Washington Post. ‘Now is the time for him to make his case to the British people.’ Others have gone even further. ‘We are fortunate that our new king possesses a willingness to intercede in public life’, wrote one particularly excited ‘post-liberal’, just after Charles’s accession to the throne. ‘His instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events’, he wrote.

This is what is most troubling. Not that Charles likes to think of himself as a 1920s-style conservative revolutionary, engaged in a project of often bizarre avant-gardist reaction. But the fact that these views chime so well with those of our political and cultural elites. His reactionary views, once the source of ridicule, are now theirs, too.

Earth Day at 53

A reminder of the utterly preposterous predictions from the past

Net Zero Watch has issued a newsletter regarding “Earth Day”, the original one having been 22nd April 1970, which interestingly was the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.

In 2015, Gary North had something to say about this non-event:

Forty-five years ago today, the Left celebrated their first Earth Day. Nothing has come of it. But they still celebrate it. They take their anniversaries seriously.

Nevertheless, in an editorial in TIME magazine, two New York professors urge “religious observance for the planet and its self-appointed watchkeepers under the headline: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday.“, as Breitbart writes about this piece.

Here’s what Net Zero Watch writes this year:

Happy Earth Day!

Never trust the prophets of doom


22 April 2023

Earth Day at 53


None of the eco-doomsday predictions have come true 

From predicting ecological collapse and the end of civilisation to warnings that the world is running out of oil, all environmental doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be flat out wrong.
 
More than three decades before Greta Thunberg was born — the Swedish environmental activist on climate change — more than 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

We now look back at quotes from Earth Day, Then and Now,” by Ronald Bailey of the spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions from Earth Day 1970.

Considering the current doomsday predictions scaremonger activists are verbalising about global warming that will result in the demise of civilisation within the next decade, many of those unscientific 1970 predictions are being reincarnated on today’s social and news media outlets.

Many of the same are being regurgitated today, but the best prediction from the first earth day five decades ago, yes 50 years ago, was that the “the pending ice age as earth had been cooling since 1950 and that the temperature would be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000”.

The 1970’s were a lousy decade. Embarrassing movies and dreadful music reflected the national doomsday mood following an unpopular war, endless political scandals, and a faltering economy.

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.data.

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine

9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

History seems to repeat itself as there will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak. I guess we’ll need to critique the 2020 doomsday predictions in the year 2050 and see if they were any better than those from the first Earth Day 50 years ago.

The World’s dumbest Harvard graduate

Donates $300 million to the prestigious university

Writes Tom Woods in his newsletter of 11/04/2023:

As a Harvard alum, I’m on the university’s mailing list. Here’s an excerpt from an email we all received yesterday:

Today, we are delighted to announce that Ken Griffin AB ’89 has made an unrestricted gift of $300 million to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences….

In recognition of Ken’s commitment to our mission, Harvard will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in his honor. For the past 150 years, GSAS has nurtured and expanded the ambitions of students who have changed the world through their vast and varied scholarly pursuits. Now, the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will do the same.

Now here’s an interesting fact about ol’ Ken Griffin: he’s a backer of Ron DeSantis for president.

Try to get inside the brain of someone like that.

He wants a GOP president, and not just any GOP president: specifically one who ostentatiously resisted the public health establishment, and much of the political establishment.

And at the same time, he gives $300 million to that very establishment.

Maybe — maybe — there was a time when we might have thought: Harvard has its problems, but it is still a world-class institution full of smart people doing important work.

That time is long over, if indeed it ever existed.

Imagine having $300 million to throw around, looking at the state of America, and thinking: the best place for this money is in academia, and particularly in an institution that has been at war with people like me for as long as I can remember.

One thing we can credit the left for: they’re not politically stupid. They know what they want, and they devote their time and resources to getting it.

The right, by contrast, has been full of people like Ken Griffin: they don’t have the guts to withstand being hated, so they delude themselves into thinking that if they just ingratiate themselves with the establishment by doing X or Y, maybe they can yet be liked.

Dear reader, if you have $300 million and are tempted to — of all things! — donate it to Harvard blankety-blank University, please write to me first and I’ll help devise a strategy to use that money more wisely — like lining animal cages with it.

Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle?

Or are we still in mid-cycle? And could it be an epochal point of inflection?

Writes Alastair Crooke:

The levelling project being essentially nihilistic becomes captured by the destructive side of the revolution – its authors so absorbed with dismantling structures that they do not attend to the need to think policies through, before launching into them. The latter are not adept at doing politics: at making politics ‘work’.

(Interenstingly, this applies not only to foreign policy, such as Ukraine and Taiwan, but also to Covid and climate change policies.)

Thus, discontent at the welling string of western foreign policy flops grows. Crises multiply, both in number and across different societal dimensions. Perhaps, we are closening to a point of beginning to move through the cycle – toward disillusionment, retrenchment, and stabilization; the prerequisite step to catharsis and ultimate renewal. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the longevity and tenacity of the western revolutionary impulse.

“The revolution does not operate as an explicit political movement. It operates laterally through the bureaucracy and it filters its revolutionary language through the language of the therapeutic, the language of the pedagogical, or the language of the corporate HR department”, Professor Furedi writes. “And then, it establishes power anti-democratically, bypassing the democratic structure: using this manipulative and soft language – to continue the revolution from within the institutions.”

The meaning of Trump’s indictment

It's the end of US politics

Writes Tom Luongo:

Civilization rests on the fantasy that there is a shared acceptance of the rules on which it operates. Americans are both immensely cynical and naïve about politics in this sense. We all know politicians are lying when their lips are moving but we also believe in the myth that the American system of justice will get the right answer often enough to keep the lights on.

Today that’s a very big assumption.

[…]

Davos is at war with humanity through undermining the institutions of civilization itself. They will not be stopped in their quest to secure global control over humanity. They have stoked an animus against Trump in the minds of people like Nancy Pelosi that can only end in fire and violence.

They know that the 2024 election is where all their dreams come together. They need another Davosian quisling in the White House to counter what’s happening with the Federal Reserve’s hawkish policy.

Davos has control over the political and monetary policies of Europe. It lost political control over the UK and got it back and will reverse Brexit. That’s brought the Bank of England back in line. However, it is very clear at this point they do not control the Fed.

So, they have political control until January 2025 in the US, but do not have monetary control over the Fed until 2026, when Powell’s second term is done. This is the window for US patriots to win this civil war before it even begins in earnest.

[…]

Davos knows this is it for them. 2024 in the US or bust. George Soros said as much at Munich this year. This is why Trump needs to be indicted even though the case is legally illiterate.

[…]

They [‘Davos’] will play this all the way out. They have no other choice if they want to win this war they’ve started to validate their view of themselves as gods among mere men.

Three articles about the decline of the US

The world's leading power is finished

I’ve been reading lewrockwell.com regularly every day for over 20 years now. I have never seen a collection of articles like the one two days ago, Saturday. No less than three of the usual 12 articles were devoted to the coming collapse of the USA.

Here’s no. 1: James Howard Kunstler, The Season is Here

Excerpts:

The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own ideally amorphous existence.

[…]

Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.

Expect three evolving dynamics to stipulate our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is…chaos unending.

Thus, others will end the project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.

Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporates and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.

Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into a ruinous debt deflation that leaves Americans, one way or another, with no money. At the same time, the people will wake to the wrecking of their energy and food supply. A line will appear drawn in the ground from sea to shining sea, as by a cosmic power, and everybody… the formerly Woke, the unvaxxed, the penitent and unrepentant, the middle and lower orders especially, who suffer most harshly… will find themselves all on one side of that line in opposition to the wicked who have brought a hard rain upon them. And there you will finally see the beginning of your long-promised hope and change. No need even to wait for it. At long last, it’s upon us.

Here’s no. 2: Bionic Mosquito, Woe to the Bloody City

Excerpts:

John 8: 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

How did we get here?  Wilson answers:

We thought we could have honesty and integrity and good government without having to confess the name of Christ. In all of this, secularism has been the foundational lie. We have been unwilling to bring our Christian faith to bear on public affairs in any direct manner. And because of this, we are now dwelling in clown world.

And this points to the institution that carries the largest weight in this fall.  It isn’t even that we have been unwilling to bring our faith to bear, it is that many churches are on the side of the lying team – from gender confusion to Scofield’s dream for supporting the chosen people.

… whatever else the separation of church and state means, it does not mean you get to tell lies so long as the content of the lies was political.

Here’s no. 3: Doug Simpson, Is It Too Late For Us?

Excerpts:

I’ve wondered if this is the same situation we face today in America? Could it be that the season has also passed for America’s healing? Could it be that it’s time to ask our Heavenly Father in all His mercy to end this facade we once knew as America? It’s just a question.

[…]

We have mistakenly believed that America is too big to fail. We have mistakenly believed that because of America’s blessed beginnings from those days at Plymouth plantation that God would always protect us no matter how corrupt we became. We understand that everything else in our lives needs our personal effort, such as, work, marriage, and family, but somewhere along the line we bought into this notion that how this nation turns out is strictly up to the Lord.

Sorry, but it does not work like that.

Things have now gone so horribly bad, become so utterly and profoundly corrupt — just like what happened to my wife’s body — that, as with her, we are far beyond any reasonable expectation of healing. That’s where I see America today. We are literally living on life support in the cancer ward. And no longer can we blame it on the Republicans or the Democrats, or Joe Biden, or the Bushes, Obama, or Trump. It is not their fault. It is my fault. It is your fault.

Does my saying so offend?

I, too, have never cared much for Chicken Littles who run around saying the sky is falling. But I strongly fear that it’s now too late for this once great America. We are now reaping what we have sown for at least four generations. Yet we pray that God will, by some miracle, send a hoard of angels down and clean up this mess — a mess for which we, and we alone, are quite responsible.

Doesn’t the Lord love America? Yes, I am sure He does. But He loved other countries and civilizations that went under. Did He have a purpose for America. Yes, but He seeks a people that will represent that purpose. And wasn’t that purpose to establish His kingdom on Earth — as it is in Heaven? I could be wrong, but, over time I seriously doubt the Father cares what chunk of land on which that happens. The America that was meant to be is no more. In my view, as with my wife, the season has passed.

[…]

I believe the season for America’s healing has passed. Yes, I hope I am wrong, but I desperately fear that this time I am not. The evil cancer that rages throughout our nation’s body at this time in history, is unlike any before. Yes, I do believe God is capable of stopping it and healing this nation. But He first must get our attention, so that He can use us to accomplish that task. I hate to think what it might take to get our attention.

Other than Grace, which was the only real free gift of God, everything else requires our earnest participation. Am I telling you to stop praying? Not at all. Pray harder. But this time put something with that prayer, otherwise save your breath.

Good news. God will not be denied. Because more important than America’s survival, is the establishment of His kingdom on earth. We could very well be dead as a nation, but God will raise up another people in another country, in another time — like happened one time in America — and continue to build his kingdom on earth.

And it may just happen right where you are now standing.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

An exciting new project arising from Jordan Peterson's ideas, arguments and presentations

It’s called ARC, alluding to Noah’s Ark and the arc of a person’s life – and maybe even to the Ark of the Covenant.

Here is their launch announcement.

Quotes from that announcement:

“New International Alliance Announces Major Conference to Enhance Global Prosperity, Challenge Declinism and Revitalize our Understanding of Human Flourishing”

“The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) will provide an alternative to “the claim that decline is inevitable.””

“The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is being established as an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.”

The website is here. At the top, it says:

We are seeking answers to some of our day’s most fundamental questions, grounded in our core belief that everyone has intrinsic worth and something to contribute, and humanity has an extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.

Jordan Peterson presents the reason and ethos of this new organisation in a Youtube podcast. Here’s the main text of what he says in written form in full: My Vision for ARC.

Excerpts:

Despite all this good news, this undeniable progress, a shadow has emerged, an adversarial challenge to this state and process of expanding abundance; an emergent crisis of meaning and purpose. God is dead, or so the story goes, and the future is uncertain. Five centuries of ascendant reductionist Enlightenment rationality have revealed that this starkly objective world lacks all intrinsic meaning. A century and a half or more of corrosive cultural criticism has undermined our understanding of and faith in the traditions necessary to unite and guide us.

In the midst of this existential chaos, the false idol of apocalyptic ideology inevitably beckons.

We find ourselves, in consequence, inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralizing messages, most particularly in the form of environmental catastrophism; the insistence that we confront a severe and immediately pending emergency of biological destruction, causally associated with our degenerate social structures and their excess and destructive industrial production.

The narrative generating these messages, quasi-religious in its structure and intensity, paints a dismal existential picture: the individual is a rapacious, predatory, parasitical consumer; society—even the little society of the family—an oppressive, tyrannical despoiler; and nature, herself, a hapless, fragile, virginal victim.

[…]

A deep, worldwide, social, economic and environmental revolution is therefore allegedly at hand; those who dare suggest otherwise are blind, if not malevolent, and must be silenced.

The results of such theories? The consequences of such proclamations?

The increasing and increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth; the resultant artificially-inflated prices, particularly for energy, that most truly punish the poor.

The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarization; simultaneously, and in predictable lockstep, the extension of reach and control over even the most private details of our lives by increasingly gigantic and centralized organizations, governmental and corporate alike.

The spread, particularly among the young, of a demoralizing and socially-divisive doubt and hopelessness.

[…]

We have therefore initiated the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new movement of hopeful vision, local, national and international in its aim and scope, aimed at the collective, voluntary establishment of a maximally attractive route forward. The ARC will open itself up to widespread public membership, as rapidly and extensively as is practically manageable, at as low a cost as is possible and desirable, so that everyone interested can aid in voluntarily formulating this story and strategy, and to discuss how its implementation might be encouraged.

[…]

The sheer complexity of the world, and the genuine diversity of individual ability and preference means that distributed decision-making is a necessity, not a luxury: no elite technocracy is capable of knowing best and then determining how we should all move forward as individuals and communities.

It follows from this that policy requiring compulsion, let alone force, rather than the voluntary assent of the participants, is bad policy.

We offer for the contemplation of those potentially interested in our invitation six fundamental questions, the answers to which might form the basis for a vision that is voluntarily compelling, motivating, stabilizing and uniting.

  • Vision and Story: What destiny might we envision and pursue, such that we are maximally fortified against anxiety and despair, motivated by faith and hope, and voluntarily united in our pursuit of a flourishing and abundant world?
  • Responsible Citizenship: How might we encourage individuals to reflect and to act so that they adopt full voluntary responsibility for themselves, present and future, as well as their families and communities?
  • Family and Social Fabric: How might we effectively conceptualize, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centered intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend?
  • Free Exchange and Good Governance: How can we continue to gain from the genius of unbridled human innovation and the productive reciprocity of voluntary production and free exchange, while protecting ourselves against the tendency of successful organizations to degenerate into a state of wilfully blind and narrowly self-serving authoritarianism?
  • Energy and Resources: How do we ensure provision of the energy and other resources crucial to our shared security and opportunity in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe, efficient and widely and universally accessible?
  • Environmental Stewardship: How might we properly pursue the environmental stewardship that most truly serves the needs and wants of all individuals today, tomorrow and into the foreseeable future?

Concluding words

We at ARC do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe that we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or our fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.

We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.

Those who present a vision of inevitable catastrophe in the absence of severely enforced material privation are not wise seers of the inevitable future, but forlorn prisoners of their own limited, faithless imaginations. Those who scheme to lead using terror as a motivator and force as a cudgel reveal themselves by definition unfit for the job.

We hope to encourage the development of an alternative pathway uphill, out of both tyranny and the desert, stabilizing, unifying and compelling to men and women of sound judgement and free will.

Welcome aboard the ARC.

I intent to formulate my own answers to the above questions, which I will post on the ARC website survey page and on this blog.

Martyrdom in the 21st Century

Persecution of Christians in the West is psychological, not physical

Pastor Andrew Isker has written a piece on “The Psychological and Social Persecution of Christians in Current Year” With the title “Martyrdom in Trashworld”. Below are some excerpts (emphases are mine).

Stories [of Christian martyrs in the past] that show the devotion of faithful Christians give us heroes to emulate. Of course, the second you begin to apply the lessons of Christian martyrs in our age, malicious people, often within the church, will attack you. College campuses are a window into the future 15 years down the road (or maybe five or ten—the pace has quickened considerably). When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, I began to see the growing hostility to the Christian faith.

[…]

Now, simply being a Christian who believes the Bible is true and who desires to live a life according to the commands of Jesus Christ, is something which is a clear impediment to pursuing a “normal life.” A successful career, finding a spouse, and gaining the respect of your friends and neighbors, all of these become much more difficult to attain if you are a Christian living in Trashworld. Then, as now, the Christians devoted to collaborating with the enemies of Christ will say, “that’s not real persecution.” Of course, it is not the same as Richard Wurmbrand having the flesh of his feet torn off or Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive. No one would dare claim such a thing. Nevertheless, it is a real thing that is happening to us. You wouldn’t say to someone who just broke their leg and was on the ground writhing in pain, “get over yourself. I know someone in hospice with stage four cancer and has way more pain than you.” Only a monster would behave that way.

[…]

Such overt, direct persecution that came at the hands of First Century Jews, Romans, medieval governments, French Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Jihadists is not the kind of martyrdom we face. The demons that rule over us are not so direct and confrontational, not so masculine. No, the demons that rule over us are passive-aggressive and rely upon psychological and social manipulation to torment us.

[…]

If you are a Christian, you will suffer persecution for your faith. There is no way around it. That persecution isn’t always going to come in the form of men with swords or guns at your door ready to torture and kill you. But if you are a faithful man in a godless world that rages against its Creator, you are the tangible, flesh and blood representative of that Creator it is raging against. You are going to suffer. The suffering you are going to face and many of us already face is the social exclusion and intense, unremitting psychological torment of a godless society that is almost designed to get you to apostatize from Christ. There are myriad vectors and mechanisms it employs. It will use your family to pry you away. It will use corporate financial power to dangle incentives for you to compromise just a little bit. It will rob you of your children, and then hold them hostage against you. Every message, from every corner of the world is a constant, 24/7 stream of that preaches the oh-so-subtle message of: “if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe the Bible is true, you are a loser and we hate you. You have no place in our society. We hope you kill yourself.” That is the subtext of every form of popular culture that Trashworld pumps out. You are not being killed and tortured, but your mind, soul, and spirit absolutely are. Trashworld has perfected a kind of persecution that is even worse than lighting you on fire or feeding you to a starving lion. It has industrialized a kind of persecution of the Christian that 1. doesn’t look “like persecution,” 2. when it is successful makes it appear as if the apostate one day woke up and freely chose to just stop believing in Jesus, and 3. therefore causes Christians to not have their guard up when they face it, leaving them totally vulnerable to its pernicious effects.

But what is the answer to this problem? It is to understand that you are at war against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, no less than the saints of old. is to bear this suffering with dignity and resolve just as the heroic martyrs of the early church did. It doesn’t matter what faithless collaborating Christians say; they already have their reward. Just as St. Paul said we will suffer for pursuing a Christian life, fake Christians are going to mock us when that suffering comes. But those with eyes of faith understand we pursue a golden crown from the hands of our king. And though the scars of our persecution cannot be seen with eyes, it is a kind of suffering for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, one we should count as joy, having been found worthy to bear it. That is the perspective ancient Christians had of their suffering for the sake of Christ, and that is how we should view it as well. Whatever affliction we bear is adding to the suffering of Christ. Remaining faithful to Christ and losing out on career opportunities is a genuine sacrifice. Sacrificing a much more comfortable life so you can protect your children from those who seek to do them harm is a very real sacrifice. Being called a bigot, racist, homophobe, fascist, and every other slur because you refuse to bend the knee to anyone but He Who Rules at His Father’s Right Hand is a very real indignity and is very much worth it.

The Bible describes the suffering of Christians as filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). It may not seem like it at all, but by suffering in this way, you are conquering. Just as the blood of Christ’s people spilled out does not fall on deaf ears but cries out to heaven, so also does the anguish and terror you experience for the sake of steadfastly holding to Christ. Your duty as a Christian is to band together with those who bear Christ’s name and build real, flesh-and-blood communities impervious to the terror of the “Negative World.” Christ’s enemies are forcing us to band together, which is what we must do. We must build our own society with our own economy within the one that is collapsing before our eyes. “Negative World” is not the end of the story. There have been “Negative Worlds” many times before, and they have all been overcome by the victory of Jesus Christ. So too, will the negative world of the Globalist American Empire.