Tag Archives: racial politics

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 5: A CRITICAL TIME IN OUR NATION’S HISTORY

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the previous part of this essay, Part 4, we concluded our brief review of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (ACCT) as it provides ways to recover from the destructive and disintegrative results of the administrative state. We also began to inquire about the relative seriousness of the differences between the policy positions of the Biden administrative state (on matters such as climate alarmism and economic policy, or racial and gender ideology and public education), and the policy positions of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. Are these differences just a matter of partisan and cultural opinion, or do they strike a deeper, more critical blow at moral and political principles that really and truly are non-negotiable for those on either side? In this part, we seek to answer these questions following the insights of Eric Metaxas and his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.]

A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History

In his small but compelling book, Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas helps us face these questions, and begin to answer them. Metaxas’s Letter is a plea to our American churches, but also to American citizens in general, to wake up to the awful and calamitous moment in which we are living. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this moment in our history is ominously similar to the period of the 1930s in Germany, when the German people and their churches closed their eyes and sat quietly by (no doubt in concern for their own comfort, safety, and security) while Hitler and his Nazi party turned their country into a totalitarian state that would eventually decimate other nations and destroy its own soul by its demonic genocide of the Jews. Perhaps one who has not studied this period closely, or looked in our own time beyond the thin virtuous veneer of the Biden state (constantly patched and polished by the corporate media) might doubt this comparison. Isn’t this talk of Germany, Hitler, and America just a lot of hyperbole? Except, perhaps, when Biden applies it to Trump and his supporters?   

If we are to take seriously Metaxas’s comparison between America under the Biden state and Germany under the Hitler regime, we need to revisit some of the “false crises” mentioned earlier in Part 2, only now to see them in sharper detail and to grasp why they cannot be regarded merely as “policy” choices. For example, let us try to form a concrete picture in our minds of the desperate plight of inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, or New York, where no one is safe, not even children, because young black men have been told that they are the victims of systemic racism and therefore have a right to snatch life and property from anyone who gets in the way of their “freedom.” Picture, if you will, the bodies lying in the street as life and possibility drain away? This is happening now in Democrat-led cities across our nation, as rogue prosecutors push their agenda on unsuspecting voters under the guise of legal reform. This is what Kamala Harris herself has promoted on public video during the BLM, defund-the-police riots of 2020. This is what the administrative state produces when “pure reason” and politicized “science” are applied to social problems without the moral guardrails of religion and the family, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Or, we might look more closely at the devastation caused to thousands of people and small businesses by Biden’s COVID lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Thousands are still waiting for our government to take responsibility for the terrible harm it has done. Can you see those who are still shaking with neurological tremors caused by adverse reactions to the experimental COVID shots, not to mention those who are already dead? They are invisible to the Biden state. Or, yet again, we might look at the explosion of fentanyl deaths, human trafficking, and sex trafficking caused by the criminally-open Biden-Harris border policies. Neither Biden nor Harris, nor their DHS staff, nor their cooperant media ever speak of these deaths and depravities. And then, looking to the future, God help us, we should try to picture soberly what will happen to our economy if the miscalculations of the Biden-Harris Green-New-Deal policies ever take full effect. The outcome could literally rival the atrocities and degradations of Mao’s infamous “bird famine” as supply chains falter and food supplies stop. Ideological, politicized science is not real science. 

All of these and more could be depicted in graphic and ruinous detail; but my goal is to awaken our consciences and to stimulate courage and conviction that leads to active resistance and change; not to overwhelm with shocking images, however realistic the images are in fact. Nonetheless, in the interest of conscience and conviction, let me give one more example in greater detail, one that may be the most compelling of all for many of us. 

If we need to face with full seriousness the resident evil of the Biden state (just as German citizens had eventually to face the death camps in 1945) then let us picture without turning away the scarred and mutilated bodies of children and minors who have been subjected under Biden’s Public Health Service to the lucrative medical experiments of so-called “gender affirming care.”[i] These are minors and children as young as 11 years old (with younger children in public schools across the nation being indoctrinated as we speak) who have followed the advice of “experts,” teachers and counselors, and some psychologists and doctors. They have taken experimental drugs (puberty blockers) for which no long-term studies of safety or effectiveness are as yet even possible, much less available.[ii] They have submitted to radical experimental surgeries that leave them with ghoulish scars and monstrous appendages that require ongoing medical care and attention, often for the rest of their lives. They face a life with permanent disfigurement, often combined with the loss of any ability to have children of their own. And yet, the promoters of this defacement of human life in the Biden state (and in groups like WPATH, whose junk science provides the so-called “standards of care”) do not want us to see or hear from the growing number of “de-transitioners,” children who have come of age, changed their minds, and are now being left to face all of this damage, much of it irreversible, on their own.[iii]

How much further would radical gender surgery have to go before people of common sense and sensitive conscience, and a measure of good faith, stand up and cry out, “Enough! Cease! Desist! Stop in the name of God and of all that is decent!”? We ourselves may not want to hear these stories. They are hard to imagine, nearly at times imponderable in their devastation. But then, Hitler did not want the German people to know what was going on in the camps under the direction of Joseph Mengele. And the German people did not want to hear or believe what they were forced by Eisenhower to see and smell when the camps were thrown open after the war. Metaxas warns us, in the spirit of his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that if we refuse to face what is happening now, then we, like the German people in the 1930s, are at least tacitly accepting and supporting it.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.”[iv]

And if we do hear and begin to speak out, will we then follow up this outcry with campaigns to elect leaders who represent a genuinely religious and moral people, leaders who will dismantle the authoritarian administrative state, and require again that our country’s laws and its character be subject to a truly representative process? According to Metaxas what we need most is a recovery of genuine faith.

Looking ahead to Part 6

In the next two parts of this study, Parts 6 and 7, we shall look more closely at what went wrong among the German churches and the German people in the 1930s that allowed Hitler and his Nazi Party to come to power without greater opposition. According to both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his biographer, Eric Metaxas, what went wrong had to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical meaning and practice of “faith” and “discipleship.” As you prepare for the next part, consider the following questions: Does our faith in Jesus and his Spirit prepare us to engage in matters of cultural and political consequence? If so, why and how does our faith in him have this result? And, if not, why not?

Endnotes

[i] The head of Biden’s Public Health Service is, of course, Admiral Rachel Levine, who has been aggressive in promoting radical gender ideology in our public health services and in our public schools, even when this involves hiding the school-based “counseling” process from parents. For up to date tracking of state sponsored rules and mandates for radical gender ideology in public schools across the nation see the online data and research of Parents Defending Education, and consider becoming a supporter of their important work.

[ii] See Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024), and Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020).

[iii] For firsthand accounts of the suppression of information about de-transitioners by WPATH and other medical groups (who now have a great deal to lose, given the rising number of malpractice cases) see the stories of Chloe Cole and the ongoing research of groups such as Genspect. A recent Genspect webinar compared the current craze for radical gender surgery on minors with the infamous fad for lobotomies that captured the medical profession for a brief time during the 1930s and 40s.

[iv] Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Salem Books, 2022) p. 51.

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 2: THE EXPANSION OF THE STATE UNDER JOE BIDEN

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the first Part of this series, we looked at how the administrative state grew from its ideological beginnings under Woodrow Wilson to the massive collection of government agencies today with millions of staff and trillions of budgetary dollars under Joe Biden. We also recognized that the power of this unelected bureaucracy has kept pace with its size and budget over all these years, and now operates in many cases to displace the basic moral principles and constitutional rights of the American people. How has this happened? And how does it continue to happen in the Biden state today?]

How the Administrative State Gains and Expands Its Power

How has the administrative state been so successful in expanding its control and consolidating its power? In an early chapter of his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, Thomas Sowell describes the methodology by which the administrative state has for many decades successfully consolidated its own power and wealth. Sowell’s reference to the “anointed” in his title corresponds of course to the “experts” of Woodrow Wilson’s and Frank Goodnow’s now 100-year-old “progressive” project, and to what others today describe as the “elite unelected oligarchy” of our massive federal agencies currently led by Joe Biden.[i] 

Sowell’s analysis identifies four steps that are typical of the administrative state’s methodology: 1) Identify a social problem that needs improvement (such as racial disparities in housing, education, or income). 2) Propose a government program as the solution. 3) Ignore statistics that show how the program has failed (usually because it misconstrues both the causes and the solution), in order 4) to increase funding for the program in the next year’s federal budget. The remainder of Sowell’s book, chapter by chapter, examines various programs of the welfare state since the late 1960s (for example, housing, education, teen pregnancy, and single-parent welfare programs) that amply demonstrate the steps of this failed methodology.[ii] In keeping with his own distinguished career—as an economist, statistician, mathematician, and sociologist—Sowell backs up his conclusions with in-depth statistical analysis at every point. 

This method of garnering power through misconstrued or even fabricated crises is very much alive in the current administrative state of Joe Biden. The bell weather example in recent memory is, of course, the great harm caused by the government’s handling of the COVID fiasco.[iii] The best analyses now pouring forth from various investigative sources both in Congress and in the wider world show that our government’s declaration of emergency powers was part of a very successful corporate/government campaign (Big Pharma plus the captured elites in the FDA, NIH, NIAID, CDC, etc.) to consolidate both wealth and power into their own hands. It worked to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And all of this was accomplished, moreover, with the cooperation of corporate and social media and of our federal justice and security agencies (FBI, DOJ, CIA) to censor and silence independent voices of responsible science (such as The Great Barrington Declaration) who tried to expose the scheme.[iv] All of this has had the distinct aroma, it should be well noted, of that coercive alliance between government and corporate power known as fascism. 

The pattern of falsely defined issues, based on poorly designed research, that demand government action to avert a misconstrued crisis, is evident in nearly every policy and program of the Biden administrative state. The Biden state tells us, for example, that we have a climate crisis that requires the government to take direct command and control of our energy resources and our economy. And yet responsible scientists such as Stephen Koonin (former Obama EPA lead scientist) in his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, tells us that the so-called crisis is based on an abuse by activist officials (including Obama) of raw data from the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC of the UN). The data, properly evaluated, however, do not support the claim of a climate crisis at all.[v] Indeed, if we follow the Biden state’s mandates for green energy and electric vehicles, we will do nothing to improve the climate, while making an absolute wreck of our own economy, as well as making ourselves dependent on other hostile economies around the world—in particular, China. This kind of miscalculation, as Sowell has observed, is a typical outcome of the command-and-control style of the administrative state.

Similarly, the Biden state tells us that we are in a racial crisis caused by systemic racism, and that this requires the government to impose programs such as DEI, CRT, ESG, and SEL in our schools, businesses, and corporate offices, if they are to lead the nation out of the legacy of slavery. And yet, responsible black leaders from the civil rights era, who currently lead successful programs of racial uplift and dignity in some of our worst inner cities, tell us that these government programs are more inwardly debilitating for American blacks and for society as a whole than the old ugly and unjust outward legacy of overt racism in the south.[vi] Indeed, if we keep following the lead of the Biden administrative state (“If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) we can only expect the now fifty-year-old legacy of the dysfunctional welfare state in Democrat-led inner cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC to become more violent and destructive.[vii] The progressive state usually makes worse the very “crises” it claims to improve.

Likewise, the Biden state tells us that we have a gender and sexual orientation crisis that requires teaching our children, against their own parents’ moral guidance, that boys can be girls, that males should compete in women’s sports, and that the practices of sex in the LGBTQ movement are just as normal and natural as the traditional moral vision of the Bible regarding the sanctity of marriage and the command to be fruitful and multiply. And yet, responsible scientists and counselors tell us that the gender and sexual experiments of the Biden state are not consistent with mental and social health, nor can they be promoted except by imposing the power of the state to undermine the role of the family and of religion in American life and culture.[viii] Even more concerning, this programmatic attack on religion, the middle class, and the traditional family clearly demonstrates the affinity of the Biden state for the subversive strategies of cultural-Marxism.[ix]

Bundling all of these “crises” together, there is at least one more crisis that is being fabricated and promoted by the Biden state, and that is the so-called crisis of democracy. According to Biden and his supporters, if we do not submit to their doubtful agenda for government programs and mandates to solve the various faux crises of public health, climate alarm, systemic racism, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, then the health of our democracy is at stake. In other words, if we insist on following the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the free market policies of Donald Trump and others in the conservative movement, then we will fall into an authoritarian state that forces us to accept rules and a way of life that we do not freely choose based on our own values and consciences. Talk about bait-and-switch!   

In reality, it is not the conservative tradition that has censored free speech and cancelled genuine open scientific debate about these issues, or shut down our schools and businesses in the name of a false COVID emergency. And it is not the conservative movement that threatens to remove children from the moral guidance of their parents in order to promote a strange and ill-founded sexual and gender ideology. Indeed, if we follow the best principles of the conservative tradition, we shall find just the opposite. There will be room for public debate, for traditional moral principles, and for dissent. And there already is a big-tent tradition of American enterprise and innovation that is open to all, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. It is to the legacy of this positive vision of our American heritage that we now turn. What would it mean, in response to the cultural disintegration now churning within the Biden state, to recover the principles and traditions of our historic founding?

Looking ahead to Part 3

In the next post, “Part 3: The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition,” we will look at the tradition of religious, moral, and constitutional principles that our founders followed in designing our own constitution and cultural heritage. This is the legacy of the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” as explored by Yoram Hazony in his important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. And it is the tradition now largely defamed and dismantled within the Biden administrative state. The aim of Part 3 will be to consider what it would mean to recover the founder’s vision in our time? As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following questions: 1) How might a recovery of constitutional checks and balances between the branches of government correct and improve the activity of the administrative state with respect to how so-called “crises” are identified and how rules and laws are imposed on society? and 2) How might the recovery of the original biblical, religious, and moral traditions of our founding redefine and reconfigure the various “crises” that currently drive and dominate the Biden state? How would this recovery be accomplished?

Endnotes

[i] These themes are developed extensively in Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, (Basic Books, 1996), and in his Social Justice Fallacies (Basic Books, 2023). In the latter, for example, Sowell describes the “knowledge fallacies” by which surrogate decision-makers in the government (that is, “experts”) think in terms of abstract mechanisms that do not comprehend the complex relationships of human life and economic activity (pp. 71-81).

[ii] On the issue of teen pregnancy, for example, Sowell observes that unwed pregnancies among black teens have soared in the post 60s era of the welfare state (68%) due to the increased benefits made available to single-parent families, and the subsequent breakdown of the black family in America. By contrast, during the unjust era of Jim Crow laws and segregation, when the black family was nonetheless still intact, unwed pregnancies averaged fewer than 17 percent. Sowell’s research thus reveals the serious and often tragic results of government programs for which the state is usually not held to account. See Social Justice Fallacies, pages 127-129.

[iii] It should be acknowledged, of course, that Donald Trump was also involved in the early stages of the COVID tragedy, along with Anthony Fauci and others in the NIAID, FDA and CDC, not to mention China’s Wuhan Lab. Based on grossly overestimated rates of infection and death, the Fauci team called for unprecedented and harmful restrictions on the constitutional rights of American citizens such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom to protest. Government censorship of so-called “misinformation” ran rampant on social media and in society at large. In 2021, Biden doubled down on these restrictions when he came into office. Trump, by contrast, had often advocated for things that would have helped (such as early treatments) but these went against the well-planned narrative of the Fauci cohort. And Trump, like others in Congress without a science background, was at a disadvantage to offer real-time criticism of Fauci’s authoritarian declarations. Nevertheless, Trump would do well, in my opinion, to revisit his account of those events and to acknowledge that he was over his head and made some serious mistakes by deferring to Fauci’s often pseudo-scientific leadership.

[iv] See, for example, Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery, 2022), and Ramesh Thakur, Our Enemy, the Government: How COVID Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023). See also, Rand Paul, “Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up,” Imprimis, Vol. 52, No. 12, December 2023.

[v] Stephen Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2024). See also, Michael Schellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Also noteworthy in this regard are the recent comments of Noble Laureate John Clausner on the great climate “hoax.”

[vi] Corey Brooks, “America Works: DEI Doesn’t,” Tablet Magazine, January 16, 2024. Robert L. Woodson, Sr., Lessons from the Least of These, 2020. 

[vii] Shelby Steele and Eli Steele, What Killed Michael Brown (Man of Steele Productions, 2020): an historic documentary film about the fallacies of systemic racism as demonstrated in the 2014 case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

[viii] Mariam Grossman, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Harm Your Child, (Regenery, 2023). Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children, (Regenery, 2023). Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024).  

[ix] See “Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education,” New Discourses Podcast, Episode 54, November 19, 2021. This audio discussion examines the influence of Marxist activists such as Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance, 1965) on our American educational system. See also, Dr. Ben Carson, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family (Zondervan, 2024).