Columnists From The United States

"Wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is going to be burned up, and is now being burned up. There is going to be no middle ground left. Churches will either go militantly woke, or may turn to a Christianized version of white nationalism. The rest of us believers will be doing our best simply to hold our churches and families together, and not lose our members to the passionate ideologies tearing the country apart."

"[T]he coming battle will actually sideline many practicing Christians. That it will be between the Woke on one side, and white nationalists on the other. There is no way that authentic followers of Jesus Christ can endorse race nationalism of either the white or the black kind."

"Character is destiny."

"Bolsheviks actually had a vision of what they wanted to see replace the order they destroyed. Other than “defund the police,” the Woke do not."

"[T]he deepest level of hell is reserved for traitors. Why traitors? Because they make life in community impossible. In medieval Italy, cities were in a frequent state of war with each other. When they closed the city gates at night, everybody in the city had to trust that no one would open the gates during the night and let in troops of the enemy. If you could not have that trust, you couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t live, for fear that your neighbor would betray you, and everyone, to the enemy. To render everyone isolated from everyone else, and living in fear — this was hell."

"[S]omeone driving a Geo Metro in this day and age isn't rich."

"For all its problems, I can’t see any governing system available to us in our pluralistic, multiracial democracy than classical liberalism."

"The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism."

"For as long as there are human beings, there will be prejudice. We are wired that way. It is impossible for most Americans to detect any difference at all between Serbs and Croats, but these ancient rivals very much see the difference between themselves. I could not detect the difference between an Ulster Protestant and an Ulster Catholic, but men have killed each other over that difference, until fairly recently, and, God forbid, may do again."

"[R]emember that because everyone is made in the image of God, and therefore has inalienable dignity, everyone is also susceptible to deformations of virtue — that is to say, sin. This ought to make us all clear-eyed about human nature."

"[A] country whose elderly — considered by most societies to be repositories of wisdom and dignity — aspire to be perpetual rutting teenagers is not a country that has much to look forward to. If you want to have a future, you need a past."

"I am thinking about something a Dutch historian once told me about the cultural revolution that swept over the Netherlands in the 1960s. It had been such a settled, orderly, bourgeois nation. The Second World War and the Nazi occupation shattered something deep in the Dutch. After the war, they tried to rebuild what they had, but it was a feeble replica. When the winds of the counterculture began to blow, the establishment institutions collapsed, as if the revolution were inevitable."

"[C]laims of systemic racism in particular institutions are now accepted and repeated as fact, and that it is practically impossible to criticize or reject those claims in any way. "Systemic racism" is as fundamental to the construal of reality in the fast-emerging social order as “class conflict” was in Marxist social orders. It is the uncontestable axiom on which the entire ideological structure is built. Deny that, and you’re part of the racist system."

"Hear me clearly: racism exists, it's a sin, and it should be resisted. But these SJWs, deeply embedded in institutions, and in command of the propaganda apparatus, are taking a genuine social problem — racism — that always needs attention, but construing it in a highly ideological way that has very little to do with addressing with this complex problem, and everything to do with advancing a narrative of command and control that demonizes an entire race of people as plunderers and parasites by nature, and incites others to despise them. We know from history where things like this go."

"[C]ircles have been contaminated by hatred and paranoia. Refuse and reject that right now. If you make room in your heart and mind for it, it will take you down, and take down all those that follow you."

"Day 6 of Covid. Now my wife and kids have it too. All of us vaxxed; wife and I both boosted not long ago. Everybody we know who has omicron was vaxxed; most also boosted. So I gotta ask: what's the point of vaccine passports now? Security theater? Prepping social credit system?"

"Everybody is afraid. The Gospel speaks to this fear! It offers a way out, and a way forward!"

"[t]he forces of disintegration are far more powerful than this rhetoric implicitly acknowledges. Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, certainly does not need to be educated in the toxicity of progressivism. He gets that. What I’m not sure that he gets is how resisting it is going to require much more than countercultural education. It is going to require forming generations henceforth in the awareness that if they hold on to their religion and their traditional beliefs — including a belief in the virtues of the Western tradition — they will be regarded by the dominant culture as moral reprobates, as outlaws. They will be hated, and in many cases made to suffer."

"Bizarrely, as blacks and other minorities are growing in power, wealth, and influence, the Left acts as if America is little better than apartheid South Africa."

"There was nothing worth saving in what the Nazis built — but could any non-fanatic plausibly say that everything German has been so tainted by Nazism that all expressions of Germanness (Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, all of it) should be annihilated? Of course not. Nor did the evil of Soviet communism negate the greatness of Russian culture. Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, though, worked systematically to eliminate any perspective that challenged their respective ideologies — and not just their political monopolies. As proper totalitarians, they knew that cementing their power required controlling the culture’s memory."

"Remember this: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character"? That’s an ideal worth defending. But do liberals even believe it anymore?"

"This story is not going to end with humanity completely vanquishing white supremacy, black supremacy, or any evil at all. Our hearts are too crooked for that. But we have it on good authority that the story ends — no thanks to us — with the defeat of evil and its poisoned fruit, death. It already has, for those with eyes to see and hearts willing to receive the good news."

"Ross Douthat’s line can’t be said often enough: if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right."

"I know it's a naive question at this point, but what the hell is wrong with people? Why are people so merciless, and take such pleasure in destroying others? Why do people demand that those we target on social media not be merely shamed, but gutted in every way possible? The mob is absolutely merciless."

"Is there anything that the new woke progressivism touches that it doesn’t destroy?"

"[I]deas have consequences — that is, material realities derive from immaterial sources."

"In high school, I was physically bullied by 17 y.o. boys, in a sexually humiliating way (but not sex). It affected the direction of my life. They never apologized. Still, I wouldn’t hold that against them if they were nominated for the Court. They were boys."

"If you believe a society built on raw force is going to be just, you are a fool."

"[T]he establishment that promotes and encourages inflammatory racial views by racial minorities implicitly and unavoidably calls forth these demons from whites like Richard Spencer. Race hatred of any kind is never justifiable, and is not the way to any kind of future worth having."

"God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort."

"You cannot reform people who do not recognize that there is anything that needs reforming."

"There really is a difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a mindset before it is anything else. Totalitarianism is the idea that there is no area of life that is free from politics — and that also means cultural politics."

"Europeans think its weird for American Gentiles to be circumcised, and I think they’re right … but I remember the one kid we had in my elementary school class, a black boy who had been born at home, and who was not circumcised. All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that."

"Don’t get me wrong: I believe that people who circumcise for religious reasons should have the right to do so."

"To be able to see God and hear God requires faith. And faith requires humility, and commitment. You cannot know what the sea feels and tastes like if you will never leave the beach."

"I fear that there will be blood. I hope and pray that there won’t be, and I will be looking for any way to avoid it."

"I’ve come to realize over the past decade or so that there are a lot of phonies among the Democratic Party’s elected officials — people who purport to be progressive, only to end up in the pocket of the big banks, the big environmental exploiters, or other vested interests. Early this month I was reminded of Democratic phonies in positions of authority, this time in Colorado... Polis is a former congressman who was elected governor in 2018 as a progressive Democrat... after campaigning on the goal of 100 percent renewable energy environmentalists have been restless for evidence of any serious commitment to that goal. So on Jan. 9, minutes before Polis took to the lectern... pro-environment protestors at the Colorado State Capitol hoisted signs reading “NO MORE SACRIFICE ZONES” and began shouting, “Ban fracking now!” Within minutes, state police arrested 38 protesters and charged them with multiple misdemeanors. Most were held in jail overnight and released the next day on $750 bond. Others... spent the entire weekend in jail... It’s the hypocrisy of politicians like Jared Polis... elected as an environmentalist. But as soon as he won his race, he reached out to the oil and gas industry and the frackers."

"So how do we trust our politicians? Consistency is probably the best test. Of all the Democrats running for president, only Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement of support for the Colorado protesters. Do we trust former Vice President Joe Biden with issues of war and peace when he supported every U.S. military intervention around the world since his election to the Senate in 1972? Do we trust Amy Klobuchar on prison reform issues when she spent so many years as a prosecutor? I wouldn’t."

"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive. Once you realize that's what you're dealing with, everything falls into place. Okay, this guy wants to sell me cancer, he makes money selling me cancer, he knows he's selling me cancer. I'm not going to get him to say that [cigarettes] are cancer, but now I can proceed accordingly knowing that this is going to be about promoting [cigarettes] or parliaments or whatever it is."

"[About the framing of public figures in the media:] If you read a play, a lot of times at the beginning of the play there will be that cast of characters and it will say like 'Jane, a wealthy widow seeking love', 'Thomas, her young paramour'. When they bring a character onto the scene in a corporate news article, it will say 'Joe Rogan, a podcaster known for his history of transphobic remarks', 'Scott Adams, the disgraced...'. They will immediately tell you from their personal perspective how you should feel about this person before they even finish the sentence. And once you spot that this is the technique, you can't unsee it."

"If you're dealing with a journalist who you perceive as being engaged in good faith, and there's plenty of them, when you explain a particular view that you know is outside of their worldview, ask them to explain it back to you to see that they got what you meant. And if you have that on tape and they try to mis-characterize you, so much the better, now you have evidence that this was done maliciously."

"You have all these choices at the supermarket and then you go to government, which is far more important than what brand of soda you drink, and you're told it's got to be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. To hell with that! I want my views and I want to live my life and you setting up this false alternative is completely unacceptable. I'm not playing this game."

"[On talking to political opponents:] Come at that conversation appreciating that what they're spouting now has become their identity and also has become their status. So you're asking them to give up something both that matters to them on an emotional and values level, but also from an evolutionary-psychology level."

"I have no interest in reaching the general population. The general population are the people who would have been nazis in the 40s and they would have been jihadis or sympathetic in some of these other countries 20 years ago. So they will always follow the ruling class."

"What are presented as the best arguments against anarchism are inevitably a description of the status quo."

"Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them."

"It's really amazing to me how many people [rather than trying to figure out Putin's endgame] are content to say that he's evil and he's crazy. OK. Sure. Well, the Penguin [in Batman] is evil. [...] He wants to get that diamond that is shaped like a bird or that really expensive umbrella. Just because someone is crazy or a bad person doesn't mean that they're not predictable or coherent along with their own internal logic. You know the Zodiac killer wants to kill people. It doesn't mean you have to agree with him or approve of him. OK, let's see if we can figure out who he's last victim is and what it's gonna take to find him."

"When you have a fundamentalist faith you are certain that you are on the side of the angels."

"Here in 2016, when [Donald] Trump got elected, what happened as a consequence was blue-pilled leftists for a long time were taught that the Trump-world view [...] [was this minority]. 'We have sat you down for a year and told you that voting for Trump is completely unacceptable. That to do so is effectively to decree yourself to be aligned with the Klan and the nazis.' [one of the big newspapers] had a front page of Trump called antichrist when the Pope critizised him for something during when he was just merely a candidate. And yet [in November] Americans went in and flicked the leaver for Hitler-antichrist. And they didn't know what to do because in their mind there is very few of these lunatics and now there's enough to elect the president and because they're passing they didn't know who's the bad guy and the good guy. They thought '100 percent of the people I know', but obviously it's not 100. At best it's [60 percent]. So this was [...] a moment of panic: 'Wait a minute! I don't know who these people are anymore!'"

"[About the Covid lockdowns:] Intentionally or not, some very very bad pepople got some very useful information of how much the populous was willing to put up with. [...] There was clearly a consideration on the parts of the authorities in each country about 'What can we do and what [can we] get away with?'"