A warning from the right: US Syndicated Radio host and a sometime Reformed Theological Seminary student Erick Erickson on Substack: “A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organisations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are being added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths.”
Who is Erickson talking about? Charles Haywood, who used money made from a Shampoo empire to found something called the Society for American Civic Renewal. Erickson reports: “Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.
“In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government ‘will not be democratic.’ The state ‘will have unlimited means,’ because ‘properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.’ Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.’ Men ‘will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.’ The state will seize the assets of ‘any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.'”
Erickson’s Substack post traces how Hayward and others have infiltrated existing conservative organisations, including the Claremont Institute, a think tank that aims to uphold natural law and the US Constitution, and another very different group, the Patriot Front, a uniformed outfit. And then there’s Nick Fuentes, the far-right streamer/agitator who has instructed his followers to infiltrate Turning Point from the right (yes, from the right).
Erickson’s concern is that these right entryists want to change scripture – in the mind of these people, we are no longer to love our enemies and are only concerned with defeating them. After all, that is what real men do, right?
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Conned: A Substack with the wonderful name “Burnout Culture” by Jonathan Malesic, who self-describes as “a Dallas-based writer and a former academic, sushi chef, and parking lot attendant who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia,” has done all Christian writers a service. At least Obadiah hopes so. His years of detecting AI-written student essays have picked up a similar pattern in serious magazines from the liberal Catholic Commonweal and the Bruderhof The Plough to a peer-reviewed journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. His digging found that a prodigious byline, Ersum Augustinus Kayra, had articles in 31 religious magazines over ten months.
What does it mean for my career as an essayist? asks Malesic. Good question for which Obadiah wishes he had an answer.
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A lesson from a Lesbian bar: the ability of the revolution to eat its children is exposed in a brilliant piece by staff writer Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, “How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar: The scourge of COVID led to drive-by whinings disguised as activism“.
“In a 2012 blog post, the writer Matt Bruenig described what he called ‘purity leftism,’ Lewis writes ‘When purity leftists do actions and organizing, their interest is not in reducing oppression as much as it is in reducing their own participation in it,” he wrote. “Above all else, they want to be able to say that they are not oppressing, not that oppression has ended.” Such people were prone, Bruenig said, to “self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” A year later, he offered another useful phrase: identitarian deference, or the presumption that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals.”
“Since then, I have become alert to all of the red flags of purity leftism: complaints about ‘white tears,’ the sadism of the get-up-so-I-can-hit-you-again tendency, the use of jargon such as praxiswhile fretting that the conversation is dominated by the privileged, and the hyperbolic assertions of nebulous “harm.” (Rhetorical inflation has gotten so bad that everything is a genocide.)”
The story of the Last Ditch, a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, might be hard to believe. “The lesbian bar strayed from the path of righteousness—brace yourselves—by announcing late last month that it would go mask-optional on Saturday nights. (‘Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months,’ the [local paper The Boston] Globe’s Annalisa Quinn notes.) The bar was deluged with complaints that it was engaged in a “mass disabling event” that would kill its patrons, and was “no better than a fascist.”
Because continuing to wear masks had become a mark of leftist purity. “Most people might be surprised that arguments over masking are still so febrile years after even cautious blue-state schools resumed in-person teaching. But across the United States, some small subcultures live as though it’s still April 2020. That’s because pandemic protections and mitigations quickly became left-coded, to the extent that Donald Trump now has to pretend he didn’t oversee the successful vaccine program. In this context, perma-masking is every bit as much a political symbol as wearing a MAGA hat or a keffiyeh.”
Now, some of Obadiah’s readers might simply want to snear at the left – which might be well-deserved. But let’s do a Romans 2 type move and say Christians should look at themselves. Many Christians are continuing to fight Covid battles about whether churches should have been closed.
And just like the ‘left-than-thou’ attitudes in the lesbian bar story, there are Christians who wear continued opposition to covid mandates just like those Massachusetts lefties still wear masks.
(Obadiah thinks that an Animal Farm reference would fit just here.)