(Pictured above: The Capitol is seen through razor wire at sunrise in Washington, Friday, March 5, 2021. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
A quarter of a century ago, fearful of my capacity to confront the challenges I saw on the distant horizon, I resolved to work to banish sin from my life. When I told my original spiritual director, the one I call Towering Intellect, he looked at me in absolute exasperation. “I thought you were smarter than that, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t you know that if you focus on banishing sin, you are focused on and engaged with sin? The only effective way to banish sin is to drown it in a sea of love.” Thank goodness his tart reply snapped me right out of my errant approach.
Of course, love is not just some schmaltzy emotional feeling as the modern world mostly defines it. It is to will the good of another. You don’t love your children by indulging their every whim. You govern and discipline them, teaching them in the process to govern and discipline their own unruly passions and appetites. So it is with your friends. You don’t love them by agreeing with every word that falls from their mouths. You honestly tell them what you think, and then support their good whether you or they are ultimately right. Many books could be written on how to properly apply love in the daily circumstances of your life – and none of them could be reduced to the mere schmaltzy emotionalism our impoverished generation thinks love is.
That is what the Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC) is all about. We are in the midst of our Lenten fundraising campaign. In this video, I talk a bit about what we have done so far, what our goals in the immediate future are and how you can help. Please donate to help us all help each other to weather the trials that now engulf us.
*********
I chuckle every time I see the media write that the protesters in Washington on Jan. 6 sought to “overturn the election.” I was among the million and a half people gathered on the mall. What we sought was an honest and vigorous investigation of the mountain of irregularities in the 2020 election before certifying the results. The media is either ignorant or liars in assessing the motive of the crowd. So why do I chuckle? Well, it occurred to me that perhaps the media agrees with me – that an honest and vigorous investigation WOULD overturn the election. So I chuckle to see them tacitly conceding my point.
To watch people in Congress and the media (including the folks occupying the office of president and vice-president) who spent all last year defending and encouraging those who were actually rioting, burning, murdering and looting in cities across the country call that slice of people who got way out of hand in Washington an “armed insurrection” is downright bizarre. Of course, that narrative took a hit as the FBI confirmed that no actual firearms have been found among the folks scooped up in the net of this witch hunt following the “armed insurrection.” No one on the pagan left cares: the point was not to protect public safety, but to establish a narrative smearing conservatives and traditional people of faith as “domestic terrorists.” They’ll keep calling it an armed insurrection. Of course, when it was your business being burned down or your loved one being attacked or murdered by rioters, the pagan left said that was just free speech, so shut up, racist – and the response was to defund the police so that rioters would have an easier time attacking you. When they get a bit nervous, they call in the national guard for themselves.
And so, an Iron Curtain has descended around Washington, D.C. During the Cold War, the iron curtain in Europe was designed to keep captive peoples inside authoritarian countries. In this new American Iron Curtain, the idea is to keep the rabble out as our betters issue edicts to rule the rest of us and make America into a dystopian nightmare. It is ironic that the two entities most enthusiastic about “open borders” – the Vatican and the Democratic occupiers of Washington – are both literally surrounded by a wall of protection. All of us in the common rabble must fend for ourselves (and with reduced police protection at that) while the ruling satraps have actual armed guards to protect them from getting a hair out of place. If any of the rabble take it upon themselves to try to defend their property, they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the lie – as the liberal couple in St. Louis found out when they tried to defend their home from an actual armed mob. The condescension and presumption of our new pagan left ruling class makes Marie Antoinette look downright populist in comparison.
Yet it is all coming visibly unglued. Even as the ruling elites have hidden themselves behind the new iron curtain, they become less relevant (if no less annoying) by the day. It was surreal to watch Joe Biden, a week after Texas and Mississippi announced their full re-opening, declare that if we were all good little boys and girls, he would let us have a couple of friends over for the Fourth of July. While many of the easily intimidated are still frightened, Covid Panic Porn is a dead man walking. The pagan left is loathe to lose any of the control they wield by telling us we are all going to die unless we do what they say, but way too many common folks are now noticing that red state governors with a light touch got uniformly much better results than blue state lockdown apostles – and that blue state policies got a LOT of people unnecessarily killed. Since everyone who tested positive for Covid at any time was listed as a Covid death (except for George Floyd) whether they died from a gunshot wound or were killed in a car accident and since the ordinary flu suddenly vanished almost altogether, we will get no useful statistics from this politicized medical scare that will be helpful in future challenges. In a weird sort of “backwards day,” leftist scolds started calling politics “science” and science “politics.” Thus when they demanded you follow their narrative, they called it following the science – and if you quoted actual science to them, they called it politics. I am sure there has been a more feckless expert sometime in history, but Dr. Anthony Fauci in his relentless politicization of public health has become the Baghdad Bob of expertise among the current ruling class. He has almost single handedly destroyed public confidence in expertise.
The military got into a weird Twitter battle with Tucker Carlson, after he criticized them for elevating social engineering concerns over mission focus and readiness. The new “woke” military leadership, in the process of purging open Christians and conservatives from its ranks, maintains that “diversity” – not training or readiness, makes it the toughest military in the world. Ha! After a mass purge of his generals, Josef Stalin maintained that the political conformity and commitment to the Communist Party of those who survived made his military stronger. After two years of catastrophic disasters in battle, Stalin figured out that training, preparation and mission focus actually were more vital than political purity. Our military will, too – and I’m kind of glad they are purging real soldiers from the ranks. That means fewer of them will be wounded or killed in the crackpot schemes the pagan left will dream up over the next couple of years.
Immediately after the courts, the legislatures, and many states refused to examine the mountain of evidence of massive election fraud last year, I floated the idea of secession. I largely abandoned that as I spoke with officials in several red states who were determined to go the route of nullification – of refusing to enforce unconstitutional edicts from Washington and setting their states up as Sanctuary States for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I did make the caveat that if ruinous spending got outrageous enough, red states would have to consider secession to repudiate debt that is not theirs and is contrary to their values – and that if the feds started looting red states to pay for blue state incompetence, secession would have to be seriously entertained as a defensive measure until the leftists have destroyed themselves. Well, here we are already. The nearly two trillion “Covid relief” bill had very little to do with Covid relief and everything to do with bailing out blue states while pumping money into leftist institutions. Normally, general federal relief is distributed based on population. This time, the Democratic Congress fixed it so that incompetent and profligate blue states got anywhere from three to five times as much per capita as red states. This was not Covid Relief – it was the Biden Blue State Bailout plan. If you are getting a rational pension plan from a red state, your tax dollars are now being used to finance the golden parachutes of folks in blue states. Before long, several states will have to begin serious debate over secession. It is either that or let the rapacious feds loot red state citizens at will. You might want to take a look at FH Buckley’s interesting book, America Secession, to bone up on the issue.
The bottom line is that we need not focus too much on how to defeat the left. Their insanity and detachment from reality is accomplishing that quite nicely – at a much quicker pace than I expected or that they understand. I always said that most people would not confront the threat until it was at their door. The pagan left is pounding at almost every door in America right now. What we must do is live our ordinary lives, openly and joyfully assuming God – for a God-centered life is a joyful, nurturing life. Many on the left are waking up to the self-destructive madness of their faction. We must not offer these potential converts an equal and opposite madness, but a way that taps into the springs of life – and that is through Christ. So we must not neglect the technical and strategic means of preserving liberty, but we must do it under God – ever mindful of the need to acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around us.
The pagan left has reached the point where it cannot be easily parodied. They are more to be pitied than feared. As they self-destruct, they are forcing those of us who are Christians and on the right to do what we should have been doing a decade ago – building our own platforms, forming communities that are free speech and religious sanctuaries. Don’t waste time and effort fighting what is already passing away into irrelevance (other than for actual self-defense). Devote yourself to building what is necessary to preserve our faith, families and freedom. Make no mistake, as the left works to intimidate us, they are actually immolating themselves and making us stronger. The City of Man is crumbling. Let us devote ourselves to building the City of God.
