True Christians Try to Always Lose, Because Christianity is Weakness and Submission to Evil

Sorry, there's some David French in here again

Pain is a teacher. People respond to incentives, and that’s how systems stay in balance. A political party pursues a dumb policy course, voters reject it, and the party moves back toward something like the social consensus. Politics paces alongside culture and society, hearing signals and performing strategic calibration. Sanity demands that you respond to social language. “Hey, you’ve gone too far.” / “Okay, I’ll come back.”

So this behavior demands punishment, because this is intolerable and insane (screenshot, click this link to play the video):

AOC has to be punished with rejection and anger — not because that’s being mean, but because crazy, hateful, sick behavior has to be reined in so we don’t Balkanize and start, I don’t know, fantasizing about murdering somebody’s children in front of him because he disagrees with us about politics. Bad behavior has to be fixed. Saying that Republicans regard “LQBTQ Americans” as “subhuman” while a Republican administration is led in economic matters by a Secretary of the Treasury who was sworn in next to his husband, say for example, is the babbling of a lunatic. Republicans believe that women are inferior and don’t deserve equal rights, which is why the person appointed by the current Republican administration to lead the literal Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is a woman. And on and on: AOC isn’t wrong, she’s an asshole. There has to be a cost for that.

So David French, I’m sorry, says that Christianity in America is very sick.

Sample argument:

Keller noted that revival begins with repentance….

In other words, revival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”

And it doesn’t stop there. It also says, “We will defeat you.” In its most extreme forms, it also says, “We will rule over you.” That’s not revival; it’s revolution, a religious revolution that seeks to overthrow one political order and replace it with another — one that has echoes of the religious kingdoms of ages past.

Donald Trump criticizes his opponents in strong language, and tries to defeat them, and tries govern, imposing one set of policy preferences over those of the leftists who he criticizes and defeats. See, that’s not being Christian. “We will defeat you” is un-Christian. Incredibly, this is a political lesson. God says to roll over and let the Democrats prevail.

Radically misconstruing an argument, French builds this strawman: “Incredibly, Christians are attacking what they call the ‘sin of empathy,’ warning fellow believers against identifying too much with, say, illegal immigrants, gay people or women who seek abortions.” A warning against the thing Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy,” against an unmoored empathy that tolerates dark and cruel behavior, becomes, in the relentlessly dishonest and lazy precincts of a David French essay, a warning against empathy itself: Christians are saying you have to be full of mean hate! They’re not, you jackass. Is humanity fallen? Oh, stop it, Christianity says you have to be nice!

Big finish:

“We will know when revival comes because we will see believers humble themselves, repent of their sins, and then arise, full of genuine virtue, to love their neighbors — to help them, not hurt them — and in so doing to heal our nation.” Love your neighbors and don’t hurt them: be pro-illegal immigration, pro-abortion, pro-trans-everything. Love is agreeing with Democrats. This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he described “men without chests.” He meant David French. Disagreeing, criticizing, and competing with late-secular leftist society is cruel and ungodly, so just go along with whatever.

Patrolling the same cultural perimeter, David Brooks — David French in a different set of loafers, a cosplay capitulationist who finds true conservative principle only in going along with the technocratic managerialism we label as “progressive” — calls now for a new American “mass movement” to arise against all things mean and orange.

Brooks formulates the problem like this:

Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.

Every word of that is absolute horseshit, total fabulist panic-fiction. “It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers,” but Kilmar Abrego Garcia is STILL HERE, somehow eternally immune to a mere deportation order. Why is that? Why is ICE all-powerful and unconstrained, but unable to deport someone? You can find your own examples in the rest of that paragraph of howlers.

So here’s what Brooks hopes for, and remember that this man plays a conservative on television: “I thought the mass civic uprising I was hoping for was at hand. So where is it? Yes, there were the (very good) ‘No Kings’ rallies in June. And yes, groups such as Indivisible continue to organize conventional progressives. But for the most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks.”

We need more No Kings rallies and a more aggressive effort from the dumbest group of leftist theater kids in the country, says famous conservative columnist.

What Brooks is missing, all day every day and for the rest of his cloistered life, is that a mass movement did arise. An open border, metastasizing debt, cancel culture, woke institutional rot, twenty years at war in Afghanistan without victory, and on and on: A mass movement arose against all of that. It democratically elected its preferred candidate, twice. David Brooks is begging for a medicine that’s already been administered. He’s wondering why a mass movement hasn’t arisen against…the mass movement that arose.

The American political left, in general, and the Democratic party as a particular thing, have become unmoored, demoralized, and insane. That’s not a given. As I’ve said before, the generation of Democratic politicians who ran against Bill Clinton for the presidency were wrong about a bunch of stuff, but they were sane, smart, and recognizably American. (I apologize, but I always kind of appreciated Jerry Brown.) The Democratic Party can be hauled back from Jonestown, but they have to be brought back from Jonestown by being hurt, politically, for building Jonestown.

The Bulwarkers and the Dispatchers, the “true conservative” hey-guys-let’s-not-fight cardigan conservatives, are prolonging the period of illness and disorder by impeding exactly the things that force a rebalancing of a disordered political culture. We have problems that can be fixed, but the Davids think that’s being very mean. Why aren’t you being Christian? Hey, guys, when Democrats take the 20% side in an 80/20 cultural issue like transgender kids and schools that keep sexual secrets from parents, you have to go along with that, or else you’re rejecting true faith, which centers on kindness. Softness is kindness. Capitulation is decency.

They’re spreading poison in the schoolyard, and calling for people to come take some of their medicine. What we need now is a fight, leading to victory, leading to a restoration of balance and health. David Brooks and David French are increasingly stupid and empty, but they’re also increasingly dangerous.