Culture Wars and Cowardice

What Do You Do When The Best And Brightest On Your Side Are Too Scared to Fight?

Over the past few years, there have been a long string of culture war flare-ups over race hoaxes (and quasi-hoaxes) which, more than anything else, have revealed a certain class of ostensibly conservative leaders, especially respected intellectuals, who are desperate for the approval of people who despise them. There were many others that preceeded it, but the first, most notable recent racism hoax was at the March for Life in 2018, when Nicholas Sandmann smirked as a seeming vagrant and American Indian activist/provocateur banged a drum as the former waited with his classmates for their bus home to Kentucky. The Soviet-esque corporate media instantly seized upon the smirking young man as evidence of widespread racism across America. Later those media outlets would settle out of court for the damages their libel did to this young man. From the jump, any reasonable person could assume there was more to this story. That didn’t stop conservative leaders like Ben Shapiro or evangelical darling Beth Moore:

It is clear these types will jump at any opportunity to show that they (unlike other bad conservatives who are closeted white supremacists) will not tolerate racism of any kind. Such things reek of desperation to present oneself as acceptable within the moral framework of your purported cultural opponents. “I’m one of the good ones.”

Just after Covington, actor Jussie Smollett, fearful he was being written off of his television show, staged a fake hate crime, for which he was recently convicted, and in which ‘roided-up Nigerian brothers put a noose around his neck, poured bleach on him, and yelled “this is MAGA country,” as one does in downtown Chicago at 3 am on a below-zero winter night.

Later still, as narrative-reinforcing appetizers for the George Floyd unrest, regime propaganda went into overdrive with both Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery; the former whom they characterized as a poor EMT who was killed when a SWAT team raided the wrong house, and the latter, a poor kid out for an innocent jog and was hunted by klansmen in pickup trucks. Left out of the narrative was Taylor’s involvement in a drug ring (including a dead body found in a rental car under her name) and Arbery’s criminal history and suspicious behavior immediately before the ill-fated attempt at a citizen’s arrest. The narrative in both of these events was set as black-and-white examples of overt racism when things were obviously much more obscure—and that’s if we are being as charitable as possible (to those who would never reciprocate such charity).

Next was the death of George Floyd, for which Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder. Far too many conservative leaders to list here were absurdly over-the-top in their lionization of Floyd and demonization of the police. Again, the event that set off the most destructive civil unrest in American history was far from as clear as the narrative the regime propagandists set. What was reported as police choking to death a man guilty of stealing a sandwich, was actually not as clear as they said it was. What a surprise! It eventually came out that Floyd was in the midst of an overdose from fentanyl, which, if we are again being as charitable as we can possibly be, complicates the narrative that the actions of the police were responsible for Floyd’s death, a fact that evaded the jury in the Chauvin trial, upon which at least one BLM supporter sat. Obviously, the original video of Chauvin makes him an incredibly unsympathetic character, but the fact that at least one BLM supporter lied to get on the jury and another juror later admitted they feared reprisal which makes it impossible for a reasonable person to conclude Chauvin received a fair trial, even if you think he indeed did something wrong.

Around the same time as the Chauvin trial, in the regime’s vassal state to our north, there began to be reports of mass graves being found on the site of one of Canada’s native schools. Before we go any further, you have to understand, that in the woke religious accounting of history, in every Western nation there is an “original racial sin” that serves as the fundamental justification for any and all anti-white racism. In America, it is obviously slavery and Jim Crow. In most of Europe, it is colonization. And in Canada, it is the treatment of the native population as the country was settled that serves as the basis for the enemies of civilization's desire to tear everything down there.

As Canada was being settled, the Canadian government paid for religious schools, often but not exclusively Roman Catholic, to be set up to instruct native children in the manners and habits of Christian culture as well as give them an education. As was common in any interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans before the 20th Century, disease was rampant and many children died. But for the deranged communist, the real crime was Europeans attempting to destroy a non-Christian culture and assimilate native peoples into Western, Christian civilization. How dare you try to make these people Christians! Deaths, accusations of mistreatment, and ripping children from their families are just additional fuel for the grievance fire. They don’t actually care about any of that. The real crime is attempting to further Christendom—whether the attempt was ham-handed and full of various sins or otherwise perfectly sinless—does not matter. Christendom is the root of all evil.

Once the regime began to claim that mass graves had been found in the schools where indigenous children had been taken to be assimilated to Western, Christian culture, the same hideous communist freaks who had run amok in the US the previous year were now set loose on the Great White North. That month over a dozen churches were set on fire, and scores were vandalized. It is clear to anyone paying attention the same playbook was being run there as in the United States: regime media organs push either an entirely false or highly distorted narrative, hordes of biotrash are allowed to rampage and literally and metaphorically destroy the pillars of the civilization they so deeply despise.

The problem with the narrative, as anyone with half a brain and a modicum of courage could tell you, is that it was almost certainly a hoax. And as it turns out, just this week the fact that it was a hoax was confirmed. After years of repeated blood libels against white Christians amplified by multibillion-dollar, regime-aligned, media corporations, you begin to instinctively have doubts about whatever the most recent leftwing outrage is—whether it is Haitian migrant hordes being “whipped” by border patrol agents or the supposed “mass murder” of hundreds of black men, women, and children in Tulsa in 1921 (for which the same ground radar is being employed trying to uncover the alleged mass graves). Until you start to do an accounting of just how regular and how intense these hoaxes are, it can be easy to forget them. Once the initial shock of thing is over, and clarifying details come out, the event gets memory holed and we just move on to the next one.

In this environment of widely pubicized racial hoaxes by the regime propaganda machine, many people ostensibly on the right are still regularly fooled. As churches were still smoldering, one public intellectual and Reformed pastor of (at the time) a Canadian church wrote about the scandal of the Canadian native schools. In it, he rightly objected to the idea that the native schools were used to systematically murder indigenous children,¹ but spends the majority of the article otherwise agreeing with the people burning down and vandalizing churches all over the country in which he pastored. In it, he applies the moral reasoning of the great Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck with aplomb. Considered in a vacuum, I would probably agree with him! Steven has a tremendous mind. He is absolutely brilliant. And I know the man personally. He is nothing but a most Christian gentleman who has shown me great kindness. Which is why seeing things like this is so incredibly painful. It is painful because men like him, with minds of his caliber, could be tremendous assets, but far too often they instead do things like this: their people are attacked, slandered, and blood libeled, and rather than employ their substantial intellectual powers to defend their people, they get to work nuancing.

In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with doing the hard work to add detail to our understanding of a thing in order to bring greater moral clarity. That is indeed the important work of academics. To go back and analyze something. But in the midst of a culture war, which is now just barely a proxy for actual war, doing the work of discerning the gray areas can only be seen as an idiotic and fatal aloofness at best, and cowardice at worst. If you are a public intellectual in the midst of an increasingly hot culture war, where churches are being burned because the disgusting communist freaks can’t quite yet get away with murdering the people inside, you don’t get the convenience of nuancing. Forty years ago, when children were not having their sexual organs removed by mentally ill parents and communists were not setting up autonomous zones where they could literally get away with murder, you could stand above it all and nuance away. But those days are long gone.

The nuancing that desperately needs to be done by the biggest brains is taking these facts into account. But Wedgeworth explicitly refuses to do this:

But it would be a mistake to treat the realities of Canada’s residential school system as simply the latest round of the culture war…

…There is no need to build one’s bunker behind accusations of media hype, social justice hysteria, or naïve anachronism.

As it turns out, this was media hype and social justice hysteria. And, yes, it was naïve anachronism, as well.² What this whole thing demonstrates is fear. There is one thing the conservative Christian public intellectual fears more than anything else: He fears being dismissed as a culture war idealogue. All the years and years of academic output, sitting at a desk and absorbing dusty tomes, late hours of tracking down footnotes for your latest 10,000 word journal article, tens of thousands of dollars of higher education credentials, all of it totally wasted if word gets out you are one of those.

What ends up happening is you do things like this: as churches are still literally being burned to the ground by people who want you dead, and your people desperately need you to tell them they are not the spiritual descendants of proto-Nazis responsible for mass graves, and instead you write about how the people burning the churches are mostly right.

This is indicative of cowardice.

The most powerful regime in the world is hellbent on eradicating all expressions of genuine, biblical Christianity. They have incited and then unleashed human trash to harass and destroy the Christian heritage of the west, where it is both spotless and contains warts. This is not stuff where you can sit back in an ivory tower and wax poetic about sins of men nearly two centuries ago. We desperately need leaders who have courage to admit what is going on, who will apply their intellects and learnedness to defending their people against enemies that want actual mass graves: filled with straight, white Christian men, women, and children.

It is time for our “thought leaders” to forgo their desire for respectability. You are never going to be taken seriously if you are a faithful Christian. Your intellect is never going to be validated by the academy. You need to stop caring what your enemies think of you. You are not dealing with people ever operating in good faith. Your ability to nuance will not save you. You have to live with the mentality of a man in a city under siege, fighting an enemy that you know will slaughter you, rape your wife, and take your children as slaves. When he breaks down the gates, he will not care how careful you were when you shot your arrows at him or that you have grave misgivings about things your own side has done in the conflict. When you are faced with a fate worse than death, you can either finally fully embrace the conflict or completely collapse into the fetal position awaiting the inevitable. What you cannot do is continue to make unclear sounds on the trumpet.

1. I must admit here that I was mistaken about the article and wrongly attributed the worst to Wedgeworth in this tweet. I was incorrect and am very glad it was not as bad as I wrongly remembered.

2. I think Wedgeworth’s criticism of the native schools is indeed naively anachronistic. Ceteris paribus, of course it is a monstrous thing to forcibly separate children from their parents. What makes it naively anachronistic is the question of what to do with a primitive, tribal people within your own borers who are often very hostile and violent. You could 1. do a combination of violent pacification and isolation that the United States did, 2. an attempt to be more humane and do the best you can to incorporate these people into your society, or 3. a magical deus ex machina where the two cultures can peacefully coexist, which is the apparent communist position. Never in the article is there an admission of the situation as it existed and anything positive put forth of what you would have done if you were in charge of Canada at the time. If the choice is between Wounded Knee Massacres and (what are by definition) concentration camps across Canada and taking native children and teaching them to be Christians, which is more humane? You don’t get to have a clean option. You have two prostitutes before you, one with a dead baby and another with a living one, and DNA has not been discovered. What do you do? And no, the reason Canada has such low levels of church attendance has a lot more to do with the modern secular onslaught that has destroyed the Christian faith everywhere in what was once Christendom and not forcing indigenous children to go to boarding school.