Introduction
We are going to be talking about Nazis in just a bit, but we need to start with something else first. Bear with me. It will all flow together shortly, as when you fold whipped egg whites into the batter for chiffon cake. Something like that, at any rate. One searches for the right words.
John Knox was initially ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. The first we hear of him on the side of the Protestants was when he appeared as the bodyguard for George Wishart, an early Scottish Protestant martyr. Shortly before Wishart’s arrest, Knox was dismissed by Wishart and sent away. He was consequently on the lam around Scotland with two young boys that he was tutoring, which should be considered one of the earlier experiments in homeschooling.
In the meantime, Wishart was arrested and burned just outside the walls of the castle at St. Andrews. Cardinal Beaton, who lived in the castle, came out to a window or balcony to watch Wishart burn. Just before he died, Wishart prophesied that not too many days hence, Beaton’s body would be displayed on that wall, and with those words Wishart was gathered to God.
A short time later, a group of Protestant . . . miscreants, let us call them . . . attacked the castle in order to assassinate Cardinal Beaton. According to Knox’s history of the Reformation in Scotland, they found him “busy at his accounts with a Miss Ogilvie,” and they dispatched him. A crowd of townspeople naturally gathered around the castle, not believing that Beaton had been killed, and so the thugs hung him from the same window where he had watched the burning of Wishart. They did this to prove the cardinal truly was dead.
So there they were, trapped in the castle in sort of a standoff situation. Although Knox wasn’t in league with the assassins, the castle became sort of a safe haven for Protestants, and so Knox took refuge there. During a church service there in the castle, a chaplain named John Rough was preaching. Near the end of the sermon, he stopped and called John Knox to the ministry. This is what Presbyterians would call an irregular ordination. Not exactly true to type, Knox fled from the room in tears.
And so now we come to the point of this extended introduction. Knox accepted the call to ministry, and began his very fruitful preaching ministry inside the castle. In doing this, he preached against sin, and he did it regardless of whether the sin was outside the castle, in the papacy, or inside the castle, with the assassins. This is because Knox did not subscribe to any doctrine called “no enemies inside the castle.”
Sin is defined by the Scripture, and not by the circumstances of any political situation. In the first pages of Scripture, the antithesis was established by Jehovah, and not by Jehovah in consultation with the serpent. The definitions of right and wrong do not slide around in obedience to pragmatic or partisan considerations. As John Bunyan might have put it, sin is sin, and there’s an end on’t.
Nobody Here But Us Chickens
I have seen a number of claims to the effect that the Ogden conference only had regular Christian folks there. “What are you talking about? There were no Nazis there, man.” There were no Nazis, man, except for that one sponsor. There were no Nazis, man, except for that one vendor. There were no Nazis, man, except for the Nazi literature. There were no Nazis, man, except for all three WBS videos, retweeted by the Ogden men. We are dealing with a form of non-Euclidean logic, by which is meant that if you don’t count the Nazis, there were no Nazis.
The Need for Regeneration and Holiness
When we emphasize the need for reformation and revival, there are some who want to represent this as a form of pietistic quietism. “Let’s just sit quietly at home, praying diligently for revival, and until God sends us true revival, we are not responsible to do anything about the state our nation is in.” No, of course not. All believers are required to pray for the right things, to support the right things being done, to work for those things, and, if they are in a position of civic responsibility, to do the right thing, regardless of the odds against them. We are all of us responsible to do as much as we can, whenever we can. But as we are deciding on what that course of action might be, Jesus does commend to us the wisdom of counting our troops (Luke 14:31-32).
How on earth are you going to establish just laws without a base of support that wants just laws? The order is this—disciple the nations, baptizing them, teaching them obedience (Matt. 28:18-20). If you go straight to #3, one of the first things you will discover is that you have not arrived at #3 at all. You will get something closer to disobedience to all He commanded. Think for a moment. Can a civil magistrate, however diligent, gather figs from thistles (Matt. 7:16)? Ah, but this is different, someone might say. We are talking about a nation full of thistles. Surely there are figs in there somewhere.
Apart from a great movement of God’s Spirit, our impatient and based “reformers” would not be able to keep Nazis out of their cabinet. The reason I know this is that they are not able to keep them out of their conferences now, and keeping them out of your own conferences is way easier than keeping them out of the government in the midst of a massive power scrum. If you can’t run with men, how are you going to run with horses (Jer. 12:5)? Rhetorical question. You can’t. If you are incapable of regimental discipline when it comes to your own troops, then stop daydreaming about the day when Nick Fuentes appoints you to his cabinet. Did I just say daydream? Opium dream mixed with the flop sweats is more like it.
Accusations and Realities
In a form of naivete that floats above their heads like it was full of helium, there are earnest men of the hard right who “refuse to countersignal” the Nazi infiltration of their movement because, they say, the left always demands that the right must denounce any designated target in our midst that they have selected for us. And so they have refused to play that counter-signalling game.
Now I grant that, in the very early days, there was a reasonable point to be made here. When the left demands that we treat George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney, or John McCain, as a Nazi, our response really ought to be that of chortling merrily. We must continue to roister down the highway, paying not the slightest attention to them. Never denounce anyone or anything simply because the progressives are insisting that you do so. They have nothing to say to us. Anyone who threatens their agenda is a Nazi, and so we may reasonably conclude that when it comes to what Nazism actually is, they haven’t an earthly. Pay no attention.
And I think that I am not wide of the mark if I say—and if its myself that says it—that I have established a decades-long track record of not caring at all if the progressive left calls me names. I have been, in their eyes, for lo, these many years, a misogynistic, patriarchal, neo-Confederate racist And do you know what? I still sleep like a baby. When the left lies about you, to use a biblical phrase, fret not. I have argued for many years that if a conservative Christian minister is not being attacked with such slanders, he needs to step up his game.
But I have also said, at the same time I have said it, that such accusations need to be slanders. They must not be true. There must not be anything to it. To come at this from another angle, the charges need to be false. The progressives need to be unable to produce any photos of that swastika booth at your conference. I don’t want to try anybody too high with these esoteric concepts, but it is kind of important that our generals not be stupid enough to play right into their hands.
True conservatives get accused of this stuff. True conservatives don’t care. But true conservatives are also interested in making sure the slander remains a slander.
And also, by the way, as long as we are on this point, those many years of not caring when I was lied about from the left were good preparation for the time when I began getting lied about from the right. I don’t care about that either. You know, paid by the Mossad, and other hoot-worthy stuff. And, as before, it is equally important to live in such a way as to make their jibes a joke. It really needs to be slander, and so I endeavor to resolve every morning to not start shilling for Israel.
What Wars are Like
So we have been using the metaphor of war since Pat Buchanan mainstreamed the phrase culture war at the 1992 Republican convention. Some youthful members of the hard right today like to prove their bona fides by circulating a picture of Pat Buchanan holding a pistol, which proves something I suppose. Some of the elderly cohort, like yours truly, prove theirs by having actually voted for him. At any rate, he was the one who put the phrase culture war into wide circulation.
Incompetent generals on the right use the language of war, but they do not understand the nature of war. They are acting more like coaches in a football game, playing in a league with extraordinarily honest referees. We have the red uniforms, and the bad guys have the blue uniforms, and all the people in the red uniforms are trying to go in this direction, and the blue uniforms are trying to go in the opposite direction. The refs call the penalties in a remarkably fair way, and so we need to make sure never to disparage anyone in a red uniform because “there is no I in team” and the survival of western civilization depends on us moving the ball in “that direction.”
But wars are not a clean and simple football game. They are dirty. They are not gentlemanly. In a war, a general has to understand that there are spies, and traitors, and informants, and honeypots, and turncoats, and false allies, and unreliable co-belligerents, and personal rivalries on your own side, and radical incompetence on your own side, and false flag operations, and feints and ruses, and propaganda, and 5GW, and fifth columns, not to mention sappers in tunnels.
So a combatant general who announces that he will have no enemies to the right (NETTR) is inviting the enemy, positively inviting the enemy, to attack him from that right flank. He has declared beforehand that he will discover no traitors, he will hang no spies, and he will expose no propaganda. And so let us all wish Gen. Simple Simon well, as he has decided to go into battle instead of to the fair.
Postscript: Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism
One last thing.
During these periodic Internet outbursts, when everybody is pelting others with various accusations, I think it would be fair to say Moscow in general, and that I in particular have been decidedly on the “hostile to Nazism” side of things. Please see above for one sample among many. And yet there are some among those who are currently going after the Nazis who are also accusing us, for did not Canon Press publish Stephen Wolfe’s book? And is it not still in print, hey?
Whether or not you like Wolfe’s thesis or not, whether you think his scholarship stands up or not, and whether you think anybody answered his arguments or not, I would like everyone to come together in order to agree on at least one thing. That one thing is that Canon Press went through the manuscript with the editorial equivalent of a fine-toothed comb to make sure there were not even any trace elements of the crap we are currently discussing. It is not there. We made sure.
However, if you see it there, and consequently want to charge Canon Press with incubating this toxic stuff, there are two basic explanations that might account for your perception.
One is that some of the people who are on the current anti-Nazi jag are soft evangelicals who, together with progressives, can hear dog-whistles when no actual dogs were being summoned. They found places in Stephen’s book where a paleo-conservative, or a Southern Agrarian, or a magisterial Reformer might say something that a Nazi could agree with—but it turns out that blood and soil are not the same thing as soil and blood. And so, with this in mind, we need to recognize that not all the attacks on Stephen, or on Ogden, are good faith attacks. Budget for that. Just as the NETTR doctrine has manifest limitations, so also the doctrine of NEITANC (“no enemies in the anti-Nazi contingent”) has the same sort of limitations. Some people attack Nazis because they love God, love liberty, and love their neighbor, while other people attack Nazis because they are commies, and every bit as bad as the Nazis are.
Stalin and his works were evil, just as Hitler and his works were evil. So another reason why playing footsie with Nazis is so stupid is that it gives a measure of plausibility to those lefty Christians who are waiting breathlessly for David French to write “A Conservative Case for Mamdani.” So let’s stay real. Lefty evangelicals who are willing to vote for commies are way more of a threat than are deluded bros who are willing to pal around with Nazis. The only reason the Nazi thing is any kind of a threat at all is that it gives cover to those who would urge us to support human flourishing by ushering in the commies. Considered in isolation, we don’t need to worry about a Nazi takeover—they would have trouble taking over a kindergartner’s birthday party. But they have no trouble at all giving propaganda freebies to the left.
The second possible reason for the perception about Stephen’s book is that after the publication of his book, Stephen has made some poor choices of association. I agree with Jon Harris that Stephen is a paleo-conservative, and not a Nazi. I agree with that. But Stephen is also a millennial, and his BS detector is broke. That said, there is a difference between being confused about NETTR, which he shouldn’t be, and throwing your lot in with the bad guys. If Stephen were to throw his lot in with the bad guys, the first thing he would have to do is repudiate his book. Which you can still buy here.