This last Lord’s Day, I had the very great privilege of preaching at our Christ Church DC church plant. The folks there are wonderful, hard working, and highly organized. This promises to be a very fruitful work indeed. This venture was plainly prompted by the Lord, and was clearly an answer to the prayers of many.
For those in the press who are keeping count, this was the second time I have met Pete Hegseth. During our visit there at church, I did not pass any coded notes to him. Our brief time of fellowship did not present any kind of threat to the security of the republic.
I had been in DC for the NatCon conference the week before, which was a good solid event, and during the course of that week I also sat down with Ross Douthat for his Interesting Times podcast, which lived up to its name by being really interesting. I also had a sit down interview with the Wall Street Journal, and then after that some of us drove out to West Virginia so I could be on the Tim Pool podcast. Since I was staying over to preach for our church plant on Sunday, the good folks at Christ Christ DC were good enough to also organize a one-day Christ or Chaos conference on Saturday. So . . . okay, busy week.
I bring all this up because the conference had some red dress handmaid protesters. I went outside to visit with them, but they were gone by the time we got there. But because the Lord’s timing is the best timing, they were back on site for our church service, so after our service I had a chance to go out there to talk with them.
When I got to the protest, they were already talking with Bloomberg and with the Wall Street Journal. These journalists graciously stepped aside, no doubt in the conviction that some more interesting things might be afoot.
There were two ladies there, and I began by thanking them for exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s so important, you know.
I tried to shake hands with them, but they declined. Now I don’t know if these were paid protesters with assigned talking points, or if they were genuine volunteers, but either way it was clear that they really believed what they were saying.
One of their signs had that infamous quote from my CNN interview—you know, “women are the kind of people that people come out of—and it appeared that they had taken some level of umbrage from it, that is, if umbrage even has levels, I don’t know, and so I asked them if they disagreed with that statement. Because it is kind of hard to disagree with—birthing persons, and all that—they tried to say that I was reducing women to that function. But that of course was the opposite of the point I was making to Pamela Brown of CNN. Biological gestation alone is not the point—the beasts of the field do that. But women who bear and nurture their little ones, taking care of three, or four, or five immortal souls, that is simply amazing.
But they wanted me to be saying that women are mere breeders, so that I would somehow fit in with their red dress theme. But that is something that I decline to do.
Let us think about this for more than a few seconds. Is there such a reductionist, transactional perversion of childbearing going on in our day? Why yes, there is. A couple of gay dudes want to have an accessory child, so they lease a womb so that they can buy a kid. You know, children as commodities. And I would be willing to bet you all a goodly amount of money that there have been no red dress protests outside the places where they are arranging that kind of thing. You know, where they are actually doing the bad thing instead of being the kind of people that you want to project the bad thing onto.
And it appeared that these women genuinely believed that I am a supporter of rape and pedophilia. I did say that I knew that we really do disagree about a bunch of stuff, but there was no sense in pretending to disagree where we actually didn’t. For example, in addition to our shared rejection of rape, I am not a white nationalist and they spent a bit of time trying to maintain that I was one. You can tell you are dealing with an ideology when folks won’t let you agree with them.
The whole red dress thing reminds me of that scene in Free Speech Apocalypse, where the kids who were coming out to protest my talks at the university in Bloomington needed to spend time earlier in the day applying make-up to themselves to make it appear as though I had bruised them with my hurtful words. Since I was not going bruise them, they had to do my bruising for me, by proxy. Because we were not going to oppress them, they needed to pretend as though we had.
All these theatrics—for that is what they are—lead us, once again to the conclusion that we are in fact dealing with theater kids. This is an attempt at revolution, but it is a role-playing, cosplaying, LARPing, grease paint activism. The only way it has an impact on the real world is if normal people go along with it to the point of that “willing suspension of disbelief.”
But that should only happen when you are reading a good story, and real story grip sets in. That is a good thing, right there, and we need more of it, not less. But it shouldn’t be happening when the writers insult our intelligence with their flat contradictions, their implausible plot lines, their wooden talking points dialog, and their third rate costuming.
And that’s the problem with these fake red dresses. In the world that conservative Christians inhabit, “put on your red dress, baby,” has an entirely different connotation. But I will grant one point as something of a concession. It is true that the conservative Christian form of red-dress-appreciation may result in the making of a baby at some point in the proceedings as that evening unfolds—but these proceedings are not at all scary or dystopic. In fact, I am told that many people enjoy it.