Introduction
Early on in the book of Acts, the apostles were hauled in because of their disruptive preaching, and after they told the Council that they were going to obey God and not them, the anger that had driven the rulers in Jerusalem to murder the Lord Jesus boiled over. They were about to do the same thing to the apostles.
Fortunately, they had a cooler head in their midst.
“When they heard that, they were cut to the heart, and took counsel to slay them. Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space; And said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men. For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought. After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God. And to him they agreed: and when they had called the apostles, and beaten them, they commanded that they should not speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.”Acts 5:33–40 (KJV)
The counsel that Gamaliel gave here demonstrates that the disruption arising from the preaching of the apostles was not a disruption that was being brought to a placid and serene society. No, there was on-going turmoil, and for all kinds of reasons. And there was also additional turbulence for a few other reasons. Everything was in upheaval, and there were numerous “solutions” being proposed . . . all jostling for a following, contending for preeminence, throwing elbows for the privilege of being able to lead the way out of the Untenable Situation.
There had been Theudas, boasting himself to be a hot shot, who got himself and his 400 followers all killed. There was Judas, who had attracted the attention of many. He was killed and his followers scattered. And then later on in Acts, a Roman officer mistook Paul for an Egyptian who had led four thousand assassins (sikarioi) out into the wilderness (Acts 21:38), and who was apparently still at large. This truly was a bumptious time.
What Causes Extreme Reactions
What causes such explosions? Reactionaries grow abnormal when the establishment has grown abnormal. The establishment imposes absurd and outlandish things, all while pretending that their impositions are not outlandish at all, and this provokes open and clear outlandish reactions. You know, like claims that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated by the ghost of Elvis. That’s a made-up example, but there are real ones in the territory beyond that
When you have an establishment that is extremely and manifestly oppressive and corrupt, and which maintains a draconian control, then what you have is a pressure cooker with the lid screwed down tight (draconian control) and the burner set on high (oppressive and corrupt). If the pressure cooker is full of beans, then at some point in the near future, you are going to have beans on the ceiling.
A number of people, prior to the explosion, have the ability to see that there is going to be an explosion. There has to be one. Basic physics, man. And what a number of ambitious types among them assume is that they—if their timing is just right—will be able to use the explosion as a way of vaulting themselves to preeminence. But there are lots of chaos climbers who think this, and most of them are wrong. There goes Theudas. Bye, Judas. What was the name of that Egyptian again? Like ten-year-olds dribbling in the driveway, dreaming of the NBA, they do not realize that the odds against them are astronomical. But the lust to be somebody is a very strong one and, after all, some people do make it to the NBA.
Extreme Establishment
Now establishment elites never think of themselves as oppressive and corrupt because it never feels that way at a wine and cheese event in Martha’s Vineyard. After all, there is cello music in the background. They swank around in what feels to them like a regular life, and somewhere out there, in flyover country, are the suburban hoi polloi, who know not the law. They know about the existence of the great unwashed, having read about them in The New Yorker.
They conform, like some sort of Plasticine putty, to the views around them, which everyone does to some extent—that part is not all that extraordinary—but because they are living their lives inside a very artificial bubble, they believe the most remarkable things. They believe in climate change, for example. They think that little boys can become little girls. They hold that intelligent people can be socialists. They believe you can chase all businesses out of California and still have tax revenue.
They display very high levels of let-them-eat-cake insolence, and no one is more astonished than they when some ne’er do well gets elected and they don’t know anybody who voted for him. They believe that the election was rigged because their candidate won the bubble vote by a landslide. When conservatives believe the election was rigged it is because somebody found a hundred thousand ballots in a culvert outside of town.
So when you couple this insolence together with idiotic policies, and there is no mechanism of feedback that will inform anybody at the top that this was a bad idea, what you get is civic unrest. And when you get civic unrest, you then get opportunists down below who see in this their grand opportunity—George Franco, great great grandson of the Spanish dictator, and chief resident of a trailer park near Houston, not to mention podcast host, starts daydreaming about all the dunking he is going to do in the NBA.
Behold, the Future!
In the examples that follow, I am not equating these men, or putting them on the same level, or in the same category, at all.
What I am saying is that it was the disintegration of our cultural center that created the opportunity for each of them to become household names. This is not in itself a criticism—Paul became a household name in the same climate as did Theudas, Judas, and that Egyptian. When everything is up in the air, God does not hesitate to put His gospel into the mix. Even though people might lump everybody all together, the biblical response is so? Christ still saves sinners. I know that I have whatever influence I have because of this same dynamic.
Jordan Peterson made a name for himself when he stood up against the woke nonsense, and because of his manifest courage he attracted a huge online following of young men. But having courage, and having penetrating questions, is not the same thing as having answers. Or Christ. On the threshold of the kingdom, he has wavered and hesitated, and we are all now seeing that young people today need something more substantial than Jungian dream analysis.
Andrew Tate’s message to young men was to hand over the keys to their inner lizard brain. “If you want some women, just take ’em.” The downside to this approach, for those who watched it for over ten minutes, is that if you act like Andrew Tate you wind up being like Andrew Tate.
Corey Mahler, bad boy extraordinaire, and apologist for a more Hitlerian direction for his new denomination, completed and submitted his application for notoriety. “No, no, not Theudas. Pick me, pick me! I have five hundred men.”
The barricades were all going up because things were getting real bad, and so all these different people have mounted the barricades, and have been waving different kinds of flags, trying to get a following. There’s a Les Mis flag over there, and then of course a swastika, and An Appeal to Heaven flag, and a Christian flag, and then one for the March of Dimes.
How Fame Evaporates
When that adulterous couple were recently caught on the kiss-cam at that Coldplay concert, they were famous for a bit. But I need to point to a different lesson about fame that can be taken from that episode. A standard joke circulating in the days after that big reveal had to do with the humiliation of being found out at a Coldplay concert, of all things.
Okay, so we all found out that Coldplay was still performing, even though their heyday was behind them. But twenty years ago, it was quite a heyday. They were bouncing along in the stratosphere—Grammy awards, millions of albums sold, selling out arenas . . . but then fast forward two decades, and they find themselves lodged in between Nickelback jokes and Justin Bieber jokes. Nothing substantive had actually changed, and so I would point out that the watching public which approves and disapproves of all such cool fame has the attention span of a hummingbird on meth.
And the same dynamic applies to radicals, race hustlers, and other eccentric outliers. Jerry Rubin. Abbie Hoffman, Lincoln Rockwell, Bernardine Dohrn, Al Sharpton, H. Rap Brown, David Duke, and a tedious line of others. Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Some use that time to sing us a song, or dance a little dance, while others use it to throw a bomb or two.
Another way of looking at this is by remembering the NBA again. If against incredible odds, some young man with a dream makes it to the NBA, what are the odds of him lasting more than a season or two? Fama fugit. Fame flies.
A Hypothetical Trump Boom
So a lot of the unrest over the last few years has been driven by the nabobs of clown world. They seemed to have a choke hold on everything, and seemed determined to do everything they could to make things more difficult for the common man. Of course, they didn’t call it that. Their phrase for it would be something like “common sense solutions for the American people.”
Now please mark my use of a conditional here. I am saying if . . . I am not predicting. I am simply gaming out a possible scenario. In this scenario, Trump is proven to be far wiser than anybody gave him credit for, or he is shown to be the luckiest politician ever. Trump fans can point to the former as their explanation, while Trump critics will just shake their heads in bewilderment., putting all the “winning” in the Bismarckian category—who once observed that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
So . . , if there is a Trump boom, I believe a lot of this podcasting extremism goes away. The extremism pool will sink to much lower levels for two reasons. One is that people who were in there complaining about the lack of opportunities for white heterosexual males will depart when they decide to pursue all those opportunities that just opened up. The other reason is that the diehards, in order to keep their audience, will have to resort to more and more outrageous claims in order to keep the clickbait traffic going. If the law of diminishing returns applies anywhere, it applies to outrage farming.
And, as it happens, outrage farming only has bumper crops in years of famine. It doesn’t do nearly as well when the grain silos are full, the way they were in Egypt under Joseph.
The people who wanted to identify a scapegoat needed to do so because something bad was clearly happening, and it was happening to them. “How do we account for this mess?” Well, the Jews are always available. The Biden years were certainly a mess in themselves, and during the Biden administration, the cumulative effect of many years of official hostility to white people was coming to a head. And, as must be recognized, a large number of white people took it ill, and started to fight back. Because the bell curve applies everywhere, some of them fought back like morons, but that did not diminish the overall energy and spirit that insisted on fighting back.
Now work with me on this hypothetical. Let’s say that this monster boom happens, and DEI is banished, and the word woke is only used with a sneer now, and the housing market explodes in a good way, the stock market is trying to get to Mars before Elon does, illegal immigration drops to zero, and deportations continue apace, and Comey, Clapper and Brennan are all three convicted and sentenced, and the unemployment rate sinks to record lows . . . and then Trump appoints some Jew to be the next Fed chair.
Does anybody care? Will there be a groundswell of caring? I don’t think so, and that’s my point.