Letters of Late Winter

The Canada shooting was quite disturbing. I had previously thought that the transgender evil was behind other shootings. On Dividing Line, James White addressed it spot on in my opinion (Feb 12). I made a clip and sent it to my ‘friend’. She is the mother of a girl my daughter’s age. We met when they were 2, they are now 34. I was shocked to receive total disagreement from her. I’m writing to you because she babysits for my grandchildren once a week, her daughter is the preschool teacher for my grandson (previously for my granddaughter), and I am very concerned about the influence they both have on how my daughter is raising her children and what they themselves might say to the children. I was studying James 4:4. Should I continue to attempt to have discussions about the issues or simply sit back and talk food or arts&crafts? My daughter has been a strong Christian but seems to be adopting a soft approach towards parenting. I believe that comes from the influence of her friend. Her friend has never dated, never expressed interest in men, and lives with mom. Any advice? This could be a whole blog! By the way, the CrossPolitic, Spank your Kids/ Save America was great. I sent it to my daughter.
Keep aiming for the prize
God’s girl,

Terry

I think some of your numbers might be off as far as viewership goes—I’m seeing 125 million viewers and a slightly higher number for the halftime show from multiple sources including Fox. The NFL is seeking to expand viewership globally so from a pure numbers standpoint it was probably a smart move. Our friend was the most streamed “artist” on Spotify globally for 3 years running. But the rest of your points stand.

Wicket Wabbit

Or . . . we could all stop caring about professional football entirely and spend our Sunday throwing festive get-togethers that didn’t involve hovering around a massive flat screen TV. If those 6 million viewers began their sit-in protest by not watching ANY of it, the result would have been just as disastrous for the NFL but even more wholesome for the families. Admittedly, TPUSA would have gotten zero viewers in that case, but I think they might have rejoiced anyway to know that 25% of former watchers were silently boycotting the whole sordid affair–from pre-game to post-game, and literally everything in between.
Let it die withering on the field, twitching through the last throes of death, unloved and unsung.

Andy

In your evaluation of the Superbowl half-time shows you write: “The heathen song, the break, and then the song inviting people to come to Jesus was meant to show us a redemption arc, but in my thinking, that point was way too subtle.”
I skimmed through the alternative half time show for interest sake, but I did not realize there was a “redemption arc” being communicated in the show. Did I just miss the subtlety? Did TPUSA or anyone else explicitly state that this was the purpose and intent?
Or was this show a “Jesus-endorsed” American idolatry? It’s very easy to slap a “Christian” label on consumerism and the idolatrous pursuit of pleasure and self. And to do so “in the name of Jesus.” The rest of your evaluation nicely captured the “scaled down” idolatry in the TPUSA show. It’s especially easy to do this and to confuse people when the “other side” is so incredibly depraved. When one group’s sin is a “nine out of ten” on the perversity scale (I hope raunchy rabbit isn’t a 6 or 7 . . . ), the two or three out of ten doesn’t look so bad. With a “Jesus” label, people might be confused into thinking “this is Christianity.”
Matthew 7 is clear. Someone can do all kinds of mighty works “in Jesus’ name.” But Jesus will say to them “depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. I never knew you.” It’s by their fruit you shall know them. I guess time will tell whether the fruit is genuine or not.

Caleb

I have nothing but fire and brimstone condemnation for the NFL’s anti-human sacrilege; however, I recall your tweaking the nose of trendy evangelicals some years ago with the “Tommy Hellfighter” image. The fat kid, huffing-and-puffing, jogging behind the cool kids, hoping to catch up to them in HIS designer jeans. I grew up in a community that bleeds red, white, and blue and was filled with Birchers. I don’t see this kind of Americana ever paving the way to the type of genuine spiritual, aesthetic, or political reform you’ve historically written about. I love these people; I’m afraid they don’t love my schools, my aesthetic, my theology, and what constitutes a nice vacation. I know some wealthy-as-you know what farmers, plumbers, and so forth and they ain’t coming off the lake. Speedboat’s too much fun! This seems like a bar that is not just low, but not worth having at all. Try a different game altogether.

Matt

As an aside, before I launch into my reason for writing, I have to share I’m a smidge disappointed in your otherwise superlative command of language in “Standing Up to Evil Rabbit.” You were really on a roll, but my browser search tool confirmed no usage to be found of the moniker “Contemptible Coney.” Could the fault lie with an overly zealous editor who recently switched medications? At any rate, chin up and let’s leave it all on the field next time, shall we?
I write to share a lament of our national dialogue along the same lines you did in “Infighting and Those Reservoirs of Guilt,” among other places. As a millennial born and raised in a leftist state / city, and working for tech companies, my monothematic experience with attempting to talk about what would be a better future for our country has been met with a lot of nonsense and virtuous outrage. For the first time in my life, over the past several years it has felt in a big way like conservative Christians have been given the football. The clown cat is finally out of the bag, and every heteronormative normie can agree that we do not like clown cats. So . . . why can’t we have a spirited and rational debate in order to identify and fix what go us into this mess? All defensible points of view welcome so long as we can reason in public, with integrity, and act civilized as our forebears did before this period of decline began. Surely, if the adults can take the microphone, we can finally start getting somewhere.
Instead, what I see one lost opportunity after another. I see unconverted influencers with interesting viewpoints worth exploring but their rhetoric is littered with f bombs and conformity to dark knight trollism as a solution to improve the national dialogue. I would legitimately be interested in a Wilson / Fuentes debate over properly framing the Jewish identity politics issue if Fuentes were who he was on his mainstream interviews, not on his show. It would be a delight to see CXR and Ogden join Moscow for a G3-esque conference where the salient crucial points of What We Must Do to restore our Christian Nation was the purpose, and intramural differences were laid aside. And then, it would be really great to see our side unilaterally chide and shame the outbursts of social media trolls, calling anon vitriol by its other name—cowardice. I’m all for the spicy wit. The teenage blowups are another thing, especially when they are powered by one’s untraceable account name and VPN. Online cowardice actually feels like the real dam holding back some genuine progress, because we all know if we used our real names and acted that way, we’d be ridiculed as childish.
My reading of your response to this phenomenon is that you saw the unforced and catastrophic error of the Candace Files and can find no other option but to go on the offensive against The Next Candace moment. This is my take of your recent brutal criticisms such as the “wickedly stupid” call to regard interracial marriage as sinful. And I agree with you that if Candacism is to become the norm, it looks pretty grim. At the rate we are going, the public Christians who have tasked themselves with “fixing the nation” will be known by 3 tenets: Jews are bad, Whites are good, and slander is the missing tool in our toolchest to win everything. Oh, and also, a week doesn’t go by without us verbally massacring one another. So I get why you’re finally on the offensive against the neurodivergent YRR, it takes an appropriate response to create distance from foolishness and preserve the entire movement against garnering a perverse reputation. But golly, can we all agree on one thing—that this dopey inability to dialogue is a bummer? It saddens me to read about some of the greatest men the world has ever known killing one another in our Civil War. And it saddens me that the leadership in a movement that has been waiting in the wings for 50 years are using their 15 minutes of fame to carp at one another. Nobody likes it when their parents shout at each other: how do you take sides when you love both mom and dad? It’s not as though I prefer the company of Leftists and Muslim refugees to even the dumbest Christian Nationalists among us—and while we are distracted with our own dumbness, they’ll continue to gain ground until we’re arguing about the exact ratio of evil elite Jews vs all Jews in commie concentration camps together.
I’ve watched how Moscow handles dispute for a few decades now, so I’m confident you’ve tried reaching out privately to these folks. My only proposal is to adopt another strategy and hope everyone will come around eventually. These hot button issues that get the anons snarling are also an opportunity to grab the mic and pivot the national conversation. I can think of a few responsible men you could pick very spicy debate topics with. But what we need are proper debates. Your 30 min at Amfest with Steve Deace felt like a teaser trailer of a headline debate: “Wilson and Deace vs Amfest Attendees.” It would be great to hear a longform debate with Deace to fully explore your differences on Israel policy. If live events are tricky to arrange, you could offer to do a Mablog debate where you two write responses over the course of months, Collision-style. It’d be great to launch into other controversial topics with Wolfe or even Torba. Pick the hottest button issues you can, and agree to some terms like “This won’t become personal and we’re going to retain our relationship after it’s done,” which may become some small tincture against the rising mistrust within the ranks of our movement.
My prediction would be a lot of traffic and interest in these interactions, and a lot of steam blown off of some loudly boiling kettles. We might even figure out how to stay frosty and approach infighting more graciously. Most of all, the need for debate won’t end, even if we manage to reconstruct into a functioning Christian nation. So . . . this rabble has to learn how to work through disputes constructively at some point.
Feedback welcome. I’m just trying to figure out how we can cooperate enough to play to win in the crucial needs of the hour, rather than disperse like bloodhounds on the scent, one going after the Illuminati, the other the Jews, a third dashing straight to Egypt in the guise of a Sumerian beekeeper, and the audience sitting at home asking “so how do we Christianly nationalize again?”

Patrick

My name is Shayna and I hope to write a novel. I have started this book twice, but I am need to start this differently. I have a question about character development in a book.
I remember hearing that you did character development with your characters before starting any book.
My question is how did you do this ? What do you recommend for me to do please?
Blessings,

Shayna

I’ve done a small amount of blogging. I’m trying to renew my efforts, and I’ve noticed a recurring snag. I have an “active mind” (read: erratic), and I struggle to stay on one theme. I’m often writing a sentence when a completely different sentence comes to mind. I try to get enough of the current thought down and start another paragraph before the inspiration goes away. Often the new thought would make a good post on a different subject, or a part two of the current one. Thirty minutes later, I have a thousand words split between eight or nine half paragraphs, some of which belong in a different document. I run out of time and move on to some other task, and next time I sit down to write it’s rinse and repeat. I have accumulated thousands of these half-finished writings as email drafts, Word docs, Scrivener projects, and notebooks. Some are a sentence and others are thousands of words, but I’ve produced very little readable content.
I’ve long admired your plodding, and I recently listened to Wordsmithy and some other stuff you’ve put out. Do you have any advice for bringing a writing project to completion? Would I be better off suppressing (and forgetting) those tangential inspirations that come while I’m in the flow? I’m compelled to acknowledge that this tendency shows itself in every area of life, so be warned that your advice may be applied to home remodeling projects too!

JD

I am a believer, and just recently came to discover your books during NQN, for which I am very thankful for. After reading through the books on family, I feel like I’ve arrived late to the party. I sinned and got a girl who is not my wife pregnant in 2024, and from it I am a father of a daughter born out the marriage covenant. How do I manage this relationship in a godly way if I am to marry someone else? Shall I just marry the mother of my daughter so that my daughter has 2 parents? I am currently spending every Monday with her, but I worry if that is enough if I want to be a father that prepares her to be given. She turns 1 in March.

Random African Guy

I hope you’re doing well. For starters, by God’s grace, I am married (yay!), so I have no qualms about Valentine’s Day existing, nor do I “have it out” for the day. However, ’tis the season of schmaltzy romance movies, or oddly gory anti-romance movies, for some reason. Growing up, while I appreciated (tasteful) romance in movies, I have never cared for the genre itself; I have often thought that it exists well as a sub-genre, rather than a genre in its own right. This might be because so many elements of romance genre media tend to be “emotional porn.” In my opinion, movies or novels from this genre tend to give a “stamp of approval” to women’s sins or bad traits (the female main character’s actions in The Notebook, for example). Had the genders been switched in a romance movie/novel, no one would be a fan. Usually, when viewers “call out” these sins, creators and fans often brush off concerns because the story’s circumstances deemed the character’s actions justifiable. Were these people to act in this way in real life, however, you’d be hard-pressed to justify their actions.
I’m not saying that we need to make everything as squeaky-clean, narratively, as Psalty the Psalter or Veggie Tales; if we applied that to God’s Word, we wouldn’t have 90% of it written down (Hello, Ruth!). However, as we (and your son) know, stories are, indeed, soul food. Every piece of media and story that we imbibe will, inevitably, influence us in some fashion. Should this genre even exist? I know you’ve written a romance novel, which I’ve read, so I know you probably have thoughts on this issue.
Thank you for taking the time to read and, possibly, answer these!

ON

I wrote you a letter a few years ago simply to thank you for, more or less, being a faithful servant of the Lord—and for filling my nostrils with the scent of burnt Marshwiggle at a time in my life when I was at great risk of falling for woke enchantments.
So, I once more give you my most sincere and hearty thanks, and I also seek some counsel. To make a long story short, I find myself at 32 years of age pastoring a church of about 1000 souls, chairing the board of a Classical Christian School startup (with 76 students in its third year of operation), and striving to be a godly husband to my wife of almost 9 years and a godly father to our three children. I am incredibly grateful for these opportunities, and I want to make as big a difference for Christ as I can. My question for you is: how have you, over the years, dealt with the pressures of full-time ministry in addition to starting up so many other ministries and organizations? I ask because there are some days where I feel way in over my head, and times when I let the pressure get to me; not in any “scandalous” way, but rather most often with moments of self-pity that seep out into my disposition with my fellow ministers or at home. I seek quick repentance when those moments come, but I’m wondering if you have more “preventative” counsel for how to handle such pressures?
Blessings to you and everyone in Moscow; may your tribe increase!

Josiah

“I think it is fair to say that I don’t know any conservative Christians who assume that if lethal violence is involved, the state must be in the right—and they must be in the right according to Romans 13.” – Douglas Wilson in In Which Russell Moore Tries On Christian Nationalism
“Nero did not violate God’s law if he executed Christians who obeyed God rather than man. If Paul continued to preach after the emperor said he may not, then Nero was doing what God ordained government to do.” – Darryl Hart as quoted by Douglas Wilson in In Which Darryl Hart Attempts to Float Above the Fray
Is it fair to say that you know one?

Yana

Do you have a recommendation for a good news source? Hopefully something that can be listened to whilst driving? I am trying to get better at keeping abreast of what’s going on around the world, but I’m having trouble finding a good source.
Thank you so much!!

R

A song I really like for some reason.

David