The Floyd Riots as a Clear Summons for Four More Years of Trump

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Introduction

If you want to know what is going on in America right now, you will need at least a couple of things. The first thing required is that you will need to be looking at it from the requisite distance. You can’t see it from down in the trees, but rather you have to be across the way on a hill looking down on the forest. The second thing you will need is a set of eyes. And I don’t mean physical eyes, but rather a framework for seeing, a worldview, or a foundational wisdom.

You will know that you have these eyes, this framework, the worldview, the foundational wisdom when the gas-lighting stops working on you. And then you are accused of racism.

On the Surface

What has been going on for the last three and a half years? I’ll give you a hint. It has been open and obvious and unremitting, not to mention glaring and palpable and self-evident and manifest and clear and unmistakable. All that, and largely invisible.

Everything can be categorized under this one heading–we are talking the absolute refusal of the Left to accept the election of Donald Trump. I did not say approve of, or applaud, or support. I said accept. When Obama was elected, I did not like it. I was grieved and dismayed, but accepted it. That is the way it is in bitterly contested elections; the side that loses is always somewhat butt-hurt, and then, after a short time for healing, the machinations for the next election start up. We’ll win the pennant next season. This is quite a different response than outlawing the game of baseball and burning down all the stadiums.

So the Left’s reaction to Trump was more like the latter. It was quite different from an ordinary loss, and the Reaction began right away. We are talking here about “the Resistance,” and the “not my president” stuff, along with all the rest of that total and complete non-acceptance. We are not actually talking about the 2020 election here, because the 2016 election is still being contested. It is not being contested by honest means, of course not, but it has been contested from the moment Trump won down to the present.

There have been many aspects to this attempted (slow-motion) coup d’état, but it has come in three major waves. The first was the Russian collusion saga, culminating in the impeachment fiasco. The second was the misbegotten coronavirus panic, an attempt at wrecking Trump’s strongest hand going into the fall election, which was the economy. Remember the economy? Good times, good times. The third wave has been the orchestrated and choreographed and astro-turfed rioting that erupted in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. One, two, and three.

This has not been standard-issue political opposition. It is not even standard-issue fierce political opposition. It is revolution being conducted by an elite who have been bred to believe that they have a divine right to whatever it is that they currently want. It is revolution, it is the spirit of revolution, it is the terror of revolution. And no, not the American revolution, a noble enterprise. This is the spirit of the French revolution, a spirit that resembles the three unclean frogs from the mouth of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet.

The first effort entailed the corruption of our intelligence agencies at the highest levels, with the political party in power using these national agencies on a domestic political opponent. Not only so, but nobody responsible for that business is in jail yet.

Then there is the second. Some might balk at the idea of including the so-called pandemic as a political operation, but that is what it was and is. Not only so, but the fact that it was a political operation can be plainly seen in the attitudes of our public health officials to the protests and rioting of the third wave. What is more apolitical than a virus, right? You might be forgiven for thinking that way, you naive little yap, but the governors and all their officials are NOT apolitical. And they all gave the game away when they all, with a straight face, waved through the massive protests over the Floyd death, but continued to restrict churches from meeting. Allow me to correct that. They actually do allow people to go to church, it just has to be a Black Lives Matter Church.

And the third has been the rioting. The first wave attempted to disguise what it was doing. The second was a little more transparent. This third is a naked attempt at overt political destabilization. Unlike a local riot, calculated to vent over a local situation, these riots all over the nation have one object in view, which is that Trump must go.

To Which the Reply Is . . .

That Trump must not go.

Now I am writing here as someone who did not vote for Trump in 2016, and I am providing this analysis for conservative Christian believers, many of whom were in the same boat that I was. They didn’t vote for him either. They were put off by his crassness, and his braggart’s ways. His life had been an ungodly mess, to put it mildly. They did not believe that he would keep his word by appointing conservative judges, although he has done so. They did not believe that he had any innate conservative principles down in his bones, which he doesn’t, and they thought that he would run to the right and govern to the middle just like everybody else does. They did not anticipate what has happened, as I most certainly did not. I am presenting this following argument for people in that category.

This coming election is not really a choice between Trump and Biden. It has become a choice between orderly representative government, on the one side, where the losing side accepts the results, and revolution on the other, where the revolutionary party accepts nothing but their own acquisition of power. This election is not an election between a corrupt politician and a tawdry businessman (although on the surface it remains that). This is an election between two systems of government–orderly elections v. chaos in the streets.

The Left is not against elections. They like them. They want to keep having them. In fact, they insist that we keep having them. We must continue to vote until we arrive at the right answer. And then, because we found the right answer, the voting stops. As the aphorism goes, you can vote your way into socialism, but you will have to shoot your way out.

The Left has accepted the election of Trump the way South Carolina accepted the election of Lincoln. We have to go back that far to find anything comparable.

So this is why Trump must remain in office for a second term. He must remain so that America may have the opportunity of accepting his election for just one term. Notice that I did not say “support,” or “applaud,” or “hail,” or “acclaim.” I said accept. If this happens, and Trump serves out his second term without all these antifa monkeyshines, then he will have been elected to the presidency twice, but he will have served a term as a duly-elected president just once.

To be clear, given the current circumstances, I am arguing that it would make good sense for a stout NeverTrumper like David French to vote for Trump this fall so that he, French, might continue to have the freedom to oppose President Trump.

I am envisioning a four-year term where the nation’s intelligence agencies are not engaged in a conspiracy to nullify an election they did not like. I am thinking about a circumstance where our public health officials do not engage in a rerun of their COVID travesty–a lock down of the functioning economy of the whole globe for the sake of eradicating a virus that a teeny percentage of the world actually got, and which had a 99% survival rate for those who did contract it. And in addition, I am looking at a scenario where young socialists are denied the opportunity to turn America into the national equivalent of their totalitolerant campuses. They want to turn America into the equivalent of Evergreen College.

In the meantime, it is conceivable that Biden might win. I don’t think he will, but it is not exactly inconceivable. Right? But even if he loses big, almost half the electorate will have voted for him. Our country is deeply divided, and the people on the other side of that division will brook no opposition, no dissent, no variation. Their organizing principle is simply viciousness. So if that electoral result happens, and Biden or his replacement takes office, what we have been seeing will only have been the overture to the full fun times oratorio–music by Schoenberg, lyrics by the Unabomber.

Against such a prospect, may the good Lord deliver us, but the only advice that I would give for preparing for that scenario is to buy guns and ammo.

“GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

And because the reelection of Trump–which I anticipate without predicting–will not be something the Left will somehow take with a good grace this time, so it might still be a good idea to buy guns and ammo.

Bedlamites as the Scriptwriters for 2020

We live in a generation of the feeelzzz. And because these feelings are mercurial, like a hummingbird on meth, and not solid and substantial like a orderly syllogism built out of gray cinder blocks, our culture has been pitched headlong into a maelstrom . Nobody in our ruling class cares about truth anymore, and all of them care about how empathetic they appear to those with the feeelzzz. This is how our ruling class has handed over the keys of the asylum to the inmates.

Allow me to point out a few of the absurdities that we are being required to not notice.

We have been told non-stop for quite a while now that average citizens have absolutely no need for owning anything like an AR-15–right before rioters fanned out through America’s cities in a way calculated to make every sane person wish they had bought an AR-15.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, the Black Lives Matter riots went out and proceeded to kill a bunch of black people, and burn down their stores. A racist is anyone who notices this as an incongruity requiring an explanation.

We are told that systemic racism is a pressure cooker that makes such rioting inevitable, and that we have no one but ourselves to blame if we fail to reform those systems. So I propose a top-to-bottom reform of what appears to be the central problem, which is corrupt Democratic administrations of large urban areas that are deeply blue. Who is actually in charge of these hellholes? Who are the leaders of these crime-ridden, rat-infested, poverty-ridden, corruption-riddled, most dangerous cities? I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with Memocrats.

Black males are about 6% of the American population, and account for over 50% of the homicides. It seems clear from this to some that we need to lay the responsibility for the carnage at the feet of slaveholders who have been dead for 200 years, and assign no responsibility whatever to the men pulling the triggers. Some background reading here.

Special note: to those readers who have been trained to respond as though the facts cared about the way we feeelzz, and who have surmised that I must be racist because I have been fraternizing with facts, I would refer you here.

Mayors and governors allow unrestrained looting, and are then begging the big stories not to abandon the area. “Yes, we let them burn you down, and will not promise to do anything different next time, but we are still wondering how you could be so bigoted as to leave our fair city.” The mayor of Chicago is begging WalMart not to leave. And WalMart would actually have a strong hand to play here, except for the fact that I’ll bet you ten dollars that head of HR at WalMart thinks just like the mayor of Chicago.

Now that the governor of Virginia has determined to remove the statue of the great Robert E. Lee, I think we can take this as the signal that America is ready to remove any monument or institution that embodies a legacy of racism. Does this mean it is time to outlaw the Democratic Party? And Planned Parenthood? How about those statues come down? These people are still selling black people. Dead ones, but they are selling them.

Woke activists are saying that justice is whatever they say it is. Let me think about that for a minute. No.

They are demanding that white people shut up. Also no.

Christian Complicity

How did this come about? How did it happen?

This is a nation with a deep Christian heritage, reflected in our history, laws, customs, and more. We are a nation that still contains millions of evangelical Christians, active in their faith. How is it that such a large group of believers has come to be trampled upon by men? Here’s a hint.

Christians get persecuted for two different sets of reasons. One kind of Christian gets persecuted because of how potent his faith is. If a group of Christians who were former Muslims began worshiping openly in Mecca, they would be treated savagely, not because their faith was insipid and worthless, but precisely because it wasn’t. That is one kind of persecution.

But in a country of 330 million people, when a quarter of the entire population is estimated to be evangelical, the only possible way for things of this nature to be happening would be if the salt had lost its savor. Jesus said that it was fitting for salt of that kind to trampled underfoot by punks. Think. Think about Roe. Think about Obergefell. Think about our cities burning down. And then think about the silence of the pastors over the course of decades.

American Christians are like sheep without shepherds, like Israel scattered over the hills. The shepherds have heard rumors of wolves, and so are hiding in caves, leaving the sheep to fend for themselves. The shepherds are self-quarantining. There are many aspects to this, but here I am going to limit myself to mentioning a couple.

There is a deep and corrupt dualism in the American pulpit. We have a theology of detachment, one that separates the upper story of faith from the lower story of day-to-day action. And day-to-day action must concern more than just personal ethics. It also includes ethics for the public square. This dualism, this detachment, has been with us for many decades, and because political controversies change over time, it has caused us to be irrelevant in numerous ways. Like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, we have a theology that summons us, requires us, to cross over the other way. Call it the theology of the averted gaze. Or you could call it the “spirituality of the church” or “R2K theology” if you wanted. Whatever we call it, we need to swallow a couple of elephant doses of Kuyperian relevance. Some parts of the church won’t be able to get enough medicine through mere pills. Escondido needs an injection in the butt with a syringe the size of a policeman’s baton.

Then there is the related problem of education. The fact that Behemoth State U had a fine engineering program when your great grandfather went there doesn’t mean that they won’t corrupt your perky little Charlotte Simmons in short order. A big part of our problem is that the vast majority of those millions of evangelicals mentioned earlier still send their kids through the government school system K-12, and then when that demolition job is done, they send them off to the wrecking yard called the world of higher ed.

Out of all the colleges and universities in America, including all the ostensibly Christian ones, there is a mere handful of colleges that have not bowed the knee to Baal. New St. Andrews is one of them. To make this a little personal, and a tad overstated, but only a tad, if you have a graduating senior who has not applied to NSA, but has applied to Old Slewfoot, then you don’t get to ask what is happening to America because you are what’s happening to America.

There is obviously more to say about all this, but I will say it later.