My 1819 podcast on classical Christian education:
https://youtu.be/Um78OdYbjPU?is=e64uM4fXVt1X85Lb
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A pastoral ordination sermon I preached at our daughter church in Huntsville, AL on 1 Peter 5, focused on the work of the pastor:
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“The greatest thing you can do to love your neighbor is build Christian civilization.”
— Bryan Dawson
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Every school has a G/god. Every classroom has a G/god. Who is the god – or God – of your child’s education?
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To paraphrase Machen, if you give your kids to the progressives, secularists, and Marxists to be educated, you might as well give them everything else.
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It’s total insanity: we are fighting Muslims over there and electing them to powerful offices over here.
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A servant leader is no leader at all.
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Isn’t it funny how the left insists DEI should exist but if you call someone a “DEI hire,” they get offended. You can’t have DEI without DEI hires, which obviously means some people are hired for jobs for which they are not truly qualified or competent to do.
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“The equal tolerance of all religions is the same as atheism.”
— Pope Leo XIII
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I preached on the David and Bathsheba passage this week (8/30), focusing largely on sexual sin. Several people told me afterwards that it was a great sermon for young men to hear. But I pointed out (because I didn’t have time to do it during the sermon) that it’s perhaps even more important for men my age (40-50s). David was about my age when he fell into sin with Bathsheba. Maybe it was something of a midlife crisis. The same is true of Solomon. When he began multiplying gold, building up a standing army, and adding foreign wives in 1 Kings 9-10 (breaking the three laws of kingship in Deuteronomy 17), he was in his 40s. Perhaps another mid-life crisis.
Some details on David:
David became king at 30 and reigned 40 years, dying at 70 (2 Samuel 5:4–5). The Bathsheba incident occurs in 2 Samuel 11, after David is already established in Jerusalem (so after his first 7½ years in Hebron) and during the Ammonite war.
Reasonable reconstructions therefore place him in his mid-to-late 40s, most commonly around 47–50. James Jordan’s reconstruction (widely cited in Reformed circles) lands on David ≈ 49 at the time of the sin, with Solomon born a year or two later.
Here’s what should be noted: While young men are especially inclined to sexual sin, older men are not exempt from such temptations. In fact, many men will find sexual temptation even greater when they reach the zenith of the power/status (and thus attractiveness), in mid-life. Yes, young men need to learn to battle against sexual sin. But older men need to continue fighting that battle in order to finish well
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Allah is a demon and Mohammad was a pedophile.
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Famous Alabama Confederates:
Alabama was a core Confederate state. Montgomery served as the first capital of the Confederacy in early 1861, where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated. The state supplied large numbers of troops, industrial output (especially around Selma), and several prominent military and political figures. About 39 Alabamians reached general or admiral rank.
Here are the most notable Confederates associated with Alabama:
Naval
- Raphael Semmes (1809–1877) of Mobile is the standout. He commanded the commerce raider CSS Alabama, which captured or destroyed dozens of Union merchant ships over two years. He is often called the Confederacy’s most successful naval officer and later served as a rear admiral. He lived and is buried in Mobile.
Cavalry and field commanders - Joseph Wheeler (“Fighting Joe,” 1836–1906) was born in Georgia but became closely identified with Alabama. He rose to lieutenant general as the senior cavalry commander in the Army of Tennessee and fought in most of its major western battles. After the war he represented Alabama in Congress for many years and later served as a U.S. major general in the Spanish-American War. Alabama’s statue in the U.S. Capitol is of Wheeler.
- John Hunt Morgan (1825–1864), born in Huntsville, became famous as a cavalry raider (“the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy”). His 1863 raid into Indiana and Ohio was the deepest Confederate penetration of the North. He was killed in Tennessee in 1864.
- John Pelham (1838–1863) of Calhoun County commanded J.E.B. Stuart’s horse artillery. Robert E. Lee nicknamed him “the Gallant Pelham” after his performance at Fredericksburg. He was killed at Kelly’s Ford at age 24. The town of Pelham, Alabama, is named for him.
- William Calvin Oates commanded the 15th Alabama Infantry in the assault on Little Round Top at Gettysburg. He later served as governor of Alabama.
Political and administrative - William Lowndes Yancey (1814–1863) of Montgomery was the leading “Fire-Eater” secessionist. He drafted Alabama’s secession ordinance, helped split the national Democratic Party in 1860, served as a Confederate diplomat to Europe, and later as a Confederate senator. He died in 1863.
- Leroy Pope Walker of Huntsville was the Confederacy’s first Secretary of War and transmitted the order to fire on Fort Sumter.
- Josiah Gorgas, Chief of Ordnance, organized major munitions production at Selma that employed thousands until Union raids in 1865.
- John Tyler Morgan and Edmund Pettus both served as Confederate brigadier generals and later as long-serving U.S. senators from Alabama.
Other Alabama-born or Alabama-based generals included Cullen Battle, Alpheus Baker, William Wirt Allen, Edward A. O’Neal (later governor), and Philip Dale Roddey.
These men represent the range of Alabama’s Confederate contribution: early secessionist politics centered in Montgomery, industrial effort around Selma, and combat leadership in both the Eastern and Western theaters.
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The NFL using sodomites as cheerleaders:
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According to Levi Secord, Jesus insulted people 78 times in the gospels – almost once per chapter in the gospels (“hypocrites,” “vipers,” “children of Satan,” “pigs,” etc.). He adds several more insults in Revelation. Jesus was not a nice guy. Jesus knew how to play hardball. It’s not a surprise he got crucified – he we t around insulting the most powerful people in his society.
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“If you’ve never seen the Blue Ridge Mountains, plan to go there someday. Go in April if you can. That’s when spring is born on Buffalo Mountain, and apple trees bloom beside the split-rail fences. Honeysuckles come later, like a pulse beat, then dogwood, then laurel, then flame azalea, then rhododendron, until the heartbeats of spring subside into deep, serene summer.
But it is at apple blossom time that the Buffalo is most beautiful. On years when Easter falls late and every hillside and hollow is decked in white, it seems as if the world is dressed for resurrection. It is then that older folks of the Buffalo shudder, remembering how it used to be…
On a hot summer’s day just a week before he died, Hasten Childress sat in the rocker on his porch and talked at length about his brother as the crickets were singing and the witch-water rising from the road beside his house. “Bob used to say that each of us is tending the little patch of ground God lends to us. ‘Whatever comes to me in the pod,’ he’d say, ‘I want to pass on in full flower, and what comes to me in the flower, I’d like to pass on in full fruit.’ Well, the plants he tended are still bearing.”
— Richard Davids, The Man Who Moved a Mountain (biography of Bob Childress)
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“The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Christian Heiens on the common good and why something like Christian nationalism is necessary to save our country:
“You can close the borders, end third world migration, ban the transing of kids, eliminate gender ideology in schools, re-open the asylums, and otherwise completely dismantle virtually everything Progressives have done for the last 60 years, but you can’t justify doing these things based solely on individual liberty and consent alone.
You’re going to have to come up with some additional justification that probably looks something like “having a country,” “protecting kids,” “public order,” and “saving Western civilization from Marxism”. But all of these things simply presuppose what society should look like or how it should function.
You could easily just call that the “Common Good”.
And once you’ve admitted that politics naturally requires you to make these kind of value judgments that obviously go beyond individual consent or the harm principle, the debate is no longer about whether society will impose some conception of the good. The debate becomes which conception of the good it will impose and how.
This is why the moral panic you see from the usual suspects melting down about Postliberals and the Common Good is disingenuous or stupid. Everyone has a conception of the Common Good. They’re just mad that some are open and honest about what they believe that should look like, while they seek to impose their own conception of the Common Good through the backdoor while pretending no one else is allowed to contest it.
But of course, when your conception of the Common Good is to tie your own hands behind your back and declare that you can’t do anything while your enemies loot and pillage this country, don’t be surprised when guys who are ostensibly on your side look at you and reject your plan for being suicidally naive.”
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John Moody on how small things/small changes add up over time:
“$10 or 10 minutes?
Four cups of coffee each week at a decent coffee shop is around $1,500 per year.
Ten minutes on an assault bike each morning, four mornings a week, is about 500 miles each year, or about 120,000 calories.
Writing three hundred words per day, five days a week, is 75,000 words per year – twice the length of an average book.
Checking your phone six times per day for five or so minutes, is just under four hours per week, or about 182 hours per year – over an entire week of the year.
Making an extra ten dollars per day, five days a week, is an extra $2,500 dollars per year. $20 per day? $5,000.
Reading to your kids twice a day, for ten to fifteen minutes, is 100 to 150 hours of reading with them per year.
Walking with your wife and kids twice a day, for ten to fifteen minutes, is around 3,000 steps per day, 60,000 per month, and 720,000 per year, an extra 100-200 calories per day… and an extra possible 100-150 hours per week talking and spending time together.
Two servings of soda per day is an extra 250-350 calories per day, almost 2,000 per week, or over 100,000 per year.
Small habits and choices stack and accumulate far faster than we often realize, like the jars of change many families had when I was a child, that after a few months, seemingly suddenly were quite full
Small things become big things surprisingly quickly, both for good and for ill.
Small decisions become weights that drag and slow you down or advantages that propel you forward in startlingly short weeks, months, and years.
Small choices compound to your benefit or harm in a matter of weeks and months, when you suddenly can no longer deny the difference, and its cost or benefit.
So what $10 or 10 minutes can you change today, to be in a better place just a few months from now?
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“Wendell Berry, RIP. Quite influential, strangely, both on the Left and Right. The Crunchy-Cons as well as the Localist Lefties.
I was never a fan.
I do sympathize with his love for local communities and do understand how liberty can disrupt communities. Over the last 40 years I’ve given this issue a lot of thought. I believe strongly in communities. The Bible does.
But I also believe in liberty. The Bible does. In a fallen world, there will always be a tension between liberty and community (The One and the Many). Barry came down differently on that issue than where I do.
He seemed willing to sacrifice liberty for community.
I am willing to sacrifice neither community nor liberty and I live within the tension.
He longed for the past romantic rural life and deplored modern urban life.
My view is that the Bible envisions both rural and urban as legitimate, under Christ‘s authority. 
Both have their place.”
— Andrew Sandlin
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It’s about that time:
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Matt Walsh in a key shift in pop music:
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Michael Clary asks men a good question: Are you a man of consequence?
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We ought to respect tradition because, in the aggregate, our ancestors were wiser than we are.
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“Growing up is largely realizing your grandma was right about most everything.”
— Michael Knowles
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“I have animosity towards him [my father] because my childhood is over.”
— Bo Jackson, on forgiving his absentee father. There’s an important point here: You don’t really enter into full adulthood until you get over and get past whatever ways your parents let you down.
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“The earth is inherited by the meek. Heaven is inherited by the violent.”
— Thomas Watson on Matthew 11:12
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Best summary of what should happen if Lindsey Clancy gets off:
https://twitter.com/Mericamemed/status/2094536010797318387/video/1?s=46
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One of the lessons from Hebrews 11 is that faith does not equate with passivity. We do not prove our faith in God by suppressing human action. Rather we act by faith. We must never use faith as an excuse for cowardice. or inaction when action is called for.
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“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning… I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
― T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, on Christendom
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J. B. Phillips on Jesus’ rough edged masculinity:
“Jesus Christ might well be called “meek,” in the sense of being selfless and humble and utterly devoted to what He considered right, whatever the personal cost; but “mild,” never…. [Consider the] sentimental Christian ideal of “saintliness.” We hear, or read, of someone who was “a real saint—he never saw any harm in anyone and never spoke a word against anyone in his life.” If this really is Christian saintliness then Jesus Christ was no saint…. He never suggested that they [men] should turn a blind eye to evil… To speak the truth was obviously to Him more important than to make His hearers comfortable….He was love in action, but He was not meek and mild?”
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“Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, you have done nothing. If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbour who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists.
It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, there is any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so.
Hence the fanaticism of Marxists, Freudians, Eugenists, Spiritualists, Douglasites, Federal Unionists, Vegetarians, and all the rest. But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.
I do not therefore find any very clear and cogent reason for inferring from the general principle of beneficence the conclusion that I must disobey if I am called on by lawful authority to be a soldier.”
— C. S. Lewis on pacifism
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“ Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. “That sort of talk makes us sick,” they say. And half of you already want to ask me, “I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?…
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently “Love your neighbor” does not mean “feel fond of him” or “find him attractive”. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are…
Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. . . .
— C. S. Lewis on forgiveness
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“The idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage—a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness.”
— C. S. Lewis on the happy warrior
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Jeremy Boreing asks a great question: What were American pastors doing while Charlie Kirk did their job for them? This is a helpful call for pastors to do political discipleship. I don’t agree with every detail, of course, but it’s pretty good overall.
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“Idleness is the Petri dish of the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes.”
— Brad Crewe
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Do not deceive yourselves. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap corruption. You may hide it from your wife. You may hide it from the session. You may hide it from the world. You will not hide it from God. He will bring every secret thing into judgment (Ecclesiastes 12:14).
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Nathan’s clever parable in 2 Samuel 12 that traps David is not an allegory. Nathan could not make it too obvious what he is doing so it is not designed to totally match the story in 2 Samuel 11. Looking for one to one corresponds is futile.
David has committed the sins of adultery and murder; the parable is about a rich man who commits theft. Certainly there is an abuse of power by David and by the rich man, but other than the equation between David and rich man (“thou art the man”) none of the other characters in the parable match up with historical figures. The poor man has similarities with Uriah, which would supposedly make the little lamb Bathsheba – but then the lamb gets slaughtered which applies to Uriah, not Bathsheba. Or, the little lamb could even point to the son born to David and Bathsheba that was put to death by God on the 7th day because of David’s sin.
The point of the parable is not that it aligns with exactly what happened in 2 Samuel. The point is that Nathan has told story a story that enraged David, which can used to get David to condemn himself out of his own mouth. David is so full of rage that he not only says the rich man should make fourfold restitution for the lamb he stole (which is what Torah requires in Exodus 22:1), he says the man should be put to death. Death for theft would be extreme. But if one “steals” another man’s wife and life, he most certainly does deserve death.
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There are a lot of heady, academic debates over Christian nationalism, and I’ve been part of a few of them myself, but it’s important to not lose sight of the big picture. Christian nationalism is simply the desire for a nation whose public and cultural life is shaped more deeply by Christian faith than anything else. Set aside problems or objections with terminology (some which I have sympathy with), that’s really what Christian nationalism is about. To put it more specifically, Christian nationalism desires a nation that acknowledges Christ as Lord, the Bible as his Word, and the church as his bride. To put it still another way, Christian nationalism calls upon a people, as a people, to acknowledge reality for what it is. It is a call to live in accord with the way things really are.
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Will Spencer’s 4 questions for pastors to expose latent feminism:
- Do women sin?
- Do women sin against men?
- Do women sin against men who don’t deserve it?
- Will you hold women accountable?
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“The Judgment of the Nations is a wild ride. As devastating as any ideology (beyond its specific massacres) is the growing uniformity of the world, the movement toward a mechanized humanity and a loss of individuality and true diversity. As the world moves toward the conformist abyss of the annihilation of the human person, Dawson claimed, power replaces love as the prime mover in the world, thus overturning the western project from Socrates through Dante. The human race, in its will to power, has embraced Babylon rather than Jerusalem. We have entered, he feared, the “Hour of Darkness.” All movements—whether going by the name of democracy, fascism, or communism—have become “mass movements,” he claimed. Further, Dawson argued, liberalism (whether in its classical or statist forms) had proven disastrous, doing nothing more than creating a purposeless world. As Dawson famously (or infamously) noted in his life, liberalism served as nothing more than a stepping stone from Christendom to totalitarianism. When it transformed from nineteenth to twentieth century liberalism, it made the fatal mistake of confusing liberty and equality….
Only through the right of association can humanity truly progress. Indeed, Dawson wrote, all of history is the struggle between the right of individuals within community and the imperialism of politics.
The modern state, Dawson continued, resembles really nothing in history. Instead, through the institutions of education, the military, and the bureaucracy, the modern state in all of its forms has become something new under the sun. Whereas the pre-modern state might achieve absolutism, the modern state can achieve totalitarianism. Whether democratic, communist, fascist, or national socialist, the modern state most resembles the medieval church in its ability to inspire purpose but antique in its understanding of God-kingships in its politics. Thus, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s has gone well beyond what Christ warned about. The new state has destroyed the “commonwealth of free citizens” into a “hive or an ant-heap.” In all of its forms, Dawson warned, the new state is “the totalitarian Anti-Christ.””
— Bradley Birzer on Christopher Dawson
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Standards of modesty for Christian women do not get thrown out the window just because they happen to be in the proximity of water.
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The essence of my Christian nationalism:
A Christian nation is one that recognizes the Bible for what it is and the church for what she is.
A nation that conceives of itelf as religiously neutral, or that is committed to treating all religions the same way, is not a Christian nation.
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Human sexuality is a lock and key. This is why male and female approaches to sexuality are so different.
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I read David Edgington’s book on white knights and reviling wives, and enjoyed virtually all of it. I’d like to interact with it a bit more with a few of his arguments when there’s more time, but here’s a summary of what I’d say to a husband with a reviling wife:
“Stand up to her! Respect yourself, even if she won’t respect you. It might not work in getting her to change her ways, but you’d be miserable either way. At least if you act like a man, you can live with yourself – even if she can’t live with you.”
Husbands and pastors should definitely read Edgingnton’s book.
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Why wouldn’t Uriah go into his wife in 2 Samuel 11? How does this connect to the Ark of the covenant in the battlefield? What does James B. Jordan say?
Uriah refused because the army was in a state of holy war, and the Ark of the Covenant—Yahweh’s throne and presence—was with them in the field. Going home to “lie with” Bathsheba would have broken the consecration required of soldiers in that setting.
In 2 Samuel 11:11 Uriah tells David:
“The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my lord Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!”
“Wash your feet” (v. 8) is a euphemism for sexual relations. Uriah would not do it.
The Ark and the Holy-War Camp
When the Ark went out with the army, the camp became a mobile sanctuary. Deuteronomy 23:9–14 requires that the camp stay holy “because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to give your enemies over to you.” Sexual activity produced ritual uncleanness (Lev. 15:16–18). A soldier who became unclean could not remain near the Ark without first undergoing purification. Therefore warriors under holy-war vows practiced temporary sexual abstinence.
The same logic appears in 1 Samuel 21:4–5. Ahimelech will give David the consecrated bread only if “the young men have kept themselves from women.” David replies that they always do so “when I set out.” Men on a holy-war mission were temporarily treated like priests: they could eat holy bread and had to keep themselves from women.
Uriah is simply applying that rule. The Ark is in tents with the army; therefore he remains under the vow. He will not enjoy the comforts of home—food, drink, or his wife—while God and his brothers are in the field.
What James B. Jordan Emphasizes
Jordan treats this as a classic instance of holy-war consecration. In his lectures (especially the “Holy War” studies and comments on 2 Samuel 11 and Revelation 14) he notes:
- Going out to fight “the wars of the Lord” placed a man in the holy-war camp and under specific vows.
- One of those vows was to “keep yourself from women” while the Ark was in the field.
- Uriah, though a Hittite convert, honors the vow more faithfully than David, the king who should have been leading the campaign.
- David’s attempt to get Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba is therefore not only a cover-up for adultery; it is an attempt to make Uriah violate his consecration. Jordan calls this a third sin alongside adultery and murder—something close to blasphemy, because it treats the holiness of the Ark and the war-camp with contempt.
Jordan also points out the irony built into the chiastic structure of 2 Samuel 11–12: the king who failed to “go out” to battle tries to force his most loyal warrior to “go in” to his house. Uriah’s refusal exposes David’s unfaithfulness on every level—military, marital, and liturgical.
In short, Uriah would not go in to his wife because the Ark was in the battlefield. That fact turned the army camp into a temporary sanctuary that demanded the same sexual restraint expected of those who approached God’s presence. Jordan sees Uriah as the Gentile who keeps Israel’s own holy-war law more strictly than Israel’s king.
Note that the consecration of soldiers like Uriah was not a Nazirite vow.
The Nazirite vow in Numbers 6 required three things: no wine or grape products, uncut hair, and no contact with a corpse. Uriah drank wine when David made him drunk (2 Samuel 11:13). That alone rules it out. Nothing in the text mentions his hair or corpse-defilement either.
What Uriah was under is the ordinary holiness required of the war-camp when the Ark was present. Deuteronomy 23:9–14 says the Lord walks in the midst of the camp, so it must stay holy; sexual relations produced uncleanness (Leviticus 15) and would have kept a man from remaining near the Ark. The same rule appears in 1 Samuel 21:4–5, where David’s men “kept themselves from women” while on mission so they could eat consecrated bread.
James B. Jordan treats Uriah’s refusal as this holy-war consecration—a temporary vow of abstinence while the Ark and the army were in the field—not the specific Nazirite regulations. He calls it “some kind of vow” tied to the holy-war camp, and he notes that David’s attempt to get Uriah to break it was an added offense against that holiness. Jordan does connect the Nazirite vow itself to holy war in other places (Samson, and later discussions of Paul’s vows in Acts), but he does not apply the Nazirite category to Uriah.
Uriah, the Hittite convert, simply kept the camp rules more strictly than the king who should have been leading the campaign.
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The most powerful drive in a man’s life is his sex drive. His sex drive is designed to be an engine of dominion. It is designed for productivity – to produce strong marriages, to produce children, to produce all its takes to protect and provide for them. His sex drive, when disciplined and channeled into the covenant of marriage, is at the center of a web of productive relationships and activities.
When a man’s sex drive is untethered from the covenant of marriage, it is still productive, but it produces misery and destruction. Fornication, adultery, and porn produce chaos, weakness, disaster, and ultimately death. His sex drive becomes an engine of Satanic dominion, rather than godly dominion. Sexual sin distracts a man from his mission, saps his masculine strength, and makes him a weak pathetic loser.
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God is love, but so is your dentist as he drills. Sometime it hurts to be loved because one who truly loves us wants what is best for us, not what is easiest for us. Someone who truly loves us might have to inflict pain on us for our own good.
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“A significant strand of the last sixty years of feminist thought has worked to delegitimize the idea that a husband can possess genuine protective authority over his wife, particularly when that authority requires overriding her stated wishes. Some of that work was necessary and good. Real abuses of male authority in marriage were real, and they needed correcting. But the correction did not stop at abuse. It kept going, until the entire category of a husband exercising protective authority over his wife, even in a genuine crisis, even when she is not thinking clearly, became suspect by default….I do not think most of the women analyzing this case want to sit with that part of it, and I understand why. It is not a comfortable thing to say that the very framework built to protect women from bad men may have also stripped good men of the one tool that might have protected a family in genuine crisis….[A] woman’s distress has, in a hundred small cultural ways, been placed beyond a man’s standing to question, right up until the moment something goes catastrophically wrong, at which point everyone wants to know why no man stepped in. “
— Clayton Wood on feminism eroding patriarchy
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What kind of bathing was Bathsheba doing in 2 Samuel 11:2?
The text itself is spare. 2 Samuel 11:2 says only that David, walking on the palace roof in the evening, “saw a woman bathing” (roḥeṣet). Verse 4 then adds, after he sent for her and lay with her: “she was purifying herself from her uncleanness” , and she went home.
Two readings dominate.
The most common reading takes the bath in verse 2 as (or as including) the washing that ended her menstrual impurity, and the parenthetical in verse 4 as looking back to that fact. The narrator thereby establishes two things at once: the child cannot be Uriah’s, and David did not also violate the niddah laws of Leviticus 15—only the seventh commandment. This is how Rashi, Radak, and many English versions treat the clause. It also fits the evening timing: Leviticus 15:19 counts seven days of impurity ending at sunset, after which a woman would wash. 
A second reading treats the verse 2 washing as an ordinary evening bath and the washing of verse 4 as the post-coital washing required by Leviticus 15:18. On this view the participle is contemporaneous with, or immediately after, the intercourse—she is doing what the law required after sexual relations even while committing adultery.
The text never says she was bathing on her own roof, nor that she was naked in public, nor that she intended to be seen. David is on his roof; she is almost certainly in a courtyard below. The narrator’s interest is not her motive but David’s: he looks, inquires, and “takes.” The “uncleanness” language is there primarily to fix paternity and to show that even the ritual details of the law were observed while the moral law was broken.
Either way, the bath is not a luxurious soak. It is the ordinary (and, in context, almost certainly ritual) washing of water poured over the body. The story’s force does not depend on reconstructing the exact basin or the exact Levitical category; it depends on a king who should have been at Rabbah lingering on a roof and then using royal power to seize what was not his.
—
“There is no such thing as a neutral education. Every school is catechizing its students into a religion. Every school has a vision for an ideal life toward which they are forming the children. If that is the case, then all of the families in our churches should desire a Christ-centered education for their children. Who gives the vision of human life our kids should be formed toward? Jesus.
If that is going to be the case, parents need to be willing to sacrifice a great deal for it, knowing how much is at stake in this decision. We understand that there are circumstances in which parents have little educational options for their kids—e.g. severe learning disabilities. Education has been placed by God under the authority of the family (Gen. 18:19; Deut. 6:7; Eph. 6:4), and so the church must respect the responsibility given to parents (especially fathers) in making educational decisions for their children. Nevertheless, the church is responsible for discipling these parents so that they understand what a Christian worldview is and its implication for education. Christian parents need clear teaching on this topic, and the church is obligated to provide it.
Christianity is a culture, and we need to pass it down to our children.
The biblical word for education is paideia, which can be translated various ways (e.g. discipline, education, training, etc.). Paideia is especially associated with Christian fathers who are explicitly told to raise their children in the paideia of the Lord—that is, an education centered on Christ.
‘Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the paideia and instruction of the Lord.’ (Eph. 6:4)
‘My son, do not regard lightly the paideias of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord paideuei the one he loves, And chastises every son whom he receives.’ (Heb. 12:5-6)
In the ancient world, paideia was the process of enculturating a child into the values of a society, preparing them to be an ideal citizen. Christian parents have to understand that Christianity is not just something you believe in to go to heaven when you die. Christianity is a civilization (a kingdom) that Jesus is building on the earth (Matt. 6:10; Rev. 11:15). It is an eternal kingdom and therefore includes the offer of eternal life (praise God!). But it is also a culture. Christianity does not just fight or resist or engage culture. Christianity is itself a culture. It is a world of stories, songs, traditions, habits, practices, celebrations, manners, history, etc. The gospel generates cultures of prosperity, freedom, creativity, mercy, and peace. The Apostle Paul commands fathers to enculturate their children into the civilization of Jesus.
Throughout history, Christians have seen education as one of the primary vehicles (after home and church life) for transmitting the culture of Christianity to the next generation. If that is the case, then the two main methods of Christian fathers offering a “paideia of the Lord” to their children will be either homeschooling or coming together with other Christian fathers and/or the church to form a school. (Or they could do some combination of these two options.) While there may be exceptions to this norm, we can’t expect a large-scale covenant succession to the next generation while secular, unbelieving government schools are the normal institutions entrusted with the discipleship of our children. The organizing of these kinds of ministries or schools should be a top priority for Reformed churches and are best administered under the governance of a church session.”
— Nate Walker, on paideia
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“There is a concept in therapeutic training called unconditional positive regard. The idea, in my kindest description of it, is that a person cannot begin to heal if they feel judged the moment they walk in the door. There can be wisdom in that. Nobody opens up to someone who is waiting to condemn them.
But somewhere between that honest insight and its everyday practice, a great deal of contemporary therapy has drifted from “I will not condemn you while you tell me the truth” into “I will agree with whatever version of the truth you bring me.” Those are not the same posture, and the difference between them is the difference between healing and enabling.
I do not think this is a fringe complaint anymore. Jonathan Alpert, a practicing psychotherapist for decades, wrote an entire book, “Therapy Nation,” making this case from inside the profession. In it he describes a woman who survives a near miss with a truck on the highway, shaken but unharmed, who simply wants to move past it. Instead her anxiety spreads. First she cannot drive near the site of the incident. Then she cannot drive on highways at all. Eventually she cannot drive anywhere. A therapeutic culture built to validate rather than to challenge does not interrupt that spiral. It affirms it, one session at a time, until a woman who once had a bad afternoon can no longer get herself to work.
Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy documents the same pattern from a different angle. More therapy, more psychiatric medication, and yet enormous levels of anxiety and depression remain. If the machine were working the way it claims to work, we ought to ask why the results are so poor.
Women are far more likely than men to seek therapy in the first place. That is simply true, and it is not an insult to say so. But it means that when a therapeutic culture defaults to validation over correction, the effects of that default fall disproportionately on women, and on the men who share a home with them. A woman who walks into a room hoping someone will tell her the truth, and instead finds someone whose only tool is agreement, does not walk out healed. She walks out armed. She has a professional’s signature under every grievance she already felt but had not yet been given permission to act on. And if the truth she needed to hear was uncomfortable, if it required her to look at her own contribution to a conflict, she may simply experience the honest counselor as cruel and go find someone easier instead. The market obliges her. There is always another provider willing to agree.”
— Clayton Wood on therapy culture
—
I suppose the government can pass the law that says employers have to pay a $15 or $30 minimum wage. But there cannot be a law that requires an employer to hire you. The true minimum wage will always be zero.
—
“Outside the Plymouth Superior Courthouse, hundreds of women gathered, expressing solidarity with her. Videos have circulated of women weeping, filming themselves in visible distress, framing Clancy’s case as a referendum on the burdens of motherhood and the failures of a society that does not “listen when a mom says she’s not okay.” Some have gone further, describing her as a victim of an unfeeling medical and social system, a woman failed rather than a woman who failed her children in the most permanent way imaginable.
Lindsay Clancy is being cast as a victim rather than a villain, in a world where therapized brokenness is all around us. Women who have grown used to demanding that a person they pay to agree with them frame them as the victim rather than the villain are now extending that same instinct, moving beyond ordinary selfishness and narcissism, all the way to Clancy…
Look at the actual numbers on mental health and ideology. Research from the Institute for Family Studies, using the 2024 American Family Survey, found that only 12 percent of young liberal women, ages 18 to 40, reported being “completely satisfied” with life, compared to 37 percent of conservative women in the same age range. Liberal women were nearly three times more likely to report feeling lonely several times a week or more, 29 percent compared to 11 percent. Conservative women ages 18 to 40 are married at rates about 20 points higher than liberal women in the same age group, and weekly church attendance sits above half for conservative women and around 12 percent for liberal women. IFS researchers found that these two factors, marriage and church attendance, account for about half the ideological gap in life satisfaction, even after controlling for race, education, income, and age. That is not the whole story, and I am not claiming marriage and faith explain everything. But a factor that accounts for half of a measured gap is not a coincidence, and it is not just “negative thinking” driven by social media, though that plays a role too. Women who are less connected to marriage and faith, the institutions that have historically given life structure and solidarity, are measurably less happy and more alone. That distress does not stay private. It gets expressed publicly, and increasingly it gets expressed as identification with other women’s pain, even pain caused by something as extreme as killing your own children…
Ask people what a man is for, and you will hear a familiar list: protect, provide, make women feel safe, make women feel special. Ask the follow-up question, what is a woman for, and the answer that comes back with far less scrutiny is often some version of “whatever she wants.” That asymmetry has always been unstable, and it is now being tested by cases like this one.
There is a mechanism behind that asymmetry. For years the culture has normalized a low-grade version of emotional entitlement in women that it would never tolerate in men. Think of how casually we talk about a man being “in the doghouse,” as if a woman is entitled to punish him with her mood until she decides he has suffered enough. Reverse the genders and we call it emotional abuse. Think of how quickly telling a woman to “calm down” gets treated as an offense in itself, as though she is exempt from the ordinary expectation that adults regulate their own emotions. Telling a man to calm down, or to express himself more, or to open up, is treated instead as noble and good, a demand he should welcome. It is a permission structure that says a woman’s distress justifies whatever she does in response to it, and a man’s job is simply to absorb it without complaint.
Once you see that permission structure clearly, the Clancy sympathy is not a strange anomaly. It is that same logic running all the way to its end. If a woman’s bad mood has already been excused for years as something a man must simply endure, then a woman’s catastrophic mental break gets excused too, right up to and including the killing of her own children…
If hormonal upheaval, medication complications, and a history that cannot be fully known are sufficient reasons to withhold moral clarity about a woman who killed her own children, then by the same logic, a man’s testosterone, which is measurably and significantly linked to aggression, should earn him the same withheld judgment when he does something terrible. Try saying it out loud the way she said it, only reversed. “How dare you lack sympathy for this man. Yes, he committed assault. Yes, there was violence. But you don’t know what it’s like to carry that much testosterone. You don’t know what it’s like to be told for years to be meek and mild instead of allowing him to be who he actually is.”
Nobody would accept that argument for a moment, and they would be right not to. The reason it collapses instantly for men and gets treated as nuance for women is not because the biology is different in kind. It is because the moral standard has quietly become different in kind, and talking about that is taboo…
The sociologist Michael Rosenfeld’s research on American couples found that women initiate roughly two-thirds of divorces. And when researchers ask why, “growing apart” and emotional disconnection now show up as often as infidelity, sometimes more often, as the stated reason. This new midlife crisis leading to destroyed marriages is not recognized as sin, it is seen as bravery. That is close to the plot of “Eat Pray Love” itself, a woman with a husband, a home, and a successful career who found herself unhappy anyway, and who wrote the book that made leaving to “find herself” a kind of secular sacrament for an entire generation of women. Gilbert wrote and titled the book, fittingly, in a hotel room in Knoxville, close enough to home that I have heard the same story with different names more times than I can count. A woman goes to a therapist who applies a definition of emotional abuse broad enough that in the cases I have personally witnessed, it was deserved by the wife who resisted the label at least as much as the husband she pinned it on. The man is removed from his own home. Sometimes the marriage ends. Sometimes it survives, but he lives for years in genuine fear of what will be said about him next.
That is the whole pattern in miniature. A woman who strangled three children gets asked whether we have really considered her medications. A husband who did nothing gets removed from his home on the strength of a counselor’s confidence in her own read of the situation. The compassion only ever moves in one direction, and when you try to point it the other way, even hypothetically, people recoil immediately, because they can feel instantly how absurd it sounds. That instinctive recoil is the whole argument. It proves the standard was never really about hormones or medication or context. It was about who gets the benefit of the doubt and who does not.
— Clayton Wood, on Lindsey Clancy and what her case represents
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“But are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners? It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent. Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures. But, if they be not certain in event, are they not possible, are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience 27 years and three months longer, for the attainment of any degree of population desired, or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”
— Thomas Jefferson
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“Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation… they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.”
— Benjamin Franklin
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Every murderer is insane. Insanity is not a defense. Murderers are worthy of death, and appealing to the muderer’s state of mind while committing the act does not in any way excuse or negate the punishment the act deserves. God is clear: we must show no pity to those who unjustly take life.
—
The “Got a Minute” podcast is not dead. Here’s a podcast we did with Bryan Dawson of 1819 News:
https://youtu.be/1WmKKxKzihc?is=HdLiYWi-fA7xDiBn
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“The general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned teachers.”
— Patrick Henry
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Spencer Pratt connects the Lindsey Clancy case to broader societal chaos and collapse:
https://twitter.com/spencerpratt/status/2091714255141663019/video/1?s=46
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Pre-fall Adam could probably have taken the devil in a fight. He should have crushed the serpent’s head. He should have made the first pair of snake skin boots.
—
In the fall, the man became effeminate and the woman became a feminist. All our sexual confusion traces back to Genesis 3.
—
Founding fathers on women in politics:
“The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion; and the French ladies miscalculate much their own happiness, when they wander from the true field of their influence, into that of politics.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“But why exclude Women? … because their Delicacy renders them unfit for Practice and Experience, in the great Business of Life, and the hardy Enterprizes of War, as well as the arduous Cares of State.”
— John Adams
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Alexander Hamilton on immigration and citizenship:
“To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot in our country, as recommended in the Message, would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.”
—
“Men … wholly destitute of Property, are also too little acquainted with public Affairs to form a Right Judgment, and too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own. … Very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own.”
— John Adams on universal suffrage
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The founding fathers were not egalitarian:
“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. … He had been too republican heretofore: He was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.”
— James Madison recording Elbridge Gerry’s thoughts at the Constitutional Convention
“Is not, Representation, an essential, a fundamental departure from Democracy? Is not every Representative Government, in the Universe, an Aristocracy? … Representation and Democracy, are contradictions in terms.”
— John Adams
“Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice. … It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Level.”
— John Adams
—
Interesting post on Appalachia:
2024 APPALACHIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Erie
Scranton
Pittsburgh
Charleston
Knoxville
Asheville
Chattanooga
Greenville
Huntsville
Birmingham
Donald Trump 65.39% – 8,295,242
Kamala Harris 33.75% – 4,280,803
Appalachian Regional Commission
7.6% of US Population
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George Washington rejected secular foundations for civil government:
“If all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. … And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
“It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.”
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James Madison on democracy:
“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
—
James Madison was already warning us about the dangers of a welfare state at the nation’s founding:
“An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. … An agrarian law would soon take place. … The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. … It ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
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John Adams on democracy:
“Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and nowhere appears in history.”
—
A post from 11/1/24:
America has become a low T nation. We no longer explore, innovate, or take risks. We have become stagnant and weak. We hardly produce anything. We don’t know how to fight, or even what to fight for. We are full of shame, false guilt, and self-loathing. Instead of a competitive marketplace, we let corporations use crony capitalism to create monopolies that allow them to get lazy without consequence. We build an economy like a house cards, using financial tricks rather rather than relying on real substance to generate wealth. We are effeminate and shallow. We lack discipline and drive, and thus have become morally corrupt.
Past generations of American men would be ashamed of us. Those men carved a civilization out of barren wilderness. They built the best and biggest manufacturing center the world had ever seen. They built roads, bridges, and skyscrapers. They broke the sonic barrier, designed the SR-71 Blackbird with slide rules, and put a man on the moon. America, led by its men, used to be on the cutting edge of everything. We were a land of opportunity, entrepreneurship, and industry.
The hollowing out of American men can be seen in what has happened to our pulpits. Sermons full of conviction and challenge used to ring throughout the land. Now limp-wristed preachers apologize for what Scripture says as they try to explain it away. Preachers used to inspire us to action and transformation; now they coddle us.
America is soft and weak. Yes, we are wealthy. No, we do not have a true global peer or rival. But the trajectory we are on is clear and without a change of course, we will crash and burn. If and when America collapses in on itself, two main questions will be asked, closely related to each other: Why did American pastors so dilute their message that the church became irrelevant? And why did American men let the great nation their forefathers built slide into such mediocrity and vulnerability so quickly?
ADDENDUM: If you told Americans in 1972 that over 50 years later, we would not return a man to the moon, and would have no plans or even way to get back, what would they have said? They’d probably want to know who castrated our nation. They’d wonder why we no longer had men with “the right stuff.” Theyd want to know what happened to men like Yeager and Aldrin. They’d probably think we must have gotten nuked by the Soviets or endured an even greater depression than the 1930s. The idea that we would just lose the will to explore, discover, and conquer new horizons would have been unthinkable to that generation of Americans at that time. Yet, here we are.
ADDENDUM: This was probably the last good ad GM ran, from about 15 years ago – it was patriotic and masculine – and necessarily nostalgic (and watching those pushrods get put in the V8 by hand is pretty cool):
https://youtu.be/y5OwJQsAhDU
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“I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. … The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”
— Thomas Jefferson
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George Washington on immigration and assimilation:
“My opinion with respect to emigration is, that except of useful Mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement. … [By settling together] they retain the Language, habits & principles good or bad which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws:—in a word, soon become one people.”
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Quotes from Joe Rigney’s book on porn, More Than a Battle:
“All sex outside of marriage attempts to gain the feeling of being a man without actually being a man.”
“C. S. Lewis noted that one of the quickest ways to disarm a lust is to turn your attention to the lust itself rather than to lust’s object. Stop looking at the woman and examine yourself and your desires. Try to identify what lie you’re currently believing. Because you can’t lust and think about lust at the same time.”
“Walking by the Spirit is the bridge between our present struggle and the future victory. It’s the path that gets us from frustration to freedom.”
“We live in an age of unprecedented access to sexual sin. Of course, sexual temptation itself is as old as dirt. Debauchery, immorality, and temptation have been around since the fall of man. But they haven’t always been so easy to access.
First-century Christians had to deal with temple prostituition. Victorians faced brothels. But not every person had a brothel in their pocket. Nor did they have to face life-size, crystal clear, photoshopped images of women in lingerie any time they wanted to pick up some milk at Target. Our society’s obsession with sex, coupled with the technologies that make pornography so accessible, means it’s never been more difficult to flee sexual immorality and pursue holiness. The result is that our families, our churches, and our society are being devastated by a pornography epidemic.
But what should we do about this epidemic? How should we address the challenge of pornography and lust in our own day? In my experience, approaches to this struggle can basically be broken down into three categories. Think of these as three lenses for viewing the fight.
- Sexual sin as immorality. This approach accents our culpability and wickedness in pursuing sinful pleasures, as we are willingly led astray by our sinful desires. Our aim in the struggle is to renounce evil desires, repent of shameful actions, and put to death the deeds of the body. The fundamental call is to fight a war against sinful passions.
- Sexual sin as addiction. This approach accents the bodily and enslaving dimension of the struggle, as chemicals and hormones hijack and rewire our brains. Our aim is to unmask the lies of sexual addiction, to seek freedom from destructive patterns, and to break the habits that enslave us. The fundamental call is to struggle for liberation from sin’s mastery.
- Sexual sin as brokenness. This approach accents the deep wounds sexual dysfunction reveals. We pursue short-term sexual pleasure as a way of coping with unmet needs, family dysfunction, trauma, and abuse. Our aim in the struggle is to pursue renewal and transformation by renarrating our stories and repairing the ruins of past pains and sorrows. The fundamental call is to heal the wounds of our sexual brokenness…
Frequently, counselors and pastors will issue warnings about the lenses they view as less important. For example, those who view sexual sin through the lens of brokenness are sometimes wary of emphasizing the evil and shame of sexual immorality, since the increased guilt prevents the individual from pursuing healing for the true causes beneath his or her broken desires. On the other hand, those who see sexual sin fundamentally as immorality worry that emphasizing the addictive element blames the sin on the body and the brain and lessens the responsibility for repentance and sin-killing. For my own part, I think we ought to see significant value in all three lenses. All three can be of enormous help for the struggling sinner. My own tendency is to default to the language of war, violence, and struggle. This is partly because the Bible regularly uses this sort of language (Matt.
5:27–30; Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5) and partly because it’s how I’ve grown accustomed to resisting the pull of sexual temptation in my own life. But, as the title of this book indicates, I am convinced that this is more than a battle, more than a war. Thus, I don’t want to ignore the bodily and addictive element or the role of brokenness, trauma, and pain in fueling sexually immoral desires and behavior. I’ve seen firsthand that the language of war, battle, and violence has a tendency to create the wrong kind of pressure in the fight, often leading to more shame and guilt…
Therefore, in the struggle with sexual immorality, addiction, and brokenness, we must learn to walk by the Spirit, who kills our sin, sets us free, and heals our wounds.”
—
My Grok prompt and the answer: “When men sin sexually, they acting in a soft, weak, effeminate way.” Assess this. Consult work by Rich Lusk, Douglas Wilson, Michael Foster, Joe Rigney, and Bill Smith.
The claim is not that sexual sin is “girly” in some cheap, locker-room sense. It is that male sexual sin is a failure of manliness—a collapse into softness, passivity, luxury, and self-soothing at the exact points God designed a man to be hard, initiating, responsible, and fruitful. That is the shared line running through Rich Lusk, Douglas Wilson, Michael Foster, Joe Rigney, and Bill Smith.
Softness is a biblical category, not a vibe
Paul lists the malakoi—literally “the soft ones”—among those who will not inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9). The word is not a synonym for “gay sex act” alone. It is the same root Jesus uses for the luxurious, delicately dressed men in kings’ houses (Matt. 11:8; Luke 7:25). Ancient usage, Christian and pagan, treated malakos as the opposite of andreios: soft versus manly, indulgent versus self-controlled, the man who will not endure hardship because he is attached to pleasure.
Wilson has pressed this for years: it is a sin to be the soft one, not only to play the soft one in bed. Softness can remain heterosexual. It can “trickle into bed with a girl.” It can be institutionalized as evangelical niceness—“be nice and don’t be mean.” The same letter that condemns the malakoi ends with andrizesthe: act like men, be strong (1 Cor. 16:13). The two belong together.
Lusk makes the same point pastorally: effeminacy is softness in men at the places they are called to be hard—courage, duty, self-restraint. Cowardice in battle is described in Scripture as becoming like women (Isa. 19:16; Jer. 48:41). Softness in the sexual realm is of a piece with that. It is not a private quirk. It keeps a man from the kingdom the same way drunkenness or adultery does.
Foster’s definition is blunt and useful: femininity on a woman is glory; on a man it is a dog meowing. Effeminacy is a man taking a woman’s posture, goals, and manner of life—throwing off masculine duties, delaying maturity, refusing responsibility for others. In the older moral tradition (Aquinas and after), it is also simply lack of discipline: obsession with one’s own comfort.
Male sexuality was designed to do something
God did not give men a sex drive so they could soothe themselves. He gave it as engine for dominion: find a wife, plant a household, fill the earth, take responsibility. Foster and Tennant: a man’s sexual desire and a woman’s sexual desirability are central to the creation mandate. The drive should push a young man toward competency and headship. Satan hates that, so he offers counterfeits.
Wilson’s famous line in Fidelity is the structural point: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Whatever one thinks of the rhetoric, the architecture is the point. Covenant sex is outgoing, costly, productive, and bound to a real woman and real children. Sexual sin reverses the vector. It is incoming, cheap, barren, and bound to the self.
Rigney works the same design from the body outward. The male body is for carrying weight, surveying the land, and planting seed in a fruitful garden. Pornography offends that embodiment: shoulders that should bear a household slump over a screen; eyes that should see potential in God’s world flicker over image after image; the member designed to plant spills seed on the ground. The drives meant to call forth sacrifice and bind a man to wife and children through self-mastery become “avenues for the barren pleasure of self-worship.” Porn is an imaginary harem in which the man is always the perfectly capable hero. It is a mirror for distorted manhood.
That is Onan’s sin with a wifi connection. It is not “too much masculinity.” It is masculinity turned inward and aborted.
What the act actually is
Lusk is the most explicit on the inversion: lust of the heart, which drives pornography, emasculates a man. “It might seem like it’s a masculine thing, but it’s actually the opposite.” His line on the Collars & Calluses episode is the thesis in a sentence: porn is gay, and it will make you gay—not as a cheap slur, but as a claim about trajectory. Deep pornography use trains a man in consumption, novelty, diminishing returns, and eventually in treating bodies (including male bodies) as interchangeable material. It unfits him for marriage. The sexual drive is a friend when aimed at God’s design; when aimed at demonic counterfeits it makes a man unmarriageable.
Notice the pattern across the sins, not just porn:
Porn and masturbation are solitary, passive, risk-free. No woman to please, no child to raise, no household to fund, no rejection to endure. The man receives stimulation and gives nothing that costs him. That is the posture of the kept, not the planter.
- Fornication often looks like conquest and is sold that way. In practice it is frequently the refusal to assume the weight of a covenant—using a woman’s body without becoming her head. Counterfeit masculinity (Wilson’s other ditch) and softness meet here: bluster without responsibility.
- Adultery is the same refusal at a higher price: a man who will not rule his own house, keep his word, or suffer the ordinary difficulties of one real wife.
- The porn-to-bisexuality/trans pipeline Lusk flags is the logical end of treating sex as a consumer good detached from telos. Once the act is about sensation and identity rather than planting and promising, the object becomes negotiable.
Wilson’s distinction still holds: a hard Roman soldier using a slave boy was not “effeminate” by Roman lights, and Scripture still condemns the act. The act need not be girly to be an abomination. But the commonmodern male pattern—hidden, compulsive, screen-mediated, shame-soaked, responsibility-avoiding—is precisely softness. It is the man who will not suffer the loss of a pleasure in order to do the arduous thing. That is Aquinas’s effeminacy, and it is Lusk’s and Foster’s as well.
Adam already showed the type
Lusk has argued that the original sin, from one angle, was effeminacy. Adam was told to guard the garden. He stood by, failed to fight the serpent, and then obeyed his wife’s voice rather than God’s. He became, in Lusk’s phrase, a cuck: the man who will not go to war for his bride. “He was effeminate when he should have exhibited manly courage. He fell because he submitted to his wife rather than leading her.” Those fallen tendencies in men run straight back to Genesis 3. Sexual passivity and domestic passivity are cousins.
Smith’s “Letters to Young Men” sits in the same stream: the church and the culture have reshaped masculinity into a feminine image; men have been emasculated not only by the world but by “servant leadership” talk that turns the head into the helper. Taking up the masculine mission is not optional if households and churches are to stand. Sexual self-rule is part of that mission, not a side quest.
Rigney’s definition of masculinity is the positive: “the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.” Sexual sin is the glad assumption of sacrificial irresponsibility. It is using the gift that was meant to make you a father to make you a consumer.
Why it feels masculine and isn’t
The culture sells male sexual sin as virility: notches, testosterone, “men have needs.” Foster’s point about the church effeminate is that the church often answers that lie with the opposite lie: your body and its urges are the problem; spirituality means becoming an androgynous spirit. Both are false. The drive is good. The undisciplined drive is not manly; it is the mark of a boy who will not become a patriarch.
A man hunched in the dark, bargaining with a dopamine loop, hiding from his wife or from the work of finding one, is not “being a guy.” He is being soft. He has chosen the king’s silk over John’s camel hair. He has chosen the pleasure he will not postpone. That is why these writers keep pairing sexual sin with luxury, cowardice, delayed adulthood, and feminized churches. They are the same vice in different rooms.
The argument is not that every lustful thought makes a man a malakos in the full Pauline sense, any more than every angry thought makes him a murderer. It is that the practice of sexual sin—especially the dominant modern practice—is training in softness. It unmans a man at the point of his strength: self-mastery in the service of a real household under God.
The remedy these men preach is the same as Paul’s: wash, sanctify, justify—and then andrizesthe. Act like men. Be strong. Plant something that lives.
—
I asked Grok to summarize my blog on masculinity, effeminacy, and sexual sin (I thought this was ok, not great, and it’s misleading at a few points):
“Sex is for covenant, not consumption
Paul’s rule in 1 Corinthians 7 is the center of the marriage essay: each spouse owes the other sexual availability. Consent to the marriage is consent to the bed. Refusal is deprivation—Paul’s language is debt, authority, fraud. Abstinence is the thing that requires mutual consent, not sex. A sexless or starved marriage is sinful and leaves a spouse exposed to Satan. 
That is the opposite of the culture’s story. Fornication and porn treat sex as a consumer good. Marriage treats it as covenant renewal, protection against temptation, and the one-flesh bond. The blog’s pastoral point is blunt: God wants a lot of sex in marriage and none outside it. Satan wants the reverse.
Male desire is good when it is aimed
The red-pill essay refuses the church’s common lie that “godliness is automatically sexy.” Young men watch pretty women chase men who are not godly, and then get told their frustration is a character defect. Lusk’s correction: the drive to win a woman’s heart, loyalty, and sexual responsiveness is part of manhood. The problem is not the drive. The problem is aiming it at fornication, pixels, or a marriage in which the man never becomes the kind of man a woman actually responds to. 
So the blog does not treat lust as “too much masculinity.” It treats undisciplined lust as a man who will not do the hard thing: become competent, take a mission, risk rejection, and then keep a covenant with one real woman.
Softness is the real sexual vice
The masculinity thread on the site is consistent with Lusk’s other writing: men without mission are emasculated; men without mission are effeminate. Sexual sin is one of the main ways a man absconds from mission. Porn and fornication look like conquest and feel like strength. They are actually escape from performance, risk, and responsibility. You do not have to become attractive, keep a household, please a wife, or face a father. You consume. That is softness. 
The 1 Corinthians 7 piece adds the married version of the same vice. A husband who turns to porn because his wife is cold is still without excuse—but a marriage that trains him in frustration and secrecy is training him in weakness. The biblical alternative is not niceness. It is a husband who leads, a wife who does not defraud him, and a bed that actually does the work Paul said it would do.
Nature will not be negotiated
The red-pill post’s governing claim is creational, not manosphere: men and women remain what they have always been. Egalitarianism plus technology tried to overwrite that and produced a disaster. Men fight physically and build; women fight psychologically and nurture. Men are mission-oriented; women are not team players in the same way. Ignore those differences and you get androgyny, mixed signals about chivalry, and young men who have no map. The “folk wisdom” is useful only when baptized: use what is true about intersexual dynamics to build households, not harems. 
The church failed men here
Lusk says the church has often shamed men or given counsel that does not work, then acted shocked when they went to Rollo or Peterson. The blog’s project is to steal the true bits—make your bed as dominion, take responsibility, understand attraction—and put them under Scripture. Pastors must speak the unsayable sexual truths. “Happy wife, happy life” as a leadership strategy is named as part of the problem in the later notes: it turns the head into the helper and rewards softness. 
Practical shape of the ethic
Across the two essays the pattern is:
- Before marriage: do not fornicate. Become the kind of man who can win and keep a wife. Sexual energy belongs to a future household, not to a feed.
- In marriage: frequent, mutual, obligatory sex. Cultivate desire; do not veto it. Sexual refusal is sin. Porn and adultery remain inexcusable even if the marriage bed is cold.
- For pastors: stop driving men away with feminized piety and start telling the truth about bodies, polarity, and duty.
That is the blog’s through-line: sexual sin is not virility. It is a man declining the weight God put on him—planting, promising, protecting—and choosing the easy pleasure instead.”
I asked Grok to do a deeper dive into my blog on these topics:
“The TPC Pastor’s Page is not a systematic treatise. It is Lusk’s working notebook: two long 2020 essays that still function as the spine, wedding homilies that apply the same anthropology, and later X-note dumps that sharpen the edge. Taken together, the teaching on sexual sin and masculinity is consistent.
The governing anthropology
Men and women are not interchangeable. Polarity drives attraction: men want the feminine, women want the masculine. Androgyny, porn, and premarital sex wreck pair-bonding and leave a generation almost unable to form households. Attraction is tied to the creation mandate—what each sex needs from the other in order to be fruitful and take dominion. “Godliness is not particularly sexy. Sexiness is sexy. Masculinity is sexy to women. Femininity is sexy to men.” 
The man is the head before he is a husband. Mission comes first; the woman is never the mission. A man who turns inward and makes domestic life his whole project becomes either a petty tyrant or a weak simp. Two weaker vessels make a weak marriage. “Frame” is just the secular word for headship. Women were designed to respond to strong masculine leadership; the wives who complain most about submission are usually married to the weakest men. 
“Happy wife, happy life” is rejected as de facto matriarchy. A man who placates rather than leads will not make his wife happy. The common evangelical “servant-leadership” model is called garbage: a 1980s business slogan that empties headship of rule. Chrysostom is quoted to keep the other side: the husband must love even when he is not respected, suffer anything for her, and never disgrace her. Duty is not optional for either spouse. 
Sexual sin as unmanning
Male sexual sin is not surplus masculinity. It is softness.
Porn and fornication look like conquest. They are actually the refusal of risk, competence, and covenant. They destroy the ability to pair-bond. They train a man to consume rather than plant. They give him an imaginary harem in which he is always the hero and never the husband. Husbands who lack masculinity in the bedroom find the marriage bed grows cold. Young men with porn-formed expectations and women who objectify themselves while fearing real sex are the fruit. 
Satan’s program is a lot of sex before marriage and none in it. God’s is the reverse. Premarital sex is simply sin. Same-sex attraction is not a neutral orientation to be affirmed; it is a “vile passion” (Rom. 1:26). The inclination to sin is itself sin; coddling it (Revoice-style) backfires. Marriage can discipline lust—not by calling desire for one’s wife “objectification,” but by focusing desire on the one lawful body and actually having sex with her. 
The marriage bed as duty, not veto
The 1 Corinthians 7 essay is the most developed sexual-ethics piece on the site. When you marry, you settle the question of sexual consent. Each spouse has authority over the other’s body. Sexual refusal is deprivation—Paul’s words are debt, authority, fraud. A sexless or starved marriage is sinful and paints a target on the deprived spouse for Satan. Exceptions exist (illness, agreed prayer). The default is: whenever either wants sex, they have it. 
Desire cannot be negotiated, but it can be cultivated. Feminism teaches a wife not to do anything for a man’s pleasure. Scripture teaches the opposite. None of this excuses the husband’s porn or adultery if she refuses. He is still guilty. She is complicit if she could have protected him and would not.
Puritan material in the May notes reinforces this against the older Latin suspicion that even marital sex is barely clean. Marital love must be sexual. Sex is due debt, paid with affection, a gift, a reflection of Christ and the church—not a necessary evil. 
Headship in the flesh: the wedding homilies
Wedding Homily #7 (Psalm 128) is the applied version. The husband is king of a household; the crown is heavy. He is protector, provider, leader, the man accountable for the name the house bears. The wife is the fruitful vine in the heart of the house—oriented to the home as life-giver and nurturer, cooperating with his leadership, adding glory he would otherwise lack. Together they fulfill the creation mandate. Fruitfulness includes children as a means of enlarging the church. Love her as Christ loves the church; honor him as the church honors Christ. That is gendered piety, not interchangeable roles with a Bible verse taped on. 
Culture diagnosis
The later notes are hotter and more occasional, but they fit the same frame:
- Collapsing marriage and birth rates mean a society is obeying Satan’s anti-creation mandate.
- Hypergamy plus female economic independence prices ordinary men out of marriage. Marriage becomes a luxury good for the top slice of men.
- Wokeness is the feminization of public life.
- Women without male headship tend, in Lusk’s generalization, toward toxic empathy, rejection of motherhood, and political radicalism.
- Porn has rewritten what young people think sex is.
- Evangelical niceness is not virtue. Cowards will not turn back anything.
- Young men need mission, structure, and fathers. Tate and Fuentes fail them. Charlie Kirk’s value, in Lusk’s contrast, was a recipe for life rather than a grievance feed.
- Be a good man who is good at being a man. Be the kind of man other men can follow.
What the blog wants from pastors
The red-pill essay ends with a plea, not a book list. The manosphere became a surrogate father because churches shamed men or gave counsel that does not work (“godliness is sexy,” “happy wife happy life,” servant-leadership as abdication). Pastors should know what young men are actually reading, steal the true folk wisdom, and baptize it: polarity, frame, mission, sexual duty, creational difference. Unstable men who want tips on fornication should not be sent to Rollo. Mature men who were never taught how male-female dynamics work can be. “Our young men are hung out to dry.”
The through-line
On this blog, sexual sin in men is treated as a failure of office. The office is head, planter, protector, covenant-keeper. Porn, fornication, and adultery are the man choosing the cheap pleasure over the costly good. Softness is the vice: attachment to comfort, refusal of hardship, consumption instead of dominion. The positive is not machismo and not niceness. It is a man with a mission in the world, a wife who is not the mission but the helper, a bed that is busy because Paul said so, and children who look like olive plants around a table where a man is actually leading.
—
Dvorstone on why women so rarely are able to lead, tend to be bossy tyrants when they try:
“This is the central error of why most women struggle as leaders. They genuinely think that “bossiness” is analogous to leadership.
They don’t consider something:
- You tell someone what to do… but then they don’t do it. Now what?
- The referenced category of women have to appeal to a higher authority. It could be “your father” or the state or their boss, but they have to be backed up by some greater authority.
- They’re mistaking “leader” with “power to compel.” This is why “power” is so central to feminist theory.
- Leadership isn’t about having power enough to compel people. It’s about inspiring them to act. The reason the term is “leader” is because you’re out in front. The leader is the one who’s accountable, i.e., the person who puts their head in the noose to suffer the consequences of the failures of the group, and who gives rewards to them for their achievements. That’s who inspires a people.
- The fundamental reason that women struggle to be effective leaders (though they can be tyrants or “bosses”) is because they’re neurological wired to be risk-averse and leadership is affirmed through the adoption of personal risk. The man who puts his reputation, money, or life on the line inspires men to do the same. Women are very disinclined to do this, which is correct for them. Unfortunately, the byproduct is that it makes them poor leaders.
- Tyranny is feminine because tyrants are extremely risk-averse. Democracy is feminine because it’s consensus-driven and the voters are usually distant from consequences. Neither of those forms of government reliably produce leaders in the way that a monarchy does because the monarch embodies the state. He is the target. He rides into battle with his men. He is accountable in the purest sense.
- Leadership isn’t exclusive to men BUT it is masculine in nature. Teaching women to be leaders is comparable to teaching them to be disagreeable. It runs afoul of their nature, on average.”
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“Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun
Which is my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive those sins, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done thou has not done,
For, I have more.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I have won
Others to sin? And, made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in a score?
When Thou has done, Thou has not done,
For, I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by Thyself, that at my death
Thy Son Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou has done,
I fear no more.”
— John Donne
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“The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.”
— Thomas Sowell
—
The biggest problem with the left is not merely that it wants to socialize the economy but that it wants to socialize responsibility. It wants to make society responsible for the bad choices of the individual. Individuals will be insulated from the consequences of their bad decisions; society as a whole will bear the cost — and so inevitably people will make a lot more bad decisions.
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“Evangelicalism has a Zionism problem, Roman Catholicism has a globalism problem.”
— Joel Webbon
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The claim that based, masculine young men are flocking to Roman Catholicism makes no sense. If you are Roman Catholic, the pope is your ultimate pastor. Why would any masculine young man put himself under the spiritual headship of a Chicago Democrat who favors Marxist economics, open borders, and cannot bring himself to condemn sodomy in plain language?
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“The effect on the mind of the people of the visible and dramatic withdrawal of the Church from the affairs of the nation…of the Church’s abandonment of all those who are not by their wholehearted profession within the fold—this is incalculable.”
— T. S. Eliot
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“Perhaps the greatest dilemma in the attempts to raise ethnic minority income is that those methods which have historically proved successful— self-reliance, work skills, education, business experience—are all slow developing, while those methods which are more direct and immediate-job quotas, charity, subsidies, preferential treatment—tend to undermine self-reliance and pride of achievement in the long run. If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes—and particularly attitudes of self-reliance.”
— Thomas Sowell
This quotation from “Race and Economics” was life-changing for Clarence Thomas. It articulated a position that Clarence was already moving towards, though he was not yet ready to be outspoken about it. Clarence realized that instead of blaming whites, blacks would have to take ownership of their problems and poverty. The pathway forward for blacks was not welfare, affirmative action, or busing; it was a work ethic, self-reliance, and personal responsibility.
—
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… All this was changed by the impact of the Great War… The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time.”
— A. J. P. Taylor, on war and the rise of statism
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Keil and Delitzsch on Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11:
“In the expression, “he took her, and she came to him,” there is no intimation whatever that David brought Bathsheba into his palace through craft or violence, but rather that she came at his request without any hesitation, and offered no resistance to his desires. Consequently Bathsheba is not to be regarded as free from blame. The very act of bathing in the uncovered court of a house in the heart of the city, into which it was possible for any one to look down from the roofs of the houses on higher ground, does not say much for her feminine modesty, even if it was not done with an ulterior purpose, as some commentators suppose.”
—
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
—
Our flesh tricks us into thinking the consequences of confessing sin will be greater than the consequences of concealing our sin. This is the opposite of the truth.
—
“Like a good chess player, [Satan] is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.”
— C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
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“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain.”
— Dolly Parton
Scott Yenor with a great appreciation of Dolly Parton here: https://www.compactmag.com/r/586eb726?m=4cba3773-3e15-44a9-9115-f2a20abcc6de
Ken Ham with a sobering spiritual assessment of Dolly:
https://youtu.be/ogd8T528xuk?is=xChuo5RJ3E5svSLv
Megan Basham balances the scales here, with an honest assessment of Dolly’s apolitical legacy. The only caveat that I would add is that while Dolly’s desire to be neutral is understandable since she was an entertainer and grew up in a more sane era, when absolutely everything has been politicized, neutrality on cultural and political topics is impossible:
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“Be sure that you care less about death than about shame.”
— Geoffroi de Charny
—
Good summary of Paul Gottfried’s work:
Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, intellectual historian, and writer. He is best known for coining the term “paleoconservative” (with Thomas Fleming in 1986) and helping introduce “alternative right” (with Richard Spencer in 2008). He has long criticized mainstream “movement conservatism,” neoconservatism, and the managerial/therapeutic state. 
Born in the Bronx to a Jewish family whose father (a furrier from Budapest) fled Hungary after the 1934 political violence, Gottfried grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He earned a BA from Yeshiva University and an MS and PhD from Yale (his dissertation examined Catholic Romanticism in Munich). He taught at several institutions and long held the Horace Raffensperger Professorship of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of Chronicles magazine, an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, and founder of the H.L. Mencken Club. 
Core Principles and Themes
Gottfried’s thought is historicist rather than abstractly ideological. He stresses that political ideas and institutions arise from concrete historical peoples, cultures, and circumstances rather than universal principles. Key themes include:
- Critique of the managerial / therapeutic state: Classical 19th-century liberalism (limited government, bourgeois morals, protection of civil society) has been replaced by a soft, administrative regime that engineers social outcomes, enforces egalitarian norms, and manages populations through welfare, education, and cultural regulation. This “therapeutic” order pathologizes traditional identities and dissent.
- Particularity vs. universalism / equality: The right properly affirms hierarchy, inherited culture, national and ethnic particularity, and limits on equality as an organizing principle. The left prioritizes homogenization and the equalization of groups. Inequality is treated as natural rather than a problem requiring permanent state correction.
- Rejection of neoconservatism and “movement conservatism”: He sees postwar American conservatism as having been captured by universalist, interventionist, and value-exporting tendencies (often associated with neoconservatives) that abandoned the older American right’s skepticism of empire, mass democracy, and centralized power.
- Post-Marxist Left and the politics of guilt: Marxism largely collapsed as an economic doctrine; the contemporary left is cultural, focused on identity, victimhood, and perpetual moral crusades against traditional Western (especially white Christian) norms. Multiculturalism functions as a secular theocracy enforcing guilt and self-abasement.
- Skepticism of mass democracy and foreign adventurism: He favors decentralized authority, cultural continuity, non-interventionism, and realistic limits on what politics can achieve.
- Historicist recovery of the Old Right: He seeks to recover pre-WWII American conservative traditions against both progressive liberalism and the fusionist/neoconservative synthesis.
He has described himself as a right-wing pluralist or reactionary critic of the Republican Party and mainstream conservatism. Critics (including the SPLC) have labeled him far-right or associated him with white nationalism; he has rejected those characterizations.
Major Works
Gottfried has published more than a dozen books. Especially important are: - Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979) — early historical study.
- The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986) — critique of the postwar right’s philosophical foundations.
- The Conservative Movement (with Thomas Fleming, 1988/1992) — early statement of paleoconservative distinctiveness.
- The “Marxism trilogy” / managerial-state sequence:
• After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (1999/2001) — argues classical liberalism was displaced by the administrative state.
• Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (2002) — links multicultural ideology, residual liberal Protestant guilt, and state power.
• The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (2005) — charts the left’s shift from economic to cultural politics. - Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (2007).
- Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (2009) — memoir.
- Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement (2012).
- Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2015/2016) — historical and semantic analysis arguing the term is now used indiscriminately as a smear.
- Later collections and works such as Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021), The Vanishing Tradition, and The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays from 1984–2024.
He has also written extensively on Carl Schmitt, Romanticism, and the history of political ideas.
In short, Gottfried is a consistent critic of both progressive egalitarianism and the establishment right that, in his view, accommodated or enabled the rise of the managerial-therapeutic order. His work combines intellectual history, political theory, and polemical analysis aimed at recovering a more historically grounded, particularist conservatism.
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“We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”
— C. S. Lewis, noting that hell is full of people who think of themselves as victims
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“If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.”
— Gresham Machen
—
“But what miserable makeshifts all such measures, even at the best, are! Underlying them is the notion that religion embraces only one particular part of human life. Let the public schools take care of the rest of life — such seems to be the notion — and one or two hours during the week will be sufficient to fill the gap which they leave. But as a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life. Without Christ he was dead in trespasses and sins, but he has now been made alive by the Spirit of God; he was formerly alien from the household of God, but has now been made a member of God’s covenant people. Can this new relationship to God be regarded as concerning only one part, and apparently a small part, of his life? No, it concerns all his life; and everything that he does he should do now as a child of God.
It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life — those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.”
— Gresham Machen, 1933
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“Always there have been tyrants in the world; almost always tyranny has begun by being superficially beneficent, and always it has ended by being both superficially and radically cruel. But while tyranny itself is nothing new, the technique of tyranny has been enormously improved in our day; the tyranny of the scientific expert is the most crushing tyranny of all. That tyranny is being exercised most effectively in the field of education. A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword.”
—J. Gresham Machen
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“The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations but also all of human thought.”
— J. Gresham Machen
—
“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.”
— Gresham Machen on the need for Christian education
—
“During the last thirty years there has been a tremendous defection from the Christian Church …
What is the cause of this tremendous defection? For my part, I have little hesitation in saying that it lies chiefly in the intellectual sphere. Men do not accept Christianity because they can no longer be convinced that Christianity is true. It may be useful, but is it true? Other explanations, of course, are given. The modern defection from the Church is explained by the practical materialism of the age. Men are so much engrossed in making money that they have no time for spiritual things. That explanation has a certain range of validity. But its range is limited. It applies perhaps to the boomtowns of the West, where men are intoxicated by sudden possibilities of boundless wealth. But the defection from Christianity is far broader than that. It is felt in the settled countries of Europe even more strongly than in America. It is felt among the poor just as strongly as among the rich. Finally, it is felt most strongly of all in the universities, and that is only one indication more that the true cause of the defection is intellectual. To a very large extent, the students of our great Eastern universities—and still more the universities of Europe—are not Christians. And they are not Christians often just because they are students. The thought of the day, as it makes itself most strongly felt in the universities, is profoundly opposed to Christianity, or at least it is out of connection with Christianity.
…I do not mean that most men reject Christianity consciously on account of intellectual difficulties. On the contrary, rejection of Christianity is due in the vast majority of cases simply to indifference. Only a few men have given the subject real attention. The vast majority of those who reject the gospel do so simply because they know nothing about it. But whence comes this indifference? It is due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living. The modern world is dominated by ideas which ignore the gospel. But it is out of all connection with it. It not only prevents the acceptance of Christianity. It prevents Christianity even from getting a hearing.”
— J. Gresham Machen
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“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.”
— Gresham Machen
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“When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are—their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudoscientific fads of experimental psychology—one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system.”
— J. Gresham Machen
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Is Christian faith a doctrine or a life? Both, of course! But I like the way William B. Evans parses it out here:
“In my conservative Reformed circles, Christianity was viewed primarily as a matter of right doctrine or orthodoxy rather than the life of Christ implanted and growing in the Christian individually and in the church corporately. Reference is often made to fundamentalist stalwart J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, where he stoutly insisted that Christianity is a “doctrine” rather than a “life.” In context, Machen had a point—when the neo-Kantian liberals of his day spoke of Christianity as a “life,” they had in mind a vague sort of ethical community! But these matters had been discussed extensively and more fruitfully some seventy years earlier when Charles Hodge and John W. Nevin debated a similar set of issues. Hodge, not surprisingly, argued for the priority of doctrine. By contrast, John Nevin rightly maintained that if Christian identity is, as the Reformed tradition has historically insisted, a matter of union with Christ, or being “in Christ,” then Christianity must be a “life,” and doctrine is a secondary, albeit vitally important, matter. I’ve sadly come to realize that an excessive focus on doctrine as opposed to life leads all too often to a preoccupation with the rational, to the intellectual arrogance that often goes with it, and to innumerable sectarian splits over fine points of doctrine as nearly any difference can become a “go to the mat issue.” Furthermore, the focus on the forensic has meant that the conservative Reformed tradition has further tended to split over praxis issues. In other words, a sectarian spirit seems to be hardwired into the conservative Reformed tradition! Seeing this, I came to understand better John W. Nevin’s nineteenth-century frustration at the Presbyterian situation of his own day…”
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“When, according to Christian belief, lost souls are saved, the saved ones become united in the Christian Church…true Christians must everywhere be united in the brotherhood of the Christian Church.”
— J. Gresham Machen
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Why feminism leads to misery and hatred of motherhood:
“This self-centered foundation [of feminism] can be seen in the way the movement champions certain causes. Take the pro-choice slogan: “my body, my choice.” No one, not even one’s own child, comes before the mother’s choice. Feminism shifted the goal from expanding women’s opportunities to participate in society to celebrating personal autonomy and individual choice despite the consequences.
Motherhood is the ultimate challenge to one’s autonomy. Pregnancy requires the sacrifice of your body to grow and nourish a baby. Every stage of motherhood requires a sacrifice of some kind: time, energy, money, and resources. The sacrifice of motherhood poses a challenge to the foundation of a self-centered ideology. The implicit requirement of this worldview is that the individual comes first. Their freedom supersedes any sort of duty or obligation to society at large. There are no duties for a modern feminist woman outside of making her own choices, since personal autonomy is the name of the game.
The only rationale a feminist needs to provide for her choices is “because it was best for me.” This answer will typically earn the praises of progressive feminists, who very rarely hold women to any sort of universal standard. For them, freedom is equal to the ability to choose. Choice, however, is not a moral standard on its own. People make all sorts of choices: generosity or selfishness, courage or cowardice, good or evil. The mere action of choosing does not entail that a moral choice has been made. Modern feminism treats choice and freedoms as ends in themselves, regardless of what has been chosen. If autonomy is the highest virtue, sacrifice and duty toward others look a lot like oppression…
The value of the child simply boils down to whether the mother chooses to want him or her. The child’s worth is no longer rooted in what the child is, but instead in the circumstances around the mother’s choice.
This society has lost the value of suffering, so any choice that involves less suffering tends to be the better one in the eyes of a progressive. Women who have been propagandized about the realities of motherhood avoid it altogether, and when they do choose it, these feminists seem to center their own well-being over their children’s. There exists an attitude among modern feminist mothers that their happiness is the most important aspect of parenthood. This leads to women seeing sacrifices like breastfeeding as unnecessary or too burdensome. They often cite using formula before even attempting to breastfeed, with the simple reasoning that they “don’t want to,” despite endless research that speaks to the benefits of breastfeeding for both mom and baby.
We’ve pushed women to deny their most basic maternal instincts in exchange for lifestyle maintenance. Many mothers will choose to dismantle their family structure in the name of self-actualization, with 70% of divorces initiated by women in the United States. This number rises to 90% when you look at only college-educated women. The number one reason for seeking divorce: irreconcilable differences. Women cite emotional dissatisfaction over anything else when it comes to reasons for divorce. Time magazine claims that “men and women experience marriage differently,” implying that women are suffering more in marriages than men, which would explain women initiating divorce more. Though perhaps women don’t see marriage and raising children as a duty or a moral good; they instead see it as a burden. The culture feminists have created emphasizes self-fulfillment, making endurance through hardship seem irrational. Progressives have transformed the idea of marriage and family into something that remains valuable only as long as it provides individual satisfaction…
This self-centered mindset around parenthood has created a generation of mothers who see choosing to put themselves first as just as good as choosing to put their children first. And in a world where choice is all that matters, how could that be wrong? The question a mother should ask is not “What do I want?” because true motherhood begins with the understanding that another person’s needs now matter more than her own desires. The tragedy of feminism is that it failed to teach women that the best choices often are the ones made for others, especially for our own children.”
— Evie Magazine
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“No man is free who cannot command himself.”
— Pythagoras
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“The children of God must not think it strange to be put to wrestling, striving, and fighting for a promised kingdom, before they be settled in possession, as David was; yea, the church of Christ must expect such like exercises.”
— David Dickson
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John Adams on universal suffrage:
“It is certain in Theory, that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People. But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle? Shall We Say, that every Individual of the Community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly to every Act of Legislation? No, you will Say. This is impossible. How then does the Right arise in the Majority to govern the Minority, against their Will? Whence arises the Right of the Men to govern Women, without their Consent? Whence the Right of the old to bind the Young, without theirs.
But let us first Suppose, that the whole Community of every Age, Rank, Sex, and Condition, has a Right to vote. This Community, is assembled—a Motion is made and carried by a Majority of one Voice. The Minority will not agree to this. Whence arises the Right of the Majority to govern, and the Obligation of the Minority to obey? from Necessity, you will Say, because there can be no other Rule. But why exclude Women?3 You will Say, because their Delicacy renders them unfit for Practice and Experience, in the great Business of Life, and the hardy Enterprizes of War, as well as the arduous Cares of State. Besides, their attention is So much engaged with the necessary Nurture of their Children, that Nature has made them fittest for domestic Cares. And Children have not Judgment or Will of their own. True. But will not these Reasons apply to others? Is it not equally true, that Men in general in every Society, who are wholly destitute of Property, are also too little acquainted with public Affairs to form a Right Judgment, and too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own? If this is a Fact, if you give to every Man, who has no Property, a Vote, will you not make a fine encouraging Provision for Corruption by your fundamental Law? Such is the Frailty of the human Heart, that very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by Some Man of Property, who has attached their Minds to his Interest.
Upon my Word, sir, I have long thought an Army, a Piece of Clock Work and to be governed only by Principles and Maxims, as fixed as any in Mechanicks, and by all that I have read in the History of Mankind, and in Authors, who have Speculated upon Society and Government, I am much inclined to think, a Government must manage a Society in the Same manner; and that this is Machinery too.
Harrington has Shewn that Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks. Nay I believe We may advance one Step farther and affirm that the Ballance of Power in a Society, accompanies the Ballance of Property in Land. The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue, is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates. If the Multitude is possessed of the Ballance of real Estate, the Multitude will have the Ballance of Power, and in that Case the Multitude will take Care of the Liberty, Virtue, and Interest of the Multitude in all Acts of Government…
Your Idea, that those Laws, which affect the Lives and personal Liberty of all, or which inflict corporal Punishment, affect those, who are not qualified to vote, as well as those who are, is just. But, So they do Women, as well as Men, Children as well as Adults. What Reason Should there be, for excluding a Man of Twenty years, Eleven Months and twenty-seven days old, from a Vote when you admit one, who is twenty one? The Reason is, you must fix upon Some Period in Life, when the Understanding and Will of Men in general is fit to be trusted by the Public. Will not the Same Reason justify the State in fixing upon Some certain Quantity of Property, as a Qualification.
The Same Reasoning, which will induce you to admit all Men, who have no Property, to vote, with those who have, for those Laws, which affect the Person will prove that you ought to admit Women and Children: for generally Speaking, Women and Children, have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property: these last being to all Intents and Purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, cloath, and employ them, as Women are upon their Husbands, or Children on their Parents…
Society can be governed only by general Rules. Government cannot accommodate itself to every particular Case, as it happens, nor to the Circumstances of particular Persons. It must establish general, comprehensive Regulations for Cases and Persons. The only Question is, which general Rule, will accommodate most Cases and most Persons.
Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So fruitfull a Source of Controversy and Altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters. There will be no End of it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell. I am &c.”
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0091
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A mediation on Psalm 60:
Psalm 60 is the battlefield prayer that belongs with 2 Samuel 8. The title itself tells us so: David fought Aram-naharaim and Aram-zobah, and Joab returned and struck down twelve thousand Edomites in the Valley of Salt. That is the summary of the wars in 2 Samuel 8 (and the parallel in 1 Chronicles 18). After the covenant of 2 Samuel 7—the promise of rest from enemies, a house, a forever throne—David goes forth conquering and to conquer. The Lord gave him victory wherever he went. Yet the psalm that comes out of those same campaigns begins, “O God, you have rejected us, broken us down; you have been angry; restore us.”
That is no contradiction. It is the difference between the historian’s summary and the soldier’s prayer.
The Felt Reality of Holy War
2 Samuel 8 reads like a royal victory bulletin. Philistia subdued. Moab measured and made tributary. Hadadezer of Zobah smashed at the Euphrates. Damascus garrisoned. Edom put under the yoke. Gold, bronze, and tribute dedicated to the Lord. David administers justice and righteousness. The refrain is twice repeated: “The Lord gave victory to David wherever he went.”
Psalm 60 tells us what it felt like while those victories were being won. The land quakes. There are breaches. The people have been given wine that makes them stagger. God has set up a banner, but it is a banner for those who fear Him to flee to from the bow. The king himself asks, “Who will bring me to the fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom?” Human help is vain. The army does not go out unless God goes with them.
This is how covenant warfare actually works. The promise of rest does not mean the absence of battle; it means God Himself fights for His people in the battle. David is not a pacifist. He is not waiting for a peaceful evolution of the kingdom. He is the Lord’s anointed going forth to take the land God swore to Abraham, to put the surrounding nations under the feet of the son of David. But he knows—and he teaches Israel—that the victory is never from the sword or the horse. “Vain is the salvation of man.” The same chapter that records the hamstringing of chariot horses also records the prayer that God would go forth with the armies.
The title calls this a miktam “for teaching.” David wants the congregation to learn how to fight. Not how to trust in numbers or tactics, but how to cry out when the Lord seems to have withdrawn His favor, and how to hear His own word of triumph over the nations.
God’s Oracle of Possession
The heart of the psalm is the oracle in verses 6–8. God has spoken in His holiness:
“I will exult; I will divide Shechem and portion out the Vale of Succoth.
Gilead is mine; Manasseh is mine;
Ephraim is my helmet; Judah is my scepter.
Moab is my washbasin;
upon Edom I cast my shoe;
over Philistia I shout in triumph.”
This is not David’s boast. It is Yahweh’s claim. The land is His. The tribes are His instruments. The hostile nations are His servants—Moab the washpot, Edom the slave who takes the sandal, Philistia the one who must shout at His victory. The very peoples David is fighting in 2 Samuel 8 are already assigned their place in the divine economy.
David’s wars are therefore not imperial adventurism. They are the outworking of God’s prior word. The king is simply the human agent of the Lord’s conquest. That is why the psalm can move from lament to confidence: “With God we shall do valiantly; it is He who will tread down our foes.”
The Greater David
We read this, of course, as men who know the rest of the story. The son of David who fulfills 2 Samuel 7 is not merely a better general. He is the One who has already gone forth conquering and to conquer. He has bound the strong man. He has spoiled the principalities and powers. He has made a public spectacle of them. The nations are His inheritance. He will rule in the midst of His enemies until every last one is made His footstool.
The church now lives in the overlap. We are not a territorial nation-state with a standing army like David’s. We do not measure Moabites with a line. But we are still the people of the King who goes forth to war. We still face enemies that would shake the land and tear it open. We still know seasons when it feels as if God has rejected us, when the wine makes us stagger, when human help proves worthless. And we still have the same banner and the same promise: God has spoken in His holiness. The nations belong to His Son. Gilead is His. Judah is His scepter. Edom will take the shoe.
So we pray Psalm 60. We teach it to our children. We sing it when the culture quakes and the church feels fractured. We do not trust in horses or in the wisdom of this age. We ask the Lord to go forth with our armies—the armies of Word and sacrament, of households ordered under Christ, of men who will protect their little platoons, of congregations that will not surrender the gospel. And we remember that the King who once struck down eighteen thousand in the Valley of Salt has already won the decisive battle. He will tread down every remaining foe.
O God, restore us. Give salvation by Your right hand. With You we shall do valiantly.
—
Lindsey Clancy strangled her 3 kids to death. Some women are excusing or defending her, which is not surprise since many of them no doubt killed children too. A huge percentage of women have committed infanticide through abortion so it’s not a surprise they would defend a woman who killed her children.
Some of Clancy’s defenders point to hormonal issues as a part of post-partum depression. But if hormones are an excuse for behavior no man should ever be convicted for rape again. It was his testosterone that made him do it.
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The historical context of Jefferson’s line about the “wall of separation between church and state” must be kept in mind – and I don’t just mean the rest of his letter. America was founded by Protestant Christian’s who had fled from statist tyranny and persecution. The point of the first amendment and Jefferson’s line was not to keep the state or public square free from religious influence but to protectvthe church from statist control and interference.
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The biggest existential threat to America is not Iran, China, or Russia. It’s white liberal females.
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Democracy means equal votes for unequal persons. The wise and foolish get the same say in government. The righteous and the wicked have the same say in political matters. The mature and immature are politically indistinguishable.
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God has spoken very clearly about the death penalty for murder. No exceptions, even for so-called “mental illness” or insanity. In cases of murder, the death penalty is mandatory. The mental state of the person who commits murder is irrelevant. We do not need access to someone’s mind or heart to determine guilt or innocence; we only need to ask what they actually did.
Justice requires Lindsey Clancy to be executed. This is not a case of accidental death/manslaughter. All available evidence points to a case of premeditated murder. There is no provision for an in insanity plea in biblical law.
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“This crime has no reference to the criminal or his mentality but only to the nature of the act. If death is the penalty for animals on the principle of life for life, then this is certainly true for men. Thus, on this principle, Biblical law has no plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Neither is there any privileged status before the law for a minor. Murder requires the death penalty whether the offender is an animal, an ‘insane’ man, a child, or a feeble-minded person.” 
— Rushdoony
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Meekness is strength tamed and channeled by the Spirit.
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We already knew feminism is a death cult. But the number of women supporting Lindsey Clancy takes it to a whole new level.
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One of the great mysteries of the immigration debate is how certain classes of immigrants can supposedly make America better but cannot make their own country better.
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I’ve said for many years that SEC football is a soap opera for Southern men. This fall has taken the drama to a whole new level.
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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
–T.S. Eliot
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…”
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
These two quotations have long struck me as an example of “great minds thinking alike.”
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Not every major world event is a psy-op. But many responses to those events ARE psy-ops.
Not every conspiracy theory is true. But enough have been proven true that mainstream narratives no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
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Meekness is strength submitted to Christ. It is power tamed by self-control.
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John Adams, replying to his wife Abigail, in her plea to “remember the ladies”:
“s to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.—This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.
Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. I am sure every good Politician would plot, as long as he would against Despotism, Empire, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Ochlocracy.—A fine Story indeed. I begin to think the Ministry as deep as they are wicked. After stirring up Tories, Landjobbers, Trimmers, Bigots, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholicks, Scotch Renegadoes, at last they have stimulated the to demand new Priviledges and threaten to rebell.”
Abigail was certainly not a “smash the patriarchy” proto-feminist. But her husband’s pushback contains several important things to note.
First, the American Revolution was not an egalitarian revolution like the French Revolution. John Adams had no intention of overthrowing the natural social fabric. To John, it was laughable that women would rebel – and if they did, he expected the men to suppress their rebellion. He even suspects any kind of feminist uprising to be a British plot!
Second, the founders knew better than to give women political power. John acknowledges that women already exerted a kind of power in their natural role. There is no need for them to become “political.” John knew that if women got involved in politics it would be a disaster — the “despotism of the petticoat.”
Finally, while John had no problem telling his wife “no,” he was also amicable and humorous, e.g., calling her “saucy” as he laughs at her proposal. John was a patriarch in his home, but he was most certainly not a tyrant.
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Good description of how feminism both affirms and denies female agency:
https://youtube.com/shorts/BUKAmat98JE?is=Yk91z4NH77fPhttE
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Democratic socialism always ends in bloodshed, starvation, and tyranny.
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Progressives want to set up their own kind of theocracy:
https://youtube.com/shorts/M4qccnFTRs8?is=Y39zzQ9DoQdCkais
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We are much better at asking God for things than we are at thanking him when he gives those things.
Of course, we also need to thank God when we doesn’t give what we are asking for.
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For great men (like George Washington), failure was never the end, but the beginning.
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Every society is some kind of theocracy – either a Christocracy or a demoncracy.
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If you are not courageous in little things, you will not be courageous in big things.
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The movie “Young Washington” uses a line that sums up what America’s founding was all about: Even a pawn can take a king. That’s exactly what happened. George Washington, the pawn, checkmated King George.
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“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
— Teddy Roosevelt
I’d like to know how far Teddy pushed against discrimination against creed here. Or to put it another, there are some creeds/religions people hold to that make it virtually impossible for them to assimilate to the American way of life.
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“We’re raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. You have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues.
They’re not being taught that it’s important to know what you’re talking about—it’s important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important, to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something and they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.”
— Thomas Sowell
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Lynyrd Skynyrd was right about Watergate. While Watergate was tragic, it pales in comparison to numerous political scandals since then, even though those perpetuating more recent scandals have not been held accountable. The significance of Watergate is not the magnitude of the crime but the fact that it was one of the last times that powerful members of the political class were held accountable.
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Whatever the curse of Ham was all about, Jesus bore it on the cross. Post-70AD, the only curse remains is the curse of Adam on unbelievers. The curse of Ham, like the curses of the Mosaic covenant on old covenant Israel, have expired. The curse of Ham plays no role in the mission of the church, eg, the Ethiopian eunuch is saved the same way as other Gentiles.
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If the curse of Ham is a curse on black people today, isn’t the most loving thing we can do is for whites to intermarry with blacks to dilute that curse?
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Society is collapsing because we simply cannot tell women “no,” no matter how destructive their choices. We cannot hold women accountable for their bad choices no matter how radicalized they get.
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“I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.
But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.”
— Javier Milei
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On the post-war consensus:
People will look at wokeness, rising Marxism/collectivism, etc. in America and say, “That’s not what the soldiers in WW2 fought for.” And that’s exactly right. A great proof of this is the Battle of Athens in Athens, TN.
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This is sickening:
“There are more hindus in America than there are members of ALL Presbyterian and Reformed denominations in America.”
— Rick Appleton
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“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise….
For whether to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate — who could number all these masts of the human heart, namely, the emotions, inclinations, and affections that impel men to evil or good? — what more effective means than music could you find?”
— Martin Luther
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Muslims have a plan to make America Islamic. Marxists have a plan to make America communist. Why don’t Christians have a plan to make America Christian?
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“What time is it? This is one of the most important questions to answer correctly. There’s a season for everything. Too many people want a single approach that’s good for all times and all places. But having timeless principles doesn’t mean having one go-to strategy or action in every situation.
America is in a liminal space, where the old is increasingly decaying but the new has not yet been fully formed. While there is still tremendous uncertainty, now is the time to build for the future….Back in the 2010s, forces that rendered many of our political and institutional arrangements increasingly unfit for purpose were already at work….
A period of disrupting legacy beliefs, approaches, political views, and institutions was necessary to make room for those seeking to address the pressing new realities of the 21st century.
However, disruption itself cannot be the goal. And many of the disruptors were unsuited to building new institutions to address the problems they highlighted. It is one thing to read a manosphere blog to learn the truth about attraction that your parents, pastors, or teachers never told you. It is quite another to build a society on the morals of Andrew Tate. Questioning authority has led all too many influencers to become purveyors of conspiracy theories.”
— Aaron Renn
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“One of the most important cultural
battlefields of the last century in the United States is education. It is hard to imagine that the steep decline of Christian faith over the
last 60 years in our country is not deeply connected to the secularism of government schools and higher education. Christians have largely sent their covenant children to be discipled and indoctrinated in these
schools, and the results have been disastrous. These children spend 30 hours per week for 13 years of their childhood in classrooms where God is not allowed to be mentioned, and the Bible is not allowed to be read. They are systematically trained: you don’t need God or the Bible to understand the world or to know how to live in it.
Our spiritual strategy for growing the kingdom must include getting our kids out of these schools.
Because of the divisive nature of this topic, many pastors chose to ignore it completely. They don’t want to alienate public school families, or make schooling a barrier to feeling welcomed into the
community. This is certainly a difficult challenge. I sympathize that pastors should offer whatever love they can to welcome families and kids
who are in government schools. But the solution can’t be to ignore the issue or say nothing about it. In fact, often the kids who are in these
schools know how hostile they are to their faith. They are not offended when these realities are mentioned in the church.”
— Nate Walker, on the necessity of Christian education
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Will you be a victim or a victor?
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“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
— Winston Churchill
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If you are a Christian, you have the third person of the Trinity residing inside of you. Think about that. Find comfort in it.
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“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler
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“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. “
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune,
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Trials forge bonds. Trial bonding is real. When a people suffer together faithfully, they are drawn closer to God and one another.
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On Boomers, social security, and Medicare – the main problem is that the Baby Boomers had a baby contraction so there are not enough younger workers paying into the system. Too much wealth is transferred from struggling young people to wealthy older people. Clayton Wood explains in his latest series:
https://claytonswood.substack.com/p/boomers-you-are-my-only-hope
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“I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action – in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then practicing it.”
— Teddy Roosevelt
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“If we were to add abortions to the female homicide statistic…
Women would account for roughly 98.5% of the deaths, versus 1.5% attributed to men.”
— Taylor Rae Jones
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This is an issue I’ve harped on for years now — the radicalization of young women:
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The myth of female moral superiority:
“Our society, including a lot of Christians, tends to think of women as the more noble and good sex. This is not true.
You run head first into reality when you start noticing how many women are cheering the ability to murder babies up until birth. In the last century, women have killed more people through abortion (over 1 billion) than men have in all the wars in that period (about 110 million). You might also notice how many women go nuts and murder their born kids these days. In fact, women are more likely to abuse children than men are. Women are more neurotic than men and often let their emotions guide them into wicked behaviors.
It was once true that most women avoided premarital sex (largely out of self-preservation) and it was the men who were seen as the enticers while women were the gatekeepers who held on to virtue. These days, the women are often more promiscuous than the men and they’re often the aggressors in sexual interactions.
Men tend to be more dangerously aggressive, but women can also be very aggressive. Their smaller size and lesser strength just makes them less likely to cause serious harm, especially in fights between a man and woman. When a woman abuses her husband or boyfriend, it is less likely to put him in the hospital, but that’s not a lesser moral crime on her part.
Women in our culture are usually held less responsible than men and often get lesser criminal penalties for similar crimes. The lower standards of responsibility for women also lead to women being less likely to fulfill their marital vows, with about 70% of divorces inititated by women, the majority of which are not for abuse or infidelity by the man. Women can also count on the courts being stacked against men, taking the children away from their father and paying them in child support and alimony when they choose to leave the marriage for frivolous reason. In addition, society will often defend and encourage her for breaking up her family while men doing the same thing are condemned.
The transgender contagion among children is mostly fueled by mothers and also by female teachers. Women perpetuate this confusion in children because they get social points for being inclusive and affirming plus sympathy points for being the mother of a transgender child. In some circles (e.g. Hollywood), a transgender child is the most coveted accessory, and nearly all the women in those circles have one or more.
Does this mean that women are worse than men? No, not really. It does destroy the myth that women are naturally angelic and innocent. Both sexes are equally fallen. Both sexes are capable of great evil. The sins to which each sex is most prone are different, but no less wicked. Toxic masculinity gets a lot of bad press, but toxic femininity is just as damaging.
It’s time to take women off the pedestal and hold them accountable.”
— Lindsey Harold
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Nothing worth doing is easy.
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“This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality…
Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.”
— Johann Kurtz
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Cultural, racial, and ethnic groups have certain traits and recognizing these patterns is a form of wisdom. At the same time individuals exist as individuals and must be dealt with as such. We have to act in wosdom and love based on the information available to us.
An example: If I am walking down a street in Birmingham and a black man in a hoodie is walking towards me, it is not racism for me to walk over to the other side of the street. It’s just pattern recognition in the area of race and criminality. I don’t know the individual so I consider where am I and the tendencies of the group he is a part of. On the other hand, when I am walking in my neighborhood, I will often cross to the other side of the street to fist-bump and chat with a black neighbor. I know him as an individual and deal with him as such.
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I have no doubt God created music and gave us a hymn book because he designed us to be musical creatures. The human body is the ultimate music instrument. We make music and we are shaped by music. If the way we use our bodies and the way the affections of our hearts are shaped to be rooted in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, then singing has to be central to the Christian life and to the culture of the church.
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Your body is a temple.
The church is temple.
But remember, the temple of Solomon was filled with music.
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“The most commonly worshipped idol in the modern West is the anti-Hitler.”
This is an interesting video. But I would argue the opposite: modern leftists are not actually anti-Hitler. The are just like him in all kinds of ways. They are globalists rather than nationalists, but otherwise their worldview is very much like Hitler’s. The video does acknowledge this on the issue of socialism. Hitler was a statist just like modern leftists. But the overlap of the modern leftist worldview with the Nazi worldview is bigger than just economics.
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The modern American view of religious liberty makes it impossible for Boniface to cut down Thor’s sacred oak. A man we laud as a hero of the faith would be tried in court and thrown in prison today.
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“The graveyards are thank I full of indispensable men.”
— Charles de Gaulle
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Good article from Foster on pastoral leadership and the social media brand. Are you building a social media brand that will die with you or an institution that will outlive you? Are you falling into the “hot take” social media trap where you get captured by an audience? Or are you doing the far less exciting work of building up a localized, flesh and blood community?
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“Men have killed somewhere around 150 million people in all recorded wars.
Women have had roughly 1.4 billion abortions in the last 20 years alone.”
— Dylan Madden
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“The term “masking” is spreading like a bad rash. Let’s call it what it actually is: emotional regulation necessary for “adulting.” If you’ve learned to “mask” your emotions, congratulations, you are no longer 14 years old. You’re just a properly socialized adult. The people pushing this term desperately want to be shoehorned into a mental health label to gain the social status attached, without fulfilling the criteria for it.”
— Hannah Spier
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At some point, a job is not about the money, it’s about leaving a legacy. It’s about where you’re going to be buried.
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Both Hitler and Churchill were heirarchicalists, who did not believe all races and cultures were equal. But here’s the difference: Whereas the British wanted to elevate the lower cultures and races by bringing civilization to them (the “white man’s burden”), the Nazis wanted to eliminate the lower cultures and races.
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Charlie Kirk was the perfect combination of charity and courage.
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The Roman Catholic Church committed the damnable sin of heresy when it excommunicated Martin Luther.
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Victimhood and envy go hand in hand. If someone else achieves success, it is not viewed as an inspiration to improve oneself but a grievance against others.
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Churchill did not “lose” the British Empire. There were many Brits who believed maintaining a global empire was too expensive, even before WW2. The British Empire ended the same reason other European empires ended: they could no longer afford it and public opinion was turning against it.
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If Nazism and wokeness represent two poles on the spectrum, mirror images of one another on a variety of issues (eg, hierarchical vs egalitarian, racist vs anti-racist, masculinity vs feminist, nationalist vs globalist, etc.), we have to say both of these extremes are equally wicked. But it should also be noted, Nazism overlaps with the left on a lot of issues as well (eg, statism, socialism, Darwinism), and these are not the only two options.
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“Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old.”
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
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“Through the many tribulations of this life it is fitting for us to enter eternal life. The tribulations of this life are figured by the evening. In the evening Christ died, and early in the morning he rose again. For during that entire evening until the morning the disciples grieved, while the world rejoiced; after that morning the disciples rejoiced to see their Lord, while [his enemies] were saddened. In this same way the saints grieve, the world rejoices until its end and death, but in the resurrection the saints will rejoice and the world will grieve.”
— Martin Luther, Glosses on Psalm 30
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“We are never in greater danger than in the sunshine of prosperity.”
— Spurgeon
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“Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
— G.K. Chesterton
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“We live the given life, and not the planned life.”
— Wendell Berry
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Churchill hated communism and Nazism. So why did ally with the communists to defeat the Marxists in WW2? Just look at a map of Europe in 1940, after the Germans conquered France. The Nazis were taking control of all of Western Europe. The Nazis were the existential threat. Churchill actually proposed a plan to conquer Moscow after Berlin fell. He wanted to help the anti-Bolshevik Russians defeat the communists. His anti-Marxist credentials are unquestionable.
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There’s no question that Churchill hated communism:
Operation Unthinkable was the code name for two related British contingency plans drawn up in 1945 for possible war with the Soviet Union at the end of World War II in Europe. Ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and developed by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee / Joint Planning Staff, the plans were never implemented. They remained top secret until declassified in 1998 (though Soviet spy Guy Burgess reportedly passed details to Soviet intelligence at the time). 
Background and Context
By May 1945, as Germany collapsed, Soviet forces had advanced deep into Eastern and Central Europe. Churchill was deeply concerned about Stalin’s intentions—particularly the imposition of Soviet control over Poland and other nations liberated from the Nazis—and about the reliability of Soviet commitments made at Yalta. With American forces expected to shift focus to the Pacific (and potentially withdraw from Europe), Churchill asked his planners to examine the feasibility of military action to impose Western (U.S. and British) will on the Soviets, framed around securing “a square deal for Poland.” 
The Offensive Plan
The primary (offensive) plan, dated around 22 May 1945, envisioned a surprise attack on Soviet forces in Germany, ideally beginning on 1 July 1945. Key elements included:
- An assault by up to roughly 47 British and American divisions (nearly half the Western Allied divisions then available in the theater), concentrated in the Dresden area in the middle of the Soviet line, with supporting Polish forces and potentially rearmed German units (drawn from disarmed enemy forces).
- The political objective: to impose the will of the United States and British Empire on Russia. Even if limited to a “square deal for Poland,” planners noted this would not necessarily constrain the scale of military commitment.
- Assumptions included full public and troop support in Britain and the U.S., assistance from Polish forces and German manpower/industry, and the possibility that the Soviets would ally with Japan.
Planners assessed the balance of forces as heavily favoring the Soviets in Europe (roughly 2.5:1 or greater superiority in divisions). Estimates around the time included Western forces with about 80 infantry and 23 armored divisions versus Soviet figures of roughly 228 infantry and 36 armored, plus Soviet advantages in tactical aircraft (though the Allies held a strategic bomber edge). A quick limited success was judged unlikely; any failure to achieve rapid results before winter risked a protracted total war against heavy odds, potentially requiring deep penetration into Russia itself—an outcome planners viewed as extremely difficult given Soviet depth, manpower, and experience.
The Chiefs of Staff concluded the offensive was “hazardous” and essentially unfeasible for a quick or limited victory. A lasting political result would require total war and the decisive defeat of Soviet forces or occupation of key Russian industrial areas—neither of which was realistic in the near term.
The Defensive Plan
After the negative assessment of the offensive, Churchill directed a follow-up study (June 1945) on defending the British Isles if the Americans withdrew and the Soviets advanced westward toward the North Sea and Atlantic. Planners were pessimistic: without major U.S. involvement, British prospects were described as “fanciful.” Reliance would fall on air and naval power, with concerns about Soviet rocket attacks and limited ability to hold continental bridgeheads.
Outcome and Significance
The plans were rejected by the military leadership as impractical. Churchill left office after the July 1945 election (replaced by Clement Attlee), and Allied policy shifted toward managing the emerging postwar order rather than open conflict. The study is often noted as an early Cold War-era contingency plan reflecting Western distrust of Soviet intentions even while the wartime alliance still formally existed.
In short, Operation Unthinkable was a serious (if highly pessimistic) examination of the military realities of confronting the Red Army in 1945. It underscored the overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority in Europe at the moment of German surrender and helped illustrate why a direct Western military challenge to Soviet gains in the East was not pursued.
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A classic:
BUTT PRINTS IN THE SAND
One night I had a wondrous dream, One set of footprints there were seen, The footprints of my precious Lord, But mine were not along the shore.
But then some stranger prints appeared, And I asked the Lord, “What have we here?
Those prints are large and round and neat, But Lord, they are too big for feet.”
“My child,” He said in somber tones,
“For miles I carried you alone.
I challenged you to walk in faith, But you refused and made me wait.”
“You disobeyed, you would not grow, The walk of faith, you would not know, So I got tired, I got fed up, And there I dropped you on your butt.”
“Because in life, there comes a time, When one must fight, and one must climb, When one must rise and take a stand, Or leave their butt prints in the sand.”
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It’s the Christian nationalist dilemma: we believe the church and the gospel should be privileged in certain ways but this is now illegal, at the federal and state level. How can we navigate this impasse?
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David Bahnsen on agency, responsibility, and happiness:
https://youtube.com/shorts/pV39rUoLMsI?is=p2fkBsEGtnnChtXS
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“To be prepared for war is the most effectual means to promote peace.”
— George Washington’s Forgotten Maxim according to Teddy Roosevelt
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I asked Grok to evaluate my super-brief summary of Schmitt: “The main political insight of Carl Schmitt’s friend/ enemy distinction is there is no political neutrality. Even if you have supposedly neutral procedures as in classic liberalism, they have to be applied. Nothing can take the place of decision. Making political decisions is inescapable, and someone has to make those decisions. Someone’s definitions of justice, impartiality, etc. will prevail.”
Grok’s response:
The claim is substantially correct. It captures a central implication of Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and his broader critique of liberalism, though it compresses a few related ideas (from The Concept of the Political and his decisionism) into one formulation.
Core of the Friend/Enemy Distinction
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the specific political distinction—the criterion that defines the political as such—is the distinction between friend and enemy. This is not a moral (good/evil), aesthetic (beautiful/ugly), or economic (profitable/unprofitable) contrast. It is existential: the most intense degree of association or dissociation between groups, one that carries the real possibility of physical conflict and killing. The enemy is the public “other” or stranger whose existence poses an existential threat to a way of life; personal hatred is irrelevant. 
Crucially, such conflicts “can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.” The political decision about who counts as friend or enemy must be made by those existentially involved. No prior rule-book or external arbiter fully replaces that decision. 
Critique of Liberal Neutrality
Schmitt’s main target is liberalism’s attempt to neutralize or depoliticize politics. Liberalism, in his account, tries to dissolve the enemy into an economic competitor or a debating adversary, replace existential conflict with discussion, procedure, and compromise, and treat the state as a neutral arena for individual interests. He claims this is a negation of the political: “there is absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.” Liberalism cannot escape the logic of the political; by universalizing its own standards (peace, humanity, rights), it often intensifies conflict while denying it is doing so, and it leaves the community unable to make the decisive friend/enemy distinction when required. 
This is where the claim’s points about procedures and decision land accurately:
- Even “neutral” liberal procedures (rule of law, parliamentary discussion, rights frameworks) must be applied, interpreted, and enforced by someone. They presuppose a normal situation and do not themselves decide the extreme or exceptional case.
- The political decision remains inescapable. Someone’s concrete determination of who belongs, what threatens the political unit, what counts as justice or impartiality in a given conflict, will prevail. Neutrality itself is a political stance that still operates under the possibility of friend/enemy groupings; pure, permanent neutrality would dissolve politics altogether.
This links directly to Schmitt’s decisionism (“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”). Norms and procedures rest on a prior decision that creates or maintains the situation in which they can function. Nothing fully displaces the need for that decision.
Qualifications
The claim is a strong and fair condensation of the anti-liberal, decisionist upshot, but a few nuances matter: - The friend/enemy distinction is the criterion of the political, not a claim that every political act is permanent total war or that every disagreement is existential enmity. Intensity varies; many matters remain non-political.
- Schmitt does not deny that neutrality or compromise can be politically useful in limited cases; he denies that they can abolish the underlying possibility of the distinction or substitute for the capacity to decide it.
- “Someone’s definitions of justice, impartiality, etc. will prevail” is a reasonable inference from the application problem and the critique of neutrality, though Schmitt frames it more in terms of existential intensity and the monopoly of political decision than in purely procedural language.
In short, the claim rightly identifies the rejection of political neutrality and the inescapability of decision as a main political insight flowing from the friend/enemy distinction. Liberal proceduralism does not eliminate the need for concrete political judgments about friends, enemies, and the exception; it merely obscures or displaces them.
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This is an excellent post from Ron Dodson on Schmitt, Strauss, and the friend/enemy distinction:
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“A non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training.”
— R. L. Dabney, “Secularized Education”
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The most evil feature of modern liberalism is that, in the name of neutrality, it requires the state and any institution that is considered “public,” to treat all religions as if they were exactly the same. It imposes a pluralistic agnosticism on people by force of law. It makes the Christianization of any public institution impossible, or at least illegal. Insofar as America is officially pluralistic (which means polytheistic), restoring America requires breaking the American system as it currently exists.
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1819 News is the Charlie Kirk of Alabama – a worthy investment. A philanthropist gave Charlie $10k when he was still a teenager to get TPUSA started. Like the faithful servant in the parable of the talents, Charlie took that original deposit and multiplied it many times over, forming a multi-million dollar organization that evangelized the lost, shaped culture, and won political elections. That’s what you call a return on investment. 1819 is having an analogous impact on our state.
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When a pastor is called “controversial,” it should often be understood as a compliment.
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Warren Buffet once said the key to a happy marriage is “low expectations.” That might not be good marriage, but it is good financial advice. The affordability crisis has many features and causes, but one issue is vastly overinflated expectations of young people – the kind of house they should be able to buy, the kinds of vacations they should take, etc.
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While I’m curious about who killed Charlie Kirk, I’m much more concerned with furthering Charlie’s mission.
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The totality of Scripture applies to the totality of life. All of the Bible for all of life.
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The most common form of dishonesty is telling people what they want to hear rather than telling them the truth. All too often, we love comfort more than truth, so we sacrifice truth to avoid uncomfortable confrontations.
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If Hitler is the only villain from history you know about, you have been seriously misled and cannot understand what is happening in the world around us. Nazism is one form of evil, but far from the only one.
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“People keep asking “why are so many women are defending Lindsay Clancy?!”
The answer is simple: over 25% of women did exactly what Lindsay did. They murdered their children, too, in cold blood, just like she did, via abortion.
They empathize with her because they’re murderers and they got away with it. So, why shouldn’t she?
We live in a world where the people are blood thirsty for child sacrifice. We desperately need to repent and abolish abortion from our land.”
— Lizzie Marbach
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Preaching a sermon is much easier than living one out, even for the preacher.
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Feminists want a kind of selective egalitarianism:
I will further explain…
What men see in the support for Lindsay Clancy is every woman who avoided accountability for her behavior.
What women who support her see is “that could be me.
The conflict is that what’s outraging a lot of men is that women want all of the privileges of traditionalism and modernism, of equality and inequality. They want to be strong and independent when it suits them but also demand endless support because they’re so fragile when it suits them.
Men see the justification of every capricious divorce (or similar): selfishness and excuses.
There’s truth in both perspectives but the men are more right here.
Women DO lack critical support… but that’s because they are weak. Their nervous systems aren’t their own. They’re not optimized for performance.
This is why women worry so much. Guess what? Worrying is not productive. In fact, it’s incredibly stressful and destructive to be around constant worriers. Worrying isn’t useful… unless you’re dealing with a baby. Babies are stupid and fragile. They actively try and die if you don’t watch them for thirty seconds. You need to worry around a baby. It’s just not helpful in the boardroom.
The central problem today is that women feel like men don’t respect them as mothers, which is true. Men keep saying “this is what you wanted” without realizing that holding women accountable is idiotic. Men should have said to women “your desire for a voting and a career is adorable, but no.” They didn’t.
Lindsay Clancy killed her children because she’s psychologically weak, which is approximately the same thing as being morally depraved.
I will rephrase: psychological health and moral character are roughly the same thing.
Did she have hormonal issues? Without a doubt. The bigger issue is that she was psychologically weak, i.e., she was a bad person and this didn’t show up until she was flooded with hormones, sleep-deprivation, and stress.
And that’s the ugly truth today: modern society produces low character men and women both, but the women are worse because an equal society is fundamentally cruel to women.
I cannot stress this point enough: treating men and women the same is cruel to women.
When men point out how awful the women are and the women respond in kind, correctly pointing out how bad the men are, they’re incorrectly identifying them as equivalent. Egalitarian society degrades women more than it degrades men, though it degrades both.
Lindsay Clancy is a victim… yes, but she’s also a perpetrator. The latter far more than the former.
She has fully confessed. The most just and merciful thing to do is execute her, today. Looking at her and saying “that could be me” is, frankly, insane.
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I question this.
The men who were outcasts who came to be with David in 1 Samuel 22:2 had families according to 30:6 – and they fought to rescue their families when taken captive.
It’s true that single men are dangerous but usually not in a good way. The most dangerous men of all – dangerous in a good way – are men with daughters. The most dangerous men in a good way are not the ones with nothing to lose but the ones with the most to lose, the most to fight for.
Dale is right that many young conservative men being single might be a “necessary evil” but if he’s suggesting those men intentionally choose singleness so they can lead some kind of revolution/reformation, I think he’s wrong.
I would not advise any young man to intentionally choose singleness unless he can prove he is called to it. The vast, vast majority of men need to marry. The only way to rebuild a civilization is through marriage and children.
And while it’s true that many young women are crazy there are still plenty of good ones out there for men who know where to look. Things do look dire, but there’s no need to take the black pill. Some young men will not be able to find a suitable wife in today’s world but I would not turn that tragic hardship into some kind of positive strategy.
And as a married older man, it would be wrong of me to ask unmarried younger men to do the culture warring that must be done to save civilization.
There’s always the chance that untethered young men will make things worse unless they have guidance and grounding from older men.
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Social media turns everyone into an armchair politician.
Most everyone thinks they know how to fix the country.
But if you can’t fix yourself first, I guarantee you can’t fix a country of 350 million people.
If you can’t defeat sin in your own life, you will never defeat it in the world around you.
It’s so easy to focus on the sins of others and ignore our own.
But we have to practice self-leadership before we can lead others. We have to defeat sin in our own hearts before we can defeat it in the world.
I see way too much moral sloppiness in the church today to think we can fix the culture.
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Liam Out Loud explains that progressivism will never admit defeat:
“A worldview that persists despite its unending list of failures is not interested in truth but power.
Consider how these people respond to the breakdown of their policies.
They don’t believe that multiculturalism itself fails but that they didn’t implement it hard enough, that they didn’t propagandize the host nation into forced compassion hard enough.
It’s not that gender dysphoria is actually a mental illness; it’s that they didn’t normalize it enough.
It’s not that safe supply failed but that it was not scaled up enough.
Decriminalization isn’t a bad idea; we simply didn’t provide the criminals with enough free things and support programs before implementing it.
Friedrich Nietzsche put suicidal empathy into his own words nearly a century and a half before Saad.
In Beyond Good and Evil he writes about a society grown so “pathologically soft and tender that it sides even with those who harm it.”
Once it reaches this stage, he noted, anything which raises a man above the herd and intimidates his neighbor is declared evil. Mediocrity becomes the highest achievement.”
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The old Christian Reconstructionist “revolution vs regeneration” debate, updated by Ron Dodson to address the current generation of young men taking the black pill and demanding to “burn it all down”:
Key sections:
“One can look at the present American order and see enormous corruption, elite irresponsibility, institutional dishonesty, oligarchic capture, and in the classical sense, extraordinary levels of injustice. I certainly do.
But it does not follow that destroying the existing order produces something better.
The classical political philosophers were much less romantic about regime change. Regimes do not normally collapse into a clean constitutional moment in which intelligent dissidents assemble, deliberate about first principles, and establish the good regime. They collapse into contests for power.
And the people best positioned to win those contests are usually the people who already possess organization, money, weapons, bureaucratic machinery, patronage networks, intelligence capabilities, disciplined cadres—or some combination of them.
The online dissident imagining himself helping draft the constitution of the new order may instead discover that food distribution, credit markets, electrical grids, courts, policing, sanitation, property records, and functioning chains of command were doing rather more work than he realized…
liberalism did not invent ambition.
It did not invent faction, greed, cowardice, tribalism, vanity, erotic desire, status competition, resentment, or the lust to dominate.
Human nature survives the revolution.
Indeed, when institutions disintegrate, those passions are often given much greater freedom of action.
This is why the classical virtue of prudence matters so much.
Prudence is not an excuse for tolerating injustice. It is the political virtue that asks how justice can actually be instantiated among these people, under these circumstances, with the institutions, customs, habits, and material conditions that actually exist…
The statesman does not merely ask, “What is the best regime?”
He must also ask: What regime is possible here? What can be reformed? What must be preserved? What can this people actually sustain? What happens on the morning after?
Politics deals with human beings as they are, not imaginary men created for the purposes of a theory.
That does not mean regimes never become so unjust that rupture occurs. History plainly shows otherwise. There are moments when political orders exhaust their legitimacy, institutions fail, and events move beyond the possibility of ordinary reform.
But that makes revolution a catastrophic contingency, not something serious men should yearn for. Civil breakdown is not an aesthetic.
It means ruined savings, collapsing credit, interrupted supply chains, political killings, criminal predation, unemployment, frightened children, displaced families, destroyed businesses, and young men with rifles deciding questions that courts and legislatures used to decide.
People romanticizing “the reset” tend to imagine the constitutional convention and skip the twenty miles of roadblocks required to get there.
The proper distinction, therefore, is not between complacency and revolution.
It is between restoration and reset…
There is no political arrangement that abolishes the Fall. There is no institutional reset that produces a new human nature.
Politics always begins with fallen, embodied human beings inhabiting a particular place, possessing a particular history, bound by particular loyalties, possessing particular virtues and vices. The task is not to escape those realities.
The task of political wisdom is to govern within them—to preserve what is good, reform what is corrupt, punish genuine injustice, recover constitutional order where possible, and build institutions capable of transmitting a better regime to those who come after us.
If catastrophe comes, prudence may require extraordinary action. But catastrophe itself should never become the political ideal.
A politics that requires the destruction of society before it can begin governing society is not realism. It is utopianism wearing combat boots.”
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Shaq probably never read Rollo Tomassi, but he’s old enough to know what it means for the man to be the stronger vessel:
When I was about 20, I remember my mom saying to my brother and me (for no apparent reason), “If I die your dad your dad will probably remarry, and if so you need to watch that woman like hawk. Women are cunning, manipulative, and sneaky. Do not let her take advantage of your dad.”
She went on to explain if that woman had children, she might try to finagle things so her kids got any inheritance, etc. It wadny until years later that I realized that my mom understood female nature, and she was warning us about it. My mom turn 79. The older generation just got it. The old folk wisdom has been lost.
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Bo Jackson’s story of his favorite moment in his career is priceless:
A funny Bo story early in his NFL career:
Bo telling the story of running a 4.13 40 yeard dash:
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My senior year year high school football team had two locker room songs that got played over and over again before games:
Be a Man by Tesla
Copperhead Road by Steve Earle
Hearing either one of those songs brings back a lot of memories.
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It’s crazy how many things in our society went wrong once we essentially outlawed smoking. It’s not that smoking cigarettes was good – far from it. But you can make a case that smoking was preferable to the obesity and SSRIs we have today that seem to have taken the place of smoking.
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In the song “Dixieland Delight,” the woman is described as a “sweet, soft, Southern thrill.” That’s a good description of femininity – sweet and soft. And it’s what every man – at least every Southern man – wants. Every Southern woman should aspire to be the kind of woman Alabama would have written a song about in the 1980s.
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What does “honeysuckle blue” mean in the Drivin n Cryin song?
“Honeysuckle Blue” is from Mystery Road (1989). Kinney wrote it after seeing a teenage boy begging outside a New York studio in the 1980s, when kids were squatting in abandoned hotels. He wondered whether that boy had ever seen a mountain. The song is that thought turned into an invitation: I have a ticket; come with me; have you ever seen the Blue Ridge, the Chattahoochee, or the honeysuckle blue?
So “honeysuckle blue” is not a plant variety. Honeysuckle itself is white, cream, or yellow. The phrase is a compressed picture of the South Kinney wanted to offer that kid—the smell of honeysuckle on a summer night, dogwoods in bloom, the Blue Ridge, the Chattahoochee—set against “caverns of gold” and a “river of death” in the city. “Blue” does double duty with the mountains and with the song’s sadness. It names a place and a kind of grace the boy on the corner has never known.
The rest of the lyric stays on that contrast: street kids in an old hotel, abandoned by the promised land, a well that’s dry for people who roam. The honeysuckle blue is what he hopes they might still reach.
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