A podcast I did with Jacoby Nelson a while back on forgiveness:
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On the day of judgment, Jesus – yes, sweet, loving, tenderhearted, compassionate Jesus – is going to say to many people, “Away from me,” and will cast them into the everlasting lake of of fire.
Fear Jesus. Reverence Jesus. Be in awe of Jesus.
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Grok book review:
Christ-Esteem: Where the Search for Self-Esteem Ends is Don Matzat’s 1990 Harvest House book—later reissued independently—arguing that the church’s adoption of self-esteem psychology is a wrong diagnosis and a wrong cure. Matzat, a longtime LCMS pastor, says the human problem is not a damaged self-image but the self itself; the answer is not a better view of you, but union with Christ.
The book is short (about 186–207 pages depending on edition), pastoral rather than academic, and built mainly on Paul, with heavy use of Luther. Its governing line, often quoted by readers: “The call of the gospel is away from self and unto Jesus, because self is the problem and Jesus is the solution.”
What the book is doing
Matzat wrote against the late-20th-century flood of Christian self-esteem literature (Robert Schuller’s Self-Esteem: The New Reformation is a named foil) and against the broader project of integrating secular psychology with theology. He does not deny that people feel empty, worthless, or lost. He denies that looking inward—positive self-talk, visualization, “you are valuable,” inner-healing techniques—can fix it. Those methods, he argues, keep the sinner circling the very thing Scripture tells him to put to death.
The cultural setup in the opening chapters is dated but still recognizable: after mid-century institutions (family, nation, denomination, ethnic identity) lost their binding power, people were left with the self as the last available source of meaning. Psychology then offered techniques for inflating that self. The church, Matzat says, often followed because it no longer knew how to preach Christ as sufficient for present identity, not only for heaven later.
The argument, chapter by chapter
The spine of the book is Pauline union-with-Christ:
A Challenging Generation — Modern questions (“Who am I?” “How do I feel good about myself?”) are historically recent and socially produced, not the perennial questions of the gospel.
An Irrelevant Gospel? — If the church answers only “forgiven and going to heaven,” it will look irrelevant to people asking about meaning now. That is not a defect in the gospel; it is a defect in how the gospel is preached.
Knowing Yourself — Honest self-knowledge leads to Romans 7, not to self-acceptance. You never finish discovering how deep the problem goes.
The Right Diagnosis — The issue is not a negative self-image but a negative self. Paul calls himself a wretched man; that is diagnosis, not low self-esteem.
Identified with Adam — Federal headship: you are not a basically good person with a bruised ego. In Adam you are the problem.
Turning Away from Self — Denial of self is not mere moral restraint (“give up what you want”). It is stepping aside so that Christ lives.
Identified with Christ — As you were in Adam, you are now in Christ: righteousness, reconciliation, a new identity given, not achieved.
Everything in Christ — Meaning, worth, and fullness are located in Him, not excavated from within.
The Conflict — Until glory you have a double life: old Adam and new man. Sanctification is not self-improvement of the old man.
Looking Unto Jesus — The practical turn: attention, not introspection.
Confessing Truth — Confession is agreement with God about what is true (about sin and about who you are in Christ), not “positive confession” as a technique to create reality.
Rejoice in the Lord — Joy is located in Christ, not in circumstances or self-assessment.
Jesus is the Life — Christ is not merely example or helper; He is the believer’s life (Gal 2:20; Col 3).
Christians under Construction — Trials expose whether you will live from self or from Christ; suffering can yield fruit or frustration depending on that response.
The Identity of the Christian Community — A church formed by self-rejection and abiding in Christ will have a different fellowship than one formed by self-esteem teaching.
The practical center is mind renewal directed at Christ, not self-talk. Matzat distinguishes biblical confession of truth from Word-of-Faith / visualization methods that treat words and images as having inherent power and turn God into a servant of the self.
Strengths
Clear antithesis. He refuses the compromise that says, “Of course we need the gospel and a healthy self-image.” For Matzat those two projects pull in opposite directions.
Union with Christ, not moralism. “Die to self” is not “try harder to be unselfish.” It is crucifixion-with-Christ and life-from-Christ. That is why many readers say legalists will dislike the book as much as therapists will.
Lutheran-Pauline texture. Original sin, alien righteousness, simul iustus et peccator, Christ as our life—these are not slogans pasted on a self-help frame. They are the frame.
Pastoral usefulness. Readers repeatedly describe it as a book you hand to someone drowning in either shame or therapeutic Christianity. Ratings stay high decades later (roughly 4.2–4.4 on Goodreads/Amazon).
Weaknesses and fair criticisms
A 1990s discernment review (Christian Discernment) praised the anti-self-esteem polemic and the emphasis on sin, mind renewal, and crucifixion with Christ, then pressed three weak spots that still matter:
“Identity crisis” as the presenting problem. Matzat sometimes treats modern man’s felt need for identity/meaning as the fundamental question the church must answer. A stricter biblical anthropology would say the fundamental need is reconciliation with God; identity language can smuggle the therapeutic frame back in even while attacking it.
Sufficiency of Scripture vs. “relationship with Jesus.” He occasionally sets “the person of Christ” over against treating the Bible as a “propositional textbook” for counseling. That can sound like a false choice. Scripture is how we know the Christ we are to abide in; the two are not rivals.
Psychology as a “legitimate discipline.” He rejects integration and Christian psychology as practiced, yet still grants psychology a legitimate role in studying behavior. Critics wanted a harder line: unregenerate counsel is not a parallel science filling gaps in the Word.
Those are real tensions, not fatal ones. The book is a pastor’s broadside, not a treatise in theological anthropology or counseling theory.
Who it serves—and who it won’t
It serves people tired of being told their misery is a self-esteem deficit; pastors who want a readable alternative to Schuller, McDowell-style image-building, and inner-healing methods; and anyone who needs Galatians 2:20 unpacked without mysticism or legalism.
It will frustrate readers who want a nuanced Christian psychology, a defense of “proper self-love,” or a detailed method for counseling trauma. Matzat’s answer is almost always: stop excavating the self; look at Christ; live from the new identity already given.
For a Reformed pastor the book is closest to a popular Lutheran statement of union with Christ against the therapeutic turn. It is not as theologically tight as, say, a Puritan treatment of mortification, and it is not as methodologically sharp as Jay Adams on sufficiency. Its value is the single, repeated move: the self is not the patient to be healed; it is the old man to be reckoned dead, so that Christ may be esteemed.
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“They Were Never Fighting for Equality
The Left’s power depends on the revolution never ending, which means it must continually manufacture new grievances, enemies, and victims.
From the Jacobins and Bolsheviks to the modern social justice movement, those who enforce the revolution eventually become its next targets.”
— Liam Out Loud on egalitarianism
https://twitter.com/liam_out_loud/status/2099224379577991403/video/1?s=46
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“Hitler was a disaster. Hitler was an occultist. Hitler was a pedophile. Hitler was horrible. Screw Hitler — burn in hell, Hitler…. [Hitler] got 24 million Germans killed! Hitler also launched a world war that killed another 80 million people. Just because our rulers are evil does not mean Hitler was good.”
— Alex Jones
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“Women’s agency needs a safe container to reach its full potential.
Men’s agency needs dangerous levels of freedom to reach its full potential.”
— Noah Revoy
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Leaders often speak of “vision.” They develop a vision and try to convince people to follow and fulfill the vision. What is “vision”? Especially in a Presbyterian context, what do pastors and elders mean by “vision”?
Obviously, this is not special revelation, the way prophets received direct visions from God. Rather, vision is leadership’s plan for the future, rooted in biblical principles, providential opportunities, and wise foresight. It is the consensus of the session (pastors + elders) that “this is the best way for us to act and build going forward.” It’s the collective judgment of the session about the best way to fulfill the mission God has given his church in our particular context.
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“There are two kinds of people in the world: doers and don’ters.”
— Noah Revoy
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Both the political left and right are instrumentalizing Christian faith in their own way. It’s performative – using Christian language to prop up political positions held for non-Christian reasons. A Christian veneer is added to a political platform to bolster support.
The Christian faith is fundamentally about God’s grace and mercy to sinners in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian message is about redemption and recreation. The Christian faith is about salvation from sin, death, and Satan.
Of course, the Christian message is also about politics. Insofar as the Christian gospel proclaims Jesus as King of kings, it is obviously political. The Bible is full of godly political characters and political teachings. God obviously has a will for the state every bit as much as he has a will for the individual, the family, and the church. The privatized faith of many modern American evangelicals (aka pietism) is sub-biblical. There very much is a Christian agenda for the nations as nations.
But this does not mean that Christian faith is just a political ideology. It does not mean the Christian faith can be reduced to a political tool. It does not mean the Christian faith should be weaponized into a political cudgel. It certainly does not mean the Christian faith can be reduced to a political platform.
In the Christian view, political transformation flows out of the fundamental truths of the gospel and the liturgy/mission of the church. Political transformation is included in the Christian mission, but is not its essence.
The current Pope, Pope Leo, is a good example of the kind of things I have in view when I describe the problem of instrumentalizing the Christian faith for political ends. Leo has used his authority and clout as Pope to push back on Trump’s immigration policies. Deportations are unkind and unChristian. Apparently, America has an obligation (from where?) to let every person in the world who wants to come here to become an American. The whole world has a right to American citizenship. Further, the Pope has claimed Christians and Muslims have “communion” — and he obviously said this right now to counter-signal the current President since he said it at the very same time America is engaging in military operations against the Islamic nation of Iran. Set aside the fact that the Pope lives in a walled city. Set aside the fact that the Pope has failed to say anything about members of his own church, like Joe Biden, who promote abortion and same-sex “marriage,” and attacks those who seek to outlaw them. When is the last time the Pope said anything resembling the gospel in a public message? The public knows what the Pope thinks about Trump’s immigration policy. But do they know what the Pope thinks about the way of salvation? As a Reformed Protestant, I would argue that the Roman Catholic Church, at best, garbles the gospel and fails to proclaim the full and free grace of God to sinners in Christ. But even Rome’s garbled version of the gospel is not being put out there. The Pope is instrumentalizing the Christian faith to prop up a leftwing political agenda. This is Pope has already made himself primarily into a political figure, giving a running commentary on current events, more than a Spiritual figure pointing people to the way of forgiveness and transformation in Christ. It’s not wrong for a Pope to speak politically in and of it self (though he can do great damage if he gets the politics wrong). It is wrong for a Pope, or any other pastor, to displace the message of salvation with political commentary. The current Pope is just a typical Chicago Democrat.
The most egregious current offender from the left is no doubt James Talarico. Talarico has used his hyper liberal, modernist, heretical version of the faith to prop up every progressive perversion imaginable, including abortion and same-sex “marriage,” with absurd and insane arguments. Talarico does not honor the Bible as the Word of God; he uses it as a grab bag from which he can pull out prooftexts, twist them into the shape he wants, and then claim his position is actually, the loving and Christian view. It is all from the pit of hell.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have Tucker Carlson, who has used Christian jargon to oppose the war in Iran. I am sympathetic with many of Tucker’s criticisms of the war. But Tucker’s framing of the Christian faith ends up similar to Pope Leo’s — Islam is good, Jesus was a pacifist, Christians should be non-violent, the Old Testament is flawed (e.g., Esther), etc. I have no problem with Tucker making appeal to historic Christian ethics (though he often gets the Christian tradition wrong). The problem is that his framing reduces the Christian faith to a political instrument. It is no longer about the salvation of sinners at its core; it is a message of inclusion (even for Muslims), of peace, of love, of niceness. It’s not surprising Tucker has gone all in on “Christian socialism” since it also fits this pattern.
Nick Fuentes would be another example, coming (supposedly) from the right. Fuentes is vile, but he packages much of his message as if it were Christian/Roman Catholic. Like Carlson, many of the positions Fuentes holds are true. But the framing is problematic. Christian faith is about saving white Western civilization. Hitler was the last Christian prince (maybe?). Etc. But the core message of the gospel is simply not there. Fuentes has no concern with personal faith or personal holiness. He instrumentalizes Christian jargon, making the faith primarily as a tool to further his political agenda. Many of his positions might be true implications of the gospel, but the gospel itself gets lost.
The pietistic solution is to make the Christian faith apolitical. This is the route of most evangelical and Reformed pastors today. But this is also not an answer. It veers towards a kind of Gnostic view of salvation. Nothing ever touches the real world. The Bible is a heavenly book, with no earthly wisdom to offer.
The answer is a holistic, whole-Bible Christian faith that grasps the breadth of the Christian mission. The gospel is the heart of everything. But the Bible gives us wide-ranging teaching and wisdom about all kinds of political and social matters. We need to know that wisdom and seek to implement it where we live, but it must always be clearly tethered to the gospel itself. The gospel sets men free spiritually — it frees us from the penalty and power of sin. But spiritually free men are going to want want to live in free societies, with free economies, free speech, etc. Spiritually free men are going to want to live in a society that rewards hard work, responsibility, and service — a society that gives the kind of moral feedback the book of Proverbs describes. Spiritually free men will want to live in a society that is orderly, that is in accord with God’s law and creational design. Spiritually free men will want to evangelize others; they will recognize that the Abrahamic promises and the Great Commission are structured in terms of nations, and so a kind of nationalism is legitimate. But the Christian goal is not merely national preservation; it is national transformation and discipleship. A nation that opposes Christ does not deserve to be preserved. Faithful and wise Christians will recognize that the Bible is full of both wicked and righteous violence, and we must know the difference. They will recognize that the civil magistrate is God’s deacon, entrusted with the sword as an avenger of God’s wrath against the evildoers, and will want to see the sword used accordingly, because a righteous magistrate enforcing God’s law in the civil realm in a blessing to society as a whole (even non-Christians). And so on. The Christian faith is not a political agenda, but the Christian faith most certainly has a political agenda. The Christian faith is indeed personally and politically utilitarian — but it cannot be reduced to a form of utilitarianism or pragmatism. The Christian faith works — but we believe not because it works, but because it is true. The Christian gospel is for sinners and only people who see themselves as sinners, deserving God’s wrath and curse, will really be able to embrace the Christian faith in its fullness. The temptation for those who do not see sin as the main problem is to turn the Christian faith into a political platform that can solve whatever problem they think is afflicting us — war, immigration, racism, or whatever.
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Liam Out Loud on “therapy culture”:
“Mental-health awareness has never been higher.
Mental health itself has never been lower.
Barely a quarter of young adults call their own mental health excellent.
Depression among the under-thirties has more than doubled since 2017.
Awareness went up, while wellbeing went down.
When the cure and the disease grow together year after year, it’s worth asking whether the cure has become part of the problem.
My latest essay is about the psychological inversion we’ve lived through.
The mind has a proper order. Judgment, logic and conscience on top. Instinct, intuition, and emotion beneath, meant to be governed.
We’ve turned it upside down and put feeling on the throne.
Carl Jung likened this inversion to a political revolution. He referred to it as psychological Bolshevism, an uprising inside the soul that overthrows the higher powers in the name of the lower ones and calls it freedom.
Therapy culture installed it in the individual. Identity politics organized it into a movement. And the twentieth century already showed us what happens when resentment and envy drive movements and the people within them.”
Full article: https://liamoutloud.substack.com/p/psychological-bolshevism
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“The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a Republican Government is practicable in a nation or not. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Swiss, the Dutch, all lost their public spirit, their Republican principles and habits and their Republican forms of government when they lost the modesty and domestic virtues of their women.”
— John Adams
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“Our culture tends to regard authority with suspicion and submission as weakness. Scripture treats both as good when they are properly ordered. Christ Himself exercises authority, and He also willingly submitted Himself to the Father. Authority and submission, therefore, are not enemies of love or communion. Hierarchy serves communion. God establishes order so that communion can flourish.”
–Randy Booth
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“The insanity in our culture over the Lindsay Clancy case is mind-boggling. Not only are vast swaths of women voicing solidarity with and support for with a woman who “viciously” murdered her 3 children, but now black women are saying that we need to wear pink and advocate for black women who murder their children also. Just the mere fact that a woman murders her child is taken as instant proof that she was insane and not responsible for her actions. Yet this assumes that women are incapable of such evil. It assumes that no mother is a bad mother who would kill her child. This is patently false. It is a flight from reality in homage to the religious ideology of female superiority.
This is what we get when the culture abandons the Christian worldview. It leaves behind objective evidence and rationality to adopt blatant lies. It ignores what the Bible says about both men and women being fallen and our universal experience of that fact in order to venerate the female as morally pure by nature. The facts are conveniently set aside. Murderous actions are reframed as victimhood (to hormones, to stresses, to emotions, to pharmaceutical drugs, to a patriarchal society that doesn’t support women in their time of need) so that women can never be counted evil.
In this worldview, it’s always something outside the woman that causes her to act in negative ways. This is claimed as a universal experience of women that they also have bad things forced upon them by circumstances beyond their control, and thus they side with Lindsay Clancy. In other words, they too would like their faults to be blamed on something besides their choices. They would like to be viewed as innocent angels who are victims of external forces whenever they do anything wrong. At the same time, they would also like to be viewed as strong, independent, and capable. As long as we’re living in fantasy land, we might as well go all out. Consistency is inconsequential in this worldview.
We must reject this false worldview. Both men and women are fallen and sinful. Both sexes must be held accountable for their actions. None of us can be given a free pass to do evil. Circumstances do not erase our choices. We will be held accountable by God for our choices, and earthly justice should do the same.”
— Lindsay Harold
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“What I’ve always hated about complementarians is how they talk about egalitarians as if they were simply “brothers and sisters in Christ,” when in reality we’re dealing with a drastic worldview difference one that flat-out rejects the plain teaching of Scripture.
It’s the same way people act when they reduce left and right to nothing more than personal preference, like choosing vanilla over strawberry ice cream. That’s nonsense. These are real, consequential worldview divides, and we’re living through the fallout. So why in the world should we pretend the Democratic platform is anything other than a nation-destroying, demonic agenda that pushes mental derangement, illegal immigration, slaughter of the innocent, and culture that destroys wholesome families? We shouldn’t.”
— Michael Foster
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“Our hyper-modern barrenness is not a function of “too many lady CEOs” or “too many lady PhDs”.
When we say that demographic collapse correlates with women’s education and employment, we mean that it correlates at the level of “escaping subsistence agriculture” and “having indoor plumbing” and “being taught to read”.
And maybe this should go without saying, but nobody — not even the Basedest truecel MGTOW — has any serious interest in maintaining Cameroonian sexual norms. Nor could they, even if they wanted to. (Nor can the Cameroonians, apparently.)
Besides being impractical and unserious, framing the problem of birth rate decline this way hands feminists the easiest possible straw man: If civilization is going to end unless I submit to life as a toothless illiterate slave gumming taro paste, then I guess civilization is just gonna have to end, man.
“I choose the bear,” and so forth.
Cards on the table: I am enough of a cucked, henpecked, longhoused Wife Guy that I don’t want my wife and my daughters to be toothless illiterate slaves gumming taro paste.
But if we take this correlation between women’s autonomy and fertility at face value — if we simply ask, “What is life like in countries with a sustainable TFR” — that really is, ballpark, the kind of world we would have to create in order to right the demographic ship.
Besides which, a naive interpretation of the correlation between women’s education/employment and fertility implies an absurdity: that if you give women any practical or legal autonomy whatsoever, having children is (almost literally) the very last thing they will willingly choose to do.
Does that make sense historically, or biologically — or even just intuitively, if you’ve had any passing personal contact with women?
Historically, women who were substantially wealthier and more literate and more autonomous than Afghan or Namibian women have managed to raise children in large numbers — not just psychologically exotic “trad wives”, but at scale, andas a rule.
Colonial New England was one of the most literate and educated societies in world history up to that point(Puritan women were not as educated as Puritan men, but better and more broadly educated than men anywhere else in the world) and also one of the most hyperfecund, with births per woman approaching biological limits.
Intuitively, I’ve known a lot of modern women who feel conflicted about the demands of family life — but they overwhelmingly like and want children.
In the feminist interpretation of the Birth Rate Crisis, raising and nurturing children is a thing that some women, we must admit, seem to sincerely desire; but it’s this vaguely embarrassing and vulgar “biological urge”: something that you want, if at all, against your will, and against your better judgment. (It is frequently expressed, in so many words, as something that the bodywants. Not me — my dumb body, my Heckin’ Meat Suit.)
Motherhood is generally described as if the most difficult parts of the first three years were the whole experience — the discomfort of the third trimester, the pains of childbirth, sleepless nights, diaper changes — essentially just physical toil, domestic servitude. The only reason anyone would “want” that is a kind of animal “false consciousness”.
Anyway, it’s definitely a different and less-legitimate category of desire than, say, the instinct to solve problems, or the craving for novel experience, or the hunger for status and recognition (the kinds of itches that a job scratches.)
These are somehow “non-biological” urges. These are the Real You — and the moment you let a woman do those higher, deeper, more meaningful things, she loses all interest in family life.
Of course, all of that is silly.
Professional aspirations are just as easy to explain in evolutionary biology terms — just as reducible to “hormones” and “primate psychology” — as family-forming instincts are.
Besides which, every job — but especially the classically meaningful and desirable “childhood dream” job — is frontloaded with drudgery and shit tests, and usually for much longer than three years. (Ask a doctor, or architect, or professor, or marine biologist.)”
— John Bennett
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The healthiest parts of our society are those least infected with feminism.
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Who benefits from the two income family that feminism normalized?
“In a two-income paradigm, the average American family can afford something like 1.4 kids — so that’s how many kids they have.
Of course, Mom working also imposes all kinds of stressors on the family, not the least of which is her Biological Urge™ to be with a man who brings home the bacon.
Some families have fewer children than they otherwise would; many fall apart under the strain — but increasingly, in dread of these seemingly irreducible problems, the family simply does not form at all.
The question is: why is Mom working?
The feminist answer is that “narrow arcane defense-finance whatever” is actually a higher, nobler, more fundamentally human vocation than raising a family, and all women everywhere can feel this to be true in their bones, and choose it whenever the choice is offered to them.
The rightist answer, basically, is that women are stupid and wicked.
I don’t think my co-worker was stupid or wicked — but the way she was living obviously did not reflect her preferences and aspirations.
My answer is that Mom is working for Moloch.
In his 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander uses the name “Moloch” to personify “collective action problems”, or “multipolar traps”: situations in which all actors behave rationally as individuals, but reach an outcome that none of them wants.
I won’t recapitulate the whole essay, but just go read it if you haven’t, because he basically lays the intellectual groundwork for our whole thing (insofar as our thing is a critique of headless procedural liberalism.)
A collective action problem exists when some collective good depends on all participants choosing to forgo some short-term individual interest — to “cooperate” rather than “defect”.
Alexander personifies these problems as “Moloch” (a bloodthirsty child-murdering Carthaginian demon) because in high-stakes collective action problems, mass defection can produce outcomes that are literally inhuman — that even the most vicious and stupid tyrant would recognize as contrary to his own interest, even if he didn’t care about anyone else’s.
The solution is to get people thinking like human beings again: to think about the long-term, to internalize the consequences of their behavior.
This suite of problems can only be solved by a human decision-maker with a “God’s eye view”, above and outside the system, not subject to its incentives or accountable to its internal controls.
He leaves the conclusion up to the reader, but he really walks you right up to it. (“Yes, this category of problem appears to be eating everything that makes human life worth living — but on the other hand, What If You Get a Bad King?”)
Anyway, the Birth Rate Crisis is one of these Molochian problems.
The work that women performed in pre-modern societies — and the power and status and compensation they received in return — was largely informal, personal, and illegible. In raising their own children and maintaining the weft of their communities, they contributed enormously to a common reserve of “social capital”.
Feminists now call this kind of thing “uncompensated emotional labor” — but of course pre-modern women were neither slaves nor martyrs. They fully expected to be compensated: in loyalty, in reciprocal obligation, in status, in honors, in protections.
This kind of thing may sound ephemeral now because it is ephemeral now, for reasons we’ll examine — but in pre-modern societies all of these things were real assets with observable material consequences. They just weren’t cleanly commodified — pegged to a dollar value or a written legal obligation.
Your mother generally could not call an attorney and a policeman to extract your obligations to her in a discrete sum from your checking account — but that doesn’t mean that you did not have a material obligation, or that your obligation to her was not enforceable.
Her work, her compensation, and her assurance of receiving that compensation, all existed in the human domain of relationships, reputation, and trust.
In other words, they existed in the world that managerialism is eating — which it has already eaten, almost entirely.
The overwhelming majority of allpre-modern human activity — not just “women’s work” — was illegible and informal in this way.
Even the most cleanly transactional behaviors — selling vegetables, or paying for labor — were multilateral iterated games with people you had known your whole life, and would know your whole life.
Whatever cash or barter changed hands was not separable from (and may have been unimportant in comparison with) the relationship and reputational consequences of the interaction.
This doesn’t mean that pre-modern societies were “fair”, but they weredeeply attentive to reciprocal obligation. A naive analysis of explicit legal rights and responsibilities, or flows of hard currency, will provide a radically misleading picture of who had what power, what people expected from each other, and what they actually got.
In particular, women got (and continue to get) a much greater proportion of what they want via illegible social means — so examining only explicit, legible power exaggerates (and in some cases even inverts) the power differential in historical gender relations.
But Moloch is in the business of eradicating all these relational assets — converting them into explicit transactions that can be booked as revenue, analyzed, and taxed.
There is enormous wealth and political power in market-making and price discovery — finding ways to convert unmet needs and unused resources into legible economic and political value.
On its face, connecting people is good — buyers want to find sellers, sellers want to find buyers.
But at global scale, this process of market-making has two consequences:
- It requires us to chop various complex human desires and goods into their constituent parts, and talk about them like merchants — and many things that we care about (especially in relations between men and women) do not survive that kind of cold vivisection.
- It connects us to an effectively infinite marketplace — not just for work and goods, but for friends and lovers. We now play far fewer iterated games in which it is costly to defect.
In other words, everything we want from each other is (or can, at any moment, become) a commodity and a one-off transaction.
There’s always another buyer or seller; Plenty of Fish in the Sea.
The personal, reputational, human consequences of defection are no longer enforceable: the only way to make your counterparty behave is with explicit economic, or contractual, or statutory power — so whichever party has more of thatkind of power gets what he or she wants.
Under those circumstances, it is individually rational for women (and increasingly men) to commodify every aspect of their “sexual market value”, and drive a hard bargain on every axis.
It is rational to convert whatever illegible (social/reputational/sexual) power you have into explicit (economic and political) power any way you can, since that’s the only kind of power that matters.
It is also rational for public institutions to encourage this kind of cynicism about love and family, since they are in direct competition with it.
A woman who works in a high-trust social milieu for the people she cares about does not generate GDP, or taxable income, or consumer demand.
If I’m a manager at Globohomocorp and one of my employees gets married or pregnant, it may be better for her and better for society in the long run, but right here and now in Q3, it’s a pain in my ass.
If I’m the CEO of Globohomocorp, I like the fact that there’s twice as many workers competing for my job openings. I also like the fact that there’s twice as many earners to buy what we sell — and they need to buy more, because all kinds of services that the informal “human economy” used to provide are no longer available, so inferior commodity equivalents must now be bought with money.
If I’m a real estate developer, I like that the market-clearing price for a house assumes two incomes. I like that families compete savagely for “nice neighborhoods” with “good schools”, because two-income families are unworkable without state daycares, and they don’t want to drop their kids off at a gladiator school.
If I’m a leftist ideologue, I like that 90% of American kids have to attend government schools where I get to set the curriculum. (Homeschooling is legally very straightforward in the US — these schools are “compulsory” only as a matter of family economics.)
If I’m the IRS, I like that this enormous bolus of payroll and income and spending and capital gains is now legible and taxable.
If I’m a political operative (left or right), I love the energy unleashed by the collapse of informal human institutions, and people’s sense that they are adrift in a sea of insuperable political forces. I am strongly incentivized to wave the bloody shirt and shriek about Who Is To Blame for all this, buying votes and attention at the cost of accelerating the cycle of defection and betrayal.
There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy to make the world worse: all of these institutions, just by “doing their job”, eat the civilizational seed-corn stored up over millennia and convert it into Shareholder Value.
The problem is that families (and therefore human life and civilization) cannot work like that. Families have to be a personal, high-trust, iterated game.
The rewards and protections that justify the effort of raising a family do not survive vivisection and commodification — they are irreducibly human and relational.
If you don’t believe that your spouse, your children, and the community to which they will contribute, are in a meaningful sense yours — that you have some claim on them, some right to them — it is difficult to understand why anyone would go to the trouble.
And in managerial societies, in the name of individual autonomy and non-discrimination, all such arrangements are explicitly illegal. Everyone must play the game as an individual buyer and seller, in the infinite market in which they have no leverage and the costs of defection are zero.
Women’s education and employment is a proxy for induction into the Global Massively Multiplayer Defect/Defect Equilibrium.
Women in the developing world are not discovering PowerPoint with ecstatic religious awe, and losing all interest in family life. They are leaving the human milieu in which the covenant of family life makes sense, and entering a managerial milieu in which it does not.
The traditional value of “women’s work” was generated in the domain of local, human, interpersonal obligation. But that realm has become a commons in which no one is able to impose any binding obligations on anyone else — so effort invested in that domain no longer pays off — so women (quickly followed by men) stop investing.
This is the rational move for them: that’s why it’s a collective action problem.
Accordingly, we get rising GDP and household income, alongside collapsing social cohesion, rampant mental illness, badly socialized and miseducated children, and fertility collapse.”
— John Bennett
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“Your great-grandparents could make it work in a 1000 square foot starter home because they knew their children would have the run of the whole neighborhood, and come home for dinner and bed.
Young families now pay a $300K mortgage premium to live in the Good School District to ensure that their children won’t be the victim of a violent crime. That used to come free with your American citizenship.
TVs are cheaper, and you may have more dollars to spend — even, arguably, in “real terms”. But all the things you need — especially if you want to raise a family — are either many multiples more expensive, or simply not available at any price.
And every step of this liquidation of the commons has registered to our sociological sense organs as “growth”: rising wages, cheaper flatscreens, ever more bachelor’s degrees.
When you liquidate the illegible social capital of a community and try to repurchase it at retail, you get the Clancy house: a small army of enormously expensive “caregivers”, powerless to prevent a psychospiritual catastrophe.
Young people simply will not breed under these conditions, and the sense organs of managerial society are not even capable of parsing this as a problem.
This is not an incidental policy problem for which the right technocrat could provide the right data-driven solution. It is a problem with data-driven solutions as such.
Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair.
What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church.
The moment these ideals enter the “real world” of money and power, they can only be understood as “prejudice” or “corruption”: not only a bad thing, but the bad thing — the enemy that the system exists to eradicate.
But the family is an inherently covenantal relationship, and it inherently involves the real world. Human beings will not raise families as a transaction — so a society that cannot honor covenants cannot have families, and very rapidly will cease to be a society at all.
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
Malachi 4:5-6
One way or another, human institutions are coming back.
It’s unclear how long this deconstruction will continue: but in secular terms, the only societies that make it to the other side will be those who make it possible to find trustworthy counterparties and play iterated, cooperative games.
Put in spiritual terms: the societies that make it to the other side will be those that restore honor and loyalty as social realities, so that it is possible for ordinary people to make and keep covenants again.
It’s not clear what mature institutions of this kind will look like, but it seems like it has to start with like-minded people getting together at human scale, to build things with stakes that matter, and place bets on each other. On the strength of a shared history between human beings with names and faces, we have to restore the primal human circuits of patronage and fraternity for our children to inherit.”
— John Bennett
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The problem with therapy culture:
“Ladies, if you ever find yourself using any of this language, you should pause.
- Mental load
- Emotional labor
- Emotional unavailability
- Emotional intelligence
- Gaslighting
- My trauma
- Narcissistic
- Weaponized incompetence
- Empathy
- People-pleaser
- Boundaries
- Triggered
- Protecting my peace
First, if your husband is actually sinning against you, you should be able to identify a sin, and not resort to some nebulous euphemism.
Even more importantly, you should ask yourself how these terms entered your vocabulary in the first place (and you’ll quickly realize it was FB, Instagram or tik tok). It’s very apparent that the algorithm has been weaponized to push discontentment. Is it possible that these terms are justifications for an artificial dissatisfaction that you probably wouldn’t feel if you weren’t being encouraged to?
This jargon should be stripped of any force. The words don’t mean anything in particular. They’re a smokescreen women are being trained to use to paint the picture of an undefined abuse that can never be repented of. It’s a trap for your husband, set by the devil, and the bait is YOU.
In other words, you guys gotta cut it out.”
— Les Lanphere, warning about the dangers of therapy culture and therapy-speak
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We are commanded to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. What is this love? Love is the willing another’s good, according to the will of God. Love is treating another lawfully from the heart.
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Toxic empathy is also suicidal:
“The Architect of 9/11 Said America Would Be Conquered by Its Own Kindness
9/11 was the raid.
This is the occupation.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told CIA interrogator James Mitchell they didn’t need another plane to hit a tower.
They would use our kindness.
Immigration.
Welfare.
Our rights.
Our churches.
Our press.
Our hunger to be decent.
He called those gifts from Allah.
America heard it. Our leaders did the opposite.
To honor the dead, we must refuse to follow the script.
How many warnings does America need?”
— Amy Mek
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“Greatness rejects all first time applicants.”
— Alex Hormozi
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The anti-usury crowd is often poorly thought out and lacks a basic understanding of finance. I’ve addressed the ethical issues elsewhere, so let me just focus on one aspect of the debate here.
To eliminate all lending at interest would have catastrophic ramifications and go beyond what Scripture warrants. Unless we want to kill the economy, we cannot outlaw all interest. So then the question becomes: What counts as a usurious loan? I’ve often wondered why those who are critical of loan sharks don’t open up low interest loan businesses or low interest credit card companies…Well, there ‘s a reason and it’s pretty obvious. Anyone who tried to open such a business would not last long. The lender has to factor in all kinds of risks, fraud, etc. Charity loans, of course, are a different matter, but there is no hard requirement for charity loans to be paid back – that’s why they are charitable.
The only fair way to determine the “cost” of money over time is through the free market. Usury, in my view, would be harnessing the power of the state to set interest rates above what the free market would warrant. I do not think any of us knows what the interest rate would be if it was set by the market rather than the Fed. But my guess is that it would be a lot higher than what we currently have. In other words, We have had interest rates set artificially low for along time now. Usury is far from the biggest economic problem we face. One reason we have a debt-run economy is that we have made borrowing money too cheap. We are subsidizing consumption and reckless investment with cheap money. Artificially cheap credit messes with the coordination of savings and investment. If favors borrowers over savers.
Artificially cheap credit does three things that a freely determined rate would not:
- It subsidizes present consumption and long-duration, low-yield projects at the expense of savers.
- It inflates asset prices and encourages leverage that would not survive at a genuine market rate.
- It transfers purchasing power from those who hold cash or fixed claims to those who borrow first (Cantillon effects).
That is the opposite of the classic usury complaint, which was that lenders were extracting too much from borrowers. Here the central bank is extracting from savers and future taxpayers by keeping the price of money too low.
Historically, Christian teaching never treated all interest as inherently sinful, as I’ve argued elsewhere. The Torah restricted interest among Israelites, especially the poor, but permitted it with foreigners and business loans. The Reformation (Calvin and others) generally allowed moderate interest as a legitimate return on deferred consumption, while still condemning predatory or fraudulent lending. The live issue today is not whether interest should exist, but whether a monopoly issuer (the state) should be allowed to set its price by decree rather than by the actual scarcity of savings.
The present problem is suppressed rates, not the mere existence of interest or excessively high interest.
—
I asked Grok how a modern woke therapist would analyze Psalm 51:
A modern woke therapist would not treat Psalm 51 as a model of repentance. They would treat it as a document produced by a high-status perpetrator who has been confronted, feels acute shame, and is trying to restore his relationship with an authority figure while leaving the actual victims offstage.
Here is the analysis they would typically offer.
Clinical framing
David presents with intense guilt, self-loathing, and a plea for internal cleansing after an abuse of power that involved sexual coercion and the arranged death of a subordinate. The therapist would note that the client is a king—maximum institutional power, no meaningful accountability structure, and a cultural script that treats women as available. The presenting problem is not “sin against God” but unprocessed entitlement plus the collapse of a cover-up.
They would likely describe Bathsheba’s situation as non-consensual in any meaningful sense: a subject summoned by the monarch. Uriah is collateral. The infant who dies is further collateral. The psalm’s silence on all three is treated as diagnostic.
Main criticisms of the text
- “Against you, you only, have I sinned” (v. 4) This is the line they would flag first. It is read as a classic perpetrator move: recentering the offense on the relationship with the highest-status party (God) so that the humans who were actually used and discarded drop out of the moral picture. Contemporary language would call it spiritualizing harm, minimizing impact, and avoiding restorative accountability. A therapist would say David is doing “theocentric solipsism”—making the victim’s body and the murdered husband’s life secondary to his own spiritual crisis.
- Original-sin language (v. 5) “I was brought forth in iniquity” would be heard as inherited shame rather than honest anthropology. It pathologizes embodiment and maternity (“conceived in sin”) and can be used to flatten every person into equally guilty, which conveniently dilutes the specific power imbalance of a king taking a soldier’s wife. Womanist and feminist readings (Wilda Gafney and others) note the irony of David invoking womb-compassion (rechem) after violating a woman’s body.
- Individual interiority instead of justice The psalm asks for a clean heart, a steadfast spirit, restored joy, and the chance to teach other sinners. It does not ask what restitution Bathsheba is owed, whether the monarchy’s structures enabled the crime, or how the community should constrain royal power. From a trauma-informed / social-justice frame, confession without structural change and without centering the survivor is incomplete and potentially self-soothing for the powerful.
- Shame-based rather than trauma-informed The language of washing, blotting out, hyssop, crushed bones, and a broken spirit is interpreted as an intensification of shame. A current therapist would prefer to distinguish healthy guilt (I harmed someone) from toxic shame (I am irredeemably filthy). They would worry that the psalm trains people—especially those already abused by religious systems—to collapse their identity into “sinner” rather than to examine how power, patriarchy, and unaccountable male leadership produce these events.
- The God-relationship as hierarchical rescue David’s terror that God will take the Spirit away and cast him from the presence is read as an anxious-preoccupied attachment to an authoritarian figure. Healing, in this model, would involve moving from “please don’t reject me, Father” toward self-compassion, boundary-setting, and a God (or Higher Power) who is less judge and more affirming witness. The sacrificial system at the end of the psalm would be viewed as an outdated purity regime.
- Missing survivor voice Multiple contemporary readings invent or recover Bathsheba’s voice precisely because the psalm does not. The therapist would treat that absence as the problem the text cannot solve from inside itself. What they would recommend instead • Name the power differential explicitly; stop calling it “adultery” as if it were symmetric. • Center the survivor’s agency and safety; David’s inner state is secondary. • Work on entitlement, objectification, and the cultural scripts that made the palace rooftop possible. • Replace “create in me a clean heart” with practices of accountability, restitution where possible, and dismantling the systems that protect high-status men. • Be cautious about using the psalm in worship or counseling rooms where assault survivors are present; some progressive liturgical resources now flag it as potentially re-traumatizing. In short: the woke therapist would say Psalm 51 is psychologically vivid and liturgically powerful, but ethically incomplete. It is a king’s prayer for personal restoration after he has used the machinery of the state to satisfy himself and remove an obstacle. The categories it offers—sin, uncleanness, a new heart granted by God—are judged inadequate next to power analysis, survivor-centered ethics, and trauma theory. That is the critique. Whether it is a more truthful reading of the text than David’s own categories is a different question.
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“Americans, since they don’t sing the Psalter, are gut-level pacifists.”
— James B. Jordan
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“”Out of thy debt-book; cross out the black lines of my sins with the red lines of Christ’s blood; cancel the bond, though written in black and bloody characters.”
— John Trapp
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“Guy: “Can’t have a Christian nation because Christ’s kingdom is not of this world.”
Same guy: “Our nation should be multicultural because Christ’s kingdom is multicultural.””
— Stephen Wolfe
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“Modern democracy, with universal suffrage, always goes bankrupt over time.
Why?
Because closely-contested votes are determined by swing voters, which means voters who are easily swayed. There don’t have to be a lot of them. Two percent will do, because two percent is the difference between 49% and 51%.
This has two first-order effects.
First of all, it strips consistent voters of political representation. If you are part of a group that consistently votes Purple, then the Greens won’t offer you anything, but neither will the Purples, because they not only don’t have to, but because they have to focus their efforts on the swing voters.
Secondly, you end up in a situation where the best, and the only viable, political strategy is “bribe swing voters”.
Elections, at this point, are no longer a contest of ideas, or a debate over the best interests of the nation. They are an auction, where minorities with X amount of votes collectively negotiate their sale to political parties for Y amount of taxpayer dollars.
So, neither party is fiscally responsible. They can’t be. To be fiscally responsible is to lose. What this means is that government spending is a ratchet… it only turns one way, increasing but never decreasing.
Even those who would love to cut spending can’t. Instead, they have to try to accumulate political power so they can, which means spending money to bribe swing voters.
They end up kicking the can down the road simply because the system effectively forbids anything else.
The second-order effect of this is that the nation moves inevitably towards bankruptcy.
Why? Because you cannot increase taxes forever. Up to a point, increasing taxes increases the money you get from taxing. But then you reach a point where increasing taxes actually gets you less, because you taxed people too much, and now they don’t have as much for you to take.
(It’s called the Laffer Curve, but when you get there, no one is laughing.)
But then you have to spend less, right? Because you have less?
Wrong. When you get to the top of the Laffer Curve, you have to keep spending because the reality of elections won’t allow anything else.
So you print money.
But what you don’t realize, or maybe you do, but you have no choice, is that inflation is also a tax.
A 5% annual inflation rate is a 5% flat tax. But it’s not a 5% flat tax on income, it’s a 5% flat tax on total net worth. It’s taking 5% of every dollar-denominated asset, every year.
And since it is a tax, it moves you up the Laffer Curve in the same way. It makes your society poorer, your direct tax revenue less, and also reduces your effective income from printing money because your currency is worth less now.
This can happen very fast if you live in Zimbabwe, and your politicians all have double-digit IQs and don’t understand any of this.
Or it can happen slowly because in you live in America and your politicians do understand this, they just have no choice.
But it always happens, because the ratchet only moves in one direction. The amount of money that universal democracies eventually spend is “all there is”.
@elonmusk found out about this with DOGE. He worked his ass off finding hundreds of billions to cut from the budget, but he was surprised and dismayed when that money was not actually cut from the federal budget, just traded away for political capital.
Which was, in fact, always the plan.
Because in a universal democracy, there is no political path to budget cuts.
He then expressed the hope that if we cannot tame the devouring monster, we could simply leverage emerging technologies like AI, robotics, and space capitalism to increase productivity and stay ahead of the monster’s appetite.
But you can’t. Because universal democracies don’t devour a fixed percent of society wealth. They devour All There Is.
You can’t appease All There Is. You can’t satiate it or satisfy it. You can’t put it on a diet.
And you can never shut it down with the political process, because swing voters control elections, and they will never allow anyone who does this to retain the political power to keep doing it.
The ratchet only spins one direction.
This means that a political collapse is inevitable. But not all political collapses are the same. Some political collapses are the Supreme Soviet voting to dissolve itself. Others are a Rwandian Machete Party.
The trick is that when the normies finally realize they are being taxed to death, and are ready for a change, there need to be new leaders who understand that the problem is not the budget, the problem is universal suffrage.
Leaders who are willing to ignore the usual collection of abstract-principle wankers cheeping out “Who decides?” like a small trained birds.
Because somebody has to decide. Look where not-deciding got us.”
— Devon Eriksen
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Women were made to care for things that cry. But not everything that cries is a baby — sometimes it’s a monster.
This misplaced maternal instinct – caring for monsters rather than babies – is one of the greatest social disasters of our day. Women (usually white liberal women without kids of their own) will turn marginalized groups (Islamic immigrants, gays, transgenders, etc.) into substitute children. It’s toxic empathy.
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Are we still allowed to make jokes like this?:
“Heaven is where the chefs are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, the police British, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organized by the Italians.”
The value in a joke like this is that is recognizes that different ethnic groups have different strengths and weaknesses. This is a truth the Bible also acknowledges, eg, Isaiah 60.
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Redeemed Zoomer has a good critique of Roman Catholicism here:
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“A broken heart is to God such an excellent thing [because] a broken heart prizes Christ, and has a high esteem for him.….. As bread to the hungry, as water to the thirsty, as light to the blind, and liberty to the imprisoned; so, and a thousand times more, is Jesus Christ to the wounded, and to them that are broken-hearted. A broken heart is of great esteem with God, because it is a thankful heart for that sense of sin and of grace it has received [and]… because it is a heart that desires now to become a receptacle or habitation for the spirit and graces of the Spirit of God.”
— John Bunyan on Psalm 51
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“Feminism promised women they could have everything. They didn’t need to dependent upon men. Then it handed them dependence on corporations, daycare centers, HR departments, government programs, and strangers. Dependence was inevitable.”
— Joseph Spurgeon
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“In confession there occurs a breakthrough to the cross. The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be for myself; I have a right to be myself, a right to my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The spirit an flesh of human beings are inflamed by pride, for it is precisely in their wickedness that human beings want to be like God. Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. it hurts, makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride. To stand there before another Christian as a sinner is an almost unbearable disgrace. By confessing actual sins the old self dies a painful, humiliating death before the eyes of another Christian. Because this humiliation is so difficult, we keep thinking we can avoid confessing to one another. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory of such humiliation.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“You are as much serving God in training your own children, as you would be if you lead an army to battle for the Lord.”
— Charles Spurgeon
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The lone holdout on the Lindsay Clancy jury is a hero and patriot. That man deserves our profound gratitude. He acted with courage and integrity. He stood up for justice.
—
Matt Walsh on Lindsay Clancy and the abomination of child sacrifice:
“When the Europeans got here… this was a systemic part of their culture..
They believed that it’s how they kept the world turning. It’s how they kept the sun burning in the sky was by constantly feeding their gods, these like evil, hideous, demonic gods, this constant buffet of human sacrifices, very often children—So this is a very common element of a primitive pagan cultures that we like to think we have advanced beyond, we have vanquished, and at one point we did, but that is abortion.
There’s no difference that any pro-abortion person can articulate between killing a child in the womb and killing a child who’s been out of the womb for a day or 20 days or 1,000 days. It’s the same person.”
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Pro-family welfare programs are still a form of socialism, even if they incentivize better goals than our present welfare system. If the money is going to be spent on something, sure. I’d rather it go to “normal” families than subsidize more illegitimacy and fatherlessness. I’d rather stay-at-home moms get paid rather than daycare workers; I’d rather subsidize (and incentivize) married families than career women and single parent families.
But welfare ruins most everything it touches. There are always trade-offs. In this case, it would have the effect of emasculating men who derive great satisfaction in being the head of and provider for their families. Making the state co-head of the family is not going to help men recover true masculinity in this effeminate age. Still, it might be the best alternative in our screwed up political system.
Someone made a flow chart: if a government can be eliminated, then eliminate it. But there is no political utopia. There will always be trade offs. If a program cannot be cancelled, at least make it so it does not punish or disadvantage conservatives. In my view, that’s what Vance is proposing. It is not a perfect proposal – but it is a realistic one, and an improvement over what we are currently doing.
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You don’t beat lust by starving your soul. You beat it by feasting at the table God has actually set for you.
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“Whether it is promiscuously using psychological jargon to make one’s own selfishness seem therapeutic or encouraging an external locus of control, therapy culture hurts people. From the perspective of secular science, it is bad because it tends to entrench or even induce mental illness. From the perspective of the Church, therapy culture is bad for a number of reasons. It pathologizes core aspects of Christian teaching like the reality of sin or the power of forgiveness. It hinders people from flourishing as God intended us to flourish. It pressures pastors to measure themselves by the standards of therapy rather than the Bible. We are creatures of heart, mind, soul, and strength who aren’t meant to waste away in front of our smartphones, while blaming our problems on our parents or society at large.”
— Matthew Loftus
The basic problem with so much contemporary therapy and counseling is that it makes things worse rather than better. It fundamentally contradicts what Scripture and nature teach us about God and ourselves, and drives a wedge between people and reality. The more we try to solve mental health problems with secular tools, the worse the mental health crisis gets.
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Welfare destroys everything it touches:
“The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, what Jim Crow could not do, what the harshest racism could not do, and that is to destroy the black family.”
— Walter Williams
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“If God in Jesus Christ descends into the worst hell imaginable in order to deliver us from the hells we inflict upon one another, then such a God is worthy of our trust. We need not stand by helplessly witnessing the suffering and dying of those we love; we have a God to whom we can entrust them in life and in death.”
— Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger
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Millennials in particular, but younger generations more generally, have a deep dislike of the Boomer generation. The Boomers supposedly had it easy, while life is much more difficult for younger people today. I’m sympathetic with a lot of the criticisms of the Boomer generation. But here’s a question for the younger folks: Would you rather be a 20 year old in 1966 or 2026? Sure a house was cheaper in 1966, but it was a much smaller house than most would want to buy today. Marriage rates were higher but thousands of young men were drafted to go fight a war in the 1960s. The economy was stronger for men in the 1960s, but there are plenty of economic opportunities today and the jobs are usually safer and cleaner. We have far more conveniences today.
My point is not that 2026 is better for 20 year olds than 1966 – far from it. As a Gen Xer, I’m nostalgic for many aspects of the way America was in the 1960s-1980s. My point is that every era has trade-offs. The good times still had struggles and the hard times are often not as hard as they seem.
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The Gospel of John uses Jewish festivals more deliberately than the Synoptics. The word “feast” (heortē) appears far more often in John, and Jesus repeatedly “goes up to Jerusalem” in connection with them. John is not merely dating events; he is showing that Jesus fulfills—and in some sense replaces—the meaning of the feasts themselves. 
Here are the festivals that appear.
Passover (Pesach)
John records three Passovers during Jesus’ public ministry, which is a major reason many conclude the ministry lasted about three years.
- John 2:13, 23 — The first Passover. Jesus cleanses the temple and speaks of raising “this temple” in three days.
- John 6:4 — Passover is “near.” The feeding of the 5,000 and the Bread of Life discourse follow. Jesus presents himself as the true manna and the true Passover provision.
- John 11:55; 12:1; 13:1; 18:28, 39; 19:14 — The final Passover. Jesus dies as the Lamb at the time the Passover lambs were being slaughtered. John is careful with the chronology: Jesus is crucified on the Day of Preparation, before the evening meal of the feast.
Passover is the dominant festival in the book. Jesus is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world (1:29) and whose bones are not broken (19:36, echoing Exodus 12).
The unnamed feast (John 5:1)
“After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” The healing at Bethesda occurs on a Sabbath during this feast.
John does not name it. The three pilgrimage feasts (Passover, Pentecost/Shavuot, Tabernacles) are the most common suggestions because adult Jewish males were required to appear in Jerusalem for them (Deut 16:16). Pentecost is often favored because chapter 5 turns on Jesus’ relationship to Moses and the Law, and by the first century Shavuot was already associated with the giving of the Torah at Sinai. Others argue it is another Passover or even Purim. Certainty is impossible, and John may have left it unnamed on purpose: the real calendrical issue in the chapter is the Sabbath, not the annual feast.
Feast of Tabernacles / Booths (Sukkot) — John 7–8 (themes continue through 9–10)
“Now the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand” (7:2). Jesus goes up privately, then teaches publicly in the temple.
Two well-known ceremonies of the feast stand behind Jesus’ words: - The water-drawing ritual (Simchat Beit HaShoevah). On the last and greatest day Jesus cries out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink… Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water” (7:37–39).
- The lighting of the great temple lamps. Immediately afterward Jesus declares, “I am the light of the world” (8:12).
The feast commemorated God’s provision in the wilderness and looked forward to the eschatological ingathering of the nations. John presents Jesus as the source of the water and light the feast only pictured.
Feast of Dedication (Hanukkah, Festival of Lights) — John 10:22–23
“It was the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon.”
This winter feast (25 Kislev) commemorated the rededication of the temple in 165/164 BC after its desecration by Antiochus IV. It is the only New Testament mention of Hanukkah. In that setting Jesus speaks of being “consecrated” (hagiazein) by the Father and sent into the world, and he makes the climactic claim “I and the Father are one.” The temple that was rededicated now finds its true meaning in the one who is himself the dwelling place of God.
Sabbath
John treats the weekly Sabbath as a holy day on which Jesus repeatedly acts (John 5, 7:22–24, 9). The controversy is never about abolishing the Sabbath but about Jesus’ authority to work as the Father works.
How John uses the feasts
The festivals give the Gospel its chronological spine and its theological structure. They mark the approach of Jesus’ “hour.” More importantly, each feast supplies symbols that Jesus claims for himself: - Passover → the Lamb and the true bread
- Tabernacles → living water and the light of the world
- Dedication → the consecrated one who is one with the Father
- Sabbath → the Son who works as the Father works
The deepest meaning of feasts is found in Jesus. The feasts are not discarded; they are fulfilled.
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David was not man enough to look away from Bathsheba. He was not strong enough to avert his eyes when he saw her bathing. Lust in a man’s heart has to be seen for what it is – spiritual and moral weakness. A man who has a weakness for women is a weak man.
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“There is a direct correlation in the kingdom of God between the depth of a man’s scars and the capacity of his calling. The men who feel a burning desire to be used greatly by God are almost always the ones who have been wounded most deeply by this fallen world.
Trauma, past failures, betrayal, and spiritual battle leave marks. But the enemy’s tactical trap is to convince you that your wounds are a disqualification rather than your training ground.
Satan wants you frozen in fear, convinced that because you’ve been broken, you are unfit to stand on the front lines. He keeps men isolated because he knows what happens when a battle-scarred man surrenders his wounds to the King: he becomes dangerous to the darkness.
God does not call the flawless; He commissions the healed. Your scars are not proof that you are broken beyond repair—they are the proof that you survived the fire, and in the hands of Jesus, they become your greatest source of spiritual authority. A man who has been pulled out of the pit by grace cannot be intimidated by the enemy, because he knows the power of the Redeemer.
If fear is telling you to stay hidden in the shadows, it is only because the enemy recognizes the potential of what you carry. It’s time to stop letting past wounds dictate your future warfare. Drop the excuses, bring your scars to the cross, and take your place in the formation.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7
“But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” — 2 Corinthians 12:9
If a man has been through hell and survived by the grace of God, he is exactly the kind of man we want locking shields with us.”
— Josh Howerton
—
A very good article on why progressivism and masculinity can never be compatible because men cannot simultaneously be an oppressor class and a victim class that needs rescue:
The article does a good job exposing the idiocy of Scott Galloway who pretends to care about men’s issues but still frames everything from a gynocentric point of view, eg, women cannot be fully happy when men are floundering, which assumes men only exist to prop up women’s happiness.
The key claims of the article are summarized at the end:
“Galloway speaks of “Protectiveness” as a key characteristic that men should be encouraged to build in order to improve their lot, noting that “it’s a tragedy that that women don’t feel safe on the subway… women shouldn’t feel they need to cross the road when they see a young man, they should cross the road to get to a young man. Your job is to protect. Who breaks up fights at bars? Big strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don’t like themselves.” This is all fine on one level – I hate violence and I don’t even disagree that being protective of others is a key way that men can provide value to others and thereby fulfill themselves. But again we see the occurrence of a key problem – equating strength onlywith protectiveness of others is a way of side-stepping the dilemma of what men want for themselves, and how progressive outlook can address that essential question.
The problem is not the idea of service and usefulness which holds a very strong appeal to men; the problem is that in a progressive world-view the purpose of politics is a therapeutic one of allowing marginal groups space to gain power, self-actualise and fulfill themselves for their own sake, not as a way of serving others. Men are still an historic oppressor group to be feared despite their recent failures, so a progressive outlook can never speak directly to their happiness, their fulfillment, their success except where it provides for women or some other group more worthy of consideration than men themselves. Even where men are targeted as a voter group it can only ever be done in a way that puts a philosophical burden on them – that burden being that political solutions tailored for them are only valid to the extent that they can be positioned as providing relief and support to other, more marginalised and historically oppressed (and therefore politically legitimate) groups.
There are a number of different places where we see this natural tension bubble to the surface – that of seeing men as both an oppressor group that progressive politics exist to liberate others from, but also as a voter group that progressive candidates can’t succeed without. Galloway keeps highlighting the biological inadequacies of men, in a way he never would with another group, and I can’t help but feel he does it with a degree of relief. So during the podcast we’re reminded that boys are less mature, have brains that develop more slowly, and are “less educationally fit” than girls. When I note he would never point out these kinds of basic biological limitations with women, it’s not a complaint – it’s just that it’s interesting and revealing. To be able to articulate men’s inadequacies comes as a relief because they allow a Progressive activist to position men as a victim class, but still one of inferior quality. Men can then be deserving of help but not in a way that is disruptive of the philosophical status quo, in which a member of an oppressor class being capable makes them dangerous.
Our modern conception of politics is that it’s about you, your success, your fulfillment – a cross between liberation, self-help, and self-love expressed through the ballot box. For the oppressed groups Progressive thought is oriented towards, it offers them support, endorsement, encouragement and nurturing and a confirmation that yes, everyone is against you, yes you deserve the world, no nothing is your fault. Everyone gets a fragment of that treatment, and it’s part of why that type of politics is successful – but men, by definition, can’t share in that. Now – no one knows better than men themselves that male strength and vitality is frightening, and that it does need to be corralled into some useful shape. Often that does come in the form of duty, self-sacrifice, obligation. And of course it’s true for most people that they find fulfillment by placing a centre outside themselves. But men are the only political group where their focus is expected to be on service alone, and I think it’s blinkered of people like Galloway (I’m less sure of Reeves) to think that men won’t notice that a double-standard is being unfavourably applied to them. The one thing that red-pill gurus and drop-shipping self-help scammers and online shitlords of various types understand is that flexing your strength (in whatever field) for its own sake is important, and can bring joy into one’s life. That’s not all there is to life, but it’s not nothing.
Galloway ends his appearance with some general blather about the need for men and women to put aside their burgeoning political differences and come together. Let’s not dwell on how we got here, where political tendencies are diverging; there’s plenty of blame to go round, and he tells us that “the genders have each done a great job of blaming each other for their own failures”. Oh really? I find this feint at evenhandedness, and treating men and women as equal political actors within a progressive framework that by definition must regard women’s political interests as more legitimate than men’s, a bit infuriating. If Scott says (or implies) with confidence that women blame men for their own failures, perhaps he can give us some examples? He can’t, of course. “Women aren’t going to flourish if men are flailing” is his final appeal as to why we need effective solutions to male-specific problems. But why should another group be your point of orientation, in a political worldview based around personal fulfillment and liberation? I’m sure Scott would agree that greater female inclusion in the political process was and still is about giving women room to self-actualise and be happy and gain their due share of power, and men’s function in the political process is to… what – help women do that? I don’t even care if it’s true, it’s just an unpersuasive message and men won’t be drawn to it. It’s a problem that is not easily solved.”
—
“Trauma immediately invokes the concept of victim and victimizer, which can very easily reinforce the unhealthy notion of an external locus of control.”
— Matthew Loftus, on how the trauma paradigm presupposes cultural Marxism and trains people in learned helplessness
—
Biblical patriarchy is not the same as ancient Rome’s paterfamilias household model. In Roman law, paterfamilias carried patria potestas, sweeping legal power over persons and property. A father could even kill his children if he so desired. Scripture does not baptize that pagan model. It does, however, treat the household as a real unit under a real head, and it names that head the man.
The Bible never speaks of “the house of Sarah” or “the house of Abraham and Sarah.” It speaks of the house of Abraham, the house of Jacob, the house of David. A man can speak and act for his whole household (Joshua 24); a woman is not portrayed doing the same. Fathers are commanded to bring children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). Fitness for church office is measured in part by how a man rules his own household (1 Tim. 3:4–5). In Numbers 30 a husband or father can nullify the vow of his wife or daughter in his house. Psalm 128 is written from the man’s place as the head of his household, with wife, children, and grandchildren gathered around his table.
That is not co-headship. Two heads make a monster. The wife has real authority—children honor both parents; the young man in Proverbs is told to heed his mother’s teaching—but her authority operates under her husband’s headship, as a vice-president’s authority operates under the president’s. Headship is a fact of creation and covenant and command, not a cultural construct (Eph. 5:23; 1 Cor. 11:3). The man is responsible whether he exercises the office well or poorly.
The household itself is the original “little platoon.” Before there is a gathered church or a civil magistrate, there is a housefather charged with provision, protection, instruction, and worship. The patriarchs offered sacrifice, catechized their children, judged disputes, and led their people. The Reformers and Puritans recovered this: the family is a little church and a little commonwealth; the father is its priest, prophet, and king, under Christ. He does not replace God the Father—from whom all fatherhood is named (Eph. 3:14–15)—but he images Him in the concrete life of the home.
The Roman paterfamilias could be a tyrant. The biblical housefather is a steward who will give an account. His authority exists for the good of those under him: to feed, guard, teach, and lead them toward the true Father. When he fails—by abdication or by domination—the household, the church, and the culture suffer. When he fulfills the office, the family becomes what God intended: the seedbed of the church and the first school of a Christian people.
—
“To complete this Revolution, Steinem collaborated with several others to found Ms. Magazine, the flagship popularizer of feminist ideology.
The first issue, released by New York magazine in 1972, maps out the next stages of the Rolling Feminist Revolution. The issue featured articles about desexing the English language, promoting gender-neutral parenting, normalizing lesbianism, and celebrating careerism. Subsequent issues defended women getting angry instead of being agreeable. Achieving such goals would require a revolution in how society operated.
This would happen not only through the coercive power of the state but also through a fundamental shift in cultural norms. Endless nagging about using terms like “fire-person” or “police-woman” began. Androgynous clothing would have to be adopted from infancy, as would demands that little girls love the same toys as little boys. Girls would play boys’ sports—and with boys.
The Rolling Feminist Revolution required the difficult task of erasing sex differences. The second issue of Ms. included “Body Hair: The Last Frontier,” which argued that girls would not be free until they were as hairy as guys. “Populist Mechanics” contended that women would not be free until as many women became mechanics as men. Steinem imagined that far fewer women would take their husbands’ last name than do even today.
Steinem’s anticipated world has come about in many ways (a testament to the power of culture), but not with the results she expected (a testament to the power of nature).
She promised breaking down traditional sex roles would lead “half the teachers” to be men—but there were more male teachers in 1970 than there are today.
She promised that doubling the workforce would lead to “higher wages”—but wages have predictably been depressed by expanding the supply of labor since 1970.
She promised that “marriage will probably go right on” once society stopped “encouraging men to be exploiters and women to be parasites”—but marriage rates have declined substantially since sex roles were destroyed, especially among the working class.
She thought women had two choices: “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist”—but it turns out the feminists are the miserable masochists, and married neo-traditional moms are among the happiest women.
She thought that characterizing men as exploiters and women as parasites would lead to a society based on mutual trust and affection—but instead it created suspicion between the sexes. Women distrust men more today than they did in 1970.
She thought that destroying the old idea of marriage would make marriage stronger—but instead marriage, for the most part, is weaker, love is less apparent, and sex is less connected to meaningful, enduring relationships.
Steinem helped midwife a world of purposeless men, miserable women, mutual suspicion, loneliness, depression, anger, insanity, collapsing family life, civilizational barrenness, and hyper-politicization. The healthiest parts of our culture are the parts least affected by Steinem’s false, pernicious advocacy. The world after Steinem would be better if men and women once again built common lives without feminism’s poisonous influence.”
— Scott Yenor, Gloria Steinem’s failed feminist revolution
—
Stats over the last 12 months:
Women +870k jobs, men -1.5 million jobs
That’s staggering
You can have feminism or you can have civilization, but not both
If you wanted to design a society that destroys marriage, family, and the future, this is exactly how you would do it
Women want to marry men who can provide for them
Our social engineering is preventing that
We are committing civilizational suicide
—
Kait Willet on male criminality:
““But men commit 90% of violent crime.”
This might be one of the laziest responses in the gender debate.
I’m going to break this down, slowly, so we can stop using regurgitated words not understanding how ridiculous this I argument actually is.
First: the number isn’t even 90%.
In the FBI’s 2024 arrest data, men accounted for about 79% of violent-crime arrests.
That is absolutely disproportionate.
I have no problem acknowledging that.
But here is where people immediately expose that they don’t understand base rates:
“79% of violent offenders are male”
does NOT mean
“79% of males are violent offenders.”
Those are two completely different denominators.
There are more than 165 MILLION males in the United States.
There were roughly 374,000 reported violent-crime arrests in the FBI data, about 79% of which were male.
That’s roughly 295,000 male arrests.
Even if we pretended, incorrectly, that every single arrest represented a DIFFERENT man, that would be around: 0.18% of the male population.
And arrests are NOT unique offenders. The same offender can be arrested multiple times.
In fact, criminal offending is highly concentrated among repeat offenders. In one major BJS analysis, just 16% of released prisoners accounted for nearly HALF of all subsequent arrests.
So yes: Men are massively overrepresented among violent offenders.
AND
The overwhelming majority of men are NOT violent offenders.
Both statements are simultaneously true.
That’s what base rates and proportionality are for.
Then we get to IPV, as this repeated statement is used as justification to dismiss men’s issues, assuming, of course, that this is in defense of women
Here it becomes even more interesting.
There is an enormous body of research using measures such as the Conflict Tactics Scales finding substantial gender SYMMETRY in the perpetration of physical partner aggression.
Straus reviewed 200+ studies finding roughly comparable proportions of men and women reporting physical aggression toward partners.
That does NOT mean the consequences are identical.
Men are, on average, physically stronger. Male violence is therefore substantially more capable of producing serious injury, and women experience greater injury from partner violence.
Fine.
Acknowledge it.
But “men can inflict more damage” does not magically transform female violence into non-violence.
A woman hitting a man isn’t empowering.
It isn’t funny.
It isn’t justified because he can probably hit harder.
It’s violence.
And current CDC estimates also remind us that men are not some hypothetical class of victims: about 930,000 U.S. men reported physical violence from an intimate partner in the preceding year in the 2023/24 survey.
Finally, if we’re going to invoke male violence, let’s talk about who actually experiences it.
According to the 2024 National Crime Victimization Survey, approximately 2.39 million violent incidents involving male victims had male offenders, compared with about 1.82 million involving female victims and male offenders.
In other words, MEN themselves absorb an enormous share of male violence.
So the next time someone responds to a male issue with:
“But men commit most violent crime…”
Ask them three questions:
What percentage of men actually commit violent crime?
How concentrated is that violence among repeat offenders?
And who are the victims of male violence?
Because “most violent offenders are men” and “most men are violent” are not remotely the same proposition.
If you don’t understand the denominator, you don’t understand the statistic.
And using the behavior of a tiny, disproportionately violent subset of men to assign collective guilt to 165+ million males isn’t statistical literacy.
It’s stereotyping with a calculator.”
—
“Gloria Steinem said, “A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
Feminism has produced impoverished families, divorced families, single mothers, women who have had sex out of wedlock and encouraged men to shirk responsibility. And in this is has slain its billions. Abortion primarily occurs in impoverished families, divorced families, and single women who have sex outside of marriage. This bloodshed has stained every fabric of American life.
But Gloria Steinem is dead and she now she can no longer resist authority but instead will be on her knees before the Father through whom all Fatherhood gets its name.
She is dead and may feminism die with her.”
— Joseph Spurgeon
—
Lindsay Clancy-style feminism is ancient Roman paterfamilias, but for women. (Paterfamilias included power over the life and death of children.)
—
“I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the sensational trial of Lindsay Clancy, which ended in a mistrial after a hung jury. I understand, since several jurors have done sit-down interviews with journalists, that the eleven women wanted to acquit Clancy of her crimes and the sole male juror refused. And those interviews are really something. One lady actually said these words: “There wasn’t one person on either side that could say anything bad about her. Even the prosecution really couldn’t point to anything.” The prosecutors couldn’t point to anything badabout Lindsay Clancy? How about … she murdered her three children? Not bad enough for you? Oof.
I did not follow the ins and outs so take this with some measure of salt. There are several worrisome things I observe in all this. First, as a societal and cultural matter it is very dangerous to equate sensational acts of violence and wickedness with mental illness. This is becoming a standard take: people tend to think that the act itself is proof of insanity. No one would do such a thing unless they were not wrong in the head! This is simply nonsense and if carried to its logical conclusion it absolves every evildoer from moral responsibility and moral accountability…
None of this is to deny that mental illness may be involved. Human beings are a psychosomatic unity and there is a mysterious connection between our physical bodies and our personhood or “self” (or, in biblical parlance, the “heart”). And I suspect that the influence is bidirectional: poor mental health can make someone susceptible to commit terrible acts, and someone can make themselves mentally ill by cultivating and nourishing evil thoughts and ideas. What Ms. Clancy appears to want to do is offload all of her moral responsibility to her “illness,” and we ought not to allow this as a societal matter.
My view is that if she wants to admit the crime and claim insanity, as she has in fact done, then if we accept her terms she should be committed to a psychiatric ward for the rest of her life. That should be the cost of claiming insanity. But, oh no. She wants to claim insanity so as to be acquitted and set free. A “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I admire that single juror who held the line on this.”
— Brian Mattson
—
Auron McIntyre on boomer luxury communism leading young people to embrace socialism:
https://twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/2097794261097808071/video/1?s=46
—
“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
— Thomas Jefferson
—
“The Lindsay Clancy case shows how feminism has broken society on so many levels, but here is what no one is talking about. All of these moms are overwhelmed and frustrated, can’t afford daycare, the kids dominate their life and they “lose their identity because they had kids,” but before feminism mom’s had tons of help. Grandma was at home, your sister was at home with her kids, and all the moms on the block with their kids, so the Mom’s had help because they would get together. It gave them camaraderie, belonging, community, and allowed them to keep their identity. This is where “it takes a village comes from.” but with so many Mom’s working, that culture is gone. You don’t have your aunt to help, your neighbor to help, all the other moms to hang out with. So moms are just alone and because of that they feel like they lose their identity.
Feminism has taken that from you.”
— Brett Pike
—
I don’t like “welfare for families” because I don’t like welfare at all
But welfare is not going away
This policy at least incentivizes the right thing
Instead of subsidizing fatherless homes, as we do now, it’s subsidizes the normal two parent family with a stay at home mo.
JD “gets it” and his ability to win in 2028 is going to hinge on him being able to distance himself from the failures of Trump’s second administration
Interestingly, Rubio proposed something similar to what Vance is suggesting now when he was in the Senate
It’s not an ideal; it’s accommodation what it (and what what isn’t changing), trying to maken the best of a bad program
—
“I cannot speak for all the men who have been posting about the Lindsay Clancy case. But I can tell you that the men I know personally, myself included, have been posting with the energy and ferocity we have because we see ourselves in the father who lost his children.
Men are highly empathetic, but not in the sense that we sit around emoting with you over your problems. When we empathize, our way of doing it is through construction. We do something. When there is a threat or danger to someone we love, we do not sit around feeling about it. We go fight it.
Right now, men perceive a threat. Perhaps it is not directly to our own children. Our own wives are not the problem. But we perceive a threat to the society we are invested in, to the civilization we rely on, and to the civilization our children will have to live, work, and marry in.
We see that threat, and our natural masculine reaction is to go into fight mode to protect what we love from evil. We want to fight the wicked witch and her flying monkeys. We want to protect the weak and vulnerable. We want to smash those who would harm children.
But we are a civilized people. And the solution is not. And that tears the heart of men. And so we take it out online.
And of course we are righteously angry. If we were not, there would be something wrong with us. If this case did not elicit a feeling of revulsion in us, there would be something wrong with us.
We want to slay the dragon that threatens the future, and woe to anyone who gets in our way.
But as we do so, we realize that so many women, women who may otherwise not be bad people, have been infected by the spell, the poison of feminism. So many men who should be fighting alongside us have turned into man-shaped beings, thralls of the undead witch queen of feminism.
In the end, very few men stand in the gap. Very few men are awake enough to fight and hold the proverbial Hot Gates against the hordes of woke.
But just as Thermopylae was an awakening for the Greek people, I believe the events of the last few years, and especially the last few days, signal an awakening for Western men.
Some of us will go down (socially “killed”) like Leonidas, and some of us will only wake up afterward. But nothing will ever be the same. Things have been put in motion. They cannot be stopped.
The die has been cast. The hands of fate are moving. And the tapestry of the West will begin to be woven without the sickly thread of feminism and all the evil it foments.
Its time is numbered, and it will be cut short soon.”
— Noah Revoy
—
I lost the source for this post, but it’s good on the need for men to resist tyranny and refuse to trade freedom for safety:
“Can You Resist Tyranny?
The average person today is incapable of governing themselves, which is why so many yearn for a new “system.”
They desire an external imposition of control to order their lives in a way they feel incapable of doing for themselves.
Riddled with fear, they trade liberty for protection. Ideology recasts their resentment as righteousness. Loneliness drives them to find a herd to become one with. Internal chaos creates a demand for imposed order.
When you tell people that the answer to collective madness is not collective action in the opposite direction, they often mistake this for rolling over and accepting defeat.
But chaos does not defeat chaos. As Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
Think about every hero story you’ve ever admired. The hero doesn’t take to the streets and try to convince everyone of his cause. Rather, he confronts evil head-on and puts himself in the line of fire.
A well-ordered individual is not harmless or ineffectual. A single competent, strong, and courageous person can carry more weight and value than a mob of NPCs.
As Carl Jung said, “a million zeros do not add up to one.”
Nor does being well ordered mean being harmless or indiscriminately nice.
Such a person must possess strength, aggression, ambition, judgement, competitive instinct, the capacity for force, and the desire for achievement.
The question is what these qualities serve. Money, power, and lust, or love, family, and God?
It is precisely this type of person who is the antidote to tyranny.
If no strong internal ordering principle exists, a movement, leader, ideology, or State will fill the vacuum externally.
This is not the only step, but it is the first and necessary one.
No one looking for a solution to increasing social insanity can afford to overlook it. All others are contingent on it.
The answer is not to dissociate from the world and simply pull yourself together.
It is that a disordered individual cannot possibly bring order to his environment.
By becoming a man of virtue, he can then carry that order into the roles individuals occupy: father, teacher, pastor, judge, journalist, leader, neighbour, police officer, and citizen.”
—
“I’m late to the Lindsay Clancy party, but here’s what I think.
- Of course, she is guilty. No one disputes this. She strangled her kids, which is a statement that is even hard for me to type. The real question seems to be, “Is she responsible?”
- The correct answer to this is also, yes. The number of people who have been convicted for murder despite having documented mental health problems is loooooong. By definition, if you’re killing people in a premeditated way, you have mental health problems. We seem to be in a bizarre world where the crime itself is evidence of innocence because “healthy people wouldn’t do that”. That’s insane, suicidal logic. Mental health challenges are real, but our fear of holding people accountable is its own kind of mental health challenge. But it has a source.
- John Battaglia was convicted of killing his two daughters in 2002. Though forensic psychologists linked his behavior to psychosis stemming from bipolar disorder, the jury only needed 19 minutes of deliberation to reach a guilty verdict. But that was a different world. We unequivocally condemned terrorism and quickly convicted murderers in 2001/2002 because we were better at naming evil and holding people responsible. Since then, we’ve had couple decades of cultural brainwashing where we’ve learned not to judge anyone for anything if they’re a “victim” of something else.
- So now, we’re a country that is kinda sympathetic to Hamas. We think the guy who murdered a health care CEO on the sidewalk in New York is actually kinda cool and definitely not evil because he had an insurance claim denied. And now we can’t bring ourselves to convict a woman who spent 25 minutes strangling her own children to death.
- The last thing I’ll say is the hardest thing to say. Millions of us have killed our own children through abortion and spent every day since convincing ourselves we’re still a good person. A lot of us look at Lindsay Clancy and see ourselves staring back. We want to believe it’s possible to kill our kids and not be evil. More than that, we want to believe it’s really someone else’s fault because of what was done to us first. Since 1973, we have aggressively defended the right to kill our children and now we find it difficult to condemn a woman for killing her children. Why are we surprised?
It’s natural to want to be absolved of guilt, and the good news is that’s possible. The gospel is Good News because we can be forgiven for the bad things we’ve done, but first we have to acknowledge we’ve done something that needs to be forgiven. At the moment, we’re struggling with that.”
— Joseph Backholm
—
“One of the dangers when you leave a church is building your Christianity around everything you disliked about your previous church.
The evangelical church had youth group, so youth groups must be bad.
They had church camp, so church camps must be bad.
They divided people by age, so every moment of church life must involve the entire family sitting together.
They sang contemporary music, so anything written after 1850 is immediately suspicious.
They neglected church history, so now we start treating historical practices as if age itself establishes biblical authority.
That is reaction, not reformation.
The question must always be: What does Scripture require? What does Scripture forbid? Where has Scripture given Christians liberty and wisdom?
Take the discipleship of children.
I strongly believe fathers have a serious responsibility before God to disciple their households. Fathers should teach their children Scripture. They should pray with them. They should catechize them. They should lead.
But that responsibility does not mean your children can never learn from another faithful Christian.
I remember the Sunday school ladies who taught me the Bible when I was a boy. They loved Jesus. They loved children. They faithfully taught us what they knew.
I thank God for them.
I also thank God for church camp. Some of it was cheesy. Some of the songs probably deserve to remain permanently buried in the 1990s. But I would come home from camp wanting to read my Bible. I would read through Scripture. God’s Word was being stored in my mind.
Years later, I can see the fruit.
A father who wisely enlists pastors, elders, teachers, camps, friendships, and other Christians to help disciple his children has not surrendered his responsibility. He is exercising it.”
— Joseph Spurgeon
—
“In my pastoral experience, many church and family conflicts are not caused by men. They are caused by active female rebellion baptized in feminist assumptions.
Gossip. Division. Manipulation. Resistance to legitimate authority. Weaponizing children. Recruiting an audience instead of seeking reconciliation.
Feminism has discipled generations of women to equate defiance with courage and submission with oppression.
It is a most bitter and poisonous fruit.
Women are taught to interpret resistance to authority as authenticity—and restraint as the death of self.
So when her sin is confronted:
- Repentance feels like losing
- Submission feels like betrayal of self
- Stubbornness feels like courage
- Public accusation feels like righteousness
And eventually rebellion can feel so virtuous that she believes disobedience itself is proof that she is standing for truth.
Thank God for godly women who recognize this temptation and wage war against it rather than baptizing it as “finding their voice.”
And thank God for godly husbands and fathers who keep loving, leading, correcting, forgiving, and standing firm when our culture tells them that merely exercising faithful authority is abuse.”
— Joseph Spurgeon
—
“Blessing has ever rested upon nations and communities just in the measure in which they have kept marriage and the home pure and holy.”
— JR Miller
—
“A woman’s place is in the home not because she isn’t good enough for the world but because she is too good for it. A woman’s precious gifts are squandered when she gives herself to the making of a dollar rather than a home. The world, its corporations, bureaucracies, and agencies are profane entities that are unworthy of a woman’s devotion and are unable to value the feminine charism. These profane entities coarsen, poison, and suck dry the maternal heart.”
— G. C. Dilsaver
—
“”Universal day care” is class war against normal people.”
— JD Vance (the whole thread is good: https://x.com/jdvance/status/1387763394158137356?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw)
—
Islam loves a fake Jesus, Judaism hates the true Jesus. Both are enemies of the gospel but in different ways.
—
“Ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776:
-James Monroe, 18
-Aaron Burr, 20
-Alexander Hamilton, 21
-James Madison, 25
-Thomas Jefferson, 33
America used to train its young men to be excellent, and then set them loose to change the world with that habit of command and developed excellence
Now, the state of near-continual childhood, bureaucracy making taking command and responsibility difficult if not impossible, and all the rest have not only coddled younger people, but made us much less dynamic as a nation because those who would create that dynamism are being scolded by some harridan of a teacher or addicted to some mindrot entertainment (likely both) instead of training themselves to and preparing to do great things”
— The Old World Show, on raising up young men to maturity and greatness
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“Any society that leaves women feeling forced into the workforce at the expense of time with their children is one who has failed women, men and children.
And the issue isn’t just financial, it’s also cultural and moral.
Much of feminist ideology has left women feeling like actual failures if they desire and willingly choose to stay home, rather than have a career.
If families can no longer financially do it, they also can’t culturally do it either.
The structure that once created all thriving moral societies is now being called into question.
The death of the west is inherently linked to the death of the family home.”
— Elizabeth Stone
—
—
“There’s a growing epidemic of women murdering their young children in our society. There are at least 4 factors at play:
- Feminism taught women that babies are the enemy of their freedom. Motherhood is seen as drudgery and slavery that ties women down. Children do take a lot of care, but the self-centeredness of feminism suggests that this is a bad thing that wastes a woman’s life. This fosters a desire to be “free” that pits mothers against their own children. She is told she can only be free by getting rid of her motherly responsibilities.
- Our society has increasingly shown women that they will not be held accountable for their actions. Women get lesser criminal penalties for the same crimes. Women are excused and even praised when they divorce their husbands for no good reason and destroy their families. Women are treated as victims by default, and victims are seen as blameless. Thus, even when women do terrible things, it’s not their fault. It must be what someone else did to them. It must be all the stresses of life that overwhelmed her. It must be mental illness. Women are not held responsible, either socially or criminally, in the way men are.
- Women have been practicing murder for decades now through legalized abortion. If they can kill the most vulnerable babies in the womb and still tell themselves they’re a good person, it’s not that much farther to kill born children (and for many of the exact same reasons). The slippery slope is actually real. The same logic that justifies abortion justifies infanticide and beyond.
- Women are especially prone to social contagions. Women, as a whole, are very much driven by social inclusion and approval. When other women do something and get attention for it, they want to do it too. Many women will do things for no other reason than being the trendy thing to do in their social circle. If it gets extra sympathy points or social approval points, there’s an even bigger draw. This occurs even when there is significant cost involved.
When society gives a lot of attention and sympathy to mothers who murder their children and excuses their behavior, this drives a social contagion which influences women to do the unthinkable, especially if other factors have already pitted them against their children and caused them to rationalize murder as sometimes necessary.”
— Lindsay Harold
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“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
— Gloria Steinam, summarizing feminism’s messed up value system
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Dvorstone on female mental health as a substitute for the patriarchy:
“Why is “mental health” such an emotionally charged concept for women? More importantly, what do women mean when they say “mental health?”
I’ll explain, and it’s grim.
Mental health represents an external locus of control. This is the first, critical idea.
We either have an internal locus of control (I am in charge of my fate) or an external (something other than me is in charge of my fate). In Western, Christian society, we normally teach an internal locus of control. In leftism (or Islam, and a few other cultures), they teach an external locus.
What is that external locus of control? Depends on the culture. Rousseau thought it was society. Marx thought it was class/economics. In Islam, it’s Shaitan (the devil), the lower soul, bad company, or similar.
For modern women, it’s “mental health.”
They’ve created a metaphysics in which mental health is separate from the will that is the self. Mental health is the external cause and it’s controlled by medication and “wellness” activities. If they don’t have appropriate medication and wellness, “mental health” takes control. It’s easy to understand if you just replace “mental health” with “the devil.” All it means is “something outside of me made me misbehave.”
The second critical idea is that the regulating authority for women has, historically, been men. More precisely, masculine authority, but roughly speaking it’s men (masculine authority includes faith in God as well). Men keep women safe, in part by keeping them under control. They mitigate women’s worst impulses and save them from themselves. Now antidepressants do that.
The result is the modern formulation:
- Mental health is the external cause of misbehavior/corruption.
- Antidepressants replace masculine authority, including God, as the thing that keeps women “safe” from that external cause of their corruption.
And that is why women talk about so-called mental health in such an emotionally and politically charged manner.
It is vitally important to understand that “mental health” is a sacred idol because it both explains and protects. All of the complexities of a relationship with God and man are eliminated. It’s all reduced to “mental health,” and anyone who threatens or is callous to that is doing the equivalent of insulting a woman’s husband, family, and her faith. It’s among the worst things you can do.
There is such a thing as “mental health” but it would be more precisely understood as “brain disease.” Any other concept is usually just what I’ve described: a comforting external force that explains bad behavior but which can be controlled by magic pills and “wellness.”
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Rachel Wilson on narcissistic modern women:
“We have a severe narcissism problem that we have bred in women. When you ask most modern women what duties they have to anyone other than themselves, they give you a blank stare and can’t tell you. They have only ever considered what they think they DESERVE. Society has been set up in such a way that they’re never required to think of anything else, thanks to feminism and women’s “empowerment.”
Real life involves self sacrifice, overcoming adversity, solving problems, and challenging yourself to grow and improve. These are the hallmarks of adulthood. We do not have a society of women. We have a society of spoiled little brats. They want weddings and baby dolls. They don’t want to be wives and mothers because that involves duty to someone other than themselves. It’s a purpose that transcends their selfish desires.
The only way to fix it is to remove women’s authority over men (which they never should’ve been granted) and restore responsibility and accountability. We must remove this silly fantasy that women are completely autonomous and independent of men, and have no duties or expectations on them in society. Incentivize good and virtuous behavior; shame and punish selfish, negative behavior. Just like we do for men and children.”
—
—
“Sexual liberation does not unleash creativity; it devours the very energy a civilization needs to flourish and endure. America has followed this trajectory with remarkable consistency.
The energies once directed toward families, faith, institutions, and the next generation have been redirected toward consumption, entertainment, pornography, abortion, and the endless pursuit of pleasure.
We have become a society obsessed with self-expression and allergic to self-control. This did not happen by accident.
It was theorized by people like Caligula, Rousseau, Sade, and Reich. It was promoted by people like Shelley, Marx, Sanger, Kinsey, and Millett. And it has been enforced by people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and an entire unelected bureaucratic establishment that seems to have more in common with Robespierre than with Alexander Hamilton.
The sexual revolution was never primarily about freedom; it was about leverage. When sexual discipline collapses, families weaken. When families weaken, individuals become isolated. And when individuals are isolated, the state steps in as the surrogate source of meaning, protection, and identity.
Cultural Marxism understood this sequence with chilling clarity. You cannot dismantle a civilization outright. You must first hollow out its moral foundations.
That is why sexual ideology targets children. That is why pornography is shielded as “expression” and “speech.” That is why abortion is elevated beyond policy to something resembling a civic sacrament. That is why transgender ideology demands enthusiastic affirmation rather than mere tolerance.
These are not random controversies. They are coordinated strikes against the structures that allow society to reproduce itself—biologically, morally, and spiritually.
A people incapable of telling a man to govern his desires will never be capable of telling a tyrant to restrain his power.”
— Seth Gruber
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“The sexual revolution has vastly increased the power of the state:
The sexual revolution was never primarily about freedom; it was about leverage.
When sexual discipline collapses, families weaken.
When families weaken, individuals become isolated.
And when individuals are isolated, the state steps in as the surrogate source of meaning, protection, and identity.
Cultural Marxism understood this sequence with chilling clarity. You cannot dismantle a civilization outright. You must first hollow out its moral foundations.”
— Nancy Pearcey
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“The Lindsay Clancy case is an analogy for western leadership as a whole.
9 crazy women.
2 pushover men.
1 single man of conviction holding the line.”
— Lauren Chen
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“Got a Minute” podcast with Bryan Dawson on 1819 News:
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“Gloria Steinem is dead. She died alone, survived by no one, because she aborted her only known child to hang out in India with Gandhi allies. No husband, either. This tragedy could have been only a personal one had she not spent her life leading a generation of college-educated white women down her path to ruin. It is cosmic timing that she died alone the same week we’re watching scores of women support Lindsay Clancy for murdering her children.”
— Steve Deace
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1920s misogyny: “women cannot make decisions due to hormones.”
2020s feminism: “women cannot make decisions due to hormones.”
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From The Federalist Papers Project on the Lindsay Clancy case and feminism:
“The Lindsay Clancy jury has now gone five full days without reaching a verdict, and if this ends with a not-guilty verdict, drastically reduced charges or a hung jury, I think some of the women cheering Lindsay Clancy on need to consider exactly what argument they are making.
And yes, I am a woman.
That matters here, because women have spent generations fighting the ridiculous notion that our biology makes us too emotional, unstable or irrational to handle enormous responsibility.
Now apparently some women want to resurrect that argument themselves.
Clancy admits she strangled her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan. Her defense argues postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate or control what she was doing. Prosecutors argue she was mentally ill but still understood right from wrong.
That is the legal question for the jury. What is NOT required is turning Lindsay Clancy into some kind of postpartum martyr.
Hundreds of supporters have appeared outside the courthouse wearing pink shirts carrying messages like “Believe” and “She Needed Help.”
Okay. Where are the shirts for Cora, Dawson and Callan?
Postpartum psychosis is real, rare and extremely serious. Women suffering from it need immediate medical treatment.
But if the broader cultural argument becomes, “Female reproductive hormones can make a woman incapable of controlling herself, so she cannot really be held responsible for killing three people,” do these women understand what they are saying?
Because congratulations, ladies. You just resurrected an argument men used against us for centuries.
President of the United States? Commander in chief? Nuclear codes?
Sorry, apparently there is always the possibility those pesky female hormones could take over.
Women have fought to be judged as rational, capable adults responsible for our decisions.
We should not surrender that principle now because the defendant is a mother and her crime is almost too horrific to comprehend.
Stop treating three murdered children like background characters in the Lindsay Clancy tragedy.
Cora, Dawson and Callan are not footnotes. They are the victims.”
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The thing about men not wanting their wives to read, be educated, etc. is that it is actually just masculine insecurity
It’s fear of woman
Just like tyrants like to have uneducated populations because they are easy to control, a man who wants his wife dumb lacks confidence in his ability to lead
He is scared he will not be able to lead if she reads a book
It’s a form of effeminacy – rather than improve himself, he holds her back
But the reality is that Proverbs makes it clear that a wise wife is a tremendous asset
I think there are legitimate issues to raise with the way women are educated today
But every man should want a wife who is pursuing knowledge and wisdom under his leadership
The fastest way to bury the birth rate is even further is to tell women that the solution requires them to go back to the stone age
Puritanism is a counterpoint – Puritan women were among the most educated in world history, but also among the most fertile
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Margaret Thatcher on the influence of Hayek on her economic policies:
“Friedrich von Hayek was an inspiration for me in the 1980s, when the government which I led sought to reverse the malign effects of socialism on Britain’s economy and society.
Hayek did not offer a set of policies: that, he considered, was for politicians themselves to devise. Rather, he offered an account of what was fundamentally wrong and he described how a better system would work. Thus he gave us the commodity which was then in shortest supply: he gave us hope.
For that very reason, Hayek’s writings have not dated with the years. They remain a star by which the governments of free nations everywhere would be well advised to steer their course.
Hayek’s analysis of the perils of the planned society and the command economy is, indeed, unrivalled. He shows how attempts to defy markets are doomed to be self-defeating. He warns us that beneath the seductive slogans and the simplistic targets of the utopians who promise heaven on earth there frequently lurks the reality of a totalitarian hell.
He reminds us that we must value the habits, rules and institutions of liberty for their own sake if we are to enjoy for long the benefits that freedom brings. And all these messages are as relevant to our own age as when he first spoke to the West about that Road to Serfdom.
Perhaps more so. This is because Hayek is still the preeminent modern philosopher of ordered liberty — something that in every continent is today under threat from dark forces of anarchy, hatred, revolution, fanaticism and violence.
Against such ideologues, he encourages us to have faith in the peaceful, subtle processes by which people co-operate in fulfilling their requirements under a rule of law; to rely on an extended, spontaneous order; in short, to promote the system generally known as capitalism.
Hayek is, therefore, the prophet not of doom and disaster, but of peace and plenty. His is a voice of wisdom for our time, and for all time. We should listen to him.”
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“A lot of conservative commentators and pastors attempt to carve out a safe path through the gender discourse by claiming that any bad behavior from women is ultimately a failure of male leadership
The power of this argument is that it’s true, in healthy patriarchal societies the male head of the house was responsible for the behavior of his wife and daughters, but the reason is they were not considered to have full agency so the male head was granted authority over them
If a women defied her husband, society sided against her, if a daughter spurned her father she was looked down upon as disgraceful, the man had the responsibility to lead but the women had the responsibility to follow
The modern conservative solution has been to assign all the responsibility to men without granting them any authority, they are just supposed to lead without any social reinforcement or lawful authority
Men are taught that they should lead, but women are not taught that they should follow
Men are taught they’re responsible for everything, even things they can’t control because society stripped them of that authority, but women are told that they’re never responsible for anything even when society has given them all the authority
We can see this reflected in the Lindsay Clancy case, but honestly we can see it reflected in most pulpits and conservative podcasts just as clearly
The two sexes must get along, no one should be stoking gender wars for clicks or attention, the future of our society depends on this
But it also depends on conservatives deciding what they really believe about gender diffrences
Are women the same as men from the neck up, with the same level of agency and responsibility?
Or are men and women different beyond their sex organs? Are men really responsible for the behavior of women?
We have to choose one or the other, because this idea that women are independent and capable of full agency, but also men are responsible for all bad female behavior can’t survivie
Young men will just listen to the Andrew Tates of the world because you have nothing to offer them”
— Auron McIntyre
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“We have a pink-collar economy, thanks in large part to the legal changes flowing out of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Women do not face discrimination. In fact it’s the exact opposite. The government holds a legal gun barrel to the heads of companies, forcing them to privilege women over men.
The other problem is that the manufacturing base in America has been destroyed so most of the new job opportunities are in things like healthcare, education, and food services, which are all jobs that women tend to excel in far more than men.”
— Eric Conn
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“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
— John Jay
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Like all sin, lust is the perversion of something good. It is disordered sexual desire.
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Far too many men today are effeminate, choosing the king’s silk over John the Baptist’s camel’s hair (Matthew 11:8ff).
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With leadership there is no try
You either lead or you don’t
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Men, don’t treat your wife like a man. Don’t masculinize your wife – it kills polarity. She needs your gentile strength and sacrificial love as you seek to lead her.
Women, do not feminize your husband, by disrespecting and belittling him, or by expecting him to relate to you as one of your female friends would. This also kills polarity. Your husband needs your quiet and gentle spirit, you respect and submission.
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Our ancestors built Christendom through their blood, sweat, tears, and most especially faith. The same blood runs in our veins. We should feel the weight of what they accomplished for us – we are the beneficiaries of their sacrifices. We should seek to live lives worthy of our Christian ancestors who gave us this civilization.
Tolkien understood this well, and it shows up in Lord of the Rings:
Several key moments in The Lord of the Rings show characters drawing courage, resolve, identity, or hope from the memory of their ancestors’ deeds (or the great tales of the past that those ancestors inhabit). Tolkien repeatedly ties personal strength and right action to lineage, remembered history, and the sense of standing in a long chain of duty.
Aragorn and the heirs of Númenor / Elendil
Aragorn’s entire arc is shaped by this. He repeatedly measures himself against (and draws power from) his forefathers:
When the Fellowship passes the Argonath (the Pillars of the Kings), Aragorn looks on the vast statues of Isildur and Anárion and says he has long desired to see “the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old.” The sight visibly strengthens and steadies him as heir of that line.
He claims authority and rallies people by invoking his descent: “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn… the heir of Isildur Elendil’s son of Gondor.” He does this when revealing himself, when challenging the Dead, and in battle (crying “Elendil!”). The reforged sword Andúril itself is the physical embodiment of that ancestral claim and strength.
His struggle with the “weakness” of Isildur’s blood (the failure to destroy the Ring) is itself a form of drawing strength through honest confrontation with ancestral failure, so that he can rise above it. Elrond explicitly frames his destiny in terms of surpassing or falling short of “all your fathers since the days of Elendil.”
The Dúnedain more broadly keep the memory of Elendil, Isildur, and the Faithful of Númenor as a source of identity and endurance through long decline.
Théoden of Rohan
At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the mortally wounded Théoden tells Merry:
“My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed. I felled the black serpent. A grim morn, and a glad day, and a golden sunset!”
This is one of the clearest statements in the book. Théoden explicitly measures his final deeds against the standard of his ancestors (the House of Eorl) and finds that he can now stand among them without shame. Earlier, the “battle-fury of his fathers” is said to run in him like new fire as he leads the charge.
Sam and the great tales
Sam draws strength less from blood ancestors and more from the stories of the great heroes of the Elder Days (Beren, Lúthien, and others), which function as a kind of shared ancestral memory for the free peoples:
On the stairs of Cirith Ungol and later in Mordor, Sam reflects on the old tales. He realizes that the people in those stories “had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.” This becomes a direct source of resolve for him and Frodo when hope seems gone.
The memory of those ancient deeds (especially the quest of Beren and Lúthien for a Silmaril) gives the hobbits a sense that their own struggle belongs to a larger pattern of resistance against darkness. Sam’s plain hobbit courage is repeatedly fortified by this larger tradition.
Other related notes
Faramir and the men of Gondor frequently speak of the blood of Númenor and the deeds of the kings of old as both a source of pride and a standard they feel they are failing to live up to; the memory still shapes their sense of duty.
The Rohirrim as a people keep the memory of Eorl the Young and the Oath of Eorl as a living source of identity and obligation.
Elrond himself, as a living witness who saw the Last Alliance, embodies the continuity of memory; his recounting of Gil-galad, Elendil, and Isildur at the Council reinforces the weight of ancestral example for everyone present.
Tolkien treats this remembrance not as mere nostalgia but as a moral and spiritual resource: the knowledge that one belongs to a people who have already faced darkness and that one’s own deeds will be judged (or can stand) in that company. The most concentrated examples are Aragorn’s claim of the Argonath and his lineage, Théoden’s dying words, and Sam’s reflections on the “great stories.”
ADDENDUM: References to blood in LOTR:
Here are the most direct references to “blood” in The Lord of the Rings that connect ancestry, inheritance, strength, or weakness to the memory of what the fathers/ancestors have done:
- The blood of Númenor / Westernesse (Gondor and the Stewards)
This is the clearest and most repeated motif.
Elrond at the Council of Elrond:
“But in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men…”
Boromir’s reply:
“Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten.”
Faramir to Frodo (in Ithilien):
“We of my house are not of the line of Elendil, though the blood of Númenor is in us.”
Gandalf to Pippin about Denethor:
“He is not as other men of this time, Pippin, and whatever be his descent from father to son, by some chance the blood of Westernesse runs nearly true in him; as it does in his other son, Faramir, and yet did not in Boromir whom he loved best.”
These passages treat “blood” as the living vehicle of ancestral quality—wisdom, stature, longevity, and the high spirit of the Númenóreans. When it “runs true,” the descendants are strengthened by (and held to the standard of) their forefathers.
2. Théoden and the battle-fury of his fathers
At the charge on the Pelennor Fields:
“Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young.”
Here the strength of the ancestors is described as literally entering his blood/veins in the moment of crisis, giving him superhuman vitality and courage.
3. Aragorn and the blood of Isildur (primarily film, but thematically continuous with the books)
The famous film lines are not word-for-word in the book, but they crystallize the book’s theme:
“The same blood flows in my veins. The same weakness.”
“I do not know what strength is in my blood, but I swear to you I will not let the White City fall, nor our people fail.”
In the book itself Aragorn is more confident in his lineage, yet he still constantly measures himself against Elendil and Isildur. The film simply makes the blood-as-inheritance idea explicit.
Summary of the pattern
Tolkien repeatedly uses “blood” as the concrete, bodily link between the living and the deeds of the ancestors:
When the blood “runs true” or the fury of the fathers enters the veins, the character is strengthened and can stand unashamed among the fathers.
When the blood is “mingled,” “spent,” or carries the same weakness, the character must either rise above it or fall short of the ancestral standard.
The strongest book examples for your original question (drawing strength from ancestral memory) are therefore Théoden’s “battle-fury… in his veins” and the repeated insistence that the blood of Númenor still carries the old dignity and power in Faramir, Denethor, and especially Aragorn.
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An old X post on the James White/Corey Mahler debate on race and sanctification:
haven’t watched much of the debate (and probably won’t), but it seems what the debate actually proved is that anarcho-tyranny and the welfare state have produced the intended results.
Obviously, White won on the merits of the case. If God can turn stones into sons of Abraham, he can sanctify people of any race to whatever degree he chooses. But there is a bit more here to explore.
To attribute the sins of a particular racial group solely to genetics is wrongheaded. For example, the black illegitimacy rate in America today very high. But if you go back a few generations in history, the black illegitimacy rate was much lower then than the white illegitimacy rate is now. In other words, black promiscuity and fatherlessness today is not just a product of genetics; it is a response to particularly perverse incentive structure (imposed on them mainly by white progressives).
Even when we characterize particular racial sins, we must recognize that races are simply not static. Whites were not always the overly docile, low T, easily deceived, self-loathing people they are today. In many ways, it’s hard to believe that whites in America today are genetically related to the people who discovered and settled this continent, claimed victory in two world wars, and won the space race. Our resemblance to our ancestors is quite vague in those respects. Likewise, during England’s Victorian era, it might have been hard to fathom how that prim and proper people could be genetically related to those who, a couple millennia earlier, worshipped rocks, ran into battle naked, and were accused of being too stupid to even serve as slaves. Other racial and ethnic groups have, and no doubt will, undergo similar transformations and deformations over the course of history.
1/2
Finally, I want to mention something I’ll write about more extensively later. The claim is made by some Neo-Nazis that “Christians have always been racists…we just believe what everyone before 1960 believed.”
This is utterly false. First, it’s anachronistic. Views of what the races are have not been static over history. Pre-18th century people did not have a biological conception of race the same way we do. Darwin, in particular, changed the way races were viewed, and the rise of 19th century (and later) racism owes a great deal to Darwinian evolution. The full title of Darwin’s work was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” The racialist implications bound up in his theory were inescapable – but also quite novel. It was common for earlier generations to think that skin color was a function of latitude, not genetics. (See book Not Stolen by Jeff Finn Paul for historical details on this point.) There is no historical evidence that racial bigotry was built into the Christian ethic or served as an article of faith amongst pre-modern believers.
When the first European colonists arrived in North America, many of them (especially the Spanish but also some English) intermarried with the Indians with hardly any controversy. Obviously they knew that a believer should marry only in the Lord, but they evangelized the Indians, and once some converted, interracial marriages became almost inevitable. Think of John Rolfe.
When I hear the claim that everyone before 1960 was a racialist, I wonder what churches these people attend. If they do go to church, what prayers do they use? What hymns do they sing? If they are part of a church that respects tradition and incorporates historical hymnody and other liturgical forms, they should know better than to think pre-1960 Christians were racial bigots. There are many pre-1960 hymns that celebrate God’s mercy to all nations. But I know of no hymns or prayer forms that tout white supremacy, or the curse of Ham as perpetual, or any other kind of racialist doctrine as an article of Christian faith. If someone can produce evidence of racial bigotry in historic Christian hymnody, I’d like to see it. What I see is a lot of the opposite of that. Take the 19th century hymn, “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed” as an example. Its lyrics include these verses:
Kings shall fall down before Him,
And gold and incense bring;
All nations shall adore Him,
His praise all people sing;
For He shall have dominion
O’er river, sea, and shore,
Far as the eagle’s pinion,
Or dove’s light wing can soar.
Arabia’s desert ranger
to Him shall bow the knee;
The Ethiopian stranger
His glory come to see;
With offerings of devotion
ships from the isles shall meet,
To pour the wealth of oceans
in tribute at His feet.
There is nothing that suggests the Arab or the Ethiopian is incapable of salvation or sanctification. No, these people groups will be included with others in bringing their treasure into the kingdom. These nations will be discipled and transformed.
2/2
ADDENDUM: Read up on the history of LBJ’s welfare state. The destruction of the black family was intentional. Creating a culture of dependency was intentional.
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I think this is right.
It’s not just Aristotle
The need for ethnic homogeneity, the view that a great many men were part of a permanent slave class, etc. were taken for granted as natural “common sense” realities for most people in the ancient world
War was a way of life
Just look at how often Israel is at war during the era of the judges and the monarchy – its constant
Every spring, kings went to battle – 2 Sam 11:1
The only respite from war came when your people got conquered and absorbed into a mighty empire that used force to keep a semblance of peace
Add to that the fact that most pagan creation myths start with violence, and the pagan view of an ontology of violence becomes even clearer
For the ancient pagan, violence just is – there is no escaping it
It’s why pagan societies are unlivable and destructive – they are based on the “might makes right” principle
Christians should not say things like “ethnic homogeneity is necessary for peace,” at least not without a lot of explanation
First of all, many homogenous societies have still had violence, going back to Cain and Abel
Second, there is too much counter-evidence
Paul’s churches were all interethnic and, to the degree they followed his directives, they had peace
Europe and America have been places where the gospel produced interethnic peace (eg, the Anglo-Saxons)
And so on
None of that is to say that having a multiethnic society is a good in itself or one we should pursue
That’s a prudential matter
There is no obligation to make a society multiethnic – a nation can seek its own good and develop its immigration policies according to that vision
Progressive global multiculturalism is not some kind of “gospel value” (even if some Big Eva goons want us to think so)
It is the intentional destruction of Western civilization
And Western civ is hated precisely because it is the most christianized civilization to ever exist
That’s why it get singles out for destruction while other monoethnic societies like those in Japan and places in Africa are left alone
I have a lot of sympathy with what @Eric_Conn
and @PerfInjust
are trying to do – but I want to make sure we use the best possible arguments
Arguments that rely on an ontology of violence are not going to get us where we want to go
Arguments that lead others to want to protect what is good, true, and beautiful about our own people, place, and heritage will
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I fully believe that globalist multiculturalism (like what is running rampant in the UK today) needs to be stopped
But I don’t believe that Aristotle is the best weapon to do so
The reality is that in America today, descendants of the very people Aristotle said could not get along are getting along quite well
America is a nation full of descendants from Europe – but in Aristotle’s day Europe was filled with warring tribes that despised and dehumanized one another
What happened? In a word, the gospel
The Apostle Paul went through the same region that Aristotle was familiar with and created communities called churches in which those different ethnic groups came together
The fact that this is invisible to us today is largely proof of the gospel’s astounding success
The problem with relying on Aristotle is that it commits you to an ontology of strife and violence. For Aristotle, interethnic strife is not the result of the fall. It’s just the way things are. Strife and violence are natural, built into the very fabric of reality. That’s a denial of Christian teaching about creation and eschatology. While Christians believe that there would have been many ethnicities in an unfallen world, we believe they would have been at peace. Of course, we also believe countless ethnic groups will live at peace with one another in the resurrection.
So how do we destroy the multiculturalism we see in our day?
1 We use the gospel. The gospel still transforms and unites people. The gospel is the solution to the world’s problems.
2 We show that nations have no obligation to commit civilizational suicide by allowing unrestricted immigration by people who have no interest in assimilating.
3 We demonstrate that we actually have an obligation to preserve our all that is good about our people, our culture, and our heritage as an application of the 5th commandment.
4 We end the welfare state, which draws immigrants like moths to a flame. Stop giving free stuff away and people will not be as eager to come here.
5 We must state the obvious: the main immigration problem in the West comes from Muslims invading once Christian nations. Islam is a demonic religion and the sworn enemy of Western civilization. There is no way to integrate serious Muslims into the West. It has never worked. Immigration needs to be limited to people who are relatively like-minded (coming from a Christian heritage) and who intend to assimilate.
6 We must remind all Western nations that their civilization was created by the gospel. If we don’t want to sink to the levels of the third world, we must reclaim our Christian heritage.
ADDENDUM: Empires often forced ethnic mixing as a way to weaken loyalties
Deportations to a new place also weakened loyalties
But even within the Roman Empire, many people groups maintained a strong ethnic identity
This was true of Jews, obviously, but many other peoples as well…The same strategy used by ancient pagan emperors is being used today by globalist “elites”
There are a few differences of course, but it’s the same basic play
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Free market capitalism is the only economic system that does not rely on coercion and theft.
Free market capitalism is the only economic system that rewards service, creativity, and diligence.
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“Can you imagine how insanely productive people and resources could be if half of everything wasn’t consumed by governments for their graft, destruction, murder, and stupidity?”
— Isaac M. Morehouse
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Can Christians and Muslims live at peace? This is pretty good:
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The Islamic strategy for invading the West:
“The behavioral patterns of Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries change predictably based on their percentage of the total population:
0–2%
When Muslims constitute less than 2% of the population, they typically maintain a low profile.
This is the stage of da’wah, Islamic proselytization, and reputation-building.
Islam is presented to the host society as peaceful, rational, and ethical. The focus is on integration, tolerance, and charitable outreach.
Criticism of Islam is dismissed as ignorance or Islamophobia, while the community builds its infrastructure, mosques, community centers, and Islamic schools.
At this stage, Muslim communities leverage the language of Western liberalism to gain a foothold: religious freedom, civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws.
Political involvement is minimal, and confrontational rhetoric is avoided. Public engagement centers around interfaith dialogues, cultural exchange events, and educational outreach, designed to normalize Islam as a peaceful, constructive force in the multicultural fabric.
This phase is also marked by a strong narrative of victimhood.
Muslims are portrayed as an embattled minority needing protection from xenophobic majorities. Laws protecting hate speech and religious freedom are invoked to shield Islamic doctrines from public scrutiny.
In the early 1990s, Muslim populations in countries like Ireland, New Zealand, and Norway remained below this threshold. The communities focused on mosque-building and cultural integration. Violent incidents were rare, and the rhetoric was geared toward coexistence.
2–5%
As the population crosses the 2% threshold, a noticeable change occurs.
Advocacy groups emerge with more aggressive postures. Demands are no longer requests but framed as civil rights: halal food in schools and hospitals, Islamic prayer rooms in public buildings, gender-segregated swim times, and recognition of Islamic holidays.
These demands are wrapped in the language of equality, but the subtext is unmistakable: Islam is not merely seeking parity; it is beginning to shape the host society.
At this stage, sharia-compliant accommodations are requested, not just in private religious life but in public institutions. Workplaces are asked to allow prayer breaks. Public schools are pressured to remove curriculum deemed Islamophobic.
Terms like “Islamophobia” become strategic weapons to intimidate critics and silence public debate.
Ontario, in the early 2000s, witnessed a push to introduce sharia arbitration in civil and family disputes. Though it was ultimately defeated due to public backlash, the initiative revealed the ideological thrust: the attempt to institutionalize Islamic jurisprudence within the Western legal system. Similar efforts have appeared in Australia and the U.S.
5–10%
Between 5–10%, Muslim communities transition from integration to parallelism. No-go zones begin to form, urban enclaves where state law is either ignored or actively resisted.
Police avoid intervention, and informal sharia enforcement takes hold. Honor killings, female genital mutilation, polygamy, and forced marriages begin to appear, not as isolated events, but as features of a separate legal order within the host nation.
This stage also sees increasing legal jihad, efforts to redefine blasphemy laws, criminalize criticism of Islam, and pressure media, academia, and politicians into compliance. Islam’s totalizing nature refuses compartmentalization.
Everything must bend to its divine law, including speech, gender relations, and governance.
More than 80 sharia courts operate unofficially in the UK, issuing rulings on everything from divorce to inheritance, often disadvantaging women and violating national law.
Efforts to investigate or criticize these courts are met with accusations of racism and Islamophobia.
Banlieues surrounding Paris, such as Seine-Saint-Denis, have become synonymous with lawlessness and Islamic radicalism.
Police do not patrol without backup. Civil authorities are unable, or unwilling, to enforce French secularism. Samuel Paty’s beheading in 2020 after showing a cartoon of Muhammad was not an aberration; it was the fruit of a system where sharia sensitivity overpowered state sovereignty.
In Sweden, Muslim immigration has contributed to the creation of over 60 “vulnerable areas” where government control is minimal. Rape statistics have climbed, often linked to men from Muslim-majority countries. The Swedish state’s response has ranged from denial to appeasement.
In Belgium, the Brussels district of Molenbeek became a safe haven for jihadists, including those who coordinated the 2015 Paris attacks. Radical imams preach freely, and efforts to clamp down on extremism have been paralyzed by political correctness.
10% and Beyond
At this point, the Muslim community ceases to be a subculture and becomes a rival culture. Integration is abandoned for Islamization.
Political parties with explicit Islamic agendas rise. Muslim representatives in parliaments begin defending jihadist regimes and condemning Western foreign policy not from a critical citizen’s perspective, but from the standpoint of civilizational opposition.
In this phase, open threats replace veiled demands. Cartoons of Muhammad are no longer protested, they are punished. Attempts to defend secularism are denounced as hate. Criticizing Islam becomes a criminal or even suicidal act. Entire sectors of society, media, academia, politics, are paralyzed by fear.
The Muslim community, now entrenched and numerically significant, weaponizes democracy against itself. It uses freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly to dismantle those very freedoms. The goal is not coexistence.
The goal is submission, the literal meaning of the word “Islam.”
Why Doesn’t This Happen with Other Immigrant Groups?
Why do these patterns not emerge with Chinese, Indian, Korean, Filipino, Ethiopian, or Jewish immigrants? Why don’t Sikhs or Hindus or Confucianists demand parallel legal systems, segregated public spaces, or censorship of perceived blasphemy?
Because none of those systems contain a theological mandate for global supremacy. Islam does. Islam is not just a private set of beliefs, it is a geopolitical doctrine, a legal code, a social order, and a totalizing ideology.
The behavior of Muslim populations is not a deviation, it is a logical extension of Islam’s core teachings when it gains numerical strength.
Based on Peter Hammond’s book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat.”
— Dan Burmawi
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Old X posts on race, ethnicity, Aristotle, and Calvin:
Much of the NT deals with precisely these questions
Aristotle’s observations were no doubt correct given his time and place – but had Aristotle lived in the days of the Apostle Paul, what would he have said about the church in Ephesus where Jews and Gentiles came together to form a cohesive, peaceful community? One aspect of the newness of the gospel is that brought previously hostile ethnic/cultural peoples
It is hard for us to grasp today just how shocking this was
The different ethnic groups of the ancient hated and dehumanized one another
The ancient world was full of xenophobia and racism far beyond anything we’re familiar with
The Roman Empire used it force to keep the ethnic groups from warring with each other but the realm Paul evangelized was an ethnic powder keg
The church created something no one could have imagined – interethnic peace
But we also see that those ethnic groups did not have to obliterate their ethnic identities in becoming Christian
Passages like Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10 deal with this
Yes, they did have to let go of ethnic practices that were contrary to God’s Word, but otherwise, there was no problem with preserving one’s ethnic heritage
Jewish Christian’s were still culturally Jewish in many ways, Gentile Christians still Gentile on many ways
One problem we face today is that these discussions are linked to discussions of immigration, border policy, etc.
Of course, a text like Ephesians 2 tells us that ethnic identity has to be subordinate to the gospel
But you cannot get immigration policy out of Ephesians 2 (or Galatians 3:28, etc.) because that’s not what the passage is talking about
Interestingly, elsewhere Paul acknowledges that nations arise in God’s providence as geographically bordered realities (Acts 17)
I have no doubt Paul would say nations have the right to determine immigration policy in accord with what is best for their own people
A completely closed nation, eg, one that would not allow in Christian missionaries because of xenophobia, is going to damn itself
A nation that with no borders is going to obliterate its own identity
Neither is a good option
ADDENDUM: What would Aristotle have said if he had lived to see medieval Europe (aka Christendom), where precisely those groups that he observed being antagonistic to one another came together to build a beautiful Christian civilization?
Aristotle could not even begin to imagine what the gospel would accomplish because he did not have the gospel
Think of Belloc’s statement about medieval Christendom, “Europe IS the faith”
Also, there is some confusion about “nature” here
What Aristotle was observing about the hostility of various ethnicities and their inability to get along was not “nature” per se
While it is true in an unfallen world, as humanity spread out to fill the earth, various genetic and cultural ethnicities would form, these groupings are providential, not natural
They would have been contingent, not fixed, even in an unfallen world
Ethnicities are not fixed in nature the way, say, male and female are
Ethnicities are contingent – they come and go in God’s providence
Many ancient ethnicities no longer exist, many new ethnicities have come into existence, and there is no reason to think the ethnicities we have today will still be the ones we have 5000 years from now
In an unfallen world, an ethnicity might have an “in group” preference but would still love the “out group” – and some degree of mixing would not be forbidden or even imprudent
What Aristotle viewed as the natural condition of divided humanity was actually fallen humanity, not God’s creational design as such
But Aristotle had no conception of the fall or redemption , so no way to distinguish fallen from unfallen (or redeemed) humanity
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John Calvin, in some places, speaks of the distinctions of peoples by race, nationality, and ethnicity, and he says that the gospel does not destroy these distinctions. He upholds natural affection and teaches that our highest duties are to our family and to those closest to us. At the very same time, in other places, he says that all mankind is our neighbor. Calvin held to a basically Augustinian doctrine of ordo amoris.
In particular, in his commentary on the Good Samaritan, Calvin says that Jesus teaches our neighbor does not end with those who are like us in nationality or religion. All people are neighbors, including even our enemies, which is why Jesus says we can love our enemies. So Calvin upholds the fact that distinctions are real, while also upholding a general love that we owe to all people. He affirms that civil magistrates can and should do what is best for their people, while also calling individuals to do good to their neighbors, whoever they may be. Christian love has both proximate and universal dimensions.
This is the biblical position.
I am often told that I confuse categories when I quote Calvin, for example when I say that all people are our neighbors. But I am not confusing categories at all. I am holding together the two things that Scripture itself requires us to hold together. Proximity, whether geographic, familial, or religious does matter. But we should never look for excuses to not love someone we can love. Our obligations are channelled by God’s law, but also tied to opportunities that arise in God’s providence.
I am not confusing categories when I call people who are not civil magistrates to love the immigrant neighbor, the person who lives near them. The order of affections or love does not only speak of those who are close to us by genetics or family relations, but also of those who are close to us by geography – an d we often have little control over that. I have a higher duty to the black man who lives next door to me than I do to the white person living in Ukraine. Why? Because proximity matters. I have more ability and responsibility to serve the person next to me than the person on the other side of the world.
The problem is that some people want to make race the single controlling category. So when I quote Calvin or Matthew Henry on one point, they immediately jump in and say that I am confusing categories. But I am not. They are.
I believe that civil magistrates can and should remove from our country all illegal immigrants. I also believe that there are some migrants who are here even legally who are acting in bad faith, who are enemies, and who should be removed by the civil magistrate as well. I would be fine with an immigration moratorium. I believe the civil government can and should do quite a bit in this area.
At the same time, when I think of myself as an individual, and when I think of most of the people who read my posts as individuals, the reality is that in their day to day lives they are going to encounter people around them, placed there by providence. The question then becomes how they treat the people they actually meet. That calls for a different kind of action. I am not blurring distinctions. The people critiquing me are the ones doing that.
They only operate with one category, which is the political.
Take the language of invasion as an example. I think it is legitimate to speak in political terms about an invasion when referring to mass immigration being brought into a country. That kind of language functions the same way politicians speak about fighting or war. But that is very different from an actual military invasion.
If China or Russia or some other foreign power started paratrooping troops into my home city, with soldiers dropping from the sky, it would be legitimate for me to grab the guns I own and shoot those invaders. That is a real invasion. That is not the same thing as political rhetoric about immigration.
Some people refuse to make that distinction. They take political language about invasion and let it govern how individuals treat the people around them. If immigration were truly the same as Russian paratroopers dropping into your city, then it would follow that you would be justified, or even obligated, to grab your guns and shoot the Mexican family that moved in next door.
No one actually believes that. I certainly hope no one acts that way, because it would be absurd and evil.
Distinctions matter. Categories matter. Scripture requires us to hold them together, not collapse them into one another.
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