An Auto Zone burns in Minneapolis early Thursday, May 28, 2020. (Nick Woltman / Pioneer Press)
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire.
Isaiah 1:7
Writing late in the history of Judah, the prophet Isaiah’s work has long struck this author as having special application to our own time. In his long career, Isaiah witnessed much, including the final destruction of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria in 721 B.C. and a remarkable restoration of the Southern Kingdom under King Hezekiah.
In the opening chapter of the book named for him, Isaiah painted a stark and unflattering picture of the current state of Judah and Jerusalem in his day. Although they had a Godly heritage, the people of the Southern Kingdom had not only abandoned that heritage but were acting in ways that were the exact opposite of what had been laid down for them in the Law of Moses. Speaking through Isaiah, the Lord called them “children who are corruptors.” Not only were they themselves corrupt, but they corrupted others. Further, the Lord said of them that, “They have turned away backward.’ The inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah not only were off course but were going 180 degrees away from the direction God had called them to go.
The Black Lives Matter street mural recently painted right next to Cincinnati City Hall. The Mainstreaming of this Marxist organization is all but complete.
“I have heard many such things; Miserable comforters are you all!”
Job 16:2
An old saying among military men is that generals are always ready to fight the last war. Perhaps the classic example of this is the French military leaders, who, having learned by experience in World War I that trench warfare and fixed fortifications were the way to fight, built the Maginot Line to defend the nation against a future attack from Germany.
From all accounts it was a well-built defensive line. A very impressive military installation it was. And not only that, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, the 800,000-man strong French army, “was thought at the time to be the most powerful in Europe.”
Unfortunately, as the French general staff again learned by experience in the Spring of 1940, in the intervening twenty of so years since the last war Germany had developed a new form of warfare, Blitzkrieg (lightning war). Blitzkrieg, sometimes called third generation warfare by military historians, is based on speed and movement. Instead of slugging it out toe to toe with the French in the trenches, the German army simply went around the Maginot Line through Belgium and down into the heart of France.
The Germans began their attack through Belgium on May 10, 1940. France surrendered just six weeks later on June 22. If it were a boxing match, you’d call it a first-round knockout.
The French generals, who were wonderfully prepared to fight World War I-style trench warfare, did not anticipate Germany’s new tactics and thus failed to defend their people. In France’s hour of need, they were miserable comforters.
In the view of this author, Republican and Evangelical leaders are making a similar mistake today. Thinking that the country is still fighting the civil rights battles of the 1950’s and 1960’s, they seem to think that white racism is the root of all evil in America today. They can’t wait to denounce white racism, as if there were a Klansman waiting behind every bush, when the truth of the matter is that it is white people, who, more often than not, are the victims of racist rhetoric, racist polices and racially motivated violence, not the perpetrators of it.
And yet, if you listen to leading Republican and Evangelical voices, one could easily believe they’ve all internalized the accusation Hillary Clinton leveled at Trump voters 2016 and really truly believe that their party and their congregations are made up of nothing but a bunch of irredeemably deplorable racists, sexists and homophobes, who, not only are being justly punished by the righteous and terrible swift swords of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but that they have not yet received from the Lord’s hands double for all their sins. The beatings will continue until moral improves. This seems to be the motto of those in positions of authority, both in the state and in the church.
Not only do Republican and conservative Protestant spokesmen fail to defend their own people who are being subjected to the most vicious psychological, spiritual and even physical attacks I’ve ever seen in this country, not only do they fail to stand up and speak up and refute the slanders of the Marxist mobs howling for the destruction of the country, the very country that was principally built by the people they claim to represent, but these same Republican and Evangelical leaders actually pile on, joining with the enemies of their own people in beating down their congregations and political base.
Miserable comforters are they all. Miserable! Inexcusably, utterly miserable.
This represents the third post in this series, a series which I no plans to write in the first place, and one which, at least in part, I would rather not continue today.
I could say that events compel me to write on this subject again, but that would be inaccurate. Events compel not such thing from me. I am entirely free to write on whatever subject I choose, the events of the day notwithstanding.
But given that the entirety of American society, including the professed Evangelical/Protestant church, seems bound and determined to draw all the wrong lessons from the recent racial tension in the United States, I would be remiss as a blogger and as a Christian were I to pass over these extraordinary errors in silence.
Philadelphia police and Pennsylvania National Guard take a knee at the suggestion of Philadelphia Police Deputy Commissioner Melvin Singleton, unseen, outside Philadelphia police headquarters on June 1, 2020, during a rally calling for justice over the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
That was quite a week, was it not?
Not since 911 have I been so transfixed by the news of the day. I have to admit, I got hooked on Twitter watching the reports come in of the rioting last Sunday night. It was the Lord’s Day, and I try not to get caught up in that sort of thing, but I just could not put my phone down.
When I sat down to outline this post yesterday and came up with nineteen subpoints, I knew this was going to be a hard post to write. Don’t worry. I’m not planning on inflicting that much on you. But still, there’s so much to say. Where to begin?
Let’s start with this…
Who’s Paying for the Bricks?
There were numerous reports last week claiming that pallets of bricks were being staged near the riot areas. The best report I’ve found so far is from NBC News New York. The headline reads “NYPD’s Terrorism Official Says Unnamed Groups Planned Protest Violence in Advance.” According to the article, “New York’s top terrorism official says there’s strong evidence that members of anarchist groups from outside the city intentionally planned to incite violence at protests calling for justice in the death of George Floyd.”
The official went on to state that, “there is a high of confidence within the NYPD that these unnamed groups had organized scouts, medics and supply routes of rocks, bottles and accelerants for breakaway groups to commit vandalism and violence. There are strong indicators they planned for violence in advance using at times encrypted communications”… the agitators, “developed a complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were and where police were not for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to places where they could commit acts of vandalism including the torching of police vehicles and Molotov cocktails where they thought officers would not be.”
So who do the New York police think was organizing and paying for all this illicit activity? No one has yet said publicly. Mayor Bill de Blasio seemed to hint that more information would be forthcoming. I’ll believe it when I see it. For my part, I think we’ll find out who was funding and organizing Antifa terrorism about the same time as we get an honest account of what happened to Jeffrey Epstein, what dirt he had on which masters of the universe, or where Ghislaine Maxwell is hiding. That is to say, the twelfth of never.
One interesting suggestion came in a tweet from forensic accountant Charles Ortel. He suggests George Soros, the Obama Foundation, and the Clinton Foundation. I’ve seen Ortel in interviews before and he struck me as a serious fellow, not someone given to hyperbole, so I don’t dismiss his accusations out of hand.
Lux Lucet 