The Left Tries to Frame Christians As the Mythical "Christian Nationalists"

 I have commented in this blog that one cannot be a Christian and at the same time be a Marxist, a Communist, Fascist, Socialist or any of the other branches from the tree of Marx.  Why is that?  Because at heart, Marxism requires allegiance to the State uber alles. But Christianity demands that you are loyal to, and love Christ above all. As He noted, one cannot serve God and mammon. Our Constitutional Republic was explicitly set up as being under God, not in place of God. Marxist systems of government attempt to replace God with the state. As Mussolini put it: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Today, at the American Thinker Wolf Howling (a pseudonym, of course) has a tour de force essay taking us back to the French Revolution and the modern beginnings of Devil's re-emergence entitled Christian Nationalism: The American Revolution Versus The French Revolution. Both of these revolutions occurred within decades of each other at the end of the 18th century. Each though had fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings. The American revolution had the Bible, and writers such as John Locke. The French Revolution disdaining the Bible, held up human reason as the ultimate good. It was consciously atheistic.  In essence, the French Revolution committed the Original Sin of putting man on the throne of God.

Howling starts his article by pointing out what most Christians believe, that God granted man certain inalienable rights - rights that a legitimate government is duty bound to protect:

Christianity stands athwart neo-Marxists’ over-arching goal of creating an all-powerful government, free from any competing moral or ethical authority. Because America was founded on Biblical principles, neo-Marxists have to drive Christianity from the public square and uncouple America’s founding from its Judeo-Christian roots. The left’s latest effort has been to attack “Christian Nationalism.”

If you are a believing Christian or Jew, you are likely mystified about this newly made-up class of “Christian Nationalists.” According to Politico’s top reporter, Heidi Przybyla, it is a small subset of Christians—evil ones—who want to establish a theocracy. The defining characteristic of this subset of evil Christians is that they falsely believe that God Himself grants each person immutable rights to life, liberty, and property.

Furthermore, we believe that if the government orders us to do something against the Commands of our God, we should resist. I would note that this is the basis for the idea that soldiers should not follow orders blindly but should weigh the legal and moral ramifications of their orders. Just following orders did not absolve the Nazis of their crimes.

The concerted scaremongering against Christian Nationalism carefully avoids discussing the Bible and for good reason. The overarching messages of the Bible are morality, the sanctity of individual life, and the necessity of impartial justice. Indeed, one of the first commands God gave the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land was to create courts of law to administer “true Justice for the people.” He emphasized that the Israelite judges “must not distort justice; you shall not show partiality… Justice, and justice alone, shall you pursue…” (Deuteronomy 16:18-20).

Here I would disagree to some extent with Howling. The moral law presented in the Torah are certainly the Commandments of God, as exemplified in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). But as Paul wrote, the Law exists to convict every man as a hopeless sinner. No one can escape, and one cannot do enough good works to merit salvation. But God sent his very own Son into the world to live as one of us, but commit no sin, and to die a brutal and horrible death by execution on the cross for the sin of the world.  By faith in Christ and through the grace of God, we may hope to be saved.  This was God's plan from the very beginning, in Genesis. Even so, it is Christ's resurrection that gives us hope that we too may one day be with Him.

The Torah presents us with both the moral law and the ceremonial law. Christ, by his death and resurrection on Easter abrogated the ceremonial law, but the moral law remains. A rightly ordered Christian's first loyalty is to God. A rightly ordered government preserves its peoples' rights under God.

While Howling leads us through a brief history of the philosophical thoughts leading up to each revolution, he closes with these paragraphs:

The canard of “Christian nationalism” comes from the atheist path that brought the Enlightenment to a bloody end with the French Revolution. Virtually all modern society’s ills can be traced back to that Revolution, which birthed socialism and a modern police state with absolute power. Naturally, the first thing the French radicals had to do to remake society was rid the nation of a competing system of morality and authority—i.e., Christianity—and this they did with brutality and bloodshed. George Neumayr explained,

"The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism’s final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the “guts of the last king.”

The French Revolution’s legacy has been a disaster for humanity. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century because of communist, socialist, and fascist police states unmoored from Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, the children of the French Revolution, people such as Michel Foucault, a gay pedophile, and Herbert Marcuse, have overtaken the West’s ivory towers and poisoned the West with postmodernism, critical theory, DEI, and atheism.

And now, the French Revolution’s legacy gives us the utter canard of Christian Nationalism. It is a charge that relies on historic illiteracy to redefine our nation. It must be fought tooth and nail, for the stakes could not be higher.

As I said at the beginning, Wolf Howling's essay is a tour de force and can not be digested fully without also looking into the many, many links. You will know some of them, but there are others that we new to me at least. Please read the whole post. Christ demands we fight, mostly with our spiritual weapons: our prayer, our confession, our liturgy and communion. But it may sometimes demand our physical weapons as well. Pray, and keep your powder dry.

Democrats view voters as subjects to be ruled

 Rajan Laad has a think piece at the American Thinker that asks the question Why do Democrats hate white rural America so much? It's a question that has weighed on my mind as well. Growing up in the upper midwest as I did, and living now in North Carolina, I meet all kinds of people, and for the most part they do not fit the description of offered by Schaller and Waldman:

“They are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geodemographic group in the country,” claimed Schaller. “Second, they’re the most conspiracist group. QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism instead of scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism.”

“They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech,” Schaller said. “They’re also the most strongly White nationalist and White Christian nationalist. ... They’re most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

No, and in fact rural America is filled with not just white people, but blacks, Asians and pretty much every other race of Americans. What all these people have in common is that they can all see what is happening to their country. They can all cite a list of unaddressed grievances like the ones Laad has listed. They just want to get the jack boot off their necks and get back to living their lives. Laad rhetorically asks "Why the hatred?

Why the hatred?

The Democrats view voters as subjects who need to be controlled rather than citizens to whom they are accountable. Their object is to rule (not govern).

They see these dissenting white rural voters as impediments to their permanence of power.

Please read the whole post and contemplate what Laad is saying. Then pray to find a way out of the net the tyrants are laying for us.

When There Is A Gun Store and a US Senator to Smear, Truth No Longer Matters

At Townhall.com today we have a treat. F. Paul Valone, the head of Grass Roots North Carolina (GRNC), who often writes for us and of course often appears on local radio, has written a national story. Valone is outraged that Leftist media is Misrepresenting Gun Tracing to Smear a US Senator. First term Senator Ted Budd happens to own a gun store and range facilites. Unlike our other US Senator, gun owners can count on Budd not to stab us in the back (we hope.) Anyway, let Valone tell it:

On gun issues, never underestimate the capacity of leftist media to distort, obfuscate, and downright lie. If they can simultaneously smear a pro-Second Amendment legislator, so much the better.

Such was the piece by McClatchy newspapers, which recently spun an elaborate yarn based on firearm tracing reports and false accusations against Second Amendment defender Senator Ted Budd (R-NC). And what was Sen. Budd’s “crime?” Owning a gun shop and firing range named “ProShots.”

“NC senator’s gun shop among hundreds monitored by ATF for weapons traced to crimes,” headlined the piece, which breathlessly described his ostensible transgression: “For the third year in a row, the gun shop owned by U.S. Sen. Ted Budd was among hundreds across the country flagged by federal authorities in 2023 for selling weapons that were later traced to crimes, according to newly released records.”

All very sinister! Could it be that ProShots is on the list for political reasons? In this day and age, would that shock anyone? Valone goes on to note:

Despite McClatchy’s assertions, traced guns are not “crime guns:” Guns used in crimes are not necessarily traced, and guns traced are not necessarily used in crimes, a long-acknowledged problem. Said a 2009 Congressional Research Service report: “Firearms trace data … may be biased by several factors,” further saying “traced firearms … may not be representative of firearms possessed and used by criminals” and “there remains significant variation over time and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to ‘when, why, and how’ a firearm is recovered and selected to be traced…” Mine was once traced during a traffic stop before being returned. Did that make it a “crime gun?”

Gentle readers should go on to read the whole article by Valone. It is very instructive to learn that the ATF trace data is not worth the paper in is printed on because of various flaws in gathering of the data. Also, one should always remember that every gun sold by any Federal Firearm Licensee (FFL) is approved by the FBI through its National Instant Background Check (NICS) system. Valone cloese with:

ProShots was undoubtedly ensnared by Joe Biden’s weaponized ATF and the so-called “zero tolerance” program through which it has shut down hundreds of gun dealers for even minor paperwork violations – all, of course, part of a scheme to curtail gun ownership by executive order. If anything, ProShots should be congratulated for surviving the Biden quagmire.

Naturally, I pointed out these fallacies and more during interviews with McClatchy reporters, who downplayed or ignored every one because, after all, when it comes to ostensibly “mainstream” media coverage of gun issues, truth no longer matters.

Indeed

A Request from David Codrea

 Per David Codrea's request, I am sharing this post at the War on Guns website.

This is the evil we face at the personal level from “our own” government.

Be outraged, be horrified, and be warned. This could have been me, this could have been you. And the DSM would have parroted the state’s narrative as the prohibitionists high-fived themselves on X and made small d!ck jokes.

Please go read the linked article by James Bovard and consider whether the Montgomery County police acted as a hit squad.

The Left Won't Like the New Rules

 Jack Hellner at the American Thinker today has a post entitled Trump's presidential immunity case to be heard by SCOTUS and the left roots for him to fail. But as he points out, the Left might not like the new rules. After all, if Trump doesn't have immunity after he leaves office, then neither do Obama or Biden.

Aesop’s fables are revered for their ability to communicate profound moral concepts to young children, but clearly the short parables are too advanced for the average Democrat, and especially the weaponized anti-Trump operatives in the Biden regime, because they’re cheering on the “no-presidential-immunity” agenda, oblivious to the “be careful what you wish for” precept.

Without presidential immunity, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are living on borrowed time.

One of the most despicable, dangerous, and deadly actions of any American president was when Obama dictatorially “derailed” a massive investigation into Hezbollah’s billion-dollar drug-running ring to appease the tyrants in Iran—which we know was because he selfishly thought it would help his legacy...

...snip...

How about Obama’s ATF and Operation Fast and Furious? The policy is directly to blame for the deaths of American agents (no one would dispute that), and how many others?

Should Biden and Obama be charged with enabling Iran and terrorists because they built up Iran’s war chest? Because at this moment they have blanket immunity, despite reaping endless death.

Should Biden be charged for refusing to enforce border laws? Because at this moment he has blanket immunity, despite a number of high-profile murder and rape cases (just over the last few days), and an obvious increase in “migrant crime.”

Should Biden be charged for having energy policies that enrich Russia, Iran, and other tyrannical regimes, that in turn cause great damage throughout the world? Because at this moment, he has blanket immunity.

Of course, even George W. Bush and Clinton would come under scrutiny. No one does anything for pure reasons. There are always a mixture of the good with the bad in any decision process. And the ones who don't like the decision of policy will no doubt use the current lawfare techniques to bring criminal charges and lawsuits against any former president. Only a masochist would want the job under these conditions. But hey, if the Left wants to play by these rules, they won't like them when turned against them.

The Emptiness of Communist Promises

 Today at Townhall.com David Harsanyi has an essay entitled If This Is 'Christian Nationalism,' Sign Me Up! Harsanyi is an admitted agnotic. But his point is that whether you believe in God or not, the natural rights theory of the origin of our rights aligns perfectly with Christian and Jewish notions of these rights. I would also note that simple observation of human nature makes these rights, in Thomas Jefferson's words "self evident."

The other day, Politico writer Heidi Przybyla appeared on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" to talk about the hysteria de jour, "Christian nationalism." Donald Trump, she explained, has surrounded himself with an "extremist element of conservative Christians," who were misrepresenting "so-called natural law" in their attempt to roll back abortion "rights" and other leftist policy preferences. What makes "Christian nationalists" different, she went on, was that they believe "our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority."

As numerous critics have already pointed out, "Christian nationalism" sounds identical to the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence. Then again, the idea that man has inalienable, universal rights goes back to ancient Greece, at least. The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can't give or take our God-given freedoms.

It is the best kind of "extremism."

...snip...

Conservatives often chalk up this kind of ignorance about civics to a declining education system. It's not an accident. But even if progressives were fluent in the philosophy of natural rights, one strongly suspects she, like most progressives (and other statists), would be uninterested. It's a political imperative to be uninterested.

If natural rights are truly inalienable, how can the government create a slew of new (positive) "rights" -- the right to housing or abortion or health care or free birth control? And how can we limit those who "abuse" free expression, self-defense and due process if they are up to no good? You know, as President Joe Biden likes to say -- when speaking about the Second Amendment, never abortion -- no right "is absolute."

Our rights are, in fact, unalienable whether they come from our Creator, or are a natural part of human nature. What are called "positive rights" are things you have a right to if you pay for them. A right to housing? Sure, whatever you can afford. A right to health care? Again, whatever you can pay for. A right to food  and to water? Again, whatever you can afford. But you do not have a "right" to abort your child because everyone, including your child in the womb has a right to life.

Harsanyi notes that he chooses to believe in natural rights. I will pray that the Holy Spirit inspires Harsanyi to faith. But as I have already been inspired by the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ by the grace of God, I can not shut up about it. The Bible's admonitions, it turns out, perfectly align not only with natural rights theory, but provide people with the best chance of having a long and prosperous life. The "positive rights" the Left promises are already ours, by virtue of the natural rights. Thus, their promises are empty as shown by countless Communist paradises.

Even in NYC the Police Cannot Stop You Just Because You Have a Gun

 Over at Bearing Arms Tom Knighton has an article explaining that The New Republic Laments Bruen's Actually Protecting Rights. In this case, the defendant wasn't what they call a "sympathetic" person. Indeed, it was an actual felon. But even a felon has rights too.  Indeed, in NYC today they may have more rights than you do.

If something is a right, then you have a right to do it without being harassed by the authorities. I can criticize the government, for example, and shouldn't have to worry about the government making my life difficult because I did. I shouldn't get accosted by the police simply because I'm going to a church the powers-that-be don't particularly care for.

But for a very long time, if you carried a gun, you could be approached by law enforcement under a presumption that you were doing something wrong until you showed them you were, in fact, legal.

So, in places like New York one would be presumed guilty until proven innocent if you were carrying a gun. Thus, they turned American jurisprudence on its head.

Folks at The New Republic have an issue with that.

With a headline reading, "How the Supreme Court Created One Nation Under the Gun," and a sub-headline that reads, "Two years after the high court's ruling in Bruen, we now live in a world with a constitutional expectation that any firearm is a legal firearm," they make it clear they see it as a bad thing.

It’s been more than two years since the Supreme Court opened a new frontier for gun laws. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court laid out a far more restrictive test for determining whether such laws violate the individual right to bear arms that the justices previously found in the Second Amendment. I’ve chronicled time and time again how judges have tried to apply that test to existing laws, sometimes with far-reaching implications.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in New York ruled that simply possessing a gun in public no longer amounts to probable cause for an arrest in that state. The decision is one of the first to apply Bruen to how police officers carry out searches and arrests—a sign of how much the Supreme Court’s ruling has changed the legal landscape when it comes to guns in American life.

In February of 2023, NYPD officers encountered Robert Homer on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, near the border of Queens’ Rochdale neighborhood. A group of officers, using the city’s ARGUS surveillance camera network, observed him sitting in the driver’s seat of a silver van. One of the officers saw Homer put what appeared to be a black handgun into one of his pockets while in the van, go to a nearby deli to get something to eat, and return to the van. After his return, officers arrested him and found a handgun in his pocket. Court documents do not say whether he was able to eat his meal first.

After his arrest, federal prosecutors charged Homer with violating a federal law that bans people with felony convictions from owning firearms. Critically, however, the officers were unaware that Homer had a previous felony conviction prior to arresting him. Instead, their justification for making the arrest—what is known as “probable cause” in court—revolved around his simple possession of a firearm. The arresting officer additionally told the court that he thought Homer lacked proper “firearm discipline” and that he was in what the police described as a “high-crime area.”

The emphasis above is mine. The police would have been fully justified in arresting Homer on the charge of being a felon in possession of a gun*. But they were not aware of the status of Homer as a felon, but merely that he had a gun. I remember years ago at a rest stop here in North Carolina that a man came out of the rest area with an openly carried gun on his hip. One of the other men got very upset, and was only less so when I explained that it was perfectly legal to do so.

If we see a group of people protesting, the assumption is that they're lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights until or unless we're shown otherwise. Gun rights are no different.

Exactly so.

* At one time, a person's right to carry a gun was restored with completion of his sentence for a felony. Wardens of prisons returned the inmate's belongings including guns and ammunition at the end of the inmate's sentence. David Codrea coined the notion that if a person can not be trusted with a gun, he can not be trusted without a custodian. So, by letting someone out of prison, society had determined that they could be trusted, rightly or wrongly. The idea that committing a felony disbars someone from enjoyment of Constitutionally protected rights seems, in my humble opinion to go againsts the jurisprudence layed out by the Constitution and common law. But I am not a lawyer.