One of the more frustrating things those trying to serve God constantly face is that they can’t be lying slobs, slanderers, morally lax jerks, and vile swine who make messes and leave everybody else to clean it up.
To be sure, many and many and vile swine can and do claim to be serving God while doing such things. But those who are actually serious about it are profoundly constrained to fight fair against people who think fighting fair is for suckers.
The anti-MAGA Normal has been manfully confronting this reality for at least a decade and doing admirable work in that regard. They are decent people who strive to remain decent and not imitate the bullies and liars in the MAGA cult despite great temptations to do so.
And, as is often the case, they find themselves confronted by evils that come, not singly, but in battalions. So even as they labor to defeat the MAGA cult, for instance, they find themselves attacked by MAGA orcs calling them Communists, and threatening them with blood and terror (as, for instance, Reichsfuehrer Stephen Miller does here as he plagiarizes his Idol):
(Just so you know, domestic terror in the US is not “leftist” but overwhelmingly white, racist, and MAGA–just like Reichsfuehrer Stephen Miller. So, for instance, those MAGA Catholics who instantly assume acts of terror against Catholics or against conservative figures like Charlie Kirk or Trump are the fruit of “left wing extremism”, are typically stone blind to the fact that Trump’s is the most anti-Catholic administration in history and that the statistical likelihood is that the shots are being fired, not from the far Left, but from a deeper circle of MAGA hell, as appears to be the case both with the shooter in Butler and the killer of Kirk.)
Not that there are no extremes on the Left. It’s just that the people they tend to hate are not the MAGA cult but Normals they regard as Not Pure Enough. And so Normals get it from both sides as the MAGA Cult calls them Komminnissists even as they also find themselves attacked by vanishingly small minorities on the super Far Left,busily doing their bit to help the MAGA cult whip up their ridiculous Red Scare against Normals.
Here, for instance, is far Lefty Hasan Piker, handing the MAGA cult a huge gift for their Right Wing Panic Machine:
The Normals in the Democratic Party want nothing to do with this sort of Far Left apologetics for mass murder and immediately do something no member of the GOP would dream of doing when–as happens every single day–Trump and his fellow Nazi admirers say something insane: reject and repudiate it:
Won’t matter to the Right Wing Lie Machine, of course. Normals will get it coming and going anyway as the MAGA Cult blames them for Piker while Piker blames them for the MAGA cult even as he fights to get the MAGA cult elected by doing all he can to cripple the Dems for their sinful imperfection.
Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project made interesting observation about the Puritan Far Left. He remarked that Republicans will forgive their leaders everything, while liberals will forgive their leaders nothing. I don’t think that is entirely accurate, but it certainly seems accurate of the Far Left. They have always wanted the eschaton NOW and have always lacked the patience with human frailty and fallenness to bear even the smallest impurity. Ironically, as here, it results in a weird commitment to The Perfect Diagram over a commitment to the human beings the Diagram was supposed to serve. It is, as is all culture war in the US, a continuation of deeply Christian arguments traceable back to the Reformation at the very least, and often to quarrels in pre-Reformation Christendom, which often prioritized some theological theory over the love of neighbor.
40 million dead is, by the way, a conservative estimate of Mao’s ocean of blood. The upper estimate is 80 million. But he was a Great Man because he stuck to the Diagram and didn’t let pity for the worthless and imperfect get in his way. So lunatics like Piker will no more speak ill of him than the most brainwashed MAGA KKKhristian will speak a word against Trump’s felonies, rapes, and murders.
It’s all summed up in the old Russian joke about the Soviet apparatchik who was shown a plan for economic reform in the USSR that would create an abundant harvest, end the debt, and renew Soviet manufacturing but which played fast and loose with Communist dogma.
His response: “Yes. It will work in reality, but will it work in theory?”
Meanwhile, the Normals getting it from both sides may well resent the experience of trying hard to be fair, honest, and just while getting nothing but lies, abuse, and slander from all sides.
I’m not gonna lie to you that it’s easy. But I will tell you the truth that this is the way God treats all his favorites, starting with his only begotten Son. As he himself once wryly observed about the impossible-to-please mob of his own day:
“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates,
‘We piped to you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Mt 11:16–19)
To live in a universe made by and for a crucified God is to be confronted by the fact that pain and the exasperation of trying to do right while everybody yells at you and accuses you is to walk the same path that He does. It not proof of your rejection. Nor is it a trick played by a prankster god. It is to share, in some degree, in his life:
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?—
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor lose courage when you are punished by him.
For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Heb 12:3–11)
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