Month: June 2020

A Critical Look at Jordan Peterson’s Revisionism of Hitler and the Nazis

For whatever reasons, Jordan Peterson remains a popular “culture critic” among evangelical Christians.

The Swedish Hitler scholar, Mikael Nilsson, has an interesting article analyzing Peterson’s revisionist account of Adolf Hitler in Haaretz newspaper, linking it with Peterson’s strange obsession with cultural Marxism (whatever the heck that is). A boogeyman he finds under nearly every bush.

The article is entitled “Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler and Nazism.”

I have posted an excerpt below.

The railing against “cultural Marxism” (a phrase with a long antisemitic history) is of course something that Peterson, unfortunately, has in common with Hitler and the Nazis. It is his blind spot, and to what degree this hatred of Marxism has influenced his analysis and understanding of Hitler and National Socialism is unknown. 

Perhaps connected to this is his trouble deciding whether Nazism was ideologically “radical right” or “radical left,” suggesting that “maybe they pulled from the worst of both extremes.” This, too, is built on a massive ignorance of the historical research on these topics. 

It’s worth noting that this narrative happens to fit rather nicely with the views of a pool from which he draws many of his fans: the pro-Trump American right, whose leading figures are engaged in a persistent attempt to brand Nazism as socialist and Hitler as a leftist, if not a Democrat. 

It is not unreasonable to assume that this monomania has affected not only his framing of Nazism – but goes to the heart of his discomforting take on the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

Racists Will Not Inherit the Kingdom of God

The New Testament makes no distinction between confession and lifestyle.

Jesus is clear. “A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. So by their fruit you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20). And I can tell you right now, There ain’t no bad trees in heaven.

The apostle Paul repeats Jesus’ warnings in his own words. Here is only one example:

Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither…thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

Our lives, our words, our actions, our attitude towards others and how we treatment them all matter. Our lifestyle tells the tale of whether or not we genuinely know the Lord Jesus Christ.

Recently, I heard three stories that have disturbed me deeply.

First, I saw the news of a young African-American woman in Wisconsin who was set on fire by a carload of strangers. As they drove past, they shouted the “N” word, doused her with lighter fluid, and hit her with a cigarette lighter.

Fortunately, she was able to put the fire out and get to a hospital for treatment. When I saw her photo, her hair and skin tone were an exact match to my bi-racial granddaughter’s.

Second, on my Facebook feed I read the story of a local African-American activist who is now being harassed for her participation in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

She had pressed charges against a man who verbally assaulted her as she stood on the sidewalk. Now this man has gathered a number of friends from the police department (not the Kalispell police) who surround her home after dark, pounding on the walls, making loud noises, while shining lights through the windows.

She and her family are terrified.

Third, I spoke yesterday with a former student, a young woman of color now pursuing graduate work in the northwest. She is also a foreign student who grew up overseas.

She shared with me how frightening it has become for her to be a visiting foreigner, a person of color, and a single young woman in today’s United States.

She is afraid that the Trump administration will not renew her student visa.

She is literally terrified to walk outside alone, never knowing who might throw something at her, scream an epithet, or do something much worse. Would the police offer any help or protection?

She also said that her all white church has remained silent about the problems of racism and police brutality dominating our headlines. The very few comments she has heard were criticisms of the recent protests, and admonitions always to obey the police.

She did not mention anyone empathizing with her personally.

No one has approached her to ask how she doing, as a foreign visitor with a dark complexion. How does she feel about life in this country right now?Nobody has taken the initiative to ask her about her thoughts and experiences. About how this unrest is affecting her as a woman of color; how they might be able to help her?

All of these stories are about racism and expressions of white privilege.

I have never faced anything comparable. And I know the reason why – I am a white male. This means that in American society, I am privileged.

I have never had to live my life facing the daily possibility that this might be the day – the day that someone calls me another derogatory name; the day that I am denied a loan, even though I have a well-paying job; the day that the police pull my son over for no good reason and put him in a choke hold; and the list goes on…

The church, too, is infected with this cancer of racism and the blindness of white privilege.

Listen to the chorus of “Christian” people who join the common rebuttal “All Lives Matter”; or deny the existence of any such thing as white privilege; or worse yet, twist their brains into a knot and claim (with Tucker Carlson) that the claims of white privilege are themselves a racist view of the world.

All of God’s people must address these problems specifically, clearly, Biblically.

Do you not know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?

What else is racism but the attempted theft of human dignity?

It is a greedy people’s way of thieving the resources, opportunities, and expectations from one group of people in order to horde them for another.

Most importantly, it is slanderous blasphemy against the image of God – the divine image borne by every human being, no matter the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes (see James 3:9).

Now is an historic moment for authentic followers of Jesus Christ to stand up, to stand apart, to identify themselves. It is a time to protest, to demand change, to examine themselves, to repent, and to correct their misguided, fellow church-goers, even to rebuke those who refuse to listen.

No, such behavior is NOT divisive. It is moral. It is obedient. It is loving. It is necessary. It is what it looks like to follow Jesus.

For, don’t you know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Book Review: The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump

Cascade books (the publisher that will eventually release my forthcoming book on Israel-Palestine) recently released a significant book entitled The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump.

The book is a timely collection of 30 essays by prominent, and not so prominent, evangelical Christians in the hope of convincing evangelical voters NOT to vote for Trump in November.

I hope and pray that the book will be a great success.

If you have family, friends – or even complete strangers our regularly see at the coffee shop – who voted for and continue to support Donald Trump, they are the target audience for this book. Go out and buy a box load and distribute them widely in your local evangelical, fundamentalist churches.

It will be a worthy act of responsible citizenship in a country desperately in need of a genuinely moral majority.

The majority (but not all) of the book’s 30 essays are written by conservative, Republican, evangelical Christians. Some of them admit that they voted for Trump in 2016 and have come to regret that decision.

All of them offer substantial, pointed, evidence-based denunciations of Trump’s egregious moral and political failures over the past 3 1/2 years. Several essays document Trump’s habitual misogyny, his pathological lying, his malignant narcissism, his public, petty demeaning of those who disagree with him, his race-baiting and endorsement of white supremacy, the abuse of immigrants and asylum seekers at our southern border, the financial profiteering from his presidency, his consistent abuse of executive power, and his utter disregard for the constitution.

I was happy to see that a few of these Republican authors even condemned the Republican controlled Senate for acquitting Trump at the end of his impeachment trial.

The best essays, for my money, are Randall Balmer’s chapter on the long (and nearly extinct) history of evangelical social activism.

He offers an important history lesson for the entire evangelical church, reminding us of evangelicalism’s past commitments to pacifist, anti-war activism, anti-capitalist economics, anti-big business, anti-slavery, prison reform, public education, universal health care, women’s rights, and much more.

I found Balmer’s dissection of the Religious Right’s origins to be especially interesting. He argues that the modern juggernaut of religious, conservative, political power was not sparked by the anti-abortion sentiments that we see today — as so many imagine. In fact, the Religious Right began as a white, pro-segregationist movement fighting against the desegregation laws emerging from the civil rights movement, especially in the south.

It was no accident that both Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell were running segregated, all white educational institutions at the time. The seeds of the Religious Right sprouted and grew in the soil of racism, the degradation of life, not “pro-life” activism.

Against this backdrop, it’s not very surprising to see how many of today’s evangelical leaders continue to condemn the Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality movement.

Steven Hayns’ chapter about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and contemporary evangelicalism’s distortion of Bonhoeffer’s social, political theology – especially at the hands of moral miscreants like Eric Metaxis, the deluded, self-proclaimed Bonhoeffer “expert” – is particularly helpful for anyone who wants to think more deeply about Christian political engagement.

(Ahem…my book, I Pledge Allegiance, would also be a great follow-up read for those who are interested in thinking more deeply.)

John Fea provides a refreshing chapter entitled “What White Evangelicals Can Learn About Politics from the Civil Rights Movement.” It is the only chapter I read twice.

If you are looking for a good resource explaining the spiritual dangers of the Trump presidency, written by conservative Christians for other conservative Christians, then look no further. This is the book to give to family and friends (even if they are not Christians) at the 4th of July family barbecue, summer outings, fall dinner parties, and everything else in between.

Now for a brief critique.

For a reader like me, the book’s strength is also its weakness; and it’s a serious weakness.

Written by conservatives for other conservatives, the majority of its criticisms against Trump predictably conform to the standard conservative, evangelical view of the world.

Only a few of the contributors (thankfully there are a few) indicate that Trump’s moral failures have led them to re-frame, or re-imagine, what their expectations of a Christian moral politics/politician might look like beyond the old, evangelical culture wars.

For most of the book’s contributors, America’s #1 moral failing is abortion. Full stop.

A handful of essays thankfully include racism, poverty, and income inequality to this list of corporate sins, but they are a small minority.

No one calls out the corporate, structural oppression created by American imperialism, the military-industrial complex, our global war mongering, the economic sanctions that kill tens of thousands of people in other nations, or America’s continuing sponsorship of military coups…and that is only the short list of issues ignored here.

The majority of the book’s criticisms focus on Trump’s personal demeanor, individual immorality, and its personal consequences.

I very much agree that all of these are serious issues.

Yet, it is also symptomatic of evangelicalism’s obsessive individualism, something that offers them very few tools for knowing how to construct a more just and equitable politics for the whole of our society and our global partners.

Trump’s principle problem, it seems, is that he has stretched the elastic, moral boundary of evangelicalism’s ethical code beyond its very flexible  breaking point.

For too many contributors (but again, not all), Trump himself is the problem — as opposed to being a symptom of deeper political problems in our country. Once he is replaced by a morally acceptable Republican candidate (no Democratic could ever fit the bill, of course) the nation’s troubles will be solved – provided he (or she?) continues to fill the Supreme Court with conservative, anti-abortion justices.

For instance, whenever a contributor offers examples of good vs. bad candidates, the opponents are always Republican vs. Democrat.  Apparently, with the exception of Donald Trump, Republican candidates who fight abortion are always good by definition, whatever their other policy positions may be.

Bill Clinton was a bad president because he was an adulterer, not because his draconian crime bills stoked the prison industrial complex, helping to put 1 of 4 African American men in prison, most of them for no good reason.

George H. W. Bush was a great president, despite the fact that he supervised numerous atrocities while head of the CIA, as well as several dirty wars in South and Central America that slaughtered thousands of innocent people.

But at least Bush didn’t swear in public.

Many of the contributors rightly condemn Trump’s womanizing, his multiple marriages, and his extra-marital affairs.

Yet, none of these folks would condemn their iconic Ronald Reagan, a prolific Hollywood fornicator and twice married star whose second wife regularly consulted a spiritualist medium in the White House. Never mind that Reagan’s administration was subject to more ethics violations inquiries (up to that point) than any previous presidency.

At least Reagan didn’t swear in public.

I know, I know. None of this is the point of the book.

Yet, the fact remains, only a select few of the contributors have a broad enough Christian vision to poke their heads up beyond the pious horizons of American, evangelical culture.

And that makes this book a disappointment to me.

After Completing Use of Force Training, Cop Murders Fleeing Black Man by Shooting Him in the Back

I am post Caitlin Johnstone’s post entitled “The Killing of Rayshard Brooks Shows How Police ‘Reform’ is a Joke.”

Raushard Brooks before he was murdered by the Atlanta police

The way our police officers are trained is not only broken and corrupt, it is corrupting and dangerous.

Ms. Johnstone’s explains how an Atlanta cop shot an African-American man in back as he was fleeing and killed him. I have included an excerpt below:

After watching all these protests against police brutality raging throughout his country since the murder of George Floyd, after being confronted with with all the public outrage about police killing black men day after day in news headline after news headline, after his society forced him to contemplate police violence and his role in it, Garrett Rolfe still decided to kill. After all that, he watched a black man running away from him, posing no threat to him whatsoever, and he decided to kill.

The fact that cops are so thoroughly inoculated against public demand that they change their behavior makes a complete farce of the decoy police “reform” agenda that establishment narrative managers have been actively trying to corral the current protest movement into to kill their support for police abolishment.

Bryan Stevenson on Racism and Black Resilience

Why Zionists Don’t Enthusiastically Support “Black Lives Matter”

Ali Abunimah, author of the book The Battle for Justice in Palestine and editor at The Electronic Intifada, has written a good article explaining why many Zionist supporters of Israel, including groups like AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America, are not only refusing to support “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations but are actively repudiating the movement.

It’s not hard to understand if we understand the truth about political Zionism and the reality of Palestinian life in and around Israel.

Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece here.

As protests sweep the world in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Israel lobby groups are struggling to appear on board with the Black Lives Matter movement while upholding their support for Israel’s racism.

While some are trying to jump on the anti-racism bandwagon, others are dispensing with subtlety altogether.

Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, demanded that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, “immediately put Black Lives Matter on their list of hate groups.”

——

The Anti-Defamation League is also no more credible as a partner against racism, especially US police brutality.

It has been a major player in the industry of bringing US police on junkets to Israel for “counterterrorism” and other kinds of joint training.

That has become a central focus of the Deadly Exchange campaign which aims to end the links between US and Israeli forces of state repression.

Militarization Has Fostered a Police Culture That Sets Up Protesters as ‘The Enemy’ — Tom Nolan

Former police officer Tom Nolan has an article at ConsortiumNews  condemning the militarization of US policing, pointing to its destructive consequences on display in the ongoing BLM demonstrations.

Below is an excerpt. Read the entire article here.

As a former police officer of 27 years and a scholar who has written on the policing of marginalized communities, I have observed the militarization of the police firsthand, especially in times of confrontation.

I have seen, throughout my decades in law enforcement, that police culture tends to privilege the use of violent tactics and non-negotiable force over compromise, mediation, and peaceful conflict resolution. It reinforces a general acceptance among officers of the use of any and all means of force available when confronted with real or perceived threats to officers.

We have seen this play out during the first week of protests following Floyd’s death in cities from Seattle to Flint to Washington, D.C.

The police have deployed a militarized response to what they accurately or inaccurately believe to be a threat to public order, private property, and their own safety. It is in part due to a policing culture in which protesters are often perceived as the “enemy.” Indeed teaching cops to think like soldiers and learn how to kill has been part of a training program popular among some police officers.

Chris Cuomo Explains Systemic Racism

Cuomo does a good job of explaining what systemic racism is, how it works, and how it continues to operate today in America.

“Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop”

Officer A. Cab has written a powerful autobiographical article at Medium confessing and repenting of his 10 years as a cop.

He describes, from the inside, why police “reform” will never work. He also makes the argument for why “defunding” (though that word is misleading and unhelpful) the police is essential if we hope to see real change.

I hope you will read the entire piece. I have excerpted select sections below. You can find the entire article here. It is worth your time.

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt.

——

While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

——-

Once police training has – through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle – promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.

——

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. 

——

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist.

Black Lives Matter in Kalispell Montana [reposted with photos]

My daughter and I attended the Justice for George Floyd/Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kalispell, MT yesterday. The organizers’ Facebook page

I am the masked man on the right

warned that members of several armed militia groups would also be there.

We both wondered what would happen.

Kalispell demonstrations are always limited to a public park at the end of main street cutting through the city center. The organizers applauded how cooperative the local police department had been in helping to plan the event. As a result, we were all instructed not to bring signs with any type of derogatory, anti-police messages.

Instead, the organizers announced, the demonstration’s intended message was “unity.”

“Unity with whom for what?,” I asked myself.

Demonstrators line main street

o, Kendra and I are going to demonstrate against police brutality in a country where unarmed African-Americans are 5 x more likely than white Americans to be shot and killed by police. The organizers have agreed with the local police department to restrict the protest to the police-approved section of the public park, where the police have also decided that we will experience “unity” with heavily armed members of local militia groups.

Let freedom ring.

On the positive side, I was happy to see the largest turnout for any protest I have yet attended in Kalispell.

Demonstrators lining both sides of the street

The Sunday morning paper estimated there were at least 1,000 people in attendance — including, of course, our semiautomatic rifle-toting, American flag waving, self-appointed, “don’t tread on me” guardians.

A small group of armed cowboys walked through the crowd carrying American flags and yellow signs calling people to repent and believe in Jesus. At one point, as they approached me I loudly reminded them that Jesus is not white.

While my fellow protesters got the point and laughed, the gang of gun slinger

Armed militia

patriot-evangelists remained totally oblivious to the mockery they were making of the gospel they came to promote.

I took time out periodically to talk with the militia members. I picked the guy with the biggest rifle and asked him why he was here? What was the group’s goal in attending this protest?

Each one repeated the same response. I got the impression that they had all been briefed on how to answer questions from the public. “We are here to protect you,” they said.

I probed further.

Armed and ready

“We don’t want to see the kind of looting and property destruction in our city that we see everywhere else these protests happen. We especially don’t want anyone defacing our veterans’ memorial,” referring to a large statue near the street.

“But,” I would say, “There is a large police presence here already. They would stop people from defacing the statue. Did the police ask for your help?”

“No. We just volunteered,” I was told.

The mass of demonstrators would periodically chant “Black Lives Matter”

Guarding the war monument, and chanting USA, White Lives Matter

while receiving a chorus of horns honking in agreement from cars passing by.

But each time we chanted “Black Lives Matter,” the militia members waved their flags more aggressively and took up a counter-chant, usually “USA! USA!” or sometimes “White Lives Matter!”

I took another break, approached a chanting militiaman and asked why he did that. Why did he respond to Black Lives Matter with USA? How was his a counterpoint to ours?

“Well,” he said. “This is America. And in America everyone is equal.”

“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why can’t you say Black Lives Matter with us, if everyone here is equal?”

Well, you guessed it. With that the racist damn broke. I was now listening to a heated  monologue about how “black people bring all their problems on themselves.”

It was impossible to get a word in edgewise, so I thanked him for his time and said goodbye.

As Kendra and I left the park later that evening, we talked about what we had learned. It was evident that everyone carrying a handgun and a rifle were devotees of Fox News. They had never seen any of the abundant video footage of peaceful demonstrations all across the country, nor had they seen the gangs of police attacking innocent protesters.

They had all arrived believing that every “liberal” demonstration was a riot-in-

How many semi-automatics does it take?

waiting. They stood guard believing that were it not for their armed presence, Kalispell would have been the next city victimized by looting liberals run riot.

I wish I could say that I feel encouraged this morning after Kalispell’s largest (maybe first?) Black Lives Matter demonstration. But I don’t.

I fear that America’s deepening divisions will never be bridged, much less mended, as everyone remains comfortably ensconced in their preferred information bubble. Between the alternate realities of Fox News and MSNBC (not to mention the others), our segmented mass media has destroyed the possibility of any truly national conversation.

We don’t live in the same world. We live in different worlds, different universes separated by contrary “facts,” alternate realities that too many of us meekly accept without challenge, investigation, or alternate, independent thinking.

It’s too easy to grab another beer in a self-assured, reaffirming world where confirmation bias goes unrecognized. Not a one of my armed conversation partners would believe that the vast majority of the nation’s recent protests were peaceful, that the looting was marginal — graphic but marginal.

And why should they? After all, Fox News told them otherwise.

I am too old to be surprised by racism. But it is still depressing to hear the stream of ignorant words pour from the mouth of a man immediately in front of me. I can’t imagine what it must be like for African-Americans to repeatedly hear from ill-informed, prejudiced lips that all their problems are of their own making.

Sure, we all make many of our own problems. But asymmetrical police brutality is NOT one of them.

How often can any person tolerate being told that when the police attack you, kneel on your neck, and choke the life out of you, it is because something is wrong with you; that you create your own problems? That if you were a better citizen, the police would not be murdering your friends and family at 5 x the rate of everyone else?

Racism is endemic to the human heart. I saw that again last night. We will never be rid of it till Jesus comes.

Sadly, the young ensemble of armed patriots qua evangelists provided vivid witness to the fact that “confessing and repenting of sin” is no guarantee of a transformed heart or a renewed Christ-like mind.