New Allies. Unexpected Allies.

There’s nothing like totalitarianism to find out who’s really with you.

From time to time, I post on our society’s decent into woke totalitarianism.  But today, I look on the bright side of life.  No, this will not be like the ghastly song from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

In recent years, I am among those who have found out who are real allies and real adversaries.  A negative example is the Bushes.  Yes, you may boo now; I won’t mind.  I was quite a fan of the Bushes years ago.  In high school I even got to ask a question of the elder Bush back when he was UN Ambassador.  I worked for his failed re-election attempt as a party precinct chairman in 1992.  I almost cried when his son “W” was elected in 2000.  I was relieved that the Democrat attempt to steal that election was thwarted (And regardless of what you think of Bush or Gore, it was an attempted steal.) and was hopeful for the younger Bush years after eight years of lies from Clinton.  I even defended Bush to the bitter end when few were doing so.

So you can imagine my sense of betrayal when the Bush family let it be known they voted for Biden.  And when I look back at their policies, I see more betrayal I had not noticed before.  They encouraged the export of much of our industry to China to mention one area.

But it wasn’t just the Bushes who betrayed me, who betrayed us.  “Conservative” voices I once deeply respected like George Will and Mona Charen became prating parrots for the Deep State.  I found out the hard way that establishment “conservatives” and cuckolded Republicans just want America to go to hell at a slightly slower pace than Democrats and with Republicans occasionally in charge of the descent, of course, and NOT Trump and other deplorables who actually believe things and are willing to do something about it.

My contempt for many leaders in the institutional church has grown as well.  It is church institutions that have produced the likes of Jemar Tisby and Kristin Du Mez.  And how many evangelicals have now shown themselves to be Regimevangelicals?

Oh that’s right.  I meant this to be a happy post.  So on the happier flip side are people like Russell Brand — perhaps I should put that differently; is there anyone like Russell Brand?  Anyway, I used to detest the man.  Years ago, I wrote him off as a very wrong, very aggravating man not to be listened to for the sake of sanity.

So imagine when one day I noticed he boldly said something sane.  I forget what it was exactly, but it was sane and pushing against “the narrative.”  I could not believe it.  “Russell Brand said what?”  So I checked it out, and he really did say something sane and with force.  (Of course, he says everything with force, but anyway…)  Now I find him a delight to hear.

Another example is

Dr Naomi Wolf

.  My attitude toward the prominent feminist was not as visceral as towards Brand.  I’ll be nice for a change and say I was not a fan. She’s “lib’rul” after all.  But then I saw her on Tucker Carlson.  And she immediately gained my respect as a woman who was willing to think and speak for herself instead of being another parrot for the Left.

I hesitate even to use that term “Left” anymore.  I used to think of politics as a spectrum between Left and Right.  But the past few years have so mixed us up and red-pilled many that it now seems more a spectrum from lies and suppression to honesty and freedom.  And the people I find on the side of honesty and freedom often are pleasant surprises.

Wolf recently wrote of how after she was more or less cancelled for pushing back against the approved COVID deceptions, among the very few venues where she could still voice her views was Tucker Carlson Tonight of all places.

Mr. Carlson and I spent most of our careers not in alignment on anything; for decades, our places were adversarial on the public chess board. He had assumed that I was the caricature of a shrieking, irrational left-wing feminist —a view for which he has had the good grace publicly to apologize — and I, for my part, was ready to accept that he must be the boorish, sexist, racist, homophobic frat boy that the progressive news outlets I read, relentlessly insisted that he was.

But eventually after making herself listen to him . . .

While I often still disagreed with him, I found that his reasoning was transparent — a rare thing these days — and that always he returned to that old-fashioned, common-sense basis for his conclusions: “this is simply true.” More often than not, he had a point.

Before she knew it, she became a whole-hearted admirer of Carlson and his journalism. Her experience is largely a mirror image of mine.  This is part of the bright side of these past few awful years.  Forms of totalitarianism differ, from soft to hard, from social media surveillance and censorship to gulags, from Fascism to Communism, but all forms of totalitarianism have a remarkable way of revealing who the true allies and real adversaries are.  And both can turn out to be quite different than expected as we are finding out.  Who becomes red-pilled is unpredictable.

I suspect most of my readers are Christians.  So I will add that the current disorientations and reevaluations provide opportunities for the faithful church along with perils.  I will likely say more about that another time, but for now I will say something an Anglo-Catholic priest, a bishop and I discussed after Mass this past Sunday.*

We traditional Christians need to know who we are, and we need to know what we believe and stick to it.  But we also need to be effectively reaching out to others of different backgrounds.  And when we can work together for truth and freedom, we need to do so — our country needs us to do so — without compromising our beliefs.

Easier said than done, but it can be done. 

Rod Dreher

has written of how the Benda family did just that under the Communists in Czechoslovakia.  With God’s help we can do that, too.  We must do that.

—-

*You expected a joke, didn’t you. ;)