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In all my years doing polemics, I have never seen a man so many people are so desperately waiting to anathematize as Joel Webbon. They sit like gargoyles on the roof, eyes fixed on every video, ears pitched toward every podcast, waiting for one crooked syllable to finally tumble out of his mouth. Just one will do. One clean, unmistakable heresy, and at last they can descend from the parapets, pronounce the long-awaited anathema, and make their denunciations to the raucous applause of respectable evangelicalism. They can’t just say, “He’s too conservative” or “He’s taken the Bible too far.” Revealing their real motivations would ruin them as much as him. So instead, they cross their fingers and hope that this might be the day they can finally blow the whistle and throw their anathema flag on the field. Their verdict has been written for years. They just need one good opportunity.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Plenty of people have already tried to “Farewell, Rob Bell” him. The problem is that every attempt has ended less like an ecclesiastical trial and more like a neighborhood HOA trying to excommunicate somebody for an unauthorized mailbox. The denunciations arrive with great solemnity, the theological equivalent of black robes and tolling bells, only to produce more eye-rolling and laughter than gasps. Webbon says something outrageous, somebody announces that the Gospel itself is now in mortal danger, everyone checks what he actually said, and three days later the heresy hunters quietly climb back onto the roof to wait for the next video, tail tucked between their legs.

I’ve had a half-dozen people or more, and I kid you not, openly express frustration that, “with you around keeping his theology from going native,” Webbon is less likely to finally say the one heretical thing they can finally cast him into the outer darkness for. Think about the pathology of that for a moment. They are not worried that Joel might fall into heresy. They are disappointed that he hasn’t. They want the theological car wreck because they have already purchased tickets to the funeral. It’s a perfect relationship, Webbon and his critics. They are voyeurs looking constantly through the window, and he is a theological exhibitionist. In other words, he’s honest.

Because, much as they hate it, and as they hate him, Webbon’s theology is stubbornly orthodox. His doctrine is irritatingly pristine. Nine times out of ten, the supposedly dangerous opinions pouring out of his mouth were already said by one of the Reformers whose faces decorate his critics’ coffee mugs, or a Church Father they named their dog after. The great scandal is frequently not that Webbon has departed from historic Christianity, but that he has wandered outside the remarkably narrow boundaries of what modern American evangelicals have decided historic Christianity is allowed to say in the 21st century. They desperately need Webbon to be a heretic, and he stubbornly refuses to participate.

AMERICA AFTER TRUMP

That makes the latest attempt particularly embarrassing. After years of waiting for him to finally step on a theological landmine, his critics believe they have caught him corrupting the Great Commission. There is just one unfortunate complication for the prosecution: they have picked a fight over elementary Christian doctrine that they clearly do not understand. Again.

Their latest opportunity arrived through NXR’s upcoming conference, Christ Is King: America After Trump, scheduled for November in Dallas. Its stated premise is aggressively practical: Christians should be prepared for what comes after the current political order. I couldn’t agree more. Much of what you see in the news is steered by the Beltway establishment’s agenda to shove whatever is left of MAGA 1.0 down the memory hole and rid Washington for good of things that Trump once stood for, and more importantly, the populist revolt that put him there in the first place.

Trump was always less important than the political earthquake underneath him. Millions of Americans had concluded that the people running their country hated their borders, squandered their money, exported their jobs, despised their religion, flooded their communities with foreigners, shipped their sons overseas to fight wars nobody could explain, and then called them stupid, racist, backward, or dangerous whenever they complained. The establishment’s great project now is not merely figuring out what happens after Trump. It is making sure Trumpism dies with Trump.

That means sanding every rough populist edge off the Right until the Republican Party becomes safe for its old owners again. Keep the rallies and merchandise if necessary, but lose the immigration restriction, economic nationalism, hostility to foreign wars, distrust of the intelligence apparatus, contempt for the donor class, skepticism toward multinational corporations, and especially the dangerous notion that elected officials should prefer the interests of the Americans who elected them over some collection of abstractions cooked up in Washington think tanks.

That is why America After Trump is the right decision. Eventually Trump will exit the stage, one way or another, and the people who spent a decade waiting him out intend to be standing there with a broom when he does. The question is whether the millions of Americans awakened by the populist revolt quietly return to their couches, or whether somebody builds institutions, organizations, churches, media, political networks, and a durable Christian political philosophy capable of carrying that revolt into the next generation. That’s what the conference is about. The other side - the NeoCons, the Israel Lobby, Bill Kristols and David Frenches, the Ben Shapiros and Mark Levins, the Ted Cruzes and whatever Lindsay Graham’s sister’s name is - are preparing for a world without Trump, and if they have anything to do with it, without Vance.

Christians should be ready, too. That’s the premise of America After Trump.

The speaker list deliberately mixes pastors with politicians, writers, comedians, and cultural figures because NXR is interested in what Christians should actually do in the world, not merely what pastors should preach on Sunday morning.

That posture grows out of NXR’s broader opposition to what I have called Pioustrategic Uselessness, the evangelical habit of treating “preach the Gospel” as the approved answer to every question, including questions that were never about how sinners are justified. A border crisis needs border enforcement. Murder needs a magistrate. Children need fathers. Schools need teachers. Nations need laws. None of this diminishes the Gospel’s exclusive power to save sinners. It merely acknowledges that God has given Christians more than one job to do after breakfast.

Hear me out on this. Yes, many of the world’s problems would miraculously be solved if everyone became a Christian tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow, because it would take a while for sanctification to progressively turn them into to better people. Eventually, anyway, a mass conversion event would take care of a bunch of issues. But because we don’t live in la-la land, there are other realistic solutions that can do the world a lot of good, even if they stop short of justifying people before a righteous God. We are just crazy enough to think that border walls and mass deportations are a solution to mass migration, tall trees and short ropes are a solution to violent criminals, a navy is the solution to an approaching army, fathers are a solution to fatherless homes, and barbers are a solution to man-buns.

TWENTY links are provided from theological resources explaining that the purpose of the Great Commission goes well beyond evangelism.

Call us crazy. Practical problems have pragmatic solutions. Jesus is the answer, yes. But not the question of “What should you do to someone breaking through your bedroom window?”

None of those solutions raises a dead sinner to spiritual life. Neither does a fire department. Yet when your kitchen is burning down, hosting an evangelistic crusade on the front lawn is not evidence that you have lost confidence in the power of the Gospel. It means you understand that God has provided different means for addressing different problems. The Gospel answers the greatest problem a human being has. It does not answer all of them. That’s why I have a gun within reach of my bed. And my steering wheel. And my recliner. And my toilet.

We have bears, and I’m paranoid. Don’t judge.

And this is where the latest heresy hunt became interesting. Webbon’s critics objected that activities such as building Christian schools, pursuing Christian political power, reforming institutions, and ultimately seeking Christian nations cannot properly be called Great Commission work. The apostles were commissioned to evangelize, they tell us, not establish governments. The Great Commission means evangelism. Heck, it’s synonymous with evangelism. Once Webbon puts Christian civilization underneath the Great Commission, the accusation goes, he has confused political reconstruction with the Gospel and wandered into dangerous theological territory.

Mike Winger, the charismatic clean-up artist masquerading as a discernment minister (who I’ve written about here), accused Joel of teaching a false gospel. Why? Because he said that building Christian nations was Great Commission work.

At last! The moment has arrived. Fetch the church fathers. Warm up the anathema machine. Somebody alert the discernment bloggers! Whistle at the gargoyles and tell them it’s time to pounce. Warm up the denunciations! Except there is one small problem.

They’re wrong.

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THE GREAT COMMISSION

The Gospel, evangelism, and the Great Commission are not synonyms. The Gospel is the good news that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again (1 Cor. 15:1–4). Evangelism is the proclamation of that good news to sinners. The Great Commission is the considerably larger command Christ gave concerning what His people are to accomplish in the world.

And Jesus did say merely, “Go evangelize.”

I know, I know. This is the verse they taught us on Missionary Sunday. Matthew 28 went on the projector somewhere between the slideshow of smiling African children and the presentation about Lottie Moon, William Carey, and whichever missionary family your church supported for seventy-five dollars a month. The Great Commission became evangelical shorthand for foreign missions, and foreign missions became shorthand for evangelism. “Go ye therefore” meant get on an airplane and go do missions. Because of that word-training, we came to think of it as an evangelism thing.

I was about 22 years old when a North American Mission Board missionary told me while on mission in Sao Paulo that the Great Commission was not principally a command to evangelize. I thought he was nuts. If there were ever an inappropriate place to question the evangelistic interpretation of the Great Commission, surely it was while surrounded by missionaries doing missionary things. The association had been drilled into me so thoroughly that his statement sounded almost self-refuting. But then I re-read it, which is what a lot of people need to be doing the last 24-48 hours. Becuase he was right.

Evangelism is obviously necessary to the Great Commission. But necessary is not the same as synonymous with. Evangelism is certainly in the machinery. But it isn’t the whole machine. It’s not the whole purpose. In fact, it’s the purpose of the Great Commission. It’s a prerequisite, not the purpose. And once somebody pointed that out to me, I couldn’t unsee it.

ALL AUTHORITY

The easiest way to settle an argument about the Great Commission is to actually read it. Matthew records Christ’s final command this way:

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20).

But the preface, before it, is just as important to understand its meaning: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” That wording should clue us in to what follows. Before Christ says a word about going, discipling, baptizing, or teaching, He announces the jurisdiction under which the entire Commission operates. It’s not some power, or merely spiritual power, nor power specifically over the visible church. Not authority safely confined to Sunday mornings, personal devotions, and the interior life of individual believers. Christ begins the Great Commission by declaring His universal kingship.

Christ is King is the predicating assertion of the Great Commission. Remember that.

That is not decorative language Jesus tacked onto the front of a missionary motto. The word “therefore” connects His authority directly to the command: because all authority in heaven and earth belongs to Christ, therefore the nations are to be discipled. The scope of the authority establishes the scope of the mission. Christ does not begin by saying that He possesses authority over individual souls and then commission His disciples to collect individual souls from around the world. He announces His sovereignty every square inch of earth. Why? Because the Great Commission will require power and authority over every square inch of earth.

One of the strangest complaints routinely lodged against Christian Nationalists is that they seek political power. Whether Christian Nationalism is good or bad, biblical or unbiblical, prudent or foolish, regardless of that: Christians should seek political power. Political power is simply authority to govern, and there is nothing inherently wicked about possessing it. Power is not dirty. It isn’t seedy. Someone will write the laws, appoint the judges, command the military, collect taxes, determine immigration policy, regulate public institutions, and decide which conduct receives punishment and which receives protection. Christians must not cede that power to unbelievers. The first reason we must seek political power is that if we don’t, worldlings will.

Where did Christians get the idea that political authority is uniquely beneath them? They did not get it from a Christ who introduced the Great Commission by declaring, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” Christ does not regard earthly authority as intrinsically profane. Scripture calls the civil ruler “the minister of God” and that they wield the sword (Rom. 13:4). The problem is not that political power exists. The sword does not become less legitimate because a Christian holds it.

Every political order rewards certain behaviors, prohibits others, teaches them to obey someone’s commands, and then uses actual men with actual guns to enforce those conclusions. The question is who’s holding the guns. Christians should therefore have no embarrassment about wanting political authority exercised by Christians according to Christian convictions. The notion that seeking political power is itself suspicious should be discarded before that discussion even begins.

Christ is King, and politics falls under “Heaven and Earth” where Christ has authority. In fact, if I were Satan, the first thing I would do would be to convince Christians that Christ has no political or governmental authority. It sounds like advice from Uncle Screwtape.

If the Great Commission concerns nothing beyond privately converting individual sinners, why does Jesus introduce it by announcing His universal dominion? He is claiming authority over the very world into which He is sending His disciples. Kings are under that authority. Magistrates are under it. Fathers, merchants, judges, teachers, nations, and their rulers are under it. Caesar does not occupy some tiny unclaimed patch of earth accidentally omitted when Christ said all.

“Go ye therefore…”

Christ does not merely announce His universal authority and then change subjects. Because all authority in heaven and earth belongs to Him, therefore His disciples are sent into the world. Their going proceeds from His kingship, carries His authority, and serves the mission He is about to give them.

That also means Christianity is necessarily expansionary. Christ sends us outward. Christianity crosses borders, enters foreign cultures, confronts rival religions, establishes churches, teaches households, and presses the claims of Christ wherever human beings are found. The movement is centrifugal. Christ possesses the world, so His disciples are sent into it.

This is not conquest by the sword, but neither is it religious pluralism with a fish sticker. The Christian goes because Christ has authority over the place to which he is going and over the people he will find when he gets there. The missionary does not arrive asking whether Jesus may be added to the local collection of acceptable gods. He arrives announcing that the crucified and risen Christ is already Lord.

The Great Commission therefore begins with a King, proceeds with an invasion of missionaries, and operates on the premise that there is nowhere on earth where Christ does not have claim.

“…and teach.”

The KJV obscures the force of the command slightly because “teach” sounds like classroom instruction. The Greek is mathēteusate, from mathēteuō: make disciples, or more directly, disciple. That is the governing command of the Commission.

Jesus had perfectly good words available for preaching and proclamation. He does not use them here. He does not say “preach,” “proclaim,” “evangelize,” “make converts,” or even simply “make Christians.” He commands His followers to make disciples. Conversion is necessarily involved because nobody becomes Christ’s disciple without believing the Gospel, but conversion is not where the verb stops, because conversion is not the goal; it predicates the goal.

Evangelism brings sinners to Christ. Jesus does not commission His church merely to produce professions of faith and count raised hands. He commands the formation of people whose lives are increasingly ordered beneath His lordship. And Christ has already told us the scale upon which He intends that discipling to occur. The next words are not “as many individuals as possible.”

“…all nations.”

And now Christ gives us the object of the command: panta ta ethnē, or “all nations.” This is not a command to disciple as many individuals as possible. He does not even say, “Make disciples from every nation.” He commands His followers to disciple the nations themselves.

Some have suggested that the word used here references people groups, generally speaking. Or maybe ethnicities. Like Jesus is saying, “Go save Caucasians, and Africans, and Asians, etc.” But ethnos, while it could mean that in a different context, is not an ancient slang word for the modern missionary phrase “people group.” Scripture uses the word for nations in a corporate sense. In the Biblical context - when looking at the use of this word in Scripture - you see that it does indeed refer to the body-politic. For example, in John 11 when the Sanhedrin plots Christ’s assassination because they fear that Rome will “take away both our place and nation,” ethnos is the word it uses (John 11:48). The First Century Jewish Zionists were afraid Rome would remove their right to nationhood.

Likewise, Acts 17:26 says that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” and determined “the bounds of their habitation.” It’s not just the people, but the people in the place where they reside. This is the context of literal nationhood. Biblically, a nation is a people occupying places, existing within boundaries, and living corporately in history. So the Great Commission is not imagining “White folk.” It’s imagining America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. It’s speaking of “Black folk.” It’s speaking of Ethiopia, Haiti, and Nigeria.

Neither is Jesus saying to make disciples from among the nations. We know that for certainty, because the Bible has a thing for prepositions, and in the Greek language, they’re evident. In the Bible, when evangelism is in view, it speaks of the Gospel going to nations, or among nations, and redeemed people coming out of nations. Jesus, for example, says that “the gospel must first be published among all nations” (Mark 13:10). Matthew 24:14 says that the Gospel will be preached “for a witness unto all nations.” Revelation 7:9 describes the redeemed multitude gathered “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.” When Scripture intends to describe Gospel proclamation, it speaks of people within the nation.

But Matthew 28 uses none of those constructions or prepositions. Mathēteusate takes panta ta ethnē directly as its object: Disciple all nations. Corporately.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean nations possess a giant collective soul, nor does national discipleship require every citizen to become a born-again Christian. We already understand corporate Christian identity everywhere else. A Christian household might still contain an unconverted child. A Christian school will likely contain an unbelieving student. A Christian church can contain a false convert. Corporate identity describes what governs and characterizes the body, not the secret spiritual condition of every individual within it.

So when Christ commands the discipling of nations, He’s not speaking of extracting individual converts from permanently pagan societies. The premise is that through the Great Commission, converted men will form Christian households, Christian churches, Christian schools, Christian customs, Christian institutions, establish Christian laws, and build Christian governments. A discipled nation increasingly orders its corporate life beneath the authority of the Christ who introduced the Commission by declaring that all authority in heaven and earth belongs to Him.

Jon Harris gave a neat response on Jeremy Boreing’s program: “You get a Christian nation by having Christians in that nation.” It’s a statement designed to poo-poo the work of Christian Nationalism, and it’s a perfectly good Jesus Juke and an excellent applause line because it quietly changes what the word nation means. Suddenly a “Christian nation” can only mean a nation in which every individual citizen is personally Christian, so that only evangelism can produce the intended result. It’s designed to stop all acts of potential usefulness, except evangelism. But nobody uses national adjectives that way anywhere else.

When the State Department speaks of an Islamic nation, nobody assumes everyone in it is Muslim. Saudi Arabia does not cease being Islamic because a Filipino Catholic works in Riyadh. We call a country Islamic because Islam publicly characterizes the nation, and its institutions, laws, customs, public morality, and official religious commitments bear an Islamic character. Likewise, we routinely speak of secular states without first proving that every citizen is an atheist. France can be a secular republic while millions of Frenchmen believe in God because secular describes the character of the political order, not the regenerated or unregenerated condition of every soul inside its borders.

Nobody is proposing justification by passport. The claim is that nations, like households, schools, universities, governments, and civilizations, possess a corporate character produced by what they publicly confess, honor, teach, prohibit, and institutionalize. And guess what! Evangelism is way easier, and way more productive, in Christianized nations. Building those Christianized institutions and civilizations does not save a single soul. But they are essential to the missionary endeavor. It’s much, much easier to tell people about Jesus when it’s not illegal to tell people about Jesus. It’s easier to get people to church on Sunday when blue laws exist (whether you agree with them or not). It’s easier to fund missions when the church is tax-exempt.

The preface to the Great Commission, Christ’s Kingship, starts with a statement of Jesus’ authority because authority is what’s needed to order a society toward the Word of God and the rule of Christ.

“Baptizing them…”

The people who have been brought under Christ’s discipling rule are baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Nobody thinks Jesus intends somebody to lower France into a baptistry. Nations are discipled corporately, and baptized individually, as they come to faith.

This is also the closest thing in the Commission to an explicit reference to conversion, and even here evangelism is not actually commanded. Jesus does not say, “Preach the Gospel to them, and after they believe, baptize them.” It is presupposed. But why doesn’t He mention it explicitly? It’s because evangelism isn’t the point of the Great Commission. Hold up! It makes sense that He doesn’t mention evangelism (or the gospel) if evangelism isn’t the point. But WHY mention baptism then? It’s because baptism is about identity with Christ.

Follow the logic. Yes, baptism requires evangelism - true. But Jesus mentions neither the gospel nor evangelism. The reason is clear. Baptism is included with the rest of the Commission, because it is the individual’s public identifier with Christ. That’s what the Great Commission is about. It’s about the nation identifying with Christ. And on a personal level, the individual also identifies with Christ through Baptism. Baptism - like Christian laws - doesn’t mean the person is saved, necessarily. Baptism doesn’t justify. Baptism is an outward expression that the person belongs to Christ. In a similar vein, Christian laws and Christian order is how a nation identifies with Christ.

Further, the moment a pastor baptizes a believer, he is unquestionably fulfilling the Great Commission. But Baptism isn’t evangelistic. The pastor dunking the believer is not evangelizing them by submerging them. And yet, it is the Great Commission.

“…to observe…”

The objective is not awareness of Christ’s commands, but obedience to Christ’s commands. This is the clearest component of the Great Commission that shows it is not evangelism. No missionary arrives among unbelievers, pulls up his britches, and says, “First things first. Obey these commands.” You or I would tell that missionary to go home until he learns what the gospel is. We would rebuke Him for dereliction of duty. The Gospel is not about obeying. The Gospel is about believing.

The commission therefore concerns the formation of Christian life, conduct, worship, morality, and practice. It aims at people actually living under Christ’s commands and implores them to obey.

Now, there is a sense in which the Gospel can be obeyed. Scripture speaks of “obeying the gospel” (Rom. 10:16), meaning repenting and believing. But the next line from Jesus will definitively rule out that interpretation altogether.

…all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”

And there goes whatever room remained for reducing the Commission to evangelism. This isn’t the Gospel we commanded obedience for. This is the whole enchilada. It’s everything Christ commanded, the entire body of Christian doctrine and ethics.

When Paul speaks of evangelism, he emphasizes the exact opposite. When emphasizing the gospel, Paul proclaimed, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). The gospel is a limited, finite message of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection (1 Cor 15). But this is the full corpus of Christ’s teaching. In evangelism, anything but the gospel (and the Law, to convict) is distracting. It draws one’s attention away from the one thing they must understand to have eternal life. But when Paul speaks to the Ephesian elders, he brags that he had “not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). In other words, the lost get the gospel exclusively. But the already-saved get the full counsel.

“All things” Christ commanded include worship, marriage, divorce, how to treat enemies, treatment of the poor, duties of parents and children, duties toward rulers, the doctrine Christ gave His church, and everything else. Nobody evangelizes the pagan village by opening with head coverings, church discipline, qualifications for elders, or paying taxes. Those are not evangelism topics.

That is precisely why Christ says disciple, then baptize, then teach them to observe all things. The Commission aims beyond producing converts toward producing an obedient people. Evangelism is indispensable because there can be no disciples without converts. But Christ does not commission us merely to convert the nations. He commissions us to get them taught, and not merely taught, but taught to obey.

Calling all of that “evangelism” does not exalt evangelism. It simply empties the word of any useful meaning.

CRYING WOLF

None of this is some exotic interpretation Joel Webbon invented in a smoke-filled back room of Christian Nationalist headquarters, with Nick Fuentes on speed dial. This is how Christians have interpreted the Great Commission since at least the birth of Post Millennialism, if not forever. Like so many divergent views, this false interpretation developed over decades of mainstream evangelical neglect of Biblical teaching. It’s one of those passages in which people assume they know what it means because they’ve heard it spoken so many times, but never really exposited. But that doesn’t explain why men ordinarily astute in the Scriptures were denouncing Webbon for having, what turns out to be, the Biblical and correct interpretation. I think that’s explained by their hair-trigger, waiting for the day they can take him out for saying something stupid. This is not that day.

R.C. Sproul put it plainly: “I’m glad that the Great Commission is not a commission principally to evangelism.” He continued, “This calling is not simply a call to evangelism.” So, condemn Webbon. But you’ll have to condemn Sproul, while you’re at it.

Or, if you prefer a more mainstream Christian study help, we can turn to Matthew Henry, the famous Bible commentator whose commentary has been the go-to classic for centuries across a huge breadth of American evangelicalism. On the Great Commission text, Henry envisioned “that Christianity should be twisted in with national constitutions, that the kingdoms of the world should become Christ’s kingdoms, and their kings the church’s nursing-fathers.”

He added, “Do your utmost to make the nations Christian nations.”

Henry wrote that three centuries before Joel Webbon had a microphone, NXR had a conference, or anybody had invented the phrase “Christian Nationalism.” No one chimped out, clutched pearls, or swooned on their fainting couch over it. And to my knowledge, Protestia has never condemned Sproul or Matthew Henry once over it.

This does not prove every proposition advanced by Christian Nationalism. I’m not a Christian Nationalist. I’m not a Christian Nationalist because I’ve not been presented a coherent explanation as to the protections that could be put into place to ensure that, in the wrong hands, the government enforcing First Table commands not turn its sword upon me. Someone skeptical of government power is not quick to lobby for more of it. But I’m not against Christians exerting power. I’d rather it be Christians holding my switch than a pagan magistrate. What this passage does prove, however, is that the Great Commission is much, much broader than mere evangelism.

And that brings us back to where we started. Once again, the supposedly outrageous position of Joel Webbon turned out to have a rather inconvenient collection of respectable theologians behind it, and a biblical exegesis that supports his view more than theirs. I have lost count of how many times this particular drama has replayed. Webbon says something outside the approved vocabulary of contemporary evangelicalism, but contemporary evangelicalism suffers from a theology so unlearned and uncatechized that it assumes anything unfamiliar is also unorthodox, then fires the theological artillery before checking the coordinates.

The ending is becoming predictable. Joel survives another anathema, and everybody learns something new.

HUDDLE UP, EVANGELICALS

We need to have a talk, evangelicals. Our theology stinks. It’s bad. It’s really bad.

I do not mean Christianity stinks, or Reformed theology stinks, or that our confessions are deficient. I mean the theology actually rattling around inside the heads of contemporary American evangelicals is frequently a watered-down, Sunday-school approximation of the historic Christian faith. Unfortunately, this is increasingly true even among people who call themselves “Reformed.” We have the confessions, the Puritan paperbacks, the Spurgeon mugs, the Geneva tabs, and enough podcasts to reconstruct Westminster Abbey out of AirPods, but scratch beneath the surface and remarkably basic theological categories are missing.

That is how this keeps happening with Webbon. He says something that sounds foreign to the tiny theological world someone inherited from American evangelicalism. They have never heard it before, so they assume Christians have never believed it before. Strange becomes suspicious, suspicious becomes dangerous, dangerous becomes heretical, and within twenty-four hours somebody is accusing the man of corrupting the Gospel.

Then somebody cracks open Matthew Henry, Calvin, the Westminster divines, a Puritan, or some other dead Christian everybody involved respects supposedly and discovers that the horrifying new doctrine has been sitting on the bookshelf for three hundred years, that this is what everybody used to believe, and they’re just putting their own ignorance on display.

We have to stop doing this. Lay off the hair trigger. You’re not going to catch him in a heresy. He knows it theology proper better than you, and knows the lines. He isn’t going to cross it, not because he’s sharp or cunning or crafty, but because he’s legitimately not a heretic. And this is why the gargoyles are going to remain disappointed. They want Joel Webbon to be Mark Driscoll. They need the brashness, controversy, and refusal to behave politely to conceal some catastrophic theological defect underneath. Surely if they keep watching long enough, the swagger will finally produce the heresy. Surely one afternoon he will accidentally deny the Trinity on a livestream, preach justification by works on a podcast, or replace the Gospel with Christian Nationalism, and everybody who has spent years predicting his demise can finally descend from the roof and collect their winnings.

The problem is that Webbon has done his homework. Whatever criticisms somebody wants to make of his temperament or politics, he did not assemble his theology from three YouTube clips and a Doug Wilson meme. He has spent years in the Puritans, Calvin, Augustine, classical theism, Reformed confessional theology, and the older Christian tradition. That does not make him infallible. It does make the expectation that he will accidentally wander into some elementary heresy considerably less plausible than his critics seem to realize. He knows where the doctrinal landmines are because he has actually studied the map.

The Great Commission controversy demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is a legitimate exegetical dispute over whether Matthew 28 principally envisions making disciples from among all nations or Christianizing the nations themselves as nations. Fine. Have that argument. But Webbon knows enough theology not to confuse either position with the Gospel itself. Do his critics? It would seem not.

His critics heard an interpretation they disliked, skipped the intervening theological categories, and reached immediately for “false gospel.” Then the annoying historical footnotes showed up. Or Polemics Santa brings them out of his bag, whatever. And suddenly the supposedly obvious heresy requires explaining why perfectly respectable dead Christians were allowed to say remarkably similar things - and why his critics didn’t know what the Bible actually says.

That pattern will keep repeating because unfamiliarity is not heresy. Webbon inhabits a considerably larger theological world than many of the people assigned to police him. They know the boundaries of contemporary conservative evangelical respectability and mistake those boundaries for the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy. When he walks outside the former without leaving the latter, the alarm sounds anyway.

So the gargoyles can keep watching. They can dislike him, criticize him, correct him when he is wrong, and argue against Christian Nationalism until Christ returns. But if they are waiting for the satisfying moment when Joel Webbon finally reveals that beneath all the controversy he was a proper theological heretic all along, they may want to bring a comfortable chair.

He has given them plenty to argue about. By God’s grace, heresy is not one.

DAMNED IF YOU DO

Which brings us back to the thing that started this latest round of ecclesiastical whack-a-mole in the first place. Apparently, organizing a conference now requires a permission slip from the evangelical hall monitors, whose goal is not protecting the faith, but gatekeeping the camp. Critics keep demanding to know why he is holding Christ Is King: America After Trump, as though he wandered into their sanctuary, commandeered the pulpit, and added the event to their church calendar without asking the elders.

Why this conference? Why these speakers? Why politics? Why should Christians gather to discuss what America should look like after Trump?

The assumption underneath the interrogation is revealing. Joel apparently owes an explanation for doing something useful that his critics would not have thought to do themselves. The entire ecosystem is so used to pointlessness, redundancy, purity-spiral conformity, and endlessly reproducing the same safe evangelical institutions that the mere act of attempting something new creates suspicion. Another conference about pastoral burnout, family devotions, church health, or how to preach the Gospel to an increasingly hostile civilization would require no explanation whatsoever. We already have six hundred of those. Nobody asks why we need number six hundred and one.

It is a strange standard: doing what everybody else is already doing requires no justification, while attempting to solve a problem nobody else is solving requires a theological defense. Redundancy passes for faithfulness because it is familiar. Initiative looks dangerous because somebody might actually accomplish something.

So he gave them an answer. The larger purpose of America After Trump is not difficult to understand. Trump is temporary. The populist revolt that produced him does not have to be. Christians therefore need to think beyond the next election and build something capable of surviving the personality around which the present movement formed. If Christians believe Christ is King over the earth, then preparing Christians to exercise political and cultural authority after Trump is not some embarrassing extracurricular activity that requires an ecclesiastical excuse.

He went even further and connected that purpose to the Great Commission. If Christ commands His people to disciple the nations, and if national discipleship means more than extracting individual converts while leaving the nation’s institutions permanently untouched, then building a more Christian America fits naturally within that work. THAT is the big purpose.

THE FIRST COMPLAINT is that it was ecumenical, because it included filthy papists. So, I went back to the actual meaning of ecumenism. I explained the distinction between ecclesiastical cooperation and political cooperation among Christians. NXR is not a church. The conference is not a worship service. Nobody is administering the Lord’s Supper. Nobody is recognizing every speaker as a qualified minister. Nobody is asking Baptists, Presbyterians, charismatics, or whoever else happens to participate to pretend their theological differences have disappeared. They are cooperating toward political and cultural ends on areas where they possess sufficient agreement to cooperate.

We explained that comedians are not administering the sacraments, the politicians are not preaching altar calls, and NXR has not secretly become a church. Christians are gathering to think seriously about politics, institutions, culture, government, and what America should become after Trump, convinced that Christ is King over all of it.

Once people learned what ecumenism actually means, and realized there was nothing remotely improper about this kind of cooperation, they quietly abandoned the accusation. Some of the more vocal critics required beating like red-headed stepchildren publicly, on their own X accounts, which was an ugly but necessary part of shutting down the complaint. They made the accusations publicly, confidently, and repeatedly, so the correction needed to be equally public and considerably more memorable. I was happy to provide it. Almost immediately after I laid out that case, the complaint disappeared.

Did they go home and repent? Be content to have learned something about the nature of words? Apologize for their brashness and poor judgment? No. They thought up a new complaint.

DAMNED IF YOU DON’T

“But the conference isn’t evangelistic!!!”

Hold up. No kidding. Why does it have to be? That was the argument I just spent several thousand words establishing. A conference concerned with the political and institutional consequences of Christian discipleship does not cease serving Christ’s mission because nobody hands Alex Jones a Chick tract before letting him approach the microphone.

What makes this criticism especially amusing is that “You’re not doing enough church stuff” was not the original complaint. The conference had previously been condemned for supposedly turning political cooperation into ecclesiastical cooperation. Now, having learned that it is not ecclesiastical, the complaint is essentially that Joel is not doing enough ecclesiastical stuff.

Where is the evangelism? Where is the Gospel proclamation? How can a conference about political order, institution building, Christian government, and the future of the nation possibly qualify as Great Commission activity?

This is an absolutely marvelous progression. First, “You are treating this political conference too much like Christian ministry.” Then, once that argument gets beaten to death, “Why aren’t you treating this political conference more like Christian ministry?”

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. Damned all around.

And suppose Joel surrendered tomorrow. Suppose he announced that the critics were right, rewrote the conference mission statement, and declared that Christ Is King: America After Trump would henceforth be explicitly organized around Gospel proclamation and evangelism. Does anybody seriously believe the gargoyles would finally climb down from the cathedral?

Of course not. They would immediately retrieve the ecumenism charge we just buried. Now Joel would be engaging in explicitly spiritual ministry with Christians outside the appropriate ecclesiastical boundaries. The conference would suddenly be too religious again. The exact change demanded to satisfy today’s criticism would become the evidence supporting tomorrow’s criticism.

That is how you know we are no longer dealing with serious objections in search of answers. We are dealing with a conclusion in search of objections.

And I’m not dealing with it anymore.

At some point, you simply have to move on. You cannot build anything worthwhile while constantly turning around to answer every man standing behind you asking whether you have permission to lay the next brick. Gatekeepers who contribute nothing can consume enormous amounts of energy from people who actually do, because criticism is cheap and response is expensive. They can manufacture an objection in thirty seconds that takes three hours to answer carefully, and then manufacture another one before you have finished answering the first.

I have explained the theology, answered the objections, defined the categories, and made the case publicly enough that anybody genuinely interested can evaluate it for himself. The rest can complain from the sidelines. There is work to do, and eventually the most appropriate response to men determined to remain perpetually dissatisfied is to stop feeding them attention and get back to doing it.

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G3 is dead.

Or at least, the part of G3 that was supposed to survive conferences, personalities, and scandals is dead. And that’s really sad. Earlier this week, G3 announced that it was dissolving the G3 Church Network “effective immediately,” pulling the plug on more than a hundred churches organized into what was supposed to be a permanent fellowship of Reformed Baptist congregations. In the end, it fell as fast as Mars Hill. But unlike Acts 29, it did not survive the failure of its more notable leaders.

That is quite a crater. It’s embarrassing. Because these are the guys who are serious™ about doctrine. They’ve got it all figured out. But apparently, they don’t.

I’m not rubbing it in. That’s the first thing you’ve got to understand, and if you think this is a victory lap, you’re wrong. I’ve got no beef with G3. I’ve never had a feud with anyone involved in its leadership. And other than having once been temporarily kicked out of a G3 conference because an angry lesbian told them to, I’ve never had an axe to grind.

Okay, okay. That’s not exactly accurate. I complained regularly over the years of their speaking roster mocking me for my polemical warnings (you know, becuase I’m a crazy-eyed, paranoid radical who’s gone and jumped another shark) only for a year to pass, and then G3’s stage to be crowded with speakers freshly warning the world of a new and pressing danger, which is whatever they had mocked me for saying twelve months prior. Always being the bad guy for being first to reach a conclusion did get old. But it’s never been a blood feud. So please consider what I’m about to write as sincere.

What has befallen G3 is sad. I’m not happy about it. And I want it to stop happening.

The temptation, especially for those of us who spent years on the receiving end of G3’s finger-wagging, is to stand at the rim and admire the smoke. Steven Lawson fell. Josh Buice cannonballed from grace. The G3 conference was canceled. Tom Buck got dinged in the latest mess, and although he’s probably not feeling it now, he will later (the accusations were not without merit, which people will realize when the smoke clears). Now Scott Aniol, Jon Norton, Dylan Joyner, and Matt Sikes have resigned from Pray’s Mill Baptist Church, and the G3 Church Network has been wheeled into the morgue.

Whatever has befallen the G3 orbit is not limited only to those men named. Something else is happening that doesn’t involve, and neither does it require a sensational public scandal. James White, despite no single scandal power-bombing him out of ministry, seems to have lost an audience rather than a platform. The lights are still on at the Dividing Line, but far fewer people are looking through the window.

In fact, I’ve never watched an evangelical micro-niche celebrity fall so far without a scandal doing the pushing. No mistress, no burner-account fiasco, or Calvinist true-crime episode. White appears to have accomplished the much rarer feat of simply wearing out his welcome. The pride has become so overt, so constant, and so thick that it practically beads off his bald head like condensation, and somewhere along the way, it seems like a large chunk of the evangelical Reformed world independently reached the same conclusion at roughly the same time that we don’t have to listen to him anymore. His stock fell like a thunderclap from Heaven, racing to the Earth as though cast down by God Himself, and just like that, no one listens to James White anymore. You can tell in his videos, too. He looks sad.

There are others, of course. Once “heavy-hitters,” and now, men who the world seems to have just stopped caring about. Meanwhile, MacArthur is dead. Phil Johnson, retired. Big Eva might be dead, but MidEva is on life support.

It’s remarkable how quickly the whole G3 orbit has shriveled. A decade ago, these men carried enormous weight in the Reformed Resurgence. Conferences were packed. Platforms mattered. Endorsements mattered. Who spoke with whom mattered. Who was invited, disinvited, sound, dangerous, drifting, divisive, pugnacious, or in need of correction occupied an astonishing amount of oxygen. These were very serious men doing very serious theology with very serious faces, keeping watch over the evangelical henhouse for the rest of us.

Then it was like God blew His breath across the whole thing. Chaff has impressive structural integrity until the wind shows up.

David Morrill and Protestia deserve credit for reporting the bizarre episode that knocked over what remained. According to their reporting, the Pray’s Mill elders anonymously distributed a dossier accusing Tom Buck of serial sermon plagiarism. This was not a nasty email fired off during a moment of bad judgment. Anonymous packets, latex gloves, a Texas postmark, and accusations were distributed beyond Buck’s church. Humorously, to everyone but James White, who briefly grievance-sessioned about it and rationalized being left out as “I scare everyone.” The whole thing had the unnecessarily overly-elaborate flavor of four Calvinists remaking Mission: Impossible on a church budget. And it worked out just as well as you would think four nerds trying to play spy would. When it comes to living a double life, they’re not Steve Lawson.

It was wrong, and they have now admitted it’s wrong. The four men confessed that they had sinned against God, Tom Buck, and the leadership of First Baptist Church Lindale, asked forgiveness, and resigned from Pray’s Mill. Now the G3 Church Network is dissolving behind them.

And, predictably, the fans of the G3 orbit are all announcing in unison that their apologies aren’t good enough and their repentance isn’t real (of course). That’s their role in this elaborate play of Kabuki theater. That’s how it goes.

The conventional diagnosis has therefore already written itself. Pray’s Mill had bad elders. The bad elders did a bad thing. The bad thing was exposed, the bad elders resigned, and another unfortunate chapter in G3's history can be closed. Now everybody else can race to the microphone to denounce them, demonstrate the appropriate amount of disgust, and assure the public that they would never dream of doing such a thing.

Plenty of contestants are already stretching their hamstrings for that race. Some already have. Justin Peters, among the first to denounce Steve Lawson and among the first to denounce Josh Buice, was among the first to denounce Pray’s Mill, too. He gets their really quick every time. Must be the wheels.

But that diagnosis (bad people doing bad things) would be considerably more persuasive if we had not watched almost exactly the same movie fifteen months ago. Back then, the explanation was equally simple. Josh Buice was the problem. Buice was exposed. Buice was disciplined. Buice was removed. Everyone screamed about his repentance being fake. G3 announced a new emphasis on “partnership over platform,” and the remaining men were left to clean the blood off the carpet and build something healthier.

Fifteen months later, some of the men who disciplined Buice for secretly attacking people were exposed for secretly attacking someone. They didn’t lie in their attacks. Their accusations were legitimate, despite the general consensus being that Buck’s plagiarism wasn’t plagiarism because, well, various reasons. According to his elders, despite the attribution problems, he still works really hard on his sermons. That’s not an excuse, nor even a response to the accusations, obviously. His elders also pointed out that Buck’s been honest about ‘using commentaries.’ But the accusation wasn’t that Tom “used them.” It’s that he used them with attribution, which is accurately stated.

In the end, consensus seemed to be that despite lifting whole sections of material from commentaries, it was, at least, not from other preachers. Besides, he works really hard on his sermons. Tom Ascol said it was just “sloppy” and maybe a little “lazy.” The fact is, had it been a random pastor, or Joel Webbon - and not Tom Buck - his head would be on a platter, and that’s a fact.

Regardless, I’m pleased that Buck’s head was not placed on a platter. Not because it wasn’t plagiarism, because by textbook definition, it was. But because it was correctable, because pastors aren’t perfect, and because even the best of people have a problem seeing their own sin until it’s pointed out to them. Most of the G3 orbit would disagree with all of that, and so it’s easier just to minimize the sin, so that’s what they did. But regardless of whether or not it was defrockable, it was repentable. Pietists will not say that, because repentance requires sin, and getting a pietist to repent of sin is like pulling teeth. Instead, it was pronounced a series of “mistakes,” and Buck promised to make fewer of them.

Meanwhile, the much bigger issue for everyone is how Pray’s Mill elders handled it, which was deciding to behave like terrorists sending out a hostage letter. Many have noted how eerily similar it was to Buice’s behavior. And yet, I’ve seen no one wonder why - out loud, anyway - it keeps happening. It would seem “bad person did bad thing” satisfies all the curiosity just fine.

At some point, a recurring symptom ought to make us reconsider the diagnosis. If removing the diseased member does not stop the body from developing the same disease, perhaps the problem was never confined to the member you amputated.

So I am not particularly interested in joining the latest footrace to the denunciation microphone, to denounce the Pray’s Mill elders as terrible scoundrels and unrepentant. Right now, plenty of people are already doing that online. They are scouring their apology letter for signs of unrepentance and using it to argue that they have not apologized enough, that they aren’t sorry enough, or that their apology itself needs to be apologized for and redone. And as fun as that seems, I have a different question.

Why does this keep happening?

I ASKED THIS FIFTEEN MONTHS AGO

The maddening part is that G3 had an opportunity to figure this out fifteen months ago. And let’s get this out of the way now. When I say “G3,” I don’t just mean G3. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this broader ecosystem the Reformed Pietist Establishment: the MidEva network of pastors, podcasters, conference speakers, ministries, and online personalities clustered around G3 and adjacent institutions, united less by any formal organization than by a shared culture of theological gatekeeping, performative seriousness, and evangelical respectability. I might as well say “Grace to You” sphere. It’s all the same. Reformed Respectability Class. The Evangelical Purity Guild. The MidEva Magisterium. Whatever you want to call it.

When Josh Buice cannonballed from grace in May 2025, there was no serious dispute about whether he had sinned. Buice had operated anonymous accounts and publications to criticize people, including microniche evangelical celebrities within his theological orbit. He lied when confronted about it. The behavior was deceptive, cowardly, and wrong, and removing him from leadership was understandable.

Sadly, the G3 variety of Reformed Pietist has never been particularly good at dealing with sinners without nuking them from orbit. The angry denunciations, declarations of “betrayal,” and frantic efforts to establish distance arrive so quickly that redemption barely gets a chance to put its shoes on. Redemption is not the priority and often seems like an afterthought. The game is to see who can denounce the sinner first, hardest, and loudest.

Every religious niche eventually develops a marketable specialty, something distinguishing its most serious practitioners from everybody else. For this corner of Reformed Pietism, the product is ministerial and doctrinal perfection. The currency is the reputation for being impeccably sound, impeccably serious, and impeccably holy. Consequently, association with a known sinner becomes a reputational biohazard, and spectacular denunciation becomes a form of spiritual decontamination. The sinner must not merely be corrected. He must be launched over the horizon quickly enough that nobody mistakes his sins for yours.

But once the ceremonial denunciations were finished and everyone had safely established that Josh Buice was bad, another question was worth asking.

WHY?

Why did the founder of G3, a man with a pulpit, a conference, a ministry, a podcast, an audience, and personal access to practically everyone he wanted to criticize, believe he needed to hide behind anonymity to say what he really thought? For many, having been labeled “bad” answers the question. It’s because he’s bad. Nothing more.

At the time, I wrote:

“We have a problem. Can we admit this? There is apparently something so fearful about speaking out about our own theological camp that it kinda makes sense to at least be tempted to criticize behind anonymity. There’s something so toxic about our theological tribe that we are afraid to say what we want to say out loud, with our name attached to it. It shouldn’t be so appealing to speak anonymously.”

Again, that did not excuse Buice. If a man gets drunk at your family reunion, he is responsible for getting drunk. But if everybody at the reunion eventually winds up shirtless in the koi pond, you might want to investigate the punch.

My contention was that G3 had helped create a culture in which criticizing somebody inside the club openly could become ruinously expensive. Disagreement was too easily moralized into rebellion. Criticism became divisiveness. Dissent became disloyalty. Questioning the wrong man could suddenly become evidence that you were pugnacious, uncharitable, dangerous, or spiritually defective. In an ecosystem where everyone’s reputation for being a “managawd” was treated like grandma’s fine china, nobody wanted to be the guy who knocked a plate off the shelf.

The surviving G3 leadership should have recognized Buice’s anonymity as more than the peculiar sin of one dishonest man. They should have asked whether something in their culture made honest disagreement so expensive that dishonest disagreement became tempting. They should have torn open the walls looking for mold instead of painting over the stain.

Instead, they removed Buice and apparently concluded that the mold had left with him. But it didn’t. And when the very men who had disciplined Buice for secretly attacking people found themselves wanting to make serious accusations against Tom Buck, they arrived at the same solution: anonymity. The only real difference is that Buice used burner accounts and they used latex gloves, anonymous packets, and strategic mailing.

You cannot ask irony to work any harder than this. Had G3 spent fifteen months asking WHY Buice believed he needed anonymity, perhaps the men who survived him would have recognized the impulse when it showed up in their own hearts.

This recurrence is because the Mid-Eva Reformed Pietist Establishment has spent years turning ordinary disagreement into a referendum on Christian character. A man is rarely allowed to be wrong. He is divisive. He is pugnacious. He is uncharitable. His rhetoric is troubling. His trajectory is “concerning.” His criticism reveals something about his heart. He is dangerous. He is bad.

James White has turned this into performance art. Recently, Stephen Wolfe mocked his insistence that the gospel is the answer to societal problems by joking that the solution to an invading horde was to “proclaim the gospel on the beach.” White reacted as though Wolfe had drop-kicked the Apostle Paul into the Mediterranean. The joke was “shameful,” disrespectful toward the gospel, and apparently indicative of some deeper spiritual defect. Then, the U.S.S. Dividing Line turns on its engines, missiles are launched, and all 45 of James White’s remaining fans spend days anathematizing Stephen Wolfe. And that’s exactly what James White wants to happen.

If disagreeing with you means I made a bad argument, I can disagree with you publicly. But if disagreeing with you means my motives will be inspected, my character questioned, my friendships strained, my ministry threatened, and my name entered into the MidEva Book of Life with an asterisk beside it, I learn something very different, which is that I had better whisper or do it behind your back.

The entire orbit revolves around endorsement and denunciation. To be endorsed by the guild is life. To be denounced by the guild is death. There is remarkably little territory between the two. You are either sound, safe, serious, and somebody whose books should be purchased and conferences attended, or you are dangerous, divisive, troubling, and somebody whose continued presence in polite Reformed society requires an explanation.

That makes endorsement enormously valuable, but it makes avoiding denunciation even more valuable. Nobody wants to be treated by these men the way these men treat people with contrary opinions. Nobody wants his motives dissected, his character questioned, his friendships inventoried, and his tweets entered into evidence at the MidEva Hague. So, you learn to praise publicly and criticize privately. You endorse enthusiastically and disagree carefully.

Sadly, the G3 variety of Reformed Pietist has never been particularly good at dealing with sinners without nuking them from orbit. The angry denunciations, declarations of “betrayal,” and frantic efforts to establish distance arrive so quickly that redemption never has a chance. Redemption is not the priority and often seems like an afterthought. And I don’t mean restoration to ministry. I mean redemption, as a sinner. The game is to see who can denounce the sinner first, hardest, and loudest.

And that produces an incredibly stupid feedback loop. Disagreement gets moralized, so men become afraid to criticize openly. Criticism goes underground. Underground criticism is discovered, prompting another spectacular round of denunciations and expulsions. Everybody watching learns that getting caught on the wrong side of a disagreement can cost you everything, making anonymity even more attractive next time. Round and round the pietistic toilet bowl we go.

This is why the Tom Buck dossier happened. The important question is not merely why they concealed their identities, but why men who had just watched Josh Buice destroy himself through anonymous criticism nevertheless concluded that anonymity was preferable to putting their names on criticism of Tom Buck. What were they afraid would happen if they simply said it publicly?

Until somebody in that camp develops enough curiosity to answer that question, they can keep removing sinners forever. They will also keep producing them.

PUT DOWN THE DENUNCIATION MICROPHONE

This is where I part company with David Morrill’s commentary on the fallout. The anonymous dossier deserved exposure, the men involved deserved criticism, and Morrill deserves credit for dragging into daylight something that was deliberately designed to remain in the dark.

But daylight has arrived. The question is what everyone intends to do now that they can see the issue. The four men have resigned. They have confessed. They wrote to Tom Buck and the elders of First Baptist Church Lindale and said plainly, “We have sinned against God and against Tom Buck and the leadership of FBC Lindale.” They asked forgiveness and offered no excuses. Pray’s Mill has lost its entire eldership, and the G3 Church Network has been folded up like a cheap lawn chair.

At some point, what exactly are we waiting for? Watching the demands for “better” repentance is frustrating. Repentance can always be better. “Even repentance needs repentance.” That’s something Thomas Watson said. Or Paul Washer, maybe. Either way, it’s true. Apologies are so bereft of perfection that even our apologies need apologies.

Morrill has emphasized that “resignation is not repentance,” arguing that the resignations may have been motivated by self-interest because formal removal would have stripped the men of the agency to leave voluntarily. Technically, that’s true. Obviously, resignation is not repentance, per se. But neither is brushing your teeth, but it still needs to be done. The problem is that resignation is not proof of non-repentance, either.

Maybe the deacons forced their hands. Maybe humiliation sharpened their spiritual eyesight. Maybe they looked down the tracks, saw the accountability locomotive bearing down on them, and decided it would be wise to move. Human motives are messy things. Most of us manage to experience conviction, embarrassment, fear, self-preservation, regret, and genuine sorrow before breakfast. But what do you want from them?

It seems people want the elders not to resign so they can be fired instead. Let me take that back, actually: that is exactly what people want. It’s childish and stupid. They want the satisfaction of seeing them fired. But it was the deacons who - despite it not being the job of deacons - issued the ultimatum to resign or be fired. They did what was asked of them, so using that as a sign of “unrepentance” is silly.

Further, they have confessed their sin and asked forgiveness, so unless somebody in the Reformed Pietist Guild recently received the spiritual gift of omniscience, perhaps we should resist setting up another tribunal to determine whether their repentance contains the federally mandated percentage of pure motives. This is where Purity Theater begins.

Was the confession fast enough? Was it specific enough? Did they resign voluntarily enough? Have they suffered enough? Should Aniol still be preaching somewhere? Has everybody sufficiently rebuked everybody? Does G3 need another statement explaining the previous statement? Can we make them stand in the stocks for a week, to throw rotten fruit at them?

This isn’t about testing whether their repentance is real. This is about making them endure “Collective Punishing,” which is like collective punishment, except it’s where the sinner gets to have the entire world pelt them with rotten fruit and question their salvation based upon their apology letter.

BEFORE BUICE, THERE WAS LAWSON

Before Josh Buice and the Pray’s Mill elders, there was Steve Lawson. Lawson’s sin was obviously different, but the reaction to it gave us an early look at the same spiritual pathology. When Lawson’s sexual sin became public, his theological friends and ministry partners scrambled away from him like somebody had dropped a grenade into the green room. Sermons disappeared. Associations were severed. Statements were issued. Everybody seemed anxious to establish that whatever Steve Lawson had done, they certainly had not gotten any on them.

I called it sin-splatter. The spectacle was strange coming from men who could explain Total Depravity with sixteen cross-references and a quotation from John Owen. Reformed people supposedly know sinners sin. But when an actual sinner emerged from their ranks, everyone behaved like the doctrine had been recalled by the manufacturer.

The immediate concern seemed less about Lawson, his family, and his paramour, than establishing sufficient distance from him. Everybody was checking his uniform for blood spatter while their foxhole buddy lay bleeding in the dirt. It was gross to watch.

Then Lawson confessed, and that should have made things easier. Instead, it created a new theological obstacle course. Was he really repentant? Where was the fruit? How could we know? How long would it take? Who gets to decide? Lawson had publicly confessed his sin, expressed sorrow, asked forgiveness, and said he was being shepherded by pastors, but people who did not know him, did not pastor him, and could not observe his daily life nevertheless demanded additional evidence before stamping his repentance USDA Grade-A.

They are much better at getting sinners out than getting sinners back in. And those two problems are connected, because if everybody inside the guild knows that becoming the next publicly identified sinner means social vaporization, permanent reputational contamination, disappearing friendships, deleted associations, and perhaps years of strangers conducting forensic examinations of your repentance, that knowledge does not magically make everyone holy. It makes everyone terrified of being discovered unholy. Fear does not eliminate sin. It teaches sin to hide.

MAYBE GOD IS TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING

And this brings us back to the crater. The temptation is to look at the wreckage, identify the latest sinners, remove them, and announce that the problem has been handled. Lawson was the problem, until Lawson was gone. Buice was the problem until Buice was gone. Now the Pray’s Mill elders are the problem, and they are gone. G3 itself is going away. At some point, you would think somebody might notice that the process of purification keeps leaving fewer people around to be pure.

Fifteen months ago, I argued that something larger was happening to this entire MidEva Reformed Pietist Establishment. I still think so, except now there is considerably more rubble to point at. At what point are Christians allowed to consider it’s God’s judgment?

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I had almost completely forgotten that I wrote this book.

About twelve or fifteen years ago (time flies at my age), I sat down and wrote Reason With Me (On the Doctrine of Election), a short book intended to explain the doctrines of election and predestination to ordinary Christians who either struggled with them, hated them, or had never been given a fair explanation of what they actually mean. I did an audio version that has disappeared into the ether, and thousands have downloaded it. And then life moved on. The book went into my files, I went on to fight approximately seventeen thousand other battles, and I rarely thought about it again.

Then Dinesh D’Souza decided to go on a tirade against Calvinism last week. I assume that’s because hyper-Dispensationalists and Neo-Judaizers are almost always Arminians and, clearly being in those circles, Dinesh picked up another fight for them. The reason for that connection is that Covenant Theology - which they called “Replacement Theology” - and Calvinism go together like peanut butter and jelly. It only makes sense, then, that Dispensational Zionism and Arminianism are also naturally affixed to each other.

John MacArthur and his surviving orbit are the exception to this rule. Being both a Dispensationalist and a Calvinist is the primary thing that made him such a novelty in the evangelical world. That odd pairing is enough to make anyone notable, and had more than a little something to do with his notoriety. If you’ve been in the MacArthur orbit for long, you’ll have a distorted sense of normalcy in which you think it’s not that uncommon to see a Dispensational Calvinist. That’s just the bubble you’re in; in the big scheme of things, it is indeed abnormal.

That detail aside, last week people suddenly started arguing about predestination again thanks to Dinesh’s tweeting. My X feed began filling up with the same objections, arguments, accusations, and Bible verses that dominated a considerable portion of evangelical internet discourse a decade or more ago. Somewhere in the middle of watching the argument unfold, I remembered: Wait a minute. I wrote a whole book about this.

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So I went digging through my files, found it, and decided to give it to premium subscribers. I also found the audio-book I had professionally recorded (not my voice) still at Monergism.com, and provided it for you to download from this Substack post.

I should probably explain why I hesitated. Here goes:

I have made no secret of the fact that I am a Reformed Baptist. Theologically, I have not abandoned the doctrines I defended in this book. I still believe that salvation is of the Lord, that faith and repentance are gifts of God, that fallen man’s will is bound to his nature, and that God has mercy upon whom He will have mercy. Those convictions have not changed.

What has changed is that I don’t spend much time fighting about them anymore. Part of that is simply because I have moved on from that particular battlefield. Frankly, I have moved on from generalized theological polemics to a considerable degree. I spent years doing it. I fought the battles I believed needed fighting, said what I believed needed saying, and accomplished enough that I don’t feel some obligation to spend the rest of my life relitigating every evangelical controversy I encountered in my twenties and thirties.

I also stopped using the term “Calvinist” several years ago, around the time most of the Calvinists I knew seemed perfectly happy to leave me behind. The fact is, Calvinists have earned a reputation for being self-righteous, pompous jerks. I’ve always said this was true, not just lately. At Pulpit & Pen, one of the most-read articles was a boring post entitled, “Why Are Calvinists Such Jerks?” I hypothesized why people always say that, and why it was true. That article was one of my best-read, not because it went viral - it didn’t - but because I hit the jackpot with Google SEO. It turns out, people Google that question constantly, and my article would pull up. To me, that’s enough evidence - people are asking the question so often that the. article had millions and millions of views, inching upwards day after day, year after year. The Gospel Coalition even stole the concept in their 2012 post, “Does Calvinism Make People Jerks?”

That does not mean I changed my theology. It means I stopped finding the label particularly useful. I have also made no secret of my belief that much of the contemporary Reformed world is profoundly ill. There is a sickness in significant portions of it, characterized by pietism, self-righteousness, sanctimony, cowardice disguised as gentleness, and an almost pathological need to demonstrate personal righteousness by condemning everyone standing three inches to the right.

There are reasons for that. Historical, cultural, institutional, and theological tendencies have helped produce it. I could write an entire book about those problems, too. Maybe someday I will, but that isn’t what this one is about. The point is that Calvinism is no longer a fight I regularly wage.

That is why I thought twice about publishing Reason With Me here. Most of you did not subscribe because you were looking for another website arguing about Calvinism. You are here because you want to learn about strange corners of history, intelligence and OSINT, Nephilim, Bigfoot, Talmudism, forgotten religious movements, bizarre government programs, obscure documents, and whatever rabbit hole I happen to fall into on a Tuesday afternoon. I like it that way.

But when the subject unexpectedly returned to X and began trending again, I realized there was no particularly good reason to leave a book I had already written sitting on a hard drive. Especially when some of you are now watching these arguments unfold and wondering what all the fuss is about.

So here it is. There is an important disclaimer. I essentially did nothing to this book. I pulled the manuscript from my files and sent it to a contractor to put it into the three major ebook formats for premium subscribers. I did not undertake a new edition. I did not go through it line by line, update every reference, reconsider every sentence, or rewrite it the way I would express these things today. I wrote it nearly fifteen years ago. I am sure portions are dated. I am sure there are things I would phrase differently. I’d probably catch errors if I sat down and subjected it to a serious revision. I didn’t.

What you are getting is basically what I wrote then. It is a snapshot of an argument I was making at a particular point in my ministry, written specifically for ordinary Christians rather than theologians. The book says as much in its preface. I wrote it from a pastoral perspective for sincere Christians who believe Scripture and are struggling with what Scripture appears to say about God’s sovereignty over salvation.

And after looking through it again, I remembered something else. There is a reason this particular theological argument mattered to me so much in the first place, and it has surprisingly little to do with winning arguments about Calvinism: The doctrine of election is good training.

I do not mean merely theological training, although it certainly provides that. I mean that wrestling with God’s sovereignty teaches a Christian something far more fundamental: how to believe the Bible when the Bible says something he does not particularly want it to say. That is a skill every Christian needs.

Everybody wages war against God’s sovereignty in his heart. Maybe the battlefield is salvation. Maybe it is suffering. Maybe it is providence, death, judgment, election, hell, unanswered prayer, or simply the fact that God has not arranged the universe according to our preferences. At some point, every Christian encounters something in Scripture that collides with something inside him. Election tends to bring that collision into the open very quickly.

Our pride does not particularly enjoy the proposition that God gets all the credit for salvation. We desperately want to bring something to the transaction. Perhaps we would never claim that our works saved us, but surely our wisdom had something to do with it. Surely we were perceptive enough to recognize the Gospel. Surely we made the right choice while somebody else made the wrong one. Surely, somewhere in the machinery of salvation, there is a little brass plaque with our name engraved upon it.

The doctrines of grace rip the plaque off the machine. Salvation is of the Lord.

That statement is actually the organizing principle of Reason With Me. The book works through predestination and election; the nature of grace, faith, and repentance as gifts; questions of equality and fairness; the human will; and, finally, the objection that election somehow destroys evangelism. The argument is deliberately cumulative. If salvation is by grace, and grace is undeserved, and faith is God’s gift, then eventually we have to confront the question of whether God owes that gift to anybody.

He does not. That is where our pride starts screaming. But learning to quiet that protest and say, in effect, “Let God be true though every man a liar,” is extraordinarily useful training for the rest of the Christian life. It teaches us that Scripture sits in judgment over us. We do not sit in judgment over Scripture. We do not believe God’s Word after determining that it agrees with our intuitions about fairness, justice, goodness, freedom, or human dignity. We bring those intuitions to Scripture and allow Scripture to correct them.

That was really the challenge I put before the reader all those years ago. Refute the argument from Scripture or submit to Scripture. What we cannot legitimately do is reject a doctrine merely because we dislike the God we think it describes. That habit becomes increasingly important the longer you study the Bible.

And something else happens after a while. The doctrine that initially seemed horrifying becomes beautiful. You begin by grudgingly saying, “Fine. That’s what the Bible says.” Then you begin to understand why it says it. Eventually, what once appeared to diminish the Gospel begins to magnify it.

You realize that salvation does not depend upon whether you were clever enough, wise enough, spiritually perceptive enough, or morally superior enough to make the correct decision while another sinner did not. God did not look down the corridors of time and discover some tiny redeeming quality in you that persuaded Him to rescue you. Grace means precisely the opposite. It means receiving what you did not deserve, could not demand, and could never earn. As I put it in the book, justice is receiving what we deserve, mercy is not receiving what we deserve, and grace is receiving what we do not deserve. Once that sinks in, election stops looking like a horrible doctrine and begins looking like an astonishing Gospel.

There is another reason I decided to give you the book. Reason With Me was never written for scholars. If you are looking for a technical academic defense of Reformed soteriology, other more boring men have written enormous books for that task. This is not one of them. This was written for laymen, skeptics, confused church members, and people who hear “predestination” and immediately begin reaching for objections. That makes it particularly useful for beginners.

It is also the kind of thing you can give to a family member or friend who keeps asking questions. If somebody wants to argue with you about election, you don’t necessarily need to spend six hours reinventing the wheel over text messages. Give them the book. Ask them to read it. Then have the conversation. As premium subscribers, you have my permission to give it to whomever you like (just don’t share it online).

That was the spirit in which it was originally written. I was not asking readers to accept a theological system because Calvin said so, because Baptists said so, or because some collection of dead theologians had voted on it. I was asking them to open the Bible, follow the argument, and decide whether Scripture could refute it. The preface ends with essentially that invitation: put aside tradition, presupposition, emotion, and caricature long enough to ask what God’s Word actually says.

So, all those years after writing it, I am making Reason With Me on the Doctrine of Election available to premium subscribers in the three principal ebook formats.

Take it for what it is. It is an old book retrieved from my files, not a newly revised theological manifesto. There may be things in it I would clean up today, arguments I would sharpen, sentences I would rewrite, and errors I would correct. But the central question has not aged at all.

When God’s Word contradicts something deep inside us, which one gets to win? That question is considerably bigger than Calvinism. Learning to answer it correctly is one of the most important habits a Christian can develop.

So, my question is, Will You Reason With Me? Find the links below.

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The Seven Noahide Laws have been quietly creeping into American political life for decades, usually disguised beneath the most harmless description imaginable: seven basic biblical principles for a moral society. What almost nobody bothers to explain is what Noahidism actually means once you get past the seven-item brochure. What it plans to do with Christians, and how deep the conspiracy really goes, has been hidden from the American people in plain sight.

Texas has produced its share of strange religious movements, but even by Texas standards, this one takes the cake. Beginning in the late twentieth century, a group of ostensibly Christian Gentiles began gathering around a former Baptist minister named Vendyl Jones, studying Jewish rabbinic law, renouncing Christianity, and embracing the idea that Gentiles are ontologically inferior to Jews, and that God had assigned Gentiles a separate, submissive religion under the Seven Laws of Noah. Jones became one of the fathers of the modern Noahide movement, and Fort Worth became home to the first International Conference of the Descendants of Noah, which was held there in 1990. Its keynote speaker was none other than Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach party, a man whose politics were considered so extreme that Kach was eventually barred from Israeli elections.

For added context, Kahane is the muse and hero of Israeli Security Minister and wanted international terrorist Ben Gvir, who he referred to as “my hero” and “holy man.” Kahane was widely repudiated for anti-Gentile racism, was banned by Israel’s Central Election Commission for racism, and Israel’s High Court of Justice upheld the ban. He advocated for the full expulsion of every non-Jew from Israel, and advocated for Israel to be run fully by the Rabbinate under Jewish Temu-Sharia, or Halakha - not just its civil legal system - the same way Iran is run by clerics under Shariah.

In 1989, Kahane said, “I have not the slightest sympathy for Christianity or Jesus.” He hated Jews for Jesus and created a group to attack them called “Christians for Moses” and said, “If you lose a Jew in Auschwitz or through conversion, it’s still a soul lost.” In 1976, he stood outside of Jimmy Carter’s Baptist church in Georgia, disrupted their worship to announce the creation of “Born-Again Christians for Israel,” and demanded “Christian American fellow citizens” to support Israel as a religious duty, and God commanded it. He was a real peach.

But back to the meeting in Texas, these weren’t Gentiles converting to Judaism. They wanted to remain Gentiles while accepting a religious system in which Jews possessed one covenant and Gentiles another, with the Gentile side interpreted through Jewish Torah and rabbinic tradition. Jones’s organization became so important that, when a group of Orthodox rabbis in Israel revived the ancient Sanhedrin, its emissary, Rabbi Michael Bar-Ron, traveled to America and attended the annual Vendyl Jones Research Institute convention looking for Gentiles to help form an international Noahide council. The stated objective was to organize the world’s Noahide communities beneath a single organization operating under the “direct authority and supervision of the Sanhedrin.”

That project culminated in a ceremony in Jerusalem in January 2006. Gentile Noahide representatives appeared before the developing Sanhedrin and pledged allegiance to the God of Israel, “His Torah and its representatives, the developing Sanhedrin,” while promising to observe the Noahide laws according to the Oral Law of Moses “under the guidance of the developing Sanhedrin.” These were Gentile men voluntarily traveling halfway around the world to stand before an aspiring Jewish religious court and formally place their religious lives beneath its guidance.

Council spokesman Jim Long was even more revealing, and addressing the rabbis, he told them, “We are here because of your Torah,” explaining that rabbis had elevated Torah and drawn these Gentiles toward it, whereas “before that, we stumbled in darkness.” Long said the movement needed to prevent emerging Noahide communities from splitting into denominations and explained its members came from other religions - primarily Dispensational evangelicalism - and therefore needed to learn how to approach them in a way that wouldn’t startle them, but get them to distance themselves from their faith in Jesus. The council planned Noahide prayer books, children’s books, and educational materials presenting the world through Torah, which wouldn’t startle evangelicals.

If this sounds considerably stranger than anything you have ever heard described as the “Seven Laws of Noah,” that is the point. Most American Christians who have encountered Noahide laws have heard something different: they are “just the basic biblical laws” God gave mankind, universal moral principles about murder, theft, sexual immorality, idolatry, and justice. That’s a lie from hell. And most evangelicals believe that this is all the Noahide Laws require. It’s very untrue.

CHABAD

Those weirdos in Texas were not just inventing a homemade religion in somebody’s double-wide. The religious arrangement they embraced is now recognizable in contemporary Noahide institutions worldwide, including an organization founded and operated by Gentiles called Noahide Nations. Its material says its Gentile members believe Torah is God’s “true, final, and definitive revelation to mankind,” revealing separate purposes and missions for Jews and Gentiles. They don’t want to convert to Judaism, because they are not good enough to become Jews. They can never be good enough. They are, by nature, inferior. They are part of a separate and non-equal religion that submits to Jewish religious authorities, but isn’t Judaism. It’s Torah for Gentiles.

Noahide Nations employs rabbis as teachers and writers and openly says that when questions of halakha, or Torah law, arise, they defer to Orthodox Jewish posek Rabbi Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel. The organization has even created its own credentialed Gentile clergy program, called the Nagid Program, but warns students not to get the wrong idea about what their fancy new title means. The program “is not meant to create leadership independent of the Rabbis or a group of scholars to replace the Rabbis,” it declares, adding that “such an idea is ludicrous!”

Essentially, Gentiles are being trained as clergy to conduct marriages and funerals, build congregations, perform prison ministry, and potentially serve as military chaplains, while the same organization explicitly says those Gentile religious leaders are not supposed to become independent of rabbis. They quote Maimonides to explain that Gentiles “are not to be allowed to originate a new religion,” meaning that Noahides must submit to Jews at all times.

Noahide Nations’ educational material says most Noahides have abandoned Christmas and Easter, develops Gentile prayers and religious ceremonies “in co-operation with leading rabbis,” and describes the elevation of Jesus to deity as one of the “later heretical developments within Christianity.” Noahides argue that true Christianity recognizes Jesus as a Jewish rabbi, not as King or God. In this, they can infiltrate Christian circles by claiming to be Christian. They speak highly of Jesus as a teacher, but they deny that He is the Messiah, effectively making Jesus the mascot of Judaism. They claim that “the nations are to come to Jerusalem to learn God’s way,” while Noahidism represents “a beginning of that great goal.”

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Now the Texas ceremony begins making sense. Those Gentiles who eventually pledged themselves to Torah and rabbinic guidance had not merely discovered that stealing was bad. They embraced an entire religious architecture in which Gentiles remain Gentiles, Jews remain Jews, Torah belongs uniquely to Israel, and Gentile religious life develops within boundaries supplied by Jewish law and Jewish religious authorities. Gentiles, they teach, are here to serve, protect, and provide for Jews. Gentiles are called to submit to Jewish authority. That’s the heart of Noahide beliefs.

And yet, when Noahide law is introduced to American Christians, that complicated theological architecture has a tendency to disappear, and all that remains is a cheerful little list about not murdering your neighbor or stealing his lawnmower, usually accompanied by the soothing assurance that “it’s just biblical law.”

HUCKABEE

Mike Huckabee has spent most of his public life presenting his support for Israel as something considerably deeper than foreign policy. He is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who speaks about the modern State of Israel in explicitly theological terms. Just this week, a new speech surfaced in which Huckabee said the following:

It is astonishing that a tiny little country of 10 million people outpunches its weight over and over again when it is threatened with its existence by those who have 10 times the population, many more times the military budget. And yet it doesn’t just survive. It thrives. So is that what the secret is? And I would say to you, no, it’s none of that. The secret is that 3,800 years ago God told Abraham, ‘I’m going to create a people and you’re it. And I’m going to put you in a place and this is it. And this is going to be your place and I’m going to give you a purpose and you’re going to fulfill it.’ And it doesn’t matter who rises up against the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And it does not matter how dark sometimes the night may get, because as it says in the Psalms, joy comes in the morning. And we are living in a land that is able to exceed what it should be able to do, whether it’s the military, the economy, diplomacy, agriculture, technology. And the reason is none of those things. The reason is because God Almighty put his hand on the land, and because God himself has said, ‘This is how you will know that I am God.’ And I believe we see it from the Bible.”

Of course, the purpose of God’s call upon Abraham was fulfilled already in Jesus. He was the purpose. It’s been fulfilled. Any Christian should know this. Jesus was the point. Jews did not fulfill it. Modern Israel isn’t fulfilling it. Ancient Israel didn’t fulfill it. God fulfilled it, in spite of them. “Joy comes in the morning” comes from Psalm 30:5, a Messianic psalm about Jesus. Apparently, the Jews to whom Huckabee spoke did not know that He was God, because they crucified Him.

That Israel-centered theology makes one of Huckabee’s longest-running relationships more interesting. Rabbi Pinchus Ciment arrived in Arkansas in 1992, not merely as another local rabbi but as a shaliach, an emissary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Ciment had studied at Chabad’s Central Lubavitch Yeshiva in Brooklyn, received rabbinic ordination in 1990, and was dispatched to Arkansas to advance the movement’s religious mission. Four years later, Huckabee became governor and became the first Arkansas governor to participate in Ciment’s public Chabad menorah lighting.

That relationship did not fade when Huckabee left the governor’s mansion. It continued for nearly three decades, and when Donald Trump selected Huckabee to become ambassador to Israel, Huckabee returned to Ciment’s Chabad community for its December 2024 menorah lighting. Another Arkansas Chabad rabbi presented the incoming ambassador with Make Peace, a book explaining Schneerson’s teachings concerning Israel.

A few months later, immediately before his Senate confirmation hearing, Huckabee and his wife traveled to Schneerson’s grave in New York, where Chabad photographed the Baptist minister praying at the tomb of the late rabbi. Afterward, Huckabee said, “After visiting the Ohel, I’m even more confident it will all work out.”

Huckabee is on the record saying, “The president told me to go pray at the Ohel. I was there, I prayed – and I got the position!” Behold, a miracle wrought by Rebbe Schneerson (that was quoted on a Chabad news site, Anash.org, and is available in the I2I Article Research Dossier intel drop in this article’s bibliography, along with links to the other quotations). Huckabee continues to go to the Rebbe’s grave to pray, as you can see below. Each time, he wears the yarmulke, prays to the grave, and reads the Talmudic passages as part of the Jewish liturgy for worship of the rabbi. Chabad's official instructions literally say, “it is customary to write a letter to the Rebbe.” You then enter the grave enclosure, read your letter aloud, tear it up, and place the pieces at the grave.

The Chabad explain that this is becuase the Rebbe now serves as an intermediary to God, and at the grave it is easier to “connect to the tzaddik's soul above” and “request his blessings.” You are also supposed to knock before entering, and are not supposed to turn around for him to see your backside. You must walk out backward.

But his relationship with Schneerson’s movement is considerably deeper than some prayers to a corpse. Huckabee’s relationship with Chabad-Lubavitch goes back to at least 1996 through Rabbi Pinchus Ciment, and the evidence now indicates that his familiarity with Schneerson and the Lubavitch world long predates his appointment as ambassador. By 2025, when Huckabee returned to Schneerson’s grave immediately before his Senate confirmation hearing, this was not some evangelical tourist being introduced to the Rebbe for the first time.

Four days after Huckabee prayed at Schneerson’s grave, his longtime Arkansas rabbi walked into the United States House of Representatives and served as guest chaplain, and of all the subjects available to a rabbi addressing the legislative branch of the United States government, he chose to preach the Seven Noahide Laws.

Ciment began with, “I beseech You, in the merit of the great leader and spiritual giant, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson…” and then told America’s lawmakers that God had given Noah and his descendants instructions intended for “all of humanity.” He presented the Seven Laws as “seven guiding principles” for a “moral, ethical, and productive life,” but he did not confine them to private morality. Ciment invoked Schneerson like a Christian would invoke God, and praised him for having “passionately shared the richness and importance of the said Seven Noahide Laws for all to embrace.”

Schneerson’s program was considerably larger than persuading Americans that murder and theft are bad. He taught that Jews possessed an affirmative responsibility to bring Gentiles toward Noahide observance and that “the nations of the world need Jews to teach them how to observe these laws properly.” His metaphor for the proper relationship between Jewish religious instruction and Gentile government was even more revealing: “The governments of the world steer the ship; the Jew charts the course.”

That doesn’t sound conspiratorial at all.

That makes Huckabee’s relationship with Ciment impossible to dismiss as just a politician occasionally shaking hands with the local rabbi. For almost thirty years, one of America’s most prominent Baptist politicians has maintained a relationship with a trained Lubavitch emissary whose religious leader commanded his followers to teach Noahide law to Gentiles, and who has demonstrated his commitment to that mission by preaching it from the floor of Congress. Huckabee has repeatedly entered that same religious world, received Schneerson’s teachings from Arkansas Chabad, and prayed at Schneerson’s grave immediately before assuming one of America’s most consequential diplomatic posts.

We have to ask a question that becomes increasingly difficult to avoid: after nearly thirty years, what exactly has Rabbi Pinchus Ciment been teaching Mike Huckabee?

GENTILES AND JEWS

To understand what Schneerson was actually offering the Gentiles, we have to go considerably deeper than the Seven Laws themselves. Chabad-Lubavitch did not begin with the premise that Jews and Gentiles are simply two populations of otherwise spiritually identical human beings who happened to receive different numbers of commandments. Its foundational theological text, the Tanya, teaches an ontological distinction between Jewish and Gentile souls, and Schneerson spent his life teaching and defending the theological system contained in that book.

The Tanya teaches that Jews possess a divine soul, described as literally “a part of God above,” in addition to the lower animal soul associated with ordinary appetites and bodily existence. The distinction becomes considerably less ecumenical when its author, Schneur Zalman of Liadi, turns to the nations. The souls of the Gentile nations, the Tanya teaches, descend from the “unclean kelipot which contain no good whatsoever.” Even the good deeds Gentiles perform are described within this scheme as ultimately rooted in self-glorification rather than the holy source from which Jewish spiritual life proceeds.

The legal structure is similarly unequal by design. Jews remain obligated to the 613 commandments of Torah while Gentiles receive the Noahide code, and rabbis administer it. Schneerson also insisted that Jews must actively steer Gentiles toward the Noahide framework to know their place in the world, sending out his followers as missionaries, “crossing land and sea to make converts twice the sons of hell that he is.” The 3500 Chabad houses in the world are outposts of anti-evangelism; telling Gentiles to submit themselves under the Law.

He wrote that Jews should do “everything possible” to secure Noahide observance, whether through peaceful persuasion or, where legitimately possible within the halakhic framework he was discussing, even “through force.”

“We must do everything possible to ensure that the seven Noahide laws are observed. If this can be accomplished through force or through other kinder and more peaceful means through explaining to non-Jews that they should accept God’s wishes [we should do so]… Anyone who is able to influence a non-Jew in any way to keep the seven commandments is obligated to do so, since that is what God commanded Moses our teacher.”

And there is another consequence that American Christians almost never hear when someone tells them the Noahide Laws are “just biblical morality.” Christianity itself becomes part of the problem. A Gentile cannot simply take the seven laws, keep worshipping Jesus Christ as God, build an independent Christian religion around Him, and assume that this is what the rabbinic Noahide system means by serving the Creator.

Christianity isn’t allowed.

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Tucker Carlson thinks there may be something supernatural hiding in the history of the atomic bomb. Eric Metaxas thinks that idea is so insane that Christians should pray for Tucker’s sanity. When I first investigated this claim years ago, I found a trail running through ancient accounts of forbidden knowledge, some of the strangest corners of twentieth-century science, occult literature, ritual magic, and the men who gave humanity the ability to destroy itself. By the time I reached the end of the rabbit hole, Tucker’s theory was no longer the strangest part of the story.

For centuries, committed Christians have lamented the retreat of the supernatural from Western thought. The Enlightenment was rough on the faithful who insisted that Scripture's supernatural claims were literal and described actual events, rather than primitive metaphors awaiting reinterpretation by more sophisticated men. By the late nineteenth century, Darwinism, German higher criticism, and an increasingly naturalistic academy had made biblical supernaturalism out of vogue, something educated Christians were expected to explain away, apologize for, or at least keep discreetly tucked beneath their pews. Some Christians even concurred and joined the other team.

After the Scopes Trial in 1925, when skepticism became a spectacle, H. L. Mencken and the national press helped transform the fundamentalist into a stock American character: rural, backward, gullible, frightened of science, and stubbornly attached to a universe populated by things modern men knew better than to believe. They did not have to disprove angels, demons, miracles, revelation, or divine intervention. It was easier just to put spectacles on the skeptic, overalls on the Christian, and let the audience know which one was supposed to be stupid. Many of the alleged Christians lined up with the skeptics and made fun of us, too, insisting it was possible to believe the main thrust of the Bible while rejecting or reinterpreting the parts that made the world supernatural. The Socinians, the followers of Fausto Socini, did this in the 1500s. Bio Logos, with Tim Keller and Francis Collins, did this in the 21st Century.

Evangelicals have complained about this arrangement ever since. We built seminaries and colleges to prove that supernaturalists could read books. We produced philosophers to demonstrate that belief in God was intellectually defensible, scientists to argue that materialism was not synonymous with science, and apologists by the thousands to assure nervous Christians that Harvard had not somehow disproved the resurrection while nobody was looking. Entire evangelical institutions were constructed around the conviction that the modern intellectual establishment had arbitrarily ruled the supernatural out of bounds before the debate even started.

Then something strange happened. Somewhere along the way, the culture started believing the world was supernatural again. And not as a fringe belief, but mainstream. Institutional Christianity has declined dramatically since the Enlightenment, but oddly enough, it didn’t create the materialist society the Christians themselves warned it would. Secularization de-Christianized society, but it didn’t secularize it. Pew now finds that 81% of Americans believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, 65% believe spirits or unseen spiritual forces exist, and only 17% say the natural world is all there is. Even among the religiously unaffiliated, 63% say something spiritual exists beyond nature.

How can that be explained? How did Christianity crumble, while supernaturalism did not?

The internet largely destroyed the old intellectual bottleneck. In 1975, if Harvard, Time, the networks, major publishers, and the scientific establishment treated something as crackpot material, most people treated it as such, despite having their supernatural experiences to talk about it; they didn’t talk about it. Now, somebody can spend three hours listening to a credentialed physicist discuss consciousness, a biblical scholar discuss the Watchers, a military pilot discuss UAPs, or a physician discuss near-death experiences without a newspaper editor standing between him and the subject explaining which conclusions respectable people are allowed to entertain. We live in a supernatural world. Intellectual snobbery couldn’t hide that forever.

Americans are now neck-deep in the supernatural. They believe in ghosts, hauntings, angels, demons, near-death experiences, spiritual warfare, extraterrestrial intelligences, psychic phenomena, simulation theories, interdimensional beings, and things in the sky that the federal government has spent the last several years assuring Congress it cannot adequately explain. Podcasts discussing ancient civilizations and nonhuman intelligence draw huge audiences. Joe Rogan can spend three hours discussing whether consciousness survives death, and instead of laughing him off the air, millions of people lean closer to the speaker. For this reason, I’ve been begging churches to speak more about supernaturality, and especially about the devil.

Heck, we live in a day when government officials, under oath, to the U.S. Congress, said that extraterrestrial beings of superior intelligence who are ‘not of this earth’ exist, and no one batted an eye. Like, aliens are a thing now, apparently. Everybody was like, “Anyway, what’s for supper?”

The old materialist sneer has lost much of its power because the people it was supposed to impress have stopped being impressed. Now, denying the supernatural out of turn is just as likely to earn condemnations for small-mindedness as believing in it just a decade ago. It is increasingly the supposedly “unsophisticated public” willing to ask metaphysical questions, while the church remains quiet for fear of being thought weird by a society that no longer thinks it. Cowardice has consequences, and one of them is irrelevance, which is what the church has largely become. Now society is eager to hear about supernaturality, but the church isn’t the first place they turn, because they’ve never even heard us talk about it because we’ve been suppressing the supernatural parts for fear of being thought weird.

Now, society is weird without us.

You would think evangelical Christians would be delighted by the surge in supernatural belief. After spending generations complaining that Western naturalism had closed people’s minds to the supernatural, we finally have a culture increasingly willing to entertain the possibility that reality contains intelligent beings besides ourselves. This should be the easiest evangelistic layup Christianity has received in a century.

Instead, some members of the Evangelical Intelligentsia seem determined to put their self-enforced irrelevance on parade. Angels may announce the birth of Christ, demons may speak through men in Galilee, Satan may enter Judas, principalities and powers may operate behind earthly kingdoms, and demonic spirits may gather kings together for war in the Bible. But suggest that malevolent spiritual intelligences might have maintained an interest in human civilization long enough to influence people today, and suddenly respectable Christians become very concerned about your mental health.

Which brings us, finally, to Eric Metaxas and Tucker Carlson.

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TUCKER HAS LOST HIS MIND

Eric Metaxas thinks Tucker Carlson has lost his mind. He appears quite sincere about it, too, soliciting prayers on his X account for Tucker, that the Lord might deliver him from the insanity of believing supernatural things. He believes that nuclear technology may have come to mankind through demonic agency, an idea Metaxas regards as so obviously insane that it apparently requires prayer and public mockery.

On May 29, Tucker sat down for nearly two hours with Father Stephen De Young, an Orthodox priest and biblical scholar with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies, to discuss Genesis 6, the Nephilim, demons, the ancient world, and the persistent historic belief that spiritual beings have transmitted knowledge to mankind. One segment was devoted specifically to the question, “Was Technology Given to Us by Demons?”

Tucker wasn’t claiming that Beelzebub personally drew the schematics for Fat Man. De Young explained a supernatural worldview held by ancient Christians in both Testaments, in which spiritual beings sometimes revealed knowledge before mankind was prepared to possess it. He began with Eden, when the serpent offered Adam and Eve a shortcut to knowledge, promising something desirable before God intended them to have it, and the gift ends in destruction.

Then Tucker said, “But nuclear technology definitely didn’t come from the demonic,” and De Young immediately understood where he was going, and then DeYoung went there, too. He alleged that nuclear knowledge was “revealed to man” and immediately turned toward destruction. Then De Young brought up Nagasaki, explaining that before the bomb fell, it was the great center of Japanese Christianity, with the Urakami district containing the country’s largest Catholic community. Tucker said he had been fixated on that fact for a while.

By the way, I wrote about it here and posited that it likely was a demonic intervention that changed the target at the last minute to the center of Christianity in Asia and with no good explanation for it. A nuke goes down the literal chimney pipe of the Christian church in Japan, and Satan wasn’t involved somehow? I wrote..

“I’m not saying it was a conspiracy. I’m saying of course it happened that way. When men flirt with demonic power to create weapons that tear open the fabric of creation, it should surprise no one when the first target is the church.”

That’s the conversation Eric Metaxas has decided is evidence that Tucker Carlson has lost his mind and moved to crazy town. But which part of it is incompatible with Christianity, again? I didn’t catch it.

Christianity teaches that demons are real, intelligent personal beings. They speak, reason, deceive, teach, tempt, possess knowledge, communicate ideas, influence human beings, and seek their destruction. Paul warns explicitly about “doctrines of devils,” which is attributing false teaching to demons. Daniel describes supernatural princes operating behind earthly kingdoms. Revelation describes demonic spirits going directly to “the kings of the earth and of the whole world” for the specific purpose of gathering them to war, which is why I often refer to “war demons.” I’m not just being dramatic or name-calling. I’m dead serious, which is why I wrote, The Ancient War Demons Were Real: Do They Control the NeoCon Establishment?

There is something distinctly post-Enlightenment about believing every one of those things right up until the invention of indoor plumbing. Satan can tempt Christ personally in the wilderness, demons can recognize Jesus before his disciples do, enter human beings and animals, communicate theology, influence rulers, and participate in the affairs of nations, provided they have the good manners to stop doing all of this once electricity was invented.

For modern Christians, angels are something for Christmas cards, demons remain useful for sermons, and “principalities and powers” get converted into government bureaucracies.

Before I proceed to the fun parts of this article, I don’t intend to prove that demons invented the atomic bomb. I intend to investigate whether Tucker’s suspicion is mock-worthy for another alleged Christian. Is it insane, as Metaxas suggests? Because I’ve found Metaxas saying other things are demonic, including “antisemitism,” which he labels as demonic while simultaneously refusing to define it, UAP phenomena, Islam, transgenderism, literal witchcraft, Democrat politics, and poor treatment of Erika Kirk. All of those are demonic, according to Metaxas. But believing demons helped make the A-bomb is “utterly stupid” and mentally ill. See his tweets below.

OPPENHEIMER AND THE OCCULT

Tucker’s theory becomes harder to laugh at once you start looking at the people who actually developed atomic technologies. Robert Oppenheimer was deeply interested in mysticism and the Occult, and Isidor Rabi, his friend and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said Oppenheimer sometimes turned “away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.” Historian James Hijiya went further, arguing that the Bhagavad Gita provided Oppenheimer with inspiration he may actually have needed to lead Los Alamos. He was a man who looked outside of himself, and outside of science, to the metaphysical for direction in his research and development. The inventor of the atomic bomb looking to metaphysics for direction is mind-blowing, in and of itself.

Oppenheimer’s fascination with this kind of Occultic material went back to Harvard. There, he became obsessed with the French poet Charles Baudelaire and fell in with a small group of friends who met to repeat lines from one of Baudelaire’s poems, almost as a liturgy for their group. The poem was Les Litanies de Satan, “The Litanies of Satan,” and their refrain was a prayer: “O Satan, have pity on my long misery.” It gets stranger when you read the poem, because Baudelaire praises Satan as a source of knowledge, connects him to the Tree of Knowledge, and calls him the “lamp of inventors.” Yeah, nothing weird about that at all, right?

Oppenheimer arrived at Harvard in 1922 as a brilliant and deeply strange young man with interests far beyond physics. He read literature, philosophy, religion, languages, and poetry, and became especially interested in Charles Baudelaire. In his poems, Satan is a constant focus, frequently functioning as the embodiment of rebellion, suffering, pride, temptation, and fallen humanity. He was fixated on Occultic imagery, often inverting it, to make Satan the good guy.

Baudelaire didn’t just use Satan as a literary device, to be clear. He addresses Satan directly, praises him as the most knowledgeable and beautiful of angels, calls him the “Prince of Exile,” and asks him repeatedly for pity. Satan comforts the miserable, teaches society’s outcasts, and serves as the adoptive father of those expelled from Eden. At the end, Baudelaire offers Satan “glory and praise” and asks that his soul someday rest near him beneath the Tree of Knowledge.

As I mentioned above, among Satan’s titles, Baudelaire calls him the “lamp of inventors.” The future father of the atomic bomb was repeating a Satanic litany that associated the Devil with new inventions, illumination, and the same forbidden Tree of Knowledge that first offered mankind knowledge it was not supposed to possess. Maybe that was nothing more than the pretentious amusement of brilliant Harvard nerds. In 1963, four years before his death, The Christian Century asked him to name ten books that had done the most to shape his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life.” Oppenheimer gave her Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.

Along with The Litanies of Satan, the rest of Les Fleurs du Mal does not exactly improve the optics, because its pages are crowded with demons, damnation, vampires, possession, death, blasphemy, and rebellion against God. In “Destruction,” a demon continually accompanies the speaker and fills his mind with wicked desire. “Abel and Cain” turns sympathy toward Cain and ends with the race of Cain rising against God, while “The Denial of Saint Peter” treats Peter’s betrayal of Christ with approval rather than shame. Is this normal?

In 1933, Oppenheimer began studying Sanskrit under Arthur Ryder at Berkeley so he could read Hindu texts, particularly the Bhagavad Gita. This was serious study, learned Sanskrit just to read it the same way a Bible student learns Greek to study the Bible, and gave copies to friends, quoted it throughout his life, and called it “one of the most beautiful philosophical works” he knew. More importantly, he used it. The Gita centers on Arjuna, a warrior who recoils from the killing required of him, and Krishna’s instruction that he must perform his duty without attachment to its consequences. Historian James Hijiya argues that Oppenheimer carried this philosophy into Los Alamos, where he faced his own question of responsibility for the killing his weapon would do, saying, “Without the inspiration of the Gita, Oppenheimer might not have been able or willing to direct Los Alamos.”

On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer watched the first atomic bomb turn the New Mexico desert into daylight, and spoke the words of the Hindu demon god, Krishna, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Was he quoting the demon, or was the demon actually speaking and taking credit for his work? Either way, weird.

Oh, and the code word Oppenheimer gave the explosion test site, which would soon be crumpled up, vaporized, and utterly destroyed by the bomb…was Trinity. The atomic bomb’s first victim.

BUT CAN DEMONS INVENT THINGS?

Christian theology certainly leaves room for nonhuman intelligence. Angels speak, teach, warn, interpret visions, execute judgment, and possess knowledge human beings do not. Most Christians think in terms of a dichotomy, of angels and demons. Demons, they suppose, are fallen angels. Fallen angels, in theory, are still angels. Demons - whether fallen angels or not - recognize Jesus before the crowds do, know who the apostles are, understand their own coming judgment and, according to Paul, can even teach doctrine. Scripture presents them as intelligent, ancient and hostile.

Nor would the idea that forbidden knowledge can cross the boundary between the spiritual and human worlds have sounded foreign to ancient readers of Scripture. Genesis 6 describes the “sons of God” descending to women immediately before the appearance of the Nephilim and the catastrophic corruption that ends in the Flood. The biblical text itself is terse, but the ancient Jewish interpretation preserved in 1 Enoch fills in the horrifying details. The Watchers do not merely take women. They teach mankind things.

But we don’t need the non-canonical Book of Enoch to show us this, because this older supernatural world is visible throughout the Old Testament, too. The Hebrew word elohim does not refer exclusively to Yahweh, although Yahweh alone is the Most High and Creator. Scripture uses the term for inhabitants of the spiritual realm, and repeatedly depicts a heavenly council around God. Psalm 82 places God “in the congregation of the mighty” where He judges “among the gods.” Psalm 89 describes an assembly of the holy ones and asks who among the “sons of the mighty” can be compared to Yahweh. Deuteronomy 32 likewise describes the nations being divided according to the “sons of God,” indicating that different regions are subject to different celestial beings. These are not angels; these are higher and stronger and wiser than angels, but lesser than God. Paul appears to describe the same unseen hierarchy when he speaks of “principalities,” “powers,” “rulers of the darkness of this world,” and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” The biblical universe is populated by intelligent spiritual powers, some obedient to God and some rebellious against Him, operating behind and sometimes within the affairs of men. They have a degree of authority and power, subject to God, but greater than angels and men.

The unseen realm of Scripture is much more diverse than what modern Christians imagine. There are the elohim, the council of gods. There are angels. There are also diverse kinds of angels: some with six wings, some with four, and some with two. Some angels have different functions than others and, ostensibly, different rank and power. Some celestial creatures, whether categorized as angels or not, look like what we would call monsters, with a nearly unimaginable, hard-to-describe appearance that the Biblical authors struggle to explain.

According to the book of Enoch, an elohim named Azazel teaches men to make swords, knives, shields, and armor. Other Watchers teach enchantments, astrology, signs of the earth and signs of the heavens. Whatever one makes of Enoch as a noncanonical text, its importance here is difficult to dismiss because Jude explicitly quotes it, and both Jude and 2 Peter describe angels who sinned, abandoned their proper place by making hybrid earth babies, and were subsequently imprisoned for judgment. The ancient Jewish world surrounding the New Testament knew the tradition well. Modern Christians just don’t discuss it much.

Another theory, from the late Dr. Michael Heiser, is that demons are not fallen angels but dead Nephilim. Being half celestial and half mortal, their bodies have died, but the spirits have nowhere to go, because Heaven and hell are both inhabitants for souls, and being only part human, they don’t have one. Demons are, this theory says, essentially ghosts - disembodied spirits- of Nephilim. They possess and afflict men, taking their bodies to commit and enjoy sins of the flesh.

As mentioned above, it’s not that a demon flew to Los Alamos carrying blueprints for Fat Man. The older and more Biblical idea is that spiritual beings - whether elohim, angels, or demons - can communicate knowledge, and that some knowledge may be given to mankind for destructive purposes by intelligences that do not particularly like mankind.

THE DEVIL BUILDS A ROCKET

Another feature of the atomic age is that it arrived unbelievably fast. Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938. Roosevelt approved production of an atomic bomb in January 1942, Los Alamos was established the following year for the express purpose of building one, and on July 16, 1945, the thing worked. Humanity went from discovering that uranium atoms could be split to detonating an atomic weapon in the desert in about six and a half years. Los Alamos went from laboratory to working bomb in roughly twenty months.

None of that proves supernatural involvement, but the speed was astonishing. What had been obscure nuclear physics at the end of 1938 became a weapon capable of destroying a city before the decade was over. This is why many people have suggested the tech came from aliens or was reverse-engineered from technology discovered in the Roswell crash. Human beings look at sudden leaps in technology, and it’s hard not to wonder whether somebody gave us a push.

And if that sounds outrageous, meet Jack Parsons. John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons was a pioneer of American rocketry. His work helped establish rocket propulsion in the United States, and he was part of the Caltech rocket group from which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory emerged. He also helped establish Aerojet, which became a major American rocket and missile manufacturer. You see, the atomic bomb was only the beginning of its weaponization. Once mankind possessed nuclear weapons, the next great technological problem was figuring out how to throw them across continents.

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Good framing of an issue matters for people’s understanding, helping folks wrap their heads around what’s happening and why, who the sides are, and where they should stand. I’m going to lay out for you the terms that are often used in today’s civil war on the right, explain their real meaning, help to demarcate the lines of this battle and its different sides, and show you why framing matters.

James Lindsay thinks he has discovered the great temptation of the “dissident” Right, and naturally, he explained it with a meme. Maybe you saw it on X last weekend. Boromir, from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, stares longingly at the One Ring in his hand. Across Boromir’s forehead, Lindsay stamped “WOKE RIGHT.” Across the Ring itself he stamped “STATE POWER.” The message isn’t subtle: the people Lindsay has spent the last several years branding the “Woke Right” are being seduced by political power. They have convinced themselves that they can seize the machinery of the state, wield it against their enemies, and somehow remain uncorrupted by it.

A legitimate warning is buried inside the meme, underneath layers of Establishmentarian: power is dangerous. His message is that conservatives who spent years watching the Left weaponize the legal system, government bureaucracy, the censorship regime, intelligence agencies, and other institutions should not conclude that the answer is to capture those weapons and point them in the opposite direction. If the Right’s answer to every abuse of power is going to become, “Wait until we get our turn,” then Boromir is not an altogether unfair comparison.

Unless we want to actually win. But if we don’t mind losing, we should definitely take that high road.

Matt Walsh thankfully noticed the rather large problem with Lindsay’s formulation. If merely wanting state power is what makes somebody “Woke Right,” then everybody who has ever participated in politics is guilty. Elections exist to determine who exercises political authority. A man voting for a sheriff wants someone to possess police power. A libertarian electing a congressman to abolish an agency is seeking political power to abolish it. A pro-life voter wants legislators and governors with sufficient authority to prohibit something he believes is evil. Politics without the acquisition and exercise of political power is not politics. It is a book club.

I added my own two cents because I think Walsh’s objection, while obviously correct, stops one step short of the real issue. I tweeted, “They’re not against government power. They’re against YOU having government power.” Those currently enjoying access to power are terrified that government might someday be redirected toward the interests of the people who actually elect it. The supposed sin is not merely that someone might wield political authority. Somebody already does. The terror begins when the wrong people start asking why it cannot be them.

Then Lindsay, almost as if determined to illustrate the point for me, made the subtext text. Complaining about Walsh and the people to whom Walsh supposedly “panders,” Lindsay wrote, “I shudder to think of people he panders to being in power.” And just like that, he said the quiet part out loud. Suddenly Boromir’s Ring looks different. Lindsay’s anxiety is no longer an abstraction about whether political power should exist. It is about which people might possess it. That was his trepidation all along.

Somebody is going to possess state power. There will be a Justice Department tomorrow morning whether conservatives feel morally pure about government power or not. Somebody will control the federal agencies. Somebody will write the regulations, collect the taxes, spend the trillions, negotiate the treaties, enforce or refuse to enforce the border, determine trade policy, regulate banks, prosecute crimes, impose sanctions, command the military, and decide which distant patch of dirt is suddenly important enough for an American kid to die on. The American state will not evaporate because conservatives have been trained to feel vaguely dirty about wanting control of it.

More importantly, the people lecturing you about the corrupting temptation of political power did not discover this concern in an anarchist commune. They live inside a political system already saturated with power. Our foreign-policy establishment has power. Our intelligence apparatus has power. Global finance exercises enormous influence over public policy. Defense contractors live on government appropriations. Multinational corporations employ armies of lobbyists to shape legislation and regulation. Foreign governments and their lobbies compete for influence over Washington. Permanent bureaucracies survive election after election while presidents come and go. None of this resembles a pristine free society suddenly endangered because a working man in Ohio wants his government to care about the price of burritos or whether his factory closes.

The fight on the American Right is not that hard to understand. We have been told that the great divide is between responsible conservatives and a dangerous new collection of populists, nationalists, economic heretics, “Woke Right” radicals, “Woke Reich” extremists, isolationists, conspiracy theorists, and crypto-Communists. But those labels obscure the more important division underneath them. Increasingly, the fight is between people who regard the prevailing institutional order as fundamentally legitimate and worth preserving, and people who have begun asking why that order seems remarkably good at preserving itself while the country beneath it gets poorer, weaker, more indebted, less sovereign, and increasingly difficult for ordinary Americans to live in.

There is a name for the first group that is considerably more useful than “conservative.” They are Establishmentarians. And to understand why they are suddenly so frightened of dissidents on their own Right, we have to understand what establishment they are actually trying to conserve.

THE ESTABLISHMENT AND THE POST-WAR CONSENSUS

Before we go any further, we need a word for the people Lindsay is actually defending. “Conservative” will not do. Neither will Republican, libertarian, neoconservative, globalist, Zionist, banker, bureaucrat, or corporate executive, because those describe different people occupying different pieces of a much larger machine. The word I prefer is Establishmentarian. An Establishmentarian is someone whose overriding political instinct is the preservation of the prevailing institutional order and the distribution of power that comes with it.

This does not require a secret clubhouse where Ben Shapiro, Jamie Dimon, a CIA director, an AIPAC lobbyist, a Democratic senator, and the CEO of Lockheed Martin gather every Thursday to receive their instructions from Satan. The Establishment is more durable than a conspiracy because it does not require one. Institutions develop interests. People acquire careers, fortunes, prestige, access, contracts, audiences, bureaucratic kingdoms, and political power inside those institutions. They naturally become reluctant to dismantle the machinery that produced them. The people occupying different parts of the machine can despise each other, vote differently, and disagree bitterly about abortion, guns, taxes, homosexuality, and elections while still agreeing that nobody should take a wrecking ball to the building they all inhabit.

That building was constructed largely after World War II. The United States emerged from the war possessing extraordinary economic and military power, and American leaders deliberately built a new international order around it. Bretton Woods placed the dollar at the center of a new monetary order and produced institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The United Nations followed. NATO followed. The United States abandoned its old habit of raising enormous military capacity for war and substantially dismantling it afterward. In its place came a permanent national-security establishment, permanent overseas commitments, permanent intelligence institutions, and a permanent armaments industry.

Warnings from our Founders about permanent alliances be damned. We have a world to run.

Dwight Eisenhower watched the thing grow and warned us about it on his way out the door. This was no hippie burning his draft card. Eisenhower had commanded the Allied invasion of Europe and served eight years as a Republican president. Yet by 1961, he warned that America had acquired a permanent arms industry of unprecedented size, joined to an immense military establishment whose economic and political influence reached into every level of government. His name for it became famous: the military-industrial complex. More important than the phrase was his warning about what such a system could eventually produce, a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

The machine did not remain frozen in 1961 because the Cold War expanded America’s worldwide security commitments. The postwar financial system evolved. Global trade expanded. Capital became increasingly international. Capital became increasingly fake. American corporations became multinational corporations, supply chains stretched across oceans, factories moved abroad, and Wall Street acquired enormous influence over an economy increasingly measured by the accumulation of financial assets rather than the health of the towns where Americans actually lived. Downtowns died, but Wall Street soared. Families struggled, while the news told them how well the economy was doing based on the Dow-Jones. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the system did not pack its bags, declare victory, and go home. It expanded.

For example, NATO was established to defend against the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we didn’t shut NATO down. We expanded it, despite no legitimate reason existing. When Russia asked to join NATO, we told them no. We can’t afford to win over enemies. We can’t afford to be without them.

Around this structure grew an entire ecosystem of permanent government bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, banks, multinational corporations, lobbying firms, think tanks, universities, NGOs, media organizations, technology companies, international institutions, and foreign interests seeking influence over Washington. They frequently compete with one another, and their interests sometimes collide, but they also overlap, exchange personnel, depend upon one another, and share an obvious interest in preventing the entire global arrangement from being turned upside down by several million angry people who suddenly notice they’re being exploited to maintain a world that is not improving.

That is what I mean by the Post-War Consensus, or PWC. It is not a claim that every policy since V-J Day was secretly written by a cabal in George Soros’ mountain lair. It is the broad institutional settlement that grew out of American global leadership after World War II and accumulated additional layers over the following eighty years. Presidents changed. Parties traded control of Congress. Wars started and ended. The Soviet Union itself disappeared. Yet the basic assumption that America should manage an enormous international political, military, and economic world order survived them all.

And this is where UniParty needs to be understood. It does not mean Republicans and Democrats are identical. They aren’t. It means that for decades the acceptable leadership of both parties largely operated within certain common boundaries concerning the basic structures of American power. Administrations changed, but the machinery remained. One party might turn one dial clockwise, and the other turn another counterclockwise, but both parties kept feeding it.

Neoconservatives are one cog in that machine, not the machine itself. Global finance is another. The military-industrial complex is another. The permanent bureaucracy is another. Foreign-policy think tanks, corporate lobbyists, multinational interests, intelligence agencies, media gatekeepers, and foreign governments attempting to influence American policy occupy still other positions. The mistake is looking at any one cog and assuming you’ve found the engine. It’s not just Israel. It’s not just the CIA. It’s not just the Federal Reserve. It’s not just the Council on Foreign Relations. The Establishment is the ecosystem produced by their intersection, and the Establishmentarian is the person whose politics reliably bend toward preserving it. It doesn’t matter if they’re a conservative Establishmentarian or a Liberal one; not really. It’s all the Establishment, one way or another.

Grasping that is crucial because an Establishmentarian can call himself a conservative while conserving remarkably little that previous generations of Americans would recognize as their inheritance. He can watch industries disappear, communities hollow out, debt explode, borders become abstractions, foreign commitments multiply, families become economically harder to make, and government become larger and more remote, yet somehow conclude that the greatest threat to America is the angry citizen asking why their burritos cost so much.

A conservative has to ask what is actually worth conserving, and sometimes that requires tearing down institutions that have outlived their purpose or turned against the people they were supposed to serve. The Establishmentarian has a much easier answer. Whatever else he is willing to sacrifice, there is one thing he can always be counted upon to conserve: the Establishment.

THE DISSIDENTS

Once you understand the Establishment this way, another word that gets thrown around suddenly makes a lot more sense: dissident. The word sounds sinister because it is supposed to. It conjures up radicals lurking outside respectable society, plotting against the institutions that keep civilization from collapsing. But a dissident is not necessarily a radical, and he is certainly not defined by how far Left or Right he happens to be. A dissident refuses to accept the boundaries of the approved political conversation.

The Establishment is perfectly capable of accommodating Democrats and Republicans because it has been doing so for generations. It can survive an argument about marginal tax rates. It can survive Republicans appointing conservative judges and Democrats appointing liberal ones. It can survive four years of one party running the executive branch followed by four years of the other. Those fights can be genuine, vicious, and consequential while still taking place inside a larger institutional framework that neither side seriously intends to dismantle.

The dissident becomes dangerous when he walks past those arguments and starts kicking the pillars. Why does the United States need troops scattered across the planet? Why are we obligated to fight this war? Why is this foreign alliance treated as permanent regardless of whether it continues serving American interests? Why did we ship productive industry overseas and then congratulate ourselves because imported televisions became cheaper? Why should capital be allowed to search the entire planet for cheaper labor while an American worker is told he must become more competitive or flexible or adapt to new careers? Why are multinational corporations treated as free-market actors when so many of them depend upon government contracts, subsidies, regulatory advantages, intellectual-property protections, favorable trade arrangements, and armies of lobbyists?

Those questions become even more dangerous when they leave Washington and arrive at the kitchen table. Why does a man with a decent job struggle to buy the kind of house his father bought on one income? Why are young couples delaying marriage and children because they cannot afford the necessities of family life? Why is consumer debt astronomical? Why does a trip through the grocery store feel like a mugging? Why can Wall Street celebrate while the town where you grew up loses its factory, its hardware store, its families, and eventually its future? At some point, people stop accepting charts showing that the economy is doing wonderfully and start trusting the far more persuasive evidence in their bank accounts.

This is why populism, rather than Left or Right, creates such panic within the Establishment. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump do not share a political philosophy, but they do share something. Sanders attacked concentrated financial and corporate power from the socialist Left. Trump arrived from the nationalist Right attacking trade deals, mass immigration, the Iraq War, NATO burden-sharing, globalization, and the bipartisan foreign-policy class. Their diagnoses frequently differed, and their prescriptions differed even more, but both committed the same unforgivable offense: they told millions of Americans that the people running the system might be the problem.

That was the electricity behind Trump in 2016. Whatever else anyone thought about him, he walked onto a Republican debate stage and attacked propositions Republican voters had spent years being told were beyond discussion. He called the Iraq War a disaster. He attacked free-trade orthodoxy. He questioned whether America’s alliances were actually reciprocal. He treated the border as something a sovereign nation was entitled to control. Most importantly, he demonstrated that Republican voters had never consented to many of the sacred cows supposedly defining Republicanism. They had merely been told that accepting them was the price of admission.

Tucker Carlson eventually became dangerous for much the same reason. His great offense was wandering outside the fence. He began asking why Americans were expected to care more about another foreign adventure than their own collapsing communities, why young men could no longer afford families, why consumer debt was swallowing the middle class, why corporations that despised their customers deserved conservative loyalty, and why “the market” mysteriously became sacred whenever its outcomes benefited people who already possessed enormous economic power. The transgression was asking the questions in front of millions of people the Establishment didn’t want to answer.

The term dissident useful for this reason. It describes a relationship to power rather than a position on the traditional ideological ruler. A populist Leftist can be a dissident. A nationalist on the Right can be a dissident. A Christian who rejects the premises of secular liberalism can be a dissident. They can disagree with one another about almost everything and still provoke the same institutional immune response because each is willing to reopen questions the ruling consensus has declared closed.

The Establishment can tolerate an astonishing amount of Left versus Right warfare because Left and Right can fight indefinitely without threatening the machinery underneath them. What it cannot comfortably tolerate is outside versus inside. It cannot tolerate millions of people deciding that perhaps the experts who managed the country into $40 trillion of debt, endless foreign commitments, deindustrialization, unaffordable homes, collapsing trust, and national exhaustion should no longer enjoy an automatic presumption of competence.

And that is when the dissident discovers the price of asking forbidden questions. The Establishment does not always have to answer him. It has developed something much cheaper.

It can simply give him a label.

“THAT SOUNDS LIKE COMMUNISM”

Once a political establishment has decided which questions people are allowed to ask, it does not need a terribly sophisticated method for dealing with people who ask the wrong ones. It needs labels. The labels change depending on the subject; instead of answering the dissident’s complaint, translate it into an ideology so poisonous that he is forced to defend himself rather than continue advocating for his interest.

The formula is simple. An American says his groceries are becoming unaffordable. Communist. He wonders whether importing millions of workers affects the bargaining power of American labor. Xenophobe. He questions another foreign intervention. Isolationist. He wonders whether a supposedly indispensable ally is actually behaving like one. Conspiracy theorist, antisemite, foreign propagandist. He suggests that multinational corporations should not possess an unlimited right to destroy American communities merely because doing so improves the quarterly return to shareholders. Marxist. He concludes that perhaps his own government should consciously prefer the interests of its own citizens.

Woke Right. Woke Reich. Scmoke Schmight. It’s all nonsense.

Sometimes these labels are perfectly accurate. Marxists exist. Racists exist. Conspiracy theorists exist, and Lord knows the Internet has manufactured enough of them. Antisemites don’t exist because that term is meaningless, but Jew-haters exist. The stunt occurs when the label is used not to describe an argument but to prevent anyone from having it. Once the guy complaining about grocery prices is busy proving he doesn't own a Che Guevara shirt, nobody has to explain why the grocery bill swallowed another hundred dollars.

Terribly intricate charts are obnoxious and hard to read, I know. But if you want to understand the big picture with these terms, zoom in on the image. Grasp it. Understand how it operates.

Burrito-Gate was an almost comically perfect demonstration. A $20 burrito became a stand-in for something much larger because ordinary Americans immediately understood the complaint. The point was never really the burrito. It was the experience of earning more dollars while discovering that those dollars purchase less life. Housing costs more. Insurance costs more. Food costs more. Vehicles cost more. Interest consumes more. Debt follows people around like a starving dog. The ordinary milestones of adulthood that previous generations regarded as mundane achievements increasingly require either extraordinary income or extraordinary debt.

And when people on the Right began saying that perhaps this deserves political attention, the ideological smoke alarms started screaming. Suddenly concern about affordability sounded suspiciously socialist. Caring whether workers can support families became economic illiteracy. Suggesting that government policy might have contributed to these conditions was treated as evidence that conservatives had abandoned capitalism. Dan Crenshaw, who invented the term “Woke Right” (which James Lindsay got from him), even framed concern about grocery prices as communism. The rhetorical purpose is obvious: move the argument away from whether Americans are being economically crushed and toward whether the person noticing it has committed ideological heresy.

Ben Shapiro’s response to the same broad economic frustration has repeatedly carried another Establishmentarian assumption: people must adapt themselves to the economy rather than asking whether the economy should be arranged to serve them. If you cannot afford to remain where generations of your family lived, move. If the local economy no longer supports you, acquire different skills. If your expectations exceed what the market presently provides, adjust your expectations. There is always some individual decision available, and therefore the system itself never has to enter the defendant’s box. When that fails, accuse the person of being entitled, selfish, spoiled, or ungrateful for living in the best country on Earth.

Tucker Carlson enrages them because he keeps dragging the system into the courtroom. What happened to the American working man? Why are people drowning in consumer debt? Why are families harder to form? Why did productive towns become wastelands while financial assets soared? Why should a conservative feel some sacred obligation to defend a corporation that will replace ten thousand American workers tomorrow morning if an algorithm can increase its margins by three percent? These questions violate the strange economic piety that took hold of the American Right, in which whatever outcome emerges from the existing economic order is presumed to be capitalism, and therefore questioning the outcome becomes an attack on capitalism itself.

That is nonsense. Capitalism is not God. Neither is GDP, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, quarterly earnings, shareholder value, or the sacred right of a multinational corporation to scour the earth for the cheapest human being capable of performing a task. We defend markets because private property, competition, entrepreneurship, voluntary exchange, and economic liberty have proved extraordinarily effective at producing prosperity and preserving human freedom. Capitalism is a means to human flourishing. Human beings are not raw material to be fed into capitalism so that economists can admire the output.

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Flock cameras are now drawing national attention (see Flock surveillance map below). But what if the surveillance system Americans are talking about now is simply a distraction from something far more powerful operating behind the scenes?

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Somewhere in Columbia, Maryland, a few miles from Fort Meade, a company most Americans have never heard of just finished moving into a building. It didn't come from Silicon Valley. It came from Tel Aviv, founded by a former Prime Minister of Israel. Its business is finding cameras that already belong to somebody else, breaking into them, and changing what they show. Not watching. Changing. While you've been staring at the pole camera on your street corner arguing about Flock, this company spent two years quietly walking through the front door of the American security state, and it just told the public it already has customers here. It won't say who.

“What’s that?” I asked one of my clients back in 2023.

I worked in finance, and he had pulled into our offices with what appeared to be cameras strapped to his car. His company “secured collateral” for ours. In other words, he was a repo guy. He told me, “That’s how we do what we do,” he told me, before explaining that finance companies, skip-tracers, private detectives, buy-here/pay-here car dealers, and anyone else who wants to can place license plate numbers in a database, pinging anyone with one of those cameras when they scan it, and they are always scanning, all the time. He told me he made extra cash between repos by laying warranty alerts on cars for manufacturers when they couldn't reach the owner by mail (proving they were notified of the warranty to decrease their liability concerns). The money he made from placing warranty fliers paid for the cameras. But the big money was repos. It didn’t matter if the lienholder was in Alaska; if the car is spotted in Atlanta, anyone driving by with such a camera would be dinged, and the car would be legally repossessed at the next stop.

This, of course, horrified me. My further questions revealed that the local police don’t use it, but they call him, and he uses it for them. But the company he used also stored the data, and most believe it’s being compiled. What that means is that, with the volume of cameras out there, they likely know which doughnut shop you're at on Tuesday mornings and the route you take home from work.

I’ve followed a watered-down, civilian-level “pattern of life” deterrence rules for years - taking different routes home to be unpredictable, or taking unnecessary turns when being followed, etc.- because paranoia has always been a hobby. I spent weeks researching ways around these new devices; chemical sprays for the license plate (illegal), magnetic obstructions (illegal), invisible flashing license plate holders, you name it. None work. If they want you, they will find you. And the “they” in this hypothetical is absolutely anyone with the cash to pay, and it comes cheap.

FLOCK

Three years later, and the technology has grown exponentially. If you have spent any time on social media lately, you’ve probably learned what a Flock camera is. The automated license-plate readers have been quietly multiplying alongside American roads for years, perched on poles at intersections, entrances to subdivisions and parking lots, photographing passing vehicles and turning those photographs into searchable records of where cars have been and when they were there. Suddenly, everybody seems to be looking up and noticing them. Roughly 120,000 Flock cameras now operate across 49 states, generating an estimated 20 billion scans every month. More than 50 jurisdictions have ended their relationships with Flock after the outrage - largely thanks to Tucker and many others who’ve sounded the alarm - while other jurisdictions are reconsidering, and the backlash has become so intense that the company announced sweeping new “safeguards” this week.

The outrage is not difficult to understand. A Flock camera does more than photograph the license plate of a car suspected in a crime. It photographs everybody’s car, builds a database from the resulting images, and lets authorized users search that accumulated history when they want to know where a particular vehicle has been. A tool sold as a way to find stolen cars and murder suspects therefore creates something much larger as a byproduct: an enormous privately operated network capable of reconstructing portions of the movements of ordinary Americans who were never suspected of doing anything wrong. The problem is that a machine capable of finding a kidnapped child is also capable of finding your ex-wife. Some police officers apparently figured that out.

More than 50 officers have now reportedly been accused of misusing automated license-plate-reader systems, with Flock involved in most of the tracked cases. Officers have been accused of using the network to follow spouses, girlfriends, and other people for reasons unrelated to legitimate police work. In Georgia alone, multiple officers were fired and arrested this summer following investigations into their use of Flock. This week, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office suspended three deputies’ access while investigating possible misuse (just their access to the software, not their jobs). CEO Garrett Langley has effectively conceded that relying on police departments to police themselves was not enough.

Another problem is receiving considerably less attention. Researchers say Flock can be hacked. Flock says it never has been. Some experts disagree. After confirmed police misuse of Flock, it’s bad enough that cops have access to it. It would appear that the giant spy network could be vulnerable to people even less scrupulous than they.

The Flock controversy therefore contains three separate problems that tend to get mashed together. There is surveillance, because an enormous network continuously records vehicles belonging overwhelmingly to innocent people. There is access, because thousands of law-enforcement users can search portions of that network and some have allegedly abused that privilege. And there is security, because every internet-connected device presents some attack surface, and researchers have demonstrated it’s possible. No matter how secure that system allegedly is, America has planted tens of thousands of networked cameras along its roads, and a security state is in place. The nightmare of a dystopian, Orwellian existence imagined in practically every sci-fi or futuristic book and movie is now reality.

That should bother you. It bothers people on the political left who spent twenty years warning about the surveillance state, and it bothers people on the political right who have recently discovered that the surveillance state occasionally considers them worthy of surveillance, too. The backlash has become remarkably bipartisan. Flock cameras have been vandalized, covered, and turned into a national symbol of a government that seems increasingly incapable of encountering a new technology without asking how efficiently it can be used to monitor us. There are now 120,000 cameras, and 20 billion monthly vehicle scans, keeping tabs on people who never broke the law.

YOU’VE SEEN NOTHING YET

But suppose, just for a moment, we’ve seen nothing yet. Suppose it gets much, much worse. Suppose the frightening development is not merely a company building its own nationwide surveillance network, but technology designed to locate existing cameras, penetrate them remotely, take control of their feeds, and watch through them. Suppose that tech could reach beyond purpose-built police cameras to ordinary internet-connected surveillance devices, like Ring cams, dash cams, web cams, and phone cams. Suppose the operator could manipulate what a camera was showing in real time, reach backward into recorded video and alter that too. The nightmare would no longer require somebody to install a government camera outside your house. The cameras already surrounding us would constitute the raw material.

Such technology does not belong to a dystopian novel, and I am not describing some hypothetical capability that might exist twenty years from now. Internal company documents obtained by Haaretz have already described the existence of this class of spy tech. A former Israeli prime minister and one of Israel’s highest-ranking military cyber officials founded the company behind it. One of the same venture-capital firms behind Flock also backs it. Brought to you, in other words, by some of the same people who brought you Flock.

The company’s name is Toka.

And so while Flock cameras are now trending on social media and Americans are waking up to the fact they’ve all been staring in a real-world version of Big Brother, Toka has been quietly moving its headquarters to the United States, openly recruiting intelligence personnel to sell its technology to the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies, and now says it already has customers here. And its customers, supposedly, only include the government.

THE FASCINATING SOURCES USED TO WRITE THIS ARTICLE, AND MORE FOR YOUR OWN ADDED RESEARCH, ARE LINKED BELOW.

ISRAELI SPY TECH

Toka was founded in Israel in 2018 by former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak and retired IDF Brigadier General Yaron Rosen, who had served as chief of the Israeli military’s Cyber Staff. Joining them were Alon Kantor, a former Check Point executive, and Kfir Waldman, a veteran of Cisco and Israel’s technology sector. From its beginning, Toka was aimed not at consumers or ordinary businesses but at governments, intelligence agencies, militaries and law enforcement. The company’s messaging is careful and antiseptic, describing technology for “targeted intelligence,” “forensic investigations” and “covert operations.”

But according to documents obtained by Haaretz, an operator could designate a geographic area and identify vulnerable security cameras within it. Toka’s technology would then exploit those cameras, allowing its customer to watch their feeds without the camera owner's cooperation. The target could be an ordinary internet-connected camera made by anyone - like your Ring cam. Those cams could become intelligence assets simply because somebody had found a way inside them. Toka described the idea in its own marketing materials as transforming “untapped IoT sensors into intelligence sources.”

Haaretz reported that Toka’s technology could manipulate video feeds and previously recorded footage. A technical expert who reviewed the materials for the newspaper said the manipulation could be performed without leaving evidence that the camera had been compromised. Secretly watching through somebody else’s camera is surveillance. But secretly changing what the camera recorded attacks the reliability of the record itself. A camera that supposedly provides objective evidence of what happened can instead become a tool for changing what everyone subsequently believes happened. It’s a framing tool. Why would governments want to plant false video?

Ordinarily, the argument is about whether authorities had the right to obtain the footage. But once technology capable of covertly altering stored recordings exists, the question is: how do you establish that the video being presented today is real?

Toka has pushed back against claims it’s a hacking company. Rosen has described its position as “something in the middle” between offensive and defensive cyber operations, and the company presents its products as “lawful tools restricted to vetted government customers.” Its technology has also been subject to Israeli Defense Ministry oversight. They advertise that to help people sleep better at night, knowing it couldn’t possibly be used for ulterior motives.

I’m not saying that Toka has hacked a Flock camera. But what has been demonstrated independently is that Flock’s physical cameras are not invulnerable. Security researcher Jon Gaines demonstrated a method of hacking into a Flock camera in roughly thirty seconds with physical access to the device. GainSec researchers subsequently documented more than 50 vulnerabilities, including outdated Android components with hundreds of known vulnerabilities, while another incident exposed more than 60 live camera feeds online. Flock is bad enough. Now, imagine the government - or your enemies - has access to all of Flock. And every other camera in your home. That tech exists.

America has spent billions of dollars covering itself in networked cameras while an Israeli cyber company has simultaneously spent years developing tools for turning other people’s networked cameras into intelligence sources. And both companies have some of the same investors. One of the companies is also overseen by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Right now, we Americans are presently arguing about whether police should be allowed to install 120,000 cameras, and which agencies should be permitted to search them. Toka eliminates the first requirement altogether. The camera could have been installed by a business owner, a city, another police department or somebody who thought he was purchasing a security system to protect himself. The useful intelligence asset is no longer merely the surveillance network somebody deliberately constructed. It is the universe of vulnerable cameras already connected to the internet.

And if Toka were merely an obscure Israeli cybersecurity company selling exotic tools on the other side of the world, that would already make for an interesting story. It isn’t. The people behind Toka lead directly back into an intelligence and surveillance ecosystem I’ve brought to you at I2I before. Including a former Israeli prime minister whose name appeared repeatedly in our investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, Unit 8200 and the commercialization of Israeli surveillance technology.

Yes, Ehud Barak is back. This time, as far as I can tell, Epstein isn’t.

PREVIOUS I2I INTEL REPORT

I2I subscribers may remember Ehud Barak from an investigation I published in February into Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement in the Israeli surveillance-technology industry. That article followed a trail stretching back to the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s, through Israel’s extraordinary investment in military cyber capabilities, into the modern ecosystem of former Israeli intelligence personnel who leave government service and build enormously valuable commercial technology companies. One recurring figure was Barak, who developed an extensive relationship with Epstein and later became involved in an Israeli emergency-communications startup eventually renamed Carbyne.

Carbyne offered emergency dispatchers dramatically improved location information, video communications and other data that could help police, firefighters and paramedics respond faster. Behind that perfectly legitimate application, however, sat an unusual collection of people from the Israeli national-security world. One of Carbyne’s early directors was Pinchas Buchris, the former commander of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals-intelligence unit. Co-founder Alex Dizengof had worked in cybersecurity for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff joined the board. And sitting among them was former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Epstein’s role made that story considerably stranger. Barak acknowledged that Epstein helped finance the company through an investment arrangement in which Barak was also involved, and reporting later established that Epstein’s participation was intentionally kept out of public view. Epstein was simultaneously cultivating relationships across the technology and intelligence worlds, corresponding extensively with Barak and taking a particular interest in Israeli cyber companies. That was the part of the Epstein story that fascinated us because it was so different from the story everyone else was telling. While the public stared at the cameras in Epstein’s bedrooms, his money and relationships were intersecting with people building considerably more sophisticated surveillance technology. My February article argued that the cameras on Little St. James were only one part of a much larger story about information, access and the commercialization of intelligence capabilities.

Toka brings us back to Barak through a different door. Epstein does not appear in the company’s publicly documented founding or financing history. Barak himself co-founded Toka in 2018 with Alon Kantor, Kfir Waldman and retired IDF Brigadier General Yaron Rosen. This was not simply Barak buying shares in an interesting cybersecurity startup after somebody else built it. Toka announced him as one of its founders from the beginning. Eight years later, the same company is openly advertising technology for covert government operations and says it has customers in the United States.

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Rosen may be even more relevant to understanding what Toka actually is. He served as an Israeli Air Force pilot before rising to brigadier general and becoming chief of the IDF Cyber Staff, where he helped coordinate the Israeli military’s cyber activities. That puts one of the men responsible for building Israel’s military cyber capabilities beside a former prime minister and defense minister in a private company commercializing cyber capabilities for foreign governments. Toka did not emerge from a Silicon Valley garage populated by four college kids trying to build a better doorbell camera. Its pedigree runs straight through the Israeli national-security establishment.

If you recall from that article, Israel has spent decades developing an unusually sophisticated cyber workforce through its military and intelligence institutions, especially Unit 8200 and adjacent cyber commands. Veterans routinely leave government service for the private technology sector, taking with them skills acquired while working on real intelligence and military problems. Many have built successful cybersecurity companies, and have made the Israelis billions. Most are invasive tech that spies on Americans, including Cellebrite’s phone-forensics technology and the Pegasus spyware. Much of that tech, experts believe, was created through U.S. public-sector research and development by the CIA’s InQTel or DARPA, shared with Israeli Intelligence (for free), given to a freshly “retired” Unit 8200 CyberCommando, and sold back to Americans through an Israeli Silicon Valley start-up. We know the money is going back to Israel. But many suspect our intelligence data is, too. The Waze GPS app is one example that has raised these suspicions. If you’ve used it, there’s a good chance Israeli intelligence knows the route you take to church.

That was the central historical lesson I drew from PROMIS in February. The cleverest way into another country’s information infrastructure is not necessarily to break through the window. Sometimes you build something the target desperately wants, convince him to purchase it, and let him open the front door himself.

Toka is now opening that door in the United States. But before I get to Washington, another connection makes the sudden national fixation on Flock cameras almost perfectly timed. Toka and Flock do not merely inhabit the same world of surveillance technology. They share a major investor, and one of the men behind that investment firm personally tried to put both technologies into the hands of the same American police department. That man is Ben Horowitz.

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The story of Leap Castle goes back 750 years and is one of mass murder, violent carnage, and blood crying out from the ground. A house of horrors dating back centuries, its story would be intriguing even without the Plymouth Brethren, who once fine-tuned Dispensational doctrines there, and Darby’s lineage, who later turned it into a house of the Occult. I encountered the fascinating tale of Darby’s family home while researching for my book, A Century of Scofield. There is a grim irony in Christian Zionism’s roots reaching back toward the Bloody Chapel. The sapling of Darby’s day grew through Scofield, spread its roots through American evangelicalism, and matured into a political theology powerful enough to move governments, money, and munitions. Two centuries later, the tree stands full-grown in the Holy Land, and its fruit is blood.

The first bones could have been mistaken for rubble. Leap Castle had accumulated plenty of both during its long life on the Irish frontier, where generations built new stone upon old stone and sealed yesterday’s rooms behind tomorrow’s walls. Somewhere inside the so-called “Bloody Chapel,” high in the ancient tower, workmen found a narrow opening leading down into darkness. Dust hung in the air as debris was pulled upward from a chamber that had been closed long enough for nobody living to remember what was inside. Then came a human bone. Then another. Soon there was no mistaking what they had opened.

It was a mass grave. Untold scores of bones, to no telling how many human beings of different sizes, long decayed, lay in piles. Bones beneath bones.

The chamber was an oubliette, from the French oublier, or “to forget,” a medieval prison designed with cruel intent. No conventional door was needed because its occupant entered from above. A man could be lowered or dropped into the darkness and left there while life continued a few feet overhead. They wouldn’t be coming up. At Leap, the forgotten had apparently accumulated. Human remains came out of the chamber in such quantity that the castle’s history records three cartloads of skeletons being hauled away. Those were roughly eight-foot carts drawn by horse, three to four feet deep, so that’s a lot of bodies.

Just imagine the wheels grinding across the earth outside, while another load was brought down from the tower, bones knocking against bones beneath the Irish daylight. Later storytellers supplied exact numbers, spikes, and increasingly elaborate methods of torture, but none of that is necessary. Three cartloads of human remains are grotesque enough. The signs of death, many being torture, were evident even in total decay. Their torture, evidently, was someone else’s recreation.

The room concealing them had already been named the Bloody Chapel. That was before the bones and torture chamber were found. According to the old O’Carroll tradition, a struggle for control of the clan ended when one brother entered the chapel while another, a priest, was celebrating Mass and killed him at the altar. Blood spilled where the sacrament was being administered, and the name remained long after the blood disappeared. Around that story accumulated others: prisoners who entered the castle but never left, footsteps following people through empty corridors, human figures appearing where no living person stood, and breathing heard in rooms that should have contained nobody at all.

Some of those stories are folklore. Others were eventually written down by people who actually lived inside the castle, and the difference between the two will become important. What is not folklore is the castle itself, the Bloody Chapel, the concealed chamber, or the human remains hauled from it. Nor is there any mystery about the family that eventually inherited the castle and occupied its rooms while the old stories continued being told.

In 1823, Leap Castle passed to an Anglo-Irish landowner whose numerous children included a son already preparing for a life in the church. That son would become one of the most consequential religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, although almost nobody who has studied the theological system he invented in his convalescent bed has ever been asked to picture the old stone tower, the chapel straight above the death chamber, or the torture and occultic experiences that famously took place there.

His name was John Nelson Darby, and the strange history of the house bearing his family’s name had just begun.

THE CASTLE

Darby was not born there. He was born in Westminster in 1800 into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family whose interests stretched across England and Ireland, the kind of family in which property, military distinction, politics, and marriage bound one generation to the next. Leap belonged first to his uncle, Admiral Sir Henry d’Esterre Darby, a celebrated naval officer who had commanded HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of the Nile under Nelson. When the admiral died without children in 1823, the castle passed directly to his younger brother John, John Nelson Darby’s father. So this was no crumbling ancestral curiosity last occupied by a Darby two hundred years before, but Leap belonged to the people sitting around John Nelson Darby’s family table.

I’ve seen the transfer in Darby’s own handwriting. In June 1823, the twenty-two-year-old Darby wrote to his older brother, William Henry, at Leap about the legal arrangements their father was executing. The surviving letter is boring, full of deeds, trustees, leasing powers, parcels of land, wine, and family business. While the younger Darby was moving toward the life of religion that would eventually consume him, his father had become the master of Leap Castle, and his brother was already there, handling the estate. Becoming the master of a castle was of generational importance, a matter of status, and considered a responsibility of stewardship.

For an Anglo-Irish landed family like the Darbys, the family castle was almost a sacred inheritance, not just an expensive house. It was the physical embodiment of the family: its antiquity, rank, continuity, land, marriages, military service, and accumulated reputation set in stone. Estates were expected to pass through generations; portraits of the dead watched the living from the walls; family papers accumulated in libraries and strongrooms; and the house gave the family its geographic identity. A London residence might be more comfortable and more frequently occupied, but the ancestral seat answered the more important question of where a family belonged. To inherit Leap was to inherit the Darby name in material form, along with the land and tenants surrounding it and the obligations and prestige attached to both. A man might spend years elsewhere and still understand the castle as the fixed point around which generations of his family revolved.

That is why calling Leap merely Darby’s “ancestral castle” can make the connection sound weaker than it was. In the nineteenth-century landed world, the ancestral seat mattered most symbolically. It connected the living Darbys to dead Darbys and promised that another generation would inhabit the same rooms after them. When Leap passed to John Nelson’s father and then his brother, it remained inside the immediate family line, occupied by his kin. The castle was the family’s monument to its own continuity, a great pile of stone intended to outlive every individual Darby who temporarily called it home.

When their father died in 1834, Leap passed again, this time to William Henry. He took up residence in the castle with his wife, Laura, and their children, Jonathan and Mary Charlotte. The medieval fortress became a Victorian family home without ever ceasing to look like a castle. Old stone rooms and newer additions, libraries and studies tucked into walls built for defense, and servants moving through passages where armed men had once stood watch. One room had been constructed by the admiral to resemble the cabin of his ship, complete with lockers, bookshelves, secret corners, and mysterious little drawers. William Henry made it his private study, filling the old warrior’s imitation ship cabin with books and writing.

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His daughter, Mary Charlotte, grew up wandering through it all. Her surviving diary shows a young woman raised amid unusual privilege and enormous intellectual curiosity, traveling through France and Germany, visiting cathedrals, museums, galleries, and churches before returning to the old family seat in Ireland. Leap was not merely a ruin with a famous name. Ordinary life happened there, and ordinary domestic life unfolded inside walls that had already been standing for centuries.

Then William Henry followed his younger brother into the Restorationist movement with John Nelson. His path wandered for a time through a fascination with Roman Catholicism, but he eventually joined the Brethren, took an active interest in their growth, contributed to their literature, and participated in the movement over which his brother exercised enormous influence. Leap Castle had therefore become something stranger than the ancestral home of the man later remembered as the father of Dispensationalism. The Plymouth Brethren were inside the castle now.

William Henry could sit writing theology in the admiral’s old study while his children occupied the rooms around him and visitors passed through the ancient corridors outside. Whatever stories the stones had accumulated remained, for the moment, stories. The Darbys had inherited an old castle and were busy turning it into a Christian home.

Then, in 1852, decades into the growth of Dispensationalism at bizarre prophecy conferences and churches here and there, one of the guests started to hear breathing coming from something unseen in their room in Darby Castle.

SOMETHING BREATHING

For years, the supernatural stories attached to Leap Castle could be dismissed with an easy explanation. Mildred Darby, the eccentric woman who married into the family late in the nineteenth century, became fascinated with spiritualism and eventually wrote publicly about the demons she believed inhabited the castle. A woman holding séances in an ancient Irish fortress is perfectly capable of manufacturing a ghost story. Some have alleged that her claims of hauntedness were the result of a fanciful mind, that she was making it up, or that it was all legend. Unfortunately for that explanation, someone in the Darby family had already written the strange happenings down decades before Mildred was born.

In October 1852, Mary Charlotte Darby was twenty-one years old and living at Leap with her parents, William Henry and Laura, when a visitor named Mr. Barton came to stay. Barton was apparently something of a character, and Mary recorded him telling grotesque stories for amusement, including an episode in which he had carried the severed head of a baby in his pocket to frighten his friends. I found a historian, Crawford Gribben, who wondered if he had an appetite for frightening people, and perhaps that’s a better explanation than supernaturality at Leap. But Mary wasn’t frightened by him, and she initially seemed entertained by him. Then, with Barton present, some strange and inexplicable things began to happen in the castle. He was the first to notice what can best be described as unseen spirits.

On Friday night there were what Mary called “all sorts of queer things.” By Saturday, whatever Barton claimed to be experiencing had escalated enough that Mary recorded him as being “frightened out of his wits.” Some have suggested that castles are just naturally scary places. Timber moved. Doors shifted. Wind found cracks in walls several feet thick and produced sounds impossible to locate in the darkness. A guest already filling his imagination with demons and severed heads hardly needed much assistance from the architecture. That’s their theory. I’d say that someone with such a dark sense of humor as Barton would be the least likely to grow terrified by nothing. But on Monday morning, he came downstairs looking, in Mary’s words, “more dead than alive.” During the night he said he had heard footsteps, followed by “a devilish sort of breathing close to his ears.

Whatever Barton thought had entered the room was no distant knock somewhere behind the stonework. He described something close enough to breathe beside his head while he lay there listening to it. The Darbys could have laughed at their guest and sent him home with another story to tell. Instead, they did something you’ll find really weird; they opened the wall.

There was nothing inside it. Jonathan slept in the room with Barton afterward, and the great supernatural assault was reduced to a door slamming during the night, which they could not explain, but it was better than mystery breathing.

But the weird thing is, the weird things didn’t end with Barton. By the time Anna Stoney spent the winter of 1864 at Leap, its reputation as “haunted” was well known. She was the daughter of James Butler Stoney, an important figure in the Brethren movement and a close associate of John Nelson. Anna lived with the Darbys long enough to experience normal family life, essentially taking up residence, accompanying William Henry to the little Brethren meetings. By Anna’s recollection, stories of something supernatural at Leap were already part of the house. By this time, it seems in the record, most of the family and possibly the community considered spirits at the castle a given; whether part of the charm or not, it’s unclear. They started twelve years earlier and kept going so often that they became well known.

Stoney gives the account in the castle lore of a woman said to have been imprisoned in the castle before throwing herself from the parapet. On a particular February night, the story went, the dead woman could still be heard making the journey again. First came the rustling of a silk dress moving through the gallery, then the sound of the fall, followed by silence. Her account establishes that by 1864, a quarter-century before the famous occult-minded Mildred Darby moved into Leap, people living there knew the castle as a place with a ghost or demonic tradition.

Mildred would eventually “investigate” or dabble in the supernatural and describe an entity that became famous as Leap’s “Elemental.” She did not, however, invent the haunted castle. The family had accepted that as fact while John Nelson Darby was still alive.

JOHN NELSON AS A CHILD

Another story about John Nelson Darby is stranger than what Mary Charlotte recorded in her diary. Darby is staying overnight there on a visit (it was later revealed the story was shared in a conversation about Leap Castle), still in bed but not asleep, when he becomes aware that he is no longer alone. A man is standing in the room; the figure appears hooded, and he says nothing. He simply stands there in the darkness with Darby.

Darby does not flee the room or cry out for help, and according to the story, he responds with words to the effect of, “Take what you want.” The hooded figure crosses to the furniture, comes close to Darby, and takes something. The tale never identifies what he takes. Darby told him to take what he wanted. He took it. The figure then turns toward Darby, apparently acknowledging his permission, and disappears. Whatever was there is suddenly gone, and Darby is left awake in the old house without an explanation for what had just happened.

The account survives by Darby biographer Max Weremchuk. Weremchuk received it from a member of the Exclusive Brethren. The informant did not pretend to know more than he knew. The trail therefore disappears backward after only a few generations of retelling.

What makes the account difficult to dismiss, if someone thinks Darby would dismiss ghost stories, is that he didn’t. Darby inhabited a world in which invisible powers were quite real, evil spirits remained active, supernatural manifestations continued into his own century, and Christians occasionally encountered things for which ordinary explanations were insufficient. More remarkably, Darby did not claim merely to believe that such encounters remained possible. Elsewhere, when asked directly whether demonic activity still occurred in his own day, he gave a short answer.

“Yes.”

Then someone asked how he could recognize it. This time Darby’s answer moved the question out of ancient Palestine and into his own experience. He believed that he had seen it himself.

“I BELIEVE I HAVE SEEN IT”

To Darby, demons, possession, and supernatural manifestations were not just relics of the biblical world. He wrote an entire essay entitled “Demoniacal Possession,” rejected attempts to explain every biblical possession as ordinary disease, and believed the same invisible powers remained active in nineteenth-century Europe. “Witchcraft is not gone,” he wrote while discussing contemporary spiritualism and “spirit-rapping.” Some of it was fraud, certainly, but Darby did not believe fraud could account for all of it.

His understanding of demonic activity was subtler than spinning heads and bodies thrown across rooms. Darby believed evil spiritual powers could act upon both the body and the mind. Under sufficiently powerful influence, he thought, a person might receive thoughts from an external spiritual intelligence while experiencing them as his own. He also believed such activity could occur within religious movements, wrapped in Christian language and accompanied by apparently impressive spiritual manifestations. Darby was no hyper-Cessationist.

During one recorded Bible reading, someone asked Darby whether people could still be demonically possessed. “Yes,” he answered. When asked how such a thing could be recognized, Darby acknowledged that the judgment required spiritual discernment and then quietly crossed the line from theological speculation into autobiography: “I believe I have seen it; but that is a question of my discernment.”

Elsewhere he was more certain. Describing unusual spiritual manifestations, Darby wrote, “I have witnessed such,” adding that the evidence had identified them to him with “the active energy of Satan.” In Somersetshire he recalled being asked to intervene in a bizarre situation surrounding a previously successful evangelist whose behavior had begun disrupting an entire Christian assembly. Darby initially refused even to approach the situation, but eventually worked up the courage. His tentative judgment that first evening was, “I cannot say, but I think it is of the devil.” By the following day he had made up his mind. “I said it was the devil.”

None of this tells us what happened in the bedroom of Leap Castle. It does establish something more useful. The story about Darby encountering a hooded figure did not come from a man who would have considered such an event impossible. John Nelson Darby himself said that he had witnessed phenomena he attributed to Satan and believed he had personally seen what may have been demonic activity. Whatever else we make of the ghost story, the supernatural Darby is not an invention of the ghost story.

THE WOMAN WHO WENT LOOKING FOR IT

John Nelson Darby died in 1882. Seven years later, a young woman named Mildred Dill married his great-nephew, Jonathan Charles Darby, and came to live at Leap Castle. By then the old fortress had accumulated centuries of bloodshed and generations of stories, including the strange events Mary Charlotte had recorded while John Nelson was alive. Mildred did something the earlier Darbys apparently had not. Rather than merely living among the stories, she went looking for whatever might be behind them.

Mildred became fascinated with psychical research, spiritualism, and the possibility that Leap was genuinely inhabited by supernatural entities. She experimented with automatic writing and séances and eventually claimed encounters with something far more disturbing than the melancholy woman of the old family legend. In 1908, writing in The Occult Review, Mildred described what became known as Leap Castle’s “Elemental,” an apparition she portrayed as roughly sheep-sized, with a human-like face, dark cavities for eyes, and a sickening odor accompanying its appearance. Whatever she experienced, imagined, or helped create through years of occult experimentation, Mildred transformed Leap from a castle with ghost stories into one of Ireland’s most notorious haunted houses.

Another peculiarity in Mildred’s biography stood out, in that she had been raised among the Plymouth Brethren. The woman who would eventually conduct séances there and write publicly about encountering an elemental spirit had grown up inside Darby’s Dispensational Cult (I use the term “cult,” not because it was Dispensational, but becuase it was a cult; the Exclusive Brethren, under Darby, fit that definition during its earliest years). This doesn’t mean she picked up her interest in the Occult from the Brethren, to be clear. But she’s not the only one. Aleister Crowley was born into a devout Plymouth Brethren household thirteen years before Mildred arrived at Leap. He also revolted against his upbringing in the Brethren, and once, having been a devout follower when he was younger, having stated, “I could not believe that anyone could not believe it,” ultimately inverted Darby’s Dispensations into an Occult version of it in his Aeons, and fashioned a Satanic faith modeled after Darby’s general premises. I’m not blaming Darby for Crowley. But Crowley definitely borrowed his main ideas.

Mildred was entering a difficult marriage. She was intelligent, restless, and determined to write, while Jonathan - 15 years older - apparently had little enthusiasm for having a novelist for a trophy wife, and she wrote under a pseudonym against his permission. Leap itself soon became one of her subjects. She explored blocked passages, rooms, staircases, and forgotten portions of the structure while experimenting with séances and automatic writing (the spiritualist practice in which a person surrendered control of the pen in hopes that another intelligence would guide the hand). She was no longer merely hearing the old family stories about its hauntedness, but actively searching the castle, physically and psychically, for whatever might be behind them. By 1898 she had begun turning Leap into Gothic literature, disguising it as “Kilman Castle” in a story published in Belgravia. A decade later she published a much fuller account in The Occult Review.

Mildred reported footsteps, screams, sudden pockets of unnatural cold, and female apparitions moving through the castle. Most notorious was something she called the “Thing,” which I mentioned earlier, also called the Elemental. She described a grey, grotesquely proportioned creature with dark cavities around its eyes and something disturbingly human in its face. Its most memorable feature was not its appearance but its smell. Mildred associated the creature with an overpowering stench of decomposition, as though something dead had entered the room before it became visible. In one account, she and Jonathan reportedly confronted the Thing together on the gallery. It was apparently so real that Jonathan’s first reaction was that he thought she was pulling a prank, so he at least saw it and appears to have reluctantly admitted it. He was eager to tone down her claims and didn’t want the attention drawn to the castle as Occultic.

LEAP’S HAUNTED HISTORY

Before returning to the Darbys, it is worth going backward, because calling Leap Castle “haunted” almost trivializes what really happened there. Long before the Darbys reported footsteps in empty corridors or something breathing beside a bed, Leap was a fortress built to dominate a strategic river crossing and the pass through the Slieve Bloom Mountains. It was not designed primarily for comfort. Its thick walls, defensive rooms, dungeons, concealed passages, and commanding position existed because medieval Ireland was violent, and the people who controlled Leap intended to remain in control. By the sixteenth century, those people were the O’Carrolls, and their history at Leap reads less like a family genealogy than a casualty list. A surprisingly early source, Constance Louisa Adams’s 1904 Castles of Ireland, describes large dungeons beneath the keep, bricked-up passages, secret chambers, and a guardroom carved directly from rock.

The violence was already old by then. In 1489, John O’Carroll died of plague at Leap during an outbreak so severe that Adams records hundreds of bodies lying unburied in the surrounding countryside, like a scene from Stephen King’s The Stand. In 1513, Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare and Lord Deputy of Ireland, marched against the O’Carrolls and attempted to take the castle. Leap held. FitzGerald withdrew to gather a larger force and heavier artillery, but died before he could return. His successor attacked again in 1516 and partially demolished the fortress. Leap survived that too. The castle standing over the pass was already accustomed to siege, disease, death, and rebuilding before the family murders for which it became infamous had even begun.

Then the O’Carrolls began killing one another. After the death of the chieftain Mulrooney O’Carroll in 1532, the question of succession opened a feud within the clan. The most famous killing occurred inside the castle chapel. According to the longstanding O’Carroll tradition, one of the rivals for power was a priest who was celebrating Mass before members of his own family when his brother entered the chapel armed with a sword. The priest was attacked at the altar and died there. Later accounts identify the murdered priest as Thaddeus and his rival as Teige O’Carroll, although the details get hazy in the accounts. The central tradition is that brother murdered brother during Mass, and the room thereafter became known as the Bloody Chapel.

The remarkable thing is how little that murder stands out once the rest of the family history is laid beside it. It was a long, bloody history. Teige O’Carroll was subsequently killed by his kinsman Cahir O’Carroll. Then, in 1554, Teige’s younger brother William killed him. William was then murdered in 1581 by his O’Conor relatives. His son John inherited the position and was murdered the following year by his cousin Mulrony. John’s brother Charles answered that killing by murdering Mulrony and taking power himself. Within a few generations, control of Leap passed repeatedly through bloodshed, with one relative killing another, only to be killed in turn by someone avenging an earlier killing or advancing another claim.

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Their enemies and hired soldiers sometimes fared even worse. Leap tradition records that the O’Carrolls occasionally hired mercenaries to eliminate rivals and then discovered an economical way to pay them. One story is that thirty-nine mercenaries from the O’Neills clan who had just “done a job” for them were invited back to Leap for a celebratory feast. Their food was poisoned, and the mercenaries were finished off by having their throats cut, and their bodies were thrown into the castle’s dungeon. Frankly, Darby’s family castle was basically the horror scene of a Rob Zombie film.

In 1599, Charles O’Carroll was fighting against Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and employed MacMahon mercenaries from Monaghan. They fought for him and afterward returned expecting payment and hospitality. The Leap tradition says the men were entertained and then murdered while they slept. Reportedly, Charles O’Carroll had grown suspicious of his own soldiers and, when the time came to pay them, killed approximately 150 of his own men along with MacMahon nobles. Whatever the precise number, Charles did not survive the consequences for long. In 1600, he was himself killed in retaliation. The rhythm of Leap had become almost mechanical: employ men, kill men, avenge men, inherit, murder, inherit again.

See why it took at least three wagons of bones to carry off the dead? Imagine the smell coming out of that place in July, mercy sakes.

The oubliette, or dungeon, was explored in 1904 - while it was still a Darby property - , which is when the human remains came out and were eventually buried in consecrated ground. Mixed among them were pieces of several old watches, meaning those deaths went right up until shortly before the Darbys got it. They found wooden spikes upon which victims supposedly landed after being dropped through the trap above.

But the dungeon was not even the only place human remains appeared. “Numerous bones” had been discovered in different portions of the castle. More human bones had been found in a field near the river below. Beneath the keep were more large dungeons. Inside the structure were sealed passages and secret chambers. The castle had been repeatedly expanded and altered, leaving portions of earlier Leap swallowed inside later construction. Walls could conceal rooms. Floors could conceal shafts. A person living there in the nineteenth century could walk through a comfortable Victorian household every day while entire pieces of the medieval fortress remained closed, bricked over, or forgotten.

That’s why, when Mary Charlotte Darby recorded frightened guests hearing inexplicable sounds, and when the family responded by actually opening a wall to see what was behind it, they were not behaving quite as irrationally as it first appears. Leap really did have things behind its walls. There were blocked passages, hidden chambers, dungeons, and a dungeon full of human remains. In a castle repeatedly rebuilt across centuries, there really might be another room on the other side, and history had already demonstrated that what waited there was not always empty.

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What happens when a theology that tells American Christians they must “become Jewish” collides with a foreign government spending millions to keep evangelicals politically loyal to Israel? Dan Burmawi’s recent article provides an unusually revealing case study. He tells Christians they have been grafted into “Israel’s covenantal family,” praises rabbis as models for Christian preaching, and argues that Christianity becomes corrupted when separated from its “Jewish identity.” On its own, that would be bad theology worth correcting. But placed inside a documented Israeli influence campaign specifically targeting American evangelicals, it becomes considerably more interesting. Every theological error in Burmawi’s article bends in exactly the same direction, toward making Christian faithfulness indistinguishable from identity with Israel.

Israel’s continued existence in the Middle East depends heavily upon American charity, and not merely the billions of dollars Washington pours into the IDF every year. The United States provides Israel with the diplomatic armor of its U.N. Security Council veto, replenishes its weapons, subsidizes its military, and when Israel’s wars threaten to outrun its capacity to cash the checks it writes, American military power waits behind it like a second big brother who doesn’t care who started it.

But the American public underwriting Israel’s outsized ambitions at regional hegemony has grown tired of it. After Gaza, Americans have spent years watching Israeli conduct that is incompatible with the Western and Christian values invoked to justify the alliance in the first place. We have watched Washington discover seemingly bottomless reserves of money, weapons, diplomatic capital, and political urgency for a wealthy foreign nation while telling Americans that our own borders, infrastructure, housing crisis, and collapsing dollar are problems too complicated to solve. Worse, we have watched American politicians speak about Israel with a reverence and obedience they rarely display toward American Citizens who elected them. We live under the reality that a U.S. Congressman is infinitely more likely to discuss West Bank settlement than housing problems in the U.S.

The thread holding Israel like a spider on a web over an Islamic Middle East is gripped by two hands. One belongs to the old NeoCon war machine, for which Israel is viewed like the goose that lays golden eggs, with every crisis being an existential threat requiring more arms that turn the global war economy. Every failed intervention becomes the justification for the next one: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq. For the defense industry and its Washington priesthood, a Middle East permanently five minutes from Armageddon is not a policy failure, but job security.

The other hand belongs to American evangelicalism. Millions of Christians have been taught for generations that underwriting the modern State of Israel is obedience to God. The Israeli government therefore received something no ordinary American ally could purchase: a vast grassroots constituency trained to support Israel, no matter their ungodly, genocidal behavior, or even their mistreatment of Christians. Genesis 12 became a foreign-aid authorization, but praise be to God, that firewall is beginning to crack. Only 59 percent of evangelicals still regard backing Israel as necessary or ethical. A generation ago, questioning unconditional support for Israel could get a conservative Christian branded a heretic, an antisemite, or both. Today, it still does, but fewer people believe it.

Israel cannot easily replace them. Access to Washington can be paid for by money from Washington, in a never-ending loop of lobbying power. But support lost among evangelicals because the stranglehold of Darbyism and Dispensational Zionism is weakening as Christians turn to their Bible and return to Covenant Theology cannot be caught up by another check. That takes generations of brainwashing inside the Israeli evangelical influence operation, and it’s dying thanks to increased Biblical literacy. This is why the fight over Christian Zionism is not merely another intramural theological squabble between prophecy nerds. Israel’s survival hangs in the balance. And Israel is fighting for its life.

THE INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN

We know how Israel’s influence campaign works, because Insight to Incite uncovered it. We’ve seen the FARA filings, highlighting the Israeli government influence campaign. Their goal is to infiltrate and manipulate American churches, Christian radio, and connect with evangelical influencers who will take payment for pushing “narrative messaging,” IE propaganda that looks like authentic Bible study, but is, in fact, state-sponsored manipulation material.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry funds this work. The initiative commonly called Project 545 directs public-diplomacy money toward Christian and evangelical audiences. It is government-funded persuasion aimed at a specific American constituency. Israel’s public diplomacy funds are massive and work similarly to Soviet “Active Measures” during the height of the Cold War. But Israel doesn’t spread out the propaganda like Russia had to do over half the globe. Its influence campaign is concentrated singularly on the United States, and most of that, on evangelicals specifically. Evangelical America is under a constant COVID-level propaganda campaign and largely doesn’t know it, becuase it’s designed to look organic. Nobody expects foreign messaging to be coming from their own pulpit or Sunday School literature.

Friends of Zion and its museum in Israel appear to be a Christian Ministry. It is, in fact, an Israeli-funded influence op. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) appears like an organic Christian movement, but it coordinates its messaging on behalf of the Israeli government. The Fellowship of Israel Related Ministries (FIRM) is another cog in the wheel. And only a tiny amount of Israeli lobbying is legally filtered through FARA. Most of the time, evangelicals have no idea that they’ve been subjected to Bible-twisting on behalf of a foreign nation. And thanks to the subversive nature of this influence op, American Christians have to stop and really consider how much of it is authentic theology and how much is curated and funded by the nation of Israel.

DANNY BURMAWI

Danny Burmawi was born in Jordan in 1988. He spent his early life there as a Muslim before converting to Christianity, a decision he claims cost him his standing in his family and homeland. Because Jordan doesn’t let its citizens change their religion on their documents and civil affairs are governed under Sharia, with prohibitions on conversion and sanctions on apostates - something I can affirm from my time in Amman - he left Jordan and lived for 14 or 15 years in Lebanon, depending upon which of his bios is right. What he did there for 15 years, specifically, is unknown.

Lebanon was a natural place for him to go. It was carved out under French mandate in 1920 to create a state with a Christian plurality, and its 1943 National Pact still reserves the presidency for a Maronite Christian. There is no official state religion in Lebanon, and Christians held a strong demographic majority through much of the twentieth century, and many Americans never knew or couldn’t imagine a Christian-majority nation in the Middle East, but it was fact, not fiction. Unfortunately, Israel has changed that. Decades of Palestinian refugees and well more than a million Syrians since 2011 have caused the Christian majority to dwindle to a minority, largely thanks to the destabilization of the Middle East being Israel’s chief foreign policy goal. Israel’s evacuation orders in Christian-held Lebanon have also drained its Christian population, and because they are reusing the Gaza strategy - order evacuation, then demolish whole neighborhoods and villages - it makes their return impossible.

If Burmawi has ever spoken sympathetically of Lebanon’s loss of its Christian majority at the hands of Israel’s foreign policy, I’ve not seen it, and couldn’t find it, because I looked. That’s the first in a long line of oddities when it comes to Burmawi and his story. One would think that compassion for Lebanon’s Christian population would be paramount, for a place and people who provided him Christian refuge from Islamic persecution. But from Burmadawi there appears to be only support for Israel’s actions in Lebanon, despite Christians being disproportionately killed and cleansed from their homeland.

Israel's actions in Lebanon have been tragic for Christian civilians, despite a campaign supposedly focused on “hunting Hezbollah.” Christian villages along the southern border, like Marjayoun, are inside Israeli evacuation zones and under direct fire, despite having no known connection to Hezbollah. When Christian residents of Marjayoun chose to stay in their indigenous homes, Israeli tanks pushed them into southern Lebanon and tore their homes to the ground. Now, roughly ten percent of Lebanese territory is under an active Israeli evacuation notice, many of them Christian areas, and they, too, are fleeing. Many will not return, and Lebanon’s Christian minority will again shrink, as it’s been doing because of Israel, for generations.

That Burmawi doesn’t defend Lebanese Christians is an understatement. I’ve found the opposite: a tone of beratement for their “support of Hezbollah” and refusal to make an “Israeli-like sovereign state” and revolt against the Lebanese government. For the record, Lebanese Christians do not routinely “support Hezbollah,” but they do fear the IDF more than Hezbollah, who has routinely protected them from ISIS.

Burmawi’s hot-takes are flat-out Israeli talking points, whether or not I can prove they were assigned to him by Israel. In fact, in July, Burmawi said on X that the Christians in Lebanon want Israel to annex them, repeating a claim of Netanyahu on Fox News the same day. I’d put a crying-laughter emoji if I didn’t mind sullying my beautiful Substack with Zoomer hieroglyphics. Humorously, his absurd claim came right after his assertion that Greater Israel is a “lie” and Israel has never wanted to expand past their current borders. So, to Burmawi, Israel doesn’t want to expand its borders, but also, they should annex Christian Lebanon.

Burmawi’s claim, and Netanyahu’s, about what Christians in Lebanon want is a lie. Christian villages in the Marjeyoun area denied the claim, stating they reaffirm their “loyalty to their national identity” and “attachment to their Lebanese flag.” The mayor of Rmeish, a Christian town, produced a joint statement from 15 different Christian villages rejecting their desire to be annexed to Israel, calling annexation “absolutely out of the question.” The mayor of Qlayaa, another Christian border village, said, “Quite the opposite. We’ve done everything they’ve requested of us so that they don’t have an excuse to enter. We don’t want the Israelis or Hezbollah. Let them kill each other and leave us out of it.”

Why is Burmawi repeating Netanyahu talking points, verbatim?

Burmawi’s X account reads like an Israeli operative trying to convince Lebanese Christians to rebel against the only nation in the Middle East that doesn’t reflexively persecute Christians, and to convince the rest of the world that the Lebanese Christians deserve whatever Israel has coming for them. Absolutely nothing Burmawi has said about Lebanon reads as compassion for the Christians who live there. It is, “revolt against your government, choose annexation to Israel, and do what the IDF tells you, or you deserve to die.”

So, color me skeptical about Badawi’s sudden appearance in the United States, a Master's Degree in theological studies that appeared soon after his arrival, and a background completely scrubbed from the Internet, or one that was never there.

Badawi alleges to have run several “NGOs in the Middle East,” but what those NGOs are, what they did, and whether or not “Middle East” means Israel, I can’t determine. It appears to have been scrubbed, if indeed it existed. There is almost nothing to prove he even existed back then, except for a single, solitary book peddled with his name on it from New Nation Ministries in 2019, a small evangelical outfit based in Beirut, and a brief mention in the blog of a missionary. There’s not a sermon clip, not an interview, not a testimony video, nothing. A man who claims to have spent fifteen years building organizations and leading initiatives across the Middle East left behind exactly two pieces of text and not a single frame of video before the year his American media career began.

He claims to have left Lebanon for Canada in 2022, stayed there just long enough to have a baby so that it would have Canadian Citizenship, and then came to the United States because, as he says, “The U.S. does not allow birth tourism.” After the birth, he came to the U.S. roughly 6 months later. It must have taken a pretty penny to make that sojourn, subsist without gainful employment, and then on to settle in the United States to immediately begin two years of school. The NGO business must be lucrative.

According to his bio material, his public activism “gained prominence” immediately following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, at which point he began publicly defending Israel and warning about Islamic expansionism. But that’s untrue. He did not gain prominence immediately following the October 7 attacks in 2023. He was still a ghost. He didn’t show up publicly until 2025, at which point he had a nonprofit, the Ideological Defense Institute, a bestselling book, and a rotating seat on the biggest stages in Christian Zionist media.

Out of nowhere, suddenly, his star rose in 2025, and he hit the Israel Lobby circuit like a freight train. Amir Tsarfati’s Behold Israel, First Fruits of Zion’s Messiah Podcast, the Middle East Forum, a Times of Israel byline, and a dozen more Israel or Israel Lobby podcasts, each and every one Israel-oriented. Then, exactly at the same time as his Israel Lobby podcast launch, a credential appeared in his biography for the first time: Master of Theological Studies. He eventually told me privately the name of that institution, and that he sped through his Master’s work from the moment he hit the ground in the United States. But he asked me not to share it, because it’s dangerous for people to know where he lives, on account of being a converted Muslim who’s outspoken against Islam. He’s more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine in the United States than by Islamic terror, but I’ve respected his request.

I’ve since not been able to independently verify with that institution if indeed he obtained the degree. If so, congratulations are in order for hustling through the coursework so quickly.

That is also why the years in Lebanon deserve more scrutiny, not less. Absolutely no paper trail? No digital footprint? And suddenly, in 2025, a fully formed media career, and a new career as full-time pro-Israel evangelical influencer? Coming out of absolutely nowhere, someone with a mysterious background has now arrived in the U.S. and is immediately catapulted into influencer status by exclusively Israel Lobby media? The man’s story makes Ergun Caner’s sound plausible by comparison.

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THE JUDAIZING HERESY

Judaizing is not, first-and-foremost, a demand, like requiring someone else to snip their foreskin or give up pork. Heresies are the beliefs which undergird those underlying demands. The Judaizing Heresy is a theological malfunction manifest in different ways in different eras and at different places. Chiefly, it is the belief that by their ethnic lineage, Jews retain a special status, and Covenant blessings and promises obtainable without faith in Jesus.

To put it another way, the Judaizing heresy is the belief that God is indeed a respecter of persons and reserves for Jews a special favor undistributed to the Gentile believers. Demanding, for example, circumcision or dietary observance is a manifestation of the underlying heresy. At different times and different places, it takes different forms. But they all are caused by the underlying belief that by becoming Jewish, a Gentile can access a special status with God. And that’s the heresy.

The New Testament consistently denies that ethnic Jews retain covenant status apart from faith in Christ, and it treats any belief to the contrary as a gospel error, not mere stylistic disagreement. In Romans 2:28–29, Paul explains that a true Jew is not outward but inward, by the Spirit. In Romans 9:6–8, he clarifies that not all descended from Israel belong to Israel, and that the children of God are defined by promise, not flesh. Instead, the Bible teaches that those of faith are the sons of Abraham (Galatians 3:7), and all who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring and heirs (Galatians 3:29).

So the core error behind Judaizing is this: the belief that Jews retain covenant privilege by lineage apart from faith in Christ. Circumcision, dietary laws, and similar requirements are just outward expressions of that deeper doctrine. And the apostles oppose it because it contradicts the central claim of the gospel, that covenant blessing comes through Christ alone, to all who believe, without distinction.

Burmawi’s recent blog post, “To Be a Christian, You Must Become a Jew,” is one of the most overt, textbook examples of Judaizing that I’ve ever seen. It’s literally there in the title. And the article’s contents don’t improve it.

“TO BE A CHRISTIAN, YOU MUST BECOME A JEW”

Burmawi opens his article with his testimony as a convert from Islam and pivots into a sweeping argument about the order of salvation. He claims that God saved Israel from Egypt before giving the law at Sinai, proving that belonging to God was never conditioned on obedience, only on promise. From there he indicts the church for repeatedly “betraying its Jewish roots,” first through Marcion in the second century, then through centuries of man-made legalism that turned grace into a performance-based system, which he says is indistinguishable from Islam. His prescription is that Gentile Christians “must recover a Jewish frame for the gospel,” culminating in the title’s assertion, becoming a Jew to become a Christian. To be clear, he says that believers are not called to convert to Judaism, per se, but to become “Jewish Christians, people of the covenant,” grafted into what he calls “Israel’s covenantal family,” modeled on the preaching he hears from contemporary rabbis.

Referring to the Christian Old Testament as the “Hebrew Bible,” Brumawi writes…

There is something unique about the Hebrew Bible that distinguishes it from every other religious book in the world, and that is the order of salvation. Salvation took place before the demands of God were given. In every religion, the gods, religious systems, or philosophies require people to fulfill an enormous list of demands in order to have a chance of entering Paradise, avoiding punishment, being reborn into a better life, escaping the cycle of reincarnation, or achieving some other form of spiritual liberation. In the Bible, however, God saved Israel first. He brought them out of Egypt, and only after their liberation did he give them his law. Their salvation from Egypt was not contingent upon their obedience to the law.

Burmawi repeatedly claims that the Law did not exist prior to Sinai. That’s inaccurate. Paul explains this in Romans 5:13-14: despite the Moral Law not being yet written down, man was nonetheless held accountable for its violation, which is why men died, suffering under sin’s mortal consequences. Moral right and wrong have always existed, which is why God punished Cain for murder, despite it coming before “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” The subtle clue of the 4th Commandment, which says to “remember,” implies a working knowledge of God’s Commandments before God etched them on stone tablets with His finger. The Decalogue was not new to the Hebrews, as though they had never known not to steal, kill, murder, or blaspheme. It’s been etched on our hearts, which is why people in the God-forsaken Third World who have never heard of Moses are still “without excuse” according to Romans 1, despite never having seen God’s written Law on tablets of stone or in the Bible, either one.

Burmawi is right that Israel’s role in redemptive history did not evaporate the moment individual Israelites sinned. He is wrong to conclude from this that Jews retain covenant standing before God regardless of lacking faith. Paul closes this loophole in Romans 2, “For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Romans 2:28-29).

Why does Burmawi make this claim about the Law at all? He says that he’s building the case that belonging to God doesn’t require obedience to the Law, so as to magnify a grace-based salvation. I believe he has ulterior motives: to argue for modern Jews remaining in the Covenant outside of faith, emphasizing their chosenness. In any event, he’s wrong.

Paul does not say “ethnic Israel keeps its covenant no matter what.” He says that ethnicity was never the Covenant criterion in the first place. Deuteronomy 31 predicts Israel’s coming apostasy, but Deuteronomy 30, one chapter earlier, frames Israel’s future restoration as conditioned on repentance and a circumcised heart, not as an unconditional guarantee:

“And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6), followed by “And you shall again obey the voice of the LORD and keep all his commandments that I command you today” (Deuteronomy 30:8), and again, “when you obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that are written in this Book of the Law, when you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 30:10). The Covenant is never granted automatically to Israel regardless of its posture toward God.

Paul goes further still. He quotes Hosea, applying the phrase “I will call them my people who were not my people” to God’s inclusion of the Gentiles (Romans 9:25-26). If Paul is willing to say a people can move from “not my people” into “my people,” the reverse direction is also true of Israel for the same reason Hosea originally said it: Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness. The wilderness generation died in the desert and never entered the land, and Hebrews says why. “So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19).

Burmawi says…

“Although the early church consisted mainly of Jews who believed in Christ, it was only a matter of time before Gentiles became the majority. Gentiles had little knowledge or understanding of God’s covenantal grace. In this sense, they were worse than the religious Jews whom Christ condemned.”

The Scripture does not say Gentiles were “worse.” Burmawi has this backward. Scripture consistently teaches that greater revelation produces greater culpability, not less. Hebrews 10:29 says, "How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?"

That is the exact opposite of Burmawi's claim. Those who possessed the covenant, witnessed the miracles, and heard Christ's own words firsthand and still rejected him bear the heavier judgment, not the lighter one. Jesus is speaking specifically of the Jews when He says in Luke 12, “And that servant who knew his master's will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more."

Burmawi concludes the Gentiles were “worse” because their pagan beliefs were all law. Again, Scripture says the opposite of Burmawi. It was the Jews - time and again - for whom the Law was a stumbling block, never Gentiles. Paul says this explicitly in Romans 9:31-33. “Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” (Romans 9:31-33). This is Paul’s own summary verdict on his kinsmen, and it is Israel, not the Gentiles, who tripped over the law by turning it into a system of works.

When Paul names the specific offense the gospel gave to each group, the law and its supposed guardians come out worse. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). Even in the one place Gentiles are described stumbling at all, it is over folly, a failure of philosophy. Israel’s stumbling is described as a stumbling block, the same word Paul used for the very stone Israel tripped over in Romans 9, planted in the middle of the law they were trying to keep. Stumbling over the Law is fundamentally a Jewish problem.

Burmawi says…

On the other hand, after the destruction of the Temple, Jews had to adapt Judaism to a radically new reality. During this development, firmer boundaries were established between Jews who followed Jesus and Jews who did not. Therefore, Christianity was increasingly severed from its Jewish roots.

No, Jews did NOT have to “adapt” when the Temple fell. They had to repent of Judaism, the religion of the Pharisees. Burmawi says this of the Rabbinic religion as if it were a necessary consequence of the Temple’s destruction, without a hint of condemnation. And “adaptation” is an understatement. It was invention, not adaptation. When the Temple fell in AD 70, the sacrificial system Moses commanded fell with it. Suddenly, every single component of authentic Old Covenant worship was gone. No altar. No Levitical priesthood. No blood atonement. No Mosaic religion whatsoever. There was no means for the Mosaic religion to continue real observance.

Rabbinic Judaism did not “adapt” around this loss. It manufactured an entirely new religion with no basis in the Christian Old Testament at all. Prayer and study replaced sacrifice and atonement. A newly fabricated oral tradition was eventually codified into the Mishnah and Talmud, and a rabbinic authority structure was placed where priest and altar used to be. None of this exists anywhere in the Torah. It was built after the fact, to paper over the absence of everything present under the Old Covenant.

Burmawi’s “firmer boundaries” line is also an understatement. What actually happened was expulsion, not fence-building. The Birkat HaMinim, the curse against heretics inserted into the daily synagogue liturgy in the late first century, was written to identify and expel Jewish believers in Jesus from the synagogue, forcing a choice between reciting a curse on their own faith or leaving. That is not a boundary. That is an armed checkpoint, built for the explicit purpose of severing Christian Jews from the religious identity Burmawi says Christianity abandoned. They were forced out at spear-point.

The Text itself already told this story in advance. Jesus had already told the woman at the well that true worship would no longer be tied to any mountain or building (John 4:21). He called his own body the temple that would be destroyed and raised in three days (John 2:19-21). Hebrews, written before AD 70, already declared the first covenant obsolete and ready to vanish (Hebrews 8:13). The Temple’s fall was not a crisis Judaism had to improvise around. It was confirmation that Jesus demolished their religion with a Roman wrecking ball.

So reverse Burmawi’s sentence, and it becomes accurate. Christianity was not “severed from its Jewish roots.” Rabbinic Judaism was severed from its Christian roots, the ones you read about in the Christian Old Testament. To put another way, that’s not when Christians fled Judaism. That’s when Judaism divorced itself from the Christian history in the pages of the Mosaic Law.

He goes on to complain of Marcionism, revising the heretic Marcion as an antisemite: “He rejected the Old Testament and removed from the New Testament writings or passages that he believed were too Jewish.” It’s not like Marcion didn’t like Jews. It’s that he believed the Old Testament God was not the God of Christianity. It was heresy. But it has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Jewish discrimination or whatever kind of AIPAC version of history he’s blathering on about. Notice the constant conclusion: Old Testament = “Jewish.” That’s not how Christians think. Old Testament = Christian history.

He then writes…

Even though the church condemned Marcionism, Christianity was soon transformed into a religion based heavily upon obedience to religious rules. Religious Jews had taken the specific law given by God and used it as a tool to control the people. Religious Christians, who had been given the fluid law of love, possessed the additional privilege of being able to improvise and add almost anything they wished to the list of laws that supposedly determined whether someone belonged to God’s family.

Again, Murbawi’s confusion on the nature of the Moral Law comes out. Earlier, he had alleged that the Law did not exist before Sinai. And here, he refers to the Law of Love as “fluid,” and next contrasts it to Christians who don’t believe in dancing or drinking. The excesses of fundamentalist purity culture aside, the Law of Love he references is taken from Jesus in Matthew 22, in which He answers a question about the most important commandment with two: to love God and love your neighbor. But these are summaries of the Moral Law, not substitutes. With his two answers, Jesus summarized the Decalogue: the First Table is the commands that deal with our love for God, and the Second Table is the commands that deal with love for our neighbor. That’s how Christians for thousands of years have interpreted Jesus’ answer, because both commands are direct quotations from the Torah: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. They were new in the sense of being new summaries. But they were both taken directly from the Bible.

Further, the Law of Love is not “fluid.” If it were, then there’s no reason that hairstyle, dancing, playing cards, non-modesty-related clothing choice, or alcohol consumption couldn’t be added if an argument can be made that it’s not loving. Loving God requires obeying the First Table, and loving our neighbor requires obeying the Second. Anything less is antinomianism, in which Christian behavior is regulated by our subjective impressions of what is and is not “loving” at any given time.

The difference between a Christian and a legalist is not the laws we follow. It’s our motivation for following them. The legalist follows God’s Laws and obeys His standards in order to be loved and chosen by God. The Christian follows God’s Laws and obeys His standards because he has been loved and chosen by God, not in order to be. The moment we ditch following God’s standards is the moment we’ve traded legalism for antinomianism.

He goes on, and it gets progressively worse…

Religious Jews before the time of Christ tied the law to God’s covenant and said, in effect, “The covenant is free. You belong to God’s family for free. But the law is what keeps you in.” The church did the same thing. It tied the gospel to performance: “You are granted salvation for free, but if you want to keep it, or prove that you really possess it, then you must perform.”

This Christianity is a non-Jewish Christianity. It is a Christianity that looks more like paganism, or more like whatever religion the Pharisees were selling during the time of Christ. It is not Jewish Christianity. It is not the Jewish covenant that Jesus came to globalize.

Track what the word “Jewish” is doing across his article. He alleges that “religious Jews” and Pharisees are the villains, the ones who “turned the law into a de facto condition for belonging to God,” the ones Christ condemned, the prototype of legalism itself. There, “Jewish” is at first the insult.

But then, he flips the word’s meaning. Legalistic church Christianity is now “non-Jewish Christianity,” a Christianity that “looks more like paganism, or more like whatever religion the Pharisees were selling.” Now, “Jewish” is suddenly the honorific, the standard of authentic grace-theology, and Pharisaism gets rebranded as pagan, something outside the category of “real” Jewish religion, rather than a historic, documented expression of it.

He can’t have both ways. The Pharisees were Jews. Not adjacent to Judaism, not an aberration imported from outside, but the dominant native Jewish religious party of the first century, operating entirely within Jewish categories, citing Torah, arguing halakha, tracing their authority back to Moses’ seat (Matthew 23:2). If Pharisaic legalism is “not Jewish Christianity” and “more like paganism,” then his own words previously, where Pharisaic legalism is his central illustration of what “religious Jews” did with the law, stops making sense. He used real, historical, ethnically and religiously Jewish legalism as his opening exhibit of the problem, and then later needs “Jewish” to mean something categorically opposed to that problem. It’s schizophrenic.

What he’s actually doing is using “Jewish” as a floating compliment, meaning whatever he currently wants to praise (covenantal grace, one moment, correct doctrine in another), and he is using “non-Jewish” as a floating insult for whatever he wants to condemn (legalism, performance religion, etc).

The word stopped referring to an actual ethnic or religious category and started functioning purely as a value judgment wearing an ethnic label. His entire argument’s controlling term, the very thing his title suggests, “become a real Jew,” has no stable referent. “Religious Jews,” on his own terms, are the Pharisees he condemns as legalists. “Real Jewish religion,” in his conclusion, is also somehow the cure for legalism. It’s nonsense. He needs the word to mean two incompatible things at once.

And as I said, it gets progressively worse…

Of course, I am not asking you to convert to Judaism. I am asking you to become Jewish Christians, people of the covenant. You belong to God not on the basis of what you achieve, but on the basis of what God freely gives. The concept of choosiness is what strikes me most when I listen to Jewish rabbis. They speak as Christian preachers should speak. They speak about God, their Father, who chose them not because of anything good in them, but because of his grace.

THE CONTRADICTIONS

Burmawi spends his entire article condemning religious Jews for turning covenant into a performance system, then closes by telling Christians to listen to religious Jews as the model of grace. He does not seem to notice he has just recommended the very group his own essay diagnosed as the problem.

What election are Rabbis actually preaching when they talk about being chosen “not because of anything good in them, but because of grace”? It’s not union with Christ. It’s not the New Covenant Jeremiah promised, in which God said he would write the law on the heart and remember sin no more (Jeremiah 31:31-34), the very covenant Hebrews says has already made the first one obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). The rabbis Burmawi is listening to preach Israel’s ethnic, national election as an end in itself, sustained by Torah observance, apart from and in rejection of the Messiah that the Old Testament pointed toward. That is grace-flavored language, but wrapped around the works-righteousness he’s been condemning.

The Rabbis are preaching ethnic salvation, a grace given to Jews irrespective of faith or obedience. That’s toxic. It’s Satanic doctrine. It sends their souls to hell. It’s not commendable. And nowhere does Burmawi suggest that they are lost in their trespasses and sins. He seems to suggest the Rabbis are right.

Burmawi writes, “They speak about God, their Father.” Whose Father, according to whom? Jesus said this to the most devout, Torah-observant, covenant-language-fluent religious leaders of his own day: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:44). That is not a verse Burmawi can wave off. It is Christ’s own verdict on Torah-zealous men using this kind of “covenant-family” language while rejecting Him. Burmawi hears rabbis calling God their Father and takes it as evidence of true relationship with God. Jesus heard the same claim from the same people and called their paternity a lie.

He wants Christians to imitate Rabbis who will, without a doubt, split hell open if they die without Christ. Then he says…

Dear Christians, if you are in Christ, then God has grafted you into Israel’s covenantal family.

No. No, no, no, no. No.

Dear Christians, if you are in Christ, God has not grafted you into the Jews' covenantal family, as though unbelieving Jews possess God's covenant and graciously permit Gentile Christians to occupy the guest room. God has grafted you into His covenant people. The covenant belongs to God, not to an ethnicity. Christ is not the Gentile entrance ticket into somebody else's family. Christ is the heir in whom the family itself is constituted. The tree is the church, comprised of ethnic Jews and Gentiles alike, but every last one, a Christian.

Burmawi suggests that ethnic Israel is the owner of the covenant and Gentiles are the beneficiaries let in by extension. Scripture never grants Israel that ownership. The covenant belonged to God from the start, made by God, sworn by God alone, and fulfilled in Christ alone. Israel was never the source or the guarantor of it. Israel was a steward and a vehicle, chosen to carry the promise forward through history, not the party holding the deed with the authority to graft anyone into anything. Jews are not “letting us in” to their house. God is letting us in to His.

This is also why unbelieving Jews can be, and are, described as cut off. “They were broken off because of their unbelief” (Romans 11:20). If the covenant were Israel’s family possession in the way Burmawi implies, ethnic Israel could not be cut out of it for unbelief, since a family doesn’t disown its own blood for failing to believe a claim about itself. But Paul says exactly that happens, which means membership was never a matter of belonging to “Israel’s family.” It was always a matter of belonging to the promise, which is Christ’s. Calling it “Israel’s covenantal family” gets the structure backward. It was God’s covenant, made with Abraham, fulfilled in Christ, carried through Israel’s history, and entered by faith, by Jew and Gentile on the same terms, into Christ.

According to Romans 11, once unbelieving Jews “do not persist in unbelief,” they are joining the Christian family. We do not join the Jewish one. Heck no.

And finally, this abomination…

Without the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot understand God, Christ, redemption, the nature of the law, righteousness, justification, or imputation. Christianity becomes a pagan religion.

It’s the very opposite, and he’s got it backward. If you could understand the Old Testament without Jesus, Jews would be able to comprehend it. Clearly, that isn’t the case.

While the Old Testament is a divine gift to Christians to most fully comprehend the excellencies of the gospel, chronologically, the truths of the New Testament must FIRST be understood to seek the face of God. If you start reading the Old, without first knowing the New, you’ll understand not a single word. It’s like reading a coded telegram without the cipher key. Every word is legible, but none of it is intelligible

The Bible says, “But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away” (2 Corinthians 3:14). And then, speaking of the Jews it says, “Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”

Understand Jesus, and you’ll understand Moses. Without Jesus, you *cannot* understand Moses. God designed redemptive history and the advance of the gospel throughout the world on that precept - the New Testament must come first - and you can see that in the Book of Acts.

For example, Paul does not open at the Areopagus with Moses. He opens with an altar to an unknown god and a line stolen from a pagan poet, because the men standing in front of him have never read a word of Torah and never will. He tells them God overlooked the times of ignorance, then commands all people everywhere to repent, because a day is fixed on which the world will be judged in righteousness by a man he raised from the dead (Acts 17:30-31).

There was no Sinai. No Passover. No genealogy of promise stretching back through Abraham. He gave them no exhaustive explanation of Israelite history. No citing of Noah or Abraham or Moses or Adam. No Jonah and the Whale, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Balaam and the Donkey, Elijah and Jezebel. He gave them just Christ, crucified and risen, dropped into the middle of a pagan philosophical marketplace with no Hebrew scaffolding underneath it. He didn’t draw on the Hebrew prophets. He drew on their own, because it would do as a frame of reference.

You see, that is what the Old Testament is for us. The Old Testament is our frame of reference. But the New Testament IS the reference. It is the very thing the Old Testament frames. It is the picture inside it.

So in Acts 17, could they be saved without the Old Testament? Of course; Dionysius the Areopagite believes, and Damaris believes, and others besides them (Acts 17:34). The gospel did not need the Hebrew Scriptures to reach Athens. It needed a crucified and resurrected Savior, not a lecture on Deuteronomic or Levitical Law. The New Testament does not frame the Old. The Old frames the New. The New is the central story of redemption. It’s the main show. The Old Testament is the spotlight. The New Testament is what’s IN the spotlight, being revealed.

Obviously, none of this undermines the need for the Old Testament for a full, thorough comprehension of God’s historic plan of redemption. Explaining the concept of sacrifice requires, at some point, a tour through the Old Covenant as designed by God. Understanding Jesus of Nazareth will eventually require understanding the Pillar of Cloud by day and Pillar of Fire by night, the burning bush, Melchizedek, and every place Jesus made his pre-incarnate appearance known or wherever else you can see Him in the Text.

That aside, a man can become fully born again, made regenerate, and justified by faith in Christ without reading or hearing a single word of the Old Testament. But no one can cross from death to life without the New. Both important. Both essential for their own purposes. But in a “chicken or the egg” situation, the New Testament must always be brought first. That’s why you don’t tell a man to begin reading in Leviticus. You tell him to begin reading in the Gospel of John.

Nonetheless, the New Testament is the means by which the Old Testament is properly understood. The New Testament illumines the Old and dispels its shadows. It is the key that unlocks the oracles. It is the light thrown backward across every page that Moses or the prophets wrote. It is the lamp Malachi never got to hold.

Christ is the Rosetta Stone of the prophets. He is the one who lifts its veil and gives meaning to that which, without Him, means nothing at all. And this is why unbelieving Jews not only don’t understand Jesus, but also - without Jesus - they don’t understand Moses. This is why there’s absolutely no one on this earth who understands the Old Testament less than a Rabbi. You’d more quickly ascertain its real meaning from a secular religious studies professor at the university. They cannot begin to decipher the oracles without Jesus as its key. It’s gibberish to them. It’s gobbledegook. Without Christ at its center, they instead only see themselves. And that takes it from being a beautiful Book to a hideously ugly one.

In Luke 24:27, Jesus is teaching the disciples, and it says, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Without Jesus, no proper interpretation is possible. Jesus - not Moses - gives an introduction to the eternal God of Scripture. He is the Author and Finisher of Faith. He is the mediator of the Covenant. He is the High Priest, that without Him, no acquaintance with the Almighty can be made.

An unbelieving Jew reading the Old Testament is reading someone else’s mail, addressed to another, sealed shut, written in a language they can’t possibly understand because it’s not in their tongue. Jesus is the only One who changes that.

Without the Old Testament, Christianity does not become “pagan.” I can demonstrate that, as the Gospel spread throughout the pagan world among people with next to no grasp of the Old Testament, it saved them from paganism. Without the Old Testament, Christianity cannot be properly understood in its fullness. An explanation of why God did what He did cannot be fully given; but what God did through His Son - to pay the penalty for sins, dying on the Cross, and raising again - absolutely can be trusted and believed to make one born again.

WHY THIS IS PROPAGANDA, NOT JUST BAD THEOLOGY

Back to our friend who parachuted into American evangelicalism from the Middle East in 2025 with a non-descript past and sketchy, vague background and popped up in the Israel Lobby ecosystem. Perhaps you’re thinking this is just run-of-the-mill bad theology. Maybe it’s just a person who doesn’t have their theology sorted out yet.

Look at what his language accomplishes. Christians are not grafted into God’s covenant people. They are grafted into “Israel’s covenantal family.” Christianity becomes authentic to the degree that it becomes “Jewish.” Rabbis become models Christians should imitate. The Jewish relationship to God becomes the template through which Christians are taught to understand their own election. By the end of the argument, Israel is no longer merely part of redemptive history. Israel owns the house, and Christians have been graciously given a key.

Now move that theology from the Sunday School room to Washington. If Israel is merely another foreign state, Christians are free to judge it like any other foreign state. Is this alliance good for America? Is this war just? Should we pay for it? Should American soldiers defend it? Should Israel receive billions while persecuting Palestinian Christians, bombing Lebanon, or doing things we would condemn if another nation did them? Those become ordinary moral and political questions requiring ordinary moral and political answers.

But make modern Israel the earthly embodiment of “Israel’s covenantal family,” and those questions become spiritually dangerous. Opposition to Israeli policy can be recast as opposition to Israel. Opposition to Israel becomes opposition to God’s covenant people. And opposition to God’s covenant people becomes rebellion against God.

That is an extraordinarily useful theological chain for a foreign government dependent upon evangelical political support. And it targets the constituency Israel’s influence apparatus is trying to preserve.

As I explained above, Israeli-funded public-diplomacy efforts target American evangelicals because evangelical support provides political protection that increasingly does not exist elsewhere in the electorate. Burmawi’s theology produces the necessary political instinct such a campaign needs: Israel is not a foreign country Christians may evaluate. Israel is family Christians are religiously obligated to defend.

Call it God’s covenant, and Israel stands underneath God’s judgment like every other nation and every other sinner. Call it “Israel’s covenantal family,” and suddenly Christians stand underneath Israel’s judgment, indebted to a people supposedly holding the covenant into which we were fortunate enough to be admitted.

Bad theology can be accidental; it happens. But bad theology that consistently produces the exact political behavior a foreign influence campaign is spending money to cultivate deserves considerably more scrutiny.

Because at some point, theology that reliably turns American Christians into unconditional political patrons of another state stops functioning merely as theology. Instead, it functions as propaganda.

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Dr. Everett Piper wrote a column for the Washington Times accusing Tucker Carlson and me of lying about Islam, which sounds serious until you discover that his “proof” consists of something I never actually said. What follows is a remarkable little tour through Christian Zionism’s intellectual immune system: poisoned wells, invented quotations, irrelevant doctorates, Ottoman history, selective outrage over persecuted Christians, and one increasingly unfortunate rooster. But beneath the comedy is something considerably more serious. Piper’s article demonstrates exactly what happens when defending Israel becomes so important to a Christian that even the Ninth Commandment starts looking negotiable.

Dr. Everett Piper first made a national name for himself as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University when an op-ed scolding his own students for their immaturity, entitlement, and desperate need for emotional coddling went viral. He parlayed the resulting notoriety into a larger role as an advocate for academic freedom and, eventually, a general-purpose commentator on national affairs.

Lately, however, Piper has found another calling. He has become an enthusiastic component of the domestic Israel Lobby, using his credibility inside the evangelical ecosystem to promote the Israeli state, defend Christian Zionism, and assure Christians that their theological and political obligations somehow terminate at the Israeli border.

Most recently, he turned his attention to me in the pages of the Washington Times. The resulting attack had the unusual distinction of being both intellectually dishonest and intellectually impoverished, which is an impressive combination. Piper did not merely get my argument wrong. Getting an argument wrong generally requires encountering it first. Instead, he constructed a cheaper and considerably stupider version of what I believe, attributed it to me, and then climbed triumphantly into the ring to beat the stuffing out of the scarecrow he had just assembled. His followers on X seemed unimpressed, with a total of one person liking his column at the time I’m publishing this response.

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Adding to a portfolio already containing titles like “Christian Zionism Is Not Christian Heresy,” Piper recently deposited another little offering at the altar of evangelical Zionism: “JD Hall and Tucker Carlson Are Lying About Islam.” It was presented as an argument, although that description is probably too generous. Most of the piece consisted of Piper lying about what I said about Islam in order to accuse me of lying about Islam, apparently hoping the irony would collapse under its own weight before anybody noticed.

Bearing false witness and gratuitously violating the Ninth Commandment are apparently permissible under the rules of Judeo-Christianity, provided the dishonesty is committed in defense of the Israeli state. Piper needed me to have made an argument I did not make, so he invented one. Then, having carefully manufactured his own opponent, he congratulated himself for defeating him in the pages of the Washington Times.

This is what leaven does to the lump. Once defending Israel becomes a theological imperative, every other Judeo-Christian obligation eventually gets negotiated around it. Defending people who reject Christ begins soliciting decidedly Christless behavior from the Christians enlisted to defend them. Truth becomes flexible, bearing false witness becomes apologetics, and the Ninth Commandment develops an Israeli exemption. Piper’s article is not merely a bad argument for Christian Zionism. It is a small demonstration of what Christian Zionism eventually requires from men who decide the cause must be defended even when the truth refuses to cooperate.

Piper began with something any freshman logic student is taught not to do, which is gratuitously “poison the well.” And if you do, it shouldn’t be so obvious, for crying out loud. Before engaging what I actually said, he treated his readers to a little tour through scandals and accusations attached to my name, making remarkably little effort to distinguish documented fact from allegation, allegation from rumor, or rumor from stuff somebody once typed on the Internet. Corroboration apparently became optional somewhere between “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “but this guy criticized Israel.”

Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. Watch: I hereby accuse Dr. Everett Piper of molesting my favorite rooster. I have no evidence whatsoever that Everett Piper has ever behaved improperly toward a chicken. But that doesn’t matter. I hereby accuse him of it, and shall forevermore refer to him as “man accused of rooster molestation.”

I’ll begin every future reference to him accordingly. “Everett Piper, the former university president who has faced allegations involving inappropriate contact with poultry, argued Tuesday…” And this from the man who arrived to lecture everyone else about lying.

Then, in an extreme display of jackassery credentialism, he ridiculed me for not having a “terminal degree.” He’s right. I don’t have a doctorate. I do, in fact, have degrees in both history and religion, including graduate-level (not that it matters in the slightest). But because it is not “terminal,” it earned ridicule from Dr. Piper.

So naturally I became curious. What is Dr. Piper’s doctorate actually in? Then, I looked it up. Theology? Nope. Biblical studies? No. Church history? Negative. Religious studies? Not that either.

Dr. Everett Piper’s terminal degree is in Student Affairs Administration.

Yes. The man waving his doctorate around as a reason you should take his theological pronouncements more seriously than mine possesses the sort of doctorate one acquires to become exceptionally qualified at administering students. His academic specialization is not Pauline theology, Second Temple Judaism, hermeneutics, Hebrew, Greek, systematic theology, or the history of Christian interpretation. It is university administration.

This is credentialism at its dumbest because Piper isn’t even appealing to a relevant credential. He is effectively barging into a theological argument, slapping a Ph.D. on the table, and hoping it qualifies him to administer student hacky sack tournaments and a frisbee golf league. I mean, I little people call me a stupid hillbilly or chicken farmer all day, and am happy to lean into that, but I’m not going to have my credentials questioned by a man who spent 20 years discussing when to order new tampon machines for the girls’ dorm.

Sorry. Your doctorate in “student affairs” does not overrule my degree in religion and graduate degree in history, when the topic is religion and history. And all of this, in a conversation outside the realm of ivory towers where a degree doesn’t matter at all. It’s worse than academic snobbery. It’s gay academic snobbery. That’s the worst kind. It’s terminal.

But if the contest is going to be academic weiner-measuring, perhaps the man with the doctorate in Student Affairs Administration should stop swinging it around in a theological debate like he just returned from defending his dissertation under Augustine.

So anyways, Dr. Everett Piper, formerly accused of molesting chickens, said the following:

So, why in the world would Mr. Carlson feature such an academically unqualified and morally disreputable man on his show? The answer seems quite simple. Mr. Carlson clearly wanted to continue grinding his ax against the Jews and pro-Israel Christians while at the same time elevating Islam as being better than both.

Here’s the proof.

While peddling his worn-out and biblically discredited arguments for “replacement theology,” J.D. Hall dove-tailed into a peculiar diatribe of praising Muslims for being “very kind” to Christianity.

No, not “the Jews.” Tucker doesn’t have a beef with “the Jews.” I might. Tucker doesn’t. I’ve never heard Tucker complain about “the Jews.” I’ve heard him talk about Israel a lot, but not “the Jews.” It’s a subtle trick, and yet somehow, still an obvious one. By saying “the Jews,” the critic just moves the implication away from politics and toward aNtiSEmiTisM. It’s a dishonest phrase, which was neither the first nor last dishonesty from Piper in the post.

Then, Piper - the scandal-plagued Rooster-enthusiast- also subtly changed “Zionist” to “Pro-Israel.” Being pro-Israel and being a Zionist are two entirely different things. The former hopes Israel the very best. The latter believes that Jews are entitled to real estate and Christian loyalty because they’re biblically illiterate. There’s a huge difference.

But then, and this is where the alleged Barnyard Bandit really grinds my gears, Piper announces: “Here’s the proof.” Cue the dramatic music. Dim the lights. Wheel in the evidence cart. If a man is going to use the word proof, I naturally assume some proof is about to occur. Perhaps a quotation. Maybe a transcript. A timestamp would be lovely. Hell, I would settle for several consecutive words that actually came out of my mouth.

Nope.

Piper’s “proof” is a paraphrase of something I did not, in fact, say. He announces that he has the receipts and then hands the jury a napkin on which he has written what he remembers the receipt probably saying. This stretches the definition of proof beyond anything contemplated by Noah Webster, Merriam-Webster, Daniel Webster, or frankly anybody named Webster who has ever successfully used a dictionary

A quotation would have been particularly convenient here because quotations possess the wonderful evidentiary quality of containing the words a person actually said. Piper apparently found this requirement unnecessarily restrictive. Why burden your argument with my words when you can simply manufacture a more convenient version, put that version into your own words, call the resulting paraphrase “proof,” and then accuse me of dishonesty?

While peddling his worn-out and biblically discredited arguments for “replacement theology,” J.D. Hall dove-tailed into a peculiar diatribe of praising Muslims for being “very kind” to Christianity.

“Worn out and biblically discredited” is one heck of a way to describe historic Christian orthodoxy, particularly when your own former university has Wesleyan stamped across the front door. John Wesley was an Arminian, for crying out loud, and even Wesley never managed to hallucinate anything resembling the elaborate eschatological Rube Goldberg machine John Nelson Darby would eventually bolt together in the nineteenth century. Whatever disagreements Wesley and I might have had, neither of us needed seven dispensations, two peoples of God, multiple divine programs, and a secret evacuation of the Church to make sense of the Bible.

That is what makes the arrogance so breathtaking. These people look at doctrines Christians confessed for centuries before Darby was a twinkle in his father’s eye and dismiss them as “worn out,” while treating a nineteenth-century theological innovation as though Paul handed Scofield the notes personally. When your theological novelty is younger than the Mormon Church, perhaps exercise some caution before pointing at historic Christian orthodoxy and calling it the newfangled sideshow attraction.

And I hate to brag here, but Piper might also want to ease up on the condescension until he checks the most recent box scores, because I just climbed into a moderated debate with Dinesh D’Souza, one of the golden children of the Dispensational parade, and beat him within an inch of his theological life. By the time it was over, the only thing “worn out” in the room was D’Souza’s backside from being dragged across the biblical text for two hours. Calling historic orthodoxy “worn out” does not refute it any more than calling your paraphrase “proof” magically turns it into a quotation.

Speaking of that, Dr. Piper, the alleged cockle-doodle-didler, then summarized my claim as, “Muslims have been very kind to Christianity.”

That’s not proof. That’s not a quotation. That’s not a summary. That’s not even a poor summary. That’s a lie. My claim was very simple, and it related to the Ottoman Millet System and their treatment of Christians under imperial decree, juxtaposed against the treatment of Christians by the Israeli state. I think most of my readers know that.

Piper, whose name has unfortunately surfaced in connection with an unfortunate poultry scandal, had the audacity to ask, after misquoting me, “What in the world is Mr. Hall talking about?” as though I wasn’t very specific in what I said. It would actually be his job to explain to his audience what specifically I was talking about. He did not do so.

My claim was as simple as it was factual: The Ottoman Millet system did not tax churches, it provided a mechanism for the care and preservation of Christian holy sites, and protected them under law. Those are facts. Even the “debunking video” by Raymond Ibrahim acknowledged, “technically, that is accurate” in the first five minutes. The claim was part of a larger point; the Christian population in Palestine remained at a steady 20% through 537 years of Ottoman and British rule. And it’s now at extinction level at 2% after 80 years of Jewish rule.

He wrote:

Anyone with a fifth-grade education should know that Islam’s conquest of Christendom was anything but “kind” and that arguing otherwise is just astoundingly dumb. Here are just a few examples to prove the point.

First, Mr. Hall specifically claims that Islam has never imposed a tax on churches. This is not true. Surah 9:29 in the Qur’an specifically mandates that a poll tax called the “jizya” be imposed on all Christians living in a Muslim country. During the Ottoman Empire, for example, all non-Muslims across Southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East were required to pay this tax while standing before a seated overlord with their heads bowed. This was a sign of submission and humiliation.

You might have noticed that my claim was about churches in Palestine. Dr. Student Affairs Administration then provided a citation from the Quran about taxing Christians. Churches and Christians are two different things, obviously. Nobody is upset that Israel is taxing Christians, as though anyone expects them to be tax-exempt. The point is that for the first time ever, churches in Israel received a past-due tax bill (going back before the tax was passed, retroactively and illegally), threatening to confiscate their property if millions of extortion money wasn’t paid, and freezing their assets for non-payment in millions of “past due” taxes. Churches were affected, could not pay their schoolteachers and charity staff, and were threatened with shutdown until the international Christian community intervened.

The apples-to-apples comparison is for churches, not Christians.

Further, not that it matters because I didn’t actually make the claim he says, but the jizya tax was actually pretty reasonable, and Christians were actually happy to pay it compared to the alternative. The reason is that the Ottomans did not forcefully conscript Christians to serve mandatorily in the Islamic military. Paying the jizya for the right not to be conscripted to serve like every other citizen of the Ottoman Empire allowed this exception to be provided without having their Islamic neighbors lose their minds in rage. To them, the exemption appeared to be preferential treatment to Christians. The jizya was a way out, a trade made in negotiation. A Christian did not have to pay the jizya tax. They could instead, if they preferred, serve in the Ottoman military like their neighbors. Their Muslim neighbors did not have the right to opt out by paying the jizya, which is why some claimed it was preferential treatment to Christians, anyway. They weren’t wrong.

But the tax also provided Janissary protection for Christians, and especially so while on pilgrimage. Today, it’s so common for Jews to spit on Christian pilgrims that Netanyahu had to intervene and ask that they please quit, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism put out a PSA explaining it was hurting tourism revenue, and Ben Gvir argued it couldn’t be prosecuted because it’s an “ancient Jewish custom.” It goes unpunished. A Janissary guard would have beaten the Jew within an inch of their life, because those were the good old days compared to life under Israeli rule.

Then, Piper - whose alleged misconduct toward chickens I cannot describe on this Substack - chose to introduce the claim that Christians in Islamic nations were second-class citizens. He might as well have argued that the Earth revolves around the sun, which is equally relevant to anything that came out of my mouth. I never alleged that the Ottomans treated Christians as anything but protected underlings.

Second, there is the doctrine of “dhimmitude,” which declares all Christians are legally and socially inferior to all Muslims. In brief, dhimmitude lays out strict conditions whereby followers of Christ are only permitted to live in a Muslim country if they submit to a list of humiliating conditions, such as being forbidden from repairing their churches, ringing church bells, displaying crosses, and being required to wear distinctive clothing to signify their disparaged status.

I mean, cool story, bro. Neat fact.

And yet, despite dhimmitude, the state of Israel bans Jews who believe in Jesus from migrating to Israel and from Citizenship, but not Jews credibly accused of molesting toddlers. And that’s not a joke, like the chicken thing. You can be a Jew with active molestation charges and a court date, and they will not extradite you to your home country to face justice. But if you’re a Jew who belongs to a Christian church, you cannot migrate to Israel under the Right of Return. The former is how a conquered people were treated in the 15th century. The latter is how Christians are treated by “our greatest ally” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Which one should we be complaining about?

How about, in the year 2026, Christian priests in Palestine being refused entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Easter? That was this year. How about Christians not being allowed to pass out water to the thirsty if it has a single Bible verse on it? How about the new “Western Wall Bill” by the Noam Party that passed its first reading in the Knesset in February, banning non-Christian prayer at the ancient retaining wall, where the Goyim Humiliation Rituals happen? What about Israel slow-rolling and effectively blocking visas for Christian missionaries and clergy for more than two years until Mike Huckabee finally developed the spine necessary to send them a strongly worded letter? Those are modern-day hostilities toward Christians, and Dr. Piper wants to slap the Wikipedia entry for “dhimmitude” into the Washington Times and complain about it?

Christian Zionism absolutely rots your brain. Christians are suffering in modern-day Israel, and Dr. Chicken Fingers here is complaining that I over-stated a fact about the Ottomans in the year 1417? Dude, in 1417 the Christians in Palestine were lucky their heads didn’t get put on spikes, because Islam very much is the demonic religion it is accused of being, which makes it all the more spectacular that the Ottomans understood that mistreating Christians in the Holy Land would invoke the wrath of God Almighty via Christian Europe, and they would be inviting trouble they didn’t want. That is the real story. Everywhere else, the Ottomans were barbaric animals, a fact I did not dispute, but I also did not state it because it had nothing to do with the conversation. In fact, Christian nations often treated colonized people worse than Christians were treated by the Ottomans. Why? It’s not because Muslims are nice. It’s because they didn’t want to pick a fight with Christian Europe and go through tenth Crusade, because the first nine weren’t fun.

Understanding that context should make one ask why, then, Israelis feel like they can persecute and systematically target Christians in the Middle East if not even the Ottomans thought they could get away with it. I repeat:

Q. If the Ottomans knew they could get away with barbarism everywhere but the Holy Land or else face the wrath of the Christian world, why does Israel do it, and do it so audaciously?

A. It’s because of slack-jawed idiot “Christian Zionists” like Dr. Everette Piper whose Judaizing Hebrew fetish lets Israelis get by with literal murder because they’re brainwashed by the theology of a 19th-century schismatic heretic sect.

So long as window-licking, mouth-breathing Christian Zionist morons defend Israel no matter what because God told them to, Israel can do whatever they want to what few Christians remain in Palestine. They have a license to kill and a permission slip to mistreat, marginalize, and oppress Jesus’ followers, signed by none other than John Nelson Darby.

The fact is, you could not pay Dr. Piper and the Dispensational Zionist cult to stick up for Christians in the Middle East. They have a backward, biblically illiterate interpretation of Genesis 12:3, believe that the people who hate Jesus the most in this world are the “chosen people” because of their ethnicity, and Christians are told we must bless them to be blessed by God. Ironically, Genesis 12:3 is about Jesus, which means that instead, Jews who curse Christ instead of bless Him are the ones under the promises of God’s curse, not his blessing.

Then, Piper leaves the reservation altogether, and no longer even attempts to apply his arguments to Palestine or the context of my actual comments.

Third, there is the issue of legal inequality of all non-Muslims who live in Muslim countries. Sharia law, for example, makes the testimony of a Christian against a Muslim inadmissible in an Islamic court. Therefore, a Muslim committing a crime against a Christian is rarely, if ever, subject to legal penalty, while a Christian accused of a crime against a Muslim often faces flogging, immediate imprisonment, and even death. How “kind” do Mr. Hall and Mr. Carlson think this is?

I’m thinking that Piper, despite his vast academic superiority, was never taught about Jewish Halakha in any of his “student affairs administration” courses, which really leaves me wondering what education is coming to these days. Do you think he knows that the Israeli Rabbinate rules their civil law through Halakha the same way clerics do in Iran through Sharia? I would highly doubt it, because he has no earthly idea what he is talking about.

I explained this to the I2I subscribers in Jewish Shariah? Understanding Halakha, and Why Western Civilization Doesn’t Want It, available here. Sanhedrin 57a states that Gentiles - not Jews - should be decapitated for legal violations. According to Sanhedrin 57a, there is a two-tiered system of justice, in which a gentile is liable for aborting a baby, while a Jew isn’t. A gentile is liable for robbery “even of less than a [penny],” while Jewish law requires theft of a minimum value for it to be punished. Under Halakha, a Jew who kills a Gentile is not put to death - and in some cases, not even punished- but a Gentile who kills a Jew must be put to death no matter what. For crying out loud, this year on March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed a law assigning the death penalty for the murder of Israeli Jews, but not Gentiles in the West Bank.

Mishnah Avodah Zarah 2:1 forbids a Jew from helping a Gentile woman give birth, and not only forbids helping a Gentile out of a pit, but says that if he’s standing close, push him in it. Not that any of this has anything to do with my remarks on Tucker, but a Christian Zionist defending the most infamous apartheid state on Planet Earth because they believe Gentiles have animal souls, while complaining about Islam treating Christians like second-class citizens, is beyond the pale. They’re both awful, but only one is subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer.

The “what about Islam” sophomorisms that Dr. Everett Piper, the poultry-adjacent former university professor, is engaging in are so sub-intellectual it’s hard to fathom he was ever given a doctorate degree (until you remember it’s in Student Affairs Administration, and then it tracks).

The suspected barnyard botherer, the alleged fornicator of the fowl, the rumored Wesleyan wing-dingler, then went and jumped the shark in Nigeria.

Mr. Hall’s claim of Muslim benevolence toward Christians is nonsense, and Mr. Carlson’s platforming of such abhorrent views serves only to betray his antipathy for biblical Christians who, even as we speak, are being butchered at the hands of, you guessed it, Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world. Claiming that Muslims have been “very kind” to Christians is nothing but a shameful lie.

The “shameful lie,” of course, is anything that Piper alleged I actually said. He did not, in the course of the entire article, provide a single quotation of my remarks. That is an extraordinary omission for a column whose title announces to the world that “JD Hall and Tucker Carlson Are Lying About Islam.” If I lied, quote the lie. If Tucker lied, quote the lie. Put the offending words on the page, explain what is false about them, and demonstrate the falsehood. This should not require a terminal degree. Instead, Piper spent an entire column arguing with a sentence he wrote himself.

I made a specific historical comparison concerning Christians in Palestine, the Ottoman millet system, church taxation, and the treatment of Christian institutions and holy sites. Piper transformed that into the sweeping proposition that Muslims have always been nice to Christians everywhere, then galloped across fourteen centuries of Islamic conquest looking for atrocities to disprove the proposition nobody made. He might as well rebut my claim that the Germans make good automobiles by producing photographs from Auschwitz. Yes, Everett. The Germans did that too. Now would you like to return to the subject?

And that is the remarkable thing about his article. Piper can tell me about jizya. He can tell me about dhimmitude. He can take us to Nigeria. He can describe Islamic persecution until his Student Affairs Administration doctorate catches fire from the exertion. What he apparently cannot do is confront the comparison that produced this entire tantrum: How are Christians being treated in the Holy Land right now, by the government Christian Zionists like Everett Piper have spent years training American evangelicals to defend reflexively?

That question is radioactive because “but Islam” does not answer it.

Islam is false. Muhammad is a false prophet. Islamic empires have committed atrocities against Christians. Muslims are murdering Christians in Nigeria this afternoon, and every Christian with a functioning conscience should condemn it without qualification. None of that purchases Israel a single indulgence for mistreating Christians. Not one. The sins of Muslims do not become righteousness in Jewish hands. There is no moral accounting system in which enough burned churches in Nigeria earn the Israeli government store credit for abusing Christians in Jerusalem.

Christian Zionism desperately needs that accounting system because otherwise Israel has to be judged by the same standard as everybody else. Suddenly “What about Islam?” becomes considerably less useful. Suddenly the Christian being spat upon in Jerusalem matters even if a Muslim murdered another Christian in Nigeria. Suddenly the church facing government pressure matters even if Ottoman rulers were bastards five hundred years ago. Suddenly Israel does not get graded against Muhammad. It gets graded against justice. And that is the conversation Piper does not want to have.

So he poisoned the well. He waved his doctorate around. He called historic Christian orthodoxy “worn out.” He replaced Zionism with “the Jews,” replaced my argument with his paraphrase of it, replaced churches with Christians, replaced Palestine with the entire Islamic world, and finally replaced the twenty-first century with whatever century contained a Muslim atrocity useful to his argument. Every substitution moved the reader one step farther from the thing I actually said until Piper was bravely defeating an argument whose only identifiable author was Everett Piper. Then he called me a liar.

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That is why this is bigger than one stupid Washington Times column. Christian Zionism has trained otherwise intelligent Christians to believe that defending the modern Israeli state is somehow adjacent to defending God Himself. Once that premise gets lodged deeply enough, normal Christian moral reasoning begins to malfunction. The Ninth Commandment becomes negotiable. Partiality becomes faithfulness. Ethnic favoritism becomes biblical theology. Criticism of the Israeli government becomes hostility toward “the Jews.” Christians suffering under that government become inconvenient complications, while atrocities committed by Muslims somewhere else are dragged onto the stage to explain why nobody should look too closely at Tel Aviv.

Piper wanted to prove that Christian Zionism is not Christian heresy. Instead, he gave us a demonstration of what happens when an ideology becomes important enough that a Christian will bend the truth to protect it.

So I will leave Dr. Everett Piper, the alleged feather-philandering cluckold, with the standard he should have begun with: If you’re going to accuse someone of lying, you need to quote the actual lie. And when somebody points out the mistreatment of Christians, try defending the Christians before demanding that everyone admire the people mistreating them.

You do not need a terminal degree to understand any of that. Apparently, having one doesn’t help.

There is a reason this kind of Zionist polemic almost always arrives as a column, a monologue, or a sermon delivered safely into an audience already trained to applaud it. Piper's argument works only if his readers never hear the interview he claims to be rebutting. Inside the BoomerCon echo chamber, he can replace my words with his paraphrase, announce “here's the proof,” and blast the resulting straw man through a megaphone to people who already agree with him. A debate would ruin the trick. I would be sitting six feet away with the inconvenient ability to say, “I didn't say that. Play the clip.” Then Piper would have to defend his characterization, and if not, then defend his character for lying. He can call me stupid from the safety of the Washington Times.

Put us behind two microphones with a moderator and the actual interview queued up, and he would collapse before the first commercial break. He knows it, I know it, and I suspect that is why I will be waiting a very long time for the good doctor of “Student Affairs Administration” to send the debate invitation.

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Were most Christians simply handed their beliefs, or did most of us arrive at our beliefs and doctrines by carefully studying Scripture? Were we issued our opinions, or did we get them from the Bible?

In Episode 2 of InciteFUEL, Jeremy and I examine the conflict between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, asking why the Bible used by Jesus and the ap…

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What they call “capitalism” increasingly isn’t capitalism at all. It is a bastardized system of privatized profits and socialized losses, where multinational corporations demand free markets when they want cheap foreign labor, unrestricted capital flows, tax advantages, deregulation, and access to American consumers, then sprint to Washington for bailouts, subsidies, contracts, tariffs, loan guarantees, and Federal Reserve intervention the moment the market threatens their societal Ponzi scheme. Americans are told this is the “free market.” It is capitalism for the losers and socialism for the winners, with working Americans given the bill. That system was exposed this week in conversations about a $20 burrito.

I love saying, “I told you so.” It ranks somewhere between finding twenty dollars in an old pair of jeans, right after finding out I still fit in them, and watching chickens peck their new barnyard toy. It’s one of those simple joys in life. The problem is that opportunities to say it usually arrive wrapped in really bad news, and this one just arrived inside a tortilla.

Several months ago, I warned that the next phase of Establishment Conservatism™ wouldn’t revolve around calling everyone “racist,” “Nazi,” or “antisemite.” Those labels have been dragged behind the political pickup truck for so many miles they’re nothing but frayed rope and broken bumper stickers now. Every time someone is called “literally Hitler,” those bugbears stop being monsters under the bed and start becoming laughingstocks. The power of those accusations loses currency the more they use them. Instead, I argued that the new accusation would be something simpler. As soon as ordinary Americans started questioning the economic order that has quietly hollowed out the middle class, the establishment would reach back into the Cold War junk drawer and dust off the word “Communist.” It wouldn’t matter whether anyone had read Karl Marx, understood Marx, or could have picked Marx out of a police lineup. The label wouldn’t exist to describe reality. It would exist to stop the conversation before it begins.

I wrote on X at the time…

I warned I2I followers yesterday that Establishmentarian globalists and NeoCon Unipartyists would soon begin alleging that the “dissidents” are secret Commies. I explained that James Lindsay just invented “Woke Right 2.0” with “Marxist” as a descriptor for people who believe in Nationalism and oppose globalism, and these two are led around by James Lindsay on a leash because they’re incapable of original thoughts. They got the memo with full talking points.

That is the go-to reaction of the Boomers who have managed American decline for 70 years. It’s all they know. It’s the only familiar card they have left. Challenge the existing power structure, the Post War Consensus corporate globalism that has ruined America and sold us out to foreign nations and interests, and they reach for, “Marxist.”

It’s the last, drying gasp of geriatric geezer middle-managers, terrified of losing the reigns of political power, too dumb to realize they never had them. It is the sad, pathetic last go-round of the very generation that has brought the U.S. to its current laughingstock status on the world stage, turned the greatest empire in world history into a vassal state of Israel that couldn’t win a war against Iran, and turned every generation after them into rentoid debtors and tax cattle.

So, when they say “Communist,” what they mean is, “People who give a damn about Americans and our best interests.”

When they say “Critical Theory” they mean caring about your family and personal well-being.

And whatever globalist economic forces are raping America’s interests, gutting our children’s future, and turning the U.S. into a borderless economic zone of homeless, indebted paupers in a post-modern hellscape? That’s just “capitalism,” and you had BETTER support our continued plundering or else we’ll call you “Commies.”

The strategy:

1. Spend every ounce of political and economic capital vilifying 2-3 celebrity figures in a 24/7 non-stop deluge of hyperbolic, catastrophized screeching. Call them “literally Satan,” for example.

2. Tie the entire MAGA 1.0 America First movement and Nationalist populism to those 2-3 figures.

3. Call them “Commies” because it’s the only movement on the right that even pretends to care about what your groceries cost, or how hard it is to buy a home, or a debt economy, or wars that cause hyper-inflation but enrich trans-national corporations.

Get it? They care about you. That’s “Communist,” obviously. Now be a good Capitalist and line up to get chipped and pay your fresh air tax. Israel needs the money for their next conquest.

What the Metamucil-sipping Boomer-Cons don’t comprehend is that their proximity to power in the Swamp has given them a disproportionate influence compared to the masses who are tired of their crap. They have the ear of POTUS and Beltway lobbyists, but not We the People. They’re on Fox, talking to nursing homes and airports, but no one is watching but captive audiences. And they’ve hitched their wagons to a shooting star in the White House who will be a lame duck in a matter of months.

They’ll wake one day, not long from now, and discover exactly how irrelevant they’ve become.

I gave that warning above because James Lindsay had sent out the memo that “Woke 2.0” would be people who complained about the NeoCon economy, and since then, Jeremy Boreing and absolutely everybody in the Israel First ecosystem has been complaining about “closet Commies” in the conservative movement who complain about things like the affordability crisis. Well, now Burrito-Gate has happened, and it unfolded almost like somebody found my prediction, highlighted it with a yellow marker, and passed it around the group chat. What happened - which I explained here at NXR - was that a young man remarked that “a burrito shouldn’t cost twenty dollars,” and any adult with an IQ higher than his thermostat immediately understood his point. He wasn’t writing a doctoral dissertation on the inflationary price of Mexican cuisine, and probably not being terribly literal, but instead was talking about groceries, housing, insurance, debt, inflation, and the increasingly absurd reality that young families are expected to finance what their grandparents bought with one blue-collar income and a handshake.

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The response was magnificent in the way only political self-parody can be. BoomerCons all across America suddenly became forensic burrito investigators, rummaging through restaurant menus like the fate of Western Civilization depended on proving a carne asada special only cost $14.95. Erick Erickson, bless his heart, was rummaging through online burrito advertisements to see if the young man was lying. It was fantastically out of touch, as though they were all so far outside the realm of normal that they needed evidence that the price of things has really gone up, which means the value of the dollar has really gone down.

The answer, of course, is that yes, obviously they have. Inflation of goods and deflation of the dollar was already bad before Trump, and has gotten noticeably worse because government borrowing - on account of war - and the inflation caused directly by the war itself is what creates inflation. Combine that with tariffs (which in principle are fine, if done consistently and with something resembling a game plan) and oil prices that are much higher than their currently manipulated status because the Straight of Hormuz is pumping 19 million barrels less daily than before, and inflation is obviously going to skyrocket. Wars have consequences, and the people promoting the policies that have consequences are busy telling us that we are imagining an economy in the gutter. And worse yet, they’re telling us that anyone struggling needs to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy.

Dan Crenshaw’s response was to tell everybody to eat ramen.

Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?”

There was a day when a civil leader speaking this way to legitimately hurting people would be met with a guillotine. The good old days, right? I have nostalgia for an age I’ve never lived.

Keep in mind, Crenshaw voted to give Ukrainians $61 billion, voted to give Israel $26 billion, and voted to raise the government debt ceiling in the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” of 2023, when they literally ran out of money because balancing a budget is something they haven’t done since 2001. The Ukrainians, Israelis, and Congress do not have to handle their own shit. But you do. When they fail to handle it, Crenshaw will give them your money. When you’re having a hard time - in thanks, due to funding foreign nations, foreign wars, and the federal Congress - you can eat Ramen.

Think about how remarkable that actually is. The generation that supervised America's post-war economic decline now recommends surviving it by eating the national goyslop cuisine of the country we fought at Pearl Harbor. Somewhere the Greatest Generation is trying to process the fact that after defeating Imperial Japan, building the strongest middle class in world history, and handing their children the most prosperous nation on earth, their political heirs have managed to turn "Congratulations, you're eating ramen now" into a conservative policy platform. Apparently, the Japs won.

Ben Shapiro took the comment like an autist with an attitude, with brutal literalism, saying, “Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20. If you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong. We have enough problems as a country without insane expectations that the government is going to provide us gourmet-quality burritos.”

The point went right over his yarmulke. We don’t want the government to provide us anything. We want the government to stop financing foreign wars with monopoly money and giving Israel blank checks deducted straight from our family bank accounts. Does it matter if it’s at a $15 burrito? How about $10? My family doesn’t go to McDonald's because we can’t get through the drive-through for less than $40, and I’m pretty sure my kids think I’m lying about hitting McDs on Tuesdays in college for 39-cent cheesburgers. Do you remember going to McDonald's not that long ago because you were poor? I do. Now it’s a luxury item, and not because its brand went bougie. It’s because Chick-fil-A is even more expensive, and that’s the world we live in now. And please, no lectures on eating at home. The point is that the price of everything is commensurate. Stuff doesn’t cost too much. Rather, our dollar is quickly becoming worthless.

The remarkable part of Burrito-Gate was how quickly the conversation skipped over whether life has objectively become harder for ordinary Americans and landed squarely on, “Sounds like Communism.” Apparently, wondering why groceries require a second mortgage is Communist. Wondering why young couples struggle to buy a starter home is Communist. Asking why BlackRock has an easier time buying neighborhoods than young families buying a 2-bedroom house is Communist. Mentioning that endless borrowing, endless money printing, and endless foreign wars might not be fantastic for the purchasing power of the dollar is also Communist, and only Communists complain about the price of stuff.

Now, my grandfather is in the Great Beyond trying to understand how the patriotic answer to a collapsing dollar became Japanese noodles and lower expectations. I mean, not really. The afterlife doesn’t include such quandries, but you can only imagine what the bulk of WWII veterans who have gone on to glory would think about seeing 30% of homes in America be investor-owned, many of whom are outside the United States. When homes are asset investments instead of habitats for actual humanity, it means the economy isn’t working for people. It’s working for portfolios.

You see, Burrito-Gate wasn’t actually about economics. It wasn’t even about capitalism versus communism. If complaining about impossible housing prices, impossible insurance costs, impossible grocery bills, impossible debt loads, and impossible inflation automatically makes me a Communist, then what exactly is today’s conservatism conserving? Because from where I’m sitting, it increasingly looks like the answer isn’t families, churches, home ownership, or the American middle class. It’s the political establishment that’s run the ship aground for 80 years.

THE LEFT-RIGHT PARADIGM and MEANS-END INVERSION

The Left-Right paradigm has become one of the most effective systems of intellectual livestock management ever devised, complete with ideological branding irons and enough psychological cattle prods to keep two hundred million Americans grazing peacefully.

If the price of questioning global finance is being called anti-capitalist, we must pay it. If asking whether investment firms should own neighborhoods instead of newlyweds earns an ideological scarlet letter, stitch it on the jacket. If objecting to trillion-dollar deficits, forever wars, and a dollar that now has the purchasing power of an arcade token makes us insufficiently conservative, then we are in “whatever” territory. We have no interest in defending the political establishment simply because somebody wrapped them in an American flag and called them “the market.”

That is why the Left-Right circus has to collapse under its own stupidity. It no longer exists to help people think. It exists to prevent them from thinking. Every question is filtered through a partisan decoder ring before anyone is allowed to ask whether it’s actually true, actually just, or actually good. The categories have become chains, and millions of Christians have become so accustomed to wearing them they mistake the rattling for freedom.

Philosophers call this a means-end inversion.

Capitalism is not a god. It is not a sacrament. It is not the eighth ordinance of the church, and Milton Friedman wasn’t the Apostle Paul. Capitalism is an economic tool. It possesses no independent moral authority whatsoever. Its value is entirely derivative. It is valuable only insofar as it serves the human beings for whom economies exist in the first place. The moment we begin defending “Capitalism” instead of defending the people Capitalism was supposed to benefit, we’ve committed the exact same means-end inversion I explained above. We’ve made the label the goal.

Suppose multinational corporations discover they can increase profits by replacing five million fathers with artificial intelligence. Is that automatically good because “the market has spoken”? Suppose Wall Street discovers it can generate enormous returns by turning neighborhoods into investment portfolios, pricing newly married couples out of home ownership. Suppose private equity can squeeze another twelve percent out of a rural hospital by firing nurses, or another twenty percent out of a trailer park by doubling lot rent, or another thirty percent out of an apartment complex by nickel-and-diming tenants with a dozen new fees. If every one of those practices can be defended as “capitalist,” does that end the conversation? No. Only if we’ve become idolaters.

That is exactly the trap the Establishment Right has laid for itself. Somewhere along the way, it stopped asking whether a practice serves families, strengthens communities, rewards honest labor, encourages marriage, makes children more attainable, or helps fathers provide. It asks only one question. “Is it capitalism?” If the answer is yes, the discussion is over. Stamp it with a bald eagle. Wrap it in an American flag. Call anyone raising objections a Communist, and move on to the next think tank luncheon.

That’s not defending capitalism. That’s worshiping it.

A healthy economic system should constantly stand before the bar of human flourishing and justify its existence. Does it make it easier for ordinary people to own property? Does it reward work? Does it encourage independence instead of dependency? Does it strengthen families instead of fragmenting them? Does it make children a blessing instead of a financial luxury? Those are the questions that matter. “Is this capitalist?” isn’t even on the first page of the exam

If capitalism is the best economic system (and it generally is), it will pass those tests more often than its competitors. That’s exactly why we defend it. But if particular practices wrapped in the banner of capitalism undermine the very human flourishing capitalism exists to promote, our loyalty belongs to the people, not the branding. We are under no Christian obligation to baptize every exploitative practice simply because somebody in a suit assures us it’s “just the free market.” Markets were made for man. Man was not made for markets. The moment we reverse that order, we haven’t become better capitalists. We’ve simply found another idol to worship.

Perhaps the most astonishing trick ever pulled by the modern political establishment is convincing ordinary working Americans to identify with the interests of the institutions slowly crushing them. It is an audacious con. The blue-collar mechanic, the electrician, the truck driver, the welder, the farmer, and the office worker have been persuaded that questioning any practice wrapped in the word “Capitalism” is somehow an act of treason against their own tribe.

AN EXAMPLE OF COMPLIANCE CAPITALISM

The accusation of “anti-Capitalism” works because we’ve been trained to fear the label more than the condition. We’d rather be called a “good capitalist” than ask why we can’t afford to own a home. We’d rather defend an economic orthodoxy than demand a healthcare system that doesn’t punish independence. We’d rather wear the correct ideological jersey than insist that markets exist to serve families instead of requiring families to sacrifice themselves for the market. That is not conviction. It’s psychological captivity.

I’ll give you a personal example. When we decided to take the leap and I’d quit the day job in finance to write this Substack, we did so, in part, factoring in the price of health insurance on the marketplace compared to what I paid out of my paycheck. We didn’t know that only weeks later, Republicans let the Marketplace Premium Subsidies expire for the self-employed. After all, those are practically socialist. Republicans had some good ideas to help, like expanding Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), expanding association health plans, increasing catastrophic health plans, price transparency requirements, broader deregulation to increase competition, and so on. In the end, Republicans did what Republicans do best, which is nothing, and the health insurance price for self-employed people tripled nationwide.

What does that do? It forces people into wage slavery, because purchasing health insurance on the market is now outrageously expensive. Wage slaves can’t avoid payroll taxes, so the government gets its cut. It also keeps the job market flooded, which keeps wages artificially low, which is what the corporatocracy wants. Suddenly, the safest economic decision isn’t starting a business, freelancing, building a family enterprise, or taking entrepreneurial risks. It’s finding an employer with a group health plan and staying put. Independence becomes a luxury good.

That has consequences far beyond healthcare. A wage slave thinks twice before taking risks, starting a business, speaking out, or walking away from a bad job. His paycheck isn’t the only thing on the line anymore. His children’s doctor, his wife’s prescriptions, and his family’s financial security are all tethered to the same employer. That’s a remarkably effective way to encourage compliance.

Self-employed people, by contrast, are inherently more independent. They don’t rely on a corporate hierarchy for advancement, and they generally enjoy greater control over how they earn a living. A society filled with independent proprietors, contractors, tradesmen, and small business owners is harder to centralize than one in which millions of families depend on large employers for both income and essential benefits. Whether intentional or not, a system that heavily penalizes independence while rewarding dependence should concern anyone who believes strong families and free citizens are the foundation of a healthy nation.

So, was the “pro-Capitalist” position really making health insurance more expensive because it’s the “free market.”Maybe. But it’s not the pro-family, pro-independence, pro-human flourishing position, so why does it matter? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of positions like that, which Christians and conservatives need to begin thinking through with a human-centered, and not label-centered, mindset.

WHERE DO $20 BURRITOS COME FROM?

A twenty-dollar burrito doesn’t happen because your local Mexican restaurant gets greedy. It happens because several economic forces converge on the same menu. First comes monetary inflation. That means Washington spends money it doesn’t have, the Federal Reserve creates new dollars out of nothing (alchemy) to help finance an ever-growing mountain of debt, and every existing dollar buys a little less than it did before. That’s the hidden tax nobody votes for.

Second comes price inflation. Energy costs rise. Transportation costs rise. Insurance rises. Regulations pile up. Taxes increase. Supply chains become more expensive. Every business in the production chain passes its higher costs to the next guy until the final bill lands on your lunch tray. Your burrito didn’t become more valuable. The dollars buying it became weaker while the cost of producing it became higher.

Third comes labor economics. For decades, the supply of available labor has steadily expanded while household expenses have climbed. Yes, that’s affected by immigration, globalization, and automation. But mostly, it was driven by women entering the workforce and the dramatic expansion of dual-income households after World War II. The practical result has been the same: one income buys less, two incomes become the expectation instead of the exception, and wages struggle to keep pace with the combined pressure of inflation and an abundant labor pool.

Fourth comes shock inflation. The Pentagon keeps trying to defeat Temu warfare with Neiman Marcus weaponry, launching million-dollar missiles at $50,000 drones because defense contractors make a lot more money selling aircraft carriers than they do selling cheap, mass-produced counter-drone technology built for modern warfare. Americans get the invoice twice: once through taxes, and again through higher prices.

Fifth comes cost-push inflation, which is when production costs rise (energy, wages, shipping, raw materials), so businesses raise prices, which is almost always the result of stupid government bureaucracy and red tape.

Stack those five forces together, and the twenty-dollar burrito begins to make a lot more sense. Now, take a look at all those. Which of those problems are Republicans willing to fix. Which of those problems are Republicans even willing to discuss?

Is the Republican establishment willing to discuss the Federal Reserve? No.

Is the Republican establishment willing to discuss shock inflation caused by war? No. What about price inflation, again, largely caused by war and other forms of massive government spending? No.

Is the Republican establishment willing to discuss labor economics? Yes, but only migrant labor, while defending H1B visas. But are they willing to discuss the role of women in the workplace as the primary cause of deflated wages? Absolutely not. Not in a million years. You couldn’t pay them to have that conversation.

So, it’s no wonder that they are hesitant to admit there’s a $20 burrito problem. They have no solutions. If you don’t have solutions, you’re going to be hesitant to admit there’s a problem, so you scour the Internet for a $20 burrito and declare it all fake news. And the response is, “You are not working hard enough. Stop being lazy.”

Last weekend, my family watched the new Animal Farm animated film. It was hot garbage, so far as cinematic quality goes, but I was happy to explain to my kids the allegory and particularly that of Boxer, Orwell’s representation of the working class, the laborers whose strength and loyalty actually built the farm's success but who get exploited by the ruling class in the end and ultimately turned into glue. You can hear the voice of Dan Crenshaw somewhere off in the distance, saying, “Work harder, horse. Work harder and eat the Ramen.”

Don’t let the “Eat Ramen” people tell you that we are the Commies in this scenario. Clearly, we are Boxer. They are Napoleon and the pigs. That they’d have the gall to claim they are the Capitalists is really beyond the pale. “All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others” is the only explanation for the modern American nation in which the wealthy are getting wealthier, and everyone else is told to eat Japanese junk food.

A HUMAN-CENTERED VALUE SYSTEM AND LABEL CONSERVATISM

And this is where the argument gets much bigger than burritos, healthcare, BlackRock, or whether somebody on Fox Business thinks you’re insufficiently enthusiastic about capitalism. Those are merely the opening skirmishes. We are entering a technological revolution that is going to force Christians to answer questions our grandparents never imagined, and “Well, I’m a conservative” is going to be about as useful as bringing a Blockbuster membership card to an ATM.

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Putting this exposé together for I2I subscribers was a lot of work. And this is just the first installment. I’ve been on this trail since Ben Gvir first rolled onto the Temple Mount with 4 thousand religious extremists two weeks ago, trying to piece together how this happened. And what I discovered was a trail that went right back to October 7. We can blame Hamas all day long - and should. But some of the people screaming the loudest about what happened that day are covering up why it happened and who else is to blame. And who else to blame are the advocates of a novel eschatological heresy that has consumed whole swaths of the American church. We all know that bad ideas have consequences. But bad theology can cause massacres, genocides, and world wars. Dispensationalism is two out of three, and the third is on its way.

Americans need to know the truth about October 7. The real truth. No, not that Netanyahu was funneling 30 million per month to Hamas despite warnings from Israeli internal security that they were using it to plan a massive attack. No, not that Israel was warned by numerous nations of the impending attack, including Egyptian intelligence, which was so concerned that it landed a plane in Tel Aviv to warn Israeli officials in person. Not that Israeli officials were told to stand down until the attack was over. And no, not that the Hannibal Directive targeted fleeing civilians, and not hostages. Those are all truths out there in the wild, for Americans to discover if they are apt enough to navigate around our censored media firewalls and look for the truth. Those facts are all readily available.

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Americans need to know that October 7 was caused, in part, by a plan supported by American evangelicals, and that Dispensational Zionism has real-world consequences. They need to know that the real cause of the attack was spiritual, and not political. Americans deserve to know that the real reason for Hamas’ attack was the Zionist plans to rebuild the Third Temple.

What I’m about to share has been said in parts, here and there - mostly there, in the region - but practically never put together in one place, so that you can see the forest for the trees. When Americans think of “extremism in the Middle East,” we are trained and conditioned to think about Islam - the type of people who storm the nation next door, attack concert-goers, and take civilians hostage. But that’s only half the story, and the half that very powerful people spend a fortune of your own resources to sell you like a manufactured product. Because it is. Let’s put it together.

THE MOUNT

Herod the Great started his massive reconstruction of the Hebrew Temple in 20 BC. There was nothing wrong with the last one, rebuilt by Zerubabbel five hundred years before, except that it was humble compared to the majesty of Solomon’s. Herod was, in great irony, an imposter Jew. By birth he was an Edomite, or Idumean, the line of Esau and not Jacob. The Edomites had been forcefully converted a hundred years before, and the Israelites rejected the Herodian family as inauthentic Jews. Ancient Israelites knew something modern Israelis do not: it takes more than looking like a Jew, talking like a Jew, and worshipping like a Jew to be a Jew. Herod, eager to compensate for that lacking ethnic merit badge, set about to make the most impressive temple Israel had ever seen, larger in scale than Solomon’s and arguably architecturally superior and more luxuriously ornate. Then Christ ordered its destruction: “Destroy this temple” (λύσατε is the second-person plural aorist active imperative), with Mark sandwiching his curse between the before-and-after accounts of Christ cursing the fig tree. In God’s manifold kindness, the Romans destroyed it, the Almighty’s last act of great mercy to the Jewish people, signifying that the Old Covenant is gone and to cast their eyes upon the New.

In 363 AD, Emperor Julian consented to let what few Jews remained rebuild it. But God’s grace is everlasting to everlasting, and their project was thwarted when an earthquake and fire ceased its construction. If Jews wanted a Temple, they could look to Christ. Then, in 637 AD, under Caliph Umar, the Muslims took Jerusalem and had built the Dome of the Rock in 691, atop the rock rumored to be where Abraham bound Isaac and Muhammad took his midnight flight to Heaven. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was constructed in 705 AD, and it remains to this day.

The site changed hands repeatedly over the following centuries, held by Crusaders who converted the Dome into a church and the mosque into royal and military quarters for roughly a century starting in 1099, then retaken by Saladin in 1187 and restored to Islamic use, later passing through Mamluk and then Ottoman control from 1517 onward. Ottoman rule held until World War I, after which the British Mandate governed Jerusalem from 1917 to 1948, followed by Jordanian control of the Old City and the compound from 1948 to 1967.

In June of 1967, Israel captured East Jerusalem and the Old City in the Six-Day War, and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made the decision within hours to remove an Israeli flag raised over the Dome of the Rock and hand day-to-day religious administration of the compound back to the Jordanian Waqf, while Israel retained overall security control. Under that arrangement, Israeli police secure the site's perimeter and entry, while the Waqf holds religious authority over the compound itself, and non-Muslim prayer has been informally but consistently barred as the one rule holding the entire arrangement together. Jordan's custodial role over the site was later formalized in the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, which explicitly recognizes Jordan's special role in Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, giving the arrangement a legal, not just customary, foundation. Successive Israeli governments, including Netanyahu's, have publicly and repeatedly reaffirmed to Jordan and to Washington that the status quo remains unchanged.

You might ask why Moshe Dayan took down the Star of Remphan and gave the keys to Israel. Dayan was a secular Zionist, a member of the generation of founding socialists who didn’t subscribe to religious extremism. He was also keenly aware that taking control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque would be the start of a war in the Middle East that would not end with Israel in existence, if it ended at all. It’s the third holiest site in Islam, and whether Israel had the support of the United States or not - Israel could scarcely imagine having to fight off the entire Arab world.

Israel, you see, has one thing going for it, the key to their national survival for 80 years: the Middle East is divided. The situation in the Middle East for Israel is similar to that of the early American colonies. The natives could have wiped us off the Continent, if it weren’t for the fact that they were fighting amongst themselves. And just as the British colonies and the early American Republic capitalized on the Indians’ intramural wars, Israel has maintained a foreign policy ambition since the beginning to destabilize and exploit that destabilization in the Middle East. Destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the one and probably only unifying move that could unite the vast differences of Islam in the region to come against Israel in one instantaneous sweep. Destroying it would bring the Islamic world together with one goal: to end Israel as we know it.

FAST FORWARD TO BEN GVIR

Itamar Ben Gvir is Israel's National Security Minister, the cabinet post overseeing the Israeli police. He heads the Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party and has held the position since Netanyahu's coalition government formed in late 2022. Netanyahu could not remain in power without him. This means Netanyahu can’t avoid prison without him.

When he was 19 years old, Israel’s compulsory conscription board rejected him for what was allegedly more than 50 arrests for extremist actions (convicted in 8), and his involvement in and membership in Kahanism, a war-cult spinoff that is so radically anti-Gentile that both Israel and the United States labeled it a terrorist organization. For years, he had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli terrorist who murdered 29 Muslims in prayer in 1994. On his first date with his wife, they went to visit Goldstein’s grave, which is something you might expect for two love birds when one of them is the most infamous genocidal maniac Israel has ever produced. Shortly before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered for trying to pursue the Oslo Peace Accords, a young Ben Gvir was in possession of his Cadillac’s hood ornament, bragging on television, "We got to his car, and we'll get to him, too.” With Rabin dead, Netanyahu won that election handily, and Israel has not seriously pursued peace talks since.

In November 2025, Ben Gvir said that if the UN recognized a Palestinian state, Netanyahu should order targeted assassinations of senior Palestinian Authority officials. He has advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, drawing UK sanctions in 2025, freezing his bank accounts and issuing a travel ban. In fact, his assets have been frozen by the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway over incitement to violence and extremist violence and Palestinian abuse. If that seems odd to you, that’s what civilized nations do to war criminals.

If you want special insight into this psychopath’s mind, Gvir once planned to build moats around refugee camps, flood them with swamp water, and import crocodiles in lieu of guards. The cartoonishness of the plan is only overshadowed by the fact he was very serious. No news reports suggested whether he wanted them to have laser beams attached to their heads. Israel’s Environmental Protections Minister classified them as endangered, just in case, killing the plan. Before the ruling, he had raised 21 million shekels for the project and had already started digging. He accused her of “siding with terrorists.” The man really wanted his crocodiles.

Ben Gvir repeatedly used attack dogs on flotilla captives, reportedly for fun. This is the man to whom the “dog rape” accounts I chronicled in an I2I Intel drop for you several months ago go back. France banned him from French territory. Poland issued a five-year entry ban, calling him “a threat to public order.” When the flotilla of activists, including Greta Thunberg, was taken into custody, he proposed they be held in prisons for terrorists and wanted to commandeer their ships for Israel. Later, he alleged that they, too, were “for the terrorists.” To Ben Gvir, there are two types of people: terrorists and people who support terrorists. And this year, he was primarily responsible for a new law passed this year that would apply the death penalty to Jews, but not Gentiles, for acts of terror.

But the most extreme line from Gvir on July 24, 2024, at a Knesset conference called “Israel’s Return to the Temple Mount,” which he himself had initiated, "I am the political echelon, and the political echelon permits Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount." Netanyahu ran to the mic to reassure the world that policy is set by the government as a whole, and not a single minister.

This was the Ministry figure responsible for overseeing the police at the Temple Mount, standing up in the middle of the Knesset, and declaring that he was making the unilateral decision by the power of fiat to overturn the one treaty that has held back a Middle Eastern Armageddon for the last 60 years.

HAMAS

How much of that did you know about Ben Gvir? Sure, if you’re an I2I subscriber, you’re probably well-read. But most Americans haven’t gotten that snapshot at all. The man, who by all accounts is the second-most powerful official in Israel, a man key to Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, has promised to undo the one thing keeping world peace hanging on like a thread, has promised to cut it with a pair of scissors.

Why did October 7 happen? If you’re an American, you’ve already heard why. Hamas is evil, and they hate Jews. It’s not any more complicated, and you don’t need to think it through any harder than that. Israel’s finance minister said, “There are 2 million Nazis in Gaza who want to destroy us when they get up every morning.” Infants included, apparently. Former President Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely untrue. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.” So, they’re all evil, apparently. The women really could have stood up to Hamas and their 30 million dollar a month Israeli allowance, or mentioned the fact that 1% of Gazans were old enough to vote in the last free election, or that Hamas had Israel’s full support in that election. And when launching the ground invasion on October 28, 2023, Netanyahu announced his soldiers were “committed to eradicating this evil from the world,” then quoted Deuteronomy 25:17. “Remember what Amalek did to you.” When asked why they did it, Netanyahu answered, “because we are Jews.” Gallant, another Israeli official, said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Netanyahu’s spokesperson said Hamas’ attack was “mind-boggling,” “crazy,” “insanity.”

Why did Hamas do it? The official narrative is they are ontologically evil, are Nazis, “human animals,” mind-boggling, crazy, and insane. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you’re allowed to know. It’s like alleging that 9/11 happened because Muslims hate Walmart and are jealous of our McDonalds’. And when Bin Laden’s own reasoning, in his own words, hit TikTok on November 13 of 2023 in his “Letter to America,” it went viral because - for the first time - Americans, especially of that young generation, were hearing from TikTok something they couldn’t read in the history textbooks. Within 48 hours, calls went out to ban TikTok, and by November 16, Josh Hawley was telling Sean Hannity, "We should ban it," and Mike Gallagher was on Fox News the same day calling for "a ban or forced sale before it is too late.” Too late for what? For the cat to go back in the bag, that’s what.

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Congress claimed it was because TikTok was “Chinese propaganda.” Americans laughed and mocked the situation, noticing that the congressmen suddenly worried about Chinese “propaganda” happened to be the same congressmen advocating nonstop for Forever Wars in the Middle East.

So what was Hamas’ reason, in their own words, for the attack? That question alone is enough to make a great many people angry. Incarnate evil doesn’t have logic. “Insane” isn’t even capable of logic. Once you’re convinced that “evil” explains it, you stop looking for reasons, and you start looking for napalm. This doesn’t mean that Hamas isn’t evil, of course. But it does mean that even insane, evil people have their reasons. What those reasons are should at least be heard out by serious people who want to avoid it repeating in the future. This principle is why the characterization of Muslims as ontologically evil concerns me. If Muslims are made evil by their religion, or if they are made evil by their culture, or if they are made evil by their environment, these are all things that can be reasoned with, evangelized, sanctified, or negotiated. But if they are ontologically evil because God made them that way, then the most rational solution is to kill every last one of them, and why they’re doing what they’re doing is irrelevant. And that’s what the Israel lobby wants us to believe, despite it being against our religion to believe it.

A hundred days into the war, military spokesman Abu Ubaida said what triggered the operation named Al-Aqsa Flood. Listing the group’s motives, he accused Jews of “bringing red cows” to the Holy Land. The fuller translated remarks, carried by the Palestine Chronicle via the Resistance News Network, tie the cattle directly to “that hateful religious myth against Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.” It was a major speech, designed to go out into the world and explain the reason for their barbaric actions. Almost no media covered it.

He wasn’t making up a reason after the fact, either. Hamas’s journal, Al-Rassala, ran a piece back in September 2022, about the five American-bred heifers landing at Ben Gurion Airport and rabbis from the Temple Institute meeting them on the tarmac for a formal ceremony. The magazine called it “evidence of a Judaization campaign against Al-Aqsa already underway.” Khaled Mashal, the group’s exiled former Gaza chief, repeated the same framing weeks after October 7 in a different interview. That’s three different men on three different platforms over three years, all giving the same reason for the October 7 attacks: the red heifers.

Their reason hasn’t been secret, but it’s still been hidden. Not by them, but by the media in the United States. Becuase if people start asking about what the Red Heifers are about, they’re going to start asking questions about a lot more, and Americans will discover two things: (1) religious extremism isn’t unique to Islam, and (2) we have been lied to about the cause of this brutal attack, and some Americans are to blame for it.

RED HEIFERS

Here’s the gist of it. Jewish Radicals are planning to invade the Dome of the Rock compound, destroy the Mosque, raze the ground, and rebuild the Temple to reinstate Temple Judaism, complete with animal sacrifice. And Dispensationalist Christians in America are helping them.

Numbers 19 requires a red heifer without blemish, never yoked to labor, burned and mixed with water to produce the ash required for ritual purification before Temple service can resume. Hebrews 9:13-14 says this was fulfilled by Christ, "For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"

Jewish radicals obviously did not get the memo about Christ’s fulfillment. Neither did Dispensational Zionist and Texas rancher, Byron Stinson. Stinson has been working with the group Boneh Israel, which spent years breeding the perfect red heifers and flew five to Israel in September 2022 aboard a passenger jet. Rabbis from the Temple Institute met them at Ben Gurion Airport for a formal ceremony. Since October 7, the Institute announced that all five had developed disqualifying white hairs and failed inspection. Stinson and his supporters dispute that finding, arguing at least two heifers still meet the criteria, with a domestic Israeli breeding program now underway to preserve the genetics (you can see NeoCon establishmentarian, James Lindsay, touring it below). Hamas cited the heifers’ 2022 arrival as their motive for October 7, calling it evidence that Israel was moving to destroy Al Aqsa and build the Temple. They’re right. That’s exactly what it means.

In Stinson’s book, Hunt for the Red Heifer, he described himself and his wife as "Judeo-Christian believers in the God of Abraham and His Messiah from the line of David." He claims that when reading Romans 9 as a child, he heard an audible prophecy about him being either a chosen instrument of God or one for the devil, devoted to sex and debauchery. He was independently wealthy from Texas oil leases, and decided to do both, partaking in the sex and debauchery early on, and then, after “sowing his wild oats,” somehow took up with an Israeli partner, Yitshak Mamo, who isn't just a rabbi, but a controversial figure who evicted Palestinian families from East Jerusalem homes to “assert Jewish ownership.” And the anti-humanitarian monster Jewish Rabbi has found the wealthy Texas oil man useful, and His Dispensationalism even more useful, talking him into bankrolling the Red Heifer project.

Stinson, like many Dispensational Zionists, believes that the temple being rebuilt is a prerequisite for the return of Christ. His Rabbi business partner - who appears to be exploiting Stinson rather than contributing anything to the project himself - believes it is necessary for the coming of the Messiah, who most certainly is not Jesus. Somehow, they still work together toward the common goal.

In the summer of 2025, Stinson and Mamo staged an unauthorized red heifer sacrifice, cut its throat, sprinkled its blood toward the Temple Mount, burned the animal in a twelve-hour sacrifice, and collected its ashes. Stinson insists it was a real and effectual sacrifice, claims the ashes have healing properties, and says they cured his wife's decades-old memory problems. He sacrificed to a false god.

It’s unknown if he remembered that Hebrews 9:13-14 is in the Bible. But I cannot emphasize to you enough the level of unconquerable dumbassery that would provoke an alleged Christian to provide the funds for someone to produce the artifacts of a new temple, including - among other things - the veil for the Holy of Holies. What God hath torn Himself, the dividing line of hostilities, a Dispensationalist is going to sew back together? They plan to stitch together the partition between God and Man that was rent by Christ’s own sacrifice? There has never been a better metaphor for the heresy of Dispensationalism than that. God help them.

Byron Stinson resides inside a documented pipeline (because I’m documenting it) that runs straight through the Speaker of the House. Twice now, in 2024 and again in 2025, Stinson has appeared on the official published roster of the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, sharing the stage and the program with Mike Johnson, Michele Bachmann, and self-styled prophet Jonathan Cahn, three of the most recognizable names in American Dispensationalist politics. Bachmann isn’t a retired congresswoman playing dress-up either, she currently serves as Dean of Regent University’s Robertson School of Government, meaning the institution training the next generation of Christian-right political operatives has its dean sharing a Temple-project stage with the man who imported the cows. Cahn, author of The Harbinger and a fixture of apocalyptic prophecy publishing, closed the 2025 gathering by declaring America’s greatness contingent on national repentance back to God, the same rhetorical register Stinson uses to describe his own calling. Jim Garlow, the event’s co-founder and CEO of Well Versed, didn’t just seat Stinson on a panel. He personally promoted Stinson’s Temple presentation afterward, called it one of the most astounding stories he’d heard in decades, and brought him back for follow-up podcast broadcasts specifically dedicated to red heifer updates.

The 2025 session went further than theology into hard geopolitics, Stinson and Mamo presenting alongside Sharren Haskel, Israel’s sitting Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and a Knesset member, updating the room not just on the heifers but on securing gold from Papua New Guinea for Temple construction, with a Knesset member from the ruling coalition, Ohad Tal, chairman of its Public Enterprises Committee, on the identical roster the year before. That means the American Dispensationalist wing and the sitting Israeli government weren’t operating together coincidentally, but they were literally sharing a stage, discussing the same project, funded by the same donor networks, in front of the man second in line to the American presidency.

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council co-host the entire operation, giving it institutional backing well beyond a fringe prophecy circuit, and the connections don’t stop at the conference room. Mike Johnson personally visited the Shiloh settlement where the heifers are kept. Mike Huckabee, as sitting US Ambassador to Israel, made the first known official ambassadorial visit inside the West Bank specifically to that same location. This is the actual architecture behind the theology: a functioning, funded, recurring pipeline connecting a Texas rancher’s cattle to the Speaker’s office, a cabinet-level US ambassador, a university dean training future Christian-right officials, and sitting members of Netanyahu’s Knesset, and it deserves to be treated as exactly the kind of organized, high-level political-religious infrastructure it plainly is, not dismissed as a fringe curiosity confined to Substack and prophecy podcasts.

It goes deeper than just your regular dispensationalist personalities. In February 2018, years before entering government, Pete Hegseth (from the photo above of this actual speech) addressed the Arutz Sheva U.S.-Israel Relations Conference at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, where he expressed enthusiasm for the prospect of a Third Temple. Referring to the modern state of Israel as a “miracle once thought impossible,” Hegseth said there was “no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” adding that while he did not know how it would happen, he believed “it could happen.”

WHO’S BUILDING IT?

Rabbi Yisrael Ariel founded the Temple Institute in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter in 1984, and it functions as the central hub for the temple project. His team has reconstructed over 70 sacred vessels in gold, silver, and copper, blessed as kosher for immediate use, the golden Menorah, the Showbread Table, the Incense Altar, a High Priest’s breastplate, silver trumpets pulled straight from Numbers. His son Azaria now serves as the world’s foremost authority on red heifer qualification, the man whose word decides whether Stinson’s cows ever get near a knife again.

Boneh Israel runs the money side out of Texas, funneling Christian Zionist cash from Byron Stinson into the hands of Israeli rabbinic authority, chiefly Yitshak Mamo, who heads his own outfit called Uvne Jerusalem. Mamo isn’t just a red heifer procurement man. He’s a controversial figure in East Jerusalem for a separate reason entirely, evicting Palestinian families from their homes to establish Jewish ownership claims, work that runs parallel to and reinforces the same project.

Rabbi Chaim Richman ran the Temple Institute’s international operations from 1989 to 2020 before launching his own group, Jerusalem Lights, chasing the identical mission through a separate vehicle. And standing above all of them, at least on paper, sits the reconstituted Sanhedrin, Judaism’s ancient religious court, revived in the early 2000s specifically to supply the legal and religious authority that could someday declare the moment has arrived. Rabbi Joshua Wander speaks for that body now.

Some rabbis argue Temple sacrifice requires no finished building at all. An altar built to Torah specification sits ready, designed to be lifted onto a flatbed truck and delivered to the Mount on short notice. Activists have staged reenactments of the Passover sacrifice near the Old City for years, treating the ritual as rehearsal rather than mere study.

In December 2004, members of the reconstituted court attempted to ascend the Temple Mount, ritually purifying themselves beforehand, before access rules turned them back. Richman sits among the modern Sanhedrin’s most visible members, and between him and Ariel, the project has its vessels, its trained priesthood, and now a body with the theoretical standing to authorize a Temple whenever conditions allow it.

The Temple Mount Administration’s objective is to build the Third Temple. Beyadenu, meaning “In Our Hands,” and coordinates the visits, counting 50,000 Jewish visitors to the compound in a single year as early as 2021 and 2022. Both groups organize flag marches, cornerstone ceremonies, and Passover sacrifice reenactments, functioning as liturgy and political pressure at once.

In the early 1980s, a cell called the Jewish Underground, led by Yehuda Etzion and Menachem Livni, plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock using four twenty-kilogram explosive devices, aiming to trigger a war that would clear the ground for the Third Temple. Israeli authorities caught the plot before detonation and imprisoned Etzion for acts of terrorism. He served his time and returned to activism, founding Hai Vekayam, a group still pushing for Jewish prayer rights on the Mount. The man who once planned to bomb the compound spent his later career building the political movement that now walks through it under police escort

.Ben Gvir’s wife, Ayala Nimrodi, is a member of the Temple Mount Administration. Is it all starting to come together for you? It will now.

FAST FORWARD TO JULY 2026 (LAST MONTH)

On the morning of Tisha B’Av, the Jewish fast day mourning the destruction of both ancient Temples (July 23), more than 4,000 Jewish radicals poured into the Al-Aqsa compound. The Islamic Waqf recorded 3,228 entries in the morning hours alone. Palestinian officials put the full day’s total above 4,200. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir walked in among them, prayer book in hand, and prayed openly at the site he is legally barred from praying at, surrounded by police he commands protecting rather than removing him. Visitors waved Israeli flags. They sang the national anthem. Some bowed in full prostration on the stones. Israeli police stood as an armed perimeter around the entire spectacle rather than as an enforcement mechanism against it.

Ben Gvir posted video from inside the compound that day. “On Tisha B’Av we mark the destruction. But we also see huge progress on the Temple Mount. Look at what’s happening here, Jews praying, feeling like they’re the owners of the place. This has never happened before.” Owners. This is literally what caused October 7.

What first caught my attention is that Western media reported Ben Gvir’s words, “The Temple is now in our hands,” but did not explain the significance of the phrase. Not only is it a quotation of what the IDF reported when first conquering all of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, but it’s the name of the organization working to destroy the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the temple. Neither did Western media spell out to Americans that his comment about “expanding Jewish sovereignty” means stealing it and taking it over. He is the second most powerful man in Israel, doing this.

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A meeting last week at the White House almost went unnoticed. Netanyahu flew in to bury his golden goose, Lindsay Graham, to drop off some top-secret info to Trump about Iran’s alleged nuclear program, which almost certainly is contrived, and to meet with 4 prominent evangelical leaders for a quick brainstorming session on how to influence American evangelicals. The strategy? Present criticism of Israel as war on evangelicalism. When asked by a reporter about Vance’s claims that Israel is running an evangelical influence operation, Netanyahu denied it, despite having just walked out of a closed-door meeting with evangelicals.

For the last two weeks, the controversy over “Judeo-Christian” has flared up again. There was no natural, organic reason. Pro-Israel influencers got the memo, and within hours, X had erupted in both human and AI bots announcing that the term was perfectly innocent. Hundreds of them. With nearly identical tweets, the same type of phenomenon was noticed by the Trump White House weeks ago, before they determined it was a coordinated campaign by Israel to shank the president, and led by his former digital campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

As I wrote about at NXR, Wesley Huff, the up-and-coming Christian apologist and influencer, told us that the term was purely academic and meant nothing about the modern State of Israel. Jordan Peterson retweeted Huff, advertised himself as being in full agreement, before adding that Americans owe the modern state of Israel for the development of Western Civilization and that anyone uncomfortable with the phrase is a morally defective reprobate. Which was fascinating, because Peterson’s “agreement” managed to contradict Huff’s point almost word for word.

Not to be left out, Allie Beth Stuckey cited the opinions of Wesley Huff, Jordan Peterson, and charismatic clean-up specialist Mike Winger. Then, after what we are apparently to believe was a long season of prayerful discernment and diligent study as an accomplished exegete, she announced that this was her carefully considered professional opinion as well.

It was one of those moments on social media when you could practically hear the starter pistol. I said at the time that it was coordinated, and somebody in the United States had just received the carrier pigeon from Tel Aviv. Or the bat signal. Or the encrypted Signal chat. Or whatever mechanism is used to synchronize the talking points, because what followed looked about as spontaneous as a North Korean election. Within hours, the same arguments, same buzzwords, and same framing were suddenly materializing everywhere, as though half the platform had wandered into the same writers’ room.

My suspicion was that it had something to do with JD Vance’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he acknowledged that an Israeli influence operation aimed squarely at American evangelicals - the same campaign I identified as being directed by Brad Parscale, Dinesh D’Souza’s boss at Salem Media, last September - was suddenly no longer a “conspiracy theory.” According to Vance, elements of the Israel lobby were turning on Trump because he had the audacity to end the war with Iran before Israel had finished carpet-bombing Christian neighborhoods in Lebanon.

The Vice President of the United States, speaking to the largest podcast audience on earth, had just told millions of listeners that Israel was engaged in an influence campaign targeting the American public, and suddenly, American evangelicals saw the curtain behind the puppet ministry background twitched. Almost immediately, the machinery lurched back to life, and everyone wanted to rehabilitate the phrase Judeo-Christian. The term has long functioned as one of the most useful linguistic crowbars in the propaganda toolbox, blurring distinctions, baptizing political loyalties, and gently reminding Americans about what they owe the Jewish people.

Then, Netanyahu flew to the United States on a mission to prove that JD Vance wasn’t making it up.

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NETANYAHU’S VISIT

Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington last week and buried his old friend Lindsey Graham on Tuesday, a man responsible for untold millions or billions in funding for him over the years. And by Wednesday, he was standing in front of a small huddle of American evangelical leaders, explaining to them that the war for their souls is the same war as the one for Israel. He was sitting down with the evangelicals to help them gameplan how to best influence Americans to keep the war going.

It was a tough week. First, Lindsay Graham died. Then, irony died.

The same day he met privately with Israel’s rented evangelicals, ABC reporter Linsey Davis asked about Vice President Vance’s accusation that Israel was trying to influence American citizens to help keep the war going. Netanyahu lied, “We're not, actually…that's not our policy.” He had just walked out of the meeting where he was doing that exact thing.

Lance Wallnau, the New Apostolic Reformation Apostle, appeared on Kenneth Copeland’s Word-Faith television channel afterward and explained that Netanyahu had warned that “the same people who did 9/11 want a nuclear bomb.” I assume he meant Iran, because Israel and the CIA already have access to some. Wallnau also divulged that Netanyahu wanted to bring Trump some information on Pickaxe Mountain, Iran’s nuclear site. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu had spoken to Wallnau about it or had heard it elsewhere. Netanyahu famously brings “urgent intelligence” to Trump in person each time he visits, to lobby Trump for more military action. Trump told Fox earlier, “"I don't need Bibi to tell me" about Pickaxe Mountain, and that Netanyahu was only bringing it up because "he wants me to stay involved."

Netanyahu finds urgent and sensitive intel on Israel’s enemies like Joseph Smith came up with prophecies. Always self-serving, and with curious timing. In any respect, the evangelicals with whom Netanyahu met in Washington were out like good ambassadors shortly thereafter, warning American evangelicals exactly what Netanyahu wanted. The message: we need more war.

As the quotation I’m about to share will show, it was a remarkable display of political shape-shifting. Before American cameras, Netanyahu played the indispensable ally, the Churchill of the Middle East, the lonely sentinel holding back civilization’s enemies. Before evangelical leaders, he slipped into another costume entirely, wrapping his geopolitical ambitions in the language of prophecy, covenant, and spiritual warfare, as though supporting Israel had somehow become the Eleventh Commandment.

THE EVANGELICAL CABINET

Netanyahu’s office released the transcript of his short speech:

“We’re descendants from the original Hebrews of the Holy Land. And we are the first part of that Judeo-Christian heritage, which we cherish and which has given the world, the civilization, freedom and faith. And, again, we have to stand up and defend it. It’s under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism. It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack, because we are one. And what I ask you is only one thing. Stand up. Stand up and don’t cower. When you’re faced with an attack, what do you do? Attack back. That’s all. That’s my long speech. And I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship. And now it’s time to fight, fight, fight, that’s it.”

In a case of “I think thou dost protest too much,” Netanyahu started with the locus classicus canard of the Zionist experiment, the claim upon which the entirety of Israel’s American public relations campaign is built; that they are the descendants of the original Hebrews. By way of Europe. Two thousand years later.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s family is from Poland and Lithuania; his surname was Mileikowsky until his grandfather chose a Semitic-sounding. His great-great-grandfather, Hirsh Ber, was still in Belarus when George Washington was president of the United States in 1790. That’s as far back as anyone can trace his family lineage, including himself, so claiming to be the descendants of the original Hebrews in the Holy Land is a bit presumptive. But that’s not the point. The point is Netanyahu dropped the line that Wesley Huff, Jordan Peterson, and Allie Beth Stuckey all told us has no propagandic purposes at all.

Long before “Judeo-Christian heritage” became a term, another Israeli leader had spent decades getting to the point where “we are the original Hebrews” wouldn’t solicit laughter from the Western world. David Ben-Gurion, the first president of Israel, was not born David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Grün, the son of Polish Jews in Płońsk. Like thousands of other Zionist settlers arriving from Eastern Europe, he discarded his distinctly European surname - most of them in place for centuries - in favor of an invented Hebrew one.

By the time Israel declared independence in 1948, getting Israelis to pick a new Hebrew surname became a cultural crusade. Tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania, and elsewhere were given booklets of approved Hebrew surnames - like a book of baby names - to newcomers. They were told to pick out an ancestry they liked, essentially to find a name that sounded cool. Before Israel even possessed internationally recognized borders, it already had bureaucrats helping manufacture ancestral continuity one surname at a time. That’s how important the project would become for legitimizing the claim that “we are descendants of the original Hebrews.”

Then came the army. In June of 1948, Ben-Gurion gathered Israel’s senior military commanders for lunch. They probably expected a briefing. Instead, they got a naming ceremony. Before anyone left the table, they were expected to abandon their European surnames and adopt Hebrew ones. Some asked for time to think about it. Ben-Gurion wasn’t interested. By the end of the day, several of Israel’s highest-ranking officers had brand-new identities, minted faster than driver’s licenses at the DMV. Because service in the IDF was compulsory, and because they could make a soldier under their command do anything, they could effectively force the name changes through the IDF. By 1955, every IDF officer at the rank of lieutenant colonel and above had to Hebraize his surname. If it sounded foreign, it was expected to disappear.

.Officers, Ben-Gurion insisted, had to serve as examples, because the army must be Hebrew “in spirit...and in all its internal and external expressions.” That is a pretty extraordinary admission. This wasn’t simply about language. It was about presentation. Identity became something that could be curated and projected until the distinction between inherited history and constructed history grew increasingly difficult to notice. The campaign didn’t stop with generals. Everyone did it. Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir. Moshe Shertok became Moshe Sharett. Aubrey Solomon became Abba Eban. Even signatures on Israel’s Declaration of Independence were quietly “Hebraized” to give the founding document a more authentically Hebrew appearance.

The political movement that spent decades replacing European names with Hebrew ones now insists no one should notice when it invokes an image of uninterrupted ancestral continuity stretching back to the patriarchs. The paperwork became the pedigree. The branding became the biography. And after generations of carefully cultivating the image, the sales pitch arrives in Washington wrapped in the comforting language of “shared heritage.” It’s an impressive feat of political marketing.

The language Netanyahu speaks is not Hebrew. It is Temu-Hebrew. It’s a European language, pronounced in European dialects, with European syntax, and a Hebrew vocabulary that’s heavily supplemented by a non-Hebrew vocabulary. It’s an overt statement to even say its scaffolding is ancient Hebrew. It is a completely contrived tongue, a made-up Frankenstein language wearing Hebrew skin. It’s a loose liturgical Hebrew vocabulary attached to a European engine, built in the early 20th century, with European syntax (Russian, German, Yiddish), with thousands of loan words directly from those European languages, Slavic pronunciation, a complete lack of actual Hebrew phonology. It is so far from actual Hebrew that a 1st century Pharisee would not be able to carry a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

It’s a garbage tongue, a living, breathing metaphor for a European people group who migrated to Palestine in the 20th century to celebrate to cosplay as ancient Israelites. It’s the Pig-Latin of world languages; vaguely reminiscent of a language, but isn’t. It is, to Hebrew what Pidgin is to English.

Klingon is, without question, a more impressive tongue. A dude named Marc Okrand deliberately built Klingon using sounds and grammatical patterns that are rare or nonexistent in human languages, like stacking uvular and ejective consonants, so it wouldn't sound like a random Earth language slightly re-skinned. He created its phonology, morphology, or core vocabulary from scratch. In his living room. Klingon holds up under decades of use, translation projects, and grammatical scrutiny by linguists say it's one of the most profoundly sophisticated languages on the planet.
"The Klingon Dictionary" exists, and it has enough depth that people actually learn to speak it fluently. There’s a full Klingon translation of Hamlet. It is an actual full language, is deeply sophisticated, some even say beautiful, and Okrand did it all himself in the course of 40 years. But it’s not a miracle. It doesn’t prove God has blessed the Klingon people.

There is no evidence that these are descendants of the original Hebrews other than their claim. There’s no evidence in their DNA; the closest you get is “Middle Eastern,” which is not in dispute, considering they came from Japheth. There’s no evidence in their native tongues of any Hebrew or Aramaic roots. Not even Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi in the Rhineland, has any Semitic language artifacts. It’s grammatical backbone, core vocabulary, and sentence structure are High German, in the same family branch as Dutch and English. It’s literally more English than Hebrew. Almost every language on Earth is somehow connected to another; for example, some vocabulary words in Polynesia are taken from the Inca in the New World. There’s some evidence, depending upon who you talk to, of Hebrew words in Native American vocabulary, or so the tale is told. But there is no Hebrew or Aramaic among those “returning” to Palestine in the Zionist project. Nothing.

Neither, if they were indeed the original descendants, would it mean a single thing about how evangelical Americans are supposed to behave toward Israelis in the year 2026.

But the real point of my tirade, an obligatory post to point this out, is that Netanyahu dropped a claim that the Internet spent the last two weeks trying to disprove and debunk. He said, “…we are the first part of that Judeo-Christian heritage that is dear to our hearts and has given the world, human civilization, freedom and faith.”

AWKWARD.

For two solid weeks, we were lectured by the evangelical commentariat that Judeo-Christian is just a harmless academic descriptor. Nothing political. Nothing strategic. Nothing propagandistic. Why, it’s practically a taxonomic label, like “marsupial” or “Early Bronze Age.” To question it, we were assured, was to expose our own embarrassing ignorance. Then, Benjamin Netanyahu himself walked into a room full of American evangelical leaders and pulled it out like a shotgun.

Not “shared values.” Not “allies.” Not “friends.” Not even “democracies.” No, he reached for the golden key. Judeo-Christian heritage. The very expression we had just been told carries no modern political freight was suddenly being deployed by the Prime Minister of Israel in a meeting whose entire purpose was to cultivate American evangelical support for Israel’s geopolitical objectives. Apparently the world’s foremost beneficiary of the term never received Wesley Huff’s memo explaining that it means absolutely nothing outside of academia. Who could have foreseen Netanyahu hijacking a perfectly sterile, academic term and ruining it like that? The gall of him, am I right?

YOU WILL NOT SEE ANOTHER DISCOUNT LIKE THIS IN 2026. ACT NOW!

If the phrase is merely an innocent historical category, why is it always unsheathed at precisely the moments when Israel needs American Christians emotionally invested in Israel’s wars, Israel’s security, Israel’s foreign policy, and Israel’s survival? Strange coincidence. Every single time the political stakes rise, out comes Judeo-Christian like a diplomatic Swiss Army knife. It is introduced not as a theological proposition to be debated but as an emotional password, designed to collapse two thousand years of covenantal distinction into one warm, fuzzy slogan. Before anyone has time to ask whether modern Israel and biblical Israel are the same thing, the phrase has already done its work.

Benjamin Netanyahu did not name-drop Judeo-Christian heritage because he was leading a seminary lecture on intellectual history. He wasn’t defending a doctoral dissertation. He was lobbying American religious leaders. He was making a sales pitch. He selected the phrase because he believes it is persuasive. Because he believes it creates obligation. Because he believes it persuades Christians that supporting the policies of the modern Israeli state is not merely prudent, but somehow intrinsic to their faith.

That is what propaganda does. It doesn’t invent words. It weaponizes them. It takes familiar language, loads it with political meaning, and repeats it until people stop noticing they’re being nudged. Then, when someone points out the obvious, a chorus of professional explainers appears to assure everyone that the loaded language isn’t loaded at all. It’s just a coincidence, they insist, that the slogan keeps showing up in the mouths of the very people with the greatest political interest in Americans believing it. It’s not that Jordan Peterson and Wesley Huff and Allie Beth Stuckey think they’re smart that bothers me. It’s that they think we are stupid.

Adding that this shared inheritance is “under attack from the rising wave of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism,” told them to “stand up and don’t cower” and asked them what they do “when you’re faced with an attack.” Quoting Jesus, Netanyahu answered, “Attack back.”

Just kidding. Jesus would never tell Christians to attack other Christians. But Satan would.

But notice the coup. Now, Netanyahu has framed the battle as the proverbial them vs Israel and evangelicals. Now, rejecting Israel is somehow rejecting evangelicals.

Notice what just happened. With one carefully chosen phrase, Netanyahu quietly redrew the battlefield. There are no longer Israelis over here and American evangelicals over there. There is now a single, unified camp: us. Israel and evangelicals fused into one political identity, sharing one heritage, one mission, one set of enemies. And if there is an us, there must be a them. That’s why the hyphen is dangerous. That is the triangulation.

You are no longer simply being asked to support an ally. You are being encouraged to see yourself as part of the same embattled tribe. If Israel is criticized, you are criticized. If Israel is opposed, you are opposed. If Israel is under attack, your faith is under attack. The categories begin to blur until disagreement with a foreign government’s policies starts feeling suspiciously like an attack on Christianity itself.

It’s remarkably efficient. Why defend every bombing, every lobbying campaign, every diplomatic maneuver, or every political controversy on its own merits when you can simply merge the identities? Once the emotional welding is complete, criticism of one becomes criticism of both. You don’t have to answer objections. You only have to ask why someone “hates evangelicals.”

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If I ever had a chance to sit down with Tucker Carlson, what would I tell him? I’d imagine many a random American conservative like myself has had that thought whilst listening to his podcast in their pickup truck. Or am I the only one who has those imaginary conversations with whoever is on the Spotify feed? I can’t tell you how many imaginary conversations I’ve had with Rogan over the years. It’s a grown-up form of a daydream, thinking about what it would be like to come across Rogan in the elk woods, who was also hunting the antlered beasts, and impressing him with my knowledge of bow-hunting and space-alien conspiracy theories. You do it, too. Admit it.

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve thought about it. Unlike millions of Americans, I had that chance. I didn’t want to pitch my books or grow my Substack subscriber list. My goal for the webcast interview was to share the gospel. But my goal for meeting Tucker was pretty singular; I wanted to show him a video.

A MAN WHO’S FACED THE DEVIL

I’ve written a lot about Tucker’s dalliance with the Dark Side over the last few years. It absolutely fascinated me because you never hear that anymore. used to never hear that. Talk about Satan was something rare, even in evangelical churches. Satan was turned into some kind of amorphous blob of evil, some non-personal embodiment of wickedness that was more metaphor than sentient, literal being. Talking about the devil was something hyper-charismatics did when talking about Jezebel Spirits and Leviathan curses. And nobody - I mean nobody - in the Public Marketplace of Ideas spoke about evil as demonic literalism. Least of all, evangelicals, because they have been too busy with their focus groups and polling figures trying to figure out what the worldlings approve of, and you don’t build a seeker-friendly, Purpose-Driven megachurch talking about the devil.

Several years ago, Tucker stopped speaking about evil as though it were merely bad legislation or corrupt institutions and began speaking of it the way Scripture does: as a living intelligence with a will, an agenda, and a kingdom. That change was enough to convince half of evangelicalism that he’d gone off the rails. Apparently, America can survive drag queens in elementary schools, legalized child sacrifice, and the prospect of nuclear war, but the moment a television host starts talking about Satan as though he actually exists, respectable Christians begin reaching for the smelling salts.

The speech that crystallized it all was at the Heritage Foundation. Tucker looked out over a ballroom full of politicians, donors, policy wonks, and professional conservatives and committed the one sin Washington never forgives. He insisted our crisis was not, at its root, political. It was spiritual. He called abortion child sacrifice. He urged people to pray. He spoke about evil without reducing it to metaphor or campaign rhetoric. He sounded less like a political commentator and more like a man who had become convinced that Ephesians 6 was describing the evening news. The reaction was immediate. Commentators who had spent years defending every fashionable absurdity suddenly rediscovered the boundaries of acceptable belief, and those boundaries apparently ended at the existence of the Devil.

Tucker sealed his fate at Fox News was in March 2023, he accepted an invitation to Rupert Murdoch's Bel Air vineyard for dinner with the Fox chairman and his fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith. According to Gabriel Sherman's reporting in Vanity Fair, the the conversation drifted toward Christianity, Smith and Tucker conversed over the Bible and the conversation came to Satan. The two agreed that Satan was a real, demons were an actual thing, and evil plays a prominent role in the world. According to reports, it unsettled Murdoch enough that he broke off the engagement and decided Tucker would need to be exiting Fox News, because, as one person said, “that stuff freaks him out.”

Then Tucker told the story that sent his critics into a frenzy. In footage recorded for a different product and released in 2024, something attacked him while he slept. He awoke bleeding. His wife never stirred. His dogs never barked, but he says it’s real and it happened, and from that point forward, got much, much more serious about God. Whether one believes his account or not is almost beside the point. Supernatural claims have always provoked ridicule from people who have quietly forgotten that the supernatural is foundational to a Biblical worldview. Evangelicals mocked him more than worldlings, with much of the secular world nodding their head and believing it, becasue many people have had experiences exactly like that. Scripture does not blush when speaking of angels, demons, principalities, powers, or the prowling lion seeking whom he may devour. It treats those realities as matter-of-fact. The modern church often treats them as embarrassing relatives who should only be acknowledged at family reunions.

I expect mockery from unbelievers. The surprise came from Christians. Men who profess belief in every miracle recorded in Scripture suddenly became functional materialists the instant Tucker suggested that the spiritual war described in those same pages had broken into ordinary life. They guffawed like Mean Girls in junior high when someone embarrasses themself. It was as though they were perfectly content to affirm Satan’s existence, provided he remained safely imprisoned between the leather covers of their Bibles. The devil quite likes it when believers become too sophisticated to take him seriously.

That was the moment I realized Tucker had stumbled onto something larger than politics. The fiercest attacks were no longer coming from ideological enemies but from people who should have recognized the terrain. Balaam’s donkey saw the angel before Balaam did, and the prophet spent precious moments beating the only creature who understood what was happening. History has a way of repeating itself. Sometimes the first man to recognize reality is not the one the experts expected, and sometimes the loudest opposition comes from those convinced they are fighting on the right side. And now, in 2026, the people who should have never stopped talking about Satan are attacking the people who are.

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SHAWN RYAN

The most exhaustive piece I produced on Tucker and the devil was Tucker Declared War on Satan (and Satan and His Followers are Fighting Back). That was written last year, but it’s just as prescient now as it was then. Over the last week, Tucker’s enemies - also known as “the Israel Lobby” (because it’s the same people) have been attacking him under the auspices of a heavenly holy war, alleging that there’s something “dark and sinister” and obviously devilish about him. The crime? His guest, former Navy SEAL and webcast host Shawn Ryan, recently appeared on his program and discussed Satan. Ryan is on Israel’s naughty list for not abiding by their embargo on Candace Owens, whom he recently interviewed about her theories related to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, chiefly, that some level of conspiracy is afoot. The Israel Lobby does free speech embargos like the United States does economic sanctions. Candace is sanctioned, so anyone “lending her a platform” is also hereby sanctioned, and Ryan has been on Israel’s naughty list for several weeks now.

On Tucker’s program, Shawn Ryan told Tucker that he'd been working with some of the most respected exorcists in the country, and that things had happened, in his words, that were “really scary shit.” Essentially, the logic expressed afterward was, if Satan is real, God must be.

So, this was a conversation between two men who built massive platforms, speaking to millions of people, agreeing that Satan is real, therefore God must be real, and therefore, things like repentance, forgiveness, redemption, and Jesus must be real, too.

Let me tell you something: If that conversation doesn’t make your heart rejoice, and make you grateful the world heard it - and can’t recognize exactly how incredibly and awe-full that is, you might not be a redeemed believer. I don’t know how any spirit-filled human being, born-again by the power of God the Holy Ghost, doesn’t rejoice that we live in such a time where that type of thing is becoming normal. Do you remember the recent past, where conversations like that didn’t happen in public? It wasn’t that many years ago. Like, maybe one or two years, and mainly, thanks to Tucker, it’s becoming downright common for people to have these conversations about Satan, demons, evil and their relation to God.

EXPLAINING THE CONCEPT

I could pontificate all day long about this, or just show you a text I sent my dad and brother on March 16, 2024, at 7:28 AM.

I said:

I’ve been to the dark place. Jesus is there. In the corner. But Satan looms large there, and his sulfurous breath can be felt down your neck. Have you ever been in a place like that? That’s what Tucker and Shawn were discussing. And that’s what Israel’s rented evangelicals chose to turn into a scandal.

What gave me the thought expressed in that text is I had just driven to work, from my farm to downtown in an American town of 53k people. Despite being a “small town” by modern standards, I saw Satan everywhere I looked. Well, not Satan technically - he’s not omnipresent - but his imps. A homeless man on the street corner, clearly on drugs, standing up but asleep, like one of those Tranq zombies you see pictures of on the news. A cross-dresser or drag queen or some version of a mentally ill man in a dress shuffling down the street in heels he clearly had not become accustomed to, looking like a character from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Over the radio, the newsman reported a child was kidnapped and murdered from across the country in what was reportedly a “ritualistic killing.” And the young lady at the Starbucks (don’t judge me) who looked like the one normal human being I saw that morning. Thank God! A normie! She looked like a girl from the church youth group, praise God. And when she handed me my change…she had cut marks on her forearms.

She goes home at night, breaks out the razor blade, and cuts herself. Demons run this world.

I’m not the only one who sees it. Most people do. And more Americans than ever believe that Satan exists. I laid this out in the article, The Devil Aint Dead, and He Aint in Your Head. I wrote, “For whatever reason, I see demons not everywhere I look, but wherever people are suffering, broken, lost in sin, promiscuous, self-harming, and self-loathing. I don’t think I’m imagining this. It’s everywhere. We literally have a culture where people use the pronouns they/them, just like demons, and we think nothing of it.”

And yet, the church barely discusses it. I pointed out in that article that SermonAudio, the collecting ground of sermons from thousands of pastors around the country, had 2,766 sermons about Satan or demons, and had 3,992 sermons about John Calvin. Who’s mentioned more in the Bible, Satan or John Calvin? The church has been burying its head in the sand for decades, afraid of freaking out the lost world. And in doing so, we’ve derelicted our duty to preach the full counsel of God’s Word. The irony is, John Calvin and the Reformers, and goodness knows, the Puritans, spoke often and frequently of the demonic, which I laid out in Puritan Demonologists and This Present Darkness. I wrote…

The Puritans did not compartmentalize the devil into a few odd sermons; he was woven through the fabric of their theology. When Owen dissected the nature of indwelling sin, he warned that Satan amplified the motions of the flesh, leveraging them to draw Christians into despair. When Perkins addressed the duties of ministers, he exhorted them to guard the flock not only against false doctrine but against the devil who invented it. When Baxter taught on family worship, he insisted that prayer and catechism were bulwarks against Satan’s assault on the household. For them, theology was not an academic exercise but a battlefield, and the devil was not an abstract threat but the adversary they named again and again.

To us, their words may sound jarring, even excessive, yet the Puritans believed they were merely echoing the Bible’s plain testimony. Christ came to destroy the works of the devil, and if His coming was a declaration of war, then to follow Him was to take up arms in that same conflict. The Puritans did not blush to call the devil an enemy because they believed that to minimize him was to minimize Christ’s triumph over him. Their robust sense of God’s sovereignty never diluted their recognition of spiritual warfare. In fact, it heightened it, for if God is sovereign, then every skirmish with Satan is part of a larger story that ends in the certain victory of Christ.

The Puritans we revere were not shy about these things. They were demonologists, serious ones, and they wove their demonology into their doctrine, their preaching, and their pastoral care. If their words unsettle us, perhaps it is because we are the ones who have grown too rational, too timid, too eager to be respectable. The irony is that our spiritual ancestors, the men modern Reformed evangelicals venerate as paragons of sober theology, would regard us as the dreamers, the ones asleep in a battlefield where the enemy is both real and relentless.

We’ve come a long way, in which evangelicals mock two Christian men for talking about the devil. May God have mercy on us.

ATTACKS ON TUCKER AND SHAWN

Apparently unable to refute any actual claim or factual argument, Israel’s sanctions were enforced by a squadron of rented evangelicals who were busy throwing flags on the field, warning the world that there was something demonically fishy about media influencers talking about the devil. Something darkly sinister about it. Some brooding evil lay underneath the surface because, as everyone knows, nobody talks about the devil that much without having an unhealthy devil fetish. Some even suggested that the two men - each of whom shared their personal testimonies and recent conversions to personal faith in Jesus Christ - were spearheading a revival of Satanism. Because, you know…it’s devilishly suspicious and stuff.

The chief attack came from Jeremy Boering, who I’ve written about here, here, here, and here, who got his start in media as an actual Israel Lobby propagandist working for the David Horowitz Institute at Truth Revolt, a Jewish version of Media Matters (attacking the advertisers of media outlets critizing Israel) with Ben Shapiro, before then hanging onto Shapiro’s coat-tails at Daily Wire, before being forced out after wasting millions on failed vanity projects. That’s a long introduction for such an unimpressive man, a sniveling goyim sell-out whose entire adult life has been spent convincing Rabbinic Jews they’re right about Gentiles being born to be their servants. Now he has a webcast with approximately a fifth of NXR's viewership, despite dropping fortunes on advertising and regularly reaching into Shapiro’s old Rolodex to fly out mid-tier guests with more renown than he has to carry the program on intellect. Each and every single episode - every one - is an Israeli infomercial doing the bidding of the desert war cult. I’m afraid people think I’m exaggerating when I say that I’ve never seen foreign propaganda so poorly passed off as original programming in my life.

I’m not exaggerating.

Boreing brought on Rod Dreher, the Eastern Orthodox…something-or-other (I’m not sure what he does now) who was once a common figure on the Big Eva lecture circuit, tight with figures ranging from Russell Moore at the ERLC to the Gospel Coalition. He was the pet OrthoBro of BigEva whose pony had one trick - convincing American evangelicals to have less to do with the culture wars. His treatise was The Benedict Option, encouraging Christians to depart from public and partisan engagement (black-pill before it was cool), and I wrote The Benedict Option Arnold in response (available for free to premium subscribers of Insight to Incite). As you can guess, I called him a traitor. A lot. He disappeared several years ago after abandoning his wife and children, apparently to go live in Europe eating oysters or something. I forgot Dreher existed until, after my interview on Tucker, he tweeted an insult at Tucker for having yours-truly on his program, along with various false accusations and scuttlebutt.

Dreher’s purpose on Boreing’s show was to tell the world that he offered Orthodox exorcists to counsel Tucker after the demonic attack experience, now famous, that he had back in 2023. This alone should have been newsworthy. Everyone accusing Tucker of “making up” the tale or fabricating its significance should be issuing apologies, because Dreher just backed up the account for the world. Legitimately, Boreing vindicated Tucker, but the Israel Lobby was too busy salivating over one detail: according to Dreher, Tucker turned down the exorcists because he was “too Protestant for that” and he seemed to allege - in a scumbaggish “read between the lines” sort of way- that Tucker was in grave spiritual danger. I wonder if the Orthodox Church has clergy-penitent confidentiality vows that would prevent them from sharing that with Dreher so that it could be put on blast during Israeli-paid advertising.

Actually, they do. The Eastern Orthodox Seal of Confession is considered inviolable, which means either Dreher manufactured it, or some black-robed priests need to be defrocked. In any event, Israel’s rented evangelicals - like Jon Harris and Joel Berry (Boreing’s producer) - are having a field day.

JON HARRIS AND THE RENTED EVANGELICALS

Enter Jon Harris, whose sole purpose in the Israel First ecosystem is to convincingly cross-wire Dispensational Premillennialism and Historic Premillennialism for people who aren’t familiar with eschatological distinctions. He started auditioning full-time for the Israel Lobby shortly after returning from a state-sponsored Potemkin Pilgrimage to Israel, although some of his former followers think perhaps shortly before. In any event, Harris made comments on X, not accusing Ryan of demon worship outright, but wrapping the accusation in a Bible verse and calling it discernment.

“Something spiritual had been happening for a while, but it’s a counterfeit,” Harris announced, quoting James 4:7-8. The proper response to demons, Harris lectured, is repentance, turning to God and away from sin, not consulting exorcists on camera.

And then, in the same breath, Harris swung at every man newly awakened to the supernatural with one broad, ugly stroke, accusing “many of the guys who are becoming spiritually aware” of being involved in some of the worst slander and lying he’d ever seen.

Translation: Ryan and Tucker’s testimonies are counterfeit, and they are liars. Harris never named which lies. He didn’t have to. The insinuation did the work the argument couldn’t. It wasn’t an argument; it was a show-and-tell of cowardice. Name the lies, Jon.

But Jon Harris can’t name the lies, because then he’d be listing grievances all dealing with criticism of Israel, which would make apparent exactly who he works for. It was a reference, no doubt, to something that Tucker and/or Shawn had said at some point about Israel, which Harris didn’t like. It’s nothing more complicated than that. Harris would not only discount the courageous testimonies of these two men, throwing out their personal accounts of their spiritual awakening despite knowing they would be mocked by peers, colleagues, Jews and Jews’ evangelicals alike, and he literally assigned their work to the devil himself.

There was nothing remotely godly about Harris’ Tet Offensive against the work of God done on a webcast to awaken the world to the supernatural realities around us. God was magnified, Christ exalted, and millions watching at home were pointed to Christ Jesus and the Christian God as the one with answers to supernatural questions. What Harris offered was, in no uncertain terms, the godless and effeminate hand-wringing and manufactured theatrics of an evangelical Balaam turned priest for the Synagogue of Satan, a minister of Jesus moonlighting as a cleric of Rabbinic Judaism to attack authentic Christians on behalf of the Israeli War Complex. He listened to what was, by all accounts, an astounding miracle on its own account - a conversation like that being had in the public marketplace - and attacked the men as “liars” for some vague reason related to geopolitics and then accused them of being Satanic.

Jon Harris is Satanic. His behavior is Satanic. It’s not just a political disagreement. It is attacking a move of God the Holy Spirit that I’ve come to call the Populist Social Revival, where God is doing this awesome, incredible thing, awakening people to the supernatural. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years. Sometimes I laugh out loud and clap my hands at what God is doing, like a toddler who sees a magic trick. It’s unbelievable. And then a sourpuss working for shekels with hopes of landing on the Israeli Influencer circuit attacks it. It’s grotesque. He is grotesque.

I saw a tweet, directed at me, on Joel Berry’s thread, alleging that the demonic attack on Tucker was the moment they possessed him - as “proven by his immediate turn on Israel.” These people have genuinely confused the Synagogue of Satan with the Christian Church. And evangelicalism has let them do it by letting myths like “Satan hates Israel” go on for far too long without being slapped down like an unruly adolescent who sassed their mother.

Harris also RT’d an account that had breathlessly announced that twenty-two days before this interview, Shawn Ryan had published his sit-down with Candace Owens, likely filmed even earlier, and now, mere weeks later, Ryan is describing the depths of hell and consulting exorcism specialists. He wasn’t claiming to know exactly why Shawn had that experience, he assured his readers, in the same sentence where he made it very clear what he wanted them to conclude anyway. The timing, he said, “wasn’t something he’d ignore.”

This is not theology. This is a man staring at a calendar and seeing a demon, because Candace Owens said something he didn’t like about the State of Israel. It’s part of the “Candace Owens is literally Satan” story-arc I covered in, “Get Thee Hence Behind Me: Satanic Condemnation in Political Marketing” from a few weeks ago. These are evangelicals who support a nation-state that bombs churches (on purpose), murders priests (on purpose), snipes children in the head with .308 rounds (on purpose), bombs their targets after they get home instead of when they leave to ramp up the civilian body count (on purpose), and has run a hostile anti-christian persecution campaign on the indigenous churches that have existed in the Holy Land longer that Israel has been a nation, but find Satan incarnate in a conspiracy theory they dont’ appreciate. They’re unserious people.

THIS LITERALLY ALREADY HAPPENED ONCE

In John 10, there’s a Man in the Text who is talking way too much about supernatural things for the comfort of the religious establishment. Jesus is standing in the temple, and he is not being subtle about his Supernaturalism. He’s talking about raising from the dead, about sheep who hear his voice, and a thief - clearly interpreted as Satan - who comes only to steal and kill and destroy. It sounded a lot like what the Israel Lobby’s evangelicals are complaining about: Supernatural categories. Cosmic stakes. Good and evil named plainly, with no hedge and no apologies. And the response from the religious professionals standing in that crowd was immediate. “He has a demon and is insane. Why listen to him?”

Let’s be clear: The concern of Jeremy Boreing, Joel Berry, Jon Harris, and Israel’s rented evangelicals is not Tucker’s theology. In as clear a way as can be demonstrated, they work for who both Jesus and Paul clearly identified as the enemy. Boreing and Berry are neck deep in Israeli funding, a charge I cannot prove but would stake my life on, and Harris is getting air-time and finger-sandwiches in Tel Aviv (some men sell out more cheaply than others). But they have the same message as the Jews of John 10, which is, “Why listen to Him?”

They don’t want people to listen to Tucker for any spiritual reason, but because Tucker is dropping truth-bombs on Israel every day of the week. It’s the same reason they don’t want people listening to Candace Owens. It has nothing to do with compassion for a widow and everything to do with 95% of what Candace is saying about Israel being drop-dead accurate.

In Jesus’ case, we know what the Jews cared about then, too. We have the minutes of a Sanhedrin meeting in John 11 where they plot His assassination. They were worried that Rome would take away their precious nation. They were Zionists. And they killed Christ because he got in the way of their Zionism.

Their message isn’t “he’s mistaken.” Not “let’s examine his claims.” It’s “He has a demon, and he’s crazy.” That is the full extent of the argument. When a man starts speaking with clarity and authority about the war between God and the devil, the fastest way to shut him down without engaging a single word he’s said is to declare him mentally unstable and possessed by the very thing he’s warning you about. It’s not a rebuttal. It’s a diagnosis, handed down by men who have decided in advance that the conversation is over.

That is precisely the move being run on Tucker Carlson right now. He keeps talking about the same things Jesus spoke of. And the response from the professional religious establishment has been the same tired script running for two thousand years. Not “let’s examine the claim.” Just: he’s gone unstable, he’s obsessed, something’s wrong with him, best to look away. Along with a “he’s possessed!” and “he’s crazy!”

The Jews did this with Christ repeatedly. Jesus’ response was, “Satan doesn’t cast out Satan,” pointing out that obviously Satan isn’t out, naming himself the enemy and warning people to be on guard for him. That makes no sense. And Satan is not possessing Tucker Carlson to get people to recognize that a real devil wants to destroy them. The Holy Ghost is possessing Tucker Carlson to get people to recognize that a real devil wants to destroy them.

But another verse comes to mind, this time from Paul, “Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost."

That should settle the argument. Let God’s Word be true, though every man a liar.

The modern-day Sanhedrin’s rented evangelicals aren’t attacking Tucker and Shawn. They’re attacking all Christians who recognize the reality of Satan, demonic work in the lives of human beings, and especially those who do it simultaneously while criticizing the anti-Christ state of Israel. They’re attacking Christianity. They’re on the other team, and it’s time to say so.

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The Daily Wire is coming apart. Ben Shapiro's flagship show, which once pulled several million views an episode, now averages around half a million, the worst collapse and steepest decline of anything in the ecosystem of news. The company watched its YouTube views fall 34 percent year over year, and saw website traffic cut roughly in half. Shapiro admits revenue is down. The company has now run two rounds of layoffs in just over a year and has just installed a new CEO to try to stop the bleeding. His audience is walking out on him in real time. Why? The public has figured out he doesn’t care for America or Americans. He’s in it for Israel, and Americans have had enough.

Ben Shapiro arrived at the Daily Wire studios yesterday, told his staff to fire up the camera, straightened his tie, stared into the lens, and at the sound of the clapperboard, fired off a message to President Trump. “We do understand that war does come along with casualties, and we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end and a victory for America.”

But it’s not “for America.” Everyone knows this. That’s the problem.

Shapiro’s monologue was one of the more macabre, eerily morbid disclaimers given in American media, something so grossly blood-lustful that it would be odd enough to stop traffic if it weren’t coming from a Jewish member of the Israel Lobby. But because it’s coming from Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, or Laura Loomer (who might be as Jewish as Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee; no one is really sure), it gets a pass as normal in 2026 America. It was a very Israel-Lobby sort of thing to declare: “I’m okay with American deaths in exchange for more Iranian deaths.”

Shapiro is fine with more American deaths. It’s acceptable. He’ll take it. He has thought it out. He’s prayed to YHWH about this, and he’s determined that more dead American soldiers are a price he is personally willing to pay. We should thank him for his sense of personal sacrifice, being willing to risk American soldiers’ lives like that. It’s sheer bravery. Let us bow in appreciation for the steel of his personal resolve to bear the loss of the brave members of the U.S. military, overwhelmingly comprised of middle- to lower-class Americans whom he famously cares about on a deep, personal level. You know, until we have “an end and a victory.”

That’s when the questions start. What does the end look like? How do we know when we’re victorious? What’s the goal here? What is the point of any of this?

Sure, we get it. Iran is bad. They’re evil. Ooga Booga. Demonic savages, all of them. But what are we supposed to be accomplishing, exactly?

Consider this from Trump’s perspective. The U.S. military has dropped every bit of strategic munitions we can responsibly drop, and then some, pounding Iran with the absolute maximum wrath and fury from the sky we can, while keeping a minimum in reserve of munitions for our own national defense or for the event of an unseen crisis in another theater. On June 17, when Trump defended his call for peace because the world was running out of oil, he explained, “We run out of reserves at about four weeks…we would really run out, and there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it…it would be bedlam.”

Continuing this war, for some unknown reasons, for an ill-defined purpose, to accomplish some unknown goals, is hardly a reason to risk the lives of American servicemen and Iranians civilians. Other than creating a diversion for Israel to invade Lebanon, crush its civilian population, and acquire some more land for Greater Israel, what’s the point of more American deaths?

Shapiro was candid about what he wanted. And it wasn’t a specific military objective. It wasn’t a discernible end or a list of things to check off to know that the war had served its purpose. What Shapiro wants is Total War. He’s not rubber-stamping more American deaths for any particular military objective. He’s rubber-stamping it for the carnage. Shapiro explained that he does not want a war fenced in by law, proportion, or restraint. He does not want a target list scrutinized by military lawyers who still believe the Geneva Conventions are more than decorative relics. He wants Total War, where civilian casualties are not a moral catastrophe to be prevented but an accounting entry to be justified after the smoke clears.

He said as much on his own show in March, while defending the deaths of roughly 160 Iranian schoolgirls when a GPS-guided precision American missile with not one, but two guidance systems struck their school. He said, “That is indeed tragic, and it’s terrible…and it’s also called collateral damage in war.” Then, he pivoted to imagining how horrible it would be if Iran targeted an Israeli school. The contrast could not have been starker. Real Iranian girls were lying dead beneath shattered concrete, and he gave it a philosophical shrug. Imaginary Israeli victims summoned moral outrage, despite it being hypothetical. Goyim mean nothing to him.

Shapiro operates by a Rabbinic caste system that assigns different values to different children, where one grave demands solemn lectures about the unavoidable costs of war while another becomes an eternal symbol of civilization under siege. And that’s the frightening, demonic thing about him. His insistence on continuing the war has absolutely nothing to do with strategic military victories or discernible goals. Americans will not tolerate 20 years of nation-building, which is good, because it doesn’t work. The entire project was undertaken on the bet that Iranians would rise up against their own regime after a decapitation strike, and the opposite has happened. It was a bad bet. The only thing that more bloodshed will accomplish is more bloodshed. That’s it. That is the goal.

And because bloodshed is Israel’s goal, that’s the goal of Ben Shapiro. It’s the Israeli religious worldview, in which the blood that was taken away from Judaism by the Temple’s destruction in 70AD can be replaced by the sacrifice of Goyim on the altar of war. Rabbinic Judaism has been on a two-thousand-year-long quest to replace the blood atonement that was once at the center of the Mosaic religion, which was later replaced by the cheap symbolism of manufactured rituals invented by Rabbis in the centuries following the Temple’s demise. And since the reestablishment of Israel as a political state, that taste for blood is satiated by constant warfare and the endless righting of wrongs committed against the Jewish nation, sanctified by the priests of war. That’s why every war is a holy war to the Israeli State. It is worship. That’s why people advocating for peace are treated by Jews as if they are mid-pogrom, and the bad men are trying to take their yarmulkes and phylacteries away. That’s why they behave like their religious rights are being taken away every time an American suggests we stop subsidizing their war efforts. To be against war is to be against Jewishness.

There is nothing in it for the United States by continuing it. There’s nothing tangible to gain. POTUS knows this. Everyone knows this. But from Israel’s perspective, and therefore the perspective of Ben Shapiro, enough people haven’t died yet. For that blood-lust to be satiated, boots are going to have to hit the ground. Short of nuclear weapons, we can’t kill people enough from the air. And that means we’re going to have to find American deaths acceptable, if the blood is going to run in Tehran like it once ran in Herod’s temple.

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW

The International Jew was a four-volume compilation of articles published in Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, between 1920 and 1922. Although Ford's role in writing the articles is debated (much of the writing was done by William J. Cameron and others), they were published by Ford’s directive. The approved history books will tell you they are “one of the most influential antisemitic publications in American history.”

The series put forth what the fact-checkers refer to as “antisemitic tropes.” They include the following:

To summarize all the above, Ford’s pre-1948 conspiracy theory was that Jews didn’t care about the nations where they lived, used whatever nation they resided in to benefit the global interests of Jews around the world, often to the detriment of their own nations, and they did so through outsized influence in banking, government, the press, and culture/entertainment, including starting and extending war for the sake of their personal and collective enrichment.

Ford’s claims resonated with what people around the world already believed. But surely with a nation of their own - a sanctuary for Jewish people in Palestine - it would solve the International Jew problem, right? The real reason for Western Civilization’s support for Zionism has been long forgotten, or concealed, from our history books. Most people would tell you it’s the product of the Holocaust, a recognized need for Jewish safe space in a world where things like the Final Solutions exist. But that’s inaccurate. European support for a Jewish state started decades before, as a way to free Europe from Jewish influence that was almost always at odds with the European people.

For example, before Lord Balfour issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which is credited as the first real step toward the establishment of Israel, he had said publicly that the "undoubted evils befalling Britain came from an immigration which is largely Jewish." By 1919, in his introduction to a History of Zionism, he wrote that the Zionist movement would help "mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb."

Winston Churchill explained his support for the Zionist project, describing Jewish influence in radical ideologies as, “This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” Then Churchill traced this conspiracy through Jewish figures “from the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States),” and says it “has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.”

The solution to this international conspiracy? Churchill says, “It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.” To Churchill, Zionism was an opportunity for world Jewry to dedicate themselves and occupy their time with causes that do not harm the world or cause pointless unrest and disharmony. Also, it would take them out of Europe.

But the beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine didn’t dissuade people of the notion, and as Jews began flocking to the region from Europe, laying the groundwork for Jewish statehood, some remained skeptical that it would lessen the impact of their influence in other nations. They believed some Jews would use their continued influence in foreign nations to benefit the new Israeli state, turning it into a clearing house for Jewish interests and legitimizing their collective behavior, including state-sanctioned violence, usury, and international crime.

As one person put it, “For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states.”

This was the prevailing notion of Western Civilization prior to WWII. This was the majority view, and by majority, I mean the vast majority of Westerners and the Christian world. This is the same view being rediscovered by countless Americans who’ve been watching the news and noticing things. This is the prevailing notion of Europe today. If these are lies or conspiracy theories, then they’re certainly prevailing ones.

The German Jewish genocide changed that. Why? Because the person who gave that quote above was Adolf Hitler.

Clearly, no one wants to be found in agreement with the Führer. The Holocaust itself is the very event that Israel’s proponents point to as the consequence of coming to Ford’s conclusions. But despite having to whisper these beliefs, forcing Israel’s critics to speak between the lines, or to put it so mildly it’s hard to perceive, the criticisms are nonetheless persistent; Jews are more loyal to the Jewish cause than the cause of whatever nations they reside in.

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DUAL LOYALTY IS A LIE

Today, when people accuse Ben Shapiro of having dual loyalty, the accusation gives him too much credit. Dual loyalty would require tension. It would require competing allegiances. It would require, every so often, doing what’s best for America would win the argument.

Nothing in Shapiro’s public record suggests such an internal struggle.

His loyalty moves in one direction with remarkable consistency. The American flag on his lapel functions less as a declaration than as packaging. He has spent years marketing himself to Middle America as the fearless defender of the Constitution, the guardian of Western civilization, the fast-talking champion of facts, reason, and “Judeo-Christian” values. Peel away the branding, however, and the product underneath looks very different. It is a man who has repeatedly argued that American blood, American treasure, and American stability are acceptable prices to advance the strategic interests of a foreign state.

Under that worldview, American servicemen can die protecting distant objectives that have nothing to do with defending Kansas, Kentucky, or Delaware. American families can watch fuel prices climb, grocery bills explode, and another generation disappear into overseas conflicts while being told sacrifice is the highest form of patriotism. Americans who dare ask whether any of this serves their own nation first are not answered. They are caricatured, slandered, and denounced before the smoke has cleared and before the dead have even been buried.

That is not America First. It is America Last, wrapped in patriotic rhetoric and sold to conservatives as though surrendering their sons, their prosperity, and their national interest were somehow the highest expression of love for country.

AMERICA LAST

If Ben Shapiro had just brushed off the deaths of those schoolgirls, charitable people could dismiss it as an unfortunate moment, a sentence spoken in haste. But it was one tile in a mosaic forming a portrait of a man who uses every spare ounce of his lifeblood and energy, weaponizing the United States on behalf of Israel. Over the last five months, Shapiro has returned to the same prescription for foreign policy woes with relentless consistency. Every new development is another excuse to demand escalation. Brushing over an entire dead elementary school as “collateral damage” has now become, “Now that I think about it, American deaths are acceptable, too.” That’s the thing about sociopathy. It doesn’t stop at borders. There is only ONE nation on Earth whose bloodshed is so intolerable that it’s out of the question. Listen to the way Shapiro speaks of the murdered souls of the U.S.S. Liberty compared to the dead of October 7. Not all men are created equal to Ben Shapiro, and you can tell by how he eulogizes the dead.

In May, speaking at a Chabad event in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Shapiro urged President Trump to “just blow up Kharg Island,” Iran’s primary oil export terminal. He described the attack as “the easiest move for the United States to make right now.” Iran had already warned that such a strike would invite retaliation against Gulf oil infrastructure and could send the global economy into chaos. There is absolutely no doubt that Iran has the capacity to make good on that promise. In fact, Iran has surprised almost everyone regarding how restrained they have been, keeping their powder dry for when it’s needed. And their powder is dry and stockpiled for an attack on Kharg. Shapiro treats those consequences as just background noise, and argued that failing to “pull the trigger” would itself be the real disaster.

Notice whose interests disappear from Shapiro’s calculations. The truck drivers paying another dollar per gallon for diesel, the factory worker laid off when energy markets convulsed, the young Marine who would be ordered to absorb the retaliation, the American family already drowning beneath inflation - none of them exist in Ben Shapiro’s calculations. So long as the blood is spilled, nothing else matters. He’s a war goblin, one absolutely transfixed with as many human beings dying as is humanly possible, no matter the cost to civilization. Shapiro does not balance costs and benefits on behalf of the American republic. He balances them on behalf of Jerusalem.

By July, reality had stubbornly refused to cooperate with Shapiro’s predictions about Iran folding like a cheap suit, about a swift and sudden end to “the mothership of terror,” or about how Iran would be groveling for an end within weeks. The conflict had dragged on, Americans had been killed, the costs had mounted. None of it produced even a moment of reflection in Ben Shapiro. Again, the answer was just, “Hit harder. Kill more. Destroy more infrastructure.”

What happens to middle-class Americans when the gas spikes, and heating oil triples this Winter, and lay-offs come because of the energy crisis, and food inflation skyrockets? Damn the poor people. Work harder, plebes. Eat cake. That’s the vibe here.

“No one in America wants American casualties,” Shapiro acknowledged. “We do understand that war does come along with casualties, and we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end and a victory for America.”

That little term rolls off the tongue so effortlessly. We are willing. We will endure the losses. We will pay the price. Yet the people making these declarations are almost never the ones burying sons beneath folded flags or watching spouses answer the knock on the front door from uniformed officers. It is remarkably easy to spend someone else's blood.

“DUAL LOYALTY IS A SLUR”

In August 2019, Shapiro tweeted a new antisemitism rule. “American Jews, whether ethnic or religious, are loyal to America, not Israel,” he wrote. “Any dual loyalty supposition is anti-Semitism.” There weren’t that many people alleging Jews had dual loyalty back then, so it was one of those “I think thou doest protesteth too much” type things. What he’s doing is alleging that

The problem is, Shapiro’s wrong. Not every American Jew is loyal to America. When asked about being accused by American Jews of having dual loyalties, Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy who stole our nuclear secrets for Israel, said, "We're Jews, and if we're Jews, we will always have dual loyalty."

Pollard would know. He proved it. Keep in mind, he said that in 2021. This is the man Mike Huckabee hosted at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and lobbied to get out of prison for more than a decade.

In July 2022, standing on a stage in Tel Aviv at CPAC Israel, an Israeli journalist asked Shapiro why he refuses to make aliyah, why he doesn’t just move to Israel, which he defends with such ferocity. Shapiro didn’t dodge with platitudes about American opportunity. He gave an answer that should be printed on a plaque somewhere as a monument to accidental honesty. “The existence of the State of Israel is the single greatest guarantor of my loyalty to the United States, frankly,” he said. “Because Israel exists, that means the United States is going to be a more welcoming place for me, because Israel is there as a backstop in case anything should go wrong.”

He did not say America earns his loyalty because of the Constitution, the American way of life, the blood spilled at Gettysburg or Normandy. He said America earns his loyalty as a conditional arrangement, contingent on Israel remaining available as an exit ramp if things ever go sideways here. Even the Jerusalem Post’s opinion page flagged this as a complete inversion of what Zionism is supposed to mean, since Israel is supposed to be home plate for the Jewish people, not a diaspora insurance policy. Shapiro turned it into a backstop. A parachute. Something you keep folded and ready in case the country you claim to love turns on you. That is not dual loyalty. That is a man telling you, in his own words, which flag actually has his heart, and which one just has his mailing address.

How many loyal Americans do you know have a backup nation set aside in case things don’t go well here? How many loyal Americans do you know who feel that the existence of another nation somehow makes them more loyal as Americans? None of it makes sense.

MANY REPUBLICANS ARE DONE PRETENDING

At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, Steve Bannon took the stage after Shapiro just left it, and accused him of putting Israel’s interests ahead of the United States, framing the entire fight as a referendum on what Bannon called “this concept of greater Israel and Israel first.” Megyn Kelly told Vanity Fair afterward that she thinks the Israel First label has been “proven correct” by Shapiro’s conduct, and she asked pointedly why Shapiro would rather divide the conservative movement over Israel than let it stay unified after Charlie Kirk’s death. That’s the irony - it’s not Candace Owens splitting the conservative movement. It’s Ben Shapiro doing it.

The Israel Lobby Republicans aren’t even bashful about this threat. We will either give them what they demand - which happens to be every single thing they want on behalf of Israel, including our sons in uniform - or they will tear apart the Republican coalition, limb from limb. They will seek out and destroy Republican influencers like Tucker and Megyn Kelly (far and away the most popular conservatives on the airwaves), they will primary stalwart Republican leaders, like Thomas Massie (who was, far and away, the most popular conservative in the House), and also go after their sizeable fanbases - the Republican voters who support them - if they do not get their way. They will castigate half the Republican voters as antisemitic bigots, and help Democrats to get elected, if they are unable to leverage their political power in America on behalf of Israel.

At this point, practically everyone comprehends that Ben Shapiro’s first, if not only, priority is the State of Israel. Even Piers Morgan publicly urged Trump to ignore what he called “the lunatic warmongers pushing for total war,” speaking of Shapiro. We have gone from lying about the Iran War as a means to “help” Iranians under the regime, to arguing to Trump that it’s time to start killing them. There is no pretense any longer about what Shapiro’s goal is, and what it’s always been. Religious sacrifice.

CONTEMPT FOR US

In January of this year, addressing young Americans priced out of the towns they grew up in, Shapiro said, “Maybe you shouldn’t live here,” mocking the idea that Americans have any claim on the places their families have lived for generations. He went on to explain that America is little more than a nation of economic nomads, people traveling from place to place without any rootedness in the community. It was sheer projection. We are not the diaspora. We are home.

Compare his antipathy for American workers who need to pack up and leave because homes are unaffordable to his own affinity for Israel. Shapiro frames Jewish presence in a homeland as sacred mission, as birthright, as something worth defending with blood and treasure and endless commentary. But an American who loses his grandfather’s house to inflation is told to pack up and leave. After all, America is just a nation of nomads and hobos looking for jobs at the gas station in the next town over. A diaspora Jew gets told his connection to a distant homeland is the single greatest guarantor of life and liberty. But for Heritage Americans, you can just move away, you filthy, homeless goy.

I shot back at Shapiro two weeks ago for criticizing someone online as having been a “Pizza delivery guy,” which is evidently a mark of low status, a punchline you throw at someone to finish him off. And somewhere in America right now, a man is delivering your pizza at eleven at night so his kids eat breakfast tomorrow, and Ben Shapiro thinks that man’s labor is the insult, not the economy that requires it. These are the people who find their lives an acceptable loss. Because it’s not Harvard-educated Jews dying in an American uniform overseas. It’s the same class of Americans who deliver pizza and are being priced out of their homes by BlackRock.

None of this is a drift. It is a pedigree. This is who Shapiro was born to be. He was an agent of Israel from jump.

Shapiro breezed through law school, then, short of being an associate at a firm for a few months right after graduating, never practiced law again. He took a job at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2011, an Israel Lobby think-tank that focused on quieting college campus criticism of Israel. He ran TruthRevolt for Horowitz in 2013 with Jeremy Boreing, modeling it after the propaganda model of Media Matters, attacking the advertisers of whatever news outlet was critical of Israel in order to stifle criticism in America of a foreign nation. That operation folded directly into what became the Daily Wire.

The point is, this is not a man who wandered into Israel advocacy after a long career thinking about America first. This is a man who was trained from his first professional fellowship to put Israel first. It is the single greatest - and sole - passion of his life. Shapiro has never been about American principles, conservative values, or Constitutional priorities. Every ounce of effort Shapiro put into growing a political audience was for the purpose of advancing the cause of the Israeli State by commandeering an American political movement. It has never been about American conservatism for the sake of America. It’s been about American conservatism developed as a lobbying tool to get whatever Israel needs from the American taxpayer.

In the end, it will not be Jonathan Pollard who has reinforced the stereotypes of “the International Jew” who is only in the United States for the benefit of Jewish interests. It will be Ben Shapiro. Pollard only stole a few secrets about America’s nuclear targeting and sold them to Israel. But Ben Shapiro stole a substantial section of the American electorate for the purpose of convincing the American government to give American lives for the sake of Israel. What Shapiro is attempting to do is so much worse and more damaging than Jonathan Pollard.

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