There is Something Ugly Happening in America Today

Lets all take a deep breath, count to 10 and try to calm down. For those on the far left, the far right, and most pundits of the mainstream media, this may be a challenge…so try making it to 5.

What happened in Charlottesville recently was a tragedy and a disgrace. But as horrendous as that act of hatred was, the ripple effect of that incident will not end anytime soon and should be a warning to all that something very ugly is happening in America today that is putting our nation in grave danger.

For 8 years, Barack Obama’s repeatedly referenced American racism and squandered opportunities to engage constructively on racial issues. He made excuses for riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. He knew that his political support came in large measure from the left’s elite apologists and he cultivated them. No wonder the mainstream media and many on the left feasted on the Charlottesville calamity, crying “racist” between every bite.

Lets be clear, racism is EVIL! It comes straight from the pit of hell. It is dangerous, divisive, and destructive and is being used every day to fan the flames of hatred and strife in a way that could tear this nation apart. Yet the left keeps peddling a very dangerous lie, one that equates the vast majority of Trump supporters as Nazis and White Supremacists. The problem with this narrative, of course, is that it’s patently false. It does not describe the vast majority of Trump’s base, only a small group of extremists.

The end game is obvious: mark as KKK and Nazis all those who do not embrace the radical, leftwing agenda, then treat those bigots accordingly. In their minds those people ( a conservative person of faith) should be marginalized, maligned, and silenced. And if it takes violence to silence them (us), so be it. As for the radical left, typified by groups like Antifa, they are largely lionized by the media, portrayed as freedom fighters with a righteous cause, instead of the lawless gang of thugs that they really are. Has hatred for Trump so blinded America’s liberal elite that it’s willing to romanticize violence?

Now, in what amounts to a sad commentary on the state of our cultural degeneracy, it appears that we’ve decided the best solution to our social ills is the violent destruction of stone statues. That Social Justice Warriors are ramping up their militancy by declaring jihad against a bunch of inanimate objects just proves that these people don’t have a clue how to really address the existential crisis facing our nation.

Cities all over the country — from Baltimore to Los Angeles — are removing statues to Confederate leaders or soldiers. But it has gone beyond the Boys in Gray. Vandals defaced a statue of Abraham Lincoln, of all people, recently in Chicago. Al Sharpton, the shakedown artist, is against the Jefferson Memorial. New York mayor Bill de Blasio says he will look into removing the statue of the “invader”,Christopher Columbus, that has stood near Central Park since 1892. What about the idiocy of ESPN replacing a commentator scheduled to call a UVA football game because his name is Robert Lee? After featuring the iconic American film, “Gone with the Wind” for 34 years, a Memphis theater announced it will no longer screen the film at its festival due to its “insensitive” nature. Is there no end to this madness? Are we going to rename Washington D.C. because George Washington owned slaves?

Contrary to what the mainstream media has been telling us, a new poll conducted by Marist for NPR/PBS News Hour, shows that 62 percent of Americans want the statues to stay where they are.” Interestingly, blacks (43 percent) are more likely than whites (38 percent) to believe the removal of these Confederate statues will actually hurt race relations.

Still the Left can’t seem to purge enough from the public sphere—religious symbols (well, at least those Christian ones), sidewalk chalk, gender-specific pronouns, and Confederate anything. Does this remind anyone of what happened in the Soviet Union and Chinese Cultural Revolutions? Any officials deemed politically incorrect vanished, airbrushed from history’s stage.

Somehow the left feels that toppling towers of dead men who once did bad things or thought bad things will be this era’s major contribution to making the world a better place. In which case, the least we should ask for is some intellectual consistency in who we honor or dishonor. They should start by being honest when they condem statues of P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and other luminaries of the slave-owning South. These were not Republicans, as the Trump-hating Left hopes to convince people who don’t know much about history. Rather, these Confederates were all Democrats.

If those on the left sincerely wish to address America’s historical injustices, rather than simply pursue political advantage, they should advocate the removal and purification of the hundreds of tributes to Democrats who oppressed blacks and other minorities.
Democratic president Woodrow Wilson had many achievements, like them or not. Wilson also was a raving bigot who resegregated the bathrooms in the federal building beside the White House. Democratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt also had enormous accomplishments. But during World War II, FDR locked up roughly 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in 10 internment centers, solely due to their heritage.

Former recruiter and Exalted Cyclops of the KKK, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd gets multiple statues. This is a man who wrote in 1944, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side … Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Margaret Sanger was a vile degenerate. She believed in exterminating lesser human beings, inferior races, and the handicapped, and she set up a murderous organization called Planned Parenthood to do exactly that. Her legacy is the lifeless bodies of tiny innocent infants thrown out in the garbage bins. But for some reason she remains immortalized with a stone monument in the halls of the Smithsonian. Planned Parenthood kills over 260 unarmed black lives every day in America, yet the Left praises them.

If we’re so committed to rooting out and destroying white supremacy for the evil that it is, why are there no riots and protests to remove the ramblings of Charles Darwin from our kids’ textbooks and the statues and exhibits we finance in his honor? Darwin believed and wrote in “The Descent of Man” that dark-skinned Africans were inferior and closer to apes than Caucasians. Darwin’s defenders always dismiss his latent racism by declaring that he was merely a “product of his time,” oddly not granting that same excuse to Confederate generals and southerners who lived at the exact same time.

What we need today is to have honest conversations about what dehumanizes. In an increasingly secular culture that is hostile to Truth, the Scriptural prescription for peace gets lost: “Love the Lord God with all of your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Jesus spoke these words. When we fail to apply them, we get the bigotry and violence that used Charlottesville as its stage.

Violent Marxists are evil. Violent fascists are evil. If we can’t understand both of those basic truths simultaneously, then we have truly lost our way.

Healing and racial reconciliation will never come through toppling statues or rioting to stifle free speech. You can take down all the Robert E. Lee statues across the nation, and it won’t change what lies in the heart. You can’t hate hate away. Until we stop seeing ourselves as hyphenated Americans whose identities are fixed in the superficial, we’ll never experience the unity that can only happen through the supernatural.

The church must lead the charge in condemning racism. Anyone who honestly reads the Scriptures will be instantly confronted by just how little Jesus seemed to care about things like race, gender or income. Instead, he looked past them and saw a person’s heart.

No person, political leader, movement or cause will ever satisfy our deepest longings for joy, peace and justice. What we need instead is a national miracle to heal our political and racial divisions. That miracle can only be found in the Gospel. It’s time to come together and collectively stand up for a unity that goes beyond our skin color and looks at the heart – just as Jesus taught us – especially in situations like this one.

As Christians we need to expose genuine bigotry and division, whether it be on the left or on the right. But make no mistake about it, these are dangerous times and things will only get worse until we can reach out to those with whom we differ with civility and grace.