I think we are in the opening phase of a massive Christian revival, the likes of which we haven’t seen for more than a hundred years. It is going to sweep the entire country and catch a lot of people by surprise. After it has completed its course two or three decades from now, the culture we had from the 1960s through the 2010s will seem as strange and as alien to us as the culture of pre-Civil War America seems to us today.
This revival is going to be the thing that ultimately holds our country together. It will not unite all Americans, though, and many will feel like they don’t have a place in it. Conservatism will dominate our politics and our culture for the next generation, but it will take a hybrid form unlike anything that it has had before. It will blend some things that feel conservative to us now and other things that don’t seem conservative at all.
We will not get a period of unity or prosperity after this crisis period. Wars will expand, economies will collapse, natural disasters will devastate millions more lives. At least one more global pandemic will bring us to our knees. But even after these crises run their course, we will not come together for a new golden age, though one will always seem to be just over the horizon.
We will not experience a first turning of the next secular cycle, but will skip right past it into the second turning, just as we did after the Civil War. It’s going to be messy—so messy, in fact, that our grandchildren won’t even consider 2020 to be a historically significant year. But the United States will hold together, even if she never experiences the same level of prosperity again. And the utter collapse of her money and her economy will only serve to fan the flames of revival that will sweep her land.
Culturally, it will be a period of incredible dynamism. After the arts are no longer enthralled to postmodernism and cultural Marxism, we will see an explosion of creative expression in every field, including in literature. It’s going to be a wild ride. Things that are cultural mainstays now will be totally forgotten within a couple of decades, and things that are popular now will feel dated and out of touch in the space of just a few years.
The authors and artists who will do the most to shape this new culture are today almost completely unknown, but they will become household names in surprisingly short order. Others will take decades to become known, but they will write their most important works in just the next few years.
The country will hold together. There will be no civil war, though there may be a global one. And there will almost certainly be an economic collapse, like the Great Depression, except much deeper and much longer. But all of this will only serve to fuel the religious revival, and the revival in turn will fuel the cultural dynamism, until the country and ultimately the world have been entirely transformed.
By his own admission, in his latest blog post: On Renarin and Rlain. He says the post is addressed “toward my more conservative readership.” However, he also calls himself “an ally to LGBT+ people” and boasts about writing the “first openly gay men [in] the Wheel of Time.” When discussing Christianity and his own Latter-day Saint faith, he makes repeated appeals to “empathy” and “respect,” without addressing the Bible’s clear condemnation of sexual sin. He also does not mention the Family Proclamation, which clearly lays out his own church’s position on homosexuality, transgenderism, and gay marriage.
In other words, Brandon basically told his conservative readers “I hear you, but you’re wrong.” He implies that any conservative Christian who has concerns with the gay romance in Wind and Truth is lacking in empathy and respect. He also implies that by voicing their concerns, they are dividing the world into “us” vs. “them” and betraying a key tenet of their own Christian faith.
If Brandon genuinely wanted to allay the concerns of his conservative readers, he would have acknowledged the Family Proclamation and Biblical standards of sexual morality. He would have discussed the gay romance of his latest book in the context of such standards. Then, he would have presented an argument similar to Andrew Klavan’s: that conservative art is not the same as conservative life. Good art must provide an honest and truthful representation of life. It should not glorify or promote those aspects of life that are evil. Brandon starts to make the first half of that argument, in discussing how Tracy Hickman portrayed gay characters in his books, but he fails to follow it up. He doesn’t explain how making a gay romance essential to the plot of Wind and Truth serves the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Brandon doesn’t seem to trust his conservative Christian readers to be able to separate the sin from the sinner. He also refuses to acknowledge the lived experience of his gay and lesbian readers who have chosen to live morally pure and faithful Christian lives. Like Brandon, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the most inspiring members of the church for me are those who struggle with same-gender attraction but still live true to their testimonies. I imagine it must feel pretty lonely at times like this, when their brother in Christ has chosen to side with those who preach the false gospel of pride, equity, and self-worship, instead of the gospel of the One who declared “Father, Thy will be done, and the glory be Thine forever.”
Has Brandon denied his faith? I’m not Brandon’s bishop, nor am I his eternal judge. It’s important to remember that the church is not a place for perfect people. I do think there ought to be a place in the church for self-described LGBT+ allies, so long as they sustain the leaders—and the doctrine—of the church. But if he hasn’t crossed the line, he’s certainly standing a lot closer to it than I ever would.
My personal testimony is that the Family Proclamation is inspired of God, and that the men who wrote and signed their names to it are prophets, seers, and revelators. It teaches true principles about the family and sexual morality. We are all children of God, gays and lesbians included, and that makes us all brothers and sisters regardless of how we choose to live. At the same time, Christ didn’t suffer and die for us so that we could continue in our sins. If the Family Proclamation is true, affirming homosexuality is not an act of love, no matter how empathetic it may be. Christ had empathy for the woman caught in adultery, but because He loved her, He also commanded her to “go, and sin no more.”
On a personal level, I feel frustrated and disappointed by Brandon’s recent turn. I count Brandon as an early mentor—in fact, it was Brandon’s class that inspired me to pursue writing as a career. I haven’t spoken with Brandon in years, but I do still count him as a friend. If I could sit down with him I would ask him about the people he’s surrounded himself with. They seem to be leading him in a bad direction, since he seems to have grown out of touch.
Has he betrayed his conservative readers? Yes, I think he has, and that he’s making a big mistake by doing so. One of the things that set him apart until now was the fact that his books are very clean. His fans may argue that Renarin and Rlain’s romance is also clean, but as a conservative reader, it feels more like a camel’s nose peeking under the tent. In a world of drag queen story hour, pornographic gay pride parades, and genital mutilation of children, is it even possible to have a clean gay romance? I think not. To paraphrase Brandon, as much as we may long for the days where there was no slippery slope, maybe that world never existed. Maybe there will always be an instinct to divide the world into the “clean” and the “queer.”
So let me just say this: whatever the stories that Brandon wants to tell, I can no longer trust that they’ll be the kind I’ll want to read. He could still turn around, of course, and I genuinely hope that he does. But reading between the lines, it seems that this turn toward the woke is not a new direction from him. It seems to be something that he’s contemplated for some time. I’ll still read the rest of his secret projects and keep my signed copies of the original Mistborn trilogy. But I’m going to DNF the Stormlight Archive, and probably won’t buy his future books.
Brandon ends his blog post by saying that one of his primary goals in life is to be more empathetic. This is what motivates him to write: because it’s how he explores the world. I, too, feel compelled to explore the world through my stories, but my primary goal is to pursue the truth. Those two goals aren’t always in conflict, but when they are, I think the pursuit of truth should be higher. The pursuit of truth ultimately leads us to love one another more fully and more meaningfully than the pursuit of empathy does. It saddens me that Brandon disagrees.
It’s new year’s eve, finally! Another year, another voyage around the M-class dwarf star we call Sol!
A lot of other writers and podcasters are doing recaps of their year, highlighting some of their best moments as well as analyzing what they learned and what changed. Generally, though, these people are either single or have producers and assistants to help them with their content. Since neither of those is true for me (I literally just put my son down for a nap, though it sounds like it will be a while before he falls asleep), I’ll just write a quick blog post with some off-the-cuff thoughts.
It’s been a very busy and eventful year for me, writing-wise, though most of that probably won’t be visible from the outside until about the middle of next year. I’ve totally reworked my writing process in ways that should start yielding a lot of new books around then, and hopefully continue to yield them for the forseeable future. If successful, I will probably write a non-fiction book about it sometime, but that’s still in the nebulous future.
I published four novels this year, all in a new series, and I’m currently writing two more in the same series (the Sea Mage Cycle). Interestingly enough, it’s one of my best rated series, which probably shows how much I’ve improved as a writer since I first started indie publishing. Also, it’s much more of a fun adventure fantasy series than some of my other stuff, which either tends toward sprawling, ambitious space opera or sober dystopian think-pieces, both of which tend to take themselves a little too seriously. But I’m happy writing fantasy adventure, so if it turns out I can carve out a comfortable niche in this subgenre, I’ll certainly enjoy leaning into it.
Four novels in a year is about four times what I typically produce, but I was starting to feel a little burned out, so after taking a break to write some AI-assisted short stories, I decided to take some lessons from the experience and spend the rest of the year reworking my creative process. It didn’t take long for me to learn that writing quality AI-assisted novels isn’t that much harder than writing quality AI-assisted short stories—indeed, in some very key ways, it’s actually easier. So since novels are much more lucrative than short stories, I decided to stop writing them and to focus exclusively on novels.
I still plan to keep putting out a new title every month in 2025, just like I have for the last several years. Until now, most of those titles have been short stories, simply because I wasn’t able to write fast enough to regularly publish anything longer. But this year, I’m hoping to put out at least five novels, perhaps more, especially if I can get to the point where it only takes a month to write them. On the off months, I will republish old short story singles, so if there are any that you remember that you want to see again, let me know and I’ll put them into the publishing queue.
I’ll have to write at length with how I’ve reworked my writing process, and not just from the AI angle. I’ve also figured out how to hack my ADHD so that a lot of the things that used to be liabilities (a hyperactive, easily distractible mind, a hunger for novelty, a constant desire to start new projects or to chase new ideas, etc) are now assets instead of liabilities. But to really get into that, I first need to write about how I hacked my ADHD to read more books—which would probably make a great blog post for January 2025, since I’m sure many of my readers are making resolutions to read more books. I used to struggle to read more than thirty or forty books in a year, but now I consistently finish a book every 2-5 days, and have been for the last year and a half. So that should make a very interesting post.
On a more personal note, my big resolution for this year is to hike Mount Timpanogos at least once, and be in good enough shape that it doesn’t totally wipe me out. It should be too hard. I enjoy hiking, but I’ve put off hiking Mount Timp for years, assuming I would get around to it some other time. Well, I’m 40 now, so if I don’t do it soon there’s a chance I may never do it. Besides, it would be great to get back into hiking again, and perhaps even tackle some truly difficult mountains, not just the big local one that’s emminently doable. But for this year, it’s Mount Timpanogos (and maybe Mount Nebo, if Timp isn’t enough of a challenge).
The kids are getting older, and we’ll probably have to figure out homeschooling before the end of this next year. We’re also moving back into our house in Orem, after my wife gets her PhD. Before we do, I’d like to build a little free library that we can post on the corner of our property, and maybe even a bench, if I can get around to it. But the library is definitely something I want to finish before we move back in. Should be a fun woodworking project.
So that’s what we’re up to around here. Definitely looking forward to another long trip around the sun!
So it’s November 6th, 2024, the day after election day. President Trump has won an astonishing election victory, marking the greatest political comeback in US history. For those of us who feel like we’ve been gaslit and abused for the last four years, it really does feel like things are starting to look up for the country.
At least, for most of us, that is the case. For others of us, the black pill has been so bitter that we’re almost scared to hope again. Last night, I was up until 2am, just because I didn’t want a repeat of 2020, where we all went to bed convinced that Trump had a lock on the election, only to wake up to burst pipes, boxes of uncounted ballots, voting machines behaving strangely, windows and doors boarded up against Republican observers, and other sorts of “election fortification.” So frankly, I don’t blame anyone for being on pins and needles until Trump actually puts his hand on the Bible and is officially sworn in as the 47th (or possibly 48th) President.
I’m seeing that reflected right now in my blog stats, where in the last 24 hours, I’ve seen hundreds of hits on my old post This Scenario Would Fulfill Ezra’s Eagle, which I wrote several years ago. For some strange reason, that post is now the #2 Google search result for the query “Ezra’s Eagle,” which makes me feel like it’s my duty to offer periodic updates to the situation.
But first, a quick explanation of the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy:
This video is a very good explanation of the prophecy, as interpreted by Michael B. Rush. The part I find most compelling about it is the sequence of rulers, which really does line up uncannily well with our last 16 presidents. Whenever Biblical prophecies start going into numerology, I always raise my eyebrows a bit, because there are lots of ways to twist numbers to make them appear to fit your own personal interpretation. But if you read the original source material in 2 Esdras 11 and 12, it actually lines up very well with what has (so far) transpired.
However, it’s where we get to Rush’s interpretation of the last two short feathers and the lion that I tend to think it goes off the rails. This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I am not convinced that there will be a singular Anti-Christ figure in the end times. I know that a lot of Evangelical eschatology revolves around this figure, but the way they get there is through a rather selective reading of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation that leaves me scratching my head. When I read the Bible, I see a lot of passages talking about a spirit of Anti-Christ, but not a singular figure—and certainly not one with Godlike powers.
But the big thing is the lion, which Rush connects (correctly, I believe—assuming of course that the prophecy is true, which it may very well not be) with the remnant of Jacob in 3 Nephi 20 and 21. Latter-day Saint eschatology draws not only from Daniel (where we get the stone cut out of the mountain without hands), Ezekiel (where we get the stick of Joseph), and Revelation, but also from Isaiah, which goes into great depth about the scattering and gathering of Israel, and the return of the lost 10 tribes. There are also several other prophecies in the Book of Mormon that describe the latter-day gathering of Israel, which is central to the Latter-day Saint understanding of the end times.
Regarding the lost 10 tribes, within the Latter-day Saint tradition there are basically three possible views about what happened to them and where they are now.
The first is that they were taken to the north pole and currently live under the polar ice. This view was very popular in the 19th century, but almost no one believes it seriously now.
The second is that they were taken into space, and currently reside on another planet or in another dimension. While this may sound crazy, it does resonate with the scriptures we have that talk about how Enoch was taken into heaven, with the original city of Zion. This is the view that Michael B. Rush espouses, and he believes that the prophecies in 3 Nephi (as well as Ezra’s Eagle) will be fulfilled when the ten tribes come back down from space and liberate us from the Anti-Christ.
If that sounds a little too science fictional to you, you’re not the only one. Personally, I would love to read a novel where that’s how things turned out, but I don’t think those prophecies are actually going to be fulfilled that way—and here’s why.
The third view is that after the ten tribes passed out of our historical records, they migrated to the northern reaches of the Eurasian landmass, probably in what is now Siberia. There, they established a civilization, which was apparently still extant when the resurrected Christ visited the Americas, because He referred to them explicitly in 3 Nephi 17:
4 But now I go unto the Father, and also to show myself unto the lost tribes of Israel, for they are not lost unto the Father, for he knoweth whither he hath taken them.
This civilization probably continued for a while, perhaps for several centuries after the resurrection of Christ, but it eventually fell, probably due to a combination of the changing global climate (which was much warmer during Roman times, but went into a little ice age during the medieval era) and political upheaval on the Eurasian steppes. When China fell apart after the Three Kingdoms period, there was a massive depopulation as the survivors of those wars migrated westward onto the steppes, creating a cascade of violent displacement that ultimately culminated in the rise of the Hunnic confederacy and the migration period in Europe, which brought about the fall of the western Roman Empire. The ten tribes could easily have been conquered during this period, and their survivors assimilated into the Hunnic or Turkish tribes. Or perhaps they survived this era, only to be conquered by the Mongols in the 1200s. Either way, their culture was wiped out, and their descendants were assimilated into the cultures that conquered them and settled on their lands.
There’s quite a bit of evidence for this theory, including DNA evidence. There’s also some spiritual evidence from the patriarchal blessings of people from this region, where most of the people are have been blessed to belong to one of the ten tribes. The guys at Ward Radio discuss this at length in the episode above—Jonah Barnes actually served his mission in Siberia, so he has firsthand experience with this. Also, there is some pretty solid scriptural evidence in Jacob 5 and the allegory of the olive tree. When the branches of the natural tree are first scattered throughout the vinyard, there is a location that is mentioned once in verse 24, and never mentioned again. If this represents the lands of the lost ten tribes during Christ’s time, that makes sense, since their culture had not yet been wiped out—but after it was wiped out, and the survivors assimilated into the culture that conquered them, they were no longer a “branch” within the context of the allegory.
So how does this relate to Ezra’s Eagle? If the ten tribes are actually among us, and not in space as Michael Rush believes—indeed, if the descendants of the lost tribes are currently being gathered into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through the missionary work currently happening in central Asia—then the “remnant of Jacob” that will go forth as a lion is the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who gather to the New Jerusalem, either to build it or to migrate there after it has been built. Third Nephi 20 and 21 go into great depth about this.
But what does it mean that they will tread down their enemies among the gentiles? Does it mean that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will go all nationalistic, organize a militia, and go to war directly against the United States? Almost certainly not. After all, the twelfth article of faith states: “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
But I could see a scenario where the United States collapses and becomes a failed state on the national level, with cartels, gangs, and local warlords stepping into the power vacuum under the veneer of what’s left of our democratic republic. Under that scenario, the church would step into the gap and help its members to organize and develop a strong, self-reliant community that could not only survive in such a post-collapse world, but actually thrive in it. In many ways, we’re already set up to do exactly that. And if the call comes during this time of chaos to build up the New Jerusalem, I could see us making a modern pioneer trek to Missouri, and prevailing over the gangs and warlords who try to stand in our way.
Under this scenario, the last two feathers of Ezra’s Eagle aren’t the Anti-Christ and the Beast, but the last two presidents of the United States, who attempt to restore the nation after the catastrophic fall of the deep state (represented by the three eagle heads) but who ultimately fail to do so. This is when the nation collapses, and we become a failed state on the federal level. Then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rises up to fill in the gap, standing against the gangs and warlords in the ensuing power vacuum, until we are called to build the New Jerusalem and fulfill the end-times prophecies contained in 3 Nephi.
To me, this is a much more plausible interpretation of Ezra’s Eagle than Rush’s view that the lost ten tribes will liberate us in some sort of extraterrestrial invasion of our planet, while a godlike Anti-Christ rules the whole world. But frankly, I don’t think any of this is going to happen—at least, not on the timeline of Ezra’s Eagle. President Trump won the election with a clear mandate, and I believe he will become our 47th president. With the way things are currently unfolding, I no longer believe that the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy is true in a literal sense. It may have been an authentic vision of a possible series of events, but I do not believe we are on that timeline. After all, there is a reason why Joseph Smith never translated the Apocrypha—or canonized it, for that matter.
But I guess we’ll find out soon. After all, if anything happens to Trump between now and January 20th… let’s just pray for our country during this very uncertain time.
(And for the record, if the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy is true, I still totally believe that Janet Yellen is the first eagle’s head.)
I know that it’s been just a week since I said I would post less about politics and current events, but the events of the past week are so Earth-shattering that I really can’t hold back.
First, yesterday’s 200+ missile strike on Israel by Iran. For me, the scariest footage I’ve seen so far was this:
Obviously, Israel was not wiped off the map by Iran’s ballistic missile strike. In fact, from what I’ve heard most recently, the only casualties from that attack are one Palestinian in Judea/Samaria, and five Iranians when the missile they were prepping blew up on the launch pad. Wah wah sad trombone.
But it would be a very different story if any of those missiles had been tipped with a nuclear warhead.
So as we await Israel’s response to this unprecedented attack, I think it’s not to early to call the start of the Israel-Iran war. It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s actually here, and I think it’s going to heat up a lot faster than most people think it will.
At this point, the two big questions on my mind are: 1) how many other countries are going to get dragged into this war, and 2) do the Iranian mullahs actually believe that they can win?
I’ll tackle the second question first. If the answer is “no,” then it means that the Iranians are being purely reactive, and this is Israel’s war to lose. And unlike the United States, which has a long track record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (especially under our current alleged president), the Israelis are clearly determined to win.
At the risk of waxing dangerously optimistic, I think there’s a very good chance that this is the case. The Hezbollah exploding pagers was an incredible operation that caught everyone by surprise, and the way the Israelis followed it up with the assassination of Hezbollah’s top dog Hassan Nasrallah was a massive blow that has the potential to completely reshape the Middle East. And now, with their assault on southern Lebanon, Israel has effectively eliminated Hezbollah as an existential threat to their nation, just as they have eliminated Hamas with the Gazan war.
Of course, given the nature of the escalation, the Iranians were forced to respond, and not just by shooting off a bunch of missiles into the desert for show, the way they did when Trump killed Qasam Soleimani. But such a response is guaranteed to escalate the conflict even further, to the point where Israel is now likely to take out Iran’s entire nuclear program, and possibly their oil wells too. They clearly have the capacity to do so.
Will the unpopular Islamist regime survive such a dramatic escalation? What if Mossad also assassinates a few of their mullahs, or the Ayatollah himself? Do the mullahs really think they can win?
What if they actually do?
What if they aren’t just purely reacting to events as they unfold, but are purposefully shaping events according to some script which we have yet to see? What if they want Israel to escalate, so as to drag other countries into the conflict?
I forget where I saw this statistic, but something like 70% of Iran’s oil production goes to China. If Iran’s energy sector is effectively taken offline by an Israeli strike, how will China respond? Does that make them more or less likely to launch an invasion of Taiwan, or to become more aggressive in the South China Sea?
Iran is also supplying Russia with most of their offensive drones, which the Russians have put to quite effective use in their war with Ukraine. If Israel takes out Iran’s drone production, or threatens to take it out, how will Putin respond? Will he come to Iran’s aid, the way he came to Bashir Al-Assad’s aid in the Syrian civil war? Will he expand the Russo-Ukraine war? Will he go nuclear?
If the Israel-Iran war is confined to a regional war, Israel will probably win and become a regional hegemon—and thanks to Biden’s and Obama’s catastrophic mishandling of foreign policy, the United States’ influence in the region has been and will continue to be seriously diminished. But with an Iranian defeat, the Abraham Accords are likely to become the framework for reshaping the entire region. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be discarded, and most of the Palestinians will probably be relocated as Israel gradualy absorbs Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Some of them may become Israelis, but most will not.
Iran’s best chance to win this war is to draw in as many other countries as it can, especially Russia and China. Will they do so? Can they do so? Do they believe they can do so? I think this question is the key.
But here’s one question I do believe that I can answer: is this the beginning of the Battle of Armageddon—the prophesied end-times conflict that will precede the second coming of Christ? No, I don’t believe that it is, for the following reasons: 1) the Jews have not yet built the third temple, 2) the Latter-day Saints have not yet built the New Jerusalem in Missouri, and 3) the world is not yet united in war against Israel. This war may be the dress rehearsal for Armageddon, and depending on the outcome, we may only be a decade or two away from it, but I don’t think this is the big event.
Not yet, in any case. As we’ve seen over the last week, the situation can change very quickly.
So the Daily Wire recently put out an interesting article about the current trend of chronically single young adults who want to get married but have had zero luck, especially with today’s online dating scene. From what I can tell, online dating is like a post-apocalyptic wasteland right now—which is a huge problem, because ever since the pandemic, online dating has come to replace almost every other form of getting out there and finding prospective romantic partners.
So since I graduated from the online dating scene after a period of chronic singlehood, and am now happily married, I thought I was qualified to share some of my thoughts on the subjects in the comments on the article. And since I thought some of my readers here might find it interesting, I’ve decided to cross-post my comment. Here it is:
I was chronically single until I met my wife at age 34. We met online and got married just before the pandemic. Some thoughts:
1. It sucks to be rejected, but if marriage is really what you’re looking for, you’ve got to embrace the suck. You’ll never find “the one” if you’re trying to please everyone. Know what you’re looking for, and when you write up your dating profile, share the things about you that will drive everyone else away. My profile had an explicit declaration of faith, because that was what I was looking for–and I found my wife on the third or fourth match, in part because that declaration was explicit enough to drive everyone else away.
2. The only way to stop wasting time is to embrace Jordan Peterson’s 8th rule of life. You grew up in an online world where almost everything you saw was a lie. Embrace total honesty, no matter how much it hurts. On our second date, I asked my future wife what she wanted to do with her life. She embraced total honesty and told me she wanted to be a wife and a mother more than anything else, even though she had no idea how I would respond to that. We were married less than a year later.
3. Have enough faith to trust God’s timing. My wife and I were actually enrolled in the same college class a decade before we met online. If we had dated each other then, it wouldn’t have worked out. We both needed to grow a bit first (quite a bit, in my case). Everything in this world has been prepared in the wisdom of Him who knows all things. Do your part to bring your life in line with Him, and all things will work together for your good.
4. Stop making everything about yourself. Selfishness is the root cause of every divorce, which also makes it one of the biggest deterrents to marriage and relationships. You grew up in an age of unbridled narcissism, exploited by Big Tech and social media to leverage your loneliness for corporate profits. When you think you may have found the right one (and you’re not in a codependent or abusive relationship), make it all about them. He who seeks his life shall lose it, and he who loses his life, for God’s sake, shall find it. I will never forget the impression I received when I first held my daughter: “this is her story now, not yours.”
There was a second shooter, probably on the water tower. The first shooter, who was identified and killed by the counter-snipers, was obviously a fall-guy, with the second shooter on scene as insurance in case the first guy failed.
I don’t think the Secret Service agents on the scene were in on the plot. They demonstrated some glaring incompetence, but that’s actually become quite typical of the agency in recent years.
The reason the counter-snipers didn’t fire first was probably because there were trees obscuring their view. I don’t think they were in on the plot. However, the fact that they were positioned where they were is all kinds of suspicious, since it gave the first shooter a perfect position—and who put the counter-snipers on that roof in the first place? They should have been on the water tower, which commanded the whole area.
The first shooter could not have gotten into position without some kind of inside help. The level of official incompetence that it would take to allow him to get into position the way he did approaches the level of an Epstein suicide. He was on the freaking roof of the temporary police headquarters, for crying out loud—he had to cross a parking lot full of police cars to get to the effing ladder!
Kim Cheatle absolutely needs to take responsibility and resign as head of the Secret Service. The fact that she hasn’t tells me that she wants to hang on to power long enough to cover up her complicity.
I have zero faith in the FBI and expect them to use the “investigation” to cover up the truth and destroy evidence. Within a month, most of this stuff is likely going to be memory-holed by Google and all the other big tech companies. Take note.
However, with everything that has happened since the failed assassination, I am actually quite hopeful. Trump is demonstrating incredible leadership, and appears to be changing his message to a genuine call for unity. From what I can tell, this brush with death has deeply changed him.
Also, the Right is tremendously unified right now, to the point where I would be surprised if the people who plotted to take his life make another attempt. If the would-be assassins are indeed with the deep state / intelligence agencies (which makes sense, since a second-term Trump administration represents an existential threat to their power), then they’ve got to see that making him a martyr will blow up in their faces, especially now.
However, I could be wrong, especially if one of the goals of the would-be assassins is to blow up the country and drive us into a hot civil war. But who would that actually benefit, besides a foreign power? A post-Trump America would become totally ungovernable, even dangerously anarchic, if Trump were to become a martyr at this point.
The way the establishment appears to be in total disarray tells me that they are in retreat and making this sort of calculation right now. They will probably throw the Secret Service under the bus and do everything they can to hide just how far up the food chain this assassination plot really goes.
If Trump survives to November and the election is allowed to proceed, Trump will almost certainly become the 47th president. Since he represents an existential threat to the people currently in power, I think there’s a high likelihood that some sort of “crisis” will emerge that gives them an excuse to cancel the election. It could be a second pandemic. It could be a global war. It could be an October 7th-style terrorist attack on American soil. All of these are possibilities.
However, if none of this occurs and we somehow manage to get to November without a major crisis, I expect the people in power to do everything they can to plant some poison pills for the second Trump administration, in order to tie his hands. The most obvious of these would be to incite a direct military conflict between the US and Russia. It wouldn’t be easy for Trump to disentangle us from the Russia-Ukraine proxy war we’re currently fighting, but he could probably still do it. However, if the bombs are already flying between the US and Russia when he comes in on day 1, then the Neocons get the war they so desperately want, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
Assuming that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is still functional, the world has never been closer to a global nuclear war than it is right now—and with every second that passes, the likelihood only grows. It will probably take divine intervention to prevent that from happening between now and November, but we’ve already seen divine intervention in the fact that Trump is still with us. Which is not to make him out to be Jesus—if anything, he’s an American Samson—but it’s only by the grace of God that he is still alive.
On the issue of abortion, I would consider myself to be very pro-life. I have written several explicitly pro-life stories, including “The Paradox of Choice,”“The Body Tax,” and “The Freedom of Second Chances.” My wife and I also donate monthly to Preborn, a charity / Christian ministry that provides free ultrasounds and support to pregnant women seeking abortions.
I was not always pro-life, however. In fact, if you’d asked me fifteen years ago where I stood on the abortion issue, I would have described myself as either pro-choice or leaning pro-choice. So what was it that changed my mind?
First, a little background about myself. I grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, with three younger sisters and a mother and father who were married and faithful to each other. Abortion was not a thing that I had any direct experience with; it was little more than a vague concept that I heard other people arguing with. And although I grew up in a religious household, we lived in a Democrat stronghold (western Massachusetts) and both of my parents were Democrats, so of course the default position that I grew up with was pro-choice.
I didn’t really hear the abortion issue debated until high school. I went to an elite preparatory academy in Pioneer Valley, so I was surrounded by people who were far left even by Massachusetts’ standards. My position, which I more or less absorbed from those around me, was that abortion was a tragic but sometimes necessary procedure, and that it wasn’t the place of men or the government to tell women what they couldn’t do with their own bodies. Basically, the “safe, legal, and rare” position.
However, there was one pro-life argument I heard at that time that planted a seed in my heart. The school paper printed a debate on the abortion issue, and the student who wrote the pro-life side argued not from the legal position, but from the moral position—specifically, asking the question “when does life begin?” Since we cannot know when life begins, the student argued, we should err on the side of preserving life and treat the unborn child like a full human being from the moment of conception. If we believe that murder is wrong, erring on the other side—that of preserving the mother’s autonomy—would risk committing an immoral act, since we cannot positively say that abortion does not take a human life.
It was an interesting argument, and I didn’t really have a counter to it. However, the abortion issue didn’t rank very high on my list of priorities, so I filed it away and forgot about it, reverting back to the default position which I’d more or less absorbed. If pressed, I would say that I didn’t like abortions, but that it was something best left between a woman and her doctor. I didn’t really give the “when does life really begin?” question any serious thought.
However, one thing I did give serious thought to was the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II. The liberal, post-modern position that I more or less absorbed from the air around me was that history (or at least the part that really mattered) began in the 1930s, that the Nazis represented the ultimate evil, and that “never again” was civilization’s most sacred value—not just for the holocaust, but for all forms of genocide, nuclear proliferation, and global war. As a kid, I read every (non-boring) World War II book that I could get my hands on, and was profoundly moved by several of the photographs that I saw, especially of the Nazi death camps. Later, in middle school, I read Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, which further cemented my revulsion of the holocaust, and my determination that I was not and would never be the kind of person who would assent to that sort of atrocity.
Fast forward to the 2000s. After serving a two-year mission, I attended Brigham Young University from 2006 to 2010. The contrast was stark. In Massachusetts, I had been the odd “conservative” kid surrounded by liberals. In Utah, I was the odd “liberal” kid surrounded by conservatives. And though BYU is not the most conservative school in the United States (that would probably be Hillsdale), the air that I found myself in was much more conservative than anything I’d experienced growing up.
Overall, the experience was good for me. I found myself questioning a lot of my unspoken political assumptions and coming to conclusions that would have surprised my earlier teachers and mentors. For example, I independently came to appreciate the second ammendment and the right to self-defense, mostly from participating in BYU’s jujitsu club and learning how to physically defend myself. I also gained a deep appreciation for the principle of free speech, since studying contrasting viewpoints was so key in shaping my own worldview at that time.
However, I still didn’t give much thought to the abortion issue, since 1) it wasn’t directly relevant to my life at that time, and 2) it was just a really icky thing to think about. If pressed, I probably would have said that I was against using abortion as a form of birth control, and that some restrictions should be put in place to prevent that from happening, but that I didn’t think Roe v. Wade should be overturned. I had never known a world before Roe v. Wade, and thus was more comfortable sticking with the default that I’d grown up with. As a faithful Latter-day Saint, I knew that I would never put a woman in a position where she would consider getting an abortion, so the status quo was enough for me.
As a side note, I should point out that the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that abortion is wrong in all cases except where rape, incest, or the health of the mother create extenuating circumstances. As missionaries, if we wanted to baptize someone who had either had an abortion themselves or had participated in one, we had to move it up the chain to a higher ecclesiastical authority to interview them and determine whether the prospective convert needed to demonstrate more repentance. Later, as a member of a bishopric, abortion was something we had to seriously consider when convening disciplinary councils. It is possible to get an abortion as a Latter-day Saint without getting excommunicated, or to come back into full fellowship after being excommunicated for abortion, but you have to go through your local (and sometimes area/general) authorities to work it out—and even then, they will strongly encourage you not to go through with it. But there is quite a bit of room for nuance in the church’s position on abortion.
Not that I ever really gave the deeper nuances of the issue any serious thought during this period. In fact, the one question that I never really asked myself was “when does life actually begin?” If pressed, I probably would have taken the position from that high school debate article, that since we don’t know we should probably err on the side of assuming life begins at conception, but I never really thought through the full implications of that position, again because 1) it didn’t directly impact my own life, and 2) the whole abortion issue was just icky.
Fast forward to 2015. I had graduated from college, traveled the world a bit, spent a few years bouncing around odd jobs and more or less living on my own, and made the best decision of my entire life: to not pursue a graduate degree. If I had gone on to grad school, I would have racked up a whole lot of debt, delayed my exposure to the “real world,” and failed to learn a number of important and life-changing lessons from the school of hard-knocks. And now that I finally felt like I was getting my feet back under me, I began to question all of my prior political assumptions, especially since the Obama years were coming to a close. I had voted for Obama in 2008, but vowed that I would never vote for a Democrat again, and was frankly disgusted with the intersectional coalition and its crusade for anti-racism and social justice.
It was around this time that I discovered Jordan Peterson. I was deeply impressed with Peterson’s earnest sincerity, intellectual honesty, and courage of his convictions. I was also intrigued by many of his arguments, which ran contrary to so many of the things I’d grown up with. One of these was his argument that most of us would have gone along with the Nazi atrocities, if we had lived in 1930s Germany. His argument was basically: “we’d all like to think that there was something unique about the Nazis that made them so evil, but that isn’t true. They weren’t so different from all of us. You may think that you wouldn’t have gone along with all of the atrocities that the Nazis committed, but the truth is that you probably would have gone along. After all, you’re not so special. You’re just as much a product of your times as the Germans in 1930s, and they really aren’t as different from us as you think they are. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just as capable of evil as they were.”
This argument struck something deep within me, partly because “never again” was such a core part of my own personal identity. Was I the kind of person who would have resisted the evils of the Nazis? Or in fact, was I not that special, and also not that different from those who had gone along with the Nazis’ terrible crimes? The only way to know for certain was to compare our times with the times of the Nazi regime, to see if there was anything comparable to the holocaust in our own time.
As soon as I asked that question, it was like my eyes were suddenly opened. There is indeed an atrocity comparable to the holocaust in our times, and it has become so ingrained into our culture that in many places—such as the blue state where I grew up—it is almost like part of the air that everyone breathes. That atrocity is the genocide of the unborn. If life truly begins at or near conception, then we have committed 10x holocausts since Roe v. Wade, a full order of magnitude more blood than the Nazis spilled. Moreover, we have slaughtered the most innocent, voiceless, and powerless people among us: our own children.
It all comes down to the question “when does a human life begin?” As far as I can tell, there are only two answers to that question that are logically consistent and scientifically sound: “at conception” and “I don’t know.” Viability is a moving target that changes with innovation and technology: in another decade, we may have found a way to grow children outside of the female womb, making them viable from literally the point of conception. Capacity for pain is also a moving target, since we’re still learning all sorts of new things as our technology improves. Sentience doesn’t work because people in comas are both alive and non-sentient. Heartbeat doesn’t work because it is possible to put an animal into suspended animation, where their heart has stopped beating, and successfully revive them. We can’t exactly do that to humans yet, but it’s only a matter of time and innovation before we can.
Now, I cannot say for certain that abortion is always wrong. Just like there are circumstances when it is just to shoot someone to death (such as during a violent home invasion), I understand that there may be circumstances where an abortion is similarly warranted. These are the edge cases like rape, incest, and health of the mother that the pro-choice pro-abortion activists always fall back on. The clearest of these is probably ectopic pregnancy, which is almost always fatal for both the mother and the child. But of course, what the activists never tell you is that almost all of the abortion bans that have been put into place since the end of Roe v. Wade have exemptions for ectopic pregnancies, which are not considered legally to be abortions. But I grant that there are other cases, such as depression and suicidal tendencies, that fall into a gray area morally. I also grant that a strict pro-life position has far-reaching implications for things like IVF and surrogacy that may or may not go too far. Frankly, I’m not at all sure where I stand on surrogacy and IVF.
But when you take a clear-headed and logical view at the way our culture practices abortion, focusing not on the legal intricacies but the simple question “when does a human life begin?” it becomes very clear that our current regime is not only comparable to the Nazi regime, but may actually exceed the Nazis in objective measures of evil. After all, what made the Nazi holocaust so evil? The sheer size of the death count? Ours is an order of magnitude larger. The innocence of the victims? No one is more innocent than the unborn. The motivations behind the killing? Hatred is one thing, but the worst evils have a quality of banality to them that our narcissistic and apathetic obsession with personal convenience captures better than almost anything else.
If it seems so unthinkable to claim that the evils of our own time exceeds the evils of the Nazis, that’s only because we are living so close to our own historical moment that we cannot see it clearly for what it is. Our modern liberal culture operates on the unspoken assumptions that 1) history only meaningfully began in the 1930s, 2) the Nazis represent the ultimate evil, and 3) “never again” is our civilization’s most sacred value (though with the October 7th massacre, that last one is beginning to fray). But if you can step back from that worldview and take a more objective look at our own historical moment, it quickly becomes obvious that we’re not as different from the Nazis as we think we are. After all, there is nothing new under the sun.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was not the end of our culture’s abortion regime, but merely a shift in the argument and an opening of a new phase. And frankly, I am disgusted by the way that the Republicans have infiltrated and exploited the pro-life movement, cynically transforming it into a get-out-the-vote operation rather than treating this issue for what it is: the fundamental moral question of our times. In the 19th century, that question was slavery. Today, that question is the value of human life—and future generations will judge us just as harshly for our own position on that question as we judge the plantation slaveholders of the antebellum south. And well should they!
In sum, I wasn’t converted from pro-choice to pro-life until after I was confonted by an argument that forced me to take a good, hard look at my own worldview. At the heart of that argument was a very simple question: “when does a human life begin?” After considering that question deeply, I not only changed my position on the issue, but changed it so deeply that my wife and I now donate monthly to a Christian pro-life charity, even though we are not evangelical Christians. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I have deep theological differences with the people in the Preborn ministry, and that most of them have been taught to view my own Latter-day Saint faith as an abominable heresy. But I’m willing to lay all that aside, because in this day and age, I think that the value of life is a much bigger issue than any of that. And when my great great granchildren look back on my life, I hope that they can say that I rose above the evil of my times.
I just finished reading The Last Election by Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche. It’s a fascinating book, but not in the way that the authors probably intended.
The book basically presents a detailed account of the 2024 election, starting in November 2023 and ending with the results of a contingent election, after the (fictional) third party campaign disrupts things so thoroughly that no presidential candidate can get to 270 electoral votes. There’s violence in the streets, a supreme court justice who gets assassinated, a presidential debate that gets disrupted by a riot before it can really begin, a stealth military coup, and all sorts of insanity. And it ends (of course) with a Trump victory in the contingent election, where every state gets one vote and the representatives from each state vote behind closed doors. Cue the end of “our democracy.”
Partisan politics aside (and I am still genuinely undecided as to how, or even if, I will vote in 2024), there is sooo much to unpack in this book. The authors are totally ignorant about half of the country, and utterly clueless about the other half… and I can’t tell which half is which. That’s what I find so fascinating. Do the authors really believe that the average Trump voter hates and fears black people simply because they are black? Do they genuinely believe that sexual harrassment makes a better kick-the-dog moment than a coerced secret abortion ending in suicide? That such an abortion doesn’t even count as a kick-the-dog moment at all?
However, my purpose in this blog post is not to unpack all the myriad layers of willful and oblivious ignorance in The Last Election, but to point out what should be obvious by now: that most of the authors’ predictions are already failing to pan out.
By now, on the timeline, we should have had 1) an assassination of a justice of the supreme court, 2) RFK projected to win several states, and 3) street violence on the level of the George Floyd riots, with about as many casualties. Of course, none of those things have actually happened. And that, more than anything, makes me think that a hot civil war is unlikely to break out in this country.
Instead, people just seem to be exhausted. There are a few keyboard warriors, of course, but from what I can tell, most people on both sides are doing their best to tune them out. The memes aren’t anywhere near as good as they were in 2016. Of course, there’s still enough outrage for the political grifters to work with, but that outrage isn’t translating into lone wolves and false flags.
The 2024 election is shaping up to be the least important election in my lifetime. If our democracy were healthy, we would be debating the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic and whom we should hold responsible for it (of course, in a healthy democracy, the citizens would not have complied with those policies in the first place). Instead, the thing that’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room is the neverending lawfare against Trump—which is still important, don’t get me wrong, but is it really the most important thing happening right now? Inflation is crushing the economy, Europe is in the midst of its worst armed conflict since the Nazis, we are closer to a nuclear armed conflict with Russia than we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Anthony Fauci is still both alive and free.
When I step away from the perpetual outrage cycle that passes these days for the news and look at the current state of the world, what I see is not a superpower that is careening toward a hot civil war, but a former superpower that is steadily disintegrating. Some parts of the country are in a greater state of collapse than other parts, but we are all in the midst of a collapse, and probably have been for years, perhaps even decades. Our dysfunctional politics is not the cause of any of this. It’s just a symptom.
As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as exceptional. We also like to obsess over the imminent fall of our cuntry. That’s probably why there’s been so much talk in the last few years about the possibility of a civil war. God forbid that America goes out with a whimper instead of a bang.
But the more I see, the more I think that that’s exactly how this country will fall apart: with a steady and unrelenting disintegration, until our politics are totally irrelevant, our military is unable to project power overseas, our national government is little better than that of a failed state, and our economy is so weak that no one bats an eye at rolling blackouts and empty grocery shelves.
Then we will pass through a period when things that cannot continue will not continue, and things that must happen will happen. Several states will become de facto autonomous, simply to survive. Many won’t. The dollar will collapse and the efforts of the global elite to replace it with a global digital currency will fail, but their depopulation efforts will succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and ultimately prove their downfall. The perpetual growth paradigm that the left calls “capitalism” and the right calls “progressivism” will unravel to devastating effect, and by 2100, there will be fewer than one billion humans on this planet (which will probably be significantly colder than it is now).
But there will not be a second American civil war, because that would require a level of dynamism that we simply do not possess. There is still a lot of ruin in this country, though, so we will probably endure longer than most other countries… kind of like how Japan is going on its fourth “lost decade” by now. But Japan had us to lean on. We’re not going to have anybody except ourselves.
That is the lesson that I haven taken from the recent blow-up over Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College. Here’s a pretty good rundown of what actually happened, and the way the internet has reacted:
If this is truly where our culture is right now—where a thoughtful and measured statement of traditional conservative belief is sufficient to incite viral online outrage from those who call themselves progressive—then I must be doing something wrong if the people who are piling up on this gentleman aren’t also piling up on me.
It wasn’t always this way. Granted, there have always been dark and hate-filled corners of the internet where people who despise traditional religious conservatism have spread their virulent views—and to be fair, Twitter/X has turned into such a toxic echo chamber that the outrage over this may be getting amplified more than it actually deserves.
But our culture has changed a lot in the last five years, and not for the better. And if the Overton window has truly moved so far that it’s considered beyond the pale to encourage women to find personal fulfillment as wives and mothers, then Harrison Butker is the man I want to stand with. They can call me every name in the book, and I will bear their vociferous outrage as a badge of honor.