Periodically, I drop in and eavesdrop on the online debates between a blue-state, “Woke” suburban named “Karen” and a red-state conservative Christian called “Obadiah.” Our politics and culture have fallen so far into Manichaean madness, they never seem to run out of stuff to talk about. Though it’s unclear whether in fact they communicate much at all … .

 

KAREN: You must be upset today. Two of your heroes, that McCloskey couple in St. Louis, got charged with a felony for illegally brandishing weapons.

OBADIAH: I’m angry on the surface. But deep down I’m terrified. Those two people ought to be held up as the George Floyds of homeowners: examples of how the System can destroy people when it goes totally wrong. When institutionalized corruption, callousness, and hatred turn the State from our protector into our enemy. Today it’s them, tomorrow it’s you and me. Well, maybe not you.

KAREN: You’re damned straight. I’m not part of the gun cult. And I would never threaten the lives of peaceful demonstrators.

Replace the Police with … Social Workers and Commissars

OBADIAH: If a mob of enemies who hated you broke down your front gate and stormed your front lawn, you might wish you belonged to the gun cult. Of course you’d just call the police. But they’ll already have been abolished. Maybe they’ll dispatch a social worker, like those Keith Ellison wants to send to rape victims, instead of cops. That’s nonsense, of course. Your Woke leaders don’t really want to eliminate the police, but replace them with mobs of Antifa terrorists and black racist thugs. Like the warlords who took over Seattle.
 

Farrakhan disciple, former DNC Vice Chair, and current Minnesota AG Keith Ellison says he doesn’t want police officers to respond to rape calls.

This is Joe Biden’s Democrat Party and a reminder that you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.pic.twitter.com/n6TsI379Kf

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 20, 2020

KAREN: When an institution is thoroughly colonized by racist attitudes, sometimes you need to tear it down and start from scratch.

OBADIAH: People who couldn’t make a paperweight if you gave them a box of Legos are keen to destroy the achievements of the past, and rip down its monuments. That’s not because of whatever moral pretexts they offer. They’re just incompetent narcissists, who want to break what they can’t understand. “Hulk no LIKE vertical structures. Hulk SMASH!”

Systemic Balderdash

KAREN: So you’re saying that Western culture isn’t infused with systemic racism? I guess black people just willingly chose to have much lower incomes and much higher incarceration rates?

OBADIAH: “Systemic racism” is an ignorant, malicious conspiracy theory, on the same order as the so-called “Zionist Occupational Government.”

The same liberals who concurred with Christian equality, and helped remove racist barriers blocking black people from our cultural mainstream, tossed aside the Church like a used condom the moment that was done. Then they poisoned that mainstream with cheap sex, hard drugs, and a rock and roll culture that told people to live for the moment. They desegregated the swimming pool, then pumped it full of toxins that made everyone lose bowel control. And set up a welfare state bribing every teenage girl in America to get pregnant as soon as possible.

That’s what destroyed black families, and is wrecking blue collar white families now. Your upscale Woke pals have enough money to insulate themselves from its worst effects. They can take “gap” years, go to rehab, work at unpaid internships while crashing in Daddy’s ski lodge. Poor people’s lives are different, and always have been. It’s typically “one strike, and you’re out.”

But you don’t care. You know you can import plenty of immigrants to replace them. The only use you have for black Americans is as plaster victim saints, and sometimes as street muscle for your political gangs.

Looting and Smashing Are Violence

KAREN: So you’re just going to demonize people for legitimate political outrage, and fantasize about violence aimed at peaceful protesters. If that isn’t fascism, what is?

OBADIAH: By “peaceful” you mean simply that as long as nobody tries to stop them looting, smashing, stealing, and destroying what others poured their own toil, time and treasure to build, that mob will just menace bystanders, instead of beating them. That’s not peace. That’s just blind thuggish force, prevailing without opposition. By that standard, Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia “peacefully” too. The government, betrayed by the Allies, had its army stand down. They were conquered without firing a shot.

I’d fire a shot. If a mob came to smash the irreplaceable stained glass church windows that my immigrant ancestors sweated to build, and the marble altar they sacrificed to buy, I wouldn’t just wave a gun. If the police wouldn’t protect the place, I’d defend it myself. Same deal with a house I’d scrimped and saved to buy. Or my neighbors’ house, if he asked for help. If the police are going to leave us unprotected from the Mob, we’re going to have to organize citizens militias to take their place. Or else the whole country turns into one big Minneapolis.

KAREN: And you call yourself a Christian. You’d shoot human beings, whom you claim to see as images of God, to protect bricks and mortar, glass and marble?

Burning Cathedrals and Gutted Businesses

OBADIAH: Without losing sleep. Violence against property is violence against people. Let’s say you spent a year’s salary on your car. And I came up to it with a sledgehammer and smashed it. I would be stealing every hour you worked to buy it, turning that time into slave labor. Burn a cathedral, as just happened in Nantes, France, that took hundreds of years to build. You’re erasing the lives of the people who sweated blood to build it, just as surely as if you smashed the headstones on their graves.

Just the same if a mob trashes the shop, restaurant, or other small business some hard-working family built from the ground up. People who try that kind of violence deserve to be met with proportionate force. We have an absolute human right to defend ourselves against being pillaged, raped, beaten or robbed.

That’s what Christianity teaches us, and why every Christian who’s actually sincere ought to be a hardcore supporter of the Second Amendment. Christians gave us that amendment, in fact. It was modeled on the English Bill of Rights, enacted to protect the religious freedom of Puritans, who’d been persecuted by the Stuarts. If you don’t think religious freedom and self-defense are connected, you should go tell that to the Yazidis in Iraq. Or the Uyghurs in China. Or the Christians in Nigeria. They’re black. They’re alive. (For now.) Could you at least pretend that you think they matter?

KAREN: [Does research, finds out Obadiah’s state has a “red flag” law. She contacts his local precinct, reports Obadiah as “dangerously unstable.” Police come to confiscate his legally owned AR-15 and pistol.]

OBADIAH: [Since such laws put the burden of proof on the accused, and don’t let him confront or question his accuser, Obadiah must spend several weeks’ salary on legal fees and court costs, to get back his weapons.]

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.