You’re seeing it already: the attempt to snap Christians’ spines and render us invertebrates, to leash us via our heartstrings, to shame us into silence about the Biden regime’s lawlessness at the border.

As a Catholic, I’m used to this dreck. I’ve been inundated with open borders agitprop by professional Catholics for decades. Some of that, to be fair, was motivated by a perverse hatred for Western civilization and masochistic white guilt. But most of it was straight up self-interest, a craving for warm bodies in pews, and greed for gold.

My bishops made $3 billion helping with the human trafficking of immigrants into America — enough, dollar for dollar, to cover all the costs of settlements for the children whose rapes they enabled by hiding and shuffling pedophiles. Indeed, by this point the U.S. bishops conference is best described as an immigration pyramid scheme and a gay employment agency … with a Catholic problem.

Protestants Catching Up with the Bishops’ Grift

Don’t start getting puffed up with pride at this point, my Protestant friends. Charitable and activist groups in your world are only five years or so behind the Catholic grift, and they’re learning fast. Evangelical truth-teller Megan Basham calls out just one egregious example here:

Here’s something you need to know about World Relief–just like other major religious NGOs that do the administrative part of refugee resettlement, it has a massive financial incentive for wanting to keep the number of those claiming refugee status in our country high. As… https://t.co/z60C8EeG9b

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) January 26, 2024

Just Speak the Magic Words

Want to know just how absurd, outrageous, and lawless the status quo now is, the situation which open-borders Christians defend? This is all that it takes for a person at the border to get admitted to the U.S., and receive free transport and free healthcare indefinitely. You just speak the words of this magic spell, which Soros and Catholic Charities functionaries are on hand to teach newcomers from a script: “I fear going back to my country.”

Border Patrol agent, Brandon Judd, explains to @benshapiro how easy it is to claim asylum:

“All they have to do is say, “The magic word is: I fear going back to my country.” And once they say that then they have to be processed.” pic.twitter.com/AIgrQEfMJC

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) January 26, 2024

How to Snuff Out the Gaslighting

This is the anarchy, cash grab, and political takeover being advocated by all those seemingly earnest, sweatily winsome, excruciatingly nuanced NPR-whispering Christians who post things like the following:

• Would Jesus lay down razor wire that endangered helpless brown children? Wasn’t he more brown than white himself? Didn’t he say “Suffer the children to come unto me”?
• The Bible says “Welcome the stranger,” not “Make America great again.”
• Radical hospitality is key to the Gospel call, which is why Jesus dined with sinners.
• Our loyalty is to the Church invisible, which has no borders or limits.
• Real pro-lifers welcome migrants, not just the unborn.

Each of these tired tropes is easy to answer, and we at The Stream have done so. Years ago. Just click on the links above to see patient, thoughtful responses to such lazy, undisciplined claims.

Nonsense like this plays on your emotions like a virtuoso’s jazz flute, while trying to slip an icepick right through the frontal lobe of your brain. Its goal is not to make you think, but to make you afraid that thinking is sinful, or that you might be shunned by all the “cool people” as a hard-hearted redneck with Trump-colored orange cooties.

They Are Not Sincere or Misguided

You might be tempted to assume that the people posting such materials are sincere, confused, or misled. That they’re worth trying to convince. That patient, point-by-point responses to their arguments might help them see things more clearly.

But none of that is true. People don’t really believe tangled piles of incoherent gibberish because they have honestly followed the arguments. Nor because they went to God in prayer and He guided them to such answers. He doesn’t do that. The Enemy does.

Most of the time when people repeat shallow, self-serving clichés that help them feel superior to their neighbors at zero cost to themselves, they don’t have the noblest motives. They’re doing it to get praised — as the Pharisees blew trumpets before they gave out alms to the poor. Or else to straight up get rich (see the U.S. Catholic bishops and World Relief). Or else out of resentment, the envious desire to tear down things that frustrate you — such as “white America” or “capitalism.” (Ted Kennedy wrote the 1965 Immigration Act that launched our national suicide out of bitter resentment at the Boston WASPs who’d shunned his criminal family.)

Expose the Priests of Baal

So don’t torture yourself with the tiniest little scruple about wading right into such jungles of logical fallacies with napalm and a machete. Your goal isn’t to convince the gaslighting soyboy with the ever-so-winsome profile pic to believe anything at all — except that it isn’t safe to trot out arguments this shoddy and manipulative. He’ll just have to do better. In other words, if you must interact with people like this, your goal is to expose them, for the benefit of the innocent onlookers who might be tempted by his candy-coated poison.

Let’s say some open-borders Pharisee is having the vapors over the plight of economic migrants who drag their toddlers through the desert, then stuff them through razor wire, so that they can earn more money in America. He’s blaming the U.S. for not welcoming each such “refugee” with a red carpet, limos, and a mariachi band. (Dang, I need to stop giving the Biden gang ideas … .)

The more tormented such a person pretends to be — to impress everyone, remember, with what a great person he is compared to NASCAR road-trash like you — the more cheerfully scornful should be your answer. Don’t play his game, where the rules are rigged. Sweep the pieces to the floor, and grab the board and use it as an air guitar. You’re not trying to win this person over, but expose him to anyone who’s watching.

Here are a few choice responses I’ve found helpful in this regard:

• If someone starts a question with “Would Jesus really” do x or y thing that seems harsh or icky if you refuse to think about it, come back with this: “Would Jesus have killed lots of Germans? Gunned them down with an M-1, or torched them with a flamethrower?” Whatever the person’s answer, demand he defend it. So he has to admit that it’s sometimes godly to do things we can’t visualize Jesus doing (except that the Bible depicts him doing them and worse in Revelation, but never mind). Or else he has to explain why he wouldn’t have fought to stop the Holocaust.
• When someone claims that you’re “not really pro-life” unless you support some insane, Utopian, and obviously irrational policy that has nothing to do with abortion, a good response is this. “Gay Jesuits came up with the Seamless Garment as a G-string for pro-abortion Democrats, which set conditions for protecting the unborn that were so absurd nobody on earth would support them. And nobody does. Why are you helping the abortion industry?”
• Another good response to the “not really pro-life” canard: “Are leftists who don’t support school choice ‘not really pro-choice?’ No, because those terms are limited to the abortion debate, and you know better. I believe in you — you’re not that stupid. You’re just being dishonest.”
• Or else just listen to him, nod thoughtfully, and disengage with these simple words: “Well as Jesus says in the Bible, you ‘already have your reward.'”

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. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.