"Christ Jesus" is trending. I have some questions and observations...
Christ Jesus is reported to have said that he comes not to bring peace but a sword.
Would that sword be a Claymore or a Scimitar?
Claymores can be terrifying, especially when a bunch of Highlanders waving them are charging straight at you but curved blades are more efficient.
Doug Coe, longtime head of The Fellowship, observed that Christ Jesus said that to truly follow him, you must be willing to renounce "mother-father-brother-sister and even your own life".
Who does this? Like, almost nobody.
Coe liked to illustrate that point with the fact that during Mao's bloody Cultural Revolution, his young, Red Guard fanatics cut off the heads of their own parents, for the good of the state.
Follow Christ Jesus with that level of devotion, suggested Coe.
Coe also said that followers of Christ Jesus were like a mafia whose members made blood oaths to each other - that they would never betray each other and would willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause.
And, Doug Coe emphasized the immense power of that mafia-like in-group loyalty, to Christ Jesus and his agenda.
Coe would illustrate this by pointing out that Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels had this sort of loyalty to each other, and look what they accomplished!
I'm pretty sure that Rick Warren, who gave a prayer at Barack Obama's 1st inauguration, learned such Christ Jesus lessons from attending Doug Coe's small group sermons. Warren moved in such elite, National Prayer Breakfast circles that he would have had an in...
Warren's riff on Doug Coe's Christ Jesus lessons was to observe that if believers could be as devoted as Hitler Youth but to Jesus, not Hitler, that Christians could "take the world". When he said this in a baseball stadium, his followers held up signs saying "whatever it takes".
I wrote about that, back in the day. This story has video of Warren giving his Christ Jesus/"Hitler Youth" lesson. He also put that in one of his books, "The Purpose Driven Church". huffpost.com/entry/follow-j…
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Curious about why "he's 78" was trending, I found the most delightful thread of comments mocking Tomi Lahren, who's about 23 & somehow thinks Mitch McConnell, 78 and a senator for a full six more years (then retirement), cares about her opinions concerning his political choices.
In 2016, Trump met William S. Lind, whose 2014 book "Victoria - A Novel of Fourth Generation War" depicts the assassination of the president & whole line of succession by suicide plane.
Fortunately, the first half of Lind's novel - which reads like a "Turner Diaries 2.0" is online. The suicide plan bit is in this chapter: traditionalright.com/victoria-chapt…
I know Trump doesn't seem to have an obvious pathway for retaining the presidency, but there's a cluster of phenomena that concerns me. It includes everything from Trump's fortification of the WH, as if it were a Medieval castle, to Pompeo's unctuous assurance of a 2nd Tr term..
2) to Mitch McConnell decision to throw the institution weight of his #Republican controlled senate behind Trump's spurious election fraud claims; to Bill Barr tasking his DoJ with finding vote fraud (which triggered resignation of his election crimes head nbcnews.com/politics/2020-…
3)..to Trump's replacement of the #1 & #2 at the Department of Defense, which seems especially significant given that former #2 Mike Esper refused to put US troops on America's streets. nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/…. That's accompanied by gossip that Trump intends to replace the..
3) After all, historical fascism is known for its weird admixture of incompetence but also unexpected, stomach churning success, when the ridiculous suddenly turns into wholesale bloodshed.