The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Cargo Cult Mentality

Posted on | December 20, 2019 | Comments Off on The Cargo Cult Mentality

 

One of the basic mechanisms of human culture is emulation, or as my parents used to call it, “Monkey see, monkey do.” Children will tend to emulate whatever behavior they see, which is how peer pressure operates: If your teenager’s friends start acting in ways that you disapprove, you can expect your child to emulate this misbehavior, whether it involves sexual promiscuity, substance abuse or criminality: “Monkey see, monkey do.” And if parents don’t exercise discretion in terms of what their children are watching on TV (or consuming via the Internet), it’s possible that your child could be drawn into very dangerous behaviors by the same principle. This is how, for example, the transgender cult has spread among adolescents by “social contagion.” Indeed, even terrorism is spread by the process of “monkey see, monkey do” emulation, which is why violent radicals post videos of their atrocities and publish “manifestos” on the Internet, justifying their violence and urging others to take up their extremist “cause.”

To understand how emulation operates, it helps to study the so-called “cargo cults” that proliferated in the South Pacific in the 20th century:

A cargo cult is a belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society. These cults . . . were first described in Melanesia in the wake of contact with more technologically advanced Western cultures. The name derives from the belief which began among Melanesians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that various ritualistic acts such as the building of an airplane runway will result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable Western goods (i.e., “cargo”), via Western airplanes.

To say that Pacific island societies were “relatively undeveloped” is a euphemism; they were primitive backward people who, when first encountered by European explorers, lived in a Neolithic stage of development far behind that of Mesopotamia in 1,500 B.C. That natives of Melanesia were at least 3,000 years behind Western civilization is simply a fact, but facts are now racism. Nevertheless, the point about cargo cult thinking is that these primitive islanders were unable to comprehend the advanced social and economic systems that produced, e.g., steam-powered ships, airplanes and the manufactured goods that the white man’s mechanical contrivances delivered. Utterly ignorant of how and why “cargo” had been produced and transported to their remote islands, the natives were understandably mystified when the arrival of “cargo” was interrupted. So they resorted to imitative rituals by which they believed the return of “cargo” might magically be reinstated.

The 21st-century American might laugh at these primitive superstitions, except that similarly ignorant “monkey see, monkey do” behaviors can be observed in our own society every day. My favorite example is the teenage boy who observes that girls are interested in athletes. The star basketball player in high school is popular with the girls, and so lower-status teenage boys — including the ones with zero athletic aptitude — will often emulate the athletic boys in terms of their attitudes, manners and clothing. This is why you see so many dorky suburban white boys wearing Nikes, NFL jerseys, etc., slouching around and speaking in a rap-influenced slang: “Wazzup, bruh?” These behavioral styles are an attempted imitation of popular black athletes. The clumsy adolescent white boy lacks the essential substance of the black athlete’s appeal, yet superstitiously believes (in cargo-cult manner) that he can obtain popularity by performing a superficial imitation.

The pioneering sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was the first systematic attempt to explain how status displays (e.g., conspicuous consumption) operate to communicate class membership among social elites. Most people never learn to think critically about such status-display behaviors, so that their emulation of the “elite” is thoughtless and unconscious. This behavior often takes the form of displaying symbols of wealth (e.g., designer-label clothing or luxury automobiles) as if mere possession of these symbols meant the same thing as actually being wealthy. Driving the same car or wearing the same clothing brands as a movie star, a software entrepreneur or a professional athlete is not the same as having millions of dollars in the bank, but we often see people who don’t seem to grasp this fact. The young guy with a $45,000-a-year job driving around in a new Cadillac Escalade wants to impress people by pretending to have wealth he doesn’t actually have. His luxury SUV is a status symbol, but the status he’s attempting to display is an illusion, if he’s leasing this vehicle for $1,800 a month (nearly half his annual income) while living with his mother. This is a cargo-cult type of behavior, and is in fact quite the opposite of behaviors that actually produce wealth. A young man who hopes to become wealthy would be best advised to live within his means, preferring to put money in the bank rather than engaging in ostentatious displays of a luxurious lifestyle. Nevertheless, we often see young people go deeply in debt to indulge their appetite for status symbols, and this cargo-cult mentality can also be witnessed in acts of criminal stupidity:

 

A bank employee from North Carolina is accused of stealing $88,000 in cash from the bank’s vault, then foolishly posing with the stacks of dough on his social media pages, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina.
The man, Arlando M. Henderson, was arrested by the FBI on Dec. 4 in San Diego — but not before dropping $20,000 on a down payment for a Mercedes-Benz, the indictment alleges.
Henderson, 29, had access to the bank vault and allegedly stole money from deposits made by customers on at least 18 occasions over the past year. He then made cash deposits into an ATM near his workplace.
But the glory didn’t last long — especially after he shared images of his riches on Facebook and Instagram. In several posts, he can be seen grinning with massive wads of cash. In one, he poses next to his new Benz.
“I make it look easy, but this s–t really a PROCESS,” a caption from an Aug. 4 post read.
In another, he wrote, “Looking at my brand thinking this how I got rich.” . . .
Henderson has been charged with two counts of financial institution fraud, 19 counts of theft, embezzlement and misapplication, and 12 counts of making false entries, which carry a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine, per count; and transactional money laundering, which carries a penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Flashing actual stacks of money is the crudest possible status display, and I can 99.9% guarantee you that anyone who does something like this on social media is engaged in some kind of criminal behavior. People who obtain wealth by honest means are not prone to such shameless ostentation, and this kind of cargo-cult behavior exhibits a level of stupidity that is not usually compatible with economic success. 



 

Category: Crime, Culture

Democrats Aren’t Hitler, But . . .

Posted on | December 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrats Aren’t Hitler, But . . .

Trying to avoid Godwin’s Law here:

One of the basic methods of propaganda is reversal — make an accusation against your enemies that is so blatantly false as to be the exact opposite of truth. This technique has become known as “the Big Lie” because of a passage in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Hitler claimed that “the Big Lie” was a trick of the Jews, who had used it to falsely blame the German high command for defeat in World War I; Hitler, by contrast, blamed the Jews “and their fighting comrades, the Marxists” for Germany’s defeat. Of course, Hitler’s so-called “stab-in-the-back” myth of why Germany lost in 1918 was false; the German army was simply incapable of winning once the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies, and it was the German high command’s authorization of unlimited submarine warfare that had brought America into the war. Thus even in his now widely cited description of “the Big Lie,” Hitler was engaged in the propaganda technique that he pretended to deplore — reversal, or what is known in psychology as projection.
Americans so far have been fortunately protected by our Constitution from outright totalitarianism, but this protection does not make us safe from propaganda. When I was a schoolboy in the 1970s, my teachers as early as eighth grade taught us to recognize the techniques of propaganda, including the “false dilemma” fallacy and “glittering generalities.” Evidently, not every student gets such lessons, an educational deficiency that probably explains why some people believe what is broadcast as “news” on CNN and MSNBC nowadays. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Category: American Spectator

In The Mailbox: 12.19.19

Posted on | December 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: This Was Completely Predictable
EBL: Nancy & Her Giant Impeachment
Twitchy: WaPo Issues Statement About Reporter’s “Ill-Considered” “Merry Impeachmas” Tweet
Louder With Crowder: Michelle Wolf Said Having An Abortion Made Her Feel Like God

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I Know A Good Place Where They Serve Nice Drinks
American Conservative: Universal Basic Income – An Idea Whose Time Has Come
American Greatness: Nunes Says FBI Director Wray’s Lies About FISA Abuse Memo Hurt The GOP In The Midterms
American Power: After General Election, Social Democracy On The Way Out In The UK
American Thinker: Operation Mockingbird’s Racist Destructive Lies
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Sense Of Community News
Babalu Blog: Pete Buttigieg Announces Outreach To Latinos Using Socialist Revolutionary Slogan
BattleSwarm: Important Safety Tip
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
CDR Salamander: Red China’s Fleet Isn’t Waiting
Da Tech Guy: Some Quick Drudge Flip Thoughts, also, Morning After Impeachment Thoughts Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Impeached. So What?
First Street Journal: The House Of Representatives Impeaches President Trump
The Geller Report: Husband Of House Judiciary Democrat Paid $700K By Ukrainian Oligarch, also, Watch As Crowds Of Illegals Flood DMV To Get Driver’s Licenses In NYC
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Is Tulsi Gabbard The Least Insane Democrat?
Hollywood In Toto: The Best Films Of 2019 – And A Joker Shall Lead Them, also, The Force Is Not With The Rise Of Skywalker
Legal Insurrection: While Everyone Was Focused On Impeachment, The 5th Circuit Cut The Legs From Under Obamacare, also, NY Judge Tosses Paul Manafort State Fraud Case
Michelle Malkin:  Stop The Ilhan Omar/George Soros Liberian Amnesty Christmas Giveaway!
The PanAm Post: Colombia’s FARC Peace Deal A Smokescreen For Corruption, also, The Death of Venezuela’s Interim Government
Power Line: Conservative St. Olaf Students Swatted In Firearms Hoax, also, Media/Academic Ignorance Turned Up To 11
Shark Tank: Trump To Target Mucarsel-Powell, Other FL Democrats
Shot In The Dark: Adding Insult
The Political Hat: The Twelve Posts Of Christmas, Day 7
This Ain’t Hell: Haste Makes Waste, also, Wednesday FGS
Victory Girls: How Will History Judge Democrats’ Impeachment Antics
Volokh Conspiracy: Court Rules Federal Flooding Of Homes During Hurricane Harvey Is A Taking, also, Fifth Circuit Declares Individual Mandate Unconstitutional, Punts On Whether Rest Of ACA Must Fall
Weasel Zippers: Pelosi Compares Impeachment To Battle Of The Bulge, also, Dem Rep Hakeem Jeffries Compares Impeachment To Ending Slavery
Megan McArdle: How A Law Aimed At Uber & Lyft Is Hurting Freelance Writers
Mark Steyn: The Non-War On Non-Terror, also, A Nickel In The Change Purse

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Category: Linkagery

The Return of the Big Yellow Button

Posted on | December 19, 2019 | Comments Off on The Return of the Big Yellow Button

 

In October, fearing that perhaps some of our readers were nearsighted, I decided to create an enlargement of the PayPal “donate” button, and was gratified by the response. Mrs. McCain has spent the past three weeks in a swing state with palm trees, helping care for our oldest daughter and her newborn son — our fifth grandchild — and my wife is due to fly home Friday. So I’m expected to have enough cash to cover the bills and therefore must once again rattle Ye Olde Tip Jar.

Meanwhile, our family is gathering for the holidays. My red-headed son Jefferson has returned home from his senior year of college, and my Army son Bob showed up this morning to go deer hunting with his twin brother Jim. My brother Kirby got some photos of this brotherly reunion.

 

 

 

 

You can click on any of those photos to view them full size. My youngest son Emerson is currently on a church mission trip to Honduras and won’t be back until Christmas Eve, but it was good to have the three older boys together, although the deer sadly decided not to join them. But still the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Christmas, Family, Shoe Leather Fund

Trump Unites Republicans

Posted on | December 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

In Wednesday night’s “historic” impeachment vote — the cable news people keep repeating that word, for some reason — not a single Republican member of the House voted “yea,” whereas there were three “nay” votes in Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic caucus: Minnesota Rep. Collin C. Peterson and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew voted against both articles of impeachment, while Maine Rep. Jared Golden voted for the “abuse of power” charge, but voted against charging President Trump with “obstruction of Congress.” Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for president as a Democrat, voted “present” on both articles.

What does this mean? It means Bill Kristol is once again proven wrong. Last month, the #NeverTrump ex-Fox News pundit claimed, on the basis of “private conversations,” that some Republicans in the House would vote in favor of impeaching the president. Oops.

 

What is the “evidence” about which Republicans “refuse to care”? Like Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and CNN’s audience, Kristol apparently still believes Donald Trump is a Russian agent who “stole” the election, and where is the “evidence” to support that paranoid conspiracy theory? If Bill Kristol is ever right about something, let me know. He’s got a Harvard education and zero common sense, but I digress . . .

If Kristol was wrong about the House vote, certainly he must be dismayed by the prospects in the Senate, where it would take a two-thirds majority (at least 67 senators) to convict and remove the President from office. That’s in the Constitution, and in yesterday’s phony “debate” in the House, Democrats repeatedly claimed that impeaching the president was about defending the Constitution, which is an obvious lie. Democrats are against the Constitution — they are against freedom of speech, against freedom of religion, against the “right to keep and bear arms,” against the Electoral College, etc. Basically the entire Constitution is wrong, according to Democrats but . . . ORANGE MAN BAD!

 

Contrary to lectures by, inter alia, noted constitutional scholar Maxine Waters, the President’s authority to conduct diplomacy is practically unlimited and, whatever your opinion about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, there was nothing unconstitutional about Trump’s July request that the newly-elected Ukrainian president “do us a favor” by investigating the corrupt activities of Hunter Biden and Alexandra Chalupa. No Democrat ever wants to talk about what Chalupa was doing in 2016, just like they never want to talk about whether President Obama authorized the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump’s campaign. To those who have bought into the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory, any discussion of these subjects is — you guessed it — Russian propaganda, so that Democrats (and Bill Kristol, but I repeat myself) are living inside an echo chamber where all “evidence” points to Moscow, including the evidence that points in the opposite direction. But once again, I digress . . .

Impeachment has united Republicans in support of Trump, and nowhere is this unity more solid than in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell seems determined that the Democrats’ bogus ginned-up charges against the president will get a fair (but brief) hearing before being dismissed with the contemptuous ridicule it so richly deserves. As might be expected, Nancy Pelosi is not happy about this:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats may wait to send their articles of impeachment against President Trump to the GOP-controlled Senate, for fear that they are incapable of holding a fair trial.
Pelosi held a press conference on Wednesday following the House impeachment vote and was asked what would qualify as a “fair trial.”
“We’ll make a decision as a group, as we always have, as we go along,” she replied.
Pelosi was then asked about possibly withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate until they get certain reassurances, and the Speaker refused to give a direct answer.
“Again, we’ll decide what that dynamic is, but we hope that the resolution of that process will be soon in the Senate,” she said.
Pelosi proceeded to read a statement from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about impeachment procedure and used it as an example of what she considers to be an unfair process.
“Let me tell you what I don’t consider a fair trial,” she told the crowd of reporters. “This is what I don’t consider a fair trial — that Leader McConnell has stated that he’s not an impartial juror, that he’s going to take his cues, in quotes, from the White House, and he is working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.”

Folks, you couldn’t make this up. According to Nancy Pelosi, it is wrong for Republican senators to support a Republican president. This fits neatly into the general pattern of Pelosi’s San Francisco-based belief system, where it is simply wrong for anyone to vote Republican. Her district is 100% urban and the median income is $111,717; Hillary got 77% of the 2016 presidential vote in Pelosi’s district. By contrast, Mitch McConnell represents the Commonwealth of Kentucky with a rural population of 1.8 million (23%) and a median income of $48,375, where Trump got about 63% of the vote. There are more Democrat voters in McConnell’s state than there are Republican voters in Pelosi’s district, so that she can (and does) completely disregard Republican opinions. In her part of California, “Antifa” thugs routinely perpetrate political terrorism against Trump supporters, and Nancy Pelosi refuses to condemn this violent suppression of opposing voices. Pelosi does not recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s election because she considers all Republican voters to be evil. The 1.2 million Kentucky citizens who voted for Trump are wrong, and their votes should count for nothing compared to the 275,000 Californians who voted to elect Nancy Pelosi — such is the cult mentality behind this impeachment. Meanwhile, in Michigan:

President Donald Trump reacted live to the results of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, during an epic long two-hour rally with supporters in Michigan.
“They don’t even have any crime, this is the first impeachment where there’s no crime!” Trump said to the crowd of supporters at his campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan after learning that House Democrats had voted to impeach him.
Trump referred to the “very dark era” of history when President Richard Nixon was impeached and said it was remarkable that the feeling this time around was much different.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time, it’s crazy,” Trump said as the crowd of supporters cheered. . . .
Trump ridiculed Democrats for the partisan vote, even losing support from Americans despite their best efforts to make their case in a series of House hearings.
“I’m not worried. I’m not worried. Because it’s always good when you don’t do anything wrong, you get impeached,” Trump said. “That might be a record that will last forever.” . . .
“I know one thing, Americans will show up by the tens of millions next year to vote Nancy Pelosi the hell out of office,” Trump said as the crowd cheered wildly.
Trump spoke for two hours at the rally, highlighting the work he was doing to help rebuild states like Michigan with more jobs, stock market records, and better trade deals. He also spoke about reviving the auto industry, praising companies like Ford who recently announced a $1.45 billion investment in the state.

Oh, and here’s a little love-tap for the #NeverTrump gang:

Notably, the Trump rally was held inside the congressional district of U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a former libertarian Republican who left the party over his opposition to Trump and was the only non-Democratic vote on the articles of impeachment.

Yeah, f–k you, Justin. Enjoy your upcoming retirement from office.



 

Category: Constitution, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Ukraine

In The Mailbox: 12.18.19

Posted on | December 18, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.18.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #838
Bacon Time: Huge Win For The Deep State
357 Magnum: The Voices Of Women In Metal
EBL: Aw Crap, This Is Going To Be Bad
Twitchy: BEAST MODE – Louie Gohmert Goes Off After Nadler Accuses Him Of Spouting “Russian Propaganda”
Louder With Crowder: Schiff Speech Interrupted By Chorus Of Boos

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Single Mothers Are The Untouchables Of Western Society, also, A Former Liar Takes Down Greta’s Lies
American Conservative: Rand Paul – Why I Voted Against The Latest Defense Budget
American Greatness: After The British Elections – Making The Anglosphere Great Again, also, #NeverTrumpers Started The Carter Page Smear Campaign
American Power: These Obama/Trump Voters Are Just Trump Voters Now
American Thinker: Is Our Russia Collusion Nightmare All Hillary’s Fault?, also, After Trump & Boris’ Wins – Rectification of Names
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Venezuela’s Maduro To Fold Civilian Militia, Death Squads Into Military
BattleSwarm: The Battle of The Bulge, 75th Anniversary
Cafe Hayek: Behold The Protectionist
Camp of the Saints:  #OUTLAW – On Trump’s Impeachment
CDR Salamander: The Smartest People In The Room Have A Thing For Those Who Aren’t
Da Tech Guy: Report From Louisiana, also, My Vox Problem
Don Surber: What Trump Learned From Watergate
First Street Journal: Saira Sameera Rao Disappears From Twitter
The Geller Report: Police Constable One Of 16 Muslims Arrested For UK Child Gang-Rape/Sex Trafficking Dating Back To 2006, also Antisemitic Boycott Of Trader Joe’s Flops As Israeli Cheese Sells Out
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Crazy People Are Dangerous
Hollywood In Toto: Carolla Dubs Press “Cheerleaders”, Calls Woke Critics “Racist”
JustOneMinute: Moving Quickly Now
Legal Insurrection: Murder Turtle Tells Chuck U. Schumer To Get Stuffed, also, CNN’s Toobin Doubts CNN Poll Showing Double Digit Drop In Impeachment Support
Michelle Malkin: Illegal Alien Drivers – Out Of The Shadows & Into The Voting Booth?
The PanAm Post: How Government Regulation Hurts Streaming In Brazil, also, Drugs, Money Laundering Fuel Venezuela’s Dollarization
Power Line: Voters Want Lawbreaking FBI Brass Jailed, also, Schumer’s Impeachment Moan Throws House Democrats Under The Bus
Shark Tank: FL Democrats Distance Themselves From Medicare For All
Shot In The Dark: You’ve Been Progsplained!
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Bad Visualizations & Bad Taxes
The Political Hat: Twelve Posts Of Christmas, Day 6
This Ain’t Hell: As Virginia Democrats Threaten Gun Bans…, also, A Couple Of Quick Updates
Victory Girls: Not-So-Grassroots “Need To Impeach” PAC Thinks We’re All Stupid
Volokh Conspiracy: Judge Willett’s Change Of Heart
Weasel Zippers: Maxine Waters Continues To Peddle Russian Collusion, also, Pelosi Can’t Explain Why Bribery Left Out Of Articles Of Impeachment
Megan McArdle: The Parallels Between The UK & US Are Inexact, But The Similarities Are Undeniable
Mark Steyn: Great Moments In Post-Christianity, also, On Track For Christmas

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Category: Linkagery

A Christian ‘Cult’ Sex Scandal

Posted on | December 18, 2019 | Comments Off on A Christian ‘Cult’ Sex Scandal

 

How bored are you with impeachment? Well, I put up a post about it this morning and, as of 1 p.m. ET, there were zero comments. On my office TV, members of the House have spent all day “debating” the articles of impeachment, but this is a pointless exercise, because Democrats have already made up their mind to vote “yea,” and indeed, this was all preordained as soon as Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the Speaker’s gavel. Everyone is thoroughly bored by this Ebenezer Scrooge let’s-ruin-Christmas drama, so instead let’s talk about Jesus.

Three years ago, I encountered a blog by a “Christian feminist” (oxymoron alert) who was part of the “progressive” (i.e., partisan Democrat) movement that included the late Rachel Held Evans. This “Christian feminist” blogger had grown up in a Pentecostal denomination, and had experienced an abusive relationship with a “Godly man” to whom she became engaged while attending a conservative Bible college in Florida. Researching her background, in one of my deep-dive expeditions, I encountered some references to various scandals in the conservative evangelical Christian subculture, including Bill Gothard and his Advanced Training Institute (ATI).

The name Bill Gothard was vaguely familiar to me, because my wife and I had homeschooled our children for several years beginning in 1996. Our curriculum was what you’d call “eclectic,” meaning that we put together an improvised hodgepodge from different sources over the years. We are Christian conservatives in a general sense of that phrase, but we were never doctrinaire followers of any particular system of Christian homeschooling, instead just picking and choosing whatever seemed best to us. However, if you’re part of the Christian homeschooling community, you become aware that there are distinct systems, of which Bill Gothard’s approach was one of the more influential. I must confess, however, that I had no idea just how influential Gothard was in the direction of the evangelical movement from the 1970s onward.

Gothard had a particular vision of the Christian patriarchal family (husband/father “headship,” etc.) that he developed into a popular seminar called Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts (IBYC) that later changes its name to Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), within which the Advanced Training Institute subsequently was formed. Gothard’s seminar was basically a slide-show lecture about principles of Christian family life that would, he asserted, prevent children from drifting into the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” youth rebellion. Given all the craziness that was going on in the late 1960s and ’70s — the Manson family, LSD freakouts, heroin overdoses, legalized abortion, Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. — there was a remarkable demand for Gothard’s lectures. Christian parents were scared to death that their sweet church-going kids would turn into teenage homosexual Communists or whatever, and Gothard offered what seemed to be a guarantee of safety against such outcomes. However . . .

“Gothard has never married.”

That one line in his Wikipedia page tells a lot about the scandal that subsequently destroyed Gothard’s ministry and thereby left a permanent stain on conservative evangelical Christianity. There is no evidence that Gothard is homosexual — quite the contrary, as various women allege — but the matter of his lifelong bachelorhood should still raise questions. Indeed, this question was raised even when he was a young evangelist in the 1960s. Gothard defended himself against suspicion by insisting that his devotion to the ministry made it practically impossible for him to take a wife, and there is abundant testimony that Gothard was a workaholic whose every waking hour was devoted to his ministry. Still, common sense would suggest a skeptical attitude toward a man who claimed to know everything about how a Christian family should function, when he himself never had a wife or children of his own.

My guess — and this is just speculation — is that Gothard had some kind of insecurity or inhibition in regard to sex, and this personal psychological problem of his (a) prevented him from ever marrying, and (b) informed his legalistic follow-the-rules prescription for creating the ideal Christian family. Whatever the case may be, the “life principles” Gothard taught were not objectionable in themselves, and I would not hesitate to recommend studying those principles, but in terms of the practical application of those principles to daily life, Gothard’s system seems to have become a rigid and unforgiving legalism. The much bigger problem, however, was corruption and hypocrisy.

Almost by accident, the other night I stumbled onto a YouTube video of a documentary about the Gothard scandal, The Cult Next Door. To explain how that accident happened: I’ve been watching YouTube videos as a substitute for bedtime reading lately, and I’ve always been interested in cults (Jonestown, Waco, Mormons, etc.) and this documentary about the Gothard “cult” popped up as a YouTube recommendation.

 

Let me say this: I dislike the attitude expressed in this documentary. There are satanic forces in the world seeking to destroy Christianity, and one of the methods by which these forces operate is to publicize scandals within the church as a way of discrediting Christianity altogether. One will notice that these satanic forces often claim to be devoutly Christian, even while they ally themselves with enemies of Christianity, and so as bad as the Gothard scandal was — and trust me, it was very, very bad — I am not enthusiastic about those who are dancing amid the ruins of Gothard’s ministry. Nor do I like the characterization of his ministry as a “cult,” because whatever personal failings and abusive practices were involved in IBYC/IBLP/ATI, the essence of Gothard’s teaching was a sincere (if in some way misguided) effort to apply biblical principles to family life. Gothard was arrogant, guilty of sinful pride among his many other failings, but it wasn’t like Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate or David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. There were no mass suicides at the “compound,” no armed standoff with AK-47s, nothing like that.

What went wrong with Gothard’s ministry was that warning signs were ignored, and previous scandals got hushed up. In the Internet Age, we take it for granted that a major sex scandal will be so clearly documented that, if a Christian ministry had such a problem, everybody would know about it, and so the ministry would be permanently discredited. But there was no Internet in 1980, which is probably why the first big sex scandal involving Gothard’s ministry was somehow forgotten.

Go read “The GOTHARD Files: The Early Years, 1965–79,” which is the first in a series of articles (Part II and Part III) about scandals that should have rendered the Gothard ministry permanently radioactive. Essentially, Bill’s younger brother Steve was using the ministry’s staff the way that Hugh Hefner used Playboy bunnies, sexually exploiting a harem of vulnerable young Christian women. While there was also some misconduct by Bill Gothard in the 1970s, it was Steve who played the central role in that early scandal and yet, despite the Gothard ministry’s emphasis on “accountability” as a principle, that whole mess somehow got buried, so that the ministry continued as if nothing serious had happened. When the homeschooled children of Gothard’s admirers were subsequently recruited to serve as “apprentices” at ATI headquarters, they arrived with no forewarning about what had happened back in the late 1970s and — surprise, surprise! — the pattern of abuse was repeated.

Anyway, I don’t know if you’ll find that interesting, but it’s got to be better than impeachment. Mister Chairman, I yield back my time.



 

Category: Religion, Scandal

Impeachment Day Arrives

Posted on | December 18, 2019 | Comments Off on Impeachment Day Arrives

Today the Democrats will vote to impeach President Trump for . . .

Uh, whatever. Ever since Trump was elected, Democrats promised they would impeach him if Nancy Pelosi ever got the Speaker’s gavel, and today they will keep that promise. The pretext for this was a “whistleblower” — a Democrat holdover on the National Security Council staff — who went running to Adam Schiff with a wild tale about Trump’s July phone call to the newly elected president of Ukraine. All questions about that phone call were answered by Trump through the simple expedient of releasing the transcript. But having worked themselves into an impeachment frenzy over this, Democrats refused to acknowledge that Trump had beat them, and continued stumbling onward.

Yesterday, Trump gave them the back of his hand:

President Trump, in a blistering, no-holds-barred six-page letter Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., lambasted the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as an “open war on American Democracy,” writing that she has violated her oath of office and “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”
“Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening,” Trump said, just a day before House Democrats were expected to vote to impeach him. “Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!”
He went on: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.”

Did you know that, in its origins in English law, an official who was impeached was usually punished by execution, then drawn and quartered? Impeachment was intended by our Founders to be a remedy of last resort, and by requiring a two-thirds majority to convict in the Senate, the Constitution discourages any such proceeding on trivial grounds or disputed charges. People who think the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton was “just about sex” have not studied the case adequately. President Clinton perjured himself while giving testimony in a federal civil-rights lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, and furthermore obstructed justice by his efforts to prevent Jones’s lawyers from learning the truth about Monica Lewinsky (which was relevant as evidence to Jones’s suit). You may believe, as I do, that the legal precedents in regard to “sexual harassment” long ago went too far, but nevertheless, the law is the law, and Bill Clinton could have settled that lawsuit out of court, but refused. Paula Jones had a right to truthful testimony in her lawsuit, and Clinton illegally deprived her of that right. When the Drudge Report first broke the story of Monica Lewinsky, everyone — and I mean everyone, Democrats included — said that if the story was true, Clinton would have to resign. Instead, as both Dick Morris and Sidney Blumenthal have said, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s response was: “We’ll just have to win.”

So anyone invoking the 1998 impeachment to justify what Democrats are doing now must ignore the obvious objections: If Clinton had settled that lawsuit — and who now doubts Paula Jones was telling the truth? — there would have been no impeachment. If, when the Lewinsky scandal broke, Clinton had resigned, there would have been no impeachment. The reason there was an impeachment was because there was clear and unrefuted evidence (DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress) that Clinton had perjured himself, and substantial evidence to show obstruction of justice in a federal civil-rights lawsuit. But I digress . . .

What is the substance of Democrats’ case against Trump now? It is simply a dispute over his exercise of diplomacy with Ukraine — a matter of foreign policy, related to corruption that occurred during Obama’s presidency, which is in turn related to the “Russian collusion” hoax that Trump’s enemies perpetrated against him for two years. Now, you may dislike the methods by which Trump endeavored to get the results he wanted in Ukraine, but the idea that this was “a threat to our democracy” (as Democrats keep saying) is ludicrous. They cannot claim Trump obstructed justice, because there was no underlying crime to conceal, besides which Trump released the phone transcript as soon as Schiff and the Democrats tried to make a “scandal” of that July phone call. How is that “obstructing” anything? Because there is no actual crime involved, Democrats have instead made “abuse of power” the central claim of their impeachment, as if the actual “abuse” (i.e., Joe Biden demanding the termination of a Ukrainian investigator who was looking into Hunter Biden’s shady Burisma deal) did not occur on Obama’s watch.

In essence, Democrats are proving the truth of what Trump says in his letter: They never accepted the legitimacy of his victory in 2016, so they “have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes.” This is self-evident, and there is a reason why polls show that support for impeachment has been declined even among Democrat voters, over the past two months.

Democrats have chosen poorly, and we can hope they will soon regret it.



 

Category: Democrats, Donald Trump
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