Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Good morning.
As we embark on the third year of O’Bservations, and before diving into my monthly summary of the news, I’d like to review with you the biblical justification for writing this publication. There is one, and it was well articulated a century ago by Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), a theologian and former prime minister of the Netherlands.
In theological circles, Mr. Kuyper is most notable for his view on the role of God in everyday life. He famously said: “No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
The apostle Paul makes a similar assertion in his second letter to the Corinthians. Defending his ministry, and explaining his captivity to Christ, Paul (in 10:5) entreats those who claim to be Jesus’ disciples to “… take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
If this is our Father’s world, and if we as representatives of His Church are called to bring all things captive to Christ – two propositions which few if any of us in our midst would challenge – then the question becomes, “How do we better understand and interpret the secular world around us?” Especially at a time when we encounter considerable babble and fog in the information emanating from the once esteemed Fourth Estate?
The operating premise of this column, therefore, is to help you, the believer, navigate that which is perplexing, interpreting the news from the perspective of a Christian worldview, and better equip you to live faithful, obedient lives under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Which leads right into my first item for today, the latest battleground in the Culture Wars which is playing out in Florida but also here in Mt. Lebanon. The Florida legislature recently passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, prohibiting public school teachers in K-3 classrooms from teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation. Progressive America has dubbed the law “Don’t Say Gay,” which is quite a conquest of political branding, given that the bill – read it here – says nothing about homosexual activity; the word “gay” appears nowhere.
What it does prohibit is the very thing that occurred in the Mt. Lebanon School District recently. One of the first grade teachers at Jefferson Elementary School read two books entitled When Aidan Became a Brother and Finding Teddy to her students, which address the subject of changing one’s gender. She then engaged students in a conversation about the books. This was, again, first graders, without parental consent or even the basic courtesy of notifying parents beforehand.
The incident prompted Jocelyn Artinger, principal of Markham Elementary School, to write in a letter to teachers and staff: “Last week, in celebration of Trans Visibility Day, a teacher at an elementary school in our district read two children’s books about transgendered children to [her] classroom. Families learned about the books from their children after they had been read … and it became known throughout the community. … As our district begins to deepen our DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] work, this type of pushback is likely” (my italics added).
That pushback was on full display at the Lebo school board meeting Monday night when many parents expressed their extreme displeasure over this situation and its secrecy. They also asked board members what they intended to do about it. Based on what I heard, the answer appears to be, essentially: nothing. The district’s DEI program is in place and will proceed as planned. It takes a lot to shock me, but I found the board’s non-response shocking.
It’s been 17 years since we had children in Lebo schools, but this much is crystal clear to me: the district today bears little resemblance to the one where my three children were educated. Words cannot fully convey how much that saddens me (especially as we have four grandchildren who could soon be students in the Lebo system and subjected to such reckless policies).
Meanwhile, in Florida – home to Disney World – the Walt Disney Company slammed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, saying the legislation “should never have passed and should never been signed into law” and vowed to fight it. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker points out: “Is opposition to parents’ rights really the hill for a children’s entertainment company to die on?” Especially when an overwhelming majority of Americans support the bill? A new poll from Public Opinion Strategies found that American parents support the legislation 67% to 24%. Among Democrats, 55% support it and 29% oppose it.
Decoding the news nowadays isn’t easy. Interpreting it has been made harder because the news media’s bias is sometimes difficult to discern. Tucker Carlson of Fox News, one of the most influential conservatives in the country, lately has sounded like a Berkeley Leftist from the 1960s, while leftward leaning publications stake out positions that were once the exclusive domain of the Right. I saw this tendency in Covid and it is now repeating itself in the news coverage of events out of Ukraine.
Last month, for instance, The New Yorker, one of the most influential publications of the Left, had as its cover story a fawning profile of Ukrainian President Zelensky. The story was written by David Remnick, a former Washington Post reporter in Moscow who now runs the magazine. I have followed his work ever since we covered the same events; he in the Soviet Union before its fall, I in West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, but crossing paths on occasion.
“At the most consequential hour in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Mr. Remnick’s story begins, “as a vengeful and erratic autocrat invades Ukraine alluding darkly to the scale of his nuclear arsenal, a comedian has assumed the role of Winston Churchill.”
He wrote, “Zelensky has galvanized his people through the clarity of his language. Churchill, in his essay ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,’ wrote, ‘Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king.’ ”
Mr. Remnick’s use of Churchill – to whom no one compares favorably, in my historical assessment – was jarring. The New Yorker doesn’t typically show much sympathy for dead white males, especially one as fond of privilege, racism and “white supremacy” as Winnie supposedly was, according to today’s woke orthodoxy.
(Recently woke academics in New York City canceled another dead white male, my favorite president, Teddy Roosevelt, whose legacy includes busting up business monopolies and creating the National Park system. Although TR’s portrait is still one of the Big Four on Mount Rushmore, his statue was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. The same group which championed its removal now contends it cannot be given to the Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, either. It must be melted.)
On the right, meanwhile, the Daily Wire provocateur Candace Owens tweeted recently to her three million Twitter followers that Mr. Zelensky (unjustifiably, in my view) was “a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interest of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment – ever – no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.”
This same flipflop between the classic Right and Left positions was apparent in the Canadian truckers’ protest in January. Conservatives, traditionally the champions of law and order, fell in love with the truckers and their civil disobedience in the face of onerous vaccine mandates. Liberals, traditionally the champions of heroic socialist agitation, deployed every woke accusation imaginable at the largely peaceful strikers, siding with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in calling them “Nazis” and “fascists.”
What gives? Some of it is changing politics and the emergence, since the election of Donald Trump as president, of what’s been called the New Right. This movement – Trumpian in its isolationist America First attitude, populist in nature and deeply cynical about the country’s ability to act competently in the world – spans people from Trump adviser Steve Bannon to Mr. Carlson and religious conservatives like author Rod Dreher. The country they see is a far cry from Ronald Reagan’s America, the exceptional and indispensable nation, “the last, best hope of humanity,” as he called it, “a light unto the nations.”
Meanwhile, the news media detests everything Donald Trump represents and everyone he allies with. According to the fanciful theories you will hear espoused on places like MSNBC and CNN, the narrative is that Vladimir Putin orchestrated Mr. Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (despite evidence to the contrary, from Special Prosecutor John Durham), to put a pro-Russian dupe and “asset” in the White House.
Echoing this perspective, the New York Times offered up prima facie evidence last week of its bias. Atop The Morning, its daily news email summary, there was this outrageous headline: “Their man in Moscow.” The man to which the Times referred was Mr. Trump, seen standing next to Mr. Putin in a shadowy photograph from 2019, three years before Russian troops invaded Ukraine.
One measure of press dishonesty is how often you see advocacy (masquerading as “news”) that mirrors what the Democratic National Committee might say. The answer is: pretty often, and increasingly so in recent years.
Here’s but one recent example. Last month, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the New York Democrat who’s in charge of keeping his party as the majority in the House of Representatives (and keeping Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House), expressed the view that the situation in Ukraine was a wedge issue that his party should exploit in the November mid-term elections.
“We’re Zelensky Democrats. And they’re Putin Republicans – that would be my bumper sticker,” Mr. Maloney said.
Given the atrocities which have now been revealed as Russian forces retreat from Ukrainian territory they occupied – including the mass execution of unarmed civilians, the murder of children and the rape and killing of women – that bumper sticker, though crass, may prove effective. Politics, it must be said, is not for the meek.
Nor is journalism these days. The news media has made our national polarization along political lines far worse, which seems to be the one skill it has honed to a fine perfection in recent years.
Consider the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which underscores why few people trust the press anymore. If you recall, the conservative New York Post broke a wild story just before the presidential election in 2020. A laptop belonging to Hunter Biden (Joe’s son) had surfaced at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. It had a lot on it. There were lurid photos of him using drugs and cavorting with prostitutes, as well as potentially incriminating information about shady payments and gifts from foreign interests, including (significantly) Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, for which he was handsomely compensated while his father was vice president.
It was the kind of white-hot story the press typically feasts upon, especially in a presidential campaign, but what did it do? It declared the laptop and all of its content disinformation, most likely Russian in origin, following the script of intelligence sources aligned with the Democratic Party. Then Twitter suppressed the story further by shutting down the Post’s account for 16 days and blocking people from sharing any information about the laptop or news of its content.
What’s the big deal if news editors and Twitter censors decide to suppress news? In a lecture to a packed hall at Grove City College last Thursday night, Michael Knowles described exceedingly well what’s at stake when Twitter decides to censor information. The occasion was the return (for the first time since 2019, due to Covid) of the Institute for Faith & Freedom’s annual spring conference. You may access Mr. Knowles’ lecture by clicking on the link below. In addition to hearing a great speech, you’ll also learn “one of the strangest facts” of his biography: the occasion, in 2013, when he attended uber-liberal George Soros’ wedding!
In his lecture, Mr. Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, demonstrated why his enormous following and popularity is justified.
“If a small group of unaccountable billionaires in Silicon Valley prevents us from presenting the facts,” Mr. Knowles said, “then we can no longer say with a straight face that we live in a republic. We would have to say that we live in an oligarchy, which is more and more what our government is resembling.”
Last month, the New York Times finally acknowledged – 17 months late – that there was something to the Hunter Biden story after all. Which prompted this snarky (but wickedly clever) headline in the Wall Street Journal above its editorial: “Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally news fit to print.” Now more embarrassing details are emerging, including last week’s disclosure that Joe Biden had written a college letter of recommendation for son Hunter’s Chinese business partner, suggesting the president was more aware of his son’s business dealings than he had acknowledged.
My point in bringing this up is not to convict anyone. That’s the job of the courts. My point here is simply to illustrate a larger truth. Whether charges are ultimately brought against Hunter Biden is up to the grand jury in Wilmington hearing the evidence. But the press effectively censoring a legitimate story was sickeningly negligent. The genius of the First Amendment – and the protections the press enjoys under it – is that the disclosure of information should always have primacy, not who may be harmed or favored by its disclosure.
Censoring stories is so routine now that none other than Elon Musk has taken on Twitter to correct it. The Tesla and Space-X founder has been complaining for a while about Twitter being too censorious and biased. Last week he did something about it. He went and bought 9% of the company, becoming its largest shareholder, and vowed to change how Twitter behaves. It turns out that another Twitter account suspension – imposed on The Babylon Bee, the satiric Christian site, for this posting in March about our former state health commissioner Rachel Levine – may have caused Mr. Musk to plunk down $3 billion (of his estimated $274 billion net worth, tops on the global billionaires list) for his stake in Twitter.
I have no idea if Mr. Musk is to be trusted. He abruptly rejected a seat on Twitter’s board of directors. But I’m rooting for anyone who fights Big Tech censorship. Observers believe that not having a seat on the board may make it easier for him to press for changes and speak out freely about the company as an activist investor.
“Life can be so unfair.”
While those words may apply to many situations in the world right now, including Russia’s deplorable invasion of Ukraine or the fabulous wealth of Mr. Musk, they were written about something else.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports columnist Ron Cook was reacting to the terrible news that Dwayne Haskins, a quarterback for the Steelers, had been struck and killed by a vehicle in South Florida early Saturday morning. He was just 24 years old and, by all accounts, a dependable teammate and good man (to the extent any person can be called “good”).
Mr. Cook’s comments on the unfairness of life were still in my head when I sat down in the pew this past Sunday morning, and heard a confirmand’s statement of faith. In it, she referenced a video her mom took of her when she was 2 years old. The confirmand, now 15, had recited the passage from Joshua 1:9 (also found in Deuteronomy 31:6), in which God commissions Joshua as the successor to Moses.
“Be strong. Don’t be afraid. The Lord your God will go with you,” the toddler, adorable and persistent, says in the video. Pastor Nate then confided that he’d watched this video many times during Covid. It had been a source of great inspiration to him. Viewing it brought a tear to my eye, as I’m sure it did others.
It also was a stark reminder of the binary choice all humans face in the living of life: between courage and life; or fear and death (both physical and spiritual). The frequency with which scary things occur is, indeed, frightening in this fallen world. But fortunately, God provided a solution to this dilemma. It’s the same solution we will gather to joyfully proclaim this weekend.
Folks, the binary choice we face is this:
Behind Door No. 1 there’s the transcendent truth so simple a 2-year-old can recite it – that the Lord our God is with us wherever we go, that nothing can separate us from God’s love, “neither death nor life, neither angels or demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow” (Romans 8:38; NLT).
Behind Door No. 2 is the fear-laden alternative Ron Cook offered up for his readers: good luck! You’re on your own. Life is an unrelenting crap shoot. Your fate is a roll of the dice. “One minute, [the Steelers quarterback] was training with teammates … the next minute, he was gone,” Mr. Cook writes. It sounds so overwhelmingly capricious and fearful, who would choose it?
Sadly, many people do. Don’t be one of them.
As we gather for Maundy Thursday service tomorrow – and as we remember the staggering price Christ paid for us the day after, on Good Friday – guard against apostasy in your own life with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
Follow the advice of a 2-year-old. Be strong.
That’s my report for April 2022. See you again in May, God willing.