I am reticent to bring up Tucker Carlson again, but as I noted yesterday, I do feel there is something much larger at play here than just a popular host in a dispute with his employer. I think Tucker's speech at the Heritage Foundation on Friday night before he was inexplicably pulled from the air could be an indication of what it is.
Tucker is the first prominent media person to clearly call out evil and define the current battle as something beyond politics, clearly drawing the line between the forces of good and evil. He succinctly and correctly defined the battlefield when he described the obvious differences between good and evil:
"This is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed-upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?
Well, I mean, good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.
And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil. That’s just true."
Many, if not most, of conservatives have made the connections between the current right vs. left ideological arguments and the eternal concepts of good vs. evil, but we are generally lacking a loud and public voice to carry that message.
Often this message comes with admonitions that there are rules to follow to avoid a descent into filth and madness, things that are obvious that humans should do and not do, but to those who are already aligning with evil, that message sounds like authoritarianism, so they act accordingly and violently resist.
Just look at Anthony Fauci just yesterday denying any role in devastating school and business closures.
My wife looked at me when we saw that and said, “We lived it. How can anyone lie like that and expect people to erase the memories of what happened?”
And St. Anthony of Fauci, the patron saint of Chinese laboratories, is not the only one denying and rewriting history – the Biden Administration has been doing it for three years and with the announcement he is running again, better get prepared for the greatest whitewash and revision of history since Reagan killed the Soviet Union.
My answer to Debbie was this - when evil is called out and recognized for what it is, interestingly enough, it always recognizes the evil in itself, and yet always denies that is its nature. Evil deceives, preferring to engage in subterfuge rather than open debate because that is simply its nature. Evil is a drug more addictive than any other that has ever existed, virtually impossible for even the righteous to resist forever.
Being good is hard, being evil is easy. C.S. Lewis, the noted author and Christian apologist, wrote:
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
Evil resists the call to good (and to God), choosing to simply redefine evil behaviors as good so to ignore the little voice inside them that tells them they are wrong. They point at those on our side who have failed, and some failing spectacularly, as evidence our call to good is a charade.
For them, one fall disqualifies a person forever, for us, it is an opportunity for forgiveness and redemption. We never forget the sin, because forgetting leads to a repetition, but we do forgive.
To the evil, our message sounds like an attack rather than a lifeline, an offer of rescue, so they dismiss it, double down, and fight back with increased ferocity.
Evil doesn’t attack the strong, it goes for the weak, the ignorant, and the innocent.
Just look at where we are today after years of civilizational, cultural, and cultural degradation, the progression evil in America has moved from attacking and seducing adults through sexual libertinism, to corrupting college students, to rebellious teenagers, to elementary school children, and now to even the most innocent, the preschool and even babies. They mover through the school dispensing transgenderism, Queer Theory, CRT abrogation of parental rights.
I’m not saying they are but perhaps, just a little, Rupert and the Murdock kids recognized themselves in Tucker’s speech.
Perhaps the forces that dominate the people who have prosecuted a cancellation campaign against Carlson in particular, and Fox News in general, by lying about Carlson, calling him a racist, a bigot, a conspiracy theorist, and an “extremist” (another word that has been rendered meaningless) didn’t like being forced to publicly look in a mirror while others were looking on.
Let me end this rant with what Luke 12:35-36 and verse 40 have to say:
35 “Gird your loins and light your lamps 36 and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
40 You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
This is one of your best pieces yet. Linking Tucker's speech with CS Lewis - bravo!
Five of the bridesmaids would agree. You often use the word "evil" when in my opinion, Satan or The Father of Lies more explicitly depicts the ideas presented.