Opinion
By Jeff Childers
05-24-23
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! New Multiplier orders today, and a good-news roundup for you: Rolling Stone goes after Turning Point for talking about Jesus too much; the left’s preoccupation with “Christian Nationalism;” the FBI’s plan to plant snitches in churches; J6 committee’s view of Christians as domestic terrorists; an antidote to moral balkanization; DeSantis to announce official campaign tonight on social media instead of the news; Target retreats from Satanic trans brands under pressure; Kari Lake announces new operation ballot chaser; and an amusing but true clip, to start your day with a chuckle.
🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞
🪖 OPERATION MULTIPLIER: It’s a quick turnaround, but we already have new multiplier orders incoming for the C&C Army: Last week, several heroic and long-suffering FBI whistleblowers testified before the House Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. Their testimony was critical in exposing the political weaponization of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, which has clearly lost its way and needs major reform.
However helpful was their testimony, it was overshadowed by the witnesses’ tragic tales of how the FBI literally tried to ruin their lives. One agent, Garret O’Boyle, was ordered to a new assignment across the country after the FBI discovered his whistleblower status. Then, after he’d sold his house, packed his family in the car, and loaded all his stuff into a moving van, the FBI fired him. They “mistakenly” confiscated his moving van and kept his families’ household goods trapped in bureaucratic red tape for months.
So today we’re going to blow up their GiveSendGo. Veteran C&C army team, you know what to do, go give any affordable amount ending in a ‘2’:
https://www.givesendgo.com/KyleSeraphin
Let me explain all this for you green recruits. A multiplier is a C&C tool that leverages the combined power of ordinary citizens. We ask every reader, every single one, to give something, however little, or however large, whatever you can afford without really noticing, and do it NOW. And in order to send a message to the tyrants and élites, we end the donated amounts in a ‘2’, like $2, $12, $22, and so on. (The minimum donation on GiveSendGo is $12. For other donations that accept smaller amounts, even $2 is great.)
The operational objective is to, in one day, flood the receipient with a single collective effort, focused like a thousand small lasers aimed at the same target, aggregating each of our individual small efforts into one gigantic eruption. Where none of us alone could drop a few hundred thousand on a cause like this — though we wish we could — WE CAN do it this way, by working together.
Chip in whatever you can. No need to stretch. They’ll see thousands of individual citizen donations rolling in and it will greatly encourage them even apart from the amount raised. And DO IT NOW. It only takes a few seconds, and I promise you’ll feel terrific afterwards. And if you have a few extra seconds, leave them an encouraging note.
Here’s the link again, do it now, then come back to finish reading this morning’s excellent roundup:
https://www.givesendgo.com/KyleSeraphin
🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞
🔥 Yesterday, Rolling Stone ran a wild-eyed scare story on Charlie Kirk, headlined “Charlie Kirk’s ‘Turning Point’ Pivots to Christian Nationalism.” The terrifying peril was revealed in the wonky sub-headline: “The organization founded to promote the free market sure is spending a lot of time promoting attacks on the separation of church and state.”
Not that! Not attacking the separation of church and state!*
(*separation sold separately, not included with Constitution)
Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point a little over ten years ago as a youth movement, aimed at teaching college and high-school kids about conservative fiscal values. TPUSA organizes campus events, conferences, and conservative speakers; it advocates for free speech on campus and has filed several legal challenges against left-leaning academic biases.
TPUSA has been remarkably successful, and many folks consider Charlie’s work essential at helping to slow leftwing indoctrination of young Americans as much as possible. But for some reason, only now is Rolling Stone paying any attention to Charlie Kirk, and trying to assassinate his character.
The article’s unstated mission, revealed in the first sentence, is to sick the IRS on Mr. Kirk for political persecution, while cloaking itself in virtue and righteousness. Rolling Stone suggested one way to get Charlie might be to compare how much time he is spending on spreading Christianity as opposed to spreading “fiscal responsibility and the virtues of free markets,” which was Turning Point’s original mission, as described in its federal tax-free registration back in 2012.
Here’s how Rolling Stone described what it sees as an unforgivable breach in Charlie Kirk’s methods:
In recent months, TPUSA has adopted a cause that’s very different from foisting Milton Friedman on frat boys. The group is putting its cash, and its political cachet, behind Christian nationalism, promising to “restore America’s biblical values.” Indeed, TPUSA has embraced a new crusade to “empower Christians to change the trajectory of our nation.”
One can hope.
Anyway, the magazine’s unstated, highly technical argument is something like TPUSA’s non-profit donor funds aren’t being used for their “approved” purposes, instead, they’re just talking about Jesus all the time. But the joke’s on Rolling Stone, because if the magazine is right and not just wildly exaggerating, TPUSA would be a tax-exempt church.
As Charlie Kirk has physically matured, he has also spiritually matured. In recent years, he’s been increasingly public about his faith, and using his experience organizing nationwide college events, is now helping organize nationwide Christian events, like helping put on revivals at all 50 state capitols, organizing a national “Pastor’s Summit” (that, not coincidentally, opens today) featuring Eric Metaxas. Charlie’s also appeared on countless Christian-based podcasts and YouTubes, and he usually invokes Biblical principles and concepts as proposed answers to the Nation’s problems.
You might be thinking, so what? Let Charlie go play with all those kooky Christians, and good luck to him. But Rolling Stone REALLY doesn’t like it. Not one bit. To Rolling Stone, somebody should DO something. In fact, the magazine pretty much accused Charlie of being a straight-up Domestic Terrorist:
[Kirk’s] focus on fundamentalism represents a clear-and-present danger to democracy. Targeting a younger generation to raise up champions of lower taxes and fewer regulations is one thing. It’s quite another to seek to organize end-times zealots, with the aim of achieving a religious takeover of the secular United States.
A religious takeover! Oh no, Rolling Stone has figured out what Charlie Kirk is really up to! And he must be stopped, at all costs, because he’s really going to do it! Take over the United States! Religiously!
And if Christians take over the government, Rolling Stone reporters might have to stop attending leather festivals and stuff. And if that happened, what would they have to live for?
But the article’s real problem, beyond even Charlie Kirk, who is on the brink of fomenting a religious takeover of the country, is actually with the left’s latest made-up bogeyman-under-the-bed: “Christian Nationalism.” Wokesters believe “Christian Nationalists” are religious nutjobs who want to put an American Pope in the Oval Office and force women — real ones, perish the thought — to wear dresses and headscarves, and even worse, force men to NOT wear dresses.
In reality, leftist propagandists are slapping the scary “Christian Nationalist” label on any Christian who advocates for applying Biblical values anywhere in the political realm. It’s the inevitable endpoint of the made-up doctrine of separation of church and state: discrediting anyone who wants to apply their deeply-held religious beliefs to their politics.
Leftists really do not want Christians organizing themselves into a political bloc. Recently the FBI whistleblowers exposed the agency’s latest efforts to organize a network of paid snitches inside Catholic Churches, presumably to start up another round of January 6th-style prosecutions against any Catholic believers who might be leaning toward “Christian Nationalism.”
Last year on March 18, 2022, the Director of Strategic Response for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Andrew L. Seidel, testified to the House January 6th Committee. He began his remarks like this:
Dear Chairperson Thompson and Members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol:
“Christian Nationalism is the biggest threat to America today. An existential threat to a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.”
I delivered that warning to a room full of reporters at the Religion News Association conference in Las Vegas on September 19, 2019. And 475 days later, on January 6, 2021, Christian Nationalists proved me right. They attacked our Capitol, our democracy, our nation, and you. Christian Nationalism was the banner under which the seemingly disparate groups united that day. This ideology provided the moral and mental permission structure Americans needed to assail American democracy.
… Christian Nationalism was THE central driving force on January 6.
There you have it. The biggest threat to America today, an “existential threat” — in the Left’s view. And of course, it’s a thought crime, a “moral and mental permission structure.” So, in other words, the biggest threat facing today’s Left is Christianity in politics. But why? How? How is “Christian Nationalism” — translated politically-active Christianity — how is that the Left’s BIGGEST threat?
To understand the answer, we’ll consider one aspect of the current culture wars, the so-called “trans” revolution. The trans movement is fundamentally a movement that erases women and permanently mutilates and sterilizes children. And a surprisingly large proportion of American society is going right along with it; they think it’s TERRIFIC.
Ask yourself if you agree with this principle:
A culture that abandons the most basic human motivation to protect its own women and children is a culture on the brink of collapse, a culture ripe for occupation by its enemies, a culture that, honestly, does not deserve to survive.
You probably took the human urge to protect our most vulnerable members for granted. You probably thought that urge was genetic, an evolutionary survival characteristic, part of the genome now, a done deal. But what if you were wrong? What if the “built in” desire to protect vulnerable women and children isn’t actually built in? What if those morally praiseworthy protective impulses, taken for granted for so long, aren’t actually genetic, but are really just the scraped-up bottom of the well of the last remaining bits of collective Judeo-Christian values, the values that comprised the foundation of our American ethic?
This is why the Left hates Christians dabbling in politics: the Bible messes up the program. And — I realize this statement might be controversial — a renewed social agreement on Judeo-Christian values is our only path to survival as a nation. Sure, you can try pulling values out of Christianity to cobble together a secular, religion-free version, but it has never successfully been done before, and since nobody alive truly understands how all the interacting Biblical values work together, trying to pick and choose among them is a strategy fraught with potential disaster.
I hope my secular C&C friends will grant me this one indulgence, and forgive me if I overstep. Maybe when you were a kid your parents made you snuggle with cobras in some weird church. Maybe you’ve struggled trying to imagine Santa-In-The-Sky.
Neither is real Christianity.
It might be time to take a closer look at Christianity — REAL Christianity, the intellectually, logically, and emotionally satisfying basic version, not the various supercharged Hollywood versions — taking a closer look if not for your own salvation, then at least so that you can ally yourself better with us.
Real Christianity isn’t weird or strange (it’s sometimes mysterious); but if you’re studying the true type, it should be consistent with your concept of desirable social values.
At this point, we’re way beyond Christianity just being a lifestyle choice. A strong faith might better be considered a survival characteristic, an original source of moral values that are necessary to hold civilization together. If we want to survive as a Nation, we won’t need to set up a state religion, but we MUST agree on a universal set of social values — such as values protecting vulnerable women and children, for example. Then we’ll have to teach those values, enshrine them, and politically enforce them.
Moral balkanization only produces chaos, which is exactly what we’re seeing in real time in our Twitter feeds.
Anyway, so that’s how Rolling Stone relates to Charlie Kirk, who relates to the whistleblowers, who relate to the FBI, which relates to the Left’s grand plan to morally poison civilization, which finally relates to biggest threat to the Left: shared morality, the antidote.
🔥 In a presidential first, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will announce his official candidacy today at 6pm EST — on social media, not on “the news,” in a Twitter space with Elon Musk. A “Twitter space” is a live event, an audio version of a zoom session, which is controlled by one or more moderators who do all the talking, and is attended by any number of listeners.
According to Musk, DeSantis plans to take live, unscripted questions from regular citizens who attend, which could never happen the traditional way. I guess corporate media reporters can also ask questions, but won’t have any greater access to the Governor than the rest of us.
It’s a brilliant move for both men. For the first time in history, a major presidential candidate’s announcement will be made online, on social media, and not in a traditional press conference before a pack of barking corporate media jackals. Chagrined reporters will have to log onto the Twitter space like everyone else. And, because it will be so easy to attend, who wants to listen on MSNBC, instead of just connecting to Twitter itself on one of their devices?
Musk wins because the event elevates Twitter’s significance over corporate media and over its social media competitors. The event could bring new eyeballs and users to the service. It’s probably safe to assume the Musk-DeSantis space will be the largest attended live event ever in Twitter history, teaching lots of new folks about the audio feature, and maybe the largest-ever live audio event on any social media platform to date.
Yesterday, reporters repeatedly asked Musk, and showing the long—suffering patience of a Biblical Job, Musk repeatedly answered: he is NOT endorsing DeSantis. Musk said he wants ALL candidates to use Twitter. And as usual these days, there was a lot of skepticism and distrust about that. Time will tell.
For DeSantis, the Twitter strategy cuts the hostile, undermining media, out of the loop, allowing DeSantis to deliver his message directly to the potential voters without reporters telling people what he “really” said.
A conservative candidate’s advantages in dis-intermediating corporate media were neatly described in this thread about Glenn Youngkin’s successful gubernatorial campaign, written by a former insider:
Monahan is right. Why should any conservative candidate fool around with corporate media? To reach democrats? Now consider how none of this could have happened if Elon Musk hadn’t chucked $40 billion at Twitter.
🔥 Fox News ran a story yesterday headlined, “Target CEO Says Woke Capitalism ‘Great’ for Their Brand and ‘The Right Thing for Society’.” The sub-headline, which should have been the top headline, explained “Some Target stores have been forced by the corporation to move LGBTQ merchandise from the front of the store amid outrage.”
How about that?
It might be one of the fastest turnabouts in the company’s history. As recently as May17th, Target CEO Brian Cornell told Fortune’s “Leadership Podcast” that the company’s new Pride-themed clothing lines were “just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand,” Cornell said.
I wonder if he really thought that.
Then yesterday, after widespread public outcry over Target’s new Pride collection of clothing for kids, and “tuckable” outfits for adults, news broke about “emergency meetings” corporate had with retail store managers, directing them to remove some of the items and move other items to the backs of the stores.
Fox quoted a Target insider who said the corporation was hoping to avoid a “Bud Light situation.” The insider explained, “We were given 36 hours, told to take all of our Pride stuff, the entire section, and move it into a section that’s a third the size. From the front of the store to the back of the store, you can’t have anything on mannequins and no large signage.”
And that’s not all. Users reported that the entire Satan-themed Abprallen collection was rudely deleted from Target’s website without notice. The Washington Post ran a related story yesterday, headlined “Target Removes Some LGBTQ Merchandise From Stores Ahead of June Pride Month After Threats to Workers.”
Haha, threats to workers. Sure. Let’s see the police reports.
The “threats” they really mean are threats to PROFITS, which the struggling retailer can’t afford right now.
Anyway, of more interest is WHICH items were removed — WaPo called them “LGBTQ” items. The article wasn’t specific about which ones were removed, but I was pleasantly surprised at how accurately WaPo described the devil-worshipping Abprallen line:
Designs by Abprallen, a London-based company that designs and sells occult- and satanic-themed LGBTQ clothing and accessories, have also created backlash.
It does look like the Abprallen items were the ones removed. The brand still shows up in Target’s typeahead search suggestions:
But they’re not in the catalog, not anymore:
Now, I wonder how normal gay Americans feel about the Washington Post describing these occult- and satanic themed clothing as “LGBTQ clothing.” Attention gay Americans! You really need to start getting “loud and proud,” because the Left is doing a better job of linking you guys to the Devil than the Christians are.
Anyway, Target was just trying to nip this thing in the bud light. The company’s prompt corrective response would never have happened without the Budweiser boycott. Thanks, Bud drinkers who changed brands.
🔥 The Epoch Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Arizona’s Kari Lake Announces Plans to ‘Paint the State Red,’ Appeal Election Ruling.”
Kari Lake made her previously-advertised major announcement yesterday, and called her new elections-security initiative the “largest ballot chasing operation in history.” The former gubernatorial candidate said her group already has millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers committed. “Ballot chasing” refers to programs where voters who got mail-in ballots also get a follow up contact to make sure they followed through and mailed their ballots in.
In other words, Kari’s volunteers will call every Republican who gets a mail-in ballot, and make sure they sent it back or dropped it off somewhere. It isn’t legal in every state, but it’s a tactic democrats have been using everywhere it is legal (and many places where it’s not).
Among many other things, Kari said:
We are going to push the envelope. The Courts have ruled that anything goes. And if anything goes, anything goes. We’re going to start rolling up our sleeves and playing by the same rules [that Democrats] play by.
We are going to continue our court case.
The people of this great Country want us to stay in the fight. We can complain that the world is unfair, or we can fight to make it fair. And sowe’re going to work on a ballot-shaping operation. We will not allow them to steal another election.
Here’s Kari’s whole press conference (48:00):
Maybe, just wondering, maybe it is time to start believing — you never know — it might be possible to win in 2024. There might be a ray of hope. A tiny sliver of a ray, at least. We still have lots of work to do, tons of it, but with heroic champions like Kari Lake and her thousands of volunteers in the game, our odds are improving.
God loves an underdog.
Keep an eye open for a chance to help with this terrific initiative.
🔥 Enjoy this short clip from Jimmy Dore’s latest standup routine, about contradictory covid rules. Remember, only dumb people ask questions.
Jimmy, is THAT what they taught you in comedy school?
Okay procrastinators, you knew this would be here, bring it home: https://www.givesendgo.com/KyleSeraphin. And have a wonderful Wednesday. I’ll see you all back here tomorrow for a fresh, hot refill.
Consider joining C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
