Politics – Anthony G. Flood

Trump’s dream: A merit-based and color-blind society

His courage and oratory are almost enough to explain how he came to lead the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). We must not, however, overlook his profession: he was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, an academically trained preacher in the Baptist tradition. Such titles bestow an odor of sanctity. They didn’t deflect the assassin’s bullet—ultimately set into motion by whom, we may never know[1]—but they shouldn’t inhibit us from questioning his message.

Unfortunately, the latter was the Social(ist) Gospel (SG), not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the wolf of socialism in sheep’s clothing of biblical passages. King’s education was downstream to the theology of SG’s American fountainhead, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), who at Rochester Theological Seminary had studied under the orthodox Reformed Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong (1836–1921).[2]

More immediately, King came under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and Howard Thurman (1899-1981).[3] Neither man held Jesus’ view of Scripture. The Bible may be profound, insightful, inspiring, they thought, even “inspired,” but not breathed-out by God, the status which it claims for itself, and all that follows from that status.[4] Through reading Thurman the young King discovered the maverick Hindu Mohandas Gandhi.[5]

“So what?,” you may ask. Here’s what: King denied Jesus’ divinity[6] and resurrection[7]. The Bible was not, for King, the inerrant word of God. Such an opinion is nonsense, the product of a naïve, bygone era. For him, it was quite errant. Continue reading “Trump’s dream: A merit-based and color-blind society”

Jimmy and Joe: Progressive bookends of a (soon-to-be-bygone?) era

When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.

Joe Biden sold his soul to the Progressives, but Jimmy Carter began his public life as one. The peanut farmer’s folksy demeanor masked his support for the Left’s agenda, arguably more scandalous than “Scranton Joe’s” scam because of Carter’s Christian credentials. Continue reading “Jimmy and Joe: Progressive bookends of a (soon-to-be-bygone?) era”

The picture that snapped me out of my cynical default position

Seated left to right: Elon Musk; Donald Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Standing: Mike Johnson. Aboard Air Force One after UFC event at Madison Square Garden, November 16, 2024

Yes, Make America Healthy Again . . . tomorrow!

Where else would Bobby get a platform of this magnitude for this noble mission?

Who in Trumpworld was talking like that eight years ago?

I wish the table was large enough for Tulsi and Vivek and . . . no, I won’t list every nominee and appointee for Trump’s Dream Team. (I don’t even know who among them, besides those pictured above, was aboard Trump Force One last night.)

Many battles for peace through strength, free speech, bureaucracy busting, government downsizing, crime fighting, invasion repelling, and terrorism crushing lie ahead.

We don’t have four years to undo the dystopia of the last quarter century. Two years to the midterms. One to make a decisive difference.

Expect our enemies to live up to their enemy status, but they’ve been served notice. And expect “47” and his army to work on Trump Time, 24/7, to execute the planned reversal.

In the meantime, don’t miss (as I am temperamentally inclined to do) the many opportunities there will be enjoy the turning of the tide.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.

“Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.” Anthony Flood, “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” January 7, 2021

“God spared my life for a reason.”

Donald Trump and family, West Palm Beach Convention Center, about 1:00 AM, November 6, 2024. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

Schadenfreude . . . on steroids. That’s the dominant emotion for me this morning.

Yes, I’ll look forward to learning exactly how Trump interred—Grover Clevelanded!—Sleepy Joe’s legacy and that of his feckless “insurance policy” (who will condescend to concede at the dinner hour).

To God all the glory.

The people who met defeat last night—the empty pantsuit and her equally hollow-headed Hollywood cheerleaders; the once-upon-a-time friends and admirers who disowned him; the political and judicial prostitutes who persecuted, prosecuted, indicted, impeached, and slandered him; the oh-so-ethically-sensitive “artists” who for a decade fantasized openly about how gruesomely he might be put to death—I’m glad they’re miserable. I hope their misery induces them to expatriate, as they often dare to do when elections don’t go their way.

Nota bene: They haven’t gone anywhere. They’re already plotting his demise (again) and will stop at nothing. For they don’t hate Trump as much as they hate the people who love him, obstacles to their totalitarian designs, who number in the hundreds of millions and will carry on when his work in this life is done.

So, this morning Freude and Schadenfreude are appropriate emotions. But during the interregnum and the next four years, vigilance is what’s required, coupled with an unquenchable thirst for justice.

This time, no more Mister Nice Guy.

Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies

Trump, with blood on his face, raises his fist triumphantly during a rally. I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.

In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him. Continue reading “Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies”

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”

The anniversary of a foolish decision

Yours truly, Xavier Military Institute (High School) senior, 1971

The diary entry of a Xavier High School student[1] and research assistant to Herbert Aptheker[2] for May 25, 1971, reads:

Got over to 23 West 26th Street [headquarters of the Communist Party USA] about 6:45 [P.M.]. Whatta nice place![3] The meeting was on the third floor, where pictures of famous comrades and covers of magazines and pamphlets were displayed. Gus [Hall, General Secretary of the Party] answered questions very well. He described how the Party operates from top to bottom, about international relations. My questions concerned the time a college student needs to be an active member and about the 2 vouchers + age stipulations [minimum age, 18]. Rasheed [Storey, 1936-2016] and Gus were the vouchers and I was let in even though I[’m] still 17!!!! I really feel like a complete person. As Gus said to me, I’ll never regret it. I really have commitment and the enthusiasm and the vision. I’m proud of the Party. I want to make the Party proud of me.

May Day flashbacks: Memories of a Communist and working-class leader — Same year, 1971: Gus Hall, in hat (above “MU”), marching on Fifth Avenue in New York City [People’s World Archives]. I believe the bespectacled gent to Hall’s right is Arnold Johnson (1904-1989); James E. Jackson (1914-2007) is the second person to Hall’s left.

Three years and three months later, on September 18, 1974, I met fellow Aptheker research assistant (and non-communist historian) Hugh Murray for lunch; at six I’d meet my closest comrade and friend, who will remain unnamed “to discuss a great decision I feel I must make once and for all.” On September 23rd, still a Stalinist, I entrusted my resignation letter, addressed to the comrade who chaired the meetings, to the doorman of her building located at the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street. “Now I can relax and decide more clearly what I’m going to do with my life.”

To resign was a wiser decision than the one it negated, but it could not reverse the latter’s effects.

To be continued, as time permits.

Notes

[1] Two weeks later, on June 9th, I attended graduation at Hunter College, Lexington Avenue and 68^th Street. My diary entry for that day mentions my regret at having missed a lecture by James E. Jackson (1914-2007) at the Center for Marxist Education, located at 29 West 15^th Street. That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.

[2] Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager,” October 25, 2018.

[3] A holding of the John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) estate, the building has a storied past. See “The Astor Offices at Nos. 21 and 23 West 26th Street,” The Daytonian, Saturday, August 4, 2012. John Jacob Astor IV (1864–1912) was a passenger on the Titanic. His son, Vincent (1891-1959), “commissioned the architectural firm Peabody, Wilson & Brown to give No. 23 a neo-Federal facelift in 1922. Only two years later he sold the building for $30,000 to Frederick Vanderbilt Field (1905-2000), a Communist who wrote for the Daily Worker ….” Yes, a Vanderbilt. One of the most intriguing and revealing autobiographies I’ve ever read was his From Right to Left, Lawrence Hill Books, 1983.

Dispensationalism, diversity, and dialectic

Yesterday I referred to my dispensational eschatology, but then realized a note about it might be helpful. The following modifies a post from 2020.

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who sees things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many other posts), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather

. . . to exhibit diversity and to point to the evidence for its roots. In this manner he will be attractive to those that appreciate full human authenticity and he will convince those that attain it. Indeed, the basic idea of the method we are trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how to appeal to it. It is not an infallible method, for men easily are unauthentic, but it is a powerful method, for man’s deepest need and most prized achievement is authenticity.[1]

Continue reading “Dispensationalism, diversity, and dialectic”

Only God can calm the perfect storm

Over at “Maverick Philosopher,” Bill Vallicella’s blog, yesterday’s post got airplay and commentary, for which I’m grateful. I expect he’ll post my response to a commenter, but here are its key paragraphs.

The perfect storm that I conjecture is not necessarily an existential threat to humanity. No member of the crew of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail survived, but their survivors held a memorial service. Millions of Germans and Russians are alive today because, even in the worst years of Stalin and Hitler, people still fell in love, married, and had children. For tens of millions, however, there was no memorial service. They would not have the privilege, as we do, of reading and reflecting upon the history of their era in their golden years. It was simply “over” for them. They await resurrection.

If my mind were a quantum computer with all historical and current data at my fingertips, I could score the accuracy of my Antonesque “cry.” But it’s not, so I can’t. I’m only a Christian struggling to make sense of a fallen world in the light of God’s Word in the day of God’s (relative, gracious, and temporary) silence. (See my series on this topic: “The Silence of God”: Anderson’s 1897 book, Otis Q. Sellers’s 1929 turning point—Part 1.)

Offsetting the gloom-and-doom is knowing that the human drivers of the storm’s vectors are not omniscient or omnipotent. And neither is the Prince of this World (kosmos; or age, aiōnos). It’s a safe bet that he inspires them, even coordinates some of their actions (John 14:30; Eph 2:2-3, 6:12; 2 Cor 4:4). But I foresee no programmatic response to their programmatic attacks except the blazing forth (epiphaneia) of His Kingdom (not yet His second advent) for which I live in expectation (1 Tim 6:14; 2 Tim 1:10, 4:1, 4:8). That is to say, there is a programmatic response, but it’s divine.

A perfect storm of converging crises

The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.

Four years ago, I stated my grounds and posed a question to a writer who thinks Christian Reconstruction or Theonomy meets the level of our times:

The argument . . . is over hermeneutics and confessional commitments that flow from one’s interpretation of Scripture. Do libertarians wish to have that conversation? That would be more than fine with me. I’ll need bullet-proof exegesis, however, to believe that Christians are charged, as Dominion theology teaches, with overthrowing Satan’s dominion of this world with its sex-trafficking, drug cartels, arms dealers, blood diamond trade, supervised as they are by pathological warlords; the totalitarian ethnostate of Communist China; radical Islam whose agents are sprinkled the world over; pandemics exploited by globalists and their medicrat tools; the virtually total loss of privacy at the hands of the Deep State, Big Pharma, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence; the trillions of dollars in unpayable debt and the hyperinflation that must follow central banking as the night the day—just to name some of the enormities that blight our planet.

In that post, I didn’t refer to this concatenation as a “perfect storm of crises,” but since then I’ve used this meteorological metaphor when considering our parlous estate.[1] It has come to mean any situation where a highly improbable concurrent of circumstances leads to an event of unusual magnitude or severity. I’d like to know where it falters, if it does.

The “event of unusual magnitude or severity” I refer to is the total collapse of the good of order—civilization, what’s left of it—on which any regular enjoyment of goods of consumption depends. Continue reading “A perfect storm of converging crises”