Last time I laid out the reasons why cartoonist Scott Adams is being persecuted with all the zeal of a 17^th century witch hunt, or a blasphemy trial in some sharia-run desert sheikdom. Because we’re in fact dealing here with a new and false religion, which Adams indeed blasphemed. He mocked the Priests of Baal and relieved himself on their idols.

Adams showed haughty, reckless contempt for the new gospel of the Antichrist, the Woke post-Christian cargo cults that fetishize stolen organs hacked out of the body of Christian moral teaching. But the South Seas Islanders never conducted witch trials.

I know it’s my job as a conservative to debunk ugly myths that defame our Western past. But in fact, there’s nothing remotely defensible about most of the witch trials of which we have good records — and certainly not of the death penalty applied to often innocent people. These institutions earned an ugly reputation even among believers in their day.

She Turned Me into a Newt

You don’t have to be an Enlightenment agnostic to be disgusted at trials that depended on wildly fantastical “confessions” of people flying through the air via Satan’s power, accounts entirely extracted under torture. With that in mind, I’d like to share this hilarious clip from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail:

Most historical witch trials were no fairer than this one. And just to be ecumenical, they were every bit as common in Protestant countries as Catholic ones. The King James of the “King James Bible” was a fanatical witch-hunter, launching vicious persecutions through England and Scotland for decades. Nobody comes out of these accounts smelling like a rose, except for the clergy who tried (sometimes) to call the mania to a halt. Some of them got persecuted themselves for their trouble.

Why are you defending witches? Are you witchcraft-adjacent? Maybe you secretly belong to a coven of witches? Take those statements and plug in “racist” instead of “witch” and you’ve pretty much got the Mainstream Media, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the FBI that obeys them.

Opportunists, False Witnesses, and Cynics

Now, as I promised, let me weigh what Adams really said on the merits. Was any of it actually racist in the sense that faithful Biblical believers — the only people with any right to condemn racism — would use the term? Not in the sense that Marxists, or trendy Progressive Christians addled by Marxism, use “racist” — which is entirely opportunistic, dishonest, and cynical. (And that’s what you must justly conclude about the moral character of Progressive Christians who throw around such damaging accusations promiscuously — that they’re opportunists, false witnesses, and cynics.)

A proper, honest definition of racism would be: Attitudes or actions showing a contempt for other human beings based on their ethnic background, false generalizations about them, or sweepingly broad stereotypes. Racism in this sense is a denial of the Image of God that we find in every single human being who has ever been conceived, and it’s incompatible with belief in a creator God.

You can watch Scott Adams’ Youtube broadcast and judge for yourself. The first 20 minutes contain the relevant remarks:

Is It Okay to Be White?

Bruce Bawer at The American Spectator did the best job of dispassionately summing up what Adams said (and didn’t say):

Adams spoke up about a recent Rasmussen poll.

In the poll, Americans were asked whether “it’s okay to be white.” Of the black people questioned, 53 percent said it was, 26 percent said it wasn’t, and 21 percent weren’t sure.

These aren’t cheering numbers, to say the least. They seem to suggest that nearly half of black Americans are, quite simply, racists.

Now here’s a twist: The phrase “It’s okay to be white” was actually invented as a brilliant piece of trolling by actual white racists, who spread it online as an anodyne statement they knew would get denounced. They knew that plenty of leftist whites and a decent percentage of non-whites don’t believe this — that they regard “whiteness” itself as a moral contagion, a collection of evil attitudes and undeserved privileges.

White employees (especially straight males) are routinely subjected at large corporations to “anti-racism training” that demonizes us, in ways that no other group (such as Jews or Muslims) would ever be singled out for abuse. And of course, neither whites nor males are a “protected class” under federal anti-discrimination law.

Lower Standards for Blacks

So let me ask, shoving aside the sneering racialists who made up the slogan, “Is it?” Is it okay to be white, in the same sense it’s okay to be brown or beige or black?

Is it okay that one fourth of black Americans asked this question said “No,” and one fifth weren’t sure? Or are we supposed to exempt black Americans from the same moral standards we demand of whites, for the patronizing reason that we can’t expect much of them? Or the Marxist reason that we want to whip up interracial hate in order to bring on a revolution?

Adams went further, being intentionally provocative as Socrates was at his trial. As Bawer recounts:

If Rasmussen’s numbers are to be credited, he said in his laid-back way, “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the h*** away from black people.”

He said much more. He was brutally honest about the problems that exist in black neighborhoods. He said he’d henceforth “back off” from trying to help black Americans. Given the scale of anti-white racism, he said, it makes “no sense” to offer such help.

…

Now, if almost half of black Americans do indeed feel that there may be something fundamentally not okay about whites, is it crazy to suggest that whites might want to consider giving these haters a wide berth? If you were black and a poll you trusted told you that most white people think being black isn’t okay, what advice would you give your kids about befriending whites?

As Adams pointed out on his Monday podcast, “I don’t hate anybody. But I was concerned that somebody hated me.”

Scott Adams Needs Jesus. So Do His Persecutors

Adams made it clear that he rejects discrimination against any individual, that every person should be judged on the content of his own character — exactly what Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked for. But Adams clearly resents the fact that black Americans are being encouraged to do otherwise, to demonize, resent, and even hate their fellow Americans who happen to be white.

And Adams also is apparently sick of the double standard that allows blacks and other minorities to engage in open tribalism — calling each other “brother,” speaking up for their group interests, reveling in their heritage at others’ expense — while denying that same privilege to whites.

Now I don’t want such a privilege. Except in very small doses, it seems to me un-Christian. Also … pathetic. But I do find it frightening and infuriating to be part of the only group that is singled out and scapegoated as somehow intrinsically wicked, unworthy of the same rights granted to everybody else. That’s … dangerous. That’s how the Nazis scapegoated the Jews, how the Bolsheviks scapegoated the “Kulaks,” and how the Hutus scapegoated the Tutsis in Rwanda.

No Lives Matter

Much of what Adams said was needlessly blunt, intentionally callous, unpastoral and unhelpful. We wouldn’t praise any Christian (which Adams apparently isn’t) for talking this way about his brothers in Christ of a different race.

No, we don’t get to be callous, to just walk away from whole races of people because we give up on them — for whatever reason. We are called to turn the other cheek, and forgive our brother 70 times 7. We ought to lament how the real sins of our fathers, of slavery and segregation, inflicted lasting wounds. We must try to bind up the wounded, even when those wounds turn out to be self-inflicted. Our Lord demands it of us.

None of this makes the slightest sense if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, and it’s ludicrous to see a pack of pagans demanding it from each other. To their complaints about racism we should simply sneer:

No lives matter, this I know
Because Charles Darwin taught me so.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”