Dan Bongino has a maxim: “Conservatives believe Leftists are basically good people with bad ideas. Leftists believe Conservatives are bad people with ideas.”  

Looking at the culture war that we’re in the midst of through this lens is helpful to understanding how the Left has achieved its position of tyranny over our society.  Their catastrophic decisions, along with our complicity through inaction, or at best ineffective action, are ruining our economy and institutions while undermining our freedoms at a breathtaking speed.  In the time it takes for us to finally recognize one of the train wrecks for what it is and begin to act, they have moved on and planted the seeds for ten more.  Why?  How can we get much better at recognizing the enemy for what it is and the enemy’s tactics for what they are?  It is to be expected that the enemy is working against you.  That’s why they’re called the enemy!  But why do so many conservatives fail to see?  Why do so many say they hate socialism and communism, yet step into its booby-traps over and over again?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a classic example of this.  It is an ideology -- basically, a religion -- that teaches divisiveness; it teaches people to hate each other based on their skin color, their economic status, their employment status, their 'anything' status.  

It does this through three fundamental tenets:

1. White privilege, or the idea that merely being white affords privileges and is therefore racist.

2. unconscious bias, which is a bias or prejudice that is present but not consciously held or recognized, but still makes you a racist, and

3. systemic (also called structural) racism, which includes “the oppressive racist realities that have been institutionalized and manifest in all of society’s parts including the economy, politics, education, religion, family, etc.” 

These tenets are espoused without revealing to targeted audiences that they are CRT.  In fact, mention of CRT is studiously avoided if not outright denied.  From a practical standpoint then, conservatives busy themselves debating the merits and demerits of whether or not whites may or may not benefit from privileges under this or that set of circumstances, for example.  We argue with each other.  We cite studies.  We wax eloquent.  We prove our position with unassailable logic.  And we continue to lose the war.  Why?

Most people think that propaganda is an effort to make you believe that lies are truth.  It isn’t! Propaganda is to make you behave a certain way.  If by throwing in elements of truth the propaganda achieves its purpose more effectively, so much the better.  This is why CRT is so poisonous.  The behaviors desired are at least twofold:

1. Distracting from the front-line of battle 

2. Ceding ground to the enemy through incremental compromise.

Conservatives always take the bait.  It seems we always accept the premises and chase the shiny object into booby-trap after booby-trap instead of staying focused on the enemy, who they are, and what they are about.  Leftists do not care about fairness, tolerance, equity, or any of the myriad “good intentions” they claim to care about.  Those on their side that are true believers in these causes are merely useful idiots to the fight.  At this late stage in the battle, those on our side are willfully ignorant, therefore, complicit.  They have eyes, yet see not, and ears, yet hear not (Mark 8:18)

Recently a conservative elder at my own conservative denomination Protestant church was confronted with his teaching of CRT from a book written by a prominent member of our denomination.  He took deep personal offense when told he was in fact teaching tenets of communism, therefore, anti-God ideology.  Yet, the fact was inescapable.  It is very possible that he truly had no idea.  With the best of intentions he had in fact been recruited into the service of the enemy.  This is happening every day, in churches, schools, and organizations of all types all across America.  As Dr. Scott Peck noted in his book, People of the Lie, “we must stop buying the masquerade and being deceived by the pretense” of evil. 

As a result, conservatives continue to cede ground -- political, cultural, and spiritual -- to the enemy.  The rich, largely white academics and activists behind things like “white-privilege” don’t actually care about racism.  But if the argument causes conservatives to cede ground, the enemy will certainly take it!  If for example, we begin to follow the trail that says whites are more sinful than other races because they are white, we cede ground on the Biblical truth that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).  If conservative Christians buy into the argument of “systemic racism” as opposed to systemic sin, they also cede spiritual ground, therefore, cultural and political as well, from salvation by the blood of Christ to salvation by the grace of race hustlers and communists.

This well-intentioned ceding of ground with no recognition of the actual battle being fought is how all cultural, political, and spiritual human catastrophies originate.  Looking back on his time in the Soviet gulags and the years leading up to that human catastrophe, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn said, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good... it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”  Then, he continued with a comment that can explain the danger of ideologies like CRT and how what I have called “the tyranny of good intentions” can advance.  He said, “Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology.  Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.  That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”  

As I said in my book, what he’s getting at is “if you want to carry out evil on a large scale, turning from God’s authority to man’s as a society, you must cloak it within an ideology known by its nice-sounding intentions.”

This is how evil advances, through the tyranny of good intentions.

M.B. Callaway’s most recent book is Crossroads of the Eternal.

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