The Anti-Christ In The White House - The Real Insurrection Of Donald Trump

January 6th was a clown show of tarted up crackers and Idaho panhandlers in fright wigs and Viking helmets. Called an insurrection by Democrats, it was nothing of the sort.  Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador, Nicaragua maybe; but not here.  An early Mardi Gras, Spring Break, some teddy boy hooliganism but no more.  

 

Yet the Left saw it as the Sign of the Seventh Seal, the last event before Armageddon and the coming of the Anti-Christ and the new, apocalyptic Age of Satan. 

Of course no progressive would ever admit to such Biblical fol-de-rol.  Progressives have pooh-poohed the Bible and persistently dismissed it as so much nonsense. Yet, maybe there was still some of that Old Time Religion in their pores.   Bible camps, revivals, and Baptist ministries cannot be expunged that easily.  Besides, progressives have never said there was no God, just that He was, if anything, a wisp of universal consciousness, a mind-soul, a godliness. Nothing to be worried about. 

Now, with the arrival of Donald Trump, they were having second thoughts.  How could one man so embody all the evils of the world - racism, misogyny, greed, misanthropy, and hatred - and espouse fascism, imperialism, and xenophobic aggression without being possessed or worse, be the Devil incarnate? 

The issue of whether evil does or does not exist in the world has been the subject of philosophical debate for centuries, with little conclusion.  Previous centuries’ theologians who began with the a priori assumption that God exists had a particularly prickly time justifying the existence of evil.  The emergence of St. Augustine’s thinking – and one which has dominated the Christian Church ever since – is that there is no such substantive, distinct thing called ‘evil’.  It is just the absence of good.

As a young man, Augustine followed the teachings of a Christian sect known as the Manicheans. At the heart of Manichean theology was the idea of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. This, of course, proposes one possible solution to the problem of evil: all goodness, purity and light comes from God, and the darkness of evil has a different source.

However, Augustine came to regard this cosmic dualism as heretical, since it undermined God's sovereignty. Of course, he wanted to hold on to the absolute goodness of God. But if God is the source of all things, where did evil come from? Augustine's radical answer to this question is that evil does not actually come from anywhere. Rejecting the idea that evil is a positive force, he argues that it is merely a "name for nothing other than the absence of good".

Augustine was aware that everyone ‘knew’ that there was evil in the world.  Whatever they called it, however they conceived of it, people observed the most horrific examples of anti-human behavior – Godless behavior, many thought; and since God was good, then there had to be a devil, somehow set up in his own kingdom as a kind of semi-autonomous state performing the necessary task of challenging ordinary mortals.

Augustine’s account of evil is, of course, metaphysical rather than empirical. He is not saying that our experience of evil is unreal. On the contrary, since a divinely-inspired world is naturally oriented toward the good, any lack of goodness will be felt as painful, wrong and urgently in need of repair.

This explanation has stretched the limits of believability.  There are too many inexplicably, pure diabolical events that occur, say many believers and non-believers, to label them ‘the absence of good’

We may demand a better account of the apparent positivity of evil – of the fact, for example, that holocausts and massacres often involve meticulous planning, technical innovation and creative processes of justification.

Shakespeare took evil to new heights when he created Iago, Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Richard III, and Macbeth; but he was not acknowledging evil as a special crime against humanity and God.  He simply saw the dramatic potential in characters who took depravity to such extremes.  Nietzsche in his belief that only the best and the brightest were Supermen who rose above good and evil to an amoral world of individual expression, espoused the same belief.  There is no such thing as absolute evil except as a common feature in all mankind; and the only validation of life is to rise above petty, temporal moral codes.

 

American progressives fall into the 'evil believability' camp, and Donald Trump is the very embodiment of evil.  Therefore he must be stopped at any cost.  Not only democracy but the nation, its people, and God forbid, the world itself is in danger of the foul being of the man. 

Such unmitigated folly is hard to imagine even given the hyper-charged, virtual freak show of American politics - a Barnum & Bailey side show extravaganza complete with Bible-thumping prayers for salvation and the embrace of the living Christ, neo-hippies flocking to Arkansas to watch the solar eclipse release the spirits of the universe, and fluoride conspiracy theorists in the piney woods of Georgia.

Those fearing the coming of evil do not have to be Augustinians or Kierkegaard fans to worry.  They know what they know - that Trump and Hitler are congenitally joined.  To suggest that the Fuhrer was simply a notion in history's meaningless ride is sacrilege; and to assume that his twin, The Donald, is simply a benign ne'er-do-well and political pest is anathema.  

Yet, despite all the necromancy, immolation, incense, and exorcism, Donald Trump is on his way back to the White House and progressives are flummoxed and afraid.  More than anything they are nonplussed - how on earth after ten years of calling the man out for what he is, exposing his corruption, turpitude, and total absence of a moral compass could he be still standing, let alone poised to take over the Oval Office?

The hand-wringing for the coming national existential crisis is nothing compared to the self-doubt, self-punishment, and self-denial of those who called for his burning at the stake.  The entire Left is doing a St. Vitus' dance - banging into things, tripping over old lines, stumbling for the exits - to no avail as poll after poll show the former President's popularity.  His coffers are overflowing, thousands attend his rallies.  Milton himself could never have anticipated Satan's charm. 

Of course Trump is only a clown, a buffoon, braggart, and pompous know-it-all but will sit in the Oval Office as the first real American president - a low-brow, arm-candy, overdone, overpriced, glitzy showman of the people.  The Left has missed the boat and doesn't even know it.