Marxism/Cultural Marxism

No Kings Protests as the Religion of Narcissism

At their core, the (No Kings) rallies resemble bad group therapy—gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release. They feel good in the moment. Participants vent, find reinforcement among like-minded people, and leave feeling heard and aligned. The experience can seem productive, even clarifying. But like bad group therapy, it stops at validation. The feelings are processed but not challenged, reinforced but not examined. There is relief but little resolution, and the underlying problems remain. It offers the feeling of progress without the substance of it.

Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert
Wall Street Journal

Allow me to use Alpert’s piece here to connect some dots.

1.) We have been saying here at Iron Ink for some time that as a culture becomes more and more consistent with its rebellion against Christ the result will be an ever-increasing psychological brokenness expressed especially with the presence of narcissism. As fallen man, no longer checked by a culture informed by Christian categories, or a Christian ethos will no longer have a reason to stay on the leash of even pretended self-denial. A culture losing the transcendence of God to keep it in check only has one place to turn and that is the inner self. With the turn to the inner self, the inner self becomes the transcendent that must be served and the result is the mental illness we call “narcissism.” The “No Kings” rally is merely a mass gathering of narcissists and neurotics as Alpert observes.

2.) Were we to put a slight spin on Alpert, we would say that not only are these “not protests but bad therapy sessions,” but these protests are religious worship services. There is a connection here as bad worship can also be labeled as bad worship service. I mean bad worship can be described in exactly the same way that Alpert describe bad therapy sessions. Gatherings that,

a.) offer validation
b.) solidarity
c.) emotional release
d.) feel good in the moment
e.) venting
f.) reinforcement
d.) departing feeling heard and aligned

One only has had to attend your average contemporary Church service to understand all that the “No Kings rally” and your average Pentecostal or Seeker Sensitive worship service have in common. The only thing Alpert doesn’t mention is the shared commonality between the “sermon” one gets at church and the keynote speaker address one finds at your average rally. Whether it is a “No Kings rally” or whether it is your average church service one is just looking at bad therapy sessions.

3.) This observation in turn informs us that when looking at these narcissistic political rallies what we are often seeing is just another bad expression of religion. The “No Kings rally,” and those like it, have largely exposed the attendees as religious devotees. As politics has replaced Christianity as our national religion this all stands to reason. As we have noted here before people intuitively understand that the state has become our god and there is nothing that people will more fight and protest over than the championing of their favorite god, or conversely, the pulling down of the god they don’t favor. Many narcissists don’t like Trump, who they view as the current unworthy God and so they take to the streets, much like the prophets of Baal of old, to cry out, lament, and protest. You can bet that if they thought that cutting themselves would work, they would be opening their veins as well.

4.) So, look at these rallies as old-fashioned revival services. In the old revival services, you would see the same exact thing you are seeing at these “protests.” Great tears. Anguish. Emotion filled expression. People becoming unhinged and beside themselves.

5.) This reminds us that religion never goes away. One can either serve the God of the Bible who is a God of order, self-control and stability or one can serve the God of the narcissistic/neurotic self and/or whatever the self will project itself onto. (In this case politics.)

6.) We have arrived here, as noted above, by rebelling against the Lord Christ and His Law-Word. Let us tease this out a wee bit. We have, over the course of generations, increasingly cordoned off the public square from the any influence of the Christian faith. There are whole theologies, such as Radical Two Kingdom theology, that insist that we need to leave the public square naked from the influence of the Christian faith via the voice of the Church. The impact of that is to strip the public square of any “word of the Lord.” The result is that which we have made completely “secular” (public square) has to come up with the voice of the sacred and the voice of the sacred we have invested in is the State. In the state we live and move and have our being. So, because the dejure “secular” state has become the defacto sacred verbum Dei, religious adherents viciously fight over who will control the god. Behold “No Kings rallies.”

7.) As Gods brook no competition what we can increasingly expect to find is that the enemies of the favorite candidates will be demonized. We have already seen this in recent decades. People who do not agree with the “No Kings” protestors are demon spawn. People who did not agree with Biden were imprisoned. Trump also routinely demonizes people who dare disagree with him. Joe Kent being the most recent example. In this narcissistic/neurotic world one is either feted or headed to the guillotine.

8.) When this kind of revolutionary religion rises, the difficult thing for those who see all of it is to know how to respond. Some of us have family members who if they were not at the “No Kings” protests would still feel right at home with the narcissist/neurotic crowd. There is no reasoning with these people. In the OT God had only one solution for them, but that solution is not available to us. So, we navigate in this mess the best we can and pray for wisdom from above in knowing how to lean into this cultural insane asylum.

It’s all religion folks. Apart from the rending of heaven yielding Reformation, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Interesting enough, what all this is going to eventually birth is a culture of repression. Eventually, some tyrant is going to grab the reins of power and that will be the end of all “No Kings” rallies, as well as the end of all loyal opposition. The current narcissist/neurotics will be shut down and like the old Soviet Union, protest, if it exists at all, will be underground and only at the risk of one’s life.

And you can the farm that the visible Church will be as silent then as it is now.

DKQ – Van Prinsterer, Nigel Lee

“Just as all truth rests upon the truth that is from God, so the common foundation of all rights and duties lie in the sovereignty of God. When that sovereignty of God is denied or (what amounts to the same thing) banished to heaven because His kingdom is not of this world, what becomes then of the foundation of authority, of law, of every sacred dutiful relation in state, society, and family? What sanctions remain for the distinctions and rank in life? What reason can there be that I obey another’s commands, that the one is needy, that the other is rich? All this is custom, routine, abuse, injustice, oppression. Eliminate God, and it cannot longer be denied that all men are, in the Revolutionary sense of the words, free and equal. State and society disintegrate, for there is a principle of dissolution at work that does not cease to operate until further division is frustrated by that indivisible unit, that isolated human being, the individual – a term of the Revolution – naively expressive of all destructive character.”

Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer
Unbelief & Revolution
Lecture 9

1.) R2K is one of those errant theologies that banish the sovereignty of God to heaven because God’s Kingdom is not of this world. This is why it must be so strenuously rejected.

2.) Those who banish the sovereignty of God in the Christian community most normally turn to Natural Law to provide the foundation of authority required for every sacred dutiful relation in state, society, and family. However, the beginning presupposition of Natural Law is that man, starting from himself via his own sovereign authority can, while being totally depraved, use his unfallen reason in order to discern every sacred dutiful relation in state, society, and family.

3.) The elimination of God is the elimination of all distinctions. If there is no God, then distinctions are completely arbitrary. That “class does not exist” yields to “race does not exist” yields to “gender does not exist” yields to “age does not exist.” All of these become social constructs. (What Van Prinsterer calls arbitrary “custom, routine, abuse, injustice, oppression.”)

4.) When Kinists see NAPARC churches disciplining Kinists they see this Revolutionary (Jacobin/Marxist) agenda being pursued.

5.) This explains the horrors of egalitarianism. The presence of egalitarianism is horrific because its presence means the absence of the God of the Bible. Denominations that are practicing egalitarianism as seen in the claim that races are equal are diminishing the Christian faith. Denominations that are practicing egalitarianism as seen by putting women in positions of leadership are testifying they don’t believe in the sovereignty of God. Denominations that are practicing egalitarianism as seen in insisting that congregations which are racially integrated are automatically superior to congregations which are not have signed up for the egalitarian agenda.

Even after God has totally banished sin and all its consequences at the end of the age, even in the city of the New Jerusalem on the renewed Earth – “the nations of them which are saved walk in the light of it and the kings of the Earth…shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.”26

Then, “they shall be His peoples (laoi) — plural. Laoi, plural – not singular (laos). Rev. 21:3,24-26. For then, they all return to Genesis 1:1’s eternally-Triune Elohiym (and not to a unitarian multiracialistic Allah).

Francis Nigel Lee

Reformed Theologian

Dostoevsky & McAtee on Egalitarianism

The radical declares,

“Everyone belongs to all, and all belongs to everyone. All are slaves and equal in their slavery… Slaves are bound to be equal. Without despotism there has never been either freedom or equality, but in the herd there is bound to be equality…. The moment you have family ties or love you get the desire for property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll make use of drunkenness, slander, spying; we’ll make use of incredible corruption; we’ll stifle every genius in its infancy. We’ll reduce all to a common denominator!

Complete equality!”

The Possessed
Fydor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky was a 19th century Russian writer who explored the human psyche, particularly as that psyche was conditioned by ideology and religion. In the quote above we find that Dostoevsky understood the nascent proto-Marxist type ideology which he believed were Demon like ideas from Western Europe that was possessing Russia.

It is interesting that even in 1873 Russia, Dostoevsky could identify the heart of collectivism that remains with us yet today. Dostoevsky understood that the end of equality, absolutized, is slavery….

Without Biblical distinctions regarding gender, roles, racial/ethnic groups, and authority structure, we will be amalgamated into the herd reality that Dostoevsky warns about. It will be a herd reality where a few elites are, in essence, the Farmers over the undistinguished and undifferentiated mass herd. Those who advocate complete equality in terms of “equality of identity” are the enemy and they are the enemy because Scripture identifies them as such. They are the enemy who overthrow the 5th commandment where a distinction and hierarchy of parents is required before they can be honored. They are the enemy who overthrow the great commission where a distinction of nations is required before those nations can be baptized, discipled and taught to observe all things taught by Christ. They are the enemy who overthrow Galatians 3:28 where a existing distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Slave and Free, Men and Women, must exist before there can be comforted that all can be justified in Christ. They are the enemy who overthrow the 9th commandment where a distinction must exist between what is my property and what is not my property before any forbidding of theft can make sense. Egalitarianism is the enemy and egalitarians are the enemy precisely because their egalitarianism strikes at the heart of God’s revelation. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of the Father of egalitarianism is to erase the distinction and hierarchy between the Creator and the creature. They desire to make God and man a common denominator. That is the ultimate distinction that is under attack in all of these penultimate battles.

Continuing to Muse on “Neighbor”

“Michael Masters writes that Christianity ‘must now share the blame for the dissolution of the West,’ that it ‘has abandoned the defense of our people and has become an accomplice’ of those who would exterminate us. When we need the church the most, it not only abandoned us, but joined in the vanguard of dispossessory efforts against us. How did the faith that once served as an anchor, that so nobly prevented us from spinning away into the ether of oblivion, become our enemy? Masters summarizes the most common criticisms leveled at Christianity, that it ‘has subverted inbred traits of altruism that help family and tribe survive, and has transmuted those traits into agents of passivity and surrender,’ that it ‘has universalized altruism, thus stripping our defenses against multiculturalism,’ and that its ‘preoccupation with eternal reward in the world to come blinds some Christians to the consequences of their actions today.'”

Corey Giles

The Sword of Christ – p. 3

When I see clergy talk about how “everyone must be treated as a neighbor,” without any qualification that treating everyone as a neighbor doesn’t mean “treating everyone the same,” I hear echoes of this quote above in my head. When we make “neighbor” a universal principle, without the particularizing of definite degrees of “neighborliness” towards the particular people we encounter day by day and hour by hour, we have so broadened the meaning of “neighbor” that it means nothing. The word neighbor begins to slip into the ether realm of “if everyone is my neighbor than nobody is my neighbor.” If I owe everybody the same obligation of neighborly altruism, then what gets lost is the obligation to owe kith and kin and those who are of the household of faith, a greater warrant of neighborly obligation.

The chief opponent of Christianity today is cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is the theology that creates multi-culturalism. Multi-culturalism is built up and supported by the idea of that non nuanced statement of “everyone is my neighbor.” If it is not explained pointedly, in our current cultural moment, that “everyone being our neighbor,” does not mean that everyone is treated the same … everyone is to receive the same prioritization … everyone is to be hailed and well met … then the consequence is that the those who teach the unqualified statement, “everyone is my neighbor,” are doing the work of the devil (intentionally or not) by contributing to the health of the multiculturalism that is serving as the current coffin for all white people but especially for the White Christian people.

Lizard People … Then & Now

I have written here before about “Lizard People.” It is just my shorthand way of referencing people who are not like most humans. They are people who seemingly have no soul, experience no guilt, shame, or remorse, and who view other people the way they might view insects or slugs. Certainly, the Lizard People are driven by narcissism but there is more than just narcissism here. They are also psychopaths and the very worse of them are this way because of their religious beliefs.

In my reading I came across one of the Lizard People from the 18th century. Meet the Duc d’Or leans. Phillippe d’Or leans was one of the wealthiest men in France and was the cousin of King Louis XVI. d’Or leans was one of the guiding actors behind the dethronement and beheading of his cousin and his cousin’s wife, the Queen.

d’Or leans also had a sister-in-law whom he hated named the Princesse d’ Lambelle, who was one of Queen Marie Antoinette’s ladies. d’Or leans hated d’Lambelle because she had rebuked him for his role in the “March of Versailles” — an earlier attempt to murder the crown family. Rumors also swirled that d’Or leans would financially gain the d’Lambelle’s dowry if she would die.

d’Or leans thus paid assassins in the mob to murder d’Lambelle and then gave it the color of law by having her condemned to death for not taking an oath to hate the recently seized King and Queen.

However, we are still not in Lizard People territory yet. Where d’Or leans is seen as a Lizard came in an incident following the murder and decapitation of d’Lambelle. Upon the deed being done and after the mob had taken the decapitated and piked head of d’Lambelle to a salon to get her hair right again the mob marched the piked head before the veranda of the Duc d’Or leans.

Here we allow Nesta Webster to describe the Lizard Person quality of Phillippe d’Or leans.

“The Duc d’Or leans was just sitting down to dinner with his mistress, Madame Buffon, and several Englishmen, when the savage howls of triumph that heralded this arrival (of the piked head of d’Lambelle) attracted his attention. Walking to the window he looked out calmly on scene, contemplated with a perfectly unmoved countenance the dead, white face, the fair curls fluttering round the pike-head. The Duke of Orléans reportedly commented ‘Oh, it is Lamballe’s head: I know it by the long hair. Let us sit down to supper’,”

This is Lizard People status. No conscience. No remorse. No guilt. No shame.

It is just these same kind of elites that we are dealing with today. Like the Duc d’Or leans they have no souls. They perpetuate the basest of cruelties upon others and without blinking they sit down to enjoy their meals. You must realize that these are the kinds of people we are dealing with when we deal with the Corporatists, the Politicians at high levels, the Silicon Valley Billionaires, and the K-Street and Wall Street movers and shakers. You can not expect these people to be like you. They are not. They are Lizard People. They don’t have your manners, your morals, or your reservations. They are not like you. That is who we are dealing with as those behind the on the street Revolutionaries.

Do you really think people like Occasio-Cortez, Bill and Melinda Gates, Peter Thiel, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Sasse, Larry Ellison, etc. are any different than the duc d’Or leans? These people have always existed, and our challenge is to realize that there exists a whole class of soul-less people at war with “legacy Americans,” and in realizing that give them no quarter when the time comes.