Luxury Beliefs

They get people killed.

After the horrors that took place in Israel over last weekend, I sat, befuddled on Sunday, before this photo below.

It’s hard to believe that the same people who are holding that banner above, watched the same footage I did. Not 24 hours after beautiful human beings were butchered in the most brutal fashion! Did they see the woman with blood-stained pants after being brutally raped, then shoved in a jeep and taken God knows where to face God knows what? Did they see the little Israeli boy taken prisoner and suffering abuse at the hands of little Palestinian children? Did they see the lifeless bodies of women being paraded through the streets like some kind of sick trophy? How can they not know that if they showed up right now in the Gaza Strip with that inane banner, that they’d be dead or worse within the first fifteen minutes?

I’m convinced they just don’t know. I’m convinced they hold luxury beliefs because reality has never slapped them in the face. Yes, they might say that the massacre which took place is just decolonization, and ask “what did you expect?!” But…they also think they’re oppressed when someone looks cross-eyed at them because they’ve never seen their mothers, sisters, or daughters raped, tortured and killed. They’ve never seen their fathers and brothers shot in the head.

They’ve never lived in a geographical location where these things are commonplace.

The last time we had battles fought inside our borders was 1865. Violence of that magnitude is no longer in our cultural memory. These kids look really young, possibly so young that they were babes in arms when 9/11 happened and have no memory of that either. These stupid souls have a baseline experience that has been so easy, so safe, and so secure compared to most people in the world, that they can believe they’re doing a good deed by carrying a banner for people who would throw them off the top of a very tall building in a heartbeat.

There is a remedy for this. The remedy is to be a good student of history.

Unfortunately, these kids have been taught history by Marxists who describe all white people (Jewish people qualify as white now, in case you were wondering) as colonizers—the evilest of the evil. They’ve been taught by professional resentment spreaders, class warfare instigators, and race baiters. They think every problem is caused by an oppressor group oppressing the oppressed group, and if you could just smash the oppressor, everything would be fine. Except that it wouldn’t be. The evil little secret from these Marxist indoctrinators is that the revolution never ends. They’ll always pick one group to stand in as the oppressors and another group to be the oppressed, seed resentment, and provoke a violent revolution about every fifty years or so. Once you are no longer useful to the revolution, the revolution discards you, often violently. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

(Recall that the revolution used to be, “Smash the Patriarchy.” Now it’s “Trans women are women.” Ladies, you’ve been discarded. This is somewhat non-violent so long as you don’t land in a prison with a trans woman bunk mate. Some of you are just figuring that out.)

Rob Henderson is that man who coined the term “luxury beliefs.” He had some specific ideas in mind when he coined that term. It’s meant to refer to beliefs that are not true, but wealthy people claim to believe them because they can afford to and won’t be effected by the fallout from these bad ideas. Things like environmentalism, “defund the police,” white privilege, “family stability doesn’t matter,” etc…

Consider a few quotes from him:

A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police. They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.

In the same way that a vulnerable gazelle can’t afford to engage in stotting because it would put them in increased danger, a vulnerable poor person in a crime-ridden neighborhood can’t afford to support defunding the police.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, and twenty times more likely to be victims of sexual assault.

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances.

And another:

When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you.

When people express unusual beliefs that are at odds with conventional opinion, like defunding the police or downplaying hard work, or using peculiar vocabulary, often what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top university” or “I have the means and time to acquire these esoteric ideas.”

Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

But most important, I think, is this statement:

And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.

Definitely read his entire article here:

Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols

As I was walking my dogs yesterday, trying to regain my equilibrium after seeing photos and videos of one brutality after the other (I can’t anymore…I just have to stop watching), I suddenly realized as Mr. Henderson has pointed out, that luxury beliefs don’t only belong to rich people by America’s standards. They belong to all of us. Because we are wealthy by much of the world’s standards, and we are shielded and protected from so much unrest. Yes, even the George Floyd riots were a cake walk compared to what Israel just endured. And with that realization, my mind immediately went to a few more luxury beliefs this whole situation implicated. So, here they are:

“No citizen has a good reason to need assault weapons.”

I watched the footage of terrorists paragliding through the sky towards the young party goers at that fateful music festival. It was eerie seeing those kids dance without a care in the world while death glided towards them from the sky. Someone may prove me wrong here, but I don’t believe a single one of them had a gun. They had no defense. They had no way to fight back. What could they do, but hide and/or run? 260 souls gone, just like that.

Yes, we live a fairly safe existence in this country, and one could argue that it’s still true that individual weapons are not needed. But let me point out, that prior to this attack, Israelis had been living in relative peace and safety as well. This attack is so unprecedented, it’s been compared to the surprise and deadly Yom Kippur war. And that’s the point. It doesn’t matter how safe your environment is. If you are unprepared for danger that arrises in a matter of minutes, you’ll die. The police won’t get there fast enough. The military won’t get there fast enough. It'll just be you for a vital ten to fifteen minutes, trying to stay alive and protect your friends and family.

It is a coddled, spoiled, and foolish population which thinks gun rights should be restricted even further. I pray to God, we don’t have a terrorist situation like Israel’s to slap everyone back into reality any time soon. That’s a hellish way to learn.

If you do not wish to carry a gun, that’s perfectly fine. But I should be able to carry the gun I legally own with me at all times and in all places without the government throwing up red tape barriers every way I turn. To deny this to me is to put me in danger. It is short-sided, stupid and cruel. It is to force your luxury beliefs on me, and to tut tut and say, “What a shame! How tragic!” when it all goes sideways.

“Only some speech is free. Hate speech should be banned.”

The naivety. The luxury of believing such garbage.

I believe in protecting all speech if only for the purpose of allowing awful people to out themselves as the awful people they are. It is a powerful thing to know your enemies. If we come down hard on hate speech, evil just goes underground and boils up in violence somewhere else. I’m grateful that a bunch of Harvard students outed themselves. I’m grateful for the anti-semitic demonstrations popping up in universities all across this country. They can’t hide anymore. And people can’t be willfully blind to it anymore.

I’m hoping this hideous anti-semitic sentiment showing up in universities, specifically, will open American’s eyes to the degradation of higher education. Many of us have spoken about this until we were blue in the face, but parents just keep sending their kids off to these cowardly places as fodder for Marxist indoctrinators. It ensures endless revolution. Do you get it? They want your kids because they are young and stupid and inexperienced and impressionable. Young people make fantastic revolutionaries.

It takes years of intense work as a parent to inoculate your young people against Marxism. And I can guarantee you that if you’re a fan of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin De’Angelo (both frauds and hucksters) they won’t withstand the hateful ideologies they’ll learn in university. You’ve been warned.

“All people are basically good. Underneath everything, we all just want the same things.”

No. Underneath it all is a seething, raging, psychopathic brutality that waits in the wings and bides its time for restraints to be lifted. It’s the part of us that would commit barbaric evil if we, personally, and society did not keep it in check. That is true of everyone. Yes, even me. It’s most easy to do this when we convince ourselves that the human we hate is sub-human.

When I saw the news report about the many baby’s bodies found at a kibbutz, some missing their heads, I thought to myself, “What depraved lunatic beheads a baby?” And just a few moments later, the answer came. “Well, abortion doctors do, from sea to shining sea, every single day in my country.”

What your culture allows, will continue. What it does not allow, will also continue covertly, but there will be a whole lot less of it and there will be consequences for those that participate in it. Some of us are working overtime to obliterate the kind of barbarity that exists in well-lit medical clinics across this country. God knows whether we’ll be successful or not, or if the restraints comprised of Christianity’s teachings that every life is valuable and deserves equal protection under the law from conception to natural death, will continue to erode or not.

Hamas does not believe this. They don’t because their actions prove it. It doesn’t matter how many indecencies, oppressions or cruelties I’ve suffered, there is nothing that could persuade me to cut the head off an infant. That is the work of Christ in me. And that is the difference between Hamas and the Western world, steeped as it has been in the heritage of the Gospel.

The point is, those ridiculous children holding that banner up above think that all people, including Hamas, just want the same things as we do. And they think this because they grew up here and not there, and they have never suffered any natural consequences for this stupid belief. And this is because they, whether they recognize it or not, have been steeped in a culture informed by Christianity where justice actually does matter and where decentness, kindness, compassion, and fairness are prized. Of course, these kids are busy sawing off the tree branch of Christianity upon which they sit, and if successful, they’re going to find out what happens when the restraints come off. God willing, they don’t succeed. Because I don’t want to live in a culture of brutality anymore than they do.

Bottom Line:

I could continue pointing out more luxury beliefs like “End rape culture in America!” (There is no rape culture in America. If you need to be convinced of this, I’ll pay for a plane ticket to one of the following countries: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, Somalia, etc… Walk in there as a woman without your head covered, utterly alone, and you will find out what rape culture really is.)

The point is, I have no hard and fast opinion about what Israel should and shouldn’t do in response to all of this. I just want the babies and children and true innocents to be safe in Gaza and Israel and that’s what I’m praying for. I have been praying that the hostages will be released and that God would restrain the Hamas terrorists from further abusing and raping them. I also pray that the people responsible for this carnage will be brought to justice. Only God can sort out this mess.

A final word of caution to sensitive and kind souls out there: be careful what videos you watch. Some of us are painfully aware of the wickedness of human hearts already and really don’t need to see any more brutality. (The people who really need to see these horrors are the people holding that banner up there. One can hope that would knock some sense into them.) Some images get seared in the mind and come up at random moments to torment us. I know this from experience. So guard your mind, know your limits, and protect your young children’s eyes from this stuff. It is not necessary for the whole world to be traumatized.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…