Letter #278: The Screwtape Videos

Wormwood is Everywhere

Sponge.

One of my witty brothers once denounced someone by saying, “He’s the worst person on earth who doesn’t run a country.” It’s a funny line, but dispiriting when you come to think of it. It really does seem that, if you wait long enough, a nation’s leadership class will largely consist of its worst human beings. Yes, power corrupts. But also, the pursuit of power attracts the lowest of the low.

So it is too with the pursuit of that form of power known as influence. Like our leaders, our influencers seem increasingly to be the precise people who should not have influence over anything.

The other day, I watched an online conversation between my former Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens and avowed racist Nick Fuentes. It was like a video version of The Screwtape Letters.

Among Candace’s recent pearls of wisdom is the declaration that Israel, the “master of the universe,” is an “occult nation,” as demonstrated by the fact the Star of David is a hexagram. (For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave our readers to write their own jokes). Nick, for his part, is the self-declared “OG” of Jew hatred. As such, he was clearly annoyed by the conversation. Here he had graciously set aside his disdain for black people to make common cause with Candace in mutual horror of Jews only to find Candace pushing back at his assertions that blacks are an inherently inferior race. What the hell, right? Nick later made a solo video in which he mocked Candace for her blackness and cursed her for having an opinion while female.

After this, I swallowed another dose of screwtapery: a chat between Tucker Carlson and amateur historian Darryl Cooper. This was a 3-hour “deep dive” into the Jeffrey Epstein case. It was a dizzying amalgam of suggestive, though not necessarily meaningful, facts, and wild, unsubstantiated conjectures presented as facts. The whole stew was seasoned with scurvy little hints that Israel, (America’s “boss,” Cooper called it) was somehow behind it all.

For those who have ears to hear, it's easy to dismiss all this as hateful silliness, just as it’s easy to shrug off those who hurl snarling obscenities at you in the name of Christian love. Why not? In my experience, a majority of normal people in this country are amazingly good at living out my paradigm of hierarchy and grace: acknowledging the benevolent foundational influence of, say, white Europeans, Christianity and heterosexuality, while existing in comity with those who don’t fit the categories.

The trouble is this. The powerful have power and the influencers have influence, and they play upon our worst instincts. Show them the slightest spark of suspicion or hostility, and they will work the bellows until it burns. They want to keep us at each other’s throats and out of their way.

We don’t have to ask: What Would Jesus Say? We know.

Love, Dad