Carl Trueman writes for First Things that romance is dead, and the sexual revolutionaries killed it. Romance depends on virtue and morality, and cannot exist in an environment where these things are abolished and scoffed at. This makes a lot of sense, and it is encouraging to hear a counter to the smear that everyone is obligated to watch a movie about gay men flirting with and seducing one another, or else they’re bigots.
Speaking of being accused of bigotry, I watched the entirety of Amazon’s ‘The Rings of Power’ series this week. It felt wrong to merely repeat the criticisms of others in this case, though I did recently pass along what some of those were from a review Daniel Coates published at Not the Bee.
Some things are written as though they’re supposed to sound very profound, like they’re inspired by lines from the movies and books; but they have a clunkiness and lack of elegance if you consider them in more than a brief and superficial way.
I’m inclined to agree with Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh on this point, that Amazon just flat isn’t capable of doing justice to Tolkien today, given their precommitments philosophically, politically, and culturally. The best they can do is imitate, but they cannot replicate. The result is more a caricature than a continuation in many places.
The casting of ethnically diverse actors need make sense only along one very obvious line. Woke culture and politics demands racial diversity in casting. But a clearly white character can have a person of color for their mother or daughter or son, and the audience is expected to say nothing negative or critical about it on pain of denunciation for racism. This is a cheap trick, and an abuse of both the audience and source material.
Speaking of abuse, the CDC is considering making the COVID vaccine mandatory for Public School attendance nationwide here in the U.S. Meanwhile, Boston University has developed a Covid strain that has an 80% kill rate in mice. That is to say that the idea that the original virus was engineered and released on a schedule is proven conclusively in my mind.
Stories weekly of totally healthy people abruptly dying for no apparent reason. That is highly suspicious, and I’m going to say the quiet part out loud. But are these abrupt deaths due to the COVID vaccine? And is this just the beginning of a wave of significant population decrease?
Megan Basham at The Daily Wire keeps on writing about how Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci waged a propaganda war to discredit and smear scientists and experts - like epidemiologists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford - when they spoke out against the lockdowns, and mandates for masks and vaccines.
And for their part, prominent figures in American Evangelicalism corresponded and coordinated with Francis Collins, and were willing accomplices in maligning the integrity, maturity, and sincerity of American Christians who attempted to express dissent with COVID policies.
In short, American Christians need a civics lesson. They may get one by reading works like ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ by Edmund Burke, or ‘Democracy in America’ by Alexis de Tocqueville. And they should.
