Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Part I

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The Ideological Capture of the Left: The Left is Increasingly Committed to Theory Rather Than Reality

As we think about the world around us, we need to note that sometimes we have to have a vocabulary to explain something that happens, a vocabulary that might not have been necessary, say, just a few generations ago. One of the categories that is really important for us to think about is the category of ideological capture.

Ideological capture means that you have some sector, you have some institution, you have some area of society that has been captured by a certain ideological worldview, a certain ideological viewpoint, captured to the extent that you really have no possibility of presenting an alternative worldview, no possibility of presenting an alternative worldview, you have a sector that has been entirely captured. To give a classic example, the ideological capture by the Left of higher education in the United States, it’s not total, but it’s approaching total. On some institutions it’s absolutely total. In many professions it’s comprehensively total.

But what you see is that over a period of time, the left captured more and more and more of academia, institution by institution, professor by professor, department by department, degree by degree. That’s how it works. Eventually, the only way you can explain what happened, is that you had an entire sector of a society ideologically captured. Ideological capture, this becomes a very critical category. And here’s the thing, you often see it only in clear terms once it’s happened. It’s only once it’s happened, you really see what’s happened.

For example, lots of questions right now about the future of the Democratic Party. Lots of people are asking, “Can the Democratic Party find some kind of moderating path forward?” Evidently, Americans did not like the positions taken by the Democratic Party, and increasingly after the election of last November, a lot of Americans have said, “The mainstream media wants to tell us this was all about the price of eggs or whatever.” It was a lot more than that. There’s a general distaste about the ideological positions that in general represent the Democratic Party.

The “extreme” arguments, as someone described them, related to the LGBTQ revolution, you just go down the list. The reality is that many Americans find the Democratic Party increasingly distant from their own worldview and their own moral commitments and instincts. How do you explain that? Ideological capture. Helpfully, Joe Klein, in his own Substack recently, published a documentation of this kind of ideological capture. He does so as something of a lament. He seems to lament the fact the Democratic Party has been captured in this way, but he does report it as he sees it.

Joe Klein tells us this: he’s citing a news report by Jonathan Chait about a recent meeting in the Democratic National Committee. And the original report was published in the Atlantic. Just as a matter of background, remember that the Democratic Party has elected a new national chairman. This is really about the outgoing national chairman, but trust me, the nonsense is not outgoing. In terms of ideological capture, just listen to this report because, as we sometimes have to say, you cannot make this up.

Jonathan Chait offering us this report about the Democratic National Committee’s meeting just recently says this, “Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which meant to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race.” The outgoing chairman said this, “The rules specify that when we have a gendered non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”

Chait goes on to report, “As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored.” The outgoing chairman said this, “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and non-binary candidates, we conferred with our Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chair, our LGBTQ Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules. To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice it is simple and transparent.”

Molly Ball of the Wall Street Journal then reports, “Later in the program, an audience member stood up to lament that there was only one at-large seat set aside for a transgender person, and called on the candidates to add another seat.”, and for, “making sure those appointments reflect the gender and ethnic diversity of the transgender community. Only one candidate raised his hand to indicate he wouldn’t make such a commitment.” I repeat again, you can’t make this up. It does demand our attention. And I want to look at that statement that was offered by Molly Ball of the Wall Street Journal, and this is a quote of the meeting itself, came out of the meeting itself. We are told that one person was adamant speaking to the group that there should be another seat added, and to make sure, quote, “those appointments reflect the gender and ethnic diversity of the transgender community.” Wow. What exactly would be the full diversity of the gender and ethnic diversity of the transgender community? I’ll admit, I don’t think I have the imagination to speculate adequately. 

Joe Klein goes on to write this, “Yes, friends, still crazy after all these years and the encroaching dementia is not benign. Can this party be saved? I have my doubts. The intellectual corrosion is comprehensive. It is only matched by the self-righteous arrogance.” He then goes on to write about what he says might be the alternative.

“I’ve been through Dems in disarray syndrome multiple times in the past, in 1972 and 1980, 1988 and 2016, but got to say, this is the worst I’ve ever seen it.” He went on to say, “There is a vast cluelessness abroad in the party. It’s prevailing vision of an America based on identity now resides in the outhouse.” He goes on to say, “Even my former employer, the New Yorker, repository of stately, elegant liberal myopia has noticed that something is amiss.” I wanted you to hear that because it’s interesting and important to us at so many different levels, first of all, in terms of the gender confusion and the ideological corruption of the age, just listen to this political party’s national committee at work.

It’s all about identity politics wedded to the most extreme gender ideologies and transgender ideologies that are imaginable. You truly can’t make this up because the reality turns out to be more extreme than your imagination would allow. As I say, my imagination is completely overcome when I receive this reference or demand about the, “gender and ethnic diversity of the transgender community.” I’ll just state that ideologically, by definition, that diversity can never end. But notice that the point being made by Joe Klein, later by Molly Ball, reported on by Jonathan Chait, all these are veteran reporters, they’ve been watching these things for a long time, not one of them is an identified conservative.

The point they’re making is that after the devastating loss, the loss of the United States Senate, the loss of the presidency, and the loss of any opportunity to recover the House of Representatives majority, the comprehensive loss by the Democratic Party might, you would think, lead to some kind of reconsideration about the direction of the party. The point being made by these three different reporters is: not going to happen. Already evidenced by the outgoing chairman’s comments about getting ready for the incoming chairman to move in, identity politics has control of the Democratic Party. And not only that, leftist ideologies have control of the Democratic Party.

There are ideological threats to the Republican Party, but they’re are very different threats than what you see here. This kind of threat leads to another question. How can this happen? What kind of infection gets into some organization or some body or some structure and then gains such control, so much control that you can have a devastating loss in an election and people come back and say, “Change this kind of direction? Why would we? We’re committed to it.” They are committed to it, all the way to the next electoral loss. How do you explain that?

Here’s where the next level I want to say after we see the ideological corruption here, and we’re not surprised to find it in the world around us. Confused as it is, sinful as it is, there can be all kinds of ideological corruptions. But the category here that’s important is ideological capture, because at some point these ideologies capture the entire institution. They control who’s in leadership, they control who gets to speak, they control what arguments are allowed and disallowed. Ideological capture, when it happens, is extremely difficult, if not impossible to dislodge. This is one of the problems Conservatives have in the world of higher education. It has been so comprehensively captured by the Left, that institution by institution, it’s hard to imagine how you could correct anything.

Furthermore, as I say in higher education, it’s not just the professors hired, it’s the ridiculous disciplines they’re hired to teach. As I pointed out, you have selection bias here, because you have no Conservative, basically, who’s going to become a professor of radical womanist studies at your local university. That’s because the Conservative would have to sell out his soul or her soul in order to even go through the process to gain the academic credentials to teach in the area. And if genuinely Conservative, what the person would have to say is, “This entire discipline is from the pits of hell and smells of smoke.”

At the most important level, it’s just really very urgent that Christians watching the world around us, we understand the risk of ideological capture, and we understand that there is some point at which an institution, a sector of society is indeed captured. And once it’s captured, there is no foreseeable means of correction. Because when you capture it, you control the platform, you control the microphone, you control the messaging, you control the leadership, you control the membership, you control the boundaries, you control virtually everything. This can happen not just on one end of the ideological spectrum, it could happen on both ends.

But when you look right now, and this is important, at ideological capture, we need to understand that the ideological energy is primarily on the Left. And you say, you’re telling me there are no conservative ideologies? No, there are some. But I am telling you that the left increasingly is dominated only by ideologies, very radical ideologies. And an ideological mode of operation, that means that if the party’s not committed to this leftist ideology today, it’s going to hear about it and someone’s going to be committed to it tomorrow.

Another way of understanding this is that the Left increasingly is committed to theory, and on the Conservative side there’s an affirmation of actuality of matter. So, there’s a distinction here. It’s a very important distinction rooted in a biblical worldview. When you’re talking about the world, you’re talking about real stuff. You’re talking about reality, not just as some kind of ideological concept, but as the rockness of a rock. The rock is a rock. Regardless of what social theory you construct about it, it’s not going to cease to be a rock. You may use that rock for your ideological purposes, but the rockness of the rock is the issue.

You could say that sounds like a ridiculously abstract argument. Well, I just asked you to consider the gender and transgender ideologies, and I want to ask you if what’s going on there is not the ridiculous, supposed construction of a new ideology so you can look at a male and say, no, it’s not a male, it’s a female. It’s not a rock, it’s something else. It’s still a rock. 

All right, we’re going to leave that for now. But it is important that we understand the category of intellectual capture and we watch out for it and we note when we have a graphic example such as what was brought to us from this DNC meeting in recent days.

Part II

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Are We 89 Seconds to Midnight? The Scientific Community Has an Apocalyptic Worldview Too

All right, now we’re going to turn to something else.

Headline, this time in the New York Times, “Now on her watch, the Doomsday Clock.” I’ve talked about this before, but from time to time it just comes up again. And I want to tell you, this is something that has a great deal to do with my own lifeline. I was born in 1959, the height of the Cold War, the height of the Atomic Age and all the atomic anxieties. I was born in Florida and shortly after I was born came the Cuban Missile Crisis and the risk of a nuclear exchange. People in Florida knew they were right there, less than 100 miles at one point from Cuba, you have Florida territory.

The nuclear risk was something that concerned many, many people. It became a very big dynamic in the 1960 and 1964 campaigns for the American presidency. And you also have a group referred to by the name of the publication, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As Katrina Miller of the New York Times tells us, “The clock is set.” That is the Doomsday Clock, as it is called. The Clock is, “set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by American physicists at the dawn of the nuclear age, months after the United States detonated atomic bombs in Japan. Last week, the Bulletin,” the Times tells us, “named Alexandra Bell, a nuclear affairs expert, as its new president and chief executive. She replaces Rachel Bronson.”

This article basically is an interview with the new president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and it is about the Doomsday Clock and how close that clock now is set by the scientist near midnight, which means human doom. Going back to the atomic age, going back to very justified fears about an atomic nuclear exchange, the clock was really set pretty close to midnight in such a way that it was to serve as a warning to all the nuclear powers about the very real risk of human annihilation, as it was claimed, or massive human casualties beyond imagination in a nuclear exchange.

It was meant as a warning, and of course the Soviets appear not to have been too concerned about that warning. It became a political issue in Western nations. That means throughout Western Europe and, of course, in the United States of America, it was used to political ends. Here’s the interesting thing: The Doomsday Clock is supposedly set in order to warn about the relative, timely danger of human-caused damage, human-caused mass casualties. So, the Doomsday Clock really isn’t concerned about earthquakes. It’s not really concerned about some kind of massive flood. It is not concerned about hurricanes. It is concerned about atomic weapons and now increasingly concerned about climate change. The claim is these are human activities that could lead to the end of life.

Christians understand this is not how life is going to end, this is not how history is going to end, more about that in a moment, but we do understand that such a thing could happen with mass casualties. I mentioned earlier this idea of ideological capture and how important it is. It’s important in this case to recognize that amongst so many academics, including those in the hard sciences, including physics, it’s never as merely scientific as it appears. On the climate change issue, there’s a lot of ideology that is being smuggled here under the label of science. Again, not a real surprise, but there are a couple of very interesting statements in this article.

The new president of the group was asked, quote, “How does an 80-year-old organization like the Bulletin stay relevant in an ever-changing world?” Dr. Bell, the new president said, “When I entered the field, the Doomsday Clock was at five minutes to midnight. I remember being struck by the symbolism. The clock being at its closest point to midnight now is really a warning that we are running out of time. The fact that it ticked one second closer is an indication that every second counts.”

Let’s just call a timeout from her interview for a moment to realize what’s being said here. You’ll notice she speaks as if there’s a real clock, about the real end of time, and that it really did get moved forward one second supposedly in calculation of the danger of human-induced climate change, nuclear exchange, end of life as we know it. There is no such actual clock. Where does the idea of this clock come from? Is it a propaganda device? Is it a learning device? Is it a warning device? It’s probably intended as all of those things.

But as a Christian, I want to point out, I think it really points to something else. We are told in Scripture that God has set time in man’s heart. We are chronological creatures and our creator intends that we continually remember that we are chronological creatures. We are born at a certain point in history and we will die at a certain point in history. Our times are known by God and our times are urgently important. And within ourselves we have a sense of time even of our own mortality and time. And the Scripture says, “That is by the Creator’s plan.” It is a part of being in God’s image, made in God’s image that we have that sense of time.

We also have a sense of an end. And in our hearts there is a sense that things have to be made right. There is a sense that the world, as you know it now, cannot continue forever. There is a very real sense that time is running out. In that sense, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is not wrong. Time is running out. The chronology will come to an end. But this is where Christians have to look at this and see a secular, doctrinal structure. And it reminds us that being made in God’s image, we are inherently religious creatures. I’m using the word “religious” in that generic term. We have a yearning for God. We know we are made. We have a yearning for a Creator.

If we hold to a secular worldview, that’s all going to be translated into some secular, systematic theology and some secular understanding of doctrine, and so the Christian doctrine of eschatology about the end times and the warning of the apocalypse that is to come. There are people who look at that and go, “That’s crude. Those Christians believe in some cataclysmic end to the world. They believe in some final judgment.” I just want to point out, they do too in their own way, they just believe it in unbiblical and, frankly, in secular terms. The Doomsday Clock is as eschatological in the shape of its idea as is the Book of Revelation.

The difference is, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doesn’t know there is a theology embedded even in their own conceptual claims, an end. There is an end. In that, we and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are in agreement. There will be an end. There will be an end to this age. Indeed, there will be an end to this world. We are yearning for a new heaven and a new earth and there will be a judgment to come. But that judgment’s not going to come from the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nor will that judgment end with their temporal judgment. If they seek to make it before the end comes, and at the very last gasp they render their moral judgment, that moral judgment will die with them. The only moral judgment that will not die at the end of the age is the moral judgment made by the Creator of all and the Judge of all.

Part III

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You Want a Penny For Your Thoughts? You Better Hurry: President Trump Seeks to Stop Minting the Penny

All right. But as we come to conclusion today, another issue with worldview significance that many people might not recognize as such: You want a penny for your thoughts? You better do it in a hurry, because President Trump wants to shut down the penny, wants the national Mint to make no more pennies. Why? The president has said this, quote, “For far too long, the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful,” said President Trump in a post on Truth Social.”Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it is a penny at a time.” 

Penny at a time, that’s going to take a long time because a penny is increasingly worthless, so increasingly discounted that according to USA Today and according to the United States Mint, it’s not just 2 cents to make it. “The penny costs over 3 cents to make.” And we are told that it cost US taxpayers over $179 million in fiscal year 2023. That according to the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE.

USA Today also tells us that the US Mint, “produced over 4.5 billion pennies in fiscal year 2023. And around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins of circulation produced were pennies.” 4.5 billion pennies produced in fiscal year 2023. I think about, I don’t know, a billion of those end up in all kinds of drawers across America, where they just get moved around from one side of the drawer to the other. Why? It is because you know already that pennies are basically worthless. They don’t represent much.

Does the president of the United States have the unilateral authority to stop the penny? President Trump thinks he does. We’re going to find out. Congress authorized the coin. And by the way, it’s been around about 230 years, but most countries are finding a way to get out of minting coins that are so worthless. It costs more to mint them than to have them, and we’re not talking about a small thing, we’re talking about 4.5 billion just in one fiscal year alone. We need to get rid of the penny, and frankly, I’m all for it.

But next in line is probably the nickel, because the nickel in terms of the cost of the metal and all the rest might be an even worse case scenario than the penny. All this points, of course, to two things. 

Number one, inflation, which means that the penny used to be a meaningful amount of money, increasingly it’s not a meaningful amount of money. And it used to be that currency was worth more than it cost to produce the coinage or the currency. At least in terms of the penny, it’s documented it’s not true. It costs more to make it than it does to have it.

That reminds us of something deeply embedded in the Christian worldview. That is that value ought to be directed towards some kind of genuine value. When you look at currency in coinage at one point in human history, just think of Jesus picking up the coin and making the point about the Emperor’s image on it, coins were valuable because they were made of precious metals. At least in terms of the little piece of metal that had the emperor’s stamp on it, that was intended to represent actual value. There was value in the coin itself. You’re not going to melt down a penny in order to turn it into something. And by the way, if you did, nobody would want it anyway. So, your 1 cent is probably going to be worth less than 1 cent. Furthermore, the intrinsic value of the metal in that coin, it’s increasingly not important, nonexistent, not even a factor.

One of the things I need to recognize is that we have transformed coinage and currency away from absolute value. Based on, let’s just say when it comes to coinage, the real value of the metal that was coined, we’ve moved away from that. The United States has abandoned the gold standard, and so we’re now at the point that this currency can mean just about anything at any time. Certainly when you look at a penny, it’s been devalued significantly over time. What will you get for a penny? Not much. Five pennies? Not much. 10 pennies? You’re still probably not at much. I can remember when having 10 cents in a candy store was really worth something. I would just suggest you shouldn’t try it now.

Printed currency, that is to say paper money, functioned in a different way, and this is in different denominations with greater value. In that case, there is still supposed to be real value behind it when currency originated, and that’s why you have Fort Knox. I’m speaking to you right now not too far from Fort Knox, outside of Louisville, Kentucky. At one point, it held the gold deposits of the United States of America as security for our currency. The gold, we are told, is still there. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it myself. I trust it’s still there.

But the fact is that once we separated our currency from the gold standard, the money is worth what people decide it’s worth. That means a currency becomes increasingly a mental game, a game of confidence as to who stands behind the value of the currency. In the case of the United States of America, the United States Treasury pledges to stand behind the currency. Who stands behind the Treasury? That’s a legitimate question. We’re going to have to take that question another day.

We’re also told, by the way, that there is a bipartisan consensus emerging on the fact we need to get rid of the penny. You’d think the math would make that pretty easy to achieve. But I’ll predict this: all things being equal, it’s going to turn into some kind of very heated political debate. You’re going to have the pro-penny people and the anti-penny people, and the arguments are over real money, the money required to have coined 4.5 billion pennies in fiscal year 2023. In conclusion, I’ll simply say that’s a staggering number of pennies. And it’s amazing, I think, that the United States Mint made them, but I’m very thankful right now I don’t have to count them.