RT
@LarryTaunton: CONSERVATIVE VS “CONSERVATIVE”:🧵
When I posted this, I was mindful of a warning from scripture: “…false prophets will arise … to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” (Matthew 24:14)
There has been a deliberate effort to penetrate conservative circles and fracture them. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Appear to abandon your lifelong commitment to the Left/Democrats. You say you’ve been “red-pilled.”
2. You earn the trust of conservatives on a variety of issues dear to them by attacking your former lefty colleagues.
3. Conservatives, desperate for heroes, immediately platform you as an oracle of truth. That you were a lifelong leftist (and often an atheist) should make the faithful wary, but those urging caution are shouted down. Your political (not spiritual, mind you) “conversion” is all that matters.
4. Now you establish a cult of your personality. Once this is done, your followers have unwittingly shifted from the fixed point of their principles to you. It’s now easy to lead them, by degrees, to embrace anything. Moreover, they become the army who insulate you from any meaningful critique. They embody the hate that you once kept hidden, but is now in the open.
5. Now comes the coup de grâce: you turn your focus, your hate, on conservatives themselves. Your followers — by now all sail, no anchor — eagerly follow you in doing it. The fracture of the right has begun. You accuse your critics of ideological “gatekeeping” when you have, in fact, sought to make yourself the ultimate gatekeeper. Game over.
This is a very old tactic predating Marxists, but revived by them. The Bolsheviks were geniuses in their use of it, and the Chinese have taken it to another level.
If you’ll permit me to say so, I was the first to warn you that Tim Keller was promoting Marxism; Russell Moore is a self-serving snake; Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are not your friends; Andrew Tate is a Muslim pig out to lure young men to that evil ideology; and Jordan Peterson Peterson, while very helpful in some respects, was not to be trusted as a Bible teacher. I took sharp criticism in every case, and in every case I was proved right. So much so, that conservative personalities now act like they knew it all along!
They didn’t.
Now I am warning you of a new threat. Some of you are following people who don’t share your most basic assumptions about God and all that flows from belief in Him. A few have gone further: they have made champions of unbelieving charlatans and gone full attack mode against the faithful. How could they do it? It’s like aligning yourself with Richard Dawkins in toto because he expressed some minor misgivings about the decline of Christianity. It’s foolish. But it’s what many have done.
My advice, wholly biblical, is this:
Make the Word of God the standard against which you measure everything. Don’t go all-in on anyone but Jesus. Test everything against scripture. I, for example, voted for Trump (three times), I’ve aggressively defended him, and I’ve been a guest at Mar-a-Lago twice, but when he platformed an unrepentant pro-abortion porn star at the RNC, I sharply criticized him. My support of Trump, of anyone, extends no further than my conscience.
Scripture has given us models. In Galatians 2, Paul publicly confronts Peter when the latter’s actions served to lead the young in faith astray. If Peter wasn’t above it, I dare say no one else is. Is it gatekeeping? You’re damn right. People say that as if it’s a bad thing. Jesus is the strictest of gatekeepers. When you’re defined only by what you’re against, you inevitably forget what you’re for. And there are several personalities on this platform who hate you and your God, but have a predatory instinct for leveraging what you passionately oppose for their own wicked ends.
“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
~Col 2: 8
