Wokey McWokeFace

James Lindsey With a side of Hunter Biden

[NB: Two people have broken computers in this household (not me) and it’s almost finals week and so I have delivered up my most precious possession into the hands of sinful husbands and children and am literally blogging on my phone with a dinky Bluetooth keyboard. This post may be riddled with more errors than normal and does not include links because I can’t cut them in. Sorry! Bear with me while everyone else gets their acts together.]

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Mor-Christ-Condé.jpg/ Jesus contemplating James Lindsey and Hunter Biden

Well, my determination not to scroll in the season of Advent is already a complete bust. Two things happened in the last two days that are awfully fascinating and caused me not to put down my phone nor walk away from it. The first was that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter. The second was that James Lindsey got the American Reformer to publish what he claimed was basically the Communist Manifesto. Mr. Lindsey called himself Mark Carlson and changed so much of the text that the editors over at what Mr. Lindsey calls a “not famous outlet” didn’t recognize it. Apparently, according to Mr. Lindsey, the “woke right” is a big problem in American life and as nobody has been listening to his warnings, he had to resort to his tactics of old—submitting fake papers to journals to show how corrupt and dumb those journals are.

On the surface, the pardoning of Hunter Biden and the publishing of the Communist Manifesto on a Conservative Christian website probably don’t have too much to do with each other. One is shaking every news outlet that exists in the United States out like a sieve and the other is raising the profile of an outfit whose mission is to produce content in the usual way, trying to carve out space in the vaunted “marketplace of ideas” that is the internet. One might be said to be about the entire American justice system, and have implications around the world, and the other is going to be definitely written about in as many as twenty substack posts by Evangelicals who like to write about Twitter fights (guilty as charged).

Whether you believe that President Biden is merely being a good father and taking care of his poor, drug-addled son, or that he is trying cover over the fact that Hunter facilitated money laundering Bourisma deals that resulted in billions of dollars being sent to the war effort in Ukraine and that President Biden is chiefly getting himself out of the way of the law—it doesn’t really matter, the deed is done. And as for Mr. Lindsey, he is too smug for words. It was always foolish of Christians to invite him in as an expert on any subject. He is good at bashing on a single, one-note drum.

No, in the grand scheme of things, these two moments in the news cycle of the week will be forgotten by Christmas. And yet, I think together they expose something obvious and unsettling—that the kingdoms of this world are too flimsy and ephemeral and will disappoint me every time. Also, when everyone is woke, no one is.