Corrie Ten Boom, author of the book The Hiding Place, was a well-known Christian who, along with her sister Betsie, was imprisoned at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for hiding Jews in their home in the Netherlands from the Nazis. Betsie died there, but Corrie went on to become a hero to Evangelicals. She is honored today at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”
She once said, “The first step on the way to victory is to recognize the enemy.” Unfortunately for her, and certainly for the Jews in the ‘30s and ‘40s, many people did not recognize evil when it stood before them, giving a rousing speech. Before evil incarnate, Adolf Hitler, ever came to power the permission structures for his vile plot had been in place for over a decade.
Among ordinary people, in the most educated culture in Europe, the Jews were blamed and dehumanized at first quietly and then gradually more publicly until their neighbors looked the other way or worse looted their homes when they were ultimately taken by force and herded into cattle cars in trains and taken to camps where six million died through starvation, brutality, and gas chambers. Old people, women, children, and even tiny babies were murdered for no reason other than their Jewish ethnicity and/or faith. We have eyewitness accounts from traumatized American soldiers who liberated those camps and, more compelling, actual pictures if you care to spend thirty seconds on the internet or an hour of your time at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or one of the 15 other major museums in the U.S. There is no question to the veracity of these claims, yet we still have holocaust deniers. I recount this history for the young people who weren’t even alive for 9/11 and for whom, like me, World War II seems like a bad dream. We are losing most of the “greatest generation,” the men who fought that war or the women who kept the home fires burning by sacrificing, working in factories, building munitions, caring for the wounded and more. The women raised their families alone and prayed for their men to come home. And many never came home. We lost about 405,000 mostly young men. A number about the size of Tampa, Florida, today.
Several years ago, I brought up the sacrifice she made to my husband’s grandmother and suggested it must have been hard to care for her child all alone. Her response was one of incredulity. She looked me in the eye and said, “A madman was taking over the world. We did what had to be done to save our nation.” Her husband, my husband’s grandfather, a doctor who served in the Pacific after the Japanese attacked our fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, died not long after returning home due to a virus he contracted during the war.
My point to this story is this, WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE ENEMY! Live and let live, my typical response is not always right and can even be dangerous.
There has been much written recently about the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with someone named Nick Fuentes. He is a 27-year-old nobody who came to fame through a provocative podcast, literally broadcast from his mother’s basement that gained about 700,000 listeners over time. No one doubts he has a large audience but let’s take a listen to what self-proclaimed Christian Nick Fuentes is feeding young men, maybe even one you know and love. He is a racist, sexist, antisemite, pro-Stalinist, and he does not belong under the Republican big tent. Take a look at some of his worst clips.
How does what he is saying line up with what the Bible tells us are the fruits of the Spirit as listed in Galatians 5:22-23: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control. They don’t. He is not a believer, and worse he uses the identity of Christ to sew discord and hatred.
Tucker Carlson, whose show many of us loved and I was blessed to appear on as a guest on more than one occasion, has been beloved by Christian Evangelicals for most of his career. I know people who stopped watching Fox News when he was fired from there. But the Tucker we know has changed. If you don’t believe me, take a listen to this.
Why a trusted voice suddenly changes so abruptly, under the guise of “just asking questions,” is shocking. Tucker has normalized hateful heretics and even repeated Russian propaganda. Although he has since walked it back, he even said that he dislikes “Christian Zionists more than anybody” because we are heretics. Now, I get that Tucker is a smart man, but he is not, by anyone’s definition, a theologian. I won’t judge his faith, but I will judge his pride. The Bible says in Psalm 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” We should all be very careful. God gives platforms, and He can take them away. Tucker Carlson, like anyone, can find a way back, but he must first repent. It is not enough to be sorry people are mad. We must all fear insulting a just God by harming His little ones, in this case, both Jews and Christians. Having a following so large comes with an equally large responsibility. Making bizarre claims gets clicks and attention, but there are consequences that eventually follow.
And Tucker is not alone, once trusted conservative commentator Candace Owens has become a conspiracy theorist who blamed Charlie Kirk’s murder on … get ready … Mossad. Yes, that is right, it is the Jews’ fault, again. This is not a one-off for her. She regularly spouts antisemitic rot out of her lovely mouth and again, one wonders why? I will leave it to others to investigate funding and ties.
In the Conservative movement today, due to the war in Gaza a lot of discussion has erupted. Most Christians saw and spoke very plainly about the atrocities of Oct. 7 where 1,200 men, women, and children were murdered, and 251 men, women, and children were taken hostage, including eight Americans. Thanks to President Trump, after over two years, all the living hostages are home, and the two dead Americans were returned just last week. Friends of CWA, Ronen and Orna Neutra, finally have been able to lay to rest their beautiful son, Omer.
What I find the most shocking of all of this is that people who should know better have begun to call good evil and evil good. I am not talking about people who rightly want to keep us out of war. As the mom of an active-duty soldier, I of all people want peace. I am not even talking about people who have mistakenly embraced replacement theology, which can be, for a few people, a cloak for antisemitism. I discuss this in my first book, Feisty and Feminine: A Rallying Cry for Conservative women.
I am talking about educated people with big followings who have once again blamed the Jews for evil brought upon them by fascists, in this case, Islamo-fascists who openly threaten to wipe Israel off the map and advocate for and support forced conversion. They hate Israel, our closest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the inventor of essential medical technology like the PET Scan and other technologies. They embrace an ideology that murders homosexuals and stones women to death. It is an ideology in which women are second-class citizens forced to cover their faces in public, not allowed an education, and forced to marry men they do not love, sometimes as children.
It’s not just the keffiyeh-wearing bullies on college campuses that should alarm us. It must also be the jolly, smart person with the microphone who has now been infected with an old, malignant hate repackaged and delivered using current technology. This trend should concern us because it seems innocuous enough not to matter. But we should care because it was the elite in Germany who ultimately brought Hitler to power.
The elites in science created the eugenics movement, which said black people and Jews are genetically inferior. By the way, that belief system was the framework that brought us our modern-day abortion movement via Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood.
Today, the culturally elite in academia hide their spite for Jews by fake compassion for Gazans. The same people have no interest in the Nigerian Christians who are currently being slaughtered by the thousands. No Jews, no news.
At Concerned Women for America (CWA) and our collegiate arm, Young Women for America, we are raising the alarm that an enemy is in our camp. There is a cancer in our movement, and we fear this cancer will metastasize and destroy our young. This has already happened on the left. The next generation of Democrats is the most radical. They even elected a socialist to run New York City, the center of commerce and media for our nation. AOC is no longer an outlier. She will most likely become their Senator from New York or even their candidate for President.
Like many others, I was deplatformed by Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it. My offense was saying plainly that Leah Thomas is a man who took a trophy from a woman. I don’t believe that institutions should cancel people. I do, however, believe that when you support the kooks on the right by hosting them and asking them softball questions, you legitimize them. De-banking someone is different than deciding not to advertise on their show or inviting them to speak at your conference. The free market can weed out those voices that, at their core, are infected with venom. However, those who believe in truth and righteousness must stand up against this insidious trend.
In 1955, William F. Buckley, the founder of the well-respected conservative magazine National Review, noticed that the fringe on the right was gaining traction. A group of conspiracy theorists and the KKK had footholds in the Republican Party that he feared would grow. In response, he worked to publicly oust them, and he succeeded. His diligence led to the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, which founded the modern conservative movement. I believe we need to exercise similar discipline in our own ranks. The bloody French Revolution had a saying, “No enemy to our left.” I would urge Conservatives not to allow a similar refrain of “no enemy to our right.” I would urge fellow conservative leaders to consider their own responsibilities in this tenuous moment.
Here is our promise. At Concerned Women for America, we will do three things to combat this scourge:
- We will stand firm and call out evil where we see it, even in our own tent, as I have just done.
- We will not platform or support in any way those who strayed down this dark path and who are both theologically and ideologically spewing hatred. We will not advertise on their programs, and we will not host them at any of our gatherings.
- When it is in our power, we will not lend credibility to them by association.
We cannot be the party of compassion, truth and justice if we cannot speak truth in this tenuous moment. We are all broken, but we must strive for goodness lest we become the enemy.
