A Deceitful Commentary by a Confessional Christian

https://www.creators.com/read/erick-erickson/08/26/our-broken-trust

My local newspaper often features columns by Erick Erickson and what's most upsetting to me is that this man professes Christ and is part of the PCA. It would be one thing if he were a Southern Baptist or something, but he's part of a Confessionally Reformed denomination. And yet what has happened to his understanding and his conscience that allows him to replace reality with fantasy and be so utterly lost in a labyrinth of lies.

First he engages in the common Evangelical error of pronoun confusion. The Church is American Society and American Society is the Church - an assumed motif that seems to dominate within his writings. The fact that these two entities are actually antithetical to each other and that very reality should shape our thinking and evaluation of American culture is not only a foreign concept to the likes of Erickson, but it's one he heartily rejects.

He tries to contextualise the present moment by building atop a foundation of misreads, misperceptions, and outright lies about Covid.

He believes Covid broke the faith Americans had in their institutions. Never mind the fact that Christians should approach all of this differently, but in reality I would say the trust in institutions was already broken - and that's why people responded to Covid the way they did. Donald Trump had already wreaked havoc on an already ailing and largely broken social consensus.

And in addition to Trump, we can also point to commentators and media figures like Erickson for creating the conditions in which society was already sundered. They worked hard to this end during the tenure of Barack Obama and were very successful as it resulted in Donald Trump - the president in charge when Covid arrived on American shores. Erickson is completely wrong here. My only question is this - does he believe his narrative or is he just being deceitful? I'm sorry to say it but I've read enough of his articles to believe the latter is a real possibility.

Children did spread Covid - often as asymptomatic carriers. That's why so many bus drivers died. A generation of students did not regress. That's a ridiculous, even ludicrous statement. The public school system has been in a state of collapse for a generation and his dig at the teacher's unions just demonstrates he's part of the larger Right-wing agenda to break these unions and privatize public schools. He's not a Christian commentator but a political operative or more accurately a political hack.

So then when you're successful in breaking the public schools, why do you complain about the results? It's just disingenuous and deceitful on every level.

His statements are unsubstantiated, out of context, erroneous, and prevaricative at best. Statistics were suppressed by state governors like Ron DeSantis and manipulated in other cases. Co-morbidities and complications were used to obscure the impact of the virus. We saw that locally - people died of Covid, but their obituaries listed their complications as the cause and this spread in the circles of local gossip.

They attack Andrew Cuomo for trying to save lives even as the Right basically wrote off the elderly population - many openly declaring as much. The Covid episode exposed the utter fraud of the supposedly pro-life Right. They never were pro-life but the fact that they just shrugged off a million deaths in their own country just demonstrates how bogus and bankrupt this movement is. It's about politics and always has been. It has nothing to do with ethics or a concern for life. The rest of their policy positions testify to this in abundance. The GOP is just as much a party of death as the Democrats they so despise.

The vaccine did work but didn't work to the extent promised because people wouldn't take it (to achieve herd-levels of immunity) and everywhere you went, you would see people ignoring attempts at mitigation or rejecting them with defiance, or (as was all too often) failing to understand how any of it worked - like the cashier lifting her mask to lick her fingers so she count my change to me.

The states tried to set out guidelines, but they weren't followed and they were not enforced with any kind of consistency. People gamed the system at every turn and the Right spread disinformation and fear. Pennsylvania was a prime example. The state never mandated the shutting down of churches but the Right pushed for legislation to keep them open - falsely insinuating the governor wanted to close them and thus using deceit, fear, and other tools of manipulation - especially within the churches. The activists who pushed this line are nothing short of scoundrels. The pastors who echoed them are bad shepherds at best (in failing to do their homework) or false shepherds at worst who employ end-justifies-the-means thinking and ethics as a means to guide God's people.

Erickson has to include the full litany of Right-wing trigger points - from the Wuhan Lab Leak lie to Hunter Biden's laptop, to taking shots at Tik Tok. It certainly looks like he got his FOX Talking Points email. Does he get paid for every time he mentions one of these items? They seem to make it into his commentaries on a regular basis.

It's hard to take this person seriously, but to my astonishment he has thousands of lemming devotees.

I was hardly surprised to find he's fully supportive of the AI-driven data centers and the Flock cameras. The 21st century GOP has been split. The older 'conservative' wing embraces authoritarianism, as we saw in the aftermath of 9/11. The Libertarian wing has a different take on individual rights and foreign policy but because they're rabidly pro-free market, they fail to grasp how corporations inevitably become strategic and intertwined with the interests of the state. Both wings manifest racist tendencies in different ways. Both support political violence, but by different means.

Erickson relies on militarism to make his argument. The threat is China just as it was al Qaeda a generation ago, and the Soviet Union before that. These people don't change much and learn nothing from history.

He follows the script - make the appeal to kidnapped children in order to defend the use of draconian surveillance, just like Americans had to have the fascistic Patriot Act in order to be protected from a few hundred terrorists holed up in the Hindu Kush.

He counters the AI opponents by taking shots in defense of Fracking. Of course, everything he says is to some degree untrue. Erickson has a real problem with truth and lying - much like the president he admires. I wonder why his PCA eldership isn't holding him to account given he's a public figure? Perhaps they like to have their ears tickled too.

Basically it comes to this. Erickson is promoting the interests of the energy companies, Wall Street, and the security state - and let's not forget the GOP in general terms. The Right knows it will have to rely on authoritarian methods to hold on to power and so he's their man. He's going to make the arguments and do so by framing every issue in a way that demonizes the opposition and blames them for all of society's ills.

It's demagoguery pure and simple and yet (in this case) trying to masquerade as cogent, informed, and morally driven (even Christian) commentary. But in reality it's simply deceitful filth and unworthy of a follower of Christ.

I would expect this sort of thing from some Darwinian Capitalist who believes the end justifies the means and only the strong survive. But this is a person who not only purports to be a Christian but even one that is Confessionally Reformed. We should expect better. Again I ask, where are the elders? Why are they not holding him to account? Not only is he not held to account, he's celebrated and featured in 'By Faith' the PCA magazine. This is to glory in their shame.

PCA leaders are concerned about the many controversies and shadow movements within their denomination. The fact that a professional liar and one who strengthens the hands of evildoers like Erick Erickson is a member in good standing is (to me) an elephant in the room.