Our Moral Confusion

Monday, January 26, 2026

Yesterday I was just apoplectic at the news out of Iran that they killed over 30,000 in the crackdown – a number comparable to the Nazis.  That’s double the 15,000 number that had commonly been running around.  Yesterday, thankfully, the New York Post reported on the same report and set the number at 36,500.  (That’s roughly 20% more than the doubled number for those not skilled at arithmetic.)  Wherever the number ends up it is enormous and heinous.  The Iranian regime is nothing short of monstrous.  I berated those that are on a moral high horse in Minneapolis while ignoring this situation altogether.  But in decrying sin, I too may have been sinful.

It would appear what is happening in Minneapolis is highly, really highly, organized.  (HT: Instapundit)  As described in this link, Minneapolis is in fact insidious, dangerous and just as evil, if not as deadly, as what is happening in Iran.  I am reminded of the times in The Screwtape Letters where “the patient” was comforted that he was not involved in the big problems and therefore ignoring the countless little ones he was involved in.  Says Screwtape to Wormwood:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

There is, in fact great evil abroad.  As I said a couple of weeks ago, Khamenei and his lackeys have joined the pantheon of mass killers like Hitler and Stalin.  But we cannot focus there and miss the evil that is among us.  The high levels of organization in Minneapolis indicate the presence of a real and virulent evil.  There is more than one way to execute a mass killing.  We all focus on the direct death things like Khamenei or Pol Pot.  But then there is the less direct methods like how germs from Europe wiped out whole bands of Native Americans that had no natural immunity.

Minneapolis seems better organized than Portland was.  Like a virus, it is spreading and evolving, “learning” to better do its destructive thing.

While so much of the nation shelters from a bad winter storm, there are two great evils afoot.  We need to be aware of both, and battle both.