Carl Wells Books

Some weeks ago I completed my reading of Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency by Jack Cashill, a book published in 2020. As I read it, it sparked my thinking, and I found myself making notes about potential lessons we can learn from everything surrounding Barack Obama.

This was the fourth book I have read by Jack Cashill, and they all have been good. He is a gifted writer, with a prose style that encourages us to keep reading. He has a sense of humor, a good-natured calmness, a willingness to be fair to everyone, and a love of truth. Better yet, he even has a connection to the state of Indiana, having taken his doctorate in American studies at Purdue University.

As I read Unmasking Obama, certain ideas kept popping into my head. I needed to write them down, and eventually to tell my teeming millions of readers what I had learned. Some of the ideas may not have come directly from the text (while some certainly do) but that is what a good writer like Jack Cashill does–he makes you think.

So here are ten takeaways from my reading of Unmasking Obama. They are numbered, for my entertainment and convenience.

1/Mainstream Media’s dishonesty is terminal. They have no love of truth. They have a Narrative in their own minds, and anything that does not fit the Narrative can be and should be ignored, at least according to them. They refuse to search for the truth, when a little digging, and a little common sense, would provide myriad openings to find the truth. These are filthy people.

2/Not only is Mainstream Media dishonest. I think they have lost the capacity even to see their own dishonesty. I don’t think any of them say to themselves, “I am going to lie now.” No, lying has become as natural to them as breathing. Do we think about breathing? No, we just do it. Similarly, these people just follow the Narrative, and the Narrative is obviously the truth, so anything that doesn’t fit the Narrative must be wrong. They have arrived at a state of being that makes them feel happy, and nothing is going to make them give up that state of being.

3/Barack Obama was a fraud from the beginning, but among left-leaning people there was a Need to Believe. To make a hero of a man so without honesty and principle, so clearly an empty suit, bespeaks an emptiness on the part of the people who have raised him up. The people idolizing Mr. Obama are numerous. These people are intellectually and spiritually void. People as ridiculous as Barack Obama are always going to exist. That millions of people honor him is far more terrifying than the existence of one unprincipled sociopath such as Mr. Obama.

4/Conservatism Inc. are not our friends. Mainstream conservative pundits have a lack of courage to tell difficult truths. They have no real principles for which they are willing to stand. They are trying to build careers in the media. We need to start ignoring these people. They offer ordinary people no help.

5/The collaboration of Main Sleaze Media and left-leaning politicians is instinctive, not something they sit down together and formally agree to do. Both have a ridiculous worldview, and warm to each other because of that. There is no conscious conspiracy.

6/The arrogance of our elite betters is off the charts. They know themselves to be morally good, and know the rest of us to be foolish peasants, and any other theory is not worth considering. One might have thought such arrogance was unjustified in view of the results of the leadership of these elite people. But our elites think they are doing very well indeed.

7/Now and in the future, the only type of person who is going to offer us much hope is a person with a centered personality of uncompromising integrity. We need people who will stand for the truth and be willing to accept criticism as they do so. If we think such individual people can’t really accomplish much, given the power of the evildoers and given the carelessness of most other people, then we are too pessimistic. Mr. Cashill provides chapter and verse of how individuals of no fame or wealth or power, have made a tremendous difference for good in searching out the truth. They have been called a “coalition of willing Lilliputians”–the Lilliputians, we remember, were the little people of Gulliver’s Travels–and that humorous name is fitting. One person can always make a tremendous difference for good. This fact should encourage each one of us to strive to become such a highly principled person. Plus it’s just the right thing to do anyway!

8/If the Christian church would reform, the consequences would be enormous. The potential among Christians is enormous, if we have been regenerated and have begun even the first tentative steps of conversion. But to reform, we are going to have to face some painful truths about ourselves. We have not been ready to do that. People who are inhabited by the Holy Spirit have enormous potential, if we love truth and pursue it. Christ promised us that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all the truth (John 16:13). But the evidence is clear: if we don’t care much about the truth, the Holy Spirit doesn’t waste much of His time in trying to guide us. We bear personal responsibility. It seems that if we want only a little bit of truth, the Holy Spirit will acquiesce in our decision. If we want “all” the truth then the Holy Spirit will roll up His sleeves, spit on His hands, and go to work on us.

9/We have lots of deadly poisons in our Christian medicine chest. Among them are pietism, antinomianism, amillennialism, and dispensationalism. We need to march into the bathroom and begin throwing away these deadly poisons, just for a start. We have dosed ourselves with these quack medications for decades. What will replace them? Search the Bible, and maybe some good ideas will begin to crop up. Theological profundity begins with wanting to do God’s will. Jesus Christ said of His own teaching: ‘”If any man is willing to do His [God the Father’s] will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself.”‘ (John 7:17)

10/All the distressing facts we learn about our leaders and our media from reading Unmasking Obama are painful–but learning all this can also be a blessing in disguise. Just from reading this one book, any person of normal intelligence can begin to understand how dangerous is our situation. Awareness of our situation has been lacking, for countless of our normal citizens. Once we know how wretched our condition is, then we will be more likely to act in a manner that changes that wretched condition. We can wake up! We have a lengthy task ahead of us: to rebuild (perhaps even extend) Christian civilization. Think of it as job security. Who doesn’t want job security?

The best price I could find for a used copy of Unmasking Obama today was $11.09 total at AbeBooks (sales tax additional). It is a reasonable price for an informative and thought-provoking book. Jack Cashill, by the way, has dedicated his book to “my fellow Lilliputians.” Lilliputians can make a difference for good.

One of the scariest prospects we can imagine is a one world government.

If we are not thinking clearly, it can seem like an attractive idea. “Finally we are getting organized around here! We’ll all be on the same page, rather than competing with one another.”

But if we are all on the same page, what if that page is a really bad page? A page like the Soviet Union under Lenin/Stalin, Germany under Hitler, the U.S. under Abraham Lincoln (620,000 dead bodies, and a formerly restrained republic morphing into an empire), or the U.S. under (fill in the blank with your least favorite recent U.S. president).

In fact, concentrated power held by human beings is intrinsically dangerous, because we human beings are very fallen creatures, and we cannot be trusted to do what is right. That is true of the worst of us, of course, but it is also true of the best of us. We are all potentially dangerous, we all can go badly wrong and harm others in an egregious fashion.

The only person worthy of holding concentrated power is the God of the Bible. If He is not worthy, we are doomed, because He does hold that power. Scripture testifies, as does world history, that God is good. But He is the only fully trustworthy person, when it comes to holding power.

Early on in man’s history, God understood that it was necessary to keep power split up among human beings. The history of the tower of Babel is very instructive. For the full story, check Genesis 11:1-9. The people all had the same language, and were acting together. I will quote only verse 6.

‘And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.”‘

God confused their language and scattered them over the whole earth.

That was very wise.

It is instinctive with a certain type of person to want to concentrate power–and to concentrate that power in his own hands. What “type” of person is that? It is a person without humility, and moreover often a person who enjoys pushing other people around.

Humility is a key virtue–and perhaps correspondingly rare.

Think about the elite people running our country today. Do any of them have humility? Of course not. Do they mind telling the rest of us what to do? No, they feel it is their right to do so, because they are smarter and more virtuous than the rest of us.

Are they really smarter and more virtuous? If they are so smart, why are they willing to fight against the good God of the Bible? Aren’t they smart enough to understand that there may be bad consequences for doing that? No, they think they are smarter than God, who probably, they theorize, does not exist anyway. So their “smartness” is of a certain limited variety. They are smart enough to seek and exercise power, but they are not smart enough to consider that they may be endangering and possibly destroying their own souls in the process. They lack humility, and as a result lack common sense. They are, ultimately, suicidal. All those who hate wisdom, love death (Proverbs 8:36).

A one world government is dangerous because there would be no place to escape to, when facing powerful tyranny. We need nations–lots of nations. Thousands would be better than hundreds.

Leopold Kohr understood, better than anyone else, that concentrated power was dangerous power. Big nations meant big bullies and big problems. Period. He fully understood that such a truth applied to the U.S. as well as to every nation. Can anyone looking at the history of the U.S. deny that he was correct? The United States, for example, has turned into the Soviet Union. We didn’t learn to avoid the example of the Soviet Union; we just became as foolish as they had been.

The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr can be obtained for about $11.70 plus sales tax, at AbeBooks. That is not cheap, but it is worth the price of admission. Kohr I believe to be thinking the thoughts of God after Him. He is Jewish, but speaks respectfully of Jesus Christ. St. Augustine is one of his heroes. I have discussed his book at length in my blog post for October 13, 2016.

One fact we need to keep in mind is that our elite, as a group, will never learn humility before God. I do think isolated individuals will learn, and will leave their folly. But we should not kid ourselves that we can persuade the elite to change their morality. It is their nature to hate humility, to hate God, and to hate the rest of us. They are the scorpion in the story of the scorpion and the frog. The following is taken from the Wikipedia article on the scorpion and the frog:

‘A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that they would both drown if the scorpion killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. The frog lets the scorpion climb on its back and begins to swim. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”‘

We ordinary people are the frog. We are going to get stung. If we say that the scorpion can act in opposition to his nature, we are lying to ourselves and setting up ourselves, our families, our friends, even our enemies, for disaster. We have to face reality: the scorpion is always going to be the scorpion, and he is always going to bring disaster on us.

Notice that the scorpion brings disaster on himself as well. How true that is in real life! How many scorpions would be better off is they learned humility before God, dropped their plans to boss us all around, and joined ordinary Christian people in trying to obey God in the way we live? All of them! All of them would be better off. But they will sting us, even if it means destruction for them as well. It is their nature to sting, to hate, to destroy, to be a parasite but eventually to kill the host on which they live, to consider themselves virtuous when they are the exact opposite of virtuous.

Kohr recounts a story of how one lady immediately understood the value of having lots of nations. This is from page 9 of the book mentioned above.

“One of the few ever to embrace the idea of division without reservations was an Italian lady from Siena. As a wartime refugee from Mussolini who had fled to London, she understood perhaps better than most that the vast unity of states imparted vastness also to the reach of terrorism and persecution. She alone seemed genuinely delighted at the prospect of a return to an Augustan world of small states. Clapping her hands, she exclaimed: ‘What a blessing! Imagine, you would have to flee a distance of only fifteen or twenty miles to reach the safety of exile.'”

We should be thinking like that nameless lady from Siena. Wouldn’t it be a blessing if, on the North American continent, there were 100 Christian nations here to which we could flee? I think it would.

The number 100 is arbitrary, but I chose a large number for a reason. We Christians need to watch ourselves like a hawk. None of us can be trusted very far with power. I take my own ideas seriously, and in the past two blog posts I gave some specifics of what a semi-sane Christian nation might look like. I think a country such as I posit would be a good place. But I would not want to be a conqueror imposing those ideas on a country. I want people to begin to agree with me after thinking for themselves for a long time. I want there to be 100 different Christian countries on this continent, not just one or two or three. I want to see the power split up. I don’t trust myself, and I don’t trust my Christian brothers and sisters. I know that at best we are only striving after semi-sanity.

We need to have humility before God. God scattered the people at Babel, and it is good to keep us scattered. If there are 100 Christian nations on this North American continent, and 10,000 Christian nations worldwide, that is safer than five or six or ten large Christian nations.

Meanwhile, we need to beware of those who want the earth organized under some sort of global government. They are scorpions. It is their nature to destroy.

Last week we theorized that it might be possible to move in the direction of having a semi-sane country. Not, I hasten to stress, that the U.S. as a whole could become semi-sane. That ship has sailed. No, the possible semi-sane nation I think could happen would be a small place of 40,000 to 50,000 to 500,000 people, somewhere on the North American continent. The morally bankrupt and financially bankrupt U.S. and A. might be forced by circumstances to break up. If that happens, there could be many small countries. There might even be 100 small nations which wanted to be self-consciously Christian. At 50,000 per country (times 100) adding up to 5,000,000 people, that would leave 320,000,000 to carry on the traditional humanist and antinomian-Christian warmongering, baby-killing, welfare state, sexually perverse, soul destroying traditions we have come to know and love in the U.S. The tiny band of self-consciously Christian nations will not be trying to push the 320,000,000 around. How could we, anyway, given our minute numbers?

Last week we began to think about what a semi-sane state might look like. Let’s continue.

I picture a semi-sane Christian state as one in which every professing Christian is committed to tithing to the church. Tithing is the easiest spiritual exercise anyone can do. Any numbskull can give one-tenth of his income toward the visible church. If we are not willing to do even that small job, we are not likely to be a very wise Christian nation. Of course it would be impractical to expect immediate perfection in this regard. As a Christian people, we are used to giving about 2.5% of our increase to the church (see emptytomb.org), and our consciences will need to have a two by four up the side of the head before we begin to understand what is at stake. We will understand gradually, however, and eventually Christians in semi-sane countries will move toward a situation in which most believers are tithing. If we aren’t tithing, then we probably won’t last long, because tithing is the easiest thing we can do. If we aren’t tithing, we won’t be doing other, more spiritually challenging things.

In a semi-sane nation, everybody would work. There would be no welfare state destruction of our spirit. The church and individuals will handle situations in which people face financially devastating hard providences. God did not create us so that we could be living on the labor of others. He created us so that we could become fully responsible human beings who want to help Him build the kingdom of God.

A semi-sane nation will have honest money. That means silver and/or gold. No more Federal Reserve creating money out of thin air, reducing the value of the money working people earn. If we have honest money, we will eventually begin to be surprised to find that savers are blessed. Unlike now in the U.S. kleptocracy, where savers are suckers having their wealth stolen by the inflation encouraged by the welfare/warfare state.

There will be no fractional reserve banking. If we are semi-wise enough to want to have honest money, we will likely also be semi-wise enough to know that fractional reserve banking is inherently dangerous. It can lead to people losing their savings, when banks fail.

People will educate their children at their own expense. There will be no public education at any level.

There will be no prisons. There will be short-term jails. Criminals will be dealt with according to biblical principles, which means there is no need for prisons. Restitution will be the pattern for crimes of theft and property damage. Murderers and rapists will be executed. This will lead, gradually but fairly quickly, to people deciding not to murder or rape–or to do it in some country other than a semi-sane Christian country. Which will protect a lot of people living in those semi-sane countries.

As a corollary, drunk driving will be rare. Because if you drive drunk and kill someone, you are executed. You won’t drive drunk again.

Wife-beaters will be whipped. I am told this is barbarian and could never happen, even in a Christian country. I don’t think it is barbarian, and I think it could happen. The Bible permitted whipping for some crimes, and it seems that whipping is most practical and fair for some crimes. Do you fine a wife-beater? Keep him in jail for a good long time (which gives him a vacation from working, at public expense)? No, you give him stripes, which helps him understand that we don’t permit men to beat on women in our benighted, backward, simple-minded Christian countries. Call us hopeless romantics, or call us Neanderthal barbarians, or call us both, if it makes you feel better.

No semi-sane Christian nation will wage preemptive war on another nation. I fully understand that warmongering Christians have given permission to the U.S. to attack other nations. But those Christians are not striving after semi-sanity. Remember, I am positing Christian nations in which people really want to be semi-sane. That will include taking seriously the Christian principle that we leave other people alone. If we fight, it is only in self-defense. Therefore we will stay home, cultivating our vines and fig trees, and quite willing to leave other nations alone to do whatever their god calls them to do.

Taxes will be small in semi-sane nations. The civil government will have only a few functions, and so it will not require a lot of money. Taxes on this continent before the American Revolution were under 2%–even lower than England’s taxes (5% to 7%) at the time. We could get back to taxes in the 2% to 5% range, pretty easily. No public education, no welfare state, no prisons, no huge military–those reforms start to add up to saving a lot of public money, very quickly. People will be able to do what they want with the money they earn–save it, spend it foolishly or wisely, invest it, give it away. The civil government will not steal it from them.

I picture a semi-sane country as one in which the people in the churches care about their Christian neighbors (and non-Christian neighbors!) enough to interact in their lives. I’ve been in the Christian community almost 50 years. You can see a lot by watching, as Yogi Berra might say. Do we help those–even those in our churches–who are struggling? Do we help someone get a job when what he needs most of all is to go out to work rather than stay home living off his parents? Do we care enough about people to get to know them? Do we try to find the gifts others have, and encourage them to employ those gifts to make the church stronger and the world a better place? We all know the answer to those questions is that we stay home in our fragmented fragments, and we have nothing to do with other people other than to meet them for church one hour a week. Nor do we actively seek to help non-Christians. But I am saying here that our striving after semi-sanity will incline us to begin to act differently.

A people striving after semi-sanity will begin to be active rather than passive. We will have a vision of where we want to get, and we will move in that direction.

Okay, that is a picture of what a semi-sane country might look like. None of this is pie in the sky impossible stuff. Bad things will still happen in semi-sane countries. There will be theft, murder, rape, violence, horrific accidents, and sadness. But in semi-sane countries we will be moving toward a better world. There will still be murders, but there will be fewer murders. There will still be rapes, but there will be fewer rapes. Just to begin with, remember, we are immediately going to stop killing unborn children. That alone will lift our spirits and encourage us. We can improve our lives and the lives of our neighbors, in countless ways, when we begin to take seriously the teaching of God in the Bible.

Christian adults really could start to move toward having countries which are semi-sane. And remember also that I said might look like, I didn’t say absolutely without fail would look like. Any country wanting to be semi-sane will find its own Christian ways of behaving, which might in certain regards look different from the vision I have. I’m just this guy. But there will need to be a desire to move toward God’s will, and the Bible’s teaching will have to be our guide, or we’re going to continue to present to the world a passive, antinomian, pietist brand of Christianity not worth the expense of the powder to blow it to hell.

I’ve been on written record since 2017 with my theory that everybody is crazy. (Read, or better yet, buy, my book The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It: Essays.) I haven’t seen anything to tempt me to drop my theory, which I have held for quite a few years beginning long before 2017.

Does that include Christians? Are Christians also crazy? Yes. In some ways we are worse than non-Christians, because we have advantages the non-Christians don’t have. After all, we have the written instructions of the Bible, we supposedly have been regenerated and converted, we supposedly have the Holy Spirit inhabiting us–and yet we still think and act in nutty ways. Practical experience confirms that Christians are not overly sane. Just spend time among us for a while, and you will see what I mean. So yes, everybody is crazy.

Having said that, I have also said that there are degrees of insanity, and that all of us can strive for semi-sanity. I strongly doubt that full sanity can be gained until after death. But semi-sanity I believe to be a feasible goal for all of us.

Today, then, I propose to have some fun by trying to find out what a semi-sane country might look like.

In the first place, a semi-sane country would be self-consciously Christian. It is complete drivel to say that there can be separation of religion and state. Every state enforces the laws of its god. It can not do otherwise. Sadly, we Christians, in our insanity, have not understood this obvious point. But, as we strive to move toward semi-sanity, I think we have a puncher’s chance of understanding this at last. We can have one or many countries where the God of the Bible is the foundation of the nation.

A semi-sane Christian country would likely be rather small. At a guess, 40,000 to 200,000 per country. Sparta in the classical period had a population of 40,000 to 50,000, and they got a lot done–not all of it good, of course!–with that small a population. According to the Internet, many Greek city-states were smaller. Athens, on the other hand, had anywhere from 350,000 to 600,000 people in that era of history. Christian nations also could be bigger than 40K. (Or smaller!) But small is better and more sustainable than huge. Leopold Kohr, in his wonderful book The Breakdown of Nations, explains why that is so. But common sense should teach us that as well: once you get too big, bad things happen. The U.S. is exhibit A.

Notice that positing one (or several) small Christian nations on the North American continent, leaves the humanists alone in their teeming millions. Of the 325,000,000 Americans of the U.S. variety, perhaps 320,000,000 would be quite content to worship their god (man) and enforce his laws. Fine. That still would leave 5,000,000 Christians to have their small self-consciously Christian countries where the God of the Bible was the one setting the rules. Why, we could have 100 small countries of 50,000 each, and we would not be trying to boss around the 320,000,000 who weren’t interested in our kinds of nations.

Would the 320,000,000 really leave us alone? Well, many of them wouldn’t want to. But the U.S. seems to be heading for a financial disaster of unprecedented proportions. Bankruptcy might mean that there could be a serious reorganization of how the North American continent is organized. We can plan for and hope for freedom, and circumstances (Providence?) might some day work in our favor. If the welfare/warfare state implodes financially, we might be surprised to find that we have a chance to have our own countries. Remember, I’m having fun here. I refuse to look on the dark side, at least for a few hours. And not all the 320,000,000 would necessarily be our enemies. Quite a few of them might be willing to leave us alone. Some of them would probably even be Christians themselves, moderately sympathetic to our goals and willing to try to restrain the democommunazis among the 320,000,000. So let’s press on in hope. Idiotic hope, perhaps, but hope.

In a semi-sane country, the standard of justice would be based on the teachings of the Bible. What other morality makes sense? God gave us standards of justice that are wise. He did it for our good. Moreover, we are capable–or semi-capable, at least–of recognizing justice when we see it. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, and so on, all kind of make sense to us because they are attuned to the sense of justice which God created in us. Sometimes this is called natural law. I am not fond of the phrase natural law. I see justice as emanating from the character of God. But I can understand how one could believe that there is something called natural law. Because God did, after all, give us a sense of justice that may seem natural to us. It is not really natural in the sense of existing apart from God; it comes from God. But we won’t quarrel too much on the point. We have much more important things about which to quarrel.

In a semi-sane nation there would be no open false worship, no anti-Christian “freedom of religion.” No open false worship was the standard set in Old Testament Israel, and it makes perfect logical sense. Remember, we are not trying to boss the whole world around. We are just trying to honor our God–the God of the Bible, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–in our own small self-consciously Christian country. That leads to the next point.

In our semi-sane nation, anyone may leave. Enemies of God are encouraged to leave, in fact. Non-Christians may stay–this well might vary from country to country, of course–but they will need to remember that the tail should not wag the dog. There will be countless places on this continent where people who hate God will be welcome, will be considered sophisticated and cool, will be free to advocate and commit all sorts of evil nonsense. But in our little semi-sane country, you will not be welcome. You can leave. Come back when you are ready to grow up.

While those who don’t like our Christian theonomic state–they prefer a humanist theonomic state, or some other kind of theonomic state, because every state is without exception a theonomic state–are quite free to leave us, we do not have an open border policy. We will let in who we want to let in, neither more nor less. We will be the exact opposite of the current U.S., where open borders are the basic standard. Which means, for the U.S., we no longer have our own country. We have the country that the elite humanists want us to have. But that is not the country our semi-sane country will have. We will have our own country. Our dog will be tiny, but he will wag the tail; the tail will not wag the dog.

In our semi-sane country (hopefully, several countries) there will be no abortion. We won’t kill unborn babies. A country which permits the murder of children, born or unborn, is so completely nutty, so morally dead, that it can be salvaged from the ash heap of history only by repenting and changing its behavior. Such a country is suicidal, if unconsciously so. That is the U.S. right now. But our semi-sane country won’t be like that. As soon as we began killing unborn children, we would immediately cease to be a self-consciously Christian country. But we won’t fall that far. We are striving for semi-sanity, remember. Which means we know that we can’t kill children. And, just for sixty seconds or so, take time out and imagine living in a country where children, born or unborn, were safe from being murdered. Where every child conceived would be protected and valued as a blessing from God. The psychological benefit of living in such a country might be surprisingly large. Or maybe it wouldn’t be surprising at all. Maybe we should expect that benefit.

I will try to wrap this up next week, in part II.