Dynasties often prove to be disappointing. Sometimes it’s straight-up inbreeding, which afflicted the otherwise worthy Habsburgs, producing as distant heirs of the great Charles V … impotent dwarf-kings in seventeenth-century Spain. Sometimes it’s just the petering out of a once-impressive bloodline, which yielded as the heir of William the Conqueror the bloodless Charles III, who currently grins as Britain liquidates itself right before our eyes.

More often the rot sets in faster and has more complex explanations. How did the brilliant Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer produce the oafish liberal apologist Franky Schaeffer, who has spent his life proving that he’s no carbon copy of his father? (We get it, Franky. Point taken!) How did Billy Graham’s family generate a member of Evangelicals for Biden who has just endorsed Kamala Harris? Most shockingly to me, how did two patriotic geniuses, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol, combine to make the shallow warmongering NeverTrump opportunist Bill Kristol? I wrote him on X to this effect:

The gap in IQ, character, patriotism and MANHOOD is greater between Irving Kristol and @BillKristol than between Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor.

— JackoWilliams64 (@JackoWilliams64) September 16, 2024

Bill didn’t reply. Which struck me as … rude.

We see something just as sad in the current controversy raised by some great-nephews and nieces of the courageous theologian and anti-Nazi prophet Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They’re speaking up to protest the new film about his life, which was inspired by Eric Metaxas’s justly celebrated 2010 biography. So far as I can see, none raised any concerns when the book came out, which got Barack Obama to invite Metaxas as speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast. (Eric gave Barack an earful.)

Don’t Play with Eric. He Has the Cooties!

No one has raised any serious issues with Metaxas’s scholarship or theology in the book. In fact, it has graced the coffee tables of countless NPR progressives. Like the regime Christians who crave their approval and funding over at Christianity Today, such people like to congratulate themselves that they are courageous and countercultural for marching in lockstep with the views of the Deep State, Google, Harvard, Facebook, the mainstream media, and all the most powerful institutions that rule us — while scorning the views and interests of blue-collar workers and besieged conservative Christians. It’s as if John the Baptist had spent his life as a courtier cultivating Pilate, Caiaphas, and Herod while preening as a prophet because he stood up to the smelly Zealots.

So what happened to turn Metaxas from a scrupulous scholar and gracious writer whom everybody wanted to sidle up alongside into a “dangerous” propagandist for “political violence” and “Christian Nationalism,” as the Bonhoeffer clan’s slanderous statement claims?

He supported Donald Trump. That’s it. He backed the same candidate as at least half of his fellow citizens, who offered some support for their political concerns and moral stands.

That was all it took. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a Manichean instrument, which operates like the cooties in second grade. Once you’ve gotten the cooties, there’s no way to wash them off. You have simply been transferred from the “cool” to the “gross” set of people, and now you must be shunned. The price of refusing to shun the cootie-positive? Of course, you will be diagnosed as having the cooties yourself. The same logic dominated the Salem witch trials, where those who questioned the guilt of some poor old crone who’d been arrested were accused of consorting with Satan as well.

The Enforcers of the Deep State and Our Elites

That’s how vicious mobs operate, and have operated through all our fallen history. Nor is it rare for elites to lead such mobs. The cruel antisemitism that taints Christendom’s history was often whipped up by noblemen, even bishops. As late as 1910, the Russian tsar and his government were encouraging pogroms and distributing the forgery they’d produced, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was all a tool of social control.

The current mob of Bonhoeffer relatives is simply echoing the official ideology of elites in Western Europe, enforced by aggressive censorship and political imprisonment. You have read here that peaceful British citizens are going to prison for questioning mass Muslim immigration, and that the fastest-growing German political party Alliance for Germany (AfD) is on the verge of being outlawed as quasi-Nazi for promoting the exact policies of the Christian Democratic Party in 1980. You know that here in the U.S., violent mobs of looters linked with Black Lives Matter and Antifa went completely unpunished while old ladies who waved American flags on the grounds outside our Capitol on January 6 are getting long prison terms.

What’s particularly rich in the case of the Metaxas smear is that the German elites whose bidding the Bonhoeffer mob enforce aren’t terribly fond of Jews. They welcomed hundreds of thousands of bitterly antisemitic Muslim refugees, whose Jew-hatred they won’t censor. They constantly criticize Israel, not for the real abuses that rogue IDF soldiers commit against local Christians, but merely for defending itself against the genocidal Hamas. Christians who resist the LGBTQ ideology or try to homeschool their kids find no sympathy in such circles.

False Lessons from the Holocaust

Eric Metaxas, in his bestselling books Letter to the American Church and Religionless Christianity, tried to apply the principles that motivated Bonhoeffer to our current state of affairs. That includes resistance to the powerful when their policies threaten justice and coopt the Gospel on Mammon’s behalf.

In 1930s Germany, the powerful were the racialist, pagan Right. In the West today it’s the globalist, plutocratic Left. Now it’s not race cranks but gender cranks conducting cruel sexual experiments on children. The hatred of Jews doesn’t come from the Thule Society but from the Muslim Brotherhood. The attack on parental rights comes not from the Hitler Youth but Big Pharma and sex-crazed educators.

Eric has the courage to say all this, to say that if Bonhoeffer were alive today, he’d be standing with the peaceful, wrongfully imprisoned January 6 defendants — not the FBI agents who goaded and entrapped them. He’d be standing with pro-lifers imprisoned for silently praying near abortion clinics, and parents stripped of their children for refusing to let them be castrated.

Our Western elites can’t tolerate that. They want to serve us pre-packaged, politicized lessons from the Nazis and the Holocaust — to draw from that long nightmare only the conclusion that Western patriotism can be dangerous, white tribalism is wicked, and Jews shouldn’t be persecuted by “Aryans.” Try to look any deeper to see how mass delusion corrupts the truth, elite brainwashing is toxic, or Muslim bigotry threatens religious freedom, and you will find yourself smeared as a “danger to democracy” who deserves to be silenced.

All that the Bonhoeffer mob has managed to prove is that they’re same kind of people their great-uncle warned against back in the 1930s: carnivorous sheep, trotting tamely behind the costumed wolves who lead them.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.