Al Perrotta is off today.

Even Christians were somewhat offended by the blatantly anti-Muslim antics at the opening ceremonies that launched the Paris Olympics last Friday. Having a morbidly obese lesbian dress up as Muhammad and mock Islam’s self-styled prophet in the hours before his death? That seemed a bit crass and vicious, even for something encouraged by France’s newly elected right-wing government. Cowed Muslims, aware that they’re still a small minority in France, issued some hand-wringing protests, and didn’t seem wholly mollified by the Olympics Committee’s “sorry/not-sorry” apology afterward.

Wait, my editor’s telling me I got a couple facts wrong in the paragraph above. To save time (we’re really busy here), instead of laboriously correcting all those assertions, let’s just do this: For “Muslim” above plug in “Christian,” and for “Muhammad” swap in “Jesus.” Now it all makes sense.

The Olympics deleted all the footage because they don’t want you to see their sick, satanic, degenerate opening ceremony.

X, you know what to do! pic.twitter.com/ZjpCaizdva

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 28, 2024

Because of course the pro-abortion, open-borders, Marxist-allied government in France and the Olympics Committee consisting of woke French leftist elitists would never mock the Muslims. They like their heads’ ongoing connection to their necks — though they’re not averse to mocking the judicial murder of the innocent, apolitical Queen Marie Antoinette by rabid leftists in 1793. Today’s French Republic was born in a frenzy of hatred, open blasphemy, and vicious ethnic cleansing — as I wrote here to mark Bastille Day several years ago. (To their credit, Muslims have actually denounced the Paris blasphemy for their own religious reasons.)

Do we as Christians envy the Muslims’ immunity from persecution? We wouldn’t want to buy it at the price they’re willing to pay — making ourselves good and feared through acts of violence and bullying. (To be fair, they’d just be imitating the thin-skinned warlord Muhammad himself.)

We also must guard against the all-too-human temptation of tribalism, which urges us to see attacks on Christ primarily as offenses against our pride, which we ought to respond to like a slap across the face. If that were all such public blasphemies amounted to, we know how we’d have to respond: by turning the other one.

No, such attacks are far, far worse than that, and merit a radically different response. Attacks on Jesus Christ may seem like insults by members of one tribe (degenerate secularists) against another (Christians). But dig just beneath the surface, and what you see lurking there is infinitely darker: mockery of the One who created the universe and crafted the human race, then suffered and died to redeem it. The hatred that pulsed through those crude, ludicrous rituals we saw broadcast from Paris isn’t human in origin. It’s pumped through weak human vessels by preternatural spirits, who hate the God who cast them out of Heaven, hate every human soul, hate creation, hate me and you — and also hate Muslims, Jews, even the pagans themselves, all of whom they hope to drag indiscriminately to Hell.

So yes, we should boycott, protest, complain, and make appalling nuisances of ourselves to try to deter such offensive filth in the future. But as we do, we need to remember the exquisite goodness and kindness of Jesus Himself, who said from the cross to the Father regarding the men who still mocked Him as He died: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That mercy is what we fight for, and what we will suffer to defend — and extend to the broken souls who blaspheme it and surely need it the most.

And God is watching, and moving. In the wake of the crass, neopagan, pansexual ceremonies in that city, the metropolis was hit with a mysterious power outage that plunged Paris into the dark — with just one exception: the Shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was built in the 19^th century by French believers to expiate the evils of the French Revolution. Its light just wouldn’t go out:

During the power outage in Paris, notice the thing that’s still fully lit: Sacre Coeur Church.

Zoom in on the dark photo.

Incredible find by @GalahadofMalta, especially in context of the Olympics anti-Christian opening. pic.twitter.com/g1KPRzrone

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) July 28, 2024

Why We Fight

It’s not going to be easy to be Christlike in this fight. And we need to prayerfully consider which face of Christ we need to model in different situations. With the broken and the helpless, we must be like Him with the woman caught in adultery, or ignorant Roman soldiers. With the prideful and the powerful, we might well have to channel the voice of Jesus confronting the Pharisees. And with faithless pastors who corrupt or sell out the Church, we might well have to overturn some money changers’ tables in the temple.

That’s what first-rate Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham did in her new book, Shepherds for Sale, which documents in grim detail how many prominent Christians used their prestige and power to serve Caesar and Mammon instead of souls. They pimped for the Dead Baby Vax, denied election fraud, and made false charges of “racism” against their critics … and all in the name of “winsomeness” and “evangelizing the culture.” Look for a Stream review coming soon, but in the meantime be sure to check out Basham’s book — which is already getting its publisher “cease and desist” letters from some of the Sadducees she exposed.

Some day, I will tell you all about the efforts that went on *behind* the scenes to stop this book from being published. Even as recently as a few days ago, publisher was still receiving cease and desist letters. God has been very good to me in shepherding this project to finish…

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) July 27, 2024

What We Fight

Yes, first and foremost we fight against wicked spirits of destruction. As I’ve said many times on social media, “Don’t demonize our political enemies. The principalities and powers that possess them like the Gadarene swine have already seen to that.” But we also face human opponents, devotees and dupes and victims of those same spirits. And what we face isn’t pretty. It requires a this-worldly response. If you want a little snapshot of the haughty, intolerant, inquisitorial attitude that pervades our elites and media, you couldn’t do better than this little clip from a confrontation on an airline:

This is beautiful!

An arrogant woman from Portland harassed a young Trump supporter and got kicked off the plane.pic.twitter.com/dEwLfZU0O4

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) July 27, 2024

How They Fight

I’ve written often here about Anarcho-Tyranny. That’s the political tactic from the original Nazi playbook which weaponizes the law selectively against one set of citizens, while letting another set act as they please. It boils down to “Anarchy for me, tyranny for thee.” And it was unleashed on national scale in 2020, from the persecution of Jake Gardner and later the January 6 protestors to the lawfare against former President Donald Trump and his supporters. But the perfect storm of anarcho-tyranny was the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots, which saw violent mobs assaulting entire cities — and going unpunished for it. Kamala Harris is the anarcho-tyranny queen, a fact which her campaign machine and media toadies are trying to erase. Social media censors are actively denying the plain fact that Harris raised money to bail out the violent looters who burned our cities.

Donald Trump, Jr., made a powerful video to document this fact, and hang it around Harris’s neck as a millstone. Don’t miss it:

Here’s another important clip which Don, Jr. unearthed, where Kamala Harris wonders aloud if young people should even have children thanks to climate change:

🚨WATCH: Resurfaced video shows Kamala Harris suggesting that young people should not have children due to climate change

She calls climate anxiety “the fear of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children.” pic.twitter.com/i7z7MY09yM

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 27, 2024

Along The Stream:

Please bless yourself by watching James Robison’s powerful message on the real meaning of freedom.

Later this morning, make sure to read Shane Idleman’s powerful letter to President Trump on how to address immigration and other issues fruitfully.

On another site (at the wonderful Chronicles Magazine) Jason Jones and I offer unsolicited advice to President Trump on what he should say to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Gaza siege, and its impact on local Christians.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.