Joel Berry Needs to Stick to Satire (and That’s No Joke)

He misconstrues the motives of those who would still fight for hearth and home.

By guest contributor TJ Martinell.

Joel Berry is the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire news site. While people debate the quality of its humor, I personally find it to be pretty funny most of the time.

The problem is when Berry decides to wade into serious matters and speak from a serious perspective on topics that are fundamental in their nature.

Recently, he posted the following on Twitter (no, I’m not calling it X):

There is a reason the Left has been teaching anti-white racism to kids in school for 20 years. Their goal has always been to create reactionary white supremacists to act as a foil for their communist movement.

Berry needs to stick to satire, because that’s what he is good at. These statements are reckless and dangerous, considering the hour we are in. Others like him in this regard must also remain silent.

I know nothing of Berry’s life circumstances, but I do wonder whether he or anyone he cares about is even suffering from anti-American propaganda in such a way that would provoke his male protective instinct. When someone you care about is being hurt by someone else, you don’t just have compassion for your loved one; you have anger towards the person engaging in the abuse. Righteous anger is not only acceptable, but in many situations, it is the only moral response.

It is this anger that Berry finds uncomfortable, because there is moral strength in it.

But first, let’s explore the absurdity of Berry’s argument. He is effectively communicating that if you are angry at the hate being spewed out toward you and others like you due to your ethnicity and oppose it, then that means you want to impose yourself on anyone who is not your ethnicity, i.e., “supremacy.”

How ridiculous can this be?

He didn’t say what I just described, but it’s about what is being conveyed within the totality of the situation. He talks about “white nationalism” (which really means “American,” because Europeans are white, but they are not one of us) within our current crisis as if there is some growing movement advocating for ethnic supremacy and Americans’ supposed right to rule over other ethnicities. There is no supremacist movement of any kind whatsoever, outside of a ten-person, FBI-run Discord chatroom.

As I’ve written before, Americans have had everything thrown at us that can be thrown at a people, apart from mass violence. Groups such as VDARE which advocate for Americans are destroyed through government persecution. Simply writing “It’s okay to be white” is considered a hate crime. A local lawmaker in Oklahoma was recently voted out of office for his past affiliations with an identitarian organization.

On what planet does Berry think a white supremacist movement is on the verge of offering any form of pushback? Berry is attacking a bogeyman to maintain a centralist position, which requires extremes on both sides.

Berry is also targeting what can only be described as members of a specific family who believe they have a right to advocate for themselves — in their own home, no less. A person’s view on nationalism is really a broader expansion of his view of the family, because every home is its own nation. Does Berry think it is unacceptable to advocate for one’s own child, to prioritize his wants, needs, and priorities over those of others? Does he see it as hateful to love your child or parent more than someone else’s child or parent, simply because you are biologically related? Would he allow strangers to enter his house and put them before his own offspring or spouse, even as others are caring for those strangers as well?

It’s ironic that the editor of a Christian satire site would promote such an attitude, because the Bible literally says that anyone who doesn’t care for the needs of his own family, especially his immediate family, is worse than an unbeliever. That means that if you’re not putting your sons and daughters first at minimum, you’re worse than someone outside the church. That naturally means that you will put their priorities over those of their peers, because they are not your children and not your responsibility.

But Christians are also commanded to look out for their own family. When a group of people collectively have the same priorities due to a shared identity rooted in familial relations, they advocate collectively. This is the essence of nationalism.

How many American Christians, when they die thinking they’ve fought the good fight, will instead be confronted with their abject failure in this regard? From a Biblical perspective, it is not just acceptable for American Christians to put their families first; it is a mandate.

Calling this belief on a collective scale “supremacist” rhetoric is heretical on its face. Berry should consider how, if he perchance enters the Pearly Gates, his wife will not be his wife anymore, as there is no marriage in Heaven. However, in Heaven there will be people “of every tribe and every tongue and every nation,” meaning our national identities will exist in eternity.

One might argue that the Biblical passage about family doesn’t relate to nationalism, but it is the inevitable conclusion of it in a broad, general sense. And right now, Americans are not allowed to operate this way, let alone speak or think like that, without drawing persecution or condemnation.

It’s not about denying others their right to advocate for themselves. It’s about having what others already have, in both their own countries and in ones to which they voluntarily immigrated.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they included a Preamble that states its objectives, one of which was to secure “the blessings of liberty.” They wrote these words to secure such things for “ourselves and our posterity.”

This was a group of fathers ensuring safeguards for their children’s inheritance (another Biblical commandment, I might add). The descendants of those children have had their inheritance stolen from them, and some have the temerity to want it back. They do not want to be subjected to hate by those who stole it. They want to regain it or some portion of it so they might pass their inheritance on to their children.

This isn’t about physical land so much as all the intangible things the Founders fought for during the Revolution that have been destroyed or ruined.

The purpose of anti-American rhetoric and curriculum is obvious. It’s to dehumanize American children, to strip them of their dignity and make them feel ashamed for who they are, and lose hope for their own future. It’s also to maintain a cohesive identity for ethnicities that might otherwise feud with one another.

Without hatred of Americans, they have little to hold their coalition together.

Teaching anyone to feel ashamed of his or her race is evil, including when the federal government did this to the Native Americans via forced assimilation and compulsory education. Fun fact: the U.S. military officer who ran one of these schools also invented the word racism to describe opposition to such efforts.

Berry — rather than trying to misconstrue the motives of those who, despite the seeming hopelessness of our situation, would still fight for hearth and home — should be enraged at this evil being committed against Americans in their own country, financed through their tax dollars and carried out by their government that was originally created to protect their rights.

But he can’t, which is why he needs to stick to satire, where he belongs.