The Bee in Our Bonnet
The linguistic subversion of Joel Berry’s “creedal nationalism”
Joel Berry, Managing Editor of the Babylon Bee, is punching right at Auron MacIntyre over the issue of Israel and nationalism again, and it’s time to deal with this tiresome fool:
https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/1859221344874881101
Harsh? Perhaps, but in the third act of the Trump story, in this pivotal moment, there’s simply no time left to tolerate laggards and dullards like Joel Berry. There is much to accomplish, and all resistance must be obliterated.
To begin, Joel Berry is responding to this quote from Auron MacIntyre, describing Joel Berry’s attitude towards Israel:
“Joel Berry is a rabid ethnonationalist.”
– Auron MacIntyre
He counters this argument with this screenshot:
But what does he think an American is?
Answer:
America as a creedal nation is a great idea I truly believe in. The problem is we haven’t taught, passed down, enforced, or required allegiance to the creed—and that needs to change.
The reason Joel Berry deserves to be treated so harshly is that he doesn’t even understand basic concepts like “nation.” A nation is an ethnic group, and all ethnic groups have a country or land that they belong to and a land that they originate from. An ethnic group is a group of people of the same culture and race. In fact, all of these words are redundant and mean the same thing, and their multiplicity is actually a form of subversion. The word gender SHOULD have the same meaning as sex, but it doesn’t because the very reason “gender” was created was to subvert the meaning of sex. Likewise, nation, ethnicity, culture, and race are all treated as having different meanings. Consider a phrase you’ve probably seen or heard, “cultural arts.” This is synonymous with “ethnic arts,” “national arts,” or “racial arts.”
The Nuremberg Moral Paradigm runs deep, and everyone will feel a little uncomfortable about that last one. But this is simply the fact of the matter.
Being born into a nation is an inextricable part of one’s identity, unlike “creed.” What would it even mean to have a nation based on a creed? Do people who renounce that creed lose national status upon doing so? Is Auron MacIntyre not an American because he apparently doesn’t believe the same “creed” that Joel Berry asserts is the crux of being an American? It doesn’t make any sense, and there is no consistent test one can apply for this type of nationalism, because it is not nationalism; it is nonsense.
Joel Berry must also be ruthlessly castigated for his talk of skin color in relation to nationalism:
What I’m against is white nationalism. I think skin color is a stupid thing to base “ethnos” on. And because I believe skin color is irrelevant, Auron will straw-man me and say that must mean I believe America is just an “economic zone” or “tax farm” or slander me as a multiculturalist.
NO ONE believes that an ethnos, or a race, or a culture, or a nation is based on something as superficial as skin color. Skin color is just one obvious way that you can tell two people are of different races, but that’s it.
Assuming he isn’t stupid, the reason he presents a false choice between racial “purity” and multiculturalism is because he believes culture is inextricably linked to race, or as many of his followers always tell me on here, “culture is downstream from race.” I disagree with that statement. I think it’s not only wrong scientifically, I think it is a godless error of materialism that denies the Imago Dei and reduces men to products of their DNA.
Joel Berry plays this tiresome game of the fake Christian shit test, wherein their opponent is accused of heresy. This is a weak attempt to outflank from the right, but all it achieves is to demonstrate the point that Joel Berry has no idea what a nation, culture, or race is. You only get these arguments about “skin color” and “DNA” from people who are ignorant. There’s no nation that is based solely on DNA, skin color, or, to use one of his own ridiculous straw men, “green eyes.”
Likewise, he’s not being honest in this thread, because as he is playing the “which whites” game, he is simultaneously asserting that his “nationalism” is “creedal,” for which there is no test. At least one can actually test someone’s DNA! There is no verifiable test for “creed.” So his arguments fall completely flat by his own standards.
Again, a nation is not merely a strand of DNA; this is reductionist and materialist, and Joel Berry is only invoking this in order to accuse Auron MacIntyre of not being as good a Christian as Joel Berry.
And he has the gall to call Auron MacIntyre a “snake.”
The creedal nation idea is among the dumbest that Con Inc has come up with. Every nation has their own sets of beliefs and expressions about how they perceive the world, but obviously these guys won’t apply that to Germans, Japanese, or Nigerians saying if you accept their creeds you can easily become one. The fact that we see when they immigrate to countries like the United States and still maintain their way of thinking and pass it down to the children for many generations should give pause to the idea that simply changing one’s beliefs and culture is as straightforward as Joel wants us to think and instead recognize that maybe there is a giant component of your heritage influencing the way you see the world.
I find it ironic that Joel's long tweet not only does not refute what Auron says in the video but confirms all of it.