Don Lemon and the viral Cities Church invasion: A political trap
Politics is 99% optics and 1% substance. This is rarely more true than last Sunday’s invasion of a church service by leftist agitators.
The bare facts are simple enough. A number of leftists stormed an Evangelical church, claiming one of the pastors was an ICE agent. As best I can determine in the fog of war, none of the pastors work for ICE, but that’s almost an afterthought at this point. What matters is the optics. Leftists, led by none other than Don Lemon, stormed a church service. It fits beautifully into some carefully prepared stereotypes. And that’s the problem.
You see, the Left has been living by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for a long time. They’ve just updated editions to a manual called Beautiful Trouble. There is a whole website associated with the book that provides activist training in four languages, plus English. One of the book's major principles is forcing your enemy's hand. They phrase it as “the real action is your target’s reaction”.[1] In other words, what the Marxist agitators do is not the real goal. The real goal is what they cause their enemies to do in response.
Another principle of Beautiful Trouble is to put targets in a decision dilemma. In other words, it’s the classic heads I win, tails you lose. The goal is to force a target into a lose-lose situation. Oftentimes, this is achieved by something called mid-level violence. They do something offensive (drag queen story hours, for example) and hope that their opponent responds by ramping up the force. If you have a sibling, you may have experienced this as a child if your sibling ever played the “I’m not touching you” card while dangling their finger an inch from your nose. You have two choices: slap the hand away, in which case the sibling runs crying to mom, or tattle to mom yourself, which probably won’t go anywhere because they didn’t touch you. Or you can try to ignore it, which is surprisingly hard.
Understanding midlevel violence explains why leftists act the way they do. It’s why they scream at police and ICE. The hope is that they can provoke a disproportionate response, which their nearby allies can film and post online, generating sympathy for their movement. And if they don’t provoke the response they want, the police look weak because they won’t stop leftists from burning down Minneapolis … again.
The invasion of the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn. fits brilliantly into this pattern. Leftists know that Christians are overwhelmingly conservative and, as conservatives, often carry weapons. They also know churches often have security teams. The goal of the St. Paul church invasion was twofold. Either get Christians on camera shooting unarmed leftists, or perhaps just violently assaulting them, or make Christian conservatives look weak by doing nothing. They know it’s very unlikely they will be prosecuted in Minnesota, so it’s the perfect decision dilemma. The leftist activists cannot lose, no matter what happens. In other words, the church invasion was theater. It was not real in any authentic sense.
Supporting this was the fact that Don Lemon just happened to be there with a camera crew to record anything that happened. He’s no random Antifa thug; he used to have his own CNN show. Lemon may have fallen far from his CNN days, but he doesn’t just happen to show up at a church invasion without deliberate planning. So, the church invasion had to have been planned in advance, which means someone considered the possible outcomes. Marxists never act randomly, no matter how random their agitation appears to be. There is always a goal, somewhere.
It turns out that invading a church has even better results for the leftists because of the internet. The clips started circulating on the internet almost immediately, and the predictable agitators immediately picked them up. Marxism only gains power by splitting a nation into ever-smaller allied groups. What better way to divide normal people, left and right, by painting the Left in exactly the stereotype the right expects? And, when the Right responds online, some people, particularly Christian Nationalists (aka the right hand of the left), are going to say things that play into the stereotype the Left has of the right. And so, the dialectic progresses.
But it gets even better for the Left because it turns out the church in question was cofounded by prominent Christian Nationalist[2]Joe Rigney, who currently pastors a church plant of Doug Wilson’s Christ Church, and teaches at Wilson’s New St. Andrews College. Wilson’s Canon Press published Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. Most Christians online, however, won’t know that. So, the right hand of the Left becomes persecuted heroes to the right, while still advancing leftist goals on the Left. For some reason, no one in the media seems interested in interviewing the church's current pastor, perhaps because he is not willing to play in the Left’s sandbox.[3]
All these coincidences lead to one inescapable conclusion. Someone (not Don Lemon) thought this through very carefully and staged a theatrical performance for the nation to see, which benefited the Left exclusively. The church almost certainly was not involved at all, and it needn’t have been. After all, it was only the stage. The players didn’t need to rehearse their lines; they just needed to respond naturally. And that is the power of Beautiful Trouble. All you need is thought in advance and an understanding of your enemy's line of thought; you don’t need carefully rehearsed lines or actions. Just create the scene and let it happen.
Fortunately, the church appeared to have handled the agitators fairly well. The only thing they could have done better was to use Don Lemon’s cameras against him. They could have explained to the watching nation exactly what Lemon was doing, why he was doing it, and what Marxists stood to gain. Alas, the pastor probably thought the agitators were just being stereotypical leftists. But the way you beat Beautiful Trouble is to turn their decision dilemma against them. Respond kindly, but state exactly what they are doing and what they gain by doing it. Force them to either shut you up, thus admitting you were right, or let you talk, and risk un-deluding their followers. Do not do what Todd Starnes did and threaten to stop the invasions with force. You’ve just slapped the hand away, and now the Left can go running to mommy government, crying.
And stop giving them free airtime. If this whole debacle had been relegated to obscurity, they would not have tried it again. Now they probably will. So, to stop it. Church leaders will need to understand that what they are dealing with is not a protest: it’s theater. And to defeat it, you just need to show that it’s theater, by knowing the script better than the actors.
Notes
[2] While debates continue about what 'Christian nationalism' is and what it entails, the left picked this church because of its affiliation with those who are close to those adjacent to it to further their narrative.
[3] The Pastor, Jonathan Parnell, tweeted in agreement with an excellent review of Stephen Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism project that pointed out, among other things, its links to Hegelian thought and its fundamentally anti-constitutional nation https://x.com/jonathanparnell/status/1653005862909116417
Percy Sinclair is a STEM PhD student, writer, and avid gardener. He's published two books and has several more in process. He's married and lives in the Midwest. He and his wife love to garden and have far more plants than they know what to do with.
