Insight to Incite: Open Source Intelligence Analysis
Insight to Incite: Audio Version
Dr. Everett Piper, and His Sub-Intellectual, Deceiptful Setting of Straw Men Aflame
0:00
-47:20

Paid episode

The full episode is only available to paid subscribers of Insight to Incite: Open Source Intelligence Analysis

Dr. Everett Piper, and His Sub-Intellectual, Deceiptful Setting of Straw Men Aflame

If you need proof of Christian Zionism rotting someone's brain from the inside out, and the incapacity of Christian Zionists to actually debate the issues fairly, look no further.

Dr. Everett Piper wrote a column for the Washington Times accusing Tucker Carlson and me of lying about Islam, which sounds serious until you discover that his “proof” consists of something I never actually said. What follows is a remarkable little tour through Christian Zionism’s intellectual immune system: poisoned wells, invented quotations, irrelevant doctorates, Ottoman history, selective outrage over persecuted Christians, and one increasingly unfortunate rooster. But beneath the comedy is something considerably more serious. Piper’s article demonstrates exactly what happens when defending Israel becomes so important to a Christian that even the Ninth Commandment starts looking negotiable.


Dr. Everett Piper first made a national name for himself as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University when an op-ed scolding his own students for their immaturity, entitlement, and desperate need for emotional coddling went viral. He parlayed the resulting notoriety into a larger role as an advocate for academic freedom and, eventually, a general-purpose commentator on national affairs.

Lately, however, Piper has found another calling. He has become an enthusiastic component of the domestic Israel Lobby, using his credibility inside the evangelical ecosystem to promote the Israeli state, defend Christian Zionism, and assure Christians that their theological and political obligations somehow terminate at the Israeli border.

Most recently, he turned his attention to me in the pages of the Washington Times. The resulting attack had the unusual distinction of being both intellectually dishonest and intellectually impoverished, which is an impressive combination. Piper did not merely get my argument wrong. Getting an argument wrong generally requires encountering it first. Instead, he constructed a cheaper and considerably stupider version of what I believe, attributed it to me, and then climbed triumphantly into the ring to beat the stuffing out of the scarecrow he had just assembled. His followers on X seemed unimpressed, with a total of one person liking his column at the time I’m publishing this response.

Share

Adding to a portfolio already containing titles like “Christian Zionism Is Not Christian Heresy,” Piper recently deposited another little offering at the altar of evangelical Zionism: “JD Hall and Tucker Carlson Are Lying About Islam.” It was presented as an argument, although that description is probably too generous. Most of the piece consisted of Piper lying about what I said about Islam in order to accuse me of lying about Islam, apparently hoping the irony would collapse under its own weight before anybody noticed.

Bearing false witness and gratuitously violating the Ninth Commandment are apparently permissible under the rules of Judeo-Christianity, provided the dishonesty is committed in defense of the Israeli state. Piper needed me to have made an argument I did not make, so he invented one. Then, having carefully manufactured his own opponent, he congratulated himself for defeating him in the pages of the Washington Times.

This is what leaven does to the lump. Once defending Israel becomes a theological imperative, every other Judeo-Christian obligation eventually gets negotiated around it. Defending people who reject Christ begins soliciting decidedly Christless behavior from the Christians enlisted to defend them. Truth becomes flexible, bearing false witness becomes apologetics, and the Ninth Commandment develops an Israeli exemption. Piper’s article is not merely a bad argument for Christian Zionism. It is a small demonstration of what Christian Zionism eventually requires from men who decide the cause must be defended even when the truth refuses to cooperate.

Piper began with something any freshman logic student is taught not to do, which is gratuitously “poison the well.” And if you do, it shouldn’t be so obvious, for crying out loud. Before engaging what I actually said, he treated his readers to a little tour through scandals and accusations attached to my name, making remarkably little effort to distinguish documented fact from allegation, allegation from rumor, or rumor from stuff somebody once typed on the Internet. Corroboration apparently became optional somewhere between “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “but this guy criticized Israel.”

Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. Watch: I hereby accuse Dr. Everett Piper of molesting my favorite rooster. I have no evidence whatsoever that Everett Piper has ever behaved improperly toward a chicken. But that doesn’t matter. I hereby accuse him of it, and shall forevermore refer to him as “man accused of rooster molestation.”

I’ll begin every future reference to him accordingly. “Everett Piper, the former university president who has faced allegations involving inappropriate contact with poultry, argued Tuesday…” And this from the man who arrived to lecture everyone else about lying.

Then, in an extreme display of jackassery credentialism, he ridiculed me for not having a “terminal degree.” He’s right. I don’t have a doctorate. I do, in fact, have degrees in both history and religion, including graduate-level (not that it matters in the slightest). But because it is not “terminal,” it earned ridicule from Dr. Piper.

So naturally I became curious. What is Dr. Piper’s doctorate actually in? Then, I looked it up. Theology? Nope. Biblical studies? No. Church history? Negative. Religious studies? Not that either.

Dr. Everett Piper’s terminal degree is in Student Affairs Administration.

Yes. The man waving his doctorate around as a reason you should take his theological pronouncements more seriously than mine possesses the sort of doctorate one acquires to become exceptionally qualified at administering students. His academic specialization is not Pauline theology, Second Temple Judaism, hermeneutics, Hebrew, Greek, systematic theology, or the history of Christian interpretation. It is university administration.

This is credentialism at its dumbest because Piper isn’t even appealing to a relevant credential. He is effectively barging into a theological argument, slapping a Ph.D. on the table, and hoping it qualifies him to administer student hacky sack tournaments and a frisbee golf league. I mean, I little people call me a stupid hillbilly or chicken farmer all day, and am happy to lean into that, but I’m not going to have my credentials questioned by a man who spent 20 years discussing when to order new tampon machines for the girls’ dorm.

Sorry. Your doctorate in “student affairs” does not overrule my degree in religion and graduate degree in history, when the topic is religion and history. And all of this, in a conversation outside the realm of ivory towers where a degree doesn’t matter at all. It’s worse than academic snobbery. It’s gay academic snobbery. That’s the worst kind. It’s terminal.

But if the contest is going to be academic weiner-measuring, perhaps the man with the doctorate in Student Affairs Administration should stop swinging it around in a theological debate like he just returned from defending his dissertation under Augustine.

So anyways, Dr. Everett Piper, formerly accused of molesting chickens, said the following:

So, why in the world would Mr. Carlson feature such an academically unqualified and morally disreputable man on his show? The answer seems quite simple. Mr. Carlson clearly wanted to continue grinding his ax against the Jews and pro-Israel Christians while at the same time elevating Islam as being better than both.

Here’s the proof.

While peddling his worn-out and biblically discredited arguments for “replacement theology,” J.D. Hall dove-tailed into a peculiar diatribe of praising Muslims for being “very kind” to Christianity.

No, not “the Jews.” Tucker doesn’t have a beef with “the Jews.” I might. Tucker doesn’t. I’ve never heard Tucker complain about “the Jews.” I’ve heard him talk about Israel a lot, but not “the Jews.” It’s a subtle trick, and yet somehow, still an obvious one. By saying “the Jews,” the critic just moves the implication away from politics and toward aNtiSEmiTisM. It’s a dishonest phrase, which was neither the first nor last dishonesty from Piper in the post.

Then, Piper - the scandal-plagued Rooster-enthusiast- also subtly changed “Zionist” to “Pro-Israel.” Being pro-Israel and being a Zionist are two entirely different things. The former hopes Israel the very best. The latter believes that Jews are entitled to real estate and Christian loyalty because they’re biblically illiterate. There’s a huge difference.

But then, and this is where the alleged Barnyard Bandit really grinds my gears, Piper announces: “Here’s the proof.” Cue the dramatic music. Dim the lights. Wheel in the evidence cart. If a man is going to use the word proof, I naturally assume some proof is about to occur. Perhaps a quotation. Maybe a transcript. A timestamp would be lovely. Hell, I would settle for several consecutive words that actually came out of my mouth.

Nope.

Piper’s “proof” is a paraphrase of something I did not, in fact, say. He announces that he has the receipts and then hands the jury a napkin on which he has written what he remembers the receipt probably saying. This stretches the definition of proof beyond anything contemplated by Noah Webster, Merriam-Webster, Daniel Webster, or frankly anybody named Webster who has ever successfully used a dictionary

GET THE FULL EPISODE OF THE INCITE-FUEL SHOW PLUS THE BONUS CONTENT ONLY AT PATREON

A quotation would have been particularly convenient here because quotations possess the wonderful evidentiary quality of containing the words a person actually said. Piper apparently found this requirement unnecessarily restrictive. Why burden your argument with my words when you can simply manufacture a more convenient version, put that version into your own words, call the resulting paraphrase “proof,” and then accuse me of dishonesty?

While peddling his worn-out and biblically discredited arguments for “replacement theology,” J.D. Hall dove-tailed into a peculiar diatribe of praising Muslims for being “very kind” to Christianity.

“Worn out and biblically discredited” is one heck of a way to describe historic Christian orthodoxy, particularly when your own former university has Wesleyan stamped across the front door. John Wesley was an Arminian, for crying out loud, and even Wesley never managed to hallucinate anything resembling the elaborate eschatological Rube Goldberg machine John Nelson Darby would eventually bolt together in the nineteenth century. Whatever disagreements Wesley and I might have had, neither of us needed seven dispensations, two peoples of God, multiple divine programs, and a secret evacuation of the Church to make sense of the Bible.

That is what makes the arrogance so breathtaking. These people look at doctrines Christians confessed for centuries before Darby was a twinkle in his father’s eye and dismiss them as “worn out,” while treating a nineteenth-century theological innovation as though Paul handed Scofield the notes personally. When your theological novelty is younger than the Mormon Church, perhaps exercise some caution before pointing at historic Christian orthodoxy and calling it the newfangled sideshow attraction.

And I hate to brag here, but Piper might also want to ease up on the condescension until he checks the most recent box scores, because I just climbed into a moderated debate with Dinesh D’Souza, one of the golden children of the Dispensational parade, and beat him within an inch of his theological life. By the time it was over, the only thing “worn out” in the room was D’Souza’s backside from being dragged across the biblical text for two hours. Calling historic orthodoxy “worn out” does not refute it any more than calling your paraphrase “proof” magically turns it into a quotation.

Speaking of that, Dr. Piper, the alleged cockle-doodle-didler, then summarized my claim as, “Muslims have been very kind to Christianity.”

That’s not proof. That’s not a quotation. That’s not a summary. That’s not even a poor summary. That’s a lie. My claim was very simple, and it related to the Ottoman Millet System and their treatment of Christians under imperial decree, juxtaposed against the treatment of Christians by the Israeli state. I think most of my readers know that.

Piper, whose name has unfortunately surfaced in connection with an unfortunate poultry scandal, had the audacity to ask, after misquoting me, “What in the world is Mr. Hall talking about?” as though I wasn’t very specific in what I said. It would actually be his job to explain to his audience what specifically I was talking about. He did not do so.

My claim was as simple as it was factual: The Ottoman Millet system did not tax churches, it provided a mechanism for the care and preservation of Christian holy sites, and protected them under law. Those are facts. Even the “debunking video” by Raymond Ibrahim acknowledged, “technically, that is accurate” in the first five minutes. The claim was part of a larger point; the Christian population in Palestine remained at a steady 20% through 537 years of Ottoman and British rule. And it’s now at extinction level at 2% after 80 years of Jewish rule.

He wrote:

Anyone with a fifth-grade education should know that Islam’s conquest of Christendom was anything but “kind” and that arguing otherwise is just astoundingly dumb. Here are just a few examples to prove the point.

First, Mr. Hall specifically claims that Islam has never imposed a tax on churches. This is not true. Surah 9:29 in the Qur’an specifically mandates that a poll tax called the “jizya” be imposed on all Christians living in a Muslim country. During the Ottoman Empire, for example, all non-Muslims across Southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East were required to pay this tax while standing before a seated overlord with their heads bowed. This was a sign of submission and humiliation.

You might have noticed that my claim was about churches in Palestine. Dr. Student Affairs Administration then provided a citation from the Quran about taxing Christians. Churches and Christians are two different things, obviously. Nobody is upset that Israel is taxing Christians, as though anyone expects them to be tax-exempt. The point is that for the first time ever, churches in Israel received a past-due tax bill (going back before the tax was passed, retroactively and illegally), threatening to confiscate their property if millions of extortion money wasn’t paid, and freezing their assets for non-payment in millions of “past due” taxes. Churches were affected, could not pay their schoolteachers and charity staff, and were threatened with shutdown until the international Christian community intervened.

The apples-to-apples comparison is for churches, not Christians.

Further, not that it matters because I didn’t actually make the claim he says, but the jizya tax was actually pretty reasonable, and Christians were actually happy to pay it compared to the alternative. The reason is that the Ottomans did not forcefully conscript Christians to serve mandatorily in the Islamic military. Paying the jizya for the right not to be conscripted to serve like every other citizen of the Ottoman Empire allowed this exception to be provided without having their Islamic neighbors lose their minds in rage. To them, the exemption appeared to be preferential treatment to Christians. The jizya was a way out, a trade made in negotiation. A Christian did not have to pay the jizya tax. They could instead, if they preferred, serve in the Ottoman military like their neighbors. Their Muslim neighbors did not have the right to opt out by paying the jizya, which is why some claimed it was preferential treatment to Christians, anyway. They weren’t wrong.

But the tax also provided Janissary protection for Christians, and especially so while on pilgrimage. Today, it’s so common for Jews to spit on Christian pilgrims that Netanyahu had to intervene and ask that they please quit, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism put out a PSA explaining it was hurting tourism revenue, and Ben Gvir argued it couldn’t be prosecuted because it’s an “ancient Jewish custom.” It goes unpunished. A Janissary guard would have beaten the Jew within an inch of their life, because those were the good old days compared to life under Israeli rule.

Then, Piper - whose alleged misconduct toward chickens I cannot describe on this Substack - chose to introduce the claim that Christians in Islamic nations were second-class citizens. He might as well have argued that the Earth revolves around the sun, which is equally relevant to anything that came out of my mouth. I never alleged that the Ottomans treated Christians as anything but protected underlings.

Second, there is the doctrine of “dhimmitude,” which declares all Christians are legally and socially inferior to all Muslims. In brief, dhimmitude lays out strict conditions whereby followers of Christ are only permitted to live in a Muslim country if they submit to a list of humiliating conditions, such as being forbidden from repairing their churches, ringing church bells, displaying crosses, and being required to wear distinctive clothing to signify their disparaged status.

I mean, cool story, bro. Neat fact.

And yet, despite dhimmitude, the state of Israel bans Jews who believe in Jesus from migrating to Israel and from Citizenship, but not Jews credibly accused of molesting toddlers. And that’s not a joke, like the chicken thing. You can be a Jew with active molestation charges and a court date, and they will not extradite you to your home country to face justice. But if you’re a Jew who belongs to a Christian church, you cannot migrate to Israel under the Right of Return. The former is how a conquered people were treated in the 15th century. The latter is how Christians are treated by “our greatest ally” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Which one should we be complaining about?

How about, in the year 2026, Christian priests in Palestine being refused entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Easter? That was this year. How about Christians not being allowed to pass out water to the thirsty if it has a single Bible verse on it? How about the new “Western Wall Bill” by the Noam Party that passed its first reading in the Knesset in February, banning non-Christian prayer at the ancient retaining wall, where the Goyim Humiliation Rituals happen? What about Israel slow-rolling and effectively blocking visas for Christian missionaries and clergy for more than two years until Mike Huckabee finally developed the spine necessary to send them a strongly worded letter? Those are modern-day hostilities toward Christians, and Dr. Piper wants to slap the Wikipedia entry for “dhimmitude” into the Washington Times and complain about it?

Christian Zionism absolutely rots your brain. Christians are suffering in modern-day Israel, and Dr. Chicken Fingers here is complaining that I over-stated a fact about the Ottomans in the year 1417? Dude, in 1417 the Christians in Palestine were lucky their heads didn’t get put on spikes, because Islam very much is the demonic religion it is accused of being, which makes it all the more spectacular that the Ottomans understood that mistreating Christians in the Holy Land would invoke the wrath of God Almighty via Christian Europe, and they would be inviting trouble they didn’t want. That is the real story. Everywhere else, the Ottomans were barbaric animals, a fact I did not dispute, but I also did not state it because it had nothing to do with the conversation. In fact, Christian nations often treated colonized people worse than Christians were treated by the Ottomans. Why? It’s not because Muslims are nice. It’s because they didn’t want to pick a fight with Christian Europe and go through tenth Crusade, because the first nine weren’t fun.

Understanding that context should make one ask why, then, Israelis feel like they can persecute and systematically target Christians in the Middle East if not even the Ottomans thought they could get away with it. I repeat:

Q. If the Ottomans knew they could get away with barbarism everywhere but the Holy Land or else face the wrath of the Christian world, why does Israel do it, and do it so audaciously?

A. It’s because of slack-jawed idiot “Christian Zionists” like Dr. Everette Piper whose Judaizing Hebrew fetish lets Israelis get by with literal murder because they’re brainwashed by the theology of a 19th-century schismatic heretic sect.

So long as window-licking, mouth-breathing Christian Zionist morons defend Israel no matter what because God told them to, Israel can do whatever they want to what few Christians remain in Palestine. They have a license to kill and a permission slip to mistreat, marginalize, and oppress Jesus’ followers, signed by none other than John Nelson Darby.

The fact is, you could not pay Dr. Piper and the Dispensational Zionist cult to stick up for Christians in the Middle East. They have a backward, biblically illiterate interpretation of Genesis 12:3, believe that the people who hate Jesus the most in this world are the “chosen people” because of their ethnicity, and Christians are told we must bless them to be blessed by God. Ironically, Genesis 12:3 is about Jesus, which means that instead, Jews who curse Christ instead of bless Him are the ones under the promises of God’s curse, not his blessing.

Then, Piper leaves the reservation altogether, and no longer even attempts to apply his arguments to Palestine or the context of my actual comments.

Third, there is the issue of legal inequality of all non-Muslims who live in Muslim countries. Sharia law, for example, makes the testimony of a Christian against a Muslim inadmissible in an Islamic court. Therefore, a Muslim committing a crime against a Christian is rarely, if ever, subject to legal penalty, while a Christian accused of a crime against a Muslim often faces flogging, immediate imprisonment, and even death. How “kind” do Mr. Hall and Mr. Carlson think this is?

I’m thinking that Piper, despite his vast academic superiority, was never taught about Jewish Halakha in any of his “student affairs administration” courses, which really leaves me wondering what education is coming to these days. Do you think he knows that the Israeli Rabbinate rules their civil law through Halakha the same way clerics do in Iran through Sharia? I would highly doubt it, because he has no earthly idea what he is talking about.

I explained this to the I2I subscribers in Jewish Shariah? Understanding Halakha, and Why Western Civilization Doesn’t Want It, available here. Sanhedrin 57a states that Gentiles - not Jews - should be decapitated for legal violations. According to Sanhedrin 57a, there is a two-tiered system of justice, in which a gentile is liable for aborting a baby, while a Jew isn’t. A gentile is liable for robbery “even of less than a [penny],” while Jewish law requires theft of a minimum value for it to be punished. Under Halakha, a Jew who kills a Gentile is not put to death - and in some cases, not even punished- but a Gentile who kills a Jew must be put to death no matter what. For crying out loud, this year on March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed a law assigning the death penalty for the murder of Israeli Jews, but not Gentiles in the West Bank.

Mishnah Avodah Zarah 2:1 forbids a Jew from helping a Gentile woman give birth, and not only forbids helping a Gentile out of a pit, but says that if he’s standing close, push him in it. Not that any of this has anything to do with my remarks on Tucker, but a Christian Zionist defending the most infamous apartheid state on Planet Earth because they believe Gentiles have animal souls, while complaining about Islam treating Christians like second-class citizens, is beyond the pale. They’re both awful, but only one is subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer.

The “what about Islam” sophomorisms that Dr. Everett Piper, the poultry-adjacent former university professor, is engaging in are so sub-intellectual it’s hard to fathom he was ever given a doctorate degree (until you remember it’s in Student Affairs Administration, and then it tracks).

The suspected barnyard botherer, the alleged fornicator of the fowl, the rumored Wesleyan wing-dingler, then went and jumped the shark in Nigeria.

Mr. Hall’s claim of Muslim benevolence toward Christians is nonsense, and Mr. Carlson’s platforming of such abhorrent views serves only to betray his antipathy for biblical Christians who, even as we speak, are being butchered at the hands of, you guessed it, Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world. Claiming that Muslims have been “very kind” to Christians is nothing but a shameful lie.

The “shameful lie,” of course, is anything that Piper alleged I actually said. He did not, in the course of the entire article, provide a single quotation of my remarks. That is an extraordinary omission for a column whose title announces to the world that “JD Hall and Tucker Carlson Are Lying About Islam.” If I lied, quote the lie. If Tucker lied, quote the lie. Put the offending words on the page, explain what is false about them, and demonstrate the falsehood. This should not require a terminal degree. Instead, Piper spent an entire column arguing with a sentence he wrote himself.

I made a specific historical comparison concerning Christians in Palestine, the Ottoman millet system, church taxation, and the treatment of Christian institutions and holy sites. Piper transformed that into the sweeping proposition that Muslims have always been nice to Christians everywhere, then galloped across fourteen centuries of Islamic conquest looking for atrocities to disprove the proposition nobody made. He might as well rebut my claim that the Germans make good automobiles by producing photographs from Auschwitz. Yes, Everett. The Germans did that too. Now would you like to return to the subject?

And that is the remarkable thing about his article. Piper can tell me about jizya. He can tell me about dhimmitude. He can take us to Nigeria. He can describe Islamic persecution until his Student Affairs Administration doctorate catches fire from the exertion. What he apparently cannot do is confront the comparison that produced this entire tantrum: How are Christians being treated in the Holy Land right now, by the government Christian Zionists like Everett Piper have spent years training American evangelicals to defend reflexively?

That question is radioactive because “but Islam” does not answer it.

Islam is false. Muhammad is a false prophet. Islamic empires have committed atrocities against Christians. Muslims are murdering Christians in Nigeria this afternoon, and every Christian with a functioning conscience should condemn it without qualification. None of that purchases Israel a single indulgence for mistreating Christians. Not one. The sins of Muslims do not become righteousness in Jewish hands. There is no moral accounting system in which enough burned churches in Nigeria earn the Israeli government store credit for abusing Christians in Jerusalem.

Christian Zionism desperately needs that accounting system because otherwise Israel has to be judged by the same standard as everybody else. Suddenly “What about Islam?” becomes considerably less useful. Suddenly the Christian being spat upon in Jerusalem matters even if a Muslim murdered another Christian in Nigeria. Suddenly the church facing government pressure matters even if Ottoman rulers were bastards five hundred years ago. Suddenly Israel does not get graded against Muhammad. It gets graded against justice. And that is the conversation Piper does not want to have.

So he poisoned the well. He waved his doctorate around. He called historic Christian orthodoxy “worn out.” He replaced Zionism with “the Jews,” replaced my argument with his paraphrase of it, replaced churches with Christians, replaced Palestine with the entire Islamic world, and finally replaced the twenty-first century with whatever century contained a Muslim atrocity useful to his argument. Every substitution moved the reader one step farther from the thing I actually said until Piper was bravely defeating an argument whose only identifiable author was Everett Piper. Then he called me a liar.

That is why this is bigger than one stupid Washington Times column. Christian Zionism has trained otherwise intelligent Christians to believe that defending the modern Israeli state is somehow adjacent to defending God Himself. Once that premise gets lodged deeply enough, normal Christian moral reasoning begins to malfunction. The Ninth Commandment becomes negotiable. Partiality becomes faithfulness. Ethnic favoritism becomes biblical theology. Criticism of the Israeli government becomes hostility toward “the Jews.” Christians suffering under that government become inconvenient complications, while atrocities committed by Muslims somewhere else are dragged onto the stage to explain why nobody should look too closely at Tel Aviv.

Piper wanted to prove that Christian Zionism is not Christian heresy. Instead, he gave us a demonstration of what happens when an ideology becomes important enough that a Christian will bend the truth to protect it.

So I will leave Dr. Everett Piper, the alleged feather-philandering cluckold, with the standard he should have begun with: If you’re going to accuse someone of lying, you need to quote the actual lie. And when somebody points out the mistreatment of Christians, try defending the Christians before demanding that everyone admire the people mistreating them.

You do not need a terminal degree to understand any of that. Apparently, having one doesn’t help.

There is a reason this kind of Zionist polemic almost always arrives as a column, a monologue, or a sermon delivered safely into an audience already trained to applaud it. Piper's argument works only if his readers never hear the interview he claims to be rebutting. Inside the BoomerCon echo chamber, he can replace my words with his paraphrase, announce “here's the proof,” and blast the resulting straw man through a megaphone to people who already agree with him. A debate would ruin the trick. I would be sitting six feet away with the inconvenient ability to say, “I didn't say that. Play the clip.” Then Piper would have to defend his characterization, and if not, then defend his character for lying. He can call me stupid from the safety of the Washington Times.

Put us behind two microphones with a moderator and the actual interview queued up, and he would collapse before the first commercial break. He knows it, I know it, and I suspect that is why I will be waiting a very long time for the good doctor of “Student Affairs Administration” to send the debate invitation.

If you appreciate my work, please grab a premium subscription to access exclusive content. This is how I provide for my family, so I rely on it and I appreciate it. Thank you. Act now and get a huge discount.

Get HUGE 20% Discount

Leave a comment

User's avatar

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of JD Hall.