Tis the Terror
Wherein We Find Ourselves Amidst a New Kind of Season (Link to video at the end of the piece)
Two US servicemembers were killed and a Brown University study session was shot up on December 13th. The next day, a Hanukkah party at Bondi Beach in Australia was the site of a mass shooting leaving 15 people dead. In both Germany and Poland police were able to stop two unrelated Christmas market attacks. And in Southern California, the FBI was able to stop a planned New Years Eve celebration attack by a group known as the “Turtle Island Liberation Front.”
That’s a lot of dead and potential death within the span of a few short sentences and all at this one time of year. After a summer of violent ICE protests and Tesla dealership attacks, it seems that ideologically-motivated violence has also developed a kind of seasonal variance. It’s mass disruption and agitating for color revolution in the streets in the warmer months while in the cooler months it’s about blood and guns.
But looking at the Bondi Beach attack in the southern hemisphere where it’s now summer, it’s safe to say weather isn’t as much of a factor as the season of celebration.
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December is a time of Hanukkah and Christmas, two big religious holidays for two of the more philosophically important faiths that have served as the foundation of Western civilization.
But who in their right mind wants to take a time of togetherness, prayer, and celebration and turn it into a season of terror? A season where we’re increasingly conditioned to look over our shoulder, consider security measures, and cast wary glances at anyone who’s acting suspicious.
Who would do this? Who is motivated to stoke fear instead of the hearth, raise alarms instead of cheers, instill suspicion instead of brotherhood?
The Turtle Island group is fairly emblematic of the people involved. According to our Department of Justice, they’re “a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group.” But according to Andy Ngo, the perps strongly resemble what he calls “trantifa“ terrorists.
They may be pro-Palestinian, but something tells me they wouldn’t last long in a strictly Muslim majority country.
But logic be damned. The red-green alliance isn’t about thinking things through to the point of avoiding self-annihilation. It seems to be a marriage of convenience. An alliance to swarm what both sides perceive as their greatest threat.
And what is that threat? Happiness? Presents? Christmas carols?
Well, yeah. They want to destroy all of that. You see, both the red and the green have a vested interest in using terror to turn us away from our traditions and customs -- especially those that help keep us connected to God. The goal is to sour us on even thinking about celebrating so that we give up on our faith and our communities and allow the red and the green to fill that void.
It’s darkly ironic that the two colors referenced here, red for the Communist Left and green for the Islamist supremacists, are also the colors of Christmas.
The very act of striking out at our holidays reveals so much about the psychology of the people doing the striking. They’re shiftless loners who’ve allowed their extremism to isolate them from humanity. To the point that, not only are they willing to murder random strangers be they elderly or children or whatever, but they want their violence to be associated with this time in particular. The idea is they want to make every year a moment when our thoughts turn from preparation and celebration, to tragic memories of bombings, shootings, or vehicle rammings.
While we want to celebrate, we can’t help but start asking questions like, “Is this really worth it?”
We can already see that these doubts have led to the cancellation of celebrations abroad. This year, Christmas markets in Germany and the New Year’s Eve celebration in Paris have been canceled over security concerns.
These developments should be scandalous. To paraphrase the Texan expression: Don’t mess with Christmas.
Yet this year has seen the mask come off for our fellow Americans on the Left side of the political spectrum. They’ve already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they want to upend civil order through a color revolution. Long before that, they’ve made it abundantly clear that murdering babies is an inviolate plank in their political platform. It should come as no surprise then, that they endorse our murder.
In a post on X, Sundance pointed out:
December 4, 2024: UnitedHealth Care CEO Brian Thompson is assassinated. The killer avoids capture for several days. Leftists celebrate the accused killer as a hero.
September 10, 2025: Charlie Kirk is assassinated. The killer avoids capture for several days. Leftists celebrate the accused killer as a hero.
December 13, 2025: Ella Cook is killed during a mass shooting which appears to be a political assassination. The killer has thus far avoided capture for several days.
In just a year’s time, the political left has not only normalized political assassination in the United States, they have created an atmosphere where it is just not tolerated but celebrated and encouraged.
If that seems like a stretch, may I remind you Virginia voters just elected Jay Jones Attorney General.
The list is incomplete. As Andy Ngo points out, the Left went so far as to try to run cover for the Salt Lake City No Kings protest shooter as well.
A lawyer for the family of the Salt Lake City “No Kings” protest bystander shot dead by the event’s leftist volunteer “peacekeeper” security says that organizers like Utah 5150 and Armed Queers SLC have intentionally obfuscated who was involved.
They’re not cooperating in the investigation and have given their members aliases. One of the security people, Matthew Alder, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter, but the organizers appear to be shielding others.
Institutional support makes the stance official: the Left wants you dead. And they’re not going to let a little thing like Christmas stand between their murderous rage and you.
Given this circumstance, we’d be forgiven for toning down our celebrations. Right? We could, like the Germans and the French, run the scenario through an anodyne risk-reward matrix and come to the logical conclusion that we don’t shouldn’t needlessly sacrifice lives for a little Christmas levity.
Is that what the Nigerian Christians are doing, though? Right now, they’re preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus despite the fact that there’s evidence that Muslims are seeking to mount an attack on the day of Christmas. Judd Saul of Equipping the Persecuted said:
We got very reliable information that they are weaponising for a Christmas Day massacre. I am imploring the Nigerian government and President Donald Trump to do something so we don’t have a bunch of dead Christians in Nigeria.
If you think the Nigerian Christians are backing down, you’re wrong. That’s because this isn’t new for the Nigerians. Josiah Abraks of the Southern Kaduna Peoples’ Union pointed out: “[S]outhern parts of Kaduna have always been attacked during the Yuletide. Bandits attack communities in the area on Christmas Day,”
Yet the Nigerian Christians always celebrate Christmas despite the routine and expected attacks.
Why?
Part of it is tactical. It pains me to inform our “allies” in Germany and France this but retreat and surrender are forms of defeat. When you make the completely rational decision not to celebrate in order to save lives, you’re telling the world that terrorism is the one thing that will get you to give up everything you love and hold dear.
More importantly, such weakness in the face of adversity demonstrates that you are faithless. You prize your comfort more than your relationship with God. So much so that, in the name of preserving that comfort, you’ll even abstain from doing something fun like celebrating.
We’re Christians. Celebrating is not optional. It’s a package deal: we keep the fasts and the feasts. Each has their purpose in drawing us closer to God. For Christians these feasts are serious business.
In his piece in support of Charles Dickens’ defense of Christmas, GK Chesterton points out the important and sacramental nature Christmas, writing: “In fighting for Christmas [Dickens] was fighting for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday.”
Elsewhere Chesterton points out that we only have holidays for ourselves because we set aside holy days for God. That by reverencing the Divine, we reinvigorate our minds and souls. It’s yet another proof of the existence of God -- by worshiping Him we become supernaturally united in the celebration of the life He gives us.
Christianity is indeed at its heart a celebration of life. We believe in the Resurrection and in eternal life. Our God conquered Death itself and the fact that He lives, even now and despite His wounds, is an act of defiance in the face of grim mortality.
To be Christian is to see death properly: as a mere portal through which we must pass to be united with a perfectly loving God for all eternity. To be Christian is to laugh in the face of death.
But as history shows; from the Romans, to the Vikings, to the Muslims and beyond; this victory comes not without its own challenges. Countless tyrants and bloodthirsty maniacs (today we call them “Democrats”) have tested this resolve, taunting us all along.
We were burned alive as living candles, our tongues ripped from our throats, hanged and shot full of arrows, disemboweled, nailed, blinded, flayed, beheaded...
Like the fasts and the feasts, it’s something of a package deal. We get eternal life, but we also accept the cross.
We Christians after all worship the executed God. The God who was arrested and jailed by mortal men. The Christians in Nigeria show us the way they learned from Christ Himself. He didn’t just say some nice things and get on a train to the next life. He was scourged, beaten, nailed, and left to die. Slowly.
The lives of the saints are similarly fraught with hardship and challenges. Even Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus himself, was exiled and imprisoned by the Emperor Diocletian.
It’s hard to think of a saint who didn’t also experience a similar form of hardship like imprisonment, exile, or execution. Outside of the Church, it’s pretty clear that such hardships are common among those who wish to do good. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi all experienced life behind bars.
And not to brag, but so did I.
It’s clear that, despite Christianity’s bold claim of a brotherhood of man and the promise of eternal life, it’s still not a faith for the faint of heart. You need a certain kind of boldness to live out the gospel, especially in today’s world.
Ours is the Faith founded by God Himself. It therefore contains within its DNA the fullness of the human experience from the terrifying and heroic to the loving and exuberant. Sure, we have our fair share of martyrs, but the Church also invented beers, herbal tonics, wines, champagne, and (thanks to the Irish monks) a little thing called “aqua vitae” more commonly known as “whiskey.”
True Christians don’t celebrate because we love ourselves but because we love God. We thank Him for our hardships and praise Him for our bounty. But the bottom line is we celebrate the life He gave us.
This was a lesson that we demonstrated in prison in DC. Though separated from our families and stuck inside a cold and inhospitable world, we gathered our junk food on Christmas day and gave ourselves a feast worthy of the martyrs. We performed skits, and sang carols to the world through the phone. We made a Christmas tree out of fabric and decorated it with a garland of American flag postcards sent by supporters and little balls of colored fuzz instead of lights. Though we were in one of the worst places in the world, I ironically longed to show my wife how much fun we were having.
We did it because we wanted to show the world that, unlike Germany and France, we were not defeated. But also because we love Jesus and wanted to celebrate His incarnation. Keep in mind this wasn’t the Christmas after the 2024 election. In 2023, we still had no idea what the next year would bring (which turned out to be a little bit of everything.) But the act of celebrating galvanized our resolve. Many of us were facing years to whole decades being locked up and had no hope of mercy.
There’s a lot more to Christmas than just presents and lights and relaxing with family. We understood that in DC DOC and the Nigerians understand that now. The whole world needs to remember why we celebrate this time and that the alchemy of true Christmas magic can be found in the life of Christ: part suffering and part joy.
With an emphasis on joy. Because after all, the battle over death has been won and that’s both the source and the aim of what makes us happy as Christians.
I have a feeling that these attacks are going to get worse before things get better. Despite our history with the Left and Islam, this feels more like a beginning than an ending. So let’s promise each other and to God: that we’ll take seriously our obligation to party hard in His name and that no matter how scary or difficult things get we never waver in our constant victory parade.
The people of Europe are being pragmatic now. Giving up when they should be holding fast. All out of fear. We’ll do the opposite. If attacked as we sing, we sing louder next year. If our Christmas trees are blown up, next year they’ll be taller.
Europeans quail in response to the question “Is this really worth the danger?” And when the same question inevitably crosses our minds, we’ll raise our voices, and our glasses as we reply:
Merry Christmas!
Video:
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