You may have never heard of the Red Hat Virus. But beware – it’s insidious and highly contagious. Trust me. I’m not talking about computers either. Moreover this has nothing to do with Red Hat Linux.
You can get this virus from the internet without it secretly downloading to your PC. It isn’t a Trojan. You can become infected by watching TV, or walking down the street. Worse, you don’t have to have physical contact with anyone to get this disease.
By now you’ve likely already figured where I’m going with this column. If nothing else, I can be predictable. The Donald Trump MAGA caps are the new virus which often seems to trigger the most woeful behavior in some people.
And note that I’m not talking about the actual Red Hat wearers. People apparently become infected by spotting someone else wearing a Red Hat.
Donald Trump has consistently triggered people since he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mind you, the trigger-effect long preceded his arrival. Nobody is likely to forget the public meltdowns. Trump was the unforeseen disaster – how could he have possibly beaten HRC? Something had to be seriously amiss!
Within a day I was reading how Transgender people committed suicide because Donald Trump won. The two articles I came across cited the same source – a source which failed to provide any factual data. Not even that paragon of fact and truth, Snopes, could find any evidence. Ironically, before Donald Trump ran for president, he was considered a liberal.
The main-stream became triggered too – though they showed somewhat more aplomb than those poor souls screaming at the sky. They set out in work-person-like fashion to get to the bottom of the how and why Trump was able to steal the election from Clinton.
Was it conservative husbands telling their wives how to vote? Women are so gullible nowadays, right? Or was it the nefarious election rigging Russians? Of course, the US would never manipulate another country’s election results. Perhaps we’ll never know. Maybe it was a combination of both, combined with Climate Change denial.
Or maybe enough people just got sick and tired of the shenanigans of the previous administration, and figured Clinton would keep the Obama snowball rolling. I kinda like that explanation. It’s neat and simple.
Combine Donald Trump and the MAGA Red Hats, and you have a highly volatile trigger-point which trumps (bad pun intended) reason. Some people seem to abandon sanity when they see anyone wearing a MAGA Red Hat. You’ll be screamed at in the streets and chased out of restaurants. You may even get beaten up.
They may have a point, though. Scientific studies show that putting on a MAGA hat can adversely alter the wearer’s character. It works something like the Jekyll and Hyde thing. No, really!
Christians aren’t immune to the Red Hat Virus either. In fact many have downloaded it to their systems. When the Covington Catholic Boys fiasco ignited the main-stream and Social Medias, several Christians joined the Red Hat Witch Hunt. I couldn’t keep up with the torrent of condemnatory tweets.
These boys, apparently, were the offspring of the President Trump Syndrome: racism, intolerance, white privilege, and arrogance etc. And all this before anyone bothered to fact-check. They all jumped the gun, assuming the worst. The kids were the villains in the entire drama: not the Black Hebrew Israelites and not the American Indian activist Nathan Phillips.
It later emerged that the circumstances were rather different than the viral twitter-world assumptions. Neither Nathan Phillips nor the Black Hebrew Israelites were victims – quite the contrary. See HERE. And despite Snopes’ insistence, Phillips wasn’t exactly who he claimed to be.
I expect a certain reaction from secular people like Bill Maher or Reza Aslan. But not Christians! I saw no retractions or apologies from them. The progressive Christian twitter world simply moved on, just as it did after the alleged Kavanaugh victims ceased to be of any use.
What really bothers me is that some Christians were more incensed by what they thought occurred in the Covington debacle than a new law permitting infanticide. Some even defended the latter arguing that “it was complicated.”
Many of these same people claim to be Christian teachers. They are published authors and even disperse Bible Studies. Let that sink in for a bit.
May God help this sick, evil world! And may He keep the Church from the wolves!
Maranatha!
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