Normal Is Not What We Think It Is

Thursday, May 14, 2026

Two unrelated stories that have been floating all week make very clear that human normality is not at all like we think it is, and especially what we wish it is.

In the past week I have encountered two pieces calling for the president to resume the massive offensive against Iran.  One, from Stephen Green at PJ Media, follows the line of reasoning I have been for a while now – Iran is incapable of negotiating in good faith.  The other is this morning’s Fox column from the host and he points out intelligence assessments that say Iran is rapidly rebuilding its military capabilities.  This is, we must remember, the Iran that gunned down 42,000 of its own citizens simply for opposing the economic policies of the regime.  Put most bluntly these are fanatics bent on the evil destruction of everything that is not themselves.

Such people are hard for most of us to comprehend.  We do not want to consider that people can be that irrationally evil.  And yet here we are, staring it in the face.

Which brings me to the other story – Nicholas Kristof’s odious NYT piece accusing, largely without evidence and based on lies, Israel of all sorts of ugly conduct.  It is gross antisemitism.  I refuse to link to the piece.  If you really must know more I will send you to Haviv Rettig Gur’s reaction on X – deeply based in uncomfortable reality – that links to Kristof’s own X pointer to the piece, but that is as far as I will go.

The host spent an enormous amount of air time this week contemplating with a variety of guests, just where the virulent antisemitism sprang from and that it has done that so rapidly, almost explosively.  This sort of irrational unsubstantiated hatred of a people group is hard to understand.  As with the evil that is Iran we do not want to consider such evil as possible for humanity.

But here we are, two stories just this week of unbridled and undeterred hatred.  If you are into Christian apologetics, this has always been the most convincing evidence I know of the truth of essential Christian doctrine.  One of the fundamental tenants of Christian understanding is the concept of “original sin” – which Calvinists render “total depravity.”  Either rendering says essentially the same thing – the deep evil we have witnessed in these two stories is not unusual, it is simply mankind unchecked by countervailing forces – it is how we are born.  Rather than the common understanding that we are born reasonably good and have to be taught to be so evil; Christianity holds that we are born with such evil inherent in ourselves and must be taught to be good.  This evil does not “spring out of nowhere,” it is simply humanity unchecked.

Now, consider it was just six years ago that we locked ourselves down fearing a germ.  In so doing we did away with many of the social and cultural impediments that check this inherent evil in us.  Left to our own devices, without the social friction that would force us to behave within some bounds of reason, this inherent evil festered and gained ground it is not normally permitted to enter.

In some parts of the nation, parts where power lust drove the government to ever stricter legal and regulatory controls rather than rely on decency to control people’s behavior, people grew uglier, harsher and just meaner. Travelling back and forth between California and East Tennessee as I did, the contrast was quite stark, and it was not just the regulatory environment.  In California, where the regulations were overwhelming, people were just nastier to one another in common encounters – slowly revealing the inherent evil as the common checks against it were eroded.

Normal humanity is not what we want to think it is – it is not good, it is evil.  The world has traditionally been structured to hold the evil at bay and to teach the good, whether based in Christianity or not.  Our recent times are not marked by the rise of evil, but by the erosion of our barriers against it.