Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, what is the awful phenomenon and how is it destroying the strength and power of the American spirit? The awful phenomenon. First of all, awful is an acronym for a very specific personality type that has arisen in American culture.

And that acronym is A for affluent, W for white, F for female, and L for liberal. Affluent, white, female, liberal. Awful. So appropriate. The awful acronym has become great shorthand for a class of people who have taken over the far left progressive politics in America.

Who makes up the bulk of anti-ice protesters, for example? Affluent, white, female liberals. In fact, this is precisely who were shot in Minneapolis at a progressive operation to hinder ICE officers from carrying out their duties. Renee Good. Becoming infamous now, Renee Good was not a loving, innocent mother who was just scared at being stopped by ICE officers when she drove into one of them by accident and got shot.

Au contraire, dear listener. Renee Good was a trained operative of ICE Watch, a group of progressive activists whose mission is to follow around ICE agents and harass and obstruct their efforts to arrest criminal illegal aliens and deport them. She and her quote-unquote husband, now Renee Good was part of a lesbian marriage, she and her quote-unquote husband were avid Trump haters and they were involved heavily in progressive causes. Also, in the 2024 election, over 57 percent of American women voted for Kamala, 70 percent of single women.

Abortion rights and DEI policies, that is diversity, equity, and inclusion continue to rate high on the list of issues that progressive women care about. In fact, these issues will get them out in protests and marches like nothing else. Whose voices do you hear stridently screaming above the din of a protest march? Oh, those of aging, gray-haired, baby boomer women, harpies who are nostalgic for the anti-war protests of the 1960s. Also, the politics of the Democrat Party has been pushed far, far left, primarily by aging white liberal women.

Awfuls. Affluent white female liberals. Awfuls. Now, the group Echelon Insights recently found that these aging white liberal women support increased immigration, enforced equal income for all races, and biological males who identify as females competing in women's sports. They also found that college-educated white women are more than twice to the far left than black and Hispanic women Democrats.

Additionally, when it comes to men compared to women, 60 percent of college-educated white women voted for Democrats in 2018 than men who voted 47 percent for Democrats. And then when it comes to culture, dear listener, our changing and evolving culture. Awfuls lead the way. Affluent white female liberals. Awfuls lead the way in trying to shape America in her image.

It was awful Alyssa Heinerscheid, for example, who led the overhaul of Bud Light brand, using the trans pervert Dylan Mulvaney as the new brand spokesman. Looking down her nose at Bud Light's customer base, she judged it was time for a DEI update for the brand. What a condescending misjudgment that proved to be right for Bud Light. InBev Brand, which is the holding company for Bud Light, inBev brand fired her soon afterward. The same can be said for the awful executive, Julie Massino, who revamped the Cracker Barrel logo.

You remember that controversy not too long ago. Julie Massino jettisoned the old-fashioned logo featuring a country farmer seated at a Cracker Barrel for what one commentator called pedestrian modern sterile. And if you saw the old, or the so-called new logo, it was precisely that, pedestrian modern sterile, complete with an overhaul of the restaurant's quaint rural ambiance. No. And after the bottom dropped out of Cracker Barrel stock and business began to plummet, the revamp was scrapped and Massino too was fired.

Disney's descent into political correctness, brand desecration, and financial hemorrhaging is also being led by awfuls, that is, affluent white female liberals, like creative director Jennifer Lee. Disney is exhibit A for the meme, go woke, go broke. But you can't tell that to awful purists, that is, affluent white female liberal purists. No, they will espouse their DEI religion at the cost of everything. And we would be remiss if we did not mention the role of awfuls, that is, affluent white female liberals, in speech censorship.

When you hear an awful say, it's time we have a dialogue about X, Y, or Z, you should just read, shut up, sit down, and listen to my monologue. That's really what they're saying when they say, it's time to have a dialogue. In an important study by the Knight Foundation, 60% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt directly opposite. Free speech was much more important to them. They also found that women were far more censorious than men, if you will.

Women are more supportive, for example, more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants or homosexuals or transgenders or African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jewish people. Awfuls were far more likely to intervene, interfere, and shut down any speech that could even remotely be construed as offensive to minorities. Three-in-one women compared to men. Awfuls want to ban Elon Musk's ex, for example, from the internet. Awfuls, that is, affluent white female liberals, support making protests at abortion clinics illegal.

They were at the forefront of changing the name of sports teams, like the Washington Redskins, right? Amanda Blackhorse was at the head of that effort. Or the changing of the sport team, the Cleveland Indians. Stephanie Freiberg led that initiative. Awful, that is, affluent white female liberal Nina Jankiewicz, for example, was the notorious director of the disinformation governance board.

Oh, what an aptly named agency that was under Biden, the disinformation governance board, created under the Biden administration. Nina Jankiewicz was the head of that, which ironically was designed to censor American speech and label as disinformation anything that contradicted, contradicted, excuse me, the official propaganda line of the Biden administration. And Ms. Jankiewicz was a rabid, awful harpy who actively worked against the First Amendment of our Constitution. Well, these are only a few samples of the affluent white female liberal, the awful phenomenon. What is at the root of this phenomenon and what can be done about it?

Well, first of all, a few points I'd like to make with you. Number one, the awful, the affluent white female liberal is a direct product of the feminist movement. Oh, yes, we touched this third rail of politics, the feminist movement. If Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963, began the feminist movement, well, then we might say that Naomi Wolf's book called Vagina, a new biography published in 2012. Her book closed the feminist movement as we have come to know it.

Read both of these books and you'll see a striking contrast between what Betty Friedan optimistically envisioned for women far into the future and what Wolf soberly assesses is the truth about women today at the end of some 50 years of feminist activism. And ironically, women have been successful beyond their wildest dreams in wresting power, wealth, and influence from men. But in the process, they have lost their true and greater power as women in that process. Oh, the 21st century female has been so intent upon adopting the male role and persona that she has lost what it means to be a woman.

Awfuls, that is, affluent white female liberals, awfuls are often childless. They're often without husbands. And even these, when they're present, these husbands are often gelded cuckolds. Awfuls rate themselves as somewhat or highly dissatisfied as well, somewhat or highly dissatisfied with their lives when compared with their traditional female counterparts. They patrol the halls of corporate America, the halls of media, they patrol the halls of Congress, and more often than not, in the role of hall monitors, if you will, making sure everyone follows the DEI rules set by affluent white female liberals.

This has been evident even within the movement itself. Books like Against White Feminism, the book Against White Feminism by Raphia Zakaria, or Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington, both of these books, while not rejecting feminism, have exposed the soft underbelly of radical feminism, especially under the microscope is the privileged virtue-signaling white female, often the aging baby boomer who has benefited from the changes wrought by the feminist movement while leaving so many other women worldwide behind.

Oh, I urge you to read the book Against White Feminism against white feminism because it is particularly critical of what we would call the awful, that is, the affluent white female liberal, although Zakaria eschews the term per se. Now, Raphia Zakaria is a Pakistani author and scholar who documents how only a small fraction of women globally have been beneficiaries of the feminist movement. Women around the world largely still live in abject economic poverty and lack basic nutritional and medical needs for themselves and their children, and they face a wasteland of opportunities.

And they often live under brutally oppressive regimes that truly subjugate women rather than the soft oppression, which exists mostly in the imaginations of the privileged white female in the Democratic West. These women, in largely in third world circumstances, these women have been left behind in the wake of a self-congratulatory feminism, which is blind to the plight of their ostensible sisters in the world. Shouldn't these fundamental needs of women be on the agenda of feminism? A truly human feminism? Asks Raphia Zakaria.

Well, feminism has focused rather on a few privileged, mostly white classes of women. These have been centered in the West. They have been narrowly focused on the pride and privilege of already well-positioned, affluent white women who have mistaken invading male roles in Western culture for true feminism. Has feminism succeeded because white women populate corporate boardrooms formerly occupied by men and perhaps are on the verge of electing a woman president? Is feminism successful because of this?

Oh, rather than focusing on changing the logos of sport teams and lobbying to ban Elon Musk from the internet and ramming ICE agents in the streets, perhaps the awful, the affluent white female liberal might hearken to the voices of feminists like Raphia Zakaria and Mary Harrington. But that is highly unlikely, for the awful has fallen victim wittingly or unwittingly to the stereotype of history. And that brings me to point number two. The angry meddling awful. The angry meddling affluent white female liberal is nothing new in the history of the world.

Oh, yes. The rage of awfuls is abundant throughout Greek mythology, for example, giving us in grand metaphors for the modern archetype of the world. Medusa. Medusa was one of the three gorgons of Greek mythology that is a raging monster of a woman with living snakes populating her head instead of her hair. Of such mythic power was Medusa's gaze that men who looked at her were turned to stone and her temple and garden were decorated with the petrified statues of formerly living men who had the temerity to look her in the eyes.

Now, Medusa, while acting as if she was attracted to men, in reality bore a contempt and hatred for them and never wasted an opportunity to destroy them. Often portrayed as a winsome beauty, she was infamous for sweetly lulling a man into submission and then exploding into raging furies which momentarily stunned these men into silence and impotency. When, as a consequence of her fury, they gazed upon her visage, they would be turned to stone. The myth of Medusa. And only by the labors of the Greek hero, Perseus, were she defeated when, armed with a shield and sandals and sword from the gods, Perseus outsmarted her and cut off her head.

But even then, her severed head retained its power to turn men to stone if they happened to gaze into its eyes. Oh, what a metaphor for the raging female, eh? In fact, modern feminism has embraced Medusa to express their rage. The feminist, Emily Irwin Culpepper, in an article for the magazine, Women of Power. Culpepper writes in her article, Gorgons, A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage.

She writes in this article, the Gorgon-Medusa image has been rapidly adopted by a large number of feminists who recognize her as one face of our own rage. Unquote. It is not difficult to make that connection, I tell you, it's not difficult to make that connection between Medusa and the awful, the affluent white female liberal. Another mythical creature, excuse me, another mythical creature often compared to her is the harpy, the half-vulture, half-woman thing from Greek mythology. Harpies were notorious for their irritating, paralyzing screech.

Sounds like an awful, doesn't it? And the harpy's ability to hover nearby and snatch the very food from the hands of hungry men just when their appetites were about to be satisfied. That sounds like the modern feminist as well. Harpies were known to snatch men themselves away and torture them before bringing them to Hades and the underworld. Well, dear listener, the Greek pantheon of gods and heroes were certainly well-developed, accurate portrayals of human nature writ large, weren't they?

And the awful is true to form. She reprises the ancient Medusa and harpy today in the 21st century. Thirdly, let me point out, thirdly, awful, that is, affluent white female liberals are captives to the Stockholm Syndrome. The Stockholm Syndrome. Awfuls have come to identify with and give deep sympathy to their oppressors.

This phenomenon, the Stockholm Syndrome, gets its name from a famous historical incident when four hostages of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973 were held for six days in a bank vault by the bank robber. It made worldwide headlines. And over the period of those six days, in close quarters with their captor, these captives came to know and understand him and develop a relationship, as one of them put it, with him. Oh, they came to identify with his plight and they refused to testify against him at his trial. Also known as destructive cult disorder.

That sounds pretty descriptive, too. Destructive cult disorder. Other situations have borne this label, too, like the hostages held in the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 for some 444 days. They, too, came to identify with their captors and express sympathy for their cause. How is it, dear listener, that a person can identify with and become dedicated to and sacrifice greatly on behalf of causes which work directly against the interests of that person?

How fervently the awful, the affluent white female liberal demonstrates on behalf of the criminal illegal alien. Although it has been demonstrated that illegal immigration has devoured American jobs, swollen the welfare rules of state and federal government, and made victims of countless American women in crime after crime of murder and rape and theft across the country, the awful is nevertheless ready to kill ICE officers who are stemming the tide of illegal immigration?

Now, while perhaps not a complete explanation, the Stockholm Syndrome at least has some explanatory power for why a victim can bleed, literally as well as figuratively, for their oppressors and abusers. One anecdotal example I have for you. It's the story of Martha McKay. In 1996, a man named Travis Lewis murdered Martha's mother and cousin in an act of cold-blooded murder. Now, while a normal person would be satisfied that such a killer is locked away, Martha is not a normal person.

She is an awful, that is, affluent white female liberal. Not only was Martha able to secure parole for the man that murdered her mother, she gave him a job working at her mansion. When Martha noticed $10,000 in cash missing, she just happened to have that type of money laying around, I guess, she confronted Mr. Lewis with it. Well, Travis Lewis ended up stabbing her to death, thus completing the tragic tale of the true-believing awful, the affluent white female liberal. Martha died for her beliefs, like believers of all faiths are called to do, right?

The true believer is the left-wing equivalent of the Japanese kamikaze pilots, if you will, without the honor that came with being a kamikaze pilot. This Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon extends not to just illegal aliens, but to issues like the censorship of free speech or the takeover of women's sports by trans athletes. Cannot the awful see how her advocacy of these issues works directly against the interests of women, not just her.

But there is something, there is something about the fervency of belief, the righteousness of the cause, the feeling of solidarity with others just as dedicated as you, the virtue of stemming the tide of perceived evil before you and the satisfaction of destroying the wicked enemy, excuse me, like Donald Trump, who has no redeeming virtues. That is all compelling to the awful, the affluent white female liberal. The principles and objectives of the cause do not have to be rational, only emotionally satisfying.

And the enemies of the American Republic are only too happy to provide those things for these women's cause, which works directly against the interests of the faithful. Oh, what can be done? Well, dear listener, I propose the solution to the awful agenda is a return to traditional biblical family roles. Although this is anathema to the awful, a step backward from the movement, it is perhaps the best solution. It has been for thousands of women in this generation who are returning to their first love, that is a home, a husband, and children.

It is reflected in articles like, This Unexpected Happiness That Women Feel When They Return Home. I like the title of that article, This Unexpected Happiness That Women Feel When They Return Home, written by Anel G. And she published it in this publication called The Body Optimist. The Body Optimist. The Unexpected Happiness That Women Feel When They Return Home. And there's a sense for many women of coming home in a figurative sense, as well as a literal one, a feeling of fulfillment as a woman not capable of being achieved in a man's world, right?

And it will, in the long run, be better for the individual woman and for the survival of Western civilization in general, I submit to you. As this trend continues to pick up steam, we, the church, must be ready to receive and support what is really today a counter-cultural movement, the return of women to the home. And we must be ready to appeal to the awful, the affluent white female liberal, appeal to them with the words of Solomon concerning the biblical woman when he says, Strength and dignity are her clothing, that is, the woman at home tending to her family. Strength and dignity are her clothing. And she laughs at the time to come.

She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also. And he praises her.

He says, Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all. Oh, charm is deceitful and beauty is vain. But a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the gates. From Proverbs chapter 31.

This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We meet for holy worship on Sunday morning, and we do so understanding indeed that it is a time for the family to be together, one with another, in worship on the day of rest on Sunday morning. And we invite you to join us for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And you can call us for more information and feedback. Perhaps this hasn't sat well with you.

Perhaps it has been precisely what you needed to hear. But in any case, if you'd like to give us some feedback, go ahead and give us a call at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.