By Colby Malsbury

 

As in a physical war, the Christian cultural wars have an approximate 5 to 1 ratio of dreary marching down uncertain roads to bursts of action. And those bursts of action more often than not can seem like pointless scrimmages. It can get to be disheartening to keep putting one foot in front of the other in a situation that can seem like a stalemate, if not an outright retreat at times.

But then….every once in a while along the salient, you garner a victory and are reminded that being a soldier in the army of the true, unreconstructed Christ is a most worthy calling indeed. They are to be savored all the more for their exceeding rarity. The last such one of significant magnitude occurred six years ago with the rather spectacular downfall of Vision Forum poobah Doug Phillips, whose poisonous brand of radically egalitarian patriarchy was rendered irrelevant by infidelity with his Mexican maid.

And, because God does not let His warriors go unrewarded, we have been blessed with another win. For one of kinism’s primary bête noires of recent years – the Tattooed Lady herself, “Dr.” Joel McDurmon – stepped down from her post as head of American Vision on March 4^th. After four years of recklessly driving that Camaro pell-mell into oblivion, with nary a stop for routine maintenance along the way, McDurr finally crashed it into a telephone pole and walked away before the cops could show up. Bravo, sir! That’s something to put at the top of the ol’ resume, all right!

You might be asking yourself why, if this happened at the beginning of the month, I am only now getting around to addressing it? This certainly wasn’t my preference, as anyone who has followed my Faith & Heritage posts on The Inglorious Chronicles of Citizen McDurr can attest. (Samples of which can be read here, here, and here – and for pieces from my worthy colleagues, please see here, here, and here.) Tis the strangest thing: until very recently there has been a massive hush-hush campaign over the sacking on the part of AV, and I have only been able to pick the story up via word of mouth until the past week or so. Now, this is most peculiar. After a change of upper-echelon management, any professional organization will offer a pro forma blurb of appreciation and well-wishes to the outgoing officer(s): ‘many thanks for all your hard work’, ‘best of luck in your future endeavors’, etc. Even if the parting was less than amicable, such gestures of goodwill are considered standard operating procedure. In the case of American Vision, though, nary a peep over McDurr’s departure was offered by Gary DeMar, re-taking the helm of his fabled Titanic in a desperate attempt to stave off the icebergs. (Way too little, way too late, Gary!) Indeed, McDurr’s entire backlog of recent online articles was quietly consigned to the invisible AV archives, while the dubious ‘talent’ McDurr brought on as contributors (the wannabe lesbian Suzannah Rowntree, the crypto-Judaic ferret John Andrew Reasnor, the ebonic bruh Trevaris J. Tutt, etc.) were all ignominiously dumped from the author masthead. In fact, as near as I can tell, DeMar is now the sole contributor to AV, as well as its ‘new’ president. And let us not overlook his bizarrely noncommittal responses to those AV posters who are understandably infuriated that McDurr was given free rein to play the scold for far too many years:

You might just as well have posted ‘I don’t wanna talk about it’, Gary. At least that would have been considerably more honest. DeMar’s terse dismissiveness could be interpreted as McDurr being let go in order to fend off a developing scandal involving his person – whether financial, sexual, or other I could not say and will not speculate on, as McDurr is definitely the type to turn litigious, especially if he no longer has anything to do past Fortnite binges to occupy his days. The red ink that AV has been hemorrhaging under McDurr’s tenure would be grounds enough for the board to turf him, anyway.

Just as the Soviets could not keep Katyn Forest under wraps forever, neither could DeMar do so to his miniature Saturday Night Massacre, and he finally got around to acknowledging the obvious on March 19 – long enough after the fact that what should have been a routine announcement instead seemed weird. And that’s still not the half of it. A mere three days after the incident, Gary North, McDurr’s father-in-law and chief means of support, just happened to put up an article on how to compose yourself should you be fired. And I’m sure it’s just a cohencidence, but the first part of the essay seems to mirror McDurr’s situation precisely. Where do you come up with your great ideas, Scary Gary? As such, it is worth re-printing in depth. (Note: the provided link is accessible only to ‘current members’ of North’s wealth-management blog – arrogant much, Gary? – yet I chose to include it for the record. How did I obtain the text? I have sources.)

*****

Making a Clean Break if You Get Fired

by Gary North – March 07, 2019

A man I know got fired on Monday. There was no warning. He was given two months’ severance pay.

The organization is a small nonprofit research foundation.

The people doing the firing had been planning this for months. In my assessment, they have made a huge mistake. I think their organization is likely to be gone within a year.

This fired man was the key figure in the organization. But, for one reason or another, the board decided that he was expendable. In my opinion, the organization is expendable. He is not.

Within 24 hours, he had a better offer. He will be able to create a startup operation that is likely to get more donor support than the organization that just fired him.

The organization has only one major product in the pipeline. If it dies, the organization dies. It is now likely to die.

The head of the Board of Directors told the fired man that the board is willing to pay him some money (meaning peanuts) if he will oversee the completion of that project. He wisely remained mute. He is not going to do it.

The biggest donor to the organization is the person who put up the money for the project. The organization had already raised a huge amount of money from another deep-pockets donor, promising him that he would get his project finished. This was before the fired man was in charge. The organization then spent all of the money raised by this promise. It never began the project until a few months ago — after 8 years of promises.

The organization has been in self-destruct mode. The man who got fired has therefore been given a blessing. The Board of Trustees had made him captain of the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg. Now they have thrown him off.

I told him that he should immediately vacate his office. There shouldn’t be a trace of his existence a week from now. The head of the Board of Trustees will walk into the facility and find his office empty. This will convey a symbolic message. It will show the head of the Board of Trustees that he is now in full command of a ship without a rudder or a captain.

The Board of Trustees assumed that he would be desperate for funding, and that he would take a pittance to complete the project on which the future of the organization rests. That was a strategic mistake.

Within 24 hours, the man had a guarantee of funding greater than what the organization had on the morning he got fired. The man who has promised to put up the money for the project is no longer going to give any money to the organization, and he will be funding the man who got fired for the next three years. The man has to create his own nonprofit structure, and he will be taken care of.

This is one more example of the shortsightedness of boards of trustees of nonprofit organizations. They really do not know how to run anything. They don’t have any ownership in it. They don’t get paid dividends. They sit around and make decisions, but then they are not there to oversee the programs that supposedly will reach the organization’s objectives. They meet a couple of times a year, they have a meeting, and they go away. They are completely dependent on the senior manager of the organization. That was the case in this organization. I don’t think it will survive.

*****

As North’s staccato bullet-point writing style should render apparent, nuance has never been his strong suit. So we shouldn’t be surprised if coyness doesn’t rank among his strengths, either. Let us count the ways. McDurr was fired on Monday, March 4. North has long been known to have given tens of thousands of dollars per year to AV, and all the more so since the start of McDurr’s tenure. The crucially important donor who provided the seed money for the project and most of the funding thereafter almost assuredly is North himself. The project that was the victim of organizational procrastination in all likelihood is the much-vaunted Worldview Study Bible App, which McDurr saw fit to assure AV readers last November was finally moving into the final stages of ‘planning’ (insert sarcastic ‘Huzzah!’ here) and which I had made mention of in a previous article. North has long been known to be passionately committed to left-libertarian concepts of perfect egalitarianism and to jeer at Cultural Marxism as a nonexistent bugaboo taken seriously only by unwashed boors unlike himself, so the chance to found and control a Transcalvinist institute dedicated to stroking his metastasizing ego must be alluring indeed. Finally, it appears that Joltin’ Joel’s breathtaking ineptitude has not hindered him from securing at least three years of steady employment. Must be a real pip to be a middle aged man-child and find yourself the President-on-paper and occasional contributor to the Gary North Center For Post-Racial Anarcho-Capitalist Excellence, answering to Gary North, Founder, CEO, CFO, and Sole Financier. Ah well. I’m sure Joel will have lots of spare time for golf or vaping or activism or whatever the hell he does to occupy his days.

“Well, you certainly haven’t been very gracious to Dr. McDurmon!” squeak respectable churchtards from coast to coast. You got that right I haven’t, and I have no intention of switching gears now, either. “Do you always kick a man when he’s down?” they squeak back. “Who ever accused McDurr of being a man?” sez I. What has McDurr ever done that is worth a scintilla of respect? Misappropriating the cherem principle to make a mockery out of theonomy? Tag-teaming with Bojidar Marinov to block every kinist on Facebook so as to wax poetic about Utopia without any irritating interjections of reality? Besmearing the likes of Dabney for not being as woke as McDurr and his soy-based posse is? Waging an envious and sociopathic campaign against Peter Hammond in a malicious (and, praise God, futile) effort to destroy his reputation and his very life? McDurr is a cockroach, a tumor, a fifth columnist crying ‘Lord, Lord!’ and seemingly indifferent should Christ reply ‘I never knew ye’. My only regret is that now that his sugar daddy has guaranteed him some more ill-gotten employment, McDurr won’t have learned a thing from this humiliation. Well, scratch that. I also have one more regret: that I now won’t be able to offer McDurr the career advice so apt to all left-wing scribes of his ilk:

Learn to code.