The Puritanical Plague of Progressive Piety

"I hate elite progressive white people." Mike Baker on the Joe Rogan Experience, #2274 (2/19/25)

Ah, the elite progressive white people. Those insufferable, self-righteous bastards who've managed to infect the American psyche with their millenarian madness for centuries. It's a flippin’ disease, a gnostic virus that's been festering in our national bloodstream since the first Puritan set his sanctimonious foot on Plymouth Rock.

The Four Horsemen of American Settlement

Four types of soccer hooligans came here from Britain:

The Puritans: New England's very own fun police

The Cavaliers: Southern gents with a drawl

The Scots-Irish: Appalachian rabble-rousers

The Quakers: Commerce-loving pacifists

Most of these folks weren't peddling the apocalyptic snake oil that's been America's favorite intoxicant. The Cavaliers were too busy playing plantation lord, the Scots-Irish only became messianic after a few swigs of moonshine, and the Quakers—well, they kept one foot on the mercantile ground while reaching for the heavens.

The Puritan Pox

But those damn Puritans. They're the ones who really left their mark, like a bad tattoo on America's collective consciousness. From Thanksgiving turkeys to witch trials, from Unitarian pulpits to Ivy League pretension, the Puritan brand is seared into our national DNA.

The Brit G.K. Chesterton quipped that England should celebrate the American Thanksgiving Day holiday by giving thanks that the Pilgrims left England. He was right. When you're so full of spiritual hot air that you can't see the earth beneath your feet, you become a special kind of unbearable.

The Insufferable Inheritance

Richard Hooker, poor bastard, spent much of his life wrestling with the Puritans. He found them smugly devoted to their wrongheaded ideas, dividing the world into "us" (the chosen ones) and "them" (the unwashed masses). Sound familiar? It should, because we're still living with the deplorable legacy.

The Hippie-Puritan Connection

Here's a mind-bender for you: those flower-power hippies? Just Puritans with better drugs. Picture it: peace, love, and social transformation through free love and LSD. It's the City on a Hill, just with more nudity and a worse work ethic.

The Gnostic Grift

This strain of thinking, this urge to escape reality, runs deep. From ancient Gnostics to medieval Cathars, from Puritans to modern-day off-the-grid preppers, it's all the same. They can't handle the messy, complicated nature of existence.

Existence is tense. We’re pulled between the spiritual and earthly. That Austrian nerd Eric Voegelin referred to our existential space as “the metaxy.”

It’s not easy to deal with the metaxy’s tension, but we haffta. It’s just the way it is.

Those millenarian movements? They're just people saying "screw it” and lopping off a chunk of the metaxy, creating an ersatz reality that they can command, and eliminating the tension. The Pilgrims molded their settlements with bogus knowledge; the smelly hippies molded under their unwashed armpits with bogus knowledge. Both were self-righteous as only the “always right” can be.

So here we are today, America, land of the free and home of the existential quitters. We've had too many folks trying to escape the tension of existence, peddling their utopian snake oil. It's high time we embraced the tension, the uncertainty, the messy reality of existence. Because in the end, that's all we've got.

And those elite progressive white people? They're just the latest in a long line of Puritan progeny, trying to sell us salvation while denying the very ground they stand on. It's enough to make a man channel his inner Scots-Irish, knock back a jar of moonshine, and howl at the moon. At least then we'd be honest about our madness.